I could say something here about the injustice of certain aspects of life qua apparently funny, intelligent people who die while other seeming wastes of human flesh* live on but why bother? This, because I said I would:
*No need to name names, I think.
So, can someone tell me what is it with this Gmail stuff? It’s giving everyone the raptures, and there are these things called “invites” that seem to be as coveted as invitations to the Secret Iraqi Government Handover party were. I visited Google’s faq page on it and I didn’t see anything particularly special. As web-based email clients go, I like the email offered by Myway.com myself. (Not that I’ve ever used that email address. But anyway.)
Update: well, I’ll get to find out – thanks to Mr. Jim Treacher, I now have a Gmail address: twistedspinster-at-gmail.com. Thanks all you guys who offered me an invite, but Jim was first! (If you wanna write me remove the “-at-” and replace with “@".)
Apparently South Korea is censoring blogs that use naughty words and talk about disturbing things and god only knows what else frosts the shorts of South Korean government officials. Anyway, that was a bad idea. A very bad idea. (As Glenn Reynolds says, just start at the top and keep scrolling down. If that sounds dirty, well…)
If you persevere, you’ll arrive at this gem:
But at that moment Jessica howled as her climax came upon her, her orgasm crashing in waves upon Frank’s frank, which was now giving off a distinctly Hebrew National Hot Dog odor. Jessica gasped several times, then fell sideways off Frank, spent and drowsy from her efforts.
Yeah, smart move, South Korea. Thanks a lot for inspiring this!
PS: I really couldn’t think of a title for this post. I have had the HELL of all toothaches today, and took a fistfull (oh okay, a couple) of Hydrocodone when I got home, so I’m kind of underpowered right now. Dentist visit tomorrow, yay – not to remove the tooth (first he has to x-ray and examine again and I have an appointment in a couple more weeks for that purpose, but I am hoping to wangle another prescription for high-powered painkiller out of him), just to remove the sutures from the previous tooth removal. Lord I hope I can afford the dentures I’m sure I’ll end up with.
Anyway, feel free to think up a name to this rambling wreck and I’ll pick one and give you – give you – uh, well, give you a nice congratulations!
Axis of Eve says “Show your panties, America! It’ll stop war!”
This has been presented as yet another example of the fact that a Liberal Arts education is the modern-day equivalent of getting the retards in the cafeteria to weave baskets. I’ll bet these honeys think that Lysistrata is a feminist paean to Strong Women™.
(Via Astonished Head.)
I got one of these emails (the one he writes about in red and green letters) too. I haven’t answered it yet. When I do I’ll post the answers here. Just because.
I’m having real trouble with this little story about alleged ethnic slur activity in the hometown of Paul Johnson Jr., who was murdered by terrorists recently. Here is my trouble: supposedly one of the naughty signs left stuck to a telephone pole or something read:
another sign in Little Egg Harbor Township read, “Last night I wasn’t a racist but today I feel racism towards Islamic beliefs.”
It just doesn’t fit the profile of the sort of people who print up “ethnic slurs” and stick them all over neighborhoods. I mean, just look at that syntax: it’s a complete sentence, it involves labored grammar and a glaring yet common misuse of the term “racism” (one can’t “feel racism” against a belief; and anyway, wouldn’t a racist, or even an enraged person pushed over the edge by the murder of a fellow citizen into racism, simply say something like “Fuck all Muslims", or even the simple “Stamp out Islam” that was on the first sign mentioned in the article?) – the whole thing reeks of those earnest yet cracked entries on various warblogs by people calling themselves Muslims scolding the bloggers for being prejudiced and so on. I sense someone with an agenda produced those signs all right, but it wasn’t someone with a burning need to protest the activities of certain Muslims. Remember the college student who complained about being subject to racist harrassment who was later found to have concocted the whole thing?
That may be why the statements of the CAIR rep – “It’s really our fear coming true” and “It indicates a hatred that could turn into something violent” – ring so hollow to me. Or maybe that is due to the fact that I think that having one’s fellow citizen kidnapped and beheaded kind of outweighs in the “fears come true” category things like graffitti.
(Via FAD.)
Update: Big Ramifications, you obviously didn’t read my entire notes on the sidebar. Your comment appeared twice, indicating that you hit the posting button again, and you used a fake email address.
I’m late linking to Christopher Hitchens’ piece-by-piece takedown of Pack of Lies About 911. He’s armed with something Moore hates: the facts. Here’s a sample:
We are introduced to Iraq, “a sovereign nation.” (In fact, Iraq’s “sovereignty” was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore’s flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don’t think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic.
How do you think the people of Iraq will feel when they get wind of Moore’s whitewashing of Saddam’s murderous reign?
Hmmm… I like this idea. Word from an ex-terrorist (as S-Train calls himself). Unfortunately, like most excellent ideas, there isn’t anyone in power with the guts to put it in effect – and that includes, alas, our president, who – though he has shown he has more steel in his spine than his two predecessors (that includes his own father) in dealing with the Middle East – has not shown a willlingness to go all the way in this fight. Not yet anyway. Maybe if he gets his second term he’ll be ready to take off the gloves, since he won’t have the spector of that flighty and fragile creature, the American voter, to worry about. We’ll see.
