"Apparently I made an horrific horror-film, but shouldn't a good horror film be horrific?"

"My dear people it is a f****cking MOVIE. It is all fictional. Not real. It is all make-belief. It is art. Give people their own choice to watch it or not. If people can't handle or like my movies they just don't watch them."

Director Tom Six responds to the British Board of Film Classification's ban on "The Human Centipede Part 2 (Full Sequence)."

IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy said:

You know what else is horrific. This has me completely terrified. I just now looked at photos of Palin's new home in Scottsdale and the whole place is empty except for one exceedingly macabre bit of taxidermy.

At the Allium Spacecraft Café...

... don't take off just yet.

(That's my photo, animated by Chip Ahoy, according to instructions by Penny.)

We don't need a fast train.

We've got a fast crane:



(Chip Ahoy animates my sandhill-crane-walking-the-railroad-track pic.)

Return of the Camouflage Poodle.

Here's the original appearance of said canine. Transformed by Chip Ahoy.

Qaddafidils.

As in: Pushing up Qaddafidils. Could someone illustrate my coinage by photoshopping (or drawing) a daffodil combined with Qaddafi?

Or Gaddafi/Qaddhafi/Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Kaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi/Qadaffi or however the hell you spell that in Latin letters.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O makes this:



Chip Ahoy makes this:

"The juxtaposition between the portrait of this girl against the ad featuring a portrait of Krauthammer is intolerably jarring."

Wrote Chip Ahoy in the middle of the night when this was the top post. And he didn't just complain. He did something about it. He "reconciled" the photographs in a girlKrauthammer mashup:

Now, let's dance!

Chip Ahoy gives us another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge.

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me"... Part 2.

Chip Ahoy responds to my request for a redesigned Gadsden flag:

Daniel Radcliffe is awesomely nerdy.

Singing "The Elements":



IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy links to this:

Nothing but wrong numbers.

ADDED: "Mary Ellen, here's your plates. Now stop calling, please, Daddy's busy."

At the Koi-Ahoy Café...

... rouse yourself from last night's serenity and move.

(Last night's koi were activated by Chip Ahoy.)

The giraffe in the woods.

Chip Ahoy plays with a photo of mine.

"The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet..."

Here's a picture of the bleakness of late October for you...



UPDATE: The words in the post title come from Bob Dylan's "Ballad in Plain D," which he did not sing at tonight's concert, here in Madison, from which Meade and I just returned.

The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet
The words to say I’m sorry, I haven’t found yet
I think of her often and hope whoever she’s met
Will be fully aware of how precious she is

IN THE COMMENTS: Clyde said:

I'll never look at those bucolic hay bales the same way again after ELO cellist Mike Edwards' unfortunate fate last month.

Now they look a little bit... Menacing.

Chip Ahoy responded:



Meade said:

Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can eat your cake and have it too

Yes, Bob did correct the classic expression when he sang "Lay Lady Lay" tonight. We both noticed and love all the cake....



... Thanks, Bob.

Chip Ahoy photoshops the details out of the shadows...

Here's the original from the "What are you doing down there?" post:



And here's what Chip discovered after a few adjustments:

At the Moving Prairie Café...

... the serenity we had last night is gone.

The Garden Angel Meets Jesus.

You remember the garden angel. Chip Ahoy bears witness to laters doings in the garden:

Let's take a closer look at that Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

Chip Ahoy animates my photograph.

"This shifting landscape is ripe for a row over Roe."

Wielding a triple-mixed metaphor, Charles M. Blow notes some new legislation that will provoke  litigation over abortion.

There's a Nebraska law that bans "most abortions after 20 weeks on the theory that that’s when the fetus can feel pain." There's a Mississippi bill forbidding public financing of abortions. And there are 2 new Oklahoma laws: "One requires women, even those seeking to end a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, to have an ultrasound and have the fetus described to them. The other prevents mothers from suing doctors who withhold information about fetal birth defects." Florida also has a new law requiring ultrasound before an abortion.

Blow frets that the Supreme Court will reconsider Roe. Of course, the Court reconsidered Roe back in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and any new litigation is highly likely to be only about applying the Casey standard to new legislation.

Blow points to polls:

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Friday found that the percentage of people who think that the Supreme Court is too liberal is at its highest since they began asking the question, as is the percentage of people who say that if Roe v. Wade were to come before the court again, the next justice should vote to overturn it. They’re not the majority, but it’s still not good.

Look at the poll. The question goes back to 7/21/05, when John Roberts was first nominated. 65% of those polled wanted Roe upheld. One month later, the percentage somehow went down to 60%.  When Alito was nominated, the number was 64% and then a few weeks later, down to 61%. With Sotomayor, the percentage came in at 60, and now, it's 59%. I'd say the percentage is pretty stable, and there isn't any real downward trend.

According to a Gallup report released on Wednesday, the percentage of college-educated people who favor legal abortion under any circumstances has been dropping since the early 1990s and has now reached a new low. And while the largest overall drop was among men over 65, it was closely followed by a drop among women under 30.

Note that the Gallup question isn't asking about abortion rights. If the Supreme Court stopped protecting access to abortion as a matter of constitutional law,  the states could keep it legal. Read the material at the Gallup link, and you'll see that it mostly shows stability in opinion on the subject.

In the end, Blow show why he's pushing readers to think there's a big fight coming. He wants Obama to "nominate a warrior" to the Supreme Court. Instead of recognizing the stability of the case law and of public opinion and accepting the idea of a dignified Supreme Court that applies itself diligently to the task of deciding cases according to an orthodox legal methodology, Blow would like us to view the Court as a political battleground, and he wants a well armed new Justice. The metaphor here is military.

He says he'd like his Supreme Court "warrior" to be someone "who agrees with Representative Long." Here's what Blow said about Long (after noting the new state laws "enacted mostly by men, that seek legal control over women’s bodies"):

I happen to agree with Representative Janet Long of Florida, who said on Friday that you should “stand down if you don’t have ovaries.”

"Stand down." There's that military metaphor again.

ADDED: Chip japes.

How do we really feel about Nancy Pelosi?

I think she's going to come out of all of this very well. Here's my salute to her:



In the comments to the "Stump Nightclub" open thread last night, kentuckyliz prodded our resident animator Chip Ahoy: "photoshop this pic with a teabag dangling down into her mouth. Or clip her out and paste her onto the background for The Scream." She meant this picture:



Not my stump picture:



And Chip said: "Gnarly root Medusa tea-bag Pelosi but nobody is allowed to look at it except for kentuckyliz and Rialby. And now I must go and pray to repent for God told me he's going to totally kick my ass."

So, of course, we looked:



Oh, lord! That's so wrong and so right. But that's another kind of salute to the lady who has claimed her place in American history. There was a time when we pulled our punches when a woman was involved. I say Chip's GIF is a landmark in the journey toward equality for women.

And God have mercy on us all.

"The little mouse, Jerry, I believe, gets ahold of thread and runs with it causing an entire sweater to unravel from the bottom to the top..."

"... and leaving a cat, Tom probably, naked in front of a crowd in an auditorium. Ha ha ha ha ha. This is great."

That's Chip Ahoy, somewhere in the depths of the "What an asshole"/global warming thread. Since this is a day on the blog that began with the suggestion that we ought to declare Sweater Christmas, it made me want to do a new post knitting it all together by embedding "Undone — The Sweater Song," but embedding is disabled, so you'll have to pull the thread and walk away over at YouTube. And I did look for that Tom and Jerry unraveling. Unsuccessfully.