I’m passing out. Went through two full bags of potatoes for french fries, 12 lbs of hamburger, 36 hot dogs, 24 drum sticks, 12 chicken thighs, pounds of cole claw and bake beans, everyone was well fed and content, my house is now clean, and I am off to spoon Lily while rocking Little Feat. Why? Because Little Feat is the greatest band that ever existed, and if you disagree with me, well then fuck off.
Late evening Open Thread
This is slightly NSFW for swearing and obvious gay porn cliches, but it made me laugh, and it’s a Saturday night so I do hope none of you have to be at work anyway.
Isn’t it about time for a drunken Cole late night post?
Saturday Evening Open Thread
Don’t know if there will ever be another BJ Book Group, but I’m looking forward to reading Wonkette‘s latest recommendation:
The U.S. State Department has been known to make noise about protecting free speech around the world. Writers and bloggers, the department says, should be allowed to publish their opinions even if they conflict with government dogma. But these freedoms are granted to humanity by the State Department under the strict condition that the people practicing the free speech live in a distant land, and that the government they annoy is just some bearded bogeyman religious regime like in Iran, or an inscrutable oligarchy like in China. Tell uncomfortable truths about U.S. policy, or so much as mention “Wikileaks,” and the American Authorities will hound you like a furious baboon (a furious baboon-hound, we mean). Hence the current jihad against Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. We have read and reviewed this delightful book!
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Van Buren is a Foreign Service officer who spent a year in Iraq (2009-2010) heading two “reconstruction teams” assigned to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure and “win hearts and minds.” What Van Buren saw in Iraq during the “civilian surge,” however, was mostly waste, futility, and criminal insanity.
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It’s not often your Wonkette book reviewer recommends “topical” books, but we recommend this book wholeheartedly. It’s savagely funny, hugely entertaining and 100% free from political and media clichés. Best of all, it’s filled with vivid (and grimly hilarious) pictures of the actual “reconstruction of Iraq.”…
More information, and hilarity, at the link.
Any other recommendations for books… or other ways to spend a weekend?
Football open thread
Keep those legs churning.
Bip bip bip, Bop bop bop, or “Saturday Morning Open Thread with musical soundtrack”
It’s apparently something past 9am. It’s dark and hot and there are random blinding flashes of light. I’m not exactly sure where I am. It’s possible I’m just at home at Shady Pines and having a stroke. However, I have a vodka/rocks clutched in one hand, which makes me suspect things are going to be ok.
Gloria is off trying to find some coke, after Katie Couric spent twenty minutes begging us for a line and then, when we relented, snuffled the whole fucking gram in the men’s toilet with Lauer. It was good coke too, having been, I am reliably informed, smuggled in from Peru only last week inside one of the spawn of the Jolie-Pitts. A little gritty on the nose but with fine blue notes in the upper register. I miss it already. Gloria had better get back soon, because reality is starting to intrude into the fine French electro.
Gesaffelstein – OPR from adrien cothieR on Vimeo.
Gloria is the only one in a fit state to go hunting for more drugs because her pill hasn’t kicked in yet. Her pill hasn’t kicked in yet because she keeps checking for text messages from Anderson, who promised to be here, but is a no show so far. I do hope he comes. Not only would it get Gloria back in the mood, the last time I saw him – at Splash, I seem to recall – Anderson started telling me a wonderful story about Marcus Bachmann, but didn’t have time to finish, so I still don’t know whether they ever managed to get the GI Joe action figure out again.
The evening has been a bit of a blur, dears. It’s Sandra Frazer’s birthday, so we are all in New York. We started off at a little drink thing at Gloria’s – just a few dozen of Sandra’s besties, all very casual. Gloria, as usual, had laid on the Billecart and the totty in equal measures, so when we asked Sandra what she wanted for her birthday, she pointed imperiously across the room she wanted “that”. “That” turned out to be Ryan Gosling, so we’ve spent the last twelve hours stalking the poor darling across New York.
The party was lovely, except for that bloody Angelina, who cornered me and WOULD NOT SHUT UP ABOUT HER FUCKING CHILDREN. Between that, her unresolved jealousy that I had Brad before she did, and the fact that she smells like someone dumped a bottle of patchouli oil in a birdcage, she’s almost unbearable. She latched on to our little group as we were leaving for the club, even though Gloria had one of her maids wave a little brown baby out the window to distract her. Eventually we managed to ditch her in some diner by ordering coffee and then scarpering when she went to the bathroom.
Weekend ‘Occupy Wall Street/Together’ Update
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Lance Mannion (who was the first free-range, non-professional blogger I ever encountered on the web) explains why he went to Occupy Wall Street courtesy of his local Teamsters:
… The goal is obvious too. We want to live in a country that isn’t run just for the benefit of bankers, hedge fund managers, and a few sociopathic rich people like the Koch Brothers.
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How to achieve that goal needs to be worked out, but it was very exciting to me when I was watching the final episode of Ken Burns’ Prohibition last night to learn that although the evils wrought by Prohibition and the Volstead Act were well known and popularly regretted for years and that the forces behind it were suspect either as hypocrites or political reactionaries with a mean anti-immigration streak—the Ku Klux Klan were sworn tea-totallers, so there you have both hypocrisy and reactionarysim—a movement to repeal the 18th Amendment made no progress until a determined rich Republican named Pauline Sabin got fed up with the hypocrisies and the meanness and set to work mainly getting people to show up to voice their support for repeal.
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There was a lot more to what she did than that, but that’s where it started, with people showing up to remind politicians, the Drys, and each other that there are more of us than there are of them…
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If you can’t show up but would like to show your support, MoveOn has site where you can sign up to take part in a Virtual March on Wall Street.
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That’s all well and good, but an even better way of showing up if you can’t show up is to write letters—to your local newspaper, to your Congresscritters, to your state legislators and governor, and to friends and family…
Commentor Raenelle‘s daughter is providing excellent coverage at her Plutocracy Files blog.
Commentor Cassidy was going to the Occupy Jacksonville meetup this weekend, and I hope he’ll report back.
Weekend ‘Occupy Wall Street/Together’ UpdatePost + Comments (98)
And Now- OPEN THREAD, Starring John Cole, Who Used to Write Here
Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth again, but it is homecoming weekend here and I had a bunch of commitments to deal with, and lots of people staying at my house, and fraternity stuff, so I just said to hell with it and let the other 85 people writing here take over. Made a killer Italian dinner, some sexy baguettes from scratch, and then there was drinking. This happened to one of my brothers:
I remember my first beer. Also, some of you have been pining for Rosie pics, so here you go. She is quite the life of the party these days, just so happy and wanting to be with anyone.
I’ll leave you with this:
I’ll probably be kind of awol again tomorrow because I have 40 people coming for a BBQ and about 15 lbs of ground beef, 10 lbs of chicken, and more kielbasa and hot dogs than I know what the fuck to do with.
And Now- OPEN THREAD, Starring John Cole, Who Used to Write HerePost + Comments (51)