Old Acquaintences

While farting around my place today I came across an old videotape containing footage of me, Larry Dahlke, and Tim Riley fooling around for the camera in my dorm room either before or after graduation. (I don't remember which). High on pizza grease and Coca-Cola, we came up with this interview where Arthur Helluvit (Larry), questions Maximillian Moucynski (Me).

My hair was so black then.

Want To Be Depressed?

The Kurds are looking to overrun Kirkuk in anticipation of ethnic civil war in Iraq. Both they and the Shiites have, apparently, been using America's training and equipping of Iraqi army to prepare their own militias for the coming battle:

Firas Ahmed, the assistant to the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Mosul, invited a Knight Ridder reporter to inspect the local Peshmerga brigade, motioning to a compound across the street.

It housed the headquarters of the 4th Brigade of the Iraqi army's 2nd Division.
"We cannot openly say they are Peshmerga," Ahmed said. "We will take you to see the Peshmerga, but they will be wearing Iraqi army uniforms."

Kirkuk is a a majority Kurdish town, but only barely. There are large Arab and Turkmen populations there. The threat is that in a coming war they will be forced out of the city at gunpoint, or murdered where they stand.

Our tax dollars at work.

What Made My Dryer Squeak

I've noticed that a few people who've come here have been looking for information on what is making their dryers squeak. From what I understand, a couple of things can cause this. Either there's something wrong with the dryer's bearings (in my dryer's case, a screw was missing from one of the bearings and the screw in another bearing had come loose), or the drive belt is worn. It's a cheap, simple fix either way. The Sears guy who came to fix my dryer finished in five minutes and didn't bother to charge me.

Hope that helps.

An Expression That Needs To Go

Yes, Virginia [insert facts here].

I've come to hate this expression for two reasons. It reeks of presumed superiority, placing the speaker among those who presumably know what the unwashed, stupid masses don't. I may be a sneering elitist, but the arrogance of the expression makes my back teeth itch.

And when did Virginia get mixed up in this? Is Virginia a notable home of the unaware? The University of Virginia is a world renowned school founded by Thomas Jefferson. It serves as headquarters to one of the premier political science schools in the U.S., an indication that a good many people in Virginia are conscious of trends in the outside world. Virginia houses many of the more conservative media types and politicos who labor in D.C. They can be silly and ignorant, but their ignorance is more a function of their self-serving omissions of unflattering or inconvenient truths than it is of abject idiocy. Virginia native Jerry Falwell may be a bigot and a twit, but he's a well-educated bigot and twit. If it's educational dead zones you're after, you need to go farther south.

When confronted with phrases like "Yes, Virginia", I'm reminded of William Strunk's advice on the use of an emptier phrase: "The fact that". Yes, Virginia, those who believe they are possessed of truths or facts should simply state them, without advance billing. Otherwise, the writer looks like he's just dressing up his obvious points with flourishes meant to make him look cleverer than he is.

UPDATE: Well, I fucked up. I had no idea that Virginia referred to a little girl whose father wrote the New York Sun requesting an article that would reassure his daughter that Santa Claus existed. I apologize for the error. Even so, the phrase needs to go because it is doubly condescending to speak to adult readers as if they were eight-year olds.

Moonraker Gains Credibility

Jeff Bezos is involved in secretive space project.

Bezos has been the most tight-lipped of all the rocketeers, revealing little about the technology he's exploring. Blue Origin's bare-bones Web site offers scant information, and the company isn't listed in phone books.

Blue Origin spokesman Bruce Hicks said officials don't want to discuss the project. "They're not at that stage yet," he said. "The time will come."

That's right, 007. And when the time comes, it will be too late.

Natural Selection In the Gym

This New York Times story describes the people who've gone in for Cross-fit, a new and potentially lethal exercise form:

WHILE many gymgoers complain that they might not survive a tough workout, Brian Anderson can speak from experience. For his first CrossFit session, he swung a 44-pound steel ball with a handle over his head and between his legs. The aim was to do 50 quick repetitions, rest and repeat. After 30 minutes, Mr. Anderson, a 38-year-old member of the special weapons and tactics team in the sheriff's office in Tacoma, Wash., left the gym with his muscles sapped and back pain so excruciating that he had to lie in the driveway to collect himself.

