January 2012
5 posts
I believe...
Rick Santorum’s wife and kids literally have a picture of their stillborn sister fetus pinned to their sweater-vests. Tea and sweater-vests…seriously why are they stealing all of our things?
Copywrongs...
I wrote about our insane pop-music copyright laws, and the relative interests of Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston here.
On the bright side
Al Sharpton is some sort of genius. Why doesn’t MSNBC give him a 2-hr Bromance show with Pat Buchanan?
: (
OMG, watching Iowa caucus coverage 4 years later is such a terrible democracy hangover. At this point in his term, Mr. Obama, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had enacted a constitutional coup and crowned himself emperor.
December 2011
5 posts
Rule of 3s
Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel, now Kim Jong-il. Statesmen, madmen, prose stylists all. : (
Conspiracy theory: I am a Kardashian Truther.
Ok, so i’ve just read pretty much everything in the public record and as much as I could get from several Freedom of Information Act requests, and let me just declare, here and now, that it’s my belief that it is the staging of the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries wedding that is being staged. Those two obviously had deep, true feelings for each other, suffered a very traumatic...
American federalism as imagined by...
“The break up would be a crisis of apocalyptic proportions beyond our financial system. Once the logic of ‘each man for himself’ takes hold, can we really trust everyone to act communitarian and resist the temptation to settle scores in other areas, such as trade? Would you really bet the house on the proposition that if the Euro zone breaks up, the single market, the cornerstone of the...
November 2011
14 posts
Two observations about 'politics':
1) All allegations about Herman Cain read so much more deliciously when one doesn’t realize that that “N.R.A.”, in this case, stands for National Restaurant Association.
1a. I’m almost certain Gloria Allred has engineered a career solely out of the semi-sexist likelihood of people confusing her with Gloria Steinem (whoever that is.)
2) There would literally be...
Incredibly telling passage on why OWS is fatally...
Vague reports, vague threats: this does not even rise to the level of the terrible phrases foisted on the public in recent years, like “credible intelligence.” And oh, the noise, the “unsanitary conditions,” that have made businesses unhappy, “quality of life,” a phrase popularized by Bloomberg’s precursor, Rudy Giuliani, but remains no clearer today than in 1993: it’s a phrase that simultaneously...
Major meaning-of-life question which struck, and...
Like all of you, I’ve seen a lot of videos of people and other simians riding unicycles in my lifetime. The trick—or “crux,” more charitably—seems to be counter-pedaling backwards to maintain side-to-side balance in forward motion or, as seems to be the more common use of unicycles, see-sawing back and forth on the pedals to stay in one place, like a two-dimensional...
attempting to escape the naïve metaphysical...
mortgagez: "In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. Différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors."
mortgagez: i wish i could buy bonds in some analogous way
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Wait, doesn't "tranche," in the French, simultaneously mean traunch as in a slice (positive portion) of something, and trench, as in a hole (present absence) in something? Why else would you use that word?!
Also, I am disappointed that mortgagez apparently reads quaternary sources on post-structuralism!
By comparison:
Duration, Occupy Wall Street (ongoing): 53 days.
Duration, Paris Commune (1871): 72 days.
It’s said that when the Soviet Union reached day 73, thus outliving the previous longest-lasting workers’ state, Lenin let everyone drink the entirety of the Czar’s stash in the Winter Palace cellar. Oh, how our horizons have narrowed!
““I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama,...”
– This is like that game where you Babelfish something from English to Magyar (or whatever) and then back to English. I’m sure Israeltards will come up with a reason to yell it him about this, but it is pretty shocking and pathological how Obama just never loses his equanimity, ever, no matter...
The trouble with anaphora (and ladies!):
I’m not really linguistically literate (in the non-redundant sense) enough to know if this is truly an example of everyone’s fav generative grammar mind-bender donkey anaphora but, still, gigglez:
Trending topic or trending target? Selena Gomez, Bieber’s girlfriend, received Tweeted death threats just for dating the pop star. How did the girl who filed a paternity suit against...
History lesson apropos the video of the judge...
WE ARE NOW AS FAR REMOVED FROM THE SHUTDOWN OF NAPSTER AS THE SHUTDOWN OF NAPSTER WAS FROM THE SHUTDOWN OF THE SOVIET UNION.
October 2011
18 posts
Because words have meaning...
Dear Internet Discourse,
Surely, you didn’t really mean to call the Ralph Lauren-clad man, or phenomenon, or epiphenomenonal formation known as The Hipster Cop “The Hipster Cop,” right? While there is a certain irony in the term “hipster”—i still use hepcat myself, but whatever—coming to simply mean “a male human being with something of an aesthetic...
Better Commonwealth Succession Law Proposal:
Why not just, as the Frankish kings did, practice equal inheritance (this time gender-equal)? There are 16 different countries already—is it really fair that one kid gets them all, even if he’s a lady?!
