Ummm… No?

She also heard former President Bill Clinton say that Obama was not eligible to be president because of his lack of birth records. In fact, she said it was common knowledge around many top Democrats. Bill Clinton has often said that he would go public with the information when the time was right.

Before that could happen, his close friend and head of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Bill Gwatney was murdered in his office and then someone told Bill that he was next if he said anything about Obama’s eligibility.

Well, Clinton got what he deserved after killing Vince Foster.

Okay. That site’s a whole bag of crazy.

You know what I hate? Everything.

There’s a memo somewhere at Fox HQ with the words “wink,” “nod,” and “certificate.”

If you work at Fox, we here at Stinque WANT THAT MEMO.

Or, alternatively, first-hand knowledge of Heather poking her head into an editor’s office, looking sly, asking “hey… can I ask you something?”

Come on, anonymous Fox staffer. In your heart, you know it’s the right thing to do. Or something.

Start snitching.

@Benedick: Here. Like this.

“Here’s a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished.”

@Lost in the Negative Space: I know that DFW has his fans around here — no, not the tornado-hit DFW — but may I just gag for a moment? Thank you. And the next time anybody uses that sentence, make sure it applies to Shakespeare.

Frothy Mix, after losing DC & Maryland: “It’s Halftime!”

I never knew lube and fecal matter could be so adorable.

@nojo: Plus cheese? Isn’t there a primary in Wisconsin tonight? I just flew back from Beijing and am somewhat vermished.

@Dodgerblue: Wisconsin’s too early to call. Frothy’s speaking in Pennsylvania, because that’s all he has left.

And Mittens takes the cheese.

Voting in D.C. is funny sometimes. The ratio of Democrats to everyone else (Republicans and Greens) at my polling place was nine to one, and apart from a handful of precincts in the wealthiest ward that will probably be the case across the city.

@nojo: You’re showing your age. ;-P

(Stand by for preface that is really an attempt at loin girding.)

John Jeremiah Sullivan hit on something a lot of people don’t understand or agree with (and that’s cool), and The Tortured Artist Thing is, well, tortured.

Pretty normal and grounded people like you read his work differently than abnormal and ungrounded people like me. His dad studied with that Wittgenstein’s guy’s last assistant, and Not the Airport DFW wrote an essay as an undergraduate about free will that was posthumously published, Fate, Time and Language. (No, I haven’t read it–I think I’d get a headache.) This is from the preface:

[David Foster Wallace] found Philosophical Investigations, the crowning statement of [Ludwig Wittgenstein’s] late philosophy, to be “silly”.

As Wallace would later admit, his intellectual leanings in these years may have been influenced by a wish to differentiate himself from his father. James Wallace received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1963 from Cornell University, writing his dissertation (on the topic of pleasure) under the direction of Norman Malcolm, a close friend and disciple of Wittgenstein’s. James Wallace, like Malcolm, was an admirer of Wittgenstein’s late work, and less receptive to the kind of philosophy that David would come to embrace. “I am not interested in logic, et cetera,” James Wallace explained to me.

Okay. I only included that bit because when I see “Wittgenstein,” I think “Nojo.” It probably has nothing to do with anything except DFW died, and people rushed to publish his preschool doodles and interpret his Puyi Poo.

/loins girded

He was a generational writer. He was batshit brilliant, incredibly depressed, lonely, sensitive, and batshit brilliant. Self-consciously self-aware, too aware, and caught in some sort of mental Mandelbrot (there you go, Bene) set. Hyper-vigilant. Hyper. Guarded yet desperately needing attention. I don’t think it was schtick. As much as people with “taste” shit on Grunge (“bunch of angsty whiners”), people grounded in The Classics shit on DFW. I can see why they do, but I submit that they don’t get it, and that might be healthy for them.

As fucked up as he was, my god if he wasn’t funny. In Infinite Jest there’s an end note about videophones that is a short story in itself, and it’s side-splitting hilarious. Those end notes were annoying at first, but then I realized they weren’t digressions. Of course they weren’t organic, but I think they were a device that he used to try to map out how some of us think.

I am not a linear thinker, but he had to be to be able to demonstrate what it’s like to go off on those mental trails and somehow make it back to what you were talking about in the first place while showing the thread that went throughout.

It’s like when you’re lying in bed and thinking about something, and then you try to trace your thoughts back to the original thought that got you to that thought you were having, but then you realize you’re thinking about all these other things, and while you might not find the path from one thought to the next, you do see the thread that connects them, but it’s beyond your reach, and it disintegrates.

