Month: April 2007

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Sentential Links #96

Ninety-six, as in, the last full calendar year in which I was a bachelor: 1996. O how time flies!

Anyhow, the linkage for this week ensues….

:: I saw empathy on my little girl’s face as she handed a hungry person soup and crackers leftover from her lunch downtown today. And a few minutes later, while holding my hand and walking through the canyons of the financial district, she told me she loved me. (Completely random blog find.)

:: Knowing full well the nature of the Internet, I have always kept this blog below the radar. The door is open, the fire is lit, and there are comfy chairs aplenty. There is, however, no listing in the phone book, no neon sign to point the way here. (Maybe not, but here’s a guy saying, “Go there.” Heh!)

:: Since the junior Pattersons don’t own any skilled rescue beasts, perhaps Deanna is hoping that a couple quick drownings, Mike’s subsequent suicide, and a sale at market rates of a house they bought at a steep family discount add up to her ticket to sweet, sweet freedom. (Yeah, For Better or For Worse snark is slowly becoming a regular feature here. Hey, I need something to vent on, and FBoFW is as good a target as anyway. And even as much as I think Calvin and Hobbes is a masterwork of late-20th century art of any kind, I’ve decided that “Everyone calls me Clambake” is the greatest thing that anybody has ever said in a comic strip, ever. Yes, I used ‘ever’ twice in one sentence. That’s how strongly I feel about this!)

:: He also talked about his preferred equipment — a typewriter. For you kids out there who don’t understand this word, it’s that thing Stephen Cannell pounded away on before victoriously yanking out the last page of the best episode of “The A-Team” and flinging it away.

:: So with that said, finding my name on this post “Congratulations, Nominees” was somewhat shocking (and a wee bit exhilarating) AND proof that every vote counts, because I’m certain that my lone wee self-nomination as a moment of weakness is not deserving of a slot in this category. Personal Blog? Maybe… (You know what, folks? The “personal blog” doesn’t get nearly enough love, and I’ll shout as much from the rooftops. If you’re a generally single-issue blogger, you’ll generally get more notice than if you’re just all over the damn place, and I have to admit to finding this frustrating. And I’d like ArtVoice to explain why BuffaloRising wasn’t a blog last year, but is a blog this year? Huh? But anyway: congrats to Jen, who deserves it just on the basis that a few months ago I was in Rochester, and someone recognized me because they had seen my blog through hers. I don’t know how she does that. I half expect that if I were running The Amazing Race, and if my team was somewhere in India, I’d meet someone bathing in the Ganges who would say, “Hey! I’ve read you! All Things Jennifer!”)

:: I somehow managed to drive home while in a fetal position. (He’s a TV writer, folks. One of my favorite blogs now.)

:: It has always seemed to me to be an artistic refuge for composers who don’t have any ideas, who decide to make an artistic virtue out of their faults, and to wear proudly the shroud of their creative bankrupcy. (Scroll down to the post dated “20070422.1430”. He’s talking about Minimalism here, with specific regard to an anime whose score he dislikes. I’m not a huge fan of minimalism either, but then, I don’t know a great deal about it.)

:: As the Sabres enjoy some rest and start preparing for the next round they should look back at this series and realize that their regular season record means nothing in the playoffs. (Amen to that! And check out the photos he has from Game Five of the Islanders series.)

:: But this fracking takes the gorram cake. Wikipedia has deleted its list of fictional expletives!! All of their reasons are total kark — various smeg about it being “indiscriminate”, “unverifiable”… a lot of which seem to boil down to it not having the Dignity of An Encyclopedia Topic. (Wow, that’s pretty toktru stupid.)

Well, that’s about it for now, I suppose. Rock on, folks.

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Parking, parking, parking!

In this post from yesterday, I discussed my belief that parking garages need not be disastrous ugly buildings that destroy cityscapes. In comments, “Bill” responds:

The problem is not the ugliness, per se– it is really more that the street life disappears around parking structures. There is no pedestrian activity, and a big block of space becomes the urban equivalent of a desert. Worse, actually– the lack of activity can make these areas more dangerous. We have plenty of parking– and plenty of arid desert in downtown Buffalo.

