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Three things for Thursday

Thing the First: Stanley Cup Playoffs

I’ll keep this part (relatively) brief, because I know only four or five of you are going to bother with it.  Everyone else can skip down to Thing the Second.

Right now, it looks like my predictions for the second round are not going to pan out.  Sure, the Devils and Senators could win their next four, and then my predictions would be fulfilled to the letter.  But that’s not gonna happen.  So where did I go wrong?

First of all, I picked the two top seeds (after tempting fate by picking the top four in the first round, against all odds), thinking that Ottawa’s first line was literally unstoppable and that Brodeur would make up for New Jersey’s offensive shortcomings and grievous Scottlessness in the defensive corps.  But Brodeur is playing like a mortal man, and all mortal men die, being mortal.  Perhaps he realized, upon skating to the bench after giving up six goals on his 34th birthday, that it would be a formidable task indeed to carry the Devils into the conference finals.  If that’s the case, then that’s one task he can cross off his To Do list for May.  The Hurricanes’ forechecking has been relentless, and, as I’ve been saying since April, the Canes can play much better defense than they’re usually given credit for.  That’s the real trick to these predictions, by the way—pick one team, but throw in a lot of praise for the other team, on which you can fall back in such a way as to suggest that you weren’t really all that wrong in the end.

Which brings me to the Sabres.  Look, both these 3-0 series leads are absurd.  The Sabres and Canes simply aren’t that much better than the Sens and Devils.  They’re just playing this much better in every single game—and actually, I’m not convinced that the Sabres have actually outplayed the Senators in all three.  But before you Ottawa folk jump all over your poor backup G, Ray Emery, look again at the game tape: the Sabres are out-forechecking you.  Even after game one, when you decided to stop giving the Sabres the puck in your own zone just to see what they would do, the Sabres have created all the turnovers they need.  And while you’ve got four or five truly terrifying scoring threats in Spezza, Alfredsson, Heatley, Havlat, and Fisher (who has played brilliantly), the Sabres have about ten.  Connolly may be out for the count, but Hecht is back, and now I’m hoping the Sabres become the dominant paradigm for New NHL® teams (pay attention, Calgary front office): three offensive lines of potential scorers, each of whom accounts for 50-80 points per year.  The Senators simply haven’t been able to let down their guard: after one wave of Sabres storms the blue line, another one comes along 45 seconds later, and eventually their crisp passing and dogged cycling wears ‘em down.  And did I promise you a fierce-skatin’ series, or what?  Almost every damn shift is exciting, and when these two teams play 4-on-4, it’s like watching Frictionless Hockey end-to-end.

So yeah, I blew my picks.  And I’m very happy about it.  I have my thoughts about how the conference finals will go, but I will keep them to myself, so as not to jinx the good people of the City of Lights.

In the West, what can I say about the Ducks except I told you so, Scott Lemieux?  This 3-0 lead is more indicative of the actual play on the ice than the two Eastern series, though—the Avs are simply outmanned and outclassed.  Up north, late last night (I went to bed at 2:30), the Sharks spent most of game three watching the Oilers skate by them, but managed to drag the game into triple OT despite being outshot 15-2 in the first period and 58-34 overall.  Still, the Oilers will need to win game four as well, or the West is going to be an all-California conference final.  I’m still thinking the Sharks are going to the final finals, but my goodness, those Ducks look scary good.

One last thing.  I have kept my remarks focused on the actual play of the game, but there are other considerations here as well.  Most important, it is critical that the Hurricanes not play another series against a team whose jerseys are just a slightly different shade of red than their own.  These Canadiens-Canes and Devils-Canes series are hurting my eyes, and if I were forced to watch yet a third (Sens-Canes), I would go out and get myself a black and white TV with a channel knob and a UHF button.  Second most important, the Ducks have taken a step in the right direction and gotten themselves third jerseys that are suitable for adults (if a bit dull), but those other two jerseys make one wonder why a bunch of 13-year-olds are playing in the NHL, and where’s Emilio Estevez?  And that nasty coach of the evil Iceland team?  A name change would help, too.  Also moving out of Anaheim and into a real city as opposed to a zoning complex.  I hear Quebec City would like a replacement for their Nordiques.  Otherwise, all good.

