dbmt

Romance Blog

2011-08-03T16:39:00.001-07:00

My Dream Date With Sebastian Junger.

[Redacted]

Our lips parted. The distant whir of helicopter blades, though not audible, could be felt. A rhythmical whumping battered our flesh. Our eyes met. His were inscrutable, but I believe I detected an ineffable sadness in them, in between the involuntary blinks engendered by the insistent percussive thumps.

A rope ladder, or perhaps hemp, descended silently. Sebastian gripped a rung with one strong hand, and began to rise. He broke our gaze and turned it upwards, and mine faltered as my tears welled. There was a faint lingering aroma of kerosene and Old Spice. Then he was gone.

Nostalgia Blog!

2011-08-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

Punchlines, remembered with fondness and regret

Rectum? Damn near killed him!

Hairlip!

And here's a banana for your monkey.

Pretty big word for a six year old.

Is it a black dick?

Rufus, you is a vagina!

Break her fingers.

That's not my finger.

A frog in a blender.

He gave me a ten inch pianist.

Smell it? I'm sitting in it!

Well, we're not gonna SPANK him.

And that's the bastard who ran over my frog!

You fuck ONE goat....

Dopey fucked a penguin! Dopey fucked a penguin!

Who's that guy with Bob?

I was talking to the duck!

Why the long face?

I'll have whatever she's having!

Why would a circus need drywall?

What was THAT all about?

Crisis Averted Blog

2011-08-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

Jeff Jarvis feels hope!
He got drunk and tweeted, "Hey, Washington assholes, it's our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it." Someone in the twitterverse, lifting his banner, suggested, "@jeffjarvis Hashtag it: #FUCKYOUWASHINGTON." This apparently sparked a Twitterlution. Thousands of tweets, saying things like:

@jellencollins: "#fuckyouwashington for making 'debt' a four letter word and 'fuck' an appropriate response."

@tamadou: "#fuckyouwashington for giving yourselves special benefits and telling the American people they have to suck it up or they're selfish."

@psychnurseinwi: "#fuckyouwashington for having the compromising skills of a 3 year old."

And so forth.

Jarvis concluded, in his July 25th post: “Believe me, I'm not overblowing the significance of this weekend's entertainment. All I'm saying is that when I get to hear the true voice of the people – not the voice of government, not the voice of media, not a voice distilled to a number following a stupid question in a poll – I see cause for hope.”

Take heed, Washington. The people have texted! The Kraken has been released!

Dawkins hits on woman, woman offended!
Gawker reports that Richard Dawkins, famed atheist, was at a skeptics’ convention in Dublin. After the day’s activity, consisting of speeches and panels about the continuing non-existence of God, various folks retreated to bars to further insist on God’s non-existence. Around 4 a.m. Rebecca Watson, conference participant and feminist non-believer, took an elevator to return to her room. Richard Dawkins was also on the elevator, and invited her to his room “for coffee.” Ms. Watson rebuffed him. You’d think that would be that.

But she returned home, and blogged a few days later, “Just a word to the wise here, guys. Don't do that. I don't know how else to explain how this makes me very uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out: I was a single women in foreign country in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I—don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.”

Various folks weighed in on this, pro and con, but then Richard Dawkins weighed in on the comments section at the science blog Pharyngula: “Dear Muslima-- Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so …And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin. Richard”

That was not a good idea, Richard Dawkins!

Various people weighed in, many not at all sympathetic to Richard Dawkins, culminating in Ms. Watson herself, on “Skepchick,” writing, “[To] have my concerns—and more so the concerns of other women who have survived rape and sexual assault—dismissed thanks to a rich white man comparing them to the plight of women who are mutilated, is insulting to all of us. Feminists in the west have been staunch allies of the women being brutalized elsewhere, and they've done a hell of a lot more than Richard Dawkins when it comes to making a difference in their lives.”

Then, according to Gawker, she called for a boycott of Dawkins' books.

Message I’m getting? Atheists don’t get laid much.

And, with the existence of God no longer in dispute, they don’t have many important things to worry about.

On Wisconsin!
Earlier this year, Wisconsin passed a law that in order to register to vote in that state you must have a valid picture ID issued by the DMV. Due to budget restraints, Governor Scott Walker is closing ten DMV offices in the state, all of them, strangely, in Democratic districts.

Further, Wonkette aggregated this: “… the Wisconsin DMV is not obligated, and in fact it is not their policy, to first inform a voter ID applicant that he or she is not obligated to pay the $28 fee for issuing the card. The applicant must know to first request a free card, and then find a small box on the form asking for the free card. Otherwise, the applicant is automatically charged $28 for the state ID. To the small minded, that sort of sounds like a poll tax!”

Changing subject abruptly! Insert Casey Anthony joke here.
Then bow your head in shame.

Eric Schmidt in conversation with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria
“Today, your phone knows who you are, where you are, where -- where you're going, to some degree, because it can see your path. And with that and with your permission, it's possible for software and software developers to predict where you're going to go, to suggest people you should meet, to suggest activities and so forth. So ultimately what happens is the mobile phone does what it does best, which is remember everything and make suggestions. And then you can be just a better human and have a good time.”

Because we need suggestions from algorithms in order to survive! Don’t you see that? What are you, a luddite?

The Debt Ceiling…
…has been raised! Thank you, Jesus! Now, America, go back to not having a job, getting hounded for getting abortions, trying to avoid foreclosure, holding bake sales to buy pencils for your public school, steering around potholes, watching bridges fall down, getting put on hold when you call 911, dropping dead from heat exhaustion, hoarding guns, hoarding gold, supporting the troops (until they come home), blaming unions, blaming pensions, blaming immigrants, blaming Obama, and texting Washington with mighty tweets. I’m behind you all the way. Over here. Cowering in my hovel.

Weiner dog weiner blog

2011-07-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

Weiner… showed his weiner!
I have to wonder if Weiner’s last name weren’t Weiner, would that flap have lasted so long? A Johnson would have been pretty good as well, I guess, and of course, there’s Boehner (that’s BAY ner! BAY ner!), and Dick Cheney. Also Dick Nixon, but he’s dead. (“Pull out like your father should have.” Remember that? Political discourse has always been thus.)

Has always been thus.
One of the plus sides of the new crudity in political discourse is that the phrase “… has always been thus” does not have the ubiquity it once possessed.

Zuckerberg: Carnivore
"The only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself," says Zuckerberg.
He posted, on Facebook, “I just killed a pig and a goat.”

Go the bleep to sleep.
So the faux-children’s book, GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP (about an exhausted Dad’s attempt to get toddler to etc.), the object of much hilarity and controversy, is finally a real best-selling book. Nothing can live up to the title, gentle readers. The author should have let it rest.

And, sure enough, Katie Roiphe, described by Gawker as “one of the leading sex-opinion-havers of American letters,” (Gawker ought to know) has weighed in on the book and its author in SLATE:

‘The book, in all its cleverness and artfulness and ingenuity, raises certain other questions: Are they having sex, these slouchy rageful parents? Not enough, perhaps. When the father turns back to the waking child's bedroom, we look out at the comfy, sexless, vaguely depressive scene of his wife sprawled asleep on the couch under an ugly old blanket….’

See what happens when you turn a one-liner into a book? You get forelock-tugging about vast cultural implications!

I eagerly await the sequel. LET US NOW HAVE DISGRUNTLED EXHAUSTED SEX, PLEASE, COME ON HONEY. HONEY? HONEY… It will be a sad, short book that will become an unfunny comedy with Jason Segel and Jennifer Anniston. I will not see it.

Murdoch shuts down treasured newspaper!
Thousands of phone accounts have been hacked for no apparent reason by Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday newspaper NEWS OF THE WORLD. Thanks to the tireless (I mean REALLY tireless) investigation from Nick Davies at the UK Guardian, it has been discovered that the journalists at NEWS OF THE WORLD, via private detectives, had not only hacked the cell phone answering service of a missing person, but deleted messages, in the hope (apparently) of making room for more. Unfortunately, the missing person, Milly Dowling, was already dead. This action by NEWS OF THE WORLD could, I believe, I’m no expert, be termed evidence-tampering.

In the wake of the growing “controversy,” Murdoch shut down the newspaper, which has been around for over a century and a half. Rebekah Fleming, News International Chief Executive, held a tearful farewell for Mr. Murdoch’s beloved former employees. She said, “The Guardian newspaper were out to get us, and they got us.” As of this writing, she is still employed. But, Guardian, watch out. Rupert will buy you, and then destroy you.

Maybe we need soldier journalists. Arm competent warriors with appropriate weapons and state of the art recording devices. Send them out into the world to create wars, and simultaneously report them. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck, formerly of Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch entity, now seeking to build a mini-empire of his own, went with his family (and security detail) to Bryant Park in NYC to see a free screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS. There, he was recognized. Various Tweets from the audience emerged. At some point, the folks behind him spilled some wine which may or may not have landed on the wife of Mrs. Beck. In her vicinity, anyway. The Becks left before the end of the movie.

Subsequently Mr. Beck, on his now defunct broadcast, spent ten minutes or so feeling sad about America. Among other things he said (approximately), “If you are sitting on a blanket, or anyplace, next to a guy that you vehemently disagree with, don’t kick your beverage on them, and certainly not their wife….”

The beverage kicker in question began to e-mail GAWKER and other publications to tell her side of the story. Her e-mail promptly showed up on Glenn Beck’s web site, Well, you can imagine what happened….

Obscene e-mails to the woman to the person behind the Glenn Beck party: "GET A LIFE YOU LOSER CUNT" And "It is with great pleasure I informed your mother that abortion is a right! You should have been aborted a$$hole!~"

From the larger blogosphere: “Tomorrow is ‘Punch a liberal in the face’ day.” That’s from Human events dot com. As is this: “…make it "Bring your own club day.” Although most of us Vets are perfectly capable with our fists!... Maybe it's the Concealed Carry laws, or that we don't mind bouncing them off a wall a few times in my neck of the woods!”

Ann Coulter wrote: “Maybe it's time for Beck to pony up some of those millions of dollars he's earned and hire people to rough up the liberal mob, or, at a minimum, to provide a legal defense to those …who do.”

All this, from a little spilled wine at a Hitchcock movie. Good movie too. I recommend it. The villain looks like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that he is. Ask Dr. Memory!

OK I'm back blog

2011-06-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

Snippets from commercials I heard yesterday
“Coconut fruit freeze does not contain coconut or fruit juice!”
Delivered in a sprightly tone, as if that were a good thing.

“Never ending bra problem.”
I didn’t make it to the end of the ad, but I believe that problem is now solved. With your good credit.

Where have I been?
Moving. Debating whether to continue with this thing or not. Moving about killed me. The blog is, well, not that hard. Thinking about doing something different though. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Blogs seem to be WAY over. On the other hand, what do I care if they’re over or not?

Song I just wrote. Will be performing said song with Philosophy Talk, at the Marsh in SF on June 19th. Info here: http://www.philosophytalk.org/LiveAtTheMarsh.html

The media gather. A fast breaking flap.
Another fine scandal has dropped in our lap.
The Blackberries shudder. The cameras click.
The fast-rising Congressman looks a bit sick.

A manager, lawyer, consultant and friend
Plead with us, “Please bring this thing to an end.”
A photograph’s shown of the family, intact,
Of the man who just may have been caught in the act.

It’s only a sin, and all sins are forgiven.
The wicked can tremble. The upright stand tall.
The good man will sin. It’s the proof of the living.
Just bow your proud head, and you never will fall.

Someone is sorry, for something was done.
Think of his daughters now, think of his son.
No need to call a man outside his name.
It’s just human nature. We all share the blame.

Up snark the tweets. There goes TMZ.
Guilty or not, doesn’t matter to me.
The Congressman’s wife looks quite lovely in gray.
She stands by his side, with her face turned away.

It’s only a sin, and all sins are forgiven.
The wicked can tremble. The upright stand tall.
Every good man will sin. It’s the proof of the living.
Just bow your proud head, and you never will fall.

We count on you, brother. Treat the thing right.
Thank you for watching. Good night. Good night.
It starts with a bang, sister, ends with a glare.
Thank you for watching good night.
Thank you for watching good night.

This Just Blog

2011-02-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

This Just In.
NEW YORK TIMES review today says the accident-plagued Broadway production of SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK is really awful. And looks cheesy. The critic at SLATE kind of liked it though. Tickets start at $150.

AOL gets HuffPo
Ariana Huffington will rule the world! Brent Bozell III disapproves! “This proves AOL News has lost its mind,” he said in a statement to CNS News.com, a division of Media Research Center, of which he is president. I guess he was talking to himself.

Sarah Palin weighs in.
AP: “Sarah Palin says the Obama administration must tell Americans what it knows about who will be Egypt's next leader. In a Christian Broadcasting Network interview released Saturday, the 2008 vice presidential candidate says the administration should level with the American people on what it knows about the Egyptian crisis.”
…
“Palin said the U.S. must find out who is ‘behind all the turmoil’ and that ‘we should not stand’ for a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Sarah Palin has a hunch, apparently, that President Obama either knows or can find out who’s behind all the turmoil, and already has the next Egyptian leader tucked away in a pocket somewhere. Why won’t he tell us!

Money woes.
So we don’t want to increase the taxes on millionaires, but we do want to trim the pensions of public employees. That’ll fix things right up.

From THE GUARDIAN
From “Comment is Free,” by George Montbiot:

“For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organized by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to ‘manipulate the medium.’ This is what he told them:

“‘Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books.” I go through and I say ‘one star, one star, one star.’ The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare,”I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.’

“Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance. In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m. A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.”

The Twitter Revolution.
Nothing irritates me more than hearing the events in Tunisia and Egypt describes as a Twitter Revolution. We might as well say the American Civil War was fought with telegrams.

According to SLATE…
Nobody’s in charge of the revolution in Egypt. Somebody ought to tell Sarah Palin, before it’s too late. Send her a Tweet!

Also in SLATE:
Dana Stevens is puzzled by Natalie Portman. Writes about it. Huh. Whatever.

Ironic!
Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg has issued a restraining order against a stalker. Was he a Facebook stalker? Insert poking, friending, etc. joke here. And then be ashamed.

How it works…
“Intel AIM Suite face detection algorithms have statistically learned the pattern of a human face by being trained on an audience database of thousands of pictures of human faces. The demographics of a face can be determined using a similar process to how a face is found, where the patterns being looked at correspond to male or female faces, or certain age brackets (children, young adults, adults, seniors). The algorithms have learned which face features have the strongest weighting for each gender and age bracket. The combination of various facial features such as eye positioning, nose shape, cheek bones, and overall facial structure are among the variables that are taken into consideration during this process.”

The above is Jose Avolos of Intel explaining Meal Planning Solution to Mashable. This is a kiosk, in development by food provider Kraft and Intel. It scans your face and based on that data, lets you know what you want to eat. Because we no longer know for sure. Another spokesman for Intel told Mashable, “We think the technology — anonymous video analytics along with the immersive digital experience in-store, has huge potential.” Just what Safeway needs: an immersive digital experience.

This is your blog, on drugs.

2011-01-21T18:37:00.000-08:00

From THINKING HOUSEWIFE, a blog
“There is a saying ‘Only in Tucson,’ when something out of the ordinary happens. Tucson is home to the weird and Tucson needs prayer also. It is no surprise that such a deranged and probably paranoid schizophrenic young man grew up in this grunge city with its most prominent public statue that of the bandido Pancho Villa and its streets lined with tattoo shops, murals reminiscent of Marxist art, bong stores and so on. Tucson celebrates diversity, but rarely does one hear about commonalities.”

If Tucson hadn’t had bongs and murals, none of this unpleasantness would have happened. That’s the message I’m getting.

Tucson thought…
I listened to President Obama’s memorial speech in Tucson. I was struck by the pep rally tone of the proceedings, which many conservative pundits took to be evidence of something unwholesome, and for which (of course) they blamed Obama.

I figure it this way: in America, nobody teaches us how to grieve. But everybody knows how to cheer.

Has FORBES gone insane?
This is from a recent article by Wendy Milling:

“At their core, public safety nets use government force to systematically seize property from some individuals and transfer the loot to others, with the implicit threat of organized government violence against those who resist. Public safety nets are systematized robbery by government proxy.”

Deduct social security from your paycheck, or jackbooted thugs will come to your door and remove it for you!

Not the WIRED editor, Chris Anderson is curator of the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conferences.

He blogged, for WIRED Magazine:
“I believe that the arrival of free online video may turn out to be just as significant a media development as the arrival of print. It is creating new global communities, granting their members both the means and the motivation to step up their skills and broaden their imaginations. It is unleashing an unprecedented wave of innovation in thousands of different disciplines: some trivial, some niche in the extreme, some central to solving humanity’s problems. In short, it is boosting the net sum of global talent. It is helping the world get smarter.”

Wasn’t the first book printed, in the West at least, the Bible? What was the “free online video” equivalent?

I do get tired of Web enthusiasts yammering on about the exciting possibilities of new stuff. It will all just turn into some different stuff five years from now (or less), with a new batch of enthusiasts, and an equal lack of evidence that anybody’s getting smarter, much less the world.

Mommy World
Once a year or so, some new book or article shakes Mommy world to its very foundation. This year, it’s BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER, by Amy Chua.
If you haven’t heard of the book, you haven’t listened to NPR, or the BBC, or listened to talk radio, or watching the morning tv chat shows.

Here’s Judith Warner, introducing the Mom herself in the New York Times: “Chua, who is Chinese-American and a Yale law professor, pushes her children to get straight A’s, forces them to spend hours each day practicing piano and violin; they are not allowed to pursue loser activities like playing the drums…. She refuses them playdates and sleepovers and TV and video games, and she demands unstinting obedience and devotion to family, all of which leads, unsurprisingly, to no small amount of crying, screaming and general tension.”

Reaction to the book comes not from the book itself - which is apparently a memoir, and not a how-to call to arms to mothers everywhere, -but from the most “controversial” portions of the book, published in the Rupert Murdoch-run Wall Street Journal.

Further, of course, the reaction to the book doesn’t even come from the excerpts published in the Wall Street Journal, but from media reactions to them. Who has time to read? Much better to listen to some talk show host read a couple sentences for you, and then throw open the lines.

The better to hook you, guilty Mommy, as you call up the talk show to defend yourself from the onslaught of Chinese mommies who are better mommies than you will ever be, calling the talk show on your handsfree cell phone, as you ferry your kids to ballet, to the Mandarin lesson, to the museum, as they hunch in the backseat, watching Justin Bieber videos on the DVD, and texting their friends on how much they hate you.

Two spacers, unite! Or don’t. Who cares.
In Slate, Farhad Manjoo issued a rant about punctuation, a diatribe against the practice of putting two spaces after a period when typing a document. The author calls this “totally completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.” He calls practitioners “two-spacers,” jokingly, of course. But maybe not.

He wrote: “Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the ‘correct’ number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two.”

These accomplished professionals won’t be breaking bread with Farhad next Thanksgiving, I’ll bet. Did he invite them all to Thanksgiving to feed them, or to coerce them into being a focus group for his insane obsession? What else was discussed? “Before we serve up the pumpkin pie people, one simple question: do we really need the semicolon? You’ll find pencils and notepads just above your butter knife.”

Animal news!
Back in World War II, a couple in Finland owned a dog. When you commanded, “Hitler,” it would raise its paw in salute. And its bark sounded like “Heil.” Newly unleashed documents, according to the Associated Press, have revealed: “In the months preceding Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin's Foreign Office commanded its diplomats in the Nazi-friendly country to gather evidence on the dog and its owner — and even plotted to destroy the owner's pharmaceutical business.”
You’ll be pleased to know that both dog and owners were spared Nazi wrath, and survived the war.

But the story achieves a special resonance in the wake of recent strange animal stories. One of my favorite publications, THE FORTEAN TIMES, which devotes itself to the inexplicable, occult, and the bizarre, had a brief series of articles about monkeys, including one from the Chinese government-run PEOPLE’S DAILY, which claimed that the Taliban is training monkeys to fire machine guns at American troops in Afghanistan. Animal experts are skeptical. While quite adept at flinging their poo at observers in zoos, monkeys are not known for their sniper skills.

The closing days of 2010 also brought news of a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea – Here is Time Magazine. “Over six days, five swimmers were attacked by sharks. That compares to just six attacks over the previous decade in Egypt, according to the Global Shark Attack File, a scientific archive that documents shark attacks worldwide.”

Sharks themselves are rarely sighted in the Red Sea, and investigators have concluded that two of the attacks were by the same shark! A serial killer shark!

Time said: “Local explanations for the shark surge varied wildly in the days following the first attacks, citing everything from climate change to the de rigueur blaming of local calamities on alleged Israeli plots. “

That’s right. The Mossad trained this shark to scare Muslims so they won’t go swimming.

News from Dubai, from The Telegraph
“…[T]he World, the ambitiously-constructed archipelago of islands shaped like the countries of the globe, is sinking back into the sea, according to evidence cited before a property tribunal.
The islands were intended to be developed with tailor-made hotel complexes and luxury villas, and sold to millionaires. They are off the coast of Dubai and accessible by yacht or motor boat.
Now their sands are eroding and the navigational channels between them are silting up…”

Finally….
Seth Rogen, fresh on the heels of GREEN HORNET’s stunning box office and critical glory, reports that he was in a meeting with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, in which Lucas began holding forth about how the world was going to end in 2012.

He told the Toronto Sun: "I first thought he [Lucas] was joking ... and then I totally realised he was serious and then I started thinking, 'If you're George Lucas and you actually think the world is going to end in a year, there's no way you haven't built a spaceship for yourself ... So I asked him ... 'Can I have a seat on it?'
"He claimed he didn't have a spaceship, but there's no doubt there's a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go ... It's going to be him and Steven Spielberg and I'll be blown up like the rest of us."

Spokespeople for Lucas, claim that he was joking. But yes, there will be no seat for Seth on the Millennium Falcon. That space is reserved for Chris Rock.

You can tell everybody this is your blog.

2011-01-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

Late breaking new from WWII.
Some guy in Finland owned a dog that, when you commanded, “Hitler,” would raise its paw in salute. Its bark also sounded like “Heil.”

Newly unleashed documents, according to the Associated Press, have revealed: “In the months preceding Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin's Foreign Office commanded its diplomats in the Nazi-friendly country to gather evidence on the dog and its owner — and even plotted to destroy the owner's pharmaceutical business.”

Nothing happened to the guy, or dog, however.

Recent study suggests….
The New York Times:“In several experiments, researchers found that men who sniffed drops of women’s emotional tears became less sexually aroused than when they sniffed a neutral saline solution that had been dribbled down women’s cheeks.”

A study, conducted by the Weizmann Institute, in Israel, hopes to expand its study to include men’s tears. Neurobiologist Dr. Noam Sobel told the Times that “… researchers started with women because when they advertised for ‘volunteers who can cry with ease,’ they could not find men who were ‘good criers,’ readily able to fill collection vials. Fortunately, he said, ‘we have a male crier now.’”

No. It’s not John Boehner. That’s funny though.

Nature News!
The closing days of 2010 brought news of a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea – Here is Time Magazine. “Over six days, five swimmers were attacked by sharks. That compares to just six attacks over the previous decade in Egypt, according to the Global Shark Attack File, a scientific archive that documents shark attacks worldwide.”

Sharks themselves are rarely sighted in the Red Sea, and investigators have concluded that two of the attacks were by the same shark! A serial killer shark!

Time: “Local explanations for the shark surge varied wildly in the days following the first attacks, citing everything from climate change to the de rigueur blaming of local calamities on alleged Israeli plots. “

That’s right. The Mossad trained this shark to scare Muslims so they won’t go swimming. Or maybe it was Dr. Evil.

In other natures news!
Thousands of birds dropped dead from the sky in Arkansas. Anderson Cooper invited the Christian actor Kirk Cameron to venture his opinion about the event on television. He said maybe somebody should call a veterinarian. There is a popular video game called ANGRY BIRDS. I’m just saying.

My vow to you
I will never again tag a comment with “I’m just saying.” I suggest that the rest of you refrain as well.

Congress in action!
The House, in its wisdom, decided to read the United States Constitution aloud. Well, not ALL of it. Members skipped the part about slaves counting as three-fifths of a person, for instance. And members drifted away as the reading went on. This was partly because the reading was not continuous. As each distinguished colleague read a chunk, he would then yield the floor to the next distinguished chunk reader.
Thanks to Jed Lewison at DAILY KOS, I learned that it went something like this:
Rep. GOODLATTE: I now yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island, Mr. Langevin.
Rep. LANGEVIN: Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Rep. GOODLATTE: I now yield to the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Lance
Etc.

These symbolic moments take time!

John Boehner himself (again, according to the DAILY KOS) bailed on the reading halfway through to hold a press conference with Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Fox News dropped its covering of the reading to cover them.

In related news…
Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot over the weekend, along with some 17 others, two of whom died (federal judge, child). She was attending a series of constituent meetings at a Safeway in Tucson. The alleged shooter has been apprehended. Early reports indicate that he is some kind of crazy person.

During the Constitutional reading, she read the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Tea Party news.

The New York Times checked in with the Tea Party on January 1st. Part of that report?

“Do I think that they’ve recognized what happened on Election Day? I would say decisively no,” said Mark Meckler, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, which sent its members an alert last month urging them to call their representatives to urge them to “stop now and go home!”

“We sent them a message that we expect them to go home and come back newly constituted and do something different,” Mr. Meckler said. “For them to legislate when they’ve collectively lost their mandate just shows the arrogance of the ruling elite. I can’t imagine being repudiated in the way they were and then coming back and saying ‘Now that we’ve been repudiated, let’s go pass some legislation.’ ”

So…. Mr. Meckler is upset that the body elected to pass laws passed some laws. That’s the message I’m getting!

End of the year blog

2010-12-28T17:17:00.000-08:00

THE KING'S SPEECH
This is a movie about a man who would be king and his speech therapist. Much acting is involved, I think. Oscars will gather.

True Wee Wife Moment
She picks up her purse. It’s heavy. Why is it so heavy? She opens it, says, “Oh. It’s pumpkins.”

NEW YEAR’S EVE
Come see me! I am a big part of a New Year’s Eve Show, with Ian Shoales (me!), Dr. Science (half me!), Randee of the Redwoods, Two Headed Dog, Train Wreck Riders, Duck’s Breath (1/5 me!), and more….
Starts at 9:00, at the Presentation Teater, San Francisco, 2350 Turk (at Masonic)
Brownpapertickets.com/event/139075

More Economic Bad News…
(From Reuters) The United States executed fewer people this year, in part because there is a shortage of the drug used in lethal injections and because executions are too expensive in tough economic times, a report released on Tuesday said.

But good news from Bolivia!
It has lowered the retirement age to 58. Here in America, we will soon be working until we’re eighty, at which point we’ll either drop dead in our traces, or receive our retirement funds grudgingly, tempered by the disapproval of pundits who hold pension funds to be at the very heart of the forces holding America back from growth and job-creation.

Dancing With the Stars!
Jamie Lee Curtis has rejected a request to compete.

The program was also unable to nab Mark Zuckerberg, Sylvester Stallone, Ann Coulter, Condoleeza Rice, Richard Branson, Tim Allen, Suzanne Somers, and more!

A source close to the program revealed to HOLLYWOOD REPORTER that Melanie Griffith tries to get on the show every year, but has so far been unsuccessful. Jenna Fisher, from THE OFFICE, was also turned down. Ditto Tara Reid. I know her from somewhere….

Nature news!

Recently re-discovered in Kenya! For the first time since 1948!

(AFP) “The Mormotomyia Hirsuta reportedly looks more like a spider than a regular fly. The creature is approximately one-centimeter long, has wings but is unable to fly, and tends to breed in bat feces. Furthermore, the creature had minute eyes, and is the only identified member of its biological family, according to Reuters.”

Kenyans refer to it as the “terrible hairy fly.”

“I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
For fans of Charles Portis - and why aren’t you one of them?- TRUE GRIT will not disappoint. For fans of the John Wayne version, this is a much better movie. I recommend it. After seeing it, we went to the library, where the Child Bride promptly checked out THE DOG OF THE SOUTH (Charles Portis), which I stayed up until three in the morning re-reading. And I’m not a young man!

Where to go when the world ends in 2012.
Apparently, it’s Bugarach, a small village in France, which has unique properties enabling it to survive a Mayan-predicted apocalypse. The town has been inundated by various groups of survivalists, etc. The mayor of the town informed The Daily Telegraph, “This is no laughing matter,”

Bruce Sterling on Assange
“…Julian Assange seems remarkably deprived of sympathetic qualities. Most saintly leaders of the oppressed masses, most wannabe martyrs, are all keen to kiss-up to the public. But not our Julian; clearly, he doesn’t lack for lust and burning resentment, but that kind of gregarious, sweaty political tactility is beneath his dignity. He’s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he’s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.

“I don’t say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I don’t doubt the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him; it’s just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.
The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one.”

Money-making idea!
The wee bride and I have come up with a surefire television series hit: MIAMI POLICE HOSPITAL LAWYER.

By the way…
The pumpkins were actually little squashes. Three of them. But those things do add up, weight-wise.

Don't Bogart This Blog, My Friend

2010-12-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

On the Road Again

Willie Nelson was busted in Texas, on the road, for pot possession.

Julian Assange Has a Blog!

From it: “Now I say unto you -- arise serpents! Tear the hinges from their doors, stand above the alter (sic) white and vomit out your poison till deceit crumbles and sets free the dove.”

Before you serpents arise, here’s another excerpt: “Don't worry about self flagellating christian guilt mania diet nonsense. Think about how much you eat. Think about the effect of being even 1 potato chip per plate out between energy demands and consumption. Daily energy demands for a woman approximates 10 mega joules. Pure fat has an energy density of around 3000 Kj/100g. So your energy demands can be met each day by a little over 333 gms of fat.”

Eyes glazed over yet? One more: “What do guitars, lollies, lipstick, tamagotchis, padded bras, pornography, movies, opium, Ever Quest, and 98% of any Australian newspaper in common? They are all technologies of emmotional (sic) manipulation which distort our perceptions for the benefit of their masters.”

To which I wonder: Tamagotchis?

Hand sanitizers.

Suddenly they’re everywhere, especially in the front of grocery stores, where I often see anxious-looking women dousing their hands before proceeding to finger the produce. I imagine this stuff pretty much evaporates in a few minutes, but whatever floats our overcrowded hygiene boat, I guess.

Also: face masks. Everybody’s suddenly donning face masks, in the hope of avoiding flu, I guess. Or maybe the air has suddenly become toxic.

Evangelicals!

Just in time for Christmas, there’s a new 12 DVD set that Christians can throw their money at. It’s called THE GREEN DRAGON. It’s about the great evil that is the environmental movement. It’s educational.

Now THIS is spam….

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Hillary Clinton

Jack Shaeffer from Slate thinks she should resign: “A secret cable from April 2009 that went out under Clinton's name instructed State Department officials to collect the ‘biometric data,’ including ‘fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans,’ of African leaders. Another secret cable directed American diplomats posted around the world, including the United Nations, to obtain passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, and other data connected to diplomats.”

Well, certainly that’s mighty damning. And I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton. But is anybody really surprised by this? It’s so… wonky. Biometric data of African leaders. If you can get your people to get that—score! But then what? Put it in a file, I guess. And then what? It’s in a file! America wins! We have iris scans of Robert Mugabe! Nothing can stop us now!

NUTCRACKER

For reasons that escape me, one Alastair Macaulay, on assignment form the New York Times, has embarked upon a Nutcracker marathon. He is going to see “as many different American productions as I can reasonably manage in November and December, from coast to coast,” He’s a dance critic for the Times, and a Brit, and has the patience for this sort of thing.

I have seen NUTCRACKER. Once. I enjoyed myself, but once was certainly enough. I don’t quite get it. The first act sets up a story in which a young girl gets a nutcracker for Christmas. Beats getting a pair of socks, I guess, but the show nearly lost me right there. “Thanks, Mr. Drosselmeyer! Maybe next year you can get me a can opener, or shoelaces.” Anyway, the nutcracker comes to life during the night and leads an army of toy soldiers to win a battle against an army of mice. Cool! Now we’re getting somewhere! But … that’s it.

Act II consists of Clara, the girl, now a young woman, and the Nutcracker, now a handsome prince, sitting down and watching a variety show celebrating sweets from around the world. That’s right. A bunch of people dancing for them. And us. Dressed like food. The end.

Bryan Fischer

Bryan Fischer, an extreme Christian commentator, has been on a roll this year. First, he wrote a column urging us to kill grizzly bears. A 70 year old man was killed by one in Yellowstone National Park, prompting Fischer to write, “Because this animal was given a nap instead of a bullet, a human being is dead, and a savage animal is alive, on the prowl, and ready to kill again.”

