Comment Worthy Super Bowl Ads

First off, I don’t know what was more lame, the Tebow ad or that anyone got upset over it. There was supposed to be a stance on abortion in there? OK. (I couldn’t find a video to embed, but it is available at the Focus on the Family website. (UPDATE: Found it on YouTube.)

Was this ad a funny tweaking of environmental political correctness or a chilling vision of the future? You decide:

I think it’s the latter. At least Cheap Trick got a check out of it.

I like how Coke paid to use Simpsons IP, but not for Harry Shearer or Hank Azaria or any of the more expensive voice actors to voice the IP:

This ad was just obnoxious:

My daughter saw this ad and responded by trying to tear off her shirt. We had to have a little talk.

The only ad I laughed out loud at was this one:

That ad of course was a call back to this ad from the last time CBS had (and the Colts were in) the Super Bowl:

That one is kind of creepy in light of recent news about Letterman and women who get invited to his in-studio apartment…

This was my least favorite ad. Probably because it falsely implies that a French woman who would marry an infidel American would have a baby. Come on, let’s keep it realistic.

And I’m throwing this one in, because I’m pretty sure it would be my wife’s favorite. (She only got to watch half the game.)

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Super Bowl Sunday.

I am ready to enjoy a Super Bowl where I am fine with whatever team wins. It sure was nice of the Saints to put away the Vikings last week. I would have been awfully tense today if they hadn’t.

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Oscar Nods - 2010

Oscar nods this morning. I really dislike the new system of nominating ten movies for Best Picture. It’s not like any of the extra five actually have a chance of winning, if they want to get more eyeballs on the ceremony they need to find a better way than the equivalent of giving everyone a trophy.

On the other hand, I smashed my dry streak of not having seen any of the nominated Best Picture nominees at the time of nomination.  This year I have seen of five of the ten nominees, including the front runners, Avatar, and The Hurt Locker. The others being Inglorious Basterds, Up, and District 9.

I told you what I thought of Avatar here. Truthfully, I think that District 9, Up, Inglorious Basterds,and The Hurt Locker are all much better than Avatar. The Hurt Locker especially.

The Hurt Locker is the best Iraq War movie ever made. Not that there was any competition for that title. But it is also one of the best handful of war movies I’ve ever seen. There is no politics in the movie, but it is an intense study of how different men react to the pressure of war. Check it out all four of the ones I’ve mentioned.

I also have to register an official complaint about the lack of eye candy included in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress category.  Personally, I think Amy Adams’ turn as Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum 2 was worth a nod.

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Nice play, greatest author since Julius Caesar.

I wasn’t going to say anything about Obama’s shot at the SCOTUS, because, who cares? SCOTUS had the binding word.

But it has slowly been dawning on me how politically stupid it was: Almost all politically hot decisions are going to be 5-4 votes one way or another for the foreseeable future. So what does Obama do? He scolds the swing vote to his face in the State of the Union for the most recent majority opinion he authored.

Good luck to the next attorney trying to move Kennedy over to the administration’s point of view next term.

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Tebow ad kerfuffle

I mentioned the Tim Tebow pro-life commercial in the Moose Droppings below, but I may have shortchanged the subject based on the hand wringing that is going on over it.

First of all, it is amusing to me to see these feminist groups pretend that they have some kind of reverence for the Super Bowl. “It’s inappropriate for the Super Bowl.” Like the ad was scheduled to run during Ted Kennedy’s funeral or something.

Second, I expect the ad to have the same message as this powerful ad that was rejected last Super Bowl Sunday, but ran at other times:

There’s noting in there about “outlaw abortion.” The message is, “think about what you are doing before you have an abortion because the going is going to get tough; you’re aborting a person.”

That’s why people who take the position like this Jehmu Greene person took on the O’Reilly factor are being disingenuous:

“It’s that very choice that Pam Tebow had about her reproductive health decisions that this ad is trying to take away.” (Or something close to that. I’m not watching it again.)

Really? Assuming I’m right and the ad has the same message as the Obama ad how is trying to take away anyone’s right to make a decision? Are we not allowed to try to influence people’s decisions anymore? That’s probably news to the First Amendment. But, no, I believe every ad being run during the Super Bowl will be trying to influence someone’s decision: which beer to drink; which car to drive; which shaving cream to use. It’s just that people like Jemhu Greene think that free speech ends when at the point where we disagree with her.

Then there’s Joy Behar with the “Tim Tebow could have been a rapist pedophile” line:

Personally, I would love to see Behar - or anyone else - pony up the dough to run an ad with that message during the Super Bowl. “This ad brought to you by the Coalition of Nasty, Dried-Up, New York Liberal Women.”

