Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Hillary Clinton’s Internet Goon Squad Attacking Daily Kos?
Not everyone spends ridiculous amounts of time perusing the left-wing blogosphere, certainly not me. But since Doug was away in Orlando, I spent some time on Daily Kos, the flagship of internet-savvy left-wingers.
Daily Kos may be the most famous and influential political meta-blog with 200,000-300,000 hits per day. Kossacks care passionately about supporting progressive candidates and aided in the Democratic victories last November. Even if you don’t believe that they exercise significant power, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have 100,000 people contributing time and money in close elections.
That is what makes Hillary Clinton’s idiotic remark last Saturday particularly stupid. In response to persistent questioning on her vote to authorize the Iraq War, according to this NY Times article she stated:
“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,†Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Not surprisingly, the majority of Kossacks took that as an official “fuck off†from the Democratic Senator from New York.
What politician willingly alienates 100,000+ voters?
In all fairness, perhaps she felt that she had nothing to lose. Daily Kos’ diarists routinely criticize Hillary Clinton. They find her cold, calculating, opportunistic, arrogant, etc. In straw polls on that site, she routinely scores at 3-4%, far behind Barack Obama and John Edwards. Still, they would have supported her if she was nominated since they hate Republicans far more than they hate her; well, at least, that USED to be true.
In the flurry of initial postings on Daily Kos over her idiotic remark, a strange pattern emerged. The first 300-400 or so comments were predictably negative. Some mentioned her apparent belief that she already has the Democratic nomination sewn up since she’s raised so much money from corporations and wealthy donors. Others thought she was following the directions of her consultants and trying to withstand the controversy with pig-headed stubbornness like a certain president we all know.
After the initial wave came the Hillary supporters. They dominated the thread with a constant stream of admiration for the strength of her character, how presidential she looked, etc. With quite a bit of repetition, they went on and on like, oh, right-wing talking points? A few even mentioned the positive editorial from the notorious right-winger, David Brooks, which they said showed how Hillary Clinton’s wonderful character has won over even a strident Republican. Excuse me? Politically active Democrats are reading David Brooks and taking his comments seriously? Hell, someone on Shakespeare’s Sister even mentioned Clinton’s strong showing in a Fox News poll.
Is it paranoid to think Clinton would use proxies to stage a counterattack on Daily Kos? On the other hand, perhaps some Republicans would like to see Clinton win the Democratic nomination – and there can be only one reason for that.
They think she’s beatable.
K.
Live Blogging Dinner, Part 2
Now, this place shows promise: Lac Viet Bistro, not far from that last horror show I wrote about. The place smells right. Mostly Asians in here, too, and the place is crowded at 5 PM. The menu unashamedly puts Vietnamese first, English translations second. And the muzac sucks. All good signs.
I’ve been here 15 minutes and they still haven’t taken my order, but good service and good food do not necessarily correlate. Oh, good — order taken, and the waiter didn’t speak English well enough to answer my question. This is going to be great!
I ordered “shrimp and grilled pork rice paper rolls,” which is grouped with cuon but has a different name (tom thit nuong). For a main course, I’ve ordered Lac Viet Dac Biet (it rhymes!) which is crispy shrimp cake, egg roll, grilled meatballs, grilled grounded shrimp on sugar cane served w/ vermicelli noodle, lettuce, mints & fish sauce. That’s verbatim.
There’s a white chick at a nearby table talking loudly about her out of body experience. I’ll try not to hold that against the place.
This afternoon, I went to Gatorland, and yes, Corn Dog m’dear, I had some gator ribs and deep fried pickles (because you can get onion rings and jalapeno poppers anywhere, but only a Southerner would deep fry a pickle). Gator tasted like pork, but was greasier, and had all manner of narrow, pale yellow cartlage ribs running through the meat. The anatomy reminded me of skate — tasty critter, but you need to overcome the conviction that you’re eating an Alien face-sucker.
As for Gatorland, I may be outgrowing the place. By the time I turn sixty, I’ll have certainly outgrown the place.
Food’s here and WOW. Wish I had a camera.
Stay tuned. Gotta fress.
I’m back. They forgot my appetizer but I don’t care. Dinner was enormous (and delicious). The grilled meats were yummy, and really, the only imperfect item was this fried, shredded sweet potato thing. Otherwise, yay! at least I can say I had one good meal in Orlando.
D.
