Oh Hitchens

I've posted too much today. But every few days Hitch rears his floppy haired melty egg of a head to remind you that he's awesome in some singular Christopher Hitchens way.

From the NY Daily News' Celebrity Side Dish: "Christopher Hitchens has warned you: The end is near! Speaking with fellow Vanity Fair contributor Dee Dee Myers at Tribeca's Brandy Bar, the grumpy Cassandra predicted, 'America is doomed. No one in this room will ever, in their lifetime, see calm and order and peace!' Time for another scotch, Hitch."

So fucking awesome.

Down the memory hole

This was a post having second thoughts about the Youtube song I linked to in the previous post.

This was a Youtube video of a song I recorded

But I removed it, so I edited this post. The song was kind of funny, a jokey folky thing in support of the bailout. Now, from a couple years distance I don't feel the same way about the bailout, but I didn't get rid of it for that reason, just because I didn't bother to make a good quality recording of the song. Too hasty, too ragged.

See my next post (next chronologically)

This explained the idea for the song.

Both candidates kowtowed to the disgraceful Kissinger. Only Obama cited him correctly. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

An article by Hitch at his more enigmatic, noting on the one hand that Obama was correct in asserting in the first debate that Kissinger has supported the idea of talks with world leaders without preconditions and McCain incorrect when he claimed that Kissinger had said the opposite. However, left unsaid but simmering perceptibly under the surface of his prose you here Mr. Hitchens growling in his English expatriate, cigarette and whiskey chaffed accent, "Why either man wants to be on the side of this war criminal is beyond me." Well, that may be true, Hitch, but he's also a brilliant thinker and practitioner of a realist foreign policy--but what matters that to Old Chris, the foreign policy idealist par excellance (that being of course the rationale that drove him from leftist provacateur to Iraq War booster). Henry Kissinger may be a war criminal, our war criminal, but he is a war criminal with panache--and panache goes a long way, you know. A lack of panache helps account for my fondest desire that Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Addington, et al. be snatched up by UN special forces unit on a reunion vacation to Bermuda or someplace and be sent promptly to a shared cell in the Hague--or perhaps Spandau! What's Spandau Prison being used for nowadays?

Both candidates kowtowed to the disgraceful Kissinger. Only Obama cited him correctly. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

God have mercy on American commerce

I'm watching the House vote on the bailout package. There's no time remaining, but the vote's being held open while their leaders kick the 132 Republicans and 94 Democrats who voted nay in their stupid, scared, ideological shins to change the vote as it stands now at 207 for the bailout and 226 against. Needless to say the Dow is down 500 points. zOMG. Can we give these 226 assholes a quick course in American economic history, 1928-1933. No bailout equals Hoover equals bad, bad shit. Yes bailout equals Roosevelt equals some degree of recovery. If the Roosevelt plan of action had prevailed in 1929, the whole mess of the thirties might have been averted or made much less severe--like, you know, the people starving and the intranational refugees and the epic, legendary misery. Fuck the sixty percent of the country that opposes the bailout. They're ignorant, seriously. I understand their objections to the unfairness of seemingly "bailing out" Wall Street, but this is the credit market completely ceasing to function and that means banks unable to function, businesses unable to play their employees, mass layoffs, mass closing of businesses, Armageddon, rivers of blood, the opening of the seventh seal, half an hour of silence in Heaven and Earth, the dead raised from their graves...

Oh good Christ voting has closed it has failed. Put on your Sunday best for the Rapture!

I love Dr. Pepper

I'm feeling good about the election, but am tired enough of it not to write about it again at least till the nightmarish/deeply satisfying trainwreck awaiting us all this Thursday evening (though I have my suspicions that a McCain staffer will be ordered to push Governor Palin down a flight of stairs on the morning of the debate, effectively canceling it).

So: music news slash end of an era news slash free Dr. Pepper news. If this stands, Guns 'n' Roses' (read: Axl Rose's) album Chinese Democracy is slated to be sold exclusively at Best Buy (insert small-to-medium boos and hisses at these kinds of deals) within the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight. I'm more interested in this fact owing to its being climax to the music industry's longest ever cocktease (The Beach Boy's slash Brian Wilson's SMiLE notwithstanding) than I am for the actual music encoded upon the long-fabled compact disc. But still.

