Sticky eyeballs.
Yeah, I know, I should lay off the AFA; low-hanging fruit, kulturkampf is a rationalization of assholery by other means, ignore the bully, strike them down and they will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. But hey: they want you to write a letter to the FCC, telling them to stop cutting sweetheart deals with CBS, and that’s something we can all get behind, right? Anyway, here’s the pitch:
In November 2004, the FCC cut a backroom deal with CBS and its parent company Viacom.
In summary, Viacom agreed to donate a paltry $3.5 million to the FCC in exchange for dropping thousands of indecency complaints filed against it by taxpaying consumers.
Basically, the FCC cut a deal with CBS. What was the result? CBS immediately went back to their standard fare of lewd and indecency programs.
On December 31, 2004, CBS re-aired an episode of Without A Trace, complete with an extended teen-age orgy scene. The original broadcast of this episode had thousands of FCC complaints against it, which were tossed out in the November FCC/CBS “back-scratching” deal.
Click here to view the abominable Without A Trace scene for yourself! Be warned, it contains offensive and graphic scenes.
Because of these kinds of backdoor deals, the FCC continues to allow networks like CBS to flood the airwaves with indecency.
Do I need to tell you that the emphasis was in the original? —Way to drive the traffic there, Don.
Leather.
Apparently, that’s the traditional type of gift one gets and gives on the third anniversary. (The modern? Crystal, or glass. There’s a moral to be drawn, if you’re so inclined.)
I’ve been at this for three years now, which is roughly a twelfth of my existence, which doesn’t sound too bad, I guess, you put it that way.
Trying to move it all over to another server and use WordPress instead and prevent another round of galloping linkrot and maybe redesign the whole shooting match while I’m at it which means I’m trapped in an another round of why am I doing this again and what is it I’m doing, anyway, and wouldn’t I have more fun if I just committed to the shallow end of the cult stud game instead of trying to come off like a second-rate Rude Poor Man, except then I feel like I haven’t done the reading, which is usually why I fall back on coming off like a second-rate etc., and anyway shouldn’t I be doing more local politics? And culture? I could have sworn there was a resolution around here somewhere to that effect. Oh, and since the day job went back to what passes for normal, I’ve been trying to do more non-whateverthisis writing. Like City of Roses. Good God, has it really been that long?
Which would explain the relative silence hereabouts of late in part, I guess.
(No, it’s not pretty. It never is. Nor does it help to realize Barbellion said pretty much what I’m trying to say 102 years ago, or thereabouts.)
So.
Um.
Oh, head over here for some photos of our cats, and me in my new silly hat; “Hänger Långsamt I Luften,” “Raining Twilight Coast,” “Red Rain,” “Polchasa,” “Ask DNA,” “Caught Making Love,” “Dead,” “Letter to a John,” “Filipino Box Spring Hog,” “Pigeon Toes,” and let’s throw in the Nappy Roots / Mountain Goats mashup, since it’s fun; vote in the Koufax Awards, where I think I’m up for best writing, but also, I got nominated for a Perranoski for design, so vote there, too, I guess, and, um, I’ll be back. Browse the archives, or hit the blogroll, or, hell, you know how this works.
Out of curiosity.
Why am I suddenly overwhelmed (to the tune of over 300 hits before 9 AM Pacific) by requests for the meaning of IOKIYAR?
The Book, the Book, the Book is on fire!
Another week, another email from the American Family Association. Shall we?
In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four Christians are facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment.
Holy cow! Really? That’s awful!
On October 10, 2004, the four Christians were arrested in Philadelphia. They are part of Repent America. Along with founder Michael Marcavage, members of Repent America—with police approval—were preaching near Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages.
When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christians’ movement on the street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians’ messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.
Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and jailed the Christians!
Goodness. As something of a free-speech absolutist, I’m appalled. One thing, though: you say Repent America already “were preaching,” “handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages,” but then, when “they tried to speak”—tell me, why do you separate the acts of preaching and speaking like that? What, exactly, were y’all doing when you “tried to speak”? —Let’s get another point of view, shall we?
The confrontation began when the 11 protestors marched to the front of a stage at Outfest and began to yell out Biblical passages to drown out the events on stage.
Police attempted to get the protestors to move to to an area on the edge of the site. Instead they went deeper into the gay crowd. Using a bullhorn they condemned homosexuality. They then got into an argument with a group of Pink Angels, who screamed back.
