A Babbling Stream of Semi-Consciousness
{ Monthly Archives }
This enormous sculpture of a Native American listening to an iPod is proof positive that Mars was once home to an advanced culture. Only a superior technological society could have formed such a vast — huh? — it’s not on Mars? It’s a rock formation in Alberta, Canada, not far from Medicine Hat?
Wow. That Martian civilization was more advanced that I thought. Just imagine — flying all the way from Mars to Canada to carve that mountain sculpture.
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day today has a ghostly look fitting for Halloween.
Pretty scary, huh, kids?
It says, right there in the Bible: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” but this is a new take on turning a blind eye:
How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television.
Michael Palmer, the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when “Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories.”
“Until then,” he added. “No more.”
Listen — this is a free country. Mr. Palmer has an inalienable right to his willful ignorance. If his eye offends his devotion to the Bush-Cheney agenda, he can gouge that sucker right out.
But that doesn’t mean we have to put the willfully ignorant into jobs where they can keep the rest of us in the dark until it’s too late.
This man needs to find a new line of work.
I have to admit it — I just don’t understand genetics. You inherit your genes from your parents — okay. But some traits seem to skip a generation or something.
I’m just now starting Bob Woodward’s latest book, State of Denial. Listen how smart Old Man Bush was in a February 1999 speech to about 200 Gulf War veterans:
Had we gone into Baghdad — We could have done it. You guys could have done it. You could have been there in 48 hours. And then what? Which sergeant, which private, whose life would be at stake in perhaps a fruitless hunt in an urban guerilla war to find the most-secure dictator in the world? Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we’re going to show our macho? We’re going into Baghdad. We’re going to be an occupying power — America in an Arab land — with no allies by our side. It would have been disastrous.
The old guy is almost psychic, huh? This is more than four years before his son’s Iraq War, which has played out just like the Old Man said.
His son, El Presidenté Bush, told Woodward years ago that he didn’t ask the Old Man for advice. “There is a higher father that I appeal to.” (Cheney, I’ll bet.)
So, anyway, if basic good sense is one of those traits that sometimes skips a generation, don’t you think we could find some way to keep the guy it skips over out of the Oval Office?
From Atrios:
Not so long after 9/11 I was in an airport, and a group of 3-4 young, probably college-aged, guys were walking by. One of them saw George Bush on the teevee and loudly and enthusiastically shouted “He’s The Man!” His companions looked at him slightly quizzically, and he backpedaled a bit, amending his proclamation by saying, “Well, he’d better be…”
None of us who lived through September 11, 2001, are ever likely to forget how that day felt. What might be harder to remember is the days, and weeks, and months that followed — how it hung over us, and clung to us, and sunk into us.
Everything looked different. Whenever a plane passed overhead, we would look up and remember. Whenever a firetruck passed by, or a siren sounded, we would look up and remember. It was hard to sleep. We newly understood something about impermanence and mortality.
It seemed we might never laugh again. On Comedy Central, The Daily Show featured serious interviews with serious people. Jon Stewart said, “We don’t know how to be funny right now.” Hollywood edited the twin towers out of shots of the New York skyline — the briefest glimpse might stir up emotions that would overwhelm any movie it was in.
On September 12, the headline on Le Monde in Paris said “We are all Americans.” On September 13, at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London, the band played “The Star Spangled Banner.” I saw it on television. It took a few seconds for it to sink in. We Americans had friends everywhere.
Passing strangers on the street, we would exchange a knowing glance, understanding that we shared something now — knowing that we were all in this together.
And, unbelievably, George W. Bush and Karl Rove saw this changed world, and what they thought was this: “What’s in this for me?”
Years go by, and the controversial issues change, but it’s always something.
Via Boing Boing, here’s a site that collects short films from drive-in theatres.
What makes this clip particularly interesting today is the exhortation, two minutes in, to oppose Daylight Savings Time.
Wired has a collection of Very Short Stories (Warning: some strong language):
We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.
Dozens of our favorite auteurs put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his (“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”), but the rest are concise masterpieces.
Concise, anyway.
Does this remind you of anybody?
David Letterman has a list of the Top Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Voting for Schwarzenegger. My favorite:
Is “Come on, it’ll be funny” a good reason to vote for someone?
Why don’t the real pundits ask questions this incisive?
I was just wondering, what kind of ads are they running against Mean Jean Schmidt this year?
What a creepy feeling to know that George W. Bush is reading my blog. From yesterday’s press conference:
And they just — as I said, they’re dancing in the end zone. They just haven’t scored the touchdown, Mark, you know, there’s a lot of time left. And these candidates are working hard out there. And my message to them is, keep talking about the security of the United States and keeping taxes low, and you’ll come back here.
Here’s what I wrote on Tuesday night:
I visit a lot of anti-Bush blogs these days, and I get that same queasy sensation as I see some bloggers practicing their end-zone victory dance weeks before election day. National polls show Democrats with a big generic edge, but I’ve also see a lot of analysts doing race-by-race totals and concluding that Republicans may very well hold onto both houses of Congress. Bush may get another two years with no checks, no balances, and no Congressional oversight.
Because I’m the only person in the country who uses football metaphors when discussing political topics, I’m thinking of sending Bush a bill for my ghost-writing assistance.
Oh, crap. Now ABC News wants to be “fare unbalanced,” too:
In a report on how recent campaigns advertisements are “getting ugly,” ABC News, unable to point to a single instance of “nasty” attacks from Democratic candidates or their supporters, suggested it is only a matter of time before “the left” begins to “unleash its garbage as well.” ABC News offered no evidence to back up its allegation that Democrats might soon resort to distasteful, negative advertising.
Facts are passé; we’re in a post-reality world now.
CNET has collected images of the worst political web sites.
They all seem to be candidate sites. Maybe that’s why this site didn’t make the cut.
For God Spoke, the filmmakers followed Al Franken for 18 months — starting with the launch of his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, through Fox’s ill-fated lawsuit to prevent the publication of the book, through the launch of Air America Radio, through the 2004 campaign season. They caught him wrestling seriously with the decision of whether to run for Senate in 2008, a decision he still hasn’t finalized, and wrestling hilariously with a backpack that somehow got tangled up with a wheel of an office chair.
The film that was shown last night wasn’t the original version, we were told during a question and answer session. They had filmed a 2004 debate between Franken and Ann Coulter at the Connecticut Forum, but Coulter demanded they remove footage of the debate from the film. Part of what was cut was this exchange:
When [the moderator] asked [Coulter] to name which historical figure she would most like to be, she replied: “(Sen.) Joe McCarthy.” She called him “a great American patriot” who removed “communist spies from the government.” Her second choice, she said, was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “so I could not introduce the New Deal.”
“Then I would be Hitler,” Franken said. “You’d call off the New Deal; I’d call off the Holocaust and World War II. But I’d keep the Volkswagen.”
I can’t imagine why Coulter wouldn’t want that in the film.