Month: April 2009

Roy Blount Jr. wrote about the tone deaf for the Atlantic in 1982:

No national foundation exists for the singing-impaired. Nor does any branch of medical science offer hope. No one provides little ramps to get the singing-impaired up onto certain notes.

A reader writes:

I'm a 52-year-old woman. Straight, married. I didn't know what "teabagging" was, either, but as soon as I heard Rachel chuckling over it, and read your recent comments regarding it, I googled. And learned. And I laughed, too, because I didn't know the act had a NAME. "Teabagging" is … well, perfect. I'm still laughing.

Given my own generational ignorance on the subject, I suppose I can forgive Scott Johnson for not knowing what the word implies, either. But why in the world would he — as a blogger putting his thoughts out for the whole world to see, for goodness sakes — not google the term?

I really worry about the GOP's seeming lack of brains and common sense, regardless of generation.

What about their sense of humor?

Nick Carr puts Twitter in context:

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

But not torture. Oh, no, not, you know, torture. That is repugnant to America's values.

Seth Rogen at 13.

A reader writes:

I'm an Army vet and a Navy family member and prior to the invasion of Iraq I was one of the ragged, resentful, and naive out on the streets demonstrating against the inevitable invasion. Except I am neither ragged, resentful, nor naive. I was exceptionally well informed and took to the streets out of a crisis of conscience. The folks I stood vigil with and marched with were, for the most part, some of the most thoughtful and gentle people I've ever dealt with. Like me, most of the people I met out there were brand new to the world of protest. 

We didn't have a friendly media outlet promoting our every move. The media was hostile and interpolated us in a way that was unrecognizable. There was no anti-war blogosphere to speak of, even people like Josh Marshall over at TPM had bought into the rush to war (I forgive him). Move-On was active but nothing close to the force it would grow into. We were alone.

When I protested the war I was made out to be the scum of the earth. What must it be like to show up for a protest, denounce your Country, bad mouth the President, threaten armed revolt, and have your very own media outlet brand you a patriot.

I know many tea-baggers, or tea-bagger sympathizers, and to a person, they are poorly informed, and instead of being alone and acting out of a crisis of conscience they are a part of a herd being stampeded by right-wing interest groups and right-wing media. They are the Clinton bashers dusting off the same tired old rhetoric. I hear nothing new and nothing authentic. For Ross to suggest a comparison is intellectually lazy.

For Coraline:

Via Kottke, it's amazing what a soundtrack can do: