A few days ago, I posted Maureen Dowd’s column from the New York Times where she eulogized her colleague and friend David Rosenbaum and skewered James Frey for his “memoir”. Rosenbaum was murdered in one of those random crazy moments that we think happen to other people, not to people that we love.

If you are not familiar with Maureen Dowd, Push yourself out from under the rock you have been living and get thee to a copy of the New York Times.

I mention all of this because there is an anonymous comment on my posting saying “Thank You.” I opened the post saying I wanted to be Maureen Dowd when I grew up and oh, how I do! The closest was a column I wrote in my University paper called “8:00AM - No Coffee” which given my liberal tendencies was rather subversive for a Utah University in 1992.

So was it Maureen that said “Thank You”?

I doubt it.

I’m from Vegas after all. The odds don’t support it.

It would be fantastic if it was her however. . .

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Please go see this movie.

God, I love Ang Lee.

I haven’t seen “Ride With The Devil” or “Pushing Hands”, but I have long considered him to be one of my favorite film directors (along with Billy Wilder).

For those of you that aren’t big geeks like me, Lee’s films are “Pushing Hands”, “The Wedding Banquet”, “Eat Drink Man Woman”, “Sense and Sensibility”, “The Ice Storm”, “Ride with the Devil”, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Hulk” and “Brokeback Mountain.”

I have a list of films in my head that have last moments that blow me away. Endings really are one of the hardest things to do well. Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” is on that list. “Brokeback Mountain” now is as well.

And what a gorgeous surprise is Mr. Ledger’s performance! I remember he blew me away in Monsters Ball, but I had no interest in the other films that he has been in, so I assumed (wrongly) he was just a pretty boy. He may be pretty, but the man’s performance kicks ass. I wanna know how this kid from Perth Australia managed to channel a repressed Wyoming cowboy.

Jake Gyllenhaal is fantastic. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway are both wonderful. Williams has bit more to chew on but Hathaway shines in every scene — her last one in particular.

There is a marvelous bit where Gyllenhaal and Hathaway are a bar sitting at a table with another couple they have just met. The woman is yammering away and starts to rib the men about how husbands don’t dance with their wives. The men have been sizing each other up in half glances while she babbles. Gyllenhaal asks the woman to dance- or does he? The camera angle makes it look like he is asking the man to dance but the woman assumes that he is asking her. Maybe I’m nuts, but I read the scene as Gyllenhaal flirting.

If I were writing a review, there is only one misstep that feels more like an editing problem than anything else. In the beginning of the third act, Ledger receives a postcard and then shortly after we see him call and speak to Gyllenhaal’s wife (Anne Hathaway). It feels like there is a missing moment between the two scenes. Saying more would be a spoiler.

Those that know me could say that as a girl with many gay friends, I do have a bit more interest in the subject matter than your average breeder, but please trust me that this film is more than just a “gay movie”.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. . .

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Oh the joy to wake up in a warm flat, to not have to talk yourself into climbing out of bed. The last few weeks have scored rather high on the “this sucks” scale.

The last of my boxes that I shipped over from America have arrived. Now if I can get some of my pictures to be hung on the wall, it will all come together. S wants someone else to hang up the pictures because he is afraid that bad things will happen. I almost want to just stick my pictures into the loft and just hang them when we get our own place.

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I am moving on to the next level for the job that I want!

This is the longest I haven’t had a job (except when I was at school). It will be so nice to be able to get my hair cut, eat sushi and go to the movies when I want.

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Vol Abroad tagged me. . . Yes this was hard because five isn’t enough.

FIVE JOBS YOU HAVE HAD IN YOUR LIFE: House Manager at the Utah Shakespearean Festival, Telemarketing, Starbucks Barista, Theatre 101 University Instructor (part of graduate work), Customer Service/Sales Hybrid Account Manager at a Internet Search Engine.

FIVE MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER: There are really much more but five are– Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, Groundhog Day, Babe and The Iron Giant.

FIVE PLACES YOU’VE LIVED: Los Angeles, CA, Seattle WA, Las Vegas, NV, Cedar City, Utah and London, UK

FIVE TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH: I am cheating and including some shows that I love but aren’t being made now– Lost, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Six Feet Under and Northern Exposure.

FIVE PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON VACATION: Budapest, Paris, Maui, Ketchum Idaho and New York City.

