Au Revoir In English

While I'm not going to Paris, I do like this video and it's making me excited about the upcoming trip to the great Southwest Peter and I are embarking on tomorrow!



I'm completely unprepared. But how hard is it going to be to look at beautiful sunsets, drive with the best dj I could possibly imagine, hike some pretty trails, and eat delicious tex-mex. I'm guessing not too hard. I hope everyone has a wonderful long weekend. Over and out.

Hot Pockets!

Love this poster: from Boing Boing.

Related: Jim Gaffigan's Hot Pockets Bit

Child of a Narcissist

I always wondered how/if a narcissist is able to love their own children. Realized that the way they love them is that they incorporate all their child's triumphs and failures as though they are their own. Pretty pathetic really, and having seen up close this kind of relationship it's not surprising that the child can't help but become a narcissist themselves.

Anger Management

I love the idea of anger being something that motivates people, but personally anger makes me do the opposite, it makes me run and hide. I like to stuff it down, deep down and forget it's a valid emotion. An emotion worth expressing and acknowledging.
I get pretty frustrated in my work environment. Anyone who has worked in customer service is well aware the kind of bizarre, entitled, and utterly illogical behavior that people tend to exhibit when money is involved. To make matters worse, my computer crashes/freezes at least three times a day (not exaggerating); sometimes I lose work, but most of the time a task that should take me five minutes can stretch into hours because my equipment won't cooperate. Then there are the co-workers, this is probably true of most work places, but when I tell my friends about the situations I encounter with certain people at my job it often leads to talk about sitcoms, as in "this would be a great sitcom material if it wasn't real or this would be hilarious if it wasn't actual, real life situation." (Cast of characters include the boss' self-centered, incompetent daughter, the Moroccan accountant who has some of the worst hygiene of an adult I have ever encountered, also likes to blame his problems on everyone but himself, the slight anti-Semitic girl who brings up my Judaism in a weird way every time she can and straight out lies or exaggerates about everything to the point madness, then there is the manager who knows very little about the day to day operations of the office, and cares more about making everyone feel good instead producing good work results, add to the mix techno phobic boss, and a second boss who makes wildly inappropriate statements constantly and is a huge narcissist.)
Basically, there is a lot to be dissatisfied about at my job. Usually I deal with it by slamming the phone and swearing a lot - this creates a pretty negative environment. I used to hide it better, but somewhere around last few months when I was told I can't be compensated the way I think I should be, I started to not give a damn. But it still bugs me all the negativity that spews out of my mouth. Yesterday, I decided to just not say anything, I acknowledged the anger to myself and then moved on without verbalizing and it felt pretty good. I had mistaken the need to shout or slam the phone as the only way to experience anger, and yet just by saying to myself "well that sucked" it makes the anger that much more manageable and little bit more motivating.

Song of the Day

Man this gets me smiling. MC Hammer's "Here comes the Hammer"

Some SATC2 Red Carpet Reflections

Why does Matthew Broderick always look slightly embarrassed whenever I see him being photographed with his wife on the red carpet. He just looks in pain most of the time.

I like SJP's dress, especially asymmetrical part at the top. I like how flowy it is, although I think it is a tad long, and I thing the bright yellow is bold color. And yet something is off about it and I can't decide what. As a side note I wonder what kind of bra one wears with that dress. I think that's always my number one questions when I see woman on the carpet and they manage not to show a bra strap and yet manage to defy gravity.

Cynthia Nixon (aka Miranda) looks so pretty with long hair, it softens her look. I also dig her understated dress.

Hey look it's Sarah Paulsen and Amanda Peet together, laughing on the red carpet. Remember that show they were on together? Me neither. But it had that hot guy with a vaguely Russian name and it was boring as hell. Jack and Jill?

Liza totally killed it.

Side note, it seems like Sex and City 2 is trying to be a bit more than a 2-hour-fashion show with a few plot points thrown in, seems somebody decided to be a bit politically incorrect.

