Sunday, August 31, 2008

Song for the Week of 08/31/08

ROLLI TERANISHI - "Suicide Kiss"

Friday, August 29, 2008

We Are the Sprocket Holes vol. 37 / GODFUCKINGDAMNITNO vol. 1

from Ain't it Cool News;



Brett Ratner: GUITAR HERO!?


Merrick here...


Brett Ratner is horny to make a movie centered around Activision's GUITAR HERO franchise.

Ratner says:

“I love ‘Guitar Hero’ and I think it’s a part of pop culture. I would love to do a ‘Guitar Hero’ movie, if Activision would ever let me. I’m trying to convince them, but why would you have a movie screw up such a huge franchise? Not that I would make a bad movie. So that would be cool, to do a ‘Guitar Hero’ movie. ”

And here is his idea for the plot:

“It could be about a kid from a small town who dreams of being a rock star and he wins the ‘Guitar Hero’ competition. One of these dreams-[come-true] kind of concepts.”

...according to THIS INTERVIEW with MTV.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 11

So the Republican Presidential Ticket looks like this;







Sen. John McCain Picks Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as His Running Mate


I don't know about you, but i totally want a vice president that looks more at home on a My First Sex Teacher video than in the 2nd greatest position of power in the country.

I mean, there are fewer things i want more in life than an after-school fuck session with Kylie Ireland, but i don't know if i'd be okay with her being inches away from becoming President should the OLDEST MOTHER FUCKER IN THE OLDEST MOTHER FUCKING HISTORY OF OLDEST MOTHER FUCKERS ...by some unthinkable stroke (tee) of circumstance... find himself fixed in a casket by the end of his inauguration speech.

Yeah. People take America Seriously.

Monday, August 25, 2008

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 36


Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69: official website w/ trailer

IMDB

Ain't it Cool News review

"The real stand out performance comes from Tatyana Kott as Nastasha the bad-ass Russian stealth fighter. She enters the movie in grand fashion. After brutally murdering a German soldier in a bath tub, she dashes, naked, through the forest laying waste to Germans as she runs. She is captured and brought to Stalag 69 wear she endures the tortures du jour. She is a trooper of low budget cinema and I hope I get to see her more movies in the future. Let’s see a naked Angelina Jolie kill a bunch of Nazis in her birthday suit! She’s got nothing on Tatyana Kott. She’s really hot too. Call me!"

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Double You, Tea F. vol. 47 (now featuring BIRDS WITH ARMS)





















and now....BIRDS WITH ARMS;















this has been BIRDS WITH ARMS.

NERRRRRRRD!!!! vol. 3

MORTAL KOMBAT vs. DC UNIVERSE














Song for the Week of 08/24/08

LAUGHING HYENAS - "Just Can't Win"




Saturday, August 16, 2008

Song for the Week of 08/17/08/Double You, Tea F. vol. 46

SWANS - "God Damn the Sun"



When We Were Young
We Had No History
So Nothing To Lose
Meant We Could Choose
Choose What We Wanted Then
Without Any Fear
Or Thought Of Revenge
But Then You Grew Old
And I Lost My Ambition
So I Gained An Addiction
To Drink And Depression
They Are Mine
My Only True Friends
And I'll Keep Them With Me
Until The Very End
I'd Choose Not To Remember
But I Miss Your Arrogance
And I Need Your Intelligence
And Your Hate For Authority
But Now You're Gone
I Read It Today
They Found You In Spain
Face Down In The Street
With A Bottle In Your Hand
And A Wild Smile On Your Face
And A Knife In Your Back
You Died In A Foreign Land
And They Found My Letter
Rolled Up In Your Pocket
Where I Said I'd Kill Myself
If She Left Me Again
So Now She's Gone
And You're Both In My Mind
I've Got One Thing To Say
Before I Am Drunk Again:
God Damn The Sun
God Damn The Sun
God Damn Anyone
That Says A Kind Word
God Damn The Sun
God Damn The Sun
God Damn The Light It Shines
And This World It Shows
God Damn The Sun

GIRL FOUND IN HORROR CLOSET

COULDN'T SPEAK, EAT - HAD NEVER SEEN THE SUN

By LANE DeGREGORY
Posted: 4:19 am
August 10, 2008

PLANT CITY, Florida - The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

The girl looked young. And too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside. Two officers went into the house - and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Someone had finally called the police.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste and his young partner found a car parked outside. A woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "Urine and feces - dog, cat and human excrement - smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

A stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice.

Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked - except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "That child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can.' "

THE detective carried the girl past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner.

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. In the pediatric intensive-care unit, they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. A doctor would write, "The child will be disabled for the rest of her life."

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists.

She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold - or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while, she grunted.

She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But they believed she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. They doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

"There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition," Armstrong said. "We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

THE authorities had discov ered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts - some fictional, some true - of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing.

It is said that during the 13th century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," Armstrong said. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.

Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General. Eventually, she was placed in a group home. In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school in a special-ed class at Sanders Elementary.

"If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position.

"She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."

It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.

By Thanksgiving 2006, her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.

Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County, decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery - a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption displayed in malls and on the Internet.

BERNIE LIEROW, 48, and Diane Lierow, 45, have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when their son William was 9, they decided to adopt.

When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.

When they met Danielle at her school, Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus. He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet.

Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.

They brought Danielle home on Easter weekend 2007.

"It was a disaster," Bernie said.

They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.

She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed.

She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours. All night, she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.

Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.

She took the plea.

After a year with her new family, "Dani" (as they call her) has grown a foot, and her weight has doubled.

Since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond.

She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback-riding lessons.

SHE'S out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost.

Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens.

Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. They had two sons.

Bernard died in August 1997. Six months later, she met a man in a casino. "His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."

Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle headed to Florida. She got hired as a cashier at a Publix supermarket. But it was OK: "The boys were with [Danielle]," she says.

She goes to the boys' bathroom, returns with a box full of documents.

The earliest are from Feb. 11, 2002. A caller reported that a child, about 3, was "left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper."

Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.

Michelle insists Danielle was fine.

A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation.

Danielle's IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating "severe mental retardation." Michelle's is 77, "borderline range of intellectual ability."

Michelle is on probation until 2012.

© Copyright St. Petersburg Times. Reprinted with permission.

Monday, August 11, 2008

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 35

haven't done one of these in a while... short movie reviews;

Cronos - 8/10 : Guilermo Del Toro's first film. Lots of heart and cool F/X.

Nekromantik - 8.5/10 : Underground classic from Jörg Buttgereit. about a million times the movie you think it's going to be. the reality of it is that it's a depraved love triangle where one of the points happens to be a corpse. beautiful music that somehow fits with the genuinely gruesome images on the screen. the ending is a masterwork of over-the-top masturbatory splatter.

Schramm - 8.5/10 : Jörg Buttgereit's serial killer character study focuses more on the isolation and the ugliness of the mind rather than lingering on any actual murder. brilliant piece of work that may be his best film. shocking hyper-real scenes of existential torment that you can almost feel on your nerves like a child running his fingers against a chain link fence.

Shoot 'Em Up - 8/10: A carrot chomping hit-man and a lactating hooker protect a baby from another hitman. perhaps the most fun i've had watching an action movie since i was 10 years old (except maybe for RAMBO). It doesn't hurt that it has people i actually like watching (Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and the timeless beauty Monica Belluci).

Sweet Movie - 9/10: one for the ages. Surrealist sex-comedy. worth it for the chocolate bath alone.

Tokyo Fist - 9.5/10: Shinya Tsukamoto. that's all.

Subconscious Cruelty - 10/10: FINALLY. Everything i heard it was and everything i heard it wasn't. This is more than a film...it's a nightmare being exorcised from a tortured soul, captured and transformed into grotesque visual and mental poetry. Rare, original, and inspiring in it's disgust for the human condition while simultaneously lusting for the very best in all of us. it shows that humanity and life are mutually exclusive, and the only way to really live is to embrace all the blood, cum, piss, and shit, and choose instead to evacuate our flat-earthed halves from our person.

Hellboy 2 - 7.5/10: Like the themes of the first one more (Hitler's interest in the occult, etc), but there were some really beautiful moments/effects here. the Angel of Death scene is the standout, particularly because the lair (as well as the Angel herself) were obviously based on Beksinski's paintings.

the Strangers - 2/10: loud noise loud noise quizzical head tilt loud noise loud noise loud noise loud noise quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt loud noise loud noise quizzical head tilt loud noise loud noise loud noise loud noise "Because you were home" quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt loud noise loud noise quizzical head tilt loud noise loud noise loud noise loud noise quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt quizzical head tilt fade to black.

Strange Circus - 8.5/10: Just about every taboo imaginable is represented here. Great imagery.

