Gates, Jobs, Gates' Job, and Jobs' Gate

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Pissing in the Wind, Round V: iThesis

It seems that Dan's topic for this week is somewhat less controversial than last week, and as such, less prone to inspire me to launch a barrage of baseless accusations at him. After all, how can you turn: "Apple or Microsoft" into "Dan's mom: lesbian Eskimo or just Canadian?" Unfortunately, you can't, so you're all just going to have to settle for some good 'ol fashioned cool reasoning.

________________________
Apple or Microsoft? iBook or PC? OSX or Windows? All questions we've undoubtedly thought about in passing two or three times in our lives. But did you know that hundreds of computer programmers have lost their lives in this bloody conflict? Deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, a vast guerilla war has been raging between the two tribes ever since Al Gore invented the internet. It includes numerous, unspeakable atrocities, like: 1) saying the other side's computers are slower and less technologically advanced than the others, 2) insults like "giga-nerd" and "mega-gay," 3) disparaging comparisons to the more unpopular characters of Star Wars and Star Trek ("Your wife uncrossed her legs and I thought I saw Chewbaca), and worst of all, 4) "super-dirty bombs"--flaming bags of shit the size of which you've never seen. But the Leviathan is all about peace and love, and so let's try to settle this in a sensitive, bitechnical way.


First, Apple has the following pros:

1. A sleek, sexy look to all their products. I don't often say an inanimate object turns me on, but just seeing one of those smooth, metallic wonders makes me want to download porn that much faster.
2. Cool names. You have iBook, iTunes, iPod. How fucking cool is that?! Put a lower-case i in front of anything and it spices it up. iLeviathan--me, but more fun! iCar--hold on to your seatbelts, this is gonna be one fantastic voyage! iRabies--I almost want it now! iCUP--hahahahahaha.
   
3. No viruses. Since no one owns a Mac, no one's gonna make a virus for it! Don't worry about your credit card number, social security number, or your ATM password. You can even save them as your wallpaper! And when applesecurity@hotmail.com asks you for them, go ahead and give it to them! I...I mean, they...just need to make sure your system is running OK.

But it does have it's Cons:

1. One mouse, one button. Forget about right-clicking anything, now you're going to put down the juice box so you can click with one hand, and press a Ctrl with the other. If anyone tells you they make a mouse with two buttons, don't listen to them. They have shit for brains.
2. Poor music downloading software. If you thought Metallica was uncool for making you pay to download music, you really have to ask yourself: why the hell did you think Metallica was cool in the first place? Get ready to shill out change for every song you download, because the iTunes store will be your home away from home.
3. Really, really annoying commercials. If you think the U2 commercial is annoying, think back to when iPods first came out. Remember when they had that goofy white guy with his iPod on rapping "I like big butts?" And that obnoxious little kid doing it to "The real Slim Shady?" That's right, you're only encouraging them...
   

But enough about Apple, let's take a look at Microsoft. What Pros do they have:

1. Software-friendly. Everything you could ever want in a Mac and more. Media players, music-downloading software, everything. Hell, they even have iTunes and iPods for Windows. And get this? They even acquired it legally! (You know Gates was going to steal them at any time).
2. Fully-equipped from purchase. Microsoft everything. Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, even anti-virus software. And the best part? Their constant security updates will make sure you don't get the latest worms or viruses--or competing products like Firefox...
3. Bill Gates! C'mon, what's not to like about him. He's been knighted for his foundations work in combating AIDS in Africa. He dropped out of college and still became the richest man in the country. Let's face it, in this uber-capitalist culture we live in, Bill Gates is about the closest thing we'll get to rags-to-riches. Call it: well-off to maniacally ruthless CEO (made for TV movie coming soon).

But like Apple, Microsoft has it's cons:

1. Viruses. Contrary to Macs, you will get a virus. It's virtually guaranteed. In fact, if you don't get one within the first 6-months of owning your computer Bill Gates will personally send you one so you have to pay an exorbitant price to repair your computer. And it's not just Bill Gates you need to worry about. Every no-good, pimply-faced, punk teen will--when not loitering outside of convenience stores and making strange, whale-like noises while gawking about passers-by to their equally awkward pasty-faced friend--be designing a virus that brings them no tangible reward except for the cheap satisfaction of pissing me off (see also here).
2. Bill Gates. Once you buy a computer with windows, Bill Gates now, legally, owns your soul.
3. Pop-ups. "Want to date me?" "Improve your sex life." "Assholeclickswhat." You can download all the pop-up stoppers you want, but nothing will stop them. They'll become a part of your daily life. You'll see salesmen promising to enhance your penis size pop out of nowhere in your office. Strange men with dollar signs all over their suits will follow you on your way home. Co-eds asking you if they're hot or not will fill your dreams. Pretty soon, you'll speak nothing but catch phrases, and hear nothing but jingles.

