Tuesday, March 17, 2009
AIG Outrage Fatigue + the Fbomber Predicts Tits, Ass, Cock, Balls.
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Saturday, March 14, 2009
Well, Now We Know How to Spark A Rally
The election of a President who doesn't have his head lodged in his own ass. Result: Stock prices fall.
Passing a massive economic stimulus plan within a month. Result: The stock market continues to fall.
Pouring and promising trillions of taxpayer dollars without questions or conditions into struggling financial firms. Result: Yet more stock price falling.
A failing bank's CEO writes a memo saying, in essence, that except for all the worthless assets on their books and reliance on government subsidies for survival*, the bank was doing, well, okay. Result: Jubilation in the Street and stock prices climb for four days straight.
Maybe we've been going about this economic turnaround wrong all along. Forget about anti-cyclical Keynesian spending, subsidizing financial firms and instituting regulatory reform. What we've needed all along are simply better memos.
*You've got a bullet in your chest, and a machine is doing your breathing for you, but, hey, your cholesterol level looks great!
Passing a massive economic stimulus plan within a month. Result: The stock market continues to fall.
Pouring and promising trillions of taxpayer dollars without questions or conditions into struggling financial firms. Result: Yet more stock price falling.
A failing bank's CEO writes a memo saying, in essence, that except for all the worthless assets on their books and reliance on government subsidies for survival*, the bank was doing, well, okay. Result: Jubilation in the Street and stock prices climb for four days straight.
Maybe we've been going about this economic turnaround wrong all along. Forget about anti-cyclical Keynesian spending, subsidizing financial firms and instituting regulatory reform. What we've needed all along are simply better memos.
*You've got a bullet in your chest, and a machine is doing your breathing for you, but, hey, your cholesterol level looks great!
Sunday, March 01, 2009
13 Year Old Conservative Wunderkind
Right Wingers are agog over this CPAC speech by 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, in which Krohn defines conservatism.
It really is quite impressive. This kid has managed to become a Republican jerkoff before he is actually physically able to jerk off.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Bye-bye Dubai
Lately, I've been getting forwarded little snippet about the travails and collapse of Dubai.
That's because an earlier, booze-soaked version of the fbomber once resided in Dubai, for nearly two years before fleeing the country in debt, shame and panic.
Here is an essay I wrote and performed back in 2006 about that experience. It's long. Take your time.
Sallie Mae and Me
I was in my home office last summer, avoiding work by whipping myself into a righteous frenzy on my favorite political blogs, when, somewhere between dailykos and talkingpointsmemo.com, my cellphone rang.
Private Number.
I don’t trust people who block their numbers. But my job requires me to call strangers and have them call me back.
So I answered.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Steven Schneider?”
I have never, ever, in my life had something good happen to me after that question. Still, I said yes.
“Ray Taylor from Sallie Mae here. I’d like to talk to you about your student loans.”
Busted.
Some people --- normal, sane, responsible people --- took out student loans, graduated, worked, and paid off those loans until they evaporated into nothing.
I am not one of these people.
Over the past ten years I’ve defaulted and gone into collections three times. I’ve restructured and refinanced twice. Once I told a collection agent that Steve Schneider had died, and I was merely a friend who had inherited his cellphone.
In my defense, I’ll say that I graduated with every intention of paying , but my first reporter job wasn’t producing that extra thousand bucks a year.
So I figured those loans would have wait until some later day, a day when I had so much money I could pay without pain or deprivation. Now, I didn’t have any sort of grandiose fantasies like winning the lottery. I had more practical plans, like meeting and marrying an heiress to the DeBeers diamond fortune, or possibly selling a screenplay to a major motion picture studio.
I was, you see, pursuing a career as a writer. Not in the sense of putting my words down on paper, mind you, but more in the sense of calling myself a writer, taking crappy newspaper jobs, and poisoning all my reading with envy and guilt.
People, usually non-writers, told me these crappy jobs were how I would “pay my dues.”
One muggy day, driving to a press conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sweating and shirtless because the AC in my $900 former cop car blew out air hotter than the combustion chamber of the engine, I began to think maybe these dues were a little steep.
I decided I would pay them, but not at the same time as my loans.
Shortly afterwards, I moved to London for “experiences” as Phase Two of my project to become a great writer without writing. While there, a publishing house offered me a job writing an Internet technology magazine in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The salary was three times what I’d earned back home, verging on what a starting shift manager at Chili’s might pull in.
I told them I needed to think it over, then went home to look at a map. The United Arab Emirates turned out to be a small, crescent shaped country on the Persian Gulf bordered by Oman and Saudi Arabia, a part of the world where money, quite literally, bubbles out of the ground. I was sold.
Surely in a country that owed its very existence to wealth without effort, there would be a place for me.
I imagined my life in Dubai as a sort of melange of Beau Gest, a harem and Somerset Maughan’s morally bankrupt colonialists at play.
Once there, I’d get one of those great old Land Rover Defenders, the boxy kind like John Wayne drove in Hatari. Every morning I would cross the dunes to work while my houseboy tidied up my seaside villa and helped the sultry consort I had left behind gather her belongings and catch up to her salt caravan.
I figured within a year I could pay off my college loans, accumulate some savings and return to the United States in style.
Some of what I imagined was true. In an oil-wealthy nation, inside the Internet field during its boom, I was working at the nexus of two gushing fountains of easy money. And at the top of the corporate org chart, the cash did just rain down.
The founder, a silver-bearded Scotsman, had a reputation for throwing glasses of expensive Cabernet at restaurant walls for sheer, wasteful sport. The advertising sales manager drove an obnoxious yellow Ferrari he filled with young female sales reps, then drove to his private beach club.
But down at the bottom of the chart it was a different story. In appearance and architecture, Dubai is Las Vegas without the taste or restraint. In terms of cost of living, it’s more like Manhattan.
My lifestyle wasn’t extravagant. Instead of a seaside villa, I lived in a crumbling corporate apartment with two coworkers. Instead of the sexy Landrover, I drove a rented Tercel. In place of a harem, I discovered a city with a male to female ratio similar to that of an Army base.
Even so, after paying my bills, my checkings and savings accounts remained at zero and my credit card balance grew every month.
My job was a disappointment. For as long as I had been half-heartedly participating in the workforce, I’d believed a dream job, would magically give me a work ethic. Other people fostered this wishful thinking, saying things like “Of course you aren’t really trying at work, Steven. You haven’t found your thing yet.”
It turned out that’s like saying that when I developed a passion for water polo, I would grow a blowhole.
