Twitter Twaddle






A couple months ago, I joined Twitter. I had zero sincere reasons to do so. I haven't the slightest interest in telling people what I'm doing right now because most of the time I don't have the slightest interest in what I'm doing right now either. Writing down whatever it is and inflicting it on other people seems to me to either be narcissistic or needlessly cruel. It's the personal-activities version of smelling month-old milk and saying, "Eeeeuggggh!!! This is terrible. Here, smell this."

Still, because I'm old and lame, I allowed myself to be talked into Twitter. If every idiot is using this, I thought, there's a good chance these idiots will stumble across my Twitter page, on which I'll cleverly have left a link to my blog. That was my entire motivation: cynical promotion for this thing.

Of course, nothing really happened. The same people who read this still read this, and nobody's come swanning in from the Twitter page. Unwilling to just walk away without at least making something of it, I started trying to update Twitter every day with the stupidest thing I could think of. I eventually slaved my Facebook status update to it, partly in objection to the surprisingly self-absorbed seriousness with which some people updated their Facebook, partly to elicit some genuine belly laughs from the few friends who likewise refuse to take "social networking utilities" remotely seriously.

After so much time making an ass of myself, I thought I'd compile some of the better updates and share them here. Feel free to click any of the thinks and choose to "follow" me on Twitter. I expect to keep this asinine exercise going. For anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with Twitter or Facebook and wondering why these are all really short one-liners: both Twitter and Facebook essentially restrict you to a 140-character limit. While it can be frustrating, it poses sort of an interesting comedic challenge.

___________________

shotgunned a bunch of old-timey sarsaparilla and is gonna start foghornin' it 12:04 PM Aug 20th from web

eagerly desires to powerlevel his paladin-buddy friendship with you 5:47 PM Aug 21st from web

I don't care how much it costs per month. I'd pretty much kill to join a website called "Captain Stabbin' and Tennile." 9:22 AM Aug 25th from web

Mess with my neighborhood? You're only gonna get two or three chances before I call the county and register an anonymous complaint. 5:28 PM Aug 25th from web

I wonder if you gotta wear black boxer-briefs at a funeral. 7:49 PM Aug 25th from txt

This bullshit funeral doesn't even have wireless 12:14 PM Aug 26th from txt

Lou Holtz is my Aryan love pixie. I'm about to break his game wide open. 8:01 PM Aug 30th from web

oh shit im all up in lou's backfield, getting constant pressure 11:00 PM Aug 30th from web

nobody will suspect a thing when i try to enrich uranium using these tubes leftover from a few rolls of wrapping paper 11:48 PM Aug 31st from web

best thing about pilsner urquell is imagining how fucked up that nerdy kid on "family matters" musta got when he thought he had his own beer 2:16 AM Sep 1st from web

whoa, jim, you're going to be on the hook for a lot more legal liability unless you can get this hasenpfeffer incorporated 4:40 PM Sep 1st from web

this palin lady sorta looks like the shrink from "Sopranos." here's hoping she goes topless in season one of the mccain administration 8:02 PM Sep 1st from web

had that dream where i was mowing down smurfs with an AK again. just a wall of blue flesh and la-la-la-la screaming and red sharp death 5:06 PM Sep 2nd from web

i'm not saying i want to have sex with a chicken. but if i did, i'd make it the new pop-fad by callin it "cluckin" 6:57 PM Sep 2nd from web

if i told you how unbelievably easy it is to assassinate cameroonians, it would blow your mind 6:14 AM Sep 3rd from web

wow, english people get really uptight when you tell them their empire crumbled because they were all stupid, tea-chugging homosexuals 2:39 PM Sep 3rd from web

i found a girl whose pants i wanna get into, and i figure the best way is to class her up real fine. step one: dinner out for canadian food 3:40 PM Sep 3rd from web

just imagine what would have happened to Captain Morgan and his crew if they shipwrecked on the coast of Ireland 4:29 PM Sep 3rd from web

i know that a flyswatter is just a weak-ass spatula. Did they think we wouldn't notice?????? 7:35 PM Sep 3rd from web

i want to meet a hooker with a heart of diamonds because u could fit a lot in there, & they'd be worth more, and she'd be real good at sex 1:00 AM Sep 4th from web

was gonna be upset i gotta go to the doctor but i remembered my subscription to People and BassPro just lapsed days ago so whatev 9:10 AM Sep 4th from web

nothing like visiting your hmo to meet every obese person in your county 12:32 PM Sep 4th from txt

my fave oddly sophisticated NFL player name is "london fletcher." my second favorite is "warsaw sartorius." my third is "copenhagen beadle" 7:37 PM Sep 4th from web

i want Sarah Palin 2 become VP because that way i'm conducting my international relations with this totally sweet mix tape 10:52 AM Sep 5th from web

Tropical storm Hannah is playing havoc with the NASCAR schedule and, by proxy, my reason to even get out of bed and face the world tomorrow. 8:49 PM Sep 6th from web

This one time, we lost my golfball in the woods. Totally gone. That's when I remembered the defoliant Raytheon sold me via an Israeli proxy. 11:54 PM Sep 6th from web

I wonder if Tom Brady's ACL snapped with the same sudden popping sound that you'd get out of the racked spine of a Rwandan irredentist. 10:58 PM Sep 7th from web

