Godspeed, old friend.
Showing posts with label Public Displays of Affection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Displays of Affection. Show all posts
Monday, October 17
Saturday, December 18
Thursday, August 26
The Best Damn Program That Has Ever Been On Television
LOUIE, from Louis CK. FX, Tuesday nights, check local listings. Honestly. In about eight weeks, for me anyway--I don't get HBO, which is to say I can't be bothered stealing it, so I've yet to see Lucky Louie--he's gone from a remarkably fearless stand-up, and a first-rate comedy writer, to a goddam genius in the art of the 22-minute film. Seriously. My Poor Wife is no longer allowed to snack while we watch it, until I get re-certified in the Heimlich.
Monday, June 28
Wish I'd Said That, Vol. MMMDCCXLIII
ROGER Ebert, via Wonkette:
Supreme Court sides with squirrel hunters and drug gangs against cops and innocent bystanders.
Saturday, May 1
The Best Thing Ever Said On The Internets, Vol. V
WONKETTE highlights Sarah Palin's concern-tweeting the Gulf oil disaster ("All industry efforts must b employed"). Not_So_Much responds:
How's that drilly-spilly thing workin' out for ya?
Tuesday, April 6
A Chicken Is Just An Egg's Idea Of How To Get More Eggs
KIA, in comments at Roy's:
My dad turns 90 in a couple weeks. He's pretty much sharp as he ever was, which means you adjust for a certain level of befuddlement, something I inherited, but we apply to different aspects of modern life. That befuddlement is the centerpiece of his gentle humor. He's a funny guy. He was the youngest survivor of eight children, and his sisters cooed over him, and petted him, until he was seventy-five. And it shows. He's sweet. He's kindly. He goes to church every week. He'd give you the shirt off his back.
He's a lifelong Republican, from a family tradition of Kentucky Union supporters. He's a racist. He's a captive of FOX News.
It colors, and it tempers (believe it or not) the things I have to say about his party and his cohort. I know he's a good man, and I grew up with a more-or-less overt racist stepfather after my parents divorced (my mother, too, was--is--considerably worse, and until the dementia confined her you had to try to steer her clear of any opportunity for blurting. In the early days I took her to the bank--before we realized she had a banking fixation--and she told the teller he spoke very well for a colored boy), so I've seen the difference intent makes. I understand, or I just pretend, that the pervasive racism of his generation, the racism I grew up with, was partly cultural. That doesn't mean I think it was excusable, just that I know that back then he wouldn't have donned a sheet, and would have helped the first African-American family on the block move in, right before he put up the For Sale sign. (Ten years later my stepfather--another lifelong Lincoln Republican--would have blamed the whole thing on Ted Kennedy.)
I've seen this close up. Those two men were both working-class kids. No African-American ever did them any harm, but both knew that the natural order of things required everyone--especially everyone else--to know his place. One lived long enough to have the Reagan Paradise he'd agitated for for years deny him Social Security benefits--"new rules, sorry"--and his twenty-year employer fire him to rob him of his health insurance when the cancer that would kill him in three years left him too weak to work, or walk much. The other's been cashing his Social Security checks, and charging his healthcare costs to Medicare, for twenty-five years. And he thinks Sean Hannity is a keen observer of the ship of state.
Now, maybe some ninety-year-old is not indicative of the Teabaggers, or maybe it's just mutatis mutandis. He had the Red Scare, and Goldwater, both failures; they had Reagan, who was too Great for his disasters to be attributed to him. He had Jim Crow; the next generation had to keep its powder dry until Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton said something in public, or Katrina wiped out a major American city, or a black man running for President garnered the sort of fawning support they themselves gave Nixon or Reagan or Bush II or Palin. My dad, it seemed, could simply assume that post-war white, American, and Christian hegemony was the natural order of the Universe. But as time passed, and as those were revealed as mere artifacts of a kaleidoscopic "reality", the "desire to empty themselves of experience in order to sustain this world view" became more and more necessary, until it became a badge of honor to complain about the PC police giving all the good parking places to cripples.
The attitude behind that sort of thing has been with us since we crawled out of the primordial soup, probably. But take a look sometime at Reagan's speeches from early on in his manufactured political career. Perpetual aggrievedness, perpetual demonization, I-was-a-Liberal-Democrat-before-FDR-went-to-Yalta, or King went to Birmingham, or Madalyn Murray went to Court. Or Darwin boarded the Beagle. Why people buy this may have more to do with innate attitudes than politics; it certainly tends to fly in the face of political common sense often enough. But one party has been willing to double down on Stupid for decades to take advantage of it. And, I blame it more than I blame my old man. For whatever reason.
I'm disposed just now to think that the worldview (stingy, sordid, narrow, unimaginative, seeing all value as money value, incapacity not to translate the money value into actual experience while at the same time cherishing the conviction that they have achieved all that culture achieved in their very own special exceptional persons--in a word, your basic Babbittry) predates the politics, it is deeply ingrained, it has been around for a long time, it's what for many years distinguished Americans from the rest of the world (see for example Edith Wharton's "The Custom of the Country" where she savages these traits in the character of Undine Spragg, or Trollope's "The American Senator"). Now they feel themselves to be under assault, and the politics is an instrument for the survival of their sense of the world and of their place in it. But there's even another layer to it, which is the desire to empty themselves of experience in order to sustain this world view, which is, at least now (if not in Wharton's time), a sort of mass-produced artifact that they think is a "personality," that is sort of churned and recycled endlessly out of this legacy of smug romanticizing self-regard.
My dad turns 90 in a couple weeks. He's pretty much sharp as he ever was, which means you adjust for a certain level of befuddlement, something I inherited, but we apply to different aspects of modern life. That befuddlement is the centerpiece of his gentle humor. He's a funny guy. He was the youngest survivor of eight children, and his sisters cooed over him, and petted him, until he was seventy-five. And it shows. He's sweet. He's kindly. He goes to church every week. He'd give you the shirt off his back.
He's a lifelong Republican, from a family tradition of Kentucky Union supporters. He's a racist. He's a captive of FOX News.
It colors, and it tempers (believe it or not) the things I have to say about his party and his cohort. I know he's a good man, and I grew up with a more-or-less overt racist stepfather after my parents divorced (my mother, too, was--is--considerably worse, and until the dementia confined her you had to try to steer her clear of any opportunity for blurting. In the early days I took her to the bank--before we realized she had a banking fixation--and she told the teller he spoke very well for a colored boy), so I've seen the difference intent makes. I understand, or I just pretend, that the pervasive racism of his generation, the racism I grew up with, was partly cultural. That doesn't mean I think it was excusable, just that I know that back then he wouldn't have donned a sheet, and would have helped the first African-American family on the block move in, right before he put up the For Sale sign. (Ten years later my stepfather--another lifelong Lincoln Republican--would have blamed the whole thing on Ted Kennedy.)
