First Looks category archive

• What: Virginia Beach Democratic Committee Third Thursday Dinner
• When: February 17th, 6:00 PM
• Where: Kelly’s Hilltop Tavern, 1936 Laskin Road, Virginia Beach, VA 23454 (map), in the nonsmoking section.

Show up, order off the menu (separate checks), socialize, and talk politics–or whatever else interests you.

I have attended several of these. They tend to be smaller gatherings, highly informal, and a lot of fun. Don’t know whether I’ll make it this week, though–a cold seems to have caught me.

For more information, email VaBeachBoy@aol.com

Who cares?

Every time you watch Jersey Shore . . .

Via Funny or Die.

In todays’s local rag, Mike Gruss describes the machinations involved in getting the Super Bowl military flyover (or any flyover) to happen at just the right time.

The timing comes down to the second. The pilot is allowed to arrive a little late, but not a few seconds early because that would ruin the experience for the television producers and the 111 million people watching on television.

Officials initially told Hewlett he would need to fly over the stadium at 17:22 military time – that’s 5:22 p.m. Central. A few months later, it was amended, down to the second. He would arrive at 17:22.45.

So, what happens when the national anthem is sung more slowly than in the rehearsal? Gruss answers that question.

From The Secret of Kells:

A surgeon once told me that there is no such thing as routine surgery, that, whenever he cut someone open, it could never be routine.

I saw the first reports of this story yesterday, but refrained from mentioning it until more details came out. More details at the link.

Buttocks-enhancement injections, often involving silicone gel or liquid, are illegal but widely available. Dozens of women have reported injuries, according to federal health agencies, including infections, kidney impairment, and, in rare instances, death.

Walker said the victim checked into the Hampton Inn on Bartram Avenue and sometime over the weekend received the injections. She was taken to Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital at 1:30 a.m. Monday after complaining of chest pains and experiencing shortness of breath.

She died later that day. Fredric Hellman, Delaware County medical examiner, said a preliminary cause of death will not be released until the victim’s relatives are notified. The second woman, who received injections to her buttocks and hips, has not been hospitalized, police said.

The woman died because she believed that enhancing changing the shape of her hips would improve her life.

I doubt she came up with this idea on her own, but I suspect she would not have followed through had someone not convinced her that it was “routine.”

Afterthought:

I cannot judge her apparently desperate desire to look different. I remember growing up dork.

She is victim, not perpetrator.

Looks like it to me.

Dennis G. on sacrifice.

Read more »

When television’s alternate reality meets, well, reality–what’s not broadcast:

Sunday morning, Allen Ward was excited that his next-door neighbor had been chosen to receive a new home through the TV show “Extreme Makeover.” Beverly Hill, her husband and their six adopted daughters are great people, he said, and deserve the honor.

By Monday evening, however, Ward felt he had to keep a vigil in his driveway. A production truck sat in his yard, and a celebrity tent was pitched near his living-room window.

Strangers, craning for views of TV host Ty Pennington and other celebrity designers, trampled through his yard until crews erected a temporary fence.

The story goes on to report that the neighbors, by and large, are willing to put up with it because they know it’s temporary and they like the persons whose home is being made over.

More at the link.

It’s 63 Fahrenheits with light rain in Virginia Beach.

The dude who was predicting the rapture to take place by the end of January, that is, by yesterday, has now revised his prediction to Rosh Hashanah, which is scheduled for mid-September.

I’ll have to update my Google Calendar. Wouldn’t want to miss it.

Afterthought:

One would think that always being wrong would send these folks some kind of message clue, but nope.

I’ve done a fair amount of driving in the American west, though never in Death Valley.

Once you get off the main roads, it can get pretty damned remote pretty damn quick, and there’s likely no signal for Google Earth.

“It’s what I’m beginning to call death by GPS,” said Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan. “People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.”

The number of people visiting Death Valley in the summer, when temperatures often exceed 120 degrees, has soared from 97,000 in 1985 to 257,500 in 2009. That pattern holds at Joshua Tree as well, which recorded 128,000 visitors in the summer of 1988. Last year: 230,000.

With another potentially deadly summer season approaching, Death Valley managers now are adding heat danger warnings to dozens of new wayside exhibits and working with technology companies to remove closed and hazardous roads from GPS units. They also have posted warnings on the park’s website, telling visitors not to rely on cell phones or GPS units.

I was driving to a job site once with the boss and advised him to strike out along some back roads rather than to go through the stoplight hell of Milford, Delaware.

As we went past the corn fields, eventually emerging right in front of the factory, the boss asked, “How did you find this route?”

“Map,” I said, and pulled out the atlas.

Dawn Turner Trice, writing in the Chicago Tribune, interviews Tom Burrell, retired ad agency owner, on the techniques of whitewashing. Burrell overcame vision problems and racial stereotyping to become the owner of one of the nation’s largest and most effective ad agencies. He knows a bit about propaganda.

A nugget:

Burrell said the campaign to cast blacks as inferior dates back to slave owners attempting to make an inhumane institution fit into a democracy. He considers slave auction posters among the earliest forms of “propaganda” in American history. Much followed, including Stepin Fetchit-type characters, along with salt and pepper shakers, postcards and Halloween masks depicting blacks with big red lips and protruding eyes.

“These messages have been passed down like tchotchkes through the generations,” he said. “Somebody had to say that if we can market this idea that slaves are not human beings — they’re chattel — then the Founding Fathers can say ‘all men are created equal’ and not have this profound contradiction. That’s how the advertising campaign came about.

“We’ve used the Bible, textbooks, symbols, the media, bad science to constantly reinforce those ideas. People buy into it, internalize it.“

Stamford, Connecticut, is a nice little town. It is the little city that could.

But it has its drawbacks.

Like winter.

H/T Alison for the pic.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is dropping plans criticized by historians to build a store near a key Civil War battlefield in northern Virginia.

Lawyers announced the Arkansas-based retailer’s Wednesday in Orange County Circuit Court, where a judge had planned to hear more pretrial motions in a lawsuit challenging the project.

Wal-Mart had planned to build a 143,000-square-foot Supercenter near the site of the Battle of the Wilderness, which is viewed by historians as a critical turning point when the Civil War started to turn in favor of the North. An estimated 185,000 Union and Confederate troops fought over three days in 1864, and 30,000 were killed, injured or went missing. The war ended 11 months later.

Like the world needs another Walmart.