BLCKDGRD

You Only Thought You Hated Steven G-----d* or: I get all the news i need from the weather report

The Liverpool and England midfielder ­Steven Gerrard was last night charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and affray following an incident at a Southport bar which left a man needing hospital treatment for facial injuries...

One report suggested Gerrard and a group of his friends were involved in an altercation after the man refused to allow them to choose the songs played on the venue's sound system. Gerrard is a big fan of Phil Collins and counts the singer's greatest hits as his favourite album. He is also partial to Coldplay.

Meanwhile, Karl Rove writes:

Mr. Bush's 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900," James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," and Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower." Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton's "Next," Vince Flynn's "Executive Power," Stephen Hunter's "Point of Impact," and Albert Camus's "The Stranger," among others... Each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.

and Richard Cohen writes a column IN WHICH HE BELIEVES ROVE and lauds Bush while psychoanalyzing Bush's "list" for insights on Bush the intellectual.

I know I'm a rube, rooting for uniforms filled with physical freaks of nature and brains of muscle who consider rubes like me shit if they think of me at all, but if Liverpool's propaganda minister told me Stevie Mbe got caught in a fight defending the artistic merit of Elliott Carter, I'd remember who was speaking.

What's easier to believe, that Stevie Mbe picks a fight over his love for Phil Collins or George Bush bombs Arab civilians after reading Camus?

*HOLY FUCK, teh google.

I tried changing the title, but typepad brands a post whatever it's called when first posted, and the first post had Stevie Mbe's name in it, and KABOOM! Want to drive up your statcounters?

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• Elric asks a question.
• One answer.
• Numbers.
• More.
• Things you won't hear on the BBC. Or CNN.
• UPDATE: Testing weaponry?
• Your Photoshop of the Day!
• Top 15 Right-Wing Blogger Trick of 2008!
• Maybe, probably, but my issue isn't her as a human, it's the tone-deafness.
• wrdwthnwrdwthnwrd has new stuff up.

Updates later. Or not.

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Bonnie Prince Billy?

Yackcackcackcacack!

I heard a Sigur Ros song selling a video game with swords and djinns and gratuitously eye-candied violence, my favorite Sigur Ros song, a song I'd listen to and daydream a never-was innocence once was...

Look, I don't consider myself a clownish obamapologist (though YMMV), but if Obama gets America back in four years to what Bill Clinton left eight years ago, he's wrought a miracle. I'm more than willing to bitch how much that sucks when it happens.

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• Meanwhile: Hell in the Holy Land.
• New tools for torture. (Sasha, of particular FYI.)
• Obama's face-mullet problem. Then again.
• Dynastic progress report.
• Richard's obamajourney, part one. Part two.
• Jeebus fuck, there's a reason I stopped reading Drum.
• Election Time at Poor Man continues.
• Passive Houses.
• Blegging, the definition.
• That photo up there? Outside a brick-layers' Union Hall Election Day 2004 Kerry foot-soldiers gathered beneath a giant inflatable rat slung with an anti-Bush banner awaiting dispatching to seamy Harrisburg PA neighborhoods. Yo.
• Keep walking, Buñuel.
• Harold Pinter on American Football.
• There's money in farts.
• Posting John Waters clips (the new rage) is an old rage, so old the ones I've posted no longer work because of cucking fopyright. (Digression: Babs can still clutch and drop, but for weeks after that post I was pinged repeatedly and daily by someone in her office and five or six times over the weeks by what I assumed were Senate cyber-security folk, but alas, for all my silly-ass anger, I was rightly judged a harmless wanker.)
  
• Today's corpse happens to have a new story in New Yorker:

• Anything Hilary Mantel writes is worth reading, and this comes with links, too.
• Wolcott, in dismissing Updike's latest, lists why Updike irritates his critics. It's revealing what pisses people off about Updike.
• Alison Lurie on Updike's latest (sub rqrd - but you sub, yes?). To be honest, my silly-ass reading morals would require me to reread Witches before reading Widows, and I don't want to. Watching the critics react to Updike is what interests me.
  
