FEDERATED STATES OF MICROBLOGORRHEA:

And if I do fail at my fake blogging resolution this year, you can always catch me on Tumblr. Microblogging! Which means, in 2013, a bloglike social stream with a network of people you don't know on Facebook (but wish you did.)

I HAVE A NEXUS 7:

And an app for the world's oldest blog. Will I blog more in 2013 consequently? Ask again, answer unclear. But look! A pretty screenshot! #shareeverything

GREAT BRITAIN JUST LOST TO CROATIA IN HANDBALL 37-14: Which is massive blowout if you know your handball and I think you do, and the 14th goal for Team GB came at the 29:59 mark, so the very last second, and the crowd went wild and the team celebrated like mad, this team of people with day jobs I'm sure who were only slightly conscious of the sport four years ago but who went out and played handball for four years or whatever because the host nation HAS to have a team. Yes, I watch the Olympics for moments like the home team scoring a last second goal in a tournament where they haven't won a game.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE NOT LIVING IN A TABLE TENNIS NATION: When your best young player is giving interviews like this:

"If I didn't have straight A's, I wouldn't play table tennis. My parents told me I couldn't play table tennis if I didn't get straight A's," said Hsing, who did interviews in English and Mandarin Chinese.
She has applied to Stanford. She is considering applying to Princeton. She's also thinking about taking some time off before starting college to focus full time on her sport.
"I think it's something that would be really, really interesting to me," she said. "I thought it would be really cool because I usually don't play a lot of pro tours. I've only played one, and I think to just for one year just focus would be really, really fun."

Oh hey yeah, devoting one's self to one's sport might be fun! Or, you know, maybe she'll go to college and work on the school paper or something. Who knows. 

And straight As, shmaight As--if this was China she'd already be in table tennis school. We're never going to get anywhere in this country in table tennis with this level of support. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT, AMERICA? A MORIBUND TABLE TENNIS PROGRAM? We'll never beat the Chinese that way!


EDIT TO ADD Ariel Hsing is close personal friends with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, so it's not like she'd lack for support if she wanted it. The problem is that she isn't sure if she wants it and if this was a real table tennis nation that wouldn't even be a question. So AMERICA IS NOT A TABLE TENNIS NATION. I have proven it on my blog.

A THE DARK KNIGHT RISES REVIEW: By Alan David Doane. I am only lukewarm on the Nolan-Bale Batman project, and ADD seems to be on a similar wavelength, so I may agree with this review in large part whenever I end up seeing TDKR. I mean not to prejudge something, but: "In the end, after three overblown and undercooked Batman movies, the only thing we’ll remember, the only thing that felt right and transcended genre, was Heath Ledger’s Joker." <---strikes me as something accurate. Liam Neeson's Ra's definitely wasn't memorable, and Bane will have to be Lord Humungus levels of awesome to be memorable in that mask.

COOKING AS A FORM OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: I've already forgotten where I got this from--it's a really great debate between Francis Lam and Eddie Huang. Is it fair for chefs to cook other culture's foods? is the question. Here, taste something flavored with out of context:

That type of “modern” food with international influences is like diversity at a law firm or Ivy League school. There is an “international class” that produces similar individuals worldwide. At a certain point, food isn’t an ethnic thing, it’s a class thing. You can go to Taichung and there are “modern” restaurants like Wein that use “international class” techniques like sous-vide, foam, square plates, and exotic reductions “inspired” by Taiwanese folklore and Shanghainese flavors. The food at Empellon could be the food at Wein could be the food at Aquavit could be the food at Kin Shop. There is a formula to these restaurants and the foreign influences are interchangeable like WWF characters.

BLOGGING AS A FORM OF SOCIAL BOOKMARKING: Little note on writing well that I wish to keep track of. Via Maria Yang.

Alternate title for this post: DEPT OF PUTTING MY BOOKMARKS ON THE INTERNET BECAUSE MY FIREFOX BOOKMARKS FOLDER IS A TOTAL MESS.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMENTS FROM MAJOR MEDIA WEBSITES: This little one in the Economist:

This article does no good for the Economist's credibility. I'm asking myself: "If articles about a country which I know well (I'm French) are so misguided and misinformed, how can I trust the Economist for news about other parts of the world - which is why I read the Economist in the first place?"

I remember Atrios saying something like this years ago, and I was all, "OH THAT ATRIOS. He's just a meanie. He doesn't even take Instapundit seriously!" Atrios was right about Instapundit, and right about The Economist. Once you see them write about something you know something about, it's invariably at least questionable and then you start thinking--hey, is this page on Ecuadorean politics also suspect? And your interest in The Economist starts to trail off. Plus it's right bloody expensive, as they say over there.

(The comment appears in this article on Francois Holland's probable victory over Nicolas "Jon Corzine in 2009" Sarkozy in the French elections, where a right bloody war has broken out in that comments thread.)

