Category Archives: Total trivia

This is what conventional wisdom holds to be ‘solid evidence’

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One of the most common criticisms aimed at my infamous Edwards column is that my "evidence" was "thin" or "flimsy"– a mix of casual personal observations and "hearsay" (God forbid we should trust anyone else’s account, right?).

Conventional "wisdom" puts a whole lot more stock in this kind of evidence, which was in the WSJ today:

Edwards, Foreclosure Critic, Has
Investing Tie to Subprime Lenders
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER
August 17, 2007; Page A1

As a presidential candidate, Democrat John Edwards has regularly attacked subprime lenders, particularly those that have filed foreclosure suits against victims of Hurricane Katrina. But as an investor, Mr. Edwards has ties to lenders foreclosing on Katrina victims.

The Wall Street Journal has identified 34 New Orleans homes whose owners have faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress Investment Group LLC. Mr. Edwards has about $16 million invested in Fortress funds, according to a campaign aide who confirmed a more general Federal Election Commission report. Mr. Edwards worked for Fortress, a publicly held private-equity fund, from late 2005 through 2006….

Well, I don’t roll that way. D-Brad doesn’t roll that way. Most of my colleagues do. They treat "Deep Throat’s" suggestion to "follow the money" as some secular equivalent of Holy Writ, brought down on stone tablets from Mt. Vernon.

My problem — and it is indeed a problem, as you can see by watching me struggle with such basic tasks as paying monthly bills — is that I don’t find money very interesting. I don’t find it solid and meaningful the way most hard-headed, sensible folk seem to do. To me it is ephemeral, abstract, gossamer stuff. It’s slippery. Its very fungibility causes me to feel like I’m gazing into a shifting cloud when others see sharp outlines.

I prefer personal observation of an individual’s behavior. Preferably my own observation, but the reliable accounts of others as well. And reliability depends upon the circumstances. When my discrete, reserved assistant, whom I trust absolutely with all that money stuff that so befuddles me and who never says a bad word about anybody, is so struck by a candidate’s callousness that she says something about it, that has meaning to me. When a guy tells me about the candidate jogging by his house after an event was supposed to start, it’s just interesting. But when an independent source sufficiently unimpeachable that he will never speak on the record because it would ruin the connections that give him such access backs it up without my having mentioned it, and even throws in such unnecessary details as the wetness of the candidates’ hair from his post-jog shower, and there are hundreds of sweaty witnesses to the fact that the candidate was two hours late to said event — well, it  becomes memorable, and gathers meaning.

But if the WSJ wants to document the candidate’s insincerity by following the money, fine. Better them than me.

Hillary bumps Biden, quickly makes my Top Five list

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My Top Five Videos, that is. She’s not on my Top Five Candidates list. That doesn’t mean she won’t be; I just haven’t composed that one yet.

But in just two weeks of boffo box-office, she has muscled her way to No. 3 among my most-watched video clips on YouTube. Well, she didn’t do it herself. Some credit goes to the star of the clip — the woman who heckled her at the College Democrats meeting in Columbia — and to her cinematographer, moi.

The title ("Hillary’s Heckler") probably helped. Alliteration is a powerful thing. Also boosting it was the fact that there was a CNN clip of the same incident. Still, that one — shot with a better camera and from a somewhat more advantageous vantage point — only got 2,232 hits, while mine had received 5,639.

How could that happen? Well, I’m going to credit the rough style of mine. First, I used the Steven Spielberg/"Saving Private Ryan" hand-held-no-steadicam style, rather than the stodgy, omniscient-viewer, fixed-position technique of the network. This really puts you in the action.

It’s shot from a combatants’ viewpoint. This is what a rapt young Democrat, fascinated by everything Mrs. Clinton had to say, would have seen and heard. The camera stays on Hillary, then there are murmurs and cries of "No!" and you don’t know what’s happening at first. Is the crowd turning against Hillary? Do they not like what she’s saying? But wait! The camera swings in the direction of the sounds, and here’s this nutty lady yelling at her, and (unlike in the CNN clip) you can hear what she’s saying — not that it makes sense, but you can’t have everything.

