#[ the link is an interview with Doug Jones ]

[felassan]

this post is just some info on yesterday's DA:TV Fandom party at SDCC. :>

What was this party? [Here] is a post with the pre-event information that was made available. [Here] is a pre-event article that contains an interview with the organizer. And [this article] on the event contains some additional information, like on the versions of this party held in previous years, which helps for context. There was no new DA:TV information of note from the party

Links to Fandom (the company's) Twitter account, their Instagram. If you look at these (including on the Instagram Stories), you can see some pictures and stuff from the party. for those interested in watching a video version of some of these, Ghil Dirthalen posted a video recording that she made last night of Fandom the company's Instagram posts [here]. there are also more pictures and stuff from the party that you can see if you click through to [some of] the source links below here in the rest of this post.

As was previously reported the other week, Jason Derulo headlined the party (like as in a gig). Here's an image of him there [source] (the him singing DA stuff part was a joke tho btw hh). They considered having an orchestra because of DA's musical score but they got Jason Derulo

One of the party props was a big background of the DA:TV key art [source]. Here you can see the DA:TV logo on another backdrop. [source] This tweet contains both of these backdrops from a different angle

There was also an archway prop based on this DA:TV key art, and big screens which projected images from the game (including of Varric and this screenshot) [source]. It looks like these images were also projected to television screens? [source]

This tweet contains the questions and the answers to the DA-themed scavenger hunt (transcription of this at the end of this post), as well as a partial look at the map layout of the party

This is how photos taken in the DA themed photo booth look (this DA:TV screenshot was the backdrop) [source]

There was a VIP section at the party [source]. Gary McKay, the General Manager of BioWare, was there [source], as were John Epler and Zach Mendez (Lucanis) [source], Ali Hillis (Harding) [source], Nick Boraine (Emmrich) [source], Kari a BioWare Brand Director [source], Jessica Clark (Neve) [source] and Corinne Busche [source]. Erika Ishii (Rook) also visited but got kicked out of VIP hh [source]. Some cosplayers from the DA community were also personally invited by BioWare & PR at EA Games and attended! like Ladytoxie as Bellara ^^ [source, two], and some celebrities also, such as Doug Jones [source]

Ladytoxie mentioned that they will be posting a Vlog of their experience and coverage of the event, "probably next week" [source], having documented it at the time [source] (tysm!!)

Ladytoxie reported that it was a good, memorable experience and that everyone was lovely [source]

There was supposed to be some DA:TV-related pins and lanyards being handed out at the party, but these got stuck at customs, so there wasn't any goodies being handed out [source]

Links to some more images from the party: [one], [two], [three]

Scavenger hunt text (questions and answers) transcription:

"Clue 1: Step up to spot the flames where Fandom's 20-year tale burns bright, celeberate twenty years of worldbuilding where this terrifying Dragon Age wiki takes flight. Answer: Archdemon Clue 2: Follow the path and find the shining blue gem, discover the wiki of this Dragon Age elven hedge mage for your chance to win! Answer: Solas Clue 3: Search for the place where steel balls ricochet, where the flippers dance and the wizards gather to play. Find the wiki of a dwarf and son from the House of Tethras, known as a Dragon Age rogue with his crossbow, Bianca. Answer: Varric Clue 4: Venture to where 360 degree views are spun, where fans share your favorite #/fandom20 with props that are comically fun. Scan the QR code to reveal this order of warriors who defeat the Blight, and with the invasion of darkspawn, they put up a legendary fight. Answer: Grey Wardens Clue 5: Finish your scavenger hunt quest where Dragon Age lore comes alive, a photo booth adventure where fantasies thrive. Pose in a setting of this wiki's southern continent vast, two moons overhead, in a world built to last. Answer: Thedas"

[source]

[catholic-character-tournament]

Catholic Character Tournament

Current Bracket

All polls here (tagged #cct polls)

Round 5 (16 nominees) is Wednesday July 5 12 PST

Character Submission List:

(Note, not in the order in the bracket. They were randomized for the bracket) (crossed out means dead-dead)

*707/Luciel Choi (Mystic Messenger)

*Abuela Alma Madrigal (Encanto)

*Akane Kurashiki (Zero Escape)

*Amon from (Tokyo Ghoul)

*Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series)

*Asia Argento (High School DxD)

Aslan from (Chronicles of Narnia)

*Aymeric de Borel (Final Fantasy 14)

*Aziraphale (Good Omens) (Disqualified) The Volturi

*Belizabeth Brassica (Dimension 20's A Crown of Candy)

*Bishop Raphaniel Charlock (Dimension 20 - the Ravening War)

*Blake Langermann (Outlast 2)

*Brother Cellanus (The Completely Unerotic Adventures of Brother Cellanus)

*Caesar Zeppeli (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)

*Carlos Reyes (911 Lone Star)

*Carrie White (Carrie)

*Catherine of Aragon (SIX: the Musical)

*CC (Code Geass)

*Chrollo Lucilfer (Hunter x Hunter)

*Chuck E. Cheese

*Claude Frollo(The Hunchback of Notre Dame)

*Crowley (Good Omens) (Disqualified) Vanessa Ives replacement (Penny Dreadful)

Dana Scully (the X files)

Doomguy  (Doom)

*Double (Skullgirls)

Doug Jones (The VelociPastor)

*Dracule Mihawk (One Piece)

*Duo Maxwell (Gundam Wing)

*Eddie Brock (Venom)

*Emilio Santoz from The Sparrow

Enrico Pucci (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure)

*Farnese de Vandimion (Berserk)

*Father Alexander Anderson (Hellsing)

*Father Brown (Father Brown)

Father John Mulcahy (MASH)

Father Paul (Midnight Mass)

*Felicia Hardy/Black Cat (Spiderman)

Firestar (Warrior Cats)

*Flayn (Fire Emblem Three Houses)

*Frank Castle (Marvel)

Friar Tuck (Robin Hood)

*Gabriel (Ultrakill)

*Galahad (The Mechanisms)

*Gerard (Unholyverse)

Gloria Maria Ramirez Delgado-Pritchett (Modern Family)

Harrowhark Nonagesimus (The Locked Tomb)

*Helena Bertinlli (DC comics)

Hell boy (HellBoy)

Homura Akemi (Madoka Magica)

*Hot Pants (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure)

*Ibara Shiozaki (My Hero Academia)

*Inori Yamabuki/Cure Pine (Fresh Precure)

Jason Todd (DC Comics)

*Javert (Les Miserables)

Jean Valjean (Les Misérables)

*Jeanne d'Arc (Alter) (Fate/Grand Order)

*Jesus (Jesus Christ Superstar) 

*John "Soap" MacTavish (Call of Duty)

*John Gaius (The Locked Tomb)

*John Ward (FAITH)

*Johnathan (Shin Megami Tensei IV)

*Junk Rat (Overwatch)

*Justin Law (Soul eater)

*Kawabuchi Sentarou (Kids on the Slope)

Kaworu Nagisa (Neon Genesis Evangelion)

*Kirei Kotomine (Fate franchise)

Knuckes the Echidna (Sonic)

*Kristen Applebees (Dimension 20's Fantasy High)

*Kuroe (Magia Record)

Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler (X-Men)

*Ky Kiske (Guilty Gear)

*Kyoko Sakura (Puella Magi Madoka Magica)

*Lady Rhea (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)

*Leliana (Dragon Age)

*Leon (8:11)

*Lestat de Lioncourt (The Vampire Chronicles)

*Libra (Fire Emblem: Awakening)

*Link (The Legend of Zelda)

*Louis de Pointe du Lac (Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Chronicles)

*Luis Serra Navarro (Resident Evil)

Mac McDonald (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia)

Maddie Fitzpatrick (Suite Life of Zack and Cody)

*Marcy Park (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee)

*Mark Heathcliff (The Mandela Catalogue)

Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Marvel)

*Mello (Death Note)

*Mercedes (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)

*Michael Carpenter (Dresden Files)

*Michael Corleone (The Godfather)

Miles Morales/Spider-Man

*Nate Ford (Leverage)

Nicholas D. Wolfwood (Trigun)

*Nico di Angelo (Percy Jackson)

*Ocean O'Connell Rosenberg (Ride the Cyclone)

*Pastry Cookie (Cookie Run Kingdom)

*Patton Sanders (Sanders Sides (Web Series))

Pope Pinion IV (Cars)

Puss in Boots (Shrek)

Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)

Remy LeBeau/Gambit (X-Men)

*Rin Okumura (Blue Exorcist)

*RoboCop (RoboCop)

Ronan Lynch (The Raven Cycle)

*Ryker (Roleslaying With Roman)

*Saint Citrina Rocks (Dimension 20's A Crown of Candy)

*Sasuke (Naruto)

*SCP-166 (Just a Teenage Gaia) 

*Seeley Booth (Bones)

Shadow the Hedgehog (Sonic)

*Shiro Fujimoto (Blue Exorcist)

Simon Belmont (Castlevania)

*Sir Keradin Deeproot (Dimension 20's A Crown of Candy)

*Sister Mary (The Young Pope)

Sister Michael (Derry Girls)

*Steve Rogers/Captain America (Marvel)

*Tammy Edwards (Legoland by Jacob Richmond) 

*Tatsumi Kazehaya (Ensemble Stars)

*Temenos Mistral (Octopath Traveler 2)

The Derry Girls (Derry Girls)

*The Penitent One (Blasphemous)

*Tobias Schneien (Ghost Eyes)

*Valeria Garaz (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reboot)

*Valery Michailov (Goncharov - 1973)

*Vector the Crocodile (Sonic the Hedgehog)

*Vito Corleone (The Godfather)

*Wesley Hailoh (Rhyme and Reason)

*William Murdoch (Murdoch Mysteries)

*Zakuro Fujiwara (Tokyo Mew Mew)

[barkercast]

453 : Peter Atkins and Quartet of Torment – Hellbound

In the Clive Barker Podcast, long-time fans Ryan and Jose interview guests, bring you the news, and take deep dives into Barker-related stuff.  In Episode 453 We’re joined by writer Peter Atkins as we delve into Hellbound to continue our series exploring the new Hellraiser Box Set, The Quartet of Torment.  Available on YouTube video and Podcast Audio. 

  Sponsor : Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination | ETSY Store

Check Out “You Can’t Keep Him” on his Facebook page. 

There are some paintings on his Etsy shop to check out. Mother and Child II, The Star Gazer, The Folk Singer, The Pearl, The Portal, Top of the World.  And don’t forget about his books, The Chimney Sweep’s Tale and Celebrate Imagination.  