Thing the Second: Richard Cohen Aftermath

The United States is not necessarily a better place today because the left blogosphere has ridiculed poor Richard Cohen.  But there a couple two-three serious points to be made here.  One is that (as lots of people seem to have forgotten) the question was never, “was Stephen Colbert funny?” There’s really no way to legislate that one, now that Richard Pryor has passed on and the world lacks a Universal Humor Meter.  The question was whether Colbert was newsworthy.  Now, it’s no secret that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are culture heroes to much of the left blogosphere, because we tend to look upon them as oases of smart snark in a vast desert of Timmehs and Cokies on TV and raving lunatics on AM radio.  So when the press, having been skewered by Colbert, brushed off his performance and spent all its time the next day on Bush’s lighthearted self-parody, the blogs smelled a rat (yes, a critical mass of blogs can have an aggregate sense of smell), and they rallied around the snark.  Then, when the Clueless Wanker Contingent sniped back at us, we believed that they had made Colbert’s point for him just beautifully (though Colbert had done quite well on his own), and we went into full mockery and denunciation mode.  But Peter Daou’s original point still stands: “The AP’s first stab at it and pieces from Reuters and the Chicago Tribune tell us everything we need to know: Colbert’s performance is sidestepped and marginalized while Bush is treated as light-hearted, humble, and funny. Expect nothing less from the cowardly American media.” If not for the blogswell of outrage and general WTF, Colbert’s routine would simply have disappeared from public view.

Now, it’s true that blogs can be silly things.  At their worst, they work precisely the way mass media do—in Jon Stewart’s immortal words, like a bunch of kids chasing the soccer ball all over the field—except that they do it in fast-forward, so that you see a bunch of kids chasing the soccer ball in these comically jerky, hyperkinetic motions, and you want to have a brisk ragtime piano score for a soundtrack.  (Have I participated in these soccer games myself?  Sure, every now and then.  Sometimes they’re kinda fun in a hyperkinetic kinda way.) But at their best, politics - and - culture - commentary blogs have demonstrated something remarkable: there really are a lot of talented writers and critics out there in the English-speaking world, and some of ‘em are smarter and more talented than Richard Cohen or Joe Klein or Howard Fineman or David Broder or . . . you get the idea.  Accordingly, the print-media pundits, some of whom have occupied their perches for decades and are not used to discursive competition from another medium, are trying to dismiss bloggers as indiscriminate ranters.

Greg Sargent’s recent column gets this just right:

This fight doesn’t really have anything to do with the “tone” of the blogosphere at all. Rather, it’s actually about the efforts of bloggers to establish the legitimacy of their medium, and about the reluctance of major news organizations and their employees to recognize that legitimacy.

The unhoodwinkable Gene Lyons thinks we’re seeing the end of the Era of the Celebrity Pundit, but that’s probably going a bit too far—and in the wrong direction, too.  (Before we get too cheerful, remember, Instaguy and the Powertools can still be found in mass media.) What we might be seeing—I hope, I hope—is the end of the era in which invertebrates and inside-traders like Klein and Cohen serve as the official representatives of liberalism in the literate public sphere.  Liberals and progressives from Eric Alterman to Tom Tomorrow have spent a decade and a half decrying mass-media “debates” that pair wishy-washy centrist/liberals (in the patented Mark Shields “patient and deliberative” mode, bless Shields’s heart) against fire-breathing avatars of Goebbels, and Hannity & Colmes is merely the self-parodic terminus ad quem of that phenomenon.  The faux-liberal routine has simply got to stop, not least because it has now reached its Late-Roman Decadent Phase in which faux-liberal aspirant Peter Beinart gushes embarrassingly all over faux-liberal eminence Joe Klein:

Another great strength of Politics Lost is that, whether by accident or design, it models the kind of political discourse Klein would like to see. Against the neutered, white-washed language that dominates contemporary American political life, Klein counterposes his own edgy, raw and often hilarious rhetorical style. Again and again, he uncorks one-liners so good that the reader stops to savor. Carter was “as serious as cancer and as colorful as cement.” “The 1970s were the 1960s for nerds.” Dukakis “hailed from the National Public Radio wing of his party.” In their obsession with the minutiae of environmental policy, Democrats “had trouble seeing the forest for the tree huggers.”

