Fagistan

Tranströmer, More Than Meets The Eye!

2011-10-06T04:29:00.001-07:00

The Swedish Academy has risen from their icy catacombs once again to deliver unto us a new Nobelist.

Several years ago a member of the committee caused a riot (the literary kind, involving a lot of obscure adjectives marked DEROGATORY in the OED) by declaring that American writers do not deserve the Nobel Prize because we're all a bunch of self-indulgent whiners with no sense of cosmopolitanism. This year, to prove just how universal and global literature is, the Swedes chose the guy who lives down the street!

They've tapped Tomas Tranströmer, "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

That seems like a perfectly decent reason to win the Nobel Prize, and all kidding the Swedes for picking a Swede aside, he is a widely known, translated and admired poet. I don't read a tremendous amount of modern poetry that isn't written by people who have won the Nobel Prize so I haven't read much of his work and therefore I have neither quarrel with nor praise for the Academy this year. Sure, the guy seems to write a lot of nature poems, which I generally detest, but those images are pretty translucent!

Besides which, I'm not certain I could form an especially good opinion of his work anyway. Why? Because poetry is extremely difficult to translate. I posted a few months ago about the art of translation, and I think it goes without saying that poetry poses a lot of problems that prose does not. There are so many structural issues to consider -- rhyme schemes, metrical feet, marginal shape, poetic sound, etc. Yes, prose writers have a voice posessing most of these qualities, too. Getting an author's voice is hard, y'all. But poetry is a whole 'nother ball of wax.

For example, I'm currently reading Breon Mitchell's recent-ish translation of "The Tin Drum", a "fresh translation" sponsored by Gunther Grass (he invited translators in various languages to stay with him in the area the novel takes place, which is sort of like a Tower of Babel Summercamp!) that is at least intended to improve upon the Ralph Mannheim translation. Here is Mannheim's translation of the opening sentence:

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there is a peephole in the door and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

.. . and here is Mitchell's:

Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can't see through blue-eyed types like me.

Mitchell's has a certain informal flow to it, is more visceral and immediate, but basically these are the same sentence, tweaked slightly. Now, as is often the case with older books, Grass says this new translation is better in part because it includes material that American publishers were squeamish about including when it was first released. So, that's a fundamental difference between the texts. But in terms of the material both people translated, it's very, very similar.

Now take a poem by Mr. Tranströmer in two different translations, both of which are, strangely, the work of Scottish men named Robin, so don't get confused! The two translators do not even agree upon a title. Robin Fulton gives us "Loneliness (1)":

One evening in February I came near to dying here.
The car skidded sideways on the ice, out
on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars---
their lights---closed in.

My name, my girls, my job
broke free and were left silently behind
further and further away. I was anonymous
like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

The approaching traffic had huge lights.
They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel
in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.
The seconds grew---there was space in them---
they grew big as hospital buildings.

You could almost pause
and breathe out for a while
before being crushed.

Then a hold caught: a helping grain of sand
or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free
and scuttled smartly right over the road.
A post shot up and cracked---a sharp clang---it
flew away in the darkness.

Then---stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt
and saw someone coming through the whirling snow
to see what had become of me.

And Robin Robertson prefers "Solitude (I)":

I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.

My name, my girls, my job, all
slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
further and further away. I was a nobody:
a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.

The headlights of the oncoming cars
bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
The seconds grew and grew – making more room for me –
stretching huge as hospitals.

I almost felt that I could rest
and take a breath
before the crash.

Then something caught: some helpful sand
or a well-timed gust of wind. The car
snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
spinning away in the darkness.

And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt
and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
to see what was left of me.

Start with the title: in English, "loneliness" and "solitude" are two very different, if somewhat related, concepts. Perhaps neither title is entirely adequate to convey the meaning of the Swedish title, but the results are two poems that from the onset present very different emotional worlds.

The first stanza is the best example of their different techniques -- Fulton's is jagged and abrupt and has a physical form similar to the events it describes. Robertson's version is more peaceful and dreamlike. I have no idea what Tranströmer intended, but the two translations are, for all intents and purposes, two entirely different poems!

I realize that it's just a matter of picking a translator you like and going with it, but with poetry always wonder if I like the poet or the translator -- or if there's even a meaningful difference.

Let me know if you have any good advice for reading foreign poetry, litfags!

Fashion Experts Agree: Jail Too Fancy For Sweatshirts

2011-07-07T02:17:00.000-07:00

A lady in South Carolina called 911 to request the cops come and arrest her because her husband wanted her to go to jail. "Because, basically, I slapped him this morning because he won't have sex with me and hasn't had sex with me in a couple of months, so I slapped him across the face and he wants me to go to jail."

When the dispatcher requests she remain at her neighbor's until the cops arrive she protests: "No honey, I'm in a sweatshirt and boxer shorts."

However, what makes this story truly genius is that when the officers arrive the husband insists his wife never slapped him and that she made it up because she just wanted to go to jail. Like, just for fun? Musta been pizza night! Fancy dress only, please!

Mario Kourt

2011-06-27T23:54:00.000-07:00

At long last, fags and fagesses, the Supreme Court has handed down its decision in Brown v. EMA (a case the Court heard so long ago that it magically changed names! At oral arguments last fall it was still Schwarzenegger v. EMA) the violent video games case.

Last year, you may recall, the Court struck down a law that banned the sale of "crush videos" (they're gross, Google them yourselves, pervs!) on the basis that there is no free speech exemption for depictions of animal cruelty. And it's this ruling that California had to try most strenuously to overcome. I mean, if videos of ladies using their high heels to crush mice to death is protected then it's kind of hard to ban . . . okay, let's be honest here, I'm not cool enough to know any of the names of actual violent video games, except Grand Theft Auto, and surely the genre has advanced? So, here's the deal: When I say "Mortal Kombat" you change it in your brain to an actual relevant video game that you know about because you're a fucking nerd who gets a nerdboner while raping pixel ladies, okay?

California tries to get around this by saying that standards are different for minors (a key piece of yet another case) but, as Scalia pointed out then and in the today's opinion, that case dealt with obscenity: a class of speech that is wholly unprotected. There is some sort of half-hearted attempt to claim that violence is obscene, but that's not going to get one very far at One First.

And so, the Court delivered a FATALITY (ha ha ha ha) to California's law. Scalia, joined by all the ladies (even Anthony Kennedy!), delievered the opinion while Alito (who I really thought would vote to uphold the law) and the Chief filed a concurrence while Thomas and Breyer dissented.

You can read the opinion, and really you should, because while hardly as amazing as it could be, it's pretty great stuff. I mean, this part, in which Scalia attacks an argument made by Alito (who concurred in the judgment!) is wonderfully snide and hilarious and it's buried in a footnote!:

[Alito points out that] the “crush-video” statute at issue there might pass muster if it were limited to videos of acts of animal cruelty that violated the law where the acts were performed. There is no contention that any of the virtual characters depicted in the imaginative videos at issue here are criminally liable.

He also writes a brilliant and lengthy footnote tearing apart Justice Thomas for his view that minors possess no First Amendment rights at all.

But the best section of Scalia's opinion is his thorough and masterful demolition of the idea that our culture has historically restricted minors' access to depictions of violence. He starts off with Cinderella's stepsisters getting their eyes pecked out and then on to the AP English syllabus with relentless emphasis on the gore and guts:

Homer’s Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. (“Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame”). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they beskewered by devils above the surface. And Golding’s Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other children while marooned on an island.

Next he tackles California's argument that "interactivity" makes video games special. And that's when Scalia trots out a reference to his very favorite book:

The latter feature is nothing new: Since at least the publication of The Adventures of You: Sugar-cane Island in 1969, young readers of choose-your-own-adventure stories have been able to make decisions that determine the plot by following instructions about which page to turn to.

But, lurking behind all this talk of warped minds, desensitization to violence and interactivity, is a much more real threat to the First Amendment. And, seizing upon Justice Alito's lengthy description of what Scalia calls "disgusting video games", he lets loose with what I think might be one of the best denunciations of the anti-video game crowd ever penned by a dude in his 70s:

But it does arouse the reader’s ire, and the reader’s desire to put an end to this horrible message. Thus, ironically, JUSTICE ALITO’s argument highlights the precise danger posed by the California Act: that the ideas expressed by speech—whether it be violence, or gore, or racism—and not its objective effects, may be the real reason for governmental proscription.

And he has scant patience for the "research" showing children react violently after being exposed to depictions of violence:

One study, for example, found that children who had just finished playing violent video games were more likely to fill in the blank letter in “explo_e” with a “d” (so that it reads “explode”) than with an “r” (“explore”). App. 496, 506 (internal quotation marks omitted). The prevention of this phenomenon, which might have been anticipated with common sense, is not a compelling state interest.

The dissenters, and Alito in his concurrence, really got nothing compared to Scalia's sweeping and unrelenting attacks. But that passage of Alito's Scalia was referring to really is pretty awesome. If I was the producer of violent video games I'd use it in my ads!

Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy. Blood gushes, splatters, and pools. Severed body parts and gobs of human remains are graphically shown. In some games, points are awarded based, not only on the number of victims killed, but on the killing technique employed.

New this Fall from VideoFag, creators of "Supreme Court Bloodbath" and "Sexy Prison Torture Pit" comes "By The Dozens" . . . Justice Alito raves: "Blood gushes, splatters and pools!"

PS: I couldn't quite find a way to slide this excellent quote into the above post, but it's one of my favorites! Echoing Sontag's famous statement that "if I must choose between Dostoevsky and the Doors, of course I choose Dostoevsky", Scalia writes in footnote 4: "Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat.But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones."

Anonymosity

2011-03-11T01:20:00.000-08:00

As a blogger who has always used his real name, despite the sometimes dubious content I post, I applaud Farhad Manjoo's anti-anonymity manifesto on Slate. I agree with him on every point, so I won't say much other than to tell you to read his piece. But I will say that I find the privacy argument especially laughable. We live in a world where privacy as a value, much less a right, has been so thoroughly undermined that it seems silly to offer up as an argument in virtually any context, but as an argument in favor of anonymous comments it's even worse. After all, no one is required to post comments in any online forum. We step into that public role willingly and unnecessarily. If a comment is important enough to post, it's important enough to own up to. When, long ago, Mr. Manjoo worked for Salon, I wrote a post here on Fagistan about an article he wrote that ended with the (only slightly regrettable) invocation, "I hate you, Farhad Manjoo!" This led to a rather interesting series of comments, posts and e-mails between myself at Manjoo that made me quite happy. But even had this not happened, at least Farhad always knew who was slinging the hate!

That being said, Fagistan, defying its reputation as an oppressive and cruel regime, has always allowed anonymous comments. I don't intend to change this (for one thing, my options here are limited mostly to sign-in systems that are easily anonymized) because, while I can't say that anonymity adds all that much to the forum, it doesn't really detract either. For one thing, in my hay-day I drew a couple of hundred views a day, and only a tiny fraction of them commented on anything at all. On those rare occasions when a Big Blog picked up my post, I received a lot more traffic but not a tremendous increase in comments. I'm amazed by the number of people willing to use a name, presumably their own, in posting things about me getting AIDS or having my urethra packed with feces. I also recognize that some of my faithful readers (if there are any left after so long an exile!) prefer a slight bit of anonymity to protect their jobs, and since I consider them part of a community of smart people I enjoy receiving comments from, I prefer to risk the occasional 5,000 word rant about Beth Twitty's plastic surgery to shutting them off altogether.

So keep on posting secretly, even if it makes you a total fuckwad!

Faithful Spouses Are Basically Terrorists

2011-03-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

Politicians are known for coming up with comical excuses for their behaviors. Like, remember when Tom DeLay said he couldn't fight in Vietnam, because all those great jobs were taken by black people? Well, let's add Newt Gingrich to the list.

In an interview with some guy from CBN, Newt discussed his extramarital affairs and offered this excuse:

There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.

So, what you're telling us, Professor Gingrich, is that your deep passionate love for this country exploded inside the vagina of a woman who wasn't your wife? You were just so hopped up on America that you couldn't help but violate the sacred vows you made to your [second] wife? That the American public should thank you for loving us so much you were Constitutionally required to get laid?

For years now I've been begging politicians to ditch the Cosmos Made Me Do It defense for extramarital poundage. Well, Newt, you've answered my prayers! Surely the American people will rejoice to know you did it all for the good of the nation. And on the bright side: no rehab!

While the highlight of this interview was clearly the Patriotism Made Me Fingerbang Her part, there's another interesting passage as he discusses his relationship with The Man Upstairs:

I do feel, in that sense, that God has given me, has blessed me with an opportunity as a person. Forget about all this political stuff. As a person, I’ve had the opportunity to have a wonderful life, to find myself now, truly enjoying the depths of my life in ways that I never dreamed it was possible to have a life that was that nice.

This might appear to be standard Christian-politician boilerplate, but please consider the context. What is the "opportunity" God gave him? Presumably, his nice life has something to do with his children [via Mrs. Gingrich the First] and his latest wife. So, it seems impossible to read this as anything but an affirmation that God let him commit the sin of adultery -- over and over again! -- because it would allow him to live a nice life. This goes pretty far beyond a "forgiving God" and all the way into a libertine God who doesn't even give a shit about adultery as long as it makes you happy!

Okay, sure, God has, at various times in Biblical history, totally approved of men having multiple wives. He even let Abraham have sex with a woman who wasn't his wife, but only because Sarah was barren -- the fact that he "opened" Sarah's womb later on only makes this one of the great examples in the Bible of God making no sense even on his own terms. But the modern Christian Right would have us believe that God really cares about marriage, and that monogamous heterosexual marriage is the only kind of sexual relationship God approves us. And yet here he's given Newt three consecutive wives just so he could have a nice life!

But God still disapproves of gay marriage. So, I guess that means we don't deserve nice lives!

Professor Uppercut v. Some Idiot

2011-03-10T00:50:00.000-08:00

In other cruelty-to-animals news: a math professor in Minnesota punched Goldy Gopher in the face, damaging the poor little loser's mask. If he were any kind of real gopher he'd have chewed the fuck out of the professor's kneecaps! But no, he just goes whining to the cops! What a terrible gopher!

Also, this happened at a gymnastics meet.

I'll Give You Something To Cry About!

2011-03-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

Quiz Time: So you're a nineteen year old woman and, for reasons unknown to us, but for which you should probably seek some sort of therapy, you get into a "dispute" with your nine year old neighbor. Maybe she really pissed you off (that's what being nine is all about!) What is the proper way to resolve this conflict?

A) Walk away, because, come on, you're fighting with a little kid!
B) Make a training bra joke, because that's hiilarious!
C) Calmly reason with her, pretending that you are an adult.
D) Yank on her stupid, ugly ponytail.
E) Challenge her to a wicked jump-rope-off.
F) Kill her pets!

If you answered F, you are correct:

According to authorities, Smith killed the hamster with her hands and threw the pet across the street during a dispute with the owner. The hamster belonged to a 9-year-old child.

Oh, but it gets so much better. Because this hamster got the full-on Crossing Jordan treatment:

Results of a necropsy at ASPCA's Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital revealed that the hamster had suffered blunt force trauma, liver damage and an associated hemorrhage.

I'm glad they pinpointed the exact cause of death! After all, without this groundbreaking necropsy it would be possible to believe the hamster just died of old age while flying through the air!

President Safe From Ice Skating Assassins

2011-03-07T06:09:00.000-08:00

Or is he?

Sure, the Secret Service beat the FBI in their annual ice hockey game, but the score was 7-6. You'd think an organization dedicated to defending the leader of the free world could find a better goalie!

Walker Sucks Koch

2011-03-07T01:34:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a household where, though the UFW's grape boycott ended in 1970, a decade before I was born, I didn't eat a grape until I started school. Unionism, labor activism and the vital necessity of solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world was the closest thing to a religion I ever had. Of course, like many people, I could never quite swallow my utopian socialist father's teachings whole. Despite brief, college-and-whiskey fueled flirtations (complete with college-and-whiskey fueled heavy petting and premature ejaculation) with Communism, Maoism (apparently, there's an audio recording somewhere out there of me declaring, "Mao was totally hot!"), anarchism, syndicalism and just general, you know, like, radicalism, man!, I've emerged from the other end a pretty traditional liberal.

But on the issue of unions, Father Gibson and I will always agree. Unions are good for workers, they're good for business and they remain virtually the only force standing between working people and utter serfdom. If America is a great nation, as I believe it is, the labor movement deserves a very big chunk of the credit.

All of which means that every image and story about the beautiful protests in Wisconsin fills my heart with love and awe and joy. And the fact that the brother of one of my most loyal and cruel warlords is a Wisconsin teacher only doubles these emotions.

In a way, it's a strange feeling. I don't like protests. The last one I went to ended with a baby getting pepper-sprayed in the face, which, though clearly hilarious, was also so symbolic of the ways in which protesters, counter-protesters and the police all behave like stupid fucking assjammers that I just left feeling sick and dazed. And not just by the tear gas.

And over the last couple of years our chief images of protests have come from the Tea Party rallies, with all their bizarre antics and wild-eyed demon-creatures and Michelle Malkins.

As a pretty typical overthinking intellectual, this troubles me. Is it simply a matter of bias: that because I disagree with the Tea Partiers they seem completely insane and high on PCP? Or does my natural affection for unions and big, sweaty, sexy Teamsters blind me to the same hysteria in a slightly different pitch?

But I think the answer to both questions is no. The biggest difference between these two movements is that the Tea Party just seems to be angry, like, in general. "Jesus Christ, we're just ragin', okay?!" It's an inchoate, disturbed sort of movement, the kind of shapeless anger at "the Government and stuff" that, while probably as necessary to cultural and political health as lancing a super nasty boil is to physical health, is most useless.

But in Wisconsin we see brave and hopeful and angry people standing up for something real, specific and vital. Governor Walker's attack on collective bargaining rights for public employees, while cloaked in something approaching a vague resemblance to something we might generously describe as reasonable, strikes at the very hard of more than a century's worth of struggle to make our world more fair and to return to workers some share of the wealth they create. To let the government destroy one union is to let it destroy them all. And that, dear friends, is not something this demented and syphilitic despot is willing to let happen.

Already Walker's popularity is dropping, his attempts to blame the unions for the budget crisis are failing and if those threatened layoffs come to pass it is the governor who deserves the blame.

So keep it at it, all you beautiful motherfuckers in Wisconsin!

Solidarity!

PS: this was supposed to be a humorous and light-hearted post about all the Koch-inspired signage in Madison. The title of the post comes from a sign witnessed by David Weigel, who has a very fine piece of the context of non-violence in labor rallies, and the relative difficulty of filming gotcha moments at them, in Slate. Somewhere else, I think on the aforementioned teacher-friend's Facebook page, I saw another sign reading "Scott Walker is high on Koch." The latter of these signs is more likely to have been penned by an English teacher, since it preserves the Koch brothers' preferred pronunciation, but y'all know that I'm the kind of guy who refers to former New York Mayor Ed Koch as "the Kochsucker", so pronunciation is never a bar to me making dicksucking jokes.

Atlas Took A Dump

2011-03-03T23:27:00.000-08:00

Are all you fags and fagesses ready for the nationwide release of the Club For Growth funded film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged?

No? Atlas isn't the only person who can shrug, you say?

Okay, fine. But David Weigel saw it and claims it's not bad. Although his definition of "not bad" involves a comparison to Syfy Channel monster movies. Unless John Galt is a 50 foot CGI mosquito flying through the skies while Dagny and Hank make wild, uninhibited, pure and reasonable love upon his back, I can't imagine this qualifies as "not bad." [the best bit of Weigel's review is the horrified reaction of one audience member at Mr. Rearden's hair: "Rearden would never have a faux-hawk!"]

And, I'm sorry, but I actually read this book. The idea of having to sit through two hours of what promises to be only "Part I" of this riveting story of boring rich people sitting around board rooms clenching their jaws and railing against looters is really too much for me to handle.

Also, can you imagine the odor of the theater? You know that smell that strikes you in the face like the fist of Atlas himself when you step into the cavernous science fiction room at Powell's Books? That mixture of burning hair, unwashed skin, decaying 1960s paperbacks and acne-pus? It would be exactly like that but worse, because there'd be teenage economists there, too. If there's a species of nerd that is most likely to smell terrible, it's surely the Randian, so full of his awkward and simplistic interpretations of her meaningless and empty philosophy that both social skill and basic hygiene escape him entirely. I'm gagging just thinking about it!

While reading stuff about this groundbreaking movie I ran across this funny quote that seems to have no proper attribution, but is clearly the truest thing ever written about Ayn Rand's masterpiece:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Maybe John Galt was an orc?

In any event, what I really wanted to talk about is the title of this novel. Atlas Shrugged is, without doubt or reservation, one of the great titles for any novel ever. Its evocation of utter destruction brought on by a mere indifferent shrug is beautiful. It carries with it the entirety of Rand's philosophy: that the world is held upon the shoulders of great men and that if we antagonize these great men with taxes and regulations they will simply walk away, letting the world come crashing down. So great a title is it, that the actual novel is rendered redundant, meaningless and impotent. I can't think of another title that even comes close to the thorough destruction "Atlas Shrugged" rains down upon its text.

Which brings me to the one big problem I have with the title. It doesn't quite mean what people seem to think. The image is of Atlas shrugging and walking away, the Earth falling down (from a cosmological perspective it's hard to imagine what this would actually entail, even under Greek cosmology), shattering into ruin and rubble as if struck by a world-wide earthquake. But, of course, Atlas does not hold up the Earth. He holds up the heavens. If he dropped them, huge fiery meteors would come crashing down into the Earth, burning it away.

Now, one could certainly argue that this hardly changes the metaphor: in both cases, Atlas's indifference causes the collapse of civilization. And that's true. But I'd argue that there's a very different cant to plummeting Earths and plummeting heavens. The earthquake is a metaphor for social unrest and revolution, the earth itself rising up against its oppressors. The sky falling carries with it, for me at least, a sense of oppression from on high. It seems more willful, more vengeful, less a matter of "going on strike" than a matter of holocaust. The John Galts of the world (who are, of course, plutocrats and tyrants, not great heroes) come off not quite so well with this image.

Which suits me just fine. There's no reason to led mythological fidelity interfere with a great title, especially when the result is even better when you know the truth about what, exactly, Atlas was balancing on his sexy, objectivist shoulders.

The Art of Translation

2011-03-03T03:14:00.000-08:00

Translators of foreign fiction are usually thought of, even in critical circles, as craftsmen. A good translator's work is as fine and precise as a stone wall or a basket. Beautiful, perhaps, but essentially defined by its function. A bad translator's work sprouts leaks and crumbles into ruin. Art is a term we use only for the underlying text. Dostoevsky is a great artist. Constance Garnett just serves her master.

I'm reading "Fathers and Sons" (in my view, the best of the nineteenth century Russian novels) in Mrs. Garnett's translation and, while I find some of her work rather crude, it's got me to thinking about the role this woman, whose name is probably not even known to a good number of Russian literature fans, played in shaping and creating Russian literature as it is known in English. Russian is one of the great modern European national literatures, alongside English, German and French. And yet it's quite possible that had Garnett not devoted her life to translating dozens of Russian works into English (most of them for the very first time, and including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol, Pushkin), Russian might never have attained that glorified status in the English-speaking world. At the very least it would have done so rather later.

What does this make Constance Garnett? Is she not, in her own way, a great and visionary artist, even in her failures? Do we not, as lovers of Anna Karenina and Raskolnikov and Nina Zarechnaya and Eugene Onegin, owe as much to Constance Garnett as we do to the great Russians themselves?

Of course, Garnett is relatively famous, and her vast influence is lost neither on her detractors nor her admirers. Two differing views of Garnett that both speak to her unique and groundbreaking impact on literature.

From Sontag's essay on translation, "The World as India":

Question: Who is the greatest Russian writer of the nineteenth century?
Answer: Constance Garnett.

And Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in a very interesting New Yorker article on Garnett and translation:

The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.

Naturally, Garnett's fiercest detractors have often been Russians, especially those like Brodsky who were living in America where they could not avoid her translations. [A situation that has been largely remedied in recent decades by many "fresh" translations of nearly all of these writers.] So, let me leave my little ode to Mrs. Garnett with this typically hilarious and nasty jibe from Nabokov, regarding Gogol:

“I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit."

SCOTUS Scrotus: Is Speech Only Free When It's Free?

2010-01-22T00:48:00.000-08:00

Hey, fags and fagesses, remember me?

No?

Fuck you!

So what's made me come slinking out of my urine-soaked hole in the ground? Romneybot 2.0's surprising victory in Massachusetts? Nope! [Though I will say: Martha Coakley would probably have made a fine Senator, but my general impulse is to weep at the Democratic Party attempting to replace Ted Kennedy with a woman who used high profile criminal cases with shaky (at best) evidence and a great deal of prosecutorial overzealousness, to build her career.]

The incredibly weird "crisis" the Democratic Party faces over losing one little Senate seat? Nope! [Though I will say: fucking pussies!]

My deep and perverse glee at watching Obama flounder his way to utter political irrelevancy while all the progessive cocksucking pantyboys who called me an idiot for even suggesting that Obama a) wasn't very liberal and b) wasn't up to the task now gnash their teeth and curse Obama's "betrayal"? Nope! [Though I will say: the only person who betrayed all you pantyboys is your own damn deluded self!]

No no, it's the SCOTUS of course!

They Court just released their opinion in the Citizens United/"Hillary: The Movie" [can't wait for the Squeakuel!] case. And this provides me a perfect opportunity to wax all bombastic and nasty and triumphant on one of my more controversial legal stances.

Slate, as one would expect, fires off not one but two articles denouncing the Court as "activist" Satan-worshippers sacrificing great mounds of babies (plus a bunch of red hot corporate cash!) to Ba'al and Mammon.

Well, I ain't buyin' it!

Although it's hardly one of the topics I used to blog about constantly, I'm sure a good number of my sexy and astute readers will remember that I have never been a fan of campaign finance reform in general and McCain-Feingold in particular.

Here's the thing. Liberals are supposed to like campaign finance reform. It's just, well, liberal! Right? [The fact that corporate money tends, on aggregate, to flow in only one rightward direction has absolutely nothing to do with our incredibly principled stand for democracy!]

But, is it?

On the question of whether or not campaign finance reforms are good policy there is room for disagreement. Surely some reforms are good. But a very cursory examination of the history of such efforts proves only one thing: it's a losing game. PACs are widely reviled as engines of "soft money" and backdoor corporate financing. But guess what? PACs were invented as a campaign finance reform! I'd argue that the overall impact of such reforms has been to make elections worse by forcing out almost any truly interesting candidate while simultaneously doing nothing to stem the total amount of corporate cash flooding the election system. Having failed so profoundly in the previous half dozen or so attempts at "cleaning up" the electoral system, we remain faithful to the idea that the next time we're gonna get it right! Uh-huh. And hiring Pete Carroll's gonna win the Seahawks the Super Bowl next year!

But that's a policy standpoint and not one our Nasty Nine have any business considering. In regards to whether or not John Roberts is the judicial equivalent of a child rapist, the only question is whether or not McCain-Feingold is unconstitutional.

And the answer is a complete and absolute yes.

A lot of ink and outrage will be spilled over the Court's conflation of corporations and "people", and I can't say I'm entirely on board with the Court's various corporate personhood precedents. But on this issue, I'm not sure how the Court could avoid such a stance. It strikes me as borderline insane to suggest that rights any individual possesses cease to exist when that person joins a group -- whether that group is a book club, a riot, a union or a corporation. When it comes to determining whether or not corporations have a right to free speech it's impossible not to remember that a corporation is simply a group of people coming together for a common purpose.

Sure, I'm not surprised that the same people who argue with a straight face (and not nearly enough endemic diarrhea) that the Second Amendment applies only to "groups" would also argue that the First Amendment applies only to individuals (unless the group in question is an anti-Bush protest!) but it still bothers me.

But the thing that should give even the most hard-hearted foes of Corporate Imperialism pause is the motherfucking devastating scope of McCain-Feingold. We aren't just talking about corporations. Unions get swept up in the net too. And on top of that, the law is explicitly designed for one purpose: to limit political speech during an election. You know I ain't no Originalist, so the "political speech as especially protected" argument doesn't go too far with me, but nonetheless this scheme seems like exactly the kind of thing that should scare us shitless.

Liberals actually want to argue that Congress has the power to shut-down the exercise of political opinions at the very moment those opinions are most vital?

"Well, no!" Cries the censor-in-progressive's clothing. "We just don't think you should be able to spend money to express your opinion!"

So, speech is only free when it's free?

Don't make me punch your nuts. Because you know I will!

There is almost no way to spread a political opinion widely in our culture without spending money. And the line here is way, way too slippery for any lover of liberty to accept.

What, after all, even is corporate money? In the "Hillary: The Movie" case, the producers of the film paid a cable provider to make the film available on demand. This, those who have already argued that we should spend the 60 days before an election with no access to any political information say, is the crux of the issue, distinguishing it from, say, HBO paying for a documentary and then airing it. But the cycle of the money (from corporations to producers to TV or corporations to TV to producers) is a pretty flimsy basis.

This is especially true when the government itself argued, openly and brazenly, that McCain-Feingold gave them the power to stop the publication of books and even websites! Do you trust the government enough to give them that kind of power? Almost all major blogs are funded by corporate money, one way or another. Newspapers are all funded by corporate money. What about political Hollywood films? Radio shows?

