brainrow

Thrilling Wonder has an ugly face contest and, no, I’m not entering. It’s true I’m ugly, but not at a competitive level.

And please stop telling me I’m selling myself short on this.

Thirty-seven years is a long time.

It’s about half the average human lifespan.

By the time a typical American male turns 37, he may already be shopping for some impractical extravagance — like an expensive sports car — to tide him over the dreaded “mid-life crisis” that all the experts tell him to expect. He’s already older than half of his fellow Americans, and substantially more than half of the world’s population.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Ohio National Guardsmen were ordered to break up a student anti-war rally on the Kent State University campus in Kent, Ohio. They put on gas masks, fired tear gas, and advanced with fixed bayonets to clear the Commons where the protesters were gathered.

When they had cleared the Commons and were returning to their original positions, one group of Guardsmen suddenly stopped, turned, and fired into the crowd of students.

Thirteen seconds. Sixty-seven shots. Thirteen hit, all students. Four dead in Ohio.

One of those wounded, Alan Canfora, has listened to an audio recording of the shooting. Right before the first shots, he believes he hears “Right here. Get set. Point. Fire.” (You can listen to a short audio clip. The orders, if present, are faint.)

“There has been a 37-year cover-up at Kent State. The commanding officers have long denied there was a verbal command to fire. They put the blame on the triggermen,” Mr Canfora told the Guardian.

He said he wants the FBI to use new technology to analyse the recording. He also said he planned to post an audio clip of the recording on two websites.

Mr Canfora, who was 21 years old at the time of the shootings, was barely 60 metres away from the Guards when they opened fire. He was shot in the wrist.

“They stopped, turned, raised the weapons, began to shoot and continued to shoot for 13 seconds,” he said. “It was like a firing squad.”

The young National Guardsmen moved on. Got married. Got jobs. Had careers. By now, some may have retired. They have friends and families who love them. Children and grandchildren.

A lot of water under the bridge in 37 years.

Allison Krause would be 56 years old now. She would have celebrated her birthday on April 23, just a week ago this past Monday.

Jeffrey Glen Miller would be 57.

Sandra Scheuer would be 57.

William Schroeder would be 56.

No careers. No children. No grandchildren.

Yep, a lot of water under the bridge.

Okay, I think I know what’s happening here.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks, we drove out the Taliban and the dreaded religious police, who executed teachers, banned music and jailed men for trimming their beards.

Apparently some of the religious police settled in Millersville, Pennsylvania.

A woman denied a teaching degree on the eve of graduation because of a MySpace photo has sued the university.

Millersville University instead granted Stacy Snyder a degree in English last year after learning of her Web-published picture, which bore the caption “Drunken Pirate.”

“I dreamed about being a teacher for a long time,” said Snyder, 27, who now works as a nanny.

The photo, taken at a 2005 Halloween party, shows Snyder wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic “Mr. Goodbar” cup. It was posted on her own MySpace site.

Although Snyder apologized, she learned the day before graduation that she would not be awarded an education degree or teaching certificate.

They hate us for our freedom.

This old song keeps running through my head. The tune is catchy, but I don’t think I’ve heard it since it made the Top 40 back in 1968.

It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.

Oh, it’s a very strange world. Listen:

British Airways has airbrushed a scene of arch-rival Sir Richard Branson out of its in-flight James Bond movie “Casino Royale”, sources close to the company said on Monday.

The Virgin Atlantic chief is briefly featured in the original 007 film at an airport security scanner, but can only be seen from the back in the edited version.

Shots of the tail fin of a Virgin plane have also been obscured.

“Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten,” apparently.

Via Ed Brayton, they have different concerns in Utah, where a Republican delegate wants his party to pin the blame for illegal immigration squarely on Satan.

Don Larsen, a district chairman, has submitted a resolution equating illegal immigration to “Satan’s plan to destroy the U.S. by stealth invasion” for debate at Saturday’s Utah County Republican Party Convention.

Referring to a plan by the devil for a “New World Order … as predicted in the Scriptures,” the resolution calls for the Utah County Republican Party to support “closing the national borders to illegal immigration to prevent the destruction of the U.S. by stealth invasion.”

“Everything I need to know I learned in Sunday School?”

Meanwhile, a school teacher in Indiana fights to keep her job. Why?

The column in the student newspaper seemed innocent enough: advocating tolerance for people “different than you.”

But since sophomore Megan Chase’s words appeared January 19 in The Tomahawk, the newspaper at Woodlan Junior-Senior High School, her newspaper adviser has been suspended and is fighting for her job, and charges of censorship and First Amendment violations are clouding this conservative northeastern Indiana community. …

[Newspaper advisor Amy] Sorrell has been placed on administrative leave and the school district has recommended she be fired. A public hearing is scheduled April 28, and the school board expects to vote May 1.

Kindergarteners aren’t cute at that age.

You want fresh thinking? Look to the U.S. armed forces:

The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks — including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer — according to Pentagon officials.

Foreign citizens serving in the US military is a highly charged issue, which could expose the Pentagon to criticism that it is essentially using mercenaries to defend the country. Other analysts voice concern that a large contingent of noncitizens under arms could jeopardize national security or reflect badly on Americans’ willingness to serve in uniform.

Remember those old movies about the French Foreign Legion? Our fresh thinking is French thinking. But our fries — those are freedom fries.

It’s a very strange world, and I thank you.