Suicide Club - 8/10: Cult hit from the same director of Strange Circus. Darkly funny and depressing.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore - 9/10: Remarkable documentary about the man and his work. Feels like you're trailing the creases of his rich brains.

Hostel 2 - 6/10 : liked the scene with the naked chick killing Weiner Dog and being showered in her blood. the girls were hot. acting and dialogue were complete shit... the almost Rob Zombie-level F-Bomb droppage was annoying and stupid.

Begotten - 9/10 : from IMDB; God disembowels himself with a straight razor. The spirit-like Mother Earth emerges, venturing into a bleak, barren landscape. Twitching and cowering, the Son Of Earth is set upon by faceless cannibals.

no review i could ever write could do this film justice. here's the trailer, with some blurbs from critics whose opinions mirror mine, though they somehow managed to cobble together their thoughts into words where as i just sat in awe..than crawled into my bed and hoped the images wouldn't destroy me too much;



Tideland - 8.5/10: without a doubt Terry Gilliam's most disturbing work. but it's also one of his most remarkable and dare i say charming films. Most won't be able to get past the putrid subject matter, but if you can just check your inhibitions at the door you'll see the film as it's meant to be seen...with innocence...with purity.

Nightwatch - 5/10: russian vampire epic. i found it to be no different than any shitty American blockbuster action/horror/fantasy mudfart, but because it's from another country it's considered "cutting edge". fell asleep in intervals through the viewing of the film. just not my thing at all.

Visitor Q - 8.5/10: Takashi Miike at his most demented is also Takashi Miike at his most hilarious. make your own double feature with this and Strange Circus.

Inside - 9/10: god damn this fucker is SAVAGE. Beatrice Dall's performance as "the Woman" is second only to Javier Bardem's "Anton Chirgurh" in No Country for Old Men when it comes to near otherworldly terror.

Frontiers - 8/10: the best Texas Chainsaw Massacre knock off ever.

C.H.U.D. - 8/10: an underrated classic. has the charm of a 1950s atomic monster movie with the Reagan-era grime of an 80s grindhouse feature.

Lizard in a Woman's Skin - 8.5/10: Lucio Fulci's psychedelic splatter film. Prefer this to his Zombie voodoo epics, though those are not without their charms.

Dellamorte Dellamore - 9/10: more commonly known as Cemetary Man. Excellent. simple as that.

Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer 9.5/10: SHINYA. TSUKAMOTO. the end.

the Machine Girl - 7.5/10: a little disappointing, but still a lot of fun. can't go wrong with a cute Japanese school girl with a gattling gun for a hand. Has that Troma/early Peter Jackson kind of b-movie likability. still could've been a bit nastier...and some of the directing was choppy.

Scarlet Diva - 9/10: Asia Argento's directorial debut. ...you know i was going to write something... maybe post a clip...but then i found this;



and i forgot who i was for a quick second. than i came.

Visions of Suffering - 9.5/10: Andrey Iskanov's unrelenting mind-rape. It's tough to describe his films...he's one of the few directors you can say really has a style all his own. They don't look like films, but rather vivid fever dreams being beamed from his mind to your screen, unfiltered by the inevitable compromise of the medium. true transgressive cinema.

trailer;



Nails - 8/10 - see above.

Buio Omega - 9/10: Italian gore classic. Stands out from other films of that era due to it's portrayal of death being slow, meditative, and messy, where as most of the films of that time were like grandiose violent art-rock operas.

Boy Meets Girl - 8/10: When people talk about "torture porn"... they don't know Boy Meets Girl.

Dust Devil: the Final Cut - 10/10: It makes me shake with anger knowing that this film isn't on everyone's classic list. So unreal. The most effectively atmospheric film of it's era, even if it was lost in that time.

trailer;



Art of the Devil 2 - 8.5/10: grueling and nasty, with a climatic torture scene that makes Audition look like and episode of Family Matters.

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 34

More Tokyo, More Gore In The New TOKYO GORE POLICE Trailer

Posted by Todd Brown at 9:33am.

Posted in Trailer Alerts , Exploitation, Cult, Action, Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Asia.


If you’ve been reading this site at all over the past few months you can’t help but be up to speed on Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police by now. The outrageous splatter film stars Audition‘s Eihi Shiina is a cop in a near-future world tasked with hunting down and killing a variety of bizarre mutants - mutants who sprout deadly weapons on the site of any injury. It’s a twisted, bizarre picture and for proof you need look no further than the brand new trailer. This raises the current video count for TGP to three, with a sales reel and now two trailers in our Video Player, and you can find all three below the break. And yes - there are new creature and gore shots in this one.

