The Top Ten Campaign Slogans John Edwards Would Go To Hell For

10. Vote Edwards- I'm not your daughter and I didn't rape her
9. John Edwards- For Democrats who hate whores
8. Vote Edwards- If anything, just to piss off your hippy liberal girlfriend
7. White men's brains are bigger- it's science. Vote Edwards.
6. Vote Edwards- Lets keep this thing respectable
5. Vote Edwards- That's what you're going to tell your friends at the club anyway
4. Vote Edwards- They're already voting, isn't that enough?
3. John Edwards- Against universal suffrage
2. John Edwards- No perm needed
1. John Edwards- Are you kidding me?

Beer Me

This video sings for itself:



Also this one, hilarious:



And two clips of the show that started it all - these two are a little long and there is some overlap but I am a big fan:

Oh Yeah, You Blend

I have just returned from a three weeks of Pan-African travel -- jarring, unpaved roads, hellaciously vivid dreams from my anti-malaria pills, more than a dozen planes, some new cuisine and some old favorites in surprising places.



It began with a jaunt up to Uganda, known to some as "The Pearl of Africa" -- a former British colony, landlocked in a collar-tugging position -- South of Sudan, East of the D.R.C. and North of Rwanda. Eeeeyikes! My travel buddy and I had not planned second one of our trip since purchasing our plane tickets a week prior. We figured English was the national language (gotta give the British Empire some credit on that one) and how hard could it be to find some mountain gorillas without a travel book, map, game plan, or a gorilla of our own, who by virtue of its ability to converse in both sign language and gorillaspeak could bridge the interspecies gap.



A few things became clear very quickly. We needed bug spray something awful; the Chinese food in Kampala is amazing; and the distance from Entebbe (where we landed) to The Bwindi Impenetrable Forrest (where the gorillas and their concomitant mist reside) gets a lot longer once you find out that the term "roads" required much exaggerated quote fingers.



No regrets, cause the endless expanse of lushly verdant hills and (hidden) valleys out our windows made up for the ass pains from the bumpy ride. I have no pictures, but the landscape made me wish that I could go back in time (Bill and Ted style) round up Cezanne, Van Gogh, Monet, et al., and set them up with an all expenses paid trip to sunny Uganda and all the Absinthe they can drink on me.

Driving through the many farming villages that line these "roads" was like being trapped inside a moving zoo. I guess I take for granted the fact that I'm white. I mean, my Mom and Dad are white, my sisters and brothers are white. Come to think of it, my whole family is white. See, I didn't even think of it til now. But staring out my window with increasing mortification I watched jaws drop, women and children stopping dead in their tracks, conversations halted in mid-sentence, the sounds of juke boxes scratching off, all because they don't see too many (dragons or) white people around.

On a side note to this, the often invoked notion that white people think all black people look alike, well I know what people mean now. We were the only two white people that we saw the whole time, blending in like My Cousin Vinny. We would go some place for a bite to eat, laugh and drink with the waiter for hours, and then come in the next day as total strangers to this man.

US: Hey, Johnny. How's it going?
John Bosco: Ahhhhhhhhh?

Because of our poor planning, we were unable to go gorilla tracking, but you can't win 'em all, as they (gorillas) say (in sign language).

A Modest Proposal

I've never supported genocide. Like the bleary-eyed law student who on the first day discussing Brown V. Board raises his hand and prefaces his comment with "I'd just like everyone to know that I'm against slavery," I would like to put on record that I am, in a general sense, against the systematic murder of a group of people. Especially since they outlawed it in the Geneva Convention. Or some convention. I don't remember, but I'm sure someone made it illegal at sometime. Nevertheless, I've concocted a judicious proposal to address one of the most crippling plagues ever to afflict New York City.

Let's kill all the real estate brokers. Think about it. These people are completely useless. Why keep them alive? They're just dragging the rest of us hard-working Americans down. Rents would drop immediately-no one would ever have to pay that stupid 15% broker's fee anymore. Craigslist adds would be pruned of deceitful advertisements. There would be less foot-traffic in the cities most desirable locations, as there'd no longer be anyone to meet you at a random street corner and take you to the apartment that you could have just gone to yourself if the brokers did not deliberately keep the location of their apartments from you. Instead of meeting that goofy-looking twenty something who could have learned a valuable trade but for some reason went into being slimy for a living, you could just go straight to the apartment, talk to the owner, and strike an honest deal between respectable people. I see no reason not to run the streets red with the blood of real estate brokers.

And another thing: these people have apartments themselves. Did you think of that? If we killed all the brokers, there would be a massive jump in supply. Now, they probably don't live anyplace that you or I would want to rent. But any supply shift will effect the entire market. Brutally maiming all real estate brokers in New York and leaving their bloodied, mutilated corpses in the streets for ravens to scour would be the best thing to happen to rental prices since the stock market crash of 1929.

