I know I'm just contributing to the tawdry and completely unimportant internet fray when I compare the speeches Hillary and Bill gave, but I must say this: Bill Clinton is incredibly moving when he's warmed up and crooning to the bleachers. Hillary, on the other hand, is as boring, uninspiring, pedantic, and wooden as I've always thought her to be. I got up and refreshed my beverage while she was talking, right around the time she got to bullet point #36.
Well, well, well, Barack Obama becomes less and less interesting each day. His decision to take Beltway institution, Joe "Six-Term" Biden, as his running mate is predictable, cynical, and rather ordinary. It has little to do with Biden's voting record (which I'm about to pounce on with more accuracy and thoroughness than the NY Times is apparently capable of mustering), his suitability to replace Obama, and absolutely nothing to do with his capacity for change...whatever that word means this weekend (by my count, the word has assumed about a dozen "nuanced" meanings since Obama started throwing it around).
Cynical because Biden is simply a blunt weapon to use against the McTroll.
BARACK OBAMA LOSES THE GENERAL ELECTION TO JESUS CHRIST, PART 2
Quick, grab your copy of the U.S. Constitution and turn to the last sentence of Article VI, which quite clearly and eloquently states:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any office or public Trust under the United States.
Yet America's presidential candidates bowed to pastor Rick Warren by appearing before him to answer questions that are of value only to deluded individuals who believe that religious fortitude is a litmus test for presidency.
Are you starting to understand why I'm leaving the U.S.?
I love the Olympics. What's not to love? The best of the best, clawing their way to a chance to compete for one of three dinky medals. It's like winning an Oscar, except that real, measurable talent is involved.
I don't have broadcast TV, so I stream what I want to watch. When you see a live event without jumbotrons, nattering experts, heart-wrenching music cues, instant recaps, instant strocaps, instant repcaps, and instant slocaps, the event is really quite fascinating. Unbroken and pure.
nbcolympics.com is one of the worst answers to a pretty ambitious problem: presenting live and subsequently processed programming in a way that is easy to find and sort through. They fail miserably when it comes to finding and sorting. Disgusting and repetitive advertisements, a labyrinthine navigation scheme, disjointed groupings. What a mess. Here it is -- 2008 -- and we still can't slice and dice content the way any old sci-fi writer from the 60s could have.
The sooper-dooper enhanced streaming video is vibrant and fluid, but it just can't reproduce a water polo match, or calm the noise from splashes that swimmers produce when stroking their hearts out toward a record finish. It does baseball games well because so much in baseball involves time standing still.
Sports experts are like whipped cream. Do we really need the extra calories? Isn't that Michael Phelps Triple Sundae exquisite without pouring half a can of fluffy stuff on top of it? Gag me.
OK, that weightlifter who snapped his arm in half trying to lift is way super hot. I hope he recovers quickly and brings many superstrong little hotties into the world.
I've already talked about how much I love the rowing. I'm also enjoying women's weightlifting (what a spunky gaggle of girls who could beat me up) and diving (no better physiques in the world).
Most boring events so far? As in deargodjustgivethesepeopleamedal? Judo, men's lightweight weightlifting, softball, and water polo (mostly because you can't see more than a bunch of blue & white blurs when streaming).
Must give superior props to the badminton combatants, who actually make striking the killing blow to a birdie look incredibly sexy.
I've streamed hours of video of the Olympics and have generally enjoyed myself. Not crazy about the American broadcasts, where American talking heads do little more than trip over themselves with breathlessness about American athletes. Go U.S.A!
But I loves me some rowing. In all, I think I've watched ten hours of it. Single sculls, double sculls, those 4-person thingies. The stroke of oars against the boat, across the water, the camera angles that so perfectly capture their speed, the calming regularity of rowers' mechanics, what seems like an endless stretch of calm water, as beautiful on a misty morning as it is under a clean blue sky.
Olympic rowing is the ultimate healthy soporific. Imagine waking up an hour after you started watching a set of rowing matches, only to discover that it's all still going on. Row, row, row, row...row...ro...
Sherry Jones wrote a novel about the relationship between Islam's Muhammed and A'isha, his 9 year old bride, with whom he consummated their relationship when she was 11. Random House was supposed to release this book on August 12. A day or two beforehand, they decided not to release the book because "credible and unrelated sources" indicated that the release of the novel would enrage Islamic fundie nuts, resulting in acts of terror on...whoever.
So, I have a couple of things to say. Muslims -- get over yourselves. You're just the new Christians, trust me, and will be deposed from your reign of terror, in due time, by the inescapable juggernaut of reason and logic. I make no distinction between liberal, moderate, or conservative Muslims since the very foundation of your belief system is hogwash.
Second: Random House, you are cowardly twats. It's a novel -- remember The Satanic Verses? Life goes on, Islam does not crumble. You have no respect whatsoever for the religion you are afraid to offend. Instead, you are afraid of a theoretical threat -- put forth -- as speculation -- by a bunch of people you enlisted to read the book before you made your cowardly decision. Really, get a pair.