Dumbass California cracker
That’s what I’m thinking when I discover I’ve overshot the Eddie Bauer outlet store by oh, 45 minutes driving time. “I see. Apopka-Vineland is a really long road.” But by then, all my bargain-hunting desire had been flayed from me by the cruel Orlando traffic. It didn’t help that my conference center was mere minutes away from the outlet store.
I’ll go tomorrow — after the morning session concludes but before I go to Gatorland to eat me some Gator for Corn Dog’s sake.
I ended up going to Orlando’s Millennia Mall. What a zoo! I’ve never had to park so far from a mall entrance (except in Silicon Valley at Xmastime). Don’t these Orlandoians have anything better to do on a Saturday night? But apparently not. Orlando is wall-to-wall commerce, one great mini-mall spreadeagled beneath its tumescent, leering, murine overlord. It’s Los Angeles without killer cops and Bald Britneys. It’s Las Vegas with lakes.
After much anguish, I found a present for Jake. No, I’m not saying. He’ll be pleased, I hope, and does he ever need something to cheer him up. He’s been sick with some kind of weird viral crud since the first of the year and I think he’s tired of being ill.
While at the mall, I picked up the nationwide Zagat to get an idea where to eat. I picked Amaya, a Japanese restaurant not far from my hotel (in Orlando-speak, that means, “Less than a thirty minute drive”). Reasonably good sushi, though not comparable to the Bay Area. I sat at the sushi bar beside a woman with livid red hair that might have been real. I tried not to stare, but she was SO BIG. Like an Amazon without the self-inflicted wound. So I ate my sushi and read erotica on my Blackberry and tried again not to stare.
Time to drink more gin. Alcohol at night is bad for sleep apnea but it has a protective effect for, oh, I don’t know. It’s in my syllabus.
And I found out that Medicare snuck in a 10% pay cut last year. This might just be for procedures; I’m not sure yet. But it’s getting harder and harder to tread water. Some docs like to figure out how many days per week they work to meet their overhead, but I’ve never been that masochistic. But it’s a good thing I’m going to be a bestselling novelist some day. We all know how lucrative that is.
D.
Walnut Has No Underwear…
because the airline lost his luggage. God only knows when the Delta is going to find it. I asked Jake how often they lose our luggage and we estimated about 33% of the time. They have approximately 24 hours to find it before having to cough up some money to replace it so, of course, they dig it up after 23 hours.
It could have been worse, I suppose; he could have booked a flight with JetBlue. To quote from the AP article,
JetBlue is offering refunds and free flights to passengers who were stranded on airplanes [at New York’s JFK airport] for more than three hours during an ice storm. The airline is under heavy criticism for leaving hundreds of passengers on planes for up to 10 hours…Many of the stranded passengers didn’t make it back to the terminal until 6 p.m. Most had boarded their aircraft before 8:10 a.m. Some of those jets were incoming flights that had been on the ground since 10 a.m. Six flights were stranded for more than eight hours.
JetBlue wasn’t the only culprit this time; American Airlines stranded passengers on a Miami flight for more than three hours. And last December, according to this AP report,
A similar incident happened on Dec. 30 [2006], when American Airlines and American Eagle diverted 121 flights found for Dallas to other cities because of thunderstorms. About 5,000 passengers were left sitting on parked aircraft, some for eight hours. One of those advocating for a passengers’ bill of rights, Kate Hanni, a California real estate agent, was stuck for hours on the tarmac on American Flight 1348, with her family.
And before that, according to this USAToday article,
The delay that intensified pressure on airlines in 1999 involved the so-called “prisoners of Northwest” — thousands of passengers who sat grounded in airliners during a winter storm at Detroit Metro Airport. Some planes had no food or water and overflowing toilets.
On Jan. 2, 2002, passengers on dozens of planes at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta waited up to 10 hours during a snowstorm. Delta apologized for inconveniencing 50,000 passengers, saying it had underestimated the storm and the time it would take to de-ice planes before departure.
I could probably dig up even more egregious examples of this type but I think the point is made. Of course, the airlines will fight any legislation to regulate their behavior as they did in 1999 when they promised to follow voluntary guidelines (worked really well last Wednesday, right?). So what to do? Rep. Mike Thompson and Sen. Barbara Boxer will be offering legislation on a Passengers’ Bill of Rights. Write and/or email your legislators in support of this bill. If you scroll down on the left, you’ll see the links under Don’t Worry ’bout the Government.
Live Blogging Dinner
I’m at Straub’s Seafood in Orlando, a place I drove 40 min to get to since they promised me their clams are flown in from New England. We Shall See. It’s a noisy, lively joint, smoke-free — and when did the South discover smoke-free eateries? I like this change.
