Spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam, sausage, bacon, and spam
Mood:  on fire

I don't know why, but my spam has been extra weird lately.  I've gotten email from Australia ("A low-interest loan for you!"), Sharpe ("Enjoy sssex with her"), and some guy named Howard Dean ("Democratic Presidential Campaign '08").

 My favorite aspects of spam are the randomly inventive names ("Rosario Thacker") and the junk-filter-evading subject lines, which sound almost like haiku if you savor them on their own:

 Unpleasantly, of our complete.  You, Pherl, will be nothing.

Now, doesn't THAT just make you want to dive in and read the rest of the message?  All your base are belong to them.

The other day, I watched Gettin' Square again, and was just bowled over by the courtroom scene.  That is a phenomenal piece of physical comedy.  It's done with such subtlety and skill: Johnny missing the chair, the timing of the dialogue, the smug little head motions at the end after he's weaseled bus fare and lunch money out of the prosecutor.  Just brilliant.  David deserved every bit of the AFI award for that scene alone.

I've also been musing over Answered By Fire, which unfortunately didn't do as well in the CBC ratings as hoped.  It's a very powerful and extraordinary movie, particularly in light of the renewed violence in East Timor, and the current situation in Darfur.  The analogies are fairly close.  Similar to what happened in East Timor, the Sudanese government, after signing a separate peace agreement with the SPLA, has armed a militia that is attacking civilians with helicopter gunships, burning villages, obstructing access to humanitarian aid, and going into refugee camps nightly to slaughter men and drag women away to be raped.  Foreign witnesses are being quietly removed.  The international community has been shuffling their feet over whether this constitutes "genocide" and warrants appropriate action, but it's mostly a semantic debate.  Genocide doesn't always mean targeted butchering of a particular ethnic group; it can be carried out through indirect means, such as taking Aboriginal children away from their parents to "breed the color out" (as one Australian official said in 1933), or failure to provide legal or military protection to threatened groups, as happened in East Timor.

Thus far, Darfur has been viewed as a humanitarian emergency, not genocide, and the UN won't act unless invited in by the Sudanese government.  Among their limited options are to put peacekeepers on the ground in Chad to try to stop the violence from spreading.  I don't see the US intervening as they did in Kosovo, not with troops already overextended in Iraq.  Meanwhile, over 2 million people have died.

Wow, this turned into a depressing blog entry.