Our Morning Roundup

* So, I fell asleep while listening to Palin’s speech on NPR. Apparently, it was a doozy. Writes the Washington Post’s Michael D. Shear:

[Palin] leaned heavily on her own biography, introducing her husband, Todd, as a commercial fisherman, a union member, a world-champion snowmobile racer and an Eskimo. She described herself as a mom-turned-politician with the “same challenges and the same joys” as other families.

She also offered at least one apparent ad-lib: “The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” she asked. “Lipstick.”

A unionized, snowmobile-racing Eskimo First Dude? Watch out, Michelle Obama.

* Slate’s John Dickerson uses the pit bull line to tell Dems why they should be scared. But why is a lipstick joke the closest this woman got to talking about women’s issues?

* All Our Noise offer up another back-to-school remix, this time with some help from Van Halen, Alice Cooper, and Nirvana.

* From the New Yorker, your dose of short fiction that only sounds right when narrated in your brain with a wavering, old-tyme British accent. From Janet Frame’s “Gorse Is Not People, a story about Nadia, a plucky, institutionalized dwarf:

For Naida was in love. She was in love with the pig boy. He passed by each day on the carts collecting the pig food, and each day he pushed a note through the window of the dayroom. He and Naida were going to run away together into the hills; they were going to dance every dance together forever; they would be married and have many children, and Naida at her wedding would have a long white dress and carry orange blossoms, and they would go to Hollywood or to Mexico City—it wasn’t decided which—for their honeymoon. The pig boy had arranged everything.

So, Frame died in 2004 and the story was written in 1954. Does that make the New Yorker’s fiction section less ridiculous?

* Brightest Young Things links you to the eight most obnoxious Internet commenters. It could be you!

Photo by pingnews.com

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