He reminds us that, biblically, humans are given dominion over animals. “…if biblical precedent had been followed, the whale that killed SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau would have been euthanized in 1991 when it killed its first human victim. Ms. Brancheau would be alive today if the principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed.”

My feeling is that rather than killing grizzly bears, if you are living near grizzly bears, move somewhere where there are no grizzly bears. I recommend San Francisco.

As far as killer whales go, not to disparage those trainers who work with them, but I would remind everybody that these animals are called killer whales, and we probably shouldn’t be shocked when they live up to the name.

I recommend puppies and kittens to Christians and agnostics alike. If you have a pet grizzly bear, well, you’re on your own pal. And if you have a killer whale, I hope you also have a pool.

Then, Bryan Fischer, having put down his thirty ought six long enough to sit down at the keyboard again, wrote that when Salvatore Giunta received the Medal of Honor for rescuing some trapped comrades, under fire, it was somehow proof that the medal has become “feminized.” He wrote, "When are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things, so our families can sleep safely at night?"

Apparently, he wants soldiers to go on rampages, like grizzly bears or killer whales. How that would help families sleep safely at night isn’t clear to me. But at least our soldiers wouldn’t be doing girly things like risking their lives to help their friends. That’s just wussy.

Fischer, by the way, has also written, "Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews." That’s right. According to Fischer, Adolph Hitler was gay. Nazi Germany was, essentially a gay culture. Kind of like San Francisco, only with goose steps and tanks. Which may be why San Francisco doesn’t have grizzly bears.

Meet Mama Grizzly

Now, Sarah Palin has written in her book AMERICA BY HEART, that grizzly bears are "Beautiful, ferocious, serious-as-a-heart-attack creatures," She wrote, “When you come upon one, you don't give her a hug, You tread lightly. Because when the ones she loves are threatened, she rises up."

They know this in Alaska, but in the lower 48, according to Palin, we persist in depicting bears as “cute and cuddly.” She has been known to represent herself as a Mama Grizzly. So I’m wondering what Bryan Fischer would do if he happened to walk into a Starbucks, handgun at his side, and Sarah Palin should happen to be there, and rise up on her hind legs, and defend her brood. Wouldn’t you like to see that on YouTube?

Let's Put Things In Perspective Blog

2010-11-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

Hi!

Over the past few months, various hindrances have been thrown in the way of these aging yet still trampling feet. Not the least of which was the total loss of my computer, and all content thereon, going back six years. Luckily, I had backed up SOME of my files. But not enough to forestall a kind of despair, sense of helplessness, and (yes) a certain amount of relief (forty plus pieces of stalled writing I don’t have to think about any more!).

I am back up, and am once more a Mac guy. Certainly, PCs are cheaper, but the whole being-devastated-by-malware-on-a-regular-basis-despite-firewalls-and-virus-removal-programs thing proved finally to be too much. I still think Steve Jobs is a dick, however.

The Beatles! On iTunes!

Oh boy! Yet another opportunity for fans to buy the entire catalog in an entirely new format! Thank you, Steve Jobs!

Oh, and…

The day my PC crashed and died, back in September, I learned that our cozy little rental was going to go on the auction block, because our landlady owes close to half a million dollars to the mortgage company.

And I turned 61, and my mother, calling to wish me a happy birthday, informed me that my father had had another small stroke (this is three). He was fine, or fine-ish. He’s 89. When I envision his brain I envision Jenga. Little pieces keep getting removed. Sooner rather than later, it will fall over.

So then…

Trying to recover whatever notes I have for the new show I’m working on…

It is strange. I have half of pieces of a piece. Looking through them, I wonder whether I should just throw it all away and start over, or build on what is there. But what is there?

There is not only my own diffidence to overcome: after all, I am no longer a young man, and could do other things with my time than mount another damn satirical revue. I could read. Work on my novel. (Wait. Do I have a novel? Oh no! Gone!)

Plus, I am burdened with a suspicion that America has become both stupid and insane.

And what is what?

I have been further disheartened by our recent election, though not as disheartened as I could have been, I suppose.

I was heartened that a blatant troglodyte in Alaska was defeated by a write-in candidate. And I was heartened that Sharon Angle went down in flames. Both of whom were endorsed by Ms. Palin.

In conclusion then…

The show will go on!

Chile today, hot tamale

Even as the Chilean miners were released, I heard many discussions worrying that the plight of the miners was not yet over. There will be nightmares. There will be post-traumatic stress syndrome. Though I would think, if I can act like an expert for a minute, and put myself in their shoes, I would put everything that happens from now on in the category of not being trapped in a mine.

Oh no, my computer died. Boo.

I’m not trapped in a mine! Yay!

Oh no, I am buffaloed by life. Boo.

I’m not trapped in a mine! Yay!

Long Time No Blog

2010-08-05T18:01:00.000-07:00

Oh, life...

It has interfered with the blogging, which has made me SO much money. I will not disturb your attention with the minutiae of my life, which barely interest me, and I'm living my life!

But here's a series of vignettes I created for... something.... I can't imagine they could have a life anywhere else, so I share them with you....

Starbucks

During the 18th Century, coffee houses in England were the equivalent of Facebook, without the games. The entrepreneurial spirit was born in those coffee houses. Before that time, the English had no idea what coffee was. Or giraffes. Or macaques. Or money.

Special Effects Sequence

No Segways were harmed in the making of this segment. There was a desire to harm Segways, but they are expensive, and surprisingly resistant to damage. The hope, originally, was to employ a jetpack, but the discharge can burn the legs severely. Besides, jetpacks don’t exist.

Life of Crime

A life of crime is appealing. Rob a bank, flee in a hopped-up Buick, the police in hot pursuit. Become the subject of movies, starring actors much better looking than you. Of course, you won’t be around to see those movies. You’re dead, having expired in a hail of bullets.

Re-enacted

Some military conflicts are re-enacted, and not others. Custer’s Last Stand is re-enacted, and Civil War and Revolutionary War battles. World Wars I and II are not re-enacted. At comic book conventions, people re-enact Imperial Storm Troopers, Klingons, Wonder Woman, Hulk, and Batman. In real life, they do not co-exist.

Guitar Hero

In GUITAR HERO, players use a guitar-shaped peripheral to simulate lead guitar from rock songs. Famous bands have given their names to the game, including Aerosmith, Metallica, and Van Halen. A knock-off of the game, for six-year-olds, features Hannah Montana, who isn’t real, and doesn’t play guitar.

Laptops

Do laptops have a future? They may be replaced by iPads and ever-smarter smart phones. And they in turn will be replaced by something else. Little puppets maybe. Shiny and furry puppets. They’ll read our minds, follow us around, and give us everything we want.

Prom

The gymnasium was transformed into an enchanted paradise. Garth looked so handsome in his white tuxedo, Sue fetching in her empire waist gown, hair stacked high on her head. But Garth got drunk, and Sue had to walk home alone, wobbling down the dark road on her high heels.

Should the Old Have Sex?

The term “cougar” is used by people who are uncomfortable with the term “MILF.” Young people are often “grossed-out” by the idea that older people have sex. Older people, however, enjoy sex very much. When they get it.

Pursuit of Happyness

Nobody knows what the future holds. Relationships implode. Jobs disappear. The thing you own proves to be useless. And yet sometimes you fall into a job that proves to be your life’s work. A date out of nowhere leads to a lifetime of happiness. Sometimes, everybody wants to be you.

Movies

Anybody can make a movie. The Internet is full of movies. But can you make a movie that people will want to pay to see? You need stars. You need a story. You need zombies. You can’t go wrong with zombies.

Importance

It’s hard to tell what’s important. If you’re hungry and cold, food and warmth are important. If you’re not hungry or cold, importance is up to you. You can start worrying about the zombie infestation, for example, if you have one. And you think it’s important.

Food

People eat strange things when they’re outside. You would never order s’mores at a restaurant, would you? Cotton candy. Soft serve ice cream. Fluffernutters. Church basements are also a strange food location. Lime jello with miniature marshmallows and shredded carrots. People have actually eaten that. And liked it.

Fable

A poor boy wanted a cell phone. He lived in a box, and only had turnips to eat, so it seemed unlikely. One day a phone fell from the sky, right into his lap. Except he couldn’t afford a calling plan. Plus, he never learned how to speak. How ironic!

Mountains

Everest used to be the Elvis of mountains. Climbing Everest got you in the history books. But Sherpas climb it all the time. And now, with advances in insulation, communications, and climbing gear, anybody can. It’s like a trip to the beach, except it’s really cold, and there’s no oxygen.

More Mountains

For a young nation, our natural wonders are awfully static and old. Mountains are great, as far as they go. But we need more volcanoes! Imagine having to step over molten viscous magma on your way to work every morning. That would keep you on your toes.

Evil Twin

In folklore, seeing your exact double, or doppelganger, usually means evil, or bad luck. That’s the trouble with doppelgangers. Which is the double of which? Who brings bad luck to whom? It means nothing if you’re not superstitious. But what if your doppelganger is?

Frustration

The frustrating thing about frustration is the frustration that comes from dealing with frustration. It’s a never-ending information loop that does not actually impart information, but prevents you from getting the information that you know is there to be had. By information I mean sex.

Orange

Houston mail carrier Jeff McKissick spent 25 years turning his home and lot into The Orange Show - a tribute to his favorite fruit. He thought Americans would flock to his installation. They didn’t. They preferred the Astro-Dome. It is said that he died of a broken heart.

Impress Me

In the future, there won’t be books on shelves to impress others with what we read. There won’t be CDs to impress others with our taste in music. How will we impress each other? Will we exchange our book readers and music players? In a special ceremony?

Webcams

Surveillance, eavesdropping, security cameras, cell phone videos at music concerts, bootleg DVDs– all have flourished because you can make movies with a camera you can fit in a pocket! Itty bitty video cameras have ruined everything. Except pornography. Home grown porn is great!

Kafka

There is a batch of unpublished Franz Kafka manuscripts in a Tel Aviv bank. Their publication has been delayed by a squabble among the heirs of Max Brod, Kafka’s executor, and Israel, where Brod died. The situation has been described as “Kafka-esque.” That’s kind of lazy, isn’t it?

More Kafka

Vladimir Nabokov has concluded that the insect Gregor Samsa becomes in THE METMORPHOSIS is not a cockroach, but a large beetle. We should probably take Nabokov’s word for it.

DVD Commentaries

DVD commentaries for Hollywood movies are boring. Indie movie commentaries are informative. STRYKER’S WAR, with director Sam Raimi as a Manson-esque villain, has commentary by Bruce Campbell. His Michigan garage was a set for both a military base and the hero’s house. Hollywood does not care about Bruce Campbell’s garage.

Kafka-esque?

What is “Kafka-esque?” What makes something “Kafka-eque,” and something else “Shakespearean,” or “Orwellian,” “Byronic,” “Brechtian,” or “Shavian?” Do we have any authors now worthy of being transformed into an adjective?

This Will Be the Last Time…

The first time one experiences something used to be important. We would dress up for premieres, take all our clothes off before losing our virginity, rent a tux for our first marriage. Now everything is everything and it all happens at once. I am not the first to think these thoughts.

Whatever

Everybody’s a critic. Everybody’s a writer. Everything exists so others can do whatever they want with it. Kafka wanted Max Brod to destroy his works upon his death. Instead, Max Brod preserved them. We can do whatever we want with them.

Pantheon

What is a pantheon? In ancient Rome, it was a domed temple. In history, it’s a vague place where we place the artists, writers, heroes, and idols that have cultural staying power. Pantheon residents come and go. Kafka did not make it until he died. Bulwer-Lytton is long gone.

Leavings

When culture discards something, somebody picks it up and runs with it. We abandoned LPs, and turntables became an instrument to make hip-hop. Old chairs become antiques. Emily Dickinson enters the pantheon. Somebody will always need a blacksmith. Fifty years from now, the iPad will make a handy doorstop.

Singularity

Eventually machines will achieve consciousness and become a lot smarter than we are. We will merge with those machines, and be immortal. Or: the machines will destroy us. But maybe we should worry more about the ghosts of things we’ve thrown away. Because everything is everything, and nothing is destroyed.

Sing Out

Wouldn’t we be happier if language was replaced by song? No. Some of us sing better than others. Some of us have a gift for composing. These may prosper, but only in service of the loudest, most tone-deaf among us, who will sing the obvious sentimental songs and rule us all.

Just the blog ma'am

2010-06-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

San Francisco County Fair

Journeyed there from Oakland to watch the Child Bride present her abbreviated compost talk.

It was well done and well received. My swell daughter and her swell boy friend were there as well, and we attended the petting zoo together. It had a zebra!

The Fair itself was rather pathetic. There was only one tent, touting organic gardening, foods, etc. That was all right. But the rest of the fair was little more than the kind of carnivals that spring up in vacant lots in August in Santa Monica. About the size of two parking lots maybe.

But the Dread Wife and I rode the Ferris wheel, so there was that!

This weekend, off to Alameda. We have been told they have an excellent old school 4th of July parade. I look forward to seeing five year old girls in tiaras twirling batons.

I am so tired of all these people....

So there’s this reporter, David Weigel, who covered the conservative movement for the Washington Post. He wrote some emails that were what we call “reckless,” about some conservatives, suggesting that Matt Drudge set himself on fire, for example, and that Rush Limbaugh should die from a heart attack. These emails were sent to a four hundred person list serv called JournoList, from whence they were what we call “leaked.’ Mr. Weigel was subsquently fired, or asked to resign, from the Post, or WaPo, as we insiders like to call it.

As kind of an outsider insider I’m a little amazed at the flap this firing has engendered. It’s kind of like the McChristal flap in a nutshell. First of all, JournoList is a group, supposedly, of liberal journalists. It’s a place where they can whinge and snark to each other, without fear of repercussions. So, some say, whoever leaked those emails betrayed a trust. And that person or persons should be considered the guilty party, not David Weigel. Others say that David Weigel was supposed to be covering conservatives objectively. His emails reveal a hatred and bias of conservatives that render him incapable of covering them objectively, and he was right to be fired. Or asked to resign.

I dunno. This whole Journolist thing I find irritating. Basically this was a glorified invitation-only chat room. Some claim that Tucker Carlson, who runs the website the DAILY CALLER that first published the emails, did so because he had requested to join JournoList and was refused.

It all sounds like 12 year old girls texting each other furiously over a sleepover gone horribly wrong.

And, in a weird way, the McChristal flap struck me as the flip side to that. After actually reading the ROLLING STONE article that got him fired, or what we call asked to resign, it became immediately clear that General McChristal did not say most of the things the media have since said that he said. Doesn’t anybody read any more? He did not call the administration a bunch of wimps. He did not describe French ministerial function as “gay.” He did not refer to Vice President Biden as “Bite me.” It was his staff who drank too much, with a reporter present, with notebook, and tape recorder rolling, who did not have the clue.

So here is this General, whose staff seems to consist of a bunch of out of control drunken swaggering frat boys who think they can say anything they want to and get away with it because they’re on the team. Team America!

We have a bunch of journalists acting like trolls in a Yahoo chat room, and a bunch of soldiers - the very people running the war in Afghanistan - acting like they’re running a chugging contest at a keg party. Fire them all, I say. Or ask them to resign. Maybe it’s time for a fresh new batch of creeps.

From the twelve items or fewer line

There’s a picture of Spencer Pratt on the cover of a magazine. Spencer Pratt thinks that 9/11 was an inside job. Huh. Who is Spencer Pratt? I have no idea. He was on the HILLS, and I’M A CELEBRITY-- GET ME OUT OF HERE, neither of which I have seen. He is - or is that was? - married to Heidi Montag, I have no idea who she is either. She was baptized on television by Stephen Baldwin though. I know who he is. Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag have been referred to in print as “Speidi.”

Heidi Montag supposedly sent a Tweet to Jusin Bieber, which said, "now that I am getting divorced I think you and I should do a photo shoot together! Cutie ;)! I'm closer to your age." Heidi denies the tweet, and tweeted, "I didn't write that thing about Bieber my fame hoer x husband hacked my Twitter and wrote that he is so lame!" I think she means "fame whore." Justin Bieber is sometimes referred to in print as "the Bieb."

The alleged fame whore Spencer Pratt went to Crossroads School in Santa Monica along with Brody Jenner, Whitney Port, and Mary-Kate Olsen. I know Mary-Kate, of course, who doesn’t, but not Whitney Port. Brody Jenner is the son of Bruce Jenner, who has had several face lifts. He was once a famous athlete.

Spencer Pratt’s parents have removed all photos of him from their home, according to Us Weekly. He also recently fired his entire security team –wow! He has a security team! - including his personal bodyguard, Cougar Zank. Spencer thinks that Cougar and Heidi may have been getting it on behind his back.

Heidi has hired a lawyer to get "the quickest divorce possible in California," TMZ reports. Heidi has her own fashion line, called Heidiwood. She too has had cosmetic surgery.

Spencer wants to start his own paparazzi website. He recently tweeted his 836,080 followers: “send me all your celeb photos you take with your camera phones and i will post them on my new blog KINGSPENCER.com and give you credit and $.”

A further advantage of being your own paparazzo is you can take surreptitious pictures of yourself. And then sue yourself, and write it off on your taxes.

The line moves forward. I want to change my name to Cougar Zank. I replace the tabloids to the rack, place my eleven items on the conveyor, and stand patiently before the card machine.

Simultaneously, all over southern California, facelifts gain momentum. Flaps of orphan skin are lifted by soft Malibu breezes and drift slowly out to sea.

Just right!
Michael Rubin in National Review Online
"A lot of the criticism surrounding Israel’s actions against the Free Gaza flotilla center on proportionality. Did Israel apply disproportionate force? … But why should any democratic government empowered to defend its citizenry accept Europe’s idea of proportion? … Likewise, when terrorists seek to strike at the United States, why should we find ourselves constrained by an artificial notion of proportionality when responding to those terrorists or their state sponsors? …One final note on proportionality: Fifteen 'peace' activists dead is a tragedy, but they represent only one one-thousandth of the death toll of a French heatwave."

I suggest that, in future, all shooting victims in dubious international encounters should be compared to French heatwave victims: if there are more victims than the French dead, it's morally unacceptable, but if it's less - well then, it's okay!

Burbank Blog

2010-05-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

Luther!

The Wee Wife and I spent the weekend rummaging through books at the giant Salvation Army station outside of Healdsburg, acquiring many books to feed our jones.

And we spent Sunday morning at the Luther Burbank Gardens in Santa Rosa. We looked at plants.

Saturday night in the motel…

We scanned the television dial, making me realize once again how much I hate television news. It’s mainly the headache-inducing visual experience. One station, MSNBC I think, had not one but two headline crawls in the bottom third of the screen, and the top third was filled by whatever talking head was talking and ever-changing images around him about what he was talking about.

So there’s that. And Fox News was interviewing the Miss USA runner up about whether she thought she was robbed of the title or not. She said no in a way designed to make viewers think she meant yes. Apparently, there is a segment of the newsmaking community that believes the choosing of a Muslim woman to be Miss USA is some kind of covert Islamo-fascist sneak attack on American values. In collusion with the Hollywood left.

The objective, it seems, is to thwart our godgiven right to objectify sexually unavailable young Christian white women.

Elsewhere (also on Fox?) there was a story about Dora the Explorer. The popular cartoon character was depicted online, satirically, as an illegal alien being beat up and arrested. Our News Source (Fox?), however, seemed to be taking the notion seriously, asking, in fact, “Is Dora the Explorer here illegally?”

Politics aside, this is so stupid it beggars belief. As the Diminutive Bride pointed out, “What are they going to do? Make her go back to a piece of paper?”

Luther, part 2

Burbank, California was not named for Luther Burbank. It was named for David Burbank, a dentist. Why, I don’t know, but somehow it makes more sense.

Burqa Ban

France is following our lead, by going entirely insane. Its proposed ban on the burqa is being offered as a victory for feminism over patriarchy. I heard one supporter on public radio saying that it is the right of every citizen to be able to view his or her fellow citizens in the face. Women are hiding behind those burqas! Come out, into the light!

But what about motorcycle helmets? Are they being banned? Ski masks? I have a friend who is very sensitive to sunlight, and never goes outside without gloves, hat, and veil. Would she be arrested? And what happens to Hallowe’en?

More weirdness from Pat Buchanan…

“If Kagan is confirmed, the Court will consist of three Jews and six Catholics (who represent not quite a fourth of the country), but not a single Protestant, though Protestants remain half the nation and our founding faith….. What kind of diversity is this — either in geography or life experience?”

The Jewish/Catholic cabal will strip us of our godgiven right to objectify sexually unavailable young Christian white women. Mark my words.

Confession

I am alone, I believe, in my dislike of the much-loved series THE WIRE. It was too… written, if you know what I mean, and wore its liberal heart on its sleeve. Series creator David Simon has a new series, TREME, about New Orleans, that not only wears its heart on its sleeve, it tries to put that heart on your sleeve as well.

Tears of Chuck Norris Blog

2010-05-11T12:17:00.000-07:00

News

I just got an email from the LA Times, the header of which read, “Why have we stopped sending you e-mails?” After much brooding and consideration, I realize there is no way I can answer that question.

Other news….

Many many years ago, we had sex with neanderthals, DNA studies reveal. This explains a lot. Though not why, suddenly, it’s pronounced neander TALL, when it was neander THALL for many many years.

Outing

The Child Bride and I wandered into Urban Outfitters last weekend, looking for… something. Many hipsters. Wandering around, looking at useless crap. The hipsters seemed forlorn, disconsolate. As if the realization was slowly dawning on them that there is no and will never be a hip apotheosis, at least not one that will be achieved through shopping. Urban Outfitters is a mall store, with irony.

There was a table piled high with books, an astonishing number of which seemed to have been Web-inspired, like “A**holeology,” and “Texts from Last Night,” “It Looks Like a C*ck” ,(which shows photographs of things that kind of look like an erect penis, sort of), and “The Truth About Chuck Norris.” Hipsters were leafing through them half-heartedly, trying to work up a grin.

When I was in high school, I had a job as the voice of Paul Bunyan, at a small amusement park in my town. Its gift shop was full of novelty gifts, involving postcards of Granny in an outhouse, you know, and variations on the “Thought I Heard a Buck Snort!” gag. There were joke books, and little plastic dolls that pissed when you squeezed them, and The Horny Monk.

What’s the difference, humor-wise, between “It Looks Like a C*ck” and “Jokes for the John?” Yet one is hip, and the other hopelessly square.

Apropos…

Sean Fennessey wrote, in GQ:

“But once upon a time, the ‘You can do it, too!’ ethic of Tumblr-born books were charming. This Is Why You're Fat. Garfield Minus Garfield. Even the recent Look At This Fucking Hipster. But these Tumblrs--compact, clearly delineated, devoid of investment, so perfectly Internet--are no more worthy of a book than the grand daddy of this phenomenon, Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like, the Caucasian-crucifying guide to middle brow haute du jour. That was a good idea for a web site, a place to spend four minutes before returning to the spreadsheet you were working on. As a book, it was a helluva web site.”

But why was I reading GQ? After much brooding and consideration, I realize I have no answer.

Trend

So two movies are out, KICK ASS, and HARRY BROWN. KICK ASS is about kids who become superheroes, kind of, to fight … something or other. Most famously it features Hit Girl, an 11 year old, who has a jet pack kitted out with gatling guns. HARRY BROWN is about an old guy who fights gangs who have taken over his neighborhood. Last year’s GRAN TORINO had Clint Eastwood pretty much doing the same thing.

What happened to our heroes? The Watchmen? Disbanded, dead. Batman? He’s all broody. We haven’t seen Superman in years. Plus, Spiderman aside, all these heroes all rich! Iron Man’s a billionaire, Batman’s a billionaire, Superman can make diamonds with his eyes. What do they care about us poor folk, who have to wade through the throngs, THRONGS! of drug-dealers, crack whores, and gang warriors every day as we trudge our way to the payday loan kiosk.

We lift our eyes. From whence cometh our help? That’s right. From tween-age girls and geezers. The fate of our cities lies in the hands of Hannah Montana and Larry King.

Correction

Hannah Montana’s too old to save us.

Elena Kagan, Cipher

Conservatives say, of course, that her positions are “disturbingly out of the mainstream,” whatever the damn mainstream even is these days. It is also said that she has no experience. Though she was, I believe, dean of Harvard Law School; that counts for something, I’m thinking. In that capacity, she (briefly) barred military recruiters from the school, because of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which was instituted under the Clinton administration, whom she worked for.

Liberals say that she supports holding suspected terrorists indefinitely without a trial. Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon that her not saying anything about various Bush/Cheney threats to the political system in itself speaks volumes. “Not a single utterance,” he wrote.

On the whole, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court is perceived as a “cipher.” We like ciphers these days.

Even folks who act like non-ciphers are distinctively cipher-ish. When the state of Arizona voted that President Obama must present his birth certificate if he wants to be on the ballot in the next election, J.D. Haworth, running against John McCain, told CNN’s Campbell Brown, "Barack Obama is the president of the United States. He is our 44th president. I have no qualms about who he is, or who he says he is." He also said to Chris Matthews, that the President "should come forward with the information, that’s all." He expanded, "Shouldn't we know exactly that anyone who wants to run for public office is a natural-born citizen of the United States and is who they say they are?"

See the cipher-ness here? He believes the President and doesn’t believe him at the same time!

The Stock Market Crash, the oil spill, yadda yadda. Our nation of ciphers has difficulty responding to situations because we’re too busy thinking two contradictory thoughts at once.

I blame it on Blackberrys. Or the iPhone. Depending, I think, on which coast you're on. (He said, cipher-ishly.)

Blogoco

2010-04-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

Journalism 2.0

Recently the New York Times ran a profile of Mike Allen, from the journalism website Politico. Through Politico, Allen puts out a daily newsletter, Playbook, which is a three dotty kind of thing, discussing policy issues, Senator sightings, Hill staffers’ birthdays -- and more! I gather it’s a must-read in DC by pretty much everybody who’s anybody, or everybody who wants to seem to be an anybody by knowing what’s posted in Playbook. Mike Allen himself is kind of a mysterious figure, who is very messy, knows everybody, and never sleeps.

But here’s the thing. Allen asked in his April 10 Playbook, according to the New York Times:

… For brunch convo: Why isn’t Secretary Clinton on the media short lists for the Court?” By Monday, the convo had moved from the brunch table to “Morning Joe” (where the host, Joe Scarborough, advocated for her) and “Today” (where the Republican senator Orrin Hatch mentioned her, too). Later that day, Politico’s Ben Smith quoted a State Department spokesman who “threw some coolish water on the Clinton-for-Scotus buzz in an e-mail.” By then, the cable and blog chatter was fully blown. The White House issued a highly unusual statement that Secretary Clinton would not be nominated. Politico then sent out a “breaking news alert,” and Smith reported that the White House had “hurriedly punctured the trial balloon.” End of convo.”

Let’s break this down.

Allen wondered why Hillary Clinton isn’t being considered as a Supreme Court nominee. A question nobody else was asking. By Monday, all the chat shows and blogs were wondering why Hillary Clinton wasn’t being considered as a Supreme Court nominee, a question being asked by nobody else. Finally the White House declared that Hillary Clinton is definitely NOT a nominee, and Politico issued a “breaking news alert” that the White House had “hurriedly punctured the trial balloon,” a trial balloon, mind you, that Politico had launched. In other words, Politico pulled a balloon out of its own ass, which was the only source of the hot air that kept that balloon aloft for three days.

In other news

In other news, on April 19th, The Arizona House on Monday voted 31-22 for a provision that would require President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate in order to be on the state's ballot come re-election time. According to the Associated Press, “Mesa Republican Rep. Cecil Ash said he has no reason to doubt Obama's citizenship but supports the measure because it could help end doubt.” In related news the Hawaii Legislature is close to passing a law that would allow the state to ignore repeated requests for President Obama's birth certificate. What is Hawaii afraid of? Release the documents! I hope that Supreme Court Justice Hillary Clinton will step in to clear this--- oh, never mind.

Well reasoned, sir! Point taken! (Comment from some newsgroup…)

Magic wrote on 04/19/2010 09:09:30 AM:

I believe that Obama is a threat to our country and it is about time we excercise our freedom and protest everything he has done and is doing, he is not above the law! Number one he is trying to takeover with the Islamics here and is slapping our religions in the toilet! He has blatently stated this is not a Christian country but that it is Islamic, and that the Islams have enriched our country! Where? By killing thousands on 9/11 or what about before that when Clinton was in? Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, etc! Saudi king is his massa, and yes we should get rid of him and all his little Obamunists right away before it is too late. For he has made deals with these foreigners! England is in great fear right now for they are being over thrown by the Islams and they are trying to ban Christianity! Yes read it look it up! Just like the Nazis did in WWII and don't forget the Turks, and the Arabs in General were our enemies then as well they signed with Hitler! DUH?

Wisconsin in the news!

Wisconsin state legislators have named the Lactococcus lactis bacterium, the official State Microbe. It helps make cheese.

Buh by Hitler!

It was an Internet trope for, oh I don’t know, months, let’s say, which is a lifetime, an infinity, in Web Time. I’m speaking of the viral videos, which took a scene of Hitler ranting in his bunker from the movie DOWNFALL, and putting in new subtitles. The idea is that Hitler is then seen ranting about iPhones, the iPad, real estate losses, the Kanye West controversy, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, Harry Potter, Virginia Tech beating Nebraska, Brett Favre, Obamacare, Obama winning the Peace Nobel, Nascar Rule Changes, Scott Brown’s election, and more. The first hundred or so were really really really really funny. So I’ve heard.

Alas, for those of us who just can’t get enough of the same joke over and over again, the distributor of the movie, Constantin Films has blocked all content past and further on copyright grounds. Appropriately some of the final “Hitler reacts’ videos included Hitler ranting about becoming an Internet meme, and Hitler ranting about being yanked from YouTube.

It’s hard to see how this relentless stream of parodies deal any lasting harm to the sales of DOWNFALL on DVD. Still, the distributor’s lawyers are being blamed for the takedown. I have read that both the director and the screenwriter/producer of the movie have confessed they are amused by the parodies. The director has declared, "Someone sends me the links every time there's a new one. I think I've seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I'm laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn't get a better compliment as a director.”

Reading between the lines there, though, I think that perhaps it was the director himself who wanted these things off the Internet. He says he’s seen about 145 of them. That would be about 140 too much for me, and I had nothing to do with the movie, beyond seeing it, and liking it a lot. The original scene in question is a very creepy and profoundly unfunny picture of a crazed and dying madman still clinging to delusion. The director says, “I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself!” Keep in mind that the director is German. Germans have a complicated and often distant relationship with humor. Slapping jokes on what he intended as a harrowing moment just may have caused him to finally snap, to call the distributor’s lawyers and say, “Stop, for God’s sake, make it stop.”

To which I can only say, fair use issues aside, it’s about damn time. Now we can get back to what we normally do. Which is to make videos of ourselves with Tiger Woods’ ghost father yelling at us, trying to figure out who the hell Justine Bieber is, and seeing what weird stuff we can make out of bacon.

B log O' My Heart

2010-04-01T18:03:00.000-07:00

Overheard

“His pants were out of control.”

Overheard

“You’re talking like my ex-girlfriend. She was a whore. You know what a whore does?”

At the video store!

I was looking for a copy of MADE IN USA, the 1966 Jean Luc Godard movie, because I’d read it was loosely based on THE JUGGER, one of the Parker novels by Richard Stark.

As often happens, the store had a video screen, playing a program. On the screen were Alec Baldwin and Isabella Rosellini, going through divorce terms. He was demanding ridiculous things, like the Arby’s franchises they owned near Telluride. She said something like, “You know I love my beef and cheddar!” I was thinking, “God, what is this?” Then the scene cut to a parody of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, in which a woman was saying, “My vagina is a lunchbox.” I thought, “What? Who does parodies of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES any more?” I asked the highly tattooed young clerk at the counter what was thing they were showing. She told me, “It’s a television show? Called 30 ROCK?” Oh. I felt old. So old. And yet strangely grateful that I had not seen 30 ROCK before.

MADE IN USA, by the way, was irritating. It had little to do with THE JUGGER, was crammed with film references, snatches of poetry, snatches of philosophy, and oodles of zero commitment to the narrative. I mean if somebody murders your sweetheart, shouldn’t there be at least the pretence of emotional involvement in finding out who did it? If only to wink at it? It was no ALPHAVILLE, is all I’m saying. It’s a movie? Called ALPHAVILLE?