It was at that point police intervened arresting the 11.
Oh.
Hey, look, folks, not to jog your elbow or nothin,’ but most definitions of “speak” aren’t so broad as to include “marching to the front of the stage and yelling out antagonistic slogans so as to disrupt what other people have peaceably assembled to do.” That just doesn’t go without saying. So, your email message? About how they’re “facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by the First Amendment”? Not to tell you your commandments or nothin,’ but that’s perilously close to false witness. Y’all might want to reconsider.
After all, yelling “Faggot!” at a crowded gay pride event is one fuck of a lot closer to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater than, oh, sending out a letter urging resistance to an upcoming draft. So that First Amendment? Not as operational as you seem to think, here. —Yes, I know, it’s a terribly grey area, fraught with complications, rife with the potential for abuse; like anyone who lives in a major American metropolitan area, I’ve seen how the cops will use it to shut down legitimate protest. But y’all went in spoiling for a fight, and you got one. You want my sympathy? You gonna have a problem if we bum-rush the megachurch, carrying Darwin fish emblems and yelling through a bullhorn about how the Christianist faith makes mothers cut their babies’ arms off?
Thought so.
Oh, and one more thing: the Bible has been determined to be hate speech? Really? Are you actually trying to tell me that 2,000 years and 66 books and three-quarters of a million words of theology and philosophy and myth and law and story and peace, love, and understanding can in its essence be boiled down to a couple of verses you like to use to hate on people whose sex lives make you feel uncomfortable somewhere deep inside?
Well, hell. Forget it. We don’t need no water; let the motherfucker burn.
Comic-page illustrator?
An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.
—The New York Times Corrections: For the Record, 6 January 2005
(Also, they forgot “vast personal fortune.”)
Pissing in the wind.
This, this is what Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), former exterminator and fine, upstanding Christianist American, your House Majority Leader and mine, had to say about the 150,000 people who died, who have died, who are still dying as a result of the horrible earthquakes and tsunamis that struck on St. Stephen’s Day:
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
And had I believed in God, as such, I would no longer: no word has yet reached Google news of the sudden and spontaneous immolation of Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land). How could any God worthy of the name allow such blasphemy to blot His earth without smiting the squalid little pisher with lightning? Or at least a coronary failure in flagrante? —There’s mysterious ways, and then there’s the only decent thing, and this, this man dares turn his back on love and compassion, decency and tolerance, on all our best qualities, the very things that make us human, that the book he professes to follow would teach him if he’d ever bother to listen—all this he spits on in a public forum before us all to play yet another game of my god is bigger than your god, Allahu Akbar motherfucker? The Old Testament God would at the very least have sent a bear to eat him up for this insult, and even the New Testament Christ at His most peaceful would eyes flashing toss this moneychanger from the temple and hurl stones upon his head.
Nor do I believe in hell, for all that I wish I could, so that I might join right-thinking people everywhere in praying fervently for his damnation to it. We could console ourselves by imagining him in the icy realm of Cocytus, and while away sinfully pleasant hours by disputing whether he might end up gripped in ice, head bent forward or backward, or completely submerged at the center of the Earth itself, awaiting his turn in one of Lucifer’s mouths. —Nor can I play the Devil, and quote Scripture to my purpose: much as I might dream of driving all-out for days from here to Washington, DC, stopping only for gas and the occasional cat nap, that I might stride horns swelling up the steps of the Capitol in my Chuck Taylors, unshaven and wild-eyed, demanding his whereabouts of everyone I met in those polished halls of power until I finally got to beard the pathetic little Texan in his wood-panelled lair and point my finger thusly, bellowing with a preacher’s booming cadences, “Know this, sinner: The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”
But I probably couldn’t make it past the cops, and anyway, that’s Tarantino, not Ezekial.
Not even the cooler æsthetic comfort of poetic justice is available to me: much as I might look forward to the day when his power will be broken, the panoply of his office scattered, his house razed, when his family will deny him bread and salt and PAC money, when the pot he pisses in will be taken from him and he must beg for the very compassion he tried to drive from this land, I can’t begin to believe he will ever come to realize it is all only what he must reap for the filth he has sown and the hurt he has spread. I can’t believe he’ll ever learn a thing. Comprehension is as far from him as compassion, or shame.
GIMEL ZAYIN YUD. This, too, shall pass. Y’all had the slightest inkling of what that really meant, we’d all be much better off. My god is bigger than your god: if that is all the meaning you pathetic little shits can draw from something like this, give me nihilistic despair. Please. It’s far more human.
