I think maybe someday we'll look back and see that it was Howell Raines who either hid or detonated the Semtex. Or that he at least created an atmosphere in which the hiding or detonation of Semtex could be seen as just another plausible thing to do.

I don't of course directly blame Howell for Arthur Sulzberger's divorce, or for the Post's firing of Len Downie, but Howell's brief tenure at the Times did seem to coincide with the point at which the nation's most important newspapers drifted off the radar and began meandering aimlessly but definitely downward.

I also clearly remember seeing for the first time a raw goose liver for sale at Key Food. This must have been six years ago. Wasn't it also about that time that the pricy little northern Italian place opened near BAM?

At any rate, the storm clouds had clearly gathered by that point. You could hear the anti-aircraft guns in the distance. Brooklyn's fate was sealed.

My thinking is that Jacobs is directing this aesthetic at the sort of young woman who subsidizes her reproductive rights activism by doing makeup or lighting for experimental theater. She probably has a few suicide attempts in her background, but nothing too serious, and whenever she refers to those attempts, she speaks about them with a heartbreaking jauntiness.

For all the senator's enormous sins, they were committed in the private sector, or on the private sector, or simultaneously both.

When balanced against recent presidential wrong doings committed against the nation, such as Iran-Contra, for example, or that military thing going on in Iraq that left-wing radicals whine about constantly, Teddy's vast fuck-ups don't seem quite so vast.

As for cocksmanship, not even Teddy can hold a candle, large or small, to ever-delightful Strom Thurmond, about whom Senator John Tower once mused, "When ol' Strom dies, they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to get the coffin closed."

Perhaps more disturbing is that you can see Amy's eyes reflexively focus on the tiny organ.

It seems to me somehow significant that people who barely have the neurological wherewithal to stand upright can nonetheless muster what it takes to notice the penis on a baby mouse.

About that sweater -- and I'm sure Nina Hagen will completely back me up on this -- I'm really seeing you looking your best in bespoke crotchless panties with the thinest of neon-yellow piping around the waist.

Also, I'm seeing you wearing your flattering crotchless panties while sitting atop a very warm toaster oven, and you're doing something fun and self-indulgent, like giving yourself a pedicure.

But the toaster oven is not set to the sort of high temperature needed for broiling turkey wings, so you mustn't think of the oven's "warmth" as any kind of punishment.

A word to the wise, as they say!

Yours,

Hamud "My Passion Is Fashion" Ibn Hamud

In a post that finds its leverage in belittling Jewish sensitivity to real or perceived threats, and following any number of comments that find their leverage in same, it's a relief to see someone unselfconsciously use what Jews revere as the sacred name of God as something to be laughed at.

As for Pareene having big ones, well, I've never really noticed that pissing off or offending Jews was something reserved for only the tough and the brave.

On the other hand, were Pareene to say something offensive about the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh), the sahabah, the Qu'ran, or Islam in general, that attracted significant attention from the Muslim world, we'd be able to see whether Pareene needed a pair of Neuticles.

PERSONAL TO BELL COUNTY: Don't worry, Bell. No Jew is going to hack this system in order to track you down, slit your throat, and shove a knife into your chest, or even firebomb your home or place of work. That's part of the reason why it's so much fun to get saucy with us in the first place.

What else would you expect from LuAnn?

The Lesseps family are noblesse de robe trash.

At the risk of sounding like a sour alter kacher with a pineapple-size wad of pedantry shoved up his ass, I'm going to come right out and say that using "data" as a singular noun sounds very goofy to me.

Besides, the most intellectually robust societies have several not altogether unbelievable superstitions that cite the use of "data" as a singular noun as the chief cause of sexual malfunction in men and women.

"I'm the lesbian who speaks on behalf of all the lesbians."

Dear Ms. Someone-Died-and-Made-You-Queen-of-All-Lesbians,

Don't be afraid! I'm not writing to complain to you about one of your subjects such as Rosie O'Donnell who must be a real handful in more ways than one! (Haha!)

I'm writing to complain to you about how Lesbians Are Destroying the American National Holiday of Thanksgiving, probably because you want to destory the AMERICAN family and this is just your first little beachhead albeit one filled with low-cholesterol low-sodium stuffing because the Jew doctors like to boss people around about what they can and cannot eat even down very small details like "Have no more than eight beer drinks per day."