Discussion: Arrow’s Hellraiser Quartet of Torment, 2023

Disc 2

Hellbound: Hellraiser II in 4K

Audio Commentaries

New Commentary W/ Steven Jones and Kim Newman

Old Commentary with Tony Randel, Peter Atkins, Ashley Laurance (2000)

Old Commentary with Tony Randel and Peter Atkins (1996)

Hell Was what they Wanted! (Kit Power and George Daniel Lea)

That Rat Slice Sound

Behind the Scenes

Clive Barker on set interview

Cast and Crew in set interviews

Behind the scenes footage

Archival Special Features

Being Frank: Sean Chapman on Hellbound

Under The Skin: Doug Bradley on Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Hellbound: Hellraiser II – Lost in the Labyrinth

Deleted Surgeon Scene

Trailers

TV Spots

Image Galleries

Show Notes: 

Episode 441 with Sorcha and Karmel

Episode 447 Boom Hellraiser Part X and Quartet of Torment Disc 1

36 Years since Hellbound Hit Number 1 in the UK

First Class Horror

One Good Scare

Sean McClure’s Retrospective Interviews

Darkness Beckons

Patreon Members Shout-Out (Become a Patron)

David Anderson

Erik Van T’ Holt

Daniel Elven

Returning Sponsor: Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination 

What’s New for our Patreon Subscribers

On Podcasting

The Art of Clive Barker

Patterns of the Dreaming God

Collector’s Corner: Jump Tribe

Coming Next 

Jericho Squad 77 Returns

A-Z Commentaries Z for Zombies: Army of Darkness

Nightbreed Soundtrack discussion (Intrada)

Phantasmagoria Hellraiser Interview Book

Review of 4K Underworld & Rawhead Rex

More Boom Hellraiser The Dark Watch comics discussion

Hellraiser Quartet of Torment Coverage

And this podcast, having no beginning will have no end. 

web www.clivebarkercast.com

iOS App| Android App, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, Libsyn, Tunein, iHeart Radio, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Radio.com, DoubleTwist and YouTube and Join the Occupy Midian group

Discord Community

Twitter: @BarkerCast| @OccupyMidian 

Buy Our Book: The BarkerCast Interviews Occupy Midian | Hardcover | Kindle | Apple

Become a Patreon Patron

Support the show, Buy a T-Shirt

Music is by Ray Norrish

All Links and show notes in their Entirety can be found at http://www.clivebarkercast.com

New episode of the Clive Barker Podcast

[once-was-muses]

A VERY DESCRIPTIVE PROFILE OF YOUR MUSE. Repost with the information of your muse, including headcanons, etc. if you fail to achieve some of the facts, add some other of your own!

NAME. Bro'Dee Walker

NICKNAME(S). Walker, Worm (by Arkillo), Moonface, Fish Dad

TITLE(S). Saint, Blue Lantern, Joo'Sech (equivalent to 'father' or 'priest')

AGE. 227½ (65 in Astonian terms)

SPECIES. Astonian

SEX. Masc aligned (race is hermaphroditic)

NATIONALITY. N/A (home planet destroyed, no permanent residence)

ALIGNMENT. Neutral Good

INTERESTS.

PROFESSION. Blue Lantern

BODY TYPE. Tall, lanky, thin and wiry

EYES. Pure black, almond esque

HAIR. N/A

SKIN. Silvery gray, smooth almost velvety scales (think leopard gecko but not as loose and moderately thicker)

FACE. Long, oval shaped, very thin; high, prominent cheekbones; no lips, nose, earlobes, or nostrils; circular fleshy patches (ear holes) far back on sides of head; rounded, slightly forward jutting chin; like most of his body, covered in "lines" of bioluminescent organs

HEIGHT. 6'7"

VOICE: Higher in pitch, slightly nasally but clear, animated while still calm and even

SIGNIFICANT OTHER? Quanta Walker (deceased); verse dependent

COMPANIONS. Kyle Rayner, Razer, Carol Ferris, Arkillo, Kilowog; verse dependent

ANTAGONISTS. Thaal Sinestro, Sinestro Corps, Larfleeze, Orange Lantern Corps, Atrocitus, Red Lantern Corps, Doomsday, Relic, Brainiac; verse dependent

COLORS. Blue, purple, black, green, white

FRUITS. Berries and nuts

DRINKS. Fruit juices, water, some tea (caffeine effects him poorly)

ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. Very bad idea, he has an extremely low alcohol tolerance (though he metabolizes it far quicker)

SMOKES? No

DRUGS? No

DRIVERS LICENSE? He shouldn't be allowed to be behind the controls of anything bigger than his ring lmao

Tagged by: @hopecerulean 💙

Tagging: @tucker-vision and @boyish-drinks (Fitz)

[kirksfattitties]

?? They were going to give Doug Jones ass prosthetics?

yeah there’s like an interview and a gif set of that interview somewhere but it was basically just like “they were gonna give me padding on my ass and i was like ‘well maybe aliens have flat asses have you ever thought about that’” or something. someone else can post a link if they have it but i really don’t think i have the cognitive ability right now

[phantombandit-films]

I feel like Crimson Peak isn’t talked about enough.

SPOILER WARNING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM. Also WARNING this post will contain photo’s of creepy SFX ghosts. 

If you haven’t seen the beautiful 2015 Gothic Romance film ‘Crimson Peak’ directed by Guillermo del Toro, then I think it’s time you do so.

As a Tom Hiddleston fan, a paranormal/horror enthusiast and a lover of period films I was going to find out about this movie one way or another. At the time that teasers were coming out for the movie, I was just starting a Media Makeup course. So when I saw the behind the scenes of making the ghosts I was so impressed and instantly wanted to see more.

I mean look at how extremely detailed and beautiful these ghost suits are, the two actors that were in the suits Doug Jones and Javier Botet also worked with Del Toro on Pan’s labyrinth, Hell boy and Mama. These suits where made by DDT Efectos Especiales who also won a Oscar for their makeup on Pan’s Labyrinth.  The two red ghost’s are the previous bride’s of Thomas Sharp, and their red colour is linked to the red clay they were disposed in down in the cellar, of  which we see Edith nearly discover when she unlocks one of the grates. They also did the makeup for Edith’s fathers brutal murder, and some more subtle effects like the scars on Lucille’s face that apparently where from getting hit by a cane from her mother.

It was also said that the physical presence of the ‘ghost’s’ helped the actors more, I think we all appreciate any film/director that goes all out and will use practical effects over CGI. It gives this film a more realistic creepy but Gothically beautiful vibe. Also the set of Allerdale Hall was just breathtaking, it apparently took 6 months to design and was built in Pinewood Toronto Studios. It was a three story set and also had a working elevator and fireplaces. Wow. A lot of attention and detail was put into it and you can definitely tell by how stunning the end result was.

I recently watched a youtube video (of which I will link Here ) called ‘10 amazing secrets about Crimson Peak’. The first fact was that the director, Guillermo del Toro wrote 10 page character biographies for Mia Wasikowska who plays Edith Cushing the main character, Tom Hiddleston who plays Thomas Sharp the male lead and Jessica Chastain who plays Lucille Sharpe, Thomas’s sister.  These included details about the characters childhoods and what their relationship was like with their parents, secrets and even favourite smells. They were also told to not share this information with any other cast mates. This attention to detail is amazing and just shows how passionate he was about this project. But this also assured that the actors knew their characters like the back of their hand, and understood in what direction the director wanted to go for scenes so they were all on the same page.

I also found out that Benedict Cumberbatch was meant to play Thomas Sharp and his portrayal was going to be a much colder character than Tom’s Thomas. I had a little giggle at this, knowing the two men are close friends. But as much as I love Benedict, I think Tom was a much better choice for the role. 

Another piece of information that I learnt was that Del Toro had two sizes of furniture made, some regular sized and some bigger. When the bigger was used it was used to emphasis the weakness of a character in that scene, and used the smaller to show a stronger character.  Although I’ve not noticed this before I’ll definitely be looking out for it now. Also the word ‘Fear’ is hidden in the wallpaper all over the house, Del Toro has also had a fascination with moths and butterflies since he was a kid so in the film he used the image of butterflies and moths to show the difference between Edith and Lucille. 

If you’re like me and you like a Gothic, Victorian ghost story than this movie is definitely for you.  As Del Toro said, it shouldn’t be seen as a horror. It’s a Gothic romance which to me is extremely beautiful.  This is also how I see it, he also said in a interview that to him the horror isn’t the ghost, it’s the humans. This is something that I always think about as well, as a paranormal enthusiast I get why people are scared of ghosts but humans are scarier and this movie projects that. You think the ghost are wanting to do Edith harm when in fact the ghosts are trying to warn and help her, as it’s the humans that intend on hurting her and nearly succeed. 

I just really wanted to talk about this film because I feel like it just isn’t talked about enough, aesthetically it’s such a stunning film from the posters and the promo photos to the actual film its self. One of my favourite visual scenes is the ending scene where Edith is fighting Lucille outside and there’s fog everywhere, it’s pure white from the show and Ediths hair and nightgown but the blood red clay stains the snow when walked on leaving what looks like bloody footprints. It stains Edith’s white night gown but it’s like a dip dye affect, like its crawling up the dress. Even the deep bleeding cut on Edith’s pale face, It’s just a beautifully stunning scene. 

I just have a lot of love to give this film and I feel like I’ve learnt so much researching to make this post, but I feel like I have so much more to say about it so I’ll probably edit (to actually edit as well, there’s probably typo’s) this post in the future or make a part 2. 

[lyselkatzfandomluvs]

My edits - Masterpost

Making a MASTERLIST for my edits because I’m losing track of what’s done and what’s in my to-do folders.

EDIT: looks like the links aren’t working on mobile anymore. They point to results on the whole tumblr instead of just on my blog. I don’t kow how to fix this so I’m afraid the only solution is to seach for the film title on my blog. 

Band of Brothers cast

They are under the tag #My BoB cast edits (outsourced content and reblogs from other content creators, mostly for those with wider fan-base, are tagged #BoB cast) and with the actor’s name or the serie/movie title.

Feel free to send me an ask if there’s anything you’d like to see from BoB and its cast

Ensemble

Band of Brothers (obviously 😝)

Ron Livingston's bootcamp video diary

Wales Comic Con 2020 twitch panel

We happy few 506 zoom panels

Doug Allen

Sherlock (BBC)

Jamie Bamber

A Christmas in New York

Hornblower

Eion Bailey

Center stage

Covert affairs

Dawson's creek

Deliver by Christmas

FBI

Fight Club

Life of the party

Mindhunters

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Stalker

Switched for Christmas

Philip Barantini

Ned Kelly

Ben Caplan

Leap year

New blood

The coroner

The lost honour of Christopher Jefferies

Whitechapel

Michael Cudlitz

21 Jump street

A river runs through it

Dark tourist

Dragon : The Bruce Lee story

Kings of con

SouthLAnd

Standoff

Dale Dye

44 minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out

Michael Fassbender

Gunpowder, treason & plot

Dexter Fletcher

Below

Bugsy Malone

Caravaggio

Dramarama

Gentlemen in squalor

Hotel Babylon

Lock, stock and two smoking barrels

The Rachel papers

Music video - Kylie Minogue "Some kind of bliss"