So there you have it, the pros and cons of Apple and Windows. I'll leave you all to make a decision based on the above criteria for yourself, but I, for one, will living life with only my abacus and Ham radio. How did I write this without a computer, you ask? With freedom, comrade, with freedom.

(Same post, different blog)

Pissing Into The Wind: What Kind of Man Are You?

There are certain questions that get to the root of a soul. Are you a dog person or a cat person? SUV or Prius? Innie or Outie? But, of course, no nerd will start talking to you without first asking (of course, in some cases, they don't have to ask, and can know just by looking at you): Mac or PC.

The times have been a-changing recently. Previously, it was easy to cast off the lovers of that harsh Apple Mistress as bourgeois, who daily gorged themselves on caviar and washed it down with all sorts of expensive liquids: champagne, experimental pharmaceuticals, unrefined sweet crude. But Apple has made a few moves towards accessibility. iTunes[sic, and goddamn you Steve for making me mess with the capitalization that has been handed down father to son for centuries!] now exists for the PC, convincing a few otherwise lost souls to see the nirvana that is applications that, get this, have a brushed metallic look! Why, it hearkens back to the day that computeres were mighty beasts of machines!

And then today, apple introduced the cheapest Mac ever (at $499) that is also the smallest computer, and an obvious competitor for the cutest of the current year. The new iPod shuffle is a stripped-down sibling of an already petite product. But at only $99, and coming with a lanyard to prominently display it around your neck, you definitely get more bling for your buck.

Make no mistake about it, this is as monumental as BMW coming to high schools everywhere and saying, "No longer are we a mark of being Daddy's Favorite Expense. Give us your tired, your Dodge Daytonas, your Plymouth Voyagers, and we will issue to you a BMW 1-series. Sure, it may have the engine that we laughed at 18 months ago as outdated and slightly prone to igniting in holy inferno, and sure, the wheels may not be 'round', but, it's still a BMW."

So, commentators: after all the shakes-up and announcements, which way do your prayer blankets point: Redmond or Cupertino?

Crimes Referential

Randy Moss, that Vikings curmudgeon, is going to be fined. Normally, the schadenfreudic in me would take delight at this bully-gets-his-lunch-money-stolen story. But look at his alleged crime: pretending to moon fans! Even if he had mooned those Cheese Wizzes, woudl that have been so bad? You're allowed to show asses on ABC (though not the oldest network *cough*CBS*cough* ABC is the most disney, and hence representative of red state family values as well as blue state proclivities for dressing up), even when they're Dennis Franz. If you can get away with it on broadcast tv in the days of Herr Powell, you know that you're offending no more than 3 people and a dachsund with the FCC complaint line on speed dial. (he barks a tough but fair rant)

But Randy Moss, I'd like to highlight, mooned no one. He was merely informing the audience that he had a posterior, which was, in fact, covered. This is like someone going to jail for saying, "there are terrorists", which doesn't happen until Gonzales is sworn in as Attorney General.

My biggest fear in life is that our reality will devolve into a Monty Python sketch. And so I can just imagine a defendant (true fact: John Cleese studied law at Cambridge, and in a giant Fuck You to everything British then wasted it by appearing in Charlie's Angels 2) in a poorly-staged court. The solicitor (they wear wigs. Haha! Wigs! And are actually willing to identify themselves as Tories!) asks him what happened, and as soon as he explains that the defendent held the gun, just so, constables (what do you need those stupid hats for? to hide your stupid wigs? stupid) rush in and arrest him. And at his crime, his accuser does the same, and so on, until we are all in prison for the awful crime of knowing crime. Punishment for Original Sin, rendered unto Caesar.

-D"I expect the Spanish Inquisition"an

On Insults

[Today, a piece that I originally wrote 3 years ago.]

The American lexicon has evolved, over the last decade, to have absent from it terms that can hurt people; I am, of course, thoroughly thrilled at such a happening. Such derogatory terms as “faggot”, “Wop” or “Mick” are no longer used, except by the coarsest of speakers, for fear of insulting “homosexuals”, “Italians” and “Irishmen” everywhere. I am pleased beyond belief at the deep, or at least surface-level, progress this highlights. But if our language is being smithed to prevent accidentally hurt feelings, then what the hell do I call someone when I mean to malign them and everything they stand for?

One solution proposed to the significant problem of insulting an individual instead of a group is to drop hurtful terms for their stereotypical characteristics. Dropping “gay” for “effeminate”, however, creates an affront that sounds forced and technical, and does most definitely not assign to the pejored shady morals and weakness of character. Indeed, replacing “Scotsman” with “Frugal” changes the character of an attempted insult so much as to sound congratulatory to the insulted for his ability to keep track of his fiduciary well-being, and forgets to suggest that he wears, late at night, the “tightest of woolen sweaters”. Thus, political correctness has disarmed my wit and taken from me my one mode of self-improvement in this world.