Continue Reading "More Tokyo, More Gore In The New TOKYO GORE POLICE Trailer"...

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Quotent Quotables vol. 12

"I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies."

Peter Sotos

song for the week of 08/10/08

PORTAL - "Black Houses"



Manor Operants Quater
Surging Discontent
Pitching Fulgor
In Lieu of those who shone

Waxen Shawls of Omenknow Afune
Cornerstones of Telemetry Gloom
Ornery De Luminate Decree

Seepia Accord Thee
Stygian Obsequious Antipodes
Drear Thy Larder
Paradoor Thy Quay

Villas Ecto

Plague Wove Rue

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Just Needed to Share vol .17

been following this story. on a Greyhound bus in Cananda, a 22 year old man was stabbed by a man almost 18 years older than him. The 40 year old stabbed the 22 year old in the neck so many times that the 22 year old's head fell off. The passengers all ran off the bus...horrified at the human set piece taking place before the cameras in their skulls. The 40 year old picked up the 22 year old's head, showing it to the passengers like a trophy, than dropping it to the floor, as if the trophy cheapened the moment. He than took a pair of scissors and began cutting off chunks of the 22 year old's flesh. He than proceeded to eat the skin and muscle. right there on a crowded bus. No one...not even the passengers sitting in front of the victim... stood up to the attacker. Amazing how one knife and one pair of scissors can bring a bus full of people to their fear-quaked knees.

The moral of the story is this... every "bad day" i've ever had, means nothing... until my head gets cut off and my lifeless carcass is than cannibalized as NOT ONE PERSON STOPS TO HELP ME OUT. and that goes for the rest of you. Spare me your dramas. "someone scuffed the paint on my car!" "i don't have enough money for a blu-ray player!" "Soul Caliber 4 is nowhere near as good as Soul Caliber 2!" "I din't get 8 hours of sleep!" "This cheeseburger makes me look FAT!" "the new Metallica is going to suck!"

pffff to the ffffft.

see i've come to this realization; i don't give a shit.

simple, eh?

say it with me; I DON'T GIVE A SHIT.

Unless you killed someone or drowned a potato sack of kittens in a polluted river, you're in no real trouble. Unless your person has been irreversibly mutilated by a vehicle crash or rabid AIDs infected mutts, you'll always be okay looking.

so just...relax. relax or do something about your "situation" other than the whining and the pissing. All you're getting with those is a sore throat and dehydration. Wake up and make the fucking change. if not, than stop complaining, cause it could be worse... you could be decapitated an eaten before a live audience.

Just needed to share.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

song for the week of 08/03/08

FEAR OF GOD (metal band) - "Betrayed"



When the night comes
Run away
When the night fall calls our your name.
The lust you feel
Has caused pain
Silent in the morning light
Go home to your betrayed.

When the night comes
Run and hide
When the night falls
Get inside
It belongs to the betrayed
Who can't decide
To live or die.
Something's on their
Minds...
It doesn't matter
They're just killing
Time.
I like the way the knife feels in your back.

Words fall
Between us
Lying in the dust, no trust
Their shadows cover us.
Recite this vow together
Swear on
Our souls forever
I'm nothing, in on one. Can we trust

Whitout mercy
Whitout pity
We silent stalk
The streets of
The city looking for you
I am betrayed. You will feel my rage
You fucking goddamn king of the world

Friday, August 1, 2008

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 10

Too Fit to Be President?

Facing an Overweight Electorate, Barack Obama Might Find Low Body Fat a Drawback

Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn't give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.

"Listen, I'm skinny but I'm tough," Sen. Obama said.

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

The candidate has been criticized by opponents for appearing elitist or out of touch with average Americans. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in July shows Sen. Obama still lags behind Republican John McCain among white men and suburban women who say they can't relate to his background or perceived values.

"He's too new ... and he needs to put some meat on his bones," says Diana Koenig, 42, a housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas, who says she voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

"I won't vote for any beanpole guy," another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

MORE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1217553 ... 008_topbox

Quotent Quaotables vol. 11

"Daddy's gonna stroll down that far subterranean shore, all littered with the flotsam of hopes and dreams. Relics of ancient times. Lonely cenotaphs. Standing along that melancholy tideland."

-
Jeff Bridges from Terry Gilliam's Tideland.