You and all the man-haters in your "Queendom" are all like some kind of dirty joke trying to have babies without a bad evil penis in the picture, and so the price of turkey basters, even the kind made in Communist CHINA, has skyrocketed beyond what American working families can afford and, please, don't tell me that a "self-basting" Butterball turkey is the answer to our prayers because it's not because there's really no such thing as a turkey that bastes itself no matter what the lying Jews on Madison Avenue try to tell people in magazine advertisements that are obviously phony because no normal American family ever looks that happy when they are sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table.

I just want to tell you that all of you "Lesbians" and your Communist-loving Jew friends are going to LOSE your war against the American family because a lot of us know what you are up to and are definitely switching to a spiral-cut Honeybaked ham for EVERY Thanksgiving because it's ready-to-serve and NEVER needs basting.

I'm praying that God will forgive you and that you will learn to love Him instead of your perverted sins.

Sincerely,

LuAnne Ginger-Phelps (An American and proud!)

I'm just wondering what your personal feelings are about the plans for refurbishing St. Elizabeths Hospital in D.C.

A lot of former patients think it was the nicest hospital for the criminally insane that they ever spent a lot of time in and they really wish people would just leave it alone because they have many very happy memories about it, especially that little storage room off the stairwell leading to the sub-basement where you could take a "special friend" for some private time together, but only if you didn't start smoking cigarettes after your private time because this could trigger the fire alarms and it was honestly not a lot of fun to have to stay for eight months in one of the isolation rooms in locked ward because you could scream for hours and hours but no one would ever call the President of the United States to tell him that you were sorry for everything and just wanted to be released for maybe nine or twelve hours so you could buy some magazines like "Tiger Beat" or "Junior Miss Beauty Queen" so you could read and relax a little and pry the staples from the magazines in order to have something very very sharp to jab into your eyes and lips when the BAD THOUGHTS wouldn't stop feeling like the way your mother's voice felt when you used super glue, which is really a laugh because there's nothing "super" about it like SUPERMAN, to keep your sister from using her ugly poisonous eyes to see all your personal things that in you had hidden for a lot of good reasons that have nothing to do with crime or so-called "DANGER TO OTHERS" in your bedroom closet.

Here's what I get:

1. Shirley Temple Black

2. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani

3. Michelle Kwan

4. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

5. Julio Iglesias

I just want to laugh so hard because I've "dated" four of the five but they don't know about each other, so doing that thing on the Facebook search is like walking into a party and having everyone smirk at you because they know you have an enormous penis that made them have lots of really fantastic orgasms.

And one of the people, who shall remain nameless, is trying to get a loan from me, which I think is also hilarious because you'd think a famous Asian-American athlete could just sell a pair of iceskates or something if he or she needed some money.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Immediately after Miranda says, "There's a literal ringing in my ear," she starts to cough up copious mouthfuls of brilliantly red arterial blood which contain a lethal and highly contagious bacterium she contracted from rats living in the walls of her poorly refurbished Brooklyn brownstone. (Turns out Steve -- no surprises here! -- was skimming the refurb monies to pay for a "dirty bomb" that he and the Muslim terrorist cell he'd joined had planned to detonate somewhere on Staten Island.)

Snipers dispatched by the CDC shoot Miranda and Charlotte many, many times in the face, over and over again, countless times -- sorta like Peckinpah with severe OCD but endlessly more bloodthirsty.

Anyhoo, Carrie manages to escape the CDC snipers, although a stray round from a Heckler & Koch PSG1 blasts her right arm completely out of its socket, leaving the useless limb hanging by a few shreds of muscle and sinew.

Diehard SATC fans will be delighted to learn that Karl Lagerfeld makes a surprise appearance in the movie as the "celebrity designer" who crafts Carrie's prosthetic arm just in time for her glamorous yet bittersweet wedding to Mr. Big.

"Fuckity-fuckity-fuck fuckers!"

You just made me nearly choke to death on my very tasty grapefruit-flavored Absolut and grapefruit juice.

You're pretty goddamn adorable.

"When AIDS came along, it was the valiant and honest gay people who fought the stigma and cared for the dying, not the delusional disco vampires of 54..."

We must not be remembering the same AIDS epidemic.

During the one with which I'm familiar, there were no dependable predictors for who would or wouldn't behave valiantly or honestly.

I saw scared, closeted people who overcame or overlooked their fear and self-disgust in order to engage in public activism and care for complete strangers through illness and death.

I also saw strident advocates for gay rights who, when confronted with the realities of HIV/AIDS and unable to handle the messiness and sorrow, just sort of disappeared.

