Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival brings us the next cinematic breakthrough in defense of unpopular sexual minorities, following the example of Brokeback Mountain. This year’s cutting edge entry is titled: Zoo.

Zoo” is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as “the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible.” But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

“Zoo,” premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen “Police Beat”) and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: “I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”..

I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, ‘Why are you making this film?’ It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything.”

In the end, Devor ended up agreeing with the Roman writer Terence, who said “I consider nothing human alien to me.”

“It happens,” the filmmaker said, “so it’s part of who we are.

Maybe of who you are, Devor.

As far as I’m concerned: “He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft, but he ain’t no brother of mine.”

Get ready for next year’s cinematic sensation, Funeral Parlor.

Says Boston herald columnist Howie Carr:

Who really wants to save a U.S. House seat for Massachusetts? You gotta be kidding. The best thing that could happen for America would be for the commonwealth to shed several districts, and it’s a damn shame we can’t cede one of our two Senate seats as well.

But if the hacks truly want to inflate the state’s plummeting population by rounding up thousands of illegal aliens, it shouldn’t be difficult. First place to check is the hospital emergency rooms. They’re the ones with translators, and a lot of them will be wearing neck braces from the phony auto accidents they’ve staged.

But if this harebrained scheme to celebrate diversity doesn’t work, which Mass. congressman will lose out in this low-stakes game of musical chairs? Come 2011, redistricting will be in the hands of the Legislature, where nothing is on the level, everything is a deal and no deal is too small.

Let’s work our way east from the New York state line. Probably No. 1 on the 2011 Hit Parade would be Rep. John Olver of Amherst. He’s old, an unrepentant Bulger hack, and I’m not saying Olver is slow, but he’s one of the few human beings in the at-risk category for contracting Dutch elm disease. Next is Richie Neal of Springfield, a former mayor. He can make a claim few other Hampden County pols can: He has never been indicted. Not once.

Moving east, we find Jim McGovern, D-Havana. This guy is so far to the left he makes Barney Frank look reasonable. Talk about your impeccable moonbat credentials – he was the first prominent hack to endorse Deval Patrick, but only because Fidel was too sick to make the run. With a Worcester County base of close to 300,000 people, he’s as entrenched as the memory of Che Guevara.

Now that the Democrats control the House again, Barney Frank is going nowhere. As a committee chairman, Dick Armey’s favorite Bay State rep hasn’t had this much fun since he responded to Hot Bottoms XXX-rated personal ad.

In the Fifth District, Marty “Midas” Meehan has $5 million and a solid base in Lowell. Plus, his district bumps up against a neighboring state (New Hampshire), which is always a good thing in redistricting, because it means there’s only so much gerrymandering that can be done. Marty’s not terribly popular on Beacon Hill right now, but you can buy a lot of friends with 5 million dead presidents.

Next door in Essex County, John Tierney won’t make waves. He also won’t make the All-Star team. Like Midas Meehan, this empty suit would have liked to run for the Senate, but with John Kerry hovering at 5 percent in New Hampshire, that ain’t in the cards.

Which brings us to the Dean, Ed Markey of Malden. After 30-plus years in Congress, most of his constituents couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, nor would they want to. Fast Eddie has outlived his district, and now it makes no sense whatsoever. Framingham?

Still, Markey always survives redistricting. When it comes to the legislature, he knows how to kiss butt and spread campaign loot around. No one knows who’ll be calling the shots at the State House in 2011, but it’s a sure bet kissing butt and spreading loot will still work very well indeed

Mike Capuano from Somerville is the guy who should have Markey’s heavily Italian, eastern Middlesex enclave. Instead he represents a Cambridge-Boston district that skews black and gay, neither of which Capuano is. But he’s tight with Speaker Pelosi, so he’s safe.

