Wow, that was a decisive victory last night in South Carolina.  Hunh.  I guess Newt’s populism can really gain traction with some people.  I was guessing he’d be a close second but he’s a clear winner instead.  I’ve been hoping Newt would keep nipping at Romney’s heels through the next couple of months and then just go away.  Since I think the country is on the right track and the Bush 43 mess just takes time to clean up and Obama is doing the best he can with a Boehner led congress, I am hoping for an Obama victory.  And the best way to ensure that is to have a weak opponent.  And since I’ve been assuming that opponent will be Mitt Romney, the more Romney is attacked now, the less appealing he’ll be in November.

But I had a scary thought this morning.  I woke up thinking about the surprise win yesterday and impressed with the impact populism has.  I was also a little surprised by how collegial all the candidates sounded.  As though they recognized that they needed to be confrontational to win South Carolina but need to switch gears in case they need to work together.  And then it hit me:  What if the winner is Romney and he picks his former rival Gingrich as his running mate?  Romney would pull in the moderates and the rich who want the country run for them while Newt would pull in those drawn by his populism.  And that ticket might be tough for Obama to beat.  A scary future for our country.

Oh, and before you say that they couldn’t get together because they are rivals, c’mon.  First of all we’re talking about Republican politicians which means they are masters at saying something to make their case regardless of the truthiness of it.  They’ll have no problem switching from attacking to a love fest (like Perry and Huntsman did when they dropped out and scrubbed their web sites of anti-other-candidate messages) and they’ll make it all about unifying to beat Obama.  And that will help sell the populist message even more.  Second, we’re talking about Republican politicians which means that their goal is election and not principles (despite what their supposed message has been) so they’ll have no problem shifting again to move towards each other to make peace for the unified goal of power.

The only snag for these two potential lovebirds would be their individual baggage.  Romney is so pro-captialism that he’s anti-real-people (companies are not people) and has money everywhere (including in the Cayman Islands) and houses everywhere and yet pays less in taxes percentage-wise than the average low to moderate income guy.  Newt may not have literally asked for an “open marriage” but he was probably caught cheating on wife #2 with eventual wife #3 and that’s after leaving wife #1 while she was sick.  And Newt is of course the guy who consulted with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while they were in the midst of causing the housing crisis he is against now.  So that’s a lot of shared baggage and you could argue the ticket would be better off with a relative unknown without the baggage.  Still, the whole relative unknown thing didn’t work out well for McCain/Palin so the GOP may push for something like a Romney/Gingrich thing.

I just saw a request come through on Poopli for a show that I had recorded but not on ReplayTV.  I had it recorded on MythTV.  So I wondered: could I transfer a show from MythTV to ReplayTV?  The answer is yes and here’s how I did it.

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When I last wrote about the TV season, it was the end of 2011 season and I was surprised at how a couple of shows had wrapped their season. Now, well into the next season, I thought it was time for another look at Chuck, Hawaii Five-O, Nikita, The Office, and The Good Wife.

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Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report:

Axe body spray has a new product for women. I’m guessing it’s mace.

Here’s an amusing, and generally accurate, view of the 2012 Republican candidates: Column: The only GOP candidates guide you’ll ever need

Christmas has now passed and the “War on Christmas” will go into hibernation for the next 11 months. But we are in a cycle now where we annually need to choose between being overly politically correct or religiously insensitive. Does it have to be this way? Of course not. I say we should say “Merry Christmas”, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. Like another political hot-button issue, it’s about terminology… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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No, definitely not as good as the original Hoodwinked, which was a quirky surprise. The sequel didn’t have quite the same heart as the original. But it would be really hard to make a sequel that did have the same heart as the original without it feeling like exactly the same movie. It’s hard to believe but I think another loss from the original to the sequel was losing Anne Hathaway as Red – Hayden Panettiere just didn’t seem to impart the same warmth into the character. Patrick Warburton was still hilarious as the Wolf and his lines were as funny as the first. And Twitchy the squirrel was still hilarious too, though there was one scene where Twitchy actually sounded a little normal and that seemed wrong. (If you haven’t watched the original Hoodwinked, do so now and you’ll see what I mean about Twitchy sounding normal being wrong.) And then, Kirk, the woodsman was a complex guy in the first film but in this second one, he’s now just a punchline.

The first movie actually had a soundtrack because there were so many good songs but the second one just had the normal movie background music. As far as the animation goes, I think it was a little better and a little smoother. It was also much more complicated since the “sets” were really detailed city-scapes. The animation may not be as good as a Pixar, but that’s okay – it doesn’t always need to be.

