Power to the people! Teeth for shrimp! Plato was a fascist!
Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber brought up Harry Perkins, the fictional prime minister from A Very British Coup, in the course of a post that seems cheekily to suggest we Yanks are a bit more starry-eyed and less cynical than Brits when it comes to pop culture representations of our respective Fearless Leaders. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind. Do remember that the monolithic Left controls the entertainment industry in both realms.) Coup is a hardnosed political thriller, but it’s leftist, socialist, old skool Labour politics, and that makes all the difference. A great little fairy tale; highly recommended when you want a little dose of mightabeen. (I’ve only ever seen it up at Skook’s place, where I imagine it’s still a rainy-day security blanket..?)
Being reminded of Harry Perkins reminded me in turn of J Daniels’ bootleg Tintin comic, Breaking Free, in which the boy reporter, on the dole after being sacked from a dodgy construction job, joins up with the Captain and just about every worker in Britain in a popular uprising, peacefully overthrowing the corporatist state in favor of a happy anarcho-socialist people-powered muddle. It’s heartbreakingly hopeful and hoplessly naïve; another fairy tale that I adore. You can buy it, of course, but while trying to scare up the links I discovered it’s also available online. Enjoy.
Your assignment.
Nathan Newman’s “where I am and how I came to be here” post is the must-read of the day.
Other than that, I suppose, you could kick superheroes around over at Barry’s place. —Me, I’ll be back in a bit.
Oh, wait, just one more.
Early November we got back the blague.
As a religious practice, blogging acquired the same status as begging. Many theories have been offered to explain the phenomenon. It has been interpreted as a beating out of evil spirits, as beautification, and even—erroneously—as buffoonery. Sacred blogs were recorded on people’s backs or on animal skins. Blog-bearers were now called bloggellants. Consumption of animal blogs was thought to unite the devot with his godhead. The ceremony was often accompanied by ecstatic blog revisions and, not infrequently, by falling to bloggerheads. Arguments over blog exegesis were the major cause of schism.
In antiquity and among primitive peoples, ceremonial bloggings were primarily concerned with the writs of initiation, purification and fertility. Bloggings might or might not be self-inflicted. Those administered by masked inbloggators are a feature of many Nordic tribloggers. Ritual blogging was also known in classical antiquity in Blogygia and around the Straits of Blogforus. A sacred alphabet, Blogham, composed of 21 characters (blogletters) equally dates to that period. There are many myths, or bloths, related to blogging. One of them tells of Blog, the king of Blashan and an antediluvian giant, who was saved from the flood by his illiteracy: he floated on a blog with sacred inscriptions which otherwise he would not have touched. Another legend reports that Blog owned a big blogstead, wrought in iron, 9 cubits oblong and 4 cubits broad (Deut. 3:11). It will be noted that the Biblical account of Blog and Mablog is a corruption of the original tale.
—“On Blogging,” by Ela Kotkowska, via wood s lot
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I’ve never been a big fan of the process known as “Fisking”; it’s a lazy and intellectually dishonest practice, and I refuse to accord it any legitimacy by lowercasing the “f,” as if it had somehow achieved common currency in our day-to-day language. (A quixotic, canutian gesture, to be sure; then, I do so love stubborn futility, except when I don’t.) And really, if we were to be honest with ourselves, go back to Fisk’s original, celebrated, storied report, and read what actually happened—
Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan. Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands—perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush—and uttered a lot of Salaam Aleikums. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank.
Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back. How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all “salaam aleikum” a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low.
Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on,” he shouted. I did. That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me.
—we’d have to agree: a process that fancies itself “logical” (or at least aiming to be; an “E” for effort, then?) doesn’t quite resonate with the all-too-human fury and outrage that lashed out at Robert Fisk, a pale mean substitute for the retribution it sought (yes, yes: how to find a mob’s IQ, none of us is as dumb as all of us, we’re better than that, honest—which is why we band together and jackboot anyone who dares suggest otherwise). —An individual administering “a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words” by “quot[ing] the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text”—that hardly rises to the rich metaphorical possibilities of chucked rocks and anonymous mob violence. (To say nothing of imposing a regrettably partisan spin on the procedure: can we on the monolithic Left not Fisk? Such a shame…)
No: it’s what’s being done to Nathan Newman and Kathryn Cramer that richly deserves the term “Fisking.”
