Elitist?

Is Roger Kimball some sort of absurdist joke? Because, unless I’m somehow mistaken, he’s calling Obama an elitist  despite having a Latin phrase and a Dr. Johnson reference in the first paragraph. Oh yeah, and he wears a bow-tie.

via

Sephora Is The Resistance

Phoebe Maltz on childhood choices of activities:

So, to repeat, we should let our children roam free amongst cosmetics.To the many commentators at Jezebel who are convinced that their own ‘real’ childhoods playing sports in the mud were somehow morally superior, I remind you that valuing physical fitness and nature over femininity, artifice, and materialism is kind of, well, fascist.

To preempt the furious comments from those who hate makeup and genocide, my point is not that valuing the outdoors makes you a Nazi, but that there’s nothing inherently innocent about either the pro- or anti-lipgloss position. But I’m no relativist, and if I had to pick, the great outdoors, not the great Sephora, is the root of all evil.

Replace “makeup” and “Sephora” with “video games” and you get a good look at much of my childhood. Except that video games seem kinda fascist in the Marinetti/Fusionist sense of the term.

On Occasion, My Life is Unspeakably Awesome

The last semester of high school is a special time.  Grades matter a bit less, everyone is excited to leave for college and so people tend to focus  on having as much fun as possible.  For some, second semester means dumping some 6,000 bouncy balls on unsuspecting students.  For others, it entails spending a good portion of the school day like this:

(that’s me on the left, and yes, this picture was taken during school hours. Life is awesome)

Posted Without Comment

Robert Frank Abides

Do you like MTV Cribs?  Do you like counter-intuitive liberal micro-economics?  If you answered “yes” to both questions, then Robert Frank’s Cribs parody is just the thing for you!

 

I’ll just add that the production values are quite high and both Frank and the video crew capture the cribs Cribs pretty well.  I am also impressed that he manages to both be married and have an entire fridge devoted to beer - his wife is pretty good looking as well.  And he’s a huge Big Lebowski fan. Basically Robert Frank is the coolest person ever.

Teh Evel: Joe Lieberman Edition

Joe Lieberman supports foreign policies that I think are unsound and will not increase our national security.  That is all

Surely Elven Hedge Fund Managers Must Pay Higher Taxes

Daniel Drezner’s vision of a Paul Krugman Christmas column is not only funny, but scarily accurate:

In the fifties, the elves at the Norh Pole were more than 40% unionized, and as we all know, it was the golden age of the elf middle class. Elf wages have since declined, and if you think that’s only because of globalization and technological change, hey, here’s a single magazine article from five years ago that ostensibly upends that supposition (while whiffing on the underlying causal trend).Moving, on, Barack Obama claims that, as Santa, he will help the elf middle class. He has also said, however, that he wants to be “the Santa of the naughty and the nice.” He’s criticized the elf union for funding alternative candidates. It’s conciliatory rhetoric like that which will guarantee that Obama will not be elected by a wide margin, dooming the progressive elf movement to a curious footnote in history….

The Onion Takes on the Blogosphere

I’m sure this will fly around the net soon enough, but here is the soon-to-be-classic “Entire Blogosphere Stunned by Blogger’s Special Weekend Post”:

NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times.

“Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs. “I thought I was going to have to wait until Monday to find out if Ben decided to put [the shelf] in his bedroom or the living room. The pictures were great, too.”

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann’s 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.

I’m a fair guy, but this f ***ing heat is making me absolutely crazy.

David Brooks can be very funny sometimes:

I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, leads to victory. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about in Santa Monica dinner parties, you want me at that podium. You need me at that podium. And I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to the self-righteous liberals who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very victory I provide! I wish you’d just said thanks and went on your way. In any case, I don’t give a damn what answers you think you’re entitled to!

I think he basically summed up the entirety of the Clinton campaign. That and I’m a total sucker for A Few Good Men.

We Need Ron Paul For the Long Haul

Via James Poulos, the best sign that Ron Paul’s supporters are the most entertaining bunch of crazies since…well, since ever.

Oh yeah, “she bring death like cheesesteak” may just be the best line ever.

The Onion Takes On Inequality

Onion TV has a funny clip lamenting how the merely rich are falling behind the super-rich and are desperately trying to catch up. The weird thing is, this is actually happening. Income statistics from the last 35 years show that the 90th percentile income has risen by 58 percent and the 99th by 121 percent. While these gains seem large, the 99.9 and the 99.99th percentile incomes have gone up 236 and 617 percent, respectively. If you take Robert Frank’s ideas on relative deprivation seriously, the rich who have geographic and social equality with the super rich are actually losing out due to localized inequality starting an arms race for positional goods and services. So, in a weird way, egalitarians ought to be concerned about the plight of the regular rich. I’ve written quite a bit about this phenomena here and here.

