We’re Waiting.

If you really think about it: A large cast of Southerners, several powerful shots of reality shattering strongly held beliefs, a REALLY strong undercurrent of forbidden homosexual love, an incredibly naive faith to trust the candy offering strangers of the Free Market and lots of booze… One would think that these guys are a Tennessee Williams play coming to life.

I suspect that eventually we will see the headline on WND:
“Joe Farah Can FLY and Shoot Heat Rays out of his butt!”

Speaking of wingnuts, anyone catch Mann Cooter on Not-Larry-King last night? She’s apparently out of hibernation now, flogging a book (really, at one point she even cut Joy off by saying “that was three books ago, didn’t I offend anyone in this book that we can talk about?”).

So, what’s everyone been doing? I can’t possibly catch up with all the posts, is there a CliffNotes version?

@nabisco: I just took delivery of a metric ton of rice and freeze dried fruit but knowing it will make me a target in the emerging cannibal anarchy placed an order for 1000 Chinese made stinger missiles and a dozen launcher tubes and a dozen Finnish AKs. The NY Post and Fox News are pointing monkey jokes at Obama and AG Holder, no kidding, because Murdoch wants to incite a civil war (for rating fuel) and inspire the assassination of Obama (to cut his taxes under a subsequent GOP administration). We’re accelerating to a CA end at an alarming pace. I wouldn’t be surprized to wake up tomorrow and seeing a neonazi killing and eating a neighbor in a nearby driveway. At the least I fully expect to hear Fox News signing off its news casts with the tag phrase, “White Power News You Can Use” any day now.

@FlyingChainSaw: The Holder story has been debunked, actually. Also, re: the Post monkey cartoon, I’m with this guy. It’s violent and dumb, but not racist.

@nabisco: I’m swirling around the bowl.

FlyingChainSaw sez: At the least I fully expect to hear Fox News signing off its news casts with the tag phrase, “White Power News You Can Use” any day now.

After the break: how people in this tough economy are going with a lower threadcount on their sheets. Stay tuned!

But seriously, folks — there was a whole lotta dumb going on at the New York Post. The cartoonist. The Op-ed editorial staff. The copy clerks. The Managing Editor / E.I.C. This cartoon got eyeballed by at least ten guys, and not one of them said, “yeah, yeah, there’s that freak story of a chimp going, well, apeshit out there, but there’s also another meaning.”

Giving them the benefit of the doubt about the whole racism thing, you must remember that they have to live and sell papers in New York. Wouldn’t you think that a significant number of Post readers may very well be black? (Circulation might have spiked as people bought up all the papers they could find about A-Fraud, too, which only compounds the error.) Knowing what is and what is not a racial epithet might be somewhat useful.

The operative color here is green. Job One of a newspaper is to actually, you know, stay in business. This is not a given nowadays. So being well-versed in, you know, not offending people unnecessarily might be a prerequisite. Just saying.

@chicago bureau: The reference was to the monkey that ripped the lady’s face off, right? (I will never use that phrase again.) I do not see the connection at all. Had the monkey gone crazy with a bucket of paint or something, sure. Clearly, it was a racist cat call from a publisher without the balls to just raise a burning cross on Lafeyette Park and shout his sieg heils honestly.

Wait. DEVELOPING HARD: The N.Y. Post speaks!

Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy. It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

Shorter version: Fuck you, Sharpton. Also, a non-apology apology for those of you nitwits who were offended.

@chicago bureau:
I expected nothing less from the Post.

@chicago bureau: After the break: how people in this tough economy are going with a lower threadcount on their sheets.
After the NY Times story on those poor girlfriends of investment bankers and last week’s “How are you supposed to live on $500K a year?”, I expected that to be the lede in this week’s style section.

@Mistress Cynica:
In this vein, here is an article you might be interested in…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123509132607428443.html

The horror!

@ManchuCandidate: People simply do not appreciate how much the rich suffer.

@chicago bureau: Cute. At least Julius Streicher had the courage of his convictions.

@Mistress Cynica: Check this out:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/20/china.economy.family/index.html

At least 20 million of them. Starving and rioting and running into cities to loot and burn. And I thought we were toast with tens of millions of cannibal neonazis.

Last summer, it cost me over $1,000 to fuel up my yacht, its going to be much better, this year, only half that, if fuel prices remain steady.