This "DD Girlz" movie is very disappointing and inaccurate. None of these girls has rolled a natural 20, and a mage would NEVER do *that*. 1:43 PM Sep 8th from web

people asked me about this, so 'll come clean. yeah, i once watched Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos have sex with a marquetry table 2:59 AM Sep 9th from web

i didn't think they could do it, but i remember being relieved in 2006 when that 11th journalist was killed in russia to cover the spread 2:56 PM Sep 9th from web

i'm disgusted by the national weather service's determination to ruin great patriotic names like ike by associating them with hurricanes 6:13 PM Sep 9th from web

went out with a girl from michigan once who referred to her girl parts as her "Bo Schembechler" also let's just say she had a huge backfield 6:21 PM Sep 10th from web

reading a pretty interesting book, but it'd be 1000x cooler and more exciting if it were called "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar—WOW!!!" 4:24 PM Sep 11th from web

i'm so committed to keeping Twitter real that i tweet these things 1 letter at a time with one of those bobbing plastic birds on a hinge 5:57 PM Sep 13th from web

i know bullets are expensive, but "Gunned Down the Entire Village" sounds much pithier than, "Randomly Executed Some of the Townsfolk" 2:18 AM Sep 15th from web

believes in the depths of his heart that Deputy Elwood Prowse of Orlando is the one who has been prophesied to bring balance to the Force. 3:44 PM Sep 15th from web

i don't care about genetically engineering tomatoes for better growth, but i draw the line at all these new models of frankencats 7:49 PM Sep 15th from web

fuck it, i'm quitting this band. i don't think any of you even know what, deep down, the real message and meaning of ska-core is 4:25 PM Sep 17th from web

starting a new genre called corps-core: pop-punk covers of marine fight songs. we can get intel to sponsor a tour if we call it dual-core 3:57 AM Sep 18th from web

don't come whining to me about eloi right to life. you forfeit guaranteed security when you decide to live upworld 2:52 PM Sep 18th from web

just got back from a haircut & there's no way to be sure, but i'm pretty sure the guy there who sweeps the floors has been keeping my hair 4:23 PM Sep 19th from web

O my god. Becky. Look @ her butt. Its full of stars 12:26 AM Sep 20th from txt

my ideal birthday party involves a piñata and a baseball bat, only the piñata is a Baconator & the bat is my mouth & i am alone 10:44 PM Sep 22nd from web

vilnius is the lithuanian capital & also a cool name only black guys could pull off. like "who r u?" "vilnius! say what 1 more goddam time!" 3:14 AM Sep 24th from web

ppl think ninjas are so cool but i could defeat them by leaving bags of chips around me b/c no1 can touch those w/out making a ton of noise 6:21 PM Sep 24th from web

i'm willing to bet you that sooner or later English people start referring to the butt love as chunneling 10:24 PM Sep 24th from web

the stenographers who do closed captioning for pornography have gotta be so tired of typing *moans* 3:29 PM Sep 25th from web

@stuph every time u eat something unhealthy, punch yourself in the stomach. this conditions you to "fear" fats & keeps u from digesting them 4:45 PM Sep 25th from web in reply to stuph

#1 gripe: when you can't get anywhere near the buffet @ a Morrison's Cafeteria b/c there's a shitload of Sleestaks camped out in front of it 5:17 PM Sep 26th from web

fuck, i don't even NEED a rocker. when i get myself a baby, ima put hydraulics on my car. he starts cryin too much, i start hittin switches 7:36 PM Sep 26th from web

TSA officials saw through my ruse when I entered the cockpit and, when asked for credentials, pointed to the chicken wing pinned to my lapel 11:45 AM Sep 27th from web

Brief Thanksgiving Update






I apologize for updates being somewhat thin on the ground during this last month. As some of you may know, I've been involved in a pretty demanding and exciting writing project. It has the potential to open a lot of doors, so I've neglected this blog because its meeting a quota has been secondary to doing the best possible work for the current job.

I also want to apologize because this blog's taking a backseat won't be rectified for at least a couple more weeks — both because of this new job and because of the holidays. Right now I'm very pleased, lucky and thankful to have family visiting, and I will have both friends and family dropping into town every weekend until the New Year. Hopefully they'll do so on a lucky rotation that allows me to crank out copy for work without making them sit in the guest room for an hour while I "finish something."

In the meantime, I'll do my best to crank out new content whenever possible. As this is the day when we theatrically stand at the dinner table and thank other people at the dinner table in full view of still other people at the dinner table, I would be remiss in not giving gratuitous public thanks for those of you still reading this junk even months later. I do appreciate it, even if I don't know who you are. (Especially one person. I apparently have a faithful reader from Sydney, Australia, and I literally have no idea who this is. Post a comment; out yourself.) I know some of you check back daily to see if there's new content, and I always feel like I'm letting you down when there isn't any.

But don't worry. There are currently eleven half-written book reviews rotting away in my head, to say nothing of campaign postmortem posts, etc. We'll get those suckers printed sooner or later.

Happy Thanksgiving!

And to those who do not celebrate Thanksgiving, greetings from America!

Toxic Wingnuts Issue Saccharine Thank You to Fantasy Version of Sarah Palin






Planet Republican daily increases in resemblance to the island of Rand McNally, where citizens wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people.

Some line highlights:

"A grateful nation wishes to say thank you."
Or, well, as demonstrated November 4th, a mathematical minority of it anyway.

"Thank you for your passionate, hopeful and articulate advocacy—"
BFFFFFFFFFFFWAAAAHAHAHAHA.

"Thank you for the grace and dignity you showed, even when some tried to smear and destroy you."
Absolutely choice that they found one of the three black citizens of Alaska to pitch this line. I guess the other two were getting fired up to go pallin' around with terrists at the time or listening to Jeremiah Wright throw down some totally unfair reverse racism at whitey or otherwise busy weakening America by trying to organize a community like a bunch of socialist assholes.

"YOU'VE INSPIRED US!"
This line brought to you from both death's door and the distant echo of youth sounding down a long and narrowing corridor of ignorance and failure.

"You've given us hope."
Never too early to start trying to co-opt your own loss.


I saw this posted elsewhere, but what I didn't see was any attempt to ID the people behind it. It seems that, since this verges so nearly on satire anyway, it's more comforting to assume a humorist created this, rather than its being the sincere work of the genuinely stupid and insane. A few clicks and some Googling brought up this information:

The officers of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC overlap extensively with current and former leaders of the pro-war organization Move America Forward (MAF).