McCain-Feingold asserts that the government has the power, even the duty, to stop certain forms of political speech for our own good. That assertion is so deeply repugnant to the principle, spirit and letter of the First Amendment and to the entire project of American liberty that it cannot be supported. Certainly not by any real liberal. What's the greater evil? Corporately financed documentaries or the evisceration of the First Amendment's most vital function?

I know where I stand.

Now, back to my stinking cave.

High School Musical 4

2009-11-04T11:49:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I went through this phase of watching bad high school musical theater on YouTube. As somehow who sings so poorly I only ever acted in one musical in high school, I certainly have sympathy for how much effort these poor souls put into the work and yet . . . if there's anything more thrilling than brilliant musical theater it's atrociously awful musical theater.

And this little gem has to win some sort of Awful High School Musical lifetime achievement award, even considering what a terrible idea it is to have high school students from a place called "Blacklick" to attempt Les Mis. You know things are going south when the cast is less intelligible during the portions of the song where everyone's singing the same frickin' words! And, seriously . . . Marius? If the only semi-decent singer in the cast wasn't already playing Eponine, I'd say you were woefully miscast!

And for those of you who are interested in hearing how this song actually sounds:

Ted Kennedy, R.I.P.

2009-08-25T23:28:00.000-07:00

Even after a year-long illness as serious as brain cancer, it's hard to wrap my mind (let alone heart) around the fact that Ted Kennedy is dead. In our liberal, Irish, post-Catholic family, Teddy was a hero, the great roaring lion standing in defense of everything we believed. He was also, of course, a more complicated person than that idolatry suggests.

I'm not talking about the drinking, or the the dead girl, or even the weight of grief and expectation that should have crushed him. Rather, I'm talking about the unlikeliness of it all. He wasn't Jack or Bobby. He was supposed to be the weakest, the least smart and charismatic, the laziest and least ambitious. But after his brothers' deaths, Ted Kennedy emerged as the most successful and powerful Senator in the modern landscape. The invocation of his name alone could raise more money for Republicans than anything else, even as he quietly and doggedly compromised his way to major legislation. He became the righteous champion of liberalism without ever become the self-righteous, self-destructive Senator so many before him had.

And he seemed, somehow, enduring, indestructible. His booming Irish voice has always been there when we needed it most. To imagine it silenced so completely, after months of hoping he could muster the strength for one more charge of the cavalry, is impossible. We've lost a great Senator, but we have also lost the jolly, grandfatherly patriarch of our party and our ideals.

And who will take his place?

Confirmed!

2009-08-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate today in a 68-31 vote!

I don't now why I even bothered with the "!" about, since a 60-member Democratic caucus had assured her of confirmation from the start. But it's still nice to know that she'll be on the bench when the Court convenes at an abnormally early hearing in September.

But just a note on the vote breakdown: I realize that both political parties prefer to blame the other for the hyperpolitical mess that is the modern confirmation process. Democrats blocked Bush nominees! But Republican wouldn't even give Clinton nominees a vote in Committee! But Republicans confirmed Ginsburg virtually unopposed despite what Democrats did to Bork and Thomas! But Reagan nominated Bork in the first place! Really, the blame lies with all parties concerned -- and although Bork was the watershed moment, I'd say that the real trouble started brewing perhaps as far back as the 60s, perhaps with the nomination of Thurgood Marshall but certainly by the nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice. His withdrawal was followed by two consecutive rejections of Nixon nominees. It just took a while for the culture to adapt to the new reality. Presidents consider politics in choosing judges. Therefore it was only a matter of time before the Senate decided to consider politics too. And, in my view, that's absolutely appropriate. I don't agree with Senator Graham and his "elections have consequences" view. Yes, a president should have the Cabinet he wants, but when it comes to a coequal and independent branch of the government, I think it's vital that the Senate play an active role in both advice and consent.

Still, I gotta say that the whole "we confirmed Ginsburg practically unanimously" argument has just been flushed down the toilet. During the hearings, various Republicans talked about how they felt Democrats treated John Roberts poorly. But when the vote came down, an absolute majority of the Democratic caucus voted to confirm (the vote was 23-22 among Democrats). This was, of course, a product of Roberts himself but also of the basic facts of reality. In replacing Rehnquist, very few nominees could possibly be worse than their predecessor from the Democratic perspective. So, why not be magnanimous?

But, when confronted with a nearly identical situation -- Souter is deeply reviled by virtually all Republicans and has become in recent years one of the most fiery members of the liberal bloc, and he was being replaced by a liberal woman -- not even one in four Republicans voted to confirm. Democrats were able not only to survive, but to triumph, in the wake of voting to confirm Roberts. The Republican machine is so hostile to even judicious moderates like Sotomayor that not one of the nine Republicans who voted to confirm her are up for re-election in 2010.

Whoever started this fight, it's clear that the Republicans are the sorest losers.

It's Wednesday And I'm Offended!

2009-08-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

By Toby Keith's new song!

Now, I realize this is the guy who has had a number of hits in the Patriotic American genre. These songs aren't offensive to me, per se, they're just generally stupid, pandering and shallow. When Keith stays away from politics and patriotism he's capable of some pretty good songs (by far the best is his Willie Nelson collabo-fabbo "Beer For My Horses", though "As Good As I Once Was" is a rather clever song about getting old) but when he doesn't the results are usually disastrous. Either overly sentimental and chock-a-block full of cliches ("American Soldier") or childish and loutish ("Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue").

But nothing really compares, for sheer nonsense, with "American Ride." Boiled down to basics, this song is Michelle Malkin's website transformed into song. Which makes it the "We Didn't Start The Fire" of right-wing wackiness. Toby Keith, Michelle Malkin and Billy Joel rolled into one? Even that is less offensive to me than some of the weird archaisms ("spilled hot coffee made a million dollars" seems to me only to prove that the anti-litigation crowd still haven't managed to find more than one example of a truly absurd lawsuit), fogey-ish denunciations of technology ("Kids on the YouTube learnin how to be cool.")and inexplicable sexism ("Momma gets her rocks off watchin' Desperate Housewives/Daddy works his can off paying for the good life.")

And even then it's not worth getting offended over. But I'm still offended. Which lyrics do you think I find most offensive?

1. "Winter gettin colder, summer gettin warmer/Tidal wave comin cross the Mexican border."

2. "Both ends of the ozone burnin. Funny how the world keeps turnin."

3. "Look ma, no hands. /I love this American ride."

Anyone who knows me at all well is likely to select 3, at leat if they've actually listened to the song. 1 and 2 are offensive all right, particularly taken together (seriously? Immigration is a going to destroy American but global warming is no big whoop?). But 3 drives me crazy for very simple poetic reasons.

Keith rhymes hands with American. There's no conceivable way these two words even form a slant rhyme. So Keith pronounces the last syllable of American as if it were a can of soup. Seriously weak, dude. On top of that, Keith, probably out of some sense of the inherent pansiness of complex rhyme schemes, employs an internal rhyme but then sweeps it under the rug by overpronouncing CAN (just to drill it into our head that these two non-rhyming words somehow do rhyme)and the taking a gigantic pause before saying "ride."

Ugh. Jingoism, nativism, scientific ignorance, hostility to the courts, women sitting around watching TV while their husbands work all day, YouTube corrupting our children's minds, bad singers with record deals, the War on Christmas? No, none of that bothers me half so much as Toby Keith's lack of poetic flair.

Party n' Play With Jeff and Pat (and maybe Sonia too!)

2009-07-17T00:30:00.001-07:00

Greatest quote in the history of SCOTUS nomination hearings? You be the judge!

From the original transcripts and not from the Fagistani translation:

JEFF SESSIONS: Senator Leahy and I are talking, during these hearing, we're going to do that crack cocaine thing that you and I have talked about before.

And the video in case you don't believe me:

Snarlin' Arlen and Stoic Sonia

2009-07-16T01:07:00.000-07:00

It always amazes me that these poor nominees are capable of making it through their hearings at all. There has to come a certain point when they think to themselves, "is a lifetime on the Supreme Court really worth listening to Lindsay Graham's whiny condescension for another twelve hours?" I wonder how often in the last week Judge Sotomayor has considered tape-recording her answers to questions about Wise Latinas and Dyslexic Honkies, concealing the tapedeck in her cleavage, and just hitting play when Senator X asks her the same question a fortieth time.

Still, today's hearing was actually more interesting than yesterday's. As a result of seniority and accident, many of the best questioners come at the end of the line, including a former chairman named Arlen Specter who has been subjected to the indignity of being senior only to Al fucking Franken.

As with Day One, I'm gonna resort to a brief paraphrasing of the proceedings, since that seems funnier and more useful to me. The only intelligent thing I'll say is that Senator Cornyn's (and every other Repbulican's) line of questioning about the "two Sonias" (one of whom actual sits in judgment and issues opinions and the other of whom gives speeches with no binding legal force) seems not to prove that she's some kind of crazed liberal but to prove that she in fact can set aside her prejudices and beliefs to rule on the law as it exists. Or, you know, she's just a giant bitch. One or the other!

SENATOR CORNYN (R-TX): Here's the deal. In your actual work you've been deliberate, thoughtful and thorough. But then you go out with the girls for Cosmos and turn into a raging Puerto Rican Dyke. What gives?

SOTOMAYOR: What girl doesn't like Cosmos? And I stand by my words, except that I'm going to pretend I said something totally different. I didn't mean that white people don't make good judges, I just meant that "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is my favorite karaoke song.

SENATOR CARDIN (D-MD): Once upon a time, ladyfolks couldn't vote. I never even met a lady until I was 30. And I thought to myself, "wow, she's just like me." Then she tried to do sex to me and I realized she belonged on the Supreme Court. Do you agree?

SOTOMAYOR: Well, as you know, I'm a raging bulldyke who hates men, white people and cock. But, I bet I'd still do sex to you.

SENATOR COBURN (R-OK): Is death within the scope of your judicial powers? I don't mean, as I once asked John Roberts, if "death is the opposite of life", but rather I'm asking about your terrible power and the unspeakable suffering you are capable of unleashing upon the people of this nation by speaking aloud the Twelve Thousand Names of The Eternal Evil.

SOTOMAYOR: As the issue of the ancient prophecy granting me demented power over the beasts of the field and the elements of the Earth, as well as the Demon Host that lives to serve me in these times of impenetrable darkness might well come before the Court, I cannot answer your question. However, I will say that I disagree with Chief Justice Roberts. Death is not the opposite of life. I AM THE NEGATION AND RUIN OF ALL WHO BREATHE!

SENATOR WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): Can anybody tell me what the deal is with juries?

SOTOMAYOR: Juries are rad. I once had a juror who lit herself on a fire, threw herself from a window on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, landed in a pile of broken glass and HIV-tainted needles, tore her throat out with her bare hands and begged passersby to "kill me, please . . .kill me!" And yet, the next day she was in court, on time, ready to work, despite severe blood loss and a charred, baked zitti torso.

SENATOR KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): My mom doesn't love me.

SOTOMAYOR: I don't blame her. Jokes! Let's watch Perry Mason and make out later.

SENATOR KLOBUCHAR: Awesome. Also, can you please tell me how to pronounce my last name?

SOTOMAYOR: That was very racist of you. Just because I'm Latina doesn't mean I speak Caveman.

SENATOR KLOBUCHAR: Sorries!

SOTOMAYOR: That's cool.

SENATOR KAUFMAN (D-DE): Listen, I'm not even sure I know who I am.

SOTOMAYOR: Okay.

SENATOR SPECTER (D-PA): The Supreme Court is full a lazy, fat-assed bitchboys. Will you work harder than them?

SOTOMAYOR: Well, I don't want to speculate until I've experienced it myself . . .

SPECTER: I can tell you're not going to answer my question.

SOTOMAYOR: You scare me.

SPECTER: They're making a horror movie about me. Who do you think should play me?

SOTOMAYOR: I wouldn't want to specu--

SPECTER: I see you won't answer that one either. I'll tell who should play me -- Jane Fonda!

SOTOMAYOR: That's cool . . .

SPECTER: I, umm, misspoke. Not Jane Fonda . . . I meant to say . . . Henry? Fonda? Is that a person?

SOTOMAYOR: I wouldn't want to sp--.

SPECTER: I gave you notice that I'd be asking this question!

SOTOMAYOR: . . .

SPECTER: Hey, fuck you guys! Why do I have to sit next to Al Franken?

SOTOMAYOR: I can't --

SPECTER: Oh, just shut up!

SENATOR FRANKEN (D-MN): Let's talk about an extremely technical administrative law case relating to the internet and then end it with a sweeping categorical proclamation of my novel theory on the First Amendment, which has nothing to do with the case. Sound good?

SOTOMAYOR: I hate my life.

Me Tarzan, You Sonia!

2009-07-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

Finally we get to actual questions! Which Sotomayor actually gets to answer! Well, okay, maybe that's going too far. At the very least we can all agree that these are "questions" that she "answers", right?

Senator Leahy starts off talking about Sotomayor's record as a prosecutor [incidentally, I was a little surprised to discover that none of the current members of the Court were ever prosecutors!] in Manhattan, under the guidance of 5,000 Year Old Mummy Lord Robert Morgenthau (which the transcripts misspell as Morgenthal for some reason) and a case she tried against a guy called The Tarzan Murderer, a case right out of Law & Order! It involved a guy who used acrobatic tricks and swinging ropes to enter homes, rob people and kill them! Totally amazing! And Sotomayor rooted through some dusty law text books and came up with a novel theory for trying all of his crimes as once case.

It's a great story because, well, it involves a guy called the Tarzan Murderer first of all, but also because it helps her describe how she truly learned to be a lawyer. "The law isn't legal theory, it's facts."

Unfortunately, we don't get to hear more sexy details about Tarzan because everyone else prefers the completely unsexy details of Mr. Ricci. Listen, I think Ricci got the raw end of the deal on that test. And I think that it's very probable that the law New Haven applied is unconstitutional. However, just hearing his name makes me want to scream. My sympathies are always with illiterate firefighters, because nothing is hotter than that. But the way this case has been mangled, abused and mistreated by a bunch of Republican asswipes makes me hate this guy!

So much time is spent today bemoaning not only Sotomayor's ruling itself but the brief per curiam nature of the opinion. Frankly, this annoys me more than anything else. As she points out without actually choking the fuck out of Jeff Sessions, there was already an opinion by the district court judge in the case. The panel upheld that decision. The notion that upholding a decision requires another 100 pages of legal gobbledygook is completely stupid. If the panel agreed with what had already been said on the case, why not just say so and be done with it?

And hey, I'm hardly the first to point this out, but isn't funny to hear Republicans make an argument that Sotomayor is an activist, racist judge precisely because she took no action in Ricci? Sessions even says, rather snidely, that the Circuit Court could've overturned it's own precedent. So, overturning precedent is now a sign of judicial minimalism? [It's not like Sessions doesn't have allies in this front, like the five members of the Supreme Court who admit that they overturned precedent and created a new set of rules in their own Ricci decision.]

Give me a break!

Other than that there was precious little of interest here. On the most interesting cases (somewhat surprisingly, given her rather idiotic behavior during previous hearings, it was Senator Feinstein who raised many of the most complex and important issues on national security, executive power, etc. I say "somewhat" only because Feinstein is, generally speaking, an extremely intelligent and diligent Senator, which only made her weirdness with Roberts and Alito more troublesome) Sotomayor rightly refrains from taking any definitive approach. Not only are a lot of these questions unsettled and almost certain to come before her on the Supreme Court, but the issues themselves are so complex that a single, definitive answer is impossible.

Senator Leahy did get one amusing, and revealing, little anecdote in:

Judge, I once on a television interview said, if I could do what -- anything I wanted to do in life, I said, "Well, if I ever have to work for a living, I want to be a photographer," because I do, at which point, two minutes after the interview, the phone rang. My mom was still alive. She called. She said, "Don't you ever say that. They'll think you don't work." (LAUGHTER) Actually, I don't. I just recognize senators here. You're doing all of the work. And I -- I appreciate the way you're doing it.

Oh, Leahy. Sweet, giant-headed, lazy Leahy . . .

Then Grassley, after a protester interrupted Sotomayor's answer on a property rights question, got this one in: "People always say I have the ability to turn people on."

Chuck Grassley is fast becoming one of my favorite Senators. His hilariously angry tweets on health care reform were pure political genius. Who would've thought that it would be a grouchy, elderly, Midwestern Republican who first used Twitter for its intended, nonsensical purpose? I assure you, Chucko, you definitely turn me on! Call me!

But Sotomayor manages at least one humorous moment of her own. Russ Feingold manages, for once, not to speak about himself and heaps effusive praise on Sotomayor's "obvious, tremendous understanding of the law" and that she should consider allowing cameras into the Court [a particular pet cause of Feingold's] so that all of us might have the joy of watching her in action.

Sotomayor, that lovely sphinx, replies, "You were a very good lawyer, weren't you Senator?"

Sotomay-boringer!

2009-07-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

The first day of the Sotomayor Hearings was so boring that apparently even the transcription services took a nap, since I can't seem to find an actual transcript of anything but Sotomayor's opening statement.

Which, frankly, is for the best. Reading that shit would fuck you up more than two Ambien and a martini!

We all know that Senators love nothing more than talking about themselves. These hearings are a perfect opportunity for them to do so at irritating length. The fact that Joe Biden didn't show up this time around only makes things slightly more bearable. [While also removing any chance of Sotomayor being asked what she thinks of the coming war against cyborgs. At least Tom Coburn's still here, so we might still get to see a pantywaist US Senator weep like a fucking bitch on TV!]

I only watched bits and pieces, and that's all it took. Everyone repeated the same stupid shit, which is basically a preview of what's to come. The notion that all 19 members of this committee deserve or need to ask questions is totally insufferable. If I was the boss, I'd lay down the law on asking the same question twenty six trillion times. But, I'm not. So, we might as well sit back and "enjoy" the ride!

Here's a little transcript I put together myself from memory:

CHAIRMAN LEAHY: My head is enormous. You were born poor and rose to the height of your profession through hard-work, determination and switchblades. I like lady judges.

SENATOR SESSIONS: I forgot why I'm even here. Oh, yeah, now I remember. Because you're a racist.

SENATOR FEINSTEIN: As a lady Senator with no legal experience, I have to point out that Chief Justice Roberts murders puppies and is a terrible umpire for the Inter-House Softball League.

SENATOR HATCH: I really hate the standards Obama used to evaluate Roberts and Alito, but still intend to use them to evaluate you.

SENATOR SCHUMER: Does anybody actually like me? Let me repeat that thing about umpires, because that's bound to be a metaphor nobody else on the committee uses!

SENATOR GRAHAM: I'm going to vote for you, but it's important for you to know that you're a racist. Also, Miguel Estrada was from Honduras, so that makes him awesomer than you, but not as awesome as me, because I'm gay.

SENATOR FEINGOLD: I am interested to know your position on the erection of a giant Russ Feingold monument made entirely out of foreskin.

SENATOR COBURN: Hey, don't you guys even care that I sterilized women against their will?! Why are we talking about Roberts? I thought this was supposed to be a hearing about some racist chick. Did I mention that Miguel Estrada was from Honduras?

SENATOR FRANKEN: While I really have no fucking clue why they gave me a seat on this committee, a committee which possesses only one woman (who isn't even a lawyer!), I'm still gonna act like I have opinions. These include: judges aren't umpires and you're a lady.

SENATOR GILLIBRAND (introducing Sotomayor): I got this jacket at Filene's Basement. Judge Sotomayor and I are both ladies, but she's also Puerto Rican. I'm not sure if you people realize it or not, but she was born poor. And she's not a lesbo. I checked that one out for myself!

JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: Thank you for all the nice things you said about yourselves. I will make an awesome judge. You can tell how impartial I am because my face hasn't moved one time during the last fifteen hours of listening to you call me a racist lesbian bitch. I look forward to not answering all the questions you're going to pretend to be asking in the next several days.

Wimblefag: We Hardly Knew Thee

2009-07-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

It seems an occasionally-blogging fag just can't catch a break!

I sat out the entire French Open, which seemed lucky for me since after finally, for once, picking Rafael Nadal to win the whole thing, dude lost in the fourth round to adorable Swede Robin Soderling. Which means Federer, fucking Federer for Christ's sake, won the title, tied Pete Sampras's record and got the career grand slam all in the course of two weeks. Which basically means I wish I were dead.

It also means that I didn't bother to blog about Wimbledon, because I was pretty sure Federer was going to win and in the process eclipse Pete Sampras altogether. My instincts were correct, but what's got me seriously bummed out is that for once my predictions would've been almost perfect!

Sure there were a number of surprise quarterfinalists, but two of them (Lleyton Hewitt and Tommy Haas) I picked anyway! Only Juan Carlos Ferrero was a surprise, and since he remains one of the absolutely hottest tennis players alive I couldn't have been more delighted by his incredible return on the wild card investment. Yes, Goran Ivanisevic won Wimbledon as a wild card, but he was probably the greatest grass court player who had never won it, so that wasn't as big a surprise as El Mosquito buzzing and blood-gorging his way to the quarters.

But get this, sweet delicious fag-crumpets, I correctly predicted all four women's semifinalists and also correctly predicted that Dementieva would almost beat Serena Williams while Venus Williams would pound the ever-loving shit out of poor Dinara "The New Kuznetsova" Safina, setting up a second consecutive, and fourth overall, all Williams Lesbo Incest Final! And then I went a step further and predicted Serena would win it! And she did! And none of you will believe me because I didn't declare it publicly!

But that's okay because I fucking hate your guts!

Also, I got three of the four men's semifinalists correctly and the one I got wrong (I picked Djokovic over Haas) was the one I was least certain of, since good old Tommy had beaten Djokovic on grass just before the tournament. And, since sometime earlier this year, I've been hyping Andy Roddick as a Wimbledon finalist, and maybe even a champion. But all you dumb cocks were all "Murray mania! Breaking the Fred Perry/Tim Henman Curse!" Well you can all suck my dangly, furry, yeast-encrusted balls! Because Murray ate it hardcore against Roddick.

I'm still depressed, because the one prediction I desperately wanted not to come true did anyway. Federer beat Roddick, for the third time, in the final. But holy motherloving vagina-surfers was that an intense match! 5-7 7-6 7-6 3-6 16-14? Seriously? 16-fucking-14?! Roddick was only broken once in the tournament, when he was serving to stay in it at 14-15, after he'd held strong in the same position all the way since 4-5. I thought it could be close, but if you'd said there'd be a five set match with two tie-breakers I'd have assumed those were Roddick's wins and not Federer's.

This has got to be a hard one to swallow for Andy. Closer than he's ever been to the title that means more to him than anything and to have it snatched away by a greasy Swiss! On the other hand, he should look on the bright side. So far this year he's tied his best finishes at the Australian and Wimbledon (in fact this is clearly his best Wimbledon finish ever), and made it to the second week of Roland Garros for the first time. If he keeps this up, he may well have a second US Open title in the fall. And in the mean time, he has his new wife, Brooklyn, to console him. But if she's not enough, my throbbing cock is here for you Andy!

It was a great Wimbledon. One of the best I can remember in a long time. Men's, women's, doubles (the Williams sister win again!), all of it had so many excellent matches including not one but two all-time classics (Serena's 6-7, 7-5, 8-6 semi was a brilliant performance from both players). Still, I leave it more depressed than ever. As Andy said to Pete Sampras, looking on from the Royal Box, "I'm sorry I couldn't hold him off, Pete."

So are we!

Now we'll really never get anyone to shut up about how Federer is the Greatest Player Who Ever Lived And Also Did You Know That His Penis Can Cure AIDS And Tuberculosis Not To Mention He Invented Kittens?.

For the record: Federer isn't the great player of all time. The only correct answer to that question remains Martina Navratilova. Federer can call me when he wins 44 more major titles. In the mean time, I still think that Rod Laver (who missed 5 years of majors at the height of his career) would easily have had more than 15 had he played those years. Don Budge won 6 in a row and then went pro (and then WWII came along). Bill Tilden won 11 without ever playing the Australian and playing the French only a couple of times. There's no way that even 15 major is definitive proof of All Time Absolute Greatness.

Oh well. Maybe I'll actually put my meaty cock-lobster back in my pants long enough to blog a bit at the US Open. We'll see! Tennis is suddenly sexy again!

That Whole Sparking Thing

2009-06-25T06:21:00.001-07:00

I don't think there's an adequate word in English to describe my reaction to the Mark Sanford scandal except to say: Holy shit!

This, my friends, is what we call an interesting scandal! As a lot of people smarter and faster than me have already noted, Sanford's rambling, heart-rending, down-right bizarre press conference was so different from the usual pageant of insincerity that we've grown used to that it's hard even to process a reaction. So soon after John Ensign joins the interminable list of disgraced politicians who appear for a staid, mock-somber press conference accompanied by their dutiful wives, Sanford appears alone and reveals far more about his affair than would seem imaginable in these days.

I'll admit that I've always rather liked Sanford. Despite his politics, I've found him to be a refreshingly interesting fellow. This only seals the deal. His career is almost certainly over, but there's no better way to leave the show than belting out an aria like that.

I don't have a lot, really, to add that you can't read almost anywhere else. But I do have a couple of thoughts. One is that I'm very satisfied to finally see a wife, any wife, of any politician, refusing to degrade herself in public for the sake of her husband's future. Maybe they all think it's perfectly dignified, but Jenny Sanford's refusal to cover for her husband while he was gone and her refusal to stand by him when he came back is as daring and groundbreaking a sex-scandal performance as her husband's, so she deserves some credit too!

The other is that while I'm usually equal-parts delighted and mortified when I read the personal e-mails, letters or IM chats of pervy pols, I found even this aspect of the story almost dreadfully romantic and very interesting.

Sanford, it would appear, has more than a bit of the poet in him. While this is probably as attributable to the rambling weirdness of his delivery than to his deep inner thoughts, the phrase he used to describe falling in love with a woman not his wife, "that whole sparking thing", is such a marvelously apt description of the muddled emotions of love that it might've come out of any of the best literary novels on the subject.

Secondly, the dirty e-mail that's been making the rounds is wonderful for two reason: the governor spells almost all the words correctly while stringing them together in actual sentences, and the e-mail actually is sexy and romantic and, I imagine, rather moving and arousing to its recipient.

Remember Portland Chief of Police Derrick Foxworth's e-mails, which included such steamy passages as, "you spread your legs and [I] slide my huge hard cock into your sweet, wet, tight pussy"? or Spokane Mayor Jim West's IM's, with that whole "we'll rub our dicks together" thing? Or how about those completely icky slash hilarious IM's proffered by Mark "I'm an Alcoholic" Foley? Even the teenagers who were the focus of the attentions of two of these men couldn't possibly have found such things sexy.

But here's Sanford:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light.

Okay, is it cheesy? Undoubtebdy (I think even romance novelists have mostly forsaken cliches involving moonlight) but it's actually very sweet, and shows that Sanford was, like actual normal human beings, attracted to this woman for many reasons, not just her pussy's ability to accommodate his huge throbbing cock. And that parenthetical isn't nearly as raunchy as it would surely be in the erotic writings of so many of his fellows , "or two magnificent parts of yourself" is an actually sexy description of what he's talking about!

I sense a great new career opportunity for our South Carolina Lothario!

I Knit Sweaters, Yo!

2009-06-18T00:53:00.000-07:00

Jody Rosen has a post up about the increasing lamosity of "white people can't rap" jokes. Obviously, I mostly agree with him, but I think he at least slightly misses the point regarding Taylor Swift and T-Pain's video from the CMT awards.

I don't think the joke here is that Taylor Swift is a white girl rapping. It's that she's Taylor Swift rapping. Taylor Swift is a teenager who writes her own hit songs and has become a major country music superstar. She's not just pretty and blond, she's also immensely talented. Even a rather maudlin song like "Teardrops on My Guitar" actually works when she sings it. But her charm is mostly in her being young and sweet, with a innocence in her face that is belied by the maturity of her songs. Carrie Underwood, who sings about everything from Jesus taking the wheel to being a whore who wakes up in bed with a man in Vegas and doesn't even "know [her] own last name", wouldn't be as funny in this skit, because she's a bit too Reba McIntyre to pull it off. It's Taylor Swift, a latter-day Barbara Mandrell, whose honey and cream sweetness makes the video funny. [Although even I'll admit it's only slightly funny.]

It's also important to think of this videos in terms of country music itself, which has only produced one legitimate black star. But in recent years, country music has become increasingly obsessed with hip hop. There are, to be sure, plenty of aggressive denunciations of the hip-hopification of America -- like the Lost Trailers' "Holler Back", but even these songs seem an attempt to reclaim for country that edge of backwoods violence that it's lost in recent years. And then there's Big & Rich, a duo who are consciously engaged in a rather interesting and very successful experiment in assimilating certain hip hop conventions into a country act, without being (entirely) funny.

So, the T-Swift and T-Pain video, I think, says a lot more about the anxieties and opportunities country music is currently presented with, and the very specific image cultivated by one of its leading ladies, then it does a lame, stale joke.

The Millionth Word Is Fuck You!

2009-06-10T08:52:00.001-07:00

That stupid fuckface who runs the Global Language Monitor has finally announced English's "millionth word." For a good rundown of exactly why this is a ridiculous notion, please check out the Language Log archives.

However, you really have to read the site's announcement to understand just how snake-oily the whole process is:

The Global Language Monitor today announced that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase.

