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Fellatio jokes are fun and all, but I’m more impressed by how much Bachmann Devouring a Corndog resembles Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

First in a series of posts which I basically wrote and finished except for putting them in WordPress or actually, y’know, posting them, and then forgot about as weeks became months. In this first installment, we get something like the NFL-related post I kept meaning to write back when the NFL season was still fresh in our minds.

So, reactionaries continue to flog the notion that public union employees need to be “taken down” because they get more money and better benefits than “the rest of us,” at least per some sort of dubious comparison. Facts and figures don’t seem to come into it really, as per usual; the argument seems to be a purely-emotional one. “They have more and that’s unfair! And your tax dollars are paying for them to have more, too! LET’S GET ‘EM!”

This appeal of this notion, whether logical or emotional, continues meanwhile to elude me entirely. I’m starting to think that I may have underestimated how many people do find something persuasive in this line of attack, though. Not only because the reactionaries keep shouting it, but also because I encountered a surprising variant form of the concept in today’s reader mail for Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback.

I’ve been playing cards with the same group of 16 guys once a month for the past three years. [...] I wanted to let you know that not one person was on the side of the players. Not that we were pro owners, we were simply just disgusted with the players. Over the past few years, several of us have been laid off, others have taken reduction in pay. Not once did we demand to see our company’s financials. We simply worked harder, either at our current jobs or finding new jobs, to support our families. I doubt it comes to this, but if things get as bad as they were during the strike, you will find me at Fed Ex field every Sunday cheering the replacement players on the Redskins. And I’m a Cowboys fan.

Okay, on the one hand, NFL players seem like a more legitimate target for envy and resentment than government employee unions; as I’ve noted I can’t really sympathize with the players.

On the other hand: seriously? Are you effing kidding me? (more…)

Some people say a man is made out of mud
A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong

You load sixteen tons what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

Sixteen Tons (Wikipedia)

“I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.”

Douglas Adams

This piece first appeared in the News Review section of The Sunday Times on August 29th 1999