In mid to late October 2008, Our Country Deserves Better held a cross-country "Stop Obama" bus tour. At a stop in Nevada, tour participant and talk radio host Mark Williams accused Obama of "rigging" the election. "I'm from Boston," he said. "I know world-class crooks, and I know how to rig an election. And I can tell you that Barack Obama is rigging this election." [3]

At the same rally, the group's director, Deborah Johns, claimed, "Obama would rather eat a box of nails than acknowledge our troops for a job well done" [3]

At the bus tour's stop in Troy, Michigan, Williams said, "I'm afraid for my country because if Obama wins, we all become chattel."

Unbelievably, further details on the PAC prove even more disgusting, but I don't want to quote them at length and essentially plagiarize a page to which someone else has actually gone to some effort. You can find more here.

Worse, why not watch some more of their utterly nauseating, distortionate, ignorant and hateful ads? This one's my favorite so far:


John Winthrop, 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: secret identity of Ronald Reagan during his Time Travels for Freedom Campaign.

Leftover Thoughts About the MLB Playoffs






I had originally intended to write an extended postmortem on the World Series, but I found myself even weeks later still in a funk about the Rays' performance. Whining didn't seem entertaining or appropriate, especially when you consider that even the Rays' appearance in the World Series was a tremendous gift of the Baseball Gods. 

Besides, looking back, I'd already talked about much of the origins of the failure. And while I could have gone into the specifics of the loss, there doesn't seem to be much call for it. Even though hundreds of thousands of women Obamaniacs across the country probably verge on the orgasmic when you mention Nate Silver and the numbers "538," probably few are interested in Nate's "secret sauce" in the WXRL, FRAA and EqK9 sense.

Suffice to say that, in the quantifiable sense (WXRL), Rays' manager Joe Maddon continued making inexplicable and barely defensible bullpen moves, repeatedly sending out the skill-poor and luck-middle-classed Dan Wheeler, despite having to propel him onto the field via the giant barbecue fork in his back. Meanwhile, in the gritty, gutty, Ecksteiny and amorphous world of baseball instinct, the Rays' batters probably beat themselves. Wound up tight with the pressure of the stage on which they found themselves, their at-bats seemed desperate, their swings enormous and incommensurate with the situation. Put simply: they were trying too hard.

At the time, I sat naturally disappointed and at least thankful that the giant runny amounts of egg on my face obscured some of the horror. At the start of the post-season, I dismissed BJ Upton as overrated. At the time, he might have been. His power numbers hadn't equaled early season projections, and it seemed that he often went out to run the bases after having left his brain in the dugout. (In my defense: he committed at least two boneheaded blunders on the bases in the postseason.) Yet while his teammates' bats went silent, Upton seemed determined to win the games on his own, memorably tying one game with what seemed like a walk, two stolen bases and a race home on a passed ball. Also, during the ALDS and ALCS, I think he OPS'd something like, I don't know, three jillion.

Since none of these observations was strictly necessary, the leftovers I'd planned to include with them lingered on my hard drive. Now that I haven't the volition to pick over the carcass of the Rays' season, I've got nowhere to put these without them sticking out like sore thumbs. But screw it.

Mike Scoscia Might Be the Saddest Person in Baseball:

I'm not sure how to describe that expression's unfolding, but at the time it seemed like the dawning of genuine anguish. It reminded me of that scene where Lisa Simpson tells Ralph Wiggum that she doesn't like him at all. Only she does it into a microphone. In front of the entire audience at a Krusty the Clown annual TV special. On live broadcast — which Bart then plays back on VHS, advancing the tape frame by frame and saying, "Watch this, Lis. You can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half."

In Scoscia's case, his expression came from an umpire's calling Jered Weaver's pitches on the outside corner for balls. Scoscia shouldn't have been so upset. Both the Angels and Red Sox pitchers alternately got that outside corner for strikes and for balls within the same game. If I remember correctly, Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester — cancer slayer and no-hitter hurler, who pitched in the background during one of the worst ten-minute spans of play-by-play I've ever heard — actually got an identical pitch called for a ball and then for a strikeout on the same batter. The officiating this postseason often ran the gamut between unstable and unforgivable. I don't know a single fanbase whose teams were represented in this year's playoffs that didn't regularly respond to calls with outrage and grief. 

Scoscia might well have been reacting with just a kind of generalized dismay that he was witnessing an awfulness of peculiar consistency. If he wasn't, if these expressions represent his reaction to mundane, incidental injustices, then I dearly hope never to see the man after he's endured a real-life tragedy. The effect must be soul-rending. 

What should concern him most is that his team couldn't beat Boston, but the team that did played Scoscia-style baseball. (Joe Maddon was a bench coach on Scoscia's Angels.) The Rays attacked the basepaths, stealing seemingly at will, combining "smallball" elements of speed and advancing the runners with more productive sabermetric approaches like taking walks and hitting for power. 

The main difference between the two teams comes in age brackets: the Rays are young and have the speed of youth; the Angels, by baseball standards, are a team of the middle-aged and downright old. The Angels, by rights, had about two opportunities to put Boston away in the ALDS, but they frittered them away by playing a high-speed game they simply don't have the wheels for anymore. The best example was probably Vladimir Guerrero, running on two legs held together by cobweb-remnants of cartilage and baling wire, trying to take two bases on a bloop hit and getting gunned down at third by a mile. If Scoscia doesn't want to look so dismayed next October, he's going to have to change his coaching strategy to accord with a team that just doesn't have the legs for that mixed style speed-and-power ball. They're going to have to ape the Red Sox instead, taking walks to increase their OBP and staying put once they get there.

Almost All Red Sox Fans Seem to Own iPhones; Also Are Assholes:

I have no idea what this signifies, but I pointed this out to a friend of mine when we stood in line for beer during game one of the ALCS at Tropicana Field. Because getting to a game at Fenway Park costs about as much as a down payment on a car, an awful lot of Red Sox fans will simply take the train to Baltimore or a cheap commuter flight down to Tampa to see the Red Sox on the road and, incredibly, save money in the process. Because of the Fenway factor and because it was the first game of the ALCS, an awful lot of Sox fans were running around. And, like I said, all of them seemed to have iPhones.

