Moonshine Mountain Endorses John Kerry

Okay, so he may not seem like the most appropriate choice for a blog rooted in moonshine-swilling hillbillies, but Moonshine Mountain is a big tent! We have room for truck drivers, country singers, murderous rednecks, New Jersey mobsters, gravel-throated musicians, scruffy baseball players and patrician Boston politicians! This is my space and these are my interests and you aren't paying for it anyway! So get off my back and go vote for Kerry!

I actually think he's going to win, too. A strange calm has come over me. The Red Sox won the World Series under a lunar eclipse and now the planets are aligned and we have entered a brief window of time where all good things are possible, black is white, up is down, and Bush is on his way back to Crawford. With my apologies for making a VH-1 reference, this really could be the Best Week Ever. Halloween probably plays into this somehow, too. I dunno, I'm babbling now, but we're in some kind of alternate reality and anything could happen.

As far as the Red Sox, I'm not gonna try to wax eloquent. I've been a pretty distant fan for a long time, until the last year or so, so I almost feel guilty about reaping the rewards. I will say I'm most happy for my dad, a long-suffering Sox fan, and for my nieces and nephew, newly minted members of Red Sox Nation who will never have to live with all the angst and futility. A lot has already been written, but here are my favorites:

Wait 'Til This Year

Keys to the World Series

Underdogs, Overjoyed

And the tearjerker:

Win It For

I saw Saw. You shouldn't see Saw.

Tarnation

The Grudge

Hell is Yankee Stadium, Part II

Anyone know where I can get my hands on some horse tranquilizers?

Red Sox and Yankees. Game 7 tonight. Apocalypse now. Three nights ago, the Sox were left for dead. The Saturday night slaughter at Fenway Park made the original Boston Massacre look like a tea party. I woke up Sunday morning feeling like I’d been mugged. I had a screening that night, so I would mercifully miss the dismal end, the Red Sox being swept by the Yankees in four. Such a great season, such a shitty ending.

I came home that night, turned on the TV, and the Sox had just taken a 3-2 lead and Fox was playing “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over.” Ten minutes later, they had coughed up the lead. I turned off the TV and went to bed. In the morning, I checked the Boston Globe website and found out they were still alive on Ortiz’s 12th inning homer.

So, Game 5 Monday night. Actually, Monday afternoon when it started, but what’s 6 hours and 14 innings between bitter enemies? It was certainly the greatest baseball game I’ve ever seen, and when it was over, the Red Sox were improbably still alive.

Game 6 last night was so packed with drama, so overflowing with subplots and twists, it was like every season of Survivor packed into one night. Schilling on the mound with his bloody ankle, Bellhorn the Goat hitting the three-run homer that almost wasn’t, A-Rod’s bush-league interference play, SWAT teams on the field, that final strike-out that forced the impossible: Game 7 tonight. One game for all the marbles. The chance to turn the $190 million Yankees into the biggest chokers of all time and the 2004 Red Sox into legendary curse-breakers.

There’s not enough beer in the world for tonight’s game.

All paths lead to Moonshine Mountain

Recent search engine queries that led folks to this here blog:

vertically challenged short dwarf midget
sopranos fart noises
morningwood incestuous town
"lynda carter" jesus
tELLY SAVALAS IN A SPEEDO
shufflepuck band
Arroyo plunks ARod
joseph kahn, torque, review
"Buzzards in love"

Three new ones this week:

Shall We Dance?

Riding the Bullet

Rosenstrasse

As for I Heart Huckabees, I'm glad I didn't have to review it, because I can't quite figure out how I felt about it. It's as if Wes Anderson directed a Charlie Kaufman script, except there's some vital essence missing. It's almost funny. It's almost brilliant. It almost makes sense. I'm glad it exists. I'm happy a movie like this can get made. But I can't quite wrap my arms around it. The individual pieces are greater than the sum total. I dunno, another viewing might be in order.

An idea whose time has come: Chris Rock to host Oscars.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Oh, that’s right. I’ve got myself a blog here. I should write something once in a while. In my meager defense, I’ve had problems with Computron #1 over the past couple weeks (now resolved), and I’ve been trying to wrap up my latest High Hat piece, which I finally have. But mostly, I’ve been lazy and neglectful of my little slice of the blogosphere.

So let’s see – I haven’t caught any of the exciting new fall TV programmes. Have they all been cancelled yet? I have been keeping up with two perennial favorites, with varying degrees of interest. There’s Survivor, of course, which has probably outlived its usefulness, but what the hell. It’s comfort TV now – still a good excuse to get together with friends (especially back-to-back with The Apprentice), but not something that requires 100% of my attention while it’s on. I know all the conflicts by heart now and even the twists are tired, although I’m still impressed by Mark Burnett’s knack for finding and casting the most strategically inept people on the planet. This year, we’ve got the alliance of old fat guys, a brilliant bunch who started playing the post-merge game on day one, eliminating anyone who could possibly help them win a challenge. Burnett must have been tearing his hair out as both male and female tribes set about eliminating all the eye-candy first.

Then there’s The Wire, now in its third season, about which I have a few qualms. Not huge complaints, mind you. But qualms. The show is known (to the extent that it’s known at all) for its dense, intricate storytelling and bazillions of characters, and that’s all still intact. But so far I’m not finding the new characters as colorful or compelling as the waterfront crew from last year. Cutty from the Cut strikes me as a knockoff of Tony Blundetto from The Sopranos, though the oily city councilman has promise. Meanwhile, Omar is in danger of becoming this show’s Fonzie, complete with recurring catchphrases. On the plus side, a subplot dealing with one cop’s efforts to legalize drug dealing is picking up steam, and the third episode had one of my favorite Wire scenes ever, an Irish cop’s wake scored to the Pogues’ “Body of an American.” Anyway, I think enough groundwork has been laid this season and I’m hopeful things will start popping soon.

Hell is Yankee Stadium

I missed the final debate last night, yet managed to replicate the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach it probably would have given me. Instead, I stuck with the rapidly unraveling nightmare that is the American League Championship Series. I still have the sound of 55,000 yahoos chanting “Who’s your daddy?” echoing in my skull. I don’t want to dwell on it, especially since The Sports Guy and the Surviving Grady blog do it better than I could anyway. What a drag.

Okay, more to come later, include a review of the new Tom Waits album, some thoughts on I Heart Huckabees, and…I dunno, other stuff maybe.

Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry

Woman Thou Art Loosed

Watching Going Upriver, I kept wondering whatever happened to this John Kerry, this confident, forceful, take-no-prisoners guy. Well, I think he finally showed up last night for the debate. Bush's people can spin it any which way they want, but their guy was a disaster and Kerry mopped the floor with him. I dunno if it will make any difference at this point, but hopefully some undecided voters were paying attention.