(Meanwhile, that rough beast just keeps slouching: the American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps opened fire on American troops; our Marines are being airlifted out by Blackwater “civilians”; it’s increasingly obvious that the folks nominally running the show have “no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work”; and our President is as chipperly clueless as ever. “I mean, in other words, it’s one thing to decide to transfer,” he said. “We’re now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty.” —I suppose that’s one way to spin a civil war…)
Oh, that wacky Shadout Mapes!
A few changes, here and there, to this blog-like apparatus: most notably, I’d like to direct your attention to the little Danegelt box there in the right sidebar (down a bit, past Achivery, past the Deltolographs, just above Permanescence, which you’ll find refreshed with links to pre- and non-blog content: Herschberg [now with discussion forum, oh my], that thing I wrote about Buffy, my second 24-hour comic [be gentle], and the somewhat-less-hiatused-than-last-week City of Roses). Recent linkage has bumped my traffic something fierce; I actually had to buy extra bandwidth last month. Not that I’m complaining much. Or making an overt plea. But: if you were so inclined, there’s a couple of tip jars on the edge of the pier, there: PayPal will let you slip some virtual folding green in (if not make an easy text-based permalink in the course of a blog post); BitPass will let you chuck in a nickel—heck, a penny, if that’s what you feel like. (It’ll also take nothing at all, yes. —It’s a micropayment system, if you missed the brouhaha: you have to put a minimum of I think it’s five bucks in, but you can spend that in nickels and dimes and quarters on mp3s and comics and prose and toys and tipping the occasional weblogger, wherever you see the BitPass sign.) —There’s also a link to the requisite Amazon Wish List, which is more so friends and family can find it easily than anything else, but hey: bait never laid traps no bears.
Other than that: an updated colophon, to reflect the broad array of syndication possibilities available (two flavors of RSS and Atom, whoo!) whose nuances I still haven’t a clue as to; also, I finally remembered to add a link to Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility, which is a good starting point for making your site better than it is if you haven’t yet. And I remembered to close some image tags and line breaks; the sort of stuff that you can’t see at all, but makes validators clutch their pearls and shriek instead of just tutting darkly over the same phrase being used as link text for more than one location. —But hey, it took up most of yesterday morning, so I figured, what the heck. Make a note. (I couldn’t mow! I’ve got a busted elbow!)
Altogether elsewhere.
No, I haven’t said much about same-sex marriage of late. (No staying power, that’s me.) (If you’re curious about the progress of the only place in America where same-sex couple are accorded the same basic respect in the eyes of the law as differently-sexed couples, your best bet is the One True b!X; he is, quite literally, a one-man newsroom.) —I’ve also been remiss in not immediately telling you that my old friend S.K. Elkins has started up a journal; nor have I managed to sit down and patiently make the case that proves Elkins is hands-down bar-none the best writer I know, full stop. But hey: it’s my lucky day: today’s entry lets me pluck all those pesky birds from the bush at once and offer them up to you.
Perspective.
Muqtada’s words before he went into retreat in his mosque: “Make your enemy afraid, for it is impossible to remain quiet about their moral offenses; otherwise we have arrived at consequences that will not be praiseworthy. I am with you, and shall not forsake you to face hardships alone. I fear for you, for no benefit will come from demonstrations. Your enemy loves terrorism, and despises peoples, and all Arabs, and muzzles opinions. I beg you not to resort to demonstrations, for they have become nothing but burned paper. It is necessary to resort to other measures, which you take in your own provinces. As for me, I am with you, and I hope I will be able to join you and then we shall ascend into exalted heavens. I will go into an inviolable retreat in Kufa. Help me by whatever you are pleased to do in your provinces.”