I wish I understood what lesson can be gleaned from that, but I have to admit I was a little distracted at the time by the sudden discovery that Red Sox fans mistakenly believed that they were in a race with Yankee fans to determine which fanbase was filled with more unregenerate, insufferable dickheads. I never thought I'd see anyone who could equal this almost fantastic piece of human garbage I saw wrapped up in a Jeter jersey and NY cap at a Rays game a year ago, but in just the time it took to get a beer, I saw about half a dozen Sox fans who looked like they'd proudly wear Burger King crowns with the words "Asslord of Fandom" written on them and beat the shit out of that guy with lead pipes. I refused to wear my Sox cap for weeks afterward, mostly out of concern for not being tainted by association. 

I suppose what makes no sense to me is that, once you take the Sox fans out of the equation, something like 99% of all iPhone owners I've met have been extremely cool people. So why the corollary? Or is it a red herring? I bet it's the herring thing.

Philadelphia Phillies Outfielder Shane Victorino Looks Like Ren Hoek or Peter Lorre... I Can't Decide:

I can't settle on one and seem to go back and forth. Depending on the camera angle, Victorino always seems like he's either about to beat his teammates while yelling, "You EEEEDIOT!!!" or grab them by the lapels and beg them for the letters of transit. I know next to nothing else about him, aside from the quality of his play, but he seems like a cool guy, so I almost feel bad making the comparisons. Although the Lorre thing shouldn't be taken as a negative, since Lorre himself was a cool guy, despite being typecast as a creep or a monster.

Going to the ALCS Game One Was a Blast:

Despite sitting somewhere in front of Bob Uecker's reserved seating and behind six unbelievable Massholes, I'd forgotten how great playoff baseball is. Unless you're talking about New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago or St. Louis, the quality of fans in attendance at playoff games jumps by about a thousand points. (Ironically, in those areas, fan quality plummets in the postseason because all the working-class regulars get priced out by corporate types indifferent to the game.) Everything seems momentous: the languid pace of baseball somehow being electrically languid instead of the sort of thing you do after work or on a weekend to unwind and drink magical $8 Budweiser. 

The area around Tropicana Field, especially at Ferg's Sports Bar, was like Mardis Gras or, for the Tampa area, Guavaween or Gasparilla. I smelled barbecue every five feet and pot smoke every ten. I kept missing the exposed breasts, but apparently that's because I didn't stay in one spot and let the breasts come to me. Everybody was getting loaded. You couldn't go ten feet without coming across another impromptu kiosk with a girl selling tallboys that had been chilling in ice-filled yellow industrial garbage bins. 

Nothing will ever equal my attending the Earthquake Game in '89, but this was pretty close. Even if I hadn't enjoyed it for myself, I could have enjoyed it for Tampa Bay. It was wonderful to see such a sense of community revelry. And of course, on a personal level, it was really great to get to go there with a friend I've known for ages. Had I been on my own or without someone who was busting out jokes on everything, I probably would have been slightly more furious about the price of seats so high up inside Tropicana Field that the people checking the tickets at the bottom of the stairwell were Sherpas. 

Worse, nobody else would have understood what I was laughing at, later, back near Ferg's, when I saw a portable ATM on the back patio. It was ten feet tall and 100% metal, except for the brightly lit plastic sign at its top. Three industrial-sized electrical cables ran into it. It was standing on a wooden palette. In two inches of water. It would have been nice if the Rays had won, but nothing will replace watching drunk after drunk after drunk line up to what amounted to some kind of Zoltar Machine of Dollars or Death.

But why end on a down note? Since we were talking about Mike Scoscia and The Simpsons, here you go:


See you for Spring Training!

Plucky Palin Speaks with Press in front of Poultry Slaughter






It's almost impossible to overstate how incredibly unintentionally funny this is.


The stark dissonance between her perky and optimistic demeanor and the unmediated gore behind her can't be fittingly described. Note to future politicians: unless it's a large-scale human tragedy like a mass killing or natural disaster, never under any circumstances field questions from the press in front of a large trough of blood. Especially not while a mustachioed guy responsible for the viscera buckets alternates between looking at the dismemberment in front of him and turning around and smiling at you.

Even better than the visual above is the changing chyron below Palin, where clearly MSNBC staffers had to restrain themselves from typing things like, "Holy fucking shit!" and "Oh my God, seriously, what the fuck???" Highlights include:

GOV. PALIN PICKS WORST POSSIBLE BACKDROP FOR TV NEWS INTERVIEW

GOV. SARAH PALIN KEEPS TALKING WHILE TURKEYS GET SLAUGHTERED BEHIND HER

GOV. PALIN NOT REALIZING INCONGRUITY OF HER WORDS VERSUS HER BACKDROP

The incongruity line nails it. There's probably no greater clash than repeatedly talking about "opportunity" while someone else keeps murdering things in the same shot. The whole spectacle also provides excellent fodder for recasting her comments in a bizarrely sinister light.

Unintentionally Amazing Quotes:
Palin: You need a bit of levity in this job.

Palin: At least this was fun.

Reporter: What are you going to cook for Thanksgiving?
Palin: I'll be in charge of the turkey!

Merry Christmas, Shit-for-Brains






I don't know if either of these amount to sayings for anyone else, but most people I know and read have long since taken it as a given that the following two statements about The Wall Street Journal are true:

Its news section is usually right about business.

Its editorial section is usually right of Goebbels.

Today's latest offering from the America's proudest tower of Fuck You for Being So Incompetent and Poor comes from deputy editor Daniel Henninger, a man who's got a friend in Jesus and who's doing his level best to counteract all the goodwill 30 Rock has tried to engender for The Cleve. His insightful thesis?—the War on Christmas is actually what ruined the economy.

In honor of the sad passing of my favorite blog, FireJoeMorgan, I'm just going to bold-quote and fire away in the style of FJM contributor Ken Tremendous (a.k.a. Michael Schur, staff writer for The Office and occasional screen sensation as Dwight Schrute's bizarre cousin Mose).

