http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/30/minnesota-decision-al-fra_n_223258.html
Senator Al Franken. How fucking great is that? I'm just gonna keep saying it all day.
I'm also gonna watch some of my favorites again...
(Oh, to be a fly on the wall when O'Reilly, Coulter and the rest of these assholes got the news...)
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Food, Inc.
So maybe you read "Fast Food Nation" or "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and thought to yourself, "This is pretty fascinating, illuminating, even stomach-churning stuff...But damnit, I need some audio/visual aids to really send the points home."
The movie for you to see, then, is "Food, Inc.", which is at the Nuart in Los Angeles and presumably will open wider. David Edelstein says it best:
After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both are in the film). But every frame makes you choke on your popcorn—if for no other reason than the focus on government-underwritten corn and the companies who put it into everything from soda to Midol to the gassy, E. coli–ridden bellies of factory-farmed cows. The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing—it touches on every aspect of modern life. It’s the documentary equivalent of The Matrix: It shows us how we’re living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything. We humans can win, but we should hurry, before Monsanto makes a time machine and sends back a Terminator to get rid of Schlosser and Pollan.
If nothing else, the movie has convinced me to TRY buying only organic food products for a while. The immediate cost is slightly higher, but (the film makes the case) the long-term savings, to your healthy, the rest of the world, and the future, make up the difference many times over, so...
Organic for a month! Let's try it!
Who's with me?
The movie for you to see, then, is "Food, Inc.", which is at the Nuart in Los Angeles and presumably will open wider. David Edelstein says it best:
After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both are in the film). But every frame makes you choke on your popcorn—if for no other reason than the focus on government-underwritten corn and the companies who put it into everything from soda to Midol to the gassy, E. coli–ridden bellies of factory-farmed cows. The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing—it touches on every aspect of modern life. It’s the documentary equivalent of The Matrix: It shows us how we’re living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything. We humans can win, but we should hurry, before Monsanto makes a time machine and sends back a Terminator to get rid of Schlosser and Pollan.
If nothing else, the movie has convinced me to TRY buying only organic food products for a while. The immediate cost is slightly higher, but (the film makes the case) the long-term savings, to your healthy, the rest of the world, and the future, make up the difference many times over, so...
Organic for a month! Let's try it!
Who's with me?
Sunday, June 14, 2009
The Troll
Sigh...Yeah, I guess there's one at every blog. But this one has a back story that I might as well share. Nutshell version is this:
I'm a regular poster on a message board that consists of Writers Guild members. Most of the posters there are kind, witty, helpful, incredibly smart, gifted writers, many of whom I am proud to call my friends. The majority of them, myself included, are also politically liberal, which has led to many a bitter political argument when one of the conservatives makes his/her case. Most of the time, it's a perfectly civil disagreement that gradually peters out. But naturally, because it's the internet, the board also attracted a serious devoted and demented troll whose stated goal was to be contrarian, to insult everyone else, to cause trouble, to basically be, as a colleague put it, the turd in the punch bowl.
His typical M.O. would be to regurgitate a pile of wildly extreme right-wing views and talking points that he didn't even believe for the sole purpose of creating havoc and disrupting conversations, and when these hysterics would be invariably dismantled with simple logic, common sense, and facts, he would quickly resort to name-calling and profanity, his mouth getting frothier and frothier until he finally melted down to such a degree that he'd say something so outrageously horrible and inappropriate that he'd get banned from the board for a while. Then he'd come back, not the least bit humbled, start posting his ravings again, and the cycle would start anew.
But his last visit to the board, several months ago, topped them all, when he tried to show off his bona fides as a "journalist" while arguing with someone who actually DID have years of experience as a journalist. He did so by posting a press release about his having won a large monetary award for his financial journalism articles online. The only problem? The award didn't exist, the entity giving the award didn't exist, and the day of the week listed in the "press release" that the award was supposedly given to him on did not match the actual day of the week that the date fell on.
In other words, dude was so pathetically desperate to make his point, and so cheerfully willing to be completely dishonest about it, that he invented an award for himself and concocted a phony press release about it.
