The Mighty Underdogs

So, I'm an idiot. I sent an email to your senate address the other day saying "please do not vote for the bailout." I was at work, had some time to spare, and I was a little tired (we had guests recently and then this dinner last night...). I thought maybe if everyone said "don't be a total douche and vote for the robbery," you might be progressive or something, and not vote for it. Of course, I wasn't holding my breath, but I had three seconds to type and send. In my defense, I also protested down on wall street, so it wasn't like I just sat back and dashed off an email. I was activist. But anyway, you added me to your mailing list and then voted for the robbery/bailout bill. And I've gotten like six emails since then telling me how it's really important that I vote for you.
Now they're each reminders of why I shouldn't believe the hype. Yes, I know you're going to be better than McCain because you'll only assault Afghanistan instead of the entire world, but uh, take me off the mailing list. I'm not sending money, I'm not rooting for you, I'm not stomaching the change message. After you voted for it, you went up and tried to shake McCain's hand all friendly like. It may feel good to agree with the decrepit old scam artist, but we're supposed to have a choice between two directions, not get to vote for which guy voted yes on handing billions of billions to our capitalist masters.

Take me off the mailing list,
Sam

Okay, other people are saying this, but let me join the fray and enter this entry, because otherwise I'll never get to claim my usual insane foresight:
If McCain temporarily scuttled the bailout negotiations, he was the best thing on the national stage for the working class in a long time. Every moment helps, every second people have to wrap their brains around the fact that it is a swindle, is better for bucking the bailout. I'm not going to be lefter than thou and say I'd hate if Obama came back with a one-two punch of "fuck the bailout, here's a real progressive agenda we could spend the money on and jumpstart the economy (read: healthcare, green jobs, solar and wind, education, et cetera)," but I'm also not holding my breath. Barring the obvious (which will soon become his nickname as he continues to pander to the right), the bailout will be saner the longer it takes them to negotiate it out: either there'll be no banks left to save or the political cost will become too much for them to hand every dollar to the slime on the ceiling. Regardless, if McCain was the one man in America who slowed it down, even just to pump blood into his dead campaign, then he deserves points. I'll only take a light shit on his grave.

• I
• am
• so
• sick
• of
• needlessly
• bulleted
• text.

A Scats/History Is A Weapon production

Recently on Boing Boing Gadgets, Rob Beschizza wrote a top ten worst kind of blog entries and I wanted to add #11:

11: The "We-got-to-hang-out-with-the-company-for-a-few-days-so-now-
we're-writing-this-fluff-piece-on-how-cool-their-factory-is-/-what-
awesome-"surprises"-their-new-product-line-holds-/-first-name-
basis-character-references-barf-barf-barf" Post.

Because we're all tuning out the white noise that is advertising (read:billboards), advertisers have begun pitching messaging through experience. And so it makes sense for them to want to work with bloggers, who the wretched of us live vicariously through in our cubicle hells. And Bloggers also make sense because they're insecure swag sharks who are desperate for "legitimacy" and don't writers for Time and the Times also review shit and hang out with the manufacturers? Whatevs, it makes me sick.

I was at a party last year and met a blogger from an unnamed but sizeable consumer blog, we'll just call it UncoolThing.com (because it's an anagram of it), and I was like what is your criteria for what you pick? Is there any thought to the fact that on some levels you create what is cool so you could put in like antiwar shit every once in a while to help improve its coolness? And he was dumb, like unimpressive dumb, and basically mouthed "I support what you're doing" (i.e., empty words at a party meaning "I don't actually support what you're doing unless I feel uncomfortable in conversation and then I will mouth these words and immediately forget what I was, hey! This is some good salsa."). After meeting him, I was pretty unimpressed by the whole consumer blog thing. Without saying it, it was clear that if something had a good advertising package and threw them some swag, they'd run it up the old flagpole if two neurons clicked together. And if you read their blog, you know that. But I still read the blogs because I'm addicted to the idea of a large network of people working full time to filter, for free, through the news, memes, and new products just for me.

But some of these people, like the guy at uncoolthing, write like they have a brain stem and nothing else and so they just repeat the crap that the P.R. people told them as they're out of breath stumbling through some corporate complex. Racist tangent: wouldn't it be great if companies' p.r. people were actually Puerto Ricans and you'd get company tours from them like:

P.R. rep: This new panasonic camcorder prototype is promising and we're hoping the actual production model will have scarface etched into the side next to this Carl Zeiss Lens.

Long story short (too late): I hate blog posts where the blogger just becomes a mouthpiece for some corporate campaign. I don't give a fuck if they let you play with cool toys and tour their secret shit.

Obviously, I don't mean this:

I fucking love Sarah Haskins.

For $179 plus shipping, you can have your face oil painted on a Chinese propaganda poster.
Via photojojo.

So last night I had an interesting dream.

Sam and I were at the DNC (I know, I know). We were watching Biden give his speech and then Obama came out, kissed Mrs. Biden, etc. etc.

Then the speeches were over and people started lining up to go shake Obama and Biden's hands. (It was a much smaller convention, in my dream.) The line was long and it was moving pretty fast, and after a while I looked at Sam and he looked at me, and we shrugged, thinking, "Why not?" In my dream I remember being curious as to what Sam would say to them.

Finally we got on stage, and there we realized that they were just wax figures and people were posing next to them to take photos. Suddenly the lack of security and the fast-moving line made sense and we chuckled. No disappointment here. Of course we'd been had. Of course they were wax figures.

Figures.