The jostling, the confusion, the lack of explanation of what just happened, Hillary’s smooth slide back into her speech — all add to a dynamic viewing experience.

That’s my interpretation, anyway.

Whatever the explanation, no video of mine has ever topped 5,000 in less than two weeks. And it makes poor Joe Biden — whose frenetic Rotary performance topped the chart for a time — even more of a footnote. Show biz is hell.

Here’s the list as it stands now:

So we see what sells, don’t we? Cars, cocaine, controversy and Nazis. At least I haven’t stooped to luring y’all in with sex. But that’s just because Ségolène Royal‘s agent has been completely unreasonable.

So that’s what I look like in tabloid

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When the weather’s like this, I’m pretty much a seersucker kind of guy (OK, no "Sophie’s Choice" cracks, wise guys), but I happened to run across the New York Post version of my column from yesterday, and now I know what I look like in tabloid.

OK, so with this look, I guess I ditch the bow tie, right? I think I’d better check with Eddie over at Lourie’s.

Mind like a trap II

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Check this out…

It seems that I once met Sean Hannity. Or saw him, anyway. Earlier this evening, when I was posting this, something rang a bell. Something about Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity that seemed to click. So, just before going to bed, I did a search on Nexis.com from home, and bada-bing — there it was.

According to this column I wrote in 2004, Hannity was one of the people the senator schmoozed with when I was hanging with him at the Garden:

The State (Columbia, SC)

September 2, 2004 Thursday FINAL EDITION

LINDSEY GRAHAM FACES MURDERER’S ROW AT THE GARDEN

BYLINE: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A12

LENGTH: 920 words

DATELINE: NEW YORK

    Lindsey Graham is on a machine-gun tour of broadcast booths at Madison Square Garden – quick pops, two or three minutes each. After one, he observes to aide Kevin Bishop: "I think that went OK, Kevin. I have no idea."
    "What happens on a day like this is you get tired and you get goaded by somebody into saying something mean, or something stupid." He starts to elaborate, but is interrupted by the shrieks of two ladies from Wisconsin:
"Lindsey Graham! Oh, I can’t believe this!" You’d think he was a Beatle. He poses for a keepsake picture with them. "Say ‘Flat tax,’ " he grins before the flash.

