BLCKDGRD

EEF!

Williams is only three miles from the Appalachian Trail, also offers a 4-1-4, and, unlike Middlebury, doesn't require a foreign language for a junior year abroad, which is a plus plus: Williams has a reciprocal arrangement with Oxford, yo.

Students, even freshmen, will never have more than a double dorm, and most students have singles by sophomore year if they want, though most, according to both the student tour guide and the admissions officer who made the presentation, choose to remain in doubles, as their cohort - they're called "entries" at Williams - has grown so tight, the singles distance from the group rooms is considered a negative.

Most importantly, the mascot is a purple cow:

and the students are known as Ephs, pronounced EEFS: the founder of Williams' first name was Ephraim.

DING! DING! DING! We have a new leader in the clubhouse.

Actually, what's most important is that Planet has been made aware that a significant upgrade in damn is required of her these next three semesters in high school if she hopes to even make a maybe pile in any of these schools' admissions offices. Which was the point, from a sneaky parental POV, of this trip in the first place.

Williamston was OK, the drive through the Berkshires pretty if on shitty Massachusetts roads (anyone who has driven on a Maryland state route over the Pennsylvania line onto a PA state route can imagine what driving from a Vermont state route onto a Massachusetts state route is like). I'm in Amherst MA as I type this, and we're gonna do Amherst College tomorrow, then do some touristy stuff (I may get to throw plastic at metal baskets!), spend tomorrow night here then head to Boston Saturday.

O! One last picture (via Planet) from Vermont!

Moo, motherfucker.

*

Maybe Obama and the Democrats aren't feckless dickweeds afraid to call bullshit on the Right's incitement to violence. Maybe Obama and the Democrats are counting on the violence to solidify and further their power. Maybe they're calculating that the horror and backlash, once a Malkinista starts throwing bullets and people are wounded and killed, will pay dividends the Democrats can cash for a generation.

Maybe Obama and Dem strategists know the rage isn't about health care, know that Obama could propose free government-subsidized ammunition and chewing tobacco and crackers would rebel, would reach for their weapons and load the free ammo, spitting chaw angrily.

Maybe Obama and Dem strategists knew a cracker catharsis was inevitable, that angry white crackers dependent on government dole would oppose government dole if the dole wasn't handed to them by one of their own.

This would not only make Obama and the Democrats cynical and complicit in the violence, it'd make them more cleverly and deviously evil than the Republicans who see inciting crackers as their route back to power. Who knew Dems had it in them?

Sheeyit: of course Obama and Democrats are feckless dickweeds. Which doesn't mean they aren't cynically complicit in whatever violence is coming.

*

• UPDATE! Re: above.
  
• Feckless Dickweeds.
• Hagerstown: Meth Capital of Maryland!
• Les Paul.
• More Gary Numan, Hamster.
• Today's Listening Assignment is quiet.

Updates later. Or not.

*

LOYALTY

James Tate

This is the hardest part:
When I came back to life
I was a good family dog
and not too friendly to strangers.
I got a thirty-five dollar raise
in salary, and through the pea-soup fogs
I drove the General, and introduced him
at rallies. I had a totalitarian approach
and was a massive boost to his popularity.
I did my best to reduce the number of people.
The local bourgeoisie did not exist.
One of them was a mystic
and walked right over me
as if I were a bed of hot coals.
This is par for the course-
I will be employing sundry golf metaphors
henceforth, because a dog, best friend
and chief advisor to the General, should.
While dining with the General I said,
"Let's play the back nine in a sacred rage.
Let's tee-off over the foredoomed community
and putt ourselves thunderously, touching bottom."
He drank it all in, rugged and dusky.
I think I know what he was thinking.
He held his automatic to my little head
and recited a poem about my many weaknesses,
for which I loved him so.

*

Via Hamster:

Bowdoin, Bates, Orr's Island

Spent a good four hours at Bowdoin, pretty campus, interesting academic programs. First campus (other than UNH, which doesn't count) Planet's seen, and that's where she now wants to go. She wants to be a Polar Bear.

Especially since

we then, after setting up base in a Brunswick Maine hotel, drove to Lewiston to see Bates. Every road surrounding the campus of Bates was being repaired, all the entrances to campus were blocked, so we didn't really see the campus much less get out and walk around, which saddened none of us: Lewiston was the most depressing city I've been in since I last drove through Brunswick Maryland. Dying, decaying, depressing.

