Your Witness

A Few Good Sins…

Kaffee: *Pontus Pilate, did you order the Crucifixion?*
Judge Gabriel: You *don’t* have to answer that question!
Pontus Pilate: I’ll answer the question!

[to Kaffee]
Pontus Pilate: You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to.
Pontus Pilate: *You want answers?*
Kaffee: *I want the truth!*
Pontus Pilate: *You can’t handle the truth!*

If I were a cross-examining trial lawyer… I’d be mixing martinis while the interns got stoned while inflating the bills.

@Benedick: that’s closer to the truth than you think.

I’ve done a cross or two – this guy would just say: “I didn’t say that, I didn’t say that ….” They even lie about their lying.

@blogenfreude: “I don’t know…” “I can’t remember…” “I don’t remember…” is what opposing counsel has trained their witnesses to say.* At one point in a deposition, an attorney I work with said to the witness, “I’m getting concerned about these memory problems you’re experiencing. Have you seen a doctor yet about this?” when the witness said he didn’t remember anything about a two hour meeting he attended the day before the depo, including what was discussed and who was there.

*including their 30(b)(6)/person most knowledgeable designees. Now that’s fun for us in the long run.

@ Tommcatt: Just received an urgent email from a Seattle casting director with the subject “ASIAN MEN NEEDED” and thought of you ; )
How’s the new house/neighborhood?

Meanwhile, I’m still rage stroking about this anti-choice GOP fuckwad tidbit straight from the collected stories of Margaret Atwood.

Oh, hi…oh!

Is it just the same five or six of us rattling about the bird cage, or has the drinque cart been moved to another location?

Signed, Mystified in Missoula

I roll through the old neighborhood once a week to see what’s going on.

@flypaper: Howdy!

Can’t speak for the others, but I’ve been craazzeee as fuck with the job for the past six months (make it 18 months) while praising the Flying Spaghetti Monster for having a job. The more personal inside shit upon which some of us would prattle have been moved to the Stinque sandbox on the Book of Faces, to which many (but not all of us) belong.

@flypaper: I’m here. It’s mostly a political blog, and right now the political world/entire country is in the process of being killed D-E-A-D by the Kamikaze RepubliKKKan CONgress (my vote would be that they just stay on permanent vacation), so not lots to get into at the moment.

Thanks all! My web usage has been little to none, not because I don’t have the means or I’m going all CRAAYZEE and living off the grid, but just because, well, books, forests and some circumstantial old acquaintances have happened and I found that living real time was actually quite fun. But damn I miss me some Tetris.

@SanFranLefty: Believe it or not, never adopted the Book. My SO keeps me apprised of the goings on of our genetic kin (not to mention a few mutants, yegads!), and other than that I just never quite got the point. Is there Tetris?

@¡Andrew!: I’ve abandoned politics. I’m a disbeliever. There is no there, there.

@flypaper: I’ve abandoned politics. I’m a disbeliever. I think you just hit the nail on the head: as the bishop said to the actress. To see the most brilliant politician of my lifetime – and plus the neckties – harried almost to death by…

I can’t even type this. I only ask that you don’t make me watch Chris Matthews. Just never again. As our president put it: You have drinks with Mitch McConnell.

All of us need more assless chaps in our lives. (Selfies! Woo hoo! Catt!) And might I add, kudos to noje for keeping us going. True, he has no life, living off the Cheetos crumbs he sucks from his birks in a basement in some hellhole that isn’t L.A., but still he is a good person. Up to a point.

Plus, living here in paradise, if I’m not fracturing bones I’m slicing pieces off myself. Are any of us safe anywhere?

@flypaper: Most of us diehards are around pretty regularly. One gets exhausted by outrage and just wants to look at videos of puppies and kittens.
I saw my first new “Mitt” sticker today on an SUV (with UC Berkeley–Berkeley! WTF?–license plate holder). It was a new one, just “Mitt” in dark blue on an ombré blue background. No year, no office. Terrifying.

@Benedick: Wait, we have basements in Southern California?

@nojo: Wait, we have basements in Southern California?. Darling, I thought you lived in the space under your parents’ house: there are those who call it Possum Gulley but that’s not me. Though technically it isn’t excavated on account of no dirt was dug out still no one wants to go down there. You know: cats and such as.

@Mistress Cynica: @Mistress Cynica: One gets exhausted by outrage. Oh yes. For me it began with the Stewart/Colbert futility demo in DC that followed hard on the hippy whatsit ‘occupy’ movement of uselessness on Wall Street. Can anyone please explain what that was? I no longer watch Stewart or his ilk. Supercool smack downs of John Boehner mean shit if you don’t show up to vote.

