I’m completely serious here : Could someone out there explain the appeal of NASCAR to me? From what I hear, it’s the most popular sport in the country, but to me it just looks like a bunch of billboards driving around in circles. Even if I found any appeal in watching cars race, the fact that they’ll slap advertising on anything seems insulting to the audience. That alone is enough to keep me from watching, yet I’m not going to assume that just because millions of people like something I don’t that it means they’re all idiots. Am I missing something here?

Based on the devotion these drivers seem to inspire, it looks like a personality-driven phenomenon, but when do viewers have a chance to get to know these guys? Every time I flip past it I just see nothing but cars. If you rarely get to see the actual guys who are competing (which seems to be in contrast of every other sport), how can people feel so strongly towards the people who they never see? Are the broadcasts broken up by a bunch of interviews or something?

Another thing that I’ve noticed that makes NASCAR stand out is that the affiliations are by sponsor and not region. I can understand why someone would root for the home team, but there are probably a dozen drivers from Atlanta for example. Their only difference seems to be that one would be sponsored by Pepsi and another by Taco Bell or something. Does brand affiliation play a role in choosing a favorite?

Or does the appeal of NASCAR lie in America’s lust for cars? If so, what makes NASCAR stand out above other forms of automotive racing? Is it that the car’s bodies look like generic Ford or Chevy sedans? Personally, I can’t tell them apart, but is there a car brand rivalry aspect to the appeal as well?

Or could it be that NASCAR broadcasts are more family-friendly than the boobies and beer commercials that are an essential part of every other professional sport? Would the relative tameness of NASCAR be because of the sport itself or because the races aren’t broadcast in prime time?

Perhaps it’s a southern thing. Are NASCAR fans more comfortable watching an event that’s the exclusive domain of white dudes with mustaches and country music as opposed to the ethnic diversity that marks just about every other sport? Not that I’m trying to connote that there’s anything discriminatory about NASCAR fandom, but that familiarity can lead to comfort.

While I’m starting to think I may be on the road to answering my own question, looking back at the points above, I still can’t figure out why the hell anyone would like NASCAR. Obviously there’s something to it, so I’m gonna open this one up to my readers. Do you like NASCAR? If so, why?

I thought Andrew Sullivan retired from blogging? Not that I’m saying he should retire or anything (he’s one of the few conservative bloggers I can stand to read every day). I’d just hate to think that the only reason he announced his retirement was to fish for compliments. Then again, if rock stars can go on bullshit “farewell tours” all the time, then why can’t bloggers?

This is the best article about intelligent design I’ve ever read (via Kottke) :

But if we can’t infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
[. . .]
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

…but that’s just the setup. These two sentences, in my mind, make up the brilliant punchline of the piece :

It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait — benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three.
[. . .]
Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory.

So ID proponents should have no problem with someone questioning the motives of the “designer” behind creation. After all, we’re not talking about the supposed embodiment of love who had his son murdered for us, but some anonymous soul who put our species together the way a child build something out of Legos. Perhaps those who find themselves on the losing end of a battle against “intelligent design” should lobby to have the “theory” given a more appropriate name. I suggest “indifferent design” or “ignoble design”.

Oliver’s got a link to one of those embarrassing “greatest president ever” surveys. What makes it so damn embarrassing is the fact that Reagan and Clinton top the list. The breakdown by party affiliation is even worse with the dueling results that shout “Oh yeah? Well, our president’s the best”. It’s nice to see that there’s a little more sanity among those who don’t have a partisan axe to grind :

I’m a bit of a history buff, but only in a “smart enough to sound stupid” sorta way. So instead of trying to come up with my own list, here’s a what I think of some of the contenders above :

Bill Clinton - I like Bill Clinton a lot. Of the guys on the list, I think he probably had the most potential to be a great President, but we all know how that one ended up. Maybe if he’d been able to pull off universal healthcare he’d be topping more lists, but he was way too embattled to get much done and too accommodating to force his agenda through Congress unscathed.