But again, my point is that this doesn’t have to be the way it is around parking garages. It just doesn’t. I’m not suggesting building a prettier parking garage that is still just a parking garage. Here’s what I’m thinking of:

That’s Eaton Centre in Toronto, facing south on Yonge Street. (Photo filched from this Toronto blog.)

See all that street facade, there? You can make out the actual parking structure lurking behind that, and in the middle of the photo you can also see the entrance to the garage where the cars go in. But flanking that garage entrance, and in front of the parking garage itself, is a regular old streetscape, with stores and, therefore, pedestrian activity. If the new waterfront/Central Wharf project is going to have its own parking — and it will have to, nobody’s going to walk all the way from the parking at HSBC Arena or farther into downtown to this thing, no matter how much parking exists in downtown already — that’s the way to build it.

A building that is primarily parking garage doesn’t have to just be parking garage, and it certainly doesn’t have to be a big gray box. (And note that there’s nothing mysterious about this: it’s just simple urban design principle at work. Build to the street, and hide your parking.)

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To arms!

I often wonder just what it would take to get Americans to rise up and storm the gates of their corporate masters. Maybe…the threat to chocolate could do it!

The federal Food and Drug Administration is proposing to redefine the very essence of chocolate and to allow big manufacturers such as Hershey to sell a bar devoid of a key ingredient — cocoa butter. The butter’s natural texture could be replaced with inferior alternatives, such as vegetable fats. And consumers would never know.

Chocolatier Gary Guittard said it best: “No one can afford to sit back and eat bonbons while America’s great passion for chocolate is threatened.”

For every defender of traditional chocolate, there are powerful proponents who want to replace cocoa butter with vegetable oil: the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Snack Food Association. These industry titans have filed a “citizens petition” to the FDA, as the Los Angeles Times recently reported, as if there were some groundswell in society to water down chocolate.

At the moment, chocolate requires two basic ingredients — cocoa and cocoa butter. Cocoa provides much of the flavor; cocoa butter, the texture. So if, say, Hershey wanted to make a chocolate bar without cocoa butter, it can under today’s rules. The product has to be labeled “chocolate flavored” (for it still has the cocoa in it) rather than “chocolate.” That gives the consumer a signal that something less than chocolate lies beneath the wrapping. To help defend chocolate, visit www.dontmesswithourchocolate.com and learn how to submit feedback to the FDA.

Well, of course it’s a done deal, because we’re in an era in which whatever Giant Company A asks the government to do, the government does.

But dammit, leave chocolate alone!

(via)

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Stuff

A few lazy links:

:: It somehow escaped my notice until just a few days ago that one of the Buffalo News‘s new blogs is devoted to poetry. That’s pretty cool.

:: Good article in the News today by Larry Quinn, one of the big wheels behind the eternal project of developing Buffalo’s waterfront, whose big thing right now is the Bass Pro project. A sample:

They want to fight about where the plaza ought to be, as if there is a substantial difference between the new and old location.

They don’t want parking, as if any project could conceivably be successful without it.

They don’t want big-box stores, as if reconstructing the Central Wharf is analogous to erecting a single-story cinder-block building in a sea of asphalt.

They think the project costs the public too much, as if leaving the ground vacant for the last 70 years didn’t cost us millions upon millions. They ignore the tens of millions of dollars to be generated in sales and property taxes and the economic impact of new jobs.

They don’t like the process; we apparently didn’t consult with the “right” people or the so-called business leaders who shoot arrows while hiding behind a veil of anonymity and offer nothing but criticism.

And on and on we go. With all due respect to Esmonde and Company, they really are missing the point.

What I never get is the whole objection to parking garages. It’s true that garages in Buffalo tend to be giant structures of ugly gray concrete, but that’s not true of other places. I sometimes wonder if people who complain about parking garages have ever been to, say, Toronto, where there are lots of parking garages that are virtually invisible as such from the street. Eaton Centre’s a good example, and I recall another such example in the vicinity of the Royal Ontario Museum. They don’t have to look like this:

:: I have a new review up at GMR of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s novel Daughter of Hounds. Short version: the book is excellent.

