Saturday, October 18, 2008

Holy Crap

I really love this woman.

...

That is all.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

2:18

You know your life is in sad shape when, walking home from work after yet another twelve hour day, a frank assessment of your current professional situation dredges up memories of middle-period Van Halen as mid-wifed by MTV back in 1992.

Two minutes and eighteen seconds in.

Only, I think the pay they mention averages a little higher than what I drag myself out of bed for these days.

And it's not even good Van Halen. Sigh...

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Nov. 4th

Call me a moral relativist--maybe that's why I vote Godless Democrat--but I completely understand the mounting emotion of those Republicans who have dedicated their mental space to a horse who will not only most likely lose the race, but do so with wild, rolling eyes. I sympathize because I remember my own investment in 2004. (Not that Kerry could muster some rolling, much less any sort of wild, but still...)

At this point, with the finish line bearing down, the election feels so important, so big, and so totally out of your hands that the only emotional response can be rage. "How," you lament, "how can people not see what a wrong choice that guy is?!"

I feel for them, the true believers frothing over Palin's knife-blade rhetoric. It's just a short hop back to my own ABB days, when the idiocy of the previous three years (I only started paying attention to politics on 9/11, when I realized--Yatzee!--that politics had real world effects) seemed so baldly plain that I was (and still am) unable to comprehend a sober lever-pull for the Fuck Up Twins. (See?) There was nothing about Kerry that got my blood moving, other than the fact that he wasn't them or anyone like them. But being against something does not automatically motivate that portion of a populace to pry their fat asses from their armchairs and be for something. And so Kerry was forced to take his ball and walk his droopy eyes home.

Now, though, the jackboot's on the other foot: Obama is up in the polls and looks like he might have the fight to finish. I imagine I'll see this pendulum swing back and forth several times during my lifetime. I also imagine that it will never stop being satisfying watching the ass-end of that pendulum grow larger as it heads back my way. At the moment, the conservative "movement" has as its spokespersons someone who has never actually been a part of it and someone who is its unflattering caricature. My heart goes out: Kerry managed to make the party of San Francisco leatherfests sound boring.

And yet...and yet...after Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping, the lawless (and, more to the point, unnecessary) war in Iraq, the politicization of the Justice Dept., and so many other offenses, I myself can only admit to a kind of glee--mathematically diametric to the paroxyms currently gripping the GOP ticket's rallies--at the current prospects of the Republican party. After all they've wrought--after all the fundamentally anti-American policies they've imposed--the best that can happen to them is the non-violence of a political defeat.

(I say "anti-American" with this story in mind: talking with a friend who generally votes Republican, I made the argument that certain of the Bush Administration's policies were anti-American, meaning that they did not respect those rights to individual liberty and speech [among other things] that are enshrined in our Constitution. My friend unambivalently shrugged: the ends justify the means.)

That said, the only mildly supportive trope I'll offer is that We're All Americans here. Representative democracy is how work it, baby. I'm a Democrat, you're a Republican; ostensibly we each have the best interests of the country at heart; let's call the whole thing off.

Still...may McCain and those loose wingnuts who comprise his base lose. Lose their way. Lose their faith in conservatism. Lose their anti-humanitarian, 19th Century frontiersman misogyny. In the worst possible way. Just lose.

I would say "lose their minds," but, well...

The End All

Over eggs and pancakes today, my love and I concluded:

It all comes down to anal sex.

Apply this to your own life as you will. Unless it's been applied for you.

(Update: Later, I took the N train to the Canal St. stop. Exactly.)

Monday, October 6, 2008

Kimbo Slice


Kimbo Slice. He'll show up at your nice, Florida house, stand by as his entourage tears up your expertly pruned azaleas, then beat the holy living He-Is-Risen crap out of your biggest friend.

What can I say, the man's scary. Has been ever since those backyard videos out of Miami started catching eyes on YouTube. (You remember that; it was a little like stumbling onto your parents' porn stash: your thoughts turn into a flaming jumble of "is this real? so this is what it really looks like! am I allowed to watch this? this has to be illegal...," all the while you're dimming the lights and keeping one ear cocked for footsteps outside your bedroom door.)

With this in mind, I was half amused by his recent, much jabbered about entry into the daintily gloved world of professional MMA. (Excepting Rio Heroes, I guess. Just....wow.) Now, I don't begrudge any man using his talents to work his way up the payscale. Still, there was one video of Kimbo that always stuck with me, a fight between him and one Sean Gannon, an off-duty policeman slumming the underground scene. Long story short, after the artwork he makes of Gannon's face, Mr. Slice gasses out. (The end is actually kinda sad.)

Which leads to the amused half of my response to Kimbo's newfound professionalism: when faced with an opponent who was better prepared than the run-of-the-mill thugs populating his suped-up schoolyard--i.e., a trained policeman, with all the day-to-day drilling and physical conditioning that that implies--Kimbo couldn't close the deal. The idea that searching out a (caged) forum where attention to diet, rest, and technique is the norm among vetted athletes would be more to his advantage than his continued pummeling of unknowns in between courses of BBQ’ed meat was—and here I speak only for myself—of the Barnum&Bailey school of spectacle. As might now be obvious, as far as Kimbo goes, I have silently leaned toward the “not” of the well-known B&B slogan.

Endurance wasn’t the deciding factor in his fight against Seth Petruzelli. At first, I thought it was a simple slip that Petruzelli capitalized on. On second glance, I noticed that as Seth’s desperate right jab lands, Slice’s front leg goes stiff—rather unmistakable evidence of some CTL-ALT-DEL going on in the higher brain functions. On third viewing, though, it’s painfully obvious: the dude got his clock re-timed with a single bunny right by a fighter who had a whole half a foot on the ground from which to leverage. For Kimbo, the end, once again, is kinda sad.

I think we’ve seen the beginning of the end of Kimbo. And I don’t rejoice at that. The sport depends on awe--amazement at the athletes’ power, prowess, endurance, all in the face of rather serious corporal punishment--and shattering that magic mirror, even for me, still provokes a certain amount of disdain. When the veneer of invincibility cracks with this brand of fighter--as it did with Shamrock, Tito, Belfort, and Liddell, for instance--multiple, humiliating defeats are only a few blearied blinks behind.

I would gamble my azaleas that Seth Petruzelli has unwittingly handed Kimbo a career as a distinguished MMA commentator.

I believe it would be wise of Mr. Slice to take it.