1 Comment I don’t usually do this, but I’ve come over all compulsive-shopper after seeing this and apparently want validation (or company):
Man how do you get to be Global Creative Director of Chanel Make Up, I wonder. And a dude, too.
No Comments Wheat & Weeds – Oops, Sorry Poor Unemployed People
Oh, cash for clunkers. Oh, sigh.
When do we get to cite the commerce clause as giving us the authority to fire congress, eh? Anyone? Seems like a logical progression.
No Comments It’s rather entertaining to see a nation full of journalists live-tweeting/live-blogging/live-article-writing a book, as they read it. It’s been everywhere. The most entertaining bit, for us ‘Mercuns, is:
[I]ndeed, the only positive references to the US President – in 717 pages – concern his abillity “to reach out over… partisan divisions” and his “suasion in argument”. But even the latter example implies that he doesn’t have “the simplicity in approach” of George W. Bush.
And it is President Bush, as you’d expect, who is heaped with praise. The most striking example is in late 2001, as the US President prepares to deliver a speech to Congress. “He was unbelievably, almost preternaturally calm… I marvelled at it, looked carefully at him; but yes, he did appear completely at ease.”
All of which, if he were to read A Journey, would probably not apply to President Barack Obama.
Not a total surprise that he thinks that way, but it’s rather amusing that he’d make his feelings quite so obvious.
2 Comments I don’t know if any of you have seen any of these before, but they’re really good, really subtle little videos on Japanese culture. The sushi one is what (I think) first went viral. I won’t say any more.
1 Comment See:
SF Chronicle – Afghanistan’s dirty little secret
For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.
“Having a boy has become a custom for us,” Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. “Whoever wants to show off should have a boy.”
In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”. . . “How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face,” 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. “We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.”
Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli’s team “how his wife could become pregnant,” her report said. When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?”
See?
Emphasis mine. Maybe if the imams cooled it and the lady invested in a bustier, he’d figure it out, poor lad.
Curtsy: @wheatweeds
6 Comments My personal life, hanging in the balance (between the uncertain and the unknown) these past few weeks, is about to get very complicated, indeed. But today we finally reached a point where there’s been some actual, concrete decision-making going on, which has helped enormously. Plus, it was the sort of happy occasion that makes the rest of it necessary, and worthwhile. It has helped so much, in fact, that I ran immediately to the supermarket for paper towels and, while I was there, impulsively bought a bottle of prosecco and a box of frozen perogies. And then didn’t open either of them. High times, indeed!
All shall be made clear by (hopefully) Friday. In the meantime, it involves only robust health, a large amount of money, a medium-sized road trip, and a flurry of paperwork.
15 Comments If any of you gents want to explain to us the game fixing scandal — for dummies — do, do.
1 Comment It’s called How to Land an A330 Airbus; And Other Vital Skills For the Modern Man
There is a very good reason why the first movement of the so-called Moonlight Sonata has become one of the most famous pieces in the entire pianoforte canon. It was dedicated by Beethoven on a particularly bad herr day to his pupil, the Countess Julie Guicciardi, a young woman for whom the tousle-headed tunesmith was suffering an all-consuming, utterly debilitating but ultimately unrequited love. And it shows. This is not so much a piece of music as an annotation of an affair of the heart; the means by which Beethoven exorcised his soul of accumulated lust and despair. “Even today, 200 years later, its ferocity is astonishing,” said the music theorist Charles Rosen.
In fact, some pianists have gone so far as to say that it is possible to play this seminal work convincingly only if you are, in fact, in love, and that the sensitive listener will understand, at a visceral level, the torment of the performer simply from the tenderness of his phrasing. When well executed, Moonlight Sonata is a highly protracted act of foreplay.
This is precisely why you should learn to play it.
Hehe.
No Comments A Dilbert cartoon:
CDR Salamander – Sunday Funnies
I won’t say why, but this has deep and powerful meaning to us these days. Oh man that makes me laugh.
No Comments I sense a certain inspiration at work in this Australian campaign ad for Bob Katter:
Compare to the similarly-hatted and always ALL CAPS DALE PETERSON:
This bodes well, my friends. GUNS HORSES HATS CROCODILES ON THE LOOSE.
No Comments 
At the same time that government-employee costs have been climbing, the private-sector workers whose taxes pay for them have been hurting. Since 2007, one million private jobs have been lost in California. Median incomes of workers in the state’s private sector have stagnated for more than a decade. To make matters worse, the retirement accounts of those workers in California have declined. The average 401(k) is down nationally nearly 20% since 2007. Meanwhile, the defined benefit retirement plans of government employees—for which private-sector workers are on the hook—have risen in value.
Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to public employees who opt to retire at age 55 and are entitled to a monthly, inflation-protected check of $3,000 for the rest of their lives.
What a mess. He begins by saying,
Recently some critics have accused me of bullying state employees. Headlines in California papers this month have been screaming “Gov assails state workers” and “Schwarzenegger threatens state workers.”
And I just don’t get how anyone could pay any attention to that crap. Maybe he needs to do like Elin Nordegren and publish this in People, accompanied by some photos of himself looking sadly out some large arched windows, the light really featuring the blue of his eyes…
2 Comments Peter and I are having the most awful, ridiculous #firstworldproblem. And Baby and me have had a bunch of doctor’s appointments this week, for separate issues. So adding that to the whole new house and remodeling up-to-our-eyeballs, things are getting a little out of hand. Exhausting, even.
But in a few days everything should be settling down again. And if not, then we know God hates me. Or I make him laugh. Either one.
2 Comments Chris Young, running for mayor of Providence, recently appeared on the local FOX station for a disastrous interview. The worst part? Choose: a) Young bringing/reading notes, b) saying that he attends church for fun, or c) serenading the befuddled interviewer.
Watch the video. Or try to. Whatever. It’s pretty excruciating.
No Comments Hehehehe:
Wheat & Weeds – Now THIS Is Blatant Anti-Semitism
I love that Apple’s dictionary.app can always be trusted to translate the Yiddishisms.
