Monday, October 30, 2006

Odds and Ends

1. Note to self: Stop putting naked pictures of myself in the trash. (More here.)

2. The best explanation yet for why Studio 60 is doing so poorly. As Golden Fiddle puts it,
Sting + anything = cancellation/death/disaster/fiasco/Dune.

Ouch! Bringing up Dune is really vicious.

3. I have a lot of work to do. Via the Guardian, twenty paintings to see before you die. I'm ashamed to say that I've seen exactly one of these (Raphael's "School of Athens," in the Vatican). (Via Crooked Timber.)

4. Alan Wolfe--my sometime professor--reviews David Kuo's new book (mentioned in the last post) in TNR. Poor David. It's not a pretty sight (though worth reading if you've thought about the role of religion in American politics). Here's a nice line that helps explain why Catholics aren't (usually) naive about government: "Catholics have had seventeen hundred years of direct involvement with government: they are not easily surprised by political power and how it works."

5. Gawker (out of context): "We do, theoretically, have a schedule...but sticking to it would involve, you know, getting our act together and subscribing to that bullshit some people call 'deadlines'." Um, no comment.

Posted by jwb at 4:10 PM  · 1 Comments   

Friday, October 27, 2006

Punch it! Punch it!

Since we can't think of anything better to blog about this morning, we thought we would check in with our Washington Bureau since we're only a few weeks out from the big mid-term elections. It's pretty much the usual stuff--sleazy behavior, criminality, slander, incompetence, borderline psychosis, and, of course, sex. Lots of sex. Here we go:

1. Via TPM, Roll Call has assembled a lovely graphic listing members of Congress who are under federal investigation. Fourteen R's (though they forgot Katherine Harris, so it should be 15) and three D's. These people have truly distinguished themselves for their accomplishments in sleaziness. And that's against some really tough competition.

2. In not unrelated news, Republicans, reeking of desperation, are running some really vicious and misleading ads about their opponents. Shocking, I know. From the WaPo: "The result has been a carnival of ugly, especially on the GOP side, where operatives are trying to counter what polls show is a hostile political environment by casting opponents as fatally flawed characters. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending more than 90 percent of its advertising budget on negative ads, according to GOP operatives, and the rest of the party seems to be following suit."

3. For an example, there's a highly competitive--and vicious--Senate race going on in Tennessee between Harold Ford, Jr., and some clown named Bob Corker. One particularly odd aspect of this race is the Corker campaign's obsession with Ford's sex life, as if that's any of their business. James Walcott proposes an explanation.

4. Our Dear Leader, speaking to a bunch of right-wing journalists, commented that being kidnapped in the middle of Baghdad "must have been weird." Meanwhile, after slogging through the entire transcript of the discussion, the very smart Matt Yglesias concludes: "You ... can't get this much Bush without noticing that ... the President of the United States is conducting national security policy under conditions of truly frightening ignorance and dangerous analytic errors.... The President, it seems to me, entered office in January 2000 utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and has spent the past six years filling in the blanks with pleasant illusions and straight-up misinformation."

5. Vice President Torquemada loves torture: "It's a no-brainer for me." If you click through, check out the graphic on waterboarding: "origins traced to the Spanish Inquisition." Nice.

6. Finally, in somewhat less depressing news, my old friend David Kuo is pimping a book on the mendacity and incompetence of the Bush Administration. I haven't read it yet, but have been hearing lots about it--most of it good. I haven't talked to him since he joined the Bush Admin., and so I didn't know that he had cancer; small world. Courtesy of TNR, I also didn't know that he's had the pleasure of being dry-humped by Sandra Day O'Connor while on a fishing trip. This is priceless:

I flailed the rod back and forth, managing to get [my] fly line tangled around a hitching post.

"Oh no! You call that casting?"

She came up behind me, pressed her front side into my back one and grabbed my arm.

"Relax!"

Sure. Sandra Day O'Connor is draped around me, gripping my right forearm like it was a stick, flailing it back and forth. It was very relaxing. She persevered and soon had me guiding the rod back and forth between an eleven o'clock and a one o'clock position. She stepped away to examine my form from the front. "NO! NO! NO! Damn it, David. Don't flail the rod like it is some pussywillow branch. Punch it! Punch it! Punch the rod to a stop. Punch it!


I'm going to go take a shower.

Posted by jwb at 12:30 PM  · 0 Comments   

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Names, names, names!


