Drive-by kulturklatsch.
I’m needed elsewhere; I’m trying to Get Things Done. (Never mind the sooty faces tugging at the Forge!) —This is mostly me using the Outboard Brain. And so: this (which found via this) seems somehow to me to be saying something, what, obverse? to this, which is (indirectly) about this. (I’d add something about the stagnation of the direct market in comics as everyone waits for trades that never come because the floppies don’t sell, but I’m not sure where to put it.) So: no thought, just bookmarks. (On a seemingly unrelated note: should I kill the joke about the three lions entirely? I mean, head, hand, and heart, but who the fuck’s gonna follow that?)
Politics as she is spoke.
Yes, it is interesting to learn that the Feds began wiretapping us in February of 2001 (though I coulda sworn we found that out like, last year already or something). But: you want to stop the warrantless wiretapping now? Don’t bother pointing out it was no fucking use at all in stopping 9/11. They don’t care, and anyway the rhetoric’s metastasized. —Point out instead it was no fucking use at all in stopping the Republicans from losing Congress.
A humble request.
I was going to rant about how nobody’s letting In Our Bedroom After the War breathe in the shadow of Set Yourself on Fire, but I have work to do, and really, you all probably knew this already, so instead I’ll just ask this: please, please, please stop saying “postmodern” when all you mean is “metatextual.” It’s so 1984.
I know you are but what am I.
As you know, Bob, they only accuse us of that which they themselves are doing, or mightily wish they could do—so maybe we might want to get a tad more concerned than usual with recent trends in rhetoric from the dextral reaches of the Islets of Bloggerhans.
The explanation you deserve.
Yeah, see, apparently? There was this football scandal or something was it last weekend or the weekend before where some guy from one team videotaped some guy from some other team and got caught and I’m not real clear on what the whole videotaping thing is about, maybe copyright violation or something, except I’m not sure how that’s cheating, I haven’t really been paying attention, but I haven’t paid much attention to football since the Superbowl Shuffle, to tell the truth, but anyway, football isn’t so much germane to the explanation you deserve.
Football comes into it because I read the Poor Man and he goes on about football and today he linked to a Gregg Easterbrook column about the whole cheating videotape thing and I know, Gregg Easterbrook, gah, but hear me out, okay? In the middle of this column on the whole cheating videotape thing which apparently is as important as that MoveOn ad in the scheme of things entire (though I am being unfair, perhaps, as Gregg Easterbrook is a sports columnist, and what are else is a sports columnist to write about but sports? Perhaps how the numinous might impact superstring theory? Ha ha), but anyway, in the middle of this column, Gregg Easterbrook said the following:
And if you’re tempted to say, “Gregg, at worst this is just cheating in some dumb football games,” here’s why the affair matters: If a big American institution such as the NFL is not being honest with the public about a subject as minor, in the scheme of things, as the Super Bowl, how can we expect American government and business to be honest with the public about what really matters?
And ever since I read that, I’ve been screaming and screaming and screaming and I cannot stop and that’s why I’m trying to pound my head through your wall I’m sorry but there it is aaaaaaaaaaaaa—
And holding; and holding.
Then again—
I always was too hopeful for my own dam’ good. (Shorter 2007: so I was wrong about the year. —I wonder if it’s the one that’s aimed at my old house?)
Blessed is the peacemaker.
One takes one’s humor where one can: the cosmic hilarity that ensues, for instance, when one reflects that Sen. Larry Craig (R) may end up doing more for world peace than all the rest of us combined.
Hyperbole.
i think he’s wrong; i think they’ll back down if we fight. i also think that the real radicals—the cheneys and boltons—are far fewer than the civil war analogy suggests. it’s not a country divided. it’s a big country against a small band of wackos.
our situation now is roughly analogous to that of the passengers on flight 93. when the right hijacked the first airplane, in 2000, we were caught completely by surprise. we thought it was more important to keep calm and not panic. so they flew the country into a building. they did it again in 2003, and we were still placing too much value on staying calm.
We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court.
—David Addington, Cheney aide, on FISA
A sobering reminder of the scale of our enterprise.
You bumble along, writing what you write, and you feel pretty good about your meagre slice of the Islets of Bloggerhans, and then a one-off joke from a video poker forum comes along and sextuples your daily traffic in a matter of hours.
(And I don’t even get the joke…)
The Reproof Valiant.
You realize, of course, that “the art of the possible” isn’t the art of doing what’s possible. It’s the art of making things possible.
You never forget your first.
An offhanded comment becomes a meme, suitable for bloggers of a Certain Age: when did you make your first “Christ, what a right-wing hack” post about Instapundit?
And in the comments over at Unfogged, a meme becomes, well, any of a number of things. I keep forgetting how vociferously active that joint is. Makes me wish I hung out in comments more. —But there’s a nice thick strand of how-did-you-end-up-in-blogging there, namechecking poliblogs of days of yore (and to realize that Body and Soul and Fafblog! now belong only to yore is icily sobering) and the folks who’ve been around long enough to remember what blogs were like before they became a corner soapbox in the marketplace of political ideas mention Rebecca’s Pocket and /usr/bin/girl to general befuddlement.
Me? The first thing-that-is-a-blog I read was David Chess’s, which is usually called The Curvature of the Earth is Obliterated by Local Noise, when it isn’t called David Chess’s blog. From him I found Textism, and Oblivio, and Anonymous Juice, and Anita Rowland, and Flutterby, and other, less reputable folks, and then I went and started my own. (Before all that, I’d spent a lot of time on Plastic, wondering why I couldn’t get an account on MetaFilter. Then I discovered I did have an account on MetaFilter, which I don’t remember having set up. But the password worked. I still haven’t used it. Since I have a blog and all. And anyway, I was never very good at the whole hipshot quicklink thing. —Though the mix-tape post that MeFi arguably started, and snarkout definitely perfected, is something I wouldn’t mind doing more of.)
