While the rest of young, liberal New York was jamming Washington Square park for the Obama rally yesterday, the Senate approved tens of billions more dollars to continue war in Iraq.From the Nation:

The Senate agreed on Thursday to increase the federal debt limit by $850 billion — from $8.965 trillion to $9.815 trillion — and then proceeded to approve a stop-gap spending bill that gives the Bush White House at least $9 billion in new funding for its war in Iraq.

The telling quote is here, though:

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the maverick Democrat who has led the fight to end the war and bring U.S. troops home from Iraq, was on the losing end of the 94-1 vote. (The five senators who did not vote, all presidential candidates who are more involved in campaigning than governing, were Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Republicans John McCain and Sam Brownback.)

The only reason I’m going to vote Democrat in the next election is because Democrats aren’t Republicans. They’ve been letting Republicans run this country in a tight circle at the bottom of the bowl for years now and squandered any legitimate leverage through total inactivity. The one thing Republicans do right is define themselves and take a stand — like the position or not, they at least DO something.

Most of my peers, young professional adults in my demographic are planning to vote for Obama in the next election. Those that don’t will vote for Hillary. We all want them in office so badly, but really we just want Bush out.

The last thing I want is same shit, different face. Which is why we, as a pack of liberals, have to ask some tougher questions — both metaphorically and literally.

Obama sings a sweet song, but I’d like to ask him one very hard, direct question. And since I missed his rally in Washington Square Park yesterday, I’ll have to harness the power of the Internet to ask him this one directly:

Mr. Obama, you were too busy campaigning to vote against continued war in Iraq. If elected, will you continue to put your own political interests ahead of representing the wishes of the American people?

I want to ask this same question of Clinton, Biden, McCain, and Brownback, too. I’d like to know why our potential Presidents skipped this particular opportunity to put their money where their mouths are.

Seriously. If you see this and happen to attend a rally for any of these folks, grab the mike and ASK it. And see what happens.

If you’re so inclined, pass this on, far and wide, until someone somewhere does ask this. I want Obama to be the sunshine superhero of American politics, but until someone takes him to task, we’ll never know if he can handle the job.

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Gawker ran a pretty spectacular post today, purportedly cribbed from a Craigslist post that’s since been deleted. It’s by a woman who makes gold-digging look ambitious and blue-collar. She’s not digging for gold so much as trying to find a man who will take the earth-sized diamond at Jupiter’s core and set it in a ring.

Then top himself somehow when he proposes.

Here’s the post itself, a choice excerpt below:

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

It gets better. Go on, treat yourselves. The post reads real to me — either by a real life poisonous white dragon who’s looking to line her nest with more gold, or by a real life comedic genius who was hoping his/her inbox would explode with outraged responses.

The best response of all, though, is in the comments section. It takes the out-of-control DeLorean that is this vicious bitch’s ambition and hits it with a lightning bolt just in the nick of time:

It’s a closely guarded secret, but the vast majority of investment bankers have the same sexual fetish: they like to shit on their partner’s face. It has something to do with their ability to understand quanitative analysis. Left brain right brain stuff. Very spreadsheety. So anyway, all the wives of Goldman Sachs managing directors, they’ve had to accept that that’s part of the trade-off for the lifestyle. Ask any dry cleaner on the UES or Tribeca. Shit stained 500 count sheets are the norm. As soon as you start demonstrating a willingness for that kind of play, they’ll be knocking down your door.

This is why I eat the Internet.

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…now get the Hell out!

Originally uploaded by tozzo
The four of us sat in the dirty aquarium screaming with green-grey light, a small filthy oasis in the Port Authority bus terminal. I was on my way to another freelance interview. Now that I’m on the treadmill, I can’t stop looking for the next gig — I’d rather face down an injured wolverine with an air rifle than go into another long stretch of nothing like I did this summer.

So there’s me in my dark grey interview suit, sweating like Whitney Houston in an airport, sitting there on the little nod-proof bench, just waiting on the bus. An old woman stood across from me, standard issue, straight from Central casting. She wore a sun hat and blue-blockers just like my grandmother and a fanny pack with an L. Ron Hubbard book sat just above her hips.

We were all doing the New York thing where everyone sees each other and says nothing at all for a good ten minutes or so when the old woman crossed the room and stood right next to me at the end of the bench.

“Scum,”

she said, in a low voice that only I could hear.

Scum on the anus of this earth is what you are. Manipulating the legal system to intimidate witnesses in a federal case is a very serious crime in this country. You might be on top for now, but you won’t get away with it for long.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

This is a fairly fascinating animation that’s making the rounds: an excerpt from Michael Sullivan’s “Sex Life of Robots.” I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but the video’s not safe for work. Unless the tech guys at your job are itching to see you go, they’re probably not going to tattle, though … they’ll just be into it themselves.

From Dylan Tweney’s slideshow on Wired:

While making an animated war movie featuring armies of battling robots, filmmaker Michael Sullivan began to get a new idea: His film should feature non-stop robot sex.

