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I just watched the Academy Awards show, all the way through, because Jon Stewart was hosting. Big mistake. Every time I’ve watched the Oscars, I’ve sworn I’ll never watch again. This time I double-dog swear. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

The only good moment in three and a half hours came early, when George Clooney won for best supporting actor:

And finally, I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it’s probably a good thing. We’re the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I’m proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch.

For a moment there, I got my hopes up. Words of wisdom: never get your hopes up while watching the Oscars. (Quote courtesy of Crooks and Liars.)

A perennial:

Did you hear about the fire at the White House? Firefighters were able to confine it, but Bush’s personal library was completely destroyed. Both books. Including one he hadn’t finished coloring yet.

Last week on PBS, I saw an ’80s video clip of Gore Vidal telling the same story about Ronald Reagan. It was an old joke even then. I first heard it on a 1971 comedy album by an odd comedian named Stanley Myron Handelman, with Spiro T. Agnew the butt of the joke.

The following joke arrived in email. I see that it’s already been posted around the web in various forms, with various people the butt of the joke. I suspect it’s another perennial.

President Bush recently went to a primary school in Macon, Georgia, to talk about the world.

After his talk, he asked if the children had any questions. One little boy put up his hand, and the President asked him his name.

“Kenneth.”

“And what is your question, Kenneth?”

“I have three questions:

1. Whatever happened to the weapons of mass destruction?
2. Why did you give a tax break to the super wealthy?
3. Did you steal votes to win both elections?”

Just then the bell rang for recess. President Bush informed the kiddies that they would continue after recess.

When they resumed, the President said, “OK, now where were we? Oh, that’s right, question time. Who has a question?”

A different little boy put his hand up. Bush pointed him out and asked him his name.

“Larry.”

“And what is your question, Larry?”

“I have five questions:

1. Whatever happened to the weapons of mass destruction?
2. Why did you give a tax break to the super wealthy?
3. Did you steal votes to win both elections?
4. Why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early?
5. What happened to Kenneth?”

No more Danish pastries in Iran:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Mohammed.”

Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners’ union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.

Isn’t that silly? The Iranians are throwing any concept of common sense out the window, and letting the overheated emotions of the moment lead them to make fools of themselves. What’s with those people, anyway? Where do they get these ridiculous ideas?

They’re all governed by emotion over there, you know. Not like us Americans. We’re rational. Our actions are guided by facts and logic. You know, if Denmark did something to offend us, we’d deal with our differences like grown-ups, and go right on eating those delicious Danish pastries. If the Belgians offended us, we’d arrange a breakfast meeting and work things out quickly and sensibly, perhaps over some Belgian waffles. If the French offended us, uh…

You know, uh… maybe this is a positive sign. Yeah. The Iranians are following the American example. That’s right — democracy is taking root! Yeah!

Sigh…

If, like me, you are a bitter pathetic loser who dreads Valentine’s Day, then this cartoon from Joy of Tech is for you.

If you’re not a bitter pathetic loser, then, umm… Happy Valentine’s Day, I guess.

After every big sports event, it seems, reporters make their way into the winning team’s locker room, where we hear player after player give all credit for the victory to Jesus.

I hope that someday an enterprising cub reporter will go to the losing team’s locker room, so we can hear the players complain that Satan has let them down.

Given Jesus’ sports record in recent decades, I’m surprised that any athlete trusts Satan these days. The Jesus team always wins the big games, and yet there is always a losing team, too. Don’t those players know that the Devil’s a liar?

Actually, maybe that’s how Satan lures them in.

Have you ever thought about finding out which team Satan’s backing in a big game, and laying down a lot of money on the other team? It seems like a sure bet, doesn’t it? But I resist that temptation when I consider that perhaps Satan’s been throwing all these games just to run up the odds, and that someday he’ll win a game and cash in big time. Perhaps that’s the story he tells his hapless players.

