Meanwhile...

Fighting the Foo

2011-09-18T17:44:00.000-04:00

The Westboro Baptist Church brought their virulent mixture of hatred, stupidity and religion to the Foo Fighters show in Kansas City Friday. Why? Who the hell knows. But the Foo Fighters fought the foo, counter-protesting the protestors by showing up on a flatbed truck to do "Keep It Clean (Hot Buns)."

"God Bless America! It takes all kinds; I don't care if you're black or white or purple or green, whether you're Pennsylvanian or Transylvanian, Lady gaga or Lady Antebellum. Men loving women and women loving men and men loving men and women loving women -- you all know we like to watch that. But what I'd like to say is, God Bless America, y'all!"

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2011-06-12T04:25:00.000-04:00

You might have been wondering after all my recent troubles, but yeah, I'm still online, though you wouldn't know it from all the activity here.

It took me a while to get all the things done that I had to do to get a new computer up and running the way I want it -- the downloading, the file transferring, the updating, the backing up, etc. -- but all that was finished some time ago. The only real glitch is that there's a setting somewhere that's keeping Firefox from remembering any of my passwords. It won't even ask me if I want to save them. Hmm.

I've been spending most of my free time trying to catch up my Civil War blog. In case you didn't know, it's the sesquicentennial (that's 150 years) anniversary of the Civil War, and I've been doing a series of posts that tells what happened on the day of the post 150 years ago as it relates to the war.

I've been working on this since October 2009 with several posts on John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. At first the posts were few and far between, but as the 150th anniversary of the start of the war got closer, the posts got more frequent. I got all the way up to the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's election to president in November 1860, just when things were really starting to happen. The Deep South states were about to secede, and the crisis at Fort Sumter was building. But I was unable to get online for quite a while, leaving a huge hole in the overall timeline -- until April of this year.

But I was back online in time for the beginning of the war at Fort Sumter. Or so I thought. I posted the day before the anniversary of the start of the war, then my computer fritzed out on me and I was gone again for another month. This was another big hole in the timeline just as some big things were going down.

I've been working hard to fill in the holes, plus keep the timeline current moving forward. I'm happy to report that the first hole -- from November 1860 to April 1861 -- is now filled in with backdated posts. It might not be exactly kosher, but you do what you can do. I've still got the other hole to fill, but I'm working on it. Hopefully, once that's done I'll have more time to spend updating this blog with something interesting.

I've also started the NASCAR blog back up again. I'm not posting there like I'd like, but I'm at least summarizing the races again.

Occasionally I might post a picture or two on the old photo blog. I've finally turned my Flickr account pro and am dumping a lot of old pictures there a little at a time. Lately I've posted a bunch of photos I took last year of my grandson's baseball team. I've also posted a few photos that I didn't take, scans of snapshots my uncle sent back from Germany in 1965.

If I'm not doing any of the above stuff for a few minutes, you might find me on the Twitter or checking in on the Facebook or getting caught up with some of my blog and news reading.

See you around the web!

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

2011-05-28T20:01:00.001-04:00

I was very saddened today to hear of the death of Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron, 62, died at a Manhattan hospital Friday. The cause of death wasn't disclosed, but he had a long, painful history of substance abuse.

If you read through some of the obituaries you'll see Scott-Heron credited as a progenitor of rap music. That's true in a way -- a lot of his work was just spoken-word pieces (mostly his poems) set to music, but the music was much jazzier than anything you might consider rap today.

He never achieved much more than cult status, but was best known for "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother.

Scott-Heron, who had a masters in creative writing from John Hopkins University, wrote a couple of novels and a couple of books of poetry, and recorded fifteen studio albums and nine live albums. Other noteworthy songs include "We Almost Lost Detroit," "The Bottle," "Home Is Where the Hatred Is," and cover versions of Bill Withers's "Grandma's Hands" and Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues." My favorite was "B Movie," a scathing protest against Ronald Ray-Gun and us for electing him -- "We're all actors in this, I suppose."

Come with us back to those inglorious days, when heroes weren't zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all-American men were like Hemingway, to the days of the wondrous "B" movie.

The Lightning Strike

2011-05-14T12:23:00.000-04:00

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via FlickrSo, yeah, we're all a little skittish after the tornado outbreak. In my case, a tornado devastated a little subdivision about a half a mile from my house, then either veered away or passed right overhead. It was close enough that I heard the train sound you're supposed to hear when a tornado comes. So, yeah, that was still pretty fresh in my mind.

After two torrid days that would have seemed much more normal for July, Friday was cooler and rainy. The forecast called for scattered thundershowers, but it was mostly just some patches of rain. Maybe a few rumbles of thunder way off in the distance.

And there I was working at my brand-new computer. Had just bought it the day before. Had spent a good chunk of my worldly fortune on it.

I don't know where the lightning struck, but it must have been a truly impressive sight. I just caught a flash of it outside my bedroom window. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Hmm. Must still be way off in the distance.

Suddenly, BOOM!

It was like standing next to a big cannon when someone suddenly decides to shoot it off without any warning. No, strike that (pun intended.) It was like the heavens suddenly split apart. I guess, in a way, that's what happened.

I 'bout fell out of my chair. My first thought was about the well-being of my new investment. Computer innards don't react too well with lightning. But the lights didn't even flicker.

I debated for a bit about shutting the computer down. It probably wasn't the wisest choice, but I kept it on and kept working. I was right in the middle of one of the dozens of tasks you have to do before you can start to enjoy a new computer. It worked out all right though. I didn't hear much of anything else out of the storm except for the long, low rumble as the heavens stitched itself back together again.

Hope your Friday was not as eventful.

Let's Try This Again

2011-05-13T18:26:00.000-04:00

A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet...well, okay, maybe it's not that funny.

The last time I posted here I had just gotten back online after a long absence of several months. I even made a comment that hopefully that might be my last online absence for a while. Everything was working great. I was ecstatic.

The good times were over as quickly as they began. About two and a half days into my triumphant return, my Internet connection started acting a little buggy. It was dropping out and slowing down. After three days, I couldn't connect to the Internet at all. It seemed like the problem was with the ISP and I tried to work with them to resolve the problem, but it just wasn't happening. I finally discovered that the problem was on my end with my computer -- specifically, I think my network card might have kicked the bucket.

Rather than put any more money into my old computer, I decided to wait a bit and get a new one. Problems led to delays, and now here we are a month older. All the pieces finally fell into place yesterday and I'm back again. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Rebooting

2011-04-08T04:48:00.000-04:00

Don't you just hate it when you're following a blog and it suddenly goes dead on you -- no updates, no new posts, not a word of warning? Did the author die or is he/she going through some sort of crisis that precludes posting inconsequential stuff on the Internet?

In my case, it was the latter. I'm still alive and kicking but have been trying to work through some things lately. To quote Genesis (the band, not the book of the Bible), "I wish that I could really tell you all the things that happened to me and all that I have seen."

My life became somewhat akin to a train wreck But I feel like I've turned a corner and can now see a tiny bit of daylight at the end of the tunnel. I'm slowly working my way out of the rut toward that big, bright, beautiful tomorrow. Hopefully, my next unexpected absence is way off in the future.

When I left you, I was working on resurrecting and restructuring my blogs. Once upon a time, I had several different blogs, each devoted to totally different topics, namely the diverse things I was interested in -- sports and photography and the Civil War. One day I had the bright idea to close them all down and consolidate everything here at the old Meanwhile... blog. The result, as you could probably guess, was a jumbled mess. Somewhere along the line I got particularly interested in writing about NASCAR, which only added to the jumble.

I finally bit the bullet, reopened the old blogs and started moving everything back where it belongs. Now, if you're interested in the Civil War, you can go to my Civil War blog and not have to wade through photos or NASCAR results. Incidentally, I'm was working on a series of posts there -- the Civil War Calendar. This was a "This Day in History"-type of series exploring the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War. When last I left you, I had just posted about the election of Abraham Lincoln. The series will resume and I've got a lot of blanks to fill in before the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the true start of the war, which is fast approaching.

My recently renamed photo blog, Visualizations, is also back. I'm hoping to pull out the camera more often and update it more frequently. I also have a big backlog of photos I haven't shown you yet. I'm going to try to post something daily, but I'm not going to be religious about it. I'd rather have quality over quantity.

I've also started a new sports blog. I'm still toying around with the name. (I'm really not too good at naming these things.) For now, I've settled on "NASCAR, etc." because it'll generally be about NASCAR and whatever other sports story crosses my radar screen.

I'm not sure what direction this blog will take. I'm not very interested in writing about politics much anymore. It's all been done before. But this is sorta the mothership of my own personal blogosphere, so at least I can write about what's going on on the other blogs while I try to think of something fresh and interesting. Stay tuned.

Saturday Six: Peanuts

2010-10-02T20:25:00.000-04:00

Image via WikipediaOver at Patrick's Place, Patrick is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Peanuts comic strip with a Saturday Six batch of questions about the beloved comic strip. Peanuts is not my favorite strip of all time, but I would have to put it in my Top 5 with Calvin and Hobbes, Doonesbury, Bloom County, and The Far Side. Peanuts was a bit tamer than my other favorites, but could get pretty deep and philosophical at times.

Anyway, on with Patrick's questions:

1. Who is your favorite Peanuts character?

Jeez! That's like asking what's my favorite Beatles album. All of them. I guess I've always been partial to the level-headed, intelligent, unflappable Linus. Either him or Snoopy and his many alter egos. I'm also a big fan of Pigpen for some reason. And the duo of Peppermint Patty and Marcie is intriguing too.

2. Which Peanuts character is your least favorite?

Patty and Violet, the mean girls who seemed to exist only to make Charlie Brown's life even more miserable.

3. If it were up to you, would Lucy have to let Charlie Brown kick the football?

Yeah, probably just once. I always thought that a good idea for a strip would have been for Lucy to hold the ball in place just once, but for Charlie Brown to flub the kick.

4. When did you last read a Peanuts comic strip?

Today. I get a daily email of comic strips from Comics.com. They rerun old Peanuts strips. Today's edition is a strip that was first published in 1963.

5. Which of the television movies based on Peanuts was your favorite as a kid?

The Halloween show -- It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I especially love the trick-or-treating. "I got a rock."

6. Should the strip ever be drawn by someone else, even if that person agrees to keep the same values its creator held so dear?

NO! While that has worked out alright for several long-running strips, I'm against it for Peanuts. If Charles Schultz had had a successor in mind and worked with him for a while, it might have worked. Since he didn't -- precisely because he did not want the strip to continue after his death -- I'd say "no." Just keep rerunning the old ones.

Weekend Assignment: History

2010-09-12T16:55:00.003-04:00

This week's Weekend Assignment is History...

We don't all live near the site of a battlefield or other world-famous event, but any place has its own history: political, cultural, even natural history. How aware are you of the past of the town, city or state where you live now? Share with us a story of local history.

I actually do live near the site of a battlefield (several, in fact), and I'm very aware of the area's history. I live in northwest Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The region's main moment in the historical spotlight happened nearly 150 years ago during the Civil War. Chattanooga was an important railroad center, where several lines met that connected most of the South. There were several battles fought for control of the town and there are historical markers and monuments scattered all over the region.

Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee occupied Chattanooga in the summer of 1863. Union General William Rosecrans sent his Army of the Cumberland around Bragg's flank, threatening Bragg's supply line from Atlanta. Bragg withdrew from Chattanooga and headed south into Georgia. The armies met at the Battle of Chickamauga. The Union army was routed, but withdrew into Chattanooga, occupying the town. Bragg besieged the town to try to starve the Federals out, but General Ulysses S. Grant arrived with many reinforcements and, after several battles, managed to drive the Confederates out of the area.

There are many, many interesting stories and anecdotes that occurred during this period. It is hard to pick just one, but one of my favorites involves John Wilder.

Before the war, John Wilder was a successful businessman. He ran a foundry in Ohio and invented many hydraulic machines. When the war broke out, he joined the army as a private, but was quickly elected captain by the other men (a very common practice at the time.) Although he wasn't a professional soldier, he advanced quickly and was a colonel within a year.

When Rosecrans's army first advanced on Chattanooga, Wilder's Lightning Brigade was at the vanguard of the attack. He took a position on Stringer's Ridge, across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga, and began shelling the town. His battery, commanded by Eli Lilly, who would later become very famous as the founder of a large drug company, succeeded in sinking two steamboats and causing a great deal of panic in the town.

Wilder settled in Tennessee after the war. He built and operated the first two blast furnaces in the South at Rockwood, Tennessee. Then he established an ironworks in Chattanooga to manufacture rails for railroads. In 1871, he was elected mayor of Chattanooga. That has to be an unprecedented achievement -- from shelling a town to mayor of the same town in just a few short years.

Rearranging the Furniture

2010-09-07T05:20:00.001-04:00

I've been having a hard time keeping one blog updated, so the logical thing to do (as I saw it) was to restart my other blogs. I just couldn't stand the hodgepodge of varying topics here, so my Labor Day weekend project was to separate out some of these topics into other blogs.

All the Civil War posts here will eventually be moved back to Civil War Meanderings.

All of my posted photos will eventually be moved back to Foto Frenzy.

I'm going to keep most of the dated sports posts, including most of the NASCAR stuff, here, but the informational posts and all sports stuff from here on out will be posted on a new blog, The Southern Sports Retort. (I had a hard time coming up with a name that was not already being used on Blogger.)

I'm not sure what direction this blog, my mothership, will take. Hopefully I can get re-energized and start posting about news and politics again along with some miscellaneous topics. Of course, any political posts I make here will be crossposted at The Blue Voice.

A good deal of the transferring of posts has been done and should be finished by the end of the week. It may not be strictly kosher to be moving these posts all around, but, in the long run, I think it will be better to have all this stuff divided up. We'll see what happens.

"OK Sarah"

2010-06-03T03:18:00.001-04:00

Check out singer/songwriter Wesley Ellis. He's working on his first album, "Broke Is the New Black" and is currently competing in the 2nd Toyota Music MySpace contest. If you like this too, go there and help spread the word.

"Bloodbuzz Ohio"

2010-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I did a Weekend Assignment post about poetry. The gist of the post was that I didn't care much about poetry unless it was set to music as lyrics. I also made the debatable point that maybe our best poets aren't really poets at all, but are songwriters.

Which brings me to the subject of my favorite new band of the moment (well, new to me anyway), The National. I like their sound, and whoever writes their lyrics -- I suspect lead vocalist Matt Berninger -- has a poet's sensibilities. Instead of just coming out and saying what he means, everything is symbolism and metaphor and hidden meaning -- so much so that I'm really confused about what it all means.

Case in point, "Bloodbuzz Ohio." When he says, "I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees," he surely doesn't mean that literally. It seems like it's related to the old adage that you can't go home again -- "...but Ohio don't remember me." Is he talking about a trip back home or is he just reflecting on the idea of Ohio? And there's all that other stuff -- "stand up straight at the foot of your love," "lay my head on the hood of your car," "I still owe money to the money to the money I owe," etc. -- most of the song actually -- that doesn't seem to have much to do with anything else. It all sounds pretty good though...