The bit about going into a retreat (i`tis.am) and hoping to join his followers later so that they could ascend to the heavens shows an apocalyptic imagination at work. The US is facing another Waco, and what we know is that military sorts of force are the worst way to deal with apocalyptic groups like the Branch Dravidians and the Sadrists. That approach only confirms their conviction that the forces of this world are attempting to prevent them from attaining paradise.
US authorities in Iraq announced Monday that a murder warrant was out for a radical Shi’ite Muslim cleric leading violent anti-American protests, but his followers swore to fight back if he was arrested.
Dan Senor, a senior spokesman for the US-led authorities in Iraq, said an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr several months ago in connection with the killing of another Shi’ite cleric last year.
Sadr, surrounded by armed followers, is staging a sit-in at a mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. Asked when he would be arrested, Senor said: “There will be no advance warning.”
No, the Islets of Bloggerhans Popular Front!
Personally, I think it’s all because Kos got his photo in Vanity Fair and Instapundit didn’t.
(Yes, the title’s an inside joke so tightly curled on itself that it pops Planck’s length, and weird sniglets of not-quite-meaning are left to straggle out of its quantum foam. Consider it the short form. I’m working on the long form. Here’s the medium, happy or not: when I launched myself into the blogosphere, I had a basic ground rule for adding links to my linchinography: if the site spent what I judged by my all-too-subjective criteria to be an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens for the 2000 debacle, I didn’t bother to add it. Say whatever you like, I didn’t need the grief, and so. —Which is why I never added the Horse, and why I never added Altercation, and why I never added Kos, and if I added a site or two or three that did spend an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens, well, there were probably extenuating circumstances, and would you look at that? I contain multitudes! —But this crap with overreacting to Kos’s reaction to the lynching of the mercenaries in Fallujah is just that: crap. He has very good and very strong reasons for feeling the way he does and you can say how he said it that one time was dumb or stupid if you like but pulling ads and yanking links and generally tutting about, fanning yourself over the faux outrage of it all because if we stoop to their level what makes us better than them, my God, is all just following the script, doing their work for them, biting a good man on the ankles and cutting a powerful posse off at the pass because, oh dear, there’s a little clay between the toes. If you’re going to cut and run over something like this, then fuck the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff: this is still the goddamn bush leagues. You know?
(So into the linchinography with the Daily Kos, an excellent site, community, resource that I’ve skimmed on a nearly daily basis for lo these many months, even if I never got over myself enough to reflect it hereabouts. —Like you care. Like he’ll even notice. Still. Sometimes the choir’s got to preach back. It’s not much, granted; then, I don’t have a radio station that can air wall-to-wall clips of Bill Kristol accusing the 9/11 widows of moral blackmail, and I don’t have a TV show that can rerun every sneering Fox report that compared our soldiers’ deaths with traffic accidents and murder rates in Washington, DC; I don’t even have tens of thousands of readers. [Not hardly.] But a link is pretty much the least I can do. The most, that I’m still working on. You got any ideas, hey.)
—One more thing: if you’re still all het up to get incensed at the deaths of four mercenaries and how dare anyone be angry at them, I suggest you get a new set of scales. Tens of thousands dead since 1991 that didn’t have to die, and where the fuck were you?
©
J. Pinkham, Kevin Moore’s new co-blogger over at blargblog, asked Pizzicato Pizza about acquiring one of their advertising posters. The response he got opens up a brand new frontier in our understanding of the nuances of copyright.
April punk’d.
“Oh, geeze,” says a friend of mine, who actually works in the industry, when I told him about the whole Tony Millionaire thing. “I just figured he was posting drunk again.”
You know, if Dirk Deppey were still kicking it, none of this would ever have gone as far as it did.
Oh, but that’s no excuse. I posted the link, and the write-up; I kicked it up to Atrios, who bit; and even though I admitted I was unsure of the whole shebang, I stacked the deck with I’d thought was a reasonably coherent translation of what it was Millionaire was reporting, but in retrospect, looks a little too much like me, who worked as a managing editor for a tiny little alternarag for a bit, imposing my own sense of what must have happened to make some sense out of what it was Millionaire was reporting. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why it’s probably a good idea I stay away from your more journalistic endeavors: I’m all too willing to carry water for whatever my immediate take on the story is (must be), skipping blithely down the paving stones of my own damned good intentions.
