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 28, 2008
(PLAYOFF-CLINCHING) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
icing the pucks 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 Penguins playoff tickets that
got scarfed up this morning. But without the exorbitant Ticketmaster
fees...
• First, a quick follow-up to Tuesday's post in which I noted that Barack Obama's campaign slogan ought to be A New Kind of Politics, But the Same Shitty Kind of Commercials. I stand by that statement for the two ads I keep seeing, repeated in an endless loop, day after day. But it surely does not apply to the one I saw on Wednesday night but have not seen since: it was decidedly fresh and interesting, with some unexpected cuts and rhythms and a style that fairly screamed This is not a typical campaign commercial while also screaming This is a damned good campaign commercial.
• Of course, now that I've gone looking for it, I can't find a link to the video anywhere on his campaign site, nor on his YouTube site. So perhaps I imagined it. Or else it was produced for his candidacy but not by his campaign. Which would, of course, bring me right back to my original point.
• Score one for Senator John McCain, who on Tuesday declared it is not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers. You took a stupid mortgage that couldn't afford and now you're losing your house? Well, tough. You gave a stupid mortgage that you knew the borrowers couldn't afford and now you're losing your money? Too bad. Don't you dare ask me or anyone else who took mortgages and bought houses they could afford for the tax dollars to help bail you out of your own irresponsibility.
• In a related story, self-described "housing advocates" marched on Wall Street this week to protest the Bear Stearns bailout. One of the protesters' signs read Help Main Street, not Wall Street. What it should have read was, Help Our Idiots, Not These Idiots.
• I am compelled to note that this week marked the two-year anniversary of TWM's first anti-Obama-hype post. You know, just in case anyone thinks I came to this position lately. Or lightly.
• For everyone who thinks that Senator Sniper Fire exaggerated the story of her 1996 landing in Bosnia, think again. This photo, obtained by my favorite local news outlet, proves she may have been minimizing the danger.
• It's a kick to see our two favorite Political Junkies getting the full-on political pundit treatment on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette web site. Their appearance on The Conversation With Bill Toland -- nice title, because Bill's got a nice name, but I think it would have been more fun if With Bill Toland had been placed in parentheses, cheesy-pop-song-title-style -- is well worth your time and attention. Bill's a good, low-key, self-deprecating host, and Maria and David provide plenty of smart, thoughtful analysis that could teach a thing or two to the phalanx of mostly shrill and pissy Clinton and Obama supporters. But, dear God, let's talk about the production values...
...that had me instantly longing for the sophisticated art direction of late '80s public access tv, and the compression quality of late '90s underground web videos.
• That watermarked PGTV logo in the lower right corner is pretty cool, but the main title, which inexplicably comes and goes like some alphabetic butterfly buzzing over poor Maria's head, seems to have been produced with an old Commodore 64. The green screen is as hideous at it is inexplicable; I kept waiting for the background actually to change -- look, there are Maria, Bill, and David in front of the White House! now they're front-stage at a Clinton rally! now they're about to be crushed by Megatron! -- or morph or do something, somehow, to justify its nasty neon self. (Maybe it's an homage to Re-Animator, and thus a subtle dig at the medical mischief it will take to keep John McCain's head talking throughout his first term.) The main camera's placed too high (viewers must be wondering why the panelists are all sitting in a hole), the compression is way too soft (I've met all three of those fine folks in person; their facial features actually have definition, and I've never seen rabid pixels dancing about their heads), and the theme music seems to have been lifted from an early Ron Jeremy film. In short: for a great idea with really good content, the execution is stunningly bad. I'd call it amateurish, but that would be a considerable insult to the tens of thousands of amateurs who, with a digital camcorder and a low-end Apple laptop, could produce much more polished and professional results in less than three hours.
• If you're gonna keep doing these things, PGers -- and I think you should -- you need to jack up the quality. In a hurry. Because it is, after all, difficult to concentrate on the content when you keep waiting for one of the panelists to shout, Party on, Wayne! Party on, Garth!
• With my lunch on Wednesday, I drank a bottle of Saratoga Spring Water, the label of which assured me that it was non-carbonated and sodium-free. This was, of course, to distinguish it from all of the carbonated, sodium-filled spring waters out there.
