These comments have to be a joke, right?
I got an A-.
Hey look
Someone found a way to make the video for Beyoncé's "Countdown" even better!!! →
I was worried the death of Steve Jobs might not give people the chance to talk about themselves.
Like every other day.
"Escape Artist" - Future Islands
OK, now that I’m home…some thoughts about what went down tonight. That shit started like a bottle of decent champagne and ended like flat ginger ale on a hungover Sunday. The rally in Foley Square? Went off without a hitch. The union speakers were concise and practiced and the whole enterprise benefited from that professionalism. The march to Zuccotti went smoothly, the rally there was frankly awe-inspiring (at least in terms of numbers).
It’s after that that things went really, really south. I’ve never seen so many cops in my life as I saw tonight. They’d been pulled from every precinct. The mood on Wall and Broadway was incredibly tense as cops didn’t let us through. It became clear that there was a choice here: either we all needed to storm the barrier and do it up ‘68 style, or meekly leave. Instead, the protesters chose a weird middle ground that worked out badly for everyone, waiting and formulating a half-assed new plan.
Look, I saw cops beating people with nightsticks. I saw a cop on a scooter plow into three girls, slamming them into a parked car. I saw all that shit and I’m not defending it. But the creepy mob mentality of many of the protesters w/r/t the NYPD is nothing if not unfortunate. They know that if they antagonize the cops, the cops will respond, and that’s when the cameras start rolling. And that’s what happened tonight.
The night ended totally off message. Two or three hundred kids wandering the streets of FiDi, an arrest here and there, everyone looking exhausted. Complete 180 from the high at Foley Square at the beginning.
The take-home: they need the structure and message that the unions can provide. The minute you leave OWS to their own devices, things have the potential to go off the rails in a big way. I forget which union president said this, but one of them said at Zuccotti “you bring the brains, we bring the muscle” and I think that’s exactly right if they want to squeeze any tangible success out of this thing.
Nice work.
Tony Parker goes to France.
Parker told the sports daily L’Equipe that the decision is “logical.” He is vice president of the club and wants to help it advance.
"I’ll be playing nearly for free … If I play the entire season, we’ll go for the title," he said.
Correction to the How to be an Asshole chart.
That's an astute point
I notice on his shelf a copy of Fortune magazine, with Meredith Whitney on the cover. And as he talked about the bankrupting of Vallejo, I realized that I had heard this story before, or a private-sector version of it. The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.
Michael Lewis received around $100,000 to write this paragraph and the many others that went into his story about California and how we all need to sacrifice and better people.
(There are some incredible scenes with Former Gov. Arnold.)
Snow White is looking a little ashy, don’t you think?
Kristen Stewart took a smoke break while shooting a reboot of the classic fairy tale in Wales. Hope she checked for Sneezy before lighting up.
She’s the best.
And for one night, America cared about baseball.
This has to be the most impressive part of Wet Hot American Summer
MICHAEL IAN BLACK: The script was pretty locked in. When you have a budget that small, and you have to make your days, and you’re fighting the weather, there isn’t time to fuck around that much. So I mean, as unbelievable as it is, the entire stupid spectacle of that movie was scripted.
