Because Why Should Your World Make Sense, Here’s Video Of Aretha Dueting With Condoleezza Rice On “I Say A Little Prayer”

“Aretha Franklin and Condoleezza Rice teamed up on Tuesday night at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia for a concert to benefit inner-city youth programs and education initiatives.” Which, sure, seems like an unusual pairing now, but will be totally forgotten after current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton teams up with Angus Young to perform a very special version of “Whole Lotta Rosie” at daughter Chelsea’s wedding this weekend.

Do you need an employee? Do you need a job? Well come on in and let’s make the magic happen! Here’s what we learned from last week’s first job board experiment.

• There are jobs in this crazy job-scarce world!
• Most readers of our site aren’t commenters. It’s helpful to leave an email address with your posting if you want a response.
• Information that might seem obvious to you, since you already know you, isn’t always obvious to us. What city do you live in, or want to live in, for one thing?
• Links to your work are helpful, if you can provide them.
• Above all, be specific. You might be willing to “do anything” but ain’t nobody hiring someone to do anything. (That’s for our forthcoming, uh, “Impromptu Rendezvous” message boards.)
• And finally, not to sound like your dad but: represent yourself the way you think you should be represented. To put it another way: Comment For The Job You Want, Not The Job You Have.

Okay! Let the social experiments begin!

“This is not a mashup album, this is an album about Wayne.” That’s the tagline accompanying a new mixtape circulating around Tumblr that mashes-up the lyrical stylings of Lil’ Wayne with the soundtrack from (500) Days Of Summer. The biggest shocker of all though is probably that it’s kind of awesome? I mean, for goofy looking white people, Lil Wayne was already pretty great, but now here he is rapping over a Zooey Deschanel sample and The Smiths (at the same time!). Go download this and then think for a long time about your life and wonder if it should be legal to rap over Hall And Oates. [Download]

I am rarely accused of excessive optimism, so when such an occasion transpires I like to step back and take a look at the situation to make sure that I am not, in fact, being unduly positive. The current insinuation of credulousness on my part concerns this op-ed from the Wall Street Journal , which posits that President Obama is dividing the country on racial lines and has been ever since he suggested that the arrest of a black man for trying to enter his own home might not have been a good idea, and this interview with Jeffrey Lord, who has complained that Shirley Sherrod and Democrats in general are devaluing the word “lynching” by not using it exclusively to refer to black people executed with a rope.

Here’s where the charge that I’m wearing rose-colored glasses comes in: A friend, rightly horrified by both of these pieces, remarked that she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My response was that the offense was even worse than it seemed, because the proponents of these pieces were not themselves racists, they were merely race-baiters, which I think is a necessary distinction to make. My friend said that I was being naive, but am I? Could Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen really be so appallingly ignorant as to believe that Barack Obama, who has spent most of his time in office hoping that people forget he’s black, is cynically playing the race card? Of course not. Even the densest of our privileged white punditocracy aren’t as shit-all stupid as to believe that. Caddell and Schoen are marketing themselves, and they understand that nothing sells better to a certain segment of the population as former members of the Democratic establishment who have somehow “seen the light,” which is apparently emanating from a lantern held up by a tricky black guy who wants to bash white people over the head with it. They’re not racists, they’re race hucksters, peddling ignorance and fear to people who are scared and uncertain and don’t have a lot of time to look at the full details of the forces arrayed against them. They’re like Andrew Breitbart, really: They don’t actually dislike black people, they’re just scumbags who are willing to gin up hatred against black people so that they can advance their own careers and causes. It’s one of the oldest rackets in America.

Jeffrey Lord, on the other hand… well, my friend is probably right. Because there are people who can be that doltish. They’re called racists.

Mostly men pick the best magazine pieces “ever” that are mostly written and published by men. (via ladies)

I spent last weekend visiting friends in Marion, Massachusetts, a picturesque little town cut out of the mossy pine forests on the shores of Buzzards Bay, from which Cape Cod stretches out. It rained a lot, but Sunday evening was clear and breezy enough to blow the mosquitoes away, so we walked out to the water to watch the sun set. After a couple minutes of looking west, though, we turned our heads to the north and gasped and said “Whoa!” just like a certain resident of Yosemite, California I’m sure you’re well familiar with by now. Because there was a rainbow in the sky. And not just a single rainbow, yes, it was a double one.

I took that picture as proof.

