Goodbye old friend

NOT the best of weeks here in the [Gorp] household. And to top it all off, some bad news. I'm losing something very close to me, something I didn't think would ever leave me.

I'm talking about this piece of work right here:



This bad boy has a long and storied history. Originally used by my grandma(r), it saw a lot of action. And I mean action. Used to watch Knight Rider on it while playing with army men in her apartment.

Then he came home. Our home. He went to the basement, the boiler room in fact. That's where he is right now, on a shelf. But beforehand he was on a table, captaining one of the sickest gaming rigs of the time. My NES got booted from the basement proper years ago, and the TV that used to be there up and died. This one took its place and was magnificent.

The old TV was prone to fuzzing up and having its vertical scroll go haywire. I don't know if you remember what life was like when you had to adjust that thing, but it was part of the joy that was watching television in the 80s and early 90s.

This new guy was perfectly stable. Pristine signal. Never fucked up. He was dependable. If you wanted to play some Rampart, he was game. When you played Bases Loaded or Ice Hockey, it was like HD. I am dead serious. The colors were sharp and you could see ever square end of every pixel. Hell, he even made the Intellivision look magnificent.

But as time went on, the NES got less and less use as the PlayStation, then the PS2, came in. By 2000, he was in semi-retirement. By 2002, he was done. Not done done, but I was done with the NES. We retired the NES (though the setup is still in its spot, ready to go at a moment's notice) and kicked the TV to the shelf because it wasn't compatible with any cables we had. A computer now occupies its space.

I learned that tomorrow I have to haul the old buddy upstairs so he can be trashed. He'll become one with a landfill somewhere, unless they use some parts for recycling or something. I'm sure he has some nasty chemicals inside there, though.

I think he's okay with it. Deep down inside, every appliance knows that one day this day must come. Just like everyone else, everything has to degrade, break down, retire and get trashed. Except plastics. Those motherfuckers have to be melted or something, they never go away. EVER.

I'm okay with it too. Old buddy was there for me, but he's been replaced now. That's the way it goes with inanimate objects.

It's tempting to say that a lot of memories are going to the landfill. That's not true. They're here with me, and as long as those neutrons are functionl, they are not going anywhere.

So long, dude.

An Okay Book

Another two months, another book down.

This time around, it's Time Wise's "Speaking Treason Fluently," a follow-up to his "White Like Me" book of essays. I heard of Wise a while ago and was interested in seeing what he had to say en masse. This is ALMOST his latest work.

For those of you not "in the know," :quotefingers: Wise is... someone, a consultant I think, who talks a lot about racism. I mean, a lot. I mean, all the fuckin' time. He's also white, in case you couldn't tell. It's rare hearing a white dude talk about racism and not sound like a douche doing so, and Wise almost pulls it off, with some minor stumblings.

Wise's whole deal is that white people have privileges in America, privileges they take advantage of daily, even when they don't realize it. And even though society has progressed (mostly) since outright racism, there are still vestiges around us that keep minorities down.

He backs this up with a solid mix of logical arguments (which isn't hard since racism itself is pretty goddamned illogical) and stastical stuff, though some of his info is outdated in this book. But the studies he uses (for example, criminal studies that show that white people are more likely to possess drugs in traffic stops, even though blacks are overwhelmingly stopped more often) are very effective. Too bad they will mostly fall on deaf ears, because racists usually have earworms and stuff.

Wise uses language well enough to avoid launching walls of text at you, but he runs into another problem. Wise repeats himself. A lot. Not as much as the Chomp, but he usually swings by the same sets of arguments over a span of essays. It's not overly repetitive, but you do notice the repetition. And if it's one thing, I repeat, one thing I really hate, it's repetition. STOP DOING THAT.

OKAY.

He's also pretty good when he stays in his statistical, professional element, but when he delves into certain tangents, he can sound like a bit of a magoo. Case in point: He devotes an entire chapter to defending Barry Bonds. Yeah, him. Barrold, you see, was victimized by racism, and it doesn't matter anyway because the records suck because most of them were taken when whites shut blacks out of ball.

