Johnny Depp: ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’

CC photo by Flickr user ATempletonPhoto.com

Vanity Fair this month features an interview with Johnny Depp in which he describes how he played the Jack Sparrow character from Pirates in the Carribean:

“They couldn’t stand him. They just couldn’t stand him,” Depp says of Disney’s reaction to his controversial interpretation of Sparrow. “I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’ Depp reveals to Smith, however, that he remained unfazed by the studio’s hysteria. “Upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?… And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite… ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ Which really made her nervous.”

Sad Songs and Waltzes

It’s Tuesday afternoon, so you’re clearly in too high of spirits, so here’s a pair of devastating stories to bring you down a little. If you’re not sad after these, you have no soul.

When You’re Forced to Cheer for the Man Who Raped You

Presumably, H.S. saw her attackers at school on a regular basis. As a member of the Silsbee High cheerleading squad, she even attended – and cheered at – their sports games. Where H.S. drew the line, however, was chanting the name of her rapist. When the rest of the squad would cheer Bolton on, H.S. would stand back quietly. “I didn’t want to have to say his name, and I didn’t want to cheer for him,” she said. “I didn’t want to encourage anything he was doing.”

I’m An Illegal Immigrant At Harvard

Joan Didion once explained that someone with a plane schedule in their drawer lives according to a slightly different calendar than everyone else. Will these next seven months be the last I spend in the United States? It is November and I have already lost the ability to think in the future tense, as if my heart had anesthetized my mind in preparation for the possible disappointments of the next several months. I sleep without setting any alarm clocks. I speak faster in hopes that I might get more English words in. I kiss slower to feel more, here, longer. I’m at a road that bifurcates into continents and I am terrified because I know I might once again have to live with a decision that is not mine to make. It would hurt to be forced to leave, but it hurts to stay the way I’m staying now. I belong to this place but I also want it to belong to me.

Impact Bold: Pentagon Report on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

The Defense Department has released its nine-month readiness study on ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning gay and lesbian servicemembers from serving openly in the military.

New York Times:

The Pentagon has concluded that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the United States armed forces presents a low risk to the military’s effectiveness, even at a time of war, and that 70 percent of service members believe that the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law would be either positive, mixed or of no consequence at all.

In an exhaustive nine-month study on the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 17-year-old policy that requires gay service members to keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge, the authors concluded that while in the short run a repeal would most likely bring about “some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention,” it could be mitigated by effective leadership.

LA Times:

The authors acknowledge that service members “repeatedly” expressed the view that allowing homosexuals to serve would “lead to widespread and overt displays of effeminacy” among gays, as well as “harassment” and unwelcome advances.

“A higher percentage of service members in war-fighting units predicted negative effects,” the survey said — a finding likely to be seized upon by opponents in Congress, who have argued that overturning the law during a time of war is too risky.

Many opponents have cited concerns raised by the chiefs of the four military services in arguing against repealing the 17-year-old statute. The chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force and Marines have all expressed reservations about ending the ban, but resistance appears strongest among the Marines, the smallest of the services and in many ways the most conservative.

…

The panel recommended against creating separate bathrooms and living facilities for homosexual service members, arguing that to do so would create a “logistical nightmare” and stigmatize homosexuals.

Washington Post:

According to the results of a survey sent to troops this summer and cited in the report, 69 percent of respondents said they had served with someone in their unit who they believed to be gay or lesbian. Of those who did, 92 percent stated that their unit’s ability to work together was very good, good, or neither good nor poor, according to the report.

Combat units reported similar responses, with 89 percent of Army combat units and 84 percent of Marine combat units saying they had good or neutral experiences working with gays and lesbians.

At the same time, the survey found that 30 percent of those surveyed overall — and between 40 and 60 percent of the Marine Corps — either expressed concern or predicted a negative reaction if Congress were to repeal the law.

Of course, John McCain isn’t impressed.

Brian McCabe at FiveThirtyEight looks at some related polling data.

What is the deal with Hanukkah, anyway?

Mike Wirth brings us a pretty awesome infographic explaining, well, the deal with Hanukkah (which begins tomorrow night). Best part: Citing “My Nana” as a source.

Tax policy and ownership versus renting

In America’s ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence… To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will … build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance – preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.

