- Was going to delete last night's KITH post (which I couldn't resist posting when I thought of it, it made me giggle multiplied by my attention sluttery) and post the two skits in this post, but Landru commented this morning so you get two extra Julie Doiron songs, why Doiron today explained below.
- I'm fascinated by the greenwald effect, the visceral reactions any mention of Glenn Greenwald provoke and provoke from 360 degrees. I confess, beyond my own pleasurable scratching of my own faux dissidence regarding transference of tribal jones first onto a totem and then hysterically off that totem, it's fun to whack a wasp nest (which is the second point of this bullet): while the first was my primary intent, the second I knew would entertain me. Greenwald has become - by whose design, by what dynamics, your theories are your theories, your ratios your ratios - a political lightning rod himself of which one must have an opinion and be judged - most times harshly, regardless of respective position on the greenwald spectrum, both vitriolic hate towards and vehement defensive love for. He's black licorice. Nobody seems neutral (at least in the Stringtowns I hang out in). Greenwald, regardless of the importance of what his work has or hasn't revealed and may or not still reveal, is a hotter button than any scandal of whatever he has or hasn't enabled. This isn't to damn anyone for any opinion they have on Greenwald or suggest it isn't held in good faith for valid reasons. I just find the phenomenon interesting.
- UPDATE: Fucked, baby.
- One thing this kabuki achieved is the thorough demonizing of the Tea Party, so thorough that when the attacks come on the safety net by Obama/Dems those of us who will protest and make noises about primarying DINOs will be relentlessly compared to the thoroughly demonized Tea Party. Obama will urged to abandon his far left base and heavily praised unto his legacy when he does.
- Oh my, Zizek says what I said day before yesterday: What is the ongoing U.S. government shutdown really about? In the middle of April 2009, I was taking a rest in a hotel room in Syracuse, N.Y. and jumping between two channels: a PBS documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American country singer of the Left, and a Fox News report on a country singer of the anti-tax “Tea Party,” who was performing a populist, anti-Obama song full of complaints about how Washington is taxing the hard-working ordinary people to finance the rich Wall Street financiers. There was the weird similarity between the two singers. Formulating an anti-establishment populist complaint against both the exploitative rich and the government, they called for radical measures, including civil disobedience. It was another painful reminder that today’s radical-populist Right strangely reminds us of the old radical-populist Left. Are today’s Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups, with their half-illegal status, seeing the main threat to their freedom in the oppressive state apparatus, not similar to the Black Panthers back in the 1960s? He then goes Thomas Frank and asks What's the Matter with Kansas?
- Of course the NSA is involved with the Drone Wars. Who didn't think so?
- King's Farm. That's technically Rockville, is really Gaithersburg.
- I did not know Selby's closed in Poolesville. The same family used to run the IGA on Diamond in Olde Towne.
- What your cat sees when it stares into space.
- On cat behavior. Re: ferals and the straight tail and meowing - all three of our ferals straight tail us, Napoleon runs to us meowing, he talks more and more all the time.
- An experiment in shell manipulation.
- The psychology of book abandonment.
- Uncollected Barthelme.
- New Ruefle poem! w/bonus Brad.
- Beckett, for those of you who do.
- I've still a crush on Julie Doiron that reminds me of being seventeen with a crush, the more ridiculously pangful the better, so happy to wake up this morning with this Julie Doiron song in my head:
METAPHYSICAL DOG
Frank Bidart
Belafont, who reproduced what we did
not as an act of supine
imitation, but in defiance -
butt on couch and front legs straddling
space to rest on an ottoman, barking till
his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.
How dare being
give him this body.
Held up to a mirror, he writhed.