1995: Acting on a tip from Oklahomans for Children and Families, undercover police officers purchase adult comics from the box Planet Comics kept behind the front counter, where kids couldn’t see them. Then the shop was raided. The shop’s owners, Michael Kennedy and John Hunter, were charged with four felonies and four misdemeanors for selling adult comics to adults. The shop was evicted and had to relocate. Sales plummeted. Cops raided Hunter’s home and confiscated his computer. Somebody heaved a brick through the store’s window one night. A divorce was filed. Hunter and Kennedy plead guilty to reduced charges, got three-year deferred sentences and fines of $1,500 each. Bob Anderson, the president of Oklahomans for Children and Families, said his group was opposed to censorship, but “There is also material that is not illegal which is not suitable for children under [Oklahoma’s] harmful-to-minors law. And who buys comic books but younger children?”
(Then Oklahomans for Children and Families went after The Tin Drum. The ACLU shut them down, hard. They don’t even have a website anymore.)
“Attorney General Hardy Meyers’ office.”
“Um, hi. I’m trying to look into claims that—well, there’s a letter that apparently was written by Attorney General John Ashcroft directing state attorneys general to aid him in cleaning up comic strips? And I’m trying to find out if this letter was really written?”
“Goodness. It sounds like you need Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection. Hold on a moment.”
“Financial fraud—?”
“Hi, this is Kevin. I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number…”
I suppose the clues are there if you want to look for them. “I’m growing it for the ‘April Fools,’ says Uncle Gabby, after all. And even if Millionaire backed off from the absurd claim that the FCC made him do it, his story’s still incoherent at best. The way it’s written, it sounds almost as if the three editors who requested the change in wording did so under specific instructions from their attorney(s) general: as if these public servants were poring over pre-release copies of Maakies and Dwarf Attack to determine if younger readers might be harmed by anything these pen-and-ink contraptions might say, before publication. This is absurd, of course. —But if it is all a joke, why would Millionaire take it so far? Posting thick chunks of Ed Meese’s famous Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography report? Going on the record with The Pulse? —Verisimilitude, of course. What’s the use of a prankish publicity stunt if you cave on the first salvo? And he’s been notably reticent about letting slip any actual facts that might back up what he’s saying: “I find it interesting that fuck you,” he says. “Are you the prosecuting attorney or my mother? Because if you’re my mother I guess I’ll have to answer you,” he says. — So what? Why does he have to answer every single one of our questions about this? Why can’t he be a grouch? Maybe it’s irresponsible and maybe it’s even dumb, but it’s hardly proof that he’s lying. Maybe he’s posting drunk, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a kernel of truth in all this. Maybe he got his facts out of order. Maybe the editor(s) in question lied to him. Only one is claiming it came from their attorney general somehow, after all, and maybe they’re getting their facts wrong, and there was never a letter from Ashcroft at all. Wouldn’t be the first time some cowboy went after the funnybooks for perfectly stupid reasons. —But cowboys want noise, bright lights, big rooms full of an adoring public grimly celebrating another hard-fought kulturkrieg. You don’t get noise and lights and big rooms with a quiet request to back down to “vagina” from “cunt.” Doesn’t make for good headlines. You know?
1994: Michael Diana used to do an underground comic called Boiled Angel. In 1990, someone rather brutally killed five women in Gainesville, Florida, on and around the University of Florida campus. Solely on the basis of the story and art in Boiled Angel no. 6, investigators decided Diana was a plausible suspect. The cops later picked up the real murderer when he tried to rob a Winn Dixie. —In 1993, a state attorney going through the old case files stumbled over more issues of Boiled Angel and decided Diana’s stuff was obscene; Diana had to be stopped. A jury determined that Boiled Angel had no literary or artistic merit. The terms of Diana’s three-year probation allowed his house to be searched at any time without warning or warrant for evidence that he either possessed or was creating obscene material. Psychological testing was mandated. He paid a fine of $3,000. And he was allowed no contact at all with anyone under the age of 18. (A prohibition against his drawing anything at all was later dropped.)
