Sir Mark Thatcher has been refused a visa to live in the United States following his conviction for involvement in the failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. Sir Mark, the son of Baroness Thatcher, the former prime minister, had intended to join his wife and their two children in the US after being given a four-year suspended jail sentence and fine at his trial in January, but immigration authorities turned down his visa application, it was confirmed yesterday.
"It is quite true that my visa application has been rejected," Sir Mark said in a statement. "It was always a calculated risk when I plea-bargained in South Africa."
Sir Mark was fined £265,000 by a South African court but escaped jail as part of a deal in which he admitted to having "unwittingly" financed the attempted overthrow of the government in Equatorial Guinea.
That's from "Thatcher is refused US visa over coup plot conviction" by Harvey McGavin and it appears in UK's The Independent. Billie e-mailed that in.
Billie: As someone living in the DFW area, I'm quite pleased to know that someone who admitted guilt in a plot to overthrow a government won't be easing his way back into Dallas
just because his mother happens to be Margaret Thatcher. At a time when Arabs are regularly targeted and treated as criminals without any proof, there's no reason in the world to let Mark Thatcher back into this country. The news that he will soon be moving his wife and children from Dallas to England suits me just fine.
From The Guardian, learn that Homeland Security apparently applies to pot smuggling as well in Julian Borger's "Behind the idyll, the drug war that threatens to erupt:"
It is a sunny spring day; the water is sparkling, dotted with the white sails of jauntily leaning yachts and the green islands that speckle the US-Canada border. Welcome to the frontline of a vicious multibillion-dollar drug war.
A high-powered grey patrol boat with a three-man crew from the US department of homeland security buzzes across this Pacific idyll like a frenetic killjoy, boarding sailboats, disrupting jolly outings on family motor launches and even accosting tiny sea kayaks.
In theory, the crew's primary task is to stop terrorists infiltrating the US. Ever since Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian militant, was caught a few miles from here in December 1999 with more than 45kg (100lb) of explosives in the boot of his car, border patrols have been braced for the next episode. One of the crew wears a radiation detector at all times.
Since then, however, the homeland security patrol has been finding mainly marijuana on the boats they search - industrial quantities of a potent strain known as BC Bud, named in honour of the Canadian province where much of it is grown, British Columbia.
From Scotland's Sunday Herald, note Connie Levett's "We fear the earth and sea will conspire and break open the mountains and flood the land:"
Like so many on Nias, the villagers of Afia are caught between a tsunami and an earthquake, fearful now of both earth and sea.
"We are afraid of the tsunami, afraid of the earthquake, already my house is falling down," says Raina, 75, who shakes with a malaria-like fever she has developed since she moved to the mountain. She cannot sleep. "All the people here go to the hill every night."
On the mountain they have built simple thatched sleeping shelters.
Over at Baghdad Burning, Girl Blogger reports the latest Iraq invasion -- media. Besides propaganda demonizing Sunnis, Girl Blogger reports this on the American programming she's receiving:
I've been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It's like hospital food. It's all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women's rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once.
About a month ago, we were treated to an interview on 20/20 with Sabrina Harman- the witch in some of the Abu Ghraib pictures. You know- the one smiling over faceless, naked Iraqis piled up to make a human pyramid. Elizabeth Vargus was doing the interview and the whole show was revolting. They were trying to portray Sabrina as an innocent who was caught up in military orders and fear of higher ranking officers. The show went on and on about how American troops never really got seminars on Geneva Conventions (like one needs to be taught humanity) and how poor Sabrina was being made a scapegoat. They showed the restaurant where she worked before the war and how everyone thought she was "such a nice person" who couldn’t hurt a fly! We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I've always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality- I just didn’t know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere.
Click the link (for those who do access links) to find out Girl Blogger's concept of a must-see reality show.
While we're on the topic of Iraq, let's return to the UK's The Independent for Daniel Howden's
"US troops injured in raid on Abu Ghraib attack:"
Heavily armed insurgents have launched an audacious attack on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, wounding 44 American soldiers and 12 prisoners, the US military said.
The raid on Saturday night, which the self-proclaimed "al-Qa'ida wing in Iraq" claimed to have carried out, targeted an outbuilding with two suicide car bombs, American officials said, and followed up with small-arms fire and grenades.
From Aljazeera, we'll note "Ex-Yukos boss faces labour camp:"
Russian prosecutors have requested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former chief executive of the Yukos oil company, be sentenced to 10 years in a prison labour camp.