There I was, living my dream of writing for a living, in a wildly exotic locale. A flashbulb-bright sun baked silvery glass towers rising from the dunes like a mirage. Imperious local men glided the streets in gleaming white Range Rovers and matching robes. Mysterious, veiled women scurried out of Victoria’s Secret, covered head to toe in pitch black abayas. Yet even in this extraordinary setting, I put in the same lackluster work performance that had blocked my promotion to fry station at the Muskogee Burger King.
One problem was I could not get excited about my stories. I wanted to be out riding with the Hell’s Angels, not rewriting press releases about how many processors Compaq had put in their new server.
I was also in over my head. Despite my interview lies, just about everything I knew about computer networking could be exhausted by typing those two words at the top of a page. What’s worse, I felt paranoid about interviewing people to learn more. Then they would know how ignorant I was about the subject my magazine was named after. Instead, I spent hours staring, paralyzed with fear, at the phone and business cards of Microsoft Middle East Marketing Reps.
I wound up using the same tricks that got me through college --- stretched deadlines, all nighters and plagiarism. To write stories I typically stole three or four articles from the internet, mashed them up, and created a fictitious expert to quote this information.
As for my own writing, it turns out I’ve only got so many words per day inside me. After cranking out news and feature stories at work, I simply could not go home and type more.
In fact, the only part of my life that aroused any passion was lunch. My South African coworker, Colin, and I spent approximately half our workday suggesting, eating at and critiquing lunch spots. But after six months, even these multi-hour gluttony excursions stopped cheering me up.
In my misery, I decided that if I was sinking into an ocean of debt, I might as well head to the Promenade Deck, tell Isaac to mix up some Mai Tais, and enjoy the ride down. I financed a new Jeep, got a gold card from the local bank and moved into my own place. I went to Ikea, pointed to one of the pages of their catalog and took it all home with me.
Every night I careened between Irish pubs, American bars and discos full of sad-eyed Ukranian prostitutes dancing with fat Arab businessmen. I spent sex weekends at five star hotels with my new British girlfriend, ordering $300 bottles of whiskey from room service.
Within months I spent my entire next year’s salary. I maxed out all my credit cards and had post-dated rent and car payment checks sitting in offices throughout the city like timed explosive charges waiting to blow.
What’s more, this new social calendar ignited the afterburners on my downward work spiral. Each day I came in later, often still drunk from the night before and occasionally wearing the same clothes.
Nasty rumors about my behavior circulated the office. One afternoon the founder took me for coffee. Over butter cookies, he told me he’d heard that I had been so aggressively amorous at a party that a girl had locked herself into a bathroom to escape me.
My defense was that the story could not be true, because I would have simply kicked that door down, just like I’d kicked my apartment door down the weekend before when I lost my keys.
Not long after this conversation, I was fired.
I had to leave the country. The question was how. And when.
I couldn’t leave right away. My old company had vouched for my debts and would alert the Dubai authorities. If caught leaving, I would be thrown in jail until someone paid.
To buy time, I took a job writing copy for an ad agency and secretly prepared my escape.
I couldn’t openly vacate my house. The security- slash - maintenance man lived downstairs, and popped from his door like a smiling, curry-scented cuckoo each time he heard a noise in the lobby. But I didn’t want to abandon my stuff. Those were, after all, the Swedish-designed treasures I had braved jail time to own.
I moved out one back-pack load at a time and traded my furniture and dishes for dinners out.
My car was another problem. Not only would selling it notify the bank of my immanent departure, but it refused to let me to shift gears while in motion. So I left it in 3rd for a month.
My last day in Dubai, I abandoned the Jeep in my bank’s parking lot with the keys on the seat and called a cab for the airport.
At the terminal, I poured fearful sweat. I believed that every cellphone was reporting me, that every policeman and soldier was there to put me in cuffs for stealing $30,000 from their country.
I didn’t relax until I was well into international airspace.
Once there, I reflected on the whole Dubai debacle, and swore I would never attempt to pay my student loans again.
After all, that loan had resulted from a decision I made when I was seventeen years old, namely to go to an expensive private university. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for a seventeen year old jackass’s mistake even --- no, especially --- if that jackass was me. After all, I might give the benefit of the doubt to a 17-year-old stranger, but I know exactly how dumb I was.
I realized I should have spent my tuition on a car. Back in 1990, $100K would have bought a monster sportscar, a Lamborghini cool enough to get me laid, even if I lacked the social skills to be in Wagoner High’s Dungeons and Dragons Club.
I would have wrecked this car, or defaulted on the payments. But either way, the bank would have gotten a good portion of their loan back from insurance or auction.
Instead, I had put myself thousands of dollars in hock for a ‘university experience’. Unlike my hypothetical Lamborghini, there was no way to abandon or return this experience. I couldn’t just take the degree off my resume and call it even.
I also thought the fact that leaving the country didn’t erase the debt was a little hypocritical. After all, our entire country is descended from people who shirked debts by moving here. I should have been lauded for exporting American values abroad.
Back in the States I pursued a second dream career as an advertising copywriter. After two dues-paying years in that field, living in a converted closet in New York City, I decided to make some life changes.
For starters, I realized that my drinking problem was getting in the way of the things that were really important to me… like my sex addiction. So I gave up alcohol.
I also gave up the idea of a dream job in a creative field.
I already dreamed of writing great books and stories. To pursue that dream and also a dream of being a highly-paid copywriter or intrepid journalist took energy and focus I simply didn’t have. It was also kind of greedy. Some people really do dream about those jobs, and the sooner I got out of their way the better.
I started taking jobs that, though not creative and exciting, paid me enough to meet my expenses and put some aside every month for writing classes, trips, and a richer life to write about.
Hence, my current recruiting job, which is like being a telemarketer who got your work number, but pays me $50/hour to work from home.
So when Ray Taylor called, I was ready. By taking some money out of savings, putting some debt on a credit card, and scrimping a little, I stayed out of court and paid off everything in three months.
My triumph is mixed with sadness, though. When I think about it, Sallie Mae was the one relationship I made in college that lasted. The girls I dated back in 1995 are long married in Connecticut suburbs. My rugby pals are so busy with their careers on Wall Street that our correspondence has shriveled from long emails about our lives to the latest nightvision mpegs of teen heiresses blowing their boyfriends.
By contrast, for the last decade, Sallie Mae was there for me, calling, writing, emailing, wanting to know how my job situation was going. And above all, wanting me to stay in touch.
I’m going to miss Sallie Mae.
But I’d like to think that we’re not so much through as taking a break.
Right now, I’m applying to graduate school.
That's because an earlier, booze-soaked version of the fbomber once resided in Dubai, for nearly two years before fleeing the country in debt, shame and panic.
Here is an essay I wrote and performed back in 2006 about that experience. It's long. Take your time.
