 I’ve been thinking about Completeness of the Soul: The Life and Opinions of Jay Breeze, Rock Star, the third novel from my friend and fellow scrogue Jim Booth. I finished reading it a few days ago, but for me it’s been a slightly disjointed experience because I’ve seen most of it in its pieces before: chapters like “Fins” and “The Balcony Scene” have been previously published as standalone short stories and there are sections (the “Rock Star Handbook”) that Jim originally developed as an offering for an SMS entertainment company in which I was a partner. So I’ve been familiar for years with the component elements, but this was my first encounter with the unified book in context.
After several days of reflection, I find myself musing on things that many readers and reviewers might not have twigged on. Full story »
 Goyim collide.
Yesterday I had the misfortune of stumbling into this little bit of bigoted, hypocritical, inflammatory, and ignorant trash at the New York Daily News:
Ahmadinejad’s Yom Kippur UN speech an outrage for New York City
You simply do not invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a pure evil crackpot Holocaust denier who wants to see Israel obliterated from planet Earth, to the United Nations on Yom Kippur, a Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Oh, the ironies abound here.
First would be Hamill’s apparent failure to understand the observance of Yom Kippur, for instance, as described at chabad.com as part of the observance the day before: Full story »
 In an attempt to quell growing fan unrest over the job being done by its replacement officials, the NFL today announced a new promotion it expects to increase public engagement with the national pastime. Commissioner Roger Goodell says the YOU MAKE THE CALL! contest will randomly select nine lucky fans to officiate Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans.
The contest hearkens back to the old You Make the Call series, where the TV audience was presented with an actual game situation and asked to decide the correct call. Full story »
So, they’re all just sitting there. Looking into the camera. She – Lisa – has that smile I know so well.
But that’s only because we have history.
Not to be too pragmatic, or over-zealous, or somehow say that there was real-life no-shit chemistry, because there wasn’t. To say that wouldn’t be the truth.
But that’s kind of a lie too.
Because boys and girls, men and women, we all can’t be just friends. Those relationships just can’t be platonic.
But that’s just one of those points I think I need to point out. Just because. You know, it sort of defines who I am.
To a certain extent.
But, that’s irrelevant I guess. Full story »
 I ordered something from an online retailer last week and in checkout I selected the 3-7 day delivery option. As a public service, I thought I’d take a few moments of the time I’m spending sitting by the mailbox to deconstruct some shipping terminology for you.
Here’s the term: Guaranteed delivery in 3-7 business days. Seems straightforward enough. But what does it mean specifically?
- Start with the “3.” That part is from Marketing. Full story »
If the conservatives were willing to take off their rose-tinted (and probably opaque) glasses and actually accept bad news, they would admit that the polls just aren’t in their favor. But rather than changing the data, they would serve the voters that elected them and do something to boost their polling numbers organically. And rather than pointing fingers and doing voodoo math, they would take action and do something to be approved of and praised for.
A team of researchers at University College London made a fascinating discovery regarding how we as humans retain news: that we remember good news, and we disregard bad news. By using magnets to stimulate the brain differently, they gradually got test subjects to incorporate more bad news into their recall and slowly got their subjects’ optimism to wane. Full story »
 The clean-shaven man entered the church after the sermon had already begun. He took a seat next to an elderly woman in pink tweed, clutching her own underlined Bible with one hand while fingering her wooden rosary with the other. She looked over at the man with contempt as he sat down. He gave the sign of the cross and winked at her.
The deacon’s voice echoed through the half-filled church.
“I reminded my son of this as he headed to his soccer game. I told him, don’t you forget why you’re here on this earth.” The clean-shaven man put his head down in his hands, his thoughts pushing the deacon’s sermon back out into the holy air around him.
God, I know you may not recognize my voice, it’s been a long time. I haven’t been to confession since my confirmation, probably. I know that’s a sin. It’s probably a sin that I’m not listening to the deacon either. What’s his name? Thomas? Luke? Henry? Whatever. I’m sorry for not listening to what’s-his-name up there. Full story »
U.S. policies toward the Middle East were more of a factor in protests against “Innocence of Muslims” than insults to religion.
It’s tough to deny that Denis Hamill (younger brother of Peter) makes a good point in his September New York Daily News column titled Radical Islamic terror ‘flicks’ insult humanity far more deeply than an idiot film about Muslims by a felonious con man. He’s referring, of course, to the video Innocence of Muslims that’s poured gasoline on fire in the Muslim world.
Suppose New Yorkers decided to retaliate and storm all their diplomatic outposts, killing ambassadors and other innocents because we were outraged by an Islamist film that we found offensive? … And, believe me, we have lots more than one dopey fictional film to be offended by. Full story »
We Democrats aren’t very good at this campaigning stuff. But we don’t need to be. Because we don’t have Fox on our side.
The conservatives are a frustrated lot. They are frustrated that a Negro is president. They are frustrated that no matter what they write in their homeschool textbooks, it’s getting warmer and everybody knows it. They are frustrated that economics (and arithmetic for that matter) don’t work the way they think it should. They are frustrated that admitted homosexuals get to sleep with members of the same sex openly and they have to sneak out to toilets in the Minneapolis airports. And, did I mention the thing about the black guy in the White House? Full story »
Looking back on his life, Michael could see the mistakes that led him to the street, but knowing them did nothing to change his fate. The world was a hard, cold place, nothing but concrete and glass. Living things struggled for space to breathe, to stretch their arms toward each other, to feel that connection of emotions changing places like osmosis before the starvation withered their limbs. The lucky ones worked their way under its surface, like water freezing in the cracks of a sidewalk to let the weeds through, but the majority were just rain drops pelted against the rock, to be recycled by the sun, whether they lived in houses or not. His hands were numb, despite the fingerless gloves he wore, and the breath he repeatedly blew into his cupped fists. He couldn’t remember the last time he had showered. His beard was a tangled mass of grays and browns, a thicket of coarse hair where bits of dust and grime clung. The strands of his mustache tickled the corners of his mouth and his upper lip. His face was a wildfire of itching dryness, bleached by the cold. In spite all this, he found himself at peace.
