BLCKDGRD

Did You Know Washington DC Has a Professional Soccer Team?

On Moreno's last game.

For those of you who read me for soccer only - who hate the politics, hate the other stuff - and who've bookmarked or blogrolled or readered me at the DCU category level, I've moved HERE and set up a label DCU so you can do the same there.

Long story short: typepad can't do what blogger does re: make blogging easier for me. I'm selfish this way. Thanks in advance for tagging along.

The Piano Stands There in the Dark Like a Boy with an Orchid

Thank you everyone who's taken the time to swap out bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers. Thank you everyone who still might swap our bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers, in hope that you do.

New stuff at the new place.

Look It Can Give Us Hope Against the Very Winds that We Batter Against It

Thank you everyone who's taken the time to swap out bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers. Thank you everyone who still might swap our bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers, in hope that you do.

New stuff at the new place.

Their Sons Grow Suicidally Beautiful at the Beginning of October, and Gallop Terribly Against Each Other's Bodies

I'm amused and fascinated by the firestorm in the NFL over players, who are taught from pee-wee to high school to college to the pros that spectacular hits are the road to getting paid, suddenly being told they can't do what they've been trained and coached and paid to do (there's profit in those spectator hits) and worse, having the characters impugned by the very owners who pay them for (and profit by) the spectacular hits. It’s as if the viciousness the league has inculcated and marketed for decades is suddenly endangered by its own reckless success; it’s not surprising the owners seek to punish the players for the players' moral failure in carrying out the orders of the owners.

The NFL owners and its players union after this season will almost certainly have a labor stoppage, probably an owners' lockout, and I've heard predictions that the owners' insistence that the players give back every single penny of debt the owners racked up themselves on stupid contracts and debt service will result in the cancellation of the entire season. The owners who today cry about helmet-to-helmet hits will in the next sentence extol the benefit of an 18 game schedule on 16 game pay. Concern with labor's problems runs that deep.

Fine metaphors abound! DC afternoon rush, local sports radio, the Conservative of the two hosts, on issue after issue between the players and the owners, agrees with motherfucking me! If it was the teachers union, if it was coal-miners, if it was the union that cleans his hotel room while he's on location at the Super Bowl, guess which side he's on. Janitors don't entertain him.

Watching the NFL owners fuck up one of the few money-making cash cows left in Bubbleville will be as educational as enjoyable. Watch, listen: an empire imploding, America in a terrarium.

*

Links, music, poem at the

NEW PLACE

I know it's a pain in the ass, but please adjust your bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers.  

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.



Green KnowsThat This Other Cat Is an Hallucination

Somebody named Graham E. Fuller in his new book (which I saw on the new book shelf, held in my hands last week for the seconds it took to read the cover, back, and inside-flaps then put it down), A World Without Islam:

There is a further irony here: How can a nation like the US, which expresses such powerful outpourings of patriotism and ubiquitous unfurling of the flag on all occasions, seem quite obtuse to the existence of nationalism and patriotism in other countries? Washington never fared very well in the Cold War in understanding the motives and emotions of the nonaligned world; it dismissed or even suppressed inconvenient local nationalist aspirations, thereby ending up pushing a large grouping of countries toward greater sympathy with the Soviet Union. This was a kind of strategic blindness ...

What? America's not "obtuse to the existence of nationalism and patriotism in other countries," America pisses its fucking pants at "the existence of nationalism and patriotism in other countries." Gleefully.

America creates rabid nationalism and patriotism in The Other, and here's the thing, it does exist. Charles World's Shittiest Human Krauthammer should be scared of the Iranian Charles World's Shittiest Human Krauthammer who's scared of ours, and both are just motherfucking propagandists who believe the other is every bit as shitty as himself and !!!, maybe more! Corporate may not weep at the crude sentimentality of their marketing (I think they do), but they're pantsful convinced of the assholosity of their opposite assholes, and they're certainly correct to fearmonger the other camps' nationalism and patriotism to their camp's sanctimoniously fearmongering nationalists and patroits as greased compliance.

 

MORE, LINKS, MUSIC, POEM at the

 

NEW PLACE.

 

I know it's a pain in the ass, but please adjust your bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers.  

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

The Man and Camel Ceased to Sing

We saw Connecticut College in bright daylight, not dismal downpour like the first time last Spring. It's a beautiful, compact campus. Planet has a friend who's a freshman, so she took a student's eye tour with him while Earthgirl and I walked the paths of the college's arboretum. Apparently New England's summer was a drought and the leaves are dull versus the usual New England fabulous, but the arboretum was still beautiful, and if I was a Conn College student, I know where I'd be studying whenever the weather is warm.

Bowdoin, not as pretty as Conn College in sunlight much less in a downpour like Friday, Planet interviewing for more than an hour with an actual admissions officer, versus Conn College in brilliant sunshine on a perfect fall day, Planet interviewing for twenty awkward minutes with some ditzy senior?

Bowdoin, which can choose any student it wants, goes to greater effort in making prospective students (and their parents) feel wanted than Conn College, which makes its profit on the kids Bowdoin rejects. Of all the ways I find metaphors to celebrate my complicity, and I find them everywhere, including this paragraph, this is the best stinger I've discovered since the last one and until the next.

Links, poem, music at the NEW PLACE.

I believe I've succeeded at pissing off everyone sufficiently that neither place are being read, but if you're Kind and so inclined, please adjust your bookmarks, blogrolls, and/or readers to the new place. I recognize it's a pain-in-the-ass, and thank you accordingly.

Birthdays, Ferals, New Place

Two new posts at the new place:

Today is two of my favorite musicians birthdays.

Today is National Feral Cat Day.

