Web Log Archive, October 7th through October 20th, 2007
Saturday, October 20th, 2007 Sixteenth Anniversary of the Oakland Hills Fire
Nearly
all online news outfits routinely append a 'comments'
section to each published story. Often, these comments are more entertaining, if
not more informative, than the stories themselves. Here's one (unvarnished)
from a few weeks back contributed by a self-appointed medical expert (with the nom
de plume of 'Dr. DJ'). He is commenting on an ABCNEWS.com
story about Farrah Fawcett's ongoing
battle with cancer:
"Farah if you see this message please take it serious. You are dying because you lack real natural Ocean salt in your body. Americans have always lived without real salt water in their bodies. Your body needs Ocean Water salt and the 92 elements that it provides. Morton Salt refined salt kills people, and is the cause to obesity and other major cancers people suffer from. All you need to do is go out to the ocean and bring some of the water home and make some chicken soup with it. Make and use it in your food. I guarantee you will feel better and the cancer will disappear, because the salt will attackit. Our body is like the ocean. We are 70-75% water, and the Ocean is 70-75% coverage over the earth. There is a connection. Did you know in WWII soldiers who had no blood for transfusions Doctors used Ocean Water and it saved their lives. Our blood needs Ocean Water. Think of it this way our body needs Ocean Water and Fresh water to live. Compare a car. It nee ds Oil for the engine, but also needs gas to make it run. The oil is the Ocean water in our bodies, and the fresh water is our gas. Beleive me dear...go to the Ocean and bring home some water to cook and eat it up. take care......Dr. DJ"
Friday, October 19th, 2007
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
"The thousands of criminals I saw in
40 years of law enforcement had one thing in common: Every single one was a
liar."
J. Edgar Hoover
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 Eighteenth Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake
“We don’t like your chicken
feathers, your paint and your cheap Hollywood chants.”
Vernon
Bellecourt, 1931-2007
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
No sense of humor: "I will not make myself a laughing
stock among my friends by adding such a weird abbreviation to my new car!"
Zhang
"This
mundane and commonplace thing which is deemed so ubiquitous by all of us, is an
acute necessity and severely missed each day by over
40 percent of the world’s populace." Dr.
Bindeshwar Pathak
Sunday, November 18th, 2007 has been
designated World Toilet Day!
This year, the 'Summit'
will be held in New Delhi, India on Halloween.
This, from the 'Contests' page of the World Toilet Organization, founded in 2001:
"Oh Yes! I've a new toilet invention!!"
The site also features a downloadable theme song called 'Secret Garden'.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
“I won’t confirm or deny she
said that. She’s not somebody I’d want to tangle with!”
Alasdair McDonnell, Social
Democratic and Labor Minister of Parliament.
Debra
Cagan (actual photo at left), United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense For Coalition Affairs.
Ms. Cagan has been described by a NATO
official as "John
Bolton on steroids".
"The United States is as
isolated in Iraq as a great power can be. A first term spent riding roughshod
over friends and vaunting 'coalitions of the willing' over alliances has
not been righted by a second term of diplomacy rehabilitation. Wounds linger."
Roger
Cohen
Sunday, October 14th, 2007
The
only British naval traditions are rum, buggery and the lash.
Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
If you're going
through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
Cassio:
Reputation, reputation, reputation!
Oh, I have lost my reputation!
I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
Iago:
Reputation is an idle and most false
imposition: oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
Othello, Act 2, Scene 3
Photos (click to enlarge) of a Hummingbird
Moth from the Fall
Flower & Garden Fest in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. Courtesy of RJ.
Friday, October 12th, 2007
The
fourth of my bargain video rentals is a quite-serious Canadian movie called
Away From Her, starring
the redoubtable
Julie Christie opposite the reliable Gordon Pinsent.
In an at-times tutorial manner, it follows the
mental decline of a sixty-something woman in a forty-something marriage. There
is no violence, no sex (to speak of), only two or three
dirty words throughout and no 'special effects'. It is a beautiful and unhurried piece of work set in snow-driven
Ontario with a strong supporting
cast (which includes Olympia Dukakis).
Memorable lines spoken by Olympia to Gordon:
"Sometimes you just have to make the decision to
be happy. Just decide. Things aren't ever what you hoped they'd be...not
ever...for anybody...and the only thing that separates one kind of person
from another is there are some who stay angry about it and there are some who
accept what comes their way. It would be easier for me if you could pretend
a little. Do you think you could do that?"
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Girls
at the Piano
1892
Pierre Renoir, 1841-1919
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
"If
Democrats had any brains, they'd be Republicans! If we took away women's right
to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president."
Ann Coulter
“It’s not about
winning elections. It’s about honoring Christ! ” Rick
Scarborough, President of Vision
America
"Liberalism Kills Kids is a groundbreaking work which documents the devastating failure of America's 40-year experiment with liberal statism. From the deaths of 44 million unborn children, to skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock births, to the divorce epidemic, to the destructive demands of the movement to normalize homosexuality -- the book exposes a cultural coup d'etat that has left our families gasping for air."
[Publisher's book-jacket description.]
Tuesday, October 9th,
2007
Happy Birthday, Bob!
Burt Reynolds asked me
out once. I was in his room.
I have a tremendous sex drive. My boyfriend lives forty miles away.
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight
The best contraceptive for old people is
nudity.
You know you're old if they've discontinued your blood
type.
Phyllis Diller...who turned ninety years old on July
17th.
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Behold
the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite;
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age,
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tir'd he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.
Alexander Pope, 1688-1744
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
Color me old-fashioned but I grew up thinkin' that a movie oughta have a beginning, a middle, an end and maybe...just to tie all three together...a plot! Silly me! David Lynch's Inland Empire, starring the very-talented Laura Dern, has not one of these four things and, at three hours, has been designated an R-Rated bladder-buster by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The question of how someone could sit through the whole thing in a public theater has yet to be answered! Gone With The Wind was only ~45 minutes longer (and it DID have 'all four'...and an intermission)!
Now...I
won't say that Inland Empire is not a compelling film but neither
is it worth the time and trouble to watch! What there is of a plot goes
something like this: an almost-big-time actress, married to a very
big time media mogul, gets a major part in a major
movie. But, come to find out, the first time somebody tried to make this
script into a movie, both leading characters were murdered
mid-production. So it never was made the first time...got it? The
intimation is that both leading characters were murdered by a powerful and
wealthy husband who acted out of jealousy when he discovered that the leading
characters had commenced a sexual relationship during the (first) making
of the movie. And so...maybe the script itself is cursed? And...maybe
it'll happen again since all the elements of the first tragedy are back
in place!?!
Trust me...nothing is ever made clear! Large
sections of the movie make no 'sense' at all! The
film is a series, not a sequence, of vignettes featuring Ms. Dern. There's
plenty of blood, guts, shooting, stabbing and
screaming...a tiny bit of nudity and a few mini-sex
scenes. A 'trick' of this filmmaker---and one that
wears thin after a couple of hours---is to keep you, the viewer,
wondering whether what you're watching is 'real-world' plot development or simply
another scene from the movie-within-the-movie.
Frankly, my dear, I don't know anyone who has time for so much nonsense. ^_^