Squirelly
I know, I know. It’s the weekend and I should be restesing. I dreamed last night I had a pet squirrel named Death from Above. He rode around town in my convertible with me, clinging to the headrest. Poor Death from Above. His sense of territorial propriety was so distorted by his lifestyle that he would leap out of the car and attack any squirrel he saw, on the grounds it was poaching his turf.
That there squirrel is Larry. I raised him and his brothers on cream and Esbilac and they grew into fine strapping big lads. But that’s another story for another day. Today, my real estate agent is holding an open house Chez Weasel and I have to make myself scarce. So here I am, gone.
I’d probably have better luck buying a lottery ticket.
September 21, 2008 — 8:27 am
Comments: 21
But Mom’s new husband lets me drive…!
I can’t resist pinching this from Howie Carr. He’s having fun with it, why can’t I? CNN is running footage this afternoon of Barack Obama getting heckled at a speech today. Well, no big. Anybody can get heckled. But if you listen to the speech Obama is trying to give in the background, it’s purest gibberish.
So you’re working longer hours. Or working more than one job just to get by. And then there are the jobs you do once the workday ends. Jobs like paying bills. Like buying groceries. Like making dinner. Doing the laundry.
It’s bookended by heckling, so god knows where he’s going with this idea, but…what the hell? Is he really whining about buying groceries, making dinner and doing the laundry? The ordinary, grownup things that make up ordinary, grownup lives for most of us?
Howie wants to know if Obama will send someone around to balance his checkbook and change lightbulbs, but he’s missing what Obama’s plugging into. Can’t you hear it?
“It’s so unfair! Clean my room! Lights out by ten on schoolnights! NO TV until my homework is done! I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!”
It’s citizen as sulky teen, government as parent. And Obama promises to be the cool stepdad who lets you have a beer when mom isn’t around. He’s aiming this idea at his natural constituency: the permanent adolescents of the Left. But bitter clingers aren’t going to get this at all.
Anyhow, here’s the audio. As an aside, note that he’s definitely speaking from a teleprompter. He says, “jobs you do once.” Full stop, and then realizes it should be “…once the workday ends…”
[audio:obama.mp3]
September 19, 2008 — 4:52 pm
Comments: 47
fanniemAeTM
If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.
– John McCain, May 25, 2006
Needless to say, Congess did not act. Lord knows I’m no fan of John McCain, but he’s too right on this one and has been riding it for years.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together hold or own up to FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS in mortgage debt. That’s more than half the total of the current U.S. national debt.
Their failure is what has sparked the world financial crisis and the blame lies solely with the Democrats in Congress who shielded them from reform for years while Democrat party hacks running the companies enriched themselves.
From Flopping Aces, where there is plenty more. We put five trillion dollars in the hands of the sleaziest band of thieves and sociopaths in America? And told them to make loans to people with bad credit? And then didn’t keep an eye on them? We did this? Really?
So now I have my nice little house on the market 30% below the value I’m paying taxes on and I can’t get a nibble because the city is stuffed with foreclosed property. Which doesn’t matter because the sort of first-time buyer who would be interested in my house couldn’t get a mortgage in this market if he sacrificed his firstborn on the altar of Ba’al.
So, Democrats — this helps minorities and poor people…how, exactly? Oh…right, right. That was never the point. It was only the cover.
John McCain is lord and master of this one. If he continues to point finger at “greedy Wall Street” out of deference to his friends in the Kleptomaniac Kongress — verily, my Bonce shall catcheth on Fyre with ye Rayge.
I barely have enough good humor left to mention that it’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day, however horribly appropriate that might be.
— 5:21 am
Comments: 46
The paper towels, they tell me things. Unspeakable things.
I don’t know how Rembrandt did it without paper towels. They’re the perfect studio companion — a mix of tough, absorbant and inexpensive. They daub excellent textures into wet paint, leach just the right amount of excess medium off an overladen brush, protect delicate surfaces from greasy human fingers and they’re totally the quicker picker upper. You can quote me on that.
When I have used a paper towel, if it isn’t thoroughly gefukt, I carefully fold it into a square and set it aside — a habit I picked up from an old art school friend (though I think she picked it up in her years of food service jobs). There’s always a big, tottery pile of gently used paper towel squares next to my left hand. When it’s panic stations, I’m on it. I’m a blottin’ fool.
