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 breakup/apotheosis of those feelings post-ceremony, and now their respective “people” are tainting the future historiography of this episode with innuendo, false statements, and even false documents to suggest that all of it was just super-clever Baudrillardian, or even McLuhanesque, mass-media performance art. No one, and certainly not Kim or Kris, is that clever, but more importantly, the money—the balance of interests—just doesn’t add up. I have the files to prove it, and will be dropping them off to my Neil Sheehan, once I determine who that is, and the time is right.
American federalism as imagined by euro-federalists (and vice-versa):
“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 European Union, will definitely survive? After all, messy divorces are more frequent than amicable ones. I have heard of a case in California in which a couple spent $100,000 disputing custody of the family cat.”
From the Polish Foreign Minister’s much-talked-about shaming/pleading of Germany.
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 nothing wrong with Jill Biden if she’d give up making everyone call her “Dr. Jill Biden.” How embarrassing when next time someone asks the room for the doctor, you raise your hand, then have to explain that—like such loophole Doctors as Martin Luther King and Martin Luther before you—no, you in fact cannot perform an emergency tracheotomy on said dying man?!
Poor Scots.
YES, for the love of god, yes!
For two months now I’ve been searching for the word(s) to explain how and why Drive is so important for The Way We Are Now, and perhaps “sexy” is it. Also the fact that he’s pursued an entire career out of mocking the less rarefied choices of similar-vintage Canadian kid star Ryan Reynolds is so cruelly bad-ass it deserves at least one end-year superlative.
(Another wonderful absurdity of Drive: hiring Carey Mulligan, and making her learn to speak American, in order to play a character almost certainly based on Michele Williams.)
(The actual winner of the prize was Bradley Cooper, the guy from the West Wing.)
Is it a catastrophe for feminism, or a victory of the generation, that after all these years Joey is still Jackie Kennedy and Jen, Marilyn Monroe?
Accidental clip-art profundity, courtesy of NY Times: Because Hungary ate Liechtenstein!
Incredibly telling passage on why OWS is fatally confused and arevolutionary (if not entirely uninterestingly so):
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 encapsulates and occludes the very struggle at issue in Zuccotti Park. What does it mean to live a life of qualities? Is quality, by definition immeasurable, only describable, something that can be charted by the cleanliness of a street, the absence of certain smells, certain people? Is the absence of dirt, smells, noise, and people what the mayor means by “thriving?” Is there really a right not to see certain things, and can the mayor of New York City destroy individual property in its name?
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The default language we have for talking about rights is, of course, private property. If no city law makes my tent a 24-hour privately owned public space, then YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!!!!
My god, who could possibly be the target for this deal?