• If anyone can explain to me not just how Ramiele Malubay has managed to survive the past three weeks of American Idol, but how she's managed to survive all three weeks without making so much as a single appearance in the bottom three, I'll buy you dinner. And then put you to work on some even more vexing questions, like What's the meaning of life? and What does everyone see in David Archuleta?
• I don't know about you, but nothing quite says "Opening Day of the Major League Baseball Season" like a 6am game between the As and the Red Sox played in a dome in Japan.
• You're doin' a helluva job, Bud Selig.
• It's been more than a week since the last Steelers' domestic violence incident. Either that Zero Tolerance policy is working, or none of the players has needed to get one of his illegitimate children baptized. Either way, Dan Rooney must be smiling. Like this.
• And, finally, to bring this post full circle on all the way back to the celebratory nature of its title: Good job, boys. We'll see you in the first round. And we promise to bring the home ice advantage...
• First, a quick follow-up to Tuesday's post in which I noted that Barack Obama's campaign slogan ought to be A New Kind of Politics, But the Same Shitty Kind of Commercials. I stand by that statement for the two ads I keep seeing, repeated in an endless loop, day after day. But it surely does not apply to the one I saw on Wednesday night but have not seen since: it was decidedly fresh and interesting, with some unexpected cuts and rhythms and a style that fairly screamed This is not a typical campaign commercial while also screaming This is a damned good campaign commercial.
• Of course, now that I've gone looking for it, I can't find a link to the video anywhere on his campaign site, nor on his YouTube site. So perhaps I imagined it. Or else it was produced for his candidacy but not by his campaign. Which would, of course, bring me right back to my original point.
• Score one for Senator John McCain, who on Tuesday declared it is not the duty of the government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers. You took a stupid mortgage that couldn't afford and now you're losing your house? Well, tough. You gave a stupid mortgage that you knew the borrowers couldn't afford and now you're losing your money? Too bad. Don't you dare ask me or anyone else who took mortgages and bought houses they could afford for the tax dollars to help bail you out of your own irresponsibility.
• In a related story, self-described "housing advocates" marched on Wall Street this week to protest the Bear Stearns bailout. One of the protesters' signs read Help Main Street, not Wall Street. What it should have read was, Help Our Idiots, Not These Idiots.
• I am compelled to note that this week marked the two-year anniversary of TWM's first anti-Obama-hype post. You know, just in case anyone thinks I came to this position lately. Or lightly.
• For everyone who thinks that Senator Sniper Fire exaggerated the story of her 1996 landing in Bosnia, think again. This photo, obtained by my favorite local news outlet, proves she may have been minimizing the danger.
• It's a kick to see our two favorite Political Junkies getting the full-on political pundit treatment on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette web site. Their appearance on The Conversation With Bill Toland -- nice title, because Bill's got a nice name, but I think it would have been more fun if With Bill Toland had been placed in parentheses, cheesy-pop-song-title-style -- is well worth your time and attention. Bill's a good, low-key, self-deprecating host, and Maria and David provide plenty of smart, thoughtful analysis that could teach a thing or two to the phalanx of mostly shrill and pissy Clinton and Obama supporters. But, dear God, let's talk about the production values...
...that had me instantly longing for the sophisticated art direction of late '80s public access tv, and the compression quality of late '90s underground web videos.
• That watermarked PGTV logo in the lower right corner is pretty cool, but the main title, which inexplicably comes and goes like some alphabetic butterfly buzzing over poor Maria's head, seems to have been produced with an old Commodore 64. The green screen is as hideous at it is inexplicable; I kept waiting for the background actually to change -- look, there are Maria, Bill, and David in front of the White House! now they're front-stage at a Clinton rally! now they're about to be crushed by Megatron! -- or morph or do something, somehow, to justify its nasty neon self. (Maybe it's an homage to Re-Animator, and thus a subtle dig at the medical mischief it will take to keep John McCain's head talking throughout his first term.) The main camera's placed too high (viewers must be wondering why the panelists are all sitting in a hole), the compression is way too soft (I've met all three of those fine folks in person; their facial features actually have definition, and I've never seen rabid pixels dancing about their heads), and the theme music seems to have been lifted from an early Ron Jeremy film. In short: for a great idea with really good content, the execution is stunningly bad. I'd call it amateurish, but that would be a considerable insult to the tens of thousands of amateurs who, with a digital camcorder and a low-end Apple laptop, could produce much more polished and professional results in less than three hours.