In other news…

The Catholic News Agency has released this report:

“Noted Italian exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, commented this week that the recent defamatory reporting on Pope Benedict XVI, especially by the New York Times, was ‘prompted by the devil.’”

Speaking of religious figures…

Author and food activist Taj Patel, shortly after appearing on THE COLBERT REPORT to plug his book, THE VALUE OF NOTHING, suddenly became deluged with emails. According to the Guardian UK, “Patel's background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or ‘the world teacher’.”

Patel has denied the charges. He told the Guardian: “My parents came to visit recently, and they brought clothes that said 'he's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy'. To them, it's just amusing."

Blog Reform Now!

2010-03-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Vanitas

I know that the world is pressing down upon us, or rather we are being pressed into the world, like shredded carrots into lime jello. But all I can think about is Carly Simon teasing us with quasi-revelations about who the true subject of her hit “You’re So Vain” was really all about. It’s not so much that I care. I didn’t care when the song was a hit a zillion years ago, and I don’t care now. But there is something sad about a woman my age and more revisiting the faux mysteries of youth in a shameless attempt to … what? Get people to buy the record again?

Anyway, some have recently speculated that the song was really about David Geffen, the gay record executive. Ms. Simon has denied it. That people find this interesting is interesting.

And what exactly did Billy Joe throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge? Get over it! It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the singer and Billy Joe were seen together, shortly before Billy Joe’s death. Or did he die? Did he REALLY die?

For Those Who Were Disappointed To Learn That John Wayne Wasn’t Really A Cowboy….

…in real life, bomb squads don’t work the way were they presented in THE HURT LOCKER. I know this because I have been Alerted By The Media, both MSM and other.

NYT Lawyer News

“A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe, kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.” The outfit is run by Liz Cheney, Dick’s daughter, who may be evil.

Then there’s this…

Viacom is suing Google and hence YouTube for posting “infringed” content.

YouTube has countered: "For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately 'roughed up' the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. ...

"Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.”

Michiko Kakutani in NYT

“It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, YOU ARE NOT A GADGET, of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes ‘metaness’ and regards the mash-up as ‘more important than the sources who were mashed.’

“Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for ‘a digital humanism,’ is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s TRUE ENOUGH, which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR, by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a ‘digital forest of mediocrity’ and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book THE SHALLOWS (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.”

Let’s do a mash-up of these books, and put a dance mix on it!

Found somewhere…

“McNeill Pediatrics—a subsidiary of Ortho-McNeill Pharmaceuticals—launched what they called an ‘unbranded group’ called ‘ADHD Moms.’ ADHD Moms markets the trademarked name ‘Mom-bassadors’ to get mothers into the Facebook page.”

“Mom-bassadors” joins “Me O’Clock” at the top of my list of unfortunate neologisms.

Oh, and Femivores too.

Peggy Orenstein in NYT: “Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?”

These are women who have GARDENS. They are GARDENING. Why do we need to create quasi-ideological movements to justify actions that need no justification? Activities that our mothers and grandmothers did as a matter of course now requires some kind of socio-cultural context, it seems.

And “Femivore?” What does that even mean? You eat women?

Let’s mash it up and set it to a dance mix!

Cover of PEOPLE.

I was in line at Walgreen’s when I saw the cover of PEOPLE Magazine, with a picture of Susan Boyle with the caption, “Is Fame Hurting Her?”

What a paradoxical question! If the answer is “Yes,” then why is PEOPLE putting her on the cover, and increasing the hurt? If the answer is “No,” then what’s the point of asking in the first place?

Good news!

Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have created an invisibility cloak! So far it has only proved effective on an object one thousandth of a millimetre high. But can tanks be far behind?

WALKER: TEXAS RANGER!

…is out on DVD. Over two hundred shows! Over fifty disks!

I became briefly addicted to this show when it was stripped on USA. It was at once a throwback to the kind of shows I loved when I was a ten year old boy, and at the same time a surreal vision of modern life, especially in Texas, which seemed to be teeming with drug cults, Satanic cults, terrorist networks, slave traders, etc. Every other episode, it seems, either Walker or Trivette’s girlfriend was being kidnapped by somebody or other. Well, she wasn’t really Walker’s girlfriend. I think he was celibate.

Tea Party

Tea Partiers get upset when they are referred to as “teabaggers,” which they consider a sneering term coined by liberals, and a reference to a (perhaps) non-existent sexual practice. I’m afraid that the Tea Partiers coined this term themselves, during one of their first protests, urging people to mail tea bags to the Senate and Congress. It soon came to their attention, however, that teabagging also referred to a (perhaps) non-existent sexual practice, which quickly lead to their assertion that it’s a left wing plot to discredit them. Because that’s what we do these days. We create our own reality and then get angry at others for supposedly making us live in it.

Cut and paste it! Mash it up! There are no more spectators. We’re all just making goo in the hive.

Kitty Blog

2010-03-09T19:41:00.000-08:00

OUT OF IT

Been busy not paying attention to the world for a few weeks, trying to write a screenplay. For those of you who follow this blog with bated breath, here's something I wrote a few years back. It's either Sadly Dated, or Eerily Prescient. Your choice.

KAP’N KITTY’S KORNER

Fade up on a bare wall, on which are written in scrawled Magic Marker, “Door,” “Window.”

KAP’N KITTY walks onto this set. He’s an extremely close-shaven young man wearing a fuzzy black cat suit, revealing only his face. He stares at his feet, as an unseen ANNOUNCER proclaims--

ANNOUNCER

Hi kids. Welcome to Kap’n Kitty’s Korner, the federally mandated program for today’s at-risk pre-teen population. This portion of Kap’n Kitty’s Korner is funded in part by Halsted Buckram & Hartford, where your money is their money. And by Plasmopheme, where glowing soybeans feed the world. Now say hello to Kap’n Kitty!

[KAP’N KITTY looks up.]

KAP’N KITTY

Don’t really say hello. Remember, I’m on television and can’t hear you. Keep in mind too that my real name is Dan Reynolds. I’m a special agent with the Treasury Department. I’m just--

[He makes quotation marks in the air with his paws.]

--pretending. Also, we might be spelling “captain” with a “k” instead of a “c” but this is for a comedy effect. It’s humorous, okay? And what’s our topic today, Mr. Bennett?

ANNOUNCER

Our topic today is “Imaginary Friends,” and it’s underwritten in part by Phosmerexetrene. Consult your physician. And by Sawyer Liddell, venture capital for the unborn. Let them get you started early on the road to personal wealth.

KAP’N KITTY

Great. And here’s our imaginary friend, Ms. Kathleen Corrigan.

[KATHLEEN CORRIGAN, a smartly dressed professional woman, enters, carrying a slim, stylish briefcase.]

You’re not really imaginary, are you?

KATHLEEN

No. I’m an attorney with the Justice Department.

KAP’N KITTY

Lost a case, did you?

KATHLEEN

Don’t even go there.

KAP’N KITTY

Why else would you end up here?

KATHLEEN

How’d you end up here?

KAP’N KITTY

I--

[KAP’N KITTY makes quotation marks in the air with his paws.]

--volunteered. I made the mistake of telling the complete truth on my initial application.

KATHLEEN

That you had a childhood?

KAP’N KITTY

My imaginary friend was named Steve. Did you have an imaginary friend?

KATHLEEN

God, no. I barely had real friends. I was kind of male-identified, if you know what I mean.

[There is an embarrassed silence.]

KAP’N KITTY

Well. It’s perfectly normal to have an imaginary friend, until it’s not. It’s a sign of imagination, and-- what?

KATHLEEN

Creativity?

KAP’N KITTY

Roger that. Remember, kids, as you get older, prospective employers look for signs of creativity in your job applications. It’s a good thing to say that you have it.

KATHLEEN

Here’s a tip, though. Don’t really have it.

KAP’N KITTY

Hell no. The truth is, most employers hate creativity.

KATHLEEN

Right. But they want you to believe you have it.

KAP’N KITTY

Right. So. Just sit there, until you can vote. That’s my advice.

[A slight pause ensues, fraught with anxiety.]

ANNOUNCER

And by Premulent Technologies. Their motto, since 1996: “If you know what we do, please tell us.”

KATHLEEN

Oh. Here.

[She hands KAP’N KITTY a piece of paper.]

KAP’N KITTY

E-mail! Remember, kids, we don’t accept telephone calls or letters. Only e-mail. This is to help you adapt to the new economy. This is from Sam in Redwood City California. “Dear Kap’n Kitty. Do you have a gun? Can I see it?”

[He hands the piece of paper back to KATHLEEN, who puts it in her slim, stylish briefcase.]

KAP’N KITTY

Yes. I carry a nine millimeter handgun. I can’t show it to you, because research has shown that it’s damaging for children to see authority figures with loaded weapons. Psychology and that, you know? It’s perfectly legal for you to have a weapon, though you probably shouldn’t. If you do, and you bring it to school, you run the risk of being arrested, or shot by police officers during a siege situation. Up to you. My leg itches.

[A pregnant pause.]

ANNOUNCER

Kap’n Kitty’s Korner is staffed entirely by volunteers from the Justice and Treasury Departments. Because America’s children are its greatest treasures. No tax dollars were spent to bring this program to you.

[Brief pause.]

And this portion of Kap’n Kitty’s Korner is brought to you by The Chalmer Group. You pay us. We’ll pay you.

KAP’N KITTY

All righty then. How you doin’ Kathleen?

KATHLEEN

Bitter. I’m bitter. Bitterness, kids. Get used to it. Work through it.

KAP’N KITTY

That’s some good advice there. Now we come to the part of the show we call “Send us your stuffed animals, and we’ll try to guess their names,” where we get your stuffed animals and we try to guess their names. Here’s Special Agent Roy Harris.

[AGENT ROY HARRIS enters, carrying a pathetic ball of fur.]

ROY

Guidelines suggest that we do not portray children on television, therefore I will represent the eight year old male demographic, aka Tim, aka Timmy, aka Little Timmy.

KAP’N KITTY

Hey Tim. That a stuffed animal you have there?

ROY

That is correct.

KAP’N KITTY

Is its name Timmy?

ROY

No sir. That’s my name.

KAP’N KITTY

Sometimes you give stuffed animals your own name.

ROY

On your planet maybe.

[A brief, yet excruciating silence.]

KAP’N KITTY

Is it called Marty?

ROY

No sir.

KAP’N KITTY

Simba?

ROY

No sir.

[KAP’N KITTY looks at his feet. ROY looks at KAP’N KITTY’s feet as well.]

ANNOUNCER

And by www. darkness.com, saying “Lights out,” to the Internet.

KAP’N KITTY

Okay. I give.

ROY

It’s Shamu.

KAP’N KITTY

Huh. So it’s like a whale, or something?

ROY

I guess. Looks more like a skunk to me though.

KATHLEEN

Maybe a dinosaur.

ROY

It’s pretty beat up.

KAP’N KITTY

Thanks, Timmy. ‘Preciate it.

ROY

Hey, no prob.

[He exits.]

KAP’N KITTY

Remember, kids, send us your stuffed animals and we’ll try to guess their names. You need to get rid of those things anyway. They’re an impediment to maturity.

KATHLEEN

There are no stuffed animals in the workspace.

KAP’N KITTY

You got that right. And write this down too, kids. It’s a federal offense for you to watch any television show but this one.

KATHLEEN

And you shouldn’t even be watching this.

KAP’N KITTY

Yeah. You should be, uh, I dunno-- doing some science.

KATHLEEN

Reading.

KAP’N KITTY

Roger that. Bottom line: if you watch television, this is the program you must watch, though we don’t recommend it.

KATHLEEN

Is anybody watching, by the way?

KAP’N KITTY

Let’s crunch the numbers. Mr. Bennett? Anybody out there?

ANNOUNCER

Working on it.... No. As of now, our viewership is zero.

KATHLEEN

Good news!

[KAP’N KITTY takes his head off.]

KAP’N KITTY

Good news for us. Good news for America. Our long nightmare is over. The future is safe. Finally, we can all go home.

[KATHLEEN is already out the door.]

ANNOUNCER

This portion of Kap’n Kitty’s Korner was brought to you by E-Solutions, providing scalable b to b synergistic platforms offering mission-critical content to expedite bandwidth. And by trimethylphenosomnihex, your one-step solution to attention deficit disorder.

[KAP’N KITTY struggles to get out of the cat suit, falls over.]

Unablog

2010-02-19T17:50:00.000-08:00

Joe Stack, the guy who crashed his plane into a building in Austin, Texas, is now being accused in death of being both a Tea Partier AND a liberal.

There was a Facebook group (gone already), lauding him as a hero. And a patriot.

I have skimmed his manifesto, or whatever you want to call it. It’s no Unabomber screed, but it’s close.

He was mad at a lot of stuff, including the Catholic Church and the IRS. Mainly the IRS, because he was being taxed more than he wanted to be as an independent contractor.

In his “manifesto” he described how he spent most of 1987 dealing with what he considered the unfairness of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Section 1706. He spent $5000 of his own money doing… something. And a thousand hours, at least, making contact with figures of authority urging them to strike down this unjust provision.

He drove around L.A. (Many, I’m told, do.) Finally, he moved to Austin, Texas. Where work was scarce. And yet, there he was, he wrote, “…with a new marriage, a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention a new asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle.”

A piano? What? I thought he was broke! Who buys a piano when they’re not working? Somebody with an over-developed sense of entitlement maybe?

Here’s a conclusion from a San Francisco Examiner op-ed piece:

“Joe Stack was one of us.

At one time or another we've all been pushed, poked, prodded and pounded nearly into submission by the big government-corporatist-unionist establishment bosses.

Joe Stack was, and he snapped.”

The thing is this: He wasn’t one of us.

Why? Because he had an airplane.

I don’t have an airplane. Do you?

If I did have an airplane, I wouldn’t fly it into a building. I’d sell the fucking thing. And the fucking piano too.

We are the blog.

2010-02-16T16:53:00.000-08:00

Haiti Relief

A bunch of musicians have banded together to make a song a video designed to spur relief for Haiti. That song? “We Are the World.” This was first recorded way back in 1985, to benefit famine relief in Africa. It’s great that Celine Dion, Josh Groban, and the gang can assemble themselves for a worthy cause. But isn’t it kind of insulting to offer up a second hand tune?Couldn’t somebody have written a new song for the event? I mean, how hard can it be?

Which will it be, boys? I’ll be over in the corner downloading porn.

From Mark Cuban’s blog:

“A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

“Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes, highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions ‘dead and boring.’ The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

“Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.”

Daniel Lyons, in Newsweek January 24

“To many in Silicon Valley, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who ‘get it,’ and those who don't. The people who get it are the ones who understand that the Internet is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race, a wave so huge and so powerful that the only way to cope with it is to jump on and hope to make money building a new world once the tsunami has laid waste to the old one.”

A typical tweet:

“I enjoy following twitter.com/iTod. He updates regularly with news about Fluid.app.”

A bad tweet:

(From a Luke Allnutt op/ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor)

“’Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.’

“That was one of the text messages that fueled interreligious violence in central Nigeria earlier this month.”

Teenage Dancing

Last night, I was awakened by the Wee Bride, pushing me away from her aggressively. I had been forcing her off the bed with extreme gyrations and, I was told, trying to smother her with a pillow.

I have no excuse for these actions.

I was, however, dreaming that I was watching a video (actual videocassette, in the dream) called “Teenage Dancing.” It was a training video for older folks like me to teach us how to dance correctly For When the Teenagers Come Over. In my dream, I was awaiting these very teenagers, throngs in fact (awaiting them anxiously, I should add), and trying to master the subtle and minimalist dance moves that would allow them to permit me into their circle.

I deeply regret trying to murder my wife as part of this learning process. On the bright side, when the teenagers finally get here, I think I’m ready.

On the street

Getting off the bus and heading for the video store, I heard a voice behind me:

“… born in Africa. He’s an African citizen.”

Another voice, impatient: “Oh, come on!”

Unable to restrain myself, I said over my shoulder, “He was born in Hawaii!”

I was surprised to see that the doubter was a young black man. He looked like Huey Newton, actually. He said to me fiercely, “Wake up!”

I turned away, and walked on. A black birther! The hell…?

Twenty minutes later, I was walking away from the video store (with a P.D. James mystery, a Glenn Ford thriller, and O’HORTEN, a quirky Norwegian comedy – yes, that’s right, shut up).

Coming towards me on the sidewalk was a fifty-ish Rastafarian (complete with Bob Marley tee)... on a Segway. The hell…?

Who knew?

Robert Pattinson, inteviewed in DETAILS: "I really hate vaginas. I'm allergic to vagina.”

Washington Post has a head-scratcher!

On Sunday, reporters Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick had a story headlined, “Under Obama, More Targeted Killings Than Captures in Counterterrorism Efforts.”

The gist of the story was that when troops are confronted with a possibility of either capturing or killing “terrorists” in the field, we are now often choosing to blow them away. Yay us! I guess!

In the interest of fairness, the reporters include this paragraph:

“Republican critics, already scornful of limits placed on interrogation of the suspect in the Christmas Day bombing attempt, charge that the administration has been too reluctant to risk an international incident or a domestic lawsuit to capture senior terrorism figures alive and imprison them.”

So. Obama is soft on terrorism because he encourages the killing of terrorists. Wrap your head around that one, okay? I’ll be over in the corner downloading porn.

There's a blog for that.

2010-01-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

Pimped

For some reason, I’d never watched the actual “gotcha” video created by James O’Keefe III, when he stung the folks at ACORN. He captured ACORN staffers on tape giving unethical and possibly illegal advice. Shortly after these videos were released, Congress cut ACORN's federal funding.

I still haven’t seen that footage, but in the wake of Mr. O’Keefe’s arrest for attempting to do something or other with the phones in Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, I have seen stills of Mr. O’Keefe in his pimp outfit.

Now, at the time of the ACORN sting, I found myself irritated by the whole thing. I wondered if this is what conservatism had come to: rich white brats badgering overeager and underpaid grass roots organizers. Don’t frat boys have anything better to do, like haze freshmen, or beat up townies?

But having seen Mr. O’Keefe’s pimp outfit, I’m starting to question whether anybody was actually convinced by his schtick, or if folks were just playing along with the crazy white boy. After all, despite all the brouhaha, no ACORN action was taken on the “pimp” and “whore”’s request for help in filing taxes, buying a home, and turning it into a brothel.

In any event, to be frank, he is not an convincing pimp. The guy was born in 1984, and went to Rutgers, so I suppose it’s understandable that he hasn’t had a lot of contact with prostitutes and those who run them. But you’d think you’d do a little more research than just watching STARSKY AND HUTCH reruns.

Why was anybody taken in? In this latest “sting,” he wasn’t even convincing as a telephone repairman. Clearly, if he’s opting for the MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE lifestyle, he might want to acquire some rudimentary acting skills. Maybe he can take some classes in prison, or – if he’s lucky - at his Mom’s house. Hopefully, the ankle bracelet won’t be too much of an impediment.

RIP JD Salinger

I’m a little mystified when Salinger is called “reclusive.” He wasn’t a hermit, was he? He went to the store, probably, had friends over for dinner. He even had an affair, if Joyce Maynard can be believed. Maybe more. Okay, he didn’t like strangers coming around. Who does?

He decided not to publish his own work. That’s what made him weird. What kind of writer is that?

Well, a writer who can afford the luxury of not-publishing. He was lucky. Most writers are not published at the whims of publishers, not their own.

Meme

If you enter the numerals ” 241543903” in your Google search engine, you will get a bunch of photographs of people sticking their heads in freezers. I’m not recommending you do this, I’m just saying.

The economy might be continuing to go to hell, but it’s nice to know there are still folks out there with time on their hands.

Scientologists in Haiti!

Sylvie, a Parisian Church of Church of Scientology ‘volunteer minister’ told the AFP: "We…use a process called 'assist' to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication. When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch."

AFP: “One US doctor, who asked not to be named, snorted: ‘I didn't know touching could heal gangrene.’”

NYT

“Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.”

NYT Again!

“’If the First Amendment has any force,’ Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, ‘it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.’”

If a corporation is a person, can it be killed?

Jaron Lanier Q and A on Amazon. YOU ARE NOT A GADGET is his interesting book.

The original turn of phrase was "Information wants to be free." And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information. Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way. What we have done in the last decade is give information more rights than are given to people. If you express yourself on the internet, what you say will be copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme. However, the information, the abstraction, that represents you is protected within that fortress and is absolutely sacrosanct, the new holy of holies. You never see it and are not allowed to touch it. This is exactly the wrong set of values.

The idea that information is alive in its own right is a metaphysical claim made by people who hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer someday. It is part of what should be understood as a new religion. That might sound like an extreme claim, but go visit any computer science lab and you’ll find books about "the Singularity," which is the supposed future event when the blessed uploading is to take place. A weird cult in the world of technology has done damage to culture at large.

Terrorists Trials

For God's sake America, grow up! Put these people on trial and get it over with! You can do it at my house, if you want to. No doubt it will be a propaganda heyday for Those Allied Against Us, but I can live with that.

Bloggers can't be choosers....

2010-01-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

Pandora’s box?

From some damn forum:

“I've read on this thread and various other sources on the web about Avatar fans feeling heightened sense of mood changes along the lines of despair and depression from the realization that Pandora and all of it's inhabitants are not tangible. I have also read about fleeting thoughts of suicide, self induced coma, and prolonged sleep from members of this website and other websites as possible ways to physically and metaphysically connect with Pandora and its inhabitants. For that matter, this website exists as an extension to the world of Avatar, a place where we all can commune, connect, freely express our love and passion for the world that James Cameron has created.”

It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie. Repeat.

Accept all phone calls from mice!

From Medical Device Link:

“In mice, cell phone radiation can prevent Alzheimer's disease. Researchers tested 96 mice, most of them genetically altered to develop the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer's disease. Those exposed to the cell phone radiation did better on tasks requiring memory than those not exposed, said lead researcher Gary Arendash of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Already impaired old mice regained memory after the treatment, Arendash said. Younger mice never developed the impairment. The study was published this week in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.”

I remember feeling symptoms of withdrawal after the first time I saw THE SECRET OF NIMH. I still have dreams about me and Mrs. Brisby doing... things... unspeakable... things....

Yemen: Land of Enchantment! Soon to Feature Drones!

Op-Ed in NYT, from Edmund J. Hull, former US ambassador to Yemen:

“In my experience, there is no deep-seeded affinity between Yemeni tribes and the Qaeda movement. Tribes tend to be opportunistic, not ideological, so the risk is that Al Qaeda will successfully exploit opportunities created by government neglect. There are also family affinities — cousins, linked to uncles, linked to brothers. These do matter. But what matters most is the ‘mujahedeen fraternity’ — Yemenis with jihadist experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. Finally, what would matter — and significantly — would be innocent casualties resulting from counterterrorism operations, which could well set off a tribal response.”

Here’s what gets me. Some guy sets fire to his pants on an airplane, and suddenly we’re going to invade Yemen. Whatever, as the young people say.

Forget Yemen! Scan this!

Michael Chertoff, former secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, wrote an editorial for the Washington Post on January 1, urging the installation and use of full body scanners at airports.

The bio at the end of his piece says that Mr. Chertoff is “…co-founder of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk-management firm whose clients include a manufacturer of body-imaging screening machines.”

In other science news…

From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

“[Inventor Douglas]…Hines started his work on artificial personalities thinking there might be a market in creating home health care aides for the elderly. ‘But there was tremendous regulatory and bureaucratic paperwork to get through. We were stuck,’ Hines said. ‘So I looked at other markets.’”

This turned out to be the sex industry market.

"Thus was born Roxxxy, who made her debut … in Las Vegas at the Adult Entertainment Expo, just one of several new innovations showing up at the intersection of sex and technology. Roxxxy still can't move without assistance, but she offers what Trudy lacked and customers apparently wanted — conversational skills. ‘Sex only goes so far — then you want to be able to talk to the person,’ Hines said. Equipped with sensors and an attached laptop, ‘she's a companion,’ he said. ‘She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person.’”

…

“Roxxxy will retail for between $7,000 and $9,000, plus a subscription fee for online updates and enhancements.”

But it might take your mind off Pandora for a few minutes. Priceless!

Mental Health News!

From a very interesting feature in the Sunday New York Times, by Ethan Watters: THE AMERICANIZATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS

“No one would suggest that we withhold our medical advances from other countries, but it’s perhaps past time to admit that even our most remarkable scientific leaps in understanding the brain haven’t yet created the sorts of cultural stories from which humans take comfort and meaning. When these scientific advances are translated into popular belief and cultural stories, they are often stripped of the complexity of the science and become comically insubstantial narratives. Take for instance this Web site text advertising the antidepressant Paxil: ‘Just as a cake recipe requires you to use flour, sugar and baking powder in the right amounts, your brain needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best.’ The Western mind, endlessly analyzed by generations of theorists and researchers, has now been reduced to a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowl of our skulls.”

Apropos…

Bruce Sterling, from his annual State of the World forum on The Well:

"Time’s most recent average weekly circulation is somewhere around 3.4 million …. That’s down 17% from 5 years ago but is still an impressive number. Plus, as Time Inc.’s media kits are at pains to remind you, a general interest publication like this also has a substantial amount of ‘pass-on’ readership (think of all those doctor’s office waiting rooms, for example).

"So who’s advertising? Turns out that the #1 type of space being bought, by far, isn’t really advertising at all. It’s prescription drug legal disclosures. Yup: 21% of Time’s Person of the Year ad pages was taken up by those comforting warnings about ‘suicidal thoughts or tendencies’ or ‘increased risk of heart attack or stroke’. On average, there were 1.4 pages of text disclosures for each page of health ads that contained a photograph.

"All-told, health advertising comprised 40% of total ad pages for 14 prescription drugs and 3 OTC ones. The biggest spender was AstraZeneca, whose Seroquel medication for bipolar depression contained a whopping 5 pages of disclaimers to accompany the one color photo of a very sad-looking lady sitting on a concrete step. …”

But think of the mice. For God’s sake, man, think of the mice. And the sex dolls, of course. They have feelings too, you know. Or will. Very soon.

Finally…

From a Slate article about Jason Lanier:

“What Samuel Johnson said about his hometown holds true for the Internet: ‘No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’”

I’m kind of tired of the Internet now. Does that mean I don’t live anywhere?

Another blog on the fire

2009-12-28T18:13:00.000-08:00

This made me laugh.

James Wolcott, on his blog, referred to Meryl Streep as Dame Judi Brunch.

This made me go “Agh!”

Newsweek, for some reason, printed some tales out of school from Secret Service agents.

“President Richard Nixon (code name: Searchlight) ogled half-naked women while on vacation in St. Martin. ‘He’d wade out into the ocean and lurk with that nose just covered by the water,’ wrote agent turned author Marty Venker. ‘Like a crocodile.’”

Xmas

Well, there’s another skirmish in the war on Christmas, and I believe I fought it to the draw. Got the Dread Wife the present she wanted – a pink Daisy BB gun, the same model featured in CHRISTMAS STORY. It didn’t come with BB’s, however. They are difficult to find in the East Bay, and BB guns themselves are illegal to possess in San Francisco (that’s right – you can own an actual gun in San Francisco, but not a BB gun).

Fortunately, my excellent daughter’s excellent boyfriend had just purchased an air pistol (I’m not sure why, exactly; it had something to do with being freaked out after playing a RESIDENT EVIL marathon), and he brought over some BBs when the two came over for Christmas dinner. Hooray! The Feared Bride still has not test driven the BB gun yet, however.

She got me DVDs (bootlegs, I guess) of YANCY DERRINGER, one of my favorite television shows when I was nine years old. It holds up pretty well! Jock Mahoney is Yancy, a riverboat gambler and spy. He has derringers hidden everywhere! In his hat! Up his sleeve! Plus, he has a sword cane, can leap up on balconies with a single bound, and has a silent Pawnee companion, Pahoo, who carries a Bowie knife and a double-barreled shotgun, which he uses frequently to blast some bad guy across a room. He’s kind of a psychotic Tonto.

Jock Mahoney started out as a stuntman (doubling for Errol Flynn among others), after being a Marine pilot. He got “discovered” when he was given a bit in a Three Stooges movie, and wound up playing Range Rider (another one for all you Boomers out there), and eventually Yancy Derringer (which only lasted one season). He was also Tarzan in two movies (and the oldest Tarzan – he was in his mid-forties at the time) and was Sally Field’s stepfather. I imagine he made a better swashbuckler than a stepfather.

Best spam ever!

Email from Amber Mockbee:

“on stump. Of go door-step, marrying! No demand jagged.

As he originality middle. In villa At strange. Have gathered.”

Tales from Gitmo!

From The Weekly Standard:

“A while back, one detainee smashed a television set when he saw a woman's bare arms during a broadcast of a soccer match. In response, camp officials bolted down the televisions and put protective plastic casings around them. They have also gone out of their way to make sure that the detainees are not exposed to any other material they may find objectionable. For example, the nondescript faces of the foosball table's characters have been chipped off so that the detainees will not be offended by any hint of idolatry.”

What I don’t get is the strange fear that if these detainees are transferred to an American prison they could somehow infect us. There’s this notion that radical Islam is somehow contagious. Well, not contagious exactly, but kind of like vampirism. Once exposed to it (And it could happen to anybody! Like that army shrink!), we’ll be taking handguns to lunchrooms, or trying to make bombs out of duct tape, hydrogen peroxide, and half-baked ideologies.

From a press release:

“San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFE) and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) officials today announced new tap water partnerships as part of the City's efforts to promote ‘on the go’ access to San Francisco's great tasting Hetch Hetchy tap water while reducing waste from use of plastic bottled water. In 2007, Mayor Gavin Newsom barred the use of City tax dollars for the purchase of bottled water. The demand for bottled water puts a strain on our environment and resources and bottled water can cost as much as 1,000 times more than tap water.

“In Yerba Buena Gardens, SFE Director Jared Blumenfeld and others unveiled the pilot water refilling station from GlobalTap, an international provider of new and innovative clean drinking water refilling stations. Following the pilot installation, SFPUC and SFE officials hope to install additional stations throughout San Francisco in 2010.”

Water refilling stations, I believe, used to be called “water fountains.” I recommend replacing our current port-a-sans with “Carbon Footprint Reduction Centers.”

According to AlterNet: “The City also announced its partnership with TapIt, a New York-based organization that has assembled a network of cafes, restaurants and other businesses throughout San Francisco where people on-the-go can refill their water bottle. People can access the network of participating businesses through the use of TapIt's search and mapping features on their personal computers, Smartphones or by downloading the TapIt Water iPhone application from the Apple Store.”

Need a drink of water? Yeah, there’s a goddam app for that.

Credit

Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Northwest Flight 253.

Hm. Wouldbe crotch bomber sets himself on fire, and gets tackled by a Dutch tourist. Al Qaeda might want to leave that one off the resume.

By the way…

That photo that TMZ had, supposedly of John F. Kennedy on a boat with a lot of naked women? Hoax. The story of the hoax was broken by the Smoking Gun. According to the New York Times, “TMZ is owned by Warner Brothers, and The Smoking Gun is owned by Turner. Both are units of Time Warner.”

The picture in question was actually a snapshot from "Playboy's Charter Yacht Party: How to Have a Ball on the Briny with an Able-Bodied Complement of Ship's Belles." It appeared in the magazine in 1967. Kennedy was killed in 1963, so it probably wasn’t him on the boat. Playboy, as far as I know, is still not part of Time Warner. But one of them might own the Zapruder Tapes. I don’t know. I just. Don’t. Know.

But I know this...

If Kennedy ever did encounter naked women on the briny, he did not observe them with his nose half in the water, like a crocodile.

Jon Gosselin’s apartment…

… was apparently ransacked over Christmas. Many believe he ransacked it himself as a publicity stunt. Or maybe to see if Balloon Boy was hiding behind the couch. I’m really depressed now.

My sister...

... who teaches art to teens in San Antonio told me over Christmas that one of her students, a fifteen year old boy, looked at her and declared, "Nice shoes."

He was referring to her sensible, comfortable, and sturdy SAS footwear. My sister was baffled: "Why would he think his sarcasm meant anything to me?"

That's America in a nutshell! We keep wasting our sarcasm on those unaffected by it. I can make fun of Rush Limbaugh until I'm blue in the face, for instance. He can hole up in his mansion and count his money. The right doesn't care what the left thinks. Sometimes the right pretends it cares, but that's only to garner itself a soundbite.

Unfortunately, the reverse isn't true. Progressives get twisted out of shape whenever the right says anything even remotely offensive. Let it go. Just let it go. We're all owned by Time Warner anyway.

Over and out…

The Obstreperous Other apparently has found DVDs of THE CAT as well, which should be arriving in the mail tomorrow. Robert Loggia forever!

