"People should not be afraid of their governments...

...Governments should be afraid of their people."

It's been a good week for the movies. After not going to the actual theater in months, Hüsbando and I have seen two good ones in less than a week. Monday we saw "Inside Man," with Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster -- an extremely enjoyable, solid "caper" film with one of the smartest, unexpectedly funniest scripts in a while. Who knew Spike Lee could do action?

And now, we have just came back from a matinee for V for Vendetta. It rocked my world. Somewhat surprisingly, it also made me cry.

I cried not for the thinly fleshed-out love story between Evey, Natalie Portman's character, and V, played with panache by Hugo Weaving, but for us. For the United States. I cried because we need a revolution, too. Sure, V is based on a comic book, but a comic book written by the great Alan Moore during Thatcher's Britain. It's about a government that lies to its citizens and believes too much in its own power to set reality through TV mouthpieces and secret police. And contrary to the reviews, ranging from tepid to scathing, that I read before seeing it, the movie has heft. It was inspiring, at least to me. The reasonably crowded theater we saw it in gasped and sighed where appropriate, and clapped and cheered at the end.

That said, it was not without flaws. There were several corny bits that made you remember it came from a comic book. And the aforementioned tacked-on "love story" just felt wrong. Reading around the Web, I see other people were peevish that Evey is so passive, despite her much-touted radical roots. I can see all this, and yet...

Without Natalie Portman, who I will watch in anything -- having been mesmerized by her starting when she was a wee girl way back in The Professional -- the movie would probably have been doomed to be cheesy, but she manages to imbue her melodramatic scenes with realistic emotion and fear. And Hugo Weaving is pretty damn phenomenal in that creepy mask -- it's amazing to realize how much of acting is usually dependent on facial expressions, and how hard an actor has to work when he has none to fall back on.

So, sometimes low expectations can work in your favor. Hüsbando and I came out of the theater strangely moved. There was something about the end, the silent march of thousands, that brought tears to both our eyes.

Give me a mask and a cape and I'll storm the White House!

Lara Logan for President!

Not being a TV news watcher, I didn't know who ABC's Iraq correspondent Lara Logan was before reading in Broadsheet about her kick-ass performance on CNN. In clipped, calm tones, she defends journalists from accusations that they're whiny, cowardly slackers holed up in hotels and refusing to report all the "good" stories happening in Iraq.

Watch and cheer for her:

I guess she can't run for president since she appears to be English. But screw Katie Couric, someone should give this woman an anchor job.

"You are what you love … and not what loves you back."

If you haven't, go listen right now to "Rabbit Fur Coat," the new album from Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins. It's streaming over at her website . I got turned on to it separately by two friends on the same day. It's as if you mashed together the voices of Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star (or maybe Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmins), the raw-polished sound of Lucinda Williams, and the wit and sarcasm of Nellie McKay's lyrics. For example:

Nothing is ever as good as it was
And what's good for your soul
Will be bad on your nerves if you reverse it

It's bound to melt your heart
One way or another
It's bound to melt your heart
For good or for bad
It's like a valentine
From your mother
It's bound to melt your heart

And we've lost the people we could have loved, and you...
What you know you have or what you think you aren't
It's never perfect

It's relatively rare that I fall so hard and so quickly for a new musician. The last time was about 6 months ago, when Hüsbando and I became obsessed with Andrew Bird. (We still are.) He manages to sound like a lounge lizard playing violin along with 1920s swing and singing lyrics that David Byrne might have written. Eclectic + cozy = awesome. Listen to a streaming version of his latest album, "The Mysterious Production of Eggs."

I got blogged by CBS!

My latest story for work, Top Iraq war correspondents discuss risking their lives to tell a truth that few want to hear — or believe got blogged by CBS and called "excellent"! Nice to hear as the story is really, really long and was really, really hard to crank out in a few hours. Don't read it unless you want to get depressed, though, about just how bad things suck in Iraq and how we're probably not hearing the half of it.

There's a boom-boom in your eyes...

Our work server is down, so I'm taking this opportunity to blog about something nonpolitical lest I start to sound like a liberal harridan. (Which I am.)