I buy the best quality paper towels I can find, with a “good” randomized texture and always — always — in plain white. So how a roll of these vapid, preachy fuckers got in my cart, I will never know. I must’ve been in a hurry.
The paper towels picked a bad time to mock me. I was thinking blearily about the whole mortgage and financial meltdown while I made coffee and paper-toweled things this morning. Generally speaking, Washington is no more than a peripheral malignancy; a sort of slow sapping around the edges of the national vitality. But at this moment, those strutting retards are directly responsible for what’s wrong with my life. Their greed and incompetence is the only reason I am sitting at a desk today facing another eight hours of PowerPoint instead of bustling about the kitchen in my English country house making pickles.
Yes I’m going to make pickles. I’m going to make the hell out of pickles. I’ll probably wear an apron while I make them, too.
But right now, I have PowerPointin’ to do…
September 18, 2008 — 8:29 am
Comments: 50
Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan
Door to door Barbra Streisand concerts.
Ba-dum-bump.
Knock-knock-knock. Good afternoon, madam. Peeeeepoooool…peeepoool who need peeeeepooool. And then $28,500 appears, as if by magic.
What does that even MEAN, anyway? It’s always bothered me. Who the hell doesn’t need people, and what’s so damned lucky about it?
Eh.
Tomorrow afternoon, they’re dryrunning the PowerPoint presentation I’ve been working on this week. Problem is, I haven’t really been working on it. So please enjoy this small sample of gratuitous snark while I, you know, do my damn job for a day.
September 17, 2008 — 5:46 am
Comments: 56
Things that make you go OMGWTF?!
When I recently asked one of Sullivan’s colleagues at the Atlantic why it abides Sullivan’s disgrace of the magazine, he simply referred to the traffic Sullivan generates for the Atlantic online.
A Drudge link. Rule of thumb, it’s worth a quarter of a million hits. I didn’t realize a permalink on his page is worth about the same, each and every day. Sheeee-it, as they say at Harvard.
I didn’t even realize Sullivan had a Drudge link until Ace mentioned it. So I took a look at Drudge’s static links for the first time in, like, a decade. What an assortment of mixed nuts! Most of them make sense, but…well…Helen Thomas? Does she actually write stuff? I thought she existed simply to rasp impertinent questions at White House press secretaries. And frighten small children. And annihilate erections.
I dug around Google for a while to see if anyone knows how Drudge chooses his links, but I didn’t find anything good. You can imagine how much pointless crap a search of “Drudge” and “links” turns up. I remember Free Republic lost their Drudge link for a long time, back in the days of their lawsuit with the Washington Post. They worked that out somehow; they’re back on the front page.
I wonder what a quarter million hits looks like, in plain monetary terms. I’m fuzzy on the concept (I couldn’t monetize this blog; it would ruin my color scheme). He could sell linkage, for all I know. He would be well within his rights to do so. Drudge has become such an institution, it’s easy to forget it’s just dude’s personal website and he can haul coal in it if he wants to.
This I do know: AndrewSullivan.com and his 280K hits a day goes directly to The Atlantic. Per the American Digest article I linked yesterday, The Atlantic is currently losing $5M a year. Ergo, Sullivan can be as balls-out, bug-fuck crazy as he likes, and the Atlantic will put up with it.
And don’t even think about trying to get Sullivan de-linked from Drudge. That much I did learn: Sullivan has crawled so far up Matt Drudge’s ass, Lemmiwinks couldn’t reach him.
September 16, 2008 — 9:47 am
Comments: 59
First rule of propaganda
First rule of sales, too: know your target.
The Obama team seems to be selling its product over and over again to hip young urbanites. Guys — you win! We concede that demographic! Good luck getting ’em to turn out on election day.
Now you need to go for a chunk of the rest of the electorate.
Strategically, there were so many things wrong with Obama’s so-called Still ad, which pokes fun at McCain for being too old and out of it to use email — even before it turned out John McCain actually lubim some email, but is too damaged from years of torture to type it himself.
As of today, the ad is still up. Which poses the brain hurty question: is it deliberate? Is this Team O’s concept of how you play political hardball?
Wow. When did the Stupid Party get so lucky, and the Evil Party get so stupid?
