This is why so many people hate rent-a-cops.
(He seems to be an actual member of the Baltimore police force, but the conduct shown is so unworthy of a badge that rent-a-cop is still the best way to describe him.)
The very last line, cut-off mid-sentence, is wickedly meta. I'd love to know what the rest of the "If I find myself on [...]" threat was.
Your latest piece seems to be a first-person narrative, albeit a satirical one. But do you really think of yourself as "young, hip, and cynical"? (emphasis added) Having graduated college in 1990, you're surely at least 40 years old, especially given Canada's 13th year of grade school.
(Gen-X, maybe, if "born in the 1970s" isn't a hard-and-fast requirement. (Is 1966 the traditional Boomer/X cutoff?) Youthful, not so much.)
Incidentally, kudos on managing to write the quintessential atrocious Maureen Dowd column without actually being Maureen Dowd.
Re ZD's comment below, I think there's been a sharp increase in the quality of both female [vice-]presidential candidates and non-white.
Think back to 1984: Was Geraldine Ferraro (of all people) really the best available female Democrat? (Given that Paula Hawkins and Nancy Kassebaum were both Republicans, and that with Barbara Jordan or Shirley Chisholm there may have been reluctance to cross two barriers at once...)
Elizabeth Dole was a perfectly cromulent second-tier candidate; somebody will be the next Liddy Dole before someone else actually does break the female nomination/election barrier.
Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton?!? I love the conceit that someone can plausibly go from community activism direct to the White House.
Yo, Professor: What's a five-letter word for a bust QB and even-bigger-bust baseball prospect who's in the process of failing at life?
Why I think it's...
This is an unbelievably good op-ed, from the opening anecdote (almost too good to be true -- but it has names! (I hope the 83-year-old doesn't get angry)) to the final intonation.
Paraphrasing Tony Shalhoub as Monk, Dowd has "a gift -- a a curse" that she seems to be capable of producing outstanding op-eds when, and only when, she's in the process of burying one Clinton or the other (or both), for example describing their own marriage as "a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies."
Has it really be 16 years (no: actually 15.5) since the first time I tried to explain to a college freshman classmate the point embedded in this MoDo quote?
"Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman."
(emphasis in original, but changed here from italic to bold)
Abstracting away from the politics (if that's even possible), I think one key to the greatness of this piece is that she avoids gratuitous cutesy pop culture allegories. (Gratuitous cutesy pop culture allegories are to her what gratuitous typecasting (with even more gratuitous neologism) is to David Brooks; those are arguably different flavors of the same embarrassing writing tic/crutch.)
Who or what told White Lion they could besmirch their legacy (further?) with a lame half-time reprisal of "Wait," on the third disc of the More '80s Hair Metal compilation?
"Wait" is actually a magnificent song, great for aspiring guitar players to learn. It has no business being a studio-watered-down phone-in job.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer set The Great Gate of Kiev to the words "Come forth from love's spire, born in life's fire [etc.]." Bah. Prog-rock at its most over-the-top.
The phrase "Pictures at an Exhibition" fits the main melody of that movement just fine.
In any case the EL&P recording demonstrably lasts at least seven minutes longer than it should.
AB R HR RBI BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
April 75 4 0 7 3 8 0.200 0.238 0.213 0.451
May 59 7 2 8 8 7 0.254 0.338 0.424 0.762
June 94 14 1 9 10 10 0.298 0.364 0.447 0.811
July 106 18 3 17 7 15 0.368 0.410 0.528 0.939
August 111 15 2 17 7 8 0.306 0.350 0.468 0.818
September 100 8 0 15 8 20 0.180 0.236 0.220 0.456
This isn't exactly an appeal to authority, but I wish I'd gotten around to staunchly defending the Shaq-to-Suns trade before ESPN finally published a Bill Simmons column doing the same.
This is grounded in intuition rather than analysis, but then so was my (OK, everyone's) belief that the Giants would get big playoff momentum from nearly upsetting New England.
The two situations are similar, in that bean-counting points strongly one direction but Hollywood storytelling points strongly in another. The big difference seems to be that most people thought the Giants would do great in the playoffs (where at the time, "great" could mean even as many as two playoff wins, much less four), while almost nobody likes the Shaq trade.
But I also have to admit that they're not nearly as damning as I thought they might have been.
Can I get odds on whether Seth Macfarlane's best Chris Berman impression makes it to network TV one way or another this year?
(If you weren't already familiar with these, the best (and first one made public) is the bottom one on the linked post.)
[adjective] [singular noun that refers to performance] with [female celebrity name] + [number] [plural noun that refers to people in a kinky way]
Sadly, none of them have been all that compelling or even unintentionally funny.
Happy belated birthday (turned 18 on February 11).
Something something Colin Farrell etc.
But everyone knows the real milestone this year is April 15.
(Kaus's February 12 entry explains what's reprehensible here far better than I could.)
The "cult following for Obama" meme is a quintessential straw man, in that I've seen it attacked many places without ever really seeing it embodied. Maybe I just have blinkers on (but nowhere near the blinders Krugman has: from which planet did he file that one?).
The link in the parenthetical comment above is via Ann Althouse's blog, and it turns out the common element to this post is Richard Nixon of all people.
Che?! (The original source video seems to be here, from Houston local news.) I realize he can't control everything his local branches do, but I'd love to hear someone ask his opinion of Che for the record.
This isn't "Patriotism" so much as the basest social engineering. (I like that team Barack understand behavior economics, but please, use it as a shield, not a sword.)
Bad news about taxes, if true.
So how irrational am I if, having read all that, and believing what I do about what to do with/in Iraq, I still think he's the preferable Democratic nominee? (Blame B. Clinton's January antics.)
(Fourth league, but the other three are teams for which I've kept the same name over the years.)
Jungle Patrol: I plan to rotate the tag-line between the various quotes featured on that link.
Developed in 1964 by economists Armen Alchian and William R. Allen, the [Alchian-Allen] theorem states that adding a per unit charge to the price of two substitute goods increases the relative consumption of the higher price good.
--Marginal Revolution, pulled from a post that's actually about long-distance relationships.
Can you think of substitute goods for which the Alchian-Allen theorem seems to get it backwards? In particular, a particular set of goods whose pairwise price difference at the same location is almost always exactly 10 cents per unit, but whose unit prices have basically doubled over the past few years?
Gas, of course.
Am I right, though? When gas prices go up, don't people become slightly more likely to get regular rather than premium? The A-A theorem would suggest the opposite.
Or so The Onion claims, as the news straight line to their man-on-the-street punchlines. (The news hook there is always genuine news, but this one I don't have any immediate other source for.)
So I just have to ask, what took them so long? A world-class city like NYC, with so many tourists, I would have assumed this had become common practice years ago.
The first punchline is "I'd like to refer everyone to Lou Dobbs for my opinion on this matter." -- that reminds me just how appalled I was by how outraged other people were that some Texas pizzeria franchises would dare to take pesos.
Part 1 of N; forgive the ugly formatting.
AB R HR RBI BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
April 86 24 5 15 24 16 0.326 0.473 0.593 1.066
May 108 16 2 14 10 23 0.259 0.322 0.426 0.748
June 86 9 1 10 13 21 0.256 0.356 0.360 0.717
July 73 16 4 16 8 17 0.356 0.427 0.658 1.084
August 93 16 3 8 16 21 0.269 0.382 0.452 0.833
September 75 10 1 5 8 19 0.200 0.282 0.267 0.549