Updated Scorecard

"The U.S. Homeland Security Department barred passengers from carrying liquids, including drinks, hair gels and lotions, on planes after officials said the foiled plot involved a liquid chemical device." --Abha Bhattarai, New US flight security targets soda, hair gel (Reuters, Aug. 10, 2006)

1865

United States 9, Confederate States of America 6

1917

United States 14, Germany 3

1945

United States 35, Germany 13
United States 63, Japan 7

1953

United States 14, North Korea 13

1991

United States 21, Iraq 0

1997

Michigan 20, Ohio State 14

August 10, 2006

United States 0, Listerine 6
United States 0, Crest 9
United States 2, Bausch & Lomb 3
United States 3, Pantene 10
United States 0, Public Humiliation 17

But hey, on the other hand, at least Americans can't be frightened

TERROR PLOT!

If this is a legitimate incident and not more ginned-up wolf-crying (and I'll suspect the former since it came from the UK), thanks go to the Brits for saving our pussy selves.

This is a country of pussies, and really, it's time for our precious pussy asses to revise the last lines of the national anthem to "the land of the pussies and the home of the pussies." For a country that views itself as exceptionalist, we certainly are exceptional at shitting ourselves every time a dozen dudes with a chemistry set step out of their flat.

Watching 10 minutes of cable news this morning, I learned that the Dow was down 30 points based on terror fears; that the price of oil is down because the markets expect bombed airlines to prompt lower fuel demands; that I'm going to be chugging saline solution to make it through security; and that Tom Cruise's offspring is called Tomkitten.

In other words: America's economy can be undermined by a group of Arab Brits smaller than my sixth-grade science class, and celebrity gossip stays retarded even when we're all about to die.

Lastly, for a bunch of dudes who fancy themselves as Churchillian, the President and his cronies sure do like to put on frilly pink dresses and hide giggling under their desks every time someone says the contemporary equivalent of Luftwaffe. Stiffen your upper lips, you fucking assholes.

Hubris

I spent part of last night typing a lengthy, digressive metapost about Joe Lieberman's loss, the kind of several-thousand-word stemwinder (read: sleep-inducer) that I liked to write in this site's first few months, but which have been rare in 2006.

Then I had a brief e-mail exchange with a friend that summed up my feelings without blathering about New Deal liberals and the good intentions of traditional neoconservatives.

Ugh.

What I wrote, slightly revised:

You're probably not surprised to hear that I'm pleased with what happened in Connecticut last night. As soon as Lieberman conceded, I donated $250 to Ned Lamont.

I consider Lieberman to be one of the "extremists" that you find troubling. Whether it has been his callous and reckless views on Iraq, his support of federal intervention in continuing Terri Schiavo's life support, or his insensitive comments concerning rape victims and contraceptive access, I do not view him as a moderate.

Add his tacit support of bankruptcy reform and Justice Alito -- not to mention his self-anointed role as national scold and arbiter of American cultural values -- and it's clear that he is not a voice of moderation, but one of big government at its worst (regulating individual conduct) and economic libertarianism at its most destructive (when it benefits major corporations).

That this could be framed as "moderation" shows how far to the right that this country has lurched.

And yet, on a human level, I find his downfall poignant. The narrative is kind of heartbreaking. Like others before him -- Nixon and McNamara, Henry Wallace and Woodrow Wilson -- his self-perpetuated collapse is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. Here was a man who had greatness in his reach but was unable to concede any flaws or see beyond his hubris. A simple, "I may have been wrong, and if I went too far, I'm sorry and will try to be more open," would have placated many of his opponents, including me. Yet rather than soften his rhetoric, or do more than give cursory acknowledgement to the concerns that fueled his opposition, he has retreated into paranoia and distortion. This campaign slowly turned into an agonizing, daily drama of a man out of step with the world around him. How did he fall so far, so quickly? Was it a sincere belief in his positions? The insulation experienced by a longstanding insider? The adulation of national press? A deeply embedded sense of self-righteousness? I don't have any answer but what's become of him should be a cautionary tale to all elected officials.

As the U.S. continues to work out a way of negotiating the world after 9/11 and Bush's Iraq fiasco, Lieberman may be the first of at least a handful of politicians, both left and right, unable to reconcile certain longstanding assumptions with a changing political environment. It speaks less to a decline in bipartisanship than to the disorientation caused by Iraq, Bush's overreaching and a motivated electorate. The right analogies aren't to 1994 but to post-Vietnam/Watergate.

Postcards

As I type this, I'm sitting on a lakeshore with my iBook, Air America commentary on the Connecticut primary channeling through while evening boat traffic and the occasional flock of Canada geese pass by. Life is not bad.

Saturday morning

For the first time in 2006, I didn't wake up in Manhattan.

At 5 a.m., Canada geese flew over the lake outside, and the honking woke me through the open window. I got up at 8:30, put on my bathing suit, and swam for a half hour. Poached eggs and black coffee for breakfast, followed by a row around the circumference of the lake. By noon, my hair was blonder and my freckles were coming out. I opened the first Bell's Oberon of the day and sat on the deck, reading this week's New Yorker and listening to Sleater-Kinney. A man and his two kids fished from a boat slowly motoring down the lake.

An entire day was in front of me, and in a brief moment of self reflection, I wondered if I had somehow gone crazy in the preceding months.

CSB Hot List!

Because it's almost 100 degrees at LaGuardia as I type this, and this heat saps the energy from what few brain cells I use for critical thinking and the like, I hereby present a Cole Slaw Blog list of shit that's relatively hot. Below you can find a list of items and their relative hotness expressed in factors of today. For example, something approximately twice as hot as today would get a factor of 2.0. You get the picture. Anyway, on to the list of stuff and its hotness in factors of sweltering August days in New York :

• A big wad of wasabi you wouldn't eat for less than a cool hundy: 1.49
• Magma erupting from the core of the Earth: 0.80
• Hot 99.7 FM, KHHK, Yakima, Washington: 0.997
  
• Summer Fucking Sanders: infinity plus one
• Gila Bend, Arizona: 1.0 (but it's a dry 1.0)
• Kennedy Airport: 0.98
• Kennedy from MTV: 0.08
• Zooey Deschanel, armed to the teeth: 3.14
• hotornot.com : somewhere between 0.01 and 0.1
• Appalachian State: 1.0 cubed.
• Kari Byron, a.k.a. the cute girl from Mythbusters, on shark patrol:
  
• That video of Bobby Abreu's former betrothed having sex on a Spanish reality show: 0.75 if you don't speak enough Spanish to translate the dirty talk from a former Miss Universe, 1.5 if you do.
• Zooey Deschanel, auditioning for a jugband: 5.38
• Crenshaw melon, right out of the fridge: - 1.0, perfectly cool
• Cool Papa Bell: -2.0
  
• The new trend of Dumpster fellatio, according to The New York Times Thursday Styles Section, June 5, 2008, in an article about hot new outdoor activities for the summer: 3.36
• Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights: 2.99
• Caliente, Nevada: 0.84
• Rebelde: 4.59
• Kate Winslet, giving me a look that can only be interpreted as 'Let's pork': 27.39

Sophisticated living

It all starts with the blowjob behind the dumpster, because when you're an attractive young lady and you arrive to the birthday party of a minor acquaintance -- a minor acquaintance who vomits shortly thereafter, vomits all night, vomits to the point where it's like The Amityville Horror and blood comes from the walls -- and you make eye contact across the crowded bar with a handsome young man, your jowls yearn. And to the dumpster you must go.*

But you're a young lady in your 20s, and you make the worst choice of your life and find yourself with another gentleman, a gentleman who horrifies your roommates when, after being sexed up, walks to the bathroom in boxer-briefs. This faux pas is second to that of the lover of your most hated roommate, whose boyfriend's porn-star boner stuns the household in a moment of indiscretion. A roommate's Cuban mother catches a glimpse, and impropriety ensues.

Yet conversation shifts when the main courses arrive. "Are you going to eat that wasabi?" a gentleman asks a well-known pussy. "I'll give you $20 if you eat that entire block of wasabi, right now."

The pussy demurs. He won't eat that wasabi unless offered $100 or more.

Conversation changes again, about the differences between eating whales and dolphins and toxic fish. Still, that pussy refuses to eat the wasabi.

Dinner ends. The group narrows from seven to three, and moves to a sake bar, and to another bar after that.

"You don't have to scuba dive to realize that finding a U-boat is some bad-ass shit," a well-known pussy observes. "My point in all this is, are submarines ever not cool?"

With no disagreement, the conversation turns cosmopolitan, to experiences in Prague and Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and the duties of royalty.

"What I think would be awesome," observes the pussy, "would be to fucking go out with people when they discover something under the ocean."

Exhausted -- either by the sophisticated conversation or by a bout weeknight drinking that began at 5 p.m. and is approaching its seventh hour -- one of the remaining three departs. She is bereft that she has tickled no one.

The author glances up to see young girls in the window outside. They are 20, 21 -- 23 at most. In the 90-degree night, they are dropping ice cubes in each others' shirts. They lift their shirts to reveal thin stomachs, ice channeling down through their breasts, dropping down to their bellies, sliding down and falling to the sidewalk below. For a moment, their navels are ice machines.

*This paragraph is 90% fictional. The rest of this post is accurate.

Blogkeeping post: reading rainbow edition

There is a new blog linked. I was a huge fan of Billmon's Whiskey Bar when I first started reading blogs regularly, just before we invaded Iraq.