A just and limited blog

2009-12-14T18:30:00.000-08:00

When Presidents Go To Norway

Poor President Obama had to accept his Peace Prize at the very same time he decided to escalate the war in Afghanistan. But he stood up to the plate, and gave a speech that achieved new heights of sophistry. I mean that in a good way.

Liberals have been criticizing his peacenik credentials, because he just moved to bring more troops to Afghanistan. Liberals view this as a betrayal, even though he said very clearly during his campaign that he liked that war a lot more than the one in Iraq.

Conservatives are thrilled, kind of, because he embraced American exceptionalism and the concept of just wars, instead of hating America, which as we all know he has done in the past. Oh, and he’s a narcissist, though less so in Norway, apparently, according to some conservatives.

Interesting footnote. I was reading Little Green Footballs, which approved of the speech, but quoted a comment on it from the LA Times: “…This incompetent unaccomplished bafoon is a joke and disgrace.” LGF deemed this racist, which led to various comments on the LGF site, as to whether it WAS racist. If it was a misspelling of “baboon,” then yes, went the consensus. If it was a misspelling of “buffoon,” then no.

As the world turned…

After 54 years on the air, the soap opera AS THE WORLD TURNS will be cancelled this September.

I feel mildly guilty for not feeling anything about this one way or another. I have never watched it. The only soap I ever watched in my life was two weeks’ worth of DARK SHADOWS back in high school, over one Christmas vacation. Nothing happened! Something was always threatening to happen, but never did. That’s what soaps are all about, so I understand.

If football went off the air tomorrow, I would feel about the same.

Climategate!

According to some newly released emails, certain pro global warming scientists don’t much care for global warming skeptics. Stop presses!

Frosty the snowman

Brent Bozell III on an online “mash-up” video of FROSTY THE SNOWMAN.

“Well-known scenes of the classic Frosty delighting children by coming to life are ruined by Frosty saying, ‘I have been with a lot of women. Blondes. Brunettes. Redheads. Big boobs. Small boobs. Medium boobs. (We see a clip of Santa Claus.) Some boobs that were big, but kind of in a bad way.’”

Bozell II disapproves. As for me, if this subversive activity assures that FROSTY THE SNOWMAN will never be aired on network television ever ever again, it would make me very happy.

From the Brits…

Came across this on Popbitch, a gossip site from England. I don’t know if it’s true, but I wish it were:

"If a Disney cruise ship ever needs to be evacuated at sea, the protocol is that the people who get the first lifeboat (before the women and children) are two Disney employees. These two employees are required to take one Mickey Mouse and one Donald Duck costume with them so that when/if the children arrive to safety they can be greeted by Mickey and Donald so that they don't get upset thinking that they have gone down with the ship."

What I learned about Tiger Woods.

He’s not very good in bed. He likes hookers. Alleged madam Michelle Braun told the SUN: "He liked girl-on-girl. He had sex with them together. He was tough to keep up with - days at a time on a booze and sex bender."

Speaking of progressives…

Slate: “…[T]he University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.”

More from the Brits

“The red bottoms on baboons are not buttocks, but ischial callosities. They are in fact rather comfy, and allow the apes to sleep on branches.”

Who knew?

Nancy Pelosi…

… is resting her voice.

NYT movie critic Manohla Dargis, interviewed in JEZEBEL, some on line magazine or other, on why so many romantic comedies are so terrible:

One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they're morons, three they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want.

Blogsgiving

2009-11-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

Black Friday

Missed it again! I was going to play the Steely Dan song in honor, but I couldn’t find it. Anybody die in an early bird shopping spree? Or are we all still survivors in the desperate battle we call capitalism? I sure hope so.

Thanksgiving

Spent half the day flat on my back, thanks to a wretched cold that struck out of nowhere. The Wee Bride cooked everything, bless her heart, even bringing me turkey, cranberries, stuffing, squash, and cranberries on my couch of pain. Great meal! Well done!

Then she too went down. Spent the evening watching DVR-ed PERRY MASON re-runs, and Black Friday was spent with James Bond.

She is sleeping on the couch as I write this, poor dear, in a Nyquil-induced slumber, as a Lifetime mini-series rolls on, unwatched. It’s about a very bad husband, I’m betting.

Folks

My parents are very very old, and moving very very slow. I went to visit them on Wednesday. We went out to eat at one of my favorite places in Woodland, a diner nestled in back of the bowling alley, which is always full of old folks and laborers having an after-work dinner. It took us about a half hour to walk into the place, and another half hour to walk out.

On the way to see my folks, I listened to TALK OF THE NATION for a while. The topic seemed to be whether President Obama had lost or misplaced his charisma. “The hell…?” I pondered.

Maggie Gallagher wrote a column on Wednesday that I never finished reading….

“I've been thinking a lot lately about thankfulness. Many people do not know this about me, but I used to be a libertarian….”

But did she have charisma?

David Freeman

I found a book among the many books the Child Bride and I have: US GRANT IN THE CITY, by David Freeman. It’s pretty good, in the old school new journalism mode, published in 1971. I went on-line to see if I could find out more about the guy. Apparently he moved to Hollywood, and has written several Hollywood novels, which I must track down. He may also be THE David Freeman, who is kind of a superstar in the ever-growing “How to be a successful screenwriter” crash course world. But I think that’s probably a different David Freeman. Anyway, I found this by my guy, which amused me.

“A few years ago I was sent a script…. It felt familiar in a way I couldn't quite pin down. Somewhere in the second act I realized that I had already rewritten this thing. Apparently, my rewrite had been junked. The producer who hired me had been replaced. The new guy didn't know about my version and sent me the same script I had worked on. I certainly remembered my version; what was hazy was the original, now once again in my hands. I was tempted to wait a few months and then deliver the rejected script that was surely somewhere in my files. I didn't have the nerve for that and in fact told the guy about it as I passed on the deal. He told me to keep my mouth shut about the whole thing. Then he hung up on me.”

Monopoly: The Movie

Ridley Scott is said to be developing this property. “The hell…?” I ponder. If ever a game lacks charisma, Monopoly is surely that game.

Beck Palin Ticket?

Sarah Palin, who is inexplicably fascinating to many people, recently said in an interview (she has a book out, have you heard?) that she wouldn’t rule out Glenn Beck as a running mate in 2012. She told Fox and Friends, “He’s a hoot!”

On his own program, Beck responded, in that artless way he has that has endeared him to millions:

“I don’t think things are hoots. I don’t. I don’t think it’s a hoot. I would never use the word hoot, and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she would stop using the word ‘hoot.’ …. No, no I’m just saying — Beck-Palin, I’ll consider. But Palin-Beck — can you imagine, can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? What? Come on! She’d be yapping or something, and I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I’m not in the kitchen.’”

“The hell…?” I ponder.

Mourning the loss of my charisma, I now return to my reading, as my Poor Other dozes on. I’m reading THE THIRD REICH IN POWER, by Richard Evans. It’s very good, and very creepy. We have much to be thankful for.

Oh, before I go…

Last week, Unspeakable Bride and I watched half of EXPELLED! This is the Ben Stein-hosted “documentary” about how evolutionists are censoring proponents of intelligent design. I would suggest that proponents of intelligent design aren’t being censored so much as ignored, as much as humanly possible. The ID argument, as I understand it, goes like this: certain features of the universe are best explained as being created by an intelligent cause, not by natural selection.

Oh, and it’s not GOD intelligent designers are talking about… well, maybe it is, maybe not. It could all just be “irreducible complexity.” Or aliens.

Where does that get you, scientifically? “We can’t explain it because it’s inexplicable! So just stop it! Surrender, biology! Or teach the controversry!”

I didn’t make it to the second half, but I gather that it shows that Darwinism was responsible for Hitler. Who knew?

Lest we forget, here is what Judge Jones said re: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which was all about this ID versus evolution business.

“…ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard.”

…

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

In Blog We Trust

2009-11-15T13:23:00.000-08:00

In Blog We Trust

At the memorial for the victims of the Fort Hood Massacre, President Obama spoke. About that, SLATE's John Dickerson, wrote, “President Obama's speech at Fort Hood, Texas, was a small masterpiece—less than 15 minutes—in part because it was so modest. The president had great material and he knew not to get in its way.”

It’s hard for me to put a finger on what I find vaguely appalling about this paragraph. Maybe it’s the idea that everything in this world now is up for review. Not to ponder upon, bow our heads to, laugh at, weep over, or even ignore. But review.

“The president had great material,” he wrote, “and he knew not to get in its way,” as if the President was a comic looking to wow some frat boys at the Chuckle Factory. As if we, instead of citizens honoring fallen dead, are critics sitting with our arms folded, saying, “Come on, Mr. President, show me what you got! You’d better have great material, or we’ll only give you three stars out of five.”

The great material, lest we forget, was thirteen dead people, who are no doubt grateful that our president did not offer B material over their fallen bones.

A sudden memory…

A producer once told me, as part of a cast assembled for a television sketch comedy pilot that failed, “Forget about acting. Go for the laughs.”

In other Muslim news…

CSM: ”Irish priest Father Michael Sinnott, who had been kidnapped by militants in the Philippines, was released Wednesday night to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which handed him to the Filipino government as a goodwill gesture.”

Of course in America a MILF would never ever let you go.

Sean apologizes!

Sean Hannity: "Although it pains me to say this, Jon Stewart, Comedy Central, he was right. Now on his program last night, he mentioned that we had played some incorrect video on this program last week while talking about the Republican health care rally on Capitol Hill. He was correct, we screwed up. we aired some video of a rally in September along with a video from the actual event. It was an inadvertent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. So, Mr. Stewart, you were right. We apologize….”

Sean apologizes! Sort of!

“…But by the way, we wanna thank you and all your writers for watching."

The footage, by the way, showed a much larger crowd from the previous rally than that which attended the referenced rally.

Computing reinvented!

Daniel Lyons in NEWSWEEK, talking about a tablet computer currently (allegedly) in development by Apple:

“Now imagine a larger form factor, with a screen big enough to hold multiple panes of information. It has no lag time and lasts many hours on a battery charge. Here, then, is your new morning newspaper, with videos next to stories and the ability to customize the panes to deliver what you want and leave out what you don't. This device is also your TV, your stereo, and probably your telephone too.”

Call me a luddite, but doesn’t that sound like a lot of work for the user? What if your phone rings while you’re watching TV? What if the video embedded in your “newspaper” causes the text to crash?

Lyons writes: “In 10 years the print newspapers we have today will seem as quaint and primitive as those old Uncle Miltie shows. Heck, the Internet we have today will seem quaint and primitive too.”

In the future, will we still use the word “heck?”

Does God hate us? Or rather will He hate us, and come back in time as a Sub-Atomic Particle, to show us that there are in fact Some Things Man Was Not Meant To Know?

Theoretical physicists Danish Holger Nielsen, and Japanese Masao Ninomiya, have theorized that the Higgs Boson, the theoretical particle and building block of life - which it is hoped that the Large Hadron Collider will discover - may be coming back through time to stop the collider before it can make one.

That’s their explanation for the technical glitches that have delayed the LHCs’ mission to recreate the moments after the Big Bang.

Whole Grain Blog

2009-11-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

Scott Baio Tweets!

“Wife calls Obama a ‘Shitfuck’ and I believe she’s right.”

This innocuous posting on Scott Baio’s Twitter/Whatever inspired a bunch of leftie responses, leading Baio to block people from his account, and eventually to his appearing on television with Glenn Beck, where they had the following exchange:

BAIO: … But and somebody said on the Twitter, why am I going against the grain in terms of my beliefs. And I said, I thought I was the grain. I thought the things that I believed in were the things that this country stood for. And there's very few things that I truly believe in and --

GLENN: Hang on just a wait a minute. I've got to go back to that. Why would you go against the grain on what you believe in?

BAIO: No, no. They felt that what I believed was against the grain.

GLENN: Yeah, but what difference does the grain make if you believe in something?

BAIO: Well, I don't know. And my argument was I thought I was the grain.

GLENN: You are.

BAIO: I thought the way that I thought in terms of politics and country

GLENN: Yeah.

BAIO: Were things that I grew up with. I believe in the military. I believe in people doing for themselves, which is what I was taught as a boy. You provide for yourself; don't look for anybody. I believe in keeping what you make, or most of it. And I believe in killing bad guys.

GLENN: See, that's the problem. That is the grain of America. But too many people see dismiss those, depending on what their party says they're for. The parties mean nothing. The candidates mean nothing. It's the grain. And if the candidate is for the grain, then okay, that's my guy.

Scott Baio is famous for being Chachi, and if you don’t know who that is you’re not alone. I don’t know what this “grain” business is all about. But if we could find that grain, and remove it from the horse’s hoof, maybe we could get the crops in on time, and save some money on veterinarian bills. That’s all I’m saying.

Good Writin’ from Frank Rich

“If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits.”

See, the toxic financial instruments, like Heene’s balloon, were empty. That is, there was no child being borne aloft by the toxic financial instruments.

Ted Rall demands it!

MR OBAMA: RESIGN NOW

And yet President Obama remains President. Once again, the will of Ted Rall has been thwarted.

Brent Bozell III, on the job.

On "Family Guy," the lead character tells his son that he should be the "best leader of the household" he can. So the son pushes his rear end into his sister's face and flatulates, and then punches his mother in the face. On "American Dad," a female dentist saves the lead character from a shooting. When she approaches for a hug, he punches her in the face and takes her gun. See the "hilarious" pattern?

…

On "Family Guy," a joke about the "extensive divorce procedure required by 18th century society" is illustrated by the lead character shooting his daughter dead with a musket. On "American Dad," there's so-called comedy in suggesting lawn sprinklers are a deadly household hazard. In a cautionary film, two little girls are shown playing catch with a doll, when one girl trips and lands on the sprinkler, which pokes through her chest cavity. The sprinkler showers the house, lawn and the other little girl with blood.

I like the scare quotes around “hilarious.” It lets the reader know in no uncertain terms that Brent Bozell III himself does not consider this hilarious at all. His readers, apparently, are subject to misconstruing his subtle messages.

I am curious as to what, exactly, Brent Bozell III would consider hilarious. Does he ever guffaw? Has milk ever come out his nose? Somehow I think not.

Afghanistan

So there’s this election run off, based on the premise that the first election was rigged, but now the guy running against the guy who allegedly rigged the election has dropped out, leaving the allegedly corrupt guy the only guy in the running for President. Send more troops!

This Is It!

THIS IS IT, the documentary of Michael Jackson rehearsing for his THIS IS IT tour, only made $32.5 million in its first five days in the U.S. and Canada, but pulled in $68.5 million in around a hundred other countries. It pulled in $10.4 million in Japan, $7.4 million in Britain, followed by less successful openings in Germany, France, Australia, and China.

Perhaps because we did not attend in the required droves, Michael Jackson remains expired. His THIS IS IT tour, therefore, will not occur.

Bridezillas

The Dread Wife is watching her DVRed queue of BRIDEZILLAS, a “reality” show which depicts horrible women planning and executing their weddings. Most of them, for some reason, seem to be from Staten Island. The odd thing is that the show is generally accompanied by advertisements which show happy families enjoying fine products in bliss and harmony, neither of which are states ever to be enjoyed by bridezillas.

Microsoft/Family Guy news

The much-anticipated Microsoft-sponsored special program of FAMILY GUY has been cancelled. Apparently somebody at Microsoft actually sat down and watched the show. Or read Brent Bozell III. Who doesn't strike me as a Mac guy.

Won't somebody save Blog Boy?

2009-10-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

Mea Culpa?

Once again, sorry for abandoning this blog to dehydrate in the void. My only excuse is that I recently turned sixty, and it caused some unforeseen consequences in my psyche…

I didn’t want to be sixty. I wanted to be 59 again. For two weeks before my birthday, and two weeks after, I spent brooding. Brooding, however, I came to realize, is a young man’s game. Brooding after a certain age does not come across as brooding, which can be sexy in a young person, but in older persons is merely perceived as “grouchy.” Brooding can be considered sexy. The most grouchiness can achieve is a kind of “cute,” as in: “Aw, look at that grouchy old guy. Let me take your picture with him!” Who needs that?

I also became concerned that my aversion to, say, Twitter, was not a response to its vapidity, but more an indicator of my own incipient geezerness. Moreover, I felt that my blog was just one blog among twelvety. My opinions, intelligent and irreplaceable as they may well be, are just a drop in the data bucket. Everybody’s a writer now. Everybody has opinions. And everybody puts them out there for free. Chris Anderson notwithstanding (he wrote the book FREE, which says that we can make money by giving ideas away; well of course HE can – he’s the editor of WIRED and therefore has both a job and credibility, and can make oodles of money giving lectures about how you can give yourself away), I have not found the New Economy conducive to making a goddam living.

But I am letting all that go.

I came across a study saying that young people do not get Twitter; it’s mainly embraced by folks over 35. So it’s not just me! I hate Twitter too! I’m still young! Ish!

And I’ve read that blogs are now so last week. That will thin the herd! Look out, DAILY KOS, LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS. Only my blog will be left standing! Soon I too will be self-important!

Speaking of which – I feel free to say this now – I don’t get HUFFINGTON POST. I enjoy various posts there, but I don’t see why it exists. A kajillion bloggers, some good, some not, blogging for free, near as I can tell, or near free, just to give Arianna Huffington the gravitas she needs to attend A-list parties.

Thanks. I feel better now.

Shiny objects!

I made a solemn vow a few years back to never ever ever watch television news again. I have fallen off that wagon occasionally, and become inadvertently mesmerized by solemn men and women as they stand adjacent to the scene of some disaster, venturing opinions on what might be happening should something actually happen; but by and large, I have successfully steered clear of the whole enchilada, and my digestion has improved enormously, not to mention my knowledge of actual news.

So I missed the whole balloon boy thing. Of course I caught up with it on the radio, and newspapers, and online. I understand that America, and the world, watched transfixed as a strange-looking runaway balloon floated around Colorado, a balloon which may or may not have had a small boy as a passenger. But as we learned, there was no boy on the balloon. So basically America and the world was watching a strange-looking runaway balloon for no reason at all, other than it was shiny.

In the aftermath of the event (which may eventually include the father of the child being charged with fraud for engineering the whole thing as a publicity stunt to land him and his family a reality television show), there was much chiding of viewers and the media by viewers and the media for giving in and watching the balloon.

This behavior is called, of course, having your cake and eating it too. You videotape yourself eating the cake, and then replay that video endlessly, chiding both yourself and the viewer for watching it, even though the cake is long gone, if in fact it ever was.

Some among us have been trying to find the Lesson In All This, though it seems pretty obvious.

As it happens I had seen Mr. Heene and his family before, on WIFE SWAP. (Yes, while I have imposed restrictions upon myself regarding television news, I have no such restrictions when it comes to reality television. I watch reality television avidly, to discover when, if ever, actual reality will intrude upon the experience. So far, no evidence has been found.)

I remember the father as being both energetic and nuts. He is a storm chaser, and his wife his enthusiastic supporter, and their children out of control. Mr Heene’s also way into UFOs, and his WIFE SWAP wife, a psychic from Florida, who did not convince Mr. Heene to discipline his unruly children more, did (if memory serves) convince him that one of them might be an extra-terrestrial. Mr. Heene struck me as a guy who would be fun to be around for about fifteen minutes, and then you’d start looking desperately for the nearest exit. (I just read that one of the supposed reasons Mr. Heene staged this runaway balloon gag, if indeed he staged it, was to get reality teevee money fast, before 2012, and the Mayan Prophecy comes true; he wants to build a bunker for his family’s hunkering, so they can all be dead in a safe place when the sun explodes.)

Mr. Heene had a YouTube Channel, now gone. In one video he dressed up in a brassiere, to rant about Britney Spears. In another he made a claim, whether as a joke or not, that Hillary Clinton may in fact be a reptilian alien.

For those of you who follow that sort of thing (and I do), the reptilian alien theory was first posited (I believe by David Icke), once a British soccer player and sportscaster, who has since carved out his niche in the world of loons with his theory that all of human history is secretly controlled by disguised reptilian aliens.

Followers of true crime may recall that the 1999 New Mexico murderer of Girly Chu Hossencofft claimed to be a reptilian shape shifter at his trial.

So what does all this mean? Well, clearly, human beings are doomed as a species. If it’s not reptilian aliens, it’s our own refusal to stop watching the news.

At least balloon boy is safe. He was hiding in the attic the whole time. An activity I recommend to all of you. If you don’t have an attic, get one. Now.

I got your intelligence right here!

Liz Sidoti of The Associated Press recently posted an interesting article, which states in part: “Obama has been a constant presence in the mass media as he expands the bureaucracy's reach into the private sector.... In doing so, he has created a quandary. Put aside for a moment the question of whether government is actually intruding into people's lives more than before. The point is that many people feel like it is -- in part because Obama doesn't stop talking about his goals. If President George W. Bush got slapped around for being inarticulate, is Obama obnoxiously articulate?”

“Obnoxiously articulate.” How dare he be well-spoken? His very presence of mind is a chiding! He shames us. Shun him.

It’s an interesting concept, especially in today’s times, when I think that sometimes I can actually see America’s i.q. points rising and falling, like barometric pressure.

Glorious Knights of the Oingo Bloggo

2009-09-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

Fail!
Poor neglected blog. Protective services will come and take you away from me if I’m not more attentive. Poor little blog will be sent to live with foster parents in Idaho, who will only take it in for the tax advantages, and do unspeakable things to it in the basement.

New book by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor!
GIMME SOMETHING BETTER is an oral history of punk in the Bay Area. Just out (as of September 21, I believe.) I’m in it! Briefly. Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre was the opening act for the Ramones the first time they played in San Francisco. It wasn’t very pleasant at the time (comedy does not play well with a deafened audience), but it certainly is a good story now. And the Ramones were totally great people. (We actually met them later, again, when we were staying at the Tropicana in LA, the same time they were, while recording with Phil Spector.)

Really entertaining book. Favorite quote: “I farted so bad, Dave quit the band.”

Sport, in the OC
Mark Whicker writes a sports column for the OC Register. Recently, he wrote this:

It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.

Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.

She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably
hasn't high-fived in a while.

She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down
the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.

Now, that's deprivation.

Readers were baffled and offended, but personally I’d be curious to know if she even knows what a double bogey is. I’m sure I don’t.

More nuttiness that seems to go unchallenged.
Talk show America seems to think that President Obama’s health plan includes compulsory circumcision.

It doesn’t.

But while we’re on the subject, apparently there is a medical opinion out there that circumcised males run a decreased risk of getting AIDS. Well, okay. I’m uncircumcised myself, putting me in a minority in America. Apologies to my cut brothers, but circumcision makes absolutely no sense to me. Why not remove our eyes so we don’t have to wear glasses when we grow up? Why not remove our fingernails to obviate the need for clippers?

As for reducing the risk of AIDS, well, don’t have unprotected sex with folks who have it. No need to cut off part of your penis to spite your… I dunno. Whatever.

Obama talks to schoolchildren! Grab your guns and go to ground!
More nuttiness here. Some people feared that President Obama, when he addressed our nation’s children, was going to … what? Show subliminal Socialist messages? Brainwash them into adoration?

I seem to recall that on 9/11 President Bush was discovered on camera reading a book to schoolchildren. Hmmm.

From a forum. Re: condoms.
“I heard that they were made from lamb or some meat product and I'm vegan, so I was just wondering... Any replies would be appreciated.”

No, you can eat condoms without sacrificing your vegan principles. Thanks for asking!

Patrick Buchanan strikes again.
He apparently has come to believe that Adolph Hitler was a pacifist.

“But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines?…”

Because he was insane? And maybe he didn't want to conquer the world. Maybe he wanted to see it burn.

Michael Jackson paternity news!
Two candidates for the father of Blanket:

Macaulay Culkin.
Mark “Oliver” Lester

Facebook v. MySpace
From a talk given by Danah Boyd to the National Democracy Forum:
“… MySpace has become the ‘ghetto’ of the digital landscape. The people there are more likely to be brown or black and to have a set of values that terrifies white society. And many of us have habitually crossed the street to avoid what is seen as the riffraff.

“The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed.”

Well, let me ask you this, Mr. Concerned White Guy - who is terrified by MySpace, exactly? I go there quite a bit, because it’s the site of choice for indie musicians to post links to their CDs, host videos, etc. If white kids may do not go there to “hang,” maybe that’s because MySpace doesn’t offer the wide array of time-wasting lame quizzes and games that Facebook has to offer. Does MySpace have Mafia Wars? I rest my case.

“Urban white flight?” How can I put this? Facebook is not a real place. MySpace is not a real place. If you flee from either of those sites, you are not really going anywhere. You are sitting at your computer, or gawking open-mouthed at your cell phone. There is no such thing as “digital migration.” But good luck with your book deal.

Favorite recent post on Freecycle
“I am planning to get married at in Las Vegas later this month and don't have anything to wear. I am looking for something Vegasy, but white to be in tune with the occasion, and now everything in the stores is dark for winter. I don't want a traditional ‘wedding dress’, just something dressy and white and perhaps a bit sexy. So, if anyone has such an item lurking in the back of her closet that she has no more use for, let me know.”

Freecycle, for those who don’t know, is a Yahoo club dedicated to giving away/picking up stuff for free. I can see asking for a wedding dress for nothing – that’s punk sensibility in action! But to get picky about it? “…something dressy and white and perhaps a bit sexy.” That’s just wrong. Get yourself a burlap bag, or some tarp, and start hitchhiking.

Warning! Study Alert!
NYT: “Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.”

Headline from Huffington Post
“The Terrible Moral Emptiness of Quentin Tarantino Is Wrecking His Films”

So become Stanley Kramer, Quentin, and bore us to death. Thank you.

News from other lands: Take that, Michelle Obama!
Miyuki Hatohama, the wife of Japan’s new prime minister claims that she has flown, while asleep, “on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus," which was "an extremely beautiful place and was very green." She also says she knew Tom Cruise in a previous life when the actor was incarnated as Japanese. On a talk show she said she likes to "eat the sun. … It gives me enormous energy. My husband has recently started doing that too."

A random forum post:
“…any girls on here who enjoy crushing toy cars with high heel shoes?”

A headline on informingchristian.com
“Marie Osmond Excepting of Lesbian Daughter”

Past the news cycle, but still creepy.
At Farrah’s funeral, Ryan O'Neal in VANITY FAIR: "I had just put the casket in the hearse and was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me. I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?' She said, 'Daddy, it's me--Tatum!' I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick."

You got that right! Perhaps someday he will learn to except her as she is. Just keep her away from your toy car collection. You never know.

Inglorious Blogsterds

2009-08-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

Tarantino
I have to admit, I’ve liked all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. I contrast his movies with the Coen Brothers’. I go up and down with the Coen Brothers. I just saw BURN AFTER READING, and a more pointless movie I can’t imagine. Despite a great cast, and some funny scenes, the movie ended up pretty much as a series of coincidences that could have led anywhere other than where it did end up. Maybe that’s the point. There was no interaction between the various story threads. It was like a farce without the central elements of farce. Contrast it to IN THE LOOP, the best comedy I’ve seen in ages, in which it is made clear at every step how the interactions between moral idiots can lead to global disaster.

And then there was the Coen Brothers’ much praised previous movie, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, which I haven’t seen. I read the book. I’m a huge admirer of Cormac McCarthy, but I thought that book was total jive – giving us this outre pyscho central figure and trying to have us believe that he stood for some kind of central Evil in the Heart of Man. He was just a pyscho with a thingie that stuns cattle! The whole book was, like, effectual psycho does something horrible, ineffectual hero tries to salvage something from life, ineffectual Sheriff pontificates. Pfui, as Nero Wolfe might say. I suspect the movie was pretty much the same.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Tarantino!
I’ll wait on INGLORIOUS BASTERDS until it hits what used to be called “video,” but as I understand it, it’s about a bunch of undercover soldiers killing Nazis, and eventually killing Hitler himself.

This, no doubt, will prove controversial. But I’m wondering if the time has come, too soon perhaps, when Hitler and Nazis enter the realm of HAGAR THE HORRIBLE, when Hitler and Nazis become a cartoon, a bedtime story to scare your children into proper behavior, a dim evil figure that can be swatted about, and broken like a pinata at birthday parties. And from Hitler’s broken body: candy!

From the dress code at Bob Jones University:
“Abercrombie & Fitch and its subsidiary Hollister have shown an unusual degree of antagonism to the name of Christ and an unusual display of wickedness in their promotions. In protest, articles displaying their logos are not acceptable to be worn, carried, or displayed (even if covered or masked in some way).”

Svedka Vodka
It has come to my attention that Svedka Vodka runs ads featuring some kind of hooter-heavy “female” robot called Svedka that… does something. People are outraged! We’re supposed to be sexually attracted to a robot? And drink vodka? That is just wrong.

Trend?
Chicken farming in the city. It’ll make you feel good about yourself, and irritate the neighbors.

Death panel alert!
Oh please. Can we just stop this now? I just visited my folks (88 and 82), and they’re not living in fear. Really.

We've got to get ourselves back to the blog

2009-07-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

Get YOURSELF back to the garden, it was your idea.
Been away from this blog for a few weeks, writing a Woodstock radio documentary, WOODSTOCK: 40 YEARS ON, hosted by David Dye from World Cafe. Listen for it in August on an NPR station near you. On it you will hear Pete Townshend clocking Abbie Hoffman! If you don’t know what that means, well, you’re probably not a baby boomer. Lucky you.

Animal moments
Outside Macy’s, after lunch with my daughter, we spotted a beggar on the street with a hound dog sleeping, and a cat sleeping on the hound dog. Many cell phone cameras from tourists and passersby took pictures of the phenomenon, mine among them.

And the Ominous Other and I were at a yard sale a few weekends back. One of the tables was “manned” by a sixty-ish woman in capris pants. A card on her table had her occupation as “Creativity Consultant.” She had a little dog, a chihuahua mix, that she had trained to scoot on a skateboard. The little dog actually performed this activity for the benefit of onlookers. It was pretty cool, but the coolness was offset by the rather frightened look the dog had on its face while scooting. It seemed to be thinking, “Must scoot, else I will be scourged.” Of course, that is anthropomorphism on my part, but I’ll still stand by that judgment.

Birthers
Those who believe that President Obama was actually born in Kenya, and not Hawaii, now have a name. They are called “birthers.”

The main branch of Shi’ia Muslims are called “Twelvers.” Apparently, many of them believe that there is an Imam among us who is invisible, or hiding, and has been around since 872 AD. Maybe Obama is that guy? Just asking.

Amazon Woman on the Moon
Amazon took heat in July for recalling copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and ANIMAL FARM from its popular Kindle device. Apparently this was a result of a dispute with the book’s publisher, but it did generate a certain amount of controversy. The incident could be perceived as being “Orwellian,” after all.

Here's the message I'm getting. Once a book appears on line, it is no longer a book. It is now a service. If you purchase a book for your Kindle, you don’t own it. Amazon has just leased reading rights to you. You can’t pass the book on to somebody else when you’re done with it. And Amazon can snatch it back any time it feels like.

And here’s another thing….
James Wolcott in VANITY FAIR wonders what will happen when physical magazines, books, records, and movies finally disappear?

He writes, “As all this space opens up—as the tokens of our cultural snobbery or keen connoisseurship… recede into the hideaway shelves and flash drives—what will refill it?”

And whither the collector? Whither the snob? Whither the geekboy?

Further:
NYT: “In the short term, the industry that may have the most to gain from augmented reality is gaming. Although video games have traditionally pulled players out of the real world and into a virtual one, augmented-reality games have the potential to ‘engage people in the real world in a different way,’ said Daniel Sánchez-Crespo, a project leader at Novarama, a game developer based in Barcelona. ‘It finds a new meaning for space. Your kitchen counter is not just where you prepare dinner; it can be a virtual racetrack for a car game.’”

And: “’The real world is way too boring for many people,’ Mr. Sánchez-Crespo said with a laugh. ‘By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.’”

There you have it. In the boring world to come, vision itself will become a pay-as-you-go service.

News from other lands
Reuters: “German prosecutors in Nuremberg have launched an investigation into whether an artist's gold-coloured gnome giving a stiff-armed Hitler salute violates the country's strict laws against the use of Nazi symbols.”

I have seen this gnome. It appears to me that he is more wave-y than salute-y, but I am not as familiar with the fascist lawn gnome trope as I probably should be.

State fair news!
The butter sculpture of Michael Jackson at the Iowa State Fair has been banned. The State Fair’s people issued a statement which read in part, “Conservatives and traditionalists find themselves opposed to Jackson’s depiction in butter. The allegations of paedophilia and blatant bizarre behaviour are simply too much for them. Then we have PETA, which often goes to the extreme left to make its point. Both factions are likely voting as fast as they can to keep Jackson out of the exhibit for different reasons.”