Also, the people at Dr. Pepper earlier in the year promised one free can of Dr. Pepper to every man, woman, and child in America (barring Slash and Buckethead) if the album was released this calender year. Better do like you said, or you'll be worse finks than Republican presidential candidate Finky McFink! I loves my Dr. Pepper.

Best Buy Snags Guns N' Roses Album Exclusive

My new life.

Have spent the evening assembling a five-shelf bookcase bought from Big Lots for thirty bucks and watching Paper Moon on TCM. So, it's been pretty much awesome.

Debate (it's early, that's the best title I can come up with).

So to look at it narrowly and dispassionately last night's presidential debate was more or less a draw. I would give Obama the win by an inch on points (mixed sports metaphor, sorry). I won't go into every little reason for that conclusion, but basically John McCain's flaws of being prickly, passive-aggressive, and presenting excessively blunt and dumbed-down answers were more prominent than Barack Obama's flaws of being too long winded, hesitant, and prone to intellectual rambling (yes, Barack, the Russia issue and the issue of alternative energy are tied, but in a debate it's best not to try to communicate this connection in the space of a minute).

However, broadening it out, it was a distinct victory for Obama. Fighting McCain to a draw in a debate centered primarily upon foreign policy, McCain's supposed strong suit, is in effect a win. You also can't ignore the context of the debate: McCain's announcing he wouldn't debate until their was progress on the bailout deal, then choosing to debate when the bailout deal was if anything more stalled than it was when he made the original announcement just makes him look erratic and flip-floppy. I'm curious to see what tonight's SNL take on it all will be, but I can imagine it dealing in some way with McCain being dragged kicking and screaming to the debate, literally or figuratively.

The punditocracy was divided except on the point that it was a close call choosing a winner. I thought a disproportionate margin gave McCain the slight edge (many reasons could account for this, but I think mostly it's their meadyuh e-leet-ist underestimation of the public's intellect--assuming viewers prefered McCain's blunt simplicity to Obama's careful explication of nuanced positions). Some did point out the fact that a draw was in effect an Obama win, but I think this point wasn't emphasized enough: their horserace, narrow, who-won-who-lost mentality made them loth to but it in larger perspective.

But who cares about the punditocracy? Immediate phone polls showed voters (in general and undecideds) clearly perceived Obama the victor. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but both CNN and CBS polls showed that among those who didn't call it a draw (which 20-40% did), Obama was considered to have bested McCain by nearly a two-to-one margin. So kew-kew. (That's another odd neologism of mine. "Cool, cool," becomes, "Kewl, kewl," which becomes, "kew-kew." This is preferable to coo-coo, because this would suggest cuckoo, and would lead to an incorrect pronunciation which places the stress on the first syllable. Rather, with kew-kew neither syllable is stressed more so than the other. Or they're both stressed equally.)

Neologism: fail.

Kinda bummin' right now. All of a sudden I had a flash in my gray matter: "perspicuitous." Is that a word, I thought? Probably not. If not, I could make my own meaning for it. There are very various directions you could go with that definition, based on the component parts. I really had my hopes up. But then it turns out it is a word. Vaguely, at least. Perspicuity is a word, meaning basically the same thing as perspicacity, and it stands to reason that perspicuitous would be a valid adjective form of perspicuity. And it comes up with fifty hits on Google. That's disappointment, y'alls.

Sometimes I feel like I am different in some respects than others. Is it possible not everyone has a casual hobby neologisms and etymology? Are there those who have greater aspirations in life than to own their very own unabridged copy of the Oxford English Dictionary?

No, but seriously, about three to four times a year, I'll have this word-befuddlement, some question I've got going about a word or phrase, and I'll be getting nothing good on the internet, when all of a sudden I'll be, like, "...O.E.D, motherfucker!" And it's like a story in Dubliners, this is such a big and satisfying epiphany. Just go look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, yo.

It's funny because it's true

This is lazy as blog posts go, but here's a brief Onion article. I don't frequent the Onion all that much, which sometimes makes me think I should get into the habit of frequenting the Onion more, but then I remember that even though it's consistently very funny, it's so formulaic that you really don't have to direct your web browser in that direction more than like every few weeks, if that. But anyway: I don't know what date exactly it stopped being too soon (re: September 11th), but it was obviously a long time ago. Still, I love remembering how the conventional wisdom at the time was that irony was dead. That'll live in infamy like the guy who ran the patent office in 1900 or something said that pretty much everything that would ever be invented already had been. Arguably the last seven years have been something of a more sincere era (emphasis on the "arguably"), but if so it's been skipping along hand in hand with irony, or perhaps living in an apartment with irony with comedic results a la The Odd Couple. (I had to spend like two minutes and utilize Google to remember that title, "The Odd Couple." I have killed off a lot of brain cells, but not so much any more, knock wood.) Anyway, the link to the article, which probably has fewer words to it than this post.

