Saturday, August 13, 2011

Automatic Catering Naturally Does a Better Job than a Hand with a Watering Can Can




That's the state of cat affairs: rather than sulking in my bedroom, Fleabus now comes out and glowers. Progress. Relatedly, only for the purpose of this Saturday-lazy post, I got this in my email yesterday from Al Franken:

Dear BLCKDGRD,

One day I'll have the opportunity to raise my hand and repeal DOMA. But first we have to make that happen -- and as much as I wish I could, I can't talk to every single person from one coast to the other and tell them about our petition. That's our challenge.
 
The solution? Online ads. They're fast and effective, and best of all, they're inexpensive to run. And this new kind of advertising is so efficient, that the $5 and $10 contributions that our supporters have been chipping in are making a huge impact and helping us grow our coalition faster than we ever thought possible.

Will you help us keep our ads running by chipping in $5 today?

I thought I'd killed all the email subscriptions I'd stupidly signed up for when I was a stupid ticket-pulling moron, so I canceled this one, and when the Will You Tell Us Why You're Canceling dialogue box came up I typed:

Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?






It's true! and they've a home game tonight I won't even try and taunt a result out of, though the best news is I'm meeting a friend of this blog (and maybe yours) before the game for a beer, he's mentioned in the poem below.






Daily Gaddis:

  - Plagiarized? Recktall Brown sat back. With a quick look over his desk, locating a manuscript, he pushed it forward with one hand and took off his glasses with the other. He fixed the figure across from him with his sharp eyes, and laughed. - Take a look at this, he said, as the quivering yellow fingers received it. - This is lifted. The whole God-damned novel is lifted. One of our readers spotted it the first thing. A lawyer went over it, and it's safe. a couple of things changed around, it's safe and it's good, and it will sell.













E-MAIL FROM AN OWL

Frederick Seidel

The irrigation system wants it to be known it irrigates
The garden,
It doesn't water it.
It is a stickler about this!
Watering is something done by hand.
Automatic catering naturally
Does a better job than a hand with a watering can can.
Devised in Israel to irrigate their orange groves,
It drips water to the chosen, one zone at a time.
Drip us this day our daily bread, or, rather, this night,
Since a drop on a leaf in direct sunlight can make
A magnifying glass that burns an innocent at the stake.
The sprinkler system hisses kisses on a timer
Under an exophthalmic sky of stars.
Tonight my voice will stare at you forever.
I click on Send,
And send you this perfumed magic hour.




8 comments:

  1. Spambots need to improve their spam. All those bits about penis pills, Nigerian next-of-kin, & save democracy for the low, low price of $10 just aren't exciting anymore.

    As long as there's no feline fisticuffs, that's major. Our various cat groupings still claw first & ask questions later.

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  2. Fleabus will be fine - I'd have been disappointed if she wouldn't have been, her being the best cat ever. Jess is fine too - she's sweet. Sarah will be a problem - she'd only recently got over Fleabus arriving four years ago.

    The only blood shed is mine - reminder to self: wear a sock on my hand when wrestling with a spaz-happy kitten.

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  3. "Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages..."

    "right anarchists"? is this his name for libertarians? in any event, what both he and they "seem not to be able to perceive" is that there can be no corporations without government (or "states"), nor can there be such a thing as capitalism without the state.

    Also, one can only wonder wtf he means by "naive reading of social interest" since he's wrong about so much else. ("problem of the commons"?)

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  4. Yeah, I posted it because it reflects the view that government voluntarily brought about the economic gains post-Depression rather than conceded those gains in negotiation with unions and workers.

    Current circumstances reflect, in part, the fact that unions and workers simply don't have the leverage they once did.

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  5. Leverage. There are more of us. With better tools. It's easier to communicate. And we're further apart, more atomized, and less sympathetic to each other than in the heyday of labor's strength.

    Something about spectacular distraction, in there, I think.

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  6. Yes, you're right, of course. It's more Cole's idea that the state is working against the atomization - that corporations have an antagonistic relationship with the state - that's still a standard belief in too many liberals.

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  7. Really? I think most liberals believe corporations own the state.

    If what you mean is most liberals don't believe we'd better off without a state, than I'd tend to agree.
    ~

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  8. The marriage of Corporation and State in our current fix is merely a marriage of convenience. It is the single most enduring power struggle of our era, and, to my mind, it's symbolized in the Reps v. Dems. Dems would rather there be greater State control/regulation of Corp behavior. Reps not so much. Granted, it's a slight difference, but more, I'd wager than .06%. Cole is spot on in his observation re company towns and tainted banks.

    Agglomerations of powerful interests do not need gov't to sanction their alliances—corporate or not. Without gov'tal constraints, we have multinational siphons of labor and capital, the most powerful of whom either absorb or destroy any resistance—b/c they have the wherewithal. Which is simply lacking in our atomized angst and vague protestations and impotent snark. And without the pull of privatization, gov't becomes even more so a self-perpetuating, power-accumulating mechanism—b/c it has its military.

    I once bumped into Al Franken in a diner across from Lincoln Center. I mean our shoulders collided and I nearly dropped my plate or glass or whatever. He just bullied his way on through, heedless. I guess it was b/c it was the 'me' decade; me, Al Franken.

    On a personal note, I'm glad to see someone else's bedroom looks like mine, books, cloths, pets and their paraphernalia lying around.

    Hey, and thanks for the linkage.

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