Not just Anybody can Do This

Joe Queenan reviews Paris Hilton in The Hottie and the Nottie.

Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful. Anyone can make a sickening movie; we are already up to Saw IV. Anyone can make an unwatchable movie; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. And anyone can make a comedy that is not funny; Jack Black and Martin Lawrence do it every week. But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining.

Mr. Queenan reveals the what and why of his choice of Worst Movie Ever Made:

While it may disappoint those who welcome my occasionally unconventional opinions, I am firmly in the camp that believes that Heaven's Gate is the worst movie ever made. For my money, none of these other films can hold a candle to Michael Cimino's 1980 apocalyptic disaster. This is a movie that destroyed the director's career. This is a movie that lost so much money it literally drove a major American studio out of business. This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that defies belief.

A friend of mine, now deceased, was working for the public relations company handling Heaven's Gate when it was released. He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend. Nothing like this ever happened when Showgirls or Gigli or Ishtar or Xanadu or Glitter or Cleopatra were released. Nothing like this happened when The Hottie and the Nottie dropped dead the day it was released. Heaven's Gate was so bad that people literally had to be bribed to go meet the survivors. Proving that, in living memory, giants of bad taste once ruled the earth. Giants. By comparison with the titans who brought you Heaven's Gate, Paris Hilton is a rank amateur.

Carry On, My Wayward Son

So I have admitted I am a prog-rocker. I can do that, I'm strong.

But what is it about Japanese kids blasting out western music? Whether it's cute 5-year olds with ¾-size violins all over Mozart or sitting at small pianos laying down some Scott Joplin they are plain on it.

10 Most Prophetic Science Fiction Films

Popular Mechanics has a fun countdown of the "10 Most Prophetic Sci-Fi Films Ever."

The writer, Erik Sofge, says:

They’re not necessarily the best movies—just the ones that got the science right, or will sometime soon.

In his list are the stand-bys of 2001, a Space Odyssey and Soylent Green. But also Short Circuit and Road Warrior.

And of the selection of Running Man, he says:

The movies that have the biggest cultural impact aren't necessarily the best ones. In fact, sometimes they're among the most embarrassing.

While I don't agree with all his choices (the purpose of '10 best' lists is to generate argument) he does make fairly good cases for his selections.

What's in a Name?

This blog has a rather pedestrian name, and for that name I make no apologies. I am not writing a political blog, nor am I writing one devoted to popular culture.

Sometimes, however, I am struck with envy. Usually it's over the headline of a blog posting.

This time, though, I must admit that the a blog's name has impelled me to venal sin. Behold, Chris Matthew's Leg:

Chris Matthews’ Leg was talking to the lifeless shriveled husk of Keith Olbermann’s sense of shame the other day. They were both totally in awe of the way ex-conservative Andrew Sullivan can turn his histrionic self-righteousness on a dime.

Fragile Crocodiles

From Jerry Pournelle:

I note that National Geographic is (1) saying that crocodiles have been more or less unchanged for 100 million years, and (2) are now endangered by global warming of a few degrees. I find that fascinating.

A New Conversation on Race

Thank you, Jonah Goldberg:

"In fact, doesn't it seem like the majority of people begging for a "new conversation" on race are the same folks who shout "racist!" at anyone who disagrees with them?"

Aroma Memory

The other day I stopped by my daughter's house to drop of a few things. As I left, she handed me a small, waxy blossom and said, "Smell it."


The effect of the smell was galvanic. I twitched and felt a sense of disassociation. It took me a minute to place it. At first I thought the flower was honeysuckle, but she corrected me, "It's orange blossom," and a door in my memory opened.

For the next few hours I could not stop holding that blossom under my nose, drawing in one of the aromas of my childhood.

We had several orange trees in our William Street backyard, as I grew up; and the countryside had many orange groves. (Odd, that we say "grove," rather than "orchard.") When the trees were in bloom, the smell was heavy and thick and sweet. On occasion we would drive to the Sunkist packing plant and buy a box of navel oranges (88's--the perfect size for a child to eat.)

The last time I traveled to Southern California I discovered that I had forgotten some of the smells. The orange groves are almost gone, but I found that several other forgotten scent memories were there.

Eucalyptus--this is a scent that is everywhere in my home with potpourri and flower arrangements.

Pepper Tree--the scent that I associate with Claremont, for some reason.

Oleander--this was a scent that I had almost totally forgotten until my trip. We had oleander on the border with our next-door neighbors. Somebody makes an oleander perfume.


Baked dust--this is the background scent for Southern California, comparable to the river smell of Portland, Oregon, or the salt air/blackberry/pine smell of my current home on Whidbey Island.

Bodily Ressurection

An interesting article in Slate about the problem of the resurrection. Not surprisingly, the Gnostics hated the idea of a bodily resurrection:

These differences over what Jesus' resurrection represents and discomfort with the whole idea are nothing new, however: Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection was not the favored post-death existence—people much preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal realm of light and tranquility. During the Roman period, many regarded the body as a pitiful thing at best and at worst a real drag upon the soul, even a kind of prison from which the soul was liberated at death. So, it's not surprising that there were Christians who simply found bodily resurrection stupid and repugnant. To make the idea palatable, they instead interpreted all references to Jesus' resurrection in strictly spiritual terms. Some thought of Jesus as having shed his earthly body in his death, assuming a purely spiritual state, and returning to his original status in the divine realm. In other cases, Jesus' earthly body and his death were even seen as illusory, the divine Christ merely appearing to have a normal body (rather like Clark Kent!).

Yet there seems to have been a virtuous consequence to the belief:

In Christianity's first few centuries, when believers often suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those who believed in Jesus' bodily resurrection found it particularly meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus' execution and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to them as well. They thought that they would share the same sort of immortal reaffirmation of their personal and bodily selves that Jesus had experienced. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, has argued that those Christians who regarded the body as unimportant, perhaps including "Gnostics," were less willing to face martyrdom for their faith and more willing to make gestures of acquiescence to the Romans—for example, by offering sacrifices to Roman gods—because they regarded actions done with their bodies as insignificant so long as in their hearts they held to their beliefs.

By contrast, Christians who believed in bodily resurrection seem to have regarded their own mortal coils as the crucial venues in which they were to live out their devotion to Christ. When these Christians were arraigned for their faith, they considered it genuine apostasy to give in to the gestures demanded by the Roman authorities. For them, inner devotion to Jesus had to be expressed in an outward faithfulness in their bodies—and they were ready to face martyrdom for their faith, encouraged by the prospect of bodily resurrection...

Identity -Politics Hand-Grenades

This whole Democratic primary campaign has spun out of control.

From Mark Steyn, via National Review:

...Senator Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that’s what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn’t be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her “insidious racism” indistinguishable from “the vocabulary of David Duke.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert wielders of identity-politics hand-grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an “insidious racist,” who isn’t?

WFB RIP

Ouch.

A personal note, a couple of quotes, and a few links.

I became a Republican at 16 years old, when I received my first minimum-wage paycheck out of which was drawn Federal Taxes, State Taxes, union dues and a union initiation fee, all of which were mandatory. I became a real conservative in the late 1970s when I encountered Mr. Buckley's television show, Firing Line.

On Firing Line I saw manifest the "marketplace of ideas." And the delight, the joy, the brio with which Mr. Buckley engaged his liberal guests gave me a model to follow. Quite frankly, after watching Firing Line every other conservative talk fest has more than a whiff of pro wrestling about it.

I saw Mr. Buckley speechless only twice.

Once was when his guest was Mother Theresa. He asked, as television hosts will, to what address could his viewers send money to support her mission. She said that she didn't appear on his show to raise money, but to communicate what God would have her share. Mr. Buckley tried again, personalizing it to try to elicit a response, "Where would I send money for your work?"

Mother Theresa said, in that quavery voice, "I don't want you to give money. I want you to go out and look into the face of the poor."

To which Mr. Buckley had no reply.

A couple of quotes:

...if there were nothing to complain about, there would be no post-Adamite mankind. But complaint is profanation in the absence of gratitude. There is much to complain about in America, but that awful keening noise one unhappily gets so used to makes no way for the bells, and these have rung for America, are still ringing for America, and for this we are obliged to be grateful. To be otherwise is wrong reason, and a poetical invitation to true national tribulation. I must remember to pray more often, because providence has given us the means to make the struggle, and in this respect we are singularly blessed in this country, and in this room.

I was in a radio exchange with the senior U.S. liberal, Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who in a casual survey of technology stunned me by saying that, in his judgment, "Word processing is the greatest invention in modern history." Suddenly I was face to face with the flip side of Paradise. That means, doesn't it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?

And a quote by Jonah Goldberg about Mr. Buckley's place in history:

In the next few days, there will be a wave of liberals — Frank Rich comes particularly to mind — who will use WFB's memory to beat up on today's conservatives....Liberals today bemoan how wonderful the conservatives of yesteryear were, solely to lament how terrible they are today. [My link -ed.] The recent bout of Goldwater nostalgia on the left was a perfect example. The strange new respect liberals have for Ronald Reagan would be another. And you can be sure they will use Buckley to that effect too.

That said, I'm delighted to have conservative heroes become simply American heroes. But it's at least worth pointing out that Goldwater, Reagan and, of course William F. Buckley were subjected to vicious criticism from the left in their day. That they belong to all Americans now is no small testament to their success in the face of often unrelenting opposition.

And for links, the best come from the online presence of Mr. Buckley's magazine:

From the Editors "It has been said that great men are rarely good men. Even more rarely are they sweet and merry, as Buckley was.

A Symposium of Conservatives "The scene was slightly surreal, but it was an adventure and we were having fun. The gift of turning life into adventure was one of his charms, which helped attract young and old alike, but particularly the young, to his side. By merrily refuting liberalism, he gave birth to a conservatism, shaped in his own image, that avoided the drearily doctrinaire."

UPDATE: Nodding to Jonah Goldberg's point above (or, since this is in re: WFB, supra), Ross Dothat in The Atlantic writes:

Liberals tend to find kind things to say about men of the Right only once they're old and out of the arena, the better to contrast the decent conservatives of yore with the supposed right-wing pygmies of the present. But in Buckley's case the contrast is accurate, so long as we make it bipartisan: He was a giant, and no contemporary commentators, be they left or right or something else entirely, can hope to live up to the example he set, or the enjoy the impact he had. He didn't quite stop history, as he vowed half-jestingly to do, but he did manage to change it, and he will cast a long shadow over political journalism, and our politics in general, for as long as American history runs onward.

Wow

Tom Leher had a line in one of his concerts:

"It is sobering to realize that by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years. It's those kind of people that make you realize how little you have accomplished."

Forty years ago I studied the (French) Horn. I even had ideas about turning pro and saw myself doing studio work, staying up all night for recording sessions, saying goodbye to fellow musicians over waffles before sleeping all day.

But I made different choices.

I still love horn music though; and this kind of thing makes me wonder how good I could have been:

Let me note that she is, as my Texan relatives would say, a little bitty thing. But the sound she puts out is wonderfully full.

I didn't realize that Bill Clinton Throws Like a Girl

I know that it's old news, but were talking legacy here, kids.

Exhibit A:

By the way, in little-boy speak the phrase "throwing like a girl" refers to the way the former president it preparing to fling the ball, pivoting on his elbow. Watch a major league pitcher and you will see that their elbow leads their wrist through the throw and that a lot of power comes from rotating their shoulders.

Pure, Intense, Brilliant Pain

There is an index to measure insect sting pain?

Of course there is, my dear.

The bullet ant sting scores highest on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a rating created by entomologist Justin Schmidt, director of the Southwestern Biological Institute, which compares the ouch factors of different insects.

How does he know how much these insects' stings hurt? He's willingly endured each of them himself.

Schmidt's rating gives a poetic description of the bullet ant's sting: "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch rusty nail in your heel."

There's a job that's gotta make it hard to get out of the bed Monday morning.

Foriegn Policy Experience

I'm just wonderin'...

One of the big memes of the Clinton campaign has been "experience." Mrs. Clinton touts her experience in the White House, said experience consisting of being a family member of the President. She is going after Mr. Obama about his inexperience.

“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”

Two points:

What foreign policy experience did the President with whom she shared the White House have before his election?

If being a family member counts as experience, doesn't George W. Bush come with a much fuller nepotistic resume? His father was a member of the house of Representatives, Chief Liaison to Communist China, director of the CIA, ambassador to the UN, Vice President for 8 years and President for four years, during which time the US saw the fall of its cold-war adversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and conducted a UN-sanctioned campaign in Iraq.