“Hi, this is Kevin. I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Um, hi. This is Kip Manley again. I left you some voicemail yesterday? I’m just trying to confirm this, uh, this claim that there might be a letter, from Attorney General John Ashcroft, directing states to look into, um, cleaning up or even, I guess, censoring comic strips in newspapers. This cartoonist says his editor told him he was told by somebody that this was the case, and, um. Anyway. You can reach me at my work number, during the day, or at home, in the evenings. Um. Thanks.”
Reaction was swift (and furious): there was the Fuck Asscroft brigade, of course, and the Comics Journal thread was locked down after an avalanche of what can best be described as juvenalia. Comixpedia assured webcartoonists everywhere that the FCC had no power to regulate content on the internet, and thank God for that. Scott Kurtz did some homework, and ended up throwing up his hands. —But running through a lot of it was a contrapuntal strain: gee, I dunno, I mean, I hate Ashcroft as much as the next person, but that word, y’know, “cunt,” in a comic strip? I can’t believe anybody would try to get away with it in the first place. I mean, what about the children?
Keeping in mind that Maakies appears in the sort of alternaweekly newspapers that run features on trends in group sex at local swingers’ clubs. Where on earth do these “children” come into this?
1999: Jesus Castillo sells a copy of Demon Beast Invasion to an undercover cop in Dallas, Texas. He is, of course, convicted on obscenity charges. —Leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not the CBLDF was rather staggeringly incompetent in their defense of Castillo, and leave aside for the moment whether or not the comic in question is or is not obscene, misogynistic crap, and leave aside for the moment whether or not it was the height of folly for Susan Napier to defend Demon Beast Invasion as filled with symbolism and political themes—literary and artistic merit that justified its pornographic excess. After all, the prosecution did:
I don’t care what kind of testimony is out there. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids.
What kids? Where?
Looks like somebody didn’t get the memo.
“Mercury.”
“Um, hi. Who’s your comics editor?”
“Our art director is Jen Davison.”
“So she’s responsible for the content of your comics?”
“Yeah. Well, she picks them out.”
“Is she available?”
“She’s on vacation.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks.”
Oh, hey, check it out! Tony Millionaire put the word “boner” in Maakies and 23 newspapers dropped him!
—He said, on April Fool’s. Oh, and he said some more, too:
posted April 01, 2004 08:41 PM
I only wish it was a good joke…
but I got a lot of mileage out of it. two weeks and a hundred bloggers.
blog…..
....sounds like a turd coming out of an ass….
Ha ha. Oh, that Tony Millionaire. Posting drunk. —And was this spectacularly stupid, then, and grossly irresponsible? I dunno. How many more people were prompted to look at Maakies again, or for the first time? How many more Uncle Gabby statues did he sell? How much respect did he lose? (How much did he have in the first place?) Does he owe anything, anything at all, to the larger idea of comics as a struggling medium? Should he go around insulting the legacies of Michael Kennedy and John Hunter, Mike Diana and Jesus Castillo like that? —Sorry. Tried to keep a straight face. Look. It’s not like I’m going to revile the name of Tony Millionaire now. It’s not like I’m going to throw the paper across the room rather than read Maakies ever again. It’s a great strip and he’s a great cartoonist and that’s all I want or expect from him, you know? It’s not like one false cry of wolf! is going to make us all pack up our gear and leave the kultur undefended: there’s plenty of wolves out there yet, and there are plenty of crusaders out there. This is comics we’re talking about, after all.
But, man, Tony. I woulda stuck with “cunt.” Short, pithy Anglo-Saxonisms are always funnier.
PS— Confidential to Michele: Calvin Klein boxer briefs, actually, which don’t tend to wad up in a bunch. But thanks for the concern—and the traffic.
PPS— Oh, hey, I finally heard back just now from Kevin at Financial Fraud and Consumer Protection. “I haven’t turned up a thing,” he says. “But let me tell you: we’ve gotten weirder things from the Department of Justice.”