    On the day after his 2 minute, 45-second introduction of John McCain, he is much in demand. He had come over to "Radio Row" to do several pre-arranged interviews, but once he’s here, producers from other shows keep coming up to ask for a couple of minutes. He always obliges.
    It’s "such a free-form thing that it’s bam, bam, bam," notes Mr. Bishop.
Our junior senator sits at a table alone with headphones talking into a microphone to a host who isn’t literally there. Then, he does an impromptu stand-up with USAToday.com. Later, chatting with a Seattle host, he tips back his folding chair, hands in pockets, looking like Andy or Barney lounging on the porch after Aunt Bea’s Sunday dinner.
    "This is Murderer’s Row here," he says with satisfaction during a brief pause. "This is the Democratic Party’s worst nightmare: talk radio."
    From encounter to encounter, he is generally completely on party message: Told of reports fellow Sen. John Kerry would hold a rally Friday to try to grab back the limelight, he calls it "the best evidence that he is in a sinking ship." Asked if he knows the Democratic nominee, he says: "I’ve met him twice. He’s never there."
    But at other times during the couple of hours I spend with him, he exhibits more of his political range: For instance, he says of the school funding equity lawsuit under way in Manning, "Whether they win or not, there’s some truth in what they’re saying." He says what’s needed to address the deep and abiding poverty along South Carolina’s I-95 corridor is "almost like a Marshall Plan." Asked whether his party is living up to that challenge, he admits, "I don’t think so."
     He stresses that he believes he and other GOP leaders of his generation "have a tremendous responsibility to represent not only a new Republican Party, but a New South." When I ask what happened to the New South that was supposed to be rising in the 1960s, he says "We took a turn in the ’70s with this Southern Strategy . . .."
    This trait that some would call a paradox (I would call it the sign of a complex and honest mind) remains on display as we make our way from Radio Row toward the CBS television booth overlooking the convention hall for an interview with a Spartanburg affiliate. Lifting a cell phone to his ear for an interview with Kevin Cohen back in Columbia as we walk, he says of the talk radio bits he’s just done, "I knew if we went over here – this is our crowd, this is our crowd." Then he immediately seems to distance himself by adding that he was "pleased that all these right-leaning sort of stations were pleased with McCain."
    He doesn’t hold this frankness back from the radio people, either: "Don’t you think," he says more than once, "the undecided voter is uneasy about Bush in a number of ways, but unsure about Kerry?"
    He’s not always the one who is sought out; sometimes he’s the seeker. He pushes through a crowd to shake hands with Sean Hannity, and risks being late to his TV spot to bat the breeze with Tim Russert. Then, in the CBS booth, he practically pitches himself off the balcony lunging to shake hands with David Letterman’s unflappable Biff Henderson.
    But Lindsey Graham himself is a star to most we meet – not only the radio people, but green-shirted volunteer guides and other regular folks. On woman enthusiastically tells him, "You did great last night!"
    The senator is too smart to believe that. He asks me on the way out of the Garden what I thought, and I tell him straight: He was no John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. He immediately agrees, and for the next several minutes indicates how much this has preyed on his mind for the past 20 hours.
    He tries to look at the bright side: "I think it warmed up" toward the end. "I think it took that line about no class warfare to get them going." But that doesn’t erase his dismay over the shaky beginning, when he just couldn’t connect with the audience.
    The crowd ignored him until they finally realized, about halfway through, that he was introducing Sen. McCain. This shook him, as I could tell even from the S.C. delegation’s seats at the very back. He had followed a guy talking about the Patriot Act, and he figures they thought this was someone else they could ignore until the good stuff came on. There was a "big commotion off to my left; I thought it was a fight going on." He was "terrified about going over" his allotted time, since he had been warned sternly not to. And it was his first time using a TelePrompTer.
    Bottom line, "Nobody told me you have to get the crowd’s attention."
He knows that now, and on the whole looks back on the experience as "good practice."
    He doesn’t explain what he means by that. But I figure that according to the Warhol principle, after his 165 seconds Monday night, he’s still got more than 12 more minutes coming to him. I think he figures it that way, too.
Write to Mr. Warthen at [email protected].

Copyright 2004 The State
All Rights Reserved

Like I said — mind like a trap. I’m not guaranteeing steel, mind you. Maybe plastic. But some kind of trap.

It’s still true that, as I said earlier, I couldn’t pick Hannity out of a line-up. The trap’s not that good.

Mind like a trap

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Fred_thompson3

You can tell I’m a trained, professional observer, on account of the way I notice stuff and remember it later, like that Jason Bourne guy.

I said to that reader in that e-mail much earlier today that I thought I saw something — I even specified, "a banner" — about the "FairTax" in the background at the Fred Thompson event. And now I go back and look at the stuff from my digital camera, and bingo. Dang, but I’m good. Mind like a trap.

It was even in the background of a couple of blurry shots I got of the lovely Mrs. Thompson. (And for those of you with differing tastes, that’s the lovely Katon Dawson off to the right.)

Fred_thompson2

Of course, I didn’t make much note of it at the time. I mean, who’s going to stop and think about obscure banners in the background when there’s more interesting stuff to concentrate on…

Fred_thompson1

… such as, the exciting possibility that an exciting guy like Fred Thompson might get into this exciting presidential contest?

By the way — has he done that yet? I haven’t been paying attention.

Dig the fractals

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So I just finished doing the pagination on the last of the six pages that will get us through the weekend,
and I’m just starting to read the proofs, and it’s 6:10 p.m. (no matter what the stupid Left-Coast Time on the blog says), and I was here past midnight last night, and I’m getting just a little bit tired, and this is what I’m thinking about:

Check out the fractals on this Ohman cartoon I put on the Saturday edit page. Do you suppose he meant to do that on purpose? Just like little airplanes, like subsets of the big airplane…

You do see them, don’t you?

