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Here is a portion of Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin, by way of Newsweek. Couric asks the Republican VP candidate about the planned $700 billion bailout.

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the–it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that. (end of excerpt)

WTF! The woman has no idea what she’s talking about!  This is gibberish strung together out of bits heard on Fox News and seen in newspaper and web headlines, without a sliver of comprehension. I do not exaggerate: you could’ve pulled that answer out of your ass. She sounds like Dubya, but dumber. It is not sexist to call a dimwit a dimwit, especially if she’s running for the vice-presidency—and let’s face it, age and health are huge issues—probably the presidency of a nation which on Monday lost One Trillion Dollars in the worst financial crash since 1987. Gone, vanished, pffft.

Careful when you’re walking down Wall Street, watch out for falling stockbrokers.

In the way of all mothers my sister has decided that I need to eat healthier, so she brought me two cartons of juice. This is a woman who is permanently sleep-deprived (she manages a call center) and believes that all food should be covered in cheese. She also left a box of cream puffs in the fridge, which should counter the effects of the healthy drinks. One is, uck, broccoli, the other pomegranate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pomegranate, all I know is that in classical mythology Persephone ate some, so she has to return to Hades every year. As for broccoli, the sight of the word is enough to make me run screaming out of the house. However, I always feel compelled to try new products (Must remember to throw out my dust-covered museum of products that swore to make my hair behave), so I poured myself some broccoli juice. It wasn’t bad. A bit too sweet, but then I love ampalaya. Fish with ampalaya, ampalaya tea, raw ampalaya. Cookie also got me four-in-one herbal coffee sachets containing coffee, cream, sugar. . .and silymarin. That’s supposed to be good for your liver, right, except that I don’t know where the cream came from and I worry about ingesting cheap dinnerware in milk.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the American financial crisis.

I hadn’t seen a new movie in over a week, I was desperate to watch anything. Finally I managed to convince someone to watch ITALY with me (I wonder why no one else wanted to go). Tickle-Me Elmo and I agreed to meet at Glorietta last Saturday for the 6.30 screening. When we got there ITALY had been replaced; its last full show was at 4.30pm. So much for my plan to review it in sentences that can be reduced to the acronym ITALY.

Today I dragged Tickle-Me Elmo to Eagle Eye. It was either that or Traveling Pants 2 (didn’t see the first one) or Bangkok Dangerous (I am distressed by Nicolas Cage’s hairline). Besides, I like Shia LaBeouf and was genuinely distressed by that Details magazine cover in which his hands look tiny. Tickle-Me Elmo believes there is a conspiracy against moviegoers; there hasn’t been a good movie in Manila theatres in six weeks. What’s going on? Is it going to be like this until the Hey, Oscar! season? Some theatres even brought back Mamma Mia, the movie that cannot be killed even if it already smells like a corpse.

Eagle Eye has an interesting premise—the government is spying on everybody—but it is loud, incomprehensible, and generally senseless. Shia and Michelle Monaghan star as the poor schmucks who are forced to do a mysterious entity’s bidding. They don’t know who it is, but it sees and hears everything they do. Hey, didn’t I see that in an old Will Smith flick? The entity is so powerful it can control traffic lights, airports and airplanes, and contact Shia using the phone of whoever happens to be standing next to him. It’s like the world’s most demanding girlfriend. Shia and Michelle make the movie almost bearable, although it’s always entertaining watching Rosario Dawson try to act. Few actors can wring such emotion out of walking to the elevator.

“How refreshing to find that the local movie industry doesn’t have a monopoly on badness,” said Tickle-Me Elmo. “The guys who made Cavite (the Fil-Am movie) should sue. It’s the same plot.”

“You’re right, it’s Cavite with a gajillion-dollar budget,” I said. “I am relieved that Shia has normal-size hands.”

“Shia LaBeouf and John Lloyd Cruz should star together in a movie with no plot, just close-ups,” Tickle-Me Elmo suggested. The sad part is, I might watch that.

WESTPORT, Conn. (AP) — Paul Newman, the Academy-Award winning superstar who personified cool as the anti-hero of such films as ”Hud,” ”Cool Hand Luke” and ”The Color of Money” — and as an activist, race car driver and popcorn impresario — has died. He was 83.
*****
Paul Newman didn’t seem to care about superstardom, glamour, fashion, power and all that stuff. This made him one of the coolest humans alive. He was spectacular and he knew it, and he knew that everyone knew it, so he forgot about his looks altogether. Which made him even more spectacular.

I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on TV when I was a kid. To me Robert Redford was purty but Newman was The guy. Then I saw Cool Hand Luke on TV late one night. My parents thought I was asleep, but I was watching Paul Newman as a prison inmate eat 60 or so hard-boiled eggs on a bet. In Cool Hand Luke he keeps trying to break out of prison and getting caught, and getting the crap beaten out of him, and trying again. I didn’t think this was stupid, I thought it was heroic. Much later I rented a laser disc of Hud. The character of Hud Bannon is supposed to be despicable. To paraphrase Pauline Kael, was it even possible to despise Paul Newman? Look, his popcorn was great. Go watch some Paul Newman movies.

Esquire features the late David Foster Wallace’s classic, obsessive essay on tennis, The String Theory. The subject of his essay, Michael Joyce, now works with Maria Sharapova. Most if not all of the players DFW mentions have retired, including Jeff Tarango, fondly nicknamed “Psycho”. The essay brings up probably the most unfortunate names ever to grace the tour: Cyril Suk and Alex Lopez-Moron. Imagine cheering for the latter: Mo-RON! Mo-RON! Imagine if they played doubles.