Full story »
When voters elect members of Congress, they are hiring them to do a job. Voters, through their taxes, compensate those politicians well — $174,000 a year, and more if they have committee or leadership roles.
Many, if not most, voters — unless they are among the 12.5 million without jobs — work about 35 hours a week for a median income of about $32,000. They get perhaps two weeks of paid vacation each year. But a member of the House of Representatives this year was scheduled to show up for only 89 days from January to November. He (and it’s generally “he,” not “she“) is taking off a week in February, another in April, still another in May, and — get this — the whole of August and the first week of September. “It’s too hot in the city in August,” he tells you, then takes off for week-long conventions in the hot, humid Deep South before working only eight days in September. That’s 89 days out of the 172 days voters will be at work (minus a few paid holidays) before Nov. 6. Full story »
A prominent disarmament and nonproliferation advocate gives his surprise endorsement to an attack on Iran.
On Wednesday (Sept. 19) I posted about how disappointing award-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest’s recent nuclear-modernization series (parts 1 and 2) was. I had thought she was poised to investigate the need for it, as well as for nuclear weapons themselves. After all, that’s what she had done in the past with the U.S. intelligence and classified activity system, as well as CIA detention sites overseas. Full story »
 I wake up on an average Sunday in Kigali and go for a journey through town. It is an ordinary day to most, but everything seems new and exciting to my two-week-old Rwanda eyes.
I exit my front gate and begin the bumpy hike up my dirt road to town. It’s a short, five-minute walk, but also a steep one. I pant the entire time.
On the way, I pass a church. The doors are open, and vibrant sounds of rejoice echo into the streets. The passionate singing, bright dancing dresses and unreserved clapping makes me smile through the exhausting climb.
Everyone stares as I pass. They do not threaten, nor am I scared. They just wonder about this white woman walking through their African neighborhood. Full story »
There’s no nice way to say this, so just let me say it plainly: We live in a criminal culture. This culture rewards bad behavior well; it rewards worse behavior even better. It is a culture where image creation means more than talent, where manipulation means more than hard work, and where self-obsessed self-aggrandizing at any cost is the only game that anyone with “smarts” (read total lack of ethical standards) believes matters.
There are still some, including many of the writers who post their sometimes thoughtful, sometimes provocative musings here, who still believe that we still have a culture worth saving. A few (I’m looking at you, Bonesparkle) realize the sad truth, however; once a culture adopts a model that follows the following tenet nearly exclusively, it’s asking to be doomed:
“The business of America is business.” Full story »
Fuck those fucking fucks.
Last week I got booted from my suicide pool when New England lost. To Arizona. AT HOME. On a missed layup at the final gun. Today I got booted from my new reboot suicide pool – in its first week – when the NFC’s newest ass-whipping runaway juggernaut, the San Francisco 49ers, got waxed by – get this – the Vikings.
Many years ago I read a very funny article about what the writer termed “Zurich games.” Full story »
 It was early in baseball season — May 2006, I think. My first year covering the Double-A Binghamton Mets. A little bit before the game started, I got an IM from my girlfriend (now wife) with a video clip of her niece (now my niece) performing in a dance recital.
As the grounds crew watered the infield and the crowd started to file into the stadium, I watched my niece dance. And mixed in with pride was a wave of sadness.
Would this be how I connected with my daughter some day? Would I be watching her dance recitals on a laptop in the press box rather than from the front row?
—
Three years ago, I walked out of the Press & Sun-Bulletin‘s newsroom for the last time, ending my career as a sports writer. Full story »
I, like a lot of other aspiring wonks, watched The West Wing when I was younger. I watched Leo talk about a big block of cheese, I watched CJ stand up for women in Saudi Arabia, and I watched President Bartlet raise my standards for elected officials far higher than could ever be met outside of primetime.
Today, as Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns, I thought of The West Wing, and what they called “Take out the Trash Day.” Friday afternoon is when all the boring or negative news was fed to the press in a lump, so that it wouldn’t take up a full news cycle, and so it would run into the weekend when most people don’t pay attention to the news.
Mitt Romney just took out the trash for his tax returns. Full story »
 Credit Joshua Holland with that headline, which I’m stealing gleefully. Rush really is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he?
In case you missed it:
Rush Limbaugh went on a tirade today about how “feminazis” and “chickification” are to blame for the fact that he has a tiny dick the average penis is 10 percent smaller than 50 years ago:
Rush Limbaugh on Thursday lashed out at feminists — who he called “feminazis” — over the news that male genitalia are shrinking.
The conservative radio host pointed to an Italian study which found that the average male penis was 10 percent smaller than 50 years ago. Full story »
When I was in journalism school back in the 1990s, there was a formula we learned that defined the reporting process: Gather, sort, report. We were taught to first gather all the information we needed for a story, then sort it (organize it, structure it, etc.), and then write the story or go on the air.
One of the main ways journalism is changing in the digital age, especially with Twitter, is what’s called “news as process.” Rather than building a reporters’ work around one story, a reporter’s work is structured around publishing the story piecemeal, as it happens. The process is the story. One way of looking at it is that it turns around the formula I learned 15 years ago. It’s not gather, sort, report. It’s gather, report, sort. You get information, you report what you hear, and then you sort it into a story, either for print or to post online. Full story »
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