The Real Thing
Can y'all remember, back in those more prosperous, more productive, happier days of Democratic administrations, how whenever one correct-thinking individual would criticize some idiotic statement that came out of a regressive mouth, that said regressive would yell "Censorship! Censorship!" Remember?
Anyway, we'd often pause, take a breath, and explain calmly that we were not indulging in censorship, that what we were doing was merely exercising our own individual rights as citizens — the same rights as those held by the regressive mouth — to say what we thought of the mouth's thoughts. Censorship is something far more serious, far more insidious, and far more damaging: censorship is when the Government tries to suppress the free expression of its citizens. Censorship inevitably is a tool of tyrrany.
Censorship is the Government barring reporters from entering New Orleans and telling those reporters that there will be no pictures of dead bodies in the devastated city.
The excuses given to suppress photographs of coffins coming home from Iraq were thin but accepted to avoid accusations of anti-patriotism. The current excuses are so thin as to be transparent, an obvious attempt by an embarrassed Government to try to control information to protect itself. That is censorship.
Dean on Direction
The Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, said this [the evident ineptitude of the Administration to deal with the Katrina disaster] could be a transitional moment for his party. "The Democratic Party needs a new direction," he said. "And I think it's become clear what the direction is: restore a moral purpose to America. Rebuild America's psyche."
"This is deeply disturbing to a lot of Americans, because it's more than thousands of people who get killed; it's about the destruction of the American community," Mr. Dean said. "The idea that somehow government didn't care until it had to for political reasons. It's appalling."
[Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, "Democrats Step Up Criticism of White House", New York Times, 8 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Convergent Blame Gaming
Frank was late getting home from work and sat down immediately and a bit breathless to eat. Kenneth had prepared a late-summer favorite: a corn and tomato supper.
Between urgent bites of corn off the cob, Frank said, "I had lunch with Tina today."
Ken sliced a tomato. "Arch-conservative, Bush-can-do-no-wrong Tina?"
"The same. Tina, it seems, is furious with FEMA and its performance in New Orleans."
"No! Why shouldn't I be surprised to hear that?"
"Well, it's pretty obvious in the end, but the path is a bit tortuous. She started out with a riddle: 'Who', she asked, 'were the first rescuers on the scene after the hurricane?' "
"Who?"
" 'The Canadians!' she exclaimed, slapping her palm on the top of the table. 'Can you believe that! They didn't ask anybody, they just went in there and rescued people!' "
"I can almost hear where this parable is going."
"Exactly. Next she related the story of all those law enforcement types from West Virginia who were ready to head down to Louisiana to help out, but weren't allowed in by FEMA. With great excitement she nearly yelled at me: 'What were they thinking of! Didn't they know there was a bureaucracy to deal with!' "
"On my goodness," Ken moaned. "So, rather than a cautionary tale of organizational indifference and inept malingering told by a Liberal…."
"Exactly! The failure of FEMA is an illustrative story of rampant bureaucracy and woefully misspent tax dollars read by a conservative from the book of Government is the Problem. Clearly, she implied, if we want to improve disaster response the only real solution is to get rid of FEMA entirely…."
"…instead of insisting that it do its job. Surely a remarkable conclusion. Perhaps we should celebrate that the two of you agreed on something."
"How would we celebrate, though, since we agreed but for entirely separate reasons that suggest entirely different solutions?"
Frank buttered another ear of corn, Kenneth sliced another tomato, and a thoughtful silence ensued.
In: All, Frank & Kenneth
We Love You Hans Haffmans!
As I type, I hear on the radio the brass fanfare from the beginning of the final movement of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, alerting us that it's 11pm and time for our weekly broadcast of "Live! at the Concertgebouw". It's a good program with varied programs beautifully played by different ensembles.
But what we really like about the program is the announcer: Hans Haffmans. Shortly after the opening fanfare, we squeal with delight to hear "…this is Hans Haffmans." We love his voice, his radio personality, his commentary, his accent — the entire package. It's such a treat, when we've forgotten that it's getting late on Wednesday night, to have Hans to remind us.
We had clues that he was Dutch (like: the name of the program, for one), but we might have guessed. His English is beautiful, melodic, energetic, and precise, virtually accent-free except for a little tightness around the lips that one often hears from speakers whose native language is Germanic. Mind you, this is not a detriment at all. No, no, no, it just adds a tiny verbal quirk to his on-air persona, the salt in the cake that really brings up the taste. And — oh boy! — can he pronounce those difficult names of obscure European composers (names that sometimes tax the talents of our local announcers on the station we're listening to).* Like the best Swiss hoteliers, he seems comfortable with several languages.