Hence, I have decided upon a course of action that I must undertake to rectify this problem. With my method, I intend to do for the English language what men such as Kipling , with the Indians, and our own Stanford, with the Chinese, have done in the past. I intend to set out on a voyage around the world, and find an heretofore undiscovered tribe of native people. They will then bend to the power of our “self-propelled howitzers” or, as they refer to them, “marching fire-ants of death.” Once enough of them are killed, the rest shall bend to our 21^st-Century Manifest Destiny, an empire on which the sun sets only rarely.

The vanquished will supply us with a new cadre of insulting terms. Long after the Sex Workers Union deprives us of “cheap whore”, their delightful and primitive face-markings will give us a term for any gaudily-made-up woman. We will cast their men alternately first infertile and then savagely over-virile, as our needs suit us, on the brink of a bar-fight to challenge a drunkard’s convictions. Their children we shall view as wholly stupid, through-and-through, which shall reinvigorate conversation on playgrounds of our country from Maine to Washington, California to Florida, and provide our children a new reason to study their language.

Eventually, it is certain, “tree-huggers”, such as the Sierra Club, Amnesty International and Dendrophiliacs United, will grow wary of our treatment of these poor creatures. As such, they shall eventually be assimilated into our culture and assume the same place as every other minority in our “melting-pot” society, i.e., they shall claim their own strip of land and not associate with anyone else. Their lawyers and own anti-defamation league will strike from our tongues their name as an insult, and innumerable sports teams shall be renamed. I write this, therefore, to offer to future generations a blueprint for finding a new butt for their jokes, and young men with a new adventure to take up for the betterment of their people.

Pissing Into The Wind

So the Piss has turned, has it? Both my commentators have agreed, leaving only the moderator to reap vengeance? Fine.

Point Number 1: Under Capitalism, man screws man. Under communism, it's the other way around.

Agenda Item Letter B: I love America. Because I live in it. But if you're on the outside looking in, this "outpouring of aid" is more like a giant's pumpkin pie crashing down on you because his feast was so bountiful that he pushed it off the table. What the woodchuck are you going to do with a giant pumpkin pie? It's not that healthy, and fuck if you don't even have any whip cream, of either brobdingnagian or lilliputian proportions to eat it with.

Argument Animal Fish: Yeah, maybe the public did right in this one instance. But you know why? Cause it was photogenic in that awful, makes you face your own mortality kinda way. (When my roommate saw this, his first response was a shocked "oh my god". His second a "that reminds me of sim city") But Americans woudl donate so much more if we saw a picture of a puppy about to be ground up and fed to orphans, all of whom have lisps, stutters, or some other sort of speech impediment. Speaking of which, another of my friends recently referred to a Parkinson's as "speaking sign language with a stutter." He's going to hell. And so are you for laughing at it. Are these the kind of people you want making choices of aid distribution? No, of course not. Admit it, you're pulling for the bureaucratic, faceless, compassionless arm of the law to come through.

-D"Though I don't know what kind of arm does have a face"an

Editor's Note: For a scholarly (that is to say, unfunny) exchange about the aesthetics and psychology of tragedy, see Bentley's seminal Theory of History, and Foster's 7 Theses in response.

...and the Southern Shaved Bush refutes the going botanical orthodoxies

Kudos to the Leviathan on his brilliant repost-riposte below. I hate to draw attention from it, but I was glancing over the Oxford homepage which I so often ignore, and I stumbled upon what may just be the greatest and best thing in the world.

Great Tits Challenge Evolutionary Theory

Now, I'm led to one of two conclusions, each of which is sufficient to convince me that, in Hemingway's words, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. Either Oxford--the oldest, most prestigious and best educational institution in the world--has still got the sense of humor and set of balls so utterly lacking at the likes of Fenlands Polytechnic and the place my Bulldog-associate so lovingly calls Epcot Oxford, or the old Oxonian dons are so sublimely oblivious to all things peripheral to their ivory towers that this Pulchritudinous Pun simply swam over their heads with all the grace of a swan on the River Isis.

-H.R. Chortleton IV

Pissing in the Wind: Round IV, or, Why Dan Hates Freedom

I wholeheartedly agree with what Baron von Foster wrote, and honestly, have little to add. So to diverge from our usual weekly format, I will now direct my ire to Castro de Bentley.

In the original posting, Daningrad wrote:

President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts.

Why, comrade, do you hate America? Is it the freedom you hate? In an obscure post from several years back, he wrote:

Yes, I hate freedom.

(note: the author is paraphrasing)

So there you have it. He hates freedom.

