funny videos
check out Jack Black's exceptionally crude take on Lord of the Rings and assorted beer ads, especially the "My Beer" and "Beer Goggles" ones at Video Humor

Send in the clones
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
The Island

2.5 stars out of five

Dir: Michael Bay

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean

As any movie critic knows, the problem with summer isn't the heat, it's the stupidity. Summer is the season of the big-budget action blockbusters, the special-effects spectaculars and the gross-out teen sex comedies all intended to sell popcorn with a mindless combination of car crashes, comic book violence and cleavage--not that there's anything wrong with that.

So what then should we make of The Island, a high-concept science fiction thriller starring legitimate thespians instead of bodybuilders or martial artists that promises to raise all sorts of interesting philosophical questions about identity and bioethics?

Ewan McGregor attempts an American or at least mid-Atlantic accent as Lincoln Six-Echo, a young man living in a sealed facility surrounded by foreboding crags and stormy seas with other apparent survivors of a biological holocaust that no one but the staff can quite remember.

This is the world of 2019: a utopian lifeboat in an ocean of contamination, where everyone but the security guards wears white, works at inexplicably simple lab jobs, and has every need catered to by the staff.

There's no sex or alcohol, and health and diet are strictly monitored, but there are plenty of cartoons, video games and designer drinks. There are even regular public address announcements assuring the white-clad survivors that they are "special" and reminding them that one day they will win the lottery and be sent to the one place that escaped the bio-contamination, the pristine Eden known simply as the Island.

McGregor does a pretty good job of playing the pampered naif in the brave new world who forms a friendship with the attractive and slightly sassy Jordan Two-Delta played by Scarlett Johansson.

But Lincoln has problems. The doctor running the facility, played by the reliably sinister Sean Bean, is concerned about Lincoln's recent tendency to ask disturbing questions. Lincoln's secret acquaintance, a techie "from another sector" played for laughs by Steve Buscemi, hints that things aren't what they seem.

Before long, Lincoln's world unravels when he discovers the Island is a hospital where lottery winners have their organs harvested and that he and his fellow survivors are surrogate mothers and walking spare parts for the so-called sponsors who have provided the genetic material Lincoln and his peers have been cloned from.

He and the latest lottery-winner, Jordan, make a break for it, emerging from underground into a ruined desert landscape

It's a promising opening 20 minutes. Despite blatantly ripping off science fiction classics Logan's Run, THX 1138, The Prisoner and Coma and subjecting the audience to an endless parade of product placement shots, director Michael Bay has managed to get this far without a single car chase, explosion or gratuitous bikini-clad starlet. Could this be that rarest of Hollywood creations--the summer-movie-with-brains?

Absolutely not.

Bay is still the man who made Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. If he were somehow hired to direct a film version of The Cherry Orchard he'd put three car chases and a shoot-out in it.

Naturally, Lincoln and Jordan's escape poses a host of problems for the people running the secretive facility, and the hired goons are quickly put on the case. After a brief comic interlude and some plot explanation with Buscemi, the film descends into an hour of predictable reality-defying zoom and kaboom as the goon squad pursues the heroes with all the subtlety of the Allied invasion of Normandy. It's the same quick-cutting shaky-camera stuff we have seen plenty of before. Bay even repeats the main highway chase from his own Bad Boys 2.

Johansson, while looking more fetching than ever, goes from a promising start to full damsel-in-distress, can't-even-run-for-her-life-without-holding-the-hero's-hand mode, and after the first 30 minutes is given little to do but look sexy and terrified at the same time.

McGregor has a few amusing scenes playing opposite himself after Lincoln and Jordan track down his sponsor in the hope he can help them expose the clone arrangers, and pronto, so Lincoln can free the slaves.

But for the most part, the final 90 minutes of The Island are typical summer fare. Bay betrays the semi-promising opening by leaving loose ends and holes in the plot that resemble the craters on the moon in both size and number.

If action is all you are after, The Island delivers. If you want interesting characters and a smart script, wait for the studios to wheel out their Oscar hopefuls in November.

