You started it. Show me everything. I can handle myself.

Just an observation on something that's been bothering me on my own blog for some time now- not enough quotes from female characters in movies as post titles.

First a quick note on the quotes themselves. I really don't have any methodology to how I pick quotes to go along with whatever I'm blathering about that day. Sometimes I'll read about something in the news and a quote immediately springs to mind. On rare occasions I'll build the post around a quote from a movie I've recently watched.

As you probably suspected I grab the majority of my quotes off of the IMDB. Again, there's little methodology. If I've written something about FISA for instance then I might immediately go look for a quote from "The Manchurian Candidate." If I can't find a good quote from that film then I may follow the link to Frank Sinatra's book of work and pick another movie he's been in to find a quote. It's a bit of a zen thing.

I have some rules for myself that I try to follow when I pick a quote and picture to head my post. It has to be a movie or television I've actually seen. The quote has to have subtext. Finally the picture has to be on or near to the point when the line used in the quote was actually spoken. (That last one is the toughest to hit and I often have to "cheat" with the picture.)

Recently I realized that the vast majority of the quotes I've used these past years were from male characters. Part of this isn't that surprising in that, as liberal and non-sexist as I try to be, I'm still a guy. I like action movies. It follows that the characters I identify with on a conscious/ subconscious would be strong male leads.

With this in mind I recently set out to deliberately find and use more quotes from women characters. I decided to use a Sophia Loren quote last week. I had a devil of a time finding a good quote from a movie with Loren to use. It didn't help that 2/3rds of the movies on her resume were Italian.

But the exercise tickled my curiosity so I spent a couple of hours thinking up the names of famous actresses, checking their filmology and then the memorable quotes from their individual films. What I found from that little admittedly non-scientific exercise is that, with the exception of women like Elizabeth Taylor or Katherine Hepburn, actresses don't have as many great lines as actors in movies. Here's some of the stuff that I think contributes to that conclusion--

• Nerds -- Quotes on the IMDB are compiled by fans of the individual movies and not some group of movie scholars who dig through the movies looking for great lines. Point is this could be a group of guys who live in their parent's basement.


• Who has the conch? --Most writers, especially in the golden age of Hollywood, were men. As such they wrote FOR men.


• By men, for men -- There aren't that many strong characters who are women written for movies. Strong characters, regardless of gender, get the best lines.


• And your little dog too -- Along those same lines characters that are strong that happen to be women are usually villains.


• It blowed up real good -- Hollywood makes action movies and most action heroes, with the exception of films like Thelma and Louise and Aliens, traditionally are men.

While I readily admit my little study was nowhere near empirical, I don't doubt for a second that any actress who has spent any amount of time around Hollywood would back up what I found.

As for myself-- I'm going to continue to try and utilize more quotes from women here. I can't promise that it will ever be perfectly distributed just because of my Schwarzenegger fixation.

At least I'm admitting I have a problem. That's a start.

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Off topic but in the course of doing the above mentioned research I did come across this long, beautiful anti-war quote from Elizabeth Taylor Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor in The Lion in Winter. It's too long to use in it's entirety as a post title and too great to break up.

Prince John: A knife! He's got a knife!

Eleanor: Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.

We're off to Rome to see the Pope.

There's been a bunch of debate bouncing around the intertubes and the more traditional media about the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion focused on the make religious make-up of the majority in that opinion and what it means towards future cases before the court. Predictably; those that pooh-pooh each an every other claim of discrimination in our society are the first to trot out the discrimination defense when they feel the least bit wronged. In this case they're screaming that those who point out that the five majority members in that decision are catholic are somehow displaying an anti-catholic bigotry.

The well that those that defend the majority justices seem to always dip from is that of John Kennedy and his run for the presidency. Kennedy faced a lot of public criticism, mostly from protestant Evangelicals in a not so ironic twist, that a catholic president would be beholding to Rome if he were elected. In a 1959 Look magazine interview he responded to this criticism directly -

"Whatever one's religion in private life may be, for the office-holder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts – including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state."

President Kennedy was flatly stating that his duty to the constitution would come before his duty to his religious beliefs. The criticism directed at the five catholic members of the court after the Carhart decision is that they were inverting that equation.

Finally- putting all that aside and focusing on diversity. Many of us do want the court to be more diverse but not under the simplistic equation religious conservatives have held us to. A female conservative, a black conservative and an Italian-American conservative do no diversity make. What we need on the USSC is intellectual diversity. Five of any group that subscribe strictly to a narrow, ideologically binding religious worldview is counterproductive towards those ends.

The sky is pocked with stars. What eyes the wise men must have had to see a new one in so many.

I'm ashamed to admit I watched the Academy Awards and was marginally entertained. The biggest letdown of the night was Peter O'Toole's eigth jobbing at the hands of the academy even though I'm sure Forrest Whitaker gave a superior performance (haven't seen either film.)

I've got a soft spot for O'Toole as a fan and would've loved to see his speech. He looked downright shoked when the announcement came which was quite a bummer. Add to that the fact this will probably be his last chance, well, very depressing.