Once again, thanks to Monica for our snazzy new look. We'll be back later with some reflections on grass-fed beef and other pressing matters. For now, I want to revisit the question of whether we (meaning me) should change the name of the blog to something more memorable or pithy. My inclination is to "stay the course" unless we can come up with something that is demonstrably better than the present name. Raphy took a stab at it in comments, though his suggestions are a little more self-deprecating than I think we're up for at the moment. (Our ego is a fragile thing. Nice try, though.) Shannon (in disguise as Anonymous) suggests the far more promising "scutube".

Since you asked, scutube is an exotic word whose origins can be found in ancient Persian. (Loosely translated, it means "whale's vagina.") A brief word on pronunciation: The "scu" in scutube rhymes with "cue" as in "Stop hitting me with that pool cue, please" and "tube" rhymes with "boob" as in "boob bait for the bubbas."

Alas, scutube doesn't seem to be much in use anymore. If you head over to "the Google" and type in "scutube", you'll get two hits. The first is for an underutilized Flickr account for someone named Shannon. The second is a Dogster page* for a funny looking white dog from Michigan.

I'm inclined to give it a shot. What do you think?

* Yeah, I'm not kidding. Dogster. Like Friendster but for dogs.

Posted by jwb at 3:30 PM  · 2 Comments   

Friday, October 20, 2006

Anniversary

Our sixth wedding anniversary is tomorrow. We're off to New York City for the weekend. I'm looking forward to having some grass-fed beef at Craftsteak on Saturday night.

In less happy news, Studio City has been put on hiatus. It's not looking good. Jenn will be bummed. She really likes that show. (To tell you the truth, I don't really care.)

We'll return next week to address such pressing matters as whether grass-fed beef actually tastes any good (at least to those of us--meaning just about everyone--raised on corn-fed beef) and whether we ought to give the blog a new name. (In comments, Susan says yes; everyone else is either really bored or is being shy.)

Posted by jwb at 2:40 PM  · 2 Comments   

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The new blog, same as the old blog

Welcome to the new and improved jwbblog. Same old crap in a new and far more attractive setting. Thanks to Monica Meehan for creating the new template. I think it's really quite lovely. We hope you like it too. (And if you don't? Keep it to yourself. We don't really care.) If you are interested, you can find some of Monica's work for other humble bloggers here.

Posted by jwb at 8:15 PM  · 4 Comments   

Sweet, sweet beer


Stout, actually. Just came across this on my computer--two freshly poured Guinesses, Dublin, ca. May 2004 (I think).

Posted by jwb at 6:02 PM  · 0 Comments   

A question for our readers

This blog will be getting a face lift in a few days--I'll say more about that later. In the meantime, as part of that process, I've been wondering whether jwbblog ought to have a proper title--something as part of the header at the top of the page. (See here for a decent example from a blog that I like.) (To be clear, I'm not talking about changing the url, just the title you see at the top of the page.) I wonder if our readers might have some suggestions.

For several reasons, my inclination is against a new title. First, I've sort of grown attached to the name "jwbblog", even though it seems to strike some people as nonsensical and seems to be difficult to remember. Second, it seems to me that many blogs with titles that their owners clearly think are very clever are, truth be told, pretentious dreck. (I won't identify any of the perpetrators by name, but I'm thinking about blogs with titles that include words like "wisdom," "thoughts," "courage", etc.) Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with pretentious dreck. It shows up here occasionally. (After all, I am pretentious. Q.E.D.) But to give the blog a title like "Speaking Truth to Power" or "Courageous Wisdom" would, in my judgment, set the wrong tone. If were going to have a new title, I think it probably needs to be a little silly or (plainly) ironic.

Whaddya think? Any suggestions?

Posted by jwb at 10:21 AM  · 2 Comments   

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

So snarky

I came across an essay by Walter Goodman of the Times from 1983 on the very interesting topic of "literary invective." I suppose if some culture reporter from the Times was doing a similar piece today, they'd talk a lot about, for example, how "snarky" a lot of discussion on the internet is, as if people were nice and respectful toward each other until Al Gore invented the internet a few years ago. Alas, using the famous dispute between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman as a starting point, Goodman points out that literary disputes, in particular, have been plenty nasty in the past.

Some of the better ones:

1. Carlyle, apparently a real SOB,
a. on Emerson: "a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape ... who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling''
b. on Charles Lamb: "I sincerely believe (him) to be in some considerable degree insane"

2. Samuel Johnson
a. on Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son: ''They teach the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master."
b. on Horace Walpole: "a babbling old woman"

3. Oscar Wilde on George Meredith: "As a writer, he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist, he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist, he is everything except articulate."