Just so they leave the pork tent alone.

More MJ
The latest rumor has it that Michael Jackson, at the time of his death, no longer had a nose.

Brent Bozell III, ladies and gentlemen!
His July 22 column chides liberals for being too mean to Rush Limbaugh.

And Wesley Pruden!
He has a blog! On Al Franken: “…the way he got to Washington, and the easy acceptance of fraud, will be remembered as typical of the times, an era when avarice reigned, and the clever swindle was a joke to be played by a clown.” Al Franken stole the election from Norm Coleman, it seems.

Not so sound like a conservative or anything, but….
Sacha Baron Cohen once again invades America with his sneaky persona-driven confrontations. This time around he’s masquerading as gay Austrian eurotrash, and I gather he confronts typical American janes and joes around homophobia and such.

Much has already been written about whether there’s really a satirical point to all this – he’s playing a flaming stereotypical queen being all in-your-face to folks who view gay men as flaming stereotypical queens. What, exactly, is being mocked?

As far as I know, Mr. Cohen was never beaten up or shot in the course of his pranks here. I wonder how his antics would play out in Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or Afghanistan? Just asking.

Anthony Lane, in the NEW YORKER: “BRUNO ends appallingly, with a musical montage of Sting, Bono, Elton John, and other well-meaners assisting mein Host in a sing-along. Here’s the deal, apparently: if celebrities aren’t famous enough for your liking (Ron Paul, Paula Abdul), or seem insufficiently schooled in irony, you make vicious sport of them, but if they’re A-listers, insanely keen to be in on the joke, they can join your congregation.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr.
What was THAT all about? A professor was inconvenienced. The nation erupts in… something.

Judith Warner has a blog with the New York Times: “The clash in Cambridge about ID and racial profiling, about identity and expectation and respect was just a snippet of our culture’s ongoing meta-narrative about race.”

Can we stop having “meta-narratives” now, please? And that goes for meta-narrative snippets as well. Thank you.

Blog Go Boom

2009-07-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Fair
I just got back from the Marin County State Fair. The Dread Wife wanted to go into the Petting Zoo to pet the wallaby. Not getting the pleasure from petting wallabies, goats, deer, or even swine that I once did, I stayed behind, thus affording America's Youth greater and more Petting Opportunities.

While waiting for the Child Bride to Pet, my time was spent (1) aiding a young boy in search of a garbage can by directing him to said receptacle, and (2) aiding an elderly lady in figuring out how to work the hand-washing station by the Petting Zoo (hint: foot pedals).

When my Intimidating Other emerged from the Petting Zoo, and I informed her of my good deeds. She told me that my taking pictures of her petting the wallaby was misinterpreted by a Mom in the Zoo. The Mom was flashing me dirty looks and shielding her daughter with her own body, lest images of the child wind up on the Internets.

I therefore wonder am I the secret hero of the Marin County Fair, or an inadvertent voyeur pedophile? I ate some bleu cheese fries, and a Polish, if that helps.

The Cliffhanger
We stood watching fairgoers indulge in this ride. Towards the end of its duration, a blonde boy, around nine years old I’d judge, vomited mightily, some bits of which sprayed several onlookers at a high velocity. Fun!

In other news…
Speaking of alleged pedophiles, much has been written about Michael Jackson, in the wake of his death, which may turn out to be as weird as he was. A writer I like, James Howard Kunstler, wrote in his blog: “It's fascinating to follow the coverage of Michael Jackson's death, but especially the lavish tributes to his ‘genius’ and general wonderfulness. He was, in fact, a monster, and an apt reflection of America's extreme collective cultural confusion. He was a distillation of the lies America tells itself. He was infantile, grandiose, horrifying, and probably dangerous.”

“A distillation of the lies America tells itself.” Was this a role Jackson chose for himself, or a role thrust upon him? If it’s even true. What, after all, does this mean? What lies? About race? About sexuality? What?

Perhaps Mr. Kunstler should stick to dystopian speculations, and leave the King of Pop alone. He may have been a monster, in the sense that he was unique, and separate from the rest of us, and may even have been a pedophile. I remain unconvinced. His weirdness was the offshoot of a life deprived of childhood, and his talent emerged from that fact.

The nation’s horror of child molestation (despite the prevalence of it) was confounded by Jackson. His popularity did not wane as much as might one might expect. He was not shunned, at least. This may be because Michael Jackson did not want to have sex with seven year olds. Maybe he wanted to be seven years old.

Darwin bashing, from Patrick Buchanan.
He notes the “…publication of ‘The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold,’ by Eugene G. Windchy, a splendid little book ....

“That Darwinism has proven ‘disastrous theory’ is indisputable.

"’Karl Marx loved Darwinism,’ writes Windchy. ‘To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution.’

"’Darwin suits my purpose,’ Marx wrote.

“Darwin suited Adolf Hitler's purposes, too.

"’Although born to a Catholic family Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs' advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire.’

“Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.”

And this is Darwin’s fault, how? It’s like blaming the Beatles for Charles Manson.

Buchanan writes, “Darwin…stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a ‘completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection.’”

That’s not even remotely true. Darwin did not steal his theory from Wallace. They came up with their theories independently. Wallace’s work did spur Darwin to finally publish ORIGIN OF SPECIES, after years of putting it off. Wallace became one of Darwin’s biggest defenders.

“… Darwinists still have not explained the origin of life, nor have they been able to produce life from non-life.”

And some non-Darwinist HAS explained the origin of life, and produced life from non-life?

Buchanan concludes: “Darwinism is not science. It is faith. Always was.”

This idea that Darwinism is some kind of religious cult is a relatively new trope. Evolution simply means that things change over time. How can you argue with that? And how is that “faith?

More Buchanan
He hosted a conference in June, discussing future Republican strategies to regain a majority. One discussion involved supporting English-only intitiatives. The banner above the English-only adherents misspelled conference as “Conferenece.”

News from the easily offended….
Slate, on the 4th of July: “Then, a bit after 8 p.m., the sun will set. The civilized thing to do at this juncture would be to go home, kick back with a little John Locke, and pass out fast. But, no, we must reckon with the stupid fireworks, an integral part of the Fourth of July since 1777, when they befouled the skies above Boston and Philadelphia. Even if you manage to avoid actually looking at their meaningless nonsense—which is essentially the same nonsense, show after show, year after year—their noise will disturb what should have been a pleasant lack of consciousness. Do we not have an unalienable right to be left alone?”

Pull a pillow over your head, and shut up.

More news from the mysteriously offended…
Michael Wolff on Mrs. Sanford, in newser: “Jenny Sanford is haughty, self-righteous, condescending, and an egomaniac….”

Does Mr. Wolff really believe this, or is he just being provocative in the hope that more people might read him?

Finally!
I received a robo-call the other day. A woman’s voice warned me of a “kitten damage alert.” Alarmed, I listened carefully. It turned out she was talking about a “kidney damage alert.” Thank God! The kittens are safe.

Notice
I have chosen to resign as governor of Alaska.

Fire This Blog

2009-06-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

My million dollar idea.
Al Pacino as Phil Spector. I thought of it first! Somebody send me money. I accept PayPal.

Has anybody besides me…
…noticed a resemblance between Benjamin Netanyahu and Zeppo Marx? (He was the unfunny Marx brother.)

Moses Ma overheating re Twitter, in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
“To me, the twitterverse is like a river of human awareness, composed of billions of tiny 140 character molecules -- each a snapshot of life or a thought or a reflection. A river of pure information that equals energy, according to the laws of quantum thermodynamics and stochastic processes. A river of life flowing by us as we meditate at its bank like some Siddhartha wannabe, in tattered jeans and Oakley sunglasses instead of orchid robes and begging bowl. And now, after long last, we see.”

Or now, after long last, we don’t see. From Good Morning Silicon Valley: underheating re Twitter, and Iran
“…[W]hile Twitter's technology makes it particularly difficult to stifle, the fact that it has remained viable also makes it fertile ground for surveillance and disinformation efforts. It's assumed that the government is monitoring the major streams and hashtagged aggregations, so first-hand reporting and mobilization information needs to be tweeted circumspectly there or fractured off into less visible channels. Security personnel are reportedly setting up Twitter accounts and posing as protesters to mislead or entrap. Twitter users outside Iran were urged to complicate government efforts to identify local dissidents by changing their time-zone and location settings to make it appear as if they were in Tehran, which may or may not hobble the authorities but certainly makes it harder for everyone else to distinguish the real front-line sources. Throw in the rumors and conspiracy theories and general noise of various third parties and you're looking at landscape where identity, location, credibility, motivation and agenda are all cast into doubt. Accurate and valuable information will continue to trickle out of Iran through Twitter, but it may take the skills of a CIA analyst to find it in the fog.”

Digital television!
Is here! Digital television is now! Thank you Congress for ushering couch spuds everywhere into a sharply defined wonderland of multi-channel crapola. LAW AND ORDER has never looked better!

In case you were wondering….
A stochastic process is, roughly, a random process. Its outcome depends upon unpredictable variables. Stochastic processes include war, meteorology, capitalism, and, after long last, Twitter.

All a twitter!
At least the blogosphere is, around David Letterman who, earlier in June, made some remarks about Sarah Palin and family that were deemed offensive. In his Top Ten List he deemed Sarah Palin’s clothing style “slutty flight attendant,” and elsewhere on his show made some lame joke about Palin’s daughter getting knocked up by Alex Rodriguez. (I would have described Sarah Palin's attire as more "flirty event planner" myself.)

So now we have firedavidletterman.com. It is run by conservative erstwhile talk show host John Ziegler who, as it happens, is working on a documentary about Sarah Palin. On that site, besides pleas to sign a petition, you will read, “62 Year Old Letterman Violates Common Decency With Sexist Insults of 14 Year Old Girl.” Well, he wasn’t insulting the 14 year old daughter, he was insulting the other one, you know, the one who got knocked up? But never mind… What I want to know is, what is common decency, exactly?

Rush Limbaugh weighed in: “The bottom line here is the joke's inappropriate whether the age of the woman is 14, 18, or 40.” I seem to recall that Rush Limbaugh once made a crack about Chelsea Clinton, when she was 13, calling her the White House dog. I got your common decency right here.

In the meantime….
The leaders of Iran appear to have bungled a coup that was probably unnecessary in the first place. Not entirely sure though. Gotta check Twitter.

Finally, in the interests of common decency, this news, sent me by the Wee Wife: Parents Throw Graduation for Ohio High School Students Caught in Cheating Scandal. "The Ceremony They Deserved." (By Meredith Heagney, from the Columbus Dispatch)

All along Main Street, people stopped what they were doing to cheer for the Centerburg High School Class of 2009.

A gas-station worker stepped outside and whooped. A woman dropped a bag of hot dog buns in her front yard and applauded. A few people had made cardboard signs of support: "Way to go class of '09."

Ninety-three graduates in crimson robes and mortarboards filed past and smiled for pictures. They were on their way to Centerburg Community Memorial Park, where hundreds gathered yesterday in folding chairs and on picnic tables for a makeshift graduation ceremony.

On Thursday, the Centerburg school board canceled the traditional ceremony planned for yesterday, citing a cheating scandal that started with a student hacking into the school's computer system and stealing tests. About half the seniors cheated or knew of the cheating and didn't report it, district officials said.

All the students' diplomas except the hacker's were released to their parents, who decided to give their kids what the Knox County district wouldn't.

The sunny ceremony wasn't the formal affair that would've taken place at the high school, but instead a slightly rowdy yet heartfelt imitation of a typical commencement, complete with a recorded version of Pomp and Circumstance.

"I didn't think we were going to have anything," said Leeza Smith, 18, whose eyes were red from crying. "The parents, they really made our day."

Several seniors marveled at the turnout as they took their seats on metal folding chairs atop a concrete platform. Before them, a small wooden stage held silver balloons and a bucket of red roses.

A few feet from them, two TV cameras filmed the event, crowded by little kids in jean shorts who wanted a closer look.

No administrators or staff members took part in the ceremony. Several times throughout, the students were applauded for overcoming the adversity of having had their ceremony canceled.
One by one, the graduates were called by name to the front of the stage to receive a rose. They weaved through the crowd to find their parents, who handed them their diplomas.

Carol Andrews couldn't stop squeezing daughter Caitlin. As a mom, she still wished her daughter had had a traditional, more formal, graduation, she said.

But, she added: "I think this is even more memorable. I'm just very proud of the community and the way they came together to give these kids the ceremony they deserved."

Last night I had the strangest blog....

2009-06-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

A dream I had the other night.
Dick Cheney was at a beach party, in bathing suit and sweat shirt, hair wet, sitting casually on the ground, legs beneath him leaning on one hand, gesturing with the other. He was animated, smiling, charming. There was a gaggle of young people listening to him attentively.

I stood on the sidelines, having recognized him, and curious as to what he was saying.

Then he addressed himself to me: “What do you think, Merle, I know that you have written about this in the past.”

I was both flattered and frightened by this, that he was familiar with my work.

I drew into the circle, and started engaging him in a battle of wits. This being a dream, however, the form of wit was there, but the content was not. We were saying things to each other like, “Oh yeah, YOU do it.” “No YOU, it was your idea.” “Get out of here.” “YOU get out of here,” etc.

Suddenly, we wound up being friends. I sat next to him. He laid his damp head on my shoulder, and took a little nap.

John and Kate Plus Eight
This show is on my ever-growing list of things I do not give two whats about, but it’s been attracting a lot of attention, especially in Christian circles. I gather that the couple, who have sextuplets and a set of twins, have professed to be Christians, but are now in danger of separating. This has put many fans in a tizzy. A marriage counsellor, writing on the Christian site, her.meneutics, wrote: “Let’s be honest: Women, in Kate’s situation, how many of us would have chosen a submissive spirit as our primary mode of relating to our husband? Men, in Jon’s shoes, would you be waking up daily wondering how you can love your wife as much as you love your own flesh? Probably not.” I have discussed this briefly, with the Child Bride. I said, “I love you as much as my own flesh.” She said, “That’s not saying much. You’re almost sixty years old.” I said, “Will you submit, woman?” She said, “Submit this,” and showed me a finger.

And I have watched this show, briefly, with My Dreaded Other. She sort of likes this sort of thing. My feeling about this sort of thing is: if I’m going to watch a show about assholes, some of them better have loaded weapons, and know how to use them. In the snippet I watched, in which John and Kate were interviewed separately, whiny unpleasant John and whiny unpleasant Kate both blamed their problems (whatever the hell they are) on the intrusive media. This, despite the fact that they have their own television show, in which they invite the world to watch them in their largely-ignored (except by the camera) gaggle of whelps. If you don’t want the world to watch you, don’t have eight children, unless you’re from Utah. That’s the message I’m getting.

My favorite scold, Brent Bozell III, on the show
“The back story was charming. Kate had fertility treatments, but refused to ‘selectively reduce’ (yet another euphemism for abortion) any of six babies for the sake of convenience. Jon's employer, the lout, laid him off because he didn't want the insurance burden. Jon and Kate instantly were very sympathetic figures facing a very real, human challenge — and serious hardship — with pluck and devotion. The show caught on enough to be "promoted" to TLC. That led to spinoff books and speeches, where the Gosselins were more candid about their Christian faith than they were on TV.”

By the way, according to the Wee Wife, Jon was allegedly not laid off because of the insurance burden. He was laid off, allegedly, because he didn’t do any work, but spent all his time trolling the Web for freebies. Back to Brent!

“But within two years, as the show became TLC's top attraction, the temptations of fame and materialism began seeping in. Companies from Whirlpool to The Gap were placing their products on the show, so much so that Nielsen ranked this series in the top 10 product-placing shows on cable TV. Both parents got their teeth whitened, and Jon got a free hair transplant. Soon they were showing up on OPRAH and GOOD MORNING AMERICA.”

And this is where we came in…

Speaking of euphemisms for abortion….
“Abortion doctor” George Tiller was shot to death in Kansas City on Sunday. The left, in its infinite wisdom, blames Bill O’Reilly. Call me conservative, but I blame the shooter.

Conan
I loved the whole opening sequence of Conan O’Brian dashing across America to get to Los Angeles for the premiere of the TONIGHT SHOW (with Conan O’Brian). He looked great in that dark suit, his long legs pumping, like a determined young man on a mission. It was poetic. Artistic. And I loved that he had to stop for a while in Utah to look at Victorian dolls.

Neo-Morning in America
I’ve been trying, really I have, to feel that New Morning in America zest and tang. I’m not even sure what we’re calling this non-evident but hoped-for paradigm shift. I’ve heard New Foundation, Hope You Can Believe In (as opposed to what? Hope You Can Doubt?). As near as I can see, we have certainly rolled up our sleeves and are in the process of dumping several years’ worth of the biggest cultural load I have seen in my lifetime. But, as part of that same process, we seem to be acquiring a different load.

President Obama has vowed to bring “transparency” to his administration. This is one of those words that irritate me. So-called transparency rarely even achieves translucence; more often it just achieves a different kind of murk.

Reverse racism.
What the hell does this even MEAN?

Another dream
My tiny wife and I were in a motor court, somewhere in the midwest. Our cabin was stuffed with things, mostly useless, and I was trying to organize it all for our trip back home. My wife wasn’t there. She was off doing a series of chores.

A woman and two children came to the door, with boxes of food and plastic army men, intended for us, as a kind of care package, I guess. I was looking through the boxes, examining the army men, ignoring the food, as the woman talked.

My wife had made these little stick tripods in the courtyard, designed to help plants climb. The woman said her grandmother used to make tripods like that. She called them “sugar towers.”

She then asked me if the Clintons were still out with Rita. (I don’t know who Rita was; apparently some kind of wheel in the area; I don’t know why we were with the Clintons; until the woman had brought it up it was news to me.) I told her the Clintons were big in Iowa.

Then I started packing the van with stuff. The van had a habit of starting and going by itself. So I kept having to hop into the front seat, to turn off the van before it ran into something.

Sugar Towers
Over the weekend, the Propagatrix and I put up some sticks bound with twine for plants to grow on. From now on, these structures will be officially known as “Sugar Towers.” And thus our dreams infect reality. Thank you, Philip K. Dick! Thanks for nothing!

One of my favorite obsessions…
NYT: “Profiled in the documentary TRANSCENDENT MAN, which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal — to ‘assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.’”

The Singularity, for those who don’t know, is the moment when machines surpass humans, and we are either subsumed and/or conquered (THE MATRIX, TERMINATOR), or become as one with the machine: our consciousnesses transferred into sturdy ABS plastic containers, we become immortal. It’s the geek Rapture. It’s one of those stupid ideas with which very intelligent people become enamored, possibly because they would prefer to live in their own heads, and would rather lose their itchy balls altogether, than face the complication of scratching them. Oh, and they don’t want to die.

My personal feeling? Everything’s going to crash, and we’ll be forced to use our useless iPods to hack furrows in cracked dirt, just to plant the turnips essential for our continued survival. Do cyborgs eat turnips? Wait a minute… do androids dream of electric sheep? Damn you, Philip K. Dick!

Grumpy Old Blog

2009-05-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

Hi!
I’ve been busy, and neglecting this blog, which has brought me so much fame and fortune. I am truly sorry.

Mancow
Radio host Mancow recently subjected himself on air to waterboarding in an effort to show that it wasn’t torture. He lasted six seconds and conceded that it was, in fact torture. If only I had been there.

Pelosi
Right wingers are incensed that she did not expose waterboarding as torture, even though they themselves don’t believe it is torture. Whatever.

Gingrich on Pelosi
"She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior." Why is Newt Gingrich still around anyway? Not only around, he's a rising star in the Republican firmament! Haven’t we been down this road before?

Blago
AP: “A Chicago-area company is marketing hair products inspired by ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The shampoo and conditioner carry the brand name ‘BLAGO It's Bleep'n Golden!’”

Waterboard them all! Make them confess to false crimes!

Obama and mustard
President Obama puts spicy mustard on his hamburgers. Right-wingers apparently think that this proves that he’s…. oh hell, I don’t know. I give up.

Obama not funny!
Rightwingers don’t think President Obama was funny at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I didn’t either. So what?

From Good Morning, Silicon Valley
“…[T]he University of Missouri School of Journalism is requiring incoming freshmen to show up with iPhones or iPod Touches.”

And a Mercedes, and show up for the interviews in Armani, please. If you’re going to save journalism, you must be stylin’.

Credit cards and guns
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, added an amendment to the credit card consumer rights bill that will allow people to carry loaded guns in national parks. So if you’re attacked by a bear, you can annoy it with your handgun? Or if a gang of crazed delinquents, on the crack and meth, attack your campsite, you can wing a couple of them before they tear you to pieces and make the mark of the beast on your forehead? If your credit card is rejected at the souvenir shop, you can shoot the underpaid clerk?

Dobson surrenders
Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, shared this with his radio listeners recently, regarding… something or other:

“I want to tell you up front that we're not going to ask you to do anything, to make a phone call or to write a letter or anything.

“There is nothing you can do at this time about what is taking place because there is simply no limit to what the left can do at this time. Anything they want, they get and so we can't stop them.

“We tried with [Health and Human Services Secretary] Kathleen Sebelius and sent thousands of phone calls and emails to the Senate and they didn't pay any attention to it because they don't have to. And so what you can do is pray, pray for this great nation... As I see it, there is no other answer. There's no other answer, short term.”

By by James! You shall be missed.

WAPO
J. Freedom du Lac, in the Washington Post, writing about country music: “The symbolism and prideful sentiments of the songs are intended to create a sense of belonging among people with similar backgrounds and lifestyles, or at least people who romanticize life in the rural South. (It's not a place; it's a state of mind.) To some listeners, though, it might sound as if the artists are closing ranks.”

Um. Excuse me. Urban music, correct me if I’m wrong, is usually about urban themes and lifestyles. Country music (at least until recent years) is about country themes and lifestyles. That’s why they call it country music. What the hell is Mr. Du Lac suggesting country singers do? Lose the twang and get with the program? No wonder they’re closing ranks.

WSJ
On Google: “The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.”

What do you know? Google really IS evil!

AP
“Meet Sockington. Twitter's latest star is a microblogging cat who regales more than half a million with his musings on meal time, personal hygiene and the view from the top of the stairs.”

Why is the nation not retching? Oh, right, it’s too busy monitoring the tweets of a fucking cat.

Cinco de Bloggo

2009-05-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

Dream
I was in a really boring firefight, in Kenya. I was in a stalled half track/armored vehicle on a dirt road among denuded rolling hills, kind of like buttes, only more worn down. I assumed I was in Kenya, because there was a lone elephant roaming about half a mile from us. Various rebels were attacking us by throwing hand grenades at us. But they were duds; none of them exploded. So we were passing the time by reading magazines and books we had already read. Behind us there was a fenced enclosure. In it was horse, on fire. The horse didn’t seem to be bothered by this; it just stood, in flame, twitching its tail lazily.

Ashton Kutcher speaks out.
In TIME Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
"Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — because the creation of Twitter ... is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer."

Could you re-phrase that as a Tweet?

Part of an email I received from Malaysia
“We apologize for the delay of your payment and all the Inconveniences and Hiccups that we might have caused you. However, we were having some minor Problems with our payment system, which is Inexplicable, and have held us Stranded and Indolent, not having the Prerequisite to devote our 100%
Endowment in accrediting foreign payments.”

I am somewhat Stranded and Indolent myself, but somehow I have my doubts that all or even part of the “Five Hundred Thousand Great British Pounds” promised me by Prize Payment Coordinator Mr. Anderson Jones will ever find itself in my bank account.

Warning: Study Alert! Stephen Colbert: Tabula Rasa
From Ohio State University: “…[C]onservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.”

The ongoing conservative response.
Pat Buchanan: “For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.”

A real President would have rolled up his sleeves and clocked the guy. Or at the very least yelled, “Oh shut up!” Or at the very very least, put his hands over his ears, closed his eyes, and chanted “layler layler layler.”

Ask the Sexpert!
Sound advice from the Mumbai Mirror:
“I had unprotected sex with a lady one-and-a-half years ago, but I did not penetrate her. After that I tested for HIV (one p24antigen HIV and HIV2, two ELISA and one Chemiluminescent). All of them were negative. I have read that HIV can show up in the blood after six months, or even three years. Am I safe?”

“You will never be safe until you are sensible enough to accept that the tests are more than enough to know that you are safe. Why not start being happy in life and thinking of the past in perspective.”

Why they hate us: part 47.
Alternet: “Dr. Mosser admits that while there is no true dirtiness to having labia hypertrophy, there does seem to be a psychological desire amongst women to have their genitals look organized or clean.”

There are women out there with disorganized genitalia, and want to do something about it.

This may be because “…there is a huge lack of knowledge surrounding genital diversity for women.” Not everybody can afford the female genitalia flip book.

On the other hand:

“If the accounts from surgeons and the media are to be believed, pornography is a major influence in what women believe is desirable. While women might not be trading notes on their vaginal proportions, they have become increasingly comfortable with mainstream pornography and that leads to one dimensional representations of what vulvas look like. Add to that the phenomenon that is the Brazilian Bikini wax, where all but the smallest trace of pubic hair is removed, and women are getting the HD version of their vulvas outside of a biology class for the first time.”

I’m not sure what HD means here… High Definition? Harley Davidson? Hilda Dolittle?

I am relieved that women are not trading notes on their vaginal proportions, however. (And how are those notes transcribed, I wonder?) Still, I think it is time to break the back of the Brazilian Bikini wax cabal once and for all, lest we become a world of sadly uniform coochies, decorated only by a lonely patch of carefully shaved heart-shaped pubic hair.

“…[W]omen … would do best to get to know their genitals as they are and should be. If nothing else, it’s a whole lot cheaper.”

So there you have it. Labiaplasty: threat or menace?

Rumble in Disney Hall!
From the Los Angeles Times:

“Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski’s ‘Variations on a Polish Folk Theme,’ Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience. In a quiet but angry voice that did not project well, he indicated that he could no longer play in a country whose military wants to control the whole world.

“‘Get your hands off of my country,’ he said.”

I was not aware that the United States had invaded Poland. The darn media won’t tell us anything any more.

Let the punishment fit the crime.
AP: “Faced with mounting unpaid lunch charges in the economic downturn, Albuquerque Public Schools last month instituted a ‘cheese sandwich policy,’ serving the alternative meals to children whose parents are supposed to be able to pay for some or all of their regular meals but fail to pick up the tab.”

Twelve Major Brands That Will Disappear
According to 24/7 Wall Street, they are Avis/Budget, Borders, Crocs, Saturn, Esquire Magazine, Gap (Old Navy and Banana Republic along with it), Architectural Digest, Chrysler, Eddie Bauer, Palm (of Pilot fame), AIG, and the travel industry.

Swine flu.
I say it’s “flu” and I say the hell with it.

Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger turned 90 this month. I happened to be the writer for a public radio documentary about him. It is called THE PROTEST SINGER, and airs this month on a public radio station near you. Check it out if you would. Thank you.

Nothing to blog here. Keep moving.

2009-04-19T17:36:00.000-07:00

This N That
Just got back from Portland-ish (Forest Grove, actually, at Pacific University), taping a show with Philosophy Talk. In Oregon, by the way, Ken Taylor and John Perry are worshiped as GODS (philosophytalk.org, for those interested).

After the show, a few local ales went down. At our table was a philosophy professor, originally from Romania. The conversation turned, for some reason, to left-handedness. She volunteered the information that when she was a child, she would often practice writing with her left hand – if she should ever become captured by an enemy, and her right hand was cut off, she would still be able to communicate.

Intrigued, we pursued her on this. It turns out, she said, that when she was a child, there were no western movies, and certainly no Romanian movies. Instead, her pop culture experience consisted of Word War II propaganda films, in which Nazis do horrible things to people.

As a result, she spent a lot of time as a child terrified of Nazis, and preparing for how she would endure their torments, should she ever be captured. In addition to her left-hand writing exercises, she would also practice staring directly into strong lights without blinking. She teaches ethics.

Just Walk Away
President Obama doesn’t want us to think about torture any more. Will do! I mean, will NOT do! I mean….

Tea Bags
What was THAT all about? People unaffected by new taxations are ticked that rich people will have to pay a little less that what they paid during the Reagan administration?

Glenn Beck Mystery
Why is he always bursting into tears?

John Batchelor, Republican, on the state of the Republican Party, from The Daily Beast
“Vigilant Democrats worry today that the Republican Party is only playing possum, or that it can be revived by extraordinary means such as a Martian invasion. In fact, the GOP is a mummy-wrapped skeleton sitting in its own chilly mausoleum of bilious resentments and creepy sentimentality. What remains to call themselves Republicans are baldly badly educated or just prankish Confederate re-enactors—chubby men in gray and butternut suits with gold buttons and feather-tipped hats, clanking down stairs with shiny sabers. A handful of them are just boors from the South who look poorly on horseback and wave unread Bibles while calling for Billy Sunday to rise like the gold market.”
…
“The Republican Party’s death doesn’t really threaten anyone, and I puzzle why Democrats and independents who vote Democratic spend words and worry debating the look of the corpse. We few Republicans with long memories wander around the cemetery admiring the tombstones and enjoying the rain. I can hear you doubting that this could truly be the end. The final stage of grief is acceptance.”

Wow! Google really IS evil! Who knew?
Henry Porter, in The Observer:
“Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model - the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits. Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time. On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues - in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans - contested by academics - to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.”
…
“Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 - now reckoned to be the world's most powerful brand - does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.”

When I was 11…
My friends and I would devise elaborate methods of torture for ourselves, and then debate what would make us “talk” or not. Curiously enough, the torturers of our imaginings were either Nazis or Japanese, because pop culture of the fifties was still permeated with the propaganda tropes of World War II.

In our little imaginations, nothing an enemy could do would ever make us reveal anything. But then again, we were kids. Even as adults, I have a hunch we have no idea what we would do. I suspect that we would fold pretty much immediately, and tell our captors everything they want to know. On the other hand, and this is perhaps our saving grace, we no longer know anything, and therefore have nothing to reveal.

New York Times
Schools around the nation are trying to teach their students empathy; this is Seattle: “Within the charter network KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program, some schools are focusing more on empathy, with lessons about the Holocaust, role-playing and a ‘values jingle’ sung to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells.’”

So the choice has finally come down to this: a nation of sociopaths, or a nation of cheerful yet humorless boosters?

Viral Video
This is a prose poem I found, by Kimberly King Parsons. It appealed to me….

1. The dog should be a little terrifying. The baby will be touching the dog, a wolfhound, a mastiff. Something foamy. The baby should be malformed in some way that is not unsettling. The head kind of dented, eyes a bit bulgy. The creepy baby touches the big dog. The baby regards the dog's sizeable paw; the dog regards the baby's liverish hand. Cue baby's smile. All of this takes place somewhere gentle. A carpet, a rug. A picnic blanket would be a nice touch.

2. This man is obese but that is not the joke. He is singing a song everyone knows, a song originally sung by a woman. The man is wearing a black leotard. He is dancing, really giving it his all. The tripod shakes. The camera topples over. We get a good look at the man's baseboards, a potted plant that's dying.

3. The worst thing about the boy is that someone taught him to play the pan flute. The pan flute in Argentina. The pan flute in the Republic of Lithuania. There he is, in different clothes on different days, playing that same song in country after country. The natives can't get enough. They flee their stoops, fight their way into the shot. They are clapping along, encouraging him. This is more than I can stand.

Presidential Puppy
This is from the Huffington Post, describing a photograph of Obama running down a hallway in the White House with Bo:

“There are all kinds of interesting elements here. Bo running free, though leashed. Obama and the dog clearly relating to one another, Obama looking back -- already creating a bond with the puppy. And especially, the new President at full sprint -- completely off the ground. ...

“One thing the photo does -- playing off an almost timeless domestic activity: running with your dog -- is to capture Obama thoroughly free of his often more self-contained manner. …”

And so on… I'm amazed that writers can find the time any more to do this sort of mindless parsing of the obvious.

The article also referenced the famous photograph of Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (on the cover of LIFE Magazine) running on a beach with his dog. That dog was called Freckles. That photograph, to my knowledge, has never been parsed, though it is still ubiquitous.

Sham Blog

2009-04-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

America Rolls Up Its Sleeves!
NYT: “…Michelle Obama, during the meeting with the queen, touched her, raising already high-brows over on this side of the pond. Buckingham Palace protocol says that commoners must not touch the queen, a dictate that foreign leaders in the past have ignored at their own peril. When Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia did the same thing back in 1992 the newspapers here called him the ‘Lizard of Oz.’

