Waka Waka– Shakira’s and Zangaléwa’s

I’ve listened to Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” at least 30-40 times in the past week. Celie and Iris play it over and over and my response to it has passed through various phases. My reaction: Listens 1-5:  This song is sort of dreck. 6-10: But very catchy. 11-15: Now I’m really getting [...]

M.I.A. and Ginger Insurgency

Intense new video (almost a mini-movie) for the new M.I.A. song “Born Free.”  (Caveat: nudity and a lot of violence.) Spoiler alert: it’s sort of derivative of “District 9″ with grittier/ more violent depictions of brutal (and multiracial) U.S. troops terrorizing, beating, arresting, & assassinating innocent civilians… who turn out to have been singled out [...]

“We spent as much money as we could”

Weird/ surprising Victorian lit reference of the day: a line from Great Expectations as epitaph for the American reconstruction effort in Iraq: At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: “We spent as much money as we [...]

What the Frack?: Battlestar Galactica

We’ve been making our way through the first season of Battlestar Galactica.  I’d heard good things about it, but I’m not the biggest filmed sci-fi fan and it felt like a big commitment.  What finally inspired me was running into an old acquaintance who has pretty hip/smart taste who declared that he believes it may [...]

End of the Southern Strategy?

Two NY Times articles today suggest that the Southern Strategy — the Republican party’s coded appeals to racist working-class whites to peel them away from the Democrats — may now be dead. Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so [...]

Ice Cream Social

Everyone’s feeling kind of happy and giddy.  Last night we went to an “ice cream social” at Obama headquarters downtown for volunteers.  It was nice.  The building they’ve been in used to house Tortilla Flats, but then (Steve tells me) they sold their liquor license and later lost all their business and gave up.  So [...]

“Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus”

Wow.  Just soaking it all in now.  What a great day.  And an especially nice fillip of frosting on the cake that Indiana went blue! I’ve seen saying/thinking that some crazy stuff is going to be coming to light about the McCain campaign and Palin in particular.  Here are some choice bits from Newsweek: NEWSWEEK [...]

Canvassing for the last time [ed. correction: in 2008!]

We did one more day of canvassing, this time in Bedford IN.  It was another gorgeous day (we saw a reading of 80 degrees on the way out in the afternoon!?) and Bedford, or the neighborhoods we were in anyway, is a pretty pleasant town.  Very few people were home, so it was mostly just [...]

Canvassing in Southern Indiana: college towns are for wimps

My mantra this weekend was “college towns are for wimps.”  Steve and I were going canvassing in Bedford, about 20 minutes south of Bloomington.  When we got to the home base 15 minutes late, though, all the downtown Bedford packets were gone, so it was either semi-rural Bedford, with a lot of driving in between [...]

Charles Meets Obama

What a sweet story.  Only five more days until we can all start to rub our eyes and awake from Rove’s dream (as my uncle Ben put it to me recently).