I've read a lot about this. Of all people, a black sports columnist comes close to summing up the other thing wrong w/ all this. An excerpt:
Including the fact that not one witness — black or white, and there were 40 statements taken — connected the jumping/beatdown of the white student (Dec. 4) to the noose incident (Sept. 1).
No one mentions that a black U.S. Attorney, Donald Washington, investigated the "Jena Six" case and held a town-hall meeting explaining that there was no evidence connecting the jumping/beatdown to the noose incident.
Only after the prosecutor overreacted (or tired of letting Bell and others skate once the successful football season was over; Bell wasn't the only football star charged) did the "Jena Six" blame the attack on the nooses and the white shade tree.
And Michelle Malkin, a commentator who I'm pretty sure doesn't actually reason, but rather has been programmed at some point with an ideology that hits more than misses, summed up the question whose beggings to be asked have fallen on deaf ears:
I’m not going to join the knee-jerk race-hustlers in celebrating the “civil right” to beat white people unconscious to rectify institutional racism. Is this the legacy Martin Luther King, Jr., would have sanctioned?
Which is the problem all the contrarians like me have w/ this. The implicit narrative behind all the "Free the Jena Six" talk is this: "Whites in this town hate blacks and punished them too harshly, and any wrongdoing blacks might have done can be blamed on white racism." It's not too big a mental leap to remove the words "this town" from that notion-- especially if you don't think about the actual words that make up that thought, which no one is.
White doucebaggery-- and nothing I've read doesn't suggest every white person in that backswamp nightmare town is the worst kind of anachronistic scummy backwash, the sort of hyper racist Bad Sheriff caricature that most of us will only ever encounter in movies-- doesn't excuse black doucebaggery. Not even when it outweighs the black doucebaggery, as it does in this case. Every race represented in this whole affair needs to disown the participants.
Still not convinced the attack wasn't at least kind of justified? Consider the logistics of a six-on-one attack. Mychal Bell was a promising football star. He needs five other kids to beat some white boy's ass? How does that number break down? Four to hold each limb, one to hold the head, and the sixth to work the body? Or maybe four for the limbs and one for each nut? Or was there room for only six?
Plus, Bell had three assault convictions prior to this. If it's racist of me to just blindly assume, without looking into it at all, that none of those three beatings were administered in the pursuit of social justice, my bitterly, drippingly sarcastic apologies.
And among the many lies by omission told about the Jena Six now-fiasco, the downplaying of Justin Barker's medical condition makes me puke the hardest. The lightness of his wounds isn't further evidence of the harshness of the charges against the Six; it's lucky defiance of the already evident severity of his beating. He was punched and kicked unconscious. Have you ever hit your head hard on a cabinet or door? Imagine someone hitting you that hard on purpose until you can't stay awake. Because we see cats getting knocked out all the time in entertainment, and have never been beat so hard we can't remember getting beat ourselves, it's easy to laugh it off. But think about what goes into a fight that escalates that high. And think of Robin Williams in Insomnia defending his accidental murder of his girlfriend in what sounds like perfectly reasonable, though tragic terms, until pursuing cop Al Pachino drops some context on the audience by screaming that choking a girl out for five uninterrupted minutes does not constitute a heat-of-the-moment outburst.
Again, none of this is to defend, excuse, or rationalize the racist institutional abuse perpetrated by the whites. And even I think hanging nooses from a whites-only tree doesn't qualifiy as aggressively provocative social satire (although making the nooses the school colors almost brings it back). Really, this whole town is a petrie dish of human bacteria that needs to be sterilized and thrown out. I don't know if segregation was wrong by itself so much as it was wrong in service of racism, if you get my meaning. Why not keep this whole townful of idiot apes away from the rest of the world?
I know, when you average it out, that black people are nowhere near the sort of thug, ass-with-impunity BET likes to spotlight non-stop. I know most of the people in any group aren't represented by the terrible examples that get all the attention, and are decent and just want happy lives for they and theirs, and don't like being a shit to anyone, really. But speak the fuck up already, folks. And don't chose solidarity with those you should shun just because you think the other guys are worse. I can tell you whitey busts his ass letting everyone know his disgraceful cousins don't speak for him. Your turn.
I think that covers it. I skipped the Cavemen premiere to write this. You owe me so big.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
More like UNcivil WRONGS: Socially Quarantine the Jena 4006
Saturday, September 29, 2007
The Life Trap (Brizoni)
Since working not working at McDonald's, I've met lots of people stuck in the Life Trap:
One guy in particular sticks out in my mind: Younger than me. Got off heroin, got off, then got on and off meth, currently quitting drinking, which he says is the hardest of all. Got screwed when his roommate when they moved out of his apartment (in my complex, even) so he has an eviction on his record, moved into his brother's house and got kicked out of there, now has lived in a hotel w/ his parents for 8 months. Life Trap.
Of course, not working at McDonald's myself means I too am not in a bit of a Life... wait, would that be "I too" or "I neither"? My self-respect-covering code screws me up if I stick too it too closely.
And that's the point. The gate's open-- it's just "'"off limits"'"
One guy in particular sticks out in my mind: Younger than me. Got off heroin, got off, then got on and off meth, currently quitting drinking, which he says is the hardest of all. Got screwed when his roommate when they moved out of his apartment (in my complex, even) so he has an eviction on his record, moved into his brother's house and got kicked out of there, now has lived in a hotel w/ his parents for 8 months. Life Trap.
Of course, not working at McDonald's myself means I too am not in a bit of a Life... wait, would that be "I too" or "I neither"? My self-respect-covering code screws me up if I stick too it too closely.
And that's the point. The gate's open-- it's just "'"off limits"'"
Monday, September 17, 2007
OJ: The Movie
I know OJ is a common and therefore uncool topic, but how interesting would an all-true biopic of this guy be:
- Football star out of college
- Tries his hand acting, enjoying genuine success in the field in 1974, with the smash hit The Towering Inferno., and a TV-movie of his life wherein he plays himself, entitled Juice on the Loose.
- Also, Wikipedia says "Simpson was considered for the lead role in The Terminator, before it was decided audiences might not accept him as a relentless villain, due to his "nice guy" image."
- Then stars in the Naked Gun series.
- Kills his ex-wife and her boyfriend.
- Flees police in a highly-watched chase.
- Goes on trial for a year, every minute of which gets televised, and by the end the only 12 people in the world who can't figure out he did it all happen, in the sort of statistical fluke mathematicians call an "Omniverse Vanisher", to comprise the jury.
- Three years later, is found guilty of "Wrongful Death". Logic dictates every thinking man and woman abandon all faith in the American legal system; crime rate plummets due to suicidal nihilism.
- Ostracized, plays golf for 12 years.
- Writes a thinly-veiled confession called "If" I Did It, detailing in detail what he did and how he did it, and when, using what. The book is pulped in a last-minute attack of the publisher's conscience, only to be reissued a year later, this time the proceeds going to the families of OJ's victims.
- Breaks into a Vegas hotel room to steal "back" from an auctioneer the suit he was acquitted in.
- Will probably go to jail and spend at least some of the time he should have spent to begin with.
Tell me that wouldn't be a badass 2 hours. And who knows what crazy crap he'll end up dying during doing? Zeppelin attack? Betrayal by a trusted associate in a counterfeiting ring which'll make 100-dollar bills w/ his face on them? "Re-animating" Nicole Brown's corpse Weekend at Bernie's-style to restore his good name, complete w/ mimicking her voice while hiding his head behind her head?
- Football star out of college
- Tries his hand acting, enjoying genuine success in the field in 1974, with the smash hit The Towering Inferno., and a TV-movie of his life wherein he plays himself, entitled Juice on the Loose.
