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Thursday, October 28, 2004

I got you, Babe

The Red Sox finally won. Aside from putting to rest baseball's most prominent myth, what does it mean?

-Bill Buckner can leave unfinished his macabre memoir Even the Toddlers Have Daggers In Their Eyes.

-New England will see a glut of World Series Babies born on or around July 28, 2005. In a recount, the Totally Worth It Sex Fairy seems to have a slight edge over the Regretted Sex Fairy, though the widespread use of Diebold condoms is expected to leave the contest unresolved for weeks. Citing recent cuts in federal funding, the Abortion Fairy claims her skeleton staff will be insufficient to attend to the region's numerous college towns in the coming weeks.

-Wooden pellets, rubber bullets, and irritant-filled balls will across the board be relabled "less lethal" weapons from "non-lethal," and will be dutifully deployed at the next rowdy political protest as if nothing had happened.

Congratulations are in order for the Sox. And though I won't be around to see their next World Series victory in 2090, I wish them all the best.
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Tuesday, October 26, 2004

What's good for one poor brown person...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - F.B.I. agents witnessed harsh treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, but did not believe that what they saw was abusive or worth reporting, according to a newly released document.
...
The report said an agent saw a naked or partly clothed inmate made to lie prone on a wet floor. One agent reported seeing inmates stripped naked and put in isolation cells. The report said this seemed similar to what the agent had seen in prison strip-searches in the United States.
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John Peel R.I.P.

John Peel was perhaps the punkest old guy on the planet (actually--sadly--he wasn't that old). Read his obit in The Guardian, and check out this list of bands he hosted on his show (which seems to be complete from 1992-2002 and contains some earlier programs as well).
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Thursday, October 21, 2004

Listen: can you hear that sound?

It sounds to me like the worst post-season collapse in the history of baseball. Eat it, Yankees fans. Bite it, chew it, chew it some more, and swallow it. The Babe has taken a big celestial dump on you, and I love it. In part, it's because I'm a Red Sox partisan, if not an outright fan. The other part is that the Yankees are baseball's alpha males, seated in a city that's overbearing and usually pretty full of itself (although occasionally for good reason, viz. bagels). I enjoy the thought of Rudy Giuliani crying himself to sleep as residents of northern Maine party late into the night around a fireplace. With no disrespect to the Astros or the Cardinals, I'll be pulling for the Sox come Saturday.

Do you like a wet pillow, Rudy? Yeah, that's what I thought.
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Ultimately, this election comes down to one thing:

Will we respect the Polish nation and the Polish people in all their coalition-joining bravery, or won't we? I think the answer is clear.
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Thursday, October 14, 2004

O'Reilly on the record

If a female Fox employee really has caught O'Reilly on tape saying this stuff...
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Monday, October 11, 2004

How I amuse myself on a Monday

1. Reading a new band described as "Napalm Death on a shetland pony." That should be funny even if you aren't familiar with Napalm Death or Shetland ponies.

2. Seeing that veteran baseball player Ken Caminiti died yesterday from a heart attack and remembering very clearly watching the first game he ever played, which was for the Houston Astros and against the Phillies, my home team. This was back when I was an avid follower of the game, late 80s/early 90s. Who knows how the brain decides which useless nuggets of information to keep and which to discard, but if you go back to the box score from that game, I guarantee you will find that the Astros won and that Caminiti tripled and homered.

3. Christopher Reeve also passed yesterday, inspiring a recollection of a story my dad recounted to me of the time his population organization honored Christopher Reeve basically for being famous and an advocate for progressive causes, and Reeve spent a good portion of his speech bashing the Catholic Church - always a worthy and necessary endeavor.
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Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Things I learned from the VP debate

It turns out that I must be out of touch with progressive politics in this country. John Edwards clarified a few points for me that I didn't fully grasp beforehand:

1) Mortal threats against Iran are the best way to deescalate that country's nuclear ambitions.

2) The Israeli people's right to defend themselves appears to be of the blank-check variety. This is something Israelis seem always to have in common with us, the American people, though the right to self defense of the rest of the world's six billion people is somewhat less clear. See point 1).

3) Marriage is between a man and a woman. And my shirt today is blue. Difference is, I can change my shirt.
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Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Krist on Democracy, or, Maybe Just Happy...

