Prescient allegory

The best political prediction of the previous week, in my opinion, came in the form of a nifty five-panel allegory by my (current) all-around favorite cartoonist, Tony Millionaire. In Mr. Millionaire's pint-sized morality play we find Hubris, portrayed by a gingerbread Rudy Guiliani, halfway around the world before Granny Truth has put on her shoes (or, in this case, her dough-belted radials). You can peruse it there instead of here because it is Copyright 2008 by Tony Millionaire.

Mr. Millionaire, like the most authentic visionaries, may have had no idea of his political prescience. No matter, I think he's the funniest cartoonist in the business today, bar no one. But a prospective fan must have a taste for vulgarity and robust cartoon violence in order to find the humor.

I offer this post as a welcome change of topic for an evening, and also as a memory jogger to myself. There are more important things to blog about in life than the U.S. Constitution and a world economy on the brink of depression. Cartoons are one of them. (That's right, English majors: cartoons are one of them. Fuck you.)

Another letter to Barack Obama....

...in which I implore the Senator to get off the #!©k!n& campaign trail for a day or two and motivate back to Washington to block the heinous telecom immunity provisions of FISA renewal legislation. The excerpt below reprints my recommended political tactic, which I provided pro bono for Mr. Obama to use in the event that blocking the bad bill were to require a filibuster (as promised by Senator Dodd):

"I urge you to join your colleagues who are opposed to telecom immunity, including any filibuster of FISA legislation that includes retroactive immunity. Perhaps this would not even require an interruption in your campaigning for the presidency: you could take your turn at the rostrum to support the filibuster by continuously reading from transcripts of your best campaign speeches until adversaries of the Constitution get tired of hearing about you and relent. Your speeches would undoubtedly be broadcast on C-SPAN, at no cost to the Obama campaign."

Now, isn't that a piece of cunning advice? Yes, I agree with your concurrence: it is indeed.

I've already written several letters on telecom immunity to Obama and to Dick Durbin, my U.S. Senators. This stuff really matters if we want to continue living in a nation where jack-booted thugs aren't authorized to kick in our doors or our throats because they don't like something they overheard us say on our cell phones. Or write on our awesome blogs. What --- you don't have an awesome blog?!? Then write your senators and tell them you agree with StuporMundi.

Awesome prediciton revisited

First, cross-reference this. Now fast-forward to this. The author of the former was me, here, on 16 December 2007. The author of the latter was bigshot wingnut and Iraq War advocate Michael Ledeen at National Review Online, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, on 25 January 2008. I don't know much about Ledeen, but evidently he's a right-wing insider, and people of that type pay attention to him. The Republican Party overflows with them.

Think of it: Joementum 2008 -- Lieberman and Petraeus as the Republican standard-bearers. A "national unity" ticket for the celebrity DC pundits and journalists to fetish. I don't think regular voters would see much of a difference between that ticket and a Hillary Clinton/Wes Clark Democratic alternative. Except I'm guessing that more of them would vote for Joe and Dave because Hillary is too cold, or too emotional, or is humorless, or cackles too much, or something. So how do you like them apples? I know Big Otis hates them and thinks they're make-believe.

I edit

Sharp-eyed visitors to my blog may notice that I have edited the dialog that originally was presented in Wednesday's "chuckle." I think the new way is slightly funnier than the original, at least to me. Blogger ethics require me to point out the revision to you, so I am, herewith. I do it all the time. I'm just a simple country editor, after all. Thank you.

Today's Chuckle

From the Department of Fantasy Presidential Debate Questions

Yes, it's time for another one of those questions, alright:

Chris Matthews: Senator Obama, given the choice, who would you prefer to have serving as First Lady right now: Nancy Reagan or Hillary Clinton?

Senator Obama: "Present." [Reaches over and pinches Matthews' rubber clown nose. Funny honk. Rim shot.]

From the Department of Round Chickens

See the two adorable tykes, as depicted on a billboard located along Bloomington Road in Champaign, Ill. I wonder if Mike Huckabee's America will still love these big embryos if they evolve into giant zygotes that spend Sunday mornings under their blankets watching porn on their PSPs.

New Year's resolution No. 1

Fewer adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions. More concision.

Cafe Kopi's continuing decline into suckworld

Champaign-Urbana residents as perceptive as StuporMundi may have noticed that local iconic coffee house Cafe Kopi has been on a downward spiral of service and public image in recent years: unannounced short evening hours because staff doesn't show up, bitchy little notes about clearing one's own table in order to keep costs down --- that kind of thing. Lame.

