rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

There’s a-spittin’ and a-fightin’ going on!

A new building is going up in lower Manhattan. It could be called a mosque, or an Islamic community center, depending on your predilections. It’s gonna be modeled after a YMCA, and city zoners and the mayor’s office have given their approval.
Howeva. There has been plenty of opposition to the project. The center (there’s my predilection right there) — called Cordoba House after the 10th-century Spanish caliphate recognized for its religious tolerance and cultural activity — would go up two blocks from World Trade Center site. Critics contend that this is too close, that the wounds are too raw, that a house of worship devoted to the religion that the 9/11 terrorists claimed is an affront to the victims of the worst terror attack in American history. It has drawn the ire of many conservative pundits, and national figures like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. In a surprising move, the Anti-Defamation League said the center would “be counterproductive to the healing process.”
yes …
I can’t sit this one out. I can’t. When I read about it, I get a tight feeling in my chest. I start seeing colors more brightly, like they’re suddenly deeper. I can feel the weather is turning. It’s only dropped down into the eighties, but I swear I can see the fall is coming. And I just, I can’t. I spent the above paragraph doing my best to use nice language — workplace appropriate language — without all the cussin’ and the swearin’ and the hot-blooded temper tantrums that would define the Map of old.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that made my blood boil as a college freshman. I used to read Ann Coulter columns while listening to Crass on the reg, just to get grist for the mill. It was always bullshit like this, a conservative pundit saying something ridiculous and offensive, finding a stupid argument and poking it until it’s raw as a means of shifting the debate from what really matters: The economy. And the war in Afghanistan that no one really fucking cares about (or, as this guy points out, not enough to raise the taxes to pay for it).

A mosque too close to Ground Zero? Oh my. This begs a whole bevy of questions. So if you disagree with me, please answer, you dickhead, if you dare:

• How close is too close?
• How many Muslims live in New York City? A guesstimate will work; that’s cool. Don’t go crazy or anything.
• What’s the nearest mosque to the site already?
• Is that too close as well?
• If it is, should it be moved?
• Would you mind laying out a time frame for when something like this won’t be too close?
• Do you have any figures on how many Muslims also died in the September 11 attacks?
• Do you think it’s fair to let 19 assholes with a completely warped view of a major religion to represent 1.5 billion Muslims?
• If you agree with the ADL in that survivors are entitled to “irrational” emotion, do you think that policy should be based on that?
• Do you think it’s possible that cynical Republican politicians — some that don’t actually live in New York City — are beating the drums about this as a way to drum up votes?
• And, finally, did your parents raise you to be this fucking stupid?
• Or did you learn it at school?

in case you needed more information before you formed your opinion, the Afghanistan thing is not going well.

I believe it’s in a couple of hours now that my friend Ashley is getting married. that’s pretty legit. Ashley was a roommate of mine in college, back in the wild, wild days of my youth.
Ashley introduced me to my first college girlfriend — which I had for all of a month — and took me along once with her student government friends on a trip to the statehouse (read her comment at the end for the full story). she also humored me when I grew massive sideburns sophomore year. annd, she gave my dumb ass a tour of Evan Bayh’s office once when she was on his staff and lived here. she’s since moved on. that is a bummer.
I would’ve gone to that wedding. I got an invite and everything, but I ended up getting laid off, and then I moved, and this, and that, and then I moved again, and now I’m in DC. a weekend in Santa Barbara, California, would have been nice, and it would have been nice to show support by making an appearance, but I guess you can’t make everything. no sir.

it has been sweltering hot around this burg lately; on the scale, it’s somewhere between ‘as fuck’ and ‘as all get-out.’ it really feels like you’re entering a sauna when you walk outside. your clothes cling to your body, and you sweat in a matter of seconds. an oppressive heat. makes you want to stay inside, sit on your ass. not train for a marathon. I skipped running today. but it had to have broken one hundred, so I’m giving myself a pass.

you want to hear some dumb shit? I got some dumb shit for you. it involves the tea party, go figure.
I’ll write this out in boilerplate sentences, as to get right to the point.

a week or so ago, the NAACP passes a resolution that declares the national tea party movement should expel any racist elements in its ranks.
prominent conservatives, as well as plenty of tea party leaders (a pointedly decentralized group) respond with outrage at the suggestion that the tea party was racist. it doesn’t matter that this wasn’t what the NAACP resolution suggested.
pundits of every stripe way in. the media goes fucking bananas over this story. columns are written. sunday talk show hosts make it the grist of their questionaires. Keith Olbermann probably talks into his bathroom mirror about it for a solid four hours during this period of time.
then, some despicable asshole named Andrew Breitbart, who runs a website that blames his political opponents for everything short of the Holocaust, puts a video up online purportedly showing a black USDA bureaucrat speaking to a NAACP event in Georgia in which she admits she once didn’t help a white farmer whose land was being foreclosed on because he was white.
the secretary of agriculture, cabinet member Tom Vilsack, orders her fired. immediately. so they fire her.
the media goes fucking bananas again. columns are written. Pat Buchanan takes his pants off during a taping of “The McLaughlin Group.” the morning show on Fox News turns into a sadomasochistic orgy. Eugene Robinson melts his Pulitzer Prize down into quarters and buys nothing but 100 Grand bars out of the vending machine in the break room at the Washington Post.
then, a day or so later, the NAACP releases the entire video of the bureaucrat’s speech. it shows that her quote was taken out on context. in fact, she was referring to an incident from over twenty years ago, and it was part of a larger narrative in which she learned the error of her ways, helped the white farmer and his wife save their farm. she now maintains a friendship with this family. the family even speaks publicly in support of her.
so it turns out that Breitbart intentionally manipulated the video so that it would suit his own ends. he goes on Good Morning America or the Today Show, or one of those television shows that has Regis Philbin or Matt Lauer or whoever the fuck, and refuses to apologize for putting words in the mouth of someone he’s never met before and causing them to lose their job. he guarantees that when karma materializes on the street outside his house as a huge ex-con with rage issues and beats him mercilessly until he pisses blood, it’ll be just that: karma. 
Vilsack calls the bureaucrat to personally apologize.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs apologizes on behalf of the Obama administration during a press briefing, while the bureaucrat watches live from the CNN studio in Atlanta.
and the media goes fucking bananas.