Different Way of Looking

I really like the description Jonah Goldberg presents of the two visions of America:

What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”

The other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit. The Constitution is not a coupon insert in your local paper, brimming with all sorts of giveaways and two-for-one deals. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights delineate what the government cannot do, not what it can. What was so fantastic and revolutionary about that is that for the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the government should mind its own business. Believing that doesn’t make you a fascist, it makes you a patriot.

Running on Water

Hot new sport!

Song of the Day

Cat Power's The Greatest

White Dudes Dancing

Another cute video featuring some awesome foot work. Now I really want to see A Behanding In Spokane.

Brilliant!

This Nike commercial for the World Cup is fantastic.

NIKE WRITE THE FUTURE - FULL LENGTH VERSION @ Yahoo! Video

Check out the cameos by Kobe Bryant, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Homer.

Tip: Peter!

"Going to be a Glorious Day"

"Lucky" from Radiohead's OK Computer

Political Pet Peeve

I hate, hate when politicians talk about their "public service" record (Hi Arlen Specter!). If they had to endure the kind of public service military personnel have to endure the term is laughable. They get a huge salary, many, many perks, and personal staff at their back and call. And to call their work a public service and put in the context of self sacrifice. That's why I like the following suggestion:

Andy Goss knows exactly what he'll do if he wins his long-shot race for the U.S. Congress. First, he'll cut lawmakers' pay 40% to $104,400. Then the former Army interrogator will use the savings to build a Capitol Hill barracks where all 535 senators and representatives will be required to live.

"If our military has to live in such a fashion, I think we congressmen should also," says Mr. Goss, one of four men seeking the Republican nomination in southeastern Arizona.

Banksy in NY & Boston!

Seems Banksy has been spotted in Boston and NYC! Yippee! While I love his art, his messages on the other hand not so much. via Alisaa and Flickr

Happy Friday Motherf*ckers!

This song always puts me in a good mood.

I said now, overcast days never turned me on
But something about the clouds and her mixed

She wasn't too bright
But I could tell when she kissed me
She knew how to get her kicks

Swiss Vader

I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm looking forward to the other two books in the series. Lately I've been noticing a lot of Swedish stuff in the news and in random stuff I come across on the internet. And while this has nothing to do with Sweden, Switzerland is a neighbor of Sweden and starts with an "s" - so hence I had to post it. Plus it completely reminded me of KITH's "Sick of the Swiss" sketch.


via ShareSomeCandy

"Honest And Refreshing"

I love how bad ass Gov. Chris Christie has been. He has been taking names and kicking ass, he does what he believes is right and doesn't seem too afraid of the press. It's quite enjoyable to see him let the reporter know where he stands and the double standards the question imposes on him. Just pure awesome.

Annie A Conservative Icon?

Little Orphan Annie’s creator, cartoonist Harold Gray sounds like a typical neo-con of today:

Jeet Heer, in volume 1’s extensive biographical piece, sees Gray as a progressive Republican, celebrating individualism, grit, and racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. He loathed con men, hypocrites, and snobs, especially those posing as moral reformers. “I hate professional do-gooders with other people’s money,” he once wrote. In 1932, the Depression brought to power one of the world’s great professional do-gooders, FDR. Roosevelt’s aggressive new liberalism transformed Gray into the new breed of Republican: a pro-business, small-government tax cutter. Feeling that the New Deal destroyed rugged individualism with its programs designed to uplift, Gray spoke out. He never named FDR in Annie. But in 1934, when prosecutor Phil O. Bluster jailed Warbucks on phony tax charges, readers knew why. Inspired by fugitive Chicago millionaire Samuel Insull, then in Europe evading the IRS, Gray torched the New Dealers he saw as hounding businessmen for their success.

....

