The crying of lot 48½.
Once you see the arrow in the FedEx logo, you can never unsee it.
“If indeed mankind came to earth for a specific reason, it certainly wasn’t to enjoy ourselves.”
I keep forgetting to mention how much I really really enjoyed this Zadie Smith essay on family and comedy.
New frontiers in the passive voice.
BART officials have said only that his handgun discharged at about 2:15 a.m. Thursday at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland and that the bullet struck the unarmed Grant, who had been detained with several others.
—the San Francisco Chronicle, on an incident in which a BART police officer may have fatally shot an unarmed man lying on a station platform with his gun instead of his Taser®
“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
Forget the Quakers: those zealots in the Maryland State Police labeled cycling advocates as terrorists! [via]
Our demon lover.
These people willingly send their own children to their deaths simply to make a statement—to accomplish nothing but the murder of two Israeli civilians and signal their commitment to the fight. The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.
That’s Michael Goldfarb, an editor of conservative organ The Weekly Standard, expressing his full-throated support of terrorism: so long, of course, as the victims of terror are people who do not reason like us, and willingly send children to their deaths, simply to signal their will to fight. —Can we do the right thing, and add his name to the ultra-top-secret terrorism watch list, along with those Quakers from Maryland? Can we train our BDOs to recognize and react to such dangerous levels of blind self-righteous smugness?
But only if we can point to it.
“Architecture is by its very nature a specific form of science fiction: whether we’re using it to design luxury high-rises, modular refugee camps, solar towers, or complete urban ecotopias, architecture gives us the means, on par with literature and mythology, through which we can re-imagine the world.” —Geoff Manaugh, on Craig Hodgetts’ designs for Ecotopia
Mad, mad world.
“Mad”ness comes from the lazy epoch.
The aunt is mad at me.
The uncle comes home late.
The children are mad.
The dog is mad.
The housewife is mad at you—
the door is barred.
The ship is sunk, the crew
is mad.
—Ernst Herbeck [via; via]
Not so sharp as a serpent’s tooth, perhaps.
RedState’s own Erick Erickson on Greg Sargent’s move from TPM to the Washington Post—
Well, we really don’t need any reminder as to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but I’ll remind you anyway.
Greg Sargent was with the left-wing Talking Points Memo. Now he is with the Washington Post.
I’m sure Greg Sargent is good at what he does, but I’m also sure the Washington Post would not even consider hiring someone directly from the right-of-center blogosphere.
Of course the Washington Post is connected to both Newsweek and Slate, so its biases are pretty well established and no doubt considers TPM to be right in line with the mainstream.
Apparently, former WaPo blogger Ben Domenech, one of the and I can’t stress this enough founders of RedState, was therefore himself to the left of the ever-lovin’ center. Who knew? (The title of his storied WaPo blog, Red America—perhaps it was some devilish trick to conceal the MSM’s well-known liberal bias?)
But I really shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Erickson; he is, after all, the mastermind behind Operation Leper. —Which means we share the same goal: I, too, dream of a day when the Republican Party is cut down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
I don’t know—
2009 looked bigger on the TV.
Actually, I kinda want to see it after that.
“It’s like reading a really bad webcomic with a vast continuity and its own tiny and deeply insular LiveJournal community,” says Alexandra DuPont of Frank Miller’s The Spirit.
In Tsaija, five kilometers out from Sovetskaya Gavan.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with this just yet—
—so into the commonplace book it goes.
It’s what you do, not who (you say) you know.
Apparently, I’ve been web 3.0 for a couple years now. Who knew? (—Web 4.0, then: we all leave our websites to languish, gathering dust and rust and rotting links.)
Taran plus five weeks and counting.
I did mention the whole kid thing, right?
—Oh, sure, over at LiveJournal and Twitter. —But here? On my own dam’ blog blog? Bupkes for weeks on end. Where did the time go?
Further bulletins when I can find the words. (I know I left them around here somewhere.)
It’s the little things, isn’t it. It’s always been the little things.
“Lately, we all need to eat dinner together. Different groups, but always groups. Long tables, long meals. Lots of dishes and drinking glasses and laughing. This is not, at all, a complaint. It’s just happening on all sides now, often, and I wonder why and, also, I love it.” —Jen Snow
Stay toasty.
I’ve got to share with you, it’s like kinda providential, yesterday what happened to me. I can use this today, after that introduction from Shelly. I’m reading on my Starbucks mocha cup, okay, the quote of the day? You’ll never believe what the quote was. It was Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador, and Madeleine has as her quote of the day for Starbucks—now she said it, I didn’t—she said, “There’s a place in hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.”
—Gov. Sarah Palin, Carson, California rally, 4 Oct. 2008
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.
Former state Rep. Eric Croft, a Democrat, sponsored a state law requiring cities to provide the examinations free of charge to victims. He said the only ongoing resistance he met was from Wasilla, where Palin was mayor from 1996 to 2002.
“It was one of those things everyone could agree on except Wasilla,” Croft told CNN. “We couldn’t convince the chief of police to stop charging them.”
Alaska’s Legislature in 2000 banned the practice of charging women for rape exam kits—which experts said could cost up to $1,000.
—“Palin’s town charged women for rape exams”
Vanity thy name is.
- Take a picture of yourself right now.
- Don’t change your clothes.
- Don’t fix your hair
- Just take a picture.
- Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.)
- Include these instructions.
Oh, wait. That’s actually the picture what Bill gave my for my birthday. (Which was spectacular, by the way.)
—The meme’s over here, if you must know.