Blogger Kenneth (Via Pejman) reprints this review of Moore’s film Roger & Me by Pauline Kael. Way back in 1989 here is what Kael, who was not exactly known for being a darling of the so-called “right wing,” had to say about Mr. Moore and his methods:
I’ve heard it said that Michael Moore’s muckraking documentary Roger & Me is scathing and Voltairean. I’ve read that Michael Moore is “a satirist of the Reagan period equal in talent to Mencken and [Sinclair] Lewis,” and “an irrepressible new humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.” But the film I saw was shallow and facetious, a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing.
I will say that despite her unbalanced (in the direction of sycophancy) reaction to some filmmakers and actors, Kael was on the whole independent of whatever constituted “mainstream” artistic dogma, and wasn’t afraid to call what she thought a lousy movie a lousy movie, no matter how dear to her heart was the concept behind it. Here’s my favorite quote from the review:
…Roger & Me uses its leftism as a superior attitude. Members of the audience can laugh at ordinary working people and still feel that they’re taking a politically correct position
That describes the attitude of a lot of so-called “liberals” and leftists I’ve been reading lately. When liberals were more like Pauline Kael I counted myself among their number. But they started to shift towards Moore-ish behavior a long time ago – well before the 2000 election. (I kept waiting for the happiness and satisfaction to set in during the Clinton administration – after all, our boy was in the White House – but it never came. It was then I realized that to be a liberal today means being a constant complainer, like the husband of story and song who beat his wife because she didn’t line up the soup cans in alphabetical order. That was when I decided I was no longer liberal.)
If this week hasn’t sucked enough, the weekend section of my town’s birdcage liner was rendered more unreadable than usual by local movie critic Jay Boyar’s account of how he crawled up and into Michael Moore’s ass and found it so cosy and warm. Here’s a sample of the smarm:
Take the sequence in which President Bush, on the morning of Sept. 11, is at a Florida elementary school. Moore shows us that after the president is told that America is under attack, it takes him nearly seven minutes to react. Instead of immediately taking charge of the situation, a somewhat bewildered-looking Bush reads My Pet Goat to schoolchildren.
Like something out of Samuel Beckett, the scene is both absurdly funny and deeply disturbing.
Here is my reaction – in the “more” section so as not to frighten small children and old people:
(more…)
James Lileks is complaining about the weather: apparently it’s in the 60s in lovely downtown Great White North. In the meantime, I just heard that here in sunny Central Florida the heat index will be a balmy 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
I know where I’d rather be right now.
I’ve just banned God. I’ve always wanted to do that. (God apparently works for Avon Cosmetics in Germany. Mary Kay had better look out!)
Have a yard sale. Well, go outside, actually.
I’ll just surface to note something that brought a brief spark of joy into my life: among the “art” works destroyed in a fire was the hideous “Holy Virgin Mary” (a.k.a. “Poo-poo Mary") by Chris Ofili. Here’s a picture in case you’ve forgotten how hideous it was (I’ll hide it in the “more” section so as not to frighten small children and old people with fragile heart valves):
(more…)
Yeah, I haven’t had much to say lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve been having one of those please-God-send-a-comet-to-destroy-the-Earth weeks. If I get over my current hatred of all humanity, I’ll be back. That’s a big “if” right now.
I admit it. I can no longer live this lie. I am not only Andrea Harris, owner of the Spleenville.com domain, I am also Tim Blair and Charles Austin! Both supposedly male creations were spawned on Blogspot as experimental forays into the world of fake internet personalities, and were so succesful that Blogspot’s servers could no longer take the load. So I “moved” them to my own domain.
It’s all true. Micah Wright knows. Oh, and everyone on Blogspot was really a confabulation of that Ev guy, including me, “my” Blogspot experiments, and Instapundit. Come on. A Tennessee law professor who supports the right to bear arms and pretty girls to wear tight jeans and midriff-baring shirts? A freewheeling, funny, yet literate Australian journalist? A single, middle-aged woman who sits up all night posting on the internet? Admit it, internet surfers, you have all been pw3nd! Then again, since you and I are all just one guy named Chet with a Commodore 64 hooked up to an old Phillips tv set, I guess that doesn’t matter.
(Via “Michele,” aka Chet on alternate Tuesdays.)
Senator John Kerry is likened to a “caged hamster” by The New York Times. I really don’t think I can add anything to that, except to note that the behavior described in the article makes the senator come off as a totally clueless dweeb. I am not sure that is the effect that the writer, one Jodi Wilgoren, was aiming for, but the article is so badly written – its tone is off; the hamster metaphor isn’t the only bad one, merely the worst; and the composition technique that seems to be most used here is “grocery list” – it’s hard to tell.
And for some reason the article was either truncated for the web or badly edited in the first place – after the final paragraph (it doesn’t really seem like an “end") there is the enigmatic fragment “But M". I think I’ll have a contest: fill in your own idea of what the rest of the sentence was supposed to be, in the comments. Here’s mine: “But Ma-a-arge!“
(Via Tim Blair.)
Update: thanks to everyone who participated! And here’s the prize (you all won), thanks to reader and fellow blogger ForNow: the actual content of the rest of the article, from the Lakeland Ledger, whose editors seem to be more on the ball than those of the Great Grey Lady of the North:
[But M]r. Kerry was still chafing at the confines of his celebrity. He had been to a Sox game a few days before, in the fourth row between the plate and third base, with a stop at the owners box. He spent much of the afternoon signing autographs and saying hello.
I hardly got to see any of the game, he lamented.
Frankly, I think I prefer any of what we came up with.
Update, June 15: I would be remiss if I did not add this link to more commentary on Jodi Wilgoren.
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