- Also, Wikipedia says "Simpson was considered for the lead role in The Terminator, before it was decided audiences might not accept him as a relentless villain, due to his "nice guy" image."
- Then stars in the Naked Gun series.
- Kills his ex-wife and her boyfriend.
- Flees police in a highly-watched chase.
- Goes on trial for a year, every minute of which gets televised, and by the end the only 12 people in the world who can't figure out he did it all happen, in the sort of statistical fluke mathematicians call an "Omniverse Vanisher", to comprise the jury.
- Three years later, is found guilty of "Wrongful Death". Logic dictates every thinking man and woman abandon all faith in the American legal system; crime rate plummets due to suicidal nihilism.
- Ostracized, plays golf for 12 years.
- Writes a thinly-veiled confession called "If" I Did It, detailing in detail what he did and how he did it, and when, using what. The book is pulped in a last-minute attack of the publisher's conscience, only to be reissued a year later, this time the proceeds going to the families of OJ's victims.
- Breaks into a Vegas hotel room to steal "back" from an auctioneer the suit he was acquitted in.
- Will probably go to jail and spend at least some of the time he should have spent to begin with.
Tell me that wouldn't be a badass 2 hours. And who knows what crazy crap he'll end up dying during doing? Zeppelin attack? Betrayal by a trusted associate in a counterfeiting ring which'll make 100-dollar bills w/ his face on them? "Re-animating" Nicole Brown's corpse Weekend at Bernie's-style to restore his good name, complete w/ mimicking her voice while hiding his head behind her head?
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Hurricane Tiger killed President John F. Kennedy, with a tiger.
Hurricane Tiger began to swirl in the exact geographic center of the Bermuda Triangle, whipping across Cuba and that other Spanish-speaking country that's around there-- but "miraculously" sparing Haiti, save for a tiger it lifts from a budding Haitian zoo, carrying the feline across half the United States, all the way to President Kennedy's motorcade.
Using the tiger as a swinging mace, Hurricane Tiger slashes the president three times, fast enough to slip between the frames of Abraham Zapruder's under-cranked Kodak film. Managing to scoop up half the president's brain matter, Hurricane Tiger, now 7 feet wide and 100 feet tall, flew in a mathematically straight line back to Haiti, where the tiger and JFK's brain, now swirled by thousands of "G" forces into the tiger's head, combining the two brains to make a JFK/tiger hybrid, a "TFK", if you will, where deposited with palpable tenderness back into the tiger pit. The occurence made front-page headlines in Haiti, but was dismissed as unbelievable folklore in the rest of the world.
Driven half-mad by gravitational stress, TFK's newly electrified tiger claws tore the bars of his cage like paper mache and promptly went on a prolonged killing spree, lasting months. While to this day no one knows how TFK was able to stay incognito for any period of time, rouge Haitian researchers-- any inquiry into the TFK case was outlawed by a traumatized Haitian Aristocracy in 1979-- have deciphered the killings were a kind of Morse code; each killing taking place either one, three, or twelve hours from the last, to the second. From this knowledge, and interpreting the twelve-hour gaps as the ends or sentences, those reseachers were the first to receive this message (note there are no commas or other punctuation in Morse code):
"We in this country in this generation are by destiny rather than choice the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask therefore that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of peace on earth good will toward men. That must always be our goal and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago except the Lord keep the city th"
Lead researcher Paco Sanchez recognized the text immediately: It was the final paragraph of the speech President Kennedy intended to give the day he was assassinated. Minus the last 5 words, that is. In the middle of Haiti's long, hot summer of 1964, a hot dog vendor named Juan Ramirez bravely fought off TFK w/ a pair of electrified hot dog tongs, sparing his fate as the letter "e" in the word "the", and effectively ending TFK's blood-soaked message to humanity as it (presumably) neared its close.
Following the foiled attack, TFK ran for 40 miles, not stopping once, sinking his claws in a major metropolitan power grid, killing his body but somehow sparing his head. The resultant electrical catastrophe caused storm clouds to swirl into existence from seeming nothingness, and a flash flood began in 7 seconds.
For seven long days, the whole of Haiti experienced floods as high as 10 feet. TFK's body bloated and dissolved in the waters, but his head, just above the floodline, didn't stop blinking normally until a lucky lightning bolt-- the only one recorded in the storm-- struck it, causing the clouds to dissipate immediately.
Economic records show no Haitian purchased any batteries for 4 months afterwards.
All the animals in The Haitian Zoo, abandoned a month prior due to an "unbearable static electricial [sic] charge", died in the flooding. All, that is, except for three tiger cubs, sparks periodically sparking in their young fir. The brave Haitian researchers were initially at a loss to explain this, but it is now believed TFK electrically passed on his exact brain pattern onto his offspring, embuing them w/ the knowledge necessary to escape their father's (their own) unholy wrath.
Sadly, nobody realizing this in time, the tigers were later released into the wilds of southeast Asia.
The oft-lamented near-extinction of many types of tigers has, in fact, saved millions upon millions of human lives. It is now estimated that 99.9 percent of all tigers living today have their brains occupied by perfect electro-chemical duplications of TFK-- in essence, they are TFK; a Jacob's Ladder sizzling between each of their unnaturally polished metallic claws.
Why haven't they sent mankind another message in blood? Tiger-murder statistics are woefully incomplete. Perhaps they already have...
Hurricane Tiger began to swirl in the exact geographic center of the Bermuda Triangle, whipping across Cuba and that other Spanish-speaking country that's around there-- but "miraculously" sparing Haiti, save for a tiger it lifts from a budding Haitian zoo, carrying the feline across half the United States, all the way to President Kennedy's motorcade.
Using the tiger as a swinging mace, Hurricane Tiger slashes the president three times, fast enough to slip between the frames of Abraham Zapruder's under-cranked Kodak film. Managing to scoop up half the president's brain matter, Hurricane Tiger, now 7 feet wide and 100 feet tall, flew in a mathematically straight line back to Haiti, where the tiger and JFK's brain, now swirled by thousands of "G" forces into the tiger's head, combining the two brains to make a JFK/tiger hybrid, a "TFK", if you will, where deposited with palpable tenderness back into the tiger pit. The occurence made front-page headlines in Haiti, but was dismissed as unbelievable folklore in the rest of the world.
Driven half-mad by gravitational stress, TFK's newly electrified tiger claws tore the bars of his cage like paper mache and promptly went on a prolonged killing spree, lasting months. While to this day no one knows how TFK was able to stay incognito for any period of time, rouge Haitian researchers-- any inquiry into the TFK case was outlawed by a traumatized Haitian Aristocracy in 1979-- have deciphered the killings were a kind of Morse code; each killing taking place either one, three, or twelve hours from the last, to the second. From this knowledge, and interpreting the twelve-hour gaps as the ends or sentences, those reseachers were the first to receive this message (note there are no commas or other punctuation in Morse code):
"We in this country in this generation are by destiny rather than choice the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask therefore that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of peace on earth good will toward men. That must always be our goal and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago except the Lord keep the city th"
Lead researcher Paco Sanchez recognized the text immediately: It was the final paragraph of the speech President Kennedy intended to give the day he was assassinated. Minus the last 5 words, that is. In the middle of Haiti's long, hot summer of 1964, a hot dog vendor named Juan Ramirez bravely fought off TFK w/ a pair of electrified hot dog tongs, sparing his fate as the letter "e" in the word "the", and effectively ending TFK's blood-soaked message to humanity as it (presumably) neared its close.
Following the foiled attack, TFK ran for 40 miles, not stopping once, sinking his claws in a major metropolitan power grid, killing his body but somehow sparing his head. The resultant electrical catastrophe caused storm clouds to swirl into existence from seeming nothingness, and a flash flood began in 7 seconds.
