Everyone knows that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest Prime Ministers that Britain ever had. Many people also know he was an alcoholic. Some people know he was a wit. And a few know he was a painter of moderate talents.
But who knew he was a rapper?
Behold the wonder which is DJ Winston, as he and his crew get this dinner party started!
via Neatorama
Well, more like A Few Men/Women/Undecided/We’reNotFussyAtThisPoint.
Seems the CIA is, as they periodically are, hiring, and as a specialized and important service, they have specialized and important expectations for their applicants, and thus they are marketing themselves to specialized and important people, like the legions of newly-“retired” Wall Street Former Masters of the Universe.
That’s right; in a Perfect Storm, a maelstrom of malevolently strategic males, the CIA is recruiting investment bankers.
Gawker charts the shocking congruence. Go read it. Hamilton’s done better with this than I ever could, so check out the snippet and then go to Gawker and read the whole thing and you’re welcome.
CIA: Did cocaine with Colombians and spent all night partying with hookers in a drug lord’s villa. It was a mission.
Bankers: Did cocaine with Colombians and spent all night partying with hookers in a Murray Hill co-op. It was Tuesday.
From Tuffy, on the recent Michaelle Jean sealsickle incident:
“That seal heart ain’t eatin’ itself.”
And a close runner-up, from Jenny Quelque Chose at Gawker:
“Eat your heart out, Palin.”
We at the ol’ raincoaster blog have long been fans (and, almost as long, confused and saddened ex-fans, like all those little kids when they found out the World Series was fixed) of the controversial, bilious, bibulous ex-Brit writer Christopher Hitchens, now enjoying a cushy, spa-ridden sinecure, the just reward of age, at Vanity “Fifteen Dollars a Word” Fair, having some time ago experienced a midlife crisis of Shakespearean proportions, from which he has yet to recover. In fact, the sole point on which I am absolutely sure we are still in agreement is that his brother is an ass.
Encouraging hints are emerging, leading those who’ve enjoyed his fine words even as we’ve missed his fine mind for, say, the last seven or eight years, to hope that the message might yet match the medium in terms of quality. And we are all about the terms of quality, yo. One of the earliest expressions of senility in retreat came in the form of this remarkable video and article:
Christopher Hitchens Gets Waterboarded
From http://www.vf.com. How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” from the August 2008 issue
Interview conducted by David Rose and filmed by Arya Surowidjojo.
Note the opening remarks: I don’t know what Hitchens did to piss Graydon Carter off, but Toby Young is lucky he got out of there when he did, from the looks of things.
So, why did getting waterboarded so suddenly turn Hitch‘s mind from self-centered, cranky mush, to something closer to a source of intellectual insight? It’s complicated, but I have an idea.
Actually, that generally goes without saying, doesn’t it? Both parts of that sentence.
So, the idea is this: as we all know, Hitchens is infamously immoderate of appetite(s). Since pre-puberty his brain has been stewed in a tepid chemical bath of scotch, tar, nicotine, preservatives, unmentionables, Red Dye #’s 1 through 642, and whatever it is that middle-class dealers cut their drugs with. Naturally, as time went on the effects got worse, culminating in the interminable Route 66 piece aforementioned, not to mention the neaderthal reactionarianism and spittle-flecked defensiveness that have marked/marred his work ever since.
Through the (admittedly rather drastic, but hey, we’ve got to be realists in this world today, amIrite?) use of the latest in waterboarding technology, thanks to one short session, the patient’s brain is already showing signs of improvement. We at the ol’ raincoaster blog believe this to be the result of nothing less than the cleansing flushing action of a pure water near-drowning, a remarkably successful (and inexpensive) way to restore the brain itself to youth and beauty.
Waterboarding. The Cranial Neti Pot of the Future.
Were we making the terrorists smarter and younger all this time? I see a future for battle-scarred veterans; no longer dependent on a sadly-depleted GI Bill or consigned to a gloomy and inadequate Veteran’s Hospital, nor shunted to the streets, they can now use the skills they developed across the oceans in the millions of American day spas. Spa visits will never be the same.
Well, it’s been far too long since we’ve taken a stroll down Self-Referential Road on the ol’ raincoaster blog, but that situation is about to be rectified. For lo, in addition to having broken into Vangroover’s Social Media Elite for Sale Or Rent (aka Will Tweet for Access) and been asked to some pretty damn-fine swankaliciously exciting events, including some I can’t tell you about yet (for lo, it would endanger my access to the open bar, and since I’m on a liquid fast that could be catastrophic and I know you wouldn’t want that to happen, right? right) and the recently blogged Capones and Bombay Sapphire events.
And as I’ve gotten on the radar for invitations, so I’ve also scrambled and clawed my way onto the radar for interviews, which come with much greater exposure, if far less gin. I’m gonna hafta do something about that: social mediaistas, are you with me? I say we get together and talk about going on strike over a few drinks and then forget all about the movement, as usual.
Anyhoohow/whatever, Kontent Creative just up and emailed me and interviewed me that way. This will sound familiar to some people. Unlike on previous occasions, I actually got back to them relatively promptly and, thus, they put it up promptly as well. Kontent Creative has a snazzy angle: each interview is just five questions, obviously designed to appeal to limited attention spans of the Twitterati. So there goes your barrier to entry.
Click and learn five things about raincoaster which oft were thought, but ne’er so well expressed. If I do say so myself.
a snippet of Kontact Creative’s 5 Questions with the Tentacled One:
2) What is your favourite online resource?
It’s a tie between Fark and The Guardian. The day is not complete until I’ve checked both of them, and on certain days it’s quite difficult to tell them apart, really. Except Fark would never let Polly Toynbee near a keyboard.
raincoaster 