Consumerism! The Musical

Henri

That was my Facebook status earlier today. This is a message I got from a friend:

“Subject: Helms..

Amen, sister, amen. I am giddy, too. What a hateful, spiteful, evil man.

I grew up in North Carolina. At 10, my mother let me come in the voting booth with her. Helms was running against Jim Hunt. My mom pointed to Helms’s name and said, “Never ever vote for this man.” That stuck with me. Eight years later, when I got to vote for the first time, the old bastard was *still* in office. I went straight for that part of the ballot and voted for Harvey Gantt. *Then* I went back up to vote for Clinton.

I saw the headline today, stood up from the couch and said, “Today is the happiest day of this North Carolinian girl’s life. Wheeee!”

I then called my mom to tell her the news. :)

Happy 4th of July!”

Arenas Agrees to Stay With Wizards - washingtonpost.com
“I looked at like this: There is nothing I can do for my family with $127 million that I can’t do with $111 million,” said Arenas, who is traveling in Asia and Europe for two weeks as part of a promotional tour for a shoe company. “I mean, college is expensive but it ain’t that dang expensive. Now, we have room to add a piece. There is a window of opportunity for us. Adding key pieces leads to championships and that’s what we all want.”

“Green Couple In Calif. Fined For Brown Lawn : NPR

Morning Edition, July 3, 2008 · Anne Hartridge and Matt George are about as “green” as it gets. They bike to work, have solar panels, dry their laundry on a line. So when they stopped watering their lawn in drought-stricken California, who would have thought they’d get fined more than $700 for letting their grass go brown.”

We just watched this on Local Point TV, a local cable channel.

“Manny whiffs - The Boston Globe
…Manny Ramirez is out of control and needs a dope slap.

And not just for shoving Red Sox traveling secretary Jack McCormick to the ground in a petty argument over freebie tickets.

The Manny being Manny schtick is long past its freshness date.

We have all known a Manny. He was the kid in elementary school who was so charismatic he could get away with anything, from not doing homework to being cruel to other kids, because the teachers loved him.

He was the high school jock who got drunk after games or into a fight, and the coaches looked the other way because he was a star.

He was the rich jerk in college who treated women like dirt and still had them lining up because, well, because he was rich.

We’ve all known Mannys, and we’ve all secretly wished they would, once, just once, get what was coming to them.

The Red Sox have become one of the richest franchises in sports by selling the idea that they are different, more special, than other teams.

And we bought it, because implicit in the deal is that we are different, that we are special: Fenway Park is unique; being a Red Sox fan is not a lifestyle choice, but an orientation.

But there is a fine line between being special and being insufferably arrogant, and Manny has crossed it.”

omg! It’s a video of my old job’s Christmas party!

Click the link below to see the photo.  ;)

“Go Fug Yourself: Because Fugly Is The New Pretty

Separately, these pieces might be lovely — the skirt and shoes in particular seem kind of girly and romantic. But I don’t think the two halves belong as a whole. The top is a gentle lemon sorbet, and the bottom is ice cream from a tub where you’ve been using the same scoop to dig into bins of five different flavors and so there’s bits of them all contaminating each other’s containers and melding together into a muddy Pistachio Chocolate Strawberry Vanilla Peach Melba Swirl flavor. You wouldn’t put that accidental sundae in a dish and serve it as dessert, unless it was called Queasy Like Sundae Morning and came with a complimentary bucket.”

And then there’s this one, too!

“You know that if the Tin Man had been in a disco band, his backup dancers would’ve worn this jumpsuit. I could throw her up on my dashboard to reflect the hot LA sunlight back off my windshield, although I am also tempted to put last night’s dinner on her stomach and fold her up into a swan.”

From The Washington Post:

I Feel Pretty and Witty and . . . What?

By Al Kamen

Wednesday, July 2, 2008; Page A13

Having an “auto-replace” filter seemed like a good notion at the time to folks at the conservative American Family Association’s OneNewsNow.com Web site. There were certain words that would pop up from time to time in the Associated Press stories that moved onto the site that were a bit salacious, or unacceptable to post.

“We don’t have the staff to monitor all the Hollywood stories,” news director Fred Jackson said yesterday, “so we wanted an automated function.” He said they put up the filter about a month or so ago.

One word they wanted to filter was “gay.” The site felt that the term put the matter of homosexuality “in a positive light,” Jackson said, when the evangelical Christian organization was much opposed. So when a wire story referred to gay marriage, for example, the phrase would automatically appear as “homosexual marriage.”

Worked fine until Sunday, when the AP reported that “Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials.” The story was headlined “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”

“On Saturday,” the story said, “Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat . . .”

That’s world champion sprinter Tyson Gay, of course.”

Click on the headline to read the entire article.