For seven long days, the whole of Haiti experienced floods as high as 10 feet. TFK's body bloated and dissolved in the waters, but his head, just above the floodline, didn't stop blinking normally until a lucky lightning bolt-- the only one recorded in the storm-- struck it, causing the clouds to dissipate immediately.
Economic records show no Haitian purchased any batteries for 4 months afterwards.
All the animals in The Haitian Zoo, abandoned a month prior due to an "unbearable static electricial [sic] charge", died in the flooding. All, that is, except for three tiger cubs, sparks periodically sparking in their young fir. The brave Haitian researchers were initially at a loss to explain this, but it is now believed TFK electrically passed on his exact brain pattern onto his offspring, embuing them w/ the knowledge necessary to escape their father's (their own) unholy wrath.
Sadly, nobody realizing this in time, the tigers were later released into the wilds of southeast Asia.
The oft-lamented near-extinction of many types of tigers has, in fact, saved millions upon millions of human lives. It is now estimated that 99.9 percent of all tigers living today have their brains occupied by perfect electro-chemical duplications of TFK-- in essence, they are TFK; a Jacob's Ladder sizzling between each of their unnaturally polished metallic claws.
Why haven't they sent mankind another message in blood? Tiger-murder statistics are woefully incomplete. Perhaps they already have...
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
couple leftovers
1. I have this image in my head of a big barrel of worms, all writhing around in every direction. Freedom is a hole at the top, about worm-level. One or maybe a few happen to be writhing in generally the right direction, towards the hole, but in light of the rest of the worms, it's hard not to look at those correct few as just a function of statistics.
2. Theory and Practice: Lesson Ω
Theory:
Practice:
2. Theory and Practice: Lesson Ω
Theory:
Practice:
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Creaky door, cobwebs, echoing footsteps, blow dust off keyboard in great cloud, blog
(Brizoni sez):
Al Qaeda to target embassies. Embassies? That's the big threat? Have I fallen into a time-warp, landing in an alternate 1993 with slightly worse pop music?
Or has the war on terror been such a thundering success that the Jihadis have scurried back to the terroristic equivalent of TP-ing houses? Has attacking essentially random Middle Eastern countries in retaliation for a homeland assault sent the message to the [I need an epithet as or more caustic than "sand-nigger" that doesn't have the collateral damage against other cultures I don't have as big a problem with] constituency that provoking the US is like playing Don't Wake Daddy with a hammer?
OR, it is just the opposite: Has the war on terror been such a bloom-off-the-rose disaster for the specter of US military might that the Tusken Raiders think they can just slack at this point? Will we really capitulate after they bomb a few embassies in African countries even Rand McNally forgot were there? Have we so lost our stomach for a fight we'll let any A-holes spread whatever clitoris-ripping-out-with-pliers religion they feel like wherever?
Here's the big thing the Western world has going for it: We've taught ourselves to be ashamed of what dicks people naturally are. So many other doucebag cultures have yet to do that math, and we have to live on the same planet as them. We think of this as the super-shiny future, only 5 or 6 generations away from Utopian abundance and security, each man and woman armed w/ toys that can rearrange atoms into whatever tickles our future fancy, but in the grand scheme, we're a select few chimps who've built elaborate twig structures, surrounded by a lot more chimps who passionately hate even that meager achievement. (No, I still can't get over what a savage goddamn time I was born in.)
Feh. Nothing I can do about it tonight. Maybe writing more Robots vs. Zombies will cheer me up. Or maybe everything I come up w/ in this mood will (barely) covertly say how shockingly, overwhelmingly high the top of the mountain looks from here.
Al Qaeda to target embassies. Embassies? That's the big threat? Have I fallen into a time-warp, landing in an alternate 1993 with slightly worse pop music?
Or has the war on terror been such a thundering success that the Jihadis have scurried back to the terroristic equivalent of TP-ing houses? Has attacking essentially random Middle Eastern countries in retaliation for a homeland assault sent the message to the [I need an epithet as or more caustic than "sand-nigger" that doesn't have the collateral damage against other cultures I don't have as big a problem with] constituency that provoking the US is like playing Don't Wake Daddy with a hammer?
OR, it is just the opposite: Has the war on terror been such a bloom-off-the-rose disaster for the specter of US military might that the Tusken Raiders think they can just slack at this point? Will we really capitulate after they bomb a few embassies in African countries even Rand McNally forgot were there? Have we so lost our stomach for a fight we'll let any A-holes spread whatever clitoris-ripping-out-with-pliers religion they feel like wherever?
Here's the big thing the Western world has going for it: We've taught ourselves to be ashamed of what dicks people naturally are. So many other doucebag cultures have yet to do that math, and we have to live on the same planet as them. We think of this as the super-shiny future, only 5 or 6 generations away from Utopian abundance and security, each man and woman armed w/ toys that can rearrange atoms into whatever tickles our future fancy, but in the grand scheme, we're a select few chimps who've built elaborate twig structures, surrounded by a lot more chimps who passionately hate even that meager achievement. (No, I still can't get over what a savage goddamn time I was born in.)
Feh. Nothing I can do about it tonight. Maybe writing more Robots vs. Zombies will cheer me up. Or maybe everything I come up w/ in this mood will (barely) covertly say how shockingly, overwhelmingly high the top of the mountain looks from here.
Monday, July 9, 2007
The Health Care Thing
Brizoni here. The Ransom Note was "kind" enough to let me use their account (I ran this blog, once upon a time, but they've appropriated it, I think just to shut it down, but who knows what plans those guys have until their sprung) to post. They're not pleased I used as many swears as I did, but, well, whatever.
Watch video of Michael "I Don't Talk in Soundbites" * Moore shit his fat. I haven't seen Sicko, and other than this evisceration, I don't know what the movie claims. I do know the political spectrum is littered w/ doucebags whose disingenuous populism can be smelled readily by their use of the phrase "the American People". Whenever someone goes on and on about "the American People", they're trying to sell you something (Moore) or get you off their backs (the President). I don't know that you'll ever hear that expression out of sincerity. It's kind of code for "you assholes".
I don't know if we just deserve free health care. I don't know that we don't, either, although I'm inclined to think that, given where we're at as a species and a culture right now, we actively don't deserve a damn thing. I do fear turning hospitals over to the government will turn them into DMVs, and that old jokes about skeletons in waiting rooms will start hitting too close to home**, but again, I don't know for sure. I want to know why exactly health care costs so much. What's the actual reason(s)? Anyone?
I've decided not to let either group of cumrag get me agitated about this one way or the other, until I've had time to think it through for myself. If that's still allowed.
What do you think?
*Actual goddamn quote.
**Want your drugs invented and open-heart surgery performed by the people who gave us FEMA, Amtrak and the CIA? Does the Post Office do a better job than FedEx? I can't mail a package via the federal government without waiting in line 20 minutes--and the Post Office is the best-run federal agency." - same guy
Watch video of Michael "I Don't Talk in Soundbites" * Moore shit his fat. I haven't seen Sicko, and other than this evisceration, I don't know what the movie claims. I do know the political spectrum is littered w/ doucebags whose disingenuous populism can be smelled readily by their use of the phrase "the American People". Whenever someone goes on and on about "the American People", they're trying to sell you something (Moore) or get you off their backs (the President). I don't know that you'll ever hear that expression out of sincerity. It's kind of code for "you assholes".
I don't know if we just deserve free health care. I don't know that we don't, either, although I'm inclined to think that, given where we're at as a species and a culture right now, we actively don't deserve a damn thing. I do fear turning hospitals over to the government will turn them into DMVs, and that old jokes about skeletons in waiting rooms will start hitting too close to home**, but again, I don't know for sure. I want to know why exactly health care costs so much. What's the actual reason(s)? Anyone?