LYRICS:

Stand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up
Stand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I never married, but Ohio don't remember me

Lay my head on the hood of your car
I take it too far
Lay my head on the hood of your car
I take it too far

I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know

I'm on a blood buzz
Yes, I am
I'm on a blood...buzz
I'm on a blood buzz
God, I am
I'm on a blood...buzz

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I never married, but Ohio don't remember me

I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know

I'm on a blood buzz
Yes, I am
I'm on a blood...buzz
I'm on a blood buzz
God, I am
I'm on a blood buzz.

So what's it all about? Any ideas?

If you're stumped on that one, try your hand at figuring out "Brainy." This is an obsessive love song -- very similar thematically to the Police's "I'll Be Watching You" or Sarah McLachlan's "Possession" -- or is it? I'm especially intrigued by the amazingly enigmatic couplet, "Everywhere you go is swirling, everything you say has water under it." The song is on YouTube, the lyrics are on SongMeanings.com.

The Nashville Flood

2010-05-05T00:15:00.001-04:00

Here in the Chattanooga area, we were supposed to be slammed by a late weekend/early work week storm. We managed to avoid most of it. Nashville was not so lucky.

Weekend Assignment: National Poetry Month

2010-05-03T04:25:00.001-04:00

This week's Weekend Assignment is all about poetry.

Weekend Assignment #316: National Poetry Month

As April wraps up, let's not let it get away without celebrating National Poetry Month. For this assignment, please share with us something about poetry. Tell us about your favorite poet, or quote us a few lines of your favorite poem, or if poetry doesn't happen to be something you enjoy, tell us why!

April (and the weekend) wrapped up before I could get to the assignment, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

When I first saw the assignment, I was all set to start a diatribe about how much I really don't like poetry. I studied it enough in my younger days that I understand the concept, but as Heinlein would say, I don't grok it. I don't get it on some basic level of understanding. If you want to tell me about something important, give me a few solidly written paragraphs of prose and I'll understand it better.

But after thinking about it some more, I realized that I do like poetry. Just make it rhyme (even if just a little), put it to music and sing it, and I'll get it.

When I was a young tyke, my mother went back to school. One of her textbooks treated some of the pop and rock lyrics of the day -- Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, Bob Dylan songs -- as poetry. As I leafed through the book and picked out songs I knew, it gave me a deeper appreciation of them -- that they were important enough to be considered "poetry." Even now, I sometimes have the crazy notion that some of our greatest poets are not exactly poets after all -- they're songwriters.

Continuing on that idea, I'll tell you about a favorite poem, the Baby Boomer generation's "Beowulf "(or maybe it's their "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"). In the late '70s, the rock band Jethro Tull released the album Aqualung. Ian Anderson, the leader of the band, was dismayed that rock critics were calling it a concept album, and said, "If the critics want a concept album we'll give the mother of all concept albums and we'll make it so bombastic and so over the top."

The next album really was over the top -- a parody of the progressive rock album from groups like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, one long, continuous, seamless 44-minute song that stretched over both sides of an LP. In addition to their standard guitar, drums, piano, Hammond organ and flute (yes, flute), they added the harpsichord, xylophone, lute, trumpet and string section. The concept was that the lyrics were a poem written by a fictitious eight-year-old English schoolboy named Gerald Bostock.

The album cover was another parody, a spoof of an English community newspaper. The main story was about young Gerald being disqualified from a literary competition "following the hundreds of protests and threats received after the reading of his epic poem 'Thick as a Brick' on B.B.C. Television last Monday night."

The entire epic poem, "Thick as a Brick," actually written entirely by Ian Anderson, is after the jump if you're interested. You can hear the song by Googling "Thick as a Brick."

THICK AS A BRICK

Really don't mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper -- your deafness a SHOUT.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Your sperm's in the gutter -- your love's in the sink.
So you ride yourselves over the fields
and you make all your animal deals
and your wise men don't know how it feels
to be thick as a brick.

And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away
in the tidal destruction -- the moral melee.
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
as the last wave uncovers the newfangled way.
But your new shoes are worn at the heels
and your suntan does rapidly peel
and your wise men don't know how it feels
to be thick as a brick.

And the love that I feel is so far away:
I'm a bad dream that I just had today
and you shake your head and said it's a shame.

Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth.
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth.
Spin me down the long ages: let them sing the song.

See there! A son is born
and we pronounce him fit to fight.
There are black-heads on his shoulders
and he pees himself in the night.
We'll make a man of him, put him to a trade
teach him to play Monopoly, not to sing in the rain.

The Poet and the painter casting shadows on the water --
as the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea.
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other --
as the failing light illuminates the mercenary's creed.
The home fire burning: the kettle almost boiling --
but the master of the house is far away.
The horses standing -- their warm breath clouding
in the sharp and frosty morning of the day.
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword.
And the youngest of the family is moving with authority.
Building castles by the sea, he dares the tardy tide to wash them all aside.

The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river
where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea:
the builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose
and contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need.
The young men of the household have all gone into service
and are not to be expected for a year.
The innocent young master -- thoughts moving ever faster --
has formed the plan to change the man he sees.
And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword.
And the oldest of the family is moving with authority.
A-coming from across the sea, he challenges the son who puts him to the run.

What do you do when the old man's gone?
do you want to be him?
And your real self sings the song.
Do you want to free him?
No one to help you get up steam --
and the whirlpool turns you way off-beam.

LATER.
I've come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways.
My father was a man-of-power whom everyone obeyed.
So come on all you criminals! I've got to put you straight
just like I did with my old man -- twenty years too late.

Your bread and water's going cold. Your hair is short and neat.
I'll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me.

You curl your toes in fun as you smile at everyone.
You meet the stares; you're unaware that your doings aren't done.
And you laugh most ruthlessly as you tell us what not to be.
But how are we supposed to see where we should run?

I see you shuffle in the courtroom with your rings upon your fingers
and your downy little sidies and your silver-buckle shoes.
Playing at the hard case, you follow the example
of the comic-paper idol who lets you bend the rules.

So! Come on ye childhood heroes! Won't you rise up from the pages
of your comic-books, your super crooks and show us all the way.
Well! Make your will and testament. Won't you join your local government?
We'll have Superman for president, let Robin save the day.

You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time.
The other kids have all backed down and they put you first in line.
And so you finally ask yourself just how big you are --
and you take your place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars.
And you wonder who to call on.

So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They're all resting down in Cornwall, writing up their memoirs
for a paper-back edition of the Boy Scout Manual.

LATER.
See there! A man is born and we pronounce him fit for peace.
There's a load lifted from his shoulders with the discovery of his disease.
We'll take the child from him, put it to the test
teach it to be a wise man, how to fool the rest.

QUOTE
We will be geared to the average rather than the exceptional
God is an overwhelming responsibility
we walked through the maternity ward and saw 218 babies wearing nylons
says here that cats are on the upgrade
upgrade? Hipgrave. Oh, Mac.

LATER
In the clear white circles of morning wonder,
I take my place with the lord of the hills.
And the blue-eyed soldiers stand slightly discoloured
(in neat little rows) sporting canvas frills.
With their jock-straps pinching, they slouch to attention,
while queuing for sarnies at the office canteen.
Saying -- how's your granny and good old Ernie:
he coughed up a tenner on a premium bond win.

The legends (worded in
the ancient tribal hymn)
lie cradled in the seagull's call.
And all the promises they made
are ground beneath the sadist's fall.

The poet and the wise man stand behind the gun,
and signal for the crack of dawn. Light the sun.
Do you believe in the day?
Do you believe in the day?

The Dawn Creation of the Kings has begun.
Soft Venus (lonely maiden) brings the ageless one.
Do you believe in the day?
Do you believe in the day?
The fading hero has returned to the night
and fully pregnant with the day,
wise men endorse the poet's sight.
Do you believe in the day?
Do you? Believe in the day!

Let me tell you the tales of your life
of your love and the cut of the knife
the tireless oppression, the wisdom instilled
the desire to kill or be killed.
Well, let me sing of the losers who lie
in the street as the last bus goes by.
The pavements are empty: the gutters run red
while the fool toasts his god in the sky.

So come all ye young men who are building castles!
Kindly state the time of the year
and join your voices in a hellish chorus.
Mark the precise nature of your fear.
Let me help you pick up your dead
as the sins of the fathers are fed
with the blood of the fools
and the thoughts of the wise
and from the pan under your bed.
Let me make you a present of song
as the wise man breaks wind and is gone
while the fool with the hour-glass is cooking his goose
and the nursery rhyme winds along.

So! Come all ye young men who are building castles!
Kindly state the time of the year
and join your voices in a hellish chorus.
Mark the precise nature of your fear.
See! The summer lightning casts its bolts upon you
and the hour of judgment draweth near.
Would you be the fool stood in his suit of armour
or the wiser man who rushes clear.

So! Come on ye childhood heroes! Won't your rise up from the pages
of your comic-books --your super-crooks and show us all the way.
Well! Make your will and testament. Won't you? Join your local government.
We'll have Superman for president, let Robin save the day.

So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?
They're all resting down in Cornwall -- writing up their memoirs
for a paper-back edition of the Boy Scout Manual.

OF COURSE
So you ride yourselves over the fields
and you make all your animal deals
and your wise men don't know how it feels
to be thick as a brick.

The Cost of Offshore Drilling

2010-05-01T16:30:00.000-04:00

The first photo is a Greenpeace ad. Both photos come from a Huffington Post slide show.

Drill, Baby, Drill

2010-05-01T16:15:00.000-04:00

Drill, baby, drill! Worst case scenario: we won't have shrimp...or oysters...or Gulf Coast marshlands...or...

On My Reading List

2010-04-29T02:03:00.001-04:00

I sorta, kinda want to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but I'm concerned that I might not understand some of it since I've never read anything by Jane Austen before. I really, really, really want to read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer.

It even has its own trailer...

Weekend Assignment: Summer Reading

2010-04-19T03:54:00.000-04:00

The Weekend Assignment has a new home, a blog of its very own. This week's assignment has to do with our summer reading plans...

Okay, yes, I know, it's still spring, but this is when I begin thinking about what kind of summer reading I might like to have on hand for those too-hot-to-clean days of summer. So, for this week's assignment, I want you to share with us the kind of summer reading you look forward to the most. Sci-fi? Horror? Political Thrillers? Romance? It's all good. Now, tell me more!

I've written before about my strange reading habits. I used to be a voracious reader until the Internet came along and gobbled up all of my free time. Now, it takes me much longer to get through a book, but I'll read from almost genre except romance.

My only hard and fast rule is that my next book is always completely different from what I'm reading now. To illustrate: I've been slowly (very slowly) working my way through the bibliography of Charles Dickens, and at this moment I'm about 120 pages into Great Expectations. Before that, there was (working backwards) a quick read about the history of NASCAR; The Black Ice by Michael Connelly, a police procedural thriller/mystery; Mila 18 by Leon Uris, a great piece of historical fiction; The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, an atypical King work -- more unsolved mystery than horror; and The Barrens and Others by F. Paul Wilson, a book of mostly horror short stories.

I've never really noticed any perceptible changes in my reading habits from one season to the next. Summer, winter, spring or fall, my reading doesn't fit any sort of pattern or genre. In the coming months, possibly during the summer, I'll try to find another Dickens book, another King book (I'm waiting for the local library to cough up a copy of Under the Dome), and anything else that strikes my fancy. The point is that I don't know what I'm going to be reading this summer, but the weather outside probably won't play much of a factor.

Quotable

2010-04-16T15:12:00.000-04:00

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on President Obama...

"It's very interesting to be with him. The most important thing that distinguishes him from many other people -- I won't name anyone by name -- he's a thinker. He thinks when he speaks."

Hmm. Wonder who he might be thinking of?

The Battles for Chattanooga: Murfreesboro to Dalton

2010-03-28T19:56:00.000-04:00

While I'm not any sort of historian other than a complete amateur, I've long been fascinated by all the history that happened around my hometown. Chattanooga was a major theater of operations during the Civil War as both armies struggled to gain and retain control of the rail center.

This post is an attempt to organize some of the various things I've written about the battles for Chattanooga, an index of all the other posts. This project will grow in time and as I add new posts, I'll update this list, placing them in some sort of chronological order.

The Battles for Chattanooga

Chattanooga and the Western Theater: A Prologue

The Battle of Stones River

Chickamauga Battlefield -- A Picasa Web Album

The Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga

The Army of Tennessee at Chickamauga

King's Pyramid

Lytle's Pyramid

"War Scrawls Its Autograph"

Missionary Ridge -- A Picasa Web Album

The New York Peace Monument

Ed Stein, Rocky Mountain News

2010-03-18T16:05:00.001-04:00

Redesigning

2010-03-13T06:43:00.000-05:00

There's a new look around here. I used the new Blogger Template Designer to change the digs around. How do you like it?

A Typical Day at Work

2010-02-23T05:35:00.000-05:00

Geech by Jerry Bittle

Quotable

2010-02-19T20:58:00.000-05:00

"I am not happy about the way things are. I pray for President Obama every single day. But tell you what. Homey made this bed, now he has got to lay in it."

-- "Actor" Stephen Baldwin at the CPAC convention today

NASCAR Basics: Window Strips & Roof Flaps

2010-02-14T03:39:00.000-05:00

An article at NASCAR.com explains how the new window strips are supposed to keep the Cup cars from going airborne at Daytona and Talladega...

"If you ride down the highway and you put your hand out the window and you hold your hand in the direction the car is traveling, there's not a lot of resistance," Darby said. "But turn your hand sidewise and it'll come back and slap you in the forehead. It's a very similar effect."

"If you picture the strip on the car, and you're going down the straightaway, it really doesn't have that much effect. But as the car starts to spin and the strip now sees the air pressure, it does two things. It slows the rotation of the car down, and as the air comes across it, it packs air on top of the trunk lid to help push the car back to the ground before it lifts."

And the reason why the trunk fin is on the left side of the window is also inherently logical.

"It's actually lined up with the left edge of the left roof flap," Darby said. "Because as the air hits that fin, part of what happens is that the airflow travels up to the flap. There's a misconception about the flap. A lot of people think that air pressure blows them open. It's quite the contrary.

"The flaps are contoured on the top and it works much like an airplane wing to where the airspeed that travels over the flap actually pulls it open. If we can put more air to the flap and accelerate where it goes across it, then it's going to open faster and stay up stronger. So part of the air helps deploy the flap and the rest of the air -- because the trunk lid is wide and you have more surface area to come across -- helps hold the car back down on the ground."

Even though the trunk fin seems to be the best solution for Daytona and Talladega at this point, Darby said the process is always evolving -- and more improvements may come from additional wind tunnel testing.

The Olympics Are Starting!

2010-02-12T13:31:00.001-05:00

Arlo & Janis by Jimmy Johnson

Daddy's Home by Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein

Authority

2010-02-11T04:24:00.000-05:00

Film student Ronnie Bruce created this video for a class project on typography. He chose a poem with a great message...

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Sarah Palin Is a F**king Retard

2010-02-11T03:53:00.001-05:00

Just some subtle satire...

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Sarah Palin Uses a Hand-O-Prompter

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economy

Quotable

2010-02-06T23:04:00.000-05:00

"Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money."