• New Tom Sleigh poem.
  
• Books of the Year Symposium.
• House Tech.

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Thought about Throwing Muses lately?

My Giftmas Present To You

Your next President of the United States:

Here's a paragraph from the story:

On Sunday, Obama awoke early for a 7:15 a.m. workout at a gymnasium at a sleepy Marine Corps base on the island of Oahu. Michelle Obama, carrying an iPod and headphones, joined her husband for the 45-minute exercise session, according to a media pool report. As they emerged from the gym, Obama, in a gray shirt soaked with sweat, lifted his right hand to give a quick salute to a couple uniformed Marines standing nearby.

A quick salute to a couple of uniformed Marines standing nearby? MILKNOSESNORT!

Merry Giftmas: KABOOMERY! for the Giftmas family dinner, should it be necessary and/or amuse you.

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I don't care enough to follow closely enough to talk about the team - though it doesn't take a die-hard to know the hometown helmetballers won't win splat as long as Dangelos Snyder owns the team - but at least they're wearing the colors at home.

That is a fine uniform, helmetball-wise. Why the fuck you'd wear white at home unless you've always worn white at home mystifies me.

Now, if the hometeam brought back the real burgundy shirts and real gold pants and get that racist stereotype off their helmets, I might be able to summon more than a passing damn. Assuming television eliminates Coors Light commercials.

Football? Uncle Fiver's Christmas Awards are up.

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I praise Ba'al this, praise Ba'al that, and then I hear this from a respected Conservative cultural critic and philosopher:

Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity. Amid horrific screams and the stench of charred human flesh, congregants – men and women alike – would engage in bisexual orgies.

and reiterate how good League One looks from the bottom of League Two in Ba'al's pecking charts, cause while League One probably gets none of that, I know I get none of that.

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• You must look at THIS and THIS and THIS. Trust me.
  
• Culture War Pornocopia!
• Happiest, most profitable days of their lives.
• Bromark sends this along, and I urge you to let your boss see you using it.
• Watch THIS!
• PURPLE LINE! chevychasebitchez.
• Augie March read for the first time.
• Bolaño and the logic of dispersion.
• UPDATE: More on Bolaño. I agree with the point, adding, I think Bolaño idolizes literature while disdaining those who would idolize their idolatry of literature.
• Today's corpse:

• Gaddis. H/T Dan, who has more. I reread Frolic about two years ago. Considering the financial clusterfuck, considering fights over intellectual property - over what is intellectual property - considering the acceleration of consumerism as religion as embraced by both the priests and the laymen, all of them rubes, I bet JR's giggles will be funnier this time. Next.
• Boomkat's Top 100 includes boatloads I've never heard.
• Luckily for you, the fucking record company killed the embed code, but if this goddamn earwhig is in my head, I dare you to put it in yours.

Updates later. Or not.

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Thought about Sleater-Kinney lately?

Eating too much Brown Acid: Some Much needed Perspective

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• Obama isn't playing the christers, he's playing the media.
• Sasha anger.
• Mr Fish has a new cartoon.
• Rick Perlestein, Poster-Liberal, deconstructed.
• Shut up and take it with a smile.
• Classic Coke.
• Dude, where's my tiara?
• Fuck patriotism.

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RIP Majel Barrett Roddenbery.

Most will remember her as Nurse Chapel of course, but for me, she'll always been Lwaxana Troi

not only because she looked like my mother-in-law, Lwaxana was - is - my mother-in-law.

UPDATE:

I need add that I think it a testament to Majel Roddenberry that next to Picard and Data, none of the main characters, none of the minor characters, grew as much over the seasons as Lwaxana.

I'm guessing it was the talent.

UPDATE: Landru's tribute.

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• Mick Foley (Cactus Jack) reviews The Wrestler. I once started writing a wrestling novel and then Stephen Dobyns did

            and I was just figuring out I'm not a novelist anyway.