On my visit tonight I took note of an item posted on a list of "upcoming changes": evidently Kopi is "thinking about succumbing to the industry standard of putting foam on lattes." Reason given? None. If you don't want foam in your latte, then you need to order a no-foam latte.

Here's the thing: foam on a latte isn't an "industry standard"; it's a Starbucks standard, and it's intended to fill a customer's cup with more air and less latte, dig? Many old-timers (i.e., those who discovered the health benefits of latte sometime in the 20th century) will remember that a latte with foam is called "cappuccino," and that a no-foam latte is called... "latte."

What next? Will our heroes "succumb to the industry standard" of putting only two shots in a "venti"? Or the "industry standard" of nosepicking behind the cash register?

Update: I just noticed that Kopi has this slick, bitchen website that is barely informative and several years out of date. Note to management: you've been in business longer than 10 years and you no longer accept personal checks... you patchouli-reeking ne'er-do-wells....

Proposal for brokered GOP convention

Last month in this blog I made the historic prediction that when none of the surviving Republican presidential candidates is able to win a majority of delegates at the GOP National Convention in September, the power brokers will draft Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, the anti-Democrat (in two senses of the word), with General Dave Petraeus --- the fresh-faced architect of the '07 U.S. surge in Iraq --- to be the nominees. I'm aware of how silly this prediction sounds, but you must admit that my dream team looks serious and distinguished compared with the psychos, geezers, and nonentities still haunting the Republican campaign trail.

Today, however, Beardy provided one of his patented instant assessments of a complex situation and served up an alternative convention scenario that would be just as effective, and even more entertaining than my prediction. With wisdom that, in my mind, makes him a modern-day heir to the throne of Solomon, Beardy suggests that the Republicans break any convention deadlock with a game of Russian Roulette. Here are the rules: if you want the nomination, you have to play. If you don't play, you (ignominiously) drop out.

This is a brilliant solution, and is highly probable to produce a nominee that most strongly appeals to the core GOP lizard brain due to the guts and vision (i.e., macho insanity) that it would take to play. For purposes of dignity, I'd suggest that the proceedings take place in a nicely appointed television studio rather than on the convention stage; the latter setting might be a little too WWE even for Republicans. Anyway, I see the event being moderated by Tim Russert. The sequence of play could be determined with Mr. Russert asking each candidate in alphabetical order a jeopardy-style question of neocon trivia. A correct answer would earn the candidate the right to select the first roulette contestant; an incorrect answer would give him the roulette trigger.

Mr. Russert: Governor Romney: This lady liberal-basher has more cold sores than Heidi Fleiss.

Neat, huh? Actually, Beardy and I initially predicted that it would come down to a contest between Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee. Then Beardy added Fred Thompson to the list because, "for him, it would be a win-win situation."

Who's the ventriloquist?

At Hillary Clinton's victory celebration in New Hampshire Tuesday night she told the audience, as reported by AP via Huffington Post, "Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice."

On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a very shrewd thing for a politician to say, most especially a female who might be the object of sexist stereotypes by opponents and media ill-wishers. So, in consideration of the ready availability of the greatest political straight line of the week, here is the first post to my brand new Fantasy Presidential Debate Questions Department. And it goes a little something like... this:

Debate moderator: Senator Clinton, on January 8 in New Hampshire you told supporters that you had that week finally, as you put it, "found my own voice." My question to you is that, prior to January 8, 2008, whose voice were you speaking in, and why?

Senator Clinton: [Silence. Big round Ralph Kramden heart-attack eyes.]

So-called "stunning comeback"

I can barely stand to hear political news coverage by the state-controlled media. For one thing it mainly speaks for corporations and propertied Americans. For another thing, it guards the gates against facts that don't fit the daily military-industrial narrative. And for a third thing, it's wrong about all the important things.

It was disappointing to see my hero Josh Marshall fall into the trap of echoing conventional platitudes about Clinton's "riveting win." Here is a link to TPM reporter Greg Sargent quoting AP on the "major upset" as if that characterization is a fact rather than someone's opinion.

Let's look at the freakin' historical NH poll data from Pollster.com. I'm terrible parsing lots of numbers, eyeball-wise; maybe Big Otis can help sort out these numbers for me. But it looks to me as if Obama, in most polls, was trailing Clinton by a wide margin --- often double digits --- back in November 2007. His numbers started creeping up in December 2007, but he was still a bit behind in most polls. He was even tied with or behind Clinton in a number of polls as late as 2 January 2008.