Stephen Graham

Boardwalk empire

Ezra Godden

Dagon

Quarantine "Isolation" videos

Rick Gomez

Applebox

Daily Rick’s tips

Hawaii five-0

Law and order

Leave

The adventures of Pete & Pete

The millionaire Tour

The week

Three to tango

Interview - Your story interview with Christine Schneider

Scott Grimes

Critters

Colin Hanks

Parkland

Tom Hardy

Colditz

Nolan Hemmings

Black Book

Colour me Kubrick

Dive to the Bermuda Triangle

Heartbeat

Pump up the volume

Sharpe’s eagle

The Aryan couple

The Mahabharata

Frank John Hughes

Applebox

Blue lagoon: the awakening

Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family

Homicide: Life on the streets

Leave

Legends

NCIS

Players

Righteous kill

The Funeral

The Guardian

The week

Viper

Lucie Jeanne

Central nuit

Joséphine ange gardien

L’été rouge

Relic hunter

Robin Laing

Beautiful creatures

Dive to the Bermuda Triangle

Doors open

Murder room

Taggart

The coroner

The lakes

The slab boys

Waking the dead

Matthew Leitch

AKA

Below

Mile high

Renford rejects

Strike back

Damian Lewis

Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker

A touch of Frost

Colditz

Life

The baker

Ron Livingston

44 minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out

Addicted to Fresno

American crude

Applebox

Beat

Boardwalk empire

Body shots

Buying the cow

Defying gravity

Dice

Digging for fire

Dinner for schmucks

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Drinking buddies

Fort bliss

Going the distance

James White

King of the ants

Kings of con

Leave

Little black book

Loudermilk

Music within

Office Space

Parkland

Players

Queens of country (trailer)

Relative strangers

Saints and strangers

Sex and the city

Shangri-La suite

Shimmer lake

Standoff

Straight talk

Swinger

The 5th Wave

The conjuring

The cooler

The long dumb road

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot

The Romanoffs

The sidekick

Timecop

Touchy feely

Tully

Interview - Off camera with Sam Jones

Interview - Alexander Valley Film Society

Misc - Keyboard cat

James Madio

Applebox

Hook

Leave

The week

Tim Matthews

Five children and It

Heartbeat

Judge John Deed

Music video - "Taking chances”

Ross McCall

A Christmas in New York

A country Christmas story

Crash

CSI: New York

Ghost whisperer

Hex

It’s not you, it’s me

Lucifer

Nature unleashed: Fire

Pie in the sky

Quarantine : Rome

Rome in love

Snake man/The snake king

Submerged

The beautiful ones

Waterland

White collar

Neal McDonough

Boomtown

Quantum leap

Jason O'Mara

Sons of liberty

The Agency

Peter O'Meara

Leap year

Strike back

Bart Ruspoli

Devil’s playground

David Schwimmer

Uprising

Matthew Settle

Beneath

Blue smoke

Criminal minds- Beyond borders

Divine secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood

I still know what you did last summer

Love, sick love

Marshall’s miracle

Ouija

So undercover

The Celestine prophecy

The in crowd

The mystery of Natalie Wood

U-571

Valentine

Douglas Spain

44 minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out

Richard Speight Jr

3 Blind saints

American crude

Applebox

Driven

J.A.G.

Jericho

Kings of con

Life

Matlock

The agency

The sidekick

The week

Shane Taylor

Agriculture

Aura/The exorcism of Karen Walker

Devil’s playground

Hunter killer

Quirke

Sons of liberty

Strike Back

The day of the Triffids

Walking with the enemy

Music video - Stalker Miller "Jenny"

Donnie Wahlberg

Boomtown

Dead silence

Righteous kill

The sixth sense

Rick Warden

Shackleton

Marc Warren

Colour me Kubrick

Peter Youngblood Hills

AKA

Michel Vaillant

Submerged

The beach

The marksman

********

MISC EDITS

James Badge Dale

Parkland

Scott Bakula

Quantum leap

Rob Benedict

Kings of con

The sidekick

Misha Collins

24

Dave Franco

interview GQ 2014

Misc - LG, It's all possible

Lena Headey

Waterland

Ilia Kulik

Center stage

Alessandra Mastronardi

Quarantine : Rome

Helen McCrory

Life

Ewan McGregor

Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker

Joe Mazzello

Wooly boys

Piper Perabo

Covert affairs

Norman Reduus

Beat

Zoe Saldana

Center stage

Michael Sheen

Music within

Brian J. Smith

World on Fire (BBC)

Sebastian Stan

Misc - Save with stories

Tom Wisdom

Mile high

[dracota]

On not seeing the new hellboy

Ooooh boy have I been thinking about this. Bit of a long rant.

And no cuts on mobile. Great.

.

.

.

I’ll start with the easy part. Del Toro & Perlman said their move was supposed to be three parts. The end of The Golden Army even set it up.

They also would not say WHY it was being held up.

Fast forward to Mignolas confusion as to why no one was realizing that this was a “new” Hellboy move. He seemed to avoid using the word reboot. Milla Jovovivh posted a ton about her part on instagram and then went suddenly silent about it.

During this Ed Skrein does the right thing by turning down a roll and then... more nothing.

Then suddenly there is news! Reboot is finally used as a discriptor! But... at this point I had started following Mignola on twitter because del Toro was talking about the movie. I am no longer following him on twitter. -_-

Mignola posted a link to an interview he did and all I got from it was that he didn’t understand how the control or rights worked. At all. Like he was shocked. He had no film rights and couldn’t handle it. The interview was in Vulture 4-12-2019 ((app linking not working for me))

It was as if he had never seen a book to film movie and considered maybe I should hold onto something.

I saw the trailer and it was jarring as fuck. No real reason for the movie that I could easily follow. Even though I have most of the comics.

I made the mistake of rereading the interview and reading another interview.

So now to me the movie is looking like a hard core member only movie for true fans.

And then David Harbor says his Hellboy can’t have sex possibly pisses off all the monster fuckers. Face meet desk.

And then Pearlman said his could.

I finally started looking into the movie more at right near the top of the wiki? It was originally planned as the third film but guess who didn’t want to let del Toro have much, if anything to do with it? Which considering the giant bridge destroying angel that looks a dead ringer for del Toros art & Doug Jones acting?

I am having trouble finding info on that.

I did see that an article in revenge of the fans from 3-25-2019 says del Toro didn’t want to work on it. And that that was how they got the rights. I call bullshit.

Film rights or options are not forever. Someone made the decision to delay the film so that the rights would expire.

So then the movie that had originally been a trilogy gets turned into a reboot that’s bombs.

And since they made it R so that takes out all the ticket sales from the under 18 crowd. Deadpool made a PG-13 version to pull in extra cash. But everything shows that it’s full of violence and grim dark with... not much else.

I adore Daniel Dae Kim but not even he cane get me into a theater for that crap.

Funny thing is, I think if they had just let del Toro & Pearlman make their third film and then do the reboot? It probably would have done better in theaters

There would have been no confusion. No promises from an uncomplicated trilogy. People would have known it was new and not the old.

To the death of a series.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Alabama’s long and strange special election for U.S. Senate comes to a close on Tuesday. Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore face off in their bids to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the remainder of the term. Moore is the favorite, according to the polls, but Jones is just a normal polling error away from winning.

Let’s talk about where the race stands, what to keep an eye on after the polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern time and how today’s results could affect the national political landscape.

1. The race has been volatile

President Trump won Alabama by 28 percentage points in 2016. Alabama is a very red state, so this race really shouldn’t be close. Moore, however, was a divisive figure in Alabama politics before this campaign. He was already significantly underperforming Trump’s margin in surveys before The Washington Post first reported, on Nov. 9, that Moore had been accused of sexual misconduct. Since that Post report, the polls have swung to Jones and back to Moore again, and now they’re a bit muddled.

Alabama Senate polls since the first Moore allegations

Surveys taken after accusations of sexual misconduct against Roy Moore were first reported by The Washington Post on Nov. 9

POLLSTER DAYS SINCE ACCUSATIONS DOUG JONES ROY MOORE MOORE MARGIN Opinion Savvy 0 46% 46% 0 Gravis Marketing 1 46 48 +2

–

Change Research 2 40 44 +4

–

Emerson College 2 40 49 +9

–

JMC Analytics 2 48 44 -4

–

Strategy Research 4 43 49 +6

–

Fox News 6 50 42 -8

–

Gravis Marketing 6 47 42 -5

–

Change Research 7 46 43 -3

–

Strategy Research 11 45 47 +2

–

Emerson College 18 47 53 +6

–

Change Research 18 44 49 +5

–

JMC Analytics 19 44 49 +5

–

Washington Post 21 50 47 -3

–

YouGov 22 43 49 +6

–

Emerson College 23 46 49 +3

–

Gravis Marketing 24 48 44 -4

–

Strategy Research 25 43 50 +7

–

Change Research 28 44 51 +7

–

Trafalgar Group 28 46 51 +5

–

Gravis Marketing 29 45 49 +4

–

Monmouth U. 30 46 46 0 Emerson College 30 44 53 +9

–

Fox News 31 50 40 -10

–

SurveyMonkey 32 50 48 -2

–

Change Research 32 45 51 +6

–

Monmouth University and SurveyMonkey data is taken from an average of their likely voter turnout models.

The polling swings have roughly tracked with voter interest in the Moore scandals. According to Google Trends data, the volume of Alabamians’ searches for Moore dropped off about a week after the Post’s Nov. 9 story. That lines up well with when Jones’s polling surge stopped and Moore began to recover.

Moore was also probably helped by President Trump giving him a quasi and then a full-throated endorsement. Surveys taken before and after Trump got involved show that Moore’s margin over Jones among Trump supporters jumped by 10 to 15 percentage points. Given Trump’s national unpopularity, that jump might not have been a big deal in many states, but it’s a huge deal in Alabama, where Trump is still fairly popular.

All told, an average of polls conducted over the final 21 days of the campaign has Moore up by a few points, 49 percent to 46 percent. But there’s a big spread in results, everything from Moore +9 points to Jones +10 points. These divergent results make sense because …

2. This is a tough race to poll

Senate polling conducted within three weeks of an election has historically been decent, though by no means perfect. Since 1998, Senate polling averages that use at least 10 polls (like the Alabama race) have been off by an average of 3.5 percentage points. In other words, an average polling error in his favor could hand Jones the win.

There’s also reason to believe that there’s a higher-than-usual chance for error in Alabama. Perhaps because of the lower turnout usually associated with elections that are held on days other than the traditional November Election Day in a midterm or presidential year, Senate polls for these races have had an average error that’s nearly a point higher than the average error for those November races.

Indeed, no pollster really knows what turnout is going to look like in Alabama. In addition to the fact that this is a special election occurring two weeks before Christmas in an off-year, there hasn’t been a major competitive statewide general election in Alabama since 2002. SurveyMonkey, The Washington Post and YouGov all have Moore doing better among likely voters than registered voters. Fox News shows the opposite. SurveyMonkey has also demonstrated how weighting for different factors (including past voting patterns) can make a big difference in who a poll shows as being ahead. (My colleague Nate Silver wrote a more in-depth story about what’s going on with pollsters’ assumptions.)

Additionally, the way pollsters are conducting their surveys seems to be having an impact on their findings in Alabama. Only three pollsters who meet FiveThirtyEight’s gold standard1 have conducted polls in Alabama since Nov. 9: Fox News, Monmouth University and The Washington Post. Fox News gave Jones his largest lead of the campaign. Monmouth and The Washington Post surveys were more favorable to Jones than the average. Traditionally, gold-standard pollsters have been more accurate than other pollsters.

