Category: Thoughts

Perez Hilton will appear on Courteney Cox’s show Dirt tonight. This is a real milestone for him. He’s been working steadily toward this moment of apotheosis, when he sloughs off the carapace of a celebrity-obsessed blogger and becomes a celebrity in his own right. He’s already abandoned his brains and ethics– the only thing left is botox and surgery to make him look like all the other Ken dolls in LA.

Here’s a cute video of a little boy dancing and being silly. Click through to read the dozens of comments arguing about how his father must have abandoned him, how he needs to be playing football instead of dancing, whether he’s been abused, and so forth, plus prayers about shielding our children from the negative influences of BET.

Sure, I think we can all agree that BET is fucked up and that pop stars are not good role models. I agree that it’s a little odd to see a kid dancing in what is basically a sexualized and provocative manner. But at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with a kid dancing and singing and playing around. Kids play at being grownups, and that includes dancing like the grownups they see on TV.

I mean, when I was about ten one of my favorite songs was “Darling Nikki.” I had no idea what it was about– I just knew it sounded good. When I tried to enter a summer-camp lip synch contest and do that, they wouldn’t let me and I didn’t know why. It was perfectly right for the counselors to stop me from doing that, but if they hadn’t it wouldn’t have meant anything. Only in retrospect, with adult knowledge, does that kind of behavior seem unwholesome. The kid dancing in the video has probably forgotten it, and moved on to playing Superman or Tyra Banks or cops and robbers.

Slate coverage of the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case is full of the kinds of weird and funny moments you’d expect from a case about disruptive, but meaningless, free speech.

The Explainer on dog food. Ew.

Hot Document on the Chiquita Banana of Mass Destruction case. Local experts will point out that everyone who works in that part of Colombia pays off the AUC, who are really more like freelance police than terrorists. You also have to pay bribes to FARC and ELN to work in rebel territory, and those guys are worse.

WSJ Informed Reader: “Focus on the Family’s chairman, James Dobson, and 22 other evangelical leaders sent a letter to the NAE in early March calling Mr. Cizik’s campaign ‘divisive.’”

James Dobson is one of the most hate-filled and divisive religious leaders of recent times, and he’s calling someone divisive– over a suggestion that humans have a duty not to screw up the earth? Hubris and irony are deeply entertaining.

Go ahead. Make Alabama look bad:

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about regular expressions, but MySpace has made me do it again, and I’ll never forgive them. They’ve gone and implemented another security measure so poorly designed and poorly implemented it could have come from the TSA.

It’s an attempt to get stop people from screwing with CSS by replacing the string “style” with <myspace>style</myspace>.

On most of the boards, you can say “style” but you can’t link to any URL with “style” in it– such as, oh, StyleFeeder.com. And then in some places, you can’t even say “style.” The phrase “I prefer freestyle to slalom” became “I prefer free<myspace>style</myspace> to slalom” in one instance. But not in every instance– it’s not even consistent.

Next thing you know they’ll be asking us to take off our shoes and limiting us to three ounces of toothpaste.

Iraq is gloomy, inequality is looming, and our republic being undermined by overzealous ideologues. The economy, as always, is in danger of collapse.

This weekend, while I was visiting my parents, I asked my dad if he thought that our society was more just than it was 40 years ago. I don’t know why I picked 40 years, but it seemed like a reasonable number.

He responded immediately that it was. Forty years ago, the University of Virginia was all-male and all-white, and the public school system was still recovering from that episode when it shut down entirely rather than accept integration. True, our republic is in danger now, but it is not really in any greater danger than it has been in the past. And the conditions of equality and justice before the law, while far from perfect, are better than they have been. Jose Padilla is the exception now, not the rule.

The rich may be getting richer, and the middle may have greater income volatility, and the gap between rich and poor may be greater… but we are as a nation better off and generally fairer than we were forty years ago. Not everyone has done equally well, and our progress is probably not enough, and it may be that we’re about to slide backwards, but it consoles me to remember that it’s better than it was.

MONROE, La. – Chicken fat clogged a major traffic artery Tuesday, a day after a leaky truck left a stinky, slippery trail along a one-mile stretch of Interstate 20.

Friday morning I had a 10:30 flight to Virginia to visit my parents, but got bumped twice due to a faulty oil pump and then faulty computer systems. Then, several gloriously internet-free days. Today: catching up.

Scooter Libby was found guilty on four of five counts– lying to a grand jury and to congress about how he learned Valerie Plame’s identity, how he spread that news, and why. Sadly, he’s held his line and not rolled over on Cheney, who passed him the secret in order to falsify intelligence, spin data, and drag the nation into a war of aggression.

Four years and thousands of deaths later, Libby’s getting a slap on the wrist and Cheney’s getting away with it. I imagine that once he’s done a few months in a minimum-security prison, Libby will get some sort of reward for his service– a suitcase full of cash, a sweet consulting or lobbying gig, whatever.

Just another day undermining human decency in the capitol.

For once, I’m not talking about Britney and Paris– instead, it’s the a talentless blonde that people actually take seriously: Ann Coulter.

Oh, I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a joke, like that classic Michael Richards act about lynching.

It’s funny– until this, I hadn’t really taken Edwards seriously as a threat, but now that he’s getting so much attention from Ann, maybe he’ll get more notice among human beings with actual souls.