I've seen this close up. Those two men were both working-class kids. No African-American ever did them any harm, but both knew that the natural order of things required everyone--especially everyone else--to know his place. One lived long enough to have the Reagan Paradise he'd agitated for for years deny him Social Security benefits--"new rules, sorry"--and his twenty-year employer fire him to rob him of his health insurance when the cancer that would kill him in three years left him too weak to work, or walk much. The other's been cashing his Social Security checks, and charging his healthcare costs to Medicare, for twenty-five years. And he thinks Sean Hannity is a keen observer of the ship of state.
Now, maybe some ninety-year-old is not indicative of the Teabaggers, or maybe it's just mutatis mutandis. He had the Red Scare, and Goldwater, both failures; they had Reagan, who was too Great for his disasters to be attributed to him. He had Jim Crow; the next generation had to keep its powder dry until Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton said something in public, or Katrina wiped out a major American city, or a black man running for President garnered the sort of fawning support they themselves gave Nixon or Reagan or Bush II or Palin. My dad, it seemed, could simply assume that post-war white, American, and Christian hegemony was the natural order of the Universe. But as time passed, and as those were revealed as mere artifacts of a kaleidoscopic "reality", the "desire to empty themselves of experience in order to sustain this world view" became more and more necessary, until it became a badge of honor to complain about the PC police giving all the good parking places to cripples.
The attitude behind that sort of thing has been with us since we crawled out of the primordial soup, probably. But take a look sometime at Reagan's speeches from early on in his manufactured political career. Perpetual aggrievedness, perpetual demonization, I-was-a-Liberal-Democrat-before-FDR-went-to-Yalta, or King went to Birmingham, or Madalyn Murray went to Court. Or Darwin boarded the Beagle. Why people buy this may have more to do with innate attitudes than politics; it certainly tends to fly in the face of political common sense often enough. But one party has been willing to double down on Stupid for decades to take advantage of it. And, I blame it more than I blame my old man. For whatever reason.
Thursday, March 18
Monday, January 25
Sports Rap With Da Dawg
• The reason my third favorite moment of the playoffs so far was the Colts win over the Jersey Jets has little to do with fandom, and almost everything to do with the fact that the goddam citizenry booed a 14-0 team because it rested its starters through two meaningless games.
• Which, by the way, led the NFL (Motto: All The Competence of the NASCAR Competition Committee, Applied To Sports!) to make grumbling noises about "the integrity of the game" while simultaneously "affirming" that the Colts did nothing wrong, unethical, or even questionable. Someday archaeologists are going to have to explain how dozens, even hundreds, of our fellow citizens could be driven into the nation's streets, public parks, and dirt tracks to protest a possible 5% improvement in the health-care system that was bankrupting them, but blatant, self-serving fabrication flies like a weather balloon over the tundra.
• Speaking of NFL rules, it would seem to behoove them to either 1) let the refs in on them or 2) let the rest of us in on the Double Golden Top Secret Rule Book they actually work from. (The latter is not a crack, nor a figment of my imagination; alone among major sports, the league keeps the exact rules given its refs a secret). They passed The Brady Rules to protect quarterbacks, then let Brett Fah-vu-ruh get shellacked, apparently on the grounds that the Saints were doing it strategically rather than tactically. And yes, the Colts got away with one, too, although it wasn't much of a hit, so far as you could tell from the only replay shot CBS had, which seemed to come from the Blimp. I'll be glad to trade the penalty if we can have the ref move off the ball when he was supposed to on that quarterback sneak, rather than standing over it while the Jets completed their substitutions. And for the life of me, how do they keep missing replay calls? I'm not sure where they saw the interference, let alone a catchable ball, on that OT call against the Vikes, and the following reception call is difficult to explain, though we have to allow that they've now fucked with the rules to the extent that the fan has no real idea what does or doesn't constitute a catch.
• But then, ye gods, can someone who knows the game explain th' fuck Minnesota was doing on that last series? I don't care who your kicker is, displaying beatific plerophory at the thought of a 51 yard attempt is religious insanity. And I know you'd displayed an inability to hang on to the football that rivaled George W. Bush's inability to find an exit door, but sheesh. We're spoiled in Indy, but the Colts would've run two plays in the time it took you guys to get up to the thirty-five and run up the middle for a loss.
• Which brings up an attendant point: how come the Colts do the hurry-up/ no huddle so much better than anyone else? When Miami had a little success with the Wildcat early in the season, half the league started direct snapping. The Colts have been doing this for ten years.
• Speaking of ten years, my second favorite moment of the playoffs has been when the Colts-Ravens announcers (Dan Dierdorf and Greg Gumble, IIRC) riffed on Manning's "happy feet", which was the CW knock on the man for nearly a decade. Ooooh, look, he's moving his feet in the pocket! He's afraid to get hit! Shifting your weight quickly from foot to foot in the pocket is apparently the one cardinal sin in all of sports mechanics and a Tell bigger'n Boris Becker's tongue. Dierdorf allowed as how maybe that sort of talk was now, oh, disproven. No, Dan, that sort of talk is now, officially, idiotic. Disproven is what it was at the time. But props to you guys for bringing it up in an industry where the shelf life of the average expert comment is twenty seconds.
• My favorite playoff moment, though, comes courtesy our local media, one division of which went around sticking microphones in the faces of Jets fans in town for the game, asking them how Indianapolis compared to New York. Really. I'm not sure what they expected; maybe "Nice clean place you got here" or "Where do you hide the attractive hookers?". I was left to ponder whether, if the Pope ever comes to town, they'll ask his entourage how that Robert Indiana "LOVE" sculpture compares with the Pietà . And one guy says, "Are you kiddin' me? [my Poor Wife recalls this as "Have you looked outside?"] This place is a dump!" Which was not just hysterical in its own right (it had the distinct vibe of Bush being interviewed by that Irish journalist who unexpectedly asked him questions, except with the roles reversed) but doubled the amusement when they went back to the anchor desk and at least one of the hairdos was visibly upset about it. Though my guess is if the guy'd said, "This place is a dump, but lemme tell ya, you've got some first-rate reporters here," it would've gone down like mint tea with honey.
