Here’s the thing about Michael Jackson. Look at this video. The stage is absolutely cavernous. It’s huge. It would overwhelm anyone else. Michael was the really, the greatest pop performer of the 20th century.
at minute 4:56, my god, have you ever seen anything so crisp in all your life?
Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?
Name Dick Cheney’s new memoir.
My favorite so far is New Orleans is Sinking: So What?
I am having a minor little brainwave about something that hasn’t had a chance to fully develop, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Read this article on Slate about the New Haven firefighters reverse discrimination case. What I’m about to say has nothing to do with race or discrimination.
Callum and I have been watching The Wire season one for the last few days. I love the show, and it’s brilliantly written, and it’s really got me thinking. There are a lot of useless fucking cops on that show. Tons of them. White and black. And they hate to work. Not to stereotype anybody, but the show was written by a former cop, and I can well imagine that most major city police departments (and possibly fire departments) work like this.
I’m reminded of my good old Marxist feminist days (not that I was one, but that I studied it). I once bought Adela a ‘better dead than red’ shirt and helped her berate a guy in a hammer and sickle shirt, so obviously I’m no Marxist. But these ladies have a point: men were paid a living wage to look after their families so women could stay home and that’s foolish. This doesn’t really make much sense to me. I mean, I know that’s how life operated for over a hundred years, but to me, I agree with the Marxist feminists, it seems like a stupid idea.
So, maybe these systems (and other bureacracies) were set up to create redundancies on purpose. As Emily Bazelon points out in the article, a lot of these guys are firefighters because their dads and grandpas were. Their dads and grandpas were likely supporting their whole families with these paychecks. The new guys likely aren’t. So maybe these guys have working wives, and maybe these wives are also contributing to 401k’s and RRSP’s, etc. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is: are the days of these bloated-jobs-with-hardcore-awesome-pensions-that-are-mostly-given-to-(white) men soon to be a thing of the past? (God I hope so).
And if they are, will this open these kinds of jobs up to more women and minorities?
This could very well make NO sense whatsoever, and I’ll try to clarify my thoughts on it some more.
Have you seen these girls lately? Dawn Robinson got fat, but she’s the only one that can still sing.
On second thought, I’m not guilty about loving this. This is sexy as hell.
Don’t act like you don’t love it. I’m just sad that I’ll never be able to name my band Technotronic thanks to these assholes. Is it a girl or a guy? Survey says?
I can go all day. Give me that toot too, give me that beep beep.
Oh God. They just keep getting worse, but I can’t stop myself.
You’re lying if you say you didn’t like this, circa grade 11.
I was too old for this song the first time it came around; I’m still too old, and it makes me feel pervy when I think the guitar player is cute. Not Pete Wentz. The other guy.
Hilarious. “2006, it’s butt naked Wednesdays. You gotta sell your coca cola and your chips ahoy.” Erykah Badu and her crazy ass self talking about how to succeed in the music industry.
Classy Republicans, I see where they get it from. Good to see the classiness has carried over to the next generation:
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” – Richard M Nixon. So the 37th president would have aborted the 44th.
To walk into a little cafe with an armload of newspapers and sit at the counter and read them over a bowl of chili and a grilled cheese and a white mug of coffee, and a waitress who says, “What else would you like, love?” — this is heaven. In the papers are dozens of people in serious trouble and you are not one of them.
-Garrison Keillor, sounds like heaven, wanna do it right now.
Tee hee. Kate Roiphe writes about how stripper memoirs are supposed to be shocking but are actually just vapid and boring. This article is hilarious: it’s similar to what I was trying to get at with my post about Ayelet Waldman, but much better and much funnier. Oh well. We all start somewhere. I particularly like number 8:
Our heroine has a feminist interpretation of the strip club world that she would like to share. This feminist interpretation may be hopelessly confused, often contradictory, and sometimes incoherent, but the author will nonetheless drape her experiences with women’s studies jargon. Elisabeth Eaves writes, “Stripping reinforces the stereotype of women that came to bother me the most: that they can be bought.” Lily Burana claims, “Anyone who thinks being sexually objectified is the ultimate degradation has never been politically objectified.” Lacey Lane writes, “It was truly empowering. I felt proud to be a woman.” What to make of all this? Burana quotes a stripper who, faced with an anthology of stripper writing, groans, “oh great, more Lusty Ladies and their precious thinky thoughts.”