So naturally, because it was so transparently phony that it took about two seconds of research to reveal it as such, he was outed as, on top of being a miserable troll, a blatant liar. Yet he continued to post, despite now having gambled away what little credibility he'd had left and was now basically the laughingstock of the board.
So he continued blathering his nonsense, and I and others continued rebutting him at every turn, never forgetting to remind him of the phony journalist award debacle (which he never even bothered to defend or explain), so he started issuing "warnings" to me to leave him alone...until he finally revealed what lay in store for me for not heeding his dire warnings: A blog post he'd written elsewhere (he has since deleted it) that called me out as a "cyber-stalker", took a bunch of baseless potshots at me, and somewhere in there mentioned that he had a gun, the implication being a pretty strong one that he intended to shoot me if I continued "stalking" him.
Well, the moderators of our message board didn't take too kindly to one of the members making what was essentially a death threat against another, so they banned him for an extensive period this time, and that's how it's been, and the board is all the better for his absence, and I went right on living my life.
And now...he's here.
Cats and kittens, meet I Lost the Nest Egg's most prolific commenter: "Karen".
Oh, make no mistake, it's him. He's denied it, of course, but judging from the instantly recognizable stylistic touches (the high school logic, the baseless potshots, the insulting tone, the crude sexual analogies, the insistence that I'm wasting my time responding to him (on the old board, he would ridicule anyone with a high post count) the use of LOL's (he's big on emoticons too), the begging me to delete his posts (on the old board he would constantly beg anyone he argued with to "Put me on IGNORE!")), and the fact that there's simply no one else in the world who would go to this much trouble to try to demean me in the way that "Karen" is trying, I would happily swear on a thousand Bibles that it's my old buddy.
Anyway, that's the back story behind all these "Karen" posts. I've deleted a few of them because they consisted almost entirely of potshots and served no purpose other than to stink up the joint, but I'm going to leave the lion's share of them up, because they so beautifully illustrate the sort of inanity I spent countless hours at various day jobs demolishing.
Oh, also, as you read them and take in all the cartoonishly nasty comments about my career and the "schooling" of me he's doing on how the business works and ridiculing me for embarking on a career outside the industry?
Keep in mind: This dude runs a payday loan company and spends much of his time lately blogging in defense of the wondrous world of payday loans. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course (well, actually many would argue that there's PLENTY wrong with payday loans, but that's for another day), in fact, more power to him for finding an alternative line of work, since apparently the writing thing didn't pan out too well for him. It's just not really helping his case against MY career all that much.
So...fun's fun, "Karen", but I think you've worn out your welcome here at I Lost the Nest Egg.
And anyway, don't you have some more journalism awards to win?
I'm a regular poster on a message board that consists of Writers Guild members. Most of the posters there are kind, witty, helpful, incredibly smart, gifted writers, many of whom I am proud to call my friends. The majority of them, myself included, are also politically liberal, which has led to many a bitter political argument when one of the conservatives makes his/her case. Most of the time, it's a perfectly civil disagreement that gradually peters out. But naturally, because it's the internet, the board also attracted a serious devoted and demented troll whose stated goal was to be contrarian, to insult everyone else, to cause trouble, to basically be, as a colleague put it, the turd in the punch bowl.
His typical M.O. would be to regurgitate a pile of wildly extreme right-wing views and talking points that he didn't even believe for the sole purpose of creating havoc and disrupting conversations, and when these hysterics would be invariably dismantled with simple logic, common sense, and facts, he would quickly resort to name-calling and profanity, his mouth getting frothier and frothier until he finally melted down to such a degree that he'd say something so outrageously horrible and inappropriate that he'd get banned from the board for a while. Then he'd come back, not the least bit humbled, start posting his ravings again, and the cycle would start anew.
But his last visit to the board, several months ago, topped them all, when he tried to show off his bona fides as a "journalist" while arguing with someone who actually DID have years of experience as a journalist. He did so by posting a press release about his having won a large monetary award for his financial journalism articles online. The only problem? The award didn't exist, the entity giving the award didn't exist, and the day of the week listed in the "press release" that the award was supposedly given to him on did not match the actual day of the week that the date fell on.
