Is there something wrong with Bill Clinton?

Eileen spotted something disturbing on the Daily Show the other night. Bill Clinton was the guest. Take a look at this clip at about 3 minutes in. Watch Bill's right thumb. His thumb starts to tremble and continues trembling even as he lays his hand in his lap. He spots the tremor and quickly hides his hand.

What the heck is that all about? Anybody know anything about Parkinson's Disease?

Taking it too seriously

Last week, I did something I never thought I was capable of: I told a colleague to "Eff off!" because he was spouting some Republican gibberish about Barack Obama. I've know this guy for 11 years and I've put up with his irrationality and illogical politics with good humor, just as he has put up with mine. I've gotten steamed at him from time to time (most of the time actually) and I've had to get up and walk out of the room on occasion. But last week I'd finally, really had enough. I sent out an email to my office telling people that they can't discuss politics with me because this election is deeply personal and the standard disinformation and sarcastic slanders that are a part of any watercooler conversation about politics are so painful to me that I've got to insulate myself from them to keep my sanity.

I hear anecdotes from friends about similar blow-ups in their respective offices. I wonder how common a phenomenon it is for folks to get exceptionally riled up this election cycle?

Don't worry about awards

People have been complaining on some of the blogs I visit about how their favorite show didn't win any Emmys.

One guy was really upset that The Wire (which I've never seen) didn't win something. "It's sort of proof if you needed any that the Emmys are not something that should be taken seriously."

Well, I think most folks knew that the Emmys were, and always have been, something not worth taking seriously. But that's not because The Wire didn't win. It's because awards shouldn't be taken seriously. John Adams winning best miniseries doesn't legiitmize the Emmys just because it happened to be the best miniseries.

I first learned that awards were a fraud when I was 14 and Star Wars lost to Annie Hall for Best Picture. I knew the fix was in and that the Academy were all a bunch of phonies.

However, I find awards and prizes are useful for hinting at a group of products that might be worth experiencing. When I don't know what the cool kids are listening to, I check out the Mercury Prize, or the NME Awards and listen to all of 'em. Some of the bands are actually pretty good. The same with the Pulitzers and the Bookers and the Whitbreads and so on. They help me filter for the "best" stuff to read.

When you're young, you either want the things you like to be liked only by you, or you want them to be liked by everybody. Personally, I always wanted to have a monopoly on the poets, and musicians, and films, and oblique little journals I enjoyed because I didn't want anyone else to be smart or sophisticated enough to "get" them like I did; it made me feel smarter. But it's been a long time since I felt that little frisson of pleasure from discovering some tattered reprint of an obscure French proto-Imagist poet in the back stacks at Powell's Books and, really, I don't miss it.

72 & Sunny

Eileen linked to one of the more brilliant ads we've ever seen. It was part of the XBOX360 rollout campaign from an ad agency called 72 & Sunny. They also are the brains behind another one of the best commercials I've ever seen. You don't have to be a soccer fan to appreciate the genius of this ad, but it helps. Head on over to 72 & Sunny if you've got a few minutes and check out the rest of the XBOX and Nike Euro campaign ads.

Finally

Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. To live in such times...what a blessing.

James Howard Kunstler

My friends, who humor me more than I deserve, have listened to me invoke the name of James Howard Kunstler for years. He is the Ron Paul of Peak Oil obsessives. While I'm not a PO crackpot, it's clear to me that there is plenty of reason to be wary of what an oil deprived world may bring. There's no disputing that there is a limited volume of easily accessible petroleum in the world, which combined with an insatiable appetite for the stuff, will lead to convulsive social and political upheaval throughout the industrialized world if we don't manage to ween ourselves off it. Unfortunately, Kunstler makes a convincing case for why that will not be easy, and why we'll have to transform in very fundamental ways who we are as a society and what we should desire as individuals. His op-ed in the Washington Post makes for a good introduction to what his argument is.

"The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it."

George Packer has another article in The New Yorker that identifies some big problems Barack Obama has in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and West Virginia. It makes for sobering reading. Here's a paragraph that jumped out at me:

John Preston, who is the county’s circuit-court judge and also its amateur historian, Harvard-educated, with a flag pin on his lapel, said, “Obama is considered an élitist.” He added, “There’s a racial component, obviously, to it. Thousands of people won’t publicly say it, but they won’t vote for a black man—on both sides, Democrat and Republican. It won’t show up in the polls, because they won’t admit it. The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it. Sad to say it, but it’s true.” Later, I spoke with half a dozen men eating lunch at the Pigeon Roost Dairy Bar outside town, and none of them had any trouble saying it. They announced their refusal to vote for a black man, without hesitation or apology. “He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Colored are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.” No speech, on race or élitism or anything else, would move them. Here was one part of the white working class—maybe not representative, but at least significant—and in an Obama-McCain race they would never be the swing vote. It is a brutal fact, and Obama probably shouldn’t even mention it.

If Packer knows this, the brain trust of the Obama campaign knows it, too, and, even worse, the Clinton campaign knows it and uses that to their advantage. Is it any wonder that the Obama campaign wasted little time in a place like Kentucky?