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damnintellectuals
Electric Bookaloo
December 26, 2007
The greatest baseball player of all-time: Ty Cobb. Also, the craziest and meanest athlete of all-time..
Topic: Sport
Ty Cobb's 1961 auto-biography, My Life in Baseball - the True Story, begins with a forward by General Douglas MacArthur, another mean as rabies, crazy as batshit, asshole. It is interesting to note that MacArthur was probably Cobb's only friend. Obviously, kindered spirits. Cobb still holds baseball records that will probably never be beaten, even in the current steroid era. His autobiography, however, is a gross mass of self-aggrandizing, closer to a Horatio Algers story bloated with statistics.
 
Al Stump, the writer who "assisted" Cobb, wrote a more faithful biography in 1994 titled, Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball. In it, he details an ailing, frieldnless yet still wild Tyrus Cobb. Sometimes, it reads as a prequel to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie adaption of Stump's book, Cobb, stars Tommy Lee Jones in perhaps his finest role.
 


Posted by damnintellectuals at 1:59 PM PST
Updated: December 26, 2007 2:19 PM PST
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December 5, 2007
Cutting.
Topic: Literature

B. R. Myers trims the hype and examines the meat. From The Atlantic Monthly, a review of Denis Johnson's latest novel, Tree of Smoke:

"Having read nothing by Denis Johnson except Tree of Smoke, his latest novel, I see no reason to consider him a great or even a good writer, but he is apparently very well thought of by everyone else. According to the New York Times, which in 2006 sent a questionnaire to writers, editors, and critics, a collection of Johnson’s short stories titled Jesus' Son is regarded by some as the best American book of the past 25 years." The review...


Posted by damnintellectuals at 1:06 AM PST
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November 30, 2007
The Diggers
Topic: Biography


 

 

From page 283 of Emmett Grogan's "Ringolevio", detailing The Invisible Circus:

The night of the Invisible Circus, the officials and ministers of Glide Church began to get rather nervous, wondering what they had gotten themselves into. They had accepted all the lies and halftruths liaisoned to them by Quaker Fish, but it was difficult to be deceived about what they saw with their own eyes. There was an elevator that ran from the street level entrance of the church to a large hall in the basement below, and Emmett had filled that hall with literally tons of shredded plastic he had spent days trucking over from a plastics factory. When people descended to the hall in the elevator, they stepped out into three feet of plastic strips and it was quite a struggle for them to move around, falling all over themselves as their feet got tied up in the strewn cord. Once they made it through the plastic jungle, they were confronted with a crush of people feeling each other up inside a low-ceilinged, cramped rec room that was sweltering hot because of its proximity to the boiler, and blustering with outrageous noise from a rock band whose amplified sound was so loud in that tiny space that it brought many to tears. The barren Formica church cafeteria took up the rest of the basement, and it had been turned into an R and R center, with a huge punch bowl on one of the tables filled with Tang spiked with salutary doses of acid." click and go to page 283


Posted by damnintellectuals at 2:07 AM PST
Updated: May 9, 2008 2:48 PM PDT
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November 24, 2007
Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can't End the Battle Over Guns
Topic: US History

From The New Republic book review of Mark V. Tushnet's "Out of Range" :

In 1991, Warren E. Burger, the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, was interviewed on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about the meaning of the Second Amendment's "right to keep and bear arms." Burger answered that the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud -- I repeat the word 'fraud' -- on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." In a speech in 1992, Burger declared that "the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to have firearms at all." In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was "to ensure that the 'state armies' -- 'the militia' -- would be maintained for the defense of the state."


Posted by damnintellectuals at 5:58 PM PST
Updated: May 9, 2008 2:50 PM PDT
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November 21, 2007
Government and Dirty Tricks
Topic: US History
In the late 1960's, the FBI printed and distributed "The Black Panthers Coloring Book" as an effort to discredit the counter-culture organization.


Posted by damnintellectuals at 9:38 PM PST
Updated: May 9, 2008 2:53 PM PDT
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November 20, 2007
"Destiny... You cannot destroy my destiny!"
Topic: Film

Orson Welles and his last screen credit.


Posted by damnintellectuals at 10:38 PM PST
Updated: December 17, 2007 11:44 AM PST
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Topic: Poetry

 Sign your name across my heart I want you to be my baby = poet.

 "Because both music and poetry are born of passion and strive to express the inexpressible, they unite quite naturally. Often it happens within the mind of a musician/poet who utilizes both art forms within a single expression. For me, one such artist is Terence Trent D’Arby...." More here...


Posted by damnintellectuals at 2:06 PM PST
Updated: May 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT
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November 19, 2007
He called his church "Eagle's Nest"
Topic: Religion

He called his church "Eagle's Nest". They gave him millions. From The San Antonio Express News:

Pastor Rick Godwin constantly presses his flock at Eagle's Nest Christian Fellowship to give generously for a new $36 million megachurch under construction on the North Side at the same time he spends tens of thousands of dollars of church money on luxury items for himself. Click here for article.

A response from the article by one of the Eagle's Nest paritioners:

This article is so low. You people have nothing else better to do than to make up rumors about people. I recently had a chance to tour the Summit(Our new church) and i KNOW where my money is going. And I will continue to give because I know of all the people I am helping for generations to come. So if your complaining about the way Rick spends his money GET OVER IT because it's none of your business AND it's GOD who has blessed him tremendously for what he is doing in the community and to people everywhere. Click here for other responses to article.


Posted by damnintellectuals at 1:23 AM PST
Updated: November 25, 2007 10:15 AM PST
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