I was pleased to find that Radio Netherlands Music, which produces the program, has a nice biographical page for Hans Haffmans. I was even more pleased that Mr. Haffmans looks enough like what I'd imagined from his voice that I don't need to alter significantly my own mental image that accompanies it. Why, we don't even have to roll out the old saying about "a face made for radio". I can even convince myself that I see in Mr. Haffmans' picture that little tightness in his voice as a kind of pert sensuousness in his lips, but I'll stop there before I embarrass the poor man.
His list of musical heroes ("Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Mozart, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Messiaen") is admirable even if it doesn't include some of mine, but these are good choices. Again: a bit of a relief from which we deduce that he is, indeed, the sensible person that he sounds like he should be.
But now, back to the program. The music's almost ended, so Hans will be talking again.
———-
*However, the talent here on the Baltimore station is not nearly so tragic as what I listened to when I was in North Carolina in graduate school, listening to the public radio station from NC State University. I vividly remember my surprise at hearing the name of conductor Sir John Barbirolli pronounced as "Sir John Barryboolie" (the closest orthographic transcription I can manage).
Herps, Gait, & the Invention of Clothes
Today's reading from Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004) touches on several topics (as I catch a bit on the lunch-time notes).
[Speaking of naming types of animals:] Yet another informal grade name, favoured by American zoologists, is 'herp'. Herpetology is the study of reptiles (except birds) and amphibians. 'Herp' is a rare kind of word: an abbreviation for which there is no long form. A herp is simply the kind of animal studied by a herpetologist, and that is a pretty lame way to define an animal.[*] The only other name that comes close is the biblical 'creeping thing'. [p. 250]
[About the "authoritative 'Tree of Life' project founded by the Maddison brothers":] This excellent resource is continually updated at http://tolweb.org/tree. The website has a delightful disclaimer: 'The Tree is under construction. Please have patience: the real Tree took over 3,000,000,000 years to grow." [footnote, p. 250]
The Human imagination is cowed by antiquity, and the magnitude of geological time is so far beyond the ken of poets and archaeologists it can be frightening. But geological time is large not only in comparison to the familiar timescales of human life and human history. It is large on the timescale of evolution itself. This would surprise those, from Darwin's own critics on, who have complained of insufficient time for natural selectin to wreak the changes the theory requires o fit. We now realise that the problem is, if anything, opposite. There has been too much time! If we measure evolutionary rates over a short time, and then extrapolate, say, to a million years, the potential amount of evolutionary change turns out to be hugely greater than the actual amount. It is as though evolution must have been marking time for much of the period. Or, if not marking time, wandering around this way and that, with meandering fluctuations drowning out, in the short term, whatever trends there might be in the long. [p. 257]
The head louse, Pediculus humanus capitus, infests only the hairs of the head. The body louse, P. h. humanus, is a subspecies in the same species as the head louse which, interestingly, is believed to have evolved from it only after we began to wear clothes. Some workers in Germany have looked at the DNA of head lice and body lice to see when they diverged, with a view to dating the invention of clothes. They put it at 72,000 years, plus or minus 42,000. [p. 266]
…it is undoubtedly true that styles of walking have a kind of contagiousness and are imitated because they are admired. The boarding school that I attended, Oundle in central England, had a ritual whereby the senior boys paraded into the chapel after the rest of us were in our places. Their mutually imitated style of walking, a mixture of swagger and lumbering roll (which I now, as a student of animal behaviour and a colleague of Desmond Morris, recognise as a dominance display) was so characteristic and idiosyncratic that my father, who saw it once a term on Parents' Day, gave it a name, 'the Oundle Roll'. The socially observant writer Tom Wolfe has named a particular loose-limbed gait of American dudes, fashionable in a certain social sector, the Pimp Roll. At the time of writing, the abject sycophancy of the British Prime Minister to the US President has earned him the title 'Bush's Poodle'. Several commentators have noticed that, especially when in his company, he imitates Bush's macho 'cowboy swagger', with arms held out to the sides as though ready to reach for two pistols. [p. 269]
[The extinct] Moas are extreme among flightless birds in that they have no trace of wings at all, not even buried vestiges of wing bones. They thrived in both the North and South Islands of New Zealand until the recent invasion by the Maori people, about 1250 AD. Thy were easy prey, no doubt for the same reason as the dodo. Except for the (extinct) Haast's eagle, the largest eagle ever to have lived, they had known no predators for tens of milions of years, and the Maoris slaughtered them all, eating the choicer parts and discarding the rest, belying, not for the first time, the wishful myth of the noble savage living in respectful harmony with his environment. [p. 280]
———-
*I'm not rushing to agree with Dawkins that it's a "lame way" to "define an animal". True, he would like names that imply some sort of fundamental biological or evolutionary connection between the members of the group, which seems desirable, but since I incline to the view that "science is what scientists do", I'm less troubled by the idea behind the name 'herp'.
