08.31.06
Posted in personal, sports at 23:57 by Toby Petzold
I just have to tell you, man: I love watching Andre Agassi play tennis —and he just played one hell of a three and a half hour match against a very classy young man named Marcos Baghdatis. Wow!
I’ve watched this man play for probably twenty years —and I’ve gone from thinking he was just some super-talented punk with a flair for flair to truly respecting him as a person and an athlete. I root for Andre Agassi like no other tennis player.
Andre’s about eight months my junior, but a real inspiration and a man to look up to. Not that I was ever going to be anything like an athlete, but it is a real point of pride with me to watch him succeed at the highest level of his calling. It’s a vicarious thrill. And I’m really proud of him.
Keep on livin’, Andre. See you this weekend.
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Posted in personal at 22:32 by Toby Petzold
Thanks to everybody for their good and/or interesting thoughts for me on my interview today.
It was the best I’ve done in any interview in many, many years.
Tonight, I am hopeful.
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08.30.06
Posted in personal at 23:03 by Toby Petzold
I have a big job interview tomorrow and, so, I am very nervous. I don’t do well in interviews because I am too aware of the stakes to be comfortable. But, in order to get to where I am going professionally, I must get comfortable in those settings.
Theodore Roosevelt used to say, basically, that one must at least pretend to be confident even if one is not —and that, by sheer force of will and resolve, what once was feigned becomes what one is. In other words, fake it ’til you make it.
I very much like and respect the people who will be interviewing me tomorrow, and I expect that that will help me through the process.
I envy people at times like these who have Providence in their hearts and the strength that comes with it. My family, of course, supports me and I know that my friends and potential colleagues are pulling for me. But I sometimes just want that talisman —or the incorporeal shield that saves me from myself and protects me where I cannot control what might come.
But let me be myself. Let me have half an hour to make my case.
Give me where I may stand and I shall move the world.
Bless me, [Archimedes].
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08.29.06
Posted in America, Big Media at 21:41 by Toby Petzold
Jesus Christ! Can you imagine living this down?
“Please! Don’t go! We’ll have to go back to reporting actual news if you turn out not to be the godforsaken liar we already knew you were but’re hoping you aren’t, anyway!”
Disgusting.
Throaty McHuskington: you are done.
(Thank you to the blog More Pressing Matters for letting me lift this.)
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08.28.06
Posted in religion, stupidity at 23:41 by Toby Petzold
I cannot believe how crazy Katherine Harris has become:
MIAMI — Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris is calling separation of church and state “a lie.”
She said God and the nation’s founding fathers didn’t intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.” Harris made the comments in the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention.
The Republican candidate for Senate said separating religion and politics is, as she puts it, “wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.”
Harris also said if Christians are not elected, politicians will “legislate sin,” including abortion and gay marriage.
Holy shit! Is this woman kidding me?! God chooses our rulers? You can’t say that stuff in public! And you sure as hell shouldn’t even be thinking it in private!
Say what you want about Bush and the Architect, but they could see this hatch coming off its hinges from a mile away. No wonder Harris has scared them and the rest of her party away: she’s a disaster.
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Posted in America, Big Media, stupidity at 22:43 by Toby Petzold
I’ll tell you what. Not only does America’s Big Media machine owe it to our society to immediately cease and desist with its coverage of this liar who claimed to have been involved in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but it should offer up a sincere apology for what it has done. And it ought to do so now.
The whole fucking thing is nothing but prurience and pornography —and I am very angry that these news networks who very self-righteously tell us how important they were in bringing us coverage of events such as Katrina have so little respect for both the American People and their own purpose in a normally-functioning society that they would persist with this garbage in the face of all logic and proportion.
It was clear from almost the moment that Karr’s claims were aired that he was a deeply disturbed freak of the first order —but that’s never stopped disgusting pornographers like Nancy Grace of CNN Headline News and Bill O’Reilly of FOX and the other losers from wallowing —again— in all of the filth that we were subjected to when this case first obsessed America a decade ago.
