POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Prayers for Congresswoman Giffords

Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was holding a town hall-type meeting when a gunman ran up and shot her and several aides, outside a Safeway store in Tucson. Some reports state that she was shot in the head.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Saturday Rule 5: Chase Masterson

One of the nice things about having Netflix on the Roku is that you run into movies that you've never heard of, such as "Yesterday Was a Lie." It's an ambitious dreamscape psychodrama film noir. Not a complete success, but neither a failure. It's full of allusions to Jungian archetypes, left-brain/right-brain dichotomy, linear versus non-linear time, Planck's Constant and yadda yadda. All of that would be irritatingly new agey and pseudo-scientific if it were pushed too far, but stands in instead for the intellect of a seeker who represses her emotions (the hard, chiaroscuro edge of the noir).

Dialogue here is okay. There are some awkward bits where the author/director seems to think he's really in synch with the clever, mordant patter of film noir at its best, and falls short. Cinematically, he does a good job of recreating the production values of the noir.

There are two attractive actresses at the center of all this. The one who plays a kind of Jungian anima-helper to the main character is Chase Masterson, of whom I was unaware, until I watched the movie.

Now, you probably know that blonde isn't really my thing, although I've elsewhere expressed my admiration for tiny Kristin Chenoweth (and her colleague on Pushing Daisies, Anna Friel). One thing Chenoweth and Masterson have in common: they can sing.

Lovely, in color or black and white. In fact, Ms. Masterson (birth name, Christianne Carafano, which is fine by me) was born in '63, which makes her a less ridiculous object of my admiration than if she were younger, I like to think. In a few of the scenes, because of the severe light, her skull seems almost pressing through her skin. I know that that will be a turn-off to a lot of youth-worshipping guys, and the sort of thing that most major actresses would nix, but for what it's worth, I find that has a sexiness of its own. YMMV.

The shots at IMDB reveal that Ms. Masterson isn't exactly waif-like, though perhaps they don't quite live up to the chubby chasing standard that Stacy holds me to. There's a little bit of Jenny McCarthy, recently mentioned here by Kill Truck, there, but mixed with Elizabeth Montgomery, which isn't a bad combo. There are pictures there, too, that make no effort to hide the horizontal wrinkles in the forehead. Rule of thumb, guys: the depth of horizontal lines to vertical (above the nose) on a woman of a certain age is a pretty good indication, along with crow's feet (good), of her character.

Reading further at IMDB, one finds out other things. She was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, so possibly an Air Force brat. Also:

She has recently performed in USO tours for the Navy and the Marine Corps. Masterson has been actively involved in numerous charities worldwide, including Caring for Babies With AIDS, Homeboy Industries, Iris Ministries, and Youth With a Mission, and founded the G.E.N.I.U.S. charity umbrella organization which is supported by her licensed fan club. She donated proceeds from a 2008 American flag photo shoot to the organization Operation Call Home, supplying phone cards to U.S. troops.

So, there's that.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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The Carnival of Fraud, 1-8-10 [UPDATE]

You probably know that I write some for Right Network. Among my friends and colleagues over there are Moe Lane and Christopher Taylor. Christopher's news round up is worth reading, and not just because it links to a couple of my posts.

One last underreported story? Usually the press loves Wikileaks, but there's one batch they sort of soft pedaled and ignored: the one that showed the invasion of Iraq was perfectly reasonable and proper. James Zumwalt at Human Events meticulously examines one portion of the leaks and the history of the Coalition of the Willing, showing how clearly the nuclear weapons program of Iraq was a threat and why it had to be acted on - and how Joe Wilson lied through his teeth.

When the leaks first arrived, I approvingly quoted Claire Berlinski saying in effect that the conspiracy theorists had been hardest hit. Whether the mixed effects of the revelations have had something to do with the partial leftist turn-about on Julian Assange is a question that's been rather drowned out by the Identity Feminist pushback. But as I like to say, people's motivations can be multiple, or complex, or even contradictory, if you like.