• If you're gonna keep doing these things, PGers -- and I think you should -- you need to jack up the quality. In a hurry. Because it is, after all, difficult to concentrate on the content when you keep waiting for one of the panelists to shout, Party on, Wayne! Party on, Garth!
• With my lunch on Wednesday, I drank a bottle of Saratoga Spring Water, the label of which assured me that it was non-carbonated and sodium-free. This was, of course, to distinguish it from all of the carbonated, sodium-filled spring waters out there.
• If anyone can explain to me not just how Ramiele Malubay has managed to survive the past three weeks of American Idol, but how she's managed to survive all three weeks without making so much as a single appearance in the bottom three, I'll buy you dinner. And then put you to work on some even more vexing questions, like What's the meaning of life? and What does everyone see in David Archuleta?
• I don't know about you, but nothing quite says "Opening Day of the Major League Baseball Season" like a 6am game between the As and the Red Sox played in a dome in Japan.
• You're doin' a helluva job, Bud Selig.
• It's been more than a week since the last Steelers' domestic violence incident. Either that Zero Tolerance policy is working, or none of the players has needed to get one of his illegitimate children baptized. Either way, Dan Rooney must be smiling. Like this.
• And, finally, to bring this post full circle on all the way back to the celebratory nature of its title: Good job, boys. We'll see you in the first round. And we promise to bring the home ice advantage...
Posted at 03:45 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
Fri - February 8, 2008
(ONE-SENTENCE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
trimming the fat 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 lovely, pithy emails I've
received today. But with far fewer exclamation
points...
• Taking a concept I tried a about a year ago and (both literally and metaphorically) doing it one better, each of today's Notes will be, as the title of this post suggests, only one sentence long.
• Or less.
• With all this breathless, wall-to-wall, overkilled coverage of the Democratic and Republican primaries, and with all of the endless talk and analysis about all the candidates, you can close your eyes and almost imagine that George W. Bush isn't the president anymore.
• Don't you feel better already?
• The only thing more fun than this week than watching the Super Tuesday election returns and speeches and inevitably biased or just plain silly over-analysis was watching all of it from Washington D.C., just a few blocks north of the White House, after spending most of the day on Capitol Hill.
• My favorite Super-Tuesday post-mortem line came from Slate's John Dickerson, who noted that a loss in Massachusetts was especially disappointing for Senator Breath of Fresh Air because he was being compared often to JFK by Kennedy family members, who did everything but play touch football with him on the lawn.
• You almost have to admire how, even on his way out the electoral door, Mitt "I Simply Cannot Let My Campaign Be a Part of Aiding a Surrender to Terror" Romney just couldn't help himself from morphing into someone else one last time and uncorking a line worthy of say, Rudy Giuliani at his best, or Dick Cheney at his worst.
• There may be someone somewhere in the world who can parallel park while talking on a cell phone, but I have yet to see it happen.
• For the record: I'm pretty sure I could do it, but I'm damned sure that I would never, ever try.
• After a less-than-stellar first episode and a less-than-stellar first half of a second episode, LOST found its footing and its rhythm in those last twenty minutes last night, pulling off the sort of mind-bending, chest-clutching mix of character-driven action and suspense on which the show has staked its well-deserved reputation.
• For everyone who loved Menopause the Musical® -- assuming, of course, that you'd admit it in public -- I highly recommend this swell new production.
• No matter what they say, and no matter how many lame excuses they might try to make about wanting to beat the traffic or needing to get home just a little earlier, the hundreds of people who filed out of Mellon Arena last night with 27.7 seconds left, the Pens clinging to a one-goal lead, Rick DiPietro pulled, and a timeout-rested Islanders team coming out for an offensive zone face-off, are not, never have been, and almost certainly never will be true hockey fans.
• Do you think those same people hurry up and leave a movie three minutes early so they can beat a couple of cars out of the Waterfront?
• Taking a concept I tried a about a year ago and (both literally and metaphorically) doing it one better, each of today's Notes will be, as the title of this post suggests, only one sentence long.
• Or less.
