Mashups are my imaginary friend

Listen to some Cansei de Ser Sexy vs. L7.



Also, here's the website for the dudes that put this thing together. It's actually pretty awesome. "Gimme Sufragette City Shelter" is my fav.

Happy Winter Solstice Celebration of your choosing

Specifically, merry Christmas, but in general, I hope you, my dear readers, are enjoying whatever excuse you have this weekend to surround yourselves with friends and family.

Two things. Since we are, ostensibly, celebrating the birth of Jesus today, I'll pass along a little bit of wisdom from the man himself that I think is worth remembering not just today, but every day.

Then Peter came and said to Him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven times."

Even if you don't go to church or believe in God or believe in anything, it's still a good idea to forgive your brother when he sins against you.

Secondly, I had a chance to talk to my friend Rich yesterday. He's with the army in Iraq, and his brother brought a laptop to a Christmas party I was at and hooked us all up via Skype. Whatever your politics, there's no denying the hardship that soldiers serving overseas and their families back home have to go through, and that sort of thing is only heightened during the holidays. So if you're in a position to comfortably sit back and count your blessings today, please don't forget that there are people out there who have been put in harm's way for our sake.

I <3 puns

Bravo, Reuters headline writer. Bravo.

Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun update!

Oh noes. The dreaded "blog post about the blog." That can't be good!

Nah. I just wanted to let you, dear reader, know that for the past week I was doing some actual like, you know, professional writing, so the ol' blog took the ol' back seat. Add to that the short trip home I took for the Eagle Scout ceremony of the Office Little Brother of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, and the lack of updates starts to make a lot of sense, eh?

But I'm back, and you'll be delighted to hear that I'm taking my Precious with me back to Bayonne for Christmas break, so you all will be getting some Jersey Fresh posts. Ding ding ding!

Zelda warriors

# For whatever reason, I had to stand on the B line this morning. Maybe once every three months, a B train will originate beyond Government Center. As a guy that rides the entire B line twice every day, truly the only perk my commute has is that I always get a seat in the morning and evening. This seatless train experiment on the Red Line scares the bejesus out of me. And I can't imagine how the grizzled subway vets in New York will handle it.

# Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I <3 puns. So I'm always pleased when wacky animal stories come out. For whatever reason, if your story is about a pet, you have free license to pepper your prose with a plethora of puns. Enjoy these.

# If ever there were a tale that absolutely begged for the long form, it's the story of Clark Rockefeller. Kudos to Vanity Fair for heeding the call. For those of you who aren't local, here's a quick summary: Boston blueblood Clark Rockefeller kidnaps his daughter during a supervised visit. The subsequent investigation reveals that Clark Rockefeller is actually a con-man who's traversed the country under a half dozen different aliases. And he's a suspect in the murder of a California couple that went missing in the 80s. It's reached the point where I cannot read enough stories about this guy. Having consumed everything the local papers put together in real time, it was good to see a big-picture account in VF. Read. It's sordid stuff.

# Am I the only one worried that this will cause a Zero Hour–esque, chronology-engulfing destructive rift at the beginning and end of the timestream?

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to some Say Anything

Say Anything |MTV Music

My friends, that's not change we can believe in

Is this true? Did Barack Obama just appoint the Green effing Goblin to be in charge of the entire Marvel universe? Is this what we can expect from our new president? What next, normalizing diplomatic relations with Latveria?

Gossip Girl is the capers on the smoked salmon that is my week

So I’m chilling (literally) in my heat and hot water–less apartment. I feel kind of like Nate, except he got to squat in his parents’ posh Upper East Side apartment. And I’m not technically squatting, since it’s my own place. I guess I’m nothing like Nate. Here’s a running GG diary.

8:00 Lonely Boy and S are so getting back together. Ftw.

Did I talk about the lameness of the off-camera death? It’s lame. Glad to see CeCe is back, though. Do I hate her or love her? I’ll check later.

8:05 Dan being the rock feels natural; probably because him and Serena were born for each other. Look at him next to Aaron. It’s no contest, S!

Oooh, CeCe catches Rufus walking away from a rendezvous with Lily. Her evil countenance makes me think I hate her.

8:07 I think I like Chuck as the creepy, cocked-head, tousled-hair, unhinged loner whacko. I’m sure it’ll be less endearing when he’s wreaking havoc, but we’ll see how this plays out.

8:11 I like the completely non-veiled disdain Dan and Aaron have for each other. It reminds me of my own loathing of that greasy-haired, dirt-stached creep.

A search through the DD&U archives tells me that I described CeCe as a “good lady” during the season premier. I have a feeling she’s about to disappoint me.

8:14 Did we just witness the formation a Chuck-CeCe-Aaron entente mauvais aligned against Dan? Holy smokes!

And yes, I definitely do like Chuck as the creepy, cocked-head, tousled-hair, unhinged loner whacko.

8:21 Isn’t this back-and-forth between Dan and Rufus a little too jaunty? Bart’s dead. And Chuck isn’t necessarily wrong to be pissed at Rufus. There’s almost blood on his hands!

I bet CeCe loved that she was kind of related to chuck. He’s her kind of guy.

8:24 Jenny, once again flaunting her ability to not only design and make an outfit overnight, but an outfit worthy of Elanor Waldorf.

Of course Aaron wants to take Serena away from her family in a time of crisis. Selfish jerk.

8:26 Aww, Jonathan.

8:29 Sorry. I had to tell my roommate about the broken hot water heater, so now I’m a minute or two behind. Woops!

8:31 This hospital in France sounds as juicy as it gets. I’m pumped!

8:33 Wow, Chuck. That was cold as ice. Also, thanks to the commercial break, I’m up to speed. Yay Tivo!

8:34 Of course Aaron would go to a weird place like Buenos Aires. Who goes there for vacation?

Dan’s passive aggressiveness and fear of confrontation remind me a lot of my own passive aggressiveness and fear of confrontation.

8:38 Serena DID beg Lily not to get together with Rufus. The blood is on her hands!

Jenny is right. Sometimes you do have to play games!

8:40 I’m a sucker for true love, but even I find the haste with which Lily and Rufus are trying to get together to be ghoulish and morbid.

8:48 Serena is such an idiot. Why do I even like her? Seriously.

AARON IS THE WORST! ! !

8:51 Are they not gonna tell us lily’s secret? Really?

8:55 Woops. I guess I didn’t realize that the episode wasn’t over.

Serena so obviously doesn’t even like Aaron. Why is she spinning her wheels? Because she’s an idiot.

8:59 So wait. Is Lily pregnant? Or does she have some sort of lovechild out there? This ending was too ambiguous!

9:00 And there’s no new episode until January. What the hell am I supposed to do for a month?

Official friend of DD&U

I meant to do this the other day, but got tied up in...forgetting to do this.

Anyway, here's the blog of my pal Christy, Chitown Fan in Boston. She blogs about sports, sports journalism, sports photography, and other sports-related topics. Christy says the blog is for a class, but Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is hoping she keeps things going once she gets her undoubtedly sterling grade, because she's wicked sharp and a general delight. Leave her some comments and tell her to update more!

Peeled

So the Boston College football team lost its second straight Atlantic Coast Conference Championship Game to Virginia Tech. Later on in the day, the Boston College hockey team lost its game against hated rival boston university. The next day, the New York Giants lost their game against hated rival Philadelphia. And then my gas got shut off. Awesome.

And yes, those peels are from one of the oranges I bought on Saturday, so that I would be prepared to celebrate BC's Orange Bowl berth. What a jinx, right?

