Monday, December 31, 2007

Three things I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be seeing in my Brooklyn, NY garden on New Year’s Eve…

  

Happy (gulp) New Year!

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/31/07 at 01:06 PM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Sunday, December 30, 2007

The all-Auld Lang Syne Selector.  Happy New Year!

Auld Lang Syne on banjo (and rainbow suspenders)

Auld Lang Syne on tuba

Auld Lang Syne on six-string bass

Auld Lang Syne on the Theremin

Auld Lang Syne sung by Cosmo the border terrier

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/30/07 at 11:32 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Friday, December 28, 2007

Mr. 9/11 on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto:

Miss Teen South Carolina on Americans’ inability to locate their own country on a map:

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/28/07 at 12:05 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Sunday, December 23, 2007

“Frosty the Snowman”—Leon Redbone & Dr. John (from my favorite Christmas album of all-time, Christmas Island)

• THE MOM AND POP CULTURE SHOP: My old pal Anna, who I haven’t seen in ages, is running a great lil’ blog that spotlights her thrift store finds (outsider art, weird vinyl, etc.).  It’s a fun place to visit, her blurbs are a hoot, and it shoehorns nicely into the holidays.
  
• MATT BURLINGAME: Burlingame’s oddball sculptures and dioramas don’t shoehorn quite as nicely into the holidays (unless Christmas makes you think about zombies and robots), but if any of you would like to buy me some of his artwork I’d consider it to be THE.BEST.XMAS.PRESENT.EVER.
  
• BUZZWORDS OF 2007:  The New York Times says, “You didn’t hear them here first. But chances are that in 2007 you caught these phrases somewhere.”  Ummm, actually, no, I hadn’t heard about a lot of these.  I would have thought “Nose bidet” was a really bad band name.
  
• IT’S THE MANDATE, STUPID: The New Republic‘s Noam Scheiber posted a good analysis of why Barack’s been creeping up on Hillary
  

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/23/07 at 12:57 PM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Matt, Josh & Craig Romney pose during Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which they helped write.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/22/07 at 12:22 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Thursday, December 20, 2007

This year we’re joining forces with FREEwilly and releasing our Best Music of 2007 list in tandem.  You can check out their list here. Our “touch points” were more limited than in the past, so we didn’t attempt to combine our lists this year, but you can spot check both lists to see what we agreed on.

In 2007 I found myself listening primarily to the endless onslaught of grade-A funk and soul collections that were released this year (I’ll get to those on a later date), but below you can find the newly-minted gems that cut through the grind…

Best Albums of 2007

1. Blitzen Trapper—Wild Mountain Nation
The Kinks meet Pavement or, more specifically, Muswell Hillbillies meets Wowee Zowee. It’s like it was written and performed just for me.  And it was.

2. O’Death—Head Home (2007 Ernest Jenning release)
I’m cheating a bit because they self-released this in 2006 before Ernest Jenning picked it up and remastered it, but it needs many more faces to tear off.  If the term “life-affirming Appalachian stomp” doesn’t excite you, please go figure out how to fuck a doorknob. (More here).

3. Various Artists—Top Shelf 8/8/88
I’m cheating a bit because these songs were originally recorded in 1988 before they were discovered in New Jersey.  Only they weren’t and this is a shameless, badly-cloaked hoax. And I don’t care at all because I listened to this release more than anything else in 2007. (More here.)

4. Bowerbirds—Hymns for a Dark Horse
A few hippies who favor lilting acoustic ballads live in the woods in a trailer without electricity and form a band.  And, amazingly, they don’t suck.  At all. I want to make a parka out of them.

5. Wu-Tang Clan—8 Diagrams
RZA is so far off the hook on this one that the cord has snapped to Uruguay.

read the whole post »

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/20/07 at 11:15 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

I was going to move away from Francisco Nava and Oranginagate, but this quote from Time cracked me up:

Says Sherif Gergis, a senior and former Anscome president: “We saw conservative bloggers start to capitalize on this, saying, ‘Look at the politically-motivated indifference.’”

Gergis, who was also one of the e-mail recipients, says he had brushed off the threat until he got a call on Dec. 14 from Prof. George: [Francisco] Nava had been assaulted and was at the University Medical Center. At the hospital, Nava explained his story. “He described to us, in really creepy detail in retrospect, how it supposedly happened,” Gergis recalled. “He said, ‘Their breath was so distinctive; if I could only smell everybody’s breath, I would be able to pick them out.’”

(photo of Nava via Sadly, No!)

MORE: Thudfactor, the newest addition to my blogroll, has a great post putting the fake beat-down in context. Bravo.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/19/07 at 11:29 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The absolute best:

Kanye West—“Can’t Tell Me Nothing” (featuring Zach Galifianakis & Will Oldham)

 

The next best (alphabetical):

read the whole post »

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/18/07 at 10:56 PM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

This is what a patriot look like.

Rock.The.Fuck.On:

“Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy,” [Chris] Dodd said in a written statement Monday night, after the compromise was announced. “The President should not be above the rule of law, nor should the telecom companies who supported his quest to spy on American citizens.”

Congrats to Dodd for showing Reid and the rest of the Senate Dems where their spines are located.

A lot more here.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/18/07 at 08:44 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

The fun continues...

More from The Daily Princetonian

Francisco Nava ‘09 said his falsification of threatening emails to prominent campus conservatives and subsequent assault on himself stemmed from a belief that his actions would draw attention to the pro-chastity cause, attendees at a Monday-evening meeting said early Tuesday morning. The gathering included Nava, Butler College administrators and fellow Anscombe Society members.

[...]

