| 06-06-06 |
[Mar. 31st, 2006|09:34 am] |
Makes perfect sense for the Slayer tour:
Less so for the Ann Coulter book:
Not that it isn't appropriate in its own way.
I just didn't expect America's Bestselling Racist to possess that level of self-awareness... |
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| Sermon on the Mount Rushmore |
[Mar. 10th, 2006|11:53 am] |
Okay, pro-lifers! Let's talk turkey. If you guys get your way and South Dakota outlaws abortion, I suppose you're going to move there to show your support. Right?
Oh, come on! I'm sure some of you can be bothered to pack up your things and move to SD to prove your commitment to the cause.
Surely a state that penalizes this horrible practice should be rewarded with a thriving economy!
No?
Yeah, that's what I thought. You're not going anywhere.
Living in a state that allows abortion just doesn't bother you all that much. That's because it doesn't affect you.
Seriously, have any of you even thought about the long-term consequences of what this might do to South Dakota? It certainly isn't going to reduce the demand for abortion. It's not going to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
But the people in South Dakota who do NOT like the implications of this ruling might well be tempted to seek their fortunes elsewhere...
And those who do already do live elsewhere will have little incentive to seek it in South Dakota.
Let's face it: collectively speaking, the people who are most concerned with access to abortion are the ones who foresee a day when it may be necessary for themselves or someone they love. There are a whole lotta college-educated folks in their 20's and 30's who fall into that very camp... those the people you want to squeeze out?
You sure about that?
How many young couples dream of moving to a state where they know that their daughter would be legally forbidden from aborting a pregnancy should the need arise?
Those of you with faith in the free market should recognize that this is a VERY lopsided equation. This ruling will repel far more American citizens than it will attract.
The anti-abortion zealots might get their way in South Dakota. Another red state or two may join them.
But the ensuing exodus of young, working people will soon have an undeniable impact on the financial health of these states. This. Will. Happen.
And all of the unwanted pregnancies in the world will not be enough to repopulate them. |
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| Downsizing This |
[May. 20th, 2005|04:16 pm] |
System of a Down have got a new one out, their first new CD in nearly four years. (I'm not counting the odds & sods collection Steal This Album.) Mezmerize, the first of two planned CD's for 2005, features 10 songs and clocks in at just 36 minutes. Is the second release (tentatively titled Hypnotize) of a comparable length? If so, then why not just put it all on one CD?
Blame the MP3 and our national shrinking attention span. The era of CD's and their 78-minute opuses (opii?) has given way to single-song downloads and programmable iPods. Never again will anxious consumers be inconvenienced with unfamilar music.
It makes a certain amount of sense that music listeners with short attention spans would find a kinship with System of a Down, a spastic art-damaged metal band that switches gears every thirty seconds. Manic lead singer Serj Tankian bellows, yelps, screeches, trills, croons... anything to get you to listen, damn it. Nobody in the universe sounds remotely like this, and I'm not sure if anyone's even trying. It's downright astonishing to hear "Chop Suey" and "B.Y.O.B." amid the phoned-in, somnambulant wasteland of "alternative" radio.
A decade ago, SOAD would almost surely have released Mezmerize and Hypnotize as one CD. But in the new millennium, why bother putting out a 72-minute album that most people are going to ignore 90% of? Modern rock radio is only going to give each CD a cursory pass anyway... might as well double their chances of getting something onto the airwaves and into the consciousness of the casual music listeners.
Contrast this with the Nine Inch Nails strategy of just six years ago. Trent Reznor, the obsessive perfectionist, spent five years working on his followup to the zillion-selling The Downward Spiral. Feeling no small amount of pressure from his growing contingent of obsessive fans, Mr. Reznor delivered The Fragile, a sprawling, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink two-disc set. An ambitious undertaking, to be sure, albeit one which was met with relative indifference from the public at large. Could be the audience was intimated by its epic 100-minute scope (and price tag to boot). Or, maybe they were just waiting for Trent to sing "I want to fuck you like an animal" again.
After yet another five-year hiatus, NIN has streamlined the approach a bit, giving us the relatively brisk fifty-three-minute With Teeth. It's relatively straight-ahead industrial rock with less in the way of moody instrumental ruminations, although there are still a couple of tracks which appear scientifically designed to lull you into a coma. Trent has also scaled back the cover art accordingly: just the NIN logo, a song list, and a link to the website. Perfectly in keeping with the MP3 ethos of modern times. |
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| Do the Evolution |
[May. 17th, 2005|03:46 pm] |
To paraphrase a famous quotation, frequently but falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:
"If you are twenty and you are positively obsessed with the liberal bias of the media, if you regularly bash the ACLU and secular humanists, if you hate the federal judiciary for being hostile to people of faith, if you claim to abhor political correctness but actually use terminology like 'people of faith' with a straight face, if you support a Constitutional amendment to prevent gay people from getting married, if you think Social Security should be abolished, if you think the United Nations should be abolished, if you grandstand to refuse a brain-damaged woman's right to die, if you despise the French, if you categorize East Coast liberals collectively as effete, latte-sipping socialist elitists, if you think the mainstream media is the primary culprit for the world's resistance to a pre-emptive military invasion, if you hammer Democrats into the ground for the most trivial offenses while blindly defending the single most careless and incompetent President of the modern era... you have no heart."
