Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Just 10 years ago, New York City (where I live) still abounded with collectively maintained public spaces in which citizens demonstrated respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it. The world 10 years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late 1990s, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn't you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I'd quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother's hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in icky little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.
I guess I've resigned myself to whichever of the supremely uninspiring people on Obama's VP shortlist gets selected. Even if it's Clinton or Bayh, which would create a nose-holding situation as bad or worse than Al Gore's horrible pick of Holy Joe Lieberman. I'm still hoping a surprise pick from outside the list gets announced tomorrow, but I'm used to being disappointed. While reading speculation about the choice, I came across this article stating that Hillary Clinton is still $24 million dollars in debt and, to nobody's surprise, is having trouble raising the money to retire it. This, though, made my jaw drop.
The report comes as some high-profile Clinton backers have expressed disappointment Obama has not made more of an effort to help his onetime rival retire her campaign debt.
"He has provided her with a pittance compared to what the Clintons have given Obama," prominent Clinton backer Lynn Forrester told the Times of London. "Her debt could have been cleared within 10 days. It's ungracious."
Ungracious you say, Ms. Forrester de Rothschild? Let's see, the Clinton campaign ran up most of that debt after the electoral math was clear that she couldn't win, while running a highly negative campaign saying McCain was more qualified than Obama to be commander-in-chief. It certainly *would* be very gracious to remove $24 million dollars from his general election war chest and transfer it to cover the costs of her futile scorched earth campaign that probably helped McCain pull close to a tie in the polls. Yes, that would be gracious indeed.
But Obama has hardly cleared the ungracious bar. He has, after all, refrained from sucker-punching her on national television, which would have been my first instinct (and one more of the myriad reasons I'll likely never hold public office). Moreover, if I had to guess, I'd say she's still got no worse than a 50-50 shot at being the name announced tomorrow.
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: Democrats only stop forming circular firing squads long enough to eat their young. Sigh.
Now this is one doctor's visit you'd hate to make.
Doctors treating a 14 year old boy from India were shocked to find a 2cm long fish had "slipped" up his penis and into his bladder. The patient, who was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period, gave an interesting explanation. Details of the case, which was documented in The Internet Journal of Urology, have revealed that the patient claimed that the fish "slipped" into his penis while he was maintaining his aquarium.
The paper's authors, Professor G Vezhaventhan and Professor R Jeyaraman, wrote: "While he was cleaning the fish tank in his house, he was holding a fish in his hand and went to the toilet for passing urine. When he was passing urine, the fish slipped from his hand and entered his urethra and then he developed all these symptoms."
Here's the journal article, in case you (understandably) doubted the story. Surprisingly, nobody seems to quite believe the kid's version of how the ninja/gymnast fish got all up in his business, sorta like when I slipped in the shower and had to go to the emergency room to get the shampoo bottle removed from my colon. Hey, sometimes you just land funny, you filthy-minded skeptics, and shampoo bottles ought to have flared bases as a matter of course. Really, you'd think OSHA would be all over that already, but I guess George Bush just doesn't care about black people my rectal integrity. But I digress. What amuses me most about this article is that I found it in the online version of a magazine called Practical Fishkeeping. Umm, yeah. For some secondary definition of "practical," I suppose.
On a loosely related tangent, be sure to buy real, American-made cock rings and penis pumps from American stores, as the Food and Drug Administration can and will seize cheap Mexican ones at the border if they lack instructions for use and proper warnings. I'm sure that's not an issue for any readers here, because we're all patriots. However, if you misplaced your instruction booklet for your genuine American penis pump, the FDA does have a handy troubleshooting (ahem) guide on its website.
Balloon Jesus represent!
Update: Hello, Catholic League freaks!
Phase I of the RIAA's misguided pursuit of an innocent, disabled Oregon woman, Atlantic v. Andersen, has finally drawn to a close, as the RIAA was forced to pay Ms. Andersen $107,951, representing the amount of her attorneys fee judgment plus interest. But as some have pointed out, reimbursement for legal fees doesn't compensate Ms. Andersen for the other damages she's sustained. And that's where Phase II comes in, Andersen v. Atlantic. There the shoe is on the other foot, and Tanya is one doing the hunting, as she pursues the record companies and their running dogs for malicious prosecution.
Grandpa Simpson addresses the Russia-Georgia hostilities.
Speaking to reporters about the situation in Georgia, Sen. John McCain denounced the aggressive posture of Russia by claiming that "in the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."
That's funny. I could have sworn we invaded two different countries in just the first three years of the 21st century. Someone should remind him.
