Oscars are Sunday. I haven't seen the films, so I make no warrant about what should win.
But I can read the tea leaves. Here's the call:
Picture: Hurt Locker
-Obviously it's a two horse race; Hurt Locker's level of campaigning got some Hollywood frownage late, which maybe brings Avatar back into it. Nothing else is worth considering.
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
-It's not a contest, don't consider anyone else in your pool. Only 4 women have even been nominated for Best Director - Bigelow won the DGA, there's just no circumstance where she loses.
Actor: Jeff Bridges
-Also not a contest.
Actress: Sandra Bullock
-Word is it's Sidibe who is charging, and that makes sense - this is an award where, ten years from now, it will be embarrassing that Bullock won for something as trifling as Blind Side ( I did read and enjoy the book, which apparently bears no resemblance to the maudlin, red state bait, Jay Leno/Sarah Palin esque film - Michael Lewis has a new book about the financial crisis which you could consider picking up. You can get Bullock for the same price you can get Hurt Locker, and both make sense as plays - Bridges and Bigelow are barely worth it given the expense, but it's free money.
Best Supporting Actor/Actress: Christolph Waltz/Mo'Nique
-Waltz is the biggest Vegas favorite of the night - and the price for both is prohibitive.
Screenplay: Inglourious Basterds/Up In the Air
-Reitman wins Adapted for Up in the Air - Original is really the first place where, if there is any chance at all that Hurt Locker punts away Picture you'll see it show up - it's 50/50 to me that Tarantino sweeps in and takes it, and I like Tarantino (although I have zero interest in seeing the film, I don't have much interest in Hurt Locker either - and I'll never see Avatar - how about that!) so I've decided to pick him. (edit, I'm changing my mind on Oscar morning - it's Hurt Locker)
Foreign: White Ribbon
-If there's an upset it's the French film - but the German film is as favored as is Hurt Locker.
Doc: The Cove
Animated, Score: Up
Art, Cinematography, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects - Avatar
Makeup - Star Trek
Song: The Weary Kind
Editing: Hurt Locker
Costume: Young Victoria
1st and Ten: The Weekly Tendown: February 21-27, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Dear Internet:
So, we know each other a little bit by now. After all, this is the 16th Issue of Tendown - heck, just Last Week, you learned about my new car and my boyhood crush on Sonny Crockett, and how I'm not as fat yet as Kevin Smith.
And since we know each other a little bit, probably you're aware of my twin pet peeves: compulsory flag salute and poor public restroom etiquette. This week saw the return of both. So that's how we'll start our look back at the cultural happenings of the past 7 days (just last night I thought I should have named this Sundown as opposed to Tendown - cause it's Sunday, it's a countdown, and it marks the end of the cultural week. Sundown - get it?). Let's get some Tendown!
First: I Just Ate a Whole Bag of Chips
I think I have Asperger's Syndrome.
My lady type friend thinks that eventually I will reveal to her that I've been diagnosed with such - I haven't - but I'm...51/49 in favor that I have it. I'll probably continue to ignore that conclusion, because I'm 39 and haven't the energy to join the ranks of the differently abled, but I fit the profile pretty solidly.
I mention that here because, while my brain completely locks up and I'm flooded with terror in social situations, I always enjoyed being with my grandparents when I was a boy; my grandmother would make me graham crackers and milk and fried hamburger patties - and my grandfather would take me to the games - we went to see the Niners (we always won, which was curious given how little that occurred in the late 70s) and the Giants (it seems unlikely that I saw Jim Barr lose both ends of a twi-night doubleheader in '79, but it's in my brain nonethless). It was at my first Giants game (night game at Candlestick against the Reds in '78) that I was first confronted with the idea of the "other" - that people existed outside of my conception of them; we arrived a little late and were on the concourse getting polish sausage (I can still taste the sesame seeds from the bun and feel the snap of the gulden's mustard on my lips) when Cincinnati got a couple of baserunners in the top of the 1st, "The Reds are runnin!" - a dude excitedly uttered as he made his way from the concession line. It was in that second that I processed a thought which had never occurred to me - that there were people who weren't Giants fans. I spent the rest of the game (the part where I wasn't eating or freezing half to death) extrapolating that thought into the rest of my life - I loved the Giants unconditionally, my first gift was a 1970 autographed team ball procured by my mother's sister (subsequently destroyed along with every other damn thing I owned in a house fire in the mid 80s) before I was born, and a world of my creation would not have included any Cincinnati Reds fans.