It increased in brightness as we watched, and eventually stretched full-on across the horizon. The upper band was not as vivid, just like in the famous YouTube video. But still, I felt lucky for sure. My kid had never seen even a single rainbow before, and here we were, able to show him this extra special specimen. Also, I was able to tell the friends we were visiting about this month’s big internet meme (they were previously unaware, living, as they do, in Marion) and the widespread search for meaning that it has engendered. I had done some work in the field of rainbows earlier this year-rainbow bridges to be specific-and when I first saw the video, I did some additional research into symbology and discovered, at the website for the Osho Energy Transformation Institute, that

“The double rainbow is the symbol of transformation.
In the first rainbow we see red is at the top and
violet at the bottom.
This represents the material world.
We are a rainbow, but the red belongs at the feet and
the first chakra area and the violet at the head.
So when we see the red at the top and the violet at
the bottom, it is as if we are seeing a person upside
down or descending from heaven diving down to the
earth. In the upper second rainbow,
and remember it is not such a common sight,
the colours are the right way up,
this symbolizes the journey back to heaven,
the ascent of the kundalini,
the journey of transformation, the spiritual world.”

“Transformation.” So, seeing a double rainbow means you’re entering a process of transformation? That’s kind of vague, isn’t it? When are we not entering a process of transformation? I checked with the science geeks over at Discovery, who were much more specific. Too specific, actually.

They explained that when the sun is at a low angle to the horizon it sends light through raindrops in the distance, which act as little prisms, refracting the light into its component colors, blah blah blah and

“As soon as the sunlight is reflected out on the first reflection, it escapes at an angle of 40 to 42 degrees. But the sunlight hasn’t finished there. There’s another reflection. And this reflection sends the sunlight out at an angle of around 50 to 53 degrees. So you can see these two very distinct rainbows. You have the primary rainbow, very, very bright. That’s the first reflection, and you have a secondary rainbow which is ten degrees farther out, and a larger rainbow, coming out at about 50 to 53 degrees.”

Clearly, this isn’t really a question science is equipped to answer.

Having had such recent personal experience with the power of double-rainbow rays, I meditated on the notion myself. Double rainbows everywhere! It certainly seems like a sign. There must be a message. But what could it be? What does it mean when you see a double rainbow? Here are some ideas:

1) You are a telepathic biopsychic electromagnetic battery. You are building a bridge over which the star people, our ancestors, will come across from another dimension. That’s kind of the most obvious meaning.

2) Reminder: Walk more lightly on the earth.

3) You’re either drunk, or need a new prescription for your glasses. And there’s really only one rainbow.

4) Thor will be even better than Iron Man and Iron Man 2. And The Avengers will be even better than that! (This very unlikely, I think. Unless they recast the new movies so that Robert Downey Jr. plays Thor and also all the other Avengers.)

5) It means you’re gay. Like, double-strength gay.

6) It means you’re not gay. Because the two rainbows cancel each other out.

7) Ronnie James Dio is riding into heaven on a unicorn.

8) Go ahead and have that second scoop. And get extra sprinkles. You deserve it.

9) You’re looking at Mork’s chest.

10) You’re looking at a double rainbow.

I’m old enough to remember a time when a naked man could be beaten senseless for no reason without some passerby shooting footage of the whole thing. It’s a very different America now, let me tell you.

It came to me in a dream-no wait, it came to me in an email from a reader last night. Yesterday, Jeb Bush said, “I am not running for president.” Yes, I was crushed. But no longer! Why, you ask? Well, right now, I am not pickling beets. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t be pickling beets later tonight, or tomorrow, or next week! Verbs! They are so useful. We hereby announce JEB BUSH PRESIDENTIAL RACE WATCH NOT AT ALL OVER, due to the deceitful power of language and its uses!

This may be the most embarrassing thing I have ever written — and looking back on my writing, there is a lot of competition for that dubious distinction — but when I became a reporter, it was almost a holy calling.

We really believed we were doing good. We informed the public and helped make democracy work. We exposed wrongdoing wherever we found it. We reported without fear or favor. As a columnist, I tried to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

I warned you that this would be embarrassing.

We loved what we did, and we did it with passion. We were proud. We felt — I am just going to go ahead and say it — honorable.

And now Roger Simon writes for Politico.

“Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values.”
-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemns Paul the World Cup-predicting octopus for spreading “western propaganda and superstition.”