Wheel of Time Casting: The Guys

This one should make the ladies happy.  Again, this is not all the major guys from the books, but instead just some of the major guys.  I did not include any of the White Cloaks yet because I plan on doing them and some others together.  Also, I am sure at some point more characters will be introduced, so whatever. 

Tam al'Thor
Rand's father during the first few books.  Although as he travels about the world, we start to get the hint that this might not be the truth.  Then we learn that he was adopted by Tam.  The man seems like a simple shepherd at the beginning, but then we find out that he possesses a heron-marked blade, which means he is a blade-master.

Also, he ran away as a young man and joined the army and became a blade-master.  This is a good thing for Rand because the Flame/Void trick he teaches Rand, which helps Rand focus during archery and other tasks (like sword play), also helps him focus saidin.

We need a bigger guy, who plays the kind of quiet, gruff, but also very likeable father.  He needs to be believable as a farmer, but also as a warrior.  He needs to be good looking enough that all the ladies of the Two Rivers want to play match-maker for him.  How about Nathan Fillion?  That dude is just so damn cool.  Let him grow a beard and he would be perfect (he should probably just be in every movie at this point).

Gawyn Trakand
The brother of Elayne.  He is supposed to be her protector and whatnot.  He is also in love with Egwene (and she with him).  He looks a good bit like his sister and he is a pretty damn good swordsman.

During the White Tower problems, when they oust Siuan, he kills a couple Warders (his teacher actually) and forms a small army called the Younglings.  I also remember him as the cocky kid who finds Rand at the palace and keeps cracking jokes about him.

I figured Alexander Ludwig would be a pretty good choice to play Gawyn.  He has the looks and in some of the movies I have seen, he has the cocky/brash attitude.

Galad Damodred
You cannot mention Gawyn without talking about his half-brother Galad.  Actually, Galad is also Rand's half-brother, and the two look a little bit alike.  Here is really all you need to know about Galad:  women think he is sexy.  I mean every woman out there.  He and Gawyn practice without shirts and all the Aes Sedai stop and watch him.  He has a thing for Egwene, but she does not have a thing for him.

Later he joins the White Cloaks and almost has his mind blown when he finds Elayne and Nynaeve.  Apparently he will always do the right thing.  To the point of idiocy.  He swears to get his half-sister back to Andor, but he also swore to bring in any Aes Sedai...this kind of thing can make his head explode.

Anyways, when you think of a sexy guy out there, who do you picture?  How about Paul Walker?  Plus, some people claim he looks like my pick for Rand.

Gareth Bryne
One of the greatest generals in the world.  He was the leader of the Andoran armies, but then when Rahvin came into Morgase's life, she pushed him away and banished him out of Caemlyn.

During his banishment, he runs in Siuan and follows her to Salidar, where the rebel Aes Sedai convince him to build and lead an army against Tar Valon. 

I picture him as a stoic individual, with a great mustache or goatee.  Who better than Tom Selleck?  Plus, have you seen him in Las Vegas?  He could definitely pull off that smug, know it all, who torments Siuan.

Thom Merrilin
This guy shows up in the Two Rivers as a gleeman.  He is basically an entertainer who will perform during the festival and then leave town.

He gets caught up with Rand and the gang and never looks back.  We later learn that he was a court bard in Andor and used to sleep with Morgase.  He pretty much teaches Rand a ton of cool things and even saves his life by taking on a Half-man.

Nowadays he is seen most of the time with Elayne and Nynaeve.  He is also good friends with Mat, who likes to play Stones with him since Mat's luck skills have no effect on the game.  So who could play a character like Thom?  Someone with a huge personality and an awesome mustache?  People always mention Sam Elliot, but he is a bit too old. 

Fortunately, I have a person who would make the role come alive.  When it comes to eccentric, go no further than everyone's favorite nutjob:  Nic Cage!  Let him take a year and grow out the mustache and he would be perfect.

Juilin Sandar
A simple thief-catcher from Tear.  At first he betrays Elayne and Nynaeve to the Black Ajah and they are imprisoned in the Stone of Tear.  He then helps Mat break in and rescue them.

After that he is pretty much by those two ladies side, along with Thom, for many adventures.  Where Thom is great at getting information through nobles and the higher ups, Juilin is able to find things out from the dregs of society.

The people of Tear are described as having darker skin/darker eyes.  I just kept picturing him as Sayid from Lost.  Naveen Andrews would be pretty awesome, especially since we know he can play a pretty bad-ass individual.

Mazrim Taim
A man who can channel.  He has been causing trouble for years, but recently called himself the Dragon Reborn.  He was captured by Aes Sedai, but he escaped before they could gentle him.  He then heard about Rand's amnesty to men who could channel and decided to join him.

