Bent Corner

It looks as though the editorial board of the New York Times has realized that Barack Obama isn’t what he seems.  At least that is the impression I got after reading today’s editorial:

Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.

Even his own chief money collector, Penny Pritzker, suggests that the magic of $20 donations from the Web was less a matter of principle than of scheduling. “We have not been able to have much of the senator’s time during the primaries, so we have had to rely more on the Internet,” she explained as she and her team busily scheduled more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person.

Quality time with Obama for 30K?  That’s a lot of arugula.

Bob Herbert writes an Op-Ed over that the New York Times about the recent coverage on the whole Reverend Wright controversy. He begins by writing:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

Except I think we’ve all seen car wrecks before. Most of us have even been involved in car wrecks. I personally have been in three different car wreaks in my life time. Car wrecks unfortunately are part of life.

The Reverend Wright controversy is different. It’s not common to have a serious Presidential candidate with a man as his self described spiritual adviser who thinks that the United States government created the AIDS virus to wreak havoc on the third-world. It’s rare to discover someone who may be our next President that chose to attended a church for close to 20 years where the paster referred to the United States of America as the United States of KKK-America.

It’s not only rare, It’s never happened before and it will most definitely not happen again.

And lets not forget just why Jeremiah Wright has appeared in the media all day and all night. It’s because he put himself there. Jeremiah Wright is the one that chose to appear on PBS in an interview with Bill Moyers. If he had been content with making that his only media appearence, he might have made the contravery go away. No, instead he chose to speak at the Detroit chapter of the NAACP followed with an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Why is it even important where Barack Obama chose to attend church? Why is it even important who Barack Obama chose to be his spiritual adviser? Because of the fact that he doesn’t have a lot of experience, his judgment deserves more scrutiny.

I stumbled on this image today while looking for something else. Something that didn’t involve gnomes armed with bull whips and wearing swastika armbands. What really struck me with this image was not the book itself, but the snippet from a review from the New York Times.

Why would the New York Times even review a book like this?

I tried to find something about the book’s author, John Christopher. As it turns out, that is not his real name. It’s only one of the many pen names employed by British writer Samuel Youd.

They don’t write books like this anymore. Maybe if they did, someone from the New York Times would review it.

Like most people, I read the New York Times article about Senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain getting just a little too cozy with Vicki Iseman, a female lobbyist. I realize the Republicans wanted us to believe during the Clinton impeachment that extramarital sexual escapades were somehow important. I don’t care if McCain is two-timing his wife. That’s between him and her. It’s none of my business.

At least it’s not a teenage boy or another dude in an airport restroom.

What bothers me the most about the story is not that he was “possibly” getting it on with a woman who is not his wife, but that he evidently is so chummy with a Washington lobbyist. Nothing good can come out of a politician being so friendly with a Washington lobbyist. At least nothing good for our country.

This only makes me appreciate Barack Obama’s stance on lobbyists.

Director: Patrick Creadon
Writers: Patrick Creadon & Christine O’Malley
Runtime: 94 painfully boring minutes

What’s an 8-letter word for a movie that totally blows? The answer is a movie entitled Wordplay. It’s a documentary on the New York Times crossword puzzle and the people that do it. Not only the über crossword puzzle nerds that actually go to a crossword puzzle convention and competition every year in Stamford, Connecticut, but famous celebrities such as Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton.

I guess the reason they included celebrities in the documentary is to show that not all people that do the New York Times crossword puzzle are major dorks. Some are just regular people that do the crossword puzzle to unwind. I can’t help but remember what else President Clinton likes to do in his spare time to unwind. It involves a female intern and a cigar.

Forgive me if I don’t take anything Bill Clinton does as an example of normalcy.

These über crossword puzzle nerds don’t just do the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, they do it while timing themselves. How do you make the New York Times crossword puzzle even more nerdy? By turning it into a speed event. Some of them keep logs documenting how long it takes them to complete the puzzle. The reason they do this is because the competition at the yearly convention at Stamford is timed.

The level of nerdiness displayed by these puzzles doers in comparison makes the Dungeon Master of my old Dungeons & Dragons group look like Fonzi.

Much of the movie takes place at the yearly convention in Stamford. The competition involves seven timed crossword puzzles with the final three people with the best scores moving on to the main event. They then do a puzzle up on stage using a large dry erase type white board while wearing sound-canceling headphones that look to have been invented in 1972.

Towards the end of the competition when the tension was at it’s highest level, I was thinking how funny it would be for someone to pull the fire alarm. If Stamford wasn’t a 7-hour drive, I’d probably seriously consider making the trip just so I could do it.

These people would freak out.