Grantland’s Justin Heckert went on a search for Puddles the Clown, famous of late for his fantastic cover of Lorde’s “Royals”.
You should read the story.
You should absolutely not skip the short video link late in the story, which contains a fragment of Puddles singing a Christmas carol in the car as they ride around in Atlanta.
The idiot represesntive being aggressively, arrogantly wrong in this story about copyright infringement hearings in Washington is, of course, our own.
The ignorant right-wing anti-gay Poe, by way of a truly shameful degree of gerrymandering, represents both distant exurbs AND most of Montrose, i.e. one of Texas’ oldest “gayborhoods.”
We’re completely sure that district was rationally determined and not constructed to minimize the Democratic vote bloc that is Montrose.
In conclusion: Fuck Ted Poe.
This should be obvious, since they want to both ban abortion AND make it harder to get access to any family planning services — hence the hostility to Planned Parenthood, and their ongoing support for folks like Hobby Lobby, who are suing to avoid having their insurance plan cover contraception at all.
You’d think that, if their actual desire was to reduce the incidence of abortion, they’d work super, super hard to make sure all women had access to highly effective means of birth control. But that’s not what they want. What they want is for sex to always carry the significant risk of pregnancy, for everyone, all the time. They see the fact that we’ve decoupled sex and childbearing as a problem, not an advance, and they’re desperate to roll back the clock.
Cases like Hobby Lobby’s force them to drop their veil just a bit, so we can see what they want more clearly. My guess is that even the notoriously halfwitted American public don’t really agree with them here; the Democrats should remember this issue come fall.
Note the stacked boxes of train cards on the couch, etc.
…it’s my birthday. I’m 44, which is my first palindromic age since 2003.
Pretty sure this won’t happen again, as it did fourteen years ago when my attorney ran down Heights Boulevard with a shopping cart full of fire:
And I’m pretty sure there will be no need to subdue needlessly cheery meat-and-whiskey-filled piñatas, as we did four years ago:
But some tomfoolery, either today or tomorrow, is more or less guaranteed.
…then you’re gonna want to make time for this loving, 24-minute retrospective — narrated by Mr Ellsworth! — produced on the occasion of the show’s 10th anniversary.
Unless you have built your son his own “working” Mission Control panel, you are apparently not in the running.
Remember that “True Hollywood Story” skit on Chappelle’s show years ago, about when Charlie Murphy ended up playing basketball with Prince?
Yeah, turns out it’s true, and Prince said so himself.
The Border Patrol got so brazen about deliberately creating dangerous situations to justify shooting at people that it has been given new guidelines on the use of force.
Is this really what True Detective sounds like to some people? Are they really that poorly read? Cohle’s dialog was never gibberish, but leave it to the American public to treat text they don’t understand as gobbledegook devoid of meaning.
Harry Crews has been on my radar for a long time, but for some reason I never actually took the plunge. I was shocked this was still the case when he died last year, but it still took me until this month to read one of his books. I picked this one because, honestly, it was for sale in a local bookshop when David MacLean was in town reading from The Answer to the Riddle is Me. I felt bad about the fact that I’d pre-ordered MacLean’s book from Amazon, so I spent about $80 on other books while I was there for the reading, and so Crews found his way into my bag.
I can’t speak to Crews’ entire output, but Feast is something I might call “Faulknerian Modern.” If you read books like As I Lay Dying, or generally other books that touch on the Snopeses, it’s hard to miss the utter disdain and disgust Faulkner holds for most of his characters. Anse Bundren is a horrible, ignorant jackass of a man; of that there can be no question. It’s impossible not to read it and see a harsh critique of the South Faulkner knew well.
When I read Faulkner, that South is, temporally at least, far from me. I don’t react viscerally to the ignorance and general embrace of brutality, because I live in a more modern world, and his people don’t. I see them as awful, but they don’t make me HATE.
With Crews, though, it’s different. He’s doing much of the same thing here in Mystic, Georgia with Feast, except it’s set in 1975, and consequently resonates a great deal more. Frankly, I hate every one of these ignorant fucks, and by the end of the book sort of wished for a massive cataclysm to wipe Mystic off the map.