There’s your fighting faith, my liberal and progressive brethren and sistren.  (And thanks to Bob Somerby for a mess of wonderful posts on Politics Lost.) And there’s your really brilliant writing, too, brought to you from the world in which the sparkling witticisms of Richard Cohen are teh funny.  The forest for the tree huggers!  Guffaw, guffaw!  That one really slayed ‘em at the Leadership Institute seminar, let me tell you.  Edgy, raw, hilarious!

But why should we take out after Klein and Cohen and their ilk, when George Will continues to bloviate into his eleventh decade as a pundit and John Tierney carries on the proud tradition of making shit up?  Because the faux-liberal routine really does produce all kinds of political pathologies in our national discourse, that’s why.  It leads conservatives to think of liberals as meek, squishy little creatures who cannot help but start every paragraph with “on the one hand” and end it with “but on the other hand, Russ Feingold / Howard Dean/ Nancy Pelosi has clearly led the party into the spider-hole of McGovernism.” And then, when these complacent conservatives run up against a reasonably vertebrate and articulate progessive-liberal writer, they scream in horror at the horrible incivility and the radical Symbionese Liberation Army far-leftism of the Dangerous Digby and the Terrible Kos.  And thus the “far left” gets redefined as “supporters of Al Gore,” and the center gets moved to the capital of McCainia.

Look, folks, I’ve been around this block a few times myself.  Fifteen years ago, when I first noticed that the academic left was no match for a hostile pack of journalists, I decided to try to write me some things for magazines and newspapers.  And you know, while it’s true that some of us academic liberal-lefties write rather obscure prose, on the grounds that strategic obscurity is both a negation and repetition of itself, and that, more importantly, it effectively stages the suturing of the self-differential subject by interrupting and interrogating the subject’s ethico-enunciative position in the project of modernity, thereby obscuring—or “de-scribing”—hegemonic Western narratives of homogeneity and clarity (you know, that old shtick), there are lots of us who can write rather clearly and effectively, too.  But weirdly, as I point out in Rhetorical Occasions, we “rarely respond to these routine charges by pointing out that the vast majority of us are quite capable writers—certainly as capable, on balance, as the great mass of journalists, not all of whom are exemplars of precision, clarity, or Kemptonian élan.” The point is all the more obvious when it comes to the best political bloggers.  The secret is out: it’s not all that hard to write a couple of smart, well-crafted columns every week.  Plenty of bloggers do it all the time, and some of ‘em are the sharpest crayons in the Internets box.

In a weird way, the left end of the blogosphere (again, much of which consists of people who like Al Gore and Russ Feingold and Wesley Clark more than, say, the International Committee to Keep Defending Slobodan Milosevic Anyway and/or the Symbionese Liberation Army) is now making the same “army of Davids” argument often associated with the Pajamas Right.  But you know, there always was something deeply ludicrous about that crew and its bizarre self-representations.  Think of it this way.  The past five years have witnessed the ascendancy of a truly radical right in the United States, and along come a bunch of allegedly conservatarian bloggers to say we rebel against the stale orthodoxies of our era!  Now is the time for a full-scale revolution in public discourse, in which the brave souls of the Resistance stand up to parrot everything the Bush Administration tells them!

Now, that’s funny.  Almost as funny as the Powertools turning to Dungeons and Dragons masters for military advice.

Whereas your local liberal-left bloggers really do constitute an alternative news- and- commentary source, and some of them could step up and replace the Beltway Boys tomorrow.  Gene Lyons cites “Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the inimitable Digby, Glenn Greenwald, Billmon, Atrios and many others,” but these are only the most obvious, public-wonk figures.  Don’t get me wrong; I heart them all with many hearts.  But among those “many others” I could add Jane, Chris, Amanda, PZ, Lindsay, and Lance, just off the top of my head (and with apologies to everyone who is currently residing in the lower layers of my head).  I don’t know if any of them would actually want to work in the politics- and- culture- and- sex- with- squids section of a major daily paper, but they could, is all I’m saying.

