Category: Uncategorized

A few links to tide you over until I can get back into my posting groove:
Woman gives birth on subway, barely notices, gives David Lynch idea for next movie. ”Thanks for your concern, we’re OK,” she said after a brief moan and letting the baby slide across the subway floor. A fellow commuter said she tied the umbilical cord in a knot and wrapped the baby in a silk scarf. ”She cradled the baby in one arm and grabbed the handrail with the other and continued to ride the T and stare out the window.”
Man invents fake son, kills him off in 9/11, profits. “[Bad guy Cyril Kendall] billed Red Cross and Safe Horizon for therapy – at $425 an hour – at a company called ‘Alliance Counseling.’ But Cyril Kendall also claimed to be the sole employee of Alliance Counseling – meaning when the charities reimbursed the family for their mental-health bills, Kendall pocketed everything.”
Got swindled out of $1,000 by Jim Bakker? The televangelist owes you exactly $6.54. (Lawyers get $2.5 million.)
South Africa’s Gay and Lesbian Alliance, a national political party, changes its name…to the Death Penalty Party of South Africa?
Never trust a German with garlic and a frying pan.

How pathetic: Superintendent, paid $156,560, can’t pass basic literacy test. Spanish is the guy’s first language, and he’s failed a basic writing test three times. I can appreciate language difficulties — I certainly couldn’t pass a basic Spanish writing test. But then again, I also don’t think I’m qualified to be a school superintendent in Latin America.
Sorry for my absence of late. Crazy busy at work. Posting will likely continue to be sporadic.

Thoroughly unacceptable: Richard Perle, member and ex-chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a major architect of government military policy, demands payment from foreign journalists who want to interview him. Talking to Perle carries a price tag of anywhere from $100 to $900.
This is absurd. I can’t imagine how angrily I’d react if I tried interviewing, say, a congressman or a mayor and he told me he’d only talk to me for a fee. Absolutely absurd.
You may remember Perle from when crabwalk.com hero Seymour Hersh wrote a damning piece in The New Yorker on his sketchy financial dealings, crossing between private profit and his government job. Perle blustered that Hersh’s article libeled him and said he would sue Hersh in British court over the matter. (This despite the fact that Hersh, Perle, and The New Yorker are all American. British courts are known for making it easy to sue writers — they require sued writers to prove that what they wrote is true, while U.S. courts require the aggrieved party to prove an article is false.) For good show, he also called Hersh “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist” for writing about him — an awfully nice thing for a government official to say about one of America’s most respected journalists.
Of course, Perle was just posing; he chickened out when it became clear that no one believed him and other newspapers started pointing out more conflicts of interest.
Richard Perle: Friend of journalists everywhere!

Good piece on Mickey Kaus, a sort of blogfather to crabwalk.com. (For the record, I’d like to point out that I’ve been using the word snarky for years.)

Whenever I head to a bookstore, I make a few regular stops. Lately, I lead off with the African history section. (That usually doesn’t take very long.) I check the non-fiction new releases, then swing by travel, journalism, music, and contemporary history. I often make a stop by personal finance.
Now, I don’t know Suze Orman from Eve. (I take Scott Burns as my pers-fin columnist of choice.) I’ll admit I’m inclined to loathe her, since I see that one of her bestselling books has the pitiful title of The Courage to be Rich. (Sure, we’d all be rolling in dough — if only we had the courage! At first glance, with chapter titles like “The Courage to Have More and to Be More” and “The Courage to Make Room for More Money,” it appears to be a half-shimmy away from a Prayer of Jabez-style cloaking of greed in self-affirming garb.)
But I’m not here to make incisive social commentary. No, I’m here to point out what I noticed in a recent trip to the bookstore: In every photo on her book jackets, Suze Orman looks like a crazy woman! And not just a crazy woman — a shapeshifting crazy woman, a different sort of crazy on every jacket!
I just got back from the spa and I’m a crazy woman!
I’m a crazy woman who watched Dynasty too much in the ’80s!
I’m crazy — and I like leather!
I’ve been smiling for 19 straight hours, and it’s driven me crazy!
365 days of crazy ol’ me!
The courage to be casual — and crazy!
I hate to think what her audiobooks are like. Read by Bobcat Goldthwaite?

How to tell you should have died a long time ago: When the guy who writes your obit dies before you do.

Here’s my column from today’s paper, on why all kids should be untan summertime geeks like I was. (Okay, that’s not the topic, but that’s the subtext. All writing is personal, you know.)
This is also my first mention of MTV’s Summer Beach House in print. May also be my first use of “picking bellybutton lint.”
You people don’t know how lucky you are. Over the last two days, I bought both electablogger.com and electmecalifornia.org. I had big plans for a guerrilla-democracy project that would involve getting someone on the California recall ballot (as I wrote about a couple of days ago). Halfway through site development last night, though, I realized I’d be too busy over the next two weeks to do it justice. Like I said, you don’t know how lucky you are.

The Pope’s not a Catholic! He’s an imposter seeking to destroy the church! So says Mel Gibson’s dad, one of the world’s preeminent retro-Catholics. He’s a Vatican II hater, and thinks performing mass in anything other than Latin is an abomination and a sign of the apocalypse.
Keep Papa Gibson’s background in mind if you go see Mel’s new Christ-on-the-cross movie The Passion — filmed entirely in Latin and Aramaic and without subtitles.

Um, this guy’s a creepy principal. Likes to take lots of young girls on unchaperoned trips to Disney World and have “swimsuit changing contests.”
“Former teacher Barbarita Clark thought something was odd in her job interview. [Principal] Baker didn’t ask her much about her qualifications, she said. He asked her if she was more of a Tigger-type person or an Eeyore-type person. She was puzzled, but Baker determined that she was a Tigger person and gave her a stuffed Tigger when she left.”

A nice write-up on the Dismemberment Plan‘s final days. The D-Plan-as-the-Police, Travis-Morrison-as-Sting metaphor is a nice change of pace from the standard band metaphor, D-Plan-as-Talking-Heads, Travis-Morrison-as-David-Byrne.
Travis also has a great essay up on his web site (which really needs to start archiving past entries so they don’t get lost every time he updates). This week’s topic: why girls shouldn’t be punk. (Here’s a link to the Jessica Hopper/Punk Planet piece he references.)