B12 Solipsism

What a strange thought to have when giving a fluff-ball interview about a television series being filmed in Chicago! Patrick Swayze worries that the Soviet¹ hordes are going to invade the US, and Chicago would be their target. Or something.

I felt that Chicago added so much, just in terms of the energy. If you read any Tom Clancy novel, Chicago is much more a dangerous point in this country than people realize. Tom Clancy says, if you want to invade the U.S., come through Mexico and come through Chicago, and split the country in half. Chicago has much deeper-reaching fingers, from a national security point of view, than most people realize.

[From Swayze feels at home in Chicago -- chicagotribune.com]

Ok. Will make sure to stockpile weapons and canned goods, thanks Mr. Swayze.

1. sic, of course, but maybe he thinks the Venezuelans are coming? Unclear who this invading army might be as I’ve managed to avoid reading any Tom Clancy novels [↩]

Being God for three minutes is fun, better than Queen for a Day anyway¹. The God Simulator forces a deity to make several consciously faulty decisions to end up where we are today. Otherwise, you are just relaxing in boring bliss, as are we all. Wouldn’t want that.

J’raxis·Com • The God Simulator
You are eternal, omnipotent God. For the past boring eternity, You have been sitting around in darkness twiddling Your thumbs wondering what the hell You are supposed to be doing and pondering where You came from and what Your purpose is and why You look like an angry old white man. Suddenly, You are hit with the desire to do something.

(via PZ)

1. a repost from my old blog, but the God Simulator still works, and still cracks me up. [↩]

Still-President Bush will be stuck in our collective craw for another 70 some days.

Hack it Up

Pat Bagley
[From Salt Lake Tribune Home Page - Salt Lake Tribune]

If we’re lucky, Bush will accept an early buyout, with full pension of course, and leave the White House sooner than that.

Hey, why not? Not sure exactly what specific benefit to the city we can expect, but we can hope nonetheless

President-elect Barack Obama will be the first White House occupant in years to hail from a major city, which is stirring hopes that he’ll deliver a boost to urban areas.

Chicago-area governments, like cities and states across the nation, are facing budget crises and cuts in federal money as the economy slumps and revenues fall. Officials said they hope an Obama administration will help improve the situation despite the grim federal financial picture. Businesses of all sizes hope to capitalize — as does the effort to lure the 2016 Olympics to Chicago.

Mr. Obama “has lived and worked in a city and understands the urban issues,” said Mayor Richard M. Daley. “He understands how important education is — it’s the cornerstone of building our cities. He doesn’t need to be educated about urban America. He’s already educated.”

Federal funds for urban programs were slashed during the Bush administration. The financial crisis is further straining city budgets, pushing them to look toward

plus there is this more important aspect

Chicago’s hopes aren’t confined to government. Second City, Chicago’s popular sketch-comedy theater, expects to see an increase in ticket sales, particularly from overseas visitors who planned trips after seeing thrilling scenes from Grant Park.

“Barack has been our meal ticket for two years,” said Second City Vice President Kelly Leonard. “Being a Chicago institution, it can only mean good things for us.”

A Second City show that ran last year called “Between Barack and a Hard Place” was the best-selling show ever for the theater. Mr. Leonard has aspirations of bringing the troupe to Washington for a special performance. “Our goal is to be the official sketch comedy troupe of the White House,” he said.

[From Chicago Officials Hope a Favorite Son Can Lift City's Fortunes, Lure Olympics - WSJ.com]

[Digg-enabled link to article for non-WSJ subscribers]

I don’t know, is that something you’d put on your resume¹ ? Especially since it is your employer saying it about you?

The constantly offended assholes at the Parents Television Council have complained to the FCC about the brief, accidental nudity on last week’s Survivor Gabon episode, in which Marcus’ genitalia was briefly visible during a challenge.

Citing the the accidentally broadcast of Libra’s “fuck” on Big Brother 10, the PTC says in a press release that “CBS has once again decided to violate the public trust,” and calls the flash “shocking and purposeful.” Because seeing a human body part will forever destroy their souls and the souls of the precious, innocent children who happen to be Googling about penises, the PTC wants an apology and for CBS to hunt down the person who dared let this happen. People: It’s a penis, and it’s only shocking to those people who don’t get to see one regularly, either their own or someone else’s.

[From reality blurred + CBS calls Marcus' penis "virtually undetectable"]

Don’t the PTC folks have anything better to do? Rhetorical question, of course. And to think, if Sarah Palin becomes President (or even Vice President), the Christian Taliban will have a high ranking politician on their side, taking their phone calls, and expanding their hateful message.

