e-cards

I must recommend cyranet cards. What they lack in aesthetic beauty, they more than make for in text. Choose from messages like

Congratulations on selling out. They say you can actually see the moment when the soul leaves the body.

It's not a commitment thing, I just like to be able to pick up and emigrate whenever I please.

Thinking of you. Not all the time, but you're in the rotation.

Your ability to find a Simpsons quote for every situation is very endearing. Someday, you might find the same enthusiasm for something I want to talk about.

I really love this site.

The coolest thing I've seen in a long time

Did you know that you can turn your own photos into legal postage stamps? Well, you can. The Fixer says he's going to have his wife take a picture of his ass and use it to pay all of his bills. Myself, I need to mull the possibilities. I'm thinking I may have to start complaining to my representatives via post rather than email. Perhaps a Munch-inspired interpretation of the Scream...

You've got to admire...

...the ability to pun in the face of everything.



You know some NYPost writer is pretty pleased with him/herself today.

Some things they shouldn't need words for

Another fine item from ResourceShelf: The New Oxford American Dictionary's list of newly added words. I know it is an indicator of my excessive geekiness but I do love things like this. In my very quick scan of these newly added lovelies, I was surprised to find that "vaginoplasty" has nineteenth-century origins. Who knew? I myself had never heard of such a thing before I moved to Los Angeles, the would-you-like-fries-with your-apocalypse? capital of the world. (The LA Weekly being replete with plastic surgery ads, including a host of possible places to get your next vaginoplasty. Ew)

Other fabulous additions:

af·flu·en·za • n. a psychological malaise supposedly affecting wealthy young people, symptoms of which include a lack of motivation, feelings of guilt, and a sense of isolation.
ORIGIN: 1970s: blend of affluent and influenza.

ge·net·ic pol·lu·tion • n. the spread of altered genes from genetically engineered organisms to other, nonengineered organisms, especially by cross-pollination.

per·ma·temp • another term for permalancer.
ORIGIN: a blend of permanent and temporary.

sec·ond·hand speech • n. conversation on a cellular phone that is overheard by people nearby: I was alternately amused and annoyed by the secondhand speech in the waiting room.

start·er mar·riage • n. a short-lived first marriage between young people that produces no offspring.

sym·pa·thet·ic smok·er • n. a person who smokes only in the company of another smoker

And so on.

We don't need no stinking textbooks!

Forgive me, but does it not figure that Texas is home to the cutting edge decision to eliminate books from the undergraduate library (at U Texas Austin). Have I mentioned how grateful I am that I no longer teach? (Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.)

Self-government for dummies

Recently a friend of mine was complaining about the "For Dummies" books. "I don't get it," he said, "Why are they so popular. Why can't they come out with a 'for regular people' series or something." I'm sure you can guess my reply--that in fact, the dummies series was for regular people, the problem being, not the book series but the population at large.

Now it seems Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt has published his tacit agreement. Boldtype's review of Frankfurt's On Bullshit includes this:

According to Frankfurt, bullshit is more potentially treacherous than its closest relative, the lie. While the lie necessarily gives a nod to the truth in the very act of denying it, bullshit doesn't bother with the truth at all. It's beside the bullshitter's point whether her statements are true or false. It is this "indifference to how things really are" that defines bullshit, making its prevalence in popular and political arenas so very frightening.

At the top of Frankfurt's bullshit list is American-style democracy. In a system that proclaims it is the duty of every citizen to vote, uninformed constituents resort to haphazard, eeny-meeny-miney-mo decisions--in other words, they bullshit their way through. And the politicians they elect, in turn, appear on television spewing political quackery and vague platitudes, feeding the entire nation with heaps of baloney.

The "book," which is little more than a glorified pamphlet is selling something like 50 copies a day and has been reprinted 10 times in a few months. The Guardian has this from Frankfurt:

"I was surprised when they said they wanted to publish it as a book because I didn't think there was enough there for a book. But my editor said: "You can do a lot with page sizes and margins."

