Thursday, October 30, 2008

Who the BLANK is that???

So we were watching (by accident) 'Celebrity Rehab' on VH1. They showed Brigitte Nielsen and the lady I was with looked at the TV and said, "Wow, Billy Idol is a real fierce tranny hot mess!"
Uh, that's not Billy Idol, but maybe they were separated at birth!

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Funk 4 Peace by the Fort Knox Five!

Oh man, ya gotta love this!



"America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future." - Barack Obama

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Tuesday, October 21, 2008

"I'm a kook too!"


I LOVE online news... instead of the filtered and watered down for the masses national news we can now be narrowcasted to by the locals who know the stories best.
Akin to the guy on Cape Cod who worked for the newspaper that had all the nitty-gritty details on Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969, and as those laboring away in Wassilla Alaska know where the bodies are buried in Sarah Palin's backyard, Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune lets the rest of us know all about their favorite girl - Congresswoman Michele Bachmann aka Joe McCarthy's illegitimate grand-daughter! Nick goes all the way back to german WWI ace pilot Max Immelman to get the allusion just right...

"An Immelmann is a precise aerobatic maneuver in which an airplane performs a half-roll to reverse its direction. A Bachmann is sloppier but more spectacular: To perform a Bachmann, a candidate for Congress puts her foot in her mouth, talks stupidly for seven minutes and watches her reelection campaign burst into flames."

To add fuel to the fire, supporters of her Democratic opponent have been dumping cash contributions into his campaign coffers in order to Negate the Hate! God Bless Amerika y'all!

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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Andy Martin for President!




My old pal Jonathan Turley, the DC lawyer and fellow trouble-maker, blogged up another dilly with his outing of one Andy Martin as being the source for the rumor that Barack Obama is Muslim... NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT!
I first became familiar with Turley back when he was involved with assisting Helen Frost in Las Vegas. Her late husband passed away after breathing fumes from the open pit burning of chemicals at a secret desert base in Nevada, better known as Area 51!

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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

My new hero - Christopher Buckley!


For years I railed against the doctrinaire and dogmatic 'Conservatives' who were always cooking up new, diabolical and insidious ways to mess up our Democracy. Turns out there are those on the Left who are right there, back-to-back with the Right Wing Nuts that if one merely changes a few key hot button words around you have a mirror image of the other!
Christopher Buckley, son of Conservative scion William F. Buckley was fired from the very publication his father created out of a sow's ear - the National Review!
As a teen I saw the parody of it in the National Lampoon and they called it the National Socialist Review, meaning they are Nazis! Anyway...
He is voting for Obama and made the mistake of writing about it online for The Daily Beast...
My main problem with Liberals is on gun control, hey, aren't they the only way to really protect yourself from the all those creepy "domestic terrorist religious fanatics"? And I mean the Christian Identity Movement (Neo-Nazi Skinheads) and the FLDS Mormans - not Muslims!
I didn't vote for Bill Clinton, I wanted Mrs. Linda Ronstadt and former California Governor Jerry Brown or at least a seasoned veteran Senator like Tom Harkin. Instead I voted twice for H. Ross Perot and when asked why I'd blink my eye with a wildly crazy tic as if I had been drugged and would answer, "Because he's the only one who knows the truth about the Mafia-CIA-POW-MIA Southeast Asian heroin cover-up!"
That would create an immediate cessation of further questioning!
I read with interest the book by J. William Middendorf II, "A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater's Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement" and fell in love with that silly gang of Draft Goldwater types who thought they could beat the party apparatus at their own game!
The more things change the more they stay the same...
Good work Chris, your father would be proud of your flexible thinking!

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Thursday, October 09, 2008

"The Man (and Woman) Who Knew Too Much"!



OK, so some American tourists travelling in the Middle East get confused for spies in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, so what? The recent flap on the border of Syria and Lebanon might make a good jumping off point for a Hollywood re-make of the original that starred Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. So we may still be using newspapers and other media as cover for secret agents, so what? As anyone will tell you these is a very thin line between someone asking questions overseas as a curious freelance reporter and asking the very same questions as a CIA agent or freelance intel contractor...
Oddly enough a story today from the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) mis-reported "missing American journalists" Holli Chmella and Taylor Luck's names as "Holy Robin Shmella and (get this!), "Taylor LANGLEY Luke! Oy Vey! The CIA HQ is in Langley Virginia... certainly a coincidence.

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Mix it Up at Lunch Day!