Chief prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin asked a Moscow court to find Khodorkovsky guilty on tax evasion and other charges on Tuesday.
Also from Aljazeera, we'll note "Inquiry into missing Algerians urged:"
Algerian human-rights groups have called for an independent investigation into the detentions and disappearances of more than 6000 civilians by the security forces during the 1990s.
They rejected a much-awaited report this week by a government commission which laid the blame on agents acting individually during a war on rebels.
From Australia's ABC we'll note "Oil prices hit new high:"
Oil prices have reached a new high on speculation that an increase in quotas, being considered by OPEC countries, will not be enough to meet demand.
US light crude futures hit $US 57.79 a barrel, topping Friday's record of $US 57.70 in New York.
Australia? Let's check in on our friend Luke of wotisitgood4. On Saturday, Natalie e-mailed this post (from Thursday) noting that Luke was staying on the Wead story:
wead
as u know - im skeptical about the whole doug waed tape-gate thingy - the whole "gee - blinky sounds exactly the same in private as he does in public" line seemed to get swallowed by just about every observer. the LATimes did another story about it earlier this week - in their 'STYLE & CULTURE' section.
heres a question i hada month ago:
"* apparently Wead quotes the tapes 'briefly' in his book - itll be interesting to see when that book went into print (released jan5).
itll also be interesting to see how 'briefly' he quotes the tapes - and how directly... presumably he didnt mention the tapes in the book - otherwise the furor would have began earlier...
"i couldnt find the answers at the time, but the LAT piece attempts to fill in some of the detailsheres the money quote from Weads book:
"George Bush apparently experimented with cocaine. He has never spoken about it publicly and so we can only speculate on if and when it happened…. The fear that it might flare into the open would become at times an obsession. Privately he brought the subject up often in his run for the presidency in 2000…. "you'd think that was kinda the end of the story - but i noticed something weird - for all the brouhaha about tape-gate and the excoriation and/or self-flagellation of mr wead, and for all the ensuing punditocracy, heres the funny thing - if u google any of those sentences that were apparently at the center of it all, you only get four hits - and they are all just copies of this recent LAT article. does that seem weird?
i wouldnt have thought anything of it, except that i had specifically asked the question at the time, and i had noticed at the time that nobody was actually quoting the relevant passages. if you google "wead tapes bush cocaine", you get 4000 results - and the only 4 which actually include the quotes from the book are all this one LAT article. weird.
if any of u lot can actually get your hands on the book, id be interested to see if these are the actual quotes. if they are the direct quotes then its kinda odd that no-one ever quoted them before. and if they arent the actual quotes, then we have a bunch of new questions.
hmmmmm
While New York Times reporters appear hungover and unable to sort out Kyrgyzstan, let's go to OpenDemocracy and Mary Dejevsky's "Kyrgyzstan questions:"
The world’s press has been filled in the past week with news about a “tulip” or “daffodil” revolution in plucky little Kyrgyzstan and the universal – and inevitable – appeal of democracy. Only a few days since the events of 24 March in the central Asian country’s capital city, Bishkek, it all looks much more complicated. In fact, it was much more complicated all along.
What we know is this. Kyrgyzstan held parliamentary elections on schedule in February-March 2005. OSCE observers reported widespread violations. Street protests began, not in the capital, Bishkek, but in the southern city of Osh, which has seen inter-ethnic violence at least twice in the recent past: in 1990, when Soviet authority was waning, and again in 2002.
[. . .]
At best, what we now have is a parliament which is the product of elections designed to keep the old, Akayev, regime in power, and a self-appointed executive from an opposition whose only significant point of agreement was the need to get rid of Akayev. This is not a recipe for long-term stability. Nor, by any stretch of the imagination, can it be defined as democratic.
There was a great deal of wishful thinking in the early days of this “revolution” which precluded sober analysis of the facts. Much western opinion insisted that Kyrgyzstan was the next post-Soviet “domino” to fall peacefully to democracy, after Georgia and Ukraine. And we had been well prepared for just such an eventuality. I received emails from opposition activists anticipating not just the rigging of the elections, but “rose-” and “orange-” style protests well before the elections were even held.