In other words, dude was so pathetically desperate to make his point, and so cheerfully willing to be completely dishonest about it, that he invented an award for himself and concocted a phony press release about it.
So naturally, because it was so transparently phony that it took about two seconds of research to reveal it as such, he was outed as, on top of being a miserable troll, a blatant liar. Yet he continued to post, despite now having gambled away what little credibility he'd had left and was now basically the laughingstock of the board.
So he continued blathering his nonsense, and I and others continued rebutting him at every turn, never forgetting to remind him of the phony journalist award debacle (which he never even bothered to defend or explain), so he started issuing "warnings" to me to leave him alone...until he finally revealed what lay in store for me for not heeding his dire warnings: A blog post he'd written elsewhere (he has since deleted it) that called me out as a "cyber-stalker", took a bunch of baseless potshots at me, and somewhere in there mentioned that he had a gun, the implication being a pretty strong one that he intended to shoot me if I continued "stalking" him.
Well, the moderators of our message board didn't take too kindly to one of the members making what was essentially a death threat against another, so they banned him for an extensive period this time, and that's how it's been, and the board is all the better for his absence, and I went right on living my life.
And now...he's here.
Cats and kittens, meet I Lost the Nest Egg's most prolific commenter: "Karen".
Oh, make no mistake, it's him. He's denied it, of course, but judging from the instantly recognizable stylistic touches (the high school logic, the baseless potshots, the insulting tone, the crude sexual analogies, the insistence that I'm wasting my time responding to him (on the old board, he would ridicule anyone with a high post count) the use of LOL's (he's big on emoticons too), the begging me to delete his posts (on the old board he would constantly beg anyone he argued with to "Put me on IGNORE!")), and the fact that there's simply no one else in the world who would go to this much trouble to try to demean me in the way that "Karen" is trying, I would happily swear on a thousand Bibles that it's my old buddy.
Anyway, that's the back story behind all these "Karen" posts. I've deleted a few of them because they consisted almost entirely of potshots and served no purpose other than to stink up the joint, but I'm going to leave the lion's share of them up, because they so beautifully illustrate the sort of inanity I spent countless hours at various day jobs demolishing.
Oh, also, as you read them and take in all the cartoonishly nasty comments about my career and the "schooling" of me he's doing on how the business works and ridiculing me for embarking on a career outside the industry?
Keep in mind: This dude runs a payday loan company and spends much of his time lately blogging in defense of the wondrous world of payday loans. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course (well, actually many would argue that there's PLENTY wrong with payday loans, but that's for another day), in fact, more power to him for finding an alternative line of work, since apparently the writing thing didn't pan out too well for him. It's just not really helping his case against MY career all that much.
So...fun's fun, "Karen", but I think you've worn out your welcome here at I Lost the Nest Egg.
And anyway, don't you have some more journalism awards to win?
Friday, June 12, 2009
Ross Whats-his-name
Okay, look...Sure, Bill Kristol was a smug, pathologically wrong asshat whose writing skill level on a good day hovered around that of cocktail napkin riddles, but at least he was always good for a laugh around the water cooler. It is simply impossible for a conversation that begins "Did you read Kristol's column today?" not to dissolve into stomach-cramping guffaws. In my book, that's worth something. Whereas...
This guy hasn't expressed a single memorable thought or composed a single quotable sentence yet. Note to Douthat: If you can't even make a column headlined "Cheney for President" memorable, you're in the wrong line of work.
Compare with this recent column from Kristol, now at WaPo, who crams more nonsense into a few lazily dictated paragraphs than even Joe Scarborough can regurgitate in his daily seven-hour show.
"But the most successful conservative intervention in the first four months of the Obama presidency has been -- counter to predictions by consultants and pundits -- that of Dick Cheney on national security policy. He may be the only Republican so far who’s really forced Obama onto the defensive."