Pre-Christmas miracle 2?

There are no words to express my joy.

Pre-Christmas miracle?

Amazing but true: two days in a row, I got at the end of the line to enter the T at the Boston College stop, and the person standing there asked me to go ahead. Why? Because both times, that person was paying with cash, and didn't want to hold up other people. A tear of joy could have been seen trickling down my cheek.

Depressing

In honor of Friday night, play with this widget that converts your alcohol intake into its food equivalent. Maybe you should wait until Sunday morning, actually.

You know I always wanted to pretend that I was an architect

Nice little piece on Slate today about the much-maligned brutalist style of architecture, and a possible comeback in the offing. A quick lesson (if you don't actually read the story): brutalist structures are more often than not made out of large quantities of concrete, and are marked by their squarish forms and, in this writer's myopic opinion, their monumental quality. A few examples, including Yale's Art and Architecture Building, are Northwestern University's library, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, and Habitat 67 in Montreal.

The granddaddy of them all, though, is Boston City Hall. I don't say that because I'm a homer (even though I am a homer). I say that because travel website VirtualTourist.com compiled a top ten list of the world's ugliest buildings, and Boston City Hall was the undisputed champ. The understanding that city hall is wicked ugly is a shared heritage of all Bostonians, so much so that Mayor Tom Menino can suggest demolishing the building and moving the seat of government to the waterfront, and we all don't immediately and indignantly scoff "why the hell would we move city hall away from the middle of downtown, away from a location at or near every major subway line?" By way of comparison, just recall how quickly this endeavor got the kibosh put on it.

Anyway, I'm glad I got the opportunity to actually go on record as saying that I like Boston City Hall. What do people want? It's distinctive. If you saw it and didn't know what it was, you'd make sure you found out. It looks sturdy and strong. Isn't that what we want out of our government buildings? A sense of security and steadiness? There's nothing wrong with a piece of architecture being of a time. Tastes change, but that doesn't mean we should act as if old tastes never existed. Art deco isn't a particularly ascendant style any more, but we're not about to knock down the Chrysler Building. (Please don't. The Chrysler Building is the best.) So, in conclusion, leave city hall alone!

The Secret of NIMBY

I came across this post today about President-elect Obama's sweeping stimulus-via-infrastructure-improvements plans. The thesis of the piece is a decent point: that there's a lot more involved in building bridges and roads and train tracks than just mixing the concrete (i.e., lengthy surveys, feasibility studies, environmental impact investigations, etc.) There are also some rather dubious generalizations, like this one:

In fact, Obama's people don't want anybody operating a noisy, smelly jackhammer anywhere near them. It's not that they're against infrastructure per se. Indeed, they would like infrastructure to have been built, but Obama People are going to oppose via lawsuits the actual building of infrastructure anywhere close to them, with its attendant racket, odors, and traffic jams. Not in my back yard!

I'm not familiar enough with Mr. Sailer's work to know if this is just a cheap jab, or if he has some special insight into the intentions of Obama's supporters. Irregardless, even the remotest possibility that this statement even approaches a whiff of truth scares the bejesus out of me.

All-time great Boston College graduate and former speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill once said that all politics is local. And while it may not be true that ALL politics are local, most of them are. I understand that Barack Obama amassed the largest margin of popular vote victory for a non-incumbent in the history of presidential elections, and that he managed to pick up stalwart Republican states like North Carolina and Indiana, and that he raised more money than any person ever in the history of everything. But Barack Obama doesn't stand a chance against oh, say, the garbage-transfer-station-opposing residents of Isabella Avenue in Bayonne, or any of a million such populations of incredibly motivated, incredibly short-sighted citizen activists who will oppose any project that will keep them up an extra 15 minutes at night or cause them to have to park around the corner for a week.

To counter Mr. Sailer, it's not just Obama's people that "don't want anybody operating a noisy, smelly jackhammer anywhere near them." Obama's people don't want that, but neither do McCain's people. Or Palin's. Or Ron Paul's. Or John Edwards's. Or Lydon LeRouche's. Nobody wants jackhammers! Jackhammers are like brussels sprouts. They're good for you. Just choke 'em down!

NIMBY is real. NIMBY is like the Green Lantern's ring. It's like, the most powerful force in politics. No matter how great a project is, no matter how many jobs it creates, no matter how many people it helps, there's always a nigh-omnipotent faction of nearby NIMBYists who will sacrifice their lives to stand in that project's way. In fact, NIMBY is so prevalent that when I worked in City Hall in Bayonne, my boss proposed the next logical step in its evolution: the BANANA theory. As in "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone." Watch out, America. And Mr. Obama, stay strong!

Gossip Girl whispers mellifluous nothings in my soul's ear

It's been a while, so here's a little running diary of tonight's episode of Gossip Girl.

8:01—Another charity ball, this one of the "Senior Snowflake" variety. Awesome.
* Finally, Serena ditches her friends to see someone besides Aaron. Of course, it’s to rub her gifts to Aaron in Dan’s face. Ugh. Old books, Serena? You're going to give your new boyfriend a gift that your old boyfriend clearly wants? What's wrong with you?
* Aaron doesn’t do paintings or sculptures. He does installations. What a wanker.

8:04—Jenny says she's organizing her dad's record collection because she has to keep herself busy. I wonder if there’s a place where kids spend the majority of their days in some sort of organized, structured activity. I’m drawing a blank.
* V to Penelope: "Bye, sad Blair wannabe." Somebody had to say it!
* Rufus is (platonically) helping Lily put together the charity ball. Didn’t we see this in The Wedding Singer? Haven’t I already made a Wedding Singer reference in a GG blog before?

8:07—Of course Aaron’s ex-girlfriend Lexy is a complete harpy. They were made for each other. They should probably get back together.

8:13—Eating dinner. I hope nothing amazing happens.
* Ugh. C'mon Dan, I’m hungry. You can’t flirt with Lexy the harpy!
* It’s a shame Jenny is so hung up on Nate. Maybe she can meet a nice boy at school.

8:20—Jenny is getting mixed up with Blair’s flunkies again. That always works out.

8:26—Tuxedoed Aaron looks like he wandered off the set of Interview with a Vampire.

8:30—Bart Bass’s assistant is named Mrs. Landingham? Like Jeb Bartlet’s assistant in The West Wing? Coincidence?

8:31—Remember the episode where Mrs. Landingham died, and they flashed back to President Bartlet’s early days, and it turned out that she was a complete fox back in the day? That was a good one.

8:33—Have you seen the Fiber One yogurt commercial with Mrs. Landingham in it? I love her!

8:34—Precious. Chuck and B found look-alikes to be each other’s dates for the Snowflake Ball. I bet there was like, a casting contest or something.

8:37—I’ve seen this written elsewhere, so I’ve avoided bringing up here in Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, but it cannot be avoided: are they purposely making Serena’s breasts look enormous? Each week is more ridiculous than the last.

8:39—Huh? Jenny’s half-baked revenge plot is about to backfire? What a twist.

8:41—Are V’s latent telekinetic abilities going to manifest right now? That's what this dress thing is about, right?

8:42—They’re making a movie out of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”? I loved that story! Although I would have been even more pleased if someone made “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”

8:54—I think Nate and V are good together. Do you?

8:55—So is Jenny now gonna be the friendless renegade prowling around the UES? How many characters can Jenny possibly be in two and a half seasons? Why am I asking so many questions?

8:59—I don’t use the term deus ex machina often (ok, yeah, I do), but isn’t Bart getting into an off-screen car accident a little TOO convenient? C'mon, GG writers, you’re better than that!

