The Angriest Blog in the World

Here. Link via Tim Blair.

I had something really witty, bitter and funny to say, but then I forgot it. Oh well. It's so hot that even with the fan on (circulating cool air from the basement through the upper parts of the house) we're still planning on sleeping on the mattress I dragged downstairs last week.

A few days ago I started noticing that whenever I washed my hair there was a strange, nasty smell -- like very bad weed. As bad as the stuff that the guys downstairs from me were growing in the planter out back of the dorm, senior year in college. This was window box pot that was not intentionally cultivated, but just grew there because they dumped their seeds and bongwater onto the planter. (Don't ask me why they didn't put it down the toilet like normal people.) Curiously, tomatoes also grew in this planter, and it turns out tomatoes make excellent camouflage for nascent marijuana plants. The tomatoes were also accidental -- I believe the widely accepted story was they were seeded from somebody's vomit.

But anyway, I had noticed that my hair smelled like really bad weed whenever I washed it. Or maybe particularly vile mold. It was hard to tell. I was starting to wonder if I didn't have some sort of cranial fungus infection before I finally figured it out -- and it really says something about the state of my personal hygiene that it took me so long. It's the shampoo.

I normally buy Herbal Essences shampoo. Actually it's Clairol Herbal Essences Shampoo Extra Body For Fine/Limp Hair. I don't have "fine/limp hair", but I like the smell. Unfortunately for me, there's a similar-looking bottle which allegedly moisturizes normal hair which I accidentally bought instead of the right kind. It's supposed to smell like chamomile, aloe vera, and passion fruit flowers, but in fact smells like, say it with me, really bad weed. So I am now using my normal shampoo, but I'm saving the other one as a backup shampoo or if I suddenly need to disguise myself as a cash-strapped stoner.

So maybe for the fringe.

Winding up this rambling post, I'd like to add a light note to the story about the forest fires in British Columbia. This afternoon as my wife and I were picking raspberries for the dessert in the family dinner we hosted tonight, she suddenly turned to me and said, "Do you smell that?"

"What?"

"It smells like... barbecued weed."

We didn't think much of it at the time, but we are downwind of BC and everybody knows that BC is loaded with clandestine pot farms. So it's not exactly impossible that barbecued weed is exactly what we were smelling this afternoon....

A Marxist Critic of the Anti-War Left

Here's a self-described marxist criticizing the movement against the war in Iraq:

I want to say something about support for democratic values and basic human rights. We on the left just have it in our bloodstream, do we not?, that we are committed to democratic values. And while, for reasons I can't go into here, there are some on the left a bit more reserved about using the language of basic human rights, nonetheless for many of us it was this moral reality, and more especially its negation, that played a part in drawing us in: to protest and work against a world in which people could just be used for the purposes of others, be exploited and super-exploited, worked maybe to an early death, in any case across a life of hardship; or be brutalized for organizing to fight to change their situation, be 'disappeared', or tortured, or massacred, by regimes upholding an order of inequality - sometimes desperate inequality - and privilege. In our bloodstream.

However, there is also a certain historical past of the left referred to loosely under the name 'Stalinism', and which forms a massive blot on this commitment and these values, on the great tradition we belong to.... The same kinds of error - excuses and evasions and out-and-out apologia for political structures, practices or movements no socialist should have a word to say for - are still with us. They afflict many even without any trace of a Stalinist past or a Stalinist political formation.

There are probably no policies I would agree with Mr. Geras about, but I find his perspective and criticism refreshing. It's always nice to see someone who champions human rights and democratic values, even if (to put it mildly) I'd disagree about the best way to develop and preserve them.

(Link via blogjunky via InstaPundit)