Please proceed from Hayekian principles.
Ain’t too proud to bleg
My therapist said to stop reading Bobo (she said he’s like a disease without any cure…don’t think you’re clever for saying the next line is true too btw), but I am now engaged in an epic battle to make my totebagger uncle stop taking him seriously. Beyond the classic Sasha Issenberg take down from the Philadelphia magazine, are they are any other definitive anti-Bobo treatises you are aware of? Any from official-looking places? My uncle isn’t the type to take it seriously if it’s from a place with a name like “Balloon Juice” or “No More Mister Nice Guy”.
Artists in Our Midst: Holiday Shopping Edition
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There are any number of gifted artists and crafters among the Balloon Juice readership. If you are one of them, this is the place to add a comment linking to your paintings, needlearts, sculpture, photography, music, cooking, house-building, graphic novel/comix, etc. website or contacts. If your highest art form is shopping, here’s your chance to browse for gifts without having to put your shoes on… and you can buy stuff for other people, too!
Pictures here by commentor Tim, who gets pride of place because he demanded it. From his website:
Legendary pop entertainment icons such as Madonna, Bette Midler, Judy Garland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Cher, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe, re-imagined in bright acrylic paint, enriched with pastels, charcoal, pencil, and pigmented glazes.
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I often surround my finished paintings with solid, industrial-inspired frames which I design and embellish with steel spikes, nails, chains, ceramic spheres and hand painted metallic highlights in silver, copper, bronze, gold and pewter over rich black-lacquered wood.
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My celebrity art has been evolving ever since I began making it just three years ago after leaving a 20- year career in public relations and advertising. In the beginning the portraits were exaggerated, cartoon-inspired caricatures of a sort. Then they took on a more realistic aspect but maintained an illustration/graphic novel feel, at which point I began to refer to them as “Portraicatures.” I felt they were something between a representational portrait and a caricature…
So, readers… What’s in your studio?
Added: If FYWP is skrwing your link, send it to me at [email protected] (or click on the link near the top of the right-hand column). The farce is strong tonight…
Artists in Our Midst: Holiday Shopping EditionPost + Comments (104)
My local paper
Our local newspaper is a Gannett paper and, as much as I worry about smaller newspapers disappearing, I won’t be that sorry to see it go:
North Korea attacks the South … a tense run-up to Congress’s lame-duck session … a cliffhanger local Congressional election on the verge of resolution … implications for special session of State Legislature … controversy over airport body scanners … there’s a scout troop short a child, Krushchev’s due at Idlewild — and here’s November 23rd’s top headline in what passes for a newspaper in Rochester.
Maybe I just don’t understand media very well, but I just don’t see how some bs story that is probably already on every bs pseudo-news website in the world can really drive readership.
By chance, last week, while driving to work, I listened to a local reporter talk on the radio about a slow response to a shooting, the new police chief, speculation about who the new mayor will be etc., all in mind-numbing detail…and it was mesmerizing, like listening to an episode of the “The Wire”, even though I understood only half of it. That has to be more interesting to a lot of people than reading about boomers’ sex lives (right?).
Greetings, All
Hello Balloon Juice (cue Robin Williams.)
It is a thrill to be here; this is the blog that has kept me as close to sane as I can hope for for the last several years, and I think I’m going to need all I can get of the front pagers and the community to make it through what seems to be bearing down on us.
So, first, of course, my thanks to John Cole, who for all his professed misanthropy, has managed to create such a fine village here, and to whom I’m deeply indebted for the keys. Also a shout out to Tim F. – almost the first reader of my home site, The Inverse Square Blog, whose support early and late for my writing there I am very grateful. And also, too, to y’all who gave me and Angry Black Lady such an enthusiastic welcome last night.
I’ve got my first real post ready to go, and it will come up immediately after this. (As predicted in last night’s comment thread, I’m just holding ABL’s coat on that one, but that’s not a bad place to start, not at all.)
But just so you know a bit of where I come from, here’s the quick background: Age, 52 (unpossible, but there it is), married, one kid, living in or around Boston, proud servant to one feline overlord, Tikka, aka Kitten Tikka Masala.
We picked up Tikka at the Animal Rescue League, aged about 12 weeks, and a vet friend of ours thinks he was seriously feral for those first months. In any event, if he doesn’t like your looks he’ll attempt field surgery on any extremity in reach.