LiveJournal came (much) later. (And all that that entails.)
Of course, if you’re not of a Certain Age, or’d rather not reflect on it, you could always celebrate the news we can finally announce: Dicebox is being made into a movie. (There’s even a novelization!)
The all-too-common tragedy of the foreseeable unforeseen.
As a Republican state senator in Montana and as a human being, I am offended by Senator Craig’s existence. Why oh why are most of the perverts that get caught Republicans? Are there more of them or are they just stupid? The thought of a US Senator chasing love in all the wrong places makes me think longingly of the Ayotollahs in Iran. They would just kill the turkey.
And James, Dave Lewis, a very honorable man, did not recommend “death for queers” (your phraseology).
His statement was obviously exaggerated, but I am sure he meant only to display his rage at Craig’s betrayal of his word and the trust placed in him.
Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people—people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is—he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.
This is a direct consequence of the war—the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.
Those who survive, flee. Through a network of safe houses and incredibly brave people and escape routes to the West.
The British home office is disinclined to regard the likelihood of being murdered by a variety of non-state agents as persecution, because it is not the government that is doing it. The leaders of the diaspora queer community are under death threats—again from Sistani—and live under police protection of a moderately minimal kind.
When troops leave, as leave they will in the runup to the British and American elections, there will be no change, except possibly for the worse.
One of the diaspora spoke to us at Translondon this evening.
He said something amazingly moving to the effect that this is not a movement of Resistance so much as a movement of Existence. Because when everyone wants to kill you, staying alive is the most radical form of resistance possible.
Not sure how that happened.
It’s not like I meant to take the month of August off or anything.
We the motherfucking people.
The Edwards campaign will send our forgetful Attorney General a copy of the constitution for every signature they receive on this petition. (Then again, maybe some of those copies could go elsewhere…)
Commutation.
I drive to work these days. Didn’t used to. —When I was freelancing, I’d drive to the occasional client’s office, and there was that month or so temping at Johnstone, and the couple of weeks writing a technical manual for PetSmart, and they’re both out by the airport. Oh, and the week or so at Rio, over the river in Vancouver, laying out cards that advertised the music pre-loaded on whatever MP3 player they’ve probably stopped making by now.
But I’ve almost always otherwise been able to bus or subway or walk to work, usually. For almost five years in this house with the job I’ve had I could walk downtown some mornings, four miles, an hour and a half.
The job moved; now I drive.
And on the one hand, so what? Most people in this country drive to work. Yeah, I say. That’s right. —And now I know why most people in this country are so blackly sullen and ashily angry, and maybe even why we elected Geo. W. Bush to the presidency. (The first time, if not the second.)
There’s a luxury to going to work under someone else’s power. (Or on your own feet, but that’s a luxury of a different order.) —Twenty minutes or so yet to read, doze, listen to the iPod, people-watch, think, write, pretend to think or write while actually people-watching. Driving, I may be master of my fate and captain of my soul, but I must be paying attention, all of it, for the half-hour to forty-five minutes (to an hour, to an hour and a bloody half with the Burnside closed and a stall on I-5 northbound backing up traffic over the Marquam and the regular line of people trying to get on the Sunset snarling the 405). No dozing. No reading. No writing. Barely any thinking, because what the fuck are you trying to do would you get over and let me Jesus! —And the people-watching sucks.
At least I can hook up the iPod to the stereo. (The joys of autonomy!)
The next-to-last straight stretch of I-5 between Bridgeport Village and Wilsonville is as-yet undeveloped; the 205 is the only interchange. Otherwise it’s trees and trees and sixty-five-mile-an-hour speed-limit signs. The median’s a wide strip of dusty yellow grass (this time of year) with a low wire fence running right down the middle. —And then you hit the last straight stretch, lined with hesitant office parks and anemic car dealerships, whose hinterlands are marked by the Garlic Onion restaurant in the basement of a Holiday Inn, its iconic sign spearing up past the overpass as you come around a bend out of the trees.
This morning, running down those next-to-last two miles of tree-lined highway, I spotted a work crew in the median, laying out safety cones and orange lights and white barricades. The barricades they were leaning up against the low wire fence, and every other one had a sign on it. The signs all said NO PARKING.
Okay. Easily enough done—
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere and otherwise, but I might as well note it here, too, seeing as how and all: The “Prolegomenon” of City of Roses has been published in the Summer issue of Coyote Wild. If you haven’t read it, go, read it, if you like; if you have, well, go read it again, why not; either way, go, enjoy some beerly free speculative fiction.
More on the behemoth.
Dylan, as ever, says it best. —Meanwhile, Momus is trying to take the piss out of Potter and The Wire at the same time, and for such an intellective jackanapes falls distressingly flat. Announcing to the world that you think the point of a name like Severus Snape is “you don’t have to waste much time working out whether they’re good or evil” is to mistake the set-up for the punchline, and if you require nothing more than a weepy third party’s word to accept that Bubbles must be “the most sympathetic character ever to appear in a TV drama,” well, you’re pretty much doomed to repeat the downfall of Tom Townsend, who never read novels, just good criticism, thus to efficiently garner the thoughts of a critic as well as the novelist.
—Ah, well. Momus is not without his point re: “wholly human,” and at least it’s—wittier? more insightful?—better than Ron Charles’ weary screed about how it’s all not really, you know, reading.
