Attention all editors: This month’s cover theme is color by number. If you don’t have one queued up already, get to work.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist cover is actually by 82-year-old inventor of the color by number, Dan Robbins, while The New Republic cover is by David Cowles.
The purpose of switching to a group blog format was to upgrade from my existing two to five posts per week to the sort of high-volume blog that would reward regular refreshing the browser. But alas K. and J. are weak oarsmen. So I’m thinking of a strategy more like that of Mad Magazine:
I would hardly be only in the company of Mad. The New Yorker obviously has had similar thoughts:
And The New Yorker cover shows that the editorial staff at that magazine is actually thinking through the practicalities of the program. On the other hand, The New Yorker is just involved in a raw numbers game. Mad is trying a strategy of mixing it up.
Back when I worked in IT I actually used to fret that my employer would fire me in favor of a monkey. I’m sure that a chimp could have been at least twice as productive as me when it came to pulling new cables through the suspended ceiling. Perhaps the same would be true of blogging.
For the last few years it’s been kissing your way to the White House. This year for a few days it seemed like it might be sobbing your way to the White House. My hope is that it might now turn to drinking your way to the White House. After a dry drunk as president, this is a welcome change. Words won’t help you now Obama. Time to pony up. You’ve done coke so showing this old lady up should be no problem. Or maybe it’ll be like Marion Ravenwood drinking a bunch of Nepalese tough guys under the table at her bar, The Raven, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Campaigning at Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana, Senator Clinton was polishing of a brew when someone offered “You want a shot with that?” John Stewart mocked her for her choice of Crown Royal. But if you watch the video, when it’s suggested that she drink a shot she says, “I want something sweet.” It turns out that her idea of something sweet is actually the sweat end of bitter. When most people say “something sweet” what they mean is a Mellon Ball or a Lemon Drop. When Hillary Clinton say “something sweat” what she means is a sweat whiskey. I’m sold.
I was so amused by this that I actually can’t decide which picture I liked the most. So here she is, both a beer and a whiskey. More at The Gawker (“A Shot in the Dark: Hot Hillary Clinton Party Photos!,” 14 April 2008).
I think that, like just about everyone else, I view my life as a series of cycles running Monday through Sunday. Some may pick Sunday through Saturday, but whatever the case, somewhere back in the mists of time someone arbitrarily picked the seven day grouping as the next most basic division after the day and with all the institutional reification, we just think that way. No TGIF for me: the high point of my week is Thursday morning. I get coffee and a baked good on my way in and just as soon as my work PC is booted up, I bring up the website of The Stranger and spend the most coveted fifteen minutes of me week immersed in the wit and wisdom of Dan Savage and the depravity and befuddlement of his correspondents. Hungry pervert that I am, this is indisputably the highpoint of my week.
I followed my normal routine this week with the usual growing anticipation. It started slow — a lot of Mr. Savage’s own words — I usually prefer the columns with more of his own writing than that of his advice seekers, but I was waiting for the punch line, but there wasn’t one this time (“At a Loss,” The Stranger, Vol. 17, No. 31, 10 April 2008).
I thought I could bang out a column today — a regular column, a column about my readers’ problems and their freaky fetishes and all those asshole politicians out there. You know, the usual.
The day my son was born, I managed to slip out of the maternity ward and write a column; I wrote one the day I was indicted by the state of Iowa for licking Gary Bauer’s doorknobs. (I was actually indicted for voter fraud — on a trumped-up charge, your honor — but Bauer’s knob needs all the attention it can get.) I’ve written columns on days that I was dumped and on the morning of 9/11. So I figured that I could bang out a column today.
I opened my laptop and started reading your letters. I love reading your letters — I do. But I couldn’t get into it. I just don’t have a column in me this week. I’m disappointed in myself. I write this column at Ann Landers’s desk, for crying out loud, and the old lady banged out a heartbreaking, truncated column when her marriage collapsed. If Landers could bang one out under that kind of emotional strain, then I could damn well bang one out, too. Just do it, right? Just fucking do it. But I just fucking can’t.
My mother died on Monday.
S. and I have read both of Dan Savage’s personal books. We read The Kid one after the other at the recommendation of a coworker (thanks Donna). I read The Commitment to S. as she drove on a number of five hour trips back and forth to her parents’. We laughed and laughed and got angry and were provoked to numerous discussions and had some sentimental moments. We have pushed these books on anyone we judged sufficiently edgy and open minded to enjoy them as well. (I have previously commented here.)
One of the standout characters of these books has been Dan Savage’s mother. I have vague imaginings in my mind’s eye of the Chicago home where Mr. Savage grew up, where the kitchen must have been situated with respect to the rest of the house (the referenced learning to bake cakes), what the back alley must have looked like, et cetera. She was alternately a voice of calm and reason intervening at the apex of a crazy moment, or someone humorously driving Mr. Savage to such a situation in her humorously pillared idiosyncratic insistence — especially so in The Commitment.
There is also something deeply weird about my sad response. My first inclination is to blame my emotional involvement with a complete stranger on the exhibitionism and voyeurism of the Internet age. But I imagine that people have been becoming emotionally involved with famous people, national leaders, writers who have used their biography as source material, et cetera for generations. Perhaps it is a phenomena of the wider age of mass media.
Whatever the case, I feel like Dan Savage is a friend of mine — if not exactly in the usual meaning of “friend” — even if I’m a complete stranger to him. His books have taken life’s milestones as their subjects and given them a contemporary, tradition-defying take. I am hoping that coping with death — certainly one of life’s milestones — may be the subject of his next book. And maybe it can be a platform for how an atheist cops with it.
