when the status quo frustrates.

The legend of Vince

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Sound familiar, Longhorns?

Fans hugged and cheered, throwing popcorn into the air and their arms around one another. On the field and in the locker room there were similar scenes of celebration.

After pulling off perhaps one of the most improbable victories in NFL history, the Titans and their fans had the feeling that maybe they’ve finally gotten over the hump.

I had the pleasure of watching Vince’s unprecedented 24-point 4th quarter that led to the Titans’ 24-21 upset over the Giants. Deja vu doesn’t even begin to capture the sensation I felt as I watched him grab a game’s momentum by the throat and force it to bend to his will. Although with VY, it usually feels more like a dance; he calmly and smoothly seduces the game into submission.

It was the biggest comeback by a rookie quarterback in NFL history, passing Hall of Famer John Elway, who led the Broncos from a 19-0 deficit to beat the Colts 21-19 in 1983.

Young passed for 249 yards and ran for 69. He cheered the fans who stuck around — many left after three quarters — before heading to the locker room to get intravenous fluids for cramping.

“It’s a sneak peek of what’s going to happen, not just with me, but with this team in general,” he said.

“It’s a sneak peek of how our future can be if we just continue to play hard and keep working to get to the point we want to be.”

Why not believe him? He’s done it before, and you get the distinct (if previously improbable) sense his presence, determination, and leadership will have the same effect on this NFL franchise as it did on his college team.

Speaking of those Longhorns, they sure look lost without him all of a sudden, don’t they? Maybe Vince Young really did bring all the mojo they used to win a title. It certainly seems he took it with him when he left.

As the Longhorns revert to form, a new era dawns in Tennessee. No coincidence there.

Wait, wait, you see, I’m the guy. Unlike you, I was always entitled to have my cake and eat it too.

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

This is some kind of satire, right? It’s British, and that just makes it too dry and subtle for my American humor palate, right? Please?

Because if not, the lack of self-awareness of some of these guys (OK, and the women as well) is just staggering. I feel like there is some sort of award I should nominate them for.

When Andrew Clover met Livy Lankester he was writing a novel and earning tiny sums from stand-up comedy. She had a proper job and earned a proper wage. When he complained about how little he earned, she would ask why he didn’t do something else instead…

They married and had two children (though not in that order). As head of corporate responsibility in a large retail business, Liv still earned more than Andrew.

“So I started doing childcare,” he recalled. “I took an old-fashioned male view: ‘I have failed at my work, so I’m looking after kids.’ I was a lone man in the world of kids. I felt a bit gay as I pushed the buggy up the streets of Hackney.”

People would tell Clover — who writes the Dad Rules column in The Sunday Times — that they admired him. “They’d say it must be terribly fulfilling. I wanted to say: ‘I’m a man. If I’m good at something, I want acknowledgement. A fancy job title. A pay rise. I don’t expect to be changing nappies in the middle of the night — working with sewage, for no money, for someone who shouts at me’.”

As he puts it himself, he had the domestic instincts of a smack addict. “The living room was an orgy of dismembered dollies. We were eating tea in the bath. I didn’t fix anything. The bulbs would go in the bathroom: we’d use candles.”

Candles in the bathroom because you’re too feckin’ useless to change a lightbulb? On what planet would that be an acceptable admission from a woman in exactly his position?

The article is way too sympathetic to these guys: “Men with marginal employment marry breadwinning women, discover that unappreciated housework is never-ending soul-sucking dream-destroying bilge and everyone is always condencending towards you. Why, oh why did no one ever warn them?”

Didn’t we already go over this?

All too often, in the homes of higher-earning women, the result is that relationships fall apart. The richer a woman becomes, the more likely she is to divorce her husband, according to Randall Kesselring, a professor of economics at Arkansas State University, who examined the finances of 112,740 women. He found that for every £10,000 a wife’s earnings increase relative to the family’s overall income, the chances of marital break-up rise by 1%.

Isn’t £10,000 nearly $20,000? For an 1% increase in my risk of divorce? I like those odds. I’ll take it.

The article buries a couple of good points in the middle of it’s incessant whining about gender roles, but by the time I got to them, I didn’t freaking care about any of those assholes anymore.

The EPA: Protecting industry from the big bad environment since 2001!

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Admit it. Environmentalists have gotten to you.

I am sorry, Keptin. I… must.. hug… this… YEEEEARRRGH!

Now those nature-humping bastards are trying to plant their ear-bugs in the kindly old folk at the Supreme Court home:

The Supreme Court is set to enter the debate on global warming for the first time next week when 12 states and several environmental groups argue that the Bush administration should regulate the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles.

The states are challenging a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency finding that, under the Clean Air Act, the agency does not have the authority for such regulation.
[...]
The states — Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, as well as the District of Columbia and American Samoa — accuse the EPA of trying to “ignore” and “distort” the language of the Clean Air Act.