That’s all!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Wow, what nice weather we’ve had the last couple of days. That plus The Wife being out of town for a couple of days, leaving me alone with The Daughter, made blogging less of a priority for a bit. In Buffalo, our springs are generally dismal, so we have to take our nice weather as we get it for these few months, and this year the spring has been even more dismal than usual. So this weekend I finally gave the grill its maiden voyage with a couple of steaks. Mmmmm, steak.

So where’s the weirdness? Well, I didn’t really notice a whole lot of outright weirdness this week, because I didn’t spend as much time trolling the Interweb for links. But I did find a few things of varying degrees of weirdness.

:: As a submission for a film class, a film student remade one of the most harrowing scenes from 24, the death of Ryan Chappelle. It’s easy to critique the acting — that’s the filmmaker playing Chappelle — but he indicates that his original Chappelle backed out, leaving him to do it. What’s interesting is how closely he got the background stuff, even going so far as to shoot his scene at the same location as the original.

And here’s the original, for the sake of comparison.

:: This is an older article, but I’m only just seeing it now (via). It’s twenty-five great installments from Calvin and Hobbes. Sadly, my own personal favorite storyline from that strip — when Calvin was paired with Susie for a school project — didn’t make their cut, but hey, Calvin was rarely less than brilliant.

:: Rich Little was the main entertainment at the Correspondents Dinner in Washington this year. Rich Little. The main entertainment. Apparently Soupy Sales was booked?

:: Sometimes I’m willing to wax poetic about how much better stuff was when I was a kid, but not on the subject of playgrounds. Hard steel jungle gyms and slides on hard rubber (or even bare concrete), whose component parts would reach tremendously hellish temperatures in the baking hot sun of summer, such that the sound of kids coming down the slide was more often the screech of agony when inadvertently bare skin contacted metal than the squeal of thrilled delight at attaining speeds of maybe a mile an hour coming down those speed-challenged slides. Yeah, playgrounds back then were pretty bogus affairs.

Not so much anymore. These kids today will never realize how good they got it!

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“Some enchanted evening….”

Oops, wrong thing set in the South Pacific. Jason Bennion reminds me of a show I really liked as a kid, Tales of the Gold Monkey. This was a high-adventure pulp show that aired in the 1982-1983 season on ABC, undoubtedly greenlighted in light of the smash 1981 box office success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, Gold Monkey wasn’t a mere Raiders knock-off, any more than Battlestar Galactica was a Star Wars rip.

Here’s a Gold Monkey website, with plenty of relevant lore for the show (including the citation of a film to which Gold Monkey was far more indebted inspirationally than Raiders). Gold Monkey only lasted a single season, but it made a far better impression than the high-adventure pulp show that aired on CBS that same season, the Bruce Boxleitner vehicle Bring ‘Em Back Alive, which was based on the exploits in Southeast Asia of big-game hunter Frank Buck. I faithfully watched both shows, but I must admit that Gold Monkey was a lot more fun.

(I never watched Voyagers!, though. I vaguely recall it being on in a timeslot during which we were watching something else, and sure enough, a glance at the Voyagers! IMDb entry confirms this: it was on Sundays at 7:00. In my household, as a ten-year-old geek I knew that suggesting that my parents forego 60 Minutes was a non-starter.)

And just to get my early-80s high-adventure pulp mini-craze credentials really in order, I owned all three issues of this Marvel series. And it was in the year after Raiders came out that something really seminal for me happened. This was back in the days before infomercials, when TV stations would show old movies on Saturday afternoons. There was one period where Buffalo’s Channel 7 ran, each Saturday afternoon, an Errol Flynn movie. Now, Mara Maru was not a particularly good movie. But The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood? I was wounded for life when I saw those, and in a good way.

Fun times, those were!

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The way of the gun

I hope Teresa Nielsen Hayden doesn’t mind, but this comment that was put into a thread at Making Light, and was then posted in full to her own front page, is sufficiently sobering and well-considered that I’m quoting it in full here. (Let me know, TNH, if you want me to remove it.)

UPDATE: TNH requests that I credit the comment’s author, who goes by the handle “Old Jarhead”. While he doesn’t seem to have a blog or site of his own, his entire commenting history at Making Light (a short history thus far, but insightful) can be perused here.