this all happened in the last four or five days. let’s see what’s being going on in Juarez, just for kicks. or on Wall Street.
anything. anything but the Shirley Sherrod story.

“don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. those chains are made of chrome steel.”

the original King Kong is on the tube right now.
Mike and Va have a big television. it’s very wide. which really lets you appreciate the way movies are supposed to look. the screen is it’s like a tiny movie theatre right in the living room.
anyway. they’ve remade King Kong three times now. there was the original, the 1933 version that I think RKO did. this is the best one, and it’s not even close. a true horror movie  of its generation. about a giant goddamn ape.
the second one stars a very young Jeff Bridges and was bankrolled by Dino DeLaurentis. it just oozes Carter-era gas crisis suck. 
and the third one was directed by Peter Jackson and came out five years ago. which was all well and good, but just a holiday-season blockbuster. watching in great detail as the crew get eaten by enormous CGI bugs is some spectacle, but it’s not iconic.

the original was iconic.
it just was.

when I think of the seventies, I choose to think of it like this.

next time a self-professed Democrat complains about how the Obama administration seems, I don’t know … limp, point out that the passed health care reform for the first time in a generation, and then an overhaul of the rules of the financial system. in the same year. holy shit!
update: the Krauthammer agrees!

Aarti and I are gonna go to a bookstore tomorrow, where she’s gonna look for a book of poetry by Rumi and I’m gonna look for something about the Byzantine Empire. so suck on that. here’s some Rolling Stones.

confirmed whorefucker and senator David Vitter of the backwards, godforsaken state of Louisiana, says he would back a legal challenge of the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate.
he’s doing this for two reasons. Numero Uno: he’s facing a primary fight. Number Two: he’s an embarrassment.

the power kicked off for about three hours tonight. and then it kicked back on. nothing makes you appreciate electricity like its absence.
if you were to follow this link, you would find an audio recording of Mel Gibson berating his ex-girlfriend over the phone. he uses many slurs. one is the N-word. in the recording, she sounds like she’s knocking back a cosmopolitan on the other end of the line, and he sounds like the same guy who starred in “What Women Want.”
I really don’t like Mel Gibson. all of this shit about his personal life, the types of movies he directs … he just seems like a particularly odious motherfucker. my sister-in-law has theorized that he may be suffering from early-onset dementia.
but (and there’s always a but) with that being said. when I watch ”The Road Warrior” — which works out to something like two or three times a year – that opinion doesn’t transfer. there is a complete disconnect between the guy from “Lethal Weapon” and the guy on screen, shit; he looks like Mel Gibson. but you have to understand that your eyes is deceivin’ you, son. Mad Max Rocketansky isn’t Mel Gibson. he’s Mad Max Rocketansky. and this is his rig, and it’s his tanker full of sand, so you can go ahead and fuck off and hijack another truck, because you’re not taking this one today, assholes.
I wonder what this says about my psyche, my chosen brand of heroes. if this isn’t readily apparent by the way I jam screen grabs from these flicks into this web page whenever the excuse arises: I love the Mad Max movies. I love that character.
some more examples: I loved “A Boy and his Dog.” I know what “A Boy and his Dog” is. I’ve played all of the Fallout video games, and will buy the next installment when it comes out (November). I went out of my way to get a copy of “I am Legend” well before the Fresh Prince starred in a shitty movie based on it. I’m re-reading “World War Z” right now, and it is no mistake that the only Cormac McCarthy novel I’ve ever read (and probably ever will read) is “The Road.”
and I don’t think I’m that odd. but then, I say it out loud: I’m really interested in speculative fiction about the end of the world. I’m big into the big, violent dystopia thing, and if you can add vampires or zombies to it, then by all means.
yeah, that’s fucking weird.
and then, to think, this stuff isn’t even that hard to come by. I guess this shit sells.

click on here, and then you’re gonna wanna fast forward to about … 8:05 for one of the best lines in a movie full of great lines: “The Bad News Bears.”
it’s been terribly hot out, still. today sucked, and not because Lebron James, with his primetime ESPN special, made an ass of himself and of us all and signed with Miami, no. tomorrow is Friday. thank god for the weekend, and for running. there’s nothing to running. all you gotta do is, you know. run.