Hi, I'm A Tea Partier

The Tea Party is many things, and sometimes folks have a hard time crystallizing exactly what it's all about. Here's a primer video:



Be sure to vote, sane people.

How Elite Are You?

A few days ago, Charles Murray of the Washington Post, who I have to assume is the definition of "elite," posted a boring old post about the out-of-touch elite, basically touching on every old, hackneyed cliche while doing so. But, because the internet is awesome, Claire Berniski made a quiz out of it, to which Kevin Drum responded, and hey, I'm game:


1. Can you talk about "Mad Men?" Yes.

2. Can you talk about the "The Sopranos?" Yes.

3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right?" Drew Carey, right?

4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? Nope.

5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? No.

6. How about pilates? No.

7. How about skiing? I guess yes - not sure what hold forth animatedly is - but I ski, and like it, so ...yes?

8. Mountain biking? No.

9. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? Yes. (This is a NASCAR driver, not the ex-coach, Survivor contestant...who I also know.)

10. Does the acronym MMA mean anything to you? Yes.

11. Can you talk about books endlessly? Yes.

12. Have you ever read a "Left Behind" novel? No.

13. How about a Harlequin romance? No.

14. Do you take interesting vacations? Yes. (Although, it must be said - before I had a kid.)

15. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No.

16. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? No. I don't even know where Boothbay Harbor is.

17. Would you be caught dead in an RV? Yes - in fact, my wife tells me we shall spend some retirement time in said RV.

18. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? Yes, but ideally only to Alaska. Otherwise, I'd prefer not to.

19. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo? Yes.

20. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? No.

21. How about the Rotary Club? No.

22. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? Well, I grew up in a town of 6,000 - but I don't think that counts, and since it's a suburb of San Francisco, I doubt it counts so ... no.

23. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? I think so - Hyde Park in Chicago should count. But, how the hell do I know what my neighbors do?

24. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? No.

25. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? No.

26. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes.

27. Have you worked on one? No.


OK, so as Drum mentions, you have to know how to accurately score this. But, if I'm scoring correctly, my "elite" score is: 14/27, or 51.8%.

By the way, how great is the internet that there was already a picture out there of specifically this number?

I think that makes me only partially an elite, and one that feels that it's not quite fair to ding me for not reading Left Behind or Harlequin romances - that's not solely out of distaste for the subject matter, but such quibbling is going to peg me as even more hopelessly elite, I suspect.

So, how elite are YOU?

Truth In Advertising

Apropos of not much (I can't quite say nothing), I updated some apps on my iPhone today - in fact, I was sort of suprised to discover that I had the Mint application on my phone, since I barely use it. It's not so much because I don't think it's valuable, or functional, it just hasn't grabbed me.

All that being said, one thing that drives me absolutely nuts with 'apps' is when they are unstable and crash frequently. It's caused me to delete more than a few, and wonder about whatever process Apple puts these through before allowing them to be listed or sold. (Plus, that review process sure lets in a lot of porn-ish apps, for such a stringent 'review' process...)

So, it's sort of nice to see this, describing the Mint upgrade:

I mean ... I love that. And if I'd been aware of the instability, I'd love it even more. More of this, please.

The Hawaii Chair

So, I read about this on Joe Posnanski's blog - apparently, I'm out of the loop because this has over 2.7 million hits already on YouTube, but ... wow. Posnanski spends most of his time being one of the best sportswriters in the business, but also has a pop culture addiction rivaled perhaps only by the Sports Guy.

He has a quest to find "the next Snuggie."

His requirements:

1. Aims to fix a problem that does not actually exist (blankets don't have sleeves)

2. Does not really fix the problem (Have you tried answering a phone in a Snuggie?).

3. Is still, for almost magical reasons, irresistible to many people.

And seriously, watch this -- can you imagine buying it?



At the end of his post, Posnanski perhaps stumbles on a selling point:

But only a great info-commercial can leave you more baffled at the end than you were at the beginning."

And maybe this is the secret. Maybe people will buy the Hawaii Chair -- like they bought the Snuggie -- because at the end of the commercial they could not help but think: "That's the dumbest product I've ever seen. Maybe I should get it. Nobody would make a product that stupid, there must be some redeeming quality in it that is just not coming through on the commercial."

That's how I feel. It SEEMS impossibly dumb. It SEEMS impossibly ineffective. It SEEMS impossible that someone would not only build a chair with a motor on the bottom that spins your butt around but also create a whole system to sell them to the public. But things aren't always as they seem.

