drat fink

reel to reel

i didnt think it possible but the ceiling in my bathroom actually looked better with a hole than it does fixed. way to spackle, lupe. i guess exposed tape is all the rage these days.

pencils down

i guess this is a form of googlewhacking. i like to check with google to see if what ive just thought up has been used before, and thats a "before" in the very limited context of whats been indexed by google.

so usually i am being unoriginal as with todays construction -- does god grade on a curve? i guess i was trying to imagine how difficult the entrance exam was to heaven, and whether or not it was standardized? word is there may be some institutional biases built into the whole system that prevert the results.

times up

fell asleep during the second half of the nba finals opener. at least from what i saw, detroit looked like it might have more of a chance than many believed. of course when noone scores more than 5 points outside of your two stars than it can be a long night. detroit played with more energy and more of a concept. it seemed like larry brown had outcoached phil jackson. but when your shots go in, it has a way of making your decisions look better.

i was marginally pro-laker as i rooted for them against the hated celtics back in the 80s but thanks in part to ever-so-tepid neoliberal kevin drum and his la triumphalism, im leaning toward detroit.

but really, i prefer chris rock to kid rock, so detroit better rock harder or theyll lose me again. not that anyone (including myself) cares. im just killing a minute between 7:49 and 7:50. and now a few words from our sponsors.

blog tent

"The DNC, in what its officials believe is a first in the world of politics, is granting convention credentials to a carefully selected group of bloggers. They will join thousands of conventional journalists covering the festivities July 26-29 at Boston's FleetCenter."

juicy juice

gillian welch and iron and wine
live concert mp3s

gillian welch - (time) the revelator

tenets balls

just world news speculates about tenets motivations.

ad monishment

"A similar dynamic has shaped political advertising. Last year William Benoit, a professor of communications at the University of Missouri, published a paper in the journal Advertising & Society in which he traced the emergence of the major themes in political advertising. After enduring some 2,027 presidential-campaign spots dating back to their earliest use, in the 1952 race, Benoit established that most of the formats used by today's campaigns originated in the 1950s. Even the snide tone that is now de rigueur dates back decades. A 1968 Hubert Humphrey ad titled "Weathervane" is a fine example. "Ever noticed what happens to Nixon when the political winds blow?" asks the narrator, as a weathervane in Nixon's image (with elongated nose) spins wildly in the breeze. "Which way will he blow next?" Switch "Nixon" to "Kerry" and the ad could easily feature in the current campaign."

ad out

fucking espn. i was going to give them props the other day for all the live coverage of the french open but in the last couple of days they dropped the ball. yesterday they held a serena williams - jennifer capriati match back until three o'clock while the match had been finished by eleven am. venus williams match was broadcast live and ran concurrent with serenas match so there were mitigating factors, except espn has at least three stations on which to broadcast. had espn wanted to, they could have broadcast it live and then rebroadcast it in the afternoon. as it turned out, i found the results on the net and was less inclined to watch when it was on. plus its shameful that a sports network has to pretend that something hasnt happened. all afternoon the matched was hyped as if it hadnt yet been played. ive come to expect that kind of crap from nbc with the olympics but i thought espn would have higher standards. obviously i was wrong.

so today i checked the scores online. seemingly exciting match being played at the moment with arguably the best story attached - three time champ battles back from serious injury - and its preempted by another match which has already been completed and was a boring straight set victory.

boggles the mind.

less filling

"Miller is a star, a diva. She wrote big stories, won big prizes. Long before her WMD articles ran, Miller had become a newsroom legend—and for reasons that had little to do with the stories that appeared beneath her byline. With her seemingly bottomless ambition—a pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders—she cut a larger-than-life figure that lent itself to Paul Bunyan–esque retellings. Most of these stories aren’t kind. Of course, nobody said journalism was a country club. And her personality was immaterial while she was succeeding, winning a Pulitzer, warning the world about terrorism, bio-weapons, and Iraq’s war machine. But now, who she is, and why she prospered, makes for a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism."

mayer weiner

jane mayer/new yorker/chalabi