For the past day or two, I’ve been seeing some very inexplicable-even-by-twitter-standards stuff on the tweetstreams. David Roth at Vice Sports finally explained this new “thing” for me, and you:
It’s greatly to Twitter’s credit that no one has yet figured out a productive use for it… It is a place to flush our puns and dispose of our surplus thoughts and spoonerisms, and that is valuable, but there is the question of what all those words are actually worth. Are they just millions of plastic bags clotting the virtual ocean? Or are they poems, each of them, waiting to be read as such?
Ha, just kidding, it’s the “millions of plastic bags” thing for sure. But the site Poetweet is doing its best to advance the idea that there’s some poetry hidden in our Twitter feeds, and uses an algorithm (presumably) to mine old tweets, chop them into iambic pentameter, and turn them into poems. If you can handle soaking in your own fragmented mundanities, you should absolutely try it yourself…
Since I am only a twit-lurker (I can get into enough trouble just with FYWP, thanks) I tried feeding Poetweet “inspiration” from our Blogmaster…
by John Cole
Out of bounds to get to the one.
Is too small for my fat fingers.
By next week he will act alone.
In next generation power sources.
This is on SNL, but it is horrible
That Judy Miller’s WMD pieces.
Detroit got J O B JOBBED.
Condemn the turkey to death…
.
(Yes: If this, my fellow Juicers, cannot attract a bigfooting puppy-update post from Himself…. well, I’ve done my best.)
Open Thread: Social Media Kidz, These DaysPost + Comments (130)
Before we go patting Mark Udall and Diane Feinstein on the back…
Remember that they knew all of the stuff in the torture report for years, and they did and said NOTHING. Feinstein was in the “gang of eight,” as the Chair of the Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since 2009. She’s known all or most of this stuff since then. A couple other notable members of that group are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.
As for Udall, he has been on the Senate floor today as a couple of earlier posts by John and Anne Laurie pointed out. But he’s been on the SSCI for at least the last two years, and was very involved in the research on the torture report.
It’s good that an executive summary of the report has seen the light of day. It’s important for us to know what’s being done in our names, and I seriously doubt we’d have gotten actual information from the Republicans after they take over late next month. It would be very nice for the Politicians who oversaw torture programs and the lawyers who twisted the law to claim it was legal to be punished, but I’m not holding my breath. The prime difference between Charles Graner and Dick Cheney is rank, after all.
Having said that, why, if this report shocks the consciences of those who’ve read it, are we only seeing the exec summary, and why only now? Udall waits until now when there’s no risk to him doing this. Well, better late than never for your ideals, I suppose, even if it’s to demand a couple of people resign and not, as he said he would, to enter the text of the report into the Record. Feinstein is as safe as a Democratic Senator can get. She could have read the actual contents of the entire report into the Congressional Record at will at any time and nobody could have stopped her and there would’ve been no cost to her at the ballot box in 2018.
Everything I’ve just said above applies to the other Democrats who’ve served on the SSCI in particular and to a lesser extent on the House Committee on Intelligence since 2001. We still don’t have effective oversight of the CIA or the NSA or the rest of the Intelligence community because our representatives in Congress are complicit in keeping these secret. If Congressional oversight is the mechanism by which we exercise control over our government, we are being sadly failed by the people that we’ve sent up there to provide that oversight. And the Republicans are every bit as complicit, but being Republicans, it was absolutely predictable that they’d actively work against the interests of the general public on issues like this, and the few who aren’t are notable for that.
And lastly, look in the mirror. After 9/11, the vast majority of the American public was demanding that the government do whatever had to be done to keep another mass-casualty attack from taking place. A lot of people who otherwise counted themselves as liberals supported the Bush administration in their taking a free hand to do whatever the hell they wanted in those early years. And while Liberals began to peel off of that support within a couple of years, it wasn’t even as Iraq dragged on, and Abu Ghraib first exposed some of the ugliness did the majority of our country begin to express doubts and question what we were doing there. And in fact, it wasn’t until after Hurricane Katrina landed on our own shores and we witnessed the full extent of their incompetence and mendacity where they couldn’t hide it that the majority of the American public finally began to admit that Bush and Cheney and their minions had lied us into an unwinnable war on the other side of the world. And our Congress, including the heroes of many people here, supported them for much of their agenda. The USA PATRIOT Act passed a Democratic-held Senate, and a Democratic-held Senate gave retroactive immunity to the NSA and private corporations that assisted them later on. These were our elected representatives that did these things or allowed them to happen. They are our will made whole, and their acts and things, dark and light, are ours. Before we spend too much time wallowing in the outrage bath, we would do well by our children and our ancestors to remember that.
