July 4, 2009

I spent the 4th of July on Coney Island with the beautiful and talented Erin Siegal covering the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest for Deadspin/Gawker. A gallery of pics with commentary is here.

Bat-shit crazy, fake baby birthing church lady Sarah Palin threatens to sue the world on the 4th of July

Today, Sarah Palin, Jesus' divine gift to America born with the ability to queef the Star Bangled Banner out of her red, white and blue vagina, spent the 4th of July holiday like all true patriots do...blitzing out bizarre tweets and Facebook messages, topping it all off by having her attorney issue craft a letter which basically threatens to sue anyone on the internet who dares to say anything critical of Sarah (coded within the vague legalese of "baseless allegations").



Naturally, this couldn't go without a response...



What a fucking dolt.

pic via Zoee

Hitler is pissed that Michael Jackson died

I will never tire of these and this one is one of the funniest ever...

"The world needs more Trigs, not fewer."

Did you see Sarah Palin's resignation speech, the one she timed perfectly late on a federal holiday Friday afternoon? Wow was that one great big barrel of crazy?! Would it be going out on a limb to speculate that something is up, that there's more to this than meets the eye?

The statement today by the Ice Princess way another one of her classics...a rambling, incoherent word soup laden with patriotic cliches, catchphrases and contradictions, but there was seriously something amiss about it. She seemed nervous, frayed, almost as if she was on the verge of coming unhinged. Maybe the squawking waterfowl in the background made her nervous (nice touch Sarah), but I have a feeling that there's so much more to this. I don't buy the notion that her decision to step down Immediately was motivated by her "no more politics as usual" desires. Horseshit.

And, of course, Sarah couldn't resist setting her and her family up for martyrdom by suggesting that comedians cracking jokes about Trig is part of her motivation. Just when you think she can't possibly be more revolting...

Here's the speech as it was covered on MSNBC. Sarah comes in at about the 2 minute mark.



If there's one good thing to come out of this, it's that maybe Palin's wacky announcement will give the cable news outlets something to cover this weekend other than Michael Jackson.



UPDATE 5:22 PM: I've been told by a source that rumors have been swirling for weeks that the IRS has something big on the Palins. What that is is unknown, but I can't wait to find out.

Ridiculous pic in short-shorts with the American flag via Runner's World

Well hey there Stinky Britches!

So over the past few weeks I've received too many kind emails all expressing basically the same sentiment almost universally expressed in the comments of the last post I did here, which usually goes something like this..."Cajun Boy we like you at Gawker, but it's not the same...Are you ever going to come back to writing your blog?" I've been kinda avoiding answering that question here for a while, not out of any sort of fear or anything, but more out of a weird sense of sadness. Allow me to explain.

First and foremost, to answer the question, yes, eventually I will come back here. This is my baby and I started it from nothing 2 1/2 years ago and developed a bit of web presence and I don't really plan on letting it go...At this point I can't imagine not having a web presence...but I just don't have the time/mental energy for CBITC right now.

You see, back in early May I started writing Gawker at night. After filling in for the outgoing night editor for two weeks, Gabriel Snyder, Gawker's managing editor, offered me the job permanently and I accepted it with great enthusiasm. Frankly, I'd have been a bit of a fool to pass it up. They made me what I thought was a good financial offer, I work at night, so I can still work on the various OTHER projects I'm working on during the day, and I have an audience of hundreds of thousands of people each day reading the site. The opportunity to write for and drive stories to that audience, one of the more influential and well-informed on the web, is sort of thrilling. It's just such a bigger soapbox, a louder megaphone, than writing on my personal blog will ever be. And to be quite honest, the night editor job at Gawker is the only gig within Nick Denton's Gawker Media empire that I've ever truly thought, "Hmmm...I'd like to do that."

So, with all of that said, again, I just don't have the time/energy to pump out a minimum of 8 posts a night at Gawker AND post regularly over here. In fact, when I'm not writing Gawker, I do everything within my power to stay the fuck off of the internet altogether, just because the job requires so much data consumption that I need every break I can get from it. I just don't have it in me to spend even MORE time on the net writing another blog. It's just too much.

However, I do plan to pop in here more often to occasionally post some things that fall outside of Gawker's scope. I haven't been doing that in the last few weeks, but that's going to change. So there.

Finally, I know it's different over there...I've had to alter my "voice" a bit to fit the writing style my boss wants out of me, and I have to cover things I wouldn't normally write about over here, but compromise is part of life I guess. So though I still haven't signed a contract for them to put my name on the site's masthead, it's official...The job was offered, I accepted, hands were shook. But again, I'll be popping in more regularly, so keep me in your RSS feeds and bookmarks and whatnot, but for the foreseeable future, you can follow me at Gawker. Here's the direct link to all of my posts there.

http://gawker.com/people/cajunboy/posts/

So again, come visit me at Gawker. Email me your tips. Email me to say hi or how you saw a clown crying in a candy store or whatever. (cajunboyinthecity at gmail dot com) I miss you guys over here. I'm sad to have to neglect this blog for a while, but I'm only doing it because it's in my best interest to do so.

