1 Week Anniversary

This is the 1 week anniversary not only of Barack Obama's win-to-tha-max, but also of John McCain's redemption, achieved through the classiest concession ever. He couldn't exactly totally redeem himself for spending two long years systematically going back on everything he believed in, but he came close to making up for it. Because I am most capable of expressing my feelings through the movies of my childhood, as is much of my social ilk, I was resoundingly reminded when watching McCain speak of a scene in Hook. Hook was panned critically - this is a fact of the universe that I still have not come to terms with, because it remains one of the most touching and inspirational movies in the history of movies. It has weird colourful food, baseball, Dustin Hoffman being typically awesome and Robin Williams being typically endearingly manic. It was a massive collective underestimate on the part of all critics everywhere to not revere and adore it.

And now it has provided me a comparison for McCain's redemption. When Peter Pan (or at that point, Panning) returns to Neverland, he's an asshole, a bumfuck overweight lawyer who hates fun. None of the lost boys believe it's Peter Pan, except the littlest one, who traces the lines on Peter's face with his finger. NOT saccharine, genuinely moving. At some point, the kid's face lights up in the subtlest way, and he says, "Oh, there you are Peter!"

It will always be cuter and better and more moving in Hook than it was in real life, when I realized I was saying to myself, "Oh, there you are John McCain!". But still, it was pretty great to see this human, who I genuinely think is much less cynical than most people of our generation*, shed his facial ticks and weird gestures and relax into the comfort of being his old self again. I mean, his old self, but still. I think it's incredible that this man has been in politics for four decades and he still really can't lie without showing it all over his face, and I'm not excusing him for lying or anything, but isn't that kind of incredible? He looks like a maniac when he lies; he is calm and self-deprecating when he doesn't. It's such a noticeable difference, and it's a whole lot of "Oh, there you are!"

*Don't believe me? Believe David Foster Wallace and what he writes in "Up, Simba", an article he wrote for Rolling Stone about the McCain 2000 campaign, which can be somewhat accurately represented (sort of) by DFW's sentence in the middle of the essay: "Maybe they really can coexist - humanity and politics, shrewdness and decency. But it gets complicated".

Make It Rain

In a frustrating turn of events, I lost the post I spent the last hour and a half writing. It was a treatise to all rain gods everywhere declaring that Fat Joe and Lil Wayne should replace them, and that henceforth all storms and showers should feature the pair standing atop a cloud performing "Make it Rain" as they, in fact, make it rain. Many things were addressed in the treatise, including my admission that the song is actually referring to making it rain money, not for-real precipitation. It also featured my vast knowledge of various rain gods, which was honed during the larger mythology obsession that consumed the better parts of grade 5 and 6, and which could be viewed as impressive or embarrassing, depending on your stance regarding the value of knowing minute details about hundreds of different kinds of deities. Okay, so, embarrassing, actually. Let's just settle on embarrassing. But alas, a brief wireless internet outage combined with my failure to press "save draft" have done their dirty, nasty, disgusting work.

The good news is that the basic point of the treatise can be easily summarized. It goes like this: Fat Joe and Lil Wayne should be the producers and distributors of all showers and storms; we should be able to gaze above us in wonder and delight as they ride around on their bejeweled clouds, all lightning bolts and cash money. If this was the new world order, there would definitely be times when it would literally be raining money, and this would somehow never cause inflation. Only joy, and somehow never inflation.

In celebration of ordaining Fat Joe and Lil Wayne as the new executors of precipitation, I am posting the link to the "Make It Rain" video as a way of assuring all outgoing deities of rain, who have henceforth been stripped of their consecrated duties, that appointing these two paragons of spectacle will not only preserve the respect that the position deserves, but will increase it many millions of times over. This video has clocked over 6 million views to date and I would be embarrassed to admit how many of those views are my responsibility if I wasn't certain that there is virtually nothing more worthy of my time than beholding the magic within it. Gods, prepare to be crippled by the realization of how you could have been rendered so utterly useless to humanity:

PS. I am posting the link because I do not know how to post the actual video and am currently uninterested in figuring out how, like a regular lazy.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOK0HXS5a4w