I”m not sure that Crews has the same sneering contempt for his characters that we see in some of Faulkner’s work, but it seems likely. Writers, like any other kind of intellectual, are generally unwelcome in the poor, rural south, and I’m sure Crews had some of the same scars that Faulkner had. At the same time, Crews includes a single learned character — the new boyfriend of a local girl come home from the University of Georgia — and treats him just as poorly, so there’s something in the rural south’s ignorant brutality that Crews seems to think as justified, too.
All that said, the book is solid. Despite my feelings about Joe Lon Mackey himself, I followed his story with the same horrified attention you’d give a train wreck (and, in that sense, was not disappointed). He’s the sort of person we have all seen: ignorant as fuck, but a star football player in a rural high school, so worshiped as a god until he graduated. College was never going to happen, so he is stuck in his backwater shithole town forever, endlessly revisiting his past while a profoundly shitty future stretches before him. No one we encounter is any less fucked up, or any less hopeless.
Should you read it? That, I’m not sure of. It’s harsh and brutal. There is endless violence. There is a brutal dogfighting subplot, the details of which make it clear Crews has been exposed to it in some detail. There is sexual assault. My takeaway was really just to be thankful that I do not have to live in a shithole like Mystic, or be around ignorant, ruined people like Joe Lon.
So that’s something.
Update: Apparently you don’t have to go all the way to Georgia for a ridiculous snake festival.
There’s not really much to say here other than that Nic Pizzolatto and HBO have done more interesting things with the material than the original author.
I only heard about this because it turns out to be part of the mythos, if you will, for HBO’s True Detective; Amazon jumped on the bandwagon and made the Kindle edition of The King in Yellow free a few weeks back, and so I snagged it to read on vacation. (It’s still free, if you want to sample it.)
Honestly, it’s kind of bland, and not really worth your time. Only the first few stories even reference the titular King, and in those it’s generally in a very Lovecraftian thing-you-should-not-know sense. My advice: skip it.
Heh.
Goddamn, I love Animals Talking In All Caps.
Their corporate owner, Diageo, though, seems really really unlikely to say anything about the whiskey that isn’t bullshit marketing.
It’s pretty common in bourbon these days, but “everybody does it” has never made “being a dick” any more permissible.
You’re making the city look just GREAT, you doofus.
Also, read isn’t quite the right word. There are no words in it, which just makes it more awesome.
Quoted by Patton Oswalt, Mr McAdam describes the beautiful, perfect elixir thusly:
Laphroaig really is the perfect whisky. Salt, blood, hospitals and fire, toffee-sweet comfort and undersea peace.
Those goofballs who make the execrable Keurig machines are annoyed that people make “compatible” pods, so they’re working out a way to keep them from working by using something akin to DRM.
But since people aren’t generally very excited about reduced functionality, they’re lying about why they’re doing it. What tools.
But, as the title says, you pod-coffee people deserve whatever you get. Grind your own, use a pour-over device, and be done with it. Cheap AND delicious!
We call this one “The Case Of The Visible Bitcoins!”
Good CHRIST those people are awful.
I think the most important thing that facebook is going to do for humanity in general and the United States in particular, as a society, is inform us which of our friends/relatives/acquaintances are fucking idiots that we really should not associate with at all.
This maps closely to another quote, the specifics and citation for which I’ve lost, to the effect of “Twitter makes me want to buy drinks for people I don’t know, and Facebook makes me want to punch my friends and family.”
Use an Apple device? And by this I mean any iPad, iPhone, or Mac?
Then you need to install all available OS updates with a furious quickness, for there is a security bug to end all security bugs in the SSL code on your device. All platforms are affected.
It’s a seriously bad, bad, bad bug. It may be the worse security bug of all time. No certificate validation is happening, which means that site you think you have an encrypted connection to might not be who they say they are. That’s an ID thief’s dream come true.
