Sat - August 23, 2008
(POST-PAINTING) NOTES FROM A SATURDAY AFTERNOON
delaying the flights of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. Or a notes post yesterday. So they're sort of like those
people you can always count on to show up on time, except,
well...
• Yesterday afternoon, CNN reported that Senator Breath of Fresh Air had released his fifth negative spot in the past few days. That is, of course, five more than he promised to release. Five more than a new kind of politics would seem able to support.. And so five more examples of his consistent, and still stunning, hypocrisy.
• The Senator explains himself here. (As Ken Kesey once wrote: It's the truth, even if it didn't happen.)
• And Jonathan Alter, blogging forObamaNewsweek, absolves him here. You know, because McCain has gone
negative -- indeed he has, and stupidly so -- and Obama hasn't been as negative
as McCain, and so, you know, it's all good. Funny that Alter fails to mention,
much less to be troubled by, the simple fact that Senator Obama is a candidate
who had on many, many occasions decried negative politics, bemoaned that
political campaigns have become far too nasty and divisive, and promised a that
much vaunted, rarely seen new kind of politics. And yet here is, yet
again resorting to the same old thing. As, it should be noted, I predicted he
would.
• Though, to be fair, even I was not cynical enough to predict the resounding silence -- followed, on the partisan-left blogs, by desperate rationalization -- with which these tactics would be greeted.
• Our body politic is in even worse shape than I feared, my friends. And it ain't gettin' any better.
• That said, I think it's safe to assume that no matter which man wins the presidency, our next Secretary of State is bound to better than our current one. The latest in a long list of reasons why comes straight out of Condoleezza Rice's mouth: Russia is a state that is unfortunately using this one tool it has always used... when it wishes to deliver a message, and that's its military power. That not the way to deal in the 21st Century.
• Pot. Kettle. Black. Condi.
• A new Archives of Surgery survey found that 57% of Americans believe prayer can reverse a terminal medical prognosis. Something tells me that 89% of that 57% was the 50.7% who voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
• Do you suppose that same 57% believes people like Randy Pausch and John Challis just didn't pray hard enough?
• An ESPN photo of the six Women's Beach Volleyball Medalists -- I know it's still hard to consider that an Olympic sport, but I'll be damned if Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor weren't two of the most impressive and dominating athletes I saw these past two weeks -- featured an unfurled Terrible Towel in the upper-right-hand corner. I thought that was kind of cool. So did PittGirl. But then the comment thread boasting and chest-beating started and just ruined the whole damned thing. Sample observation: This is why the rest of the country hates Steeler Nation. Maybe. Or maybe they hate you because you're so fucking smug about it.
• Apropos of nothing, FoxSports.com this week listed the NFL's Top 10 Fan Bases. Listed at #1, the Philadelphia Eagles: The most passionate fans in all of sports are without question Philadelphia Eagles fans. They're cold-blooded and probably give KC a run for their money as being the loudest. They are by far the most knowledgeable fans in the league..." You'll forgive me, of course, if I find no flaw in that assessment.
• The Steelers? They were slotted at #6. And described very annoying. Which is kind of funny, given what unfolded two notes ago. And yet you have to question any commentary that, though rightfully acknowledging the greatness of Sidney Crosby, seems to have no knowledge of Mario Lemieux. Or Willie Stargell. Or Roberto Clemente. Or...
• I damned near choked on a cookie a few nights ago when I saw Joan Allen in a commercial for that abominable new Death Race movie. She can't need the money that badly, can she? My God. How embarrassing for her.
• Roger Ebert, whose job compelled him to watch the movie, felt the same way: Yes, that ethereal beauty, that sublime actress, that limitless talent, reduced to standing in an observation post and ordering her underlings to "activate weapons"... She plays her scenes with an icy venom, which I imagine she is rehearsing to use in a chat with her agent.
• And, finally, one more bit of follow-up on that creepy M&M baby: My buddy Badger emailed to say that he'd shown Thursday's post to his wife and to his brother, and that all three of them were so freaked out by it they were afraid to go to sleep. He was convinced that he would have nightmares about that little bastard, and he was afraid that it might come and suck out his soul while he slept. I must confess I felt the same way. And was, in fact, simply glad to wake up with no (obvious) wounds or bite marks. The more I think about that ad, the more I'm starting to fear that I may never be able to eat M&Ms again...
• Yesterday afternoon, CNN reported that Senator Breath of Fresh Air had released his fifth negative spot in the past few days. That is, of course, five more than he promised to release. Five more than a new kind of politics would seem able to support.. And so five more examples of his consistent, and still stunning, hypocrisy.
• The Senator explains himself here. (As Ken Kesey once wrote: It's the truth, even if it didn't happen.)
• And Jonathan Alter, blogging for
• Though, to be fair, even I was not cynical enough to predict the resounding silence -- followed, on the partisan-left blogs, by desperate rationalization -- with which these tactics would be greeted.
• Our body politic is in even worse shape than I feared, my friends. And it ain't gettin' any better.
• That said, I think it's safe to assume that no matter which man wins the presidency, our next Secretary of State is bound to better than our current one. The latest in a long list of reasons why comes straight out of Condoleezza Rice's mouth: Russia is a state that is unfortunately using this one tool it has always used... when it wishes to deliver a message, and that's its military power. That not the way to deal in the 21st Century.
• Pot. Kettle. Black. Condi.
• A new Archives of Surgery survey found that 57% of Americans believe prayer can reverse a terminal medical prognosis. Something tells me that 89% of that 57% was the 50.7% who voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
• Do you suppose that same 57% believes people like Randy Pausch and John Challis just didn't pray hard enough?
• An ESPN photo of the six Women's Beach Volleyball Medalists -- I know it's still hard to consider that an Olympic sport, but I'll be damned if Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor weren't two of the most impressive and dominating athletes I saw these past two weeks -- featured an unfurled Terrible Towel in the upper-right-hand corner. I thought that was kind of cool. So did PittGirl. But then the comment thread boasting and chest-beating started and just ruined the whole damned thing. Sample observation: This is why the rest of the country hates Steeler Nation. Maybe. Or maybe they hate you because you're so fucking smug about it.
• Apropos of nothing, FoxSports.com this week listed the NFL's Top 10 Fan Bases. Listed at #1, the Philadelphia Eagles: The most passionate fans in all of sports are without question Philadelphia Eagles fans. They're cold-blooded and probably give KC a run for their money as being the loudest. They are by far the most knowledgeable fans in the league..." You'll forgive me, of course, if I find no flaw in that assessment.
• The Steelers? They were slotted at #6. And described very annoying. Which is kind of funny, given what unfolded two notes ago. And yet you have to question any commentary that, though rightfully acknowledging the greatness of Sidney Crosby, seems to have no knowledge of Mario Lemieux. Or Willie Stargell. Or Roberto Clemente. Or...
• I damned near choked on a cookie a few nights ago when I saw Joan Allen in a commercial for that abominable new Death Race movie. She can't need the money that badly, can she? My God. How embarrassing for her.
• Roger Ebert, whose job compelled him to watch the movie, felt the same way: Yes, that ethereal beauty, that sublime actress, that limitless talent, reduced to standing in an observation post and ordering her underlings to "activate weapons"... She plays her scenes with an icy venom, which I imagine she is rehearsing to use in a chat with her agent.
• And, finally, one more bit of follow-up on that creepy M&M baby: My buddy Badger emailed to say that he'd shown Thursday's post to his wife and to his brother, and that all three of them were so freaked out by it they were afraid to go to sleep. He was convinced that he would have nightmares about that little bastard, and he was afraid that it might come and suck out his soul while he slept. I must confess I felt the same way. And was, in fact, simply glad to wake up with no (obvious) wounds or bite marks. The more I think about that ad, the more I'm starting to fear that I may never be able to eat M&Ms again...
Posted at 05:43 PM
Fri - August 15, 2008
(ALIVE & KICKING) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
bending the notes of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all the shows you could be watching
when you busy watching the Olympics. But without all those annoying commercial
breaks...
• First, a bunch of follow-ups to yesterday's post about bikes and cars and their inevitable showdowns on city streets and comment threads... A regular TWM reader wrote to agree with much of what I said, but to take issue with Bram's "100% of all cyclists" comment. It's important to note, I think, that Bram didn't say 100% of all cyclists everywhere break traffic laws; he said that 100% of all the cyclists he's taken the time to watch and observe. Now. You can argue about whether or not that's true, and about whether or not there must have been some cyclist, somewhere in the city, that he watched for more than five seconds who didn't break a traffic law, but the simple fact remains that, in his experience, (damned near?) all of them have.
• In my experience, to be fair, I'd say the number is about 75%. (Though it often feels like 100%.) That number was borne out this morning, when three of the four bikers I saw blew through stop signs and/or traffic lights. My favorite was the women who blew through her stop sign and rode right in front of me -- if I'd not jammed on the brakes, I'd have broadsided her -- even though I had no stop sign in my direction; she yelled at me, of course, even though I did nothing wrong and was alert enough to have prevented the accident. Uh, yeah, lady -- you're welcome.
• It's worth noting that I also saw about a half dozen cars careening like assholes around the East End, including one guy who passed me twice -- yes, twice; he was in a hurry, but he wasn't particularly bright -- on two different streets, neither of which allow passing. Both times he crossed the center line to do it. The speed limit, apparently, is just too damned slow for him.
• I guess he was just doing it for the betterment of the car traffic [he was] in and avoiding.
• If I were asked for a solution to this endless discussion -- and Lord knows I wasn't -- I'd suggest a thorough (re-)consideration of all traffic laws, a clear articulation of how and when they do (or do not) apply to people in bikes, and then a simple but rigorous statewide licensing process. If cars and motorcycles and scooters have to be licensed to travel on Pennsylvania roadways, then let's do the same for bicycles. And if drivers of cars and motorcycles and scooters have to be licensed to operate those vehicles on Pennsylvania roadways, then let's do the same for bicyclists. Just as you do for those other licenses, you have to pass both a written and a road test to prove you're skilled (or at least competent) enough to operate your bike on a public thoroughfare. Car and motorcycle tests (both written and road) should be amended and updated to ensure that people passing those tests also understand how bicycles must follow (or, perhaps, not always follow) the rules of the road. You have education, certification, elevated status, and legal accountability all rolled into one. As an added bonus, you also have more money rolling into the state coffers. This solution won't solve all the problems -- we test and license automobile drivers, and look at how many idiots and assholes still make it onto the road -- but the screening and tracking would, as they do with cars and motorcycles and their drivers, provide a welcome layer of awareness and responsibility.
• A first-time TWM emailer -- we'll call him Mr. J. -- wrote to compliment Tuesday's Steelers-want-a-state-grant post, and then to raise an issue I'd planned to address but ultimately cut for the sake of a consistent theme: I wonder though if their business planning quantifies the NEW tax revenues that this project would generate. As long as Pittsburgh is a dying small market, it seems to me that any "entertainment" development is playing in a zero-sum game, and will merely redistribute dollars from, say the South Side Works to the new venue. In that situation, everyone is likely to lose.
• Well, everyone except the Steelers.
• Can someone explain to me why our esteemed President thinks he has the right, much less the moral high ground, to protest another country's deadly invasion of a sovereign state based on some trumped-up, bullshit rationale? Anyone?
• While we're trying to unscrew the inscrutable... Can someone please explain to me why we need to know every last excruciating detail of John Edwards' affair? Now that we know he did it, are the timelines really so important? Is the paternity (or lack thereof) really any of our business? Will the Republic crumble and die if we fail to learn the time, location, and position of every one of John Edwards' adulterous orgasms?
• The funniest read I had all week was undoubtedly this opinion piece by Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver. In it, Shriver wrings his hands and rends his garments over the new Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder, which will apparently bring about both the downfall of civilization and the brutalization of all people with disabilities because, while mocking Hollywood actors and awards conventions, the film includes 17 uses of the R-Word. (That would be retard.) Mr. Shriver needs to learn a little more about satire and context and the difference between depicting something and actually endorsing it. (Perhaps he should go to work for the Obama Campaign. Or MSNBC.)
• Mr. Shriver also needs to learn how best to protest something. Repeating its name over and over and over again, almost as if it were your mantra -- 12 times in all, including "Don't show or see Tropic Thunder" and Stop "Tropic Thunder" and "It's time to raise our voices against "Tropic Thunder" -- merely assures that we can not possibly forget the name of what it is you want us to forget. Or oppose. Or ban. (Yes. He wants to ban it. Really.)
• I wonder if Mr. Shriver thinks that Spike Lee is a racist, and that all of his films that include the N-Word should be banned or at least boycotted. (And we won't even discuss that scene in which racist cops kill a young black man in Do the Right Thing. What sort of a thing is that to show to impressionable youngsters and police academy trainees?) Or, perhaps, if he thinks that Steven Spielberg is an Anti-Semite, because some of his films depict horrible slurs and crimes and violence against Jews. (Why, in Munich and Schindler's List alone more Jews die on screen than in most other movies I've seen put together. What kind of a message does that send?)
• Those two idiot college professors embarrassing themselves, their students, the schools, and their professions in that hot new YouTube video? Don't be fooled into thinking that's the story. The real story is what happens -- or, more accurately, what won't happen -- next. If you held a job in the real world and behaved like that in public -- with the professionalism of a middle-schooler, the maturity of a kindergartener, and the vulgarity of a drunken sailor -- you'd be fired immediately. And rightly so. But both universities are currently looking into the situation. Which means they'll talk to a few people, maybe convene a small panel of insiders to discuss it, and then, when time has passed and everyone has forgotten about it, do absolutely nothing. He's a tenured white male professor. She's a young, African-American female professor. Which means neither one of them will suffer anything more than a wink and nod and the gentlest of disappointed slaps on the wrist. You heard it here first.
• Communication professors. Both of them. My God. Watching those two in that video is like watching a med school professor stab someone in the chest. For nine minutes.
• The If It Ain't Broke, Don't Even Think About Fixing It, and If You Must Fix It, At Least Don't Destroy Much of What Made the Unbroken Original So Great Award goes to the "New Facebook." Tabbed layers of information are precisely what I don't want in a site like that; the fun for both creator and visitor was in the controlled flow and contained chaos of the single page. The only saving grace so far is that users have not been compelled to switch over. That day, I fear, is coming. It will also be the day I start using the site a whole lot less.
• The film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince postponed until July 17th, 2009? Less than 24 hours before the first trailer hits theaters and proclaims its originally scheduled release date? Oh, Warner Bros., you're risking the wrath of a hell of a lot of pissed-off muggles for the sake of next year's balance sheet. Good luck with that.
• And, finally... I know there's no way in hell that it is, but somewhere, deep down inside of me, the ten-year-old boy who always loved scary stories and legends and tall tales really kinda hopes that is a Bigfoot in that freezer. And wherever he is, you can bet that Roger Patterson does too...
• First, a bunch of follow-ups to yesterday's post about bikes and cars and their inevitable showdowns on city streets and comment threads... A regular TWM reader wrote to agree with much of what I said, but to take issue with Bram's "100% of all cyclists" comment. It's important to note, I think, that Bram didn't say 100% of all cyclists everywhere break traffic laws; he said that 100% of all the cyclists he's taken the time to watch and observe. Now. You can argue about whether or not that's true, and about whether or not there must have been some cyclist, somewhere in the city, that he watched for more than five seconds who didn't break a traffic law, but the simple fact remains that, in his experience, (damned near?) all of them have.
• In my experience, to be fair, I'd say the number is about 75%. (Though it often feels like 100%.) That number was borne out this morning, when three of the four bikers I saw blew through stop signs and/or traffic lights. My favorite was the women who blew through her stop sign and rode right in front of me -- if I'd not jammed on the brakes, I'd have broadsided her -- even though I had no stop sign in my direction; she yelled at me, of course, even though I did nothing wrong and was alert enough to have prevented the accident. Uh, yeah, lady -- you're welcome.
• It's worth noting that I also saw about a half dozen cars careening like assholes around the East End, including one guy who passed me twice -- yes, twice; he was in a hurry, but he wasn't particularly bright -- on two different streets, neither of which allow passing. Both times he crossed the center line to do it. The speed limit, apparently, is just too damned slow for him.
• I guess he was just doing it for the betterment of the car traffic [he was] in and avoiding.
• If I were asked for a solution to this endless discussion -- and Lord knows I wasn't -- I'd suggest a thorough (re-)consideration of all traffic laws, a clear articulation of how and when they do (or do not) apply to people in bikes, and then a simple but rigorous statewide licensing process. If cars and motorcycles and scooters have to be licensed to travel on Pennsylvania roadways, then let's do the same for bicycles. And if drivers of cars and motorcycles and scooters have to be licensed to operate those vehicles on Pennsylvania roadways, then let's do the same for bicyclists. Just as you do for those other licenses, you have to pass both a written and a road test to prove you're skilled (or at least competent) enough to operate your bike on a public thoroughfare. Car and motorcycle tests (both written and road) should be amended and updated to ensure that people passing those tests also understand how bicycles must follow (or, perhaps, not always follow) the rules of the road. You have education, certification, elevated status, and legal accountability all rolled into one. As an added bonus, you also have more money rolling into the state coffers. This solution won't solve all the problems -- we test and license automobile drivers, and look at how many idiots and assholes still make it onto the road -- but the screening and tracking would, as they do with cars and motorcycles and their drivers, provide a welcome layer of awareness and responsibility.
• A first-time TWM emailer -- we'll call him Mr. J. -- wrote to compliment Tuesday's Steelers-want-a-state-grant post, and then to raise an issue I'd planned to address but ultimately cut for the sake of a consistent theme: I wonder though if their business planning quantifies the NEW tax revenues that this project would generate. As long as Pittsburgh is a dying small market, it seems to me that any "entertainment" development is playing in a zero-sum game, and will merely redistribute dollars from, say the South Side Works to the new venue. In that situation, everyone is likely to lose.
• Well, everyone except the Steelers.
• Can someone explain to me why our esteemed President thinks he has the right, much less the moral high ground, to protest another country's deadly invasion of a sovereign state based on some trumped-up, bullshit rationale? Anyone?
• While we're trying to unscrew the inscrutable... Can someone please explain to me why we need to know every last excruciating detail of John Edwards' affair? Now that we know he did it, are the timelines really so important? Is the paternity (or lack thereof) really any of our business? Will the Republic crumble and die if we fail to learn the time, location, and position of every one of John Edwards' adulterous orgasms?
• The funniest read I had all week was undoubtedly this opinion piece by Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver. In it, Shriver wrings his hands and rends his garments over the new Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder, which will apparently bring about both the downfall of civilization and the brutalization of all people with disabilities because, while mocking Hollywood actors and awards conventions, the film includes 17 uses of the R-Word. (That would be retard.) Mr. Shriver needs to learn a little more about satire and context and the difference between depicting something and actually endorsing it. (Perhaps he should go to work for the Obama Campaign. Or MSNBC.)
• Mr. Shriver also needs to learn how best to protest something. Repeating its name over and over and over again, almost as if it were your mantra -- 12 times in all, including "Don't show or see Tropic Thunder" and Stop "Tropic Thunder" and "It's time to raise our voices against "Tropic Thunder" -- merely assures that we can not possibly forget the name of what it is you want us to forget. Or oppose. Or ban. (Yes. He wants to ban it. Really.)
• I wonder if Mr. Shriver thinks that Spike Lee is a racist, and that all of his films that include the N-Word should be banned or at least boycotted. (And we won't even discuss that scene in which racist cops kill a young black man in Do the Right Thing. What sort of a thing is that to show to impressionable youngsters and police academy trainees?) Or, perhaps, if he thinks that Steven Spielberg is an Anti-Semite, because some of his films depict horrible slurs and crimes and violence against Jews. (Why, in Munich and Schindler's List alone more Jews die on screen than in most other movies I've seen put together. What kind of a message does that send?)
• Those two idiot college professors embarrassing themselves, their students, the schools, and their professions in that hot new YouTube video? Don't be fooled into thinking that's the story. The real story is what happens -- or, more accurately, what won't happen -- next. If you held a job in the real world and behaved like that in public -- with the professionalism of a middle-schooler, the maturity of a kindergartener, and the vulgarity of a drunken sailor -- you'd be fired immediately. And rightly so. But both universities are currently looking into the situation. Which means they'll talk to a few people, maybe convene a small panel of insiders to discuss it, and then, when time has passed and everyone has forgotten about it, do absolutely nothing. He's a tenured white male professor. She's a young, African-American female professor. Which means neither one of them will suffer anything more than a wink and nod and the gentlest of disappointed slaps on the wrist. You heard it here first.
• Communication professors. Both of them. My God. Watching those two in that video is like watching a med school professor stab someone in the chest. For nine minutes.
• The If It Ain't Broke, Don't Even Think About Fixing It, and If You Must Fix It, At Least Don't Destroy Much of What Made the Unbroken Original So Great Award goes to the "New Facebook." Tabbed layers of information are precisely what I don't want in a site like that; the fun for both creator and visitor was in the controlled flow and contained chaos of the single page. The only saving grace so far is that users have not been compelled to switch over. That day, I fear, is coming. It will also be the day I start using the site a whole lot less.
• The film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince postponed until July 17th, 2009? Less than 24 hours before the first trailer hits theaters and proclaims its originally scheduled release date? Oh, Warner Bros., you're risking the wrath of a hell of a lot of pissed-off muggles for the sake of next year's balance sheet. Good luck with that.
• And, finally... I know there's no way in hell that it is, but somewhere, deep down inside of me, the ten-year-old boy who always loved scary stories and legends and tall tales really kinda hopes that is a Bigfoot in that freezer. And wherever he is, you can bet that Roger Patterson does too...
Posted at 02:19 PM
Fri - August 8, 2008
(THE 183RD OLYMPIAD OF) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
carrying the torch of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all the Olympians who've gone to
Beijing without any real shot at winning a medal. But without those cool hats
and jumpsuits...
• When the week's most engaging political message comes from Paris Hilton, it might be time for both parties to reconsider their choices. Or at least send both guys away for a week's vacation to rest and recharge their batteries and stop making people like air-headed heiresses look like charming, viable options for our attention.
• While they're away, maybe Cindy and Michelle could take over. I'll be it would be more interesting than what we've seen the last week or so.
• Well, with the exception of this, of course.
• I've said it before (and before, and before, and before, and before). And something tells me I'll say it again (and again, and again, and again, and again). Because it just keeps proving itself to be true: New kind of politics, my ass.
• Let me be perfectly clear here: In no way do I condone or excuse or forgive or even want to attempt to defend the content of stories that depict the graphic murder and torture and mutilation of children. I highly doubt they had any artistic or literary merit whatsoever. And I sure as hell do not condone or excuse or forgive or even want to attempt to defend the people who paid $10 a month to read them. But you'll forgive me nevertheless if I am chilled, and made more than a little uneasy, at the thought of someone being federally prosecuted for writing fiction.
• I am even more chilled, and made even more uneasy, by the admonition delivered to the defendant by U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti: If anyone would have read the story and acted upon it, a little child could have suffered devastation that you would have had to live with for the rest of your life. Because you could say the same thing to the authors of every book in the history of the world that depicts so much as a single act of violence. Should we prosecute those writers too? You know, on the off-chance that some lunatic might read what they wrote and decide to act upon it?
• Okay? Good. Then let's start with The Bible. There's a lot of nasty, violent shit going down in that book -- rape, murder, infanticide, stoning, cutting off thumbs and toes, forcible adult circumcision, death by tent stake and ox goad -- and we don't want any of that being perpetrated on little children, do we? In fact, the sooner we ban that sucker, the sooner I can stop worrying about Adam and Ethan being nailed to a cross on their way home from school.
• Oh, hey -- I think I'm suddenly even happier to be living in Squirrel Hill. (Has anyone ever been nailed to a Star of David?)
• Chalk up another earth-shattering exclusive for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week: a front-page story on Wednesday informed us that some new mothers suffer from post-partum depression. Yet again, I think I smell a Pulitzer.
• I don't know what's more offensive: that the PG's editors continue to lower their standards in reckless, feckless pursuit of the oft-prized Mommy demographic, that their relentless pandering so often wastes the considerable talents of a writer like Mackenzie Carpenter, or that they've now bent their once-proud backs to a new and alarming level of sub-mediocrity by absorbing and promoting this unfortunate site.
• If you think I'm being too harsh, or that I'm just not appreciating the vital support and social networking opportunities such a site can provide, consider the first paragraph of its most recent blog entry, penned by the site's General Manager: Matthew is totally into the "kiss my boo boo and make it better" phase. I must kiss every boo boo. And I must kiss it exactly on the right spot or he makes me redo until I get it right. Just right. I am not excused until he approves.
• Too bad the site's editors and overseers don't share Matthew's high standards.
• These subjects, and especially that PG article, remind me that one of the most consistent sources of Google-driven traffic here at TWM is a search for the term post-mortem depression. The top result leads them here, which is surely not what they're looking for. Perhaps the people Googling are just too depressed to spell post-partum properly. Perhaps I should include a link to the PG piece at the bottom of my post.
• The Olympic Opening Ceremonies cost $300 million to produce. And no one seems the least bit bothered by that. Presumably because there is no one dying or starving or suffering anywhere in the world who might have been helped by a little of that money.
• Today, at least, the slogan of the games should be amended to One World, One Dream, One Colossal Waste of Cash.
• If this makes me a bad American, so be it. But I just can't root for Michael Phelps with that awful moustache.
• Enjoyable Read of the Week (and Maybe the Month): Scott Spencer's Rolling Stone piece on the criminally underrated, at times almost forgotten, Mark Knopfler. The guy's a master songwriter, a monster of a guitar player, and, as Spencer's profile makes plain, a hell of a good bloke.
• Should I be ashamed, or at least a little embarrassed, to say I'm kind of looking forward to an NFL pre-season game? The play calling will be bland, the starters won't play more than series or two, and the fourth quarter -- which, let's face it, I won't be sticking around to watch -- will be most likely be abysmal on both sides of the ball. But seeing your hometown favorite team play your adopted hometown second-favorite team is just about the best way I can think of to get yourself in the mood for a new season or to football. Or to make yourself forget that exhibition games, when they're not being played between the Eagles and the Steelers, almost always suck.
• Oh, and finally -- I think I might have heard something about Brett Favre maybe being traded to a new team this week. Can anyone confirm that?
• When the week's most engaging political message comes from Paris Hilton, it might be time for both parties to reconsider their choices. Or at least send both guys away for a week's vacation to rest and recharge their batteries and stop making people like air-headed heiresses look like charming, viable options for our attention.
• While they're away, maybe Cindy and Michelle could take over. I'll be it would be more interesting than what we've seen the last week or so.
• Well, with the exception of this, of course.
• I've said it before (and before, and before, and before, and before). And something tells me I'll say it again (and again, and again, and again, and again). Because it just keeps proving itself to be true: New kind of politics, my ass.
• Let me be perfectly clear here: In no way do I condone or excuse or forgive or even want to attempt to defend the content of stories that depict the graphic murder and torture and mutilation of children. I highly doubt they had any artistic or literary merit whatsoever. And I sure as hell do not condone or excuse or forgive or even want to attempt to defend the people who paid $10 a month to read them. But you'll forgive me nevertheless if I am chilled, and made more than a little uneasy, at the thought of someone being federally prosecuted for writing fiction.
• I am even more chilled, and made even more uneasy, by the admonition delivered to the defendant by U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti: If anyone would have read the story and acted upon it, a little child could have suffered devastation that you would have had to live with for the rest of your life. Because you could say the same thing to the authors of every book in the history of the world that depicts so much as a single act of violence. Should we prosecute those writers too? You know, on the off-chance that some lunatic might read what they wrote and decide to act upon it?
• Okay? Good. Then let's start with The Bible. There's a lot of nasty, violent shit going down in that book -- rape, murder, infanticide, stoning, cutting off thumbs and toes, forcible adult circumcision, death by tent stake and ox goad -- and we don't want any of that being perpetrated on little children, do we? In fact, the sooner we ban that sucker, the sooner I can stop worrying about Adam and Ethan being nailed to a cross on their way home from school.
• Oh, hey -- I think I'm suddenly even happier to be living in Squirrel Hill. (Has anyone ever been nailed to a Star of David?)
• Chalk up another earth-shattering exclusive for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week: a front-page story on Wednesday informed us that some new mothers suffer from post-partum depression. Yet again, I think I smell a Pulitzer.
• I don't know what's more offensive: that the PG's editors continue to lower their standards in reckless, feckless pursuit of the oft-prized Mommy demographic, that their relentless pandering so often wastes the considerable talents of a writer like Mackenzie Carpenter, or that they've now bent their once-proud backs to a new and alarming level of sub-mediocrity by absorbing and promoting this unfortunate site.
• If you think I'm being too harsh, or that I'm just not appreciating the vital support and social networking opportunities such a site can provide, consider the first paragraph of its most recent blog entry, penned by the site's General Manager: Matthew is totally into the "kiss my boo boo and make it better" phase. I must kiss every boo boo. And I must kiss it exactly on the right spot or he makes me redo until I get it right. Just right. I am not excused until he approves.
• Too bad the site's editors and overseers don't share Matthew's high standards.
• These subjects, and especially that PG article, remind me that one of the most consistent sources of Google-driven traffic here at TWM is a search for the term post-mortem depression. The top result leads them here, which is surely not what they're looking for. Perhaps the people Googling are just too depressed to spell post-partum properly. Perhaps I should include a link to the PG piece at the bottom of my post.
• The Olympic Opening Ceremonies cost $300 million to produce. And no one seems the least bit bothered by that. Presumably because there is no one dying or starving or suffering anywhere in the world who might have been helped by a little of that money.
• Today, at least, the slogan of the games should be amended to One World, One Dream, One Colossal Waste of Cash.
• If this makes me a bad American, so be it. But I just can't root for Michael Phelps with that awful moustache.
• Enjoyable Read of the Week (and Maybe the Month): Scott Spencer's Rolling Stone piece on the criminally underrated, at times almost forgotten, Mark Knopfler. The guy's a master songwriter, a monster of a guitar player, and, as Spencer's profile makes plain, a hell of a good bloke.
• Should I be ashamed, or at least a little embarrassed, to say I'm kind of looking forward to an NFL pre-season game? The play calling will be bland, the starters won't play more than series or two, and the fourth quarter -- which, let's face it, I won't be sticking around to watch -- will be most likely be abysmal on both sides of the ball. But seeing your hometown favorite team play your adopted hometown second-favorite team is just about the best way I can think of to get yourself in the mood for a new season or to football. Or to make yourself forget that exhibition games, when they're not being played between the Eagles and the Steelers, almost always suck.
• Oh, and finally -- I think I might have heard something about Brett Favre maybe being traded to a new team this week. Can anyone confirm that?
Posted at 12:17 PM
Fri - August 1, 2008
(CAN IT REALLY BE AUGUST ALREADY?) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
roasting the red peppers of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those last little pieces of pretzel
you find in the bottom of the bag. But without all that extra
salt...
• Now that we've seen and heard the lyrics to Ludacris' Politics as Usual, we can all see why Senator Breath of Fresh Air met with him to discuss "youth empowerment." Nothing says youth empowerment like calling one United States Senator a bitch and fancying the paralysis of another.
• I like to think that we could create for ourselves better media, a better political process, and even a better country, if we would just agree to never again use the terms flip-flop, race card, or poll numbers. Election coverage -- to say nothing of our political discourse -- would improve by a power of ten overnight.