FIVE WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY: All the Friends and expats on my blog, Various Job Sites, The New York Times, The Guardian and Yahoo News

FIVE OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS: Sushi, corndogs, steamed clams, Baked stuffed shells from Carluccio’s Tivoli Gardens in Las Vegas and a dish my mom makes that we call “Popeye Chicken” which is red pepper spicy chicken and spinach with linguine. Orange slices squeezed on top cut the spiciness and add flavor.

FIVE PLACES YOU WOULD RATHER BE: Here in London in a flat with heating and a job to go to next week, Maui, Big Sur, Seattle, San Francisco.

FIVE ALBUMS YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Another impossible question. Willie Nelson- Stardust, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins- Ellington Meets Hawkins, Tony Bennett and Bill Evans- Together Again, Louis Prima- Capitol Collectors Series Greatest Hits, Sam Cooke- The Man and His Music

FIVE FOLKS I”M TAGGING: Scott at Agent XXX, Jolie at Prncsaj, Neil H at Dogwood Tales, Lala at The World of Oz and Gina at The Gina Blog.

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Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

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Back in the freezing flat. They are supposed to come Monday and fix it finally, which is why I couldn’t stay in Greece longer. It all worked out badly for me. I couldn’t fly in sooner because of my interview last Thursday and I couldn’t stay longer because of boiler man.

Had a lovely time in Athens other than an evil taxi driver stiffing me on the ride in, but it was a good lesson for me to not take shit from a cabbie. He refused to drive me to the door of the hotel. I found out later that he didn’t do that because then the concierge would have given him shit of fleecing me. It was one of those situations that I knew the moment I got into the cab that he has going to play games. Frustrating when you don’t know an area. Now I know a bit so that ain’t going to happen again when I go back there again.

Will post pictures later. Lots of old stuff and stray dogs.

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I Can’t wait.

01/13/2006 @ 12:01am

Gore to Address “Constitutional Crisis”
by John Nichols

It sounds as if Al Gore is about to deliver what could be not just one of the more significant speeches of his political career but an essential challenge to the embattled presidency of George W. Bush.

In a major address slated for delivery Monday in Washington, the former Vice President is expected to argue that the Bush administration has created a “Constitutional crisis” by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties.

Aides who are familiar with the preparations for the address say that Gore will frame his remarks in Constitutional language. The Democrat who beat Bush by more than 500,000 votes in the 2000 presidential election has agreed to deliver his remarks in a symbolically powerful location: the historic Constitution Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution. But this will not be the sort of cautious, bureacratic speech for which Gore was frequently criticized during his years in the Senate and the White House.

Indeed, his aides and allies are framing it as a “call to arms” in defense of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law in a time of executive excess.

The vice president will, according to the groups that have arranged for his appearance — the bipartisan Liberty Coalition and the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy — address “the threat posed by policies of the Bush Administration to the Constitution and the checks and balances it created. The speech will specifically point to domestic wiretapping and torture as examples
of the administration’s efforts to extend executive power beyond Congressional direction and judicial review.”

Coming only a few weeks after U.S. Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, introduced resolutions to censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and to explore the issue of impeachment, Gore in expected to “make the case that the country — including the legislative and judicial branches and all Americans — must act now to defend the systems put into place by the country’s founders to curb executive power or risk permanent and irreversible damage to the Constitution.”

Don’t expect a direct call for impeachment from the former vice president. But do expect Gore to make reference to Richard Nixon, whose abuses of executive authority led to calls for his impeachment– a fate the 37th president avoided by resigning in 1974.

Gore’s speech will add fuel to the fire that was ignited when it was revealed that Bush had secretly authorized National Security Agency to monitor communications in the United States without warrants.

Gore will argue that the domestic wiretapping policy is only the latest example of the administration exceeding its authority under the Constitution.

With a Congressional inquiry into Bush’s repeated violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act scheduled to begin in February– and with Bush already preparing to pitch an Nixon-style defense that suggests it is appropriate for the executive branch to violate the law when national security matters are involved — Gore will articulate the more traditional view that reasonable checks and balances are required even in a time of war. And he will do so in a bipartisan context that will make it tougher for Republican critics to dismiss the former vice president’s assertion that the Constitution is still the law of the land.

Former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who served as one of the most conservative members of the House, plans to introduce Gore. Barr, an outspoken critic of the abuses of civil liberties contained in the USA Patriot Act critic who has devoted his post-Congressional years to defending the Bill of Rights, refers to the president’s secret authorization of domestic wiretapping as “an egregious violation of the electronic surveillance laws.”