1. CBS lawyers responded “This was a completely unintentional, inadvertent and fleeting incident that was virtually undetectable when viewed in real time. In the first 24 hours after the broadcast, before freeze-frame images were widely posted online, we received one viewer comment from the 13 million who watched the telecast.” [↩]

Here’s a Palin I could support. I mean, I’d rather Bill Moyers ran for President, but Michael Palin wouldn’t be a bad second choice

Blizzard of Liars - McCain and Palin

Paul Krugman worries that the McCain campaign is even more untruthful than the 2000 Bush Rove group of liars.

how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

[Click to read more of Paul Krugman - Blizzard of Lies - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com]

Obviously my collage skills are a bit atrophied, but you see what I mean. If you have a knack for such caricature, send my your version, and I’ll replace my lame-o one with yours…

“Blizzard of Oz” (Ozzy Osbourne)

“Battlestar Galactica - Razor (Unrated Extended Edition)” (Universal Studios)

I use frack often, actually, though I probably should use it more often.

Lee Goldberg thinks Glen A. Larson is a genius, and not because the prolific television writer and producer gave us “Knight Rider” and “B.J. and the Bear.”

Jamie Bamber gets plenty of chances to say “frak” in “Battlestar Galactica.”

It was Larson who first used the faux curse word “frak” in the original “Battlestar Galactica.” The word was mostly overlooked back in the ’70s series but is working its way into popular vocabulary as SciFi’s modern update winds down production.

“All joking aside, say what you will about what you might call the lowbrow nature of many of his shows, he did something truly amazing and subversive, up there with what Steven Bochco gets credit for, with ‘frak,’ ” Goldberg said.

There’s no question what the word stands for and it’s used gleefully, as many as 20 times in some episodes.

“And he was saying it 30 years ago in the original goofy, god-awful ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ ” said Goldberg

[From The curse word 'Battlestar Galactica' created - CNN.com]

I spell it ‘frack‘ and not ‘frak‘, but the meaning is obviously the same: fuck.

The word has even appeared in the funny pages where Dilbert muttered a disconsolate “frack” — the original spelling before producers of the current show changed it to a four-letter word — after a particularly dumb order from his evil twit of a boss

Dilbert Fracked

[click to embiggen]

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams calls the word “pure genius.”

“At first I thought ‘frak’ was too contrived and it bothered me to hear it,” Adams said. “Over time it merged in my mind with its coarser cousin and totally worked. The creators ingeniously found a way to make viewers curse in their own heads — you tend to translate the word — and yet the show is not profane.”

Best-selling novelist Robert Crais slips the word into the prologue of his latest Elvis Cole mystery, “Chasing Darkness.” He did it because “Galactica” is his favorite show, like calling out in the wilderness to his fellow fans. But he sees the word popping up everywhere, even among those who have never watched the show.

“It’s viral, it spreads like a virus,” Crais said. “That first wave of people who use it are all fans. They use it because they’re tickled by it and like me they’re paying an homage to the show. When they’re using it, they’re probably doing it with a sly wink. But as it gets heard and people use it, it spreads.”

Astute observers of politics already realized that the Republican candidates are always elites, as are, by definition, nearly every politician. However, in our current toothless media climate, simply asserting that one is a thing¹ and not another² is generally enough for the assertion³ to get repeated endlessly on the talking head circuit. Vetting a candidates statement is a vestige of the old days, when the Fourth Estate served a different master - the citizenry - not their corporate overlords. Anyway, John McCain’s gaffe⁴ was so obvious the press had a field day. Daily Kos’ DemFromCT has compiled at least 10 stories covering the topic. Bwwwaahahaha…

Special Edition of John McCain and his seven eight houses. Do not swim with sharks while you cut your own jugular. See what happens when you do:

…

Ouch. If this were a prize fight, the ref would call it. But it’s politics, so he’ll just keep bleeding.

Note to the press… McCain and his campaign continue to make huge gaffes and unforced errors, such as showing up late at Saddleback, attacking Andrea Mitchell, overdoing the POW defense, etc. Meanwhile, Obama’s doing a great job managing the VP roll-out. Yeah, I know, the media narrative is that Democrats are always nervous and reactive, and Republicans are always efficient and confident, but look beyond the labels at this one.

[From Daily Kos: Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Special Edition]

Video, with images of the houses, and a Cat Power soundtrack:

[bushism]

1. thanks to Bishop Joseph Butler [↩]
2. though the full quote is “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” [↩]
3. in this case, that Obama is an elite, and McCain is a common man. Yeah, right. [↩]
4. he wasn’t sure how many million dollar homes he actually owned - was it seven? Eight? Four? [↩]

Blog posts don’t really lend themselves to heavy semicolon use; I have a fondness for the little things¹ .

