The Enchanted Porkfist

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July 31, 2008

It's our 15th today.

Celebrate with us by giving some dough to the NO On 8 Campaign. A good marriage is a beautiful thing, and we should encourage more of them.

July 29, 2008

The gods of irony are well pleased.

Image via Slog, in a posting about the forthcoming web publication of Orwell's diaries.

July 28, 2008

The allure of power.

People will do just about anything to get photographed with my sister Sarah. Nancy Pelosi hauled her pantsuited ass all the way out to Montana for this coveted pose.

Word is that McCain is angling for a similar opportunity, but his campaign is worried that if she changes her mind and snubs him in person, his poll numbers will plummet.

More soon, no doubt.

Terrorist fist jab.

USA Toady, true to form, misses the irony completely.

And in case you've been living in Tora Bora and missed it, here's a look back at the original Fox Fear Smear.

Fluffy doom on the march.

CO is to blame.

July 27, 2008

Your four wheels are hazardous to my two.

Seattle's indefatigably excellent free weekly The Stranger has an online presence known as Slog, and its writers are excitable, opinionated, usually intelligent, and often very funny.

Seattle is large enough to qualify as a big city, but small enough to avoid being as Balkanized as, say, Los Angeles. And let's face it: The Stranger is a much, much better paper than the L.A. Weekly or Reader ever were. So when shit goes down—especially in an area these people care about—they're on it like a bum on a baloney sandwich.

So, let's say a Seattle motorist deliberately plows into a crowd of bicyclists during a Critical Mass ride. Think Slog will cover it? Um, yes; this is from the sixth post so far:

As the driver pulled away, [bicyclist Tom] Braun—who was not part of the group talking to the driver—was caught under the vehicle, and the car rolled over his leg. “I literally got run over,” Braun says. “I was hanging on the front of [the] car. I’m glad he made a left and tried to take off down the road. If he’d turned right, I would have been crushed.”

Braun was taken to the ER, and although he miraculously avoided breaking any bones during the incident, he may have sustained internal injuries as doctors found blood in his urine.

Braun says he’s been consulting with other attorneys about filing suit against the driver. Braun says he was also getting ready to do an interview with KING 5 [TV] in the hopes of setting the record straight. “I saw the media reports this morning and I was shocked,” Braun says. “Somebody’s got to get out what really happened. This was a vehicular assault that could have killed people.”

“I Literally Got Run Over”, Jonah Spangenthal-Lee on Slog

I'm biased, of course, having just returned from a Midnight Ridazz excursion with about 200 of my fellow Los Angeles degenerates.

Taking over the streets with a massive crowd of very competent riders is a pretty amazing experience. Watching them pound beers and weed hits every six miles is impressive as well.

Update—On Monday, Slog poster "Chicago Fan" added an interesting point of view:

Critical Mass doesn't accomplish much in terms of concrete improvements in cycling infrastructure. All Critical Mass really does, in my experience, is piss people off. Pissed off people tend not to support the political causes of the people who piss them off, so I've never signed on with CM's agenda.

What does get things done? Corrupt politicians.

So, the only solution to Seattle's endless Process regarding a cycling map (whoo-hoo! Cartography, however inaccurate, will serve!), inadequate bike lanes on appropriate streets and bike routes and so forth: trade [Seattle Mayor] Nickels for Daley.

Richard M. Daley, Chicago's Mayor-for-Life-or-Until-Indicted, is a recreational cyclist. And he is an absolute dictator who pretty much gets what he wants (he has appointed or directly got elected the majority of the City Council's Aldermen, either to replace Aldermen who died or were indicted). So Chicago has a comprehensive bicycle plan that actually, you know, gets done. You want bike racks outside your business or local El station? Contact the city and they'll install 'em. Roads appropriate for bike traffic get sharrows and those which are perfect get bike lanes. A new park is built downtown, put in a bike center, with lockers and showers for bike commuters. Keep expanding the lakefront path. Drivers endanger cyclists? Increase the fines and have cops out writing tickets for drivers who door cyclists or cut them off.

All of this has happened because Daley wanted it to happen and then made it happen, not because a bunch of gear-heads block traffic one Friday rush hour a month. No single businessman can call up the city and whine and get a street taken off the plan for bike lanes. No community meetings, no endless planning, just corruption (Daley's supporters make money on all the road work, for instance) and a bike-able city.

We could use some of that strong-arm leadership here in L.A.

July 26, 2008

Pooparazzi.

A large hawk has been making occasional visits to the back yard. Apparently there are helpless, tasty morsels about. I tried to photograph him (her?) today, waiting patiently for literally minutes on end.

All I can offer you as a trophy of my effort is a glimpse at the work of a local bee. But take this bee and use it well. Use it for waffle!

One black glove, one very white dance.

Traveling correspondent Lucy Cienfuegos has filed a video report from Raleigh that features "the redneck version of the Elaine Benis School of Dance."

Much respect to her for getting right up in his action. This close scrutiny could have attracted his unpleasant attention, but she wanted the story—and got it.

Wait, he's not done yet:

July 25, 2008

Dead U.S. soldiers? What dead U.S. soldiers?

Forget finding Iraq on a map—can the average U.S. citizen tell you (within, say five hundred) how many of our soldiers have died there since the invasion in 2003?

I think we both know the answer to that question.

