. but you'd be fairly astounded at the legion of bloggers out there who don't see a visit from moi as the honor i always at least intend it to be (or then again, maybe you wouldn't).
while the following after-comment apology from the tail-end of my golden age of drunk-commenting happened to be issued to josh & josh [who, bless their hearts, still put up with my comments], it could just as easily have applied to any number of others who tend to run screaming when they see me coming.
this one's pretty good, tho--i guess that's why i saved it.
[proving once again you never know what you're gonna find while you're digging around for something else]
______________________
sober update: "tomorrow he'll cringe" woulda been so much better. damn.
. i've never talked about my friend mark, but something came up recently as regards him, so let's do that.
mark levine is one of the smartest, most accomplished guys i know: ivy-league educated, fulbright scholar, massive over-achiever, dyed-in-the-wool liberal, perennial optimist--in other words, my polar opposite in almost every way.
to give you an insight into mark's nature: dragged to an audition for wheel of fortune while an undergrad at harvard--he got on, the friend who dragged him there did not--mark, suddenly seeing this as his best shot at paying for law school, left nothing to chance. while the other contestants were no doubt crossing their fingers and thinking good thoughts, mark spent every night up until game day in the library poring over letter-frequency charts and books on cryptography and code-breaking, and calculating the physics of how hard he should spin the wheel based on its position. the result?
at the time i met him, mark was in his second year of law school at yale, and was visiting los angeles in preparation for a summer-associate gig at the firm where he would ultimately end up working after graduation. for whatever reason, we hit it off pretty much immediately.
how would i describe our relationship? to paraphrase hillary clinton, mark and i started an argument in the spring of 1991, and almost 20 years later, we're still talking.
always passionate about politics and policy, mark abandoned a successful and lucrative law career in order to take a job as counsel for congressman barney frank; and then, once he'd had his fill of intrigue on the hill, began a new career in radio, where for the last several years his show, the inside scoop, has given his listeners a perspective on washington and national/world events with a depth that they're not likely to get anywhere else in radioland.
i've watched mark evolve from his stiff, awkward beginnings into a polished, confident radio--and now, tv--personality, and struggle with his characteristic focused tenacity to make a name for himself in one of the toughest, most competitive businesses out there.
and it looks like all that hard work is finally beginning to pay off: he is now being heard nationally as a fill-in host on air america, and--the reason for this post, actually--just appeared last week for the first time on fox's the o'reilly factor, where, in the limited time bill allowed him, he gave as good as he got:
[incidentally, this clip is an instructive lesson as to how o'reilly works--avoiding his more formidable opponent and instead devoting most of the segment to a back-and-forth with the blonde bonehead who really contributed nothing of substance other than her apparent eagerness to act as an easy foil for the host.]
if you're weary of the kind of janeane garofalo-level drivel that passes for progressive talk radio these days and would prefer an informed, in-depth exploration of the issues of the day, i urge you to go over to radioinsidescoop.com and check mark out--in addition to his ongoing broadcasts, he has all of his past shows archived and available for free.
oh, and if you're in the d.c. area and think you can keep up, he's single ;)
. i've watched this clip a dozen times, and it just gets better and better.
h/t to v
update: even though i've been watching this clip all day, msnbc suddenly chooses to take it down five minutes after i publish a blogpost in which it is prominently featured. fine, whatever--i'm nothing if not adaptable. you assholes wanna make me create a re-enactment, i'm more than up to the task:
the clip opens with some anonymous msnbc news-chick
stating the following:
joining me now to talk about this--the nation's real problem of joblessness--the reverend al sharpton.
[cut to the following split screen]
the clueless anchor continues:
what's your reaction to hearing someone say, "you know, when it comes to income inequality, all's well--the rising tide floats all boats?"
[cut to the following shot, and the following priceless exchange]
uh, i'm reverend jesse jackson.
at which point the flustered anchor falls all over herself saying,
right--you know, i'm so sorry, the script in front of me said "the reverend al sharpton"--i'm looking at your face and i know you're reverend jackson--we all do--i'm sorry...
at which point the right reverend starts into his canned spiel and the clip mercifully ends.
trust me, it was funny as hell.
update #2: apparently the clip's back up, if only for the moment. whatever--i'm leaving my re-enactment in place, in case it disappears again.
. first, he was gone for a week, and then just as he got back i took off for a week, and then work got in the way, and then...whatever--it was too long.
i took this picture yesterday with my crappy iphone at the papa john's in westwood as we waited for the crappy pizza we took home and ate curled up in fronta some crappy movie we'd picked up at blockbuster.
. i mostly don't remember shit about my past, but i do remember the night the above picture was taken: it was at a party in austin on a chilly night in late 1979, in the first semester of my first year at the university of texas school of architecture--the gayest school in the most liberal university in the most liberal city in the lone star state, at a time when it looked like gay was gonna take over the world.
four years older than most of my peers, i typically exuded the kinda smiling confidence evident in the above snapshot, but truth be told, it was all a lie--i was scared shitless somebody was gonna find out i was as queer as half my classmates.
while most everybody else in my class partied and fucked each other senseless during our five years there, i mostly kept to myself and fended off advances with lame excuses.
downside of that cowardly decision: i'm the emotionally-stunted wreck you see before you today.
upside of that cowardly decision: virtually every hot guy who hit on me back then has been dead for at least fifteen years.
