Linda Cohn is also Stupid

She thinks Marty Turco and Kenny Rogers could be connected by virtue of their reputations as postseason chokers. Here's her hook: Rogers turned it around this year--why can't Turco?

Because, Linda: pine tar isn't used in hockey and even if he could get his hands on some, I don't think Turco could use it to get an edge on the 9 other players out on the ice. Unlike a 1-on-1 battle between a pitcher and a batter, a goalie is only one part of a whole crew of players, all moving around in different schemes and for different purposes.

You WERE talking about cheating, right? That's why you mentioned Rogers, a proven cheater who once called Ken Caminiti scum and accused him of taking food out of his children's mouths by using steroids to gain an unfair advantage--right, Linda?

Dave Nonis is Stupid

I've never heard of this guy, but apparently he's the GM for Vancouver's NHL team. He thinks it's a "joke" that the NHL rules for rookie contracts don't allow their teams to enslave them for their entire careers and actually--if you can believe this--let them file for unrestricted free agency after SEVEN years.

Yes, seven (7). I know, I know: it's like the blink of an eye. I remember once when I got this piece of dirt stuck in my eye for 7 years...that was awful, but at least it was only seven years, so I barely even noticed it. Or, it's kind of like junior high and high school all rolled into one: you remember how short a period of time that was, right? Or how about the seven years or so that have passed since Bill Clinton was effectively President? It was just yesterday...

So, the example goes (back to hockey!), the Penguins have Crosby and Jordan Staal, 19 and 18 years old, respectively. When each turns 25--in consecutive seasons--they will be able to demand a huge payday from Pittsburgh or else they can get same from one of the other 29 teams in the league. If Pittsburgh pays up, they're bankrupt (it actually doesn't take a great prognosticator to foresee that--they're broke NOW); if they don't pony up, the two youngsters jump ship and go to a better team with deeper pockets, where they will make billions of dollars BWAAaaaa-hah-ha-haaaaa!!

Of course, that presupposes all of the following:

They turn out to actually be good players.

They don't have any injuries.

Or personal issues.

Or their careers weren't ended already.

Or Pittsburgh hasn't already traded them.

Or they want to file for free agency.

Or the goddamn NHL is even still in existence.

What a douchebag Dave Nonis is. And to think I just met him.

Can You Smell That?

It's the smell of millions of stinky little kids getting excited about Halloween. The best day of the year: combines candy with social interaction and just enough danger to be interesting. Naturally, a bunch of wankers have recently gone through scads of old newspapers and found that there never actually was a razor in an apple, nor poisoned candy, nor any white slavery ring that kidnapped unescorted children. Spoilsports.

It seems--neither here nor there--that in Chicago there is segregated trick-or-treating. Over in what's left of Little Italy/Maxwell Street (the part that isn't under UIC), white kids went out Sunday night and black kids are on for tonight. People who live in the neighborhood actually try to get on the approved lists of one of the races so they can give away candy. In a racist way. What is wrong with these fucking people?

Twat? I Cunt Hear You

Gallaudet University is one of the leading higher education institutions for weird proto-fascist deaf people who insist on segregating themselves from the rest of humanity while earning a college degree.

Oh, I meant to write that it is a great place for those (handicapped martyrs) who can’t hear, to go and get a college degree without being stared at or taunted by crappy "normals" like myself.

No, wait. That’s not it. In fact, I played football against Gallaudet whilst in college, and let me say that they are the dirtiest bunch of dick-sucking cheap shot artists I have ever encountered…can’t hear the whistle, my ass! Late hit, bitch! And, their field had a nasty colony of yellow jackets living in it, so us ear-users got stung repeatedly in between late hit spearings from bulked-up, pissed-off deaf people. Faggots.

Anyway, apparently all is not well (Ha!) at Can’t Hear U (double Ha!): this week the university, in response to protests from students and faculty, decided to fire the newly-appointed president because she isn’t "deaf enough." No, I’m serious.

Apparently, the fact that for most of her life she lip-read and didn’t use sign language means she is a fucking "normal" like you and me and therefore she can’t possibly serve as an advocate for a bunch of hyper-demanding, fucked-in-the-head deaf people (who, did I mention, like to hit after the whistle during football games?). SHE'S NOT DEAF "ENOUGH"!