The Daily Yomiuri (Jul. 21, 2005)

A two parter
Well, what with the wife and kids out of the apartment this morning, and what with the fact that the humidity in Tokyo is going to be in the 80 to 90 percent range for the next few months I decided I needed something to amuse myself, so I shaved my head. Not right down, but to the 1.2 cm measure on my clippers. If more than a half dozen people post comments requesting it, I will post pics.

peace and quiet
A rare moment of peace and quiet in the Woodshed this morning as the Missus is out with the kids and I'm on the nightshift. At last a chance to blog:

Item the first - Bob Dylan, Super Genius
Just finished reading "Chronicles" Bob Dylan's stab at autobiography - it's well written, but a bit scattered and tragically doesn't deal with the making of any of his early classic albums. He does talk a fair bit about how things were when he first came to New York and his early days in Minnesota. At one point he talks about how important folk songs were to him and how when he started playing the coffee houses he noticed that most singers were trying to put themselves across to the audience, but he was more interested in putting the song across.
This got me to thinking about how much I love early Dylan, so I dug out my copy of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" and tried to listen to it with a fresh ear. Go thou, and do likewise.

Remember what was on the radio at the time this record was created - Johnny Mathis, Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson - this is before the Beatles, Beach Boys and Rolling Stones. This is before Peter, Paul and Mary - Mitch Miller was hip! Forget for a moment the iconic status of "Blowin' in the Wind" and just listen to the song. This was before anyone had heard of Vietnam, a good old Pete Seeger-style anti-war song. Genius.

Now listen to the rest of the songs, from the wistfulness of "Girl from the North Country" to the venomous "Masters of War" the goofiness of "I Shall Be Free" the smooth "Corrina, Corrina" the nostaligia of "Bob Dylan's Dream" the subversive and sly "Talking World War Three Blues" and "Bob Dylan's Blues" - the other instant classics off the record "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (one of my all time desert island must-have favorite songs) . Listen to these songs and tell me that if this record was made today, note for note the same way, that it wouldn't still be an instant million seller. He was 21 when he made this record. Even if he had never recorded again, never made albums like "blood on the tracks" "love and theft" "Highway 61 revisited" or "Blonde on Blonde" this album alone would have made him a legend. I have an old friend who makes a living of sorts from performing classic rock albums more or less note for note and I can't see them doing this one, because it really isn't reproducible- it would be like trying to pick up a handful of mercury. Say it with me now..."We are not worthy"

I'm now listening to the Bob Dylan live official bootleg series #6 the Concert at NYC's Philharmonic Hall from Oct. 1964, with Joan Baez joining him on stage. Dylan complains a bit in his book about being branded the "voice of a generation" and people expecting him to lead them. Listening to this record I'm amazed he wasn't elected world president by 1966.

Item the second - I'm a better harp player than Van Morrison
Based on his harmonica work on his newest album, the extremely good Magic Time, I'd blow Van the Man right off the stage in a blues harp contest. Of course, he is a better singer, songwriter, guitar player, saxophone player and all-around human being than I am by so many orders of magnitude that it would take scientific notation to write it down and I'm not smart enough to figure out how to do that on this computer. But when it comes to the Mississippi saxophone, the chrome biscut, the harpoon - I'm better, me, the Rev. Paperboy, I'm the boss harp player between me and Mr. "Here Comes the Night". And while I'm bragging, I'm a way better driver than Ray Charles.

Item the third - New Asylum Street Spankers stuff
The Spankers have a new web site on line and a new live record coming out soon! go buy it! In fact while you're at it buy everything they have ever done. Twice, and then give the second set as gifts to other people. Apparently they have a new DVD in the pipeline too.

stay tuned to the woodshed for two reviews later this week, first of the summer blockbuster scifi film "The Island" and second, comic book god Will Eisner's debunking of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in graphic novel form, "The Plot".

Work just keeps getting weirder

I thought I was hallucinating when I looked up from my desk and saw a bevy of cheerleaders trooping through the office. Sorry, no photos.

Where did all the money go?

By way of Tbogg, we see an excellent expose in the London Review of Books of financial responsibility in Iraq

Philosopher takes on fertilizer
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
On Bullshit

By Harry G. Frankfurt
Princeton University
67 pp, 1,500 yen

Humbug, claptrap, mahooha, quackery, bunkum, hooey, balderdash, shinola, malarky, baloney, nonsense--they all mean the same thing.