• With all this breathless, wall-to-wall, overkilled coverage of the Democratic and Republican primaries, and with all of the endless talk and analysis about all the candidates, you can close your eyes and almost imagine that George W. Bush isn't the president anymore.
• Don't you feel better already?
• The only thing more fun than this week than watching the Super Tuesday election returns and speeches and inevitably biased or just plain silly over-analysis was watching all of it from Washington D.C., just a few blocks north of the White House, after spending most of the day on Capitol Hill.
• My favorite Super-Tuesday post-mortem line came from Slate's John Dickerson, who noted that a loss in Massachusetts was especially disappointing for Senator Breath of Fresh Air because he was being compared often to JFK by Kennedy family members, who did everything but play touch football with him on the lawn.
• You almost have to admire how, even on his way out the electoral door, Mitt "I Simply Cannot Let My Campaign Be a Part of Aiding a Surrender to Terror" Romney just couldn't help himself from morphing into someone else one last time and uncorking a line worthy of say, Rudy Giuliani at his best, or Dick Cheney at his worst.
• There may be someone somewhere in the world who can parallel park while talking on a cell phone, but I have yet to see it happen.
• For the record: I'm pretty sure I could do it, but I'm damned sure that I would never, ever try.
• After a less-than-stellar first episode and a less-than-stellar first half of a second episode, LOST found its footing and its rhythm in those last twenty minutes last night, pulling off the sort of mind-bending, chest-clutching mix of character-driven action and suspense on which the show has staked its well-deserved reputation.
• For everyone who loved Menopause the Musical® -- assuming, of course, that you'd admit it in public -- I highly recommend this swell new production.
• No matter what they say, and no matter how many lame excuses they might try to make about wanting to beat the traffic or needing to get home just a little earlier, the hundreds of people who filed out of Mellon Arena last night with 27.7 seconds left, the Pens clinging to a one-goal lead, Rick DiPietro pulled, and a timeout-rested Islanders team coming out for an offensive zone face-off, are not, never have been, and almost certainly never will be true hockey fans.
• Do you think those same people hurry up and leave a movie three minutes early so they can beat a couple of cars out of the Waterfront?
Posted at 05:48 PM
Fri - February 1, 2008
(AFTER-ICE) NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
quitting the race 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 brittle branches outside my
window, sagging a bit under the wait and hoping for a chance to break
free...
• Let's begin by redressing a most egregious oversight from this past Sunday: the failure to cite, to praise, to urge you immediately to read this typically wonderful Dennis Roddy piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Reporting from Chicago, TWM's Patron Saint of Reporters & General-Purpose Columnists uncovers a trend that will be no surprise to regular readers of this site: many of Barack Obama's supporters are unable to justify their support beyond some vague and comforting notions of change, personality, and/or inspiration. In other words, as I've been suggesting all along: they're pretty much running on the same blank-slate, pseudo-intellectual fuel that powered so many of W.'s glassy-eyed supporters eight years ago.
• Now there's a comfort to us all.
• It's difficult to say what part of Mr. Roddy's column is the most telling or even the most entertaining. It's probably a toss-up between this opening salvo... Andrew Tieng knows all he needs to know about Barack Obama: that he deeply wants the Illinois senator to be the next president. / Mr. Obama's strategy for the economy? "I can't really say," Mr. Tieng admits. / Trade and tariffs? "I don't know anything about that." / Iraq? "I don't know," Mr. Tieng shrugs. / At 19, working his way through college, Mr. Tieng is the kind of voter the Obama campaign has been luring into its fold. ...and this one, which appears halfway through the article to prove, beyond a shadow of a Chicago doubt, that no deep thought is ever too shallow: It is, in fact, people such as Kevin Sharp, a 40-year-old New Yorker who fled that city after 9/11 and settled into a pizza shop in Wicker Park, a newly fashionable neighborhood in Chicago's north side. / Ask him about the election and he'll announce Mr. Obama as his choice. Quiz him on policy and he'll chortle at how little it means in the wake of the current administration, which he said was quite specific about its agenda, beginning with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. / "The biggest lies that have been told have all been policy specifics," Mr. Sharp says.
• In fairness to the vapidity of Senator Obama's supporters, my third favorite passage comes when a young woman confesses she used to support Obama but, after taking an online test, found out [she] was really more for Hillary.
