It's All True!!!

I'm sorry, but I think this is really fucking hilarious.

Mexican Pig Attack!!!!

I can't even deconstruct all the insanity in this shit.

Here are some articles that mad-libbed in the term "swine flu":

to describe how Obama is letting the terrorists win,

to tell us that it's probably Iran testing bioweapons it's going to use on Israel,

and for good measure, that it's a government conspiracy to grap even more civil liberties and aid the pharmaceutical companies.

Your Moscow Expat Fired Attorney Sex Novella is Subpar

On one hand, you have to appreciate what this woman did. On the other hand, she's a totally crazy bitch in a global way. Word to the wise: before you deliberately destroy your current career and try to launch a new one by distributing your novel online, have someone edit the thing.

Stealing Home

Pettitte is stupid. (And I wish this was an opportunity to criticize A-Rod, but Berroa was playing third.) Watch the replay. Berroa is playing about fifty feet away from the base. Pettitte's windup takes about twelve seconds. If you want to take chances like that, you need to do something to hold the runner. Fake a throw or something. (And righthanders should never even pitch from the windup with a runner on third.)

"I saw him in the corner of my eye and tried to speed up my windup," Pettitte said. "I couldn't speed up my windup fast enough to get him out." You can tell that, if he hadn't sped up his windup, the play wouldn't have even been close. But Pettitte still threw a curveball, which was not smart. Why did he do that? In the wise words of a coach I once had, probably shitburgers . . . rolling down his leg.

I was going to say that Ellsbury is the only thing to ever come from Madras but apparently River Phoenix was born there (because his parents were cult members).

"Can't Shit Where You Eat"

. . . as Maron says.

But Mr. Zainuddin — who graduated from Lipia, a Saudi-financed university here that promotes Wahhabism, a rigid interpretation of Islam — also believes in the party’s founding goal of carrying out Shariah in Indonesia.

It's not like the existence of radical Islamic politics is accidental in Indonesia or anywhere else. So can we stop pretending that this stuff is some inexplicable worldwide grassroots political movement and own up to the fact that it's extremely well-funded by people who we have to give money to because we have a retarded energy policy?

More Confusion About Torture--At the New Republic

Marty Peretz's commenters rightly eviscerate this post. He's under the impression that we've only captured terrorists. Again, whether we've tortured anyone and how much and whether we'll do it again is largely irrelevant because we still haven't figured out a decent way of determining which detainees are innocent. Most of them were sold to us for ten thousand bucks in a part of the world where that's a ton of cash. To say that we want to give them access to American courts of law is an exaggeration. We just want to give them access to military hearings that aren't a sham and weren't designed by Donald Rumsfeld.

No Explanation Necessary

Butterbean vs Johnny Knoxville
Uploaded by Mystik1972

I don't know why I've been thinking of Butterbean lately . . .

Torture Torture

It's been another big week for torture memos. Turns out we actually waterboarded KSM and that other guy (Abu Zubaida) hundreds of times and Condi knew about it.

But I wonder if all this talk of torture is distracting us from our bigger detainee abuses.  Such as the innocent men we've imprisoned, some of them for years, with no way of proving their innocence.  Although the Times and the Post, and the blogs and the blawgs are lit up with torture talk, I think that most people could give a shit that we waterboarded this guy.

He's a confirmed terrorist.  And people have an assumption that we've only detained real terrorists.  Although The Chinese dissidents, Afghan satirists, the unlucky taxi driver, and the guy who just had the wrong name, among various others who were sold to us to out of revenge or greed have certainly proved that wrong.  We've detained a lot of innocent men and it's pretty disgraceful.  

I finally watched Taxi to the Dark Side a couple of days ago and learned that we've tortured these innocent guys as well.  So, really, who cares whether we waterboarded Abu Zubaida when we forced innocent men to wear panties and masturbate onto snarling dobermans while butch Marine women in cheerleader outfits did little dances about how we were going to murder their families, and then sent the guys back to their cells to be shackled in stress positions until they almost died?

