FUKUOKA (Kyodo) With a 12th championship title already in the bag, Hakuho exacted swift revenge over Asashoryu on Sunday to wrap up the Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament with a perfect 15-0 record.
With the presentation of the Emperor's Cup to yokozuna Hakuho on Sunday evening Nov. 29, the first decade of sumo in the 21st century came to a thundering close.
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However, what promised to be a great record-breaking basho all but fizzled out once yokozuna Asashoryu went on a four-day losing streak toward the end,
Fukuoka, Japan. Mongolian grand champion Hakuho wrapped up his 12th Emperor’s Cup victory on Sunday by beating countryman and fellow yokozuna Asashoryu at the Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament.
"Primer" is a film for nerds, geeks, brainiacs, Academic Decathlon winners, programmers, philosophers and the kinds of people who have made it this far into the review. It will surely be hated by those who "go to the movies to be entertained," and embraced and debated by others...
Our neighborhoods, "commons" places like stoops and parks and streets and libraries, are disappearing into the corporatized world of big boxes and chain stores. But if we "back away from the product" – even a little bit, well then we Put The Odd Back In God!
"We used to be a nation of producers. Now we're a nation of consumers."
"We're proceeding into this shopping season under an enormous misunderstanding. We think that we are consumers at Christmastime. No! We are being consumed at Christmastime."
"What was Christmas before the shopping started?"
"Start Giving. Stop shopping."
What Would Jesus Buy? follows Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir as they go on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse: the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!
Let me summarise the idea of Christian responsibilty in four areas:and more.
We have a duty to God.
Psalm 24 begins with the following words: ‘The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.’ The earth is not ours. Contrary to some popular understanding, God did not give us the earth – he gave us the use of it.
We have a duty to the world
In Genesis we read that God made the earth good, and that the earth is ‘cursed’ because of us. Human behaviour and the state of the earth are inextricably linked. Have a look at Hosea 4, where it describes a society’s violence and dishonesty, and goes on to say: ‘Because of this the land mourns…’
We have a duty to each other
A very simple principle that John the Baptist puts best in Luke 3: ‘The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.’
The consumer dream is, in essence, the promise that happiness will come to us through our consumer choices. I will be a more fulfilled person if I have a larger house, a faster car, and newer clothes. I will feel better about myself, and others will like me more.
On paper, it looks patently false and insulting to our intelligence. And yet somehow we’re all drawn into it, to one degree or another.
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As Christians, we have a different reality, a higher purpose than this endless cycle of distraction and gratification. We know who we are in Christ, and we express that identity through our love for each other, not our choice of logos. We are at liberty to live simply, because our sense of value doesn’t come from what we own. It comes from the knowledge that we’re made in the image of God.
As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.(Letter to C.L. Moore (August 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 574)
Session 9 is reflective of the new aesthetic that seems to have settled on the horror film after The Blair Witch Project (1999)...
The film uses naturalistic, sometimes handheld, camerawork rather than dramatically staged set-ups; is shot on high-definition video rather than film; uses everyday surroundings – an actual abandoned asylum rather than any constructed sets; and is one that focuses on actors reacting to the environment rather than performing around camera set-ups. Both Session 9 and Blair Witch strip the horror film away from conventions and clichés – they are more realistic character dramas. Session 9 is particularly well written in this regard ...
The character tensions are remarkably well drawn and some of the soliloquies granted the characters quite haunting. Amidst all of this Anderson generates an intensely haunted atmosphere....
Innocent House, a mock Venetian palace occupied by Britain's oldest book publisher. Here, after a spate of malicious pranks, someone killed Gerard Etienne, the ruthless managing director, and jammed the office mascot, a stuffed snake, in his mouth. Who wanted Etienne dead? Everyone on staff and several authors too. Now Dagliesh and his two junior detectives begin uncovering the dark private tragedies in the lives of Etienne's mistress and colleagues. But the mystery at Innocent House might prove more primal still - and too deep, too old, too evil to stop at just one death.
