OK, I broke my stay-away-from-newsblogs resolution briefly ... I start off looking for recent stories on Haiti and the next thing I know, I'm following links all over the place ... thank God someone just gave me something to do at my job so I can stop now.

New York Press writer Matt Taibbi is sometimes a raving asshole but often writes a good column, like this one about Dennis Kucinich:

There are a lot of people out there who are inclined to laugh at this candidate. A few do so because they genuinely find him laughable, but most do it because they see him being laughed at in the news media. In this country we generally take our cues about whom we can safely laugh at from the mainstream press, and for the most part we laugh at the weak, the earnest, the sincere, the emotionally vulnerable.

Body and Soul takes a typically discursive approach to the blood-crazed aspect of modern Christianity and finds that Mel Gibson is the least of our problems:

... I have a similar memory of boys who talked about the suffering of Jesus as if it were proof of manhood. The same boys who told stories about Indian tribes that tied boys to red anthills or hung them by their nipples to see if they could take it, if they were really men. The boys who thought kamikazes were the ultimate cool. .... Putting all your attention on death inevitably leads to something cruel.

And TBogg dug up a jaw-dropping bit from a prominent figure in right-wing fake science (in an old Rolling Stone article) on the real reason gay sex is eeevil: because gay sex is so great:

It's almost like pure heroin. It's such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. Marital sex tends toward the boring end ... Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does ...

(Wait a minute, which end is "the boring end"?)

In the paper world, right now I'm reading the collected stories of Cordwainer Smith, the collected stories of Clark Ashton Smith, some Pendle Hill pamphlets, and a bunch of mini-comics from APE. They make just as much sense as the news.

So last night I felt compelled to watch The Mouse That Roared, the Peter Sellers vehicle based on the Leonard Wibberley book where a Lichtenstein-like country declares war on America in order to lose and get reconstruction money, but then accidentally wins by getting hold of our latest doomsday bomb.

Why was I compelled? (a) Nostalgia—for some reason I was crazy about those books as a kid. (b) I wanted to see if, now that I'm a jaded old fucker, I could still enjoy a comedy of international manners where war and nuclear weapons are sort of silly goofy things.

Well, (a) worked pretty well. Sellers was just exactly the way I wanted Tully Bascombe, Count Mountjoy, and the Duchess to be—I was a big Goon Show fan as a kid and would've liked Sellers to play every character; the movie wasn't as wild as that, but there were some Goonlike touches in the narration and inter-scene bits. And Grand Fenwick looked pretty good considering it had about three sets, but the New York part was disappointing ... my childhood picture of New York was way weirder.

(b), not so good. I've had screaming nightmares about nuclear bombs off and on for the last 20 years, and even though the quadium bomb is a great character (it looks like a football and makes a constant pathetic wheezing noise) it gave me serious heebie-jeebies in every scene. They were still doing air-raid drills when the movie came out in 1959 but they didn't have to worry about some guy just blowing us up with a suitcase without warning. At one point the movie cuts to a mushroom cloud, then the narrator says "This is not actually the end of our film—but such a thing might happen at any moment. We just wanted to get you generally in the mood." Nice, but I'm always in that mood. Maybe Lord Buckley was right that the way to stamp out the H-bomb is to make it funny; I can only hope that'll work better for other people than for me.

Plus the story kept making me imagine, say, Cuba or Costa Rica trying the same thing and just getting bombed into the Stone Age like Afghanistan. May I blame the world for making me such a killjoy?

But the movie is pretty good at making nationalism look charmingly stupid, Jean Seberg is a cutie, and who can resist a half-minute scene of Peter Sellers in a sparkly blue gown doing an incomprehensible harpsichord serenade.

(I sent this to The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks but it looks like that noble site has been inactive for several years, so let's put it here. I'll keep it sort of anonymous but it's all true.)

My current boss is a vice president in charge of, among other things, public relations and sending thank-you notes to employees. She is also the owner of a unique and striking prose style, heavily reliant on quotation marks and miscapitalization for emphasis. You've seen the kind of thing: Smoking is "not" allowed in the Bathroom, etc. She's also got some surprising variations, such as the quoted parentheses for double emphasis, like so:

And "(Thank You)" for all your help...

The most common effect of quote-mark abuse is unintended sarcasm; this reached new heights when the public relations department adopted "Be the Best" as a company motto, and the executives took to quoting from this motto as often as possible, whenever the subject of quality came up. Strictly speaking, this is a more legit use of quotation marks—but the effect can be unfortunate:

Thanks for helping to make this truly "The Best" place...

I quickly got used to this. But my boss still managed to surprise me recently, when she wrote this:

Thanks for helping to make "XYZ" the "Best"...

...where XYZ is the name of the company we work for.