– President George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address

In 2005, after winning reelection, President Bush presented an inspiring vision where everybody would be entitled and able to own their own home. He presented this as a good ends until itself: that people who could own their own homes could own their own futures and legacies.  It was largely a set of loose policies that, tied together with the mortgage interest deduction and in concert quasi-government agency Freddie Mac, would encourage home ownership (it was also a theme that tied together Bush’s other policy objectives, namely social security privatization). This wasn’t a new push; in fact, President Clinton unveiled a “National Homeownership Society” with roughly the same aims in 1995.

But home ownership is not a good objective in itself. As we’ve learned, home prices do not always appreciate,  and ownership is not always economically best for families. For many, renting makes more economic sense, and renting is a large part of urban life. No matter how skewed the incentives, there will always been a large swath of the population who rent their homes.

Of course, any policy that favors home ownership will have the equal and opposite reaction of burdening renters. And, of course, renters tend to be poorer than homeowners. Also, as we’ve discovered, the interest deduction really only makes it easier for people to buy houses who already would be buying a house anyway.

Alexander Hart at The New Republic does a pretty good job of explaining how the mortgage interest deduction favors the wealthy:

[I]t’s clear that the benefit derived from the deduction is almost perfectly increasing with income. Low- and middle-earners are less likely to itemize their returns, which makes them unlikely to benefit from the mortgage-interest deduction. And because they make less money, they pay taxes in a lower bracket—meaning that every dollar in deductions reduces their tax bill by less than it would for someone in a higher bracket. Calling the mortgage-interest deduction a middle-class tax break essentially requires us to define someone in the 80^th or 90^th percentile of earnings as middle class. But they’re not; when you make more than 80 percent of the country, you’re rich, even if you don’t want to admit it.

Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism does some digging, and finds another burden on renters: property taxes that favor owner dwellings over multi-family apartments. He links to a paper (PDF) published in the Housing Policy Debate journal:

The study finds that for the nation as a whole, multifamily rental housing bears an effective tax rate (tax divided by property value) that is at least 18 percent higher than the rate on single-family owner-occupied housing. This gap appears to have arisen during the 1990s. The level of taxation and the apartment/house differential vary considerably by location. Much—but not all—of the differential is associated with the fact that apartments have a lower average property value per unit than houses. The residential property tax, as implemented, promotes low-density development, disproportionately burdens lower-value properties, and may impose higher taxes on apartment residents than on homeowners with identical incomes.

Truly, it is time to rethink the policy priorities that favor owners over renters. It’s absurd that property tax rates be  regressive, but that is, ultimately, the consequence of wrong priorities. It’s the same backwards  thinking that aims to keep tax rates low for the wealthy while blocking benefits for the long-term unemployed. Additionally, at both local and regional levels, it encourages sprawl and low density development, which in turn encourages inefficient use of energy resources: sprawl necessitates more car use, while spread-out single-family dwellings cost more to heat and cool.

In the Washington, D.C. region, housing costs so much that one in five renters and one in seven homeowners in the Washington area spend more than half their income on housing. This gives lie to the common perception that most people want to live away from each other; clearly, the market is sustaining high enough costs that demand is far heavier than supply. Tax incentives that encourage density, but making renting easier, instead of ownership, which encourages sprawl, would be one step towards bringing this back into balance. And, while unemployment benefits have a strong stimulative effect on the economy, I suspect that assistance to renters, as opposed to owners, would likewise be strong. Funny how helping those who need it tends to be good for the economy as a whole.

Finally, I’m heartened that the mortgage interest deduction is on the chopping blocks of almost everybody’s deficit cutting plans. It costs over $100B a year, so it is an attractive cut (even though it is wildly popular—everybody loves tax breaks). Making it a credit instead of a deduction would cost as much, but would actually help the less wealthy who don’t itemize their deductions. Dropping it altogether is a better solution.

“Get Your War On” is back

David Rees did two new pages of his classic “Get Your War On” for New York Magazine. Go check them out.

Once again, meet Steve King, the man who will be in charge of immigration legislation in the House

We’ve discussed Iowa Republican Representative Steve King’s hijinx before. As a living lesson that elections have consequences, now he’s likely going to head the House immigration committee. Bryan Curtis of The Daily Beast, offers a solid assessment of King’s record on immigration:

If the GOP votes as expected this month, Steve King will be in charge of immigration legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives. For proof that a meteor hit D.C. on November 2, listen to the ideas running through the head of the likely next chair of the immigration subcommittee. King has called for an electrified fence along the border. He wants to interpret the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to deny birthright citizenship for immigrants who have children here. He has dubbed illegal immigration not just a “slow-motion terrorist attack” but a “slow-motion holocaust.” “The line of scrimmage has moved closer to our goal line,” King tells me, “and you’ve got a different team calling the plays.” What gives liberals tremors is not just that Barack Obama’s immigration agenda is dead. It’s that King’s swaggering personality will dominate the debate for years.

