Day: December 21, 2006

Well at least it’s not another horror movie:

Sarah Michelle Gellar has joined the cast of TMNT, Warner Brothers’ upcoming computer-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, USA Today reported. She will play April, the human researcher who serves as the Turtles’ tech-services worker and mother figure.

Of course, now I’m confused. Having recently watched the trailer for the movie, I got the impression that it was already finished. Then again, there’s no sign of April in the trailer, so it’s possible that’s still to be added, or that Gellar has come on board to re-voice the character. It’s that, with a proposed release date of March 2007, it seems a little late to just now be joining the cast.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually see this movie. I was a fan of the original cartoon — did you know it ran for ten years? I sure didn’t — but I was already fourteen by the time the second live-action movie came out, which is probably the age when wisecracking pizza-eating turtles start to look uncool. (It didn’t help that the first live-action movie was uncool, and pretty lame to boot.) But I have to admit, it really doesn’t look half bad.

“AIGH! I’m losing the game of ‘jump through random hoops to learn something I already know!'” – Tasha Robinson on linking to the new Harry Potter title

Having followed the instructions here, I’ve got to agree with her: that was pretty pointless and random. I only hope the book itself isn’t half as tedious.

The title itself isn’t a great sign. It’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At least it’s no worse than any of the others. I guess Harry Potter and You’re Damn Right I’ll Kill Everybody Off if I Want, It’s My Last Book, So There! was too wordy for her publisher.

From Yahoo News:

As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. “We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, “Absolutely, we’re winning.”

He’s this close to trying to convince us there is no war, or to pointing at something in the distance, shouting, “Lookit that!” and running away.

I gotta tell you, if billions of dollars, and thousands of lives, and the fate of an entire region of the world wasn’t at stake, this would almost seem funny.

In another turnaround, Bush said he has ordered Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to develop a plan to increase the troop strength of the Army and Marine Corps, heeding warnings from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill that multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the armed forces toward the breaking point. “We need to reset our military,” said Bush, whose administration had opposed increasing force levels as recently as this summer.

Reset the military? And what, spend another three years “not winning, not losing,” just to end up back here again, only worse? And where are the extra troops coming from? We’re stretched pretty thin as it is.

Bush acts exactly like a man who’s screwed up, screwed up big, and is pretty happy to continue screwing up because he knows that, soon enough, it’ll be somebody else’s problem.