http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY8trqxjUag
Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)
Kansas, what were you thinking?
It takes a completely bifurcated mind to pray to heaven that our country has not fallen this far and, at the same time, hope (with that little guilty hope we all have sometimes) that they actually run a ticket like that just to get the popcorn and revel in the disaster that is the modern day GOP.
"SORRY,KID. YOUR NAME IS BRADY BRADY."
In an episode of the show Sex and the City, Miranda and her ex-boyfriend Steve Brady mull over names for their in-utero son. Miranda ponders the classic “Danny”, and Steve suggests a name with familial significance, “Paul”. Ultimately, Miranda opts to name the baby “Brady” – the father’s last name – as an ostensible booby prize for Steve, who is out of the picture romantically. Baby Brady will have his mom’s last name, “Hobbes.” Later in the series, however, Miranda and Steve reconcile and marry, begging the question: will the red-headed tyke be “Brady Brady”? Or at least, Brady-Hobbes-Brady?
In my nephew’s kindergarten in Pennsylvania, his classmates are: Ethan, Jacob, Josalynn, Josie, Susan, Caroline, Toshi, Juliette, Arthur, Augusta, Lillibeth, Joshua, Henry, Joseph, Kate, Thomas, Charles, Lauren, Liam, Claire, Nora, Matthew and Sarah.
In my friend’s child’s kindergarten in Los Angeles, the kid’s names are; Porter; Delaney; 2 Jaggers; Axel; Anderson; 3 (one male, two female) Sawyers; Bennet; Wilson; 2 (one male, one female) Parkers; Truman; Maxwell; 2 Masons; Presley; Hendrix and 2 Coopers.
The banal baby naming trend of using surnames as first names has got to be one of the weirdest and most desperate in the entire storied and perverse history of baby naming trends. Thin on meaning, outside of their traditional place in the sur name category, I find this trend perplexing. Why name your kid “Cassidy” or “Kennedy” when we have lyrical, literary names like Clara, Clarissa or Caroline? What the heck does “Riley” have over Ethan or Thomas, other than it is also common dog name?
Consider these popular and unisex winners:
Taylor
Sawyer
Addison
Cassidy
Mackenzie
Grayson
Archer
Presley
Marshall
Delaney
Baker
Carver
Hunter
Tyler
Kennedy
Riley
Leighton
Bennett
Davis
Wilson
Mason
Carson
Emerson
Brayden
Jackson
Anderson
Harrison
Robinson
Walker
Carter
Campbell
Cooper
Chandler
Porter
Parker
Hudson
Maxwell
….and the horrifying and now-infamous (shudder)…. Madison.
One of the problems is that a large majority of these share the distinction of being the most popular first names and most popular sur names, threatening an entire generation of future Americans with the whole “Brady Brady” conundrum.
Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways, such as how I met so many Jennifers and Rachaels in college, and how there is an alarming plethora of Jasons and Andrews in my workplace today. The “Sawyer and Mason” generation is going to be a world of hurt. 20 years from now, a good chunk of our young men and women of the unisex last name generation will be co-mingling, and everything will be a big confusing mess.
Show me the hipsters with the balls to their kid Weintraub or Horowitz and I’ll change my opinion.
The hippest trendies in the world will be the couple who names their baby “Steve”.
by Saul Leiter
This is too much, I almost can’t take it. I am a sucker for urban archeology, it makes me faint with joy. There’s something chillingly fascinating about an abandoned building and the way it acts as a time capsule for life ways past, or a sit, shuttered and stopped in its tracks in time. I once almost jumped out of a moving car upon seeing a sign that read “Santa’s Village” covered with overgrowth on the side of the road near Arrowhead, CA. I dragged my companion out of the car and into the brush to discover a children’s theme ark, still standing. Truly “pristine” abandoned spaces are rare. Consider the Notting Hill tube station decorated with 1959 movie posters, a 1932 British home, and a New York City tram stop.
An undisturbed apartment in Paris an example of perhaps the most compelling of all abandoned sites: the “time capsule” left as it “really was” in an un-staged moment arresting the flow of a distant material life.
Sometime during World War II, a Parisian woman named Madame de Florian, with the Nazi’s merely a few kilometers away, fled to the south of France, leaving everything she owned behind. She locked up her apartment on the Right Bank near the Opéra Garnier and left. She never returned.
No one knows why Madame de Florian never returned to her beloved Parisian home, but she continued to pay the rent right up until she passed away aged 91 in 2010.
Yes, since 1942, the apartment has been sitting untouched, uninhabited, under lock and key, a sleeping beauty, with no hint of what was inside. On a wintery December afternoon in 2010, a Commissaire Priseur (Auctioneer), named Olivier Choppin-Janvry, turned the key of the apartment for the first time in over 70 years. The decadently glorious apartment remained frozen in time, a time capsule recording the precise moment of de Florian’s sudden flight.
Behind the door was a perfectly preserved treasure trove of turn-of-the-century objets, an untouched piece of its history nestled deep within today’s bustling and brightly lit city streets in Paris’ 9th arrondissement.