Steve Lynch is from South Boston, and his district is the answer to the question, Where did Southie go? He’s safe, but Bill Delahunt might have a problem down the road. Technically he’s from Quincy but that’s Lynch-land. Rep. Dilettante’s real base is Venezuela. But he’ll be 70, and by then may be ready to cash out his various public pensions and succeed Bob Dole as a spokesman for Viagra.

So what do you call getting rid of one of these dolts? A good start.

Is it possible to locate a man given only his photograph and first name?

A UK-based game company is testing the theory of six degrees of separation. They have given us a photograph of a man, a name, and the Japanese characters that translate to “Find me”.

We are each only five to seven people away from any target in the world. Someone, somewhere, knows Satoshi. Help spread the word and track down this person!

Project site.

It was just occurring to me: presidents of the United States are a lot like cats, and adversaries of the United States are a lot like mice.

George W. Bush is like some cats I’ve had. The mice made a mess on 9/11, and Bush responded by desultorily playing with Afghanistan and Iraq in much the fashion some cats will enthusiastically start tackling a given mouse, but simply bat him around a bit, and then lose interest and go to sleep, while the mouse recovers and scuttles off to violate one’s domestic order another day.

In the case of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Venezuela and a growing list of leftwing dictatorships in Latin America, Bush is worse, more like an old, lazy, and utterly indifferent spoiled housecat, who does no mousing at all.

When one thinks about it, one realizes that in the last 50 years we’ve had good looking presidents and ugly presidents, presidents who had a lot of charm and presidents who made Americans go out and throw up in the street. We’ve had presidents who talked a good game, presidents who screwed up everything, and Ronald Reagan who had a special grace. Besides Reagan, though, we’ve hardly had a president, since the time of FDR, who was any kind of mouser at all. And by my standards, even including Reagan, we have not had a really serious mouser.

I used to have a small grey cat who’d nail one foreign enemy, at least, every night. Our cellar was full of corpses of mice, and voles, and shrews. She didn’t just play with them. After a short session of batting her victim around, she’d administer a lethal, leopard-like bite to the back of the neck, and that was that.

How can a US administration just sit there, and let some idiot like Chavez take over a nearby country, nationalize property (including the property of US corporations), denounce the United States and embark on a campaign of Hemispheric subversion in alliance with our enemies? One really wants to take one’s slipper, and whack that sleeping president a good one, and say: “Over there! Mouse. Go get him! Hunt him up. Kill, kill, kill.”

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez, the tin-horn dictator of Venezuela, has followed Adolph Hitler’s example, and gotten his rubber-stamp parliament to start passing legislation permitting him to rule by decree, and remain in power forever.

Venezuela’s National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months. President Hugo Chavez says he wants “revolutionary laws” to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.

The bill allowing him to enact laws by decree is expected to win final approval easily in the assembly on its second reading on Tuesday.

Venezuela’s political opposition has no representation in the National Assembly since it boycotted elections in 2005.

Chavez has been hosting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and is doubtless plotting ways and means to extend the reach of our enemies into this hemisphere. The Bush Administration will be guilty of criminal negligence every bit as bad as Clinton’s, if it fails to remove this revolting communist thug from power before he does further violence to the rights of his own people, and before he creates a functioning base for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Mouseguns has an anonymous humor item comparing the AK-47, the AR-15, and the Mosin-Nagant.

It reads to me like it was written from a Russian perspective. An American would use the Garand as the older comparison. A really sophisticated connoisseur (i.e., somebody old, like me) would compare the 1903 Springfield.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.

Reuters has a story of a feral woman from Vietnam.

HANOI – A woman has been returned to her home in Vietnam’s Central Highlands 18 years after she went missing as an eight-year old girl tending cows near the Cambodian border, her father told a newspaper on Thursday.

Policeman Ksor Lu long believed that his daughter had been eaten by a wild animal until last Saturday when he was told that loggers had found “a forestman” at a village in Cambodia’s province of Ratanakiri.

