The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Chris Quinones:

IIRC Huffington is her married name, Stassinopoulos her maiden name (hence the wacky Greek accent). Perhaps she dropped the Stassinopoulos so as not to sound too much like a Sesame Street character.

FWIW, I've never read The Alteration.

Teresa, thanks. How 'bout that Mets bullpen?

My prediction for the next pope's handle is Innocent XIV, as a nice culture-of-life poke in the eye. I'm not taking bets on this, however.

In my knapsack: Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s by Ann Douglas, and Burr by Gore Vidal, which I got bogged down about 40% in some weeks ago and am still determined to finish RSN. It's my fault, not his.

Outside my knapsack, I'm concentrating on opera books. To those who care: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades is the shit. Love at first listen.

Also, I am tremendously pleased to confirm that any resemblance between the intro to "Rapper's Delight" (I said a hip, hop, the hip, the hippie to the hip hip hop you don't stop the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogety beat) and the chorus to "The Ketchup Song" (Aserejé, ja deje dejebe tudejebe de sebiunouva majabi an de bugui an de buididipí) is entirely deliberate. I still have not determined how the coda to Earth Wind & Fire's "Fantasy" (the one whose chorus goes "and we will live together/until the twelfth of never/our voices will ring forever/as oooooooooooone") ties into all this, but I'm on the case.

hkreader, what I wrote was exactly what one of my Chinese coworkers (most of whom came from around Beijing and Shanghai) taught me, with spelling double-checked online. There were no adverse consequences in practice. If they were mindscrewing me, I can only salute them.

Yoon Ha, I have that course too, bought a few years ago when I worked for a Chinese-owned company. I never got far into speaking; my party phrase is...lemme check for spelling...Wo bu hui zhongwen. Qing shuo yingwen.

Enough suspense, it means "I don't know Chinese. Please speak English."

I can recognize some ideographs, like those for certain numerals and year, month, day, and a few others. America is Meiguo, which makes me a meiguoren from Niu Yue.

I'd be game to help you practice, but I'm in Brooklyn, so it's probably not feasible, alas.

I took your advice before I even read it. Working Families for Prez, Senate and House, D for everything else.

I was #101 at shortly after 9. I haven't voted at the venue before, so I have no basis for comparing to other years. My mother reported that they opened the auditorium up at her polling place, when the anteroom to the auditorium usually suffices. I think people actually give a damn.

what we’re declaring war on is world conservatism: the attachment of people everywhere to their land, their family, their established way of life

Well, some of the neoconservatives are reformed Trots, and the Halliburtons of the world are certainly attuned to the creatively destructive attributes of capital, so I'm not the least bit surprised by this conclusion.

Jeremy: "Marquees" is the word your looking for.

And the signs in the subway tunnel were still there last I checked, which was no more than a year ago. But they emulate the Burma Shave signs, not Alka Seltzer.

Dang. My hero. Too bad we can't afford to wait for Dean in 2008, ain't it?

BTW, Dean is doing the Top 10 on Letterman tonight. I like this move.

SFW? Who he?

Lieberman liked Andrea Bocelli. Jeez.

Mitch: Just this week in Science Times, there was an article about a challenge to the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention. From the article:

"This theory has been one of the most important in criminology. It was first proposed in an article published 20 years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, written by Dr. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The theory provided the intellectual foundation for a crackdown on 'quality of life' crimes in New York City under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

"Today, 'broken windows' policing is endorsed by police chiefs across the country, its proponents sought out for lectures and consulting around the world. But from the beginning, Dr. Wilson concedes, the theory lacked substantive scientific evidence that it worked.

"'I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce crime,' Dr. Wilson, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently said in a telephone interview. 'People have not understood that this was a speculation.'"

Not arguing with your assessment, but I think it's interesting that the proposal is questionable even in the eyes of its chief proponent.

Given that I just LJ'd something of Taibbi's I thought was brilliant, I feel obliged to point out that even if he's nuts, he has frequent flashes of genius that go a long way in my opinion to mitigate the nuttiness. The quote above, however, is indeed nuts.

Interesting. I think this was the outfit that bugged me about offthekuff.com the other day; I just forwarded the mail to Chuck Kuffner and then deleted it. I'm not sharp enough to inform the spam filter services about it, nor my ISP. And I don't have the message anymore. Oh well.

Avram, sweetie, I love you, but dogs rule.

This isn't a dealbreaker, is it, after all these years? Hon?

Just call me a dupe of the caniphile agenda.

I pointed out in my LiveJournal that the timing of the Mars approach vs. the blackout was awfully suspicious.

This morning en route to work I pased by the new Talbots Mens store on Madison and 54th. Yes, Mens has no apostrophe. I despair.

Damn straight. I know I've had a harder time with my respiratory system since 9/11 than before. And Christie Whitman should die a horrible death at the hands of her former constituents in New Jersey who may have been disserved by her inaction, too.

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