“Yeah,” says I, “I just found out for sure it was a prank myself. But it sure sounded plausible.”
“Oh,” he says. “It sounds very plausible.”
Facetiæ under contract of the King.
It’s National F-Word Day! So take one fuckin’ moment to send a fuckin’ memo to FCC Chairman Michael fuckin’ Powell and tell him to fuck off and stop fucking us over by clearly departing from past fuckin’ precedent in important fuckin’ ways. —Mercy!
(Yeah, I know. Late to the party. Fuck.)
Especially since the FCC wants broadcasters to implement a set of voluntary guidelines to define and police indecency. Well, hell, there’s plenty precedent for that.
Fuckin’ idiots.
If, if they take his stapler, he will, he will set this building on fire.
INT. CLARKE’S APARTMENT—NIGHT
CLARKE is sitting glumly on his couch, watching CNN. Suddenly a voice, that of former president BILL CLINTON, booms through the wall.
CLINTON (offscreen): Hey, check it out, Clarke, man, Juliet Huddy’s on “Fox and Friends” and she’s got her high-beams on, man!
CLARKE: (rolls his eyes) Bill, I already told you, if you want to talk, just come over!
CLINTON (offscreen): Oh! Sorry, man!
Within seconds, CLARKE’s front door opens and in walks CLINTON, who takes a seat on the couch next to CLARKE.
CLINTON: What’s wrong, Clarke, man?
CLARKE: Bill, when you were on Capitol Hill, trying to drum up support for a bill or something like that, and you weren’t making a lot of progress, did anyone ever tell you it looked like you had a case of the Mondays?
CLINTON: A case of the Mondays? Hell no, man. Hell no. Matter of fact, I think I’d kick somebody’s ass for saying something like that, man.
CLARKE: Now let me ask you this—what would you do if you had a billion dollars?
CLINTON: A billion dollars? Tell you what I’d do, man—two interns at the same time.
CLARKE: That’s it? Two interns at the same time?
CLINTON: Yeah. Man, I’d hire Pamela Anderson for one of them and Carmen Electra for the other. Always wanted to do that, man. And I figure if I had a billion dollars I could hook that up, ’cause chicks dig a dude with money.
CLARKE: Well, not all chicks, Bill.
CLINTON: Well, the kinda chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
CLARKE: Good point.
CLINTON: What about you, man?
CLARKE: Besides two interns at the same time? I would do nothing.
CLINTON: Nothing?
CLARKE: Yeah. I’d just sit on my ass all day and do nothing.
CLINTON: Well, hell, man, you don’t need a billion dollars to do that. Look at Jeb Bush, his state’s broke, he don’t do shit.
Oval Office Space. Damn, I’m still giggling. (Via My Whim Is Law.)
The pros from Dover.
Bob Somerby is as ever on the case, and Lord knows the media is providing him with every reason in the world to howl, and Atrios is all over Jack Kelley and the festering illness of which he’s merely a symptom, but it’s the pseudonymously lower-case skimble with the perfect parable to put the journalistic integrity of today’s fourth estate into proper perspective:
Sometimes it’s not an ethics dilemma, just dumb stuff, that tarnishes credibility. MSNBC got gigged last week when Deborah Norville reported a federal study that supposedly said 58 percent of all exercise done in the United States occurs in those TV infomercials for body-sculpting workout machines.
But the story was a spoof from The Onion, a satirical newspaper and online publication. The network said it inadvertently dropped the attribution in picking up the story, but c’mon—most of the exercise done in America is on TV? Shouldn’t somebody in the control room have said, “Hey, wait just a minute …”
Oh, pshaw. Why start now?
We are all oblique leftists now.
Belle Waring reminds me (well, all of us, really, I suppose) that the Onion’s underrated AV Club did an interview with Dave Sim on the occasion of getting to 300. Here’s the story behind the interview: what Tasha Robinson had to go through to talk to the man from Kitchener. —Ooh! Here’s more behind-the-scenes Simmery, including a (partial) transcript of the Onion’s recent appearance on The Cerebus TV Show.
