It's rare here at Cheshire Prospects that we actually get to do some first-hand reporting on something. But having flown this past week and gotten to actually experience the TSA's new security protocols, I figure my opinion might actually have some sort of weight this time around. So here's what we got from it:
Philly doesn't have the new scanners yet, so they aren't patting you down. At least on Wednesday they weren't, which I find kind of surprising since PHL tends to be a pretty high traffic airport as a hub for a whole bunch of airlines. But oh well. You missed your shot, Osama.
Providence did have the new x-ray-see-my-naughty-bits scanners. Now granted, I didn't have much a problem with the new regulations and protocols to begin with, but I still didn't quite know what to expect. Well here it is - you go in between what looks like two giant curved servers, put your hands over your head, WOM WOM WOM, go stand on this mat on the other side in case they need to pat you down, and then get. The Man never touched me - in fact I didn't see anyone get stroked.
So sorry all you worriers, none of the TSA got to feel up my sweet love handles, made extra sweet by our five pies, baklava, and cheesecake two days before (side note, I am all for dessert and really am a big fan, but seven desserts for 13 people? Really?). Now I can only hope my scanner x-ray makes it in to Playgirl: TSA.
I'm sure that some people did get patted down this holiday travelling season, to which I say - suck it up. You want an invasion of privacy? Let's go wire-tap some phones or suspend habeus corpus. I don't like to fear-monger, but when you're trapped in an aluminum tube 10,000 feet up with a couple hundred gallons of jet fuel strapped to you and someone with a couple screws loose and stuffed underwear, you're gonna wish somebody gave everyone on your flight a once-over with their hands coming through security.
You want to be safe (or out of debt, or healthy, ) America? Start making some sacrifices. Get comfortable enough with your body to know the balding TSA guy with a wife and kids at home trying to pay the bills doesn't want to have to feel you up either - it's just his job to see if that's a stick of dynamite in your pocket, he doesn't care if you're happy to see him.
Via Sullivan, Danny MacAskill is back doing things that just don't make sense having taken physics classes. Just a beautiful production. Oh Danny boy...
I've been on a bit of a bender lately, watching Westerns. Now I'm no movie buff (like this guy or my buddy who got me turned on to them - thanks Asha) so I can't entirely speak as to why these kind of pictures don't get made as frequently as in their golden era, and to be fair I haven't seen anything with John Wayne in it yet. I do think though that as you go through chronologically, I can figure out what happened and why the Western genre has lost some of it's edge. And why I think it'll never be like in the days of my dear ole dad, why I think the Western is making a comeback.
Here's what I've seen so far of the old westerns (in order of seeing them):
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid The Outlaw Josey Walles A Fistful of Dollars For A Few Dollars More The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Then you throw in what I guess we can call "90's Westerns:"
Tombstone Maverick The Quick and The Dead
And then what I'm going to call the Millennium revival:
No Country for Old Men 3:10 to Yuma (remake - I know, I need to see the original) There Will Be Blood
Now I'll start off by saying that I've enjoyed every one of these movies, though certainly some more than others. "The Man With No Name" trilogy is just incredibly well done - I never really understood why everyone thinks Clint Eastwood is such a badass until now, and I think he actually does an even better job in Josey Walles as far as having a much more compelling character and developed story beyond being just a drifter bounty hunter (and I can't even get started on how much it made me think of Cowboy Bebop - nerd cred). And Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is also very well done as any Redford/Newman collaboration is, made slightly later that some of the other movies on the list and reflecting the cinematic ground covered by them.
But the 80s and 90s were a different time, where the moral ambiguity and fine line tread by characters in older westerns gets wiped away and replaced with clear-cut, lighter, drier characters. The Quick and The Dead, while I find it to be a very well shot and scored movie, has a plot and characters that are blatantly stereotypical. Maverick with Mel Gibson is amusing, but so much lighter than earlier films that its more of a comedy in the Old West than anything else. Tombstone, the only of the three that really makes an attempt at jumping into the vein of its predecessors, but seems so commercially stock that it never reaches its potential.
I think the western is making a comeback though, though in a very different incarnation than the classic westerns of yesteryear. Granted, Bale and Crowe's 3:10 to Yuma is a remake, but it is incredibly well done and the characters are not the one-dimensional cutouts that we've seen in westerns the past few decades. Look at Daniel Day Lewis and his performance in There Will Be Blood - not a traditional shootout western but evolved to show the politics, the grittiness of the old west and characters with very conflicted moralities.
And then there is No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers epic. This is what I think defines the new future of westerns - not necessarily set in the old west but a modern representation of what made those old westerns so great: complete drama, good guys doing not so good things, bad guys being boldly bad, suspense, and really not knowing how good was going to overcome the bad in the end (if at all). While the western genre will never be as prominent as it once was, I would much rather see infrequent, high quality dramatic westerns come out of Hollywood than what has been passed of for it over the last quarter century.
The Coen's have another western coming out soon, a remake of John Wayne's True Grit with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin, and the trailer for it looks great. I know - I'm a hypocrite because I rant about Hollywood only remaking movies and not having any original ideas anymore, but tough. Here's to hoping the Western can be re-won:
So there's some sort of stats thing that the fine people at Blogger run that keeps track of how traffic gets to our little spot here in the series of tubes, and makes note of where in this great big world of ours they're coming from to check it out. And upon review of this information, while most of our hits come from the good ole U.S. of A., there were two anomalies: Russia and Brazil.
So shout out to our readers in Russia and Brazil - I don't know how you happened to stumble across the (frequently un-updated) mess that is Cheshire Prospects, but thanks for stopping by.
Sam Adams' Chocolate Bock in their new Winter Classics mix pack is unreally good. It's like a chocolate milkshake beer, which may be the greatest drink combination anyone has ever thought of. And even better, it replaced that god-awful Cramberry Lambic in the mix, which was always the beer-equivalent of the last kid getting picked for dodgeball anyways. We actually would make it a punishment to have to drink them when you've gone through the rest of the awesome line-up in the mix (Boston Lager, Winter Lager, White Ale, Holiday Porter, and Old Fezziwig's Ale) and all that's left in the fridge is "The Lambic."
But no more! The wicked witch is dead! So check it out.