Is the military's clampdown on photographs of dead American soldiers partly to blame? Has it helped keep the public from demanding an end to the war?

While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified, in practice, photographers say, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared. In four out of five cases that The New York Times was able to document, the photographer was immediately kicked out of his or her embed following publication of such photos.

In the first of such incidents, Stefan Zaklin, formerly of the European Pressphoto Agency, was banned from working with an Army unit after he published a photo of a dead Army captain lying in a pool of blood in Falluja in 2004.

Increasingly, photographers say the military allows them to embed but keeps them away from combat. Franco Pagetti of the VII Photo Agency said he had been repeatedly thwarted by the military when he tried to get to the frontlines.

In April 2008, Mr. Pagetti tried to cover heavy fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City. “The commander there refused to let me in,” he said. “He said it was unsafe. I know it’s unsafe, there’s a war going on. It was unsafe when I got to Iraq in 2003, but the military did not stop us from working. Now, they are stopping us from working.”

4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images (NY Times)

Easy to catch, hard to hate.

Sloth may be a deadly sin, but it's a very slow and sleepy one.

Baby sloth on Flickr (warning: more cuteness ahead)

July 23, 2008

There's no "I" in evolution. Well, OK, there is, but...

Evolutionary biologist (and cheeky monkey) Olivia Judson proposes abolishing the term "Darwinism" from the popular vocabulary.

Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. “Why Darwin was wrong about X”; “Was Darwin wrong about Y?”; “What Darwin didn’t know about Z” — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix “neo”), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.

Why is this a problem? Because it’s all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the “Origin.”

He wasn’t, and it has...

Darwin was an amazing man, and the principal founder of evolutionary biology. But his was the first major statement on the subject, not the last. Calling evolutionary biology “Darwinism,” and evolution by natural selection “Darwinian” evolution, is like calling aeronautical engineering “Wrightism,” and fixed-wing aircraft “Wrightian” planes, after those pioneers of fixed-wing flight, the Wright brothers. The best tribute we could give Darwin is to call him the founder — and leave it at that.

I'm all for it. Lowering the cult-of-personality quotient is almost always a good idea, and might make it easier to have a discussion with this guy—

—who was once partly responsible for my safety on a hot-air balloon voyage. I, for one, do not welcome faith-based crew members when I'm about to ascend to 7,000 feet in a fucking wicker basket.

And while it's never easy to convince fundamentalists to actually study the same scientific method that makes their cell phones and teevees work, at least it helps to deprive them of a cheap ad hominem attack. I doubt that homeboy here would be quite as comfortable in an "Evolutionary Biology Lies" t-shirt.

Worlds collided, and it all went wrong.

Hüsker Dü meet Joan Rivers, 4/27/87.

I remember. Do you?

July 21, 2008

Contrast in styles.

Two candidates, both photographed today.

Ben Smith at Politico puts it mildly:

It's not really close.

July 17, 2008

Larry Craig renders satire impotent.

In an transfixing performance that blended noxious, preening bluster, grammatical/geographical incompetence, and utterly misplaced metaphor, Senator Larry Craig today:

1. Encouraged us to stop letting "the Venezuelas, the Nigerias, the Saudi Arabias, [and] the Irans" continue to—

2. —"jerk us around by the gas nozzle."

I do not lie, for the video from Crooks and Liars proves it to be so.

July 16, 2008

Perhaps a boner-pill question hits too close to home?

Slog's Maverick Moment of the Day:

July 15, 2008

When turtles attack (fruit).

All praise to The American Caliban.

July 14, 2008

Two hillbillies in trouble; should you care?

Nerd alert: a Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) primer follows. Skip if this just isn't your meat.

First, Gretchen Morgenson:

It's dispiriting indeed to watch the United States financial system, supposedly the envy of the world, being taken to its knees. But that’s the show we’re watching, brought to you by somnambulant regulators, greedy bank executives and incompetent corporate directors.

This wasn’t the way the “ownership society” was supposed to work.

Next, Paul Krugman:

But here’s the thing: Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble.

Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.

More cute pictures of animals coming soon, I promise.

July 13, 2008

Flint says no to crack.

Yes, this ran in the Detroit Free Press:

Scott Morgan, at Chronicle Blog:

Leaving aside the absurdity of telling people how to wear their pants, just contemplate the ironic path that brought us here. The style itself is an artifact of prison culture, where inmates' belts and shoelaces are confiscated and the standard-issue clothes never fit right. The style made its way back onto the streets where it entered popular culture. Now, in 2008, you can go to jail for 93 days to a year just for dressing like an inmate.

Chronicle Blog has some worthy descendants of Oscar Wilde writing in their comments section, by the way. My favorite so far:

HOW ABOUT OLD FAT MEN WHO DONT WEAR THIERE SUSPENDERS THAT DAY ARE THEY GOIN TO JAIL TO .WTF

Panic + Helpless Flailing = Comedy.

Ripped straight from the TeeVee:

Wolf Blitzer (CNN): Are there any significant economic differences between what the Bush administration has put forward over these many years as opposed to now, what John McCain supports?

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (Republican/McCain apologist): Uh, yeah. I mean, for instance take, you know, ummm, ahhh, take for instance the issue of uh, of uh...(knocks on table)...I’m drawing a blank. I hate it when I do that, particularly on television, uh—

It's even better in the video clip (via Crooks and Liars).

July 11, 2008

Ante up!