• I haven't thought about the Regeneration Trilogy in ages, not so much because I liked it (it was OK, but...) but because a good friend/former professor thinks it's a triumph.
• Today's corpse:

• Silver Spring is awesome!
• Most important news of the day:

• Mourinho v Ferguson? They couldn't rig Inter v Chelsea since they finished the same position in their respective groups, so this must have been deemed second best.
• Nearing the end of Zappadan.
• Scott's last batch (this round) of mp3. (My favorite D of S? She's a Little Lighthouse! - takes about 20 seconds for the music to start - sorry.)
• Largehearted Boy has been compiling year end lists if you need a fix.
• Pitchfork's Top 50 as picked by staff. #1? That, erm, Fleet Foxes album.
• Obscure Sound's #1 is my #6, his #2 my #1, his #4 my ??? and his #8 my ???. And to be honest, I've seen Bon Iver on a bunch of lists but am thoroughly unfamiliar with it, so I've a chore.

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My #6?

Boning Opostasy Boned

Obamagasm?

Fuck to the fucktillionth, no, but jeebus people, stop clutching your OMFG!s and howling about Rick Fucking Warren as if this surprises you one onanistic dribble of outrage.

Some asshole who believes he's got The Bearded Statutory Rapist on spiritual speed dial is going to give the invocation for the inauguration of a president of a country where an overwhelming majority of citizens pray daily to The Bearded Statutory Rapist and his bastard son born of rape, and a majority of those citizens believe same-sex butt-fucking is a mortal sin (forgiven in their individual pre-saved cases by the subsequent acceptance of the bastard son's thoroughly un-gay love), so chill.

It's a fucking bone, an insulting, deliberately fuck you bone, a brilliantly pragmatic and obvious bone, and every shriek by every megaphoned lefty justifies the bone. Rubes.

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My favorite book of poems of 2008?

 

LOYALTY OATH

Solemnly do I swear and affirm and affix
many foil seals with arcane symbols
to the lividly carcinogenic spirit
of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy
of Wisconsin, a state I like
for letting Matt live there in happiness
with his wife, for being the only place of birth
Karri is likely to have. And further
do I tiresomely swear with my face
made up in moral gravity that in most ways
I am fucking awesome
and not a subversive person interested in
or committed to the overthrow of governments
by violence, disobedience or denial
of gym membership. I swear
upon the many stacks of leather bound Bibles
the Gideons leave in hotel rooms
where I often went with lovers
to roll around entire weekends
in sheets we fouled with ourselves and Chinese takeout.
I swear on your mother's grave
and the fresh one beside her
where your father sleeps beneath new sod.
On my children screaming inside me
to hurry up and create them
with a foolish but lovely woman.
On her body's every curve
by which I know how not to grow lost
when all there is to see by
is the moon tumbling from the sky
and the alarm clock's red math.
I swear this and avow that
and sometime I promise
to promise to never violate
the Geneva Convention in all its charming quaintness.
I depose and declare
and many other verbs
which sound wondrously stern.
I lay down with my heart
and my hands above it
and both are filled with blood
and every breath swears its false oath so help me God.

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• Holiday in Cambodia.
• Ipecac.
• Minority shame?
• Say anything?
• To boldly blow?

 

• Footy giggles.
• Wyatt Mason captures an essential aspect of Bolaño. (Hey, ALT-164 gives you the tilde!)
• Hey, Waggish is back, and he's thinking about Bolaño too.
• New things to look at are up.
• Scott's latest year-end mp3s twang.
• Make it stop.
• Obscure Sound's 30-21 and 20-11, with mp3.

UPDATE!(h/t Alex)

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My #5? (More here):

Into the Into

Did you know Dwayne DeRossario has been traded to Toronto by the same professional wrestling bylaws and ethics that brought Freddy Adu to United?

MLS provides critical perspective on the rubotics of my politics. In the past year I spent $60 in straight donations to the Obama campaign plus $40 more on Obama signs to piss off the neighbors, which is $1600 less what I spent on United season tickets last season.