I've decided not to let either group of cumrag get me agitated about this one way or the other, until I've had time to think it through for myself. If that's still allowed.
What do you think?
*Actual goddamn quote.
**Want your drugs invented and open-heart surgery performed by the people who gave us FEMA, Amtrak and the CIA? Does the Post Office do a better job than FedEx? I can't mail a package via the federal government without waiting in line 20 minutes--and the Post Office is the best-run federal agency." - same guy
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Reason to Love Comics #90,227 (Fourth of July edition)
This is from Action Comics #309, which has a cover date of February 1964. To let news vendors know when to remove items from their shelves, comics are traditionally dated two months ahead of their actual publication date, making this, more accurately, the December 1963 issue. President Kennedy was shot November 22, which means this story hit America's red, bleary eyes a month after the assassination at the latest. Could have been as early as 12 days.*
The story has Superman tricked by his friends into being a guest on a "This is Your Life"-type show called "Our American Heroes". Since everyone else from Superman's life has been notified and scheduled to appear, Clark Kent's absence would be conspicuous, so Supes has to produce a Clark double, and quick. But, all his usual doubles-- Chameleon Boy from the 30th Century, Batman, one of his Superman robots-- all fall through. Luckily, JFK shows up in a rubber mask, saving the day.
Imagine the impact this comic had on the youth of a traumatized nation. The ghost of JFK masquerades as Clark Kent. How does a child's mind process that symbolism (whether intended or not)? And "If you can't trust the president, who can you trust?"? Prophecy, much? All these old-school Superman books are fertile American mythology, but the implications of all the elements in this issue seem aggressively resonant. I wonder if history should take more notice of this book coming out when it did. Maybe it had... I don't know, some notable impact. It's strong enough to have.
*A full comic takes months to produce. The creators of a comic are about two-to-six months ahead of the readers, which is why this came out at all. Years later, another Superman book, depicting the smoldering wreckage of Lex Luthor's twin Lexcorp towers, came out a day after 9/11. That entire crossover stunk, so I skipped it. My haul for September 12 did include this gem, however, and imagine my surprise when I turned a page and saw this.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Procrastinatory Meditation On and Around the Movie Joe (part 1) (SPOILERS)
0.
In the Old New, Dvorak, historian of fortune, his severely pockmarked cowboy friend Dusty Voz, and ladyfriend Polly Cracker toil away a rainy afternoon. Dvorak's clacks on his laptop approach a drone, while Dusty cooks up a pot of beans and bacon on the hot plate and Polly lies on her stomach on the crash mat, idly thumbing her way through her assigned stack of comicbooks, punctuated w/ occasional heavy sighs.1.
"Gonna break the damn delete key if I keep this up." mutters Dvorak. He's engrossed in his work, and hasn't really realized he's spoken aloud.2. "This is terrible. I'm just... dumping out the contents of my brain, trimming only what immediately strikes me as fat, then dumping some more. It's sub-Ransom Note, is what it is. Might as well cut my penis off and join the Divinyls."
3. "Didn't you hear?" pipes up Dusty, his beaten old face obscured by plumes of steam. "Turns out there's already a band called The Divinyls who had a song on the radio once upon a time. Our Divinyls had to change their name."
4. "To what?", incredulously.
5. Dusty suppresses a sigh. "They call themselves The Scissor Dykes now."
6. "The WHAT? That's... awful! It's awful." Dvorak almost forgets to pantomime his flustration. "Are they insane? Did they pick that name? E... whu... I just now saw how badly it's going to end for them now, in vision, clear as day! Is... is this The Note's way of... shutting down the fan club?"
7. Dusty kneels staying still, a picture of patience. "And how does it end for them?"
8. "They... devolve into an angry lesbian biker gang, in process of time. With this new name in the backs of their heads, they'll start to think maybe they should live up to their names more literally, they'll each pair off and experiment, and that'll be that!"
9. "You think so?" Dusty smiles.
10. Dvorak smiles back, slowly realizing how dumb it sounds, now that he's said it out loud. "They don't call me Nostra-smart-ass for nothing, sir."
11. "I never got that, anyway," says Polly, bending her head up. "Divinyls."
12. "It's a play on 'divine'. The verb, not the adjective."
13. "Oh. Anyway, I finished this one."
2.
And her tone lets you know "I finished this one" has become a rote mantra over the last few hours.2. "I didn't get it," she half-whines. Dv rolls his eyes, then looks over at the book in her hand. JLA Classified #3.
3. "The 'infant universe' is ours. The Justice League sends us their heroes that can't cut it in their homeworld. We're just a two-foot cube of stars in Batman's lab on Pluto. It's like Superman says at the end:
4. "
5. "It's Literalist Mythology. Instead of using exploits of the gods a loose metaphor of suggested human conduct, superhero comics are (more and more) deliberately different. Instruction by contrast, not similarity."
6. "Yeah, but this same guy used superheroes exactly as metaphors for human conduct in X-Men, at least in anticipation of science-augmented superabilities. Remember that telepathic affair between Cyclops and Emma Frost? "Does extramarital activity count if it's just thoughts?" That wasn't instruction by contrast at all, he was trying to get us to ask questions about the ethics inherent in future abilities and... dominions we may well enjoy, and before we have to figure out those ethical issues on the fly!"
7. "Look. There's not.... There's enough ideological 'space' here that there's no contradiction.
8. "And you shouldn't need this background, anyway. It's OK, understandable, that you expected Morrison's Justice League story to match his X-Men stuff in meta, but you should have figured out the difference by seeing it. Your expectation was a full impediment to perception. Not cool. Read it again."
9. "What? No way!"
10. "How do you plan to comprehend books without pictures if you can't get your head around those with? Read it again."
3.
1. "Slop's on," announces Dusty, finding a break in the conversation. "You two lovebirds get to the bottom of the nature and mechanics of metaphor in funnybooks yet?"2. Dv shoots him a dirty look, but some of a smile breaks through his glare. He takes a beat. "Ah, it's all a welcome distraction. Speaking of metaphor, this latest Boomer Bible movie's got me stumped.
3. "The rich guy finally gets worked up enough to declare the war on the younger generation the poor guy wanted him to all along, and the very end of the film is he kills his own daughter? I know what it could mean, but not what it does mean. It could be metaphied a number of ways.
4. "You know what it is? It's Tarot-riffic. Tarotastic. The characters are archetypes and rigorously believable, which is awesome."
5. He trails off, fist on his forehead, staring intently past his computer. "Dusty!" And now he moves. "Come here and read my thoughts so far."
(end part one)
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Membering and Remembering on Memorial Day (special guest star: Marvin Gardens)
Only a series of unremarkable but serendipitous reminders kept me conscious that yesterday was Memorial Day. Normally, I would have known only by the day off I'd be pleasantly surprised to get, but I left my job a few weeks ago in a blaze of scene, and beyond that the day clocks as many brain hours as Arbor Day (though more than Earth Day, in my defense).
This year marks the first I've made a point to remember on Memorial Day, and it's telling my big behavior change was in the type of movie I rented. I've had in mind to watch Zardoz, the 1974 Sean Connery catastrophe which started out as Hollywood's first attempt to adapt Lord of the Rings, and come up w/ a Hollywood Bizarro Butchery formula for making intriguingly weird cult classics. If Lord of the Rings contains a floating stone idol head that vomits machine guns by the time it makes it to the screen, what giggle-and-hand-clappingly great zany might we wring from, say, King Lear, or the Book of Ezekiel?
