drat fink
View current page
...more recent posts
Thursday, Aug 07, 2003
lost in space
sorry for the dearth of posts. in addition to the desk issues and the summer doldrums, the spacebar (good name for a bar?) on my keyboard is fokked up. plus ive got an annoying bug on my computer which has me in pop-up purgatory (not quite hellish). nothing going on in headspace anyway. mostly put off by what ive put on aka the weight im in. bought the first season of rocky and bullwinkle yesterday so im sure everything will be fine soon. cant wait fro the arnold (swarzenegger) v. arnold (gary coleman) foxy boxing match live from sacrementos really cheesez your hunger a way down yonder by the old yolk treatise if you will and gracefully.
Monday, Jul 21, 2003
gold digging
"Republican strategists pretend that they would love to run against Howard Dean when in fact the candidate they would really like to run against is Joe Lieberman. They are trying to psych-out Democrats into fearing another George McGovern because they want an opponent who will leave no footprints which was the case with Mondale, Dukakis and Gore.
George McGovern spawned a mailing list which animated progressive public interest groups for the next decade and countless political professionals, including the young Bill Clinton, got their start in politics in a campaign based on idealism. McGovern’s loss was partially from a country that wanted to re-elect Nixon but McGovern’s biggest mistakes were not ideological but professional (losing control of his convention to the point that his acceptance speech wasn’t on until three in the morning; selecting a running mate who resigned the next week after it was revealed he’d received electro-shock treatment for depression, etc.). And, of course, McGovern’s campaign was bedeviled by illegal dirty tricks that were among the reasons Nixon was formed to resign two years later."
two to tengo
"In order to prevent collisions with Venezuelan-born shortstop Elio Chacon, New York Mets centerfielder Richie Ashburn learned to scream "I got it" in Spanish in 1962. Unfortunately, a few games later, his shouts did not stop English-speaking rightfielder Frank Thomas from crashing into him. Brooklyn-raised indie rocker Ira Kaplan loved those bumblin' Mets so much that in 1984 he named his new band "Yo La Tengo.""
la dolce vita
"Hollywood actor George Clooney reportedly is set to buy Italian Serie B soccer team Como for approximately $25 million, Britain's ITV.com reported Monday.
According to the report, the former ER and Ocean's Eleven star has told friends he is "about to buy a small soccer team" near his Italian lakeside home in Villa Oleandra."
Friday, Jul 18, 2003
anamatrix
"Censored SNL Animation about Corporate ownership of media."
Thursday, Jul 17, 2003
rockist paradigm
"Then again, maybe it’s not a problem that so much pop-music scholarship sounds conspicuously uncool. For decades, jazz rhapsodists and rock poets were so intent on projecting attitude that they never got around to saying much about the music itself. The pioneering rock critics of the sixties, such as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, wanted to mimic the music in their prose, and they had enough style to pull it off. Bangs, whose writings have been collected in a new anthology from Anchor Books, lived the life of a rock star, or at least died the death of one. But his writings are a better guide to the mentality of smart people who went to rock shows in the sixties and seventies than they are a reliable record of music and musicians. Discussing the Rolling Stones in 1974, Bangs wrote, “If you think I’m going to review the new ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’ album right now, you are crazy. But I am going to swim in it.” Between prose poetry and academic cant there has to be a middle ground, and pop-music studies is searching it out."
Monday, Jul 14, 2003
hot seated
"July 14 — Bill Keller, the man who was passed over for the top editorial job at The New York Times two years ago in favor of Howell Raines, has been elevated to the executive editor’s position."
le chic, c'est geek
todays buzz, howard dean is sitting in for lawrence lessig on his blog this week. also, heres a dean profile from the squirrelly howard fineman.
balls to the walls
"In the process, James himself has become part of baseball legend. To some, he’s a philosopher-hero who brought baseball out of the Dark Ages; others consider him a calculator-punching pedant with too much time on his hands. The once proud and conservative Red Sox, by hiring James to be their Senior Baseball Operations Adviser, have joined the ranks of those teams—such as the Oakland A’s and the Toronto Blue Jays—which are now emphasizing the principles of “sabermetrics” as an alternative to the steadfast reliance on weather-beaten scouts with radar guns, hunches, and cigars. (The term, which James coined two decades ago, echoes the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research, and denotes “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”) The Red Sox have not merely sided with the brainiacs; they’ve enlisted the help of the founding nerd."
soul survivors
"Trippi vehemently denies the story. Yet it's clear that the Dean camp and the DLC are fighting an increasingly acrimonious civil war. Even as the Democratic Party seeks to unite against George W. Bush, many of its grass-roots activists are in mutiny. The rift is less about issues than an argument about the way politics works in America and the role of passion and anger in stirring the electorate, and its resolution will determine the Democratic strategy in 2004 and the direction of the party thereafter."