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.

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• 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?

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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.

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My head, your head