But here he was - a Reds fan. An adult man in a white t-shirt and a Red cap cheering for Joe Morgan. And against my Giants. This was not my idea.
And if that wasn't my idea - that meant that the world was not my own creation - my Cartesian doubt about the existence of a world outside my head was shattered - I was, with, every tangy bite of the sausage, cast into a world larger than my sense of it. The healthy response, one assumes, is to engage with that reality - I've never really been able to do that - instead retreating as deeply inside as I could go, to a place where only Giants fans are allowed to live.
Even more viscerally startling, if not as existentially significant, was a trip to watch the Harlem Globetrotters at the Cow Palace (I think the Trotters eked that one out - that's the benefit of choosing that as my initial hoops experience rather than going to a Golden St. game) less for the actual game - than for the experience in the men's room. The Cow Palace, in the late 1970s, did not have individual urinals. Instead, it had a man trough - a bathtub like structure in the middle of the men's room, in which a group of encircled men would, standing shoulder to shoulder - do their business.
I was unprepared for such a dong laden halftime.
My primary takeaway from that evening was a lifelong dislike of public restrooms - not to the point of avoidance, as a life in the workforce which I have chosen makes that impractical - but instead, I've become a signatory of a very simple piece of etiquette with which, in my experience, most men (perhaps who have shared similar experiences to my Globetrotter halftime - say in the military or in a federal penitentiary) concur - that a men's room is an experience that, if it must be shared, should consist of as little talking as an elevator or a Benedictine monastery. I want you talking to me in a men's room about as much as I want you urinating on my shoes. Just stare straight ahead and go on about your day.
I've noticed just in the past couple of years, with the increase in hands free phone use - that every now and again a student (as that's who I share most of my public restroom encounters with, students) will appear to be talking to me (or Talking to No One, which is a good title for a book by a guy with Asperger's Syndrome who lectures for a living) but instead be on the phone. I keep my dislike of this practice to myself. But I note it and make the appropriate gradebook adjustments (jokes, I tell the jokes).
This week, a particularly brutal week in the most demanding stretch of my professional life, I stood alone at the furthest urinal from the door in the downstairs men's room at my institution - when a student walked in and set up shop three urinals down, a safe and manageable distance.
We wordlessly continued doing what men do without acknowledging that each other existed, when, without any provocation - in full voice - he said "I just ate a whole bag of chips!"
Yeah, don't do that.
My first thought....is dude apologizing for an odor that I am not noticing....
My second thought...oh, yeah, he's on the phone.
By the time I washed up (that's hygeine, son!) and left he had continued with his conversation, so it was clear what the circumstance was, but that thoroughly out of nowhere, I had the experience of hearing "I just ate a whole bag of chips" in a men's room was the thing that happened this week that had the most impact on me - so that's how we start Tendown. After the jump - we'll talk about compulsory flag salute and all the rest of the happenings from the past 7 days.
So, we know each other a little bit by now. After all, this is the 16th Issue of Tendown - heck, just Last Week, you learned about my new car and my boyhood crush on Sonny Crockett, and how I'm not as fat yet as Kevin Smith.
And since we know each other a little bit, probably you're aware of my twin pet peeves: compulsory flag salute and poor public restroom etiquette. This week saw the return of both. So that's how we'll start our look back at the cultural happenings of the past 7 days (just last night I thought I should have named this Sundown as opposed to Tendown - cause it's Sunday, it's a countdown, and it marks the end of the cultural week. Sundown - get it?). Let's get some Tendown!
First: I Just Ate a Whole Bag of Chips
I think I have Asperger's Syndrome.
My lady type friend thinks that eventually I will reveal to her that I've been diagnosed with such - I haven't - but I'm...51/49 in favor that I have it. I'll probably continue to ignore that conclusion, because I'm 39 and haven't the energy to join the ranks of the differently abled, but I fit the profile pretty solidly.