…

King’s specialty is the outrageous ad-lib. “A lot of that stuff happens spontaneously,” he explains. In 2008, King predicted terrorists would be “dancing in the streets” if Obama were elected president. He dismissed the torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison as mere “hazing.” In 2006, he appeared in the House carrying a miniature replica of a border fence—it looked like King’s entry in the science fair. Running along the top of King’s mini-fence was a wire he said would be filled with electrical current. “We do that with livestock all the time,” King explained.

These are not gaffes; to believe in gaffes, King would have to believe in spin. No, King has honed a kind of empathy-free immigration rhetoric. He defers to the law at all junctures, just as Emmett King used to when he read to his family from the Iowa code books. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat who is surrendering her immigration subcommittee chair, recalls a 2007 bill that allowed more Afghan and Iraqi translators to obtain special visas to enter the U.S. “When we took it to the floor,” Lofgren says, “Steve King—and I thought it was irrational—called it ‘amnesty.’”

Morning Constitutional – Tuesday, 30 November 2010

They’re no Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, but maybe that’s the point– apparently having James Franco and Anne Hathaway host the Oscars this year is supposed to help lure in younger viewers.  And now, your morning constitutional:

Despite accusations of fraud and mismanagement in Haiti’s general election on Sunday, international observers from the Organisation of American States and Caricom, the Caribbean regional grouping, say that the election is valid.

Analysis of the WikiLeaks diplomatic documents continues.  The NYT editorial page calls the leaks “embarrassing” but says they show US diplomacy to be “appropriate and, at times, downright skillful.”

Hillary Clinton is not so sanguine; she called the leaks “an attack on the international community.”  Jack Shafer at Slate, meanwhile, thinks the revelations should force Clinton to leave her job.  And the Pentagon is investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be charged with violating the Espionage Act.

In Oklahoma, a federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against a ballot initiative that passed there in November, which would ban state courts from considering international law or Sharia law.

Following claims that Google has misused its dominant position in online searches, the European Commission–the EU’s top antitrust regulator–has begun an investigation into the company.  This is not the first such inquiry; Google is also under separate investigations in Italy, France, and Germany.

A Pentagon study released today deals another blow to DADT: based on a survey of 115,000 troops, the study argues that allowing gays to serve openly in the military would not damage the military’s ability to fight.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has launched a new social network, Jumo, a site dedicated to social activism.

Japan was hit by a 6.9-magnitude earthquake yesterday, but so far no injuries or damage has been reported.

President Obama meets with Republican leaders today.

On the other side of the aisle, House Democrats plan to hold a vote this week on middle class tax cuts, even though there’s little chance of such a measure passing in the Senate.

“When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the evenings.”  Apparently, the bright red bees that have appeared recently in Brooklyn hives were acquiring their color from a nearby maraschino cherry factory.

Finally, the story of a man after my own heart.  The head of the Washington State Potato Commission went on an all-potato diet for 2 months to call attention to the health benefits of the common tater.  After his 60-day diet, Chris Voigt and his doctor were both surprised to find he’d lost 21 pounds and his cholesterol dropped by 67 points.  Take that, people-who-say-potatoes-have-no-nutritional-value!

Unsuitable for viewers under 75

The Simpsons once again this week took a job at Fox News (check out last week’s if you missed it). However, it’s been hard to find online. Simpsons Executive Producer Al Jean explains:

Jean: It was inserted late because we did the first joke last week and Bill O’Reilly got upset and called [the characters] “pinheads.” If you’re calling cartoon characters “pinheads,” what does that make you? [Simpsons creator] Matt Groening wanted to do a response to O’Reilly so we slipped this in just for U.S. version. We didn’t pay to put it into every edition, which saves the company money that can be funneled back to Fox News and O’Reilly.

Also, you should check out this profile of Simpsons writer Bill Oakley (seasons 4-8, so relax, it’s the good ones), where he describes how the classic Simpsons episodes were written.