Timestamped Gossip Girl prediction

Tonight, we'll discover (via Bart Bass's PI) that Lily Van der Woodsen did a stint in a mental institution and was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and that she secretly leads a double life as Gossip Girl. Just watch!

xoxo

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to some Kevin Devine.

I can haz dekonstrukshun?

If you're here, on the intertubes reading this blog, I'm not going to explain to you what lolcats are. Instead, I'll point you toward this wickedly smart Salon piece by Jay Dixit, an editor at Psychology Today. Money quote:

"A second major factor in the poignancy of the sad lolcat, I would argue, is the use of animals. The comic form is generally a prophylaxis against sentimentality. By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we're able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony -- which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness."

If there was going to be anything that could break through the irony force field of today's postmodernly aloof, internet-savvy youth, who'd have thought it would be lolcats?

WTF?

"Behavior detection officers"? What the hell is a behavior detection officer!

Somewhere, George Orwell is screaming.

Zelda warriors

Because we don't want Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun to get too serious, here are some links.

# Here are more images from Cracked that will make you want to say "authenticity FAIL," but are actually true-life, no joke, real photographs. Who knows what to believe any more.

# This is just cool: the Life magazine photo archive is now available on Google. Some of the most iconic images in American history have appeared in Life, and they're all (I think) available for browsing. It's probably a better way to kill time than, say, reading your friend's blog. But not that much better!

# The "Kid Playing Dragonforce's 'Through the Fire and Flames' on Guitar Hero" Youtube video has become a genre in itself in recent months, up there with "Laughing Baby" and "Kid Faceplanting Off the Roof." But this guy goes the extra mile. Kudos, friend.

# This story is getting a ton of play, so you probably didn't hear it here first: meh is now a word in the Collins English Dictionary. It's not Webster's or the OED, but still noteworthy. I'm obviously excited, but like a lot of you, I've been saying meh for quite some time. In fact, I say a lot of words, irregardless of whether they're actually in the dictionary.

Crisis on Infinite Economies

Did you know that we're in the middle of a huge financial crisis? And on our way to a recession? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's true.

Now that the election is over, we no longer have to view this crisis through the lens of partisan slogans and sound bites ("The deregulators did this!" and "Freddie Mac did this!" and the like). I just recently read two very sharp, very engaging articles that offer a big picture view of the crisis, and I though I would share. You're welcome!

The first, "The End" by Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame), is in this month's issue of Portfolio. Lewis wrote a book called Liar's Poker about his time as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the late 80s, and uses that experience to draw the necessary parallels between the go-go 80s (which ended with the savings and loan crisis and a multi-billion-dollar government bailout) and go-go 00s (which ended with the subprime mortgage/collateralized debt obligation/credit default swap crisis and a multi-billion-dollar government bailout).

The second is "Wall Street Lays Another Egg" by Niall Ferguson, a history and business professor at Harvard, from the new Vanity Fair. I especially like this one because it traces a coherent narrative of the history of not only the current crisis, but of banking itself. (His latest book is called The Ascent of Money, so I guess he knows a thing or two about it.) It's one thing to read the Wikipedia page about collateralized debt obligations; it's another to be able to coherently connect the dots from farmers negotiating future prices for their crops to bankers slapping mortgages together and selling them as AAA-rated bonds. Ferguson does a good job.

Tending the flock

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I have no problem speaking my mind about political matters. Religion, on the other hand, is a bit of a collar-puller. I've always been reluctant to talk about faith, because I think it's a really personal thing, and also something that can cause otherwise rational people to think and behave quite irrationally (for example, I'll cite, oh, all of human history). But, here it goes. Recent political events have prompted some pretty wacky stuff to come out of the Catholic Church, the faith tradition that I was raised in. And quite frankly, it's all bullshit.

One of the most insidious trends in recent years has been the co-opting of the Eucharist as a political cudgel. You saw it in 2004, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, encouraged denying Holy Communion to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Catholic senator who supports legal abortion. After the most recent election, you saw a Catholic priest in South Carolina go a step further, telling his parish

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."

Eat and drink their own condemnation, he said. For the faithful who believe that women have the right to choose what goes on with their own bodies, one of the Church's most sacred rites becomes their condemnation. Wrap your head about that.

Then, we've got James Francis Cardinal Stafford, who serves as Major Penitentiary in the Roman Curia (and presumably has the ear of the Pope). In a talk at Catholic University, the Cardinal called President-elect Barack Obama “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,“ and said “For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden." Maybe I'm just jaded, but that "apocalyptic" sounds quite a bit like a pernicious dogwhistle to all the lunatics who believe that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. In this blogger's myopic opinion, Cardinal Stafford should have been a little more candid: "For the next few years, Armageddon will not be marginal. We will know that valley." Why sugarcoat things, you know?

Then there's this bit of folly:

"Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood," released Oct. 30 by the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, not only reiterates the teaching that men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies are unworthy of ordination, it also urges seminaries to enlist the aid of psychologists in screening candidates for homosexuality and other "psychic disturbances."

You read that right. "Homosexuality and other 'psychic disturbances.'" Interesting choice of words there. Since in order to refer to "other" psychic disturbances, you have to have one psychic disturbance to begin with. Homosexuality is most definitely not one. And it's alright for the Church to bar gay men from entering the priesthood. Young men are banging down the doors of the cathedral to become priests, so the Church can afford to cling to anachronistic junk-scientific bigotry.

I understand that the Church has a right to run itself the way it sees fit. And I'm sure, as that L.A. Times editorial says, there are plenty of esoteric theological reasons for the decisions the Church makes. But I think the question begs to be asked: are these the horses that the Church is hitching itself to? Fire-and-brimstone-style hostility towards those who support reproductive rights, and blind, counterproductive homophobia? Is the great balance sheet of "intrinsic evil" so heavily loaded on the side of abortion that it outweighs a host of other things that reasonable people find to be evil, like torture, and war, and state-sanctioned killing, and antipathy to the poor and infirm?

I don't mean to frame this as a "Jesus was a liberal" or "God's on our side" thing. What I wonder, though, is why Catholics aren't threatened by their leaders with condemnation if they vote for candidates who vigorously support torture and war. I also wonder how the Church can justify shooting itself in the foot by denying ordination to gay men when it's literally starving for people to fill the ranks of the priesthood. The Catholic Church isn't the only guilty party here; so much of what passes for Christian values in our discourse is just hatred gussied up in a moth-eaten Old Testament veil.

I often wonder if I'm reading the same Bible as everyone else. I hear a lot about condemnation and sin and anger, but I don't hear a lot about love and forgiveness and service. I mean, doesn't it say in the first letter to the Corinthians "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing"? Didn't Christ Himself say in a parable "Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me"? Doesn't the first letter of John say "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us"? No one has ever seen God. Not me. Not you. Not the pope. Not the woman walking out of the abortion clinic, or the man protesting outside of it. We're all in the same boat here in this world. We ought to love one another.

I think those are the important parts of the Bible. There's a lot more like that. We'd all do well to remember.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to this cover of "Hot in Herre" by Official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Super-Crush Jenny Owen Youngs.

The audacity of updates

So remember the other day, when I wrote that post about Barack Obama's election? And I said this:

From the days of the first colonists, when John Winthrop said of his Massachusetts Bay colony "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us," America has seen itself as a uniquely great nation. The mistakes that we have made have happened when we act to exert America's greatness, instead of working to make it great. When we fall back on America's might, instead of its ideals. When we treat our greatness as a birthright, instead of a goal to be strived for. The president-elect understands this. His election was historic—really, significant beyond my ability to put it into words. But the real work is yet to be done. His election is a symbol of a concrete change that we have to take up ourselves. It's a chance. We may take it. Or we may not.