As Geoffrey Pullum rightly pointed out at the log, Web 2.0 is not a word, it's a phrase. As is jai ho, which also isn't English. Noob has been an English word for years, so how can it possibly be in the running for the millionth word? We're already up to 1,000,001 words, and the lucky million and first? Financial Tsunami. Ummm, assholes? Also not a word!

Any agglutinative language probably has more than a million possible words, but if we include motherfucking phrases?

Fuck you, Mayor of Lepercock!

(Did I just invent the 1,000,002nd English word?)

Wise Latina Fatigue

2009-06-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

I suspect that the right-wing has basically blown its load on Sonia Sotomayor. In the weeks since her nomination there's only really been one talking point. Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment -- which has totally drowned out that whole "the Circuit Court is where policy is made" comment and the charges that she's a nasty mean lesbian bully with no life. By highlighting this quote, in an attempt to show that she's a racist (even if some of them deny that's what they mean!), they only highlight both her gender and her ethnicity, which are both obvious plusses for her nomination. The fact that it seems that both Supreme Court obsessives and the apathetic alike find very little objectionable in what she said only proves the anemia of the argument.

But I'm still gonna, finally, weigh in.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

It isn't the judicial rulings that trouble me so much as her non-judicial opinions and mindset. The constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity - racial and gender - and the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation. I don't think it's disqualifying and I don't see any crude racialism in her rulings, but I do think it shows that for Obama, this kind of racial/ethnic view of the world is so endemic it's invisible to him. And it's off-message for his candidacy and life. But, hey, maybe he feels Scalia needs to get as good as he gives.

Some of his readers point out that Sullivan himself constantly and aggressively harps on his homosexuality, a point he slickly dismisses by pointing out that he really, really wants gay identity to disappear! But, Andrew, despite your deepest desires to become straight, isn't it an absolute fact that in order to achieve that goal you must fight against the oppressive culture that seeks to stifle your legitimacy?

To say that you'd like her more if she wrote something called "The End of Latino Culture" ignores the same crucial fact you miss in your dreams of gay assimilation: the cultural power ain't ours! And, what are you really suggesting? That Latino Culture disappear into the great "melting pot" of America? As if the "American culture" you want her to assimilate into isn't white?

You've long assumed that the basic structure of straight society is perfect and therefore gays should be delighted to join it and it appears you feel the same way about white culture. Both straight and white culture are "neutral" values to which the rest of us had better conform. And here comes Sonia Sotomayor, a woman who is deeply proud of her vagina and her brown skin, and says so, like, publicly! She actually thinks that maybe white culture isn't perfect? She must be a victimologist then!

Here are three other responses to Sullivan's "critique" of the good judge:

1. Whatever she actually meant (which is both debatable and totally irrelevant) the fact remains that the core essence of her theory is already enshrined in American law. It is unconstitutional for prosecutors to intentionally exclude people from juries based on their race. Why does this rule exist? Because the Supreme Court recognizes that as much as we'd love to live in a "colorblind" world, we don't. And that juries are far more likely to empathize with someone of their own race. Which means that a black man accused of murdering a white woman is up against a big obstacle with an all white jury. All white juries are not banned outright, but judges and lawyers should, and usually do, take great care to find competent jurors who are also diverse. Such diversity will, in many cases, result in a "better" verdict. If this standard is applied to our juries why should it not also be applied to our judges?

2. Especially at the appellate level. Sullivan argues that gays should come out of the closet because people who know at least one gay person are far more likely to support gay rights than those who do not. The same principle applies to judges in race and sex discrimination suits. While the suits themselves are often very difficult to win, and while judges of all races and sexes are generally bound by fairly complex rules governing such issues, isn't it just basic common sense that three middle class white men might have more trouble understanding the nature of those "on the bubble" acts of racism than a "wise Latina"? That having a judge on the panel who is capable of at least giving her colleagues a bit of perspective on why certain actions might be deeply hurtful to a person of color is sometimes a good thing?

Remember Little Stevie Breyer's Underpants? In those oral arguments, only Justice Ginsburg seemed at all cognizant of how traumatic a strip search might be for a 13 year old girl. If she hadn't been on the Court, nine men would've had no one to challenge their automatic assumption that this was "no big deal." The girl may still lose her appeal, but at lest there's a chance that the judges will in some sense actually understand the action at the heart of the case. No matter the outcome, that has to result in a "better" decision, doesn't it? Again, this isn't to say the white men should defer to the more "real" experiences of their colleagues, but merely to make what I always thought to be an rather obvious point: people always come to better conclusions when they have access to better information -- including personal relationships with people different from themselves!

3. Even Sullivan himself admits that he only has a problem with her "non-judicial" record. I understand that many people view such hermeneutics as not only useful (they aren't) but necessary (they rarely are) because judges refuse to answer questions directly. But there's a big difference between John Roberts, who had a very brief career as a judge preceded by an extensive career as a lawyer and who argued that none of his work as a lawyer could be taken to mean anything about his judicial philosophy because he was just working for someone else, and Judge Sotomayor who has a very extensive record as both a district court and circuit court judge.

Anyone who looks honestly at her record will see that she is not much more likely than your average white male judge to rule in favor of plaintiffs in sex and race discrimination claims. She's a technical, rigorous, thorough judge who applies the law as it exists, not as she wishes it to be. Has she been lying in wait for a chance to change the precedent on the Supreme Court? Maybe, but you're as likely to find the correct answer to that question in Nostradamus as in her public speeches.

Her non-judicial record is her record as a person. She has opinions! Slightly, vaguely controversial ones! Oh no! But these statements (which she hardly "harps" on, and which mostly grew out of the fact that Latina judges are almost inevitably asked to discuss these issues while John Roberts is assumed to have no opinion on race) stand in striking contrast to her judicial record.

She didn't show up on your eHarmony match list, Andrew Sullivan. She's been nominated to be a judge. You're troubled by her belief that her heritage makes her a better, and not a worse, judge? Then don't invite her to your next P-Town slumber party. But if you can't find something objectionable in her actual record than shut the fuck up already!

Cloris-form

2009-06-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

Please read this very amusing interview with Cloris Leachman on PlanetOut. She has all sorts of nasty things to say on many topics, but my favorite is this assessment of a certain telephone hurling Oscar winner:

I just can't stand Russell Crowe. I don't know, he just seems so dumb! I don't know him and I don’t need to know him. He's an asshole fuckface! I just don't like him. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

"I don't conspire, I inspire."

2009-06-05T05:27:00.000-07:00

Here's what inciting people to violence against abortionists actually looks like:

Note how Bob Lokey, the guy with the giant Supreme Court Murders Babies sign, explicitly declares that although he will not himself kill an abortion he will "inspire" others to do so. And note how he uses the internet in the same way creepy pedophiles do, to prey upon young, idealistic men and manipulate them into commit murder. Sound like anyone we know? Because that's how Islamic militants turn passionate young men into suicide bombers without ever once risking their own hides.

Not that Lokey is exactly innocent. He did a 20 year stint in prison for a first degree murder unrelated to abortion activism.

Also, notice how very few people involved in this most militant wing of the anti-abortion movement are women. Many women, obviously, are pro-life. But very few of them are leaders among the militants. I wonder why?

Inciteful Thoughts!

2009-06-05T00:21:00.000-07:00

Abortionists, as I've said time and again, are not murderers. In fact, what they do is so far from the evil of murder that it deserves its own word. So, when people like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulteer and pro-life groups refer to men like George Tiller as "baby killers" and "mass murderers", you can bet I find it disgusting, enraging and (almost always) cynical.

But that doesn't mean, as various pro-choice organizations, leaders, politicians, bloggers and others have claimed, that these people are somehow responsible for "inciting violence" and thus culpable in the assassination of Dr. Tiller.

This kind of disregard for the meaning of language and for the very notion of open debate that drives me crazy. Yes, pro-lifers do the same thing, but it's less aggravating to me because I fully expect them to rely on underhanded, deceitful, ugly methods to achieve their goals. But pro-choicers are on the right side! So, I have to hold us to a higher standard.

Calling someone a murderer does not incite violence. It is intended as a statement of fact -- in this case a "fact" I believe is utter nonsense. Now, I know I've also expressed deep outrage at people insisting that any attempt to shut them up is a violation of the First Amendment, which only protects us from government censorship. But this argument that calling Dr. Tiller a murderer is in some way even close to similar to openly calling for his death or putting a gun in Scott Roeder's hands, betrays a flagrant hostility to debate no less flagrant than the hostility shown by O'Reilly himself, who thinks badgering and abrupt ends to interviews somehow counts as a rhetorical exercise.

Here are a couple of examples, neither of which is particularly far-fetched, though in one case rather impractical, that I think demonstrate my point perfectly.

1. Jeffrey Dahmer was a murderer. No article about Dahmer fails to mention the fact that he murdered 17 young men, torturing and raping them along the way. So then, are those who called Dahmer a "sociopath" and a "serial killer" somehow responsible for his murder in prison? This case is a lot more obbvious than Tiller's, but I think it shows a progression of thought that leads, inevitably, to the useless and stupid denunciation of pro-life commentators as virtual accomplices to murder.

2. For years now, lots of protestors, bloggers and writers and labeled Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and others as "murderers" for their war policies. These charges are certain at least as debatable as calling an abortionist a murderer. But how many of those same blogs are now claiming that Ann Coulter incited her followers to violence? If someone were to assassinate Dick Cheney (a harder task than assassinating a doctor, to be sure) would all those people up "BUSH IS A MURDERER!" signs be responsible? Somehow, I doubt liberals would be so quick to cry "inciteful speech" then!

So, here's the thing. Do we have to like what these people say about abortion? No. Do we have to suffer it in silence? Of course not. We can certainly point out how even these mainstream organizations as deeply fanatical and how that fanaticism will, inevitably, manifest in violence. But to claim that essentially non-violent commentators who believed Tiller was a latter-day Mengele intended for their readers and listeners to go out and kill is absurd and would be unworthy of even addressing if it weren't so fucking common!

I don't think it takes a mathematician to figure out that during 10 years of unrelenting savagery from the opponents of personal sovereignty, dignity and reproductive liberty, years in which we've ceaselessly been called babykillers, Nazis, eugenicists, racists, judicial tyrants, sinners, murderers and slavemasters, no abortionists have been killed. There was a spate of such killings in the 90s and now Dr. Tiller.

The evidence thus suggests that it is not the ugly, malicious rhetoric of Bill O'Reilly to blame, but the fact that now, as then, we have a Democratic president.The culture wars are on again, and the sad part for Bill is: he had nothing to do with it.

PS: in fact, the term "baby killer" itself originates within anti-war, and not anti-abortion, politics as a way of slurring US soldiers. So, if some crazed antiwar activist murdered some Vietnam veterans, would everyone who used that phrase guilty of conspiracy to commit murder too? Note that babykiller.com is a site dedicated to "the truth about war" and not the truth about abortion.

The End Of The Line

2009-06-02T06:55:00.001-07:00

William Saletan -- whose writing on abortion is probably among the most interesting available, even though I often disagree with his (hardly unique) constant harping on "safe, legal and rare" -- has written a very nice piece on Tiller. A couple of excerpts:

The people who do late-term abortions are the ones who don't flinch. They're like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you're pro-choice. You think marching or phone-banking makes you an activist. You know nothing. There's you, and then there are the people who work in the clinics. And then there are the people who use the forceps. And then there are the people who use the forceps nobody else will use. At the end of the line, there's George Tiller.

. . .

The people who kill abortion providers are the ones who don't flinch. They're like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you're pro-life. You tell yourself that abortion is murder. Maybe you even say that when a pollster calls. But like most of the other people who say such things in polls, you don't mean it literally. There's you, and then there are the people who lock arms outside the clinics. And then there are the people who bomb them. And at the end of the line, there's the guy who killed George Tiller.

Porno For Judges!

2009-06-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the very excellent Suits and Sentences for alerting me to Judge Sonia Sotomayor's hilariously raunchtastic decision in Farrell v. Burke.

The case involves a rather interesting question. Mr. Farrell had been convicted of "pa[ying] four boys between the ages of 13 and 16 to have anal and oral sex with him" and was released on parole. A condition of parole was that he not possess "pornography" and was then sent back to prison for possessing books like "Scum: True Homosexual Experiences" that included graphic depictions of man-on-boy action. His appeal was based primarily on the notion that the pornography band was unconstitutionally vague, because the definition of pornography is so very contentious in its legal application. It's a nice argument, I suppose, and Sotomayor seemed reasonably sympathetic [PS: for all you civil liberties aficionados out there, her record tends to support prosecutors and cops over defendants, as a general rule] to this notion, particularly since the parole officer insisted a copy of Michelangelo's David would run afoul of the parole agreement. But ultimately, she and her colleagues side with the parole officer, since even under such vague criteria, the works in question were clearly pornographic.

The decision, then, is a fair and judicious one, well-entrenched in the complexities of both parole/sentencing law and pornography jurisprudence. So, I suppose it can be held up as an example of the thoroughness, intelligence, rigor and lack of prejudice with which Sotomayor approaches all cases.

But, me? I like it for the naughty bits!

All of the following quotes are taken from Sotomayor's opinion and have been left unedited, but the bold is mine, naturally.

The text on the back cover of Scum gives a fair picture of its contents:
Scum is the thirteenth in Boyd McDonald's best-selling series of Straight to Hell chapbooks. Like earlier titles, (Flesh, Meat[,] Cum, Juice, Skin, Wads, Cream, Smut, Filth, Sex, Raunch, Lewd), Scum contains dozens and dozens of true homosexual experiences. Men from all over write the naked, shameless truth in stories like, "Youth Displays Shit-Hole for Dog to Sniff, Lick," "Soldiers Grope Each Other in Back Row of Theater," "Pushes Partner's Face into Puddle of Piss," "Army Officer Sniffs Soldier's Jockey Shorts," "Suck Stops on the Highways of Vermont," "US Marine Displays Dick, Butt to Cubans," "Wipes Asshole With His Tongue, Then Screws It With His Tool," and "Cleric Fucks Army Vet's Mouth." Plus there's Boyd McDonald's incomparable "Sex in the News," and plenty of sexy photos, making Scum one of the hottest reads ever!

. . .

Another narrator regrets that one partner has fully grown up ("He is 25 now and has lost his earlier cuteness") before turning to describe another partner who "first started having sex — and liking it — with his stepfather when he was 9 years old and has been turning tricks since his teens." Id. at 102.

. . .

Numerous stories in Scum describe sex between boys. In the first story in the book, for example ("He Liked to Fuck My Face For Half an Hour"), the narrator remembers a series of sexual experiences that occurred "when [he] was a teenager," id. at 7. "Sometimes we would drive around the hills and he would pretend like he was kidnapping me, tie up my body, and then fuck my face . . . ." Id. at 8. In another story, the author says he had "sucked around from age six or seven, sucking all my elementary school male class mates, then on into High School . . ." Id. at 85. Representative stories involving underage boys include a story called "Milwaukee Prodigy, 16, Takes On Two at a Time," id. at 11, and a story about two boys at summer camp having sex called "His Dick Was Sticking Out of His Pajamas." Id. at 14-15. Scum graphically describes boys in their early teens having sexual encounters in pools, id. at 40-41, in locker rooms, id. at 42-43, in the woods, id. at 47-48, in garages, id. at 57-58, and in France, where one narrator remembers "when [he] was 16" and his partner "was 11-1/2," id. at 98-99. Scum contains other examples of stories involving young boys; rather than recount them here, we merely note that the examples cited thus far are all taken from the first half of the book.

Sotomayor's understanding of this book as pornography derives mostly from the fact that the book contains almost nothing except descriptions of sex, which is fair in my mind, since it would preclude, say, Dennis Cooper novels from the pornography label. And I think Sotomayor's rather wry and amusing tone (my favorite is that "in pools, in locker rooms . . .and in France" list) shows that she's not particularly puritanical in her view of sexuality, as displayed further in her treatment of the other book on appeal, called My Comrade:

My Comrade is satirical; although it deals with sex, it appears intended more to amuse than to arouse. It contains a few depictions of nude men, but they are usually in a satirical context, as with the drawing of a furry (but obviously male) naked creature accompanying the article entitled "I Had Gay Sex — With Bigfoot!" Erect penises are visible in two photographs in the book, but in each case the photograph is part of a collage in which the sexual images are juxtaposed with other non-sexual images, and the caption identifies local art galleries in which the artist's work has been displayed. The intent of these images seems more artistic than prurient. The rest of the magazine, containing articles like "Why I Love Disco" and "Underground in the Land of the Breeders!", is a lighthearted treatment of issues relating to sex and sexuality.

The Death Of A Hero

2009-06-01T02:47:00.000-07:00

The murder of George Tiller reminds us yet again that when the Culture Warriors fail to win their cause politically or legally they will resort to the very kind of terrorism we are so desperately engaged in a War Against. The scale of this crime is, of course, smaller than the scale of Timothy McVeigh's or the 9/11 hijackers' but it is of the same kind. The murder of George Tiller may have been justifiable to his killer as a means of "saving lives", but it's far more likely that the motivation wasn't just to stop Tiller from doing his work, but to strike fear into the hearts of all abortionists, clinic workers and women seeking to exercise their legal rights.

This is an attack not just on a man, but on the system of law itself. The use of fear, intimidation and brutality to enforce one's will on an entire society is the very definition of terrorism and we must not allow it to succeed.

The campaign against George Tiller, of course, is a long one. He's easily the most famous abortionist in America (his only competition is LeRoy Carhart, whose name appears in two major SCOTUS abortion decisions) and as such has been at the center of the anti-abortion rhetoric for some time. It seems to me no coincidence, then, that his murder follows so closely the President's Notre Dame commencement address and his nomination of a new Justice of the Supreme Court. Just a few weeks ago, Ann Coulter suggested Tiller should give next year's commencement address while performing a patial-birth abortion. This is hardly to blame her, or any of Tiller's rhetorical detractors, for what happened, but it does suggest to me that we are reaching a crucial tipping point in the abortion wars, a tipping point where violent radicals will be emboldened to abandon the niceties of official, mainstream political pro-life organizations, who will not hesitate to call Tiller a murderer but stop short of taking the law into their own hands.

It shouldn't be necessary to say that most pro-life activists are likely more horrified by this attack than we are, just as most Muslims, including anti-American activists, were horrified by September 11th and most of those who denounced the American government in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco were horrified by McVeigh. But these pro-life activists, who had been successful in restraining the violent element of their culture, have been increasingly rendered impotent by political and legal trends. There will always be that element in any moral crusade (e.g., the eco-terrorists and PETA and "radical anarchists") who will resort to violence when the legitimate path to power fails.

This murder is, I'm afraid, only an omen of more to come. But it's also a kind of vindication. For some years now, abortion foes have been comforted in the knowledge that the conservative revolution in the Courts was coming and that the President of the United States was an ardent supporter of the "culture of life." This return to the kind of anti-abortion violence that was relatively common in the 1990s is a sign that at least the most radical of pro-life forces believe that we've won and that we're too powerful to stop with anything lighter than a bullet.

We musn't let those bullets stop us either. If George Tiller had survived, I know he'd have been performing abortions as soon as he was able. Let us not allow the right wing terrorists to shackle our rights in fear. Let Tiller's death be just another nail in the coffin of the political theory that has allowed the real murderers to endure while liberty stumbles.

PS: Michelle Malkin, laughably, declares that we should not "politicize" his death so soon, comparing those of us who, like George Tiller, stand up for the principles of liberty to the Westboro Baptist Church! Mr. Tiller's murder was as political an act as September 11, it deserves a political response. Even Tiller's family, whom Malkin contends she is thinking of in issuing her dictat, spoke about Tiller's devotion to providing for the health of all women. No, what Malkin is truly afraid of is that an honest appraisal of the rhetoric directed at Dr. tiller will make pro-lifers look bad.

Roland Faggos: Rafael Nadon't!

2009-06-01T01:59:00.000-07:00

Somehow I totally fucked up and forgot to issue my usually sweeping proclamations before the beginning of this year's French Open. Somehow, with the weird new clay court schedule, Roland Garros kinda snuck up on me! In retrospect, I can only be grateful, because man would my predictions have blown dirty chunks!

For once, I actually picked the invincible Nadal to win, beating Djokovic in the final. Oops. The world's two best clay-courters are both gone before the quarterfinals, Djokovic losing to Philip Kohlschreiber, admittedly one of the toughest players to have to face in the third round, and now Nadal has gone out to Robin Soderling, the big-serving (and super handsome!) Swede -- a guy who is a wonderful player, but with the kind of power game more suitable to upsets at the US Open. Nadal once said, after a match against Soderling in which Robin mocked Rafa's habits, that Soderling was going to pay for it "in the afterlife" which only makes the upset that much more hilarious and awesome.

This has been a very exciting week of tennis: upsets, the miraculous return of Maria Sharapova, who has won four weird, topsy-turvy three set matches, the early defeat of Venus Williams, Serena Williams's struggles to advance, the defeat of the sisters in doubles by Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Nadia Petrova and the absolutely stunning fact that Dinara Safina has lost only five games in four matches!

The big question now, of course, is whether or not Federer can rise to the occasion and win the tournament now that his two biggest obstacles have been overcome. Considering how poorly he's adjusted to the #2 ranking, I suspect that he might be upset along the way, particular since his section of the draw still features an enormous well of clay talent!

Sotomay-boring!

2009-05-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

Listen up, fags and fagesses: I've got nothing against Sonia Sotomayor. She's an accomplished, smart lady who will bring -- at least if rumors of her "being a bully" are true -- some much-needed energy to the liberal wing of the Court. She's been on my own personal, private, musky short-list for quite a while. I think that, even considering some of her "controversial" statements, she's an essentially unassailable pick. That alone is enough to recommend her.

Still, I have to say this much-anticipated nomination has turned into a total snoozer. Obama suggested he would be interested not only in women and Hispanics but in professional lawyers, academic and politicians as well. He went with a member of the Second Circuit -- replacing a former First Circuit judge and joining colleagues who served on the First (Breyer), Third (Alito), Seventh (Stevens) and Ninth Circuits (Kennedy.) The only "safer" career choice would've been to go with a member of the DC Circuit, whence come four (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Ginsburg) current Justices!

And Sotomayor herself, despite all those rumors flying about, strikes me not just unabashedly liberal but also at least as moderate as, say, Sam Alito and, like Alito, a judge who is so boring in her demeanor that it's hard to find her scary. Good for confirmation, yes, and probably even good for the Court (especially if all those rumors are true! Scalia's the biggest bully in the federal judiciary and it might be nice to have one on our side for once!) but it's EXTREMELY DULL for all us lawfags!

And, by all accounts, Obama really had a chance here. Bush went with Alito because he was replacing O'Connor and wanted to achieve his goal without a big fight. Alito was perfect! But Obama really shouldn't be worried about even the most sweepingly bold of choices. He's got what amounts to 60 seats in the Senate already. He's popular. And he's appointing a replacement for the Justice so reviled by the Right that he's become central to a clever little game certain conservatives play with every safe Republican nominee ("Gonzales is Spanish for Souter", "Clement is Souter in a dress") so it's far more like replacing Rehnquist than replacing O'Connor. A big reason why so many of us supported John Roberts (besides him being dreamy!) was because he almost couldn't help being more liberal than his predecessor.

I'm happy with the Sotomayor nomination, in that I really do think she'll make an excellent Justice, but I still can't say I wasn't hoping for a little Kim Wardlaw or Elena Kagan action today!

V Is For Vawesome!

2009-05-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I went on a weird nostalgia kick and watched the entirety of the brilliant series V, which was notable not only for its sexy perm-sporting lizard people, but also for the half-lizard-person baby that grew into a sexy adult in days and for being one of the few times that Robert Englund showed up with his face burned off. It wasn't quite as awesome as I remembered, but it's probably at least half-responsible for my lifelong love affair with science fiction, so obviously I'm excited by even the prospect of a remake! And ABC's done if for us. Here's Troy Patterson's slightly funny take:

A remake of the extremely awesome '80s hit about alien visitors. (It was kind of like Alf as a parable about fascism.) If you were not a fan of Firefly or Stargate SG-1, then you'll want to be introduced to star Morena Baccarin, who might well be in contention for the coveted title of "hottest woman on TV," even after exposing her space-lizard face. Can't wait for the blog posts likening her character to Sarah Palin.

I'm pretty sure it was the space-lizard Nazis that that guy was thinking about when he voted for lizard people!

The Three Great Scourges Of The Twentieth Century

2009-05-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading A Terrible Splendor by Marshall Jon Fisher on my new Kindle (more about that at a later date, but I think I'm in love!) The book is about a Davis Cup rubber (using that word instead of "match" for Davis Cup matches always makes me giggle) between rising American superstar Don Budge and the German aristocrat, and homosexual, Baron Gottfried von Cramm in 1937, a man held up by the Nazis as a great example of Aryan superiority even as they plotted his downfall due to that whole homo thing. After discussing James Thurber watching a Wimbledon match on a television (one of the first things ever broadcast in England was the 1937 Wimbledon), Marshall writes:

"The word [television] is half Greek and half Latin," intoned one editorial. "No good will come of it." Cramm may well have read this and thought of two other Greco-Latin hodgepodges -- automobile and homosexual -- and smiled: there you have it, the three great scourges of the Twentieth Century.

Fisher, of course, it perhaps stretching a bit in putting these thoughts in von Cramm's head for literary purposes (von Cramm would die in a car crash), but it still made me smile.

Obama Taps Deanna Troi For High Court

2009-05-19T00:06:00.001-07:00

I've mostly stayed out of the inane debate about judicial "empathy" that has erupted in the wake of Justice Souter's announced retirement. President Obama says this quality is a "priority" in his selection. This has been viewed by many as some kind of code (mostly for "woman" but also possibly for "racial minority" and therefore probably for "Hispanic lady.") Others on the right have declared it an attack on the fundamental nature of our judicial system: all that much vaunted impartiality and fairness the Court is supposed to embody.

For my part, of course I think empathy is worthless as an indicator of judicial ability. I also think that being a woman or Hispanic or gay or being the lawyer with the office nearest the President are terrible indicators of judicial ability. But things should be viewed in context. There are at least a hundred (probably many more) people in this nation who ware qualified to be Supreme Court Justices. There is only one opening at a time. As a result, Presidents almost have to create criteria, some of which are bound to be arbitrary, for making their decisions. Saying that, at a time when half of all practicing lawyers are women, more than one woman maybe should be on the Court isn't some kind of Crazed Feminist Plot. It's true. And it helps the President focus on a smaller pool of candidates.

The same is true of empathy. I don't believe for a moment that President Obama intends to nominate the most empathetic person he can find. He merely wants to ensure that his choice has an understanding of how the law works in the real world, not just in the mysterious Aether of Pure Law. It's not a particularly useful criterion, since it's hard to be sure what it even means, but it's not a criterion that is inherently bad.

I do believe the Court should be impartial and should care mostly about the actual legal issues before it. But impartiality can be a fetish that is more hindering than useful. As Justice William O. Douglas once put it, when asked about the value of a "neutral" judiciary: "The Constitution is not neutral." Like so many of the Court's rulings, a "balancing test" must be used for determining how impartial, or empathetic, the Court should be in any given case. And frankly, I'll trust a competent jurist to make that decision more than I'll trust Michael Steele to do it.

But please check out this very fine deconstruction of the empathy debate. from Dahlia Lithwick and Doug Kendall. They make the obvious point that almost all successful Supreme Court appeals, including those with conservative outcomes, have at their heart a "sympathetic plaintiff." It's easier for the Court, and Americans, to see an injustice when the victim of that injustice is nice. This isn't about judicial balancing acts, it's about very basic human drives. Should we like that? Not necessarily. Should we encourage our judges to do their best to look past such things? Absolutely. But in the end, these are human beings sitting in judgment of other human beings. A tiny ounce of compassion can hardly be a bad thing. Their prime example, because it's been a focus of much conservative attention lately, is Frank Ricci, the dyslexic white firefighter who had to work much harder than his peers to do well on the promotion test, but then had the results nullfied because the only people who passed the test were white. Ricci is a perfect sympathetic defendant. His dylexia and all that hard work obviously make his case more unsettling than it would be if he hadn't studied a wink and had breezed through life. As Lithwick and Kendall point out, this has very little to do with Title VII, but conservatives certainly aren't asking us all to carefully weigh the legal issues without even sparing a thought for Ricci as a person. Here are some other examples:

Kelo v. New London, had absolutely nothing to do with the adorableness of Kelo's Victorian house and the tenacity with which she fought to keep it. But to read about it in the press, you'd think Justice David Souter himself showed up on Kelo's doorstep, punched her in the mouth, then moved into her home and ate off her good china. . .

If the lead plaintiff in Heller had been a crack dealer who'd shot a pregnant woman while robbing a liquor store, those constitutional issues might have looked a lot murkier to the court that ultimately ruled in his favor. . .

Richard Gasqaine

2009-05-12T02:49:00.000-07:00

For many years, we tennis fags have never wavered in our hopes that Richard Gasquet would finally live up to his potential. Gasquet is, at his best, capable of the kind of tennis that would make Federer's game seem mundane. And that fact that he's moody and sad and prone to withdrawing from majors because his throat is sore only somehow made him more compelling. He's Exhibit A in the landmark case Great Expectations v. Reality.

Luckily for tennis, lots of charismatic and interesting young men have filled the vaccuum left in the wake of Gasquet's relentless quest for perplexing mediocrity. And lucky for the French, too, because a goodly number of those young men are Gasquet's compatriots. I was of the opinion that the rise of Tsonga, Monfils, Simon and Mathieu (and even Alize Cornet) would finally give Gasquet (and even Amelie Mauresmo) the breathing room he needed to "find himself" both on and off the tennis court.

