I have a new favorite drink, largely because of the insanely funny commercial.
The official VM girlfriend and I simply call the stuff “ROY! ROY-ROY-ROY!”
Smackdown
Jeff Larkin offers the top 10 ass-kickings delivered by Chris Hitchens in 2004, including
6) On John Kerry:
“I heard that people were sending the checks to the $10,000-a-plate dinner, or whatever it was–they were sending the check, they wouldn’t come to the dinner. That’s too much. ‘I’ll pay you not to have me to dinner with the nominee.’ That may be a rumor, but it did appear in the NY Times fairly authoritatively, and it seems somehow horribly true. Also it seems to me astonishing that the test of a Democratic liberal now is to be gung ho, or have been gung ho, about Vietnam. Of all wars. And then, did he think Mr. John O’Neil had died? Did he sort of check? Because the last time he tried this, it’s agreed by all that John O’Neil gave him a pretty good run for his money back in the seventies. Whatever you think about the merits of the case.”
Mystery Achievement
Jennifer Weiner explains how to submit a Talk of the Town piece to the New Yorker.
Step eight: Paranoia. Decide that Talk of the Town assistant is twenty-two-year-old Brown graduate with size zero leather miniskirt and degree in semiotics who automatically shuns any book or short story with actual plot and unambiguous ending. Imagine Talk of the Town assistant as mean-faced girl from freshman year of college who corrected your pronunciation of “heinous” in front of a room full of classmates, including guy on whom you had a crush.
Lesson for Viktor Yuschenko
Get oil heat.
Lifetimes
This is some of who we are.
It’s About Time!
I’m so glad that the new biopic about Christopher Hitchens is coming out in February.
I’m not sure about the casting, though . . .
Business as usual
According to this article, the sex-biz is back to normal in Thailand. I’m not sure which line is funnier:
“Yes, we are just as busy as before the tsunami,” said Toto, a drag queen.
or
[S]ex tourism […] accounts for 5 per cent of Thailand’s gross domestic product.
because with the latter, you can talk about just how gross that domestic product really is.
Is it genocide yet?
Nope, not yet. Just ask the UN.
Oh, wait: my bad! That link was about how Kofi Annan’s son was actually involved in negotiating a deal to sell 2 million barrels of oil in the UN’s oil-for-food scam.
HERE’S the link about how the UN has determined that there’s no genocide occurring in Darfur. I lose track of this stuff sometimes. Sorry.
Puts my NBA preview in a new light
The Sports Guy has a new mailbag column, and it includes a letter that made me laugh like a retard:
Q: Not that there is anything wrong with this, but have you ever noticed that most NBA team names sound like gay bars? Bulls, Bucks, Rockets, Cavaliers, Nuggets, Mavericks, Jazz, Hawks, Blazers, Warriors, Heat, Bobcats, Pistons, Spurs, Timberwolves, and Grizzlies all sound like they are catered to the leather and mustache set. I also think Magic, Wizards, Kings, 76ers, and Pacers sound like male performance enhancement pills. Rockets could also fit into that category as well.
–Scott G., Chicago, IL
Just thought I’d share.
My City of Ruins
Theodore Dalrymple has a very thoughtful essay about Dresden in the new City Journal.
Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up.Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland. Walking with the widow of a banker through the one small square in Frankfurt that has been restored to its medieval splendor, I remarked how beautiful a city Frankfurt must once have been, and how terrible it was that such beauty should have been lost forever.
“We started it,” she said. “We got what we deserved.”
But who was this ‘we’ of whom she spoke?
Who, indeed? Dalrymple explores that notion of culpability, that almost Greek tragic sense of a cursed house, nation-wide Atreides, shame that pre-emptively annihilates the possibility of pride.
Perhaps I’ll give Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction a read this week.