Like BLCKDGRD's new theme, btw, the new colors? Hope so, cause I do. A friend emailed and said, that white type on noxzema-blue? you're good you know, I really like reading you, but not enough to take the headache reading white type on noxzema-blue gives me. I've created a new category, Autoblogography, because that's what I do and I'm not going to pretend I don't anymore, and I've also started the rearrangement of the blegrolls. If you don't see yourself where you were, I've moved you up to daily. Feel flattered, but not too much: this is for my convenience, yo.

I pay Typepad $150 a year, $1550 less than I paid United last year for four season tickets, $50 more than I gave to Obama, making me Little Ruby Blegginghood, blegging the poison porridge that's just right, the bestest rubiest rubity, dollar for dollar, I spend on myself instead of my daughter's college fund.

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• The Duty Calls Model of Blogging, with examples.
• Conciliatory note from an otherwise intelligent blogger.
• I hate when this happens.
• Ask a cannibal, did God ask Mary if he could fuck her?
• Giftmas: a proper perspective.
• Crackerstani youth.
• I've been going to Georgetown (the destination) for three decades and working in Georgetown for two, and once Desperados and the Cellar Door and The Bayou bellied-up, it's sucked as destination. This is nothing new.
• Friday Hope Blogging.
• Seven theses about the history of literary theory.
• Garth's year in reading includes the disclosure he's the first person since 1990 to read from cover to cover McElroy's Women and Men. Let me spin around in my deskchair to my bookshelf for today's corpse:

 

• Toptenpalooza, novels-edition.
• The woodfoodfight continues in comments, in which, amongst the flung nuggets, a couple of comments that remind me I haven't reread Confidence Man in at least fifteen years and any Melville in a couple. Hey! Anyone wanting a free doctoral thesis topic no charge? Melville and Ashbery, yo.

Ashbery? New Ashbery?

ALCOVE

Is is possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, 'mugwump
of the final hour', lest an agenda - horrors! - be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapses
like a hole dug in sand. It's breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.

And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who's to say we weren't provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it's not over yet. Terrible accidents happen
daily. That's how we get around obstacles.

• Scott's got some juicy downloads for you.
• My friend, and Seattle Sounders season-ticket holder, Stevie Zoom's top ten.
• Moka's number one of the year.

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My #3?

Autoblogography

I am this close to stop pretending I'm gonna quit blegging no matter how dramatically my conviction swells that I lose a piece of my reboot-sole with every keystroke I strike knowing it's struck self-adoringly, which is each and every one. I'm even closer to stop pretending I can stop blegging about blegging.

I quit that place that got me started, I feel ten-fartillion quatloons of fatuity lighter. The details of the (mostly amicable) divorce are immaterial, but not worrying here about cross-posting there is surprisingly meh-less, or rather, pretending to not worry about cross-posting there was more meh-ful than I conceded.

Click on Fleabus, yo, remembering...

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• Republicans are still pigs, or: remember to depend on the .06% more shitty for moral compass when feeling used and ruby.
• Triumph of Derrierism.
• Glass cliff.
• Thoroughly modern McCarthyites.
• Pragmatism is an ideology.
• Solid swipe at Libertarians.
• McLemee on Negri.
• Use the vomit onomatopoeia of your choice.
• Sadly,No! experienced some bug, so a week's worth of funny has just been released. Re: above - thank goodness Sadly, No! saves me countless redundant and less-funny though still self-adoring keystrokes.
• Doesn't the article title define the problem?
• Welsh christers are idiots too.
• Mountains are more spiritual than beaches, I keep telling Earthgirl.
• Today's corpse:

• David Foster Wallace as philosopher.
• Alex Ross' best of the year. Wanna buy me something for Giftmas (in case you didn't get me the New Order and/or Olsen shirt? Get me the Feldman. Or this.
• I cannot emphasize how much I like the incredibly generous and eclectic music blog Motel de Moka.

Updates later. Or not.

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#2 album, #1 song:

Blegfluenza

Do you want to engage Blogoverlords in wonkywanky debates (in which your voice will not be heard - Mr Comment 245 - frist!) on mass-transit proposals to improve your Blogoverlords' commute from Upper Condostan to downtown think tanks? I don't.