I mention that here because, while my brain completely locks up and I'm flooded with terror in social situations, I always enjoyed being with my grandparents when I was a boy; my grandmother would make me graham crackers and milk and fried hamburger patties - and my grandfather would take me to the games - we went to see the Niners (we always won, which was curious given how little that occurred in the late 70s) and the Giants (it seems unlikely that I saw Jim Barr lose both ends of a twi-night doubleheader in '79, but it's in my brain nonethless). It was at my first Giants game (night game at Candlestick against the Reds in '78) that I was first confronted with the idea of the "other" - that people existed outside of my conception of them; we arrived a little late and were on the concourse getting polish sausage (I can still taste the sesame seeds from the bun and feel the snap of the gulden's mustard on my lips) when Cincinnati got a couple of baserunners in the top of the 1st, "The Reds are runnin!" - a dude excitedly uttered as he made his way from the concession line. It was in that second that I processed a thought which had never occurred to me - that there were people who weren't Giants fans. I spent the rest of the game (the part where I wasn't eating or freezing half to death) extrapolating that thought into the rest of my life - I loved the Giants unconditionally, my first gift was a 1970 autographed team ball procured by my mother's sister (subsequently destroyed along with every other damn thing I owned in a house fire in the mid 80s) before I was born, and a world of my creation would not have included any Cincinnati Reds fans.
But here he was - a Reds fan. An adult man in a white t-shirt and a Red cap cheering for Joe Morgan. And against my Giants. This was not my idea.
And if that wasn't my idea - that meant that the world was not my own creation - my Cartesian doubt about the existence of a world outside my head was shattered - I was, with, every tangy bite of the sausage, cast into a world larger than my sense of it. The healthy response, one assumes, is to engage with that reality - I've never really been able to do that - instead retreating as deeply inside as I could go, to a place where only Giants fans are allowed to live.
Even more viscerally startling, if not as existentially significant, was a trip to watch the Harlem Globetrotters at the Cow Palace (I think the Trotters eked that one out - that's the benefit of choosing that as my initial hoops experience rather than going to a Golden St. game) less for the actual game - than for the experience in the men's room. The Cow Palace, in the late 1970s, did not have individual urinals. Instead, it had a man trough - a bathtub like structure in the middle of the men's room, in which a group of encircled men would, standing shoulder to shoulder - do their business.
I was unprepared for such a dong laden halftime.
My primary takeaway from that evening was a lifelong dislike of public restrooms - not to the point of avoidance, as a life in the workforce which I have chosen makes that impractical - but instead, I've become a signatory of a very simple piece of etiquette with which, in my experience, most men (perhaps who have shared similar experiences to my Globetrotter halftime - say in the military or in a federal penitentiary) concur - that a men's room is an experience that, if it must be shared, should consist of as little talking as an elevator or a Benedictine monastery. I want you talking to me in a men's room about as much as I want you urinating on my shoes. Just stare straight ahead and go on about your day.
I've noticed just in the past couple of years, with the increase in hands free phone use - that every now and again a student (as that's who I share most of my public restroom encounters with, students) will appear to be talking to me (or Talking to No One, which is a good title for a book by a guy with Asperger's Syndrome who lectures for a living) but instead be on the phone. I keep my dislike of this practice to myself. But I note it and make the appropriate gradebook adjustments (jokes, I tell the jokes).
This week, a particularly brutal week in the most demanding stretch of my professional life, I stood alone at the furthest urinal from the door in the downstairs men's room at my institution - when a student walked in and set up shop three urinals down, a safe and manageable distance.
We wordlessly continued doing what men do without acknowledging that each other existed, when, without any provocation - in full voice - he said "I just ate a whole bag of chips!"
Yeah, don't do that.
My first thought....is dude apologizing for an odor that I am not noticing....
My second thought...oh, yeah, he's on the phone.
By the time I washed up (that's hygeine, son!) and left he had continued with his conversation, so it was clear what the circumstance was, but that thoroughly out of nowhere, I had the experience of hearing "I just ate a whole bag of chips" in a men's room was the thing that happened this week that had the most impact on me - so that's how we start Tendown. After the jump - we'll talk about compulsory flag salute and all the rest of the happenings from the past 7 days.
TBOR Athlete of the Month - February 2010 (Plus 1991 Recap)
Friday, February 26, 2010
Drew Brees. Runners-Up: Alex Ovechkin, Bode Miller, Kim Yu-Na
Garret Hartley had maybe the best SB a kicker ever had and got my texted in vote for MVP; but I've got Brees's SB 12th all time for SB QB performances, and that gets him the win.
He joins Peyton Manning, who won last month, in the race for TBOR Athlete of the Year.