Bob Costas is the perfect specimen of a class of sports/athletics broadcasters my father describes simply: "These people have never played a professional sport. They've never pitched a baseball or swam a competitive lap or biked 100 miles or slid through the mud on their way to the end zone. But they talk more than anybody else. They're experts. They know it all."
I was so looking forward to the televised exchange between Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps. As soon as I saw that asshole Costas was the host, my spirits plummeted. I can't remember a less inspired, more boring, plastic, and information anemic interview.
Instead of coaxing Spitz and Phelps out of their robotic exclamations of mutual admiration -- i.e., inspiring in them some sense of emotional spontaneity -- Costas spent his time with foolish trains of thought such as: if you could swim against each other today, who would win? That's at about the level of the arguments I used to have when I was 6 years old: who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or Superman?
My mom asked me today if I had heard about the SWAT raid in Berwyn Heights. No, I said, because I tend to ignore local and national news when I can. As I prepare mentally for my expatriation, I'm shedding the American impulse to dwell on scandal, the media's obsession with pain and suffering, and Americans' disgusting but keenly developed rubbernecking instinct.
So, I listened as she explained what happened. Let's consider the cast: Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, which is located in Prince George's County, Maryland, not far from the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. His wife, Trinity Tomsic, a human resources bureaucrat. Her mother, who the couple had invited to live with them. Two black labradors, Payton and Chase.
Now consider the scene: Mayor Calvo arrives home, takes his dogs out for a walk. During his walk, he waves to people sitting in black SUVs, thinking they have parked for a nearby party. He returns home, where he finds a large package that had been delivered earlier. His mother-in-law asked the deliverer to leave the heavy package on the porch. Mayor Calvo brought it inside. He then went upstairs and began to undress.
The mother-in-law sees armed masked men on the property and begins to scream. Immediately, the front door is busted open, armed men enter. They shoot and kill one of the dogs without hesitation. The other dog runs up the stairs. The men shoot him in the back, killing him. Mayor Calvo comes down the stairs in his socks and underwear. He and his mother-in-law are wrested to the ground and handcuffed, where they remain for approximately two hours.
I grew up in Montgomery County, which abuts Prince George's County. For as long as I can remember, PG County had a terrible reputation for overzealous cop action, most of it -- at least in the 70s and 80s -- racially related. My dad was a D.C. cop, and he spoke of the PG police force as if they were to be feared or at least widely avoided. Even he, a black man, would not drive through the county if he could avoid it.
PG County's police force, for a time, had one of the worst reputations in the country for police violence and heavy-handedness. Every time I think of the place, I think of drug problems, wicked cops, bad roads, poverty, and white trash. It was a stinking pit when I was a kid.
Today, it's a place where your civil rights still mean shit. Even if you're the apparently unassailable mayor of a bedroom community.
The police made a mistake. That, they do not deny. But they have done what misguided law officials who make colossal mistakes often do -- we've seen it here in San Francisco: they refuse to lower their heads in shame and expose themselves to the public humiliation they deserve.
I will admit that the shocking murder of two dogs beloved in the neighborhood by kids and families first got me hot and bothered. Once I cooled my jets, I realized that even if the dogs had not been so carelessly slaughtered, this would still be a horrible violation of personal rights. It turns out that Maryland does not have a law supporting no-knock entry, as the joint siege squad (Country Sheriff and County Police) claimed they had.
More surprising is that the Chief of Berwyn Heights Police had not been informed of the simmering raid. That would be the same Chief of Police who knows the Mayor and who since has publicly stated that he could have walked up to the Mayor's house and asked to come in and talk about the package. Without cuffing an old lady and her near-naked son-in-law. Without shooting two beautiful pets.
But it gets better. The package contained 30+ pounds of weed, which an undercover cop had delivered after it had been siezed in Arizona with the Mayor's wife's name and address on it. So, now we have a pretty clear violation of Constitutional rights. Clever criminals, having borrowed Trinity Tomsic's identity, planned to use the Mayor's front porch as a drop-off and pick-up for a large quantity of pot. They had done the same thing for other victims of borrowed identity.
In the end, this all boils down to pot. This is your brain. This is your brain on the war on drugs.
Are you feeling good about that? Are you feeling safe in your own home? If not, think about moving to a country that values individual rights over the misguided impulses of zealous fucktards chartered with serving and protecting you.
Can you believe it? Baseball's American League won their 5 millionth All-Star game, but this time both leagues dragged us through 15 innings of incredibly stifling ball play, resulting in a -- wait for the exciting part -- 4-3 win. After 15 innings, I want a 2,000-1,456 run count.
Once again, everybody but you and stupid me makes tons of money off a single exhibition game that is no more interesting -- and a hell of a lot less lengthy -- than a Democratic primary.