In actual voting totals, Obama finished only three points behind Clinton, which is well within the margin of error for a properly conducted poll. Now I'm just a simple country editor, but it looks to me as if the real stories are these:

* Obama slowly and steadily closed the gap between him and Clinton in December, and finished in a statistical tie with her for the primary win.

* Something --- the euphoric impact of a real news event on the people polled, the polling organizations, and the mass media, maybe --- skewed multiple polling results between the caucuses and the primary crazily in Obama's favor.

* The entire media establishment (plus non-establishment guys like Josh Marshall) became deranged --- first by all the amped-up Obama buzz out of Iowa, then by all the bizarre Clinton buzz (negative and positive) after Iowa through NH.

I think the Clinton fall from grace and stunning comeback happened mainly in the minds of celebrity journalists and the people who shovel them press handouts. Yes, we may see that Clinton had a late surge in voter support, and there is in fact anecdotal evidence (too lazy to link to it) that some late support was voter reaction against the negative coverage of her after Iowa. Fine: so be it. But the final NH voting totals were right in line with how the polling there had been trending all along! At least that's the way it looks to my dyslexic eyebones.

So the big news, in my view, is that the establishment media and polling organizations completely misreported what was really happening in the run-up to NH. And now they are all covering each other's backs by pretending that some sort of miracle occurred for Ms Clinton. Can't let the rubes see behind the curtain. To me, this "comeback kid" narrative is even less plausible than the fairy tales Mike Huckabee is ridiculed for spinning.

I'll forgive Josh, though: he's a young guy, and overworked.

Late update: I hate Blogger's numbered list and bulleted list styles. They screw up all typography that comes after them. Therefore, my bulleted lists will employ manual asterisks in order to otherwise preserve typographic beauty and legibility.

International Journal of Nana Studies 1(2)

Background and Objective

Nana enjoys making conversation that employs special forms of logic of her own origin. The objective of this report is to examine nanoconversation Way 2, known as Pretzel Logic. This way of nanoconversation may not be dismissed as an artifact of Nana's inability to apply communal forms of reasoning to a simple set of facts, but it is better understood as a highly refined mode of social interaction where no obvious basis for such activity is in evidence.

Analysis

When employing Nanoconversation* Way 2, Nana begins with a statement festooned with more hooks than a Rapala jigging shad rap, any one of which may snag the living flesh of a person temporarily attracted by the glint of it. Then, once nanoconversation is initiated, Nana will use her free-range associative capabilities to advance the talk in any direction that simulates a logical interaction.

The following example is a typical application, wherein Nana comments upon an invitation to Sunday breakfast, telephoned to her on Saturday evening:

Nana: I almost broke my neck getting to the phone last night. I'd just gone to bed.
StuporMundi: Don't you have a phone in your bedroom?
Nana: No.
StuporMundi: Would you like me to put one in there for you?
Nana: No, I have another phone somewhere.
StuporMundi: Well, I can hook it up in your bedroom for you if you want.
Nana: No, it would always be in a place I couldn't get to it.

Discussion

As with other ways of nanoconversation, the central motivation for Pretzel Logic is to construct a controversy, a mystery, or another rhetorical framework designed to maximize interaction based on the minimal amount of substance. In the example above, the rhetorical framework was an implicit unjustified admonishment. The genius occurs when an attempt to correct the imaginary transgression (i.e., installing a telephone in a convenient bedtime location) is rebuffed with a logic that indicates no corrective measures are possible under conditions normally prevailing in the universe.

Conclusion

Nana enjoys maximal conversation with minimal intellectual or factual input. Nanoconversation Way 2, Pretzel Logic, enables Nana to insert drama into a mundane event, imply external blame or responsibility for said event, then rebuff offers of help or reparations with the sort of recursive reasoning that drove Hal 9000 into a fateful series of illegal operations.
_____________________________

*Erratum [Int'l Journ. Nan. Studies 1(1)]

In the subject issue of this journal, the term nanoconversation was incorrectly conflated completely with nanoconversation Way 1. That variety of nanoconversation is correctly identified as "smallest talk". The editor regrets the error, and this erratum has been posted as a late update to the subject issue of this journal.

Strange affliction

One of my favorite household devices is the wet/dry shop vac. I've accumulated three over the years: the oldest for the garage, the biggest for the funky basement, the mighty portable for everywhere else.

But here's a problem: I'm reluctant to use them because I don't like to get them dirty.