Nation Secretly Hoping 9/11 Becomes A Day Off Soon | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Aerogyros, You Say? Hrmpf.

Probably Obama's actual response, suggesting clearly without stating directly that McCain was being a fink with his pulling-out method of not getting knocked about at Friday's debate, and only after lecturing tediously on the bailout plan in general first, was probably wiser than my own, though lacking pizazz.

It was satisfying, though, the way Obama pointed out that most people who are not John McCain are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Granted dealing with an economic crisis and debating foreign policy are more of a challenge than either ambulation or gum-mastication, but that's why we don't let any old yahoo from the provinces become president (insert your own Sarah Palin joke here). You're supposed to be smart and good at doing stuff. You need skillz.


Most satisfying was Obama's drawing McCain's attention to the existence of, in his words, "big planes" that make it possible to be in two separate places, with hundreds (even thousands!) of miles between them, in the very same day. Such as, say, the District of Columbia and Mississippi. The question to be inferred was: has Senator McCain forgotten in his senility of these flying machines exist? Granted commercial air travel was in its infancy when McCain was a child, but he was at one time capable of flying military-grade jetplanes (with some greater or lesser degree of competency). Might some traumatic event in his past involving planes, perhaps their crashing into bodies of water while behind enemy lines, caused him to repress all knowledge of man's ability to travel through the air in large metal tubes at high rates of speed? When he has to board one of these air-sailing-through implements, do his wife or staffers make him close his eyes as he boards, lower the flaps on the windows, and tell him he is traveling on his very own bullet train?

So, Barry O. didn't lay on the sarcasm as thick as all that, but it was there, and it was savory to mine ears.

"Muppet stunts"

Wow. McCain wants to postpone Friday's debate and for Obama to, like he claims to have, suspend his campaign until Congress has hashed out a bailout plan. Is that fucking hilarious or nightmarishly depressing or depressingly nightmarish? I wouldn't bet my feeble bank account on it, but I'd like to thinks there's just a little chance that Obama's people will react in a way reminiscent of General McAuliffe's reply to a demand for surrender when he was surrounded on all sides by the Germans at Bastogne, "Nuts," the Obama campaign will simply release a statement consisting of Kingsley Amis' favorite phrase in the Englis language--

"Fuck off."

And if McCain's so devoted to this gimmick then Obama can say, fine, I'll show up Friday and talk for an hour and a half while you have some skin cancer removed or whatever he'll be up to, 'cause it sure won't be solving the nation's financial crisis. There's at least a thousand people in America, inside and outside of government, who are more qualified than he is to do that.

Ordinarily I'm too snobbish to make literary references to a middle-brow though enjoyable work such as the Harry Potter series, but do you think that the real John McCain is actually chained up in a chest somewhere and Trent Lott or Dick Cheney or somebody is drinking polyjuice potion to campaign in McCain's place?

Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip » Blog Archive » BREAKING: Ha Ha, McCain Wants To Postpone Debate Because He’s Losing Because He’s So Worried About Economy

zomg

This is pretty much shaping up to be the best month of my life. That train just keeps a-rollin' with this news:

Knightley eyes starring role in Zelda biopic | Entertainment | Film | Reuters

Adventures in Photoshopping

Considering I suck at graphic design, I'm decently proud of this mock-People cover I was moved to create after seeing the cover story of the actual one. Yeah, that's hand made, motherfucker. Kind of a waste of an hour in retrospect. Or not? I was too lazy to try and actually replicate, like, the People font.

Self-mandated blogging.

