Wonkette
- Michelle Obama is the spokeswoman for the new and groovy United We Serve initiative. But consider this: first we were asked to “stand” united and now the government wants us to “serve” united? That’s a big leap there, going from just standing around to “cleaning up a neighborhood park”, united. Baby steps Michelle, baby steps. [The Caucus]
- What? Matt Taibbi has posted some sort of odd video from Russia, which he claims is very funny if you are like him and understand Russian. But wait, before you assume Taibbi is some sort of bilingual Tolstoy-reading Cossack genius: he posted the video at 1:02 a.m.! Yeah okay Matt, everyone speaks fluent Russian — when they’re drunk! This is so unlike you. [Matt Taibbi]
- Some poor immigrant family had their door kicked in at 4:00 a.m by a SWAT team, which then proceeded to handcuff all the teenage girls in the room. Whoops, wrong door! And then Montgomery County generously offered the distraught family “a couple of movies passes” as compensation. And then the ACLU laughed and laughed and laughed. And laughed. [Hit & Run]
- RedState has expensive-looking Venn diagrams to show how every state is debt-ridden and practically foreclosed! Oh no, does this mean Mexico gets California back? [RedState]
- Every night our cultured, worldly President cooks a big pot of traditional Pakistani tuna casserole and then reads mystical Urdu poetry until it’s time for bed. Jesus Obama, why don’t you and Taibbi get married so you can speak Russian together? The rest of us will be watching television, like normal red white and blue-blooded Americans. [Politico]
“And then the ACLU laughed and laughed and laughed. And laughed.”
Oh god, I fucking died. You WIN THE AFTERNOON, Riley.
Damn, Riley, you have some huge nuts talking shit about Taibbi like that! Can I buy ya a beer?
I see that Michelle will be on the teevee, probably telling us to turn off our damn teevees.
Oh the wingnuts will have something to say about the Urdu poetry reading. Why can’t Barry read dirty limericks or poetry that rhymes like normal Amurkans??!!
Am I missing some meta joke here, or do you not know that Taibbi lived and worked in Russia? The dude speaks Russian. He had Russian girlfriends and trounced their Russian boyfriends in Russian basketball, and got paid for it. Probably laughed all the way to the Russian bank, in Russian.
octupletsmom: So long as she doesn’t tell me to turn off my internets. Because then I’m voting Palin in 2012.
Gorillionaire: I’m sure Riley is sorry that he is not Matt Taibbi’s biographer.
imissopus: ON NOES THIS PROOVES IT THE PRESNIT IS A MUZLIN WHO READS MUSLIN POEMS ABOUT MUSLINS IN PACKUSTAN
Lil’ Waggamuffin, I’m with Zadig on the ACLU snippet: the coup of the day, snark-wise. You get the Pretend Tin Medal, as my mother would say. Prizes were grander in the concept than in the execution when I was growing up.
Taibbi actually played b-ball for cash in Mongolia. Back on topic, he posted that video to piss off the last group of people who like him. People like me, who would prefer not to be reminded that despite my education, I am a provincial, monolingual hillbilly compared to the founder of The Exile, which totally kicked ass. Taibbi is self-destructive that way.
Zadig: I liked “Jesus Obama.” The new name for Christ.
Aw what a cute little graph thing the red state has.
So like, the biggest deficits are in the biggest budget states. Those red state geniuses apparently neglected to scale the bubbles by the size of the budgets of the states.
Running 100 million deficit if you have a 10 billion dollar budget is about the same as running 100 thousand deficit if you have a 10 million dollar budget. Poor red staters ought to avoid that math thingie. New York has a deficit that is a lower percentage of its budget than Nevada. But this chart doesn’t look that way.
Silly silly red staters…
Jesus Obama save me!My head is exploding from these GOP fuckwads on MSNBC talking about Obama not being forceful enough in his condemnation of Iran. Obama needs to pick up Chuck Todd and that other idiot from Faux News by their heels and go around smashing fools heads with em like those freaky gorillas with the stone paddles in the book Congo.
