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DAY STREET  For the first time, or for as long as I can remember, anyway, I find my birthday today somewhat depressing. I think it's because the picture on my recently renewed driver's license is without a doubt the worst picture ever taken of me in the entire history of photography, and today is the day I have to start using that license. The state of New York sent me the new license a few weeks ago. Since then, I have kept it hidden in a drawer, ashamed of it, like it was some dirty little personal secret, a deeply humiliating confession I always knew I would have to make in public someday. Today is that day. Today I have to, speaking metaphorically, stand in front of the ladies and gentlemen of the press with their cameras flashing and their klieg lights blinding and admit that I have, more or less, hiked the Appalachian Trail or that I have, you know, asked my parents to pay off some sexual chippie or... and here's the real truth of the matter... ...that I am turning into an old man. *Sigh*... Vanity, thy name is me. I can't believe it, but I did it. MSNBC just ran the entire Palin speech, all 18 minutes of it, wherein she announced she is resigning her job as the Governor of Alaska. Whew. What a nut. We really dodged a bullet there. What scares me is that there seem to be some number of people who think she is just the person we need to run this country. Swear to gawd... that scares the hell out of me. I don't know what she did, but she did something really bad. She's hiked her own Appalachian Trail. All that remains now is for the blood-hounds to sniff out what sort of trouble she's in. What. A. Disaster. By way of Sullivan, a remarkable set of reports from Iran by Jason Jones of the "Daily Show". Jason Jones: Behind the Veil - The Complete Saga. It breaks your heart to think that some of the kind, good-hearted, silly-humored Iranian people he interviews have since been arrested, facing god-knows-what fate. And now... on top of everything else... Billy Mays is dead!! Brazil presses hard, hard, hard in the second half... takes a 3-2 lead with 5 minutes to play... Well, the USA probably is going to fall short AGAIN... One of these days... one of these days... Whaddaya think? I'm psyched. USA Goooooaaaallll!!!! 9:40 mark! USA Goooooaaaallll!!!! 26:50 mark! Wow... soccer shocker... USA leading Brazil 2-0 at the halfway mark of the Confederations final... I'm sure we all Hunger For Answers. Amidst all the uncertainty, there IS one piece of reliable information I can pass on.. It's spelled "MichAEl", not "MichEAl". Us Michaels of the world don't really mind all that much, you understand, but it does have a tendency to make you look dumb. Yes, there are those who spell their names "Micheal", but the percentage who do so is vanishingly small. And the particular Michael in question here spells it the usual way. If he's going to be your beloved idol in death as well as life, you probably want to at least spell his name correctly. Have you been following the desperate tweets (there's a phrase for the ages) from Iran today? I find it incredibly moving. It isn't just that a people hungry for genuine democracy is rising up in the face of deadly thuggery. It's these tiny little reports coming out of that Dark Place. Many internet years ago, I was on a mailing list the primary theme of which was how The Man would never be able to silence us, now that we had the internet. I made the tentative point that The Man owned and controlled all the machinery of the internet. I suggested that it was silly to think that our freedoms could not be ever be curtailed again on account of the internet when it was those who would curtail our freedoms who owned the infrastructure through which we expressed our freedoms. Naturally, I was thrown off the mailing list. We all know the story of the Terminator Universe. Man invents Machines. Machines turn against Man. Desperate struggle of Man to survive the rise of the Machines. Sometimes I get the feeling we already live in that universe, only it isn't the Machines that threaten our survival; it's the Men who administer the Machines. Today was a remarkable Twitter Day. So remarkable, one has to wonder how long it will be before the Men-Machines shut it all down. We are in a race, I think, with the Men-Machines. With luck, freedom will win the race. Without luck, the Men-Machines will learn how to completely shut things down before the freedom loving people of the world shut them down. Don't know who is going to win this race. Hope it's us. Still... today was the Courage of Tweets Day. It was a bit like those tiny noises rescuers detect from deep inside a collapsed building... tap, tap, tap... I am here... I am still alive... help me. Only, in this case, I'm not sure we can rescue anybody. I suppose the best we can do is tap, tap, tap, back... "courage... we are with you... in spirit... we are sorry we cannot do more..." So every once in a while, when you live in New York City, you meet a famous guy or gal. One time, I was at a party at an old friend's house. This friend and her husband had two dogs. They lived up near Central Park. They walked their dogs in Central Park. They met other dog owners. One of them appeared to be famous. So at this party, the apparently famous guy was in attendance. I had another friend with me who had an interest in modern art. This famous guy apparently had paintings by Modigliani and other modern masters in his apartment. We chatted up this famous guy and wangled an opportunity to go to his apartment to see these famous paintings. The apartment was kind of cheezy. This was explained by saying the apartment was simply a pied a terre in the city. The paintings were impressive, though. They all had thick plastic covers over them. For insurance purposes. There was something really creepy about the guy, though. There was something not right. He had two dobermans. He set some food out for us to snack on. He let the dobermans eat from the same snack tray. Is this the way the Rockefellers were raised? Yeah, so, this guy called himself Clark Rockefeller. At the time, I actually did a little bit of googling about him, and, you know, I didn't see too much about a Clark Rockefeller. Well, whatever. So I guess you've all heard about this guy by now. I'm just watching a "Dateline" on him now. Of course, they bring up the fact that he is a suspect in a California double murder case. This is, perhaps, the weirdest personal encounter I've ever had in my long life. ...I wish to hell the Republican Party would get its crap together and come up with a legitimate leader and/or spokesperson. Somebody with the courage to express his or her differences with the Left in real policy terms. The problem now isn't that the Republican Party is full of nuts. The problem is that it has no one who has the courage to stand up and tell the right-wing nuts in the Republican Party that they are right-wing nuts. The Republican Party leadership, such as it is, is populated by complete cowards who don't have the guts to stand up and express in rational terms legitimate ideas and principles. At first it was kind of funny. Now it's becoming dangerous. When you don't have a loyal opposition capable of framing the objections of the out-of-power party in reasonable policy terms, you leave the nuts to fill the oppositional voids. And THAT, as we are beginning to learn, ends up killing people. Seriously. Republicans. For the good of the country. Become a legitimate party again. Fast. |
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