If you intend to get a carry permit and pack heat for self protection, you should keep several things close to mind:

1. Unless you have invested the time and money to be well trained in the defensive use of a handgun, don’t carry one.

2. Unless you are willing to spend the money and time to go to the range and fire your weapon at least monthly and at least a box of ammo at that time, don’t carry one.

3. Unless you are certain that you have the emotional and psychological ability to shoot another human being dead, don’t carry one. Do not count on “brandishing” the weapon to frighten the other party into submission – it is far more likely to dramatically increase the level of violence. Do not even consider “shooting to injure”. Unless you are willing to put two rounds, center of mass, into the other person and kill him (usually) dead, you are far more likely to end up the dead or grievously injured one.

4. A handgun is not a magic wand. Displaying it will not cast a spell of caution or calmness on the various parties. A loaded weapon makes people crazy – the person at which it is aimed, the persons who are witnesses, and often the person who is holding it.

5. Unless you are willing to purchase and practice with a handgun that is large enough and packs a sufficient punch to put an attacker down and down now, don’t carry one. In the early 70s a female student at [University] was in her apartment with her daughter when an attacker burst through the door. She had a .22 pistol and shot him 4 or 5 times. He had a .45 and shot her once. He was arrested at the hospital. She was dead.

There are lots of sources of good advice on combination of caliber, proper ammo, and frame size for control.

What it comes down to is that there is no way to prepare for the first time you point a loaded weapon at an identifiable human being and have to pull the trigger. The reason the military does repetitive, mind-numbing training is to try and ingrain the muscle memory and develop the reflexes so that brain does NOT interfere, because if you give it a vote it will pause and then it is too late. Soldiers call the enemy by racial or ethnic names to depersonalize them so that they don’t have to think about the fact that they are killing other people with mothers, fathers, kids, wives, and families. Troops assigned to Special Operations forces or Delta Force fire hundreds of rounds a month because in their job they have to be able to make a split second decision on whether the human in their sights is a target or a hostage or innocent.

The passive defensive measures discussed herein are excellent approaches and will be far more effective in providing security than a sign that says “This family law attorney is protected by Smith & Wesson”.

When I was a young Marine we lived in southern Cal, and one night about 2 am my wife said that she had heard a sound in the garage. I scoffed of course (husbandly response #1), but then I heard the sliding door of the VW van. There WAS someone in the garage. I got up and sneaked to the garage door and peeked – the dome light was on. Heart beat at 120, adrenaline everywhere. As I whispered for my wife to call the cops I saw an arm – a little arm. A 5 y/o girl’s arm! I stormed out into the garage to confront my little daughter and as I demanded an explanation she sobbed that she couldn’t find her bunny rabbit and was looking in the car.

I had numerous weapons in the house – all locked up. After that I asked myself – “If I had had a weapon quickly available would I have gotten it and had it ready?” My answer was “yes”. And then I realized that if I had, I would have been confronting my little girl with a .357 in my hand. Accordingly I have never kept a weapon out of the safe in the house.

Given my background I obviously am not an anti-gun crusader. I believe, however, that the decision to carry a weapon in the office or on the street places an enormous responsibility upon the bearer to obtain excellent training, to commit to frequent practice and refresher training, to choose a weapon ideally suited for you and the purpose, and to stare into the mirror and ask yourself if you could really use it – and if you would make its use a truly last resort.

If you shoot and kill someone in the office you are not going to be celebrated as “Annie Oakley” and carried around the Family Law convention on a sedan chair. You are going to go to a private place and vomit until you don’t think you will ever be able to stand up straight again.

I have never had any problem with gun ownership, but I do have a problem with the idea that the more people are packing heat, the safer we’ll all be. I personally do not own a gun, nor do I have any desire to own one. Guns give me the willies.

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Quizinalia

Time for another quiz, via Tosy (or was it Cosh?):

What was the first recorded music you bought?

The soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back. Holy crap, I played that thing into the ground over the next nine years or so. I played it so much that it has taken years of listening to subsequent CD releases to get to the point where I no longer hear the music the way that it was edited together for that album. (The tracks were not in film order, and some bits of score from different scenes were edited together into longer tracks.)

What was the last?