4. Shaw to Chesterton: "I know everything you say is bunkum, though a fair amount of it is inspired bunkum.''

Posted by jwb at 2:29 PM  · 0 Comments   

Outer space

So, I get up this morning to a rather odd headline on the Washington Post (the internerds edition): "Bush Sets Defense As Space Priority". The long and short of it seems to be that we--more accurately, the Bush Administration--has asserted the right to universal hegemony over outer space. As a hypoetetical, this is, I suppose, something that is worth discussing--weighing the pros and cons, etc. However, the timing, to me, is just bizarre. Matt Yglesias puts it nicely:

This seems like a fairly peripheral concern at the moment -- there's no pressing space-based threat. At the same time, one imagines that countries like Russia and China aren't going to be thrilled with this idea. Coincidentally enough, right now we're trying to secure a higher level of Russian and Chinese cooperation over North Korea, which is a fairly pressing issue. So was it really necessary to announce this just now? Does the White House even think about that kind of stuff -- the idea that we should set priorities and try to avoid pissing people off over third-tier issues right when we're potentially on the verge of accomplishing something important?


I suppose one could think of more sinister explanations for the "why now" question, but that would make my head hurt. For now, we'll go with incompetance.

Posted by jwb at 11:15 AM  · 0 Comments   

Martin Amis


Martin Amis has a new novel on the way and he seems to be back in "major novel" mode after some fairly minor stuff--"Yellow Dog" was bizarre and yet forgettable and "Koba the Dread" was fascinating but was essentially the longest book review in recorded history. My sense is that Amis tends to think a lot about his place in the world as a novelist in terms of the way the Greats thought about their lives. Here he seems to be channeling Tolstoy (or maybe Solzhenitsyn) in a story about love and betrayal in the gulag in late 1940s Russia.

If I'm remembering correctly, Raphy and I have had some disagreements about whether Amis is really a major figure, or not--if I'm misremebering this, I'm sure he'll correct me. I tend to think he is. He tends to be quite brilliant when he's writing about contemporary society, urban life, people who work hard and yet don't see much reward. He's on slightly unfamiliar turf here, though I'm looking forward to seeing how he works it out.

My favorite is probably "The Information," which is an astonishingly good--and very funny--novel. He's also got a big autobiographical novel called The Pregnant Widow" in the works, due in 2007. He comments here that it's mostly about "women"--which I think means sex, sex, and more sex--in 2007. Looking forward to it.

Posted by jwb at 6:50 AM  · 0 Comments   

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

The Power of Thoughts

Making fun of celebutards isn't really our thing here, but this is too funny. Carmen Electra on the new intellectual trend of the day:

I'm really into quantum physics. Some of my friends are into it, some of them aren't, so I'm trying to get them excited about discovering all these interesting things about thoughts and the power of thoughts. It gives me chills thinking about it. It's fun.


I can't wait to hear what she thinks about string theory. BTW, I think she means "quantum mechanics", but my dad is a physicist, so I would know that, wouldn't I?

Via one of the snarky celebrity gossip blogs you've probably heard about.

Posted by jwb at 9:02 AM  · 0 Comments   

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Odds and Ends


1. Despite my fears, the Michigan trip went pretty smoothly. (Spirit Air rocks, in sharp contrast to most of their competition.) As you can see, we hung out with 107,000 or so of our dearest friends at the game and Michigan dispatched State without too much difficulty.

2. R.W. Apple, Jr.--better known as Johnny Apple--passed away last week, and I've been remiss in not mentioning this sooner. He was a famous old school reporter for the New York Times. I have to admit that I found his writing about current events (particularly the stentorian tone) a little hard to swallow. However, he also wrote a lot of entertaining stuff about food--more accurately, he ate a lot of food and drank a lot of wine in various exotic places and wrote about it in the Times (and on the Times' dime). That would be a pretty cool job to have. The annoying Adam Nagourney had a remembrance in today's DI/DO. Check it out, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

3. I note, via Amazon, that Charles McCarry's Secret Lovers--one of a series of novels about CIA agent Paul Christopher that I have raved about below--is being reissued by Overlook Press in November, just in time for Christmas. Robert Littell's The Company is amazing, but I don't think McCarry has a peer amongst contemporary novelists on the CIA beat. Most of the books were out of print, but the good people at Overlook have been periodically reprinting them.