And so it will come to pass once again that many people will spend four weeks biting on tongues lest they say "Merry Christmas" and perchance, give offense. Christmas, the holiday that dare not speak its name.
I know! I fucking hate that. People say "Merry Christmas" to me at work or walking in the neighborhood, and I don't just say "Merry Christmas" back to them like it's a reflex. I actually stop and try to eat my own skin by chewing on my mouth first and working my way inward toward the tongue, thinking, "What's some sort of celebratory corollary I can offer here? Arbor Day? No! That was months ago! Don't you remember giving the Tree Sign to all those hippies??? THINK, you asshole. Ramadan? No, that's not it either. How could you already forget about those three islams you saw walking out of that middle-eastern restaurant Tuesday? You called in and reported them to DHS. If it was Ramadan, they'd have burst into flames for not being in their coffins during daylight. Shit! Now this guy's starting to stare, just SAY something!" Uh, Kwazy Kwanzaa!

This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays"
No shit, man. I hate how we can't even call it "Christmas" anymore and now it's all PC and wussy liberal and "Holidays." Look, I can try telling people till I'm blue in the face, but they don't realize Christmas is the only religious holiday this time of year. And good luck explaining to people that those Jews went back in time 200 years before Christ was born to totally make up that Hannukah story about their castle being attacked and them still having enough fire to win the war just to make the rest of us have to use sarcastic air quotes when saying "Holidays" out loud. First they murdered Jesus; now they've killed the ad copy celebrating his birth and only his birth every winter. And don't even get me started about how we don't celebrate Him at Easter anymore. All I'm saying is that goddamn bunny has a biiiiiig nose. You know what I'm talking about.

amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin -- fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.
I just said "Merry Christmas" and my wallet exploded with 20s. Now, I'm not saying this will happen to you, but I'm pretty sure if it doesn't it's because you're not believing in Christ hard enough. 

Brb. I'm going to go lie down naked and say "Michelle Wild" really sincerely for about an hour.

How the financial markets fell so far so fast will occupy economic seers for years. The path to 50% wealth reductions and the death of Wall Street was paved with good intentions, notably the notion that all should own a house
Fucking-A right, bro. I don't know what Jesus some of these people grew up listening to, but MY Christ didn't say a mothershitting thing about equality and the blessedness of anything. Maybe some of these people are those Gideon assholes. I don't know about you, but whenever I'm stuck in a hotel room, I like to go through the New Testament with a red pen and mark out whoever this "Mary" bitch is and write in her REAL name: Ayn Rand.

This good intention set off history's largest chain of moral hazard.
You heard it here first from The Wall Street Journal: good intentions and the idea that all should own a house = MORAL HAZARD.

Stay tuned next week for: People Should Not Die from Poverty = CULTURE ANNIHILATION.

The great unraveling
Hahahahahaha. Yes, I too like to like to employ the name of a book by a Nobel Prize-winning economist — who, for the last eight years, has devoted his weekly New York Times column to describing this current administration as the economically most irresponsible and catastrophic in American history — to somehow explain that the economically most irresponsible and catastrophic administration in American history was less culpable for the looming Second Great Depression than black people who insist we take Kwanzaa seriously and Jewish people who like to remind us their sacred rites pre-date ours by centuries and are calendrically proximal.

began sometime between 2005 and 2007, when borrowers, lenders and securitizer shamans all found themselves operating in a zero-gravity environment, aloft on moral hazard.
Once again: the idea that people have a right to ownership and security and should be aided in achieving both DESTROYED AMERICA.

His narrative runs through borrowers making misrepresentations on loan applications (fraud), the collapse of Bear Stearns's hedge funds, revised ratings-agency methodologies that led to "unprecedented" mass downgrades, causing a contagion that spread from subprime to prime home-equity loans, and a warning from the president of the IndyMac S&L that "the private secondary market is not functioning." This in turn precipitates a "torrent of deleveraging." Here's the best part: Mr. England's chapter-and-verse article appeared in October -- of 2007, one year before the current mass panic.
Note the total absence of the biggest precipitating factor in this crisis: people who understood what bad loans were/are/will be CHOSE to make bad loans to people they knew stood little chance of paying them back because it temporarily created new debts that could be sold at a profit. But nope, let's not mention that. Let's instead list, first, how the selfsame poor people who were too stupid to understand the punitive loan terms they just agreed to somehow defrauded the banking industry. Let's make sure that one is right up front and center. Let's make sure the first issue of blame is laid at the people on the bottom end of the chain of profit extending from predatory lending. Let's make sure that when the sins are finally tallied, those who risked losing their homes and livelihoods and not those risking a depreciated profit margin for billion-dollar conglomerates are condemned before all others.

This is like trading the developmentally disabled kid in class a button you found in exchange for his Snickers bar, accidentally getting food poisoning from it and claiming he masterminded bacterially sabotaging you. Then suing his family and watching his father stage his own "murder" so his family could get the life insurance money to live on. Then calling the dad a "liar" and a "quitter."

A more recent, widely emailed article for Portfolio.com by Michael Lewis of "Liar's Poker" fame describes a skeptical hedge-fund manager and his associates walking through the wild world of mortgage-backed securities like stunned characters in "Mad Max," in effect asking bankers, borrowers and ratings-agency executives one question: Why? Why do you think all of you can get rich, all at the same time, forever?
Maybe — instead of indulging in a cheap, flawed and intellectually dishonest exercise that attempts to tie the far right wingnut fabrication of The War on Christmas to masterfully conniving poor people who bilked the finance industry out of profit on credit default swaps — you could answer his fucking question.

(For anyone still reading this: Michael Lewis also wrote Moneyballand the amazing article "Commie Ball: Journey to the End of a Revolution" and basically completely and utterly rules.)

