Serious Question

13 Comments

1. 

   BooMan on April 24, 2015 at 12:18 pm

   The Keyes constant is constant.

2. 

   Snarki child of Loki on April 24, 2015 at 1:24 pm

   You’re going to get slang out the wazoo.

3. 

   Robin Oz on April 24, 2015 at 2:07 pm

   I love so many songs, which makes this a difficult question to answer. But I do have a favorite album, and I sort of have a favorite song on that album. The album is “III/IV” by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, and the song is called -wink- “My Favorite Song”.

   Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5bHw1McuTk

4. 

   Robin Oz on April 24, 2015 at 2:09 pm

   Oops, I misread the original post. Dang!

5. 

   ixnay on April 24, 2015 at 4:02 pm

   Copacetic is a pretty useful word. The best slang has no obvious or agreed-upon etymology. Then there is one of the fun parts of having a professional personna: use a flagrantly slang word, and then solemnly announce, “that’s a technical term.”

6. 

   Marie2 on April 24, 2015 at 4:19 pm

   Glen Ford at Jacobinmag Why They Hate Cornel West:

   As the clock unwinds on the nation’s first black presidency, much of the black political class is scrambling to rewrite the history of their own behavior over the past six or seven years. Suddenly, all of them claim to have been “constructive critics” of the Obama administration, despite the absence of any public record of such criticism when it might have made a difference.
   …

   Historical background and deeper thought in  Platypus interview with Adolf Reed, Jr.

   A good operating assumption is that any person who has access to the public microphone is on the right. …My son teaches at Illinois State University. He has remarked to me in recent years that the Martin Luther King Day speaker is the one that the student affairs staff take charge of. They’re under pressure both from the student body and the administration to produce turnouts. What the students want, because they don’t know any better, is people who are famous, people they see on TV. The resulting speaker is inevitably some form of racial self-esteem hustler. [Fascinating observations about the movie Selma in what I omitted from this quote.]
   …
   As Gottschalk notes, even if all the racial disparities in criminal justice were eliminated, for example, the United States probably would still lead the world in carceralization. Anti-racism–along with anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc., as well as diversity as the affirmative statement of them all–is a species of a genus of social and economic justice that is utterly compatible with neoliberalism: parity in the distribution of costs and benefits among groups defined by essentialized ascriptive identities. That is what is commonly referred to as identity politics. Despite the chatter among its proponents about group celebration and recognition, the substantive ideal of identity politics is a condition in which costs and benefits and potential individual winners and losers are sorted in rough proportion to their representation in the society. A “Left” committed to this metric, in addition to identifying outrages, focuses on cleansing opportunity structures of invidious and unjust discrimination along identitarian lines within what remains a regime of increasingly ruthless upward redistribution. That is a vision that marks the ultimate triumph of Gary Becker’s utopia.

   William Gerrard on twitter.  Schizophrenia at the NYTimes.  Also, “Redrum” is clever.

   Finally, Amb Pyatt continues to spew out lying tweets to increase US engagement in Ukraine on the way to regime change in Moscow.

7. 

   Marie2 on April 24, 2015 at 5:20 pm

   Waldo Tunnel Will Be Renamed After Late Comedian Robin Williams.

   The Waldo Tunnel rainbow painted archways do look like Mork’s suspenders.  Driving south on 101 (through the northern portal) is the dividing line between the SF fog belt and clear skies of Marin.

8. 

   Marie2 on April 24, 2015 at 6:37 pm

   Latest Quinnipiac poll.  Not sure how good this polling operation is at the national level, but they were good in the midterms.

   The GOP primary voter breakdown is interesting.  The GOP ladies don’t much like Cruz, Paul, and Walker.  It also confirms that Santorum was nothing but the “not Romney” candidate in 2012; he’s down at the bottom with Graham, Fiorina, and Jindal.  And “Oops” with professor specs isn’t getting any second looks for a second chance.  

9. 

   clearskies on April 24, 2015 at 6:41 pm

   I kind of like the term “kludge” (pr. klooj). From time to time I have used it in class  in reference, for instance, to a particularly inelegant but correct proof, and have received blank stares.

   • 

     centerfielddj on April 26, 2015 at 12:10 pm

     Always liked “kludge”; the weird pronunciation helps express the unusual concept.

     “Flibberjibet” is pretty fun. I use it so rarely that it’s hard to classify it as my favorite slang, though.

     “Nitwit”. Yeah, I’ll land on nitwit today. Describes plenty of people these days. Anybody who angrily demands that workers in the private and public sector should have their compensation and work rights cut; they’re REAL nitwits.

     Another thing I like is the phrase that describes a person with perfect comic pitch. “Iowa Congressman and Man Trying To Forget What He Buried In That Cornfield Steve King” is my favorite. Stephen Colbert and his writers brought us that phrase; they also brought this totally hilarious takedown of that Iowa nitwit:

     http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/q82dz5/steve-king-s-dogfighting-defense

10. 

    Marie2 on April 24, 2015 at 7:03 pm

    Charles Pierce has a good one today: Stuff The President Said Today – In which the president oversells the bad deal that is the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

    …
    It takes some big clanging brass ones to complain about ad hominem attacks after you’ve essentially just called SPW [Senator Professor Warren] and others liars. But, more curiously, after spending six years taking all manner of distasteful and racist abuse on everything from his legislative agenda to the circumstances of his birth with amazing equanimity, the president decides that this is the issue on which he will not tolerate ad hominem attacks? That’s just weird. …

11. 

    Indianadem on April 24, 2015 at 8:12 pm

    I enjoy how a lot of Hoosiers say SEE-ment when discussing concrete products. It drives Mrs. ID, who is quite proper in things grammatic, absolutely crazy.

12. 

    TarheelDem on April 24, 2015 at 10:36 pm

    One from the 1960s was “tough” with a lot of the connotations that “sick” has today.