Saturday, November 12, 2011

FatAss Paul LePage Chronicles

FatAss Paul LePage has decided that people who receive taxpayer's money should be drug-tested.

Wonder if that includes himself and his fatass daughter... both of whom receive taxpayer money in their state salaries.

Bet it doesn't.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Glass Houses Department

A while back, I mentioned that one of the medical bloggers I read got caught up in the Massachussetts EMS scandal, where more than 200 EMS personnel got caught falsifying recertification training records. This guy now has a post up criticizing private-sector EMS providers, and says he's embarrassed when the best excuse he can make for them is lack of training.

This coming from someone who fraudulently submitted records claiming he had attended mandated in-service training.

To use his own phrase, "Sorry, guy, I am not impressed."

If you want to bitch about someone else's training, maybe you should have made sure your own was in order.

Oh, yeah, that's right, you were too busy skipping training but claiming the credit anyway.


And he no longer allowing commenting on his blog.  Maybe he got tired of being called a hypocrite.

RIP Hal Bruno

Hal Bruno, the long-time political director for ABC News, and life-long volunteer fire fighter, has died at the age of 83.

He was the commanding general of ABC's political coverage in the 80s and 90s, but more important to me, he was a dedicated firefighter, rising to the rank of Chief in his department, and a tireless campaigner for fire safety:

In what amounted almost to a second career, Mr. Bruno was a volunteer firefighter for much of his life and became an authority on fire safety. He wrote a monthly column for Firehouse magazine.

When he retired from ABC in 1999, he was appointed chairman of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, which honors firefighters who have lost their lives in the line of duty and provides assistance to their families, a position he held until 2008.

Mr. Westin recalled that on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bruno was among the first to phone in details of the attack on the Pentagon. He had got word of a fire there and had rushed to the scene to help.

Chief Bruno won just about every award there was in the world of fire suppression.  His voice, his expertise, and his experience will be missed.

[And now, the Block Quote function has decided not to work. Don't know if it's Blogger or Microsoft or both.]

Perry: At Least He (Usually) Speaks English...

Goodhair's YouTube moment, when he forgot the third Federal agency he would eliminate as President, drew its share of humor, from Dependable Renegade all the way to Goodhair's own campaign committee.

As Tengrain might have put it, "'Hey, he's from Texas, jes lahk gee-dubya. Y'all oughta be happy he's talkin in English, and makin' full sentences,' his campaign committee didn't add."

Betting around here at 618Rants World HQ is more or less evenly split among the Department of Health & Human Services, EPA, National Endowment for the Arts, IRS, ATF, and of course GAO (Government Accountability Office)... basically, all the agencies that keep the Teabaggin wingnuts from doing whatever the hell they want.  My money is on CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (stopping to make sure I put the "L" in "public"), which isn't really a government agency per se, but the Teabaggin wingnuts hate them some CPB.

Monday, November 07, 2011

Movie review

Watched a disappointing movie last night, Certain Prey, based on a novel by John Sandford. The made-for-TV movie was produced by Mark Harmon (of NCIS fame), so -- not surprisingly -- it starred Harmon "as you've never seen him"... which is a load of hooey.

Certain Prey is part of Sandford's series about Lucas Davenport, formerly Lieutenant and Deputy Chief with Minneapolis PD and later with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.  Davenport is described in most of the novels as relatively tall, ruggedly handsome (as opposed to Harmon's almost "pretty boy" looks), with a chilling smile.  Face it, Harmon just doesn't fit that bill.  I think Nick Chinlund (below) is much closer to Davenport's description of his protagonist:


"He was slender and dark-complexioned, with straight black hair goping grey at the temples and a long nose over a crooked smile. One of his central upper incisors had been chipped and he had never had it capped. He might have been an Indian except for his blue eyes." 

Harmon's Davenport is almost exactly like Harmon's Leroy Jethro Gibbs: calm, collected, wry, ready with a quip, driving insanely fast (although in Davenport's Porsche rather than Gibbs' Charger), and being an inhumanly accurate shot.  Not exactly Harmon "as you've never seen him." The only Gibbs characteristic that is missing is the headslap.

Comparing the movie to the book (which I had re-read the previous day) showed a lot of shortcuts and plot changes.  In the book, Carmel Loan and Hale Allen had a professional relationship prior to the killing; in the movie, they had had an affair several years earlier. There were many others, some understandable because of the transition from book to movie, others were unnecessary.

The biggest problem, though, was perhaps unavoidable, given the star's history.  In the book, the lead FBI agent's name is Louis Mallard.  Since the medical examiner on NCIS is Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard, that would have been a bit much.

An earlier "Prey" novel, Mind Prey, starred Eriq LaSalle (of ER), who was also one of the producers. This indicates to me that maybe Sandford (or his agent) should be a little more careful about selling movie rights (Sandford has a whole page about that fiasco here).

Now I'm not saying I could have done any better, or even that I could have done as well. I'm simply saying I think the movie could have been much, much better.