THE POLLS ARE IN!

Horse-raceish campaign coverage reminds me of a guy tasked to cover the summer swimming hole who wastes his word count dragging his fat big toe through the water skittishly reporting "The water here at the swimming hole is still cold"--but who never actually girds his swimmers and swims, refusing to grace his exasperated readers with even the most cursory splash.

Times for a Quote

More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth.

Octopus Love

It's sweet. And no, I'm not thinking of the Dream of the Fishmonger's Wife.

(via Drawn.)

Wither?

I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself.

“I manufacture opinions,” I said.

“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”

“By the number of people who strongly agree or strongly disagree with me,” I said. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly inaccurate, there is somehow a perception that I am being successful."

-via Fimoculous

Richard Nixon's gremlin.

From the obviously-beloved Museum of Hoaxes comes this story of Dick Tuck, a man who--for reasons which go unmentioned in the article, but will be readily imagined by anyone with a prime-time-television understanding of American history--decided to make Richard Nixon's life miserable and so dogged the pol with simperingly quiescent pranks. My favorite prank: a whole nursery of pregnant women, bellies bulging, holding signs outside a campaign appearance saying "Nixon's the one".

We should totally Tuck McCain.

Who is more dangerous? Bin Laden's driver? Or the guy on the corner smoking crack.

Today Osama bin Laden's driver was sentenced to spend the next five months in prison (he's already served about five years waiting for a trial.) Now this is big, front page news because it's a nice and tidy important judicial victory that comes tantalizingly close to global fear-or-ist number one himself. But one huge glooming thing stretches over this conviction for me. The man is being sentenced, really, for his proximity to bin Laden. The actual charge-this guy is now a war criminal for this-is "providing material support to a terrorist organization." This man was no terrorist mastermind, no idelogical firebrand. He was a driver.

But there's a double-take-worthy sort of twilight justice going on here. On the one hand, the courts declared this guy a war criminal. On the other hand, they don't see his war crimes as eliciting any more than five years in prison. Just to put that into perspective, that's the mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine. In fact, the average sentence for someone convicted of first-time trafficking of crack cocaine is ten years. So your local rock-slinger is TWICE as dangerous as Osama bin Laden's driver. Who is a war criminal. Isn't that a bit strange?

"Thought Experiment"

What if there was a gangster mystique about selling cookware instead of crack?

What Book Are You Ashamed Of Not Having Read?

A bunch of cultured Brits answer that question in this amusing video. How is it that while these people are proclaiming their ignorance about the classics of Western Thought I still feel like they are infinity more cultured, intelligent, and dinner-party-worthy than your current humble bog writer?

Wednesday Morning Video Blogging

First, I totally have an internet crush on the delightful cooking-puppet-crazy TV show FOOD PARTY, the Christmas episode is embedded below.



The second mixes one of my true loves--bluegrass--with one of my kinda loves--indie music--HERE WE GO:



Charming links, right? Well they're both from Metafilter. Which explains why Metafilter is more popular than this here blog.

Scratched the surface of the treasure trove.

I have a strange hobby. Now, it's less of a hobby and more a potential for a hobby-an interest I have which I've only surreptitiously and half-heartedly started to follow. I love vintage music. Especially pop music. Hearing the worn-out strains of 1920s popular songs on my iPod is such a magnificent confusion. The songs seem so immediately familiar in their usual poppiness, but they sound like pop from another world, from a distant America, which is true, they're from a completely different America, one we can never know, a passed, strange America which wore hats.

All this is an introduction to today's find: two large treasure troves of vintage music (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog).

The Greatest Literary Hoax (Or One Of Them)

Check out the story of I, Libertine, a literary hoax to end all literary hoaxes (via Boing Boing.)

Gosh, I wish I could make a hoax like this one.

How Smart Is The Octopus?

Readers of this blog will know: very smart.

NO DESPOT, PLZ

Like any sensible man, I've been thinking about Henry Timrod this morning, the poet laureate of the Confederacy--reading his poems shows just how batshit crazy the Civil War was. Here's a particular gem:

A CRY TO ARMS.

Ho! woodsmen of the mountain side!
Ho! dwellers in the vales!
Ho! ye who by the chafing tide
Have roughened in the gales!

Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot,
Lay by the bloodless spade;
Let desk, and case, and counter rot,
And burn your books of trade.

The despot roves your fairest lands;
And till he flies or fears,
Your fields must grow but armed bands,
Your sheaves be sheaves of spears!
Give up to mildew and to rust
The useless tools of gain;
And feed your country's sacred dust
With floods of crimson rain!

Come, with the weapons at your call -
With musket, pike, or knife;
He wields the deadliest blade of all
Who lightest holds his life.
The arm that drives its unbought blows
With all a patriot's scorn,
Might brain a tyrant with a rose,
Or stab him with a thorn.

