I’ve had the theme from The Prisoner going through my head for 3 days.
It’s not so bad, I like the theme, but it adds a surreal aspect to my day.
This is the extended opening from the first episode, “Arrival,” and I noticed a couple of things that I Had not before: McGoohan’s character drives under the gate before it opens, and he enters through what is clearly labeled an exit.
I am definitely going to have to go through the whole series looking for Easter eggs.
It appears that cows are conspiring to destroy us all.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBs.
At some point, you realize that all you need to hear about Ayn Rand has been told by someone else.
In this case, it’s John Oliver, or more accurately, it’s his show, Last Week Tonight:
I’m not sure how I can top this.
I understand that the right wing in general, and Caribou Barbie in particular, find the Obama administration to be a veritable font of mendacity.
That is the nature of politics these days.
However, when Sarah Palin says that “Truth is an endangered species at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue, I just want to bang my head until I lose consciousness.
Seriously. This woman has me aching for the quiet competence of J. Danforth “Dan” Quayle.
But she still is a force in right wing politics, so I still have to pay attention.
I’ve always wondered where the chopping motion on his arm that David Byrne uses in the video for Once in a Lifetime.
I just came across an interview where the Talking Heads front-man explains the meaning:
Pitchfork: I just had one last question. A friend of mine played a show in Providence and went to a hot dog stand. They’re in a band, so the hot dog stand guy says, “Oh, David Byrne used to work here. We’ve been here 30 years and he worked at this hot dog stand.” And at this place, when they do the hot dogs, they line them up on their arm and they take the condiments and they go like this [I make a chopping gesture along my arm, as seen in the video for “Once in a Lifetime”]. “That’s where he got that!”
DB: I did work at a hot dog stand, a place called New York System, where you put the hot dogs on your arm like that. But I got that thing from, I saw these Japanese kids dancing in the park in Tokyo, these kind of rockabilly dancers, and then there were these kind of space cadet kids that had a completely different set of movements. I videotaped a bunch of them, and that’s where I got that.
So, now you know too.
In the Ukraine, a member of the parliament was accosted by an angry crowd and thrown in the dumpster.
Now I do understand that the intersection of “Ukrainian Politician,” and “Perfectly Good White Boy” is a null set, but how often does one get to quote the cult favorite teen movie Better off Dead?
I will note, however, that what the crowd did is wrong.
They should have pantsed him.
Jon Stewart cut Lindsey Graham a new one for his constant, and constantly hysterical, fear mongering over, basically everything.
He describes Graham’s, “Panic for 13 years,” and said that, “The poor man lives his entire life trapped in ‘The Blair Witch Project,” and that he’s, “Seen chihuahuas in handbags who are less fretful and shaking.”
Of course, craven abject fear has been a dominant theme of movement conservatism for decades, as I observed when involuntarily forced to watch Fox News.
Republican politics thrive on fear and panic, so it’s not surprising that they advocate for it, but I also think that they are really that scared of well, everything.
On Meet the Press yesterday, newly minted host Chuck Todd interviewed Barack Obama.
It did not go well:
As he says, you’ve got to be on it, paying attention to every word. Watch him nail Chuck for missing four separate mentions of Syria before telling the President he hasn’t heard him mention Syria.
Chuck Todd has just sounded the death knell of his gig as a host.
I give him 6 months.
Hostility and criticism is one thing, but I do not think that NBC News can deal with his being a punch line.
It’s not gonna end when Letterman retires, because Stephen Colbert is replacing him.
It’s kind of like Joe Biden said, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11,” of Rudy Giuliani.
Olbermann is still limiting himself to matters of sport, but sometimes there is a case where he gets to do one of his special comments in everything but name.
This is a really good one:
I was looking forward to getting my Daily Show fix after a 2 week hiatus, and they did not disappoint.
Needless to say, the commentary on the police brutality in Ferguson, (top vid) and his video with Michael Che, where the latter unsuccessfully tries to find a place where a black man hasn’t been shot (bottom vid), are amazing.
Just watch.
This guy has to be the luckiest motherf%$#er in all of Russia.
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Here he is on payday lenders:
He is much edgier than Stewart, but I am not sure whether this is a difference in styles, or a difference in networks.
HBO, having its revenue come from viewer subscriptions, does not have to round off the sharp edges.
Deep moral outrage scares advertisers.
Woodward and Bernstein were interviewed about the constellation of scandals that became known as Watergate on Face the Nation:
The high points from the transcript:
WOODWARD: ……… And so what happened here is — and Carl and I have spent a lot of time looking at tape transcripts, and listening to these tapes and so forth, and you see the real Nixon come out which is kind of the dog that never barks on the tapes. Nixon never says, what’s good for the country, what do we need. It was always about Nixon and it was using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge in a horrendous way.
………
BERNSTEIN: When we were the writing the final days we started to encounter this, and it’s in the final days in person after person would tell us about how he railed against Jews and about blacks and finally Arthur Burns, the patrician economic adviser to the president said to me while we were reporting on the final days, Nixon had epithets for whole sections of mankind. There was an anger.
………
WOODWARD: Yes, and then, also, if you look, he was — he was vice president for Eisenhower for eight years. And there’s some marvelous reporting that’s been done on this, which shows that Nixon was snubbed by Nix — by Eisenhower, that Eisenhower never brought him in. And — and Nixon felt that America was filled with a series of clubs that he could never get into.
And it — and it just burned him. And, again, it’s on the tapes. He’ll — he’ll say things like, oh, you know, all those — he joined — after he left the vice presidency and lost the governor’s race in ’62, he went to practice law on Wall Street.
And he says on the tapes with this kind of seething bitterness, you know, any of those lawyers ever ask me to their country clubs and ask me to go out and play golf with them?
Not a one.
………
WOODWARD: Yes.