I think the essay was written before the Roidmuffin admitted under oath that he took roids ("unknowningly" :quotemarks:), because he attests that Barry never even admitted to taking them. Well he did. He definitely dog did. Then he tries to argue that roids don't make you a great player, which is missing the point (they allow great players to hit more HRs than they would, which was the entire fucking problem with Barry). As for his Negro League argument, well, I don't know what he wants to do about that because there's no way to prove that the great Negro Leaguers would have done better or worse if the MLB was integrated from the start. It's irrelevant anyway because they have done a lot since integration, including holding both the legit and illegit titles of Homerun King.

But other than that, Wise usually is on point and entertaining. He's even better when he speaks (his cadence, in particular, is cool to watch). In print, though, he suffers a bit from repetition and the occasional odd tangent.

If you're at all interested in racism in modern America and are prepared to learn some shit you might not already know, you should check this one out.

And that, as they say, "is that." :fingers break doing quotemarks:

ELECTION 2009: AMERICA: THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, PART 3: JUDGMENT DAY

I don't know what's going on in Poland on Tuesday, if they're having elections for chief comissar or if they're voting on the referendum to rename Lodz to Get a Lodz of Me, but tomorrow is election day. Or erection day if you live in Corea. Corea has the best elections.

But, you might say, it's 2009. An off-year election. How interesting can this shit get? You might not have noticed when you were here, but America has gone kookier than normal, especially your right-winged comrade at arms. In fact, things are downright HECTIC. This year is no different.

There are three elections that people are hyping because a) they're bored and b) they're desperate. Even though these elections will change absolutely nothing pertinent about anything, they're amusing to watch because of all the batshit nonsense implications about them, and because they reveal a glimpse of the background machinations of our shitty political system.

Let's stop chewing the fat and get right down to brass tacks. While we climb the ladder of success, keeping our noses to the grindstone.

ERECTION 1: VIRGINNY GUBENATORIAL. GOOBERNATORIAL?

Name: Creigh Deeds

Party: Democrat

Pros: Professional macker

Possibly rich

Cons: Illiterate

Everyone laughs at him

VS.

Name: Bob McDonnell

Party: All the time

Pros: Loves Jesus

And her boyfriend too

Cons: Not quite Hawaiian

Insane

Virginny went to Obama in the last election, but when it woke up and realized it was sleeping next to a black guy, it quietly panicked and took a shower. That shower is coming in the form of Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Jerry Fallwell's Bible camp. Now all Virginia has to do is wait in the shower until the black dude goes away, then it can come out and confess its sins. Oh wait, they don't do that down there.

McDonnell's opponent is Creigh Deeds. I have no idea who Mr. Deeds is (HEH), but he certainly isn't going to Washington (HEH HEH). Because the governor's house is in Richmond, actually (HEH HEH HEH). But yeah, he's like 13 points down in the polls, so of course the GOP is playing this shit up. It's like when the Dodgers were going to the playoffs and they're like, "HELL YEAH WE BEAT THE REDS. WORLD SERIES HERE WE COME." Then Manny slips on a banana peel and they're eliminated by Jonathan Broxton's shitty pitching.

So yeah, this is a layup for the GOP. But it's also the least important of the BIG THREE.

ERECTION 2: NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR. GUVNA!!!

Name: Jon Corzine
Party: You betcha
Pros: Rich as fuck
Rockin' the beard
Cons: Incompetent as fuck
Exemplies pretty much everything wrong with our system

VS.

Name: Chris Christie

Party: The elephants

Pros: I suppose he's "bonhommie"

Can use fat to survive long winters

Cons: JOWELS

As generic as Republicans can get

Chris Christie vs. Jon Corzine on paper looks like a mismatch. Corzine has tons of money, tons of fans, and tons of some other stuff probably. Oh yeah, he's also the incumbent.

But Corzine has gotten in his own way. First it was getting in a car crash rushing to the aid of the Ruggers women's basketball squad. Then it was fucking up the budget. Then everyone realized that he's the governor of New Jersey.

Amazingly, someone wants to take this job away from Corzine, and that's this guy. Up there. On the right. Chris Christie. He's a lawyer, and probably a really nice dad, and he probably lets his kids smoke weed. I think. He looks the type. But other than that, what does he stand for?