Again, I'm just sayin'...

The Enduring Popularity of HP Calculators With Geeks

Many people don't realize that technophiles can be the most conservative of people.

In the drive for miniaturization and ease of use, there are those who smile and stand aside:

While not the sexiest consumer product out there, our engineering audience will likely see the appeal that HP's latest scientific calculator had for me. The 35s, which this new model is dubbed, is similar in many ways to the 15c I bought twenty-some-odd years ago when I entered engineering school... There's no doubt that the 15c was the premier calculator of its time. Just about everybody in engineering school seemed to have one...

I bet many of you are smiling to yourselves saying the same thing, "yeah, I bought one of those, too." But the kicker for me, and I'd bet for many of you, is that my 15c is still going strong. In fact, it still serves as my everyday calculator. And it doesn't get lost like many of the other objects on my desk, such as the tape dispenser, stapler, and scissors, thanks to its use of reverse Polish notation (RPN). My family members take the attitude that it's easier to find another calculator than to learn RPN. And that suits me just fine...

Why We Can Never Have Another Clinton Presidency

These are dry times for conservatives like me. I see that the current tack of the Republican party (which began with the election of George W. Bush) is taking to a more mainstream course. I know that the world has changed almost immeasurably since 1980, and that those that long for the second coming of Ronald Reagan both do not know what they want and would not accept it if it came.

I have my strong doubts about Obama. He lacks executive experience and will rely on teams of advisers. Who are these advisers? Perhaps they should be making policy speeches.

But in all this there is to me one constant: There can never be another Clinton in the White House.

Many Clinton haters will to this day gas on and on about the Rose Law firm and Whitewater billing records. These issues display in the Clintons a small-minded meanness.

Others will cite the White House Travel Office scandal. In this Hillary showed that she saw the office of the president as a a spoils machine, there to dole out plum jobs to cronies.

Others point out the trifecta of Clinton supporting the independent-counsel law; supporting and signing a law that enhanced and extended the ability of victims of sexual harassment to compel testimony; and Bill's feeling that he, as usual, was above the law.

All that pales next to the Clinton's actions in the closing days of Bill's presidency, when he released from prison 16 terrorists.

Debra Burlingame runs down some history that I am sure Hillary doen't want springing up on any of her carefully managed "listening tours" or "town halls."

On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he "will not rest until justice is done." Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN.

The FBI cracked the cases with the discovery of an FALN safe house and bomb factory... FBI agents obtained a warrant and entered the premises, surreptitiously disarming the bombs whose components bore the unmistakable FALN signature. They found 24 pounds of dynamite, 24 blasting caps, weapons, disguises, false IDs and thousands of rounds of ammunition....

Federal law enforcement agencies considered these individuals so dangerous, extraordinary security precautions were taken at their numerous trials. Courthouse elevators were restricted and no one, including the court officers, was permitted to carry a firearm in the courtroom.

Given all this, why would Bill Clinton, who had ignored the 3,226 clemency petitions that had piled up on his desk over the years, suddenly reach into the stack and pluck out these 16 meritless cases? (The New York Times ran a column with the headline, "Bill's Little Gift.")

Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the midst of her state-wide "listening tour" in anticipation of her run for the U.S. Senate in New York, a state which included 1.3 million Hispanics. Three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- Luis V. Gutierrez (D., Ill.), Jose E. Serrano, (D., N.Y.) and Nydia M. Velazquez, (D., N.Y.) -- along with local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights advocates, had been agitating for years on behalf of the FALN cases directly to the White House and first lady.

Initial reports stated that Mrs. Clinton supported the clemencies, but when public reaction went negative she changed course, issuing a short statement three weeks after the clemencies were announced. The prisoners' delay in refusing to renounce violence "speaks volumes," she said.

The Clintons were caught in an awkward predicament of their own making. The president had ignored federal guidelines for commutation of sentences, including the most fundamental: The prisoners hadn't actually asked for clemency.

To push the deal through, signed statements renouncing violence and expressing remorse were required by the Justice Department. The FALN prisoners, surely relishing the embarrassment and discomfiture they were causing the president and his wife, had previously declined to accept these conditions. Committed and unrepentant militants who did not accept the authority of the United States, they refused to apologize for activities they were proud of in order to obtain a clemency they never requested.

So desperate was the White House to get the deal finalized and out of the news, an unprecedented 16-way conference call was set up for the "petitioners" who were locked up in 11 different federal facilities so that they could strategize a response to the president's offer. Two eventually refused to renounce their cause, preferring to serve out their lengthy sentences rather than follow the White House script.

Mr. Clinton's fecklessness in the handling of these cases was demonstrated by the fact that none of the prisoners were required, as a standard condition of release, to cooperate in ongoing investigations of countless unsolved FALN bombing cases and other crimes. Mrs. Clinton's so-called disagreement with her husband on the matter made no mention of that fact. The risk of demanding such a requirement, of course, was that the prisoners might have proudly implicated themselves, causing the entire enterprise to implode, with maximum damage to the president and potentially sinking Hillary Clinton's Senate chances.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican politicians in New York who'd been crowing to their constituents about the impending release of these "freedom fighters" were enraged and insulted at Hillary Clinton's withdrawal of support. "It was a horrible blunder," said State Sen. Olga A. Mendez. "She needs to learn the rules."

I don't think that we need to doubt that Hillary has learned the rules.

Change! Can You Spare Some?

The People's Cube Has this great Obama graphic.

One of the great things about teh internets is that we no longer have to settle for 12-generation xerographic copies of great visual jokes. We get to see the original.

A New National Motto

James Lileks was harrrumphing over the NYT Freakanomics Blog's contest: Create a new 6-word motto for the United States.

(Of course the USA already has a wonderful three-word motto, "E Pluribus Unum," that is, "Out of Many, One."

Mr. Lileks cuts loose:

It was no doubt tendered in good faith, but reading the suggestions is like licking a corroded battery. The latter-day sub-Menckens will always get off the sharpest lines, of course; you can’t draw a laugh with something Grandma might knit on a pillow, and drawing a laugh – or a mirthless snort of appreciation, which counts as a laugh nowadays – is the prime objective. Go on: read. It’s not just a lefty thing; the hard-core Ron Paulites are there as well, luxuriously immersed in simon-pure certainties.