Which brings me to

Thing the Third: a Special Announcement!

Having said all that, I have to announce that I’m stepping down, taking a break, handing over the reins for a while.  I’m burned out.

I realize that I hit the blogburn on a regular basis every six months, so it must be seasonal.  Last year at this time, when I was thoroughly tired of my own writing and turned over the blog to John McGowan (who wrote a series of wonderful posts on the Republican assault on democracy, well worth revisiting today), I promptly found myself in the emergency room, having an appendectomy in which the offending appendix was so uncivil as to burst as they were removing it.  (That last link takes you to my unprecedented live-blogging of the appendectomy itself!)

image

(Graphic NSFW pic courtesy of Elayne Riggs).

In the end, I was out of commission for about a month.  I don’t know how long I’ll be on hiatus this time (not longer than that, I hope), but I can’t wait to find out what kind of emergency surgery is waiting for me this year!

So I’m going to turn off the computer now and go outside, where, they tell me, the weather has been quite nice lately.  I might even start writing my next book soon.  But not just this minute.

In the meantime, please welcome two guest bloggers whom I’ve never met, but whose work I’ve come to know and love in the past two years.  The infallible and gracious Amanda Marcotte will start things off tomorrow with something arbitrary yet fun, the contents of which I cannot predict any more than I can foresee the winners of the Stanley Cup (hem, hem), and the inimitable and generous Lance Mannion will join her on Monday with whatever is on his mind and at the tips of his fingers.

My sincere thanks to both of them for being so kind as to take over this little blog while I rest my weary soul. 

Posted by on 05/11 at 01:59 PM

  1. You’re taking a rest?  Nooooooooo!

    For the “the blogosphere can produce better commentators” thing, of course that’s true, but it’s not enough.  Yes, it’s better to have a snarky, witty commenter, or even a plain old angry commenter, than the usual centrist bit.  But what we really need are people who are going to become political powers in their own right, through their ability to focus communal action.  I don’t think the end result desired is for people to read a liberal blog and think about how witty it was.  They should be concerned that their interests are going to be affected.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  03:49 PM

  2. "on the grounds that strategic obscurity is both a negation and repetition of itself, and that, more importantly, it effectively stages the suturing of the self-differential subject by interrupting and interrogating the subject’s ethico-enunciative position in the project of modernity, thereby obscuring—or “de-scribing”—hegemonic Western narratives of homogeneity and clarity”

    To quote Kevin Kline, “What was the middle one again?”

    Enjoy your rest.  You’ve earned it.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  04:03 PM

  3. I’ll miss your commentary while you are on hiatus, but wow, what wonderfully great choices as guests!

    Posted by Ann Bartow  on  05/11  at  04:05 PM

  4. Well, your scar is cuter than LBJ’s, anyway.

    So far.

    Posted by Ron Sullivan  on  05/11  at  04:14 PM

  5. Even after game one, when you decided to stop giving the Sabres the puck in your own zone just to see what they would do...

    Wow.  My team employs this strategy all the time.  I had no idea it meant that they were playing like professionals.  Perhaps I should take back some of the horrible things I’ve said about them.

    I really need to get cable.  Now that I’m over the travesty that was the Bruins’ season (well, over it enough to enjoy the playoffs), it’s really starting to bug me that I have to read about the games rather than watching them.

    Posted by Marita  on  05/11  at  04:19 PM

  6. Enjoy your rest.  We’ll miss you.  Oh, and try not ro burst any more organs.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  04:34 PM

  7. For a second, I thought, “Bummer, Michael’s taking time off.  Well, at least now I’ll have one less blog to obsessively check for updates all day long.” Then I read who the special guest stars are, and it looks like the list of blogs to obsessively check will be staying the same.  Enjoy your break, and remember: the more organs they remove, the fewer organs you will have plotting against you from within, bursting at inopportune moments.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  04:43 PM

  8. Is there some sort of post-modrun thingie out this way you need to attend out here, Michael? Because I could drop you off at the beach for a long walk. I am given to understand those are rather centering.