Back to the proofs…

Ohman14

‘… and on banjo, Mr. Giddily Pickets!’

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Quick, go to the search function on thestate.com and search for "JoDell Pickens." You’ll see one of the most delightfully goofy guesses I’ve ever seen a search engine or a spell-checker make.

I was looking for that name while reading tomorrow’s proofs. There were a couple of letters mentioning thatGiddily Ms. Pickens had asserted in a news story that she employed illegal aliens. I thought I’d better double-check that. (It was true, by the way; that was in the story.)

Anyway, the search engine asked, "Did you mean giddily pickets?"

Wouldn’t that be a wonderful stage name for a performer on the Grand Ole Opry?

Or perhaps it refers to the actions of a particularly blissed-out-looking protester, such as the lovely young Italian antiwar demonstrator below?

When I told a colleague about the question the computer had asked me, he replied, "No, but I am intrigued…." Unfortunately, the impertinent machine was merely teasing us; it had no such association to share.

Alas, not even Google could sate my curiosity on the point. Shame.

Antiwaritaly

That’ll show ’em!

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Sombrero

It’s not enough for some hard-liners that the immigration bill was defeated in the U.S. Senate last week. In some parts of the country, retaliation is the order of the day.

To get even with Mexico for having a lousy economy and forcing all its poor to stream across our border, the Oregon legislature has decided to start sending our politicians down there.

That should stop the flow of illegal aliens quicker than any old wall. Anyway, here’s the Associated Press caption to the picture:

Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney is joined by his wife, Margie, on the Senate floor in Salem, Ore., Thursday, June 28, 2007, after receiving a gift trip to Mexico from fellow Senators as the legislature works to wind up this year’s session.

This might be more devastatingly effective than the time we sent the Marines down to Montezuma’s place.

Mrs. Thompson and the rock

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Thompsonmain

As I mentioned in this previous post, my camera kept adjusting for, and auto-focusing on, Jeri Thompson when I was trying to shoot Fred Thompson today — probably because she was wearing white, and certainly not because of any conscious decision on the part of the photographer.

Thompsonjeri
I did get a couple of shots of her intentionally, but it was mostly from behind, because she generally kept her eyes toward the candidate.

Men who frequent blogs have seemed motivated to call up pictures of Mrs. Thompson, no doubt because of their admiration of her husband’s political philosophy. But in one of my missed-focus shots, I noticed
something for the ladies to take an interest in. See the blow-up below.

I assume that thing’s real, although what I know from diamonds youThompsonrock could fit into a quark. Nothing like having a husband who’s made big bucks in several fields, huh?

This post is certified free of any political significance, although I did see "Blood Diamond" on DVD last night. But I have no idea where this one came from, so we are still relevance-free.

The machine broke?

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Reading a letter on tomorrow’s page on the subject, I was struck again at how often Andre Bauer does something that would draw all sorts of criticism and/or derision were anyone else to do it, but we generally don’t remark on it around here. There’s too much else out there to write about.

When we DO clear our throats to say something, of course, we are immediately subjected to howls from the Andre lobby about how we’re ALWAYS criticizing him, and why don’t we EVER write about anything else, and other easily controvertible assertions.

This has a chilling effect, so that we tend to give him one or two extra missteps before the next one we comment on? Why do we let that happen? Because Andre is the lieutenant governor, and the lieutenant governor is not a very important figure, so one can give him slack without neglecting one’s duty — at least, when there are plenty of important things to write about. Sure, it’s embarrassing for people to know this is our lieutenant governor (a title that sounds important, anyway), but in the scheme of things…

Since we’re not having elections right now, it’s not all that important to the state of South Carolina whether Andre screwed the pooch as a pilot, or the machine just broke. But this lawsuit is at least worth a raised eyebrow, is it not? I say that on the same day I read about this interesting case, and I am reminded of it.

So, any opinions out there among the brethren on the higher and lower steps of the pyramid? John Glenn? Chuck Yeager? Wrong-Way Corrigan? Anybody?

Rudy: Good for the Israelis?