Through layers of dust and cobwebs lies a Belle Époque interior, harkening back to the feminine elegance of 18th-century France, but with eclectic 19th- and 20th-century touches, like Persian rugs, oil paintings, mirrors and toys. The walls, covered with peeling damask and pink floral wallpaper, are quietly luxe backdrops for painted Louis XV- and Louis XVI-style in the drawing room and parlor.
In a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state’s main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. “Dick” Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf, who is retiring. Dick thinks that spousal rape should not be a crime. When Virginia voted to allow spouses to be prosecuted for rape, Black opposed it as a state senator and questioned whether marital rape is even possible, saying:
“when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth”
We all know that there are Mason Dixon lines everywhere, and that there are rednecks everywhere. Anyone who has been to Louisiana or thereabouts knows that it’s lousy with rednecks and that they do all kinds of things: shootin’ things, hunting, fishing, four-wheeling, making moonshine, but also wearing Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie and playing golf. Is it really a surprise to see pictures of these Dick Dynasty dudes looking like douchebags 15 years ago? The parodic, beard-touting Central Casting hillbillies from Louisiana, are just that, a parody. I’m sure much of the redneck population in the South consists of Nike shoes wearing, fad-sporting, frosted tips wearing d-bags driving big lifted diesel trucks, littering, and spouting racist shit every now and then.
Because they’re wearing linen, or sweater vests, doesn’t mean they’re good guys (example: Rick Santorum). But while their cultural and political beliefs may be consistent with being “rednecks”, that alone was not enough to get them a reality teevee show. They had to be repackaged as real salt of the earth, down home “true” Amurikkkans, unsullied by East Coast relativism and West Coast hedonism, who could never be mistaken for effete, blue state, haute-bourgeois intelligentsia. A bunch of clean cut yuppie d-bags spouting faux Christian homilies and homophobia is the Faux Newscasters gig.
Big money making idea for me: take a well-educated, rich black family, put them in costumes and pretend they’re “from the hood.”
Chris Christie Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Kelly (left)
NOBODY’S “Deputy Chief of Staff” does what Chris Christie is claiming Bridget Kelly did, the sole action of a rogue, GOP hack. These are traditional, east coast mainline Republicans. They do what they are told. Anyone from the ranks who rose to GOP Municipal Chair in New Jersey did so because they had a reputation of doing what they were told. Governor Sammiches admitted Bridget Kelly had no operational authority, that she was only a liaison between agencies. So, even if she is a total psycho, nobody had any reason to take her directions to shut down bridge lanes. When she “liaised” with David Wildman, she said: “time for traffic problems.” She was passing along orders from someone else, a superior. Also Chris Christie is fat.
From Salon:
“In another correspondence, this time between Wildstein and an unknown interlocutor (the documents are partially redacted), Wildstein dismisses his correspondent’s concerns over how the lane closure and the ensuing traffic jams affected New Jersey residents. “I feel bad about the kids,” the unknown person texts Wildstein. Wildstein responds, texting, “They are the children of Buono voters.” Barbara Buono was Christie’s Democratic opponent in 2013′s gubernatorial election.”
This is a great scandal! And by the way, this vicious swaggering vengeful bridgetroll monster, you just fucking know that everyone on his staff is fucking terrified of him, they have the most reason to be afraid of him, they are within chubby arms reach. You think anyone who works for this vicious petty vindictive fuck would EVER go out on a limb and freelance something like this?
It is part of Christie’s spin to keep calling these the “Fort Lee Lanes,” as when Christie said “why does Fort Lee get three lanes to itself?” They are the local lanes for all the people who are not coming to the bridge on the interstate.The reality it that this wasn’t just a kick in the truck nutz to Fort Lee. All folks who live along the Hudson were affected. There’s the Hudson River, a few hundred yards of flat then a cliff, which Ft. Lee sits on top of. Becuz of that cliff, the tens of thousands of schlubs who live on the flat have nowhere else to go. There aren’t many back roads you can use to try and get around any tie up, let alone entrances to the bridge. This is the highest degree of nastiness.
This should be a nail in the oversized coffin of Christie’s political career.
Who am I kidding? The Republican “base” loves shit like this. The knuckle draggers are gonna love him for what they consider being bad ass, when really he’s just an ass.
On the other hand, he’s from NJ, not middle ‘Amerikkka, and DID hug that black guy while giving him a reach around in matching windbreakers just because Jesus sent some major winds through New Jersey…he did make the mistake of trying to appeal to independents and right leaning democrats without hail Jesusing enough to the base…
But then again Americans will tolerate a lot of bullshit, but they will never vote for someone who fucks up traffic on purpose.
Then again these are REPUBLICANS we are talking about. By the time primary season rolls around, they’ll be arguing over who left the most Democrats stranded on bridges…
Them again, think of the children…..the laughing at the school kids stuck on the busses part will stick in people’s craws. That chilling little detail shows what kind of vicious fucksticks Christie and his crew are and this is just the tipoff the iceberg of his corruption and hubris.
But t this sort of thing makes him seem more likely to nuke Iran….
No, I think this ends in a pincer maneuver: he loses votes on the extreme right for the Obama photo op and loses votes from the left and center for the GWB dick move. that leaves as his base people who take Jennifer Rubin seriously.