The enemy is life.
Eisner the cartoonist always left me a little cold: shopworn stories and whiskered gags told in some of the most gorgeously expressive cartooning you’ve ever seen. The ink flowed as naturally as breathing, but I’d look up and shrug. Eh. —I’m smart enough not to write him off as a triumph of technique over substance, but even if I weren’t: my God, what technique. I’ve nattered on about how important Scott McCloud and Understanding Comics are in the scheme of things, for laying the groundwork of a grammar of comics and its study. Will Eisner was one of the first cartoonists to look up and realize what they were messing around with, all that ink and newsprint, those squiggles and balloons, was a language. Comics is a language. That’s huge. So I understand why all the cartoonists around me revere him so.
Eisner the man? I shook his hand. I think. Cons are busy, noisy, overwhelming things, and I’m flighty and absent-minded. Maybe I just said hi. He touched Jenn’s cheek once. Which is more important to me than anything I might have said to him, or he to me. Gosh, Mister Eisner, you’re one of the most important figures ever in comics. Well, thanks, young man. —Tasha Robinson once asked him, “Do you think all of your works address heartbreak on some level?” and he said, “Probably. I’m dealing with the human condition, and I’m dealing with life. For me, the enemy is life, and people’s struggle to prevail is essentially the theme that runs through all my books.”
Will Eisner is in intensive care following open heart surgery on Wednesday afternoon. Quadruple bypass. He didn’t want anyone to know until he came through OK, but all signs are that he is recovering terrifically. He’s already joking with the nurses and “biting his lip” over delayed deadlines. [...]
He’s not supposed to return to work for 6 – 8 weeks (I’m making side bets), so it’d be nice in the interim if the industry deluged him with warm words while he’s recuperating.
He knew what he was on about and he did it with everything he had and on the way he taught tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world how to do what they were doing better, or to do it at all in the first place. He’s left this world a better place for his having been here, and if that doesn’t do much to mitigate the heartbreak of his passing, well, it’s the best any of us can ever hope for. Would that we all could do it half as well as he did. The Spirit is dead; long live the spirit.
The Onion: What is it like seeing the early-1940s Spirit stories back in print again?
Eisner: Well, I love the package. I think the package is marvelous. I try to avoid looking at the artwork because it makes my toes curl. [Laughs.] I want to grab a pencil and redo it. “Oh, my God, did I get away with this junk?”
0wnzorship society.
Hark! That awful, sucking sound… the indescribable shape looming towards us through the gloom… that gagsome stench… What could it be? (Melvin?) —No, it’s the January Surprise: the plans to abolish Social Security, as prophesied, are beginning, slowly, to coalesce...
Social Security Formula Weighed: In informal briefings on Capitol Hill, White House aides have told lawmakers and aides that Bush will propose the change in the benefits formula…. Currently, initial benefits are set by… adjust[ing] those earnings… based on wage growth…. Under the commission plan, the adjustment would be based instead on the rise of consumer prices…. [A] middle-class worker retiring in 2022 would see guaranteed benefits cut by 9.9 percent. By 2042, average monthly benefits for middle- and high-income workers would fall by more than a quarter. A retiree in 2075 would receive 54 percent of the benefit now promised….
Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post on October 20, 2004:
Ads Push the Factual Envelope: John F. Kerry is denouncing deep Social Security cutbacks that President Bush has not proposed…. A Kerry ad, based on a private comment Bush is reported to have made on wanting to privatize Social Security, says: “Now Bush has a plan that cuts Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” But the president, while favoring allowing younger workers to put part of their benefits in private accounts, has never put forth a plan—and has vowed that any change would not affect current retirees…
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit by half. For the funny bit, you have to dig into the numbers a little, and figure out what you ought to be making, what you’ll probably be making if we do nothing, and what you’ll end up making if the Republicans carry the day. Max points out the CBO study which does the math, and you really ought to listen:
In Table 2 of this study, we get estimates of benefits resulting from this approach. Since it’s all about the kids, we should start with the impact on what’s called the “10-year birth cohort starting in year 2000.” Kids born after January 1, 2000. We focus on the middle of the middle, as far as income distribution goes (“median in middle household earnings quintile”).