Well, it seems young Dicky has indeed been finding himself. And it wasn't in a renewed commitment to tennis or the arms of a sweet yet stern leatherdaddy. Gasquet has been tested positive for cocaine.

Gasquet, like Martina Hingis before him, professes his total innocence. Although both his A and B samples from Miami tested positive, he may actually have a case, since he claims another test (of his hair) showed no traces of cocaine. He's suspended pending his hearing, which means he'll miss the French Open and probably Wimbledon, too, at the very least. [If he was found to have used cocaine during the Miami tournament, he'd be banned for two years. The ban is three months if he used it out of competition.]

When the Hingis story broke, I made the case that sporting authorities testing for drugs which are illegal but not performance enhancing is ridiculous and deeply troubling. So we won't go over that again. And considering the tremendous train-wreck that has been Gasquet's professional life over the last few years, it's not even going to make that big a difference to have him not in the draw.

Still, it makes me sad. I'm gonna miss our fragile French flower. Because I like Gasquet, because I wish he'd been a truly great player, but mostly because he's so fucking hot! With Marat "King of All Sex" Safin retiring at the end of the year and Gasquet facing a ban that would in all likelihood prove fatal to his career the world of tennis is getting uglier by the week!

[Richard Gasquet Says: I'll Take My Pants Off Too, If You Let Me Snort Coke Off Your Ass!]

Souters Me Just Fine!

2009-05-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

David Souter is about to retire? Only a measly 3 and a half years after we had our last confirmation battles we're gonna have another one?

Oh, my sweet motherfuckers, I'm stoked!

Of course, while conventional wisdom has persistently swirled around Ginsburg and Stevens, both older and more infirm than Souter, as potential high court drop-outs come summer break, most of us who pay close attention to the elaborate rituals of the Imperial Court of Law suspected strongly that Souter was at least considering jumping ship. Souter hasn't hired law clerks for next term, he is notorious for hating Washington, having no friends there and loving New Hampshire. Obama's appearance was probably all it took to finally push him over the edge.

And this is okay with me. I have no particular problem with Souter, but I've never been fond of style -- either in arguments or written opinions -- and his prissiness often bleeds into a kind of self-righteous liberalism that is miles away from the confident articulation of Justices Ginsburg and Stevens. Souter's been a fine justice, and his admirable ability to evolve in his jurisprudential thinking is to be commended. But the liberal bloc is in especial need of fresh blood.

Kim Wardlaw, anybody?

There Are No Morals In A World With God

2009-04-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

You know how we atheists are always being told that we can't live decent, moral, rewarding lives without Christ? (Or you can substitute the name of whichever mythological creature your local population worships.) Of course, only someone who believed in childhood fairy tales could possibly believe such a stupid notion -- a notion that presumes humans behave decently only out of fear of retribution from God and not retribution from baseball-bat wielding neighbors. But now the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has not only proven such an idea wrong, but has gone even further and proven that those who attend church regularly are more likely to approve of torture than those who attend seldom or never.

Yes, friends, you read that right. Church attendance might as well be categorized as a leading indicator for sociopathy! Did you torture small animals and/or go to church when you were young? Well, then, I bet you're a serial killer.

Okay, yes, I'm blowing things out of proportion. The study is depressing on most counts -- there's a really, really big minority of respondents who love torture. And actually it's Mainline Protestants who have the highest aversion to torture (about 1/3 of believe torture is "never justified"), only then followed by the "unaffiliated" which we can't exactly assume is entirely made up of atheists at 25%, 20% of Hispanic Catholics and a whopping 12.5% of white evangelicals.

Need any more proof that the wholesale welding of the charlatan evangelical movement to the Republican Party has corrupted the moral sense of all its adherents? Didn't think so.

Grendel's Mommy

2009-04-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

Erstwhile blogging buddy Ben posted a link to this article from the Atlantic about the eternal recurrence of horror films. The first part is quite amusing, but rather old-hat. [In fact, as Ben pointed out, the second part may well be old-hat as well, but I don't give a shit, because it's strictly new fedora to me, assholes!] But then it gets better with a nice historical glimpse at the deep cultural heritage these movie monsters share and the idea that perhaps "torture porn" (a phrase I'd love it found it actually applicable to any of the films it "describes") is as deeply written into our DNA as regular sexy porn. Whille Oogbar the Caveman was lovingly tracing the contours of Gumba's vulva on one side of the cave, Grak was surely painting a creepy hunchback with a wicked mammoth-bone atlatl on the other:

Look at Grendel, the ur-slasher, the slaughterous bog-dweller whose war on society and eventual comeuppance are chronicled in the thousand-year-old text of Beowulf. Slasher-wise, Grendel’s got it all. He’s a blue blood of homicide, directly descended from Cain, with a mother who (like Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th) will avenge his death with her own string of sub-slashings before being (again like Mrs. Voorhees) decapitated. He has, in addition, the true slasher’s great hatred of parties—nothing primes his purpose like the sound of a harp being struck. . .

Not only is there nothing new under the sun, there’s precious little of novelty under the moon, either. Sir Halewyn the Miserable, the supernatural serial killer of medieval European balladry, liked to slice out hearts with a sickle—much in the manner of My Bloody Valentine’s murderer, Harry Warden. Your hockey-masked machete artists, your chain-saw assassins, are cinematic iterations of an ancient and venerated principle. If they unsettle, if they horrify, if they augur the end of the Western world, they’re only doing their job. They are a company, a guild. Leatherface, Jason, Michael Myers, Freddy, Jigsaw, and the sportsmen of Elite Hunting—traditionalists to a man.

So, Does This Mean I'm Supposed To Stop Eating Pig Phlegm Sandwiches?

2009-04-27T23:24:00.001-07:00

So, I was minding my own business, reading some news about my new girlfriend, Swine Flu, when I came across this:

"This is a good example of why [Twitter is] headed in that wrong direction, because it's just propagating fear amongst people as opposed to seeking actual solutions or key information," said Brennon Slattery, a contributing writer for PC World. "The swine flu thing came really at the crux of a media revolution."

Twitter's popularity has exploded in recent months, and Slattery said it's a new development that a wide number of people would turn to the site in search of information during an emergency.

That's my friend! On CNN! Oh, Sweet Ted Turner, how cool is that? Pretty damn cool.

PS: I actually don't really agree with Mr. Slattery's opinion on this issue, since I'd wager the benefits of swift, simple communication devices during times of crises probably outweigh the downside of a bunch of stupid people spreading stupid ideas. The mere fact that Twitter makes the process of disease-panic happen faster hardly means it's to blame for a phenomenon as old as the cough itself. But that's not the point. He's quoted in a CNN piece. I'm not. Therefore he is, by definition, righter than me.

PPS: Maybe the networks are just super bummed that they've been dethroned as the centers of media hysteria about disease?

Somehow, An iPhone Vagina App Seems So Much Less Sexy

2009-04-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

News that a remake of David Cronenberg's seminal (sometimes, rather literally) film Videodrome is in the works has set off yet another predictable round of burbling, semi-coherent ranting amongs the cinescenti.

We here at Fagistan have been down this road before, but it remains a particularly vexing topic to me. Otherwise intelligent people being reduced to such an ideological, ahistorical and, frankly, stupid knee-jerk reaction against even the hint of the word "remake" is a phenomenon worth some bit of exploration, I think.

Previously, I've mostly restrained myself to the notion that, indeed, some remakes are great -- some of them greater than their predecessors -- which is a good enough argument in itself. But there's still something troubling about the persistence of this anti-remake bias. And it has something to do with our peculiar notions about film.

After all, almost nobody seems particularly incensed when novelists do the same thing. Thomas Mann's remake of Goethe's Doctor Faustus is generally regarding with great esteem. William Shakespeare is widely considered one of the most original English writers in history, though all of his great plays are remakes either of history or of other writers' work.

But, of course, in literature we never use the word "remake." We say "retelling" or "drawing inspiration from." Remake is an ugly word and therefore seems to describe an ugly phenomenon. But it strikes me as possible that the ugly word creates, rather than describes, the phenomenon. And such a word only seems possible in the context of film.

Film, unlike theater, is capable of mass production and dissemination and therefore doesn't require remakes. Literature has such an innate cultural acceptance as art that something as infantile as a denunciation of a work of art for being "unoriginal" seems preposterous. But film still lacks the ingrained artistic superiority that the novel still, raggedly, possesses. And so I think many artistically inclined film fans find the notion of remakes, and the impression they leave that film no longer possesses the spontaneity it could only sustain when it was a new form without having yet achieved the immutable timelessness of literature, painting or music, hate remakes because they seem to eat away at the edifice of the films they remake -- diminishing great works of art and, simultaneously, film-as-art itself.

But I'd argue that it is exactly this snarling reaction that does the most damage to film's artistic integrity. A fundamental fear and dismissal of The Stupid Remake not only seems more desperate than the state of cinema requires but also seeks to isolate film from itself! [Yes, from itself, but not from other arts. It's still considered perfectly legitimate to adapt novels into films, another form of "remake", a process that is mostly despised only by the literati.] This hardly seems conducive to the kind of evolution and development that led, eventually, to many of the greatest novels of the last 100 years.

Of course, many remakes are bound to be bad. But the fact that If At Faust You Don't Succeed is a terrible novel hardly diminishes the work of Goethe, Marlowe or Mann.

Of course, all of this can be put much more simply by noting that one of Cronenberg's early successes (and still one of his best films) is itself a big-budget remake of a low-budget cult classic.

SCOTUS SCROTUS: Little Stevie Breyer's Underpants

2009-04-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

Supreme Court season almost makes me feel like old times. You know, when I used to blog regularly and before a terrible laboratory experiment ruined my ability to wear jockstraps foreveer. O, Halcyon!

On Tuesday, the Eight Men and a Little Lady met to hear arguments about strip-searches. And not the sexy kind!

You see, 13-year-old Savana Redding was minding her own honor's student business when she was hauled out of class, taken to the principal's office and forced to remove her clothes so administrators could search for ibuprofen she had allegedly secreted somewhere on her body. I don't know about y'alls, but I always keep my Tylenol in my panties. I like to make sure it stays moist and warm for later.

But Savana, it turns out, was not keeping ibuprofen in her bra. Not because that's not a convenient storage space, but because she didn't even have any! Some other chick got busted with the drug and blamed it on Savana.

The question before the Court is whether or not such strip searches constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment and thence whether or not Ms. Redding has standing to sue the school.

Dahlia Lithwick, as always, was on hand and describes the proceedings as Porky's 3: The Supreme Court Says "Panties."

And, based on the slew of hilarious opinings she relates that seems pretty accurate. Over the last ten years or so, the Court has continued to limit the Constitutional protections of school children (even for behavior that takes place off of school property when school is not in session, e.g. Bong Hits v. Jesus) and when listening to or reading the Justices in these cases it often seems that they were never themselves children. In this case it would also appear that they never had genitalia.

Adam Wolf, from the ACLU, and Justice Ginsburg are the only people who seem to get what's fundamentally gross about this case, by focusing on the fact that we are dealing with school administrators forcing adolescent children to get naked in front of them:

The Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl's naked body.

Of course, even he can't help but say something totally hilarious when he notes that the school should not have suspected she was hiding ibuprofen in her panties because if she was going to sell it there would be a certain "ick factor" involved in her choice of humidor.

But the grand-daddy of all clueless Justices today has to be Stephen Breyer. Breyer seems simply incapable of comprehending why being dragged out of class and being forced to display your body might be at all humiliating, particularly to a girl Redding's age. He insists that this is no different from changing clothes in gym despite the fact that, typically speaking, the gym teacher isn't standing a foot away from you peering down your shorts. Nor are you being forced to strip because you are suspected of criminal activity. Then he lets loose with what can only be described as the perverse fantasy of a very disturbed old man, and what may well be one of the funniest monologues ever uttered by a Justice:

In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.

After the uproarious laughter fades, Breyer continues:

Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's beyond human experience.

Oh, Stephen! You just made my day! I'm now obsessed with thinking about other boys humiliating the nerd who will one day wield the power to commute their death sentences by putting junior mints in his underwear!

However, Breyer's stirring and passionate ode to childish underwear games still misses the point. On so many levels I'm almost staggered. 1) Another kid giving you a wedgie in the locker room is fundamentally different from this case. 2) Breyer suggests this happened when he was 8, 10 or 12. The girl in this case was 13, and it seems undeniable to me that children are even more confused and shy about their bodies in puberty than they were as fucking 8-year-olds. 3) Since when does something have to be "beyond human experience" to be unconstitutional? Slavery is not beyond human experience. Torture is not beyond human experience. Censorship is not beyond human experience.

Hopefully Ginsburg will force all her colleagues to strip for her while she searches for any illegally smuggled Alzheimer's drugs and see how they like it!

PS: Lithwick, in her brief rundown of previous school cases, notes that Ginsburg once accused the court of invoking "nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock run amok, and colliding tubas" in her dissent in a drug testing case. So, naturally, I wanted to read her opinion. The phrase is a good deal less hilarious in its context -- the school officials argued that non-athletic extracurriculars also opened the door to random drug tests because of the danger posed by high marching bands, tripping FFA members with 1500 lb. cows and crazed-meth-fueled Future Homemakers wielding kitchen knives -- but is still pretty choice. Her entire dissent is nearly as sourly sarcastic as a Scalia masterpiece, but my favorite line isn't the one about colliding tubas, but instead this: "If a student has a reasonable subjective expectation of privacy in the personal items she brings to school, surely she has a similar expectation regarding the chemical composition of her urine."

SCOTUS Scrotus Returns!

2009-04-22T03:09:00.000-07:00

Well, fags and fagesses, It's 5-4 decision time! And it's not even June!

The Supreme Court has handed down its decision in Arizona v. Gant, a case relating to warrantless searches of vehicles.

The Court has previously held (in a series of cases starting with New York v. Belton and continuing with Thornton v. United Sates) that police officers can search a vehicle without a warrant, even after they have arrested and secured the suspect in their squad car, because the threat posed to an officer by weapons in the car justifies immediate search. As a result of this ruling, people arrested for even minor traffic violations are subject to searches lacking in probable cause and these searches can lead to the discovery of evidence of other crimes -- usually relating to guns and drugs, but sometimes also rape, robbery, murder, etc.

So what's the big deal? Well, to start off with, the rule is transparently designed to circumvent the driver's (or other occupants') Constitutional rights by fabricating an essentially nonexistent threat. Remember, the ruling applies to incidents in which the occupant of the vehicle has already been arrested, handcuffed and locked inside a police car. At this point in the game, there is no reason for a police officer to fear for his life, since there is no plausible means by which the arrested individual could uncuff himself, escape the vehicle, return to his own vehicle, grab a weapon and shoot the cop. Even if we accept that the ruling was made in good faith (and I have my doubts) the reality on the ground is that police virtually never choose not to exercise this power, because they are eager to find evidence of other crimes.

In this specific case, Mr. Gant was arrested for driving without a license and, upon searching the car, police found cocaine, upon which Mr. Gant, who was locked up in the police car during the search, was charged with drug possession. Even if he did have weapons in the car, he'd have been utterly incapable of accessing and using them.

And the Court agrees! The majority opinion limits such searches to two categories: incidents in which the suspect is still within "reaching distance" of any potential weapons (i.e. not yet secured in the police car -- and following the reasoning of a Warren Court decision called Chimel v. California) and situations in which the "ojbect of the search" is evidence relating to the crime of arrest, or when police have probable cause (the same standard that would get them a warrant if they sought one) that evidence of another, specific, crime may be found.

This is, as you can imagine, a ruling that I find heartening. Although I do find the Chimel ruling, and its application here, rather strange. One justice (more on that in a minute, faggies!) suggests this might lead officers to leave a suspect unsecured in order to justify a search. That would be a bad result, but I don't think it's all that likely, since it would force officers to willingly expose themselves to more danger than is likely justified by a trunk full of cocaine. But it is does leave me wondering when, exactly, this could be applied. Since the first order of business would be to make sure the suspect is restrained, there doesn't seem like there's that much time to execute an actual search!

Still, what's even more heartening to me is the actual breakdown of the Justices involved. Yes, it's a 5-4 decision, but look at this. The Opinion of the Court was written by Justice Stevens and signed by Ginsburg, Souter, Thomas and Scalia! Roberts, Alito, Kennedy and Breyer were all is dissent. I've long argued that Scalia and Thomas can both be relied on in most civil liberties cases -- their mutual devotion to originalism, so often maligned by people who know very little about the theory, more or less requires it.

And y'all know that if there's anything that gives me a bigger boner than Antonin Scalia, it's Antonin Scalia writing an excellent Bill of Rights opinion. And if there's anything that gives me an even bigger boner (full on rip-right-out-of-my-skin big) it's Scalia using his concurring opinion to slice up the majority he's siding with!

Scalia would (rightly in my view) limit searches only to the second category I mentioned above -- allowing searches only for evidence pertaining to the crime of arrest, plus other possible crimes having probable cause. Here's what he says of Chimel and Stevens:

I believe that this standard fails to provide the needed guidance to arresting officers and also leaves much room for manipulation, inviting officers to leave the scene unsecured (at least where dangerous suspects are not involved) in order to conduct a vehicle search. In my view we should simple abandon the Belton-Thornton charade of officer safety and overrule those cases.

Still, Stevens does get off a little easier than poor Alito!

Justice Alito insists the Court must demand a good reason for abandoning prior precedent. This is true enough, but it seems to me ample reason that the precedent was badly reasoned and produces erroneous (in this case unconstitutional) results. . . This formulation [i.e. the majority opinion] of officers' authority both preserves the outcomes of our prior cases and tethers the scope and rationale of the doctrine to the triggering event. The fact of the arrest in the automobile context makes searches on exigency grounds less reasonable, not more so.

Still, he closes with a good jab at both offending parties:

It seems to me unacceptable for the Court to come forth with a 4-to-1-to-4 opinion that leaves the governing rule uncertain. I am therefore confronted with the choice of either leaving the current understanding of Belton and Thornton in effect, or acceding to what seems to me the artificial narrowing of those cases adopted by Justice Stevens. The latter, as I have said, does not provide the degree of certainty I think desirable in this field; but the former opens the field to what I think are plainly unconstitutional searches -- which is the greater evil. I therefore join the opinion of the Court.

oh, Nino, let's commit some greater evil at my place! Call me!

This Blog Doesn't Exist

2009-04-21T23:41:00.001-07:00

Well, well, well, what have we here? A Congresswoman allegedly caught on a wiretap making deals with "foreign agents"? Oh, and it's Jane fuckin' Harman?

O, Delicious Karmic Retribution!

I'm sure the lefty blogosphere has already pounced, one more time, on Poor Old Jane, but that don't mean I won't get my limp-wristed karate chops in!

Now, listen, we have no idea what this conversation actually entailed and Rep. Harman is perfectly within her rights to proclaim her innocence and to demand that the "anonymous sources" back up their word with an actual transcript of the conversation. Certainly it's possible that the information leaked is either entirely false (somewhat unlikely, since I can't quite grasp a particular motive someone would have for making totally unsubstantiated claims against Harman two years after she was effectively spayed by Speaker Pelosi, especially when those claims are about an actual recording which either does or does not exist) or that the information is distorted, incomplete and less incriminating than it seems at first glance (much more likely, given the deliberately and lovingly groomed excerpts prosecutors have given us of wiretaps in the Blagojevich and Stevens cases.) So, hey, maybe she's at least innocentish and never agreed to help finagle reduced espionage charges against two AIPAC officials in exchange for their support in her quest to become Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Certainly neither half of this deal seems to have come to fruition, since the officials are about to go to trial and Harman is most decidedly not the Chairman. And maybe she doesn't spend too much time watching political thrillers and therefore never actually ended a wiretapped phone call with the phrase "this conversation doesn't exist."

Even if she's as innocent as water's wet, who the fuck cares?

There's something deeply satisfying in seeing a woman who used her substantial power in the then-minority party to promote, defend and applaud President Bush's illegal and deeply disturbing warrantless wiretapping scheme to suddenly be crowing:

I think the question is about ... did our government abuse the rights of American citizens, including members of Congress, with legal or illegal wiretappings about things that were not appropriate and then selective leaking of the product of those wiretaps.

No shit, Sherlock!

Of course that's the issue! But somehow you weren't all too concerned about the possible abuses of both illegal and legal wiretapping schemes until you ended up on the losing end of the recording. When the Bush Administration was revealed to be secretly bypassing the FISA court without any authorization by Congressional law, you stepped up to the plate and offered to help make this shit perfectly legal.

So, I'm sorry Jane, but what's good for the Brandon Mayfield goose is surely good for the Jane Harman gander. Especially when the sources indicate that the only reason an FBI investigation was never launched was because Attorney General Gonzales was desperate to maintain the power of his pet We-don't-need-no-stinkin'-warrants Democrat in the House.

So now you know what it's like to get fist-fucked in the ass by the steel hand of the US Government. Don't come cryin' to me!

PS: Bonus No Shit, Sherlock moment: "I never had any idea that my government was wiretapping me at all." Really? You mean they don't send you a politely worded letter in the mail before they bug your phone? I'm perfectly willing to admit to all kinds of crimes when chatting on the phone, but not if they don't ask nicely before recording my confession! Of course, the sources have said that Rep. Harman wasn't even the target of the wiretap. So the government never was wiretapping her at all -- they were wiretapping her alleged co-conspirator.

Are Those Actual Seals? And Navy SEALS?!

2009-04-21T00:09:00.000-07:00

Well, Novak Djokovic couldn't quite kill the King of Clay at Monte Carlo on Sunday, but the nipple tassels make up for it:

PS: I promise that sometime soon I will actually start blogging again!

Clay or Grass, She'll Flay Your Ass

2009-04-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hugh Laurie singing a sweet song about Fraulein Forehand:

PS: I'm not easily shocked, but I gotta say that I never saw the completely, hilariously tasteless verse about Monica Seles coming!

The Dictionary Loves Fags

2009-04-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

We're often being told by homophobic bigots that the "definition of marriage" hasn't changed in thousands of years. We've all been down this path before, so I won't belabor all those things (like divorce and monogamy) that weren't exactly part of the way King David viewed marriage. But Daniel Redman's written a neat piece in Slate about how The Dictionary itself is changing the definition of marriage to include, usually as a secondary definition, same-sex unions, legal and otherwise. Naturally, a lot of conservatives are enraged that the dictionary would dare to include a definition, despite its widespread use by both proponents and opponents of gay marriage.

Many of these people howl things such as "the word 'marriage' has never been synonymous with same-sex relationships!" Of course, that might explain why the dictionaries are only now altering the definition, to reflect, you know, like, actual changes in the usage of the word? But even if this is some kind of super-awesome lexicographical conspiracy, merely perusing the various older dictionary definitions shows how much our notions about marriage have changed.

Here's how Webster's current definition deals with regular, traditional, straight marriage (the obscene stuff about homo is def. 1 a (2)):

1 a (1) the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a contractual and consensual relationship recognized by law

Now, when they go back to show us the definition from 1992, ostensibly to prove to us that same-sex unions weren't in that version, they actually reveal just how much change has been wrought on opposite-sex unions:

n. The institution under which a man and a woman become legally united on a permanent basis.

So, in 1992 the dictionary didn't even admit divorce as a possibility! Much less make any reference to something as new age and faggy as mutual consent!

Old Noah Webster himself offered this defintion:

instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children.

Even the editions released in early twentieth century had softened the overt moralizing by which Webster, and society, had enforced the marriage contract for centuries.

Contrary to popular belief, dictionaries are not infallible arbiters of absolute truth. They merely seek to define the ways in which words are used by actual living human beings. What Abraham or King Henry VIII or Noah Webster thought a word meant is of little consequence. So, all this kerfuffle about the definition of marriage mostly exhibits a rather obscene fetish for the authority of The Dictionary (how often, in common usage, is it implied that there's only one?) and its ability to order and construct our lives. But it also reveals how much the right wing has invested in the notion that the "definition" of marriage is both immutable and timeless. They are able to easily shrug off all the historical evidence to the contrary through some act of pure faith and aluminum poisoning, but to have The Dictionary so vilely corrupted is too terrible a blow!

Of course, as an inveterate foe of marriage and therefore only a rather compromised supporter of definition 1 a (2), I think we'd all be much better off if we chucked all the Websters and Oxfords and American Heritages and relied on the only dictionary that truly gets to the heart of the matter:

MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

Thank you, Ambrose Bierce!

PS: Also, you should read this charming ode to the Moz. My favorite line: "Rock singers had blasted the trumpet of Nietzschean triumph before; they had mewed like Keatsian lambs. But before Morrissey, had anyone done both? In the same breath?"

Danielle Steel's Done It Again!

2009-04-08T23:33:00.000-07:00

Apparently all I do now is post shit from YouTube. This is because I am now officially too fat to do original blogging. It's the law. Read it!

Anyway, this is Kyle Riabko, who was in the touring company for the musical Spring Awakening and is some sort of singer songwriter. However, clearly his greatest achievement is "Book Talk With Kyle And Mom" in which young Mr. Riabko and his mother discuss literature:

Best Antichrist Ever!

2009-04-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

There have been a lot of candidates for Antichrist lately -- the current President being only one. But I don't think any is quite so convincing as . . . Prince William!

Apparently, the British royal family took some dried up old blood from the Shroud of Turin and used it to clone Jesus, then implanted the clone-fetus in the womb of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her eldest son has the exact same DNA as Jesus himself! But, being a clone, he is a literal, as well as figurative, BEAST.

My first favorite piece of evidence is that "The Lion King" was released the week of Prince William's twelfth birthday . . . although I'm unsure if it is Simba ("I Just Can't Wait To Be King") who is supposed to be Wills or Scar ("who mocks our crucified nail-scarred king") but nonetheless, I think this pretty much erases all doubt.

My second favorite piece of evidence is the question of Clone Jesus's hair color. It "changes frequently" -- proven by a series of photos which, to my eye at least, show a blond adolescent growing into a blondish-brown-haired adult (a most distressing evolution the President of Fagistan himself underwent, with only minimal occult intervention.) But the hair color changes are intended to make William avoid looking "Jewish." Then we see a bunch of photos of him "wearing" his dark hair -- most of which are black and white photos, which all tend to make dark blonds appear very dark-haired, and a few other photos which, I suspect, are more the result of winter than Satanism -- and proving that he looks like a "handsome young Jewish man." They didn't include anything about bleaching his skin, but I assume the Knights Templar did that to him too!

Do Your Hear or Fear Or . . .?

2009-03-03T09:17:00.000-08:00

How did I ever forget how amazing Ann-Margret was in Tommy? This shit is genius!

Viaggravated Assault!

2009-02-27T02:41:00.000-08:00

From Russia with engorged love:

Police say 2 women bet their friend Sergey Tuganov that he couldn't keep up with them during a 12-hour sex marathon.

The prize, $4,300.

Tuganov took the bet and decided to boost his chances of winning by downing a bottle of Viagra.

It worked. He won the wager.

But just minutes later, the 28-year-old mechanic >died of a heart attack, Moscow police said.

Uh oh! Sounds like WADA needs to update their Orgy Marathon Rules!

If There's Anything More Annoying Than Kids, It's A Cockatoo!

2009-02-27T02:36:00.000-08:00

Some people in Louisiana have been arrested after a woman offered to trade two children (that she was "looking after") for a cockatoo. Well, a cockatoo + $175.

So, a bird is a lot cheaper to feed than children. And I guess if you get tired of it you can just cut its head off and say a cat did it. But if Baby Lord Jesus floated down on a magical cloud made of chocolate and said to me, "President of Fagistan! You must either have a toddler or a bird! Choose wisley! I'm Jesus!" I'd pick the toddler in a heartbeat. And then I'd sell it. For a guinea pig.

I've Got The Strength Of An Ape And No Remorse!

2009-02-27T00:08:00.000-08:00

John Hawks tackles the pressing question: exactly how strong are chimps, anyway? This is a question of particular importance to me, since I am deeply, staggeringly sexually attracted to ape-human hybrids. [Come on, mad scientists, get with it! I need a Manpanzee!]

So, just because a chimp tore that lady's entire face of, is it really true, as we've been told so often, that chimpanzees are vastly stronger than their brainiac human cousins? Turns out, not so much.

It sounds extreme to suggest that humans are only an eighth as strong as chimpanzees. Consider that a large human can bench-press 250 pounds. If the "five to eight times" figure were true, that would make a large chimpanzee capable of bench-pressing 1 ton.

Oh man, imagine what a chimp could do if subjected to a grueling East German women's weightlifting training program?! We'd be their total bitches! Eating their fleas and sucking their tiny dicks! Luckily:

Tests in the 1960s confirmed [that a] chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights.

Phew! That means a human is probably as strong as a chimp, since chimps are about half the size of humans. We're out of the clear! But wait . . . what's that?

The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier.

Oh for the sweet love of mercy, don't give that chimp any of Pat Robertson's Magic Protein Shake! Chimps'll be leg-pressing the fuck out of us!

Nixon Had His Jew-Counters and LBJ Had . . . Bill Moyers!