And here’s something that maybe the creators of the Tebow ad didn’t think about: The ad could cause a spike in abortions amongst students and alumni of Florida State and the University of Georgia.

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Moose Droppings - Anchower Style

Hola Amigos. It’s been a long time since I wrapped at you, but here comes the round-up:

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Two Four!

Sometimes I get blue after the Christmas season. The lights come down, and it is dark and cold and wet. The fact that my birthday is in January used to cheer me up, now it just drags me further down.

However, tonight Jack Bauer arrives for twenty-four “24″ episodes. Those twenty-four “24″ episodes will lead me through this dark time of year and right into May when my favorite time of year begins.

Huzzah Jack Bauer! Who needs a Happy Light when we have you?

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Purple monkey dishwasher science.

More global warming “science.”

“I heard from a guy, who heard from a guy, who read it in a popular magazine, who got it from some guy speculating that…” is good enough to end up in the IPCC report. Brilliant. Makes the doctored data look downright legitimate.

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Of course it’s unconstitutional. Like that matters.

Oh, George Will, you’re so quaint.  Like Congress even pretends to care about what the Constitution says anymore. Though he does nicely sum up the way things ought to be:

More truly conservative conservatives take their bearings from the proposition that government’s primary purpose is not to organize the fulfillment of majority preferences but to protect preexisting rights of the individual — basically, liberty. These conservatives favor judicial activism understood as unflinching performance of the courts’ role in that protection.
That role includes disapproving congressional encroachments on liberty that are not exercises of enumerated powers. This obligatory engagement with the Constitution’s text and logic supersedes any obligation to be deferential toward the actions of government merely because they reflect popular sovereignty.

There isn’t anyone, including the President, who has seriously studied the Constitution that can say this health care bill would ever be considered constitutional without the tortured interpretations of the New Deal Supreme Court cases and the Warren Court.  The problem is that a lot of people have talked themselves into the proposition that the Constitution actually was meant to be changed in that manner and not through the provided amendment process.

I wonder if this will be the point where enough is enough. Who knows. I’ve talked a lot about the 4-4-1 tie in the court. It’s another coin flip.

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Crazy all over

If all Christians are held responsible for this bag of crazy:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it… They [Haitians] were under the heel of the French … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story… And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.

then all global warming alarmists should be held responsible for this nutty statement:

When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this [the earthquake] is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?

At least Pat Robertson’s statement makes some sense in the nutty context it is in. (Deal with devil = earthquake as God’s punishment.) I’m not sure why Gaia - or whatever - would be punishing Haiti for pumping out carbon dioxide, since I’m pretty sure the average Haitian’s carbon footprint is tiny compared to Americans, Europeans, or Japanese. Maybe Glover should have saved that for when an earthquake hits Tokyo or Los Angeles.

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Moose Strips #24

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Hadn’t heard anything about that.

I don’t care about this story, but I found this paragraph funny:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then Sen. Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Obama is the nation’s first African-American president. [Emphasis added.]

I suppose it conforms to some rule of journalism to include the italicized sentence, but I wonder if we can just assume that everyone knows that at this point.

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Moose Strips #23

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Dumb Lawyer Stories - Starring Me

This story from The Namby Pamby, Attorney-at-Law made me remember a story I was going to post about one of my recent trips to court. On one hand it isn’t as funny since what I said wasn’t as funny. On the other hand it might be a little funnier since I actually said it.

I was defending a summary judgment motion in oral arguments against a lawyer I have nicknamed “Spirit of Crazy Horse.”  Not because I’m a racist or because he’s Indian, since neither is the case, but because he actually released a freaking album of folk songs entitled “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.” (This is the guy I wrote about here when I moved for SJ against his client a few weeks later.)

After the judge denied the plaintiff’s motion, we went back to the table to negotiate and order while other people with civil litigants took their turn in front of the judge. When it became obvious I was going to have to go back to my office to write one up Spirit of Crazy Horse took off and I stuck around to tell the judge we’d return the next week with the order.

When the two pro se litigants were done with their interminable argument, I walked up to the bar and said, “Your honor, Mr. Crazy Horse and I have to work out an order. We’ll present it next week.” Then I realized I had actually called the guy “Mr. Crazy Horse” on the record in open court.

The judge looked at me for a second and said, “Uhh… OK.” I turned on my heel and got out of the court room while the getting was good without having to explain anything. Fortunately, the judges (and other lawyers in the county) don’t have much use for Spirit of Crazy Horse, so I got away with that one. I do have nicknames for other lawyers (and some of the judges) which probably wouldn’t fly, though.  I’ll have to be more careful…

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Smart People for ManBearPig

This line from today’s David Brooks column caught my attention:

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise.