“But so high is the adulation that has been heaped on the Obamas from the normally caustic British press since their arrival that newspapers here said it was a sign of how well Mrs. Obama got along with the queen. In Mrs. Obama’s defense, the queen did touch her first, putting her arm around her as the two looked down at their feet, presumably talking about shoes.”

Where there are shoes, there also peace shall dwell.

Behind the Scenes at Google!
Designer Douglas Bowman, in his blog, telling readers why he left Google:
“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.”

Bowman now works for Twitter, which is pretty much design-free, near as I can tell, except for the Fail Whale. And word is that Google might buy Twitter. Which will probably mean a redesign of the Fail Whale, which will take months.

Mac Users Whiners! Hold Front Page!
From Good Morning Silicon Valley:
“ Now in heavy prime-time rotation, the initial installment of the "Laptop Hunters" ads features vivacious Lauren, who was recruited for what she believed was generic market research into laptop purchases, given a $1,000 budget, and turned loose to shop for a laptop that met her needs — in this case, something reasonably speedy with a 17-inch screen and a comfortable keyboard. Followed by a camera crew, Lauren makes a quick U-turn out of an Apple store after determining that the only Mac portable in her price range had a 13-inch screen. Later, at a Best Buy, Lauren bounces through a bountiful selection of Windows-based machines before picking an HP Pavilion for $699 and declaring, ‘I'm a PC and I got just what I wanted.’ And the money quote? In the car between stores, Lauren sighs in mock resignation, ‘I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person.’”

“Well, you could practically hear the Mac hackles going up every time the commercial ran, and the fan sites quickly filled with indignation. … Doubts were raised over Lauren's veracity because she's an aspiring actress and her credibility as a bargain hunter because she's driving a nice Volkswagen. Still frames from the ad were analyzed like the Zapruder film for evidence of deceptive editing. And the machine that made Lauren so happy was derided as ‘a piece of crap’ and ‘the epitome of what people dislike about PCs.’ Throw in the ‘not cool enough’ line, says Technologizer's Ed Oswald, and the ad goes from misleading to ‘offensive.’”

Another Golden Idol Tarnished.
The Sham Wow Guy had a dust up with a hooker in Miami hotel. Sharing a kiss, she clamped down on his tongue (allegedly) with her teeth, causing him to hit her to make her let go. Bleeding, he stumbled down to the lobby. Authorities were summoned. According to The Smoking Gun, the police reported: "Both parties had a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from their persons.”

Why I Love Wikipedia.
“The Lloyds Bank coprolite is a large human coprolite, or fossilized dung specimen, recovered by archaeologists excavating the Viking settlement of Jórvík (now York) in England. It was found in 1972 beneath the site of what was to become the York branch of Lloyds Bank and may be the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found.”

From a Christian Mommy Blog: No More Kids!
“I didn't want to impose the goat character upon my children. Our children should be different from the children of the world, anyway. I therefore made an effort to stop using the word 'kids'. Now I find that it grates upon me when I hear it.”

Elsewhere, she compares (at great length) goats and sheep. She writes, citing the Bible, “When God visits His flock, he will separate the sheep from the goats and punish the goats!” And “Goats by nature are independent, proud, rebellious, destructive and yet cowardly in the face of danger.” And “…[T]he goats would herd their young together in one spot on a knoll of a hill and leave them while they went off to forage for the day. They did not provide the same individual attention which the sheep gave to their offspring.”

Whatever. You lambs stay off my lawn!

Health Alert! Cleveland Plain Dealer.
“It has become LeBron James' trademark. Just before tipoff, he leans over the courtside scorers' table, pours a pile of powder on his hands and then -- poof! -- throws it skyward as if filling the arena with a cloud of magic dust.”
…
“Dr. Kathleen Fagan, an environmental health expert at Case Western Reserve University, wants the Cavaliers superstar to take a powder from the pregame ritual. She fears kids at home will mimic him, create cumulus clouds of their own and then inhale the dust. ‘It's not a good idea to throw powder up in the air and breathe it in,’ said Fagan, who's also an assistant professor at Case's medical school. The particles can irritate the lungs, eyes and nose, she added.”

Think of it. Throngs of children making cumulus clouds of powder, infecting their little lungs, and placing a thin sheen of white dust on the dining room furniture. Sounds more kidlike than lamblike, but again- whatever. You lambs stay off my lawn!

Things You Didn’t Know About Bobby Jindal.
Max Blumenthal, in The Daily Beast: “When he was four years old, Piyush changed his name to "Bobby" after becoming mesmerized by an episode of The Brady Bunch.” He converted to Catholicism as a teenager. When he was in college, performed an exorcism on his girlfriend. The demon was successfully driven out, by the way.

I Had a Dream!
I was standing in a driveway. A little fat dog waddled up to me with a red ball in its mouth, and dropped it at my feet. Then I woke up.

Or Some Blog...

2009-03-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

Jacob Weisberg, in SLATE
“I'm doing my best not to become a Kindle bore.”

Too late, pal.

Twitter Twating
I joined Twitter, and tweeted: “Using Twitter for the first time.” For some reason, somebody responded to that. I mean, God, I bored myself typing it. I have no idea what to do with Twitter, but I signed up anyway. What’s the difference between Twitter and Instant Messenger? Why is it suddenly not only a big deal, but an attractor of followers who seem kind of cult-y, if you know what I mean? Going to update my Facebook status now. Not.

“Or some shit…”
I’ve noticed a habit with young males, at least from overhearing their conversations, that they frequently qualify a statement with “…or some shit” at the end. As in, “He was going downtown, or some shit,” or “he was drinking a beer or some shit,” or “she said she didn’t want to see me any more, or some shit.”

I noticed that this qualifier doesn’t really qualify anything. The original statement is perfectly unambiguous. He was going downtown. He was drinking a beer. She said she didn’t want to see me any more.

The intention seems to be to apply a layer of urban insouciance to statements of fact. The speaker cannot be bothered to vouch for the truth of what he is saying, he’s just, you know, throwing it out there. Whatever.

But I was on the couch of an evening, as is my wont, and found myself applying this qualifier to statements made by people on television, silently to myself, at first, and then – sensing that the Dread Bride might find it funny – out loud. My, we were amused!

I’m listening to the radio now. It works with best with pundits and newscasters. It’s easy to do. When you hear “We need to reduce regulatory obstacles,” add “or some shit.” “Obama’s top budget officials seem confident they can deal with this immediate difficulty. Or some shit.” My, you will be amused!

Shootings in Oakland, Where I Live
Four cops dead, for no apparent reason, shot by a guy who probably should have still been in prison. Between the first shooting, and the second, the shooter acquired (somehow) an AK-47. Where did that come from? I’m not a gun control kind of guy, really. I grew up with guns. But they were .22s, shotguns, and like that. Why should ANYBODY outside of the armed forces have a machine gun? And the killings in Mexico? Thousands dead? That’s because people can’t get machine guns in Mexico, but they can certainly buy them here. And smuggle them down.

I keep trying to dredge up some enthusiasm for our post-Bush world, but what can I say? I’m going to be sixty in October, have no money (but I’m debt-free!), want to drown Octomom in her own litter (Horrid Wife calls her “Octopussy”), set fire to AIG, and half of Obama’s administration (which half?), and make the Twitter, Tweets, Twaters, and Twitterverse just. Go. Away. We are turning into Smurfs. Evil Smurfs.

Did I mention Afghanistan?

From AP
“A woman accused of taking more than $73,000 from the Arlington church where she was an administrative assistant blames the devil. Papers filed with a theft charge Wednesday in Snohomish County Superior Court say the 62-year-old Arlington woman told detectives ‘Satan had a big part in the theft.’”

He held the bag, politely.

Swinging computer generated blog

2009-03-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

A Mom speaks out.
The Fearsome Wife sent me a link to a conservative mommyblogger’s review of WATCHMEN. She didn’t like it much. It’s bad for children.

She also wrote, re WATCHMEN: “…[T]he Soviets are about to nuke America. It's 1985 and Nixon is President. We've won in Vietnam. Oh, and Henry Kissinger has a Russian accent. And Ronald Reagan is thinking of running for President in 1988. Wow, isn't that cool that they got it wrong on purpose? I'm so amazed at this ‘high-brow art’ of deliberately getting dates and timelines wrong, you know, just to be ‘artistic,’ and get the drooling of the critics. That is sooooo genius. Like way totally cool.” Apparently, she has difficulty grasping the concept of “alternative reality.” And she also didn’t notice that critics, by and large, far from drooling over WATCHMEN, pretty much all hated it.

She also used the phrase “computer generated penis” three times. Disapprovingly. That is to say, unlike the vast majority of Americans, she does not approve of computer generated penises. When it comes to computer generated penises, she’s against them and doesn’t care who knows it.
Oh, the first time she refers to Dr Manhattan’s “swinging computer-generated penis.” The second time: “computer generated penis swinging about.” The third: “…terrible computer generated images (including the penis).” I wonder: if it had not swung, but remained perfectly still, would she have cut the penis a little more slack?

Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, on WATCHMEN:
“Last and hugest is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is buff, buck naked, and blue, like a porn star left overnight in a meat locker.”

My daughter, on WATCHMEN:
“It was awesome.”

The Ongoing Crisis
Right after 9/11, you’ll recall, President Bush urged us to get out and shop. I found this a curious way to respond to the murder of hundreds of people, but by coincidence I did find myself going to Macy’s on September 12. I needed a pair of pants. There was nobody in the men’s department except me. There were two clerks. As one was ringing up my order, I noticed the other clerk, way down at the other end of the men’s department, marching around his workstation to the strains of patriotic music that was blaring over the store’s sound system.

Well, we have a new President now, and he’s urging us to, I don’t know really, cut down and spend at the same time, kind of.

I’ve been trying to wrap my poor brain around the whole economy thing. I’m not good with money, but I always thought I knew what it was at least. Now I realize that nobody knows what money is. Anybody who claims to know what money is is a fool or a liar.

I’m reminded of a minor digerati phenomenon, the Singularity. This is a belief that at some point (the Singularity) machines will achieve self-awareness, and either destroy us utterly, or usher in a new epoch in which we actually become machines ourselves. It’s kind of the geek version of the Rapture.

Maybe that’s what happened with money. Money has become so complicated and opaque that is has achieved its own reality and its own volition. In the future, we won’t spend money any more. It will just spend us.

Bubble gum 2.0
I sometimes think that modern day product development is focused on one central question: “What don’t we need right now? Let’s make it.”

Take Topps, the bubble gum card company. I don’t think the cards come with gum any more. Remember that gum? It was like pink cardboard sprinkled with sugar. You chewed it for roughly three minutes before it turned into a mass with the consistency and taste of tile grout, or spackle. And you were left with a picture of an athlete you’ve never heard of. Luckily, you had a friend who collected the things. You’d swap him the card for a plastic cowboy, or a marble, and he’d put the card carefully in a shoebox, where it would be alphabetized, and coded by team, and he would grow up to sell his collection on eBay for thousands of dollars, providing him the seed money to start his own company that would eventually earn him millions of dollars.

You wouldn’t think Topps would mess with that system, would you? Well, profits are down. Baseball cards, once a billion dollar a year business, now pull in around 200 million a year. There are a couple reasons for that. One is that the player stats so beloved by baseball fans can be easily found online. Another is, perhaps, that baseball players are so pumped up on steroids that the stats are meaningless.

Be that is it may, Topps, which is now owned by former Disney chief Michael Eisner, has come up with a new baseball card. If you point a webcam at it, a 3D avatar of the player on the card shows up on your computer screen. Rotate the card and the player on the screen rotates. You can use your keyboard to animate the figure to perform simple batting or pitching actions. Wow, apparently.

The trouble is, this new card requires a webcam and a computer to work. How many eight year old boys have those things, and if they do, are they really going to spend their free time watching some cartoon benchwarmer strike out? No. They’re going to make a video of themselves lip-synching to a bubble gum pop song, and post it on YouTube. They’ll be famous for two months, and then sink back into bitter obscurity, without even a shoe box to show for their trouble.

I think Topps should focus on the gum. Surely, with today’s technology, you can create a piece of gum that actually has flavor, for one thing, and maintains that flavor for longer than thirty seconds. And if you want to create little 3D baseball players, why not put them on the gum itself? The act of chewing will animate the player. Kids, amaze your friends! Open your mouth, and everybody around you will see a little tiny A Rod, for example, balanced on your tongue, and swinging a bat. And even if the technology doesn’t quite work, the animation fails, and you have a little dead baseball player in your mouth, you can still say, “Ha ha! Made you look!” And that, my friends, is what childhood is all about.

From an old notebook.
"Mycroft Fonzarelli."

The Fonz’ smarter brother, I think. I was going to do something with that, supposedly, but never got anything done beyond writing down the name. Sometimes, perhaps, that suffices.

Blog comes in like a lion.

2009-03-01T12:44:00.000-08:00

Same Oh
I watched President’s Obama’s speech to Congress, and was satisfied that he is acting Presidential. I’m not going out and buying any Obama commemorative plates any time soon, or putting his poster in my window, or weeping with joy over the stimulus package, but still….

However, watching Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary on HBO (“Right America: Feeling Wronged”), I was reminded that there is a whole world out there, beyond my irritating little Bay Area bubble of semi-lefties, cynics, and eco-twits, of angry conservatives who really really hate those who are not angry conservatives.

And there are many who fear that President Obama is taking the United States to hell in a handcart. (Even if that’s true, those many seem to forget that the handcart is not of his making, nor is the hell towards which we are careening. I’m certain he would love to have his own special handcart that runs on solar power, but you have to go to hell with the cart you are dealt.)

Still, it baffles me that in the wake of the successful passing of the stimulus package, some conservatives are claiming victory. I found this, for example:

"If Senate Republicans show a unified voice in opposing the stimulus package, it will be a clear victory," says Richard Viguerie, chairman of the conservative grassroots Web site ConservativeHQ.com. "Not only will it undermine Obama's determination for bipartisan support, it will show the American public that Republicans are the clear alternative to Democrats—a remarkable change from the years of the Bush administration when that line was blurred."

I found that on the conservative grassroots website, ConservativeHG.com, Richard Viguerie’s website, as part of an article written by Richard Viguerie. A self-closed information loop! Wow!

Santelli
Rick Santelli, CNBC correspondent, broadcasting live, made the viral video circuit with his anti-Obama rant: "This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? ... President Obama, are you listening?" That he issued this anti-enconium from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade seems to be an irony lost on those who think Santelli tore the new administration a new one. I mean, there he was surrounded by a bunch of white guys trading in futures and options and derivatives, the kind of guys who in their eagerness and fondness for unique financial instruments helped create the mortgage crisis in the first place. Their shouts of approval for Mr. Santelli’s outburst struck this viewer as more pathetic than stirring.

Santelli 2
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, responding to queries about Santelli’s remarks, suggested that Santelli take the plan, "download it, hit print and begin to read it."

Santelli appeared on “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” and agreed with Liddy’s on-air claim that Gibbs was making a “veiled threat.”

When he appeared on “Today,” host Matt Lauder asked him if he was serious about that.

Santelli said, "Ok, this is more about the feelings my wife had when she watched the body language and listened to what he was saying." To which Matt Lauer responded: "But this is the White House Press Secretary. You think he's going to threaten you on national television?"

Everything now really means something else. It is all shadows and symbols, and coded messages. That only your wife can read.

Monkey Business
This brings us to the flap over the cartoon in the New York Post. The day before it was published a chimpanzee had escaped in Connecticut, and was shot dead by police. So the cartoon showed a dead chimpanzee in a pool of blood on the street, with two bullet holes in its chest, and two cops: one with a smoking gun, and the other one saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Al Sharpton and others immediately jumped on this cartoon, calling it “racist,” that it was comparing President Obama to an ape, and encouraging his assassination. The Post issued an apology, explaining that the cartoon was a reference to the chimpanzee in Connecticut, and was intended to mock the stimulus package. (It’s so stupid, you see, an ape could have written it. Get it?) Critics were not mollified, and called upon people to boycott the Post, and shut it down.

Well, in the first place, though it has now become known as the “monkey cartoon,” an ape is not a monkey. It’s obvious that the cartoonist was reviving an old trope: “A monkey could draw that,” or “A chimpanzee could write better than that,” or “My three-year-old child could paint a better picture.” Because that old trope is always true, and always funny as hell.

In the second place, President Obama did not write the stimulus bill. A team of lawyers did. Or maybe a hundred chimpanzees. I don’t know.

In the third place, that is about the clumsiest punch line I’ve ever read. Punchier would have been “Who’s going to write the next stimulus bill?” On second thought, no. There is no way to make a punch line that includes the words “stimulus bill” funny.

In the fourth place, the cartoon is kind of grotesque. Why would the cartoonist think a bullet-ridden dead chimpanzee in a pool of blood amusing?

Headline: Will Web readers pay for news?
No. They spent all their money on ring tones.

Agog Blog

2009-02-16T18:36:00.000-08:00

Old news new again!
Not exactly breaking news, but last October the National Rebublican Senatorial Committee released a video with Hollywood celebrities apologizing about Al Franken. It was called “We’re Not All Like Al.” The ad is very amusing in a mutant kind of way (view it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/28/gop-turns-to-rapid-anti-o_n_138585.html).

For one thing, the celebrities are Stephen Baldwin, Robert Davi, John Ratzenberger, Pat Boone, and Victoria Jackson. Of course we all know Stephen Baldwin. He’s, um, one of the Baldwins. Robert Davi was one of the two FBI agents in DIE HARD, and was also the villain in the James Bond movie, LICENSE TO KILL. John Ratzenberger was Cliff, of course. Pat Boone was videotaped in a swimming pool. He said he liked ice fishing.

It took me a second to remember Victoria Jackson. She was the ditzy blonde on Saturday Night Live a hundred years ago. Apparently she is and always was a very devout Christian. So devout, in fact, that she wrote on her website: “I don't want a political label, but Obama bears traits that resemble the anti- Christ and I'm scared to death that un- educated people will ignorantly vote him into office.”

Wait a minute…. That happened! He’s President! Watch Obama for telltale signs of Satanic indwelling.

Meanwhile… the backlash begins!
Former Bush White House chief of staff Andrew Card appeared on INSIDE EDITION to lament about President Obama’s sartorial style: "There should be a dress code of respect. I wish that he would wear a suit and tie."

Stimulus package backlash…
I got this from Alexander Wolcott’s blog. He got it from AMERICAN DIGEST:

“What if, instead, this bill contains - since it is protean enough to contain almost anything - the actual items that outline the most deeply held beliefs of a man suckled at the breast of all the broken dreams that sent hundreds of millions of humans to the block in the last century? What if, as we root about in the endless paragraphs and pages, we do see the outlines, at last, of what this strange and obscure man actually believes and plans? What if nothing is accident and all is intent? And the intent is ‘darker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp?’”

If I follow this, and I don’t think I do, the poster apparently thinks that the ghostly outline of the “real” President Obama is hidden in plain sight in the words of the Stimulus Package, there for any student of the Kabbala to decipher. Watch for telltale signs of Satanic indwelling!

(The “darker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp” line, by the way, is from the Harlem Renaissance poet James Weldon Johnson.)

Thanks Irwin, for this!
From the Buffalo News: “Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.”

He was arrested last Thursday, charged with beheading his wife.

Science on the march!
Reuters: “A widely available blood pressure pill could one day help people erase bad memories, perhaps treating some anxiety disorders and phobias, according to a Dutch study published on Sunday.”

What if you forget to take the pill?

Book notes…
I just read NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. It pretends to be a series of Wikipedia type entries on various thugs, smug aesthetes, hangers-on, would be dictators, poets, and novelists – all of whom have vague or strong right wing world views. Some are harmless, some are insane, some are scary, some are silly. They were all invented by Bolano, though real historical figures are sprinkled throughout the book. It put me in mind of Borges’ stories, only less aloof, more engaged. And though the biographies here are largely of fringe figures, there is a creepy overtone to the book: people like this could very easily become the central figures in a culture. I recommend this book highly. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

It inspired me to write this….

Civilization
Aristocrats and thugs merge their flesh in a dream their stylish women endorse. Slim outsized books grace their tables, full of careful photographs of buildings and sparse chairs. They seek to reclaim a lost glory, and send scholars around the globe to find its traces. Hidden from public view, the artifacts gathered spin a tale both wispy and bloody. Poets fill in the cracks. Schoolchildren sing. Old myths are translated once more, but despite every effort, by the time the powers read them, every god is dead.

Nickname the Wee Wife heard for the crazy woman who just had eight children, and has inspired so much hatred from a controversy-hungry America.
“Octopussy.”

Mundi's blog is full of it.

2009-02-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

Sic transit gloria mundi
I went to Portland last weekend to participate, with the Philosophy Talk radio program, in a seminar. That’s right. I’m an intellectual. Get over it.

On the way from the airport to the hotel, I spotted this sign: Airport of the Year. On the way to the airport from the hotel, I spotted this sign, for Horizon Air, Regional Airline of the Year. I did not note the years.

Michael Phelps
The Olympian wunderkind was photographed smoking a bong, igniting both amusement and outrage from an easily amused and more easily outraged nation. I say as long as he doesn’t try to burn a blunt while swimming, America is safe.

Stephen Fowler
On a recent WIFE SWAP, a supercilious Brit (now living in San Francisco) and partner in a bioenergy firm got, in exchange for his “weight loss coach” wife, a housewife from Missouri whose family loves paintball.

In the course of the program Mr. Fowler called his swapped wife fat, stupid, and less of a person for living in a podunk town. He told her the only way her children would ever see the world would be to join the military. He called her a stupid hillbilly, redneck and the stupidest person he had ever met on the earth. He added that he earns more in one week than her husband did in a year.

He was a complete asshole, in other words. And America agreed! The blogosphere ignited. Pretty much every bit of information that could be found about the guy was posted – his job, his address, his email, his phone number, his board memberships. He had to hire security to watch his home.

And, on several blogs, this was posted: “Stephen Fowler has resigned from Pacific Environment’s Board of Directors and is no longer associated with the organization in any way. Please note that he was never an employee of the organization; rather, he was a volunteer.”

Well done, blogosphere, I guess. You may have destroyed a man’s life, just because he was rude to a woman on television. That's social networking in action!

But then there’s…
Christian Bale, caught on tape, tearing a DP a new one because he was fiddling with lights or something while he was trying to do a scene. America found this amusing. Seemed like a run-of-the-mill temper tantrum to me. It may even have been justified. Why for the life of me this tore across the Web is beyond me.

And then there’s…
“David After the Dentist.” Look it up on YouTube. A cute kid is all drugged-up and says druggy kid things. It is pretty funny. He says things like “I have two fingers,” and “Is this real life?” Okay, ha ha. But there are already mashups, and reenactments, and animated versions, much like what happened with the zombie kid who likes turtles (Remember that? Oh, how quickly we forget!). What is with us? Don’t we have anything important to do? Or at least find something trivial to do that doesn’t involve turning a minor episode in a child’s life into a life-defining searing soul trauma? Just asking.

And then there’s…
President Obama. Boy, that honeymoon period was quick!

But, armed with his well-stocked cabinet of tax evaders, he staggers on, into our glorious future!

My dream
I had a dream last night that I was performing at some college somewhere (as I did so many times back in the late seventies and early eighties) with Duck’s Breath partner Jim Turner, and Jonathan Winters (that’s right, him, but younger). But then a troupe performing a show with giant puppets showed up, and everybody dashed out of the audience to go see the giant puppets. I emailed Jim about this, and he emailed back, “That wasn’t a dream.” Thanks, America. Thanks for nothing.

And then there’s…
From NYT: “…eightmaps.com …takes the names and ZIP codes of people who donated to the ballot measure (the notorious Proposition 8) — information that California collects and makes public under state campaign finance disclosure laws — and overlays the data on a Google map.”

“Some donors to groups supporting the measure have received death threats and envelopes containing a powdery white substance, and their businesses have been boycotted.”

And then there’s this…
From Slate: “Last November, an inebriated 24-year-old with the woefully apt name of Kyle Drinkwine was found by police in the back of a Wisconsin alley, his hands covered in blood. According to testimony compiled by the Smoking Gun, Drinkwine had spent the evening unwinding at Emma's Bar, a local watering hole that was hosting a karaoke night. Shortly after performing an Eminem song, he allegedly became so enraged by another patron's version of ‘Holy Diver’—the 1983 anthem by heavy-metal patriarch Ronnie James Dio—that he assaulted the singer and his friend and fled when police arrived.”

The story was called “Karaoke Rage.” Add it to your list of things to worry about, won’t you? Thanks.

My Facebook "25 Random Things About Me"
(1) I don't make lists.

Bloggo Redux

2009-01-29T16:50:00.000-08:00

John Updike, at dinner with John Irving (from Slate)
Once, when he came to dinner, my middle son, Brendan, was in a phase of dressing up—disguises, voices with accents, bizarre enactments. Updike and I were having dinner when Brendan appeared in a kimono; he was holding a lit candle, and something that looked like (or was) a microphone. "Good evening," Brendan said. "This is the news in Japanese." And then he went into an incomprehensible imitation of Japanese news; it was pretty convincing. (I think Brendan must have been 8 or 10 at the time.)

That was all. Brendan left, with a bow, and we went back to our dinner. Updike had never met Brendan before.

When we were saying good night, Updike asked: "The news, in Japanese—is it a regular event?"

"No, just for us," I said; I couldn't think of what else to say. Brendan had never done it before, nor would he ever do it again.

"Well, that was … special," Updike said.

Social Networking News!
Burger King launched a campaign in which it would give a free Whopper to anybody on Facebook who would “unfriend” ten “friends.” According to a feature in the New York Times, “Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the castoffs letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich (or, more accurately, a tenth of a sandwich).” Facebook policy apparently does not permit e-mail notifications to those who have been defriended, or to alert others that you have defriended somebody, and the Burger King campaign was suspended.

More Writer News!
In THE BELIEVER, a short story writer named Gary Lutz published a lecture he gave at Columbia University, called THE SENTENCE IS A LONELY PLACE, an analysis of sentences he considered wonderful, beautiful, etc. This was one of them, from a writer named Sam Lipsyte:

“Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.”

That doesn’t seem like such a good sentence to me. I would cut “…to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.” I have no idea what it means. If it means a literal heart, well, hearts don’t squeak. If it’s the “heart” that is “soul,” it’s unearned sentimentality. And besides, it’s inferred by the “sticky saxophone music” in the first place. Still, it’s the kind of sentence I would like, if I found it in a piece of pulp fiction.

Which reminds me…
A writer I love, Raymond Chandler, had this sentence in his story, “Wrong Pigeon,” which I recently re-read: “It was a quiet street in Bay City, if there are any quiet streets in this beatnik generation when you can’t get through a meal without some male or female stomach singer belching out a kind of love that is as old-fashioned as a bustle or some Hammond organ jazzing it up in the customer’s soup.”

The hell…? The sentence starts out as a standard detective noir trope, and then suddenly lurches into the voice of old man complaining about these kids today. Stomach singer? An organ in the soup?

Barbie News!
According to TOY MONSTER: THE BIG, BAD WORLD OF MATTEL, Jack Ryan, the designer of Barbie, was a swinger, patronized prositutes, attended orgies, and was once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor. Gwen Forea, who voiced the talking Barbie, claimed, "He once said to me he loved me being tall so he could stick his nose in my boobs when he hugged me.”

Happy birthday, over time.
John C. Dvorak in PC MAGAZINE:

“2009 marks the 30-year anniversary of the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet program. And society as a whole has deteriorated ever since its invention. It was the spreadsheet that triggered the PC revolution, with VisiCalc the original culprit. Can anyone say that we've actually benefited from its invention? Look around: I think we've suffered….

“And yes, while all the pundits and visionaries talk about business intelligence and modern practices and this and that, where's the evidence of improvement in the way business runs or works? Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere. At every level of the business scene today, some bean counter does a what-if calculation before making the decisions. The spineless CEO worries about what the shareholders would think if he disagreed with what the spreadsheet and the CFO told him to do. To make him feel better, the board will give the CEO a fat bonus for saving money.

“The what-if society has marched forward with little actual regard for the customer. If the customer has a complaint, she can call someone in India—someone doing customer support there because the spreadsheet told the company it could save 1 cent a year on phone costs. There's no way this idea would have evolved without spreadsheets.”

Burn your Excel. You have nothing to lose but your database.

Australia news!
(AP) Before there were cuddly koalas, hoards of flesh-eating kangaroos, "demon ducks" and marsupial lions roamed Australia's Outback, according to recent fossil discoveries by paleontologists.

Nigeria news!
(AP) … In a front-page article on Friday, the Vanguard newspaper said that two men tried to steal a Mazda car two days earlier in Kwara State, with one suspect transforming himself into a goat as vigilantes cornered him.

Whew!
The U.S. House may vote to extend television’s digital conversion deadline to June 12th, because many Americans are supposedly still confused about the whole thing. I’m not confused, but I am angry. If I had my way, I’d still be watching shows on a twelve inch black and white that uses a coat hanger for an antenna.

A smattering of reader posts on a Minneapolis Star Tribune story about this, however, shows that I am alone in this.

There was this post: “…If these people have not prepared themselves in two years what makes you believe they are going to get it done in the next four months? Sounds to me like good old fashioned laziness or an unwillingness to change. I thought that Barack Hussein Obama was all about ‘change’, and he was behind this extension. I guess he only wants change that will benefit him and the liberals.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you already have a digital converter or cable, you will receive television just fine, right? So what’s their problem with the delay? They want to watch WIFE SWAP in 3D?

And this: “I'm always bitterly amused when the Leftist apologists say that one population or another can't access one thing or the other and throw up various excuses like language barriers. They don't seem to realize that they themselves are defacto, treating these populations like they are nothing but helpless morons. Good grief, if something is IMPORTANT, a refugee or minority population will sure as hell find out about it through word-of-mouth at the very least and develop their own solutions. Instead, we now coddle them like they were little children. I often wonder how my own Scandinavian and German immigrant ancestors ever survived without Leftist cocooning.”

Again, what does coddling minorities have to do with this? Is forcing a poor person to buy a digital converter really a conservative cause?

Most posts were like the above. But this poster made my same point: “Obama only asks for a delay because the economy is so bad that some people cannot afford the $80 to spend on a converter. Let alone afford to have cable. If you have the converter now, you're already getting the channels. Some areas have 64 channels with the least of 33 that I have seen. Major networks are already broadcasting in HD, so majoy shows wether you have the converter or not come in crystal clear. Plus, the government isn't issuing anymore coupons, there has been a delay in those also. So those of you that have the converter already, or have cable already, quit your b i t c h i n g.”

And finally: “it's not like the government is cutting off their oxygen or starving their children. And WTF!? Our gov is spending our tax money on giving coupons to pay for a luxury item? How about a rebate for us cable users since we now HAVE TO have cable (instead of choosing to have it and affording the luxury)!”

I hate us. Love television though.

Batman
Just watched THE DARK KNIGHT on our new (digital) television. I didn’t get it. Heath Ledger was all right. I liked the little snaky thing he did with his tongue. But he was, after all, just another over-the-top villain. Not enough Batman. The fight scenes were poorly choreographed and murky. And it was bleak. Who wants to see a bleak comic book movie? Well, millions, I guess. Must be a sign of the times. Plus: it was two and half hours long! And self-important! Good grief. Must every Hollywood action movie now be these lumbering glittery dinosaurs lurching from explosion to car chase to fistfight with patches of obvious dialogue stitching the scenes together? Just asking.

Joe the Blog

2009-01-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

Joe the What?
I don’t watch much television news, so I missed most of the “Joe the Plumber” soundbites. I did intuit that he, like Sarah Palin, was a godsend to journalists desperate for something to write about in the waning days of the campaign. He was a poster child for the kind of people Barack Obama said wouldn’t suffer from his tax plan. At the exact same time, he was a poster child for what John McCain claimed was the kind of person that would suffer from Barack Obama’s tax plan.

Just as America’s eyes began to glaze over, our ever-alert media dug up the fact that Joe wasn’t really a plumber, and he owed some taxes. Scandal! Then he wrote a book (with the help of some other guy): JOE THE PLUMBER – FIGHTING FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM.

And now, he’s a reporter in Israel for Pajamas Media, a branch of the conservative blog, Little Green Footballs. I don’t know how much he’s being paid, or what purpose Joe the Plumber’s presence in Israel will serve. A symbolic one, of course. An American working class joe, bringing the truth about Israel to a rabidly anti-zionist media! At last!