So yeah, I sold out. Sometimes you just have to do it.

And oh yeah, I almost forgot...

I'm writing Gawker at night again this week. They asked me back, amazingly. Come over and say hi!

Quote of the week

College grads don't deserve to be feted by celebrities, or honored, or lifted up with inspiring words. They deserve to be BROUGHT THE FUCK DOWN BY THE CRUSHING WEIGHT OF REAL LIFE'S BITTER DISAPPOINTMENTS. They deserve a stern lecture from someone like me, who is NOT famous, NOT inspiring, and NOT attractive to look at.

I bet you grads had one hell of a spring, didn't you? Oh, I bet you spent your whole spring taking a miniscule courseload, lounging on blankets outside on the quad, fucking each other, drinking your gay little Twisted Teas... I bet you even smoked pot on Wednesday morning, just for the hell of it. I bet you just had the time of your fucking lives the past four years, didn't you?

YOU MAKE ME SICK.

Guess what, fuckos? Party's over. You're out of college now, and your parents are now too poor to nurse you through grad school. No more fantasy life for you. No more ice luges. No more intellectual discourse. No more ripe teenage pussy. That's all over now. YOU ARE FUCKED. Your days will now consist of searching for a job in a marketplace where no available job of any sort fucking exists. Your commencement speaker will probably tell you your class "faces enormous challenges," or some bullshit euphemism like that. This is a lie. A challenge is something you can overcome. You, on the other hand, are completely, unavoidably fucked. You're not going to cure cancer. You're not going to stop wars. You're not going to save the planet. If you're lucky, you may stumble upon a $2 coupon for Honey Nut Cheerios one day. That will be about it.

Otherwise, you are entering a world that is running out of money, a world that will slowly choke itself to death unless it somehow stumbles upon a miraculously clean, cheap energy source that has yet to be invented and almost certainly never will be. Ten years from now, your degree will be 1/100th as useful as a fucking life vest. So wipe that nauseating smile off your faces and heed now this glimpse into your very near future…

-My buddy Drew Magary writes a commencement address to the nation's graduates each year over at Deadspin, and he nailed it once again. Seriously, go read it...it'll make your fucking day.

I'll be somewhere else for the next few days

All this week I'm filling in for Ryan Tate on the night shift at Gawker, so I'll be posting infrequently here, but posting a lot over there, so come over and say hi.

Rachael Ray's corn porn

Now, one of the nice things about having a moderately read blog is getting all sorts of fun stuff sent in from readers via the emails. Now, with that said, you people have failed me, because for some reason months have gone by without anyone bring this to my attention...



Just try harder next time, OKAY!

"Sexual Healing" performed by the Hot 8 Brass Band

These guys do a pretty fucking fantastic rendition of one of the greatest songs ever recorded...



Have a great weekend! And thanks for sending this over Logan!

It's just about time for Michael Arnone's 2009 New Jersey Crawfish Festival!

Oh yes! It's that time of year again. The 2009 Crawfish Fest is almost upon us. Since I've moved to New York, this is something I look forward to each year. It's like a mini-Jazz Fest, filled with great musicians and bands from Louisiana, not to mention all the restaurants from back home that make the trek up to serve their gumbo, boudin, etoufee, jambalaya, fried alligator, pralines...I could on and on and on...and, oh yeah, thousands of pounds of succulent BOILED CRAWFISH!

This is from the official festival press release...

Over the past 20 years Michael Arnone's Crawfish Fest has become one of the most exciting events on the summer festival circuit, presenting a cornucopia of Louisiana music, food and related culture. The 20th Annual Crawfish Fest, scheduled for Saturday May 30 and Sunday May 31, at the Sussex County Fairgrounds, Augusta, New Jersey, will showcase a stellar collection of award-winning Louisiana musicians, including several headline acts from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Four stages (three of which are under cover) will feature 24 Bands playing New Orleans Funk, New Orleans R&B, Delta Blues, Brass, Cajun and Zydeco. Multiple Best of the Beat and Big Easy award winners Bonerama and the incredibly hot Big Sam's Funky Nation will bring the irresistible dance grooves of New Orleans' brass band sound to the Jager Pavilion Stage. However, that's not all. Two of the best solo artists currently working in New Orleans, the incredible vocalist John Boutte and one of the city's greatest songwriters, Paul Sanchez, will join forces for what is sure to be an unforgettable performance.

Known as the single most important Louisiana and New Orleans Style Music, Food and Camping festival north of the Mason Dixon line, the Crawfish Fest features an assortment of New Orleans fare including boiled crawfish with corn and potatoes, pork sausage and chicken Jambalaya, grilled alligator sausage, Shrimp Creole, Fried Catfish, raw oysters, Po-Boys and more. Festival enthusiasts, who prefer a more traditional menu, may choose from grilled Portabella mushroom sandwiches, vegetarian Red Beans, burgers, hot dogs, ice cream, fruit cups, sno-balls and other desserts. All dishes are $8.00 or less.

You can check the musical lineup and view the menu and buy tickets to the festival at their official website, www.crawfishfest.com. And they have drunken shuttle buses that run from Port Authority to the fairgrounds!

And here's a short video from the festival three years ago to give you a taste...



Aw Jesus this can't get here fast enough! I might just live on the fairgrounds for the entire weekend this year.

(click on the poster to enlarge it)

Quote of the day

Glenn Beck is Fox 3.0. The sheer variety of his tics—weeping, clowning, etc. (for a video sampler, click here)—make him appear more a performer than a news broadcaster. But the effect is to convince his few critical viewers that he's a human performer, thereby obscuring the reality that he isn't human at all.

Our brief tour through the world of Artificial Intelligence has surely enabled you to spot the giveaway that this commentary is computer-generated. It lies in the high frequency of words expressing an exaggerated sense of disaffection: "trouble," "trust," "lying." Other words Beck favors: "socialism," "slavery," "destroy," and "confiscate." Clearly Fox News has some sort of Web crawler trolling hard-right Web sites to compile their newest bot's vocabulary. Another clue is Beck's face, which resembles the exaggeratedly pink and rounded human faces generated by Pixar's state-of-the-art computer animators. Pixar can design convincing-looking robots, but its people remain highly stylized. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Fox subcontracted to Pixar the visual component to its Beck software. Yet another clue is Beck's recent statement, in a New York Times profile, that he identifies with Howard Beale, the news anchor played by Peter Finch who cracks up on air in Network. In Beale's climactic speech in the film, he says: "We'll tell you any shit you want to hear." What better definition of what chatbots do best?

However they did it, my hat's off to Fox. For 59 years the world has waited for a machine that could pass the Turing test in some definitive, inarguable way. Fox News has done it. Let me be the first to nominate Roger Ailes for the unclaimed Loebner grand prize of $100,000. Can a Nobel be far behind?

-Slate's Timothy Noah takes a hard look at Glenn Beck.

Artie Lange on Bob Uecker's use of the "cough button" and Harry Caray's hallucinations

Last night Norm Macdonald was the guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. On the show, he shared a story about his friend Bob Uecker, which was funny, but it reminded me of another funnier story about Uecker that Artie Lange told on the show a couple of months ago. It's pretty great...

Morning links 5/8/09

-A student at a Pennsylvania Christian college has been booted from school for doing gay porn to pay his tuition. (Fox News)

-New Orleans appears to be a lock to host the Super Bowl in 2013. (Nola.com)

-New York teenagers basically tell Bristol Palin to shut the fuck up and go back to Wasilla, Alaska. (ABC)

-The nationwide manhunt for the Wesleyan killer has come to an end. (New York Times)

-That Drew Peterson dude whose wives keep dying has been arrested for the murder of his third one. (MSNBC)

-Can In-N-Out burger survive and maintain its quality of product if it expands? (LA Times)

-The family of a 6-year old who disappeared thirty years ago in downtown NYC now think they know what happened to him. (New York Magazine)

-The CIA says that Nancy Pelosi was fully briefed on the torture of suspected terrorists. (Washington Post)

-A UK man thinks that an addiction to energy drinks caused his son to commit suicide. (Daily Mail)

-The WHO is still saying that up to two billion people could get swine flu. (Breitbart)

-Dick Cheney doesn't think there's anything wrong with the current state of the Republican party. (Politico)

America's leading conservatives are shocked and appalled over Obama's lust for fancy, elitist condiments, among other things

There's just so much all-around nuttiness going on with the right wing today, it's almost mind-boggling. Let's review...

-Just about every conservative "thinker" under the sun is bloviating all over the place over the fact that Obama ordered a cheeseburger and asked them to hold the ketchup and add dijon mustard to it. No, seriously. Apparently "Real Americans" slather ketchup on their burgers and hold the mustard. For the record, I prefer neither. I'm a mayo man you see! Does that make me a commie too? Anyway, Jason Linkins at HuffPo has a nice roundup of video and audio clips from the usual suspects expressing outrage. This is what it's come to.

-My old buddy Joe the Plumber announced today in Time Magazine that he's leaving the Republican party to join the Aryan Nation or something. Who knows?

-And just when you thought they couldn't embarrass themselves even more, the Republicans in the Senate released this new promotional video today to scare every Bubba under the sun into believing that Obama's closing of Guantanomo Bay will result in terrorists blowing up the nation's local VFW halls...


(via Wonkette)

Just fucking embarrassing.

The rapping flight attendant almost makes me want to book a Southwest Airlines flight right now!

So that's what DJ Jazzy Jeff is doing these days...



Thanks for sending this over Molly!

The deep purple bruise on my shoulder and the Manny Ramirez story that wasn't

So last night I ventured out into the rain (Seriously, it's like fucking Seattle around here these days!) to have a couple of drinks with my buddy A.J. Daulerio, he of Deadspin.com and cookie sheet to the face fame. We met at this joint near his apartment in Carroll Gardens called the Zombie Hut, where we sat for a few hours bullshitting around and watching the NBA playoffs. Over the course of the three hours or so we were there, we each put down a half dozen or so of the Zombie Hut's signature concoction, the appropriately named "Zombie," and at the end of the night, A.J. convinced me to get down into a three-point stance on the wet sidewalk and attempt to take out a parking meter with my shoulder. Now, before I go any further, I should note that he, A.J., does this sort of shit all the time. If I had a dollar for each time I've heard Daulerio say, "hey Cajun Boy...how bout you shot-put that ATM machine through the window," I'd have a few hundred bucks, but this time, on this night, I, with my capacity for rational thought somewhat impaired, decided to appease him, so I took on the parking meter. Twice. And I failed both times. I mean, they must really reinforce those things these days because it didn't even budge! But hey, I do have a lovely shoulder contusion to show for it today!

Convinced that I wasn't giving it my best effort, A.J. also attempted to take out the parking meter, an effort that proved as equally futile as my own. I even snapped this blurry photo of his failed attempt on my Blackberry...



My point in telling you all of this is to make mention of the fact that in all of the time we hung out together getting hosed and generally acting like idiots, not once did A.J. mention that he was was this close to breaking a major story about Manny Ramirez using steroids. But then the news broke today that Major League Baseball was suspending Ramirez for failing a drug test, and A.J. subsequently came forward with his story.

Now, I'm not sure what I'm more pissed about...the fact that I finally succumbed to Daulerio's relentless peer pressure, or that he never made mention of his Manny Ramirez scoop the entire night, but regardless, his story is a great read and I highly suggest you go over to Deadspin to check it out.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin loves to take family vacations paid for by city vendors

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, noted lover of pussy and guns and one of the most unpopular elected officials in the history of American politics, is in deep shit again. Surprise! You see, Nagin had this guy, Greg Meffert, who was the city's chief technology officer. Meffert, while employed by the Mayor's office, was also doing work for a tech firm called Netmethods. Netmethods outfitted Meffert with a corporate credit card. That's where the fun starts. From Nola.com...

Mayor Ray Nagin has said he remembers only one trip paid for by his former tech chief Greg Meffert, a 2004 family vacation to Hawaii, but records show the mayor and his family flew first-class to Jamaica in November 2005 on Meffert's vendor-provided credit card.

The cost of the airfare to Montego Bay for Nagin, his wife Seletha, their sons Jeremy and Jarin, and daughter Tianna was $6,532 -- all covered by technology contractor NetMethods.

Unlike the Hawaii trip, there's no evidence that Meffert or his family accompanied the Nagins to Jamaica.

The newly exposed credit card records are a part of a civil lawsuit in which NetMethods' competitors allege unethical favoritism by the Nagin administration.

Separately, the FBI is investigating possible influence-peddling in City Hall in an inquiry that appears to be centered on Meffert and Mark St. Pierre, who ran NetMethods as well as Imagine and Veracent, two small firms that got the bulk of the city's technology work while Meffert was chief technology officer.

When asked last week about other trips paid for by NetMethods, Nagin said he remembered taking only one trip with Meffert -- the one to Hawaii.

"There's some other charges on a credit card statement that suggest I may have taken" another trip, Nagin told WVUE-TV. "But nobody can verify that."

Ha! There's something almost admirable in Nagin's brazen "fuck you bitches now pay me" attitude toward the whole thing. He just doesn't give a shit anymore. Personally, I think he may actually be slowly going insane, but then again, he never really was all there to begin with.

Shaq wants to do unspeakable things to Krispy Kreme donuts

You see, there's lots of famous people who coulod have made this video and it would have been funny. It would have been funny because certainly all of us can relate to a lust for a Krispy Kreme or any other forbidden culinary fruit, especially when that lust is set to a Mariah Carey tune. But it's Shaq's facial expressions that really sell this. I mean, I can feel his pain here, and that is why I laughed all the way through it...

Quote of the day

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during this period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

"On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.

-Joan Didion.

The hot winds are blowing around in southern California again, and even though I've never lived there, there's something that excites me about that.