He knows how to do plenty of stuff, since he has been channeling for awhile and has yet to go crazy.  He is able to copy something Rand does after only seeing it once.  Rand has him teach the Black Tower men, even though Rand knows there is something off about Taim and that he cannot be trusted.

They describe him as skinny and with a little of an attitude about him.  I kind of picture him to talk a bit like Scar from The Lion King.  Every site I found says that Jason Isaacs should play him (I am guessing that Taim turns out to be a bad guy at some point, since people are not usually creative).  However, I picture Willem Dafoe.  He is a fantastic actor, and he would easily pull off that not-so-trusting guy that is trying to help you role.  I mean, just look at the guy!

Logain Ablar
The monster we hear about in the first book who claimed to be the Dragon Reborn.  He is captured and gentled by the Aes Sedai.  He pretty much disappears until all the crap happens with Siuan.  When they escape the Tower, they bring him along.

He believes he will get his revenge, but instead Siuan uses him to convince other Aes Sedai that Elaida and the Red Ajah set him up at the Dragon Reborn in order to further their own agenda.  Most of the time he seems depressed and pretty out of it.   Fortunately, every time Min looks at him, she sees great things in his future.

Eventually, Nynaeve cures him of being gentled and heals him back to his normal strength.  She is the first person to ever do such a thing.  Egwene later helps him escape and tells him to go to Rand.  I am hoping/guessing that eventually he will square off with Mazrim Taim.

He is described as a big guy, and very king-like.  I picture Eric Bana every single time I read a chapter with him.  Think of Bana from Troy.

Masema Dagar

Speaking of a guy helping Rand.  How about our good buddy Masema?  Funny story, remember how in the first couple books the armies of Shienar are all badass and whatnot.  Then after awhile, you never really hear much about them again.  There was one soldier who pretty much hated Rand, especially when they were searching for the Horn, his name was Masema.  He thought it was bullshit that Rand was named the second in command and all that jazz.

After Falme, Masema realizes that Rand is the Dragon Reborn and declares himself a loyal servant.  Well, at some point Moraine sends the soldiers in search of someone and Masema starts calling himself the Prophet of the Dragon Reborn.  From there, shit gets kind of screwy.

He collects people to him like crazy and pretty much causes chaos wherever he goes.  At some point, Rand will have to send someone to deal with this lunatic.  Who could play a tough soldier, who might be a bit insane?  Christian Bale.  No question.  I can see him now screaming at a queen about her style of dress, using his cool Batman voice...

Uno
Honestly, this guy is such a minor character, but he is great comic relief.  I get the feeling that he is an old soldier, with his eye-patch and scars.  He eventually helps Nynaeve and Elayne escape somewhere and make it to Salidar.  I think he is in Gareth Bryne's army nowadays.

I like Michael Keaton.  I think he could pull off the old soldier thing and the funny, trying not to swear around the ladies part.  Whatever, these are my choices, live with it.  And it would be great uniting all the Batman actors together.  I just need Val Kilmer and Adam West...

Abell Cauthon
Mat's dad.  Not much to really say about the guy.  He is basically a background character who helps Tam during the Two Rivers wars against the Trollocs.  Mat mentions that he is great with a quarter-staff.

I figured you need someone who is a bit of a smart-ass to play Mat's father.  How about Ty Burrell, do you remember him from Dawn of the Dead?  He was pretty funny.  Again, this is another one that you just have to accept from me.

Padan Fain
The peddler who shows up at the beginning and turns out to be a Darkfriend.  Then we learn that things went very wrong for him in life.  He ends up becoming something of pure evil.  I do not even think he has any loyalty to the Dark One anymore, since he likes to kill Fades for fun.

He has one goal and that is to kill Rand and everyone he loves.  He is absolutely insane.  He is described as having a big nose and being a pretty ugly fellow.  He is tall and lanky (I think).  I personally think Adrian Brody should probably play him.  Basically because of the nose thing.


Davrim Bashere
Faile's father and another of those great generals.  He has not really played a major part so far except to offer Rand advice.  I do know that he is described as kind of short, but I did not take that into consideration.  I figured since I went with Middle Eastern for Faile, I should probably do so for her father.

To be perfectly honest, no one really came to mind.  I found this picture of Faran Tahir and figured he could pull the role off, but I am not really all that pleased with it.  Maybe someone else has a better suggestion.

Lews Therin Telamon
The original Dragon.  The guy that went crazy and broke the world.  The most powerful Aes Sedai ever.  Remember how when I described some of the Foresaken, they turned to the Dark One out of jealous and because they were tired of playing second fiddle to Lews?