It’s also possible, though, that the non-gold-standard polls will be more predictive in this campaign. To meet the FiveThirtyEight gold standard, one thing a pollster must do is use a live interviewer to conduct its surveys. It’s plausible that some voters may not want to admit to another person that they plan to cast a ballot for someone accused of child molestation. They may feel more comfortable saying they are voting for Moore to a recorded voice or to a computer, which is how the vast majority of polls in Alabama have been conducted.

Either way, there’s a lot of reason to be uncertain about how predictive the Alabama polls will be.

3. Jones must win big in the cities — really big

No Democrat has won a statewide race in Alabama since 2008. During that losing streak, Democrats have tended to do their best in two types of places: counties where a large share of the population is black and cities.

But to win the Alabama Senate race, Jones will have to do even better than a typical Democrat — after all, Democrats usually lose in Alabama. He’ll probably need to run up even larger margins than normal in the black belt and win handily in counties with significant population centers, such as Jefferson (Birmingham), Madison (Huntsville), Mobile and Montgomery. Beyond that, it’s difficult to pinpoint how well Jones will need to do in each county to win — we don’t have a string of competitive statewide elections to get a sense of the baseline.

So instead of one baseline, let’s use three that each share some characteristic with today’s election: a federal race, a race with Moore on the ballot, and a combo of the two. Below, I’ve created a table of the three county benchmarks, estimating how well Jones needs to do according to each to win the statewide Senate race. The first is based on the 2016 presidential election results. The second is based on the vote share margin between the 2012 Democratic candidate for state Supreme Court chief justice and Moore, who won that race. And the third is an average of the first two.2 To take one example, if Jones is winning Madison County (average benchmark Jones +9.5 points) by more than 9.5 points, that’s a good sign for his chances of winning statewide.

The benchmarks Doug Jones needs to beat in Alabama

Jones’s target margins over Moore based on the 2016 presidential election and Moore’s performance in a 2012 Supreme Court race

BENCHMARKS COUNTY▲▼ SHARE OF 2016 VOTE▲▼ 2016 PRESIDENTIAL▲▼ 2012 SUPREME COURT▲▼ AVG.▲▼ Winston 0.5% -53.3 -54.0 -53.7 Blount 1.2 -53.2 -49.8 -51.5 Cleburne 0.3 -49.3 -49.4 -49.4 Geneva 0.6 -44.3 -54.0 -49.2 Cullman 1.8 -49.4 -46.4 -47.9 Marion 0.6 -48.1 -44.4 -46.3 St. Clair 1.8 -40.1 -40.0 -40.1 Covington 0.8 -40.5 -37.0 -38.8 Lamar 0.3 -41.0 -35.4 -38.2 Chilton 0.9 -38.6 -37.8 -38.2 DeKalb 1.2 -41.2 -32.0 -36.6 Marshall 1.7 -41.2 -31.4 -36.3 Cherokee 0.5 -41.3 -29.2 -35.3 Fayette 0.4 -37.2 -30.4 -33.8 Walker 1.4 -39.3 -27.0 -33.2 Coffee 1.0 -28.4 -32.4 -30.4 Bibb 0.4 -27.5 -30.6 -29.1 Franklin 0.6 -32.7 -25.0 -28.9 Clay 0.3 -32.8 -24.4 -28.6 Baldwin 4.5 -29.4 -25.8 -27.6 Jackson 1.0 -34.3 -19.0 -26.7 Dale 0.9 -22.4 -28.6 -25.5 Randolph 0.5 -25.4 -24.8 -25.1 Shelby 4.8 -21.7 -23.0 -22.4 Houston 2.0 -19.4 -24.6 -22.0 Elmore 1.8 -23.8 -20.0 -21.9 Morgan 2.4 -24.1 -18.8 -21.5 Limestone 1.9 -20.9 -19.4 -20.2 Autauga 1.2 -21.3 -15.8 -18.6 Henry 0.4 -13.7 -18.8 -16.3 Washington 0.4 -15.3 -16.8 -16.1 Crenshaw 0.3 -17.7 -12.2 -15.0 Lawrence 0.7 -20.9 -8.6 -14.8 Etowah 2.1 -22.0 -6.0 -14.0 Lauderdale 1.9 -17.7 -9.4 -13.6 Tallapoosa 0.9 -13.8 -10.4 -12.1 Calhoun 2.3 -13.3 -8.0 -10.7 Escambia 0.7 -8.2 -9.8 -9.0 Colbert 1.2 -10.2 -2.6 -6.4 Coosa 0.2 -2.8 +0.4 -1.2 Lee 2.8 +5.1 -2.0 +1.6 Talladega 1.6 +2.3 +1.4 +1.9 Pike 0.6 +7.7 +3.6 +5.7 Monroe 0.5 +13.5 +3.0 +8.3 Tuscaloosa 3.9 +8.4 +8.4 +8.4 Pickens 0.4 +12.1 +5.8 +9.0 Chambers 0.7 +12.9 +5.4 +9.2 Madison 7.7 +11.3 +7.6 +9.5 Clarke 0.6 +17.0 +4.6 +10.8 Choctaw 0.3 +14.0 +8.8 +11.4 Mobile 8.1 +14.4 +10.4 +12.4 Butler 0.4 +14.3 +11.0 +12.7 Barbour 0.5 +22.1 +17.6 +19.9 Conecuh 0.3 +22.6 +18.8 +20.7 Russell 0.9 +29.6 +19.6 +24.6 Marengo 0.5 +31.2 +21.6 +26.4 Jefferson 14.3 +35.0 +29.6 +32.3 Hale 0.4 +47.6 +38.0 +42.8 Montgomery 4.5 +53.6 +45.4 +49.5 Dallas 0.9 +65.2 +47.0 +56.1 Wilcox 0.3 +70.1 +56.8 +63.5 Perry 0.2 +73.5 +58.0 +65.8 Lowndes 0.3 +74.6 +60.8 +67.7 Bullock 0.2 +78.4 +61.0 +69.7 Sumter 0.3 +77.0 +62.8 +69.9 Greene 0.2 +92.7 +75.4 +84.1 Macon 0.4 +94.8 +76.0 +85.4

Source: DAVE LEIP’S ATLAS OF U.S. PRESIDENTIAL Elections

Broadly speaking, the three benchmarks are similar. However, there are some differences. For one, the 2016 benchmarks show that Jones needs to do a lot better in heavily black counties like Bullock, Dallas and Macon than the 2012 benchmarks show. The 2012 benchmarks have Moore underperforming the usual Republican vote share in his home county of Etowah and the surrounding Cherokee and DeKalb counties, so if you go by those, Jones needs to do better in those areas. The 2012 benchmarks also have Jones needing to make up a disproportionate amount of ground in counties that are on the periphery of statistical areas (as defined by the federal government) such as Jackson and Lawrence, which are in the Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama, statistical areas respectively.

It’s not clear which of these provide the best baseline. On the one hand, 2016 was a federal election, as is Tuesday’s election. On the other, Moore is a unique candidate, so it could be best to look at an election in which he was a candidate. For now, the best bet is probably to look at some average of the two.

4. This election has national implications

There will be a lot of talk about what a Moore win or loss says about the Republican Party. But the most immediate potential effect of the election would be from a Moore defeat, which would: (i) make Republican efforts to pass legislation in the current Congress more difficult and (ii) make Democratic efforts to take over the Senate in 2018 easier.

Republicans currently have 52 seats in the U.S. Senate. A Jones win puts that majority at just 51 seats. That means that Republicans could afford to lose only one GOP vote on legislation3 — two would be enough to sink any bill that is universally opposed by Democrats. Given all the trouble that Republicans have had passing legislation with a two-seat margin for error, it’s likely that they would struggle even more with a one-seat cushion.

Meanwhile, in 2018, Democrats hope to take control of the Senate, but they have limited opportunities. There are only two Republican-held seats up for election in states where Democrats are normally competitive: Arizona and Nevada. If Republicans have 52 seats heading into next year, Democrats will have to win those two seats and at least one additional GOP-held seat to take control of the Senate in 2019. If, however, Jones wins, the path to a Democratic-controlled Senate in 2019 gets a lot easier.

Finally, no matter who wins, Alabama’s Senate race will almost certainly be another special election this year in which Democrats outperform the presidential lean of the district or state. Although there are obviously some particular circumstances in Alabama, that Trump’s approval rating (even if still relatively high in Alabama) is below his percentage of the vote in last year’s election hasn’t helped Moore’s cause. Moore’s likely very poor performance versus Trump’s 2016 showing adds to the evidence that the national environment favors the Democrats heading into 2018.

[barkercast]

447 : Boom Hellraiser P6 plus Quartet of Torment D1

Thanks for listening to the Clive Barker podcast.  The only podcast dedicated to the imagination of Clive Barker. Coming up next on episode 447, We get back to the Boom Studios Hellraiser comics with the Dark Watch 1-4, plus in the last half we review disc 1 of the new Arrow 4K Hellraiser box set, “The Quartet of Torment.”

Sponsor : Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination | ETSY Store

Check out “Bouquet“, “Brushfire” and “Mother and Child II” on his Facebook feed.   

There are some paintings on his Etsy shop to check out. Mother and Child II, The Star Gazer, The Folk Singer, The Pearl, Top of the World.  And don’t forget about is books, The Chimney Sweep’s Tale and Celebrate Imagination

Also Check out “The Eclipse” on his Facebook page

Catching Up

Nightbreed 2CD Deluxe Edition

Jericho stuff from Russell

Phantasmagoria hardcover

Jose’s Nightbreed on-set polaroids

Discussion: Boom Studios Hellraiser

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #1 – February, 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #2 – March, 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #3 – April 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #4 – May 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia, Korkut Oztekin

Discussion: Arrow’s Hellraiser Quartet of Torment, 2023

Overview: Packaging

The Book ‘Ages of Desire’

Disc 1

Hellraiser in 4K

New Commentary W/ Steven Jones and Kim Newman

Old Commentary with Clive Barker, Ashley Laurence, Pete Atkins

Old Commentary with Clive Barker

Power of Imagination with Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Karmel Kniprath

Unboxing Hellraiser

The Pursuit of Possibilities

Flesh Is a Trap

Newly Uncovered Interviews

Electronic Press Kit

Being Frank – Archival Interview w/ Sean Chapman

Under The Skin – Archival Interview W/ Doug Bradley

Soundtrack to Hell – Archival Interview with Coil Steven Thrower

Trailers and TV Spots

Image Galleries

Draft Screenplays

Show Notes

Episode 441 with Sorcha No Fhlainn and Karmel Kniprath

Patreon Exclusive – Collector’s Corner 1: Jump Tribe

Patreon Exclusive – Patterns of the Dreaming God

Patreon Members Shout-Out (Become a Patron)

David Anderson

Erik Van T’ Holt

Daniel Elven

Returning Sponsor: Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination 

Coming Next 

News Episode

Jericho Squad 77 Returns

A-Z Commentaries Z for Zombies: Evil Dead 2

More Boom Hellraiser The Dark Watch comics discussion / Hellraiser Quartet of Torment Coverage

And this podcast, having no beginning will have no end. 

web www.clivebarkercast.com

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            New episode of the Clive Barker Podcast

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND April 12, 2019  - HELLBOY, LITTLE, MISSING LINK, AFTER

We’re almost midway through April (already?) but that also means that we’re one week closer to Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, which is probably the only movie everyone is really waiting for anyway, going by advance ticket sales.

