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PROPOSED ADVERTISING SLOGAN OF THE DAY.
Alcohol. Purifies you of the toxins associated with sobriety.
A message from the alcohol council.
REC OF THE WEEK:
Hertzberg's opening "Comment" in this week's New Yorker about the well-deserved troubles of Imperial VP Cheney. As usual, it's 100% spot on and humblingly well written. But it also boasts a much better than usual headline: Veep Doo-Doo.
DANGLING DESCRIPTION OF THE DAY:
After an hour of dutiful attendance at the party, L. traded the discomfort of being with his friends for the more familiar discomfort of being with his girlfriend. He was a man endlessly shuttling between competing forms of unease.
UNFUNNY NEWS-RELATED REFLECTION OF THE DAY:
When I read the other day about witnesses claiming they’d heard yelling between the drunken young woman who’d been murdered downtown and the bar bouncer who is under suspicion for the crime, I immediately had this strong visceral intuition that the thing that had pushed it over the line from altercation to annihilation was some kind of a racial slur-- some hateful epithet rising up through the white woman’s alcohol haze from the vast residuum of subconscious racial prejudice and triggering in the black man the violent release of long-simmering rage. When we are truly angry we all have an unerring instinct for finding the most hateful, hurtful thing we can say, the utterance that will lodge itself most deeply and damagingly in our antagonist’s psyche and we often draw upon primal, inarguable differentiators like race or ethnicity or class or size or weight. When I thought about the events of that night, I had this hyper-vivid surreally slo-mo sense of what that fateful interaction had been like: the furious, impotent rage of the inebriated woman who was being bounced from the bar, the internal search for the cruelest possible thing to say, the momentary catharsis upon emitting the odious utterance, the sudden animal realization of the severity of the reaction and the awful inevitability of the consequence, the terrible knowledge that there was no turning back…. Hence, it was a little creepy to have my intuition confirmed the next day by a report that the woman had, in fact, been overheard saying “That’s why all you black people are in jail.” While it didn’t make me feel in any way psychic (fear not: Teddy Vegas will not be making special guest appearances on The Psychic Friends network) , it did strike me as ironic that this had happened in the same week that “Crash” (a halfway decent but entirely overrated film devoted to the pernicious effects of our sub-conscious racism) had won the Oscar and Hollywood had indulged in an orgy of self-congratulation about its racial enlightenment.
NEW AGE BASHING OF THE DAY
Just read that the new age singer Yanni was accused of spousal abuse. Now, it’s not so much the fact that Yanni beat up on his wife that’s shocking. It’s the fact that he HAS a wife! Shocker number two is that he's physically strong enough to beat up his wife. She must be very petite. Indeed, it’s a brave and humiliating act for a woman to acknowledge that she’s been beaten up by a guy named Yanni. It’s as brave as Liza Minelli’s husband acknowledging he’d been beaten up by his wife. Can it be long before Kenny G’s wife steps intrepidly forward with a black eye?
PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING STORY OF THE DAY:
Look at this point there’s more likelihood that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone than that Barry Bonds didn’t knowingly take steroids. Of course, as I believe I stated earlier on this blog, I am one of the few remaining subscribers to the Lone Gunman theory. But be that as it may. Assuming that Bonds did take steroids, the thing that interested me about this week's book-related revelations (which sound less like news than merely a more detailed elaboration of what we’d already been told) was the claim that he had been motivated to take the steroids out of jealousy that Mark McGuire was getting more attention than he was. And yet, once the juiced-up, bigger broader Barry eclipsed McGuire and got the adulation that he apparently sought, he continued to snub both the press and his fans in the same surly manner he always had. The coexistence of the megalomaniacally attention-seeking and the self-pityingly attention-snubbing (the extravagantly entitled and the perpetually persecuted) is a fascinating--if singularly unappealing--aspect of his character. It strikes me that while he may have relied on steroids to become an incredibly big man, he didn't need any kind of help to become an incredibly big baby.
PERFORMANCE-REDUCING SUBSTANCE OF THE DAY:
I read about a French man who confessed to repeatedly drugging his daughter’s tennis opponents by putting tranquilizers in their water bottles before matches.
http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8G868H86.html
Roger Federer must feel like his father has been doing that to his opponents his entire life.
I guess there's been so much talk about performance enhancing substances in sports that it was only a matter of time before someone started using performance reducing substances.
CARTOON WITHOUT ILLUSTRATION OF THE DAY:
VIS: Guy talking to his therapist.
GUY: I still have suicidal thoughts. But now they're about other people.
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Posted on 3/10/2006
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