That night he went to the emergency room, where doctors told him he had rhabdomyolysis, which is caused when muscle fiber breaks down and is released into the bloodstream, poisoning the kidneys. He spent six days in intensive care.

Yet six months later Mr. Anderson, a former Army Ranger, was back in the gym, performing the very exercises that nearly killed him. "I see pushing my body to the point where the muscles destroy themselves as a huge benefit of CrossFit," he said.

I'm more of a pilates/walking/bus-chasing guy, but I do understand the appeal. There's is a certain sexual thrill to be derived in abusing one's body nearly to the point of death. Masochism isn't confined to the vanilla leather play of overpaid, unimaginative, doughy suburbanites. Those people need to retain a measure of control. The possibility of actual death would frighten them right out of their hard-ons. Guys like Mr. Anderson however (what a wonderfully bland name), are probably a lot like the protagonists in J.G. Ballard's Crash who find sexual satisfaction in being in car accidents. Unlike the characters in Ballard's book, Mr. Anderson is engaged in an ostensibly healthy and normal thing: an exercise program. This makes his fetish something he can brag about to his friends. To his buddies he can say, "See how close to death I came?" To himself he can say "I came so close to death I came."

This is probably why Greg Glassman, who dreamed up Cross-fit, is so comfortable about describing his regimen's risks. To his potential clients, they're the selling point. When the sports doctor says in the article that "There's no way inexperienced people doing this are not going to hurt themselves," a small group of readers, nipples hardening, will shout "Finally, a reason to go to the gym!"

How do I judge this? I don't, except to say that any scheme for universal health coverage should make these people pay triple. Aside from that, this really is just natural selection at work. If there were more people like Mr. Anderson, there'd be fewer people like Mr. Anderson.

Hardcore Barry on Bill Action

Merry Solstice,' Bill

At a time when the nation found itself distracted by frivolities such as an unjust and illegal war, torture scandals, congressional scandals, statewide scandals, energy prices plunging an icy dagger into the hearts of American families, the continued calamitous ramifications of Katrina, and a White House overrun by felons and even traitors, leave it to Bill O'Reilly to bring the focus back to an issue we've all been ducking for far too long: holiday salutations. And who better than O'Reilly to appoint himself as Jesus' personal savior? Even if the FOX News host has things he'd much rather be doing with a marital aid, his anus, his leprechaunic Irish penis, a speaker phone, a loofa, some falafel, and an unwilling employee, he found the time to speak up for the vast majority of Americans: the oft-overlooked Christians. Christians who had become much too lax with department-store employees' godless use of phrases such as "Happy Holidays."

O'Reilly saw through this Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, pagan, Wicca, agnostic, atheist plot and spearheaded a drive to forcibly put the phrase "Merry Christmas" back in the mouths of those who during the rest of the year sincerely urge us to "have a good one."

By way of thanks, I'd like to send along this special holiday greeting to Mr. O'Reilly: Go fuck yourself ... you have the technology.

--Barry Crimmins

The Path Al Davis May Take

According to press reports, the Raiders's players are going to petition Al Davis to allow Norv Turner and the coaching staff to keep their jobs. The defensive players in particular feel that their unit has improved dramatically in comparison to last year's model, and they believe in the system. While this view has a lot going for it, I doubt it's enough to save Turner from the axe that will most surely fall on him. The offense's failures, despite the acquisitions of Randy Moss and Lamont Jordan, plus Turner's poor handling of the quarterback situation, make it hard to see how Turner can keep his job.

Defensive coordinator Rob Ryan is another story.

If Davis fires Turner, as everyone expects, it would be hard for him to keep Rob Ryan as defensive coordinator. New head coaches typically prefer to bring in their own staffs, and many candidates would be reluctant to take a head coaching job if they had to accept the incumbent defensive coordinator as a condition of employment. If Davis listens to his defensive players, who like Ryan's defensive system, and Davis has difficulty finding an immediate replacement that would let Ryan stay, there is a way to fire Turner while keeping the defense intact: promote Rob Ryan to head coach.

While Davis prefers offensive-minded head coaches (Flores, Shell, Gruden), there is precedent in Raider history for Davis's promoting a defensive coach. The last time it happened was in 1969 when John Madden, the Raiders's linebacking coach, rose to replace Head Coach Johnny Rauch. And Rob Ryan, a firey guy who looks like he spent the last few years living in the woods, not only has the respect and loyalty of his players, but he's also the only Raiders coach in the last three seasons who's actually presided over an improving squad. Seeing as he managed to develop that defense in spite of a depleted secondary and a linebacking corps that lacks established playmakers, Rob Ryan looks at least as impressive as any of the other coordinators Davis would be likely to interview. Couple Ryan with a good offensive coordinator and some good things might happen.

I'm not saying it will go down this way, but this scenario would allow Davis to please both his defensive players and the ticket holders who (quite reasonably) want to see both Collins and Turner pay for their blunders.

The Bush Speech

I caught a portion of it while flipping channels. I usually don't watch Bush on TV, because if I'm going to be lied to, I'd rather read the lies in print than watch them on C-Span. It's a time saver. Anyway, at one point Bush took time out to talk to me, saying that, now that we're in Iraq, the only options are victory and defeat, implying that I should just forget about how we got into the war and just go with him on his course without further complaint.

(I thought it was a laugh when Bush said he'd "heard" his opponents on the war. Sure he did. His wiretappers are pros.)

Okay, now I'm speaking to the President who B.S.'d us into a war:

The victory versus defeat choice is a false one. Very few wars result in total victory or total defeat. Most of the time they settle down to a political arrangement that allows hostilities to cease and both sides, who may still think of each other as absolute evil, to find more productive uses for their time. The task in Iraq is to identify the best realistic outcome we can envision, and determine what policies are most likely to move us toward that outcome. We have to decide whether the presence of our troops helps or hurts Iraq's stability. (I'd say it does much more harm than good to have them there now. The longer they stay, the less the Iraqi people will believe that the governments they've been voting for will fulfill their hopes for national dignity and sovereignty. If the troops are no longer useful in the job of bringing stability to Iraq, calling for their withdrawl is not defeatism; it's intelligence.

As for his wish for us to stop talking about how he got us into the war, Bush is conveniently forgetting something. His pre-war statements, to the American people and to the world, have everything to do with why we're finding it so hard to get international help into Iraq and why so many of our allies around the world hold us in so much contempt. Bush's lack of credibility on Iraq, and on terrorism in general, makes it harder for the U.S. in all phases of foreign policy. Fewer nations trust our judgement, fewer world leaders want to be seen with us, and fewer leaders take us at our word. And why should they? I don't know if Bush has figured this out yet, but crediblity is not something that comes with being an American; credibility comes from a diciplined, daily commitment to making sense.

I'm numbed to it now, but it used to amaze me how conservatives could be so upset with Bill Clinton's lies about oval office fellatio, while they're so casual about the torrent of untruths that spill out of Bush's mouth whenever he approaches a microphone. Which lies have been, in the end, more damaging to American policy and objectives around the world?

If we're ever going to recover the trust of the world, we have to begin by demanding that the truth about our decision to invade Iraq come out. Such an accounting will be very painful. It's never fun to admit you've been conned. (Don't worry. I won't say "I told you so" too loud.) Bush's lies couldn't have advanced so far if they hadn't played on the hopes and ideals of a great many people. But the sooner we start telling ourselves the truth, the sooner the rest of the world will regain their comfort with us as a great power. For Bush to lie to us is a crime and an insult; for us to lie to ourselves is an invitation to disaster.

And havent' we sent out enough of those?

John Spencer Died

He's probably best known for playing Leo on The West Wing but I've been following him since he shared screen time with Michael Madsen in the opening sequence of War Games. 58 is far too young to go.

Bush and McCain Come Together On Torture

And thus do these two GOP Giants join hands and stride boldly forward into the mid-19th century. Zippedy-dooh-dah! An agreement sure to endure until Bush's minions at the justice department find a way around it, or until the Dick Cheney discovers a new super-secret-double-dog method of shipping prisoners to Uzbeckistan for their boilings and beatings.

