• Fights were great. I thought they were going to show more of them though. #
• -Getting ready to watch Affliction MMA fights tonight! #

• -Worn out. Long week. Went to the movies and saw Gran Torino. Great movie. #

Gran Torino [Theatrical Release]

Clint Eastwood couldn’t screw up a movie if he tried. Gran Torino begins as an in-your-face testimonial about bigotry in America that calls attention to how ridiculous racial preconceptions really are. By confronting these issues head on, Eastwood shows us that when intolerance is challenged with love and compassion, instead of hate and scorn, even a lifelong racist can find redemption and salvation among those he used to execrate. A roller-coaster of a movie, Gran Torino will make your sides hurt with laughter, and sting your cheeks with tears. It is a bittersweet lesson teaching us that words only have power over you when you let them, and simple friendship and acceptance can change lives.

Rating:

I’m not a fan of Barack Obama’s. I haven’t made any secret of that. That doesn’t mean I don’t realize the cultural and historical significance that his inauguration as President of the United States brings with it. While I am ideologically opposed to his political agenda, I understand that the symbolic nature of his election is truly an awesome and significant step forward for minorities in our country, and I hope they can gain from it the hope and understanding that this is not the America of yesterday. Actor Will Smith superbly imparted his thoughts on how President Obama’s election impacted him personally. Of the hundreds of such opinions I have heard of the last couple of months, his, I think, are the most astute.

Here are his reflections, as he related them to USA Today, when he was asked : “What does Barack Obama’s election mean to you?”

Photo by Sergio Perez, Reuters

Will Smith

Academy Award-nominee Will Smith’s latest movie is Seven Pounds.

For me, it was something that I’ve always believed. I’ve read the Declaration of Independence. I’ve read the Constitution. I have the preamble memorized. It’s something I’ve always believed in, and when Barack Obama won, it validated a piece of me that I wasn’t allowed to say out loud – that America is not a racist nation.

I love that all of our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were really trying to keep you down, he would have done everything he could to keep Obama down. Yes, there are racist people who live here, absolutely. But they’re not the majority anymore.

I’m an African American, and I was able to climb to a certain point in Hollywood. On that journey, I realized people weren’t trying to stop me. Most people were trying to help me. Before Obama won the presidency, it was like, I’m the exception. Tiger is the exception. Michael Jordan is the exception. Bill Cosby is the exception. But there’s something about being the leader of the free world, with every other position on earth below that. You can’t argue with that. If Barack Obama can win the presidency of the United States, you can absolutely be the manager at Saks.

Come on. It was such a fantastic experience for me to be able to say out loud that I love America and not be called an Uncle Tom. That I can stand out, and I can say out loud that I love this country and not get funny looks.

I don’t think we are African Americans, Irish Americans or Japanese Americans anymore. I think Americans are a new race of people. We are Americans of African descent. We are Americans of Irish descent.

It’s a whole new world.

Good for him.

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Elves of Cintra (The Genesis of Shannara, Book 2)

Brooks’ writing formula takes a pretty mundane turn in The Elves of Cintra, the second book of his Genesis of Shannara trilogy. As I said before, I found the characters introduced in the first book to be just interesting enough to warrant continuing on in the series, but The Elves of Cintra does its very best to strain my resolve to learn the fate of these tragic characters. There are a couple of bright spots in the novel, such as Logan’s conflict with the renegade Knight of the Word, but overall, it was anticlimatic at best. The story never unfolds, it just goes from point A, to point B, and so on. Ultimately, it was no more than a bridge to the third book and couldn’t stand on its own if you gave it crutches.

Rating:

CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE

Rafters
A Ghost Story
By
Island D. Richards

There was just enough light seeping into the cavernous basement from the few windows scattered along the walls to dimly illuminate the bare-boned skeletal walls of rotting two-by-fours that zigzagged through the underground room like a maze. Wonderful, Jerry thought as he peered into the seemingly endless darkness, fumbling with the battery powered lantern trying to get it to light up again, where the hell are we gonna find a fuse box down here.

“Shit,” Michael said from behind him, “the fucking door is locked!”

“What do you mean it’s locked? That door doesn’t lock!” Jerry was on the verge of blowing his top. First the house lights, then the lantern, and now this.

“Fuck you if you’re so smart. Try it yourself, asshole,” Michael answered with a hiss.

“Knock it off guys, this is bad enough without you two chewing each other’s heads off down here,” Sally said from the place near the wall to the door’s right that she had moved to after coming out of the stairwell. “Can you please just get that light back on?”

“I’m trying, babe. Let me see if the connections are loose. It’s a new battery dammit, it shouldn’t be dead already.” Why me, he thought as he fumbled with the screw-on bottom of the lantern. All I friggin’ wanted was a night alone with Sal. Why’d she have to bring along her sister and that thick headed fuck, Michael?

“What the hell is that?” Michael said. “What are those?”

Jerry could hear a tremble beginning to build in Michael’s voice, in fact, he could almost feel Michael’s fear start to charge the air that filled the few feet between them. In that same moment, he could swear that the temperature in the previously warm and humid basement dropped twenty degrees. “Come on you pansy, there isn’t anyth…” Just then, Sally screamed, and Jerry looked up to see what they were so afraid of.