I don't want to let a full day pass w/o (what a time saver, that w/o! It means without you know--oops, defeated its purpose w/ this parenthesis) a post. Routine! Persistence! This sucker has outlasted previous blogging attempts on the part of moiself by like a million, but considering past failures is always tottering on the edge of the abyss of nonupdatal. So many topics that I could touch on, but don't want to really invest too much thought and time on:

1. Spellchecking functions are bad. Now, you might think that I'm snobbishly saying they're bad because people use them as a crutch not to learn how to spell properly. Neigh! Nein! F. Scott Fitzgerald was a terrible speller. Shakespeare couldn't decide how to spell his own last name. And I've been known to missspel (sp?) a word or two. (Kudos to me for not taking the false-humility route by avoiding grouping myself with Fitzgerald and Shakespeare.) Rather, my objection to them is their tendency to squelch neologisms. One of the many great things about the English language (as opposed to French for example with their Academies and such) is that it is awfully malleable--taking on foreign words, using old words in new meanings, creating verb forms out of nouns (editors edit, sailors sail, so why do not doctors doct? Someone work on popularizing this please). And just making shit up wholesale, with no logical etymological basis. Plus they discourage varied or eccentric word use. Once a word processer made me think that there was no such thing as the aforeutilized word "squelch." Shame. Shame not it the sense of "It's a shame," rather in the sense of "For shame." Stop nudging me into linguistic conformity by highlighting disapprovingly such spirited inventions as "moiself," "nonupdatal," "doct," and "aforeutilized."

2. I don't even care about what I just wrote about. Why did I write so long and opaquely about it?

3. I forgot what my other topics were.

4. Oh yeah. I'm tired 'cause I stayed up till three in the morning watching Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" on TCM. I'm sorry. It is perhaps the quintessential pretentious ponderous bleak European film. But it is so good. It is so good. I was tired when I started watching it and I was like, "Am I gonna be able to stay awake for this?" But it wasn't even close. I didn't stop to blink. But then Robert Osborne came on at the end and told me that the classic shot where Death is leading the group in a dance across the top of a hill was actually done with carpenters and boom mike guys and whoever Bergman could find in costume, because everybody had gone home when ol' Ingmar noticed this striking cloud formation he had to shoot something against. Well, thanks Bob. Ruin it for me. Now every time I see that, I'll be like, "Max Von Sydow was probably off clipping his nails or something when they shot that. It's just a bunch of caterers and shit." Dang.

Another Sunday: the Nation Digests Another SNL Cold Opening

So last night's SNL began, as it does every election season, with a sketch with political subject matter. No need to describe it, you can watch it yourself, or perhaps already have, but suffice to say it depicted John McCain in the process of recording and approving hyperbolically outrageous advertisements criticizing Obama. I think it was only inferior to the season premiere's cold opening because of the lack of Tina Fey's doppelganger of a Palin-impersonation (Darrell Hammond as McCain, like most of his impressions, was competent without being great). It was still extremely appropos and laugh-out-loud funny at about a half-dozen moments.

What is particularly interesting is that Al Franken, former SNL writer and featured cast member and satirist and author and Senate candidate, pitched the idea originally. It was then fleshed out by head writer slash Weekend Update co-host Seth Meyers. Naturally this will cause a small shitstorm for poor Al in his Senate race. He has a chance of beating Norm Coleman, but the odds are against him at the moment. But goodness wouldn't it be nice if he won. Yes, because we would have an intelligent, fiery Paul Wellstone acolyte in the Senate. But mostly I think that if Franken were elected to a comfy six-year term he would lighten up a little. In preparation for the race, he has basically, out of grudging necessity, turned off the lights on the humor part of his brain. Without another election for six years, maybe he'd go back to denouncing his political adversaries in wildly over-the-top ways and telling filthy jokes, if not on the Senate floor, than on cable news interviews. Fingers crossed! Don't fail us now, you chilly Lutherans of the North Country.

Political Comedy: Al Franken Hashes Out Anti-McCain SNL Skit

The day music suffered extensive burns.

So...Travis Barker and DJ AM were the only survivors in a plane crash that killed four others, and are in critical condition with severe burns. I won't front and act like I'm wrecked by this information because I was serious fans of either. But it is pretty staggering. Travis Barker is either the or one of the most talented drummers of his generation. I know a million times more about drumming than I do about DJ-ing, but I understand DJ AM was similarly near the pinnacle of his profession. It's miraculous they survived and tragic they were seriously injured. Well, enough sincerity for now. I'll try to come back with some snark/cynicism/irony before the day is out.