The irony just kills me.

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." James Bovard

Hard work

From Cindy Sheehan's November 4 letter to the president:

George, let me tell you what "hard work" really is.

Hard work is seeing your oldest son, your brave and honorable man-child go off to a war that had, and still has, no basis in reality. Hard work is worrying yourself gray and not being able to sleep for 2 weeks because you don’t know if your child is safe.

Hard work is seeing your son’s murder on CNN one Sunday evening while you’re enjoying the last supper you'll ever truly enjoy again.

Hard work is having three military officers come to your house a few hours later to confirm the aforementioned murder of your son…your first born…your kind and gentle sweet baby.

Hard work is burying your child 46 days before his 25th birthday. Hard work is holding your other three children as they lower the body of their big “baba” into the ground. Hard work is not jumping in the grave with him and having the earth cover you both.

But, Dear George, do you know what the hardest work of all is? Trying to digest the fact that the leader of the country that your family has fought for and died for, for generations, lied to you and betrayed your dear boy’s sense of honor and exploited his courage and exploited his loyalty to his buddies. Hard work is having your country abandon you after they killed your son. Hard work is coming to the realization that your son had his future robbed from him and that you have had your son's future and future grand-children stolen from you. Hard work is knowing that there are so many people in this world that have prospered handsomely from your son's death.

I don't know how he sleeps at night. I really don't.

Thanks to the Alternate Brain for the post.

Saturday night

Rook asks:

Black coffee, The Beatles and Blogging. Could there be a better way to spend Saturday evening? If there is, do not tell me, I am enjoying this moment and do not want it spoiled

Since it's now Monday, I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything by saying...yeah.

I spent Saturday night watching Treasure of the Sierra Madre at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which screens classic films summer Saturday nights against the side of the mausoleum. Picnic dinner of humus, fresh pita, sugar snap peas, strawberries, Danish feta, and homemade chocolate chip cookies followed by this.

You know, the worst ain't so bad when it finally happens. Not half as bad as you figure it will be before it's happened.

And happy birthday, Rook.

Could it be gloomier today?

I don't think so.

It feels like quadruple Monday. I am grateful I work in a lowrise building with windows that don't open--that's the kind of day it feels like.

And can we talk for just a minute about the Ministry of Truth's complaints against Newsweek? For those of you who have been on a news blackout, Newsweek has apologized for errors in a story about Guantanamo Bay, a story which included the now-disputed allegation that Gitmo torture staff flushed a Koran down the toilet. Now the Pentagon and White House are demanding a retraction of the entire story:

In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the original story was "demonstrably false" and "irresponsible," and "had significant consequences that reverberated throughout Muslim communities around the world."

"Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny," Whitman said. "Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."

Um....hello!!!! HELLO OUT THERE?! Information from anonymous sources that doesn't withstand scrutiny? Resulting carnage? Massive disruption of Muslim communities? Is this ringing a bell for anyone?

This is like Gaslight on a national scale. I really sometimes think I'm going insane when I listen to NPR.

Update: See Corrente for the eight zillion other press citings of the unconfirmed facts in the Newsweek story. For fuck's sake, the whole thing is so disgusting words cannot even form an effective commentary. Damaging our reputation abroad and harming our efforts to improve our image indeed. The mind fucking boggles; it really does.

Quote of the week

After School Snack has been rocking lately. First there was the post about Russ Meyer movies that could make government budget processes more exciting, then this weekend we have Chris's rant:

One troglodytic Mtkan gets two choice quotes. First, he asks, "Our education system is the envy of the world... Why would we want to subordinate that to some organization connected with the United Nations?" One might ask who exactly envies our high schools, which consistently rank outside the upper tier of industrialized nations, but never mind - the real issue emerges with his statement that "my fear is that my kids are going to be taught America isn't better than any other country in the world."

