Category Archives: Uncategorized

Every Cake You Bake

Stewart Copeland, on his blog, writes a funny review of a recent Police show. Here's a little bit:

    I stride manfully to my drums. Andy has started the opening guitar riff to MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE and the crowd is going nuts. Problem is, I missed hearing him start. Is he on the first time around or the second? I look over at Sting and he's not much help, his cue is me – and I'm lost. Never mind. “Crack!” on the snare and I'm in, so Sting starts singing. Problem is, he heard my crack as two in the bar, but it was actually four – so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho.

AP (via CNN.com) finds the blog and posts a bitchy little gossipy piece, taking things so out of context that it makes Copeland sound like he's completely pissed, ex.:

    The crowds have been ecstatic, but Police drummer Stewart Copeland has been anything but impressed so far by the band's reunion concerts.

    Copeland trashed Wednesday's concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a posting on his Web site the morning after. "This is ... lame. We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea."
    ...
    That misfortune extended into the second song, "Synchronicity II." They couldn't "get on the good foot," said Copeland, before going on to criticize Sting's footwork during the set.

    "The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock," he wrote.

Meow!

But, in context, Copeland's comments don't sound anything like that:

    Well we are professionals so we soon get sorted, but the groove is eluding us. We crash through MESSAGE and then go strait into SYNCHRONICITY. But there is just something wrong. We just can't get on the good foot. We shamble through the song and hit the big ending. Last night Sting did a big leap for the cut-off hit, and he makes the same move tonight, but he gets the footwork just a little bit wrong and doesn't quite achieve lift-off. The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock. Never Mind. Next song is going to be great…

Stupid lousy media.

Sea Pineapple

This tasty morsel is nestled deep inside a fascinating Vanity Fair article about Tokyo's Tsukigi fish market, the history of sushi in America, wasabi and the even the Rev. Sun Myung Moon:

Sheets of kombu (kelp) covered with herring roe; big white sacs of octopus roe. Among a biochromatic wealth of mysterious mollusks and other sea invertebrates of unknown nature, I see the weirdest creature I've ever seen. Now, that's a fucking organism. Tom Asakawa looks at it awhile, too.

"Sea pineapple," he says. "Attaches to rocks in the ocean. Tastes something like iodine. Sendai people like it."

It looks nothing like a pineapple. It looks like something that could exist only in a purely hallucinatory eco-system. It looks like, I don't know, maybe an otherworldly marital aid of inscrutable purpose for the brides of Satan.

"I need to eat that," I say.

"I'll see what I can do," Tom says.

Even though I couldn't stand to eat any of the crazy stuff they eat over there, I can't wait to go back to Japan.

A LOLCat Sonnet

Posted in comments at Making Light:

    I in ur sonnet, doin ur ritin.
    How do this hapn? I just a kitty.
    Main job of catz are just 2B pritty!
    (`Cept with the doggies, then us be fitin.)
    Course back in da old days catz was workin
    Eatin ur mouses an axin fr milk…
    Now giv me treatz or me clawin ur silk!
    An bring em here fast, none of ur shirkin.
    U humanz r comin under r powr
    Uzin ur money to pamper n feed us,
    Learnin from websitez how much u need us.
    R clvr planz is comin to flower!
    Now mousie are safe in his tiny holz
    Nless u go catch him. I da boss. LOLz

Genius.

Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

Rich Lowry at the Corner is miffed that the White House is being dishonest:

    Again, that's exactly what the bill does [gives amnesty to illegals]. It has some hoops if people what to get a Z visa or green card, but illegals are immediately granted forgiveness for being here illegally and don't have to pay any penalties to stay here legally.

    How stupid do these people think we are?

How stupid ?

Here's Rich, two years ago:

    It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq.

    ...

    Based on conversations with administration officials and key combatant commanders, this is the story of how, two years after the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has begun to win the war for Iraq...

That's how stupid they think you are.

(via)

The Sharpened Interrogation

From a directive by the Gestapo chief, Muller, 1942:

  1. The sharpened interrogation may only be applied if, on the strength or the preliminary interrogation, it has been ascertained that the prisoner can give information about important facts, connections or plans hostile to the start or the legal system, but does not want to reveal his knowledge, and the latter cannot be obtained by way of inquiries.
  2. Under this circumstance, the sharpened interrogation may be applied only against Communists, Marxists, members of the Bible-researcher sect, saboteurs, terrorists, members of the resistance movement, parachute agents, ascocial persons, Polish or Soviet persons who refuse to work, or idlers.
  3. The sharpened interrogation may no be applied in order to induce confessions about a prisoner's own criminal acts. Nor may this means be applied toward persons who have been temporarily delivered by justice for the purpose of fruther investigation.
  4. The sharpening can consist of the following, among other things, according to circumstances:
    simplest rations (bread and water)
    hard bed
    dark cell
    deprivation of sleep
    exhaustion exercises,
    but also the resort to blows with a stick (in case of more than 20 blows, a doctor must be present).

Read all about it, here.

In addition to all the things the Nazis were doing in 1942, we've added others, including waterboarding which the explicitly Nazis forbade (at least initially). And these are the very things the Republican candidates tried to one-up each other on, during their last debate; Mitt Romney wished we could have two Guantanamos; Giuliani and Tancredo both said they'd support whatever methods interrogators could think of; Tancredo wants a "Jack Bauer", presumably to come and break as many fingers, knees and laws as it takes.

These men should be excluded from public office by the simple fact that no decent person would vote for someone advocating interrogation methods identical to those used by the Gestapo. But they aren't; instead, they are the leading lights of the Republican Party. They get thunderous applause as they shake their fists and demand harsher interrogations and more torture. Among their supporters, their advocacy for torture is a selling point, not a sign of mental illness.

America is a deeply disturbed country.

Update:

And why has America so quickly fallen in love with torture? I will blockquote myself:

    Even though I normally hate me some mass-pop-psychology... my pet theory is that 9/11 simply gave people an excuse to indulge aspects of their personalities that they normally would've kept under wraps. All the latent authoritarian, sadistic impulses now have a chance to jump up and work out under cover of "patriotism" and "making them pay". It's every little macho coward's dream come true: a chance to do what's normally forbidden or taboo and come out of it looking like a Jack Bauer-esque hero.

    By coincidence, Tim F., today, plucks the same note:

    Future generations can argue whether 9/11 made a subset of Americans so loopy that they lost the moral compass altogether, or the terror attacks just offered a golden chance to let those ugly impulses hang out in the open. (my emph)