Look, dicks: I know you got a raw deal. And, I know you’re pissed off about it (I have the bruised kidney and the concussion to show for it). But, you are also acting like a bunch of assholes and, frankly, you’re wearing me out. This lady IS deaf; she IS an advocate for deaf people; she WANTS the job, despite the fact that the government (which provides a lot of your funding) found your university to actually be pretty suckass and have an abnormally (triple Ha!) low graduation rate (maybe because you goddamn people act like the world owes you something?). Maybe you should step back and reconsider this whole "Purity Of Essence" thing you got going here.

And, just so you know: you make me sick, with your "only deaf people can feel my pain!" bullshit. If that were true, then you would be restricted to only seeing, thinking, signing, and interpreting the work of other deaf people. Because, shit for brains, by your own logic people who can hear operate on another plane of consciousness and therefore YOU can’t understand US. Stop trying to steal MY culture, fucker! Everything that makes a sound belongs to ME!

Of course, we could all just agree to get along, but then you’d have to stop taking cheap shots and also stop eating your own. And that’s not what good little Nazis do, is it?

We Believe in Ghosts

Last election, Kerry was going to win by about 4-5 million votes. Then, about 2 million people lost their right to vote just before the election--by which I mean that the voter rolls "lost" them.

Then, Karl Rove's army of 4 million evangelical zombies, tired of consuming brains and out on a bit of a holiday, descended on the polls and crazy-voted their boy George to victory.

But that's total bullshit. And yet, who has said that there can't possibly be 4 million zealots in this country who have never voted before, and who can be magically summoned at the 11th hour only that one time, and then disappear never to be seen again? Why hasn't Dobson's ministry grown by 4 million? Why hasn't the Republican Party mailing list grown (it's actually shrinking) by 4 million? Where did they go?

They never existed, obviously. Voter fraud has never been so obvious, and yet the media has been pushing the phantom voter thesis for 2 years, as Rove has been feeding it with all manner of ridiculous claims. I suppose that for a nation that in the main actually does believe in a spirit in the sky it isn't so far-fetched to also accept that millions of people felt the call of secular politics--and were in fact swayed to come to the polls by a big fat blob of cynical, anti-Christian puke like Rove--and then went away without a peep.

The goddamn scenario the White House came up with is laughable and always has been. Where are those God nuts now, Karl? Why are you so far behind in the polls, Karl? Do they not own telephones or televisions, or get the mail, Karl? Why aren't actual reporters asking you these questions, Karl? FUCK!

Life Is Pain, Highness

Maybe existence is just the most traumatic experiences in life and everything else--the majority of our time--is really the waiting period in between traumatic episodes.

Your best interests are not served by getting up and going to work. They are best served by staying in bed and sleeping.

Getting a job really is just another way of hurting yourself.

Is Our Children Learning?

Is it any wonder even college students are barely literate these days when they have this to look at? This woman is a professional film critic and she has at least three grammar errors in what amounts to a 1-page review. And, she writes like a child. Yes, I know that was a poorly-structured sentence. In her review, to get back to the subject, this passage really pisses me off, because it's the kind of nothing, meaningless drivel I get from students all the time:

"Why didn't Chamusso just tell the truth immediately? The damage done to the refinery certainly required investigation. Chamusso is considered a hero in South Africa and his story influenced the end of Apartheid. The real Chamusso appears at the end of the film and, indeed, he comes across immediately is a charismatic, kind man. I liked him."

1. Are you seriously trying to deconstruct the plot of a nonfiction film as though the writers could have changed the storyline to make more sense to you, a white middle class cow?

2. Do you know what a non sequitur is?

3. You "liked him"? Do you think I (or any readers of your "review") give a fuck that you liked him? Children writing essays, when they run out of actual information to convey, usually resort to the "um, so like, ya...his struggle was real hard but eventually he like, made it...and I liked him and stuff. The End."

Memo to FilmsInReview.com: I'm available. Call me.

Format

Is anybody else seeing this in a fucked up format where all the links and archives are at the bottom of the screen?

I read a poll, now I understand the South

Or so says this douche.

So an NC State poll says southerners are "very sad" (what the fuck kind of question was that??) about the war. Well, gee. Hard to figure, seeing as how all those military bases are in the South and are such a large part of the regional culture and economy--not to mention they symbolize the only way up or out for many--and so many southerners join the service and, you know, have family and friends who worry about them. Yeah, I'm scratching my head fucking bloody over this tough little nut.