Overall, I’d say Hoodwinked Too! was more for the adult crowd than the children with characters like the way Moss The Troll talked and lines like Boingo talking about “Clarice” in a Silence Of The Lambs kind of way. But at the same time, the plot was more of a children’s plot so I think the movie made the mistake of providing only limited appeal to both audiences. Or put more simply, it just wasn’t as good as the first.

Rating: 3 (out of 10)

When I become aware of a movie that I might be interested in, I don’t read reviews about it other than to look for stars or grades or whatever. If I know I want to go see a movie, I try my best to learn about the movie during the movie as it was intended to be. I don’t want to know about the movie ahead of time and then feel like I’m watching a repeat while watching the movie for the first time. So I went to see a movie called the Descendants that I thought was going to be a quirky movie about a guy whose ex-wife dies and he gets to know his 3 kids better after her death when he discovers that she was seeing somebody else. What the movie is actually about (and if you follow my advice, you’ve either already seen the movie or you will stop reading now) is a guy whose wife (not ex) ends up in a coma for most of the movie and during that time, gets to know his 2 kids better while finding out she was cheating on him in the short time before her accident. The actual movie was a much better story than the movie I had guessed I was going to see from the pictures and trailer. I was more emotionally involved for all the characters than I would have been with the movie I thought I was going to see. And this is exactly why I do like to see the movie for the first time without much prior knowledge. It makes it all the more impactful.

Much was made of the older daughters ability to “cry underwater” which still doesn’t seem like that great a feat. However, acting for much of the movie with George Clooney in the scene does seem like a great feat for a 20 year-old and good for her. (No, not Oscar worthy, but there will probably be more good movies for her in the future.) And damn if I didn’t get choked up when it was time to say goodbye to the mother/wife in the coma.

I did have a one major complaint. I had seen pictures of Clooney walking with 2 girls and a boy and naturally assumed all three would be his kids. Turns out the boy, Sid, was just a friend of the older girl. Okay. But the silliness is that he’s new to the family, accompanies them on the mission to tell people about the imminent death, acts doltish, and yet isn’t jettisoned by the otherwise smart Doug. We don’t learn why he is helpful to the older daughter until later in the movie and we realize that he is actually helping everybody by the end of the movie. But I think Doug needed to have learned that earlier in the story for him to allow Sid to stay in the story at all. At least at the very end, it was just Doug and his daughters in the outrigger and on the couch.

Rating: 8 (out of 10)

I’m a big Muppet fan and have been since I was a kid. I loved the original Muppet Movie and still enjoy watching that today. Reruns of the Muppet Show still crack me up. The Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker are my favorites. So it was good news for me that a major Muppet Fan, Jason Segel, was behind the making of this movie.

I was a little disappointed, then, in the result. I guess I wasn’t surprised, though, because part of the magic of the Muppets was Jim Henson and Frank Oz. Jim Henson died years ago and Frank Oz is in semi-retirement so without either of them, it’s not really the same Muppets. Jason Segel and Amy Adams were earnest enough to fit in with the cast. But I think some of the charm of the original Muppet stories was about how they tried to cope in a human world – different from Sesame Street where the Muppets and humans were equals in the pretend world. The Muppets were wowed by Hollywood and Manhattan and by every place on their epic road trip in the early movies. But in this one, the Muppets themselves seemed tired and that left the story feeling sadly flat.

There were some great gags, some cool cameos, and a couple of decent songs. I loved Animal in anger management therapy and Jack Black as an unwilling guest host. Also, it should be noted that this was less a movie featuring the Muppets and more like a pretend documentary about how the gang got together for one last Muppet Show. And therefore, it was a little more like a long version of The Muppet Show, so perhaps expecting it to be a full feature film was unreasonable.

And yet it was feature film length and in theaters so it was a feature film. I wanted to like it more than I did. And if Jason Segel can convince Disney to get the Muppet Show back on TV with a new batch of “special guest stars” (NPH, Hugh Jackman, Ellen Degeneres, Kristin Chenoweth, Drew Carey, to throw out a few names that would be fun), then even better. But the movie on its own just doesn’t get me too excited.

Rating: 5 (out of 10)

Duran Duran’s new video for Girl Panic. Good song and great video – love the wit and production values are top notch. Not to mention getting all the supers together is a feat in itself. If you are like me, watch it a second time once you get what’s going on. Oh, and Nick really rocks that bellman’s cap.