I've Looked At Bipartisanship From Both Sides Now

Tom Tomorrow sees all:

TSA! TSA! TSA!

A bit of north-of-the-border perspicacity from The Province

Four Loko Mania

Hot on the heels of the alcoholic energy drink/Four Loko ban in Michigan, New York City chef Eddie Huang (Xiao Ye) is rolling out an all-you-can-drink Four Loko night. Said Huang, who's been stockpiling the stuff in case of the apocalypse: "Four Loko is not a drink, it is chlorine in the gene pool. It weeds out all the people unfit for the next generation, like Darwin in a can."

Thinking Of Hunter

The immortal Hunter S. Thompson...

I nearly suffocated laughing when I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
40 years later it is still a reference point for my shaky foundation of reality.

But THIS, this transcends even that Olympian achievement, and is my favorite work by the Gonz. Why it suddenly overcame me like a demented apparition I have no clue, but am grateful for the visitation.

Read the whole thing at this link:
"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved"

Or see below for easily digestible nibbles.

I took the expressway out to the track, driving very fast and jumping the monster car back and forth between lanes, driving with a beer in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved to catch the right exit.

"Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomitting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up."

Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn't sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men's rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomitting in the urinals. "They'll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the front of their suits," I said. "But watch the shoes, that's the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomitting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes."

Here is Wikipedia's description of the demented one's writing technique in creating this literary creature.

Accompanied by Ralph Steadman's sketches (the first of many collaborations between Thompson and Steadman) the genesis of the article has been described by Thompson as akin to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids". Faced with a deadline and without any coherent story for his editors, Thompson began tearing pages from his notebook, numbering them, and sending them to the magazine. The resulting story, and the manic, first-person subjectivity that characterized it, were the beginnings of the Gonzo style.

Shortly after Thompson's suicide in 2005, Steadman recalled their meeting at the Kentucky Derby to the British newspaper The Independent. In the article Steadman remembered his first impression of Thompson that day:

"I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. 'Holy shit!' he [Thompson] exclaimed. 'They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him.' [...] This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand."

 I sure do miss him.