See? We’ve already lost 12 states to the environmentalists’ devious cunningliciousness. We’re in danger of a hostile cultural takeover. How can he hope to protect ourselves should the judges fall?

Fortunately, the Bush Squad is on it.
(more…)

Who wants to go halfsies on an eight-ball and hit the autobahn?

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Seems Europe’s now the Wal-Mart of adult candy.

It’s true that if I’d never learned to type, it would be that much harder to mock you right now

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

There is no stronger weapon in the anti-feminist arsenal than that of making feminists defend the same damn obvious points again and again and again. And if you don’t believe me, check out my 300-comment thread where a guy whines repeatedly that a few wrongful rape convictions compared to an ocean of unreported rapes means that we totally have to treat rape victims as lying whores until proven otherwise by, oh, I dunno, four male witnesses or something before we can even think about convicting more guilty men. He declared himself the winner of this debate, I have the first 300-post threat at PAB, we all left happy.

Regardless, I’m sure Mrs. Alexandra had only the bestest, most sincere intentions when she asked a question that preys upon that tiny little subsection of humanity that wonders, in the back of its mind, if women actually have souls (answer: sorry guys, but it the question was never seriously posed and only became debate because pundits in the Middle Ages were just as good at missing the point as they are today. Not that this should discourage you from the debate at hand. There are no similarities. Trust me.)

Should we be educating women? You know, like they were men or something?

Education, especially female education has become a very controversial subject in the recent years.

There are two kinds of people who think that female education is controversial: people with agendas, and people with different agendas. Both of them hate women.
(more…)

The value of opinionated, decentralized, interconnected information dissemination

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

It’s no secret that Chris Clarke has grown weary of participating in the blogosphere, and maybe of the sphere itself. I’m too new to the format to presume I know exactly what he’s going through, but I do know how it feels to burn out on a writing format or forum. When you’re done, you’re done.

In his last post before taking a hiatus, Chris printed a comment left previously at Creek Running North. The commenter wonders whether blogs have any real value at all:

I’ve had the thought that blogs are “over.”

It’s a question worth posing on every blog:

What has all the good writing, the confirmation that there is really Someone Intelligent and Caring out there, actually accomplished—besides making us feel a little better for a few minutes?

Be honest about that. Even with the really big-time blogs. What real, solid gains—for people other than the big bloggers themselves, who enjoy a quasi-celebrity and a quasi-legitimacy—have been made because of blogs?

I’m not posing the question to put this blog down. It’s thoughtful, it’s well-written. But Chris himself mentions doubt about the real utility of blogs among his reasons to go on hiatus.

I think it’s a doubt worth addressing.

What is this medium for, exactly?

I thought that on this, the day of giving some thanks, I would give my thanks for the blogosphere by answering that question as best I can, albeit from a (relative) n00b’s perspective.

(more…)

Clash of the titans

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

snakegator.jpg

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

(clik on the pic to get to the bbc article)

The toxic savior

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

Apparently, the kids who failed to turn in their high school science textbooks have grown up, gotten religion, and decided Jesus was a mutant (thanks Lauren).

Praise the Lord, for his is the face that will greet you upon thine entrance into Heaven:

How Barney the Priest ruined Christmas

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

I’m going to shock you with something heretofore unthought and unspoken in the blogosphere: Dawn Eden…

hates fun.

Take Catholic mass. (Please.)

Catholic mass is where old people go to die in peace. It’s where parents go to smack children for not entering a trance for 75 consecutive minutes. It’s where songs about praising god are sung in the tone you use to chastise your dog for peeing on the rug.

If you don’t leave mass with sore knees, a vague sense of self-loathing, and almost no memory of what transpired over the last hour-plus, you aren’t a Catholic. And Dawn Eden and friends will have you know that if you try to spice up mass in any way, you might as well be dipping your wick in the wineblood.

Recently, Dawn proudly published a letter sent by one of her friends/readers/drones to a priest that dared conduct a Halloween mass in a Barney costume. The indignant author of the letter is a former Anglican priest who decided to go Catholic (presumably for the extra guilt) and states:

What I am trying to show you is that most of what is done on Halloween has NO Christian background and therefore, your use of costumes on the Sunday before All Hallows Eve was completely absurd and a degradation of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. You should be ashamed of yourself.

The envy is palpable. Barney’s more popular than Jesus, and he spends all kinds of alone time with small kids. Most priests must loathe that lucky fucking dinosaur. And I bet this former priest is absolutely kicking himself for not thinking of capitalizing on Barney’s advantages via the Halloween costume idea before leaving the cloth, and his jealousy has driven him into a holy rage against the man who did.


Don’t hate the player, hate the game!