I know it's a pain in the ass, but please change your bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers to go to the new place.

Thank you very much.

I Think I Would Do Better to Make Some Soup and Light Up the Cave

Hey, please go HERE for the rest of the post. I will keep posting content here for a couple more weeks, don't have time today. I know it's a pain in the ass, but please swap out your bookmarks, blogrolls, and readers. Many many thanks.

I and My Life Will Shut Very Beautifully

I'm three years away from being out from under a mortgage barring complete reaming by the coming mortgage clusterfuck, but I'm about to go half-a-mortgage under soon when Planet picks an elitist Liberal Arts school, one of which might be Bowdoin or Connecticut College; we're flying this afternoon to Boston then driving to Brunswick ME for an official interview at Bowdoin Friday morning, then driving to New London CT to interview Saturday morning. (We land at Logan Thursday at 7:00PM, probably get out with the rental by nine, then drive into New Hampshire, get a room, sleep a few hours, get up at six and drive north to Brunswick, interview, turnaround and immediately drive south to New London. Montag, I'll wave hi to and from from the 295 overpass over 309.)

I know this sounds callous and complicitous, but my generation of mes probably won't lack for catfood, it's my daughter's generation that will begin hording catfood, it's my grand-childrens' world that need survive the catfood famines, both natural and man-made, but my only child wants to go to Bowdoin or Hamilton or Carleton or any of seven others, we can afford to send her to a school which will credential her to be in a class of Americans who'll risk exposure to tainted catfood almost next to last, and so would you.

I'm still distraught with the certainty I'm leaving my daughter a world shittier than my parents left me, but I fear I've underestimated with my puny hive-mind how many zeroes are multiplying zeroes in cascades of kazillions of totalitarian square-root signs, that my house may be repossessed by square root even after I've paid it off, that my timeline of catfoodery is too optimistic by at least one generation.

REMEMBER! - I've moved HERE. Please adjust your bookmarks and blogrolls and readers. I understand it's a pain in the ass, so many thanks!

Links - I know I promised links here for a week, but I discovered/remembered that some blogs list other blogs linking to a particular post and was mortified (as much as I can be mortified) to see both the typepad and blooger links, and while I thought I was an unabashable blogwhore, apparently there is a threshold beyond which is abashedness.

So, links, poem, music are HERE. Thanks.

Consider the Abundance of Such Resource as Illuminates the Glow-Blue Bodies and Gold-Skeined Wings of Flies Swarming the Dumped Guts of a Natural Slaughter

I hadn't given Axelrod's statement that he was "hoping that with more seats, the Republicans will feel a greater sense of responsibility to work with us to solve some of these problems," much thought, dismissing it as his obamalamely attempt to establish a meme for the 2012 elections, which is the only election that matters to Obamaxelrod, don't you know.

But think why Obamaxelrod lift the moratorium of deepwater oil drilling yesterday when they didn't have to until after the election, have a knee to the nuts, eco-progressives, and you know what? Axelrod may be right: having followed corporate mandate and disabused America's Left that America will ever move Left again, corporate will rein in the hyenas (though not as easily as they think they can) post-election. Obama has done his job. There is a center-right model of middle-American consumer-citizens corporate likes; corporate thinks there's 20 more years of coal in that middle-American center-right consumer-citizen, needs to keep you and me breathing until we motherfuckers can be top-mined for scrap.

REMEMBER! - I've moved HERE. Please adjust your bookmarks and blogrolls and readers. I understand it's a pain in the ass, so many thanks!

 

• Will post links here for the next week or two - though not updated links through the day, which will only appear at THE NEW PLACE.
• Enemies list.
• Sweet denial.
• NEW PLACE.
• Malaise, with no end in sight. 
• Clusterfuck nation.
• NEW PLACE.
• Punch a strawman.
• The cop.
• NEW PLACE.
• Ruth Marcus isn't as mendacious as the other YFWP columnists, but she is the stupidest.
• The education of Pam Geller. 
• Paladino: I'm very sorry I called you the disgusting fudge-packers and carpet-munchers you are.
• Have more catnip: Every November, all five of The Dobbs Group’s show-jumping horses must be transported from their summer stables in Vermont to their winter stables in Wellington, Florida. The workers are transported to the tropics too, returning to New England with the horses in April. They ride in trucks each way alongside their expensive equestrian charges, tending to the horses’ needs throughout the thirty-two-hour journey. Their return to Vermont marks the start of a new annual circuit of horse shows—an exhausting schedule during the spring, summer and fall months that entails constant travel between their Vermont base and horse shows around the country. At these shows, it is not unusual for the grooms who care for Dobbs’s horses to rise in the middle of the night or in the predawn hours to clean, brush and prepare the horses for a training session or early morning competition. For years, undocumented immigrants from Mexico have been relied upon to meet these labor demands.
• NEW PLACE.
• State of the Kitty Address. 
• Rhee!
• NEW PLACE.
• Yesterday's abandonment of a Euro Cup Qualifier in Genoa between Italy and Serbia because of Serbian hooligans reminded me of when Elric (whose father is a Serbian) was stationed in Belgrade within the past two years and was strongly recommended to stay away from any bar where Serbian soccer fans drank much less attend matches. Elric, send me the links from your archives, please.
• NEW PLACE.
• Booker.
• Funny old Booker. I have the Jacobson on my desk. It keeps Hey Sailoring me, and I pick it up and then put it down. It's not so much I don't want to read it, it's that other books keep butting in front of the line.
• NEW PLACE.
• Hejinian.
• On C, part four.
• Who cares if you read?
• NEW PLACE.
• Bookshelves.
• Bad music, worse politics.
• Try it before you buy it.

Poems and birthday songs are at THE NEW PLACE.