-- RNC Chairman Michael Steele

I'll just have to take his word for that.

Quotable

2010-02-03T02:42:00.000-05:00

"Speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me personally, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution."

-- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee

Weekend Assignment: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

2010-01-30T02:50:00.000-05:00

Karen has a weekly assignment at Outpost Mâvarin. This week's assignment is pretty straightforward...

Weekend Assignment #302: Do you Tweet? Why or why not?

Yes, I am a Tweeter...or a Twitterer...or a Twit, whatever the people who use Twitter are calling themselves, and you can find me here.

I was avoiding social networking sites like the plague; they just didn't seem like my cup of tea. Several people told me I needed to get on Twitter, but I kept putting them off. One evening, my wife basically just put me on Facebook, and within a day or two, I finally decided to take the Twitter plunge. Both have worked out pretty well for me. On Facebook, I've managed to reconnect with several friends I lost track of over the years. Twitter has turned out to be a pretty useful tool to quickly get an overview of the day's news events, keep up with the few friends I've found on the site, and occasionally promote my blog. And although I'm not sure that I could repeat the process, I somehow managed to link my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that anything I tweet shows up on Facebook as a status update.

Extra Credit: If you do use Twitter, how many people follow you? How many do you follow?

It's not my goal to get on Twitter and interact for hours at a time, so I only follow 20 people. Some are not "people" at all. I follow MSNBC's and National Public Radio's News and Politics tweets, as well as tweets from AlterNet, ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post. There are also a few liberal individuals I follow, like Rachel Maddow, Bill Mahre and Thom Hartmann. Andy Borowitz has funny tweets about the day's events. I follow a couple of sites that cover NASCAR news, one that was tweeting pretty regularly about the health care debate, and John Scalzi. The remaining handful are personal online friends.

I'm trying to keep it from getting out of hand. I like being able to log on to the site and work my way through the tweets that have accumulated since the last time I was on in about half an hour, including time to check out interesting links. But I'm looking for more people to follow. I'm interested in useful information, not necessarily what you're having for lunch (unless you're a friend -- then I might be interested). I like people that tweet often, but not obsessively. I like people who retweet useful information from the people they follow.

I have 14 followers so far.

2010-01-29T00:27:00.000-05:00

Robert Ariail, The State

A Spending Freeze?

2010-01-27T03:53:00.000-05:00

I'm trying hard not to buy into all this voter anger directed at Obama. I'm trying to be optimistic that he is going to learn from his first year mistakes and the economy is going to improve and the next three years are going to be better, but a spending freeze? That's what you're going with? A spending freeze?

To get the proper level of disdain I feel about this proposal, watch this short clip of Jim Mora. Every time he says "playoffs" replace it with the words "a spending freeze."

Rachel Maddow lays out how Obama and the Democrats have driven all the way down the field to the one-yard line and are now ready to punt..

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And by all means, yes, if you're going to have a spending freeze, don't dare mess with the bloated Pentagon budget. Jeez!

For Your Consideration

2010-01-24T03:43:00.000-05:00

I filed the link to this NY Times story away in my bookmarks and forgot about it until just recently -- about twenty minutes ago. The article talks about Danny MacAskill and how he "can divide his life in two: before his YouTube video and after." I can understand that. I've been able to ride a bicycle for most of my life and can still ride one now when the need arises. I've seen a lot of people ride bikes, but I've never seen anything like this, the video the Times was talking about...

Obama Responds to the Supreme Court

2010-01-23T22:16:00.002-05:00

In a followup to my previous post, President Obama devoted this week's weekly radio and Internet address to discussing the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, vowing that "as long as I am your president, I'll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you."

Transcript:

One of the reasons I ran for President was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington. And the result was a national agenda too often skewed in favor of those with the power to tilt the tables.

In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests. On my first day in office, we closed the revolving door between lobbying firms and the government so that no one in my administration would make decisions based on the interests of former or future employers. We barred gifts from federal lobbyists to executive branch officials. We imposed tough restrictions to prevent funds for our recovery from lining the pockets of the well-connected, instead of creating jobs for Americans. And for the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House – the people’s house.

We’ve been making steady progress. But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. By a 5-4 vote, the Court overturned more than a century of law – including a bipartisan campaign finance law written by Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold that had barred corporations from using their financial clout to directly interfere with elections by running advertisements for or against candidates in the crucial closing weeks.

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.

(more of the transcript and the video of the address after the jump)

All of us, regardless of party, should be worried that it will be that much harder to get fair, common-sense financial reforms, or close unwarranted tax loopholes that reward corporations from sheltering their income or shipping American jobs off-shore.

It will make it more difficult to pass commonsense laws to promote energy independence because even foreign entities would be allowed to mix in our elections.

It would give the health insurance industry even more leverage to fend off reforms that would protect patients.

We don’t need to give any more voice to the powerful interests that already drown out the voices of everyday Americans.

And we don’t intend to. When this ruling came down, I instructed my administration to get to work immediately with Members of Congress willing to fight for the American people to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision. We have begun that work, and it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done.

A hundred years ago, one of the great Republican Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, fought to limit special interest spending and influence over American political campaigns and warned of the impact of unbridled, corporate spending. His message rings as true as ever today, in this age of mass communications, when the decks are too often stacked against ordinary Americans. And as long as I’m your President, I’ll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you.

Video:

The only real troubling part comes about three minutes into the video, ten paragraphs into the address, when Obama says that he's instructed his administration to get to work with Congress "to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision." As I mentioned in my previous post, most members of the Reactionary Party have visions of overflowing campaign coffers -- their version of sugarplums -- dancing in their heads. And, of course, they made the decision some time ago to oppose anything this president is for, consequences be damned.

A FRESH HELL or How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America Democracy

2010-01-23T08:08:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

My friend Carly likes to discuss politics with me and sent me an email Thursday night with the subject line, "And what about this FRESH HELL?" She was talking about the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and FRESH HELL (in all caps) is one of the best descriptions I've heard so far on the decision. The conservative justices on the Roberts Court in their infinite wisdom...oops, sorry, that should be infinitesimal wisdom...decided that biggest problem with American politics was that there just wasn't enough corporate money involved.

You see, in today's Orwellian world, money is speech and corporations are people with all the rights you and I enjoy with none of the responsibilities, and the conservative majority, those damned judicial activists, went far beyond the limited legal questions of the case before them and overturned decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations in political campaigns, including a large part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act that the same court, albeit with a different lineup, declared constitutional just six years ago in McConnell v. FEC, and even broadened the scope of the case to include constitutional questions raised by a 1990 case (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce), which they also managed to overturn. The decision also threatens many state laws.

In the minority dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens declared, "Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law." Later, he declared, "Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech." Perhaps that's next. Stevens concluded his dissent with...

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

For a fascinating look at how far this court overreached and how badly they managed to subvert American democracy call up the .pdf file of the decision and skip ahead to page 88 where Justice Stevens's dissent begins, then read until you feel your head start to explode. If you're not that ambitious or masochistic, the Progressive Review has a very small excerpt.

The Roberts court struck down a law dating back to 1947 which prohibits corporations and labor unions from using money from their general treasuries to produce and air campaign aids in congressional and presidential races, and struck down a McCain-Feingold provision that prohibits corporations and unions from airing campaign ads in the 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. They did manage to retain a century-old ban on donations from corporations from their general treasuries directly to federal candidates and upheld disclosure requirements on campaign activities.

So why is this such a big deal? In 2008, the Fortune 100 companies amassed $600 billion in profits. Just 1% of that enormous total ($6 billion) would double the amount spent by Obama, McCain, and every candidate for the House and Senate in 2008 combined. The Roberts Court expressed concern that the free speech rights of corporations were being suppressed, but even with the restrictions that were in place, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still managed to spend $123 million in lobbying efforts in 2009, the financial sector invested $5 billion in influence peddling in the past decade, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent $26 million in 2009 alone to influence health care reform, with the individual drug companies ponying up tens of millions more in the effort.

This imbroglio started with Hillary: The Movie, a hatchet job produced by Citizens United when Hillary Clinton began her presidential run in 2008. The organization wanted to run advertisements for the film and wanted to air the movie on DirectTV, but a lower court, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, decided that the movie and the advertisements ran afoul of a McCain-Feingold provision that prohibits corporations, unions and special interest groups from "electioneering communications" or speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate, ruling that the film had no other purpose than to discredit Clinton.

The imbroglio over corporate personhood dates back much further, and, while corporations already had limited rights as "artificial persons," seems to have come about due to an obiter dictum headnote by a court reporter, Bancroft Davis, who just happened to be the former president of the Newburgh and New York Railroad, in a case from the days of the robber barons. The case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, was unremarkable, having to do with how much the railroad owed the county in property taxes. In his headnote, a short summary of the decision and an outline of the main facts and arguments, Bancroft wrote, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." Somehow, this headnote which addressed an issue that never came up in the case in question (as he mentioned in the headnote) became the legal basis for all this nonsense about corporate personhood which drove the Roberts Court to rule as it did in the Citizens United case.

Reactions are varied to Citizens United v. FEC. Most Republicans are giddy over the prospect of overflowing campaign coffers in upcoming election, spouting a lot of nonsense about the First Amendment and free speech. Most Democrats are stunned and dismayed, and exploring options like hearings, additional legislation, and even a Constitutional amendment. Remarkably, around 40 corporate executives have already sent a letter to congressional leaders urging them to approve public financing. They are tired of getting fundraising calls from candidates and fear that it's only going to get worse in the wake of Thursday's ruling. And Colorado Republicans are already planning a lawsuit to challenge voter-approved state limits on campaign contributions in the wake of the decision.

In a rare move for a sitting president, Obama condemned the ruling as "a green light to a new stampede of special interest money" and added, "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."

John McCain is one of the few Republicans that is not elated over the decision, but his reaction thus far has been very subdued:

I am disappointed by the decision of the Supreme Court and the lifting of the limits on corporate and union contributions. However, it appears that key aspects of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), including the ban on soft money contributions, remain intact.

From Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI):

"It is important to note that the decision does not affect McCain-Feingold’s soft money ban, which will continue to prevent corporate contributions to the political parties from corrupting the political process. But this decision was a terrible mistake. Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president.

Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns. Just six years ago, the Court said that the prohibition on corporations and unions dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns was ‘firmly embedded in our law.’ Yet this Court has just upended that prohibition, and a century’s worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government.

The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections. In the coming weeks, I will work with my colleagues to pass legislation restoring as many of the critical restraints on corporate control of our elections as possible."

From Gary Ruskin of Green Change:

"The U.S. Supreme Court's decision today in Citizens United may bring an end to democracy in America. It is effectively a corporate coup d'etat.

The court has created a new right for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of wealth to purchase elections at all levels of government. This decision will devastate the integrity and moral legitimacy of our government and our elected officials. It will bring more corruption than our nation has known in more than a century.

It is sobering to see that the forces of corruption have such firm control of our nation's highest court.

Starting today, large corporations will rule our country. Their money will dominate our elections and our elected officials, and will purchase more influence than we can imagine. Our nation's giant corporations have used our own Constitution against us to grab power for themselves. We should have no pretence that it is any other way.

Today's decision marks the beginning of dark times for our nation. It is hard to see how we will emerge from them. Obviously, we must work for constitutional amendments to remove corporate money from politics, and more broadly, to end corporate personhood. These will be exceedingly hard to win. But try we must. And it is only the beginning of what we must do."

From Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) on a segment on Countdown with Keith Olberman:

"I'm shocked. I'm shocked by this decision. This is the most irresponsible decision by the Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision over 100 years ago...The Dred Scott decision has some analogy to it. In the Dred Scott decision, the Court decided that slaves and their free-born children do not have any constitutional rights. Today, the Court, in effect, decided that only corporations have constitutional rights. This will lead to a drowning flood of money from corporations in exchange for favors, and it basically institutionalizes and legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them, and will able to beat to death the politicians who don't.

In anticipation of Thursday's decision, Grayson introduced five bills to offset some of the damage, and he has a great penchant for naming bills. They are the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, the Public Company Responsibility Act, the End Political Kickbacks Act, the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act, and the Ending Corporate Collusion Act. He discusses the decision and the proposed legislation with Olbermann in this video clip...

From Ralph Nader:

Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.

This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow “King Corporation” and restore the sovereignty of “We the People”!

David Bossie, president of Citizens United, is understandably thrilled with the decision:

There can be honest disagreements about the role of money in politics. But I would hope that, whether Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, we can all agree that any attempt by the government to silence a citizen should be met with a stern rebuke. This is not an issue that is easily categorized as "conservative" or "liberal." In our case, the ACLU joined with the NRA, and the AFL-CIO joined with the Chamber of Commerce in support of Citizens United and the First Amendment. We were fighting as much for the rights of filmmakers like Michael Moore as we were for our own right to produce, advertise and distribute films.

Thankfully, the Roberts Court has put the brakes on a slide down a very slippery and very dangerous slope. With yesterday's ruling, so-called "reformers" have been put on notice that, as Justice Kennedy said in the opinion of the court, "when Congress finds that a problem exists, we must give that finding due deference; but Congress may not choose an unconstitutional remedy."

The Legacy of MLK

2010-01-18T06:59:00.001-05:00

This NBC News clip tells the story of the final days of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "I must confess that that dream that I had that day has at many points turned into a nightmare."

Tennessee Finally Finds a Coach

2010-01-16T04:38:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

In the interest of proper disclosure, I should begin by saying that my two favorite college football teams are Alabama and whoever is playing Tennessee, but the Volunteers have a rich, storied tradition and deserved better than they got from Lane Kiffin who bolted with five years left on a six-year contract when Southern Cal came calling.

It was a rough few days up in Knoxville. Kiffin, after promising Tennessee fans the moon, suddenly announced that he was leaving. I understand. He was a So Cal assistant for many years and jumped at the chance to return home to accept his dream job. Tennessee fans thought he already had a dream job and didn't understand. Students, players and others surrounded the athletic buildings on campus and burned mattresses and T-shirts with Kiffin's "It's Time" slogan, painted obscenities on The Rock, and forced Kiffin and his family to spend their last night in Knoxville under police protection.

The most troubling aspect of the whole kerfuffle was that Tennessee was now without a head football coach (although they could have just made interim coach Kippy Brown's title more permanent) less than three weeks before National Signing Day. They needed a new coach before the weekend when potential recruits would be visiting the campus. They tried to woo Will Muschamp away from Texas, but the defensive coordinator is just waiting on Mack Brown to retire so that he can take his place as head coach; his dream job.

David Cutcliffe, the head coach at Duke and a two-time former assistant at Tennessee, was also wooed but he passed on the job. I was amazed. I know that the head coaching job at Tennessee is his dream job, but he honored the commitment he had made to Duke...

"You follow your heart in big decisions," Cutcliffe told ESPN.com's Heather Dinich. "I have a lot of ties and a lot of people that I'm very close to, and a lot of respect for the University of Tennessee, but my heart is here. We've worked very hard these two years to change the culture, to change the team physically. You feel like the job's not done, and in this era, it bothers me, what we do as coaches, moving here and there. This is mid-January. Nothing about that felt right to me as a person."