Ross Douthat Has Some Predictably Asinine Opinions About the Catholic Church + Contraception

Naturally, Pope Benedict’s pronouncement that condom use is morally acceptable in certain situations has gotten people talking.  To be honest, my general skepticism toward the Church makes it hard for me to evaluate the news objectively– I’m too caught up in but isn’t it absurd for the Pope to be dictating anyone’s sexual morality when his church still hasn’t dealt with the unequivocally awful sexual sins within the church itself? and however they cloak it in moral arguments, isn’t the conservative Christian stance against birth control really, at heart, about keeping women barefoot and pregnant and subservient? and so on.  So I think the Pope’s new comments are a good thing, but it’s hard for me to get too excited about them.

In perusing the blogosphere, it occurred to me to wonder what Ross Douthat has to say on the subject.  Ross always seems eager (like, weirdly eager) to opine on women’s sexual choices and the inevitable deviance of those choices.  Sure enough, here he is opining, using his big words (“Condoms, Catholicism, and Casuistry” is the title).  Oh Ross, you’ve become almost too predictable.  High-minded rhetoric?  Check.  Combined with sneering dismay at the morals of contemporary Americans?  Check.  Okay, onward with some quotes then.  At the heart of Douthat’s treatise is his own view on contraception.  Like usual, he’s reluctant to come right out and say that he thinks that birth control is only for bad, bad women, but that seems to be the bottom line.

True, he says, many Catholics dissent from the Church when it comes to birth control.  But “the fact that the Church’s moral reasoning seems unpersuasive may just reflect the distorting impact of a contraceptive culture on the individual conscience.”  Oh may it, Ross?  Tell me more.

The Church was right to prophecy that a contraceptive-friendly culture would become increasingly hostile to traditional Christian sexual ethics across the board…Likewise, the Church’s assumption that the widespread use of artificial birth control would lead to more divorces and more abortions (rather than fewer of both, as many voices argued in the ’60s) was largely vindicated by subsequent trends. [emphasis added]

[I tried to think of an appropriate sentence to express my emotions on reading the second sentence, but all of them began with profanity, so I'll just leave you to fill in the *&%%$!!!!??! blank]

Okay, let me get this straight.  What this man (who gets the NYT editorial page as his soapbox) is saying is that birth control use caused an increase in both divorces and abortions? Really?  Where is the data to back this up?  Didn’t you ever take a stats class in college, Ross?  Where they teach you on the first day that “correlation does not equal causation”?

As per usual in a Douthat piece, this absurd claim is stuck in the middle of a dense paragraph, just one of another long list of “facts” because hey, if they’re all bunched together like this, he must be making a lot persuasive points!  Here’s another:

[The Church] was right to suspect that the advance of artificial reproductive technologies wouldn’t stop with ortho-trycyclen, and that the quest for technological “solutions” to intimate problems would lead to the commodification of human life on a grand scale.

Only, wait, none of these are facts at all!  It’s all ideological bullshit masquerading as truth!  Did I accidentally stumble onto the Vatican’s newsletter, or Fox news?

I planned to write more about condoms, but I’m a little distracted because why the hell does this guy still have a platform at the NYT for his lies?

Another Obama Proposal That Excites No One… Except John Boehner? Come Again?

Today, President Obama announced his support of a two-year freeze for all federal employees’ salaries.  Unsurprisingly, the employees themselves don’t seem too keen on the plan, nor does Obama’s own party at large.  The only people who are on board, apparently, are the GOP leadership, who are happy to take credit for the idea.

Boehner:

I welcome President Obama’s announcement, and hope he will build on it by embracing much-needed steps to reduce both the size and the cost of government, including the net federal hiring freeze Republicans propose in our Pledge to America.

Translation: yeah, good start, I guess… but if it were up to us, we’d do it better.  Oh wait, I don’t even have to decode, because here’s what the soon-to-be Speaker says next:

Without a hiring freeze, a pay freeze won’t do much to rein in a federal bureaucracy that added hundreds of thousands of employees to its payroll over the last two years while the private sector shed millions of jobs. Today’s action is a clear indication that the Pledge to America, which lays out concrete steps to cut spending and reduce the size of government, is the right plan to address the people’s priorities. [emphasis added]

Given that Obama doesn’t have any actual power to enact the freeze, what exactly was the point of his pronouncement?  It’s not like the GOP is going to give him any credit.  As Boehner makes clear, their party line is that Obama is caving, that his proposal somehow acknowledges that Republicans have the superior plan for America.  Rep Eric Cantor echoed Boehner’s smugness, saying “We are pleased that President Obama appears ready to join our efforts…”  Will the GOP spin work?  Will they succeed in getting the credit, while Obama is left looking like a hanger-on?  If the comparative messaging success of the two parties over the past two years is any indication, the answer to both questions is probably yes.

