Some Untidy Spot Where the Dogs Go on with Their Doggy Life

I hear both the NBA and NFL are in negotiations with their players' unions over their next Collective Bargaining Agreements. Both leagues expect shutdowns; ownership, especially in the NBA, seems eager to shut down for a season to break the union like the NHL broke theirs.

Must be a coincidence, in it a country whose elite whip up racial tensions like morning Mamosas to defuse class anger, whose elite decided a hot fucking July in an off-year election is an excellent time to nigger-bait, that the same corporations which broadcast the NBA and NFL (and Fox and NBC and CBS and ABC and ETC) convened their talking heads to hand-wring that three (African-American) professional basketball players (within their contractual rights) "colluded" to play together against the noble spirit of NBA competition, now to pontificate on the evil of (African-American) unproven NFL draftees accepting tribute before they've earned it.

In case the racism doesn't work re: us, there's also capital's implied threat to labor: Go ahead, strike. We dare you.

• Polanyi on the consequences.
• Infrastructuralism.
• On not wanting.
• Remembering.
• More Jensen.
• Paradise swamped.
• Sometime in the past month I too said they've stopped trying to pretend. They dare you.
• UPDATE! Glenn, bubula, nobody cares except you and me.
• Counterfactuals.
• UPDATE! Barney Frank dares Obama. We know how this will end.
• Qualifications.
• To the surprise of no one:

• Glenmont! Driving to Soccerplex Wednesday night on Great Seneca, the shopping centers in Germantown at Wisteria and the one at Richter Farm look glenmontable!
• Fillmore Silver Spring!
• Sadness.
• Gah. Bromark went to Good Council.
• Metro!
• No mention of a new United stadium here.
• Heh.

• Blogging is dead; long live the blog.
• Blegangst.
• Good morning, Boxer. I went looking for a youtube of Eddy sliding face-first down the steps at her birthday party in Ab-Fab, but nope.

• Libraries are the next cupcakes?
• My favorite Second Story was on Greenmount in Waverly, my second the house on Old Georgetown which is now a gigantic condo next to the Hyatt. Oh, the girl I dated while she worked at the Bethesda store says Stypeck is a cheat and an asshole.
• Here's a truth about me and Next Generation - I cannot watch season one because it sucks, I cannot watch season two because it sucks AND has Barbara  Diana Muldaur.
• Yes, I am rereading Auden, and so should you.
• Midnight tempo.
• Kimberly.
• I confess I'd forgot about Kyuss.
• Friends of P.
• Heaven's on fire.
• You do read Auden (and all poetry) out loud, yes?

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
    walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the
    torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Well, since I've been going through everything the past week: