Random Things Worth Reading

Jan Freeman on semicolons (and gender, sort of).
Mischa on John McCain’s weird tendency to use John Lewis to his advantage (much to Lewis’ chagrin).
United States of Jamerica on good things about Joe Biden (who apparently could be vice president).
Phil Klinkner, responding to Rick Warren’s query to the candidates, asks “what’s rich?” and provides some quantitative [...]

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Travel Update

I’m spending the night in Charlottesville, VA, before catching the train to New York in the morning. Had a decent-but-not-great dinner at The Virginian; the place had a alright atmosphere though. Apparently you can smoke in restaurants in Virginia, which somehow seems really strange to me now since you can’t in Tennessee (where I’m from), [...]

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Race, Class, and Homophobia

Criticizing the notion that homophobia is significantly more prevalent in the African American community, Jamelle writes:
As far as African-Americans are concerned, it just so happens that a greater percentage live in very low-income communities, where these kinds of status concerns arise (since I’m sure that you’d see similar levels of homophobia in say, Southwest Virginia).  [...]

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Random Things

1. In a rather arbitrary turn of events, Bob Kelleher — a mostly liberal, 85 year old, ever-present political candidate for a hodgepodge of parties in Montana — is somehow the GOP nominee for Senate running against Democratic Senator Max Baucus. He pulled in about 36 percent of the vote in a six-person primary contest. [...]

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A Query

Am I the only wannabe indie rock hipster that didn’t know that song from Juno is actually “Anyone Else But You” by the Moldy Peaches?

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Tennessee’s First Congressional District Primary Update

Here in Tennessee’s first congressional district, Phil Roe’s very interesting primary challenge to Republican incumbent David Davis turned out be successful. After a mere one term in office, Davis will no longer be my home district’s member of Congress as of 2009. It was close, but Roe appears to have edged him out by about [...]

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Hip Hop and the Conservative

Mark Gauvreau Judge, in a review of John McWhorter’s new book about hip hop, writes:
A great jazz critic once referred to the great black musical traditions as giving the audience the ability “to deal with adversity with grace.” Rap teaches the very opposite, to deal with adversity with resentment, misogyny, and street theater left over [...]

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“They might think that’s odd.”

A glimpse into my future.

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Pop Culture and the Candidates

If you had to guess which presidential candidate said, “And I like The Wire a lot, too. That’s a great show,” you would probably guess Barack Obama. But according to an Entertainment Weekly interview, it was actually John McCain, who also lists Dexter, Big Love, and Curb Your Enthusiasm among his favorite shows. Obama, by [...]

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My Web Browsing Gender Confusion

It seems I am distinctly more womanly than Matt Zeitlin. In contrast to his impressive 100 percent web machismo score, I just now received a mere 58 percent male, 42 percent female result on this fun little test. Even this is skewed slightly upward towards masculinity because I often end up at the General Motors [...]

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