The proprietor of said digital drinking establishment was trenchant and illuminating then, and now that he's back from hiatus, he remains so. Few skewer pretense and obfuscation better with just two or three well-chosen quotes. But his longer analyses are what keep me coming back. He just sees and writes through bullshit better than most of us. If he's not a daily read he should be.

I meant to post about two great rediscoveries I've had upon my return. I've recently been recording episodes of News Radio, a show I fell in love with when I first moved here, and watched in syndication sweltering in my sublet apartment on 36th Street five years ago. But I'm sure everyone is familiar with the brilliance of the show, and the corresponding tastiness of Maura Tierney.

I also recently re-read one of my favorite books, Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. If you're an idiot like me, you've often foudn yourself at the beach staring at the horizon and wondered what was over it. After reading this again, I'll probably start considering what's beneath it as well.

Shadow Divers is not as high-minded as the fare my co-blogger has been pimping (think of us as the Maslin and Kakutani of the vegetable-based blog world), but it's incredible nevertheless. It's the best piece of non-fiction I've ever read, and not only because of the fascinating story. It's not too much to describe the plot at "two scuba divers become obsessed with finding the identity of a mysterious sunken German U-Boat."

The depths Kurson is able to plumb in the story's main characters, as well as the breadth of research he does on even the most minor actors in the story is inspiring. Driven by a shared passion for discovery that's stronger than they expected, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, spend years diving the wreck of a sub that refuses to give up its identity. Did I mention that this wreck is 230 feet below the surface, and therefore a very dangerous place to dive? People die on dives like this.

Now, the location of a sunked WWII submarine isn't the sort of thing that causes textbooks to be torn up and republished but it sure as hell matters the people who were there, and to those whose sons, brothers and fathers were. I don't usually want to cry after reading about submarines, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't consider it on the E train the other day. Not bad for a beach read, right?

Kurson also manages to keep up the suspense throughout the book, a nice touch that plenty of non-fiction writers skip. I was planning for this to be a short review, with a longer, more comprehensive one to follow, but but in this heat, who fucking knows. A dip in the North Atlantic sounds like a great idea right about now.

Dick Cheney is a freedom shower

I just read the Vanity Fair article about the government's confused, disjointed response to the hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001. The portrait it paints is one of complacence. There was next to no preparation for the improbable, for the truly ridiculous, and as a result good people were forced to do the best they could with the resources and planning they had. I'm sure it's all fixed now, though. I mean, we did invade Iraq.

Reading the article, one can't help but sympathize with the men and women who found themselves at the center of the shitstorm, trying to catch up to the situation with what little tools they had. Most acquitted themselves well, including the two officers in charge of NORAD's northeastern sector.

Naturally, when their higher-ups went before the 9/11 Commission, they lied anyway.

One other fact that caught my attention: Our Vice President is a deeply troubled man. Yes, Dick Cheney was misleading when he implied he gave the order to shoot down any further hijacked airliners.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.

President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which—though no one knew it at the time—was 15 minutes after the attack was over.

It's like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel. Cheney slyly trying to make himself sound like an important world leader giving Momentuous Orders with a heavy heart. There's no reason to lie there, but he went ahead and did so anyway, in a way that conveniently makes him seem like some statesman down in the bunker, when what he was really probably doing was hoping the estate tax wouldn't eat up too much of his Halliburton stock. What a douche.

In other stupid news, members of the House of Representatives will once again be able to eat french fries. The deep-fried potatoes had previously been called freedom fries, in order to punish the French for failing to join us in the totally not-insane-at-all invasion of Iraq.

France lost approximately $37 in trade and tourism dollars, as well as royalties on the fries.

Same river, different post

Courtesy of EDSBS, it's my second straight city-by-the-Danube-themed post!

We have a kind of unwritten rule here at CSB. We don't like posting short little entries when another blog posts, and adding our agreement. (Or possibly even a "heh-indeedy.") We'll leave that to willfully ignorant obfuscators.

I'm making an exception today. Why? Two reasons. One, it's 98 fuckin' degrees, and the amount of focus and sweat it's requiring to write this post makes me feel like I'm landing a 707 in Chicago. But also this involves important shit: Budapest, a city I just visited, might soon be the home of the Chuck Norris bridge.

The government decided to open the naming of the bridge to internet voting (Oh, Hungary ...) and the Chuck Norris Bridge now leads the polling, although the site appears to be down, which is OK by me now. I admit to a bit of trepidation about naming someone else's bridge for yuks. What if Hungary retaliates, and some poor American city winds up with the Zsa-Zsa Gabor Bridge? Or the Bela Bartok Tunnel? Even the Joszef Attila Turnpike? OK, I'm done padding this post for photo purposes now.

Welcome to Buda! The state charges ... 268 forints.