I can speak about this as an authority because I was waterboarded (for about ten seconds at a Spongebob-covered art installation at Coney Island).

After the Dept. of Defense fucked around for years trying to avoid giving Gitmo detainees any real way of proving their innocence, the Supreme Court finally had to step in and acknowledge a constitutional right to habeas corpus review.  They should give habeas to the detainees at Bagram as well.  We've had long enough to come up with a decent process for sorting through the men we capture and have simply refused to.  The fact that we may have tortured them after holding them for years without sufficient reason is just the icing on the cake. 

Books

The White Tiger was good. Adiga has a great voice--very funny. This reminded me a little bit of Vernon God Little with the use of hilarious hyperreality to address controversial social and political issues, but in The White Tiger the reality is not so exaggerated, it's just India.

I happened upon a book fair last weekend in Philly. At the McSweeney's stall, I told the attending nerd that I really enjoyed Lemon, which they published a few years back. He told me that the book had created some internal controversy, probably because it didn't sell any copies. Apparently even a company that has a superhero supply store where they used to also sell puzzle pieces by the pound has its limits, and those limits include publishing a novel about a man who falls in love with a lemon. However, that just happens to be the plot of Lemon. It's probably more accurately described as a really funny novel about a man who has a total nervous breakdown that causes him to fall in love with a lemon.

Kashmir

Shandana has posted some picture of the mountains and rubble from her trip. And one kid with enormous eyes.

Unethical Behavior

The fact that there was an exchange of sex for money becomes a little less surprising after you look at her name.

Playoff Scenarios

5 in a row and 9 of 10, with a 3-way tie to clear up. Although deciphering these playoff scenarios is pretty incomprehensible, it looks like there's a better than 50% chance of playing San Antonio.

Batum sat last night with "flu-like symptoms." Let's hope he didn't succumb to mono.

Flutter

Weirdly God-like

You really have to admire, or at least be in awe of, Ted Stevens.

Pepperoni Truth and Chicken Parm Fairness

“Comparing Supreme Court, say, to this is like comparing a hospital to a MASH unit,” said Anthony Pizza, a lawyer for insurance companies. “A lot of it is meatball justice.”

Two things about this quote.
1. Was he not aware of his name when he said this, or has his name caused him to subconsciously relate to the world as food?
2. I think he's probably referring to New York's Supreme Courts, which, of course, are the lowest courts in the state other than the village courts (where the adjudicating reeves, who obtain their positions through a complicated pattern of maternal succession and are all descended from mole-men, still sometimes decide cases with trials by ordeal).

What Good Are Landmines if You're Not Going to Use Them?

This seems unnecessary. What are they fighting over? The only thing there is the temple, which won't generate any money for anyone until the area is safe and demined. Someone tried to sell me land there for $500 a hectare a few months ago, so there really is nothing there to fight over. Except for national pride. This fighting seems to be caused by jealousy over a UNESCO designation, which is pretty ironic.

UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded on 16 November 1945. For this specialized United Nations agency, it is not enough to build classrooms in devastated countries or to publish scientific breakthroughs. Education, Social and Natural Science, Culture and Communication are the means to a far more ambitious goal : to build peace in the minds of men.

Kaiju Big Battel

Went to see absurdist monster costume pro wrestling last night in, yes, a Polish meeting hall in Brooklyn that only serves Żywiec. My only major complaint is that too few of the characters were food items or other dadaist concepts; most of the characters are humanoid monsters. But in defense of this, it did look really hard for that waffle to maneuver.

Megan McCormick

I meant to post this two months ago:

I now know why Globetrekker's Megan McCormick annoys the fuck out of me on a molecular level.

She worked on Mitt Romney's unsuccessful 1994 campaign to unseat Sen. Edward Kennedy.

I knew that no one could really be so peppy about eating at a lunch counter in Sri Lanka while being mentally undressed by unemployed belt makers.