cheese it, the cops!

Nailed it...Sideways!

I am not sure where Dave Barry's stuff normally appears, but the annual year end summary is always helpful in gaining perspective on the past year. It may not be a valid perspective, because he does still drink a lot of concoctions involving coconut oil, metamucil and Everclear, but it is a perspective. And, it is never wrong...in it's underlying themes. At times, I picture his son calling him on Christmas Day and asking if Dave could send him some of the shelf Levitra because like the old TV commercial that they used to watch during the Superbowl, he wants to make his passes go longer and straighter. He would start crying, and wonder why he thought leaving the Miami Herald for the Boise Gazette was a good idea...

It's a shame, really. Like most years, he should win the Pulitzer for best description of the Zeitgeist and myraid of rough beasts preparing to assault Jerusalem. He wrote:

"We’re trying to think of something nice to say about 2020.
Okay, here goes: Nobody got killed by the murder hornets. As far as we know.
That’s pretty much it.

"In the past, writing these annual reviews, we have said harsh things about previous years. We owe those years an apology. Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.

"This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper."

So, Zeitgeist nailed. Read on those who can read. If you're Trump, have Eric and Don Jr draw pictures and have Ivanka write some one line explanations. "Remember March Daddeee? It sucked." Something like that.

 

 

Love is a bar band in Boston or Austin

Ok. Crusader AXE here. I guess the incredible, inscrutable, incomparable one either wanted me to occasionally put something here for the erudite masses, or he just forgot he gave me permission many years ago. Regardless, I'm glad he did. He gets a better class of reader here than we do at the Defeatists, most of whom appear to be robots. 

 

Today's topic is love and Valentine's Day. I speak as a bloodied veteran here on several fronts.

So, in the proper spirit of the thing.  Ok. Yesterday was our 36th anniversary. We are very fond of each other and have a reasonably complex financial life that would make disengaging difficult. We don't want to cause the other pain or even inconvenience. I rate this as a successful marriage. We don't hate each other, wish the other grevious harm, and try not to act contrary to our mutual best interests. 

That said, we got married on Friday the 13th. My thought, being a strategic thinker, was that this way I would not forget both Valentine's day or the Anniversary and hopefully, one would key my brain as to the other. Generally has worked...I see the Valentine's bullshit in the stores, and it triggers the response that I need to do something to commemorate the day so as not to violate the "first, do no harm or cause unnecessary pain" part of my ethic. It does not make me happy. This makes me happy... 

I hate Valentine's Day. It is part of the conspiracy of the consumer society that begins in pre-school to make us all ready for a life of disappointment and conspicuous consumption. 

weaponize ebola now

davos provides an excellent argument for getting weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists worldwide, and that will be the first priority of a sartwell administration.

from the la weekly (thanks, adam!)

 

as i've said many times, barack obama is martin luther king...with a world-annihilating nuclear arsenal, predator drones, the greatest miltary the world has ever known, a sprawling prison system, etc.

time once again to smack down judith warner, who obviously has more education than a person with female gonads could normally handle. that education, however, didn't really coax her toward coherence, or succeed in inculcating in her a distinguished prose style. but i cat. truly, i do not understand that piece. it takes this wacky, tiny case from bozeman, montana as a demonstration that people like me, judith warner, are oppressed, in virtue of our privilege and excellence and wealth and stuff. the only other example of the stunning attack on educated women today is the mere existence of sarah palin.

that there's some sheriff out there who is a reverse snob and kind of comes down hard on professors is sort of too bad. but it might occur to you that a far bigger problem is sheriffs who despise poor people, black people, uneducated people - many of whom are women - and treats them more harshly than middle-class white people. now, if you were to produce a statistic that showed that female ph.d.s were disproportionately being arrested or imprisoned, or abused while in custody, that would be interesting. here you just vaguely show that someone somewhere has some kind of class resentment. and you congratulate yourself and your kind on your excellence and merit.

of course, reading judith warner might make you sort of realize how some dude in bozeman might roll his eyes at her ilk. but the strategy is to put her ilk above criticism, an ad hominem defense: criticize me and you show your politically-significant discomfort with the strides that women are making etc. of course, this makes the actual grounds of criticism irrelevant.

i like the last line: "Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place." the use of the second person is odd, because surely "elite" women are more or less the entirety of judith warner's audience. but i guess she means me and this very blog entry! fortunately when i do stuff like that it's explicable, though execrable.

thank god.

Fish pedicures — the use of tiny, live carp to clean feet — have been made available in several Florida cosmetology salons in recent months.
Now, Florida is banning the practice.

how weird is my family? so weird and unique that we listen to u2. so unbelievably idiosyncratic and confident in our amazing bizarreness that our faucet drips. so utterly pathological and beautifully eccentric that we were inspired by the obama inaugural. so unbelievably, insanely normative, so absolutely dead center of yuppie demographics, that we don't actually exist at all, that we are, strictly, redundant.