Utah's Kyle Whittingham also reportedly turned down the job. The final interviews were with Temple's Al Golden, Houston's Kevin Sumlin, and Louisiana Tech's Derek Dooley. The Vols settled on Derek Dooley, the son of legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley. Dooley, like Kiffen, comes to Knoxville with a very thin head coaching record. He was just 17-20 in three seasons at La Tech, but won the Independence Bowl in 2008. He also served as the school's athletic director and worked as an assistant under Nick Saban for seven seasons at LSU and with the Miami Dolphins.

It's a big jump from the WAC to the SEC, and Dooley's first task was to settle Vols fans down. He offered some reassuring words in his introductory press conference...

"The times of worrying about what happened is over," Dooley said.

Dooley talked about how he learned early that Tennessee represented the essence of college football, and remembers watching the weekly television shows of former coaches Johnny Majors and Phillip Fulmer. He also promised he will not try to sell Tennessee in a sound bite, perhaps taking a shot at Kiffin, who was reprimanded by the Southeastern Conference for brash comments.

"Everything we're going to do is going to be done with a foundation of integrity with every aspect of the program," Dooley said. "We're going to represent this institution with class on and off the field."

The restless nights are finally over in Knoxville...or maybe they're just beginning.

2010-01-16T01:24:00.000-05:00

Ed Stein, Rocky Mountain News

Quotable

2010-01-14T03:24:00.000-05:00

Writing in the New Yorker, Calvin Trillian claims to have predicted the Underwear Bomber...

In a book I published in 2006 called “A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme,” here is what I said, in one of the non-rhyming passages, about the so-called Shoe Bomber of 2001: “I’m convinced that the whole shoe-bomber business was a prank. What got me onto this theory was reading that the shoe bomber, a Muslim convert named Richard Reid, had been described by someone who knew him well in England as ‘very, very impressionable.’ I had already decided that the man was a complete bozo. He made such a goofy production of trying to light the fuses hanging off his shoe that he practically asked the flight attendant if she had a match. The way I figure it, the one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, ‘I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.’ So this prankster set up poor impressionable Reid and won his bet. Now Khalid is back there cackling at the thought of all those Americans exposing the holes in their socks on cold airport floors. If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his M.O., referred to in the press as the underwear bomber, you’ll know I was onto something.”

That’s right: I predicted the Underwear Bomber in 2006. You could look it up. Around the same time, I repeated the prediction in public appearances and, as I remember, a couple of times on television. (I firmly believe that, in this world of ever-diminishing irreplaceable resources, using a line only once represents the sort of wastefulness our society can ill afford.) And what transpired on Christmas Day three years later? Another bozo tries to blow a hole in an airplane and succeeds only in setting his underpants aflame in a manner that might have rendered him ill equipped for the seventy-two heavenly virgins who were to be his reward if he succeeded. And how is this bozo described by friends and family? Naïve. And where was this bozo educated? University College London, within commuting distance of that diabolical trickster Khalid the Droll.

Tales of the NBC Pinheads

2010-01-14T02:11:00.000-05:00

David Letterman comments on the situation at NBC. I especially love his dream for American television: "I want everyone who wants a show to have a show."

What About Sarah Palin?

2010-01-10T23:26:00.000-05:00

On 60 Minutes this weekend they ran a story that delved into Game Changer, a new book on the 2008 presidential campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. In "Revelations from the Campaign," they talk to Halperin and Heilemann and focus on the Republican side of the campaign, specifically, how did they decide on Palin for vice president. Funny stuff...

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I also got a kick out of the bit about Senator O'Biden.

Alabama Wins!

2010-01-09T06:53:00.000-05:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

More than 24 hours later, and I'm still giddy over the Alabama Crimson Tide's 37-21 victory over the Texas Longhorns in the BCS National Championship Game. It's Alabama's first championship since 1992, and either their eighth or twelfth or thirteenth or seventeenth national championship -- it all depends on who's doing the counting and what they're counting.

The eight championships are from the Poll Era (1936-present) and include AP and UPI polls, and not necessarily both in the same year. The College Football Data Warehouse says that Alabama has twelve championships dating back to 1925. The school claims thirteen championships and has the merchandise to prove it. If you count every championship recognized by any sort of reputable source, whether it was a consensus pick or not, you can count seventeen for the Crimson Tide. The school picked up four trophies for their Thursday night win -- the crystal BCS trophy along with others from the Associated Press, the National Football Foundation, and the Football Writers Association.

The SEC is now 6-0 in BCS Championship games and has won the last four straight. Florida won in 2006 and 2008, LSU won in 2007. Coach Nick Saben became the second coach (Urban Meyer) to win two BCS championships and the first to win two at different schools (LSU in 2003). Running back Mark Ingram is the second player (Matt Leinart) to win the Heisman Trophy and the BCS championship in the same season, and just the second running back (Tony Dorsett) in the Poll Era to win the Heisman and any kind of championship in the same year.

The game was a little closer than the final score would indicate. Alabama started slow and made a serious early mistake when they threw up an interception on an fake punt attempt, but the defense limited Texas to just two field goals. Alabama woke up and took over and was ready to go into the locker room with a 17-6 halftime lead, but with the seconds winding down in the first half, Texas tried a little shuttle pass. The receiver showed off his juggling skills until Alabama lineman Marcell Dareus snatched it and ran 28 yards for the score.

The play gave Alabama a 24-6 halftime lead and almost cost them the game. They came out flat in the second half and let Texas's high-powered offense cut the lead to just three. Another great Alabama defensive play settled it. Linebacker Eryk Anders got a blindside sack on freshman QB Garrett Gilbert. The ball came loose and Courtney Upshaw recovered it on the Texas three. Three plays later, Ingram punched it in to get the lead back to ten. Alabama got another turnover and scored another last-minute touchdown. Kicker Leigh Tiffin capped a record-setting career at Alabama by missing the extra point for the 16-point win.

About This Blog

2010-01-09T05:17:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

This blog breaks one of the biggest cardinal rules of blogging; it doesn't just deal with one topic. That's what they tell you to do when you start blogging; pick a topic and focus in on it like a laser. When I first started blogging, that's what I did, focusing almost solely on politics on AOL Journals.

I also tried the bit about focusing on one topic when I left AOL and started blogging here on Blogspot. At "sotto voce USA" it was blogging politics all over again. Then I decided I wanted to write about other topics as well. I started a now defunct sports blog, and a Civil War blog, and a photo journal.

Since I'm barely motivated enough to maintain one blog on a consistent basis, you can imagine what a chore it was to manage four. Then I started blogging about politics with a bunch of other AOL journeymen at "The Blue Voice." By the way, that's still an ongoing concern and I still contribute to it on a much too infrequent basis. The group blog confused things by robbing my main blog, the first one, of its focus...politics.

During a long Internet layoff, I decided to start anew and consolidate everything here. So here it is: a blog that encompasses almost everything I'm interested in. I've always been interested in politics to one degree or another. I've been pretty apathetic about it of late, but occasionally get motivated enough to offer my two cents about one thing or another and usually cross-post anything political at "The Blue Voice." I became interested in the Civil War from spending most of my life in the Chattanooga area where a good chunk of it actually happened. I've been a sports fan all my life...also to varying degrees at different times. I used to watch almost anything that was on, even Australian Rules Football when that was all I could get. I'm more selective these days, focusing mainly on NASCAR, SEC football, and the Braves, Falcons, and Titans (and mainly in that order). I've also had an on-again-off-again affair with photography over the years.

So its all here -- all the stuff that I like to blog about. Pick a topic on the sidebar to the right or start at the top and read straight down. Whatever. That's what I'm here for. Keep in mind that a lot of the topics to the right take you to series of posts that are sometimes works in progress.

I made the blog's domain name fdtate.blogspot.com because I didn't want the domain name to be the title. I envisioned changing the blog's title from time to time just to shake things up a bit. I've changed names exactly once. This blog was originally called "life...the universe (and everything)," a title borrowed from Douglas Adams and indicating the wide range of topics that would be here. After another long Internet layoff, I sorta did a system reboot -- changing the template and changing the title to "Meanwhile..." I saw it as akin to Monty Python's "and now for something completely different" line. As in, the last post was about the Civil War, meanwhile here's something else.

I've probably told you most of this stuff before...mostly in the first post back in September of 2007. It just seems appropriate to refresh the mission statement from time to time.

YeeHaw! -- The Coca-Cola Caper

2009-12-31T21:48:00.002-05:00

Raw Video...

Yeah, that's a Coke machine. Dude snatched it from the front of a Dollar General Store in Riceville, Tennessee. Just wrapped a big chain around it and took off down the highway. It wasn't long before concerned citizens called the cops. After a chase of several miles, he was tazed for his trouble and charged with vandalism, evading arrest, resisting arrest, and theft. See how many cola related puns you can count in the local newscast.

the local newscast (WVTC-9)...

How Can You Tell Christmas Is Over?

2009-12-30T15:18:00.000-05:00

"Frazz" by Jef Mallett

A Decade's Worth of Music in Search of a Theme

2009-12-30T04:38:00.000-05:00

"F Minus" by Tony Carillo

I'm of the opinion that decades and centuries and the like should start with the Year One -- that is, the 20th century should have started on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000, and the 00's should have started on January 1, 2001 and shouldn't end until December 31, 2010 -- but I'd like to get this decade from hell over with as soon as possible so I'm bowing to popular convention. And since a lot of sites are doing some sort of end-of-the-decade roundup, I thought I'd roundup some of my favorite songs from the 00's.

I originally planned a more complete year-by-year roundup, but it all seemed a little much. This is a more concise collection. This is not a history of the decade in music or a list of the biggest sellers or the most critically acclaimed music; it's just a collection of songs that made me say, "Wow!"

A Perfect Circle - "3 Libras"

The frontman for Tool started A Perfect Circle with a guitarist buddy. It took Tool a while to grow on me, but the side project was a little more accessible. I am a Libra so this worked out nicely.

Coldplay, et al. - "Clocks"

Rhythms del Mundo combined some big hitmakers, like Coldplay, with some Cuban musicians to get that Buena Vista Social Club sound.

Wilco - "Jesus, Etc."

Reprise Records rejected Wilco's fourth album and severed ties with the bands. As part of the buyout deal, the label let the band keep the rights to the album. Wilco eventually sold Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to Nonesuch Records. The punchline? Reprise and Nonesuch are both subsidiaries of the same company, Warner Music Group.

Nickel Creek - "When In Rome"

I don't care too much for country music, but I love bluegrass...and whatever it is, a bluegrass/rock jazzed-up fusion, that Nickel Creek does.

Radiohead - "The National Anthem"

Radiohead really started to test the limits of the envelope in the early 00's. This video was the first runner-up in MTV Latin America's "Make Your Radiohead Video" contest.

Sarah McLachlan - "World On Fire"

Instead of spending the money to produce a lavish video, they shot a stripped-down video with just the singer in a chair with a guitar and spent the money in other ways.

John Mayer - "Neon"

When Mayer released his first album Room for Squares in 2001, rock critic Erik Crawford asked, "Is he the consummate guitar hero exemplified when he plays a cover of Stevie Ray Vaughan's 'Lenny', or is he the teen idol that the pubescent girls shriek for after he plays 'Your Body Is a Wonderland?'" I don't know, but he does pretty well in this live acoustic album track.

KT Tunstall - "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree"

I didn't think too much of this song until I saw the performance that generated all the attention, the performance on Later...with Jools Holland where she did the whole song by herself.

U2 and Green Day - "The Saints Are Coming"

U2 and Green Day performed this song on Monday Night Football before the Falcons-Saints game on September 25, 2006, the first game played in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina.

NASCAR News Update

2009-12-26T20:16:00.000-05:00

Even though it's the off-season, there's still plenty going on in the world of NASCAR...

The latest news comes just this morning of the Christmas evening death of Donald "D. J." Richardson from complications of the H1N1 virus. Richardson was the rear-tire changer for Kevin Harvick's No. 29 Chevrolet. Richardson's flu turned to pnemonia and he was admitted to the intensive care unit at Health Alliance Hospital in Leominster, Massachusetts, in early December in acute respiratory distress. He was 37. Here's the announcement/statement from RCR.

NASCAR has changed the eligibility requirements for the 2010 Budweiser Shootout at Daytona. The old rules, which were just put in place in 2009, called for the top six drivers in owner's points for each manufacturer to be included in the race. That was a problem since Dodge is now down to just three Cup drivers, those at Penske Racing. The new rules allow past Bud Shootout and Daytona Cup race winners (Daytona 500 and Coke Zero 400 winners) to make the entry list. Former Cup champions and the current Raybestos Rookie of the Year (Joey Lagano) are also eligible.

The Bud Shootout is a non-points exhibition race that opens the NASCAR season the week before the Daytona 500. Previously, when Budweiser was the sponsor of the Pole Award, the entry list for the Shootout focused on pole winners from the previous season. That changed for the 2009 race when the Pole Award sponsorship went to rival brewery Coors. (Updated Meanwhile... Bud Shootout post)

Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kevin Harvick, Jamie McMurray, Bill Elliott, and Bobby and Terry Labonte are among those who now make the 2010 race under the new rules. David Reutimann, A. J. Allmendinger, Elliott Sadler, Marcos Ambrose and Brad Keselowski are among those who would have qualified under the old rules, but are now out of the 2010 race.

On December 18, the operators of the Milwaukee Mile suddenly announced that they would not be holding their scheduled 2010 NASCAR races -- Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series races on the weekend of June 18-19. The operators of the track, the Wisconsin State Fair Park Board, was unable to find a promoter for the 2010 season. At the time, NASCAR issued a statement saying that they "were aware of this possibility" and that they were working on "alternative opportunities." The Nationwide alternative opportunity was up the road at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, at Road America. The 4.048-mile, 14-turn road course will take the Milwaukee Mile's slot on the 2010 Nationwide schedule. Truck Series alternative opportunities haven't been announced yet.

(Danica's debut, a major award for Jimmie Johnson, and more after the jump)

Danica Patrick got plenty of on-the-job training last weekend at the Daytona ARCA test. Rain hampered the first day's testing session, but Patrick got plenty of drafting experience on Day Two, and seemed to have the hang of it by Day Three. Patrick will make her stock car debut in the February 6 ARCA opener at Daytona, but will skip the Daytona Nationwide Series opener and make her debut in that series at California on Feb. 20.

"The race (the Daytona Nationwide race) is basically a Cup race, some 30 odd drivers in Cup run in it," she said. "So, is that the right time for me to start or not? You only get one grand opening, so I've heard. We want it to be the right opportunity."

In other news, Jimmie Johnson claimed a major year-end award. He was named the Associated Press 2010 Male Athlete of the Year. The overall sports award came after Johnson became only the fourth three-time winner of the Driver of the Year award. Tiger Woods was named the Male Athlete of the Decade.

The founders of Kentucky Speedway are through with their lawsuit against NASCAR. After the judgment against them in the U.S. Court of Appeals, they've decided not to pursuit their remaining legal options.

Marty Reid was named the lap-by-lap announcer for ESPN races, replacing Dr. Jerry Punch who will return to his previous role as a pit road reporter.

