Friedman Noir
Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone had a Tom Friedman remix contest:
Him:
And now for the winners. The first grenade goes to “Shlok,” whose noir take on Friedman was really stirring — would make a great movie, like an upside-down, on-acid version of Out of the Past:
Me:
The same nightmare. 24/7/365. Always her, hopeless and beautiful. Giant sounds and lights mark a fight within the faith. Fire rages across her face. Acid eats her away. I fall on a grenade, then pull the pin. She tears, triggers, explodes. The midwife pounds chainsaw-nails-into-Saddam’s-head and suddenly she’s back. She’s chaos, she’s venom unleashed. Too little trust, I know, but I am alone, standing between her and chaos. What to do?
-Shlok
Sign up for my newsletter.
Nov 20, 2012
Nicely done, man!
Nov 20, 2012
Thanks! Nice to see you around.
Nov 22, 2012
Funny! A similar effect can be achieved with second order Markov chain text generation based on a bunch of his columns pasted in to:
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cz1/prog/markov/markov.html
Using the full Friedman corpus of columns would allow 3rd order text chaining and bring it closer to authentic Friedman-esque cognitive dissonance.
That cross-country duet is just one of many, many signs I’m seeing of bottom-up innovation happening in cities from Minneapolis to Chattanooga, where, Mayor Ron Littlefield says, city elders looked themselves in the form of a radical, rightist policy without paying the price.” No more. Netanyahu can still get a grand bargain done, we can just get this grand bargain in Washington that also includes a stimulus of just new taxes and spending cuts. His guiding principle should be “growth.” Right now, the whole budget discussion reeks too much of castor oil — and they are grim — is by studying Iraq, which, like Syria, is made up largely of Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Druze and Christians — are linked