• Really. It would.
• On Wednesday morning, I woke up to three Today show teases: the California earthquake's effect on the Judge Judy show, the prospect of Miley Cyrus giving up Hannah Montana for her own musical career, and what happened when a tiger was reunited in the wild with the men who raised it in captivity. And these were all AT THE TOP OF THE SHOW. Not the 8 o'clock hour. Not the 9 o'clock hour. Not the 10 o'clock hour, or whatever hour they finally end that fucking endless show these days. But the 7 o'clock hour. Those were the three big stories with which they lead off the whole morning's telecast. It's a good thing we're not at war. Or in the middle of a recession. Or trying to elect a new president. If we were doing any of those things, they might actually have to report on real news.
• But, alas, they are not alone. Consider these (absolutely real) headlines of the week: Air guitarist loses toe in stage dive | Huge shark caught with bait, hoisted | Beer marathoners run, drink, vomit | Astrologer can't predict quake | Break dress code, wear ugly jumpsuit | Jesus' face seen in kitten's swirly fur | My parents named me Indiana Jones. (I could go on and on and on. Really, I could. I could fill every note with 'em.) Wanna know where I found every last one of those scintillating nuggets of news? The CNN Home Page.
• If they had even an ounce of self-awareness -- or is that shame? -- they'd embed the theme from The Twilight Zone in the page so that whenever you read any of those kinds of headlines, you could just pretend that you were in an alternate reality. Or dreaming. Or about to die and be put out of your misery.
• For the second happy week in a row, I've had to add only one name to The Wall. And we actually went thirteen days -- from July 17 to July 30 -- between American military deaths in Iraq. That's a happy record for the now more than two years since I began listing the names, and so it must surely be for the whole damned war as well. I'm still waiting, of course, for the blessed week when I have no names to add.
• And when I can stop altogether.
• It runs out of steam at the end, but the first minute of this video is the funniest damned thing I've seen all week.
• The funniest damned thing I read all week -- and, no, I didn't write it -- was this Carbolic Smoke Ball news item.
• Speaking of funny news items... Consider this observation from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Reg Henry: Many of us take pride in the fact that liberals don't dominate talk radio. Liberals don't think it's funny or clever to stereotype and bully, well, not autistic children anyway, but only certain deserving jerks. Even if you grant that the second sentence contains a joke, and even if you can appreciate the joke after wading through the inelegant set-up -- is he serious? Has he read any partisan liberal blogs lately?. I can think of a few in Pittsburgh alone that might change his mind.
• Unless, of course, by only certain deserving jerks he meant anyone who doesn't agree with us.
• I've seen the trailer for the new James Bond film about four times now, and each time I had the same reaction: instead of calling it Quantum of Solace -- which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue -- they should have just gone ahead and called it The Bond Supremacy. Or The Bond Ultimatum. Or maybe The Bond Stolen Identity.
• This week's edition of Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man Column is the first serious mention I've seen of the possibility of a Best Picture nomination for The Dark Knight. Ebert says, in fact, that he'd be astonished if it were not nominated. I learned long ago never to underestimate the Academy's ability to ignore a brilliant genre film, but I suspect, especially in these post Lord of the Rings days, that he may be right.
• And I certainly hope that he is.
• Now that we've seen and heard the lyrics to Ludacris' Politics as Usual, we can all see why Senator Breath of Fresh Air met with him to discuss "youth empowerment." Nothing says youth empowerment like calling one United States Senator a bitch and fancying the paralysis of another.
• I like to think that we could create for ourselves better media, a better political process, and even a better country, if we would just agree to never again use the terms flip-flop, race card, or poll numbers. Election coverage -- to say nothing of our political discourse -- would improve by a power of ten overnight.
• Really. It would.
• On Wednesday morning, I woke up to three Today show teases: the California earthquake's effect on the Judge Judy show, the prospect of Miley Cyrus giving up Hannah Montana for her own musical career, and what happened when a tiger was reunited in the wild with the men who raised it in captivity. And these were all AT THE TOP OF THE SHOW. Not the 8 o'clock hour. Not the 9 o'clock hour. Not the 10 o'clock hour, or whatever hour they finally end that fucking endless show these days. But the 7 o'clock hour. Those were the three big stories with which they lead off the whole morning's telecast. It's a good thing we're not at war. Or in the middle of a recession. Or trying to elect a new president. If we were doing any of those things, they might actually have to report on real news.
• But, alas, they are not alone. Consider these (absolutely real) headlines of the week: Air guitarist loses toe in stage dive | Huge shark caught with bait, hoisted | Beer marathoners run, drink, vomit | Astrologer can't predict quake | Break dress code, wear ugly jumpsuit | Jesus' face seen in kitten's swirly fur | My parents named me Indiana Jones. (I could go on and on and on. Really, I could. I could fill every note with 'em.) Wanna know where I found every last one of those scintillating nuggets of news? The CNN Home Page.
• If they had even an ounce of self-awareness -- or is that shame? -- they'd embed the theme from The Twilight Zone in the page so that whenever you read any of those kinds of headlines, you could just pretend that you were in an alternate reality. Or dreaming. Or about to die and be put out of your misery.
• For the second happy week in a row, I've had to add only one name to The Wall. And we actually went thirteen days -- from July 17 to July 30 -- between American military deaths in Iraq. That's a happy record for the now more than two years since I began listing the names, and so it must surely be for the whole damned war as well. I'm still waiting, of course, for the blessed week when I have no names to add.
• And when I can stop altogether.
• It runs out of steam at the end, but the first minute of this video is the funniest damned thing I've seen all week.
• The funniest damned thing I read all week -- and, no, I didn't write it -- was this Carbolic Smoke Ball news item.
• Speaking of funny news items... Consider this observation from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Reg Henry: Many of us take pride in the fact that liberals don't dominate talk radio. Liberals don't think it's funny or clever to stereotype and bully, well, not autistic children anyway, but only certain deserving jerks. Even if you grant that the second sentence contains a joke, and even if you can appreciate the joke after wading through the inelegant set-up -- is he serious? Has he read any partisan liberal blogs lately?. I can think of a few in Pittsburgh alone that might change his mind.
• Unless, of course, by only certain deserving jerks he meant anyone who doesn't agree with us.
• I've seen the trailer for the new James Bond film about four times now, and each time I had the same reaction: instead of calling it Quantum of Solace -- which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue -- they should have just gone ahead and called it The Bond Supremacy. Or The Bond Ultimatum. Or maybe The Bond Stolen Identity.
• This week's edition of Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man Column is the first serious mention I've seen of the possibility of a Best Picture nomination for The Dark Knight. Ebert says, in fact, that he'd be astonished if it were not nominated. I learned long ago never to underestimate the Academy's ability to ignore a brilliant genre film, but I suspect, especially in these post Lord of the Rings days, that he may be right.
• And I certainly hope that he is.
Posted at 04:51 PM
Fri - July 25, 2008
(TWO-SENTENCE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY NIGHT
uploading the photos of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those offers I'm still getting,
credit crunch be damned, for Visa cards and Discover cards and big home equity
loans. But without the handy reply envelopes...
• I first tried this little gimmick about a year and a half ago. On a late night with a tight deadline, I thought it would be fun to try it again.
• Two and a half years ago, I (in)famously wrote that Barack Obama was George W. Bush all over again. If this piece by Slate's John Dickerson is any indication, it seems more and more people are catching up to me.
• The first paragraph of that piece should send a chill up the spine of anyone who's paid any attention at all during last seven-and-a-half years. And Dickerson knows it: We should pause when a man auditioning for commander in chief says that the facts confirmed his beliefs and that he's never in doubt.
• I saw an ad this week -- I imagine you did too -- in which the McCain Campaign says you can "thank" Barack Obama for "rising prices at the pump." I'd say it's the early frontrunner for TWM's Quadrennial Worst, Most Offensive Commercial of the Campaign Award.
• It's so bad -- by which I mean so egregiously full of shit -- that I'd like to think it's the biggest of the Big Lies I'll see this whole campaign season. But I know better.
• One of TWM's favorite correspondents emailed this afternoon to tell me about this news item: Investigators are looking into how a young boy managed to slip out of a Denton day care center unnoticed, then cross two busy roads and end up a half-mile away at a Hooters restaurant on Tuesday afternoon. And to tell me that he has the answer: the same impulse that sends chinook salmon upstream to spawn and die.
• I was sorry to see that Professor Randy Pausch died this morning. I imagine I'll be even sorrier to see the media coverage that follows.
• (With apologies to and admiration for Bill Maher...) NEW RULE: The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission can not brag about offering E-ZPass until every exit has a dedicated E-ZPass lane. Waiting my turn behind three ticket-taking cars in one of those infuriating combo-lanes at the Bedford interchange this afternoon felt very little like E-ZPass and a whole lot like F-UChad.
• And another NEW RULE: ESPN -- and most of the rest of the sports commentariat -- must stop pretending that anyone outside of Green Bay gives a damn about what happens to Brett "Most Interceptions in NFL History" Favre. His never-ending, ego-fueled story has been holding ESPN News hostage for so long that I keep expecting him to appear alongside the Ayatollah Khomeini.
• Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight was that rarest of pop culture commodities: a reality that exceeded the hype. If it were up to me, the Academy would have awarded him the Oscar already.
• Many of you emailed to agree with my utter distaste for Entertainment Weekly's new layout. My favorite comment, from a reader we'll call Ms. D: I remember [the layout] from when it was called People magazine.
• I just took a look at this week's issue, and I hate it even more. If the magazine gets any thinner or includes any less content -- three CD reviews? -- it'll be a pamphlet.
• Tomorrow night, for the first time in five years, and for only the second time ever, Foo Fighters come to Pittsburgh. I'll take anything and everything they play, and I know they're gonna play a bunch of my favorites (Times Like These, Everlong, Monkey Wrench, All My Life), but if I could make one request -- c'mon, Dave, I know you're reading -- it would be for another beautiful acoustic version of Big Me.
• I first tried this little gimmick about a year and a half ago. On a late night with a tight deadline, I thought it would be fun to try it again.
• Two and a half years ago, I (in)famously wrote that Barack Obama was George W. Bush all over again. If this piece by Slate's John Dickerson is any indication, it seems more and more people are catching up to me.
• The first paragraph of that piece should send a chill up the spine of anyone who's paid any attention at all during last seven-and-a-half years. And Dickerson knows it: We should pause when a man auditioning for commander in chief says that the facts confirmed his beliefs and that he's never in doubt.
• I saw an ad this week -- I imagine you did too -- in which the McCain Campaign says you can "thank" Barack Obama for "rising prices at the pump." I'd say it's the early frontrunner for TWM's Quadrennial Worst, Most Offensive Commercial of the Campaign Award.
• It's so bad -- by which I mean so egregiously full of shit -- that I'd like to think it's the biggest of the Big Lies I'll see this whole campaign season. But I know better.
• One of TWM's favorite correspondents emailed this afternoon to tell me about this news item: Investigators are looking into how a young boy managed to slip out of a Denton day care center unnoticed, then cross two busy roads and end up a half-mile away at a Hooters restaurant on Tuesday afternoon. And to tell me that he has the answer: the same impulse that sends chinook salmon upstream to spawn and die.
• I was sorry to see that Professor Randy Pausch died this morning. I imagine I'll be even sorrier to see the media coverage that follows.
• (With apologies to and admiration for Bill Maher...) NEW RULE: The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission can not brag about offering E-ZPass until every exit has a dedicated E-ZPass lane. Waiting my turn behind three ticket-taking cars in one of those infuriating combo-lanes at the Bedford interchange this afternoon felt very little like E-ZPass and a whole lot like F-UChad.
• And another NEW RULE: ESPN -- and most of the rest of the sports commentariat -- must stop pretending that anyone outside of Green Bay gives a damn about what happens to Brett "Most Interceptions in NFL History" Favre. His never-ending, ego-fueled story has been holding ESPN News hostage for so long that I keep expecting him to appear alongside the Ayatollah Khomeini.
• Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight was that rarest of pop culture commodities: a reality that exceeded the hype. If it were up to me, the Academy would have awarded him the Oscar already.
• Many of you emailed to agree with my utter distaste for Entertainment Weekly's new layout. My favorite comment, from a reader we'll call Ms. D: I remember [the layout] from when it was called People magazine.
• I just took a look at this week's issue, and I hate it even more. If the magazine gets any thinner or includes any less content -- three CD reviews? -- it'll be a pamphlet.
• Tomorrow night, for the first time in five years, and for only the second time ever, Foo Fighters come to Pittsburgh. I'll take anything and everything they play, and I know they're gonna play a bunch of my favorites (Times Like These, Everlong, Monkey Wrench, All My Life), but if I could make one request -- c'mon, Dave, I know you're reading -- it would be for another beautiful acoustic version of Big Me.
Posted at 10:25 PM
Fri - July 18, 2008
(THE DARK K)NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
fighting the crime of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all these unexpected, consecutive days
of sunshine we've had in Pittsburgh. But without the damned humidity...
• I'm starting to get the emails. I knew it was only a matter of time, but they're still coming a little earlier than I thought. The we know you don't like Obama, but you can't like McCain either, and you're living in a swing state, so you know what you have to do. They're earnest, and they're passionate -- one in particular is so much of both that I'll be reprinting it verbatim tomorrow; stay tuned -- and they're a marked improvement over all the insults and invectives I usually receive from supporters of a candidate who believes American politics are too filled with insults and invectives, but they occasionally miss the point and, so far at least, are not especially persuasive. Compelling, yes. Persuasive, no. If only because I am not, as you might have guessed, someone who takes his vote lightly. And so the you must help undo the last eight years of mistakes by voting for a guy you fear will make plenty of new ones gambit is only marginally less onerous than the you must do your duty and stand by the Democrats argument. Neither one is likely to send me sprinting for the polls. Or anywhere else.
• In November 2004, for the first time in my life, I voted not for one candidate, but against another. And I didn't much like the way it felt. In November 2006, I did it again. And it felt even worse. And so I told myself I would never do it again. I know, as Sean Connery taught me, that once you say never, you can never say never again. And I have no desire to compound what felt like two big mistakes (compromises? sell outs?) with the commission of a third. And that's why, if the election were held tomorrow, I would not vote for either man.
• Yeah. Okay. I hear you. So please spare me the you must vote or you're a bad American/person/citizen bit. I happen to believe that along with the right to vote comes the right not to vote. Because in the end, though we all must live with the sum of our choices, each of us must also live with the spirit of our own individual choice. And right now, I simply could not live with either.
• One more note about that awful Barack Obama commercial about which I wrote last Sunday: the problem, in a nutshell, with those sorts of ads is that the characters talk to each other like they're 10, and they talk to us like we're 5.
• When campaigns -- and I mean both of them -- think so little of their audience's intelligence, it's no wonder they should think us also incapable of distinguishing satire from reality.
• If both sides are aiming that low, it's no wonder they've missed me.
• That said, it is nice to see that The New Yorker will be making amends this week.
• An Obama supporter with a sense of humor -- hey, they really do exist! -- watched the new Jib Jab video on Wednesday and then emailed: Tell me Obama on the unicorn isn't the funniest part of the day. :) I responded that, yeah, it was pretty great, but that I thought it finished second to McCain just keeling over in the hospital corridor. That caught me off guard and, unlike anything else in the video, actually made me laugh out loud.
• The thing about that video, as it was about the last couple, is that it just wasn't very good. Or fresh. Or inspired. It's just more -- and so in many ways less -- of the same. They struck pure gold with the first one, but for my eye and ear, they’ve unearthed mostly silt, and just a couple of tiny, shiny nuggets, since.
• I meant to call your attention to this on Sunday but never got back to it: Dennis Roddy's typically brilliant, positively heartbreaking piece on the late Ricky Nguyen -- a most unlikely subject, it seems, for so much sympathy, much less empathy. It reminded me a lot of a another piece he did about a year and a half ago on a lost soul named Molly Jean Dilts. And so it reminded me that, among his many remarkable gifts as both writer and reporter, we can count chief among them a lovely ability to find, and then to communicate, the battered and broken lives of people like this. And to so do in a way that makes them not just emotionally but even physically uncomfortable to read.
• As usual, Dennis is operating on his own, rarefied level at the Post-Gazette. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
• The TWM Great, Unexpected Ending to an Otherwise Straight-Up Paragraph Award this week goes to Slate's Farhad Manjoo, for this passage from a piece on the new iPhone applications: They can also use the fantastic Apple-produced app that turns your iPhone into a wireless remote control for iTunes. Where you once had to trudge five or six feet to your computer in order to search through your music library, now you can do it from the couch. I'm waiting for a whole family of such remote apps—soon we'll use our iPhones to control multiroom music players, wireless security systems, and unmanned Predator drones.
• Have I mentioned how much I hate the new Entertainment Weekly magazine layout? I haven't? Okay. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At its current rate of change, the publication will, only one or two years hence, publish nothing but photos and white space. The only remaining text will be on the address labels.
• Which, if they're still employing Diablo Cody as a columnist, will be fine by me.
• Ever have one of those moments when you're alone, and you're listening and maybe singing along to a song you know and love, and some emotion sneaks up from deep down inside you, from some place you knew you had but, until the song caught you at just the right time, you hadn't really been paying much attention to? And then, before you realize what's happening, and long before you could ever hope to stop it, it just reaches up and grabs you and damned near rips your heart out? I had one of those moments this morning, listening to Drive-By Truckers on my way home from dropping off Ethan at his day-camp bus stop. Some combination of that, and talking to my Mom -- who lives, of course, on the other side of the state, and who, along with my father, I don't get to see nearly as often as I like -- for a long time last night, and all the thinking I've lately been doing about all the best parts of my childhood, and missing the holy hell out of Adam, who's finally coming home tomorrow from two weeks away at camp and who's going to high school next month and who's growing up just too God-damned fast, made Jason Isbell's Outfit reduce me to a suddenly blubbering mass of father and son on the front seat of the 4Runner. I'm pretty sure you had to be there, and I know you had to be me, to fully appreciate it. But it's still a wonderful song, one I'm pretty sure any parent or child out there will appreciate it, and so it seems like a fine place to close for today...
You want to grow up to paint houses like me? A trailer in my yard till you're 23?
You want to be old after 42 years? Keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears.
Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back, and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing, and I figure you already know,
But in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent; a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Five years in a St. Florian foundry; they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School, just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama, and I got to missing you too,
So I went back to painting for my old man, and I guess that’s what I’ll always do.
So don’t let 'em take who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent, and don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Don’t give it away.
• I'm starting to get the emails. I knew it was only a matter of time, but they're still coming a little earlier than I thought. The we know you don't like Obama, but you can't like McCain either, and you're living in a swing state, so you know what you have to do. They're earnest, and they're passionate -- one in particular is so much of both that I'll be reprinting it verbatim tomorrow; stay tuned -- and they're a marked improvement over all the insults and invectives I usually receive from supporters of a candidate who believes American politics are too filled with insults and invectives, but they occasionally miss the point and, so far at least, are not especially persuasive. Compelling, yes. Persuasive, no. If only because I am not, as you might have guessed, someone who takes his vote lightly. And so the you must help undo the last eight years of mistakes by voting for a guy you fear will make plenty of new ones gambit is only marginally less onerous than the you must do your duty and stand by the Democrats argument. Neither one is likely to send me sprinting for the polls. Or anywhere else.
• In November 2004, for the first time in my life, I voted not for one candidate, but against another. And I didn't much like the way it felt. In November 2006, I did it again. And it felt even worse. And so I told myself I would never do it again. I know, as Sean Connery taught me, that once you say never, you can never say never again. And I have no desire to compound what felt like two big mistakes (compromises? sell outs?) with the commission of a third. And that's why, if the election were held tomorrow, I would not vote for either man.
• Yeah. Okay. I hear you. So please spare me the you must vote or you're a bad American/person/citizen bit. I happen to believe that along with the right to vote comes the right not to vote. Because in the end, though we all must live with the sum of our choices, each of us must also live with the spirit of our own individual choice. And right now, I simply could not live with either.
• One more note about that awful Barack Obama commercial about which I wrote last Sunday: the problem, in a nutshell, with those sorts of ads is that the characters talk to each other like they're 10, and they talk to us like we're 5.
• When campaigns -- and I mean both of them -- think so little of their audience's intelligence, it's no wonder they should think us also incapable of distinguishing satire from reality.
• If both sides are aiming that low, it's no wonder they've missed me.
• That said, it is nice to see that The New Yorker will be making amends this week.
• An Obama supporter with a sense of humor -- hey, they really do exist! -- watched the new Jib Jab video on Wednesday and then emailed: Tell me Obama on the unicorn isn't the funniest part of the day. :) I responded that, yeah, it was pretty great, but that I thought it finished second to McCain just keeling over in the hospital corridor. That caught me off guard and, unlike anything else in the video, actually made me laugh out loud.
• The thing about that video, as it was about the last couple, is that it just wasn't very good. Or fresh. Or inspired. It's just more -- and so in many ways less -- of the same. They struck pure gold with the first one, but for my eye and ear, they’ve unearthed mostly silt, and just a couple of tiny, shiny nuggets, since.
• I meant to call your attention to this on Sunday but never got back to it: Dennis Roddy's typically brilliant, positively heartbreaking piece on the late Ricky Nguyen -- a most unlikely subject, it seems, for so much sympathy, much less empathy. It reminded me a lot of a another piece he did about a year and a half ago on a lost soul named Molly Jean Dilts. And so it reminded me that, among his many remarkable gifts as both writer and reporter, we can count chief among them a lovely ability to find, and then to communicate, the battered and broken lives of people like this. And to so do in a way that makes them not just emotionally but even physically uncomfortable to read.
• As usual, Dennis is operating on his own, rarefied level at the Post-Gazette. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
• The TWM Great, Unexpected Ending to an Otherwise Straight-Up Paragraph Award this week goes to Slate's Farhad Manjoo, for this passage from a piece on the new iPhone applications: They can also use the fantastic Apple-produced app that turns your iPhone into a wireless remote control for iTunes. Where you once had to trudge five or six feet to your computer in order to search through your music library, now you can do it from the couch. I'm waiting for a whole family of such remote apps—soon we'll use our iPhones to control multiroom music players, wireless security systems, and unmanned Predator drones.
• Have I mentioned how much I hate the new Entertainment Weekly magazine layout? I haven't? Okay. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At its current rate of change, the publication will, only one or two years hence, publish nothing but photos and white space. The only remaining text will be on the address labels.
• Which, if they're still employing Diablo Cody as a columnist, will be fine by me.
• Ever have one of those moments when you're alone, and you're listening and maybe singing along to a song you know and love, and some emotion sneaks up from deep down inside you, from some place you knew you had but, until the song caught you at just the right time, you hadn't really been paying much attention to? And then, before you realize what's happening, and long before you could ever hope to stop it, it just reaches up and grabs you and damned near rips your heart out? I had one of those moments this morning, listening to Drive-By Truckers on my way home from dropping off Ethan at his day-camp bus stop. Some combination of that, and talking to my Mom -- who lives, of course, on the other side of the state, and who, along with my father, I don't get to see nearly as often as I like -- for a long time last night, and all the thinking I've lately been doing about all the best parts of my childhood, and missing the holy hell out of Adam, who's finally coming home tomorrow from two weeks away at camp and who's going to high school next month and who's growing up just too God-damned fast, made Jason Isbell's Outfit reduce me to a suddenly blubbering mass of father and son on the front seat of the 4Runner. I'm pretty sure you had to be there, and I know you had to be me, to fully appreciate it. But it's still a wonderful song, one I'm pretty sure any parent or child out there will appreciate it, and so it seems like a fine place to close for today...
You want to grow up to paint houses like me? A trailer in my yard till you're 23?
You want to be old after 42 years? Keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears.
Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back, and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing, and I figure you already know,
But in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent; a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Five years in a St. Florian foundry; they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School, just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama, and I got to missing you too,
So I went back to painting for my old man, and I guess that’s what I’ll always do.
So don’t let 'em take who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent, and don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Don’t give it away.
Posted at 03:36 PM
Fri - July 11, 2008
(OH, THANK HEAVEN FOR 7/11) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
pouring the slurpee of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like a whole lot of things I might have
said, but not regretted saying, into an open mic these past few days. And,
thus, without the need for empty
apologies...
• Here's hoping the next (ahem) Christian (ahem) Reverend who insults, mocks, demeans, denigrates, or otherwise postulates physical harm to someone will, at the very least, explain what Jesus would do about Senator Obama's -- or anyone else's -- nuts. And then shut the hell up.
• I know, I know. But this graphic still makes me laugh:
Nothing like an OPEN convention that you could get to go to. As long as you give money first. And don't make any disparaging remarks about his testicles.
• When I saw this morning's wonderful Rob Rogers cartoon -- for which you can be sure he'll suffer a couple of hysterical letters to the editor -- the first thing I thought was, Hey, Rob, it only took you a little less than twenty-eight months to catch up to me. The second thing I thought was, But that's okay, because you were still next person to arrive.
• I guess he and I'll just sit here and wait for the rest of you.
• TWM's Insular, Idiotic Quotation of the Week Award goes to Janet Taylor of Plymouth, Massachusetts, who, in an Associated Press article detailing how pet owners so far prefer John McCain to Barack Obama, told the reporter, I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person -- caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners. If the thought of our current, senseless-war-starting, more-than-four-thousand-Americans-killing, dog-owning president is not enough to change her mind, I doubt that the notions of Hitler's dog or Mussolini's cat will be enough to make her reconsider her position either.
• Timothy McVeigh's dog, anyone? John Wayne Gacy's dog? How about Lizzie Borden's cat?
• I don't know if he owns a pet -- how could he? right, Janet? -- but I do know that if anyone in the country is suffering from a mental recession, it's Phil Gramm.
• When Wendy and the boys and I left for vacation, contractors for the city of Pittsburgh were milling the street in front of our house. When we returned home ten days later, a Public Works crew was paving the street in front of our house. Which means, of course, that for the nine days in between, a large part of Shady Avenue looked (and no doubt felt) like a cross between the Burma Road and some bombed-out back alley in Baghdad. And it's not alone. A long stretch of Murray Avenue, replete with several meteor-crater-sized holes, currently suffers the same fate. Parts of Beechwood and Northumberland suffered it before that. Now. I know that schedules vary and weather delays can make things even worse. But. Can't someone somewhere do a better job of co-ordinating the milling and the paving, so that they occur just a little closer together? They really can't do any better than ten (or more) days?
• Driving around the East End this summer gives me an idea of what it must have been like to drive around in the summer of 1994. In Sarajevo.
• I must give yet another shout-out to long-time friend and TWM Best Man Jim Pascoe, whose fabulous Undertown continues to get all sorts of positive press and reader reaction -- especially now that it's being syndicated in the Sunday comics section of newspapers worldwide. The latest example: this fine article from the Concord (N.H.) Monitor about Undertown and its place in the Manga genre, replete with some typically thoughtful and entertaining observations from the man himself.
• The man himself also forwards me this link, which outlines how a collection of monumental talents -- Howard Shore, David Cronenberg, Dante Ferretti, David Henry Hwang, and Placido Domingo -- has collaborated to produce The Fly: The Opera, an all-new adaptation of Cronenberg's 1986 horror masterpiece for performances in Paris and (this fall) Los Angeles. The very thought of seeing one of my favorite films of all-time -- already a kind of intimate little operatic tale in its own right -- given a full-blown stage treatment, much less by these masters of their crafts, gives me the chills. And makes me want to book a flight on Southwest.
• As the movie poster said: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
• I've always said that I would buy a ticket just to watch Morgan Freeman read the phone book. But I'm now prepared to go one giant step forward in my praise and admiration of the man and his talents. After seeing a few of those Olympic-themed Visa commercials he narrates, I've decided that I would even pay to see him host NBC's God-awful-excuse for live Olympic TV coverage. If they'd be willing to place Mr. Freeman on Bob Costas' Throne of Unctuousness, I'd be willing to sit through all 472 hours of their cloying, maudlin, Dick-Enberg-moment filled crapfest.
• I'd only get to see about forty-seven minutes of actual athletic competition, of course. But with Morgan Freeman hosting, it would still be worth it.
• With a tip o' the cap to the great Mike Woycheck, who linked to it earlier this week, this may be the funniest damned thing I've seen all week.
• Speaking of great and funny... It is with a sad and heavy (but ultimately hopeful) heart that we mourn the timely death of the Hon. Judge Rufus Peckham, Jurist, Bon Vivant, Advocate of the Downtrodden, and Guiding Light to Discerning Newshounds Everywhere. He was truly a great man, and, if only because he never once yelled at me for missing a deadline, also a great boss. You can read his full obituary here, at the landmark site he founded and loved. The fake news community will miss him dearly. He will not be forgotten.
• Also not forgotten are big, happy, punch-lines-and-belly-laughs kinda birthday wishes to my collaborator and co-conspirator, Tim Murray. Today is a big day for Tim in more ways than one, and I am both honored and privileged to share it with him. Just as I am to know him, and to call him my friend. Happy Birthday, Tim. May your day be as rich and as brilliant as you.
• Here's hoping the next (ahem) Christian (ahem) Reverend who insults, mocks, demeans, denigrates, or otherwise postulates physical harm to someone will, at the very least, explain what Jesus would do about Senator Obama's -- or anyone else's -- nuts. And then shut the hell up.
• I know, I know. But this graphic still makes me laugh:
Nothing like an OPEN convention that you could get to go to. As long as you give money first. And don't make any disparaging remarks about his testicles.
• When I saw this morning's wonderful Rob Rogers cartoon -- for which you can be sure he'll suffer a couple of hysterical letters to the editor -- the first thing I thought was, Hey, Rob, it only took you a little less than twenty-eight months to catch up to me. The second thing I thought was, But that's okay, because you were still next person to arrive.
• I guess he and I'll just sit here and wait for the rest of you.
• TWM's Insular, Idiotic Quotation of the Week Award goes to Janet Taylor of Plymouth, Massachusetts, who, in an Associated Press article detailing how pet owners so far prefer John McCain to Barack Obama, told the reporter, I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person -- caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners. If the thought of our current, senseless-war-starting, more-than-four-thousand-Americans-killing, dog-owning president is not enough to change her mind, I doubt that the notions of Hitler's dog or Mussolini's cat will be enough to make her reconsider her position either.
• Timothy McVeigh's dog, anyone? John Wayne Gacy's dog? How about Lizzie Borden's cat?
• I don't know if he owns a pet -- how could he? right, Janet? -- but I do know that if anyone in the country is suffering from a mental recession, it's Phil Gramm.
• When Wendy and the boys and I left for vacation, contractors for the city of Pittsburgh were milling the street in front of our house. When we returned home ten days later, a Public Works crew was paving the street in front of our house. Which means, of course, that for the nine days in between, a large part of Shady Avenue looked (and no doubt felt) like a cross between the Burma Road and some bombed-out back alley in Baghdad. And it's not alone. A long stretch of Murray Avenue, replete with several meteor-crater-sized holes, currently suffers the same fate. Parts of Beechwood and Northumberland suffered it before that. Now. I know that schedules vary and weather delays can make things even worse. But. Can't someone somewhere do a better job of co-ordinating the milling and the paving, so that they occur just a little closer together? They really can't do any better than ten (or more) days?