A. J. Allmendinger pleaded no contest to a DWI charge and received a 60-day suspended sentence, 18 months unsupervised probation, 24 hours of community service and $100 fine plus court costs.

CJM Racing, which had 12 Top 10 Nationwide finishes in 2009, is ceasing operations.

And the owners of Motorsports Authentics, the NASCAR memorabilia company, are attempting to reorganize the company to avoid bankruptcy.

Another Health Care Hurdle

2009-12-25T00:20:00.001-05:00

Amazingly, that 60-vote bloc of Democrats and Independents hung together through a series of cloture votes and the Senate was finally able to pass their version of a health care bill. The final bill only needed 50 votes, but, in a rare Christmas eve sunrise session, the Senate voted for the bill 60-39. Every Reactionary voted no -- they'd probably kick anyone who voted aye out of the party. The final vote took about 15 minutes, the entire session lasted about 30, then lawmakers headed out of town.

The senator that didn't show up for the vote was Jim Bunning (R-Ky). The Louisville Courier-Journal says this "caps a year of unusual incidents involving the senator." Bunning has missed 21 votes this month, one more than the ailing 92-year-old Robert Byrd.

If you slept through your high school civics class, we now have two versions of a health care bill; one from the House and one from the Senate, and there are significant differences that will have to be reconciled. The House bill is better, but the final bill will look more like the Senate bill to make it through the 60-vote gauntlet again. The House is back in session on January 12; the Senate on January 19. President Obama would like to have a bill to sign before the State of the Union address, but final passage might slip on into February.

Paul Krugman weighs in...

If progressives want more, they’ll have to make changing those Senate rules a priority. They’ll also have to work long term on electing a more progressive Congress. But, meanwhile, the bill the Senate has just passed, with a few tweaks — I’d especially like to move the start date up from 2014, if that’s at all possible — is more or less what the Democratic leadership can get.

And for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle — even if it falls somewhat short in practice — that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.

Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008 — an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism. (For what it’s worth, the reform that’s being passed is closer to Hillary Clinton’s plan than to President Obama’s). This made health reform a must-win for the next president. And it’s actually happening.

So progressives shouldn’t stop complaining, but they should congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big win for them — and for America.

"The 12 Days of Christmas"

2009-12-24T15:20:00.000-05:00

The Muppets with Jimmy Fallon...

This Looks Ominous

2009-12-24T14:58:00.001-05:00

Tell me this doesn't look ominous. Darth Vader rings the opening bell Tuesday at the New York Stock Exchange flanked by the stormtrooper color guard. This was some sort of stunt for Lucasfilms -- like they need the publicity. Toronto's Globe and Mail had a caption writing contest with a photo of Vader down on the trading floor -- a lot of Goldman Sachs references in the comments.

(Photo by Dario Cantatore/Getty Images)

Big Nate

2009-12-24T13:35:00.000-05:00

Lieberman Socks

2009-12-17T15:31:00.001-05:00

An ad from MoveOn.org...

MoveOn launched a fundraising drive Tuesday. The initial goal was to raise $400,000 to run an ad campaign against Lieberman and to set up a fund to oppose his reelection in 2012. They've already passed $1 million.

Weekend Assignment: D.I.Y.

2009-12-13T18:36:00.000-05:00

At Outpost Mavarin, Karen wants to know about our handyman skills...

Weekend Assignment: #297: There are times when we hire professionals to build or fix things for us, and other times when we attempt the job ourselves. Some people pride themselves on their DIY skills or electronics geekery, while others leave it to the experts as much as possible. How about you? Is your first instinct to call for help, or do it yourself?

Like last weekend's assignment, you can put me down for somewhere in between. As Clint Eastwood once said, "A man's got to know his limitations," and I'm pretty good at knowing mine. If it's a simple project like changing the oil in the car or something similar, I'll tackle it myself. The last such job was replacing some of the drain pipes under the kitchen sink. If it's a little more complicated I'll try to find someone who knows what they're doing to come over and help me, i.e., make sure I don't screw it up worse than it was before I started. If it's still under warranty or absolutely necessary, I'll send it in for repairs or call someone to come out. It all depends on how complicated it's going to be. I'm not real handy, but I do have some skills.

With cars, I can usually figure out what's wrong with it by what it's doing, or at least narrow it down to a couple of possibilities. I may or may not know how to fix it, but I can tell you what's wrong with it. Around the house, I can saw a board or hammer a nail or connect some PVC pipes, but forget about any kind of major renovations. Computers are a special category. I've often stated that I know just enough about them to turn a minor problem into something major.

Of course, the whole topic reminds me of that song by Peter Gabriel...

Commercial Music

2009-12-09T01:25:00.001-05:00

Twitter has a very active thread (or topic) called MusicMonday. The idea is to mention what you're listening to and maybe even link to it. I linked to a YouTube video -- "1901" by Phoenix. Even if you're not familiar with the song, you've heard parts of it. Part of the intro and part of the chorus is featured in a Cadillac commercial that seems to play fairly constantly on TV.

Anyway, I linked to the video and it played fine for about a day, then suddenly started going to a page that says that the video is not available in my country. I'm fairly used to YouTube making videos unavailable, though usually for copyright violations. I don't understand it, but I'm used to it. If I link to a video of a song and someone happens by and plays it and likes it, what's the downside for the record company? That they might accidentally sell an album or a single that they wouldn't otherwise?

Until they make this one unavailable, this is another version of the song, a live version from June when Phoenix appeared on the David Letterman show. See if you recognize the song from the commercial...

Taco Bell has been blitzing the airwaves with a new commercial, and the music was driving me nuts. It's the one with the chorus that keeps repeating "One more time" over and over. I knew the song from somewhere in the dim recesses of my youth, and narrowed it down to one of those late '70s or early '80s New Wave ditties. I just couldn't figure out who in the hell did the song. I finally had to break down and Google it. If you'd given me a thousand guesses I never would have gotten Joe Jackson...

Weekend Assignment: Scandalized

2009-12-06T22:16:00.002-05:00

I haven't done one of Karen's Weekend Assignments in a while. I don't know why. I just got out of the habit. I like this one...

Weekend Assignment: #296: The press and the public always seem to be obsessed with one scandal or another, from Tiger Woods to Balloon Boy. Do you eagerly follow such stories, try to avoid them, or something in between? Does the identity of the celebrity (or would-be celebrity) affect how interested you are?

Put me down for "something in between." I'm a major news junkie so it's virtually impossible for me to avoid the media's scandal of the day, but I'm certainly not obsessed with them either. When a scandal or any other big celebrity news story comes along, I usually pick up on the major points and ignore the rest, switching the channel or turning the page as the story drags on through Day Three, Day Four and beyond. I'm certainly not interested in knowing every teeny, tiny detail of Tiger's life.

You can usually catch me on my soapbox, railing about how the media is wasting so much time on such nonsense while there are much more important stories going on. For example, in the past few days, while the media has devoted major resources in tracking down every single one of Tiger's mistresses, the escalation of the Afghanistan War, the health care battle in the Senate, the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen, and other major stories haven't received the attention they deserve.

Extra Credit: Have you ever purchased a supermarket tabloid?

Not for myself. My wife goes through phases where she likes to read them, and I've occasionally picked one up for her and even occasionally flipped through one. One of them (the National Enquirer, I think) has a pretty good crossword puzzle, and almost all of them have some sort of puzzle page. That's about the most that I get out of them.

Image via Wikipedia

My wife is partial to supermarket tabloids like the Enquirer, Star Magazine and US Weekly, but my favorite one to flip through while I'm waiting in line is the Weekly World News, which bills itself as "the world's only reliable news." They're great at covering all the major stories that the mainstream media somehow misses, like how Obama met with aliens at the White House to avert a Fourth of July invasion, or how Michael Jackson faked his own death, or that Megan Fox is a man, or that the Earth's rotation has suddenly increased to 66,666 mph -- "the Speed of Satan!"

An aside: When I was younger, I used to know who all the people were in the celebrity tabloids. Now, I don't have a clue who a lot of these people are. They must be reality show stars or something.

Rob Rogers

2009-12-04T08:45:00.000-05:00

Soup to Nutz by Rick Stromoski

2009-12-01T05:04:00.000-05:00

Quotable

2009-12-01T00:06:00.000-05:00

"Dream big but be patient. You never know when the next George W. Bush is going to come along and give you a once in a lifetime opportunity like he gave me, but you have to be patient."

-- an example of the advice former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gives to his political science students at Texas Tech

The Knight Life by Keith Knight

2009-11-26T20:58:00.002-05:00

Packers 34, Lions 12

It's been a pretty good Thanksgiving holiday for me. I finally managed to see all of my kids today -- my daughter had to work during the shank of the day and one son was stuck at his in-laws all day, but both managed to stop by for a while, and we ate dinner with the other son at my sister-in-law's house -- and through a Facebook connection I hooked up with my best friend from high school, a guy I hadn't seen in about 30 years, for a while Wednesday. Happy Thanksgiving to one and all!

Update: I was going to link to this mental_floss blog post about why the Lions and Cowboys play on Thanksgiving when I posted this, but they were having server problems or something. Here it is now.

"Bohemian Rhapsody"

2009-11-25T20:46:00.000-05:00

The best cover versions are those where the artist doesn't try to recreate the original song note for note, but reinterprets it to fit their own style. Like this version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" by the Muppets...

Quotable

2009-11-25T02:57:00.000-05:00

"It is starting to become clear to me what the GOP strategy is- they are trying to turn the entire country into California- an ungovernable mess where the majority is incapable of governing because of an obstinate and insane minority party and ridiculous procedural hoops.

"And when you realize that, it makes complete sense why no one in the Republican party stands up to the lies spewed by Sarah Palin, like, for example, this nonsense about mammograms and death panels. She is flat out lying, as she does most every time she opens her mouth, but no one in the GOP will call her on it because it is to their advantage to make the country ungovernable. They like it when there is so much bullshit and disinformation out there that the public is incapable of being informed. Sarah Palin is cheaper and far more effective than all the bullshit factories the Koch Foundation and others have been funding for decades."

-- John Cole

The Cost of Dying

2009-11-23T00:26:00.000-05:00

60 Minutes had an excellent segment Sunday on "The Cost of Dying" -- how Medicare (and by extension, we the taxpayers) spent $50 billion, more than the budget for the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education, on end-of-life treatment, doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of a patient's life.

They're talking about people with terminal illnesses whose lives are prolonged in ICUs at a cost of about $10,000 a day. That might sound crass, but, in many cases, it's treatment that doesn't do much good, that only delays an inevitable death.

"Families cannot imagine there could be anything worse than their loved one dying. But in fact, there are things worse. Most generally, it's having someone you love die badly," (Dr. Ira) Byock (of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H.) said.

Asked what he means by "die badly," Byock told Kroft, "Dying suffering. Dying connected to machines. I mean, denial of death at some point becomes a delusion, and we start acting in ways that make no sense whatsoever. And I think that's collectively what we're doing."

A vast majority of Americans say they want to die at home, but 75 percent die in a hospital or a nursing home.

We've heard all the diatribes from the tea-baggers -- rationing, death panels, and pulling the plug on grandma -- and thus this topic has become off-limits, but...

Multiple studies have concluded that most patients and their families are not even familiar with end-of-life options and things like living wills, home hospice and pain management.

"The real problem is that many of the patients that are being treated aggressively, if you ask them, they would prefer less aggressive care. They would prefer to be cared for at home. They'd prefer to go to hospice. If they were given a choice. But we don't adequately give them a choice," (Dr. Elliott) Fisher (of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy) said.

"At some point, most doctors know that a patient's not likely to get better," Kroft remarked.

"Absolutely," Fisher agreed. "Sometimes there's a good conversation. Often there's not. You know, patients are left alone to sort of figure it out themselves."

Read the story or watch the video. There are also two short web extra videos, "At Home, At Peace" and "Comfort and Costs."

"Immigrant Song"

2009-11-22T22:25:00.001-05:00

I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I've been something of a Luddite, shunning some of the more popular sites around the web, content to just do my thing here at the old Blogspot, but my wife basically forced me onto and into Facebook. A few days later -- actually in the wee hours of this morning -- I finally broke down and, on the advice of several friends, signed up for a Twitter account.

One of the first people I found on Facebook was my best friend in high school. That got me thinking about the days when "when in doubt, I whip it out" seemed like a viable personal philosophy. Led Zeppelin was a favorite back then and this song still kicks a generation later...

NASCAR Tracks: Homestead-Miami Speedway

2009-11-20T03:40:00.000-05:00

This is another post in a series on the NASCAR Sprint Cup tracks. I started this series when the 2008 season began, and planned to feature each track as it came up on the schedule. Due to a couple of unscheduled absences from the Internet, I still haven't quite finished the whole list two full seasons later. I'm planning to profile the few remaining tracks before the start of the 2010 season. Here's the list thus far.

Image via Wikipedia

Homestead-Miami Speedway is located in Homestead, Florida, southwest of Miami. Florida developer and promoter Ralph Sanchez proposed building the track to help the area recover from Hurricane Andrew. With financial backing from H. Wayne Huizenga, groundbreaking began on August 24, 1993, exactly one year after the hurricane. The first race, the Jiffy Lube Miami 300, a Busch (Nationwide) Series race, was held on November 5, 1995, and was won by Dale Jarrett.

When the track first opened it was a four-turn, rectangular oval, a smaller 1.5-mile version of Indianapolis Motor Speedway with long 1760-ft. straightaways, flat turns and short chutes. The racing was not good. The flat, almost 90° turns made passing difficult, and the geometry of the track created severe crash angles. In 1997, the track was reconfigured -- the turns were still a rather flat 6°, but the aprons were widened and the ends of the track were rounded off. The track went from a rectangle to more of a traditional oval.

After a massive expansion that saw the seating capacity almost double, the NASCAR Winston (Sprint) Cup series made its debut at the track on November 14, 1999. Tony Stewart won the inaugural Pennzoil 400. 2002 was the year of the first Ford Championship Weekend, with each of NASCAR's three national series all crowning their champions for the first time on the same weekend at the same track.

In 2003 Homestead-Miami Speedway was configured yet again. The track's website describes this as "the most technologically advanced track-reconfiguration project in the history of motorsports: a $12 million re-banking project that transforms the track from a flat 6-degrees to a computer-designed 18-to-20-degree variable banking system in the turns." Lights were added a short time later. The racing is a lot better now. There is much more side-by-side racing and you'll see drivers moving up and down the track to find the perfect line and the fastest way around.

The track is one of the most beautiful on the NASCAR schedule with soft pastels that evoke the art deco decor of Miami. 1005 palm trees line the track. Four lakes were created in the construction of the banking. Three of the lakes are on the speedway property, two are in the infield. The largest lake covers 18 acres and is stocked with Peacock Bass. HMS also has a 14-turn 2.2-mile infield road course that utilizes both oval straightaways.

Greg Biffle leads all drivers with three wins at HMS. Jamie McMurray holds the Sprint Cup qualifying record, 181.111 mph, set in 2003.

In 2009, Homestead-Miami Speedway became the first track ever to host the championship races of six different racing series. In addition to the season-enders for NASCAR's Sprint Cup, Nationwide, and Truck Series on November 20-22, HMS also hosted the season-enders for the Indy Racing League, the Firestone Indy Light Series, and the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series on October 9-10.

