GIRD THY LOINS BEFORE CLICKING THIS LINK: Riddick is the manliest film possible.

(Just put a cup on, that's as good as modern girding gets.)

WELL, THERE'S AT LEAST ONE DECENT OUTCOME FROM THE DEATH OF GOOGLE READER:

I've switched to Feedly, and it's a nicer app at least in terms of presentation than Reader is, at least on my Nexus 7. It actually looks a bit like the Google+ app, so, ummm, IRONY, or something.

What I will switch to once Google determines Blogger to be unprofitable is yet to be determined.

AND WHEN THEY GOOGLE "WELLS FARGO":

I hope they see this story:

Wells Fargo Typo Victim Dies in Court - Page 2 - News - Los Angeles - LA Weekly

MORE E STREET EPHEMERA:

From April, 2009:

The Armadillo World Headquarters, the first real road trip I ever took with the E Street Band. We got in a motor home and drove from New Jersey to Austin, Texas. I remember we got out in the parking lot of the Armadillo, and they were cleaning up from the night before. There was nothing but Dixie Beer and paper cups on the floor. We played that night, packed house, and I remember during a song, Bruce turned around and kind of faced me. Then he turned back around, and as he turned around, somebody tossed a cowboy hat from out in the middle of the audience. They threw a cowboy hat, and the thing landed on the head of his guitar. And he looked at it, looked at the audience, took the cowboy hat, and put it on his head. It was just one of those moments. If you had to do it in a movie, you'd have to try like 40 times to get it. So there you have it, the Armadillo.

File under "things found when googling for The Professor Roy Bittan." (Also file under "browser tabs finally closed.")

THE BALLAD OF CHILD ACTRESS Q:

Ugh yes this:

Okay, look, the Onion tweet nor the outrage isn't that hard to understand. But I can explain quickly.

1) It's clear the intent was straight irony, because it *should* be true that Quvenzhané Wallis is so clearly adorable that saying otherwise is a joke, like saying, "Man, that Al Gore needs to start caring about the enviroment." 2) Sadly, the author clearly didn't realize that in our sexist and racist environment, the adorableness of Quvenzhané Wallis is, in fact, controversial and a lot of people actually do deride her. 3) The joke was made assuming one context that wasn't true, and upon realizing this, it was retracted and apologized for. End of story. This isn't hard to understand. We've all said things we thought were clear irony only to find out otherwise. It happens.

(Timely reporting as ever here at the Blogistan celebrity news desk.)

THE OPERATIC BAR BAND GENRE:

A subgenre that occurred to me when I was thinking to myself that The Hold Steady plays in the Springsteen genre, and then wondering well what would one call the Springsteen genre?

(This has been a draft here in Blogger for weeks that I am only now offering up to take its place in the rich tapestry of Internet public opinionz. Again--in a E Street mood.)

DEPT. OF FOUND INTERNET OBJECTS, ASBURY PARK DIVISION:

Interview from 1985 with early E Streeter Suki Lahav. She's probably best known for the violin part on Jungleland. Yes--I am on a Springsteen kick. (Also clearing out an open tab.)

HOW NOW YELLER EUROCRAT:

Wrestling was dropped from the Olympics because it didn't have friends in the right places. That's it. End of line, as the Master Control Program would say. And this: "FILA didn't think its sport was at risk, so it waged virtually no campaign to save itself." Wrestling--perhaps THE sport that harkens back to the ancient Olympic times, when the Greeks famously wrassled sans any clothing--should never, even have to justify itself to anyone, and definitely not to a pack of loathsome IOC aristocrats. What bullshit.

...you can also see this as the expression of the IOC's anti-Americanism, as we have the all-time medal count in wrestling and the last two sports cut--baseball and softball--were also American as spam musubi, but that's more of a reach, in my opinion.

DEPT. OF E-MAIL MAILING LIST TITLES THAT WILL CONVINCE ME TO NOT DELETE THEM UNREAD:

It's the Bacevich article that makes the More Flan/Less Ayn argument. By the way, AmConMag, you need a tablet version in the Play store, yo.

...there's an AmCon Center For Public Transportation? I am soooo out of the loop.

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.