• Driving around the East End this summer gives me an idea of what it must have been like to drive around in the summer of 1994. In Sarajevo.
• I must give yet another shout-out to long-time friend and TWM Best Man Jim Pascoe, whose fabulous Undertown continues to get all sorts of positive press and reader reaction -- especially now that it's being syndicated in the Sunday comics section of newspapers worldwide. The latest example: this fine article from the Concord (N.H.) Monitor about Undertown and its place in the Manga genre, replete with some typically thoughtful and entertaining observations from the man himself.
• The man himself also forwards me this link, which outlines how a collection of monumental talents -- Howard Shore, David Cronenberg, Dante Ferretti, David Henry Hwang, and Placido Domingo -- has collaborated to produce The Fly: The Opera, an all-new adaptation of Cronenberg's 1986 horror masterpiece for performances in Paris and (this fall) Los Angeles. The very thought of seeing one of my favorite films of all-time -- already a kind of intimate little operatic tale in its own right -- given a full-blown stage treatment, much less by these masters of their crafts, gives me the chills. And makes me want to book a flight on Southwest.
• As the movie poster said: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
• I've always said that I would buy a ticket just to watch Morgan Freeman read the phone book. But I'm now prepared to go one giant step forward in my praise and admiration of the man and his talents. After seeing a few of those Olympic-themed Visa commercials he narrates, I've decided that I would even pay to see him host NBC's God-awful-excuse for live Olympic TV coverage. If they'd be willing to place Mr. Freeman on Bob Costas' Throne of Unctuousness, I'd be willing to sit through all 472 hours of their cloying, maudlin, Dick-Enberg-moment filled crapfest.
• I'd only get to see about forty-seven minutes of actual athletic competition, of course. But with Morgan Freeman hosting, it would still be worth it.
• With a tip o' the cap to the great Mike Woycheck, who linked to it earlier this week, this may be the funniest damned thing I've seen all week.
• Speaking of great and funny... It is with a sad and heavy (but ultimately hopeful) heart that we mourn the timely death of the Hon. Judge Rufus Peckham, Jurist, Bon Vivant, Advocate of the Downtrodden, and Guiding Light to Discerning Newshounds Everywhere. He was truly a great man, and, if only because he never once yelled at me for missing a deadline, also a great boss. You can read his full obituary here, at the landmark site he founded and loved. The fake news community will miss him dearly. He will not be forgotten.
• Also not forgotten are big, happy, punch-lines-and-belly-laughs kinda birthday wishes to my collaborator and co-conspirator, Tim Murray. Today is a big day for Tim in more ways than one, and I am both honored and privileged to share it with him. Just as I am to know him, and to call him my friend. Happy Birthday, Tim. May your day be as rich and as brilliant as you.
Posted at 01:53 PM
Fri - July 4, 2008
(ALL-VACATION) NOTES FROM A (4TH OF JULY) FRIDAY AFTERNOON
signing the declaration of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and vacation observations that didn't make it into a
full-length post this week (or last week, or even the week before that). So
they're sort of like a whole bunch of silly, semi-tacky souvenirs from our
vacation. But without the little box of salt water taffy to go with
them...
• First, the obligatory travel stats: we logged just under 1,000 miles (from Pittsburgh to Sinking Spring to King of Prussia, through Philly and all the way to the very last tip of New Jersey in fabulous Cape May, then back north and south again, through Delaware and Maryland with a quick stop in Baltimore, for two days in our nation's capital, then back home to the ‘Burgh), spent time in eleven cities, stayed in two hotel rooms and one fabulous townhouse, dined at 17 different eateries, played miniature golf at four different courses, lounged in four different pools and three different jacuzzis, and took one really cool river cruise.
• Along the way, we did what every self-respecting, road-tripping family does to pass long hours on the road: we played the License Plate Game. By the end of the trip, we’d rebounded from last year's disappointing total of 42 and spied our now-almost-automatic 45 states (plus the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces). The fives plates that eluded us: Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and North Dakota.
• That's right. For the first time in four years, we found evidence that the people of South Dakota are allowed to leave their state. On a car parked two spaces to our right in the Cape May Lighthouse parking lot.
• Which means that Wyoming is now the only plate to elude us each of the last four years. I'd planned to declare it the new National Champion of License Plate Elusivity, but then, of course, we saw one. In Squirrel Hill. Less than twenty-four hours after we'd returned.
• And, yes, we saw a license plate from Hawaii. Eleven of them, in fact. Nine on an auto-transport truck heading east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (we're still trying to figure that one out), one on the Garden State Parkway near Stone Harbor, and one on the Mall in Washington D.C.
• You may remember that last year, my favorite bike-riding-on-the-boardwalk moment came when I rode past a woman who, while riding her own bike across a wildly uneven stretch of boardwalk planks, extended a disposable camera in one hand and tried to snap a photo of the ocean. This year, my favorite bike-riding-on-the-beach-trail moment was when a woman rode by me, with one hand on her handlebars and the other holding a cell phone to her ear, shouting, So how's the weather back home?
• You may also remember that last year, my favorite Raging Waters water park site was the Jerry Garcia look-alike attempting -- and actually being allowed -- to ride the slides in shirt and shorts and shoes and socks. Though not quite up to that peculiar par, my favorite site this year was the forty-something woman riding the water slides in Timberland hiking sandals.
• I resisted the temptation -- and, let me tell you, it wasn't easy -- to ask if she'd lost her sherpa.
• Best T-shirt we spied along the way: the one at several shops on the Wildwood Boardwalk, in bold New York blue-and-white, that declared, Eighteen Wins and One Giant Loss.
• Best Roadside Sign we spied along the way: the one at a stand along New York Avenue in D.C. that advertised the can't miss combination of FIREWORKS and AZALEAS.
• Runner-Up, Most Shocking Thing We Saw Along the Side of the Road: an ostrich, happily strolling just inside the fence of a South Jersey front yard.
• Winner (& Quite Possibly All-Time Champion), Most Shocking Thing We Saw Along the Side of the Road: a thirty-something woman, squatting no more than ten yards off the side of New Jersey State Route 83, facing traffic, hands on her knees and pants around her ankles, peeing.
• Let's just say that, even if she'd been wearing a helmet, I still could have told you what color hair she had.
• Once more, I am compelled to recommend the high quality, reasonable rates, and outstanding customer service offered up at Homewood Suites. The chain has long been the Official Hotel of the Hermann Family, and it continues to distinguish itself on just about every road trip. If you can find one anywhere near your next destination, I urge you to give it a try.
• I also, for the second time in three years, urge you, should have a hankerin' for Mexican food while in our nation's capital, to get yourself (before 6 o'clock) to Lauriol Plaza. Great ambiance. Spectacular food. And a Saturday evening hostess who, as one of my dining companions cheekily pointed out, should probably be the next head of FEMA.
• A full-length post on this subject will soon follow, but... One of the highlights of our time in DC was a trip to the brand-spanking-new Newseum. Just the right mix of exhibits and interactivity, with some truly wonderful integration of technology and a room full of original front pages -- preserved under glass, of course, but encased in rolling drawers for easy access and scrutiny -- from throughout history that, more than a few times, damned near brought me to my knees in wonder and reverence. Highly recommended for everyone, but especially for news junkies and lovers of history.
• Is it just me, or is the new Sideling Hill Service Plaza little more than a giant food court stuck inside a miniature ski lodge?
• And, finally... After some reluctance, several recommendations, and finally agreeing to take the plunge, I can say that an E-ZPass technology really is the road trip equivalent of iPhones and DVRs and high-def television; once you've experienced life with it, you'll never, ever again want to experience life without it. The time it saves is great, the aggravation it saves you from dealing with yet another surly PA Turnpike toll taker is even greater. Throw in the bonus of using it all over the eastern seaboard, and, well, I can't imagine why I waited so damned long to get it. From Pittsburgh to Philly to Delaware to Baltimore to Breezewood (where, in keeping with their dedication to slowing down your travel as much as humanly possible, they have only one -- count it, one -- dedicated E-ZPass lane), I actually looked forward to arriving at a toll booth.
• Though, of course, I looked forward to them far less on the way home than on the ways East and South...
• First, the obligatory travel stats: we logged just under 1,000 miles (from Pittsburgh to Sinking Spring to King of Prussia, through Philly and all the way to the very last tip of New Jersey in fabulous Cape May, then back north and south again, through Delaware and Maryland with a quick stop in Baltimore, for two days in our nation's capital, then back home to the ‘Burgh), spent time in eleven cities, stayed in two hotel rooms and one fabulous townhouse, dined at 17 different eateries, played miniature golf at four different courses, lounged in four different pools and three different jacuzzis, and took one really cool river cruise.
• Along the way, we did what every self-respecting, road-tripping family does to pass long hours on the road: we played the License Plate Game. By the end of the trip, we’d rebounded from last year's disappointing total of 42 and spied our now-almost-automatic 45 states (plus the District of Columbia and two Canadian provinces). The fives plates that eluded us: Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and North Dakota.
• That's right. For the first time in four years, we found evidence that the people of South Dakota are allowed to leave their state. On a car parked two spaces to our right in the Cape May Lighthouse parking lot.
• Which means that Wyoming is now the only plate to elude us each of the last four years. I'd planned to declare it the new National Champion of License Plate Elusivity, but then, of course, we saw one. In Squirrel Hill. Less than twenty-four hours after we'd returned.
• And, yes, we saw a license plate from Hawaii. Eleven of them, in fact. Nine on an auto-transport truck heading east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (we're still trying to figure that one out), one on the Garden State Parkway near Stone Harbor, and one on the Mall in Washington D.C.
• You may remember that last year, my favorite bike-riding-on-the-boardwalk moment came when I rode past a woman who, while riding her own bike across a wildly uneven stretch of boardwalk planks, extended a disposable camera in one hand and tried to snap a photo of the ocean. This year, my favorite bike-riding-on-the-beach-trail moment was when a woman rode by me, with one hand on her handlebars and the other holding a cell phone to her ear, shouting, So how's the weather back home?
• You may also remember that last year, my favorite Raging Waters water park site was the Jerry Garcia look-alike attempting -- and actually being allowed -- to ride the slides in shirt and shorts and shoes and socks. Though not quite up to that peculiar par, my favorite site this year was the forty-something woman riding the water slides in Timberland hiking sandals.
• I resisted the temptation -- and, let me tell you, it wasn't easy -- to ask if she'd lost her sherpa.
• Best T-shirt we spied along the way: the one at several shops on the Wildwood Boardwalk, in bold New York blue-and-white, that declared, Eighteen Wins and One Giant Loss.
• Best Roadside Sign we spied along the way: the one at a stand along New York Avenue in D.C. that advertised the can't miss combination of FIREWORKS and AZALEAS.
• Runner-Up, Most Shocking Thing We Saw Along the Side of the Road: an ostrich, happily strolling just inside the fence of a South Jersey front yard.
• Winner (& Quite Possibly All-Time Champion), Most Shocking Thing We Saw Along the Side of the Road: a thirty-something woman, squatting no more than ten yards off the side of New Jersey State Route 83, facing traffic, hands on her knees and pants around her ankles, peeing.
• Let's just say that, even if she'd been wearing a helmet, I still could have told you what color hair she had.
• Once more, I am compelled to recommend the high quality, reasonable rates, and outstanding customer service offered up at Homewood Suites. The chain has long been the Official Hotel of the Hermann Family, and it continues to distinguish itself on just about every road trip. If you can find one anywhere near your next destination, I urge you to give it a try.
• I also, for the second time in three years, urge you, should have a hankerin' for Mexican food while in our nation's capital, to get yourself (before 6 o'clock) to Lauriol Plaza. Great ambiance. Spectacular food. And a Saturday evening hostess who, as one of my dining companions cheekily pointed out, should probably be the next head of FEMA.
• A full-length post on this subject will soon follow, but... One of the highlights of our time in DC was a trip to the brand-spanking-new Newseum. Just the right mix of exhibits and interactivity, with some truly wonderful integration of technology and a room full of original front pages -- preserved under glass, of course, but encased in rolling drawers for easy access and scrutiny -- from throughout history that, more than a few times, damned near brought me to my knees in wonder and reverence. Highly recommended for everyone, but especially for news junkies and lovers of history.
• Is it just me, or is the new Sideling Hill Service Plaza little more than a giant food court stuck inside a miniature ski lodge?
• And, finally... After some reluctance, several recommendations, and finally agreeing to take the plunge, I can say that an E-ZPass technology really is the road trip equivalent of iPhones and DVRs and high-def television; once you've experienced life with it, you'll never, ever again want to experience life without it. The time it saves is great, the aggravation it saves you from dealing with yet another surly PA Turnpike toll taker is even greater. Throw in the bonus of using it all over the eastern seaboard, and, well, I can't imagine why I waited so damned long to get it. From Pittsburgh to Philly to Delaware to Baltimore to Breezewood (where, in keeping with their dedication to slowing down your travel as much as humanly possible, they have only one -- count it, one -- dedicated E-ZPass lane), I actually looked forward to arriving at a toll booth.
• Though, of course, I looked forward to them far less on the way home than on the ways East and South...
Posted at 04:52 PM
Fri - June 13, 2008
NOTES FROM A FRIDAY (THE 13TH) AFTERNOON, PART 4
severing the limbs of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those weapons -- a harpoon gun? at
a summer camp?! -- that Jason never had any trouble finding or handling or
putting to great, gruesome use. But without all the cool, Tom-Savini-inspired
make-up effects...
• That's right, folks. For only the fourth time in its almost four-year history, Notes From a Friday Afternoon falls on Friday the 13th. I survived the first three, and now I'm back for more. Which does not, I'm afraid, bode all that well for this series. Because once you've reached the point where Corey Feldman appears in your franchise, it's all down hill from there.
• The often unctuous ramblings of Keith Olbermann aside -- it's a shame to watch a guy so smart and so talented become so shrill and, lately at least, so much of a caricature; I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before he pulls a Howard Beale -- what John McCain said to Matt Lauer is being warped and twisted and demonized out of context. You want to argue, or just simply disagree with, what he said? Great. Then hit back straight-up and head-on. When you fudge the facts or play fast and loose with the truth, you undercut yourself, your argument, and your what little is left of your credibility.
• Exhibit A: This new Democratic National Committee YouTube video, with edits that, as ABC's Jake Tapper and other even-handed observers have already pointed out, gleefully omit key parts of Senator McCain's answers. It's deception, pure and simple. And so it should, no matter how badly you want Senator Obama to win, embarrass you.
• This assumes, of course, that you still possess at least some shreds of dignity and self-respect. I'm starting to fear I'm one of the precious few Democrats who does.
• Oh, and please spare me the We-Have-to-Out-Karl-Rove-the-Karl-Rovers-of-the-World defense. Dirty tricks and cheap rhetoric are still dirty tricks and cheap rhetoric. If it's wrong when they use 'em -- and it is -- then it's wrong when we use 'em too.
• You (rightly) rail about insider access and sweetheart loan deals and excessive corporate compensation, then appoint someone who's been party to all three with a financial company you (rightly) singled out for scorn to hear your VP vetting team? New kind of politics, my ass.
• Now that Jim Johnson is out as head of the VP Vetting Team, do you think Barry Switzer will replace him? Chan Gailey? Bill Parcells? And, perhaps more importantly, do you think we'll every know -- with all apologies to Plato and Alan Moore -- who vets the vetmen?
• In Texas this week, a 14-year-old boy was killed in a hunting accident. His grandfather accidentally shot him in the back when the trigger of his AK-47 -- that's right, kids, his AK-47 -- snagged on a branch and discharged. An AK-47? An AK-47? What the fuck were they hunting?
• Al Qaeda? Wild hogs with tech nines? Advocates for sensible gun control?
• Here's a great Slate.com article about how the new (lovely and delicious) 3G iPhone may be the beginning of the end for stand-alone GPS manufacturers. The piece, by the delightfully named Chadwick Matlin, also scores the TWM Funniest Sentence of the Week Award: In a perfect world, the GPS iPhone might even do the impossible — make Twitter useful.
• Well, I doubt it.
• Looking for a fun, breezy little guilty pleasure to help you survive the summer television doldrums? Then I heartily recommend you check out The Next Food Network Star. Part Survivor, part American Idol, and (last week, at least) part Amazing Race, the show packs good food, great challenges, and an entertaining mix of personal drama into every sixty-minute episode. It airs Sunday night at 10, with replays Thursday night at 9 and Saturday afternoon at 2. Last week's second episode -- which you can still catch, or at least DVR tomorrow -- was the most brisk and enjoyable installment I've seen in the last two seasons. If you're a foodie and/or a reality tv junkie, I guarantee you'll be hooked before the second commercial.
• Now that The Incredible Hulk is getting mostly mediocre reviews, how long do you think it'll be before the folks at Marvel try a third time? Unless they can pry Christopher Nolan away from the Batman franchise, I'd say it's about time to hang it up.
• Now that the Pens' season is over, and with what could be their most important off-season ever now officially underway, I'd say it's time for the Pittsburgh hockey faithful to unleash a new and equally fervent chant: Let's Go, Ray! Let's Go, Ray! Let's Go, Ray!
• Let's Go, Ray.
• That's right, folks. For only the fourth time in its almost four-year history, Notes From a Friday Afternoon falls on Friday the 13th. I survived the first three, and now I'm back for more. Which does not, I'm afraid, bode all that well for this series. Because once you've reached the point where Corey Feldman appears in your franchise, it's all down hill from there.
• The often unctuous ramblings of Keith Olbermann aside -- it's a shame to watch a guy so smart and so talented become so shrill and, lately at least, so much of a caricature; I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before he pulls a Howard Beale -- what John McCain said to Matt Lauer is being warped and twisted and demonized out of context. You want to argue, or just simply disagree with, what he said? Great. Then hit back straight-up and head-on. When you fudge the facts or play fast and loose with the truth, you undercut yourself, your argument, and your what little is left of your credibility.
• Exhibit A: This new Democratic National Committee YouTube video, with edits that, as ABC's Jake Tapper and other even-handed observers have already pointed out, gleefully omit key parts of Senator McCain's answers. It's deception, pure and simple. And so it should, no matter how badly you want Senator Obama to win, embarrass you.
• This assumes, of course, that you still possess at least some shreds of dignity and self-respect. I'm starting to fear I'm one of the precious few Democrats who does.
• Oh, and please spare me the We-Have-to-Out-Karl-Rove-the-Karl-Rovers-of-the-World defense. Dirty tricks and cheap rhetoric are still dirty tricks and cheap rhetoric. If it's wrong when they use 'em -- and it is -- then it's wrong when we use 'em too.
• You (rightly) rail about insider access and sweetheart loan deals and excessive corporate compensation, then appoint someone who's been party to all three with a financial company you (rightly) singled out for scorn to hear your VP vetting team? New kind of politics, my ass.
• Now that Jim Johnson is out as head of the VP Vetting Team, do you think Barry Switzer will replace him? Chan Gailey? Bill Parcells? And, perhaps more importantly, do you think we'll every know -- with all apologies to Plato and Alan Moore -- who vets the vetmen?
• In Texas this week, a 14-year-old boy was killed in a hunting accident. His grandfather accidentally shot him in the back when the trigger of his AK-47 -- that's right, kids, his AK-47 -- snagged on a branch and discharged. An AK-47? An AK-47? What the fuck were they hunting?
• Al Qaeda? Wild hogs with tech nines? Advocates for sensible gun control?
• Here's a great Slate.com article about how the new (lovely and delicious) 3G iPhone may be the beginning of the end for stand-alone GPS manufacturers. The piece, by the delightfully named Chadwick Matlin, also scores the TWM Funniest Sentence of the Week Award: In a perfect world, the GPS iPhone might even do the impossible — make Twitter useful.
• Well, I doubt it.
• Looking for a fun, breezy little guilty pleasure to help you survive the summer television doldrums? Then I heartily recommend you check out The Next Food Network Star. Part Survivor, part American Idol, and (last week, at least) part Amazing Race, the show packs good food, great challenges, and an entertaining mix of personal drama into every sixty-minute episode. It airs Sunday night at 10, with replays Thursday night at 9 and Saturday afternoon at 2. Last week's second episode -- which you can still catch, or at least DVR tomorrow -- was the most brisk and enjoyable installment I've seen in the last two seasons. If you're a foodie and/or a reality tv junkie, I guarantee you'll be hooked before the second commercial.
• Now that The Incredible Hulk is getting mostly mediocre reviews, how long do you think it'll be before the folks at Marvel try a third time? Unless they can pry Christopher Nolan away from the Batman franchise, I'd say it's about time to hang it up.
• Now that the Pens' season is over, and with what could be their most important off-season ever now officially underway, I'd say it's time for the Pittsburgh hockey faithful to unleash a new and equally fervent chant: Let's Go, Ray! Let's Go, Ray! Let's Go, Ray!
• Let's Go, Ray.
Posted at 04:05 PM
Fri - June 6, 2008
(6.6 ON THE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON (RICHTER SCALE)
knowing the bias of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all the games and booths at tonight's
Linden Elementary Fun Fair. But without me in the dunk
tank...
• First, an update to Saturday's post about Senator Make Stuff Up and the alleged rise in Hispanic Hate Crimes... The source of Senator Obama's claim may be a recent report by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which found that hate crimes against Hispanics more than doubled from 2006 to 2007. In Tennessee. Not in Florida, where he was speaking. Nor across the nation, as he implied.
• The total number of offenses against Hispanics in Tennessee was 47, up from 14 in 2006. That was 5 more than the number of offenses against whites (which were up 40%), 62 fewer than the number against blacks (up 49%). In the previous year, from 2005 to 2006, Tennessee hate crimes against Hispanics fell 26%, from 19 to 14. (Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh must not have been broadcast in Tennessee during that time.)
• The report also found that hate crimes against the disabled in Tennessee rose 3,000% (from 1 to 30) between 2006 to 2007. Whose fault do you think that is? James Cagney?
• My favorite -- by which I mean, the one most likely to make my head explode all over this keyboard -- stat in the report was this: there were 101 Hate Crimes of Unknown Bias Motivation. That's right. Unknown. Unknown was the second highest number on the list, accounting for 22.7% of all Tennessee hate crimes total. Uh, folks? I'm sorry to trouble you with the indelicate asking of painfully obvious, but... If you don't know the Bias Motivation, how can you possibly know it was a Hate Crime?
• I'm just curious. How do you know?
• No. I mean, seriously. How do you know?
• The Artist Formerly Known as The Barmaid emailed this week to say I should read the (now in)famous Vanity Fair Bill Clinton article, if only for this firecracker of a sentence: But the real cynosure of the occasion last August was the smiling, snowy-haired man who is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral he attends, the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Hard to argue with that. Or the recommendation.
• My pal over at the PG, editor extraordinaire Mr. John Allison, emailed this week with a heads-up about two upcoming books he thinks I may want to add to my reading list. The first, Mathew Honan's Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle: 366 Ways He Really Cares, is a whimsical little number that evolved from a web site of (roughly) the same name, to which I first alerted you back in February. The second, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, may be even funnier, though unintentionally so. Titled Obama - The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate, the book comes from Progressive Press, which bills itself as America's Dedicated Truth Publisher. As if that weren't alarming enough, here's a sample sentence: Barack Obama is a deeply troubled personality, the megalomaniac front man for a postmodern coup by the intelligence agencies, using fake polls, mobs of swarming adolescents, superrich contributors and orchestrated media hysteria to short-circuit normal politics and seize power.
• At least now Senator Sniper Fire knows who to blame next. The campaign wasn't my fault, and it wasn't the fault of all my crappy advisors either. It was the CIA's fault! It wasn't sexism or rank incompetence that did us in, it was a vast left-wing conspiracy of a postmodern coup!
• No, really. Tell us. How in the hell do you know?
• Oh, wait. I think I got it. Let's say someone beats up a disabled lesbian of Asian and Hispanic descent. That's gotta be a Hate Crime, right? (Hell, it could be four...) But suppose the attacker doesn't actually utter any slurs or epithets while delivering the beating. That means the police, and thus the TBI, don't know for certain which bias -- but it had to be one, right? and that would make it hurt more, wouldn't it? -- motivated the beating. So it's definitely a Hate Crime -- with all those victimhoods to choose from, how could it not be? -- but, they just don't know which one. So: Hate Crime, Known. Motivational Bias, Unknown.
• Sigh.
• Ten weeks ago, if you'd asked me whether any version of Nintendo's Mario Kart -- or, for that matter, any video game by anyone -- could, for sheer playability and relentless replayability, could have measured up to the original SNES version of Super Mario Kart, I would have told you that you were a fool. But now, after a little more than two months of getting the feel of the game and the wheel -- which is, all by itself, a simple stroke of genius -- and after enduring dozens of epic, blue-shell-of-death-descending races with the boys, I'm prepared to declare that Mario Kart Wii is not just the single greatest game yet released for Nintendo's most recent, fiendishly clever, family-friendly gaming system, but also that it may just be the equal of -- or at least a close second to -- its iconic forerunner.
• The game is so damned addictive, you'd think the disc were laced with heroin.
• The music world lost another of the greats this week -- a man without whom a whole lot of artists would have had no particularly place to go. Or beat to keep. Rest (and rock, and roll) in peace, Bo Diddley.
• Reasons and explanations will come later, but for now, if I had to rank the Pens' big three free agents in the order that Ray Shero should pursue them, I'd call it: 1) Hossa, 2) Orpik, 3) Malone. In a perfect world, you re-sign all three, along with role players like Adam Hall and Jarkko Ruutu, all while locking up Malkin, Fleury, and Staal long-term. In a less-than-perfect world with a suddenly-not-as-large-as-we'd-like salary cap era, you have to make choices and set priorities. And right now, no matter how much I love the other two guys, and unless he really, really wants to break the bank, a world-class, two-way sniper like Hossa tops my list.
• And, finally... T-Minus two weeks 'til vacation! Not that I'm counting.
• First, an update to Saturday's post about Senator Make Stuff Up and the alleged rise in Hispanic Hate Crimes... The source of Senator Obama's claim may be a recent report by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which found that hate crimes against Hispanics more than doubled from 2006 to 2007. In Tennessee. Not in Florida, where he was speaking. Nor across the nation, as he implied.
• The total number of offenses against Hispanics in Tennessee was 47, up from 14 in 2006. That was 5 more than the number of offenses against whites (which were up 40%), 62 fewer than the number against blacks (up 49%). In the previous year, from 2005 to 2006, Tennessee hate crimes against Hispanics fell 26%, from 19 to 14. (Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh must not have been broadcast in Tennessee during that time.)
• The report also found that hate crimes against the disabled in Tennessee rose 3,000% (from 1 to 30) between 2006 to 2007. Whose fault do you think that is? James Cagney?
• My favorite -- by which I mean, the one most likely to make my head explode all over this keyboard -- stat in the report was this: there were 101 Hate Crimes of Unknown Bias Motivation. That's right. Unknown. Unknown was the second highest number on the list, accounting for 22.7% of all Tennessee hate crimes total. Uh, folks? I'm sorry to trouble you with the indelicate asking of painfully obvious, but... If you don't know the Bias Motivation, how can you possibly know it was a Hate Crime?
• I'm just curious. How do you know?
• No. I mean, seriously. How do you know?
• The Artist Formerly Known as The Barmaid emailed this week to say I should read the (now in)famous Vanity Fair Bill Clinton article, if only for this firecracker of a sentence: But the real cynosure of the occasion last August was the smiling, snowy-haired man who is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral he attends, the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Hard to argue with that. Or the recommendation.
• My pal over at the PG, editor extraordinaire Mr. John Allison, emailed this week with a heads-up about two upcoming books he thinks I may want to add to my reading list. The first, Mathew Honan's Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle: 366 Ways He Really Cares, is a whimsical little number that evolved from a web site of (roughly) the same name, to which I first alerted you back in February. The second, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, may be even funnier, though unintentionally so. Titled Obama - The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate, the book comes from Progressive Press, which bills itself as America's Dedicated Truth Publisher. As if that weren't alarming enough, here's a sample sentence: Barack Obama is a deeply troubled personality, the megalomaniac front man for a postmodern coup by the intelligence agencies, using fake polls, mobs of swarming adolescents, superrich contributors and orchestrated media hysteria to short-circuit normal politics and seize power.
• At least now Senator Sniper Fire knows who to blame next. The campaign wasn't my fault, and it wasn't the fault of all my crappy advisors either. It was the CIA's fault! It wasn't sexism or rank incompetence that did us in, it was a vast left-wing conspiracy of a postmodern coup!
• No, really. Tell us. How in the hell do you know?
• Oh, wait. I think I got it. Let's say someone beats up a disabled lesbian of Asian and Hispanic descent. That's gotta be a Hate Crime, right? (Hell, it could be four...) But suppose the attacker doesn't actually utter any slurs or epithets while delivering the beating. That means the police, and thus the TBI, don't know for certain which bias -- but it had to be one, right? and that would make it hurt more, wouldn't it? -- motivated the beating. So it's definitely a Hate Crime -- with all those victimhoods to choose from, how could it not be? -- but, they just don't know which one. So: Hate Crime, Known. Motivational Bias, Unknown.
• Sigh.
• Ten weeks ago, if you'd asked me whether any version of Nintendo's Mario Kart -- or, for that matter, any video game by anyone -- could, for sheer playability and relentless replayability, could have measured up to the original SNES version of Super Mario Kart, I would have told you that you were a fool. But now, after a little more than two months of getting the feel of the game and the wheel -- which is, all by itself, a simple stroke of genius -- and after enduring dozens of epic, blue-shell-of-death-descending races with the boys, I'm prepared to declare that Mario Kart Wii is not just the single greatest game yet released for Nintendo's most recent, fiendishly clever, family-friendly gaming system, but also that it may just be the equal of -- or at least a close second to -- its iconic forerunner.
• The game is so damned addictive, you'd think the disc were laced with heroin.
• The music world lost another of the greats this week -- a man without whom a whole lot of artists would have had no particularly place to go. Or beat to keep. Rest (and rock, and roll) in peace, Bo Diddley.
• Reasons and explanations will come later, but for now, if I had to rank the Pens' big three free agents in the order that Ray Shero should pursue them, I'd call it: 1) Hossa, 2) Orpik, 3) Malone. In a perfect world, you re-sign all three, along with role players like Adam Hall and Jarkko Ruutu, all while locking up Malkin, Fleury, and Staal long-term. In a less-than-perfect world with a suddenly-not-as-large-as-we'd-like salary cap era, you have to make choices and set priorities. And right now, no matter how much I love the other two guys, and unless he really, really wants to break the bank, a world-class, two-way sniper like Hossa tops my list.
• And, finally... T-Minus two weeks 'til vacation! Not that I'm counting.
Posted at 04:09 PM
Fri - May 30, 2008
(BODYGUARD-FREE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
registering the voters of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those emails that flooded my inbox
this morning, just trying to squeeze in a couple of important points before the
weekend arrives...
• The Burgher has already posted a link to this video of The Boy Who Would Be Mayor mumbling and bumbling and stumbling his way through a few simple questions from local reporters, but after watching it, I'm compelled to do the same. I'm also going to forward it to anyone I ever meet who thinks you can not tell, simply by looking or listening to him, when someone is A) lying and B) dumber than dirt.
• For more on A), see Char's excellent work over at the Pist-Gazette. For more on B), well, just read this.