(diagram from NASCAR.com)

Homestead-Miami Cup winners
NASCAR tracks index

Local Must See Video

2009-11-17T03:30:00.001-05:00

I saw this on the local news last week, and meant to try to find it online so that I could share it with you, but I forgot. Then I saw it a couple of days later on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He had it on his Oddball segment. I forgot again. Finally remembered.

Here's the scene: There was a rock slide on U.S. 64 -- I'm guessing maybe 30 miles northeast of Chattanooga. They sent a crew out to clear the road. The crew almost had the road cleared. There was just one good-sized boulder left in the middle of the road, and they went to work to break it up so they could move it. Click here to see what happened next.

Update: A local TV station has a report and some aerial photos...and even more aerial photos.

The Golden Age of Video

2009-11-09T01:05:00.002-05:00

Lemondrop calls this "the best video you will see this week." Yeah, what they said. If the techno music was turned down a touch so that you could hear the "lyrics" better, it would be just about perfect. This video also makes for a good game of Name that Movie or TV show...

Here's the "lyrics" and the shows they came from.

The New York Frigging Yankees Win the Series

2009-11-05T05:34:00.000-05:00

I was really getting into baseball as the season was winding down. The Atlanta Braves remarkable run that fell just a few wins short, the last couple of races that kept tightening up, the final race that went to an extra game that went into extra innings -- these were happier times.

As the Division Series gave way to the League Championship Series, my mood worsened. I was hoping for one (or both) of the Los Angeles teams to advance to the World Series so that I might actually care who won. A Yankees-Phillies Series was the last thing I wanted to see. Wasn't there some way that they both could lose? I was still watching, but I had to root for the Phillies. I wouldn't (couldn't) root for the Yankees if they were playing the al-Qaeda All-Stars.

A clash of the cretins indeed...

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Keith Olbermann had a segment on his Countdown show the other night -- "The Nine Smartest Plays in World Series History." (I can't find the video on his show's page; the link goes to Olbermann's baseball blog.) These are the smart, heads-up, small ball plays that are often overshadowed by the big home runs (although one of the plays is a home run -- on the list because of the scouting report that the player, Kirk Gibson, remembered). Although my Braves got burned by one of the plays and the top play was made by a Yankee this past Sunday, it's a good list.

So now, in a postseason that has habitually failed to go the way I would have liked, the Yankees have won it all. Hideki Matsui was named the Series MVP after knocking in six runs in the 7-3 clinching win. I guess I should have used a live chicken.

What a revolting development -- the Yankees have won and another baseball season has come and gone. There's a chill in the air and winter will be here before you know it.

Oops!

2009-10-31T17:47:00.001-04:00

If you're hoping for meaningful health care reform, you've got to like this story. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina recently sent out a mailer to voters in the state urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid card to Senator Kay Hagen asking her to oppose any government-run health care program that would compete with private insurers. The punch line? They sent out this mailer at the same time that they sent out a notice to customers that their premiums would be increased by an average of 11% next year.

The Raleigh News and Observer picks up the story...

Indignant Blue Cross customers have rebelled against the insurer's message, complaining that their premium dollars have funded such a campaign.

They've hit the Internet in a flurry of e-mails to friends and neighbors throughout the state. They've called Hagan's office to voice support for a public option. They've marked through the Blue Cross message on their postcards to instead vouch support, then dropped them in the mail -- in at least one case taped to a brick -- to be paid on Blue Cross' dime. Or dimes...

Lew Borman, a Blue Cross spokesman, said he wasn't sure how many people got the flier urging them to contact Hagan, but he said the mailing relied on voter registration records, not a customer list.

Since the company controls more than half of the state's health insurance market, there was unavoidable overlap.

Borman declined to reveal how much money the insurer paid for the mailing. Blue Cross is a nonprofit, so its finances are not as open as public companies.

He acknowledged the timing was unfortunate, coming as the firm typically sends its annual notices about rate increases. But he said the two mailings were coincidental, hinged to current events in Washington.

"We said from the beginning we were going to be involved and would tell North Carolinians what kind of impact the health-care proposals would have, and that's what we've been doing," Borman said.

Jenny Warburg, a freelance photojournalist in Durham, said she wishes she could switch insurance carriers over the issue, but no other company will cover her.

So she's stuck, and that makes her even madder.

"You're over a barrel," she said. "You have no choice."

And that, she said, is exactly what Blue Cross is eager to protect.

Cross-posted at The Blue Voice

The Latest Local Brouhaha

2009-10-28T05:46:00.001-04:00

Just up the street from where I live, actually just on the other side of Missionary Ridge, Friday night football has turned into a weekly old time tent revival, and it's getting to be that every Friday night another national news organization makes a stop to check out the little local controversy. This week it was the NY Times. Their story of what's going on in Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia appeared on their website Monday. ABC News was here a few weeks ago and got quite a bit of mileage out of the story -- about the same time as the Associated Press. It's always a treat when the folks in the big cities take notice of what's happening down here in the sticks. I think the last time the national media showed such an interest was when someone found a bunch of bodies lying around a local crematorium. This time around the story is church and state.

After the 9/11 attacks, the cheerleaders at Lakeview-Ft. Oglethorpe High School, who make the big banners the football team runs through to get out on the field, decided that they would start putting Bible verses on said banners. This has been going on ever since -- for nine straight football seasons, long enough for it to become a tradition.

Finally, this season, word came down from the school board -- no more religious messages on the football field. There are still a lot of people who think the whole Bible verse ban came about as the result of a complaint. But no. The Times reporter got it right. The ban came about from a concerned citizen realizing that "Hey, we might get sued for this." The school board consulted some lawyers who agreed. Yes, Bible verses promulgated by a public school-sponsored club at a public school-sponsored event could be grounds for a suit. Now, in protest of the ban, the messages are gone from the field, but are ubiquitous throughout the stands.

I might have commented on this earlier, but I just don't care that much. As a godless heathen (or atheist or realist or freethinker), I'm not driven to get the word out for these folks. They're doing just fine on their own with their T-shirts and their Facebook page and their national media attention.

Also, as a son of the South, I'm pretty used to this sort of thing. I could be offended or try to explain why that wall between church and state is necessary, but it's easier just to ignore it until the day it all blows up and/or blows away.

Also, this particular high school was the biggest rival of the high school I attended a few decades ago, and is the biggest rival of the high school that replaced the one I attended. I could be petty and say that their Bible verses didn't help them while they were getting beat 34-0, but I won't.

Coming Soon to a Chain E-Mail Near You!

2009-10-26T04:02:00.000-04:00

You've got to love the lunatics that have taken over the asylum that is today's conservative movement -- for the entertainment value they provide, if nothing else. The latest meme, that was picked up by Rush and the "talent" (their word, not mine) at Fox Nation and is coming to you soon in the form of a chain e-mail, concerns President Obama's college thesis -- the one that trashes the constitution and capitalism. The money quote that had the lunatics up in arms...

"The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

Michael Ledeen at PajamasMedia was the first to pick up on this with a blog post. Quoting (and linking) to Brian Lancaster at the Jumping in Pools blog, Ledeen was almost hysterical...

That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate. I wonder if the prof–and I’d like to know who the prof was–made an appropriate marginal comment, something about historical context, about the Constitution’s revolutionary status in the history of freedom, and about the separation of powers in order to make the creation of any “shackles” as difficult as possible.

Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write. Maybe he’d like to parse “the so-called Founders,” for example. I’d like to know what he thinks of those words today. And what about the rest of the thesis?

According the story on the Jumping in Pools blog entitled "Obama College Thesis: 'Constitution Inherently Flawed'," Time Magazine "reporter" Joe Klein was looking into Obama's academic records for an upcoming article when he ran across the thesis entitled "Aristocracy Reborn." He was only allowed to see the first ten pages of the 44-page thesis. The first inkling most people had that the story might not be true was when Joe Klein (JokeLine to most of us) said, "Huh?" (That might not be an exact quote, but is close enough.)

The Jumping in Pools blog is written by one Matthew Avitabile, whom PolitiFact describes as a "22-year-old grad student in upstate New York." Occasionally, he practices a journalistic technique commonly known as "making shit up," which is becoming more and more popular on the right. He puts together a fake news story and runs with it with only the tag "satire" to indicate that the story might not be on the up-and-up. I don't think this is a malicious thing. I think he's trying to emulate The Onion or Andy Borowitz, but doesn't quite have the humor thing down yet on a consistent basis. Although his story "Kanye West: I Had a Gluten Overdose" was fairly humorous. Some other recent "satire" tagged stories are "HHS to Vaccinate All Schoolchildren for Swine Flu," "Obama Considering Turning Off Flame at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for New 'Green' Initiative," and "Nine-Year-Old Forcefully Removed from Town Hall Meeting after Question." So guess which other story on his blog also has the "satire" tag. That's right. The one about the Obama thesis.

Enter Rush Limbaugh. On Friday's radio broadcast he jumped all over the story with both feet, quoting Ledeen's PajamasMedia post and getting even more apoplectic than Ledeen. He spent a lot of time promo-ing Ledeen's latest book, quoting the Founding Fathers and lambasting Obama. To his credit, before the end of the show, when things weren't checking out, he finally realized he might be getting punked. Did he back down and, perhaps, apologize. HA!

Now, I got a note from a researcher who has been scouring the Internet, and the note says this:

"Rush Limbaugh: Mini-warning on these quotes." Because the paper that Obama wrote, "Aristocracy Reborn," the first ten pages were all that reporter Joe Klein was permitted to see; and it says here that Klein did write about it for TIME Magazine. A researcher has been scouring the Internet and can't find any sources for the quote. "The blog that Ledeen cites doesn't have supporting info," supposedly. The source post that was from August, says it's going to be in an upcoming report from Joe Klein, but the researcher can't find anything that has come out since, and nothing in Klein's blog. There have been no matches found on the Internet for any of the info or quotes other than the source posting. So I now say that the blog from which this came has no sourcing data other than Joe Klein upcoming report and Joe Klein hasn't written his upcoming report.

So we have to hold out the possibility that this is not accurate. However, I have had this happen to me recently. I have had quotes attributed to me that were made up, and when it was pointed out to the media that the quotes were made up, they said, "It doesn't matter! We know Limbaugh thinks it anyway." Sort of like Dan Rather said, "I don't care if these documents are forged. I know that Bush did what he did at the National Guard. I don't care if the documents are forged." I don't care if the Limbaugh quotes are made up. So, I can say, "I don't care if these quotes are made up. I know Obama thinks it. You know why I know Obama thinks it? Because I've heard him say it." Not about the Constitution, but about the Supreme Court.

Fox Nation also didn't apologize or issue a correction. They just removed the page and acted like it didn't happen. Thank God for Google's cache! Leeden did apologize in a later post, but threw in, "It worked because it's plausible."

PolitiFact got involved back in January over a different Avitabile story in which he claimed that Obama was changing the military oath. Instead of pledging to uphold the Constitution, soldiers and officers would have to pledge loyalty to the Office of the Presidency. PolitiFact jumped in when the story went viral, appearing on many blogs and chain e-mails, and set the record straight with a "Pants on Fire" rating...

Avitabile, a Republican who had previously poked fun at Obama with a tongue-in-cheek article that said scientists had determined that he was "genetically superior," is thankful for all the traffic it generated for his blog Jumping in Pools. In the past he was lucky to get 1,000 hits on a story, but this one got more than 50,000. Yet he's disappointed that so many people published his work without verifying it.

"Out of the 50,000 who looked at it, only three had the good sense to contact me and see if it was true," he told us (PolitiFact was one of the three).

Avitabile described himself as a moderate Republican — "I'm pro-gay rights, pro-wind energy" — but said he was surprised that so many in his party had such negative feelings about Obama.

"People wanted to believe this about the president so bad, that he would really go toward a dictatorship so much that they would go with it without checking it," he said.

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times-Free Press

2009-10-24T17:02:00.000-04:00

Quotable

2009-10-12T00:38:00.000-04:00

“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

-- Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on Fox News

The Buckets by Greg Cravens

2009-10-07T04:03:00.000-04:00

FlashForward

2009-10-07T03:44:00.001-04:00

I'm a sucker for the quirky and the weird in most forms of entertainment, so I find myself mesmerized by "FlashForward." I haven't seen much of the new network TV fall offerings, but this is my favorite show so far. I've noticed a few plot holes (or things that haven't been adequately explained away) and I'm pretty sure I know who one of the bad guys is, but this is good stuff so far.

I think ABC is trying to market the show as the new "Lost," but it's still way too early for that -- even though "Lost" castmates Sonya Walger and Dominic Monaghan are both on "FlashForward." Like "Lost," "FlashForward" also has an official website to allow fans to delve deeper (and plenty of unofficial sites as well). It also has the "Lost" penchant for easter eggs, the little hidden goodies to look for along the way, like an "Oceanic Airlines" billboard in the background early during the first episode.

The show's premise was quirky and weird enough to get me to tune in for the first episode. At exactly the same moment, everyone on the planet passes out at the same time for two minutes and seventeen seconds. As you might guess, mayhem ensues. But if that weren't weird enough, almost everyone's consciousness jumps forward about six months to April 29, 2010. It's not like a dream; it's like they are actually experiencing what's happening. From there the show mostly focuses on a team of FBI agents who begin investigating the mystery.

They need to tighten the plot up a bit and flesh the characters out some, but this looks good so far.

I haven't seen much of anything else, just a couple of episodes of "Community" (yawn) and "Modern Family" (pretty decent). Am I missing anything worth seeing?

I am surprised at how little I watch TV anymore. Other than live sporting events (mainly NASCAR and college football) and the occasional movie, I seem to be watching almost everything else later, on my own schedule, On Demand or on the Internet. Since "FlashForward" comes on Thursday nights when I'm at work, I usually watch it a day or two later on Hulu. If you've missed the first couple of episodes and want to get caught up, or if you're caught up and want to see interviews, behind-the-scenes stuff, and scenes from upcoming episodes, Hulu is where you need to go too.

Candorville by Darrin Bell

2009-10-06T00:06:00.000-04:00

A look at what happens when a tea-bagger, complete with a scythe representing "death panels" and a birth certificate marking him as a "birther," throws his back out...

NASCAR Tracks: Kansas Speedway

2009-10-01T04:42:00.004-04:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Kansas Speedway is one of the newest tracks on the Sprint Cup schedule, opening in May 2001 in Kansas City, Kansas. It's one of several 1.5-mile, D-shaped "cookie cutter" tri-ovals. You've seen the same design in various sizes at Las Vegas, California, Michigan, Atlanta, Texas, and other tracks.

Kansas Speedway is considered a sister track to Chicagoland Speedway, which was built around the same time and is also owned by the France family's International Speedway Corporation. Kansas is very similar to Chicagoland except that Kansas is a little flatter with 15° of banking in the turns, 10.4° in the front stretch and 5° on the back straightaway. Chicagoland is also one continuous turn with a noticeable bend in the back stretch whereas Kansas has a straight 2207-feet back stretch.