Black Lung

Let me review with relative brevity the day in my life and the nation. I've been getting down to working hard at writing, in advance of a deadline. I've still yet to start any wholly new projects, but I've been editing old stuff extensively, including old stuff that had been left only partially complete. That means a decent amount of actual creation of new prose and verse, in addition to simple line editing and rearrangement. So bully on me. I'm primarily a prose guy, but my self-esteem in regards to my verse output is up slightly. For some reason I just can't get a grip on writing accentual verse (da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM) but I can at least do syllabic verse (a set number of syllables per line. Sometimes rhyming, but more often not. Then there's the long-line prose-poem stuff that I've always been able to do, stuff that's like a Joyce-Whitman mash-up. Needless to say I'm only describing style here, not quality. I've been researching (if you call using wikipedia researching) some of these poetry subjects, which allows me to justify my limitations with big words and arcane facts. So my poems with 12-syllable lines? They're now alexandrines! And my syllabic, unaccented verse in general? I'm just working in more of the tradition of French poetry than English! Instant ego-boost.

I think I'm like Barack Obama in one respect though. Obama has said that he was a light smoker except when he was writing or campaigning. Well, I usually average two cigarettes a day, but now that I'm writing I've already had three and it's only 4:30 in the afternoon.

In national news: the proposed federal bail-out that could cost as much as a trillion dollars. Well, if our economic straits are really as dire as people say it may be necessary and the right thing to do. But the moderate/independent/sees-both-sides-of-every issue part of me wonders about the ramifications of setting this bail-out precedent. In the future, what's to keep companies and financial institutions from behaving irresponsibly if they have good reason to believe they can accept a bail-out when things go sour? It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario, with the bail-out being probably the lesser of the two evils. Also: I have a gut feeling that people underestimate the extent to which our deficit and overall national debt is a drag on our economy. A trillion dollar bail-out isn't exactly going to help with that.

Here's what I propose: do the bail-out to keep the economy from tanking. But take a few dozen CEOs, CFOs, and board members out into the public square and execute them without trial. That should be a deterrent to something like this happening again.

Today was a good day.

News I acquired via that Web 1.0 scandal sheet/guide to what will be on cable news tomorrow, the Drudge Report:

Rachel Maddow's new show on MSNBC is owning in the ratings despite only having been on air for a week and a half, beating Olbermann and Larry King and nearly tying Anderson Cooper. I have a few quibbles with Maddow: she can be idealogue with blinders on to the merits of opposing arguments, and her, ahem, Sapphic haircut and fashion sense I find a bit unaesthetic. But she's brilliant and has a dorky charm and is right on the issues 85% of the time. I give her an A- overall. Glad to see her succeeding.

And this from a San Fran newspaper: Obama mocks McCain in Nevada stops.

"'I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face,' he said. 'And if they tell you that, 'Well, we're not sure where he stands on guns.' I want you to say, 'He believes in the Second Amendment.' If they tell you, 'Well, he's going to raise your taxes,' you say, 'No, he's not, he's going lower them.' You are my ambassadors. You guys are the ones who can make the case.'"

In the words of Ice Cube, today was a good day.

The newly found wherewithal to try and fail.

Since a week or two ago, my mood and even personality have taken somewhat of a 180 degree turn for the positive ("somewhat of a 180 degree turn" is probably oxymoronic). Anyway, one of the many new things I've been doing is sending off the vast cache of humorous vignettes I have accumulated over the years to McSweeney's Internet Tendency. I have only submitted one thing in the past, because it got spontaneously passed around campus a bit and I received more than one unsolicited compliment. But it was rejected. I never submitted anything before that, or after, or to any other internet or print journal because of classic fear of rejection. But now with my new attitude I've taken to heart all the stories I've heard (F. Scott Fitzgerald springs to mind, but there are perhaps literally millions of examples) of being able to wallpaper a room with rejection letters before finding success. Of course now these things are done via e-mail, so the wallpaper thing is right out. But I've decided that when I have one piece rejected by McSweeney's, I'll promptly send off another. Seriously, I've got a minimum of twenty in store. I haven't counted yet. Anyway, this makes the following Onion story muy appropos:

McSweeney's Rejects Mike Mussina's Seventh Consecutive Submission | The Onion - America's Finest News

This post

It was dumb. Down the memory hole.

Holding Pattern

So. If World War I was called the Great War until World War II came around, will the Great Depression start being called World Depression I when this investment bank gang rape is shown to have lit the fuse of financial armageddon? The first one at least was world-wide (in a staggered way, I guess. I'm reminded of wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks, but that was in the twenties while we 'Mericans were bathing in bootleg champagne in the lobby of the Biltmore.) But this one could go either way, national or international. If it's just national I guess we can call them Nightmarish Economic Clusterfuck I & II. NEC I & II for short.

