(and that's ten syllables. Phew.)

(Actually, bravo! I needed the laugh.)

One semi-regular got things started by ostentatiously deploring every mention of Palin. Ever since he was chastised for attacking several of us (including me), he's been the Hall Monitor from Hell, counseling that nobody should mention anything political, lest assholes (like him) take offense and start flame wars like the one he tried to start and was called on.

After several such comments from him, another irregular poster showed up and started flaming in earnest, supported by a clutch of new names (purported lurkers who seemed to know nothing about the group) and posts under forged names of regulars. This poster or posters has a group blog that leaves them/it with lots of time on the ol' hands, as nobody seems to comment there. If you go back a score of posts in its eponymous blog, you'll find a whopping six comments, three of which are trackbacks on a hardhitting post about cellphone photos of teenage tits.

For the first time I can recall, Josh (who was trying to enjoy a brief vacation) had to shut down the comments on a post. Of course, the A-hole Team has shown up to jeer in the new thread. You can't keep us out! is their theme now.

If only there was some harmless sandbox where these maladjusted troglodytes could take out their frustrated rage on the world and it just didn't matter. Besides the internet.

Man, you guys are good.

Never was an Irish accent mangled more horribly than by Jonathan Pryce in Ronin. Except maybe by Natascha McElhone in the same movie. Or Tom Cruise in Far and Away. Or Richard Gere in The Jackal. Or...this list could get out of hand.

A drum, a drum, McCain doth come.
Along with all the weird posters of sea and land.

You are good, my son. Go the Masses are over.

Jane

I'm not going to apologize for liking Ronin. Or Armageddon, for that matter. If you say you like My Dinner with Andre my reply will be "well, that explains a lot". heh.

Go figure.

and to elfwreck:

Hazah!

Wherefrom then do you hale, that there it haileth not?

What strike me is that it's a word that the film-makers thought an audience would already have some meaning for. The whole samurai myth seems to have a utility in the West, as a label for certain sorts of warrior.

Erik Nelson @22:
The movie you describe, could easily be a sequel to Highlander.

No. Please. Four is Five too many. Speaking of mangled accents . . .

What's in a voice? that which exposits
In any accent would sound as clunky;
So infodumps would, were they not infodumps call'd,
Retain that dread redundancy they owe
Without that title. For Bob, as you know,
There is no thread which on topic stays,
yet with strange postings, even drift's a phase.

It is a troll, and spewing is its fun.
Arise, fair mods, and disemvowel the envious troll,
Who is already sick and pale with bile,
That they, the regulars, have far more art and wit than s/he.

Ronin has become a common loan word in English. As early as 1985, when the "Engineering Computing Systems" division of the company I worked for was dismantled and laid off wholesale, some of us bought T-shirts that read "ECS Ronin" against a background of an armored samurai attacking with his sword.

Do you mean one of Ken Loach's criticisms of Thatcher and New Labour?

OBAMA:
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Obama was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd--in Kenya.