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Katrina Resources
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a useful collection of Katrina resources at Making Light.
[Later:]
Also, "Bush and Katrina: so many outrages, so little time" from BobHarris.com (thanks to Paul the Spud at Shake's Sis).
To consolidate from an earlier posting of mine, here is a resource page for LGBT Katrina survivors being maintained by PageOneQ. (via Avedon Carol.)
[10 September 2005:]
TPM Hurricane Katrina Timeline
Progress Is Possible
Sacramento — The state Assembly, in a stunning victory for the gay rights movement, approved a landmark bill allowing same-sex marriage Tuesday night and sent it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The measure, which passed with no votes to spare, marks the first time that a legislative body in the United States has approved a bill that legalizes gay marriage. Schwarzenegger has not taken an official position on the legislation but has hinted that he would veto it.
Just three months after the Assembly defeated an identical bill, 41 Democrats voted to approve the measure. Three Democrats who had abstained on the previous measure changed course and voted for the bill.
"It's always a dilemma whether to follow or lead. This is one of those times history is looking to us to lead," said Assemblyman Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana, one of the swing votes, during more than an hour of debate. The final vote was 41-35, with all Republicans and a handful of Democrats opposed.
[Lynda Gledhill, "Legislature approves gay marriage: Gender-neutral legislation in hands of Schwarzenegger, who hints at veto", San Francisco Chronicle, 7 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
We/2 Told You So
Spin is in, has been for too long. Framing is everything, at least when there are cardboard cut-outs in charge. New words pop up like mushrooms: how many times have you heard the verb "to blame-game" used in the last 10 minutes? (One would suggest that Rove shouldn't press the "blame-game" vocabularly too much lest the rhyme suggest the equally childish "to named-Plame-blame-game".)
So, I've heard two framing-for-history suggestions for popular names to attach to the New Orleans Debacle (i.e., the name-lame-blame-game):
Both seem useful to me.
And who will investigate the excruciating laxity of the administration's response to the storm? Yes, the most trusted investigator in America – George W. Bush. (Because he's a guy who can admit a mistake, right?) And I'm sure there are plenty of wing-nuts who can't even imagine why that is a stupid idea.
Besides, the idea of politicians investigating themselves has a certain appeal — I can just hear the the slogans about who should know a politician's failings better than the politician!
My latest suggestion for a T-shirt aphorism:
Disaster Relief: Bush Quits
How likely is that, we wonder? Well, consider how petulent he's looked lately having to take trips he wasn't looking forward to and not getting to ride his bicycle and having to end his vacation early which left him un-crisp and un-presidential. I don't think he's a happy camper.
I'm pleased enough by all the conservative voters who are beginning to see what they are responsible for, but could we do it a little faster please? This "Bush is horrible but I'm still glad he's President" dichotomy denial phase tends to induce vertigo and nausea. And, frankly, I've had enough of the weak excuses from neo-cons who invoke the We as they attempt to spread the blame for Bush and his quiver full of failures around to everyone — excuse me, but We/2 did tell you so, quite loudly, so let's just drop all this failure-to-see-of-the-We crap.
Is it time yet to return to the progressive agenda that what it is today (or, more precisely, what it was a few years ago before the Bush League began looting — um, finding)?
