When someone plants this flag along a residential driveway in Santa Barbara — one of America’s wealthiest, but probably not sexiest cities — you just absolutely, positively have to go with it.
Category Archives: absurdity
Praying for the GOP nomination
I just thought I’d horrify my friends on the East and West coasts with this inspiring little report from the “Third Coast,” in which Texas Gov. Rick “Good Hair” Perry has, as the Houston Chronicle‘s Austin bureau puts it, “invited the country’s other 49 governors and evangelical leaders for a ‘non-political’ event to pray for the nation.” Of course, the non-political event actually appears to be another step in Perry’s nascent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Or, as the Chron puts it:
Such an event would allow Perry to build his profile with Christian conservatives, a group that play a key role in Republican primary politics, especially in the South and the Midwest. The playbill for the call to prayer hits all of the notes that a candidate seeking the GOP nomination would be expected to hit (see: debasement of society). And the venue selection— Reliant Stadium (a football stadium) — indicates that organizers are aiming to make a splash with the event.
Beyond horrifying with words, this post hopes to cause widespread cursing at coastal computer screens via the picture, provided courtesy of the Texas Tribune, of Gov. Perry, praying to the heavens. Good afternoon, elite thought leaders. And you’re welcome.
Coordination to the fourth power
Well, the republic is saved and this week’s competition for best academic abstract is all but over. The title alone — “Emerging Theoretical Understanding of Pluricentric Coordination in Public Governance” — essentially ended the competition. But within the abstract itself, the Danish authors of the paper surpass the title by miles and miles, hitting this new height of obfuscatory explanation: “Although the traditional theories of coordination tended to view vertical and horizontal forms of coordination as radically different modes of coordination, the new theories question the analytical value of this distinction by pointing to the relational, interpretive, interdependent, and interactive aspects of all coordination processes including processes in which public authorities seek to govern their subjects.” Game, set, match (without mentioning four uses of the word “coordination” in a single sentence). Even if they were aided by a bad translation or less than fluent English language skills, I have only one thing to say to these researchers: Good work, Danes!
How Warren powned* a congressman
There’s a California-ism that my 13-year-old son uses — powned* — that has something to do with beating someone so badly in a competition that you didn’t just own him, you poned him. I don’t know where the starting p came from, but being poned by your son in basketball is definitely worse than merely being owned. And if you want to see the definition of someone poning a member of Congress, watch what one of my heroes, Elizabeth Warren, does to Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry in this video. (h/t to Gawker.)
* as noted in a comment by the esteemed Shameless Pedant, I had no idea where “pown” came from or even how it was spelled when I wrote this post. As explained below, pown or pwn is an acceptable spelling, but “pone” is not. My apologies to the powning world.
Comedy and Theoretical Criminology
We have a clear winner this week in the competition for “best” academic abstract, and it comes from the wonderfully named journal Theoretical Criminology, which has set me to thinking along several tangents, including one that involves theoretical jaywalking. But that’s neither there nor here; what’s important are learned and impenetrable sentences such as:
Taking its cue from Bakhtin’s exposition of the grotesque realism of the Rabelaisian novel, this article explores the abstract notion of ‘justice’ through the lens of ‘folk humour’—specifically, stand-up comedy which references securitization in the post-9/11 period.
There’s more, including Habermas. Go here, and enjoy.
Irony, thy name is Debby Boone
When you have a headline this eerie — “‘You Light Up My Life’ composer kills self, police say” — I suppose you have to go with it. Especially if the composer-suicide was facing multiple sex-crime charges.
Filed under absurdity, sex crimes, suicide, You go with it
Area 51 Revisited
I’ve always been a sucker for stories about and images of spy planes. The U-2 and more particularly the SR-71 Blackbird had a Jetsons, the-future-as-seen-from-the-1950s look that seems, somehow, classic to me. And National Geographic has an exclusive set of pictures of the 1963 crash of a prototype of a successor to the U-2 known as the A-12. It’s an early attempt at stealth technology that looks like it was designed in Hollywood for a sci-fi movie. Here’s the run-down:
Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly at 2,200 miles an hour (3,540 kilometers an hour)—fast enough to cross the continental U.S. in 70 minutes. From 90,000 feet (27,400 meters), the plane’s cameras could capture foot-long (0.3-meter-long) objects on the ground below.
But there’s another reason I’m linking to this annotated slideshow. I’ll let National Geographic explain: “During the 1950s and ’60s, Area 51’s top-secret OXCART program developed the A-12 as the successor to the U-2 spy plane.” Area 51. Top-secret spy plane. How could I resist? Particularly when I know the search engines are going to feed hordes of UFO-niks to this blog, where they will doubtless find yet more evidence of the government’s fiendishly clever attempts to cover up what really happened at Area 51.
La mordida, mapped
When you have a state-by-state map of the likelihood that traffic police will be offered bribes in Mexico, you go with it.
Filed under Above the Law, absurdity, bribery, human rights, map, Mexico, my bothered mind, pandering, You go with it
John Mecklin, writer/editor 
