Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The lights are all blinking red.

Come on, man.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

The words do not have to be perfect.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

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Archives for 2014

Sunday Garden Chat: Time to Start Planning for Next Spring

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comrade olaf Seed Savers Catalogs arriveFrom commentor Comrade Olaf:

I thought of the Garden Chat folk this afternoon when my Seed Savers Exchange seed catalog came in the mail. I thought I would share my mid-winter joy/spring longing with the BJ community as well as a great heirloom seed resource with a cool story (http://www.seedsavers.org/).

As you can see in the other two photos, their St. Valery variety of carrots did “alright” for us this past year.
comrade olaf St Valery Carrots 2014
comrade olaf St Valery Carrot 2014

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Because I’ve got more money than skill (not that I have that much money), and more skill than space, I don’t start seeds, I buy plants. I’m lucky to have a couple very good local nurseries, but I’ll spend many happy hours this winter pouring over Laurel’s Heirloom Tomato Plants, Territorial Seed Company, and Local Harvest‘s farm & garden section. For tools & other hard goods, I like Gardener’s Supply and A.M. Leonard (can’t beat their Root Pouches for cost or usability).

Where do you find the best garden seeds / plants / supplies?

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Open Thread: “We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom”

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Ursula K. Le Guin accepts the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19, 2014: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine rights of kings.”

Via Noah Berlatsky, at the Atlantic, dyspeptic about “When Science Fiction Stopped Caring About the Future“:

Most people think of science-fiction as being about the future; it’s a genre that explores possibilities, from Dr. Frankenstein’s invention of artificial life to Ursula K. Le Guin’s world populated by humans who have all evolved into single-gendered hermaphrodites. What might happen if? What could happen when? Sci-fi thinks about new technologies, new societies, and new ways of being, good or bad.

And then science-fiction fans turn to the new Star Wars trailer, and find, not the future, but a reshuffling of 30-year-old detritus. There are the storm troopers, there’s the Millennium Falcon, there’s Tatooine, there’s one of those cute droids we’re always looking for. There’s nary a pretense that we’re actually supposed to be imagining a different world. Instead, the pleasure is in reshuffling the old, worn-out bits…

It’s no accident that the most ubiquitous, overwhelming sci-fi sub-genre around is the one that has the least to do with the future: superheroes. Much of the superhero genre, in fact, is devoted to the fantasy that we don’t need to wait for technological marvels, but can experience them right here, right now. More, we can do so, magically, without the comfy old familiar world we know changing that much at all.

Tony Stark invents new magical energy sources three times before breakfast, but he uses them mostly to punch Thunder-Gods in the head, rather than, say, to completely transform the world’s technology and economy. Aliens land on earth, and rather than conquering England with H. G. Wells or forming an utterly new human race through tentacle-sex gene splicing a la Octavia Butler, they perform minor acts of altruism while taking their shirts off to reveal the pecs of Henry Cavill. Superheroes are sci-fi wonders without consequences, the future resolutely flattened by today…

I have been reading sf since I started ‘borrowing’ my dad’s pulp paperbacks in the early 1960s. (Groff Conklin‘s effect on my budding imagination cannot be overstated.) I came to science-fiction fandom in the early 1970s, when the genre was being invaded by alien minds — women (like LeGuin!), gays, people of color (Samuel R. Delany); the resentment of the white male Trufen ran deep and wordy. The one thing that unified our entire tribe, however, was the burning awareness that “real writers” considered all sf as a mental ghetto (Kurt Vonnegut: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since [Player Piano], and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”) The very idea that the author of Rocannon’s World or even Lathe of Heaven (serialized in Amazing Stories) might eventually be cited for her “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” would have been considered as unlikely, as implausible, as FTL travel. Things keep changing, whether or not we like the changes…

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Not-Football Open Thread

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IMG_0733.JPG

I took the above photo from a balcony at the Cuban Club in Ybor City a couple of years ago. It’s so terrible it transcends crappy phone photography to approach the realm of art. What are you up to this evening?

ETA: I think my dog may have broken her tail. She’s been acting weird for the last couple of hours…her tail is hanging straight down, and she’s been clingy. I thought maybe she was feeling sick. My kid came home a little while ago, and the dog didn’t wag her tail, which is HIGHLY unusual.