It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations - to name no names - tend to reserve for footballers, footballers’ wives or (if they’re lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable, indeed laudable, to state one’s profession as “thinker”.

That country is France, which is currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.

Encouragingly, a Committee for the Defence of the Semicolon appeared on the web (only to disappear some days later, which cannot be a very good sign). Articles have been written in newspapers and magazines. The topic is being earnestly discussed on the radio. It was even the subject of an April Fool’s joke on a leading internet news site, which claimed, perfectly plausibly, that President Nicolas Sarkozy had just decreed that to preserve the poor point-virgule from an untimely end, it must henceforth be used at least three times a page in all official correspondence.

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely “a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought”.

…

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that - in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur - “the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought”.

The semicolon, continues this sadly anonymous defender of the Gallic grammatical faith, “finds its rightful home in the subtlety of a fine and rich analysis, one which is not afraid to pronounce - and sometimes to withhold - judgment where mere affirmation might be found wanting. It allows the writer to link ideas without breaking a train of thought; by contrast, over-simplified communication and bald, efficient discourse whose simplistic style is the best guarantee of being widely understood is naturally wary of this punctuation mark.”

[From Jon Henley on the fate of the semicolon | The Guardian ]

I may have a fondness for an occasional semicolon; the French have taken the debate to a level well beyond my interest level.

1. I am probably using semicolons wrong - in my mind, two sentences or clauses can be joined with a semicolon if the sentences have a close relationship, and the semicolon could be replaced by a “but”, “yet” or similar conjuctions [↩]

Tony Clifton may well be the rudest, crudest, most musically talentless lounge lizard ever to stalk a stage. But for those of a certain age and/or sensibility, he is an entertainer nonpareil.

As part of a national tour, his performing prowess will be showcased starting Thursday at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Accompanied by the Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra, the bellicose balladeer will croon from a vast repertoire of Sinatra, Lynyrd Skynyrd and even Led Zeppelin to raise funds for Gulf Coast artists who were hit by the hurricane.

“This is an amazing, amazing showman,” says Clifton’s longtime pal Dennis Hof, who owns the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel in Carson City, Nev., where Clifton is said to be a frequent guest and winter boarder. “And he’s the last of his kind.”

Hof met Clifton a few decades back, when the late hooker-loving comedian Andy Kaufman would swing by the cathouse (which then bore a different name) with his Chicago-born friend Bob Zmuda, who now runs the charity Comic Relief.

In those “crazy” times, Hof says, Andy wasn’t always himself.

“I remember one time, Andy partied with 18 girls in two days,” he remembers. “And sometimes it was Tony.”

[Click to read more of Kaufman's alter ego Tony Clifton is all trick and no treat :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Entertainment]

Cheaper Dope

Ben Sargent has this just about right: the Republican answer to the US oil addiction is to find cheaper oil. Quick fix, in other words, with no concern for long term health of the nation.

Harlan Ellison tells us, “Get Paid”! Applies to photography (no more freebies if there’s an option), music, writing, everything. Especially when a corporation as wealthy as Warner Bros is asking for free content, why should they get it?

(Note, Harlan Ellison uses many, many NSFW words, so adjust your viewing accordingly)

This cracks me up.

July 27, 2004, a friend invited Guru Raj to create a Google e-mail account. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia, Raj, then twenty-one, was watching the Democratic National Convention on a television in his parents’ basement, in Norcross, Georgia. The beta version of Gmail—available by invitation only—was less than four months old at the time, and largely unproved, but Raj’s U.V.A. e-mail account was set to expire in a few weeks, so he decided to give Gmail a try.

At first, Raj tried to create an address using his own name, but, remarkably, both gururaj@gmail.com and rajguru@gmail.com were already taken. So he tried the name of the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV. To his surprise, it worked, and, moments later, barackobama@gmail.com was quietly born. “I’m not some cute little Indian boy who grew up in America with political aspirations,” Raj, the first in his family to be born an American citizen, said recently. “I just thought it would be kind of funny to create an e-mail address based on a random senator whose name no one could spell.”

Over the next four years, as Gmail became the third most popular Webmail provider in the U.S. and Obama became a serious contender for the next President of the United States, Raj used the account for his personal e-mail. In the fall of 2006, he received, for the first time, a message intended for the Senator. By February, 2007, when Obama formally announced his candidacy, Raj was daily receiving dozens of misdirected notes from all over the world.

[Click to read more of Squatters: Obama’s In-box: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker]

I’ll bet a lot of crazy stuff gets sent to that email address.

Booze Truck

A summer favorite: the booze-mobile¹ .

1. click to embiggen [↩]