Hi,

I am in two classes that deal with Asia this semester. They are both my least favorite classes too. Not because I don't like Asia. Nope, I really like Chinese history, Japanese lit. and Korean pet-names for children: Dun Teggie (which translates to 'shit pig'). But man, these classes are bad.

I have noticed over the semester that American's love two things about Asia: 1) The Dalai Lama 2) Singapore. These are two things I don't much care for.

Free Tibet bumper stickers litter the cars of every university parking lot. Americans love Tibet, though they don't know very much about it. We imagine a peaceful land that finds injustice and disparity abhorrent. We ignore that it is a brutal, feudal society which exists to support their god-emperor. Peasants are horribly oppressed, they are Serfs.

The Dalai Lama has raised thousands of dollars for Tibetan seperatists. Ya, that means guns and bombs and stuff. He gives men like Richard Gere and Stephen Segal titles of spiritual nobility because they give lots of money.

Man, can't wait to go back to that in a free Tibet (which, by the way, has been a part of China for hundreds of years). I mean, ya, they have a right to self-determination and all. But an independent Quebec should be higher on our list than a backwards and violent Tibet.

Then there is Singapore. It is so CLEAN! Have you seen how clean it is? Singapore is one clean city! You would think these people have never been to Canada or Sweden by the way they gawk at Singapore's cleanliness.

Did you know that you can spend time in jail for possessing gum in Singapore? Did you know that poppy seeds are illegal? Did you know that the government recently made it illegal to rent apartments to same sex couples?

Singapore has the highest per capita rate of capital punishment in the world. Ya, they leave China and Iran in the dust. The murder rate is relativly low. Most executions are given to drug offenders. 22 grams of coke will get you murdered by the state.

Singapore is a police state. But it is so CLEAN!

AH! I mean, look this shit up on a wiki. It's not like the information is hard to find people.

(e:Joshua) has been talking about cooking. Well, (e:Jbeaty) has been talking about cooking a lot and (e:Joshua) brought it up. But it made me think about why I don't like Rachel Ray.

The thing about her is, she makes meals in twenty minutes. They are simple foods that everyday Americans would love to eat. Nothing fancy, no ingredient they can't get in a regular grocery store, nothing difficult to pronounce. Her set is like her food, simple and a bit nostalgic with a retro fridge and not a scrap of stainless steal in site. It would evoke grandmas kitchen where you brought in some eggs from the hen house.

And yet this whole air is betrayed by the window. Grandmas farm kitchen is apparently in a high rise in Manhattan, with the visible skyline of that city etched out between those yellow country curtains. This is the lie she serves up, that the everyday, the humdrum, is somehow extra ordinary and classy.

There is pleasure in the regular home cooked meal. A meal so simple anyone could make it. And that is the charm of Rachel Ray, anyone really can make it. Her recipes litter the grocery store aisles on packages of triscuts, miracle whip, ketchup. It is food that anyone with a passing interest in cooking can make. It is a pat on the back to the mediocre and the store bought.

Rachel Ray is not edifying. We learn, essentially, nothing from her. Julia Child took America into culinary worlds we had not yet imagined! French cooking with serious technique became fashionable, dethroning jell-o molds and aspic. Now, ecen greasy spoon diners will serve a sandwitch au ju. Her effect on America's palate is immeasurable.

On the other hand, Ray sends us into a bit of a time warp. With Julia we realized the importance of technique, with Ray we trade that for ready made. Rachel Ray is making the meat and potato meals of days of yore in an age where eating bears the scientific name gastronomique.

A celebration of the everyday isn't really a good use of time, but man can it get you sponsorships.

Ever since the NY Times let me once again have access to their op/ed section I have been doing basicly what I have been for the last four years since they initially restricted access.... reading other things. But I could not turn away from the synergistic pizzazz of the fluffy snark Maureen Dowd with the cuddly Stephen Colbert.

You can read it here

Or you can read it in its entirety below.

enjoy kittens


OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Mock Columnist, Amok

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2007
I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

He was sneering that Times columns make good "kindling." He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, "it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade." He was observing, approvingly, that "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann's skull."