Note DFW’s virulent hatred of Andre Agassi. I didn’t like Agassi either, but not as much as I loathed Ivan Lendl. My opinion of Andre changed after he fell out of the top 100, then made his amazing comeback. Marrying Steffi Graf also helped. DFW expressed surprise at how good-looking Goran Ivanisevic was. We’ll always love Goran Ivanisevic. He wasn’t “good-looking for a Croat”—and by the way Croats are good-looking people—he was lovely, period.

Question from a reader: “Sarah Palin and the fundamentalists make me think that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is now shifting from speculative fiction to fact. I read it when I was in my early teens and I remember being seriously freaked out. . .

“Some years after the book was published, a film version with Faye Dunaway and Elizabeth McGovern came out, and I clearly remember that it was distributed in the Philippines under the title “Slave Girls”. (Chalk one up for subtlety). I remember seeing the trailer - the usual technically polished Hollywood trailer - suddenly being spliced with its new title, a crudely designed sign that read “Slave Girls” in a faux handpainted logo. Can anyone among your readers or your circle of friends confirm or refute this? Did my brain just make that up? I would dearly like to know.”

I remember that The Handmaid’s Tale was retitled for the Philippine market. This is a common practice among the local distributors, presumably to increase the movie’s box-office appeal. Who can forget how Jude, the film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s gloomy Victorian masterpiece, suddenly acquired the new title, “Bare”? Now there’s a bit of sexy stuff in Thomas Hardy—check out the character of Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native. Or the eponymous heroine of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, whose film adaptation directed by Roman Polanski somehow avoided being retitled “Disgrasyada!” The print ad for Bare prominently featured an apparently naked Kate Winslet, fresh from the box-office bonanza of Titanic. The distributors managed to restrain themselves from throwing in a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Adel has just reminded me that Hal Ashby’s Being There, starring Peter Sellers as the gardener whose babbling is mistaken for brilliance, was shown in Manila theatres as Supergenius.

In the October issue of Reason Magazine, Mike Flynn, Shikha Dalmia, and Terry Colon illustrate what it takes to be a legal US immigrant. Brilliant flowchart for those who are standing in line; it’s going to be a long wait.

“Google’s “internet evangelist” Vint Cerf has been in the UK and in the headlines this week, visiting the British Computer Society and The Guardian, among others. Both the Times and the Telegraph have picked up the scary “news” that the Internet will run out of IP addresses by 2010, warns Vint Cerf, or just a touch less accurately, Father of the internet: ‘web is running out of addresses’.

“It is certainly true that IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) is running out of addresses, because technically it only supports 4 billion of them (2^32). However, we saw this coming at least 16 years ago, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) adopted Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) way back in 1996. This provides up to 2^128 addresses (340 trillion trillion trillion), which means there’s well over 4 billion addresses for everybody on the planet. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, IPv6 can provide 2^52 addresses for each of the 70 sextillion observable stars in the known universe, which I think may constitute “comfortable headroom” even for a pan-galactic internet.

“Further, most of us already have computers that can support IPv6, without even downloading an update. . .” Jack Schofield in The Guardian.

By Kevin Allman at blogofneworleans.com, via 3Quarks Daily.

Dear American, My Dear Friend:
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America.
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.I am working with “Mr. Phil Gram,” lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a citizen, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check.
We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction.
After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Do not discuss this message with anyone! Time is of the essence!
Yours Faithfully.
Minister of Treasury Hank Paulson

You’re walking into the mall. You stop at the guard’s desk for the obligatory security check. You know and he knows and everybody knows that this is part-pantomime and part-placebo, because even supposing you had a bomb in your possession, it is highly unlikely that the guard would identify it as such (Maybe if it were a large round ball with a fuse sticking out like in Road Runner cartoons). Weren’t there bag inspections as usual the day that Glorietta 2 blew up? 

So you’re doing your role in the pantomime when someone literally walks into you, treading on your jeans. It’s a woman so preoccupied with texting that she doesn’t look where she’s going. She says “Ay!” and keeps on walking. She does not say “Excuse me” or “Sorry”. It is as if you are invisible. Ordinarily you would let it go, forget about it. You put up with so much aggravation in this city, you hardly even notice it anymore. In fact, you’re so accustomed to dealing with rude, uncouth behavior that when people do exhibit good manners, you do a double-take. Every time someone says “Sorry” or “Excuse me” or “Walang anuman”, you feel like saying, “Thank you.” 

Today you do not feel like putting up with other people’s shit. Today you refuse to be invisible. You walk slowly behind the woman who had crashed into you. You observe that she is wearing flip-flops and an anklet. She is still texting, oblivious to her surroundings. You calculate her pace. At the right second, you step on the back of her flip-flop, sending her sprawling. “Oh I’m sorry,” you say sweetly, and walk away. Someday, while texting, she may walk into an open manhole and disappear forever.

Vote for vision, change, and someone who knows where Spain is. (I am a cat, but I know that (former) fighter pilots should know some geography lest they bomb the wrong place.) Someone who knows the difference between the former Soviet republic named Georgia and the state where Atlanta is. Someone with a sound environmental policy, who understands that polar bears are an endangered species (I love bears!).

Reject George Bush in lipstick!

This message was approved by Saffron Sassafras Saoirse Schmitz Sandler Zohan Zafra-Safina. T-shirt design by Wricky.