Ronald Reagan - Maybe if conservatives had spent more time reading the newspaper at their Invisible Hand circle-jerks they’d remember the explosion in the homeless population, the S&L scandal, the 1987 stock market crash, the recession that followed his term, and the Iran-Contra scandal. Seriously, he was no hero.

Franklin Roosevelt - If forced to name a favorite, he’d probably be my pick for the top spot. This list of New Deal programs alone makes him my pick for the top spot.

Abraham Lincoln - My favorite Republican President. The party should could use more like him these days, huh?

Dwight Eisenhower - How the hell does he rate worse than Nixon? I’m shocked that more Republicans don’t hold Ike in high esteem.

John F. Kennedy - A martyr President. Yawn. If he’d lived long enough to take the blame for Vietnam, I doubt he’d be on this list at all. At least he was openly supportive of the civil rights movement.

Richard Nixon - I’ll say it again…how the hell did he get on this list? My only thought is that maybe the survey respondents were so stupid that they couldn’t even name 10 presidents.

George Washington - I think the obviousness of choosing the first President as the best obscures how great a President he really was. Although it was a losing battle, his fight against the formation of political parties should put him in the top five of anyone’s list.

Also worth noting is that 1% of Democrats named George W. Bush as the greatest President. In other news, a new survey shows that 1% of Democrats are completely retarded.

Oh. My. God. It’s like somebody is shitting on my eyes (via Tom) :

Hoping to breathe new life into its animated Looney Tunes franchise and prop up the WB television network’s slumping Kids’ WB line-up, Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. is planning to launch a new cartoon series this fall based on “re-imagined” versions of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tasmanian Devil, Lola Bunny, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

Warner Bros. has created angular, slightly menacing-looking versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters for its new series, dubbed “Loonatics” and set in the year 2772. Names for the new characters haven’t been finalized, but they are likely to be derived from the originals: Buzz Bunny, for example. Each new character retains personality quirks of the original. The new Bugs, for example, will be the natural leader of the Loonatics’ spaceship; the new Daffy will remain confident that he is the one who should be in charge.

Brace yourselves for the picture everybody….

BOO-YAHHHH!!

This reaction from Cartoon Brew pretty much says it all :

A friend last night made this perceptive comment about the new Looney Tunes-inspired TV series LOONATICS: “Warners has already desecrated these characters so many times, why the hell would anybody care at this point?” That pretty succinctly sums up how I feel about the new series.
[. . .]
That having been said, I’m still pissed about this project. But for a wholly different reason. Pissed, because for every misguided show like LOONATICS, we lose out (and Warner Bros. loses out) on discovering the next Chuck Jones, the next Bob Clampett, the next Tex Avery, the next individual who could be creating the Bugs Bunny’s and Daffy Duck’s of our generation. There are countless modern creators out there who have ideas…who have something to say…and it’s a slap in the face of every talented artist working in this business whenever a major animation studio chickens out like this. Shoving a tired rabbit down America’s throat for the umpteenth time will never reap WB the rewards of giving America a great new cartoon star, an honestly-created cartoon that speaks to our time and place. But why take risks, especially when you can be successful by playing it safe: successful like BABY LOONEY TUNES and its sweet ranking of 104th in children’s programming or LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION and that delectable $20.9 mil it accrued in North American box office receipts.

To display anger over LOONATICS means that Warner Bros. has won yet again. The executives love hearing affirmation that people still care about these characters; when somebody likes the cartoons enough to voice concern, they know their job is safe. It’s not like they’ve created any cartoon characters of their own that audiences actually give a fuck about. These classic characters are their lifeline to a weekly paycheck. So let me be the first to say to Warner Bros.: take Bugs and fuck him however many ways you want - make him anime, give him pants and a spongy complexion, pair him up with Snoop Dogg and produce a Broadway rap-musical…I just don’t care.

Somewhat along those same lines, my good friend Josh had this interesting question to those who are offended by X-treme Looney Tunes :

Not that I think that Loonaticz-X is a good idea or should be done, but when does a character gain folklore status? When is it okay to start reimagining, interpreting, adapting or whatever they want to call it.

Dracula was created in 1897 and has had many adaptations over the years and I think most everyone on this list is pretty keen on several of those interpretations.

