Damn It, Mamet

I liked The Unit. It was Boys Own stuff you could watch because there was always a chance that David Mamet had written it. A memo from Mamet to the writers of The Unit has been found recently and it is well worth reading, as it is Screenwriting for Beginners but excellently expressed (except for the all caps thing and some dodgy proofreading).

ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

Visions Of Lesbians

Boing Boing has a small article on how the Florida Family Council used a pic of a lesbian couple as a scare tactic. The FFC thinks that the couple on the left is what a lesbian couple look like. The couple on the right is who they were actually talking about:



The picture below is what you get when you put "lesbians" into a Google image search:



I'm sure this says something. But I'm not sure what. I'll be in my bunk.

Those French

I was talking about this in the pub the other day. So, just for fun, I thought I'd put it up. It's an ad for a French lubricant that is quite subtle until you realise just how filthy it is...

Fry On Catholics

Stephen Fry, mostly in the politest way possible, eviserates the Catholic Church. Make ten minutes for it right now.

Must Have Been A Slow News Day Or Something

Boing Boing link to an Article in the New York Magazine called A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things. It's a slide show of the American President dutifully looking at stuff he'd been taken to see in his day job.

I sort of understand why this exists, but it's not to show a man competently getting on with what he has to do. The captions suggest that Obama is bored or, perhaps, not really the man of the people he claims to be and that these photos slowly pare back the thin veneer of his everyman-ness.

It just seems gratuitously mean-spirited with a whif of condescension to random people with boring jobs that New York media types feel free to look down on.