For those who can’t wait for more super-heroics, Mike Mignola’s HELLBOY (Lionsgate) gets another go in theaters, this time played by David Harbour (Stranger Things) and directed by Neil Marshall (Game of Thrones). I wish I could say I was looking forward to seeing this, but frankly, I loved Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy: The Golden Army, and I have secretly wished for the last ten years that he would be able to continue that story with Ron Perlman, Doug Jones and the rest. This one has some interesting casting including Ian McShane, Milla Jovovich as the main baddie, Sasha Lane and Daniel Dae Kim. I guess with that cast, maybe it won’t be so bad? I expect the movie will be more geared towards the fanboys and girls rather than the mainstream audiences that have been flocking to other comic movies. (My review is now over at The Beat… and I hated it!)

Universal and Will Packer Productions are offering some interesting counter-programming to Hellboy in the comedy remake (of sorts) LITTLE, written and directed by Tina Gordon and starring Regina Hall, Issa Rae and Marsai Martin (from ABC’s Black-ish). This is the type of body-swapping comedy that’s delivered some great laughs in movies like both Freaky Friday, Tom Hanks’ Bigand others like Jennifer Garner’s 13 Going on 30. I mean, there’s still so much that can be done with this sort of thing as seen by Shazam!, and this sort of high-concept premise is also fairly easy to sell audiences. I missed the press screening of this, but if I have a few moments in April (it might happen!) I’d go check it out.

The other movie I saw that’s opening this weekend is LAIKA’s new stop-motion animated film MISSING LINK (Annapurna/UA Releasing), featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana and Zach Galifianakis. I’m not going to review the movie even though I generally liked it, mainly since it’s been a minute since I watched it, but if you like some of LAIKA’s other films (particularly director Chris Butler’s earlier film ParaNorman) then you should enjoy this one, and like with all of LAIKA’s movies, I

Lastly, there’s Aviron’s AFTER, another teen romance drama, this one based on Anna Todd’s fan fiction that pairs Hero Fiennes Tiffin (Ralph’s nephew) and Josephine Langford in the type of Y.A. romantic drama that has had mixed results in recent years. Sure, the recent Five Feet Apartdid fine but others, like last year’s Midnight Sun, released by the defunct Global Road, barely made $10 million. Since I haven’t seen the movie – honestly, I haven’t even watched a trailer -- I’m not really sure what the appeal of this is going to be except that some younger women may not have much interest on other options this weekend.

LIMITED RELEASES

Well, I totally screwed up last week… including one movie that was delayed until this week and neglecting a movie which I thought opened this week. (This is why you need to keep me apprised on date changes, publicists!)

Actor Max Minghella makes his directorial debut with TEEN SPIRIT (Bleecker Street), starring Elle Fanning as Violet, a young woman from the Isle of Wight who hopes to get out of her smalltown blues by performing on a popular talent television show called “Teen Spirit.” Helping her out is the scraggly Vlad (Croatian actor Zlatko Burik, who starred in Nicolas Refn’s Pusher trilogy) who was an opera singer in Croatia and offers to manage Violet and help her get to the finals of the show.  While Elle is no Aretha Franklin, I was truly impressed with her singing voice as well as Minghella’s screenplay and direction of the film which has a distinctive look and tone but is also a movie with quite a lot of mainstream appeal. If you like television shows like The Voice and American Idol, you might be interested in seeing one contestant’s (fictional) journey to get onto one of those shows.

You can read my interview with writer/director Max Minghella over at the Beat.

The movie I left out of last week’s column is HIGH LIFE (A24), the new movie and first in English from French auteur Claire Denis, which stars Robert Pattinson, André Benjamin, Juliette Binoche and Mia Goth. I saw the movie at the New York Film Festival last year, but I guess I never got around to writing about it, but I wish I did. Not that I particularly liked the movie, but if I wrote about it, at least I could remember what it was about. I know it takes place on a spaceship with a bunch of astronauts including Pattinson and his young daughter, all of them trying to survive.

But my absolutely favorite new movie of the weekend is Alex Ross Perry’s HER SMELL (Gunpowder and Sky), starring Elisabeth Moss as Becky Something, the lead singer of an all-girl punk band who have hit the big time but are about to implode due to Becky’s addictions and eccentricities. Becky also has a baby daughter who she is constantly neglecting and her bandmates (Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin) and everyone is worried about her. I’ve liked some of Perry’s past work, but something about this one really connected, maybe because I spent a couple decades working in the music business, so I can relate to the frustrated engineer in the recording studio section of the film.  Moss, obviously, is amazing as Becky, a role that puts her through all the highs and lows of success and fame, but I also liked the cast around her, actors like Cara Delevigne and Amber Heard who I barely could recognize in their respective wigs. I actually saw this at the New York Film Festival, and I liked it even more when I watched it again recently.  It opens in New York on Friday and in L.A. and other cities next Friday, and I hope to have an interview with Perry, probably over at NextBigPicture by next week some time.

A movie that I hoped would play the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, but instead got up in the Harvey Weinstein scandal was Garth Davis’ MARY MAGDALENE  (IFC Films), the follow-up to his Oscar-nominated film Lion.  It stars Rooney Mara as the title character and her real-life boyfriend Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus… and just hat last part gets me worried just because I remember Rodrigo Garcia’s Last Days in the Desert a few years back, starring Ewan McGregor as Jesus. This is being released this weekend into about 50 theaters in select cities after playing in just about every other country in the world last year as it sought out a new U.S. distributor.

Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone of Gamorrah fame returns with DOGMAN (Magnolia), a crime thriller set in a small seaside village where a dog groomer named Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is being coerced into committing petty crimes by an ex-boxer bully named Simoncino. Apparently, this is based on true events, and I generally liked it, particularly the performance of Fonte. It opens at the Film Forum and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center Friday, as well as the Landmark Nuart in L.A. It will expand to more California theaters on April 19.

Martial arts fans will want to check out master fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s latest The Ip Man Legacy: Master Z (Well GO USA), starring Max Zhang as Cheung Tin Chi, who is trying to make a life in Hong Kong with his young son after being defeated by Master Ip.  The movie also stars the legendary Michelle Yeoh (in a great sequence with Zhang), Tony Jaa (ditto) and Dave Bautista… yeah, well I guess two out of three isn’t bad, but Bautista is pretty terrible, and the movie is disjointed in its storytelling. But the action is cool, so there’s that! It opens in select theaters this weekend.

Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun (Cohen Media Group) stars Golshifteh Farahan (Pasterson) as Bahar, commander of the “Girls of the Sun” battalion, who are set to free their hometown from extremists, while also freeing her son. Emmanuelle Bercot (My King) plays a French journalist who is embedded with the warriors during the mission. Husson’s film opens at the Quad,Landmark 57and the FIAF Florence Gould Hall (now showing first-run films) on Friday, as well as the Laemmle Monica Film Center in L.A.

A movie I sadly had to miss at this year’s Oxford Film Festival is V. Scott Balcerek’s doc Satan & Adam (Cargo), a movie that took twenty years to make, as Balcerek pulls together two decades of documentary footage of the blues duo that were a fixture in Harlem in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. “Satan” is Sterling Magee, who played with so many greats but felt exploited so he walked away from the music scene, before being joined by Adam Gussow, an Ivy league scholar…but then Magee vanished, and the film follows what happened after that.

I had heard great things about Kaili Blues director BiGan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night  (Kino Lorber), when it played a number of film festivals last year. It follows a man, played by Huang Jue, who is haunted by a woman from his post who he goes looking for her. And it includes a substantial single shot in 3D… for no particular reason that I could ascertain. To call the movie a “slog” would be an insult to actual slogs, and I barely could stay awake while watching it. It’s playing at the Metrograph and Film Society of Lincoln Center starting Friday.

Also now playing at Film Forum is Camille Vidal-Naquet’s debut feature drama Sauvage/Wild (Strand Releasing) following a gay sex worker, played by Felix Maritaud from BPM (Beats Per Minute).

Tim Disney’s William, opening at New York’s Cinema Village and L.A.’s Laemmle Monica Film Center, is a love story between two scientists who fall in love while trying to clone a Neanderthal from ancient DNA creating William, the first Neanderthal to walk the earth in 35,000 years. The film stars Will Brittain, Waleed Zuaiter, Maria Dizzia and Beth Grant.

Gilles de Maistre’s Mia and the White Lion (Ledafilms Entertainment Group) is an ambitious film about a ten-year-old named Mia whose family moves to Africa to manage a lion farm, bonding with a white lion she names Charlie. The film was shot over three years, so that the film’s young starsDaniah De Villiers and Ryan Mac Lennan could bond with their lion co-stars. The film also stars Melanie Laurent and Langley Kirkood, and it opens in select cities.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

I’m finally shifting my gaze over to Chicago where the 21stAnnual EBERTFEST kicked off yesterday with Alan Elliot’s Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, as well as a special showing of the Wachowski’s Bound with special guests Jennifer Tilly and Gena Gershon. It continues through the weekend with showings of recent and older movies, including Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married and more.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Late Nites at Metrographwill screen Werner Herzog’s Bad Liuetenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring the inimitable Nicolas Cage, while the Playtime: Family Matineesthis weekend is Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Anderson. Although I forgot to include it last week, Michael Blackwood’s 1968 docs Monk and Monk in Europe(as in Thelonious Monk) will continue for the next week, as does King Hu’s The Fate of Lee Khan from 1973. This Saturday night, the Metrograph is presenting a cast and crew reunion for Sidney Lumet’s 1988 movie Running on Emptywith Christine Lahti, screenwriter Naomi Foner and producers Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

L.A.’s hottest newish rep theater will show Michael Ritchie’s 1975 film Smile as well as his 1992 film Diggstownon Weds and Thursday (and apparently, Bruce Dern appeared in person on Weds!), Friday and Saturday are Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry  (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz  (1978), while Sunday and Monday screens David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai  (1957). This weekend’s KIDDEE MATINEE is Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, while the midnight offerings are The Hateful Eight on Friday and The Blues Brothers (1980) on Saturday. On Monday afternoon, there’s a screening Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

On Saturday, Film Forum will screen Jaime Chávarri’s 1976 documentary El Desecanto, introduced by author Aaron Shulman, who wrote a book about the Spanish literary family, the Paneros, on which the movie is based. (FYI, Chávarri’s film was never released in the States, and there is only one screening on Saturday.) Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) will screen Saturday and Sunday as part of Film Forum Jr, and Francesco Rossi’s 1973 film Lucky Lucianowill screen a 4k restoration for a single screening on Sunday afternoon.

AERO  (LA):

The late Luke Perry gets a tribute with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) shown on Thursday, and then the Aero is doing its own Claire Denis tribute (cause everyone else is doing i!) with Salt, Sweat and Sunshine: The Cinema of Claire Denis with a double feature of her debut Chocolat  (1988) and White Material  (2009) on Friday, a screening of Beau Travail (1999) on Saturday, Nenette and Boni (1996) and 35 Shots of Rum (2008) on Saturday, and then Trouble Every Day  (2001)and Let the Sunshine In (2017) on Sunday. Most of those will be showing on 35mm and Denis will be there, at least for the first two nights.

