Schadenfreude is wrongly deprecated. Without it, life would lose its savor.
1. Watch lame-duck Dubya being snubbed by the entire line of G20 leaders. Sure, objectively speaking it’s no skin off his ass, but I’m sure that he’d gotten to enjoy strutting around being King of the World.
2. Tom Friedman’s cash cow is dead. As of yesterday it had lost 99% of its value, and bankruptcy is now expected so it should fall lower.
While I was cursing the darkness, that poor motherfucker was lighting candle after candle — and now look at him! I’m going to completely enjoy seeing him change his tune, now that his net worth is in the low eight (or high seven) figures instead of ten.
I’ve always been a big fan of orders of magnitude. I keep a bucket of them by the desk and throw in an extra one whenever my writing seems insufficiently extreme.
November 20, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I prefer mine to be a little more long-term, a little more … cold. For instance, I remember a guy on Usenet (this guy, if anyone cares) exclaiming, sometime in the late 90’s, how he couldn’t believe that the U.S. wasn’t going to do anything about global warming because of the Gilbert and Sullivanesque team of Doolittle and DeLay. That made it especially memorable. Well, first DeLay went, then Doolittle — it’s taken a while, but they finally got theirs.
November 20, 2008 at 9:19 pm
The moustache of understanding knows all and sees all. Gold, ammo and rice have been stockpiled against such an eventuality. Pies will not be allowed in the new order.
November 20, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Here’s my humble translation of a short piece by Russian avant-garde poet Dmitri Prigov (he died last year). He wrote it in the 1980s, I guess when Reagan was first elected:
November 21, 2008 at 3:35 pm
The video’s fun to watch, but when Bush isn’t playing the saddest little kid in the clubhouse he’s still busy burning down the world.
November 21, 2008 at 4:01 pm
But at least Bush took a number of things with him that are better off gone, perhaps.
Including techno-libertarian SF genres, as the least of it. I’m blogging now, and if you’d like to comment on anything, John, that’d be great. I promise to save anything particularly troll-like for here, should I be inspired.
November 21, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Oops, here’s the link.
November 21, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Bush is unlikely ever to be punished the way he deserves.
November 22, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Bush is unlikely ever to be punished, period. As far as deserved punishment, it’s hard to conceive of what could be done to him – or any post-WW2 president, for that matter – that could possibly compare to the atrocities he’s committed. Thirty years from now he’ll get his state funeral and all the tearful bipartisan tributes that come with the genre; no one kills real monsters anymore.