Perhaps the more important questions are 1)  How much effect would the freeze really have on the deficit?  and 2) How likely is the proposal to actually be enacted?

On first reading, I figured the call for a federal pay freeze is a lot like the constant cries for an end to earmarks.  Going after supposedly overpaid bureaucrats who’ve kept their jobs while the private sector has suffered seems like a popular populist mission, but probably not all that effective in terms of deficit reduction.  My personal political correspondent, Jack Burden, though, tells me the freeze would save about $28 billion over ten years, which clearly isn’t insignificant.

He also says he thinks the proposal will be very popular– the public at large cares a lot more about cutting spending than protecting government employees’ salaries.  Of course, whether Obama’s proposal will actually make it into law is another issue, especially given that Democrats in Congress have opposed similar proposals initiated by Republicans in the past.

Opportunism in ideology not so equal opportunity

Douthat, in his column today, writes that on the topic of security versus liberty, both sides have basically aligned in such a way that as long as they’re the ones in power, they don’t mind the intrusion of the security apparatus:

But because a Republican was president instead, conservative partisans suppressed their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an open-ended war on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns accusing the Bush administration of shredding the Constitution.

…

In other words, millions of liberals can live with indefinite detention for accused terrorists and intimate body scans for everyone else, so long as a Democrat is overseeing them. And millions of conservatives find wartime security measures vastly more frightening when they’re pushed by Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano (as the Drudge Report calls her) rather than a Republican like Tom Ridge.

The first thing I thought was: “Where are these millions of liberals who don’t mind indefinite detention as long as the president is a Democrat?” Followed pretty closely with: “And what sense does that make?”

Turns out The Atlantic’s James Fallows was thinking similarly:

Yes, it’s true that some liberals who were vociferous in denouncing such practices under Bush have piped down. But not all (cf Glenn Greenwald etc). And I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy — as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.

So: it’s nice and fair-sounding to say that the party-first principle applies to all sides in today’s political debate. Like it would be nice and fair-sounding to say that Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are contributing to obstructionism and party-bloc voting. Or that Fox News and NPR have equal-and-offsetting political agendas in covering the news. But it looks to me as if we’re mostly talking about the way one side operates. Recognizing that is part of facing the reality of today’s politics.

Athelete finally blames God for defeat

Normally, athletes like to praise God when they emerge victorious, whether by catching a touchdown pass, dinging a home run, scoring a goal. And yet, God never gets the blame for losses. Well, until now. Buffalo Bills receiver Steve Johnson dropped a game-winning touchdown pass in overtime yesterday. How did he react? By dropping by Twitter, of course, and blaming God:

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

Maybe this will make the late and great George Carlin smile:

What can we do to silence these Christian athletes who thank Jesus whenever they win and never mention his name when they lose? Never a word. You never hear them say, “Jesus made me drop the ball,” or “The Good Lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage.” According to these guys, Jesus is undefeated; meanwhile, these assholes are in last place. Must be another one of those “miracles.”

New York Times Columnist Line of the Day

If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality.

Today’s is from Paul “The Little Professor” Krugman, who opens his column “The Spanish Prisoner” with the following:

The best thing about the Irish right now is that there are so few of them.

Actually, the column’s pretty good, and you should read it, latent hibernophobia aside.

Morning Constitutional – Monday, 29 November 2010

Good morning, everybody. Willie Nelson has been charged with marijuana possession. Now, your morning constitutional:

The lame-duck session of Congress returns this week to face a daunting mess of economic issues such as the budget and unemployment benefits. Democrats seem poised for a battle over the Bush tax cuts, but unsure of their strategy.

Senators show that politics, not policy, holding up New START treaty.

The E.U. has approved a 85 billion euro rescue package for Ireland.

Illinois Republican Mark Kirk joins the Senate today when he is sworn in this morning by Vice President Biden.

Presidential candidates in Haiti allege fraud in elections held yesterday. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party, the largest opposition party, failed to win any seats in Egypt’s election, and accuses the government of fraud. Ivory Coast awaits run-off election results.

In an effort to control military health care costs, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates may ask to raise fees for the first time since 1995.

Sen. John McCain believes “don’t ask, don’t tell” is working and compares Sarah Palin to President Reagan.

