Juxtaposing the Nobel Peace Prize and amateur porn? Piece of cake...

Everyone's shocked that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm still digesting, but here's what I find interesting. This is all about aspirational voting. Rather like how some people vote for Republicans because they want lower taxes on the wealthy, in case they someday join their ranks. Or moreso that the Nobel voters want to believe that Obama will someday achieve the things that he's being criticized by the haters for not yet doing even though the disagree with his approach to their very core. My feeling is that this is exactly what Obama needs right about now, even if his advisers privately feel like it's a distraction. Keep Barack looking out at the much broader horizon, which is what he does so well. Have the world focus on what a break from the recent past of U.S. policy he represents. All the while slogging through the nuts and bolts of governing. Aside from all that, I was struck by the passing reference to how he's the "third sitting U.S. President" to win a Peace Prize. The other two? Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for founding the League of Nations, and Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. In my mind those Prizes were for very different criteria. But this is a very different world, so I say debate amongst yourselves.

To shift gears mightily, I'm going to see some porn at noon today. In a theatre. Hump! is the 5th annual amateur porn contest sponsored by The Stranger (Seattle's only real newspaper) that inspired the storyline for the movie "Humpday". Speaking of which, I saw "Humpday" in Milwaukee recently as a part of the Milwaukee Film Festival because, well...I was in Milwaukee and I'd missed it on its art house release schedule this summer (it's out on DVD in November). "Humpday" was a sweet, perfect little movie. Well, almost perfect. My rating - B-plus. But Hump! is the real deal. Amateur porn shorts, shot by real local people and screened only today and tomorrow before the entries are burned or sent to Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council in a brown paper wrapper or sent to NASA to be included in the next Moon bombing. Am I a fan of porn? Um, define fan. But then again, who isn't? And I'd rather see a hilarious compilation of local perversion surrounded by hipsters than Marlon Brando getting his butthole buttered up in "Last Tango in Paris" with a bunch of film snobs that might endeavor to call that humorless crap art. Check back for a rating. Sometime after I pick up Maya from daycare, one should expect.

Hope your own definition of modern parenting adds a slightly revised definition today. Rock on.