But I'd been thinking about MD and the lack of rememberence thereon for a few days by then, so that little ember of responsibility was growing just a bit brighter than usual. I trolled the aisles for awhile. Lingered over Saving Private Ryan, which I've never seen (or Lion King or Braveheart, if you need yet another reason to not respect me), but I don't trust Spielberg after Munich. Finally lucked upon We Were Soldiers, and the three of you reading this know an Insta recommendation is all the good word I need.
The native reviewer on amazon.com lauds the film as paying "tribute to brave men while avoiding the pitfalls of propaganda", but the reviewer quoted below it, the New Yorker's David Denby, can't quite put up with a Vietnam movie that, as IP puts it, doesn't remake Kafka:
A bloody piece of hero worship devoted to an ideal commander-Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore (Mel Gibson)-and to fighting and dying in the right way. The training is bruising, the leadership inspired, the wives as supportive as deeply rooted oaks. In 1965, early in the war in Vietnam, Moore leads units of the Army's Seventh Cavalry against a much larger North Vietnamese force. Mel Gibson is leathery but quick and alert, his eyes darting this way and that. When he runs around from one part of the perimeter to another, his M-16 blazing, the movie is exciting in a rudimentary, gung-ho way. The writer-director Randall Wallace stages much of the combat at very close range, with masses of North Vietnamese infantry hurling themselves against American riflemen. Recapitulating the many pictures made in the forties and fifties which portrayed the Americans as good and simple people fighting for a just cause, Wallace and Gibson have taken Vietnam out of history-essentially, they have assimilated it into the Second World War. (emphasis added)
I've heard two stories about this film, and Denby's take is in the minority. The other perspective I get mostly from the DVD itself, but also from amazon's first customer review; namely, that of all Vietnam flicks, this is the one that gets right what it was like, and what sort of men and families were involved.
And the film's story is almost objectionably simple: Earnest young men in the just-barely-pre-radicalized '60s, led by an earnest man twice their age and a course-but-sincere gentleman another decade older get called to war, do their damndest to keep each other alive, while the wives they left home do their best to support each other. No innovative plot, no clever storytelling. There's grit, but the film doesn't glory in how unafraid of grit it is. All it has to say about Vietnam is how honorable everyone fighting was (including respect for the North Vietnamese so genuine I teared up [not that that was the only time my face came down with bitch-leak]).
What I'm getting at is this. I'm only recently learning new reasons to appreciate, to be impressed by movies. The King of Marvin Gardens, for example, I would have dismissed even a few months ago as meager. It's got the "here's how awkward and uncinematic real life really is" voice down pat, but nowhere near as much to say about that awkwardness as that calamitous symphony of human nuance, Glengarry Glen Ross, a contrast that would have earned Marvin Gardens demerits in my eyes then. Also, in my old eyes, the story doesn't really go anywhere. Yes, sad things happen in real life and exploits don't always end in victory. So what? Is that really worth making a thousand movies about? And why do they all seem like they think they're the first?
BUT, watching movies to get perspective on the Boomer Bible has opened my whole face. For all its trappings of a bleak 70s movie that, in standing in contrast to the type of movie and storytelling that came before it, glories in pointlessness, KOMG has a moral, of all things, and a damn good one at that. GIST AND SPOILER: Jack Nicholson plays a Philly late-night radio personality who tells bleak personal anecdotes-- a Boomer Jean Shepherd, kind of. His inept hustler brother, Bruce Dern, calls him down to Atlantic City one day to get him in on a Hawaiian real estate deal. Of course, their basically is no deal, so Jack, Bruce, Bruce's girl, and her daughter (step-daughter?) have love triangles that don't quite congeal and typically Boomer exploits fueled by foolish fantasies, and aren't all those typical fantasies foolish, seeing as how life isn't a movie and things don't work out so easily and no one gets to be a movie star in real life? How true, how true. I don't know how Atlantic City looks in reality, but in this movie it looks either cast or made up as archetype of just this point.
But there's kind of a twist: at the end, during another halting, proto-Mamet conversation, Bruce's girl, played by Ellen Burstyn, grabs Bruce's revolver, portrayed up to this point as a laughable male power fantasy, and shoots Bruce dead in what w/o a gun would have been a simple lashing out.
Jack comes home and does a broadcast about the debacle. He ends it like this:
...all seemed harmless. No sense in not going along for the ride, not enjoying the games. That's what the trip seemed to be about.... If the goals didn't seem serious for moments, then certainly nothing more serious could happen. Maybe there would even be a trip to blue Hawaii. I certainly didn't wanna stop it. But in the fun house, how do you know who's really crazy? How do you know if it's supposed to be you that stops it, right now? (starts sobbing) And that you don't know how to stop it? The gun was (pause) always w/ the water pistols. (ea)
Had I seen this the beginning of the year, I would have just sneered at it. Bleak movies suck, screw them. Waaa. End of story.
The previous 3 or 4 paragraphs should go inside parentheses, or under an asterisk, but I'm behind on my BB movie reviews and so have a couple birds to kill w/ this post. What I'm saying is, I'm only now in a mental position to appreciate We Were Soldiers despite it not being concerned w/ the things I'm immediately interested in. WWS is a film surprising and moving in its distinctly American humility, brotherly love, and open goodness. The only fault I find is in the editing: Every Deleted Scene should have been left in, "flow" be damned. I defy you to watch the church outtake and tell me you don't feel a fist in your throat.
Since I didn't really have enough in my head to properly memorialize and reflect, I had to learn this Memorial Day. Call me crazy, but I saw a movie that was great education. InstaPunk had a more exciting MD weekend than me, but I did OK for myself.
I'll close w/ a quote from the Amazon customer review: [Randy, who served two tours] He was silent through the film, and when we left the theatre I asked what he thought. He said, "They finally got it. That's what it was like. All the details are right. The actors were just like the men I knew. They looked like that and they talked like that. And the army wives too, they really were like that, at least every one I ever knew." [Then] he was silent for a long time. At last he said, "You remember the scene where the guy tries to pick up a burn victim by the legs and all the skin slides off? Something like that happened to me once. It was at a helicopter crash. I went to pick him up and all the skin just slid right off. It looked just like that, too. I've never told any one about it."
This year marks the first I've made a point to remember on Memorial Day, and it's telling my big behavior change was in the type of movie I rented. I've had in mind to watch Zardoz, the 1974 Sean Connery catastrophe which started out as Hollywood's first attempt to adapt Lord of the Rings, and come up w/ a Hollywood Bizarro Butchery formula for making intriguingly weird cult classics. If Lord of the Rings contains a floating stone idol head that vomits machine guns by the time it makes it to the screen, what giggle-and-hand-clappingly great zany might we wring from, say, King Lear, or the Book of Ezekiel?
But I'd been thinking about MD and the lack of rememberence thereon for a few days by then, so that little ember of responsibility was growing just a bit brighter than usual. I trolled the aisles for awhile. Lingered over Saving Private Ryan, which I've never seen (or Lion King or Braveheart, if you need yet another reason to not respect me), but I don't trust Spielberg after Munich. Finally lucked upon We Were Soldiers, and the three of you reading this know an Insta recommendation is all the good word I need.
The native reviewer on amazon.com lauds the film as paying "tribute to brave men while avoiding the pitfalls of propaganda", but the reviewer quoted below it, the New Yorker's David Denby, can't quite put up with a Vietnam movie that, as IP puts it, doesn't remake Kafka:
A bloody piece of hero worship devoted to an ideal commander-Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore (Mel Gibson)-and to fighting and dying in the right way. The training is bruising, the leadership inspired, the wives as supportive as deeply rooted oaks. In 1965, early in the war in Vietnam, Moore leads units of the Army's Seventh Cavalry against a much larger North Vietnamese force. Mel Gibson is leathery but quick and alert, his eyes darting this way and that. When he runs around from one part of the perimeter to another, his M-16 blazing, the movie is exciting in a rudimentary, gung-ho way. The writer-director Randall Wallace stages much of the combat at very close range, with masses of North Vietnamese infantry hurling themselves against American riflemen. Recapitulating the many pictures made in the forties and fifties which portrayed the Americans as good and simple people fighting for a just cause, Wallace and Gibson have taken Vietnam out of history-essentially, they have assimilated it into the Second World War. (emphasis added)
I've heard two stories about this film, and Denby's take is in the minority. The other perspective I get mostly from the DVD itself, but also from amazon's first customer review; namely, that of all Vietnam flicks, this is the one that gets right what it was like, and what sort of men and families were involved.