Toast.
So my father. He’s very proud of his long-standing membership in the fraternity of Gamma Damma Iota (“The goddamn independents!” he bellows), but he’s also terribly rocky of rib; as an entrepreneur and a Southerner, this is, perhaps, not unexpected. He’s got a strong thick streak of leave-me-the-hell-alone, but looks to his bottom line first (only sensible; that’s where the government’s most likely to hit him, after all), and so he’s voted for an overwhelming assortment of Rs in his day: Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Dole, Bush, as a few for instances.
Anyway. Called the folks yesterday to let them know I’d broken my first bone in about 20 years. My father was pounding away in the background, putting the finishing touches on a pressed-tin ceiling for the downstairs den: they’d bought the tin from a shop in Nevada, apparently, that had stopped making pressed tin tiles back in the 1930s, and only recently started up again, blowing the dust off the 70-year-old molds and picking up pretty much where they left off. He came to the phone and teased me about breaking my elbow and we half-joked about suing the city and then he said, “You know, I really don’t know what I’m going to do in November.” Bush stubbed his toe on the economy, you see, and Bush stubbed his toe in Iraq—Dad doesn’t know whether they’re liars or woefully stupid (me, I say both, but he’s pretty much in the “they wanted a little too hard to do what they thought was the right thing” camp), but whichever—Bush isn’t making him very happy at the moment.
“I’m starting to think,” he said, “that maybe the best thing is a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Just tie the whole country up for a few years so nothing gets done and we have a chance to sort it all out.”
And hey: who am I to disagree with my father?
Eating crosswalk.
I have quite possibly fractured my right radius (which is strange, since it was the ulna that hurt). Stepped off the bus on the way into work, waited for the light, stepped blithely into the crosswalk, caught my toe on a sandbag the city had left by the stormdrain, and went down hard. The immediate pain faded rather quickly, which is good; I haven’t been in that much pain in years. But now it just feels—weird. One doctor seen, x-rays shot, the orthopædic doctor this PM, thank God for health insurance, and since I work for a litigation support firm, one of my fellow project managers nipped out on the double with a camera to snap photos of the offending bag. (Many thanks; they all rallied with alacrity when I stumbled into the office, grey of face, cradling my arm; my only regret is that I misplaced the bag of frozen peas and carrots and broccoli somewhere in the Portland Clinic, but until then, it served admirably to keep the swelling down.)
But fuck the arm. The important thing was, I’d been carrying my iBook, and even as I was lifting my face off the pavement I was sick with worry—the bag had bounced. So the first thing I did (as my co-workers were rallying round, scaring up phone numbers, calling the clinic for me, digging up various bags of frozen vegetables) was yank open the padded case, pull out the computer (wincing not at the considerable pain but at the sight of the CD drive, popped open), and fire it up.
It was fine.
Anyway. Blogging and suchlike will be light the next few days, I think. (Most of this typed left-handed, which, well. Not recommended for the dextrous.) Further bulletins yadda yadda. —Oh, for those with my medical history at hand, keeping score: it’s the right elbow, which means if I’ve broken it, it’s a first. (The left elbow I’ve broken twice, and it’s better if I tell that story in person, since it involves gestures. The right has only ever been severely contused a couple of times.)
Severe contusion; tiny, minor fracture; wear a sling, work the elbow now and again to prevent stiffness, don’t lift anything heavy, and see the doctor again in about 10 days.
Oh, and typing is not contraindicated.
Another memo I didn’t get.
So how come nobody told me cartoon journalist extraordinaire Joe Sacco was doing strips for the Washington Monthly? —I’d point you to a couple of examples, or maybe the archive listing so you could browse ’em yourself, but there doesn’t appear to be one, and the Washington Monthly’s front page has no search function (appalling enough for the rather notable blog currently enhancing it; inexcusable for the site as a whole). (Maybe they don’t archive the strips? But why on earth not?)
Anyway, here’s April’s, and I for one will be keeping an eye on Kevin Drum’s sidebar for updates.