This bug is bad enough that it’s entirely possible that it was deliberately introduced at the behest of the NSA. The crypto we use daily relies on provably unbreakable encryption, so the only vulnerabilities they can exploit rely on broken implementations; this is a known tactic that the NSA and similar organizations have used. The timing certainly works.
More here.
You can check to see if you’re vulnerable using this site. On a Mac, you’ll need to use Safari to get the best possible reading, but it’ll mostly work with other browsers.
Shoring up the argument that it’s part of a deliberate effort: an even worse bug has subsequently been discovered in the Linux GnuTLS code.
Skipping the technical stuff, the takeway for you, the Heathen reader, is that you absolutely MUST upgrade your iOS devices and Macs today, right the fuck now. Full stop.
Fortunately, Apple makes this pretty easy. Just go to Settings -> General -> Software Update on an iPhone or iPad, or to (Black Apple) -> Software Update on a Mac.
Trigger Happy over in the New Republic raises issues worth considering.
If you can identify the movie these pictures are from, well, you’re both as old as I am, and as geeky as I am.
(The answer, in an IMDB link instead of my customer Wikipedia one, to avoid spoilers.)
Via Kadrey: “Alice in Waterland” by Elena Kalis.
When Bruce Springsteen toured Australia last year, he needed an extra guitar man because Little Steven couldn’t make the trip.
He tapped Tom Morello, with whom he’d apparently become friends since a performance together in LA in 2008.
Here they are, doing “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (from the Hall of Fame in 2009, not the Aussie tour).
I think it’s safe to say the collaboration works. Play it loud.
(Via this Rolling Stone interview with Morello, which is worth reading for lots of reasons.)
Update
In the “that settles it” department, looks like I’m buying tickets to see Bruce in the Woodlands in May, because Morello is with him for the whole tour owing at least partly to Van Zandt’s shooting schedule on Lilyhammer.
Without network neutrality, it may well be. N.B. that Netflix is already paying Comcast for the privilege of not being throttled. This should alarm you.
The communications networks have been built largely by government-protected monopolies, but those monopolies are now trying to extract every single dime from their customers they can. We have to stop this. The FCC needs to treat them as common carriers, and we need to realize that the net is a basic utility, like water or power.
If we don’t fix this, then the net as we’ve enjoyed it for the last 15 years is going to die.
They’re apparently not completely sure if District of Columbia drivers’ licenses count as ID.
Every time I think the Internet has gotten weird enough, somebody has to go and raise the bar.
Heathen, I give you 50 Cent dubbed over a Jehovah’s Witness signing to deaf people about how important it is that they not masturbate.
(Widely linked, earliest h/t to R. W. S.)
“WHERE THE FUCK IS WALLACE? STRING! STRING! LOOK AT ME!“
Oh. Right here.
I see.
Nevermind.
Carry on.
I have a time machine, apparently, because I got all these Christmas pictures!
How about a short, fan-made film about a lightsaber fight in the dark? It’s very well done; make time.
TODAY, I did not have to touch SharePoint.
TODAY was a good day.
Thug Notes is completely brilliant. The argument: stereotypical urban gentleman explains classic literature.
Seriously, beat this, from the Atlantic’s new feature on fraternities:
Oe warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
Cockfighting Fans Swear Revenge Against Mitch McConnell.
Ah, Kentucky.
Well, darn.
The first Culture book I read was the the awful Consider Phlebas a couple years ago. Honestly, it’s such crap that it nearly put me off the whole series. It wasn’t until last year that I bothered with the next volume of the series, Player of Games, largely due to the number of people I found who agreed that Phlebas was crap and that a better place to start was Games.
Ok, fine. Turns out, they were right; Games was a fun book. With Banks inconveniently promoted to the choir invisible, though, I didn’t want to run right into another Culture book, so I paced myself, and didn’t start the third book until this month. And now, having finished it, I think I’m done with Culture.
Weapons is a mess. Banks is trying an ambitious interleaved structure here, but it didn’t really work for me — largely because I never really gave a shit what happened, or had happened, to the protagonist. This is further reflected by the enormous gap between the last book and this one; by the end I was really finding this a slog.
It’s entirely possible Banks just isn’t for me.