It was like any other war-type situation. Weak and brave people rose to the challenges. Weak and brave people went AWOL. Normally nice people proved utterly useless. Normally selfish and despicable people proved utterly selfless.

Some of those "delusional disco vampires of 54," by the way, discreetly wrote hefty checks when many people who had a lot more money than the delusional vampires ever had never bothered to contribute a dime.

"Your absolutely circular intellectual tunnel-vision wraps around your universe of perspective and aims right back at your own ass.

Seriously, do you actually kiss your mother with that mouth? Because it seems you're too busy puffing long, academic words out of it in intensely specious ways to even have the time to pucker your lips..."

I think we're progressing rather well, given how very briefly we've been working together.

You're obviously experiencing a number of very distinct emotions all at the same time. Some of these feelings may be painful and confusing and quite difficult to express. But it's important to remember that there's no wrong or right way of expressing them.

Sometimes when we reach a point such as this, to help us both better understand your confusion, I'll ask you to talk a little bit more about certain things you've said that stood out to me.

For example, I'd like to direct your attention, please, to the words I've set in bold in the partial transcript above.

When thinking of me, or when trying to express your thoughts about me, you seem concerned with specific parts of my body -- my ass, for example, or my lips.

Could you please talk a little more about that? When you think about my ass or lips, how does it make you feel?

Word on the street is that Compton has been "talkin' shit" about Salt Lake City for years.

Since Elizabeth seems to have an uncanny knack for disappearing without a trace for months at a time, chances are she'll be able to avoid Suge's wrath until cooler heads prevail.

"To be honest, I could care less about whose actually Jewish. Or any Jewish matters whatsoever. What I do care about is the preponderance of a great big school of writing which takes up a giant slice of the american consciousness, media attention, and bestseller list spots, while providing the world with a kind of reading experience I don't particularly enjoy...."

It's odd that you perceive a dichotomy between Jewish authors and the "American consciousness, media attention, and bestseller list spots," and that you express a prissy dislike for "pinky, pansy, jewy intellectuals."

You very much enjoy announcing your familiarity with Derrida, a Sephardic Jew -- one of your "pinky, pansy, jewy intellectuals" -- who had a rather famous hand in influencing the "American consciousness" with regard to literature.

This is only one contradiction in your three paragraphs above. Had they been well-rehearsed, they couldn't possibly have packed more contradictions into so few sentences.

But your mind's easy way with contradiction and cliche isn't as interesting as its equal ease with parapraxis.

Eventually you'll discover that the world is more forgiving and tolerant than you now assume. But to discover that, you'll first need to be more forgiving and tolerant with yourself. In the meantime, your "secret," if we can call it that, is safe with us.

"But I have to say, the preponderance lately of pinksy, pansy jewy intellectual writers living in and writing about each other in the sweaty-sheeted boroughs of new york sort of make me long for another resurgence of manliness. ..."

Given that Gentiles have had more than 2000 years of intensive Jew-baiting practice, you'd think that even the most callow among them would be able offhand to do better than "pinky, pansy, jewy intellectual."

If a non-Jew has his eye on, for example, Hadassah's Annual Otto Weininger Award for Best Jew-Baiting from a Sexually Confused Hysteric, he really ought hunker down and study the manly pioneers of the form he apparently yearns to master.

Even without subjecting it to what you might call a "close reading," Myers' essay, from the beginning, doesn't make sense.

Given that the piece fails laughably to meet the clarity and tight reasoning traditionally required of the short-essay form, perhaps it was never intended as such.

Perhaps it's meant to be a literal representation of Myers' inchoate thoughts and bizarre reasoning.

A harrowing, factual first-person account of a woman whose interior life is luridly irrational, but who maintains a fairly plausible facade as a media professional.

If so, it succeeds admirably.

As if it were more of an aura, or unearthly presence, than physical human hair.

This may be because Bill's hair is actually afraid of him. Afraid that Bill might tear it out by the roots.

Living with this constant fear of violence, Bill's hair has entered a perpetual fugue state. Seemingly present, but quite somewhere else indeed.

Among people this rich and powerful, doesn't it take a little more than infidelity to end a marriage?

Wouldn't it be something more along the lines of cheating + falling in love?

If people are too busy engaging in reaction formation to respond to this post, they should know that there is hope.

After consulting with my colleagues, I've obtained a rabbi doll, a teeny tiny Torah, some plastic nachos, and an ample sandbox.