From ZNet, Lloyd e-mails W. David Kubiak's "Introducing The Constitution Restoration Act: Say Hello To Taliban America And Goodbye To Godless Judges, Courts And Law:"
Just when you thought the corporatist/Christian Coalition had milked the 9/11 "surprise" for all it was worth in powers, profits and votes, we regret to report that you may have to think again. Just in case you've briefly fallen behind on your rightwing mailing lists, you might have missed the March 3rd filing of Senate bill S. 520 and House version is H.R. 1070, AKA the "Constitution Restoration Act" (CRA).
In the worshipful words of the Conservative Caucus, this historic legislation will "RESTORE OUR CONSTITUTION!", mainly by barring ANY federal court or judge from ever again reviewing "any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." [Emphasis demanded - see full text here.]
In other words, the bill ensures that God's divine word (and our infallible leaders' interpretation thereof) will hereafter trump all our pathetic democratic notions about freedom, law and rights -- and our courts can't say a thing. This, of course, will take "In God We Trust" to an entirely new level, because soon He (and His personally anointed political elite) will be all the legal recourse we have left.
This is not a joke, a test, or a fit of libertarian paranoia. The CRA already has 28 sponsors in the House and Senate, and a March 20 call to lead sponsor Sen. Richard Shelby's office assures us that "we have the votes for passage."
[We're putting Z-Net in here because Lloyd e-mailed about this on Friday and he's been waiting ever since. My apologies to Lloyd.]
From the Canada's CBS, we'll note "Bombs hit airport, mall, hotel in southern Thailand:"
Three bombs exploded almost simultaneously in southern Thailand on Sunday, killing at least two people and injured at least 40 others.
The blasts hit an airport, a department store and a hotel in Songkhla province, which has been wracked by an Islamic insurgency for more than a year.
Also, we have a young member who's 12. She's a big fan of Avril Lavigne and I see this story on
the CBC that we'll note just for her, "Billy Talent, Avril, k-os win big at Junos:"
Rockers Billy Talent won two of the most coveted honours at the Juno Awards, Canada's annual celebration of music, while pop singer Avril Lavigne and rapper k-os won the count, netting three Junos apiece.
[. . .]
The pop-punk Lavigne -- currently on tour in Southeast Asia – won in absentia for artist of the year, pop album of the year for Under My Skin and the fan's choice award, which she accepted through a pre-taped message.
From Haaretz, we'll note Yoav Stern's "Envoy to Ethiopia dies from gunshot wounds:"
Israel's ambassador to Ethiopia, Doron Grossman, 49, died of his wounds yesterday morning at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, in Jerusalem, the Foreign Ministry announced. Grossman shot himself in Addis Ababa last Tuesday, apparently after learning he was suffering from an advanced stage of terminal cancer.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Larry's open letter to Geov Parrish
Larry: As someone who's enjoyed your writing for years and trusted your voice, I'll be taking a break from you. Your column about the protests was one I disagreed with. No problem, there, we can disagree.
But then you structure a column around your letters and come off rude and dismissive of those wanting to end the war in something other than your own personal idea of how a protest ought to be run. You're 'bravery' in taking a stand for the easily accepted takes me by surprise.
The Nation had already addressed the conflict you seem to think you've discovered. (Part of the curse of being a pundit appears to be the desire to play "me first!" One of the best things about your writing has been the refusal to play that game.)
I disagreed with your take. I read it. I thought, "He's getting it off his chest." Fine.
But to have the same hatred spewed in the latest column?
It's not fine with this reader.
Your rudeness isn't amusing nor acceptable. It's not just that I strongly disagree with your tactics. It's that you've lost my ear because you're disrespectful to people you disagree with while claiming some let's-all-pull-together nonsense which strikes me as far from honest.
I'm not sure what you majored in (I hold degrees in poli sci) but you've gone from sharp edged "conventional wisdom" to muddled political thought. I honestly don't think you're currently up to the mental stretch you seem to be attempting.
You're entitled to your opinion and when you expressed it once, I was fine with disagreeing.
When you attempted to follow it up with more snide remarks, that's not okay with me.
And for the record, I'm not a 60s relic. (Sorry, I wasn't born then.)
Nor am I some fire breathing anti-war radical.
Your opinion I can disagree with, even when you returned to expressing it yet again.
What I can not go along with is the rudeness and your targeting of peace activists while you appear to shore up your "cred" by latching on to the military.
You're entitled to hate whomever you wish. But I never understood you to be a voice that tore apart the masses, as opposed to standing up strongly to deserved targets of criticism.
The inductive generalizations strike me as beneath you.