I know there will be some resistance to my proposal. You can't just kill tens of thousands of people because they are useless and annoying and it would be great for the rental market and the morale of the city and pretty much what everyone wants to do anyways. It would be expensive. To that I say "Come on- live a little. You've gotta spend money to make money. Lets forget about the budget just once and do what we know is in the best interest of the city. Lets just get out there and start killing brokers. Expenses, and obnoxious people, be hanged."

Plus, think about the job creation, people. Someone would have to actually butcher the brokers- hey, that's a catchy slogan: Butcher the Brokers, a 2007 initiative for the city. Anyway, genocide doesn't happen by itself. Someone would be collecting a pay check after this thing, and that's what we call economic stimulus.

But of course, its a slippery slope. Today we're killing real estate brokers, tomorrow we could be killing stock brokers. Before you know it, there's not a single over-paid middle-man left in New York and there's perfect information and transparency in every transaction. Wait, maybe I've been narrow-minded about this. I'd like to amend the proposal. Kill ALL brokers. Now we're talking.

Mostly Lounging on Denali

Last month I took a long walk in the snow and reached the highest point in North America, but, lest I be accused of productivity, I’ll have you know that I abandoned neither my tranquil constitution nor my taste in leisure to do so. The story I would like to recount now is how I, in true Brooklyn fashion, passed an entire day lounging in a café at 14,000 feet.

On June 1st I traveled from New York to Alaska to take a guided trip up Mt McKinley, or Denali, as it is sometimes called. This story of “Café 14” took place three weeks into the trip. I had reached camp IV (elevation 14,600 ft) on the north side of Denali, late on June 21st, though you’d never know it from the Alaskan sun. I was tired and hungry and the weather was moving in. I rested the next day to acclimatize in preparation for the move to high camp. On June 23rd, I awoke early to check the weather and found the skies clear. After a quick consultation with the guides and my fellow climbers, we decided to ferry a load of food and fuel up to high camp and return to sleep at camp IV. As I readied myself for the move, a paralyzing bout of mountain sickness knocked me on my haunches. At extreme altitudes, lower atmospheric pressure inhibits air intake, depriving the brain of oxygen. The effect is similar to a hangover and can be quite debilitating. I had it bad that morning, and knowing the results of working through hangovers, I opted out of the move.

One other climber stayed down with mountain sickness that day and one guide. We all retired to our tents to “hunker,” the honored climbing pastime of killing time in tents, and none too pleased about it. We had been moving quite well up to 14,600 and were all excited to be moving higher. The idea of a second consecutive day hunkering in stale-smelling tents was as unappetizing as the left-over beans from dinner. Then a miracle happened: “I was getting signal on my radio last night,” the guide explained. “Why don’t you two come to my tent and we’ll see what we can get.”

Amazing. Deep in the Alaskan wilderness, on one of the most remote climbing routes in the world, we were able to get radio signal all the way from New York. At such high altitudes there were no intervening land masses to disrupt the signal. Our spirits were rescued from despair. We packed into the tent, lit some incense; brewed some coffee. The guide and I began a game of cribbage. I joked that life in the tent was not so different from my life at home in Brooklyn. To call it an oasis in a desert would not be far from the truth. We played cards and listened to music for several hours until we all fell into a luxurious sleep.

We joked and called it Café 14, after the elevation. It was a momentary reprieve from the ardors of climbing a treacherous and vindictive mountain. A small taste of home’s civility, carried three weeks over glacier and rock, to be unpacked there in the harsh environs at 14,600 feet, on the side of Mt. McKinley. I was very happy for it.

I awoke the next day and my mountain sickness was gone. So was the other climber’s. Three days later we both reached the summit at 20,320 feet and began the happy descent back towards thicker air and an easier way of life, having had our fun- lounging on Denali.

Nursery Rhymes

Ricky Gervais from the original British office, doing stand-up. Hilarious.

Impressions

The funny thing is that I know Virginia Dissentator is still reading this, silently. Yeah that's right. I'm lookin at you, fella.

Flight of the Conchords

For those of you who have or haven't seen Flight of the Conchords, it is amazing. Kind of reminds me of Arrested Development where a lot of people probably won't think it's funny and will think it's too weird, and then other people will think it's the funniest thing since probably Arrested Development.

But FOTC is definitely its own show and what a show it is. Most of it is just like a regular comedy but then a few times per episode they do songs since the two main characters are in a band.

A band called Flight of the Conchords.

Summer Time, And the Blogging's Infrequent

Sometimes it's rough to come home from work and see this guy sitting contentedly in the same spot he was in when you left for work that morning, but it's hard to stay mad at a lemor, so...

Yeah so I don't know if anyone has noticed cuase we don't seem to get that many comments in general so I don't really know if anyone was ever reading this in the first place, but now we don't even seem to have writers anymore.

Well I noticed.

I have to admit I am not Pope Innocent in all of this.
But who is really?
Any of you Pope Innocent?
That's what I thought.

So after keeping it afloat single keyboardedly CapeTown Dissentator has probably been busy interacting with some of the humans that they got down there in Capetown so I thought I'd try to give him a break and post for once. As for Brooklyn Dissentator I believe he is somewhere in Alaska enjoying the 20 hours of sunlight in a day that they have there over the summer, Virginia Dissentator is probably sitting on his laurels after putting up that picture of a litter box and figuring no one's gonna top that, and the new guy? "La Dissentator"? Apart from being Spanish for "The Dissentator" I don't know what she/he is doing as opposed to writing to us.