Last month, I started uploading the archives with the full 1990 tally. Here's 1991 (The AP Winner was Michael Jordan)
1991 Athlete of the Year - Michael Jordan
January - Thurman Thomas (Chris Zorich, Marcus Allen, Matt Bahr)
February - Stacey Augmon (Jimmy Jackson, Dominique Wilkins, Scott Skiles)
March - Brett Hull (Oliver Taylor, Sergei Bubka, Christian Laettner)
April - Roger Clemens (Hakeem Olajuwon, Ian Woosnam, Magic Johnson)
May - Mario Lemieux (Nolan Ryan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson)
June - Michael Jordan (Monica Seles, Scott Erickson, Barry Larkin)
July - Steffi Graf (Cal Ripken, Ian Baker Finch, Dennis Martinez)
August - John Daly (Mike Powell, Fred McGriff, Carl Lewis)
September - Jimmy Connors (Marshall Faulk, Barry Bonds, Chuck Knoblauch)
October - Jack Morris (Alejandro Pena, Kirby Puckett, Steve Avery)
November - Desmond Howard (Michael Jordan, Barry Sanders, Guy Forget)
December - Emmitt Smith (Kevin Willis, Bobby Hebert, Joey Mullen)
1st and Ten: The Weekly Tendown, February 14-20, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Dear Internet:
Hi. I'm Jim and this is the 15th Issue of the Weekly Tendown; Last Week, Sarah Palin wrote on her hand; Peyton Manning threw the biggest interception in football history; and Hollywood Week from American Idol was better than the national touring company of A Chorus Line - what - what do you suppose we'll talk about this week?
First: Tiger Woods Was a Big Supporter of Waterboarding.
The country stopped this week for 15 minutes. Four networks, all the cable news channels, every sportstalk radio program in the country - they all went live with the Tiger Woods statement on Friday in which he confessed to war crimes.
It was a startling fall from grace and I hope, once he apologizes to the public and goes through a personal journey of self-exploration where, hand in hand, he will walk with his spirit guide, that he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sentenced to play the rest of his life from the ladies tees at the Pelham Park public course in the Bronx. Perhaps that seems harsh, but his use of notes instead of just speaking from the heart gave his statement the ring of inauthenticity that I just don't care for from my war criminals. I need my heart talk. I need Tiger's heart to reach out to my heart and caress it, slowly but confidently, then with increased intensity until it builds to a feverish crescendo of hot heart on heart spurtgasmic pleasure. Mmmmm. Oh - wait - I have a voicemail. It's one of the new google "pimp my blog" accessories - you can leave me a voicemail right here at TBOR. Let's see who it is:
Hey. This is Tiger. Can you please take my name off your blog? My wife is going through my RSS feeds. Thanks.
I just want to walk through this.
Sunday, the former Vice President of the United States said, on ABC, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding." Now, waterboarding's torture, by all international precedent (including our prosecuting the Japanese after WWII). And Harpers identified specifically what US law it is that Cheney confessed this week to breaking. Presumably, principled conservatives, who are now arguing that, while civilian courts were used to try suspected terrorists during the Bush Administration - that doing so now is a sign of terrible, near treasonous appeasment during the Obama Administration - presumably principled conservatives would say that Dick Cheney should face a military tribunal for his confessed actions.
If only there had a been a gathering this week of the very most principled conservatives to test the theory.
Cheney, like Bob Hope making an unannounced walk on to the Carson show during a San Diego zoo spot in 1977, magically appeared at CPAC this week to "thunderous applause". Not everyone at CPAC viewed Cheney's statements with such equanimity, Bob Barr, who just fifteen years ago was as red as a red state congressman could be, said "waterboarding is torture" and was resoundingly jeered, almost as if he had said "evolution is real."
(You see this poll from this week? 30% of Texans think people and dinosaurs lived at the same time).
Actually, I don't hate Cheney for this - I didn't anticipate that a debate over "is torture ethical" should be part of our national discussion, but clearly it should be. That it's not isn't his fault - Cheney and the conservatives are very clearly taking a position that torture should be part of our prosecution of the war on terror (and perhaps normal criminal procedure; I don't know, I'd be interested in just how much big government conservatives believe in; how much power they want the government to have in criminal investigation. The theme at CPAC this week was the liberal assault on the Constitution (Simple Jack used the word cancer). And as half of the Bill of Rights specifically speak to the limits on the power of government in its criminal investigative role, probably someone should ask them to reconcile these views). What we need is another political party - one to the left of the Republicans, to challenge this view about torture - maybe we could have a clash of ideas about who we are, what we stand for, what are the American principles for which we continue to fight trillion dollar wars to uphold and defend.