Five Things About The Beard

This ... is awesome.



I too, think that Cholula Hot Sauce is AMAZING, by the way. (Best hot sauce...in the world.)

FEAR THE BEARD

Elect the Willfully Ignorant

I post this mainly because this video is starring my friend Rob, but it's making the rounds and should -- it's honestly not all that different from many Republican campaign videos and campaigns in general this season.



We should expect more, but we don't. At least here, we can laugh about it.

Stay Classy, Philadelphia

Giants 1, Phillies 0.

On the wolf-whistles fans were giving him (presumably to suggest that, because he has long hair and works in San Francisco, he's gay), The Freak had the line of the night:

"I must have a really nice butt," Lincecum said. "I was hearing a lot of them."

(And seriously, "Hippy Trash?" What is this, 1971?)

Once again, Giants 1 - Phillies 0.

Some Not So Deep Political Thoughts

The last California Gubernatorial Debate was held tonight, about five minutes from my house. Didn't attend in person, and wouldn't have watched any of it except my wife is more responsible than me. Of course, we've both made up our minds on who we are voting for but you never know with these things, right?

So, I turned it on, and heard Meg Whitman say the following (I may be paraphrasing slightly):

Proposition 13 is critical to the future of California.

Yeah...it's critically awful for California, and the only people who think otherwise are people who think the future of California is dependent on people not paying enough property tax to fund our schools.

Look, I'll be holding my nose when I vote for Jerry Brown -- it's not that I think he's a bad candidate, it's just ... seriously? In a state this large, we can't find anyone new? Seriously?

Awhile back, I wrote about a guy in Kansas who spent money to put up a billboard calling Democrats a "Party of Parasites" ... who also has taken over $1,000,000 in governmental subsidies. He didn't see a contradiction because he isn't lazy, it's his money coming back to him (he pays a lot of taxes, you see).

It turns out this is pretty endemic to many in the Tea Party (which, of course, is just a bunch of Republicans pretending to be a upstart political movement). Matt Taibbi has been writing about the Tea Party for Rolling Stone, and as you can imagine, it's not a pretty portrait.

Back in September, he wrote this:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact:

They're full of shit. All of them.

At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

Yeah, ouch.

Not content to just put merely a large pin in this idiotic, hypocritical movement, he's at it again:

This whole concept of “good welfare” and “bad welfare” is at the heart of the Tea Party ideology, and it’s something that is believed implicitly across the line. ...

The reason these arguments are inherently ridiculous is that if you live in America, you have a pretty good chance of being in some way or another dependent upon government aid. Whether it’s aerospace or military contracting or farm subsidies or grants in academia, medicine or the arts… most of us are in some way living off of this spending, directly or indirectly. Defense spending in particular has been a primary engine of American capitalism for more than half a century now. And government subsidies of agriculture and financial services have begun to rival defense largesse.

All of which would normally make it unfair for any journalist to go after a politician for taking government aid. After all, pretty much everybody has in some way or another lived off the government in his life – whether by working in a firm that takes government contracts, or attending a state school, or getting into a college thanks to affirmative action programs, or serving in the military or law enforcement, or collecting Medicare or food stamps or unemployment.

But these Tea Partyers make themselves fair game with their preposterous absolutist stance on government. If you call Obamacare radical socialism and unemployment insurance a parasitic welfare state program—well, guess what, asshole, you’re going to get rung up when we find out you had your whole family living off state medical aid and farm subsidies.

And yet, people still fall for this nonsense. Embarassing.

Speaking of Tea Party candidates, one of them (Christine O'Donnell) has had to put out a campaign video stating "I am not a witch..." while another (Sharron Angle) believes some cities in the country have enacted Sharia Law --- presumably simply because some cities have large Muslim populations -- and yet another (Rich Iott) likes to re-enact WWII by acting as a Nazi.

Now, it's this last transgression that I have both the least sympathy for and the most -- I'm not inclined to like anyone who is a Nazi sympathizer, but then again, historical reenactments of wars aren't that rare. (Though I've never heard of anyone re-enacting WWII, but what do I know?)

But then, Iott doesn't do himself any favors, when asked about this particular hobby:

Ohio Congressional candidate Rich Iott got grilled by Anderson Cooper last night on his rather unusual hobby of dressing up as a member of the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division, a unit in the German army during World War II.

Iott defended the members of the unit, who he said "wanted to fight what they saw as a bigger threat to them than Germany," so they joined up with the Nazis to fight the eastern front of the war against Soviet forces. "I don't think we can sit here and judge that today. We weren't there the time they made those decisions," he said.

