God's Own Crunk

Heh:

The closest celebration of reason was in Baltimore, but traveling to Baltimore didn’t seem very reasonable at all.

via Feature: Atheist unconvinced of religion’s evil | Washington Free Beacon.

So writes fellow-skeptic CJ Ciaramella at The Washington Free Beacon. I had a chuckle. If one is going to go to Baltimore, one has The Wire to draw from for some tourism points of interest.

Ciaramella writes of the National Day of Reason, a response by the kinds of atheists I tend to dislike to The National Day of Prayer. I don’t believe what most Americans believe, but I find atheist responses to homogenous expressions of Jude-Christian beliefs to be off-putting and counter-productive. For example: Who is so weak-minded they feel the need to counter the National Day of Prayer?

What, exactly, is so offensive about this? To wit, a folksy observation:

Prayer, like salt, tends to improve the lives of those who like it without hampering the lives of those who don’t. 

In other words: live and let live, and quit dogging people who don’t see the world the same way you do. Jeebus. A national day of reason – if only the anti-Christian, Islamic-pandering Donkeys on the hill saw life the same way.

I may not be a Christian, but I know who my friends are.

Are you going to be an early-adopter to Google Glass, or are you going to hold out as long as possible? I was literally the last person in Generation X to get a cell phone (not until 2008, TYVM), but Glass is appealing. My goal upon getting one will be to never wear it in public – because That Guy is going to be a thing, sort of like – as referenced in this story – BlueTooth Headset Guy.

All it’s going to take is for one Glass wearer to record or photograph someone or something that shouldn’t have been filmed to ruin Glass for everyone. Let’s not incite lawmakers or angry mobs. Stick to photographing kittens, consenting friends and those totally amazing pancakes from your favorite brunch spot, OK?

via Google Glass: An Etiquette Guide – WSJ.com.

He likes it. I replaced my iPad, which basically turned into a $500 Kindle, with a Galaxy Tab 2, for a couple hundred bucks, and I much prefer the Tab 2, not only for its size, but for its lacking all the Apple idiosyncrasies that get less interesting to me with age. My iPhone 4s will be my last Apple product. For those who have eschewed a mid- or full-sized tablet, I’ll tell you this: as a voracious reader, I’ve read more than ever in the three years or so I’ve made the transition (Kindle>iPad2>Tab2), and god only knows how much money I’ve saved on the far less expensive digital version of books:

At first, the obvious option would be the iPad mini.  I’m familiar with the interface, the Retina display is best in class by far, and using the Mac as my computing platform makes it more convenient.  However, I preferred to go outside of the Apple world because I still plan on making use of my iPad. Why own two of them at a time? Also, I had begun to scope out some other tablet options in the Windows 8 and Android markets, especially from Samsung, and liked having the option to use MicroSD chips to expand storage; none of the iPads have that option.

Unfortunately, none of the other tablets came in the same size as the iPad mini.  The one I preferred was the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, but that had a 10.1″ screen, almost the same size as my iPad. Samsung and others had 7″ tablet options, but the power and performance scaled down considerably (although the price was a lot lower, too).  I had all but resigned myself to an iPad mini when a Best Buy associate tipped me off last weekend that Samsung had an 8″ tablet ready for release in a few days, one that had the same capabilities as the Galaxy Tab 2 — the Galaxy Note 8, which I picked up on Thursday, for $399 on its first day of availability.

via Product review: Galaxy Note 8 « Hot Air.

I’m late to this because I’ve been busy, but all the White Knights and sob sisters are freaking out over Nike’s latest Tiger Woods campaign, one sparked by Woods’ return to the number 1 ranking in golf. The catchphrase of it is “Winning takes care of everything,” which is about as American as apple pie. Not so for the White Knights – cue Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

Advertising Age’s Abbey Klaasen says this campaign has “swagger,” but will swagger work for Woods in this instance? Klaasen says this is part of modern sports culture, which is certainly true — but Tiger Woods wasn’t just a sports star.  He was a cultural phenomenon, a household name in a sport that produces almost no other household names.  That massive popularity wasn’t based on “swagger,” it was based on a much different kind of persona.  If he’s planning to regain that iconic popularity, “swagger” about winning doesn’t sound like a great plan to get there — although perhaps Nike and Woods are just accepting the fact that Woods’ scandal will never allow him that kind of comeback, which seems odd to me.

via Nike, Woods: Winning takes care of everything « Hot Air.

Over at TOM, Smitty recently accused me of being a concern troll because I said that Steven Crowder was a no-talent hack who was a terrible spokesman for conservatism. Here, I’ll accuse Ed of being the same – a concern troll. Ed’s a big fan of Crowder’s, and like Crowder, the White Knight is strong in this one. His concern, noted in the paragraph above, covers for his discomfort of Woods being accepted in a good ad campaig again since he – gasp! – fucked women that weren’t his gold-digging ex-wife.

As I get older and stay bachelor, my antenna for White-Knighting gets longer and my patience for it gets shorter. The vast majority of people who were truly offended by the behavior of Tiger Woods was said White Knights and Oprahtized women, the kind who wear pink ribbons year round yet find humor in castration stories. I was a helluva lot more offended by his wife getting away with beating him silly with a golf club (a thing of jokes in the 1950, much like wife-beating), then walking away with a half-billion dollars.

I have a feeling Tiger Woods has been wanting to give his critics a big “fuck you” for a long, long time, and now that his game has returned, he can. Anyone that even modestly follows golf knows that Woods has never been a choir boy – his cursing, competitiveness and lewd humor have been legend since he was in college, and I’m neither a golfer or a fan of the game. But as these things go, the media were insistent on turning him into something they wanted and then turned on him when things went bad for a minute.