• Interesting story at CNN.com, courtesy of Anderson Cooper's AC 360, about how Senator Breath of Fresh Air worked to invalidate the voting petition signatures of all three of his challengers, including long-time community activist and incumbent Alice Palmer, during his 1996 Illinois State Senate campaign. What he did is described in the story as both perfectly legal and Chicago-style destroy your enemy political maneuvering. How it reconciles with a man who repeatedly proclaims himself to be both far above the old kind of politics and a bringer of change and unity who wants to ensure that no voice goes unheard in public discourse, I will leave for you decide. (I'm sure you know what I think.)
• My favorite passage in the piece: The Obama campaign called this report "a hit job." They insisted CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. Only a campaign this full of itself, in support of a candidate this full of himself, and thus quite full of something else, would consider an objective reporting of the facts a hit job and an on-the-record political supporter an objective source of information.
• But, hey, what else should we expect from the campaign of a candidate who, when pimping his uncle's World War II heroics, didn't know the difference between Buchenwald and Auschwitz? I guess those concentration camps all look the same to him.
• Oh, Scott McClellan. If only you'd grown these balls four years ago.
• The TWM New Math Customer Comment of the Week Award goes to Emma's Reviews, who advises iTunes users on the new KT Tunstall EP: I think if you were going to get only 1 song, then I would get "The Other Side of the World" and "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree." They are both really good.
• As are the two new Coldplay songs, Violet Hill and Viva La Vida. I was no fan of their last CD, but if these two tracks are any indication, the new one could be pretty darned good.
• After a week of pandering, maybe-we-can-get-some-more-young-women-to-read-us features on the new, almost certainly insipid Sex and the City movie opening today -- that's right, Post-Gazette, I'm talking to you -- along comes just the tonic I needed, in the form of the first two sentences of Roger Ebert's review: I am not the person to review this movie. Perhaps you will enjoy a review from someone who disqualifies himself at the outset, doesn't much like most of the characters, and is bored by their bubble-brained conversations. Many fans of the film will, I'm sure, be compelled to dismiss Mr. Ebert's view because he possesses a penis. Which is fair enough, I suppose, when you remember that Mr. Ebert is compelled to dismiss the film (and the television show on which it is based) because he possesses a brain.
• As someone who possesses both, and who has never been especially ashamed of either, I'm gonna have to trust Roger on this one.
• There are few greater pleasures in life than kicking back, turning on your mind and your heart and your soul, and surrendering yourself to the powers of great storytelling. Minus all those damned, intrusive commercials -- may God forever bless the inventors of the first DVR -- the season finale of LOST, like almost all of the show's fantastic fourth season, proved that point quite nicely again last night.
• After sixteen years without a home Stanley Cup Finals game, seventeen years without a Stanley Cup Finals loss, and three playoff rounds in which the Pens lost only two games, one each after already winning three games in a series, Game 3 was, without questions, as intense and urgent a hockey game as this town has seen in a very, very, very long time. Which explains why my heart was in my stomach, my stomach was in my throat, and my head came awfully close to exploding all over section C12 at least a dozen times Wednesday night. I expect all of that and more tomorrow night, when the stakes will be almost as high and, one more game on, the emotions will be even higher. Add to that the joy of taking Adam to his first-ever Stanley Cup Finals game -- he's been a fan all his life, has been to dozens of games (even during the lean years, when his fandom never, ever wavered) and at least a half-dozen playoff games, but has never seen the Pens get this far in his lifetime -- and there's a very good chance that, should the Pens pull out another one, no matter what happens from the time the puck drops until the final horn sounds, it will be the single greatest hockey game I've ever attended. Which leaves me, then, just one more (perfectly predictable, but still essential) thing to say:
• LET'S GO, PENS.
• The Burgher has already posted a link to this video of The Boy Who Would Be Mayor mumbling and bumbling and stumbling his way through a few simple questions from local reporters, but after watching it, I'm compelled to do the same. I'm also going to forward it to anyone I ever meet who thinks you can not tell, simply by looking or listening to him, when someone is A) lying and B) dumber than dirt.
• For more on A), see Char's excellent work over at the Pist-Gazette. For more on B), well, just read this.
• Interesting story at CNN.com, courtesy of Anderson Cooper's AC 360, about how Senator Breath of Fresh Air worked to invalidate the voting petition signatures of all three of his challengers, including long-time community activist and incumbent Alice Palmer, during his 1996 Illinois State Senate campaign. What he did is described in the story as both perfectly legal and Chicago-style destroy your enemy political maneuvering. How it reconciles with a man who repeatedly proclaims himself to be both far above the old kind of politics and a bringer of change and unity who wants to ensure that no voice goes unheard in public discourse, I will leave for you decide. (I'm sure you know what I think.)
• My favorite passage in the piece: The Obama campaign called this report "a hit job." They insisted CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. Only a campaign this full of itself, in support of a candidate this full of himself, and thus quite full of something else, would consider an objective reporting of the facts a hit job and an on-the-record political supporter an objective source of information.
• But, hey, what else should we expect from the campaign of a candidate who, when pimping his uncle's World War II heroics, didn't know the difference between Buchenwald and Auschwitz? I guess those concentration camps all look the same to him.
• Oh, Scott McClellan. If only you'd grown these balls four years ago.
• The TWM New Math Customer Comment of the Week Award goes to Emma's Reviews, who advises iTunes users on the new KT Tunstall EP: I think if you were going to get only 1 song, then I would get "The Other Side of the World" and "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree." They are both really good.
• As are the two new Coldplay songs, Violet Hill and Viva La Vida. I was no fan of their last CD, but if these two tracks are any indication, the new one could be pretty darned good.
• After a week of pandering, maybe-we-can-get-some-more-young-women-to-read-us features on the new, almost certainly insipid Sex and the City movie opening today -- that's right, Post-Gazette, I'm talking to you -- along comes just the tonic I needed, in the form of the first two sentences of Roger Ebert's review: I am not the person to review this movie. Perhaps you will enjoy a review from someone who disqualifies himself at the outset, doesn't much like most of the characters, and is bored by their bubble-brained conversations. Many fans of the film will, I'm sure, be compelled to dismiss Mr. Ebert's view because he possesses a penis. Which is fair enough, I suppose, when you remember that Mr. Ebert is compelled to dismiss the film (and the television show on which it is based) because he possesses a brain.
• As someone who possesses both, and who has never been especially ashamed of either, I'm gonna have to trust Roger on this one.
• There are few greater pleasures in life than kicking back, turning on your mind and your heart and your soul, and surrendering yourself to the powers of great storytelling. Minus all those damned, intrusive commercials -- may God forever bless the inventors of the first DVR -- the season finale of LOST, like almost all of the show's fantastic fourth season, proved that point quite nicely again last night.
• After sixteen years without a home Stanley Cup Finals game, seventeen years without a Stanley Cup Finals loss, and three playoff rounds in which the Pens lost only two games, one each after already winning three games in a series, Game 3 was, without questions, as intense and urgent a hockey game as this town has seen in a very, very, very long time. Which explains why my heart was in my stomach, my stomach was in my throat, and my head came awfully close to exploding all over section C12 at least a dozen times Wednesday night. I expect all of that and more tomorrow night, when the stakes will be almost as high and, one more game on, the emotions will be even higher. Add to that the joy of taking Adam to his first-ever Stanley Cup Finals game -- he's been a fan all his life, has been to dozens of games (even during the lean years, when his fandom never, ever wavered) and at least a half-dozen playoff games, but has never seen the Pens get this far in his lifetime -- and there's a very good chance that, should the Pens pull out another one, no matter what happens from the time the puck drops until the final horn sounds, it will be the single greatest hockey game I've ever attended. Which leaves me, then, just one more (perfectly predictable, but still essential) thing to say:
• LET'S GO, PENS.
Posted at 03:38 PM
Fri - May 23, 2008
(NOT NECESSARILY THE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
hedging the bets of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all the endless analyses before the
start of the Stanley Cup Finals. But without that blowhard Don
Cherry...
• First, a quick follow-up: I received two emails -- one thoughtful, one pretending to be -- from readers wanting to protest my tactics in Tuesday's epic WWACD? post. Both seemed to think that what I did -- responding to an immature, marginally literate, fantasy-based insult with a withering, hyper-literate, fact- and example-based assault -- was just terrible. That's funny enough at first blush, but funnier still when you realize that neither emailer seemed to have a problem with the provocation. Their complaints reminded me of the responses I used to get from students whose papers or presentations earned grades far lower than they expected: Oh, that's so harsh. How could you be so tough on them? To which the answer was always: Because that's what they earned. And so what they deserved.
• How wonderful, and refreshing, to list only two names on this week's installment of The Wall.
• If those small numbers continue apace, it's only a matter of time before President Bush can start golfing again.
• While we're on that subject... Rob Rogers' cartoon on that subject in Tuesday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was his best piece of the year and maybe one of his best pieces ever. It's like a punch in the gut and a kick in the head; you're a little queasy and a little woozy, and by the time you've stopped laughing, you don't know whether to cry or scream, but you know you'd wouldn't mind hitting and kicking someone in return.
• Anyone, including all those silly people who've been writing letters to the editor to complain about it, who thinks that Rogers went too far, or took a bit of a political cheap shot, should, besides learning to think a little more critically, read these remarks -- to which I first alerted you more than two years ago -- and see that the satire is not all that far from reality. The highlight: President No Self Awareness, while visiting multiple-amputee Iraq War Veterans at Brooke Army Medical Center, says: As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself -- not here at the hospital, but in combat with a Cedar. I eventually won. The Cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel.
• And thank you for yours, George.
• Senator Breath of Fresh Air: I don't take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists. Slate.com's Christopher Beam: Yeah, as long as you don't count all of these guys.
• I don't agree with everything in this George Will column, but I do love the way it repeatedly raises the great environmental spectre under which we were living thirty years ago -- the next Ice Age! -- and wonders what happened to it. As someone who, at age 7, got pretty freaked out by the idea that he might one day have to live on a glacier in southeastern Pennsylvania, I've been wondering that for a while now too. I, like Mr. Will, have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
• Sample text, from the February 1973 issue of Science Digest: The world's climatologists are agreed [that we must] prepare for the next ice age. What a difference 35 years can make. If I live to be 74 -- and I sure hope I do -- it will be interesting to see what great climatological crisis threatens us then.
• The Next Great Dust Bowl? The Next Round of Continental Drift? The International Potato Famine?
• Pittsburgh Police are on the lookout for a man who accosted an 8-year-old girl on her way to school on Wednesday. Here, according to one officer, is a description of the suspect: [he] may have been 18 to 20 years old or as old as 40. [He] may have been using a silver car. With that kind of detail, you can bet he's already in custody.
• This past Tuesday, May 20th, I received in the mail a new Eddie Bauer catalog. The Fall Preview catalog.
• If this retail rushing of the season continues apace, next year at this time, I'll probably get the Fall Preview catalog for 2010.
• Now that I've seen the film, Roger Ebert's single sentence about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull rings all the more true. If you liked the other films -- or, at least the first and the third ones -- you will most certainly like the fourth. It labors a bit at times, and the whole is not quite equal to the sum of its parts, but you will have a good time, you will be thrilled and amused and amazed, and you will, especially when that fanfare kicks in, or when Karen Allen appears, or when you realize that Harrison Ford hasn't been this likeable on screen in almost twenty years, have a smile on your face for the whole two-hour running time. I'd say that's well worth your $8.
• USA Today's Ken Barnes, who writes Listen Up, a great music blog full of eclectic -- and never stuffy or pretentious -- recommendations, this week calls Southern Rock Opera, an amazing double disc by TWM-favorite Drive-By Truckers, the best rock album of the century so far. I'd be hard-pressed to disagree.
• ESPN's John Buccigross proves once again why he's one of the best hockey writers in the country with this week's column, in which he breaks down the Stanley Cup Finals, looks back on his pre-season predictions for both the Pens and the Wings, and lays out a so-sensible-it-probably-wouldn't-work plan for the Pens to re-sign Hossa and Malone while extending Malkin, Staal and Fleury all at the same time.
• Come on, Saturday night...
• First, a quick follow-up: I received two emails -- one thoughtful, one pretending to be -- from readers wanting to protest my tactics in Tuesday's epic WWACD? post. Both seemed to think that what I did -- responding to an immature, marginally literate, fantasy-based insult with a withering, hyper-literate, fact- and example-based assault -- was just terrible. That's funny enough at first blush, but funnier still when you realize that neither emailer seemed to have a problem with the provocation. Their complaints reminded me of the responses I used to get from students whose papers or presentations earned grades far lower than they expected: Oh, that's so harsh. How could you be so tough on them? To which the answer was always: Because that's what they earned. And so what they deserved.
• How wonderful, and refreshing, to list only two names on this week's installment of The Wall.
• If those small numbers continue apace, it's only a matter of time before President Bush can start golfing again.
• While we're on that subject... Rob Rogers' cartoon on that subject in Tuesday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was his best piece of the year and maybe one of his best pieces ever. It's like a punch in the gut and a kick in the head; you're a little queasy and a little woozy, and by the time you've stopped laughing, you don't know whether to cry or scream, but you know you'd wouldn't mind hitting and kicking someone in return.
• Anyone, including all those silly people who've been writing letters to the editor to complain about it, who thinks that Rogers went too far, or took a bit of a political cheap shot, should, besides learning to think a little more critically, read these remarks -- to which I first alerted you more than two years ago -- and see that the satire is not all that far from reality. The highlight: President No Self Awareness, while visiting multiple-amputee Iraq War Veterans at Brooke Army Medical Center, says: As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself -- not here at the hospital, but in combat with a Cedar. I eventually won. The Cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel.
• And thank you for yours, George.
• Senator Breath of Fresh Air: I don't take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists. Slate.com's Christopher Beam: Yeah, as long as you don't count all of these guys.
• I don't agree with everything in this George Will column, but I do love the way it repeatedly raises the great environmental spectre under which we were living thirty years ago -- the next Ice Age! -- and wonders what happened to it. As someone who, at age 7, got pretty freaked out by the idea that he might one day have to live on a glacier in southeastern Pennsylvania, I've been wondering that for a while now too. I, like Mr. Will, have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
• Sample text, from the February 1973 issue of Science Digest: The world's climatologists are agreed [that we must] prepare for the next ice age. What a difference 35 years can make. If I live to be 74 -- and I sure hope I do -- it will be interesting to see what great climatological crisis threatens us then.
• The Next Great Dust Bowl? The Next Round of Continental Drift? The International Potato Famine?
• Pittsburgh Police are on the lookout for a man who accosted an 8-year-old girl on her way to school on Wednesday. Here, according to one officer, is a description of the suspect: [he] may have been 18 to 20 years old or as old as 40. [He] may have been using a silver car. With that kind of detail, you can bet he's already in custody.
• This past Tuesday, May 20th, I received in the mail a new Eddie Bauer catalog. The Fall Preview catalog.
• If this retail rushing of the season continues apace, next year at this time, I'll probably get the Fall Preview catalog for 2010.
• Now that I've seen the film, Roger Ebert's single sentence about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull rings all the more true. If you liked the other films -- or, at least the first and the third ones -- you will most certainly like the fourth. It labors a bit at times, and the whole is not quite equal to the sum of its parts, but you will have a good time, you will be thrilled and amused and amazed, and you will, especially when that fanfare kicks in, or when Karen Allen appears, or when you realize that Harrison Ford hasn't been this likeable on screen in almost twenty years, have a smile on your face for the whole two-hour running time. I'd say that's well worth your $8.
• USA Today's Ken Barnes, who writes Listen Up, a great music blog full of eclectic -- and never stuffy or pretentious -- recommendations, this week calls Southern Rock Opera, an amazing double disc by TWM-favorite Drive-By Truckers, the best rock album of the century so far. I'd be hard-pressed to disagree.
• ESPN's John Buccigross proves once again why he's one of the best hockey writers in the country with this week's column, in which he breaks down the Stanley Cup Finals, looks back on his pre-season predictions for both the Pens and the Wings, and lays out a so-sensible-it-probably-wouldn't-work plan for the Pens to re-sign Hossa and Malone while extending Malkin, Staal and Fleury all at the same time.
• Come on, Saturday night...
Posted at 04:12 PM
Fri - May 16, 2008
NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON (WITHOUT THE USUAL POMP & CIRCUMSTANCE)
echoing the silence of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those fan-made signs at the
Wachovia Center last night. Except smart. And subtle. And not full of
profanity...
...(well, okay, not too full of profanity)...
• It's gettin' kinda testy out there, isn't it? First, President Bring 'Em On, when he's not crowing about giving up golf (sort of) in solidarity with the troops, compares Ahmadinejad to Hitler and, by extension, Obama to Chamberlain. Not to be outdone, Senator Breath of Fresh Air, when he's not sweetie-ing female reporters or trying to explain himself for doing so, digs into his bag of GOP tricks, which he must have borrowed from Karl Rove, or maybe from Hillary, and laments not so much what the President said but where he said it: a political attack targeted toward the domestic market in front of a foreign delegation. (Which sounds like he's pissed that Bush bought a Toyota while a group of Scandinavian tourists watched.) What a spectacle. And what an embarrassment to us all.
• Someone oughta tell President No Foreign Policy Credibility to shut up. And then someone oughta tell Senator No Foreign Policy Experience to toughen up. If not, it's gonna be a long six months.
• It's already been a long week, and it got a little longer today when Senator Obama chirped that Senator McCain had a naive and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington will somehow cause Iran to give up its nuclear program and support for terrorism. This, one day after Senator McCain sniped that Obama's foreign policy position shows naivety and inexperience and lack of judgment, to say that he wants to sit down across the table from an individual who leads a country that says Israel is a stinking corpse. And only a few moments after he lamented that Senator McCain's remark was the kind of dishonest, divisive attacks against which he stands. Uh, Senator? What you said about Senator McCain was pretty much the same thing he said about you. Does that mean you're also launching the kind of dishonest, divisive attacks against which you stand? Isn't your response just a tad hypocritical? Or are attacks okay as long as they're in retaliation for others? I think we need a judge's -- or at least a referee's -- ruling on this.
• But then, as Brooks Orpik -- or any true hockey fan -- will tell you, retaliation is almost guaranteed to earn you a trip to the penalty box. Even when you're right. And even when your opponent is a cheap-shotting, classless, gutless thug.
• That's right, Scottie Upshall, I'm talking about you.
• The TWM Award for Worst Metaphor of the Week goes to Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who uncorked this little beauty about the Flyers' awful performance in Tuesday night's first period: There was a storm? Looked more like a low pressure system. Uh, Gene? Storms are low pressure systems. Hurricanes are low pressure systems. Typhoons and cyclones -- you know, like the one that just hit Myanmar -- are low pressure systems. Tornadoes -- you know, like the ones that recently hit the central and southern U.S. -- form in low pressure systems. And, given the disastrous nature of that metaphor, I'm guessing that it, too, formed in a low-pressure system. One that hasn't moved out of the PG Sports section as long as I've been reading it.
• Here's a good rule of thumb and keyboard for all you kids out there at home playing with metaphors: when you write them, be sure they do not, for the sake of a crappy pun, undercut the very point you're trying to make.
• Remember when I wrote that Gene Collier tries too hard to be arch and clever? That's exactly what I meant.
• While we're on the subjects of trying too hard and writing too bad(ly)... With probing thoughts like these -- I’ve always tried to write about universal themes, like love and hope and dreams. This is a book about dreams, about the American Dream, and sometimes they come true and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they come true and don’t go so well, and you have to get over it. -- it's a wonder James Frey had to resort to overcooked, bullshit memoirs to get himself published. You'd think he could have gone straight into self-help books.
• And, hey, he still could have appeared on Oprah.
• While we're on the subject of people in need of help... Can someone please explain why people allow their teenaged daughters to wear shorts and/or sweatpants and/or miniskirts with the word PINK emblazoned across their asses? Does the insinuation, the lurid, right-out-there, more-than-a-little-creepy connotation not bother them? Not give them even the slightest parental pause?
• What's next for the fourteen-yeard-old set? Skirts, shorts, and sweatpants with CHERRY printed on 'em? Or maybe PUSSY?
• Walking back to the 4Runner after yet another excellent lunch at the Food for Thought Deli on N. Craig Street, I was struck by the grandiosity, and maybe even the pomposity, of the names of some of the apartment buildings in that part of North Oakland. The Ambassador. Bayard Mansions. The King Edward -- which looks, not coincidentally, like it hasn't been cleaned or renovated since King Edward held the throne. It appears that the property owners are banking on the names and some fresh, heaping layers of mulch under the bushes to convince all those Pitt students that they really are living in the lap -- or perhaps the palace -- of luxury.
• Coming soon for thirteen-year-old boys: sweat shorts and boxers with WOOD printed straight up the crotch.
• If I ever find any for (ahem) grown-ups that have DICK printed on them, I'll buy a couple in extra-large and send them to Mike Richards and Scottie Upshall, both of whom proved last night that, whatever their surplus of talent, they have the deficits of class and dignity and maturity that make them ideal standard bearers for that black-and-orange punk patrol on Broad Street.
• If anyone at the NHL home office had any guts -- or, better yet, any self-respect -- they'd at least fine and maybe even suspend both Richards and Upshall for what they did at the end of last night's game. Cheap head-hunting and two-handed slashes are despicable at any time during the game, but when they occur in the last sixty seconds, after the game has been decided and the other team has essentially let down its guard, they're especially pathetic. That display was disgusting and embarrassing -- not just to the team, but to the whole damned league. As long as the powers-that-be allow that crap to persist, the NHL will, no matter how great its sport and the vast majority of its players, be afforded the respect it could, and probably should, command in the world of top-tier sports.
• I've been saying all along that Jordan Staal and Tyler Kennedy -- who continues to impress the hell out of me with both his work ethic and his hustle -- need more ice time, because they're offensive threats as well as great checkers. And now that he's back (almost) to 100%, (Mad) Max Talbot needs more ice time too. And that's why Michael Therrien's decision -- Love/Hate Meter tilting hard toward LOVE! -- to unleash those three on a reconstituted third line late in last night's game made such perfect sense even without those two great goals. I have no problem with switching Talbot and Jarko Ruutu permanently, but, at the very least, Therrien needs to get Talbot out there with Staal and Kennedy a lot more in Game 5 on Sunday.
• You could make a convincing argument -- and I just might -- that, besides Marc-Andre Fleury, Staal and Kennedy have been the Penguins' two most consistent forwards throughout this entire playoff run. Not the most productive, certainly, and not the most dynamic or explosive, but the most consistent. I don't remember either of them ever having a bad shift, much less a bad game. Which is all the more impressive when you consider that their combined ages are roughly one-half-year younger than Gary Roberts. And when you consider that Staal played that two-goal gem of a game last night only a little more than 24 hours after burying his grandfather.
• Maybe someone oughta Chuck-Norris-ify him. Or at least have him give Barack Obama a few lessons in how to stay tough, stay focused, and keep playing within the system, no matter what sorts of tragedy or nasty, nattering opposition you face.
• [Let's Go, Pens.]
...(well, okay, not too full of profanity)...
• It's gettin' kinda testy out there, isn't it? First, President Bring 'Em On, when he's not crowing about giving up golf (sort of) in solidarity with the troops, compares Ahmadinejad to Hitler and, by extension, Obama to Chamberlain. Not to be outdone, Senator Breath of Fresh Air, when he's not sweetie-ing female reporters or trying to explain himself for doing so, digs into his bag of GOP tricks, which he must have borrowed from Karl Rove, or maybe from Hillary, and laments not so much what the President said but where he said it: a political attack targeted toward the domestic market in front of a foreign delegation. (Which sounds like he's pissed that Bush bought a Toyota while a group of Scandinavian tourists watched.) What a spectacle. And what an embarrassment to us all.
• Someone oughta tell President No Foreign Policy Credibility to shut up. And then someone oughta tell Senator No Foreign Policy Experience to toughen up. If not, it's gonna be a long six months.
• It's already been a long week, and it got a little longer today when Senator Obama chirped that Senator McCain had a naive and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington will somehow cause Iran to give up its nuclear program and support for terrorism. This, one day after Senator McCain sniped that Obama's foreign policy position shows naivety and inexperience and lack of judgment, to say that he wants to sit down across the table from an individual who leads a country that says Israel is a stinking corpse. And only a few moments after he lamented that Senator McCain's remark was the kind of dishonest, divisive attacks against which he stands. Uh, Senator? What you said about Senator McCain was pretty much the same thing he said about you. Does that mean you're also launching the kind of dishonest, divisive attacks against which you stand? Isn't your response just a tad hypocritical? Or are attacks okay as long as they're in retaliation for others? I think we need a judge's -- or at least a referee's -- ruling on this.
• But then, as Brooks Orpik -- or any true hockey fan -- will tell you, retaliation is almost guaranteed to earn you a trip to the penalty box. Even when you're right. And even when your opponent is a cheap-shotting, classless, gutless thug.
• That's right, Scottie Upshall, I'm talking about you.
• The TWM Award for Worst Metaphor of the Week goes to Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who uncorked this little beauty about the Flyers' awful performance in Tuesday night's first period: There was a storm? Looked more like a low pressure system. Uh, Gene? Storms are low pressure systems. Hurricanes are low pressure systems. Typhoons and cyclones -- you know, like the one that just hit Myanmar -- are low pressure systems. Tornadoes -- you know, like the ones that recently hit the central and southern U.S. -- form in low pressure systems. And, given the disastrous nature of that metaphor, I'm guessing that it, too, formed in a low-pressure system. One that hasn't moved out of the PG Sports section as long as I've been reading it.
• Here's a good rule of thumb and keyboard for all you kids out there at home playing with metaphors: when you write them, be sure they do not, for the sake of a crappy pun, undercut the very point you're trying to make.
• Remember when I wrote that Gene Collier tries too hard to be arch and clever? That's exactly what I meant.
• While we're on the subjects of trying too hard and writing too bad(ly)... With probing thoughts like these -- I’ve always tried to write about universal themes, like love and hope and dreams. This is a book about dreams, about the American Dream, and sometimes they come true and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they come true and don’t go so well, and you have to get over it. -- it's a wonder James Frey had to resort to overcooked, bullshit memoirs to get himself published. You'd think he could have gone straight into self-help books.
• And, hey, he still could have appeared on Oprah.
• While we're on the subject of people in need of help... Can someone please explain why people allow their teenaged daughters to wear shorts and/or sweatpants and/or miniskirts with the word PINK emblazoned across their asses? Does the insinuation, the lurid, right-out-there, more-than-a-little-creepy connotation not bother them? Not give them even the slightest parental pause?
• What's next for the fourteen-yeard-old set? Skirts, shorts, and sweatpants with CHERRY printed on 'em? Or maybe PUSSY?
• Walking back to the 4Runner after yet another excellent lunch at the Food for Thought Deli on N. Craig Street, I was struck by the grandiosity, and maybe even the pomposity, of the names of some of the apartment buildings in that part of North Oakland. The Ambassador. Bayard Mansions. The King Edward -- which looks, not coincidentally, like it hasn't been cleaned or renovated since King Edward held the throne. It appears that the property owners are banking on the names and some fresh, heaping layers of mulch under the bushes to convince all those Pitt students that they really are living in the lap -- or perhaps the palace -- of luxury.
• Coming soon for thirteen-year-old boys: sweat shorts and boxers with WOOD printed straight up the crotch.
• If I ever find any for (ahem) grown-ups that have DICK printed on them, I'll buy a couple in extra-large and send them to Mike Richards and Scottie Upshall, both of whom proved last night that, whatever their surplus of talent, they have the deficits of class and dignity and maturity that make them ideal standard bearers for that black-and-orange punk patrol on Broad Street.
• If anyone at the NHL home office had any guts -- or, better yet, any self-respect -- they'd at least fine and maybe even suspend both Richards and Upshall for what they did at the end of last night's game. Cheap head-hunting and two-handed slashes are despicable at any time during the game, but when they occur in the last sixty seconds, after the game has been decided and the other team has essentially let down its guard, they're especially pathetic. That display was disgusting and embarrassing -- not just to the team, but to the whole damned league. As long as the powers-that-be allow that crap to persist, the NHL will, no matter how great its sport and the vast majority of its players, be afforded the respect it could, and probably should, command in the world of top-tier sports.
• I've been saying all along that Jordan Staal and Tyler Kennedy -- who continues to impress the hell out of me with both his work ethic and his hustle -- need more ice time, because they're offensive threats as well as great checkers. And now that he's back (almost) to 100%, (Mad) Max Talbot needs more ice time too. And that's why Michael Therrien's decision -- Love/Hate Meter tilting hard toward LOVE! -- to unleash those three on a reconstituted third line late in last night's game made such perfect sense even without those two great goals. I have no problem with switching Talbot and Jarko Ruutu permanently, but, at the very least, Therrien needs to get Talbot out there with Staal and Kennedy a lot more in Game 5 on Sunday.
• You could make a convincing argument -- and I just might -- that, besides Marc-Andre Fleury, Staal and Kennedy have been the Penguins' two most consistent forwards throughout this entire playoff run. Not the most productive, certainly, and not the most dynamic or explosive, but the most consistent. I don't remember either of them ever having a bad shift, much less a bad game. Which is all the more impressive when you consider that their combined ages are roughly one-half-year younger than Gary Roberts. And when you consider that Staal played that two-goal gem of a game last night only a little more than 24 hours after burying his grandfather.
• Maybe someone oughta Chuck-Norris-ify him. Or at least have him give Barack Obama a few lessons in how to stay tough, stay focused, and keep playing within the system, no matter what sorts of tragedy or nasty, nattering opposition you face.
• [Let's Go, Pens.]
Posted at 03:45 PM
Fri - May 9, 2008
(CONFERENCE-FINAL) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
clearing the bandwagon of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all that damn green tree pollen that's
been covering everything in sight the past few weeks. You're not quite sure
where they came from, but you know they're not going away any time
soon...
• I have long argued that accusations of the Clinton Camp playing the race card have been a bit of a stretch and almost always been blown out of proportion. But when Senator Clinton, no matter how weary and unfocused she may have been, sat down with a USA Today interviewer and said, I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition... Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again... There's a pattern emerging here, well, that looked and sounded to me like a whole house of race cards.
• It may well be true, but saying it that bluntly and that gracelessly -- especially now -- feels both dirty and desperate. When I read the text, I had a sudden urge to take a shower. After I heard the sound clips, I did.
• Funny, isn't it, that everyone piled on Hillary for knocking back a shot in an Indiana bar a couple of weeks ago -- she's a poseur; she's stooping to act like she's in touch with the commoners; what a phony baloney bitch -- but no one, at least not in the mainstream media, felt the need to question Obama's sudden interest in (loudly) ordering a beer at a pub in North Carolina. Funnier still when you consider that Hillary knocked back that shot like she knew what she was doing, and that Obama, after brandishing it for all the reporters and photographers to see, sipped that "PBR" like he was drinking a fine sherry.
• The Strange Bedfellows Tour continues, with a link to another Christopher Hitchens piece that seems to me spot on. Perhaps because I made a similar argument just last week. Here's the money paragraph: Nettled at last by the way in which this has upset his campaign, Sen. Obama last week cut the ties that bound him to his crackpot mentor. Well, high time. But those who profess relief at this should perhaps revisit what they thought (and wrote) about the earlier Philadelphia speech in which Obama was held to have achieved the same result with less trouble. If he was right last week, then the Philly speech was a failure on every level, and if it was a failure on every level, and thus left Obama hideously vulnerable to the very next speech made by his foaming pastor, then that must raise questions of eligibility for the highest office.