This event will be on Nov. 13th and aims to create "inclusive school communities" and is part of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tolerance.org's Teaching Tolerance project. It is like walking a mile in someone elses moccasins by sitting at their lunch table. If you don't think the drama of school lunch rooms can be intolerant, you don't know what is going on... back in my day we had as a lunchroom at middle school an indoor gym that had a partition. On one side was the 'hot lunch' and on the other was the 'cold lunch'. I for one wanted a hot lunch on occasion and had come from a different school to 9th grade. I found out it was a form of 'de facto' segregation as most of the kids on the hot lunch side of the very real divider were either black or hispanic. Some received lunch 'tickets' as part of a social service program. Sometimes I'd go over to the other side and hang out with the kids there, slowly I came to realize the seperation did indeed have psychological effects...

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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Flirting her way to Victory!

Republican Vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has been called a VPILF and worse. Michelle Goldberg's October 3rd article in the UK newspaper 'The Guardian' was not just a great piece on feminism, politics and Palin, but her word choice demonstrates once again how the English have a real command of... English!



'preposterous'
'platitudes'
'venerate'
'vaporous'
'cutesy'
'spunky'
"fuckin' redneck"

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Friday, October 03, 2008

Notes on Susan Sontag



Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' was a revelation that echoes down through time. An essay of observations on 'camp' sensibility and taste, a way of seeing and enjoying things, not the velvet jacketed rarified world of the modern day 'dandy' but a nod to the seemingly tastelessness of the underclass, the way a John Waters film makes one feel in the know, happy to be part of a cool inside joke the stuffy square people just don't get...
Celebrate her birthday the next January 16th by renting a low-budget B-movie that makes you groan and laugh and be glad you can appreciate the 'other' side of our culture.

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The New Sentimentality



Robert Benton and David Newman wrote the script for the film "Bonnie and Clyde". At the time few could have seen the lasting impression the portrayal of the two 30's criminals by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway would have. This is mainly because Benton and Newman had managed to channel the prevailing 'zeitgeist' of the times when they wrote an article for Esquire magazine titled, "The New Sentimentality".
It posited the idea that in 1964, after the assassination of JFK, we, as a country, were in a profound transition... we had one foot in the past and one in the future, we were somewhere in a grey area between the simpleness of "Leave it to Beaver" and the mixed-up family of "The Brady Bunch" and the fatherless "Partridge Family".
We are yet again at another crossroads of cultural sentimentality, seen in the upcoming election, in the messages the media mediates, or fails to mediate.

We still may have a 'last decade' view of media and politics although those quaint notions should have been destroyed after the treatment of Al Gore and John Kerry. Karl Rove and 'Scooter' Libby are modern day criminals who should be on the run, dodging the cops, driving through the mid-west in a V8 Ford looking for a bank to rob, the old fashioned way - with a gun. I saw on TV an 'old' movie from 1976. I forget how the definition of 'old' keeps changing! 'Rocky' was the story of an under-educated under-class meat cutter and boxer from the tough streets of Philadelphia played by Sylvester Stallone. He fought the flamboyant black man - very much like Muhammad Ali. The same week I warmed over that chestnut I also saw 'The Legend of Ricky Bobby' about a down home Southern-baked under-educated and under-class race car driver played by Will Ferrell. Whereas for Rocky we felt kinship for the underdog and understood his tortured syntax and verbal malapropisms, we laughed at Ricky Bobby and his. One was a hero and the other was a joke. My how times have changed.

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Rise of the Anti-Hero, Part 12



Every 20 years or so we see the ascent of the Anti-Hero, a cultural embrace of the bad, the wrong, the... polar opposite of what we were all taught to believe was 'right'.
We are in another of those times, back when Lt. Col. Oliver North broke the laws of the land to facilitate and illegally finance a war on Communist subversion in 'our' hemisphere and to (in his mind) help free hostages in Lebanon by selling weapons to Iran, it was President Ronald Reagan who was the proverbial 'good guy' who would later look so confused in the dock testifying about the murky details of the Iran-Contra Scandal.
Now, we have another set of super-patriot bad guy anti-heroes close to being at the end of their terms in public service who will go away and perhaps, with a little luck will end up testifying before some committee about how they broke laws and subverted democracy to facilitate the War on Terror, with W as the confused ex-President pretending not to know what the guys down the hall were up to...
If the original Superman movie were made today, I wouldn't be surprised if good old General Zod was not only elected President, but he'd be the champion of defeating the subversive elements in our midst, including Al Qaeda, and there would be those apologists who would say, "But he got rid of the bad guys."

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