Batman is even younger and I like both Frank Miller’s reimagining, as well as some of the countless other offshoots and adapations. With any of these characters there have been misses and hits.

My immediate thoughts are that Batman, Dracula, and (my favorite) Superman are more archetypes than characters at this point. Unlike Bugs Bunny, the characters above don’t really have much of a personality. For that reason, Adam West’s campy Batman, Bob Kane’s Shadow-inspired original, Frank Miller’s postmodern antihero, Tim Burton’s movies, and the Timm/Dini animated series can all exist side-by-side. Bugs Bunny, thanks to the brilliant voice-work of Mel Blanc, has a strong enough comic persona that the character should be held in the same regard as Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges, or Groucho Marx.

Then again, Josh brings up an interesting point. At what point do characters graduate into the realm of folklore? When everyone who cared about the original dies or stops caring? Or does it just depend on the originality of the reinvented version?

Propaganda? Recruiting tool? Whatever you call it, glorifying war to children is pretty screwed up :

Rather than evacuating a crew of aid workers, the Army detachment was shepherding a few dozen programmers, designers and marketers who have been working on one of the Army’s latest recruiting tools: a computer game called, simply enough, America’s Army.
[. . .]
America’s Army lets users play soldier online, band together with other Internet warriors and battle enemies in detailed 10-minute scenarios that the Army says are more realistic than any other game. It is available free for downloading at americasarmy.com.
[. . .]
Likewise, while the equipment and uniforms in the game are designed with maximum realism in mind, the same approach does not apply to other aspects of the military experience, like death and injury. In contrast to other popular computer games, in America’s Army limbs are never blown off. Instead, wounds are marked by a puff of red smoke. Maimed foes never writhe or scream in agony.

“We have a Teen rating that allows 13-year-olds to play, and in order to maintain that rating we have to adhere to certain standards,” said Chris Chambers, a retired Army major who is now the project’s deputy director. “We don’t use blood and gore and violence to entertain. That’s not the purpose of our game. But there is a death animation, there is a consequence to pulling the trigger, and we’re not sugarcoating that aspect in any way.

“We want to reach young people to show them what the Army does, and we’re obviously proud of that. We can’t reach them if we are over the top with violence and other aspects of war that might not be appropriate. It’s a choice we made to be able to reach the audience we want.”

A puff of red smoke? Why don’t they just have rainbows and unicorns fly out of the wounds?

If they really want this game to accurately reflect the military experience, they should have the game completely take over the computer so the player can’t check email, browse the web, do any work, etc. for as long as the game is in progress. Every day the player must complete a mission, regardless of what else is going on in their “real” life. The game continues like this for six to nine months or so, after which the game is in “reserve” mode and may restart itself at any time. If the player dies in the game, their harddrive is reformatted. If the player is only maimed, the screen shows nothing but a static photo from the inside of a military hospital for a few weeks and a few random keys on the keyboard stop functioning completely. Sounds pretty shitty, huh? Well, so is getting shipped off to war.

Apparently the conservative group Citizens United has enough money lying around that they could throw it away on these “fuck you” billboards to the city of Los Angeles :

What the conservative elites don’t realize is that Hollywood gets money every time they watch TV or go to the movies. You may think you shit doesn’t stink, but you’re just as media saturated as the rest of us. Perhaps the maligned entertainers can cough up a few bucks for this response ad :



..and by the way, you know all the stuff Jesus said about judging people? Well, don’t forget that you’re the ones who voted for Kindergarten Cop.

Apparently my lack of outrage about the Jeff Gannon prostitution revelations means I don’t get it or something. So, let me try to address some of the criticism and make a few additional points

On thing I should have made clearer in my previous post was that my outrage over this whole “outing gay Republicans” game is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. I probably would have gotten around to complaining about this stuff eventually, which is why in this case a made sure to add a caveat. Like I said previously, I have no problem with outing a public figure when it’s done in context with anti-gay remarks, but that’s not the case here. The problem with Gannon is that he’s a conservative shill who’s been granted unprecedented access to the White House press room and who may or may not have had a role in blowing the cover of a CIA agent. His alleged homophobia which is being used as an excuse for his outing is irrelevant to the issues at hand.