Me personally, I have been searching for a cure for the summer time blues, trying to prove wrong the old adage that there ain't no such thing as that. The closest I have come so far are dumplings. A few weeks ago I heard about soup dumplings for the first time. Yeah that's right, dumplings with soup in them. I know you might be thinking it's kinda hot out for soup but I am still feeling kinda cold from the Boston winter, it normally takes me right until the next winter begins to recover from the previous one. So I can drink soup year round. What.

If you guys and girls can think of something better let me know. And I don't mean year-round soup (I can think of lots of things better than that, like year-round French onion soup, or year-round Christmas vacation, or year round European Vacation, in France perhaps, with year-round onion soup, or maybe even year round Thanksgiving). But I am saying if you can come up with a better cure for the summer time blues let me know and I will tell you what I think of it.

You might be thinking you don't know where to begin, which is why I have offered some cure for the summer time blues clues:

1. Water
2. Broth
3. A microwave
4. A bowl
5. A soup spoon
6. Crap sorry I got distracted by the thought of soup again
7. Swans a-swimming
8. Footprints
9. Fingerprints (remember in Ace Ventura 2 where he dusts for fingerprints?)
10. Soup Dumplings

So take that as a start and just run with it, but you should probably wait at least an hour after eating year-round soup if you are going to start running. Of course what do I know I'm only a dissentator.

Fathers and Sons

As it is Father's Day, I thought a relevant post couldn't hurt. The complex dynamic between a father and son has been written about before this present attempt -- with more sagacious insight, with more stunning prose, and evoking a greater degree of pathos and emotion. Ancient Greek mythology is inundated with this theme -- i.e. Zeus's father, Chronos, on a hunch from an oracle who warned him that one of his children will overthrow him, ate all of his sons and daughters; Zeus escaped and killed his father. The Bible offers a few stories of its own: the tale of Isaac trip up the mountain with dear old Dad, Abraham; Isaac's sons fighting over his birthright; Judah Macabee had a few sons of his own; and let's not forget God had a kid of his own in there as well (I think they wrote a Testament about [H]im).

More recently, Russian novelist, Turgenev, offers us Fathers and Sons (though this is more of a generational critique); and in the 20th Century, James Joyce complicates it all for us as only he can in Ulysses, while Freud provided us with his pervasive take on the myth of Oedipus. Clearly there have been milennia of examples that point to the darker side of the paternal/filial relationship, but I'm assuming that none of these were considered when Hallmark or whoever created Father's Day.

So, might I suggest some more uplifting reads, music, and movies that may lead us to some more positive ruminations about our Dads.

1. "Indian Camp" by Earnest Hemmingway. A short story about a son who follows his father and uncle who are sent to help deliver a baby at a nearby Native American village.

2. "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens. Most people hit up the cliched "Cats and the Cradle" when thinking of "Dad" songs, but this one far outshines it. The Johnny Cash/Fionna Apple cover isn't bad either. And if you're looking for more of a downer song, then Credance Clearwater's "Somedays Never Come" ain't too bad.

3. Field of Dreams - In my life, no work of art, be it film, novel, poem, or song, has better incapsulated the often traumatic and strained relationship between an American father and his son.

For each of us, the film opens a different wound or inspires a unique set of memories. For me, the images of James Earl Jones, Moonlight Graham, and Shoeless Joe Jackson are inextricably bound with countless hours in my yard, when I was a little guy playing catch with my Dad. Once we hung up the gloves, and my hero worship turned to adolescent, misguided angst, the movie would serve as a topic of debate -- my Dad futilely explaining to me that it was a film about fathers and sons, while I stubbornly contended that it was just a movie about baseball. Throughout these discussions, we shared the unspoken knowledge that we both understood the true meaning of the film, and, more precisely, we both knew that this ongoing debate was just our own way of keeping the lines of communication open as our relationship grew more strained.

I've heard several confessions from friends who say that while watching Field of Dreams with their Dad was also the first time they saw their fathers cry. The moment that a son witnesses this rare expression of vulnerability from their father is one not soon forgotten, for in it is revealed the possibility of a father's weaknesses and what could be a vast sea of inner turmoil usually concealed beneath a stoic facade. Even more, the moment reminds you -- maybe for the first time -- that your Dad is a son, himself, and knows all too well of the lovely and timeless struggle between a father and his boy.

Just to conclude and to point out the obvious, Field of Dreams is about fathers and sons. It's about the strained and broken relationship between a kid and his Dad and their chance at redemption. For many of us, our reconciliation is more easily attained than it was for Ray Kinsella. We don't have to build a baseball diamond or go on a road trip with James Earl Jones. We just need to give the old man a call today, Father's Day, and let him know that we love him and that many more things in our lives, besides that movie from 1989, turned out to be about fathers and sons.

Love ya, Pop.