BY THE TIME MACHETE GETS TO ARIZONA ...

ITEM [via Ain't It Cool News]: Danny Trejo has a message for Arizona: you just fucked with the wrong Mexican.

""Fast Times At Ridgemont High" on CBS (Pool Scene - TV Version)" (Watch on YouTube)

Of course there will be some who question the judgment of Robert Rodriguez to use Machete (which featured illegal immigration as the political backdrop for the film well before the AZ law was passed) as a comment on Arizona’s new law. If someone on the conservative blogscape hasn’t already written a rant about how Machete amounts to Liberal Pro-Illegal-Immigration Hollywood advocating a declaration of war on Whitey, they probably will soon. [EDIT: They did. –dF]

On the other hand, you can’t always judge a plot by the trailer. And anyway, judging how upset a lot of people are with Arizona, I think that anger is a legitimate topic for film, even a Mexploitation homage.

But then I’m a Rodriguez fan and I am SO going to see this, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us,

This is dF

========================

EDITED TO ADD [7 MAY 2010]: Not surprisingly, YouTube is deleting the trailer for copyright issues (even though Rodriguez himself made it available for posting in the first place). I've replaced it with one that hasn't been deleted yet, but you can click the Ain't It Cool link to see it as well (for now).

Oh, and yes, the backlash has begun.

THIS BLOG POST IS NOT AVAILABLE IN YR COUNTRY

ITEM: Craig Engler of Syfy Digital explains why Syfy doesn't make its shows available online internationally, and why they don't make more shows in the US available.

The short answer is “licensing”, but Engler has a good breakdown of just what that entails, and why it limits distribution of online content. And he’s talking about Syfy here, but a lot of it applies to every other cable channel, as well as things like Hulu and (at least in principle) even music download services.

To put a fine point on it: multimedia is copyrighted under an insanely complex and multilayered royalty system that does not translate well to the borderless Internet. This is why they’ve been so slow to address it, and why everyone from Napster to YouTube is light years ahead of them.

Hoisted by my own petard,

This is dF

I LOVE YOU / YOU PAY MY RENT

So presumably by now you’ve heard the one about George Alan Rekers – who co-founded the Family Research Council with James Dobson and has been one of the most ardent campaigners against gay marriage, gay adoption and pretty much gay anything – shopping for hot male luggage handlers at Rentboy.com.

And I wasn’t going to post on it, if only because so many anti-gay activists have been outed in the last few years that it’s hardly news anymore. Indeed, one could be forgiven at this point for suspecting that the entire anti-gay movement is secretly as gay as a picnic basket.

On the other hand, this is the co-founder of the FRC we’re talking about, as well as someone who claims that homosexuality is curable (but just hasn’t got around to curing himself – maybe it’s not covered in his health insurance plan).

Even better is Rekers’ claim that while he did find “Lucien” on rentboy.com, he had no idea that he was a prostitute:

"I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him."

So basically, Rekers is asking us to believe that he thought rentboy.com was a temp service for hiring household staff and butlers.

Which is, of course, hilarious. It makes Larry Craig’s wide-stance excuse seem believable by comparison.

Obviously, I don’t care if Rekers wants to hire hot young male companions for traveling purposes. And while he’s technically a hypocrite, in a way I do feel sorry for people like Rekers who are – I presume – essentially so needlessly driven by shame about their true nature that they’ll work against their own interests in some mad futile desire to pass for “normal”.

But I’m always amazed that so many people still take these boobs seriously as moral guardians. How many more of these people have to be caught violating their own standards before people finally stop listening to them?

That’s my bag,

This is dF