bANALity

Hand in glove / The sun shines out of our behinds

There's a Catalan expression which says the same thing as "hand in glove" or "thick as thieves", only in a far more colourful way. You can describe two people as being cul i merda or "ass and shit". (If you want to clean this up, you say they are carn i ungla or "flesh and fingernail".)

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asshole In an active sense, an overbearing, arrogant, and inconsiderate person. In a passive sense, a shmuck or loser, e.g. "that poor asshole". But even in this case, there's more of a sense that the person has done something to deserve being shat upon than there is with those terms.

dick Only used in an active sense for someone who acts inconsiderately and uncharitably.

Thoughts?

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I once knew a soft-spoken public-school type from the Midlands who never cursed. It didn't upset him, he just seemed unable to do it. I remember him once prompting me to repeat one of my most vulgar outbursts by saying, "You know the one, 'You're a [pause] and a [pause] so go...'" "You mean 'You're a dick and an asshole so go FUCK yourself!'?" At the time, I got a kick at playing the casually vulgar American to his repressed Englishman. It was similar to the charge I got when reading an American-British dictionary and finding this definition for motherfucker: "An expletive so vulgar that it has no British equivalent." I was all like "YEAHHH! WE KICK YOUR LIMEY ASS!"

The cure for what ails your Bush

Back some months ago (please don't make me dig up the entry), I said I would consider voting for Kerry if he (or his advisors) made more of the right noises on foreign policy. A debate elsewhere led me to this article from Sandy Berger on what a Democratic foreign policy would look like. Since he's Kerry's chief advisor on the subject, it's not unreasonable to view this as a blueprint for his administration. In that light, what do y'all think of it?

( Some disordered thoughts of my own. )