And the film's story is almost objectionably simple: Earnest young men in the just-barely-pre-radicalized '60s, led by an earnest man twice their age and a course-but-sincere gentleman another decade older get called to war, do their damndest to keep each other alive, while the wives they left home do their best to support each other. No innovative plot, no clever storytelling. There's grit, but the film doesn't glory in how unafraid of grit it is. All it has to say about Vietnam is how honorable everyone fighting was (including respect for the North Vietnamese so genuine I teared up [not that that was the only time my face came down with bitch-leak]).
What I'm getting at is this. I'm only recently learning new reasons to appreciate, to be impressed by movies. The King of Marvin Gardens, for example, I would have dismissed even a few months ago as meager. It's got the "here's how awkward and uncinematic real life really is" voice down pat, but nowhere near as much to say about that awkwardness as that calamitous symphony of human nuance, Glengarry Glen Ross, a contrast that would have earned Marvin Gardens demerits in my eyes then. Also, in my old eyes, the story doesn't really go anywhere. Yes, sad things happen in real life and exploits don't always end in victory. So what? Is that really worth making a thousand movies about? And why do they all seem like they think they're the first?
BUT, watching movies to get perspective on the Boomer Bible has opened my whole face. For all its trappings of a bleak 70s movie that, in standing in contrast to the type of movie and storytelling that came before it, glories in pointlessness, KOMG has a moral, of all things, and a damn good one at that. GIST AND SPOILER: Jack Nicholson plays a Philly late-night radio personality who tells bleak personal anecdotes-- a Boomer Jean Shepherd, kind of. His inept hustler brother, Bruce Dern, calls him down to Atlantic City one day to get him in on a Hawaiian real estate deal. Of course, their basically is no deal, so Jack, Bruce, Bruce's girl, and her daughter (step-daughter?) have love triangles that don't quite congeal and typically Boomer exploits fueled by foolish fantasies, and aren't all those typical fantasies foolish, seeing as how life isn't a movie and things don't work out so easily and no one gets to be a movie star in real life? How true, how true. I don't know how Atlantic City looks in reality, but in this movie it looks either cast or made up as archetype of just this point.
But there's kind of a twist: at the end, during another halting, proto-Mamet conversation, Bruce's girl, played by Ellen Burstyn, grabs Bruce's revolver, portrayed up to this point as a laughable male power fantasy, and shoots Bruce dead in what w/o a gun would have been a simple lashing out.
Jack comes home and does a broadcast about the debacle. He ends it like this:
...all seemed harmless. No sense in not going along for the ride, not enjoying the games. That's what the trip seemed to be about.... If the goals didn't seem serious for moments, then certainly nothing more serious could happen. Maybe there would even be a trip to blue Hawaii. I certainly didn't wanna stop it. But in the fun house, how do you know who's really crazy? How do you know if it's supposed to be you that stops it, right now? (starts sobbing) And that you don't know how to stop it? The gun was (pause) always w/ the water pistols. (ea)
Had I seen this the beginning of the year, I would have just sneered at it. Bleak movies suck, screw them. Waaa. End of story.
The previous 3 or 4 paragraphs should go inside parentheses, or under an asterisk, but I'm behind on my BB movie reviews and so have a couple birds to kill w/ this post. What I'm saying is, I'm only now in a mental position to appreciate We Were Soldiers despite it not being concerned w/ the things I'm immediately interested in. WWS is a film surprising and moving in its distinctly American humility, brotherly love, and open goodness. The only fault I find is in the editing: Every Deleted Scene should have been left in, "flow" be damned. I defy you to watch the church outtake and tell me you don't feel a fist in your throat.
Since I didn't really have enough in my head to properly memorialize and reflect, I had to learn this Memorial Day. Call me crazy, but I saw a movie that was great education. InstaPunk had a more exciting MD weekend than me, but I did OK for myself.
I'll close w/ a quote from the Amazon customer review: [Randy, who served two tours] He was silent through the film, and when we left the theatre I asked what he thought. He said, "They finally got it. That's what it was like. All the details are right. The actors were just like the men I knew. They looked like that and they talked like that. And the army wives too, they really were like that, at least every one I ever knew." [Then] he was silent for a long time. At last he said, "You remember the scene where the guy tries to pick up a burn victim by the legs and all the skin slides off? Something like that happened to me once. It was at a helicopter crash. I went to pick him up and all the skin just slid right off. It looked just like that, too. I've never told any one about it."
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Remember the Man Show?
I couldn't stand it either. Adam Carolla in general stuck in my craw for years as the obnoxious dick-joker who constantly interrupted Dr. Drew's sound advice (which always, always culminated in "seek counseling, but usually had some good insight leading up to that) w/ detailed reports of his masturbation frequency.
Sometime last year, I turned the corner on the Ace-Man. I don't remember when or why I first listened to his new morning radio show, taking over for Stern on regular radio on the west coast, but I did and I loved it. Gone are the Man Show frat-boy jerkings-off-- or I should say they show up a frequently as they did on Loveline, but now that he's running a show instead of acting as sidekick, he has to talk about other things the rest of the time. Lucky for the listening public, the only conversation topic that can keep his interest for 4 hours a morning is the fumbles and shortcomings of the world he lives in. Think Dave Barry, but w/ a pointed fist instead of a goofy shrug, and you'll get the idea. He has the dick-n-fart sense of humor, but his show's not about that, which makes him unique in non-pundit radio right now, as far as anyone knows.
(Didn't there use to be a whole type of entertainer who would talk and write about these sorts of things? What were they called?)
Yesterday he went off on cartoon dudes, which prompted this entry. You can get more on the Rant of the Day page, which may not be long for this world, since it's no longer linked to from the main page. I trust this guy more than any tool pundit on the AM dial. Give a listen, you'll see why.
EXTRA: This is the news segment from Friday, a good sampler of why the show's better than anything I can think of on the air. The girl is newsgirl Teresa Strasser (smart, but damaged) and the gravel voice is none other than Danny Bonaduce (bright, but damaged). Inane PSAs are a favorite topic of the show, and this rant is a good primer.
UPDATE: Turns out the second news segment was more purely platonic-- plus Jersey governor Johnny Crashtime gets called out.
Sometime last year, I turned the corner on the Ace-Man. I don't remember when or why I first listened to his new morning radio show, taking over for Stern on regular radio on the west coast, but I did and I loved it. Gone are the Man Show frat-boy jerkings-off-- or I should say they show up a frequently as they did on Loveline, but now that he's running a show instead of acting as sidekick, he has to talk about other things the rest of the time. Lucky for the listening public, the only conversation topic that can keep his interest for 4 hours a morning is the fumbles and shortcomings of the world he lives in. Think Dave Barry, but w/ a pointed fist instead of a goofy shrug, and you'll get the idea. He has the dick-n-fart sense of humor, but his show's not about that, which makes him unique in non-pundit radio right now, as far as anyone knows.
(Didn't there use to be a whole type of entertainer who would talk and write about these sorts of things? What were they called?)
Yesterday he went off on cartoon dudes, which prompted this entry. You can get more on the Rant of the Day page, which may not be long for this world, since it's no longer linked to from the main page. I trust this guy more than any tool pundit on the AM dial. Give a listen, you'll see why.