MOMA (NYC):

Modern Matinees: B is for Bacall continues with 1948’s Key Largo on Thursday and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004) on Friday. The What Price Hollywood series will screen George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974) on Thursday, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place  (1950) and Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess  (1973) on Friday, Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight  (1939), Clarence Brown’s 1931 film A Free Soul and George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood  (1932) on Saturday and Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night  (1952) and Joseph Lewis’ Gun Crazy  (1950) on Sunday.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad begins its new series Wild Things: The Ferocious Films of Nelly Kaplan, a tribute retrospective to a pivotal filmmaker in the French New Wave, which I know next to nothing about, so I won’t even try. Just click on the title to see the movies playing.

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

This week’s series is The Anarchic Cinema of Věra Chytilová, a celebration of the filmmaker who emerged during the Czech New Wave, which I know even less about than the French New Wave. Just click on the link if you know who she is.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART  (LA):

This Friday’s midnight screening is the ‘70s classic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), starring Peter Fonda and Susan George. I’m not sure when was the last time I had a chance to see this movie but if I were in L.A., this is where I would be on Friday night.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Streaming on Netflix starting Wednesday is THE SILENCE, the new apocalyptic thriller from director John R. Leonetti  (Annabelle), starring Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka and Miranda Otto. In this twist on Netflix’s hit Bird Box (and rip-off of A Quiet Place?), this one involves a world being terrorized by primeval beings with acute hearing and a family trying to survive. Also streaming Friday is the high concept teen rom-com The Perfect Date, starring Noah Centineo as a guy who is payed to take a friend’s cousin to the prom.

Next week, another horror movie in New Line’s The Curse of La Llorona, plus the faith-based drama Breakthrough from Fox and DisneyNature’s Penguins.

[lorajackson]

The White House Made a List of All the Times Fauci ‘Has Been Wrong’ on the Coronavirus

The White House has undertaken behind-the-scenes efforts in recent months to undercut and sideline Dr. Anthony Fauci—even going so far as to compile a list of all the times he “has been wrong on things,” according to The Washington Post. After canceling some of his planned TV appearances and keeping him away from the Oval Office, White House officials and President Trump have taken to publicly expressing a loss of confidence in the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and face of the administration’s coronavirus task force. The apparent attempts to undermine Fauci come as he continues to counter the president’s overly optimistic narrative on the state of the pandemic. Against this backdrop, an unnamed White House official told the Post: “Several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” The official attached a list of incorrect predictions Fauci had made, including his doubts early on that asymptomatic spread would play a large role in transmission and a February assurance that Americans did not need to change their behavior. Like many other public health officials, Fauci said at first that masks were not necessary but recently recommended that they be mandated nationwide. “Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, told the Post in a separate statement. “Now Fauci is saying that a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening. So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is only with caution.”In recent days, the 79-year-old doctor has offered unsparing assessments of the United States’ current situation. In an interview with 538 published Thursday, he was perhaps at his most blunt: “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.” The same day, the commander-in-chief told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview that Fauci was “a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” The two haven’t spoken in months, but Fauci has reportedly not complained about that. David Barr, an AIDS activist who knows Fauci, told the Post the doctor has become exasperated that state and local officials aren’t listening to experts.“Our bigger issue with Fauci is stop critiquing the task force…and try to fix it,” another White House official told the Post. The official said Fauci’s high approval and trustworthiness ratings have upset the president as his own deteriorate. The White House has also reportedly sought to keep Fauci out of the the public eye. A CBS anchor said last week that the White House has ignored requests to interview Fauci on air since early April, though he has spoken to print and podcast outlets. The White House maintains the authority to approve or deny interview requests for high-profile public officials and granted requests from PBS, CNN, and NBC to speak with the doctor only to cancel them after Fauci disagreed with Trump in a conversation with Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), according to the Post. The epidemiologist said that Trump’s contention of a lower death rate indicating success in tamping down the virus was “a false narrative.” He warned against “false complacency.” Fauci has also said he’d like to go on Rachel Maddow’s show, which routinely critiques the president, a request that was rejected.Trump himself has been wrong on the coronavirus in a laundry list of ways as he’s pushed to reopen the country, and going after Fauci is not the only time he has attempted to contravene public health guidelines. He famously told Dr. Deborah Birx, the chief medical adviser on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, to “look into” the injection of bleach and the ingestion of sunlight as possible COVID-19 curatives. He’s also pressured the Food and Drug Administration to reinstate its emergency authorization for the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, as has his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said doctors “don’t know what they’re talking about.” Trump himself has said he took the drug despite FDA advisories warning it is unsafe to do so and unlikely to prevent or treat the coronavirus.The president donned a face mask for a Saturday visit to Walter Reed Hospital, one of the first and only times he has done so in public after repeatedly shrugging off their importance in recent weeks and even mocking Joe Biden for wearing one. In Dr. Fauci We TrustRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[poetryofchrist]

Biblical Studies Carnival for February 2020

Welcome to Février Gras.

This is The Biblical Studies Carnival 3x7x23

completing 168 monthly editions since the inaugural BS carnival 180 months ago, music, poetry, art in celebration of those studying the ancient texts.

Official colours of Mardi Gras

The Krewe of TNK The head of the first parade is Deane Galbraith presenting Marc Zvi Brettler's lecture on Jewish Biblical Scholarship. Torah

Day 1 - The earth was a right old mess2

All sorts of free goodies distributed from this krewe. Laurent Sangpo gives us a 5 minute reception history on Le Déluge de Michel-Ange."...il suit ainsi l’exégèse ancienne, qui voyait dans la catastrophe la représentation symbolique de notre monde."

Mark Leuchter and Zev Farber describe the relationship of the siblings, Moses, Miriam, and Aaron, "partners of similar standing in redeeming the people". Carol Meyers asks Who wrote the song? Athalya Brenner-Idan has updated an essay from 2016, Are female readers included in the Decalogue?

Sandra Jacobs writes on Exodus 21:22-25: Accidental Injuries in a Public Brawl, 3 interpretations of the degree and type of compensation required. A d'varling from the Velveteen Rabbi, "if you keep making that face, you'll get stuck that way." Prophets

... wasn't it something to behold that mess

Pete Enns brings up the violence against the Canaanites. Aaron Koller writes on Composing the Song of Deborah, "here we have two empirical models with clear parallels to the biblical Song of Deborah, and both are well attested and fairly well understood."

Judges 5:2 (The whole song is here.)

Saul was Tall by Brian Doak, Bodies speak ... Solomon has no body of significance. ... Hezekiah possesses no beauty... Josiah is a complete ghost. Brant Pitre introduces the lessons for the Presentation in the Temple with particular emphasis on Malachi and the Twelve. Writings

... A symphony of voices

A hole in the parchment, through which the word 'gratiam' ('grace') is visible

Kate Thomas presents a medieval manuscript in praise of the Psalms. De laude psalmorum. "This short Latin treatise explains why saying the Psalms was considered spiritually beneficial, and which Psalms were good for which purposes. It opens a window onto how medieval people understood one of the most important liturgical and devotional books of the Middle Ages, the Psalter."

Brent Niedergall posts on a textual issue in Ruth. "What if an English Bible translation translated a Hebrew word meaning 'he' as 'she'?"

Esther: Girls of marriageable age in the ancient world were much younger than brides today in the western world.

Marg Mowczko begins a series on Esther, and continues with a second post, For such a time as this. The girls "weren’t volunteering for a wonderful opportunity. They weren’t competing for a marvellous prize. Most may well have been taken against their will and against the hopes of their families who might never see their girls again."

Daniel became a writer

Phillip Long continues the unrolling of Daniel. "Belshazzar can look no worse, his mother publicly rebuking his cowardice! (Did she stop to comb his hair and tell him to tuck his shirt in as well?)" He must be nearly right through to the end - if that's not the end, it's close.

Daniel 5:25 - setting the words, the accents in their simplest form

Announced this month via the Times of Israel: A 616-page codex that was written in 1028.

Psalm 150 Karaite

An article with some images is available here from The Jewish Quarterly Review. "NEARLY A THOUSAND YEARS have passed since Zechariah Ben 'Anan finished the demanding work of copying Ketuvim (Writings), the third part of the Hebrew Bible, in a manuscript found by sheer happenstance on a dusty shelf in the Karaite synagogue of Cairo in late July 2017" The tail of the Krewe of TNK

Your host posted a tabular comparison of two strategies for explaining the accents of the TNK and a brief on reading with the music stimulated by the medieval book on the accents translated by Geoffrey Khan, The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew. Benjamin Kantor officially launches the Tiberian Hebrew page here. Jonathan Orr-Stav responds to a question on Tiberian pronunciation. Jim Davila highlights an article on dating the Hebrew Bible through linguistics. And, via William Ross, the LXX has its international day. A quote from the obit for S. R. Driver (for links see the final parade below):

The Old Testament must remain an ever-fresh fountainhead of living truth, able to invigorate and restore, to purify and refine, to ennoble and enrich, the moral and spiritual being of man.

The Krewe of the NT

Travis Proctor heads the second parade with an exploration of the demonic body, "residual souls of antediluvian giants".

Gospels and Acts

... like the first glimmer of rising

If it quacks...

A few goodies distributed to the people from this krewe may require a payment. But there's enough even if you can't get into the post-parade-party. Bart Ehrman reviews a Newly Discovered gospel. "rarely does anyone actually discuss the actual *evidence*". His post reaches back into the archives. Ekaterini G. Tsalampouni points us to an article on the ending of Mark.

Jacob Prahlow completes his series on the Odes of Solomon and the Gospel of John. James McGrath posts his impressions of the Enoch Seminar's dedicated session at AAR/SBL on Adele Reinhartz's book Cast Out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John. Johnson Thomaskutty writes on the Characterization of Thomas in the fourth Gospel. Andrew Perriman writes in response to Michael Bird, on the church and the mission of Jesus. "Did they succeed? Fail? Or did someone move the goalposts?" Ken Schenck points out his work on Mark and Acts as part of his project Through the Bible in Ten Years. Richard Beck continues his series on the gospel according to the Lord of the Rings.

A Matthean Thunderbolt?

Ian Paul republished a post on the influence of John on the synoptic gospels, and explores a spoof on choosing your own Jesus. It being that time of the year, he also did a review of the temptations of Jesus. Michael Pahl encourages following the teaching on economics from Jesus. Jim Gordon would have us consider ornitheology. His series for Lent holds promise. Here is the leap-day special, the pearl. Chuck Jones points out Vizualizing Acts, graphic online support for reading Acts.

Letters

... What do you say

James Tabor writes about What Paul claimed to have seen.

Tim Gombis explores chapters 2 to 5 of Romans with particular reference to boasting. Andrew Perriman posts on theological prisons vs historical readings of Romans.