We all think we recognize it when we see it or hear it. According to Harry Frankfurt, moral philosopher and Princeton University professor of philosophy emeritus, "One of the most salient features of our culture" is that there is so much of it.

In his trenchant philosophical pamphlet On Bullshit, Frankfurt combines tongue-in-cheek high seriousness with academic style in examining the nature of his subject and how it differs from outright lying.

Frankfurt makes the case that while liars deliberately make false claims about what is true, truth is irrelevant to the BS artist. Writes Frankfurt: "He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Admittedly, some of the appeal of this brief book lies in seeing sharp-edged scatological expressions scattered through formal academic prose like cow patties through a pasture, but Frankfurt also manages to cite Ezra Pound, Ludwig Wittgenstein and St. Augustine to support his erudite arguments.

Why is there so much of it? Frankfurt posits: "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about...This discrepancy is common in public life."

While criticizing those in public life for being full of hot air, the author also notes the "conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything" as a contributing factor.

Additionally, Frankfurt slams the growth of various forms of skepticism which deny the ability to perceive objective reality as aiding the proliferation of male bovine feces.

Frankfurt's book should be required reading for anyone whose speech or writing are intended for public consumption. Despite his subject, he is definitely not full of it.

(Jul. 10, 2005)

Pick of the Pickers
There was a strong thread over at Eschaton the other day in which a number of us were knocking about the idea of "Who is the best acoustic guitar player?"

Naturally the idea of a "best" in this area is very subjective but we did come up with a pretty good list. We (okay, I) limited the to living players to avoid getting into long lists of deceased bluesmen.As a result Robert Johnson, Jerry Garcia, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Django Reinhart and other luminaries are not included.

The list we came up with, in no particular order:
Tony Rice
Leo Kottke
Kelly Joe Phelps
Jorma Kaukonen
Doc Watson
John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola & Paco De Lucia
David Grier
David Bromberg
Pat Metheny
John Hammond
Ry Cooder

others I would add upon reflection

Taj Mahal
Bruce Cockburn
Kotaro Oshio

Add your comments, complaints and further suggestions below

The witless wisdom of the American Taliban
See all a collection of charming sentiments and pithy quotes here but I've lifted a few of my favorites


"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-George Herbert Walker Bush



“George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.”

-Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, U.S. Army

"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."

-Randall Terry, Operation Rescue

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
The Observer | International | Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps

you get tar, I'll get the feathers
Fox newscreep John Gibson wonders why there is so much anti-Americanism in Canada, and why we feel so "smugly superior" to the Americans. Could it be because jackasses like him write essays likeMacleans.ca | Canada Switchboard | Essay | Un-Happy Birthday, Canada

I wonder why they call it Black Sturgeon Lake?
CBC News: Manitoban struggles 90 minutes to land huge sturgeon

And he had the class to let the big fish go. My nominee for Canuck of the month!

The envelope please...
Apparently all you mugs are allergic to posting comments as only one person attempted to guess the twenty lines listed below

1. "I bet I can eat 50 eggs"

2."We're on a mission from God"

3."Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"

4."Where do you want me to hold it?" - "between your knees!"

5."Saigon, shit, I'm still in Saigon"

6."We deal in lead, friend"

7."Goooooood Morning Vietnaaaaam!"

8."That's mighty big talk from a one-eyed fat man" "Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch"

9."Peel me a grape, Beulah"

10."I'm out of order? You're out of order! The whole damn system is out of order"

11."Was you ever bit by a dead bee?"

13."Never get out of the boat"

14. "The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club."

15."Quick, close the doors, there's a traitor inside trying to escape"

16. "Who are those guys?"

17. "What are you rebelling against anyways?" "Whaddya got?"

18. "I love children, could never eat a whole one, but I love the little tykes"

19. "The new phone book's here! the new phone book's here!"

20. "I crap bigger than you"


and the answers......


1. Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke

2. Dan Akroyd and John Belushi in The Blues Brothers

3. John Belushi in Animal House

4. Jack Nicholson's famous toast scene in Five Easy Pieces

5. Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now

6. Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven

7. Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam

8.Robert Duvall and John Wayne in True Grit

9.Mae West in Diamond Lil

10. Al Pacino in And Justice For All

11. Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not

12. Ha-Ha! Tricky me - there is no number 12!

13. Fredrick Forrest in Apocalypse Now

14. Brad Pitt in Fight Club

15. Errol Flynn in Robin Hood

16. Robert Redford and Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

17. Marlon Brando in The Wild One

18. WC Field in The Bank Dick

19. Steve Martin in The Jerk

20. Jack Palance in City Slickers

Isn't he dead yet?

The rest of the freakin' story from a moldering racist warmonger

In Your Ear
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
String Cheese Incident
One Step Closer
Yellow Bus Records, 2,800 yen
The most common, and occasionally even justified, complaints leveled against so-called jam bands are that too much emphasis is placed on long, meandering instrumental solos and that after a while all the songs sound the same.

Neither applies to One Step Closer, the latest studio effort from the Colorado-based String Cheese Incident. While longtime fans may bemoan the lack of bluegrass-flavored tunes, One Step Closer is by far the band's most cohesive and democratic album to date. All five members of the band contribute at least two songs, all take turns as lead vocalist and, with the exception of keyboard maestro Kyle Hollingsworth, all play guitar on at least one track.

To a some extent, String Cheese Incident have taken up the mantle of the Grateful Dead as touring torchbearers of hippie counterculture. Like the Dead, they've always been primarily a concert experience with live recordings being preferred over studio work by most fans. One Step Closer may change that.

Grateful Dead collaborators John Perry Barlow and Robert Hunter are partially responsible for the album's two most atypical songs. Barlow teamed with SCI's mandolin and fiddle whiz Michael Kang to pen the catchy U2 pastiche "Give Me the Love" that kicks off the disc, while on the ambitious "45th of November" Hunter and Hollingsworth fail to reach the heights the former scaled with Jerry Garcia.

The album's title track is a typical SCI uptempo, upbeat bit of sunshine from guitarist Bill Nershi, who also cowrote ballad "Big Compromise" and the rootsy "Farther" with singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale. Other standouts include the rocker "Swampy Waters," a song that wouldn't sound out of place on a White Stripes album, and bassist Keith Mosley's radio-friendly "Sometimes a River."

No eight-minute guitar solos here, just tight rock grooves and catchy hooks. For those who still prefer live Cheese, the Japanese edition of One Step Closer includes a companion disc with eight live tracks recorded at the 2004 Bonnaroo Music Festival, enough to tide the faithful over until the band revisits Japan for dates in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka at the end of September.

North Mississippi Allstars
Electric Blue Watermelon
Buffalo Records, 2,500 yen
Another group of Bonnaroo stalwarts, the North Mississippi Allstars, blend elements of '70s rock, hip-hop, and traditional southeastern U.S. fife-and-drum music with a heaping dose of energetic delta blues on Electric Blue Watermelon.

Slide guitarist Luther Dickinson and brother Cody (drums) combine their high-intensity attack with rock-solid bass guitarist Chris Chew to reenergize the blues genre. The brothers, sons of top Memphis-based producer Jim Dickinson (Ry Cooder, The Replacements), have been recording since their teens, working with blues greats like R.L. Burnside and most recently backing up John Hiatt on his latest album, the excellent Master of Disaster.

Electric Blue Watermelon starts at full gallop with the driving blues of Charley Patton's "Mississippi Boll Weevil," downshifts into a bluesy hip-hop groove as the band teams up with rapper Al Kapone on "NoMo." Other guests include Lucinda Williams, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Robert Randolph on tracks that run from Stones'-style rock shouters to jangly pop. "Bounce Ball," a fife-and-drum track by the late Otha Turner--a Dickinson family mentor--closes the album with the relaxing chirping of north Mississippi hill country crickets. An only-in-Japan track "Dragonslayer" tacked on the end, returns the listener to the present day.

(Jun. 30, 2005)

Happy Canada Day eh!

Yup, that time of the year again to celebrate all things Canuck. So kick back with a few Molson's or a nice cold CC and Canada Dry, make yourself a backbacon sandwich with a side order of poutine and enjoy watching Strange Brew or a tape of an old hockey game. Or just throw some Neil Young/Stompin' Tom Conners/Tragically Hip/Frere Brothers or even (gulp) Bryan Adams on the boom box and enjoy the right to smoke and/or marry what or who ever you want.

