Love Letter

 

 

Love letter received from a foreign robot, very touching:

 

-----Original Message-----

From: albertporter

Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 3:16 PM

To: John Sandwich

Subject: I will wait That you smiled at me

 

I wish to find my soul mate!

I am a attractive and confident woman. I do believe in love based on a deep passion and even deeper understanding

And I know how to love and appreciate a really fine man.

I appreciate in men their ability to communicate with lady.

I am an honest woman and I have nothing to hide from you. My dream is to create a family with a decent man. Here are my photos and my profile, may be http://kzK65fcffd5hhwXol3mRr.populus.ch I am yours fate.

 

 

America, A Paranoiac-Critical State of Mind

Free association via Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method
Another bad time for Hillary Clinton, just out of the State Department and she slips and falls in the bath before her Senate hearings over the Libyan fiasco.

And what’s with John McCain for State? Too much conciliation with stuff the way it is, they must have Obama by the balls in foreign policy and “defense” – the Libya thing seems like a symptom too.

And military power to the CIA, drones galore.

There’s good movie they’ll never make after Argo and the Kathryn Bigelow, thing about blowing away Bin Laden: living poor in the Pakistani highlands with drones over your head 24 hours a day. We’re making lots of new friends over there for sure.

And I hear rabid police departments are salivating over having drones of their own, for “surveillance” purposes, naturally.... for the moment.

Did you see that photo of the local constabulary patrolling the streets of Newton, the fat guy with the shades and the automatic rifle, grinning from ear to ear? He looks like the next one ready to burst into a school or a shopping mall with his big dick substitute blazing away.

Why We Hate The New York Times Part 3 or 4

The New York TImes will never learn. Look at this profile in T-Bone Magazine on my favorite slicko-French architect. Rudy Riccotti (above), and his new cultural center in Marseilles, a city which is described in the article as that "simmering bouillabaisse of Mediterranean cultures".

Rudy had my friend David Cohn simmering too this summer when he reviewed his Jean Cocteau Museum for Architectural Record. And they hired this guy for the Islamic wing of the Louvre? The French are really hard up for architects these days.

Here's more of that T-Bone prose I just can't get enough of:

"Dressed in a faded navy tank top, khaki jeans and espadrilles, Ricciotti conjures the casual nonchalance and swagger of a Rolling Stones-generation rock star. This is no accident. At 60, the French architect has earned a reputation as a tempestuous and provocative iconoclast with a sly sense of humor, a thick-as-olive-paste southern accent and an effusively gesticulating manner....."

 Isn't he just yummy?

Obstructed Voter

Take a look at the New York absentee voter ballot package I received here in Spain. If you can make heads or tails of it. Beats me.

First, try sizing the PDF ballot (above) to print on letter paper, as per instructions. It doesn't print correctly, the names don't come out, and it's full of black streaks -- I tried 4 different ways and downloaded it twice.

Then all the nonsense about cutting and pasting the two envelopes they want you to print out. "Fold on the dotted line": I remember that joke from third grade. Haven't they heard about labels? You know, cut it out, tape it on an envelope, vazoom.

 Or why not vote on the web? We do out banking on the web, pay our taxes on the web, so why not?

Seems designed by idiots, or people who don't want absentees to vote.

And then of course being digital, I can print and fill out as many ballots as I want and send the forms to all my friends so they can do the same. If any of us can manage to assemble it correctly and not have our ballots thrown out as unreadable.

 It is so bad it should be denounced. Will try to do so. Please help!

Meanwhile,  how am I supposed to vote?

Guisqui a Go-Go

While Madrid seethes with battle-frenzied protestors and politicians, and Catalunya plots  sedition, a Spanish magazine has found the receipts for Spanish President Mariano Rajoy's 1000 euro dinners aboard government planes. 

And all this, absolutely all of it, is designed simply to distract us from the fact that there is no ready solution for the problem at hand, and we are all going to hell in a basket. 

Article thanks to Jeff English. 

Text in Spanish.

 

Rajoy: “Extra de whisky y vino”
Interviu, 24 Sept. 2012

Warbucks and the General Strike

Funny Coincidence Dept: The New York Times chronicles Starbucks efforts to open the European market the day after fringe extremists in Barcelona torch a Starbucks during the General Strike of 29 March. I hope the executives in Seattle can take a hint.

One of the obstacles to profit in Europe: supposedly high employee wages.

Photos of the Barcelona rioting were widely distributed in the world press, especially in financial coverage, but you don't see many photos of the hundreds of thousands peacefully demonstrating in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, with their massed red flags and standards of the leftist national unions, looking quite photogenic in the haze of a fine spring day. Evidently,. the old Commie scare doesn't do the trick anymore.

The financial markets, real drama queens, make money with scare stuff, and the pornography of  violence blown out of proportion beats peaceful red-flag waving these days.

Howlin Wolf

A friend who likes to provoke sent us the following article from The National Review by one Victor Davis Hanson, reflecting on the effect of metal-hunting thieves on his rural California community. Hanson writes, "I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455."  He goes on for four pages documenting the atrocities committed in his vicinity, and punctures a "vague code of silence" to pont the finger at "gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans." Here's one typical lament:

"Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?"

Too bad about the bell, but on the subject of the end of civilization our author hasn't been to, say,  downtown Detroit over the past 50 years?

What's going on here is described in Christopher Leinberger's column in The New York Times on The Death of the Fringe Suburb (November 11, 2011), which explains how the real estate crisis and the trend back to urban centers have finally doomed the unsustainable sprawl of the outer suburbs.

Crime in cities has gone down so it is logical that crime in the outer burbs will go up. Mayor Giuliani, prisons and demographics made cities safe for the bright sons and daughters of the well-to-do, and now society’s honest minimum-wage working-class losers must move out with their frustrated offspring to bankrupt subdivisions in the outer burbs. Out there with the deer, coyotes and other wildlife.

In this apocalyptic scenario, our author will soon be joining a panicked swarm back to urban living, just as he and his parents swarmed out of the cities from the 50s until now. All to be accompanied, as the article's subtext foreshadows, by very civilized fantasies of Dirty Harry revenge.

Photo:John R. Street, Detroit, 2003, by Camilo José Vergara
From a silly article in Domus, 2011, that almost merits an Exabrupto of its own

Fluff and Filth

Why I Hate The New York Times update
T Mag has a blog by Christopher Petkanas specializing in, quote, Fabulous Dead People, which as you can guess are decadent French aristocratic gays and socialites.

If it were Warhol's old Interview I couldn't object, but isn't this getting a little tiresome?

What is it with the Times? Even Vanity Fair has more aggressive reporting on the general stink of things -- see the January article on the military-industrial complex by Todd S. Purdum.

The Fab Dead blog's latest role model is one Alexis, Baron de Red (pictured above right at a costume ball).  Makes you want to run out and get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

PS: Don't miss the comments, including this by Brightshadow:

"It is utterly tragic to read about someone, obviously one's soulmate, whom one never met and now, never will. I feel the same way when I read about Erasmus, Diderot and Lord Byron."