Count on Gore, who has pulled few punches in the speeches he has delivered in recent months, to be at least as caustic.

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Flew to Athens to meet up with S for the weekend.

I normally don’t get hangovers, but last night we did Ouzo, red wine and vodka on the rocks. In the middle somewhere there was Greek dancing.

To quote Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this shit.”

(We had a lot of fun though.)

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Another person I wanna be when I grow up is Maureen Dowd.

January 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Oprah! How Could Ya?

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

The day we mourned a man whose life was devoted to clarity, this city was hidden in fog. You couldn’t see the Potomac, even on its bank.

There were many things to love about David Rosenbaum. He had a grin that always improved the weather. He was uncommonly generous to reporters he worked with and competed against. He was an exemplary husband, father, brother, uncle and grandfather.

But the truly astonishing thing about David, the Times reporter who was killed in a random robbery a week ago, was his unglamorous, unsanctimonious, unvain sort of goodness. He had a black-and-white sense of honor that was oddly old-fashioned in a capital slimed by lies, bribery, greed, corruption and ends-justify-the-means malarkey.

The skells, as Detective Sipowicz would say, saw David walking in his neighborhood after dinner and whacked him in the head with a pipe. One low-life bought laundry detergent, gas and tires with David’s credit card while he lay dying.

Our friend David Shribman, the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote in The St. Petersburg Times, where David Rosenbaum started: “A thoughtful man struck down by the ultimate act of thoughtlessness. A man who taught others when to use ‘that’ and when to use ‘which’ only to be felled by that over which he had no control.”

Despite George Washington and the cherry tree, we no longer have a society especially consecrated to truth. The culture produces an infinity of TV shows and movies depicting the importance of honesty. But they’re really talking only about the importance of being honest about your feelings. Sharing feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth. We’ve become a country of situationalists.

Journalism, politics and publishing have been tarred by scandals that have revealed a disturbing insensitivity to right and wrong. Random House isn’t concerned that an author makes up stuff in a book labeled nonfiction; it just kept counting the money after The Smoking Gun exposed James Frey’s lies about his own life.

When Mr. Frey went on “Larry King Live” with his mom to defend his book’s “essential truths,” Oprah Winfrey called in to back him up. She sounded disturbingly like Scott McClellan. Despite doubts about facts in the book, she said, “the underlying message of redemption” still “resonates” with her. She should have said: “Had I known that many parts were fake, I wouldn’t have recommended the book to millions of loyal viewers. I wouldn’t have made this liar a lot of money.” She should take a page from Stephen Colbert and put the slippery Frey on her “Dead to me” list.

For David Rosenbaum, just retired at 63 but still full of enthusiasms, there was a right way and a wrong way, and he possessed a natural knowledge of which was which.

“My father taught me the importance of always doing the right thing, always, even when it didn’t really matter,” his daughter, Dottie, said at the memorial service yesterday in a committee room in the Senate, David’s old beat. “At my 12th birthday party, my parents took me and a bunch of friends to see a movie, and they counted up how many of us were already 12 so that they could pay the adult fare. … even though none of us carried ID, and we all looked like total pipsqueaks.”

As his pal Robin Toner put it, David thought that behind every arcane tax provision and appropriations bill, “there were real people, getting something or having something taken away by their government.” You had to keep digging and arguing to find the truth in the fog. Even when he was smothered by conventional wisdom, Robin recalled, “David’s voice would break out: ‘I disagree!’ ”

He was practicing a lost art. Tough questioning now have no place in polite society. Martha-Ann Alito cries, and the Democrats back off from examining why Samuel Alito was so opportunistic about his bigoted alumni club and whether he will curb women’s rights for generations. It’s the wimpification of debate.

W. mau-maus the Democrats and the press on his administration’s Freyish blurring of fact and fiction on Iraq, trying to stifle any debate over the phony genesis of the war as bad for morale. What’s truly bad for morale is when the president suggests it’s dishonest to have an honest debate about the Bush cabal’s dishonesty.

If only someone had said, “I disagree!” in W.’s presence long ago, on pre-emptive war, on kidnapping and torture, on illegal eavesdropping.

David’s tortoise-shell reading glasses are still hanging on his computer. That scrupulous gaze will be missed.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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