Possibly you're going through a bad period (in your personal life, I don't mean you're writing). If so, I wish all the best. (Always. I still like you as a writer.)
But I won't be reading because you're using snide remarks to reduce complex realities into simplistic stereotypes that seem hurtful and demeaning to me. Intentional or not, that's how it reads to this longterm reader.
Larry
But then you structure a column around your letters and come off rude and dismissive of those wanting to end the war in something other than your own personal idea of how a protest ought to be run. You're 'bravery' in taking a stand for the easily accepted takes me by surprise.
The Nation had already addressed the conflict you seem to think you've discovered. (Part of the curse of being a pundit appears to be the desire to play "me first!" One of the best things about your writing has been the refusal to play that game.)
I disagreed with your take. I read it. I thought, "He's getting it off his chest." Fine.
But to have the same hatred spewed in the latest column?
It's not fine with this reader.
Your rudeness isn't amusing nor acceptable. It's not just that I strongly disagree with your tactics. It's that you've lost my ear because you're disrespectful to people you disagree with while claiming some let's-all-pull-together nonsense which strikes me as far from honest.
I'm not sure what you majored in (I hold degrees in poli sci) but you've gone from sharp edged "conventional wisdom" to muddled political thought. I honestly don't think you're currently up to the mental stretch you seem to be attempting.
You're entitled to your opinion and when you expressed it once, I was fine with disagreeing.
When you attempted to follow it up with more snide remarks, that's not okay with me.
And for the record, I'm not a 60s relic. (Sorry, I wasn't born then.)
Nor am I some fire breathing anti-war radical.
Your opinion I can disagree with, even when you returned to expressing it yet again.
What I can not go along with is the rudeness and your targeting of peace activists while you appear to shore up your "cred" by latching on to the military.
You're entitled to hate whomever you wish. But I never understood you to be a voice that tore apart the masses, as opposed to standing up strongly to deserved targets of criticism.
The inductive generalizations strike me as beneath you.
Possibly you're going through a bad period (in your personal life, I don't mean you're writing). If so, I wish all the best. (Always. I still like you as a writer.)
But I won't be reading because you're using snide remarks to reduce complex realities into simplistic stereotypes that seem hurtful and demeaning to me. Intentional or not, that's how it reads to this longterm reader.
Larry
Clubbing with the New York Times
"Honey, I was punny tonight!" You think any of the headline writers at the Times ever drag themselves home and greet their spouses that way?
Reading William J. Broad's front page story about the dangers of aging nuclear warheads (specifically W-76) you find something a little deeper than the punny headline "Aging Warheads Ignite a Debate Among Scientists." [That's the print headline, online users get the more substance based "A Fierce Debate on Atom Bombs From Cold War."] Just tossing that thought out there as something to consider while your friend drags you from one club to another.
Moving on. You realize you've hit the frou-frou, chi-chi, upscale club scene as you hear Somini Sengupta work in the word "ennui" while doing a poor job of concealing a self-satisfied smirk. (The headline writer merely apes her lead with "Fear, Ennui and Doubt Underlie Calm in Nepal's Capital").
Sengupta, baby, stick to the art galleries when trying to score with impressive vocab, okay? Striving for tome poem, but coming off like fourth rate Cole Porter ["Come to the Supermarket (In Old Peking)"], Sengupta offers such passages as:
On a recent Sunday afternoon,
as the market women sat on their haunches hawking cabbages,
and the riot police milled about with eyes darting this way and that,
Nepalis revolting against their king's emergency rule decree
straggled up the narrow alleys in ones and twos.
Walk on. Walk on.org. Note the poster art as you're dragged to the next club while you give it up to Angela Jimenez and whomever decided her photo was just the thing to accompany Andrew Jacobs' "AIDS Fighters Face a Resistant Form of Apathy." Apathy. AIDS. Even more deadly new strain.
Does it bring to mind two bodies pressed tightly against one another? Does your mind conjure a framed crotch shot in some sort of hommage to the Rolling Stones album cover Sticky Fingers? Well in the minds of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" Angela Jimenez and the editor/s it conjures up exactly that. Like drunken revelers at karaoke night doing the stiff-neck-head-jerk while singing/slurring "She like to par-tay all the time," I doubt either Jiminez or the editor/s realize how much they've embarrassed themselves. Flee the club quickly before you're tainted by association.