PinaColliding operates under two assumptions:
Escape, by Rupert Holmes, is a great song; and
Should there fore be in every movie.
Like, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Departed.
Actress Alexandra Daddario, late of True Detective, had this to say yesterday evening.
The NSA is a threat to our national security.
Go. Read. Schneier knows what he’s talking about.
TechDirt gives the Feds both barrels over the appalling case of Rahinah Ibrahim:
Our government lies.
This is an obvious statement but it needs to be put out there in black and white. We, the people, are represented and “protected” by a government that actively lies to its constituents to cover up its mistakes. The recent case of Rahinah Ibrahim, who was accidentally placed on the government’s “no fly” list and only removed after a long legal battle, illustrates this truth about our government to a sickening degree.
Instead of owning up to the mistake, our government argued for the better part of a decade that to even acknowledge that a no-fly list existed would expose “state secrets” and that they therefore couldn’t possibly even confirm or deny any such list, so obviously discussing this person’s status, or trying to ensure that the status was correctly determined, was impossible.
For example, from James Clapper this year, quoted in the TechDirt article:
“My assertion of the state secret and statutory privileges in this case precludes defendant or any other agency from making any response, including through document production or deposition testimony, that would serve to disclose classified information regarding plaintiff or any other individual; the sources, methods, and means by which classified information is collected; and information which would confirm or deny whether information regarding plaintiff or any other individual is in NCTC’s TIDE database.” — James Clapper, director of national intelligence, April 23, 2013.
What. The. Fuck. Techdirt again:
Eric Holder’s deferral to “state secrets” in 2013 was based on the belief that a single disclosure, especially if it prompted more, would lead to terrorists gaming the no-fly list. John Tyler, then-attorney for the DOJ, claimed in 2006 that Ibrahim’s complaint was so inextricably intertwined with the utility of the “no fly” list that her case should be dismissed.
According to these statements, being mistakenly placed on the “no fly” list is just something those wrongly blacklisted will have to deal with. These citizens (and other foreigners) just need to resign themselves to the fact that they won’t be boarding planes, possibly for the rest of their lives. Once you’re on the list, you’re on it. The list is apparently so crucial to national security that even admitting it may have blacklisted someone accidentally would turn the nation’s airports into terrorist playgrounds.
A mistake was made made, but rather than looking for a solution, the government grabbed its “state secret” broom and swept it under the “neither confirm nor deny” rug.
The government cannot be so beholden to its own inflated terrorism fears that it willingly punishes a person for nearly a decade because of a paperwork error. There’s plenty of middle ground between keeping the country safe and screwing someone over because an agent couldn’t follow a form’s instructions.
Go read the whole thing.
Remember when the FBI claimed it didn’t have to answer Ryan Shapiro’s FOIA requests because he might learn something as a consequence of their hilariously inconsistent and irrational redaction?
Yeah, they’re doing it again. This time, they heavily redacted a letter released to some privacy hawks in Congress despite the fact that one of them had already been released in full previously. But go read the whole link; it’d be hilarious if it weren’t, you know, the top law enforcement body in the country.
Snake handling pastor bitten by snake during service. He then refused medical attention, and was thereby promoted to the choir invisible.
All good Heathen, of course, know this Robert Heinlein quote, from Time Enough for Love.
Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
RAH was wrong about many, many things, but this is not one of those times.
Look. I don’t watch TV news. It’s been a dead letter for a long time. I sure don’t watch TV sports coverage — I’ve got little use for the nattering foolishness that usually qualifies as sports broadcasting, and find reading stories on ESPN completely fills what needs I have for information from that world.
So I skipped Dale Hansen’s commentary on Michael Sam until just now. That, gentle Heathen, was a mistake.
Dale Hansen is the sports anchor for Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA. It should without saying, then, that Hansen is an older, straight, white man (I checked; he’s 65). So what Hansen says about Michael Sam caught me a little flatfooted even though I knew, as you must by now as well, what his position was.
You’d think with a headline like that, I must be taking stuff out of context just for amusement’s sake, right?
Yeah, not so much.