My re-reading of Lord Jim has been troubling to say the least. Not only on account of the ridiculous plot and preposterous narative gambit: no. now I find it’s got all the moral heft of an episode of Wonderwoman. I read and adored all Conrad’s works in my late teens/early twenties: was I so dumb?

Just back from Scotland where I learned about the warm and peaty single-malts from Islay. Worth the price of the trip, right there. The English oppressors did a good job about scaring 55 pct of the Scots electorate into fearing that their jobs and pensions would go away if Scotland became independent.

@Mistress Cynica: Kal does have a business school, so maybe that it explains the juxtaposition.

@Dodgerblue: A little Shelley Oh hotness to get your Monday back at work going.

@SanFranLefty: I am thinking lewd thoughts about FLOTUS. With no other FLOTUS has this happened or had any chance of happening.

@Dodgerblue: So you refuse to come clean about Bessie Truman?

@nojo: Or Jackie O. Not my type.

@Dodgerblue: Pudding supper. It’s a thing.

@flypaper: I don’t know if there’s Tetris on the Book of Faces (mental note to self: Figure this out, because Tetris calms me more than a big bowl of weed), but there are multiple variations of Scrabble. I miss baked, goddess/St. Christopher/St. Francis bless her heart now raising hell, hugging puppies, and picking up dog shit in the dog park in the sky, because she was guaranteed to always kick my ass and Dodgerblue‘s when we’d play Scrabble on the Book of Faces. Nowadays, your stinquey friends are talking trash and playing Words With Friends in one-on-one games. If you’re up for some wordplay,share your WWF nickname and we will challenge you in 60 seconds.

@SanFranLefty: Careful — she’s good, and ruthless.

In other news, the results of my organizations rebranding efforts are to be released this morning. We spend a ton of $$ on this, money that will not go to fighting polluters, and I can only hope that assless chaps are somehow involved.

@Dodgerblue: Swing free, or die?

@SanFranLefty: Hmm, must investigate. Is this like Wordscraper? Is there an app for that, there always seems to be an app for that.

Baked was awesome, in the original sense of the word. I saw someone directed us to what used to be Wonkette. My lord, is that place run by middle schoolers now?

@flypaper: That’s better than what the branding consultants came up with: my organization’s name as the tag line under a graphic that a friend likened to a bear farting.

@Dodgerblue: Is that what that is? Peeked earlier, didn’t know whether that was the new one.

Saul Bass rolls over in grave, etc.

@flypaper: Yes, like Wordscraper, but yes there’s an app for this one too.

@Dodgerblue: I went to their website and it looked same as it ever does. And featuring one of the spokesmodel celebrity scolds who travels everywhere by private jet.

@SanFranLefty: The farting bear is being rolled out slowly, so to speak.

Nice win for your boys last night.

@Dodgerblue: Sucks that they’re playing the Montreal Expos Nationals in the middle of the work day…

@SanFranLefty: This is why God created mlb.com.

@SanFranLefty: @Dodgerblue: Whoa, whoa, whoa there. No love for Los Piratas, even in their spectacular fail from grace?

The Nats are MLB’s answer to sports gentrification in ONC. Possibly the whitest of white crowds, all exurbs and twenty-something policy students (sorry, Mellbell…) who have adopted them. Since SFL set me straight on the Night of The Collapse, I’ll boost her Gigantes (sorry Mr. SFL, that is not how I intended it to come across, knowwhatimean?).

@Beggars Biscuit: Y’know, I’ve been to a couple of Nats games in their park, including one with MellBell while she was taking a break from kicking my butt in WWF, and I noticed how whitey-white the crowd was. It’s not like that at Dodger Stadium.

@Dodgerblue: As I listened to the record-setting 18-inning six hour game game on AM radio while watching Fox Sports with the sound muted, I thought there seemed to be a sea of white at Nationals Stadium, and not just from the rally towels the Nats fans were hanging over their faces because they couldn’t stand to watch the insanity unfold. I felt like I had run a marathon when that game ended, can’t imagine what it felt like for the players who actually were in the game.

@Beggars Biscuit: Favorite random factoid of last night: Giants player Brandon Belt (who finally put everyone out of their misery with his 18th-inning home run) played in the longest college baseball game in NCAA history with our Universidad de Tejas Longhorns.

@SanFranLefty: I went to the ballgame yesterday late afternoon with 3 other Jews. My buddy drove us in his Mercedes. If there is a Hell, we’re going there.

@Dodgerblue: But at least you were able to calculate Matt Kemp’s Yom Kippur WAR.

/shows himself out/

@Beggars Biscuit: Nice. Kemp hit that ball like Jehovah smiting a miscreant.