Unfortunately, minus flashbacksWwe are only going to hear his voice in Rand's head most of the time.  And at times that voice needs to sound like a completely insane person.  So, what actor out there could pull off such an awesome role?  What guy is good looking enough to cause guys like George Clooney and Daniel Craig to be pissed off?  Is there really a question here?  Brad Pitt would knock this one out of the park.

Alright, that is it for this round.  Like I said, there will probably be some more at some point.  Still plenty of characters I have omitted.  Next time it will probably be Aes Sedai.  Should be fun (mostly hot girls!).  As always the drawings after the jump are brought to you by Seamassketches.

Work Rant

I normally try not to talk about The Place That Shall Not Be Named, but today I feel like I have to or else I might explode.  If you do not feel like reading me bitch about work then feel free to skip this post.

Before I begin, allow me to explain a few things.  First, TPTSNBN gives managers one weekend off every period (a period being a 28 day time frame, for those idiots out there that do not know this or have a girlfriend).  Second, they close our units only a few times a year:  Christmas (actually they close for half of Christmas Eve as well), Thanksgiving, half of Easter, and a Steelers Super Bowl.  I bet some of you can figure out where this is going...

Christmas has decided to fall on Sunday this year (I think the rest of the group is catching up, but I will keep explaining).  That means that the unit will close at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday and be closed all of Sunday.  My Boss will work Saturday morning and give us managers off all of Saturday and Sunday.  Very nice, right?  Unfortunately, this is being counted as our weekend off.  This is why I am upset.

How are they going to count a day we are not open as my weekend off?  Understand this:  they also give us our two days off that week.  Just so we are clear, we get two days off each week and once a period, those two days are a weekend.  In my opinion, we should still get a weekend off.  Unfortunately, the next level boss decided we did not need an actual weekend off and for the first time in years, every weekend will see every manager.

What angers me most about this is the way TPTSNBN acts like they care about us.  They constantly talk about winning ethics awards and having happy employees.  You would think they would want to keep us happy and treat us to another weekend off.  Hell, if they were wise, they would have told us at our September seminar that they were giving us an extra weekend off and made themselves seem like the good guys.  Instead they take away a weekend and fail to mention it to anyone, which just seems shady.

Do not even get me started on the way like to shaft us when it comes to vacation days and their inconsistencies in how they can be used.  Anyways, I feel better getting that off my chest.  If anyone mentions the company in the comments, I will delete the comment.  Sorry, just being safe.

Dependency theory and conspiracy theory

There was a post at Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.

A long time ago, when I took a course to become a kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to a type of fish.

In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.

However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:

The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.

In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:

The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.

Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.

**

This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.

It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.

While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.

Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.

De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.

As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.

To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.

Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.

At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.

It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.

These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.

Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.

**

The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:

And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.

By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.

The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

**

To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.

All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.

Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".

However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:

Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.

This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.

So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:

Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.

To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.

Best New Movie Poster of the Week

(Official movie poster for upcoming movie  
Killing Bono.)

 

WHY THIS POSTER IS GREAT!:

*The movie's characters, title and tagline, very cleverly on a faux graphic t-shirt.

***

Devious Double

The Verdict:

GO SEE!

REVIEW:
COMING SOON!

Fantasy Football Week Eight

Buffalo has cheerleaders?  That is weird...

Kevin's League
I lost again, dropping to 4-4.  I am still in third place, which is not too bad.  Victorious Secret beat me 136-84.  His team just had a great week.  My team was not so bad considering it was a few bye week replacements.

My best player was actually the Cincinnati defense, which scored 27 points for me.  Other than that, my team was pretty much average.  The Steelers shut down BenJarvus Green-Ellis (0 points, haha) and Mike Wallace/Antonio Brown combined for 19 points (they were projected for 18).  No one really had a big game for me, which cannot happen when Cam Newton scores 30, Adrian Peterson goes for 27, and Buffalo's defense puts up 25.  Those three almost beat me themselves.

Steel City League
Get killed in one league, doing the killing in another.  I beat The Sure Shots 163.28-58.46 and jumped into seventh place, and I have scored the fourth most points in the league.  Pretty sweet.

My best players were Stafford, Gore, and Foster.  Nate Washington also stepped up and made me look smart for picking him up awhile back.  The most points I received came from the Buffalo defense (gotta love a bye week pick up). 

I hope this means I might be getting on a hot streak...

Happy birthday Aishwarya Rai!

We recently had the pleasure of seeing the beautiful Aishwara Rai in the Tamil science-fiction film Robot, which was brilliant. Today's her birthday!

Rai won the Miss World pageant back in 1994:

Representing, of course, India.

We liked her acting, and were pleasantly surprised that she does Fergie much, much better than Fergie.

And, above all, was simply beautiful.

If you get a chance to see Robot, do. It was awesome.