February 2012
14 posts
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WatchLewis Black remains one of my favorite comedians, if only because his total-meltdown style of delivery is so appealing to my own sensibilities. Melting down is a key component of life. Pretending otherwise is grating at best.
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WatchA transcendant performance by all involved but mostly Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler.
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Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 9
You know what I’ve learned from watching The Walking Dead? Women ruin everything. If I didn’t know better, the entirety of the show is dedicated solely to communicating this point, never so much as in last night’s catastrophe of an episode. Let’s focus on what we learned:
-Women Go Too Crazy: last week, Lori lost her mind because she had been without Rick for almost five...
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The War Is Over. The Bums Lost.
You know how you end up thinking that writing this article is a good idea? You’re fucking bonkers insane. No normal, reasonable person looks at the ingestion of contraception and sees a Leviathan at work, tearing our society apart. No normal, reasonable person looks at the ingestion of contraception and sees anything other than a woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant.
But not George...
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The Walking Dead, Mid-Season Premiere
Last December, The Walking Dead ended on a high-note with the plain execution of the girl-zombie Sofia. Yes it was emotionally painful. Yes it was perhaps overdramatic. Yes it was a plainly obvious outcome. But at least something finally made sense.
So when The Walking Dead re-emerged from its self-imposed break, it was easy to imagine a show that had finally gotten itself together thematically....
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Howard Stern Crushing Republican Demagogues
Howard Stern crushes Republicans for their abhorrent views on gays. Howard Stern. When you’re getting crushed for your indecency by somebody like Howard Stern, the tide is turning mightily against your positions. How on Earth are Republicans going to run on this stuff this year? Or in 2014? Or in 2016?
The Incessant Whining Of Social Conservatives
(Catholics love birth control, incidentally. It’s just their bishops that don’t.)
Socially conservative Christians would like me to believe that a governmental rule forcing their organizations to pay for birth control is oppressive at best and tyrannical at worst. You can see at least some of their seething contempt for the rule in this article. As is typically the case with socially...
Takes Guts
It takes guts to run a website dedicated to hugely expensive, utterly over-the-top fashion well beyond the means of most Americans and then recoil in horror as if you’re not part of the problem. Because yes, it is insane to pay $500 for something cheap, but it is just as insane to pay a “pretty penny” for clothing that doesn’t even fit you.
If you’re going to...
Spectacularly Bored?
If you find yourself bored beyond your wildest imagination, you could consider reading something I wrote about preferences. It is posted here. I suppose it would be fair to say that the thing I believe in the most strongly is the equality of human preferences. Which makes me a megadork.
Thanks to Erik Kain for publishing it. He is super famous.
January 2012
9 posts
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And So You TRY To Write...
…and then some asshole writes something like this and you want to say, “Fuck it, I can’t do that.” That, for the record, is good journalism, entirely unlike the utter crap that is produced so mindlessly by so many, and if that makes me nothing more than the author’s fanboy, so be it. I’d be willing to wager that there is more real work done in that relatively...
Megan Amram: Paula Deen’s Health Food Cook Book →
meganamram:
Recently, Paula Deen has admitted that she’s had Type II Diabetes for years. Accordingly, she’s putting out a cookbook of healthy food. Here are some excerpts!
FRUIT SALAD
INGREDIENTS:
1 lb. bag of Skittles
3 cups ranch dressing
DIRECTIONS:
Mix well. Serve room temperature.
-
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The Utterly Infuriating Notion of Appropriate...
In what was an apparently horrendous fashion faux-pas, an actress at the Golden Globes - an actress whose work was highly praised via a nomination that she received for it- was caught wearing toe shoes. This is nightmarish, according to the people who trouble themselves with caring about what third-parties are wearing out in public. The author writes:
Vibram Five Fingers are not appropriate...
A Statute of Limitations
Surely, there is some sort of statute of limitations on anger, on unrelenting fury that grabs ahold of you at the most unexpected and unwelcome times. How can anybody continue to be angry about things that happened five, ten, fifteen years ago?
And when I ask generally, I mean specifically, about myself. I suppose there are some things that I can push into the background far enough to be beyond...
On The Media, Briefly
In the summer of 2000, when I was 19, I went to work for an unnamed media organization at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. I spent three weeks working for them and made close to $3000, which I immediately turned into a car that I continue to love despite totaling it eight years ago. I genuinely still love that car.
In retrospect, the most important thing I took from that...
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On Conformity, Briefly
I am forever aghast at the societal imposition of norms upon individuals even though I do precisely the same thing myself on an almost daily basis. Ask me, for example, about skinny leg jeans and my head will explode and go rolling down the street. Still, I read with great interest Erik Kain’s brief missive on the issue conformity and stealth variations of non-conformity.
To be brief: I...
2012 Better Be A Year For Doing Something
A quick postscript for 2011: I didn’t do anything of note. An entire year went by with nothing to show for it. That’s lame. So for 2012, the following:
Write More: because I don’t write now, and because it is a thing I’ve spent a long time doing and loving. I have no idea what success will be defined as, so we’ll simply say 200,000 words or more. And no, I...
December 2011
14 posts
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November 2011
21 posts
Abandon All Hope
Worth noting: this is enough to make me abandon all hope in America. It is the prosecution of an elderly American who deeply believes in the idea of jury nullification, which involves juries not only finding a person innocent of whatever they have been accused of but also nullifying the law itself. The prosecutor’s argument is that it isn’t legal to encourage this behavior near a...
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Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 7
Credit where credit is due: the show finally got something right. That something - when Sofia shambled out of the barn, desperate for “Braaaaaaaaaaainnnnns!” - was a moment of watching the show that made me say to myself that all of the crap that has come along with the show was worth it.
Except, it isn’t really worth it. In fact, much of the show is a steaming pile of...
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Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 6
In a show ostensibly about a zombie cataclysm, we’re left to debate life itself.
Remember the moment we all realized that The Walking Dead’s title was referring not to the walkers wandering the globe, but the remaining living? And remember how we all went, “Oh, okay, that makes sense, I guess.” And we patted each other on the backs for realizing that life after a zombie...
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Anonymous asked: AHH, just a response to your walking dead post. When they tried getting water out of the well during the last episode, I couldn't help but think of how stupid they were for not taking the bottled water out of the truck!
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Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 5
Umm…here are the problems, briefly:
1. Everybody in my living room knew that there were dead people somewhere on the farm. There had to be. It was too idyllic, too perfect, too serene. That Hershell kept alluding to things he couldn’t talk about only hinted that something somewhere was amiss. So it wasn’t entirely shocking when Maggie’s freakout about having sex in the...
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3.96 Miles, 40 Minutes, Distraction
I was distracted for the entirety of my run today, and as a result, I never focused enough on what I was doing to prevent the recurrent stitching and neverending tunneling that took me away from my ever-present goal: making it home. So I didn’t make it home. The entire run was ruined by this inability of mine to stop thinking about things that consume my focus.
How goddamned irritating.
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