If Little Nell is this type of person, in retirement she would be due $26,400 a year in benefits annually under current law. This would require some kind of infusion into the Trust Fund after 2052 (when CBO says it runs a shortfall). With no such infusion, alas Little Nell can only be paid $19,900 (everything here is constant 2004 dollars). (The same type of person retiring today—“the 1940 birth cohort”—gets $14,900.)
Let’s chew on that for a second. With no transfer of revenue into the Trust Fund after 2052 (as opposed to redemptions of its assets with general revenue), Little Nell still does quite a bit better than a retiree today.
This is a crisis? Surely we can do better. What about the excellent reform envisioned by G. Bush?
When you include the returns to the individual accounts and “price indexing” of benefits, Little Nell’s benefit is . . . $14,600. SHE DOES WORSE THAN UNDER THE “BANKRUPT” TRUST FUND! Way worse! Can you hear me now? She even does worse than a current retiree.
And Matt’s right: there’s nothing ideological about this, the delusions of Grover Norquist notwithstanding. The financial industry has more money than any one of us does. So we lose. Simple as that. Our future’s been pwned.
The year in review:
This, too, shall pass.
thirteen billion dollars : thirty million dollars :: political capital : ?
The basic moral issue is why a direct political connection (a la the political bonds of Florida to other US taxpayers) creates a strong presumption of massive US government aid. Obviously, there is a political reason for a better response to Florida, since Indonesians won’t be voting for anyone in the next Presidential election, no matter how much aid we send.
But that’s a pretty pathetic moral response—disaster relief as political pork barrel.
Yup.
Mr. Newman cites a New York Times analysis which says, “even Mr. Bush’s critics do not expect spending on that scale for the far greater disaster in South Asia.”
Count me with the chorus that says, on the contrary. Oh, yes. Yes we do, and more, besides.
Actions speak louder than words.
The ultimate argument against privatization.
It’s not the clear and simple proof that Social Security isn’t in anything remotely approaching a crisis; it isn’t the accounting shenanigans that will make us all look back fondly on Enron’s best practices; it isn’t even Daniel Davies’ immortal question, just as important to ask now as it was then:
Can anyone give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.
These are all important arguments to make, and we should go on making them, as often and forcefully as we can, but much as with the war on Iraq, we’re rapidly approaching a world in which there are two kinds of people: those who know this to be true, and those who know, but choose to believe otherwise.
No, the ultimate argument against mandatory private retirement accounts is this: do you have any idea how much more junk mail you’ll be getting? From multinational financial corporations and fly-by-night penny-stock–pimping quasi-firms? Lurid brochures and badly written come-ons, envelopes tricked up to look like overnight deliveries with that stupid handwriting font misspelling your name in the corner, Kipp, I thought you would appreciate a look at this, Mr. J.K. Manly, you could be making thirteen percent, Ms. Beezel Lee, have you thought about your retirement account? Dire red-inked envelopes with bold block letters RE: YOUR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS IMPORTANT OPEN IMMEDIATELY, anonymous cheap white envelopes hoping to sneak past your first brute-force Bayesian filter, your own goddamn bank shoving ten-page slick-papered prospectuses financed by your ATM fees through your mail slot every week or so, just because they can.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest a best-case scenario would merely be an increase by an order of magnitude or so in pieces of mail delivered. Do we really want this brave new world?
What goes through your mind.
1. First, establish your bona fides.
I’ve shot guns. I’ve enjoyed shooting guns. Had a pump-action BB gun when I was a kid: twelve progressively stiffer pumps with the plastic stock that levered in and out under the cold metal barrel and you were ready to go. Coke cans stacked in rough pyramids in the chicken barn would tremble at my approach, let me tell you. —It wasn’t till I got to 4-H camp and had a chance to shoot some bolt-action .22s that I figured out I was shooting weird: I’m right-handed, but left-eyed, so I set the butt against my left shoulder, peered through the sight with my left eye, wrapped my left finger around the trigger—and had to awkwardly reach over and across with my right hand to work the bolt to eject the old cartridge and load a fresh bullet. (They didn’t have a left-handed bolt-action .22, and anyway, I wasn’t really left-handed.)
2. But.
HOME DEFENSE
(Three gun match)
Scenario—About 10:30PM you are dressing in your bedroom just after stepping from the shower. Suddenly you hear your daughter scream from the direction of the living room. You grab your home defense weapon and head in that direction. As you come on the scene you see your daughter on the floor, a stranger on top of her, knife to her throat and tearing at her clothes. Proceed as necessary.
