BrewersScientist, you may have seen this before, but give this link a click. I can’t imagine anyone else here liking it, but give it a go if you want to hear a cool song. I wish there was more than just a chorus. This would make a really good montage soundtrack.
Aww, poor widdle Texas fans, lookin’ all sad cause their team got swept off the planet by the White Sox. Fuck you, Texas, and you too Barbara Bush you old goat. I didn’t want to see your mummified face on my screen the entire game. Good job, Sox.
Just so you know where I stand on things during the final reckoning, I hate Laguna Beach and everyone associated with it. Yes, even if you’re a gaffer on that show I hate your guts. Secondarily, I wish someone would shove a splintered broomstick up the ass of every bitch on My Super Sweet 16. There is a reason I don’t hate everyone associated with My Super Sweet 16, though. After watching a few episodes, I can confidently say that every behind-the-scenes person hates those bitches as much as I do, and they go to great lengths to show them being spoiled, nasty, shit-eating asshats that they truly are. In every single episode I saw, I’d wish around 10-15 minutes in that a brick would come flying into frame from off-camera and split the bitch’s head open down to the brain. As in, I wish I could see them get hit by a car and explode. I wish they’d walk into a jet engine and get sprayed out the back in 100 million bloody pieces. As in, if I still worked at the Concourse I’d probably have to drive her and her bitch parents down to Langdon Street for the grand total tip of $1 and a condescending glare. Jesus I hate those bitches.
Write a newspaper article about how all the restaurants in your city are serving fucking enormous portions because if they don’t, the Milwaukeans used to the ol’ 96er-fer-96-cents will go up the street to stuff their fucking faces at O’Bigportionnigann’s. My reaction to the article: the Journal-Sentinel’s veiled attempt at calling Milwaukee a City of Fatties.
“The greatest way for a casual, mid-scale restaurant to improve the diner’s experience is to increase portion size,” Guilfoyle said. “A secondary benefit is often the consumer will take food home with them.”The takeout container reinforces the restaurant brand and becomes a second chance to instill customer loyalty, he said.
…
At some restaurants, the big signature item may not make it to the doggie bag, but tongues still wag nonetheless.
The Outback Steakhouse has its Bloomin’ Onion, which starts out tipping the scales at about 1 pound but, with coating, ends up at your table weighing closer to 25 ounces. It’s supposed to be feed four people, but couples like to order it, and polish it off, said Ross Steger, proprietor of the Outback Steakhouse, 1260 S. Moorland Road, Brookfield. The chain also has locations in Fox Point and Greenfield.
“We never labeled it as giant food,” Steger said. “It kind of grabbed people’s attention as we walked through the dining room and so forth. It’s more of a visual thing.”
The eyes have it.
“We pretty much sell one at every table, if not then every other table,” Steger said. On a weekend, the restaurant will sell 100 to 150 of the colossal onions at $6.29 a bloom.
In the land of the free and the home of the value conscious, big sells.
So, the reason these restaurants sell fucking enormous portions is so when people take them home, they’ll see the take-home bag in the fridge, and while stuffing their face will say, “I LOVE O’HEARTATTACKS FOOD, LET’S EAT THERE AGAIN!” Except that’s not the reason, because as we see above, two people rountinely sit down and shove 25 ounces of onion in their fucking mouths before they ever get to their dinner! I was almost nuts at this point, but then the newspaper followed it up two days later by running another article off a wire, so on to…
OK, so two days after Milwaukee celebrated the fact that the majority of their city won’t buy any food in a restaurant unless it’s less than 20 dollars but more than 20 ounces, they run an article blubbering about how a bunch of shows on TV are about fat people. Oh boo-hoo, lady. From the article:
And coming soon is “Thick & Thin,” an NBC sitcom about a young divorced woman who has lost 60 pounds and struggles to fit in with her chubby family and overweight friends. In the opening scene, we see the woman’s mother topping a mountain of cheese with butter as she makes nachos.“Mexicans invented butter,” explains the mom
, played by real-life weight-battler Sharon Gless of “Cagney & Lacey” fame, to raucous guffaws.
That IS pretty funny, considering that slathering nachos in butter and cheese doesn’t sound all that different from two people eating a gi-fucking-gantic deep fried onion meant for a family.