EXTRA: This is the news segment from Friday, a good sampler of why the show's better than anything I can think of on the air. The girl is newsgirl Teresa Strasser (smart, but damaged) and the gravel voice is none other than Danny Bonaduce (bright, but damaged). Inane PSAs are a favorite topic of the show, and this rant is a good primer.
UPDATE: Turns out the second news segment was more purely platonic-- plus Jersey governor Johnny Crashtime gets called out.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Movies 1
I quit my job not two days after I activated my Blockbuster Online account. Why not Netflix? Because for every mail disc I return to the store, I get a free rental off the shelf AND the next flick in my queue gets sent as soon as it's scanned (shaves a day off waiting for the thing to get to them in the mail), which keeps me close to force-fed in free DVDs. If you have a Cockbuster in walking distance, I highly recommend.
Boomerbible.com has had BB hints and aids for years. A relatively recent companion to the Books That Help page is Movies That Help*. More recently, I checked in on the page after ignoring it for a long while, and was surprised and pleased to find it not only still there, but about doubled-- Thomas Crown and Flesh used to be the last two movies there, and a few new entries have been slipped in earlier in the timeline.
Now that I've got all this free time, what else is a full-time writer to do but work his way through the list?
Of the 32 films, I'd only seen 3 (in full) on my own: Clockwork Orange, Thomas Crown, and Network. I was probably just too young to appreciate the chunk of 2001 I saw, and I'm gonna really have to disabuse myself of the notion that movies should always be entertaining if I wanna choke down any portion of The Greatest Story Ever Told again.
From these and from what I know already about TBB, I'm expecting two types of hints: insights into the Boomer worldview, like King of Kings, and more explicit morals, like Thomas Crown's explanation (if you can call it that: "...the system.") why he robs all those banks.
The first few movies in my queue have trickled in the last few days. First up-- as in next post-- The King of Marvin Gardens.
*there's rumors of a music list too, but it hasn't turned up.
Boomerbible.com has had BB hints and aids for years. A relatively recent companion to the Books That Help page is Movies That Help*. More recently, I checked in on the page after ignoring it for a long while, and was surprised and pleased to find it not only still there, but about doubled-- Thomas Crown and Flesh used to be the last two movies there, and a few new entries have been slipped in earlier in the timeline.
Now that I've got all this free time, what else is a full-time writer to do but work his way through the list?
Of the 32 films, I'd only seen 3 (in full) on my own: Clockwork Orange, Thomas Crown, and Network. I was probably just too young to appreciate the chunk of 2001 I saw, and I'm gonna really have to disabuse myself of the notion that movies should always be entertaining if I wanna choke down any portion of The Greatest Story Ever Told again.
From these and from what I know already about TBB, I'm expecting two types of hints: insights into the Boomer worldview, like King of Kings, and more explicit morals, like Thomas Crown's explanation (if you can call it that: "...the system.") why he robs all those banks.
The first few movies in my queue have trickled in the last few days. First up-- as in next post-- The King of Marvin Gardens.
*there's rumors of a music list too, but it hasn't turned up.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Date Test: Grading (continued)
1944 - D-Day. That's right. Battle of the Bulge was in December, but I'm guessing that wasn't what the date referred to.
1836 - Alamo.
399 BC - Death of Socrates.
1564 - Another head scratcher. Bill Shakespeare born, John Calvin died. Conquistadors, maybe?
33 - DING.
1871 - Chicago Fire.
337 - Constantine dies.
1848 - DING!
323 BC - Alexander dies, Babylon partitioned.
1452 - John Talbot, I guess. Leo Davinci, Richard the Third, and James III all born this year.
1789 - DING.
1660 - John Thurloe?
1763 - Treaty of Paris.
1849 - Gold rush. That's a fumble.
So, do I pass?
Since we're not counting 1984, there's 49 dates on the test. I got 18 1/2 DINGS. %38.
Final Grade: BIG F.
Then, out of the blue, Patrick did receive some indication of where bottom was. After giving this test, he was collared by one of the female students, who urgently requested to meet with him privately. He did so the next morning, in the school library. She had a terrible personal story to relate. As the child of abusive parents, she had been moved from place to place all her life and had never attended school before being put in a foster home three years before. Since then she had been working feverishly to make up the lost time and to conceal her lack of schooling from everyone but the school administration. She was in a panic when she spoke to Patrick because she was certain that the five-name exercise had finally blown her cover. Thus, she wanted to explain to Patrick why she had done so miserably on the test. Patrick tried to console her. The truth was that her test paper was indistinguishable from the others, except that it may have been marginally better than most.
So this was bottom. High school seniors fared no better than a girl who hadn't been to school for the first fourteen years of her life.
1836 - Alamo.
399 BC - Death of Socrates.
1564 - Another head scratcher. Bill Shakespeare born, John Calvin died. Conquistadors, maybe?
33 - DING.
1871 - Chicago Fire.
337 - Constantine dies.
1848 - DING!
323 BC - Alexander dies, Babylon partitioned.
1452 - John Talbot, I guess. Leo Davinci, Richard the Third, and James III all born this year.
1789 - DING.
1660 - John Thurloe?
1763 - Treaty of Paris.
1849 - Gold rush. That's a fumble.
So, do I pass?
Since we're not counting 1984, there's 49 dates on the test. I got 18 1/2 DINGS. %38.
Final Grade: BIG F.
Then, out of the blue, Patrick did receive some indication of where bottom was. After giving this test, he was collared by one of the female students, who urgently requested to meet with him privately. He did so the next morning, in the school library. She had a terrible personal story to relate. As the child of abusive parents, she had been moved from place to place all her life and had never attended school before being put in a foster home three years before. Since then she had been working feverishly to make up the lost time and to conceal her lack of schooling from everyone but the school administration. She was in a panic when she spoke to Patrick because she was certain that the five-name exercise had finally blown her cover. Thus, she wanted to explain to Patrick why she had done so miserably on the test. Patrick tried to console her. The truth was that her test paper was indistinguishable from the others, except that it may have been marginally better than most.
So this was bottom. High school seniors fared no better than a girl who hadn't been to school for the first fourteen years of her life.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Date Test: Grading
First off, here's the naked list for those who want to take the test:
1776 -
1812 -
1860 -
1914 -
1941 -
1066 -
1215 -
1640 -
1688 -
753 BC -
44 BC -
476 -
1453 -
1783 -
1865 -
1799 -
1918 -
1945 -
1820 -
1815 -
1917 -
1500 BC -
1912 -
1916 -
1588 -
1929 -
2001 million BC -
1348 -
1607 -
1877 -
1788 -
1898 -
0 -
1984 -
"Four thousand and some BC" -
1919 -
1944 -
1836 -
399 BC -
1564 -
33 -
1871 -
337 -
1848 -
323 BC -
1452 -
1789 -
1660 -
1763 -
1849 -
Now, here's the answers. Ones I got right (or right enough) get a DING, others get corrected.
Checked it as simply as I could: Went to Wikipedia, looked up the year. BLAM:
1776 - Yeah, DING.
1812 - DING. I was right about the post-treaty battle being the Battle of New Orleans, too. Good guess. Andrew Jackson was the general in that one, turns out.
1860 - Uh, I looked it up and I'm still not sure. It's either Lincoln winning the Presidency on Nov 6, or it's South Carolina seceding from the union on Dec 20.
1914 - DING.
1941 - DING.
1066 - "Battle of Hastings, fought between King Harold II of England and Duke William of Normandy. Harold is allegedly killed by an arrow to the eye and William is victorious." El Cid died in 1099, is what I was thinking of.