AH, I SWEAR I DON'T PLAN ANY OF THIS: Like writing a post a month. I mean I don't have a reminder set up in my phone or something that tells me, "it's been a month! Update the stupid blog again!" It must be something primitive, in the back of my hindbrain, that gives me the ability to post on a nearly monthly basis. OMG IT'S INNATE! EVOLUTION PROVIDED FOR A BLOGGING GENE!

DEPT. OF PRESSING THE LIKE BUTTON ON COMMENTS MADE ON OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS: The entity known as "elm," a member of the LGM commentariat, offers the following on the "Corey Robin on Cory Booker" thing:

Yes, sure, but how do we know he didn’t set the fire to begin with just so he good [sic] save the woman? Answer me that, will you.
(Seriously, even if Booker had funded the fire department up the wazoo, do we think that it would have improved reaction time such that they got there before Booker, who lived next door? Once he saw the fire and knew someone was inside, what was he supposed to do? He did the brave–even heroic–thing, but we’re not supposed to applaud him because he’s not always as progressive as we would want? Really?)

Yeah, the Robin thing...it just struck me as the work of someone so focused on their own set of issues they can't even enjoy a good set of "CORY BOOKER IS CHUCK NORRIS" jokes in the aftermath of an elected American official saving a woman from a fire.

LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE OVER: In record time, and in close to the most humiliating way possible, in terms of seeding. Never humiliating to lose to a Patriot League team, though, not really--those kids can hit their free throws.

My favorite part was the Lehigh coach and one of the players really really trying hard not to smile when there were like 20 seconds yet.

WAIT, THE LATEST RIGHT-LIBERTARIAN ARGLE BARGLE IS BASED ON NOT MUCH OF ANYTHING?: Captain Renault reference, Captain Renault reference!

This is re: that idiotic "state workers forced a preschooler to eat chicken nuggets!" story out of North Carolina. Stupid right-libertarian argle bargles always take this form, by the way: state agent forces unwitting and/or powerless citizen to do something stupid! AREN'T AGENTS OF THE STATE ALWAYS DOING STUFF LIKE THIS? They are, like, the worst. And then you gargle with that argle bargle until the next one comes around.

(I like using the phrase "right-libertarian," I think. Non-left-libertarians are the ones most likely to claim they're neither left nor right, simply AWESOME FREE-THINKERS. They're also the ones most likely to side with the right on issues of GIT OFF MAH PROPERTY. "Propertarian" is kind of an epithet. "Right-libertarian" isn't, and it's descriptive, and contrasts well with left-libertarians, like, I don't know, ACLU members or something. Right-libertarians would be those in the Kochosphere certainly, employees of Reason or Cato. I guess it would also apply to the paleo-libertarians...well, "right-libertarian" is the umbrella term then, covering paleolibs and Kochlibs. There! Easy, cheap categories! I love the Internet.)

GETTING ON THAT LOCAL ISSUES TRAIN: The audience for my blog is already very tiny, and the remaining audience that would be interested in subject matter of this post is even tinier--it has not even been determined if that number is nonzero--but: the Chris Christie administration has come out in favor of the entirety of the UMDNJ Committee report (you can read it here) which contains some sensible recommendations, like dissolving the corrupt UMDNJ institution, and some odd ones, like giving the medical school in New Brunswick to Rutgers (makes sense) but spinning off the rest of the spare parts into a new institution that's, ummm, indistinguishable from UMDNJ (what?) The real headscratcher, though, is the proposal to fold Rutgers-Camden into Rowan University, which would involve a regional, undergraduate focused university with little graduate activity absorbing South Jersey's only public research university, which of course carries the centuries of prestige of the Rutgers name with it. This is, of course, completely illogical. It's being done so the nascent medical school in Camden (which still hasn't admitted anyone to my knowledge) can have the backing of a public research university, which it does need. But this can be done just much more simply with Rutgers maintaining its AAU status and creating a formal research relationship with Rutgers, as in the model proposed by former Camden Dean Margaret Marsh here. Otherwise the proposal destroys Rutgers-Camden to no good purpose I can imagine, though I can imagine some less good ones with no relationship to education or research.

Too long? Didn't read? Just sign this petition opposing the merger, please.

AND SO, IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PROTESTS GOING ON ACROSS THE INTERNET, THIS BLOG WILL GO DARK FOR A DAY: Wait....

(Seriously, though, SOPA is terrible and needs to be stopped. Don't let ancient corporations Sonny Bono Act the whole Internet, y'all.)

EDIT: And every other jerk who never updates their blog made the same stupid joke. STOP SOPA, PREVENT REPETITIVE HUMOR.