Platypus Billsight
Two selections from today's reading in Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004)
The point is that the platypus bill is not just a pair of jaws for dabbling and feeding, as in a duck. It is that too, though it is rubbery rather than horny like a duck's bill. But far more interestingly, the platypus bill is a reconnaissance device, an AWACS organ. Platypuses hunt crustaceans, insect larvae and other small creatures in the mud at the bottom of streams. Eyes aren't much use in mud, and the platypus keeps them tight shut while hunting. Not only that, it closes its nostrils and its ears as well. See no prey, hear no prey, smell no prey: yet it finds prey with great efficiency, catching half its own weight in a day.
If you were a skeptical investigator of somebody claiming a 'sixth sense', what would you do? You'd blindfold him, stop his ears and his nostrils, and then set him some task of sensory perception. Platypuses go out of their way to do the experiment for you. They switch off three senses which are important to us (and perhaps to them on land), as if to concentrate all their attention on some other sense. And the clue is given by one further feature of their hunting behaviour. They swing the bill in movements call saccades, side to side, as they swim. … [pp. 235–236]
Platypuses have about 40,000 electrical sensors distributed in longitudinal stripes over both surfaces of the bill. …a large portion of the brain is given over to processing the data from these 40,000 sensors. But the plot thickens. In addition to the 40,000 electrical sensors, there are about 60,000 mechanical sensors called push rods, scattered over the surface of the bill. Pettigrew and his co-workers have found nerve cells in the brain that receive inputs from mechanical sensors. And they have found other brain cells that respond to both electrical and mechanical sensors (so far they have found no brain cells that repond to electrical sensors only). Both kinds of cell occupy their correct position on the spatial map of the bill, and they are layered in a way that is reminiscent of the human visual brain, where layering assists binocular vision. Just as our layered brain combines information from the two eyes to construct a stereo percept, the Pettigrew group suggests that the platypus might be combining the information from electrical and mechanical sensors in some similiarly useful way. [p. 238]
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
DMort Estimates
A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.
"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.
His partner, Dan Hicks, of Paducah, Ky., was deployed Monday. Buckner, of Dickson, is on standby. Their funeral home is one of several collection sites for donations to be taken to the Red Cross in Fayetteville on Wednesday for transfer to places in need.
The 40,000 estimate does "not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from … mausoleums," Buckner told the Times-Gazette Monday.
[Clint Confeh, "Funeral director deploys to hurricane region", Shelbyville [TN] Times-Gazette, 6 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Rehnquist's Legacy, Parts I & II
Allen Dershowitz wrote about the legal career of the late Chief-Justice William Rehnquist ("Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist"). After recounting some telling incidents from Rehnquist's time (the late '40s and early '50s) at Stanford law school, which still discriminated against Jews and other minorities, he told of the memo Rehnquist wrote at the time of Brown v. Board of Education in which he maintained that the principle of "separate but equal" (from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision) was sound and should be affirmed. These remarks were surrounded by other startling facts about Rehnquist, making me wonder how in the world Rehnquist could come to seem almost moderate in the current political milieu.
Dershowitz summarized Rehnquist's law career, which "set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation" this way:
Rehnquist’s judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks, aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations, polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists, homophobes, and other bigots.
Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise regressive career.
None of this is really shocking. Informative, perhaps surprising, possibly alarming, but not shocking.
Then Dershowitz told the story of being interviewed soon after Rehnquist's death on Fox News by Colmes (nominally) and Hannity (in fact), and how rudely he was treated by Hannity when Dershowitz' remarks were not to Hannity's taste, and how the interview was ended prematurely by a petulant Hannity. None of this was even very surprising.
What shocked me was Dershowitz' saying he'd been receiving a lot of e-mail hate messages, many of which are anti-Semitic. For instance:
One writer called me “a jew prick that takes it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic].”
Now, that shocks me. You might think, given that I'm a big ol' homo myself and quite accustomed to hearing "fag" or "homo" or "queer" or any number of similar epithets casually used as combining forms to fill out the iambic feet in relatively uncreative insults, and given that I am no stranger to the idea of taking it in the a** either, I'm still shocked. Not, I think, because the writer called Dershowitz a "prick", but because the writer called him a "jew prick".
I just don't get it. I really don't. Maybe this was what Dershowitz meant when he wrote that
His [Rehnquist's] rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Reflections
Katrina LGBT Resources
Just to help spread the word about ways to help Lesbian, Gay, Bi- and Trans- people who've survived Katrina to suffer continuing homophobia while looking for relief, here is a resource page being maintained by PageOneQ. (via Avedon Carol.)