From reading that translated Urdu poem in Politico, I’ve discovered one thing about that language: they apparently don’t have any words that rhyme with the Urdu word for doors. I’ll stick with WB Yeats and Wallace Stevens, thank you, as I’m culturally insensitive enough to figure I can’t learn anything about love from a people who clothe their women in tents and marry their cousins.
I may have mentioned this before, but if you put a baseball cap on Matt Tabbi, he is instantly transformed into a hot bottom. Without the hat, not so much….
I may have mentioned this before, but if you put a baseball cap on Matt Tabbi, he is instantly transformed into a hot bottom
At Truth/Slant he has this devil-may-care smirk, like he’s trying to be Han Solo, but every time I see it I think of gay porn legend Zak Spears.
in Taibbi’s defense, that old lady would sound great on the senate floor. wouldn’t mind seeing her reply to cheney’s “fuck off”
“There is no shelter: my love is on her way”
John Ensign, Urdu poet.
Yes, but Urdu is an anagram of Duur. Which is pronounced door. If you want it to be.
Why did RedState give Northern California its own circle?
kinginyellow:
Except if I recall correctly, Spears was a top.
Taibbi, bb, didn’t you hear babulya say she was from Kiev? I mean, Kyiv? MOSKALIST!
Anyway, I’m not sure what’s supposed to be particularly funny or outrageous about the video. Imagine if “Cops” showed up at some projects where some apartments burned down. Imagine it *hard*. That’s what the video shows, only in Russian with a Ukrainian accent.
For someone who’s lived in Russia, Taibbi is way too entertained by Russian ‘mat’.
SayItWithWookies: Take a page from habibi-Taibbi and try Russian poetry. They have a rhyme for doors: “beasts”! As in:
Стояли звери
Около двери
В них стреляли
Они умирали
(The beasts stood
Near the door
They were shot at
They died.)
(by “A Very Small Boy”.)
It seems Mr. Taibbi thinks that if you can understand the Russian words for fuck and penis, you are speaking Russian. The woman asks the reporter if she should speak in Ukrainian or Russian and they decide on Russian. Then, a drunken man accosts her and begins shouting abuse at her, to which she replies with abuse of her own. It’s not as if she commenced explaining how the fire in her apartment began by shouting a string of obscenities. She also details that prior to the fire, the guy who was shouting abuse at her was asking her to “give it up” and she told him no in an obscene way as she explains she has her “sponsors” and knows who to give it up to and who not. Wow, and all you blogosphere hipsters were going on about not wanting to hit Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan when they were going commando all over LA, because they were too over-the-hill. In the part of the world where that YouTube post was recorded, there are men who say “I’d hit that” about the white-haired, geriatric in the tape. As Churchill observed on his first visit to Moscow, “These people will never be defeated.”
S.Luggo: I’m left to wonder how their diagram supports their perpetual claim that the federal government should be replaced with a freeware auto-responder and each state should be made into quasi independent Caliphate.
BTW, if that ever happens, Delaware is cold invading Marylands eastern shore and renaming it “Shit-house” (Operation “Rural Renewal”) at which point we each get a Clinger to cut our grass, fetch us cool drinks and fan us when we perspire.
Did you know that many Departments of Police have an entire department devoted to the paying of damages due to accidental doors smashed in and other property mishaps that occur when SWAT teams use MapQuest instead of Google to get their directions? A friend of mine learned this when he had the misfortune of living in the vicinity of a crack den. When the cops came, thanks in part to phone calls he had made to report them, they smashed his door in instead of the offenders.
Apparently these departments are experts at replacing doors, but all of them are only open on Wednesdays from 2:00 to 2:33.
Zorg: As we clearly saw from the tape, her kavalery are no prettier or younger themselves, so it all works out.
zenferret: Ok, I’m sure this comment will die in a decidedly non-Neda way, but the aforementioned RS article is just a flat out bunch of hooie. As a refugee currently residing in Arkansas, I can tell you with no fear of contradiction that we are not (and could not, per constitutional provision) running a state budget deficit. We are also, in fact, one of SEVEN (not four) states in said condition. And as to what party is in charge? Five of six national elected officials, the gov, the lt. gov, and the overwhelmingly majority in upper/lower state chambers: DEMOCRATS. Ok, enough bile…here’s a spiffy clip of RedState/Republican math courtesy of Ma and Pa Kettle (honestly, it’s a hoot!):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7106559846794044495
I flunked Russian in college but I’m pretty sure bisdjelnik means something like “ass-hat”. I was sick they day we were supposed to learn how to proposition old ladies, alas.