Monday, January 18
None Of Your Damn Business *
* explanation E. D. Nixon was given when he inquired about the reason Rosa Parks had been arrested.
Friday, January 15
I (Heart) Charles Pierce
"...the execrable Mark Halperin, who is to political journalism what E. coli is to steakhouses."
Monday, December 7
Fun With Matrimony Vol. MCCCXXXI
THIRTY-three years ago today the sweetest and loveliest and funniest and most talented person I know decided to let me shack up with her, proving 1) you can be all those things and still suck at decision making, and 2) it probably didn't occur to her that three decades later I'd be describing it as shacking up just for a cheap laugh. That's twelve-thousand fifty-three days, and I'm sure she's regretted the decision at least once per. I, on the other hand, have regretted it about as much as Errol Flynn regretted being famous.
She makes me laugh, every day. I try to return the favor, although her laugh sounds a lot more strangled. She does the toughest job anyone can, and she does it whole-heartedly.
And she does it when anyone you know would chuck it and take the day off. Last Friday she had to have an outpatient medical procedure; she scheduled it for after school. I didn't know when she'd make it home, or how she'd be feeling, so I made her favorite soup and, it being the first day I got to play with the new mixer, I cranked out a couple loaves of potato bread.
She made it home in fairly good time, if a bit worse for wear, walked in the kitchen and told me something smelled good.
"Cock-a-leekie soup and fresh bread."
"What're you, tryin' to get laid?"
Happy thirty-third, darlin'. Just give me thirty-three more an' I'll let you change your mind.
Saturday, September 19
I Heart Charles Pierce
VOL. LXXIV:
I came to the not unreasonable conclusion that most of the politicians involved in this business--up to and including the lemon in the White House--don't care about the simple fact that this country is going to allow people to sicken and die because they can't afford to do anything else. Period. Everything else is dumbshow, a WWE card covered by people engaged in a really bad form of sportswriting--people, I might add, who could care less themselves that this country is going to allow people to sicken and die because they can't afford to do anything else.
Does anyone honestly believe that this White House has acted in good faith? With its allies in Congress? With its constituents? Hell, with its own campaign promises? Does anyone honestly believe that, say, Chuck Todd gives a rat's ass how many people out in the country slowly sicken and die as long as Chuck can tell us who's up and who's down, and what's politically feasible and what's not, and that he can still get a good table at the Palm? Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen an spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far removed from the actual concerns of people's lives--so far removed that, last weekend, we had a gathering of the politically halt, lame, blind, and crippled in Washington, gathered for the sole purpose of petitioning various oligarchs to keep screwing them with their pants on. Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen a spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far beyond even the limits of Irish Smartass to describe it. The political class in this country--politician and journalist, lobbyist and legislator, Republican and Democratic, Executive and Legislative -- has made a collective decision to protect the profits of one of the least popular industries in the history of the Republic, to preserve the iron grip of corporate bureaucrats over the practice of medicine in America, and to refuse vitrually without serious discussion to adopt measures favored by 77 percent of the voting public. It is to be in awe, is what it is.
Monday, June 22
I (Heart) Charles Pierce
ON the publicly celebrated, fer chrissakes, God-given Freedom to kick unprofitable customers off insurance rolls:
I've been trying to say that for 1745 posts.
Watersheds just ain't what they used to be, I guess. There was a time, and not so long ago, when a story like this would have been a game-changer in the debate over reforming the nation's healthcare system, if anything as capricious, and vicious, and utterly random as what we have can rightly be called a "system." Executives of the insurance companies got up in front of the Congress and said, quite calmly, that, yes, they would continue to deny coverage to sick people in order to make themselves even wealthier. That should have resulted in sufficient political pressure to infuse a spine even into the members of this Congress. But we no longer are a viable self-governing political commonwealth, and our representatives know that, and truly don't give a damn, and the people in the elite political media could care less. (Hey, Mark Halperin, go clean a bedpan, OK?) It is on health issues where the gulf separating the inside and out Beltway realities swallows up common sense and, in doing so, causes the most material damage. The Schiavo case was a garish and noisy example, but the idea that a Democratic president and a Democratic congress can't craft a health-reform package that contains a substantial public option that 75 percent of the people out there want because the Democrats are overly sensitive to intramural political imperatives is the Schiavo case writ unacceptably large. This is a political class responding only to itself, speaking its own language, operating by its own rules while real people get ground up in a system that everyone knows is a rigged game. Hell, at 75 percent, the president has enough "political cover" to put a single-payer option back "on the table." But he won't. Some corrupt old white man might yell at him.
I've been trying to say that for 1745 posts.
Thursday, March 5
Sustainable Limbaugh Farming
OKAY, first: what's it going to take to get people to realize who the real fucking criminals are? The woman in Florida who called 911 "because McDonalds ran on out McNuggets" was the victim of an attempted robbery which she should have reported to the police non-emergency line. We know nothing of her comportment, before or after the arrival of the police; we do not know whether Fort Pierce routinely cites people for making non-emergency 911 calls, or whether she was arrested for Talking After the Cop Told Her To Listen. What we do know, or can feel pretty safe in guessing, is that one cannot hang up a sign in Fort Pierce saying "Unidentified Fowl Parts, $3", take someone's money, and then say, "Oh, we're all out of Fowl, and it's against policy to give you a refund. I do have the Bucket O'Sludge, but since that's just $1.98 you'll have to take two. That'll be an additional 96¢ please. Plus tax. Thanks for waiting!"
Okay, it's Florida. Maybe I spoke too soon. But everywhere else that's known as "Theft by Conversion".
And, y'know, if you'd like to convince me that the way Ms Goodman was treated was not part of a concerted effort to steal people's money in the utterly predictable event of a fast-food restaurant running out of an item--or, for that matter, a customer changing his mind--which operated in part by assuring that no one in a supervisory position would be available to correct the problem without a long delay, you may start talking.
Here's another thing we know: we know the mass-market media flogged the incident in a knowingly misleading fashion because "Woman Calls 911 Over Missing McNuggets" is seen as a ratings grabber--and what that says about 'em is enough right there--while "Major National Advertiser Systematically Short-Changes Customers" somehow is not. The pampered pets reading this stuff off the teleprompter--who get the opportunity, while they're at it, to sneer at the $3.50 involved, or roughly what they're paid each morning to tweeze one eyebrow--would never have dreamed of calling 911 had they been victimized. They'd have called Corporate, and two minutes later the McDonald's Regional VP of Media Relations would have roller-skated in offering to perform vigorous and enthusiastic anilingus while they waited for the chopper to arrive with fresh hot McNuggets from California, where stringent consumer protection laws require them to know what the chickens actually died of.
