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The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
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They're Cloning Cats In Texas, But I Still Can't Get a Beer*
Quote of the day, from a story about two cats being cloned in Texas (the bad punctuation is, for once, not my fault):
"Healthy cats and kittens are being euthanized and killed and sheltered for not having homes so we'd like to see that problem taken care of before more animals, are you know, kind of extremely created," Director of San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Adoption Kiska Icard said.
OK, Kiska, you work on that part of the problem, and you know, let the cloners do their thing. They in turn will agree not to supply any cali-speak backgrounder quotes to investigative stories about income and expenses at the SPCA. Deal?
Reporter of the day, from a story about Ricky William's shape-shifting plans for retiring from football.
Williams told Dan Le Batard, a reporter for the Miami Herald and for ESPN The Magazine, that he learned he failed a third drug test and faced a suspension just days before making his decision to retire
..."I didn't quit football because I failed a drug test," he said. "I failed a drug test because I was ready to quit football." Williams also told Le Batard that he had wanted to quit playing football even before testing positive a second time for marijuana use in May and getting fined $650,000.
I would have told Le Batard off for even asking such a question, but then I'm not as mellow as Ricky. Give me a test, I'll prove it.
If you'd asked me Monday morning, "When did Henri Cartier-Bresson die?", I would have guessed 1969. Or 1971 at the latest. When in fact, Henri died Monday morning, right about the time you were hypothetically asking me when he died. You are clearly an angel of death and you should really stop inquiring about the expiration dates of personages of note. Me especially.
There were two volumes of H. C.-B.'s work in that waterlogged pile of books I picked over recently. I haven't paged through From One China To The Other yet, but I have completed my examination of The People of Moscow (1955, Simon and Schuster). It is a book of attractive and interesting pictures. The kind of pictures any intelligent person with a good camera and a moderately fine aesthetic sense would have taken. So while Henri gets no points for art, he gets all the points for effort, since he was the intelligent person with a good camera and moderately fine aesthetic sense who made the effort, time and trip to take these particular pictures.
I was struck most by the headgear of the new soviet men in a series of pictures at the ZIS auto factory. Most of the men wear skullcaps that go half way down the brow, but they are mostly cut away, so that it's less a hat than a suggestion of a hat. They're kind of like jock straps for your head. I decided they must be butch hairnets. A good idea when you combine all the spinning gear teeth of the ZIS works and all those full heads of Russian hair. One teenaged Slavic beauty on the assembly line wears a considerably less butch nog-strap than the others. It looks more like something a new soviet girl would wear. To her old Russian wedding. Bravo, new soviet boy.
Then there's the two page spread of the bare chested dudes of the Moscow boxing societies taking the field on Sports Day with arms inter-linked, their white boxing-gloved hands at their hips. A very good-looking phalanx, but the least muscular boxers I've ever seen. The boys on the debate team at most American High School's have better pecs than these warriors. I think this speaks to a certain lack of protein in the Soviet diet in the early fifties.
Henri comes off as more sympathetic than sycophantic to the Soviet cause in his captions for the book. Perhaps very sympathetic. Let's just say the slope from sym to syc is pretty well greased, but Henri never slides all the way down. My favorite of Henri's blurbs:
110. The culture aspect of Gorki Park is highly developed: theaters, reading-rooms, exhibitions devoted to great writers...chess clubs--chess is a national passion. In flower filled gardens are big posters to stimulate social consciousness and national pride, or again proclaim the necessity of peace for all men. There are loudspeakers just about everywhere.
137, 138. The puppet theater directed by Obrastov is famous. Puppets are a favorite amusement and they are sometimes used for educational purposes...Their repertory includes a number of social satires on bureaucracy, formalism and other topical subjects.
144. Intermission at the circus. Some women from the audience eating ice cream cones. If I am not mistaken, they were much interested in my wife's dress.
This last caption accompanies a picture of four women eating ice cream cones and wearing four of the losing entries from the farm-fashion sewing contest at the 1935 Kentucky State Fair. The eyes of three of the ladies are popping out of their heads as they focus on an object 20 degress to the right of the photographer.
Which reminds me, my condolences to Madame Cartier-Bresson, a circus-lobby cynosure nonpareil, in 1954 Moscow.
OMG, Atrios has Christopher Hitchen's haircut. Except Chritch flops the bang to the right and Atrios to the left. But then again that's a perspective thing, through their own eyes the canopies hang differently. Atrios would see himself banging right, while the POV through Chritch's port-holes would reveal a leftward obstruction. (Me, I do a modified, self-inflicted Caesar, ie bang-free--takes 45 seconds with my NBA electric trimmer. I'd be willing to flout* the barber code and take up to three minutes apiece, free style re-styling each of the Hitchrios twins. The world needs more makeshift Caesars.)
I wish he'd just go back to his Louis Quatorze/Teddy Boy look. It's the opposite of timeless (timeful, I guess). Only the timeful ever make it to timeless.
*I originally wrote this as flaunt, a classic malapropism. But I think flaunt might win the war yet. It registers to my mind as flamboyantly taunt, collapsed to its atomic core.
I, Ho'bot Will Smith battles a racy super race of chrome cyber-sluts in a near future that isn't near enough.
M Night Shyamalan's The Frottage Sexy, autumnal goings on in the fields and woods of Southeastern Pennsylvania (aka The New Hollywood), set circa whenever it was that everybody wore (when they weren't taking them off) one of those Little Red Riding Hood cape, coat & caul numbers.
The Pourne Supremacy The Soviet Empire revives, and finally attains world domination. Of the porn industry. Stalin's great grandsons and daughters, from Prague to St Petersburg, take the rope that capitalism sold them, tie each other up with it, and suk, fuk, fuk, suk, fuk and fuk the American porn industry right off the screen.
Fahrenheit 9-11 They've devised a new test for the rookies at Engine House Sixty-Nine. If you want to slide down the pole at ol' 69, you better measure up. Grab your hose and bring the spotted dog as super hung and uber hunky NYC fireman make the best of the downtime between three alarmers. You won't need the popcorn, but don't forget the oil.
