September 2008
“This is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle of it and I am not going to eat that cow patty.”
—
Paul Broun (Rep., Georgia) on the proposed bailout package.
This is the sort of southern fried Twain-ism that makes me want to move to the South just for the mint julep-sipping front porch social scene.
"If the markets fear that the nays have thrown their toys out of the pram..." →
portfolio.com
“A campaign against “self-abuse” had another lasting effect: The Seventh-Day Adventist doctor John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, a bland breakfast cereal intended to suppress the urge to masturbate.”
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Is the Fourth Great Awakening finally coming to a close? - Reason
Also: Graham Crackers
“I give wide latitude to blasphemy, so long as it is actually funny. However, if you strike at a king you must kill him; and if you make a joke about God, it had better kill. The ultimate comedic challenge is to make God laugh. If instead God just kind of stares at you in stony silence, or gives you one of those awkward courtesy chuckles, you’ve missed the mark. Big time. You had better give up while you’re ahead. Don’t test his mercy, like Tom Arnold.”
—One Cosmos on Religulous
Achewood's Chris Onstad Interviewed on Morning Edition →
npr.org
(via bg5000)
I had to turn it off when he started doing the voices. Please God let there never be an Achewood movie.
Turn to the Left
From Colestryker:
Question: Does wearing Chucks make someone any less of a self-obsessed attention whore? By wearing Chucks, isn’t one aligning themselves with certain “mainstream alt” lifestyle choices? Isn’t one, in essence, trying to portray a certain facet of his or her lifestyle that someone else wouldn’t normally gage just by looking at them? Not all girls wear Chucks, but a girl wearing Chucks signifies something, doesn’t it? Like maybe she wants to be “comfortable” but still hip? Like maybe she has good taste in music or is laid back but still cares about her appearance? And who’s to say a girl wearing Chucks or a girl wearing Puma’s is not the same as a girl wearing high heels? Attention is attention is attention. What kind of attention is valid? Doesn’t the fact that one can identify Chucks as Chucks and not just gym shoes signify that they are beyond your “average” shoe and thereby signal some sort of cultural icon?When I see a woman wearing shoes like this, I simply cannot take her seriously. If you value fashion over comfort that much, it means that not only are you a self-obsessed attention whore, you are also participating in that whole weird foot-disfiguring, back-breaking history of women wearing awkward high heels so men can ogle their jutting-out boobs and butts. Give me a gal in Chucks any day of the week. Oh yeah, and try not to break your ankle on those cobblestones, hon.
And furthermore, the sort of high heels evident in the photo of Louise Ebel is about the sort of attention you get from others interested in fashion. It’s not really about, “wearing awkward high heels so men can ogle their jutting-out boobs and butts,” but to make other people envious. It sounds terrible but it’s true.
Other questions: Why can’t what is fashionable also be comfortable? And, why should wearing something that’s comfortable be the end-all-be-all? And who defines what’s comfortable? Chuck Taylor’s are NOT comfortable to me due to the shape of my feet and the way the bones grew in my lower legs, so I don’t wear them. I usually wear flats when it’s warmer and boots when it’s colder, with the occasional high heel thrown in when I feel like it.
I should have just said “flats”, but this did not come to me initially, as I am male. I wear Chucks because they are the cheapest, most comfortable shoes that don’t make me look like I need a handler.
But that wasn’t really the point. I’m living in a small British town that is mostly paved with cobblestones. Every day on my walk home from work I see ridiculous European tourists in stilletos getting their heels stuck between the stones. Not only are they nearly in tears from the pain from walking around in these monstrosities, but they’re worried about ruining their $400 kicks. This is stupid.
Anyway, not all heels are that ridiculous. I wear cowboy boots throughout the winter. They give me an extra inch and make me look tough. That was a rant against ostentatious, impractical fashion, not against fashion as a whole or a plug for Converse.
“Similarly, I don’t think Carter is right when he says that libertarianism “is rooted in an ethic of utilitarianism rather than virtue ethics.” I think it would be better to say that libertarianism doesn’t see the government as the primary custodian of virtue, at least not of most virtues. The model that George Will used to call “statecraft as soulcraft” makes libertarians cringe, not because they don’t believe in soulcraft or think that the cultivation of virtues is vital, but because they don’t trust the government to be a sound arbiter of what virtue is or to implement it in citizens. It is true that the Founders used that kind of language, but they lived in a much more ideologically unanimous society, with a narrower range of differences in citizens’ models of virtue. Our society is, I fear, too diverse in its moralities for that. I’d rather the soulcraft be left to families and communities, insofar as they’re willing to take up that essential task, and I’d like the government to enable that soulcraft simply through its role in preserving our freedoms.”
—an excellent response to this.
What's brown and rhymes with "snoop"?
…
…
Dr. Dre