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The Jerusalem Post sent me this electronic solicitation from Rudy Giuliani courting the pro-Israel vote. I suppose you could see it as a "Rudy — Good for the Jews" type of message, but there are a lot of goyim among the electorate equally interested in such a stance (me, for one):

    As a longtime friend and staunch supporter of Israel during my entire public life, I want to share with you my deep concern for the Jewish state and ask for your support as I campaign to become the next President of the United States.
    We are at a crucial moment in history. We are once again at a point where the free world’s resolve in fighting evil is being tested.
    In the 1990’s, we had the blinders on with regard to Islamic terrorism. Coddling terrorists — even applauding for winning the Nobel Peace prize as was done with Yasser Arafat — is a policy we cannot return to.
    Yet, these blinders are still worn by some people who wish to lead our country.

I don’t know whether Rudy is the right candidate when it comes to this issue or not, but in the interests ofStage_deli
employing as many ethnic stereotypes as possible, I’ll tell you this: I was at the Stage Deli on 7th Avenue Saturday, and he has his own sandwich. That’s something, right?

Boys, give me something in a C progression…

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Hey, those guys had some pretty good timing, didn’t they?

Anyway, this morning I see that The New York Times is saying that:

Former Senator Fred D. Thompson  of Tennessee has taken new steps that make it clear that he is likely to run for the White House, potentially shaking up a field of candidates that has failed to strike a chord with the Republican base….

… and with my uncanny ability for going right to the heart of the matter, I immediately wondered, "which chord would that be?"

I’m thinking a basic C chord, within the context of a blues progression. That would be very Nashville, with a hint of Memphis thrown in. It would go with the drawl and the red pickup truck, which has been Fred’s campaign persona in the past.

Get out your ax (not the one you grind, the acoustic one) and strum C, F, G, G7 — maybe throw in an A minor in there someplace, or an E minor, or…

OK, I’m way out of my depth on music here. I can strum it, but when I try to write it, it’s too hard. Phillip, or anybody else out there?

Beyond that, in order to strike this chord in the electorate, would Fred have to sing a new song, or should it be something we know already that he could cover? I’m thinking a cover of an old favorite, or a new song that sounds old-timey. Anybody have any titles?

What’s really important

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You want me to tell you what’s really important? Do you? Are you sure?

The other day, I posted a quick ditty about the NCAA basketball tournament. It was as much to enhance my own enjoyment as anything else — a form of sports Viagra, if you will. In the past, I’ve really enjoyed the tourney IF I had a bet in a pool. Because I had staked something, even a dollar, on the outcome, I cared, and got involved with the excitement as a spectator. It was fun. It almost made me feel like a normal person — taking interest for a change in both sports and television, at the same time.

But I had missed the deadline for any pools, so I filled out my bracket anyway and posted it, thinking that would be a good hook for me. It didn’t really work, possibly because my son got married over the weekend, so I was even busier than usual — a LOT busier. (And it was a blessed time with family and friends, one of the best I can remember. Much better than basketball.)

Anyway, on a whim, I did a video of my bracket and posted it on YouTube, meaning to link to it from the blog post. But I thought that just too stupid and obsessive for words, so I just went with the still photo.

It’s hard to find a dumber or more boring video than my out-of-focus panning over my poorly-considered picks for the NCAA. And yet, even though I didn’t promote it in any way, 58 people have called it up to watch it.

Sure, that’s not many by YouTube standards, but compare it to 59 views of my video of Lindsey Graham talking about the importance of energy independence — which, in my book, is greater than the importance of what an editorial page editor thinks about who will make it to the Final Four.

And it’s not just that people ignore the videos I push. They just watch what interests them. My first video on Grady Patterson, which I also promoted, has been watched 826 times.

Anyway, now that I know what is important to the viewing public, here is some truly riveting cinema on my basketball picks:

Too late — but here’s my bracket

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Brackets_warthen

Well, I missed the deadline for getting in my bracket — both to the McCain site and the, uh, less licit arrangement in which I was asked to join — by a few minutes. I have no excuse. I was busy working, which is, of course, no excuse.

