(no subject)

[wickedflea]

Several months ago I was babbling about becoming a Lone Kung-Fu Monk of Death. (What was I on that day, anyway?) "Kung-Fu Monk" was just one of those random phrases that pop into my head, like, all the time. As far as I knew, I'd made it up. So the other day it popped back into my head and I did a Google search for it, and lo and behold I found that there's a movie about real Kung-Fu Monks! Not only that, but a few days later I'd forgotten all about it, went to netflix.com, and there was the movie in my list of recommendations. I think the world is trying to tell me that I should pursue this vocation of Kung-Fu Monkery. And frankly, it's starting to sound pretty good again.



Did y'all see that paid users now have access to LJ picture hosting?

Check out this excerpt of a review of Bill Clinton's book that The Atlantic Monthly ran a while back. Read all the way through it.

As for "the worst presidential decision I ever made," you get one guess: agreeing to appoint a special prosecutor in the Whitewater case, the Pandora's box that gave us Ken Starr, a stained blue dress, and impeachment. But this is where the very dreariness of Clinton's number-crunching, detail-munching, oppressively chronological narrative lets him pull off a hat trick. Aside from a rhetorical nod at La Brea ("I was seething inside. No one can be as angry as I was without doing himself harm"), he doesn't mention his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky at the time they occur. Instead his buildup to the 1995 government shutdown, which was when she started bringing him pizza, blooms with encomiums to -- what do you know? -- Hillary: "I was so proud of her," he writes, soon before his wife leaves on "another trip." For their twentieth wedding anniversary he gives her the engagement ring he couldn't afford in 1975: "Through all our ups and downs," this chapter ends, "we were still very much engaged." It's up to the alert reader to recall who else he was up and down with around then, since "Lewinsky, Monica" appears only when Starr exposes the affair, a hundred pages later. "Finally, after years of dry holes, I had given them something to work with," Clinton bitterly comments -- a sentence his editor, Robert Gottlieb, or perhaps New York's junior senator, might have urged him to rethink.