Hundreds of snippets of derisive snark. You can picture the satisfied little grins on the authors’ faces; you can imagine the whole tableau – the computer (which most people in the world will never touch, let alone use, let alone own) the TV in the corner connected to a network that has channels catering to every taste, the iPod stocked with music hoovered up free of charge without consequence, the fridge stocked with food – the light comes on when you open the door, too, unless it’s burned out, and then you go to the store and get another one; they always have another one. The soft bed, the coffee machine, the well-fed pet, the vast panoply of free information and unfettered opinion flowing 24/7 from the internet. You can drink alcohol without being sentenced to death; you can be a girl alone in a room with a man without earning a public stoning; you can stand up in a room and argue for the candidate of your choice without being arrested; you stand in a society that allows for astonishing amounts of freedom, comfort and opportunity. But.

But. Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed.

Actually, while lots of them are miserable bile-spew, I found some of them quite funny. Here are a few that stuck me:

“Land of the six word motto”

That’s MISTER America to you, pal!

Enlightenment scientific rationality meets puritan morality (This is the secret to American exceptionalism! -ED)

“Liberals hate it–must be good.”

Everyone hates US; immigration way up

USA - “That hot girl who ignores you”

“50 states, 2 parties, 1 dollar”

“We are the world’s rich uncle.”

“First to the moon and last”

“Home of Hollywood and New York”

“We don’t need no stinkin’ motto!”

“Politically: Representative democracy. Economically: Chaotic meritocracy.”

“If you live here, you’re home.”

Like Ancient Rome, with flush toilets.

“Luckily, our parents left your country”

When pigs fly, cows are jealous.

Mitt Stands Aside

Mitt gives a speech at CPAC, announcing that he will not fight on to the convention.

So to the people that told me that I was wasting my Washington State primary vote by choosing "Thompson," I say, "Poo."

Fifty Years on the Threshold of Space

There has been some small to-do over the fact that January 31st was the 50th anniversay of the launching of Explorer 1, the United State's first orbiting satellite. Rand Simberg has posted a great retrospective piece about the 50 years from then till now.

I celebrated the day by putting in the DVD for one of the finiest films ever made about the Sputnik era, October Sky.

This is also the film that made me a Chris Cooper fan, and one of the three or four movies guaranteed to make me cry.

I Miss Fred

My Washington State primary ballot arrived. I could do nothing but mark in Fred Thompson.

EarthDesk

I love cool stuff, but I hate a computer desktop cluttered with widgets and I am cheap.

These contradictory impulses are all satisfied by my latest, coolest acquisition: EarthDesk.

I started out with it configured in equirectangular:



But now I am keeping it mostly set to globe:



For extra bling, I added a starfield, taken by the Hubble telescope, behind the globe.



So now my desktop looks like this:

USA Plunges Into Poverty!

Back during the Cold War, kids, I used to listen to Radio Moscow on the old short wave. They were rather entertaining. (Radio Peking was just sad, constantly listing statistics about the number of trucks produced in the last two quarters.)

Radio Moscow would play lots of great symphonic music and interesting folk music from all over the Soviet Union. But the most entertaining segments were "Moscow Mailbag" (where an announcer read letters from CPUSA members scragging the US and praising the workers paradise of the USSR) and the world news segments on the US.

Radio Moscow of course had nothing good to say about the US. They would breathlessly report crime statistics and news of obscure civil rights trials. Every report of a trial would mispronounce the term "prosecuting" to "persecuting."

Well, Putin's Russia has fallen back into this "no good news" pattern, posting this story with the graphic above:

"USA plunges into poverty"

The number of Washington residents living in poverty is up sharply since 2001, with increases in every county except Garfield, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The agency reported this week that 12 percent of the people in the state were living in poverty in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. In 2001, just 9.9 percent of the state's population was in poverty.

The state had 732,049 people living in poverty in 2005, compared with 586,456 people in 2001, the bureau said. The federal poverty line in 2005 was $19,350 for a family of four, the AP reports.

That photo, though...I think that's the line up to get the "Halo 3" release.

But then, they also offer this breaking news:

Extraterrestrial beings caught on tape for the first time ever

Extraterrestrial beings have finally been taped on video, the head of the Turkish UFO Center, Haktan Agdogan said.

The ufologist said at a special press conference in Istanbul that a local resident, a watchman from one of cottage townships, managed to film an extraterrestrial spaceship and two aliens. The lucky man, named as Yalcin Yalman, presented his 22-minute video to reporters.

Robots!

Glenn admits that he wants the robot from Lost in Space.

I, however, have always wanted Robby, from Forbidden Planet.

In Iraq, the problem is "Too Many Targets, Not Enough Robots".

Night of the Living Fred!

Is Fred! dead?

Not if there is that holy grail of political junkies, the brokered convention.

Fred's Out

Sigh.

I kicked Fred's campaign a few bucks and talked him up among the small circle of people with whom I feel comfortable talking about politics. You know, just once I wish that my particular fringe candidate would last long enough for me to actually VOTE FOR THEM.

UPDATE:

I guess this makes me a Romulan.

I Don't Do Comedy

Other than an occasional wry remark, I don't even try. This is why:

This is like watching Steve Hawking goof on about singularities. I'll stick to commenting about my sad life.

Think Twice, Write Once

I haven't been very active on this blog lately. Odd, considering the just-completed Christmas season is ripe with spare time and lots of emotional and memory triggers.

But I am careful about what I write in this venue. I generally don't discuss work, family details, or specifics of my personal associations.

And here is why.

Whether they like it or not; and whether they realize it or not, nearly every person who uses the Internet creates an online reputation which reveals details and conveys an impression independent of the actual truth. I describe some of the issues associated with an online reputation at Pajamas Media. There are companies which will sell you reports describing how you "look" on the Internet. There is now an industry devoted to finding, deleting or modifying information about us on the Internet. Don't believe they can do it? Why, check out their online reputations!

Personal reputation is influenced in unexpected ways. Back in the mid-1980s I worked at a technology company in Oregon. It was a wonderful time, professionally, working in a group with a lot of people who became friends, and a couple of people that did not become friends.

At that time I occasionally wore a floppy velvet hat, somewhat like a large beret. (Please, it wasn't ghay, it was hippie. Except that hippie is kind of ghay.) It was a goof, but I thought that if you had to be known for something, better a bit of a goof than cruelty or boorishness, or any of an uncountable list of bad behaviors. If you can't leave `em laughing, at least leave `em with a smile...

...Until four years later during a market downturn when I badly needed a job. Then, during a job interview, the business owner said, with a sneering voice, "I hear that you like to wear funny hats."

What?!

I swallowed my pride and laughed it off--got the job. But the job didn't last. The owner was a big a jerk as he had revealed himself in the interview.

But I have always wondered if I was never offered interviews because of some people's big mouths.

Goofy Purchases

Some men, in a vain attempt to recapture their long-lost youth purchase toupees, open-necked shirts, and red convertible sports cars.

I have my hair, like my present wardrobe, and don't have the money for a new car.

I do, however have the money for this:


My goal is to regain the facility that I had in college.

Weep for my wife, as I spend the next few month getting my embrochure back into shape.

Remembering Jeff Meisch

This was a tribute to one of my very best friends. I posted it to forum for old alumni, GaneshaHighSchool.com.

Jeff Meisch was my best friend through High School and into my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright (Dery).

We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff.) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney, Jeff was Jackie Gleason.

Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick. You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: lightness and grace. But Gleason had gravity, too. Modern fat comics haven’t had that skill; Belushi was just amped and revved, which is different from having, uh, inner buoyancy.... John Candy was heavy, period. Chris Farley was an overinflated kickball still bouncing off the walls an hour after it was thrown. Gleason was different. He had – what’s the word? Buoyant innards.

That was Jeff.

I remember summer days when we would hop in his old Ford Econoline van, fill up on $0.35 gas and drive aimlessly all over Southern California -- from Grapevine Hill to the Mexican border, from watching girls in bikinis on Huntington Beach to shooting cans on the high desert with a .357 magnum. We would have wide-ranging conversations that multiplexed from music to metaphysics to what we saw ahead for our lives.

Jeff, a Jack Mormon, introduced me Beefeater's gin and Black Watch cigars. I never did take a shine to gin.

Jeff came up with a brilliant plan to sneak hooch into our Senior Party. The party was a multi-school event to be held in Disneyland. Jeff knew that there would be a shake-down at the gate for contraband that night, so we paid to enter the park the day before, packing several flasks of Beefeater's. We rode the Storybook Land Canal Boats ride and, as it passed near the bank in a secluded spot, stuck the bottles in the shrubbery. The night of the party, we rode the ride and grabbed the flasks. Good times.

When we worked in the pit orchestra for the High School musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Jeff bought a dozen roses to give to Joyce Wright. Knowing how painfully shy I was he decided to torment me by announcing he was going to sign my name to the card. I was stunned, but I knew what to say. "You wouldn't dare." He took it as a challenge and wrote my name. Joyce gave me a kiss.

Jeff was one of the few people I knew at my own wedding. That was the last time I saw him.

It's often said that guys never form friendships as close as ones formed in school years or in the military service. I can attest that this is the case with me. For respiratory health reasons Mrs. Gray and I moved away from Southern California in the early 1970s. With the demands of a new career and family and the tyranny of the immediate, it was very easy to let contacts slip away. Pre-internet it was difficult to re-establish contacts.

But for a couple of years I have been trying to re-establish those ties with family members and friends. So I googled Jeff's name now and again. Last Thursday I came across this site. Once again I scanned the registered members looking for Jeff's name. Then I saw a scan of a program for a 30-year reunion dinner. I browsed the photos, trying to pick out familiar faces. On one of the last pages was a "Memoriam." There on the list of departed classmates was Jeff's name.

I was shocked at how much I was shocked. My cohort is now well into the half-century mark and news of another passing is a more and more frequent occurence. But I was really saddened that I won't be able to catch up with Jeff.

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

The headline reads:

Too Much Sugar-Free Gum Linked to Severe Weight Loss

Does this seem like bad news to Wrigley's? I can just see overweight people thinking, "Hey! I didn't know it was that good!"

Encountering Limits

As you age, you realize that many of your childhood dreams will never come true. You'll never be as strong as Superman, you'll never be as rich as Bill Gates, and you'll never be as clever as Dick Cavett:

Years later, as a guest on the Tonight Show, [Johnny] Carson told Cavett that his favorite joke Cavett wrote for him during his days as a writer was the humorous caption to a newspaper photo of Aristotle Onassis looking at the home of Buster Keaton which he was considering purchasing.

Cavett wrote: "Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster."

Just You Wait...

I was driving home Thursday night and, while waiting in the ferry line, I found my CD of the movie soundtrack of My Fair Lady in the door bin. I hadn't listened to it for a year or so, so I popped it in and turned up the volume.

I can think of no-one who approaches the lyric genius of Alan Jay Lerner (and Oscar Hammerstein [except, perhaps, Howard Ashman]). I was especially struck by how wonderful were the non-romantic songs in MFL.

For example, "I'm and Ordinary Man," in which Higgins is recounts the bliss of bachelorhood:

I'm an ordinary man,
Who desires nothing more
Than an ordinary chance,
To live exactly as he likes,
And do precisely what he wants...
An average man am I, of no eccentric whim,
Who likes to live his life, free of strife,
doing whatever he thinks is best for him,
Well... just an ordinary man...

But...

Let a woman in your life,
And patience hasn't got a chance,
She will beg you for advice, your reply will be concise,
And she will listen very nicely, and then go out
and do exactly what she wants!
You are a man of grace and polish,
Who never spoke above a hush,
All at once you're using language
That would make a sailor blush,
Let a woman in your life,
And you're plunging in a knife,

Let the others of my sex,
Tie the knot around their necks,
I prefer a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition
Than to ever let a woman in my life.

Or the wonderful call-and-response between Higgins and Colonel Pickering in "Hymn to Him"

Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please;
Whenever you are with them, you're always at ease.
Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?

PICKERING -- Of course not!

Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?

PICKERING -- Nonsense.

Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?

PICKERING -- Never.

Well, why can't a woman be like you?

One man in a million may shout a bit.
Now and then there's one with slight defects;
One, perhaps, whose truthfulness you doubt a bit.
But by and large we are a marvelous sex!

Why can't a woman take after like a man?
Cause men are so friendly, good natured and kind.
A better companion you never will find.
If I were hours late for dinner, would you bellow?

