Category: Uncategorized

I was picking up outside after the Ridgeback – an activity that always makes me wonder just who is the master and who is the servant – when I encountered a towering pile so massive that it made me want to take a picture of it and post it on the front door. I figure that no BEWARE OF DOG sign could possibly be as intimidating as the sight of that with the words “IF YOU TRESPASS, THIS COULD BE YOU” underneath.

I’m wondering if she might have eaten the UPS guy.

Eponymous offers evidence that vestiges of humor do survive on the left side of the political spectrum:

Our gun-stockpiling, newslist-lurking Mystery Guest was indeed Dr. Professor Mike Adams, as Bill S. said. While Dr. Mike sounds increasingly nutty with each of these “letters” he shares with us, I imagine that the guns have to suffer through a whole lot worse. (Mike: “Colt, that snotty lunchroom cashier looked at me funny today, undoubtedly because I’m a conservative. But someday we’ll make them all pay, won’t we, Colt? It’s just you and me against the world!” The Gun: “Mike, I think we should see other people.”)

Okay, that made me laugh. It’s not quite up there with her classic take on Ann Coulter, but it was good. And it made me think: do we have any actual evidence that Julie is the oft-absent working mother that Nate claims her to be and not a talking gun? I’m just saying….

WFB ponders Iraqi withdrawal:

A wise young thing writes provocatively. He wants to know when the serious right wing in America — National Review, and critical legislators and commentators — is going to come out and say what he thinks, that we were wrong to go into Iraq. At a dinner meeting in New York last week of fourteen urbane and weighty conservatives, the host asked the question, How many of you would have voted to go into Iraq if circumstances were as advertised? The vote in favor of intervention was unanimous. The next question was, “Given what we now know, are you glad that we intervened?” The vote here was pretty well split, in the neighborhood of 50-50. My young correspondent puts it this way, “I rue my earlier support for the invasion.” And goes on to ask, “When will we hear on the question from you — from senior U.S. analysts on the conservative side of the fence?”

He is pretty withering in his language. He writes about National Review: “To the extent that one can discern NR’s position, it is something like ‘Bush should keep doing whatever it is that he’s been doing so far and hope for the best.’ But for how long? At what point can we call the Iraq venture a success (or a failure) and leave, NR doesn’t say. The editors seem to be saying, ‘Get back to us in a month; maybe by then we’ll have made up our minds….

Only Bush, not his critics, can coalesce these considerations. This isn’t merely because he has up-to-date information. It is that the force of the leader is required in order to escape the conundrum with confidence. What my correspondent torments himself with in his sleep — How can we keep it up? The Iraqis have made it impossible to succeed. We accomplish nothing more than a directer display, day by day, of the bootlessness of our venture — only Bush can bestride, as De Gaulle did his own impasse. The force of any argument for disconnection requires the prestige and dominance of the leader. There is no point in arguing for withdrawal, unless Mr. Bush beckons us to do so.

Yes, just in case you didn’t follow WFB’s meandering prose, he just said that conservatives are not to argue that American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq, now or in the future, until the Dear Leader gives them permission.

Unbelievable.

Maureen Dowd laments the unwanted woman:

A few years ago at a White House Correspondents’ dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: “I can’t believe I’m 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women.” I’d been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers….

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to – unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don’t have to talk to.

I wonder if she’ll get all the hystrionic hate mail that I got from feminists after writing almost exactly the same thing two years ago. And what a classist bitch Dowd is. Does anyone here think that I can’t talk to Space Bunny? Speaking as a man who is far more intelligent than Dowd, I can assure her that you can have interesting conversations with almost anyone. Everyone is an expert on something. I highly doubt that the beautiful actress she mentioned is likely to be inclined to discuss Elliott Wave patterns on the currency markets or the military tactics of the Reconquista.

The problem successful women have is that for the most part, they don’t want to marry down. But the higher you go, the smaller the pool. Even worse, intelligent, educated and successful men are smart enough to avoid these over-indoctrinated professional pains in the posterior like the plague.

So, in answer to your question, Maureen, yes. Men don’t give a damn about female achievement. They never have.

PS – I read this to Space Bunny – a former nanny, you may recall – and her only comment was that if I thought I’d seen some hate mail recently, well, Maureen had better dig out her flame-retardant skirt.

David Brooks writes a surprisingly thoughtful article on women, work and children, published by THE NEW YORK TIMES, of all places:

Over the past 30 years, the fraction of women over 40 who have no children has nearly doubled, to about a fifth. According to the Gallup Organization, 70 percent of these women regret that they have no kids….

Why? For some, it’s a question of never finding the right person to have kids with. Others thought they’d found the right mates, but the relationships didn’t work out. Others became occupied with careers, and the child-rearing part of their lives never got put together. But there is also one big problem that stretches across these possibilities: Women now have more choices over what kind of lives they want to lead, but they do not have more choices over how they want to sequence their lives.

For example, consider a common life sequence for an educated woman. She grows up and goes to college. Perhaps she goes to graduate school. Then, during her most fertile years, when she has the most energy for child-rearing, she gets a job. Then, sometime after age 30, she marries. Then, in her mid-30’s, when she has acquired the maturity and character to make intelligent career choices, she takes time off to raise her kids. Several years hence, she seeks to re-enter the labor force. She may or may not be still interested in the field she was trained for (two decades earlier). Nonetheless, she finds a job, works for 15 years or so, then spends her final 20 years in retirement.