Gray ran this as FDR signed the Wagner Act on July 5, 1935, giving unions the right to organize and represent workers. In August, Gray’s union rioted. In September, the New Republic denounced Annie as “fascism in the funnies.” In Huntington, West Virginia, Lewis’s coal-mining power base, the Herald-Dispatch dropped Annie as “alarmingly vindictive propaganda.” The Tribune quickly ordered Gray to “stop editorializing.” Gray was no fascist. He hated big government, right or left. Ten months before Pearl Harbor, he undercut the isolationist Tribune. Warbucks, an antifascist sympathizer, escapes from a foreign concentration camp and returns home, eager to arm America. Predictably, the right protested, also demanding Gray keep his politics out of the funnies. Gray felt muzzled by such dictates, but he and the other Trib cartoonists who followed Sidney Smith’s realist style had made a mark.

Werner Herzog reads Madeline

This is pretty freakin awesome and hilarious:



via Julius Goat

I've reached that age...

...where all I want is babies. I see them everywhere and I want one of my own. Except that's not happening right now for many reason (especially since being out of wed mother doesn't appeal to me and having radioactive babies seems also kind of a crappy route to take). Anyhoo, back to my baby lusting ways, I'm not proud of it, but I guess part of dealing with a problem is admitting you have one. Good thing, my sister went ahead and gave me the cutest niece with the most delicious cheeks you ever did see. The Gnome is keeping me a bit sane in my pursuit of a spawn. Please look at your peril, because you will want to eat these cheeks. Fair warning.

La Vie en Rose - Edith Piaf

I Had A Dream

"People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation."
— Chuck Klosterman

Sensitivity More Important Than Safety

At least that's what I get from following passage about undercover police infiltrating would be terrorists in the Muslim community.

The undercover program is both secretive and controversial. Local Muslim groups have criticized the infiltration of the Muslim community by investigators from the Intelligence Division as a form religious profiling.

The police deny that, saying they follow threats wherever they may lead.

You know why there is "religious profiling" it's because people from your community keep trying to blow shit up. Is it racial profiling to infiltrate a Latino gang or ethnic profiling to go undercover working for the Italian Mafia?

hat tip Allah's twitter feed.

Short Movie Review

My Blueberry Nights was a huge disappointment. I blame the fact that it was Kar Wai Wong's first English film. The dialogue was hockey and filled with pretentious cliches. Maybe he doesn't realize how bad or forced it sounds to American ears. Dialgue like this: "If I threw these keys away then those doors would be closed forever and that shouldn't be up to me to decide, should it?" made me roll my eyes. And while the cinematography is beautiful, it felt forced, especially the slow motion shots. The shot of the kiss at the end could have been so sensual, instead it felt like a gimmick. It's as if someone took all the technical aspects of Wong's film and made a Kar Wai Wong film by numbers, forgetting to put any soul into the movie.

Chinglish!

In The Mood For Some "Jew's Ear Juice" or "Hot Marxism"? Shenghai got you covered with all the fun Chinglish signs.

Lileks Explores How To Think Like MSNBC Anchor

Those are the people who rush to judgment. They hear there’s been a terrorist attack, perform some twisted calculation based on stories from Fox’s highly rated “Jihadis in Your Garage” daily update, and figure it might have something to do with Islamists. Shame! Good people not only don’t judge before-hand, they want to refrain from judging after-hand, so they can theoretically judge someone who didn’t do it, but might.

Here’s what Contessa Brewer must go through when she hears of a terrorist attack anywhere in the world — meaning, not just Times Square but above 112th and below 13th street as well. (It’s hard for New Yorkers to see beyond their city; there are some who no doubt read “Oklahoma Bombing” and think it’s a story about a Broadway revival closing on opening night.)

Secretly kinda hope that the attack was caused by an atheist — no, that would empower the religious maniacs who only support Israel so Jesus will have a place to chill when he returns next week. Scratch that. So:

Hope the attack was caused by one of the several dozen million militia members — also known as “Midwesterners.” After all, that’s the logical extension of being opposed to anything the government does while in control of the Democratic Party: blowing up that oasis of commerce and gaudy free enterprise, Times Square.