PICKERING: Of course not!

If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?

PICKERING: Nonsense.

Would you complain if I took out another fellow?

PICKERING: Never.

Well, why can't a woman be like us?

Why indeed?

The Incomprehensability of Wealth

Peg' O My Heart has this observation on our New Gilded Age:

The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There's a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again.


A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.

I write for a living. I write on-line help. Two sentences--guess I'm no billionaire.

Good Dog

Noted with only this comment: Jake lived only because of the love and dedication of Mary Flood.

Good, human, Mary. Good Human.

Click on the image to see a slideshow.

Sept. 11 rescue dog with cancer dies

NEW YORK - A black Labrador that burrowed through smoking debris after Sept. 11 and flooded rubble after Hurricane Katrina in search of survivors has died after developing cancer.

Owner Mary Flood had 12-year-old Jake put to sleep Wednesday after a last stroll through the fields and a dip in the creek near their home in Oakley, Utah. Flood said Jake had been in pain, shaking with a 105-degree fever as he lay on the lawn...

...Flood adopted Jake as a 10-month-old puppy. He had been abandoned on a street with a broken leg and a dislocated hip.

"But against all odds he became a world-class rescue dog," said Flood, a member of Utah Task Force 1, a federal search-and-rescue team that looked for human remains at ground zero.

On the evening of the team's arrival in New York, Jake walked into a fancy Manhattan restaurant wearing his search-and-rescue vest and was treated to a free steak dinner under a table.

Flood eventually trained Jake to become one of fewer than 200 U.S. government-certified rescue dogs — an animal on 24-hour call to tackle disasters such as building collapses, earthquakes, hurricanes and avalanches.

After Katrina, Flood and Jake drove from Utah to Mississippi, where they searched for survivors in flooded homes.

In recent years, Jake helped train younger dogs across the country. He showed them how to track scents, even in the snow, and how to look up if the scent was in a tree.

He also did therapy work with children at a Utah camp for burn victims and at senior homes and hospitals.

"He was a great morale booster wherever he went," Flood said. "He was always ready to work, eager to play — and a master at helping himself to any unattended food items."

She said Jake's ashes would be scattered "in places that were important to him," such as his Utah training grounds and the rivers and hills near his home where he swam and roamed.

Smell the Coffee

Bumped into this image at National Review Online.

Ha!

R.A.H. TANSTAAFL!

With all of the to-do over the Heinlein Centennial, the Wall Street Journal has a nice tribute by Taylor Dinerman available on-line.

Mr. Dinerman writes:

"The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, "Between Planets," he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story "Blowups Happen," the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961 masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Heinlein--decades before Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House--introduced the idea that a president's wife might try to guide his actions based on the advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein's best known "inventions" is the water bed, though he never took out a patent...

[One of Heinlein's characters says] "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government--sometimes I think that it is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive--and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby." As they say on the Moon, "TANSTAAFL!": "There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch!"

Passing of a Titan

Alas, the print business has been hard, lately. All of the great metropolitan dailies have been suffering with dropping readership. The New York Times has tracked more and more liberal to try and staunch it's loss of paying customers.

It seems as though that collection of tubes, the Internets, is claiming yet another victim. The Weekly World News:

Weekly World News, the tabloid that for 28 years has chronicled sightings of Elvis, extraterrestrial activity and the exploits of Bat Boy, is no more. Its publisher said Tuesday it would put out its last issue next month, maintaining only a Web presence.

The Constant Reader knows of my near squeamish fascination with the Weekly World News.

One of WWN's writers, Bob Greenberger, did not return a telephone call seeking comment, but he wrote on his blog that the paper's staff was alerted of the closure Friday.

"The reasons given make no sense," he wrote. "We're stunned and shell-shocked."

I don't know why Mr. Greenberger expected sense from a publication that gave us the story of Bigfoot's capture of a lumberjack that he kept as his love slave.

One thing's for sure: Americans' waits in supermarket checkouts will forever be changed.

Hmmm... Is the introduction of supermarket checkout-TV bear the responsibility for the loss of this American Institution? People are distracted away from the headlines to see Rachel Ray telling us how fun it is to cook Jerusalem artichoke?

Debates?

Anyone who understands the meaning of the word debate knows that what are heralded as "Candidate's Debates" are anything but. They are really more of a joint press conference where the point isn't to exchange ideas or test ideas against one another, but to provide a pulpit for a recital of sound bites and stump-speech homilies to the media. (Any real give-and-take occurs later in the spin rooms.)

This Monday, the Democratic Party is holding a debate with the most foolish of premises: that one-shot questions from average folks will penetrate the hard shells of candidate's handlers, PR flacks and advisers, and will actually provoke them to say something honest and unguarded.

Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit, has submitted his hard-hitting, no-holds-barred question. In fact, he's zeroed in on what's been keeping me awake at nights as I contemplate the question "Who will next steer this mighty ship of state?"

Bald Eagles

The Bald Eagle may be rescued from endangered status, but that doesn't mean that Bald is Beautiful electorally.

The Economist points out that Fred Thompson has one underreported handicap: Americans haven't elected a bald man since I was a boy--Dwight Eisenhower.

To illustrate how Americans prefer a hirsute chief executive, they provide comparison images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

By all means--click on over to a disturbing rogue's gallery.

Holy Smokes!

Here they are, the Wholey Trinity of Democratic front-runners, Barak, Hillary!, and John.

"Polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that Americans believe the Democrats to be less friendly to faith than they had been even a few years ago. Yet a donkey with a halo over his head graces the cover of Time magazine this week and the story inside chronicles "How the Democrats Got Religion." From faith working groups to faith breakfasts, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are all participating in what strategist Mike McCurry tells Time is "a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party." --Wall Street Journal

Is this the end of the Republican lock on Evangelicals?

"Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, is probably less than excited by such initiatives. She recently said in a speech, "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now."

I guess not. Republicans have been, for the last 20 years, the party beneath an ever-growing tent. This has lead to some of the current fractious (yet healthy) debate over the priority of issues in the public arena. Is the Global War on Terror the top priority, or is it immigration? Or are these two sides of the same coin? What about health care? Medical insurers, threat or menace?

But the Democratic party has one hell of a donnybrook coming when the increasingly-militant secularists start to wrestle with people of faith for control of the party.