There, in the darkness among the struts, were a pair of pinpoint lights that hovered there in the air, almost as they were floating on air currents, watching them like…like eyes, Jerry answered himself. But, as Jerry stared at them, trying to see what they could be attached to, they flittered from his sight. Then more pairs of these eyes began to twinkle into existence in his peripheral vision. First one, then three, five…but every time he tried to focus on any particular pair, they simply flickered away like candlelight in a cold breeze.

“Jerry! What are they?” Sally was crying now, he could hear her behind him over his right shoulder.

He noticed now that every time he attempted to focus on any one pair and prompted its disappearance, the others that he saw in the periphery seemed to get closer. As they did, he thought he could start to make out shadows floating behind the pinpoints. Almost like entities, but he just couldn’t get a visual grasp on them. Every time he tried, they once again disappeared and the rest drew closer, seemingly bringing the darkness with them. In a panic now, he tried to simply focus on the darkness of the room and found, surprisingly, that the many pairs of starlight, in the dozens now, seemed to stop advancing and, yes, he was sure of it now, to even retreat.

“Don’t look at them Sally, OK? Just look down and pretend you don’t see them,” Jerry told her.

“But I…”

“No! Just do what I tell you,” Jerry said as he started to slowly back toward her, the hair on his neck prickling and a lump forming in his throat. Is this what a deer feels like when wolves corner it? Are we being hunted?

“What the hell are you?” Michael suddenly began to yell at the pinpoints in the darkness. “Stay away! I’m warning you! I got a gun you fuckers!” He was screaming at the top of his lungs now.

Did he just say he had a gun? “Mike, listen to me! Don’t look at them. Don’t look, do you hear me? Pretend they aren’t there!”

Michael wasn’t listening though. He’d drawn his .380 from its hiding place in the small of his back and was trying to hold his sights on a pair of the tiny eyes as he yelled at them. But every time he would sight in one pair, it would disappear and more would come closer. One after another he pointed his automatic at them, and one after another they would disappear, only to bring the others nearer. Then, a pair appeared virtually right in front of him, mere feet from his face. Panic stricken, he lifted the gun, pointed right between the eyes and pulled the trigger.

Jerry felt as if he’d just received a sledgehammer blow to his left ear when the first shot rang out. Then came another, and another, with white hot flashes filling the darkness, but illuminating nothing. “Stop! Stop shooting,” he screamed. Then Sally grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arms around him and pinning his arm against his torso, making him drop the lantern to the dusty floor.

When it hit the ground, it suddenly came alive, flooding the basement with its light. Jerry was looking directly at Michael as the light began to fill the room. As it reached out and filled the air around Michael, Jerry could see something else reaching out of the darkness toward him as well. What looked like a burly and grotesquely muscular arm, hairy, gray, and with long, yellow, talon-like claws at the tips of it’s long fingers swiped through the air at Michael’s head, as if were about to tear it from his shoulders. But, as the light covered it, it seemed to dissolve in midair as a dawn shadow does when it is found out by the sun’s morning rays.

Michael saw it, too. He didn’t stop screaming for a long time.

• Three days ahead of sitting in gyms watching Brandon wrestle. Watching Brandon wrestle +. Sitting in gyms -. #

Rick, that was pretty close to the most ignorant, self-serving, and arrogant commentary I have ever heard. You are supposed to be a journalist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call you out, so let me talk directly to you.

First of all, who are you to tell someone what name they should use? My son uses his middle name too, does that mean his opinion doesn’t count? How about my brother? He uses his middle name, too. Should his opinions be ignored? How condescending can you get?

Second, If you’re going to attack someone for what they say, attack them for what they mean, not for how you parse their words. You know what he meant. He meant that real time reporting of tactics and locations is dangerous, and that the currently entrenched media are biased. Try addressing it honestly instead of for the sake of protecting your “craft”.

Third, it is clear that the mainstream press, which means you, is feeling very threatened by the intrusion of the average joe — like Joe the Plumber, Matt Drudge, and every blogger out there, me included — into your beloved “craft”. If it was your choice, we’d all be silenced so the truth, as you and you alone tell it, can be heard.

Finally, Senator McCain and Governor Palin didn’t make “Joe the Plumber” famous. You did. You, and all of the pathetic, sound bite chasing, ratings mongering, “journalists” who dared to think that an honest question posed to “The One” by an average, random guy on the street could possibly count as news. Oh wait. It wasn’t news, was it. It was reality, and the press stopped dealing in reality a long time ago.

Joe reminded people that the truth isn’t contained only in press releases and on CNN. The truth is in honest questions, asked by honest people, and if the “real” reporters won’t ask them, somebody else has to.

So Now You’re A Correspondent? Really, “Sam”?

Posted: 03:56 PM ET

Guess Who’s Taking A Crack At International Journalism…

Something to take note of today. I want to share with you the thoughts of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher…you know, “Joe the War Correspondent”.

Yes, he’s in Israel filing reports, and here’s his analysis: (you can find his reports on the web, YouTube, etc. I don’t want to link to them here)

“I don’t think journalists should be anywhere around war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at, you report what’s happening day to day, you make a big deal out of it, I think it’s asinine.

I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting. War is hell.” (Samuel J. Wurzelbacher)

Samuel, let me talk to you directly.

[Read More...]

• -Yep. It was a looooong day. #
• -Gonna try to get some sleep. Long day tomorrow. #
• -Back from Denver. J Island took 4th in the tourney. Would have done better, but ref in last match missed him pin the kid TWICE! #