Unfortunately, the former priest should’ve used better logic than what was quoted above, because I’m afraid there’s another little holiday that also has no Christian background. It involves cutting down and decorating a tree in a practice that was verboten for centuries. It uses mistletoe, a fertility charm of the Druids. It happens around the same time as the mid-December festival of Saturnalia, which already involved the giving of gifts. In fact, the 25th of December was the very popular birthdate already attributed to Mithra when the Church miraculously gave it to Jesus 353 years after he croaked.

So are we sure we should let our petty grudges lead us down the path of shaming people for celebrating holidays with no Christian background? Because if we do, I’m afraid you’ll have to give up a lot more than your Barney fantasies, dude.

Well I haven’t heard of it! Is it kinky and exciting?

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

The spam becomes more and more cryptic:

Name: Anthony | URI: xyz.info | IP: xx.xx.xx.xx | Date: November 21, 2006

Nice…

Yes, I’ve heard of “decaf.” What’s your point?

The URI had something to do with gold and rings, so I’m not sure if “decaf” is what the kids are calling it these days or if it was just something innocuous to get past the spamulator.

But we haven’t had an innuendo contest in awhile, so I ask the PAB community:

What is “decaf” and why do you call it that?

Don’t let a little racism get in the way of your holiday DVD shopping

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

Apparently, Jerry Seinfeld heard Shakes’ Sis say she won’t be buying any more Seinfeld DVDs after Michael Richards openly pined for the good ol’ days of lynching and public n-bombs.

Shakes’ Sis also has the footage from Richards’ apology on Letterman, which came during Seinfeld’s appearance on the show. At the end of the interview, Seinfeld says he wanted to help a friend apologize to the country.

*ahem*
Bullshit.

Yeah, sure, maybe Jerry felt a little bit of “hey, my unquestionably racist buddy needs a break on national TV.” Being a multimillionaire one-trick Three Stooges wannabe is a tough racket. If he doesn’t get a chance to pretend he’s not a bigot, he might not be able to swindle more money mailing in third-rate stand-up gigs (except in the kinds of towns that name their high school mascot “Johnny Reb”).

Seinfeld has to know many fans will feel the same way Shakes’ Sis did about buying Seinfeld products in the future, and I think he foresees the kind of dip in his earnings potential that might prevent him from purchasing Grenada as an anniversary present for another future child bride.

If he really wanted to help Michael Richards, Seinfeld would suggest the assclown find some way to use his pile of money to actually work with people in the African-American community in some meaningful way instead of just letting him come on air and say there’s racism in all of us and he’s sorry he’s been a bad boy. When Letterman asked what else Richards was going to do other than apologize, Richards clearly hadn’t even _considered_ doing anything other than “personal work,” which I take to mean enhancing the diversity in his life. Which probably means hiring more black folk around his mansion and/or raising the pay of any he might’ve inadvertantly “forked in the ass.”

No way around it: Seinfeld trumpeted the apology hoping to earn holiday cash from more than just the KKK’s Amazon wish list.

The good news is that I’m sure Wal-Mart will order an extra batch of the season where Kramer burns the Puerto Rican flag. Maybe they can even set up an in-store display showing Richards festively lynching with a wreath one of the many black actors never hired on Seinfeld’s lilly-white show.

Romney slathers himself in anti-gay cologne to enhance his attractiveness

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

How do you know you really hate TEH GAY? When you use your last few lame-duck days in office to stir up some good old-fashioned prejudice. Hell, everyone but Arizona’s doin’ it:

Gov. Mitt Romney, fighting to end same-sex nuptials in his waning days in office, yesterday mailed copies of the state constitution to 16 area lawmakers he said violated their oath of office by dodging a vote on a gay-marriage ban.

Romney plans to ask the state’s high court later this week to go around the Legislature and put the gay marriage ban directly on the ballot for voters to decide.

Pink triangles must really piss you off to waste those last few governating hours on the gay marriage ban.


Winners of the 2006 Mitt Romney “Most Adorable Tots” Award

What would possess a man to make such an asshole (tender, inviting asshole) of himself?

Targeted lawmakers slammed the outgoing GOP governor for trying to appease national voters as he weighs a run for president.

Ohhhh, I get it. Romney thinks that by hating on the rainbow he’ll resemble one of the Nazi plush toys to which so many frightened Christians cling at night.


Available at Wal-Mart this Christmas!

The actual scary development is that Romney thinks this is the issue his prospective voters care about most. He did not make a symbolic move to beef up security or denounce a bad war or cut government spending or protect corporations or pretend like he cared about small business or privatize/deregulate anything or kiss a baby. No, he hated on gays as publicly as possible, something he hadn’t made a point of doing previously.

Anti-gaiety appears to be what conservatives feel will be their sexiest play going into a presidential election.