“A bit of Mexican electoral history could provide some necessary context. Decades of one-party dominance supported by tampering with the vote created a plethora of allegories for common electoral practices that seem drawn from Magical Realism literature: the “crazy mouse” (ratón loco), where voters run around “like crazy” trying to find the booth where they should vote until they quit tired from never finding the right place; the “carrousel”, whereby groups of voters cast a ballot in different voting booths along a pre-set route; the “tamale” (tamal), whereby a voter stacks the booth with votes that he had previously brought with him; the “pregnant ballot boxes” (urnas embarazadas); whereby the ballot boxes are brought to the polling station already stuffed with votes for one candidates; the “shoe ballot boxes” (casillas zapato), ballot boxes where all votes are cast for one candidate; the “shaved-off voters” (votantes rasurados), whereby partisan of the opposing parties are eliminated from the list of voters; and all these allegories are perpetrated by “racoons” (mapaches), electoral “alchemists” who tamper with the votes in order to get the desired outcomes.”
— Joshua Tucker, “Post-Election Report II: Revisiting Fraud and the 2012 Mexican Presidential Election,” The Monkey Cage, 11 July 2012, available at<http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/07/11/post-election-report-ii-revisiting-fraud-and-the-2012-mexican-presidential-election/>
11:02 am • 18 July 2012
“Perry High school was named after Oliver Perry who fought the long battle of 1994, where he courageously lost his life. It’s a myth that his body is burried under the high school’s office. But some of the student are undercover pirates and try to steal the burried treasure that the Great Oliver P. left behind. This high school is ranked three in the state. Perry High school offers classes like pirate jewelry making, sword crafting, and ship engineering.”
— Wikipedia entry on “Perry High School, Allen County, Ohio.”
1:14 pm • 12 November 2011 • 2 notes
Slick and Tricia Nixon, former President Richard Nixon’s daughter, are alumnae of Finch College. Grace was invited to a tea party for the alumnae at the White House in 1969. She invited the political activist Abbie Hoffman to be her escort and planned to spike President Richard Nixon’s tea with 600 micrograms of LSD. The plan was thwarted when they were prevented from entering after being recognized by White House security personnel, as Slick had been placed on an FBI blacklist.
—Slick, Grace; Andrea Cagan (1998-09-01). Somebody to Love? A Rock-and-Roll Memoir. New York, New York: Warner Books. pp. 189–94. (via Wikipedia)
12:09 pm • 7 May 2011 • 2 notes
![“In 1930, [Samuel] Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon became disillusioned with his chosen academic vocation, however. He expressed his aversion by playing a trick on the Modern Language Society of Dublin, reading a learned paper in French on a Toulouse author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism; Chas and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented by Beckett to mock pedantry.” (source)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljri0dwcQD1qa70lvo1_400.jpg)
“In 1930, [Samuel] Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon became disillusioned with his chosen academic vocation, however. He expressed his aversion by playing a trick on the Modern Language Society of Dublin, reading a learned paper in French on a Toulouse author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism; Chas and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented by Beckett to mock pedantry.” (source)
4:24 pm • 16 April 2011
“He relates a bizarre story: Last year, while interviewing a house full of Hamas members, he entered into a rather ordinary conversation on the banalities of soldiering (the journalist, like most Israelis, is an Israel Defense Forces veteran). “So how do you pull these long shifts?” he wondered. “Well, we take pills smuggled in from Tel Aviv,” said the Hamas apparatchik. “What pills?” He didn’t know, but graciously placed a call to a Hamas comrade, who, apparently, doubles as his pharmacist. “He says they are called the EK-STAZY.” The raver-jihadists explained that these mystery pills induce a mild euphoria, and allow them to shoot at members of the Israel Defense Forces for long, happy stretches.”
— “Diary of an Israeli Junketeer, Part Two,” by Michael C. Moynihan
5:54 pm • 8 August 2010
“The result, on this critical telling, will be, simply, liberaltarianism, which purports to make of politics a uniform realm advancing the interest of equality over unequal honor, and to make of non-politics a similarly uniform realm in which all inequalities are inherently trivial and contingent enough to be always respected, revolvingly celebrated, but never honored. At this point, it will no longer make sense to speak of public and private, for the government will intervene regularly in what was once considered ‘private’ life, and what were once considered private acts will regularly take place in what was once considered ‘public’. There will simply be politics and non-politics, which is to say government and non-government. From today’s vantage, when most of politics has been completely captured and defined by those interested in politicizing (that is, getting government respect for) heretofore non-political behaviors, the liberaltarian utopia seems absurd in thinking that the political and the non-political could ever so clearly and concisely be separated. But the contentious hodgepodge and category confusion of today — otherwise known as ‘the culture wars’ — is considered by liberaltarians only an uncomfortable prelude to getting everything sorted.”
— James Poulos, ‘The Promising Animal’ (9 March 2009)
3:44 pm • 29 June 2010
Look at this fucking hipster (source).
11:25 am • 21 May 2010
“The prohibition regime isn’t broken. It functions exactly as it is supposed to function. Iniquity is its purpose … well, that and secondarily the preservation of market share for the legal tobacco and alcohol industries. The fact that powerful people can talk openly on the teevee and in their hackjob memoirs about smokin’ doobs and blowing a few lines without consequence isn’t evidence that we need to address the unequal application of laws and statutes but rather evidence that inequality is the fundamental principle underlying the practical application of these policies.”
— http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/05/mind-if-i-do-j.html
1:41 pm • 13 May 2010
“What makes caffeine more desirable, or less potentially dangerous, than other stimulants is its built-in restraining mechanism. Technically called caffeinism, it’s the state in which an overcaffeinated user hits the drug’s “dysphoric” range and is overcome by the shakes, anxiety, tension, and nausea. Caffeine, that is, is self-regulating. “That’s one of the secrets of caffeine and probably why it’s accepted worldwide,” says Roland Griffiths, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins and the unofficial dean of caffeine researchers. “With cocaine and amphetamines, when you increase the doses, you generally get increased stimulation and well-being.” Too much cocaine makes you feel invincible; too much coffee makes you think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
— http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/breakfast/47395/index1.html
1:49 am • 1 May 2010