Sometimes when we play make-believe it's easier to express our feelings and thoughts about difficult things.

"I still think there is a double standard, so I guess we disagree. As for you implying that I am antisemitic, that is so wrong that it's laughable."(emphasis mine)

From our work together so far, if pressed, I would offer that you are dealing entirely in pure projection.

The "tolerance" you find intolerable is the tolerance you are unable to afford yourself.

Conflict of this nature frequently arises when the tolerance, or self-acceptance, at issue involves "intolerable" insights with regard to sexual identity.

Were you to accept the social tolerance "jammed" into your head at school, you would as a consequence be forced to confront your resistance to accepting your own Otherness.

(The relationship between latent homosexuality and anti-Semitism, particularly the association of Jews with perceived effeminacy, powerlessness, and weakness, is well-documented and has been examined exhaustively by many scholars.)

Since our time is limited, we should perhaps set aside classical technique and move without delay to the matter of your sexual fantasies and dreams.

Classical technique requires that we first ask the patient for clarification before we proceed to resistance interpretation.

Priam:

"I was immediately perceived as ignorant, and occasionally a bigot, if I didn't agree with them.(Even when I was correct- with a rabbi in the kitchen making nachos to verify my argument as being correct)...."(emphasis mine)

The "accidental" ambiguity of the above construction necessarily leads us to ask, "Why did this rabbi need to make nachos in order to prove that you were correct? Would another kind of finger-food somehow have negated your argument? What about mild or spicy Buffalo wings, or perhaps carrots sticks with a blue-cheese dip?"

"You want to know what's really crazy? I had to deal with bigotry by Jewish folks against me because of my heritage and appearance."

While I'd very much like to hear more about the nacho-making rabbi, and examine your wording of the specific sentence in which he appears, we should probably first take a closer look at the statement above.

When approaching this statement, which is remarkable not only for what precedes it, we ought keep in mind the following:

"The analysand speaks about what brings him there, his suffering, his symptom. This symptom is hooked into the materiality of the unconscious, made out of things that have been said to the subject, that have hurt him, and things that are impossible to say and cause him suffering. ...Analysis is a matter of recuperating something lost from the [analysand].This recuperation of an object is the key to the Freudian myth of the drive..." (emphasis mine)

-- "Guiding Principles for Any Analytic Act," IV Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, Ilha de Comandatuba, Brazil, 2004

See also: L'orientation lacanienne du Champ freudien, Eric Laurent, 2006

"...With Judaism, however, one has to walk on egg shells or the ADL will be on you before you can even finish your sentence. ..."

Does one, really?

I mean, need one persist in holding forth on a subject about which one obviously knows little?

Or does one feel rather obliged to make a faith and its adherents the object of one's preening condescension?

What with one's ignorance and self-regard, one should assume that the reason one so often seemed to be walking about on eggshells was that one so often had a bit of egg on one's face.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, isn't the whole Christian premise of reconciliation and absolution based on finding one of God's little loopholes?

"Well, we're not technically supposed to engage in mortal or venial sins, but if we tattletale on ourselves to this 'magical' person called a 'priest,' he -- and it's inevitably he --
says some 'magical formula' and poof! Our sins disappear, except not some of the mortal ones completely."

It's 2008, people. Just dispense with the fucking drama about right and wrong, sin and forgiveness, and just sit where you are watch some more television already!

I'm not anti-religious. I'm not really educated enough on the subject of religion to have any sort of reasoned opinion about it anyway. I think agnostics and atheists are pretty much the only people on earth who are at all times rational and reasonable.

The Jewish law defining how an eruv is made is just the right amount of vague so that if one group's in charge of making the eruv, another group inevitably comes up with reasons why it isn't kosher.

To non-Jews and non-Orthodox Jews this may sound insignificant. But the way this plays out is that those Jews who don't hold by the eruv generally feign mistrust of the dietary kashrus, or kosherness, of those who do.

This feigned mistrust is a convenient weapon for most of the year, but it becomes particularly nasty during Pesach when the anti-eruv folks make a big deal out of categorically refusing to eat anything whatsoever that comes out of pro-eruv household's kitchen.

@kokotaylor:

There's an enourmous eruv in Manhattan that extends from the East River to the Hudson, and roughly from E/W 57th to E/W 112th.

"He's in Chelsea - so it's a building number and beginning of a street address. 219 West 22nd Street, etc."