And then remember when the new issue of New York magazine came out today, and Kurt Andersen's story about Barack Obama's election said this:

We acted true to the original Puritan vision of America “as a City upon a hill,” as opposed to the self-satisfied, we’re-Number-One-no-matter-what revisionism of the last few decades. John Winthrop’s phrase was a warning to do right so as to avoid the world’s disappointment and condemnation, not an eternal dispensation to do anything we wanted because we’re specially blessed.

Pithier, smoother, yes, but the same sentiment. Eh? Eh? Eh? How cool is that!

Official friend of DD&U

Well, there's no sense putting it off any more. If you ever read this blog and say "Whoa, people actually leave comments? Amazing", then you can thank my buddy Miles, aka spikemgb, who is secretly the author of Now is Not the Rhyme. Look for some inter-blog collaboration in the hopefully not too distant future, but in the time, watch him regain his faith in American democracy in real time.

Audacious

I just trashed 500 or so words worth of a rambling, verbose exploration of the redemptive power of change. It wasn't that good, so let's talk about books.

Do you remember East of Eden? In it, the character Lee is tripped up by a section of the book of Genesis (chapter 4, verses 6 and 7, to be precise). You see, in one translation, God tells Cain "thou shalt rule over" sin; in another, God says "Do thou rule over" sin. Lee, a thinker, was understandably perturbed by the difference. When it comes to conquering sin, getting a promise from God and getting an order from God are drastically different things.

So of course, to get to the heart of the matter, Lee learns Hebrew, to better understand the original text. And what does he discover?

"The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"

Not to spoil things, but this whole timshel idea is the crux of the story.

I was reminded of Steinbeck's story the other day when President-elect Barack Obama gave his victory speech from Grant Park in Chicago. The long presidential campaign, during which our identity as Americans was used as a political cudgel, was over, and something needed to be said about what America really is. The president-elect might not have used the term "thou mayest," but he came pretty close:

"This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. . . . And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope. For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

A lot is said about American exceptionalism. From the days of the first colonists, when John Winthrop said of his Massachusetts Bay colony "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us," America has seen itself as a uniquely great nation. The mistakes that we have made have happened when we act to exert America's greatness, instead of working to make it great. When we fall back on America's might, instead of its ideals. When we treat our greatness as a birthright, instead of a goal to be strived for. The president-elect understands this. His election was historic—really, significant beyond my ability to put it into words. But the real work is yet to be done. His election is a symbol of a concrete change that we have to take up ourselves. It's a chance. We may take it. Or we may not.

President-elect Obama gets it, drawing from the preamble of our founding document: our union can be perfected. The diction in the Constitution is no accident. It wasn't written to form a perfect union, but rather a more perfect one. The implication couldn't be more clear: perfection isn't on the horizon. It's just beyond it.

That's what makes America great, that quest for perfection. Our history as a nation is pocked by almost unforgivable sins: genocide, slavery, war. I say almost unforgivable, because I believe that the American story is a story of redemption. (I guess we're back to the redemptive power of change.) And whether the redemption is of the ancient crimes of European tyranny, or our own more recent ones, America is a place where that cleansing can happen, where things can be made right. Because even though their application hasn't always been consistent, the words that actually are our birthright have never changed: that all men are created equal; that our union can be more perfect; that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish. The American story is a long slog; too long, in fact. But the slog inevitably leads to the same place. That's the genius of America.

I have a favorite quote, which I think is appropriate here, and crazy enough, it's from Captain Jame Kirk, of the starship Enterprise. He said "We’re human beings, with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we won’t kill today." Yes. We can.

Don't be stupid

Vote tomorrow. I don't care who you vote for (actually, I do, but for the sake of this rare during-the-workday post, let's assume I don't), just vote. But go here first and get the information on your state's election day procedures.

Lame Halloween

So Halloween, my favorite holiday, has come and gone, and as the title of my post indicates, it was sort of lame. Neither of my roommates were particularly into it (i.e., no costumes). Friday night was cool enough, but I actually went to a non-costume party on Saturday. Swish that around in the ol' head for a sec. A party thrown on Halloween weekend...and there are no costumes involved! Wtf?

In discussions with some of my compatriots, this turn of events hasn't raised the eyebrows that I thought it would. "Well, Saturday was the day after Halloween, so I'm not surprised there weren't a lot of costumes," or "One day is enough for me." Are these people crazy? We should be dressing up more! We should be extending Halloween for as many days as is reasonably acceptable! And then maybe a day or two after that.

I almost feel like I grew this stupid beard for nothing.

Champs

A good buddy of mine is a diehard Phillies fan, so I was happy for him that his team won the World Series.

But really, the only reason this post exists is as a vehicle for me to share this, the lead to Jere Longman's New York Times story about the postgame festivities:

PHILADELPHIA – In a place where the glass always seems half empty, finally it has been raised in a Champagne toast to a champion instead of smashed in the heartbreak of drowned sorrows.

Wow. That's like, a triple mixed metaphor, in one sentence! I love it!

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to this awesome Dashboard Confessional cover of "In a Big Country."

Rare Gossip Girl follow-up

I've been tossing this around in ol' head all day: how is it that t.A.T.u.'s weirdly cool cover of the Smiths classic "How Soon Is Now" wasn't one of the featured songs at the end of last night's Gossip Girl? This song, no matter what the iteration, is wicked awesome!

Good placement, though, during the scene were Jenny and Agnes are dancing around in their slinky underthings, since "How Soon Is Now" is the official soundtrack of "awkward/dangerous moments featuring nice people in situations they shouldn't be in." (Does anybody else remember a drunken Robby Hart being seduced by Linda on his front lawn in The Wedding Singer?)

I dunno about Cecil the Caterpillar. But I can tell you about John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt

The theme of this week's episode of Gossip Girl was "Who the hell do you people think you are?" Don't believe me? To wit:

Dan: you're helping Blair? To get with Chuck? I don't care if you didn't know what they did to Vanessa. You know better. And in the process of helping BLAIR, you're not straight up with Serena? Dude, that's why you guys broke up! Who do you think you are?

Jenny: you're really telling off Elanor Waldorf? The highly successful designer that gave you your start? And who is Agnes? And why are you traipsing about in your undies with her? And what makes you think that you can make it as a designer on your own? You're 15! Who do you think you are?

Serena: Aaron the artist? Really? So you're gonna go from Dan the Writer to this clown? What's next, Phil the Photographer? Pete the Poet? Look, any chucker can throw some paint on a canvass (or put up some dopey, nonsensical "installation" in Brooklyn). But to weave together words, like a tapestry lovingly crafted, worthy of appearing in the Paris Review? That takes a certain kind of genius. But yeah, go with the guy who remembers the campfire tunes you used to sing as kids. Hey, Serena. In eighteen-hundred and forty-three, the Canadian Railroad hired me. Wanna grab some drinks? Also, who do you think you are?

Nate: see above. She's 15. Who do you think you are?

Blair and Chuck: Do I have to ask?

Blatant political advocacy

You all know where I stand on the presidential election. But if you live here in the Commonwealth, you need to know about Ballot Question 1. Basically, Question 1 seeks to phase out the state income tax by half on January 1, 2009, and then eliminate it entirely by the next year. I'll let the Boston Globe explain to you why this is so preposterous, although here are some hard numbers: the Massachusetts income tax brings in $12.6 billion of revenue, representing about 40 percent of the budget. That money has to be made up somewhere (but not from the $13 billion mandated by the constitution and various court orders and laws).

