brainrow

How do you persuade someone to wear a seat belt? Here’s an ad from England:

I think I’ve entered my second childhood, or maybe I just never got out of my first.

I’ve been thinking about things I’ve known about for a long time, and letting myself be astonished all over again. Things that would make a sophisticate roll his eyes and say, “Well, duh!”

Things like this:

Ludwig van Beethoven started losing his hearing early in his career as a composer. His deafness grew progressively worse over time. Yet Beethoven wrote some of his greatest works — some of the greatest music ever written by anyone — when he was already profoundly deaf.

Or this:

During the entire time he served as President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt was totally paralyzed from the waist down. From a wheelchair, he led the country out of the Great Depression and through World War II. He died less than a month before the surrender of Germany, and about four months before the surrender of Japan.

Human beings are pretty remarkable people. There’s always more to them than meets the eye. Sometimes, a lot more.

Spanish bagpipes.

Stolen in its entirety from Daily Kos:

Let me see if I have this straight: in the last few days members of the GOP have savagely screwed the unemployed, protected the bankstas, trashed Thurgood Marshall, implied rape and incest is part of God’s plan, defended BP, threatened to either end social security or screw over 20 million plus people who have paid into the system for at least 20 years by making them wait until age 70 to see their benefits, and screwed homeless veterans with children. That about it, or is there more?

There’s always more.

And yet the cable TV talking heads think Democrats are going to have an uphill fight against the GOP in November.

This is new (to me, anyway): Cartoonist Barry Deutsch shows us the 24 Types of Libertarian. Maybe you recognize some of them? (Click the image to see the full cartoon.)

Via A Blog Around the Clock:

Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now. —Denis Waitley

So, I guess you’re saying my strategy of regretting the past, dreading the future, and being paralyzed in the present isn’t the best option? If only you had told me this in the past!

Cartoonist Clay Bennett says libertarians make bad lifeguards. Click the image to see the full cartoon.

In other cartoons, he examines the Republican sympathy for Bluto and asks, “Do you still want a government that’s run like a business?“

If you don’t have much time to read for pleasure, you should check out Six Word Stories. (Warning: some strong language.)

It all began when someone bet Ernest Hemingway he couldn’t tell a complete story in just six words. Hemingway won the bet, with this:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Lots of astonishing stories at the site.

The web comic Medium Large suggests you should be careful when it comes to voting your religion.

Click the image to see the whole cartoon.

I think this goes on all the time inside the book trade, but it’s odd when Amazon offers consumers a book called Untitled on Obama Administration.

Bob Woodward, one of the reporters who dug out the story of Watergate, is a perennial author of bestselling insider-y tales from the White House. Clearly, he’s got a contract to deliver one of those books in September, about the Obama Administration.

We don’t know what’s going to be in the book, but Woodward’s always good for a couple juicy headlines. We don’t know who he’s talked to or what he’s going to say, but Amazon knows there are plenty of folks waiting to get in line to wait for Woodward’s take on the new guy.

Come September, the words on everyone’s lips will be, “Have you read Untitled on Obama Administration?”

I’m thinking blockbuster. I’m thinking Pulitzer Prize.

I’m thinking “Six Crises, and Counting”.

The new job numbers are out. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says:

No amount of spin will resolve the fact that the President’s policies have been a colossal failure when it comes to creating jobs.

Here, from Steve Benen, is the latest graph, with Bush in Red and Obama in blue:

Listen to Michael Steele, people! The Republicans know all about colossal failure.

I do love this Jimi Hendrix song…

I think that guy has taken lessons.

Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly has been creating a monthly chart of job statistics. The red bars are from the final year of the Bush Administration; the blue bars are from the Obama Administration.

It seems something changed at just about the same time Obama took office — what a coincidence, huh?

Every bar below the “0″ line represents jobs lost, so this certainly doesn’t mean the whole mess has been cleaned up. But it does seem to indicate that elections have consequences.

(On the Rachel Maddow Show, they call this the Bikini Graph, because someone there thinks it resembles the bottom half of a bikini swimsuit.)

Revealed at last, the secret origin of our modern political discourse:

Okay, Kurrgo, your ray worked. You can check the results yourself by monitoring Fox News or C-SPAN. Now, please turn it off!

Cartoonist Don Asmussen explores issues with the new “papers, please” law in Arizona. (Click the image to see the full cartoon.)

Next step: change the state’s name to Aryzona.