 

Maine is weird. It's the most like western Pennsylvania of anyplace I've been outside western Pennsylvania in that it's either beautiful or hideous, often right around the corner from the other.

 

White Mountains, Mt Washington today.

*

Haven't been following the news much: Has Obama started killing grandmas yet?

 

Excellent!

O! Today's Google Tip!

Want to increase hits? Title a post, re: like the one proceeding this one, with the words Uckingfay and Amegay. Know what you get?

 

Exactly kaboom.

*

Just posted at MD-Discgolf board: This is me and Bromark's home course.

Um, that guy, assuming he's not cheating, shot at least twelve strokes under my best.

Haven't got out to play this trip, doubt I will.

Swans Have Been Feasting on the Tainted Snails. The Swans are Sick

Jeebusfuck, their unalienable rights to punish sluts for sluttishly fucking pigs endangered, pigs power up the ATVs and yadda, I've been singing this song longer than this shetty bleg but no less loud than singing my roobity, which exists to feed my pig hate.

I'm watching Obama's presser on health care, and know what? My knowledge of what's in any bill is zippo. I know I'll hate the Democrats for what they settle for knowing who they bargained against and love hating who they bargained against .06% more than I hate Democrats. I'm watching Obama's presser on health care: he feels like an 82 win regular season team winning the World Series.

Mofos, roobity is not accepting human's incremental movement from Total Assholes to Pretty Much Total Asshole is glacial, roobity is belief Pretty Much Total Asshole is remarkable achievement.

I could find leftwing echoes to above rightwing We the Peopling, which is to say midsummer meh is a Lyme Disease of will, aching, enervating, bulls-eyed. You disc golf you get ticks is as predictive as you root you get roobies, the symptoms an increase in my already aching meh and a psychic rash I can't help scratching.

*

• Elric's in Vienna, says he's got some Wien kit.*
• Serial War.
• Shoot to thrill, way to kill.
• Those who resist the end of racial profiling.
• UPDATE! Via a comment from Montag, Frog.
• What the media will focus on.
• UPDATE! Another take.
• UPDATE! While I've given up on Obama ever not siding w/entrenched interests, entrenched interests' requirement that Obama be a good Tom reminds me what Obama would face if he did truly challenge entrenched interests.
• UPDATE!

 

• UPDATE! Jim proves The Birther's theories true!
• UPDATE! *!hEh!*
• Yes.
• Here's Jess, our dumb and pathetically needy cat, who makes me feel fail I don't love her more:

• Look at these.
• Jacques Tati, who a favorite mentor always praises.
• Seidel reviewed yet again.
• Gabriel remembered.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! If this is in my head, be in yours.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! My head, your head.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Good and generous MP3s.

Updates later. Or not.

*

JEREMIAD

Norman Dubie

After a night of opium and alcohol, Edgar Poe
Walks out of a laundry into the harsh sunlight
Of an affluent Baltimore. From behind, as I see him,
He is not
Of experience, and he is without sin -
He waddles in the archetype of Charlie Chaplin
And crosses the street to the park
Where yesterday evening yellow swathes of poison
We dropped on the wind
To kill an unprecedented population
Of ground snails.

Now, Poe is reaching the great lawn of the park
Where swans have been feasting
On the tainted snails. The swans are sick.
Poe, drugged as he is,
Shatters with this vision of vomiting swans. He turns,

And running at him
In a line fifty yards long
Is a pack of stray dogs from everywhere
In Baltimore. They will eat the swans.

Edgar Allan Poe, who stood between them,
Made a judgment -

The hounds of hell were coming for him;
He climbed the statue of a stylish general
On a rearing horse.
He clung to the marble thigh of the stallion.
He watched, in horror, the field below him.
The torn swans were long sylabbles
Over the ground.
By the time he was able to climb down,
A crowd had formed. He told them, wide-eyed,

He told them what he saw - truth and beauty
Fornicating on the public lawn. Everyone frowned

As they sometimes will in Baltimore.

*

*UPDATE!