Pedestrian Caesar salad (no anchovies), and the dinner roll was oh-so-easy to skip. And I’m a pushover for bread, particularly on vacation. So far, to quote my high school math teacher Mr. Smith, “Ah am underwhelmed.”
If the seafood rawks, all will be forgiven.
Ugh. The seafood is like the dinner roll: not worth the calories. I ordered a platter with a small lobster tail, one crab cake, and fried clams. The lobster tastes like a bad mussel, the crab cake smacks of frozen and thawed crab, and, most depressing of all, Mrs. Paul’s clams have more flavor.
I’d head over to Little Saigon (the sign out front says they’re rated in Zagat) but I’m not sure I have an appetite. Maybe I’ll just hit that mall I saw on my way over here.
Stay tuned.
Okay, so get this:she asked me if I wanted a box, but no comment re my mostly uneaten dinner! Guee they get that a lot.
I’m back. It was just past 9 when I left that joint, so I drove back to the hotel, then walked around until I could find some company.
Bombay Sapphire company, to be precise. No sense letting the evening go completely to waste.
Good night!
D.
Thirteen things I learned from Cosmo, Part Cinq
Pity me. As you read this, there’s an excellent chance I’m a mile above America, wedged between George W. Bush’s Last Vocal Supporter and a Moonie behind on his conversion quota. Times like this, I wish I knew some relatively obscure foreign language — Yoruba, perhaps — in which I could repeat, “I don’t speak English.”
See, no matter how badly you pronounce, “I don’t speak English,” some wag will point out that you are, in fact, speaking Engish. Yuk. Yuk. So I need a language — something guttural, something phlegmy. I mean, a guy can pretend to be asleep for only so long.
*please please please no coughing sneezing children oh PLEASE*
. . . because I always catch stuff on planes, too. Bad enough that snot rockets are a hazard of my profession. Gaaaah, enough kvetching already — let’s find out what’s new in this month’s Cosmo.
Dangerous love
How far would you go for love?
Note: for the purposes of this post, and because I’m a guy, sex = love. The two are interchangeable. No, don’t bother to argue with me.
World Sex Records tells us, “Menstrual blood, placenta, and genitals have all been devoured to increase sexual prowess. Semen was also popular. (“The semen of virile young men should be mixed with the excrement of hawks or eagles and taken in pellet form.”) Chinese eunuchs, seeking regeneration of their lost sexual organs, would hopefully eat the warm brains of newly decapitated criminals.”
Sex is not without hazard. Heart attacks, seizures, and ruptured aneurysms number among the risks. And whatever else you do, don’t take “blow job” too literally. Blowing into the vagina during cunnilingus can result in air embolism and sudden death.
There’s risk, and then there’s risk; autoerotic asphyxiation is one well known way to off yourself in the throes, but the Darwin Awards site has many more creative ways of turning the little death into the Big One. Whether it’s inadvertant carbon monoxide poisoning, sex at 80 mph, or sex in the road, cars and sex don’t mix. Exceptions granted for the back seats of parked cars in dark, secluded places.
Needless to say, membership in the Mile High Club is only granted to survivors.
Fortunately, some horror stories are only urban legends. A man did not electrocute himself by masturbating into an electrically-stimulated cow heart, Catherine the Great was not crushed to death having sex with a horse, and [insert name of most hated rock star or starlet here] did not get a gallon of semen pumped out of his/her stomach. Damn. I always liked that tale. At least it’s true that Marilyn Chambers really was the Ivory Snow Girl.
Happy Valentine’s Day, droogs.
D.
Candle in the swirling dark
Yesterday, Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister announced her resignation from the John Edwards presidential campaign. This followed shortly after Amanda Marcotte’s similar announcement, and, as I understand it, both women stepped down for the same reasons: they were tired of being chum for the irReligious Right’s single-digit-IQ trained barracudas. Read this for background.
The only flickering light in this dark, dismal time is the fact that Melissa and Amanda are now free to fight back. And you can fight back, too.
Visit Melissa’s and Amanda’s blogs. Give ’em some love. Link to them. Join Driftglass, Blue Gal, and the rest of us in our blogswarm. Kick up a fuss.
D.
PS: While we’re at it, how about a Googlebomb for William Donohue? Check my left sidebar Googlebomb category.
PPS: Shakes is keeping track of the blogswarm here. I almost forgot . . . I AM SPARTACUS! Bloody hell you’d better believe it.