Does any falter? let him turn
To some brave maiden's eyes,
And catch the holy fires that burn
In those sublunar skies.
Oh! could you like your women feel
And in their spirit march,
A day might see your lines of steel
Beneath the victor's arch.

Let's conversate in this space.

To the stakeholders of the Super Naarkatron project,

We need to touch base about this offline, but in order to pre-prepare and get some forward planning as we are going forward together, from the get-go we’d better not let the grass grow too long on this one and get all of our ducks in a row, we need to start actioning 110% of our human capital if we don’t want to have egg on our face because we didn’t pick the low-hanging fruit when we have the chance and we ended up being stuck at the close of play without even looking under the bonnet to conversate about how we could solve the challenges we faced: the fact is that we are in negative territory in this space; we need to have some 360-degree thinking idea showers because we all know you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change—I assure you I have a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach on my radar but my door is still open with respect to this—but let’s loop back on this: the fact is that you can't have your cake and eat it too, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music; I know that there have been rumors to the effect that we don’t have enough bandwidth to come to the party and really live the values of our company, but at the end of the day that’s a way to wrongside the demographic—why don’t you take a business 2.0 approach to that and learn to sprinkle some magic on our challenges and incentivise our paradigm shifts?—also in addition if anyone wants to get their fingers down the throat of the organization of that nodule tell them you’ve got leverage it was auspiced by me, Rupert Naark: to feed it back, not only do we need to become project evangelists we must capture our colleagues and hope for the strategic staircase will cascade into the target demographic, but I digress; taking a high-altitude view I assure you the business is still a really cool train set, and we continue to be optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline, but despite drilling down, we must make drastic reductions in our workforce in this space.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Rupert S. Naark, CEO-at-large, Nark Industries

This sentence has every single one of the BBC News' 50 office speak phrases you love to hate.

A. O. Scott, you are my favorite person in the world.

Seriously, A. O. Scott. I would really like to be you. Reading an A. O. Scott review is like eating chocolate--WHILE READING AN A. O. SCOTT REVIEW. It's so good, it's fucking recursively good. Check out this gem from his review of "The Love Guru"

No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

And here's another one:

I’m not opposed to infantile, regressive, scatological humor. Indeed, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. Or maybe a glutton. So it’s not that I object to the idea of, say, witnessing elephants copulate on the ice in the middle of a Stanley Cup hockey match, or seeing a dwarf sent flying over the same ice by the shock of defibrillator paddles. But it will never be enough simply to do such things. They must be done well.

A. O. Scott, can we be friends?

How To Nap

We humans make everything more complicated than it needs to be. Just to expend our excess brain power, I suppose. In that proud tradition, here's a handy infographic on how to nap. I encourage you to practice at work today.

Gore Vidal Is A Badass The Only Problem Is He Knows It

Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days? Like everyone else, no, I don’t.

Signs That You've Been Bit By The Travel Bug

If you read this list of tourist spots Americans can't visit (via Kottke) and you begin to plan how, indeed, you could visit them all.

I think that Kumgangsan is a bit within my reach, right?

This Time, The Times

The recipe didn’t run in the magazine. Nor do ones that call for glove boning, which is a way to turn a bird inside out to bone it without cutting into the skin.

“It’s a marvelous technique, but who is going to do that?” Ms. Minifie asked.

In South Korea, Students Study So Hard They Have To Leave South Korea

The New York Times reports on the curious phenomenon of South Koreans sending their kids to English-speaking countries to study English. Don't think for a second when you're reading this that this is at all rare. In every single class I teach there is at least one student who has lived in Australia or Canada or New Zealand (usually Canada). Sometimes there are two or three. And these students have a definite edge over the other kids, at least when it comes to English.

The demand for English education in Korea is huge. There are about 300,000 of us native English teachers here (keep that number in mind when you read that Lee Myun Bak wants to add an additional 10,000). And part of the reason why the demand is so great is that there exists a sort of low-level desperation about English. Everybody knows that it's important, and everybody studies very very hard, but learning good English, the sort of English expressed on test scores, seems almost Sisyphean.

And the problem I see is that the high cost of education is driving a wedge between rich and poor. After-school kids are expected to go to private academies (which cost a lot of money) and these kids will do better in class. And so in the public school classroom, the bar is raised a little higher--perhaps so high that the kids whose families cannot afford academies or private tutors or trips to Australia will fall behind. I know in my classroom sometimes the only kids who can understand me are those who have been to America, go to two English academies a day.

And it's not like the kids who can do well are enjoying themselves. My students--middle school students--study so much that when I ask them questions like "What are your hobbies?" they tell me "Sleep." "Video games." Indeed, after the last vacation I asked my students: "What did you do?" and many told me "I went to Bangkok."---This is Korean slang for staying in the house all day. (Bang means room, and I think Ko means corner [I'm not sure.]) Anyway. The kids are being educated ragged. Without the freedom to let their minds play, get creative, rebel, create themselves.... Just so they can speak good English. Damn.