(Koo-loo-koo-koo-koo-loo-koo-koo!)

The kids are NOT all right

A very scary bit of info from a well written NYT editorial about how the U.S. doesn't really care who it locks up. or even who it shoots

Off the radar

Since neither AP or Reuters seems to have covered this, I suppose it is up to the blogosphere to let people know that Forbes has been taken over by liburils that hate America

"US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo; in Iraq, Afghanistan - UN
06.24.2005, 11:37 AM

GENEVA (AFX) - Washington has, for the first time, acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

'They are no longer trying to duck this and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,' the Committee member said. "



Like Claude Raines in Casablanca, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!

"Does not play well with others"

The latest Pew survey has some interesting numbers on what other countries think of the United States and its foreign policy, as well as what they think of each other and what they think other countries think of them. A massive number of Canadians (more than 90%) apparently think everyone likes us. The most interesting part is the steady slide in world opinion of the United States. Almost every country in the report likes the US less now than five years ago, except (and don't forget them) Poland.
Apparently there is one thing that Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims agree on - that the United States should be more religious.

Extremely talented and incredibly readable



Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin, 368 pp, 24.95 dollars

With his latest novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer maintains a connection to his award-winning 2003 debut Everything is Illuminated. Like his previous novel, his latest is told mostly in the first person by an idiosyncratic narrator and concerns the effect that mass death on a historic scale has on the narrator and his family.

In Everything, most of the narration comes from a Ukrainian translator who is guiding Jewish American college student Jonathan Safran Foer as he searches for the Ukrainian woman who hid his grandmother during the Holocaust.

Extremely Loud follows the quest of precocious 9-year-old Oskar Schell to unravel the mystery of a key left behind by his father, who was killed in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Foer has brilliantly captured the voice of the eccentric young self-described "inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist, [and] collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia and semiprecious stones."

His constant inner monologue and odd dialogue ring true, reflecting perfectly the rambling, scattershot and utterly nonlinear thinking and speech of an intelligent and traumatized young boy. In Oskar, Foer has created a younger, 21st-century version of Holden Caulfield.

While Oskar spins his story of what happened after his father died and his dogged efforts to track down all 262 people named Black in the New York city telephone directory to inquire about the key, the reader is treated to an array of characters worthy of J.D. Salinger or Wes Anderson: Oskar's centenarian war correspondent neighbor, his father the professional jeweler and amateur copy editor, the various Blacks of New York, and especially his grandparents, survivors of the horrific World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany. Characters are as often as not the sum of their quirks: Oskar will only wear white, his elderly neighbor keeps biographical files of thousands of important people that consist of a single word, his grandfather is a compulsive writer who scribbles on walls or even shirt sleeves, if no paper is at hand.

Oskar's grandmother provides some of the narration in a few relatively straightforward autobiographical chapters about her childhood and how she came to America. Oskar's grandfather, a mute, half-crazed sculptor the boy has never met, tells part of both Oskar's story and his own, a quirky and emotional tale reminiscent of some of Kurt Vonnegut or Paul Auster's best work.

There are a number of well-executed set pieces in the book, some tragic, some comic. Oskar's conversations with his mother and the passages about him listening to his father's dying words from the World Trade Center, recorded on the Schells' answering machine, are as heartbreaking as Oskar's correspondence with various prominent people is hilarious. One of the shortest of the latter is:

"Dear Stephen Hawking,

Can I be your protege?

Thanks,

Oskar Schell."

Foer's writing is by turns sentimental, playful, sly and experimental, but always engaging. While the background of the events in the novel is tragic and the characters' motivations and outlook often heartrending, the author always manages to lighten the mood with a dose of whimsy or wry humor at unexpected moments. Foer explores a variety of themes: the importance of expressing love and not keeping secrets from loved ones, surviving and coming to terms with grief, the allure of mystery and the thrill of discovery.

The use of photos, unusual text layouts and other visual stunts is interesting and not without impact, but overall adds little to an already appealing and expertly rendered novel.