Quote of the Day: "Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity..."

Store Clerk: I can get the part from Bristol. It'll take two weeks, here's your pomade.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Two weeks? That don't do me no good.

Store Clerk: Nearest Ford auto man is Bristol.

Ulysses Everett McGill: [examining pomade] Hold on, I don't want this pomade. I want Dapper Dan.

Store Clerk: I don't carry Dapper Dan, I carry Fop.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, I don't want Fop, g**damn it! I'm a Dapper Dan man!

Store Clerk: Watch your language, young feller, this is a public market. Now if you want Dapper Dan, I can order it for you. I'll have it in a couple of weeks.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!

Free-Association Synthesizing, but w/o the Purple Trench Coat

Here's the way my head is working today: Blog -> Synthesizing -> Synthesizer -> Synthesizer riff -> DMSR.

Alice says the thing she likes about my blog is the way I "pull things together." And, certainly for my longer posts, I tend to try to knit together a distillation of my thoughts by gathering pull-quotes from multiple sources on any given topic.

It is a matter of processing and synthesizing the opinions of others in order to figure out what I ultimately think.

The word synthesizing got me to think about the synthesizer as a musical instrument. This got me to thinking about my favorite synthesizer riff in any song I could remember.

And so, without further ado, I present Prince releasing the hounds of funk on DMSR.

All the white people clap your hands on the floor now...

Watch more imeem videos on AOL Video

(P.S. Prince-nerd shout out: Those of similiar ilk to myself will recall this one as featured during one of the party scenes at Tom Cruise's house in Risky Business.)

Quote of the Day: "And, it worked for my family..."

Christy Cummings: It's interesting, we have kind of a family dynamic going on here which pretty much mirrors what I grew up with, I'm the daddy figure, the taskmaster, the disciplinarian.

Sherri Ann Cabot: [nodding to Christy] Mr. Punishment over here.

Christy Cummings: Oh, but I also reward, and Sherri Ann is responsible for the unconditional love.

Sherri Ann Cabot: And the decorative ability.

Christy Cummings: She's the heart and the soul, which was what my mom did, that was her role, she was there for the unconditional love. And, it worked for my family, you know... until my mom committed suicide in '81.

To those who prefer their f-bombs served straight up

Quote of the Day: "You're being very un-Dude."

The Dude: [answering phone] Dude.

Nihilist: [on the phone] Who is this?

The Dude: Dude. The bag man, man. Where do you want us to go?

Nihilist: Us?

The Dude: Sh*t! Uh. Yeah, uh. Me and, uh, the driver. I'm not handling the money, driving the car and talking on the phone all at the same time.

Nihilist: Shut the f*** up.

Walter Sobchak: Dude, are you f***ing this up?

Nihilist: Who the f*** is that?

The Dude: That is the driver.

[Nihilist hangs up]

The Dude: Sh*t! Walter, you f***... you f***ed it up! You f***ed it up! Her life was in our hands, man!

Walter Sobchak: Nothing is f***ed here, Dude. Come on, you're being very un-Dude. They'll call back.

My Hope for Obama

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is the first blog I ever started to read on any regular basis. I can no longer remember why, but I presume it is because I often buy The Atlantic Monthly when I travel. Something in the magazine must have motivated me to seek out the website, and as Andrew is the first blogger (from left-to-right in the navigation bar) on the site, The Daily Dish is where I landed.

I still haven't made it down to Barbara Wallraff on the right hand edge of the navigation. Maybe she should petition to re-order the bloggers alphabetically by first name (though Andrew would still beat her out for the alpha spot).

But, now that I have a blog of my own, I guess I can cite Sullivan as my blogging godfather in a way.

One of the things about reading someone for a long period of time is you get a real sense for the cadence of their written voice, the pattern of their thoughts, and even the texture of their personality as it leaks through on the screen. Sullivan can be overly-emotional at times (at least for my taste) and given to hyperbole. But, it may simply come with the form.

Given that he blogs so prodigiously, there is less time for real-time editing and considered reflection. Inflamed commentary is "walked back" in future posts if needbe, but what you get most of the time is the immediate gut reaction.

So, taking that grain of salt, I can't help but post this item from Sullivan today in its entirety. I can't say that I feel the claims he makes therein are uncontestable. It may be a matter of heart and hope coloring his eyes (and mine) at this very early stage.

What I can say is that this is what I wanted to see from Obama more than anything else he could do policy-wise as President. But, I believe it is more than simply wishful thinking and projection, as so many have claimed that Obama's campaign was built around -- people casting their own idealized notions of Obama the myth onto the tabula rasa of Obama the actual candidate.

What Sullivan describes is what I thought I saw revealed in Obama under the kleig light glare of the campaign spotlight. It was the measure of the man, not his platform.

And, if he can actually govern in accordance with the spirit that Sullivan identifies below, then I will be one very proud American:

One impression from Obama's interactions with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you'd get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment - the election of 2004 - and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.

At times, Bush's indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush's presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush's authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, as opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

Let the people say Amen.

Quote of the Day: "From Moses to Sandy Koufax..."

Walter Sobchak: I'm saying, I see what you're getting at, Dude, he kept the money. My point is, here we are, it's shabbas, the sabbath, which I'm allowed to break only if it's a matter of life or death...

The Dude: Will you come off it, Walter? You're not even f***ing Jewish, man.

Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talkin' about?

The Dude: Man, you're f***ing Polish Catholic...

Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talking about? I converted when I married Cynthia! Come on, Dude!

The Dude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...

Walter Sobchak: And you know this!

The Dude: Yeah, and five f***ing years ago you were divorced.

Walter Sobchak: So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?

The Dude: It's all a part of your sick Cynthia thing, man. Taking care of her f***ing dog. Going to her f***ing synagogue. You're living in the f***ing past.

Walter Sobchak: Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax... [shouting] You're g**damn right I'm living in the f***ing past!