Enough with Bill O’Reilly and angry little men. I found a great new blog today. It’s called The art of Living Bodaciously:
Pat was a chip off the same block. There was something very sinister about the way she handed out a pair od skipping ropes with the strict demand that the lucky recipients had to use them daily.But what distressed me more was the revelation of the Slimmer of the Week. One member, I’ll call her Jean, was much heavier than all the others. I’m guessing she probably weighed in at more than 350lbs and this was reflected in the much larger amounts she was losing each week, and for each of those three weeks I attended, she won the prize.
But along with the box of fresh fruit she received, she also had to endure the leader’s lengthy speech, a speech which lingered somewhere between patronising and humiliating and left me feeling horribly uncomfortable. It wasn’t enough for Pat to praise her loss, oh no – on top of this came the revelation that this week Jean had been able to mop her own kitchen floor for the first time in ten years!
The next week, Pat shared the revelation that Jean’s husband was totally unsupportive of Jean’s efforts – in fact, on the way to class he’d stopped off at McDonald’s and eaten a whole Big Mac meal right in front of her. I should point out that tears were sliding down Jean’s face at this point – and there was more; Pat barked, ‘Tell them what he did last week, Jean,’ and Jean was forced to tell the class how her husband was buying bags of doughnuts and eating them in her presence to taunt her. I was weeping too, by this point; it all just felt horribly, horribly wrong and I stopped going. I think it took about a month for Pat to stop texting me and stop sending me postcards reminding me that I had x weeks to ’shape up for summer.’ I was relieved to be out of it.
The weight-loss industry comes in many unpleasant forms, capitalising on vulnerability and cashing in on low esteem, but for me, the wrongest thing about it has to be way that shame (and isn’t that awful sense of cheek-burning shame hideous to even imagine, let alone experience?) is used as a tool, no, a weapon, for people to use against themselves in the name of corporate profit. I’m no psychologist but I can’t for the life of me work out how positive change can come from a point of such negativity.
Joel Plaskett made it to PEREZ!!!!
Nebraska’s attorney general sounds like a lovely person….
For the time being, Carhart said he will offer late-term abortions in his Bellevue clinic. He said Nebraska’s abortion laws are flexible.
“As long as I get referrals from other doctors that say the fetus is not viable, then it’s my intent to take care of those patients,” Carhart said.
Carhart’s intentions aren’t being received well by Nebraska’s Attorney General Jon Bruning.
“I’m disgusted and I’m saddened and I hate it that he’s here in Nebraska, and I hate it that he’s in America. I mean, this guy is one sick individual,” Bruning said.
Carhart said his critics, including Nebraska’s Attorney General can say what they wish.
“I think everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I have no problem with the protesters’ opinions outside,” he said. “But you know, they have to recognize those are their opinions.”
Last time I checked, abortion was LEGAL in America, dickhead. Isn’t he supposed to um, A) know the laws, and B) support and uphold them, seeing as he’s the effing attorney general?
It’s striking to see someone who would have been a step away from being leader of the free world, feuding with a talk-show host. Sarah Palin is in tenacious possession of a small mind.
That might be one of my favorite sentences ever. Not just because I hate Palin, but oh man, isn’t it just a beauty?
How it makes of your face a stone that aches to weep, of your heart a fist, clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue an iron latch with no door.
Britain’s new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy from her new poem “Politics” .
Can we get some more of this please?
Alix Reads Too Much 