A bureaucratic eunuch from the UN, financially supported no doubt from Dan's anti-freedom PAC, claimed America was being "stingy" with their aid. To which America grabbed our collective crotch and replied, "Stingy deez nuts!" Private donations have been pouring in so heavily that agencies have more than they can possibly use. Doctors Without Borders even told people to stop donating money to tsunami relief (people are more than encouraged to give money without earmarking it to the Asian crisis, but that's a whole different story).

But back to why Dan prefers to sleep with a cool, all-encompassing iron quilt rather than a nice, warm capitalist blanket. Digging further into Dan's shady network of writings, we find another window into his drab, beige-colored mind:

You know what I hate even more than freedom? Private property. Know what I really get off on, though? The rationing out of resources.

(note: this quote is from an actual article that was never written)

So Dan likes to give away his things to super-happy-fun-benevolent government, and then stand in line for hours on end to get his weekly allowance of slurry. Well, what's keeping you, Dan?! Is it freedom that's keeping you from doing this?! Why do you insist on hating freedom!

"Communism was a good idea," he says, "it just had some bad leaders." Know what else was a "good idea" with bad leaders? Gigli, and that movie fucking sucked. "What about socialism? Sweden and other Scandinavian countries are basically socialist, and they're doing fine." Oh, they're doing fine, alright. But when Lars and Hans aren't too busy building clogs, ice-skating around in chocolate leotards and combing each other's white-blonde hair they're hurling themselves off buildings. Not to mention their governments aren't socialist, but actually run by free-masons with idyllic visions of an uber-Aryan state.

I don't know about you, my sickle and hammer bearing friend, but I'm going to go buy some deep-fried fast food from a multinational corporation, make numerous unnecessary purchases of goods produced cheaply in third-world countries, and go write inflammatory things about my government.

(Same post, different blog)

"Knock Knock","Who's There?", "Tsunami", "Tsunami Who?" "Tsunami gonna come up with a punchline for this joke"

Let me just start, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with some statistics. Some agents of the United States of America, which UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland called "stingy" last week, have ponied up the following:

-Pfizer: $35 million
-Coca Cola: $10 million
-Exxon Mobil Corp: $5 million
-Citigroup Inc.: $3 million
-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $3 million
-Merck & Co. Inc: $3 million in cash, plus drugs and health supplies
-Johnson & Johnson: $2 million, plus drugs and health supplies
-Abbott Laboratories Inc.: $2 million, plus drugs and other supplies.
-Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.: $1 million in cash, $4 million in antibiotics and antifungal drugs.
-Nike Inc.: $1 million
-American Express Co.: $1 million
-General Electric Co.: $1 million
-First Data Corp.: $1 million
-Amazon.com: collected about 87,000 donations totaling more than $6.2 million for the American Red Cross
-Wal-Mart Inc.: $2 million, plus donations.
-Catholic Relief Services: $25 million

That's more than $125 million and counting. This list is non-exhaustive. Also, it's a week old. Oh, and it doesn't include personal donations. Um, or the $1 billion in aid set to be paid out by the Feds themselves.

Just for grins, one could add that the US was responsible for 40 percent of all disaster relief aid paid out this past year. And if we were feeling particularly saucy, we might even let slip that Uncle Sam (or is it Uncle Scrooge?) donated $826 million to the UN World Food Programme, $100 million more than all the EU countries combined, despite the EU's larger population and GDP.

Stingy? If the US is stingy, then I'm unpretentious and satisfied with the size of my penis.

But boy, am I just all broken up about the fact the UN, the EU, the pot and the kettle all think we Yanks are a bit tight with the pursestrings. Its just that, by the time Marshall and Eisenhower and the boys got around to unclusterfucking Western Civilization and getting the electricity and running water turned back on in Brittain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the whole of Scandanavia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, the British and French Near East, Northern Africa, Turkey, Greece, Japan, China, Indochina, the Phillipines, Australia, Micronesia, and Luxembourg, we were a little light on walking-around money and a bit wary of real estate scams. But, if the free world is done borrowing the Modernity we loaned it, it could give it back and we could totally hawk it at the pawn shop for like, at least a hundred bucks.

See, what's sad is that a handful of minor powers have seen fit to make a point of outspending the US in Tsunami relief. The goal is to get into a pissing contest. If for nothing else, we can credit Bush with not biting. No press conference or forced contrition, just an envelope under the table and another subtle fuck you to the UN. Bush himself donated a measly 10K out of his own pocket. Why so little? Two reasons: 1) Sitting Presidents' assets are placed in a blind trust, and word is Bush's portfolio took a dive on account of some bad advice about Enron, and 2) Bush is setting a realistic example for every American. Nobody has to break the bank to help out. If you've got a hundred decent regular people, you don't need one Hollywood hero.

And you don't need your government proxying for you either. The American people are perfectly capable of recognizing a noble cause when they see one, and the needy are far better off when that recognition comes at the business end of a debit card than when it comes at the business end of a 155mm Howitzer.