2009-02-24T23:56:00.000-08:00

As usual these days, I'm way behind the curve in dealing with, well, anything. So many of you may well already be aware of the tempest a-brewin' over Bill Moyers' role in "homo-hunting" during the Johnson Administration. I'm not surprised, since Moyers is a Grade-A Asshole. Anyone as self-righteous as Bill Moyers has to either be brain-damaged or secretly involved in something disgusting. I always figured Moyers to be one of those guys who climbs into a crib and pretends to be a baby, but a-hunting-for-homos is even better!

I haven't got a lot to say on the topic, but please read Jack Shafer's two pieces on the issue, as well as Moyers's typically sanctimonious response.

PS: My favorite part is Shafer quoting Dallek quoting Goldwater, when asked for a comment on the arrest of a Johnson aide who got caught sucking dick at the Y. Goldwater would only speak off the record and his response was, "What a way to win an election. Communists and cocksuckers." Huh?! A candidate refusing to get sleazy?! Decency in a presidential campaign?! Say it ain't so!

Empty Nets

2009-02-24T23:34:00.000-08:00

The other day, a work colleague and I were discussing how frustrating it is when the hotel's internet slows to a grinding, dial-up circa second Clinton Administration pace (usually due to stinky, piggy hotel guests illegally downloading Slumdog Millionaire). Whenever I complain about slow internet, it reminds me of the fact that once upon a time what we now think of as mind-numbingly turgid was considered blazing, state-of-the-art fast.

[As it happens, I get the same bemused form of nostalgia whenever I tear off the phone charge list from its dot matrix printer. Suddenly I'm back in my middle school computer lab, oohing-and-aahing. It prints so fast! Tearing off these little paper edges is so much fun!]

But my colleague and I quickly came to the conclusion that a big part of the reason that the internet's pace didn't bother us back then (besides the obvious fact that we had nothing to compare it to, other than William Gibson novels) was that there just wasn't really anything to do on the internet. There was e-mail, but it hadn't yet achieved its hegemony over the phone. There were, by the time I logged onto the Web in 1997, chat rooms wherein I could "date" 40 year old prison guards from Virginia, but beyond that there were surprisingly few ways to waste one's time.

Indeed, probably the most amazing things about the internet is that it survived its novelty phase, with one area cordoned off for the nerds and their listservs and another area cordoned off for . . . well, not much exactly, except sending lame jokes via e-mail. The internet very rapidly became extremely useful, as well as extremely distracting, so that none of us really had time to realize that it was totally boring.

Well, it seems that my colleague and I are not the only people pondering Internet History. Farhad Manjoo explores the Web of '96 in a rather amusing piece at Slate, tracking those elements of the early internet that prefigured things to come and those which seem entirely quaint. Of course, even the prefiguring stuff seems quaint. Just seeing the letters ICQ made me feel like I was in high school again!

I Wore An Evening Gown Made Of Human Livers

2009-02-22T23:48:00.000-08:00

Oscars!

For some reason, I was actually, like, excited about the Academy Awards this year. Well, not just for "some reason", but instead because I loved Slumdog Millionaire and the notion that a film that I not only enjoyed but actually thought was the best movie of the year winning Best Picture? It made me feel like Roger Ebert!

I don't really have a lot to say about the winners, although I can say that my sensibilities weren't completely offended by any win. I didn't even see The Reader, so even if it was gross and stupid and morally objectionable, who the fuck cares? It's Kate Fucking Winslet! They could give her the prize for a movie in which she just sits on a toilet pooping and reading Harry Potter books to herself and I'd find it totally deserving of recognition.

And Penelope Cruz? First of all: I didn't super-love Vicky/Cristina Barcelona, but any time a Woody Allen movie wins awards, you know I'm down with that. And second of all, Allen is the first American director to actually put Cruz to non-boring use. She's fantastic in that film, and much as I love Viola Davis, Amy Adams and Marisa Tomei: too bad! Penelope can eat you alive!

Heath Ledger? I'm not certain that if he were alive he'd even have been nominated and almost certainly wouldn't have won. But he was great in that movie and what, exactly, was his competition? Josh Brolin? No thank you!

But what I really want to talk about is Sean Penn. I realize that posting these sorts of predictions after they come true is a little Nostradamus-y, but perhaps other than Ledger I was more confident about his win than anyone else's. How can that be, you ask? This was, after all, a pretty legitimate race, with the two men splitting all the major pre-Oscar honors.

Still, it was a no-brainer. Why? Because Harvey Milk was a real person.

It has been 11 years since all four acting Oscars went to fictional characters. Here's the breakdown over the last ten years:

Best Actress: Edith Piaf (Cotillard), Queen Elizabeth II (Mirren), June Carter Cash (Witherspoon), Aileen Wournos (Theron), Virginia Woolf (Kidman), Erin Brockovich (Roberts), Brandon Teena (Swank)

Best Actor: Idi Amin (Whitaker), Truman Capote (Hoffman), Ray Charles (Foxx)

Best Supporting Actress: Katharine Hepburn (Blanchett), Alicia Nash (Connelly), Lee Krasner (Harden), Queen Elizabeth I (Dench)

Best Supporting Actor: John Laroche (Cooper), John Bayley (Broadbent)

And that list doesn't count Angelina Jolie's character in Girl, Interrupted, since I'm not absolutely certain that character wasn't a composite, much less if that was her real name.

Now, a few of these people weren't all that famous, but even in those cases the fact that a person really lived is an obvious benefit lately in Oscar-dom. Of the last 40 acting awards sixteen went to nonfictional characters -- that's a whopping 40%. On average, three biopic-ish performances win Oscars every two years.

And this year, Penn was the only reasonable biopic choice -- filling in the role Cotillard occupied last year. Not a single real person was even nominated in Best Supporting Actress, while Supporting Actor had just Josh Brolin's Dan White -- and is a pathetic assassin really gonna beat the Joker? In Best Actress (by far the most likely category to yield a real person as winner -- 7 of the last ten trophies have gone to such performances) there was only Jolie's character in Changeling, and she was definitely in the "not really famous" category.

So that leaves us with Best Actor, where Penn had to compete with Frank Langella for that honor. But Langella wasn't even in the conversation. So, by deduction, Sean Penn's gotta win.

Which leaves the oozy, gaping question: when will the Academy's sick obsession with real people transformed into totally fake versions of themselves finally run its course? Hopefully not next year, because I'm hoping to win an Oscar for my stunning portrayal of of Senator David Vitter in All The Senator's Diapers!

Who Wants Some BJ?

2009-01-27T00:22:00.000-08:00

Over the last year or so Ron Rosenbaum has somehow replaced Dahlia Lithwick as my favorite at Slate. Mostly, this is because he's an excellent writer with a vivid critical mind, able to speak intelligently on virtually any subject, from Hitler to Shakespeare. He's also funny, and intertwines his personal psychological reactions to art with more typical criticism in a way I find totally addicting.

There are some writers, like Susan Sontag, who are almost always at their best when writing about subjects they love. Others, like Dale Peck, are almost always at their best when writing about subjects they despise. Rosenbaum has written some very nice odes, but my favorite of his pieces are the nasty ones. And his latest, on the pressing topic of aristic value by way of Billy Joel, is particularly excellent, as is his tendency to refer to Mr. Joel and B.J.

This must be prevented! No career re-evaluations please! No false contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel's famous song "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"? Please. It never was rock 'n' roll. Billy Joel's music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: "Mock-Rock."

And then there's Rosenbaum's song-by-song reading of every Billy Joel song as expressing "unearned contempt" for its characters.

"Anthony's Song"—straight up contempt for lower-middle-class aspirations. B.J.'s down with the authentic stuff in life. This is the one with the line about the "heart attack-ack-ack" where he attack-ack-acks people who work two jobs so they can "trade in their Chevy for a Cadillac"-ack-ack, something B.J. would never do. No phony "movin' up" for him!

And it seems Rosenbaum and I share something in common. When he goes to Barnes and Noble to buy Billy Joel's "Greatest Hits" he "also bought a copy of an album [he] already had—Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose "Hickory Wind" is just ravishing—so the cashier might think the B.J. box was merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste."

I, too, am overly worried about what music shop cashiers will think of my purchases. Since I have a number of musical interests that the pretty boy hipsters who dreamily populate every music store in North America would find "embarrassing" *(despite the fact that my musical taste is, natural, totally awesome), I find myself nearly crippled by the contempt I imagine they will have for me. This is why I buy the original cast recordings of Broadway musicals on Amazon, even if I suspect that actually hipsters probably do at least theoretically like Sondheim. Still, I can't bear to imagine the cashier's eyes glinting out from behind his slightly-too-long hair with malevolent disdain.

And I've never even tried to buy a Billy Joel album. Although, once I did buy a Neville Brothers CD for my mom. I was more embarrassed than the first time I bought a copy of the Advocate at the Hastings in Helena, Montana circa 1997.

Well, That Didn't Take Long!

2009-01-22T04:35:00.000-08:00

Three weeks after Sam Adams became the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city, he's on the verge of resigning in the wake of a sex scandal involving a totally hot 18 year old [the kid is now older, since the affair was in 2005] he was "mentoring." (PS: I would make a great mentor, hot 18 year old gays!)

Okay, so common sense tells me that Adams did not wait until the young man turned 18. But as you all know, I am a virulent opponent of the 18 year age of a consent. Adams is out of the closet, he was single at the time, the kid was either of age or so close that it's irrelevant. Adams has a strong vision for the city and I believe he should fight for his job at all costs. Don't let them beat you down Sam!

Yeah, there are some troublesome aspects to the story. Like how he hired a reporter covering the story for a prominent City Hall job. And the fact that lying about a consensual, non-controversial relationship (assuming it was as non-controversial as he alleges) is rather gross and spineless. But still, people! David Wu represents parts of Portland in Congress and he is an admitted would-be rapist! If we can handle a guy who tried to have totally non-consensual sex with his ex-girlfriend, I think we can have a Mayor who had totally consensual sex with a teenager.

But of course, gay sex gets everyone hot and bothered. I love when people get all google-eyed and sweaty while screeching "He lied to us!" or "He's such a hypocrite!" As much as those lines of reasoning are valid, they just serve as a way to cover up for homophobic gay-sex anxiety. We were willing to have a gay mayor as long as we didn't have to consider the fact that he actually crams his cock into buttholes! Add to that the silly, repugnant attempt to transform 17 year olds into "children" by denying them the basic, fundamental human right to control their own sexual lives and you've got the good old Gay Molestor Bogeyman on your hands.

Oh, and here's one more thing that bothers me. See that dude in the photo of the Oregonian story I linked to above with his "look at me, I'm a total shitbag and I'm wicked clever!" Dr. Seussy protest sign? Note the caption. "Stephen Young of Lake Oswego carries a sign Wednesday outside City Hall calling for Mayor Sam Adams to resign." Ummmm . . . Mr. Rhymey-pants? Do you realize that you are not a resident of this city and therefore have no right to call for his resignation? Why don't you go stirring up gay-sex trouble for Lake Oswego's mayor? You didn't vote for Adams. You live in the suburbs and, like all suburban leeches, take full advantage of Portland's urban wonderland without contributing to it in any way. And you have the audacity to take the day off work (ha ha! Like that guy even has a job!) to call on my mayor to resign?

Ten words for you, Stephen Young of Lake Oswego: Go fuck yourself with a razor-blade encrusted tampon applicator, prickbreath!

Fight, Sam, fight! Show 'em what happens when you back a fag into a reeking corner! Don't let a bunch of assless-chaps-wearing shitblocks from Lake Oswego push you around. You're the mayor. So fucking act like it.

PS: Steve Duin, the wonderful Oregonian columnist, had a rather savvy take on the issue, suggesting that Adams support a recall election (which cannot be held, probably, until the fall) which would give the voters a chance to contemplate things more soberly and Adams a chance to prove he's as competent as we all know he is. Although I hate recalls and wouldn't suggest Adams consent to such a thing even if I didn't, it's not exactly a bad idea. I do, however, take issue with Duin's suggestion that the scandal is much worse if it turns out Beau Breedlove was only 17 when the affair began. Comparing Adams having sex with a 17 year old to Neil Goldschmidt having sex with his 14 year old babysitter is a bit . . . overheated, no?

PPS: Ugh, I hate you stupid gays! Our hideous local gay newspaper wants Adams to resign! When will gays stop apologizing for our sexuality? We want straights to give us civil rights, but even our leaders seem to think gay sex (or, as they refer to it in the editorial, "lying to the people of the Portland", see paragraph four above) is something so dirty and shameful it should be banished from even the slightlest public view!

PPPS: I had some other things, somewhat less militantly-pro-Sam, to say at Fey Friends as well.

Ann Coulter Loves A Good d10

2009-01-15T01:15:00.000-08:00

Ann Coulter's latest column is mostly just a columnar ad for her latest book, which happens to be about how single mothers are responsible for all crime in America. But it does include at least one excellent argument, about the New York Times's woefully inadequate reporting on veterans who commit murder. Despite Coulter's own somewhat questionable use of statistical data (like when she lumps high school dropouts in with child murderers to make a point about the evils of single-motherhood) she's nonetheless correct to point out that the rate of murder among returning veterans is lower than among the non-veteran population and therefore the Times pieces are just another form of media hysteria.

And then Ann goes ahead and fills my heart with pure joy with this:

Consider the harmless fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons -- which happens to be played almost exclusively by young males. When murders were committed in the '80s by (1) young men, who were (2) Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, some people concluded that factor (2), rather than factor (1), led to murderous tendencies.

Thank you, Ann! You've just become the first person with any connections to the mainstream media to recognize that D & D is an benign practice that does not leave our children vulnerable to the powers of Satan! I love you, again! Please don't eat my face!

Ram Rod!

2008-12-31T00:04:00.000-08:00

My beloved Rod Blagojevich has stepped up to the plate and done exactly what I told him to do while we were snuggled together on a mattress made entirely of cum-stained $20 bills: he's appointed a US Senator!

Senate Democrats still say they intend to deny the 71-year-old former Attorney General (and former Blagojevich opponent), Roland Burris, his seat at the table. But by selecting someone who is presumably not any of the numerical candidates in Fitzgerald's criminal complaint, and choosing a relatively elderly African-American who was the first black man elected to statewide office in Illinois (and who, incidentally, managed nearly two decades in major state office in Illinois without going to prison!) at a moment when Obama's absence leaves the Senate once again without a black member, Rowdy Roddy has just made things a bit more difficult for them.

This is especially true since, contrary to what Harry Reid might believe, the Senate doesn't have absolute and unilateral power to deny a legally-appointed Senator his seat. While my initial legal thoughts on the matter mostly revolved around the doctrine of "political questions", whereby the federal courts keep their hands out of Constitutional issues in which another branch of government appears to have Constitutionally absolute authority, it turns out the Supreme Court has dealt with this issue before. As Edward McClelland (who, like the President of Fagistan, believed Blagojevich should appoint a Senator, preferably an old one without much future political ambition) points out, with help from the great Eugene Volokh:

In the 1969 case Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress is limited to determining whether a person meets the constitutional requirements for membership—30 years old, nine years a citizen, and a resident of his state—or was legitimately elected. "Saying the appointee lacks the necessary 'qualifications' simply because the appointing governor is believed to be corrupt or untrustworthy or deserving of removal seems to be foreclosed by Powell v. McCormack," said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. "And the 'elections' and 'returns' provision would only allow them to refuse to seat a senator if there are allegations that this seat was obtained through bribery or other illegal conduct. If he picked somebody who'd never been talked about as a possible source of a bribe, it's hard to see how his appointment could be disqualified."

So, if Reid and Co. refuse to seat Mr. Burris next week, he'll likely respond by going to court, and while this process might keep him out of office indefinitely (Powell was decided in June 1969, half a year into the 91st Congress, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. had been elected to the 90th Congress and was denied his seat in March of 1967, though in light of the precedent Burris might be able to get either a quicker ruling or an injunction allowing him to take his seat), it will be an ugly, intra-partisan fight with racial overtones that the ambitious new President can scarcely afford.

Now, I'm not one who thinks that race should be a factor in determining Burris's qualifications -- but in light of the fact that he is absolutely qualified under the Constitution and has been legally appointed to the seat, it strikes me as absurd to think that the Senate Democrats want to start off the Obama Administration by refusing to let a black man sit at the Senate lunch counter and much less do they want to let this fight go all the way to the Supreme Court where they'd have to hope the conservative faction overwhelmed the liberal heirs to the Warren Court.

I understand that many Democrats want to take as hard a stance as possible against Hot Rod. But it's surely a mistake to assume that those voters nation-wide who particularly give a shit about the Blagojevich scandal will be so easily hoodwinked. The only reason Democratic leaders from Illinois to Washington are in such a lather is that they're afraid people will realize that they spent six years supporting this man, including during his re-election bid when scandals danced like sugarplums across the Land of Lincoln.

It's all well and good for the Illinois legislature to remove the governor from office. But until they actually do, he remains the governor and he has made appropriate (if cynical and manipulative) choice. So let Burris represent his state in the Senate! At least he's not Caroline Kennedy!

PS: It annoys me to no end that Barack Obama has also, apparently, taken up arms against Burris by "supporting" the Senate leadership's almost-certainly-unconstitutional attempt to block any nominee whomsoever that Blagojevich might appoint. If Obama cared so fucking much about who served as Illinois's Class III Senator, he wouldn't have shat all over it and used the explosive diarrhea to catapult himself into the Oval Office!

It's Not Just Fags Who Hate Rick Warren . . .

2008-12-24T03:51:00.001-08:00

. . . God does too!

Wiley Drake (bitch totally stole my porn star name!), pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park (CA), has written an open letter to Warren, denouncing Warren.

I pray He is kind to you in this punishment that is coming . . .[due to your] recent plan to invoke the presence of almighty God on this evil illegal alien.

In a later interview, Drake declared, "It's an abomination before God and God's going to deal with that."

Judging from his denunciation of Obama as an "evil illegal alien" [this, incidentally, goes well beyond the usual charges that Obama isn't a "natural born" citizen, since even most of those theories have to admit that Obama's mother was a citizen and therefore he is not an "illegal immigrant"] I have to assume the "abomination" is being born in another country. Or perhaps it's just miscegenation, which the Southern Baptist Church long rallied against.

Drake, just so you know, has previously called upon his followers to pray for God to kill the leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State after the IRS began an investigation into whether or not Drake's pro-Huckabee sermons were a violation of his church's tax-exempt status. And he was also the great Alan Keyes's running mate in the 2008 presidential election. He's presumably still praying that God will swoop down and scatter his "illegal alien" opponents from the field and hand Alan Keyes the Presidency. Unfortunately, I've already discussed why Joe Biden would more likely than not become President in the event of the simultaneous disqualification of McCain and Obama.

Queers, Jews and Christmas

2008-12-23T00:34:00.000-08:00

Dahlia Lithwick explores the "fraught proposition" of which Christmas specials are acceptable viewing for Jewish children. I sympathize only slightly, since censoring a child's holiday viewing in order to protect him from spiritual degradation is both futile and rather authoritarian. It's not all that much different from the "frought proposition" of whether or not to allow your children to watch R rated films. My parents never restricted our viewing [well, not often. once at the video store my brother and I stumbled into the "adult section", though both of us were too young to realize exactly what that meant. We stumbled across a film entitled Who Reamed Rosie Rabbit. My embarrassed father quickly returned the video] and therefore all of our friends would simply come to our house to watch R rated movies. These movies never had any particular allure to my brother and I, but they were objects of mystical veneration for our friends. Christmas is so ubiquitous that shielding your children from any aspect of it is impossible, and probably counterproductive. Call it Rudolph as forbidden fruit.

Still, Lithwick's survey of her Jewish friends on what specials they were allowed to watch as children and which they allow their children to watch is quite interesting. Lithwick unearths, and explores perhaps a bit too briefly, the sense in which so many Christmas stories involve a cetain type of character, one that is easily recognizable to herself and many of her friends as a Jew:

dig a little deeper and what surfaces is a universal (and discomfiting) sense that the Grinch is a fundamentally Jewish show because the Grinch himself is a fundamentally Jewish character. I got one e-mail that concluded, "Who is more of a Grinch than a grumpy old Jew?" And a Jew with a heart problem no less? . .

To the panoply of Christmas rejecters and cancellers above, one can readily add the Heat Miser and Snow Miser from The Year Without Santa. Again, the show clearly violates the "No Santa" rule, and yet nearly everyone I spoke to grandfathered it in as Jewishly acceptable. Asked why, the response is that the sheer genius of the Heat Miser/Snow Miser musical rivalry redeems any sectarian message. Yet it's hard not to wonder again whether there's something about the grouchy, bitter misers—misers!—poised to wreck Christmas that seems to speak to Jewish parents.

Of course, all of these stories hearken back to the Big Granddaddy of all Grouchy Old Christmas Haters, Ebenezer Scrooge himself. Which made me think of another aspect of virtually all of these stories that points us down a slightly different line.

Scrooge's redemption comes in the form of crippled, angelic Tiny Tim. The Grinch is redeemed by Cindy Lou Who. And although the Heat and Snow Misers' are never really redeemed, there is a poor little girl who guilts Santa into returning to work, and the misers are brought into line by their overbearing mother (which can be added to the Jewish heap too, while we're at it.)

All of these characters can, then, be viewed not only as Jews converting to Christianity just in time, but as queers converting to the heteorsexual, familial order just in time. The redemption of monstrous old bachelors by the golden-haired products of heterosexuality (and not only at Christmas-time. Silas Marner, anyone?) was explored by Lee Edelman in his book No Future, and his reading of these stories remains compelling to me. [I covered similar, but different, territory here.] Scrooge and the Grinch represent a forceful rejection of the "natural order" of family, and their resistance to such things is treated as a disease or deep psychological wound. But all it takes is one kind-hearted child (plus a few manipulative ghosts) to transform these withered old queens into jolly co-conspirators in the great organized crime that is the "family."

Which raises another interesting question, a question that I'm hardly the first to bring up, but which remains deeply fascinating. Why and how did a virtually identical cluster of stereotypes -- greed, egocentrism, the good old overbearing mother, sexual perversion, etc. -- come to be attached both to the Jew and to the Queer? My suspicion is that another stereotype, that of the Jew as weakling, and the incumbent questions of masculinity that raises made it all-too-easy to simply squint one's eyes and see, in place of The Greedy Jew, The Selfish Fag.

Naturally, this has nothing at all to do with Christmas, except to say that I've always wished Scrooge would beat Tiny Tim to death with his pitiful little crutch and then throw the mangled corpse into the stove while laughing at Cratchett, "You wanted fuel for the fire? Now you've got it!"

Give Me Some Of That Sexy, Stinky Rod!

2008-12-12T00:32:00.001-08:00

Maybe it's just that I'm an old-fashioned kinda fag, with lots of fluffy, cotton-candy ideas about romance and holding-hands on the ferris wheel with corrupt politicians, but I have to admit that I find Rod Blagojevich totally dreamy.

I mean, think about it. He's a foul-mouthed (hot) Chicago political beast (hotter) who happens to be Serbian (hottest)! What's not to love?

Now, I know some of you will be tut-tutting about how I'm minimizing political corruption and treating it as a mere joke. I assure you this is not the case at all. I really do think corruption is sexy! And so do you! Those of you who don't spent the day masturbating to stories about skulls found in swamps and Culkinettes being struck my cars.

Political corruption, particularly of the sort alleged against Governor Blagojevich, has never, necessarily, bothered me all that much. There's a reason I don't support "campaign finance reform", after all (and it's not just the First Amendment!) I think that a politician can be corrupt and nonetheless deliver the goods. Now, I realize Blagojevich is not that sort of corrupt dude. He's the kind who has absolutely no moral compass and a matching 13% approval rating (that's before he was arrested people!!) He's a soulless, self-serving machine with no desire to do good. Which is what makes him hot enough to actually melt my testicles! Messy, greasy and totally delicious! But, even though he liquefied my genitalia, I understand that Blago isn't everyone's cup of mocha semen steamer.

Still, aren't we getting a little carried away with all the drama?

While soliciting campaign funds in exchange for filling a Senate vacancy is pretty stupid and totally illegal, it's not as if Milorad's the first guy to think that one up. How do you think these seats get filled? There's no election. The governor does whatever the hell he pleases. So he gives the seat to someone who provides him with political advantage. Money is only one kind of advantage. Sometimes, he appoints someone who is super old and can be counted on not to run in the next election, freeing the slot for the governor. Soeteimes he resigns after extracting a promise from the Lieutenant Governor that once the deal is done the new governor will appoint the old one to the Senate. Sometimes he appoints his daughter.

The idea that Senate vacancies are filled through meritocratic advancement is ridiculous. We've already heard many sources saying that Chuck Schumer is putting pressure on Governor Paterson not to fill Clinton's vacancy with someone who will "upstage" him. The Governor of Delaware is replacing Biden with one of Biden's staffers, after much speculation that she was going to go for Biden's son.

Now, none of these appointments necessarily suggest "corruption" in the fixed quid pro quo sense. But in the larger scheme of things, outside the technicalities of the law, is there really much difference? If Paterson should appoint Caroline Kennedy (which I suspect and hope he won't) will it really be so different from what Blagojevich is up to? After all, the only reason Paterson would pick Kennedy, who has no political or life experiences that would suggest she's qualified for the job, would be the political advantages her family could bring him in the 2010 election. And guess what? That includes fundraising, one of the few skills Kennedy has. Like I said, I doubt he'll make that appointment -- but if he doesn't, one of the reasons may well be Schumer, whose support Paterson also clearly needs in 2010. So Paterson has to weigh these thoughts. Who is acceptable to the people of New York? And who can offer him the most political support and fundraising opportunities for the future?

To presume that any governor is above such considerations when faced with the chance to appoint, without consulting anyone else, a U.S. Senator is absurd. So why are we so shocked when a governor brags about it on a wiretap?

Obviously, the same goes for Blagojevich's attempt to get himself a Cabinet spot. Since when was Obama nominating people based only on their qualifications? Is trading a Cabinet spot for a Senate seat so much worse than trading a Cabinet spot for the political support of the Clintons? Obviously, Obama didn't actually play with Blago (and seriously, the biggest boner-killer about Obama is that he isn't corrupt enough!) but again, what makes it illegal, and unseemly and insidious, is merely that Blagojevich showed his lack of refinement by saying it out loud!

Now, I'm not saying that all of Blagojevich's actions are on this scale. That whole thing about withholding money from a children's hospital? That's super hilarious and pretty awesome, but it's also actual, real political corruption. Filling a Senate seat is a much more political act, and no governor would give it away for "fucking nothing!" They just don't talk about it on the phone.

And that's not even addressing the issue of whether or not Fitzgerald has even come close to proving a "conspiracy." Two people must do a great deal more than talk about their plans to commit crimes in order to be criminals. So far we haven't gotten any real evidence that Blagojevich and Harris (and that sexy, potty-mouthed Mrs. Blago for that matter!) actually took any real steps to realize their intent.

So, I say keep your job, Rod! I can't stand the idea of this scandal being quickly buried and thus being unable to stare dreamily into your soft, puppy-dog eyes while some shrieking banshee calls for your execution in the background.

Oh, and while you're at it, I'll pay you 46 BJ's, four HJ's, 31 used condoms and a broken Talking Ann Coulter Doll for that Senate seat!

Call me!

And I Thought Jeremiah Wright Was Awesome

2008-12-10T01:16:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how many of you are aware of the vast, rapidly-growing movement to alert the world to the truth that Barack Obama is not a "natural born American" and thus is ineligible for the presidency. The Supreme Court has refused to hear the lawsuit calling for Obama to be disqualified, so I guess the high court doesn't give a shit about the Constitution or "the greatest hoax in 200 yeears" as one conspiracy-theorist puts it.

(This lawsuit, incidentally, also sought to disqualify John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone. This would leave us with a Constitutional crisis even more baroque than having an unqualified President. Since it's unlikely that anyone will receive electoral votes other than these two non-natural citizens, the House of Representatives would be incapable of choosing a new President. My reading of the appropriate Constitutional Amendment suggests to me that Joe Biden, who would have been legally elected Vice President, would assume the Presidency, but the text is a little fuzzy as it says that if a President has "failed to qualify" the Vice President would "act as President" until someone does qualify for the office. Again, this is impossible. No one could qualify for the office. So, my instinct is to say that Biden would actually be President for four years, but I'm sure the conspiracy-theorists have ideas about this one too! Incidentally, if anyone else received an electoral vote from a faithless elector, say Hillary Clinton or Mike Huckabee or Shannen Doherty [hint, hint!], that person would almost certainly become president, since he or she would be the only candidate the House would have to choose from.)

Anyway, these noble and heroic folks donned their tin-foil hats and had themselves a press conference! At this press conference, one of the speakers was a preacher from Harlem named James David Manning. And what do you think he has to say about Barack Hussein Obama?

David Weigel quotes him thusly:

It is common knowledge that African men, coming from the continent of Africa—especially for the first time—do diligently seek out white women to have sexual intercourse with. Generally the most noble of white society choose not to intercourse sexually with these men. So it's usually the trashier ones who make their determinations that they're going to have sex.

In case he was being too subtle for you: by "trashier ones" he means Barack's Mom.

And if this isn't amazing enough for you, please watch Manning on the YouTubes. In this wonderful sermon he reveals many dark secrets about the "Trinity of Hell", which is either his name for Jeremiah Wright's church or an actual group of three people: Wright, Obama and Oprah. First of all, sit in awe at the nonchalance with which he says "Trinity of Hell" and then listen to his revelatory preaching upon these foul perverts.