Sallie Mae and Me
I was in my home office last summer, avoiding work by whipping myself into a righteous frenzy on my favorite political blogs, when, somewhere between dailykos and talkingpointsmemo.com, my cellphone rang.
Private Number.
I don’t trust people who block their numbers. But my job requires me to call strangers and have them call me back.
So I answered.
“Hello. Is this Mr. Steven Schneider?”
I have never, ever, in my life had something good happen to me after that question. Still, I said yes.
“Ray Taylor from Sallie Mae here. I’d like to talk to you about your student loans.”
Busted.
Some people --- normal, sane, responsible people --- took out student loans, graduated, worked, and paid off those loans until they evaporated into nothing.
I am not one of these people.
Over the past ten years I’ve defaulted and gone into collections three times. I’ve restructured and refinanced twice. Once I told a collection agent that Steve Schneider had died, and I was merely a friend who had inherited his cellphone.
In my defense, I’ll say that I graduated with every intention of paying , but my first reporter job wasn’t producing that extra thousand bucks a year.
So I figured those loans would have wait until some later day, a day when I had so much money I could pay without pain or deprivation. Now, I didn’t have any sort of grandiose fantasies like winning the lottery. I had more practical plans, like meeting and marrying an heiress to the DeBeers diamond fortune, or possibly selling a screenplay to a major motion picture studio.
I was, you see, pursuing a career as a writer. Not in the sense of putting my words down on paper, mind you, but more in the sense of calling myself a writer, taking crappy newspaper jobs, and poisoning all my reading with envy and guilt.
People, usually non-writers, told me these crappy jobs were how I would “pay my dues.”
One muggy day, driving to a press conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sweating and shirtless because the AC in my $900 former cop car blew out air hotter than the combustion chamber of the engine, I began to think maybe these dues were a little steep.
I decided I would pay them, but not at the same time as my loans.
Shortly afterwards, I moved to London for “experiences” as Phase Two of my project to become a great writer without writing. While there, a publishing house offered me a job writing an Internet technology magazine in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The salary was three times what I’d earned back home, verging on what a starting shift manager at Chili’s might pull in.
I told them I needed to think it over, then went home to look at a map. The United Arab Emirates turned out to be a small, crescent shaped country on the Persian Gulf bordered by Oman and Saudi Arabia, a part of the world where money, quite literally, bubbles out of the ground. I was sold.
Surely in a country that owed its very existence to wealth without effort, there would be a place for me.
I imagined my life in Dubai as a sort of melange of Beau Gest, a harem and Somerset Maughan’s morally bankrupt colonialists at play.
Once there, I’d get one of those great old Land Rover Defenders, the boxy kind like John Wayne drove in Hatari. Every morning I would cross the dunes to work while my houseboy tidied up my seaside villa and helped the sultry consort I had left behind gather her belongings and catch up to her salt caravan.
I figured within a year I could pay off my college loans, accumulate some savings and return to the United States in style.
Some of what I imagined was true. In an oil-wealthy nation, inside the Internet field during its boom, I was working at the nexus of two gushing fountains of easy money. And at the top of the corporate org chart, the cash did just rain down.
The founder, a silver-bearded Scotsman, had a reputation for throwing glasses of expensive Cabernet at restaurant walls for sheer, wasteful sport. The advertising sales manager drove an obnoxious yellow Ferrari he filled with young female sales reps, then drove to his private beach club.
But down at the bottom of the chart it was a different story. In appearance and architecture, Dubai is Las Vegas without the taste or restraint. In terms of cost of living, it’s more like Manhattan.
My lifestyle wasn’t extravagant. Instead of a seaside villa, I lived in a crumbling corporate apartment with two coworkers. Instead of the sexy Landrover, I drove a rented Tercel. In place of a harem, I discovered a city with a male to female ratio similar to that of an Army base.
Even so, after paying my bills, my checkings and savings accounts remained at zero and my credit card balance grew every month.
My job was a disappointment. For as long as I had been half-heartedly participating in the workforce, I’d believed a dream job, would magically give me a work ethic. Other people fostered this wishful thinking, saying things like “Of course you aren’t really trying at work, Steven. You haven’t found your thing yet.”
It turned out that’s like saying that when I developed a passion for water polo, I would grow a blowhole.
There I was, living my dream of writing for a living, in a wildly exotic locale. A flashbulb-bright sun baked silvery glass towers rising from the dunes like a mirage. Imperious local men glided the streets in gleaming white Range Rovers and matching robes. Mysterious, veiled women scurried out of Victoria’s Secret, covered head to toe in pitch black abayas. Yet even in this extraordinary setting, I put in the same lackluster work performance that had blocked my promotion to fry station at the Muskogee Burger King.
One problem was I could not get excited about my stories. I wanted to be out riding with the Hell’s Angels, not rewriting press releases about how many processors Compaq had put in their new server.
I was also in over my head. Despite my interview lies, just about everything I knew about computer networking could be exhausted by typing those two words at the top of a page. What’s worse, I felt paranoid about interviewing people to learn more. Then they would know how ignorant I was about the subject my magazine was named after. Instead, I spent hours staring, paralyzed with fear, at the phone and business cards of Microsoft Middle East Marketing Reps.
I wound up using the same tricks that got me through college --- stretched deadlines, all nighters and plagiarism. To write stories I typically stole three or four articles from the internet, mashed them up, and created a fictitious expert to quote this information.
As for my own writing, it turns out I’ve only got so many words per day inside me. After cranking out news and feature stories at work, I simply could not go home and type more.
In fact, the only part of my life that aroused any passion was lunch. My South African coworker, Colin, and I spent approximately half our workday suggesting, eating at and critiquing lunch spots. But after six months, even these multi-hour gluttony excursions stopped cheering me up.
In my misery, I decided that if I was sinking into an ocean of debt, I might as well head to the Promenade Deck, tell Isaac to mix up some Mai Tais, and enjoy the ride down. I financed a new Jeep, got a gold card from the local bank and moved into my own place. I went to Ikea, pointed to one of the pages of their catalog and took it all home with me.
Every night I careened between Irish pubs, American bars and discos full of sad-eyed Ukranian prostitutes dancing with fat Arab businessmen. I spent sex weekends at five star hotels with my new British girlfriend, ordering $300 bottles of whiskey from room service.
Within months I spent my entire next year’s salary. I maxed out all my credit cards and had post-dated rent and car payment checks sitting in offices throughout the city like timed explosive charges waiting to blow.
What’s more, this new social calendar ignited the afterburners on my downward work spiral. Each day I came in later, often still drunk from the night before and occasionally wearing the same clothes.