That statement may very well be true, but I find it puzzling. I am skeptical of global warming because I am in the “educated class.” Specifically my education and experience in statistics and the scientific method makes me skeptical about almost all doomsday alarmists, not just global warming. And after recent events I have only become more skeptical that there is a lot of valid science going on in the climate change field.

I understand Brooks’ point, but I don’t think someone with an AB in History ought to be casting a lot of dispersions on public skepticism when the “educated class’s” “belief” in global warming is based on about as much understanding of the issue.

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Review: Avatar

You know the hype: After a 12 year absence James Cameron returns to the directing chair with a movie so innovative it will forever change the way movies are made. If there was one director that I would believe that hype about it would be James Cameron. In “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” he demonstrated he that he was able to use cutting edge special effects without getting distracted by them. And in “The Terminator,”  “Aliens,” and “Titanic” he proved that he could use more conventional special effects better than almost any other director.  In all of those movies he proved that no matter what special effects he uses he can craft intense action sequences, usually connected with a pretty good story.

So how is Cameron’s proprietary  live action 3D technology? Unlike almost everyone else I’m going to reserve judgment. I saw Avatar on a RealD 3D projection system with DLP digital projection. That system is supposed to be less impressive than the IMAX 3-D projection system. (Even though the film was originally rendered in RealD… I don’t know, don’t ask me.)

The reason I’m going to reserve judgment is that while in “Avatar” it worked well to seamlessly immerse the viewer into the world of Pandora, the problem was it is an alien world.  Almost all life on Pandora is pointlessly bioluminescent. There is lots of quick movements through alien tree tops, floating mountains, and in general a bunch of stuff that is fantastic. The only time we see human dominated environment is inside buildings where the 3D isn’t very conspicuous or in a space ship at the very start of the movie, which seemed off to me.  Of course that could have been because my eyes weren’t adjusted to the RealD projection yet.

On the other hand the movie is just plain beautiful and the 3D only makes it more beautiful. I just hope Cameron’s system works well in the future. What I want to see is James Cameron use the same system in an Earth-bound action movie and see how it looks. Jim, Arnold is done being governor in a year, have your people call his people. (I’m thinking more “Terminator 5″, less “True Lies 2.”)

What about what all of those 3D special effects were supporting? Cameron’s movies have always had a serviceable story, often a great story. That is until now. I guess the problem was he was damn sure going to get a message in there, but he couldn’t really decide which one, so he jammed as many as he could come up with in. That is kind of strange for a man who used his first four movies (not counting Piranha 2) to deliver essentially the same message: “Nuclear weapons are bad.”

The movie meanders around from “Dances with Wolves” in space, to criticism of the Iraq and Afghanistan War, to a Gaia hypothesis story, to a criticism of the military-industrial complex (in a movie financed in part by News Corp.) and back again. You may think that lefty politics in movies bug me. It really doesn’t, especially when it is in allegory. And especially if it is done well. For me it’s easy to laugh off a message with “those crazy lefties” and enjoy the movie.

But it wasn’t done well here. Cameron famously worked on this movie since 1994. The problem that created is that I don’t think he ever locked the screenplay. The clumsiness of certain parts of the screenplay create a vision of him watching the events of the Iraq war and hurrying back to his word processor to add in some things before the animation had to be locked. Sometimes the result was merely distracting - when one character mutters something about “shock and awe” the fourth wall breaks down and I am ripped out of the world that Cameron created; I’m not sure why he’d want to do that when he spent $300 million to get me in - sometimes it just makes the screenplay sloppy. If it is a retelling of the myth of the American Indian why do the Na’vi win? (I don’t think I’m giving anything away here. We all know what is going to happen.) If it is about Iraq it is so superficial as to be laughable. (Where are the Sunni and Shia Na’vi? Where was the evil Na’vi dictator who used his unobtainium (!) wealth to invade and slaughter his neighbors?) And why don’t the humans just regroup and come back with more guys and weapons in a few years?

Strip away and ignore “The Message” and it’s a serviceable story, but one we’ve seen in a thousand movies. It seems strange for Cameron to waste ground breaking special effects on a well-trodden storyline, and it is too bad that he did. There are some heart pounding action scenes to be sure, but in the end I guess I didn’t care about the outcome of those scenes enough. I think Cameron missed a good opportunity to develop the rules of avatars the way he did with time travel in the “Terminator” movies. Some originality might have helped me overlook some of the more mundane aspects of the story.

I will say that 2009 has made me say I’d like to see more Sam Worthington. He was pitch perfect in both “Terminator: Salvation” and “Avatar” this year. (Maybe his projects have to have some connection with Cameron.) Like his “Terminator: Salvation” co-star Christian Bale, he can act, but doesn’t seem to either look down on action roles or use them as a chance to ham it up.