Where does shit like this come from? Wasn’t this the thing that absorbed all the undissipated energy left over from the O.J. Simpson case? Why can’t we be done with it? This is an embarrassment and an indictment of us as an essentially unserious culture too easily seduced into following the worthless speculations of a legal and media machine with too little inclination to explore issues that actually affect us in our everyday lives.
But we all know what’s going to happen. Big Media will find some way to keep this thing alive for a few more weeks rather than owning up to its irresponsibility and apologizing for its willful perpetuation of yet another lie.
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Posted in America, Big Media, Science at 17:31 by Toby Petzold
Uh oh. Looks like John Mark Karr —the obligatorily three-named villain of the past few weeks of Big Media TV coverage— is not a match for the DNA found on JonBenet Ramsey’s underwear and, so, will not be charged with her murder.
I hope Nancy Grace’s producers have removed all the sharp instruments from her studo.
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08.27.06
Posted in Big Media, Islamofascism at 23:50 by Toby Petzold
I am very pleased that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig of FOX News have been released from their captivity, but I am offended to learn that they were forced at gunpoint to convert to Islam.
What a sick joke.
Let us hear some condemnations from the Ummah on this obscenity. Some that don’t sound like crickets.
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08.26.06
Posted in Science, Unexplained Mysteries, personal at 06:13 by Toby Petzold
As hard as it is to believe, I really have come to the conclusion that aspertame is a sinister substance. My recent consumption patterns tell me this —and it’s just a huge surprise to believe that it could have contributed to any sort of health problem for me; viz., a nagging cough that is now largely gone.
For one thing, I have been a consumer of Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper and pretty much any other calorie-free carbonated beverage you can think of for most of the past two decades. I was, until about six or so weeks ago, probably a six-pack-a-day consumer of these drinks. I do love the cold burn and, although I am mostly unaware of it —probably on account of developing a high tolerance from its overuse— the buzz a nice cold soda pop gives me.
I have surely kept an army of hobos in liquor for all the aluminum cans I have given them to recycle over the years.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I think people’s immune systems change over the course of their lives. And I figure that aspertame has somehow been getting into my body’s mucus production plants and just completely fucking up everything. I don’t know how, but it’s right up there with fluoridation, Mandrake.
How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh?
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Posted in Joe and Valerie, stupidity at 02:13 by Toby Petzold
Speaking of asses and how they get owned, check out this post at Say Anything on the disposal of Joe and Valerie’s latest crap. Quoting the Associated Press (via The Smoking Gun —and with my emphasis):
AUGUST 25–A federal judge yesterday turned down a request from former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband that the couple’s address be kept secret in court filings in her lawsuit against Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney. In an August 11 motion, Plame and Joseph Wilson argued that their privacy would be jeopardized if their Washington, D.C. residential address was included in court pleadings. But that request was rejected by Judge John Bates, who noted in an order filed yesterday that, “in less than thirty minutes, the Court was able to ascertain plaintiffs’s residential address from multiples publicly available sources, including a database of federal government records.” Bates added that the couple’s lawyer, Christopher Wolf, has been quoted in one newspaper saying that he is Plame and Wilson’s next-door neighbor, “and the residential address of that attorney is readily ascertainable.”
The Wilsons are just pathetic. But at least Bates was able to restore some of that honesty!
But, to continue with Say Anything:
Both of these two have acting been like first class media whores for several years now. Wilson is a proven liar of epic, self-serving proportion. Valerie may have had some modest intelligence skills years ago, but over the past 5 years has shown herself to be about as capable as Inspector Clouseau. Their infamous lawsuit was filed, with great fanfare, earlier this summer, and these two are only now figuring out that they might be better off if everyone and his grandmother couldn’t look them up at the click of a mouse?
Ha, ha, ha!
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