But I went ahead and filled it out anyway, so that you can see, once again, how lousy I am at prognostication.

Oh, and if you’re worried that I’m cheating even the slightest bit, I can assure you without fear of any credible contradiction that there is no possibility of that. I haven’t the slightest idea how the first games are going, or even which ones are the first ones. I just raced through the form, looking at the names and the seeds, and writing down winners.

If you doubt me, you don’t understand the extent to which I do not follow sports. I’ll tune in to the league playoffs and World Series as long as the Braves are in the running, and I will pay some attention to the NCAA IF I have filled out a bracket and IF my teams are still in it — which I won’t even investigate until the first games have been played.

I could have turned my bracket in tomorrow to the ool-pay, and nobody’s money would have been in danger. Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of pull with the local mob.

The French

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Got a kick out of this comment from Phillip:

The following is completely a non-sequitur, but I absolutely can’t
resist: in today’s State, Brad and Dave’s worst nightmare…"France had
more babies in 2006 than in any year in the last
quarter-century…capping a decade of rising fertility that has bucked
Europe’s graying trend…."

Then he followed it up with some kind of twisted Paris talk
that I couldn’t make out:

Nous avons votre "valeurs familiales" exactement ici!

It doesn’t make sense to me, either. But I think the thrust of it is that Phillip is suggesting I have a certain antipathy toward the Gauls, to which I can only say: Hate the French? Moi? Perish the thought.

I’ll confess that I did enjoy Sasha Baron Cohen’s send-up of every "Old Europe" stereotype ever conceived in "Talladega Nights" (yes, I finally got around to seeing it, and yes, it was mostly pretty awful, although I also enjoyed Gary Cole, as usual).

But how can any red-blooded American despise the French these days, with signs that the De Gaullists are dying off? And check out (again) who might be their new president:

As I said to a colleague the other day when I ran across that video, "You know, if she were my president, I’d probably believe everything she said, even though I wouldn’t understand a word of it." Being a good friend, he warned me, "Careful … it’s just like those French socialists to send comely, sweet-talking females to fool American men." To which, being besotted, I could only reply, "If she wanted to surrender Paris to the boche, I’d say, ‘Sure, we can get it back later….’" Hey, we’ve done that for the French before, right?

But pretty is as pretty does, and we have to assess folks by words and actions as well as by pulchritude and sheer foxiness. Fortunately, Segolene measures up pretty well in that department to — relatively speaking. For a French Socialist.

Here’s a link to a WSJ piece that had encouraging things to say about her, and especially about her center-right opponent. I was encouraged, anyway. Here’s a pertinent excerpt:

His version of Gaullism — and Mr. [Nicolas] Sarkozy does after all lead the general’s old camp — would save "la France éternelle" through a rupture with the Gaullist past.

Less can be said about Ms. Royal’s views; she smiles
much and reveals little. But, in a series of debates before November’s
Socialist primary, what Ms. Royal didn’t say said plenty. As the other
candidates brought out the well-worn trope of France as counterweight
to the evil hyperpower, Ms. Royal stayed mum. So far she refuses to
play the anti-American card. Though Iraq’s "a catastrophe," she says
its democracy deserves support. To more guffaws from Paris elites, Ms.
Royal calls for "extremely strong diplomatic action to prevent Iran
from getting nuclear power, which would be very dangerous for the whole
region" and rules out atomic energy for civilian use. That’s as hard a
line as any out there today. Ms. Royal, wrote a gushing editorialist in
Le Monde, "favors a break with the soft consensus that for too many
years has prevailed in French foreign policy."

As I said — for a French Socialist.

Surrendair monkeys we are non!

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Chirac2
Jacques Chirac employs the national art of hand gestures in an effort to explain France to a Dutchman.

