"Far from what saddens my heart"

Great graphics.



Feed us with a spoon, babe.

"Are you ready for the monster?"

Yeah, the drum solo is a little bit long. But you weren't going anywhere, admit it.

Good for him

Rick Santorum suspends 2012 bid. Excerpt:

Santorum's decision to "suspend" his campaign, rather than formally end it, allows him to continue raising money to cover campaign debt and to keep his delegates. Under Republican National Committee rules, many of Santorum's bound delegates will remain with the candidate unless they are formally released by the campaign. Santorum sent an email to supporters soliciting donations immediately following his announcement Tuesday, saying "our campaign has debt, and I cannot be free to focus on helping defeat [President Obama] with this burden." He will also likely look to Romney to help him retire his campaign debt.

All the Blogs Which Might Have Been

It's too bad I don't have an infinite amount of time. If I did, I would no doubt spend waste most of it creating random blogs of senseless beauty. Or perhaps, meaningful blogs of random accuracy. I’d probably make some place-mats also and weave some baskets. But my blogs would be so unique, so full of fantastic assertions, so solipsistic and so pointless so as to make the mind reel and stagger and pour itself another drink. They would feature many uses of the word “so” both at the beginning of sentences and in the middle so that no one would mistake them for anything other than authentic blogs.

Here are a few of the blogs which I would pen. In reading these, you will no doubt weep that they should never be, for alas, I have better things to do with my time. But perchance they will inspire you—yes, even you, dear reader—to aspire to the beautiful random senselessness to create something on your own. After all, you are already wasting time reading this post. Please feel free to plagiarize from these awesome ideas.

1. Frodo did not offer her any tea. This would have been an incredibly deep and satisfying read for the brainy, know-it-all English literature types. The title is, of course, a rather obscure sentence from a mundane passage in J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring.

The tagline would be "A journal about religion, culture, humanoid scaled economies, home-made beer, fancifulness and living at peace with the furry animals in this Middle Earth." It would explain how to make the cities of the world more like the Shire described by Tolkien in his writings using a minimal amount of bulldozers, wrecking balls and cultural displacement. Comments to each post would be greatly encouraged, however anyone misusing the comment boxes to poke fun at or to question the serious ideas presented would have their comments deleted IMMEDIATELY, as would anyone suggesting that the Lord of the Ring series was a work of fiction.

2. My House Is So Cool. If you've ever read a few pages of the now defunct Cottage Living magazine, you might be able to prepare yourself for the tremendously irritating combination of pretentiousness, self-importance and domestic narcissism presented in this would-be blog. The upside for me would be advertising; Cottage Living—sample copies of which were sent to my business address before its demise circa 2007—basically contained 140 pages of advertising. Of course, it is curious that all that advertising didn't keep them in business. I think you also need readers for that. But, hey, I probably would at least get all the readers of the also defunct crunchy blogs by including words like craft beer, conviviality, bungalocity and chestertonianistical . (By the way, I do have a cool house, and the fact that it is usually beat all to hell by kids just makes it cooler.)

3. “Will I still suck at math in Heaven?” – These would be my musings on the ultimate questions about the meaning of life. They would be set forth in a question and answer format, the questions being from kids ranging in age from 4 to 11. I would try to balance the outright heretical ideas by including a number of passages directly plagiarized from the Catechism so it would contain some correct answers. The posts about where babies come from will be the most interesting, but I’ll have to look up a lot of that material; I’m always forgetting how that stuff works.

4. How Green and Orange was my Valley. Tagline: "Oooh, I'll take that crispy little one!" Yes, this would be the crown jewel of all my theoretical blogs, and it would contain nothing but the inside jokes my wife and I have come up with since 2000 when we started dating. The explanations would be tedious, oblique, self-referential and unfunny to most. They would also be especially embarrassing to my wife if she found out I was publishing these. But she would only be embarrassed for a short time before fierce anger set in as she realized I was doing this instead of hacking into the long list of projects she has assigned me. I have no doubt that if I were to do this blog, it would truly be my swan song and that I might never publish another blog again after I, ummm, got caught redhanded.

So there it is—my list of so very excellent and so-so blogs. So. If you do decide to steal any of these ideas and start pouring your imaginative energy into it, good for you! I certainly won’t read it, but a bunch of other idiots will. And you will be well on your way to blog-awesomeness.

Creativity

With all his supposed accomplishments, Mike Wallace never did anything this cool.



No proof of the possibility of fraud without an ID, Mr. Attorney General? Quod. Est. Demonstratum.

"Faster than you can say furious." Lovely flourish.

Holder is well on his way to going down in history as a laughingstock and a failure.

More laughs from OWS

Here's a treat for your Easter Basket. Excerpt from beginning:

As the nascent Occupy movement attempts to revive interest in its radical left-wing agenda, it is burdened with a host of organizational and financial problems left over from some of the bitter infighting that took place during the winter.

Last night, the two main organizational bodies of Occupy Wall Street were dissolved, and a new group running OWS’s finances is admitting to a lack of transparency, financial discrepancies and poor financial decisions by the previous custodians of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

There are a lot of laugh lines in here like "Who’s accountable if this is a ‘leaderless’ movement?" But the main takeaway for me is that no one among the general populace really cares that much for their ideas, let alone their methods. Sure, they may get propped up by Soros or Obama if they are needed for the election, and for that reason I don't think OWS is dead as a political force. Who knows, maybe the ranks will be combed for drones to staff the next incarnation of ACORN.

However, the Occupy movement is not vibrantly alive as a grassroots organization like one of the Tea Party groups. I believe that one reason is that the Tea Party groups aren't tied to bizarre manifestos touting obscure ideals like horizontalism, General Assemblies or Facilitation Working Groups. My theory is that most of the people who really believe these kinds of structures can work on a large scale are dyed-in-the-wool academics who have seen it work in some pointless non-profit agency or a group home they worked in while working on their degrees. In other words, only on a small scale in a controlled environment. These theoretical models haven't been tested for real until now, and they are failing.



This is a bit rambling, but I'll offer a line to sum this development up as follows: "Seeking to be peaceful anarchists, they became contentious bureaucrats." Maybe someone can improve on this summation. Or just enjoy a laugh at their expense.

Happy Easter!

H/T Diane.



Christ has risen. Alleluia.