200,000 people showed up in Berlin today to hear Obama dish it out. Apparently his speech was preceded by reggae a concert.

happy birthday hemmingway

Somehow On

Some of Beckett's prose is being performed on stage this week in New York. I don't live in NYC, but if I did, I'd be there for at least two performance.

And maybe, just maybe they'll think to throw in that bit about laughter from Watt.

Do you have diesel on tap?

I've been badly slacking on the blog front. Damn grad school. Anyhow, the internet is still alive and well, apparently, so here's a nice little video of Naomi Klein on Faux News talking about disaster capitalism.

By the way, apparently Fox News has a show that takes place in a bar? What a truly vapid idea. And whose idea was it to invite this well-informed, articulate, anti-capitalist intellectual into happy hour?



From The Opinion Mill

Bon Iver - "Skinny Love"

Monday morning music videos

Les Savy Fav's "What Would Wolves Do?"



Santogold's "L.E.S. Artistes"

Garden

I finally got around to taking pictures of our garden and uploading them to shutterfly. Here's the link.

And here's a shot of this week's non-tomato harvest:


*Update: OK, I've been seriously disenchanted with shutterfly. It's just not very easy to use. Flickr is about a thousand times better, by which I mean that it's faster to use. Here's a link to the same garden photos at Flickr.

Record keeping

It's totally weird to me to see the Obama/McCain campaign playing out like Kerry/Bush. It's not just that McCain is flagrant flip-flopper and will be called out as such during the election, but he's also an absentee Congressman. According to Think Progress, "McCain now ranks as the #1 most absent senator of the 110th Congress, having missed 61.8 percent of the votes." Chalk up another Bush/Kerry dynamic in reverse for 2008. And the best part? He has no fucking idea.

Happy Birthday, Bushie

Check this out. Here's still-President Bush giving a totally innocuous speech at Monticello yesterday. What's really great about this 9-minute speech is that protesters in the crowd seriously interrupted it. About once a minute you can hear people yelling things like "War criminal" and "He brought fascism to these shores." Check it out:



Just imagine if every single one of Bush's speeches went like this. Amazing.

Holler Back

I don't know why I find making wordles so fun, but I do. Two more in response to Gerry's great Wes Anderson wordles:

Apocalypse Now and Proust's Swann's Way:

              

Here's a link, also, to all my wordles so far. 

word clouds

Here's a Wordle of Joyce's Ulysses. Thanks Gerry.

And, for good measure, a little Paradise Lost:

The mindless menance of violence in America

RFK, in 1968, on senseless violence.



Happy Independence Day.

Via Crooks and Liars.