Bring popcorn. A circus is not the same without popcorn.

The Heav’n-Rescued Land

I wonder these days how many people know the first verse of the national anthem? I wonder how many people know that The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses?

I know, friends and neighbors, because I once sang all four verses to get out of a tight spot.

I was a young fellow, and a trainee at the U.S. Army Signal School's Ceremonial Unit. The unit was run like a kind of fraternity with several weeks of initiation where the pledge's lives were made miserable by the older team members. A common punishment was to order the trainees to drop for endless pushups. (I left the unit a year later with arms like Popeye.)

One particular fellow, PFC Peake, had made it his mission to make me spend as much time as possible doing pushups. After three weeks I knew that the situation couldn't go on. I knew that we were headed for a showdown. And so I began to memorize the entire national anthem.

Sure enough, a few days later I walked into the unit's dayroom and into a circle of older team members. On seeing me, PFC Peake yelled "Drop trainee!" So I assumed the pushup position. But, before he could assign me a specific number of pushups to do, I began singing The Star Spangled Banner. Of course everyone in the room saw the joke and played along, coming to attention (including me).

As I reached the first refrain, "O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave," Peake's eyes lit up. I had played my joke on him, but now whatever number of pushups had been ready to assign, it had now doubled.

As I sang, "O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave," I coud see the group start to relax. Before they could drop from attention, I began the second verse:

"On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes"

Again, as I reached the refrain, the group prepared to see Peake's aweful vengance. But then came the third verse and refrain--then the fourth.

By the time I sang (with a cracking voice) the final refrain, "And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave," the atmosphere in the room had changed. They knew that they had been topped. As I finished PFC Peake gave me the command, "Carry on," and I went about my business. Two week later I passed my tests and inspections and became a unit team member.

I think that it's good for us to see the full text of Key's poem that so swept a nation that it became it's national anthem. And if we find some of the words hard reading, we need to measure ourselves against the text, not measure the text against what we think it should be.

So here it is, in it's non-politically correct form, The Star Spangled Banner:

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream

’Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation,
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our Trust"

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Imagine All the People...

...Living for today.

You don't have to be a dreamer, because these people seem to exist. They are called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). They are described in this New Yorker article:

...They playfully tossed my name back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi, that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me later. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds.”

But his [Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor's] work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition...

Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts by missionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “The stuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows when you spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enough manioc flour to last a few days...

...Everett hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

No cultural memory...no art...I don't want to come off as a kind of cultural imperialist here, but this really tests the boundaries of my understanding.

Something Scary about Fred Thompson

This guy has his ex-wife and former girlfriends campaigning for him. This makes Karl Rove's mid-control ray-gun look like a Pez dispenser.

IN the battle for the women’s vote, Fred Thompson has a secret weapon against Hillary Clinton - the legions of former girlfriends who still adore him and who want him to be president.

The Hollywood actor and former Tennessee senator racked up an impressive list of conquests during his swinging bachelor days in the 1990s, but he appears to have achieved the impossible and kept their friendship and respect.

Lorrie Morgan, a country singer who dated Thompson and considered marrying him in the mid1990s, told The Sunday Times: “I couldn’t think of a bad word to say about Fred if somebody put a gun to my head...."

...he was also able to reassure them that he was on excellent terms with his first wife and home-town sweetheart Sarah Knestrick, whom he married in Tennessee at 17 and divorced 26 years later. Thompson said he had just spoken to her and she was intending to campaign for him.

“It says a lot about his character that his ex-wife and ex-girlfriends think he is fabulous,” said Mosbacher. “Character is important in a president.”

...

Morgan blames herself rather than Thompson for the break-up of their “serious” relationship. Although she is a Republican, the country singer believes that she was too politically incorrect to suit the role of senator’s wife. “Country music is all about glamour and shine and politics is a little more reserved,” she said. “I felt I had to change my whole wardrobe.”

Thompson not only charmed her but also the women in her family. At the time, she had two young daughters who are now in their twenties. “My children thought the world of Fred and my mother thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Morgan said. “He has such charisma. He can go to a down-home Southern-fried chicken dinner and later that evening eat the best caviar and drink wine with an ambassador.”

So not only does this guy alley-cat around in his 50s, but his ex-girlfriends and their mothers love him!

Don't point that ray at me Fred!

Can No-one Stop Them?

Hard on the heels of reviews that Rattatouille is the best Pixar-Disney film since Monsters, Inc., comes news about their 2008 release: WALL * E.

You know, I'd have bad deja-vu about Short Circuit, but so far it seems that Pixar won't let themselves release a dog.

He's Got Global Warming in His Hands...

The Constant Reader knows of my dismay when Churches leave the realm of bearing witness to the Good News and enter the realm of trying to get on the Nightly News. This dismay is illustrated in the following snark from National Review Online's Planet Gore blog.

Stephen Hawking Opposes Designated Hitter Rule [Jim Manzi]

Apparently the Southern Baptist Convention has just approved a statement that questions the role of humans in creating global warming, and has come out against government-mandated limits on carbon emissions. I assume this is at least in part a response to the National Council of Churches June 7^th statement that the unequivocal role of human activity in creating global warming demands, among other things, legislation to reduce US carbon emissions by 15 – 20 percent by 2020.

In related news, NASA has released a statement affirming the Trinitarian nature of God, and the Modern Language Association has published a new Global Climate Modeling textbook — presumably as a direct response to Paris Hilton’s recent research papers questioning the lack of robust Bayesian analysis of parameter uncertainty in long-term temperature forecasts.

Jeff's Dead

Few reading this blog (with the exception of Mrs. Panjandrum) remembers Jeff. Jeff was my best friend in High School and my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright.

Jeff was one of the few people I knew at my own wedding. That was the last time I saw him.

We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff.) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney, Jeff was Jackie Gleason.

Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick. You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: lightness and grace. But Gleason had gravity, too. Modern fat comics haven’t had that skill; Belushi was just amped and revved, which is different from having, uh, inner buoyancy.... John Candy was heavy, period. Chris Farley was an overinflated kickball still bouncing off the walls an hour after it was thrown. Gleason was different. He had – what’s the word? Buoyant innards.

That was Jeff.