The Sex Life of Robots centers around a robot baby and his mother scanning their home computer for porn. It shows — in graphic detail — the scenes of robot coitus that pop up on their screen. “It’s supposed to be like a silent robot porno movie from another planet,” Sullivan explains. Despite the subject matter, Sullivan’s creation exhibits a high degree of artistry.

Sullivan’s showing some of these dioramas in Manhattan’s Museum of Sex as well.

Here’s my question: if robots are machines — and dildonic pistons (there are a LOT in that clip) are machines too — can a robot tell the difference between sex with a humanoid robot and a crude sex machine? As humans, we can tell the difference between a partner and a fucking machine (sooo NSFW). Maybe robots can tell the difference, and being emotionless, they just don’t care.

For an even more whimsical take on the genital interface between man and machine, check out the video for Add N to (X)’s “Metal Fingers In My Body.” By now I shouldn’t have to tell you not to do this at work, either.

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Indulge me here. Just sit back for a minute. Don’t look at your computer, but keep your eyes open. Wait a bit. Count your breaths if you have to. Wait until you fidget a little and think “Christ, Jeff, what’s your POINT?”

Feel that? You don’t know what you’re feeling, but you do.

You’re feeling minutes of your life die. Seconds are racing past and they’re never coming back. They’re like molecules striking your skin, the tiny white dust that crumbles off a coral reef when you say “screw the sign” and step on it anyway. Each second is unique and special, a fleck in a steady blizzard from the 4th dimension that is never slowing up and never stopping. The fourth dimension never stops hosing seconds into the universe, pumping out the atoms that minutes are made of, minutes where you’re born or die or get married or just wish for six o’clock so you can go back home and get back on the computer again.

The fourth dimension never weakens and the fourth dimension never dies. That’s your job — each second hurtles you closer to heart attack, blindness, erectile dysfunction, a diminished ability to enjoy the seconds you have left.

I swear to Christ I can feel every second trickling out of my life all day long. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, if I’m not wringing every ounce of my life out of each second then I’m walking through a curtain of corpses hung in my face by Father Time. “Try yoga, try meditating,” people tell me. “You need to be more grounded, more relaxed!” Bullshit.

Yoga is the Facebook of physical activity, an anesthetic for life spent next to people without ever really communicating.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

This woman’s workout routine is ridiculous enough as it is — but imagine if it caught on as an actual fitness phenomenon.

Imagine her, in the front of a crowded classroom full of people grunting and sticking their tongues out. And those people, at work and on the subway, instead of carrying their little yoga mats in special slings and acting all type-A about something that’s supposed to be relaxing and non-competitive … imagine if people got all uptight about the way they crossed their eyes and waggled their tongues.

I think it’s catching on.

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Forget the graffiti, the cool bars, the great music, the art scene and the hordes of gorgeous women everywhere you look: If you ask me, the best thing about New York City is biking to work. The Williamsburg Bridge is a bear first thing in the morning, but once the hard climb is over you’re above the traffic and the train clunking away under your feet with a full 360 view of the entire city and then it’s a whoop and a high-speed plunge into the steaming, honking Lower East Side.

Now that my legs and nerves are built up a bit, I barely hit the brakes on the way down the bridge and slip into the traffic stream weaving between slow trucks and stopped cabs like a dragonfly among hippopotami. From there it’s a bit of a stop and go bob and weave around potholes and nervous women with massive sunglasses in Soho and then onto the West Side Highway.

The West Side Highway is a fairly flawless stretch of dedicated bike path that runs all the way up the west side of Manahattan. It’s seperated from the actual road part of the highway with trees, plants and concrete barriers, so there’s a fairly good chance you won’t get hit by oncoming traffic.

Note that I said “fairly good.” It is a fact that I was nearly run over by a Lexus on the bike path one afternoon. I guess the driver had had a gutful of the traffic (which wasn’t even that bad) and decided to make a go of it on his own. He cam blowing down the path at about 20 mph, which is not that fast for cars, sure, but when it’s barrelling at you on the bike path, it’s something different.

Apart from the odd encounter like that, I love biking here. There’s more of a pedestrian culture, and while drivers are nuts here, they also know that everyone else is nuts, too, and they’re ready for you. DC drivers are by and large a bunch of furious suburbanites — New York drivers are just trying to get from A to B without killing anyone, or being killed. The net effect is that people stop for you, honk to say “careful, man, coming through,” rather than “die in a fire.”

However: This morning, I was hooking it up the West Side, running a little late. And this kinda heavyset older woman sat in the middle of the freaking lane, bike straddling both side of the pack while she lifted the flaps of her stomach to ferret something out of her fanny pack. I dodged her and passed her on the right just as a rollerblader passed her left. And behind me, I heard her shout

Oh, I hope you get killed.

Like everyone here says when something like this happens: “Welcome to New York.”

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