Heh, meh, feh, and gah. I try to make a point on every blog I frequent regularly to ping a site on that blog's blogroll to see if I can find something to make me giggle and/or think, and the number of sites I've tried recently that looked live and thriving in October but gone comatose or died in November is astonishing.

While your Blogoverlords consolidate their power (and if you want an object lesson in how power - cold, indifferent, Mississippi River 500-year flood power - works, watch Blogoverlords consolidate their power) now's a chance for us shetty bleggers, re-awakened rudely to our rubity by bleg-fatigue, bleg-hangover, bleg-inadequacy, blegmeh, to rededicate our individual brands, because what the fuck, now nobody is really reading us.

Me and mine, mofos. You and yours.

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• Cricket diplomacy, by Elric.
• Long article on Naomi Klein, Superstar.
• OBAMYFUCKINGGOD! The Pastor has an orgasm and wants you to eat his splooge AND PRAISE HIM FOR ITS TASTE.
• I claim outrage fatigue at this Greenwaldian duh.
• A moment of wild surmise.
• Party of the People, or Armpits.
• Rituals for Post-Consumer America.
• Holiday cheer - read the last paragraph at least for the best comment on the Wal-Mart* trampling.
• Fifteen maxims.
• Zizek is a fraud. Terrifically entertaining, but a fraud. Maybe somewhere I haven't seen he admits he's a fraud, but I'm sure he'd write an essay on fraud x fraud x fraud performativity in late decadent market wankery, to great mwahing in graduate English departments everywhere.
• While the post itself is worth reading, worth noting is the post uses a silly-ass Star Trek allusion to an episode whose bad guy some (once-upon-a-time) blogger took for a name.

Who the hell posts silly-ass Star Trek allusions anyway.

Oh.

• Robert Pollard writing soundtrack to Cleopatra musical?
• Best book covers of 2008 (h/t Ed - who also discusses the Naomi Klein article linked above) by people who call themselves BDR.
• New Pynchon details.
• Holyfuck, the lead singer of The Walkman recommends Anthony Hecht?
• Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton sit-com vehicle!

I think of Plath's

METAPHORS

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

every time I see a pregnant woman. I never think of Anne Sexton poems other than when I hear a particular Gabriel song

There was a time when I first started reading poetry I liked Sexton's poetry far more than Plath's, though I haven't read either in decades.

I have first editions of Sexton's moldering in my basement.

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For the two of you who asked, Feral Update!

The planned de-balling and/or ovary-extractions didn't happen the weekend before Thanksgiving because the guy from west of Baltimore got squirrelly on us, changing plans, umming and ohhing, babbling about prices in an ever-increasingly expensive ways. I finally told him we'd make plans elsewhere.

This weekend, if all goes as planned, the three kittens plus mom will be trapped Saturday morning, chopped and/or scooped Sunday morning (with small notches snipped in their ears in case they're caught later and face a now unnecessary and futile re-operation), and released to our backyard Monday.

Nap we want to keep, and if possible we're going to introduce him into the house (he knocks on the door asking to come in when he sees us), and the others are welcome to stay. We know Nap is a boy; the other two we're not sure, but I've got permission to name one, if a boy, Frankie, Frankie Feral, for reasons only two of you out there will understand.

Sand

2666 Progress Report: I've finished the first section, The Part About the Critics, and I'm positive any brain-gymnastics attempting to interpret the buzz would not only be pointless but would destroy the buzz. I'm being set up, and I'm going to enjoy it.

Blegmeh! I'm reading, writing, shittily, happily.

A new biography of John Lennon passed by my desk this week, reminding me of a novel I started to write but stopped ten or so years ago when faced with the research that would be required. (And before I acknowledged to myself my brain is poet-wired, not novelist-wired.) In the novel I was given an opportunity to go back in time and murder anyone I chose and replace him in his life with my knowledge of his life I brought from the future. The Fab Four: Jeff, Paul, George, and Ringo!

See, after I murder John, when I first meet Mick Jagger, I....

What? Max Boot approves of Obama's national security personnel choices?

Blegmeh: the minute I think I'm out they drag me back in.