There's apparently a newly-created "anti-war South" that just sits there, waiting for the Democrats to exploit it for votes. Amazing what you can find out from one little poll. The poll didn't say anything, though, about making the Democratic Party inclusive of evangelicals and rednecks, so let's just assume all these anti-war folks are like you and me, reasonable and progressive, and they just happen to be caught in the tarpit of stupid that is everything below the Mason-Dixon.

Teetering....teetering....teetering...

Why do leftwing pundits who think they're smarter than mainstream pundits still play the semantics game on the Republicans' terms?

Take, for instance, the fact that Iraq has been "on the brink" of civil war, according to both the blogs and the mainstream media, for the last 3 years. When the fuck will it go over the edge, dummies?

Bush says "no chance of civil war." Media says, "possible indications of beginnings of civil war." Bloggers say "teetering on the edge of civil war." Problem: when you say "on the edge of civil war" long enough, and never actually get to "civil war" status, it legitimizes Bush's spin that America is preventing civil war.

Do this right, leftwing loudmouths: just declare that is IS a civil war. Words have meaning. Take the words and use them. Dumb fucks.

America has been "on the edge" of rejecting the rightwing junto for the last decade, too. Why doesn't some enterprising lefty explain that one? Declare victory, like Bush did in 2000, which will allow you to get to the postmortem and effectively silence the entire GOP echo chamber. Why do I even have to say this?

Hateful Reality

The results are in on the 2006 faculty survey, which asks teachers to comment on the qualities they find most useful in students. Other than "exciting mammalian protruberances," and "makes me feel hip by laughing at my jokes about Seinfeld...do people still watch Seinfeld?" the most popular answer was "has military/law enforcement experience."

This is shameful. There is no group I would rather shit on than soldiers and cops, unless it's Republicans who are soldiers and cops, but Republicans are too chickenshit, in my opinion, to be soldiers, and they are too dumb to go to college on the way to becoming cops. Broad and speculative, not to mention almost certainly incorrect, I know.

But the survey, unfortunately, reveals a truth about higher education: teenagers aren't ready for it. They ought to be out traveling the world, having experiences, or at least working in factories, so they can decide they really, really want to go back to school. Too often my class is full of know-nothing twits who are proud of the fact that they have never left the city, and who are there only because they think everybody needs to go to college and do so right after high school. Sorry, Brit'ny: that's just not true. Flunking out of college is not going to help anybody, and kids who don't want to be in my class will most assuredly fail it.

And perhaps it is for the reason that so very many of the people in college are the indifferent type that the jarheads, skinheads, meatheads, and flatheads stick out.

I am not kidding: ex-military types are not just better students, they are light-years better than everyone else. They do the reading, they speak up in class, they ask questions. They make appointments to discuss papers and exams, they bring original ideas to the meetings, and then they write and revise those ideas to perfection. They are our best students, and it has come to the point where we can spot them in the crowd by virtue of their commitment to learning.

What is this phenomenon? It shames me to think how often I have disparaged these people, and the evidence is so overwhelming that I am not just wrong but that I should really recruit these people to be in my classes.

Is it because they have learned self-discipline in the service? Is it because they don't feel any pressure in a classroom, compared to the demands of the military or law enforcement? One student told me she was sick of being obviously lied to in the Marine Corps and that in college she would make up her own mind about things, now that the Marines had taught her to be skeptical of authority.

Truly amazing. Who would have thought?

Cool, AIDS!

There's nothing funny about AIDS. Or puns with the acronym AIDS in them. AIDS, actually, is not an acronym at all, since it is just a word spelled by extracting only those letters from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome that spell a word. As immunodeficiency is not two words, you can't just select the "d" as part of the acronym; but I guess "AIS" isn't pronounceable. The point is, true acronyms don't include letters chosen for their expediency (nor are the words in them superfluous. So, for example, including extra words just so the initials will spell something is to make faux-acronyms, as is taking the beginning of two or more words and capitalizing them to make an "acronym" word. You listening, COINTELPRO? COMSAT? Finally, initials that don't make a word, like NSC, WAARFG, and the like, are not technically acronyms; they are merely initialisms.).

That all has nothing to do with this post. The UIC history department was going to sponsor a brown bag talk last Wednesday on the subject of AIDS and the history of AIDS research funding, 1987-present. I think the talk was cancelled, probably, because somebody realized that 1987 to the present isn't part of "history," but rather is what we refer to as "recent memory" or, in the case of the present, "today."

I would like to give a talk called "The history of today, starring tomorrow."