Nasty rumors about my behavior circulated the office. One afternoon the founder took me for coffee. Over butter cookies, he told me he’d heard that I had been so aggressively amorous at a party that a girl had locked herself into a bathroom to escape me.
My defense was that the story could not be true, because I would have simply kicked that door down, just like I’d kicked my apartment door down the weekend before when I lost my keys.
Not long after this conversation, I was fired.
I had to leave the country. The question was how. And when.
I couldn’t leave right away. My old company had vouched for my debts and would alert the Dubai authorities. If caught leaving, I would be thrown in jail until someone paid.
To buy time, I took a job writing copy for an ad agency and secretly prepared my escape.
I couldn’t openly vacate my house. The security- slash - maintenance man lived downstairs, and popped from his door like a smiling, curry-scented cuckoo each time he heard a noise in the lobby. But I didn’t want to abandon my stuff. Those were, after all, the Swedish-designed treasures I had braved jail time to own.
I moved out one back-pack load at a time and traded my furniture and dishes for dinners out.
My car was another problem. Not only would selling it notify the bank of my immanent departure, but it refused to let me to shift gears while in motion. So I left it in 3rd for a month.
My last day in Dubai, I abandoned the Jeep in my bank’s parking lot with the keys on the seat and called a cab for the airport.
At the terminal, I poured fearful sweat. I believed that every cellphone was reporting me, that every policeman and soldier was there to put me in cuffs for stealing $30,000 from their country.
I didn’t relax until I was well into international airspace.
Once there, I reflected on the whole Dubai debacle, and swore I would never attempt to pay my student loans again.
After all, that loan had resulted from a decision I made when I was seventeen years old, namely to go to an expensive private university. And I wasn’t going to be responsible for a seventeen year old jackass’s mistake even --- no, especially --- if that jackass was me. After all, I might give the benefit of the doubt to a 17-year-old stranger, but I know exactly how dumb I was.
I realized I should have spent my tuition on a car. Back in 1990, $100K would have bought a monster sportscar, a Lamborghini cool enough to get me laid, even if I lacked the social skills to be in Wagoner High’s Dungeons and Dragons Club.
I would have wrecked this car, or defaulted on the payments. But either way, the bank would have gotten a good portion of their loan back from insurance or auction.
Instead, I had put myself thousands of dollars in hock for a ‘university experience’. Unlike my hypothetical Lamborghini, there was no way to abandon or return this experience. I couldn’t just take the degree off my resume and call it even.
I also thought the fact that leaving the country didn’t erase the debt was a little hypocritical. After all, our entire country is descended from people who shirked debts by moving here. I should have been lauded for exporting American values abroad.
Back in the States I pursued a second dream career as an advertising copywriter. After two dues-paying years in that field, living in a converted closet in New York City, I decided to make some life changes.
For starters, I realized that my drinking problem was getting in the way of the things that were really important to me… like my sex addiction. So I gave up alcohol.
I also gave up the idea of a dream job in a creative field.
I already dreamed of writing great books and stories. To pursue that dream and also a dream of being a highly-paid copywriter or intrepid journalist took energy and focus I simply didn’t have. It was also kind of greedy. Some people really do dream about those jobs, and the sooner I got out of their way the better.
I started taking jobs that, though not creative and exciting, paid me enough to meet my expenses and put some aside every month for writing classes, trips, and a richer life to write about.
Hence, my current recruiting job, which is like being a telemarketer who got your work number, but pays me $50/hour to work from home.
So when Ray Taylor called, I was ready. By taking some money out of savings, putting some debt on a credit card, and scrimping a little, I stayed out of court and paid off everything in three months.
My triumph is mixed with sadness, though. When I think about it, Sallie Mae was the one relationship I made in college that lasted. The girls I dated back in 1995 are long married in Connecticut suburbs. My rugby pals are so busy with their careers on Wall Street that our correspondence has shriveled from long emails about our lives to the latest nightvision mpegs of teen heiresses blowing their boyfriends.
By contrast, for the last decade, Sallie Mae was there for me, calling, writing, emailing, wanting to know how my job situation was going. And above all, wanting me to stay in touch.
I’m going to miss Sallie Mae.
But I’d like to think that we’re not so much through as taking a break.
Right now, I’m applying to graduate school.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
As If Today Wasn't Sweet Enough
Yeah, I know we're supposed to be post-partisan now, but I hope it hurt like a mother.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Michael Lewis Tearing It Up
I have always enjoyed reading Michael Lewis, author of "Liar's Poker" but have always considered him to be something of a lightweight. His positive, good-natured spin on his subjects, his cheery tone, his breezy and humorous writing style was fun, but a trifle superficial.
The collapse of the business and culture of investment banking, and the pain that collapse has wrought onto the rest of the economy, seems to have lit some sort of fire in Mikey. Though never veering into anything like righteous indignation, he does come across as more serious --- not to mention peeved --- than I've ever read him.
The first shot of this more serious, concerned Lewis was fired in the pages of Portfolio, a Conde Nast publication that was launched to be a kind of New Gilded Age wank-mag but looks to be turning into its autopsy report. It's a great, comprehensible overview of the chicanery, shenanigans, subterfuges, and magic thinking that created our current financial system collapse. As well as a thumbnail sketch of the culture that created a welcoming environment for it all.
The second shot, popped off in the NYT Opinion pages adds a look at the governmental and institutional (especially the financial ratings institutions) capture by the investment banking culture.
Both are rewarding and enlightening reads.
The collapse of the business and culture of investment banking, and the pain that collapse has wrought onto the rest of the economy, seems to have lit some sort of fire in Mikey. Though never veering into anything like righteous indignation, he does come across as more serious --- not to mention peeved --- than I've ever read him.
The first shot of this more serious, concerned Lewis was fired in the pages of Portfolio, a Conde Nast publication that was launched to be a kind of New Gilded Age wank-mag but looks to be turning into its autopsy report. It's a great, comprehensible overview of the chicanery, shenanigans, subterfuges, and magic thinking that created our current financial system collapse. As well as a thumbnail sketch of the culture that created a welcoming environment for it all.
The second shot, popped off in the NYT Opinion pages adds a look at the governmental and institutional (especially the financial ratings institutions) capture by the investment banking culture.
Both are rewarding and enlightening reads.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Home of the Pregnant Burrito
Also on the menu:
The Lactating Flan
The Menstruating Chimichanga
The Prematurely Ejaculating Churro
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Letter to Another Aspiring Screenwriter
A college friend living out of Los Angeles recently asked me to help him sell a pair of screenplays he has written. Here was my response:
I'm pleased that you believe me to be capable of selling screenplays through my efforts. I kind of feel like the Michael Rappaport character in True Romance. Yeah, sure, I live out here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I can move a briefcase of cocaine, or a pair of screenplays.
