Yes, the Nap Signal will be displayed as header at night until Nap's reappearance, will appear in posts during the day until his reappearance. Once he reappears I will never pull this stunt again, so it will be over soon or go on forever. I fear the forever - MCPS is redoing the trailer classrooms at the elementary school across the street; Nap napped under them, I think he's freaked out and ran farther from home than he'd before. The future of header stanchion porn is in the balance. Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
It's true! and they play an important game tonight in Kansas City which we will but probably shouldn't cast as runes, though a loss will make me silly and a win yet sillier. Very curious the line-up, who's not one of eighteen. Looking forward to it, tweet or text during the game, yo. O! I'm not going to go blind, there's medication for it and a new RX for glasses. That was scary. OKOKOKOKOK, you can have some links after this song.
- What, now you want autoblogography?
- Verily.
- From a purely entertainment pov, I'm delighted that Romney has chosen Ryan: Make no mistake. In his decision to make Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, his running mate, Romney finally surrendered the tattered remnants of his soul not only to the extreme base of his party, but also to extremist economic policies, and to an extremist view of the country he seeks to lead. This is unimaginable to those of us who lived here under Romney's barely perceptible stewardship of the Commonwealth (God save it!). If he'd even hinted that he agreed with a fraction of a smidgen of a portion of the policies on which Ryan has built his career, Romney would have been hanging from the Sacred Cod by the middle of 2005. And it's hard not to notice that the way the decision got leaked — in the dead of a Friday night, with the Olympics still going on, after two weeks in which Romney and his campaign had demonstrated all the political skills of a handball — fairly dripped with flopsweat. Pierce could have come up with something for Portman, but not as vicious.
- Which isn't to say Ryan isn't an asshole.
- Asshats. (h/t Sasha via twitter).
- I'm certain the Obama campaign and DNC are delighted too.
- Thought experiment: Joe Biden clutches his chest and slumps over this afternoon - imagine the noise.
- Police state.
- Domain Awareness System.
- Torture state.
- Looterism.
- Fuck each and every one of them.
- Standard operating procedure, both the crime and the eventual non-punishment.
- Couple more new sites in Because Left and Because Right. New places to see solicited.
- Misunderstanding with Queequeg.
- Borges.
- Woke up with Ivy in my head, don't you know.
IF WE WERE HONEST
Albert Goldbarth
When I tell you that cultural ritual is an artifice
composed of simultaneous social-dynamic complexity vectors acting
in anthropometric units,
I’m thinking of sex. I mean it.
We all are. It isn’t just me. Or when I say
the war, or the god, or the list with the juice and the cereal...
sex. What is it the psycho-experts are claiming?—every ten seconds?
When I tell you that I’m thinking of sex,
I’m thinking of death. Its worm is always
in my eye, its sour and dirt-blown web is always
a catch in my throat. It was always a wen
releasing a small electrical jolt to the brain
of Napoleon, Alexander, Attila. It was funereally
in the black, black ink of the Brontes;
why should I be any different? Why can’t we
be honest?—every poem is “Sex.” (Or “Death.”)
If we were honest, half of our poems would be about
the making of poems, the conference on the making of poems,
the resume of poems successfully made...you know, the way
that half of the time is actually spent. And did
ten seconds pass just now? If so, then
sex. (If so, then death.) Not too long after
the Dolphin first made port in Tahiti, it was discovered
the crew were trading its nails
for dalliances with the pliant and welcoming
women of that island—“to such a great extent, the ship
was in danger of being pulled apart.”
Inside the cradling waves of moonlight
on those waters...smiling...consummating...human
nails into smooth, bamboo-brown human grain...
how did they know, how could they foresee, that
my mother would die from her own lungs
shaping hundreds of obstinate fists in her chest,
my father would die with his own blood turning
into a useless negative of itself?
And yet they must have known, they must have seen the lesson,
they were trying to deny it with the drive of such
combustive, zealous engines! This is my topic
tonight, and how the craft of poetry and the role
of the postmodern in a society of gender-defined relationship roles is yes
a bare knee like a beacon,
like a skull beneath the face-skin, and a question
from the audience on a quasi-political sense is yes in my mind, yes
in yours, yes
sex and death—the one thing.