Last night I went up to Politics and Prose, as per my last post, to see Mark Andersen and Krist Novoselic speak about their respective new books. Mark's presentation came off a bit too scripted in parts, but I know him to be a thoughtful, articulate, dedicated activist who has long been a good shepherd of radical politics in a variety of roles and venues. Krist's talk, on the other hand, was a different story. I should say that a friend of mine who also attended the event encouraged me to write a bit about the experience, during which we shared some suppressed laughs and rolled eyes. Novoselic's book, Of Grunge and Government, which apparently clocks in at just over 100 pages ("some people are calling it a pamphlet"), is (according to his talk, since I haven't read the book) a promotion of electoral reforms, specifically instant-runoff voting and proportional representation. Now, those reforms would be a welcome step closer to what I consider to be legitimate democracy, but they are, in my humble o., a far cry from the changes that need to be engineered to make the US and the world a healthy and welcoming place for all. So the problem is not that Novoselic is excited enough about these reforms, which would be better than nothing were they to be instituted here, to write a book and do a speaking tour. I'm glad he cares enough to look into this stuff and contribute to the national discourse. The problem is that he presented his ideas in such an airy manner, free of historical perspective, and laden with cliche after cliche. It was as if he discovered the idea of proportional representation a year ago (I understand he's 38 years old now), did some research (an aside: there is a lot to be said for the instructive potential of the Internet, to say nothing of its democratizing power, but there was something a bit off about Krist goofily extolling the virtues of Google while standing in an independent bookstore - like where, oh where, would he ever have found out about these things without digitized text?), decided that everything that's wrong with America could be fixed if we focus on these significant but narrow reforms, and then voila! back to the good old days of this nation, which he was bizarrely trumpeting. After his presentation, one questioner added some perspective of her own by drawing attention to the 40th anniversary of Fannie Lou Hamer's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the national Democratic party's civil rights platform. Krist responded by reciting some superficial pablum about busted heads and dogs and fire hoses and then proceeded to butcher Martin Luther King's quote about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.

His narrow focus and puppy-dog optimism lent a Bushian quality to his performance - though I suspect he has the lying and killing a little more under control. It's worth mentioning that Nirvana was a great band, and Krist is to be seriously commended for his contributions to the art world through that medium. Hopefully touring with Mark will help push him toward a more holistic approach to social justice, which will then be reflected in future public appearances. And perhaps, after last evening's talk, he was able to call off a hot date with a search engine and browse the curious, pulp-ish objects that line the walls of P&P - now that he's responsible for one of them himself.
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Sunday, October 03, 2004

Are you all enjoying yourselves? Outside? On this fine Sunday? Great. Really. I couldn't be happier for you. Jerks.

[Note: I tried to post this two days ago, and it didn't work. You know how the saying goes: if at first you don't succeed, fire shots into a Bush/Cheney campaign headquarters.]

Sadly, this post is the by-product of another gorgeous Sunday spent inside at work. In theory, I don't mind working Sundays, but why can't we have some of that hurricane shit when I do?

Good times all around yesterday celebrating Scott's birthday. I don't go to many movies, so I'm probably not a reliable critic, but The Motorcycle Diaries is a pretty sharp film. The scenery along western South America alone is almost worth the ticket price. The film follows a young Che Guevara on his long-ass trip with a friend from Argentina through Chile, Peru, and Colombia to see the continent and spend a few weeks working in a leper colony. The rest, as they say, is history. And history, as they don't really tend to say, often takes unfortunate turns involving the Central Intelligence Agency.

I've been meaning to write about it for a while, but for those of you who don't like to spend your free hours with a Twinkie in one hand and a remote control in the other, there are a ton of good shows in the area this fall. Just last night was Baroness, who need to be seen by everyone, not just fans of heavy music. So epic. Tonight is indie rock/jazz stars Do Make Say Think. Monday at Politics and Prose is a punk-related event with Krist Novoselic (remember that band?) and Mark Andersen (local mainstay author/activist) talking about their recent books. The City Paper slammed Novoselic's Of Grunge and Government, but Mark's presentation will likely make the event worthwhile. The rest of the month finds DC and its environs (take that, Baltimore: you're an environ) hosting out-of-towners Requiem, Witch Hunt, The Faint, Pinback, Magnolia Electric Company, Rachel Jacobs, Karate, and local rockers Q and Not U, Homage to Catalonia, Tradition Dies Here, Ryan Harvey, and more, of course.

And now on to the vomit-inducing part of our program: Hello Kitty debit cards for pre-teens. I hope our handbasket at least has leg room.