4. Since I'm on the subject of reading, a few additional items:

a. Late last week, I finished Julian Barnes' most recent book, Arthur and George. I've had it for a while and started it several times, but just couldn't get into it. However, this time I persevered and it was worth it. It's a wonderful book. The Arthur in the title is Arthur Conan Doyle, who gets involved in a trying to help a young man (the George of the title) who is wrongfully convicted of dismembering animals exonerate himself. Based on what I gather are true events, it's a mystery of sorts mixed in with biographies of the main characters. If you haven't scratched your Holmes itch in a while, check it out.

b. Over the weekend, while on several airplanes, I managed to fly through (so to speak) Philip Kerr's The One from The Other, which I mentioned a few posts below. It's quite good, up there with the Berlin Noir stories and far superior to his recent Hitler's Peace. If you enjoyed any of the Furst books that I have recommended, I think you'll enjoy this one too (though it's more of a police procedural than a spy story).

c. Finally, anyone who likes to read knows there are simply way too many good books out there to ever get through them all. And, as Alex Beam of the Globe notes, most books published these days are badly written and probably not worth reading anyway. With that in mind, here are some very handy tips on "How Not to Read a Book."

Posted by jwb at 6:33 PM  · 0 Comments   

Friday, October 06, 2006

Flying

We're heading to Michigan this afternoon for the Michigan-Michigan State game tomorrow afternoon. This will be the first time I've been on an airplane since the ban on carrying liquids and gels on airplanes in August. I've never been afraid of flying at all, but the fact that this (and yes, I know they've modified it to some degree) is somehow seen as a useful way of making the skies safer from terrorists has had me pondering over the last few days how we're really doing in that regard. Kevin Drum has a post this morning that is not reassuring.

NAMES NOT TO HAVE....Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes has somehow gotten hold of a copy of the no-fly list used by airport authorities to screen for possible terrorists. So who's on the list?

60 Minutes: "Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels. "Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list," says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. "They're going to be inconvenienced every time ... because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist," says Bucella."

You know, I'll bet if there were some senator named Robert Johnson, the FBI would figure out a way to make this list a little more user-friendly. Maybe we should try to elect one.


I try not to be overtly partisan here most of the time, but I feel pretty strongly about this: if you think this is what good government is supposed to look like, please vote Republican. Please do so now and forever. However, if, like me, you think this is a small, though not unimportant, example of what a corrupt and incompetent government looks like, do not vote Republican ever again (or at least for a long, long time). And thank God (and your parents) that your name isn't Robert Johnson or John Williams. (Mine is a little too close for comfort to the latter.)

Oh, and fire Donna Bucella. Fire her now!

MORE:

"[Former] FBI agent, Jack Cloonan, knew the list that was hastily assembled after 9/11, would be bungled. 'When we heard the name list or no-fly list … the eyes rolled back in my head, because we knew what was going to happen,' he says. 'They basically did a massive data dump and said, 'Okay, anybody that's got a nexus to terrorism, let's make sure they get on the list,"' he tells Kroft.

"The 'data dump' of names from the files of several government agencies, including the CIA, fed into the computer compiling the list contained many unlikely terrorists. These include Saddam Hussein, who is under arrest, Nabih Berri, Lebanon's parliamentary speaker, and Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. It also includes the names of 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers."

Posted by jwb at 8:44 AM  · 3 Comments   

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Philip Kerr


Five or six years ago, I read Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir and was blown away. Berlin Noir is actually three books under one cover--March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem--that describe the travails of a Marlowe-esque detective name Bernie Gunther in 1940s Berlin. They're brilliant and excruciatingly dark, in the sense that it is by no means clear that the good guys (and Bernie is definitely a good guy) are going to win. I've read some of Kerr's other books since and they're kind of a mixed bag. I was really excited for his most recent book, Hitler's Peace, which involves British spies, plenty of sinister Nazis, etc., but as actually disappointed--the story is preposterous and the characters didn't convince--and would be reluctant to recommend it to anyone. However, Kerr has been a busy boy. The postman today brought Kerr's latest, The One from the Other, a fourth Bernie Gunther novel. I am actually genuinely excited to read this and am praying it's more like the Berlin Noir books than his more recent stuff.

This reminds me of something else I've been meaning to blog about. I've been a little bored with the reading selections at hand of late--though the next few evenings are accounted for (see above), and wonder if our readers might suggest some things that, given our varied though not limitless interests, we might enjoy. In particular, I quite enjoyed Moore's "V for Vendetta" and wonder if there are other graphic novels that I shouldn't miss. Other novels? I've never read LeCarre's George Smiley books. Any thoughts about those?

Posted by jwb at 4:25 PM  · 3 Comments