July, 2009 archive
Drink Liberally 0
on Tuesday, at Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.
Live charitably all the time.
Missing the Point 0
Sorn Jessen thinks that reporters missed the point of Mr. Obama’s speech to the NAACP:
The problem with this entire way of reporting is that somewhere in the fusion of stereotypes, people lose their humanity.
.
Improving Senate Hearings 0
Radio Times host Marty Moss-Coane suggests that Senators preface their questions with
July 17, 2009, show, Hour One.
Girdling the Earth 0
U. S. space suits come from Delaware. So do I. I’ve actually driven by the factory a few times. It’s a small building on a back road surrounded by farmland.
Space suits are also descended from ladies’ underwear (emphasis added):
For NASA’s first trip to the moon, the high-tech suits worn by Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins had their roots in bras and girdles.
ILC Dover began as part of International Latex Corp. — later known as Playtex — when the company spun off a division in 1947 that made products such as life vests and rafts for the military.
(Also posted, with slight changes, at Geekazine; I don’t usually duplicate posts, but this was too good to pass up. Cross your heart.)
Cronkite 0
Frankly, I find the adulation tiresome.
He was a good newsman and a decent fellow, with a voice made for broadcasting, but I don’t recall ever seeing him walk on water.
Unlike the professional “news anchors” of today, he actually knew something about how to report news, not just about how to be a television actor reading other persons’ copy. After he retired, he did a lot of good stuff, including one of the best training films on public speaking ever made. But he wasn’t the only decent fellow in broadcast news.
I grew up in a Huntley-Brinkley family. I don’t remember this sort of adulation when either Chet Huntley or David Brinkley passed away, and both of them were as competent as Cronkite.
I think a lot of it has to do with symbolism: the passing of the first generation of symbols of when television was becoming the dominant source of news, the time before news organizations became “profit centers” (profit was a result of a job well done, not an overriding goal to which the concept of “job well done” was sacrificed).
Even so, almost the whole news establishment of the time–as well as almost the whole political establishment. as well as the populace–was taken in by the propaganda supporting the Viet Namese war.
In looking back at Cronkite’s celebrated realization that that war was a lost cause, one should remember that many persons had known and been saying for a long time that the United States never should have been there in the first place; they were reviled as “unAmerican (whatever that is),” “Commies,” “radicals,” and the ever popular “ComSymp.”
Their having been right all along does not keep them from being reviled as unAmerican even till this day.
Cronkite was late to our party.
Somewhere in a jewelry box somewhere, I still have my peace symbol.
Return of Beyond the Palin Meets Tweety Bird (Updated) 0
James Wolcott:
Addendum, Later That Same Day:
Mudflats has more. Click through the image:
Measuring Everything 0
Victoria Coren in the Guardian:
Which would you prefer to receive: a declaration of love or a gift of £163,424?
It’s OK. Don’t feel bad. There is a recession on. Anyone might have said the same.
In fact, according to impressively scientific-sounding organisation BrainJuicer, these two offers are exactly equivalent. Having polled 1,000 British people on the happiness inspired by “significant life events”, researchers compared their findings to the contentment brought on by lottery wins, then calculated that hearing the words “I love you” brought precisely £163,424 worth of pleasure.
Read the whole thing. It will cause you to reevaluate your life.
Blue 0
Babe the Blue Ox had a certain amount of charm, even though she was a corporate symbol to advertise a lumber company.
The Blue Dogs, not so much. They are to preoccupied with getting their tickets punched by BCBS:
In related news, the new Puritan witchhunters. Wimmen’s bodies belong to them.
Text of the speech, below the fold.
Cut Him Off 0
He’s already failed the credit check:
Now that the Lone Star State is in dire financial straits, Perry is singing another tune and has asked the feds for a loan to cover the very expenses the stimulus money he rejected would have paid for.
Get Your Scorecard! 0
You can’t tell the players without a scorecard! Get your scorecard here!
Seen on the Street 0
Dueling bumper stickers:
I speak FOR God;
I know what’s best for you.
Other bumper sticker (same car):
Freedom is the distance
between church and state.
True Colors 0
Bob the Builder may build it, but Pat the Destroyer will tear it down.
MicroSpin 0
WebMonkey Microsoft’s attempts to portray Internet Explorer as better than the competition:
Here’s a nugget:
The fact that both Firefox 3 and Google Chrome are both leaps and bounds ahead of IE8 when it comes to support for both established and emerging web standards, like HTML 5 and CSS 3, is no mystery to anyone who’s developed websites using anything beyond CSS 2.1, the latest CSS standard Microsoft IE8 supports, or to those developing user experiences with open video players or offline data storage features. Furthermore, for users of Ajax-heavy websites like Gmail and Netflix, IE8 performs just fine, but it’s not nearly as fast as Google Chrome.
Follow the link for more MicroSpinCycle.
Via the Cranks.
Soap 1
Many years ago, I went through a period during which I watched the Young and the Restless because one of my friends liked it (Victor is still my hero).
It excited my admiration for the cleverness of soap opera writers: they normally keep six or seven stories going, figuring that at least one will catch a viewer’s interest; as summer approaches, they wind down the adult characters and wind up the teenaged (read, “actors old enough to get a work permit and younger than 25”) characters and the reverse as fall nears; a day of action on the show takes a month in real time, yet Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s still all manage to come on time.
Nevertheless, in terms of duplicity, intrigue, hypocrisy, marital infidelity, and underhanded retribution, it had nothing on the Republican Party.
Both Ends, Middle 0
For quite a while, Wall Street has been patting itself on the back for “creating wealth” by devising “new financial products.”
More accurately, they have been repainting the shells in the same old shell games and touting them as something new. Their motto has not been “innovation.” It has been, “There’s one born every minute.”
Paul Krugman on Goldman Sachs:
And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.
The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.