Of course, if she'd just thought to bring along a finger she'd have been a media darling for 48 hours. Plan ahead.
The capper is that the exercise almost certainly winds up costing Kroc Full O'Crap money, since the over/under on Number of Lawyers on Ms Goodman's Doorstep One Hour Later is six.
Like many other Issues of the Day this brings me to local teevee "news", or as I like to call it, Competitive Teleprompter Phonetics. These would be the people who last Friday brought us the sad story of Ringo, the Jack Russell terrier found dead, having been killed, his owner said, by coyotes. The man had seen the marauding beasts just outside his property, he said, pointing to the land just beyond the fence he didn't have. (This was one of those treeless Burghervilles in Greenwood, the former-pastureland Indianapolis suburb just over the border in Dixie, so I'm not sure that they actually have a law requiring dogs to be fenced in. For that matter, I'm not sure it's illegal there for siblings to marry.) Anyway, two days later a tiny notice appeared inside the Metro section of the Sunday Racist Star, quoting a Department of Natural Resources investigator as saying it wasn't a coyote, that coyotes generally do not attack dogs, and that the culprit was most likely a wild dog. To my knowledge none of the locals rushed a film crew out so we could hear the man set the record straight; if anybody covered it at all I missed it. But then, you know, dogs=cute, full of tricks, faithful companions; coyotes=chaotic, scary, and publicly-fornicating Nature intruding on McHomes thrown up incontinently and zoning-free on Its habitat, which It obstinately refuses to recognize as Its former habitat. Sorta like 21st century Apaches.
The locals were cheered yesterday when Nestlé announced it'd be adding a few hundred jobs, long-term, in war-torn Anderson, IN, and they got to return to the cheerleading mode they were in during Mitch "Small Beer" Daniels' just concluded fourteen-month reelection campaign. I swear I'm not exaggerating. The Channel 8 anchors--both got a piece of the story; one imagines them fighting like kids in the back seat before the Solomonic decree that settled that one--were in an obvious state of excitement, and not just the professional excitement mode they break out for the routine puffery of church bazars and Billy Joel concerts. They use that so much I know it better than I do my wife's moles. The news was so big that Governor Mitch "How's the Weather Down There?" Daniels actually left his bunker and was sighted for the third time since November. Of course, the Nestlé folks gave him a big pair of scissors and a ribbon to cut, a combination guaranteed to lure Mitch like doughnuts lure his police escort.
A few minutes later came the latest advice on How You Can Save Money, as told to you by the same over-paid personalities who were, as recently as three months ago, telling you about all the fucking electronic gimcracks it'd be a sad Christmas if you didn't buy.
They have no fucking idea; once the price of gasoline fell and they adjusted to the necessity of staying in their present homes a little longer, these people lost fucking touch again. And these are goddam mid-market locals. If you told David Gregory he couldn't get a refund on his McNuggets, you'd be the one in jail.
This is why, though I've sorta gone back-and-forth about it, I think the Rush Limbaugh: Head of the GOP bit is absolutely brilliant. I honestly had no idea this administration had it in 'em. I was all but convinced to begin with that they'd never stick with it, and I'm still agnostic about that, but if they do it's pure gravy. Limbaugh can't do anything but double-down every time he's attacked (although he did try to back-peddle his way out of that "I want Obama to fail" routine by trying to morph it into Obama's plan, the fat coward). He's the goddam Jake LaMotta of Political Blubberweights. He can't go down; he can only throw more haymakers. Keep the spotlight on this guy and sooner or later his 911 McNuggets moment will come (I mean his next one) and this time they'll be showing it on the nightly news instead of pretending they've never heard of him.
Okay, it's Florida. Maybe I spoke too soon. But everywhere else that's known as "Theft by Conversion".
And, y'know, if you'd like to convince me that the way Ms Goodman was treated was not part of a concerted effort to steal people's money in the utterly predictable event of a fast-food restaurant running out of an item--or, for that matter, a customer changing his mind--which operated in part by assuring that no one in a supervisory position would be available to correct the problem without a long delay, you may start talking.
Here's another thing we know: we know the mass-market media flogged the incident in a knowingly misleading fashion because "Woman Calls 911 Over Missing McNuggets" is seen as a ratings grabber--and what that says about 'em is enough right there--while "Major National Advertiser Systematically Short-Changes Customers" somehow is not. The pampered pets reading this stuff off the teleprompter--who get the opportunity, while they're at it, to sneer at the $3.50 involved, or roughly what they're paid each morning to tweeze one eyebrow--would never have dreamed of calling 911 had they been victimized. They'd have called Corporate, and two minutes later the McDonald's Regional VP of Media Relations would have roller-skated in offering to perform vigorous and enthusiastic anilingus while they waited for the chopper to arrive with fresh hot McNuggets from California, where stringent consumer protection laws require them to know what the chickens actually died of.
Of course, if she'd just thought to bring along a finger she'd have been a media darling for 48 hours. Plan ahead.
The capper is that the exercise almost certainly winds up costing Kroc Full O'Crap money, since the over/under on Number of Lawyers on Ms Goodman's Doorstep One Hour Later is six.
Like many other Issues of the Day this brings me to local teevee "news", or as I like to call it, Competitive Teleprompter Phonetics. These would be the people who last Friday brought us the sad story of Ringo, the Jack Russell terrier found dead, having been killed, his owner said, by coyotes. The man had seen the marauding beasts just outside his property, he said, pointing to the land just beyond the fence he didn't have. (This was one of those treeless Burghervilles in Greenwood, the former-pastureland Indianapolis suburb just over the border in Dixie, so I'm not sure that they actually have a law requiring dogs to be fenced in. For that matter, I'm not sure it's illegal there for siblings to marry.) Anyway, two days later a tiny notice appeared inside the Metro section of the Sunday Racist Star, quoting a Department of Natural Resources investigator as saying it wasn't a coyote, that coyotes generally do not attack dogs, and that the culprit was most likely a wild dog. To my knowledge none of the locals rushed a film crew out so we could hear the man set the record straight; if anybody covered it at all I missed it. But then, you know, dogs=cute, full of tricks, faithful companions; coyotes=chaotic, scary, and publicly-fornicating Nature intruding on McHomes thrown up incontinently and zoning-free on Its habitat, which It obstinately refuses to recognize as Its former habitat. Sorta like 21st century Apaches.