Hero: Not Just a Sandwich Anymore

Maybe you never heard this one, but dead cops are always called "heroes" by somebody, usually a family member or small-time political hack in interview/eulogy mode.

But you know what I realized the other day? They really are heroes.

Before you call on me to burn my CPUSA membership card, or peel the "Bad Cop! No Donut!" sticker off my Prius, hear me out.

Cops are there to serve, first, and protect, second. Nothing in there about using deadly force or beating nigras, but I digress...

"Protect and Serve" it would seem, refers to protecting life and property and serving the public. That is, the whole public, which of course includes criminales (isn't that Spanish for "criminals"?) but does not include the cops themselves.

So, when confronted with a dangerous suspect or a threatening situation, the cop has pledged to be the sacrificial lamb. How did we get to that assumption? Easy: the cop is there in a professional capacity; it is the cop's responsibility to assess and mitigate the situation. For all purposes, the civilian(s) involved bear no responsibility whatsoever. The cop, on the other hand, has as his sworn duty to protect the life of not only any bystander, but also the suspect.

When and if conditions arise that cause the situation to move beyond the cop's control--when there is a moment of uncertainty in which it is not clear whether the suspect intends to submit or fight--it is the cop, and only the cop, who has the responsibility to wait and see what happens.

If that means that the cop gets killed, then so be it.

That is the job. It is exactly what the cop signed up for. Therefore we may conclude that the only good cop is, indeed, a dead cop. He did his job perfectly.

Are dead cops heroes, then? Certainly.

But firemen aren't, no matter what they did.

You're Killing Me

Foley.

1. If this is all a big joke, why did he resign? People don't shitcan bright political careers over jokes they don't know anything about.

2. If he had known the party was going to get this stiff in his defense, would he have resigned in the first place?

3. If you go to Blockbuster and rent all the political scandal-genre movies from decades past, everything from "The Candidate" to "Three Days of the Condor," could you find anything in them that isn't just quaint and completely trivial compared to what has happened in this country in the past 6 years? College sexual indiscretions? Secret international spy rings? Somebody authorized a small military action in Central America? So fucking what? (Tom Clancy, you are on notice: your thrillers about high officials violating esoteric laws are obsolete--we've moved on to global-scale crimes against humanity, sucker!)

I mean, Watergate was a fucking joke. Maybe the GOP can dig up Nixon and get a public apology from Woodward and Bernstein for thinking that anyone gave a shit about the Constitution.

Are you ready for the country?

A few months ago, because the family car has a huge dent in the passenger side that traps air and kills gas mileage, this environmentally-conscious (meaning "I'm aware of it," not "I wear sandals") city boy took the electric train out to Downer's Grove, where an aunt picked me up and drove us out to her farm. I believe it's in Ogle County, outside a very scary little hick town called Oregon, which is pronounced by Illinoisans as "Or-a-GON," in a funny twisted understanding of words that also sees them say "Peru" as "PEE-roo" and "Cairo" as "KAY-row."

To get to Ogle County one must traverse all of Dekalb County, which is right in the heart of Dennis Hastert's own 14th congressional district--which goes from the far western suburbs of Chicago all the way to Iowa.

On the way, my aunt, who moves in fairly conservative circles (including Bush pioneers and other such wanks), began telling me about a lawyer she used to work with who is now Hastert's towelboy (or maybe she said chief of staff or something of that nature?). Anyway, the story was a true tale of the South, except it was set in rural Illinois: Hastert returns to his district at every opportunity; he's legendary for his folksiness and familiarity. His constitutents know they can always find Dennis at a certain diner on Saturday morning, hammering down porkfat gravy, with pork biscuits, pork meat sides, and a pork shake. And apparently it's delightful, delightful! how his plain-spoken supporters give him an earful every time about property taxes, that fag liberal media that forces them to watch "The Birdcage" on the Sunday Night Movie and they just can't turn off that dadblamed TV, and the price of gasoline for the ol' 1955 Chevy pickup with no headlights and a large exhaust problem. Hilarious.

The thing about this experience that comes to me now, now that Hastert is on television defending himself by proclaiming a conspiracy by George Soros, liberal bloggers, and everyone who didn't vote Bush last time, is how utterly creepy the whole thing is. Like Hastert's bloated, waxy, I'm-already-in-the-first-stages-of-cardiac-arrest face, or the assumed simple humanity of people who must lead double lives--like Hastert--as both interpreters of the dirtfucker's complaint but also power brokers in DC.