• In the wake of some bloggers and commenters still contorting themselves to defend -- or even to praise -- the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, here's an interesting email from one of TWM's most regular readers: All I can say is this: a nation that is afraid to expose the inanity, the grotesque immorality, of Rev. Wright is not ready to have a black man or woman for president. We're not sufficiently racially mature if we feel a need to patronize, or to treat Wright's expression of the black "experience" as worthy of respect.
• PittGirl's on a roll today -- even issuing a thumb war/Parcheesi/Guitar Hero challenge to we humble purveyors of the Smart, Handsome, Articulate, Incredibly Dashing, Non-Self-Pitying Boys Society (TM, Patent Pending) -- but this is, by far, her best work of the day. And the week.
• Looking for a sweet, full-featured, shockingly affordable all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax for your home (or any) office? I heartily recommend the Canon Pixma MX 310. An inelegant name, perhaps, but one hell of an elegant -- and efficient -- machine.
• After family and friends, there are few greater arrivals at your door than a five-pound box of Wilbur Buds.
• Though I imagine there will be a few more Oh my God! moments mixed in with all the action and suspense sure to dominate the last three episodes, last night's rich, mythology-packed installment of LOST feels like the one everyone will be thinking about and talking about and, no doubt, wildly debating for the next seven months. It was that good. And that much of a wicked, mind-bending tease.
• Yeah, I know it's Sweeps. And I know the show lost what was left of its dignity a long, long time ago. But when I wake up to hear Meredith Vieira telling me that the Today show will tell me more about that huge sinkhole in Texas, and then asking me to wonder whether something like that could be waiting under your town -- or under your house, I just want to scream. And then hope that, if another one of those sinkholes does exist, it's beneath the Today show studios.
• While we're on the subject of great and grating media sinkholes... You know that strange and fabulous days are upon us when I'm agreeing with great swaths of a Bob Smizik column. But today's piece about the rise of Penguins passion and fandom gets it just about right. Here's the rightest of all: The team is positioned to be a contender, if not a champion, for years to come. They have a stable full of young players who are both fan and media friendly. Of greater significance, most of the players, and virtually all the stars, are as wholesome as the boy next door. Some, in fact, are young enough to be the boy next door. Parents looking for role models need look no further. The Penguins are thick with them. These guys aren't packing guns, they're not getting arrested, they're not being sought for child support payments, they're not demanding to be traded. They are the anti-modern day athlete, and no one exemplifies that more than the team's best player, Sidney Crosby.
• Amen to all of that, but especially to the last two sentences.
• Though Mr. Smizik gets most things right in that column, here's one bit he surely gets wrong: the notion of the Penguins' youthful fan base. There's no question, of course, that this team has energized the under-30 and even the under-20 crowd in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And that surely bodes well for the future of the franchise and for the finances of all the people, including all the residents of the city and the county, who stand to benefit from it. But to be a base, you have to have been there from the beginning. Or at least for more than three years. Loyal, long-time fans and season ticket holders are this team's true fan base. Without them -- without us -- the team wouldn't have lasted long enough to excite all these new, young fans. The rock-solid foundation on which this team stood, between the Jagr and Crosby eras, was the core group of fans who continued to support the team even when it was losing, when it was enduring those pre-lockout lean years with little chance of success but a lot of scrap and hope and hard work anyway. I'm thrilled for every fan in the city, the county, and the whole damned region who's discovered this great team and, through them, this great sport. But please don't tell me the newcomers and bandwagon jumpers are the team's base. They're great, and they're a huge part of the future. But they're merely building new levels of support and success atop a foundation that's been there all along. Even when it was watching the likes of Steve McKenna and Konstantin Koltsov.
• Now. After five almost interminable days of waiting, like the weeks before Christmas and vacation all rolled into one, and after five truly interminable days of fan idiocy and media frenzy, it's nice to know the boys will finally get back to playing some hockey tonight. And that all three Hermann boys, along with our surrogate brother and uncle The Blizz, will be there to watch 'em.
• (Let's Go, Pens.)
• I have long argued that accusations of the Clinton Camp playing the race card have been a bit of a stretch and almost always been blown out of proportion. But when Senator Clinton, no matter how weary and unfocused she may have been, sat down with a USA Today interviewer and said, I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition... Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again... There's a pattern emerging here, well, that looked and sounded to me like a whole house of race cards.
• It may well be true, but saying it that bluntly and that gracelessly -- especially now -- feels both dirty and desperate. When I read the text, I had a sudden urge to take a shower. After I heard the sound clips, I did.
• Funny, isn't it, that everyone piled on Hillary for knocking back a shot in an Indiana bar a couple of weeks ago -- she's a poseur; she's stooping to act like she's in touch with the commoners; what a phony baloney bitch -- but no one, at least not in the mainstream media, felt the need to question Obama's sudden interest in (loudly) ordering a beer at a pub in North Carolina. Funnier still when you consider that Hillary knocked back that shot like she knew what she was doing, and that Obama, after brandishing it for all the reporters and photographers to see, sipped that "PBR" like he was drinking a fine sherry.
• The Strange Bedfellows Tour continues, with a link to another Christopher Hitchens piece that seems to me spot on. Perhaps because I made a similar argument just last week. Here's the money paragraph: Nettled at last by the way in which this has upset his campaign, Sen. Obama last week cut the ties that bound him to his crackpot mentor. Well, high time. But those who profess relief at this should perhaps revisit what they thought (and wrote) about the earlier Philadelphia speech in which Obama was held to have achieved the same result with less trouble. If he was right last week, then the Philly speech was a failure on every level, and if it was a failure on every level, and thus left Obama hideously vulnerable to the very next speech made by his foaming pastor, then that must raise questions of eligibility for the highest office.
• In the wake of some bloggers and commenters still contorting themselves to defend -- or even to praise -- the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, here's an interesting email from one of TWM's most regular readers: All I can say is this: a nation that is afraid to expose the inanity, the grotesque immorality, of Rev. Wright is not ready to have a black man or woman for president. We're not sufficiently racially mature if we feel a need to patronize, or to treat Wright's expression of the black "experience" as worthy of respect.
• PittGirl's on a roll today -- even issuing a thumb war/Parcheesi/Guitar Hero challenge to we humble purveyors of the Smart, Handsome, Articulate, Incredibly Dashing, Non-Self-Pitying Boys Society (TM, Patent Pending) -- but this is, by far, her best work of the day. And the week.
• Looking for a sweet, full-featured, shockingly affordable all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax for your home (or any) office? I heartily recommend the Canon Pixma MX 310. An inelegant name, perhaps, but one hell of an elegant -- and efficient -- machine.
• After family and friends, there are few greater arrivals at your door than a five-pound box of Wilbur Buds.
• Though I imagine there will be a few more Oh my God! moments mixed in with all the action and suspense sure to dominate the last three episodes, last night's rich, mythology-packed installment of LOST feels like the one everyone will be thinking about and talking about and, no doubt, wildly debating for the next seven months. It was that good. And that much of a wicked, mind-bending tease.
• Yeah, I know it's Sweeps. And I know the show lost what was left of its dignity a long, long time ago. But when I wake up to hear Meredith Vieira telling me that the Today show will tell me more about that huge sinkhole in Texas, and then asking me to wonder whether something like that could be waiting under your town -- or under your house, I just want to scream. And then hope that, if another one of those sinkholes does exist, it's beneath the Today show studios.
• While we're on the subject of great and grating media sinkholes... You know that strange and fabulous days are upon us when I'm agreeing with great swaths of a Bob Smizik column. But today's piece about the rise of Penguins passion and fandom gets it just about right. Here's the rightest of all: The team is positioned to be a contender, if not a champion, for years to come. They have a stable full of young players who are both fan and media friendly. Of greater significance, most of the players, and virtually all the stars, are as wholesome as the boy next door. Some, in fact, are young enough to be the boy next door. Parents looking for role models need look no further. The Penguins are thick with them. These guys aren't packing guns, they're not getting arrested, they're not being sought for child support payments, they're not demanding to be traded. They are the anti-modern day athlete, and no one exemplifies that more than the team's best player, Sidney Crosby.
• Amen to all of that, but especially to the last two sentences.
• Though Mr. Smizik gets most things right in that column, here's one bit he surely gets wrong: the notion of the Penguins' youthful fan base. There's no question, of course, that this team has energized the under-30 and even the under-20 crowd in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And that surely bodes well for the future of the franchise and for the finances of all the people, including all the residents of the city and the county, who stand to benefit from it. But to be a base, you have to have been there from the beginning. Or at least for more than three years. Loyal, long-time fans and season ticket holders are this team's true fan base. Without them -- without us -- the team wouldn't have lasted long enough to excite all these new, young fans. The rock-solid foundation on which this team stood, between the Jagr and Crosby eras, was the core group of fans who continued to support the team even when it was losing, when it was enduring those pre-lockout lean years with little chance of success but a lot of scrap and hope and hard work anyway. I'm thrilled for every fan in the city, the county, and the whole damned region who's discovered this great team and, through them, this great sport. But please don't tell me the newcomers and bandwagon jumpers are the team's base. They're great, and they're a huge part of the future. But they're merely building new levels of support and success atop a foundation that's been there all along. Even when it was watching the likes of Steve McKenna and Konstantin Koltsov.
• Now. After five almost interminable days of waiting, like the weeks before Christmas and vacation all rolled into one, and after five truly interminable days of fan idiocy and media frenzy, it's nice to know the boys will finally get back to playing some hockey tonight. And that all three Hermann boys, along with our surrogate brother and uncle The Blizz, will be there to watch 'em.
• (Let's Go, Pens.)
Posted at 01:19 PM
Fri - May 2, 2008
(GETTIN' READY TO GO TO HUNKER) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
tipping the cows of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those aisles and aisles of
miscellaneous crap just waiting to be bought at Home Depot. But without all
that damned dust...
• It's been a while since I updated these totals, but with the passing of yet another Mission Accomplished anniversary, it seems like a good time to do so. If you count the 24 persons still officially listed as missing, the September 11th American death toll was 2,998. The Iraq War American death toll currently stands at 4,065. Which means that George W. Bush leads Osama bin Laden by 1,067 innocent American lives. And counting.
• If Hillary were trailing Obama by that many delegates, she'd have already dropped out. And rightly so. If bin Laden doesn't hurry up and close the gap, the Superterrorists are all gonna throw their support behind Bush, and the race for biggest American-butchering jackass in the world will be officially wrapped up.
• It's obvious by now that when Bush said Bring 'em on, he didn't mean that he wanted to fight 'em; it meant he wanted to beat 'em at their own game.
• Well, then... Mission Accomplished indeed.
• Speaking, as I was a few moments ago, of Barack and Hillary, I'll stand down on those subjects this week and turn the commentary over to another rip-snorting piece, post-Pennsylvania-primary, from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi. It's all worth reading and considering, but here, for my ear, is the money passage: With all his verbose deflections of Hillary's attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to "obliterate" Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who'll crawl through the mud for "Madam President" while marching to classic rock tunes like the "Horst Wessel Song." Clinton's genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road. The result has been an epic clash, a war of cultural types that has nothing whatsoever to do with issues and everything to do with self-image. It's become a pitched fight between the fucked-over suburban little guy and the vilified intellectual, two groups that for years have felt put upon and dispossessed, for different reasons. The fact that their respective champions are identical superstar U.S. senators/multimillionaires makes the bitter hatred this schism is inspiring absurd, but it doesn't make it any less real. Or likely to end anytime soon.
• As a quick follow-up to last week's Home Depot vs. Giant Eagle Self-Checkout Note: I bought three items at Giant Eagle earlier this week, and it took me almost four minutes to complete the transaction. I bought a three-foot fluorescent light bulb at Home Depot this afternoon, used my check card, got cash back, and was on my way in under 45 seconds. The difference between the two makes me nuts. It also makes me want to forgo eating and just make lots of home improvements instead.
• TWM Strange But True Tip of the Week: if you like chocolate-covered almonds, try the CVS -- yes, the pharmacy chain -- brand. They're shockingly good and incredibly addictive; at that price, and even at considerably higher prices -- I'm talking to you, Trader Joe's -- you won't find any better.
• TWM Music Tip of the Week: if you like Tom Petty, Ryan Adams, Gram Parsons, The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, or any other great, country-tinged roots-rock, check out the over-thirty-years-in-the-making debut album from Mudcrutch, Petty's pre-Heartbreakers band. All those glowing reviews are true: it's not a self-indulgence, and it's not a novelty project; it's a CD as good as anything he's done since Full Moon Fever, and evidence -- as if we needed any more -- that the guy has talent and inspiration to burn.
• Orphan of the Storm, my favorite track so far, may be the greatest Gram Parsons song Gram Parsons never wrote. And it's surely the most gorgeous song I've heard all year.
• Thank God viewers sent Brooke White packing on American Idol this week. I was really starting to fear for her health, if not her sanity; that look on her face during the first few bars of I'm a Believer Tuesday night was virtually indistinguishable from the look on Shelley Duvall's face in the last half hour of The Shining. If she'd have had to sing even one more week, I'm afraid she would have died of fright right there on the stage.
• I can almost picture it now. Paula Abdul would turn into that crazy, flesh-rotting woman in the bathtub in room 237, Ryan Seacrest would be running around that stage wagging his finger and shouting This... is American Redrum!, and that cranky brit would, after seven seasons trapped as the only responsible caretaker of the Idol Hotel, would grab a microphone stand, leap up on stage, and beat David Archuleta senseless while screaming Heeeeeere's Simon! at the top of his crazy lungs.
• The Pens played last night like a team that, after seven straight wins, just couldn't summon the urgency or concentration to compete. Sure, they had some good chances, Marc-Andre Fleury was strong in goal, and Jordan Staal and Tyler Kennedy worked and forechecked like madmen, but the rest of the team was sloppy, turnover prone, and seemed, until those last few minutes, to be mailing it in and waiting for another sweep. Credit the Rangers with having other ideas. And expect the boys in black and gold, delivered an extra dose of adrenaline by an amped-up Mellon Arena crowd, to have no such problems come Sunday afternoon.
• I heard a few minutes of local sports talk radio this morning, and it sounded like more than a few people were already starting to panic. I even heard two different discussions about whether the Pens would lose the series. Now. I'm not saying it's not possible. But the Pens lose one game after starting the playoffs with seven straight victories, and people have to be talked down from the ledge? What kind of lunatics are you? Did you expect them to win the Stanley Cup without losing a game? (This sort of bipolar sanity -- from unrealistic optimism one day to irrational pessimism the next -- only confirms my suspicion that the Pens' bandwagon is filled with bored, half-drunken, half-witted Steelers fans. But more on that in another post...) If you'd told me at the start of the week that they'd split in New York, or if you told me at the start of the series that they'd be coming home for Game 5 up three games to one, I'd have been doing backflips. Now, suddenly, that scenario seems so dire that people are threatening to do backflips off the Liberty Bridge.
• Hang up the phone, have another beer, and hang on 'til Sunday, okay?
• Okay.
• It's been a while since I updated these totals, but with the passing of yet another Mission Accomplished anniversary, it seems like a good time to do so. If you count the 24 persons still officially listed as missing, the September 11th American death toll was 2,998. The Iraq War American death toll currently stands at 4,065. Which means that George W. Bush leads Osama bin Laden by 1,067 innocent American lives. And counting.
• If Hillary were trailing Obama by that many delegates, she'd have already dropped out. And rightly so. If bin Laden doesn't hurry up and close the gap, the Superterrorists are all gonna throw their support behind Bush, and the race for biggest American-butchering jackass in the world will be officially wrapped up.
• It's obvious by now that when Bush said Bring 'em on, he didn't mean that he wanted to fight 'em; it meant he wanted to beat 'em at their own game.
• Well, then... Mission Accomplished indeed.
• Speaking, as I was a few moments ago, of Barack and Hillary, I'll stand down on those subjects this week and turn the commentary over to another rip-snorting piece, post-Pennsylvania-primary, from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi. It's all worth reading and considering, but here, for my ear, is the money passage: With all his verbose deflections of Hillary's attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to "obliterate" Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who'll crawl through the mud for "Madam President" while marching to classic rock tunes like the "Horst Wessel Song." Clinton's genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road. The result has been an epic clash, a war of cultural types that has nothing whatsoever to do with issues and everything to do with self-image. It's become a pitched fight between the fucked-over suburban little guy and the vilified intellectual, two groups that for years have felt put upon and dispossessed, for different reasons. The fact that their respective champions are identical superstar U.S. senators/multimillionaires makes the bitter hatred this schism is inspiring absurd, but it doesn't make it any less real. Or likely to end anytime soon.
• As a quick follow-up to last week's Home Depot vs. Giant Eagle Self-Checkout Note: I bought three items at Giant Eagle earlier this week, and it took me almost four minutes to complete the transaction. I bought a three-foot fluorescent light bulb at Home Depot this afternoon, used my check card, got cash back, and was on my way in under 45 seconds. The difference between the two makes me nuts. It also makes me want to forgo eating and just make lots of home improvements instead.
• TWM Strange But True Tip of the Week: if you like chocolate-covered almonds, try the CVS -- yes, the pharmacy chain -- brand. They're shockingly good and incredibly addictive; at that price, and even at considerably higher prices -- I'm talking to you, Trader Joe's -- you won't find any better.
• TWM Music Tip of the Week: if you like Tom Petty, Ryan Adams, Gram Parsons, The Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, or any other great, country-tinged roots-rock, check out the over-thirty-years-in-the-making debut album from Mudcrutch, Petty's pre-Heartbreakers band. All those glowing reviews are true: it's not a self-indulgence, and it's not a novelty project; it's a CD as good as anything he's done since Full Moon Fever, and evidence -- as if we needed any more -- that the guy has talent and inspiration to burn.
• Orphan of the Storm, my favorite track so far, may be the greatest Gram Parsons song Gram Parsons never wrote. And it's surely the most gorgeous song I've heard all year.
• Thank God viewers sent Brooke White packing on American Idol this week. I was really starting to fear for her health, if not her sanity; that look on her face during the first few bars of I'm a Believer Tuesday night was virtually indistinguishable from the look on Shelley Duvall's face in the last half hour of The Shining. If she'd have had to sing even one more week, I'm afraid she would have died of fright right there on the stage.
• I can almost picture it now. Paula Abdul would turn into that crazy, flesh-rotting woman in the bathtub in room 237, Ryan Seacrest would be running around that stage wagging his finger and shouting This... is American Redrum!, and that cranky brit would, after seven seasons trapped as the only responsible caretaker of the Idol Hotel, would grab a microphone stand, leap up on stage, and beat David Archuleta senseless while screaming Heeeeeere's Simon! at the top of his crazy lungs.
• The Pens played last night like a team that, after seven straight wins, just couldn't summon the urgency or concentration to compete. Sure, they had some good chances, Marc-Andre Fleury was strong in goal, and Jordan Staal and Tyler Kennedy worked and forechecked like madmen, but the rest of the team was sloppy, turnover prone, and seemed, until those last few minutes, to be mailing it in and waiting for another sweep. Credit the Rangers with having other ideas. And expect the boys in black and gold, delivered an extra dose of adrenaline by an amped-up Mellon Arena crowd, to have no such problems come Sunday afternoon.
• I heard a few minutes of local sports talk radio this morning, and it sounded like more than a few people were already starting to panic. I even heard two different discussions about whether the Pens would lose the series. Now. I'm not saying it's not possible. But the Pens lose one game after starting the playoffs with seven straight victories, and people have to be talked down from the ledge? What kind of lunatics are you? Did you expect them to win the Stanley Cup without losing a game? (This sort of bipolar sanity -- from unrealistic optimism one day to irrational pessimism the next -- only confirms my suspicion that the Pens' bandwagon is filled with bored, half-drunken, half-witted Steelers fans. But more on that in another post...) If you'd told me at the start of the week that they'd split in New York, or if you told me at the start of the series that they'd be coming home for Game 5 up three games to one, I'd have been doing backflips. Now, suddenly, that scenario seems so dire that people are threatening to do backflips off the Liberty Bridge.
• Hang up the phone, have another beer, and hang on 'til Sunday, okay?
• Okay.
Posted at 03:41 PM
Fri - April 25, 2008
(THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, & THE E-STREET) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
shagging the flies of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those white t-shirts the Penguins
are giving out at the arena tonight. Except that these come in different
sizes...
• Now that the investigative panel for the WVU MBA scandal has released its final report and -- shocker -- determined that well-connected Mylan Exec Heather Bresch did not actually earn her degree and -- imagine that -- revealed that high-ranking university and business school administrators allowed it, attempted to cover it up, and still can't bring themselves to acknowledge either the errors of their ways or the bankruptcy of their ethics, the next course of action should be clear: everyone who attended that fateful meeting and contributed to this farce should either be fired or forced to resign. That includes WVU President Michael Garrison, Provost Gerald Lang, and Business School Dean R. Stephen Sears. They all bear responsibility for this despicable breach of academic integrity -- there should be a special place in Academic Hell for Lang and Spears, who both refuse to apologize and say they would do the same thing again -- and thus have they sacrificed every last ounce of respect or honor ever them. It's an embarrassment and an outrage, and it should -- swiftly, and decisively -- be treated as such.
• Though a scandal of this magnitude is mercifully rare, do not kid yourself into thinking that these sorts of things -- the sad and sordid bartering of both influence and favoritism, the willful and capricious disregarding of both merit and process -- do not happen all the time. They are standard operating procedure at all levels of academia, and they seem especially at home -- if not especially surprising -- at the ethically challenged intersection of business and education.
• Think I'm exaggerating? Read this book. And then talk to people who've been there, and who are oh-so-glad to have escaped.
• To phony and hypocrite we can now add schizophrenic to the list of Barack Obama descriptors. Consider this claim he made yesterday: We think that, in the end, if we end up having won twice as many states and having the most votes, then we should be the nominee. Unless he's including Lady McBama -- and Lord help us if he is -- then someone needs to remind the Senator that, no matter the size of his ego, he is still only one person.
• By the time the convention rolls around, I imagine he'll want to be his own running mate. And, not long after that, all of his own cabinet picks too.
• Here's an interesting email, in response to yesterday's Clinton-Voters-Are-Apparently-Unthinking-Racists post, from someone we'll call Ms. A.: Seriously, if we’re going to stereotype the entire state with one broad-stroke brush, I can do it too: Pennsylvanians are nothing if not pragmatic, with a preference for experience and a resistance to sparkly rhetoric. If you ask me, they have looked at the emperor and, thanks to a healthy dose of skepticism, have seen that he's not wearing any clothes. (Look at that, I didn't even have to bring up that Hillary Clinton has surely lost votes based on her gender, or that racists are often also sexists and wouldn’t like either candidate.)
• TWM Comment Thread Comment of the Week Award goes to my esteemed Carbolic Smoke Ball colleague, the Hon. Judge Rufus Peckham, for this dead-on assessment of both the (ahem) Jan Beatty controversy and the intellectually bankrupt culture out of which it crawls: We are stranded in an era of the perpetually indignant, the chronically offended, where self-proclaimed victims hide behind shibboleths of political correctness, such as “censorship,” or “academic freedom,” in an attempt to justify some supposed outrage or other that they’ve manufactured. And frequently, of course, these purported injured parties don’t care a whit that the thing they are crying “censorship” over would be an affront to someone else’s sensibilities.
• One last note on this subject: It always amuses me when people of great position and privilege, in an era and a country that provide more and better opportunities to be heard than any in the history of the world, cry Censorship! the moment one thought or idea or (in this case) reasonable business decision go against them. Not being allowed to speak your mind in public, or to your government, or in your own home, is censorship. Not being allowed to write or to publish or to distribute your work is censorship. Not being given a microphone to read your poetry aloud in a privately owned bookstore is not censorship, it's not discrimination, and it's not even an insult. It's a choice and a right and, in this case, especially given Ms. Beatty's irrationality, a pretty wise move.
• Maybe I lampooned too soon. It turns out that Twitter can spring you from an Egyptian jail cell. Sort of. In a round-about way. Just like any text-message can. So it's not really a big deal. But, hey, CNN thinks it is.
• I've been meaning to make this recommendation for a while now, but... if you like good, award-winning southern barbeque in a laid-back, might-even-imagine-you-were-in-Georgia-or-Florida atmosphere, check out Famous Dave's. There are two locations here in Pittsburgh (Waterworks, North Hills) and many more across the country. Well-worth your time and taste buds, I assure you.
• The people who designed the self-checkout technology in use at Giant Eagle could surely learn something from the people who designed the self-checkout technology in use at Home Depot. Even if I'm only buying three things at the Eagle, it takes me five minutes to get through the process, thanks to technology that seems to be powered by a combination of 386s and gerbils on treadmills. If I only have three items at Home Depot, I'm in and out so fast the security cameras have barely had time to register my existence.
• And don't even get me started on the accuracy and efficiency of the weight sensors. I can buy a couple of two-by-fours, a can of paint, and a twopenny nail, and the Home Depot sensors pick 'em all up and send me on my merry way. But try to buy a bottle of soda and a couple of sprigs of rosemary at Giant Eagle, and you'll be in line for six weeks, waiting for some slack-jawed customer-service-tron to reset your register.
• Interesting trailer for a new movie called Quarantine. Though they might want to consider changing the title to The Cloverfield Witch Project. Just to be fair.
• Just when my Love-Hate relationship with Pens Coach Michael Therrien was tilting so close to Love, along comes this little tidbit: Therrien plans to reconfigure two of his defense pairings. The Brooks Orpik-Sergei Gonchar unit will remain intact, but Hal Gill will play with Rob Scuderi and Kris Letang will be alongside Ryan Whitney. I'm speechless. The pairings have been playing together for over a month, performing brilliantly and complementing each other perfectly. Your team has been hotter than hell in that time, and you've just come off a sweep of the defending Eastern Conference champs. Yeah. That sounds like a good time to change things up a little bit.
• And, finally... Because, unlike -- tilting back toward Hate! -- Michael Therrien, I know better than to mess with success. Especially when we're about to start the second round of the playoffs. So... LET'S GO, PENS!
• Now that the investigative panel for the WVU MBA scandal has released its final report and -- shocker -- determined that well-connected Mylan Exec Heather Bresch did not actually earn her degree and -- imagine that -- revealed that high-ranking university and business school administrators allowed it, attempted to cover it up, and still can't bring themselves to acknowledge either the errors of their ways or the bankruptcy of their ethics, the next course of action should be clear: everyone who attended that fateful meeting and contributed to this farce should either be fired or forced to resign. That includes WVU President Michael Garrison, Provost Gerald Lang, and Business School Dean R. Stephen Sears. They all bear responsibility for this despicable breach of academic integrity -- there should be a special place in Academic Hell for Lang and Spears, who both refuse to apologize and say they would do the same thing again -- and thus have they sacrificed every last ounce of respect or honor ever them. It's an embarrassment and an outrage, and it should -- swiftly, and decisively -- be treated as such.
• Though a scandal of this magnitude is mercifully rare, do not kid yourself into thinking that these sorts of things -- the sad and sordid bartering of both influence and favoritism, the willful and capricious disregarding of both merit and process -- do not happen all the time. They are standard operating procedure at all levels of academia, and they seem especially at home -- if not especially surprising -- at the ethically challenged intersection of business and education.
• Think I'm exaggerating? Read this book. And then talk to people who've been there, and who are oh-so-glad to have escaped.
• To phony and hypocrite we can now add schizophrenic to the list of Barack Obama descriptors. Consider this claim he made yesterday: We think that, in the end, if we end up having won twice as many states and having the most votes, then we should be the nominee. Unless he's including Lady McBama -- and Lord help us if he is -- then someone needs to remind the Senator that, no matter the size of his ego, he is still only one person.
• By the time the convention rolls around, I imagine he'll want to be his own running mate. And, not long after that, all of his own cabinet picks too.
• Here's an interesting email, in response to yesterday's Clinton-Voters-Are-Apparently-Unthinking-Racists post, from someone we'll call Ms. A.: Seriously, if we’re going to stereotype the entire state with one broad-stroke brush, I can do it too: Pennsylvanians are nothing if not pragmatic, with a preference for experience and a resistance to sparkly rhetoric. If you ask me, they have looked at the emperor and, thanks to a healthy dose of skepticism, have seen that he's not wearing any clothes. (Look at that, I didn't even have to bring up that Hillary Clinton has surely lost votes based on her gender, or that racists are often also sexists and wouldn’t like either candidate.)
• TWM Comment Thread Comment of the Week Award goes to my esteemed Carbolic Smoke Ball colleague, the Hon. Judge Rufus Peckham, for this dead-on assessment of both the (ahem) Jan Beatty controversy and the intellectually bankrupt culture out of which it crawls: We are stranded in an era of the perpetually indignant, the chronically offended, where self-proclaimed victims hide behind shibboleths of political correctness, such as “censorship,” or “academic freedom,” in an attempt to justify some supposed outrage or other that they’ve manufactured. And frequently, of course, these purported injured parties don’t care a whit that the thing they are crying “censorship” over would be an affront to someone else’s sensibilities.
• One last note on this subject: It always amuses me when people of great position and privilege, in an era and a country that provide more and better opportunities to be heard than any in the history of the world, cry Censorship! the moment one thought or idea or (in this case) reasonable business decision go against them. Not being allowed to speak your mind in public, or to your government, or in your own home, is censorship. Not being allowed to write or to publish or to distribute your work is censorship. Not being given a microphone to read your poetry aloud in a privately owned bookstore is not censorship, it's not discrimination, and it's not even an insult. It's a choice and a right and, in this case, especially given Ms. Beatty's irrationality, a pretty wise move.
• Maybe I lampooned too soon. It turns out that Twitter can spring you from an Egyptian jail cell. Sort of. In a round-about way. Just like any text-message can. So it's not really a big deal. But, hey, CNN thinks it is.
• I've been meaning to make this recommendation for a while now, but... if you like good, award-winning southern barbeque in a laid-back, might-even-imagine-you-were-in-Georgia-or-Florida atmosphere, check out Famous Dave's. There are two locations here in Pittsburgh (Waterworks, North Hills) and many more across the country. Well-worth your time and taste buds, I assure you.
• The people who designed the self-checkout technology in use at Giant Eagle could surely learn something from the people who designed the self-checkout technology in use at Home Depot. Even if I'm only buying three things at the Eagle, it takes me five minutes to get through the process, thanks to technology that seems to be powered by a combination of 386s and gerbils on treadmills. If I only have three items at Home Depot, I'm in and out so fast the security cameras have barely had time to register my existence.
• And don't even get me started on the accuracy and efficiency of the weight sensors. I can buy a couple of two-by-fours, a can of paint, and a twopenny nail, and the Home Depot sensors pick 'em all up and send me on my merry way. But try to buy a bottle of soda and a couple of sprigs of rosemary at Giant Eagle, and you'll be in line for six weeks, waiting for some slack-jawed customer-service-tron to reset your register.
• Interesting trailer for a new movie called Quarantine. Though they might want to consider changing the title to The Cloverfield Witch Project. Just to be fair.