Remember, people: this country was attacked. Thousands died. This is an emergency. There’s no way the Bush Administration can do what it wants to do if citizens are thinking. Via The Lantern:

Isn’t that a load off your mind?

In 1981, a rotten nobody shot President Ronald Reagan to impress a girl.

Also seriously wounded in the shooting were White House press secretary James Brady, DC police officer Thomas Delehanty, and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy.

Suddenly, all of America knew the rotten nobody’s name. His life story was told and retold on the evening news. His picture was on television, and in every newspaper and news magazine.

Only a few months before that, a different rotten nobody had murdered John Lennon outside his home in New York because the nobody wanted to be famous. He got his wish — even now, it seems Barbara Walters interviews him in prison whenever she needs to fill out another hour of infotainment. He’s her “go to” guy.

I made a resolution back then: insofar as possible, I would never mention the name of those rotten nobodies, or of any other rotten nobody who hurt or killed people to become famous.

It costs me points in Trivial Pursuit games. That’s a price I’m willing to pay.

But it’s lonely. Every time there’s a shooting in a school, you can bet every television network will remind us of the long history of earlier school shootings, and they’ll show us the faces and tell us the names of the rotten nobodies who murdered students and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999. Still famous after all these years.

The rotten nobody who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday paused between atrocities to mail off a press kit to NBC News in New York. What a surprise.

NBC received the package on Wednesday, and showed some of the photos and video during their nightly newscast. What a surprise.

They justified the decision to show the videos with high-minded words about the public’s right to know what caused the murders.

On MSNBC, they aired the photos and the videos non-stop. During Keith Olbermann’s one-hour MSNBC program, the videos and photos played over and over on a loop on screen even during talking-head interviews. The replays paused only during a very brief segment about some of the victims. (Now, that’s respect.)

Funny, I still don’t understand what caused the murders.

Last night I checked the websites of CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC. Every single one of them featured a photo from the rotten nobody’s press kit. What a surprise.

It pays to advertise.

Via John Moltz: The next time someone calls you “chicken” because you don’t like war, show him this very short video of two chickens breaking up a rabbit fight.

If only our State Department were half that effective.

More perspective:

Insurgent bombers launched a series of attacks across Baghdad on Wednesday and killed at least 171 people and wounded scores — a particularly violent day in a bloody capital city enduring sectarian warfare and an aggressive government crackdown against insurgents.

Let’s not get competitive, okay?

Here in America we have Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon and many less spectacular but no less beautiful scenic wonders. Makes a fella quietly proud.

Well, it turns out we don’t have a monopoly on natural or man-made wonders. Thrilling Wonder has some photos of the Chinese landscape. This is just one of them:

And here I thought China was all about the Great Wall.

Also from Thrilling Wonder: a gallery of strange clouds.

Via a comment on Eolake Stobblehouse’s blog, Chris Jordan is doing artwork that provides perspective on American life:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images.

The linked site shows each image in several scales, to hint at the impact of the full-size work. Staggering stuff.

Via Eolake Stobblehouse: Not long after 9/11, The Onion reported from a press conference by God: (Warning: Strong language.)

“Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.”

…

“I don’t care what faith you are, everybody’s been making this same mistake since the dawn of time,” God said. “The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don’t even get me started on the hardline, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ but you’ve been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades.”

Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.”

It seems the more “religious” they are, the less they listen to God.

Not politics. Just perspective:

Virginia Tech 33, Baghdad 34.

I try to respect all cultures. I can certainly see how much of modern Western culture is vulgar and might seem offensive in other parts of the world. But this is ridiculous:

Actor Richard Gere has sparked protests in India after kissing Celebrity Big Brother winner Shilpa Shetty at an Aids awareness rally in New Delhi. Demonstrators in Mumbai (Bombay) set light to effigies of the Hollywood star, while protesters in other cities shouted “death to Shilpa Shetty”.

The protesters said Gere insulted Indian culture by kissing the hand and face of the Bollywood actress.

Death to Shilpa Shetty?

Holy … crap.

Memo to the whole world: It’s time to grow up.

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the breadth and depth of stupidity in politicians, some politicians will step forward with a bold new idea and surprise you:

With little fanfare, the Canadian government recently introduced legislation that breaks with conventional trademark law and would grant the Vancouver [Olympic] organizing committee rights to “winter” and a long list of other common words, among them: “gold,” “silver,” “medals,” “sponsor,” “games,” “21st,” “2010,” as well as the name of the host city itself. The legislation would also give the committee special enforcement powers.

…

The law would also allow the organizing committee, a private group, to act like a government agency when it comes to enforcement. That means it would be able to obtain a court injunction without proving that an infringement of its trademark for, say, “winter games,” has caused it “undue harm.”

When some U.S. legislators demanded that french fries and french toast be called “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” after France wouldn’t support the invasion of Iraq, I believed they were setting a record for stupidity that would stand the test of time. But it’s very competitive out there in the world of political stupidity. I’d say this is an Olympic-class example, but I can’t afford the lawsuit.

My God — life! Who can understand even one little bit of it? — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Some folks at Harvard, apparently.

Warning: the following video may be educational. It’s an eight-minute animation of the inner workings of a cell, down to the molecular level. Unless this is your field, you might not understand it all. I didn’t, anyway.

Some people believe the intricacy and complexity of the internal mechanics of life force us to one inescapable conclusion: that life was formed by an intelligent designer. That leads to an inescapable question: where did the designer come from?