I am SO excited!

Being a snooty New Yorker by proxy I love me some NY Times. Their web site has been the way of choice to read it for me. About four years ago they changed their site creating Times Select: a subscription service where you can get articles about certain subjects emailed to you, their op/ed pieces, and access to back issues going back to... when ever their content becomes public domain. The first two of those services were absolutely free before that, of course.

What would I do without my Nicholas Kristoph! Or my beloved queen of snark Maureen 'I should be writing for Designing Women but instead I am a journalist' Dowd. Tom Friedman leaves a bad taste in my mouth now a days, what with the whole Iraq War RULZ thingie. And nobody blows smoke up your ass like Frank Rich (who I guiltily enjoy).

Well, starting tomorrow (I believe) we will have access to the Op/Ed pages once more! Of course, in those four years I stopped reading traditional media and became hooked on the likes of Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos and it is sad watching great giants of journalism drag their neanderthal knuckles of paleo-journalism together towards extinction with dinosaur-blog newspapers.

But at least for a few weeks I can enjoy Dowd's tangy fluff!

Ahoi,

New user (e:wwebby) has a lovely user icon that reminded me of one of the little gems I found on the internet. Yes, my lovelies, Edward Gorey presents an original teleplay of the infamous Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles.

enjoy

(e:Jim) is the freakin' BEST!

Just out of no where, for the heck of it, he gets me two books on how to teach leftist politics in the classroom. Just so show he cares. I am so happy.

Soon I will be diving into "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" by Bell 'ZOMG I LOVE HER!!' Hooks. and "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire: whom I have never read but always read about, like Dewey or Foucalt but less opaque.

I am so happy this weekend. I can't wait to get my hands on these suckers. He shall have to be repaid with a fancy dinner and some sweet, sweet lovin'.

My uncle James has been my hero since I cast off childhoods diapers for grander things. He lives at the tip of long island and I live at the tip of western New York, opposite sides of the same state which is much larger in the driving than one would think of the state. Well, I had a chat with him on the phone tonight and it made me supper giddy!

You see, my uncle went to school for history, like me, and so we both get really worked up talking about the finer points of the Hapsburg monarchy in the latter part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Well, he has become a sinophile of late and was very happy to hear I was taking a graduate class on Chinese history.

Well, he was in Beijing as a guest lecturer at a law school. While in China he was invited to a large, formal dinner party. He was the guest of honor and was, kind of, set up on a date with a Manchu princess. The Manchu's are the people of northern China and are a different ethnic group from Han Chinese: the largest group. They ruled all over all of China under the Qing dynasty from 1648 until the Empire was overthrown in 1911.

He and she were having chat. He asked her how she was a princes. She said she is royalty through a relation to an emperor. "Oh," he asked "which one?" and idly she told him Kangxi. Now, being related to Kangxi for a Chinese is like being related to Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt for an American. He is a big deal, considered one of the best Emperors ever.

My uncle made a face like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Do you know Kangxi?" the princess asked. He said 'of course, every school boy in America knows of the great Kangxi!" But it got better.

He also said that no American wants to learn to speak Japanese because we all believe that in 20 years everyone in Japan will be speaking Chinese. Japan will be referred to on our maps as 'East China' well, considering little acts like killing every man, woman, and child in a city of 45,000 south of Manchuko at the beginning of WWII by the Japanese my uncle was loved by them! He was made an honorary descendent of a famous Chinese general.

I love that man.

I wanted to post my reply to Jim's 'how did you find estrip' thing in its own post because I have nothing better to talk about and I am inching my way towards having 100+ posts! YA for frivolous demarcations of worth! Gotta Catch 'em All!

    I was living in a tiny apartment on the fault line between the nice west side and the horrible west side. My kitchen was the largest room in the house, and the most useless room. The linoleum floor and the drafty windows made sure that the floor was cold in the months with no t-shirt weather.
    The most obnoxious feature of that kitchen was the sink. On top it was all aluminum, new and flashy, the sort of think that keeps you from checking underneath it before signing a lease. I had many problems with my life while I lived in that apartment. I love of whiskey and opium would turn out to be lesser problems than the perpetual leak from that sink. Leaking, leaking, always leaking like 16 year old cock in the woman's department.
    As it leaked it collected into a old brown plastic bucket, cracked from the years of wet and dray, bleach and vomit. It was a storied bucket, epics are written in some indecipherable language into it's chewed corners, in the filth stuck to the chalk outline of where a price tag used to be. Well, the drip, drip sound continued and was then accompanied by the sound of water overflowing.
    I kneeled down on that cold December floor and opened the cabinet to dump out the grey, viscous fluid in the tub. And that is when I saw them. Little KGB agents.

The had been bread by Kremlin scientists to fit between the walls of heads of state's homes. To use their tiny stature to go where no man could. Thy had been waiting for years for a response from the Premier with nothing. Too small to leave and travel home they were stranded. The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union fell. And they were forgotten.

I would bring them food and vodka. We would try and talk but they spoke no English, peculiar as they were spies. Mostly we would laugh and nod our heads as we ate and drank. But when we were done I would see them hide their sadness behind a stoic face and close the cabinet door. I am sure they saw the same face on me.

Seeing them like that would make me feel helpless, a bug on a windshield. To cheer myself up I would masturbate. Estrip wasn't the porn-acopia I was looking for, but it makes me not think about the men stranded in my old kitchen.




anyway, that is my story. It is all true, every word. I have already sent it over to MGM and my team of lawyers and super villains are already talking about merchandising, including pitching this to Six Flags to be made into a ride. They tell me a part of it will actually submerge the rider under a pool of whiskey for three whole minutes! See you there.