Friday Diversion

By no means is this little purlieu a political forum, but this Todd Snider video was way too good to pass up. When I was down in Cleveland, one of my best buddies was an ultra-conservative, right wing republican. In fact, I'm pretty sure he is presently campaigning for Fred Thompson (note: the last sentance was not intended to be a punch line). One of the best guys you'll ever meet. Salt of the earth. But we could not have been on more opposite ends of the political/moral spectrum.

As we got to know one another a little better, he began calling me "Al Gore" and "Liberal", and by virtue of my being Canadian was immediately deemed the class pot smoker. I didn't really have a nickname for him because he was about 6'5, 250, but we did have many a late night drunken symposium on the merits of the Global Warming argument, how every Republican argument is based in fact alone, and why his boy Fred will almost assuredly be the next President of the United States of America (I'm not sure how he felt about my case for Oprah Winfrey '08, but let's go ahead and assume he would have violently contested the idea).

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the two of us dropped a couple of quaaludes one night and put this video together because it could not be more bang on with regards to where the two of us stand. High comedy.

And hey, if me and my Fred Head buddy could get along as well as we did, being as far apart on the issues as we are, can't just about everybody else find some kind of happy middle ground? See you at Woodstock, man.

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Some fantastic reading from this week's issue of The New Yorker to help you pass the last four hours of this Friday afternoon:

A great short story by Stuart Dybek called If I Vanished. If you are reading this blog, you will enjoy this guy's writing. I couldn't help but think it read like something I would write (except, you know, better). It ends with a beautifully cold-hearted kiss off, reminiscent of that brilliant Hemingway line that extinguishes Brett and "The Sun Also Rises".

There is also a great piece in there about a meteorite landing in someone's bathroom in Freehold, NJ, with plenty of fascinating information about Meteor Crater in Arizona that Skeeter and I didn't get to see on our whirlwind tour of North America because it was "closed" (I'm still mystified by how someone can "close" a meteor crater). Unfortunately, that piece is not available online yet. I'll post it when it is.