Here's hoping that David Thompson joins us there. Since Scott Burgess disappeared (to Slovakia, where he writes about mushrooms and cuisine), he's been the writer on point covering the idiocies of the Grauniad and other leftist UK publications.

I'm always saying that Richard Fernandez is my favorite writer at Pajamas. Here's a fragment from his latest:

Recently, the anti-vaccine movement received an impetus from a study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose findings were published in the Lancet, showing that the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine caused autism. Unfortunately for Dr. Wakefield, his study has been attacked as a fraud. Many of his co-authors have retracted and it has been alleged that he received money from a group of lawyers to stir up liability suits against vaccine manufacturers.

[Emphasis mine] In medical malpractice and liability cases, physicians are held to a standard of responding appropriately to what they knew or should have known. It is time that lawyers were held to the same standards. After the Iraq War deaths fiasco, one might think that this blow to The Lancet would be enough to finish it, but one would be wrong, of course.

BP has been paying a law professor $950 per hour, with another $475 for his research assistant, to find that the "Czar" of their $20 billion claims fund is fully independent from their influence. Plaintiffs' lawyers are outraged--OUTRAGED that the Czar would use such tactics as to purchase expert testimony on his behalf.

Via The Anchoress on Twitter comes this distressing tale:

A man who was molested as a child by a Portland priest -- then secured a $900,000 settlement from the church -- has yet to see a penny more than seven years after the church paid out the money.

In a lawsuit filed this week in Multnomah County Circuit Court, the man alleges that attorneys who represented him in the case managed to claim $877,000 of the settlement, leaving him with no more than $23,000. Yet the man, identified only by his initials, G.B., hasn't seen a check for any amount.

According to the suit, G.B. has been living off $400 to $500 a month in Social Security disability payments. Little else has been disclosed about G.B., other than he's suffered a lifetime of damage because of the abuse, which occurred while he was a student at All Saints School in Northeast Portland by the Rev. Thomas Laughlin. Laughlin was kicked out of the priesthood in 1983 after being convicted of molesting boys.

Unfettered rapacity.

You can add to that my post from earlier this week, about the brief filed by a prosecutor stating that as many as half of the claims of clergy abuse that he'd been involved in researching over a significant period of time were fraudulent. The Church pays out to avoid scandal and attorneys' fees, even where the evidence doesn't warrant them doing so. The Pigford Settlements, the monies taken from Fannie and Freddie in bonuses, often by people such as Chicago mayoral front-runner Rahm Emanuel who held their positions as sinecures, Jamie Gorelick's disastrous policies and practices rewarded, the flouting of SEC regulations and corporate law involved in bailing out Chrysler and GM--all rife with fraud. The continued gaming of the CBO scores for ObamaCare, the list goes on and on.

UPDATE: CBO now says repealing ObamaCare would save $540 billion.

But we as a society have a very deep interest in seeing that the very basest, most selfish, least scrupulous and most mendacious among us are punished for bearing false witness, rather than rewarded. Nancy Pelosi's jaw-dropping defense of her tenure's being all about the deficit reduction is only the most recent massive insult to the brain we've received from these people.

I wish Issa and King all success. Regardless of party, we need to let these people know that play time is over.

For some reason, Paleo Pat feels it's necessary for him to renounce on behalf of his own political niche the violence and stupidity of the would-be bomber who has mailed several incendiary packages, including one to Janet Napolitano, complaining about the eyes open PSAs that Homeland Security have been pushing, including on the DC Metro, urging people to report suspicious activities. Personally, I don't have enough information to regard the bomber as some kind of libertarian. For all I know, he or she may be an anarchist. At any rate, there have been enough false flag operations that I'm unwilling to make any statement regarding this person's self-affiliation, if any.

That's not to say that I don't renounce the use of violence and abhor this idiot's behavior, and hope that he (or she) is caught, and soon, and punished to the maximum extent of the law. I do. It's just that I file this under those "word problems" that require more information to solve.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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