Hattip - Bryan Caplan

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god

Reuters reports:

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.

That is all.

Well, With A Name Like That…

Garance Franke Ruta has been investigating the legal background of Senator Craig’s lewd conduct/soliciting/cruising snafu, and found out that “in State v. Limberhand, [the Idaho Court of Appeals] ruled that (solo) masturbation within an enclosed restroom stall was constitutionally protected behavior as the individual within the stall had a reasonable expectation of privacy within the stall.”

Yes, you read that right, the man who went to the Idaho Court of Appeals to protect his right to masturbate in a bathroom stall was named Limberhand. Just like Wordsworth was destined by his name to become a poet, or Chris Moneymaker was destined to become a poker player, so Limberhand was destined to….well, you can figure it out.

German Journalism

Turns out those krauts down at the league office can spin a good phrase reporting on the otherwise dry subject of sub-prime mortgages, as Corey Spaley has discovered.  Der Spiegel wrote this:

Wenn Otto Normalverbraucher, der in den USA Joe Average heißt, seine Hypothek nicht mehr bedienen kann, gehen alle baden.

Which translates to

If Joe Average in the USA can’t pay his mortgage, we’re all screwed.

I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!

From Dr. Evil to the Pentagon.

Creating armor that renders a soldier invisible. Stimulating the brain to suppress sleep for days. Arming sharks with chemical implants and cameras to work as spies.

This year the Pentagon will spend $78 billion — about half of all government research and development dollars — on a variety of projects, according to the American Association for the Advancement for Science (AAAS).

Are they ill tempered?

Tip of the hat…Pandagon 

It’s Business, It’s Business Time

Well, my family and I drove the entire distance from Atlanta to beautiful Lexington, Kentucky. That means the entire height of Tennessee plus good stretched of Georgia and Kentucky. Didn’t see too much, because I was asleep most of the time. Stopped at a gas station in Tennessee and saw some nice confederate memorbilia and firecrackers. Tennesse is full of entire stores devoted to firecrackers, which is neat. Being from nanny state California, a good m-80 or Roman candle is hard to come by. Also saw some “choose life” license plates in Tenn, as well as a nice big “WAIT UNTIL MARRIAGE” billboard somewhere between Chattanooga and Knoxville. Meh, I guess that’s the coastal elitist liberal coming out in me. I’m super tired and could barely read my dailiy round of blogs, newspapers and magazine websites, let alone write about anything, so, I leave you with this:

Never Stop Believing in a Campaign’s Ability to be Stupid

Via Yglesias, the Clinton Campaign decided to make a spot portraying Bill and Hillary as Tony and Carmela in the infamous final scene of the Sopranos.  Call me cautious, but I don’t think it’s the best idea for a couple who spent the better part of the 90s fending off accusations that they ran something of a mafia in Arkansas to pretend their America’s most famous mob couple.

In case anyone cares, the Hillary campaign picked Celine Dion’s “You and I” as the official campaign song. Hillary just lost my primary vote, well, that is if I could vote in the California primary.  I mean, she’s clearly  decided to orient her campaign to half deaf, muscially retarded,  weepish middle aged people who are responsible for the 1997 Oscars Best Original Song travesty, you can hardly blame for feeling a bit alienated from the cause.

Smoke Weed And an Alien Will Steal Your Girlfriend

…and maybe your talking dog will be ashamed of you. Check out Seth Stevenson’s review of the most recent anti-Marijuana ads floating around the tube, though they may seem ridiculous, they are more effective, subtle and realistic than classics like the dude not realizing his Dad’s gun is loaded or the guys running over a little girl onher bike.

Note - The black text that shows up when the alien goes away with the girl isn’t in the original spot.

The Price Is Wrong, Bitch!

From TMV, we have the sad, sad news that after his many years of sleeping with the models and hosting The Price is Right, Bob Barker is retiring.  I, having had to go attend school nearly the entire time my life and The Price is Right intersected, never got to watch it very much.  But the man is a cultural icon and will surely be missed.  The show reached it’s peak with this surreal episode:

What Would Quagmire Do…

if he saw the headline of this Feministing post?