Michael Kok continues his series on Corinthians, beginning with notes on Peter, and Apollos. James McGrath points to a note on Paul's letter carriers. Henry Neufeld writes about How to Read Hebrews 4. Revelation

... It won't be long

Very short parade. The tail of the Krewe of the NT Mike Aubrey wants more language resources for translation. Marg Mowcsko talks about "preaching" words in the NT. The tail of the first two Krewes Pete Enns and Jared Byas have some advice to their fellow citizens on how to read the Bible in 2020. Jim West reviews the Jesus Bible, i.e. how not to read the Bible.

Other Krewes

... How many powers

James McGrath posts on the SpaceX Rocket bouncing off the firmament. You can watch the whole thing with exegetical commentary from a booster seat. Just click on the image.

Archaeology Jim Davila asks if Solomon's temple had competition? He also has some thoughts on information in a vitrified brain. And a list of posts on the BAR spring 2020 release including one from the original xkv8r. Todd Bolen reports on extensive ruins of a Canaanite temple dating to the 12th century BCE at Lachish. Yana Tchekhanovets and Leonid Belyaev write about Russian archaeology in The Ancient Near East Today. Textual criticism

Drew Longacre reports on Feature-extraction methods for historical manuscript dating based on handwriting analysis. James McGrath gets around to writing up the 2019 Digital Humanities AAR/SBL sessions in San Diego. Jim West quotes Jerome in defense of errors in his rendering of the Bible. Sarah Allen interviews Zachary Cole on his chapter in Myths and Mistakes.

Theology and Liturgy

Great St Mary's, the Selwyn Consort via the Minerva Festival

Sarah MacDonald presents "Silent in the Churches", an exploration of Music in the liturgy by female composers. NT Wright explains penal substitution, 'according to the Scriptures'. And here's a C.R.A.S.S.H course on explaining. Who knew that James McGrath was an award winning Mandaic poet? Matt Page is still blogging about Bible films. Here is an entry on the Netflix Messiah. Both Bosco Peters and Airtonjo have things to point out about Querida Amazônia. John Bergsma on the Sacred Page lays out the lessons for the sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Alex Finkelson at Scribes of the Kingdom wonders about the promises to David. A slightly early entry for the Revelation parade from Doug Chaplin. (Ah well, February is a short month and January is long, so let's give them 30 days each this year... and he is still writing occasionally.) Bart Ehrman has some interesting questions from Buddhists. John Jillions writes on the religious attitudes of some famous Roman skeptics. Journals and Reviews and other things James McGrath points out a new open-access Journal of Religious Competition in Antiquity. James also notes this announcement on Women interpreting the Scripture through music and the arts. Kelsi Morrison-Atkins reviews Moshe Blidstein. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature. 'Blidstein guides the reader through the “web of allusions” that characterized early Christian purity discourses in the first through third centuries.' Noah Benjamin Bickart reviews Paula Fredricksen's When Christians were Jews. "If anything is missing in her excellent book, it is a more robust engagement with rabbinic texts." Steve Walton notes a set of essays from a conference, Healing and Exorcism in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. Ben Witherington's book on Priscilla is reviewed by Kelley Matthews. Bart Ehrman has a very nice promotion of his book, Heaven and Hell.

Fetch

Brent Niedergall is working with Bel and the Dragon on a Reddit reading group here. Jim Davila points out Sonja Noll's book on the Semantics of Silence in Biblical Hebrew. And a collection of essays on Parables. "Essays cover parables in the synoptic Gospels, Rabbinic midrash, and parabolic tales and fables in the Babylonian Talmud. Three essays address parables in Islam and Buddhism." And Henk de Waard's Jeremiah 52, "Jeremiah 52 is not a mere appendix to the book, but a golah-oriented epilogue, indicating the contrasting destinies of pre-exilic Judah and the exilic community in Babylon." Kerry Sonia reviews Shawn Flynn's Children in Ancient Israel Kathleen Gallagher Elkins reviews The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field. BLT reports on Suzanne McCarthy's book as told to James McGrath by her sister Ruth Hayhoe. Phil Long reviews All Things New, Revelation as canonical capstone, by Brian Tabb.

Remembering

... And morning

Suzanne McCarthy 76 months ago reminded us of a riddle related to time. Here is a Sunday Superlatives post from the same year, 2013, from Rachel Held Evans. Jim Gordon reminds us of the 75th anniversary of the death of Bonhoeffer. The tail of the whole carnival is a reflection by Marc Zvi Brettler on the 106th yahrzeit of S. R. Driver of whom, it is said: He taught the faithful criticism and the critics faith. Read Marc's article to find out who said this and more importantly, why. And as a coda, this music, which as Matthew Larkin says, if you allow yourself the necessary time, "will leave you speechless".

Next Carnivals

Brent Niedergall hosts in March 2020 (Due April 1). Phillip Long is looking for volunteers for the rest of 2020. Contact him at plong42@gmail.com or twitter dm @plong42 to volunteer to host! ----------

(1) The carnival number is an even number higher than 148, (June 2018 - 20 months ago). The number of this February carnival is the product of the first two perfect numbers, 6 and 28, and is also the count of primes less than 1000. There are 50 words in TNK with gematria = 168. See also. (2) right hand side linked poetry snippets by James McGrath.

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[thisdaynews]

The senator betting a true-blue Democrat can win in Alabama

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-senator-betting-a-true-blue-democrat-can-win-in-alabama/

The senator betting a true-blue Democrat can win in Alabama

His opponents have jumped on impeachment, attempting to make what is already a politically perilous situation even more painful for Jones. The Alabama GOP held a press conference earlier thismonth saying it would hold him accountable for voting against the president. Rep. Bradley Byrne, one of Jones’ potential opponents, compared it to the Kavanaugh vote and said he thinks Jones is “predisposed to vote against President Trump.”

After dealing with impeachment at the top of his town hall, he got no questions on it — though he faced a relatively friendly audience of five dozen people, nearly all of whom applauded when he answered the first question by confidently saying he’d win a full term in the Senate.

His toughest questions were from his own side: One woman in a Bernie Sanders shirt, who said she backs him even though he isn’t progressive enough, asked about corporations paying more taxes to alleviate student loan debt (Jones said he doesn’t link the two together, and dismissed the idea of a wealth tax); and a man later vented about the state of the Democratic Party in Alabama.The state party is in shambles, andJones and other Democrats are publicly feuding with the state party chair in an effort to enact changes.

Republicans are convinced that wherever impeachment lands, Jones has given them plenty of ammo to defeat him. But the GOP has to worry about a crowded field that includes Roy Moore, the defrocked former judge who lost to Jones after facing credible allegations of sexual misconduct from decades ago. Moore says the race was “basically stolen” and plans to run a similar anti-establishment campaign.

Even with Moore in the race, the current GOPfrontrunners are Byrne, who argues his background is well known from his congressional races and a previous unsuccessful run for governor, and Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach, who has led early polls and earned a key endorsement from the Alabama Farmers Federation political arm. Also running: Secretary of State John Merrill, who has the advantage of having won statewide before, and Arnold Mooney, a state representative already running TV commercials aimed at evangelical voters, an effort to crack into Moore’s base of support.

A divisive primary could help Jones: He has $5 million in the bank, nearly as much as all five of his opponents combined.

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he is “highly confident” the GOP will flip Alabama next fall, and that Republicans will nominate someone who can win. When Jones was first elected in 2017, many Republicans expected him to side with themon some big-ticket issues to earn some crossover voter support.

“Some of his votes have kind of surprised me purely from a standpoint of political survival,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of GOP leadership. “I think he realizes he was extraordinarily lucky last time, and his luck may not continue.”

Jones dismisses the idea that he should have triangulated more. Asked why he hadn’t, he popped his finger in his mouth and mimed putting it into the wind to mock the idea of voting on political whims, and dissed the media for expecting him to do so. Interviews with several Democratic senators revealed a level of admiration for his approach.

“I think on some level it’s freeing to know they’re going to attack you no matter what you do,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “Because then you might as well just do the right thing.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the Senate Democrat who has crossed party lines most, plans to campaign with Jones soon, potentially on a football Saturday — Manchin is close friends with Nick Saban, Alabama’s football coach, who endorsed Manchin last year but stays neutral in in-state races.

“The bottom line is it’s all about Alabama,” Manchin said. “That’s all Doug talks about. It’s all he cares about.”

Rep. Terri Sewell, the only other Democrat in the state’s delegation, said even his vote against Kavanaugh had an upside: He energized his Democratic base, which he needs to turn out at record levels.

“I think he is living up to what he thinks are the values that most Alabamians cherish,” Sewell said.

Jones admitted that in looking at the current top of the presidential primary, Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as the nominee would make his reelection considerably tougher, forcing him to work harder to separate himself. He’s committed to supporting the Democratic nominee but said he’d voice disagreements on things like the Green New Deal and “Medicare for All.” But he also said he thinks Trump is weaker now than in 2016, saying the president has a lot of “soft support,” and that Democrats will be “more competitive” in 2020.

He’s hedged his message to work for either result: He says Trump would need Democrats willing to cross lines if he wins a second term, but that Alabamians would want a moderating force in the Senate to pull the Democrats to the middle if their party takes back the White House.

Jones said people “damn sure” underestimated his chances in 2017, and that he gets frustrated with those who already write him off this time around.

“I’ll only change that perception once I give my victory speech again, like I did the last time,” Jones said. “I changed it for 24 hours, then all of the sudden all the pundits said, ‘[He’s the] most vulnerable Democrat in 2020.’ When I win in 2020, I’ll be the most vulnerable Democrat in 2026. That’s just the way it is. Alabama is not going to change that quickly, and it may never change to a point where a Democrat is seen other than as an underdog. And that’s fine.”

Read More

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Somebody’s going to be wrong in Alabama.

We’ve already urged caution when interpreting polls of Alabama’s special election to the U.S. Senate, which will be held on Tuesday. Some of that is because of the media’s usual tendency to demand certainty from the polls when the polls can’t provide it. And some of it is because of the circumstances of this particular race: a special election in mid-December in a state where Republicans almost never lose but where the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, has been accused of sexual misconduct toward multiple underaged women.

What we’re seeing in Alabama goes beyond the usual warnings about minding the margin of error, however. There’s a massive spread in results from poll to poll — with surveys on Monday morning showing everything from a 9-point lead for Moore to a 10-point advantage for Democrat Doug Jones — and they reflect two highly different approaches to polling.

Most polls of the state have been made using automated scripts (these are sometimes also called IVR or “robopolls”). These polls have generally shown Moore ahead and closing strongly toward the end of the campaign, such as the Emerson College poll on Monday that showed Moore leading by 9 points. Recent automated polls from Trafalgar Group, JMC Analytics and Polling, Gravis Marketing and Strategy Research have also shown Moore with the lead.

But when traditional, live-caller polls have weighed in — although these polls have been few and far between — they’ve shown a much different result. A Monmouth University survey released on Monday showed a tied race. Fox News’s final poll of the race, also released on Monday, showed Jones ahead by 10 percentage points. An earlier Fox News survey also had Jones comfortably ahead, while a Washington Post poll from late November had Jones up 3 points at a time when most other polls showed the race swinging back to Moore. And a poll conducted for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in mid-November — possibly released to the public in an effort to get Moore to withdraw from the race — also showed Jones well ahead.1

What accounts for the differences between live-caller and automated polls? There are several factors, all of which are potentially relevant to the race in Alabama:

Automated polls are prohibited by law from calling voters on cellphones.