I stated that there was a bisexual relationship between Senator Obama and Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and that of course everyone has long suspected that Oprah Winfrey is a lesbian. . . .do to my love for the African-American people and all Americans generally I was entrusted by a source with very critical information regarding the intimate bisexual relationship.

Totally awesome!

I'm so happy you exist, Reverend Manning!

You can also hear the good Reverend preaching that Colin Powell has single-handedly destroyed race relations in America by endorsing Barack Obama (and let me just stress, the glass table is totally transparent!), his founding of an "underground" resistant [sic] movement (cleverly announced on YouTube! Totally open and public to all is the new underground!) and his fears that the people might "rise up" and kill him if Hitler Obama loses the election. Finally, see more devastating politico-historical analysis of Hitlobama here!

Hmmmm, Well They Both Look Kind Of Reptillian

2008-11-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

I want to date this voter:

But on second thought, Al Franken is more of an amphibian. I say it's a vote for Coleman.

I Bet It Has Something To Do With The Kennedys

2008-11-19T02:30:00.000-08:00

I just found an article discussing a book of presidential doodles (Reagan: hearts with "NDR + RR" inscribed in them. JFK: boats.) and found this truly amazing drawing by none other than my (and Special Tyler's!) beloved LBJ. Behold:

Is the three-legged creature an alien? And is it being killed by a smoke-breathing, tubby devil? And what's up with the three-headed thing? These are questions without answers. But I can say this much: LBJ you are TOTALLY AWESOME!

Only In America?

2008-11-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

There's an excellent historical essay up on Slate about the obnoxious, self-congratulatory tone the media has taken regarding the election of a black president. David Berreby attacks an article in the NYT that congratulates America for doing something that "will never happen" in Europe. He builds a compelling argument that in times of upheaval, ethnic and religious minorities often rise to the top.

The two most famous are, naturally, Napoleon (a Corsican with a funny name) in France and Disraeli (a Jew with a funny name) in Great Britain. Both of whom served at the head of their respective governments long before anyone even dreamed of Barack Obama. But Berreby also cites more ancient (Arabic and Slavic Roman Emperors) and more recent (Alberto Fujimori, a dual citizen of Japan and Peru) examples. So, in short, shut up with the American exceptionalism!

Even if you buy it that France and Germany would never elect a black leader, that's entirely skirting the issue. The United States is certainly not alone in its attitudes towards descendants of Africans, but if there's anything "exceptional" about Obama's rise it isn't in America's unique ability to heal the wounds of its past, rather it's in the very fact that those wounds still fester badly enough to make Obama's race a milestone worth talking about.

Now, will France or Germany elect a Turkish or Arabic leader? I wager the answer is yes, and probably even rather soon. Nicolas Sarkozy was born in France but he's not ethnically French and he, like Obama, has a "funny name." And yet there he is, fucking his supermodel wife and running the country! Of course the barriers Sarkozy faced were different than those that would face, say, the son of a North African immigrant, but it's nonetheless absurd to believe that United States alone has the ability choose leaders from maligned, oppressed ethnic and religious minorities.

PS: Berreby also quotes Disraeli (who was a practicing Christian), responding to a bigoted member of Parliament's attacks on his Jewish heritage. It's very tasty:

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

McCain Blames Loss On Whore Of Wasilla

2008-11-06T23:53:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, I didn't blog about the election at all! That's because I'm still bitter CNN didn't turn me into a hologram. But here are the highlights:

1. Obama holds McCain to less than 200 electors! I'm still a little wary of Obama, and I'm certainly looking forward, with salivating glee, to the great wave of misery and disillusion that will strike all his more left-wing supporters when he doesn't use his inaugural address to magically teleport our troops home, execute Justice Scalia and get gay-married. But still, come on, this is a truly epic and historic moment. Even I'm a little emotional seeing a super hot, mixed-race man giving a victory speech. (Hell, even Condi Rice got emotional about it!) I don't have a tremendous amount of faith in Obama, but at least he has the potential to achieve real goals (I can't bring myself to say "change" especially in the wake of superhotty of the US House Rahm Emmanuel's appointment as chief of staff). And, fuck it, the dude's a Democrat! A Democratic landslide is just too awesome to stay grumpy!

2. 57 seats in the Senate! Delicious! I doubt we'll pick up any of the remaining three seats, but we might. Filibuster this, cocksuckers! [PS: All this talk of 60 votes is ridiculous. On every single issue that faced filibuster over the last couple of years, every single one will have cloture invoked with the net gain we've seen today.]

3. Liddy Dole, Reanimated Corpse Republican, loses a decisive victory to Kay Hagan after trying to insinuate that Hagan doesn't believe in God. I'm very happy to get Dole, who once seemed like such a friendly moderate Republican but has morphed into the ugliest kind of Right Wing shitknob, outta town. But I'm still not down with Kay Hagan, whose defense of herself more or less agreed with the central premise of Dole's ad. Hagan was only mad that Dole lied. She didn't challenge the far more offensive element of ad, which was its implication that atheists are Unamerican! It was just like that time McCain responded to a supporter shouting "Obama's a Muslim!" with, "No, I have to correct you on that. I know Senator Obama and he's a decent American." Hagan can suck on my prolapsed anus!

4. Through the beauty of ballot measures, Americans send a clear message: We hate gay people, but we love abortion, suicide and pot! Sounds a lot like Fagistan, don't it?

So, that's my recap.

Now let's talk about these "startling revelations" about Sarah Palin for a second, kay?

I know I'm not supposed to believe in a liberal media bias, but the fact that every serious news organization has taken at face value the claims of bitter losers has to disturb anyone, doesn't it? Every journalist seems to assume the information Newsweek received was accurate, and to judge Palin by it. But doesn't it cross any of their minds that perhaps these high-ranking advisers to a Total Loser might have an ulterior motive? They want to blame McCain's loss on Palin (absurd on its face, since that would require somewhere around 4% of voters to be McCain supporters who voted for Obama because of Palin) in order to save their own careers and they want to cut her off at the pass in regards to 2012. The Republican establishment wants Romney and they intend to get him.

I'm not saying none of these allegations are true -- perhaps they all are. But many of them strike me as the kinds of exaggerations that fit in so well with the caricatures of her that they just can't all be true.

But the one that bothers me the most is the one wherein Palin greets two top-level McCain staffers wearing nothing but a towel.

Let's assume this is a true story. Who the fuck cares?! Would it be unprofessional of her? Certainly no less professional than holding a meeting in her hotel room. And perhaps the dudes showed up early, while she was still in the shower. The fact is that no matter what the circumstances are, she was wearing a towel. Many women routinely wear dresses smaller than the average hotel towel. She didn't flash her boobs at them. She didn't rub her pussy all up in their faces. It's so puritanical, prudish and bizarre to even care. I know McCain is gay, but surely his staffers have at least seen a partially clothed woman in the past!

And if it's not true -- and I suspect it is not -- then it's just one last entry for Sexism's Greatest Hits, vol. 2008. In either case, McCain's employees, who won't even admit who the fuck they are, are even more disgusting than we believed they were from the beginning!

Note to McCain: you didn't lose this election because Sarah Palin went "rogue." If people voted against you because she was on the ticket, you have no one to blame but your own damn self. You picked her. She didn't pick herself. But even then, you still don't get it. Palin didn't cost you one electoral vote. The American people wouldn't vote for you because YOU'RE CREEPY AND THEY HATE YOU!

Hypochondria Is Awesome

2008-11-04T02:54:00.000-08:00

Richard Trenton Chase was the Vampire of Sacramento, a serial killer who put human and animal blood and viscera into his blender to make a delicious smoothie intended both to stop his heart from shrinking to an infinitely small size and to re-energize his blood, which was turning to powder.

Now, frankly, I'm not sure this guy should even be considered a serial killer in the usual sense, since his motivations came more from his paranoid schizophrenia than from sociopathy and sadism, but nonetheless he's one of the more interesting cases. In fact, that's probably what makes him least like most serial killers. While the actual crimes serial killers commit are varied and fascinating, the actual killers themselves are almost all virtually identical in personality, history and behavior.

But check out some of Chase's pre-murdering hypochondriac fantasies, which to shame anything any of my hypochondriac friends and family members have ever come up with:

He was preoccupied with any sign that something was wrong with him, which held true throughout his adult life, and he once entered an emergency room looking for the person who had stolen his pulmonary artery. He also complained that the bones were coming out through the back of his head, that his stomach was backwards, and that his heart often stopped beating.

Sometimes he would put the intestines with the animal's blood into a blender, liquefy them, and drink this concoction in an effort to keep his heart from shrinking to the point of disappearing from his body. He once injected rabbit blood into his veins and got very ill. He believed this rabbit had ingested battery acid that had seeped into his stomach, but in fact he had a bad case of blood poisoning.

And from his bizarre, pre-murder crime spree:

On August 3 that same year, police officers found Chase's Ford Ranchero stuck in sand near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. Two rifles lay on the seat, along with a pile of men's clothing. Blood smears on the inside and a blood-filled white plastic bucket containing a liver made them suspicious. When they spotted Chase through binoculars, he was nude and covered in blood. He saw them and ran, but they caught up with him and took him back to his pick-up. He claimed that the blood was his. It had "seeped out" of him. The liver, it turned out, was from a cow.

[After he was seen running from a house he had broken into.] The police arrived to find the house in a shambles, with theft of valuables the obvious motive. However, he had also urinated into a drawer of freshly-laundered baby's clothing and had defecated on a child's bed.

Then of course, he goes on to mutilate and drink the blood of various victims, stealing their organs, stabbing their anuses, sometimes raping them, and even killed a baby and severed its head. Although these crimes are obviously considerably less hilarious than those detailed above, sometimes the way sensationalist writers (as if there are any other kind when it comes to serial killers) describe these crimes are themselves rather hilarious. Take this one for instance:

Chase had stabbed her repeatedly in the lung, liver, diaphragm, and left breast. He also had cut out her kidneys and severed her pancreas in two. He placed the kidneys together back inside her.

There was blood in the bathroom and it was later learned that Chase had smeared Terry's blood all over his face and hands, licking it off his fingers. The discarded yogurt container near her body was also bloodstained, as if he had used it to drink her blood.

Pretty awful right? Do you think this crime could get any more depraved? Well, according to this writer, it did:

His most heinous act, however, was to stuff animal feces into her mouth.

Yeah, it's not so much the slicing off of her nipple or the cutting her pancreas in half while drinking her blood from a yogurt cup that bothers me, it's the animal feces stuffed in her mouth.

WTF, Fagistan?

2008-10-31T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ummm . . . what the fuck is up with the title to my most recent post?

He's A

2008-10-29T00:07:00.000-07:00

I'm always delighted by listening to Lyndon Johnson's secretly recorded telephone conversations, mostly because I find LBJ such a fascinating, engaging, funny, depressing sort of guy, but also because it's almost invariably true that at some point either the President or his interlocutor will say something mean about somebody else.

Salon's got various audio and documentary bits up today about John McCain's daddy. LBJ's conversation with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is especially tasty. This time is McNamara who lands the withering takedown, made funnier by his mild manner.

LBJ: [Senate Minority Leader Everett] Dirksen's callin' and he's all upset about McCain again. He wants him to be chief of naval operations.

McNamara [interjecting]: Oh, boy, that's just impossible.

LBJ: . . . is McCain a competent fella?

MnNamara: I'm told he isn't, Mr. President. I don't know him very well myself, I work with him off and on. He's a nice little fellow, he talks well, pleasing appearance. But he's not a good, strong, tough commander and couldn't therefore be commander in the chief of the Atlantic or the commander in chief of the Pacific or something like that. . . but there are other four star jobs around here, and we could conceivably find one to put him in.

Talk about damning with faint praise, Secretary Strange!

Of course, Johnson being Johnson and Washington being Washington, McCain ended up in command of first the Atlantic and subsequently the Pacific and got that fourth star.

Is There Even A Single Decent Person In All Of The Sixteenth Florida?

2008-10-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

I know this is hardly news, but I have to say that I'm delighted by the latest sex scandal to befall the beleaguered voters of the Sixteenth Florida Congressional District.

At some point, when voters replace a guy who writes dirty IM's to underaged Congressional pages with a guy who touts his "family values" but turns out to have had multiple affairs, you've just got to question the basic abilities of these voters to judge the human character. Either that, or you've got to wonder whether or not they're just all perverts.

Tim Mahoney maintains that his positions (actually fucking other women, then giving them jobs in exchange for fucking them, then firing them when they broke up with; also, fucking women and then helping to secure them some FEMA dollars, which probably tells us more than we want to know about the natural disaster that is Mahoney-lovin') is somehow better than Foley's (sending dirty IM's to teenagers, not actually fucking anyone or using public corruption as a sex toy).

How is it better, exactly? Because Mahoney's a Democrat? (A Blue Dog! So I'm still allowed to think he's a dickweed!) Because he fucked the ladies and Foley's non-fuck-friends were dudes?

Anyway, that's beside the point, because 16-FL is gonna be in the hands of some other pervert in just a few weeks now. What I really wanted to bring up is something else.

Remember when we were all laughing about how McCain doesn't know how many houses he owns? Well, check out Mahoney's answer to a question about how many affairs he's had.

You're asking me over a lifetime?

No, silly, of course not! We would never expect a married man to be able to remember how many people he's fucked during his life! We just meant, like, this week!

Little Mayhems And Unexpected Joy, Wikipedia-Style

2008-10-10T02:10:00.000-07:00

As most of you probably know, I'm addicted to Wikipedia. I can spend hours hopping from link to link. On the one hand, I'm amazed that so many people have so much time to devote to so many topics. I understand why nerds would want to write lots of articles about, say, He-Man or some other topic with which they are fairly obsessed. But extremely complex, thoroughly expansive articles on the reproductive strategies of plants? But what amazes me more is the amount of time people spend arguing about whether a certain phrase constitutes "weasel words" or is too trivial to be included on Wikipedia. The talk pages on most articles are both more illuminating and more interesting than the actual articles.

And then there are Wikipedia vandals, who engage in meaningless and juvenile edits for no particular reason other than the fact that they can. They remind me a bit of a middle school friend of mine who filled in every line of the "This Book Belongs To" list at the front of his Spanish textbook with names like "Ben Dover" and "Heywood Jablowmi." Pointless, not really that funny, but still sorta anarchistic and vaguely amusing.

But once in a while, one stumbles across something so unexpected that this kind of obnoxious teenage pranking attains a certain kind of hilarious poetry. At first, my brain can't quite process what I'm reading and I get the same feeling I get when I pick up a can of soda expecting to taste Pespi and actually taste 7-Up (or, worse yet, from my childhood memories of a tobacco-chewing father, tobacco spit.) But then, once it makes sense, it's so funny (even if it's incredibly dumb) that I almost pee my pants.

Who knows how long before the Wikipolice come through and scrub this little piece of graffiti away, but my latest discovery is from the opening sentence of the article on whales, and I hope you get as much a kick out of it as I do:

Whales(rosie o donnel) are marine mammals which are neither dolphins (i.e. members of the families Delphinidae or Platanistoidae) nor porpoises.

And The Nobel Goes To: Someone Who Isn't Philip Roth!

2008-10-09T04:55:00.000-07:00

This year's Nobel laureate is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio of France, an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

So, a good number of recent Nobel laureates are people I wasn't very familiar with but almost all of them (Gao Xingjian, anyone?) were people I'd heard of. I've never heard of this guy, although he's apparently quite the literary celebrity in France, who had an early career as an experimental novelist and a later career as a less-experimental one.

Obviously, you'll get no insights into him from me. Especially because a search for his name on Amazon reveals a whopping total of zero books in English translation! Indeed, the results look virtually identical over at Le Amazon de France. Das Amazonerin offers a few very old translations in German, but is mostly French. Ye Olde Amazone does offer us some English translations, but all of them out of print. El Amazonio offers only five results, but they are at least in Spanish.

Three cheers for the Swedish Academy for so bravely choosing a cosmopolitan European writer so well-known throughout the Continent!

I mean, Roth can't even compare to the scope of Le Clezio's translation.

Roth en Francais, en Espanol, and ein Deutsche.

What's that you say? Virtually all of Roth's novels are available in recently published German, French and Spanish translation? And virtually none of Le Clezio's are?

Hmmmmmm. Well, I'm sure the Swedes still have a point. Or something.

And just for kicks, here are the French Amazon searches for all those other insular Americans who will never win the Nobel because they aren't in the center of the literary world:

Don DeLillo

John Updike.

Thomas Pynchon.

Joyce Carol Oates.

Noble Savages Give Camille A Hard-On

2008-10-08T01:12:00.000-07:00

Listen, I happen to like Governor Palin. Sure, her interviews were embarrassing. But I blame that on some poor, Professor Higgins-inspired strategy devised by McCain's operatives than on Palin. But there's a limit to my sympathy for her, and particularly a limit to my ability to tolerate so many of her supporters. I thought Camille Paglia's first Salon article on Palin was brilliant. But this one? Not so much. Six weeks ago, I could give her the benefit of the doubt and suggest she might turn out to be a true "game-changer." But with Florida, a state McCain should've locked up some time ago, still in play at least in part because of Palin's atrocious poll-numbers among Jewish voters McCain has been courting for years, it's a bit harder to still think Palin is going to have a chance of winning McCain this election.

But don't tell it to Camille! As you know, Camille knows way more than you do about the English language, poetry, rhetoric and, well, everything else! So, do you think Palin sounds kinda dumb once in a while? You're a philistine!

[A]s a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules. . . I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse.

"Shapely and syncopated"? Huh? And I say that as someone who quite likes the way Palin speaks -- largely because she's not terribly self-conscious about her regional dialect. But even I wouldn't go around calling her "discourse" structured!

And did Camille really just compare Sarah Palin to William Shakespeare? Maybe Alaska uses the spirts of all those dead wolves to build a time machine, allowing the Governor to travel way back when and write Romeo . . . oh! and the health care too, and also Juliet, which has to be coupled with tax breaks!

But the weirdest section surely must be this one, in which Camille reveals her obsession with Palin's possible ancestry:

The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

This is, of course, the sort of trafficking in what we might call spiritual-stereotyping that Paglia is rather famous for. I'm not always opposed to it, as different cultures will naturally produce different types of "spirits." But Paglia's argument is about a great deal more than culture. For a woman who openly disdains even the theory that homosexuality is an inborn trait, it seems strange that she'd suggest that Native American blood, divorced from authentic Native American culture, would endow Sarah Palin with "extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness." This is especially troubling in that she believes Palin must have Indian blood because of a "suggestion" in her facial structure (as if no Europeans, such as Slavs, have the same intensity of facial features she identifies in Palin) and Palin's energy level (as if European women are lazy cows!)

I've never worked with any overpowering celebrity icons with Native American blood, but I have met actual, full-blooded Native American women. Lots of them. And guess what? They're just like white women. Some are overpowering volcanoes of energy and passion, some are quiet and reticent, some are stupid, some are brilliant, some are beautiful, some are ugly. Even those raised on reservations, where a vital semblance of dying cultures remains, are more or less "American" in cultural behavior and presentation. The days of the shriveled, wise old battle-ax intoning ancient prophecies in her teepee are long gone. Paglia's ignorance of the essential "normalcy" of native women tells me that she learned everything she knows about Native Americans from white women who claim "Indian blood" (and who doesn't claim that anymore?) and such brilliant anthropological films as Ernest Goes To Camp and Steven Seagal's directorial debut On Deadly Ground.

That she applies this depth of knowledge in the way an astrologer might ("Oh, you're so stubborn. You must be a Taurus!") is just plain weird. And I know that weirdness is part of her appeal, but surely there's a limit to how patient I'm supposed to be with her utterly dull political opinions, much less her laughable theory of racial descent.

Oh, and what're the odds on whether she will ever write a piece in Salon in which she doesn't once mention that she once declared Madonna "the future of feminism." You said that 18 years ago Camille! Come up with something new to say, or just shut up and eat my pussy!

Senator Stevens Hates Fuckers

2008-10-07T00:09:00.000-07:00

Isn't it amusing how we still get our panties all knotted up whenever someone swears in some kind of public forum such as the Oscars, or a football game, or on a wiretap played to the jury in a federal corruption prosecution?

Senator Ted Stevens is still, for the moment, on trial on charges relating to some home improvements he didn't pay for. The guy who did all the work has pleaded guilty to attempting to corrupt various Alaska lawmakers, but says he didn't intend to bribe Stevens.

For his part, the Senator maintains that he believed he was on a new reality show called Extreme Makeover: Public Corruption Edition.

The prosecution played some wiretapped recordings of Stevens today, and I really don't know what the full content of the tapes was because CNN focuses only on Ted's potty mouth. The headline? "Jury Hears Senator Curse on Wiretap Call." Ooooooooooh! He must be guilty! He said a naughty word!

Actually, two. First he said, "I'm not getting much sleep. Maybe four hours, thinking about all this shit coming down." Now, you might well question why an entire article need be devoted to what has to be the mildest incident of "cursing" since Josiah Pembroke was burned at the stake in 1687 for telling Old Widow Atherton, "I'm not getting much sleep, with all this hellfire damned business coming down."

But fear not, the good people at CNN made sure to record every curse the good Senator uttered. Here he is a short time later: "I'm trying to figure out why these fuckers are doing this."

Score! He said the f word! This trial is fucking awesome! What next? Will he refer to the US Attorney as a faggot cunt? Stay tuned and find out! Who cares about all the subtle details of bribery law when you'd got an old man with a filthy mouth to worry about.

PS: I'm certain that Ted Stevens is guilty of something, but I can't say that the prosecution's "star witness" was all that compelling -- since he says he never tried to bribe Stevens and hid the costs from the Senator because his company apparently had a history of overcharging people for work done on their homes (including the witness himself, who hired his own company and got overcharged!) and he didn't want to embarrass his company by getting into a public fight with the Senator. To my mind, when the prosecution's best evidence is a witness who claims no crime ever took place and some wiretapped recordings of Stevens cursing and other people complaining about what a cheap bastard he is, that's not much of a case.

PPS: The CNN article continues it's commitment to excellence in journalism with this: "The defense repeatedly has accused the government of concealing information that could help Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in history."

Ummm, actually, no. The longest serving Republican Senator in history remains Strom Thurmond, who left office after 49.67 years in office. Now, perhaps it's fair to note that CNN was technically accurate, since during both Thurmond's first brief stint in the Senate and the first eight years of his unbroken service (starting in December of 1956) he was a Democrat, which means he only spent about 38 years as a Republican, while Stevens is closing in on forty years of service. But the sentence nonetheless misleads one into thinking that Stevens has been a senator for longer than Thurmond, doesn't it?

PPS: CNN also misses the very best thing Stevens said on the wiretap, while trying to cheer his friend up about what was going to happen to them: "They're not going to shoot us - it's not Iraq."

Well, We Don't Want Your Stupid Nobel Prize Anyway!

2008-10-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

Snooty Swedish bitchface Horace Engdahl, member of the Nobel Prize Committee, declares Americans too stupid to write good books!

He says Americans can't expect to win the Nobel because our writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," and don't translate enough foreign novels (presumably Swedish ones?)

I'm not even sure what he's trying to say, but it's mostly nonsense. I mean, sure, he's right that the United States can't expect to win the award all that often -- there are a lot of countries out there, including a lot of other English-speaking countries, so surely it shouldn't be some kind of scandal that we have won since Toni Morrison.

But I doubt this is a uniquely American arrogance. Don't you think the French (who have won the award more often than any nation, although the U.S. is close) and the Germans, and for the matter the much overlooked Japanese and Chinese and Koreans, also believe that their great writers are overlooked in favor of people they've never heard of? That's the nature of literature. Translation is all well and good, but very few "foreign" books will be read and admired, particularly in a contest that has a certain nationalistic flair to it.

Besides which, it should be noted that Swedes have won the award several times, and almost none of these writers is generally regarded as great anywhere but Stockholm. Par Lagerkvist is more widely read, but mostly only for one slim (brilliant) novel. All these other people? Is it possible they won because the Swedish Academy is "too sensitive to the trends in their own . . .culture?"

I'm not too concerned with whether or not Philip Roth wins the Nobel this year or never, since there's already the much larger scandal of the lack of recognition for Milan Kundera (Czech and French) and Salman Rushdie (Pakistani and British) to worry about. But you know, what? If Roth never wins it, he'll join a rather nifty club of his own.

As the New Yorker's David Remnick puts it, before spouting some nonsense about how John Updike?! should be considered for the Prize:

You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.

What Ever Happened To Robbing Your Johns To Get Breast Implant Money?

2008-09-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

If I were this kid, I'd just have dumped her and gotten a girl with bigger tits, but that's just me:

A Colorado teenager hired men to kill his mother so he could use her money to get breast implants for his girlfriend, police said.

Nikita Lee Weis, 18, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, said Fountain Deputy Police Chief Mike Barnett.

Weis' mother, Hyun Weis, was attacked Thursday with a small wooden baseball bat at her home but escaped, authorities said. She was released Friday from a hospital.

Barnett said Weis wanted to sell his mother's car and use money in her bank accounts to pay for breast implants for Alsept, 21.

Okay, first of all, when hiring a hit man you should probably make sure that the hit man actually knows how to kill people. A small wooden bad isn't even on the top five list of effective means of killing. And second of all, why not just steal her checkbook like every other red-blooded American kid?

What is becoming of our youth?

Death-Continent

2008-09-26T02:42:00.000-07:00

I'm reading D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent. It's a tremendously good book, full of all that great writhing hate that makes Lawrence so unique among major novelists. His repetitive use of words lulls some readers to sleep, but it has a tendency of digging its talons into me and never letting go. I hate to sound pretentious, as some have accused me, but Lawrence (perhaps along with Hesse) provides the only vaguely mystical experiences I've ever had. But every so often, out of all that mystical fury (so different from Hesse's, of course, which lifts one's soul up rather than dragging it down), strange and cruel insights emerge. These are the kinds of insights about humanity and the human condition that can only be found in literature. Lyric, symbolic, broadly sweeping and yet subtle, Lawrence manages to say something so profound and intriguing that the whether or not it is factually true pales in comparison to the aesthetic, even spiritual, truth he reveals.

Here, his protagonist, Kate Leslie, is trying to decide whether she wishes to remain in Mexico or return to the United States with her cousin. She hates Mexico and yet is drawn to it, or at the very least repulsed by the US and Europe, even her native Ireland which she sees as so much like Mexico. And then she lets loose with a devastating, irresistible peering into the heart of the Americas:

And sometimes she wondered whether America really was the great death-continent, the No! to the European and Asiatic and even African Yes! Was it really the great melting pot, where men from creative continents were smelted back again, not to a new creation, but down into the homogeneity of death? Was it the great continent of the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the mystic destruction! Plucking, plucking at the creative soul in a man, till at last it plucked out the growing germ, and left him a creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of every living spontaneous creature.

Was that the clue to America, she sometimes wondered. Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up. The continents whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God. Was that America?

And all the people who went there, Europeans, negroes, Japanese, Chinese, all the colours and the races, were they the spent people in whom the God impulse had collapsed, so they crossed to the great continent of the negation, where the human will declares itself "free," to pull down the soul of the world? Was it the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of Godless democracy, energetic negation? The negation which is the life-breath of materialism. And would the great negative pull of the Americans at last break the heart of the world?

Fagistani Bible College Presents

2008-09-19T02:48:00.000-07:00

In her latest column, Ann Coulter makes her usual number of ridiculous claims about, for instance, Barack Obama's allegiance to Satan (based on the dedication to a book written by someone who "tried" to hire Hillary Clinton and then trained some of the very people who later actually did hire Obama) and other infuriating historical fallacies.

But she takes particular time to attack Steve Cohen (D-TN) for saying this:

Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor.

Now, she's obviously right to mock this as an utterly stupid statement. It's the kind of analogy only an incredibly simple-minded person with little regard to either current events or history (or mythology as the case may be) would ever make. It's an empty, needlessly provocative phrase. Much like virtually everything Coulter herself says. (And I say this as a fan!)

But her mocking criticism, meant to point out that Jesus was nothing like Barack Obama, strikes me as boneheadedly stupid not just by Coulter's standards but even by those of Michelle Malkin or Jonah Goldberg.

As anyone familiar with the New Testament can confirm for him, there are no parables about Jesus passing out cigarettes for votes, lobbying the Romans for less restrictive workfare rules or filing for grants under the Community Redevelopment Act. No time for soul-saving now! First, we lobby Fannie Mae to ease off those lending standards and demand a windfall profits tax on the money-changers in the temple.

First there's her implication that Jesus was in the active business of "saving souls" -- something utterly unsupported by the Bible. He didn't actually save a single soul, after all, until the moment of his death. His ministry was about far more than souls.

But what's particularly stunning about this little riff is how, to anyone who actually is "familiar with the New Testament", it makes not an argument that Jesus was conservative, but rather that he was far too radical for such measly half-measures as "workfare benefits" and "a windfall profits tax."

Here is how the 21st chapter of the Gospel of Matthew (in the KJV) describes Jesus's "community organizing":

12. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

13. And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

No, Jesus never would've promoted such a cowardly, anemic reaction to moneychangers as a windfall profits tax. Instead he strode into their lair and overthrew their tables! Surely Ann isn't suggesting that Sarah Palin believes we should stride into the lairs of the corporate oligarchs and cast them out the windows of their 75th story office buildings now is she?

In the very next verse, Jesus tackles universal healthcare.

14. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them. 15 And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the son of David; they were sore displeased,

When you imagine this scene in your head, is Ann Coulter standing with Jesus, or is she one of the priests and scribes who are "sore displeased" to see such a "wonderful thing" as free medical care for the poor?

