Thursday, February 26, 2004

Deliciously Stupid Song Of The Day 2.25.04

Ratt's In Your Direction.

abusing you all across the country
said i feel hot coals, yeah.


By far those are the smartest lyrics in that song. Not so cool that it was followed up by The Postal Service's Such Great Heights-- ITunes, I like discordant and jarring as much as the next guy...

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Passonate 2.24.04

So who's with me to see Mel Gibson's new movie? We'll start a religious pie fight. Here is one review.

Saturday, February 21, 2004

No Title 2.21.04

Note: After watching Bringing Down the House, I realize that we certainly have a hard time talking about much of anything—racism in this case—without sweeping, broad stereotypes; or perhaps we are all generalizations and condescensions.

Note: The silliest fashion trend—winter knit hats with summer cap brims. So stupid it’s gangsta.

Note: I feel old again; after drinks on the Upper West with Hollycat (who convinced us to make it up there?) Selvadurai/ Dave/ the Fighting Samantha convinced me to see the great Roni Size at Avalon, which was once known as the underage dance mecca Limelight. There was the spike-haired tool, drunk as hell behind us, talking to himself:

Roni Size!
DJ Die!
N-U-T!
B-N-T!
D-S-L!


Or whatever he was saying; and there we were, freezing, waiting to get into a place that I only went to when my only ID was a school ID. The show was live and the place looks pretty cool, though there is something strange about noting places where my friends took lots of codeine; where I hooked up with some girl; where Descha and Tony were kicking it to some women who would have nothing to do with us.

And ohhh, my bunions. My hammertoes! My insole! Dancing in boots and when out of shape is humbling; used to be that Samantha and myself could keep going and going and going. Damned age.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Hey, Where Is The Money Going? 2.18.04

If the government isn't going to pay for the bst equipment with the ridiculous appropriations our Congress is giving for the war effort, the NRA should consider spending some of that lobbying money and convention cash on protecting our red-blooded troops. Or perhaps the government could ask our corporate tax-avoiders to pony up some scrill? Just an idea. Read here.

The Price of Boston 2.18.04

Boston, that jealous city north of us in NYC, covered in ice and fat people in SUV’s was graced by my presence this weekend. I would continue about what I ate each day and my times with Seabiscuit Anna and a moment with Gabi, but what’s really important—besides a person I missed—are the two bits of entertainment we caught.

A Winter’s Tale was put on by Brandeis’ performing arts crew. The sets were tight, two stories of metal doors, with the image of bare trees etched out of the frosting on the glass. Backups painted for wintry gloom in Europe and desert heat in Africa.

That was the good. The bad included the play reimagined as the friendship between a European and an African monarch—cool concept—and opened a frenetic second half with kids doing some cockamamie version of African dance. Words won’t describe it but if you drop you jaw and look confused, like when your neighbor’s SUV knocks on your door to tell you to stop changing naked with the blinds open, you’ll get the same impact. I was wondering why none of the people had a better tan. And what was with the snakes coming out of the men’s pants.

Truly amazing, the acting. Limp, unconvincing, and Autolycus was played by the very fruity Andrew Fitzpatrick. Any of you WU kids remember him? The boy who went around telling everyone how he and the chancellor’s son got nakedly acquainted? Apparently he is up there at Brandeis, over-the-top as always. And then he did a pop song, set to Shakespearean lyrics. Think a stripped down budget-ass *NSync. Then think of having not slept in a day and watching this play drag on like a LOX freestyle. It’s long to begin with and falls apart in the end—it’s obvious that either Billy Shakespeare was playing a joke on theatre or he got really lazy… or drunk. My eyes were drifting down and I wanted it to end, to end, to end.

Also of note is that the Perfect Score features Darius Miles… and fired St. John’s coach Mike Jarvis. More on that in the other blog, soon, but of humorous note: Darius’ character (the well-named Desmond Rose) has to get his grades up to get into St. John’s. Oh, I laughed about that one.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Two Turntables and No Conscience 2.10.04

You know that feeling you get when you hear a song so unbelievably wack you can’t imagine someone sat in their studio, poring over beats and mixing music, and though it was a good idea? The song that has to be explained by excessive stupidity and bribes?

If you can download it look for a remix of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” with overlays by Mobb Deep (from Shook Ones) and The Wu-Tang (from The Mystery of Chessboxing). I promise. You’ll be impressed.