But, um, what — it was seven years ago I went over to do what turned out to be the last interview with Bob McNamara, who was secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson, Mr. Vietnam, and who apologized for Vietnam. And it was three hours. And he had an apartment in the Watergate and I kept pressing McNamara, you know, squeeze out what’s the final lesson of the mistake of Vietnam?
And he said, there’s one lesson, and that is the advisers to the president need to sit around with the president and argue with him and say, wait a minute, let’s look at all the options. Uh, you have to create a conflict situation.
And he said what happens in the presidency is no one wants to argue with the president, particularly in front of other advisers. So the president gets isolated and lives in a bubble.
And I think you can argue that happens to every president, including this one.
I think that this last bit might be the most important lesson.
The founder of GM, William Durant, was famous for not allowing a major decision to made if everyone showed up at the meeting in agreement. He thought that it meant the idea had not been properly thought through.*
I think that he was right.
In addition, I think that any President who goes to a meeting of his staff/cabinet and thinks that he is the smartest guy in the room is likely to be have even more problems with the bubble phenomenon, because they will find it natural for people to agree with him.
*I cannot find this bit on the Google machine right now. I recall hearing it on the radio at some point in the past century.
In this case, a dot matrix printer playing “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor:
H/t Neo on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
My older (and hairier) brother, AKA Bear Who Swims, is the umbrella bearer in this production of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta, The Mikado.
You will notice that he is not singing. This is because none of the Saroff boys got their mom’s singing voice, they got their dad’s singing(?!?!?) voice.
I just came across a Kickstarter for a new Star Trek movie:
Axanar is the independent Star Trek film which proves that a feature-quality Star Trek film can be made on a small budget.
(PLEASE NOTE: Kickstarter will not charge your pledge till the end of the campaign on August 31. So you have that much time to save up!)
Our 20-minute short film, Prelude to Axanar, premiered Saturday, July 26th, 2014, at San Diego Comic Con and features Richard Hatch, Tony Todd, Kate Vernon, JG Hertzler and Gary Graham, who reprises his role of Soval from “Enterprise”. The makeup was done by Academy Award winner Kevin Haney and Star Trek veteran Brad Look and Make Up Effects Lab. Top that off with the amazing visual effects of Tobias Richter and The Light Works, and sound by Academy Award winner Frank Serafine, and the result is Prelude to Axanar: something unlike anything you have ever seen before. We have our loyal donors to thank for this!This Kickstarter is for the full-length feature Axanar. Unlike the short film, which we shot in two days and cost $75,000, the 90-minute Axanar feature will take about 20 days and cost about $650,000. So we are breaking up our costs into discreet sections which should allow us to reach significant milestones, as we don’t expect to raise all $650,000 at once. This first Kickstarter will be for the sound stage and set construction. Anything over what we need for that will be applied to the feature production costs. Full details are below.
It should be noted that they have already raised $207,447 of their goal of $100,000 with 16 days to go, so I do not think that their funding goal is unrealistic, though I cannot see how they can do a whole feature length film for $650K.
The CGI might not be that much, what with the realitiess of Moore’s law, but I cannot see how they could do this on such a low budget.
I do not think I could even to decent set design for their whole budget.
Still, enjoy this nerd pr0n.
House of the Rising Sun played on archaic computer hardware.
I’ve never heard a scanner sing before.
H/t Neo on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
An irate Cleveland Browns fan urinated on Art Modell’s grave.
The writer at the above link objects to this, because he feels it generates sympathy for Art Modell, the worst NFL team owner ever.
I disagree.
Why?
That being said, while I understand the need for some stealth, so I do not object to his showing up in a Raven’s jersey, and then taking it off to reveal a Brown’s Jersey*, but I do object to his method of urination: he used a catheter tube that ran down the leg of his pants to surreptitiously pee.
If you are going to piss on someone’s grave,† you have to whip out your penis.
The brandishing of genitalia is an essential part of disrespect, as can clearly be observed when watching the behavior of Baboons and Soccer Hooligans.
If you war going with the whole catheter thing, you might as well just bring it in a F%$#ing jar.
It wasn’t like they weren’t going to catch you, you posted the vid to YouTube, and you are now facing up to 2 years in jail, so half measures just do not make sense.
*It was Lyle Alzedo’s Jersey, but Alzedo only played about ⅓ of his career at Cleveland. He should have gone with someone who spent their entire career at the Browns, like Jim Brown, Otto Graham, Gary Collins, Ozzie Newsome, or Lou “The Toe” Groza.
†Full disclosure, my father pissed on Huey Long’s grave while in Louisiana.‡
‡I believe that some quantity of alcohol was involved.€
€This is not the weirdest thing that my dad has done. While he was in the Navy, he was a Corpsman, he was also ordered to function as an HMO for the local brothels around the Navy base at Yokosuka, Japan, because of his CO deal with the fact that, “The base had the highest VD rate in the Pacific Theater.” §
§Well, actually, he wasn’t ordered to be an HMO for the local brothels, he was just told to, “Fix it”, and that his CO, “Didn’t want to hear anything more about it.” Implicit in this was the unspoken thought that my dad could use the supplies of Penicillin, but that if he got caught, the CO knew nothing of it. Ah, the military life. (He was not caught, and left with an honorable discharge)
Of course, with his new gig, they have to be sport related, but this is beautiful:
It’s about wife beater, and (hopefully soon to be former) local professional football player, Ray Rice.
I miss Keith on the politics beat.
No, I am not joking here,
As they’ve been doing on each third Saturday for months, advocates for the open carrying of firearms gathered — semiautomatic weapons in tow — at Dealey Plaza over the weekend. As usual the demonstrators, who call themselves Come and Take It Dallas, handed out literature and preened with their armaments of choice.
Seriously. Really?