Michelle Malkin, a green footballer herself, wrote, “Joe the Plumber's new gig is an affront to the Fraternal Order of The Professional Journalist because it underscores hard truths: An Ivy League journalism degree does not a truth-teller make. International war broadcasting experience does not a truth-seeker make. Look at Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post fabulist Janet Cooke. Or New York Times fiction writer Jayson Blair. Or Boston Globe fabricators Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle. Or former CBS News Captain Queeg Dan Rather.”

So the hope is that our working class joe will roll up his sleeves and bring home the truth bacon for a hungry America. Unfortunately, Joe gave an interview to the Associated Press. This is part of what he said, “I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, ‘Well look at this atrocity,’ well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."

So, let us recap. Joe the Plumber, who is not a plumber, is now a reporter, who does not believe in reporting.

I want that job! Do I have to go to Gaza though?

DIY
According to the Associated Press, “Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, … hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.”

According to the AP, in San Francisco, “31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.”

Supposedly these basement chemists and programmers will ultimately find the cure for cancer, or whatever, where the bloated bureaucracies and lumbering private enterprises cannot.

Some, of course, find this amateur approach to genetic engineering alarming. I grew up in an era in which our fathers were enthusiastic hobbyists. They were all about electric trains, hi-fi equipment, home carpentry, battle tableaus, and DIY fireworks displays. So I worry a bit. I knew a Dad who liked to collect and pose lead soldiers. Unfortunately, he could only solder a musket on a lead redcoat for about a minute before requiring a trip to the emergency room.

Still, I welcome a return to grownups having hobbies. Nobody has hobbies any more. We only build things in the hope of attracting venture capital. And most of the building is virtual, anyway. We don’t make a ship in a bottle, we make software that allows you to create a ship in a bottle online.

And a group in Cambridge, called DIYbio, gives me hope. They have set up a “community lab where the public could use chemicals and lab equipment, including a used freezer, scored for free off Craigslist, that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive.”

Well, okay, that’s kind of scary. I don’t know if I’d want a bunch of enthusiastic biology dropouts storing staph infections in a Kelvinator anywhere within a ten mile radius of me. On the other hand, one of the co-founders of DIYbio claimed that while “amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels,… they might also try, for example, to use squid genes to create tattoos that glow.”

Now, that’s more like it! That’s the America I love. No cure for cancer, no life-extending protein drinks – glowing tattoos! Inflatable feet! Adjustable hairlines! A sixth finger! Toes that can sing! Eye color that adjusts to match your mood! A chihuahua that fits in a spoon! A formerly endangered tiger that fits in your pocket!

And Dads everywhere will take up smoking pipes again. After work, they’ll loosen their ties, go into the den, fire up the particle accelerator and either end life as we know it, or emerge with a self-sharpening pencil, a cat that knows how to bark, or a bacterium that feeds only on dust bunnies. Just in time for dinner! Thank you, says Mom. You Go Dad, say the kids. I love you, says the genetically re-engineered dog. And Dad will beam in his new found glory, glowing like a hopeful tattoo, a beckoning beacon for a dark and frightened nation.

A Story I Found Strangely Touching, if Creepy
From Popbitch, a Brit gossip newsletter: "Mariah Carey doesn't like to go to bed without
the security of someone just watching her sleep."

Another Story I Found Strangely Creepy, but not Touching
Farhad Manjoo, in Slate: “Friends—can I call you friends?—it's time to drop the attitude: There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook. The site has crossed a threshold—it is now so widely trafficked that it's fast becoming a routine aide to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant. It's only the most recent of many new technologies that have crossed over this stage. For a long while—from about the late '80s to the late-middle '90s, Wall Street to Jerry Maguire—carrying a mobile phone seemed like a haughty affectation. But as more people got phones, they became more useful for everyone—and then one day enough people had cell phones that everyone began to assume that you did, too. Your friends stopped prearranging where they would meet up on Saturday night because it was assumed that everyone would call from wherever they were to find out what was going on. From that moment on, it became an affectation not to carry a mobile phone; they'd grown so deeply entwined with modern life that the only reason to be without one was to make a statement by abstaining. Facebook is now at that same point—whether or not you intend it, you're saying something by staying away.”

If I understand this moron correctly, he’s saying that if you don’t own a cell phone, you’re an elitist stand-offish sort of person. Of course, you could also be an orphan in Zimbabwe, cowering in a ditch. A cowering orphan with an affectation.

Okay, that’s harsh. But if you are indeed saying something by not being on Facebook, what could that something be? Well, maybe you're saying you don’t want to be bitten by vampires, or play Scrabulous (Lexulous now), or “poke” people, or make “friends” with people you don’t even know, or spend hours updating your profile, or have zombies attack your “friends,” or have all personal information posted on Facebook open to anybody with a Facebook account (or not), or frantically count up how many “Friends” you have, or check the status updates of others, or send YouTube links, and post funny pictures of fuzzy animals.

That’s what I would be saying, if I didn’t have a Facebook account.

Unborn Blog

2009-01-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

Favorite new catchphrase, from THE UNBORN
“Jumby wants to be born now.”

Sunday Bloody Sunday
Our friend S just had her hip replaced, and is out of commission. Her mother is in town to watch over her for the duration, and I have been entrusted with S’s car –since she can’t drive it, and S’s mother is scared to drive in Oakland. So I drove S to the hospital, took her home, picked up her cat from the vets, went to the grocery store…. Like that.

This morning, while taking S’s mother to church, I hit a major pothole (Broadway and MacArthur: drivers in that vicinity, look out), which blew out the right front tire.

S’s trunk is full of many useful things, but tools are not among them. There was a jack, but it was one of those unhelpful cheap jacks that come with the car, and it did not have a lever. And she did not have a lug wrench. Being car-free myself, I had none of those things either.

So I called a tow truck. A very good looking young Israeli man showed up, changed the tire, and charged me 125 dollars for it. I couldn’t find my credit card, so I went in the house to look for it, and still couldn’t find it; I wound up using the Dread Bride’s card.

That being done, I went to the Safeway/Wells Fargo where I had last used my card. None had been turned in. So I cancelled that card, and not only ordered a new one, I started a new account.

So that’s been my Sunday. Now the landlady's brother is painting the house. The landlady is supervising, unhelpfully. Happy New Year!

Yesterday…
The Fearsome Wife and I left the house, she to buy some ReMent (miniature foods and such), I to buy ANTATHEM, the new door stopper novel by Neal Stephenson.

As I was paying for the book, we noticed a PEANUTS anthology at the country. My wife said something about it, to which the clerk responded that her grandfather had been one of the animators for the PEANUTS specials. His name was Frank Smith. His granddaughter told us that he told her that Linus was the hardest to draw. Now you know.

Bono in the New York Times, going on about something or other….
“Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ with him on the 1993 DUETS album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

“We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.”

What is that, that “Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis?” Is that free association? A pun, or something? Beats me.

Headline form AlterNet
“Why Atheism May Be the Best Way to Understand God”

Well sure, if you don’t believe something exists, understanding it is a snap.

From a link somebody sent me….
“Bold Nazi Candle Designs… Adolf Hitler wishing you a Merry Christmas!”

“Each 3 inch x 6 inch pillar candle comes in a variety of pleasing scents (we choose) and colors white, beige, red, pink, green, cinnamon, orange (we choose but you may state preference in comments section of checkout) with a lead free wick that will burn 50 - 60 hours.”

Of course, THEY choose. They’re Nazis!

Oh boy! Ann Coulter and L. Brent Bozell III! Together at last!
L. Brent Bozell III, writing about Ann Coulter’s new book, GUILTY, which I gather is about how liberals are pretty much to blame for everything: “Call Coulter outrageous, call her a bomb-thrower, even state she goes beyond the pale of civility, if that's your read. But do not assign that label to Coulter and then present your on-air love, kisses and giggles to all the public leftist hate-spewing that far exceeds any perceived incivility by Coulter. That is utterly transparent liberalism, and utterly transparent hypocrisy.”

Harry Smith, on CBS’ EARLY SHOW, asked Ann Coulter some relatively pointed questions when she was plugging her book there, to which Bozell (III) responded: “Harry Smith hosted Maher on CBS just months ago on his faith-mocking movie RELIGULOUS and didn't say one discouraging word to him about his caustic remarks about Cheney or his hateful anti-Christian bigotry. Not one word.”

So there you go.

Associated Press
... had a feature about “biohackers,” that is amateur scientists, tinkerers “…working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself. Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering.”

Whatever happened to, I dunno, making a bookshelf, or a ship in a bottle?

One DIY biologist told the AP that “…amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use squid genes to create tattoos that glow.”

Headline, AFP
“CIA give Afghan warlords Viagra in exchange for information on Taliban”

Keep those caftans loose, boys.

Part of a highly-convincing email I received from Robert Mueller III (any relation to Brent, I wonder?), of the FBI
“WE BELIEVE THAT THIS NOTIFICATION MEETS YOU IN A VERY GOOD PRESENT STATE OF MIND AND HEALTH. WE THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI) IN CONJUNCTION WITH SOME OTHER RELEVANT INVESTIGATION AGENCIES HERE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HAVE RECENTLY BEEN INFORMED THROUGH OUR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE MONITORING NETWORK THAT YOU PRESENTLY HAVE A TRANSACTION GOING ON WITH THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA (CBN) AS REGARDS TO YOUR OVER-DUE CONTRACT PAYMENT WHICH WAS FULLY ENDORSED IN YOUR FAVOR ACCORDINGLY.”

Slate review of THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX, by Emily Bazelon
Another alarmed Mommy with too much time on her hands: “Why, given this likely audience, did the moviemakers feel the need to include extended sequences with fear-pumping music; a giant menacing cat that charges after Despereaux in a gladiator ring; and Botticelli, the torture-obsessed leader of Rat World? And what's the point of a G rating if movies like Despereaux fall into that category? This movie confirms my feeling that it's past time to replace G with better age-tailored guidance.”

Gumby wants to be born now.

Mona Charen’s Christmas column:
“It's Christmastime and the Fox News Channel, the most conservative of the major media outlets, is running an ad for PajamaGrams, ‘the only gift guaranteed to get your wife or girlfriend to take her clothes off.’ The ads feature soft porn images of women disrobing and tossing slips and bras to the floor. The ads run at all times of the day and night. Thus do we usher in the season supposedly devoted to the Prince of Peace and the Festival of Lights.”

In a related vein, Jay Nordliner in NRO
“Two seconds ago, ‘Merry Christmas’ was about the warmest, nicest, most joyful thing you could say to someone. Now, it can be borderline hate speech.”

So: Happy Horny Daze everybody! Oh wait - it's over? Thank God, or thank Jumby, or some other non-existent entity that I, like, understand totally.

Xmas Xlog

2008-12-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

Tis the season to be something....
I suppose there's really nothing to be done about the ubiquity of goddam Christmas songs every Christmas, but lord, one does grow weary. It's either Andy Williams, or someone like him, half-heartedly crooning some song he hates, and we all hate, in palpable boredom, or some damn choir dragging their heels through "Little Drummer Boy," or some diva singing "Silent Night" in a belting voice that wakes the dead. Cripes. It's a Christmas miracle that I got any shopping done.

Here's a piece I wrote a while back that never got published. So here it is for free. Merry effing Xmas.

(Oh. The wee bride gave me the Budd Boetticher western collection for Christmas. I am a happy guy. Randolph Scott! Richard Boone! What more do you want from life?)

Bed & Breakfast & Testosterone
I had the occasion a while back, at the suggestion of my girlfriend at the time, to indulge in a wild, sensual weekend at a Bed & Breakfast in a place very much like Carmel. Setting foot inside a B&B, or a place like Carmel, is not something I would normally do, but hey, she was paying. If she wanted to whisk me away, I was willing to be whisked.

We did eventually have a wild, sensual weekend-- but only after I learned to keep my mouth shut. “Why does this joint have dried flowers everywhere,” I wondered. “It’s called decor,” my girlfriend snapped. “Look it up sometime.”

I also noticed that the B&B had teddy bears everywhere. On an antique chair in a corner: a teddy bear. On the frilly little bench at the foot of the bed: a teddy bear. Sitting on the pillows: a teddy bear.

Teddy bears lined the upper walls of the hallways. Teddy bears perched atop walnut cabinets. And they weren’t just normal teddy bears-- you know, plain brown functional teddy bears-- but teddy bears in frocks, plaid teddy bears, brightly colored teddy bears.

“I don’t think this place has enough teddy bears,” I remarked, perhaps too dryly. “What do you mean,” my girlfriend asked, her eyes narrowing. “They’re cute.”

Well, we broke up soon after. I was too classless and broke for her, and my heart fell when I discovered she could utter the word “lifestyle” without irony. We were doomed.

But I was talking the other day with my current girlfriend about where we would get away-- if we had the disposable income to go anywhere-- and she happened to blurt, “I hate B&B’s.”

My heart swelled! What a gal. If only she had the money to whisk me away to a cheap motel in an iffy part of town....

Then I got to thinking. I’d always liked the IDEA of a Bed & Breakfast, but the actual Bed & Breakfast experience is geared towards the girly girl demographic, if you know what I mean. Potpourri. Crystal. Doilies. Little tiny bottles of conditioner in a wicker basket. A complimentary bottle of red wine. All things twee come with the hefty fee.

Where are the MANLY B&B’s? Isn’t the time ripe for such a thing? Rough hewn timber? A buffalo head and rifle rack in the lobby?

It wouldn’t have a name like Wind Whistler, or Old Chandler House, or Whale Cove Inn, no sir. It would be called The Lair, or Grizzly Den.

Breakfast is served twenty four seven: coffee, eggs, bacon, white toast, no jam. If you want juice, pal, bring your own. There are no waffles, no biscuits, no sausages made from apples and chicken, no fruit, and no decaf. Ask for Egg Beaters, and you will be evicted. No milk. No sugar. We got Lipton’s. You want chamomile and peppermint, go out into the woods and get it yourself. As a matter of fact, if you want any meal other than breakfast, go into the woods and get it yourself. (Rifles provided at the front desk.)

We do not have a host; we have a desk clerk. His name is Sarge. He communicates with grunts. He will not answer any question. He is not friendly. Give him your money, and he will give you a key. (No checks, no credit cards.) Take a right at the “No Wine Allowed” sign, and you’re there.

Rooms do not have names like Riverrun, Dunswold, Caprice, or Mar Vista. They have numbers, big brass numbers pounded into the center of the door with a nail gun.

By that door, you won’t find a pair of slippers, but a pair of hob nail boots. Put ‘em on, buddy!

Yeah, we got amenities. You’ll find a pint of Jack in your bedside drawer, and nothing on cable but the Playboy Channel and westerns. Lifetime, Oxygen, and E! have been blocked. The sheets? Flannel. The blankets? Army issue. The bed is a simple iron frame. Oh, you want a four poster? Queen-sized? Take a hike!

We provide big rough brown towels, and lots of ‘em! No maid will call during your stay with us. Feel like cleaning your carburetor in the bathtub? We sure as hell won’t stop you! It is NOT a clawfoot tub.

There are no carpets. The only visible color is brown. There are six ashtrays in every room, big thick glass ones (unfiltered cigarettes available at the front desk), and a spittoon. There’s a black velvet painting of a big-breasted nude over the bed. To further enhance the experience, outside each window is a neon sign that says “Bar.” The “A” is broken.

There are no seats on the toilets. Old Sears catalogs have been provided for toilet paper. You want heat? There’s a wood stove in the corner. You have to chop the wood yourself. The wood pile’s out back. If you want to grab a .22 from Sarge and plink some rats while you’re out there, be our guest. Ditto raccoons and possum.

Don’t forget, there’s a nudie bar just over the hill, and a twenty four poker game in Room Thirteen. Just tell ‘em Doc sent you.

You like music? There’s an eight track player in every room. No Beyonce. No Dave Matthews. We got Hank Williams, ZZ Top, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.

No, we don’t provide a blow drier. No, we don’t provide white fluffy robes with our logo on the pocket. We do not have a logo. Out here, we use wicker and dried flowers for kindling. Got that? We use teddy bears for target practice. There is no spa. There is no golf course. There are no vaulted ceilings. Learn to stoop, pilgrim. Finally, the furniture is not antique, hand crafted, or specially selected. If it doesn’t fall apart when you sit on it, we consider it a good chair. We hope that you will too.

Enjoy your stay. Or don’t. If you want to come back some time, well, that’s up to you. We could care less. Just make a lot of noise when you’re coming up the drive. Sarge can get a little jumpy.

Hell Hole Blog

2008-12-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

New one on me...
TelegraphUK:
Doctors have reported the first ever case of someone using the internet while asleep, after a sleeping woman sent emails to people asking them over for drinks and caviar.
…
The 44-year-old woman, whose case is reported by researchers from the University of Toledo in the latest edition of medical journal Sleep Medicine, had gone to bed at around 10pm, but got up two hours later and walked to the next room.

She then turned on the computer, connected to the internet, and logged on by typing her username and password to her email account. She then composed and sent three emails.

Each was in a random mix of upper and lower cases, not well formatted and written in strange language.

One read: "Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm. Bring wine and caviar only."

Ha ha ha!
ZZZ-mailing! Get it?

In other news…
Telegraph UK (which seems to specialize in this sort of thing):
The self-exposure, instant fame culture peddled by reality shows, social networking internet sites such as Facebook and – above all – the home video-sharing website YouTube has provided a "perfect storm" for vulnerable people, encouraging them to put their fantasies on a global stage, say researchers.

Joel and Ian Gold, a New York psychiatrist and Montreal academic, say they have been inundated with cases since they first expounded what they have dubbed the "Truman Syndrome" two years ago.

The title refers to the 1998 film starring Jim Carey in which the main character gradually realises his humdrum life is being filmed as a reality television show and that everyone he knows is merely acting.

The condition might seem comical - one man went to a US government building and announced he wanted his show to end - but it tended to be "absolutely debilitating" as sufferers believed they could trust no-one, said Dr Joel Gold, head of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

He said he had recently been contacted by the father of a girl who had contemplated suicide because she believed it was the only way of "getting out of the show".

It was also difficult to treat because, as he had found himself, sufferers will dismiss their doctors and psychiatrists as actors.

Ha ha ha!
Seriously. Quit watching me.

Reptoids unite.
NYT: A Fort Carson soldier and war veteran charged in the murder and sexual assault of a woman in Colorado last month faces accusations that he also raped a 14-year-old girl and sexually assaulted a third woman, an internal Army document states.

…

It was common knowledge among his commanding officers and fellow soldiers, the document states, that Specialist Marko, who is being held without bond, believed he was an “alien dinosaur-like creature, and that he would transform from his human form into his Black Raptor form on his 21st birthday — 13 Oct 08.”

Shoes!
According to the MSM, the throwing of shoes is a “grave insult” in Islam. Here in secular America, however, the throwing of shoes is a festive occasion, often marked by, um, the throwing of shoes. How well I remember my childhood! Our shoe-tossing parties were legendary. Entire blocks would be cordoned off. Festivities would last for days, at the end of which we would return home, barefoot, exhausted, and yet strangely exhilarated.

Shoes! More! Headlines!
Reuters: “Iraq shoe-thrower inspires Web games”
Oh, go Google. You’ll find one. Do not e-mail a link to me. Thank you.

Reuters: “Egyptian offers daughter to Iraqi shoe-thrower”
How to Pick Up Girls, Chapter Twenty-Seven.

Headline of month!
"Lustful Madonna Offends God"

Poke me with a fork, and stop me from dating dept.
AP: The home of the Whopper has launched a new men's body spray called "Flame." The company describes the spray as "the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat."

Can you hear me now?
MSNBC: We take them with us to the dinner table, the bedroom, even the bathroom stall. But in recent years, some of us have started taking our beloved cell phones someplace really startling: the grave.

“It seems that everyone under 40 who dies takes their cell phone with them,” says Noelle Potvin, family service counselor for Hollywood Forever, a funeral home and cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. “It’s a trend with BlackBerrys, too. We even had one guy who was buried with his Game Boy.”

Game Boy?
So, when the cataleptic awakes from his stupor in the coffin, he can play a little Frogger before the oxygen runs out?

Local news
The Wee Bride and I, despite lingering colds, soldiered into the cold and drizzle to devour Indian food and see Bruce Campbell, in person, at the screening of his new (ish) movie MY NAME IS BRUCE, which he directed, and in which he starred, as a parody of himself. The movie was pretty awful (though amusing); on the other hand, Bruce Campbell was in it. And the man himself was there, for a Q & A after the screening. He is notorious for mocking his fans. He did not disappoint. And his fans are mockable. One fellow had had the likeness of Bruce Campbell, from ARMY OF DARKNESS, with chainsaw, tattooed on his back. He shared that with the crowd. He’d spent five hundred dollars on the tattoo. The Wee Bride and I, though fans ourselves, sport no tattoos of his likeness. We do, however, possess several action figures. The Wee Bride asked Bruce about the “Fake Shemp.” (Look it up. It’s in Wikipedia.) Apparently annoyed by the question (as he appears to be by any question), Mr. Campbell nonetheless addressed the Dread Spouse as “ma’am.” And answered the question.

Cremains BLog

2008-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

Globe and Mail…
… informs me that the Jane Austen’s House Museum has had to crack down on visitors who deposit human ashes there.

In an open letter to the Jane Austen Society, collections manager Louise West wrote: “'It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!”

An online commenter from New Zealand posted, regarding this story, “The ashes of the recently deceased contains high amounts of nutrient rich phosphates, just perfect for sprucing up that garden, I can understand the curators resistance to these ashes, but please come up with a valid excuse.”

To which Horrid Bride said, “Yes!” Her little fist in air. Et cetera.

It’s kind of bizarre, however, that a museum would attract this kind of behavior. Whatever happened to scattering ashes on windswept vistas? Surreptitious dumping of ashes at museums seems kind of, well, not to put too fine a point on it – creepy.

What scamps they are!
New Yorker, A Reporter at Large, “Anatomy of a Meltdown, Ben Bernanke and the Financial Crisis,” John Cassidy

One of his first tasks was to deliver a monthly economics briefing to the President and the Vice-President. After he and Hubbard sat down in the Oval Office, President Bush noticed that Bernanke was wearing light-tan socks under his dark suit. “Where did you get those socks, Ben?” he asked. “They don’t match.” Bernanke didn’t falter. “I bought them at the Gap—three pairs for seven dollars,” he replied. During the briefing, which lasted about forty-five minutes, the President mentioned the socks several times.

The following month, Hubbard’s deputy, Keith Hennessey, suggested that the entire economics team wear tan socks to the briefing. Hubbard agreed to call Vice-President Cheney and ask him to wear tan socks, too. “So, a little later, we all go into the Oval Office, and we all show up in tan socks,” Hubbard recalled. “The President looks at us and sees we are all wearing tan socks, and he says in a cool voice, ‘Oh, very, very funny.’ He turns to the Vice-President and says, ‘Mr. Vice-President, what do you think of these guys in their tan socks?’ Then the Vice-President shows him that he’s wearing them, too. The President broke up.”

AlterNet
Glenn Beck, in his blog, claims that this November he was verbally assaulted by a truck driver while standing in line at a Wendy’s restaurant. Beck says the truck driver called him a “racist bigot.” Beck claimed that the “…hatred was palpable.” As his security detail stood between him and his assailant, Beck says the truck driver ended his rant by threatening to run him over.

Beck: "I wanted to say, I think you have me mistaken for someone else, but I knew he knew who I was and he just hated me for who I was…. Wow. Is this who we've become? Is this who we've become?"

On his radio show, Beck said, “I could stand in line with Michael Moore and I wouldn't say that to him. I would say some things to Michael Moore, but it wouldn't be that. Is this who we've become? I believe there is a cauldron of hatred on both sides, but the left is quite frightening. The extreme right is frightening, as well. I don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat, or independent. I don't care who you voted for. We cannot become that person. No matter how passionate -- it took everything in me, it took everything in me not to say anything to him.”

Okay, whatever. Media Matters reveals: “Beck has previously said of Barack and Michelle Obama, ‘[T]here's a socialist agenda there for America.’ He has also described other politicians in similar terms, including calling Sen. Hillary Clinton ‘Comrade Clinton’ and characterizing former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) as ‘a communist.’”

And here’s Glenn Beck on Michael Moore, from his show, May 17, 2005, according to Media Matters:

“Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,’ and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I'm not sure.”

So: heat, meet kitchen. Why would Beck be surprised by this confrontation anyway? He already has a “security detail,” in anticipation of such an event. Random capital letters alert: HE’S A FUCKING TALK SHOW HOST! WHY DOES HE HAVE A SECURITY DETAIL? AT WENDY’S!

NYT
“It took Axl Rose 14 years to complete the latest Guns N’ Roses album. But it took his lawyers only two days to take Dr Pepper to task for not making good on a promise of free soda to ‘everyone in America’ in celebration.”

There seems to be a consensus among critics that CHINESE DEMOCRACY, Guns N’ Roses’ long anticipated album, marks the death of the album as we know it. Some say it sucks, some say it’s excellent, but any road, that’s about it. From now on, it’s just going to be random crap from iTunes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

This Dr. Pepper thing, though. Man. I was looking forward to my free beverage. I am ticked. Axl Rose, and lawyers, please, kill them. Whoever they are. Dr. Pepper. Lawyers.

Big news from Bangkok!
Reuters: “A maverick Thai general who has threatened to bomb anti-government protesters and drop snakes on them from helicopters has been reassigned as an aerobics teacher….”

Slate
Farhad Manjoo:
“More than a year ago, I canceled my cable subscription, figuring I could get all the TV I needed through Netflix and the Web. This has worked out well enough: These days, you can find just about every prime-time show on Hulu or one of the networks' Web sites. There's only one problem: The ads are driving me crazy. Sure, I'm thrilled that there are fewer ads on the Web than on television, where every hourlong program is padded with about 16 minutes of commercials. On the Web, I'm served only two or three minutes of ads per show, but those few minutes are often excruciating. Online video ads are repetitive, banal, completely unsuited to the speed and tone of the Web, and—for a medium rich with personalization—often clueless about my interests and tastes.”

Let me digest this. Okay, he’s annoyed by network television. Because it has too many commercials. So he turns to the Web, which shows less commercials. But the commercials on the Web are even more annoying to him, because they are inappropriate to the “speed and tone of the Web,” whatever that means, and don’t target him as a consumer. And it’s often “clueless about my interests and tastes.” He actually WANTS the Web to know his interests and tastes? He wants the Web to know him personally? Does he want to have sex with the Web?

Oh, and by the way, do actors or writers get paid for downloads from Hulu? Just asking. I hate us.

Obama
Apparently, Barack Obama was, in fact, born. This should make his transition into presidency much easier.

JCVD blog

2008-11-29T19:34:00.000-08:00

JCVD
The Hazardous Bride and I left the house - cautiously - today to go see JCVD, a movie we both really wanted to see. We are both unashamed and unabashed Jean-Claude Van Damme fans. We also like Steven Seagal movies, and are fascinated by Seagal's spiral down from not-quite A-list star to an international icon for the kind of folks who aren’t too fussy about the quality of their action movies. You know, like whether shots match or not. Or whether it’s convincing that a fat guy in a caftan could really take out five terrorists in a single take.

Lo and behold, JCVD is ABOUT all that. Jean Claude Van Damme plays himself, a verging-on-fifty action star, beset by divorces, child custody disputes, and past drug and media scandals, struggling not only to make a living but to justify his own existence. The plot involves him coming home to Brussels after making some crappy action movie shot in Bulgaria (or somewhere), directed by some bored young Chinese hot shot. JCVD is jet-lagged and slightly desperate, hoping for a payment advance on another crappy action movie, so he can pay off his lawyers. He goes into a post office, which (unfortunately for him) is being occupied by thieves and hostages.

Through an even more unfortunate chain of events, the outside world comes to believe that is JCVD who is committing the crime. The movie is funny, moving, and smart – especially with one astonishing moment (though many viewers have differed about the degree of this astonishment), when JCVD is lifted out of the scene of the crime (literally), up into the bank of lights illuminating the movie, and he talks to the camera about his life in an extended six minutes-plus monologue. Some have called this monologue “self-pitying.”

No.

In a much more minor respect, I have been where JCVD has been, and knew EXACTLY what he was talking about. As a matter of fact, I think I know JCVD now better than anybody. I am going to camp outside his house. I have pictures of him. I want his autograph. I want to bear his children.

IRON MAN!
We also rented IRON MAN, which had value from the performances of Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges. I enjoyed it very much, until….

Until the movie ended like all of these movies end. ROBOCOP II is the prototype (I think). Robots slam each other into freeway barriers. One of them perishes in flames. Who the fuck cares.

Bozell update!
The Hazardous Bride and I took the Thanksgiving occasion to watch the Stephen Colbert Christmas special. It was all right. We enjoyed it. It was funny enough. Wouldn’t care to see it again, really, but I could say that about a lot of things I have enjoyed over the years.

But then I read Brent Bozell (III), as I am wont to do, and I found myself becoming a boiling-with-rage liberal, which is a hard position to achieve, actually, as many of you no doubt know from personal experience.

Bozell writes: “Christmas is coming, which means it's time for Comedy Central to begin besmirching the holiday. This year's first salvo is ‘A Colbert Christmas,; hosted by the clueless ultraconservative buffoon persona played by Stephen Colbert. Colbert is so busy manufacturing his O'Reilly-esque right-wing jerk that it's impossible to tell where the real man and the cartoon diverge.”

Besmirching the holiday? Who uses the word “besmirch” any more? And what does Bozell mean when he says “that it’s impossible to tell where the real man and the cartoon diverge?” Being a right wing jerk cartoon himself, why would he object to that impossibility?

After eliminating any grounds for objection, Bozell (III) nonetheless goes through the show, objecting to Toby Keith’s song about the war on the war on Christmas, and Willy Nelson’s song about offering pot to the baby Jesus, and Feist’s turn as an angel who puts Colbert on hold when he offers up a heartfelt prayer (okay, make that “heartfelt”).

Bozell (III)’s critique concludes, based on the fact that Colbert is a practicing Catholic, “If Colbert doesn't believe that God judges people when they die, why is he teaching children at church? What has he been teaching? Certainly not the passages about judgment all over the Bible. More to the point: What Catholic parish in its right mind would allow this man to teach religion to its children?”

As to the first point, I have no idea where Bozell (III) took away the conclusion that Colbert doesn’t believe that God judges people when they die. Why would Colbert bring it up in the first place? It’s awfully, I dunno, Nietschean or something, for Comedy Central, isn’t it? This was a satirical program, making fond fun of old Andy Williams specials and their ilk, with a bit of a bite to it, but not much. I mean, this was a show where the big payoff was when Santa Claus disemboweled a bear, thus freeing Elvis Costello who had previously been devoured. There are a lot of reasons to deplore that in a television program, but the accusation of heresy is not among them.

As to what Colbert teaches children at church (does he teach children at church?), maybe it’s the old virtues like, “Love your neighbor,” or “Lighten the fuck up.”

New York Times
Kevin Kelly, from WIRED, writing in the Sunday Magaazine:
“Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.”

So why didn’t he make a movie out of this vapid and obvious conclusion? Maybe because nobody would watch it? I noticed Mr. Kelly is working on a book, a “coming book on what technology wants.” Unless it’s a movie, why the hell would I care what technology wants? In a movie, after all, what technology wants is to kill Sarah Connor. That’s entertainment! It will end with robots slamming each other into freeway barriers! In a book, what technology wants is whatever Kevin Kelly says he kind of thinks it wants. So he can get another book deal farther down the line. Oh, how I hate us. I like movies though. As long as they’re as heartfelt, ironic, and thoughtful as JCVD.

Obama Unborn
I've noticed, because I listen to a lot of talk radio, and follow certain blogs, that hope is surfacing among right wing folk that Obama will be disqualified as President because his birth certificate is.... a forgery!

Accusations accrue that the Obama folks have "refused" to display the actual birth certificate, which would would supposedly prove that Obama was born in Kenya, and is some kind of Muslim/Commie mole.

Dream on, dear friends! Obama was born in Hawaii, in 1961. There's proof! The man exists! Deal with it.

Of course, John McCain went through this same nonsense, because he was born in the Canal Zone. Oh, how I hate us.

Chinese Democracy Blog

2008-11-23T16:29:00.000-08:00

Chinese Democracy
Guns N’ Roses has finally released its first album since 1991 -- CHINESE DEMOCRACY. Most of those holding their breath waiting for it have since either passed on, or lapsed into unconsciousness from oxygen deprivation.

Critical response has been mixed, but it mainly seems to consider the CD bombastic, over-thought, and over-produced. Many reviews I’ve read also claimed that it was probably the end of a breed- the last lumbering dinosaur called “the album.”

