Apr 21 2011
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This is an Open Thread
Apr 20 2011
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Wednesday is mishima‘s well deserved day of rest
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This is an Open Thread
Apr 20 2011
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This is an Open Thread
Mar 17 2010
| The Wearing Of The Green |
| O Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that’s goin’ round? The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground! No more Saint Patrick’s Day we’ll keep, his color can’t be seen For there’s a cruel law ag’in the Wearin’ o’ the Green. I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand |
| So if the color we must wear be England’s cruel red Let it remind us of the blood that Irishmen have shed And pull the shamrock from your hat, and throw it on the sod But never fear, ’twill take root there, though underfoot ’tis trod. |
| When laws can stop the blades of grass from growin’ as they grow And when the leaves in summer-time their color dare not show Then I will change the color too I wear in my caubeen But till that day, please God, I’ll stick to the Wearin’ o’ the Green. |
You can listen to it here.
Feb 18 2010
So it appears that CPAC is trying to ramp up enthusiasm with video games (warning, Faux Noise link).
Let me tell you how that works out.
Back in the day I was running my brewing buddy for capo di tutti (which by the way he never got and I did) he used to host these legendary Halloween Parties. I remember the first one.
In addition to the usual party things you do, between us we have an unusual collection of classic video games including dedicated Pongs, Ataris, Colecos, Segas, Commodore 64s, Apples, and others of more ancient vintage that we set up as stations among which people could circulate.
AND we had a new video projector on which we planned to show Music Videos that people could dance to, but with which we debuted the most mesmerising 10 minutes in movies- the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
12 hours of couch drooling passivity later we vowed to never again include the Hypnotoad in our plans for world domination through pastel colored boxes.
The Hypnotoad.
| "Television is a vast wasteland" |
 |
Jan 21 2010
I was inspired to reflect on this by paradox over at the left coaster.
However, Mr. President, I’ve heard your pronouncements and speeches before, and even though I watch television frequently I did not take on the asinine presumption of that ludicrous medium, I have a memory, I forget very little. The past is indeed relevant in evaluating your proposals, oh yes, and what I’ve repeatedly seen is a great speech to start good politics and then total failure as no leadership fight evolves to make it happen.
My minor point is-
Television and Radio are a serial medium of communication. Even as you are processing the information they provide, new information is coming in all the time and I find myself frequently sitting there after an hour or a day of mind numbing novocaine saying to myself-
What the fuck?
What did I just see?
Seriously, I can’t remember. It washes over me and through me with no point of reference, bobbing up and down in the middle of a vast ocean like Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia.
Print on the other hand is random access.
No only can you absorb it at your own pace, but you can go back and review in light of new information and confirm what you think is true.
Blogging is kind of a hybrid. You can review it if you can find it and good luck with that.
The perfect form is a book, condensed and easy to carry. Indexed with page numbers.
News papers are much more messy. Not only does the ink rub off on your hands, if you collect too many of them you’re in danger of suffocating under a collapsing pile of the past.
Dec 23 2009
I want to start by giving a huge flaming finger to my audience which expects miracles I can’t provide so they can point out the platonic shadows while they freeze to death like a match girl.
 |
Welcome to America 2010.
There was a time softened by the distance of memory when I rode north past Stockbridge Massachusetts in a red VW Microbus with circles and arrows and implements of destruction.
It was a dark and stormy (I miss him, I should look him up) night and we huddled under thin blankets I can still find since like most parsimonious New Englanders (and unlike profligate Washington new money) the Gilmores never throw anything away- including that red VW Microbus with circles and arrows and implements of destruction even after I crashed it into the back of someone’s car (my legs were on the other side) and the engine blew up (this actually happened twice, once while I was driving it and once while my Dad was. Hello Enfield coast to a stop or charging up a hill to a street named after a classmate who shat themselves in first grade).
But this wasn’t one of those bad nights and we only had to deal with the fact that you just can’t heat a red VW Microbus.
So it was pretty fucking COLD as we drove north to the Lake House and we hadn’t got our Christmas Tree yet so at the gas station we got the least pathetic one. I want to emphasise at this point that least means beyond Charlie Brown.