Before we go patting Mark Udall and Diane Feinstein on the back…Post + Comments (108)
Fables Of The Reconstruction: Cue The World’s Tiniest Violin Edition — Plus: Bonus For A Good Time On The Cape!
Attention conservation notice (term stolen from Cosma): What follows is mostly purely Levenson-domicile maundering. The good stuff is at the end; great art by someone I love. Now you know.
I’ve gone silent on our kitchen renovation farrago, for the obvious and very good reason: it’s the eternal return of the same, and thus boring. Everyone who’s lived through (or, FSM-forbid, DIY’d) a major house project knows the one universal truth: it sucks. It’s like parachuting without the thrill: August 1 at 7 a.m. we were riding a perfectly functional airplane had a perfectly functional kitchen. By 8:30 we’d jumped.
And the usual followed: the house is filled with dust; we’ve broken so many glasses in our makeshift sink that we’ve finally given up and gone to plastic; and as the weeks go by the house looks more like a communal grad-student flop than I ever thought I’d inhabit again.
But there’s hope. Yesterday — all in one day! — saw the transition from this:
To this:
Of course, the resulting upsurge in that sweet feeling that suggests, yes, this may someday end, is “hope” only in the sense that Robin Williams describe here. (Round about 1:48 for the reference.) Yeah, the room finally looks more or less like a room again — but now we’re going head on into the fiddly stage, where two or more skilled craftspeople will nudge something or other into some precise configuration that takes hours to work out, for an indefinite and seemingly unending future. Again…tiny violin time.
Never mind. We still cook — this week I managed a lamb stew, even, browning the meat on the gas grill — in the midst of a thunder squall — before finishing everything else on 12o0 watt burner on the hot plate:
Tasted fine.
There’s HOOOOOOOOPE (18 f**king times!)
Meanwhile, of course, life continues to do its thing — and given that, can I draw your attention to something that makes me very happy, and that I think (as I should) shows real power as a work of art.
That would be the new installation show my wife, Katha Seidman, is about to open with two other artists at the Cotuit Center for the Arts — calling all Cape Cod-proximate Balloon Juicers!.
Inspired by and in conversation with Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (to be seen at MOMA in New York), the installation opens tonight. Details on the card:
Lots more on the installation (with photos of both the stages of creation and some of the more sculptural elements) can be found at its Facebook page.
I’ve seen it go through all the stages of gestation, from sketches and models to huge bits and pieces, some of which we trialled on our lawn. It’s (in my no-doubt utterly unbiased opinion) a deeply conceived and executed work of art, powerful as spectacle and more so as I’ve lingered with what its elements say in themselves and with and through each other. So, if you happen to be passing anywhere near that way in the next month, check it out.
Last, just for grins, here’s a picture of me, singing cooking in the rain:
And now…open thread.
The Insanity Continues
I really wish we had a functioning political establishment that would deal with stuff like this:
Speaking of insanity, I don’t know if it is the weather changes or what, but I have been having insane and extremely vivid dreams the past few days. Last night my dream was about dropping my toothbrush into the toilet and then having to go through sheer hell to buy a new one. I had to go to 40 stores in my dream and every time I thought I was close to getting one someone would buy it before me. I even remember the clerks saying there was a run on toothbrushes (and you all can insert your own damned WV jokes here). Finally, I got to a store and it was stocked wall to wall with toothbrushes, and then I couldn’t make a decision on which one to buy. That’s when I woke up. Oh, and the colors have just been so vivid. In the final store, I remember the toothbrushes were so brightly colored it looked like a big bag of jelly beans- not that cheap Walmart shit, Jelly Belly or stay home.
Must be a glitch in the matrix.
State of Play
Do you have any idea how hard it is to deal with addiction and get treatment in America? I have gold plated insurance, am comfortably middle class, and I have been going through sheer hell trying to get into a facility. It’s almost like you have to show up with a syringe full of heroin dangling from your arm and a crack pipe in your mouth to get anyone to take you seriously.
A while back, I went to my general practitioner and tried to get into a rehab facility. He was caught off guard and sent me to some place which was basically a level 4 detox facility (this meant nothing to me when I was first told it). Regardless, I had made the plans, packed my bags, gone to go be admitted, and the doctor there told me there was no way in hell he was admitting me because this was a place for court ordered detox of people who were in a far different place than me, criminal, and basically the people drinking MD under a bridge for 30 years or smoking crack rock and holding people up at gas stations. Basically, he told me that under no circumstances was this the place for me. I’d set aside the time for work. Showed up, got rejected.
