"There's another fellow, my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas.
I'll retire to Bedlam."
Ebenezer Scrooge
Web Log Archive, December 2nd through 15th, 2007
Saturday, December 15th, 2007
"There's another fellow, my
clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a
merry Christmas.
I'll retire to Bedlam."
Ebenezer Scrooge
Friday, December 14th, 2007
This country is engaged in two
wars...neither of which is going well. Not quite fifty million people do
not have health insurance. It is conservatively
estimated that two million people are now about to be evicted from
their homes because they'd signed up for loans which they could never
have repaid! It is the consensus of the world's scientists that the climate
of Planet Earth is changing at a rate that, not long ago, was thought
to be impossible. The national debt
is at a new record every minute. Our country has established extra-territorial
and extra-legal prisons wherein people are 'harshly interrogated' (i.e., tortured)
while denied the long-venerated legal opportunity (habeas
corpus) to challenge the basis for their confinement. There is corruption at
every level of government and the nation's highest elected official is a
mendacious, inarticulate clown.
Yet: today's news was dominated...swamped
even...by the release of former Senator George Mitchell's report documenting the
use of 'performance enhancing substances' by the
nation's professional baseball players!
Who among us lives a life so well appointed that he can
summon the leisure to spare a tarry stool about what a bunch of overgrown,
overpaid and undereducated bee brains might ingest to improve their performance
in a little boys' game? I mean, what possible harm can some fat-headed
half-witted athlete do to anyone other than himself? I mean, who cares
if one of them is inexplicably able to hit or throw or run harder or longer or
faster? I mean, doesn't that make the stupid game that much more entertaining
(for the proletarians) and isn't entertainment the whole and sole
objective of that game...that 'pastime'?
For that matter, why should every or any Joe
Lunchbox be required to pee on demand for his employers when, surely, nothing
a poor working slob could ever screw up will compare to the harm done to possibly
millions of lives by the capricious behavior of only one
drug-addled President who, it is known, requires that his
own excreta be sequestered lest a sample of it fall into the test
tube of an analytical chemist (at any one of thousands of laboratories
that routinely test Joe's urine) who might then
identify which 'mood-altering' chemicals play a role (not
in the number of home runs, strikeouts and stolen bases...but) in
decisions of global dimensions!?!
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when
men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the
murder of men.
Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag
of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
Where there is shouting, there is no true
knowledge.
Leonardo da Vinci,
1452-1519
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
"I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were
not narrowed and distorted by religion."
"If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it, then you are the happiest man in this country." Spoken to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, by our 15th President, James Buchanan.
Buchanan (1791-1868) served one term (from 1857 to 1861). He was
the only President who never married.
Monday, December 10th, 2007
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi or "oh well!"
"We're very lucky to have in
Babel province Major General Qais al-Mamouri, who is a very good Iraqi police
chief for all of that province. He is committed to securing Iraq for the people,
for the population. He does not see anything through a sectarian lens. It's all
about Iraqi law, and the people see that."
United States Colonel Tom James, from a speech delivered in praise of
General Mamouri...a few hours before the 'popular' police chief was killed
yesterday in a roadside
bomb attack on his convoy.
<<<General
David Petraeus, left, and Major General Qais al-Mamouri in August of
2005
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
"Innovation
has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans. From
colonial times through the early twentieth century, most people had quite
limited access to credit, and even when credit was available, it was quite
expensive. Only the affluent...were able to obtain personal loans from
commercial banks. Working-class people purchased goods with cash or through
barter, since banks did not make consumer loans to the general public. Home
mortgage loans, as we know them today, are a fairly recent product born of the
failures of the mortgage finance system during the Great Depression. With...advances
in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other
techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of
consumers. Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been
denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by
individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements
have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending. Today subprime mortgages
account for roughly 10 percent of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up
from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s."
From a speech by then Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, April 8, 2005
Saturday, December 8th, 2007 Happy Birthday, Carol!
"We have been too often
disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders...to have faith any longer
in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. To say that we are closer
to victory today is to believe...the optimists who have been wrong in the past."
It has been widely reported that Lyndon Johnson, upon hearing Walter
Cronkite's broadcast of February 27, 1968, said, "That's
it! If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
It is likely that this development was a decisive factor in Johnson's decision,
announced barely a month later, to remove himself from consideration for
re-election later that year.
Now, nearly forty years later...though a bit late to the
party, Walter has once again lent his great voice to the chorus of those who are
willing to concede what has long been obvious. But this time, his language is
less circumspect:
"The
war is being carried on by a stubborn president who...does not want to lose.
From the beginning this has been an ill-considered and poorly prosecuted war
that has diminished respect for America. Like Vietnam, the Iraq War has
introduced a new vocabulary: “shock and awe,” “mission
accomplished,” “the surge.” Like Vietnam, we have destroyed
cities in order to save them. The invasion of Iraq was illegal from the start.
Not only was Congress lied to in order to secure its support for the invasion of
Iraq, but the war lacked the support of the United Nations Security Council and
thus was an aggressive war initiated on the false pretenses of weapons of mass
destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nor has
any assertion of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda proven to be true. In
the end, democracy has not come to Iraq. Its government is still being
forced to bend to the will of the US administration. Each minute we are spending
$500,000 in Iraq. Our losses are incalculable. It is time to remove our military
forces from Iraq. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the
war will drag on to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We
will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now."
