Don’t have a seizure in Chicago!

Or you might get tased.
Personally I intend only to travel to Chicago with my own personal staff of bodyguard, detective, and physician with complete mobile emergency room.  I’ll bring along a Canadian consular official as well, because apparently accidentally hitting a cop while you have a diabetic seizure is grounds for being tased ELEVEN F*CKING [...]

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The Torture Memos: Now on CD Baby!

Want a copy of the Torture Memos, but don’t want to send me $10 directly? Worried that I will spend the money on beer and ice cream and you’ll never get your CD? Well, here’s an option: buy it from CD Baby.

A perfect holiday gift for the NPR listener on your list.
It’s not [...]

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Cashing in the cultural capital

My non-snarky Thanksgiving post.
I have been something of a downer lately, complaining about my stalled career, my legs, the American political system, you name it. So I’m making an effort now to be positive, to stop railing at fate and finding something good to say.
I was doing yoga this morning, trying to think positive [...]

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 37: Happy Thanksgiving, America!

As a gift I give you a dictionary.
In this episode:
- Socialism? Really?
- The one thing I have in common with Glen Beck: I love America, and I fear for her, because something is *not* connecting here.
- That is not socialism. That is Gilded Age robber baron capitalism with some protection for the proletariat. [...]

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Hound party manifesto, part 2: Why Gus would make a better Prime Minister than Stephen Harper

Item:
1 While he doesn’t LIKE them, Gus does not actually eat cats.* Unlike Stephen Harper.
2 Gus is lazy enough to avoid antagonizing foreign leaders, but tough enough to growl at them if they approach his food.
3 He will encourage agriculture, especially animal husbandry.
4 He is a symbol the country could unite around – who [...]

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Book review: The Unlikely Disciple

I can’t remember *where* exactly I read about Kevin Roose’s book, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University. I can’t remember when exactly I reserved at the library.  But I must have done so – I’m guessing sometime in July, at the peak of my Quiverfull obsession – because a week [...]

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An extremely civilized Facebook flame war

One of my Facebook friends (Ali Berkok, of the excellent jazz group Arkana Music and others) posted a link today to Nina Paley’s essay, Artists are not inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their art. The ensuing flame war was both educational and relatively civilized.
Paley’s point appears to be that, like no one feels like [...]

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 33: Solving the problem of survival.

A thought experiment.
Link.

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Alchemy: Still not dead yet.

Today at the art gallery I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary about the financial, social, and moral disaster that was Enron, the oil/internet/utility company that crashed and burned so spectacularly in 2001. Yeah, OK, the movie came out in 2005 or something, but I didn’t see it until today [...]

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Complaining with Kay, Episode 28: Fiddling while Rome burns.

Is America becoming fascist?  If so, should I be doing something about it?
Smarter people with better research skills have written about this:
at Orcinus
at Crooks and Liars
on Alternet
and many other places
Link to the episode

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