    And wow, is it ever lucky you opened your “potential guest blogger rolodex” to the “Ma” section! Your finger could have landed on the “Da” section instead, and we’d have had to read stuff by Dave Winer and Dawn Eden. Phew!

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/11  at  04:45 PM

  9. Also: I thought Amanda was wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/11  at  04:47 PM

  10. eek the captcha word is “end” as in end of this year of MB sharing his bon mots with all of us.  Odd that just the other day i was reveling in the thought of how amazing it is that you actually do this, so often and regular, with such quality and breadth.  I was thinking how you must be able to let your fingers move so quickly and so freely that the notion of the conscious interdiction of “thinking” is no longer an obstacle.  Alas, i was deifying and reifying, and that’s not good at all.  So now that this cycle has come to an end, may you find the rest, re-creation, renewals and time with family and friends to be most harmonic and wholesome for you.  But hurry back now, you hear??

    And though it is so damn tempting, i will avoid the obligatory reference to that LA band from the mid-60’s.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  04:59 PM

  11. Enjoy your vacation, and stay out of hospitals!
    captcha is across, as in your abscence will be across for your faithful lurkers to bare.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  05:00 PM

  12. Enjoy the well-deserved break.  I can barely post twice a week, much less five days.  Can you maybe burst Richard Cohen’s appendix?

    Wait--has the government been tracking your phone calls?  Notice the timing--we learn about the gov’t tracking calls, Berube takes a “break.” Hmm.

    Posted by Crazy Little Thing  on  05/11  at  05:01 PM

  13. Please get a good rest, then come back kicking ass—we’ll miss you.

    Posted by Jim Shirk  on  05/11  at  05:33 PM

  14. What commenters 1-13, above, said.  Don’t forget, please, to save up some good Jamie stories, too.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  05:37 PM

  15. Enjoy the time off, but as long as you’re emulating LBJ, couldn’t you pick up a pair of beagles by the ears, too?

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  05/11  at  05:52 PM

  16. (Whispering to thwart eavesdroppers on what turns out to be the world’s largest party line outside of the PR of C), bonne vacance. United 93 is definitely not entertaining, a recommendation for when after the merry’s gone round.

    captcha: nothing.

    Posted by black dog barking  on  05/11  at  06:22 PM

  17. Awwww. You’ve been on a roll. What about my needs? And my needs?

    Mark your last few day’s output as contenders for Funniest Posts of 2006, aka The Last Year Such Outbursts Were Allowed Without Holding The Proper Badge.

    Posted by David J Swift  on  05/11  at  06:40 PM

  18. The secret is out: it’s not all that hard to write a couple of smart, well-crafted columns every week.  Plenty of bloggers do it all the time, and some of ‘em are the sharpest crayons in the Internets box.

    Exactly. That’s leaving on a high note, you sharp crayon you.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  06:46 PM

  19. Michael, you’re the best. Thanks for a great year of posts. In the secret code the General and his troops have been working on: “t’es magnifique toi! amuse-toi bien et à bientôt.”

    Captcha: “today,” as in “the first day of the rest of your life”

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  07:07 PM

  20. "Working on” in the sense of trying desperately to crack it.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  07:12 PM

  21. "At the recent Washington Correspondents’ Dinner, master comedian Stephen Colbert performed magnificently. With the rapier of wit and the mace of truth, he respectively skewered and censured the presidency of “dum’ass botch”.

    Talk about wonderful lagniappe! Mr Colbert made that nincompoop’s lap dogs in our national conventional media run for cover with their tail between their legs. And that’s not all our man accomplished.

