“Apparently, some ‘enterprising' Jamaicans have figured out a solution to the growing problem of private ownership of our beachfront lands”: Long Bench reports on the stealing of a beach, adding: “If this kind of theft weren’t a sign of how actively we are digging a serious hole for ourselves in this country…I would salute the […]
Unzipped: Gay Armenia continues to detail the ongoing saga of Agil Khalil, an opposition reporter in Azerbaijan, who was recently stabbed. Although the authorities in Baku continue to maintain that the perpetrator of the attack was a jilted former-lover, the blog notes that international organizations have determined the following trial as “fake.” The blog says […]
Li Yin-he re-posted an article about “naked government officials” which refers to (quite often corrupted) officials whose family members have migrated overseas. According to the article, there are 1,080,000 overseas Chinese who are relatives of these “naked officials”.
The Philippine government and Moro rebels announced a breakthrough in the peace negotiations. An agreement will be announced soon. Bong Montesa speculates about the content of the agreement.
East Ethnia writes about the arrest of a man thought to be Peter Egner, 86, “a member of the Nazi security police in Belgrade between 1941 and 1943 where he acted as an interpreter during interrogations of prisoners and guarded transports of prisoners (at least) between two prison camps in the city. During the first […]
Bosnia Vault writes about “the famed EXIT festival in Novi Sad” - and the politics that surrounds it.
Sarah Franco of Cafe Turco and Jelena Markovic of Invisible Sights co-author a satirical text on “the cult” of Slobodan Milosevic.
Sarah Franco of Cafe Turco writes about her visit to Srebrenica this year and muses on “moral monsters, bystanders and civic minded people.”
The raven caw of Laura Ingraham’s voice on the radio has never been one of nature’s nobler mating calls, and her on-air personality has always struck me as the antithesis of sparkling. Her off-air personality likewise, based on my brief cheesegrating exposure to it. Years ago, waiting in a remote studio to do Howie Kurtz’s show, I heard Ingraham mutter in complaint, “Why am I always on with this guy?”–this guy being, of course, the inimitable me. My tender feelings might have been hurt by her little snippy-poo had I not divested myself of pride, vanity, and the need to appease others years ago by taking a summer course in emotional detachment at the Learning Annex, where “lack of affect” was considered a major plus. But from behind the Fortress of Solitude ice-blocks of practiced indifference, I admit I felt a flicker of sympathy for Ingraham as exasperation gets the worst of her in this samizdat highlight reel of lowpoints at the host desk of Fox News’s “Just In…” At the mercy of inept nincompoops who seem to be studiously ignoring her escalating objections to their studio chatter and doorway hovering (you half-expect to see stagehands crossing behind her, carrying planks of wood), Ingraham sounds like a U-Boat commander just before everything goes pitch-black and desperate cries compete with the ominous clanging of pipes. The point is, it’s not her fault the ship’s about to spend eternity as a steel turd on the ocean floor. And a shiny forehead is simply impermissable given today’s advances in on-air cosmetology and the ruthless demands of HD TV. No, she has every every right to gripe,* and managed to maintain her composure, which is more than can be said of at least one Harvey Keitel impressionist.
I also find myself in rare concord with Elizabeth Hasselbeck, token Republican Twinkie on that lettuce bed of insurrection, The View. I’m tired of the N-word, I’m tired of the phrase “the N-word,” it’s an ugly-sounding word that does immense more harm than comedy or comradely good; the debate over its shock value, over whether it’s self-asserting or self-hating, is one of those unresolved, racially-frictive bores, given the flux and flex of the context in which it’s considered OK and the subjective sliding scale of acceptability depending on whose mouth it’s coming out of. That Jesse Jackson dropped this familiar nugget in the Fox studio during his insta-classic mumbly “nuts off” monologue seems to me worse than Imus’s “nappy ho” comment because Jackson assumes sonorous airs of eminence and should know better. Imus can be a jerk, but he doesn’t drop his bucket into the deep well of piety from which Jackson honey-coats his words when he knows the mike is on. His use of the n-word is as indefensible as any rapper’s, Whoopie Goldberg shouldn’t be slinging around the air either, and the easiest thing to do is to anethematize the word across the board. Just drop it already, an unofficial universal ban that would make its utterance as crass and offensive as spitting on the sidewalk instead of solemnizing it into controversy that “we as a people must come to terms with” when there are so many other topics more deserving of blathering to death. It’s time to “move on” and explore new and different ways we can get on each other’s nerves in the post-racial America Time and Newsweek have laid out so nicely for us on the picnic grass.
*Alas, K’Lo does her heroine no favors hailing Ingraham’s cool aplomb in a post titled “Laura, the Cucumber Queen.” In today’s climate of innuendo, ‘Cucumber Queen’ is the sort of honorific that could be easily misconstrued.
Blog Politique au Senegal thinks Senegalese singer Demba Dia’s candidacy for public office is hardly serious. But neither is politics in Senegal!