There's a little spark of something left on this side of the pond that some other parts of the world look at as peculiarly as if it were a BetaMax(R) cassette player, and it's called Civil Society. You see, Civil Society is where people get together and do things without inviting George Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes they do silly things like sell each other tupperware, or collectively ape Oprah's literary tastes, or bowl for the league championship; and sometimes they do naughty things like dress up in latex and spank each other, or burn crosses, or vote; but every now and again they do something downright strange, like put a couple cans of soup or a few dollars or a little brawn and elbow grease on a plane and send it to people they'll never meet so their lives can be a little less miserable. Odd, I know. But then again we've always been a little fucked up like that.

I close, as all startlingly unoriginal polemicists do, with a quote--nay, a Gospel--from a petty Minnesota bourgeoisie by the name of Scott Fitzgerald. He said, "France was a land, England a people. But America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. It was the graves at Shiloh, or the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, or the country boys who died in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."

Now, despite my wont to make the occasional lighthearted quip, there is absolutely nothing capricious or funny about Mr. Fitzgerald's words. Except that "heart" rhymes with "fart".

-The Ugly American

Pissing Into The Wind

Are we stingy? We've been guilted by the liberal and Jewish-(mother-)dominated press into pledging $350 Million towards Tsunami relief. As near as I can figure, this is approximately the same amount it costs us to be in Iraq for 74 seconds. (twice in a row)

President Bush has made it clear, though, that any more aid is going to come not from the government but form the public. Right. Cause Americans have such great hearts. We being the nationality most able to avoid eye contact with people in squalid living conditions who are yelling at us directly. And we're going to open our hears and our pursestrings for victims that had the beachfront property we all secretly wish we could have instead of this stupid-ass-Ranch-split-level-condo-in-a-gated-community-ohmygod-i-hate-the-burbs.

So, commentators, have at it. Illuminate us. What should we do to help our brethren? Would the response be the same if the wave had hit Western Europe instead of Asia?

Newest Year Ever (or: The Metaphysics of Then)

Faced with the choice that befalls every man at some point in his life--spend New Year's Eve with the ones you love, or with the ones you love and a hundred assholes--I opted, as a change of pace, for the latter. I was invited to a party at popular high school acquaintance x's house, and there promised to be a cadre of TNA and a contingent of Ubercrombie there to help vomit forth the new year in suburban style. Now, I know you, dear Reader, would never guess it, but old Foster kid wasn't often invited to the cool-kid parties back in high school. But I married up, and the girlfriend managed to secure spots for me and a crew of friends so motley we make Vince Neil and Tommy Lee look about as well-ordered as the set of positive integers.

So what was it like to hobknob with the beautiful people, the quarterback, the homecoming queen, the social directors, the winners of yearbook superlatives? Well, this isn't fucking page six. If you want a tit-for-tat account, go read Live Journal. We here at the Enfranchised deal in Big Pictures. Often of naked ladies. But I digress...

Suffice it to say that watching the ball drop while taking a trip down memory lane that goes all the way back to when your balls dropped, was a bit surreal. I've been quoted by some sources as saying that youth is a funny thing in that you're supposed to be young when it happens, but I was old at sixteen, too fucking old to go around being reckless and carefree.

When high school ended I remember realizing with a gasp and a blink that I only had four years left to do the things I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and that if I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life. But I didn’t have the stomach or the semen for that.

Besides, freshman year at university is neither what’s expected by hopeful intellectuals nor what’s portrayed in B+ movies. I rarely did find the bunchings of sensitive sophists, eagerly powwowing around the vast depth of smart things and/or painstakingly harvesting their collective minds for one kernel of Universal Truth. Therewere no academic orgies, nor orgies of any kind. The frat houses were shotgun and brick affairs that led one into the other along the mediocrity of H Street. Their pulp-fabled glory was non-existent. The parties were—for lack of a better word—lame. And then I asked myself, What did you expect? Corridors of alternating pulpits and soapboxes manned by the future giants of art and politics situated under a cherry tree and flanked on either side by Coors’ Light Gardens and hook-up chateaus, fueled by a never-ending string of full frontal shots and gross out jokes? Is that what you expected? Yes. Yes it is.

But, alas, people were either typical or typically atypical of the most common common denominator. They’re Thin-Candy-Shelled-Men wandering in the RecycledLand, whose deviancies and rebellions fall neatly into accepted norms. The last new idea was that we should be open to new ideas, and now all that's left are second-rate, third-generation Subterraneans who wear their old costumes with all the oblivious absurdity of a British Magistrate in his powdered wig...