• Isn't it good to know that some people consider the presidential race at least as seriously as they consider what color or which Office character they are?
• Ongoing war and oncoming recession be damned, the State of the Union got a whole hell of a lot brighter Monday night when President Bring 'Em On delivered his last-ever January smirk-and-jive. I don't care who delivers that thing next year; it'll be a welcome and considerable improvement.
• After watching his endorsement speech on Wednesday, then seeing him show up at Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement speech yesterday, I'm starting to think that Rudy Giuliani is gonna keep following John McCain all over the country until the Arizona senator either chooses him as a running mate or kills him. Poor Rudy's starting to look like a little lost poodle, constantly panting and yapping at Senator McCain's front-running heels. And that's far more embarrassing than what happened to him on Tuesday.
• We know you've been in Florida for the last year and a half, Rudy, but there are plenty of places to escape the Sunshine State besides John McCain's shadow. Why don't you and Bernie Kerik and your extensive collection of dresses take a break, pay a visit to Ground Zero, and go find somewhere else to hide for the next six months.
• Anyone remember the Bird Flu? I do. Any
• Let's begin by redressing a most egregious oversight from this past Sunday: the failure to cite, to praise, to urge you immediately to read this typically wonderful Dennis Roddy piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Reporting from Chicago, TWM's Patron Saint of Reporters & General-Purpose Columnists uncovers a trend that will be no surprise to regular readers of this site: many of Barack Obama's supporters are unable to justify their support beyond some vague and comforting notions of change, personality, and/or inspiration. In other words, as I've been suggesting all along: they're pretty much running on the same blank-slate, pseudo-intellectual fuel that powered so many of W.'s glassy-eyed supporters eight years ago.
• Now there's a comfort to us all.
• It's difficult to say what part of Mr. Roddy's column is the most telling or even the most entertaining. It's probably a toss-up between this opening salvo... Andrew Tieng knows all he needs to know about Barack Obama: that he deeply wants the Illinois senator to be the next president. / Mr. Obama's strategy for the economy? "I can't really say," Mr. Tieng admits. / Trade and tariffs? "I don't know anything about that." / Iraq? "I don't know," Mr. Tieng shrugs. / At 19, working his way through college, Mr. Tieng is the kind of voter the Obama campaign has been luring into its fold. ...and this one, which appears halfway through the article to prove, beyond a shadow of a Chicago doubt, that no deep thought is ever too shallow: It is, in fact, people such as Kevin Sharp, a 40-year-old New Yorker who fled that city after 9/11 and settled into a pizza shop in Wicker Park, a newly fashionable neighborhood in Chicago's north side. / Ask him about the election and he'll announce Mr. Obama as his choice. Quiz him on policy and he'll chortle at how little it means in the wake of the current administration, which he said was quite specific about its agenda, beginning with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. / "The biggest lies that have been told have all been policy specifics," Mr. Sharp says.
• In fairness to the vapidity of Senator Obama's supporters, my third favorite passage comes when a young woman confesses she used to support Obama but, after taking an online test, found out [she] was really more for Hillary.
• Isn't it good to know that some people consider the presidential race at least as seriously as they consider what color or which Office character they are?
• Ongoing war and oncoming recession be damned, the State of the Union got a whole hell of a lot brighter Monday night when President Bring 'Em On delivered his last-ever January smirk-and-jive. I don't care who delivers that thing next year; it'll be a welcome and considerable improvement.
• After watching his endorsement speech on Wednesday, then seeing him show up at Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement speech yesterday, I'm starting to think that Rudy Giuliani is gonna keep following John McCain all over the country until the Arizona senator either chooses him as a running mate or kills him. Poor Rudy's starting to look like a little lost poodle, constantly panting and yapping at Senator McCain's front-running heels. And that's far more embarrassing than what happened to him on Tuesday.
• We know you've been in Florida for the last year and a half, Rudy, but there are plenty of places to escape the Sunshine State besides John McCain's shadow. Why don't you and Bernie Kerik and your extensive collection of dresses take a break, pay a visit to Ground Zero, and go find somewhere else to hide for the next six months.
• Anyone remember the Bird Flu? I do. Any