Guesses?

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Question: Which of the following doesn’t belong with the rest?

a: kittens
b: bunnies
c: rainbows
d: unicorns flying out of your ass
e: Rammstein

Answer:

Thx to Ubertramp for passing this along.

I’m trying to decide if I want to read the new book by David Denby called Snark, which is just being published here in Britain. It’s apparently a dignified commentary on what’s wrong with the world today, perhaps something along the lines Miss Manners might come up with if she addressed blogging as a cultural phenomenon. But I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t really say if that’s what it is. Denby is a film reviewer for The New Yorker Magazine, which gives him a certain cache as a “New Yorker staff writer.” He has also written some books, one of which chronicled how he lost a bundle of money by being naïve, greedy and stupid (American Sucker), although it’s possible he made some money by writing the book, which also chronicled the failure of his marriage and a near-breakdown—all aspects of David Denby’s life I could probably get by without learning anything about. Another book chronicled his return to Columbia College many decades after graduation to re-take the Great Books courses he had taken as an undergraduate (Great Books). This was a pretty good book, and Denby and I share something in common—we like to re-read great books we read decades earlier. Personally, I think Conrad and Cary hold up pretty well, but Durrell doesn’t, sadly. So far as I know, he does not have a blog.
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“I keep telling you guys my aim is to become a legend,” said Usain Bolt, after smashing the world 200 metres record and becoming the first man to hold the 100 and 200 metres sprints in both the Olympics and the Athletics World Championships.

Competition at international sporting events is fierce and the pursuit of an edge, sometimes measured in hundredths of a second, leads some to cheat.  Steroid abuse aims to increase the strength, speed and endurance of what is natural.  But the androgens created by the body are not set to any standard.  Some people do genuinely produce more than others.  Figuring out what is normal and what is not is difficult.

And, sometimes, something else is going on. Full story »

Results: Those guys over there waving the white flag? Yeah, those are the Tournament of Rock handicappers. They’ve given up trying to guess how our voters are going to behave in the wake of our second straight major upset. They expected #6 seed Joni Mitchell to have a tough time, but they thought it would come from Alice Cooper or Todd Rundgren. Instead, Joni is dismissed by The Doobie Brothers. The numbers: The Doobie Brothers 33%; #6 Joni Mitchell 30%; Alice Cooper 13%; Todd Rundgren 10%; Motorhead 8%; Rod Stewart 8%.

Our ever-more disorienting quest to name the greatest band in history now moves to the Red Rocks region and one of popular music’s more cerebral tandems, Steely Dan – a quintessential studio band that’s been enjoying significant critical acclaim for some of its recent performances. Given their competition and the results of the last two pods, Messrs. Becker and Fagan perhaps have much to fear…. Full story »

From time to time I wander over to Front Porch Republic, or What I Saw in America, or some other crunchy-con site, to see how they’re getting on. I can’t really tell yet–there still seems to be a fair amount of negative reaction from some of the more mainstream conservative sites (mainstream being a relative term here), ranging from disbelief to outright hostility, but leavened with some befuddlement–what are these folks up to? Well, I can’t claim to be an expert here, but it seems to me that they want to rescue conservatism from what it’s become. Specifically, the modern corporatist form of conservatism that seems to pervade the Republican party and the conservative news establishment, including thinktanks like the American Enterprise Institute. The problem, from the crunchy-con perspective, is the corporatist mind-set that has taken over the movement at the expense of localism. Globalization is not all it’s cracked up to be, in other words.

I’m way overgeneralizing here–there’s lots of other stuff gong on as well, including a broad range of opinion on issues such as abortion. But it’s interesting to me that some many of these young writers–and they are young, as a rule, or certainly younger than I am–have adopted Wendell Berry as one of their intellectual mentors. Because as anyone familiar with Berry’s work is aware, Berry is the philosopher of the local. I’ve been reading Berry for decades now, and his place in modern American thought is still a bit of a mystery. He’s written one of the best American novels of the century (A Place on Earth), a number of volumes of pretty good poetry (particularly Farming: A Handbook), and most importantly, a series of essays over the years that stand as a testament to sound conservative judgment.
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