A "F*** You and Your Friends" Jig

A special birthday cascade tribute for a longtime blegfriend who's just paranoid enough to believe it might not be about him (& just might listen to a song or two to discover if the music will save him again (from his [& our] complicity)):

Panic in Detroit!! (or blogland)

BDR has been evicted. Google hosting has banished him from the internets. He's in some sort of Catch-22 limbo. He has to log in to the Goggle, but it doesn't recognize either his email or his password. He's sought tech help, but it's been ineffectual.

I bet the poor bastard's panicking. Dude scours the interwebs daily and posts more-than-generous links to any number of shitty blogs like this one: Politics, Maryland/DC, Soccer, Literature, Poetry, Music. He posts his poetry and notebooks and aaarghocolyptic (sp?) musings for our delight and derision.

And, irony or irony, he loses his digital home on the same day his beloved (despised?) DC United ink a $300 million deal for a new home in Buzzard Point in SW DC. Do metaphors indeed abound? Is this some sort of digital performance art? If so, then bravo, my friend. BRAVO!

If not, I hope you get your place in the digitarium back. And your archives and links reader. And soon!

Good luck JMP!



[Dude, contact me if you want a place to post while you're trying to sort it all out. I might be able to figure out in Blooger how to anoint you as a guest poster here.]

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UPDATE: You can get updates on his struggle here. Vanity's Graveyard. Yep, that sounds about right.

Miscellany

I post this image in response to a comment by Frances Madeson on this previous post. This haunting image of a manacled person with schizophrenia in Beni, Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) entered into this story.

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If you don't read BDR's blog, BLCKDGRD, every day, you're missing something, whether it's politics, local news and sports, literature, music, poetry, or out-and-out or merely-tongue-in-cheek curmudgeonry. He misses little. For example, in this post, he refers to my previous post about Congo and Nicholas Kristof's important op-ed piece in Sunday's New York Times in the same sentence. The more attention brought to this seeming intractable humanitarian crisis the better.

BDR's clearly paying attention and has proven himself a true blegfriend over and over again. Frankly, I don't see how he finds the time to do what he does without getting paid.

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Over the weekend, there was a little get-together of about 600 people in Nashville, Tenn. You may have heard about it; they called themselves a tea party. Personally, I'm not sure why such a minuscule gathering garnered so much press and publicity and commentary in the media and around the blogosphere. You'd've thought it was a million-man march or a multi-city, multi-million person protest against the plan to invade Iraq (which didn't get anywhere near as much press). Even though I watched it on C-Span, I was planning to ignore Sarah Palin's closing keynote address. It was shallow. It lacked any sort of logic or reasoning. It was all ATTITUDE. But here's the thing: Andrew Sullivan, a former conservative Republican, heard the same speech and, as his ear is experientially attuned to the dog-whistles of the right wing, came away with a very different appreciation here and here. As he says, it was pure sophistry (something I wrote about recently here in my two "Feck" posts). Yet:

It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity - utterly fraudulent, of course - that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs - except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.

Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war.

I cannot vouch for his conclusion, but it does give me pause.