RANDOM "WHO COMMENTS ON THE COMMENTATORS?" SORT OF THOUGHT: Glenn Greenwald occupies the same position in the pundit ecosystem than Camille Paglia did back in the late 90s/early 00s. Right? I mean, the Salon thing is obvious--possibly too obvious and also misleadingly obvious--but also the liberalish politics that could not possibly be constrained by the Democratic party. There's just less "porn is art" and more "how can liberals POSSIBLY NOT LIKE a Texan Republican congressman who wants to dismantle Social Security?!?!?" with Glenn.

PRESS THE DISLIKE BUTTON IF YOU'RE WORKING THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS: Yay me.

I did want to add that I agree with Jim's point here that Ron Paul is pretty much screwed by his newsletters (well, by that and by being a crank. Actually, wasn't "having a newsletter" a prerequisite for crankdom back in the day?) Admitting that Lew Rockwell wrote them makes all of Rockwell's stuff fair game and--oh boy--there's quite a bit of that out there. His "ignore it even though it won't go away" is all he has...unless he wants to, you know, change the game and actually attempt to move past the issue. But he won't risk losing the position he has--leader of a political cult that isn't even at Perot levels of popularity--so he's going to stay right where he belongs, in the minor leagues of career eccentric congressmen.

YEEEEARRRGH APPLE HATES WOMEN: Remember that one time Amazon searches hated gay people? This is another version of that. Especially when you consider the thoughtless, unreflecting dudeity of Silicon Valley.

Me, I think it's another useless gimmick for the Apple cultists to use to reassure themselves that the objects of their veneration are still holy and righteous without their chief shaman around to bless them anymore. And I've decided talking to the Majel Barrett computer from Next Generation does not make me feel like I'm living in the future to anything like the degree those curly-Q, allegedly-loaded-with-mercury light bulbs do.

THE BEST FAKE AMAZON REVIEWS: Are the ones you're not expecting:

I'm a clown who likes a 10-12 oz. nip at the spirits every now and again, before each performance, or when I'm alone. I can say that this flask is perfect for me. My other flasks were always getting lost in my comically oversized pants pockets amidst the confetti, balloon animals, and ropes of colored handkerchiefs. It was nearly impossible for me to quickly find and swig from these puny things, not to mention they did almost nothing to satiate my thirst for liquid comedy. I tried just using the bottles my zany sauce was originally packaged in, but quickly found I needed something more discreet when performing before uptight prudish children and the priggish parents who love to scream and yell about their morals. Not to mention glass is breakable. That doesn't combine well with my specialty trick, constant pratfalls and collapsing in heaps. Then I found this 64 oz. paragon of discretion, and my hollow void now has one shining object. I've incorporated my frequent swigs into the act, and the stupid kids are none the wiser. I mean, it's opaque. They don't know what's in there, and I keep getting funnier until I somehow wake up in the park. 

This is for a 64 oz. giant flask. I mean, okay, maybe I should expect gag reviews for gag items, but I was SERIOUSLY thinking "wow, think of all the booze you could carry with you!" and I swear I'm not a drunk I JUST NEED TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF and then BAM, the gag review, reminding me that one really shouldn't tote around 64 ounces of bourbon (enough for 32 smallish Manhattans) with them.

LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE JUST BEGINNING: Apparently Coach K set some of wins record tonight. But I bet at least 245 of those wins were due to refs giving his floor-slapping Coach K white boy-Mini-Me's credit for charges while they were clearly moving their feet but K had spent the previous half screaming at them (the refs, I mean) so they gave in.

Just the most unattractive style of basketball I can think of, three pointers, ref-baiting and floor-slapping. I do not celebrate an achievement based on such dreck; I condemn it; I fart in its general direction.

EDIT: I regret being such a churlish hater. Thanks for getting us that gold medal, though, Coach K. That was the time I did cheer you on.

AS GOOD AN EXPLANATION FOR THE FRIENDLY'S BANKRUPTCY AS ANY: From out of the mouths of Yelp reviewers:

How does this chain still exist?  So fried, so greasy, nothing healthy on the menu and limited options.   You are better off swimming in butter and stapling donuts to your ass.

And yet, how is Five Guys a hot chain? They don't even have a turkey option, let alone a veggie patty option, and Friendly's does. Cracker Barrel isn't a hot chain anymore, but they're enduring, and they're not healthy either. But Cracker Barrel does kitsch and Five Guys does great burgers...Friendly's doesn't do any one thing particularly well, except possibly the Fribble, and that isn't enough anymore. (I admit to being partial to at least the idea of Friendly's breakfast, if not always the results.) The Friendly's menu is a wilderness of things that were unambiguously delicious decades ago, and there's too many other options now to make them viable at their current size, which is bigger than it should be relative to, like, Bob Evans or Perkins, is my guess. (EDIT: Wikipedia tells me Perkins has gone bankrupt as well.)

 ...so basically I like that line from the review about stapling donuts. Good job, Yelper David C.!