You have been warned.
He’s the perfect cat to me, however, except in his expectation of regular 4:30 a.m. feedings.
My day job has me teaching science writing at MIT. It should go without saying, but in case it doesn’t, any views I express here are mine alone, and can’t be blamed on anyone else over at 77 Mass. Ave, nor on the Institute itself.
As for what I’ve actually done/do with my time – I’ve spent the better part of three decades variously committing journalism, writing books and making documentary television, mostly about science, its history and its context.
Oh – and I’m as a close to an obligate liberal as you can be: actually born between Telegraph and College Avenues in the People’s Republic of Berkley, in whose public schools I was educated through high school (go Yellow Jackets!), from whence I passed to a series of other towns in which no real Americans could possibly live. If anyone is auditioning for the role of sane conservative around here, it ain’t me.
Again, thanks for having me here, John and all and sundry – and I’m looking forward to the usual Balloon Juice full and frank exchanges of views.
And last: Angry Black Lady’s Macallan 18 is not safe from me. But I have not put the crayon line to mark the level of my Dalmore 15, so turn and turn about’s fair play.
(Same plea as ABL here too: still getting used to the tags and all that. Corrections and guidance always welcome.)
Rahm Touched Me Here
Thanks to John and my friend DougJ, I’m going to be posting my barely literate musings here. I’ll write a little more about myself in a later post, but I want to start with one of the strangest things I’ve heard in, well, perhaps forever.
Eric Massa, my Congressman for about 12 more hours, had his Dick Nixon 1962 moment yesterday on a radio show he co-hosts on Sundays (audio here). Highlights:
- House leadership inspired one of his aides to make an ethics complaint so they could get him to resign, all because they needed to lower the bar to get HCR passed by one vote (Massa’s resignation makes the number needed to pass 216 instead of 217).
- Rumors that he’s teh gay in the Navy are all misunderstandings of an incident where Massa walked in on a crewmate masturbating in his bunk.
- Steny Hoyer lied about Massa’s ethics investigation.
- A naked Rahm Emanuel confronted Massa in the showers of the House gym, and Massa and he also had a loud, expletive-filled argument over the phone about his “No” vote on HCR.
The incident that Massa believes sparked the investigation happened at a wedding reception for one of his staff members. When being razzed about possibly banging one of the bridesmaids he had just danced with, Massa “tousled the hair” of one of his male staffers and said “What I really ought to be doing is fucking you.”
It’s a strange end to a promising career, but those of us who have been watching him over the years always knew he had something like this in him.
Update: Just to be clear, by “always had something like this in him”, I meant a crazypants rant, not the harassment stuff.
Reading Recommendation (Not Political)
Because there are a number of Terry Pratchett fans here, and some suspense /mystery readers as well, I would like to recommend Castle Freeman Jr.’s novel ALL THAT I HAVE. It’s a little book, only 165 pages, because that’s exactly enough pages to tell the story (stories) it wants to tell. Imagine Sam Vimes as a Vermont sheriff, responsible for 17 towns in a mostly-depopulated corner of a thinly-settled state — or maybe the son of Captain Vimes and Esme Weatherwax, serving and protecting Lancre and a double-handful of similar hamlets in his own remote corner of the Ramtops.
Sheriff Lucian Wing (as he’s known in this corner of the metaverse) has to deal with a bunch of very dangerous people From Away, who are looking for something the local bad boy may have taken from them, while dealing with various domestic complications caused by the fact that very few people can be content with exactly what they’ve got. This doesn’t sound humorous, but (as told in Sheriff Wing’s dry voice) it’s very funny. And it doesn’t sound tragic, although many of Wing’s anecdotes concern all the sorrows of the human condition. It’s one of those rare books you read quickly, because you can’t wait to see how it comes out, and then go back and start re-reading immediately, because you’re afraid you might have missed something the first time through.
I think I picked it up on a recommendation from a Boston Globe review, comparing ALL THAT I HAVE to one of Donald Westlake’s novels. Which is a pretty good comparison, if you can imagine one of Parker’s plots narrated by Dortmunder. It’s available through Amazon, as are a couple more novels and some essays by Castle Freeman Jr., which I am already starting to acquire.
(Late-night test post, not related to anything in particular, just to see if I can get this thing off the ground without getting caught in the trees.)