Though if you have a briefcase of cocaine, feel free to send it. I don't know if I could sell it, and don't use it, but I could certainly move it up the noses of a lot of sexy chicks in exchange for gratifying my strong --- if dully conventional --- physical needs.
All I can offer is the same, hackneyed advice that everyone ever gives about the biz. Because it is true. And that is to make a list of agents and agencies and actors and producers and send them a copy and hope some of them get some flunky to read it. Really that's all that someone without writing credits can hope for.
All that connections and face-time really gets you is the ability to skip the flunky and get the script directly to the agent or star or producer or studio exec directly. In other words, to jump over a possible dead end. Then the script has to stand or fall on its merits.
There is another hackneyed bit of verbiage that gets thrown around the screenwriting world a lot here, and it is also true. If a great script were to be thrown out the window of a moving car on the 405, it would still get made and opened wide in two years.
There is a ravenous, insatiable, burning hunger in this town for great scripts. Great scripts are like the seed crystal that drops into a supersaturated solution, and immediately cause the other elements of a film to bond to them. Stars want to be in a great scripted film. Directors want to direct big stars. Producers want to make a movie with top directors and stars. Studios want to distribute a movie made by top producers, directors and stars. The audience duly lines up to go see The Prestige.
This is all true.
Those of us who are churning out words on paper, formatted with actions, characters and dialogue don't want to believe that this is true.
One, because we see films coming out to the theaters that fall far short of the "great script" standard.
And Two, because writing a great script is so fucking hard and we know we aren't doing it, and don't even really know if we want to do everything it takes to write one. Or if we can.
I mentioned True Romance up top. That was a great script. So was Pulp Fiction. For all his eventual excesses and indulgences, Tarantino has put down some strikingly fresh, original, smart, interesting stories down on paper. Stories that are informed and grounded in the time-tested principles of drama, yet break free of them in an exciting way. True Romance would have been made if it had been found under a bush in a lawn. So would Pulp Fiction.
I know that I'm not writing Pulp Fiction right now. I am, more or less admittedly, writing Stir of Echoes. But so what? It's only my second go at the form. By script six or seven I might be a bit closer to the mark I'm shooting for.
So, a neophyte screenwriter might wonder, how do all these sub-great scripts get made? And how, he might continue to wonder, could he get his bad Stir of Echoes clone turned into a film? This is where connections and favors and obligations and misjudgments and chance enter the picture. After all, the movie industry has to make movies. If there aren't enough great scripts to go around --- and there aren't --- other factors enter the selection process.
People that went to USC or NYU film school with decisionmakers prevail upon them to buy a script. TV writers have their agent push their feature film onto producers and execs for them. One decisionmaker buys a script he isn't in love with because he's making a marketing decision to capture a demographic he thinks will love it. Another decisionmaker has more money and power than taste. A third has a personal, political or social agenda he/she wants to push.
Sadly, you and I cannot count on those factors.
We simply haven't done the things in our life that would bend and tweak and push the system in our favor. We didn't know we were supposed to, for one thing. And we were busy doing other things for another.
So we just have to write a great script, send it into the world more or less through the usual channels, and see what happens. I've watched some people have what this industry calls success through this route. Typically, they've had one script get some buzz and interest, but nothing happen. Then a couple scripts get bought, but languish and expire afterwards. Then they pitch a ton of other scripts, get some rewrite jobs, and bang out a few more spec scripts. Then something gets made that disappears. Then, maybe, something gets made that people see and like. To be honest, the process looks an awful lot like work to me.
Alternatively, we could turn ourselves into a producer, and director, and craft services provider and make our films ourselves.
Believe me, I wish I had more to offer you than cliches and exhortations to work even harder for an uncertain reward, but I simply don't.
P.S. If you have not read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, I cannot recommend it more highly. Dude breaks it all down. Why we want to be creative, why we aren't, how we can be, and why we should.
I'm pleased that you believe me to be capable of selling screenplays through my efforts. I kind of feel like the Michael Rappaport character in True Romance. Yeah, sure, I live out here. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I can move a briefcase of cocaine, or a pair of screenplays.
Though if you have a briefcase of cocaine, feel free to send it. I don't know if I could sell it, and don't use it, but I could certainly move it up the noses of a lot of sexy chicks in exchange for gratifying my strong --- if dully conventional --- physical needs.
All I can offer is the same, hackneyed advice that everyone ever gives about the biz. Because it is true. And that is to make a list of agents and agencies and actors and producers and send them a copy and hope some of them get some flunky to read it. Really that's all that someone without writing credits can hope for.
All that connections and face-time really gets you is the ability to skip the flunky and get the script directly to the agent or star or producer or studio exec directly. In other words, to jump over a possible dead end. Then the script has to stand or fall on its merits.
There is another hackneyed bit of verbiage that gets thrown around the screenwriting world a lot here, and it is also true. If a great script were to be thrown out the window of a moving car on the 405, it would still get made and opened wide in two years.
There is a ravenous, insatiable, burning hunger in this town for great scripts. Great scripts are like the seed crystal that drops into a supersaturated solution, and immediately cause the other elements of a film to bond to them. Stars want to be in a great scripted film. Directors want to direct big stars. Producers want to make a movie with top directors and stars. Studios want to distribute a movie made by top producers, directors and stars. The audience duly lines up to go see The Prestige.
This is all true.
Those of us who are churning out words on paper, formatted with actions, characters and dialogue don't want to believe that this is true.
One, because we see films coming out to the theaters that fall far short of the "great script" standard.
And Two, because writing a great script is so fucking hard and we know we aren't doing it, and don't even really know if we want to do everything it takes to write one. Or if we can.
I mentioned True Romance up top. That was a great script. So was Pulp Fiction. For all his eventual excesses and indulgences, Tarantino has put down some strikingly fresh, original, smart, interesting stories down on paper. Stories that are informed and grounded in the time-tested principles of drama, yet break free of them in an exciting way. True Romance would have been made if it had been found under a bush in a lawn. So would Pulp Fiction.
I know that I'm not writing Pulp Fiction right now. I am, more or less admittedly, writing Stir of Echoes. But so what? It's only my second go at the form. By script six or seven I might be a bit closer to the mark I'm shooting for.
So, a neophyte screenwriter might wonder, how do all these sub-great scripts get made? And how, he might continue to wonder, could he get his bad Stir of Echoes clone turned into a film? This is where connections and favors and obligations and misjudgments and chance enter the picture. After all, the movie industry has to make movies. If there aren't enough great scripts to go around --- and there aren't --- other factors enter the selection process.