I remember summer days when we would hop in his old Ford Econoline van, fill up on $0.35 gas and drive aimlessly all over Southern California -- from Grapevine Hill to the Mexican border, from watching girls in bikinis on Huntington Beach to shooting cans on the high desert with a .357 magnum. We would have wide-ranging conversations that multiplexed from music to metaphysics to what we saw ahead for our lives.

Jeff, a Jack Mormon, introduced me Beefeater's gin and Black Watch cigars. I never did take a shine to gin.

Jeff came up with a brilliant plan to sneak hooch into our Senior Party. The party was a multi-school event to be held in Disneyland. Jeff knew that there would be a shake-down at the gate for contraband that night, so we paid to enter the park the day before, packing several flasks of Beefeater's. We rode the Storybook Land Canal Boats ride and, as it passed near the bank in a secluded spot, stuck the bottles in the shrubbery. The night of the party, we rode the ride and grabbed the flasks. Good times.

It's often said that guys never form friendships as close as ones formed in school years or in the military service. I can attest that this is the case with me. For respiratory health reasons Mrs. Panjandrum and I moved away from Southern California in the early 1970s. With the demands of a new career and family and the tyranny of the immediate, it was very easy to let contacts slip away. Pre-internet it was difficult to re-establish contacts.

But for a couple of years I have been trying to re-establish those ties with family members and friends. So I googled Jeff's name now and again. Last Thursday I came across a site that was an on-line forum for alumni of my old high school. Once again I scanned the registered members looking for Jeff's name. Then I saw a scan of a program for a 30-year reunion dinner. I browsed the photos, trying to pick out familiar faces. On one of the last pages was a "Memoriam." There on the list of departed classmates was Jeff's name.

I was shocked at how much I was shocked. My cohort is now well into the half-century mark and news of another passing is a more and more frequent occurence. But I was really saddened that I won't be able to catch up with Jeff.

Kim Jong-il Contemplates The Silken Pony

I'm so far behind these guys, I'm embarrassed.

From Reason Magazine's Hit & Run blog, quoting Shawn Macomber:

Poor John Edwards. His personality cult is all personality and no cult. One imagines Kim Jong-il sitting in an undisclosed hermetically sealed room somewhere in Pyongyang lecturing an audience of apparatchiks. "Can you believe this Edwards guy?" he squawks, lifting his sunglasses to show his own wide-eyed shock. "Is his ego out of control or what?"

Strategic Pork Reserves

Sometimes the real world outstrips my poor ability of mocking.

via Best of the Web:

Lard Have Mercy

The New York Times reports that China is in the midst of "an acute shortage of pork," which is affecting the international economy:

Steep increases for pork loins and bacon are the most tangible sign that after a decade in which prices have fluctuated but not moved significantly upward, inflation is creeping back into China. In response to this pressure at home, Chinese companies are starting to raise prices for exports, removing what has been a brake on inflation in the West...

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited the pork counter at a supermarket in Xian in central China on May 26 and called for local governments to pay pig farmers to increase production. The commerce ministry has raised the possibility of distributing pork from China's strategic pork reserves.

Strategic pork reserves? Let's hope the U.S. Congress doesn't get any ideas.

Good Riddance

And shame on those that gave this bad man a pulpit to pound:

He wasn't an Army Ranger. He didn't earn a Purple Heart. He didn't witness war crimes in Iraq.

The truth about Jesse Macbeth? He's a fraud, and he's now facing prison.

Macbeth, 23, pleaded guilty in a Seattle federal courtroom Thursday to making false statements to the Department of Veterans Affairs and altering his discharge papers.

Kicked out of boot camp after 44 days, Macbeth instead portrayed himself as a decorated soldier who served in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was discharged due to post-traumatic stress disorder...

For several years beginning in 2003, Macbeth became a star of the anti-war movement by claiming he saw and participated in war crimes in Iraq.

He gave interviews to news reporters and was popular in blogs and the alternative media. In a video that was widely distributed on the Internet, a frail Macbeth dressed in camouflage told of killing hundreds of civilians. "We would burn their bodies ... hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque," he said.

As part of the plea agreement, Macbeth admitted he had been lying. Anti-war Web sites have pulled his video.

Jetson's Fashions

At Rio Fashion Week:

The Gratuitous Humiliation of our Would-be Kings

Charles Krauthammer gives two-and-a-half cheers for our seemingly endless political primaries:

In Britain, Canada, and other civilized places, national elections are often called, run, and concluded within six weeks. In America, election campaigns go on forever.

While we can grow weary of the endless stumping, it does serve a purpose:

The final function of the endless campaign, and perhaps the most psychologically important, is to satisfy the American instinct for egalitarianism. We have turned the presidential campaign into a pleasingly degrading ordeal — pleasing, that is, to the electorate. The modern presidential campaign is meant to be physically exhausting and spiritually humbling almost to the point of humiliation. Candidates spend two years and more on bended knee begging for money, votes, and a handshake in a diner.

Why do we inflict such cruel and unusual punishment? Because our winner is not just chief magistrate but king. True, the kingship is temporary, but its glories and perks are beyond compare — the pomp and pampering of a head of state, married to the real political power of controlling the most important state on the planet.

The bargain we offer the candidate is this: We will make you Lord, circling celestially above us on Air Force One, but because we are flinty Jeffersonian yeomen, we insist that you flatter us first with a very extended show of camaraderie and commonality with the Iowa farmer, the New Hampshire alderman and the South Carolina good ol’ boy. Aboriginal tribes have slightly different rituals for those who pretend to kingship, but the idea is the same: ordeal before dominion.

As similar thought concerning local politics is expressed in this cartoon by David Horesly:

The Latest Democratic Primary Debate

Actually, no. But it would have been a lot more fun this way. Japanese contestants try to say a tongue twister under "duress."

http://www.glumbert.com/media/tonguetwister

Or, why I'll never appear on a Japanese Game Show, Part XIII

In other commentary:

...a key constituency among Democratic primary voters in 2008 will be insane people.

Kenjutsu

How do you settle marital disputes?

Dead Conservatives

Peggy Noonan writes on the "Weeping Reagan" Time magazine cover:

Could I be correct that they only front-page weeping Republicans, and only laud conservatives when they're dead?

Peg o' My heart, you are completely correct.

Old, dead Republicans are kind of wonderful:

Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.

Oops...

Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

Hey! Time passes. The 1980s are the 21st century's 1950s.