Monday, November 10, 2003

Oh no. Barbra Streisand is angry that her husband's miniseries has been cancelled by CBS. Sure, they may have portrayed the Reagans in an unflattering light by making up things that never happened and all, but it's a movie, not a documentary. They should be allowed to take some artistic license.
You know, she's got a point there. When STREISAND! The Movie comes out, I'm sure she wouldn't mind if a few things were exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth to illustrate a larger point. For instance, there could be a scene with a young Barbra Streisand (Mayim Bialik) pushes another singer in front of a bus before going to audition for a role in a musical. Sure, that may never have happened LITERALLY, but it could demonstrate that Babs was driven and ambitious even at a young age. Another scene could show an older Barbra Streisand (Sarah Jessica Parker) beating and kicking her then-husband Elliott Gould (David Schwimmer). Sure it may never have actually happened, but the two did get divorced, so that could show that there were stresses in the marriage.
I'm sure she wouldn't have any problems with that at all. · Why should movies about real people stick to the facts? [AdventuresinBureaucracy ]

Blog Sleuth Hipper
Eurovavant points out this fantastic bit of blogging detective work on the HipperCritical blog. Some lawyer was allowed onto the New York Time's Op-Ed pages yesterday with an editorial arguing that Iraq should be required to pay its international debt in full. Turns out (but the NYT didn't bother to provide any clue about this) that he's a lawyer whose clients are those companies and kingdoms to whom Iraq owes that money. Our sleuth "Hipper" took to the Google trail and found that out, plus a whole lot of other juicy information - such as that the lawyer is on record in the past as urging the forgiving of Russia's foreign debt. (But Russia was the one paying his fees then, you see. That was then; this is now.)
· Hippercritical