To illustrate how bad things could get for the state, the Globe has made this fun little game. Play it! I recommend just pulling every bar into the red to see how long it takes you to balance the budget. What an eye-opener.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the whack-jobs at the Center for Small Government, the masterminds behind Question 1. I mean, nobody LIKES government waste. And they see eliminating the state income tax as a strong message to Beacon Hill that state government needs to tighten its belt and work better. A fine message, but a horrible way to send it. Since I'm a poet, here's some figurative language: Question 1 is the equivalent of you, dear reader, sending me the message that you don't like Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun not by oh, say, actually sending a message, but rather coming into my apartment, smashing my precious Macbook into a million pieces, and then kicking me in the nuts for good measure. Just leave a comment!

So tell all your friends: vote no on Question 1.

My new favorite actor UPDATE

Remember Pan-Kun, the Seqway-riding chimp? He made it onto Anderson Cooper 360! Check it out.

And don't forget that Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is your number one source for chimp-related hilarity.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to some Patent Pending.

"We're free"

That's a quote from my roommate, and I think it sums things up nicely.

Your Tampa Bay Team Formerly Known as the Devil Rays are the American League Champions. Let that sink in real quick.

It's a tremendous story, but really, the Rays were only an agent in a historically important quest, a quest that amounted to nothing less than restoring order to the universe.

See, I showed up here in Boston in 2002, seven months after the New England Patriots won their first Super Bowl. They proceeded to win Super Bowls in 2004 and 2005. The Red Socks, of course, after 85 years of uselessness, won a World Series in 2004 and then 2007. Boston, a sports city kept afloat by the memory of 16 Celtics world championships was suddenly the toast of the world. Fans went from arrogant to entitled in the blink of an eye. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be.

But then something happened.

The New York Giants, who had more or less fallen ass-backwards into the playoffs, strung off a series of road wins against the Buccaneers, Cowboys, and Packers to face the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl. To say the G-Men weren't given an ice cube's chance in hell is to grievously understate the case. The Patriots were undefeated! Record-breaking! Invincible!

We all know what happened.

And tonight, we just saw the defending champion Red Socks fall to last year's last-place team, the Rays. Now, I understand that the Rays won the division this year. And that technically, the Angels were the team to beat. But I've seen championship series where the Socks have been down 3 games to 1. Or 3 games to none. And they've come back. Like a zombie. No matter how many bullets you put in them, they're unkillable. Once the Socks came back in game 5 on Thursday, I was convinced they would win. That was the new order of the universe. The Socks fall behind, and then roar back.

Thankfully, the old order has been restored. And hopefully, we've just seen year one of the Curse of Manny. Thanks, Tampa.

My new favorite actor

...is Pan-kun, the Japanese chimp. You might remember him from my Hole in the Wall post. Here he is riding a Segway.

Cause and effect

Other people have debunked the hysteria surrounding Acorn and its voter registration drive (including Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker, and official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Favorite Legal Expert Dahlia Lithwick over on Slate).

Reasonable people understand that this is a completely overblown farce. Reasonable people understand that Acorn hardly represents a threat to the very "fabric of democracy," as Senator McCain said in Wednesday's debate. Reasonable people understand that the process is hardly already "tainted," as former Senator John Danforth pronounced this week.

I feel like someone needs to remind Senator McCain that words, especially hyperbolic, incendiary, untrue words, have consequences, and that not all of his supporters are reasonable people. This is the tip of the iceberg, guys.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to some This Providence

Commercial thread

Let me try to do a real blogger thing here. . .

In response to this post, commenter SPIKEmgb points us in the direction of an ad that drove him crazy back in the day.

Personally, I'm grateful, because I think the Whatchamacallit jingle is one of the catchier candy bar jingles, and now I have it back in my head. But it reminded me of a commercial that I hated as a kid, even though it was targeted directly to me (notice the cutaway from the end of Get the Picture at the start of this video).

I have a whole slew of commercials that I absolutely can't get enough of that I'd like to share with you at some point, but for now, dear readers (and I know you exist), consider this an open thread for you to talk about your all-time most hated commercials. I'll see you all in comments!

Best. Political ad. Ever.

So I'm watching last night's Gossip Girl. Maybe I'll post later. But in the meantime, here's a great ad from MoveOn starring Penn Badgley and Blake Lively. I'm persuaded!

Punch me in the face

I'm watching the Giants on Monday Night Football, and every commercial break, this Toyota ad has come on:


Imagine watching that 12 times in an evening. Are ads that make you want to smash the product effective? Is there some focus group that I'm not privy to?

Obama is leading, but not running away. Why?

More of your favorite toobz guy

So I set up a Twitter account. I'm certain this won't interfere with regularly scheduled installments of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, but if you want to see what goes on with this thing, my URL is http://twitter.com/frombizzone.

The Dallas Cowboys are the American economy of the NFL

So embattled Cowboys cornerback Adam quote unquote Pacman Jones, who was suspended for an entire season last year for a plethora of off-field offenses, beat up his own bodyguard in a Dallas hotel. You can imagine how hard the team is going to come down on him.

Profiles in courage, eh?

Meantime, the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants suspended one of their best players for skipping practice. And then proceeded to rack up their biggest margin of victory in 17 years.

Dallas sucks.

Zelda warriors

Lot of good links today. And since there's no new Gossip Girl tonight, I've got a bit of time to kill. Enjoy!

# Great, great, great article in this week's New York magazine about the future of product placement in television shows (spoiler alert: it's bleak!) The example of 30 Rock is particularly insidious. You can't blame Tina Fey for expertly navigating the new world of advertising-as-narrative, but I don't think I can be blamed for finding it to be really creepy. I'm still of the mind that television and movies are art, and while I understand that certain compromises are necessary in order to get on the screen, the extent to which art and commerce are tied up is troubling, to say the least. When the baseline necessity for an artist is "you need to be able to work Acme Widgets into your 17th century bildungsroman," I think we have a problem. And if you think this is merely a dilemma for aesthetes, product placement's ugly cousin, guerrilla marketing, threatens our very souls.

# Reading the New York Times Week in Review about American writers being snubbed for the Nobel Prize, I became incensed and vowed to write a scathing takedown. And the Adam Kirsch, an actual literary critic, beat me to it over at Slate. Good for him.

A few thoughts, though. I'm guilty of having been a little starstruck by the Nobel Prize. Same thing with the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. But there's no denying that a significant swath of the canon has never been recognized by the Nobel committee: Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, Twain, Proust, Joyce, Greene, Nabokov, Auden, Miller. These guys aren't all-knowing, and there are definitely political considerations (we're talking about snubbing America here, guys). So I suppose it's best to start (if we haven't already) looking at the Nobel Prize less like an anointing of literary greatness, and more like the Oscars, or the Major League Baseball All-Star game: an excuse every year to argue with one another about books and, more anagogically, to consider what's important to us as a people and how we want to be reflected in our literature. They serve their purpose.