Oh, and more Michelle Rodriguez in loose tank-tops in anything.

Avatar: In 3D: B+; In 2D: B-.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, right after I wrote this review I popped in “District 9,” which  provided a great example of how a story about the interaction of humans with extraterrestrials which is really an allegory about human politics can still feel original. I’d give “District 9″ a solid A-.

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The Band Blog

What do you do when you haven’t had the time or energy to post on your blog in a couple of weeks? Why, start a new blog of course.

TheBandBlog.bullmoosestrikesback.com is my new blog which will cover only one subject: My decision to undergo gastric banding surgery.

I decided to separate it from this blog since the subject might be very boring to a lot of people and because I wanted to make the postings more accessible as a resource to other people investigating gastric banding surgery.

If you think the subject interests you, check it out.

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What Do You Get a Wookie for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb)?

Just thought I’d share the best Christmas song ever made with everyone:

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More population nonsense.

Sigh. Every time I see something like this, I wonder how anyone could have the nerve to get mad at me when I call militant environmentalism what it is: Anti-human nihilism.

Do a quick exercise. If 6.5 billion people lived in the same population density of New York City, how big would the city be? About the size of Texas? Check my math.

So why do we have proposals like that being made as the western world commits suicide? (2.1 live births per woman is what is needed to maintain a stable population.) Liberals - classical liberals in the historical sense of the word, not people who necessarily voted for Obama or against Bush  - who value things like freedom of speech, religion, women’s rights, tolerance of homosexuals (as in not killing them), clean air and water, science, and everything else western civilization has spent 2,500 years developing shouldn’t want to turn the world over to the backwards civilizations that appear on the top of that list. But people like Diane Francis seemingly can’t wait to do so to the point where she wants to mandate it.

You’d think people would be embarrassed to still be pushing this particular boogie man after all this time. Especially since even some at UN are predicting the world population topping out at 9 billion in 2050. (Sure, that’s only a prediction, but does anyone see the next generation of the western world, Russia, and China having more kids than their parents?) So that’s Texas and New Mexico. Still seems like a lot of room left for growing rice, wheat, and trees.

The answer to the world’s problems, whatever they may be, is not a population crash, especially in the societies likely to produce technological solutions.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I missed the most obvious problem with a global one-child mandate: Can you imagine a world totally populated  by sufferers of only child syndrome? I shudder thinking about it.

UPDATE 2: D’oh. This post got moved to “Private” for a while. I hate when that happens.

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Stunned by obtuseness

Over at Ron Coleman’s Likelihood of Success: Ron Coleman’s Pretty Good Blog, Mr. Coleman writes about facing one of the attorneys on KSM’s defense “dream team” earlier in his career.

[Fenstermaker] is very, very stupid.  I know this because I he was my adversary in a small case once–a case, in fact, in which he represented his own law firm, and thereby proved the ancient adage about what sort of a lawyer the self-represented get for themselves… Fenstermaker stunned me with this obtuseness.  The experience was more akin to attempting to interact with masonry than any other I have had in my litigation career.  He was dumb, and he was childish.

I appreciated Coleman’s timing since I just had my first run in with such an adverse party’s attorney who struck me the same way. I am handling a case in which a septic system is draining onto another person’s property. I’m the attorney for the person who owns the land being drained upon. The adverse attorney is pretty much a criminal attorney who handles drug cases and civil and criminal actions stemming from drug use. (Right before the case that I argued with him, he argued a case to try to prevent the forfeiture of a house that was producing meth. There are allegations that the house draining sewage on my client’s land was a meth lab as well.)

That this guy is a bad attorney is beyond doubt. His bar license was suspended at one point for seriously mishandling a series of cases. But that doesn’t always mean dumb. However, when he moved for summary judgment, I decided that he was dumb, getting the same impression that Ron Coleman did about Scott Fenstermaker.

He moved for summary judgment on the theory of a prescriptive easement. My response was to point out that he only made a prima facie showing for 7 years of use, not 10 as required by Washington. His reply was that I didn’t have evidence that after 7 years any of the elements were not met. He said that in a reply and in front of the judge.

I was stunned. How could someone get through law school and then practice law for 17 years - well, when not suspended - and not know what a prima facie showing is? “Stunned by obtuseness” is a good phrase to describe how I felt. I wonder if a lot of times he doesn’t confuse judges into accidentally making the wrong decision. However that didn’t happen last Friday and I won the motion.

I think I might have mentioned this guy before on Facebook. He sent a guy over to serve a motion that I’m sure was supposed to be an attempt to intimidate me. Too bad the guy wasn’t physically capable of intimidating me. (Hey, he was playing the odds.)

In any case, he is now late to file a response to my motion for summary judgment. Sounds like someone is angling for another suspension.

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