At least once a month - it seems - somebody at Fox tries to take on Jon Stewart. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that about once a month, Jon Stewart makes some crack about Fox and somebody at Fox takes exception. Then they get their ass kicked. Why do these idiots at Fox do this.
Do they just figure that because their research is so shoddy, Stewart's will be shoddy also? I guess it should be because The Daily Show is only a comedy show, but - by now - they should have learned. But they haven't learned and we are given an enjoyable little nugget like this.
I feel sorry for Joe Biden when Jon Stewart makes so much fun of him and then he - Joe that is - says that Mubarak is not a dictator and I think What a clueless - and, in the end, dangerous - goofball. And we help keep him in power - Mubarak, that is - with our desire for stability, our money, and our tear gas grenades.
We say that we are on the side of the Egyptians, but - it seems to me - we really aren't. We are for stability, for order, for maintaining the status quo. When we attacked Iraq in 2003, the Marine commander's call sign was chaos - because, he said, the more chaotic the situation, the better we do - but that turned out to be idle chatter. When the battlefield turned chaotic, we couldn't adjust for years, despite out huge military superiority.
John Kennedy said Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. It seems to me that we - with our support of Arab dictators - are making peaceful revolution very difficult. When Jimmy Carter helps keep the Shah in power way past the Shah's due date, when the Palestiniann people vote in Hezbollah and we say we don't like your choice so we will not acknowledge it, when we say Mubarak is not a dictator after he has been in power for almost 30 years and is trying to put his son in power; we are not promoting peaceful change, we are not promoting democracy.
It is sad and I wish my country were better at walking its talk.
As a Public Service...here are the EPA instructions on What to Do if a Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) Bulb orFluorescent Tube Light Bulb Breaks in Your Home. The instructions - and I love the passive voice as if the bulb broke on its own - make it seem that living with these bulbs is about as dangerous as living at Chernobyl.
Since I am not ready to live in the dark and firmly believe we have to start conserving energy , I am all for energy saving bulbs. But, unless the EPA is trying to unnecessarily scare us, these bulbs - with their mercury vapor - really are pretty scary and dangerous. Yuck!
When people - I'm talking about me, here - talk about guilty pleasures, we pretend that the said pleasure is bad, but we are really trying to convince you that the said pleasure is good. When we say Oh! my guilty pleasure is watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer, we are really saying, If you don't like Buffy, either you haven't seen it or you are stupid. But:
when I watch NFL season - and game, and, even, team - promos, I love them and that is more than sort of embarrassing. I know that the ads are childish, almost prurient, complete bullshit: the low voice, the slo-mo, the hyper-dramatic music: (:again?) it is all so unbelievably sleazy. The promos are all sizzle and no steak. This ad? promo? video, for a - WTF - political candidate just fits in so well. In a way, it just seems so logical to selling a candidate as a commodity. >
Here is a 49er promo, but I don't think it is as good - maybe too many facts)
I got my right knee operated on this morning by the usual team, Dr. Shabbi Khan and the great nurses at Seton. I have high hopes that this - along with hyaluronic acid injections - will do it. So far, the right knee seems much less painful than the left knee did, although the doctor says that tomorrow will probably be worse.
Saturday, I had the honor of installing three of my photographs in the lobby of the Oakland office of AECOM. According to its website, AECOM is a global provider of professional technical and management support services with 52,000 employees. I am thrilled.
It started for me when Courtney Gonzales saw some bookmakers that I had made and suggested that a couple of them would look good in the lobby of the company she works for. Eventually, we ended up with two bookmarkers blown up and re-formatted into a more conventional shape and a square shot of sunlight through water.
Here are the two shots formatted as bookmarks - but enlargeable by double clicking - and the square shot of dappled water.
One of the tricks - techniques? skills? - I admire in an artist is the ability to create a picture that looks like nothing up close and only looks like something when the viewer stands back. The parking garage at the San Jose Airport has a - sort of - super premium chain link screen that - sort of - hides the parking garage.
Industrial strength hocky pucks are then wired to the screen and they form a design when seen from a distance.
Most of us who have been to the San Jose Airport have driven right by the hands; I know I have more times than I would like to admit. Last Sunday, I was given the chance to stop and look at what I will call the Hands. With climpses of garage behind them, they are great!'
Richard Taylor sent me a link to an article in the New York Times on extrasensory perception - a couple of days ago - and I have been thinking about it ever since. Not so much the extrasensory perception part, but a quote in the article that inadvertently points out what I see as the major problem with Science. And with everything else, as far as that goes - the Stern Unified Field Theory on what is wrong . In disagreeing with the results of an experiment, a scientist says Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence.
What he is really saying is Claims that agree with the already agreed upon laws of science are, by definition, ordinary and do not require much evidence. In other words, if it reinforces the status quo, we start by presuming it is correct. Of course this reinforces the status quo which - then - is used to prove the status quo is right. What ever we are doing, what we believe, is right because we are doing it, because it is our belief structure.
Maybe it's the movies, maybe it's the books Maybe it's the bullets, maybe it's the real crooks Maybe it's the drugs, maybe it's the parents Maybe it's the colors everybody's wearin' Maybe it's the president, maybe it's the last one Maybe it's the one before that, what he done Maybe it's the high schools, maybe it's the teachers Maybe it's the tattooed children in the bleachers Maybe it's the Bible, maybe it's the lack Maybe it's the music, maybe it's the crack Maybe it's the hairdos, maybe it's the TV Maybe it's the cigarettes, maybe it's the family Maybe it's the fast food, maybe it's the news Maybe it's divorce, maybe it's abuse Maybe it's the lawyers, maybe it's the prisons Maybe it's the Senators, maybe it's the system Maybe it's the fathers, maybe it's the sons Maybe it's the sisters, maybe it's the moms Maybe it's the radio, maybe it's road rage Maybe El Nino, or UV rays Maybe it's the army, maybe it's the liquor Maybe it's the papers, maybe the militia Maybe it's the athletes, maybe it's the ads Maybe it's the sports fans, maybe it's a fad Maybe it's the magazines, maybe it's the Internet Maybe it's the lottery, maybe it's the immigrants Maybe it's taxes, big business Maybe it's the KKK and the skinheads Maybe it's the communists, maybe it's the Catholics Maybe it's the hippies, maybe it's the addicts Maybe it's the art, maybe it's the sex Maybe it's the homeless, maybe it's the banks Maybe it's the clearcut, maybe it's the ozone Maybe it's the chemicals, maybe it's the car phone Maybe it's the fertilizer, maybe it's the nose rings Maybe it's the end, but I know one thing. If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns.
Michele and listened to the memorial at Tucson last night. I think this may have been the first public memorial I have ever watched. I missed both Reagan's Challenger speech and Clinton's Oklahoma bombing speech. I don't know why I usually don't like to listen to these sort of things but did want to hear Obama's comments ( which were billed as being about ten minutes), but I am glad I listened.
At first I was taken back by the boisterous crowd. I was expecting a church - with hushed, somber, rhetoric - and I got a basketball arena. But -starting with the opening prayer - I was moved by the whole thing. I thought Obama was at his best and it reminded me of Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech - not so much in the words but in the internal timing of the speech. I was not the only one that felt that way.
But, in the end, it was not so much what Obama said, but the obvious emotion that was so powerful.