Kansas Speedway was pretty boring when it first opened. Drivers could only run in one groove, making passing almost impossible. That has changed as the racing surface has aged. Now it's a multi-groove track and it's a bit easier to pass there.

There have only been ten Sprint Cup races held at Kansas. Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Greg Biffle are the only drivers to have won twice. Gordon won in 2001 and 2002. Stewart won in 2006 and 2009. Biffle won in 2007 and 2010. Matt Kenseth holds the track qualifying record, 29.858 secs. (180.856 mph) set in 2005.

There were plans to build a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino overlooking Turn Two. Kansas Speedway was also planning to add a road course. Those plans have been put on hold since the bottom dropped out of the economy.

Kansas Speedway hosts one race from each NASCAR national series per year. The Sprint Cup race, the Price Chopper 400 presented by Kraft Foods, takes place in October. It is the third race in the Chase for the Sprint Cup. The Nationwide Series runs at Kansas on the same weekend. The Camping World Truck Series races have been held at various times ranging from April to June.

In 2010, NASCAR made several changes to their Sprint Cup schedule that take effect in 2011. Atlanta and Fontana each lost one of their two races. Kentucky Speedway was awarded a race. Kansas Speedway will add a second race to be held in June.

NASCAR tracks index page
Sprint Cup race winners

"Never Stop"

2009-09-29T02:33:00.001-04:00

In the 1980s, Echo and the Bunnymen were pretty big deals in their native England, but were never able to achieve much more than a cult following here. Their dark, moody sound threw me off when I first heard them, but I learned to love them. This song is one of their best. In this performance, recorded at Royal Albert Hall in 1983, the basic quartet is joined by a host of other musicians in order to achieve the sound of the studio version. I love the way the intro draws you in...

Lyrics | Echo And The Bunnymen lyrics - Never Stop lyrics

An incredible case of serendipity: I had no idea when I first posted this in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, but Echo and the Bunnymen have reunited for a new album, The Fountain. If you click the link above, you'll go to the band's home page and hear their new single, "Think I Need It Too." They'll be appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC) on October 23 in the middle of a small American tour.

NASCAR: Dover Preview

2009-09-25T21:08:00.000-04:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

NASCAR has three races in two days on this weekend's schedule. Two races and all the attention are at the Monster Mile, Dover International Speedway. It's Week Two of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, the AAA 400, Sunday at 1 p.m. (ABC).

They call it the Monster Mile for a reason. DIS is exactly one mile long with high banking (24° in the turns and 9° on the 1076-feet straightaways), which leads to higher speeds. The cars get good grip on the concrete surface, which leads drivers to push the issue, but the surface is bumpy, which can lead to trouble, especially with the new double-file restarts. The confines are tight -- a single-car spin can quickly turn into a multi-car accident that can cause problems with twelve drivers racing for a championship.

In Friday qualifying, Jimmie Johnson captured the pole with a lap of 22.878 seconds (157.356 mph). It was his second pole of the season. Juan Montoya will be beside Johnson on the front row after a lap of 156.699 mph. Chase drivers took six of the first seven starting spots. Ryan Newman and Greg Biffle start on Row Two. Kasey Kahne and Jeff Gordon start in sixth and seventh respectively. Carl Edwards has the best average finish among active drivers at Dover, but he has his work cut out for him Sunday. He qualified 30th, worst among the Chasers. (Race lineup)

Mark Martin comes into Dover with a 35-point lead over Johnson and Denny Hamlin. Nine drivers are separated by less than 100 points. Jeff Gordon is in tenth, 102 points back. Kasey Kahne trails the Chase field, he's 161 points behind Martin after just one Chase race.

Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, and Jimmie Johnson each have four wins at Dover, most among active drivers. Johnson picked up his fourth win in May.

The Nationwide Series is also at Dover. The Dover 200 is Saturday at 3 p.m. (ESPN2). Kyle Busch leads Carl Edwards in the series by 201 points. In between Dover races, the Camping World Truck Series races on the other side of the country in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas 350 is Saturday night at 9 p.m. (Speed). Ron Hornaday holds a 217 point lead over Matt Crafton in the series.

Meanwhile...

I think we will see Danica Patrick in NASCAR soon, but it will be a long haul before she races here full time. She just signed a new three-year contract with Andretti Green Racing to continue in IRL. Expect Patrick to accumulate some experience in the Nationwide and Truck Series in the meantime.

NASCAR has eased up a little on their testing ban. Starting next season, teams can test at tracks that host regional touring events, but not at tracks that host national series events.

Fans will decide the start time for next February's Sprint Cup race at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. The choices are 3 p.m. ET (noon PT) or 7:30 p.m. ET (4:30 p.m PT). Vote at the track's web site, its Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook pages, or by email.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA

2009-09-25T03:27:00.000-04:00

Funny or Die puts a fresh spin on health care reform with this public service announcement...

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

"Sometimes (Lester Piggot)"

2009-09-24T03:52:00.002-04:00

While we were experiencing our deluge here in the Southeast last weekend, this song by James was playing on repeat on my mental iPod...

Lyrics | James lyrics - Sometimes (Lester Piggot) lyrics

I like the video, but I wonder how they managed to make it without someone in the band drowning. I also wonder why they cut the third (and best) verse of the song.

NASCAR: Loudon Preview

2009-09-19T04:00:00.001-04:00

Image by The Pit Zone via Flickr

NASCAR travels to New Hampshire for a two-race weekend. The big race is Sunday's Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. It's the first race of the Chase for the Sprint Cup Championship, twelve drivers vying for the championship separated by just forty points.

I'm not a big fan of the Chase. I like the old system where a driver had to be consistent over the entire season to win the championship. Now, a driver just has to be consistent enough over the regular season, the first 26 races, to be in the Top 12 and make the Chase. The Chase is a playoff format; the points of the 12 Chase drivers are reset and they begin the playoffs on an almost equal footing. The winner of the Sprint Cup champion is the best of the 12 over the final ten races of the season. Big leads are almost always erased. Last season, Jimmie Johnson took home the championship that should have belonged to Jeff Gordon. Now, I'm not a Jeff Gordon fan so that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I am a Tony Stewart fan and this year eleven other drivers are vying to take home his championship. He had a 197-point lead after Richmond, but starts this Chase ten points behind Mark Martin. NASCAR got tired of drivers running away with championships, clinching them with races left on the schedule, and came up with this playoff format.

I also don't like the scoring system for the Chase. It's the same as any other time of the season, but twelve drivers are competing for the championship alongside 31 other drivers who have their own reasons for being there. Shouldn't the Chase drivers be scored separately from the other drivers?

Another gripe is that the ten races that determine the championship haven't been selected with some grand design in mind. The schedule of 2009 Chase races looks very much like the final ten races of the 2003 schedule, the year before the Chase started. The races have all been grandfathered into the slots on the schedule. If the Chase is anyway representative of the entirety of the whole season it's purely by accident. There's no mystical, magical reason the Chase starts at Loudon, that was just where Loudon has pretty much always fallen on the Cup schedule.

Not that there's anything wrong with Loudon. It's a neat little racetrack. It's a little over a mile long with very little banking. It's similar to Richmond, where last weekend's race was held, but more closely resembles the layout of Martinsville -- long parallel straightaways and tight turns on both ends. In fact, NHMS is sometimes called "Martinsville on steroids." It's a hard track to pass on so track position and the double file restarts will be very important.

Juan Montoya starts Sunday's race with the best track position. He'll be on the pole after a qualifying lap of 28.545 seconds (133.431 mph), a new track record. Tony Stewart will also be on the front row after a lap of 132.581 mph. Seven Chase drivers have spots in the top 10, including Kurt Busch, Denny Hamlin, and Carl Edwards, who are in the top 5, but Brian Vickers starts way back in 26th position. Last year's winner Greg Biffle starts 22nd. (Race lineup) Bobby Labonte qualified eighth, but might have to park his race car early if he can't pick up some last minute sponsorship money.

You'll hear a lot about how important it is to win at New Hampshire and take the early Chase lead, but only one driver (Kurt Busch in 2004) has won the late summer/early fall race at Loudon and gone on to win the championship. Consistency over the final ten races is much more important. One bad finish can put a driver in a big hole; two bad finishes can end all hope of lifting the championship trophy at Homestead. But it all begins here, Sunday at 2 p.m. (ABC). The last couple of races at Loudon have been rain-shortened, but weather shouldn't be a factor this time there.

The Nationwide Series takes the weekend off. They'll return next weekend at Dover. The other race this weekend is also at Loudon, a Camping World Truck Series race, the Heluva Good! 200. It's Saturday at 3 p.m. (Speed). Ron Hornaday goes for his third win in a row at Loudon and enters the race with a 197-point lead over Matt Crafton for the Truck Series championship. We'll see if they pick up where they left off last weekend at Gateway.

Meanwhile...

the 2009 Chase drivers spent the week doing a media blitz of New York City while other off-track news swirled on...

We're still don't know what happened with Pat Tryson at Penske, but the veteran crew chief couldn't have picked a worst time (last weekend at Richmond) to announce that he was going to Michael Waltrip Racing to be the crew chief for Martin Truex Jr. next season. He says he's leaving Penske for personal reasons that have nothing to do with driver Kurt Busch. There were even some rumors that Tryson might leave early if Kurt Busch stumbles in the Chase, but they appear to be together until the end no matter what.

Another departure concerns Richard Petty Motorsports. RPM announced that they have parted ways with Mark McArdle, the team's director of competition. This comes as a surprise to many. RPM had a director of competition? The announcement comes after a heated argument between McArdle and main co-owner George Gillett in the garage last Friday at Richmond. McArdle left the track after the argument and was absent for the rest of the weekend. Meanwhile, confusion seems to be the norm at RPM.

Danica Patrick is still making noise about coming over to NASCAR from IRL, but Tony Stewart says she is not in Stewart-Haas Racing's 2010 plans.

Hendrick Motorsports has announced that they have signed Mark Martin to a contract extension through yet another year, 2011. Brad Keselowski had been waiting for Martin to retire so that he could become the fourth driver for Hendrick, so it now looks like his decision to go to Penske was a good one. This week, Penske announced that they have secured a major sponsor for Keselowski at the Nationwide level, Discount Tire. Over at JR Motorsports, a subsidiary of Hendrick, they've announced the hiring of Kelly Bires to replace Keselowski in their Nationwide program.

And Red Bull Racing had flirted with switching to Chevys, but announced this week that they were sticking with Toyota.

"Rubbing the Sore"

2009-09-18T04:55:00.003-04:00

I didn't care too much for "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?," Time Magazine's latest cover story by David Von Drehle. I don't think it did a very good job of answering the question posed in the title. But I did like this little excerpt...

We tell ourselves a tale in America, and you can read it in Latin on the back of a buck: E pluribus unum. Many people from many lands, made one in a patriotic forge. And there's truth in that story — it conjures powerful pictures in the theater of our national mind. But it can also be misleading. Lots of Americans can't stand one another, don't trust each other and are willing — even eager — to believe the worst about one another. This story is as old as the gun used by Vice President Aaron Burr to kill his political rival Alexander Hamilton. And it's as new as the $1 million–plus in fresh campaign contributions heaped on Republican Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina after he hollered "You lie!" at the President during a joint session of Congress. Anger and suspicion ebb and flow through our history, from the anti-Catholic musings of the 19th century Know-Nothing Party to the truthers and birthers of today.

We're in a flood stage, and who's to blame? The answer is like the estimates of the size of the crowd in Washington: Whom do you trust? Either the corrupt, communist-loving traitors on the left are causing this, or it's the racist, greedy warmongers on the right, or maybe the dishonest, incompetent, conniving media, which refuse to tell the truth about whomever you personally happen to despise.

But we can all agree that — no matter where it comes from — rubbing the sore has become a lucrative business.

Apparently Alternet liked the article even less than I did.
Salon has an interesting article about "the man who changed Glenn Beck's life."

Norman Borlaug: 1914 - 2009

2009-09-15T02:16:00.005-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Norman Borlaug, agricultural scientist, died at his home in Dallas, Texas, Saturday from complications from cancer. He was 95.

When I was a kid (we're talking the Dark Ages here, the late 60s), Dr. Paul Erhlich published his book The Population Bomb in which he predicted that population growth would very shortly outpace agricultural growth. Erhlich looked at the exponentially-growing population and declared that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

That Erhlich's predictions have yet to come true is largely the result of the work of Norman Borlaug.

From the New York Times...

Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. “A miserable term,” he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.

Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history.

Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, like Mexico and India, became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.

“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”

Borlaug was one of only five people to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. In an episode of Penn and Teller: Bullshit! that deals with genetically modified food, Borlaug is referred to as "the greatest human being who ever lived" and is credited with saving the lives of a billion (with a 'B') people. And he also got a nice mention in an episode of The West Wing.

Jim Carroll: 1949 - 2009

2009-09-14T05:58:00.001-04:00

Jim Carroll, poet, punk rocker, and author of The Basketball Diaries, passed away Friday. He died of a heart attack at the age of 60. I first became aware of him back during my college radio days when The Jim Carroll Band released "Catholic Boy." This song from the album seems like a fitting tribute...

His NY Times obit

Sports Update

2009-09-14T03:47:00.000-04:00

Baseball -- the Braves and the pennant races

I was trying to stay up-to-date with the Atlanta Braves, but grew disgusted with them. In my last update, the Braves were on their way to Florida to begin a four-game set with the Marlins. They were tied with the Marlins for second place in the NL East and in good shape in the NL wildcard race. They took the first two games of that series and life was good. Then they lost the third game on a late home run and got blown out in the fourth game. The slide continued with the Cincinnati Reds sweeping the Braves in a three-game series at home. That made five losses in a row and things looked pretty dismal. But the Braves are trying to salvage something. They went back on the road and took two out of three from the Astros and three straight from the Cardinals.

But the days are dwindling down to a precious few. There are just 19 games left and the Braves are pretty much where they were at the beginning of the month as far as the division standings -- they're in third place, 7 1/2 games behind the Phillies. They've lost ground in the wildcard race though -- they're now in fourth place, 6 1/2 games behind the Rockies. The good news is that the remaining games are all against NL East opponents. The bad news is that they've got to win most of them and the Phillies or the Rockies are going to have to have a terrible swoon. The Braves open up a three-game series against the Mets Tuesday evening.

Overall, the baseball season has been a drag if you like close races. The Los Angeles Dodgers are holding onto a three game lead over the Rockies in the NL West, and that's about the closest thing we have to a pennant race. The Phillies lead the Marlins by 6 1/2 in the NL East. The Cardinals, even after the sweep by the Braves, lead the Cubs by 9 1/2 in the NL Central. In the American League, the Yankees lead Boston by seven in the East, the Tigers lead the Twins by 5 1/2 in the Central and the Angels lead the Rangers by six in the West. The wildcard races are a little closer -- Boston leads Texas by four in the AL, and the Rockies lead the Giants by 4 1/2 in the NL.

College Football -- the SEC

We're now two weeks into the college football season. For the most part, SEC teams played the Sisters of the Poor in Week One. The only exceptions were the Georgia - Oklahoma State and the Alabama - Virginia Tech games. The Georgia game turned on a personal foul penalty. The Bulldogs marched down the field and scored a touchdown on the opening play of the game, but only scored three more points the rest of the way, losing 24-10. Virginia Tech led Alabama 17-16 until the fourth quarter when the Tide finally wore them down and got out with the 34-24 win.

