Wednesday, August 29, 2007
















Thursday, August 16, 2007

Manhattan Mini-Storage Ad

Monday, August 13, 2007

Insensitivity Training, Part III

Take One
"I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to," courtesy of Rudy Ghouliani.

Battalion Chief John McDonnell, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association in New York: "I have a real problem with that statement. I think he's really grasping and trying to justify his previous attempts to portray himself as the hero of 9/11."

Take Two
"What I was trying to say yesterday is that I empathize with them because I feel like I have that same risk," he said.

"There were people there less than me, people on my staff, who already have had serious health consequences, and they weren't there as often as I was," Giuliani said, "but I wasn't trying to suggest a competition of any kind, which is the way it come across."

"He is such a liar because the only time he was down there was for photo ops with celebrities, with politicians, with diplomats," said Deputy Fire Chief Jimmy Riches, who spent months digging for his firefighter son.

"On 9/11 all he did was run. He got that soot on him, and I don't think he's taken a shower since."

[Also see: Insensitivity Training Part I & Part II.]

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Little Wisdoms

I don't advise a hair cut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bold-headed men are uptight.
- Bruce Robinson
[Editor's Note: I'm sure it's probably supposed to be "bald-headed men," but--come on--it's better this way.]

Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
- Emo Phillips

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
- George Carlin

Initially, a lot of people are put off by my work. I don't purposefully start out to make something grotesque...it just ends up that way.
- Patricia Piccinini

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean, I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.
- Mariah Carey

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
- Andy Warhol

Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?

Answer: I would not live forever because we should not live forever because if we were supposed to live forever then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know.
- Donald Rumsfeld

The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe.
- Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia

As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who was not there.
He was not there again today,
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.
- Mike Jackson (Quoted in Ghost and Ghoul - T C Lethbridge)

It's all happening too fast. I've got to put the brakes on or I'll smack into something.
- Mel Gibson

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.
- Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)

Friday, August 03, 2007

That bitch is still on delay.

From Levees.org: "President Bush has promised to veto the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), which contains flood protection projects critical to this country and to south Louisiana, a region ravaged by faulty federal flood protection."

This doesn't surprise me, though it does disgust me; after all, George W. Bush is the same man who stood in Jackson Square and pledged to rebuild New Orleans in early September of 2005, then literally pulled the plug after his speech, plunging the city back into darkness on his way out, where much of it remains to this day--yeah, he shut off all the electricity once his photo op was over. It's in When The Levees Broke, a documentary that should be required viewing. Why more Americans, including certain notoriously lax New Orleanians [read: the Eddie Jordans; the Warren Rileys], are not visibly outraged by this whole debacle is something I'll never understand.

Wake up, America.

My slightly tweaked version of Levee.org's letter:
"I strongly urge you to immediately sign the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA).

A veto of WRDA would constitute yet another terrible governmental blow to New Orleans and south Louisiana's recovery. WRDA includes major projects like 100-year hurricane protection and restoration of Louisiana's ravaged coast.

It also includes billions in crucial projects that protect other areas of the country. These projects cannot wait.

In 2005, our nation learned the hard way what happens when critical water projects go unfunded. Large sections of New Orleans were destroyed due to poor design and management of a federal flood control project. This costly destruction could happen anywhere. I would also suggest using the Netherlands's system as a model for our own levees, as that nation has certainly been much more effective than the Corps of Engineers. Katrina did not kill thousands of Americans; the breaking of the fragile, ill-conceived levees did and federal apathy continues to ensure the city's stagnation and ruin--which may very well be your goal because you are doing very little, if anything, to help restore the city of New Orleans on any level.

Taxpayers must be able to trust the critical infrastructure that protects their lives and property, or we should not be required to pay taxes."