Little or nothing that has occurred through this crisis discredits the system of free-market capitalism.
I take absolutely no real, human satisfaction in the economic dislocation of the country, the ejection of people from homes they thought they'd have forever and the loss of jobs that had barely anchored family members in the distant tidewater of the American Dream. But, if that has to happen — if it is an irrevocable horror with which we all must cope — then certainly watching The Wall Street Journal defend free market capitalism like a chainsmoking doctor explaining, in the 1990s, how Chesterfield Cigarettes not only couldn't hurt you but also cleared up your T-Zone will go a long way toward making this plunging death-ride a lot more hilarious.

Across several centuries of rising world incomes and social gains, the system has proved its worth.
Shhh, nobody tell Daniel Henninger that at no point in the history of the west has a truly free market ever existed.

Also, don't tell him about the 19th century.

In this instance, the system has been badly used -- by mere people.
Look, we have to be honest, here. A system didn't fail. People failed. The system just involves people and tries to predict their behavior and is dependent on the actions of people and can't actually exist without people. But if you take them out of it, it's fucking flawless, okay? It's like a Fabergé egg wrapped inside the Shroud of Turin inside a Camaro made out of steak that can drive in space. It's all things that are rad. There's no reason to start taking apart the system now. That's, like, WAY out there.

Look, I'm sorry. I'm a little cranky because I slept funny on my air-scrubber tube. What's that?—oh, I wear a Level-5 Decon suit in my house. Yeah, I know, it's a nice two-story colonial with really great wood floors, and it's designed for people to live in it and use it. But I cleaned it this one time, y'see, and if I actually go inside it, it'll get dirty.

Amid all these downward-pushing pressures, occurring in plain sight, hardly anyone or anything stepped up to brake the fall. What happened?
I know, it's almost like the most laissez faire administration in American history since the Gilded Age not only slashed Wall Street regulations but also let the inmates run the asylum by staffing the SEC with exactly the sort of people whose former companies would most benefit by seeing the SEC turn into a toothless, gutless, narcoleptic, senile and terminally ill regulatory agency.

The answer echoing through the marble hallways of Congress and Europe's ministries is: regulation failed.
Exactly.

In short, throw plaster at cracked walls. Trusting the public sector to protect us from financial catastrophe is a bad idea.
Oh, wait, my bad. You meant how the almost complete absence of regulation actually created a crisis by actively forcing people to do things by its not being there. The crisis predicated on the most laissez faire treatment of financial markets since 1933 was actually caused by being not laissez faire enough! Reading The Wall Street Journal explain how unrestricted capitalism failed by not being itself enough is like reading Soviet-apologist historians explain that the USSR failed because its adherence to Marxism-Leninism became insufficiently orthodox.

When the Social Security and Medicare meltdowns arrive, as precisely foretold by their trustees, will we ask again: What were they thinking?
Okay, look at these oranges rotting on the ground in Mr. Tannen's yard, here. You see how this is exactly like these apples I stored on top of the radiator for the last ten days???

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse.
I know, it's like people could do whatever they wanted to make more money, so they did it. We sort of let them do it.

They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.
Either you're talking about something totally imaginary, or you screwed up your free market description when you forgot to add "your" to the former and "my" to the latter.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."
Seriously, people. What are societies going to do about compassion without Jesus? Do you think that all of them are somehow going to, aheheheh, magically discover "compassion" and "community" and "prudence" and "responsibility" on their own??? The 4,004 years this planet existed before the Lord weren't a stygian shithole of robbery, betrayal, exploitation and poverty by accident. It's because we hadn't heard the Good News. Thankfully now we have none of those.

At all. 

Ever.

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous.
I just read a book by Richard Dawkins and fired a gun into a crowd. I saw this one lady talking about the Buddha, and she drove into traffic on the left side of the road. I watched this Dirty Harry movie where Callahan quoted John 3:16 at some scumbag, and the guy actually turned into a kiosk that sold flowers. I also support Israeli violence against Palestinians and American military support against Israel's enemies because the absence of a viable Jewish state means that Jesus cannot return to earth and convert or murder them to usher in His Kingdom.

That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The old joke, "How do you explain the invisible hand of the market? Well, Jesus does it," couldn't be more apt. The slavishly orthodox Wall Street Journal editorial page has been a happy purveyor of this pabulum for years now, but it's rare that you see such a naked expression of their "a wizard did it" philosophy on display. How did the free market err? It was regulated too much — perhaps by forces from Opposite Land — and interfered with the invisible hand of the free market Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Who can restore the integrity of the free market and save the country? Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. How can we make that happen? All y'all poor citizens who was fraudin' them banks and all y'all banks lookin' for a profit need to be ditchin' that credit failure and get y'all a Savior. How does it work?—MAGIC!

Also, apparently Daniel Henninger has access to a database of imaginary loans and loan purchases where people apparently filled out a form that required you to check a box labeled, "I'm a Believer" or "JUCK FESUS."

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.
Just FYI: the current administration that deregulated the banking industry is the most unabashedly evangelically Christian in nearly a century. Oh, look: facts. Your one weakness.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.
Daniel Henninger: I hope you get ass cancer.

Merry Christmas.

Law & Order: Hilariously Earnest Unit






When A&E first began airing syndicated Law & Order reruns years ago, I used to watch them every night at ten p.m., with the sound turned down, while talking on the phone to a girl I knew. There would be long pauses in our conversations during which I'd be able to catch the verbal plot twists; the rest I could infer. To this day, those first four seasons are inextricably tied to my memory of the girl who always slouched a little, who had sleepy eyes and lashes like vaudeville hooks.

Other people think back on the high school crushes and recall the songs popular then, the places they hung out. I think of Mike Logan, Ben Stone and Lenny Briscoe.

For partly that sense of emotional familiarity, I spent the ensuing years almost gravitating toward Law & Order when it was on, but I'd be lying if I didn't say the show's format probably played a bigger role. Like pizza, sex and Carl Hiaasen novels, even bad Law & Order is still pretty good. Its instantly disposable format — almost no story arcs, personal drama or characters extraneous to the procedural structure — makes watching it instantly familiar, instantly rewarding and almost instantly standardized in quality. You can give each episode total attention or almost none at all and find both satisfying. If you're home sick and too nauseated to sleep or read and notice TNT is running an afternoon marathon of Law & Order (and when aren't they?), your afternoon is made.