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Q-Tip: Hollywood's Cool? 2.03.04

from the EUR:

Hip-hop star Q-Tip has become popular among
the Hollywood types. The rapper, who apparently will
be releasing a new solo album this year, is currently
dating 40-year old actress Tatum O'Neal ("Bad News
Bears"). Q-Tip has also dated Nicole Kidman, Janet
Jackson and rapper Angie Martinez.

Play on, playa.
John Kerry: No Wimpy Dukakis. 2.03.04

from the Atlantic Monthly:

Indeed, Mr Kerry stands a chance not just of deflecting the wimp charge but of hurling it back at his detractors. Both George Bush and Dick Cheney somehow managed to avoid serving in Vietnam. Paul Wolfowitz spent the war storming the groves of academia rather than the canals of the Mekong delta. Indeed, it is hard to think of any neo-conservative who has put on his country's uniform other than in his dreams. Mr Kerry can legitimately argue that, as someone who has been at the sharp end of battle, he would have thought more carefully than these “chicken hawks” before launching a pre-emptive war. He gets some of his loudest applause on the stump when he says that he knows “something about aircraft carriers for real”.

Read more.
Dork Factor 10 2.03.04

Happily, Pixel has turned me on to Que Sera Sera, whom Gully met at New Year's. This definitely cements her dork factor and I have added a link to her blog to the side. Get to reading!

Also, hear people read William Blake's London.
Token Sucker! (from the NY Times) 2.03.04

Of 25,382 repairs in December, 16,936 involved the bill-handling unit. About 45 percent of these - or 30 percent of all repairs - were caused by tampering. The tamperer's goal is to break the machine so that riders will be forced to use the services of a person who just happens to be waiting nearby with a handful of unlimited-ride day passes offering to swipe people through for $2.

"They start a transaction," said Antonio Suarez, chief officer of automated fare collection equipment maintenance for the transit agency. "Instead of money, they introduce a card or a foreign object."

"What these guys will do is they will purchase multiples of those cards and just switch them as they're swiping people through and charge them two bucks apiece," said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York City Police Department.

The scam was in full view on a recent afternoon at the station at 125th Streeet and Lexington Avenue, where a group of men jostled to swipe riders through the turnstiles. All three MetroCard machines in the station were out of commission.

Officials say the scam represents an evolution of the extinct art of "token sucking," in which a person would clog the token slot with a matchbook or even glue. After the stymied rider walked away, the token sucker would clamp his lips over the receptacle and suck the token out, then turn around and resell it. The scam produced repair headaches similar to those the transit agency is experiencing with MetroCard. Repair crews used to fix turnstiles at a clip of about 250 a day, about 60 percent of them because of paper stuffed in the token slots.

Some of the swipers of today, as they are nicknamed, have stumbled upon a MetroCard quirk in which someone can bend a discarded card a certain way, then swipe it through a card reader three times quickly and somehow end up with a $2 credit.

[--stupid token wrecking f**kers.--]

Monday, February 02, 2004

from Maureen Dowd, NYTimes 2.1.04

Saddam, [Condeleeza Rice] told Matt Lauer, had secretively refused to account for missing stockpiles of botulinum toxin and anthrax, even though he knew he would face serious consequences: "I don't know how you could have come to any other conclusion but that he had weapons of mass destruction."

A conservative, ice-skating Brahms aficionada from Birmingham had assumed that a homicidal, grenade-fishing Sinatra aficionado from Tikrit reasoned just like her.

Bush officials, awash in the vice president's Hobbesian gloom, deduced that Saddam would not hide if he had nothing to hide. Even after all their talk about a Bernard Lewis clash of civilizations and a battle of good versus evil, they still projected a Western mind-set on Saddam.

Ms. Rice argued that the U.S. was right to conclude that Saddam had W.M.D. and attack him because the dictator was not behaving rationally. But why did she think someone President Bush deemed "a madman" would behave rationally?

Cheney & Company were so consumed with puffing the intelligence to try to connect Saddam with 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear material, they failed to challenge basic assumptions....

Even Paul Wolfowitz observed last May that it was important not to assume that foes like Saddam "will be rational according to our definition of what is rational." Interviewed by Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair, Mr. Wolfowitz said bad intelligence came from mirror imaging — assuming people would behave like us: "The kind of mistake that, in a sense, I think we made implicitly in assuming that anyone who was intelligent enough to fly an airplane wouldn't commit suicide with it."

Read more here.