My scenic route from Hilltop to Soccerplex this past Tuesday:

Foxhall to Canal to Clara Barton to Cabin John to River to Partnership to White's Ferry Rd to West Willard to West Offutt to Edwards Ferry Road to River to Elmer School to White's Ferry Rd to Martinsburg to Dickerson Rd (Rt 28) to Park Mill to Bear Branch to Mt Ephraim to Comus to Sugarloaf Mountain (where I stopped for half an hour to sit on the stone bench at the lower circle where I wrote much of the first draft of my masters thesis, and would have a photo for you if the drunken lout hadn't knocked the camera out of my hand later that evening)

SUB-UPDATE! I fixed my camera: figuring WTF, I slammed the jammed telescopic lens against my desk, and Viola! where I wrote most of the first draft of my masters thesis (and have spent many magical days for over thirty years)

to Comus to Mt Ephraim to Harris to Barnesville to Clopper (Rt 117) to Germantown (Rt 118) to Germantown Park Rd to Soccerplex. Easy.

BONUS YAY! THE CAMERA WORKS UPDATE!

Just before halftime:

*

Hamster emailed and asked if I wanted to go to Neko Case next Tuesday in Bawlmer, but next Tuesday is FIRPODAY!

So no, but damn.

Mirror fear mirror fear mirror

The insult of the Iranian hostage crisis still bleeds and hurts so good when scratched by America's dick-swingers, their obsessive hate and fear and envy of Iran is in part rooted in their seeing and admiring in Iranian dick-swingers what they see and admire in themselves.

I'm a firm believer that anyone I feel an instinctive and electric hatred for needs studying as he overtly represents what I covertly hate about myself, which is what separates dick-swingers from me, who instinctively and electrically hates dick-swingers.

*

• On the Iranian elections.
• Why not the best?
• Apt pupils.
• Badiou babbles, hastening to say I can't understand a word of Badiou, but I enjoy reading and learning from (and occasionally giggling at) people who think they do. Like here.
• About which, the most excellent thing you'll read, look at, listen to, and think about all day.
• Though this might be the most important.
• UPDATE: Consider this.
• A reading of James von Brunn and readings of James von Brunn.
• Silence is traffic: watch this.
• An homage to World's Shittiest has best Goldfinger allusion since Alton Brown threatened a pear with a power drill.
• Committed to being the shittiest, now and forever.
• Duh.
• Stating the Obvious.
• Daily Obamapostasy.
• UPDATE: I've stopped reading Digby for her daily duh, and I hadn't written about the Palin/Letterman spat because of the duh, but a friend sent me this Digby post which nicely pulls the two duhs together.
• How to disappear.
• Why I've always feared having outdoor cats. The asshole should be buried up to his neck and have his head run over with a lawnmower. I volunteer.
• Hey! Mocomofos! A tribute!
• Gaithersbleh and cat permits?
• My future hell.
• UPDATE! Fire Bob Bradley NOW!
• UPDATE! Look, it's not Bradley's fault his players suck - and O! they suck, O! yes they do - but if the only way the USMNT can avoid going three and out this year in South Africa and three and out next year in South Africa is with smoke and mirrors, Bradley's not the man to do smoke and mirrors.
  
• East Moco boo-hoo.
• My summer vacation - yes, we do the Planet college tour this summer. Just how fucking old am I?
• Because you asked, another view of the Nut Sac:

• OK, so you didn't ask.
• I haven't read Patricia Highsmith in twenty years, but I remember liking what I read.
• Uniformity and blandness.
• Waggish's last thoughts on 2666.
• Snobbery on the Installment Plan (and a follow-up).
• How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll.
• Hugh Hopper, RIP.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

Updates later. Or not.

*

Poem

W.C. Williams

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

*

My head, your head (and love):

EEPGAH

Look, I don't think United's brain trust has decided to Major League United and deliberately alienate the fan-base into declining attendance to make abandonment less dishonor than smart business yet, but I ask: Has frustration unconsciously introduced a fatalistic and growing diminishment of damn at United? Today, probably no, but the question needs asking.

No one asks me anymore how I separate my soccer and politics. Want a case study in disenfranchised rump-party apocalyptic paranoia, read me write about United.