Or maybe it's the place itself. Country Illinois is as bad or worse than country South, if only because there is a certain grimness to the place. These are resigned, beaten people, who will scrape along either as the fastidiously-washed lower middle class of Aurora, or else live and die as puritanical, hypocritical farmers who kill the earth even as they work its soil. That lower middle class, though, it is the larger part of the problem, because it's spreading. After an hour in the car, we were about 80 miles from Chicago and it was sod farms as far as the eye could see. And little crackerbox houses every so often off in the distance. But there was massive road construction on that Sunday morning empty highway, because white people by the hundreds of thousands are moving to the farmland and commuting into the city some 4-6 hours a day. Apparently, the backup begins about 50 miles from Chicago and lasts from 7am to 10am every morning.

Where did we lose the point, though? Hastert has recalled for me the horror of realizing that the better part of the state we live in is composed of proudly backwards people who know in their hearts of hearts that Republicanism is a lie, but who demand that people like Hastert tell them the familiar lies to ease their pain. There is no talking or reasoning with them, because they won't be reasoned with. They like tyranny in ideas, and they aren't under any illusions--they are not the victims of false consciousness who need our liberal educated powers of clarification and rescue.

There is, I am now certain, no evangelical movement in this country worth speaking of. Millions claim to have found inspiration in Jesus, but all the evidence says that they are openly trying to kid you. They pray and weep, wail and shake, but they also wink at you right before skimming from the till, putting on the white sheet, or pulling the lever for the GOP straight ticket.

These are people of one mind, not two. Their actions are entirely explicable by one rubric: they are liars. And they like to be led by other liars. Sincerity is not a Republican value, nor decency, charity, humanitarianism, or anything else that would not readily combine with an utter disrespect for honesty.

It has become a curiosity to me that the word "liar" is never used in American political discourse, even when a Republican evangelical stands in front of the public and lies in the most insulting fashion. Could it be because the very word is like holy water in Hell? Or has a majority of the public just embraced dishonesty as the coin of the realm, rendering obsolete the words we used to use to condemn the avaricious?

Anyway, the point, to come the long way around, is that Hastert has nothing to fear from his constituents: they will continue to support him and vote for him until he keels over from one too many porkfat sandwiches. The lesson to be learned from his obvious pandering to his personal constituents in response to this scandal is that all politics is local; but as progressives we ought to be very afraid of the weight that such crude and disingenuous pandering carries.

But more than that, epiphany has been reached: given Dobson's characterization of Foley's pursuit of sex with teenage boys as "just a joke" perpetrated by the pages themselves (which begs the question "why did Foley resign?"), it is time to drop the respect, if we still have any, for born-agains. I don't know why it happened only now, but Hastert and Dobson together have finally allowed me to see that the Christian Party--I mean, the GOP--is NOT worthy of respect and study, it is NOT worthy of reasonable discussion, it is NOT, nor are its members, worthy of being treated like anything more than a pack of liars. The distinction so many on the left have tried to make, that evangelicals and Republicans (which for this purpose are the same, since the secular minority of the GOP feeds off of the fear and respect generated by what I believe to be the majority of the party, the self-identified Christian right) are worthy of our time and effort to understand how a group can be of two minds, simultaneously both pious and venal, is false.

There is only one conservative mind, and it is empty of all save one idea: preserve power.

When a God-fearing Republican speaks to you in lies, you need not look under every rock and shrub to find the reason why. You need not believe that there is a complex reason for it. You may rest on the evidence as your eyes and ears give it to you. These people aren't that deep or complex, by their own admission. And they're proud of it.

Somebody must warn the people!

...to wipe off their greasy black fingers before they vote.

Yours truly just got trained to operate and troubleshoot some charming little theftboxes which I like to call "touchscreen voting machines" for the upcoming Chicago Board of Elections comedy going under the working title of "Election '06." Yes, America: I am a pollworker!

But when the nice, older white lady doing the training suddenly snapped out of her muttering funk, which I recall was about something related to how to clean the touchscreens after people voted, I knew she was about to spit up a true nugget of wisdom and I was not disappointed.

"The biggest problem, we find, is they always get clogged up with chicken grease!" she said.

If one were into that sort of thing, we might even imagine that the government compiled a database of all black voters' fingerptints by scanning their grease-stained paper ballots under the old system. The new one obviously records their fingerprints by virtue of infrared technology built into the screen.

Die-a-boldically clever, says I!