The Voices that I hear

The black commie Nazi did it!

Common wisdom now holds that while Obama finally succeeded in a truly historic, once-impossible vote, he has failed in his promise to be the uniter president, the community organizer of our liberal dreams, the guy who could somehow mend or at least bridge the hemorrhaging rift, not merely between the two parties, but also the two sides of American culture. This rift is defined hereby as the gulf between people with extant intelligence and subtle understanding of ideas, and the Sarah Palin-grade paranoids who don't quite understand what the hell they're raging about, but nevertheless do so with much clenched passion, fake tears, guns and a whole garage full of stockpiled bullets.

via www.sfgate.com

Mark Morford makes some interesting points in this piece, worth reading in full.

Sunil Chhetri's move to Kansas City Wizards confirmed

In terms of international celebrity or soccer pedigree, Chhetri is no David Beckham. He might not even be Landon Donovan. But in India, the interest in Chhetri’s move to Major League Soccer has generated so much interest in the sporting media that the Wizards have gone out of their way to accommodate reporters by setting up a news conference timed for the Indian news cycle.

Chhetri will appear at the Cerner headquarters in Kansas City (the health care technology firm’s founders are the Wizards’ principal owners) at 10:30 p.m. central, while a world away, as many as 250 Indian journalists will gather at the Cerner offices in Manyata, India, near Bangalore, for an audio and video feed from the United States

It’s unusual for an M.L.S. club to make such a big deal over a signing before all of the paperwork is complete. Chhetri must receive a P-1 visa and the Indian federation must turnover his international transfer certificate before he can play. But it is just as unusual to sign a player from India; Chhetri would be the first in M.L.S.

via goal.blogs.nytimes.com

Good for him. Last year he didn't get the visa when QPR wanted to sign him, hopefully he won't have issues with MLS.

Coulter tells Ont. Muslim student to 'take a camel'

The student, Fatima Al-Dhaher, asked Coulter about previous comments in which she said Muslims shouldn't be allowed on airplanes and should take "flying carpets" instead. Al-Dhaher noted she did not own a flying carpet and asked what she should take as an alternative transportation.

Coulter did not deny making the flying carpet comment and replied to the university student: "What mode of transportation? Take a camel" to a mix of jeers and cheers.

via ottawa.ctv.ca

Who allows such people anywhere near a campus?

Don't celebrate these billionaires, be horrified by their existence

It is the ultimate degeneracy of the age. There is little critical appraisal of billionairedom. It is just accepted that loadsamoney, capitalism, jobs and economic progress are indissolubly linked. More billionaires of any hue is a sign of economic vitality. Lucky Mexico for coming up with the winner. But wealth is not connected to economic progress in a linear way. Wealth can come from productive or unproductive entrepreneurship. Society wants the former and deplores the latter. If you want to be seriously wealthy the message from the Forbes list is clear. One way or another you need to have played the system, played the financial markets, been born to the right class or manipulated government to have got rich. This is a list of expropriated wealth on a Midas-like scale. Marx will be grimly smiling in his grave.

via www.guardian.co.uk

The Youtube blog "googlies" itself

Indian Premier League bowls wicked googly* to the world on YouTube

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Goes on about the IPL

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* A googly is a kind of pitch similar to a baseball pitch or a bowling throw in the game cricket; a wicked googly would be a really good pitch.

via youtube-global.blogspot.com

First of all that's the worst definition of a googly ever. Second of all, to throw a googly at someone would mean to "trick" or to "cheat" someone - hardly the message they wanted to convey.

A googly is a ball that a leg spinner bowls that instead of spinning away from the batsman, spins in the opposite direction into the batsman(assuming both the bowler and the batsmen are right handed). It's supposed to surprise or trick the batsman and hence the usage in the non-cricketing context.