    Tucked away in his address to the dinner’s flabbergasted attendees, like a ticking time bomb, there was an ‘easter egg’, which we had absolutely . . . here ‘we’ is a polite nod . . . NO right to expect. Like the Easter Bunny in a mischievous mood, Mr Colbert camouflaged a bon mot, so profound as to approach philosophical.

    oh, before I reveal Mr Colbert’s casual accomplishment, I should like to preface with a caveat. The appropriate interpretation of that remark requires sagacity an-- . . .”

    oh, alright (!) already, I’ll admit it.  The above text is meant to serve as “bait” for the dear Reader’s curiosity.  Yes, I would like people to visit my blog.  And why not?!  The average visitor is bound to find one or two startling insights.  What’s more, it’s a good bet that more than a few visitors will discover that I evoke with the written word thought, hitherto more, well, tantalizing than articulated.

    toodles
    ...../
    .he who is known as sefton

    http://hewhoisknownassefton.blogspot.com/2006/04/rehabilitation-of-and-by-and-for-right.html

    . . .  oh, yeah, I should add that the full title for that post is “rehabilitation of and by and for the right wing” . . .  by the bye, depending on visitor’s essentiality, one might be either heartened or dismayed by one, or two, of my easter eggs.

    Posted by A Alexander Stella  on  05/11  at  07:13 PM

  22. Oh well now that’s typical - I go all slack and careless and forget to check this blog for weeks (I think largely because I’m afraid of spending whole hours reading it) and the day I come back to check is the day you leave. Perfect; spiffing; spot on. I’ve always been good at timing.

    Oh well; enjoy the break and the major surgery.

    Posted by Ophelia Benson  on  05/11  at  07:18 PM

  23. The capture is days, which I hope is all your hiatus is. Of course, a year is days, too. Shoot--I can’t even crank out a couple of smart, well-crafted comments a week.

    We’ll all miss someone who can do so much more than that.

    Have fun.

    Posted by George  on  05/11  at  07:22 PM

  24. Infallible?  Does this mean I have to wear a funny hat?

    Posted by Amanda Marcotte  on  05/11  at  07:34 PM

  25. And carry a censer, Amanda.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  05/11  at  08:34 PM

  26. Yeah! Amanda Marcotte in the house!!

    Posted by Sadie Baker  on  05/11  at  09:30 PM

  27. Enjoy lurking, Michael!

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  10:21 PM

  28. Thanks so much, everyone.  I’ll try to stay out of the hospital, and I promise to come back.  In the meantime, Amanda, this blog is mitre-optional, but you will be speaking ex cathedra, as we discussed.  I hope you’ve chosen a good name, because last I checked, Pandagonus I is not recognized by the Holy See.  I’m partial to Multiplex XIV, myself, but only because it was the only place in town showing Brokeback Mountain.

    David, I have been thinking about your needs, so just this once I have decided to open my archives to the general public.  And Marita, you definitely need to get cable—but that Outdoor Life Network isn’t on just any cable carrier.  I had to launch my very own geosynchronous satellite just to get these playoffs on TV, and my pesky neighbors are still grumbling about the teeny little liquid oxygen spill we had just before liftoff. 

    Posted by Michael  on  05/11  at  10:26 PM

  29. But what about the beagles?

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  05/11  at  10:41 PM

  30. Enjoy your break, Michael.  It seems timed to coincide with the end of the academic year (when all us eggheads could use a break!).

    Two little things:

    Thanks for the Bob Somerby link on Joke Line.  Somerby was really one of the great ones back in the day, but lately he’s been _way_ off his game (he was actually on the wrong side of the Colbert/Cohen affair).  He’s kind of become the Liz Phair of the left blogosphere.  Nice to be reminded of his skillz.

    And though I think you’re right that the center-of-gravity of the “left” of the blogosphere is right around Wesley Clark, not everything to the left of that is the Symbionese Liberation Army.  We moonbats are apparently named after George Monbiot, after all…

    Have a great break and don’t do any thing too professorially dangerous...at least to yourself!

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  10:43 PM

  31. And though I think you’re right that the center-of-gravity of the “left” of the blogosphere is right around Wesley Clark, not everything to the left of that is the Symbionese Liberation Army.