Take this picture, now. It’s an outtake from a cover shoot for the Atlantic (to think that magazine once published Mark Twain, back in the day when rumors of his demise were etctera). Not really an outtake, it’s the one the photographer wanted to use.
After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”
What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.
That, or they don’t give a shit. Look, sweetie, we aren’t confused about which party is running a scarred-up crusty old bastard and which nominated an attractive, innocent young puppy. Your job is much, much harder. You have to convince us that this crazy-evil angry old sonofabitch isn’t exactly the sort of thing we like in a president.
And remember: this is America we’re talking, not one of those pussy Yoorpian countries.
More on Jill Greenberg, the photographer who took that shot, from the American Digest. We’re classmates! (Well, not really — she went to RISD a decade after I did). In addition to taking a stealth gotcha! shot of McCain, she had some Photoshop Phun of her own with the outtakes. That goes beyond grossly unprofessional and flirts with actionable breach of contract. Here’s hoping you starve, Jill!
Update: Ace has a thread going on this. Someone in the comments, with the euphonious moniker Boobenfloppinschtoppin reminds us that Jill Greenberg is the photographer who caused controversy a couple of years ago for this:
So what is Jill Greenberg doing? She is taking babies, toddlers under three years old, stripping them of their clothes and then provoking them to various states of emotional distress, anger, rage etc. — so that she can then take photos of them this way to “illustrate her personal beliefs.”
Remember that? I sure do. The photographer/blogger quoted above, by the way, got the full liberal treatment for his pains: lies, smears, threats and calls to his boss. I revise and extend: Jill, here’s hoping you die in a fire!
UPUPDATE: by popular demand — aww, I’m just shitting you. Nobody demanded this, I just wanted to hear it again. I think I got ’em all: the complete cast of proposed male action characters from MST3K’s Space Mutiny:
[audio:bigmclargehuge.mp3]
September 15, 2008 — 7:32 am
Comments: 99
Photoshop Phun
Bonus weekend shameless partisan hackery! Click for rehue and uplargenment.
I’m not sure about the tagline. I mean, I think you should own your weaknesses whenever possible, but the double negative is a little brain-hurty.
Alternative: “Who’s bringing cool back to what, now?”
Moar.
I really hesitated over this one. It is, generally speaking, a really rotten idea to mention death within five miles of a presidential candidate. So please, dear respected members of the Secret Service, interpret the Valley Girl sentence structure as an amusing colloquialism and not a reference to actual mortality or even harm.
In conclusion, don’t lock up my ass. Thank you.
September 13, 2008 — 11:43 am
Comments: 76
In the market for a nice, long walk
It’s supposed to rain intermittently all weekend, but I’m not sure I care. Have you ever done that? Laced on your hiking boots and thought, “so what? If I get wet, I get wet.” It makes you feel all tingly and hardcore.
Which is important when you’re a pasty city woman of late middle age.
— 5:39 am
Comments: 11
It burrrrnnnnssss usssssssss
You know who really showed me something? Hillary Clinton, that’s who. I’m serial.
Her whole life was a preparation for this race. Big Feminist on Campus weds fat-face smarmy hick from Arkansas — Arkansas! Arkansas, man. There’s not even no crack-heads in Arkansas. She stoically squeezes out a kid to fluff her ‘regular jill’ resume (do you doubt it?) and plays First Lady of Upper Possumnuts until the unbearable weight of that fucking smile nearly breaks her.
Life is one humiliating kick in the crotch after another. Perpetual campaigning (for Him). Perpetual scandal. Always on guard. Always running. Always catching the shit and cleaning up the messes. And then finally…at long last…after sixty years of baking the fucking cookies — IT’S! HER! TURN!!!!!
And here comes Hopichangelo who totally steals her shit. OMGWTF???? Dude is practically jailbait. And then that moose-humping beauty queen elbows in on her first-woman-ever cred, the only thing that makes a Hillary candidacy special. Bitch stole her woman card!!!
We’ve all asked ourselves whether we could take the five years of torture and captivity that McCain survived (‘tsha! No). Could you take this? To have yearned and labored and suffered humiliations and chased one single prize for sixty long years, and just as your fingers close around it, it is slapped away. Could you put on the pants suit and the happy face and go out there and be a good trouper about it?
Nuh uh. Not me. Hillary Clinton is a better man than I.
September 12, 2008 — 10:43 am
Comments: 47