People that went to USC or NYU film school with decisionmakers prevail upon them to buy a script. TV writers have their agent push their feature film onto producers and execs for them. One decisionmaker buys a script he isn't in love with because he's making a marketing decision to capture a demographic he thinks will love it. Another decisionmaker has more money and power than taste. A third has a personal, political or social agenda he/she wants to push.
Sadly, you and I cannot count on those factors.
We simply haven't done the things in our life that would bend and tweak and push the system in our favor. We didn't know we were supposed to, for one thing. And we were busy doing other things for another.
So we just have to write a great script, send it into the world more or less through the usual channels, and see what happens. I've watched some people have what this industry calls success through this route. Typically, they've had one script get some buzz and interest, but nothing happen. Then a couple scripts get bought, but languish and expire afterwards. Then they pitch a ton of other scripts, get some rewrite jobs, and bang out a few more spec scripts. Then something gets made that disappears. Then, maybe, something gets made that people see and like. To be honest, the process looks an awful lot like work to me.
Alternatively, we could turn ourselves into a producer, and director, and craft services provider and make our films ourselves.
Believe me, I wish I had more to offer you than cliches and exhortations to work even harder for an uncertain reward, but I simply don't.
P.S. If you have not read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, I cannot recommend it more highly. Dude breaks it all down. Why we want to be creative, why we aren't, how we can be, and why we should.
O-Borg-Ma?
True. I can’t help myself from mutilating Obama’s name to make my silly writing points.
But seriously. Has anyone noticed that Obama has the uncanny habit of absorbing his former opponents into his organization?
Joe Biden, VP. Hilary, Secretary of State. Bill Richardson, Commerce Secretary. Republican-Picked, Surge-Supporting Robert Gates to stay on as Defence Secretary.
Indeed, say some progressives, Obama seems to prefer appointing people from the center and even center-right --- where the real challenges to his nomination came from, incidentally --- over the progressive and left elements who formed his earliest, loudest and most eager supporters.
Resistance, apparently, is not futile. It is rewarded.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Eliot Spitzer: Columnist
Disgraced former NY District Attorney and Governor Eliot Spitzer has published his first column for Slate, in which he astutely criticizes the form that the taxpayer-funded bailout has taken. Whatever you may think of Spitzer, it's clear that the man recognizes a good fucking when he sees one.
Burger Assault
A South Florida man was arrested and charged with domestic violence for repeatedly smashing a McDonald's cheeseburger into his girlfriend's face.
The original charges of attempted murder were dropped when police determined that he was not trying to make her actually eat it.
The Jolie Bible
A new, illustrated version of the Bible has been released, which includes glossy photos of Angelina Jolie, cruelly placed right next to the chapters that tell you not to masturbate.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Sarah Palin's Book Contract
The publishing industry is abuzz with speculation about Sarah Palin's memoir sales.
Insiders say that if Gov. Palin writes a book, she would get paid $7 million dollars. Furthermore, if she reads one, she'll get $8 million.
Insiders say that if Gov. Palin writes a book, she would get paid $7 million dollars. Furthermore, if she reads one, she'll get $8 million.
College Too Expensive for Most American Families Now
A report has come out that trends making higher education more expensive and household income lower makes puts college out of reach for most American high school graduates.
That's the bad news. The good news is that they've just released "Girls Gone Wild: The Burger King Breakroom Edition."
That's the bad news. The good news is that they've just released "Girls Gone Wild: The Burger King Breakroom Edition."
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
America's Moment of Clarity: 21 Days Clean
It feels strange to me that election day was only three weeks ago. Usually, for me, three weeks is hardly any time at all. I have dishes sitting in my sink that have been there longer than three weeks. I have unopened mail sitting on my table older than three weeks.
But in the case of Obama’s election, November 4th seems like a long time ago. Like months past. Maybe even like something that happened last year.
I don’t know how to explain this warping in my sense of time’s passing.
Maybe it’s because I’m able to breathe again. To relax, knowing that George W. Bush and his gang of crooks, thugs, idiots and con artists are finally getting the boot. And that a smart, competent, sane, decent person has been put in charge again.
It goes even deeper than that, too. I feel like the country I live in remembers what is right and important again. The last eight years have been surreal for me, like I have been put in some sort of Bizarro World version of America, where all our values and priorities had been turned upside down.
Since 2000, I’ve wanted my country back. And now I feel like I have it.
What’s more, it’s even better than when I lost it. Maybe not financially, right now. Or militarily. But psychologically. Emotionally. Dare I even say it? Spiritually.
If America were a person --- a filthy, street-living, meth-addicted person --- I would say that we have hit bottom, had a moment of clarity and are poised to make an even stronger comeback. Because this time we’ve realized that our meth --- all the immediately-gratifying, short-term-thinking, status-quo-preserving shit we’ve been sucking on for decades --- really isn’t good for us. That it might have served us in the past, helping us pull all-nighters on our way up, but has ultimately brought us down to our current bedraggled state.
Though it took a bad beating to get us here, we might finally be at a point where we seriously consider how we are going to live without getting back on that shit again.
Here’s some of what we’re purging:
1) Racism. Things are different in America now. I saw it in the coalition that Obama put together to work for him. I saw it in the way that America voted. I saw it in the way that the people who didn’t vote for him more or less shrugged and shut up when he won.
I feel that something has truly changed in this country between how it was just 22 days ago. Heavy tectonic plates that have been grinding against one another for decades finally slipped three Tuesdays ago and we’re in a new landscape now.
A specific, personal example: I do standup comedy. I had written and told some jokes that used racial issues. Not in a derogatory, stereotype-perpetrating way, but in a way that exploited racial tensions for their humorous energy. For instance, here’s one that got big laughs up to November 1st.
Today, that joke --- and others like it --- is dead. Not because it’s offensive, but because the reality that supported it --- that of whites being reflexively nervous and afraid of darker skinned people --- simply doesn’t exist anymore in a country where the President is black. That battery is drained.
As much as I hate losing good jokes, this tectonic shift is a very big and awesome thing. Maybe the most big and awesome thing that has ever happened in this country.
2) Metastastized Financialization.
Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, tells this story better than I can in this article about our current financial debacle, and the two decades of insanity that preceded it.
Since I’ve been aware of America’s economy, I’ve been struck and worried by the outsized prominence that financial services has taken. And had a sneaking suspicion that that sector’s activities were not necessarily providing proportionate value to investors, economies or societies. After all, if there is any subject that I am an expert in, it is failing to provide adequate service to those counting on me.
