“Cut His Nuts Off” | July 9th, 2008
I’m picking up a hint of jealousy here.
You’d think a guy who did so much to allow this nomination to happen would have saved the personal stuff for the ride home.
Archive for July 2008
Esquire’s 75 Things To Do | July 9th, 2008
My new copy of Esquire arrived today, featuring a list of 75 things every man should do by Tom Chiarella. (Sadly there’s no online link yet.) This is a sequel, the previous list being 75 skills every man should master. I notice this month’s version got a big fold-out ad placement from Patron, and on the heels of the previous list it’s one of those nice edit specials that practically sells itself to advertisers. In this day and age of the media industry, it’s reassuring to see nearly any ad buy, much less a foldout.
While there are many good entries, and by that I mean several that I’ve done, this list is at times a bit too cosmopolitan for my taste — eat mussels in Bruges? Live in a hotel suite for a week? I don’t think it takes riches to achieve a great list of worthwhile accomplishments. Here are my addenda:
- Buy a home. Care and ownership is a surprisingly humbling experience.
- Read from the Western canon. Going back and hitting those high-school requirements you missed really is worth it.
- Have more than one bad-date story. Mine are the time that I was three hours late, bombed the execution, gave up on things completely, then later found out I should have called anyway because the girl was disappointed that she never heard from me; and the time a date of mine got drunk and started heckling the comedians at the stand-up club. You need a good supply of these for when you’re married and still at a party with single people.
- Own a pet. Good preparation for kids. Plus, fun.
- Gain a firsthand memory of just why violence is bad. Get beat up, beat someone and feel guilty, or just watch a fight and be sickened by it — it’s far too easy to be a cheerleader when you’re far away.
- Swim in a natural body of water. Fewer people do this than we’d think.
- Join a national organization. The military is a great one, but so are the Sierra Club, PADI and the Elks Lodge.
- Go to a city council meeting. The business of altering people’s lives can be surprisingly mundane.
- Listen to an old guy’s stories. That’ll be you someday wishing it mattered just as much to someone else.
- Put one of your stories in writing, even if you’re the only one who rereads it. Nothing like the written word to imbue meaning.
Steelers: At Least the Other Guy Is Pittsburgh Too | July 8th, 2008
I’m reserving judgment on how I feel about this potential Steelers sale until I know more. But whoa, big changes potentially ahead.
Why Obama Is Breaking Right | July 5th, 2008
This Frank Rich piece from the NY Times makes a good point about the listlessness that seems to have infected the Presidential campaign in the past month or so. Most of that is attributable to the summer vacations drawing away the attention of both the press and the media audience, but it’s true that there hasn’t been a lot of substance recently. So why though does the Obama campaign move away from all that fun audacity of hope stuff?
Thing is, Obama and his campaign have the calculation down: he isn’t going to win the election by appealing to Frank Rich, and no matter how much his changed policies on Iraq and public-campaign financing make his original fans angry, they aren’t going to matter much to the rest of the electorate that has tuned things out until the fall and didn’t agree with the lefty positions on those issues in the first place. He can also save the exciting rhetoric for the time that the spotlight’s turned back on. It’s cynical, but Obama surely won’t lose left-leaning voters in the general election — they’re going to sit this one out after what happened in 2000 and 2004? — and can only potentially gain middle-ground voters by moving that way. Sure, it’s inconsistent, but sometimes you gotta know who you can afford to piss off, and that’s usually the party base.