Spent another couple months trying to get a place that was right, covered by insurance, and amenable to my time schedule. Found a place in Ft. Myers, Florida, and was getting ready to go, but then they flaked out on me and would never send me proof that my insurance would cover it. I’m not jumping into that kind of scam, especially in Rick Scott’s Florida. Not to mention, I sweat in a meat locker, and Ft. Myers in July sounds like my own personal hell.
So then I just said fuck it. I’m just going with the VA, even though I have private insurance. It’s close, veterans (who bitch more than anyone on the planet) consistently rate their care at the VA higher than civilians rate their hospital experiences, plus there would be a comfort level there because I was around folks I understand. Spent a couple days making arrangements with people at the VA in Pitt, they told me what to bring, packed everything up, and went, thinking I was making a big step.
Guess what. In 2003, under our favorite President, for whom I voted twice, they changed the rules of eligibility. Because I am comfortably middle class and have a retirement account, even though I am a veteran with a combat patch, I am not eligible because I have too much money. At this point, I’m just like, you have to be fucking shitting me.
Get home, called the local hospitals. None of them have facilities for rehab, or if they do, they are all outpatient and they basically give you aspirin for headaches from withdrawal. Called a number of places, and it was all the same.
Finally, I called a hospital which accepts my insurance, and I can’t even set up a rehab appointment, I have to go through their emergency room, and then they will refer me to the clinic. So that is the plan this weekend.
Why is this so fucking hard? Am I just incompetent or is it this fucking bad everywhere? You’d think they would make it much easier for people to voluntarily check in to rehab. I mean, after all, I’m a drunk. A high functioning one, but a drunk nonetheless. Sometimes I cut myself while slicing tomatoes or doing basic everyday things because… I’m fucking drunk. Why is it that getting into rehab requires a fucking PhD in bullshit and the equivalent of a tax attorney’s knowledge of procedure? Isn’t getting clean tough enough? Jeebus.
I’m winding down now. Was really psyched to start today and get shit done, and got home dejected and have just been keyed up and pissed off all night. Not to mention the bullshit of the day we discussed earlier.
Weird fucking world we live in.
Generic Open Thread
Randomness.
Watching the Leftovers. It’s kind of interesting.
Ok, this isn’t that much of a spoiler for True Blood, so I don’t feel bad sharing it before West Coast peeps watch, but was I the only one who immediately yelled “Why the fuck are you shooting a BB gun at a bear?”
One of the things that is super funny about my pets is that whenever I have company, they all have their favorite people. Kind of like a hierarchy of who they love the most. Steve and Shawn are inseparable, but when Harry and Chatman are over, Lily is draw to Harry, Rosie to Chatman. Rosie also really loves Walt, but there is one man who is Rosie’s #1. My fraternity brother Christion. As soon as he comes over, she is on his lap and just with him the entire time he is here.
Rosie is still kind of fucked up, even though she has been here for several years. She is still a little bit bipolar with everyone, and Shawn and I think it was because she was abused by someone she really trusted. With most people, including me, if you rub her the wrong way or upset her she’ll go all Snarls Barkley on your ass. She never bites, but she lets you know to back the fuck up. Things are not kosher atm.
Sometimes she actually gets so happy when she is having good time that I think her wires get crossed and she starts getting snarly, and you just look at her and say “What are you doing, silly girl?” and give her a second and she snaps out of it. I really do think she was traumatized and was not given a stable environment, and yellings were as random as pettings.
But she never does that with Christion, and is draped on him or tucked up next to him all night long. I seriously think they are soul mates, but I think most of it is that he moves so slowly and cautiously, as opposed to me, who goes banging around the house like a cave man.
At any rate, Christion fell asleep on the couch the other night, and as soon as she knew he was asleep and defenseless, she draped herself across his lap and stood guard. Anyone even looked at him or got close to him got the snarls.
I dunno if you can tell the murderous intent in her eyes in the second photo, but she was totally resource guarding there. You got within three feet of her man Christion, and you got fangs and the clear message to back off, beeoch.
It’s just so cool how animals pick their humans.
I need to go the fuck to sleep
Got to bed last night at midnight after a fifteen hour day working on next year’s Exchange filing plan. My son then woke up at 1:30 in the morning and would not get back to sleep until 4:40 as he had one of those spurts of putting things together for the first time as he started on three and four world sentences that cracked him up. And today looks like another sixteen hour day.
Fuck!