Procedure—Start with back to wall three feet from corner with weapon in hand. At signal jump to corner, engage your daughter’s attacker, then accomplice who’s [sic] in foyer. Hit plate to stop clock. Run twice each with pistol, shotgun, rifle. Eighteen rounds minimum. Roll dice to determine which order you will use the three weapons.
Paladin Score—Combine all six times for score. Five second penalty for hits on daughter. Five second penalty for not attempting to use cover.
We have some gun magazines in the house; useful for photo-reference and technobabble. The little ditty above is a sidebar exercise from the “Tactics” column in the March 2000 number of Combat Handguns. One Rick Miller. Here’s a full column that he wrote. “When I am not at home, my wife has standing instructions to stay in the bedroom in the event of an intruder.” —Can I just say that me an’ the Spouse have not devised a game plan to cover an intruder in the house? Have not even given it a moment’s thought? Beyond the usual what was that noise oh it was the cat?
There’s a third-page vertical ad next to the “Home Defense (Three gun match)” sidebar exercise. It’s for the Quik2see magazine-mounted flashlight system, and it’s got a picture of a grimly determined man holding a Quik2see-equipped handgun in a nice-enough cup-and-saucer, while a woman cligs to him, fearful, behind and a little to one side. From the lighting and the placement of the night-table lamp, it’s evident they’ve just sat bolt upright in bed. What was that noise?
Ideally, everyone should congregate in the master bedroom or other safe place, where the defense weapon is stored. If that is not possible, the children should be instructed ahead of time to lock themselves in their bedrooms in case of emergency, while you sort the situation out, and your spouse calls the police.
(Oh, to be sure: you could find similarly unselfconscious descents into ghastly self-parody inside of five minutes with any particular magazine from the other side, wherever you might locate that other side to be; that’s not the point. What else are bad writers and advertisements for? —I’m still trying to get past the five second penalty you take if you hit your hypothetical daughter with a hypothetical hunk of metal a notch under a centimeter across traveling at about 350 hypothetical meters per second.)
3. Bona fide.
Our second German shepherd was named Duchess. (Full American Kennel Club name: Duchess Eilonwy. Our first was Indigo. Our third? Schtanzi, after Mozart’s wife.) She had a bad habit of catching bees in her mouth, and once she teamed up with a neighbor’s dog and ran down all but one of our geese, which was a bad, bad thing, but me and my sister and brother hated the geese, so we didn’t mind so much. We always had the plan of paying a stud for a litter of German shepherds at some point, so she was never fixed, and when she was in heat stray boys and otherwise respectable male workin’ dogs would slip the leash and be seen loping through the garden, sniffing up the front porch. “Scare ’em off,” Dad would say. He’d hand me the BB gun. “I’m serious.”
I came home from school one day to find Duchess standing hindquarters-to-hindquarters with a liver-colored stray. She was whining and pulling against him and he, the poor dumb sonofabitch, was pulling against her, and neither of them was going anywhere but in circles in the driveway. I yelled, I waved my hands, I threw gravel. I kicked him. I kicked a goddamn dog. I had no idea what copulatory lock was. All I knew was he was hurting Duchess and I wanted him to stop.
Five minutes later, maybe ten, he fell out of her with an anticlimactic plop and headed for the woods, his tail between his legs, his head down. We let Duchess into the house and made much fuss over her. There were no puppies. —Six months or so passed, and here came the liver-colored stray again, sniffing at the front porch, skulking about the garden. I went out and yelled at him. Waved my hands. “Go on! Get out! Get the hell out! Don’t come back!” Threw a rock. He scooted away, slowed down, circling, started edging back. Guilty look on his face: dude, I know, it’s wrong, but come on, cut a fella some slack?
I went and got the BB gun.
The first shot caught him by surprise. He yelped and spooked. I’d aimed at his backside and stung him, and as he started to trot down the driveway I went walking after him, pumping up the gun, and stung him again. And again. And again.
Our driveway was a little over a mile long.
Just past the second cattle grate he lay down in the ditch and I stood over him, crying, and shot him over and over again, watching the little welts appear on his belly, his haunches. His flopped-over ear was swollen. I’d hit it without realizing on the way down. “Get out!” I was yelling. “Get the hell out of here! Leave us alone!” Could I hit his tail? Yes, yes I could. He wasn’t even looking at me, wasn’t looking at anything at all. Just lay there in the ditch, in the dust, shivering.
I stopped before I ran out of BBs.