So we strapped that on the roof and trundled down to the Lake House and by trundled I mean that if Dad hadn’t jumped an Olympic 90 Meter ski hill we might have missed the driveway.
Which was blocked by a 9 foot snow drift, but when one of your gifts is a toboggan you can kind of make it to the door.
And call Skip the plow guy.
Who doesn’t actually dig you out so much as wade through the snow to tell you your pathetic tree sucks and the cranberry popcorn garland a waste of time.
“Let me fix that for you.”
Skip is mostly famous for surviving without a scratch a high speed collision into a bridge abutment so I don’t want you to get the impression he’s the most reliable guy but my Dad and I went off in his plow to his garage where he walked out the back at random and picked a tree and gave it a few wacks.
In New Hampshire this behavior is considered normal.
But it was undeniably a better tree (did I mention pathetic?) and we dragged the fresh kill back to our lair and after a wee cup o’ yuletide joy we were able to scoot Skip out.
Oh. It gets weirder.
I rescue the pathetic Charlie Brown Tree for my own because I’m a rank sentimentalist (hit the tissue twenty times just writing this) but my point is The Great Squirrel Hunt
Didn’t I tell you it got weirder?
We’d had bats in our chimneys and rafters but never a flying squirrel. This one dove out the fire place (now in fairness I must admit we had lighted a fire) for Skip’s tree trunk and ran up and down while I chased it out the porch door armed with oven gloves and a badminton racket.
I am a formidable opponent, especially with a badminton racket.
So I’m off to the Lake House again to sleep on Granddad’s narrow red leather couch and watch Sat TV protected from the cold by the very same red VW Microbus with circles and arrows and implements of destruction thin blankets and will use whatever excuses for tools I can cram on a CD that plugs into Mom’s laptop to stay in touch as best as I can.
But wait-
Dec 22 2009
This will certainly not be the deepest or most analytic essay I’ve ever published and I apologize to the people I’ve moved down, but it needs to be said and I’ll just say it briefly-
The only things the Versailles Villagers care about are money, and approval.
Don’t give them that.
Don’t pay for their shit. Spit on them!
Don’t watch their shows or vote for them or pay for their products. Tell them in the Mega-Mart when you meet them that they are hurting America, that they are nothing but failed novelists and stenographers.
I’m not asking for the world here or advocating pitchforks and torches or even that you stop doing what you need to do to provide for yourself and your family.
What I am saying is that you have to give up pretending that everything is normal.
That those bruises of yours are just because you are clumsy and “undiplomatic”.
It is well past time for you to take a good look at your life and decide if you are better off than you were 4 years ago.
Or even last year.
Oh Rose, have something to eat.
Two hundred thousand years in the future he’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do.
Well, like you said, two hundred thousand years, it’s way off!
But it’s not! It’s now. That fight is happening right now! And he’s fighting for us, for the whole planet, and I’m just sitting here eating chips!
Listen to me! God knows I have hated that man, but right now I love him, and do you know why? Cause he did the right thing, he sent you back to me!
But what do I do every day, Mum? What do I do? Get up, catch the bus, go to work, come back home, eat chips and go to bed, is that it?!
It’s what the rest of us do.
But I can’t!
Why, cause you’re better than us??
NO, I didn’t mean that! I just… But it was. It was a better life!
And I don’t mean all the travelling, and seeing aliens and spaceships and things, that don’t matter.
The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know, he showed you too!
That you don’t just give up! You don’t just let things happen!
You make a stand, you say no, you have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away.
Dec 07 2009
A Stars Hollow Gazette
Recently I’ve had a lot of people ask me what course of action I would take.
Most of them are hopelessly compromised sellouts looking to justify craven capitulation because, frankly, they can’t stand to look at their own cowardly face in the morning mirror.
You do what you need to do to eat and provide for your family. Please don’t bother trying to convince me your shit sandwich is anything but two slices of bread wrapped around a turd.
I’m not Navin Johnson. I know a hole in the ground when I see one.
“But that’s not constructive criticism ek”, you whine.
Why do you care for my approval anyway?
Oh, I get it. You want something from me. My money. My vote. The ability to walk among decent people without having them spit on you like the soul-whore liar you are.
Not that there’s anything wrong with being an honest sex worker. Most of them are decent people who provide the service they sell. They should have a union.
