Better Banter

Wow. I have yet to see 300 , but the respect I was contemplating throwing Frank Miller's way has grown exponentially. Must read (link requires worse-than-usual-pain-in-the-ass registration, but it's worth it). Via Michelle Malkin . Choice quote: "I think it's ridiculous that we set aside certain groups and say that we can't risk offending their ancestors. Please. I'd like to say, as an American, I was deeply offended by 'The Last of the Mohicans.' " More... At a comic book convention in 2006, he announced that he was working on a book about Al Qaeda attacking Gotham City that would be titled "Holy Terror, Batman!" People glanced around to see if he was joking. He wasn't. The book is still not out, and in the industry there is the general sense that the project has stalled a bit. At the W, though, Miller said about 120 pages of his Batman tale have been drawn and inked and he's starting in on the "final 50 or so." He sai

Interesting. A Dutchman named Johan Huibers has made a half-scale version of Noah's ark , nearly three storeys high. Part of his inspiration seems to be that his Dutch lowlands might soon be flooded by global warming. Might be a nice consolation if climate change hysteria made people get religion, but reason tells me that if you believe man is solely responsible for changing the planet's climate, you're not thinking much about God in the first place.

Rocky II is not by any stretch a message movie. It's an action movie that is by most accounts greatly inferior to its predecessor. But it holds a special spot in my heart, as I can remember with vivid detail being nine or ten years old and watching the television debut, crowded around a nine-inch black-and-white TV, with my entire family, wildly screaming at Rocky to get up off the canvas. What I remember about subsequent viewings (and there have been many), however, is not the fight, but the "gong moment." What was the gong moment and why do I bring it up today? Well the movie takes a long time to unfold. Rocky had lost a split-decision to Apollo Creed and tried to find a life outside of boxing. When Creed asks for a rematch to prove to the world that the last fight was a fluke, Rocky, out of other options, agrees. His wife, Adrian, does not support his decision. At one point she tells him, harshly, "You can't win!" Rocky goes about his trai

Last night I finally got around to watching the History Channel's excellent special on Sherman's March. A fascinating anecdote related to Confederate troops mining the roads on Sherman's path. When Sherman is brought to a wounded union soldier whose foot was blown off by a mine, Sherman angrily called for Confederate prisoners to be brought to the front. They would go first from now on and dig up the mines in the road. The rebels balked, but Sherman was furious and insisted they do it, telling them he didn't care if they blew up. However he also dispatched a prisoner to seek out the Confederate general in the area to tell him that rebel prisoners would be tasked with mine removal and walk in front from now on. There were no more minings. We can't draw too close a parallel between Sherman's roadside bombs and the ones killing our troops in Iraq. We can't strap Guantanamo detainees to the front of Humvees, and even if we could, it wouldn't even slow the te

I arrive at this story a bit late, but it's a subject worth some discussion. Last week Republican Congressman Wayne Allard demanded that North Korea return the U.S.S. Pueblo to the United States. In exchange, he offered a 19th Century Korean battle flag. With constituents in Pueblo, Colorado, Allard believes it is time for this ship to be sent home. Here's where embarrassment set in for me. The Pueblo? Rings a bell. What's North Korea doing with it? How'd they get it? Why have we let them keep it? A quick primer from the official U.S.S. Pueblo website only heightened my embarrassment. As an American, I should have known about this. Here's a quick, over-simplified summary, after which I'll get to my point. In January, 1968, the Pueblo was performing electronic surveliance off the coast of North Korea. The Navy maintains that the Pueblo was in international waters, and was therefore doing nothing illegal. North Korea obviously says differently. The Pueblo was eng