En route to the next club, remember that Jacobs didn't help his own case for being taken seriously, in this non-economic theory article, by referring to a "laissez-faire attitude" towards safe sex. Snort, "He should talk!" While Keesha notes that "The picture and the article combine to scream out the apparent new attitude: 'Step, you muthers! Grey Lady be letting her hair down!'"
Not content to merely toss a new weave, Jacobs also gave his props to fellow peeps such as
the Anne Robinson wanna' be & look alike Ed Needham who, while nearly destroying Rolling Stone magazine in his brief tenure as editor, still managed to create one "trend story:" "bug chasers." Damned if Andy Jacobs don't give it up for his peep Eddie Need-HAM with a shout out to the questionable and undocumented "bug chasers." (But could it have really been a "trend story" if it was based on heavy documentation or if, in fact, it hadn't been questioned by sources quoted in print just as hit the streets?) Can I get a uh-huh?
Standing in line at the hot new 'in spot,' note the Times' apparent "New Attitude" (Keesha says "the whole thing simply screams of Patti LaBelle's eighties hit") with the in-your-face title of Peter Applebome's "A Meditation on Taxes, and Bad Karma." Full of insta-classics like this sentence striving to be a riddle but far less amusing than Peter's own last name:
So if the question is: What's the sound of one hand flipping land? The answer here is: the howls of local residents fed up with seeing more land taken off the tax rolls.
Continuing in the "all the news that fit to toss around while you try to close a booty call," you register Hassan M. Fattah strutting off the dance floor, reeking of Jovan, while approaching the bar to toss out "Limits Set for Boy Jockeys in Emirates' Camel Races." Fattah's spent almost as much time shaping this anecdote as grooming the hair.
Feel like the odd one out stuck at the table with two losers as Scott Shane and David E. Sanger state the obvious -- repeatedly -- in "Daily Intelligence Briefings Are Vague, Officials Say." Try to catch the eye of the friend you came with to signal that you're leaving before Shane and Sanger move from verses of "Love is like, you know, it's . . . hard, man, it's really tough, but it's like this, this thing I saw on the Discovery channel about the life cycle of the fruit fly . . ." and break into choruses of, "Dude, you gave her everything!" and "I tried to, man, I really tried to!"
Failing to catch your friend's eye, scream at Shane and Sanger, "Cut this male bonding crap and get a room!" Then try to escape to the safety of the bathroom only to be stopped enroute by
the dreary duo of Jim Yardley and David Barboza who open with:
The pipeline that pours young, eager workers into China's manufacturing juggernaut begins in the country's interior at vocational schools like Hunan Top Software.
[. . .]
For Wu Dongshan, the job placement coordinator at Hunan Top, the most obvious sign of change is that factory recruiters now come to him, a reversal from three years ago, when he would make the long drive to Guangdong with busloads of students desperate for work.
"Punchline, please!" you hiss, while wondering if you're some sort of asshole magnet? Pressing their grinning faces too close your own, Yardley and Barboza leer, "Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage." Roll your eyes as they high-five and head butt.
Finally making it to the shelter of the bathroom, you quickly find yourself confronted by little Associated Press, hopped up on God knows what, chattering away, using lots of words but saying very little in "Schiavo's Remains Cremated as Autopsy Becomes Part of Feud." Reassure Ass Press, for the fourth time, that those jeans do wonders for the butt, silently curse your friend for dragging you along and get the hell out of there before Ass Press's eyes start tearing up again.
Hail a cab, and half-way home, realize that cabbie Kate Zernike's yammering on in some value-void, fact-void manner that's possibly worse than anything you heard inside the club:
Across the country, efforts to expand or establish laws allowing concealed handguns have been fueled by the horrifying shootings in the last month - of the family of a federal judge in Chicago, at the church service in Wisconsin, at courthouses in Atlanta and Tyler, Tex., and the nation's second-deadliest school shooting, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota.
Interrupt her spiel on "Shootings Fuel a Drive to Ease Gun Laws" with, "Yeah, that's what we need, a country of armed vigilantes! Can you just drive? Thank you."
While your eyes water and burn, the morning sun creeps across the sky. Turn the key, open the door and crawl into bed. But as you do, say a prayer for poor Craig S. Smith.