The locals were cheered yesterday when Nestlé announced it'd be adding a few hundred jobs, long-term, in war-torn Anderson, IN, and they got to return to the cheerleading mode they were in during Mitch "Small Beer" Daniels' just concluded fourteen-month reelection campaign. I swear I'm not exaggerating. The Channel 8 anchors--both got a piece of the story; one imagines them fighting like kids in the back seat before the Solomonic decree that settled that one--were in an obvious state of excitement, and not just the professional excitement mode they break out for the routine puffery of church bazars and Billy Joel concerts. They use that so much I know it better than I do my wife's moles. The news was so big that Governor Mitch "How's the Weather Down There?" Daniels actually left his bunker and was sighted for the third time since November. Of course, the Nestlé folks gave him a big pair of scissors and a ribbon to cut, a combination guaranteed to lure Mitch like doughnuts lure his police escort.
A few minutes later came the latest advice on How You Can Save Money, as told to you by the same over-paid personalities who were, as recently as three months ago, telling you about all the fucking electronic gimcracks it'd be a sad Christmas if you didn't buy.
They have no fucking idea; once the price of gasoline fell and they adjusted to the necessity of staying in their present homes a little longer, these people lost fucking touch again. And these are goddam mid-market locals. If you told David Gregory he couldn't get a refund on his McNuggets, you'd be the one in jail.
This is why, though I've sorta gone back-and-forth about it, I think the Rush Limbaugh: Head of the GOP bit is absolutely brilliant. I honestly had no idea this administration had it in 'em. I was all but convinced to begin with that they'd never stick with it, and I'm still agnostic about that, but if they do it's pure gravy. Limbaugh can't do anything but double-down every time he's attacked (although he did try to back-peddle his way out of that "I want Obama to fail" routine by trying to morph it into Obama's plan, the fat coward). He's the goddam Jake LaMotta of Political Blubberweights. He can't go down; he can only throw more haymakers. Keep the spotlight on this guy and sooner or later his 911 McNuggets moment will come (I mean his next one) and this time they'll be showing it on the nightly news instead of pretending they've never heard of him.
Monday, March 2
The Neverending Search For Reasons To Wake Up
I'VE been watching Simon Schama's 15-part History of Britain on videotape--well, first I was watching it; lately I've been scanning it to locate the missing Elizabethans, who may have got bolloxed up in a tape switch or something--and I shut that down last night to find the teevee was tuned to one of the VH-1 henchnetworks, which was playing a retrospective of The Who. This would have been my signal to change the channel immediately, but for two things: first, the remote is on the fritz, and chose that moment to add "channel selection" to the list of things it was refusing to do; and, second, the surviving members were busily engaged at that moment in trashing the corpse of John Entwistle for his "sordid" exit (Vegas, Hard Rock hotel, coke, stripper). That is, the inventors of Rock-Star Excess were sneering at his death as unbecoming. Let us rise to his defense, then, if for no other reason than--so far as we are aware--the man never wore a jumpsuit, or fringe, onstage.
The worst thing, though, about any sort of Who retrospective that features band co-operation is the certainty that Pete Townshend will talk.
Now let's note here that I was what is now called an "early adapter" of The Who, whose first appearance in America, so far as I know, was on tape from some British pop show or other that was picked up by Shindig. It was the Keith Moon Bullseye Sweatshirt era, and, of course, you couldn't take your eyes off Moonie. These guys were serious; they were The Kinks without the fopish Edwardian duds. I was, and am, a huge fan of their mid-60s Top 40 output--"Pictures of Lilly", "Substitute", "I Can See For Miles"--which didn't chart all that well in the US, and were more or less ignored by my Herman's Hermits-fan grade-school compatriots. I routinely ripped open fingers and bled all over various parents' garage floors trying to evoke Townshend's guitar gymnastics. Then they released Tommy.
Now, I'm fifty-five, and I'm still not exactly sure what "pretentious" means, but whatever my fifteen-year-old take was, Tommy was its four-sided avatar. Plus they'd been smashing their instruments at the end of every set for four solid years at this point, passing not just from sensation to beyond boredom, but perpetrating this carnage while I had to connive and grandstand just to get a guitar, and save the proceeds of three years of summer jobs to pay for a decent practice amp. Around then Townshend started talking, and never shut up. And most of it was at the service of the idea that he, Pete Townshend, was the world's leading rock star intellectual, just in case you'd missed it from the world's leading rock star intellectual lyrics he wrote, and High Concepts he highly concepted, and the rest of it was how the secret to World Harmony--which was very popular in those days--was the teachings of some guru who'd maintained a forty-year vow of silence, or something, which Townshend chose not to emulate.
Then, just to confound me, he made the greatest classic rock album evah, Who's Next.
Y'know, I like to think of myself as a man who tries to be open-minded; I understand why Pete Townshend would want to quit writing three-minute pop gems and start writing turgid rock "operas". I just happen to believe, personally, that it was a bad idea. This does not mean I believe he'd have kept on producing three-minute pop gems otherwise. I understand that there may be people out there who haven't heard enough from him, or who missed their first 14,728 opportunities. I even understand why VH-1 has henchnetworks. What I can't fathom is who th' fuck demanded 2500 words on the bewitching enigma that is Marissa Mayer, the woman who "controls the look, feel and functionality of " Da Google. As such she is "one of the company’s most ubiquitous and closely watched public faces". But that's not All:
• Employee No. 20, the company's first female employee.
• A popular guest on TV news programs and talk shows, a Google-booster often quoted in print, and a rapid-fire presence on San Francisco’s social scene.
• She has invited attention — and in some cases, derision — in the last year for such actions as creating spreadsheets to find the perfect cupcake recipe, attending lavish ballet, art and fashion galas, paying $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and hosting breezy, dying-to-get-invited-to parties at her $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.
• Refuses to be stereotyped.
• Almost every new feature or design, from the wording on a Google page to the color of a Google toolbar, must pass muster with her or legions of Google users will never see it.
• She adore(s) bold blocks of color against a white background, much like the Marimekko prints that once hung in her childhood home in Wausau, Wis. Her San Francisco penthouse has a similar, but more expensive, aesthetic. It is painted in neutral shades and decorated with fanciful, multihued glass artwork by Dale Chihuly.
• In meetings with subordinates, Ms. Mayer comes across as a zealous copy editor or meticulous art teacher correcting first-semester students. With so many new recruits, she reasons, someone has to teach them how Google does things.
• Her Solomonic, split-the-difference decision between the design team's choice of blue and the corporate brain-probers' preference for green showed her reliance on her gut, but she prefers to "rel[y] on charts, graphs and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating people."