Goading into Action was Necessary
NEW YORK Appearing on the Larry King show on CNN Monday night, former President George H.W. Bush defended his son against criticism for his response to the hurricane disaster, suggesting it was mainly media-generated.
[…]
Asked about the criticism, the former president said, "I think any time there's a crisis people want to blame someone. I've never been much for the Monday morning quarterbacking and to be very candid, Larry, I think some of the criticism had been grossly unfair, particularly when they suggest the president doesn't care and all of that.['George H.W. Bush: Media Unfairly Slamming My Son (Paging "Mr. Sulzberger")', Editor & Publisher, 6 September 2005.]
While Pappy is right that there has been a lot of criticism of his boy over the Katrina issue, his implication that the criticism was unnecessary, uncalled for, and unfair is way off the mark.
As far as one can tell, it was only because of 4 solid days of outcry, indignation, horror, incredulity, and criticism directed at the President and the Bush League that they finally, finally, finally stopped vacationing so they could be seen to be returning to work. (I say that because it's not clear that any of them actually did dive back into doing anything useful, but there were ample photo-ops.)
Petitioning the government for redress is one thing; yelling and screaming at them to do what they should be doing is another. If anything, last week's criticism of the so-called administration fell short for taking so long to work, with no evidence yet that it has had any lasting effect.
Marxist Lawn Mowing
A couple of nights ago, I was mowing the grass — well, to be honest, the weeds that make up what we call our "lawn" — and thinking, as I often do. The steady noise of the lawnmower, plus the focus on repititive physical activity seems to create something approaching a meditative state for me. I've solved some interesting and challenging puzzles while mowing, and mentally written some stories.
I'd planned to mow the lawn anyway. The weather had suddenly become very pleasant, a rather abrupt change from the notably hot and icky summer we'd been having. And my schedule and social activities were such through this long weekend that I'd better do the mowing Saturday evening, because there would be no other time, practically speaking.
But what really prodded me into action was this: at 5pm our power went off. Clear blue skies, no clouds, no wind, no visible excuse for it. It just went off. I was thinking maybe it was a sympathetic outage in honor of New Orleans. Whatever. Nevertheless, it was an end to blogging for the moment and I set out to do the mowing.+
I think my mood for this mowing event was somewhat on the gloomy side. Partway through I was struck by the thought that my gas-powered lawnmower, which I bought just two years ago, would probably last longer than the world's supply of the oil that made the gasoline that it consumed. It was a profoundly sobering thought.
Between wondering about the End of Gasoline Lawnmowers and when our power might come back on, worrying over what seemed like the near breakdown of civil society in disaster-stricken Louisiana and the piss-poor response of a government that refused to serve its people, I felt like we — that is, the American We — were suddenly living in a third-world country.
Like I said, I think it was a lawnmowing episode on the gloomy side.
I did have one Eureka! moment. I remebered well that the current President during the last election — can you believe that was less than 12 months ago? How time flies when the economy is forever turning a corner and the people in power are so corrupt that they are the source of endlessly diverting headline and scandals — through the voice of the Vice-President, vowed that if We The People dared to elect the evil Democratic Candidate, we would be less safe. Guaranteed! I was trying to think of something that Kerry would do that would make the survivors of Hurrican Katrina feel any less safe. The best I could come up with: Kerry probably would have let disaster relief distract him from the vital business of government and taken his eyes off the all-important vote to repeal the estate tax this coming week, thus undermining freedom and democracy and making us all feel less safe somehow.
Well, the implication is that we are, therefore, more safe than we were — we've been told frequently enough that we're profoundly safer thanks to the active attentions of our dear leader. See? No terrorist attacks lately!*
So I was pondering, how is it that we are safer today but that I still feel less safe. Easy! It's just like the way average wages in America are rising. Recall: for the vast majority of workers, real income has fallen since 2000, but for a select and deserving few income has increased so much that the average has gone up.
Well, suppose that you're one of those deserving few, reaping the benefits of the fine, attentive government that you bought with your hard-earned money. What to do with the windfall from all those new tax cuts? Answer: invest in personal and estate security systems, of course. Then, even though the vast majority of us face more security issues today than in 2000, nevertheless average security has increased. Voilà!
As I said, this was a somewhat gloomy lawn mowing episode.
__________
+Since I never get back to it in this narrative: the power came back on Sunday morning at 2:30 am, for a total of 9.5 hours without.