David Foster Wallace Appreciation Day

2008-09-16T06:27:00.001-07:00

In honor of the fact that I managed to totally enrage one of my very favorite commenters with yesterday's obituary of David Foster Wallace, I thought it only fitting that I should admit that there is at least one aspect of Wallace's career that I've always admired, and that was his tennis writing. His writing on the subject was always clearer, more passionate and more enthusiastic that anything else he wrote -- and miles ahead of any other tennis writer. Oh, sure, it could've used a few more references to anal sex and cocksucking, but surely we can forgive a folly or two.

Of course, him being David Foster Wallace and me being me, I didn't always agree with some of his specific passions. Still, there was something about the way he tackled even those subjects that made them come to vivid, agonizing life. His essay "Roger Federer As Religious Experience" is a superb example. I detest Federer. Wallace worshipped him. But the way Wallace describes the "Federer moment" at the beginning of the piece remains one of the great prose depiction of tennis at it's most thrilling.

I'm not sure why tennis has attracted so few great writers, since the game is a series of tiny narratives building ever closer to the kind of climax impossible to imagine outside of Dostoevsky. The nature of the game, as a duel between two warriors, and as one of the fastest-moving sports in the world, seem ideally fit to rhapsodic language. But the fact is that very few great writers have written about tennis, and very few tennis writers are anywhere near great.

For all I believe we didn't lose with is passing, we did lose his distinctive and beautiful voice from the court.

Here's a very excellent tennis-obituary by Tom Tebbutt, which managed with its final line to actually make me tear up!

RIP: DFW

2008-09-15T01:54:00.000-07:00

So, David Foster Wallace killed himself.

I can't tell you if his family, his friends or his fans are surprised by this. But I can tell you that I'm not. The artistic suicide carries a certain legitimizing force. It becomes, sui generis, proof of seriousness and deep wellsprings of emotional pain and fury. Wallace's supporters have always claimed that he was on some lifelong journey for community and legitimate emotional engagement with the world. Suicide, working it's metaphorical magic, has a way of simultaneously declaring such efforts hopeless and proving the suicidal artist's personal emotional riches.

I'll admit I've never exactly been a fan, but since all of his fans are likely to read more into his suicide than I ever will, I don't feel too bad in saying that this seems like one last cheap trick in the Wallace show.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that suicide can be a noble, courageous and beautiful thing. There is no right more fundamental to liberty than the right to die. Nonetheless, it's impossible to see Wallace's suicide outside of the context of an artist who explicitly sought to use art to build for himself a world and community he longed for.

For that search and that struggle to end in happiness wouldn't quite work,, now would it? It would, in fact, cut against everything he has claimed about the impossibility of true human life in our disconnected age. But a suicide, with all its romantic underpinnings and its tips of the hat to so many who have gone down that road before, with its implicit repudiation of the world, of humanity and all its works, is far more fitting.

And frankly, I find the whole thing rather too artfully crafted. Oh, I'm sure there was a lot of messiness involved, a lot of "issues" I have no knowledge of. I'm not interested in Wallace's suicide as the self-inflicted death of a human being. I'm interested in it as the death of a novelist. The suicide of a famous person is always as much a work of performance art as it is a deeply felt personal decision. Wallace may not have approved of that notion (my suspicions aside) but that doesn't make it less true.

Wallace's whole act of injured innocence always struck me as, at best, whiny and put-upon, and at worst something uglier and more sinister. His romantic image of the Hero-Writer was compromised by all the messy realities of art and life in the twenty-first century. For all his stated attempts at Something Serious and Important, he was too clever, too self-satisfied, too deeply committed to his status as a victim of society (so committed, in fact, that he once dismissed "tribal" writers -- gays, blacks, Latinos, women -- as insufficiently victimized in light of the profound victimization of all those poor straight white guys who suffer so greatly in a regime that promotes them, and their work, ceaselessly) to ever really say anything serious or important about the contemporary world.

It's hard to pose as a victim of society when your novels become ubiquitous symbols of a certain intellectual status within the literary world and when you and your friends have successfully published a slew of okay-to-terrible novels and written hundreds of essays (mostly about each other, in as unseemly a circle jerk as the literary world has witnessed).

It's hard to be the outsider once they've let you in.

So Wallace decided to go back out the only way he knew how.

I don't believe our artistic culture has lost something especially precious. Still, there's something at least slightly melancholy about the business. Wallace, alone among that particular group of youngish male writers of the 90s, had real talent. He was never the utterly banal poser that, say, Dave Eggers or Jonathan Franzen are. He was, instead, a sort of literary Mariah Carey. Possessed of every trick in the book, every skill a writer could desire, he felt compelled to throw every note in his fifty-seven octave range at us at every moment. He justified this with a lot of bilious and empty talk about "complexity" and attempts at rendering even a fragment of his inner life to the world. But in the end it was all nonsense. He masterfully gathered up the clippings from the floor of the barbershop inhabited by everyone from Pynchon back to Joyce, but what he assembled lacked even those writers spark and sharp edge. Still, he had something to say. And there was always the hope (as pessimistic a person as I am) that he'd eventually find the voice to say it.

And in the end, perhaps he did find that voice. And he found it not in language, but in the obliteration of language. Faulkner, perhaps, would be proud. Me, I'm just annoyed.

"There Were Too Many Reports Of You In Your Underwear For Me To Ignore"

2008-09-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

The police minister of New South Wales has been forced to resign after he admits that he did, indeed, "dance in 'very brief' underpants to techno music on a leather couch during a drunken late night party in his Parliament House office three months ago."

Don't worry, Minister Brown, there are plenty of openings (and orifices!) here on the Fagistani Cabinet. You'll fit right in to our weekly Leather Couch Techno Orgy, although we don't wear underpants.

Palinophilia Hits A New High!

2008-09-10T01:56:00.000-07:00

Finally, someone who makes my passionate love affair with the Governor look sober, tame and reasonable in comparison! Here's Camille Paglia's take on the Barracuda:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

A Conversation

2008-09-08T01:55:00.000-07:00

I'm re-reading The Idiot. Oh, okay, I'm re-attempting to finally finish The Idiot, a book that, much as I love it, never seems quite to end. This morning at work I had the following conversation with a rather unliterary fellow:

"What's The Idiot about?"
"An idiot."
"Um . . ."
"It's about an epileptic Russian prince returning home to Russia after a long absence."
"Sounds like an idiot."

Amusing, no? But it raises, yet again, a question that has agonized me since childhood. How to answer that dreaded question, "What's that book about?"

In my youth, the question was difficult to answer mostly because of the sorts of books I read. Science fiction and fantasy novels are difficult to describe not because they reach for the sublime (although they often do) but because they detail worlds that don't exist. How, exactly, to explain even a relatively simple concept like Asimov's Foundation, a notion that took him seven novels to flesh out (and which is linked to an even greater mythology in his Robot and Empire novels?)

As I began to read Important Books, the puzzle only deepened. One of the defining characteristics of great literature seems, to me, to be that it is "about" things that can't be easily described. Is Absalom, Absalom! "about" the rise and downfall of a peculiar type of Southern man? Or is it "about" the timeless guilt of Southern history? Well, it's obviously about both. And when someone who isn't much of a reader asks this question, they're clearly more interested in the former answer. But how pale and limp that is! Many great novels, even those with excellent plots, are pretty boring when viewed only from the angle of action. Even when a novel isn't "about" something "bigger" or "deeper", even when it is simply (if only it were that simple) a pure aesthetic phenomenon, it's still not the plot, but the manner in which that plot is told and truths and untruths in tells. It's about the narrative, which is both smaller and larger than the story it tells.

To be sure, it hardly matters how I answer this question. The gentleman in question is unlikely to read The Idiot no matter what I say. But for those of us who are passionate about art, and especially for those of us who believe that art is the highest and most important of human endeavors, more important than democracy and science combined, it's still a painful question. Shouldn't there be a way to tell someone, someone who has expressed at least a basic curiosity in the concept of the novel, what The Idiot is really about? To transcend the ordinary and get to the heart of the matter? To let him know that even if he never reads this book that it is something more rare and more precious than nearly anything in the world?

And the question only gets uglier. You see, I'm writing a novel. [I know, me and every other douchebag in Portland. Fuck you!] The instinctive reaction to "I'm writing a novel," is invariably, "Oh, what's it about?" If it seems slightly pretentious and unseemly to burst out in lyrical passion for Dostoevsky, how much worse to unleash it on behalf of one's own unfinished novel? So, it's "about" a bisexual love triangle, a rock band, an unplanned pregnancy, drunkenness and fucking. But how to say that I also hope that it's equally "about" the fragility of intimacy and the violence at the heart of all human behavior? It sounds so obnoxious, even if it's true. And, assuming for a moment that it is true, how can the ideas I'm expressing possibly be condensed into something that is at once telling and brief? After all, there's a reason why I decided these ideas, and these characters, these imaginary lives that have lived inside me for so long, require a novel to be understood, even by myself.

These are questions without answers, I know. Which makes them the only kind worth asking. However aggravating that can be.

PS: While writing this post in my usual erratic, web-surfing manner, I came across Ron Rosenbaum's latest essay in Slate, about his own struggles to distill the genius of a Keats poem, and his new-found fascination with contemporary poetic criticism. It's an excellent piece, filled with Rosenbaum's usual wit and passion. Rosenbaum is one of the few literary critics around who approaches the subject with both intelligence and humor, and this piece is much better than anything I've written above. So you should probably read it.

The Warlord Speaks (About Palin)

2008-09-04T06:36:00.000-07:00

Warlord Claire sends me this fantastic critique of last night's proceedings:

1. sarah palin's husband is HOT
2. her son is kinda hot too, i think i want a 3 way.
3. why are bristol's boobs so big, did you see them, they are like bigger than texas
4. did you see her BF's face book page told the media to fuck off, ha ha, very family values
5. it was so awkward when creepy cindy was holding her downy baby, maybe even creepier when mini-palin was petting it.
6. blah blah blah, she is irritating.
7. cindy's weird green cape dress is out of control; she is scary.
8. republicans are irritating.
9. biden is soo sooooo much better.

While I second the Todd-Track-warlord threeway notion, I have to say that I, for one, completely love Cindy McCain and all of her brilliant outfits. I especially love them because you know there's some atrocious, totally out of control fag behind it all and he's all, "Oh CINdy, you absolutley MUST wear the crazy green CAPE dress tonight! It'll look totally FIERCE with a downy baby nestled in it!"

Snaps, Cindy! Total. Snaps.

Palin-tology

2008-09-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

Is it wrong for me to love this woman so much?

Yes, it probably is. She's an insane conservative, after all. Worse yet, her selection for the VP slot is looking more and more like a stroke of genius almost by the minute. The choice of such a unique figure has left most of us liberals gaping and frothing and desperately trying to destroy her as quickly as possible.

But every revelation only seems to make her more attractive, both to the "base" and, I suspect, to all those ordinary, small-town voters that have trended Republican in recent years and that Obama has a chance of winning back.

Of course, it's a little pathetic when the liberal attack machine actually starts off with the most outlandish and unbelievable scandal: Palin faked her pregnancy to hide her daughter's pregnancy!

No one could seriously believe such a rumor. Well, perhaps they could in a world where so many people think Barack Obama is a Muslim. But such a baroque conspiracy is the kind of thing JFK-assassination aficionados would come up with, not a legitimate scandal.

And of course, Palin addresses those rumors by revealing what was potentially a real scandal. That 17-year-old girl who apparently gave birth to her "brother" in April? Oh, she's five months pregnant.

This, of course, sets liberals into a complete frenzy of jubilation! "Ha ha ha! So much for 'family values!'" Only, guess what, this scandal only makes her more sympathetic to the family values crowd. And so does her husband's DUI arrest 22 years ago.

Add to that all the sexism that Obama's supporters are throwing at her (it must've been totally awful to go a few months between Hillary and Sarah without a woman to sneer at, huh?) and Palin suddenly looks like the best choice McCain ever made.

And, yes, Palin benefits greatly from the vastly lowered expectations the Democrats handed her. Generally, smart political operations seek to increase expectations of their opponents to an unreachable level (think all that John Kerry as Cicero stuff in 2004) so as to disappoint the voters. But this year, Democrats have done Palin's job for her. They've made her out to be the bumbling virgin at our quadrennial political orgy, a dumb beauty queen with no experience about anything outside her igloo.

So when Sarah Palin got up on that stage and delivered a speech that, while hardly substantive, was nonetheless effective, raucous, pointed, piercing and, oddly enough, fun she rose so high above the expectations her enemies had set that she's being compared to Obama in 2004!

She knows what the real job of the Vice President is, better even than Joe Biden did last week. She'll attack ruthlessly but somehow sweetly, wrapped up in her mixture of dorky class president and sleek beauty queen.

And why not? Palin, like Michelle Obama, has blown the lid off the expectations of political women. And the problem is, no one really knows what to do about it. Obama's campaign is still run by men, after all. And even the women hanging around are more influenced by Hillary Clinton, whose feminism is a little older (and, let's face it, a little more masculine) than Obama's or Palin's.

I don't believe Palin demonstrated that she has what it takes to assume the Presidency if John McCain's goiter should explode. She almost certainly can't demonstrate that to me. But the actual abilities of a Vice Presidential nominee are only really important to voters at large when that nominee turns out to be entirely unsuited to the task.

Palin's speech tonight was supposed to be her Dan Quayle deer-in-headlights moment. And it wasn't. Despite being drowned in more media attention, personal and political, than she probably ever thought she'd endure, she looked utterly unfazed and completely up to the moment. Not so bad for a woman's who's a mere small town mayor, huh?

I'm not the kind of voters she's designed to attract, but I still find her attractive. Totally crazy, sure. But also a more complicated and original bit of political theater than anything Obama's offered us. Nothing short of a revelation that Barack Obama is actually a Nazi war criminal in hiding wearing a suit crafted by the geniuses behind all those Eddie Murphy fat person movies would convince me to even consider voting for McCain. And even then, it'd be a tough call. Still, the fact that even I (and many other liberals) found her smart, engaging, tough and funny is probably proof that she's far more dangerous than at least some liberals are willing to bet.

The real problem for the Obama campaign now is to figure how exactly to attack this woman. Obama supporters have tried the sleazy, bottom-of-the-barrel approach and failed. Obama's proxies have floated the "inexperience" balloon and found it not exactly effect [my favorite line of Palin's tonight was "I guess being a small town mayor is like being a 'community organizer' except you have actual responsibilities."] So how can they fight back?

Of course, in a sense they probably don't need to. I don't think Palin can turn McCain's campaign around single-handedly. Had she run her own campaign for President, she might well be the nominee, but she's not and so the Republicans are stuck with McCain. And there's only so much this Alaskan she-wolf can do for his fortunes. And thank God. Much as I love the woman, I don't want her (or her sugar daddy) anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Cindy McCain's Notes To Self

2008-09-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

1. When addressing the Republican National Convention regarding Hurricane Gustav, show solidarity with the victims and refugees by wearing a gorgeous yellow designer pleated silk rain coat.

2. Make sure Laura looks as frumpy as possible so everyone knows I'm the lipstick in this relationship!

Tennis: Just Like High School Only With Racquets Instead Of Pregnancy Tests!

2008-09-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

My Olympics coverage really drained me of all the assfucking jokes I could make about athletics for a while, so I've been a unseasonably quiet about the US Open. But in tonight's quarterfinal action, Andy Murray takes on Juan Martin Del Potro, the rising Argentine on a twenty-something match winning streak. I think Murray will win, but it's gonna be a great match! Especially if we see a repeat of this!

The two have known (and apparently despised) one another since their days on the junior circuit. Their last match, played in Rome earlier this year, featured the bizarre, awesome and sexy confrontation seen above.

Although I think my favorite part is definitely Del Potro's crack about Murray's mom, the chair umpire-as-study-hall-monitor routine is classic too. And listen to the commentators who suggest they "pull their shirts over their heads" and go out it like "in the old ice hockey."

Wanna lay bets on how many sets the too will last before engaging in sexy homoerotic fistfights?

More Things I Thought I'd Never Do

2008-09-01T00:59:00.000-07:00

Jesus on a toaster strudel, but the last coupla weeks have played hell on my native impulses. First, I had to swallow my pride (and choke on the rinds, though the lack thereof left me empty inside) and admit that Joe Biden isn't always as bad as I make him out to be, even if he is perhaps the foremost Drug Warrior in the United States and is therefore, if not singlehandedly than at least multihandedly to blame for the immoral imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of American citizens.

And now I'm about to do something even more unthinkable. Defend a Republican Vice Presidential Candidate!

One has to admit that even a cursory overview of the history of such people that Republican VP nominees are an extremely unsavory lot. From Cheney to Jack Kemp (remember him?!) to Dan Quayle to Spiro Agnew it's not exactly a Totally Awesome People Club or anything.

But I find myself deeply annoyed at the majority of criticisms of Governor Sarah Palin, McCain's admittedly outside-the-box, vaguely Harriet Miers-y choice for the post.

It's one thing, of course, to attack the woman's expansive conservative record. She doesn't believe rape victims should be allowed to take the morning after pill. And while her hatred of polar bears is well-regarded in these parts, her desire to destroy vast expanses of dwindling wildlife habitat in order to produce an amount of oil so fractional as to be functionally nonexistent is deeply disturbing.

Nonetheless, I find the sudden Democratic-talking points rather hysterical, even desperate. She's completely "inexperienced"? Yes, her resume is a little thin. But no thinner than Barack Obama's, unless one chooses to believe that "community organizing" is legitimate political experience while raising five children is not. He spent eight years as a state senator, a job in which he had 58 other people to do his job for him. Then he spent two as a US Senator, where he had 99 other people to do it for him and where he had so little seniority as to make it impossible for him to prove his leadership skills. Then he spent two years running for President. The last time he actually ran something of real significance was when he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Governor Palin, meanwhile, has led both a small city and a state. And one can poo-poo that sort of experience all one wants. I would be doing it too, if the Democratic nominee weren't the least-experienced major part presidential nominee since George W. Bush.

While Michael Kinsley is surely correct to say that the "experience" meme is largely irrelevant, he's not correct to suggest that Palin's nomination seriously undercuts McCain's experience mantra.

After all, hasn't Barack Obama been telling us for two years now that he's the best choice for the office precisely because he lacks experience? In the olden days, state governors were the ones trumpeting their ability to "change Washington." Now it's Obama, who implicitly admits that his Senate service doesn't count because if it did he'd be part of "Washington culture." And then he picked Joe Biden as his running mate. Senator Biden, whose home state is practically part of the DC metro area and who has been in the Senate for only ten fewer years than Ted Kennedy.

So if McCain's choice of Palin means that he really doesn't care about experience than the necessary corollary is that Obama's choice of Biden means he really doesn't care about change.

All of which assumes that Vice Presidential picks are actually a better barometer of the Presidential nominee than he is himself! It's all rather silly isn't it?

[Kinsley aside: he notes that no candidate, other than a sitting president or perhaps a vice president, can have both executive and foreign policy experience unless they've been both a governor and a Senator, which makes them the most dreaded of all creatures, a "career politician." This is obviously true. But in the debate over the relative experience of Palin and Obama, surely it should be noted that Palin really does have executive experience while Obama has neither executive nor foreign policy credentials.]

Of course it's hilarious that McCain would choose someone with so little experience to flesh out his experience ticket. But it's not half as hilarious as Obama supporters suddenly caring about the experience level the Vice President has when their own candidate for an even higher office, is just as inexperienced. Nor is it less hilarious than Obama choosing a man whose never had a non-political job as his co-agent of change.

And yes, obviously I believe the experience issue only goes so far. It's one thing for me to argue that Obama is perhaps dangerously inexperienced when he's being compared to Hillary Clinton, with whom he had no policy differences. But experience clearly matters a good deal less when the choice is between Obama and McCain, whose thirty years of experience is chiefly in the field of fucking us in the ass with an unlubed, barbed-wire dildo. McCain is one of the most conservative members of the US Senate. He's certainly one of the most partisan. His image as a "maverick" has always been a sham, based on a few minor quibbles with the party line. His vision for America is, in a word, horrifying. And Governor Palin shares his views on virtually every issue except the few she's even more zealous about.

The worst Obama can do is fail. And while I doubt he even wants to "change Washington", he may well actually succeed in advancing the liberal agenda. The very least we can rely on is that he'll nominate liberal SCOTUS justices. With McCain, we have to hope he'll fail.

So, yes, I'll take the inexperienced Obama over the experienced McCain any day of the week. But that doesn't mean I can't admit he's inexperienced. And if I'm not allowed to admit that, then I must admit that Governor Palin is by far the more experienced candidate.

[Hilarious Obama Cocksucking Award of the Palin-o-rama goes to Andrew Sullivan, who responded to a reader who pointed out Obama's inexperience with this:

It occurs to me that some on the right actually think that Obama is as inexperienced and as trivial a figure as Palin. So ask yourself: could Sarah Palin have run a national election campaign against, say, a machine as powerful as the Bush family, and won? Does she have the skill set to construct a campaign that would actually have brought her to the nomination herself? I find the comparison with Obama ludicrous.

So now running a great presidential campaign is itself "experience" for the office? If I remember correctly, two of the most effective presidential campaigns of all time were recently waged by none other than George W. Bush, whom Andrew Sullivan believes to be a profound and irredeemable failure.]

[WTF, Sully: Your completely bizarre obsession with the rumors that Governor Palin's latest child is, perhaps, actually her grandchild is practically insane. Sure you can be a bit excitable, but this is downright deranged. And the mere fact that her baby has Down Syndrome virtually ensures that she's the mother. A 44 year old woman is the far more likely mother of a child with Down Syndrome than a teenage girl. Just so you know.]

[Oh, and while we're on the Down Syndrome topic: I understand why conservatives want to praise her for not having an abortion. I prefer not to judge women either for their good or bad abortion choices, so I don't care. But doesn't it seem at least a little selfish for a woman in her early forties to decide to become pregnant a fifth time knowing that her chances of having a baby with special needs was exponentially higher than it was the last time she had a baby? See, I can still say mean things about her!]

The Problem With Guys These Days

2008-08-27T01:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I realize that complaining about any of the content in USA Today is a waste of time. It's hardly a serious journalistic enterprise, after all. The issue I'm complaining about, for instance, has hard-hitting articles on the ability of cows to differentiate north and south and how capuchin monkeys, when given a choice, opt to share their food rewards with a friend or family member rather than keeping them to themselves. Neither topic is exactly the brutal invasion of Georgia.

But sometimes I am nevertheless boggled by what passes for a news story in this paper! That thing about cows was maybe a hundred words. But "Guys try to read society's road map for behavior" takes up three whole columns! (Admittedly, a good amount of this pace is devoted to photos of a sexy barechested college dude and his friends horsing around in a lake and then talking about their feelings on the beach.)

And guess what? This article taught me absolutely nothing about either male culture or the conflicting messages young men receive about masculinity. For instance, the article makes much of the prevalence of hooking-up among young men, only to reveal in a sidebar about these lads' parents that actually, "most guys are not promiscuous. Most guys have had very few hookups, if any."

There is also such insightful advice to young men as "find at least one close guy friend." Maybe I'm just pissy because they didn't ask me, a self-proclaimed expert on the topic of nonsexual male intimacy, for my opinions, but man this shit it awful.

There are two specific references in this article I found particularly galling and flagrantly sloppy. The first is where Leonard Sax, whose claim to expertise on the topic is that he's a "family physician", decides to blame neither feminists nor gays for the crisis in masculinity and instead lays the blame at the feet of . . . video games!

[He] suggests that many young men are becoming slackers, in part because male motivation is being undermined by too many hours of video games and a dearth of role models.

I'm not entirely sure what Sax is even getting at. Young men being slackers (which comes up several times) isn't even really the topic at hand. The article is actually about how men learn to be men. The implication that Sax gives, then, is that more traditional masculine activities, like playing football, create strong men capable of succeeding in the world. But both football and video games are forms of play. Video games have always been a more social enterprise than they are given credit for, but with the synergistic confluence of broadband telecommunications technology and video game consoles, they have become massively social. Even before this breakthrough, playing video games performed much the same social function that playing football does.

The chief social value of athletics is learning the concept of team-work, following the rules, learning how to share the ball and how to both win and lose with equal grace. These same values can be learned playing board games like Monopoly. And by playing video games.

My brother had a friend who would come over with his Nintendo games (he always got the best ones before we did because he was an only-child and his single mother felt guilty) and then would refuse to let us play them. On our own machine! So my brother took to lying in wait until Ben would be just on the verge of beating the boss and then lean into the console and hit the RESET button while crowing "Now you're playing with POWER!"

Even thinking of this, now, leaves me as hysterical as it did then. But Ben eventually learned the rules -- he had to share or he'd never get to finish the game. Of course he could've gone home, but despite his selfish character and tyrannical bearing, he was (like all kids) desperate for social interaction. Which meant he had to learn how to play well with others.

How does this inevitably lead to slackerdom, exactly? Especially in an economy where physical strength is increasingly an irrelevant commodity? Playing video games may well be a greater predictor of future success in a technoconomy. At the very least it's no worse than playing sports.

And slackerdom aside, I don't see how video games have any impact on male-to-male bonding or in learning about masculinity. Lots of girls play video games, and I'm hardly the go-to-guy on video game culture (that would be Mr. Barleycorn), but I'm willing to wager that playing video games is still a largely male enterprise that is, therefore, an ideal space in which to practice masculinity. And, unlike football, it's far less likely to result in embarrassing boners or jock itch.

And then we get to the other, rather hilarious, bit of this article that describes what guys do (and you're in for a shock: guys do . . . "guy things!" says the author of Guyland! What's next? Girls hang out and do "girl" things?! What is the world coming to?!?!):

Guys pal around and do "guy" things, like play video games, talk sports, watch porn, binge-drink and hook up with girls.

First of all, I think that Dr. Sax already proved that playing video games is not a "guy thing" at all and secondly, as noted above, it turns out that it's a "really small percentage of guys who hook up regularly." But even if that's an extremely typical behavior . . . how exactly is hooking up with girls a "guy thing"? Is it not also a "girl thing"? For every guy hooking up with a girl, there's a girl hooking up with a guy.

Now, we know that guys often exaggerate their exploits, since even if the same really slutty girls hooked up with all of them, the population of females on Earth would need to be about five times greater than it currently is in order to accommodate the sheer volume of cock young men would like us to believe is banging pussy. But still, girls are involved in this practice. And usually guys don't hook up with girls while simultaneously "palling around" with their guy friends, unless straight people are way, way kinkier than I've given them credit for.

Even if you're hooking up without any expectations of dating, or even seeing, the girl in the future it's still an activity that, by its very heterosexual nature, is excluded from the realm of "guy things" and is, in fact, a "guy-girl thing."

Or am I totally getting this wrong? If any straight people read this, please let me know! But this bizarre conflation of inter-sexual (but not necessarily intersexed) behavior with intra-sexual male bonding reminds me of a classic line from Strangers With Candy, when Jeri's secret-boyfriend meets her for a lunchroom liaison (she's hiding in the trash can and they make out through the flap) and then tells her they have to keep the relationship secret because, "having a girlfriend is gay. Now I gotta go take a dump with the guys."

Things I Thought I'd Never Do

2008-08-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

I can be a pretty stubborn person. It can take extreme efforts of the will for me to change my opinion about virtually anything. And my opinions about people, whether I know them or not, are almost impossible to change. So, it's rather strange to find myself suddenly defending Joe Biden, a man I've suggested was completely insane and whom I once referred to as a used fetus salesman. [What makes that joke even more hilarious is that Joe Biden's father was an actual used car salesman, a fact I didn't even know when I wrote it! Apples don't fall far . . . ]

I'm not sure I'd have picked Biden as my running mate, and I'm not sure that, for all his obvious foreign policy intelligence, that he's necessarily someone I want a heartbeat away from the presidency. But this is all relative. I've resigned myself to voting for the actual beating heart, after all, even if I'm incapable of getting myself particularly excited about Barack Obama.

And it's not like I've never defended him in the past. Still, I have made various references to his career in plagiarism, but now that Slate has devoted two articles to Biden's "deeply troubled soul" and his "unusually creepy" plagiarism, there's something in me that is revolted by the whole spectacle.

David Greenberg's insistence that the standards of academic rigor should be applied to every arena of life is at once shocking and amusing. Whatever Joe Biden was doing, he wasn't writing a scholarly book in which he stole another scholar's work. He was giving a speech. A speech which he stole from someone else, yes. A speech in which he told rather fantastic lies, certainly. But this is a presidential campaign. The creation of a candidate's mythos is a central part of that process. While the facts that Obama and McCain tell us may be technically true, the way they are framed and the conclusions we are intended to draw from them are fabrications, set-pieces in an elaborate electoral fantasia. Bill Clinton's "Man From Hope" was no more real than Biden's coal-miner ancestors. The best politicians are able to twist their real history into a compelling narrative. Some of them, like McCain and Obama, have such rich actual histories that this is relatively easy to achieve. Others, like Joe Biden, have a bit more difficulty in this respect.

But from where I stand, in a post-Edwards landscape, Biden's overall campaign strategy seems perfectly decent! Edwards son died in an auto accident and Edwards leaped at the chance to turn his son's death into a political career. Biden's wife and daughter died in an auto accident and Biden kept his personal feelings close to the vest. He commuted from Washington to Delaware every night to raise his young sons as a single father, but he rarely (if ever) used his personal tragedy to gain political traction. Indeed, I'd wager that many voters are still unaware that such tragedy even exists in the Biden world.

