December 2010
50 posts
O' Daddy Be Gay
Judy Collins
“O’ Daddy Be Gay” - Judy Collins
I heard this on the radio yesterday. Are songs where cartoonish devils come to take people away, but are then gotten the better of the best? They may be.
The anti-novel
JW: I need a good ending sentence for this cover letter.
ML: Hm, how about…”And then, amid the hoarse and terrible roar of the one remaining jet engine, a peculiar peace drew over him. ‘It wasn’t such a bad way to go,’ he thought. ‘Bloodied and screaming.’”
ML: Will that do?
“The whole point of Christmas is for me to get loaded and eat a Thanksgiving’s worth of food every night for an entire month.”
—Drew Magary, who has a spot-on list of many other things Christmas would be better off without.
“Irregular wars like Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t decided by superior weaponry. If they were, we’d already have won both those wars about a million times over…Let’s take the best-case scenario and say that this new weapon, the XM25, makes every American infantry squad so lethal that the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents lose a huge number of men and can’t afford stand-up fights any more. What that would do is force an accelerated evolution in the same direction guerrilla war’s been evolving for more than 100 years: away from trying to fight the invading army on its own terms and toward assassination, bombs, betrayal—all the ways insurgents love to fight and conventional armies hate…Most of our GIs are not dying or being wounded in the kind of firefight the XM25 is designed to win. They’re dying in a much nastier way: getting blown up by remote control while they patrol rural Afghan dirt roads. And unfortunately, the only effect a gee-whiz weapon like the XM25 is likely to have is raising that figure closer to 100 percent.”
—Preach it to me, Brecher! As always Gary Brecher, War Nerd, slicing through the bullshit like a bullshit-slicing machine and examining the continued imbalance between hi-tech and lo-tech and how flashy go-go gadgetry isn’t always the fastest way to win asymmetrical conflicts.
12 Days of Christmas
According to PNC Wealth Management the cost of all the items in “The 12 Days of Christmas” has surged 9.2% this year to $23,439.38. The main drivers of the increase are: three French hens +233%, two turtle doves +79%, and five golden rings +30%. Four items stayed flat: the pear tree, four calling birds, six geese a laying, and eight maids a milking.
Who’d have guessed the price for a milk maid would hold steady in this economic environment? Also, shorting French hens on the year? SUCH A BAD CALL! This is what happens when your broker is an elf.
“Which is why, essentially, there were no war correspondents at the court of the King of Kings, no chroniclers of all his many victorious campaigns. From the point of view of Darius—and of his son and heir, Xerxes—history had been brought to a glorious close. The empire of the Persians was both its end and its summation—for what else could a dominion be that contained within itself all the limits of the horizon, if not the bulwark of a truly cosmic order?”
—
Tom Holland, “The Persian Way of War“ Lapham’s Quarterly (Winter 2008)
Wow, Persia…high opinion of yourself much? But can you imagine a state that had this much confidence in itself to the extent that it felt like it transcended history. Like, we are so great that the natural order is victory and anything other than that is a mere dip into unnatural disorder and thus is not worthy of record. The historiographical dispositions of different cultures is interesting and says a lot about how they viewed themselves and how they viewed time and space. Some took great pains to preserve their doings, whereas others, like the Persians, looked down their noses at the same process.
“Journalism serves an important function in supplying accessible and understandable information to a public who would otherwise not take the effort to investigate their world.”
—Gawker commenter OedipusMex
“Though we know the cinematic landscape is so blighted and toxic that everyone who wanders out into it is just asking to suffer, we have to totter out there eventually, hoping for a miracle.”
—Eileen Jones in her review of The Warrior’s Way
Russia in talks to adapt own version of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"
- It’s Always Overcast in Omsk
- It’s Always Bleak in Balakovo
Massively corrupt studio executives took time away from their usual work of fostering age-disparate relationships with young pop stars of their own making to deliberate the question of a name more suited to Russia. Previous hopes for internationally syndicated spinoff/adaptation foundered when a British vehicle, It’s Always Raining Quite Drearily in Driffield, tested poorly with a studio audience earlier this year.
And now a report from our World Sport desk...
ML: who got the world cup and when, again?
AC: russia 2018, qatar 2022
ML: russia is such a hot mess
AC: ya and qatar is hot, as in literally, 150 degrees in june
“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
—Margaret Thatcher (via marginsofmynotebook)
"And while America may be struggling with a lot of the things we used to do well, there is always this: We still have the party. We still have Daisy Dukes, beer bongs, credit-card debt, and pop culture that tells us how amazing it is to be a teenager. Our auto industry may not be what it once was, but give us some margarita mix and a radio and we shine." (via microwavecake) →
nymag.com
This music review, by way of its blown out intellectualism, sends us sprawling into the most erudite of KY jelly wrestling matches and causes us, in the midst of all that slippery skin, to briefly brush against the American soul.
“In America, there is New York, San Francisco and New Orleans and everywhere else is Cleveland.”
—
Mark Twain
Not entirely true, but well worth posting for the anti-Cleveland sentiment.
Overheard during reading week
Voice 1: God, I think am going to have a panic attack.
Voice 2: Don’t. Or if you do, make it spectacular.
“In a free society we’re supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it. This whole notion that Assange, who’s an Australian, that we want to prosecute him for treason. I mean, aren’t they jumping to a wild conclusion? This is media, isn’t it? I mean, why don’t we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?”
—Ron Paul spewing some hot hot truth on the unnecessary yet rabid furor over WikiLeaks. When people call WikiLeaks treasonous, it really depletes the value of the accomplishments of people like Benedict Arnold in that field.
Lil Wayne's Last Dance
It's Overture
“Lil Wayne’s Last Dance” - It’s Overture
“I just love musicians. They’re not all super-happy all the time, but when they’re playing they’re happy, and it’s such a beautiful thing. I also like them because they sleep late in the morning; they’re more like children.”
—David Lynch