Instead of that, we made Tiger put on the hair shirt this week.
Because that's who had to answer for his crimes. Tiger Woods.
Some people thought he was sincere. Others did not. A thought commonly expressed by the sports media industrial complex was from the SF Chronicle; which offered that Tiger was still a "control freak" and if he wanted to prove that he was really trying to change, he could start by skipping the Masters.
One way to understand a society is how it manifests disapproval of behavior.
So - Tiger Wooods had sexual intercourse with women other than the woman with whom he is supposed to have sexual intercourse. And the penalty for that is he should miss the Masters. Got it.
What if he had only gotten to second base?
Let's say that on Deadspin tomorrow is a photograph of Vijay Singh feeling up an Applebee's waitress.
What should be the penalty - that he, say, has to sit out Doral? What if we just penalize him some strokes? Golf's good like that - maybe he has to give up 3 shots a side in his next tournament.
Tiger's not a priest or a politician - he's a pitchman. He's not Larry Craig, taking a wide stance in a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall after a career of anti-gay legislation; the bar for "it's not about the sex, it's about the hypocrisy" has to be a little higher than "he wasn't getting blown in any of those Buick commercials - I have been deceived and demand recompense!"
Or maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I don't make the rules; I just write Tendown. This week, a former Vice-President confessed (without any enhanced interrogation, just freely of his own will) to torture and the response to his subsequent public appearance was tremendous applause - and a golfer went live on every channel on your television to apologize for having sex. That's where we are today. Right there.
After the jump - the rest of the Tendown.
Hi. I'm Jim and this is the 15th Issue of the Weekly Tendown; Last Week, Sarah Palin wrote on her hand; Peyton Manning threw the biggest interception in football history; and Hollywood Week from American Idol was better than the national touring company of A Chorus Line - what - what do you suppose we'll talk about this week?
First: Tiger Woods Was a Big Supporter of Waterboarding.
The country stopped this week for 15 minutes. Four networks, all the cable news channels, every sportstalk radio program in the country - they all went live with the Tiger Woods statement on Friday in which he confessed to war crimes.
It was a startling fall from grace and I hope, once he apologizes to the public and goes through a personal journey of self-exploration where, hand in hand, he will walk with his spirit guide, that he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sentenced to play the rest of his life from the ladies tees at the Pelham Park public course in the Bronx. Perhaps that seems harsh, but his use of notes instead of just speaking from the heart gave his statement the ring of inauthenticity that I just don't care for from my war criminals. I need my heart talk. I need Tiger's heart to reach out to my heart and caress it, slowly but confidently, then with increased intensity until it builds to a feverish crescendo of hot heart on heart spurtgasmic pleasure. Mmmmm. Oh - wait - I have a voicemail. It's one of the new google "pimp my blog" accessories - you can leave me a voicemail right here at TBOR. Let's see who it is:
Hey. This is Tiger. Can you please take my name off your blog? My wife is going through my RSS feeds. Thanks.
I just want to walk through this.
Sunday, the former Vice President of the United States said, on ABC, "I was a big supporter of waterboarding." Now, waterboarding's torture, by all international precedent (including our prosecuting the Japanese after WWII). And Harpers identified specifically what US law it is that Cheney confessed this week to breaking. Presumably, principled conservatives, who are now arguing that, while civilian courts were used to try suspected terrorists during the Bush Administration - that doing so now is a sign of terrible, near treasonous appeasment during the Obama Administration - presumably principled conservatives would say that Dick Cheney should face a military tribunal for his confessed actions.
If only there had a been a gathering this week of the very most principled conservatives to test the theory.
Cheney, like Bob Hope making an unannounced walk on to the Carson show during a San Diego zoo spot in 1977, magically appeared at CPAC this week to "thunderous applause". Not everyone at CPAC viewed Cheney's statements with such equanimity, Bob Barr, who just fifteen years ago was as red as a red state congressman could be, said "waterboarding is torture" and was resoundingly jeered, almost as if he had said "evolution is real."
(You see this poll from this week? 30% of Texans think people and dinosaurs lived at the same time).