Fingers crossed: Oh, if only the attack was caused by someone protesting Arizona’s immigration policy. Such a thing would be misguided, but there’s a lot of anger out there about a law many say harkens back to Nazi Germany, where they rounded up Jews who had entered the Third Reich illegally, and made them return to Israel.

Pure Drivel Part 2

Common sense is dead.Yeah what he said.

I started off by stating that perhaps my first example was too "controversial" as it dealt with sex differences. Accordingly, I would next provide a more "innocuous" example that was perhaps easier for her to digest. I asked her whether it was indeed a universal truth that from any vantage point on Earth, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Surely, since time immemorial sailors have relied on this cosmological fact. Take a minute to think about how she might have retorted in this case. Here is a hint: she used the tools of deconstructionism to "tease apart" my latest universal. Deconstructionism argues that reality is a linguistic creation. Hence, there is no objective truth to speak of, as all information is constrained within subjective linguistic bounds. She proposed that I was putting labels on things, and she refused to play such games. She did not know what I meant by "East" or "West". These were arbitrary labels. What did I mean by "sun"? That which I called the sun, she might refer to as "dancing hyena" (her actual words!), to which I wryly replied: OK, the dancing hyena rises in the East and sets in the West. Better yet, the dancing hyena gives me a dancing hyena burn on my fat stomach if I lay out too long without any dancing hyena protection!

If you think that this is an isolated incident that is otherwise unrepresentative of postmodernists, academic feminists, or deconstructionists, you'd be wrong. These anti-science movements have spent the greater part of the past four decades polluting the minds not only of bright academics but also of generations of students who were otherwise impressed by the obscurantism and fake profundity of these intellectual charlatans. The concerted efforts of several exemplary scientists have managed to slowly eviscerate the influence of anti-science movements on university campuses. For example, the physicist Alan Sokal purposely submitted a nonsensical postmodernist paper containing pseudo-randomly generated passages to Social Text, one of the elite journals in the field. After it being accepted, Sokal confessed his ruse albeit this did not seem to embarrass the editors. After all, since all meaning is relative, the editors construed his randomly generated nonsensical paper as meaningful!

These anti-science movements coupled with cultural relativism, political correctness, and an ethos of self-guilt regarding all geopolitical realities will prove the demise of Western civilization. It is such babble that caused nearly all of the American news media to offer hallucinatory explanations regarding the recent Times Square incident including that the alleged terrorist did this because he had defaulted on his mortgage payment, and hence was facing great financial strain. Both the media and Obama officials are under a strict edict to avoid uttering the most obvious of geopolitical facts. These nonsensical pseudo-intellectual movements will spell the end of liberal democracies if they are not eradicated from public discourse.

Poetry Time

Dawn Summers asked me to guest post for her Poetry Wednesday gig and I actually wrote a somewhat coherent post about my favorite poem. If you are wondering about the meaning of my name, here is a bit of an explanation.

The State of the World

"Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps. Consequently, reformers of all varieties terrify me. I only need to be told that I'm being served new, improved, low-fat baked ham, and I gag." - Charles Simic

I have a similar when I hear many current politicians speak.

Compliments All Around

The WSJ's article rules on how to properly compliment someone is pretty spot on. I like giving compliments. I like giving sincere compliments. I don't think enough people today mention the good they see and experience. In all seriousness it's part of my life philosophy (although before I typed that sentence I'm not sure I have a life philosophy.)
While I'm good at giving, I'm not so great at receiving (Ed. note: that's what she said). I'm a bad compliment receiver. The worst. I can't handle any kind of praise without pointing out a deficiency. Lately I've learned to say politely (and mostly sincerely) "thank you" when complimented. I always think specific compliments are the best and the general "you look so pretty" are a waste of breadth, (although sometimes girls do look pretty and I fall into the trap of saying it).

• Be sincere. (Enough said.)

• Be selective. Think Goldilocks: You don't want your compliment to be too big or too small. You want it to be just right.

