Picked that yesterday and am letting it ripen a little more on the table- was terrified the varmints would get my first or I would have let it stay on the vine longer.
I have to get some work done and hit the nursery, so I will see you all later.
by John Cole| 35 Comments
This post is in: Garden Chats
Picked that yesterday and am letting it ripen a little more on the table- was terrified the varmints would get my first or I would have let it stay on the vine longer.
I have to get some work done and hit the nursery, so I will see you all later.
by John Cole| 56 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Our Failed Media Experiment
There is significant overlap between Americans who identify as supporters of the Tea Party movement and those who identify as conservative Republicans. Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene.
No shit. That won’t stop our media from pretending this is some new and emergent force in politics. No one could have predicted a movement funded by the Koch brothers and initiated by Dick Armey was actually just another Republican effort.
by Randinho| 162 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
What color will the winning team be wearing? Orange or canary yellow?
Two of the last three times the Oranje have been eliminated (1994 and 1998) was by the Canarinhos.
by DougJ| 44 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Media
The New Yorker is the only magazine, other than various alcohol-related periodicals, I’ve ever regularly subscribed to. I don’t like it as much as I used to — there are too many favorable profiles of VSPs and CEOs and too few of weirdos, trouble-makers, fuggers, and thieves (aw, but they’re cool people). I already knew that it used to be more smart-assed many years ago, long before I started reading it, but I was struck by how much its early duels with Time magazine sounds like the blogger/establishment media arguments of today:
Time Inc. once sent out a flyer: “TIME has given such attention to the development of the best narrative English that hundreds of editors and journalists have declared it to be the greatest creative force in modern journalism.” Ford’s “The Making of a Magazine” included an exposé called “The Construction of Our Sentences”: “Before a sentence may be used in THE NEW YORKER it must be cleaned and polished. The work of brightening these sentences is accomplished by a trained editorial staff of 5,000 men named Mr. March.” The New Yorker once ran a cartoon with the caption “But, Lester, is it enough just being against everything that ‘Time’ magazine is for?”
This story about a nasty New Yorker profile of Henry Luce, who owned Time Inc. (which included Fortune and Life) really rang my bell:
[A] brutal parody of Timestyle, called “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce”: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” He skewered the contents of Fortune (“branch banking, hogs, glassblowing, how to live in Chicago on $25,000 a year”) and of Life (“Russian peasants in the nude, the love life of the Black Widow spider”). He made Luce ridiculous (“ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce”), not sparing his childhood (“Very unlike the novels of Pearl Buck were his early days”), his fabulous wealth (“Described too modestly by him to Newyorkereporter as ‘smallest apartment in River House,’ Luce duplex at 435 East 52nd Street contains 15 rooms, 5 baths, a lavatory”), or his self-regard: “Before some important body he makes now at least one speech a year.” He announced the net profits of Time Inc., purported to have calculated to five decimal places the “average weekly recompense for informing fellowman,” and took a swipe at Ingersoll, “former Fortuneditor, now general manager of all Timenterprises . . . salary: $30,000; income from stock: $40,000.” In sum, “Sitting pretty are the boys.”
This led to a confrontation between Henry Luce and Harold Ross, the then-editor of the New Yorker:
“There’s not a single kind word about me in the whole Profile,” Luce said. “That’s what you get for being a baby tycoon,” Ross said. “Goddamn it, Ross, this whole goddamned piece is malicious, and you know it!” Ross paused. “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.”
Far too few media elites believe in this kind of malice anymore.
This post is in: Humorous, Media, Open Threads
Justin Halpern’s twitter-stream Sh*t My Dad Says has (of course) been turned into a dead-trees book. Luke Jennings, at the Guardian online, is amused but not impressed:
When 28-year-old writer Justin Halpern split up with his girlfriend, he moved back in with his parents in San Diego, California. His father, a specialist in “nuclear medicine”, did his best to be accommodating. “All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don’t leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang.”…
__
Justin Halpern started posting his father’s sayings online. Then he started a Twitter page, “Sh*t My Dad Says”, and within a short time literary agents were calling, TV producers inviting him on to their shows, and reporters asking him for interviews. A book came out, and earlier this month it hit No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, edging out Laura Bush’s memoir. When Halpern told his father this, the reaction was phlegmatic. “Trust me,” Halpern Sr said of Bush. “She doesn’t give a fuck. She could have you killed.”
[…] __
From the sparse handful of details vouchsafed us in this glib, self-engrossed account, Halpern Sr comes across as an extraordinary and heroic figure. Born into extreme rural poverty, he qualifies as a doctor, serves in Vietnam and goes on to become a distinguished cancer specialist, whose lectures are attended by oncologists in their hundreds. If his world view is that of a scatalogically inclined Samuel Beckett, he’s earned the right to it, and his pronouncements are anything but shit, or even Sh*t. When he says, of his son’s friends: “I like them. I don’t think they would fuck your girlfriend, if you had one,” you’re hearing the voice of a man who’s seen too much to bother with the niceties.
__
By contrast, there’s almost nothing to get to grips with in the son’s story. By his mid-20s he’s worked shifts at Hooters, a catering franchise involving greasy chicken wings and waitresses in high-cut shorts, and decided to “try his hand” at screenwriting. Moving to LA, he finds no takers, a fact that will come as no surprise to readers of this book, though it stokes Halpern’s own neurotically inflated sense of victimhood. Back in San Diego, he tries to move in with his girlfriend and, quelle surprise, she dumps his slacker ass.
__
At which point he posts the dog’s asshole quote and the multimedia phenomenon kicks in, with Halpern Sr, possibly suspecting that lightning will not strike twice, refusing to take a cent of the proceeds. Earlier this week I glanced at Halpern’s blog and was amazed to learn that his father, years ago, wrote a book about his time in Vietnam, which he, Halpern, has not yet read. Was this indolence, I wondered, or the apprehension that a real understanding of his father’s past might expose the whole Sh*t My Dad Says exercise for what it is?
by Randinho| 44 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Five teams came and four remain from CONMEBOL, the South American football conference. Thirteen teams came from UEFA, the European football conference and three remain. What can account for the differences?
I believe the key lies not only in the quality of the players (bear in mind that one third of the players on Inter Milan’s squad come from Brazil or Argentina, four each), but also the qualification process. While the comparison may be unfair, the ten CONMEBOL teams play two games against each other and while there are minnows in this conference (Venezuela has never qualified and Bolivia tries to schedule its home games in La Paz to count on wins), they do all compete against each other.
UEFA, due to the size of the conference, broke its fifty-four team conference into nine groups of six, with a ew competitive teams in the same group against teams such as Andorra, San Marino and the Faeroe Islands. Germany, for example, qualified out of a group that included Russia, Finland, Wales, Liechtenstein and Azerbaijan. Other than Russia, Wales is the only team out of that group that has ever qualified for the World Cup, and they haven’t done so since 1958.
So, what could UEFA do to make the qualification more competitive and perhaps infusing the process with a bit more vigor?
Why Are South American Teams Doing So Well?Post + Comments (44)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 54 Comments
This post is in: I Smell a Pulitzer!, Our Failed Media Experiment, WTF?
Kathleen Parker shows us why she deserved that Pulitzer:
No, I’m not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed.
[…] Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan. […] Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.
I’m not a DC columnist, so I’m not qualified to judge testosterone levels from speeches and policy statements. Even so, I don’t see a hell of a lot of robust masculinity in politicians of either party. If Parker (and MoDo) are looking for wimps, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and Joe Lieberman, just to name three of many, seem like better targets than Obama.
(via)