"Papa was a rodeo."

"There is no capital more useful than intellect and wisdom, and there is no indigence more injurious than ignorance and unawareness."

— ALI BIN ABU-TALIB

2:39 am • 11 June 2010

IT’S A TERRIBLE LOVE AND I’M WALKING WITH SPIDERS

10:20 pm • 13 May 2010

If you have a vote in Britain, use it to vote Labour today.

“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were ‘thick’? Did they lack talent - those people who could sing and play, and recite poetry: those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands; those people who could dream dreams, see visions; those people who had such a sense of perception as to know in times so brutal, so oppressive, that they could win their way out of that by coming together?

I say to you in complete honesty, because this is the movement that I belong to, that I owe this party everything I have got - not the job, not being leader of the Labour Party, but every life chance that I have had since the time I was a child: the life chance of a comfortable home, with working parents, people who had jobs; the life chance of moving out of a pest and damp-infested set of rooms into a decent home, built by a Labour council under a Labour Government; the life chance of an education that went on for as long as I wanted to take it. Me and millions of others of my generation got all their chances from this movement. That is why I say that this movement, its values, its policies, applied in power, gave me everything that I have got - me and millions like me of my generation and succeeding generations. That is why it is my duty to be honest and that is why it is our function, our mission, our duty - all of us - to see that those life chances exist and are enriched and extended to millions more, who without us will never get the chance of fulfilling themselves…

If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you….I warn you that you must not expect work - when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet - when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort - with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound - when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less - when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.

If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.” (Neil Kinnock, 1983)

12:07 am • 6 May 2010

Moments at which my wit is wasted IRL, No. 65,554

Me:	Hey, nice to meet you, Christopher Schuller.
This guy:	Hey, I'm Paul Denton.
Me:	(in sly glee) Sorry about leaving you hanging at the 'Ton Hotel like that, but UNATCO was sounding like serious business.
This guy:	What hotel? Have we met before?
Me:	(internal) -.-

10:43 pm • 23 April 2010

Has anyone heard The National’s new album? Is it any good?

8:18 pm • 23 April 2010

"The Hansens have yet to announce their intentions. Sheriff Randall Boyce of Bedford County, who on Monday acknowledged that the boy probably had dual American and Russian citizenship, said he had been told by the Hansens’ lawyer that they would speak only if they were charged with a crime. Whether that will happen is an open question, and Sheriff Boyce appeared reticent. He said he told the State Department, “Do you not feel that this is over the sheriff department’s head?"

VERY PERCEPTIVE OF YOU, O Sheriff of Bedford County.

5:39 pm • 13 April 2010

"I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or the concealment of child rape."

PAUL CONSTANT wants to be excommunicated. Where do I sign up?

4:12 pm • 8 April 2010

Not live from the show, but this was the best of the many songs the Magnetic Fields played in Berlin last night.

5:30 pm • 28 March 2010

"And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so."

THE VANISHING LIBERAL: How the left learned to be helpless (Harper’s, April 2010)

8:04 pm • 20 March 2010

This is a world of terrible hardship, everywhere. And I search for words to put you at ease. But there, in the looking-glass, a kite is soaring, stilling my warring heart and my trembling knees.

12:11 am • 3 March 2010