• She ultimately ordered further animal testing on 41 gradations of blue-green to determine consumer preference.
• She responds to co-workers who use "pregame" as a verb.
• Still, students of Google’s culture wonder whether Ms. Mayer and her management style would flourish outside the insulated world where her tenacity and curiosity mirror the company itself. “She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro,” said John Battelle, author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.” With any luck, that's another 2500 words.
• She says she is vexed by how some perceive her. “I am not a girl about town,” she says. “It isn’t how I project myself. It is how other people choose to project me.”
• She doesn't like odd numbers. She does like shopping and fashion, and isn't going to stop just because people don't like that, according to a friend.
• Noted in a Web interview that her gay friends demanded invitations to her women-only “Sex and the City” movie screening and birthday party. She relented, meaning they too got to enjoy the hors d'oeuvres and the fabulous shoe cam.
I'm sorry, but...it's a fookin' search engine, right? And this woman is its Stanford-educated snooty mâitre-d', who single-handedly defends its white homepage against rampaging barbarian hordes? And the eleven-inch tall, three-column wide pic that accompanied all 2500 of those hang-on-every-word words graced the front page of The Paper of Record, The New York Times Sunday Business section, correct? So how th' hell can this country be in trouble?
The worst thing, though, about any sort of Who retrospective that features band co-operation is the certainty that Pete Townshend will talk.
Now let's note here that I was what is now called an "early adapter" of The Who, whose first appearance in America, so far as I know, was on tape from some British pop show or other that was picked up by Shindig. It was the Keith Moon Bullseye Sweatshirt era, and, of course, you couldn't take your eyes off Moonie. These guys were serious; they were The Kinks without the fopish Edwardian duds. I was, and am, a huge fan of their mid-60s Top 40 output--"Pictures of Lilly", "Substitute", "I Can See For Miles"--which didn't chart all that well in the US, and were more or less ignored by my Herman's Hermits-fan grade-school compatriots. I routinely ripped open fingers and bled all over various parents' garage floors trying to evoke Townshend's guitar gymnastics. Then they released Tommy.
Now, I'm fifty-five, and I'm still not exactly sure what "pretentious" means, but whatever my fifteen-year-old take was, Tommy was its four-sided avatar. Plus they'd been smashing their instruments at the end of every set for four solid years at this point, passing not just from sensation to beyond boredom, but perpetrating this carnage while I had to connive and grandstand just to get a guitar, and save the proceeds of three years of summer jobs to pay for a decent practice amp. Around then Townshend started talking, and never shut up. And most of it was at the service of the idea that he, Pete Townshend, was the world's leading rock star intellectual, just in case you'd missed it from the world's leading rock star intellectual lyrics he wrote, and High Concepts he highly concepted, and the rest of it was how the secret to World Harmony--which was very popular in those days--was the teachings of some guru who'd maintained a forty-year vow of silence, or something, which Townshend chose not to emulate.
Then, just to confound me, he made the greatest classic rock album evah, Who's Next.
Y'know, I like to think of myself as a man who tries to be open-minded; I understand why Pete Townshend would want to quit writing three-minute pop gems and start writing turgid rock "operas". I just happen to believe, personally, that it was a bad idea. This does not mean I believe he'd have kept on producing three-minute pop gems otherwise. I understand that there may be people out there who haven't heard enough from him, or who missed their first 14,728 opportunities. I even understand why VH-1 has henchnetworks. What I can't fathom is who th' fuck demanded 2500 words on the bewitching enigma that is Marissa Mayer, the woman who "controls the look, feel and functionality of " Da Google. As such she is "one of the company’s most ubiquitous and closely watched public faces". But that's not All:
• Employee No. 20, the company's first female employee.
• A popular guest on TV news programs and talk shows, a Google-booster often quoted in print, and a rapid-fire presence on San Francisco’s social scene.
• She has invited attention — and in some cases, derision — in the last year for such actions as creating spreadsheets to find the perfect cupcake recipe, attending lavish ballet, art and fashion galas, paying $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and hosting breezy, dying-to-get-invited-to parties at her $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.
• Refuses to be stereotyped.
• Almost every new feature or design, from the wording on a Google page to the color of a Google toolbar, must pass muster with her or legions of Google users will never see it.
• She adore(s) bold blocks of color against a white background, much like the Marimekko prints that once hung in her childhood home in Wausau, Wis. Her San Francisco penthouse has a similar, but more expensive, aesthetic. It is painted in neutral shades and decorated with fanciful, multihued glass artwork by Dale Chihuly.
• In meetings with subordinates, Ms. Mayer comes across as a zealous copy editor or meticulous art teacher correcting first-semester students. With so many new recruits, she reasons, someone has to teach them how Google does things.
• Her Solomonic, split-the-difference decision between the design team's choice of blue and the corporate brain-probers' preference for green showed her reliance on her gut, but she prefers to "rel[y] on charts, graphs and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating people."
• She ultimately ordered further animal testing on 41 gradations of blue-green to determine consumer preference.
• She responds to co-workers who use "pregame" as a verb.
• Still, students of Google’s culture wonder whether Ms. Mayer and her management style would flourish outside the insulated world where her tenacity and curiosity mirror the company itself. “She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro,” said John Battelle, author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.” With any luck, that's another 2500 words.
• She says she is vexed by how some perceive her. “I am not a girl about town,” she says. “It isn’t how I project myself. It is how other people choose to project me.”
• She doesn't like odd numbers. She does like shopping and fashion, and isn't going to stop just because people don't like that, according to a friend.
• Noted in a Web interview that her gay friends demanded invitations to her women-only “Sex and the City” movie screening and birthday party. She relented, meaning they too got to enjoy the hors d'oeuvres and the fabulous shoe cam.
I'm sorry, but...it's a fookin' search engine, right? And this woman is its Stanford-educated snooty mâitre-d', who single-handedly defends its white homepage against rampaging barbarian hordes? And the eleven-inch tall, three-column wide pic that accompanied all 2500 of those hang-on-every-word words graced the front page of The Paper of Record, The New York Times Sunday Business section, correct? So how th' hell can this country be in trouble?
Monday, February 9
Programming Note
Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyers' Journal.
JAY ROSEN: If you're a career Washington reporter, how do you know that your knowledge is always going to be relevant throughout your career? Well, if politics is just an inside game, then you're always on top of it. If all of a sudden, a new dynamic enters it, you may not have the knowledge you need to be the expert, to be the authority. And I think there's a tendency for Washington journalists to see everything converging towards the political game that they are themselves masters of.