I don’t know if he wasn’t a linear thinker and was trained to be one, or if he trained himself to be all over the place while totally in control of what appeared to be chaos. I think the latter. Either way, I understood him.

He was different, and I understood him. And he wasn’t cool or anything. He looked weird and pretentious. I’m sure his publishers fought with him over those jacket photos (horrible!). But then he wrote stuff like Incarnations of Burned Children, and I was like, “Yeah.”

Also, Marion Barry is winning his primary with over 70% of the vote, so we have another four years of that to look forward to.

Romney is talking about the plight of single mothers living in poverty. Weird.

@mellbell: What is it about him, anyway? It’s not like he’s a brilliant politician.

Paul Ryan on teevee, talking about Obamas “broken promises” and about how Obama “refused to moderate” after 2008. Thus from the architect of obstruction and extremism in the House. O I wanna barf.

@Tommmcatt Wears A Hoodie Daily: Romney’s advantage is that he’s filthy rich, and his opponents are idiots. The soft bigotry of low GOP expectations.

If this is the Kinder, Gentler Mitt, I’m not feeling it.

@Tommmcatt Wears A Hoodie Daily: Watch The Nine Lives of Marion Barry (streaming on Netflix). It’s eye-opening.

@Lost in the Negative Space: Beauty’s truth,
Truth beauty.
Gabriel blow your root toot tooty.

I am engaged on an epic love story spanning 40 years.

@Lost in the Negative Space: I don’t know who these people are. I am such a fool.

@Benedick: I didn’t know who Lucretius was, but now I do, Toots. :-*

@Dodgerblue: ‘Vermished’ is a lovely word. Vermeer’s rendering of assless chaps.

@Tommmcatt Wears A Hoodie Daily: Paul Ryan. Bossy bottom.

@mellbell: Wait. “Bitch set me up” Marion Barry? That guy is still around?

@Dodgerblue: He is looking at a fourth nonconsecutive term representing Ward 8 on the city council. To put that in perspective, when he ran for an at-large council seat in 1990, mere months after his arrest (with election day itself coming only a few weeks after his sentencing), he carried Ward 8 despite losing miserably everywhere else.

I heard that Heather Childers feasts on dead feetuses to stay young looking because she was born in 1475 to a witch.

@ManchuCandidate: Apparently Heather can say anything as long as she prefaces it with “thoughts?” or “conversation=good!”

The Sarah Palin School of Journalism.

@Benedick: Man, there goes the nookie this weekend. Thanks. Now if I sraeted something with Mr. Catt it would only bring mind movies: Paul Ryan with his ankles up by his ears telling me I have to take my socks off before I start.

Hell, that picture probably did me in for two weekends.

@Nabisco: Anal Dog Rape. Thoughts?

@Lost in the Negative Space: There’s a Great Schism between Early Ludwig and Late Ludwig, and partisans of the former tend to find the latter (starting with the Investigations) silly. So DFW’s in good company — even if Late Ludwig is ironically a better guide to his work.

Roughly: Early Ludwig tried to theorize how language literally maps to the world. Late Ludwig thought language is a self-contained practice. More broadly, Late Ludwig was trying to show how classic philosophical problems stem from a misunderstanding of what language does and doesn’t do.

Me, I’ve never had much use for the Investigations, other than the opening pages. I was much more interested in On Certainty, mainly because I was drawn to epistemology — the theory of knowledge. (Language is an important part of that, of course.) But then, I also crossed the chasm: The Wittgentstein I still quote most frequently is from the Tractatus (Early Ludwig), although a part of the book that many find, well, silly.

In any event, my own take on Ludwig is somewhat eccentric, so there’s no point getting into a flame war over it. You’re either on or off that bus.

@Tommmcatt Wears A Hoodie Daily: Ah. Good. It’s late. I didn’t want to spend ten minutes hunting something down.

@Tommmcatt Wears A Hoodie Daily: @nojo Conversation: good!

(tanget: what would Late Ludwig think about 140 character assassinations musings?)

@nojo: The map is not the terrain. Having said that, when the map says that the Sierra Nevadas are just ahead, you have to expect to gain some altitude.

@Lost in the Negative Space: His dad wrote on ‘pleasure’. Lucretius’ subject, in the tradition of the Epicureans, I think. Noje will know.

@Tommmcatt Wears A Hoodie Daily: You’re welcome.

In other news, Chuck Colson has had a brain haemorrhage.

@Benedick: Didn’t someone steal a shitton of Vermeers in Boston? Like, walked right out of a museum with them?

ADD: No. One Vermeer and a shitton of other stuff.