I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d'moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He's typing and drinking and threatening to "shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle."

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Surprised to see my byline here, aren't you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don't. So I'll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(

I'd like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she's watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn't have to think about. It's all George Bush's fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I've written Frank Rich's column too.

So why I am writing Miss Dowd's column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can't remember if I'm supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she's actually easy to beat, or if I'm supposed to be scared of her because she's legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can't remember if I'm supposed to support him because he's the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I'm supposed to support him because he's legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion "Law & Order" never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don't mean Al Gore (though he's a world-class loomer). First of all, I don't think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don't need to care about science, literature or peace.

While my hat is not presently in the ring, I should also point out that it is not on my head. So where's that hat? (Hint: John McCain was seen passing one at a gas station to fuel up the Straight Talk Express.)

Others point to my new bestseller, "I Am America (And So Can You!)" noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Look at the moral guidance I offer. On faith: "After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." On gender: "The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex." On race: "While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad." On the elderly: "They look like lizards."

Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, "Doesn't this thing have a reverse gear?" Let's back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road - or even roads. Or forks, for that matter. I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.

Let me regurgitate: I know why you want me to run, and I hear your clamor. I share Americans' nostalgia for an era when you not only could tell a man by the cut of his jib, but the jib industry hadn't yet fled to Guangdong. And I don't intend to tease you for weeks the way Newt Gingrich did, saying that if his supporters raised $30 million, he would run for president. I would run for 15 million. Cash.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet - even though it's clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.

What do I offer? Hope for the common man. Because I am not the Anointed or the Inevitable. I am just an Average Joe like you - if you have a TV show.

Dude!



Crab Apples are so fricken sweet. Growing up we had a crab apple tree in our front yard that was constantly rotting. Like a much beloved fruit dispensing zombie.

They are as hard as rocks, slightly larger than grapes, and hurt like a song of a bitch when thrown.

Well, now is the time for them to ripen and fall off the tree; giving plenty of ammo to the poor souls forced to live under their projectile burden.

To make myself feel better, here is a picture of a crab apple titty.



ya, you so want to tap that

Ahoi,

On Halloween last year I accomplished two fine things. First, I sold my piece of shit car to a guy in Rochester for more than I should have; but he was as desperate to get a cheap car as I was to sell one. Second, I bought my very first new car. Yum, so sexy you could climax just looking at the tail pipe... which reminds me of a very disgusting story I need to tell sometime when very, very drunk. (It isn't about me, and I could tell it sober but it is more believable after a few dozen.)

Well, short of our one year anniversary some colostomy bag threw a Zima bottle at a window and put a dent in the door and cracking the paint off. I have unleashed the hounds in search of his loved ones.

My question to you, dear estrippers, is where should I go to have that little dent repaired. I don't want the exposed metal to start to rust.

thanks

Well, well, well,


My brother Jordan is about ten years younger than his two older siblings, me and my younger brother Matt. Matt and I were free to blaze a trail to adulthood, dabbling in secret vices like tobacco, drink, or satanism. Jordan however was marched at gun point down the same path, but without the side trips of vices to those wonderful vistas of opium or grain alcohol. It is the path that our folks could see, and not the whole one they couldn't. One day, I am going to tie him down and force a bottle of cheap wine down the kids throat and not rest until he has done a line off a dead hookers ass.

Well, he has come to one of those kind of vistas, the respectable kind in which grandmothers love you all the more for being apart of. Like his two older brothers he just became an Eagle scout. For those who had fun childhoods and not in the know, Eagle scouts are like boy scouts par excellence. They can start camp fires with a glint in their eye and help old ladies across the street with superhuman speed.

It is an honor for him and one that is accompanied with much pomp and circumstance. No hooded men speaking an occult tongue decipherable to only the initiated. Rather, in the basement of a church the county executive's liaison shakes his hand and tries desperately to relate himself to Jordan. More on that in another post through.

Two of my friends and my brother Matt all had me write a little speech for them: a humorous appraisal of them as a person fluffed up with some genuine praise. Well, Jordan wants me to offer the same sort of speech.

