Friends: please go vote today. You know how important this is. Just fucking do it.
I was so nervous last night I couldn’t sleep. Election day is like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one, but only if I wasn’t sure whether my present was going to be a pony or getting shot in the face.
Everything is Free- Gillian Welch
This is my favorite. A friend of mine describes this song only as “terrifying.”
Sundays at my apartment now mostly consist of watching Anthony Bourdain and making sex noises at scenes with meat in them. Sorry you know that now, so here’s the first SNL sketch to make me uncontrollably lose it in years.
A quick Googling yielded no fewer than seven blogs chronicling their owners’ heroic struggles to watch every movie in the Criterion Collection (I’m sorry, everyfilm).
aubade replied to your post: aubade replied to your post: Yom Kippur I think…
I had the same problem. Last night I wasn’t even hungry but I was thinking about things I wanted to eat and how I couldn’t and THEN I got hungry. Then I felt like a total piece of shit lol.
Just got stuck at the best pizza place in Batavia, NY with two coworkers while they enthusiastically plowed through slices and wings. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
And then the guilt kicks in. Our forebearers are nothing if not experts on guilt.
aubade replied to your post: Yom Kippur
I think however you break it is good, haha. I’ve been daydreaming about coffee all morning but I have bagels and lox waiting for me when I get home from work.
Going for family dinner around 8, but there’s no way I make it that long. Walking past my boyfriend’s offered cup of coffee this morning was difficult, but I’m mostly realizing how much of my normal day I spend thinking about food.
Think a long line of Jewish ancestors would object to breaking a fast with malted chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream? Tonight, I mean. Totally tonight.
1. Cigarettes
2. Gin
3. Pirates
4. E
5. Smut
6. Diapers
On the left is the manager of the Rochester Hustlers, John Ganzel, known as “Big Jawn.” On the right is owner Charlie Chapin, who despite the bowler and moustache, is not known as “Charlie Chaplin.”
Ganzel was originally a player for the Hustlers. Here is his baseball card from 1911:
Big Jawn played sixteen seasons in the minors, and seven seasons in the majors, including with the 1900 Chicago Orphans. Ganzel was called “one of the best first basemen the country has ever produced” by the Washington Post in 1906, and he hit the first ever home run for the team that would become the New York Yankees. His family was known as the First Family of Michigan Baseball. His brother Joe Played for the Boston Beaneaters. They really knew how to name baseball teams then.
Relations between the two men began to go downhill when, in 1912, Chapin sold the Hustler’s two best players to the Yankees three weeks before the end of the season. Ganzell ditched Rochester for Brooklyn in 1915.
Photo via Monroe County Library System. Card via LOC.
Between around 1908 and 1918, Rochester was home to a baseball team called the “Rochester Hustlers.” This is a picture of the Hustlers with Rochester’s mayor Hiram Edgerton around 1912. The Hustlers are kicking off what will be their third consecutive pennant-winning season.
Ten years later, Edgerton would die suddenly at the age of seventy five, his death blamed on the death two days before of his closest friend and political boss, George W. Aldridge. Edgerton made his fortune as a contractor. According to his obituary, Edgerton was “very popular with the labor men”. He built the Sibley Building, and also operated steamboats on Lake Ontario. His last words were “George is gone and I’ll join him soon.”
Photo via Monroe County Library System.
Over the weekend, on Meet the Press, which is apparently still pretending to be a serious hard news show, Mitt Romney said this:
“Of course, there are a number of things that I like in health-care reform that I’m going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with preëxisting conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their— their family up to whatever age they might like.”
Leaving aside the ridiculousness of the idea that people would be able to just wave a magic wand and have their children covered basically forever (this is the rhetorical equivalent of shrugging and saying, “eh, whatever you want to hear”), a few short hours later, the Romney campaign had this to say:
“In a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.”
and also this:
“Governor Romney will ensure that discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage is prohibited”
Even the most casual reader would notice something specific about these statements: they are the opposite of each other. Mitt Romney went on national television, was asked a direct question, gave an answer he knew people wanted to hear, and then later sent some notes out to conservative reporters to say “don’t worry, I didn’t actually mean that stuff.” These follow up statements essentially say that Mitt Romney’s health care plan is to send everyone fuzzy wishes and hope they feel better. And the fact that he wouldn’t admit that in the first place means that in that particular moment, Romney realized how cretinous it would sound to give a massive fuck you to every American with a chronic health condition and just told the interviewer what they wanted to hear.
I’ve read a fair number of commentators today who think that somewhere in this exchange there are small breadcrumbs leading towards a useful understanding of Mitt Romney’s true policy. That’s bullshit. I think the answer is pretty obvious: Mitt Romney lied. He told a self-serving lie that he knew people wanted to hear. He knew it was not in his interest to tell the truth, so he didn’t.
Maybe that’s a less interesting conclusion, or maybe the collective press is simply too polite to point it out. Maybe the language of politics has collapsed in on itself to such an extend that the actual words Romney used were black holes of meaning. But either way, Mitt Romney lied. It’s possible that if we called it that more often, it might happen slightly less.
Just had a conversation with a candidate for significant public office in the course of which he revealed himself to be the real life Bobby Newport.
Strong and rational though it may be, the temptation to ignore entirely the election year spectacle should be resisted. Despite its shallow and manipulative qualities – or, more accurately, because of them – this process has some serious repercussions for American political life.
The election process is where American politicians go to be venerated and glorified, all based on trivial personality attributes that have zero relationship to what they do with their power, but which, by design, convinces Americans that they’re blessed to be led by people with such noble and sterling character, no matter how much those political figures shaft them…
It’s the supreme propaganda orgy, devoted to aggressively reinforcing the claim to American exceptionalism: the belief that even when things look grim, America will forever be that special God-favored land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity, and all citizens should therefore be deeply grateful – quietly and passively so – for the privilege of residing in such a land, no matter how wretched are their circumstances and how pervasive is the corruption.
"— Glenn Greenwald writes election coverage to end all election coverage.
In the hallway, one electrician to another upon being told that a staff member was away attending the IBEW women’s conference:
“Isn’t that so prejudiced? If we had a meeting like that they’d be all over it, they’d be up in arms…”
Five minutes later the same guy walked into my office and called me “honey”.
22. Rochester, New York.
Poseur academic, incognito politico.