The Sopranos are back! 15 minutes into last night's episode, it was as if the two-year hiatus never happened. I was immediately sucked into Tony and Co's new lives: Uncle Jun with Alzheimer's, Carmela's sushi addiction, Janice with a baby...just listening to Tony's horse-like heavy breathing made me feel oddly happy and calm.

"Big Love," the new HBO drama about a polygamous family, was promising -- plenty of gripping, uncomfortable moments. It reminds me of a mishmash of Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Deadwood. Not sure yet if Chloe Sevigny's acting is just not up to par with the others or whether she's doing something with the character of the Machiavellian second wife that I don't get yet. Harry Dean Stanton is really, really creepy as the "patriarch."

Although I'm glad to have good TV to watch once again, I have realized something lately: the fewer magazines I read and less TV I watch, the happier I am. Books -- particularly nonfiction right now -- and good movies seem to be much more nourishing and provide a lot more food for thought, the whole mental junk food versus spinach thing I suppose.

What I've consumed in the past month and really enjoyed:

Tell Them I Didn't Cry, Jackie Spinner's account of a year in Iraq for the Washington Post. She starts out an annoyingly perky little vegetarian and rapidly turns into a battle-hardened correspondent, peeing in Gatorade bottles in a moving HumVee filled with soldiers. Her heartbreak over the beating she gets from right-wing bloggers is very compelling too: "I'm not here to serve my country, I'm here to serve the story" she says, and I at last understand that it might be possible for reporters in Iraq to do so even if they have to work through translators as they sit inside a car wearing an abaya.

Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which I didn't finish the first time around but this time really, really enjoyed. (I have the galleys for his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, for an interview in early April.) Where else can you learn about how the cannabis plant chose humans to fulfill its evolutionary destiny, and how Johnny Appleseed was a barefoot freak who sold apple plants so that pioneers could make alcoholic cider and fell in love with an 11-year-old girl?

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. As good as the hype. Although I found Didion's narrative distance a little emotionally chilly at first, I was soon completely gripped by the intensity of her self-inspection. And I can't believe her daughter ended up dying after the book was done...it's just brutal.

The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. "Dick Lit"! Like a more intellectual -- John Donne's poems figure prominently -- Bridget Jones' Diary from a male point of view. Somewhere in between Nick Hornby and Martin Amis. Plot machinery starts to creak in the last third, but it's sure to make an excellent movie starring Hugh Grant or someone similar who is simultaneously charming and loathsome.

The servers are back up....and it's back to work pour moi.

Rant #2, plus a suggestion for framing Bush

I really should stop reading the political pieces in the New Yorker. It just upsets me. My blood pressure rises and my jaw starts to ache from clenching my teeth as I ingest the latest proof of the religious-right-wing (I use the two terms collectively, not interchangeably) assault on every front of what formerly made this country great. But halfway through reading "Political Science: The Bush Administration's War on the Laboratory" in this week's New Yorker, I had an idea of how to apply George Lakoff's framing principles to Bush's Evil Empire. And I needed to blog it before I forgot.

First the rant: Michael Specter's article describes in excoriating detail dozens of instances in which the Bush Administration has bullied or simply bulldozed scientists. Merck has invented a vaccine that would prevent the human papilloma virus, an STD, in women -- but it has to be administered before the woman becomes sexually active and is exposed to the virus. Meaning, probably around the age of 15. This runs contrary to the RRW's insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of combatting teen pregnancy and disease and so they are gearing up to prevent its distribution. And then there's the morning-after pill, approved by an overwhelming majority on the FDA's advisory committee of scientists but declined in an unprecedented move by the FDA's politically appointed director. And the EPA head who removed damning sentences in a report on global warming and replaced them with energy industry recommendations. Scientists prevented from speaking to the World Health Organization "who do not represent the views of the U.S. properly." Evolution versus creationism (excuse me, intelligent design). Terry Schiavo. Stem-cell research.

The stem-cell research ban, Specter explains, is really debilitating because facilities that have received any federal funds, like a university building constructed partly with federal funds, cannot mix stem-cell research with their other research. So anyone doing it needs their own electron microscope and spectrometer, which as you can imagine really cuts down on those able to do it.

