Awesome.

David Lee Roth "Runnin' With The Devil" Vocal Track
Highlights: 1:26, the train whistle at 1:56 and the hard rockin' beginning at 3:01 which by 3:04 leaves him winded.

It's only teen age wasteland

Top 3 songs to listen to while watching that:
Lou Reed, Perfect Day
The Who, Baba O'Riley
Time After Time, Cindi Lauper (Featuring Sarah McLachlan. This may seem arbitrary, but really it's sort of important to the experience of this animated .gif. The duet speaks to a lesbian-experimentation-gone-awry-hands-and-feet-under-the-table-at-the-PTA-meeting-but-we-were-outed-and-now-have-been-driven-apart-by-the-media sort of thing)

Ever drink so much it actually makes you wake up earlier? I can't sleep right now and I've no idea why. I should be asleep. I feel like maybe the Tikka Massala did something to me last night--made me stronger somehow--better--more resistant to toxins.

Gupta, what did you put on my chicken? What oriental witchery have you wrought upon me!?? Seriously though. Doesn't some indian food have the look of like radioactive waste? Like the shit that made the TNMT?

Somebody check me on this. I was describing Filipino food to a friend yesterday and I said that Filipino food is to Asia as English food is to Europe: everything is either boiled or fried. Except for pancit, which is actually boiled noodles which are then fried. Was I right about that? I can't think of a single entree that's broiled or pan-seared.

I have a news ticker running, and it just occurred to me that I haven't been following this mine thing in Utah. And it makes me wonder what else I'm missing. This job has the odd effect of turning you off to everything that isn't within your immediate actionable radar or, even sadder, part of the calculus of reelection. For this reason I'm actually farther away from what I want to deal with (foreign policy) and closer to those things which I'm maybe kind of not that interested in (agriculture and the environment).

I am getting a good mix of policy though and that was really the goal. I miss writing though. Id really like to get back into it. Oh, I write plenty now, but it's all crappy, hurried, antiseptic memo shit or (and this is the worst) bullshit letters where I affect the voice of my employer. Where I say things like "I wish upon you a strengthful return to...blah blah blah" STRENGTHFUL? I'm serious. This has happened. That's not even a fucking word, bitch! What're you Warren Harding? Actualy hahha I think this is what he has in mind when he asks me to write crap like this: dissatisfied by the lexicon of commoners, Congressman X develops his own language--one more suited to convey his high-minded ideals and revolutionary theories of policy. Thus, may I present to you the most recent editions to the new language of change:

Strengthful. Competitioners. Infocrease. Durple. (okay this last one's still in the testing stages and has not been deployed in any official correspondence)

Gun Control

An argument against...




An argument for...

Associated Press: "One law enforcement official said Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol. Cho held a green card, meaning he was a legal, permanent resident, federal officials said. That meant he was eligible to buy a handgun unless he had been convicted of a felony."

Yep.

So I'm getting off my ass and posting some stuff I'd written over the past couple of months...Enjoy. (Or don't. I always thought it was a little weird and presumptuous when people prefaced something they've prepared or created with that. "enjoy") Whatever.

Enjoy.


February 25, 2007

There’s a saying in retail that goes something like, "the more you talk, the less you make.” The actual idiom is far catchier than that, but the upshot is this: To sell to the public, be it telephones or timeshares, you have to sort of halt the stampede of thoughts and choices in a customer’s head by reigning in his field of vision and telling him what’s good for him and what’s not—keeping the length of your sales pitch in proportion with the customer’s presumed attention span, while using keeshond appropriate tones and grammar.

For example, you go to the Good Guys to buy a cordless phone. Without a sales person, you’re struck immediately by the choices in front of you: fifty, maybe sixty phones on display. A good salesperson—as suggested by the idiom—will, as a courtesy, ask you what you want in a phone, then take the mind numbing array of choices and boil them down to two models: the one he wants to sell you and one that only reinforces that choice by typifying the competition. When he chooses correctly, he’s rewarded with affirmation either verbally (“great choice”) or, for the truly skilled sales person, materially via undocumented accessories from the last inventory, (“don’t worry about the extra battery. That’s between you and me.”)