    Oh, I’m not lettin’ that one go!  Ben, I was not suggesting that on the world’s Lefty Train, the very next stop after moderate liberal Democrats was full-blown lunacy.  Personally, I count at least twelve or thirteen more stations before Wesley Clark Plaza gives way to Ramsey Clark Square.  And as you know, my usual stop is somewhere around Michael Harrington Junction.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:02 PM

  32. But what about the beagles?

    Oh, all right.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:04 PM

  33. Oh, I’m not lettin’ that one go!

    Hehehe...made you come back!

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:14 PM

  34. Enjoy the break, Michael, and I hope you stay away from the ‘orpitals!  You are the purple crayon in the great box of the Internets.  Like Harold’s, you take us here and there, and we never want to stop.

    Save up some Jamie stories, have fun lurking, and we hope to see you soon.

    Arrivederci e a prestissimo!

    Captcha “off”—perhaps a hint about bug spray for the great outdoors?  (or even Jamie’s tent...)

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:18 PM

  35. LBJ reportedly showed off his scar (vertical, gall bladder ) because of rumors he’d had heart surgery.  Imagine that--just forty years ago, a wartime President concerned with empirical evidence. 

    Enjoy your time off.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:33 PM

  36. hurry back, michael!  blogtopia (and you certainly know who coined that phrase!) will not be the same without sentences like

    and you know, while it’s true that some of us academic liberal-lefties write rather obscure prose, on the grounds that strategic obscurity is both a negation and repetition of itself, and that, more importantly, it effectively stages the suturing of the self-differential subject by interrupting and interrogating the subject’s ethico-enunciative position in the project of modernity, thereby obscuring—or “de-scribing”—hegemonic Western narratives of homogeneity and clarity (you know, that old shtick), there are lots of us who can write rather clearly and effectively, too.

    it’s either brilliant self-parody or too incredibly complex for mere mortals to comprehend.  either way, it’s pure berube, and we need it!

    Posted by skippy  on  05/11  at  11:45 PM

  37. Have a great break!

    Posted by Matt  on  05/12  at  12:55 AM

  38. Your appendix didn’t have the courtesy to allow for a simple laproscopic procedure?  Sacrement tabernacle!

    I think that Emery is playing way over his head, and he’s going to have to do this for another few games.  He will, until Hasek can start the Carolina series.  Despite what idiots like Burnside at ESPN are saying, Hasek, when he is on, is the difference maker for anyone.  Had the NO GOAL been called back, had the puck-through-the-side-of-the-net not counted, then Hasek and the Sabres would probably have their names on a couple of cups.

    The Avs, and Pierre Lacroix, now have a lot of time for golfing.  I don’t understand why Lacroix is considered a genius, as he lost the best player in the league (Forsberg), had no real replacement for Roy, and lost his big-heart guys without much compensation (Claude, and more recently, Drury). 

    I agree fully with the Ducks 3rd jersey being a vast improvement, as opposed to, say, Edmonton’s.  Edmonton/Anaheim will be a wonderful series.  SJ/Anaheim looks horrid...I can’t imagine an all-California Western final.  Hockey needs Canada to perform well...say, as opposed to the way Les Habs played in the first round.

    Bonne chance on the brief sabbatical.

    Posted by Ashley Morris  on  05/12  at  01:53 AM

  39. Inside-traders..nice..selling since ‘94 and selling short since fall ‘01.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  05:00 AM

  40. Time to roll out the big guns…

    ‘Dulce et Decorum est’

    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
    Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
    Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
    And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
    Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
    But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
    Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
    Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

    Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
    Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
    As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

    In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
    He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

    If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
    Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
    And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
    His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
    If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
    Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
    Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
    Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
    My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
    To children ardent for some desperate glory,
    The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
    Pro patria mori.

    [WILFRED OWEN, written in 1917, published posthumously in 1921]

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  05:13 AM

  41. Michael;
    enjoy the playoffs. (I’m surprised you’d say all that against the ‘Canes after being down here on your NHC fellowship!)

    I’m still bummed that I didn’t get a chance to meet you when you were here. I found out just the other day that you were in the building just next door!

    we’ll be looking forward to your return

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  10:26 AM

  42. Enjoy the holiday, Michael.  Excellent though your fill-in choices are, I look forward to your return.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  01:50 PM

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