Don't you just love that herky-jerky -- and by "herky-jerky" I mean a style wherein rather than going to the trouble to create a smoothly flowing sentence, a writer -- a man or woman, as the case may be -- instead just stops the sentence cold -- or at least lukewarm -- to insert a qualifying clause -- style of his (Kristol's)?
Here, you can even make a game out of this next example; try to make it to the end of this sentence a) without having to reread any part of it, and b) without giggling.
"And most conservatives and Republicans would, I think, agree that the other Republican who’s effectively -- if episodically -- challenged Obama on foreign and national security policy has been Newt Gingrich."
How'd you do?
"Here’s an interesting question: (Little-known fact: Whenever Bill Kristol says "Here's an interesting question", what follows is not an interesting question. It's true!) Will any Republican whose career lies mostly ahead of him -- or her -- step up to confront Obama on the foreign policy and national security front?" (See?)
"Both Cheney and Gingrich have the background and stature to address credibly national security issues."
Yup. A grown man actually wrote that. Really. You couldn't make this shit up.
Douthat, my man...You have some big, stupid shoes to fill.
This guy hasn't expressed a single memorable thought or composed a single quotable sentence yet. Note to Douthat: If you can't even make a column headlined "Cheney for President" memorable, you're in the wrong line of work.
Compare with this recent column from Kristol, now at WaPo, who crams more nonsense into a few lazily dictated paragraphs than even Joe Scarborough can regurgitate in his daily seven-hour show.
"But the most successful conservative intervention in the first four months of the Obama presidency has been -- counter to predictions by consultants and pundits -- that of Dick Cheney on national security policy. He may be the only Republican so far who’s really forced Obama onto the defensive."
Don't you just love that herky-jerky -- and by "herky-jerky" I mean a style wherein rather than going to the trouble to create a smoothly flowing sentence, a writer -- a man or woman, as the case may be -- instead just stops the sentence cold -- or at least lukewarm -- to insert a qualifying clause -- style of his (Kristol's)?
Here, you can even make a game out of this next example; try to make it to the end of this sentence a) without having to reread any part of it, and b) without giggling.
"And most conservatives and Republicans would, I think, agree that the other Republican who’s effectively -- if episodically -- challenged Obama on foreign and national security policy has been Newt Gingrich."
How'd you do?
"Here’s an interesting question: (Little-known fact: Whenever Bill Kristol says "Here's an interesting question", what follows is not an interesting question. It's true!) Will any Republican whose career lies mostly ahead of him -- or her -- step up to confront Obama on the foreign policy and national security front?" (See?)
"Both Cheney and Gingrich have the background and stature to address credibly national security issues."
Yup. A grown man actually wrote that. Really. You couldn't make this shit up.
Douthat, my man...You have some big, stupid shoes to fill.
Intelligent Design on Trial
This isn't new, but I just got around to watching it. It's a 2-hour "Nova" episode on a case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, that I've been researching for a project about the landmark defeat of the attempt to sneak the intelligent design textbook "Of Pandas and People" into the science classes in Dover, Pennsylvania. The trial dramatizations are kinda cheesy, but this show covers the saga quite thoroughly.
The good guys didn't win too often in the last 8 years. This time, they did.
And keep the link bookmarked for the next time some chowderhead tries to tell you that evolution is "just a theory."
The good guys didn't win too often in the last 8 years. This time, they did.
And keep the link bookmarked for the next time some chowderhead tries to tell you that evolution is "just a theory."
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The Hangover
Yup, it's all true. The guys who wrote "Four Christmases" and the director of "Starsky and Hutch" somehow bring you the funniest Hollywood comedy since...Okay, since "I Love You, Man", but before THAT, it was a long dry spell.
Remember the names: Zach Galifinakis, Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper. You'll be seeing more of them (particularly Zach, who steals it). Hell, I'll bet they're signing the deal for the sequel as I type this.
Oh, and Heather Graham?
Welcome back.
Remember the names: Zach Galifinakis, Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper. You'll be seeing more of them (particularly Zach, who steals it). Hell, I'll bet they're signing the deal for the sequel as I type this.
Oh, and Heather Graham?
Welcome back.
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