Now tell me again what happens when you turn forty. |
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| Context Is Everything |
[Apr. 26th, 2005|11:30 am] |
The year: 1994.
"A guy is stranded alone on a desert island, and he finds a lamp. He rubs the lamp, and a genie comes out!"
The place: Happy hour at The Squeeze Bar; Shelton, CT.
"The genie tells the guy that he'll grant him one wish, and the guy tells him that his one wish is to spend the night with three famous women!"
The speaker: My company CEO.
"The genie says, Your wish is granted', and sends down Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, and Hillary Clinton!"
The audience: Assembled corporate underlings.
"The next morning, the guy wakes up with a broken knee, half a dick and no health insurance!"
The reaction: As if watching a Richard Pryor / George Carlin tag team performance. |
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| Longing for Another Slice of Fabricated Outrage |
[Apr. 11th, 2005|09:57 am] |
One week ago, Free Press sports columnist Mitch Albom submitted a Sunday column with a factual error. Michigan State was competing in the NCAA basketball championship, and Albom was informed that two team alumni, Mateen Cleaves & Jason Richardson, would be taking a break from their busy NBA schedules to attend the game together. Albom used this event as a jumping-off point to discuss the culture of college hoops versus that of the pros, and surmised that perhaps our young athletes should not be so quick to dismiss the former in their eagerness for the latter.
It was actually a very sweet and touching column, with one admittedly glaring error: Cleaves & Richardson did not actually attend the game. In order to make the deadline for Sunday's paper, Albom wrote the column several days in advance, describing the alumni reunion in the past tense. So, four days after the column was published, the Free Press printed a retraction and apology from Albom. While this should have sealed the lid on the controversy, the aroma of blood in the water was just too tantalizing for some.
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"Mitch Albom and the Detroit Free Press should be ashamed for allowing the travesty of his column that was published on Sunday. His "apology" only aggravates the matter, since he doesn't fully own up to what he did. He lied."
"Other reporters at other newspapers have been fired for making up stories. Stand up for journalistic integrity, if you have any left, and restore your burnished honor."
"So, Mitch Albom turns out to be a liar? After all these years of him yapping at the heels of various Republicans for imagined or created wrongs we now find that paragon of virtue himself is a mere mortal. Let no good deed go unpunished."
"This is yet another example of a powerful media person refusing to realize the magnitude of what he has done (Dan Ratheresque?). I hope the management of the newspaper has the nerve to do the right thing and terminate their relationship."
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Jesus, get a grip. Can we please put this thing in perspective? Let's look at the title of the column again: Longing for another slice of dorm pizza. This is the chink in the armor of the hated mainstream media? Are we so enamored of controversy that we would resort to poking holes in this editorial statement?
Look, anyone who has ever delivered newspapers or worked at a drugstore knows that the feature sections of the Sunday paper are published a few days early. They're not really where you're going to find the "hard news" on any given Sunday. But as the writers hide behind the smokescreen of "journalistic integrity", their motivations are more than clear: it's payback time. While it was undeniably dishonest of Albom to have described the event as if it already happened, it hardly merits the pretend outrage of the "LET'S GET 'IM!" crowd. They got Dan Rather; now, it's time to take down the rest of the so-called "liberal media". However they can; with whatever it takes. |
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| Never Mind the Pollacks |
[Apr. 8th, 2005|04:35 pm] |
Just found out the other day that author Neal Pollack and I are almost exactly the same age. It's slightly intimidating to realize that he and I have shared almost the exact same amount of time on this Earth. Not that there's much in the way of common ground with which to compare us; we simply do not share the same stock in trade. I wonder how it could come out if I started writing satirical blog entries in the style of Andrew Sullivan or Christopher Hitchens? Probably exactly the same as Pollack, except for the "side-splittingly funny" part.
In the meantime, I'm going to try and figure out what is is about Good Charlotte that makes people hate them so much. All right, it makes sense that a certain segment of the youth population is going to find something bogus about a band that dresses like the Sex Pistols but sounds like Blink-182. GC certainly aren't the first kids to discover this particular goldmine, and they're not even the worst offenders. I've long resigned myself to the cognitive dissonance in my head which expects bands that look like punk rockers to sound like punk rockers, like they did back in 19-eightysomething when I was hearing this stuff for the first time. So I won't bore you youngsters today with the details.
But I think I've figured out the problem: the lead singer's name is "Joel". Who the hell ever heard of a punk named "Joel"? It doesn't work. "C'mon, Joel, let's smash the State!" Maybe if he'd changed his name to something like "Chameleon Suicide" then he wouldn't have to work so hard to maintain his cred. I don't know; they seem like nice enough kids. Which may be part of the problem... |
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| Clever, nee pithy, header |
[Apr. 5th, 2005|03:53 pm] |
Welcoming message, introductory material.
Link to silly argument at odds with my worldview
General derisiveness at ideological opponents.
> direct quote from link
Line-by-line refutation. Proceed to marvel at differences between red and blue states.
> continuation of strawman argument
Further refutation.
Summary, conclusion, general feeling of worldliness and satisfaction.
Cute animal photo:
Okay, I think I've figured out this "blogging" thing. |
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