This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

Of course, this being the New York Times, the solution Brooks recommends involves government management. Because if we spend X trillions on retirees, we can certainly spend Y trillions on young families etc etc. Ah well, it’s still a thought-provoking concept he has put on the table.

The Sports Guy gives an award to Randy Moss:

Best all-around performance: Randy Moss

First, he gets all the uptight guys on the studio shows in a hilarious lather. Honestly, Boomer Esiason became so angry during his pregame tirade on Moss, it was like watching Hitler give those crazy speeches in the late-30’s. (Not to compare Boomer to Hitler, but you know what I mean.) Then, Moss decides to wear Thelma’s afro from “Good Times.” Then he kills the Packers downfield, drops a few 12-letter swear words on camera while screaming at the Lambeau fans, and caps things off with a second TD and the fake moon, which drove the MAWSM (middle-aged white sports media) bonkers again. And then he took credit for the Minny win by claiming that he caused such a distraction leading up the game, everyone was focusing on him and not the annual Minnesota collapse — which was actually sorta true.

(Moss’ grade for the weekend: A-plus. You couldn’t ask for much more.)

See? If you can’t trust the Sports Guy about sports, who can you trust?

Porcus is dubious:

Is that number inflated by the department of tourism, or is “Land of 10,000 Lakes” just a way to conjure up warm summertime visions of fishing in the ‘ol swimming hole? I suspect false advertising.

You have it backwards, my meaty friend. There are actually more than 12,000, but they try to keep the number low because Minnesotans know that a “lake” is actually nothing more than a mosquito breeding ground.

Space Bunny and I both had chills of stark terror shooting up our spine when we went down to spend some time in north Florida and saw these pools of standing water alongside the highways. Fortunately, it turned out that the Florida mosquitoes are either a lesser breed or are a bunch of lazy, insectoid retirees. Combine those larval breeding pools with the vampires that inhabit the North Woods and you’d be finding the emptied shells of children, even teenagers, scattered everywhere.

Derb is most annoyed:

Some weeks ago I received in the mail a form from the Census Bureau, titled “The American Community Survey.” I’m supposed to fill it out, under threat of some dire penalty. I threw it away the first time, but they sent me another one with A BIG FAT WARNING.

This thing is ***TWENTY-FOUR PAGES LONG*** with HUNDREDS of boxes. Samples: What time did my wife leave home to go to work last week? Does either of my children have any of a long list of medical conditions? In the past 12 months, what was the cost of water for this house? Et cetera, et cetera, et damn stinking bloody cetera. Who the hell do these fool bureaucrats think they are, stealing my time like this? What the hell business is it of federal bureaucrats what time my wife leaves for work? Or what conditions my children might have?

I have no idea about some of these answers, e.g. cost of water. I’d have to go through my files and add up all my water bills. I’m putting down numbers at random. The hell with these nuisances. I think I’ll lie on all those impertinent questions about what race we are. If challenged I’ll say I read in the New York Times that there is no such thing as race.

I love my country, but just at this moment, I hate my filthy lousy stinking government.

I loathe this sort of thing too, but I recommend embracing the madness instead of shirking from it. Think of a survey as an opportunity, not a problem. It’s a chance to indulge your fictional writing skills, to stretch your imagination. Make GIGO work for freedom and take the opportunity to foul up their Big Brotheresque data collection every chance you get.

According to the last census I filled out, 27 lesbian Asian/Eskimo/Pacific Islanders live in my house. Big Brother demands an answer? Sure, I’ll give you an answer. Happy to oblige.

Lucky Ducky points out the obvious:

BTW – Atrios labeled his comment as sarcasm. Which pretty much makes me wonder why you tried this deflection.

Yes, Atrios had to because many of his readers aren’t intelligent enough to recognize it. In fact, I even had to define sarcasm for one Atriocity who didn’t understand the ironic aspect of the concept. Mine, on the other hand, are.

You’ll also note that I did not label my apology for taking $800,000 from the Department of Homeland defense, my confession of heterosexual necrophilia or my belief that the Vikings will defeat Philadelphia next week as sarcasm. Okay, that last actually isn’t sarcasm, just what may well be wishful thinking. Do you really think I have 800 grand in cash and a dead girl in the basement?

There are two possibilities. Since absolutely NO ONE took any offense to my post for over a day until the Atriocities showed up, either all 2,000 daily readers are a bunch of whacked-out evangelical Jew-haters or the post was well-understood to be harmless by all. The fact that some 11,000 more visitors than normal came by and less than one hundred people posted, (and less than ten people emailed), indicates that most people understood perfectly well that there was nothing anti-semitic there.

Believe what you like.

And I might add – if you don’t give a damn about what anyone else thinks of what you say (code for liberals or people who disagree with you, I’d wager) then you’ve operating a vanity project.

Absolutely, this is nothing but a vanity project which appears solely for my own amusement. If I wanted to make a case for anti-semitism, I would have written a column about it. This blog is just the home for my random thoughts, made in passing. You’d also lose that wager. Almost no one here wanted me to continue beating a certain dead horse into the ground for three weeks, but I did anyhow. Why? Because I felt like it, and that’s the only vote that counts here.

But I sure do appreciate all you would-be thought police.