I Don't Blame You a Bit, Tui

Norv Turner's switch back to Kerry Collins has Tuiasosopo pissed off. I don't blame him. Here are Tui's stats for his first start:

14-26-124 1 TD, 2 INTs, 2 Fumbles Lost

Looks pretty bad, but check out Kerry Collins's first full start as a Raider (Week 4, 2004, versus the Texans):

21-38-244 0 TD, 3 INTs, 1 Fumble Lost

Or, for other comparisons, check out Drew Brees's first game:

15-27-221 1 TD, 0 INTs, 2 Fumbles Lost

Or Peyton Manning:

21-37-302 1 TD, 3 INTs

Or Donovan McNabb:

8-20-68 0 TD, 1 INT

Or Matt Hasselbeck:

20-34-178 0 TD, 2 INT

Even my man Rich Gannon, in his first Raider start:

16-31-227 0 TDs, 1 INT

My point? That with rare exceptions elite quarterbacks have a period where they look bad before they start looking good. Sometimes they find (or rediscover) their rhythm in a week or two. Some take half a season or longer. Many of them, like Hasselbeck, have to endure the doubts of those who think the plodding, vanilla veteran behind them in the depth chart is in fact superior. Still, if they have a coach sees potential in them and is enough of a leader to keep his team together through the growing pains, they can end up where the Seattle Seahawks have ended up. If, however, his coach is a jackass, a quarterback like Tui has to wait for an opportunity to grow, usually on another team.

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions about Tui though. Some quarterbacks start mediocre and stay there. I've seen it. This year, boy have I seen it. Still, I guess Norv Turner figures it this way--why go with someone who might be lousy when we can go with someone we know is lousy.

Richard Pryor's Dead

I know he'd been suffering for a long time, but it still sucks.

Something I Like

As those who read this blog regularly know very well, I hate a lot. I try to hate with style and with wit, but I really do despise a lot of people and things. So I thought I'd break the pattern by writing about something I actually like.

I just watched my DVD of Mystic River, and it knocked me out all over again. Very few filmmakers handle old wounds as well as Clint Eastwood does, and the performances he got from Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon transported me to wonderful, terrible places. Brian Hegeland's script built a Boston neighborhood that felt lived-in, and successfully imported the feeling of density that the Lehane novel had. Very few adaptations can pull that off. Most movies dodge complexity; Mystic River seeks it out, finds it, and invites you to linger over it.

Thanks, Clint.

Now This Is Just Pretty Fucked Up

First she helps Bush into the White House, and in 2001 she commissioned a study of supernatural wateras a citrus tree protectant.

Next up: Harris commissions the Skywalker ranch to offer Jedi training to U.S. troops in Iraq.

We now return you to the reality-based community.

Merry Daily Show

All this Bill O'Reilly shit about Christmas would be a lot harder to take if Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert weren't around to mercilessly mock him. But in a way I have to give it up to our most famous falafel consumer. He's a man with his finger firmly on the railway track on which America travels. He saw that with all the problems in America--the War, the deficit, the willfully ignorant sociopath who somehow gets to run stuff--that what America really needs to pull itself together is a bullshit, fake-ass problem which can be blamed on invisible enemies that only Bill O'Reilly can see. And, like any helpful bus station lunatic, O'Reilly is delighted to point wildly at those enemies and call them by their proper names.

I'm not saying, by the way, that Bill O'Reilly is a common bus station lunatic. Can a bus station lunatic tie a full windsor knot? He may try, but the demon monkeys will always thwart him.

So, if you're out there, Bill, here's a message from me to you, simulcast directly into your skull via secret satellites of the great secular conspiracy (which meets every Saturday in the Factoria Mall Applebees at 7pm): Happy fucking Holidays, you diseased weeping pustule.

UPDATE: You can check out Jon Stewart's beatdown of O'Reilly here

Miss America Conservatives

Mark Schmitt gets credit for the term, which I think is a wonderful way to describe many "maverick" conservatives--including John McCain:

Each of the so-called moderate Republicans seems to have a "platform" issue on which they break with the party, much like a Miss America contestant who chooses an issue that makes her seem thoughtful and altruistic, but as soon as the platform segment is over, she resumes her place in a degrading spectacle.