I’ve also noted with alarm that a great deal of our economic “growth” takes the form of successive bubbles. In my adult life, I’ve watched a broad stock bubble grow and pop, a more narrowly focused Dotcom bubble grow and pop, and a real estate bubble grow and pop. And can’t help but notice that efforts to stimulate the economy after one pop --- i.e. low interest rates --- generally give rise to the next bubble.
I’ve felt like at some point we’ve got to make reforms more substantive than simply inflating the next financial instrument-led bubble to rise out of a recession. At long last it looks like serious thinkers and policymakers are considering what those reforms might be.
3) Dependence on Foreign Oil.
This summer’s stratospheric gas-prices that turned already-suffering American consumers upside down and shook all the money out of our pockets --- while loathsome Oil Execs and Traders enjoyed record profits and bonuses --- finally made believers out of us all. I think Americans realize that we can’t be so dependent on foreign oil suppliers going forward. And that developing a domestic source of energy is at least as vital to American interests --- and worthy of sustained effort and funding --- as picking up some moon rocks, or toppling a petty Middle East dictator.
4) Crazy Christian Bullshit
Yeah, this is a tough drug for America to put down. And it looked like we were going to relapse, when we got a look at that big pretty hunk of Alaskan Ice. But we did resist, and on January 21st we will officially be 100% Creationism-Free at the top levels of government. I’m so proud.
But in the case of Obama’s election, November 4th seems like a long time ago. Like months past. Maybe even like something that happened last year.
I don’t know how to explain this warping in my sense of time’s passing.
Maybe it’s because I’m able to breathe again. To relax, knowing that George W. Bush and his gang of crooks, thugs, idiots and con artists are finally getting the boot. And that a smart, competent, sane, decent person has been put in charge again.
It goes even deeper than that, too. I feel like the country I live in remembers what is right and important again. The last eight years have been surreal for me, like I have been put in some sort of Bizarro World version of America, where all our values and priorities had been turned upside down.
Since 2000, I’ve wanted my country back. And now I feel like I have it.
What’s more, it’s even better than when I lost it. Maybe not financially, right now. Or militarily. But psychologically. Emotionally. Dare I even say it? Spiritually.
If America were a person --- a filthy, street-living, meth-addicted person --- I would say that we have hit bottom, had a moment of clarity and are poised to make an even stronger comeback. Because this time we’ve realized that our meth --- all the immediately-gratifying, short-term-thinking, status-quo-preserving shit we’ve been sucking on for decades --- really isn’t good for us. That it might have served us in the past, helping us pull all-nighters on our way up, but has ultimately brought us down to our current bedraggled state.
America Looks Forward to Its Bright Future
Though it took a bad beating to get us here, we might finally be at a point where we seriously consider how we are going to live without getting back on that shit again.
Here’s some of what we’re purging:
1) Racism. Things are different in America now. I saw it in the coalition that Obama put together to work for him. I saw it in the way that America voted. I saw it in the way that the people who didn’t vote for him more or less shrugged and shut up when he won.
I feel that something has truly changed in this country between how it was just 22 days ago. Heavy tectonic plates that have been grinding against one another for decades finally slipped three Tuesdays ago and we’re in a new landscape now.
A specific, personal example: I do standup comedy. I had written and told some jokes that used racial issues. Not in a derogatory, stereotype-perpetrating way, but in a way that exploited racial tensions for their humorous energy. For instance, here’s one that got big laughs up to November 1st.
“A lot of whites think it’s hypocritical that white people can’t use the n-word, while blacks use it with each other all the time. But I don’t mind. Because white people have our own “n-word.” A word that we don’t mind using with one another, but that we get kind of uptight when we hear blacks and Mexicans call us. That word is “neighbor.””
Today, that joke --- and others like it --- is dead. Not because it’s offensive, but because the reality that supported it --- that of whites being reflexively nervous and afraid of darker skinned people --- simply doesn’t exist anymore in a country where the President is black. That battery is drained.
As much as I hate losing good jokes, this tectonic shift is a very big and awesome thing. Maybe the most big and awesome thing that has ever happened in this country.
2) Metastastized Financialization.
Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, tells this story better than I can in this article about our current financial debacle, and the two decades of insanity that preceded it.
Since I’ve been aware of America’s economy, I’ve been struck and worried by the outsized prominence that financial services has taken. And had a sneaking suspicion that that sector’s activities were not necessarily providing proportionate value to investors, economies or societies. After all, if there is any subject that I am an expert in, it is failing to provide adequate service to those counting on me.
I’ve also noted with alarm that a great deal of our economic “growth” takes the form of successive bubbles. In my adult life, I’ve watched a broad stock bubble grow and pop, a more narrowly focused Dotcom bubble grow and pop, and a real estate bubble grow and pop. And can’t help but notice that efforts to stimulate the economy after one pop --- i.e. low interest rates --- generally give rise to the next bubble.
I’ve felt like at some point we’ve got to make reforms more substantive than simply inflating the next financial instrument-led bubble to rise out of a recession. At long last it looks like serious thinkers and policymakers are considering what those reforms might be.
3) Dependence on Foreign Oil.
This summer’s stratospheric gas-prices that turned already-suffering American consumers upside down and shook all the money out of our pockets --- while loathsome Oil Execs and Traders enjoyed record profits and bonuses --- finally made believers out of us all. I think Americans realize that we can’t be so dependent on foreign oil suppliers going forward. And that developing a domestic source of energy is at least as vital to American interests --- and worthy of sustained effort and funding --- as picking up some moon rocks, or toppling a petty Middle East dictator.
4) Crazy Christian Bullshit
Yeah, this is a tough drug for America to put down. And it looked like we were going to relapse, when we got a look at that big pretty hunk of Alaskan Ice. But we did resist, and on January 21st we will officially be 100% Creationism-Free at the top levels of government. I’m so proud.
Friday, November 14, 2008
We Are All Even More Fucked
I have deliberately stayed away from commenting on this economic and financial catastrophe because I do not possess a great deal --- fuck, let’s just say any --- expertise in the world of global finance. Mortgage Backed Securities, Credit Default Swaps, monolines… for many years, these words were just chatter that my friends who worked in finance made to eachother while I tried to think of good fart jokes to tell and change the subject.*
But as I have watched Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson “handle” the crisis, I have decided that the financial catastrophe scenario is not really so much about the intricacies of the financial markets as it is about a couple of subjects that I can indeed claim a great deal of expertise in:
a) being over one’s head.
b) fucking up
c) trying desperately to hide a and b.
On Tuesday, Paulson announced that he wouldn’t be using the $700 billion taxpayers gave him to buy up dodgy mortgage backed securities after all.
Never mind that’s what he assured us, implored us, begged us to let him do that a scant two months ago. Now he is going to use that money to buy up bank stock to provide a capital injection, kind of like England did --- and critics of the whole toxic asset-purchase plan suggested in the first place. He has also let it slip that he’s considering other options as well.
