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June 04, 2004

Jackass of the Week

Occasional Ace of Spades HQ contributor Aaron Burr has decided to do a half-blog feature over on The Perfect World, and I think it's a pretty good one.

The Jackass of the Week: Chris Lehane. I'm sure everyone can get behind that call, even though I'm not sure what makes Chris Lehane the Jackass of this particular week.

Perhaps it's more of a Lifetime Achievement thing. Maybe the Irving G. Thalberg Award for Lifetime Technical Achievement in Jackassery.

He invented the Dolby (TM) ass-jacking process.

Not-necessarily-safe-for-work Advisory: Aaron Burr doesn't call him a "jackass." No, he goes for the very, very potty-mouth word that got Mr. Lenny Bruce into so much trouble all those years ago.

The "c" word. The other "c" word, the longer one. The one you might use for John Kerry, rather than the one you'd use for Barbara Boxer.

Apparently Aaron Burr doesn't follow the Ace of Spades Golden Rule: You'll never fill the big rooms workin' blue. I attribute that to a simple lack of maturity and restraint on his part.

I'm still pulling for Dana Milbank and/or any of the useless, girlish shriekers at the amateur webzine Slate. (Mickey Kaus excepted, of course. William Saletan partially excepted.)

Quibble: As odious as Chris Lehane is, I am convinced he's working for our side.

Oh, he might not think he's working for our side. But objectively he is. Even liberal reporters recoil from him as if he were a stinking rummy with his dick hanging out of his haggard pants.

He's kind of like a metrosexual Nosferatu. Every time this lisping nightwalker appears, I get the willies something awful.

I am convinced he has the power to command rats and vermin with his voice. Somebody must take his simpering seriously, I figure.

It's a mystery to me how someone so bereft of charm, grace, or rhetorical persuasiveness could have possibly worked himself up to such a high position in media relations.

posted by Ace at 02:16 AM

Comments

Apparently Aaron Burr doesn't follow the Ace of Spades Golden Rule: You'll never fill the big rooms workin' blue.

Maybe, but you can fill the medium-sizers. The big A was known to drop an f-bomb or two in his day and he did okay traffic-wise.

Posted by: Allah on June 4, 2004 02:33 AM

"metrosexual Nosferatu"

Now *that* is writing!

Mo Dowd thinks she writes like that, but she doesn't.

Posted by: Nicholas Kronos on June 4, 2004 09:03 AM

Forget jackass or cocksucker of the week.

We need "metrosexual Nosferatu" of the week.

Posted by: on June 4, 2004 09:04 AM

The first time I ever saw Chris Lehane I got the creepy feeling that a certain propaganda minister for a european dictator in the 30's and 40's had survived and fathered a son in his old age.

Posted by: jj shaka on June 4, 2004 09:36 AM

Metrosexual Nosferatu of the Week would be a great title.

Posted by: rdbrewer on June 4, 2004 09:36 AM

Ace,

Writing like this is why you've become #2 (after LGF) on my blog to-read list checked daily and several times a day at that. (especially now that Allah's on hiatus)

Making the phrases "command rats and vermin with his voice" and "a stinking rummy with his dick hanging out of his haggard pants" work in the same context is simply excellent writing.

Maybe you're a little, ahem, "enthusiastic" (read too male and funny) for the general population, but I think you're the thinking man's Frank J.

Posted by: hobgoblin on June 4, 2004 02:38 PM

Sorry. To me, the name Aaron Burr is still synonymous with a certain commercial for a certain dairy product.

Posted by: Da Goddess on June 4, 2004 05:18 PM

Hmmm... I don't know which product you mean.

Must have been a regional product.

Posted by: ace on June 4, 2004 05:35 PM

Oh, and thanks all to the praise for "metrosexual Nosferatu."

He really is.

Maybe you're a little, ahem, "enthusiastic" (read too male and funny) for the general population, but I think you're the thinking man's Frank J.

I've always wanted to be the thinking man's something. Frank J. is as good as anything else.

Posted by: ace on June 4, 2004 05:36 PM

All hail Ace on yet another fine piece of work!

But am I the only one here with clue-deficit disorder? What's this past-tense stuff coming from A-double-lizzle?

Did I miss a memo? Must I now remove the Allah link that's next to my Ace link at the top of my not-to-be-missed sites list?

Posted by: Patton on June 4, 2004 07:19 PM

Allah was taking a break last time I checked.

Posted by: rdbrewer on June 4, 2004 07:29 PM

Yeah, the Mighty and Wise One is On Sabbatical, although he might object to that Jewish-derived term.

A-double-lizzle mentions that he drops the f-bomb on occasion, and suffers no loss of traffic. Well, Allah, have you been reading my site lately? I've been dropping the f-bomb like I was a B-52 loaded with profanity but losing fuel and needing to lighten my load.

I'm talking about drooping my schween over boys' faces, for cryin' out loud.

I was being ironic, you foolish false god, you.

OTOH, I really didn't think it would be appropriate to put the word 'cocksucker' into the title of a post. A big font makes a word like that unsafe for work. So I changed it to "jackass," and then did an ironic lecture about "keepin' it clean."

Posted by: ace on June 4, 2004 07:51 PM

RDB: Of course I'm looking forward to Allah's triumphant return, and I am painfully aware of the Sabbatical. The phrase that tossed me off was (above):

"The big A was known to drop an f-bomb or two in his day and he did okay traffic-wise"

From this, I took the meaning that his day "was" in the past. I continue to hope this was just a semantic slip.

As an aside, and to get back on topic, I'm still yukking it up over Ace's cautionary words about safe for work posts. I tend to be fairly clean-mouthed on my site, not because I have a problem with more colorful language, as anyone who knows me would attest. I just can't weave it into a story as well as Ace or Allah, and they do it well enough to keep my relatively goody-two-shoes speechification from polluting the internet.

Posted by: Patton on June 5, 2004 03:55 AM

HAH. metrosexual Nosferatu. keep up the good work.

Posted by: phoniq on June 17, 2004 01:07 PM

Join the Linux community. Linuxwaves.net

Posted by: Michael on July 5, 2004 05:31 PM

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What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
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Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]

TJM gives you a brief tour of his movie collection.

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine

US decimation of Iran's ICBM forces is due to Space Force's instant detection of launches -- and the launchers' hiding places -- and rapid counter-attack via missiles
AI is doing a lot of the work in analyzing images to find the exact hiding place of the launchers. Counter-strikes are now coming in four hours after a launch, whereas previously it might have taken days for humans to go over the imagery and data.

Robert Mueller, Former Special Counsel Who Probed Trump, Dies

“robert mueller just died,” trump wrote in a truth social post on march 21. “good, i’m glad he’s dead. he can no longer hurt innocent people! president donald j. trump.”

TJM has thoughts on Superheros and Iconography

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Podcast: Sefton and CBD have a short chat about Iran, the disgusting SAVE Act theater, Mamdani's politicizing of St. Patrick's Day, and more!