“Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn’t really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we… Read more →
Year: 2006
The Case for Impeachment
Have I mentioned my deep and abiding love for the essays of Lewis H. Lapham? They were (and sometimes are, now that he’s “editor emeritus”) the first thing I read in Harper’s every month, and I’ve bought a linear foot or two of books of his writings because of them. He’s more than a bit pretentious in style at times,… Read more →
This whole ports thing…
While I’m Bush-bashing, I should toss out at least some small comment on the whole ports thing. Look, I actually don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the ports deal–I think most of the reaction to it has been ridiculously overblown. In fact, I think Kenton Kelly has some excellent points in his piece over at Reason Online: Beyond that,… Read more →
Implosions Make Me Happy
In my Firefox bookmarks, I have a “To Blog” folder, where I store links I want to come back to later and say something about. Inside that folder, there are some additional subfolders that break things down into rough categories. The most populous of these folders is the “Hate Bush” folder, with well over 125 bookmarks in it. I mention… Read more →
Personal Space Limits
How can you not want to read an article that includes this: Bin Laden was “very polite and humble and shy. He didn’t like too many kisses… he didn’t mind being hugged but kisses he didn’t like and he just seemed to float… across the floor,” and this “I never really thought I’d be a Muslim,” he told ABC. “I’d… Read more →
HGPA February Invitational
Friday night was this month’s HGPA tournament. To make a long story short, I had a great time over the course of nine and a half hours, and made it into the money. We had two tables worth of people initially, and once elimination play got us down to one table a lively cash game appeared to break out in… Read more →
The right way to start a Sunday
Sleep in a bit. Get up, pull on some comfy clothes. Go to the kitchen. Grab some fresh chives, and “dice” them into very small bits (this is actually more easily done with kitchen shears than with a knife). Take two black truffles, each about the size of the first segment of my thumb, and dice them up into very… Read more →
In Praise Of Idleness
So, one of the things I told myself I would do in 2006 is spend a lot more time writing about Bertrand Russell [wikipedia], or rather about his works, on this blog. Russell, you may recall, is one of my biggest heroes, to the extent that there are multiple images of him around the house. Writing about Russell is going… Read more →
Monday MP3 Miscellany
So, in lieu of actual content, I bring you a bag of links to audio content, both musical and book-related. This’ll be a long post. Read more →
Take down that scam, kids!
Remember last year when a bunch of SF writers got together to prove that PublishAmerica was a vanity publishing operation, not any kind of real publisher? (See more info here or here.) You might remember that I even bought a copy of the book they submitted–I really tried to read it, but it was so unendurably bad that I couldn’t… Read more →
Footdragging time over: WP2.0.1
OK, I finally bit the bullet and did the upgrade from WP1.5.3 to WP2.0.1 (It feels like I just did the upgrade to WP1.5, but it looks like that was almost exactly a year ago.) Everything seems to have gone smoothly, although I had to update a few of my plugins to make them happy. Also, my “old man”-ness is… Read more →
Also…
Attn: Jackass who busted off my driver’s side mirror last night while I was shopping for DVDs. Subject: You’re a jackass OK, so you don’t know how to drive, and somehow managed to hit my car in the parking lot. Fine. I drove into a light pole once, I’m not going to mock you for that. However, you stop, and… Read more →
Music for Black Valentines
UPDATE: MP3 links have expired. There seems to be a lot of ‘unhappy love’ music circulating around the web today for some reason. For instance, you might want to check out the WilL YoU BE MinE? post at the Mashup Of The Week Podcast. Even better is Jamie S. Rich’s post today, which has a brilliant set of lyrics, and… Read more →
Black Valentines
When I was in my early twenties, I used to celebrate Valentine’s Day by sending out my annual “Black Valentines” messages to a select group of like-minded individuals. At the time, this was more about protesting too much. You know the story–I was single, and I hated the pressure of V-Day, so I would kick against it and act like… Read more →
Number 11
Source, via Number eleven, of course, is “bust a shell up in your face, yo”. Or, as WikiNews puts it: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter on Saturday during a bird hunting trip at a south Texas ranch. The victim, 78 year-old Harry Whittington, is an Austin lawyer who was accompanying the Vice President on a… Read more →