The 4-disc set of the scores to the Karate Kid movies, music by Bill Conti. Wonderful 80s cheese for the most part, but there’s one track in The Karate Kid Part Two (underscoring the tea ceremony between Daniel and Kumiko) that I consider to be among the finest bits of love music in all films.

What was the first “professional” music show you ever went to?

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, when I was ten or eleven. My sister was taking French horn lessons from a then-member of the orchestra. I don’t recall what was on the program, but Julius Rudel was the conductor, I believe.

What was the last?

I haven’t been to any live music in so long that it’s really very depressing.

What’s your “desert island” album?

Lord, I can’t name one. Truly. The LOTR scores? Geez, I dunno.

What’s your favorite album/song title?

Album title? Maybe Fire in the Kitchen by the Chieftains (amazing album, by the way). Song title? I’ll go with “Seven Spanish Angels”. A song with a title like that can’t help but be gorgeous.

What’s your favorite album art (include an image of it if you can)?

I always loved this cover to the Solti/VPO recording of Das Rheingold:

The version I own has this dull cover:

(OK, that’s for Gotterdammerung, but the art’s the same, just with the right name for the opera.)

Ideal choice for a karaoke song?

Lord, I don’t know.

Song you don’t like that WILL NOT LEAVE YOUR HEAD if you hear it.

“Hey Jude”. I absolutely detest that song. And yet if I hear it, I end up hearing that interminable “Na na na nanana naaaa…” crap in my head for hours.

Which is cooler? — Vinyl? CD? Cassette? 8-track?

CD. I like having a physical object, and I’m not wild about the idea that if your hard drive goes kerblooey, there goes your music.

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A quiz thing

Geez, two angry rants in a row in this space. I need a quiz to push them down a bit, and here’s just the thing! I saw this on Andrew Wheeler‘s blog. (Bad enough that I keep giving the guy my money — he’s one of the honchos with the SF Book Club — but now I’m giving him traffic, too!)

What do you think about Ouija boards? Complete nonsense.

Your favorite TV shows? Scrubs, American Idol, Grey’s Anatomy, The Office. I’m also enjoying NBC’s midseason show Raines, but I’m not holding my breath since the spectacular failure of the last midseason show I liked, Eyes (the Tim Daly private-eye caper show — did anybody besides me watch that?).

What’s on your mouse pad? My mouse. Duh.

Favorite board game: We just taught The Daughter checkers, so that’s probably it right now. Chess will come in a year or two. But I love Chinese checkers. Othello is fun, too. Some day I want to learn Go.

Favorite magazine: Just subscribed to Mental Floss, and that mag is just a ton of fun to read. I wish it came more often. I also still faithfully read WIRED (even though I still find their “Digital good, not-digital BAD” stance annoying at times).

Favorite smells: Cooking garlic and meat. The Chinese restaurant when I walk in. The main food alleys at the Erie County Fair. Maple. Tilled earth. Freshly-cut wood.

Worst feeling in the world: Losing a child.

Best feeling in the world: Ask me again when the Sabres win the Cup! But for now, noticing that The Daughter has learned something new, or getting a smile from a pretty woman. Good thing I married one.

Favorite soundtrack: Star Wars (all six), Lord of the Rings (all three).

What is the first thing you think when you wake in the morning: If I’m getting up for work: Ihatetheworldandeverythinginit. On my days off: Huh. I could sleep a little more. Think I will.

Roller coaster – scary or exciting? Fun, but I don’t like the upside-down ones.

How many rings before you answer the phone? Zero. We don’t answer the phone, and the ringer is shut off. If it’s important, we’ll get back to you. (Seriously. Why should I feel any requirement to answer the phone?)

Future daughter’s name:

Future son’s name: (You know, I’m going to avoid these ones for now.)

Favorite foods: See here. Not enough space here.

Chocolate or vanilla? Both! I reject your dichotomy! (But Dark Chocolate over Milk Chocolate; and French Vanilla or Vanilla Bean over regular vanilla.)

Do you like to drive? Yes.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? No.

Storms – cool or scary? Thrilling, actually. Except the ones that destroy stuff. Those aren’t very much fun at all.

What type was your first car: 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit with a diesel engine.

If you could meet one person dead or alive – who would it be? You know, I think I will now vow to never answer this question in any blog quiz again.