From the seller’s standpoint, this is good stuff. It capitalizes on the conventional wisdom that if given the choice between having to think and not, people will choose not. Republicans have done well to incorporate this into its policy shilling. Democrats haven’t. But I think this is a good thing.

Whether you think it’s a linguistics game , or capitalizing on some latent mid-western backlash against intellectual, non-patriot hippies , Republicans have perfected this notion of throwing thumbtacks at Americans’dual Achille’s heels: their attention spans and, well, literacy.

I bring this up now because here we are, three months after the Democrats have taken control of congress, and they still seem to be entirely incapable of framing a debate or breaking away from the nagging image of being ginormous pussies who do nothing but play call and response with Republicans at every rhetorical turn.

Democrats are selling to Americans out of the Republican training book and it just doesn’t work for them.

For example, the administration has dubbed its current troop increase a “surge”. As innocuous as this seems, rhetorically, it does the job they want. “Surge” conjures purpose, control, power—all the good stuff that Americans want to hear after realizing, and consequently voting against, the policy bumble-fuck in Iraq. But rather than take the high road and move away from Republican rhetoric, Dems did what they always do which is to incorporate it into their own Lonely Planet phrase books. The result is powerhouse phrases like “surge of caring” ala Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, or “surge of diplomacy” ala presidential hopeful, Barak Obama. It’s embarrassing. Fuck conventional wisdom. Sell on your own terms.

Going back to Carl Levin, he’s a smart guy who’s clearly had some experience with thorough explication (Swarthmore and Harvard, civil rights attorney, assistant attorney general for Michigan). But when he clearly and decisively explains his stance on Iraq (that he’s against abandoning presently deployed troops and that he wants to see a greater emphasis on training than combat), then ends the interview with the phrase “surge of caring”, different topic or not, people will walk away from their TV’s singing “surge of caring” to a Gershwin melody and continue to see Dems as weak on defense, security and foreign policy.

Don’t give it to them Carl. Don’t give them the soundbite. Make a concerted effort to speak in complete sentences, and give us all the options. Tell us why caller ID is necessary. Convince us to go with the 2.4ghz model over the 1.2 (Is this even still a feature? I haven't bought a phone in forever). Force the media into more comprehensive coverage of your remarks. If you do, you’ll find that Americans will be receptive to it. At least I think so.

We live in a security state. 9-11 isn’t that far from people’s minds. Look at the way Boston handled the Light-Bright thing for god’s sake. You can’t expect a city that stopped working because of the Cartoon Network to be at all comforted by leaders that use phrases like “surge of caring.”

But beyond rhetoric there’s action, legislative action. And, again...hea cum da Pussy Parade ,waving from atop a hundred-foot tall, non-binding-resolution float. I sort of get the idea of presenting Americans with an ideological consensus, but you can do that while introducing a measure with some teeth, can’t you? Why not go straight into Jack Murtha’s plan? Or the new Biden/Levin Plan? Instead, the headline people get is that the Democratic led Senate can’t get passed a debate on how to debate—all this to pass a measure that does nothing but flaccidly state opposition to the troop increase. It’s like the guy that makes a big show of taking off his coat and glasses in a street fight only to get his ass kicked while his arm’s caught in the sleeve. They got beaten without throwing a punch, when they should have entered congress the way you’re supposed to enter prison; kicking the shit out of the biggest guy in the cell block.

Democrats didn’t take back the Legislature because of what they had to offer, but because of what they didn’t—namely, page-groping, ethics-violating, invariable deference to an incompetent administration. And to get back to my point, Dems had better start selling substantive legislation with meaningful rhetoric and stop using second-hand Republican bubble wrap, or, come '08, they’re liable to get their sales returned.

In Moooohamad We Trust!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My favorite part of this is his suggestion that escalating sectarian violence, encouraged by the House's non-binding resolution, could result in the mass immigration of Iraqis into the United States.

Top 3 shows I kind of wish I'd started watching when they first came on, and are now so far along that just beginning to watch them seems kind of pointless.

1) 24
2) The Wire
3) Lost (sort of)