*I'm reminded of that stupid childhood joke about the remarkable elephant repellant. How can you tell it's working? Seen any elephants lately?
In: All, Reflections, Splenetics
Unnamed Senior Bush Officials Not On Vacation
As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior [unnamed, unattributed] Bush official said.
[Manuel Roig-Franzia and Spencer Hsu, "Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting: White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials", 4 September 2005.]
[Later:]
Correction to This Article
A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.
Anyone want to start a pool on who the "senior [unnamed, unattributed] Bush official" might be?
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
NO Green Zone
Iraqis watching the New Orleans drama unfold are suggesting that a section of the city be found which is still dry and not on fire which can be designated a Green Zone. There a little city within a city can be set up with running water, lights, toilets, air conditioning and a mess hall suitable for entertaining visiting politicians and anchormen. The New Orleans Green Zone will have a press room with a raised platform from which government spokespersons can dispense inaccurate and/or meaningless statistics, laughable predictions of progress to come, babble about boots on the ground, and praise for the military for bringing democracy and women’s rights to the water logged city.
[Nicholas von Hoffman, “We Coulda Told Ya.", The Huffington Post, 3 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
"Biblical Proportions"
Hard work. Think 'bout it a lot.
My heart bleeds, I have to admit. I feel the President's pain.
"It was not enough for the president to bank his plane and look at the window and say, 'Oh, what a devastating site,' " Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, said in a statement on Thursday. "Instead of looking out the window of an airplane, he should have been on the ground giving the people devastated by this hurricane hope."
White House officials, already sensitive that Mr. Bush is suffering the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and under pressure to manage a catastrophe of what they called biblical proportions, reacted with frustration.
[Elisabeth Bumiller, "Democrats and Others Criticize White House's Response to Disaster", New York Times, 2 September 2005.]
This is where I, the smug, insensitive, atheistic bleeding-heart liberal jump in and exclaim: "Hey! It's their Bible. Should be a easy as pie!" Won't the President just pick up the phone and jawbone a bit with The Father?
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Chimps? Bush?
Has anyone tried yet to sequence the President's DNA to determine how close he is to chimpanzees, genetically speaking, of course?
THE CHIMP: COMPLETE GENETIC MAP CONFIRMS DARWIN'S THEORY.
Scientists at MIT and Washington University, St. Louis, announced Wednesday that they have determined the precise order of the 3 billion bits of genetic code needed to make a chimpanzee. There is only a 1 percent difference from the human genetic code. But for that 1 percent, chimpanzees would have a seat in the UN. Robert Waterston, who led the Washington University team, was quoted in yesterday's Washington Post saying, "I can't imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas."[Robert Park, "What's New Friday September 2, 2005", What's New.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Boo! They're Republicans
Just because Maureen Dowd wrote
What Hillary has going for her is exhaustion. Exhaustion kicks in with any party in power for eight years, let alone one that tricked the country into war.
I can't stop freely associating things like:
Republicans are the Hallowe'en Party: every day is Trick or Treat
Will they be taking over the holiday — long considered the national "gay holiday", by the way — as a national day to celebrate radical conservatism? Perhaps they should even consider incorporating Labor Day into a two-month celebration, since Labor with a big "L" is hardly a force to contend with these days. Why, do that and they even get Columbus Day thrown in for free!
Back to Dowd, I did like the idea of Geena Davis as President, even if it was only for a television show.
In: All, Eureka!, Splenetics
Tupper Inspiration
Earl Tupper was born in New Hampshire in 1907. He came up with the idea for air tight plastic food storage containers while working at Dupont. In 1938 he founded the Tupperware Plastics Company in Orlando, Florida and in 1946 introduced his line of Tupper Plastics at hardware and department stores. Sales were dismal at best. He struggled along until 1951 when a take-charge woman named Brownie Wise came along, saved his plastic products from extinction and built him an empire. She came up with the brilliant idea to eliminate the retailers and sell direct to the housewives in living rooms while having a party. Yes, the Tupperware Party is an Americana cultural event of the highest order. There is no question about that!
In 1958, Mr. Tupper sold his company for sixteen million dollars and retired for life.
[Charles Pheonix, "Slide of the Week: Tupperware Factory, Mexico, 1967", God Bless Americana, 2 September 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Curious Stuff