Author Archive
The Declaration Of Awesomeness
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An Open Letter To President Emanuel
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President Rahm Emanuel, 10 Seconds After Taking Oath Of Office, Jan. 20, 2009
Thumbing Nose At Everyone To His Left. American Youth Scowls In Dismay.
I wake up some mornings hating me too.
– President Rahm Emanuel
Dear President Emanuel,
Let me begin by saying I’m pleased you’re lucid some mornings. I hope you read this letter on one of those mornings. I hope it awakens you with the cold certainty of a window left open to the blizzard.
Like nearly everyone else, I placed hope in you; it was a cautious hope, a hope borne of knowing no other hope existed. We needed you to be almost perfect, so that you might rescue us from almost perfect ruin. Heck, I even turned my cautious hope into a song. Went a little like this… Soup_And_Songs
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No Heavy Lifting
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There will be no overriding theme to this post, amigos, except that Here Are Some Things I Like.
The Beast bills itself as The World’s Only Website. This is what logicians refer to as “self-evident truth.” Since 2002 (but skipping 2003) the Beast has published its list of the 50 Most Loathsome Americans. The 2009 List includes one jerk in particular who seems to make every year’s Loathsome List:
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Rules and Metarules
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“Anything that can be done can be done meta.” – Charles Simonyi
It’s probably not necessary to explain here what “meta” means, but I’ll quote from Wikipedia anyway:
Meta- (from Greek: μετά = “after”, “beyond”, “with”, “adjacent”, “self”), is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.
Comedy Break: Second Amendment Translation Party!
Posted by: | CommentsTranslation Party is a website that lets you, the intrepid Internet Explorer, type an English phrase into the empty text box (oh, see how empty, how hungry it is, hungry for your words!) Then Translation Party translates your text into Japanese. O, but the magick is only begun! Then it translates that Japanese text back to English, and repeats this process until the translation stops changing: “equilibrium is reached,” as Translation Party puts it. I got the idea to feed it that already controversial nugget of English writing, the Second Amendment.
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President Of The Lambs: Redux
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A hello to Scrutiny Hooligans readers: my name is Tom Buckner, and I’ve been offered the chance to post here, “above the fold” as it was put to me. For this I’m very grateful. Osiris only knows what shenanigans I’ll repay this kindness with. Like ending sentences with prepositions. Or sentence fragments. I may even relapse into the Pelagian Heresy.
But I have decided to get my feet wet by reprinting an essay from 2005, which was hosted at a wondrous blog called the nonist. There are a few things I could update and a few things I would now emphasize differently; I’m less inclined now to let the Democratic Party off the hook, for one thing. And let’s not dwell on the purple prose in the first paragraph, either. But nothing important has changed. I still think the idea I expound here is an important and overlooked one. It asks a simple question: if your boss can make you piss into a cup to prove you’re not seeking what wiser people than I have termed “illegal states of mind,” then why cannot society demand proof that its rulers have a conscience? Read More→
