Category Archives: Apropos of nothing

Solomon Grundy Versus the Hulk: Battle of Metaphors

Posted on by

Kevin Drum agrees that the proper reference to go with regarding the Bush administration is stupid violent comic book characters. Regarding their policy toward poppy growing in Afghanistan, he explains as such (“Bush and the 60s,” Political Animal, Washington Monthly, 7 October 2007):

So: hippies bad. Hate hippies. Drug culture bad. Hate drug culture. Drugs come from poppies. Poppies come from Afghanistan. Hulk smash.

I went with Solomon Grundy instead of the Hulk (“Iraq and Vietnam; Civil Wars and Asymmetric Conflict,” 5 October 2007). When I think <man who declares himself in the third person> + <planned violent act>, it’s Solomon Grundy who comes to mind with me. Solomon Grundy is a little more down-stream a villain and if I had thought about it, the Hulk would have been better, especially with George Bush being mild-mannered Bruce Banner at the presidential podium and obviously a raving, retarded lunatic behind the closed doors of the White House.

Lives Better Than Yours

Posted on by

  1. Lauren Weedman, who wrote for The Daily Show for a brief period, recounts her experience (“I Am So Funny,” The Stranger, vol. 17, no. 3, 26 September 2007):

    Stephanie suddenly looks sad.

    “I’m sorry I’m not laughing — it just takes a lot to make me laugh. It has to be like, hilarious, to make me laugh. I’m sure you’re really funny, but I’d just be careful with the ‘trying to be funny’ thing. Everyone has a really low tolerance for that around here. So, anyway, welcome!”

    Ya gotta imagine the competition around that office to be funny is pretty damn steep. I’ll bet none of the staff needs help working on their obliques at the gym.

  2. When an editor requested some modifications to a piece on a fantasy sexual encounter to make it seem more attainable to the average person, Audacia Ray replies (“My Naughty Adventures in Print,” Waking Vixen, 2 October 2007),

    Well, I do have to say that there’s probably not a lot about my life that is attainable to the average person …

    That’s a pretty heady boast, but her blog bears it out. The resultant article is here (“I Want…Double Penetration,” Time Out New York, no. 627, 4 October 2007) and not safe for work.

Billy Jeff Clinton

Posted on by

Bill Clinton and Angelina Jolie at the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative

I know he’s Brad Pitt and all and is probably pretty secure in that, but I wouldn’t let Angelina Jolie anywhere near Bill Clinton if I were him. Ms. Jolie has lost a lot of weight lately, but she is totally the ol’ hound dog’s type. And Ms. Jolie was married to Billy Bob Thorton so we know she has a high tolerance for dried up, grey old guys and vulgar male pantings in that dopy Southern accent.

More Liberals Who Love Guns

Posted on by

22 September 2007, Matthew Yglesias as The Punisher

John isn’t the only liberal who likes guns. Here’s Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein. And Yglesias is doing it with style!

I imagine John a lot more Eddie Bauer, whether it’s out fly fishing or carrying his concealed piece. With a cable-knit sweater and mock turtleneck you can’t very effectively wear one of those cool strappy holsters that situate your gun high under the arm (there’s probably a lesser-known leather-man fetish around these holsters), but the ankle holster is pretty cool too. It results in some awesome crouched action poses. Or maybe John has two sawed-off shotguns rigged up his sleeves a lá John Conner in the first Terminator film.

The Dinner Party is a Mewling Homunculus of Plagiarism

Posted on by

[Annotation (3 September 2011): in a previous incarnation, this blog was titled “This is Not a Dinner Party”]

Via Andrew Sullivan, a particularly scathing review by A. A. Gill (“Put Not Your Faith in Comedians,” Times (London), 16 September 2007) of television show, The Dinner Party:

Finally, and most awe-inspiringly, that someone sat down at a keyboard, tapped away and made The Dinner Party — a crippling, dribbling, mewling homunculus of plagiarism. And, having done it, they didn’t turn white and book themselves into an ashram. They said: “This is cool. I’ll show it to the grown-ups”, and pressed Send. The next time this writer sees his or her name in print, I abjectly pray it’s under “Employee of the month” at Burger King.

One of the titles that we considered for this blog was homunculus. But I remind you, this is not a dinner party.

Zombies, Guns, Manliness

Posted on by

My brother passes along the following story with the admonition to “Stock up on shotgun shells, everybody — the zombie outbreak is upon us”:

“Officials Confirm Meteorite But Question Sickness Claims,” Associated Press, 19 September 2007.

