Dear Jesus
If I hear that commercial for “the greatest Christian power anthems of our time” again, I’m going to crucify my ears.
In loving testimony,
football pron
Christmas came early this year. For the second time, the Dallas Cowboys are the featured team in HBO’s preseason documentary, Hard Knocks.
McNulty Tramp Stamp
Tattoo Ideas
All right, all right, hear me out.
Full size back tatt… wait for it…
Omar Little or Stringer Bell.
‘Llectuals
I’m Going to Watch More C-SPAN
Every time each guy sat there and read his testimony to the Judiciary Committee there was a different very hot girl sitting in the background looking beautiful and bored like the ones in that Robert Palmer video.
The remarks were about impeachment or something but oh those girls.
This is the best country in the world.
Too Weird for The Wire
In Baltimore, inner city drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories in an attempt to undermine cases against them.
“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.
The precedents the West Baltimore drug dealers were invoking were based in the laws southern Democrats after the Civil War used to limit the protection of black southerners from violence and discrimination and that marked the beginning of Jim Crow.
Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The flesh-and-blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protesters, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.
The evolution of this defense culminated in a series of self-help seminars for white farmers in the 1980s.
Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses “guaranteed” to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone’s name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters—the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal “straw man.” It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men.
A PCP dealer locked up for twenty seven years brought these arguments to inner city drug defendants.
In Baltimore, Burpee found a group of inmates at the margins of society, people like Willie Mitchell and company who were staring at the full force of the federal government. As one defense attorney representing a flesh-and-blood defendant put it, they “saw a freight train coming and felt three feet tall.” Soon the unorthodox legal filings and courtroom outbursts began to multiply. It was, one public defender later explained, “like an infection that was invading our client population of pre-trial detainees.” Burpee appears to have been patient zero in the epidemic. For over a year, he harangued his lawyers and judge about the conspiracy and spread the word in the Baltimore lockup. Then, in a stroke of bad luck for the public defender’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s office decided to drop the charges against Burpee—perhaps reasoning that he wasn’t worth the hassle considering that he had already been sentenced to twenty-seven years. For Burpee’s peers, the decision imbued the flesh-and-blood defense with legitimacy and the hope of freedom.
So, the use of the defense ended 180 degrees from where it began.
Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community—that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam—also fond of conspiracy theories—have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, “I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.”
Dear Jesus
At the beginning of every season of The Wire when I hear the new version of the theme song I think how odd it sounds and how I will never forget the old one. Then I do. Please forgive me.
Your faithful servant,
Canadian fiddler sells rights to music on eBay
A Canadian fiddler who answered the question “What’s beneath your kilt?” on Conan O’Brien in 1997 is now bankrupt and auctioning rights to half his future earnings on eBay.
“I’m not David Bowie, I’m not Madonna, I’m not Eminem, I’m Ashley MacIsaac, so to set a price at that (C$1.5 million), I thought, was fair market value,” he said.
Generation Kill
David Simon, creator of The Wire, has a new 7 part mini-series about the first 40 days of the Iraq War to air July 13 on HBO.
Puppetry on Parade!
This is not for everybody (she says, blustering just a bit, working a little too hard at crafting an image of One Who Is ‘In the Know’, the priestess of high hip mysteries).
It was the first installment of Tracy Hinshaw’s Sister Smackdown series that got me started on my latest puppetry jag, and then Daryl Scroggins had to go and propose sock puppet re-enactments of bits from favorite movies.
I have no idea how this comes off to people who’ve not seen any of the Gerry Anderson ‘Supermarionation’ programs. But it’s a wonderful reminder of what fine physical (as well as verbal) comics were Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
It’s — eh — it’s, um, a parody of a Thunderbirds (Supermarionation) episode in which Cook and Moore impersonate the marionettes, and, um, it’s about a mid-1960s version of a Gunpowder Plot against the British hospitality and tourism industry.
Would you eat lab grown meat?
(via wired)
Waves of Qualification
Saturday morning coffee, newspaper, PBS on in the background–British Antiques Roadshow:
“Ah…Yes. A very much slightly over-romanticised view of mother and child.”
Kermit Love dies at 91
Kermit Love, the designer that helped Jim Henson bring almost everyone I love to life, passed away this week.
Henson designed the original sketches of Big Bird, and Love then built the 8-foot, 2-inch yellow-feathered costume.
It was Love’s idea to add a few feathers designed to fall off, to create a more realistic feel.
for George
(via reverse cowgirl)
People Watching Channel
I’m watching soccer right now and realized that I like the crowd shots as much as the actual game. I love to people watch. There should be a people watching channel.
Pinch Me
I just saw a television commercial for a prescription sleep-aid that included this phrase, spoken in that soothing voice they all use: “If you walk, eat, or drive while sleeping, contact your doctor.” Drive? Isn’t that a little like saying “If you happen to murder somebody while taking our product, contact your doctor”?
Daytime TV
Speaking of day jobs, it’s kind of weird to be glued to the tube on a . . . is this . . . is this a weekday?
I guess that when you come down to it, I’m just not a Fanfare for the Common Man kind of girl. I really really really want Tiger Woods to win this US Open play-off.
Rafael Nadal Back Together with Pamela Anderson
Although he is most famous for his prowess on hard clay courts, Nadal is proud of his overall versatility, saying, “I think I have already proven my capabilities on soft, slippery surfaces.”
“If you do not believe me,” he added, “just ask Pamela.”
Meet the Press Host Tim Russert Dead at 58.
I guess this isn’t the sort of thing that normally gets posted here, but I guess I’m kinda shocked. He died at work. Sheesh. (link)
call 1-866-739-3150 to nominate the next bachelor
Me: I think Franklin should be the next bachelor.
Amy: He doesn’t have any balls.
Me: That’s okay. We can get him neuticals.
Amy: Can he still get it up?
Me: Dogs have a penis bone.
Amy: You should get one.
Dear clusterflock
Best HBO series.
Captain Hook and His Scurvy Christian Pirate Puppet Crew
I stand corrected. The televangelizing, ventriloquizing Captain Hook was not, as I implied, a Texan (though he did release an LP titled “Captain Hook A-live in Texas”). He was a Hoosier. A Hoosier biker who wiped out, lost a leg, and saw the light, which light illuminated a vision of himself as the piratical Christian captain of a piratical Christian puppet crew and host of a Christian television program for children.
The televangelical Captain Hook was no fey Cyril Ritchard pirate dandy nor ambiguous Jack Sparrow. Nosirree. He had him a Mrs. Hook right there on the ship with him (what might Jack Aubrey have said?) along with those puppets, one of whom was named Sharkey. If you listen to this clip, you can pray along with Sharkey: Captain Hook and His Scurvy Christian Pirate Puppet crew.
He’s right, you know.
confession
I kind of like So You Think You Can Dance.