Never trust Satan, folks. He cheats.

I’m not much of a football fan, and I quickly tire of relentless hype, so I didn’t watch the Superbowl yesterday. I see today that the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks 21-10, ABC bleeped the Rolling Stones twice during the halftime show, and people are talking about the ten thousand or so commercials that aired during the game.

Well, maybe it wasn’t ten thousand commercials, but it sure was a lot. Superbowl commercials generate so much buzz that this site was created with links to all the commercials. (I had some trouble getting the page to load, but I’m on a Macintosh, running an unconventional brower, OmniWeb. Hope it works first time for you.)

I haven’t seen all the commercials yet. I don’t think I’m ever going to watch all of them — I’m a middle-aged man, and life is short. I did see this one. It isn’t what I expected from a Superbowl commercial. To that, I say “Bravo!”

(I confess: I’m just an old softy at heart.)

Via Crooks and Liars, here’s comedian Frank Caliendo on George W. Bush. It’s not deep, just funny.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.

— Frederick Douglass

I wonder, sometimes, whether we’re doing the right thing in the way we honor civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.

There’s scarcely a politician in the country today who has anything but warm words of praise for King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Which is strange. During King’s lifetime, there were armies of politicians resisting the civil rights movement every single step of the way.

Rosa Parks came to public attention by being arrested. She was hauled to jail; mug shots and fingerprints were taken. Martin Luther King was arrested many times. He was vilified in language that makes my face feel hot even today.

His non-violent movement was met with dogs and clubs, tear gas, firehoses, guns and bombs. But today, politicians of almost every political stripe stepped up to podiums across the nation with smiles and glowing words about the civil rights movement.

Have we really changed so much since the 1960s? I doubt it.

Tomorrow, many of those smiling politicians will go back to work tying the law in knots to find ways to disenfranchise black voters. It won’t be on account of race — oh, no — they’ll have to find some dodge to explain it. They will approve tax breaks carefully calibrated to benefit millionaires, and then plead poverty to make cuts in programs for poor people.

I wonder whether we’ve made a mistake making Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks icons of the civil rights movement. I don’t think they ever intended to be put on pedestals and serenely admired as heroes of a glorious past. I don’t think they ever intended their struggle for social justice to be turned into an historical relic.

Some of the old injustices are gone, thank goodness, but there’s plenty of injustice left. To honor the memory of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, we need to carry on the work. We need to press the fight against injustice wherever we find it.

How can we tell whether we’re doing it right? There will be an army of politicians resisting every single step of the way.

It might be hard to believe, but blogger Hetty Litjens seems to have a considerably harsher opinion of the Bush Administration than I do. I’ve often seen a headline from Hetty’s blog and thought, “Woo hoo! Tell it!” Then I read the blog entry itself and think, “Uh, I’m not really sure I want to link to that.”

This entry, too, comes on pretty strong. But I think it makes a point about the very nature of civilization. I have taken the liberty of reformatting the excerpts below:

When Christianity took over from the belligerent and greedy Roman empire, it did so on the basis of new ideals and tenets. These were essentially Pax et Justitia, Peace and Justice, as exposed by St. Augustine. Peace can only be based on justice. These ideals met with general acceptance and resulted in the success of the Christian church. When things went wrong in the Church it was because it became entangled in power and wealth.

“Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”

“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?”

— De Civitate Dei (The City of God), Book IV, Chapter IV.

…

St. Augustine changed the course of history by giving a new alternative to the reign of war, his new tenets were Peace and Justice. These were the guiding principles of our Christian civilization for hundreds of years. George W. Bush is wiping out not only the American Constitution, but also the attainments of thousands of years of civilization.

Hugh Thompson Jr. died today. We are all poorer for the loss.

In 1998, he received the Soldier’s Medal, the army’s highest award for heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.

But in 1968, he was shunned. His patriotism was questioned. He received death threats. Thompson, a military helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, had protected unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai from a massacre by American soldiers.