Yep, folks...this guy won a primary in Ohio. Your modern Tea Party...

The Amateurs: A Novel by John Niven

If I told you that The Amateurs: A Novel by John Niven was a novel about golf, many of you would stop listening immediately. And it's really not about golf though the sport plays an important role. But Niven had the same issue when pitching this book, as told in an interview tucked into the nice "P.S." section of this book:

If you play golf, you forget what a dirty word it is to a lot of people. So gradually I started pitching the book as being about "murder, adultery, contract killing, drug dealing, and golf," and funnily enough, everyone seemed much happier.

And The Amateurs is indeed about all those things, and it's quite a fun ride.

The protagonist is Gary Irvine, a man sadly celebrating his birthday by shanking golf balls at a driving range (his wife, Pauline, who is cheating on him, gave him a gift certificate at the Pro Shop), and trying to avoid the realities of a generally unsatisfying life. In fact, the one thing that he thinks gives him happiness - golf - is as frustrating and maddening as anything. (All golfers reading this are nodding their heads right now.)

In fact, in no short time, we find Gary sobbing in his car - despite spending countless dollars and hours on golf, he still stinks and can't seem to improve. A friend takes heart and brings him out to the course where they start practicing, and in fact, Gary swings a perfect 6-iron and hits an amazing shot -- just as another golfer's errant shot results in Gary getting beaned in the skull with a golf ball, sending him into a coma.

When he awakes, his muscle memory is locked on that perfect shot, and Gary has suddenly become a fantastic golfer, so much that he sheds his handicap in a record amount of time. On the downside, the head injury has also left him with Tourette's Syndrome and another condition I'll leave to you to discover. What results is a seriously fun ride as Gary begins qualifying for the British Open, while trying to stop swearing and insulting his fellow golfers and patrons with the filthiest mouth on the course.

Of course, this book's title is plural - and the other amateurs notably include his thug brother Lee, who gets himself into serious trouble with gangster Ranta Campbell (who is also a big golf fan), as well as Gary's wife Pauline, a character developed perfectly for the readers to enjoy hating.

The book is quite fun (and I'm happy to see it's been optioned as a film because it's made for it), but if I have one complaint, it's that Niven writes the Scottish brogue in phonetic, making some passages almost impossible to read. One sampling:

"...so she's goat aw this meat she'd forgotten wis in there scattered aw over the kitchen flair -- she disnae think for a minute tae call ye and tell ye she's gonnae be late, naw, no oor Sadie - she's goat aw this newspaper doon tae soak up the water, I says tae her, Sadie, whit the bloody hell ur ye daeing defrosting yer freezer when ye know we're gauin up taie Glasgow? Och, she says, ah didnae think it'd take long! Is she no aff her suffering heed?"

If that's difficult, I can say that it gets easier as you get more used to it ... but it's quite a hurdle and one that I think really isn't necessary. I've had writing teachers say this is sloppy writing, and others point out that even if I try to read it in a Scottish brogue -- I'm from Northern California, so it's not really going to work anyhow. I'd much rather just have the characters use local expressions (Is she not off her suffering head?) rather than make me slow down my reading to try and decipher what often looks like code.

However, Niven has written a very fun novel that should appeal to golfers and non-golfers alike, and is well worth your time if you are in the mood for a really enjoyable read. Well done.

Rating: 7.5/10/0

For my complete list of books I've read, please visit here and roll up your sleeves.

What's a Worse Look?

Over the weekend, I was out quite a bit - first at the heartbreaking Giants game on Friday (made almost obsolete by the amazing come from behind victory in Atlanta yesterday), I saw at least five or six adult males wearing the Kung Fu Panda hats, seemingly without irony.

This appears to be ironic.I can live with that.

This is not a good look.

And then, on Saturday, while at a park with my daughter, I saw a father walking around with his daughters and reading his novel ... a copy of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight.  I'm really hard pressed to provide any good adjectives here - while I'm always encouraging reading, folks have to have some standards, right?

(By the way, a Google search on "straight guy reading twilight" yields over 226,000 results, none which are really encouraging. There is even a Facebook support group for these folks, linked above.)

But which is worse? Vote in the poll to the right. And feel free to mock and feel superior to anyone you see rocking either of these truly bad looks.

