Sorry folks- internet was down!
Archives for 2014
Open Thread: Douchecanoe of the Week
Jeff Hamilton, the “artist” calling himself Xvala:
… Los Angeles artist XVALA will showcase some uncensored images of the stars, among others, as part of his new exhibition, titled “No Delete,” next month at Cory Allen Contemporary Art’s The Showroom in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“We share our secrets with technology,” XVALA said in a statement describing the project. “And when we do, our privacy becomes accessible to others.”…
The exhibit immediately drew criticism and accusations of exploitation for displaying the stolen explicit photos in a public space. “We don’t condone anybody hacking or taking advantage of anyone. This is not about that. The artist is trying to make a statement,” said publicist Cory Allen, who owns the gallery….
XVALA doesn’t appear too concerned about consequences. “I hope we don’t need an attorney,” he told LA Weekly. “I’m taking them off the Internet and putting them into a new medium that is transformative. I’ll be using them as commentary.”…
Dude, just smear the canvases with the contents of your diaper. That’d get your “message” across just as effectively, and at least you’d be able to honestly say you’d contributed something to the work!
Memo to Republicans: There Aren’t Any Stirrups in a Pharmacy
The GOP strategy of telling as many fucking lies as possible between Labor Day and Election Day is off to a roaring start with this one:
During the North Carolina debate tonight, Republican nominee Thom Tillis trotted out a new line of attack that his fellow Republican Senate candidate in Colorado, Cory Gardner, tried out this week too: Win over women voters by trying to seem in favor of greater access to contraception by pushing for over-the-counter access.
The flat, simple response to this is that pharmacists don’t insert IUDs and they don’t give you Depo shots, and buying the pill over the counter is a hell of a lot more expensive than getting it paid for by insurance. From the coverage I’ve seen, it looks like the Udall campaign took a while to spit out that response to the Gardner campaign, but I’m not reading the local papers in Colorado.
One of the these stories quotes a political scientist who says that attacking opponents as flip floppers isn’t proven to work. Maybe, but I’m a big fan of the “Who’s the real Cory Gardner” flavor of flip flopper ads. “Flip flopping” is a silly political game that’s easy to ignore. “Who’s the real Cory Gardner” is more of a core question of whether you can trust anything that comes out of their mouths.
Memo to Republicans: There Aren’t Any Stirrups in a PharmacyPost + Comments (69)
Site Was Maintained
If you were trying to comment a few minutes ago and it didn’t work, it was due to a WordPress update in progress.
If you didn’t try to comment and are feeling some regrets over it, you can comment on this Open Thread.
Saturday Morning Open Thread
Via Buzzfeed:
Why would you do that to a cat? Why would you do that to a pizza?
We’re taking a short road trip today to visit relatives and plan to be home in time to watch the afternoon / evening college football games. Need to find a cheap yard sale / Craigslist TV for the outside tiki bar because SOMEONE forgot to cover the old one, and it rained sideways.
Last night, we went to the local roadhouse and watched people humiliate themselves via karaoke. I think the hardest (non-opera) karaoke tune to pull off would be Janice Joplin’s version of “Summertime.” I could maybe pull it off with sufficient quantities of Jim Beam and Marlboros, but I’ve never attempted it.
What are y’all up to today?
Late Night Cheap Laffs Open Thread
From the “timing is everything” department: io9 reports that “Saturday’s Doctor Who Has Had Its “Beheading Scene” Edited Out“.
And because I am always in favor of a good point&mock job, here’s Dave Weigel laughing at the Media Village Idiots — “Can’t Sleep! Caliphate Will Eat Me!“:
… Today, Beck is a well-paid advocate for whatever FreedomWorks is doing, and a part-time apologizer for his (far more popular) persona of the early Obama years, but in 2011 Beck scared the bejesus out of his viewers by speculating that a caliphate could grow like cancer to cover much of Africa, central Asia, and Europe.
“You have Somalia and Iran already in green,” said Beck. “Now, let’s add Tunisia. Former Tunisian government was considered one of the most secular and corrupt governments in the Arab world. The poor and the angry demanded changes. Most dangerous scenario is that radical Muslims seize power and put Sharia law into place.”…
Seriously, just read Beck’s monologue. The host speculated that the weak economies of Spain and Portugal and the Muslim populations of France and Great Britain left them exposed to some kind of Shariah revolution. This was what “caliphate” meant—not a gang of killers terrorizing parts of Iraq, but a green wave spreading across the world that the early Muslims almost conquered.
This is a pretty silly dispute—it started on Twitter, after all—but the overrating of ISIS is one of the driving trends in politics right now. As Michael Calderone points out, the New York tabloids are leading with ISIS news, with photographs taken from the propaganda videos the group shot while beheading journalists. There’s an election in two months, just as there was an election 12 years ago, in the run-up to the Iraq war. The dividends of convincing voters that their country is under attack, and the barbarians who killed James Foley could be on your lawn if President Obama doesn’t come up with a strategy, are bountiful and obvious…
Ciao, Joan Rivers
R.I.P. Joan Rivers, possibly the last great comic who wouldn’t have minded being labelled a comedienne. The curse of living to old age in the public eye is that, inevitably, one ends up viewed as a cuddly caricature — ask Mr. Samuel Clemens, aka “cranky Granpa Mr. Twain”…
My Joan Rivers thoughts, now in Storify form: https://t.co/rrHWxEFjen
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 5, 2014
James Wolcott, at Vanity Fair:
… There’s a lot to be said for living to an age where you don’t give a faint damn anymore, and for a generation or so that’s the age Joan Rivers was their entire lives. Generation X, Y, and into the Millennial beyond only know the Joan Rivers who was the red carpet scourge of E!, the host of her own show on QVC, the talk show guest and stand-up who stuck a hot fork into the pretensions and absurdities of tabloid celebrities, converting every day and every venue into her own personal Friars Roast. Those who came late to the broadcast that was her public life know little or nothing about the Joan Rivers who didn’t conduct herself like the fifth and most outrageous Golden Girl, who came up in the same Greenwich Village club scene as Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, appeared in the film version of John Cheever’s The Swimmer, and suffered enough personal and career blows to qualify for a Judy Garland purple heart: the falling out with Tonight show host Johnny Carson and the banishment into his permanent Siberia; the subsequent failure of her own late-night show, where she was introduced during the premiere to the brassy strains of “The Bitch Is Back”; the suicide of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, months after the show’s cancellation (he had been a producer on the show, the pressure of which, compounded by the heart medication he was on, may have deepened his clinical depression); and too many controversies to count that rocked her cockpit wherever she went. To anyone who came of hazy consciousness later than 1990, say, Joan Rivers has prowled the pop culture stage entirely as a self-caricature, a worthy foil for Miss Piggy of the Muppets…
Actual NY Times correction: "misstated the year of Ms. Rivers’s death. It was 2014, of course, not 1914."
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 5, 2014