After a week long, mad party spree, full of coverage of the wild and wacky Kyrgyzstan's non-revolution, he wakes with a killer club hangover to announce a "malaise" (whether he's a club child of the late 70s or just a current club child nostalgic for the Studio 54 NYC failed to provide his generation with I don't know) has settled "over this country" and apparently around his temples. In "Kygrystan's Shining Hour Ticks Away and Turns Out to Be a Plain, Old Coup" he announces, possibly between hurls into the toilet bowl, that "we all got it wrong!" That's more than last night's booze he's tasting, it's also the jagged edges of his (and the press corps) tattered image having bungled coverage of the third "revolution" this year. So say a prayer, say a prayer.
The Five Stairsteps told us:
Ooh Child, things are going to get easier
Ooh Child, things'll be brighter
Ooh Child, things are going to get easier
Ooh Child, things'll be brighter
Some day we'll get it together and we'll get it undone
Some day when the world is much brighter
Some day we'll walk in the rays of the beautiful sun
Some day when the world is much lighter
Leafing through this morning's New York Times, one can only hope.
E-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
[Words & music to "O-O-H Child" by Stan Vincent. I used the Nina Simone version, available on the album Here Comes the Sun (1971), for the lyrics above. On The First Family of Soul: The Best of the Five Stairsteps and on Laura Nyro's Spread Your Wings and Fly: Live at the Fillmore East May 30,1971 the song is listed as "O-o-h Child."]
Reading William J. Broad's front page story about the dangers of aging nuclear warheads (specifically W-76) you find something a little deeper than the punny headline "Aging Warheads Ignite a Debate Among Scientists." [That's the print headline, online users get the more substance based "A Fierce Debate on Atom Bombs From Cold War."] Just tossing that thought out there as something to consider while your friend drags you from one club to another.
Moving on. You realize you've hit the frou-frou, chi-chi, upscale club scene as you hear Somini Sengupta work in the word "ennui" while doing a poor job of concealing a self-satisfied smirk. (The headline writer merely apes her lead with "Fear, Ennui and Doubt Underlie Calm in Nepal's Capital").
Sengupta, baby, stick to the art galleries when trying to score with impressive vocab, okay? Striving for tome poem, but coming off like fourth rate Cole Porter ["Come to the Supermarket (In Old Peking)"], Sengupta offers such passages as:
On a recent Sunday afternoon,
as the market women sat on their haunches hawking cabbages,
and the riot police milled about with eyes darting this way and that,
Nepalis revolting against their king's emergency rule decree
straggled up the narrow alleys in ones and twos.
Walk on. Walk on.org. Note the poster art as you're dragged to the next club while you give it up to Angela Jimenez and whomever decided her photo was just the thing to accompany Andrew Jacobs' "AIDS Fighters Face a Resistant Form of Apathy." Apathy. AIDS. Even more deadly new strain.
Does it bring to mind two bodies pressed tightly against one another? Does your mind conjure a framed crotch shot in some sort of hommage to the Rolling Stones album cover Sticky Fingers? Well in the minds of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" Angela Jimenez and the editor/s it conjures up exactly that. Like drunken revelers at karaoke night doing the stiff-neck-head-jerk while singing/slurring "She like to par-tay all the time," I doubt either Jiminez or the editor/s realize how much they've embarrassed themselves. Flee the club quickly before you're tainted by association.
En route to the next club, remember that Jacobs didn't help his own case for being taken seriously, in this non-economic theory article, by referring to a "laissez-faire attitude" towards safe sex. Snort, "He should talk!" While Keesha notes that "The picture and the article combine to scream out the apparent new attitude: 'Step, you muthers! Grey Lady be letting her hair down!'"
Not content to merely toss a new weave, Jacobs also gave his props to fellow peeps such as
the Anne Robinson wanna' be & look alike Ed Needham who, while nearly destroying Rolling Stone magazine in his brief tenure as editor, still managed to create one "trend story:" "bug chasers." Damned if Andy Jacobs don't give it up for his peep Eddie Need-HAM with a shout out to the questionable and undocumented "bug chasers." (But could it have really been a "trend story" if it was based on heavy documentation or if, in fact, it hadn't been questioned by sources quoted in print just as hit the streets?) Can I get a uh-huh?
Standing in line at the hot new 'in spot,' note the Times' apparent "New Attitude" (Keesha says "the whole thing simply screams of Patti LaBelle's eighties hit") with the in-your-face title of Peter Applebome's "A Meditation on Taxes, and Bad Karma." Full of insta-classics like this sentence striving to be a riddle but far less amusing than Peter's own last name:
So if the question is: What's the sound of one hand flipping land? The answer here is: the howls of local residents fed up with seeing more land taken off the tax rolls.