JAY ROSEN: If you're a career Washington reporter, how do you know that your knowledge is always going to be relevant throughout your career? Well, if politics is just an inside game, then you're always on top of it. If all of a sudden, a new dynamic enters it, you may not have the knowledge you need to be the expert, to be the authority. And I think there's a tendency for Washington journalists to see everything converging towards the political game that they are themselves masters of.
Tuesday, March 4
The Mick Jagger Of American Conservatism
PANEGYRIC has its place; being forced to sit through it while maintaining a hypocritical silence is, like the occasional cold shower, not exactly the worst thing in the world. Bill Buckley himself waited over a week to slag the deceased Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, his major rival for the crown of Preeminent Psychopathic Chronicler of the 1960s in American Letters. But then noblesse oblige perched on Buckley's shoulders as naturally as the shoulders of those Pee Wee Herman suits of his.
(It's interesting to note that Buckley and Thompson were not just polar opposites politically, but theatrically as well; one was left wondering how much Hunter just made up, while with Bill it was a question of just what, and how much, he was managing to keep bottled up with that twitchy ticciness. One always wondered--and I think I owe apologies to Roy here--whether a particularly bad performance, like his being depantsed by Noam Chomsky, say, meant that his body servant would receive a particularly strenuous lashing that evening, or if that was just how he got himself up for a performance in the first place.)
The faster we're carried, the less time we have! my townsman Mr. Tarkington observed--in 1918--without ever dreaming that just over a lifetime later that would apply to how fast we hit the remote button when there wasn't a shirtless moron swallowing a Madagascar cockroach onscreen. But my quiet contemplation and display of good manners (okay, by Internet standards, and, okay, except for that Vidal quote) was rewarded as first David Brooks, then Bill Kristol, turned out to have nothing to say about the man, and instead spent a total of over 1500 words worth of prime New York real estate reminiscing about Sophomore Year. (Which, I almost forgot, manages to make Kristol mention his 1970 prep school graduation, which sorta blows that whole "I was too young for Vietnam thing", huh?)
So why is that? Neither the Last Cold Warrior Still Wobbling, nor the Libertarian AV Nerd, mentions a single book of Buckley's. In the dozen or so journalistic eulogies I read only George Eff Will mentioned anything other than God and Man at Yale, and that was something his quote boy dug out from the introduction to an essay collection. Most left it at "nearly fifty books", occasionally tossing in a discreet reference to his spy novels without mention of their dreadfulness. This, then, is the Father of Modern American Conservatism, the Intellectual whose allusions to Edmund Burke launched a thousand David Brooks columns. Half a century, fifty books, and one idea. And that not a very good one.
(Okay, so I haven't read them either, aside from wading into God and Man at Yale when a copy fell into my hands in college, but if Buckley's disciples can't cough up any contribution he made to serious thought then the matter's closed.)
I think we'd all be better off today if he'd have focused on yachting.
Okay, I take that back, at least to the extent that I was a regular, if not faithful, viewer of Firing Line in its heyday, if only for the bitter college-student satisfaction of noting that a freakish High Latin vocabulary combined with post-graduate dining club manners and the stage presence of a precocious fifteen-year-old essaying Miss Havisham in the Spring Play could convince any number of Americans that one was an Intellectual without the bother of genuine ideas or personal honesty. It was fairly amusing to read, multiple times (I think first at The Corner, but I managed to lose a page of notes to a cat-induced power outage and I'm not going back there to check) the Wither Bill Buckley? pieces which asked about how he might view the crew of mental midgets bobbing in his wake (the Corner piece said something like "The Left is sure to bring this up") when, in fact, those people are his legacy, along with George Eff Will's bowties. "Conservatism" hasn't been dumbed down. It's been exhausted after producing a few ounces of low-grade ore and a mountain of slag. David Brooks is Bill Buckley after fifty washings; Jonah Goldberg after one-hundred-twenty, except he was beaten with a stick on a big flat rock, Old Skool.
The Dead Buckley was also given credit for "dekookifying" the American Right, by which is meant he kept Birch Society anti-fluoridationists and anti-Semites off the pages of his magazine, leaving more room for scholarly considerations of whether we were wasting time trying to cram Algebra into those smallish Negro skulls. Buckley's supposed opposition to the Iraq War got a nod or two, as did his brave decision to sail outside the then-Twelve Mile limit to do some bong hits. Here we repeat our gratitude that anyone on the Right who takes a reasonable, sensible, or nuanced position, or rejects any species of bigotry, hedged or no, is hailed as a Maverick, and our hope that the underlying point will some day soon be more widely appreciated.
We're not going to quibble that his racism was left out of all the Buckley blather. He lived long enough to see it widely disseminated, thanks to new technologies, to see his crypto-Nazi AIDS stance jackboot its way up his own walk, and to receive an advance copy of Liberal Fascism. He lived long enough that even David Brooks, whose career he kick-started, could find precious little to say about him in the flotsam of that movement they share. We do wish that whoever it was--the Times, maybe--who saw fit to mention his threatening to knock Gore Vidal's teeth down his throat had either not done so, or had refrained from editing out the "God damn" and the "you little queer". (And we love the fact that Brooks--who keeps repeating that God damn story of his brilliant underclassman lampooning of Buckley as his single 'I was a Liberal' bona fide--is the only person on the planet left convinced that in offering him a job Buckley was demonstrating some sort of trans-partisan bonhomie, rather than a practiced eye for spotting the sniveling toady in his natural habitat.)
But that's just us, and at the end of the day we have to admit that the emptiness of the panegyric suits the man and his movement, but--as with the first of two disastrous Presidents it engendered--the nonsense should be buried with him. We add our own: that thanks to Bill Buckley's movement the United States did not go Marxist in his lifetime, just as thanks to the lucky rock I keep under my pillow my home has not been overrun by marmosets.
(It's interesting to note that Buckley and Thompson were not just polar opposites politically, but theatrically as well; one was left wondering how much Hunter just made up, while with Bill it was a question of just what, and how much, he was managing to keep bottled up with that twitchy ticciness. One always wondered--and I think I owe apologies to Roy here--whether a particularly bad performance, like his being depantsed by Noam Chomsky, say, meant that his body servant would receive a particularly strenuous lashing that evening, or if that was just how he got himself up for a performance in the first place.)