Maybe that's why the suburban shindig at x's house was so oddly satisfying. Call it the-devil-you-know, but these people whose adolescences waltzed with mine all those years ago, they were somehow softer now, realer and less anonymous than the herds of WASPs and JAPs and BoBos in training who graze on stale beer and resin at America's institutions of higher learning. Now they're my small town heroes: The prankster who joined the Corps and ships off to Iraq next month, but not before you buy him dinner; that popped-collar who kicked his low-grade coke habit and worked his ass from County Junior College to Big State University, and dropped some of his superiority along the way; the dandy who's finally out and happy and minus one chip on his shoulder; and, of course, all the girls you thought you could have saved, the best of them with something like a self now to go along with the flesh.

If I've rambled its because the point is slippery here. Essays that hit a vein ought, if 9th grade biology serves me, get eventually to the heart. But essays that hit an artery...well, there the end of the road is a thousand other roads. But I suppose if there's something to be gleaned from this dwelling qua prose, it's the lessons of that temporal nexus we call midnight--when the bleary-eyed, sentimental longings of the past and the bright-eyed, zealous pronouncements for the future hurdle toward one another for about ten seconds, and collide for the briefest of instants at the orgastic Nowly Nowness of Now. Its just about the only time the artist, hedonist, and scientist versions of You are ever seen in the same room together.

-The '05 Baby.

PS: How obscure was this post? Your opinion is valuable to us, and will help us continue to bring you only the most obscure insight here at The Enfranchised. Please vote using the Modern Language Association's Obscurity scale: 1 being Charlie's Angels and 10 being Finnegan's Wake.

Luxury's Lap

Mich Napolitano always was a funny bird. One of those guys who would be eccentric if he had money, but as things stood he was just plain crazy. I remember him explaining his Wiccan beliefs to seventh-grade me (he was an illustrious eighth-grader), when my knowledge of witchcraft was almost entirely culled from Nick-at-Nite reruns of Bewitched. And he and John Atkinson did a great scene from The Importance of Being Earnest at some high school drama festival (I can't remember who was Algernon and who was Jack, but, neither can the characters, so it evens out). So maybe it's because he's carved himself a niche in my mind's pantheon, but Mich Napolitano is the only person whose choice of Dunhill cigarettes I can respect.

You know Dunhills. Reds, Blues, Menthol Greens. They're the "top shelf" pack on the 7-11, holding their noses higher than the Camels and Marlboros to the left. They cost more, sure, but remember: you're not paying for a premium blend, you're paying for status. These have not one but two of those tin foil wrappers on the inside, presumably because a "Dunhill Man" needs to savor his cigarettes with a bit more freshness.

But if you really care about the quality of your tobacco, are you really shopping at the 7-11? No, you are not. You are shopping at Nat Sherman's or Mac's Smoke Shop or some store which caters to your taste. You are buying a brand no one has heard of because you think it will suit your palate better. If you are buying Dunhills, it is because you have an extra $1.80 burning a hole in your pocket and you want to treat yourself to "the best". The same reason that people buy Grey Goose or Glenlivet or Tanqueray Ten. These are not the best, these are just the best popular members of their classes.

So, enjoy your faux luxury. Drink it down. But I hope a small part of you remembers: there's no such thing as the best rum. So either invest as much time as disposable income and sample a wide range of sorts to develop your taste... or drop a packet of sweet and low in ethanol and call it a life.

How the Reviews Were Won [UPDATED]

In Today's Times, Margo Jefferon calls out performance artists. Great, the kind of sneering disdain for those cream puffs of the art world. Normally, I live for this kind of stuff.

"Do what you're good at," she yells (paraphrased, cause she's, well, let me put it this way: she hates talking in straight lines when circumlocution will do). Her call for collaboration is appreciated. But only as a critic. Any artist would be a fool to listen to her, unless they actually cared about the art.

Americans don't want to believe in collaboration. They believe in the monoartist: for a film, he writes, directs, lights, dresses, dollies grip, and controls each of the actors with an elaborate mannequizing machine he designed himself. Oh, also, he *was* the sick kid that inspired the whole damn thing. If a singer took Jefferson's advice not to write their own songs, every middle-class critic (the kind who actually create middle-class snobs, who are the ones spending middle-class dollars to create media-class empires) would deride them as just another pop-tart, propped up on the backs of hacks so untalented they can't even get their names known.

If you want to make it as an artist, you have to be Woody Allen. I mean, except for the, well, you know. But this is something so devious you have to be as neurotic as Woody to get it: every time somebody criticizes his jack-of-all-trades-approach by saying, "he may be a great director, but he limits himself with his acting", well, he just got you to compliment his directing.

And that's one more compliment for directing a major motion picture than you've ever gotten.