But more seriously, I guess there's a decent chance this'll be like those days in the eighties where the stock market dropped by twenty percent, but the economy never tanked in a really fundamental day. Black Monday, Black Friday, Black Thursday, Black Sunday, Black Arbor Day, all that. And this credit/mortgage stuff (my understanding of it is existent, but shallow) is like our savings and loan crisis.

Most likely it'll be somewhere in between the late eighties and the depression. Bold prediction, non?

Anyway, the point of this post was to say that even though the world is still an eventful place today, there haven't been any particular articles or pieces of news I felt compelled to post. (For the record, I'm pretty sure at the moment I'm talking to myself, i.e. I have no readers of this blog. However it's possible in the future I'll accumulate some acolytes who can then satisfying themselves with a perusal of the archives.)

I also have little to report on the personal front. My mood is still so good that my main project for today, cleaning out my drawers and closet and doing laundry, seems if not fun, satisfying. I contacted Knox yesterday to make 110% sure that everything was in order for my return to school after the New Year. I was successful in this, except that the housing guy isn't responding to enquiries about my housing sitch. If I haven't received a communique on the subject by Monday I will have to give him a call. Menace the fellow a little. I vant zee informahtion. Iz it safe? Iz it safe? I've never actually seen that movie, Marathon Man, isn't it called? I'm so broke that I can't in good conscience rent movies from Blockbuster. Maybe I should look into Netflicks. Probably can't afford that either. Looks like I'll have to start selling my body...again!

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: World War III.

Lacked time and inclination for a proper post for this, the sixteenth day of September in the year of our Lord two thousand and eight. So I'll just leave you with the concluding verse to Robert Zimmerman's "Talking World War III Blues," one of his series of dream narrative songs, revolving around being one of the only humans left alive after a nuclear war (a topic that was not so played out or fanciful in 1963 as we might regard it today).

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.
Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all the people can't be all right all the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"
I said that.

All the great artists of the past half century or so (Mr. Zimmerman, I venture, may be counted in this group) have had to be expert at juggling the twin balls of irony and sincerity. But that reminds me sadly of the recently departed David Foster Wallace, one of the hallmarks of whose art was that negotiation. Mad posthumous props, D.F.W.

Tucker Bounds: in five years, we'll all either be working for him... or be dead by his hand.

McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds strikes me almost as a dead wringer for Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock. Here he is, this sweet, simple (slow) Southern boy put in harms way by his sense of duty and loyalty to his powerful, just-a-touch-evil boss. Follow the link to Gawker to get a better idea of the fellow:

Tucker Bounds: McCain Spokesman Told Off On All Networks

Liz: Kenneth, why did you bet that terrible hand?

Kenneth: Why? Because I believe life is for the living. I believe in taking risks and biting off more than you can chew. And also, people were yelling and I got confused about the rules.

I don't watch 30 Rock religiously...but I gotta change that this season. Such a great show.

Is that the sound of a tank rumbling? No, it's just the economy tanking!

From the only media outlet I can think of that has a truly perceptible leftist bias, but is still a pretty classy joint, the BBC, this harrowing description of the economic situation circa the past day:

"For Wall Street, it has probably been the most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s."

Better start stocking up on apples to sell on the street for a nickel.

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Robert Peston

Making Me Feel Better About Not Getting Fucked Up

Oversharing time: I'm a recovering alcoholic. The NY Post is out with this trend piece claiming all the cool fashion and media elites in New York are teetotalers. Yeah...not sure about that one. But I can pretend anyway that I am being super urbane and Anna Wintour-esque.

Meet the Wagonistas | Page Six Magazine | The New York Post

Pakistan is the problem. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

What, what. Christopher Hitchens, "Hitch" to his fans and friends, is out with an article grudgingly, grudgingly, grudgingly conceding that Barack Obama is the candidate that's correct on the issue of dealing with Pakistan. Come over to our side, Hitch. The water's warm. We have all the Johnnie Walker, cigarettes, and George Orwell books you're heart could ever desire.

Pakistan is the problem. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Dicky Cavett's Take

I'm in a persistently great mood, which is stultifyingly ironic considering the world seems to be falling apart all around us.