Tempers ran high in those days, just like today. Plenty of American hot-heads called Lt. William Calley, who led the massacre, an American hero, and vilified Thompson and the other men who stopped it. Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison, but Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.

From BBC News:

Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.

He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.

“There was no way I could turn my back on them,” he later said of the victims.

Mr Thompson, a warrant officer at the time, called in support from other US helicopters, and together they airlifted at least nine Vietnamese civilians — including a wounded boy — to safety.

He returned to headquarters, angrily telling his commanders what he had seen. They ordered soldiers in the area to stop shooting.

But Mr Thompson was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.

…

Mr Thompson died of cancer. He had been ill for some time and was removed from life support earlier in the week.

Even Fox News, whose commentators are quick to question the patriotism of anyone who stands up against the Bush Administration, today called Hugh Thompson Jr. a hero.

The wheel of history turns. Time sifts right and wrong.

Hugh Thompson Jr. was a hero. I hope there will always be Americans like him.

From The Once and Future King:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

As a farewell to 2005, the Washington Post brings us the year in review, as seen by Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird:

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick told a middle-school class that the U.S. Congress is different from the Texas legislature because in Washington, there are “454” members on the House side and “60” in the Senate.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was on The Charlie Rose Show not long ago, talking about Team of Rivals, her book about Abraham Lincoln.

She repeated a story from her book. Only a little more than forty years after Lincoln’s death, Leo Tolstoy found that Lincoln’s fame had spread to one of the remotest places on earth.

From the book:

In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucusus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth … his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”

Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not such a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.

“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow looks back at 2005: part 1 and part 2. He also has a parable of recent American history.

From an email message: Connecticut apologizes.

With thanks to Colorado Jyms, here’s Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, explaining global warming.

From a leftover political ad, here’s Will Ferrell again, as George W. Bush down on the farm.

I’ve linked to this before, but it’s funny enough to watch again: the George W. Bush biopic, Dubya, the Movie.

Finally, a consummation devoutly to be wished:

There are lots more Bush pictures here. Most are pretty disrespectful, which is the only way I’d have it.

I’d like to wish everyone a very happy Winter Solstice.

Every day since the first day of summer, half a year ago, the Sun has risen and set a little bit farther south, and the noonday Sun has been a little bit lower in the sky. The days have grown shorter and the nights longer — at least here in the northern hemisphere. Today, that changes. The Sun stops its southward movement. Tomorrow, and each day for half a year, the Sun will rise a little higher, the days will grow a little longer, and the nights shorter.

Imagine how happy the sky watchers of ancient times must have felt when they realized that the Sun was returning — that the cold and dark of winter would not last forever. What a celebration there must have been then!

Those ancient people almost certainly believed the earth was flat. How do you suppose they explained the movements of the Sun that governed the seasons? We know that some cultures worshipped the Sun, and made sacrifices to it. Greek mythology says the Sun was the chariot of the god Apollo, but it seems unlikely that many Greeks actually believed that. There were countless other ancient cultures about whom we know little or nothing. I would be fascinated to know how they balanced reason and fancy in their explanations of what they saw.

Ancient people weren’t stupid. They just didn’t know some things that we know now about the reason for the seasons: that the earth is round, and orbits the Sun once a year; that it rotates on its axis, which is tilted about 23.5° relative to the plane of that orbit, so that the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun for half the year, and away from the sun for the other half.

How much effort did ancient cultures put into observing and describing the phenomenon, and how much into weaving intricate flights of fancy attempting to explain it? How many years did it take for those flights of fancy to become dogma? Did they persecute those who doubted? How much has human society lost when mystic certainty has trumped logic and doubt? How often, and at what cost, does dogma triumph over truth today?

Oh, well. You don’t have to be a pagan or a Zoroastrian to appreciate the Solstice. The Sun is returning to the north. There will be brighter days ahead.