Two more NBA divisional previews are up on the Official VM NBA Preview page! The Atlantic & the Pacific! Only one division left! Let’s hope I get it done before Sunday’s business trip to Orlando! Exclamation point!
Now easier to ignore!
Look, kids! An Unrequired Reading archive page!
Throw the Jew, etc., etc.
Ron Rosenbaum prefers the HBO-Borat to the movie version:
[T]o me the original Borat segments were more than stupid-funny; they were extremely smart-funny, occasionally even off-handedly profound, as the fake Kazakh newsman “personality” managed to tease out moments of appalling honesty from ordinary Americans with a light touch and brilliant comic timing that made it not about him, about Borat, being a clueless foreigner, but about us being clueless Americans. Not even clueless so much as naively blind to our own implicit smugness.While Borat One [the HBO version] gave you brilliant comic intelligence, Borat Two [the movie version] gives you ass-in-your-face (and I mean that literally) grossness from an aggressively, smugly dumb foreigner. Borat One had at least a touch of the sweetness of Andy Kaufman’s Latka, his “Foreign Man,” incarnation. Borat Two, alas, is more Yakov Smirnoff hammily exploiting his accent. They botched the joke.
Unrequired Reading: Nov. 3, 2006
Official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon & his brother Whit sacrifice themselves to The Guiding Light in order to chronicle the soap opera’s tie-in episode with Marvel Comics.
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Two tax articles from Slate: the continuing phenomenon of Bushenfreude — those who benefit from the Republican tax cuts but contribute to Democrat politicians, and Bono/U2’s decision to reduce its tax burden by moving its music publishing company out of Ireland:
“Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market … that’s a justice issue,” Bono said at a prayer breakfast attended by President Bush, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and various members of Congress earlier this year. Preaching this sort of thing has made Bono a perennial candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He continued:
Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents . . . that’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents . . . that’s a justice issue.
And relocating your business offshore in order to avoid paying taxes to the Republic of Ireland, where poverty is higher than in almost any other developed nation?
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Dan Drezner examines the importance of China in negotiations with North Korea. I believe I’ve said it before: When you manage to get the U.S., Russia, China and Japan on the same page against you, you have severely messed up.
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BLDGBLOG remains one of the most eerie/haunting sites out there. This post about offshore oil rigs proves my point.
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When we gaze into the Barack, does the Barack gaze back at us?
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In honor of the premiere of Borat, the UK press has been doing interest stories from Kazakhstan.
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Reason on misreading the Beats.
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I know enough small publicly-held company execs who would agree with this post: SOX sucks.
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And in honor of the NBA season kick-off (as it were): Kieran Darcy gives up on the Knicks, about 10 years after I did.