[Of course, the thing Jefferson would hate most is a world in which instead of using another's points, we responded directly. Shakespeare and his cronies^Wpeers were the men who took a tale they liked, and redid it. Now such productions are the province of Jerry Bruckheimerettes, looking for a cheap way to generate power by harnessing the rotational energy of Jimmy Stewart's Grave. How ironic to shape something out of the ashes of a movie called Flight of the Phoenix, eh? (if this blog were a Batman-era comic, there would be a sound effect balloon with the words, stylized, "Unintended Irony!") Of course, this is what English is like nowadays: armchair readers who only write about emotions at several syllables' distance. And historians have long since stopped talking about events, and only now discuss analyses of second-hand retellings.

Or, maybe in her darkest nightmares, she envisions a land in which some awful blogger, finding himself with nothing else to say, decides to tear apart nonsensically her earnest warning, instead of just taking to heart what substance he could find in it.]

Taunting on the Company Dime

Ah, New Year's. 'Tis the season for remembrance of a year gone. And of course, being Americans, that means that we have to quantify our appreciation in lists of ten. Every critic out there has taken it as his God-given right, responsibility, and privilege to espouse the top ten books, top ten pop albums, top ten movies, top ten top ten lists. Fine . Great. Good way to encourage people to think the way you do and buy more of your yellow journalism. But the one that struck me most was Ben Brantley's Top Ten Plays.

The thing about theater is that, well, you can only enjoy it if you're in New York, which the majority of NY Times reader's aren't. But, fine, this is their little nod to metrosexuality, or whatever. But fully half that list has already closed. So, basically, Mr. Brantley here is just bragging to you about what you missed. And this is what we're supposed to pay for?

Man I wish I'd gotten to see Jumpers...

Majored in Drama, with a concentration in disembowelment, specialty of self-evisceration

For years, television acting has been a field in retreat. First, simple reality: The Real World. Then, game shows (remember a simpler time? When Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was all we could hear about and we were only afraid of our own children turning guns on us, their peers, and eventually themselves?) roamed the earth. When the two were merged, the behemoth Survivor was created. Survivor begat Big Brother, and Big Brother begat a crapload of crappy, campy, crap.

Every show that had a script feared for its future. Those with intellectual humor ran and cried underneath a sofa. So did Frasier. It seemed like the only way to survive was to create characters so boring and predictable that no one would believe a writer had taken time to craft it. Cf. the longevity and popularity of Friends.

But the renaissance we are now experiencing is limited: you must be morbid to make it nowadays. The CSI's, SVU's, and ER's are taking over. Fox's House (about a quirkily genius doctor that I try hard not to enjoy, but still do) meets that network's definition of a smash success. Even this season's breakout hit, ABC's Desperate Housewives, features more dead bodies than fat ones.

Which leads me to wonder: how do actors prepare for this? Has Julliard begun offering a course in how to decompose? "Think like the worms. Feel the worms." How do you even cast that? "Well, I loved #17's rack, and her headshots were flawless, but let's not kid ourselves, #23 nailed that Grand Mal Seizing!" Or telling your relatives? I mean, it's at least respectable to only have part of your body featured if it's, e.g., the ear with that Diamond Tiffany's stud. But do you really want to be sitting around the Thanksgiving table, explaining to old half-deaf "Uncle" Tomas that you were the severed limb in the landfill on episode 712A3-- oh, and could you pass the meatloaf?

This is why, I say, we should forbid any expression that involves dead people. All sick must be played by bunnies and body parts replaced by lollipops.

-D"The Tell-Tale Sucker"an

Lowered Decision Expectations

Well, after weeks of turmoil and strife, the Ukraine is calm. Night has fallen, the birds are humming doo-wop, &c. And how was this Balkanesque dispute settled? By a Herculean margin of victory with Yuschenko pulling down (drumroll) 51.99% of the vote.

Wait, what? Less than 2% above even can now count as an irrevocable mandate of the masses? Well, I guess this is what we've been preparing ourselves for all these years. It's all been downhill since Reagan in 1984, when Mondale's mother sat little Walt-Walt down and said, "I'm sorry, honey, but he just seems so honest and damn loveable" before casting her vote for that proto-Schwarzenegger.

I mean, in Washington, people are basically just accepting the race is over because the current winner now leads by a commanding 130 votes. This is after she was losing by 261 votes after the initial count, and on the second recount. But, this is 13 times as large as the lead she first had: 10 votes. 10 votes! I've personally lost campaigns by a wider margin (I would have made a great homeroom representative).

But what use is just ranting? I guess I should just sit back and learn to love an electoral system that can be decided by someone nudging the voting booth a bit too heavily.

-D"TILT!"an

This Side of Purgatory

Well, now that Jesus H. Christmas is over, it's time for us all to stand up, dust ourselves off, and see what we managed to hang on to in the bumrush.

I'm happy to hear they still read print on the west coast, and that Bentley still reads so much of it. Word to the wise compadre: The things you don't get in Vonnegut--you don't get them because they're not funny. Also, there's nothing to 'get' in Anderson that you don't want there to be. Bottle Rocket is about being fourteen. Rushmore, Tennenbaums, exercises in the meticulous Peter Pan sublimity of being fifteen and sixteen, respectively. No doubt The Life Aquatic is about the vague meloncholy of seventeenness. Beyond that, Anderson's the tofu of filmmakers. It's all in how you cook him.