Nutria should be considered clothing, food source
Nutria fur, teeth hard to find
Nutria and the unforeseen

it's pretty cool that they're bringing back the mammoth. but i'm more interested in cloning historical figures. let's bring back marilyn monroe, jimi hendrix, kurt cobain, so they can kill themselves again. that was so excellent. today's popes are boring. revive alex vi and bring back the chestnut parties. i wonder whether we can find the tomb of alaric the visigoth. i know barack's looking for a secretary of state. come to think of it, hillary will do just fine.

good morning.
check this out, a truly pleasurable piece of writing, in a newspaper!

After the early risers and the guests with children have left, when the party has been whittled down to the philosophers, the poets and the drunkards, I like to turn the lights low and listen to the breathy voice of the first lady of France.

just for the hell of it i will mention that we saw one of the best plays in the history of football last night, when manning avoided four apparent sackers in houdini-like fashion, and heaved the ball toward david tyree, who caught it, miraculously, with one hand and his helmet. it was not only a beautiful play, it won the fucking super bowl.

fuck! it's general butt naked.

be sure to celebrate mlk day with a random act of savage, senseless violence again this year.

Got no dog in this fight but...

Hi, y'all. Crusader AXE here, occasional guest blogger from the Defeatists. I personally have no dog in this hunt, but find it something that Crispin would probably find enragingly amusing. The idea of not swearing in bars is intriguing -- in a lot of places you can't smoke in bars, so not swearing in bars sort of fits in with the puritanical-Mormon-Nanny-State ethos that the country is evolving toward. Next, they will turn off the big screen TVs because sports TV encourages yelling, cheering and betting in bars. Then they will forbid talking to strangers. The sole reason for going to bars will be to drink. Which will then be forbidden by the FDA because alcohol is addictive and a food. (C6-H12-O6). Commerce will be paralyzed and human life will become extinct, although ....Life is already not worth living...

you know if you've never indexed a book, you ought to; it's fun. it's a whole hermeneutic dimension: you develop a reading of the work. (right now workin on against the state for suny. in my new little tiny house in the woods, beeches.) and listening to mad bluegrass (well, right now the kendalls: my baby's gone.) springtime in jan.

i don't know whether you remember the firesign theater, the psychedelic comedy troupe the seventies. my brothers and i used to recite whole sketches to each other. in fact, me and jim were doing that right up to his death last summer. but anyway i want to point out to you that the firesign theater are prophets for our time, and for every time. in 1974 they put out an album (not their best, true) called the tale of the giant rat of sumatra, a sherlock holmes parody. but it turns out that there really are giant rats in sumatra. well at least in papua new guinea. here are the best:

PUEBLO — Three people were arrested on charges of swapping a 5-month-old boy for a downpayment on a used Dodge Intrepid and cash, police said Tuesday.

nothing, nothing compares with a mother's love. except a used disdge intrepid.

man, or nutria?

ok, ok: michael richards called someone a nigger. here's a little huffpost entry about american comedy: its racism, sexism, homphobia etc. let me explain something: almost the only real accomplishment of the american left in curing our prejudices was to effectively ban the expression of certain attitudes and to edit words out of the language. this has the following effect: it gives the expression of these attitudes the zing of violated taboos, and also the ring of truth: they say plainly what no one is supposed to say but people are still thinking. these two things make prejudice the perfect comedy, which is at its essence trangressive truth. cf. borat. if you want to change the comedy or the culture, you're going to have to go counter-inuitive, and let everyone say what they want.

thank god that the mainstream media have finally awakened to the apocalytic threat posed by nutria. the visionary billy tauzin understood this years ago

happy 48th birthday to the lovely yet lovely marion winik.

pretty fucking flat

video: how flat is the world? flat as a pancake. flat as dick cheney's affect. flat as kansas after a tornado. real, real flat. flat as billy joel on a bad night. flat as a sheet of tracing paper. flat as an idea in the mind of thomas friedman. flat as a white person's butt. flat as...oh whatever.

home economics

it's cute to think, as hu meets with bill gates and advertises starbucks, that china and the us have precisely the same economic system. that's cute because one is allegedly based on the principles of marx, the other of adam smith. both are massively regulated entrepreneurial capitalist communism. china probably has a few more of its cf and ceos who are nominally government officials, but that's just a little matter of titles.

please

so seriously, the american left had better hop off the hunting accident. it's bullshit. like bob herbert: cheney needs to resign or whatever. that you go mad at a hunting accident just discredits you when you're opposing torture etc. get me? focus on what is important, eedjits.

hunting bankers

so the question is whether shooting shotgunning your buddy  is as damaging to a political career as being photographed as you are attacked in a canoe by a rabbit.