Oh. My. God. I feel like cutting my frontal lobe out and spelling "cui bono" in brain splatter. Better how? Better for whom? Better at what? Perish those questions.

I'm sure it's not a sign of anything good inside me that the idea of verbalizing my disgust with frontal lobe brain splatter seems really appealing.

Moral values

Okay, let me make sure I'm getting this. It seems that Hager sodomized his narcoleptic wife repeatedly over a period of years. Bolton forced his wife to get gang banged. And Tom DeLay says the Democrats have "no class."

Um okay.

Go read Shakespeare's Sister, from whom all of the above information comes. She's on a roll.

Me, I'm crawling back under my rock.

Never mind "cross-cultural +panties +knickers"

My new favorite search term via which someone found NMTE is "sacco and vanzetti's pet dog," which Andrea and I both agree sounds like a forthcoming Michael Chabon novel. Andrea, by the way, has determined that Sacco and Vanzetti need to be the names of her next pair of cats, which is as good as Becky's cats' names, Terence and Phillip, if in a different way.

And then I am wondering if there's some relationship between Schroedinger's cat and Sacco and Vanzetti's pet dog.

Why it is risky to be friends with photographers

WaPo tells the tale of Diane Arbus' subjects lo these many years later:

"We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we'd ever seen," whispers Bob Wade, the girls' father. He and his daughters are visiting the Met exhibit one recent afternoon and at the moment are standing a few feet from "Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967," the image that is clearly the star of this show. It's featured on the publicity photo and there's a bench nearby so visitors can sit and stare.



"I mean it resembles them," Wade continues. "But we've always been baffled that she made them look ghostly. None of the other pictures we have of them looks anything like this."

Link courtesy of Chris, who has immortalized my own 21-year-old self.

Quote of the day

Via Bitch. Ph.D. comes this gem from the president of CNN, Jonathan Klein.

Brooke Gladstone's interview with Klein focuses on the question of the "runaway bride" story and what happened to CNN's promise of more rigorous journalism after Klein assumed the role of president.

Klein: If you were listening to me, Brooke, you would have heard me say that on some days, that story that we decide to focus on will be the runaway bride. On other days, the story will be the spread of democracy in Lebanon.

Well, that clarifies things a lot for me, Jon. More rigorous journalism--sometimes. And I love his attempted smear: "Who are you to argue with 'the people...'"

Argh.

Things that make your whole morning better

Was greeted this morning by an unexpected gift from a friend propped on my keyboard: a copy of William Hazlitt's On the Pleasure of Hating:

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred to the French, or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen to be at war with for the time.

And so, I really think it will be a good day today.

Getting things under control

From the latest issue of ACLU online. You can read more about their appearance before the House Intelligence Committee here.

Playing with your food

So today I had planned to post about all sorts of things, including but not limited to the extraordinarily disturbing Force Ministries that Yelladog called my attention to, the fact that the Santa Anas make me feel like total kaka, and Working Families information about CAFTA. But here it is 5:00 and I am leaving to go to the Farmers Market with nary a word on any of the above. It's been a busy day.

Never mind free trade agreements and the fact that people think the word of god is best delivered from the barrel of a gun, what I do want to take a moment and say is that I find the avant-garde foodie movement really silly. I posted a few months ago about how silly I find inkjet maki, but apparently that's only the tip of the absurd food iceberg. Today's NYT has the story on a host of restaurants that are "deconstructing" food, turning bacon into sculpture, deep frying mayonnaise, and liquefying olives:

Mr. Bowles has been known to serve crushed Altoids instead of mint jelly with lamb and to present diners with lollipops of foie gras encrusted with Pop Rocks. His cooking typifies another facet of this cuisine: the way it recruits junk food into the service of fancier dishes or creates highbrow versions of lowbrow classics.

"Why not go to the store and get the curiously strong mint?" Mr. Bowles said in a telephone interview, going on to reject "that horribly boring quote, 'I love to use farm-fresh products and local ingredients and European technique.'"