Everybody from every corner has noted the passing of Isaac Hayes, so I don't have much to add, especially after a post like this. It has been weird first watching the great jazz artists from the '50s and '60s die off, and now seeing so many of the soul greats from the '60s and '70s checking out. Perhaps weird is the wrong word, since they're reaching the age where that happens. Still, I've gone digging through the more obscure corners of their catalogs whenever I run across another obituary, and I'm struck by how original, even revolutionary, some of it had to have sounded at the time, and how different music would sound today without it to build on.
All of which made me realize that in a little over a decade the actuarial tables will start catching up to the early '80s hip-hop legends, who I actually listened to in real time rather than 20 or 30 years after the fact. And while I was thinking about all of that, I chanced across this post and video at whatisthewhat about the most famous freestyle battle, Busy Bee Starski vs. Kool Moe Dee, and how in retrospect it really did signal a sea change in the sound of hip-hop. Here's the .mp3; it's only five and a half minutes long. But you really ought to go watch the video first; it's fascinating.
America is too important to be led by a doddering gadfly with a belligerent drunk's grasp of foreign policy realities. I'm only going to quote the one paragraph, but you should definitely read it all.
An honorable man who served his country well, it is clear his time has past and his grasp on the most basic foreign policy calls we'll need to make in the coming years is very tentative indeed. He'll be surrounded by second-tier 'yes-man' realists and residual neo-con swill, few with any ideas worth pursuing if we mean to take the national interest seriously with sobriety and freshness of perspective. So let us help him exit off-stage gracefully, as he served his country with dignity when called upon, but let us not sacrifice our children's future to ignorants with deludely romantic notions of empire. Been there, done that. Indeed, we have a President who has announced a pre-emptive doctrine which allows us to, willy-nilly, instigate regime change when and where we deem appropriate. Who are we to lecture Putin now? What standing do we have to do so? And what parochial and self-satisfied myopia has us indignantly thinking we are some unimpeachable arbitrer of right and wrong in the international system after the disastrous missteps of the past eight sordid years?
Understand that McCain's policy prescriptions so far on the Russia-Georgia hostilities mean that we would be obligated to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia over who controls South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which not one in ten thousand Americans could find on a map or, I would wager, even knew existed before this week.
The man has completely lost his marbles. He's quickly approaching the point where it wouldn't even be possible to be less fit to be commander-in-chief, short of wandering the streets in a soiled adult diaper with a Tupperware helmet, wooden sword, and a trash can lid.
Update: Obama boards the crazy train. Bleah.
"A Michigan man has pleaded guilty to sex abuse after being accused of wearing a 'World's Greatest Dad' shirt to meet for sex with someone he thought was a 14-year-old-girl. Thirty-three-year-old Daniel Allen Everett pleaded guilty Thursday in Oakland County Circuit Court to child sexual abuse and using the Internet to attempt child sexual abuse. [...] Authorities have not confirmed whether Everett has children."
Even Middle Earth can't escape the housing market meltdown.
As a result of plummeting property prices, The Shire - a development in Bend, Oregon that was modeled after Tolkien's descriptions of hobbit houses - has been hit with a foreclosure notice. Astonishingly, it turns out that in these troubled economic times, the hobbit-wannabe market isn't quite as lucrative as the developers thought.
The dearth of fantasy fans willing to pay $899,000 to live in a mock hobbit-hole in the Pacific Northwest is blow for the project's mastermind, non-hobbit Ron Myers. 'It basically destroyed my life financially, but that's the price of a dream,' he told the Bend Bulletin.
According to this article, one home was sold in 2006 and a second is nearly finished but still unsold. The lone inhabitants of The Shire must get lonely, sitting in the amphitheater all by themselves.
They still face lots of pressure from Ebola, poaching, and habitat elimination, but here's a rare spot of good wildlife news from Africa.
Conservationists have found so many Lowland gorillas surviving in the northern part of the Republic of Congo that they have been able to double previous population estimates. A new census has found 125,000 western lowland gorillas in an 18,000-square-mile (47,000-square-kilometre) area, the Wildlife Conservation Society reported. Estimates from the 1980s had suggested that fewer than 100,000 of the great apes had survived and many experts believed that these numbers had been cut nearly in half by disease and hunting.
The newly discovered population boosts the estimated world population of lowland gorillas from 50,000-100,000 to 175,000 to 225,000.
John McCain: "He's the oldest man in the universe. But can he eat hot dogs?"
And on the domestic front, Noah explains his drawing. Sort of. Y'know, you spend the first couple years of your kid's life wishing he would go ahead and start talking so that you can figure out what's going on inside his head. Then he starts talking, and it's somehow even more confusing than before.
"After watching this clip of the Ross Sisters's performance from the 1944 musical Broadway Rhythm one may be forgiven for wondering just what is meant by the phrase 'solid potato salad'."