The fact is, Gannon’s homosexuality is being used in a negative way to heighten the impact of this story. If this is just about his prostitution, then why the inclusion of this frequent modifier?

So in the end, why does this matter? Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House.
[. . .]
Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky - a tasteless episode, “inappropriate,” whatever. Monika wasn’t a gay prostitute running around the West Wing.
[. . .]
Someone had to make a decision to let all this happen. Who? Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it? Who?

Is there a reason why a gay hooker is worse than a straight one?¹

In the post I quote above, John actually goes into detail about why he’s beating the gay angle. For him, the hypocrisy of the Republican party using a gay man to help push an anti-gay agenda is too much to take. Fair enough, but if that’s the problem, how is this any different from the rumors of homosexuality that have followed Ken Mehlman, Scott McClellan², and David Drier? The “gay Republican hypocrite” angle has been beaten to death. Concentrating on it here just muddles the issues and distracts from the greater point.

Does the Bush Administration keep a conservative plant in the White House press pool? Did they intentionally leak the identity of an undercover operative who specialized in weapons of mass destruction? These are important questions whose answers get to the very heart of our government. Photos of Jeff Guckert’s cock don’t help us get those answers.

While I’m engaging in hyperbole, my last post on this solicited a number of outrageous comments. I guess I hit a nerve or something. For example :

The fact that he was a paid escort, a whore, a criminal (in the eyes of the law), a perhaps mentally unbalanced individual, blithely hanging out with the White House press corps, winning favor from the WH Press secretary is at least shocking, at best scandalous.

An escort and a whore?? Wow. Seriously though, this whole “perhaps mentally unbalanced” thing may fly in the comments section of a semi-obscure blog, but psychoanalyzing people from afar won’t help you win any arguments in the real world.

Even more outrageous, however, was this comment :

A vocal and powerful proportion of the Republican party thinks homosexuality is evil and wrong. They think homosexuals should rot in hell…Of course not every Republican feels that way, but the Republican party has done nothing to distance itself from this stance and is very close to embracing it. A homosexual republican is akin to a black person who is in the KKK because they agree with some of their positions.

While I agree that the Republican party has been for all practical purposes hijacked by the radical right, that analogy is so completely off base, it’s a wonder that the GOP weren’t just compared to Nazis instead. Do I really need to bother explaining the differences between the Ku Klux Klan and the Republican party?

^{1: Here’s a revealing quote from the comments section : “It’d be the same scandal if it were a female, straight, prostitute with special access. It’d probably be less fun though.” Well, this may be “fun” to some people, but I prefer to not think of this as a game.}

2: By the way, it’s amazing how quickly idle speculation about “blackmail” got added to the talking points on this one. Within a couple days, every other post on this issue seems to have thinly-veiled attacks about “questions that deserve answers” and such. Everybody would do well to take things like this with a huge grain of salt.

Today this site got its first dose of trackback spam, hacked by some “l33t” asshole, and then completely taken down for the majority of the day because someone else on the same server installed some really insecure forum software. Jeez, when it rains it pours, huh?

Matt Drudge is in righteous indignation mode today :

OSCAR HOST CHRIS ROCK SHOCK: ABORTION IN AMERICA IS ‘BEAUTIFUL’

Shock Oscar host Chris Rock recently declared that abortion in the United States is a “beautiful thing!”

“Abortion, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful abortion is legal. I love going to an abortion rally to pick up women, cause you know they are f**king,” Rock said during his club routine.

Veteran members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have grown concerned over the choice of Chris Rock to represent the Academy before a worldwide audience, well-placed insiders claim.

“This is not who we are,” said one top source from Los Angeles.

It’s odd that either Drudge or the Academy would make a big deal out of this since Chris Rock has been using that abortion joke for fifteen years. (If you don’t believe me, go check out his 1991 album Born Suspect.) Perhaps Drudge can do a followup story about how the millionaire Rock is really a cheapskate who keeps trying to convince people to sell him only “one rib”.