*

• You mean rump-party apocalyptic paranoids who were called delusional whackjobs when saying one major intent in illegal NSA eavesdropping would be to blackmail opponents of the Bush administration into giving cover for Bush administration crimes?
• The sterility of vanguardism.
• Drowned 183 times?
• Revealing the secrets in Room 101.
• Thankfully, the London cops didn't get to my camera.
• Ike Leggett needs four bodyguards at 90K per?
• White Flint Hell.
• Real Cooking v TV Cooking.
• Cool, look at these. (h/t)
• Rubber-wood rocs?
• Thinking of buying a netbook?
• Radio's Uncanny Origins.
• RIP J.G. Ballard. More. More.
• Pnin reconsidered.
• Lit links.
• New Chris Adrian story, and a reaction. I hated Children's Hospital so much I couldn't put it down.
• What's the word I'm looking for?

*

THE SAGA OF STUPIDITY AND WONDER

Albert Goldbarth

The history of the world could be written
in anything's history: native gourd; meteor rubble:
in capping machine at bottling plant number 7...
I'm convinced of this - how anything,
gripped right and studied long, contains the telescoped
story of everything, the way our protein coding holds
the germ of the lizard we once were. It's so

tempting to start the saga of stupidity and wide-eyed wonder with
us, in bed this morning, waking into another
day of our individual lives and our life together: but
any unit would do. Say... oh, say birds. In
1497, in Zurich, the citizens tried and
hanged for sorcery (truly) a rooster
accused of laying an egg. Or then

there's the tale Odoric of Pordenone brought back
from his travels "on the farther side of the sea.
I beheld," he tells us, a man who journeyed
with a faithful cloud of 4,000 partridges following him.
His journey was three days. When he slept, they
gathered like one solid object around him. When he walked,
they were his constant weather: the air was 8,000 wings.

*

My head, your head

Not-Here United!

My close personal friend Kevin Payne sends me an email:

BDR,

We need your help! Several groups who oppose our stadium are bombarding Maryland state and county legislators with e-mails and letters asking them to block our proposed new stadium.

Perhaps the up-beat news conference several weeks ago caused our supporters to think this was a done deal -- but nothing could be further from the truth.

It's time for you to weigh in strongly and let them know of your support for our stadium plans!

It doesn't matter where you live -- if you support us and want to see us in the type of stadium our club and our fans deserve, you need to take action now! If you live in Maryland, let them know, but, regardless, your support will make all the difference.

The most important to contact at this time are the members of the House of Delegates Committee on Budget and Appropriations, which will hold a hearing on our bill next Tuesday, and the Senate Tax and Finance Committee, which will also hold a hearing next week on the bill.

I cannot over-emphasize the importance of this. We have to let the lawmakers know that we want the stadium, and we'll fill it up once it's built. A failure in this effort could have far-reaching effects -- the bottom line is we cannot remain long-term in RFK, and this is the only stadium option, which is available to us now.

Don't take anything for granted. Call or e-mail today, if you care about your team!

Kevin Payne
President, D.C. United

E-mail Maryland lawmakers now!

D.C. United
RFK Stadium
2400 East Capitol St. SE
Washington, DC 20003
dcucustomerservice@dcunited.com

Build the stadium or lose the team - threat explicit enough? I'm not saying it's an unreasonable threat - United's ownership cannot reasonably be expected to eat losses forever - but it is a threat, yes?

There's not going to be a new stadium, yes?

Provided MLS survives until 2012, my home team will be someone else's home team, anywhere but here. Kevin Payne just promised.

Twenty-Nine Over-Par on Twenty-Seven!

Disced with Bromark yesterday, seventy-five sweet degrees, at our home course (which happens to be one of the best courses in the world), a course that kicks our ass when we're in form, and Banshees and Orcs, I'll speak only for me, I sucked even by my standard of suckitude. Knee only hurt wee, so I forfeit that excuse for shanked drives, botched ups, clanked putts, and general barking aargopalyptic yips.

On 22's tee (old 15 backwards), stopping to catch breath and wonder at our laughably shitty golf skills, we debated whether Obama is an idiot or only playing an idiot on TV until pigs over-pig and The Clusterfuck over-Clusterfucks. I said, maybe Obama has judged his political capital vis a vis his ability to address The Clusterfuck significantly isn't greater than The Clusterfuck's perceived danger, maybe he's waiting for the critical mass of pig-asshatery and catastrophic economic temblors that would enable him to push through the paradigmatic changing legislation necessary to mitigate what can be mitigated in a catastrophic Clusterfuck. Maybe he knows what he could enact now won't make a shit's worth of difference, has sensibly determined any capital spent now is lost. Odd's are, said Bromark, Obama's an idiot.