I suspect the kids themselves wouldn’t mind shaking slightly fewer hands and if they do, we’d at least be able to enjoy watching Harry and Wills kill each other over...
Well, one of my demands was met!
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, also supports the change. “If Prince William and Catherine Middleton were to have a baby daughter as their first child, I think most people would think it fair and normal that she would eventually become queen of our country,” he said this year.
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The British Commonwealth (nee Empire) has been totally scared about changing its antiquated...
I reviewed:
1Q84 by Haruki Murikami.
Further proof that God is a 1%er:
Snow in the forecast this weekend!
“As a freshman, instead of trying to join the Harvard Crimson, Abramson wrote...”
– This week’s New Yorker profile of Jill Abramson.
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!!! I don’t even know what emoticon to deploy.
Is it wrong to be super-excited...
by the prospect of a Franco-German–backed Czech invasion of Slovakia?
keyholez: Yom Kippur! →
keyholez:
Reminder: this holiday is mainly about pushing a goat off a cliff, to serve the demon god Azazel. From Leviticus 16:
Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the LORD…
This reminds me of a passage from my bible, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of...
The fix is in...
Were we really to expect the people who gave their name, via Thirty Years War, to the most amazingly disgusting torture method ever to actually believe in global fellowship and (inter)cultural justice less than 400 years hence, just because the dynamite guy said so? Sweden accounts for 0.137% of the world’s population. With this week’s awarding of the 2011 prize to Tomas...
youngmanhattanite:
Jobs report today is really depressing.
Is this actually a joke on the BLS’s jobs report, which is to come out tomorrow morning at 8:30, and will surely be incredibly depressing?
Umm...
The committee appoints several “pacekeepers” for every march, who make sure it doesn’t go too fast or too slow, and it is they who decide on the direction. There are also informal “scouts”, who keep an eye on progress, and “runners” who run back and forth between the various organisers telling them of any problems arising.
One of the problems of the...
Fun with verbs
What a weird lie that out-of-office auto-responses must always speak of one “having very limited access to email,” as if everyone spends their vacations in Patagonia or something. Is “I will be checking my email rarely, if ever, and certainly not responding” just too much Truth?
Language 'Immersion' in the Age of Global English
Most dispiriting aspect of the Amanda Knox case: Apparently her false confession/accusation was a matter of not having a proper police translator, which she needed despite her enrollment in the local (and global) Italian immersion program, and being a “languages major” at the University of Washington. Four years of Umbrian Lady’s Prison later, and she was able to deliver her...
fiat luxemburg: →
fiatluxemburg:
Does the iPhone voice thing seem like a crazy gable? Maybe not. I suppose no one ran off to by TouchPads because Ping was a big dud. Still, it seems like this has the potential to be a disaster. If any other handset maker announced voice control I feel like they’d be dismissed as totally…
Read FiatL’s thing… It’s kind of like this was timed to...
My boss...
today, in between discussing the Yankees with a deplorably unknowledgeable/unmanly interlocutor and heading down for a lunch meeting at the NYSE, expressed great sympathy and interest in Occupy Wall Street, making explicit claims of its world-historical coherence with the Year of Revolutions, etc. As my boss is generally a good bellwether for when things I’ve tried desperately not to think...
September 2011
11 posts
Yeah, i’ll believe it when I see al-Awlaki’s long-form birth certificate, thanks.
My Lunch Hour
Had, desperately, to buy socks and a brown (that is to say, not-black) belt. Went to H&M. Is there anything more depressing about late capitalism than the shoppers and jostlers at the column of jeans cut in “boyfriend” style?
Yay!
Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad has been named a MacArthur Genius. How many .wav sound effects can you get for $500,000?
[I told you so?]
the shot that made her retarded...
michelle bachman complaining about the HPV vaccine, and the subsequent comparisons to jenny mccarthy, raise an interesting point: why hasn’t jenny mccarthy been pissed off about the HPV vaccine in the past?
is it because J.M., and her/our generational contemporaries, have first-hand knowledge of the unpleasant effects of HPV, and not of the significantly more awful diseases measles, mumps,...
Announcement
For some reason (probably downton abbey) i found myself watching the pbs reality show manor house —edwardian country house in the u.k.—on youtube. It is a gonzo-educational reality show that has a family of four (five including the spinster aunt) become landed gentry, circa 1905 (when of course they weren’t really “landed” in the old-regime sense, and most of their...
Nothing makes a skeptic appreciate Frank Rich...
like reading Frank Bruni. Obviously a thankless job, but it’s pretty excruciating to watch someone who’s not by nature egomaniacal, amoral, or shameless trying to convince himself he has two thoughts a week worth telling us. In mid-piece, the reader inevitably finds himself rooting for Bruni to make it to word count, or by deadline, without succumbing to finals week...