Lu arrived and “recognized his daughter from the first sighting” even though her body was blackened and she had long hair down to her legs and could not speak, according to the account in the Vietnam Rural Today newspaper.

Lu said his daughter, Ro Cham H’pnhieng of the Jrai ethnic minority group, probably spent most of the time in the jungle in Cambodia since she went missing in 1989.

The loggers told Lu that they caught her after realizing that someone had sneaked up and taken their lunch.

Lu said that at first it was difficult bringing her back to normal life because she resisted showering, wearing clothes or using chopsticks, fending him off and shouting and crying.

Four days later she started cooperating, Lu said.

“It is not easy indeed but life is waiting ahead for her.”

Local government out of control and burdening residents with an ever-increasing array of pettyfogging rules and regulations?

The little village of Fago, located in the Spanish Pyrenees, found a solution to this overly common problem.

Mobius shoe

What should the up-to-date and sophisticated young lady wear?

How about Mobius shoes and a dissolving dress?

What every well-designed home needs.

New York Times story.

No picture of the stairs, alas!

Seven years ago, when Nader Tehrani and Monica Ponce de Leon, partners at Office dA, an architecture firm in Boston, were asked to renovate a five-story town house in the Back Bay neighborhood, they faced a singular design challenge. The house belonged to Elmar Seibel, now 54, a dealer in rare books on art and architecture, and his wife, Azita Bina-Seibel, 46, a chef and restaurateur.

Mr. Seibel’s personal collection includes at least 40,000 books on Persian and Iranian culture. He keeps many in a warehouse, but perhaps 14,000 or 15,000 are at home.

There is a 1491 copy of a medical book written by Avicenna, the 11th-century philosopher and physician also known as Ibn Sina. A 17th-century eyewitness account of the coronation of a shah, written by Jean Chardin, a French jeweler, is inscribed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, then the finance minister of France. A 19th-century cookbook has 4,000 handwritten recipes of dishes made for the shah’s court.

The collection began with the birth of the couple’s son, Kian, now 13. Mr. Seibel, a West German native, and Ms. Bina, born in Iran, wanted to give him something from his mother’s family’s cultural heritage. “The original idea was to create something for him — but it takes on a life of its own,” Mr. Seibel said. (Kian, who is fluent in Farsi, has not yet read any of the books in the collection. But he says he will, soon.)

Where, then, were the 14,000 books to go?

“What holds the house together is a vertical staircase that wraps itself around a tower of books that goes up three floors,” Mr. Tehrani said. (The family lives on the top three floors, while Ms. Bina’s mother, Aghdas Zoka-Bina, and a tenant occupy apartments on the first and ground-floor levels.) The stairway ends just below a skylight. “The tower of books appears to pierce the skylight, though it doesn’t in reality,” Mr. Tehrani said.

“The staircase is the ‘it’ factor,” he added. The books are easily accessible from the staircase, just four inches away. Some shelves are designed to hold books upright, while others are wide and shallow, so that manuscripts or magazines can be left there, in an offhand way — and they are. Many of the shelves are backed in translucent glass to let natural light shine through, and recessed lighting in the ceiling makes it possible to grab a book, settle onto any step and read in perfect light. Squinting is not required.

We just bought 80 surplus library bookcases.

Jonah Goldberg‘s mind is boggling at the results of a recent Fox News Poll.

News story:

63 percent of Americans say they want the plan to succeed, including 79 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and 51 percent of Democrats.

Meaning 37% of Americans, 21% of Republicans, 37% of Independents, and 49% of democrats either desire its failure, or are not sure.

On the larger political front, more people think “most Democrats” want the Bush plan to fail and for him to have to withdraw troops in defeat (48 percent), than think Democrats want the plan to succeed and lead to a stable Iraq (32 percent).

Robert Edward Lee, the greatest American military commander of all time, was born January 19, 1807 at Stratford Hall Plantation, Westmoreland County, Virginia.