Fuck American Barbecue

I just spent Christmas day at a couple of major Buddhist sites, but that's what's really on my mind. Our blind insistence that our barbecue is better than South East Asia's is perhaps even more audacious than that time we carpet-bombed half of the region.

Holy Fuck

More on my vacation to come . . .

American Rounders

I learned about this about a week ago, and I thought I'd be able to organize my thoughts about it after awhile, but it's just too crazy, so here they are in no particular order.

- That agent and the Pirates are toying with my ridiculous sports diplomacy ideas, but completely accidentally, just because this country is looking for relief pitching as much as it's hoping for something magic to burn in our cars.
- It's really sad that their first impression of America is Tom House. He is such a goddamn nutcase. It's also too bad that he's the one teaching them how to pitch.
- If they ever become even somewhat OK, the Mets would be incredibly stupid not to trade for them.
- Dinesh may get fat in a David Wells/Orson Welles kind of way.

Re: Well(e)s: "dinesh has fallen in love with a sweet called Pecen Pie. I think he could eat the whole pie if JB sir would let him."
Their blog is amazing. I hope it's real.

What is Going on in Louisiana?

First Jindal, now Cao. The racism of the Southern GOP is, apparently, now too nuanced and complex for people like me to understand. This makes conservative Asian immigrants from the South look like a possible new future for their party, but Cao also represents a doubling-down on the stale boomer wars in a kind of audacious way.

"The American dream is well and alive," he said, flanked by his wheelchair-bound father, who spent seven years in a North Vietnamese prison camp during that country's civil war.

What happened first was that Cao's father, a South Vietnamese military officer, was sent to a Viet Cong "re-education camp" for six years. That's why his children had to escape Vietnam without him.

Iranian Basketball Update

Haddadi is on Vancouver's D-league team. Canada doesn't need an Iranian player. The U.S. does. Portland hates Bush enough to support an Iranian player for that reason alone. The Blazers should pick him up. He can't possibly need to learn much more than Oden.