Because I know you, dear reader, hang on every word, I'll let you in on what kind of culture I've been conspiciously consuming in this post-coital, post-solstice winter.

Moby-Dick: I'm enjoying it far better the second time around. Maybe it's because when I read it the first time in high school it was presented to me from within the fascist restrictiveness of the middle-American, late-capitalist, faux-egalitarian educational system. Or maybe it's because I've been laid since then. Regardless, it works on two levels: 1) Minor hero in decline chases Death, Revenge, and a White Whale on the high seas (I know what you'll say, total Wes Anderson rip-off), and 2) the same exact thing, but replace hero with America and villains with Industry, Capital, and Manifest Destiny. Watch out for Melville's wit. They never tell you in school how brutally funny that m.f. is.

The Pentagon's New Map: Thomas P.M. Barnett is to Security Studies what Mos Def is to hip-hop: without them, their professions are just a lot of borderline sociopaths bragging about all the shiny things they've bought. Barnett is like Jack Ryan, Tony Robbins and Drew Carey rolled into one, and he's presented a theory of military power in the 21st century that should command as much of your attention as those Doritos presently are (I'm looking at you, New Jersey).

Esquire: Still the best glossy in America and the one with the best mix of high, low, and unibrow humor. The New Yorker be damned! Damned, I say! (By the way, te-hee-hee-hee).

Michael Loux's Metaphysics: If you only read one introductory treatment of Aristotelian metaphysics this winter, it shouldn't be this one.

John Broome's lectures on Normative Ethics: If you only read one series of unpublished lectures on Normative ethics given at Oxford University in the fall of 2004 which you were supposed to have attended but didn't, it should be this one.

Closer: This is the movie everybody should be talking about, but they're too busy talking about how Garden State is the movie everybody should be talking about. Great material, acted greatly. Even Julia Roberts shines. Highlight lines:

Ann: "Why?!? Why do you want to know?!? Why is the sex SO important to you?!?!"
Larry: "BECAUSE I'M A FUCKING CAVEMAN!"

and

Dan: "She has a good heart, too good for you [paraphrasing]"
Larry: "Have you ever seen a heart? It looks like a clenched fist covered in blood"

Anyway, run along now and do my bidding.

A M[icr]o[wa]veable Feast

Ah, Christmas Day. And while all you suckers are either celebrating the birth of Our Lord (gentiles) or plotting our downfall (you don't think we know what the rest of you do on this day?), us lapsed Protestants are bunkered away doing all of nothing.

In preparation for the closing of everything good and decent (ironically enough, on the day that I'm supposed to be most consumerist, I find nothing open), I stocked up: microwave dinners galore, diet coke to feed the 3rd Marines for a month or me for a weekend, and books. So many books. Yet to touch, I have Gravity's Rainbow, Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons (winner of a British award for worst sex scene of the year), Orson Scott Card's Enchantment, Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten (the most recent in the Harry-Potter-for-English-Majors Thursday Next series) and Godel, Escher, Bach.

Also in the basket was "Nothing Feels Good", a history of Emo. I couldn't pass up reading a chapter entitled "The Curious Case of Weezer." Turns out, odd guys. And I'm halfway through Angels in America (thank you, Jill Wurzburg, for recommending it.) And I finished Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (again, for suggesting, you get a shout out Justine FuckIForgetYourLastName). And then this morning, I saw Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

I realize now that the reason I've not truly enjoyed Vonnegut and Wes Anderson in the past is that, well, I feel like there's so much of it I'm not getting. I feel like everyone else who likes them listens to me say what I like, then laughs at me when I leave. Why is it so jumping? When I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, I feel like I get about 95% of what they put on the page.

But, you know, maybe I'm supposed to feel lost reading Vonnegut. Maybe Mr. Anderson's movie are supposed to seem odd, but laughily so.

Or maybe you're all just laughing at me.

Merry Saturday.

Legal Defenses TDQMIAWIFCMD

We all know about patient-doctor confidentiality. And husband-wife confidentiality. And owner-dog confidentiality (though not if your dog is a parrot).

Wouldn't it be great if alongside this recognized reason to shut up, and the fifth amendment, and "it depends on what your definition of includes includes", you were *allowed* to swear an oath, be on the witness stand, and say with a straight face "What Happens in Vegas Stays In Vegas"?

I.O.U

I hereby owe you, the reader, one (1) pithy, intelligent and reference-laden response on Blockbuster and Iraq. Since you are few in number this time of year, I hope the damage will be contained. You see, Christmas is both the most wonderful time and the least timely wonder of the year.

-D.R. Kringle.