I‘m actually officially taking vacation this week, but I had to pause to share this with someone. In trying to do some post-Christmas shopping (exchanges, gift cards, etc.), I tried to go to Amazon.com and somehow ended up first at the French version, which featured a book with this intriguing title:

Pourquoi les français sont les moins fréquentables de la planète

I have little to no French myself, but thanks to those two years of Latin and intuition, I could sort out most of that — just not quite all. So I turned in vain to Google to provide additional info about the book. It kept given me French source, so I asked it to translate one of the pages. It came up with a hilarious rendition, of which this is a part:

Why the French are the least frequentable of planet

Presentation   

Disentangle, in good mood, the truth of the forgery of reciprocal and misleading stereotypes

You probably already wondered what our European neighbors think of
us, French. You finally will obtain answers to this distressing
question!

Let us raise a corner of the veil: the Germans find
us off-hand and frivolous pretentious, the chauvinistic, intransigent
English and without humour, the disobeying, immoral and dirty Swedes…
And all with the endorsement!

The reciprocal one is true and we are not remains about it to overpower them, all as much as they are, of all the defects.

But, with the fact, how are they actually, our European partners? And on which reciprocal positive images can we rest to live, speak, exchange, work, distract ourselves and even dream together?

It is with a handing-over flat of a crowd of prejudices
sometimes full of consequences that you invites this book… to live in
Europe with the daily newspaper.

Amusing, non? Note that I am making fun here of the translation software, not of the French or their obsession with their national identity. However, I do reserve the right to do that at some other time.

Segolene2

Segolene Royal’s ordinarily lovely face shows the strain of speaking her native tongue.

The Manly Art of last-minute shopping

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Big game shopping with
Conan the Contrarian

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
“For years to come, the simple merchant folk of Columbiana will speak of this day, and their voices will be filled with awe,” I announced to my household as I strutted back and forth.
    My household rolled its eyes. But I was not to be gainsaid, nor was my glory to be denied. I had just returned from a good, clean shop, the sort of shop that makes a shopping man proud to be what he is. I had gone, I had seen, I had shopped, and no one could take that away.
    There are those who derogate the virtues of shopping, especially at this time of year. My friend and comrade Mike Fitts did so on this very page not three days hence. But he is to be forgiven; he has been woefully misled.
    There are other men — I spoke to one just recently — who wrongly hold that shopping is properly the work of women. What an abominable falsehood! It denies our hunter-gatherer heritage. Those who propagate it have forgotten the visceral joys of the hunt.
    Now the gathering, I grant you, can just as easily be accomplished by women. I would not say otherwise. But the shop itself? It requires certain atavistic reflexes that come only with the Y chromosome. Or two of them, in the case of the great shoppers. It demands strength, agility, a lack of fear, and an innate ability to manipulate objects in space and time.
    Forgive me; I boast. But my satisfaction is great. There is something about a good shop that draws upon testosterone, releases endorphins, dilates pupils, opens breathing passages, and makes a man speak boldly in the cadences of Conan the Barbarian.
    Which, out of mercy to you, I will now stop doing.
    What’s wrong with enjoying the raw challenge of shopping?
    I know: Christmas shouldn’t be commercialized. In fact, this isn’t even Christmas season yet, except in the minds of those of us brainwashed by merchandisers. This is Advent. I’m Catholic, and I can read a liturgical calendar.
    This is supposed to be a quiet, contemplative time of prayerful anticipation, and for me at least, it never works out that way, for which I feel appropriately guilty. How bad is it? This bad: I was so busy I didn’t go to the special Advent reconciliation service at my church Tuesday, at which I had planned to confess that once again, I had failed to be contemplatively prayerful this month. (So in lieu of that, I confess it to you, my brothers and sisters.)
    And yes, it’s really bad for people to get all greedy and acquisitive, and to claw and tear at each other in the struggle to obtain one of a limited supply of something that nobody had heard of a month ago, and without which billions of people have lived happy, fulfilling lives.
    But I’m not going to buy one of those. What I am going to do is be honest, and admit that I enjoy the hunt —  the shop.
    In many ways, I am not a regular guy. I hate football. No, I don’t mean I’m not interested in it; I actively hate it.  And yet I don’t hate it as much as “Reality TV,” and look how popular that is. What’s wrong with me?
    But when it comes to shopping, I am at one with the zeitgeist. At least, I think I am. So many people complain about having to do it that I wonder. I guess it intimidates them.
    But it’s not the shopping itself they fear; it’s the hassle. I’ve never been to war, but if I had to, I think the part I would dread the most would not be the short periods of getting shot at. It would be the months of training, away from home, living in foxholes, not bathing, freezing or roasting, eating MREs, living cheek-by-jowl with a bunch of other smelly guys and standing in line to use the latrine: The hassle.
    Shopping can be like that. But it also has its moments of adrenaline rush that make you glad you got out there amongst ’em rather than staying home and ordering gifts from the Web.
    Hey, it’s OK to be afraid, kid; we all are. But it’s what you do in spite of your fear that makes the difference.
    Before heading out to Harbison last weekend, I groaned as I beheld my list. Why me, I moaned. But there was no question that the time had arrived to begin — all the ads said “Last-minute Gift Ideas,” and that’s a sure sign.
    So I made my plans, girded myself, and headed out. And once I was in it, I was in it all the way. Wham! I hit Dutch Square long enough to exchange something that was the wrong size, pick up a couple of other things, and then Bam! slipped into Harbison the back way, evading the congested paths, my mind going at light speed improvising the best, the fastest path to the kill. I pulled into the alley behind PetSmart, left my vehicle next to the dumpster (parking lots are for amateurs), ran in a crouch through the landscaping at the side of the strip, all senses at full alert, and Pow! was into Michael’s and out with the item I had come for, slipping swiftly back to the alley before anyone could ask, “May I help you?” Then back into the car, down the alley the back way to Barnes & Noble (encountering not a single opposing vehicle), where Bam! Bam! BambamBAM! I bought five gifts in as many minutes, and was off, infiltrating the very citadel of capitalism itself — the holy of holies, the Mall — before Harbison had even awakened to my presence… pant, pant. Less than an hour had passed since I had left the house.
    Now that’s what I call shopping. Yes! You know it! You have to attack, grab the initiative and maintain it, never giving those who would stop you a chance. If you slow down, you’re finished.
    OK, OK, I know this is stupid, and now you’re ticked off that you’ve read this far, but here’s my point: You’ve got to do it anyway. Christmas is Monday. You might as well enjoy it. Be a man. Get out there. Show us how it’s done.