  “He said he pummeled his face; he didn’t say what with. He scraped his head against a brick wall [and] broke the bottle ... over his head,” Anscombe president Kevin Staley-Joyce ‘09 said, referring to a glass Orangina bottle with which Nava had initially said his assailants beat him during the attack. “It certainly was enough to merit treatment by doctors,” Staley-Joyce added.

[...]

Nava admitted to being “responsible for everything that happened,” Staley-Joyce said, adding that Nava “saw Anscombe’s ideals as not making enough progress” and wanted to bring more publicity to the group’s cause.

“He wanted something big and showy as opposed to the approach that we set out in our mission statement,” Staley-Joyce said. The statement describes Anscombe’s goals as providing “social support and a voice” for students committed to its ideals and “intellectual engagement” on campus.

[...]

Additionally, Staley-Joyce said, he found it “strange” that he “couldn’t tell a whole lot of difference” between Nava’s behavior during the meeting and the way he had acted before the hoax was revealed. In terms of his demeanor, “it was almost as if I was meeting the same Francisco that I met this time last week,” Staley-Joyce said.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Here.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/18/07 at 08:10 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Monday, December 17, 2007

This weekend the nuttersphere was all aflutter about how a conservative Princeton student was allegedly threatened via email and then savagely beaten up for his views. He Who Cuts His Own Hair highlighted a comment from a post about the incident at Red State:

And as a commenter notes, this would get more attention if it had involved a noose on a doorknob even though in this case, according to the reports, we have an actual physical assault and beating.

Oops.

Just posted on the web site of The Daily Princetonian:

Francisco Nava ‘09 has admitted to fabricating an alleged assault on him that he said occurred Friday evening and to sending threatening emails to himself, other members of the Anscombe Society and prominent conservative politics professor Robert George, Princeton Township Police said today.

“He fabricated the story,” Det. Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said.

Nava was released to Public Safety and charges “have not been filed pending further investigation,” according to a statement from Township Police.

WE WILL, WE WILL MOCK YOU:

Atlas Shrugs: “Princeton Hate Crime: If it were a Black or Muslim Student .... the media would be beating us over the head with this story. Even the hoaxes get full media attention. Not this and it’s a horror.”

Brandon McGinley, The Daily Princetonian: “Whoever is responsible seems to have gotten the message that it is open season on people who defend morally traditional views on our campus. It’s time for the administration to send them a new message: the season is closed.”

Vocal Minority: “My guess is that nothing will happen to these perpetrators if they’re caught, owing to the religion and political views of the victim. Liberals claim to reject intolerance and violence; that statement is only half-right. It all depends on who the victim is. If the victim belongs to a group the left deems ‘protected,’ e.g., a religious, racial, or ethnic minority, then they will defend them to the ends of the earth.”

MarkTalk: “Compassionate Liberals beat conservative student to a bloody pulp, following death threats for his conservative political views or because he is a Hispanic Mormon, hard to tell with the mentally, culturally and socially retarded Moon Bats of the Left.”

The Strata-Sphere: “Left with know [sic] political recourse (no one is buying the paranoid delusions) these people have one recourse: take matters into their own hands. Do not be surprised if we see a spate of violence break out as we near the elections and there is no radical lefty among the top contenders. I think the top is coming off the restless and angry left.”

MORE: Gavin at Sadly, No! remembers Justin Zatkoff.

UPDATE: More info from NJ.com.

IN ADDITION: Eugene Volokh, who is supposedly an intellectual or something, opines: “And you further undermine others on the Right, some of whom might face real threats or attacks in the future but who will have a harder time being believed because of you. Lovely.”  Yeah, because as we all know, the righties are the most put-upon minorities in America.  As a Volokh commenter so succinctly put it: “Don’t we on the right EVER get our own Tawana Brawley?”

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/17/07 at 01:20 PM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/17/07 at 11:16 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Over the weekend the beltway crowd has pushed forth the meme that there’s some kind of John McCain surge in the works, but I just ain’t buying it. First of all, poll-wise, there’s just no evidence of it, so all they seem to be running with are some recent newspaper endorsements he’s received (and, please, the endorsement of the sniveling “Independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman won’t help at all).  Let’s take a look at what impact those newspaper endorsements will have according to Rasmussen:

Just 4% of Americans say an endorsement by their local newspaper will make them more likely to vote for a candidate. Thirteen percent (13%) say it will likely have the opposite impact.

McCain is dead in the water barring some weird confluence of extraordinary circumstances.  I still think Romney’s going to be their guy. The Huckabubble will burst relatively soon and Mitt’s sitting on piles of cash. Thompson is a dud and Giuliani is covered in ooze.

MORE: I don’t see Ron Paul doing much in Iowa, but look for a surprise showing by him in New Hampshire. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict he’ll come in third behind Romney and McCain.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/17/07 at 09:54 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

...and line of the day, too, over at And I Am Not Lying:

...his prose clinks like bullet casings on wet concrete.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/17/07 at 09:23 AM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Captain Beefheart—“Ice Cream for Crow”

• JAPAN HAS ALL THE COOL TOYS: I want one.
  
• BLOWING THEIR COVER: Roy at alicublog takes a look at the Republicans’ discomfort with Alan Keyes.
  
• THREE WORDS I NEVER EXPECTED TO USE TOGETHER: “Golf,” “kangaroo” and “masturbating.” (via Missing the Moon)
  
• THE RISE OF RUDY: Good article in the Washington Post examining the young life of Rudy Guiliani and how early events helped mold him into the massive dickhead he is today.
  

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/16/07 at 12:36 PM
Trackbacks (0) • Permalink