As you might have heard, much has been made about Barack Obama's smoking habit. I don't know who decided to make a public fuss about it, but I'll make a wild and completely unfounded accusation that it was a Republican who wanted to cast doubt on his moral character. All Obama needs is a goatee and we'll finally understand just how evil he is.
This popped up in the New York Times today. If ever there was much ado about nothing, Obama's supposed smoking habit is it.
Mr. Obama’s heaviest smoking was seven or eight cigarettes a day, but three was more typical, according to an interview published in the November issue of Men’s Health magazine.
Three cigarettes a day? That barely qualifies as recreational. Has he ever sat in a bar and smoked an entire pack in four hours? Has he ever walked to the corner store in the pouring rain to buy a pack? Is walking to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes in the pouring rain the only exercise he gets?
I can smoke three cigarettes in the first 45 minutes I'm awake. I've been up for just over three hours, and I'm on my sixth cigarette of the day. I have a smoking habit. Obama's smoking is an occasional stress reliever. I doubt he sits in the family room and smokes while watching a movie with his kids.
Any stress he has experienced before is nothing compared to what he's headed for. Let him have his three smokes a day.
Two things before I get to my point:
1) I don't usually condemn a movie without seeing it first. Like anyone, I have my rules: any movie based on a character from Saturday Night Live is most likely going to suck; ditto any Rob Schneider movies; and I'm going to hate all Tom Cruise movies, even if they don't suck. He ruins good stories in order to feed his enormous ego. (Given the chance to play Jesus, he'd be at The Last Supper by himself. Because he always works alone.) But previews can be misleading. What seems like a silly comedy turns out to be a movie about death, love and family dysfunction, e.g., Little Miss Sunshine; a movie marketed as a chick flick is actually a guy's movie - Beautiful Girls; a movie that should be awesome is really a piece of crap - Wonder Boys.
2) I say seriously and with no shame that I love good chick flicks. What qualifies as good is subjective, certainly. Movies about lost love just kill me. I've cried my eyes out at every viewing of The Way We Were and Splendor in the Grass. Edward Scissorhands upset me so much I don't think I can ever watch it again. But I still loved it. I'm also a sucker for love triumphing over class differences - Dirty Dancing is a favorite. It has everything a girl could want in a movie - Patrick Swayze. Jennifer Grey before the nose job. Creepy frat boy getting his comeuppance. Kelly Bishop. Sex. An illegal abortion. Dancing! And, my God, Jerry Orbach!
There are a ton of sub-genres within "chick flick", and "girls being shitty to each other" is one of them. I know girls can treat each other like crap sometimes. But the very premise of Bride Wars offends me to no end.
I've been seeing previews for the movie lately, and "you have to be kidding me" was my first reaction. But I thought that the girls were strangers fighting over wedding dresses and who gets the best caterer in town. Then I saw this preview, and got the full story. They're lifelong best friends. They're each others maids of honor. Then a mix-up occurs! And hijinks ensue! Kate Hudson tells Anne Hathaway her "wedding can suck it." Anne retaliates by attacking Kate while she's walking down the aisle.
The hilarity must be endless, I'm telling you right now. Look, I've been divided about weddings for a long time. I love them, but they bring out the worst in people. The only brides-to-be who don't want to lock their mothers in a closet are the ones who don't have a mother. I was ready to lock up both my mother and my future mother-in-law, and not let them out until after the wedding. The stress of planning a wedding can make anyone lose perspective.
But there's something that seems so completely distasteful about Bride Wars. It feeds on the idea that women are desperate to get married; that a wedding is the most important day of a woman's life; that all women have been planning their weddings since they were six years old; that women are, at heart, enemies of one another; that the wedding is more important than the marriage - so important, in fact, that no expense is too much. Even the expense of a lifelong friendship.
I know. It's just a movie, and a piece of fluff comedy at that. Comedy, after all, is often about the weaknesses and general dopiness of humans. Beneath all the funny is the truth of how people reconcile their idiocy with their desire to be good and loving to the people who matter to them. It's possible that Bride Wars is actually funny, because anything is possible. But, having seen only the preview, I can't get rid of the bad feeling I have about this movie being made in 2008, more than 40 years after the beginning of the second wave of feminism. I assume that Hudson's and Hathaway's characters are supposed to smart, talented, educated young women, maybe even professionally successful and ambitious. So why are they behaving like jealous, mean spirited harpies?
I have no doubt that Bride Wars will have an absolutely shocking ending, in which Anne and Kate realize the errors of their ways, and tearfully make up, swearing to never let anything come between them again. But you know what? Once you've told your best friend that she has a big ass, you can't ever take that back. I'll never know for sure if Bride Wars is as bad as I think it is, because I won't be spending either the time or the money to see it.
JP and I were trying to remember which county Hanover, PA is in. (It's York County, by the way.) I did some googling (and by some I mean a half hour's worth) to find a map of PA's counties. I came across this, which gave me a big laugh.
1. There is no North Amberland County in PA. It's Northumberland.
2. Lake Erie is not the only body of water in the Commonwealth. There's that little river called the Susquehanna, which starts in New York State and flows into the Chesapeake Bay. And there's a reason for the name Three Rivers Stadium. It's where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers come together.
3. Unless there's been a double-secret probation, major geographic shift lately, PA's neighbor (or "neighbour", as they spell it) states are not Washington, Idaho, Nevada and California.
Check out your state map. Post the stupidity here.
I can't say I blame the Iraqi reporter who did this. I guess Bush thought he was on sort of victory tour. Yeah. Not so much.
At least all that working out paid off. He ducks with the best of them.