Well, not much. His campaign is basically CUT YER TAXES AND CUT SPENDING. I HATE FRAUD AND I LOVE P(censored). So Republicans have supported his campaign, but not overwhelmingly so.

New Jersey hasn't been Democratic since Christie Todd Whitman, but she was not a maniac right-winger so her tenure isn't looked on so fondly. I don't think Christie will similarly be that nuts, just a bumbling retard but not crazy Jesus retard. I'm not sure NJ can be destroyed much more than it already can be.

To show how confident Corzine is in his election chances, he let loose this devastating salvo.

The race is in a dead heat. That's all. Go away now.

THE MAIN ERENT: NEW YORK CONGRESSIONAL-23. TWO THREE.

Name: Bob Owens
Party: Like a rock star
Pros: Doesn't look like he will kill/molest you
Cons: He's Bob Owens

VS.

Name: DeDe Scozzafava
Party: Nobody

Pros: Was a Republican

Can farm beans

Cons: One "De" short of being a Kirby archvillain

No longer in the race

VS.

Name: Doug Hoffman
Party: Co-- wait a second, that's not Doug Hoffman!!

Name: Doug Hoffman
Party: Ahem. CONSERVATIVE
Pros: Will kill babies to win
Has a ton of money now
Cons: Look at him
Just fuckin' look at him

NY-23 started off as a ho-hum affair. The former Congressman, Jon McHugh, a Republican, got picked by Obama to be Secretary of d'Army. So he ditched NY-23, as any thinking person would, and left a vacuum. The local GOP picked DeDe Scozzafava, a liberal Republican, to run for the special election. So far, so good.

No wait, not at all. I don't know how or why, but right wingers noticed DeDe and noticed that she's relatively liberal. She supports gay marriage and is pro-choice. She's also "pro-union," whatever that means. She was endorsed by the Working Family Party, which means ACORN. If you don't understand why ACORN is dangerous, imagine an overweight southerner in a thatch cowboy hat saying it as loud as he can. Not yelling it, but just saying it. Like "ACORN." As in "THAT GAM ACORN TOOK MY DANG RACCOON." It's the devil.

Well right wingers weren't gonna take that. In a move only Stalin could appreciate, GOPers flooded NY-23 like crusaders descending on Constantinople. I mean they got in and owned that P-(CENSORED). Suddenly DeDe was in hot water in a normally safe GOP area.

Enter: Doug Hoffman, an accountant or something who doesn't even live in the district in question. Dougie Doug passed the right-wing purity test. He hates abortion, hates fags, hates taxes and loves business. That's him in a nutshell. Oh yeah, he's also apparently dog stupid.

Let's take a brief intermission to talk about NY-23. NY-23 is hinterland defined. Only the Jersey Pine Barrens are less densely populated in the Northeast. I've been to the area in question. You could carpet bomb it with hydrogen bombs and you'd only kill maybe 1,000 people. It's that fucking empty and boring, so this whole election shit must be like their first Christmas.

When Hoffman jumped in, he immediately split the GOP vote. Now all of a sudden Scozzafava is pulling in less than 25%, while the Democrat, an empty shirt named Bob Owens (who is incidentally more CONSERVATIVE than Scozzafava) took the lead, if only a slim one. As Scozzafava decreased in popularity, Hoffman's surge intensified. The psychos smelled blood.

It became so bad that Scozzafava fell to THIRD. That was enough for her. This past weekend, she quit the race, giving Hoffman a boost (or so I think; I don't know if there's been any solid polling since then). But as a final fuck you to the party that summarily ditched her, she endorsed Owens. Not sure that'll make much of a difference.

The race is currently in a dead heat, or a dad heat if you don't believe in death. The smart money is on Hoffman but it's not a sure bet. If Hoffman wins, he will be nominally a Conservative, not a Republican, but he has the GOP's organized support now. Not that that means anything at all.

So there you have it. Three races, all really not a big deal at all, but all are marked as "bellweathers" about Obama. If the right wingers take all three, then OBAMA IS TOAST. If not, then OBAMA IS STILL TOAST because we are not dealing with rational people here. Basically any vote for these honkies is a vote against the black dude. That's all it boils down to and that's all it's been about since November '08.

Stay tuned for an update!!