SayItWithWookies: They do have, however, about a bazillion ways to say “Marriage? But, my father would never approve!” Then they break into song and dance. This goes for everyone in south Asia, actually.
Otter bored.: Bezdel’nik means a “do-nothing.”
SayItWithWookies: Ghazals, are btw, very repetitive. It’s kind of a trait of much of Urdu and Persian poetry. More like chants than poems, per se. I only know this because I went through the requisite Rumi phase in college.
‘enry ‘iggins was a wanker, and so is Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi’s got a funny story in his book The Great Derangement where he’s undercover at some southern revivalist bible camp, and the wackjob preacher is making them try to speak in tongues, and since everyone else is just faking it with gibberish anyways, the first time he just recites the words to some beautiful-sounding Russian punk song in a demonic, eyes-rolled-back manner, and the second time around he just speaks the words to the old Soviet anthem
mattbolt: WEIRD. That is exactly what my Russian grandmother used to do when she was a batshit crazy Pentecostal. None of us were fooled.
I didn’t understand more than two or three words in Taibbi’s video, so I queued it up for my (Russian) wife and walked away. I could hear her laughing out loud all the way down the hall.
Apparently, the joke is that the reporter is trying to ask her how the fire started, and she’s describing how she picked up some guy in a bar, bought some (more) booze along the way, and brought him home to fuck. After a long pornographic encounter, he got angry and started the fire. While she’s telling the story, in way too much scatological and sexual detail — and simultaneously cursing out this other guy in the video (who was also fucking her), the reporter keeps trying to get her back to his question:
“OK, but, how did the fire start?”
“That’s what I’m trying to TELL you: so I brought this motherfucker home, and he stuck his dick in my…”
My wife found it hilarious. However, she learned colloquial English from the Howard Stern show, so there might be something a tad askew about her sense of humor…
AnnieGetYourFun: I guess that comes from their being easier to memorize when there’s lots of repetition and poems are transmitted orally rather than in writing. Any linguistic beauty in Rumi’s and other’s works tends not to survive the translation. In very much the same way, many non-native English speakers have asked me what the big deal is about Shakespeare. I just tell them he was hung like a horse.
SayItWithWookies: For reals? But Shakespeare is more popular overseas than here, isn’t he? It might not be true - it’s probably my fault for having a crush on John McWhorter.
I suppose that repetition would help with memorization, yeah. Alot of the meaning IS lost in translation, for sure, and it goes both ways. There are these words in Urdu that my boyfriend uses all the time to describe things when he can’t come up with an English equivalent - words that are translated as “love”, “air”, and “moon” when they mean something so much more specific that it would take a full paragraph to translate the word. In the same way that English doesn’t have an equivalent of schadenfreude, we aren’t getting the full meaning of so many of the Urdu words.
krustysfather: Actually, “ebannyj v rot” (fucked in the mouth) is just an exclamation. I don’t think she literally meant that the guy was requesting oral. I heard her say (and it’s not entirely clear from the slurring & the accent & the general WTF) that he wanted her to “dat’” (daj, daj - gimme, gimme) and “ebat’ (fuck). “Ebannyj-v-rot” is sort of like “motherfuckin’”.
Russian mat is <3
AnnieGetYourFun: I may be going to hell for this, but Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet beats the original for me. Of course, this may have something to do with the relative quality of performances of both I’ve heard in my life.
Venn
Can anybody think of any reason why we need to hold on to California? I mean, it is one step away from being the Florida of the West.
S.Luggo: Yeah, you would think weed sales alone would keep them in the black.
SayItWithWookies: Which is good to say, since it is true.
AnnieGetYourFun: I’m not sure how Shakespeare translate as poetry, but the stories hold up pretty well. See Ran Throne of Blood for an example.
Yeah, well, if Barry-O speaks Muslin so well, why’d he say “hajib” instead of “hijab” in his big Cairo Proclamation?