The New York Times has an article about blogging yourself to death (Richtel, Matt, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” 6 April 2008). The Japanese, for whom this is not a new phenomena, actually have a word for death by overwork: Karōshi.
Matthew Yglesias asks what’s the big deal? (“Death by Blog,” TheAtlantic.com, 6 April 2008). “…[T]o me the most draining times are really those times when I’ve undertaken substantial work on top of the blog.” I, on the other hand, have undertaken a blog on top of substantial work. I’m not a full-time blogger. I have a 40 — okay, more like 50 or 60 — hour a week job. I blog over my lunch break — when I take one — and in the evenings. Often times I feel like I have two jobs. Writing even a few posts is, for me, very time consuming. I get home in the evening and think, “Now it’s time to start my second job.” It frequently takes me a couple of late nights to finish a post and when the end is in sight, I often chase the mirage of finishing until dawn and the horror of birds chirping (Quoth the raven, “Time to get your ass to work”). Back in 2005 I ran a few queries and found that my average post was made between 10:00 at night and 6:00 in the morning (“Hundredth Post: Taking Stock,” smaties (first series), 18 January 2005). I would provide some current stats, but the new blog has a lot more complex a data model than what I developed.
I’m not griping — I’m just riffing. I do it to myself: I’m a wannabe intellectual with a boring day job. I wish I were a writer and I am desperate for a little intellectual exercise. The problem is that by depriving myself of as much sleep as I am, I am incurring as much brain damage as I am engaging in brain stimulation.
And Mom: I turned off comments not to thwart open thread on your concern for my health, but because of a recent rash of comment spam.
Kevin Drum has a post on right-wing anger over a Pizza Hut delivery guy who was fired after he shot an armed robber. Pizza Hut fired him because corporate policy prohibits employees from carrying weapons on the job (“Guns on the Job,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 2 April 2008). This seems like the opportune occasion to break out another passage from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway — might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on the poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a burning star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied instead on a matching set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration. (pp. 1-2)
Note this is from pages one and two. I have a minor interest in how authors begin a book and so occasionally will pick up a book and just read the first few sentences or paragraphs. This is the most memorable book beginning I have ever encountered. What follows is the text that, not having read it, you have not fully claim to have joined the ranks of geekdom.
A hitherto unknown to me, but apparently famous exchange from the tense final days of the July 1914 Crisis (May, Ernest R. and Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., “An Identity of Opinion: Historians and July 1914,” The Journal of Modern History , 79, June 2007, pp. 335–387):
Famously, when Moltke protested that it was too late to concentrate forces on the Russian front rather than in the west, the kaiser exclaimed: “Your illustrious uncle would not have given me such an answer. If I order it, it must be possible.” (p. 361)
Compare this to the tepid legalism of Richard Nixon:
Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.
(interview with David Frost, aired on television on 19 May 1977)
Kaiser Wilhelm II was at least disjointed enough to think that he could mandate the possible, not merely the legal.
But thank goodness our leaders have gotten back into the business of denigrating reality in favor of will.
Dewars Scotch has the brilliantly targeted (at me and my ilk) advertising campaign of promoting the notion of Repeal Day (Dewars | independent), celebrating the end of prohibition. That’s a holiday I can get behind!
Fittingly Franklin D. Roosevelt, the last president to have been photographed with a cocktail and a cigarette, ran on the repeal of prohibition, signed the Volstead Act legalizing the brewing of beer and presided over the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. On 5 December 1933 Utah, of all states, ratified the Twenty-First Amendment to the United States Constitution ending prohibition. Another reason that FDR is one of the best presidents in U.S. history!
It’s snowing out and the bars in D.C. all suck so I will probably be staying in, but while setting the scene for the photograph above, I happily came across a forgotten bottle of now thirteen-year-old Glenlivet single malt scotch: the kind of thing to keep you warm on a winter night. Sorry Dewars, but your promotional failed on me as I will be drinking the competition tonight.
It’s been a sleepless week of some rather arduous posts as well as a long time since the last Friday Cat Blogging. So here is a little Friday frivolousness.
Kitty is almost entirely indifferent to human food — eating it at least: if it stinks, he will try to bury it. The one exception, oddly enough, is bread. For some reason he is fanatical about the stuff. He pricks up when it goes out on the table and will launch round after round of attack on a baguette.
And it’s not some unknown factor: he wants to eat it. If I pinch off a bunch of buds of bread and lay them out for him, he eagerly chews them down as best a pure carnivore’s fangs will allow.
Here he is at last night’s dinner, bellying up to the bread basket like his claim to its content was legitimate and going to go down unharried.
This piece from The Onion takes the piss out of right-wing economics (“Reaganomics Finally Trickles Down To Area Man,” Issue 43-41, 13 October 2007). And they really realize the potential of the original idea. After the hook it reads like a John Updike novel in miniature.
HAZELWOOD, MO — Twenty-six years after Ronald Reagan first set his controversial fiscal policies into motion, the deceased president’s massive tax cuts for the ultrarich at last trickled all the way down to deliver their bounty, in the form of a $10 bonus, to Hazelwood, MO car-wash attendant Frank Kellener.
“Back when Reagan was in charge, I didn’t think much of him,” Kellener, 57, said, holding up two five-dollar bills nearly three decades in the making. “But who would have thought that in 2007 I’d have this extra $10 in my pocket? He may not have lived to see it, but I’m sure President Reagan is up in heaven smiling down on me right now.”
Leading economists say Kellener’s unexpected windfall provides the first irrefutable proof of the effectiveness of Reagan’s so-called supply-side economics, and shows that the former president had “incredible, far-reaching foresight.”
Marching Under Banners 
