My football team is sucking in their Bowl game and my desktop pc just blew up. Cuz I have two grand just lying around to buy another.
Might go on the bottle early.
This post is in: Open Threads
My football team is sucking in their Bowl game and my desktop pc just blew up. Cuz I have two grand just lying around to buy another.
Might go on the bottle early.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Rare Sincerity
Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has posted his Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012 — “The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves”. I count fifty-seven different submissions, and those I’ve seen have been excellent, so anyone whining that there’s never enough fresh posts here at BJ looking for new reads should hie themselves over and start clicking.
No, there does not seem to be a Balloon Juice entry — although Tom Levenson did send in a link for his Inverse Square blog. So did a bunch of BJ commentors who have their own blogs, including WereBear, Mustang Bobby, Southern Beale, and J. of J-Two-O. Either Mr. Cole was too modest to self-promote, or he figured one of his underbloggers would get around to it — you decide.
But seriously: Good stuff! Go Look!
(And incidentally, don’t we all wish Jon Swift/Al Weisel had been around to give us the Definitive Willard Mitt Romney Concession Speech?
Recommended Reading (Bloggerific Edition)Post + Comments (19)
This post is in: Open Threads
Not much going on here. Working on the boy’s car today. New headlights and headlight mounting bracket and wiring harness. For all of our talk about me helping him fix this car up, it’s been mainly me working on the car by myself and him occasionally coming outside to ask how it’s going. And I’m really enjoying the alone time as it turns out, so it’s not really a loss.
The LG 47″ LCD TV in our living room has died. It’s under warranty, though so repairs will be free, which is fortunate. It’s under warranty though, so I have no excuse to go buy the 65″ LED TV I really want, which is unfortunate.
What’s going on in your corners of the world today?
This post is in: Open Threads, Rare Sincerity
Cord Jefferson is a writer worth reading, if you can catch him — I first noticed his byline at Wonkette, I think, or maybe Slate, and places like Gawker. To get you in the right mood for the weekend, here’s a lovely year-end memento from The Awl:
I have never been a physically daring man. I’m afraid of heights such that my palms begin to sweat when I go up high flights of stairs in shopping malls. I’m awful at skiing, made slow and hesitant by an unyielding and morbid fear that I will propel into a tree or somehow shatter my femur in a devastating tumble. In middle school, when I joined the football team, in an attempt to realize my father’s thinly veiled desire that I be a quarterback, I was decidedly not one of the star players. To be very good at football, you need to be able to snuff out the voice inside of you that says it’s better for everyone if you do not hurtle your body at great speeds into another person’s body. I couldn’t squelch that voice, which only got louder after I watched a massive and overeager boy named Ryan bend my friend Mike’s leg the wrong way during a hitting drill, breaking it in two places.
Some people don’t have a voice urging reticence and caution. My friend Chris doesn’t, largely due to the influence of his father, Leo. Leo grew up in Tucson, Arizona, which at that time wasn’t even the mid-sized strip-mall Mecca it’s become today. Though in many ways he’d had an average middle-class upbringing, Leo’s father was an abusive alcoholic, prompting him to move away from home and get his own place as soon as he could put together enough money, which he earned laying pipe for a construction company. He married his high-school sweetheart, a half-Japanese woman with permanently rosy cheeks named Martha, and soon they were having children. Chris was first, and then his sister, Kelle….
What I appreciated most about Leo, and what was most different about him from my parents, was how much time he spent in the outdoors. My father once said to me, “All the camping I need to do in this life I already did in Vietnam”; my mother, while lovely and doting, always preferred a bridge game to a fishing rod. I grew up a child who found many of my most enriching experiences indoors, in front of a computer or a book or a movie. For that reason, Leo’s stories about his far-flung wilderness adventures were exotic to me, stirring a curiosity deep from within, as if I were listening to an alien describe a cocktail party on the moon…
It’s impossible to be raised in such an environment and not emerge with a siren’s song in your guts and heart pulling you toward adventure and danger. From my father I took, among other things, a love of jazz and an affinity for wearing loafers with no socks. Chris took from Leo the desire—nay, need—to push his life to the limit. Besides sailing boats and going fishing and going hunting and all the other things Leo taught him to do, Chris builds and rides motorcycles; rock climbs, occasionally in the middle of the night; hikes the mountains around his house in Tucson; and cycles the softly sloping and winding roads that stretch out into various corners of the endless Arizona desert. To accomplish all of his various activities in a timely manner, Chris will occasionally demand his friends stick to a rigorous schedule—”Up at 8 and out the door by 8:30″ and that sort of thing. He calls this “being a Leo.”
Chris, with his love of exploration and impulsiveness, has grown to be my closest traveling companion over the years, and thus, not incidentally, the major balancing offset to that cautious voice in my head warning against risk and bodily injury. Chris is the guy who, after spending all night barhopping in Budapest, demands you climb out the hotel room’s skylight and dangle your legs off the roof. Chris is the guy goading you into leaping from your hotel balcony to your passed-out friend’s hotel balcony in order to sneak into his room and obtain an iPhone charger. Chris is the guy driving his motorcycle 80 miles per hour five feet away from a sheer cliff drop on the Croatian coast. In late 2011, I ended up staring off a 50-foot rock looming over the Adriatic Sea in Dubrovnik. Below was Chris, who had already jumped and was now treading water while screaming at me.
“Just fucking do it!” he shouted. “Don’t think about it! Everyone’s staring at you! Aren’t you embarrassed?”…
Friday Night Open Thread: “Don’t Stop Running”Post + Comments (106)
by John Cole| 40 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Watching the worst bowl game ever. Rutgers and Va. tech have the worst offenses I’ve seen since, well, every Steelers game this season.
This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own
From Gawker:
On the day of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, two new petitions were added to the Obama administration’s home-brewed “We the People” petitioning system.
One called on the White House to “immediately address the issue of gun control” through legislation; the other demanded the Westboro Baptist Church be “legally recognize[d]” as a hate group.
The former has nearly 200,000 signatures. The latter is well on its way to 300,000.
Spurred by WBC threats to picket funerals of deceased Sandy Hook victims, the petition is now officially the most popular “We the People” petition ever posted on the site since its launch in September of last year…
Apart from denigrating IRL trolls, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: Something Upon Which We Can All AgreePost + Comments (54)
by Betty Cracker| 203 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I stayed up half the night watching “The Walking Dead.” God, how did I get sucked into that series? I usually don’t watch serials at all, especially anything horror-tinged, but I’m hooked. They do explore some complex moral issues while hacking zombies to bits.