• Just when my Love-Hate relationship with Pens Coach Michael Therrien was tilting so close to Love, along comes this little tidbit: Therrien plans to reconfigure two of his defense pairings. The Brooks Orpik-Sergei Gonchar unit will remain intact, but Hal Gill will play with Rob Scuderi and Kris Letang will be alongside Ryan Whitney. I'm speechless. The pairings have been playing together for over a month, performing brilliantly and complementing each other perfectly. Your team has been hotter than hell in that time, and you've just come off a sweep of the defending Eastern Conference champs. Yeah. That sounds like a good time to change things up a little bit.
• And, finally... Because, unlike -- tilting back toward Hate! -- Michael Therrien, I know better than to mess with success. Especially when we're about to start the second round of the playoffs. So... LET'S GO, PENS!
Posted at 01:11 PM
Fri - April 18, 2008
(OH, WHAT A WEEK FOR) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
clinging to the guns of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those annoying, pre-primary,
pro-Hillary robocalls I've begun to get. But without the unlisted number. Or
the ear-splitting volume...
• Here endeth The Moratorium. It was painful -- especially this week -- but also quite refreshing. At the very least, it spared me a week of emails from people pissed off by nothing more than the (what's that word again?) audacity of truth.
• One of my most faithful and favorite readers -- we'll call him The Blizz -- emailed this week, lamenting the Moratorium but proving, in two deft sentences, that TWMers were doing an even better job than I could have in laying bare the hypocrisies of the week: By the way, words matter... But they only matter when they benefit me. When people try to use my words against me, then I'm going to say that they are playing semantic, political games and not dealing with the issues that really matter.
• While we're on the subject of double standards, I can't help but wonder whether some of the Obamans' outrage over the tone and tenor of Wednesday night's ABC Democratic Presidential Debate -- and please note that I said some, because much of it was surely justified; Gibson and Stephanopoulos demeaned both themselves and their profession with, among others, the lapel pin and Bill Ayers questions -- is a way to shift the focus away from, or maybe even to work out some frustrations over, how often, and how soundly, Senator Clinton outshone their candidate on the questions and issues that mattered. (Come back tomorrow for a post about one particularly telling example.)
• Those justified criticisms aside, the post-debate bristling and whining provided yet another example of how touchy and entitled, how haughty and supercilious and outright contemptuous Senator Obama and his supporters can be when they're the objects of anything less than loving adoration. And, once again, I have to laugh at the thought, the irony, the sheer (what's that word again?) audacity of the Obama campaign feeling suddenly besieged by a(n allegedly) biased media.
• That seems to me like a child who's been fed ice cream and cookies his whole life suddenly whining about the one or two times that someone stooped to serve him peas and carrots. Feel free to spit 'em out, kid, but don't think that gives you a right to complain about your diet.
• If only because people are still emailing about it, here's a little more reaction to TWM Uber Idol Bruce Springsteen endorsing TWM Mega Phony Barack Obama: It’s a beautiful and typically poetic piece of writing that I admire as much as anything else I've read about Obama. At least in part because of how broad and careful it is. You'll notice, in particular, that it praises the Senator in ideals but not in details' it notes that Obama “speaks to” the American ideals about which Springsteen has sung these past 36 years. Which is not the same as saying he "represents" or "embodies" or even "is able to deliver them." It seems to me that Bruce, like many of Obama’s supporters, is taking a big ol’ flyer here. He’s putting hope in the hope, and hoping it turns out not to be more than hype.
• It is also worth noting again, if only to be able to use one of my all-time favorite stand-up-comedy lines, that four years ago, Bruce Springsteen endorsed and even stumped for John Kerry, a man who, in losing to George W. Bush, performed, in the immortal words of Lewis Black, the political equivalent of a normal person losing in the Special Olympics.
• The Best Mock Attack Ad of the Primary Season may just be this one. Clever. And very funny.
• The Worst Robo-Call of the Primary Season (and probably even of the year) comes from the folks at the Civic Duty Coalition, who just left a message on my cell phone informing me that On Tuesday, April 22nd, we can make history -- we can choose to elect a war hero, we can choose to elect the first woman president, or we can choose to elect the first African-American president. Sounds like the copy writers at the Civic Duty Coalition need a few more Civics lessons. Or at least a reminder that we can't actually elect anyone to the presidency in a state primary.
• After stumbling upon a link to a 2001 BusinessWeek "analysis" in which Cliff Edwards explains Why Apple Stores Won't Work, it occurred to me that BusinessWeek really ought to offer an analysis that explains Why Business Analysts Don't Matter. They are, after all, only marginally more accurate than most meteorologists.
• After hours and hours (and hours) of gratuitous and, worse still, just plain boring coverage of the story this week, I'm thinking that NBC's Today Show should be renamed NBC's Polygamy Show.
• The next time babbling-judge- and shrieking-fan-favorite David Archuleta holds my attention throughout his entire American Idol performance will be the first.
• Alex Ovechkin was on the ice for 28 minutes of the Capitals' overtime loss to Philly last night. He had two assists on the power play, yes, but the two stats that really stand out are these: he had ten hits, but just one shot on goal. (He also played crappy defense and was on the ice for the Flyers' game-winning goal.) I had no idea that when the Caps gave him that new contract, they were paying him to become Eric Lindros.
• The Pens sweep the Sens, and suddenly people around these parts are worried that they're gonna be rusty, or that they're not gonna be able to keep their edge, or that they're gonna lose their focus with a week off before the second round. You know what, folks? Get a grip. And a clue. When they step on the ice next week, against a team that has played a five- or a six- or a seven-game series, they're going to be rested. And energized. And their opponents -- you know, the team without the rust, with the edge, and with the focus? They're going to be exhausted. By the second period, the Pens will shaken off the rust and regained whatever meager edge or focus they lost. And that other team? They're still gonna be exhausted.
• And, finally... In the spirit of this Tuesday's thank-God-it's-finally-here Pennsylvania primary, I should remind you that there's still time to cast your vote and/or make your nomination for this year's Official Muse of TWM. I'll announce the lovely Kate Beckinsale's no-doubt-just-as-lovely successor next Saturday, but I still haven't made up my mind. Or any other affected organs. So, TWM readers and Official delegates, this is your chance to cast aside your bitterness, stop clinging to your antipathy, and help me make history by influencing the election of a Muse We Can All Believe In...
• Here endeth The Moratorium. It was painful -- especially this week -- but also quite refreshing. At the very least, it spared me a week of emails from people pissed off by nothing more than the (what's that word again?) audacity of truth.
• One of my most faithful and favorite readers -- we'll call him The Blizz -- emailed this week, lamenting the Moratorium but proving, in two deft sentences, that TWMers were doing an even better job than I could have in laying bare the hypocrisies of the week: By the way, words matter... But they only matter when they benefit me. When people try to use my words against me, then I'm going to say that they are playing semantic, political games and not dealing with the issues that really matter.
• While we're on the subject of double standards, I can't help but wonder whether some of the Obamans' outrage over the tone and tenor of Wednesday night's ABC Democratic Presidential Debate -- and please note that I said some, because much of it was surely justified; Gibson and Stephanopoulos demeaned both themselves and their profession with, among others, the lapel pin and Bill Ayers questions -- is a way to shift the focus away from, or maybe even to work out some frustrations over, how often, and how soundly, Senator Clinton outshone their candidate on the questions and issues that mattered. (Come back tomorrow for a post about one particularly telling example.)
• Those justified criticisms aside, the post-debate bristling and whining provided yet another example of how touchy and entitled, how haughty and supercilious and outright contemptuous Senator Obama and his supporters can be when they're the objects of anything less than loving adoration. And, once again, I have to laugh at the thought, the irony, the sheer (what's that word again?) audacity of the Obama campaign feeling suddenly besieged by a(n allegedly) biased media.
• That seems to me like a child who's been fed ice cream and cookies his whole life suddenly whining about the one or two times that someone stooped to serve him peas and carrots. Feel free to spit 'em out, kid, but don't think that gives you a right to complain about your diet.
• If only because people are still emailing about it, here's a little more reaction to TWM Uber Idol Bruce Springsteen endorsing TWM Mega Phony Barack Obama: It’s a beautiful and typically poetic piece of writing that I admire as much as anything else I've read about Obama. At least in part because of how broad and careful it is. You'll notice, in particular, that it praises the Senator in ideals but not in details' it notes that Obama “speaks to” the American ideals about which Springsteen has sung these past 36 years. Which is not the same as saying he "represents" or "embodies" or even "is able to deliver them." It seems to me that Bruce, like many of Obama’s supporters, is taking a big ol’ flyer here. He’s putting hope in the hope, and hoping it turns out not to be more than hype.
• It is also worth noting again, if only to be able to use one of my all-time favorite stand-up-comedy lines, that four years ago, Bruce Springsteen endorsed and even stumped for John Kerry, a man who, in losing to George W. Bush, performed, in the immortal words of Lewis Black, the political equivalent of a normal person losing in the Special Olympics.
• The Best Mock Attack Ad of the Primary Season may just be this one. Clever. And very funny.
• The Worst Robo-Call of the Primary Season (and probably even of the year) comes from the folks at the Civic Duty Coalition, who just left a message on my cell phone informing me that On Tuesday, April 22nd, we can make history -- we can choose to elect a war hero, we can choose to elect the first woman president, or we can choose to elect the first African-American president. Sounds like the copy writers at the Civic Duty Coalition need a few more Civics lessons. Or at least a reminder that we can't actually elect anyone to the presidency in a state primary.
• After stumbling upon a link to a 2001 BusinessWeek "analysis" in which Cliff Edwards explains Why Apple Stores Won't Work, it occurred to me that BusinessWeek really ought to offer an analysis that explains Why Business Analysts Don't Matter. They are, after all, only marginally more accurate than most meteorologists.
• After hours and hours (and hours) of gratuitous and, worse still, just plain boring coverage of the story this week, I'm thinking that NBC's Today Show should be renamed NBC's Polygamy Show.
• The next time babbling-judge- and shrieking-fan-favorite David Archuleta holds my attention throughout his entire American Idol performance will be the first.
• Alex Ovechkin was on the ice for 28 minutes of the Capitals' overtime loss to Philly last night. He had two assists on the power play, yes, but the two stats that really stand out are these: he had ten hits, but just one shot on goal. (He also played crappy defense and was on the ice for the Flyers' game-winning goal.) I had no idea that when the Caps gave him that new contract, they were paying him to become Eric Lindros.
• The Pens sweep the Sens, and suddenly people around these parts are worried that they're gonna be rusty, or that they're not gonna be able to keep their edge, or that they're gonna lose their focus with a week off before the second round. You know what, folks? Get a grip. And a clue. When they step on the ice next week, against a team that has played a five- or a six- or a seven-game series, they're going to be rested. And energized. And their opponents -- you know, the team without the rust, with the edge, and with the focus? They're going to be exhausted. By the second period, the Pens will shaken off the rust and regained whatever meager edge or focus they lost. And that other team? They're still gonna be exhausted.
• And, finally... In the spirit of this Tuesday's thank-God-it's-finally-here Pennsylvania primary, I should remind you that there's still time to cast your vote and/or make your nomination for this year's Official Muse of TWM. I'll announce the lovely Kate Beckinsale's no-doubt-just-as-lovely successor next Saturday, but I still haven't made up my mind. Or any other affected organs. So, TWM readers and Official delegates, this is your chance to cast aside your bitterness, stop clinging to your antipathy, and help me make history by influencing the election of a Muse We Can All Believe In...
Posted at 03:26 PM
Fri - April 11, 2008
(OBAMA-FREE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
cleansing the palate of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those rally towels twirling at
Mellon Arena Wednesday night. And again tonight. If I'm not careful, they just
might hit someone...
• That's right, folks. Obama-Free. (Well, except for this note. And the next one. So, technically, they're not really Obama-Free. But they will be after these first two. Which, let's face it, are logistical explanations, not substantive declarations. Now. Where was I?...) Oh, yes. Obama-Free. Just like the whole week to come. I'm tired of writing about him, and I'm especially tired of all the responses I'm getting from people who, through willful ignorance, intellectual negligence, or some combination of the two, repeatedly mischaracterize what I write. So much so that their emails inevitably argue -- and I use the term loosely -- not against what I wrote, but against some bizarre and distorted caricature of it. At best. So, for the sake of my sanity, a seven-day moratorium starts now.
• (Insert Soup Nazi voice here:) No Barack for you! Come back, one week!
• Either it's been a really slow news week, or those new, All-You-Can-Eat Seats at PNC Park -- an idea the Pirates borrowed, by the way, from more than a dozen other big league franchises -- are one of the great local news story of the year. How else to explain all six -- that's right, six: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, plus a video report -- features the Post-Gazette has produced in just the last eight days? I know that beautiful ballpark is the only remotely interesting aspect of yet another season of Pirates sub-mediocrity, but surely we could have done without the gluttony gimmick six-pack.
• I wait with breathless anticipation (and endless indigestion) for regular, season-long updates from the new pig-slop seats: first fan to eat more than a dozen hot dogs; first fan to down more than twenty Cokes; first person to pass out and choke on his own nacho-flavored vomit.
• That said, the PG in general, and reporters Len Boselovic and Patricia Sabatini in particular, continue to do outstanding work on the Heather Bresch/WVU Bogus MBA scandal. It's been a comedy of errors and incompetence this week, as Ms. Bresch finally opened her mouth and removed all doubt about not only the nature of her "degree" but also the "ethics" at work from the b-school to the governor's mansion, and the PGers have been there to provide the laugh track for every newly uttered absurdity.
• When WVU finally does the right thing and rescinds her MBA, maybe Ms. Bresch can apply for a job in the Ravenstahl Administration. I think she'd fit right in.
• Kudos, also, to the PG for their so-far exceptional Penguins playoff coverage. They're covering the Boys of Winter (& Spring) with almost the same, comprehensive alacrity they normally reserve for thegirlfriend beaters Steelers. Keep up
the good work, folks.
• So all three remaining presidential hopefuls delivered pre-recorded testimonials on American Idol last night, and the clear winner was John McCain, if only because he was the only one who appeared loose and natural. (And well-rested; the other two looked like they'd just been beaten and whipped on the campaign trail.) And perhaps most especially for this great zinger: American Idol is a lot like a presidential primary election, except for people who live in Michigan and Florida -- their votes actually count.
• To which someone should have responded: Unlike eight years ago.
• I just saw a news headline that read, Is Couric leaving CBS?, and my first thought was, Is Couric still on CBS?
• While we're on the subject of shameless media whoring... What are the networks and news magazines going to do with themselves after Randy Pausch dies? Where will they turn for the next feel-bad/feel-good fix? Will they start interviewing his wife and his kids? Will they just re-run their features in endless, enervating loops of maudlin melodrama? Or will they seek out some other poor soul who's dying and doesn't mind profiting from it to become the next poster boy for the ratings-and-readers-grabbing sensationalism of suffering?
• I don't mean to sound cold. Or cruel. And I surely wish the man and his family well. But I can not, for the life of me, understand the obsession with a man who is, unfortunately, doing what hundreds of thousands of men and women do in this country every year: face the terrible, untimely reality of their own rapidly approaching mortality. And all, it should be noted, without the considerable attentions and advantages from which he and his family have benefited. I asked a variation of this question before, and I'll ask it again: if an administrative assistant, or a groundskeeper, or a campus police officer from Carnegie Mellon (or from anywhere else in the country) were going through this very same thing -- and you know what? they are. by the thousands -- would they be getting all this attention? What makes any of them any less inspiring, or any less worth mourning, than Professor Pausch?
• While we're on the subject of terrible, untimely realities... After catching some of Pirates Manager John Russel's post-game press conference on TV Wednesday night, I have to say that I'm fearing for the guy's sanity. It was only the eighth game of the year -- and, let's face it, at only 2 games under .500, that's about as good as it's gonna get -- but his levels of despair and depression already appeared to be in mid-season form. He looked thoroughly beaten and forlorn. We all know the job can do that to a guy -- but this fast? That's gotta be some kind of record. I suggest that from now until Russell's inevitable firing, team officials prohibit sharp objects blunt objects, and maybe even thick good, thick belts in the press room.
• When we allow "Cotton-Eye Joe" to be played at our civic arena, we demean both our city and our species.
• It's difficult to choose my favorite moment from the Penguins' thorough Game 1 dismantling of the Ottawa Senators Wednesday night. The towel waving frenzy just before the faceoff? Jeff Jimerson digging down and bringing a little extra excellence to his rendition of both national anthems? The gorgeous Malkin-Sykora two-on-one goal? Gary Roberts' first goal 66 (!) seconds into the game? His second goal to ice it? That moment not long afterward, when he appeared to challenge the entire Senators team to a fight and sent a loud, clear message that you will not fuck with us, and if you do, we will make you pay? Kris Letang skating and passing like someone forgot to tell him he'd never played in an NHL postseason game before? Tyler Kennedy following the puck like a heat-seeking missile on every shift? Marian Hossa making his presence felt on both ends of the ice? Marc-Andre Fleury looking so calm, cool, and collected that he may as well have been defending against Adam and Ethan in our driveway? Max Talbot, in the unmistakeable language of the flying headlock, telling Martin Lapointe, Do not even think about talking to my goalie? The penalty killers relentless energy and focus? Sidney just being Sidney?
• How about this one: Ryan Whitney, fresh off a gorgeous pass to assist on Evgeni Malkin's sickeningly sweet goal, leaping to his captain's defense and absolutely pummeling Wade Redden for the liberties he'd lately been taking with Sidney Crosby's face. That's teamwork. That's team toughness. That -- like Gary Roberts' face -- is the very definition of playoff hockey.
• And, finally, with Game 2 only a few hours away, the only way we possibly end today is with a great, top-of-the-lungs-and-the-keyboard cry of LET'S... GO... PENS!
• That's right, folks. Obama-Free. (Well, except for this note. And the next one. So, technically, they're not really Obama-Free. But they will be after these first two. Which, let's face it, are logistical explanations, not substantive declarations. Now. Where was I?...) Oh, yes. Obama-Free. Just like the whole week to come. I'm tired of writing about him, and I'm especially tired of all the responses I'm getting from people who, through willful ignorance, intellectual negligence, or some combination of the two, repeatedly mischaracterize what I write. So much so that their emails inevitably argue -- and I use the term loosely -- not against what I wrote, but against some bizarre and distorted caricature of it. At best. So, for the sake of my sanity, a seven-day moratorium starts now.
• (Insert Soup Nazi voice here:) No Barack for you! Come back, one week!
• Either it's been a really slow news week, or those new, All-You-Can-Eat Seats at PNC Park -- an idea the Pirates borrowed, by the way, from more than a dozen other big league franchises -- are one of the great local news story of the year. How else to explain all six -- that's right, six: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, plus a video report -- features the Post-Gazette has produced in just the last eight days? I know that beautiful ballpark is the only remotely interesting aspect of yet another season of Pirates sub-mediocrity, but surely we could have done without the gluttony gimmick six-pack.
• I wait with breathless anticipation (and endless indigestion) for regular, season-long updates from the new pig-slop seats: first fan to eat more than a dozen hot dogs; first fan to down more than twenty Cokes; first person to pass out and choke on his own nacho-flavored vomit.
• That said, the PG in general, and reporters Len Boselovic and Patricia Sabatini in particular, continue to do outstanding work on the Heather Bresch/WVU Bogus MBA scandal. It's been a comedy of errors and incompetence this week, as Ms. Bresch finally opened her mouth and removed all doubt about not only the nature of her "degree" but also the "ethics" at work from the b-school to the governor's mansion, and the PGers have been there to provide the laugh track for every newly uttered absurdity.
• When WVU finally does the right thing and rescinds her MBA, maybe Ms. Bresch can apply for a job in the Ravenstahl Administration. I think she'd fit right in.
• Kudos, also, to the PG for their so-far exceptional Penguins playoff coverage. They're covering the Boys of Winter (& Spring) with almost the same, comprehensive alacrity they normally reserve for the
• So all three remaining presidential hopefuls delivered pre-recorded testimonials on American Idol last night, and the clear winner was John McCain, if only because he was the only one who appeared loose and natural. (And well-rested; the other two looked like they'd just been beaten and whipped on the campaign trail.) And perhaps most especially for this great zinger: American Idol is a lot like a presidential primary election, except for people who live in Michigan and Florida -- their votes actually count.
• To which someone should have responded: Unlike eight years ago.
• I just saw a news headline that read, Is Couric leaving CBS?, and my first thought was, Is Couric still on CBS?
• While we're on the subject of shameless media whoring... What are the networks and news magazines going to do with themselves after Randy Pausch dies? Where will they turn for the next feel-bad/feel-good fix? Will they start interviewing his wife and his kids? Will they just re-run their features in endless, enervating loops of maudlin melodrama? Or will they seek out some other poor soul who's dying and doesn't mind profiting from it to become the next poster boy for the ratings-and-readers-grabbing sensationalism of suffering?
• I don't mean to sound cold. Or cruel. And I surely wish the man and his family well. But I can not, for the life of me, understand the obsession with a man who is, unfortunately, doing what hundreds of thousands of men and women do in this country every year: face the terrible, untimely reality of their own rapidly approaching mortality. And all, it should be noted, without the considerable attentions and advantages from which he and his family have benefited. I asked a variation of this question before, and I'll ask it again: if an administrative assistant, or a groundskeeper, or a campus police officer from Carnegie Mellon (or from anywhere else in the country) were going through this very same thing -- and you know what? they are. by the thousands -- would they be getting all this attention? What makes any of them any less inspiring, or any less worth mourning, than Professor Pausch?
• While we're on the subject of terrible, untimely realities... After catching some of Pirates Manager John Russel's post-game press conference on TV Wednesday night, I have to say that I'm fearing for the guy's sanity. It was only the eighth game of the year -- and, let's face it, at only 2 games under .500, that's about as good as it's gonna get -- but his levels of despair and depression already appeared to be in mid-season form. He looked thoroughly beaten and forlorn. We all know the job can do that to a guy -- but this fast? That's gotta be some kind of record. I suggest that from now until Russell's inevitable firing, team officials prohibit sharp objects blunt objects, and maybe even thick good, thick belts in the press room.
• When we allow "Cotton-Eye Joe" to be played at our civic arena, we demean both our city and our species.
• It's difficult to choose my favorite moment from the Penguins' thorough Game 1 dismantling of the Ottawa Senators Wednesday night. The towel waving frenzy just before the faceoff? Jeff Jimerson digging down and bringing a little extra excellence to his rendition of both national anthems? The gorgeous Malkin-Sykora two-on-one goal? Gary Roberts' first goal 66 (!) seconds into the game? His second goal to ice it? That moment not long afterward, when he appeared to challenge the entire Senators team to a fight and sent a loud, clear message that you will not fuck with us, and if you do, we will make you pay? Kris Letang skating and passing like someone forgot to tell him he'd never played in an NHL postseason game before? Tyler Kennedy following the puck like a heat-seeking missile on every shift? Marian Hossa making his presence felt on both ends of the ice? Marc-Andre Fleury looking so calm, cool, and collected that he may as well have been defending against Adam and Ethan in our driveway? Max Talbot, in the unmistakeable language of the flying headlock, telling Martin Lapointe, Do not even think about talking to my goalie? The penalty killers relentless energy and focus? Sidney just being Sidney?
• How about this one: Ryan Whitney, fresh off a gorgeous pass to assist on Evgeni Malkin's sickeningly sweet goal, leaping to his captain's defense and absolutely pummeling Wade Redden for the liberties he'd lately been taking with Sidney Crosby's face. That's teamwork. That's team toughness. That -- like Gary Roberts' face -- is the very definition of playoff hockey.
• And, finally, with Game 2 only a few hours away, the only way we possibly end today is with a great, top-of-the-lungs-and-the-keyboard cry of LET'S... GO... PENS!
Posted at 12:56 PM
Fri - April 4, 2008
(NOT-SO DAMP, DREARY, AND DISMAL) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
grating the cheese of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those warnings we got about all
that rain we were gonna get today. Except, of course, that these notes are
accurate. And not designed to scare you into reading more of them
later...
• Among the many interesting emails forwarded my way this week was one from Tom Hayden, Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Bill Fletcher, Jr., announcing a new Progressives for Obama web site. My favorite bit in the email -- yes, even funnier than the part where the emailers note that they need to produce a stonger liberal/progressive force behind his campaign, because Obama positions himself in the political center; you'd think a group of people supporting his candidacy would actually take a look at his voting record -- was the clause that touted a united African-American community in support of the Illinois Senator. I'm guessing that's news to all of the African-Americans still supporting Hillary Clinton. And to the ones who support John McCain. And to the ones who support no one at all and won't even make it out to vote.
• Apparently they're all lying. Or mistaken. Or, at the very least, no longer welcome in the community. In any case, this doesn't strike me as an especially progressive or unifying message to be sending. In fact, it sounds an awful lot to me like You're either with us, or against us.
• Who was it who said that again?
• I can't decide whether I'm amused or embarrassed -- probably both -- by this MSNBC headline: In speeches, Clinton often veers to dark side. Obama supporters, Chris Matthews, and Darth Vader are, I imagine, quite pleased by it.
• I can see the bumper stickers now: CLINTON/VOLDEMORT '08.
• Which, when you get right down to it, is far closer to the truth than the alternative: OBAMA/JESUS '08.
• A pair of head-scratching, eye-rubbing letters to the editor didn't get the full-blown treatment but still deserve mention this week. The first, from Jean Martin of Trafford, claims Senator Bob Casey turned his back on his state because he endorsed Barack Obama for President. Though I'm no Casey fan, and though I obviously do not share his enthusiasm for Senator Obama, I'm not sure how a U.S. Senator speaking his mind and voting his conscience and endorsing the man who will almost certainly be his party's nominee for President somehow constitutes turning his back on the commonwealth. Of course, when you go back and re-read the first sentence of the letter -- About two weeks ago, I contacted Sen. Bob Casey's office to ask for his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, who I believed he supported -- it's clear that what Ms. Martin really means is that Senator Casey turned his back on her candidate.
• Note to Ms. Martin: Though I enjoyed your Napoleon Dynamite reference (Barack Obama looks a lot like Pedro...when he runs for high school class president and tells the student body, "Vote for me and all of your dreams will come true"), it's a bit silly to suggest that failing to share your political viewpoint is equivalent to selling out everyone in the state.
• The second, and far less explicable, letter appeared in this morning's edition. Sister Patricia McCann of Oakland, apart from making the odd (but typical) intimation that Senator Obama's calls to racial harmony and justice are somehow new and original -- this is, after all, the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose own bold and brilliant calls to racial harmony and justice were hardly new themselves -- includes one sentence over which I'm still puzzling: Pastor Jeremiah Wright's words were strong, but his message did not contain anything that many people who lived through Selma, the Vietnam War and the Iraq war do not understand and affirm. I doubt Sister McCann begins and ends each day by asking God to damn the USA, and I find it rather difficult -- if not downright depressing -- to believe that many people who lived through those very real and terrible times also understand and affirm the very silly and terrible lie that the United States government created AIDS as a way to kill blacks.
• Note to Sister McCann, and to everyone else who mistakes apologizing for Rev. Wright with supporting Sen. Obama: bigotry is bigotry, and stupidity is stupidity. It may not be nice to point these things out if we're all going to hold hands and skip off into our oh-so-bright future, but if that oh-so-bright future is going to include very real solutions to our very real problems, then it will surely be necessary to do so. The rationalization of race-baiters and the co-dependency of fools are not much better than the rationalization of war-mongers and the co-dependency of other fools we've lately suffered. If we really want to make progress as a national body politic, we first need a president willing to admit when he or she, when his friends or her advisors, when his party or her supporters, are wrong. Or non-sensical. Or both. Until then, we're just replacing one form of smugness -- and one form of hypocrisy -- with another.
• I imagine this study has made a whole hell of a lot of men feel a whole hell of a lot better about their sex lives. Except maybe for Sting.
• Passing through Shadyside's great Kards Unlimited on Wednesday afternoon, I caught a glimpse of a greeting card that demanded closer inspection. So I stopped, read it...
...and laughed so hard I almost coughed up a lung.
• All those stories you've read about the new R.E.M. album being a glorious return to guitar-driven alt-rock form? All true.
• All those stories I've read about the new Martin Scorsese/Rolling Stones concert film being a brilliant and glorious piece of work? I hope they're all true.
• Great, and typically sensible, suggestion from ESPN Hockey Guru John Buccigross on how the Penguins should -- post-Cup, dare we hope?! -- approach negotiations with bona-fide sniper and free-agent-to-be Marian Hossa: If I am the Penguins, I offer Hossa six years at $36 million. If he says no, let him walk. That negotiation would take five minutes. Do you want to be a part of a perennial power where everyone takes a little less than they could get on the open market and play with the game's best playmaker AND make $6 million a year for six years? No? Later, dude.
• Five days until the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Not that I'm counting. Or waiting. Or so excited I could burst.
• And, finally, on a personal note: pride, congrats, and all the love in the world to Adam, Elder Son of TWM, on the occasion of his hard-earned, CCD-ending, (semi-)spiritual-adulthood-beginning Catholic Church confirmation this Sunday. It's difficult to see and even more difficult to understand when you're thirteen, but there's a gentle grace and beauty in Adam that, acknowledged and celebrated this weekend, mature and radiate all the more with each passing day. They have been, just as he always is, a joy and a wonder and a blessing to behold. Have a great weekend, pal. I love you so very much...
• Among the many interesting emails forwarded my way this week was one from Tom Hayden, Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Bill Fletcher, Jr., announcing a new Progressives for Obama web site. My favorite bit in the email -- yes, even funnier than the part where the emailers note that they need to produce a stonger liberal/progressive force behind his campaign, because Obama positions himself in the political center; you'd think a group of people supporting his candidacy would actually take a look at his voting record -- was the clause that touted a united African-American community in support of the Illinois Senator. I'm guessing that's news to all of the African-Americans still supporting Hillary Clinton. And to the ones who support John McCain. And to the ones who support no one at all and won't even make it out to vote.
• Apparently they're all lying. Or mistaken. Or, at the very least, no longer welcome in the community. In any case, this doesn't strike me as an especially progressive or unifying message to be sending. In fact, it sounds an awful lot to me like You're either with us, or against us.
• Who was it who said that again?
• I can't decide whether I'm amused or embarrassed -- probably both -- by this MSNBC headline: In speeches, Clinton often veers to dark side. Obama supporters, Chris Matthews, and Darth Vader are, I imagine, quite pleased by it.
• I can see the bumper stickers now: CLINTON/VOLDEMORT '08.
• Which, when you get right down to it, is far closer to the truth than the alternative: OBAMA/JESUS '08.
• A pair of head-scratching, eye-rubbing letters to the editor didn't get the full-blown treatment but still deserve mention this week. The first, from Jean Martin of Trafford, claims Senator Bob Casey turned his back on his state because he endorsed Barack Obama for President. Though I'm no Casey fan, and though I obviously do not share his enthusiasm for Senator Obama, I'm not sure how a U.S. Senator speaking his mind and voting his conscience and endorsing the man who will almost certainly be his party's nominee for President somehow constitutes turning his back on the commonwealth. Of course, when you go back and re-read the first sentence of the letter -- About two weeks ago, I contacted Sen. Bob Casey's office to ask for his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, who I believed he supported -- it's clear that what Ms. Martin really means is that Senator Casey turned his back on her candidate.
• Note to Ms. Martin: Though I enjoyed your Napoleon Dynamite reference (Barack Obama looks a lot like Pedro...when he runs for high school class president and tells the student body, "Vote for me and all of your dreams will come true"), it's a bit silly to suggest that failing to share your political viewpoint is equivalent to selling out everyone in the state.