(Note: Due to my prior note about the Giants, I've decided to keep mum on this blog about their progress until they finish up their season, hopefully a few weeks from now. All I can say is, YES, I would vote Brooks Conrad at least a half-share in the playoffs. Ouch, babe.)

TV Roundup: The Greatest Show of All-Time.

We are here, the last entry in my TV Roundup, my self-indulgent write up of my twenty-one favorite shows of all time. At last report, I was detailing why Seinfeld is the 2nd best show of all-time, and in fact the singular funniest show of all-time. The entire list thus far looks like this:

21. Kids In The Hall
20. Taxi
19. How I Met Your Mother
18. Dexter
17. The Simpsons
16. The Daily Show
15. Mad Men
14. Arrested Development
13. 24
12. The Office (UK & US)
11. Lost
10. Cheers
9. Six Feet Under
8. The West Wing
7. Friday Night Lights
6. Survivor
5. Battlestar Galactica
4. Sports Night
3. The Sopranos
2. Seinfeld

Dang, that's good eatin'.  But they all take a backseat to our next and last entry, my favorite show of all time. It's a show I've written about several times, and definitely more than any other show.

It's a show that lasted five seasons, and I'd argue that three of those represent three of the greatest seasons of any television series. It was both funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking and shocking, and it took what seemed like a stereotypical 'cops and robbers' show and made it something so much more. The depth of the characters was surprising and challenged you to think differently about things, to question your expectations and maybe reset them slightly.

I'm talking, of course, about The Wire, the greatest show of all-time.

D'Angelo Barksdale: The king stay the king.

In Which A Metaphor Becomes Reality

So, here's how this goes ... while there are people out there who believe that there should be no taxes whatsoever, most people understand that some things should be public services, to ensure such things are available to everybody.

The common way this is described is by talking about the fire department. While one could argue that a police department, gas and electric, water and garbage could all conceivably be justifiably private enterprise, the idea of a fire department doing this has obvious bad results -- if your neighbor doesn't pay for fire services and his home burns down, there's a full fledged fire right next door to your house.

One can hear this exact argument, using the fire department as the example, rather often should he or she get into those kind of discussions because it's so patently obvious. In fact, it's such a bad idea I didn't know there were places that had, in fact, put this into practice.

Um, whoops.

A smoldering rage may be all that remains after Gene Cranick's home burned to the ground last week in Obion County, Tennessee.

This is not the same house, but you get the idea.

Firefighters are usually the bold "veni, vidi, vici" sort, but those from neighboring South Fulton could only say "veni, vidi." They came. They watched. That's it.

Cranick lives outside of the city limits and he admits that he forgot to pay a $75 annual service fee that would have provided him with fire protection. Firefighters wouldn't lift a finger, much less the hoses that might have saved the house.

The fire reportedly started in some barrels outside. As the flames crept closer to the home, Cranick says he offered to pay whatever it would take. The plea fell on deaf ears. Hours later, the home was gone.

So were three dogs and a cat.

"They coulda' been saved if they put water on it. But they didn't do it," Cranick told MSNBC.

This got national attention because of the way this part of the story is spun - they watched the home burn down, even though they could have put it out. (And seriously, they couldn't have gone in and saved the pets? That's just awful.) It's a disturbing image, one that seems more out of a dark satirical film than anything in, say, Tennessee.

But I find it more interesting because it's not just a good example of the popular metaphor, it's the exact damn thing happening. It's like if I went to a store that sold actual widgets, or if some one on reality television literally threw someone else under a bus.

By the way, Ezra Klein draws an interesting and pretty compelling parallel to the individual mandate in the health care reform:

When liberals explain why health care needs an individual mandate, the traditional metaphor is firefighting: Everyone needs to buy insurance for the same reason that everyone needs to buy fire protection. But if you leave the market unregulated, some people won't buy -- or won't be able to afford -- fire protection. And we're not comfortable letting their houses burn down. Similarly, if you leave health coverage to the market, some people won't buy it, and others won't be able to afford it, and then, when they get sick and need it, insurers won't sell it to them. But we're not comfortable letting them die in the streets. Hence, the health-care law.

When Republicans talk about repealing the legislation, they keep the argument abstract. It's about freedom. About American values. About Nancy Pelosi not reading the bill. When they actually try to repeal the legislation, things are going to get concrete in a hurry. It's going to be about this child with that condition being rejected by insurers. And she's going to be adorable, and her parents are going to tearful, and voters will be able to relate.