In any event, lying on the stump is hardly new. The fact that he stole elements of Neil Kinnock's life is hardly shocking or even creepy, as Jack Shafer suggests. There's no indication that Biden routinely lied about his family history to his friends or his children. This situation can only be creepy if Biden himself actually believed the lies he was telling. Since he didn't, and since he told the lies only to voters, I'm afraid my skin just refuses to crawl.

Remember when it was revealed that Joseph Ellis, the historian and Amherst professor, had told almost anyone who would listen (but mostly his students) that he'd done and seen various horrors in Vietnam (where he never served) and was a dedicated anti-segregation protester (which he wasn't)? I defended Ellis too, because there was no hint of plagiarism or untruths in his actual books. But yes, I think it could be argued that Ellis's personal fantasy, designed to make him seem more amazing than he was, is kinda creepy. All Biden did was say his ancestors were coal miners and he was the first in his family to go to college, none of which were even really lies about himself, but only about his family.

Greenberg and Shafer seem to suggest that plagiarism is more revealing of derangement and bad character than having an extramarital affair (Greenberg specifically gives Gary Hart's affair a pass, blaming it on an "overzealous press" even though Hart actually dared the press to follow him around!) Neither is necessarily a sign of character flaws, to me. But shouldn't the press be more concerned with the kinds of lies that actually impact our lives? It makes no difference to anyone in this nation whether Biden's ancestors were coal miners or millionaires, just as it makes no difference to anyone in this nation if Joe Biden has sex with porcupines. Find evidence that Biden has told significant lies about public policy and then we can talk.

In the meantime, I need to go make up some relatives!

[PS: Neil Kinnock said, "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?" Hyperbole aside -- a thousand generations is roughly 20,000 years, during the vast majority of which there were neither universities nor Kinnocks -- this has a nice ring to it. Biden's wasn't quite so sharp, "Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?" The third person is a bit galling, but please notice that had Biden only plagiarized slightly more, he'd have told one fewer lie. He later had to admit that some of his mother's family members had been to college, rendering "[Joe Biden's] family" a lie. But had he used Kinnock's phrase and said, "Why is Joe Biden the first Biden to go to a university," he'd have been technically accurate, since his mother's college-educated kinfolk were not Bidens.]

The Olympics End On A Beautiful Faggy Note

2008-08-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

And I'm not talking about the closing ceremonies!

China's absolute domination of diving had nearly reached its leather-clad apotheosis when Chinese divers seemed poised to win all eight diving gold medals! I find Chinese divers to be a bit creepy in a pod people sort of way (though far less creepy that that super ripped fourteen year old boy from Great Britain! I didn't know British people were even capable of growing muscles!), but it was certainly a nice way to say goodbye to Guo Jingjing, one of the greatest divers of all time, who is retiring.

But somewhere along the way to that eighth gold medal, something happened. And that something was Matthew Mitcham.

Matthew Mitcham was 30 points behind Zhou Luxin with one dive remaining. That's a huge gap. Perhaps even huger than my ass gap after a full week of getting my blowhole gang-raped by Phelps, Sullivan and van den Hoogenband!

And then Matthew launched himself into an astonishing two and a half back somersault with two and a half twists to earn the highest score in diving history and take home the gold!

Oh . . . and in case you hadn't heard, Matthew also just so happens to be openly gay!

Score one big one for the fags!

The Hero Gotham Needs

2008-08-25T00:41:00.000-07:00

I may well be the last human being in North America to see The Dark Knight. It's strange, because it's a movie I've been looking forward to since the credits started rolling on Batman Begins. But somewhere between huge, surging, sweaty opening weekend masses and my usual apathy towards, well, everything, I almost forgot the movie even existed.

It's a wonderful film, at least in part because it occludes the very subject it's allegedly about. Was Batman even in this movie? I mean, other than as a some dude hang-gliding through the city and catching bad guys? Even Michael Caine's Alfred seemed a more solid, real presence in the film. And on first glance, this would seem like some kind of profound failure. But it works. It works because Batman himself just isn't all that interesting, his allegedly ambiguity and "darkness" aside. Surely he's more interesting than Superman, but once Batman gets into his suit he becomes a cipher. That's largely what's compelling about him, this very lack of "character." He appears suddenly, does his thing and fades into the night. Every Gothamite can write anything at all across that nocturnal surface.

Of course, the real "hero" of the film is the Joker. Many people have already sung Heath Ledger's praises, most of them a bit hyperbolically, so I won't waste much time on it. Was he excellent? Indeed, he was. Though far more excellent than he'd have been were he still alive. He turns one of the most cartoonish of all super villains to shocking life, all twitchy energy and languid grace. Disheveled, filthy, scarred and heavily-made up there is nonetheless something freakishly sexual about him, enticing and scary and beautiful. Christian Bale, for all his undeniable total hotness, can't compare. Again, once he slips into his suit he becomes something asexual and impenetrable (in every way imaginable.) But Ledger is alive under his mask, lividly and frankly and disturbingly.

I still can't help but think, though, that the "depths" to which he sinks in order to deliver this performance are at least slightly overstated. Sure, I'm surprised to see an actor who considered an extreme case of lockjaw to be Great Acting managing to pull this off, but I'm afraid I'm left rather lukewarm to the notion that performing this role required any kind of peering into the abyss. His Joker certainly isn't any "deeper" than Anthony Hopkins's campy, overwrought Hannibal Lecter (a performance I find increasingly less interesting as time goes on.) He's just a very weird guy. Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow was far more interesting a villain, in psychological terms.

But, whether or not Ledger was attempting to plumb the depths of madness, the fact that he doesn't succeed (or never really tried) works. The Joker, too, is a kind of cipher. He, perhaps alone among significant comic book characters, has no official backstory. He gives two differing accounts of how he came to have those scars, neither of which is likely to be true. There is something scarier about this, a killer who cannot be understood or defined or profiled, acting out of the pure joy of causing chaos and, as Alfred puts it, "watching the world burn."

Three years ago, I got myself worked up over Batman Begins and its violent anti-democratic ideology.

It's funny what a difference a few years can make. This new Batman is, if anything, almost nauseating in its melodramatic, cheesy endorsement of democracy. Aaron Eckhardt, all handsome normalcy, is a kind of Gothamite Teddy Roosevelt, punching a would-be assassin and turning it all into a joke. He proves that the justice system can, indeed, act in the best interest of the people. Even his eventual downfall, with all its Satanic overtones, doesn't bear the faintest whiff of anti-democracy. Even Batman, who we call a knight but is, in fact, a warlord, admits finally to the great things a popularly elected government can achieve. He sees in Harvey Dent a real hero who may be purer of heart than most of us, but is nonetheless an ordinary person without a fancy suit and ninja-star-shooting gauntlets and wealth-beyond-imagination. This ordinary man can, nonetheless, be the hero Gotham needs the very most, even if it requires Batman to rewrite history to cast himself as the villain.

As I noted, I now find myself somewhat uneasy with how heroic the prosecutors have become. Batman Begins would have us believe that prosecutors are corrupt, craven and coddled by the electorate and that this leads to cities overrun with dangerous criminals who are treated more like victims than murderers. Now, The Dark Knight would have us believe that (at least some) prosecutors are brave enough to stand up against crime despite the odds. Anyone who is at all aware of how the justice system actually works finds either of these notions laughable. Prosecutors often are corrupt and craven, and they court the electorate not by sending mass-murderers to Arkham Asylum but by sending them to the gurney.

Still, this is a damn-sight better than the creepy feudophilia of the previous film, and in any event is just cartoonish enough to be rousing and enjoyable without being too troubling.

Indeed, the only real problem I had with the movie was that everytime Batman opened his mouth, all I heard was "I'm gonna go listen to my Britney Spears records!

Meet Me At The Lube Cube!

2008-08-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

Holy motherfucking boner parties, fags and fagesses! The first week of the Olympics has rolled triumphantly to a close and my cock is totally exhausted! I haven't lost this many layers of skin since Pieter van den Hoogenband played the old "pool full of acid" trick on me back in 2004!

Even A Tuna Net Couldn't Catch Tursiops Phelpsii

I'll admit that sometimes I'm a little cynical. Phelps's second attempt at winning eight fucking gold medals seemed nearly impossible. But, sweet loving colonics, did he come through!

As noted earlier, I was a little worried about the 100 fly, where Milorad Cavic-y Search had been swimming with almost Phelpsian power. The butterfuly is the hardest stroke in all of dolphinfucking, the race came late in the meet, at a time when any reasonable person would suspect Phelps's blowhole would be dangerously crammed with bodily fluids. And, truly, it looked, both to the naked eye and to this naked faggot, that Cavic had done it. But no! Phelps took one awkward half-stroke at the end that propelled him to the wall one one-hundredth of a second ahead of the Serbian Salmon. Even Phelps's adorable mom thought he'd gotten the silver until the board flashed and erections erupted like volcanoes on every one of our world's seven continents.

Then, with the help of the heroic Jason Lezak, the over-the-hill Brendan Hansen and the world-record setting Aaron Peirsol, he won his eighth medal on Sunday morning in Beijing, finally breaking the record of Mark Spitz-not-Swallowz. It wasn't as heart-stopping or erotic as the 100 fly, and I'll admit part of me was hoping that Aussie Super Hottie Eamon Sullivan could find the power to finally win the gold he's been cruelly denied throughout these games. But even then, even with my glans penis permanently damaged and swollen to monstrous size, I still found the hidden inner resources of strength, courage and homosexuality to tug one more out for Phelps.

In honor of his surpassing Spitz, here's a photo of him with a suspiciously Spitzian stache:

Oh, and speaking of Spitz, I'll admit that b in the d (as Brennon would say), that bitch was hot. But have y'all seen him lately? He looks like the Little League coach who bought me some Hot Tamales and then assraped me in the back of his station wagon in third grade! Serious, Spitz! Take it easy on the Pedogaine!

Okay, one more dirty picture and then I'm done talking about Phelps. At least until my sperm count recovers.

Acts of Dara-ing

Dara Torres is the only she-swimmer who makes my prostate ooze. At 41, she's got the sickest body I've ever seen, can swim faster than girls a third her age, and is sweeter than an afternoon gangbang with the US Swim Team. Before her semifinal in the 50 free, she noticed that a lovely young Swede had torn her suit. Of course, I hoped this would lead Sapphic erotics on the deck, so I was slightly disappointed, but nonetheless happy when Dara told the girl to go change her suit and then told the referee to hold up the race. Despite this break in concentration she went on to win her heat and ended up the silver medalist the next day when she was beaten by Britta Steffen of Germany by, yet again, one one-hundredth of a second!

She then anchored the silver medal winning women's medley relay team and became Lezakesque in the last few meters, almost closing the gap!

Dara, ask Phelps for my number! I'll buy you a Mondo Mudslide at Applebee's!

The Stupidest Name Ever

Let's talk about Australians for a second. Don't they all have funny names? Like Grant Hackett and Eamon Sullivan and Ian Thorpe. But one of their extremely great female swimmers has a name that is almost mind-boggling in its ability to send me into a total rage so powerful it can only be soothed by blow jobs and pastrami! What is this name that I find difficult even to type?

Jessicah Schipper.

That's right, Jessicah. With an h at the end. For no reason. Why not just spell it Jesikquahhe?!

I know this isn't her fault. A certain beach volleyball star's parents named her Misty after all. And the girl is sweet, and adorable in a kind of Jan Brady way and a great swimmer from a great nation of swimmers. I have nothing against her, but come on!

Jessicah?!

Usain In The Membrane

Track and field gets off to a great start with Usain Bolt of Jamaica setting a new world-record of 9.69 seconds in the 100 meter dash. Unfortunately, Tyson Homosexual failed to make it to the final and Asafa Powell sucked once again so it was all Usain!

Usain, who probably learned to run in Jamaica's beloved annual 100m Lynch-a-fag Dash, is cocky and charming and pretty hot and set his first world record in this event the second time he ran it. He was running so fast that he actually basically stopped running at the end and had his shirt half-way off before even crossing the finish line.

Watching people run fast makes me sick to my stomach, so I wasn't able to pop a chubby for you, Usain! Sorry!

The Almost-End of the Faggy Olympics Update

Now that dolphinfucking, gymnastics and fencing are pretty much done, we've come very close to the conclusion of the faggotry around here. I'll still post some occasional update on the track and field events and anything else I feel like boning, but it is with great sadness and extreme post-coital depression than I announce we are on the verge of bidding adieu to Beijing. London can't come soon enough!

Phellatio-Phueled Phelps Phlattens Phield!

2008-08-15T02:06:00.000-07:00

Cubism

It's almost getting boring to write about Phelps winning again! Even he looks like he's over it, no longer grinning happily in the pool as he looks at his time. Still, six golds, six world records. This is amazing stuff -- and I think he really is gonna take all eight!

In the 200 medley, he cockblocked all his opposition in such a comprehensive way that it's almost embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as that time I shit my pants at work, nor even the time I prematurely ejaculated on Thorpedo's goggles. Still, I wonder if he'd like some real competition.

This event was one he looked vulnerable in. And the whole aura of invincibility is certainly sexier than fuck, but nothing makes a withered old fag's heart beat faster vulnerability!

Ryan Lochte (more on him in a mo) beat Phelps in the semis and is himself a gold medalist in the backstroke. His strengths in that stroke, added to Phelps's perceived weakness in the breaststroke shoulda coulda made this a race.

The problem? Phelps's weakest stroke is still better than anyone who isn't a breast inspector. And while he doesn't swim the backstroke outside of medleys, he's easily good enough to do so if he wanted to. It's not for lack of skill that Phelps cut the back out of his repertoire (perhaps he prefers lying on his back in other events, ike the Anal Fuck Medley?) it's for lack of time.

And timing was a crucial issue here too, because Lochte had just won a gold medal immediately before this race, placing himself in dangerous oxygen debt even before he got his flippers on the starting block.

Only one more individual event to go, and Ian Crocker has been trading records in the 100 fly with Phelps for a long time and he's hungry for gold. And so is Milorad Cavic, an enormous orcafucker from Serbia who has won both preliminary swims against Phelps so far in this event! So watch out for the Serbian Menace!

Cseh-mate

Indeed, Lochte finished bronze, showing that only thing close to a rival Phelps has is a relatively unknown Hungarian named Laszlo Cseh. Laszlo has won three silvers behind Phelps in this Olympics and still remains, because he's not American or Australian virtually anonymous. So let's give some love to Cseh, okay? He's a great swimmer, a world champion and a legit rival to Phelps. He's also Hungarian and that makes me Hungary for his taint!

He's not as sexy as Phelps and certainly not in the van den Hoogenband- Eamon Sullivan tier of merciless hotness. But he's still pretty adorable. He even looks a bit like Phelps, although in his younger days he actually bore a resemblance to the late lamented Brad Renfro:

It was difficult to find pictures of him without his shirt on, which is weird considering that he's a swimmer and all. Those closest I got was this, which is a bit more intimate, showing in him the bathroom shaving his skull.

The Lochte Ness Monster

Ryan Lochte has, as mentioned above, won a few medals himself this year and has an undeniably gorgeous body. Still, I'm not entirely sold on him. When he can be bothered to cut his hair, I want to fuck him until I bleed.

Still, I get the impression that it's a bit of a douchebag. Why? Well, for one thing, he doesn't always cut his hair. And then he sometimes wears giant skull necklaces.

And then, there's, ummmm, this.

I can't get the video to work here, so go to the link and watch the splendidness unfold.

I'm really conflicted about this! On the one hand, he seems like an immature man-child. On the other hand, I love boning immature man-children! Although his beloved diamond grill ("it's just like a really expensive retainer") is disgusting, the high regard he has for his own drawing skills is sort of endearing. "Instead of showing raindrops coming down, I'll make them go up. Or, like, there'll be a raindrop and then it will turn into a fish and then it will turn into a comet and the comet will be like coming out of an egg and the egg will be like the world."

As one commenter on that site put it: "He's pretty, but acts like he's 12. So yeah, I'd fuck him."

Indeed, with all the evidence in, I have to concur!

The Angriest Swede of All Time

Yes, Fagistanis, there are, indeed, sports going on that don't give me a boner. One of these is Greco-Roman wrestling, which is clearly among the more homoerotic events on the program, featuring huge sweaty men basically dry-humping their way to gold. Still, I've never much gotten off on seeing huge slabs of meat have simulated sex. But Swedish bronze medalist Ara Abrahamian, enraged by the referring of his semifinal bout, has taken the faggotry to a whole new level! Not content with having his face stuffed in a sweaty, lycra-covered crotch for 25 seconds, Abrahamian had to throw a super sized diva bitch fit on the medal stand! First, he tried to pull his opponent's hair out by the roots while clawing his face and then he took the bronze medal off his neck, stormed off like a panty boy and threw his medal on the ground in disgust!

God bless you, Ara Abrahamian, you're Faggot of the Year!

The Only Time Of Year When Tennis Doesn't Increase My Sperm Count

I'm mostly bored by Olympic tennis. It's the kind of sport that really doesn't belong in the games. A gold medal isn't that important to a tennis player, the Games come right between Wimbledon and the US Open and so play havoc with the schedules of the players. Worse yet, especially on the men's side, the great players never win! Only Andre Agassi, among Legends of Sperm of Volley, has a gold medal. Mardy Fish has a silver. You do the math!

Still, I suppose since I'm an unrepentant tennis slut, I should update y'all on the action. As usual, it's a fucking mess! Djokovic and Nadal will face off for a berth in the gold medal match and the right to face either James Blake or Fernando Gonzalez. That's right, one of the latter two will at least be a silver medalist. I'm happy for them both, especially for Blake who wins extra hand jobs for making sure Roger Federer never wins a medal in the Olympics, finally beating the Swiss Miss in their ninth meeting!

On the women's side, a Russian sweep seems a strong possibility. Zvonareva and former silver medalist Dementor the Clown are set in one semifinal, while Li Na of China will face either Jelena Jankovic (de jure No. 1) or Dinara Safina (de facto No. 1) who still have a QF to play. I love Jankovic and I'm rooting for her to prove she deserves that 1 spot with a gold medal, but Safina's had her number too often of late. If Safina goes forward, three of the four semifinalists will be Russians, with one Chinese player of considerably lower skills. Imagine that, a Russian sweep! And without Sharapova or Kuznetsova! Not too shabby, Russian barbarians!

Yer Nasty Lookin'!

2008-08-14T23:49:00.000-07:00

There's so much to talk about today that we're giving you two faggy updates! And we're going to start with what remains, despite my nearly pathological lust for all those sexy cetaceans down there in the Water Cube, the signature event of the Summer Olympics. That's right, Gymnastics: Mal-Nourished Teen Girl Division All Around Final!

The New New Mary Lou?
Despite all the stumbling, sitting, fall and sucking in both qualifications and the team final, the US was widely expected to go gold-silver at these games. Shawn Johnson and the unfortunately named yet amazing Nasty Nastia Liukin are dear friends, bitter rivals and polar opposites in the field. Liukin, proving her loyalties lie with Russia, is tall, blond, sleek and stylish with that brooding Slavic air that is just so fucking compelling. Okay, so she's no Svetlana Khorkina, erstwhile Queen of the Bars who was prone to calling any event she placed second in rigged, once spent a medal ceremony showing the other winners pictures of her in a magazine and boasted that winning a gold was more important than bearing children. Nastia's calmer, less theatrical off the mats and generally a much nicer person. Which is to say she's slightly boring.

Nonetheless, her gloomy expressions and those legs! Endless, pale, powerful legs slashing like knives through the heavy air of the gym!

Hey, I've got nothing against Shawn Johnson. She really is, in my opinion, the New New Mary Lou. The CARLY 5000 was granted this title four years ago, much to my disappointment, when I complained that she had no fire, no spark, none of the combination of gawky adolescence and simmering sexuality that when combined with athletic power makes a truly great champion. But Shawn's not just powerful enough to crush my skull, she's got her own little style, and a lot of Mary Lou's endless reserves of perkiness and charm, which made her endearing for at least 18 seconds until she started making ads for Reagan!

She was definitely the favorite, if only through unanimity of opinion that she had the edge. We heard about this alleged slightly minute barely perceptible "edge" a lot in the run up to the event. Not only were Elfie and Tim willing to have it both ways by declaring her the winner without actually risking much embarrassment if she failed, but even Bela Karolyi, as indecipherable as ever, joined that band wagon.

Well, that edge is blunt! It was Nasty all the way, practically leaving poor Shawn in the chalk-dust. Glorious stuff, fags and fagesses! Riveting, nail-biting stuff! I honestly never thought I'd see the day when beauty beat brawn in gymnastics again, especially under this fancy, and idiotic, new "Code of Points." Perhaps all that is beautiful in humanity is not quite yet dead, buried, dug up, corpsefucked and sloppily reburied!

Nasty is a True Hero of Freedom!

Watching Gymnastics Could Get You Arrested In 52 Nations!

I'm hardly the first person to offer an opinion on the latest "scandal" in the gymnastics world, but I don't care!

Reports are swirling around that three of the six women on China's team were underage. Gymnastics rules require "senior" athletes to be at least 16 in order to compete. And those Chinese girls sure do look younger than 16!

Their passports say they're sixteen. But a few newspapers have published stories that say they are fourteen. At current count, the number of sources is at around three, one for each suspected kiddie.

Do I care? Absolutely not, and neither should you. Why? Let me break it down, molestors!

1. It's funny to see the American media whipping up a witch hunt after we lose the gold. Had the Americans landed their routines, this conversation simply would not be happening. Lesson: Cheating only matters if Americans lose!

2. Am I wrong to find the mounting "evidence" utterly laughable? First it was just a local newspaper that referred to one of them as 14. Then it was a "biography" that assigned a too-young birthday to another athlete. Now a story in a state-run national paper also includes the 14 year age for one of the girls.

These ladies are celebrities. They live under constant scrutiny. People write a lot of stuff about them! Doesn't it seem possible that if you trolled through every single news item on Michael Phelps over the last 10 years, that it's possible a few of those journalists got it wrong? Or hit the wrong key, or suffered and egregious printing error? Not only is it possible, but it's almost impossible to be otherwise. The third source is widely seen as the most damning, because it is the Official Propaganda Paper. Fair enough, but since when have we gone around assuming that government bureaucrats pretending to be journalists are always accurate?

And the "they sure do look like young 'uns" theory is hardly scientifically accurate. Most gymnasts look younger than their peers. The physical requirements of the sport more or less necessitate extremely small frames (Khorkina, who was considered extremely, freakishly tall for an elite gymnast, was a soaring 5' 5") and that's bound to make girls look younger. And Chinese women are, on average, smaller than American women. Sure, among any group of world class athletes there's going to be some homogeny, but nonetheless I find it difficult to believe that you can tell someone's age merely by looking at them. [Bill Frist diagnosing neurological disorders from a videotape notwithstanding.] And the Americans are older, even if we accept the Chinese officials' record of birthdays, than the Chinese so they're bound to be larger in comparison.

3. So what if they're 14? The "age restrictions" placed on gymnasts are absurd, detrimental to the sport, arbitrary and poorly thought out. Think about it! We're living in an Olympic era when professional athletes can compete. This was allowed in order to ensure the best motherfuckers come to the games! Basketball would probably not even be on the agenda if it weren't for pros (and don't even get me started about tennis!) And yet, here is the gymnastics community deciding to exclude girls solely based on their age even if they are the best athletes in the world! If these girls turn out to be 14 it might even be a good thing, by proving how destructive the rule is. [The same problem exists in figure skating where the United States was recently forced to send an inferior group of losers to the world championship because of similar age discrimination Keeping great athletes out of the games solely because of their age seems like a bit of grade inflation doesn't it? Don't let them compete! They might beat the US!

4. Oh, and hypocrisy! Many people who support the rule would argue, against what I wrote above, that this is in the best interest of the sport, and especially in the best interest of the athletes. Okay, fine. Maybe it is. Maybe training at such a high level is dangerous and damaging. Why then does the FIG allow younger girls to compete in parallel "juniors" events (at every level but the Olympics) that use an identical Code of Points that requires the same level of physical training and ability as the senior circuit? Furthermore, it's not like gymnastics is something you can train at sporadically or slowly. Elite gymnasts start very young, regardless of when their 16th birthday is. An age requirement doesn't change this, it simply makes it more difficult for great athletes to gain the necessary senior experience before their one shot at Olympic glory.

Rather, I think the age restriction is actually intended to ameliorate some of the uneasiness so many people have with gymnastics, with all its rigor, tyrannical coaches, high stakes, lingering injuries and weeping girls. The fact that many of the most central gymnastics moves also tend to highlight, or at least draw attention to, the fact that these athletes are female sexual beings adds to this uneasiness.

5. And, lastly, the enduring Myth of the Prepubsecent Gymnastics Star. It's true that gymnasts began to get rapidly younger in the 1970s. But, at least at the true apex of the sport, it's simply not true that Olympic Champions have ever been consistently young. The last ten gold medalists range in age from 14 (Nadia Comaneci in 1976) to 20 (Ludmila Tourischeva in 1972 and Simona Amanar in 2000) with and average age of 17.5, a full 18 months older than the requirement. The age restrictions began in the 2000 Olympics, and our three champions in those events were an average of 18 years old (one 18 year old, one 16 and one 20.) The preceding seven champions, almost certainly the youngest group of winners in history, were an average of 17.28 years old. So the age restriction, still in its relative infancy, only raised the average champion's age by 263 days. Some 14 year old girls are tremendous athletes who can win gold medals, but almost all female gymnasts actually peak in their late teens and even their early 20s. Only two women under 16 have ever won the gold medal. And one of them, again, was Nadia Comaneci, perhaps the most famous and beloved gymnast of all time! If the age restrictions had existed then, Nadia likely would've died in unknown squalor in Romania. Instead, she is perhaps the greatest gymnast ever.

How can this age restriction possibly be good for gymnastics? It can't. End of story.

The 100 Free: Where The Hotness Dies And Is Reborn On Waves Of Pure Sex

2008-08-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

A fantastic, sexy first week in Beijing is coming to a close, fags and fagesses. We didn't get to see even one webbed foot from Michael Phelps today, but he's still got three golds on the way! And in the mean time there's plenty of other dolphinfucking action going on at the Water Cube!

War Crimes

The men's 100 free featured one of the deepest, sleekest, hottest line-ups we've seen in a long time, led off by Alain Bernard, who is far less hot than he should be and Eamon Sullivan, who is far hotter than anyone has a right to be. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Sullivan's raging hotness is classified as a weapon of mass destruction under numerous arms treaties! And, at the very lest, it's a weapon of mastur-struction!

For evidence of Australia's clear violation of the Homopolis Accord on Athletic Boner Formation please look at these diagrams of Eamon.

Exhibit A:

And Exhibit B:

Of course, he wasn't alone in this race, either in talent or in stifling sexual attraction.

There was, after all, a former champion in the pool and his name was Pieter van den Hoogenband! Even at thirty, even after fatherhood, even with younger, faster, stronger, sexier men gallavanting about, van den Hoogenband remains virtually peerless in my muscular, throbbing heart.

Okay, so he didn't win a medal. He finished fifth over all, failing to break 48 seconds as he had in the semis. So what, okay? I'm allowed to love a formerly great athlete even when he cuts out all other events to focus on this one and then fails spectacularly to keep up with the field! And I'm especially allowed to do this when his named is van den Hoogenband! And it doesn't hurt that he looks like this:

Anyway, I was, of course, rooting for van den Hoogenband, but even with his late surge I knew he'd fail, so I was hoping Sullivan would deliver another brutal torpedo to the blubbery flesh of Bernard. It wasn't to be! Bernard kept his head down and won the gold, Sullivan took silver and Jason Lezak, who has techincally swam 100m faster than anyone ever (the official world record is Sullivan's at just over 47 seconds, but Lezak did the last leg of the 4x100 relay at less than 47), tied with Cesar Cielo Filho of Brazil for bronze!

With Thorpedo retired and van den Hoogenband about to be, the Sullivan-Bernard rivalry arrives at just the right moment. Sure, Bernard isn't very hot, but I still love this match up. And despite his nation of origin, Sullivan is certainly the van den Hoogenband in this relationship -- smaller, sleeker, more graceful and fluid in the water, but beaten by the larger, stronger, muscular daddy bear at the wall.

Delicious.

Flipper-Babies

Natalie Coughlin continues to win gold medals while Katie Hoff is still hiding in a public men's room weeping for shame.

Proof That Porn Staches Actually Are Hydrodynamic

Did anyone see Serbia v. Croatia in water polo? I love water polo and I love Slavs, but I've never seen such a collection of sexy, wet swimmers sporting 70s-era mustaches. Disgusting yet strangely, and hopelessly, hot. Keep it up, Yugoslav stache wranglers!

Flipping Out

Yang Wei of China is the individual all-around champ in Gymnastics: Homosexual-Ape Hybrid Division, triple twisting back roundoffing his way to total obliteration of the field. Jonathan Horton earns death sentence for failing to bring home any medal at all. Alexander Artemev given a reprieve due to the vital role he plays in Presidential autoerotic asphyxiation policy and will merely be kept in a dungeon for a few days to soften him up.

And that'll do it for today! I promise more intensive, engorged coverage over the weekend as swimming comes to a heartbreaking end and the way is paved for track and field.