Friday, July 19, 2013

Cheap shots and fat pagans

Our best of the week:
Nothing against orangutans. Oregon Zoo.
They do but jest, poison in jest; there's no offense i' the world.

 New York Times:
Roberto Calderoli, a leader of Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League, had told supporters on Saturday that whenever he sees photographs of Cécile Kyenge, the Congolese-Italian minister for integration, “I can’t help but think of her resemblance to an orangutan.”
[jump]

But he totally didn't mean any harm:
“There was nothing racist about it. I didn’t even mean to be offensive,” he told La Repubblica. “I’m always comparing people to animals.”

Venus, Cupid, Bacchus, and Ceres: Peter Paul Rubens, 1612. The big thing about pagan sex, be sure to get plenty of fiber.
What's wrong with pagan sex?
Washington Post:
Has pornography ruined sex? Pat Fagan thinks so.
“What we really have is a pagan sexuality, which is totally different from a Christian sexuality,” Fagan told an audience Wednesday of mostly young people, naming vampire fetishes, bestiality and intercourse between same-sex partners as examples of the porn trends sweeping the nation. “Our teenagers today cannot know what is natural, sexually. That’s what we’ve done.”
It's not really relevant, but my semidyslexia made me see this guy's name (he's Senior Fellow and Director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) and part of the Family Research Council) as "Fat Pagan". Why would this phenomenon, should it exist, be bad for people's sex lives?
having sex with one person is the best way to happiness, because there’s nothing to compare it to. “Those who are monogamous have the best sex they’ll ever know, because they don’t know anything else,” he reasoned.
Pat Fagan points out the way. Raw Story (another hilarious story).
A weird little storm in the world of right-wing semantics:

Obama said he wasn't going to let Detroit go bankrupt (multiple times!), but Detroit went bankrupt. Though Obama was quite clearly talking not about the Michigan city but the national automobile industry for which it stands, as Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Madison Avenue stand for theirs (are there any advertising agencies left on Madison Avenue, by the way? I really have no idea).

Obama's language mistake—he should have said he wasn't going to let Grosse Pointe go bankrupt. And he was right.

Detroit, the non-bankrupt part. Gross Pointe Real Estate.
The answer to what Josh Marshall called the lamest tweet in history (I've decided she was snarking; I'm a copy editor too) may actually be the lamest tweet in history.
My English not so good Mr. Brandon, where is infinite splitting of which you speak? (The comma is unobjectionable as well.) Seriously, if he's an English professor (at Winnipeg) while Bagwell and I are slaving away at the crappy writing of  people who get paid better than we do, the terrorists won a while ago.

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