I'm glad that Kirsch brought up Philip Roth, official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Favorite Author and Undergraduate Thesis Subject, to cement his thesis. I've never been one for literary theory, and I'm not familiar with Horace Engdahl aside from what I can glean from my own half-assed understanding of post-structuralism. However, comma, everything I know about "the big dialogue of literature" tells me that it's a self-reflexive, masturbatory endeavor. Count me among the Tom Wolfe school of literary realism, which Roth does exceedingly well (is American Pastoral, published eight year's after Wolfe's manifesto, the late–20th century realist novel that he was looking for? Who's to say, but it's a good attempt.) But, presumably like Engdahl, Roth also knows the limits of this style, or at least the obstacles it presents to the writer trying to say something resonant. He also coined, 48 years ago, the now-official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Credo:

"[T]he American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."

In other words, just give him the damn prize!

# That might have been dense. Here's some abject horror to take your mind off of literature. ZOMG!

# In these uncertain economic times, we need to find solace in any place we can find it. Sometimes, justice gets done, dear readers.

# What? I got through a blog post without saying something political? Woops.

Road tripping

So I just got back from a trip to Raleigh, North Carolina for BC's game against NC State. It was fun! The team won, I had some good times with my pals, and everything was right with the world.

But something has been perturbing me. As we were walking out of the stadium, through the NC State student tailgating area, I walked past a kid in the back of a pickup truck eating a sandwich. Being clad in BC regalia, my buddies and I were prepared to be taunted, so it didn't surprise anyone when this kid started yelling at us. But instead of the usual "BC sucks!", he said "Mmm, this pork is delicious. Oh wait, you don't have pork in Massachusetts!"

Huh?

GG blasts a shotglass off my head

Sometimes, when the world has turned upside down, and you think that nothing is stable, and danger is around every corner, and the whole discourse is in tumult, sometimes you need something to grab onto, something stable.

Gossip Girl is not that. Not this week, at least. But that's ok! Here's a running diary.

8:02 Early frontrunner for line-of-the-night: Dan's "reading, writing, and aristocrats." You're so clever!
8:03 I can’t even look at Serena. She’s be-bopping with Lily like she’s a real person, but she’s actually a monster. Monster!
8:05 "I thought a writer was supposed to write what you know. This is what I know," Dan says. "Then learn something new," the curmudgeonly Noah Shapiro rejoins. I don’t know if this is trite or like, wicked deep.
8:08 Dan: "You think I’m a boring sheltered nobody." Chuck: "I don’t think it." Great!
8:14 Of course all of the shots are for Dan. And don't these guys not have school tomorrow? And are we just forgetting that they're supposed to be 17? And is it within a reasonable suspension of disbelief that Dan would just take whatever pills Chuck is offering, solely for the sake of his craft? Stick to scotch, Lonely Boy!
8:17 Twins find me, Chuck goes. Nice! And then Gossip Girl calls Dan "shoeless and clueless." Yes! I wonder if GG is learning slam poetry from the girl who does the voiceovers on Next.
8:19 Rufus might want to let his kids know that he skipped out on touring so he could stay home with them. Maybe then they'd stop being drug-abusing, school-skipping screw-ups!
8:25 Where does B vs. S rank on the list of all-time grudge matches? Are we in Reed Richards vs. Victor Von Doom territory? Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadrunner?
8:26 First of all, Charlie Trout is a virtuoso pseudonym. It reminds me of Sal Bass, from Seinfeld. Second of all, Shapiro characterizing Charlie Trout as a young Mephistopheles? Simply awesome! I love getting things!
8:35 Dan! With the hook!
8:37 Oh boy. Chuck has a backstory. A tragic backstory! Charlie Bass is becoming the Lance Berkman of GG. Other characters get the spotlight week after week, and before you even notice it, the Bassmaster has hit 34 dingers with 120 RBI.
8:43 Now, everything I know about catwalking comes from America's Next Top Model, so I'm no expert, but isn’t it unreasonable to think that all of these socialite girls can just get up there and do it?
8:48 Jenny, you're right. Serena DOES just glide through!
8:49 What a stupid idiot I am for not knowing that Chuck would find out that Dan is just writing a story. Stupid stupid stupid.
8:52 Whose fall was more precipitous and drastic: Serena’s, or the country's economy?
8:57 I wouldn't mind them semi-reprising the "Serena's friend is blackmailing her in order to get her to do things she would never do normally" if it meant that I got my precious love back!
8:58 Why am I disappointed to see that Dan writes in Times New Roman? Don't be so provincial, man!

Thursday recap

Craziest pills

Holy smokes. John McCain wants to suspend his campaign and postpone Friday's debate? The mind reels.

There are any of a number of ways that this can be exposed as a crass, desperate, political stunt (perhaps to divert attention away from Freddie Mac "consultant"/campaign manager Rick Davis), but I'd like to talk just for a minute about governing.

You see, there's this myth that John McCain hopes you're stupid enough to subscribe to: that Congress is just 600-odd guys and gals in a big room, running around like useless, foolish idiots. And when the going gets tough, all they need is a no-nonsense maverick to step in and knock some heads together and get people to focus. And John McCain is just that maverick!

My friends, that's not faith-in-the-intelligence-of-American-citizens that we can believe in.

The reality of the matter is that whatever this bailout legislation is going to look like, it's going to come out of the relevant Senate and House committees. These are the folks who are spending their week going back and forth with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke. The people whose job it is to like, you know, know things about banking and finance. Not to go Schoolhouse Rock on you or anything, but these are the few key Congressmen that Bill was singing about.

Click on those links, and one of the things you'll notice is that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama are on the Senate Banking Committee. What does that mean? It means that NEITHER OF THEM HAVE SHIT TO SAY ABOUT THIS BILL! Sweet fancy Moses, people, we have a process in place here! If John McCain wants to break his Cal Ripken–like streak of not voting in the Senate by casting his vote on whatever bill comes out of the Banking Committee, that's great. But in the meantime, he'd just be getting in the way.

Oh, don't worry, I read this:

“I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Barack Obama and myself,” Mr. McCain said in New York on Wednesday afternoon. “It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”

But the leadership is already meeting! He wants to get President Bush involved in this! That should disqualify McCain from the presidency right off the bat. Matt Yglesias has it right. So does the estimable representative of my former district, the pride of Bayonne, Barney Frank:

"It's the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys."

Crazy pills 4

The title of this post is actually a little misleading. I don't actually feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I feel like I'm taking this-is-Republican-business-as-usual pills. Tell me, do the regular, small-town-values-having folks that Sarah Palin claims to represent and fight for get to dodge subpoenas? As my buddy just told me, yes, they do. They just have to go underground, not run for vice president. What a sham.

I <3 Dahlia Lithwick

Because she writes things like this.

Oh boy

So I'm watching Hole in the Wall. It came on after football on Fox. If you haven't heard of this show, you at least have seen Youtubes of the Japanese version.

If you read Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, you know that I watch a lot of garbage TV. But this might just be too garbage. I mean, the whole point of Japanese game shows is the meaningless, exuberant gibberish that's shouted over the action. When that is transformed into slick American production values and a professional commentator . . . I don't know. Some of the charm gets lost. We already have plenty of shows where jerks get pushed into pools of water, you know?

Maybe I'm just upset that they didn't make an American version of my favorite Japanese show.

Gossip Girl is back!

Sometimes, when life is getting you down, and it seems like the whole world is weighing on your shoulders, and nothing makes sense, the light at the end of the tunnel is the only thing that keeps you going. Tonight, America was finally able to bask in that light: the season premier of Gossip Girl. I haven't decided how to treat this season on Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, so here's a simple live blog of the proceedings.

P.S. I watch GG through the lens of Dan and Serena possessing a love that transcends reality itself. So you can imagine how the summer, after the season finale, was a burden to me. And how overjoyed I am right now.