Actually, I don't hate Cheney for this - I didn't anticipate that a debate over "is torture ethical" should be part of our national discussion, but clearly it should be. That it's not isn't his fault - Cheney and the conservatives are very clearly taking a position that torture should be part of our prosecution of the war on terror (and perhaps normal criminal procedure; I don't know, I'd be interested in just how much big government conservatives believe in; how much power they want the government to have in criminal investigation. The theme at CPAC this week was the liberal assault on the Constitution (Simple Jack used the word cancer). And as half of the Bill of Rights specifically speak to the limits on the power of government in its criminal investigative role, probably someone should ask them to reconcile these views). What we need is another political party - one to the left of the Republicans, to challenge this view about torture - maybe we could have a clash of ideas about who we are, what we stand for, what are the American principles for which we continue to fight trillion dollar wars to uphold and defend.
Instead of that, we made Tiger put on the hair shirt this week.
Because that's who had to answer for his crimes. Tiger Woods.
Some people thought he was sincere. Others did not. A thought commonly expressed by the sports media industrial complex was from the SF Chronicle; which offered that Tiger was still a "control freak" and if he wanted to prove that he was really trying to change, he could start by skipping the Masters.
One way to understand a society is how it manifests disapproval of behavior.
So - Tiger Wooods had sexual intercourse with women other than the woman with whom he is supposed to have sexual intercourse. And the penalty for that is he should miss the Masters. Got it.
What if he had only gotten to second base?
Let's say that on Deadspin tomorrow is a photograph of Vijay Singh feeling up an Applebee's waitress.
What should be the penalty - that he, say, has to sit out Doral? What if we just penalize him some strokes? Golf's good like that - maybe he has to give up 3 shots a side in his next tournament.
Tiger's not a priest or a politician - he's a pitchman. He's not Larry Craig, taking a wide stance in a Minneapolis airport bathroom stall after a career of anti-gay legislation; the bar for "it's not about the sex, it's about the hypocrisy" has to be a little higher than "he wasn't getting blown in any of those Buick commercials - I have been deceived and demand recompense!"
Or maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I don't make the rules; I just write Tendown. This week, a former Vice-President confessed (without any enhanced interrogation, just freely of his own will) to torture and the response to his subsequent public appearance was tremendous applause - and a golfer went live on every channel on your television to apologize for having sex. That's where we are today. Right there.
After the jump - the rest of the Tendown.
1st and Ten: The Weekly Tendown, February 7-13, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Dear Internet,
Hi. I'm Jim and this is the 14th issue of the Tendown, your weekly look at the best cultural happenings of the previous seven days; Last Week, I pit the 44 Super Bowls against their corresponding 44 US Presidents. Most shocking result - a victory for Nixon, which even I didn't see coming. It was the longest and most productive (not like a cough, but like - look how much product there is, which I picture myself saying while wearing a paper hat and a nametag and smiling fearfully at a supervisor) Tendown thusfar. I like Tendown, it's the opposite of proven blog technique (multiple little posts as opposed to one gelatinous one) but I prefer to write in essay form. I keep threatening myself to move back to dialogue based pieces, which is in my wheelhouse (the most recent gimmick, used in the 2006-7 versions of my online career, was that I'd have debates with a voice in my head). The value is that it's more entertaining than my essay writing, as if I have any real writing strength its in a 2 man rhythm (that's what she said; see, I told you I was funny!) but that requires a lack of self-censorship just not in keeping with my attempt to at least marginally be a public intellectual; I enjoy the occasional wildly off color reference, but I'm a soon to be 40 year old college instructor with a +1 corporate health insurance plan; it not only seems imprudent to make the same types of sketch comedy jokes I wrote two decades ago, its maybe a little creepy.
Funny. But maybe a little creepy. That's me and this is the best thing that happened over the past week:
First: The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations.
If there was ever a proof required of the "a picture is worth a thousand words" aphorism, here you go.
For all the words that have been written (and the many, many more that will be) about The Decline and Fall of the American Empire - none is as clarifying as this demonstration that, in 2010, in the middle of two unending, unwinnable wars and the worst economy in over a half century, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party has the intellectual horsepower and academic temperament of a tenth grader who's sleeping through American history.
David Broder wrote this week about her "pitch perfect populism." Joe Klein wrote this week about the "mystic chords" that she strikes. Frank Rich wrote this week about her message gaining traction.
