Maddie!
“That’s what college is for: being gay and watching porn.” — Random stranger, loudly on the bus. This weekend is off to a great start.
“Of COURSE you can sample my family’s fine fermented juices.” —
Tee hee.
Coburn Puts Hold on Legislation to Repay Furloughed Federal Workers -
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has put a hold on legislation to provide back pay to thousands of federal workers furloughed earlier this month by Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) filibuster of an unemployment bill.
The unemployment benefits bill included a one-month extension of highway spending, which lapsed for several days during Bunning’s one-man filibuster.
Although Coburn believes restitution should be made to furloughed Department of Transportation employees, he opposes using additional taxpayer funds to do so and is demanding a vote on an amendment that would pay for it out of the budgets of all 541 House and Senate offices.
“
[On MSNBC’s Hardball recently] I was talking about Obama and health care and I used the analogy of selling watermelons by the side of the road. It’s an expression that stretches to my boyhood roots in Southeast Texas, when country highways were lined with stands manned by sellers of all races. Now of course watermelons have become a stereotype for African Americans and so my analogy entered a charged environment. I’m sorry people took offense.
But anyone who knows me personally or knows my professional career would know that race was not on my mind. Reporting on the injustices of race was part of the reason I became a reporter. I grew up in segregated Texas on the same side of the tracks as the African American community. At the time, enlightened people called them Negros. Many people called them much worse. When I covered the Civil Rights movement, I saw sheer hatred in ways that still haunt and shock me. For doing my small part in reporting on the South in the 1960s, I was called a traitor to my roots and other names not fit for print. I was threatened with death by people who would have welcomed me to their church on Sunday on account of my white skin if they didn’t know what I was there to do. I do not take this issue lightly.
” —Dan Rather on Watermelons, Washington, and What We Call News Today (via ryking)
This is something I think about too. I remember about 9 months ago, I was talking with some friends about the Obama Administration’s (lack-of) legislative strategy and was being sarcastic in saying that it was about “as fun as a barrel of monkeys.” About .02 seconds later I realized the unintentional undertones that I inadvertently made by using a term that I’ve used since I was a kid, a term that had I’d never associated with any type of slur. Needless to say, I’ve become more…cautious, I guess, about choosing my words when talking about the President and his Administration because of situations like these.
That being said, I think people know racism when they see it (like pornography!) There’s a difference between making comments like Dan Rather and I made in situations where we’re searching for an apt metaphor and not thinking about the racial ramifications because the President’s race isn’t really something we spend a lot of time thinking about (which I’ve written about before) and blatantly comparing Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee. Or am I way off base?
Also, also, this all being said, Dan Rather is still kinda nutty.
On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens—at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world—hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.
Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research … or something more terrifying?
Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens’s life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens’s friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author’s last years and may provide the key to Dickens’s final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.
My reading material for today’s bus ride.
Cuz it’s happened to me quite a few times in the last month or two, and I find it kinda funny.
I’ll still have abs for summer tho. They might be drawn on, but I’ll have ‘em.
bj-cg asked: Turn ur g-d replies on.
sry. jermaine keeps turning them off.
(via tuffghostevan)
NYC weekend 3/2k10
Haters get fro-yo.
