To wit: "a brown condom stuffed with walnuts."

That's the kind of thing that gets you into heaven no matter what else you did on this earth.
Christopher Hitchens reviews the latest volume of James's memoirs here.
Saddam was a nasty genocidal-class tyrant. Perhaps realpolitik would have required the West to make him a friendly tyrant -- a son-of-a-bitch, but our son-of-a-bitch, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once referred to a president of Nicaragua -- and Europeans certainly flirted with the idea even after the Americans abandoned it.
Whether they are worth holding together is a different question. Britain and France created modern Iraq in 1921 for reasons of their own. Those reasons no longer apply. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with an independent Sunniland, Shiadom, Marsh Arabia and Kurdistan. But as long as we feel that it's in the world's interest not to let a federation lapse into its constituent parts, the solution isn't to imitate Dr. Frankenstein by breeding some two-headed calf, a democracy without democrats, but to help nations of Iraq's ilk install a saner and friendlier strongman than Saddam. Prototypes include Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf or, in a deluxe version, the Shah of Iran. If they get out of hand, hanging them is always an option.
Jay-Z is bigger than this. He doesn't leak singles to the street; he launches them on Budweiser commercials during the World Series. He doesn't blog on Myspace; he flogs for Hewlett-Packard. He doesn't beg for time at MTV; he owns the billboards above it. To most of the world, he's not just a rapper, he is the rapper. When he calls himself the "Mike Jordan of recordin'," he's not talking about being the greatest player the game has ever known, he's talking about being the game itself.
But, like athletes, we expect rappers to disappear when they turn 30. We have no use for them as they become older and more comfortable with themselves-- even if their minds are as sharp as ever. We don't want to see them smiling on the cover of Life or hear about their hopes for the future. In hip-hop, there is no future. Everything is now because, presumably, it could all end brutally tomorrow. Jay's two biggest rivals are dead, and we canonized them partly because they were murdered in their mid-20s, most likely because of each other. Jay-Z didn't die young, though. He dubbed himself Jay-Hova and lived beyond any of our imaginations, and now he's left to figure out what the biggest rapper in the world is supposed to do when he gets old.
The early consensus on Kingdom Come is that it's one of Jay-Z's worst albums.
Regardless, Jay-Z seems quite willing to play the part of savior.
Of course, even he can’t pull it off and save hip-hop. Jay-Z is hip-hop, yes, but the dirty little secret that he likes us to ignore is that hip-hop is not Jay-Z: whether Sean Corey Carter came back for the judgement or not, children would still be ridin’ dirty and wondering just what they know about that. As a matter of fact, Jay’s stature as impossibly-rich-CEO and certifiable hip-hop legend almost seem to cripple him in this regard — that Jay is an icon first, operating on a plane so far above his contemporaries (at least with regards to status), creates enough of a separation between hip-hop and him that even with a resounding success it would just be Jay-Z, not the pulse, not the mass of hip-hop. So the rainforests all have grown back? Big surprise, man, the walking god did it.
We aspirant “writer” types discuss with religious diligence our “angle,” the way we plan to tackle a piece of writing. We assume all stories are already written, but then find the new take on it; that’s the angle. Jay-Z’s always been a master of the angle, rhyming about nothing but doing it with wit, style, and absurd ease. But a writer without an angle always knows it, and so the writer writes unsurely, clinging to half-cooked paragraphs and unnecessary wordings, clunky at times and anemic at others, starting a sentence in one place and ending it somewhere else. The writer flounders, self-loathes, feels “blocked.” I’ve been there a thousand times, taunted by the cursor and utterly ashamed at my inability to put words down. I know those waters, and I rejoice that I’m not in them now, because my angle hangs in front of me, glinting in the sunlight: Jigga didn’t have one.
WASHINGTON - Pentagon guidelines that classified homosexuality as a mental disorder now put it among a list of conditions or "circumstances" that range from bed-wetting to fear of flying.
The new rules are related to the military's retirement practices. The change does not affect the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibits officials from inquiring about the sex lives of service members and requires discharges of those who openly acknowledge being gay.
The revision came in response to criticism this year when it was discovered that the guidelines listed homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders.
Ootes' political future lay in a box in a trunk of a broken-down car
In one of those moments that hushes a dinner party, an astute student of federal politics bet his wife against a serving platter that the next Liberal leader won't be Stéphane Dion.
Where the American Jewish novelists were American first of all – "I am an American, Chicago born" is how Augie March greets us – and could lay claim to a whole literature, to Melville and Whitman as much as to their parents' jokes, Richler, like the Australian and Caribbean writers, had first to show that what he was writing about existed at all. He had to show that a language and lore existed before he could attach it to anyone else's tradition.
The satiric, deprecatory tone that he shared with Amis and Braine was therefore allied in his writing to a larger ambition – he had to write about a city (and country) that didn't quite know it was one, about the manners of a tribe who hadn't been told they had them. The urge to inventory a reality that everyone else thought was merely a dependency, one that didn't really count, is present everywhere in his novels, and it creates an unwilled expansiveness, an appetite for setting down experience, that feels less claustrophobic than the worlds of his English contemporaries. It was the same tone, but they were describing a world shrinking inwards. He was describing one pushing out.
So he had to give form to a world before he could make fun of it, and the two ambitions were so closely allied – the affectionate urge to inventory a city and tribe already vanishing as he wrote of them; the satiric urge to mock their narrowness and pretensions – that they became indistinguishable.
The mission of the Global Orgasm is to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy. Now that there are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti- submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, the time to change Earth's energy is NOW! Read more about the fleet buildup here.
The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.
The goal is to add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it will reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world.
Global Orgasm is an experiment open to everyone in the world.
The results will be measured on the worldwide monitor system of the Global Consciousness Project.
To the modern imagination the city becomes increasingly something hideous and nightmarish.... No longer a community, it seems more like a community turned inside out, with its expressways taking its thousands of self-enclosed nomadic units into a headlong flight into greater solitude, ants in the body of a dying dragon, breathing its polluted air and passing its polluted water. The map still shows us self-contained cities like Hamilton and Toronto, but experience presents us with an urban sprawl which ignores national boundaries and buries a vast area of beautiful and fertile land in a tomb of concrete.
George Bush described [Saddam's death sentence] as "a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."
I’m really pretty sure that this is the first Holocaust collaboration joke in the history of the comics.
A very subtle and funny writer - one I've become obsessed with over the past year - in a decidedly Muriel Spark mood. Imagine The Pr...