Favorite alcoholic drink: Spum-and-Coke. (“Spum” being “spiced rum”, of course. Since Spam is “spiced ham”.)

What is your zodiac sign? The Avenging Sword of Dismay and Doom. (I got bored with Libra, so I made up my own.)

Who is your favorite poet? Alfred Lord Tennyson

Do you eat the stems of broccoli? Broccoli is a vile, hateful thing that should be expunged forever from the Universe.

If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be? Keeper of one of the Beacon Fires of Gondor.

If you could dye your hair any color, what would it be? Fiery red that might strike fear into the hearts of my foes.

Have you ever been in love? Are you kidding? My default reaction with stuff is to fall in love with it.

What is on your walls in your room? For the purposes of this quiz, I’ll assume “my room” to be my work area at home. I have two maps of the world, one a print of an antique Renaissance map and the other a National Geographic map of the world (both are now partially obscured by bookshelves), a wall sconce bearing a candle, and posters for Casablanca and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Is the glass half empty or half full? The glass is always in flux. But the bottle? Ahhhh, that’s too empty. Gotta get to the store this weekend.

What is your favorite Snapple? Oddly, I no longer drink Snapple. No real reason; I just like other stuff now. Like that Vitamin Water stuff. And pomegranate juice, but that crap is expensive. Boy howdy.

Favorite movie(s): Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, My Fair Lady, Casablanca, and so on.

Are you a lefty, righty, or ambidextrous? Right handed.

Do you type with your fingers on the proper keys? No. And I still type at around 70 wpm.

What’s under your bed? The bodies. Oh yes, the bodies….

What is your favorite number? Pi, because it rhymes with pie and I like pie.

Favorite sport to watch: Football and figure skating. (Were the World Championships even televised this year? Did I miss them that completely?) And here’s an embarrassing admission for a Buffalonian: I’ve always had a hard time watching hockey on TV, so much so that I actually liked it when they superimposed that little dot over the puck for a while and did this “streaking laser” thing when the puck was shot.

Say one nice thing about the person who sent this to you: Well, I don’t know him personally, but I’ll ask a favor that he go a few months without putting books I want into the SFBC flyer, so I can get caught up on some reading and bills? Please?

[Two questions from this quiz’s original e-mail circulation genesis removed]

Favorite quote: Too many to list, but I’ll note one thing I once read in a book of funny quotes. Apparently there was once a photo in a sports magazine of the officials with the stop watches in a track-and-field event, which was captioned thusly: “These are the souls that time men’s tries”. I love that.

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Mr. Jaw, meet Mr. Floor (part deux)

I often think that the Right in this country is living in some kind of dream world, and the reason why is stuff like this idiotic thought by John Derbyshire:

As NRO’s designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren’t bad.

“Count the shots”? “Just jump him”? “Even if hit, your chances aren’t bad”?!

My God, this guy — and anyone who has thought anything like this — is just living in a delusional fantasyworld where the things that people do in action movies or shows like 24 are actual options in real life. We might as well wonder why anyone didn’t just slip on a Ring of Power and then use the resulting invisibility to sneak up behind the shooter and then eviscerate him with their lightsaber. He probably thinks that in the face of a massive explosion people can outrun fireballs, too.

I hate this kind of crap. I really do. I hated it a few weeks ago when those British soldiers were released by Iran, and a number of right-wing bloggers actually seemed disappointed that they hadn’t been murdered. I hate that Derbyshire has the audacity to bring up Flight 93 (“Did we learn nothing?”), as if the situations were in any way similar. I hate the impulse, the ever-constant reflex, to blame victims for everything: it’s your fault for not leaving the city when the hurricane came, even if you had no means and nowhere to go if you did. It’s your fault for not getting a better job, even if you applied and applied and applied and no one was hiring.

And it’s your fault this guy was able to shoot as many people as he did, because your actions didn’t match the hypothetical macho-man fantasies of a guy who once engaged in a conversation with Jonah Goldberg (Mr. “I’ll have my book done just as soon as my readers are done researching it for me”) about why the victims of the Titanic didn’t just float to safety on armoires and hutches, and who thinks that women hit their peak of attractiveness just after puberty.

Tell me again about right-wing civility. Please.

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