The faster we're carried, the less time we have! my townsman Mr. Tarkington observed--in 1918--without ever dreaming that just over a lifetime later that would apply to how fast we hit the remote button when there wasn't a shirtless moron swallowing a Madagascar cockroach onscreen. But my quiet contemplation and display of good manners (okay, by Internet standards, and, okay, except for that Vidal quote) was rewarded as first David Brooks, then Bill Kristol, turned out to have nothing to say about the man, and instead spent a total of over 1500 words worth of prime New York real estate reminiscing about Sophomore Year. (Which, I almost forgot, manages to make Kristol mention his 1970 prep school graduation, which sorta blows that whole "I was too young for Vietnam thing", huh?)
So why is that? Neither the Last Cold Warrior Still Wobbling, nor the Libertarian AV Nerd, mentions a single book of Buckley's. In the dozen or so journalistic eulogies I read only George Eff Will mentioned anything other than God and Man at Yale, and that was something his quote boy dug out from the introduction to an essay collection. Most left it at "nearly fifty books", occasionally tossing in a discreet reference to his spy novels without mention of their dreadfulness. This, then, is the Father of Modern American Conservatism, the Intellectual whose allusions to Edmund Burke launched a thousand David Brooks columns. Half a century, fifty books, and one idea. And that not a very good one.
(Okay, so I haven't read them either, aside from wading into God and Man at Yale when a copy fell into my hands in college, but if Buckley's disciples can't cough up any contribution he made to serious thought then the matter's closed.)
I think we'd all be better off today if he'd have focused on yachting.
Okay, I take that back, at least to the extent that I was a regular, if not faithful, viewer of Firing Line in its heyday, if only for the bitter college-student satisfaction of noting that a freakish High Latin vocabulary combined with post-graduate dining club manners and the stage presence of a precocious fifteen-year-old essaying Miss Havisham in the Spring Play could convince any number of Americans that one was an Intellectual without the bother of genuine ideas or personal honesty. It was fairly amusing to read, multiple times (I think first at The Corner, but I managed to lose a page of notes to a cat-induced power outage and I'm not going back there to check) the Wither Bill Buckley? pieces which asked about how he might view the crew of mental midgets bobbing in his wake (the Corner piece said something like "The Left is sure to bring this up") when, in fact, those people are his legacy, along with George Eff Will's bowties. "Conservatism" hasn't been dumbed down. It's been exhausted after producing a few ounces of low-grade ore and a mountain of slag. David Brooks is Bill Buckley after fifty washings; Jonah Goldberg after one-hundred-twenty, except he was beaten with a stick on a big flat rock, Old Skool.
The Dead Buckley was also given credit for "dekookifying" the American Right, by which is meant he kept Birch Society anti-fluoridationists and anti-Semites off the pages of his magazine, leaving more room for scholarly considerations of whether we were wasting time trying to cram Algebra into those smallish Negro skulls. Buckley's supposed opposition to the Iraq War got a nod or two, as did his brave decision to sail outside the then-Twelve Mile limit to do some bong hits. Here we repeat our gratitude that anyone on the Right who takes a reasonable, sensible, or nuanced position, or rejects any species of bigotry, hedged or no, is hailed as a Maverick, and our hope that the underlying point will some day soon be more widely appreciated.
We're not going to quibble that his racism was left out of all the Buckley blather. He lived long enough to see it widely disseminated, thanks to new technologies, to see his crypto-Nazi AIDS stance jackboot its way up his own walk, and to receive an advance copy of Liberal Fascism. He lived long enough that even David Brooks, whose career he kick-started, could find precious little to say about him in the flotsam of that movement they share. We do wish that whoever it was--the Times, maybe--who saw fit to mention his threatening to knock Gore Vidal's teeth down his throat had either not done so, or had refrained from editing out the "God damn" and the "you little queer". (And we love the fact that Brooks--who keeps repeating that God damn story of his brilliant underclassman lampooning of Buckley as his single 'I was a Liberal' bona fide--is the only person on the planet left convinced that in offering him a job Buckley was demonstrating some sort of trans-partisan bonhomie, rather than a practiced eye for spotting the sniveling toady in his natural habitat.)
But that's just us, and at the end of the day we have to admit that the emptiness of the panegyric suits the man and his movement, but--as with the first of two disastrous Presidents it engendered--the nonsense should be buried with him. We add our own: that thanks to Bill Buckley's movement the United States did not go Marxist in his lifetime, just as thanks to the lucky rock I keep under my pillow my home has not been overrun by marmosets.
Monday, December 24
Seasonal-Appropriate Wishes Event
I hope you all will take a moment to remember, through tenth eggnog or seventh Xanax, that somewhere tonight in some icy outpost a cold, lonely, homesick young man or woman is keeping a watchful eye on greedy, wasteful, hubristic, thieving bureaucratic motherfuckers on your behalf. And that, unlike the people we defend ourselves from with guns, these mofos really are capable of taking our freedoms overnight.
Whether you chose to celebrate or ignore the quadrant-shifting sun/earth relationship, to accept wild postulations of Ice Kings or happy elves, dance naked round the fire, or quietly hope for undeserved salvation, may you get your wish, may the gifts you give others delight and fit properly, and may you yourself receive just what you need and no more. May your opponents wise up, your screenplay be greenlighted, and your teeth be their whitest. May the year to come be better than the last. And Lord help us all.
And may the women and men of our Armed Forces, scattered across the globe, come home and get laid. Amen.
Whether you chose to celebrate or ignore the quadrant-shifting sun/earth relationship, to accept wild postulations of Ice Kings or happy elves, dance naked round the fire, or quietly hope for undeserved salvation, may you get your wish, may the gifts you give others delight and fit properly, and may you yourself receive just what you need and no more. May your opponents wise up, your screenplay be greenlighted, and your teeth be their whitest. May the year to come be better than the last. And Lord help us all.
And may the women and men of our Armed Forces, scattered across the globe, come home and get laid. Amen.
Tuesday, November 27
Understanding Alien Cultures
"She liked sex. She was like those girls in high school who amazed you because they actually liked sex.”
--Danny Fields on Linda Stein.
Thursday, November 8
We (Heart) R. Porrofatto
OKAY, we always do, but most recently for this , in a discussion of Alan Dershowitz' recent WSJ piece, "Nazi Supermen Are Our Intel Gathering Superiors," at LG&M:
Geez, Alan, it's a pity them expert Nazis weren't around for some of your famous clients, huh? Cuz after they'd worked their magic on O.J., you can bet that fucking glove woulda damn well fit.
Geez, Alan, it's a pity them expert Nazis weren't around for some of your famous clients, huh? Cuz after they'd worked their magic on O.J., you can bet that fucking glove woulda damn well fit.
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