The rigid adherence to the procedural aspect leant itself easily to all manner of spinoffs, and I greeted the arrival of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as an opportunity to watch something completely familiar, yet different — a pleasant More of the Same without the aggravation of having to ask myself, before each episode, whether I'd seen it twice, three times or too many to count. SVU's start was both fresh and auspicious. The first few seasons brought a semi-familiar format and also a welcome departure into different areas of crime and the law. The last few seasons, however, have been almost uniformly ridiculous.

Like new episodes of The Simpsons, which take until the second act to even have a semblance of plot, almost every SVU episode twists, turns and doubles back on itself to reach a conventional finale. ("There's a kid being raped? Oh, shit, but he lives in a hasidic community subject to arcane Jewish law! How can we get him out of this? Well, we can use the Patriot Act because it turns out they're ironically not trading diamonds on the market but actually smuggling guns for neo-Nazis! Cool, we rescued the kid, but it turned out his dad wasn't raping him; it was Santa.") All quirky characterization has been stamped out. The primacy of both The Law and Keeping Order have been eroded by family-drama subplots, Has This Good Cop Gone Bad? cliché and whole in-episode acts with little more substance than can be found in the breathy dramatic voicovers in the show's promos: "And finally, someone gets hurt... one of their own...."

It's actually possible to chart the intelligence/inanity levels of any episode of SVU just by looking at something you might call the Munch-Makeup Scale. Despite starring on — and, depending on the episode, sometimes carrying — the unequivocally excellent Homicide: Life on the Street for seven seasons, Richard Belzer's John Munch character has pretty much become totally marginal in SVU episodes. His exile to the periphery of storylines typifies the narrowing of the show's focus and the misuse of all but two characters. The less you see of him, chances are the worse the episode and the later (read: worse) the season.

In early seasons, almost every character got a few episodes dedicated to them, and the non-"character" episodes were almost equally shared by the ensemble. In the last three years, I can remember maybe one or two Munch episodes at most, while the ensemble aspect to the show has all but disappeared. The smart former sixties radical who distrusted his government and who could be incredibly entertaining just kvetching in the Homicide station house now spends his full two minutes per episode as Sgt. Exposition, walking into scenes bearing pieces of paper and the words, "I just ran those prints you found. Turns out they match a Nazi Santa from Binghamton."

As said, the other easy clue is the makeup. In earlier seasons, Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) wore off-the-rack women's suits, had her hair down, wore lipstick and brushed a bit of color on her cheeks. While she was obviously much shapelier and more beautiful than the average woman cop, she at least still seemed practically sexy: the kind of sexy that stays within the budget and can get out the door in under an hour each morning.

As seasons wore on, the makeup increased, as the clothes switched to impractically tight designer jeans and v-neck shirts and the hair went up into a short styling waxed display of effort. Now she wears a rotisserie of stylish clothes, feathered hair, silly highlights and enough liquid eyeliner, foundation and powder to play a transvestite in a John Waters film. While no one expected her to look ugly or even "TV Ugly," the character who pushes herself 20 hours at a time on the job — who can't let go sometimes — wanders into every scene looking like she spends her four sleeping hours being dressed and lacquered by a team of makeup contractors.

In many ways, the Benson character — and that of her parter, Detective Elliot Stabler (the amazing-in-almost-anything-else Christopher Meloni) — is a hallmark of how terrible a given season is and how terrible the show has become overall. As ensemble stories diminished, needlessly melodramatic private-life-oriented shows increased, making SVU the "Benson and Stabler Personal Demons Hour."

Take a late-season episode from last year for example. Seemingly convinced that a plot about investigating a series of male-guard-on-female-inmate prison rapes couldn't keep the audience jacked in, the writers had Benson go undercover at the prison and spend five minutes running through underground service corridors and piping and steam blasts before being pinned and nearly raped by a monstrous guard. The whole thing was such shallow, cartoonish exploitive garbage — like watching Pepe le Pew star as the lead rapist from I Spit on Your Grave.

The writers departed from the little-backstory Law & Order procedural format in a confused and inconsistent mish-mash of overwrought camp and cliché. Benson spent the first few episodes of this season obviously haunted and broken down by her near-rape experience. By episode four, it was almost entirely forgotten, and she's since spent at least two episodes breezily posing as drunken rapebait and tarted up in ratings-grabbing prostitute garb. Tune in any episode of the last four years, and you stand at least a 50% chance of seeing a spontaneous rule-breaking undercover mission, police brutality, civil rights infringement, a giant ethics violation, or someone saying — with almost hilarious sincerity — some riff on the line, "You're too close to this case!" Tune in a week later, and not a single one of those things will have had any consequences.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than a breakdown of Benson & Stabler highlights:

Benson

• Is the product of a rape.
• Alcoholic mother dies in a booze-fueled accident before they can reconcile.
• Kills two suspects.
• Slept with coworker.
• Has her throat cut by a rapist.
• Left partner Elliot Stabler.
• Returned to partner with Elliot Stabler.
• For no logical reason whatsoever is asked to leave New York and go halfway across the country in an FBI sting, posing as an eco-terrorist.
• Finds out she has a brother.
• Finds out her brother is a rapist.
• Helps her brother evade the FBI.
• Reconsiders and helps track down her brother.
• Finds out her brother isn't a rapist and that an FBI agent is crooked.
• Nearly sleeps with an astronaut.
• Nearly forced to perform oral sex on a rapist prison guard.
• Has been taken off a case something like a dozen times — each time ignored orders and continued working the case.
• Has been investigated by internal affairs, like, a billion fucking times.
• Sees herself in every woman raped/molested.
• Wants to see women victims get vengeance on their attackers.
• Has been on the edge of a breakdown for nine years.