[btw, i still have that down jacket--it's held up much better than its owner.]
. flying into los angeles the other night, i happened to be waiting outside the rear lavatory at just the precise moment that we hit the only patch of turbulence in an otherwise calm flight—my timing tends to be good that way—resulting in my getting pitched against the bulkhead and ending up with a nice, colorful lump in the middle of my forehead.
all day today, it’s been nothing but “oh my god, what happened?”, with the follow-up question almost always being some variation of, “so what’s the airline gonna give you to make up for it?"
i guess i tend to be of the “shit happens” school of thought when it comes to stuff like this—it never occurred to me to even mention the incident to the airline, much less try to extort money or tickets outta them. this apparently makes me, by current american standards, a sucker.
a co-worker told me her mother's the same way--seems she was having dinner at a restaurant a year or so ago and inadvertently swallowed a bay leaf that was in her soup; it got stuck in her throat and she had to be taken to the emergency room to have it removed.
the restaurant tracked her down and not only paid her medical bills, but insisted that she accept a settlement check of $3,000 as their apology to her. when she refused, saying it was her own damn fault and she shoulda been paying more attention, they hounded her for a year until she finally accepted their check.
i haven't been able to get that story outta my mind all day. think about it--some woman does something stupid, and the business in which she happens to do it falls all over itself thrusting thousands of dollars at her and counting themselves lucky for having gotten off so easy.
these stories, i think, speak volumes about the litigious mentality that’s so pervasive in america today—shit, in fact, doesn’t just happen; it’s gotta be somebody’s fault, and somebody’s gotta pay. it really got me to thinking about how much the fear of even frivolous litigation must drive up the cost of everything in ways we don’t even know.
the funny thing is, i was arguing with an attorney friend just the other day—a good liberal—about tort reform; he, naturally, insisted with a straight face that malpractice lawsuits and defensive medicine were negligible factors in the high cost of healthcare in america.
i wish I’d had the bay leaf story to throw at him.
. you know me, folks--i'm no genius; i'm just some guy who gets drunk and transcribes whatever random shit happens to pass through his alcohol-inflamed synapses between mkf cocktails 1 and 3 on any given night.
am i booze-eloquent? yes indeed, i am. am i someone whose drunken pronouncements should in any way be taken seriously? astonishingly (to me, anyway), apparently at least one of you out there thinks so.
so, before the reader in question rushes out to invest his meager savings in gold merely on my say-so (much less any of the rest of you), i feel it necessary to elaborate on my position.
for those of you who couldn't care less, i promise to keep this as short and sweet as possible (and for those of you who wonder, i bought the bulk of my gold back in 2006 when it was half the price it is now and everybody told me i was crazy).
* * * * *
our broken economy is in recovery, we are told; the recession is over. the people who are telling us this point to evidence that (a) the housing market seems to be bottoming out, (b) the dow has recovered 50% of the value it lost since its high two years ago, and (c) leading economic indicators are pointing upwards. cool, huh?
while i would (and easily could) dispute each and every one of the above points, that would make this post longer than i want it to be, so let's just assume for the sake of argument that each is correct.
the thing these economic cheerleaders fail to mention in their pep rallies is that the only reason all this shit is happening is because of something euphemistically called quantitative easing--a fancy name the federal reserve dreamed up for their practice of creating massive amounts of money outta thin air in order to fund all of this foolishness while simultaneously keeping interest rates artificially (and ridiculously) low.
in other words, it's sorta like referring to an intensive-care patient who depends on life-support for his every breath as "recovering."
but damned if all this artificial stimulus hasn't worked, sort of--people are buying houses with government-backed 4.75% 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, and the stock market is suddenly awash in cheap money.
the problem, of course, is that all this inflation of the currency has debased the dollar, shaken the confidence of our creditors like china and japan (upon whom we depend for our lifeblood) to the point that they're hesitant about buying any more of our debt, and driven the price of gold well past $1,000.
the fed has promised the world that it's gonna end quantitative easing at the end of october, and if it actually follows through on this promise, a couple of interesting things will happen very quickly:
first, and most importantly for our purposes, the dollar will strengthen almost overnight, and the price of gold (in dollar terms) will plummet.
second, and most importantly for the politicians, easy money will dry up and interest rates will spike, thus killing not only the artificial housing recovery but the artificial stock-market rally as well. housing prices will collapse, the market will tank, and voters will panic and demand heads on spikes.
so there you have it, my friends--a sophie's choice if ever there was one: will the fed (1) keep printing money in order to maintain the uneasy status quo, even though such a policy ensures certain hyperinflation of our currency at some point down the road; or (2) stop the madness, let the economy finally take its lumps and hit a painful rock-bottom so a true recovery can take place?
with mid-term elections coming up next year, and knowing my politicians as i do, i'm betting they're gonna go with option 1, kick the can down the road and hope they can keep the current bubble inflated for at least as long as they're still in office.