On the opening night of Alinea, the name of which refers to a symbol for a fresh train of thought, the first course was a visually nifty riff on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a peeled, heated grape, still on a sprig, that had been dipped in a peanut purée and encased in a thin layer of brioche.

. . .

There was some harmless fun at Moto, where a dish called McSweetbreads presented three pieces of sweetbreads impaled on plastic pipettes that squirted versions of dipping sauces for Chicken McNuggets.

It's wrong, people; it's really just wrong. If you're going to obsess over food, please do so properly. This is like saying you're obsessed with sex but preferring an anatomy textbook to the Kama Sutra.

There is no excuse to ever eat something called "McSweetbreads." Ever.

Almost makes up for some of the other stuff

Someone found my blog by searching for "cross-cultural+panties+knickers," which almost makes up for some of the truly disgusting searches for which I seem to rank high in the returns. Note to pedophiles: if you found my blog by searching for anything related to 11-year-old virgins, do yourself a favor, log off the Internet, call your healthcare provider and find out how you can get some help for yourself.

Redistribution of wealth

I am often asked, by my less politically minded acquaintances, what I mean when I say "I'm a leftist; not a liberal." One of my oversimplified, in-a-nutshell explanations is that I am in favor of an income ceiling and a complete redistribution of wealth.

Krugman's Monday column makes it clear that Bush, too, is in favor of redistributing wealth:

Let's consider the Bush tax cuts and the Bush benefit cuts as a package. Who gains? Who loses?

Suppose you're a full-time Wal-Mart employee, earning $17,000 a year. You probably didn't get any tax cut. But Mr. Bush says, generously, that he won't cut your Social Security benefits.

Suppose you're earning $60,000 a year. On average, Mr. Bush cut taxes for workers like you by about $1,000 per year. But by 2045 the Bush Social Security plan would cut benefits for workers like you by about $6,500 per year. Not a very good deal.

Suppose, finally, that you're making $1 million a year. You received a tax cut worth about $50,000 per year. By 2045 the Bush plan would reduce benefits for people like you by about $9,400 per year. We have a winner!

I'm not being unfair. In fact, I've weighted the scales heavily in Mr. Bush's favor, because the tax cuts will cost much more than the benefit cuts would save. Repealing Mr. Bush's tax cuts would yield enough revenue to call off his proposed benefit cuts, and still leave $8 trillion in change.

I think I'm going to have to work on nuancing my explanations a bit.

From the mouths' of pastors

The Smoking Gun has posted a selection of the 1000 letters sent to Duluth, GA administrators concerning the runaway bride case: What to do? Charge her? Forgive her? Fine her? Most of them are the sort of fare you would expect.

But, to my own surprise, Pastor Mick Murphy captures some of my thoughts pretty well:

As a pastor with almost 30 years of experience, I want to suggest something: I'm surprised this woman didn't run away earlier. From what I understand, six hundred people were going to be packed into a church to see a small circus. Over ten bridesmaids were going to troop up and down and this after, what was it? eight showers in one week. Not to mention flowers, DJ's, video people, cheap-skate uncles and aunts in bad hats dripping with fake Dogwood blossoms.

. . .

Look, welcome her home, wish her well, and get over it. Read the paper, Bubbas. We have people trying to kill us. Your neighboring state of Florida has declared hunting season on women and children. From what I understand of Georgia, your racial tension still simmers beneath the surface. The nation's economy is in the toilet and an idiot is in the White House writing jokes for his wife, a woman whose distant relative slammed into the Titanic and sank it. You people have better things to do with your time than get even with a girl who, in the long run, might have done us all a favor by making us see what an idiotic past time a formal wedding really is. The vows, the preacher, the license are all important. The rest is just marshmallow fluff. Which goes great on sweet tater's but that's about it.

Okay, I'm not really down with the preacher and license being all that important, but I'm on board for the marshmallow fluff.