In other words, dude is floundering.
This doesn’t look good for us.
In the long run, the US economy is made up of too many greedy, ravenous consumers and efficient, remorseless producers to really fail. I am confident that we will be prosperous, vulgar and insufferably arrogant again.
The only question is how long it will take us to get back there. Unfortunately, there is only one way to get there as soon as possible: do the right thing, at the right time, and with the right amount of firmness.
By that logic, there are many more ways to fuck up and delay our return to economic health.
We could do the wrong things. We could do the right things too late. We could even do the right things at the right time, but do them in a half-assed and unconvincing way. Economic actors hate uncertainty and risk, so if they don’t know how committed the government is to a course of action, then they aren’t going to move until that doubt is removed.
Right now, it looks like the lamest-possible-duck Bush team is failing in each of the three categories. By their own admission, they are doing the wrong things. They are wasting so much time doing these wrong things, that they are delaying doing the right things. And by reversing course and making changes, they are decreasing consumer and investor confidence.
Estimations of how long the credit/financial crisis and the economic slowdown would last are pretty much guesses in the first place. But every time the Government's "solution" has to shift like this, it’s safe to say that we can lengthen it out a bit more.
In other words, this Christmas, only the good little boys and girls will get coal in their stockings. Because that means they can have a few moments of warmth burning those coals in a converted coffee-can fireplace in front of the cardboard box they live in.
Next Christmas, they get nothing. Because they will have boiled and eaten their stockings to survive.
* Who am I kidding? All fart jokes are good.
But as I have watched Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson “handle” the crisis, I have decided that the financial catastrophe scenario is not really so much about the intricacies of the financial markets as it is about a couple of subjects that I can indeed claim a great deal of expertise in:
a) being over one’s head.
b) fucking up
c) trying desperately to hide a and b.
On Tuesday, Paulson announced that he wouldn’t be using the $700 billion taxpayers gave him to buy up dodgy mortgage backed securities after all.
Never mind that’s what he assured us, implored us, begged us to let him do that a scant two months ago. Now he is going to use that money to buy up bank stock to provide a capital injection, kind of like England did --- and critics of the whole toxic asset-purchase plan suggested in the first place. He has also let it slip that he’s considering other options as well.
In other words, dude is floundering.
This doesn’t look good for us.
In the long run, the US economy is made up of too many greedy, ravenous consumers and efficient, remorseless producers to really fail. I am confident that we will be prosperous, vulgar and insufferably arrogant again.
The only question is how long it will take us to get back there. Unfortunately, there is only one way to get there as soon as possible: do the right thing, at the right time, and with the right amount of firmness.
By that logic, there are many more ways to fuck up and delay our return to economic health.
We could do the wrong things. We could do the right things too late. We could even do the right things at the right time, but do them in a half-assed and unconvincing way. Economic actors hate uncertainty and risk, so if they don’t know how committed the government is to a course of action, then they aren’t going to move until that doubt is removed.
Right now, it looks like the lamest-possible-duck Bush team is failing in each of the three categories. By their own admission, they are doing the wrong things. They are wasting so much time doing these wrong things, that they are delaying doing the right things. And by reversing course and making changes, they are decreasing consumer and investor confidence.
Estimations of how long the credit/financial crisis and the economic slowdown would last are pretty much guesses in the first place. But every time the Government's "solution" has to shift like this, it’s safe to say that we can lengthen it out a bit more.
In other words, this Christmas, only the good little boys and girls will get coal in their stockings. Because that means they can have a few moments of warmth burning those coals in a converted coffee-can fireplace in front of the cardboard box they live in.
Next Christmas, they get nothing. Because they will have boiled and eaten their stockings to survive.
* Who am I kidding? All fart jokes are good.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Kudos to McCain
One has to admire the class that John McCain has shown in his concession speech and afterwards.
Though he seemed to lose his way in the campaign, once he no longer had any alternatives, options or possible actions he really seemed to shine as a person of grace and dignity.
I guess John McCain is just one of those people who is at his best when he has been put in a box.
Though he seemed to lose his way in the campaign, once he no longer had any alternatives, options or possible actions he really seemed to shine as a person of grace and dignity.
I guess John McCain is just one of those people who is at his best when he has been put in a box.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Voting Day. And a Strange Compulsion
Since I will be out of town on Tuesday, I went to the County Registrar's Office in Norwalk to vote early.
After a one hour drive and a three hour wait, I finally got into a voting booth with a numbered ballot in front of me.
For just an instant, I had a powerful temptation to vote for John McCain. A temptation so strong that I actually envisioned myself filling in the numbered oval that corresponded to the McCain/Palin ticket.
This sudden compulsion unnerved me. I would never have imagined that a perverse thought could consume me so, even briefly. This strong and unexpected vision made me understand why people are tempted to have other people piss on them or fuck barnyard animals. A person can get a very real and illicit thrill from doing something that violates a deep, ingrained moral conviction. There is no arguing the fact that breaking a taboo is exciting.
Still, I didn't do it.
Vote for John McCain, that is.
I did let someone piss on me, though. And fucked a barnyard animal tonight. In fact, I sexually ravaged an entire petting zoo. Including a mohair goat, a Vietnamese potbelly pig, and an extremely well-hung Shetland pony. Then I had my exertion-spawned sweat hosed off by the urine of a homeless man who has been eating nothing but asparagus and B vitamins the last three days.
A man has to get his kicks where he can.
But vote Republican? Hey, I'm not some kind of sicko.
After a one hour drive and a three hour wait, I finally got into a voting booth with a numbered ballot in front of me.
For just an instant, I had a powerful temptation to vote for John McCain. A temptation so strong that I actually envisioned myself filling in the numbered oval that corresponded to the McCain/Palin ticket.
This sudden compulsion unnerved me. I would never have imagined that a perverse thought could consume me so, even briefly. This strong and unexpected vision made me understand why people are tempted to have other people piss on them or fuck barnyard animals. A person can get a very real and illicit thrill from doing something that violates a deep, ingrained moral conviction. There is no arguing the fact that breaking a taboo is exciting.
Still, I didn't do it.
Vote for John McCain, that is.
I did let someone piss on me, though. And fucked a barnyard animal tonight. In fact, I sexually ravaged an entire petting zoo. Including a mohair goat, a Vietnamese potbelly pig, and an extremely well-hung Shetland pony. Then I had my exertion-spawned sweat hosed off by the urine of a homeless man who has been eating nothing but asparagus and B vitamins the last three days.
A man has to get his kicks where he can.
But vote Republican? Hey, I'm not some kind of sicko.
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