Already, Republicans are running from that argument, trying to pretend that they'll somehow preserve the protections for preexisting conditions while repealing everything that makes those protections possible. But the bill's unpopular parts are inextricably intertwined with its popular parts. Remove the unpopular ones and you're asking firefighters to sell insurance for homes that are already engulfed in flames.... If you're not comfortable explaining why you let someone's house burn down, you're really not going to like explaining why you let insurers turn their sick child away.

Um, co-sign.

TV Roundup: Seinfeld, #2

And down the stretch we come...when last we took a visit to the TV Roundup, my documentation of my top-21 favorite TV shows of all-time, I was detailing my third favorite pick, The Sopranos.

With only two shows left, it may be fairly clear where we are going, so I'm going to try and get 'er done as quickly as possible. But before we get to my next pick (spoiler alert - it's in the Title of this post), here's what we've done thus far:

21. Kids In The Hall
20. Taxi
19. How I Met Your Mother
18. Dexter
17. The Simpsons
16. The Daily Show
15. Mad Men
14. Arrested Development
13. 24
12. The Office (UK & US)
11. Lost
10. Cheers
9. Six Feet Under
8. The West Wing
7. Friday Night Lights
6. Survivor
5. Battlestar Galactica
4. Sports Night
3. The Sopranos

I'm looking at this list and here's what I have to say -- all those idiots driving around with Kill Your Television bumper stickers are bummed. Because in their insistence that TV is nothing but bad news, they are missing out on all these gems.

And my pick for #2 is an institution, one that became actually defined "Must See T.V.," added words to our lexicon and changed television for the better (while also spawning countless bad imitations). I'm talking, of course, of Seinfeld, the second-best television show ever made.

Timmy Lincecum Brings The Nuschler

Yes, folks, the San Francisco Giants are National League West Champions, and it's pretty awesome -- here's a fan-edited video of ace Tim Lincecum's response to the generally execrable Amy Gutierrez, asking him, 'Are you ready for your champagne shower?' His response, which was blasted across the stadium on AmyG's microphone?

"FUCK YEAH."




My absolute favorite part of this -- well, okay, it's when Brian Wilson grabs Tim and they yell in each others faces for a moment - but my second most favorite part here is listening to Amy shriek in terror at Tim's potty mouth.

Just awesome all the way around. It is, in some ways, reminiscent of a young William Nuschler Clark, one of my all-time favorite Giants, screaming, "I've been waiting so fucking long for this!" in the locker room after winning the West in 1987. (By the way, that was Clark's second year in the pros, making it even funnier, as well as his high pitched voice which was the icing on the cake.)

As faithful readers of this blog may know, I've been hyper-critical of GM Brian Sabean for years, and I admit that I have some crow to eat. But that crow? It's delicious.

LET'S GO GIANTS! (clap, clap, clap-clap-clap) 

TV Roundup: The Sopranos, #3

We have arrived at the top three of the TV Roundup, a countdown of my 21 favorite TV shows of all-time. This little exercise has stretched itself over almost three  months, it seems, but we'll be at the finish line soon enough.

Here's the list so far, and I must say I enjoy it more with every new installment. And, of course, now that we've hit the top three, it only gets better.

21. Kids In The Hall
20. Taxi
19. How I Met Your Mother
18. Dexter
17. The Simpsons
16. The Daily Show
15. Mad Men
14. Arrested Development
13. 24
12. The Office (UK & US)
11. Lost
10. Cheers
9. Six Feet Under
8. The West Wing
7. Friday Night Lights
6. Survivor
5. Battlestar Galactica
4. Sports Night

By the way, here's a tip I'll take the next time I start some foolish countdown list -- don't give away the name of the new entry in the Title. But, I've been doing it, so you already know my next choice, The Sopranos.

Rejected Movie Poster

Courtesy of The Film Vault, it's pretty easy to see why this one didn't make it, though apparently it was briefly in actual circulation.

I believe Bryan Bishop's quote was:

"It looks like they're on amyl nitrate poppers, and Yogi Bear is pounding Boo-Boo!

...

Look at their eyes! Look in their eyes!

Look at the joy!"

Yes...yes, it does.

And pairing that with the line, "Good things come in bears." was, in retrospect, probably the death knell for this bad boy.

Happy Friday.

Friday Tuneage: The History of Rap

A few people shared this link on Facebook, but I didn't click through until right now, and ... wow. First, Jimmy Fallon can, suprisingly, bring it. And Justin Timberlake continues on his tour of, "Wow, that guy is actually pretty cool" tour:




Really, sit back and enjoy this one - a few times.

Happy Friday.