So we were examining the dog, seeing if her abdomen felt distended, etc., and my daugher said maybe the dog’s tail was the problem, not the symptom. When she felt the tail, the poor dog yelped! It’s the tail, alright.

So what do you do about an injured tail? I’m not sure I can find a vet open this time of night. Would it be safe to wait? The dog is lying down now and doesn’t seem to be in acute pain, but she’s not happy, poor critter.

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Open Thread: Learn to Code, TNR!

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Full disclosure: I currently have a subscription to The New Republic, because I was offered a loss-leader price, and I wanted unmetered / print access to writers like Alec MacGillis, John Judis, and Julia Ioffe. I’ve had TNR subs, on and off, going back to the mid-80s — their Bush I parodies were a comfort during the first Gulf War — which I cancelled whenever the latest editorial team did something particularly, egregiously terrible: the Bell Curve dishonesty, or Michael Kelly going off the rails, or giving Tony Snow a platform. The magazine’s always been a vanity project, but it’s also published a lot of great writing. So I’ve treated it like a grocery chain — when they have enough brands I like, TNR gets my business; when the latest crew of MBAs dump “my” products and reconfigure all the aisles, I switch to a different chain.

Now MacGillis and Judis and Ioffe have jumped ship, at least temporarily:

… The narrative you’re going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. Don’t believe them. The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine’s founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR’s web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even board for going monthly. We’re not afraid of change. We have always embraced it.

As for the health of long-form journalism, well, the pieces that often did the best online were the deeply reported, carefully edited and fact-checked, and beautifully written. Those were the pieces that got the most clicks…

Dave Weigel has a smart take on “How #Disruption Broke The New Republic”:

… Hughes was destined to accrue more media coverage than the average owner or editor. He was a young, married, gay tycoon, and there hadn’t been many of those. He’d been credited with some of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign web success—a victory that claimed a thousand fathers—so he was an easy target for anyone who wanted to bemoan the magazine’s swing away from publishing pieces liberals hated. (Some held up well. Some, like the Iraq War advocacy and Bell Curve excerpt, less well. And then there was the endorsement of Joe Lieberman for president …)…

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Saturday Correspondence

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Here are a couple of recommendations via email that I thought you might find interesting:

  • Guest poster Vida Loca recommends this piece at Booman Tribune, and especially this comment by Tarheel Dem. The topic is how white supremacy is almost acceptable today.
  • Friend of the blog Brian Glucroft sends a couple of pieces about China’s new electric police vehicle, which is a strange blend of Popemobile and Ferguson-style armored riot truck.

Open thread for the non-sporting life.

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College Football Open Thread

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College football is winding down, and after this week’s conference championships, the inaugural playoff picture will become less murky — or maybe it’ll be thrown into turmoil. We know the Ducks are in after walloping Arizona yesterday; the only question is at what seed. Here are my picks for today’s games; less-than-rational rationales below:

cfb_picks_1206

The Horned Frogs will win because they’re the gott-damn HORNED FROGS! I think Alabama beats Mizzou. I like Mizzou better, but I don’t think they’ll win, and as an SEC gal, I’m sorta pulling for ‘Bama because I think they’ll be a stronger conference rep in the playoffs.

I really want Georgia Tech to beat the fucking ‘Noles because I hate the fucking ‘Noles. But the fucking ‘Noles tend to play badly enough to toy with the emotions of their haters and then win in the end. That will happen one more time today, dashing my schadenfreude yet again.

I think Boise State, Houston and Tulane will prevail over their opponents. Just a feeling. I am pulling for Oklahoma over Oklahoma State purely for the sake of front-page colleague Soonergrunt.

Baylor beats K-State because they have a better coach. I’m hoping Wisconsin knocks off the Buckeyes because fuck The Ohio State University, and I think there’s a good chance of that outcome because OSU lost its QB.

Southern Meth vs UConn — good lord, they both suck. I think Southern Meth wins just because the poor bastards have lost every game this year, so they’re due.

Marshall vs Louisiana Tech — I picked Marshall just because. What say you, football fans?

PS: Thoughts on the new Gators coach, Jim McElwain? I think he’s a solid hire. At a minimum, I was hoping for someone who knows the SEC and has successful head coaching experience. McElwain fits the bill.

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