Author: Aaron Weber

A Conversation On World Events In The Roman Style

bolivia-riotiing.jpg Let’s have a dialogue about world news, but between… oh, let’s say Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. That makes it kind of fun.

Vorenus: Today, troops seized control of a major port, after a dispute over docking fees in which managers demanded that foreign shipping lines pay all fees in cash directly to them, rather than depositing the money with the central government. People are rioting in the streets around the port in protest and counter-protest. It boils down to the province wanting more autonomy than the central government will allow. The citizens are probably right that the central government can’t be trusted with the money, but I don’t think the local port managers are any better. And that’s just in one city. To make things more complicated, in the poorer sections of the capital, people have begun sacking bars and brothels to protest drunkenness and whoring, and are blocking the streets with the flaming wreckage.

Pullo: That’s completely insane.

Vorenus: Seems more like a return to normalcy to me. October is a big month for violent protests here.

Pullo: If it’s any consolation, the people in charge here are also completely nuts. They’ve just refused to provide medicine to poor, sick children, and they also renewed “Big Bang Theory.”

Vorenus: I read the reports from your country. I know it’s going down the tubes. What surprises me is that nobody’s rioting in the streets or taking over the ports. At least here, people know how to express their righteous indignation.

Pullo: It’s true. Here, people are just hoping the new consul will fix everything in two years. But the problems we face aren’t entirely the current consul’s fault. Many of them are systemic, and he just exposed them and twisted them to his advantage. I fear what will happen when people begin to see that a new consul can’t immediately undo all the damage of the past eight years.

Waiting For “Milf” To Be Added To The OED

“Ginormous” is the latest addition, at least the latest one I care about or use. But I’m really waiting for “milf” to end up. And not just as an all-caps acronym. I want them to accept “milfy,” as an adjective. And I want to know whether the plural should be “milfs” or “milves.”

Seriously, these things plague me. I need to know!

“The Wire”

Via BuzzSugar and of course MeeVee, I suggest that everyone read this incredible profile of David Simon in The New Yorker, which explains the motivation behind his shows, and mentions that his next project might take him from Baltimore to New Orleans.

Great anecdote: “Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.””

I Am Not A Crook

Phil Nugent:

By now, it’s clear that “We don’t torture” is going to be George Bush’s equivalent to “I am not a crook” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”–an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn’t been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case….
At some point, every politician is put in the position of having to flatly deny that he’s doing what he’s doing, but few of us have made that the automatic life choice that Bush has.

People Really Do Form Emotional Attachments With All The Wrong Things

If you haven’t already heard of it, “Meerkat Manor” is a nature show about a family of meerkats, narrated as though it were a prime-time soap opera. It’s hilarious and touching, a half-hour long, and suitable for families. However, it also involves a lot of casual, unmarried sex (I guess meerkats don’t have religions or souls). Anyway, the matriarch of the clan died protecting her cubs from a cobra, and people are really sad about it.

The NY Times has an obituary, of sorts: “What the outpouring of sentiment that has followed says about the present character of American emotional life is disillusioning. Thousands have outlined the particularities of their sadness on Internet message boards, some claiming they haven’t cried so much since they lost a parent.”

Let me remind you: this is a wild animal living its natural life in its natural habitat which has been eaten by a natural predator.

Does God Love Racist Mascots?

Friday, the ALCS begins with the Indians/Sox matchup. I hope the Sox win, and not just because they’re my team: The Indians have a racist mascot.

On the other hand, the Indians are more favored by God, because God sent a plague of flies to bother the Yankees and it broke their concentration and let the Indians win Game 2 of that series.

Does that mean that God loves racist mascots?