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.
A Fast Brick
As if we needed more proof that the world is batshit-insane, I present . . . the 500-hp drift-racing edition of the Honda Element!
The Living Thank You, Too!
Happy Day of the Dead, all you zombies and zombettes!
To commemorate the event, I was too exhausted this morning to write up more NBA previews, so the next update will be this evening. But I decided to make this blog easier for readers who don’t give a crap about the NBA (and the humorous takes Tom Spurgeon & I provide) by moving the hoops previews to a separate page!
So head over to the Official VM NBA Preview page to check out the new postings, and come back here for my other wacky ruminations. I promise to get a good Unrequired Reading together tomorrow morning!
USA Tomorrow?
One of the aspects of This Travelin’ Life that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned is the complimentary copies of USA Today that hotels distribute. While it’s not a paper I read under typical circumstances, it’s kinda comforting to find the issue waiting outside my door when I head out for breakfast during these trade show trips. This morning, I took my copy down with me and read it over migas and coffee. Lots of coffee.
The lead article in today’s Life section was “Mainline pulls in Protestants,” discussing a trend that may or may not be occurring among christians. I wasn’t interested in reading it until I noticed the headline for the story on its second-page jump: “Like television, religion is now ‘highly fragmented'”.
Those editors sure know how to get my attention.
This almost got trumped by the two articles on page 2 of the business section: “Flat wages, rising key prices a double whammy” and “After trailing inflation, wages rise at fastest rate since 2004.”
Fortunately, the absurdities and contradictions of USA Today’s headline writers was beaten by a giant ad in the News section:
How To Be $1,835,360 Richer
Win 95.12% Of All Trades
And Still Lose Nothing . . .
Even If You’re Absolutely 100% Wrong
On the plus side, the paper did tell me that PW Botha died.
The conference wraps up today, and I’ll be flying back into Newark Airport tonight. Which airport is that? Oh, you know: the one where they had a 90% failure rate in finding knives & explosives in check-in bags during a test, where two jets just “bumped wings” on the taxiway, and where an incoming plane from Orlando landed on the taxiway instead of the runway.
Oh, and I’ll be flying to Orlando next week.
One of the side-effects is that it makes you sound like a self-absorbed douchebag
It seems that some people in the military are not fans of the mandatory anthrax vaccine (AVA):
U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate Captain Kelli Donley developed Idiopathic Spinal Cerebellar Ataxia after receiving the AVA anthrax vaccine. The disease impaired her brain function and motor skills, a U.S. Air Force Medical Evaluation Board (“Board”) found. She retired in April of 2006 after the Board granted her a 100 percent disability because she could not practice law or perform tasks requiring high cognitive function or demanding speech.
“Before receiving the anthrax vaccine, I was perfectly healthy and in good shape. Now, I talk with slurred speech, I have trouble walking, and I stopped seeing those seeking legal assistance because their legal issues paled in comparison to mine,” said Donley.
Yellow rose, etc.
Walking through the gate into the airport terminal, I realized that this is my 4th visit to San Antonio: 3 pharma conferences and 1 car wash industry event (I got my start on a magazine called Auto Laundry News).
I’ve been through a bunch of airports large and small in the last 10 years. Sometimes I don’t remember a lot about them. I didn’t recall anything about San Antonio until I started walking down the long hallway to the baggage claim and ground transport (I was looking for the latter, since I had everything in my carry-on). It was then that I thought, “Oh, yeah! They had that game room with the Addams’ Family pinball machine!”
And, lo and behold, what was in the next doorway to my right? Showtime! Well, not exactly, since it was 11pm and I was too exhausted from the 4 hours in the air, 3 hours in the airport, and the hour or so I’d spent sawing trees and hauling lumber that day.
But it was reassuring to see the machine there.
The flight wasn’t eventful. Most of us were on the way to the conference. When I walked back up the cabin from the bathroom, just about all the laptops I saw open displayed the logos of various drug companies. The woman next to me worked for a French company that handles pharma packaging (glass containers). Her name was Pascaline. I only mention her because I love the name.
I read and listened to music for most of the flight. The guy across the aisle from me was reading, but he didn’t have any music. What he had was a book with the title, The Way Of The Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Woman, Work, and Sexual Desire. I only mention this because of the title of chapter 16: “Women Are Not Liars.”
Go figure. I read about half of that Portis novel, Gringos.
The first day of the show’s done. There are a bunch of hospitality events going on; I’ve been invited to a couple of dinners and other get-togethers. This is usually a good opportunity to get wrecked on someone else’s dime, but I’m feeling pretty tired just now. I might just take the night off, scare up some room service, watch Monday Night Football, and get back to that novel.
Or I’ll be table-dancing to Thunderstruck at a bar on the Riverwalk. I’ll letcha know.
One for the road
The book I’m taking on this trip to San Antonio? Gringos, by Charles Portis.