Problem is, I don't like the boy scouts, not one bit. I run into some problems with them as I am an atheist homosexual. Ouch, two strikes. In fact, in 2004 I was still an actie member, teaching classes and such, when I tried to get my council (an organizing body, like a county) to draft a statement saying we were opposed to discrimination based on sexual orientation and religious belief. Two weeks letter I received a letter I had to sign for from the national headquarters in Texas. I was kicked out.

I would love to use this ten minutes of time to just slice into the institution who I worked for and who's highest honor I earned. But, instead I have 17 years worth of dirt on this kid. He is my little brother. I changed his diapers as a kid. I mean, how can you let material like that go to waste?

I have now done teacher observations in two school districts: Buffalo and Orchard Park. The difference is disgusting.

In Buffalo, the teachers hadn't had a raise in six years.

In Orchard Park they have their own TV studio.

In Buffalo there were 35-40 kids in a classroom.

In Orchard Park there was 20-25

In Buffalo kids were doing fundraising to keep their drama club going.

In Orchard Park they offer horseback riding.


Now, I don't want to take those nice things away from Orchard Park. But if it is good enough for them it is certainly good enough for the poorest schools in Buffalo.

(e:Janelle) has been journaling about the Sims, that video game where you... uh... simulate humans? You know, soup to nuts. From planing out their home and rise in a simulated capitalist economy to the micromanagement of sending them off to pee. And at a time-laps pitch it is oddly addicting.

Well, I played the Sims once, when it was a new game. Like Janelle I started off modestly. But mostly because I didn't read the instructions and just moved into the first shack I came across. Well, living in a miserable tiny apartment with room mates I wanted to axe murder I thought I would play out my childish fantasies. So, two guys move in and I try to get them to fall in love.

Now, this isn't a one-who-got-away sort of story. At the beginning they didn't like when I made them hug. But they kind of liked it when one bought a gift for the other. They could joke and pall around, but if I made them flirt. Yikes! It was uncomfortable.

But, I was persistent and my fantasy couple got together. One was an artists, because that sounded much more exciting than the waiter I was at the time. The other was in the military. Oh, everyone knew about his boyfriend, but it was never talked about on the base because our man was such a good soldier.

One morning, the military man wakes up early and sneaks downstairs to make the other breakfast in bed. A few weeks earlier they bought a grill for their anniversary. He starts cooking on the grill as the other gently slept and then.... BOOM!

FIRE!

FIRE!

Military man was engulfed in flames and died. A little tomb stone stood among the chard remains of the grill. The other sim would spend all day weeping beside it. He lost his job because he spent all day grieving.

Occasionally military man's ghost would appear and try to hug his lover. But the living sim would get frightened and run away. Then, when the ghost would disappear hugless the other would just return to the tomb and cry some more.

I was taking a Modern Russian history class at the time. The Albany winter was especially cold that year and reading the Gulag Archipelago for class should have been a harrowing experience. But the death and suffering of thousands was less depressing than my one and only game of the Sims.

Hi,

You know how you get a song in your head, in this case Last Dance With Mary Jane by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and then you read a little on wikipedia then 30 minutes later you have followed a giant trail of vaguely related items and find yourself reading about sausage casing?

Well, that happened just now. And check out what treasure was unearthed






That is right! From a large distributor you can order sausage casing in the shape of a beer bottle! And this isn't a skimpy little sausage. Oh no, this is 1 1/4 pounds of summer sausage fun my friend.

Think of the hilarity as you whip this bad boy out on your next fishing trip. All your friends will be pawing for a bit of your beer bottle sausage. Hey there fellers, there is more than enough sausage to go around!

Order yours now from the mouthwateringly named Mid-Western Research and Supply Inc.

Ya, the big, big, big, big news is out.


We made it on the top ten list after all. I am happy for Buffalo, but after all that hype I wouldn't have been happy with anything short of a five-story H&M

Here is the Buffalo News story.

Yup, that's the big, big, big, big news.

Which reminds me...



I will never tire of that song or video.