Full Text at
Commondreams.org
Friday, December 7th, 2007
Not
everyone, as they age, gets grumpy and irritable, but neither did the cliché
about Grumpy Old Men arise
without reason. The older one is, the more likely one is to have chronic
health problems...including trouble seeing and hearing. And so if, as a
young person, you were able to read without glasses, it can take many years
before you no longer expect to be able to read except with them...a situation
which is unlikely ever to elevate your mood. And if you're not sure you can hear
as well as you once did, then it can be exhausting to engage in 'casual conversation'
and, perhaps, even impossible to pick up on subtle turns of language (as
might occur in a joke). No wonder that so many (though not all) older
people seem angry too much of the time.
Earlier this year, some egg-headed clowns at Washington University in
St. Louis published a
study purporting to test the hypothesis that older people (those
sixty-five years of age and older) don't
have as good a sense of humor as younger people (those in their
early twenties) and that the difference is
attributable to 'cognitive decline' associated with aging. Like many such
studies done by mental health academics, this one was stupid. Among the
conclusions: young people are 6% better at 'getting' jokes. Here was one
of those 'jokes':
"A businessman is riding the subway after a hard day at the office. A young man sits down next to him and says, 'Call me a doctor, call me a doctor'. The businessman asks, 'What's the matter, are you sick?'. And the the young man replies, 'No. I just graduated from medical school'."
A gut-splitter, no? I like the comments some old goats made after learning of this study. Here's a sample:
I think you would have to be incredibly
immature to find such a joke even vaguely funny. This study consequently
reflects the greater intelligence of the older participants.
The punch line is "I just graduated from medical
school"? That's pathetic! Maybe someone should do a study as to
whether researchers actually have a sense of humor.
It's entirely possible that, after a lifetime of experience, older people may be less inclined to laugh. They may get the joke all too well.
I turned 38 yesterday but I already look 55. A lot of the people I know say that I'm noticeably slower-witted and regularly grumpy for no reason.
I don't understand anything anymore. I just go with the flow and pretend to, laughing uproariously at all the wrong moments. :-)
Thursday, December 6th, 2007 Happy Birthday, Charlie!
Last
year, as an exercise in artificial intelligence, Microsoft encouraged
kids to connect directly to "Santa"
by adding northpole@live.com to their Windows
Live Messenger contact lists. The kids could discuss their Christmas wishes
with this 'bot'.
Although the company's engineers claimed to have sanitized Santa's
vocabulary, the
user of a United Kingdom-based server reported that a chat between Santa
and his (the user's) underage nieces revealed a 'bug'
in the bot software. After declining the girls'
repeated invitations to eat pizza, Santa
responded, "You want me to eat what?!? It's fun to
talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else."
According to Adam
Sohn, a spokesperson for Microsoft, his company was unaware 'that
the Santa code included the foul language' [but an employee
prank was not suspected]. Sohn said the lewd comment was sparked by someone 'pushing
this thing to make it do things it wasn't supposed to do.'
El Reg says: pizza (pi)
Santa says: Yum! What do you want for Christmas, El Reg?
El Reg says: Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much! You are quite
large!
Santa says: My elves will get right on that. And what else
are you wishing for this year, El Reg?
El Reg says: Maybe you shouldn’t eat it?
Santa says: See if you can get someone else to eat it!
El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: No thank you. I don’t eat things!
El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: See if you can get someone else to eat it!
El Reg says: Eat it
Santa says: You want me to eat what?!? It’s fun to talk
about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else…
El Reg says: You dirty bastard!
Santa says: I think you’re dirty bastard.
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
Death,
so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is
passed in sleep.
In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue - is
hypocrisy.
Friendship may, and often does, grow
into love, but love never subsides into friendship.
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere
pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
George
Gordon Lord Byron
(1788-1824)
Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.
This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
If inscribed over human ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG
Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803,
And died at Newstead, Nov 18th, 1808.
Inscription On The Monument
Of A Newfoundland Dog.
Newstead Abbey, November 30, 1808
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 First the sentence, then the trial!
"Iran
will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nucular
weapon. In August, I think it was Mike
McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn't tell me what
the information was. And it wasn't until last week that I was briefed on the National
Intelligence Estimate that is now public."
"If that's true, [Bush] has
the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most
incompetent presidents in modern American history." Senator
Joe Biden
Monday, December 3rd, 2007
"The people of those foreign
countries are very, very ignorant. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes
and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in
making those idiots understand their own language!"
Mark Twain, Innocents
Abroad, 1869
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
“At Christmastime, he asks if Santa Claus is coming, and I say,
‘If you’re good’. It’s a little sad. They ask where’s Santa Claus, is he going to bring any
presents. I say 'yes' not to shatter their dreams.”
Maria Torres
“I have
blisters. They want toys and you don’t have money. I’m pressured because
there’s not a lot of work and I want to buy something for the children. I just
work to give them something to eat.”
Jorge Torres