a few things:


September 10, 2007

a-last night was the mtv music awards? wow. i honestly had no idea. either i'm woefully ignorant as to the ways of televised pop culture, or mtv didn't put up enough posters.
i hear that britney's performance wasn't so, uh, stellar. that's sad. poor britney. she's like the blanche dubois of pop culture.
and apparently tommy lee and kid rock engaged in some ribald fisticuffs during the show.
huh. how about that.
did anything else happen? or was i not the only person who didn't actually know that last night was the mtv music awards?

b-general petraeus(which is a cool name, kind of like a cross between a dinosaur bird of prey and an ancient greek warrior-statesman)is testifying before congress about the 'surge'(and not the caffeine fueled sports drink). what's this called, 'operation mutton as lamb'? or 'operation king lear'?
the surge is a big, fat failure, and everyone knows this. the administration established 18 bench marks for evaluating the success of the surge and thus far there's only been success with 3 of the benchmarks according to the g.a.o.
how many hundreds of billions of dollars have we spent?
how many americans and brits and iraqii's have been killed and maimed?
it's not working. and it's not going to work.
the only thing that will work is a loose federation in iraq with kurdish, sunni, and shi'ite areas/states.
that's how it'll end up eventually. and a huge western troop presence is just providing a huge western target for insurgents and terrorists.
very sad.

c-tomorrow's my birthday. and september 11th. the first september 11th to fall on a tuesday since 2001. it's also the easiest day of the year to be a tv news producer. just dust off the footage from 9-11-2001 and push people's raw, emotional buttons. maybe this year the news broadcasts will be a bit more dignified and a bit less reliant upon emotional pornography(do we really need to see that footage of people jumping from the burning towers again?). or maybe not. my friends in broadcast news refer to september 11th as the easiest news day of the year. they just show the same old footage and push people's emotional buttons and everyone gets upset all over again.
speaking as a new yorker i'd like to say 'enough'. can't we have a moratorium on this terrible and tragic footage that we've all seen a million times? some of us actually lived through it, and, speaking as someone who did live through it, watching it all again 6 years later sucks.
we lived through it. we watched it up close. we grieved, almost inconsolably, for years. now we're healing and doing much better. cant the media just let it rest? let us get on with our lives and let us grieve and remember as we choose, without these terrible images being shoved down our throats for the 500th time? i call for a tv news blackout day on september 11th. remember what you want to remember. grieve how you want to grieve. but remember and grieve without the tv news pornographers showing us graphic and horrifying footage from 6 years ago.
ok, that was a long 'c'.

d-and it's my birthday. and i'm going to see the new david cronenberg movie. and i'm excited.
i still think that 'dead ringers' is one of the most remarkable movies(and one of the most disturbing)ever made.

e-ok, have a nice monday.

moby