Automated polls get lower response rates and therefore may have less representative samples.

Automated polls may have fewer problems with “shy” voters who are reluctant to disclose their true voting intentions.

Automated pollsters (in part to compensate for issues No. 1 and 2 above) generally make more assumptions when modeling turnout, whereas traditional pollsters prefer to let the voters “speak for themselves” and take the results they obtain more at face value.

Issue No. 1, not calling cellphones, is potentially a major problem: The Fox News poll found Jones leading by 30 points among people who were interviewed by cellphone. Slightly more than half of American adults don’t have access to a landline, according to recent estimates by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also found a higher share of mobile-only households in the South than in other parts of the country. Moreover, voters with landline service are older than the voting population as a whole and are more likely to be white — characteristics that correlate strongly with voting Republican, especially in states such as Alabama. Pollsters are aware of these problems, so they use demographic weighting to try to compensate. Even if you can’t get enough black voters on a (landline) phone, for instance, you may have some reasonable way to estimate how many black voters there “should” be in the electorate, based on Census Bureau data or turnout in previous elections — so you can weight the black voters you do get on the phone more heavily until you get the “right” demographic mix.

This sounds dubious — and there are better and worse ways to conduct demographic weighting — but it’s a well-accepted practice. (Almost all pollsters use demographic weighting in some form.) And sometimes everything turns out just fine — automated polls don’t have a great track record, but firms such as Trafalgar Group that do automated polling generally performed pretty well in 2016, for example. Some automated firms have also begun to supplement their landline samples with online panels in an effort to get a more representative sample. Still, cell-only and landline voters may be differentiated from one another in ways that are relevant for voting behavior but which don’t fall into traditional demographic categories — cell-only voters may have different media consumption habits, for instance. If nothing else, failing to call cellphones adds an additional layer of unpredictability to the results.

Apart from their failure to call mobile phones, automated polls have lower response rates (issue No. 2) — often in the low single digits. This is because voters are more likely to hang up when there isn’t a human on the other end of the line nudging them to complete a survey. Also, many automated polls call each household only once, whereas pollsters conducting traditional surveys often make several attempts to reach the same household. Calling a household only once could bias the sample in various ways — for instance, toward whichever party’s voters are more enthusiastic (probably Democrats in the Alabama race) or toward whoever tends to pick up the phone in a particular household (often older voters, rather than younger ones).

As for issue No. 3, proponents of automated polls — and online polls — sometimes claim that they yield more honest responses from voters than traditional polls do. Respondents may be less concerned about social desirability bias when pushing numbers on their phone or clicking on an online menu as opposed to talking to another human being. That could be particularly relevant in the case of Alabama if some voters are ashamed to admit that they plan to vote for Moore, a man accused of molesting teenagers.

With that said, while there’s a rich theoretical literature on social desirability bias, the empirical evidence for it affecting election polls is somewhat flimsy. The Bradley Effect (the supposed tendency for polls to overestimate support for minority candidates) has pretty much gone away, for instance. There’s been no tendency for nationalist parties to outperform their polls in Europe. And so-called “shy Trump” voters do not appear to have been the reason that Trump outperformed his polls last year.2

Finally (No. 4), automated and traditional pollsters often take different philosophies toward working with their data. Although they probably wouldn’t put it this way themselves, automated pollsters know that their raw data is somewhat crappy — so they rely more heavily on complicated types of turnout and demographic weighting to make up for it. Automated pollsters are more likely to weight their results by party identification, for instance — by how many Republicans, Democrats and independents are in their sample — whereas traditional pollsters usually don’t do this because partisan identification is a fluid, rather than a fixed, characteristic.

Although I don’t conduct polls myself, I generally side with the traditional pollsters on this philosophical question. I don’t like polls that impose too many assumptions on their data; instead, I prefer an Ann Selzer-ish approach of trusting one’s data, even when it shows an “unusual” turnout pattern or produces a result that initially appears to be an outlier. Sometimes what initially appears to be an outlier turns out to have been right all along.

With that said, automated pollsters can make a few good counterarguments. Traditional polls also have fairly low response rates — generally around 10 percent — and potentially introduce their own demographic biases, such as winding up with electorates that are more educated than the actual electorate. Partisan non-response bias may also be a problem — if the supporters of one candidate see him or her get a string of bad news (such as Moore in the Alabama race), they may be less likely to respond to surveys … but they may still turn up to vote.

Essentially, the automated pollsters would argue that nobody’s raw data approximates a truly random sample anymore — and that even though it can be dangerous to impose too many assumptions on one’s data, the classical assumptions made by traditional pollsters aren’t working very well, either. (Traditional pollsters have had a better track record over the long run, but they also overestimated Democrats’ performance in 2014 and 2016.)

So, who’s right? There’s a potential tiebreaker of sorts, which is online polls. Online polls potentially have better raw data than automated polls — they get higher response rates, and there are more households without landline access than without internet access. However, because there’s no way to randomly “ping” people online in the same way that you’d randomly call their phone, online surveys have no way to ensure a truly random probability sample.

To generalize a bit, online polls therefore tend to do a lot of turnout weighting and modeling instead of letting their data stand “as is.” But their raw data is usually more comprehensive and representative than automated polls, so they have better material to work with.

The online polls also come out somewhat in Moore’s favor. Recent polls from YouGov and Change Research show him ahead by 6 points and 7 points, respectively; in the case of the Change Research poll, this reflects a reversal from a mid-November poll that had Jones ahead.

But perhaps the most interesting poll of all is from the online firm SurveyMonkey. It released 10 different versions (!) of its recent survey, showing everything from a 9-point Jones lead to a 10-point Moore lead, depending on various assumptions — all with the same underlying data.

Although releasing 10 different versions of the same poll may be overkill, it illustrates the extent to which polling can be an assumption-driven exercise, especially in an unusual race such as Alabama’s Senate contest. Perhaps the most interesting thing SurveyMonkey found is that there may be substantial partisan non-response bias in the polling — that Democrats were more likely to take the survey than Republicans. “The Alabama registered voters who reported voting in 2016 favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 50 to 39 percentage point margin,” SurveyMonkey’s Mark Blumenthal wrote. “Trump’s actual margin was significantly larger (62 to 34 percent).”

In other words, SurveyMonkey’s raw data was showing a much more purple electorate than the solid-red one that you usually get in Alabama. If that manifests in actual turnout patterns — if Democrats are more likely to respond to surveys and are more likely to vote because of their greater enthusiasm — Jones will probably win. If there are some “shy Moore” voters, however, then Moore will probably win. To make another generalization, traditional pollsters usually assume that their polls don’t have partisan non-response bias, while automated polls (and some online polls such as YouGov) generally assume that they do have it, which is part of why they’re showing such different results.

Because you’ve read so much detail about the polls, I don’t want to leave you without some characterization of the race. I still think Moore is favored, although not by much; Jones’s chances are probably somewhere in the same ballpark as Trump’s were of winning the Electoral College last November (about 30 percent).

The reason I say that is because in a state as red as Alabama, Jones needs two things to go right for him: He needs a lopsided turnout in his favor, and he needs pretty much all of the swing voters in Alabama (and there aren’t all that many of them) to vote for him. Neither of these are all that implausible. But if either one goes wrong for Jones, Moore will probably win narrowly (and if both go wrong, Moore could still win in a landslide). The stakes couldn’t be much higher for the candidates — or for the pollsters who surveyed the race.

[wetrumpfeed]

CPAC Watch Party: Silver Fox, Ted Cruz, Don Jr, Nigel Farage, and others. All Day Event!

/u/DanWofSoc here again hosting CPAC for an all day event. Grab your popcorn and settle in for a packed morning and afternoon. Vice President Mike Pence is up at 10am today and President Donald Trump is on tap tomorrow at 11:30am so be sure to check back in on Saturday. Here we go!!

Will update the thread as needed

Live Streams

CPAC

Right Side Broadcasting

Fox News

NBC

Schedule (All Times ET)

9:00 AM A Conversation about the Opioid Crisis with Kellyanne Conway and Sara Carter

9:20 AM Nationhood and the Border Crisis: A Conversation with Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) and Rich Lowry, National Review

9:45 AM TBA

10:00 AM Vice President Mike Pence

10:45 AM Live from our CPAC Stage at Liberty University Jerry Falwell, Jr., Liberty University Donald Trump, Jr., The Trump Organization

11:05 AM Peter Navarro, The White House

11:10 AM Does America First Mean America Alone? Moderator: Katie Pavlich, Townhall Sen. Joni Ernst (IA), Fred Fleitz, Center for Security Policy Rep. Roger Williams (TX-25)

11:50 AM A Conversation with Amb. Bill Hagerty and Sec. Wilbur Ross Interviewed by Pete Hegseth, Fox News

12:10 PM Examining the Contributions of the Only Democracy in the Middle East Moderator: Aylana Meisel, Tikvah Fund Amb. Yoram Ettinger, The Ettinger Report Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, George Mason University Elie Pieprz, Yesha Council

12:45 PM Michelle Malkin Sponsored Event: Heritage Action for America

1:00 PM An Interview with Senator Josh Hawley on the Threat of Big tech to America Interviewed by Kim Strassel, Wall Street Journal

1:10 PM An Interview with Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim on Competition Policy in the Digital Age Kim Strassel, Wall Street Journal

1:20 PM BLOCKED: This Panel Has Been Removed for Conservative Content (A Townhall) Host: Kim Strassel, Wall Street Journal Harmeet Dhillon, Dhillon Law Group James O'Keefe, Project Veritas

1:55 PM 21st Century Terminator: How China is Using 5G and AI to Take Over the World Moderator: Ethan Epstein, The Washington Times Jeremy Achin, DataRobot Gordon Chang, author, The Coming Collapse of China and Losing South Korea Rep. Mike Gallagher (WI-8)

2:25 PM The John Batchelor Show: Live from CPAC The Booming Trump Economy: An Oasis of Prosperity Surrounded by the Parched Economies in EU and Asia Host: John Batchelor, The John Batchelor Show Mattie Duppler, National Taxpayers Union Liz Peek, The Hill Salena Zito, Washington Examiner

3:10 PM Sue The U: A Crash Course in Fighting Censorship Part 1 Moderator: Lawrence Jones, Campus Reform Spencer Brown, Young America's Foundation Kassy Dillon, Lone Conservative Hayden Williams, Leadership Institute Part 2 Moderator: Terry Schilling, American Principles Project State Rep. Timothy Hill, TN House of Representatives Mark Trammel, Young America's Foundation

3:50 PM Tim Huelskamp, The Heartland Institute

4:00 PM Promises Made, Promises Unkept: Time to get Serious About Healthcare Moderator: Peter Pitts, Ctr. for Medicine in the Public Interest Doug Badger, Mercatus Center Gov. Matt Bevin (KY) Larry Foster, Liberty HealthShare Dr. Marc Siegel, NYU Langone Health

4:45 PM Nigel Farage

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