@Prommie: In 2010, you’ll be eating the leather from the yacht cabin if you can survive that cannibal neonazi onslaught during the previous winter.

@FlyingChainSaw: @Prommie: Sounds like just another day in paradise, then. Good news.

@chicago bureau: Keef had the guy on who wrote that book about Murdoch saying that Rupe is becoming almost “liberal” in his dotage, an Obama man (or at least pretending to be so for bidness reasons) and is prolly steamed with the Editor, at whose feet the cartoon apparently has been laid.

ADD: all you copy editor types (Cyn, I’m looking atchew) please don’t beat me up for that string of parentheticals, please?

@FlyingChainSaw: All the quadripeds in North America will be gone inside of 6 months, but the pelagic fish, they will be the last thing left. Those with sailboats may well be the best off of all, sir.

Saab has filed for bankruptcy, the first major make in my lifetime.

Prommie: Yes, and also a member of the General Motors family of SUCK. The Saturn division is probably next. And then Delphi will layoff another 10% of their workforce, and the whole thing goes to hell.

Incidentally, I jumped out of the stock market yesterday. Couldn’t take it any more. I’ll wait until Dow 6,000 (or employment data that does not totally blow goats) before getting back in again. Srsly, Wall Street: screw you guys, I’m going home.

@nabisco: You know of his father’s legend at Gallipoli and in adventures advocacy journalism in South Australia?

@Prommie: So what’s with the stinkpot?

@FlyingChainSaw: Life is filled with compromises, isn’t it? In some ways, Mrs. Prom and I resemble Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in Green Acres, I was content to go days without bathing, tromping through the wilderness with all I needed on my back, she required 700-count sheets and a down duvet, and always, always, AC current for the hair dryer. Boating was itself a compromise, its similar to Winnebago-“camping” but one can still pretend to some fucking dignity. But then even sailing was taken off the table, heeling was considered intolerable. Flapping sails are so scary, having to haul on a sheet or a halyard occassionally was a burdensome and stressful imposition. And so, the trawler. As usual, I agreeably compromise, until the point is reached where my original goals are completely lost in the distance, a speck on the horizon, and I find myself living a life I never wanted, never even imagined, in fact find repugnant in nearly every way. I am a democrat.

@Prommie: You might just get a small sailer for afternoon sails. Once you’re away, you’re gone. In another life, I remember a member of our yacht club who had a long bout with cancer. I never saw him with hair, actually. Might well have been multiple onsets. Guy had a small sail boat, maybe 19 footer, painted with primer that looked like it had seen far better days. He’d load up girlfriend, friends, cooler, park his butt on the transom, push off with his foot, pull back on the mainsale and headsail lines and head into the channel in majestic silence. Fellows would invariably shout their farewells, ripe with jealousy, usually something along the lines of “Fucking show off!” I dunno if he even had a Seagull on the thing. The way he made ocean transport a matter of mind, spine and wind, that made me want to sail.

@Prommie: Marine diesel fuel prices are way down. The Chinese have parked 5 % of their container ships because they ain’t got nothin’ to ship in them. Throughput at the ports of LA/Long Beach, home to over 40% of US imports, fell off a cliff in December. All in all, this is a really good time to get a cigarette boat and import goods from Colombia.

@FlyingChainSaw: We had one of these as our first boat, nice, sturdy, its no racer, but it had salty lines and accomodations sufficient for camping out in gunkholes, if you were accustomed to roughing it just a bit, which of course means we never did (gotta have that hot shower and AC current). http://www.sailingtexas.com/sseaward17100.html

@Prommie: Wow. Nice, broad beam, must have been a stable ride, too. Shame, it is big enough to hook a camp bag shower onto the mast. Still, hair dryers don’t do DC. Ended up on one trip in far north Queensland on the side of the Daintree River where there’s no grid, at a cabin operation run completely on solar power. Huge signs everywhere NO HAIR DRYERS! They’d run fine but could prematurely drain the batteries if someone stood there for 45 minutes with one of those 100,000 watt paint-remover guns they call hair dryers.

@FlyingChainSaw: Hey FCS! One of my livejournal friends posted this and this, and I was like hey I recognize that second pic! Seeing the launcher makes it even more awesome, though.

@drinkyclown:

Oh My God, that is the most awesome thing ever.

TJ: Bibi is going to form a government in Israel. The End is near. If I were working in an Iranian nuclear facility, I’d get real familiar with the exit routes.