A fiery meteorite crashed into southern Peru over the weekend, experts confirmed Wednesday. But they were still puzzling over claims that it gave off fumes that sickened 200 people.

…

Jose Mechare, a scientist with Peru’s Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute, said a geologist had confirmed that it was a “rocky meteorite,” based on the fragments analyzed.

He said water in the meteorite’s muddy crater boiled for maybe 10 minutes from the heat and could have given off a vapor that sickened people, and scientists were taking water samples.

“We are not completely certain that there was no contamination,” Mechare said.

Jorge Lopez, director of the health department in the state where the meteorite crashed, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that 200 people suffered headaches, nausea and respiratory problems caused by “toxic” fumes emanating from the crater, which is some 65 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

Undoubtedly the headaches and nausea will give way to a strange gate and an unquenchable desire to “eat brains.” So stock up folks.

Popcorn Workers’ Lung

Posted on by

This is potentially very bad news for K.:

Harris, Gardiner, “Doctor Links a Man’ Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit,” The New York Times, 5 September 2007

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

Apparently many brands of microwave popcorn use a chemical called diacetyl to create their buttery flavor and inhalation of diacetyl is strongly associated with an inflammatory lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn workers’ lung” (I hear a neo-Dickensonian tale in there somewhere). This guy had consumed at least two bags of microwave popcorn a day for the last ten years and when doctors measured the levels of diacetyl in his house, they found them comparable to those in popcorn factories.

K.’s tastes are so bland that he may have saved himself by not bothering with the buttered brands, but on the offhand chance that you have, K., the FDA might want to get in touch with you.

The Bibliographic Legacy of the Cold War

Posted on by

Walking around a used book store in Washington, D.C. I am reminded of another as yet unresolved dilemma left over form the Cold War: what to do with all the really narrowly focused specialty books on the Soviet Union for which all the retired Kremlinologists no longer have any use. You go to the Russia section in the store and it is like the PC book section: full of titles so arcane to the average used book store buying agent that they have no idea that they are the dupe to someone’s need to offload a bunch of obsolete books. Instead of, say, a few general histories of Russia in the Nineteenth Century or some modern books on Putin’s Russia, what you have are dozens of heavily thumbed tombs dating from the Sixties and Seventies on topics such as the persistence of the third five year plan in Soviet economic planning or the roll of the Politburo in ideology formation, 1954-1960. Just like many used book stores don’t buy PC books, D.C. used book stores should adopt a policy of no books on the Soviet Union by former CIA Directorate of Analysis employees.

Seize the Opportunity to Throw One Back

Posted on by

I’m considering educating myself a little on Graham Greene and so, at the inspiration of a passage posted by Andrew Sullivan (“‘The Torturable Class’,” The Daily Dish, 26 July 2007), purchased a copy of Our Man in Havana. Christopher Hitchens wrote the introduction and — apropos an earlier post (“Booz-Hound Christopher Hitchens,” 28 June 2007) — he tells the following tale:

Graham Greene famously subdivided his fictions into ‘novels’ and ‘entertainments’ …

I should like to propose a third, or subcategory: the whisky (as opposed to the nonwhisky) fictions. Alcohol is seldom far from the reach of Greene’s characters, and its influence was clearly some kind of daemon in his work and in his life. A stanza of that witty and beautiful poem ‘On the Circuit,’ written in 1963, registers W. H. Auden’s dread at the thought of lecturing on a booze-free American campus and asks, anxiously and in italics:

Is this my milieu where I must
How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag
An analeptic swig?

Describing a visit to a 1987 conference of ‘intellectuals’ in Moscow in the early Gorbachev years, both Gore Vidal and Fay Weldon were to record Green making exactly this dive into his bottle-crammed briefcase.

Makes me think, as Nietzsche said, that all writing is autobiographical of a sort.

Cool Dude

Posted on by

With the publication of his latest, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Christopher Hitchens has acceded to the rank of author whose photograph is promoted from the back inside flap to displace a more topical graphic from the cover. Some authors you can understand why they go on the cover. Ann Coulter is at least hot (as right wingers go) and can be expected to move some copies, more to be admired than read. Christopher Hitchens, on the other hand, is like the Archie Bunker of the left. But I guess he’s a man whose image is an icon at this point though.