Happy Thanksgiving!

Shortchanging the Muse by ~RedSparr0w

Thanks for all of the kind comments and emails. Due to technical difficulties and the holiday, I probably won’t be online much until this weekend, but I do have a W.S. Burroughs Thanksgiving Prayer for your viewing pleasure...



For the most part, I’m doing OK considering – mainly losing myself in books. Eating has been troublesome and somewhat nauseating, but I wouldn’t mind losing a couple of pounds before the holidays. The hardest part has actually been the little quirky things that come up that I’d like to share with him, but cannot any longer.

Anyway, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m trying to be thankful for what I have. In many ways I’m very lucky and it is rather pathetic to wallow in self pity.

No! via this isn't happiness

I Love Charlie the Unicorn!

BREAKING NEWS VIDEO UPDATE!


Pass the PAW Act -- End Alaska's Aerial Hunting Program!

Victims of Sarah Palin's support for aerial hunting

These bear hunting videos show what Sarah Palin supports so strongly.

Palin even spent $400,000 of state money to fund a media campaign to convince Alaskans to support aerial shooting of wolves and bears, even though Alaskans have voted against it- twice!

Everyone will be Anonymous for 15 minutes (in the Future)

Books, Websites, and Forums about the Anonymous Street Artist Banksy: Part Seven in an Eight-Part Banksy Series

For Edgar:




Mick strikes me as a wannabe Jimi in the above video.

I like the shocked expressions in the audience when Jimi burns and bashes his guitar. Quaint that people were so easily disturbed back then.

Check out the pink fishnets in the video above.

#1 Favorite Version of Sympathy for Devil previously posted somewhere here or there.

Gas Mask Anyone?

in her gas mask two by ~decima


Only a Child by ~TOIYI

À la recherche du temps perdu

memorial day by ~herekittykittay



memorial day by ~annalavigne

While you're enjoying your BBQ and day off, please take a moment to think about the more than 4000 troops in Iraq who died for...For what exactly?
Think of how many others are seriously crippled, brain-dead, committing suicide and ask yourself FOR WHAT EXACTLY?
FOR WHAT EXACTLY?????!!!!!!!!
For fucking what exactly?!!!!!!!
FOR FUCKING WHAT EXACTLY?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When you find an answer that makes any ethical sense, please feel free to let me know what it might be.

Channeling M. SINGH

Olbermann To Bush: "This War Is Not About You...Shut The Hell Up!"
Flawed.

You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw out every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.

You, Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober, contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, fast.

You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how "intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment."

You and the sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most important steering wheel in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of every intelligence community across the world and punished anybody who didn't agree it was really chicken salad.

And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics who bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country's policy in lieu of, say, common sense.

The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco.

You should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

That would be a far more fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library you are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you might as claim was built from "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential library as there were inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Politics Ignore Mode

Barack Obama by =julvett

Due to taxes and the general state of annoyance they leave me with, I've been attempting to practice Politics Ignore Mode this weekend. However, Ogg (who had suggested as much) sent me The Audacity of Hopelessness from the NYT.
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country....

BTW Akubi keeps farting and I'm not sure what upset his stomach.

While I hate the Academy Awards these days, the part-Irish sap in me fell for the Once moment.

Got my Spine and got my Orange Crush!

Some people eat them.

Battleship Down!

LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows


UPDATE!

I thought this book looked rather intriguing and hope a Groovy Ager might review it one of these days.


In other news Zillow Book is currently really big in Saudi Arabia and I have no idea why.

Werner von Trapp dies!

Werner von Trapp, a member of the family made famous by the legendary Hollywood film The Sound of Music, has died aged 91 in the US.
The film was loosely based on a 1949 book by Mr von Trapp's stepmother Maria and changes some details. He was depicted by the character named Kurt.

Mr von Trapp died on Thursday at his home in Waitsfield, Vermont.

The Sound of Music opened on Broadway in 1959. The Julie Andrews film version in 1965 won five Oscars.

Crunch-a-tize the Constitution!

Groovy find of the morning via ectoplasmosis...

YET ANOTHER UPDATE!

A related rss find of the day:

...Nothing wrong with that you might think. At least here in Britain. But in the Bible belt that is South Carolina, writing, and reading, about normal life, which in many people's eyes includes sex, was understood to be "pornographic". Her friendship with Grealy was far too intense, so intense that they had to be lesbians, didn't they? Despite being untrue, this assumption was more than enough cause for censure for some of the open-minded young women at Clemson, since, obviously, it was "not normal".

Patchett gave her talk, along with a bodyguard to protect her from angry parents and righteous 18-year-old boys - asking how often she'd cheated on her husband - and defended the students' right to read anything and not to be protected from supposedly "corrupting" texts. For, as she pointed out, if you start with her book, where do you stop? She mentioned, among others, Anna Karenina (adultery and suicide), The Great Gatsby (adultery, alcoholism, murder) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (incest). As I read the piece, I realised (having once taught a course entitled From Romeo and Juliet to Sleepless in Seattle, about the representation of love) that most of the books I had once studied, and taught, would be off-limits to the protesters at Clemson. Going to my bookshelves, I racked my brains about what I had studied as a teenager. I started Shakespeare with Othello (all that tupping), studied The Outsider in French (murder and nonchalance, which is probably just as much of a sin to some) and learnt all I needed to know about Freud and families by reading Sons and Lovers (where do I start?!). In fact the more I looked, the more I realised that in a world that considered Patchett's book as offering a "deviant sexual agenda", most of my secondary school and undergraduate syllabus would have to be banned. As would most of the books taught in the US...

- When Ann Patchett became unrequired reading

UPDATE: The NSFW Shining Twins post may have freaked some people out a bit, so I've decided to keep anything beyond PG-13 over at Zillow Book (linky is NSFW BTW) and keep this blog wholesome all-American organic sweetness.

Also, for those who have sent Yahoo! messages I seemingly haven't responded to, Yahoo! has been eating my responses again.

Don't forget to vote for the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Cap'n Crunch Win-Win winner!