evolution

My heart was filled with glee this morning.

Retail drain: Lawrence shoppers taking their dollars to Wyandotte County. Not Johnson County. Wyandotte County. To shop at “big box stores”, which is what snotty elitist Yuppies (which are who I call “typical Lawrence residents”) call “successful, major retailers”. Wholesale clubs for me, but not for thee.

First, the “Muslim” garb. I don’t care about this; it wasn’t “Muslim” garb (unless said Muslim was from a cartoon — there’s a Muslim man who does his prayers near my office and he usually wears a suit); I wouldn’t have cared if it were Muslim garb, and here’s why:

Just in case you can’t or didn’t want to watch that, that’s President Bush — dancing with and kissing a scimitar while locking arms with a Saudi prince, whose family is among the leading funders of radical madrassas in the world. I personally think that clip should be played in the corner, like the ASL translator on PBS, every time Bush is giving a speech about “fighting terrorism”. (Nick Berg’s head could not be reached for comment.)

Second: the “Hussein”. No one who brings this up is fooling anyone as to why. The same excuse the Clinton campaign gave for pushing the “Muslim garb” photo was used by others to justify referring to Obama at every opportunity by his full given name. It’s pure coincidence, a happenstance of his birth, and everyone knows it.

There’s enough not to like about the Obama candidacy. Leave these things out.

And it’s going swimmingly. I weighed in at 266.6 pounds this morning, a change of -4.8 pounds since last week, and a change of -18.4 pounds since January 21. I now move on to week 4 of the workout. I still struggle with pushups; last night, when I did the “Bodyweight 200“, I had to substitute kneeling (“cheating”) pushups for some of the real ones in order to do them all. My arms, quads, and thighs could take no more by the end of it. However, the changes have become apparent to me. My gut rolls are no longer the handful they once were, and my shoulders are starting to square off. The fat is nearly falling off of my legs.

This week’s routine is identical to last week’s, except that the final workout depicted above must be completed twice with five minutes’ rest inbetween. Look for my name in the “rescue calls” section of the Journal-World.

One cold winter’s night
I sat on a stone bench
that was like a slab
in a funeral parlor.

Which is rather funny,
because the bench was
next to old John Purdue,
who is dead.

I turned and asked him,
“Mr. Purdue, I’m lonely.
No one here loves me
and I don’t belong.”

Said John, “Shut the
hell up, willya?
It was quiet here
till you showed up.”

I said, “Goodnight, then,”
got up off my grave,
and left old Purdue to his.

I’m breaking my embargo on blogging about the entertainment “industry” to tell you that Sunday was the lowest-rated Oscars on record. Tempering my faith-restoration: knowledge that the writers’ strike¹ probably had something to do with it, and that Americans still watched the Oscars above all other programs last night.

Eh, you take what you can get.

1. which I also didn’t give a crap about, and now am disappointed that it’s over. [↩]

I saw this on public television last night [IRONY BREAK: I got tired of a special on racial diversity so I switched to the other public television station and watched a documentary on the life and times at... Windsor Castle], and they billed it as something like an opportunity for openness and cultural exchange. The media has taken that ball and run with it — CNN calls it “historic”; the Beeb calls it “a remarkable display of cultural diplomacy”;

Really? I’d call it “neat, but barely noteworthy”. The people of North Korea — who, I might add, will be force-fed this performance on state radio and TV, which will take a break from its all-Kim Jong Il, all-the-time programming to carry it — will be disappointed to learn that you can’t eat a New York Philharmonic performance.

Certainly the Philharmonic players will remember it. I don’t mean to denigrate them — no doubt they are highly talented and among the best in the world. There’s no reason to think that they won’t put on a good show, and I’d imagine the people Kim handpicks to attend the event will have a good time, what with the Hennessy VSOP, the Pleasure Brigade, and one of the world’s finest orchestras.

The talk about “cultural openness” and such is just that — talk. A showy gesture, which the people who talk about such things are famous for. It will change nothing.

UPDATE [21:42]: Reuters: “a unique moment of unity.” Do journalists have some standardized “lofty cliche” handbook they consult at times like these?

UPDATE [21:49]: All of the news stories said that the orchestra wanted to open with “The Star-Spangled Banner”, but they opened the dress rehearsal with the North Korean anthem, followed up by the national anthem. Make of that what you will.

Okay — we all know how I feel about visual artists, so I might be inclined to view this disfavorably anyway.

But… come on.

Of all the pretentious subfields of visual art, people who call themselves “culture jammers” (Discordians without cojones) have to be the worst.