Continuing in the "all the news that fit to toss around while you try to close a booty call," you register Hassan M. Fattah strutting off the dance floor, reeking of Jovan, while approaching the bar to toss out "Limits Set for Boy Jockeys in Emirates' Camel Races." Fattah's spent almost as much time shaping this anecdote as grooming the hair.
Feel like the odd one out stuck at the table with two losers as Scott Shane and David E. Sanger state the obvious -- repeatedly -- in "Daily Intelligence Briefings Are Vague, Officials Say." Try to catch the eye of the friend you came with to signal that you're leaving before Shane and Sanger move from verses of "Love is like, you know, it's . . . hard, man, it's really tough, but it's like this, this thing I saw on the Discovery channel about the life cycle of the fruit fly . . ." and break into choruses of, "Dude, you gave her everything!" and "I tried to, man, I really tried to!"
Failing to catch your friend's eye, scream at Shane and Sanger, "Cut this male bonding crap and get a room!" Then try to escape to the safety of the bathroom only to be stopped enroute by
the dreary duo of Jim Yardley and David Barboza who open with:
The pipeline that pours young, eager workers into China's manufacturing juggernaut begins in the country's interior at vocational schools like Hunan Top Software.
[. . .]
For Wu Dongshan, the job placement coordinator at Hunan Top, the most obvious sign of change is that factory recruiters now come to him, a reversal from three years ago, when he would make the long drive to Guangdong with busloads of students desperate for work.
"Punchline, please!" you hiss, while wondering if you're some sort of asshole magnet? Pressing their grinning faces too close your own, Yardley and Barboza leer, "Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage." Roll your eyes as they high-five and head butt.
Finally making it to the shelter of the bathroom, you quickly find yourself confronted by little Associated Press, hopped up on God knows what, chattering away, using lots of words but saying very little in "Schiavo's Remains Cremated as Autopsy Becomes Part of Feud." Reassure Ass Press, for the fourth time, that those jeans do wonders for the butt, silently curse your friend for dragging you along and get the hell out of there before Ass Press's eyes start tearing up again.
Hail a cab, and half-way home, realize that cabbie Kate Zernike's yammering on in some value-void, fact-void manner that's possibly worse than anything you heard inside the club:
Across the country, efforts to expand or establish laws allowing concealed handguns have been fueled by the horrifying shootings in the last month - of the family of a federal judge in Chicago, at the church service in Wisconsin, at courthouses in Atlanta and Tyler, Tex., and the nation's second-deadliest school shooting, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota.
Interrupt her spiel on "Shootings Fuel a Drive to Ease Gun Laws" with, "Yeah, that's what we need, a country of armed vigilantes! Can you just drive? Thank you."
While your eyes water and burn, the morning sun creeps across the sky. Turn the key, open the door and crawl into bed. But as you do, say a prayer for poor Craig S. Smith.
After a week long, mad party spree, full of coverage of the wild and wacky Kyrgyzstan's non-revolution, he wakes with a killer club hangover to announce a "malaise" (whether he's a club child of the late 70s or just a current club child nostalgic for the Studio 54 NYC failed to provide his generation with I don't know) has settled "over this country" and apparently around his temples. In "Kygrystan's Shining Hour Ticks Away and Turns Out to Be a Plain, Old Coup" he announces, possibly between hurls into the toilet bowl, that "we all got it wrong!" That's more than last night's booze he's tasting, it's also the jagged edges of his (and the press corps) tattered image having bungled coverage of the third "revolution" this year. So say a prayer, say a prayer.
The Five Stairsteps told us:
Ooh Child, things are going to get easier
Ooh Child, things'll be brighter
Ooh Child, things are going to get easier
Ooh Child, things'll be brighter
Some day we'll get it together and we'll get it undone
Some day when the world is much brighter
Some day we'll walk in the rays of the beautiful sun
Some day when the world is much lighter
Leafing through this morning's New York Times, one can only hope.
E-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
[Words & music to "O-O-H Child" by Stan Vincent. I used the Nina Simone version, available on the album Here Comes the Sun (1971), for the lyrics above. On The First Family of Soul: The Best of the Five Stairsteps and on Laura Nyro's Spread Your Wings and Fly: Live at the Fillmore East May 30,1971 the song is listed as "O-o-h Child."]
[Note: Post corrected and "tightened up." Thanks Rob. And to correct Scott Shane's last name which was wrongly listed, by me, as "Shange" in the third mention.]
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