I know a photographer who lives near there and does these utterly sublime pictures of endangered seafaring birds.

They're quite astounding, really.

Sort of like the chilling, emblematic work of Dorothea Lange, except her subjects never choked to death on tiny bits of plastic. Well, you know what I mean.

Nowadays so much of children's play in locked into the drearily conventional bright side, the unrealistically optimistic.

The poor little dears have hardly any opportunity at all to explore their Thanatos, their gothic selves enthralled by life's dark mysteries, such as lunatic mothers dressing their five-year old daughters in trashy, ridiculous clothes.

Thank God this country has finally awakened from its puritanical slumber and acknowledged that children are sensual creatures who positively yearn to be acquainted with the night.

Bring on the sinister carnival music!

Let our little ones embrace human existence's voluptuous sadness and dance wildly in their grotesque fashion clown costumes around fate's brilliant fire that reduces hope to nothing more than sparks and smoke!

"I do appreciate the fact that unlike in NY, "being from somewhere else" is totally welcomed and appreciated here..."

Almost 40% of people living in New York were born outside the U.S.

So, I'm not quite sure what you expected from New York in terms of appreciation and welcome.

I think the city officially stopped throwing big "We Welcome & Appreciate YOU!" parties for newcomers sometime in the mid-1660s.

I just think it's important that musical theater liberate itself from the conventions and cliches that prevent it from really speaking to today's audience.

That's nothing.

Now that the weather's getting warmer, all those twee little "French-style" tables and chairs in Bryant Park are absolutely swarming with three species of the world's deadliest snakes.

Death adders. Malayan kraits. Plus, Green mambas.

Just last week I personally watched several dozen Malayan kraits surround and strike a young mother and each of her two-year old quintuplets, killing them all instantly.

She must have been from out of town because you can rent a mongoose by the hour for a very reasonable fee at the three Wichcraft kiosks. (The rental comes with a 15% discount for any beverage, which is nice.)

In some ways, you seem quite familiar with its culture.

But in other ways, you're either choosing to ignore what you already know, or you need to get a better sense of the NYT in and of itself.

In the entire Tri-State, the locked wards at Bellvue are the only place that smells more strongly of craziness than does the NYT.

Even well before the recent round of lay-offs, when you walked into the NYT the odor of "fear pheromones" was so strong that it made your eyes water.

I don't know why people continue to insist that the NYT is staffed by knowable types such as "neocons" or bien pensant middle-of-the-road liberals.

The NYT is the nuttiest work environment on the planet. It is staffed by people in constant thrall of unspeakable dread.

These are addled people barely capable of remembering their own names. Forming the intent required for having an opinion or "political bias" is beyond them.

And yet given the NYT's pungent craziness, which is apparent to anyone who's as much as shared a coat rack or locker room with anyone who works there, you come up with breezy, rational prescriptions like this:

"Bill Keller needs simply to come to terms with the nature of modern newspapers. He and his colleagues will feel so much lighter if they do."

Simply?

"Had Sylvia Plath simply taken a brisk twenty-minute walk every day and eaten more fresh fruits and vegetables, she would never have written 'The Bell Jar' or shoved her head in an oven."

"I hate that just because I drink soy milk I'm lumped in with the communists. Life just isn't fair."

Greetings, Zorica.

Life under the brutal and inhumane capitalist system is not fair. Which is why the Party's youth wing would like to invite you to attend a very whack political discussion group for extremely intelligent dudes like yourself who are also def, ill, and phat.

This sick group is truly da bomb and will almost certainly help you think critically about capitalism's internal contradictions and how you personally might help organize the urban lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary vanguard.

Historical materialism is fresh shit, yo!

We look forward to meeting you.

Yours, in revolution,

Hamud

Dean's borrowed his entire style from the steamy "down low" romance novels that lots and lots of African-American women buy for "one-handed reading."

If you've ever stopped to check out what any of the dozens of African-American book-peddlers in the city are selling, you've probably seen at least a few of these "DL romances," aka "thug porn," on their tables.

Dean's genius is that he's figured out a way of bringing this sub-genre to a mass audience.

FUN FACT: Brooklyn is the world's largest purveyor of African-American "street lit," which includes "thug porn." A distributor on Duffield St supplies street lit not only to the book peddlers you see around the city, but also to hundreds of chain and independent bookstores across the country.

Either you're one of those Bertelsmann designed and manufactured autobahn-worthy young editors, or your main squeeze is one.