Lipstick Vogue governments

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Yeah, I know I’ve been kind of silent, but that’s because those of us who are still in the office have been working our steely buns off just trying to get editorial pages out every day.

But I just had to share this typo, on a proof I’m reading of our Saturday page. It’s in a letter to the editor:

    It is beginning to look a lot like 1938.
    Last week the Iraq Study (AKA surrender) Group issued its report. The report writers believe that Iran and Syria can be good partners shaping a new Iraq. History has left a message for us about dealing with rouge governments…

The same transposition is repeated later in the same epistle, as "rouge states," which the writer suggests are not trustworthy.

Well, I certainly don’t trust them. They may not be as obviously wicked as those "excessive mascara states," but they’re pretty bad. And don’t even get me started on those "Lipstick Vogue governments."

By the way, I have no idea whether the errors mentioned here are those of the writer, or our fault. I do know it’s our responsibility to fix it. I just thought I’d share it with y’all, since mere newspaper readers will miss out.

There is, of course, the possibility that this is not a typo. It could be a reference to the cultural decadence of Germany in the early ’30s, as symbolized by Joel Gray‘s makeup in "Cabaret." But I’m sort of doubting it.

Borat make controversy

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Borat72

It’s not every day you get to put the star of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" on the editorial page, but I managed it in this morning’s paper.

The thin excuse I used was the letter to the editor that touched — and indirectly, at that — on the subject on today’s page. I inserted a mug shot derived as a detail from the above photo. I hereby reproduce the full-length image for the benefit of you ladies out there — or at least, the really hard-up ladies.

I saw the movie over the weekend. It may be the funniest of the year, although it’s not for the easily offended. It’s not even for the moderately sensitive, for that matter. Come to think of it, it’s not all that tough to be the funniest movie around when one scene features the protagonist wrestling naked with a really hairy fat guy.

Anyway, have any of y’all seen it? What did you think?