• The second, and far less explicable, letter appeared in this morning's edition. Sister Patricia McCann of Oakland, apart from making the odd (but typical) intimation that Senator Obama's calls to racial harmony and justice are somehow new and original -- this is, after all, the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose own bold and brilliant calls to racial harmony and justice were hardly new themselves -- includes one sentence over which I'm still puzzling: Pastor Jeremiah Wright's words were strong, but his message did not contain anything that many people who lived through Selma, the Vietnam War and the Iraq war do not understand and affirm. I doubt Sister McCann begins and ends each day by asking God to damn the USA, and I find it rather difficult -- if not downright depressing -- to believe that many people who lived through those very real and terrible times also understand and affirm the very silly and terrible lie that the United States government created AIDS as a way to kill blacks.
• Note to Sister McCann, and to everyone else who mistakes apologizing for Rev. Wright with supporting Sen. Obama: bigotry is bigotry, and stupidity is stupidity. It may not be nice to point these things out if we're all going to hold hands and skip off into our oh-so-bright future, but if that oh-so-bright future is going to include very real solutions to our very real problems, then it will surely be necessary to do so. The rationalization of race-baiters and the co-dependency of fools are not much better than the rationalization of war-mongers and the co-dependency of other fools we've lately suffered. If we really want to make progress as a national body politic, we first need a president willing to admit when he or she, when his friends or her advisors, when his party or her supporters, are wrong. Or non-sensical. Or both. Until then, we're just replacing one form of smugness -- and one form of hypocrisy -- with another.
• I imagine this study has made a whole hell of a lot of men feel a whole hell of a lot better about their sex lives. Except maybe for Sting.
• Passing through Shadyside's great Kards Unlimited on Wednesday afternoon, I caught a glimpse of a greeting card that demanded closer inspection. So I stopped, read it...
...and laughed so hard I almost coughed up a lung.
• All those stories you've read about the new R.E.M. album being a glorious return to guitar-driven alt-rock form? All true.
• All those stories I've read about the new Martin Scorsese/Rolling Stones concert film being a brilliant and glorious piece of work? I hope they're all true.
• Great, and typically sensible, suggestion from ESPN Hockey Guru John Buccigross on how the Penguins should -- post-Cup, dare we hope?! -- approach negotiations with bona-fide sniper and free-agent-to-be Marian Hossa: If I am the Penguins, I offer Hossa six years at $36 million. If he says no, let him walk. That negotiation would take five minutes. Do you want to be a part of a perennial power where everyone takes a little less than they could get on the open market and play with the game's best playmaker AND make $6 million a year for six years? No? Later, dude.
• Five days until the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Not that I'm counting. Or waiting. Or so excited I could burst.
• And, finally, on a personal note: pride, congrats, and all the love in the world to Adam, Elder Son of TWM, on the occasion of his hard-earned, CCD-ending, (semi-)spiritual-adulthood-beginning Catholic Church confirmation this Sunday. It's difficult to see and even more difficult to understand when you're thirteen, but there's a gentle grace and beauty in Adam that, acknowledged and celebrated this weekend, mature and radiate all the more with each passing day. They have been, just as he always is, a joy and a wonder and a blessing to behold. Have a great weekend, pal. I love you so very much...
Posted at 02:01 PM
Fri - March 21, 2008
(NOT BAD) NOTES FROM A (GOOD) FRIDAY AFTERNOON
hopping the bunny trail of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all the Easter candy that'll still on
the shelves of retail stores on Monday morning. But without those sad little
clearance sale signs...
• First, a nod to unfortunate realities: it's been pretty crazy end of the week here at TWM Headquarters, with an upcoming holiday, a couple of boys home from school, and a couple of huge, I'm-actually-getting-paid-for-these writing deadlines fast approaching. So we'll keep these notes today, in the grand tradition of jelly beans and Cadbury Mini-Eggs, short and sweet.
• I've been wanting to do a full-scale, magnum-opus kinda TWM deconstruction of Senator Obama's big speech, but I just haven't had the time. Watch for that sometime next week. In the meantime, here's the short version: a few bursts of honest and interesting stuff that, in the end, were overwhelmed by more of the same political and rhetorical hoo-ha. And made all the more disappointing -- if not at all surprising -- for the way it danced on the borders of the issue it most needed to address.
• Perhaps by the time I get around to writing about it, Senator Breath of Fresh Air will have explained this comment, made to a Philadelphia radio station in the wake of his speech, in an attempt to explain what I thought was -- despite its abundant praises from the punditry -- one of the more odious and dubious portions of it: The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, uh, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, you know, there's a reaction that's bred into, uh, our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way. And that's just the nature of race in our society.
• That's right, folks. The great uniter and uber-thoughtful racial harmonizer used the phrase a typical white person. And meant it. (I imagine you have not heard that he did. Go figure. But if you'd like to hear him say it for yourself, click here.)
• Anyone care to speculate whether you'd have heard about it if, say, Hillary Clinton or John McCain, while talking about race or bigotry or any damned thing else, had used the phrase a typical black person?
• New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, no doubt nosing around for a Vice Presidential nomination, yesterday endorsed Barack Obama, calling him a once-in-a-lifetime leader. He can tell this, of course, from Senator Obama's long and impressive track record of leading... what, exactly?
• Oh, that's right. A presidential campaign that, despite the greatest blow job in the history of modern media coverage, still can't put away a typical white person as divisive as Hillary Clinton.
• In response to yesterday's post about that repulsive Roomful Express commercial, one of TWM's most favorite readers and writers -- we'll call him Mr. R. -- emailed to note that [his] own personal grievance on that sort of silliness came from the Berenstain Bears books: Did you ever notice that among the trio, Papa Bear was always the clueless doofus? The Bears books... just grind me down.
• I agreed, of course, because I always hated the Berenstain Bears books. But Mr. R.'s email reminded me of a series of children's books I hated even more. A series of books that -- and I know this is sacrilege to many people who, for some reason, hold these things in high esteem -- ground me down and then laughed at what was left of me: those damned Clifford the Big Red Dog books. Norman Bidwell never -- and I mean never -- used an active verb. In fact, I don't think he could find an active construction if you gave him a map and a compass. To this day, I'm convinced he earned a bonus for every passive verb he included in those damned, stultifying books. I used to hide them under the couch so I didn't have to read them to Adam. By the time Ethan was born, I'd taken even more proactive measures: I threw most of them away before he ever had a chance to ask me to read them.
• Forget the unbelievable hypocrisy of the Pittsburgh Steelers' selective, no-tolerance, but-baptism-makes-it-okay policy for players who assault their girlfriends -- it's already been well-covered here and here and beautifully satirized here -- and focus instead, for a moment, on the other astonishing thing that came out of Dan Rooney's hypocritical, self-serving pie-hole yesterday. Explaining why the Steelers are hiking ticket prices next year -- which, for the record, I do not begrudge them -- Mr. Rooney said, We needed to increase the prices to remain competitive. For those of you still struggling to regain your senses, I'll repeat that last bit: to remain competitive. You know, in a league with a hard salary cap. And the world's most lucrative sports television contract. In a market that worships his team so much, it happily shrugs its collective shoulders when he tries to claim the moral high ground by cutting his girlfriend-punching 4th wide receiver, all the while coddling his girlfriend-slapping Pro Bowl linebacker.
• The more I've thought about it, the more (and more uncomfortably) I've been wondering: if James Harrison's girlfriend had been a Satanist, do you suppose, in Dan Rooney's world, it would have been worth it for Harrison to kill her? Or at least to beat her a lot more than he did? Or would that have gotten him a couple of extra sprints in training camp and maybe a tsk tsk from the owners' box? At least until his first sack of the season?
• First, a nod to unfortunate realities: it's been pretty crazy end of the week here at TWM Headquarters, with an upcoming holiday, a couple of boys home from school, and a couple of huge, I'm-actually-getting-paid-for-these writing deadlines fast approaching. So we'll keep these notes today, in the grand tradition of jelly beans and Cadbury Mini-Eggs, short and sweet.
• I've been wanting to do a full-scale, magnum-opus kinda TWM deconstruction of Senator Obama's big speech, but I just haven't had the time. Watch for that sometime next week. In the meantime, here's the short version: a few bursts of honest and interesting stuff that, in the end, were overwhelmed by more of the same political and rhetorical hoo-ha. And made all the more disappointing -- if not at all surprising -- for the way it danced on the borders of the issue it most needed to address.
• Perhaps by the time I get around to writing about it, Senator Breath of Fresh Air will have explained this comment, made to a Philadelphia radio station in the wake of his speech, in an attempt to explain what I thought was -- despite its abundant praises from the punditry -- one of the more odious and dubious portions of it: The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, uh, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, you know, there's a reaction that's bred into, uh, our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way. And that's just the nature of race in our society.
• That's right, folks. The great uniter and uber-thoughtful racial harmonizer used the phrase a typical white person. And meant it. (I imagine you have not heard that he did. Go figure. But if you'd like to hear him say it for yourself, click here.)
• Anyone care to speculate whether you'd have heard about it if, say, Hillary Clinton or John McCain, while talking about race or bigotry or any damned thing else, had used the phrase a typical black person?
• New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, no doubt nosing around for a Vice Presidential nomination, yesterday endorsed Barack Obama, calling him a once-in-a-lifetime leader. He can tell this, of course, from Senator Obama's long and impressive track record of leading... what, exactly?
• Oh, that's right. A presidential campaign that, despite the greatest blow job in the history of modern media coverage, still can't put away a typical white person as divisive as Hillary Clinton.
• In response to yesterday's post about that repulsive Roomful Express commercial, one of TWM's most favorite readers and writers -- we'll call him Mr. R. -- emailed to note that [his] own personal grievance on that sort of silliness came from the Berenstain Bears books: Did you ever notice that among the trio, Papa Bear was always the clueless doofus? The Bears books... just grind me down.
• I agreed, of course, because I always hated the Berenstain Bears books. But Mr. R.'s email reminded me of a series of children's books I hated even more. A series of books that -- and I know this is sacrilege to many people who, for some reason, hold these things in high esteem -- ground me down and then laughed at what was left of me: those damned Clifford the Big Red Dog books. Norman Bidwell never -- and I mean never -- used an active verb. In fact, I don't think he could find an active construction if you gave him a map and a compass. To this day, I'm convinced he earned a bonus for every passive verb he included in those damned, stultifying books. I used to hide them under the couch so I didn't have to read them to Adam. By the time Ethan was born, I'd taken even more proactive measures: I threw most of them away before he ever had a chance to ask me to read them.
• Forget the unbelievable hypocrisy of the Pittsburgh Steelers' selective, no-tolerance, but-baptism-makes-it-okay policy for players who assault their girlfriends -- it's already been well-covered here and here and beautifully satirized here -- and focus instead, for a moment, on the other astonishing thing that came out of Dan Rooney's hypocritical, self-serving pie-hole yesterday. Explaining why the Steelers are hiking ticket prices next year -- which, for the record, I do not begrudge them -- Mr. Rooney said, We needed to increase the prices to remain competitive. For those of you still struggling to regain your senses, I'll repeat that last bit: to remain competitive. You know, in a league with a hard salary cap. And the world's most lucrative sports television contract. In a market that worships his team so much, it happily shrugs its collective shoulders when he tries to claim the moral high ground by cutting his girlfriend-punching 4th wide receiver, all the while coddling his girlfriend-slapping Pro Bowl linebacker.
• The more I've thought about it, the more (and more uncomfortably) I've been wondering: if James Harrison's girlfriend had been a Satanist, do you suppose, in Dan Rooney's world, it would have been worth it for Harrison to kill her? Or at least to beat her a lot more than he did? Or would that have gotten him a couple of extra sprints in training camp and maybe a tsk tsk from the owners' box? At least until his first sack of the season?
Posted at 12:15 PM
Fri - March 14, 2008
(FRIDAY THE 14TH) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
pulling the pork of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those people who'll descend upon
Market Square tomorrow. But without the excess alcohol consumption. Or the
inevitable vomiting...
• Speaking of vomiting... That's it, folks. It's all over. The Boy Who Would Be Mayor, after yesterday claiming he was still undecided -- you gotta love a guy who thinks that appearing either callow or deceitful is a shrewd political move -- has today officially endorsed Hillary Clinton. As I said on Monday: to hell with the primary; whoever doesn't get his support is the one we should nominate. And that leaves us with only one choice...
• ...OBAMA '08!
• Change! Hope! Hypocrisy!
• The Soft Bigotry of Low Specifications!
• (You knew it wouldn't last.)
• (And, unless you're a complete idiot, you knew I was kidding.)
• Loved that Post-Gazette article this morning -- you know, the one ostensibly about the endorsements. Here's the headline: Onorato, Ravenstahl back Clinton. Here's the lede: New York Sen. Hillary Rodham [this isn't a typo; they failed to include her last name; I can hardly wait for a future lede about Barack Hussein] will collect the endorsements of Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl today as she courts voters in the city in her campaign for the upcoming Pennsylvania Democratic primary. Now. When the headline and the lede unfold like that, it should be pretty clear what you're about to get. Six consecutive paragraphs about Senator Barack Obama and his campaign. Then one paragraph about Governor Ed Rendell and Senator Clinton's aides questioning Senator Obama's effort in the state. Then six more paragraphs about Senator Obama and his campaign. And then, finally, on page A7, long after the jump, in the fifteenth paragraph of the story, we get the story promised by the headline and the lede. For the last six paragraphs.
• I can't decide if this is bad editing, egregious bias, or just sloppy journalism. But whatever it is, it's kind of embarrassing.
• As a follow-up to this week's post about the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, my esteemed Carbolic colleague, the Hon. Judge Peckham, emailed to add: To paraphrase the most respected judge in America, Judge Posner from the 7th Circuit, the Pirates are the gratuitous authors of their own disappointment. They deserve no love. They were the trustee of little boys' dreams, and they squandered away all their goodwill.
• Ah, yes. But they've given them pierogi races in return.
• Justifiable homicide? You decide.
• Pity about poor little David Archuleta's train wreck of a performance on American Idol this week. It has, for now at least, damaged his AI front-runner status, and it may have even cost him the vice-presidency.
• Anyone who saw Kristy Lee Cook's nausea- and epileptic-seizure-inducing performance on American Idol will no doubt agree that Entertainment Weekly's always entertaining Michael Slezak is the easy winner of this week's TWM Quotation of the Week: Kristy Lee's country-fication of a classic Beatles tune reminded me of the out-of-control merry-go-round at the end of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. It kept going faster and faster and faster, and I saw brief images of a trail horse, or a carousel pony, and people were screaming, children I think, and — for the love of God, somebody make it stop!
• Speaking of young, soulless blonde country singers... Remember a couple of months ago, when I wrote about Sarah Marince, the back-up anthem singer who tortures The Star Spangled Banner, the ghost of Francis Scott Key, and all non-hearing-impaired Penguins fans when the legendary Jeff Jimerson has another gig? Well, not long after that, I noticed that several different people in the region, including at least one from her native Moon, came to this site by Googling either Sarah Marince and Chad Hermann or Sarah Marince and TWM. Which means that word must have spread. And that some people -- maybe her people -- were coming to read the remarks. And then, quite possibly, to heed them. Because, even though she managed to stretch the word flag across about eight syllables Wednesday night, young Sarah's recent performances have been much lighter on the melismatic acrobatics, and she has also, at every performance I've seen since those Googlers arrived at my cyber doorstep, stopped shouting Thank you to the crowd as if they'd actually come to see her. (She's wisely replaced it with just a smile and a wave. ) Now. I can't prove those changes -- by which I mean, vast improvements -- were the results of the criticisms posted here on TWM... but I think I'm gonna take credit for 'em anyway.
• You're welcome, Penguins fans.
• And nice job, Sarah. (Really.) Whether or not those changes came from what I wrote here -- and, come on, we all know they did! -- what is perhaps most important here is that, for whatever reason, Sarah and her handlers realized that some things needed to be changed. And, at least in some small part, they changed them. For the better. That willingness to absorb and to heed and to benefit from criticism immediately separates Ms. Marince from almost everyone you see on American Idol, and, for that matter, almost everyone of her generation who has any talent at all. How refreshing indeed.
• Though not nearly as refreshing as this Tuesday's Drive-By Truckers show at Mr. Smalls Funhouse figures to be. There are still tickets available, and I highly recommend them for anyone who wants to see what should be one of the best, most brain-and-body-cavity-rattling rock shows of the year.
• If you want to get a little preview of what you might see, check out this fantastic page of photos from concert photographer Todd Owyoung, who had unprecedented full-show, front-of-stage access for the Truckers' February 29th show in St. Louis. Be sure to scroll all the way down the page, past the recap and the setlist to see all the photos. You don't even have to know or like the band to appreciate the sheer, eye-popping brilliance of Mr. Owyoung's artistry. It's truly beautiful work.
• And, finally, to close out the week and kick off the weekend and start setting the mood and the stage for the show, I'll leave you all this afternoon with one of my all-time-favorite Drive-By-Truckers verses, from Mike Cooley's great Gravity's Gone:
Those little demons ain't the reasons for the bruises on your soul you've been neglecting
You'll never lose your mind as long as you're heart always reminds you where you left it
And don't ever let 'em make you feel like saying what you want is unbecoming
If you were supposed to watch your mouth all the time I doubt your eyes would be above it...
• Speaking of vomiting... That's it, folks. It's all over. The Boy Who Would Be Mayor, after yesterday claiming he was still undecided -- you gotta love a guy who thinks that appearing either callow or deceitful is a shrewd political move -- has today officially endorsed Hillary Clinton. As I said on Monday: to hell with the primary; whoever doesn't get his support is the one we should nominate. And that leaves us with only one choice...
• ...OBAMA '08!
• Change! Hope! Hypocrisy!
• The Soft Bigotry of Low Specifications!
• (You knew it wouldn't last.)
• (And, unless you're a complete idiot, you knew I was kidding.)
• Loved that Post-Gazette article this morning -- you know, the one ostensibly about the endorsements. Here's the headline: Onorato, Ravenstahl back Clinton. Here's the lede: New York Sen. Hillary Rodham [this isn't a typo; they failed to include her last name; I can hardly wait for a future lede about Barack Hussein] will collect the endorsements of Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl today as she courts voters in the city in her campaign for the upcoming Pennsylvania Democratic primary. Now. When the headline and the lede unfold like that, it should be pretty clear what you're about to get. Six consecutive paragraphs about Senator Barack Obama and his campaign. Then one paragraph about Governor Ed Rendell and Senator Clinton's aides questioning Senator Obama's effort in the state. Then six more paragraphs about Senator Obama and his campaign. And then, finally, on page A7, long after the jump, in the fifteenth paragraph of the story, we get the story promised by the headline and the lede. For the last six paragraphs.
• I can't decide if this is bad editing, egregious bias, or just sloppy journalism. But whatever it is, it's kind of embarrassing.
• As a follow-up to this week's post about the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, my esteemed Carbolic colleague, the Hon. Judge Peckham, emailed to add: To paraphrase the most respected judge in America, Judge Posner from the 7th Circuit, the Pirates are the gratuitous authors of their own disappointment. They deserve no love. They were the trustee of little boys' dreams, and they squandered away all their goodwill.
• Ah, yes. But they've given them pierogi races in return.
• Justifiable homicide? You decide.
• Pity about poor little David Archuleta's train wreck of a performance on American Idol this week. It has, for now at least, damaged his AI front-runner status, and it may have even cost him the vice-presidency.
• Anyone who saw Kristy Lee Cook's nausea- and epileptic-seizure-inducing performance on American Idol will no doubt agree that Entertainment Weekly's always entertaining Michael Slezak is the easy winner of this week's TWM Quotation of the Week: Kristy Lee's country-fication of a classic Beatles tune reminded me of the out-of-control merry-go-round at the end of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. It kept going faster and faster and faster, and I saw brief images of a trail horse, or a carousel pony, and people were screaming, children I think, and — for the love of God, somebody make it stop!
• Speaking of young, soulless blonde country singers... Remember a couple of months ago, when I wrote about Sarah Marince, the back-up anthem singer who tortures The Star Spangled Banner, the ghost of Francis Scott Key, and all non-hearing-impaired Penguins fans when the legendary Jeff Jimerson has another gig? Well, not long after that, I noticed that several different people in the region, including at least one from her native Moon, came to this site by Googling either Sarah Marince and Chad Hermann or Sarah Marince and TWM. Which means that word must have spread. And that some people -- maybe her people -- were coming to read the remarks. And then, quite possibly, to heed them. Because, even though she managed to stretch the word flag across about eight syllables Wednesday night, young Sarah's recent performances have been much lighter on the melismatic acrobatics, and she has also, at every performance I've seen since those Googlers arrived at my cyber doorstep, stopped shouting Thank you to the crowd as if they'd actually come to see her. (She's wisely replaced it with just a smile and a wave. ) Now. I can't prove those changes -- by which I mean, vast improvements -- were the results of the criticisms posted here on TWM... but I think I'm gonna take credit for 'em anyway.
• You're welcome, Penguins fans.
• And nice job, Sarah. (Really.) Whether or not those changes came from what I wrote here -- and, come on, we all know they did! -- what is perhaps most important here is that, for whatever reason, Sarah and her handlers realized that some things needed to be changed. And, at least in some small part, they changed them. For the better. That willingness to absorb and to heed and to benefit from criticism immediately separates Ms. Marince from almost everyone you see on American Idol, and, for that matter, almost everyone of her generation who has any talent at all. How refreshing indeed.
• Though not nearly as refreshing as this Tuesday's Drive-By Truckers show at Mr. Smalls Funhouse figures to be. There are still tickets available, and I highly recommend them for anyone who wants to see what should be one of the best, most brain-and-body-cavity-rattling rock shows of the year.
• If you want to get a little preview of what you might see, check out this fantastic page of photos from concert photographer Todd Owyoung, who had unprecedented full-show, front-of-stage access for the Truckers' February 29th show in St. Louis. Be sure to scroll all the way down the page, past the recap and the setlist to see all the photos. You don't even have to know or like the band to appreciate the sheer, eye-popping brilliance of Mr. Owyoung's artistry. It's truly beautiful work.
• And, finally, to close out the week and kick off the weekend and start setting the mood and the stage for the show, I'll leave you all this afternoon with one of my all-time-favorite Drive-By-Truckers verses, from Mike Cooley's great Gravity's Gone:
Those little demons ain't the reasons for the bruises on your soul you've been neglecting
You'll never lose your mind as long as you're heart always reminds you where you left it
And don't ever let 'em make you feel like saying what you want is unbecoming
If you were supposed to watch your mouth all the time I doubt your eyes would be above it...
Posted at 04:03 PM
Fri - March 7, 2008
(A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
smoothing the nap of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those big plans you have for the
week that, for one reason or another, get pushed back to the weekend. But this
weekend, you have one less hour to get to 'em. So we'd better get
started...
• First, a BREAKING NEWS ALERT: You've no doubt heard about that house explosion in Plum on Wednesday, but did you know there was a second, far more shocking explosion in Pittsburgh yesterday? You can read about it, and even see pictures of it, here.
• For anyone wondering or worrying about how a protracted battle for the Democratic nomination could harm the party or hurt the country or somehow undo either Senator Obama's or Senator Clinton's chances in November, Rutgers University Professor David Greenberg provides an excellent primer and history lesson. The bottom line money sentence: Fighting all the way through the primaries, in other words, is perfectly normal.
• Obamedia Update: At the risk of inciting another dozen or so emails from the hysterics, I am compelled to note that the brand-spanking-new, pretty-damned-slick Decision '08 commercial that NBC just started running to promote its campaign coverage features, in addition to shots of the network's on-air talent, a loving close-up of Barack Obama, a close-up of John McCain, another tight shot of Barack Obama, and a medium shot of John McCain. Hillary Clinton appears once, after the first McCain image, in a shaky long shot, half-obscured by a studio camera. That seems pretty fair and balanced to me.
• In NBC's (slight) defense: they almost certainly had this piece in the pipeline before Tuesday, and they, like everyone else covering those primaries and tossing around phrases like Hillary Clinton's Last Stand, assumed Senator Obama would win and the deal would be more or less be sealed. Though it was a bit premature, and maybe even a bit presumptuous, you can't blame NBC for wanting to have a slick new commercial ready to go at the start of what would have been, for all intents and purposes, the general election campaign. But you can, of course, blame them for running the thing when it's still very much the primary season. And especially when the piece is so obviously slanted.
• Okay. Bring on the emails. But before you set fingers to keyboard, I'm begging you: respond to what I've actually written and argued, not to your own overreactions to it. In a world of sense and reason, I don't think that's too much to ask.
• If you remember the days when Bill Clinton inflicted hernia enough upon the English language to dispute our definition of the word is, consider this New York Times piece, in which legal lingo guru Adam Freedman breaks down some maddening distinctions in diction -- some real, some imagined -- made by Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, and NBC anchor Brian Williams during last week's Democratic presidential debate.
• Denounce? Reject? Renounce? Deject? I vote for Depress. (And I'm a language geek!)
• It is one hell of a good week when I only have to write two names on The Wall.
• It will be a far better week -- and year, and world -- when I no longer have to write any names on it at all.
• Maybe it's just my temperamental DSL connection, but it seems to me that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette web site has been awfully sluggish at times this week. On my computer, at least, Post-Gazette Now has seemed more like Post-Gazette Eventually.
• Got a tip to this bizarre little YouTube clip from one of TWM's most favorite readers and writers. I'll let him explain: You must go to the attached link and view this clip in its entirety. It is worth the high hilarity. It is worth the insight into how language and meaning can be distended into the shape of a pig's bladder filled with sand and then used to smack the unsuspecting across the back of the head, possibly whilst an accomplice in large, floppy shoes squirts merrily from the seltzer bottle of theology. Yes, it really is just like that.
• After lightly perusing yet another interchangeable, uninspired Facebook photo album, I got to wondering: How many photos of you and your friends mugging for the camera, striking goofy dance poses, and drinking beer from plastic cups does the world really need? It's only a matter of time before that site, and perhaps even the world, implodes under the weight of its own uncritical narcissism.
• Speaking of uncritical narcissism... Let's hope the exposure of yet another phony memoir helps big publishers and big, gullible book clubbers alike realize that the only memoirs truly worth reading are: a) the ones that are actually true, and b) the ones that are written by people we've actually heard of. It should help the cause to note that plucking ones from Category B often makes Category A a foregone conclusion; after all, it's much harder for someone like Steve Martin or Colin Powell to lie about his life and work than it is for anonymous hacks like James Frey or Margaret Seltzer to lie about theirs.
• Perhaps in the future, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will make it much easier for the publishers of self-absorption and celeb-reality to fact-check all the sloppy, angst-ridden memoirs that cross their desks: We're sorry, Mr. Smith, but we know you weren't living on the streets of Chicago and shitting in dumpsters in the spring of 2008; your best friend's Facebook site has photos of you playing beer pong in Secaucus and downing over-priced Mai Tais in Manhattan bars during that very same time season. So give us back that advance, and forget about Oprah. We'll be moving on to someone whose melodrama is much harder to disprove.
• Now that they've whittled their way down to the Top 12, and now that I've had three weeks to watch their full performances, I'd have to say my two favorite American Idol finalists are Carly Smithson and Brooke White. They both have great voices -- in Smithson's case, really great -- great instincts (White's reinvention of Love is a Battlefield was fantastic) and, as far as I can tell from a couple of weeks of reality tv, great personalities. I want to like Michael Johns and David Cook more than I do -- Johns needs to really rip into a tune soon, and Cook took a big leap forward by turning a Lionel Richie song into an emo power ballad -- and I also have soft spots for Jason Castro and Syesha Mercado. One finalist for whom I most certainly do not have a soft spot: too-earnest-and-programmed-by-half frontrunner David Archuleta, whose explanation of why he chose to sing Another Day in Paradise ("to bring attention to the people of the world who have nothing") confirmed every single suspicion I've ever had about him. Once I stopped gagging.
• Just a quick update on the primary process for TWM's next Official Muse: so far, I've received email nominations -- some with photos, some with full (and awfully persuasive) arguments attached -- for Caliope, Elizabeth Banks, Rachel McAdams, Scarlett Johansson, Evangeline Lilly, Grace Park, Konnie Huq, Megan Fox, Katherine Heigl, and Eva Green. Excellent choices all. Stay tuned for more coverage of Muse '08.
• And, finally, on a personal note: TWM takes a moment and makes a note to wish a big 'ol, one-day-belated Happy Birthday to history buff, gardening God, classic rock mix master, and brother-in-law-extraordinaire Ralph Moeslein. Happy Birthday, Ralph. Hope your day was as great and as true as you...
• First, a BREAKING NEWS ALERT: You've no doubt heard about that house explosion in Plum on Wednesday, but did you know there was a second, far more shocking explosion in Pittsburgh yesterday? You can read about it, and even see pictures of it, here.
• For anyone wondering or worrying about how a protracted battle for the Democratic nomination could harm the party or hurt the country or somehow undo either Senator Obama's or Senator Clinton's chances in November, Rutgers University Professor David Greenberg provides an excellent primer and history lesson. The bottom line money sentence: Fighting all the way through the primaries, in other words, is perfectly normal.
• Obamedia Update: At the risk of inciting another dozen or so emails from the hysterics, I am compelled to note that the brand-spanking-new, pretty-damned-slick Decision '08 commercial that NBC just started running to promote its campaign coverage features, in addition to shots of the network's on-air talent, a loving close-up of Barack Obama, a close-up of John McCain, another tight shot of Barack Obama, and a medium shot of John McCain. Hillary Clinton appears once, after the first McCain image, in a shaky long shot, half-obscured by a studio camera. That seems pretty fair and balanced to me.
• In NBC's (slight) defense: they almost certainly had this piece in the pipeline before Tuesday, and they, like everyone else covering those primaries and tossing around phrases like Hillary Clinton's Last Stand, assumed Senator Obama would win and the deal would be more or less be sealed. Though it was a bit premature, and maybe even a bit presumptuous, you can't blame NBC for wanting to have a slick new commercial ready to go at the start of what would have been, for all intents and purposes, the general election campaign. But you can, of course, blame them for running the thing when it's still very much the primary season. And especially when the piece is so obviously slanted.
• Okay. Bring on the emails. But before you set fingers to keyboard, I'm begging you: respond to what I've actually written and argued, not to your own overreactions to it. In a world of sense and reason, I don't think that's too much to ask.
• If you remember the days when Bill Clinton inflicted hernia enough upon the English language to dispute our definition of the word is, consider this New York Times piece, in which legal lingo guru Adam Freedman breaks down some maddening distinctions in diction -- some real, some imagined -- made by Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, and NBC anchor Brian Williams during last week's Democratic presidential debate.
• Denounce? Reject? Renounce? Deject? I vote for Depress. (And I'm a language geek!)
• It is one hell of a good week when I only have to write two names on The Wall.
• It will be a far better week -- and year, and world -- when I no longer have to write any names on it at all.
• Maybe it's just my temperamental DSL connection, but it seems to me that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette web site has been awfully sluggish at times this week. On my computer, at least, Post-Gazette Now has seemed more like Post-Gazette Eventually.
