No.

NO NO NO. Also, no. Oh god the COMMENTS.

Just the word “blogophobic” was enough to give me a permanent spasm in my eyelid.

Thanks mendel.

SubJ: ha ha you fat ass gimmick copolymer

What song the Sirens sang o’er stormy waves
So that Odysseus strove in vain and raved
Or blast of horn before old Jericho’s walls
Did crumble ‘fore the righteous trumpet’s calls
And even Aeolus’s box of airy blast
Though roaring and tempestuous, fails at last
Can triumph over Apple’s little pearl?

Away, drunk troubadours and skip’d CDs
Fair iPod is the Muse of MP3s.

Miss Williamsburg Pageant

Teleport them into space.

Bush uses new nickname for senator

LINCOLN, Nebraska (AP) — Sen. Ben Nelson finally has succeeded in getting President Bush to stop calling him by the nickname “Nellie.”

Bush had been referring to the Nebraska Democrat as “Nellie” since 2001.

Nelson disliked the nickname and had asked the president to stop using it.

The president likes to give people nicknames. He has called Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, “Pootie-Poot,” while aide Karen Hughes gets “High Prophet.”

But Bush heeded Nelson’s request to scrap his moniker, and at the recent White House Christmas party, the president referred to Nelson as “Benny.”

“The president had a twinkle in his eye when he called me that,” Nelson said. “He knew what he had done. I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. President.”‘

If it’s bittersweet you like, I’ve got half of that.

Today I marched through the false Spring leaning into an invisible wind. My red shoes, intended to cheer me up, were clean and neatly tied. I wrote a check for brain improvement, drank coffee, fought back waves of fear and horror, and cracked jokes. The following adjectives described me: glib, nuanced, dyspeptic, melancholy, narcissistic, irritable, anxious, fearful, itchy.

There was a madman walking up Dover drive as I arrived for therapy. He stopped to carefully comb his big bristly grey madman’s beard and then went back to humping it up the hill. Later he showed up at D’s and smoked in the corner looking like the wise homeless madman in a movie. However, I think he was just a regular madman.

You can’t be the chorus in your own play, it turns out. You’re stuck with “protagonist”. Stupid rule.

1. http://www.martinlutherking.org/ is an anti King site run by white supremacists
2. King’s speeches in their official repository at Stanford online are only available as PDF’s which you cannot print or fully save to your hard drive because of jacked-up DRM.
3. All the websites about him are horrible. They all have missing parts, or their DNS is blown up, or they are full of typos, or they’re tiresome agitprop for some other cause.
4. James Bevel, the guy who made that wonderful speech I quoted below, has since been Lyndon LaRouche’s running mate and shilled for the Moonies.

Reminds me of King’s remark in one of his sermons about life being a process of building a temple and never quite getting there.

At the time Martin Luther King was assassinated, he was in Memphis, giving his support to a garbageman’ strike. A day after the murder, the union held a memorial meeting, which is here described by Gary Wills:

Memphis is not really the birthplace of the blues, any more than Handy was the father of them; but these are the same people who created the form — the triple repeated sighing lines, with a deep breathing space between each, space filled with the accompanists’ “break” or “jazz.” That is the basic pattern for the climactic repetitions, subtle variations, and refrains of the preacher’s art. That kind of sermon is essentially a musical form; and the garbage men are connoisseurs. When a white pastor from Boston got up, he gave them slogans and emotion; but without a response from the audience — he didn’t know the melody.

Nor did all the black preachers succeed, or win equal acceptance. The surprise of the afternoon, at least for me, came when an S.C.L.C. delegation reached the hall, and the Reverend James Bevel got up to preach. He and his associates looked almost out of place there amid the do rags and scarred ebony skulls; they were immaculately dressed, with educated diction, wearing just the proper kind of “natural” and a beard.

Bevel was the fourteenth, and last, speaker of the afternoon. It seemed that earlier emotional talks would have drained these men of all response left them after the shock of the preceding night. But Jim Bevel slowly built them up, from quiet beginnings, to an understanding of what it means to be “on the case.” (This is a phrase he invented a year ago to describe musicians who are perfectly interacting; it is now an S.C.L.C. phrase of wide applicability.) “Dr. King died on the case. Anyone who does not help forward the sanitation workers’ strike is not on the case. You getting me?” (They’re getting him.) “There’s a false rumor around that our leader is dead. Our leader is not dead.” (“No!” They know that King’s spirit lives on — half the speeches have said that already.) “That’s a false rumor!” (“Yes!” “False.” “Sho’ nuff.” “Tell it!”) “Martin Luther King is not — ” (yes, they know, not dead; this is a form in which expectations are usually satisfied, the crowd arrives at each point with the speaker; he outruns them at peril of losing the intimate ties that slacken and grow taut between each person in the room; but the real artist takes chances, creates suspense, breaks the rhythm deliberately; a snag that makes the resumed onward flow more satisfying) — “Martin Luther King is not our leader!” (“No!” The form makes them say it, but with hesitancy. They will trust him some distance; but what does he mean? The “Sho’ nuff” is not declamatory now; not fully interrogatory, either; circumflexed.) “Our leader — (“Yes?”) — is the man — (“What man?” “Who?” Reverend Abernathy? Is he already trying to supplant King? The trust is almost fading) — who led Moses out of Egypt.” (“Thass the man!” Resolution; all doubt dispelled; the bridge has been negotiated, left them stunned with Bevel’s virtuosity.) “Our leader is the man who went with Daniel into the lions’ den.” (“Same man!” “Talk some.”) “Our leader is the man who walked out of the grave on Easter morning.” (“Thass the leader!” . . . ) “Our leader never sleeps nor slumbers. He cannot be put in jail. He has never lost a war yet. Our leader is still on the case” (“That’s it!” “On the case!”) “Our leader is not dead. One of his prophets died. We will not stop here because of that. Our staff is not a funeral staff. We have friends who are undertakers. We do business. We stay on the case, where our leader is.”