The SEC has nullified a provision in the new financial regulation law that requires asset issuers to publicly disclose ratings.

Looks like the New York Times was left out of the initial round of access of the newest information dump from WikiLeaks and got access from the Guardian.

New round of climate talks begin today in Cancun.

Fire was set to a Portland mosque frequented by a terror suspect.

Since Russ Feingold lost reelection, who could be the next defender of civil liberties in the Senate?

Can the Chinese become big spenders? While their economy has grown astronomically, their health and life expectancy have not.

John Bolton’s considering running for President.

Was Christopher Columbus actually Polish?

The Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers. At the top: exactly who you think.

The darker side of Bingo.

Dan Aykroyd confirms rumors that Ghostbusters 3 is in the works.

Finally, a Swede broadcasts music from his stomach, but disappointed in audio clarity.

And don’t call me Shirley

Airplane! and the Naked Gun series may be hilarious movies, but they’re strikingly unquotable. In fact, the writing is pretty terrible—it’s truly a testament to Leslie Nielen’s comic awareness and timing that not only made them watchable, but wildly entertaining.

In Which I Win Another V&V Bet

Excuse the self-promotion, but…

That’s right.  It’s only November 28, and I just exceeded the NaNoWriMo word count goal.  50,322, and I’ll probably keep writing for the next couple days (and perhaps beyond).

Is this a good book?  Not hardly.  There might be some bright spots, but much of the writing is maudlin, trite, self-indulgent, and flabby.  Am I still really psyched to have written that many pages?  Hell yes.

You guys, I am not by any measure a “disciplined” writer.  I go months without any creative writing whatsoever, and then I write a sad journal entry about how I “never write anymore,” and then I go another few months without writing.  My (first) point is: if I can do it, you can too.  And: sometimes it’s fun to aim really high.

Final point: this project has made me very, very happy, even though it’s also occasionally made me frustrated and whiny and caused me to go on serious chocolate binges.  In terms of Happiness Project success, this ranks way up there– it added to my day-to-day happiness, and it’s given me a longer term boost.  It’s really fun to find out I’m capable of something I’d never before even considered attempting.

(One other result of this is that I’ve bested Clev at the V&V NaNoWriMo challenge–in past years, he’s attempted a novel but never finished.  This means he owes me a blog post on the topic of my choice, TBD.)

WikiLeaks drops a new mixtape on totally suspecting public

WikiLeaks dropped a new mixtape today, this time a massive dump of secret diplomatic cables.

New York Times notes: a potentially disastrous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel, American discussions with South Korea over a possible collapse of North Korea, bargains to close Guantanamo Bay, corruption in the Afghan government, a Chinese effort to hack Google, an intriguing alliance between Russian PM Putin and Italian PM Berlusconi.

The Guardian notes: Arab leaders pushing for an attack on Iran, spying on UN leadership, links between the Russian government and organized crime, “devastating criticism” of the UK’s military operations by US military leadership, inappropriate comments made by a member of the British royal family about a UK law enforcement agency.

Duck of Minerva is not terribly surprised. Andrew’s, for the most part, reassured. Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy wonders if Wikileaks has gone too far this time.

Fox Nation citing The Onion.

It has come to this: Fox News is getting news from The Onion. In a post that’s since been deleted (hence no link), FoxNation reposted a clearly satirical article from The Onion titled “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation 75,000-Word E-Mail.”

Of course, not only did Fox not get the joke, but neither did the commenters. Mediaite notes that it took 20 commenters before somebody even noticed it was a joke. As commenter Janerogers so succintly put it:

OK. Long, rambling tirade typed at 4 am. Judgement impaired as he didn’t think twice before sending it. Didn’t think of the consequences. Diagnosis: Bipolar Disorder. And we already know he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Omama is mentally unstable and should be removed from office at once. Can’t wait to hear what Charles Krauthammer has to say about this psychotic episode.

Me neither.

Google’s cache saved the post. After the bump, a screencap of the post.

Continue reading »

Buckeyes Triumphant, and I Win the Bet

Unsurprisingly, the Ohio State Buckeyes kicked some major Wolverine ass today.  In OSU’s seventh consecutive victory in the rivalry, the final score was 37-7.

Back on Election Night, Ghost and I made a bet that whoever’s team won would get to assign the other a blog post.  Ghost, your assignment is to write a Book Rec, on the topic of your choice.  You have 2 weeks.  Also, sorry your college team sucks so bad.  That must be sad for you.