• Be specific. Don't say: "You look pretty today." Say: "That sweater really brings out the color of your eyes."

• Show impact. Tell the person how they have positively affected you. So instead of "I like your column today, Elizabeth, try: "Your story made me run right out and compliment a stranger."

• Just say thank you. When you receive a compliment, be gracious, not self-deprecating. Take the remark for what you want it to be. And don't worry about praising the person in return. It's a compliment, not a volley.

• Praise yourself. If all else fails and no one is lavishing you with praise, do what my dad taught me to do: Pat yourself on the back.

I learned early on that in real state, as in child rearing, you need to say exactly what you mean. Calling a child "smart" or describing a house as "fabulous" leaves the child thinking the compliment is empty and a potential home buyer will think the actual house is the opposite of "fabulous". Whereas describing the house as "Victorian build with white trimming" or saying "answered all those problems without a calculator" leaves the person knowing exactly why or what they are being praised for. So compliment away, just be specific.

A Moment

There are moments where you feel exactly where you need to be with exactly the person you need to be with. Just walking on an ordinary sidewalk, lights from a store illuminating the street, avoiding the uneven payment, belly full of food and beer - and out of nowhere - a feeling of fullness for everything just hits you. Yeah, I need to remember this feeling more often.

Las Brujas

The internet is a wondrous thing, I heard this song last night on the radio and without the internet I would never be able to find it again.

Las Brujas by Conjunto Jardin



Strangely it reminds me of old folk Russian songs.

Double Standards For All

Gib is kind of back. Pointing out that if we should have double standards for one form of politician, than shouldn't the same be applied to politicians on the other side.

When Republicans get more crap over sex scandals than Democrats, the claim is made that this is fair because Republicans trumpet "family values" as a key plank, which means that David Vitter's shenanigans are a far greater betrayal than, say, Eliot Spitzer's. OK, fair enough. But applying the same argument, the party that wants to get the government more involved has a higher obligation to keep their noses clean. Put another way, a party that brought their own pitchforks and torches to the doors of Charlie Rangel and Christopher Dodd years ago could tell me to put my faith in the government. A party that tells me to trust the government, but trusts these assclowns to run it, is basically David Vitter paying for erotic massages, only they're using my money, and there's no happy ending.

I hope Gib keeps writing and posting more.

Pure Drivel

This is the kind of drivel that had led to my disillusionment in my studies. Complete idiocy taken for brilliance and innovative thought. David Thompson points out:

...Professor Vostral’s most recent public comments involve the political ramifications of patchwork quilts:

This use of patchwork as an insult really struck me, because it is such a gendered insult. [Atlantic politics editor, Marc] Ambinder deploys the metaphor because it assumes that no thought goes into a quilt (like policy), and it’s just a hodgepodge. In reality quilting is a predominantly woman-based art form, that had roots in resourcefulness, community, and skilled sewing hands. To debase something by calling it patchwork is based in gendered and derogatory understandings of the quilt.

Note the professor’s confidence as she rushes to the podium on Mount Grievance. She is righteous and wise, and apparently telepathic. Non-literal uses of the term “patchwork” must assume whatever sequence of ideas suits Professor Vostral’s worldview. Used metaphorically, the word “patchwork” must signal disdain for quilt making, quilt makers and, by implication, an entire gender too. There can be no doubt about it. “Patchwork” simply is a “gendered insult”- one “based in derogatory understandings” of a “woman-based art form.” It’s “embedded,” apparently. Why? Because,

The way a patchwork metaphor works is, in part, due to its origins in women’s circles, and many things labeled as “female” are used as put downs.

But wait. As Tommy Christopher points out with admirable patience:

The metaphoric use of “patchwork” isn’t meant as a value judgment of patchwork quilts, but rather as a way of visualizing the concept of something made up of existing leftover pieces, rather than pieces fabricated for a given purpose. It’s a great way to make use of scraps of fabric, but not the best approach to government policy.