• Got a tip to this bizarre little YouTube clip from one of TWM's most favorite readers and writers. I'll let him explain: You must go to the attached link and view this clip in its entirety. It is worth the high hilarity. It is worth the insight into how language and meaning can be distended into the shape of a pig's bladder filled with sand and then used to smack the unsuspecting across the back of the head, possibly whilst an accomplice in large, floppy shoes squirts merrily from the seltzer bottle of theology. Yes, it really is just like that.
• After lightly perusing yet another interchangeable, uninspired Facebook photo album, I got to wondering: How many photos of you and your friends mugging for the camera, striking goofy dance poses, and drinking beer from plastic cups does the world really need? It's only a matter of time before that site, and perhaps even the world, implodes under the weight of its own uncritical narcissism.
• Speaking of uncritical narcissism... Let's hope the exposure of yet another phony memoir helps big publishers and big, gullible book clubbers alike realize that the only memoirs truly worth reading are: a) the ones that are actually true, and b) the ones that are written by people we've actually heard of. It should help the cause to note that plucking ones from Category B often makes Category A a foregone conclusion; after all, it's much harder for someone like Steve Martin or Colin Powell to lie about his life and work than it is for anonymous hacks like James Frey or Margaret Seltzer to lie about theirs.
• Perhaps in the future, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will make it much easier for the publishers of self-absorption and celeb-reality to fact-check all the sloppy, angst-ridden memoirs that cross their desks: We're sorry, Mr. Smith, but we know you weren't living on the streets of Chicago and shitting in dumpsters in the spring of 2008; your best friend's Facebook site has photos of you playing beer pong in Secaucus and downing over-priced Mai Tais in Manhattan bars during that very same time season. So give us back that advance, and forget about Oprah. We'll be moving on to someone whose melodrama is much harder to disprove.
• Now that they've whittled their way down to the Top 12, and now that I've had three weeks to watch their full performances, I'd have to say my two favorite American Idol finalists are Carly Smithson and Brooke White. They both have great voices -- in Smithson's case, really great -- great instincts (White's reinvention of Love is a Battlefield was fantastic) and, as far as I can tell from a couple of weeks of reality tv, great personalities. I want to like Michael Johns and David Cook more than I do -- Johns needs to really rip into a tune soon, and Cook took a big leap forward by turning a Lionel Richie song into an emo power ballad -- and I also have soft spots for Jason Castro and Syesha Mercado. One finalist for whom I most certainly do not have a soft spot: too-earnest-and-programmed-by-half frontrunner David Archuleta, whose explanation of why he chose to sing Another Day in Paradise ("to bring attention to the people of the world who have nothing") confirmed every single suspicion I've ever had about him. Once I stopped gagging.
• Just a quick update on the primary process for TWM's next Official Muse: so far, I've received email nominations -- some with photos, some with full (and awfully persuasive) arguments attached -- for Caliope, Elizabeth Banks, Rachel McAdams, Scarlett Johansson, Evangeline Lilly, Grace Park, Konnie Huq, Megan Fox, Katherine Heigl, and Eva Green. Excellent choices all. Stay tuned for more coverage of Muse '08.
• And, finally, on a personal note: TWM takes a moment and makes a note to wish a big 'ol, one-day-belated Happy Birthday to history buff, gardening God, classic rock mix master, and brother-in-law-extraordinaire Ralph Moeslein. Happy Birthday, Ralph. Hope your day was as great and as true as you...
Posted at 12:00 PM
Fri - February 29, 2008
(THE FIRST-EVER LEAP-DAY) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
extending the calendar of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all that snow we got today that we
weren't expecting. Except that, well, we were all expecting
these...
• First, a couple of follow-ups to Tuesday's long-in-coming, almost-as-long-in-the-reading epic post on the rampant one-in-four nonsense. I received several emails asking for direct links to more information on the origin of the one-in-four figure and its subsequent, systematic debunking. I'd already included a link to the best source in the (admittedly link-heavy) post, but I hadn't called special attention to it, and people are obviously interested in it, so here it is again.
• That link takes you to the full text of a chapter from Christina Hoff Sommers' landmark Who Stole Feminism? -- an undeniably brilliant book to which I first made reference here on TWM almost two years ago -- that demonstrates how a few reporters and researchers, against some heavy and often ugly resistance, expose the one-in-four figure for the hackery it is.
• Here's my favorite -- by which I mean, the most sickening -- example of that often ugly resistance: Sheila Kuehl, the director of the California Women's Law Center, confided to readers of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, "I found myself wishing that [Neil] Gilbert, himself, might be raped and ... be told, to his face, it had never happened." Neil Gilbert is a UC Berkeley professor who contributed to the debunking. Sheila Kuehl is a woman who, based on that quotation, needs serious psychological help.
• That quotation would be unbelievable were it not so typical. It's also rather ironic, since Kuehl, apart from her despicable cruelty -- is sadism too strong a word? I don't think so -- actually comes close to making Gilbert's point for him. One of the great flaws in the study, as I noted in Tuesday's post, is that 73% of the women identified as victims of "sexual assault" in the original study said they were not sexually assaulted. In other words, they were not raped, and then were told to their faces that they were by researchers who, without evidence but with big ideological axes to grind, claimed to know better. I don't know about you, but I imagine that women who haven't been raped don't like being told that they have been any more than women who have been raped like being told that they haven't.
• But, hey, in the eyes of radical gender feminists, only one side is right on this issue. Pity it's not the truth.
• On the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, above the fold in the upper-right corner, a headline reads: Obama's latest persona: The king of cool. As if that weren't enough, above the headline is a photo of Senator Obama holding a football, his hand cocked as if ready to pass. The caption below reads: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. posed with a football during a tour of the University of Texas, but he wouldn't throw it. That was cool in the eyes of some. First question: in the eyes of some what? Second question: when did posing with a football but not actually throwing it -- especially because you think you'd be pretty bad at it -- become cool? Last time I checked, that wasn't being cool; it was being a poseur.
• Remember when I said Senator Obama was a phony? That he was just another Breath of Stale Air? New kind of politics, my ass.
• Here's a headline that does not exactly inspire confidence: Bush, Bernanke hopeful on economy. I have not, at least until I saw the front page of this morning's PG, been one a Bernanke-basher or even a Bernanke-doubter. I think he's been doing fairly well at a thoroughly thankless job. But when you start aligning with President Bush on the big issues, and especially on the economy, well...
• ...that's kind of like reading a headline that says Captain Smith, Bernanke hopeful on Titanic.
• From the Signs (& Sights) You Don't Ever Want to See Department: On my way back to the parking garage after an event at CAPA Monday night, I caught a glimpse of a flashing LED sign on the wall outside the Blush Gentleman's Club, and for one terrifying moment, I thought the sign read: BUSH is Totally Nude!
• No doubt coming next week: Bush, Bernanke are Totally Nude!
• Let me see if I have this right: the Steelers, who received about a kajillion dollars in public funds for the ten-dates-a-year Mustard Bowl on the North Shore, now want $4 million more in public funds so they can build their $10 entertainment complex next to it? Am I missing something? Or are the Rooneys just missing all senses of shame and perspective?
• (Yeah, I know I'm a homer. But I don't care. And, in this case, it's kind of appropriate...) The most artful and poetic of all the Myron Cope memorial notes and posts I saw on Wednesday was this one.
• This may be the first time in my life that at least one winner in a major Oscar category didn't totally piss me off. No Country? Ratatouille? Daniel-Day Lewis? Javier Bardem? Bourne Ultimatum winning three technical awards? Fantastic choices all. I'm still scratching my head over The Golden Compass winning for visual effects, but I long ago made my peace with the inevitable Diablo Cody Best Original Screenplay win. And the Cinematography win for Robert Elswit and There Will Be Blood was more than compensation enough.
• In the midst of some typical Oscar over-coverage at Slate.com, Dana Stevens gets this observation absolutely right: I'm amazed that Sarah Polley isn't the human-interest story of these Oscars: She's a 29-year-old knockout who just made an astonishingly mature, critically lauded debut as a writer/director. Is it because Away From Her's subject matter is so depressing (as opposed to the nonstop merriment of, say, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)? Is it a woman thing? A Canadian thing? Or is Polley just less savvy at self-packaging than, say, Diablo Cody?
• I've spent the last week trying to decide whether Barack Obama is the political equivalent of Juno or of Diablo Cody. And then it hit me: he's the political equivalent of both.
• If only there were a political equivalent of Paul Thomas Anderson. Now there would be some true audacity...
• First, a couple of follow-ups to Tuesday's long-in-coming, almost-as-long-in-the-reading epic post on the rampant one-in-four nonsense. I received several emails asking for direct links to more information on the origin of the one-in-four figure and its subsequent, systematic debunking. I'd already included a link to the best source in the (admittedly link-heavy) post, but I hadn't called special attention to it, and people are obviously interested in it, so here it is again.
• That link takes you to the full text of a chapter from Christina Hoff Sommers' landmark Who Stole Feminism? -- an undeniably brilliant book to which I first made reference here on TWM almost two years ago -- that demonstrates how a few reporters and researchers, against some heavy and often ugly resistance, expose the one-in-four figure for the hackery it is.
• Here's my favorite -- by which I mean, the most sickening -- example of that often ugly resistance: Sheila Kuehl, the director of the California Women's Law Center, confided to readers of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, "I found myself wishing that [Neil] Gilbert, himself, might be raped and ... be told, to his face, it had never happened." Neil Gilbert is a UC Berkeley professor who contributed to the debunking. Sheila Kuehl is a woman who, based on that quotation, needs serious psychological help.
• That quotation would be unbelievable were it not so typical. It's also rather ironic, since Kuehl, apart from her despicable cruelty -- is sadism too strong a word? I don't think so -- actually comes close to making Gilbert's point for him. One of the great flaws in the study, as I noted in Tuesday's post, is that 73% of the women identified as victims of "sexual assault" in the original study said they were not sexually assaulted. In other words, they were not raped, and then were told to their faces that they were by researchers who, without evidence but with big ideological axes to grind, claimed to know better. I don't know about you, but I imagine that women who haven't been raped don't like being told that they have been any more than women who have been raped like being told that they haven't.
• But, hey, in the eyes of radical gender feminists, only one side is right on this issue. Pity it's not the truth.
• On the front page of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, above the fold in the upper-right corner, a headline reads: Obama's latest persona: The king of cool. As if that weren't enough, above the headline is a photo of Senator Obama holding a football, his hand cocked as if ready to pass. The caption below reads: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. posed with a football during a tour of the University of Texas, but he wouldn't throw it. That was cool in the eyes of some. First question: in the eyes of some what? Second question: when did posing with a football but not actually throwing it -- especially because you think you'd be pretty bad at it -- become cool? Last time I checked, that wasn't being cool; it was being a poseur.
• Remember when I said Senator Obama was a phony? That he was just another Breath of Stale Air? New kind of politics, my ass.
• Here's a headline that does not exactly inspire confidence: Bush, Bernanke hopeful on economy. I have not, at least until I saw the front page of this morning's PG, been one a Bernanke-basher or even a Bernanke-doubter. I think he's been doing fairly well at a thoroughly thankless job. But when you start aligning with President Bush on the big issues, and especially on the economy, well...
• ...that's kind of like reading a headline that says Captain Smith, Bernanke hopeful on Titanic.
• From the Signs (& Sights) You Don't Ever Want to See Department: On my way back to the parking garage after an event at CAPA Monday night, I caught a glimpse of a flashing LED sign on the wall outside the Blush Gentleman's Club, and for one terrifying moment, I thought the sign read: BUSH is Totally Nude!
• No doubt coming next week: Bush, Bernanke are Totally Nude!
• Let me see if I have this right: the Steelers, who received about a kajillion dollars in public funds for the ten-dates-a-year Mustard Bowl on the North Shore, now want $4 million more in public funds so they can build their $10 entertainment complex next to it? Am I missing something? Or are the Rooneys just missing all senses of shame and perspective?
• (Yeah, I know I'm a homer. But I don't care. And, in this case, it's kind of appropriate...) The most artful and poetic of all the Myron Cope memorial notes and posts I saw on Wednesday was this one.
• This may be the first time in my life that at least one winner in a major Oscar category didn't totally piss me off. No Country? Ratatouille? Daniel-Day Lewis? Javier Bardem? Bourne Ultimatum winning three technical awards? Fantastic choices all. I'm still scratching my head over The Golden Compass winning for visual effects, but I long ago made my peace with the inevitable Diablo Cody Best Original Screenplay win. And the Cinematography win for Robert Elswit and There Will Be Blood was more than compensation enough.
• In the midst of some typical Oscar over-coverage at Slate.com, Dana Stevens gets this observation absolutely right: I'm amazed that Sarah Polley isn't the human-interest story of these Oscars: She's a 29-year-old knockout who just made an astonishingly mature, critically lauded debut as a writer/director. Is it because Away From Her's subject matter is so depressing (as opposed to the nonstop merriment of, say, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)? Is it a woman thing? A Canadian thing? Or is Polley just less savvy at self-packaging than, say, Diablo Cody?
• I've spent the last week trying to decide whether Barack Obama is the political equivalent of Juno or of Diablo Cody. And then it hit me: he's the political equivalent of both.
• If only there were a political equivalent of Paul Thomas Anderson. Now there would be some true audacity...
Posted at 05:53 PM
Fri - February 22, 2008
(ANOTHER WINTRY MIX OF) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
expanding the horizons of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like a lot of the schools delays the boys
have been getting lately: not always necessary, but still a nice way to break up
the monotony...
• This Just In: During last night's debate, Hillary Clinton uttered four sentences that kinda sorta maybe, in some vague thematic and inspirational but no real syntactical way, possibly perhaps sounds eerily and vaguely reminiscent of something that John Edwards said during a debate in Iowa in December.
• The Clinton passage is 45 words, the Edwards passage 36. They share exactly 7 -- count 'em, 7 -- words across three phrases: going to be fine, happens, and this election. Quick, someone convene a judicial board!
• That's a helluva story you got there, CNNBO. At least you placed it correctly on the home page: one spot above the bullshit McCain lobbyist story, and seven places above the thought-provoking news that Tori Spelling dishes on sex during '90210'.
• The TWM Obama Whopper of the Week Award goes to this little nugget of campaign trail wisdom: It's true that speeches don't solve all problems, but what is also true is if we cannot inspire the country to believe again then it doesn't matter how many policies and plans we have. Gee, Senator, did you ever stop to think that people -- you know, these voters in whom you seem to have so much faith -- might be inspired to believe in their country again if its leaders ever came up with more than speeches? If they were given a whole host great laws and plans and policies? Did you ever think of that?
• Apparently not.
• I know that's kind of an old-fashioned notion -- you know, actually giving people something more to believe in than your own inflated sense of self -- but, hey, it just might work.
• Speaking of inflated senses of self... What Michelle Obama said this week has already been scrutinized to death -- mostly, as Tony Norman points out in today's PG, by ideologues and hypocrites far more full of crap than she -- but I'm still struck by the (what seems to me) excessive reach of her rhetorical hand. Could she really have found nothing -- not one single thing -- in America of which to be truly proud, ever, before the country began to hunger for the change of her husband's presidential campaign? Really? Really? I, for one, would love to hear her expand upon that claim -- not because I want to demonize her like Pat Buchanan or Rush Limbaugh or all those yahoos on Fox, but because I'm finding it difficult to wrap my mind around the (alleged) reality of the rhetoric. It all strikes me as a bit of a show. A little self-absorbed. And more than a little melodramatic.
• Not to mention awfully dark and cynical for The Wife of the Man of Hope and Dreams.
• Got lots of email -- including some from staunch Obama supporters -- about Wednesday's post directing you (thanks again, JPP) to the oft-hilarious, nigh-refreshing Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle web page. Everyone seemed to have their own favorite sentences. For the record, my four favorites (so far) are: Barack Obama folded your laundry. Barack Obama paid your speeding ticket. Barack Obama carries a picture of you in his wallet. Barack Obama helped you move a sofa.
• Freezing fog? Did I really hear WPXI's Krista Villareal warn us about freezing fog in her weather report this morning?
• What the hell's next? Freezing dew?
• On the bright side: at least there weren't any ice pellets.
• If you haven't seen it, you really should check out this video of Pittsburgh blogger Matt Hogue going on the record and exposing some unbelievable slime and waste at the City of Pittsburgh Housing Authority. (Yeah, I know it's got that two-faced, three-mouthed jackass Marty Griffin, but I promise it's worth the effort.) Matt and I have had plenty of differences in the past, but I'll say here what I've said to him twice now in personal emails: he took a strong and inspiring stand when he quit his job and decided to expose that corruption, and I admire the hell out of him for it. If we had more people with those sorts of principles in city government -- or anywhere else -- we'd all be a lot better off.
• The TWM Grammatical Pet Peeve of the Week, brought to you by Ron Cook's spot-on Saturday column about the multiple absurdities of Patriots' Spygate: the grating use of the phrase centered around. Note to Ron and everyone else: You can't center around. You revolve around. A center is the center. You can center at, you can center in, you can center on. You can even center up if you're playing basketball. But you can not, under any physical or grammatical circumstances, center around.
• It will be fun to be able to say that I attended the game when Evgeni Malkin took over the NHL Scoring Lead for the first time in his career. It will be even more fun if, as I suspect, he holds that lead for the rest of the season. And yet somehow I feel the fun and novelty of that moment will wear off over time, and perhaps quickly, if only because he's shown that with increased ice time -- and even with the incredible Sidney Crosby on his team -- he's capable of claiming that spot over and over and over again.
• I hope that all Penguins fans -- by which I mean real Penguins fans, not those idiots who booed after the 2nd period Tuesday night, and certainly not the ones who left early and (ah, sweet justice!) missed that fabulous third-period comeback -- truly appreciate what we have, and what more we're about to have, over the next decade or so. Sure, we had Lemieux and Jagr on the same team, including two Stanley Cup winners, and we had 11 Art Ross Trophies between them. But the primes of their careers barely overlapped, and only once -- in the 1995-96 season -- did they ever really push each other (Mario 161 points, Jagr 149) for the scoring title. We're about to watch two of the top five -- if not two of the top three -- talents in the world grow and mature and develop in tandem, on the same team, right here before our eyes. That's pretty amazing stuff.
• The only thing more amazing would be for all those frustrated, neanderthal Steelers fans to stop yelling "Hit somebody!" every time the other team touches the puck. Shouting for Sid or Geno or Peter Sykora or Ryan Whitney to hit somebody is like shouting "Dance the Polka!" at Mikhail Baryshnikov or "Play chopsticks!" at Chick Corea. In other words, folks: just shut up and watch the masters at work...
• This Just In: During last night's debate, Hillary Clinton uttered four sentences that kinda sorta maybe, in some vague thematic and inspirational but no real syntactical way, possibly perhaps sounds eerily and vaguely reminiscent of something that John Edwards said during a debate in Iowa in December.
• The Clinton passage is 45 words, the Edwards passage 36. They share exactly 7 -- count 'em, 7 -- words across three phrases: going to be fine, happens, and this election. Quick, someone convene a judicial board!
• That's a helluva story you got there, CNNBO. At least you placed it correctly on the home page: one spot above the bullshit McCain lobbyist story, and seven places above the thought-provoking news that Tori Spelling dishes on sex during '90210'.
• The TWM Obama Whopper of the Week Award goes to this little nugget of campaign trail wisdom: It's true that speeches don't solve all problems, but what is also true is if we cannot inspire the country to believe again then it doesn't matter how many policies and plans we have. Gee, Senator, did you ever stop to think that people -- you know, these voters in whom you seem to have so much faith -- might be inspired to believe in their country again if its leaders ever came up with more than speeches? If they were given a whole host great laws and plans and policies? Did you ever think of that?
• Apparently not.
• I know that's kind of an old-fashioned notion -- you know, actually giving people something more to believe in than your own inflated sense of self -- but, hey, it just might work.
• Speaking of inflated senses of self... What Michelle Obama said this week has already been scrutinized to death -- mostly, as Tony Norman points out in today's PG, by ideologues and hypocrites far more full of crap than she -- but I'm still struck by the (what seems to me) excessive reach of her rhetorical hand. Could she really have found nothing -- not one single thing -- in America of which to be truly proud, ever, before the country began to hunger for the change of her husband's presidential campaign? Really? Really? I, for one, would love to hear her expand upon that claim -- not because I want to demonize her like Pat Buchanan or Rush Limbaugh or all those yahoos on Fox, but because I'm finding it difficult to wrap my mind around the (alleged) reality of the rhetoric. It all strikes me as a bit of a show. A little self-absorbed. And more than a little melodramatic.
• Not to mention awfully dark and cynical for The Wife of the Man of Hope and Dreams.
• Got lots of email -- including some from staunch Obama supporters -- about Wednesday's post directing you (thanks again, JPP) to the oft-hilarious, nigh-refreshing Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle web page. Everyone seemed to have their own favorite sentences. For the record, my four favorites (so far) are: Barack Obama folded your laundry. Barack Obama paid your speeding ticket. Barack Obama carries a picture of you in his wallet. Barack Obama helped you move a sofa.
• Freezing fog? Did I really hear WPXI's Krista Villareal warn us about freezing fog in her weather report this morning?
• What the hell's next? Freezing dew?
• On the bright side: at least there weren't any ice pellets.
• If you haven't seen it, you really should check out this video of Pittsburgh blogger Matt Hogue going on the record and exposing some unbelievable slime and waste at the City of Pittsburgh Housing Authority. (Yeah, I know it's got that two-faced, three-mouthed jackass Marty Griffin, but I promise it's worth the effort.) Matt and I have had plenty of differences in the past, but I'll say here what I've said to him twice now in personal emails: he took a strong and inspiring stand when he quit his job and decided to expose that corruption, and I admire the hell out of him for it. If we had more people with those sorts of principles in city government -- or anywhere else -- we'd all be a lot better off.
• The TWM Grammatical Pet Peeve of the Week, brought to you by Ron Cook's spot-on Saturday column about the multiple absurdities of Patriots' Spygate: the grating use of the phrase centered around. Note to Ron and everyone else: You can't center around. You revolve around. A center is the center. You can center at, you can center in, you can center on. You can even center up if you're playing basketball. But you can not, under any physical or grammatical circumstances, center around.
• It will be fun to be able to say that I attended the game when Evgeni Malkin took over the NHL Scoring Lead for the first time in his career. It will be even more fun if, as I suspect, he holds that lead for the rest of the season. And yet somehow I feel the fun and novelty of that moment will wear off over time, and perhaps quickly, if only because he's shown that with increased ice time -- and even with the incredible Sidney Crosby on his team -- he's capable of claiming that spot over and over and over again.
• I hope that all Penguins fans -- by which I mean real Penguins fans, not those idiots who booed after the 2nd period Tuesday night, and certainly not the ones who left early and (ah, sweet justice!) missed that fabulous third-period comeback -- truly appreciate what we have, and what more we're about to have, over the next decade or so. Sure, we had Lemieux and Jagr on the same team, including two Stanley Cup winners, and we had 11 Art Ross Trophies between them. But the primes of their careers barely overlapped, and only once -- in the 1995-96 season -- did they ever really push each other (Mario 161 points, Jagr 149) for the scoring title. We're about to watch two of the top five -- if not two of the top three -- talents in the world grow and mature and develop in tandem, on the same team, right here before our eyes. That's pretty amazing stuff.
• The only thing more amazing would be for all those frustrated, neanderthal Steelers fans to stop yelling "Hit somebody!" every time the other team touches the puck. Shouting for Sid or Geno or Peter Sykora or Ryan Whitney to hit somebody is like shouting "Dance the Polka!" at Mikhail Baryshnikov or "Play chopsticks!" at Chick Corea. In other words, folks: just shut up and watch the masters at work...
Posted at 04:00 PM
Fri - February 15, 2008
(THEN WE CAME TO THE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
receiving the shipments of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those things you give up for Lent.
This post is like one big Sunday's worth of catching
up...
• Once again, some homicidal lunatic shoots up a school campus. And once again, students and journalists are wondering how such a violent, senseless crime could happen here. If they read TWM, they'd know: It always happens here.
• Just add one more small community in one more state to that grim and ever-growing list: DeKalb, Illinois. Population: 42,500.
• Interesting John Dickerson piece at Slate.com on Wednesday, noting that both John McCain and Barack Obama are beginning to shape their messages for a possible general election showdown, and suggesting that the McCain camp may as well have been reading TWM: They, too, think the press has given the Democratic front-runner a pass and that his rhetoric of boldness isn't matched by the quality of his policy prescriptions or punch of his ideas.
• The money lines from McCain: To encourage a country with only rhetoric is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude. ... Voters [must] ask more from their candidates than an empty promise of "trust me, I know better."
• It looks like Slate's Timothy Noah has, after a long hiatus, resurrected his Obama Messiah Watch column. Lord knows he'll find plenty of material for it. Especially if he extends it to coverage of the Blessed Lady McBama.
• The Burgher and a few others have already covered this, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't at least mention that, while talking about employees of the city's Public Works Department, The Boy Who Would Be Mayor yesterday told the PG's Rich Lord, They don't listen to me. Which is, short of We've run out of money or I've poisoned the water supply, one of the last things a city hopes to hear from its mayor.
• Oh, yeah. Here's another thing a city hopes never to hear from its mayor: I, David Caliguiri...
• From a former student and faithful reader of TWM -- we'll call him Big C. -- comes a forwarded email that suggests no one at the Southern California American Marketing Association bothers to proofread, or even to give a damn about carefully crafting, the organization's promotional pieces. Here's the opening clause: This events brings together. And the second sentence: The event will facilitate professional development by giving attendees the opportunity to network and to keep up to date on the lasted developments in research development by discuss the most pertinent current trends with the leaders in the industry.
• Who's writing these things? Borat?
• I can't say I understand the uproar over episodes of Showtime's Dexter airing on CBS. I mean, any show with gratuitous violence and gruesome, bloody murders will fit right in on CBS. Anyone who's ever suffered through a football game's worth of commercials knows that CBS has essentially turned itself into the Snuff Film Channel. I can't remember the last time I saw a promo for one of their shows that didn't include a mutilated and/or eviscerated body. Or series of bodies. At least Dexter will leaven the non-stop carnage and exploitation with a little intelligence and character development -- qualities that haven't been seen on a CBS drama since, oh, the days of The Waltons.
• One more from the I Didn't Write It But I Wish I Had File: the funniest, and certainly the truest, Carbolic headline of the week.
• If anything can make me feel like I'm 12 again, it's this. Here's hoping that, come the end of May, I still feel that way.
• The TWM Quotation of the Week Award goes to Toronto Maple Leafs' head coach Paul Maurice, who, when asked what was going through his mind during his team's 8-0 loss to the Florida Panthers last week, replied: Mostly profanity.
• When Arlen Specter stops investigating the New England Patriots and Congress finally tires of Roger Clemens, his wife, and his swollen, bleeding ass, perhaps they will remember that most of us in America are not nearly as concerned about the integrity of the game as we are about the integrity of our government. As long as the economy's tanking and the war's still raging and there are kids all over the country without decent (or any) health care, I think we can all get over the thought that Bill Belichick might have known the Rams' offensive formations, or that Roger Clemens' wife wanted to look good for her Sports Illustrated photo shoot. So cut the pandering, people, and remember your priorities.
• Finally, a personal note and a personal indulgence... My good friend Jim Pascoe, noting that I allowed my birthday to go un-noted last week, paid lovely tribute to me and to last year's TWM Birthday Haiku tradition by composing one for me. Because it celebrates his talent and our relationship as much (if not more) than it does me, I thought I'd offer it here, a week late but still right in time:
teacher: less a job,
more your center; wordsmith,
madman, never change.
• Once again, some homicidal lunatic shoots up a school campus. And once again, students and journalists are wondering how such a violent, senseless crime could happen here. If they read TWM, they'd know: It always happens here.
• Just add one more small community in one more state to that grim and ever-growing list: DeKalb, Illinois. Population: 42,500.
• Interesting John Dickerson piece at Slate.com on Wednesday, noting that both John McCain and Barack Obama are beginning to shape their messages for a possible general election showdown, and suggesting that the McCain camp may as well have been reading TWM: They, too, think the press has given the Democratic front-runner a pass and that his rhetoric of boldness isn't matched by the quality of his policy prescriptions or punch of his ideas.
• The money lines from McCain: To encourage a country with only rhetoric is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude. ... Voters [must] ask more from their candidates than an empty promise of "trust me, I know better."
• It looks like Slate's Timothy Noah has, after a long hiatus, resurrected his Obama Messiah Watch column. Lord knows he'll find plenty of material for it. Especially if he extends it to coverage of the Blessed Lady McBama.
• The Burgher and a few others have already covered this, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't at least mention that, while talking about employees of the city's Public Works Department, The Boy Who Would Be Mayor yesterday told the PG's Rich Lord, They don't listen to me. Which is, short of We've run out of money or I've poisoned the water supply, one of the last things a city hopes to hear from its mayor.
• Oh, yeah. Here's another thing a city hopes never to hear from its mayor: I, David Caliguiri...
• From a former student and faithful reader of TWM -- we'll call him Big C. -- comes a forwarded email that suggests no one at the Southern California American Marketing Association bothers to proofread, or even to give a damn about carefully crafting, the organization's promotional pieces. Here's the opening clause: This events brings together. And the second sentence: The event will facilitate professional development by giving attendees the opportunity to network and to keep up to date on the lasted developments in research development by discuss the most pertinent current trends with the leaders in the industry.
• Who's writing these things? Borat?
• I can't say I understand the uproar over episodes of Showtime's Dexter airing on CBS. I mean, any show with gratuitous violence and gruesome, bloody murders will fit right in on CBS. Anyone who's ever suffered through a football game's worth of commercials knows that CBS has essentially turned itself into the Snuff Film Channel. I can't remember the last time I saw a promo for one of their shows that didn't include a mutilated and/or eviscerated body. Or series of bodies. At least Dexter will leaven the non-stop carnage and exploitation with a little intelligence and character development -- qualities that haven't been seen on a CBS drama since, oh, the days of The Waltons.
• One more from the I Didn't Write It But I Wish I Had File: the funniest, and certainly the truest, Carbolic headline of the week.
• If anything can make me feel like I'm 12 again, it's this. Here's hoping that, come the end of May, I still feel that way.
• The TWM Quotation of the Week Award goes to Toronto Maple Leafs' head coach Paul Maurice, who, when asked what was going through his mind during his team's 8-0 loss to the Florida Panthers last week, replied: Mostly profanity.
• When Arlen Specter stops investigating the New England Patriots and Congress finally tires of Roger Clemens, his wife, and his swollen, bleeding ass, perhaps they will remember that most of us in America are not nearly as concerned about the integrity of the game as we are about the integrity of our government. As long as the economy's tanking and the war's still raging and there are kids all over the country without decent (or any) health care, I think we can all get over the thought that Bill Belichick might have known the Rams' offensive formations, or that Roger Clemens' wife wanted to look good for her Sports Illustrated photo shoot. So cut the pandering, people, and remember your priorities.
• Finally, a personal note and a personal indulgence... My good friend Jim Pascoe, noting that I allowed my birthday to go un-noted last week, paid lovely tribute to me and to last year's TWM Birthday Haiku tradition by composing one for me. Because it celebrates his talent and our relationship as much (if not more) than it does me, I thought I'd offer it here, a week late but still right in time:
teacher: less a job,
more your center; wordsmith,
madman, never change.
Posted at 04:30 PM
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Published On: Mar 13, 2009 07:27 AM
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