Delicate Meissen plates were ranged in incongruous proximity to Victorian ribbon-decorated souvenirs bearing pictures of Brighton and Southend-on-Sea; a toby jug which looked like a fairground trophy stood between a Victorian Staffordshire flatback, obviously original, of Wesley preaching from a double-decker pulpit, and a fine Parian bust of the Duke of Wellington. (from a description of a display in a club in which Dalgliesh was lunching)
Here, surely was the epitome of every mother's favourite son: fresh-faced, ambitious without being ruthless, a devout Methodist, engaged, so it was rumoured, to a girl in his church. (from an Inspector's description of one of the police officers)
Using clips from more than 300 of the greatest movies ever made, this series explores film history and American culture through the eyes of over 150 Hollywood insiders, including Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Eisner. In-depth treatments present film as a powerful economic force, potent twentieth-century art form, and viable career option.
"It's about being borm, and being afraid of dying, and how love saves us."
It was good to look up during the day and know that the stars were still above his head, even though he couldn't see them. It was doubtless the same for countless other mysteries. That they shone, but the world shone more brightly, and blinded him to them.
Here is storytelling on a grand scale--the stuff of which a classic is made. Weaveworld begins with a rug--a wondrous, magnificent rug--into which a world has been woven. It is the world of the Seerkind, a people more ancient than man, who possesses raptures--the power to make magic. In the last century they were hunted down by an unspeakable horror known as the Scourge, and, threatened with annihilation, they worked their strongest raptures to weave themselves and their culture into a rug for safekeeping. Since then, the rug has been guarded by human caretakers. The last of the caretakers has just died.
Vying for possession of the rug is a spectrum of unforgettable characters: Suzanna, granddaughter of the last caretaker, who feels the pull of the Weaveworld long before she knows the extent of her own powers; Calhoun Mooney, a pigeon-raising clerk who finds the world he's always dreamed of in a fleeting glimpse of the rug; Immacolata, an exiled Seerkind witch intent on destroying her race even if it means calling back the Scourge; and her sidekick, Shadwell, the Salesman, who will sell the Weaveworld to the highest bidder.
In the course of the novel the rug is unwoven, and we travel deep into the glorious raptures of the Weaveworld before we witness the final, cataclysmic struggle for its possession.
Barker takes us to places where we have seldom been in fiction-places terrifying and miraculous, humorous, and profound. With keen psychological insight and prodigious invention, his trademark graphic vision balanced by a spirit of transcendent promise, Barker explores the darkness and the light, the magical and the monstrous, and celebrates the triumph of the imagination.
Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) is merely arranging cliches in new patterns until the surprise ending blows enough pro-military fervor up the audience's ass to make Colin Powell call a halt.
The legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald remains the most mysterious and controversial of all shipwreck tales heard around the Great Lakes. Her story is surpassed in books, film and media only by that of the Titanic.The cause of the wreck has been a controversial subject from the beginning, and this article reports a documentary exploring the latest research.
The supernatural part of Onibaba is secondary to director Shindo's main theme - the human debasement of war. The two women make a ghoulish living in isolation, with survival their only remaining value. It's a harsh world where everyone must make do on their own.The New York Times opens its review with this:
SELF-PRESERVATION and sex in a primitive society made desperate and bestial by war are the raw materials out of which Kaneto Shindo has conjured up "Onibaba" ("The Demon")
represents one of the most important of the MGM musicals of the 1950s, indeed in the history of this Hollywood genre. In particular, The Band Wagon stands as one of the masterworks to emerge from the very productive musicals unit that producer Arthur Freed controlled at MGM during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Anchored by its first-rate leads, who originated the roles on the London stage — Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost — the movie is a talkathon embellished with camera movements.Rolling Stone closes with this:
Frost/Nixon, one of the year's best films, far exceeds its roots as docudrama. It cuts to the core of a toxic culture that sees politics as show business, a culture still all too recognizable as our own.Variety describes it as
an effective, straightforward bigscreen version of Peter Morgan’s shrewd stage drama about the historic 1977 TV interview in which Richard Nixon brought himself down once again.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's mercy he was catched
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
The English, among other talents, are adept at nurturing their grudges. How else does one explain the enduring enmity toward Guy Fawkes, a conspirator in a plot to blow up Parliament in 1605? Some four centuries after Fawkes was caught, tortured and executed for his role in a scheme that never came to fruition, Britons still celebrate his demise each Nov. 5 by burning his likeness in effigy and setting fireworks ablaze.
Q: If you were teaching a high school literature class, which science fiction or fantasy books first published within the past 10 years would you include on your syllabus?
The arguments still rage whether The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a cult masterpiece or seventies trash, but no matter what one’s opinion it doesn’t stop the film from being the numero uno cult film of all time.
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