You can read more about how he developed this idea here. It seems like one that's as applicable to McCain on torture as it is to Gordon Smith on Medicaid, or Dominici on Mental Health Coverage. While it's certainly a good thing that McCain wants to pile on the administration concerning its torture policies now, why didn't he push his anti-torture legislation in the summer of 2004, when it our policies of extraordinary rendition and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were already major scandals costing us credibility around the world? Reason, it wouldn't messed up McCain's future political prospects in the Bush's Republican party. Instead of sticking up not just for his principles but for his own experience of torture at the hands of the V.C., McCain aggressively campaigned for Bush's re-election. Only now does McCain want us to know that, even though he's a Republican, he's not in favor of torture.

What does he want? A cookie? Republicans aren't supposed to favor torture. If McCain had said that last sentence to Bush a year ago, when it might have mattered, I'd have been impressed. Now, it just reads like another Republican politician trying to look moderate and thoughtful in comparison with the administration. Oh, to be more thoughtful and moderate than G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Who can you brag to about that?

A Wish Come True

AP reports that Norv Turner is leaning toward starting Tui over Collins this week. And Beethoven's 9th, 4th movement, begins.

Colts 35; Titans 3

I didn't get to see this game, and have very little to say about it actually. I just wanted to write about a game where a team I like actually won, where I look at the starting quarterback and can understand why he's starting, where, well you get the idea. Colts win again!

Congress Springs Into Action

To find out if the BCS College Bowl system is flawed. Next up, a hearing on whether the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts, acted alone.

Gay Marriage Ruled Constitutional In South Africa

If you'd told me twenty years ago that one day soon South Africa would be ahead of the U.S. in any aspect of human rights, I'd have said you were crazy.

We torture; they permit gay marriage. Funny how the world turns out, eh?

And Someone Wins Bad Sex In Unclear Headline Prize

Coren Wins Bad Sex in Fiction Prize

For a second there I pictured poor Coren winning a night in a hotel room with my lunchlady from West Elementary School in Tooele. (And she was wearing leather and carrying both a whip and a garden hose.) Then I remembered it was that time of the year again. This year's "winner" of the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize is Giles Coren, the author of Winkler:

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

That's one athletic dick, but I can't quite picture how it leaps around "like a shower dropped in an empty bath". (Showers leap? Shower heads stay still, unless they're broken; and the water doesn't leap, it falls. He did say the shower "dropped" in the empty bath, but dropping is a different motion from leaping, and since when were showers characterized by their tendency to drop? Sorry, I'm spending way too much time in this simile.) Still, the protagonist did manage to get enough control over his member to make the sign of the Z on her chest.

Coren's prose reads like the porn spam I sometimes get. I'm amazed that this passage managed to get past an agent, a battery of editors, and a publisher. (Unless, of course, the effect Coren was going for required him to write like a porn e-mail spammer.) Having read this, I'd say that Coren deserves to win a night with my lunchlady in an hourly-rate hotel room. We'll see if he, too, can make the sign of the Z.

Read all the other finalists here. Some pretty famous names are here, an indication of just how easy it is to foul up a sex scene. I guess Milan Kundera was on to something when he said that there is a certain--hard to take--comedy in sexuality. With all that rattling and wrenching, it's hard to take indeed.

It's The End of Toronto As We Know It

No, this is not a post about the no-confidence vote that dissolved the Canadian parliament, but rather a link to Grady Hendrix's very funny take on Kirk Cameron's el-supremo-cheapo Left Behind movies. Apparently, if you spend $1.65 (Canadian), Toronto can stand in for "New York, Chicago, and Israel. Also, Washington, D.C. And Egypt. London, too."

I almost want to watch the movies now, just to see if they made the same mistakes the Glitter crew made when they included shots of the CN Tower in their "New York" backgrounds. I'll bet when they pan across the Western Wall or some Cairo neighborhood, you can see the Sky Dome, or pay phones with little maple leafs on them.

On a dark, sticky, stygian level, it pleases me to know that while Jerry Bruckheimer makes high priced crap like National Treasure (a movie that must be seen to be disbelieved), Kirk Cameron is up in Canada making even crappier movies for less money. Economic efficiency, that's what NAFTA was all about.