Another Wimbledon Rain Delay Musings

Watching what is developing into a pretty epic Wimbledon men's final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal get delayed by rain again -- curse you England.  So with time to kill let me just say --

- Roger Federer may well be the most talented tennis player ever.  Peter Garrett may have the resume I would most like to call my own.  But goddamn, in my next life I would like to come back as Rafael Nadal.

- For those of you in college, when your girlfriends spend junior year in Spain they will sleep with Rafael Nadal and you will have phone conversations like this one.

- Strangely enough, I've never written a post about what a smug, shallow, reprehensible, hateful piece of crap Fred Barnes is -- consider this it.

- The Fred Barnes piece and the continued veneration of Jesse Helms by right wingers brings me back to one of life's eternal verities -- the Republican Party consists of greedy Social Darwinists and those who hate the "other" be they blacks, gays, muslims or [fill in blank].  The hate constituency has always been the predominant part of the party for at least the last 44 years.

[Rain delay over and match officially epic.]

- Modo, bitter spinster extraordinairre, devotes an entire Sunday column to marriage advice -- by a priest!  Actual advice not that bad - conclusion: "there are no mens for you" - priceless.

- Ezra  and Matt are both very enthused about Frank Rich's column today.  Musings about Wall-E and the fact that John McCain doesn't use a computer, along with some plague on both houses denunciations of both presidential campaigns.  I was pretty unmoved. How about you? 

- Stephen Carter puzzlingly suggests that raising the minimum wage doesn't help the poor in another plague on both your houses type column.  Show your work Stephen.

Nadal fuckin' rules - watch out for your girlfriends - and wives too. :-)

Comments

[Lisa Simeone]

Okay, I admit I had to look up what (or who, as it turned out) "Nadal" was. But then I was laughing so hard at your link about the foreign boyfriend that I no longer cared!

As for MoDo's column, I thought it was actually quite good -- and ended in an appropriately tongue-in-cheek mode.

[Sir Charles]

Lisa,

Did you check out Nadal's picture linked to above?

I was surprised that the MoDo column was not totally obnoxious. But it seems a tad odd as well.

[Sir Charles]

This line from the Onion bit just killed me: "I am condolence for you but what is to be done? There are many fishes, yes?"

[bigbadwolf]

that was a great, great match. i know that strummer approved the use of london calling in ads to help out a couple of the others, but i still hated that the broadcast ended with london calling.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

Gotta agree on London Calling. It's really inappropriate. It would be like using Born in the USA for the Olympic trials. (They're not doing that are they?)

But what a match. One of the best I've ever seen. And both guys are such class acts.

[Joe Klein's conscience]

Sir Charles:
Do they have to get permission to use the music for like your describe(Since it is different that pitching for corporations)?

As far as Frank Rich, you don't agree with him? I don't know that it was a pox on both houses as much as making a point about Obama. Obama is moving too much to the middle, for no good reason. Rich is right about that.

[Sir Charles]

JKC,

They do need to get permission from whoever holds the rights -- not always the artist (see e.g. Beatles and Michael Jackson). But bbw indicates Strummer allowed for the benefit of the other band members.

It's not that I don't agree with Rich to some degree -- I just didn't think that it was a particularly notable column. I guess when both Matt and Ezra linked to it I got the impression that there was more there there.

[bigbadwolf]

right around the time strummer died, london calling was used in a jaguar ad. wow, that was painful. SC gets it exactly right: springsteen and the clash were the two successful artists that seemed most unlikely to sell to advertising (a shout out to kreiger and densmore who have also resisted). i read, in the stories about strummer's death, that he relented on the licensing because at least one of his mates was having problems and the licensing would help out. that made the licensing still disappointing in its way (much less so, inured as we now are, than it would hae been in 1988 or even 1998), but contextualized.

perhaps the same financial need still applies and so the licensing to nbc. even so, the song was simply wrong, as even someone who works at nbc should know. jaguar was looking, i assume, to build credibility among yuppie, no longer young people who, having been young, vaguely knew that the clash was cool and so too must be this car now. the menace in the guitars and the steel in the post-apocalyptic lyrics were appropriated to suggest you and your expensive car were masters of any universe. unfortunate, but viable. magnificent as today's match was, it had no resonance with london calling, and sticking the song over pictures of a fortnight of tennis called forth nightmares of great songs reduced to one shining moment.

[KathyF]

They had a nice shot of Nadal on the cover of the Guardian this morning, which no doubt prompted me to buy it, but there was also an interesting observation about The Onion:

"Britons tend to think that Americans are unwilling to send up their own culture but these very funny films do just that - and, in the process, confirm our prejudices, such as that all Yanks are fat."

I'm sick and tired of being labeled a humorless American. Just because I'm not all Adrian Mole-ish.

[Sir Charles]

Kathy,

The Guardian is rather smug and reflexive in its own biases.

I didn't much like the "greed" comment toward the end either. I am not sure I need to be lectured on our greed by a country that is responsible for about two-thirds of the world's present global ills due its colonial practices in the subcontinent, Africa and the Middle East. All done, of course, with keen disinterest in matters financial.

I'm getting rid of my "If I had a Second Passport it Would be English" bumpersticker.