8—Nice little recap of last season. Oh, Serena.
8:01—Nate making out with a blonde...and it's not Serena! Yes! I knew them being together was too awful to be true. And what is Chuck doing with all these hot topless ladies with that dopey hat and Popeye t-shirt?
8:04—Dan! What are you doing making out with another girl! And I know Dan is a bright guy and an undoubtedly talented writer, but what is he doing with pieces in the New Yorker? And potentially the Paris Review? That's almost as unrealistic as him juggling two non-Serena, non-Vanessa women.
8:13—No, B, S didn't have any fun with anyone all summer. She's hung up on Dan, because he's the best! Ooh, Jim drinks gin martinis. How impressive! Great line: "And if by that you mean I won't like him at all, then you're right." Yes, Chuck!
8:15—Is Rupert on tour with Lucious Jackson? Or the Breeders? Or Veruca Salt? Or Letters to Cleo? I forget.
8:20—Grandma Van der Woodsen makes another appearance. That dried up old fossil had left a wicked-witch-shaped hole in my heart! Also, doesn't that thing on B's headband look delicious?
8:28—Blair: "That Chuck Bastard!" Good! Chuck: "I'm in the mood to be right." Better!
8:36—Does anyone else find the Vitamin Water product placement to be particularly insidious here?
8:38—Huh? Is Grandma Van der Woodsen a good lady now? What happened? And how great is B's dress? It reminds me of the edge of a sheet of postage stamps.
8:48—Dan, Serena, my advice: get your heads out of your asses!
8:50—Meet you at the beach, Dan goes. This can go wrong in 100 ways in the next ten minutes. This is me, pulling my collar.
8:57—Chuck doing his best Fonzi impresonation. I l-l-l-l-l . . . And Dan, by the fire with a moleskein notebook. In a wifebeater. How Hemingway.
8:59—Is it too much to ask for Dan and Serena to kiss? Like, for real? Damn you, Gossip Girl!

Crazy pills 3

So John McCain's choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was the news of the weekend. Even the most cursory look at her record indicates that it was a desperate, poorly thought-out, and ultimately disastrous pick for Senator McCain. (Although, like every good Republican, Governor Palin comes built-in with her own abuse-of-power scandal.)

Political expediency aside, my biggest concern is how batshit-crazily conservative this woman is. Anti-abortion (even in cases of rape or incest). Global warming denier. Polar bear-hater. Crazy gun person. Abstinence-only sex ed booster.

I find the last one to be of particular interest, given the newly discovered fact that Governor Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant, and will be marrying the child's father. I don't particularly care that this girl is pregnant. The fact itself is irrelevant (and even I find the "Palin faked her pregnancy" rumors to be creepy and ghoulish).

But what does this say about the effectiveness of abstinence-only education? I don't know much of anything about young Bristol Palin's education, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Sarah Palin (lauded by Republicans and the evangelical right as a loving and attentive mother) did her best to instill abstinence-only values in her daughter. If Bristol Palin, a girl in a conservative state in a conservative, religious family can succumb to the same primal, sexual urges that the rest of us northeastern liberal elite DFHs do, anyone can. It's less of an indictment of Ms. Palin or her mother's parenting skills, and more of an indication of the folly of abstinence-only education.

Abstinence-only education isn't about preventing unwanted pregnancies, or stopping STDs. It's about controlling young people, and especially young women. And not only does it not work, but it's incredibly dangerous. Let's talk about this, eh, folks?

Live blogging . . . life, I guess

So I'm sitting on the couch with my roommate, because it's the only seat in the whole apartment. No other seats. No bed. No dresser. No plates. No cups. No forks. No knives. No food. I just bought some Elio's pizza, Cape Cod chips, and a Hostess fruit pie from 7-11. That's dinner and breakfast. Except I don't have a plate, or a knife to cut up the pizza, or an oven mitt to take the baking sheet out of the oven. Labor Day weekend! Woo hoo!

Zelda warriors

I think this is a cool batch of links, but they're kinda old because I've been busy and unable to post for a bit. Soorry, pals.

# Awesome bit in the Boston Globe Magazine about innovative ideas in pedestrian/driver relations. It really does make you think: pedestrians have to press a button to cross the street. Why shouldn't drivers have to press a button? The indignity!

# Here's a top-15 countdown of real, actual, non-photoshopped photographs. It's not often that Cracked list can lead you to a philosophical meditation on the nature of authenticity in the Intertubes age, but here we are.

# Two Simpsons-related links: first, some superheros, Simpsonized. (Sandman? Cmon. Why not Galactus? Or the Anti-Monitor?) Second, an interactive map of Springfield. I haven't gone through it all to check for veracity, since it kinda makes me nauseous. But it's a fun kind of nauseous!

# Finally, why isn't the whole world made of this stuff?

Quick question

In the Lord of the Rings movies, how come they never show any lady Orks?

DD&U Friends in the News

Official Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun buddy Joe Mondry won the "First Person to Appear in Billboard Magazine" pool among my group of friends by, well, appearing in this month's Billboard Magazine. He's a part of the fourth annual Top 30 Under 30 music executives list. Unfortunately, you have to have a subscription to read it online, but I encourage you, my precious reader, to go out and buy your copy today!

My only beef is his lack of mention of Wait for Summer, the emocore-iest North Jersey emocore band in the history of the scene (the debut EP The History of an Error is dropping soon!) What gives? Otherwise, congratulations Joe!

Niche blogging is teh best

I'll never have an idea as good as Cake Wrecks, so instead I just write gibberish about nonsense. Anyway, enjoy.

Some Olympic notes

Sorry, dearest readers. I haven't been watching that much. What started as a silent, self-indulgent protest of China's authoritarian regime became an "eh, I have other things to do" thing. That doesn't stop me from having a few things to say, though!

# Slate ran a takedown of world record breaking performances here. I found the stuff about the size of the pool to be very interesting. I don't revel in debunkings like this, and I don't think it matters that much, since gold medals is the only measure that people even remotely care about. It's fun to watch the green line chase Michael Phelps, but I think the viewing public is savvy enough to know that these records fall all the time. Meh!

# I was prepared to write a self-righteously indignant bit about how these idiots on NBC and ESPN are mispronouncing the name of the host city (duh, guys, it's Bay-zhing). So after running "beijing pronunciation" through teh Google, I came across this piece from my hometown Boston Globe.

# They're doing a lot of talking, but is anyone going to do something about this? There are any of a number of stories to read, but I like how this one describes the discrepancy as between online reports and newspaper accounts, and the gymnasts' China-issued passports. It's like that Simpsons episode where Bart has to deliver himself from Knoxville to Springfield. "Well, you sure don't look 25, but your unlaminated, out-of-state driver's license is proof enough for me."

Zelda warriors

# Men's Vogue has a dynamite profile of Elisha Nelson Manning, the greatest hero in all of sports. Hat-tip to New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer blog, which put the Eli profile side-by-side with Esquire's verbose hagiography of Tom Brady. I could go on and on about how gross the Brady interview is, but I think the subhead speaks for itself: "New England Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady will go down in history as the greatest football player never to go down in history. And he's still smiling." Huh?

# This is a video of Summer Streets, a program that New York is trying out on three weekends in August. They basically shut down seven miles worth of Park Avenue and Lafayette Street to cars, and host a ton of programs, vendors, and activities. Based on the unadulterated joy in this video, and this glowing editorial in the Times, I'd say that people are really into this thing. Are you reading, Boston? Maybe shutting down Boylston Street from Mass Ave. to Charles Street? Eh?

