Because it’s funny, because it’s annoying

And to help you out: UrbanDictionary.com’s definition:

1.	lookin boy
	Popularized in the song called “Lookin Boy”.. It is when you roast somebody because they look like somone or act like someone... SCOOBY DOOBY DOOO!!!!!!!!…….Mike Vick Lookin Boy

I refuse.

Can you imagine this woman as VP? Or, given how old McCain is, as President?

On the other hand, it almost seems as if the Republican Party isn’t that invested in winning this election. Or, if they were, they would stop throwing Palin in front of a camera, which is turning out to be the equivalent of throwing the party under a bus.

CBS Interview: Katie Couric takes on Palin

I’m sorry. What?

Today I interviewed someone who just moved from Philly three weeks ago.

I ask her when she can start. She gushes that she would start tomorrow if she could. “I’m SO bored.”

I don’t even know what to say. My right eyebrow is shooting up into my forehead.

How does a person move from anywhere to NYC and say she’s bored after three weeks?

Grab your camera. Go outside. Nice cool seventy-degree days accompanied by forgiving sun is hardly a thing to sneeze at. Do something touristy. She’s not from here. I know that much. She, like me, came here from the SF Bay Area. “I have NO interest in going back.” Another reason why I don’t think she’s too bright.

If you’re too dumb to enjoy NY while you’re jobless [because admittedly there is so much to do in NY, armed just with your MetroCard and open eyes], then you’re too dumb for this job.

Thanks.

Next.

I want to see what white people like.

I want to go to one of this guy’s readings. It should be funny. Does anyone else want to join?

 

Obviously for the Berkeley or SF date.

NP + C = Together 4Eva!

me:  [gushing] I love our photos.
NP: Ya, we both look super hot.  We look so good together, you and I.
me: We always do.
NP: It almost never fails. I should keep you around just so I have better photos.
[mental cross-country high-fiving is going on now]
me: I’ve thought that about you too. It’s because our heads don’t look as huge, because we both have huge heads. No more eclipsing effect!
NP: There you go.
me: And our big smiles help too.
NP: We’re proportional!
me: You make me more photogenic. We should have wedding photos done some day for the hell of it. It would look absolutely amazing.
NP: That would be hilarious. Absouletly hilarious
me: It’ll be something to hang up in your grandma’s house at least.
NP: LOL. I just cracked up in my cube.
me: Then every year we can rent babies and puppies and then infants and have glamour shots on the beach in khakis and white button downs with our sleeves rolled up.
NP: Ohhhh yeah.
me: It’ll be fantastic.
NP: Amazing. I want a photo of the two of us pouring different colored sand into a giant vase shaped like a big round head.
me: [guffaws into the quietness of my office] Oh my goodness, that would be amazing.
NP: ehehehe
me: What is the logic behind that little ceremony anyway?
NP: [eyes rolling] The merging of two different lives bladeblah
me: [brows furrowed] Via sand?
NP: [likely nodding] Via sand.
me: I’ve never considered my life as made of sand. That makes me seem dumb and small. Can we light a big candle shaped like a head too? We can have a merging themed wedding.
[Pictures of merging lanes dance in my head. There would be two giant long tables at the reception with linens the color of asphalt, maybe some fake gum ground deep into the fabric, thick yellow stripes, and they would merge to form one big "lane" and NP and I would sit at the end of merged lane. There'd be fake blinkers involved in the ceremony... the flower girl dressed as a car....]
NP: What? [Cheesy muzak begins to play in the background] You never thought how each special moment is a single grain, that alone seems so small but together creates a beautiful playa?
me: [turns green] NP, God, you’re going to make me sick.
NP: Teeheeeee. [later] I should probably try to do some work now.
me: Okay, we’ll schedule the photo-opps later.
NP: Sweet. I’ll ask my friends about their wedding photographers. I already have the beach picked out.
me: Nice, I’ll look for the rental children
NP: Okay. Make sure they have nice round heads a big smiles too, otherwise people will begin to wonder…
me: And no blond hair. That’d be the one thing we couldn’t explain.
NP: Exactly. I can see the children-renting is in capable hands.

Yes, that would be the one thing we couldn’t explain. The blond children. That’s what’ll make people wonder. Not the fact that he’s gay and I’ve never been pregnant, much less how those two ideas may mix and produce NP and I and our fair-haired spawn on a beach somewhere in khakis and white shirts, laughing easily amongst the reeds and sand dunes, taking turns hugging a golden retriever puppy.

Or the money we had to come up with to get the glamour shots on the beach.

Not that any of this this logic stops us from self-congratulatory conversations as to the aesthetics of our unlikely romance.

Because, yes, it’s true, we’d be a smoking hot couple.

Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race

[fromThe New York Times]

September 22, 2008

Editorial Observer

Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race

 

By BRENT STAPLES

 

It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated “uppity niggers” and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples.

The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.

Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye — and argued with them about things that mattered — were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.

This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche — and the national language — to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency.

A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as “uppity” in response to a reporter’s question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear.

The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. — and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama’s lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” he said.

In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed “disrespectful,” the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.

In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being “disrespectful” to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.

The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.

Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.

These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.

I think I’ll pass.

There is no trash in the world that compares to New York City’s trash. It is so disarmingly rank. It reaches up into your nostrils and pulls the wires loose in your brain. I almost walked into oncoming traffic after getting a whiff of the “juices” left on the street by the garbage truck.

At least I won’t have to put up with this for much longer.