“Get out!” I said, and I turned and ran back to the house.
We never saw him again. There wasn’t any blood in the ditch when we went to school the next morning; then, there hadn’t been much blood at all in the first place. I didn’t shoot the BB gun much after that. We lived right on the Ohio River, across from an Indiana state park, and every autumn weekend you could hear the rifles popping like occasional firecrackers.
4. Balletic.
“What a wonder is a gun,” sings Charlie Guiteau. “What a versatile invention! First of all, if you’ve a gun—”
Click-chack.
“—everybody pays attention!”
5. And then.
“Why do I recommend two pistols in the night stand?” says our friend Rick Miller.
It is simple. If you must search the house, the second weapon is for your spouse to use. If you confront the intruder and you lose, the rest of the family won’t be defenseless. It is a good idea to make the second gun of similar type and caliber to the first, to avoid confusion in time of stress.
I haven’t shot a gun since I was, what, fourteen? I’ve held a pistol since then, and it’s true, what they tell you: it’s colder and a lot heavier than you expect. I have no intention of ever buying a gun, or of ever having one in the house. One of these days, though, I probably will make it out to a shooting range. Just to see.
Every gun nut I’ve ever known, which, granted, isn’t many, has every one of them been a nut about safety and maintenance. Not a one of them ever had a home invasion drill, that I know of. Or standing orders for their spouses in the event of a bump in the night. None of them had guns in order to feel safer.
A week ago, maybe fifteen minutes after I got off the bus, Michael Egan got up from where he’d been sitting on the sidewalk and went up to Vincent Stemle as he was getting off a bus. They got into an argument about something. Prescription pills, somebody said. Spaynging, somebody else said, but that was on Fox, and who believes them? —Egan started slapping Stemle. Knocked his hat off. His glasses. Stemle pulled a .357 and shot Egan three times, then turned and ran.
Did he say go away? Get out of here? Leave me alone?
“He almost thought everybody had something out for him,” [Willie] Spakes said.
An ill wind.
Apparently, I must say something, anything, about a hideous and unthinkable disaster, whose awe-striking natural terror (islands shoved to one side or the other, the planet left thrumming in its orbit) is not matched, no, but certainly compounded by a willful blindness and stupidity that is as criminal as it is all too human—I, me, this guy over here with a weblog on the sinister side of the Islets of Bloggerhans, I have to say something cogent, something approved, or every blue-state blog will stand condemend with the entire Left for just not caring enough.
All right, then:
Actions speak louder than words.
A cheap monkeywrench is thrill enough.
At some point or another I got put on the American Family Association mailing list, which makes for a sour splotch in my inbox every week or so. But here at the arse-end of the year, the Rev. Wildmon is making another touchingly naïve attempt to harness the power of the web. He wants us all to advise the President as to what sort of judges he ought to appoint to the federal courts. If one were to click here, one could send an email which says roughly,
I feel a Federal judge should seek the original intent of the Constitution, and make his or her rulings based on the original intent. Please nominate individuals who have this concept toward the Constitution.
Whereas, if one were to click here, one could send an email which says something rather like,
I feel a Federal judge should have a “progressive mind” and make laws he or she feels are needed regardless of the Constitutional intent. I think the Constitution is a “living” document and must be interpreted by Federal judges willing to make needed laws that Congress refuses to make.
And if one were to click here, one would see the total number of each email sent to date. —At the moment, it stands at 16,380 fans of “original intent,” as opposed to 288 progressive minds.
Let’s do something about that, shall we?
This ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated—
—broke asunder and fell from her hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog’s feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness.
With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard’s knees, dragging her to the brink. She staggered, and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. “Fly, you fools!” she cried, and was gone.
And just what the hell is up with all that coal in Newcastle, huh?
So I’ve got a minute (a single, precious, golden minute) while I’m waiting for a database to rebuild its sorry ass, and what do I do with it? I go check out the Ain’t it Cool report on last night’s Serenity screening, that’s what I do. —Spoiler free, y’all. Almost entirely. Anyway. What else did I do? I scrolled the messages posted at the bottom (since rebuilding its sorry ass takes more than a single, precious, golden minute: I also calculated next week’s production, figured out some staffing issues, and pulled an executive decision about a document type from thin air), that’s what I did, and buried in the shitstorm, I stumbled over this gem of a plaintive cry for help:
Fucking sci-fi fanboy shit. That’s all this site cares about anymore.
Too true! Too true!
