Even though you know where he is going with it, the conclusion of this post had me laughing out loud.
Monday Morning Open Thread: Calendar Call for Pet Pics
(Katherine H’s Juanita)
Excellent news! — we have a volunteer for the 2012 Balloon Juice Pet Calendar. Here’s Beth S.:
i am so pleased to be working on the calendar this year. i’ve been a devoted balloon juice reader since the 2008 campaign and i’m delighted to give a little bit back to this community that keeps me sane, informed and shares my sappy love of animals, especially rescues. (i have two dogs who are both rescues, one of which is my consolation prize for not being able to rescue any more cats as my husband is terrible allergic.) so here goes…
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the calender is for 2012. i will do my very best to get it done by the holidays. it’s my understanding the calenders will benefit charlie’s angels. i do have a full time job as a graphic designer but will try not to let that interfere too much with this.
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you can send your submissions to [email protected]. please send photos of all your fuzzy, scaly, feathered, finned companions. let me know their names and i’ll be sure to include it on their photos…
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i will do my best to answer any technical questions and you can always send me an email at the yahoo account.
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thanks so much for your generosity in sharing your pets for the calendar!
Deadline for submissions is Wednesday, November 30 — take some time over the long weekend to dig out those mementoes of your beloved pets, past or present. Email them directly to Beth at the address above, or click on my name near the top of the right-hand column & I’ll forward them.
One of the first submissions, posted above, came from commentor Katherine H:
We found Juanita homeless and starving down on the Res where the San Juan river passes through the canyons / Hence she is named for the San Juan.
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We think she is part some kind of terrier and an undernourished coyote.
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She is the most fun loving and sociable dog I have ever had / every one in town knows her name.
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We have endless pictures of her being cute but this one is her serious look.
Monday Morning Open Thread: Calendar Call for Pet PicsPost + Comments (18)
Late Night Open Thread: Krugman, Not Just Shrill, But Croooel
I owe at least one commentor a hat tip. David Edwards, at Raw Story:
… “I have a structural hypothesis here,” Krugman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour Sunday. “You have a Republican ideology, which Mitt Romney obviously doesn’t believe in. He just oozes insincerity, that’s just so obvious. But all of the others are fools and clowns. And there is a question here, my hypothesis is that maybe this is an ideology that only fools and clowns can believe in. And that’s the Republican problem.”
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Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan spoke up in Gingrich’s defense.
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“We need a little on the pro-Newt side balance,” she remarked. “The base of the Republican Party knows that the establishment of the Republican Party doesn’t like Newt. That’s a big plus.”
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“It was his time,” Krugman explained. “The Republican base does not want Romney and they keep on looking for an alternative. And Newt, although — somebody said, ‘He’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.’ But he is more plausible than the other guys they’ve been pushing up.”
Shorter Professor K-Thug: “Respect you in the morning? Lady, they don’t respect you now!”
Click the link for the video, and a photo of His Shrillness suitable for framing.
Late Night Open Thread: Krugman, Not Just Shrill, But CroooelPost + Comments (89)
Open Thread
Watching Thanksgiving Live on the Food Network, and it is basically Chef’s Behaving Badly. Anne Burrell is already doublefisting cocktails.
What are you all up to?
Random movie thread
I really enjoyed our last movie thread, so I thought we’d try another. It comes to mind because there’s a documentary about Woody Allen on PBS tonight and because I read a great review of “Breathless” on Can’t Explain last night.
I know he’s an asshole but I loves me some Woodman. I grew up obsessively reading Pauline Kael and two of the first Pauline Kael-type movies I ever saw (I grew up in a town with one movie theater that only showed “Back to the Future” and stuff like that) were “Annie Hall” and “Broadway Danny Rose”. I loved them! I wanted to move to the Upper West Side and shop at Zabar’s and eat at the Carnegie Deli and talk to Diane Keaton-type women about literature. Of course, when I lived in New York, I learned that the Upper West Side was overrun with frat boy douches just like everywhere else and that Woody had never lived there at all anyway.
What are your favorite Woody Allen movies? I’ll go with Manhattan, then Crimes and Misdemeanors, then Take the Money and Run. Diane Keaton’s singing ruined Annie Hall a little bit for me in the end.
There are those who say we shouldn’t like Woody Allen because he married his step-daughter, so I’ll add some other topics into the mix. Apropos of “Breathless”, has any of you ever actually enjoyed a Godard movie? I have not. And finally: have you ever seen a truly obscure, only-in-a-film-festival type movie that you liked a lot but that most people here might not have heard of? I used to see a lot of those types of movies, and mostly I wasn’t that keen on them, but I once saw a Korean movie called “Murmur of Youth” that is one of my favorite movies ever.
All the peacemaker turn war officer
I’m going to put on my northeastern, ethnic, my-uncle-fixes-my-traffic-tickets hat for a minute here and ask a question: are there a lot more ridiculous police brutality actions out west than here in the northeast? I don’t mean cops fucking with people like that asshole who ran Henry Louis Gates in, I mean pepper spraying people in the face, shooting people in the back on the BART, and so on.
My sister lives in Portland and wrote me last year:
According to the Oregonian, of the 29 murders in Portland last year, 4 were committed by police. I looked up those stats for NYC, and it was 8 out of 532. Is that not completely crazy? I feel like this should be national news. It’s outrageous.
I’ve always got the feeling that police culture was different on the west coast, more cowboy, less community connection (which bleeds into graft, I admit). Has anyone ever seen comprehensive stats about police misconduct by region?
Update. Here’a link for those stats.
Late Night Open Thread
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For some reason (she said), this song reminds me of John G. Cole, Master of Balloon-Juice.
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Also, from the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell finds an anecdote in the new Jobs biography that actually made me laugh:
In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”
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Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”