Our future is my mother-in-law, angry beyond cranky, angry beyond bitter, anger as the most profound and only mood morally justifiable, her body literally falling off her, toes at a time, her mind lucid enough to be aware of her body's inevitable teleology, her mind senescent enough to feel betrayed by her body's inevitable teleology.

Awoo! My roller on 22 turned early and left me an upshot I surprisingly didn't botch, my forehand ups the one part of my game that hadn't abandoned me, got the par, but promptly, on 23, horked a forehand roller into the ground. Best time I've had in weeks.

*

• This is true: I find new blogs and many, soon after my unrelated discovery, go on hiatus if not stasis if not death. This is a criticism of me, mind.
• Failure of the Will?
• On the Nature of Pussiness. Should not be dismissed just because the case study of pussiness scored twice, including the game winner, tee-hee.
  
• Ralph Nader: A Reconsideration.
• Michelle's arms, Maureen's tits.
• You've got to get out of the valley.
• Cause and effect.
• Killing the song.
• On Facebook and pigs.
• Steele's slander - a Fox roundtable discussion.
• Boatload of lit-links.
• UPDATE: Today's Listening Assignment.

*

Sixty-seven today:

London?

About to leave for the airport. Five day touristy tour w/Earthgirl and Planet. wOOt!

More today if there's wifi at Dulles (there wasn't last March when we flew out to San Francisco, but someone told me there is in the int'l terminal). If not, more from London itself tomorrow.

No football. Sunday's going to be weird, and we're booked anyway, and this week is an int'l week, so no weeknight games. I did notice this and this and this and have packed a beast, a roc, an aero.

Slumpeddepmuls!

Work and family and work and soccer and work and politics and work and disc and work and shetty bleg and work and work all contribute to reading slumps, but nothing sparks a reading slump except a great novel, and it's official, 2666 has left a gigantic reading slump in its wake.

I've tried:

and

and

and even this, given to me as a late Giftmas present, the new translation from Pevear and Volokhonsky

Get my Bezukhov on, yo?

Suggestions are welcome, though consider this yet another prompt to get you read 2666, cause the quickest way out of a reading slump is to talk to someone about the book blocking the sluices.

*

• Obama as Michael Corleone.
  
• First words and deeds.
• The word Dionne won't use is "pussies."
• I, however, will use the word "pussies."
• Neo-remorse.
• Sorta what I've been saying. But there WAS a cult of personality built around W

he just fucked it up.

• BBC as Fox.
• Israel's Lies.
• Goliath's peace plan.
• Fuck Clarksburg, Ike Leggett, Doug Duncan.
• I would like to think the decline is due to better parenting, but no.
• I shit you not

Geriatric care be expensive, yo, not to mention the daily flushing of Garcia's embalming fluid.

• Speaking of suck, this guy's basketball team SUCKS! so much he now goes to hockey games.
• Read The Rambly One.
• Google and the future of books.
• Richard responds to this in his excellent rumination on that particular novel.
• Jim joins in, tangentially.
• NBCC Award time. Bolaño and Hemon I've raved about, Robinson I haven't read (and probably won't read - I don't get the love, which is on me, not her). The last two, Trenchmouth Taggert and Olive Kitteridge, I'm not familiar with.
• Here's the poetry nominations: KLEINZAHLER!
• Friday Hope Blogging (do!).
• Wanna hear the title cut of the new Robyn Hitchcock LP? 
• Please please please listen to Here We Go Magic's Tunnelvision. (h/t Obscure Sound).
• Darkblack has some jazz for you (in case you forgot what early Miles Davis sounded like).
• Cotton Jones: start with Gotta Cheer Up.

Updates later, but probably not.

*

My head, your head:

Why My Anti-Giftmas Protestations Are Full of Shit

*

*

*

Thermos, United coffee-thingee, New Order, Latitude 64 Sparkle-Optoline Vision 175g from, respectively, Planet, Bromark, Landru, and me.