UPDATE! LIVE PUPPY-CAM!

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• Yes, but no, as yes will get a new meme.
• No, but yes, as no always gets a new meme.
• Zizek on Obama and joy in pragmatism.
• Have some U.S. history.
• The word you're looking for is....
• Sarah Palin for Poet Laureate.
• Holy Goodhell, listen to this.
• Listen to this too.
• Thought about Victoria Williams lately?
• Don't forget Largehearted Boy.
• Did you know James had a jazz blog?

Updates later. Or not.

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My head, your head:

Blorderblurs

I am chastised by one of three people on the planet whose chastisement I unconditionally accept as valid:

I don't think Mannion's dark. I think he's spot freakin' on. Detroit is a double for them, in ways Katrina wasn't; they didn't get to ass-ram the unions when they abandoned New Orleans. These fuckers desperately want it to be the 19th century, and walking away from Detroit while serving up gravy to bankers with ladles made from human skin is exactly up their alley.

The real question here is, given an opportunity of this magnitude, why aren't you dark enough?

The first point is this: shame he doesn't blog.

Here's the Mannion post, in full, that I linked to that Landru references:

I'm sure union-busting is a big part of the Congressional Republicans' hostility to a bail-out of the autoindustry.  And some of it is just a general "Not my constituents, so what do I care?" assholery.  And some of---ok, a lot of it---is the reflexive Screw you for not being rich of their tribe.  And there might even be a few who are motivated by honest Free Market conservative principles.

But I can't help thinking that in their hearts a lot of them are looking at the possibility of tens of thousands of people in Michigan losing their jobs and then their homes and seeing the opportunity to do to Detroit what Katrina allowed them to try to do to New Orleans, empty the city of Democrats.

Jokes going to be on them when a million other people around the country, many of them Republicans, many of them their own constituents, lose their jobs along with the UAW workers.

Clearly, my mwhahahappiness at pigheads exploding

has been overindulgent. Time to start angry screaming again, especially considering its inefficacy is as awesome as my overindulgent mwhahahappiness.

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• Your headline of the day, but especially if you're gburgmofo.
• When did Digby become dumb-cousin slow?
• According to this carnival-ride, I'm a mechanic.
• A plug for Gates from Horton.
• Irrelevant, lying, sack of shit.
• Progressives ride the war machine.
• Conservatives and bears.
• The word you're looking for is.....
• The Constitution Strikes Back, or: what kind of geek uses Star Trek allusions?

Oh.

• Mr Fish.
• The bay is dying, and.... More.
• Things that fascinate me.
• New Lucksmiths. Listen to some.
• Billy Joel: "Fuck You" -  hAh!
• Listen to some Mason Proper.
• Band's name is Fucked Up. Listen.
• Gena and the Three-Cock Pile-up is a good band name (I also like Jefferson Slaveship, but I'm old).
• James Wood reviewed again, acutely.
• I am so there.

Updates are highly unlikely, but you never know.

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Dream pop? Fever-dream pop:

To Earthgirl's distress, I found my Dead Can Dance box set the other night and it's in my car. hEh.

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UPDATE!

I'm told:

Although as Whispers (who hangs with me and Sasha and Ilse but doesn't so much get you, and that's okay) would tell us, it's not gonna be a proof.

Whispers? Kananga's fat henchman in Live and Let Die?

Awesome!

I'm sure union-busting is a big part of the Congressional Republicans' hostility to a bail-out of the autoindustry.  And some of it is just a general "Not my constituents, so what do I care?" assholery.  And some of---ok, a lot of it---is the reflexive Screw you for not being rich of their tribe.  And there might even be a few who are motivated by honest Free Market conservative principles.

But I can't help thinking that in their hearts a lot of them are looking at the possibility of tens of thousands of people in Michigan losing their jobs and then their homes and seeing the opportunity to do to Detroit what Katrina allowed them to try to do to New Orleans, empty the city of Democrats.

Jokes going to be on them when a million other people around the country, many of them Republicans, many of them their own constituents, lose their jobs along with the UAW workers.