Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
And:
I'll have one or two at the most.
Three and I'm under the table,
Four and I'm under the host.
Friday, June 9th, 2006 Happy Birthday, Tom!
Not The Perfect Crime Department
Got one for ya: say you were inclined, as
a gesture of disrespect, to personally deliver a
large envelope stuffed with dog excrement to someone's home or office. OK?
Wouldn't you see to it that the envelope could not easily be associated with
you? As in: wouldn't you, like, use a brand new envelope or, at least,
one with no writing
or printing of any kind? Well, I mean, this
person simply used an old envelope addressed to herself after having blacked out
the address information. It took the police about three minutes to discern her
address through the Magic Marker. The perpetrator, one Kathleen
Ensz, French
Professor Emerita at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, was
tracked down and cited for criminal use of a noxious substance.
"We will not be defeated. We will
not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a
meaningless agreement.
We hope that peace will come swiftly. But that is in the hands of others besides
ourselves. And we must be prepared for a long continued conflict. It will
require patience as well as bravery, the will to endure as well as the will to
resist.
I wish it were possible to convince others with words of what we now find it
necessary to say with guns and planes: Armed hostility is futile. Our resources
are equal to the challenge. Because we fight for values and we fight for
principles, rather than [for]
territory or colonies, our patience and our determination are unending."
President Lyndon Johnson, April 7, 1965, by which date a 'mere' four hundred US
soldiers had died in Vietnam.
Thursday, June 8th, 2006
I
don't know why anyone should give a rat's rear end about anything
that Ann Coulter says but...in case you missed it:
I also don't know why she is referred to as a 'conservative author'. But I do know that she's a traveling freak show...and that's why she gets interviewed! Kristin Breitweiser (of Middletown, NJ), one of the four (or five) Merry Widows, has now weighed in on Ann: " She sounds like a very disturbed, unraveled person! "
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006
Braggin', not Complainin'
"I’m really proud to say that in
the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of
homosexual relationship.” United States Senator
Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma
"It's the first time we ever talked about
these issues publicly. The last thing we want to do is offend anyone because of
our beliefs."
Colorado Rockies
General Manager Dan O'Dowd
Tuesday, June 6th,
2006
6-6-06!
"Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious, and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all." President George W. Bush, 6/3/06
Ya know...I might have some respect for Alfred on this one if I could believe that he actually gives a dark stool, one way or the other, about gay marriage. But his delivery on this subject is so perfunctory...so lacking in enthusiasm...so like a man who has been told what to say, that his God-fearing supporters (the ones whose votes he's trying to huckster) are the ones who should be the most offended!
"[Woodrow] Wilson's racist views were hardly a secret. As president of Princeton, he had turned away black applicants, regarding their desire for education to be 'unwarranted'. [As President of the United States, he] allowed various [federal] officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: white government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by blacks. In extreme cases, federal officials built separate structures to house black workers. Most black diplomats were replaced by whites; numerous black federal officials in the South were removed from their posts; the local Washington police force and fire department stopped hiring blacks. Wilson's own view...was that federal segregation was an act of kindness. 'Off by themselves with only a white supervisor, blacks would not be forced out of their jobs by energetic white employees.' He told one protesting black delegation that 'segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.' " Lawrence J. Friedman
Monday, June 5th, 2006
According to the New Jersey Association of Behavioral Therapists, the 'ventilation hypothesis' is the widely-accepted belief that expressing negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, or fear, is good for our mental health, our physical health, and our interpersonal relationships. But in "Expressing Emotion" (Guilford Press, 1999), Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Jeanne Watson point out that expressing negative emotions is likely to intensify distress when expressing these emotions evokes feelings of guilt or shame, or when the listener responds critically rather than empathically.
"The aim of the president's radio address — which darkly warned that Massachusetts and San Francisco (nudge, nudge) are going to destroy marriage — is the same as the Republican leadership's plans to trot out one cultural hot button after another in the coming weeks. After gay marriage comes the push for a constitutional ban on flag burning, a solution in search of a problem if there ever was one." NYT Editorial
Sunday, June 4th, 2006
Until I read the current article by RFK, Jr., in Rolling Stone, I was inclined to believe that the talk about election fraud in the 2004 Presidential contest was, well, just talk. But then...maybe it is just talk.
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006
What I wanna
know is: how come this
tax collector guy was carrying 28,000 dollars
when he went to relieve himself? Anybody have
an answer for that? See...in Austria, it shoulda
been Schillings!
So what's this? He had been going from door-to-door...collecting
taxes?
Anybody smell a rat?
Friday, June 2nd, 2006
Is
it unavoidable, as we age, that we tend to 'repeat ourselves', literally and
figuratively? I am aghast at my own (growing) proclivity to tell the same
story, in response to the same cues, over
(and over) again. It happened (again) last night: I
was driving my genius son back to his current Berkeley dwelling when we (not for
the first time, he and I) passed the intersection of University & MLK.
The 'same story' (yawn) is
this: I and my first wife, on the warm evening of June 5th, 1968 had just
watched RFK's California Democratic Primary victory speech on a past-its-prime
B&W TV and had ventured out (in our 1960
VW Bug...a wedding present from her dad...'nother story, 'nother time) in search
of sweets. ;-)
Ya see, at that intersection, in 1968, was an
open-all-night 'U-Save',
frequented by long-haired potheads. Hard to believe, maybe, but in 1968 I had
long hair. The 'story'
is how the news of the assassination was shouted on the streets. Well...maybe it
wasn't as exciting as it sounds. You woulda had to have been there, I
guess. When I started to tell my son the story
(for probably the 80th time), he politely (but accurately) finished it for me. ;-)
And so, I do hereby resolve never to mention it again. That is, if I can remember
not to.
Thursday, June 1st, 2006
"Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)...regarded belief in God as an illusion that mature men and women should lay aside. The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness." Karen Armstrong
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006
Timothy
Leary has been dead ten years. The story
of his life is riveting. Among the factoids: both his first wife (in 1955) and his (their) only daughter,
Susan (in 1990), committed suicide and his (their) only son, Jack, refused to
have anything to do with him after ~1975.
In the late 60's Timothy was convicted of marijuana possession in Texas
and was sentenced to 30 years in prison and a $630,000 fine!
Although the US Supreme Court overturned that conviction (on a
technicality),
he was retried and sentenced to a 'mere' ten years.
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
This just in, courtesy of Skip, MCP:
Japanese scientists have created a camera with such a fast shutter speed, they now can photograph a woman with her mouth
shut!
Monday, May 29th, 2006 Happy Birthday, Ana!
Hard work often pays off after some time, but laziness always pays off now.
It's twice twenty-eight and four times fourteen.
It's eight times seven and it's as many years as were granted to Nietzsche,
Hitler and Lincoln.
Sunday, May 28th, 2006
At JumpToday.com, one is exhorted to "Sail through blue skies, past white clouds." Oops!
"In the middle of a conflict not of their making, fighting an enemy as deadly and resolute as they themselves are, the Marines are now lectured by generals to destroy only that which needs [be] destroyed, kill only those who need [be] killed, as if war was ever that easy." Scott Ritter, writing in the UK Guardian
"Your Cardinal...expresses the hope, as do I, that in the
short future
we will be [able] to enjoy the beatification and canonization of JP2."
Oh Boy Oh Boy!
Benedict
24, 5/27/06