Dick Cavett, former television host, great wit, and quintessential WASP with humble origins has been making something of a comeback lately with a series of articles/blog posts appearing every fortnight or so on the NY Times website. Lately he delivered this, a witheringly funny summation of the Palin Situation:

Experience 101 - Dick Cavett - Opinion - New York Times Blog

I am reminded however of the exchange in Woody Allen's Manhattan:

EXT - NIGHT - A DINNER PARTY SLASH CHARITY EVENT

ALLEN'S CHARACTER
Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in
New Jersey, you know? We should go there, get
some guys together. Get some bricks and baseball
bats and explain things to 'em.

PARTY GUEST 1
There was this devastating satirical piece on
that in the Times.

      ALLEN'S CHARACTER
Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one
thing, but bricks get right to the point.

    PARTY GUEST 2
But biting satire is better that physical force.

    ALLEN'S CHARACTER
No, physical force is better with Nazis. It's
hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots.

Appropos, non?

EDIT:  Blogger is screwy or I'm dumb because I can't for the life of me
get the formatting on the script portion to come out right.  I have
given up!  You get the idea.

Jill Greenberg, Photographer

This story via Gawker of Jill Greenberg, a reasonably famous/successful photographer who, when commissioned to photograph McCain for The Atlantic, went out of her way to make the lighting terribly unflattering. She also Photoshopped the pictures with vulgar content for her own website. I must say the whole thing is unprofessional, juvenile, brilliant, and hilarious. I think some of the pictures actually give McCain that weathered look one wants out of an old warrior, but then others really do make him look like a character played by Bela Lugosi.

I don't really have any especial interest in photography, but looking over Greenberg's website I love the distinctive look her work has...and I recognize a number of magazine covers, etc. It has a sleek, slick, commercial look in the best possible sense. So here's the link both to the Gawker article and her website.

Jill Greenberg: Mag Photographer's Grotesque McCain Trick
Jill Greenberg :: The Manipulator

Flogging a Dead Horse

I hereby break my previous vow to leave the Sarah Palin issue alone. Here is a front-page NY Times article that sums up her shady, shady history in government:

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes - NYTimes.com

And here via HuffPo is the spectacular cold opening from SNL with Tina Fey as Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton:

Tina Fey As Sarah Palin On SNL (VIDEO)

Making America Stupid/Making Me Not Stupid at Blogging

This is a link to an averagely good article by he of the Globalizing Lip Hair, Thomas Friedman. In the recent past I was of the opinion that he was a grade A dope, because while everyone was hailing him as brilliant, he was just observing very simple and obvious phenomena and describing them in a clear, succinct manner. I still think that's all he does, but it takes some gift to be able to see what's staring you directly in the face and then say just what that thing is. I post not so much because this is hugely important to read, but I'm continuing to expand the ease and flexibility of creating posts from news stories/links. So this one is the first I've done by Digging the article, then using the option to make a blog post from it. Technologies is uh-mazing! Seriously, I don't see why I didn't just bite the bullet and learn/start making use of all of these services earlier. Link belowz.

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What the fuck

Breaking: David Foster Wallace Dead of Suicide at 46

What is there to say?

Why McCain is going so negative, so often - Jonathan Martin - Politico.com

I must say (for the millionth time) that the direction this election has taken is shocking and distressing to me. Another good article that summarizes what has happened and why:

Why McCain is going so negative, so often - Jonathan Martin - Politico.com

Sizzle to the Nizzle, Dizzle

I greet another day...would have a good feeling about it, except for this crazy Hurricane Ike.

Sorry to sound so sincere, but I'm super psyched about the season premiere of SNL tonight. Let's just say I'm a fan. I can hear you now: it's not as good as ('75, '89). Well, maybe. SNL has its peaks and valleys, but in my opinion its valleys have been pretty shallow. And it's my feeling that the last two seasons have been another period of renaissance...digital shorts, indie bands, Will Forte, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig...honestly I don't understand how anyone could be left cold by that program. But to each their own. Rumor is Tina Fey will be coming back for a cameo as Sarah Palin...perfect casting of course.

Yikes.

Just had an interesting but disturbing thought about the parallels between the elections of this year and 1968. A president made unpopular by a military quagmire is being replaced. The Republican candidate is a man whose political career appeared to be dead not long before. He says he want to bring troops home with honor, but has no plans and few intentions to do so. He picks a vice-presidential candidate that is unqualified, corrupt, and a vicious, gleeful attack dog. The major difference is that Barack Obama, the Bobby Kennedy figure, prevailed over Hillary Clinton, the Hubert Humphrey figure...but this just makes me superstitiously more worried than ever for Obama's safety.