I guess that was more of a recap than a rant. But if you read the article, you too will slowly realize that there may come a day when you will not have access to the life-saving cancer intervention that people in Europe will -- because it was based on stem cell research. That if you are raped and impregnated, you'll be carrying the baby to term. This country is going to look more and more like Mississippi, circa 1950.

So, I was thinking we need to start calling the RRWers what they are: reality hijackers and truth terrorists. They see a fact they don't like, and they immediately go on the offensive against it. With science, they completely omit or eliminate any information that doesn't accord with their religious -- not moral -- worldview, whether by forcing out the scientist who came up with it or preventing him/her from presenting their findings or getting further funding. Instead of cowering and wringing our hands about it, progressives (and liberals, damn it) should start attacking. Doesn't "reality hijacker" have a nice ring to it?

Annoyingly, the New Yorker has not made this particular article available online, instead offering a Q&A with Michael Specter that is shorter but not as alarming.

Why atheists are, quite simply, superior beings

Excellent opinion piece by Slavoj Zizek in today's NY Times explaining why atheists should not be faulted for feeling morally superior in these days of Jihad vs. Crusade:

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward.

Why aren't there more atheists?

Bill of Rights, 2006 edition

In Slate. [Categorize under "This is funny and I wish I had thought of it"]

[Also categorize as, I ran across it in the blog of a complete stranger that I've been reading because she's going to private investigator school. And because she's funny and Boggles and lives in Seattle, where she goes to a Unitarian Church. If she's not Aunt Vicky, she's Erikaje's long-lost sibling...]

It's jeanetic....

Yesterday I enjoyed: a post-lunch slice of ginger cake with caramel sauce (scrumptious), a late-afternoon pick me up of a home-made Oreo cookie by my pastry-chef coworker (practically orgasmic), and ten "After 8" mint thingies I inhaled while watching America's Next Top Model update (a killer corn-syrup combination all around).

Today, on an unrelated note, I have officially forsworn all sweets for the month, with the exception of the lemon mousse I am making for our fancy-shmancy dinner party Saturday.


This is not Lent privation. I have to. It is either this or give up and buy low-rise jeans in a size 12, which there should be a law against. Bart points out that I can always buy Mom jeans. Grrrreat. There should be a law against that too. Maybe there already is.

Babes in my woods

A third friend has just told me she's pregnant. While I am extremely happy for her, don't get me wrong -- she and her husband are going to be great parents, they'll raise a credit to society and probably a drop-dead gorgeous one too -- I'm feeling like the walls are closing in. I am hurtling toward my 35th birthday like it's the edge of a cliff at the end of this year.

No, I am not thinking about having children. OK, I am. But you know what? Every time I think about a cute little grub snuggled up to my breast, tiny fingers and toes and rosebud lips, all I feel is trapped, panic-stricken, and horrified. I think about the endless demands. About preschools and colleges, daycare and dangerous strangers. I think about how much easier and almost as satisfying having cats is. Except cats won't take care of you when you're old. Cats won't replicate the excellent relationship I have with my own mother. Whenever I follow the baby-thought all the way through to the end, I just can't see it. I can, however, see me as the most beloved aunt of whatever children my sister's going to have, who I will spoil rotten.

What's bothering me about all the pregnancies is that they represent a major milestone in one's life: creating another life. Reese Witherspoon gets on my nerves and I thought the Oscars were beyond boring, but something in her acceptance speech hit me between the eyes. She said, "I'm just trying to matter." Well, I'm just trying to matter, too. It's a lot easier to leave your mark with a kid. One way or another you "matter" to that little person more than anyone else. As a childfree atheist, I've decide the only way I'm going to matter is by writing books that other people will hopefully read and take something away from. I don't need or truthfully even want to be famous. I just want to be able to make a living writing books that enough people will buy and with a little luck, read some of the funnier or wise passages out loud to their friends.

So, as a now-disgraced author would say, "F*** the bullshit, it's time to throw down." I'm just going to have to write my way through baby season. Or else I'll have to decide whether it doesn't matter if I "matter" or not -- and I know that it doesn't to anyone but me, that we have just a brief time on earth, all 5 billion of us, and we do the best we can but regardless, we die anyway -- but I'm not there yet!