# LOL Bush. 'Nuff said.

# And finally, a no-brainer. The Olympics have handball and not bowling? Cmon!

Crazy pills 2

The latest soupy dreck from John McCain:


Really? Whatever happened to Straight Talk? Whatever happened to a civil campaign based on the issues? I mean, the only substantive thing this ad even tries to say (ooooooooh...Obama will raise taxes on everyone making $42,000 a year...scary!) is demonstrably false. It's a good thing the rest of the video isn't burdened by, you know, facts.

Rock star? Taco Bell? Huh? This whole "celebrity" meme is absurd to the point of causing migraines in people with even a shred of good sense. And I'd like to see a logical explanation of what "ready to lead" actually means. What does it mean? Assuming John McCain actually is "ready to lead," what's the point? He's a ruthless warmonger! This guy shouldn't be leading tours of the Grand Canyon, let alone the United States.

All in all, this is just an insult. Anybody who thinks this drivel is persuasive, or worse, true, is an idiot. Yeah, I said it.

The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems

Salon checks in with a pair of neat articles on the state of American swill beer in the wake of Anheuser Busch's sale to Belgian-Brazilian beer superconglomerate InBev. The main gist is the question of what beer will assume Budweiser's mantle of the Great American Beer. Being a beer guy, I'm delighted to read anything on the subject, but I'm impelled to tackle of a few of the points made by Mr. McClelland and the Salon staff.

First is the idea that Budweiser is going anywhere. It's not. Just because A-B is no longer American-owned won't change the price of Bud, or the hegemony that it has in every bar, liquor store, and sports venue in the country. Will people make a spite-choice when it comes to their favorite beer? I suppose. But can you imagine a lifelong Bud drinker being so principled? Meh. I drink Bud Light when I'm out because it's cheap, it's always around, and almost any given bartender has the ability to lip-read the words in a loud barroom. It's as simple as that.

Are Americans actually looking for an all-American beer? I certainly hope so. Is domestic swill the answer? Meh again, although a can of Blatz is better than a bottle of Heineken any day, in my opinion. I wrote a column a few years ago that touched briefly on the Pabst phenomenon, and I remember being amazed, and a little perplexed, that they had swallowed up so many defunct regional beers (check out their lineup. It's actually funny. [And on a related note, check out this AMAZING half of an ad for Ballantine from none other than all-American man's man and Nobel Prize–winner John Steinbeck. Tremendous!]) The problem, at the end of the day, is that, as much as I love Ballantine and Naragansett (I actually do!), the one thing all of these old-time regional beers have in common is that they're not good. And since I'm too young to have grown up on Schaefer, the nostalgia factor doesn't make up for the lack of flavor.

I had a real problem with craft beers being dismissed as "twee." Cmon! Craft breweries are at the forefront of the battle to crack open the stranglehold that the big three brewers have on beer in America. I'm a firm believer in the idea of drinking locally, and there's no getting around the fact that craft breweries are today what the Pabsts and Blatzes and Pielses were 100 years ago. Out west, they've got Anchor and Sierra Nevada and Stone; down south they've got Terrapin and Sweetwater; the east coast has Brooklyn and Victory and Dogfish Head; and up here in New England, a hotbed of craft brewing, there's Sam Adams (still a craft beer!) and Harpoon and Magic Hat and Smuttynose. Those were all off the top of my head. The local brewery used to be a fixture in this country; there's no reason it can't be again. Drink up!

Crazy pills

So a military tribunal sentenced Salim Hamdan (he of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld fame) to 66 months, a large chunk of which may get lopped off due to time served. Way to go, Military Commissions Act.

I'm not so concerned with the conduct of the trial, or even the results. Everyone knew the Guantanamo military tribunals were going to be a joke. I'm extremely concerned with what could happen to Mr. Hamdan after he completes his 66 months. Money quote:

"It was not immediately clear how the Pentagon would handle Mr. Hamdan after the sentence. For years administration officials have maintained that, because detainees facing war crimes charges here are all classified as unlawful enemy combatants, they could continue to hold an accused even if he had completed a sentence or were acquitted by a military commission panel."

Pardon? The man will have finished his sentence (or paid his debt to society, as we say about less...touchy...ex-cons), and he can still be held indefinitely? What the hell was the point! Didn't the English fight a civil war about stuff like this? I would call Mr. Hamdan's situation Kafka-esque, but honestly, I don't think Kafka would have sold a book if he had written a story so ludicrous.

I was going to title this post "The day the Constitution died," but honestly, I've had that sentiment dozens of times in the past, and I'll have it dozens of times in the not so distant future. Crazy pills.

T villains

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I'm a regular rider of the T, and it's my firm belief that the Green Line is like a rolling crucible of the soul. I've dedicated a number of posts to exposing particularly heinous violators of what I believe to be the unwritten code of not just T-riding, but of existing in our society in general.

Add stroller pushers to the list of offenders.

I love little kids. Everybody knows that. This isn't about babies, infants, toddlers, or youngsters of any stripe. This is about the people responsible for looking out for our tiny little friends. I was just at Government Center, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, and the station was packed. I got on an empty B train, and no less than three strollers got on. I'm not talking tiny ones, either. I'm talking the huge, Galactic Empire starship–sized ones. One of them had a giant helium balloon tied to it! Suffice it to say, these things took up a TON of space. One of them was parked in the aisle, forcing people that wanted to get off to contort their arms and legs into ridiculous and unnatural positions in order to navigate around this monstrosity.

The most offensive thing was, these strollers weren't carrying around one-month olds. All of these kids were perfectly capable of walking, or at the very least standing on their own two feet. The most offensive thing was, the only woman that actually had the decency to fold up her stroller into a more compact state had the smallest kid!

They don't allow bikes on the Green Line. A giant stroller is AT LEAST as obtrusive as a bicycle, if not moreso. So where's the restriction? I understand that you need a stroller to push your kid around. But is it too much to ask that these things get folded up before the train starts moving? Of course not. Make room for everybody, Stroller Pushers! Riding the T is bad enough. We don't need to be pinched up against the wall by some huge, AT-AT–esque tank.

Amazing fact

Guys still walk around with popped collars. Unironically.

Houston to the earth: We hate you

I saw the headline to this story, and my jaw kinda sorta hit the floor.

It's one thing to be proud of your town's "independent" streak. It's another altogether to be so completely clueless to the world around you as to actually be proud of NOT recycling. Does Houston watch television? Read the newspaper? Green is the zeitgeist! Irregardless of whether you're an environmentalist or a global-warming denier, as a Houstonian, do you really want to be from the city that DOESN'T recycle?

The Times piece clued me in to the amazing fact that Houston is the only major city in the country without zoning laws. (Here's some very brief background.) To which I respond: wtf, mate? "The separation of land uses is impelled by economic forces rather than mandatory zoning"? "Widespread private convenants"? What sort of Ayn Rand nonsense is that? Sure, pure free market principles work in the boom-town days of expansion and sprawl when any cowpoke could stake a claim and put up a neo-brutalist townhouse next door to a pet shop, but they fail miserably when your town becomes so big that garbage trucks can't make it from one end to the other on a tank of gas. Here's a message to Houston, from the rest of the world: this isn't the wild, wild west. Start recycling.

The funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. So far.

If you know me, you'll understand why anthropomorphic typefaces are literally in the center of my wheelhouse. I'd watch an entire TV show like this. God bless you, College Humor.

P.S. The CH video player is wide, so it looks kinda funny. Just click and it should play alright.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.