But there is something different about being a confidence man, a professional betrayer.
One of the reasons I got out of journalism at a young age is professors at J-school telling me that any lie was acceptable to get a source to talk.
Yet I am a proud and successful politician because I deliver what I promise and I’m not afraid of fights because I know what’s right and have the people behind me.
In a local way of course, but it’s all the Village Number Six.
Are you a Number or a Free Man?
Nov 23 2009
Leaked documents reveal No 10 cover-up over Iraq invasion
Richard Norton-Taylor, guardian.co.uk
Sunday 22 November 2009 20.43 GMT
Military commanders are expected to tell the inquiry into the Iraq war, which opens on Tuesday, that the invasion was ill-conceived and that preparations were sabotaged by Tony Blair’s government’s attempts to mislead the public.
They were so shocked by the lack of preparation for the aftermath of the invasion that they believe members of the British and US governments at the time could be prosecuted for war crimes by breaching the duty outlined in the Geneva convention to safeguard civilians in a conflict, the Guardian has been told.
The lengths the Blair government took to conceal the invasion plan and the extent of military commanders’ anger at what they call the government’s “appalling” failures emerged as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, promised to produce a “full and insightful” account of how Britain was drawn into the conflict.
h/t Chris in Paris & Americablog
| “Oh for a pen of living fire. A tongue of flame. An arm of steel. To rouse the people’s slumbering ire, and teach the tyrant’s heart to feel.” Whitfield, James M.– How Long. |
Nov 16 2009
Perhaps it will grow on me, but at the moment I’m underimpressed with the new Prisoner.
That link is to the Wikipedia entry for the original and what you don’t get from it, or it’s pale, tepid remake, is the urgency and energy of the paranoia.
This is a Prisoner on Quaaludes and Thorazine, vaguely aware of all the rampant wrongness around him, but unsure of what it is.
The real Prisoner is black and white, Patrick knows precisely where he is- an exact replica of his London flat, but not the same place at all.
Where am I?
In the village.
What do you want?
Information.
Whose side are you on?
That would be telling.
We want information…Information…INFORMATION!You won’t get it!
By hook or by crook, we will.
Who are you?
The new Number Two.
Who is Number One?
You are Number Six.
I am not a number.
I am a free man!
The Prisoner is born in rebellion- “Why did you resign?” This Prisoner is born in confusion- “Why are you torturing me?”
The Prisoner has hope and confidence, panache. He looks at the world and knows what it is.
This Prisoner?
He has no principles, just confusion and unease.
Perhaps that is a truer statement of the human condition, but I can’t relate to it. I’ve never had any doubt. I may die, but I’ll never surrender.
Sep 12 2009
What a long strange trip it’s been.
Well, anniversaries are supposed to be times of introspection and remembrance. If I concentrate a little on my own feelings and less on those of others it’s because I value everyone’s contribution so much that I don’t trust myself not to forget one or two.
I’ve spoken before about this being a team blog, indeed tomorrow at 8 am I’ll repost my opening day essays and the first Pony Party to start the celebration. We publish a good amount of content, most of which is excellent.
I like to feature the essays of others on the Front Page, but it’s a mixed blessing. You only last about a day unless you’re picked up on the Rec List which is a dKos and a half (12 to the uninitiate). It ages in 3 days which is just about long enough to keep it filled through Thanksgiving and eksmas.
I’m not likely to feature personal stories because I’m not sure how much you really want to share although I can think of occasional exceptions.
I have my Recent Essays set to 50 and essays age in about 3 days there too. In terms of volume of original content I’d compare our collective output to some pretty active sites though I have no statistics at all to support that.
I look at DocuDharma pretty much as a interactive Daily Newspaper, Literary Magazine, and Gossip Column, so those are the kind of stories I tend to promote, but there are other editorial voices and I’m very responsive to recommendations.
I expect the future will pretty much resemble the past. I think that after the election it’s going to be quite a problem to enact a progressive agenda. but I am sure what the results will be if we don’t at least try.
My hopes for DocuDharma are rather modest, that it remain a place where people are not afraid to express themselves creatively or politically and that through discussion we can generate some activity and awareness that percolates up.