These days, it seems, listeners prefer to be their own producers, kind of. Maybe their own deejays. Listeners put their iPods on random, and listen to Dock Boggs one minute, Ukrainian klezmer the next, some emo guy the next, some quavery singing’ songwritn’gal the next, etc., until the batteries run out.

I can understand the loss of love for the album format, certainly. I remember buying a SIMPLY RED album back in the day, because I’d heard the band’s cover version of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” and was knocked out by it. But the rest of the album sucked. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve bought an album since, unless it was a CD re-issue of some vinyl I already had.

Calling this a Guns N’Roses album, by the way, is not exactly accurate. It’s Axl Rose’s album. The other guys are gone. And I’ll bet they weren’t holding their breath waiting for CHINESE DEMOCRACY.

Speaking of dinosaurs, kind of….
From the New York Times’ op-ed page:

“There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth — a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. rex. We’re just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth.”

There’s another downside of cloning right there. What kind of recreational activities will be provided for the cloned? Do mammoths play pinochle?

Morning in America!
Is anybody besides me getting kind of tired of feature stories on how hard it’s going to be for comedians to make fun of Barack Obama? Poor comedians! What will they do? Where will they turn?

Morning in America II
Michelle Malkin:
“Before Election Day, national media handwringers forged a wildly popular narrative: The right was, in the words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, gripped by ‘insane rage.’ Outbreaks of incivility (some real, but mostly imagined) were proof positive of the extremist takeover of the Republican Party. The cluck-cluckers and tut-tutters shook with fear.

“But when the GOP took a beating on Nov. 4, no mass protests ensued; no nationwide boycotts erupted. Conservatives took their lumps and began the peaceful post-defeat process of self-flagellation, self-analysis and self-autopsy.

“In fact, in the wake of campaign 2008 there's only one angry mob gripped by ‘insane rage’: left-wing same-sex marriage activists incensed at their defeat in California. Voters there approved Proposition 8, a traditional marriage initiative, by 52 percent to 48 percent.”

Ms Malkin cites: “A Los Angeles restaurant whose manager made a small donation to the Prop. 8 campaign has been besieged nightly by hordes of protesters who have disrupted business, intimidated patrons and brought employees to tears. Out of fear for their jobs and their lives, workers at El Coyote Mexican Cafe pooled together $500 to pay off the bullies.”

Homosexual extortion! Yikes! There’s more, but you get the idea:

“Corporate honchos, church leaders and small donors alike are in the same-sex marriage mob's crosshairs, all unfairly demonized as hate-filled bigots by bona fide hate-filled bigots who have abandoned decency in pursuit of ‘equal rights.’”

Michelle Malkin is on the job!
In another column, she wrote: “Congratulations, tolerance mau-mauers: Your shakedown of a Christian-targeted dating website worked. Homosexuals will no longer be denied the inalienable ‘right’ to hook up with same-sex partners on eHarmony. What a landmark triumph for social progress, eh?”

She writes, “Neil Warren, eHarmony's founder, is a gentle, grandfatherly businessman who launched his popular dating site to support heterosexual marriage. A ‘Focus on the Family’ author with a divinity degree, Warren encourages healthy, lasting unions between men and women of all faiths, mixed faiths or no faith at all.”

Well, apparently, the gentle grandfatherly Neil Warren has folded: eHarmony will now feature and promote same sex matching services. Damn those homosexuals!

Morning in America III
Christian Science Monitor: “The election of America's first black president has triggered more than 200 hate-related incidents, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – a record in modern presidential elections. Moreover, the white nationalist movement, bemoaning an election that confirmed voters' comfort with a multiracial demography, expects Mr. Obama's election to be a potent recruiting tool – one that watchdog groups warn could give new impetus to a mostly defanged fringe element.”

eHarmony?
From a review site: “eHarmony offers a managed, personality inventory based approach to online dating. You may learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible and have the opportunity to share the information with matches selected for you by eHarmony.”

Now, gay or straight, you can all be a part of that process, and allow eHarmony to choose the partner that’s right for you. I hate us.

I heart Gitmo!
Some outfit from Brazil wants to turn Guantanamo Bay into a theme park.

From the zer0group web site:

--Cuba is a major destination for sex tourism.

--Cuba is located in the middle of American springbreakers ultimate spots.

--Cuba is the attractive ‘illegal’ destination for American tourists that love to try to sneak in.

--Cuba is ‘the’ place of fake cigars, fake rum and other black markets.

--Cuba is nowadays surrounded by countries rivalizing in casinos, and used to be the major destination for gambling and alcohol in the 50’s when those were illegal in the States.

This bullet point demo concludes: “Guantanamo is the perfect location for a combination of political systems in one place where all vices could simultaneously coexist!”

This is a hoax, I believe, but who the hell knows any more? I'm just glad that "rivalizing" is now a verb.

Irony rises from the dead, only to have another stake in its black heart….
NYT: “The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. (Joan, of course) Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an ‘irony-free zone,’ a vast Kool-Aid tank where ‘naïveté, translated into “hope,” was now in’ and where ‘innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.’”

Oh shut up and enjoy the Kool-Aid.

TruthyBlog

2008-11-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

Why We Have the Internet (Part XII)…
The election is barely wet behind the ears, and already conservatives are snapping to attention. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to be attacking Democrats right yet, but each other. Specifically, they are going after McCain staffers who have been attacking Sarah Palin.

Here’s Michelle Malkin: “Fox News reporter Carl Cameron breathlessly reported that his unnamed McCain sources told him Palin lacked ‘a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate’ because, they claimed, she didn't know which countries were parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement and ‘didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself.’”

This prompted Erick Erickson, on his blog, RedState, to announce that it “… is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper. We're tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others.”

Then, supposedly in response to Sarah Palin’s calling her detractors “unprofessional,” “jerks,” and “cowards,” a fellow named Martin Eisenstadt revealed on his blog that he was the source for these allegations.

The bio on his blog informed us that Eisenstadt is a "Senior Fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy in Washington, D.C.” And that he is the "founder and president of the campaign consulting firm The Eisenstadt Group and was an advisor to the Rudolph Giuliani presidential campaign in 2007-2008."

Well, the first item should have tipped people off. Who would name an Institute for Warren G. Harding, widely regarded as one of the worst presidents ever?

Yes, it was all a hoax. Eisenstadt was created, according to the New York Times, by “Eitan Gorlin, a filmmaker who says he planned to pitch a TV show based on the character.”

Apparently Mr. Gorlin and his cohorts spent months creating web sites, links, fake position papers, videos, and took in (briefly) MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Fox News – and bloggers, of course.

The point of all this? That’s a head scratcher. He got conservative’s blood pressure raised, and bestirred Sarah Palin to at least the semblance of outrage. And, who knows, maybe Mr. Gorlin will become the American Borat. It could happen. Deceit always adds a little spice to a resume.

But golly, doesn’t anybody do any fact-checking any more? I wondered about this from the beginning: I mean, how would anybody discover that Ms. Palin allegedly doesn’t know Africa is a country in the first place? How would that come up in conversation exactly?

And then, of course, there’s the whole Warren G. Harding thing. Maybe I’ll start a think tank called the James Buchanan Center for Social Justice, and let the punditry begin.

In other hoax news…
I learned from SF Weekly that Savannah Knoop, who was the public persona of JT Leroy (Remember him?), has just published a memoir: GIRL BOY GIRL: HOW I BECAME JT LEROY. She was in San Francisco to publicize the book. Her cohort in the hoax, Laura Albert, who supposedly actually wrote JT LeRoy’s books, has called Knoop’s memoir “sad and sleazy.” Strangely enough, these seem to be the very qualities that attracted readers to JT LeRoy in the first place.

Anyway, the book reveals her intense but brief sexual affair with Asia Argento, who directed and starred in a movie based on LeRoy’s THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS. Apparently Ms. Knoop told Ms. Argento, to explain the fact that she wasn’t really a guy, that she had changed her sex. Laura Albert, who did the actual writing (allegedly) quickly became jealous of this relationship. Ms. Knoop was getting the groupies, you might say, while Ms. Albert toiled in the trenches, anonymously.

It all ended badly, of course. In 2003, JT LeRoy was featured in Dave Eggers’ BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING, just as James Frey’s pseudo-memoir, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, hit the bookstores. (Remember him?) Shortly after that, the non-identity of JT LeRoy was revealed.

The grifter’s life is not an easy one. Unless you get a book deal at the end of the scam, of course.

Election 2008
Did something happen? What? Oh, this happened in Florida:

AP: “A nudist community on Florida's west coast wants to establish the first clothing-optional polling site. The Caliente Resorts, located in Pasco County north of Tampa, has approached election officials about the idea. Nothing in state law would prohibit it, but the supervisor of elections says he is opposed to creating any new precincts before redistricting in 2010.”

What’s wrong with Nebraska?
AP: “A judge has thrown out a Nebraska legislator's lawsuit against God, saying the Almighty wasn't properly served due to his unlisted home address.”

What's Wrong with Ann Coulter?
"For the first time in 32 years, Democrats got more than 50 percent of the country to vote for their candidate in a national election, and now they want to lecture the Republican Party on how to win elections. Liberal Republicans have joined them, both groups hoping no one will notice that we just lost this election by running the candidate they chose for us."

That's right. Liberals picked John McCain because... they knew he'd lose? Kind of, I guess. Ms. Coulter continues:

"And then Election Day arrived, and all the liberals who had spent years praising McCain all voted for Obama."

So their fiendish plot worked, according to the ever-prescient Ann Coulter.

Palintology Blog

2008-10-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

Out of it…
So my mother had her hip replaced earlier this summer. Since she is 82, this led to complications, including being sequestered at the recovery unit of her retirement village.

It took her a while to get back up on her feet again, leading to frustration and despair on her part, most of it stemming from her environment.

--Her roommate, a vague old woman, wears a colostomy bag. In the middle of the night, she would forget she was wearing it, and try to get out of bed, leading to alarming odors, and a swat team of nurses descending upon the room at three o’clock in the morning. Mother did not like this.

--Another old woman, in a wheelchair, and definitely out of it, was given to shouting in a hoarse voice, “God help me! Help me!” This would occur at any hour of day or night. Mother did not like this.

--Another old woman, under the delusion that she was on some kind of committee, would corner my mother when she was trying to walk up and down the hall, and urge her to participate more: “I can’t do it all myself!” Mother did not like this. She wound up hobbling into her room, and closing the door when she saw this woman coming. I was present when this woman, wheelchair bound, tried to make a break for it through the emergency exit. She wound up setting the alarm off, and a swat team of nurses wrestled her into submission, figuratively.

--On the day she got out of surgery, she got word that her sister died, her last of three, a week or so short of her 90th birthday.

--My father, bless his heart, at one point drove his electric scooter into the glass door that separates the recovery unit from the rest of the facility, shattering the glass. This caused him to hide in the cottage for two days, like an eight year old afraid to be caught after breaking a window with a baseball. My mother, having not seen him for a day or so, freaked out. But then my Dad forgot about the whole thing, and returned. One of the hidden blessings of dementia, I guess.

My sister tried to convince me that because Mother was depressed, she should be put on anti-depressants. My feeling was, “Of course she’s depressed! She’s just had major surgery, her husband is non compos, she’s surrounded by sick and dying old people, and the economy just went into the toilet.”

Anyway, she’s back in the cottage. I got her a scooter. She’s walking around pretty well, and she and Dad are on the waiting list to get into the assisted living unit. We played pinochle, always a positive family health indicator.

“I don’t know about that,” Dad told me. “Next stop: funeral.”

My mother said, “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.” Her favorite poem, by the way, is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam. She describes herself as a fatalist. No, duh!

So, anyway, trauma at bay for now, back to the blog!

Palin News
Some friends of Sarah Palin, asked if there was something they knew about her that the world does not:
"She doesn't care for cats very much.”
"Oh, yes, she's afraid of my cat."

Palin News2
Wasilla was recently named the meth capital of Alaska.

Palin News 3
From Alternet: “…Sarah Palin has a new and unexpected problem -- the Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 on clothes and accessories for Palin and her family in just seven weeks. The figure includes more than $75,000 at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, and nearly $5,000 on hair and makeup. The funds were not just directed at the governor -- about $5,000 was also spent at Atelier, a high-class shopping destination for men.”

I don’t know how much of this to believe, but there hasn’t been much denial, now has there?

Well, some: According to the Associated Press: “John McCain says a third of the money spent on Sarah Palin's clothing and accessories has already been given back. He told NBC's 'Meet the Press’ that ’the rest will be donated to charity.’”

Further on, however, the same article claimed: “A McCain strategist says the third of the $150,000 that was returned included items that were the wrong size.” What? $150,000 can’t pay for a tape measure? And: “Palin's campaign spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt, says,…’Many of the remaining clothes have never been worn.’ She adds that Palin generally wears her own outfits on the campaign trail.” So what was the point of all this, rather than generate negative publicity for Sarah Palin?

AP again: “Sarah Palin is blaming gender bias for the controversy over $150,000 worth of designer clothes, hairstyling and accessories the Republican Party provided for her, a newspaper reported Thursday.

‘I think Hillary Clinton was held to a different standard in her primary race,’ Palin said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune posted on the newspaper's Web site Thursday night. ‘Do you remember the conversations that took place about her, say superficial things that they don't talk about with men, her wardrobe and her hairstyles, all of that? That's a bit of that double standard.’”

Moreover: “Most of the clothes have never left the campaign plane, she told the newspaper.”

Again, point? Why have a $150,000 worth of stuff stuck on a campaign plane?

Oh, the Chicago Tribune claims that the Salvation Army will gladly take any clothing donations from the McCain/Palin campaign.

Endorsements
Christopher Buckley and Christopher Hitchens have both endorsed Obama.

Buckley Fallout
Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama in the pages of Tina Brown's new Huffington Post-y thing, The Daily Beast. Apparently, he received an avalanche of e-mail in response: “7-to-1 in favor,” he wrote. However, he also has a column in the National Review, which his father founded. Even though his endorsement did not appear in those pages, he was deluged with email there as well: “7,000-to-1 against.” Because of the brouhaha, he offered to resign. Buckley wrote, “This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.”

Then: “So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.”

More National Review Angst!
Timothy Noah, in Slate: “…[G]et a load of this posting on NRO by Andy McCarthy, alleging that Barack Obama didn't write Dreams From My Father. The book, McCarthy writes, was in fact written by the former Weather Underground bomb-thrower Bill Ayers. The logic of this argument, which is accompanied by a remarkable dearth of evidence, is founded on the patently false conceit that Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, was well-written. Excuse me, but this is a book that begins with the words, ‘Memory is a motherfucker.’ It goes downhill from there.”

Frank Rich
Quoting Ron Suskind, writing in Esquire, January 2003, quoting John Diulio, the “disillusioned” chif of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

On the city bus:
Stylish, 40-ish black woman, sitting with a mannequin head. It is an object of fascination to women around her.

One asks: “Is it a boy or a girl?”

She replies: “Whatever you want it to be.”

Another asks, “Where did you get it?”

She replies, “I found it in the trash.”

Another asks, “Where can I get one?”

“Pray for one,” she replies. “God gonna give me another one.”

Backwards B
(AFP) “A John McCain campaign volunteer admitted she made up a racially and politically charged story of being robbed and having the letter ‘B’ carved into her cheek by an assailant who saw a McCain sticker on her car, police said.

“Ashley Todd, who is white, is being charged with filing a false police report after telling police she was assaulted by a large black man as she was withdrawing money from an automatic teller machine in an area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, according to the city's assistant chief of police investigations division, Maurita Bryant.”

Well, you know, I had this one sussed from the getgo. I mean, if an assailant were to carve a letter in your forehead, it wouldn’t be backwards, would it? Unless your attacker was dyslexic, of course.

By the way, new rumors that Ashley Todd was a disgruntled former ACORN employee are equally unfounded.

Blogdeath anyone?

2008-10-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

Blog Doom
Paul Boutin, writing for Wired, recently posted a blog advising readers: “Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.”

It seems that he believes that blogs, once the realm of personal ruminations, have become supplanted by “professional” blogs, many of them the online equivalent of a magazine, like the Huffington Post, or Engadget, the post-millennial Popular Mechanics.

Even though he himself was blogging for Wired. And he has his own blog on Valleywag.

Furthermore, he wrote, “When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic.” Nowadays, you’re lucky if your blog shows up on Google at all. On the other hand, flamers lurk! And “text-based Web sites aren't where the buzz is anymore.” Plus a guy Paul knows stopped writing his blog. So there you go. Who needs the hassle?

Mr. Boutin wrote, “Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.”

What? The blogosphere had a year? And now we have to pay really really close attention to Twitter? Twitter? The equivalent of scribbling with Magic Marker on a bathroom stall? It gets a whole year too?

He continued: “You'll find Scoble, Calacanis [famous names in Internet world] and most of their buddies from the golden age there.”

Golden age? What is this, ancient Greece?

“They claim it's because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.”

Wow. You can find half-thought-out nitwittery in nanoseconds.

He concluded: “As a writer, though, I'm onto the system's real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.”

That’s what we need, more unagonized amateurs blurting whatever pops into their heads.

He gave an example: “@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?”

The message I’m getting is that once you cross over to Twitter you start writing like the Hulk? This good? No. Hulk smash.

Lipstick on a blog

2008-09-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

Good God, is that man still around?
President Bush has agreed to a "general time horizon" for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. Do not confuse a “general time horizon” with a “timetable!” They are two entirely different things. A timetable is an unacceptable admission of failure. A time horizon is a proud admission of victory.

Family values.
It sure is interesting that conservatives now find virtue in teen pregnancy. Is that what they were getting at with the convention chant, “Drill, baby, drill?”

Co-opting liberal values.
Now that Republicans have found the value in calling critics “sexist,” I’m probably going out on a limb when I say that I don’t find much appealing about Sarah Palin. She looks like a guidance counselor at a junior college, or a concierge at a Holiday Inn, or an event coordinator for the convention center in Omaha, or runner-up for senior class president. Only with anger management issues.

Like shooting wolves from an airplane….
Shooting wolves from an airplane? You know, on a certain level that sounds kind of fun! If I were a younger man, and I could fly, and I had an airplane, and a high-powered rifle, and I lived in a place where there were huge clusters of slavering (perhaps even rabid!) wolves, threatening civilized areas where terrorized families huddled in their homes, sure, I would put on the special uniform (which my beautiful girlfriend had designed), swoop down in my special jet (designed by Q, by the way, from the James Bond movies? Hello?), and take the beasts out.

I suspect that this kind of activity, however, is pretty much limited to Alaska. Here in northern California, for example, we prefer activities like wine-tasting, and sneering at Wal Mart.

On the other hand, you never know when something will resonate with the ever-fickle American public. If McCain and Palin are elected, who knows, a few years from now, we might ask our gay spouses (if they’re not in the special reeducation camps) , “What do you want to do tonight, hon? Go see the revival of HAIRSPRAY, or go up in the Lear jet with the Glock and take out some lupine predators?”

Speaking of entertainment…
I happened to catch the first commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, which was an advertisement for… something. Jerry and Bill shopped for shoes. The ad ended with Bill Gates wiggling his butt in a parking lot. What?

Crime in the 21st Century!
AP, out off Valentine, Nebraska:
“Beginning more than a year ago, some man has been skipping from one business to another at night, pressing his naked behind — sometimes his groin, sometimes both — on windows. Store owners, church workers and school janitors have had to wash lotion and petroleum jelly off the windows he selects.”
…

“The only clue is a blurry picture of him caught by a surveillance camera at the middle school last year. The man was 6-feet-tall or slightly taller, and slender. He had a dark complexion, and [police Chief] McBride said the man's dark hair was styled in a ‘1980s, feathered look.’”

Cherry County Attorney Eric Scott informed the media that “(t)his is not normal behavior for Valentine."

Crime in the 21st Century, part II!
Fresno Bee: “Authorities say they've arrested a man who broke into the home of two California farmworkers, stole money, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.”

Final Palin news
Slate Magazine is asking for your Sarah Palin dreams:

“When I mentioned my Palin dreams to Slate colleagues, they volunteered their own. One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips. A third says, ‘In the Sarah Palin dream I keep having, she has superhuman powers but is not really a person at all. In fact, she is more like the weather with glasses and an up-do, pushing clouds around and pitching lightning bolts.’”

And one final tidbit from Slate.
A review of MAMA MIA!

“And anyone who's used a hairbrush as a microphone should get off on the showstopping ‘Dancing Queen’ number, in which an entire village of Greek women follows Streep and her cohort to the ocean Pied Piper-style, affirming their God-given ability to dance, jive, and have the time of their lives. The rest of you—well, you can always stay home and frown.”

Thanks, I will.

Local news
The wee bride has many plants. She noticed that a plant in one of her pots was bent and crooked. Looking to see what had caused the problem, she found there was a walnut in the pot, buried there by the red squirrel that inhabits our corner of the block. Bring the guns and planes, people! We’re gonna go squirrel huntin’!

Labor Day Blog

2008-09-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

A rest from my labors.
Must be the hot weather, but not only have I been avoiding my blog, but have been leaving the house! The Cruel Spouse and I saw two movies in a week! And we hadn’t been to a movie in a theater since August, 2007.

We saw PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, which amused us perhaps too much. But then, we both are suckers for stoner humor.

Earlier, based on a reference from a review of PINEAPPLE EXPRESS in Slate, we Netflixed (Is that a verb? It probably shouldn’t be.) SMILEY FACE, with Anna Faris. I’d never seen her in anything before. Somehow I missed the SCARY MOVIE franchise altogether. SMILEY FACE was more odd than funny, but it was very odd, and even frightening in an inexplicable way. Kind of reminded me of bad trips I took in college, only watching the bummer happen to somebody else. For all that, it was quite entertaining, and Anna Faris deserves whatever fame comes her way, if HOUSE BUNNY doesn’t blow it for her.

And we saw HAMLET 2 on Saturday. Many are not, but Cruel Spouse and I are both big fans of Steve Coogan. I don't see how this movie could have worked with anybody else. Fatuousness, earnestness, self-delusion.... Nobody does it better.

And the play itself (HAMLET 2, that is) was believably dreadful. It actually seemed like something the Coogan character would have come up with. The face rape song had me gasping for breath, especially the stage picture at the end.

Also went to see Circus Vargas yesterday (C.S. got free passes from work). The circus members outnumbered the audience, which added to a kind of Fellini-esque charm.

High points: The clowns played "My Heart Will Go On" on outsized Michael Jackson gloves that had little harmonicas in them. I don't know why.

And there was this line from the ringmaster: "It's not a lion, it's a puppy!"

GOP Veep
Sarah Polley? Isn’t she Canadian?

GOP Veep
Just kidding! The media have been all over themselves debating whether the choice of Sarah Palin was stupid or really smart. She is a hunter, likes ice-fishing, rides snowmobiles, has her own marathon, and enjoys the occasional mooseburger. She also approves of shooting wolves from airplanes, an activity that I believe is largely confined to Alaska, is very pro-life, and doesn’t believe that global warming is man-made.

Well, she might come in handy if the White House is ever under a polar bear attack, but as for the hope that she might take some votes away from Obama, especially among disgruntled Hillary supporters, well, I don’t see it: “She’s just like Hillary, only she kills her own food!”

There is a rumor that Joe Biden has bought a rifle, and is scouring Delaware for stray moose. You heard it here first.

New extreme sport I thought up
Taser tag.

Neologism C.S. made up.
If you’re eating something, and some of it falls on your chest? Snacktation.

Democratic National Convention
Yeah, we watched the convention. Why are pundits so wrong? Remember? Obama was going to have to pry Hillary Clinton’s delegates from her cold dead fingers. Bill Clinton was going to go off on Obama, or something, ruining his chances forever. Obama was going to blow it with his big speech. Disunity and chaos would rein.

In a similar vein, the ever-angry Michelle Malkin wrote this:

“The hard-core Left vowed to turn out 50,000 protesters for the Democratic National Convention this week. They pledged to ‘Recreate ‘68’ and cause the kind of tear-gas-infused revolutionary havoc that marked the DNC in Chicago four decades ago. Police prepared for the worst riots. Media from around the world anticipated the best pictures.

“But when rhetorical push came to real-life shove, the nostalgic, Marx-adoring organizers of Recreate ‘68 seem to have mustered no more than, oh, 68 bodies. Their presence here is dwarfed by the massive show of police, press, and camera-toting looky-loos. You can’t take a picture without someone else taking pictures of everyone else taking pictures of not much else getting in your frame.”

The point of this, near as I can tell, is that … um… Gosh, I don’t know. She’s disappointed that Commies didn’t disrupt the Democratic National Convention? She’s happy that Commies didn’t disrupt the Democratic National Convention?

She seems to be sneering at the far left, but if there are only 68 far lefties to sneer at, isn’t the sarcasm kind of wasted? It’s like shouting in an empty room.

Oblogma

2008-08-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

Another reason not to vote for Obama…
TIME: “…[T]he ad — which includes images of Charlton Heston as Moses and culled clips that make Obama sound truly egomaniacal — taps into a conversation that has been gaining urgency on Christian radio and political blogs and in widely circulated e-mail messages that accuse Obama of being the Antichrist.”

Deny THAT, Barack!

David Duke weighs in….
Last February, he wrote, “Compelling evidence shows that Barack Obama is an Afro-American whose ultimate loyalty is not to ‘all the people of the United States,’ but primarily to his fellow African-Americans.”

But then, in March, he told the New Republic, that he doesn’t "…see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain.”

And, in August, he wrote that Obama, “…helps make everything very clear to our people. He paves the way for thousands of other candidates on the American horizon, White candidates who stand up for our own people the way that Obama stands up for his.”

So a vote for Obama is a vote for a “new age of racially conscious American politics.”

Put on your sheets and go to the polls!

Oh shut up.
Cokie Roberts on ABC’S THIS WEEK, took a stance on Obama’s vacatio choice: “I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be at Myrtle Beach and if he’s going to take a vacation at this time. I just think this is not the time to do that.”

Then she followed up on NPR’s MORNING EDITION: “It's a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he's feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.”

So he should have gone on vacation in Kansas? Or Kenya?

Myrtle Beach, by the way, is in South Carolina. I am given to understand that Cokie Roberts has a vacation home there. Myrtle Beach has over a hundred golf courses, and fifty miniature golf courses. According to the Myrtle Beach web site, when it comes to mini-golf, you can choose “…from a myriad of themes, from man-eating dinosaurs and lava-spewing volcanoes to high seas adventures aboard pirate ships.” Sounds pretty exotic to me.

Dr. Rice (from the Huffington Post)
“I don't believe Condoleezza Rice can actually play piano. Everything else she's ever touched has been a fraud and a catastrophe, why should her alleged musical abilities be any different? Think about it. Think about any event she's been even remotely involved in since you first heard her name. An endless string of threats and blundering and arrogant bluffs turned squalid pigfucks. It's not that she can't do her job; she can't do anything. I think when she plays piano the piano catches fire and the audience dies.”

Bon Appetit
Julia Child was a spy for the OSS during World War II.

Pause for laughs.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD reveals a gag from AN AMERICAN CAROL, a new film by David (AIRPLANE) Zucker:
“The set jumps to life. Two young men--both terrorists--enter the station. They are surprised to see a security checkpoint manned by two NYPD officers. ‘I'll need to see your bag, please,’ says one of the officers. The lead terrorist glances nervously at his friend and swings his backpack down from his shoulder to present it to the cops. Just as the officer pulls on the zipper, however, a small army of ACLU lawyers marches up to the policemen with a stop-search order. The cops look at each other and shrug their shoulders. ‘This says we can't search their bags.’

“The young men are relieved. They smile fiendishly as they walk toward the crowded platform. As the lead terrorist once again slips the backpack over his shoulder, he mutters his appreciation.

“‘Thank Allah for the ACLU.’”

That’s just a sample of the fun to be had at this yock-filled chucklefest, coming soon straight to a DVD near you.

Fly the friendly skies. Ka-ching!
NYT: “In just a few short months, the airlines have discovered to their glee that their customers are willing to pay for most everything from checked bags to soft drinks to pillows and blankets — and are doing so without much fuss. With that knowledge in hand, the airlines aren’t about to stop.”

I like the image of gleeful airlines! Do they chortle, I wonder? Clap their little hands together in delight? As we, like stunned cattle, move ponderously down the aisle, clutching our quarters for the rest room?

Who’s not watching the Olympics?
Me!

McCain and the bikers.
Appearing at the Sturgis Bike Rally earlier this month, John McCain told the crowd, “I was looking at the Sturgis schedule and noticed that you have a beauty pageant and so I encouraged Cindy to compete. With a little luck, she could be on the only woman ever to serve as both the first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

Mr. McCain was apparently unaware that the competition for Miss Buffalo Chip frequently involves toplessness. And bottomlessness.

Georgia on my mind
Robert Scheer offered the opinion in a recent column: “Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?”

He suggests that one “Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser,” goaded Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili into attacking South Ossetia, with the assurance that the West had his back. Of course, Russia was bound to react. And, of course, the West did nothing.

Scheer wrote, “What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union.”

Well, maybe. But the Russian army responded pretty darn quickly, suggesting that the Russian army had been more than ready for this invasion, and Putin was just waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to launch one. Kind of like Hitler and Poland!

Putin may not be the new Josef Stalin, but he seems scary enough to me.

Ooh baby, eh?
Reuters: “The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved the Category 2 pay-television service on Wednesday, allowing Northern Peaks to become ‘Canada's first adult video channel offering significant Canadian adult content.’”

Long Time No Blog

2008-08-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

Hi! Atus!
I have been absent from the blogosphere (and don’t we hate that word though?) for a few weeks. Hi! My mother is about to have her hip replaced, after much hemming and hawing around it. But she had emergency ulcer surgery in January, and the lack of ensuing pain finally convinced her that even though she’s 82, quality of life matters. She’s lost thirty pounds, has color back in her cheeks, and received a very fetching new hair do. My father, in the meantime, is not quite in the moment if you know what I mean, and many of you, I’m sure, do. So I will have to do some Dad sitting while Mother is in recovery, because he will have no idea what’s going on.

Also I’ve been dealing with another virus infestation. Or maybe it’s the same infestation as before. I think I have finally removed all traces of Trojan from my PC. I think it’s odd that this virus is called a Trojan. Shouldn’t it be called a Greek? Because it was the Greeks who entered Troy through a trick.

Birthday Q
Had a bunch of people over yesterday in honor of the Wee Bride’s birthday. She is 39. Really. Brats, chicken, beer, and the thick aroma of burning coals! That’s what summer is all about.

Our cat, Rocky, turns one today as well. He doesn’t seem to be aware of that fact.

More signs of the times
From “Apprehension,” a crime column in the East Bay Express: “…Stolen golf clubs are an ongoing trend and stolen license plates… are an emerging trend, and in Walnut Creek on July 23, three Caucasian men were seen dismantling three aluminum benches…. In Martinez on July 25… two Caucasian men were arrested for uprootng a parking meter and stealing it….”

More signs of the times
Willamette Week: “Oregon State Police blame soaring prices at the pump for a sharp increase in how many urine-filled bottles litter crews find on a stretch of Interstate 84.”

OMG! LOL!
From “The Trolls Among Us,” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, some rules for trolls:

“You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”

One troll, Weeve, explained: “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money… I make people afraid for their lives…. Trolling is basically Internet eugenics. I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”

Strategies against Obama, so far.
He’s not fat, so you shouldn’t vote for him.

(Really. From the Wall Street Journal: “But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.”)

He’s too popular, therefore you shouldn’t vote for him.

(As the McCain ad says, "He's the biggest celebrity in the world.")

He gives some practical advice for car owners to save on gas mileage, therefore he should be mocked, and you shouldn’t vote for him.

Another sign of the times?
A man in Jacksonville Florida called 911, twice, because a sandwich shop made his sub incorrectly.

Anthrax, anyone?
Recent events made me recall that the anthrax scare had America much jumpier than the events of 9/11. Remember? People were stocking up on duct tape, to seal their windows; people were suspicious of anything powdered.

Anthrax 2
From Wikipedia: “During the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, the band altered its website to provide information about the disease because many people had come there simply by entering anthrax.com in their browsers. Amid what could have become a PR nightmare for the band, Anthrax issued a press release on October 10, 2001, that jokingly mentioned that they were going to change the name of the band to ‘something more friendly, like “Basket Full of Puppies”.’ The band later put a nail in the coffin of all of the name-change rumors that erupted from the press release at the New York Steel 9/11 benefit concert in November 2001, when they took the stage wearing boiler suits with a different word on each one that, when they stood single-file in a specific order, spelled out the sentence ‘WE'RE NOT CHANGING OUR NAME’. “