None of these pieces really argue that she's qualified to be President or that her ideas will alter the trajectory of what appears to be an inexorable slide. Instead, the throughline seems to be that a woman who needs to write "lift American spirit" on her hand to remember that very nuanced policy point is to whom the American electorate is gravitating. (And here's the important point). Not in spite of actions like this but because of them. The argument made this week was that who we want is a woman who writes notes on her hand.
We like her because she's dumb. That's the argument. We like Sarah Palin because she's dumb.
On this week's Office, Michael Scott said "sometimes the smartest people don't think at all." Which sounds like something that might be slipped into one of Sarah Palin's speeches.
Not that we'd know that from her upcoming Florida appearances, because the media is barred from attending.
Of all the baseless charges Rush aims at Obama, the idea that he's not bright is the one where I most wonder how even his most ardent devotees think he's not full of crap:
I think this is the first time in his life that there's not a professor around to turn his C into an A, or to write the law review article for him he can't write. He is totally exposed. There is nobody to make it better. I think he's been covered for, all his life.
Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law....writes crib notes on her hand. Okay.
Emerson said "the mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself."
Perhaps that, and not the high fructose corn syrup, is the cause of our obesity epidemic.
That's the best thing that happened this week. After the jump - the rest of the Tendown!
Hi. I'm Jim and this is the 14th issue of the Tendown, your weekly look at the best cultural happenings of the previous seven days; Last Week, I pit the 44 Super Bowls against their corresponding 44 US Presidents. Most shocking result - a victory for Nixon, which even I didn't see coming. It was the longest and most productive (not like a cough, but like - look how much product there is, which I picture myself saying while wearing a paper hat and a nametag and smiling fearfully at a supervisor) Tendown thusfar. I like Tendown, it's the opposite of proven blog technique (multiple little posts as opposed to one gelatinous one) but I prefer to write in essay form. I keep threatening myself to move back to dialogue based pieces, which is in my wheelhouse (the most recent gimmick, used in the 2006-7 versions of my online career, was that I'd have debates with a voice in my head). The value is that it's more entertaining than my essay writing, as if I have any real writing strength its in a 2 man rhythm (that's what she said; see, I told you I was funny!) but that requires a lack of self-censorship just not in keeping with my attempt to at least marginally be a public intellectual; I enjoy the occasional wildly off color reference, but I'm a soon to be 40 year old college instructor with a +1 corporate health insurance plan; it not only seems imprudent to make the same types of sketch comedy jokes I wrote two decades ago, its maybe a little creepy.
Funny. But maybe a little creepy. That's me and this is the best thing that happened over the past week:
First: The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations.
If there was ever a proof required of the "a picture is worth a thousand words" aphorism, here you go.
For all the words that have been written (and the many, many more that will be) about The Decline and Fall of the American Empire - none is as clarifying as this demonstration that, in 2010, in the middle of two unending, unwinnable wars and the worst economy in over a half century, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party has the intellectual horsepower and academic temperament of a tenth grader who's sleeping through American history.
David Broder wrote this week about her "pitch perfect populism." Joe Klein wrote this week about the "mystic chords" that she strikes. Frank Rich wrote this week about her message gaining traction.
None of these pieces really argue that she's qualified to be President or that her ideas will alter the trajectory of what appears to be an inexorable slide. Instead, the throughline seems to be that a woman who needs to write "lift American spirit" on her hand to remember that very nuanced policy point is to whom the American electorate is gravitating. (And here's the important point). Not in spite of actions like this but because of them. The argument made this week was that who we want is a woman who writes notes on her hand.
We like her because she's dumb. That's the argument. We like Sarah Palin because she's dumb.
On this week's Office, Michael Scott said "sometimes the smartest people don't think at all." Which sounds like something that might be slipped into one of Sarah Palin's speeches.
Not that we'd know that from her upcoming Florida appearances, because the media is barred from attending.
Of all the baseless charges Rush aims at Obama, the idea that he's not bright is the one where I most wonder how even his most ardent devotees think he's not full of crap:
I think this is the first time in his life that there's not a professor around to turn his C into an A, or to write the law review article for him he can't write. He is totally exposed. There is nobody to make it better. I think he's been covered for, all his life.
Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law....writes crib notes on her hand. Okay.
Emerson said "the mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself."
Perhaps that, and not the high fructose corn syrup, is the cause of our obesity epidemic.
That's the best thing that happened this week. After the jump - the rest of the Tendown!
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