So why is fat such a big joke these days? Are fat people the last minority deemed acceptable to ridicule? We’ve gone through racial and ethnic jokes, gender jokes, gay jokes - even jokes about the handicapped. Fat is our final frontier.But with studies showing that as many as 65% of Americans are clinically obese - and obesity is now recognized as an official disease - why is this suddenly fair game and funny?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because it’s difficult to watch someone bang on their dinner table demanding the buggest fucking steak in the house with a one pound side of fries, then inhale it and complain about the $9.99 price, then squeeze behind the wheel of their car and go home to watch TV for the rest of the night and complain that they’re being picked on by a glowing box without breaking into gales of laughter. Fucking gales and peals of laughter, after which you shoot yourself because the world is full of self-righteous ham-creatures.
i’m back
I’ve just kinda gotten sick of spending any time whatsoever on this site. It’s not like anyone reads what I write up here; you just click the Comments button and start posting comments as made-up people. That isn’t so much why I wanted to have my own website. Instead, I’ll just post an open thread every so often and anyone who wants to can post whatever nonsense they please. Go wild, I don’t care any more. Here’s my digital home; go ahead and egg it, I guess.
Open Thread.
| You are a Social Liberal (78% permissive) and an… You are best described as a: Socialist
Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid |
Erin and I got some free screening passes from Salon.com to the preview of George Clooney’s new indy movie Good Night, and Good Luck (Salon.com review, The Onion’s review) , a look at Edward R. Murrow and CBS’ series of programs in the mid-fifties on Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt. I had heard about the movie several weeks prior and was going to check it out anyways, so free tickets to the pre-release screening really rang my bell.
Growing up in Wisconsin, I learned in various civics classes that the Red Scare of the mid-20th century was one of the great travesties in our nation’s history. Somewhat surprisingly, I also learned about it from different angles. One aspect of our English class reading of The Crucible by Arthur Miller was the history behind Miller’s denuciation by the McCarthyites and how it influenced the work.
As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly.…
Fear doesn’t travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of “Incident at Vichy,” showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.
Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling—if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler’s snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat’s eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.
The movie is essetially an office-based overview of the crucial segments that CBS ran in the early fifties that contributed the investigation and censure of McCarthy himself. It’s dificult for me to comment on the authenticity of the time period, due mainly to the fact that I was born 13 odd years after Murrow died, but it is certainly not the sunshine and lollipops 1950s portayed by so many. The focus on the Story and how the CBS team presented it to America keeps much of the movie focused in the CBS Studio and newsroom, which creates not so much a cramped feel as one of comfort. The climactic sequence where Joe McCarthy rebuts Murrow on his own show with such utter slander sufficiently displays the lengths that the anti-Communists were willing to go to in order to avoid criticisms, questions, or concerns over their activities. Moreover, the fact that Joe McCarthy himself delivers the false indictments makes the entire thing real.
One of the most powerful techniques Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov use is the lack of any actor portraying The Junior Senator from Wisconsin. All scenes in the movie involving Joe McCarthy are actual film and radio. Just as a period-piece retelling of Adolf Hitler’s life does not compare to seeing him from actual footage, so did Joe McCarthy’s angry polemics against ordinary Americans stir my emotions in a way that an actor could not. Perhaps its because, as a society, we’re so used to seeing evil and injustice portrayed by actors and special effects that we no longer recognize the horror of real injustice and tragedy. Moreover, the outrage that eventually bubbled to the surface in 1954, over people fired from their jobs and ostracized by their communities due to government hearings, is noticeably absent today while our government declares random people picked up in Iraq (whether insurgents or not) to be enemy combatants and thrown in a Guantanamo Bay cell to rot without any hope of a trial, or even of anybody to know where they are.
Better historical analysis of the Red Scare can certainly be found elsewhere, but my reactions to this movie had much to do with ruminating on the (completely intentional) comparisons drawn between 1950-1954 and 2000-2005. A government that hastens to call anyone that disagrees a traitor, embroiled in a war with no clear way to win, should not be given the benefit of the doubt. Were it my decision, everyone in America would see this film and be reminded that real, damaging political persecution did not die when McCarthy was censured. It can strike anytime the citizens of a country become too concerned with appearence and not enough about truth and justice.
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.–Edward R. Murrow, Speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) convention in Chicago (15 October 1958)
Good idea, katiek:
Ladies and Gentlemen.
I am living up in the northwoods of Wisconsin. I know two people who live in this town. I am on a fellowship from school to finish my dissertation. I am way ahead of schedule and I do nothing but sit at my computer, write, and browse ye olde whazzmastere. This is my only lifeline to the outside world. I swear. I would like to see more posting, please. This is one of my few forms of human contact. I am a desperate woman.
Please feel free to comment on any of the following topics for my reading pleasure:
The end.
RAJ OUT.