Is this all a terrible dream?

I hereby resolve to myself to make no further comment upon the Sarah Palin issue. It's just too depressing, distressing, and I could spend literally hours a day recording what a train wreck she is and how poorly it reflects upon John McCain to have chosen her as his running mate. So I will simply provide a link to this article by Joan Walsh on Salon.com that does as good a job as any in summarizing any sensible person's reaction to her and this ugly affair.

Joan Walsh - Salon.com

In other news, I bought a package of Jolly Ranchers a few days ago, and I must say--they is delicious!

News from the nation's uncircumcised penis.

Florida! Thank you for continuing to boost the rest of the nation's self-esteem. Many times as a Missourian I've thought, "I live in a state that elected Matt Blunt as governor." But then I say to myself, "Hell, at least it's not Florida.

Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip » Blog Archive » Typical Florida Person Creates Year’s Best Campaign Sign

A vacation observation.

I survived two weeks in the delightful, terrifying city New York this summer, and formulated tenuously an observation. The relative douchbagery of the people found there can be ranked in the following fashion:

1. Tourists
2. People in Yankees hats
3. People in Mets hats
4. T he cops



Thumbs up to most everyone else, though. For simplicity's sake this observation ignores the denizens of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, towards whom I felt a profound ambivalence. And yes, there really are legions of rats and Hasids. Not that I'm making a comparison!

This is a test...

I'm practicing with Google Reader and its facility in helping along the creation of these newfangled blog posts. So here's a few quick links with comments. First: Kanye West attended the VMAs this weekend and was able to control his ego-fueled, impulsive anger. That's the good news. The bad news is that violent sense of superiority was allowed to simmer, boiling over today and leading to his arrest. Jesus, perp walk!

And finally, just one of the myriad items from the "Sarah Palin could very well make Dick Cheney look like a simple pursesnatcher" file: "Palin's Town Charged Rape Victims For Exams, Former Alaska Gov Says"

A house divided upon itself cannot help but be commented upon by gadfly critics

So...as I observe it the two sides of this country are now in a kind of static death-lock, much like continential shelves meeting...and you know what that leads to: either a catastrophic earthquake or the creation of a towering, majestic, unmovable mountain. Yeepers creepers. Yes, I am super corny, prone to long and mixed metaphors and strings of adjectives. But I am self aware.

Of course we have been in this culture war fourty years or so, but it's just been escalating and escalating until reaching a head this year with this election and finally the Sarah Palin veep pick. But being an optimistic person, I think it's possible that whoever loses the election will be a legislative leader of their party and will reach across the aisle to accomplish certain necessary reforms. If you're wondering, yes, I have recently been prescribed with klonopin (for which I would like to hereby proffer a neologistic street name: Clown Penis.)



The first piece(s) of interest I will bring to your attention: Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia have both come out with articles defending that mother of the knocked-up Juno knock-off from the Juneau area, that beautiful Yeti, that sizzling book-burning librarian, that second-ever veep candidate with female genitalia that we know off, Governor Sarah Barracuda.

I think that Hitchens and Paglia both have one side of a broken-heart friendship necklace pendant: each are superiorly cool, smart, pithy writers willing to contentedly condescend to write for upper-middle brow online journals and both are absolutely bat-shit crazy wrong about most things. Praise God they have never had the opportunity or inclination to procreate with one another. Or maybe they did make the sex in some book-strewn London flat in 1977, just without offspring. Is that thought/image grossly hot or just plain gross? The world may never know...

"Don't patronize Sarah Palin." (Hitchens, Slate)
"Fresh blood for the vampire." (Paglia, Salon)

So it begins...

I had started a blog a couple days ago on livejournal, but am thinking I'll switch over to Blogger, mostly because it has convenient tie ins with Google, and I don't want to have to waste a super lot of time on this endeavor, not initially at the very least. So I suppose tomorrow I'll duplicate one or two of the posts from there onto here, so as to get a sort of head-start. Then I'll pull up anchor and sally forward, to internet fame, or the anonymous failure of the dwindling of frequency and volume of postings. One way or another, whatevs. My mood is so good right now I'm rocking out the ABBA. Speaking of the those sonically saccarine Swedes, they're John McCain's favorite band. No shit. I keep wanting to dismiss the coot as a complete bastard, but he then he pulls me back in. Oh, also the whole American warrior hero thing.