Good for him – I like people giving a good fuck you ever now and then.

This shit’s bananas, and I liked Crunchy Cons - there, I said it. His weird brand of Beta Male Conservatism is why urinals will probably be outlawed at some point in my lifetime. Whatever – Rod Dreher wore out his welcome with me a long time ago, and RSM had me in stitches in this extended take-down:

Notice that I don’t link to the Amazon page of the book, because I don’t want to risk anyone accidently being influenced by Dreher’s awful ideas, even if it would make me a profit. Jonah Goldberg famously ripped the wretched thing to tatters and flung the bits back in Dreher’s face, leaving me little to do except clean-up work in my Reason magazine review of that Very Bad Book. And in that controversy, I recognized a conflict that wasn’t really about politics, but about career ambition.

Dreher was (and is) what the magazine trade calls a “back of the book” writer — book reviews and so forth — rather than a guy who specialized in actual reporting, and his Moment of Glory on the cover of the National Review was the life’s dream of a thousand literary types who are forced to slum it in journalism.

via OK, Let’s Make This Quick : The Other McCain.

I saw this on Instapundit earlier, Mr. Reynolds wondering when sportswriters became such pansies. The Insty link goes to Frank Deford, sort of the godfather of living lyrical sportswriters, ruminating about guns. Mr. Quick’s response:

Right about the time they admitted female sportswriters to men’s locker rooms.

via Asked and Answered | Daily Pundit.

Rush Limbaugh talks about this on occasion, and his point is the correct one: most sportswriters are journalists first, and most journalists are Liberals. Roger Ebert likes to talk about how he started out as a sports-writer when he was still all wetbehindtheears, then he became an acclaimed movie critic, and now he’s known as a either a Liberal hero or a half-mad ranting leftwing nutjob, depending on your politics. Ebert ditched the bulk of his reputation as a reliable film critic and a good writer to be loved by other Liberals.

Remember: At the end of the day, Liberal journalists long only to be loved by other Liberals. Everything else is a mean to an end.

Regarding Mr. Quick’s point, as a man with a love/loathe relationship with popular sports, I say that reporters have no business in locker rooms, period, and women damn sure have no business in men’s locker rooms (which is currently accepted) any more than men do in womynz locker rooms. Another annoyance for me is the weird specter of women calling men’s games. It’s not that they’re not capable, it’s that they’re tokens, and for every game they call, there are hundreds of men who’ve played the men’s game, whatever the sport may be, that are more knowledgeable of the sport in question, especially when it comes to color commentary. Plus, women tend to have voices that are grating, shrill – men’s games deserve the soothing sopranos and barritones of a man who’s balls have dropped, so to speak.

That, however, is a broadcasting issue. Regarding sportswriters being pansies…

Sports Illustrated was, from my observation, Ground Zero for this business. A magazine that was once regularly devoted to football, baseball, track and hunting started its decline with an increasingly Liberal slant in the 1990s ie its shunning of its hunting roots and the growth of anti-gun views.

Now, “progressive” issues and people populate the sports-reporting world, especially at the high-exposure levels of SI/ESPN. Peter King’s must-read MMQB column following each NFL Sunday is regularly infused with soft-liberal politics. SI is unreadable, in part because of this same cancer. ESPN and its crusade regarding concussions is an example. Anything manly is dangerous, anything dangerous is manly, and we all know that anything manly is bad. One thing I like about ProFootballTalk.com is that while Florio is an attorney and probably a Liberal, he keeps the politics out of his reporting, which I admire.

Then there is the Pink Cancer that greets football fans each October to raise awareness for an affliction that affects all men: Breast Cancer.

While Mike Lupica evolved into the Roger Ebert of sports-writing, Mitch Albom evolved into its Dr. Phil. The most influential writers now have a TV presence, and the most beloved writers – shocker – keep their politics to themselves, or cloak them very well.

National sports-writing is a game for the best-of-the-best Beta Males these days – fuzzy manlets who are quick to pull the trigger against guns and violence while nasally whining about whatever issue of the day their sexless wives and lives will find appropriate.

Such is life in America these days.

Per Betsy Woodruf, at NRO:

At its core, Girls feels like a deliberate, dissective examination of a group of people who stubbornly refuse to grow up and are lucky enough to be able to pull it off. The main thing Dunham’s characters share is the idea that just because they exist, somebody else should give them stuff. In and of itself, depicting that isn’t at all a bad thing. Girls is an interesting project, it’s well executed, and it can be really, really funny. Look, I like Girls, and I’m excited about the second season.

via Girls Not Coming of Age – Betsy Woodruff – National Review Online.

Although this rule isn’t really important to me regarding, er, television, I’ve always tried to hold fast to the idea that I’ll not critique or react to “art” I’ve not seen/heard/experienced.

This is just silly, though. BW spends more than 1,000 words dogging this show at NRO, then writes what I’ve bolded above.

I try to downplay my misogyny, in part because I don’t hate women. Let’s put “Girls” aside – I’ve not seen it, and have no interest in watching it. If you’re going to spend all that time at a Conservative place like NRO bashing the show, then … seriously? “I like ‘Girls’”. Either you believe your initial reaction or you don’t – either the show is shit or it’s not – if it’s not shit, if it’s The Sandra Papers, and you don’t want to admit it, that’s fine.

Be. Honest.

You’re critiquing, not punditing. You can’t dog a show for all that time, then admit you like it. If you like it, either you’re dishonest or confused or … honestly confused. You can’t be all those things.

Just saying.