Week Two was a little better. There were still some Sisters of the Poor games -- Florida destroyed Troy and Alabama crushed Florida International -- but there were some conference games and Tennessee lost a non-conference game against UCLA. The Vols were driving for the win, but were stopped on fourth-and-goal from the two with just over a minute left. The Vols caught Bruins QB Kevin Prince in the end zone for a safety and got the ball back, but Jonathan Crompton took a sack and threw three incomplete passes to give the ball back to UCLA to run out the clock. UCLA 19, Tennessee 15.

Georgia almost began the season 0-2, but survived against South Carolina when Rennie Curran stuck up a hand and knocked down the final pass of the night, a fourth-down pass from the 7-yard line with just 22 seconds left in the game. The Gamecocks had to go for the touchdown; they were behind by four after having an extra point blocked earlier in the fourth quarter. It was a wild one. The Gamecocks had ten more first downs than the Bulldogs and over 100 more total yards. Georgia 41, South Carolina 37.

In the other conference games it was Auburn over Mississippi State 49-24 and LSU over Vanderbilt 23-9.

The Pros -- the Falcons and Titans

Pro football kicked off this weekend. Actually, the Tennessee Titans began the season Thursday night, traveling to Pittsburgh to take on the Steelers. The difference was field goals. The Titans' Rod Bironas missed two from inside the 40, but the Steelers' Jeff Reed hit a 32-yarder to make it a 10-10 game with less than three minutes left. The Titans lost the overtime coin toss and never saw the ball again. The Steelers drove down the field and Reed hit the game-winner from 33 yards out. Steelers 13, Titans 10. It was a costly win for the Steelers; safety Troy Polamalu left with a knee injury and could be out 3-6 weeks.

The Falcons defense is a big question mark this season, but on Sunday afternoon they forced four turnovers to beat the Miami Dolphins 19-7. Matt Ryan went 22-for-36 for 229 yards and two touchdowns, one to new TE Tony Gonzalez.

Half-Baked Political Analysis

2009-09-13T22:20:00.005-04:00

Politically, last week was pretty strange with most of the news centered around two presidential speeches. On Tuesday, President Obama gave a back-to-school speech (which struck me as odd since the kiddies around here have been back at school for weeks now). The next day, the president gave his health care address before a joint session of Congress.

The hysterical reactions of the president's detractors before, during and after both speeches only served to make the president seem more...well, presidential, in comparison. The overreaction of the political right to the back-to-school speech was especially laughable. The fringe that can't decide if Obama is a socialist or a Nazi or a closet Muslim born in Kenya were vehemently declaring that Obama was trying to indoctrinate our impressionable schoolchildren. The whole thing centered around a poorly worded lesson plan in which children were asked to write letters to themselves on how they could help the president. At least that was the only halfway coherent objection I ever heard about the whole thing.

What did they think the president wanted them to help with? That was never fully articulated, but if Obama wanted it, it had to be bad. When the president gave a speech in which he basically said, "Study hard, stay in school," the whole hullabaloo made the loons seem even more loon-like than usual.

I'm not sure the health care speech was the "game changer" the Democrats are claiming. There was a bump in the polls and people who watched with an open mind were impressed, but too much attention was focused on Joe Wilson and Republicans behaving badly and not enough on what the president actually said.

Personally, I'm perfectly disgusted with the whole process to this point. Health care reform is badly needed and long overdue and Obama's laid-back approach to the whole problem has even party loyalists dismayed. Maybe he is finally getting in the game, articulating what is needed, pressuring lawmakers to get with the program and fighting the spurious claims. 'Bout time!

But my cynicism is acting up again. We'll probably end up with some sort of health care reform bill before too much longer, but it's not looking good for those of us who wanted some meaningful reform. Instead of a tough, progressive bill that scraps the whole broken system, we'll end up with "reform" that just sands down some of the rough edges and keeps the status quo mostly intact. If anything, the corporate interests will be thrilled that a large new group of "consumers" will be mandated to buy their crappy products.

I would have been happier if Obama had started the whole process with a single-payer solution and negotiated down to a public option rather than starting with a public option and negotiating down to nothing. I would have been happier if we had some Democrats who acted like Democrats and not just Republican-lites. But old-school Democrats are hard to find these day. Too many are too reliant on campaign contributions from Wall Street and industry to worry too much about crafting a bill that might actually help anyone.

I'm also pretty sick of this whole bipartisan attitude. It sounds good, but it's never going to produce good results on health care or any other issue. The Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they don't intend to vote for any kind of health care reform, even the most watered-down version imaginable. Even some of the negotiators, the Republicans in the Gang of Six, have made it clear that they are just "negotiating" as a means of blocking reform. And I understand. The party that is always bereft of ideas is in dire straits these days. They don't have a clear leader. Rush and Beck are left to navigate the political shoals for them. They took a beating in the last couple of elections and are facing much more of the same if the economy improves in a timely manner and health care reform passes without them. Their only weapon is fear, so they harp repeatedly about death panels and pulling the plug on grandma and advocate scrapping the whole business and starting over yet again.

But Democrats need to realize that public opinion is a two-edged sword. If they can't get together and start trying to solve the nation's problems, their days in office will be numbered. It seems to me that Blue Dog Democrats (the most conservative Dems representing the most conservative districts) would be the most vulnerable if the public is dissatisfied with the results.

During last year's primary season and the general election, I made no secret of the fact that Obama was not my candidate. I never understood the liberals who thought that he was one of us. He always struck me as too centrist and too willing to go along to get along, to willing to compromise away for the sake of comity. I'm afraid that my worst fears about Obama have been realized during the health care debate.

I'd like to see the president start hammering away on this issue every hour of every day with speeches and town halls and interviews until a decent bill is passed. If Republicans can't be persuaded to go along and negotiate in good faith (and they can't), the president should say, "Well, I tried," and shut them out. Craft a good bill and sell it by making the moral argument -- the one in Matthew 25:40.

If you missed it and you have about thirteen minutes to spare, check out the president on 60 Minutes.

WTF?

2009-09-13T18:49:00.000-04:00

I wanted real health care reform and all I got was this stupid t-shirt!

Meanwhile, there's absolutely no irony in this Quote of the Day...

“The American people are fed up with the political games in Washington, and I refuse to participate in an effort to divert our attention away from the task at hand of reforming health insurance and creating new jobs. Having apologized on Wednesday to the White House, we agreed that we must move forward in a civil manner to do the work the American people have sent us here to do. Health insurance reform is too important to take a backseat to political partisanship.”

-- Congressman Joe "You Lie" Wilson

Quotable

2009-09-03T05:09:00.004-04:00

“We’ll find out whether people don’t want to watch a woman anchor the news or whether they just didn’t want to watch Katie (Couric).”

-- a "veteran television news industry executive" comments on the news that Diane Sawyer will replace Charlie Gibson as anchor of ABC "World News"

Something Different

2009-09-01T02:15:00.004-04:00

Image via CrunchBase

Over the weekend I ran across a blogging tool called Zemanta. I'm in an experimental stage right now, trying to figure out how it all works and whether it adds or distracts from the old "Meanwhile..." blog.

It's a pretty neat little gadget. If you use Firefox, it's a simple plug-in. I believe there is also a plug-in for Internet Explorer and some other browsers. When you start to type out a new post (or edit an existing post), it suggests links, tags, pictures, and related articles to add to the post. You can use any or all of the suggestions as you see fit. It also works with certain email programs.

Check out Zemanta in action in some of my newer posts and let me know what you think. Does it add or distract?

"Imitation of Life"

2009-09-01T00:40:00.004-04:00

R.E.M.'s "Imitation of Life" is one of their great pop songs but, like most of their stream-of-consciousness ditty's, it's hard to figure out just what they're driving at sometimes. I'm not a big fan of videos, but this is one of my all-time favorites. It's about twenty seconds of the same scene played forward, then backward, then forward again with a lot of panning and zooming on selected parts.

R.E.M. - New Music - More Music Videos

Lyrics | Rem lyrics - Imitation Of Life lyrics

Senator Edward Kennedy Dies

2009-08-26T02:33:00.004-04:00

I was flipping through my Google Reader feeds and the news broke around me that Senator Edward Kennedy has died. From ABC News (where I saw it first, via memeorandum)

Sen. Ted Kennedy died shortly before midnight Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77.

The man known as the "liberal lion of the Senate" had fought a more than year-long battle with brain cancer, and according to his son had lived longer with the disease than his doctors expected him to.

"We've lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever," the Kennedy family said in a statement. "He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it."

It's a strange reaction to the passing of a person I don't really know, like the passing of a favorite uncle. I've always admired Senator Kennedy. I saw him as a tireless public servant, working hard in many key legislative battles all the way back to the Civil Rights Act. He was always fighting the good fight on such issues as equal rights, education and, yes, health care legislation.

Half-Baked Political Analysis

2009-08-25T00:52:00.002-04:00

I hate to be so cynical, but the health care debate is over and the opponents of reform won. Oh, I believe we'll eventually get something called "reform," but that it will be a watered-down piece of legislation bearing only a passing resemblance to real reform. It will probably be a boondoggle for industry; that always seems to happen when corporate interests and the public interest collide.

The president, Democrats, and those of us praying for reform lost the battle before it even began by not getting out front of the opposition in the race to reach the ill-informed. Rush, Fox News and suspiciously well-funded policy groups transmitted some misinformation that the birthers, the teabaggers and the other disaffected decided passed the "truthiness" test, and turned town hall meetings into scenes reminiscent of the Jerry Springer Show.

Real reform died a quick death as some of the right-wing themes took hold in the public consciousness. There amongst the Twinkies and the theme song to Gilligan's Island, the collective id pondered "death panels" and "rationing" and decided that they weren't sure reform was needed after all.

While the right was framing the debate, President Obama was playing it low key, almost Zen-like, preferring to pass the agenda to Democrats on the Hill. Sure, Obama had a few town halls of his own and a few interviews where he tried to set the record straight, but the damage was done.

And House and Senate Democrats set out to prove Will Rogers right when he said, "No, I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

Of course, a single-payer solution was not even considered and the public option plan melted away in favor of the co-op plan that the Republicans still won't consider. And Democrats keep trying to negotiate a bipartisan solution with Republicans who think the system is just fine the way it is...unless there might be a way to increase the corporate take. And even if the Republicans stayed out of it completely, the fractious Democrats could never be whipped to agree about much of anything.

Obama might be able to turn this thing around. He might one day unleash the resources that got him elected and awaken the public, but I'm not optimistic.

Digby hit the nail on the head...

Watching a Democratic president and a large Democratic majority unwilling to pass decent legislation in the face of the dysfunctional, impotent clownshow that currently calls itself the Republican Party is about the most depressing thing I've seen in all my years observing politics. I can't even imagine how I would feel if I were 20 years younger and a lot less cynical.

as did Krugman...

How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.

Science Ponders 'Zombie Attack'

2009-08-24T02:18:00.005-04:00

I'm glad scientists are focusing their attention where it belongs -- on the hunt for the living dead. Researchers in Canada have been studying a zombie attack and have concluded that we are doomed unless we strike the zombies hard and fast. It's a little more serious than it sounds. Professor Neil Ferguson, a UK science advisor, says the study has parallels with the spread of some infectious diseases, and adds...

"The paper considers something that many of us have worried about - particularly in our younger days - of what would be a feasible way of tackling an outbreak of a rapidly spreading zombie infection.

"My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days."

Sounds like a Quote of the Day, especially that last paragraph.

Weekend Assignment: Writers or Actors?

2009-08-24T02:12:00.001-04:00

Karen's latest Weekend Assignment...

Weekend Assignment: #281: Who has a greater impact on your decision to go to a movie or watch a tv show, the actors you see on the screen, or the behind the scenes writers, producers and/or directors?
Extra Credit: Who is your favorite actor?

Aren't they both important? Doesn't one group complement the other? I'd lean toward the writers, producers and directors, but my set of favorites would be small. The actors would influence my decision, but the material, the kind of movie or show it is would influence me the most. I'd rather see Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves than The Bodyguard.

I'm not sure about a favorite actor. I have many. Give me someone who doesn't revert to the same character in every movie they appear in. Give me someone who can appear in a wide range of movies, someone like a Gene Hackman or a Robert Duvall, comfortable in almost any role.

The Prodigal Returns

2009-08-22T00:18:00.003-04:00

A four-month hiatus and I'm behind the wheel again. Clear the sidewalks. I'm back with fingers crossed -- my financial situation has eased somewhat but my computer is acting very buggy. Will it come back on the next time I want it to? I guess we'll find out together and if I disappear again suddenly, you'll know why.

A Temporary Hiatus

2009-07-06T14:31:00.002-04:00

You might have noticed that this blog hasn't been updated in quite some time. There's a good reason for that. Poverty has reared its ugly head again. Work has been slow and my place of employment has been on short time for quite some time which has meant smaller than normal paychecks of late. Maintaining an Internet connection is well down on my list of priorities, below such niceties as rent and food. But as the Good Book says, "This too shall pass," so stay tuned for further developments.

"Gin and Juice"

2009-04-03T18:14:00.002-04:00

This could possibly be one of the greatest cover versions of all time. The alternative country band The Gourds cover Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." (Rated PG-13)

Gin & Juice - The Gourds

Agnes by Tony Cochran

2009-03-28T15:41:00.001-04:00

"Country Blues"

2009-03-24T03:52:00.007-04:00

I let a guy at work listen to my mp3 player tonight. "Eclectic" was the review I got a couple of hours later. I think that's Latin for 'I don't know what the hell to make of that.' I wonder if he heard this one...

Country Blues - The Chieftains

The Chieftains, the Irish folk band, traveled to Nashville and recorded Down the Old Plank Road. The point was to show how Irish music transformed into bluegrass and country music in the hills of Appalachia. "Country Blues" was originally recorded by Doc Watson. Here, the Chieftains play, and Buddy and Julie Miller sing.

Update: I just realized that the whole song won't play unless you're logged onto Imeem.com. If you're not a member and don't want to sign up, here's a BugMeNot logon:

Username	shnkfpl6cx748oy@jetable.org
Password	password

Quote of the Day

2009-03-23T04:58:00.002-04:00

I've gotten away from writing about politics. I hope to detail why in a post soon. I've also gotten out of the habit of coming up with a Quote of the Day lately. One problem is finding a pertinent quote everyday. Another problem is that if I don't make other posts for a couple of days, I end up with several quotes in a row with nothing much else going on. So let's just call this the Quote of the Day with the understanding that it probably won't be a daily feature here, but hopefully several days a week.

To get back in the swing of things again, here's a lovely thought from Fox News talking head Bill O'Reilly...

The other day, left-wing muckraker Seymour Hersh went on MSNBC and said he had information, provided by the usual anonymous sources, that Dick Cheney was running an assassination squad out of the White House.

I have but one simple observation: If Cheney really had such a crew, Hersh would have been dead a long time ago, and so would most everybody at MSNBC.

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