Stabler

• Mom is bipolar.
• Daughter is bipolar.
• Wife is jealous of his relationship with Benson.
• Has a sexually tense and emotionally intimate partnership with temporary partner Dani Beck.
• Is accused and then cleared of beating a suspect to death.
• Daughter gets a DUI.
• Covers up DUI.
• Daughter gets another DUI.
• Burns daughter's driver's licence.
• Daughter's DUI and his coverup — and his numerous ethics violations — get brought up every time he testifies in court; somehow doesn't impeach his credibility at all, and he's neither removed from investigations nor witness lists.
• Separates from his wife.
• Knocks up his wife for something like the fifth time.
• Signs divorce papers for his wife.
• Gets back together with his wife.
• Has family nearly attacked by a stalker who takes his wife hostage with a knife.
• Wife nearly dies in a car accident with Olivia.
• Wife survives to make it to the hospital.
• Wife nearly dies in the hospital in childbirth.
• Daughter steals his credit card and maxes it out with her boyfriend while buying tattoos and other slutty garbage.
• A pedophile suspect uploads a photo of one of his other daughters to a pedophile "clothed erotica" website.
• Nearly beats pedophile to death.
• Is shot by a white supremacist.
• Is held hostage at gunpoint.
• Is held hostage at gunpoint again, only this time the perp gets shot by the big-haired medical examiner.
• Beats another suspect.
• Gets injured in an explosion.
• Gets stabbed in the chest with a pen.
• Has shot and killed two suspects.
• Gets thrown through a window by Bill Goldberg.
• Gets thrown onto a car window and goes temporarily blind.
• Gets shot twice in the chest by a Russian smuggler.
• Sees his kids in every child raped/molested.
• Has been taken off a case something like a dozen times — each time ignored orders and continued working the case.
• Has been investigated by internal affairs, like, a billion fucking times.
• Wants to seek vengeance on male attackers.
• Has been on the edge of a breakdown for nine years.

Almost none of those things on the list would pose much of a problem if the show presented itself as a shoot-'em-up cops-'n'-rapists show with car chases, beatings and pimps with great hats who would always give you a hot tip. But within the show's context, they all seem so dissonant and overdone because of the show's biggest underlying problem: its contrived and comprehensive earnestness. It's bad enough that the medical examiner — the medical examiner??? — goes around shooting gunmen, but it's worse when ridiculous scenes like that are counterbalanced by her needlessly showing up in the station house every episode, proudly bearing the latest deus-ex-machina lab report and a lecture on some social phenomenon.

Invariably, her dialogue seems not only ripped from the headlines, but ripped from the headlines from some Sunday New York Times feature a show writer obviously thoughtfully munched toast over before saying, "Now, there's an episode idea." Stupid and rollicking and violent and adventuresome is no problem. Stupid accompanied by her saying (to take last night as a paraphrased example), "Animal smuggling is bigger than you think. In fact, animal smuggling is the third most lucrative form of smuggling and often sees endangered species taken from underdeveloped nations" tests the audience's patience. These are circumstances crying out for one-liners, spoofing replies, anything that indicates a vibrant, cooperative humanity with variant opinions and degrees of investment in them. But plurality of ideas and attitudes can't be found. Nothing of the monolithic seriousness can be distilled with anything like levity. Instead, the jokes further exposition. Even the comedy is grimly purposeful.

It's the earnestness that rankles when, for the sake of convenience, the writers remember that Stabler is Catholic and suddenly have him oppose some liberal measure based on the conviction of his faith — then, in the next episode, have him scream at some religious whacko for not giving gay people equal rights. It's the earnestness that makes their stumbling across militia groups, separatist groups and cults insufferable, because they don't want to keep the cases out of selfishness or job ambition but because they've got the most heart and won't forget that one kid who's getting abused within a group of 78 people armed with an arsenal of nuclear dishwasher detergent bottles. It's not, "Give us the case because we fucking found it, and your task force didn't, asshole!"; it's, "Give us the case because Sex Crimes is the division that cares the most."

The show started out with some grit and ugliness to it, but its unrealistically über-liberal and sensitive detectives now regularly verge on acting out Disney's Wonderful World of Sexual Abuses every week. In the first few seasons, sometimes victims were awful people, and the job was just the shit that had to get done when you were at work. Nine seasons later, the two lead characters have spent a combined 18 years "on the edge," and every case was one they got too close to, in between their personal lives being determined by someone opening up a book of 101 Easy Plot Devices and picking whichever one his finger landed on.

And just as you start to resign yourself to this stuff — to accept that, no, this show is now pretty much terminally silly; just as you accept that, yeah, it's Law & Order, so I'm just going to grab the remote, fire-n-forget, put it on NBC and just see what the fuck happens for the next hour while I do this crossword or write an email to family or dust some shelves; just as you're resigned to a lowered level of quality, a higher level of histrionics and your own baseline of what's acceptable entertainment, something unbearably ludicrous happens.

Maybe it's Miranda from Sex and the City threatening Stabler's wife with the knife. Maybe it's the lady who does autopsies establishing cause of death by squeezing off a couple of hot slugs to the chest of some lousy perp. Or maybe (and I swear I'm not making this up) it's Benson spending the entire episode on the phone with a little abused girl with a twee voice and then racing against time to dig her up from the grave in which she's been buried alive and then — despite the girl having run out of oxygen for ten minutes — reviving her, without negative effects, with mouth-to-mouth. Yes, Detective Benson's breath resurrects telegenic children whose brains have gone without oxygenated blood for at least five minutes.

At that point, it's too much.

The show means well and it entertains fairly regularly, but once you hit a moment like that, no episode can pass a laugh test anymore. What was once passively ridiculous — too sincere, too convenient, too clichéd — becomes actively so. Any show that's been on the air for nine years will have long since stretched truth, plausibility and the main characters' backstories to the breaking point. But it takes rare effort to go from good, to amusingly mediocre to sublimely ridiculous. The show takes itself very seriously and once presented its subject matter in a way that was sobering. Now not an episode passes without a moment, a line, or a glance that's hysterically, unintentionally funny.