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I can't figure out whether I'd rather be governed by someone stupid or someone corrupt (assuming those were the only choices and there was no third option of, say, Cory Booker).

I know it's stupid to find anything romantic about the mobbed-up antics of Quebec mayors. They pay people off; they pay people off in fancy steakhouses; the construction professionals they pay off in fancy steakhouses look more like mobsters than any other mobsters who have ever existed. And I know the mob is all about nasty stuff, and so it's not like I find it alluring.

So it's not like I wish Toronto had a mayor who was a Vegas-style crook. I just wish we didn't have a mayor who was a Vegas-sized dick. If you do a google search for "corrupt mayors," the first result is a wikipedia entry for Buddy Cianci, former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who was forced to resign twice—once because he pled guilty to assault, and once because he was convicted of racketeering conspiracy. If you do a google search for "stupid mayors," the first result is a Facebook group called "Top Ten Stupid Things Rob Ford has Done (since he was elected mayor." Rob Ford is the stupidest mayor on the internet.

There's just something so ignominious about having the Stupidest Mayor. Not even some impressionable '70s-movie-loving high-schooler will go through a phase where he wants to be Rob Ford. There is no Goodfellas for ignorant dicks.

(Actually, there probably is, but I liked the ring of that so I decided not to think about the matter any further.)

And I don't yet feel any relief. Because he might become some ignorant folk hero and get reelected. Or his brother might get elected and keep the seat warm until he's legally allowed to run again and then he'll win because he'll have become some kind of ignorant folk hero...

There's only one candidate who can take him down.



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George would save CORY BOOKER from a burning house.
I'm talking about George the cat, not television's Michael Weatherly.

Heck, Hank the Cat placed third in Virginia's senate race.

In fact, George and Stabler the guinea pig co-existed so peacefully on my lap this evening that she would be an obvious choice for deputy mayor. The only problem with that would be that there would be a lot of hay-related motions, and demands for more hay.


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I have accomplished absolutely nothing in the past week. I de-stacked a stack of UPS shipping bills from 2010 Christmas presents and re-stacked them in a different place, but I'm not convinced that represents progress.

There is a reason I have not yet unpacked and settled in more completely; there is a reason I am not writing about this (although I suppose just noting that I felt ashamed for being delighted, and then just plain delighted, and then amazed that a full ten minutes had gone by probably sums up my response more than adequately). I have been shamefully unmotivated because I recently became a besotted half-wit. Here are five reasons I recently became besotted and half-witted:
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My
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heart
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will
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surely
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BURST


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I've spent much of this past week realizing that I have many things, and that those many things have to be unpacked once they have been put in boxes and moved from one place to another. I feel like each box I moved from my old apartment somehow transformed into a Tardis en route--each one looks like it's a reasonable box-y size when closed, and then turns into a bottomless pit filled with things I really should just have thrown out when I was fourteen when opened (not that I should have thrown out the Doctor when I was 14--that analogy got away from me near the end).

I recently found a box filled with a) loose paper clips, b) unremarkable postcards from a person I'm no longer in contact with, and c) undergraduate essays. I will doubtless feel overwhelmed by the prospect of disposing of any of those things and find a way to stow it under my bed, where it will rest undisturbed until the next time I move (I sometimes think of what will happen to all of these things after I die. Some Value Village will some day be swimming in essays about Conrad featuring alliterated titles). 

And at some point within the next two days, a cat will be joining me. The anxieties inspired by that could fill a whole entire post (although really I suppose it boils down to: "A cat is moving in. I fear he will not like me"). I now look at my apartment only as a collection of small, pointy things that could be eaten. What's that on the floor? Probably a screw from that box of screws I recently knocked over. Or maybe it's a nail from that box of nails I recently knocked over.

I suppose it's possible the cat will have a taste for pulpier things--maybe he'll pass on the hardware and eat all my undergraduate essays.

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I am still recovering from the 8-hour-long Blitzer-krieg pundit attack that was Tuesday night. It was like an awesome television-drama crossover episode (the classic Magnum P.I./Murder She Wrote two-parter springs to mind)—all my pundit friends were there AT ONE TIME. Jones and Castellanos and Gergen and Crowley! Carville and Martin and some blonde lady I'm pretty sure was Republican! (Gloria Borger could be Jessica Fletcher. Van Jones could be Magnum. David Gergen would obviously be Higgins. I was going to make a crack about how Ari Fleischer could be the person whose murder they'd be solving, but then I decided that was unnecessarily nasty).

And I reaffirmed my sense of the places in America I would not like to live and the people I would not like to live with. I would not like to live with these people (because they're racists) or this person (because he's sexist—he seems to have now made this post private, so I was forced to track down a weird copied-and-then-pasted version). Although I have to thank the sexist Christian man, who credited the "slut vote" for Obama's win, because the only thing liberal sluts have been able to do in large groups together that doesn't involve crazy open-minded sex using birth control is walking, and now they have another option. You know that if this guy had published his reasoned argument about slutty lady voters a week ago, there would have been organized "slut votes," and left-wing women would have gotten all dressed up in their actual, everyday super-slut clothes and gone to the polls together. Maybe they'll still do that four years from now, but it's all too possible someone will call them sluts for doing something completely different, and then they'll start doing that together and forget all about voting in a big old harlot bloc.


POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.