Things that have nothing to do with Keith Richards.

Drudge looks like this right now:



Great photograph of Keith Richards. I'm really enjoying it, but... robot rape? The link goes to The College Fix:

John Banzhaf, a well-known activist professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School, says experts disagree on the consequences of allowing people to engage in mock acts of rape with humanoid dolls, and lawmakers should vet this issue as soon as possible....

“The obvious first step would be to have hearings and do studies to determine just how serious the threat is, whether there are any real benefits to having sexbots programmed to simulate being raped, and then what if any new laws, regulations, etc. might be appropriate,” he said....

Sexbots, already in use in European brothels, can be intentionally set to “frigid” mode in which the user must effectively rape the robot because it will resist advances....

Let me know when they make a robot in the image of Keith Richards and program it to "effectively rape" the customer who intentionally sets herself in "frigid" mode. 

The "In Defense of Cigarettes" piece at the link does feature a (different) photo of Keith Richards smoking and a text reference to him, but it's just the fusty Weekly Standard musing about whether it was better back in the good old days:

I liked the ceremony of the cigarette. The implicit danger of starting a fire near your face. The punctuation that talking while smoking affords, giving your words animation and shading: the stops and starts, the dramatic pauses, sitting still after exhaling while letting the smoke do all the work around you. It could make even some suburban hump drinking piss-water beer at the Greene Turtle on a Tuesday afternoon feel like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or like Keith Richards in life.

What's a suburban hump?  Is "hump" even a noun there? Suburban hump drinking piss-water beer... I'm just guessing that "hump" and "beer" are nouns, that there's a type of person called a "hump" who lives in suburbia and that beer needs to be compared to piss for the billionth time.

The OED does have 2 definitions of the noun "hump" that are a type of person. One is "hump-backed person." The other is "Sexual intercourse; (hence) a woman who makes herself available for sexual intercourse. coarse slang." So it's like calling somebody a "fuck." But is it special for women? Because I don't get the process of smoking making a woman feel like Robert Mitchum. I do, however, understand how a woman smoking might get into the feeling that she's like Keith Richards.

"I meet my Glass Guide, Danielle. She is young and blonde, and bears some resemblance to the actress Alicia Silverstone."

"I pull out a micro-recorder, asking if she minds if we document the experience. She doesn’t. She is wearing Glass, too, as do all the Glass Guides. With camera lenses embedded in our titanium eyewear, we are all documentarians now, although she asks me not to photograph other Glass base-campers when I pull out a traditional camera. It’d be a shame to violate their privacy while they’re learning how to violate everyone else’s."

Writes Matt Labash, with a photograph to prove not only the resemblance to actress Alicia Silverstone, but also the disquieting dorkiness Google Glass imparts even to those who resemble Alicia Silverstone.



This look, of course, is part of what other people with Glass will catch on you, if you have Glass. We'll all be Glass-y eyed, and yes, you might say, Labash probably chose the stupidest-looking shot of not-Alicia, but the internet is only just beginning to fill up with shots chosen by other people, often on the principle of stupidest-looking.

Later in the article:

Colleagues find the spectacle dorky enough that three of them whip out their smartphones to click pictures of me, causing me to threaten violence if anyone posts them to Twitter. 

So, within Labash's moral scheme, how many lashes at Labash does not-Alicia get?

With or without Glass, we are already a surveillance society.

Much more at the link, including using Google Glass at church, during communion, in a casino, counting cards.

"Oh, and one more thing: F--you."

In The Weekly Standard, Matt Labash has a long, colorful article about Ward Churchill, whom he followed about and had a long drunken conversation with. An excerpt:

That night, Churchill, his wife Natsu, and I meet up at the Hotel Durant bar, just off the Berkeley campus. ... [W]e tuck into a bay-windowed nook with a no smoking sticker displayed prominently. "I usually put that right over my ashtray," he rasps.

Seeing as how we're getting along so famously, I pop out my tape recorder and start with a softball. "Why do you hate America?" I ask him.

"Next question," he says. "Why do you beat your wife? When you answer that, I'll answer yours."

I go with a different approach, asking what Easter means to him. "Easter?" he says, as if he's just heard the word for the first time. "That's when that poor man was crucified. Is that after he'd been entombed, and they rolled the rock back, he ran out, saw his shadow and ran back in?"

I take the Punxsutawney Jesus crack to mean that Churchill is up for a good mud-wrestling match, so I order fire-waters all round (he's a Jameson's Irish Whiskey man), and we hunker down for a three-hour duel. ...

As the night wears on, I feel transported back to my college days, when, on any given evening, you could end up in an off-campus bar with some batty radical professor, drinking, arguing, and throwing darts--at each other. Churchill and I, in repeated cycles, suffer through the classic three stages of happy hour: boozy bonhomie, injurious repartee, then schmaltzy reconciliation.

We find common ground on a few things. We agree that singer Townes Van Zandt is God, or was, until he drank himself to death. We resolve that Paul Newman characters make for good children's names (Luke, Hud, etc.). We concur that one of the most satisfying lines in the English language (Churchill's favorite) comes from Dashiell Hammett in The Dain Curse, when he describes a woman's face as a "dusky oval mask between black hat and black fur coat."

We disagree on nearly everything else, sometimes violently. ...

We patch things up, for the most part. And by the end of the evening, I again posit to Churchill that he knows no transgression unless it's American transgression, that his calculus considers only the wars we've fought, but never the wars the world never had to fight as a result of American might. I tell him that communism, which set into motion so many of the American policies he detests, was no joke--it took the lives of 100 million people. At this, he blanches. "You don't really want to sit here and get into an arithmetical tally of who killed more people. Both have killed astronomical numbers of people in order to maintain themselves. Neither is defensible. The Soviet Union, however, has the virtue at this point of not being here anymore. The United States cannot claim that credit."

As I settle the check, and Churchill and his wife get up to leave, he says offhandedly, "Oh, and one more thing: F--you." I think he's joking, but in case he's not, on behalf of the little Eichmanns, I offer back with relish, "F--you too."

Great article. There's much more in it. You should read it.

A developing wave of revulsion.

David Carr (in the NYT) reports, amusingly, on the disgust New Yorkers are feeling about the approaching Republican conventioneers. The best quote is from The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash:

They can say that they won't even know we are here, but they will. We will plunk down our garment bags in their hopelessly trendy hotels, standing out like Good Humor men in our summer-weight khaki suits while all those hipster squirrels scramble for our tips. ... They needn't worry. The contempt is mutual."

I also liked this, from Details editor Daniel Peres:

I don't want to see a lot of bad Men's Warehouse suits and a lot of badly parted hair walking around my neighborhood. All Republicans part their hair the same way.

Note the assumption that all Republicans are not only repulsive, but male. Or do Republican women have Trent Lott hair too?

The article also contains an interesting comparison between the way power operates in in New York and in Washington, which is connected to the feelings of mutual contempt. The theory is that Washington power is all about what position of power you hold, but New York power is less "hierarchical" and more "dispersed": In New York, you can be powerful through physical beauty or controlling access to a trendy place. The notion seems to be that people who have succeeded playing one city's power game find it quite unsettling to share physical space with the set of powerful persons produced by the other city's game.