1215 - DING. Still only know it was something to do w/ the King having less power, for the first time ever.
1640 - Short Parliament and Long Parliament? Portuguese independence? No clue.
1688 - Glorious Revolution, is what that was.
753 BC - Rome founded, or so the story goes.
44 BC - Julius Caesar assassinated.
476 - "September 4 - Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed by Odoacer. Traditionally this was regarded as the date of the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the European Dark Ages; historians now consider it to be essentially insignificant." OK.
1453 - Printing press invented. I'm stupid.
1783 - American Revolution ends, Treaty of Paris signed. Let's call that a DING, even though we all know I got lucky.
1865 - DING.
1799 - Napoleon takes power, first as co-emperor in name only, then stops pretending.
1918 - Wait, WWI ended this year? So what the hell is 1919?
1945 - DING.
1820 - Missouri Compromise.
1815 - Waterloo. (Battle of New Orleans on Jan 8, incidentally)
1917 - DING, but it was more complex than I described. Lennin didn't just shoot the Czar in the head and take over.
1500 BC - "Date of the Biblical Exodus, according to Simcha Jacobovich in the documentary Exodus Decoded."
1912 - DING
1916 - Uh... Battle of the Somme? Probably.
1588 - DING, but I know nothing further.
1929 - DING
2001 million BC - DING
1348 - Black Death begins, basically.
1607 - JAMESTOWN. I knew that. They even have the banner ads lately. I'm stupid.
1877 - This must be the Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction ends.
1788 - New Orleans fire?
1898 - Right about the lease, wrong about them taking it over (happened 60 years before). Spanish-American War is the right answer anyway.
0 - DING
1984 - I suspect this is more than a reference to the book, so I'm neither going to DING myself or count this one towards my final grade.
"Four thousand and some BC" - Um, Sumeria?
1919 - Treaty of Versailles. Half-DING.
And we'll put the rest of this test to bed tomorrow. PBS is calling...
1776 -
1812 -
1860 -
1914 -
1941 -
1066 -
1215 -
1640 -
1688 -
753 BC -
44 BC -
476 -
1453 -
1783 -
1865 -
1799 -
1918 -
1945 -
1820 -
1815 -
1917 -
1500 BC -
1912 -
1916 -
1588 -
1929 -
2001 million BC -
1348 -
1607 -
1877 -
1788 -
1898 -
0 -
1984 -
"Four thousand and some BC" -
1919 -
1944 -
1836 -
399 BC -
1564 -
33 -
1871 -
337 -
1848 -
323 BC -
1452 -
1789 -
1660 -
1763 -
1849 -
Now, here's the answers. Ones I got right (or right enough) get a DING, others get corrected.
Checked it as simply as I could: Went to Wikipedia, looked up the year. BLAM:
1776 - Yeah, DING.
1812 - DING. I was right about the post-treaty battle being the Battle of New Orleans, too. Good guess. Andrew Jackson was the general in that one, turns out.
1860 - Uh, I looked it up and I'm still not sure. It's either Lincoln winning the Presidency on Nov 6, or it's South Carolina seceding from the union on Dec 20.
1914 - DING.
1941 - DING.
1066 - "Battle of Hastings, fought between King Harold II of England and Duke William of Normandy. Harold is allegedly killed by an arrow to the eye and William is victorious." El Cid died in 1099, is what I was thinking of.
1215 - DING. Still only know it was something to do w/ the King having less power, for the first time ever.
1640 - Short Parliament and Long Parliament? Portuguese independence? No clue.
1688 - Glorious Revolution, is what that was.
753 BC - Rome founded, or so the story goes.
44 BC - Julius Caesar assassinated.
476 - "September 4 - Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed by Odoacer. Traditionally this was regarded as the date of the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the European Dark Ages; historians now consider it to be essentially insignificant." OK.
1453 - Printing press invented. I'm stupid.
1783 - American Revolution ends, Treaty of Paris signed. Let's call that a DING, even though we all know I got lucky.
1865 - DING.
1799 - Napoleon takes power, first as co-emperor in name only, then stops pretending.
1918 - Wait, WWI ended this year? So what the hell is 1919?
1945 - DING.
1820 - Missouri Compromise.
1815 - Waterloo. (Battle of New Orleans on Jan 8, incidentally)
1917 - DING, but it was more complex than I described. Lennin didn't just shoot the Czar in the head and take over.
1500 BC - "Date of the Biblical Exodus, according to Simcha Jacobovich in the documentary Exodus Decoded."
1912 - DING
1916 - Uh... Battle of the Somme? Probably.
1588 - DING, but I know nothing further.
1929 - DING
2001 million BC - DING
1348 - Black Death begins, basically.
1607 - JAMESTOWN. I knew that. They even have the banner ads lately. I'm stupid.
1877 - This must be the Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction ends.
1788 - New Orleans fire?
1898 - Right about the lease, wrong about them taking it over (happened 60 years before). Spanish-American War is the right answer anyway.
0 - DING
1984 - I suspect this is more than a reference to the book, so I'm neither going to DING myself or count this one towards my final grade.
"Four thousand and some BC" - Um, Sumeria?
1919 - Treaty of Versailles. Half-DING.
And we'll put the rest of this test to bed tomorrow. PBS is calling...
Sunday, April 29, 2007
The Date Test (gotta start somewhere)
from The Diary:
Two years ago, Patrick had made suggestions to their school administration about the curriculum for the course in Christian Apologetics. The school was nominally Christian in its charter, the administration was warm in its response, and Patrick soon discovered that he had volunteered to teach apologetics himself. He was to teach the entire senior class, half of them per semester. Shortly after he began, he discovered that none of his students knew anything about church history. Then he discovered that they didn't seem to know much about history period.
He was nonplussed. He spent the rest of the semester trying to awaken their curiosity about what they had missed, and some of them seemed to respond. When he ran into the same wall of ignorance with the second half of the senior class, however, he decided he had to try something different.
We talked about it and reached the conclusion that teachers must be making discoveries like this all the time. Why don't we ever hear about it? Probably because it's a dirty secret that has to be covered up. So we elected to pursue an opposite course. Perhaps the only positive step one could take was to find bottom.' Just how bad was it?
As part of his curriculum materials, Patrick had a list of seventy-five significant historical dates. We used this as a template and compiled a list of the seventy-five historical events, all the way from the birth of Alexander the Great and the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the bombing of Hiroshima. Amerian history was somewhat over-represented, but not in any esoteric way. In the next class session, Patrick handed out the list of events and told the class to date them (year only).
The results were so appalling that Patrick wound up grading the test on the basis of just four dates: Columbus's discovery of Ameria, The Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor, and the bombing of Hiroshima. Of the thirty-two college-bound high school seniors in the class, two got all four of the dates correct. The majority got only one or two correct. Some got none of them correct. On the rest of the list their performance was laughable.
We weren't laughing, though. By reputation and record, this was a good high school. We thought someone in the administration would want to know what the test had revealed. Patrick discussed it with administrators and history teachers. They wanted to know if he had announced the test. They downplayed the importance of knowing dates. They wanted to know what mainstream historical events had to do with Christian Apologetics. Patrick patiently explained that the Christian faith and the Church existed within the context of western civilization and could neither be understood nor defended without knowing the relationship between, say, the Reformation and the Renaissance. He was told that it was unfair to test students without some warning of what they would be asked about.
In the Boomer Bible, in the book of Psayings, chapter 5Y, there's a list of 50 different years. For lack of the original list of 75, this'll suffice, even though it's a reverse of the original Test, and actually easier having to match up events to years, rather than the other way around. Years are more mnemonic.
I know at least one of the years in the list is a joke, maybe more. Don't know how to tell, though, not really knowing history all that well.
But let's see how I do. Rules for myself: No looking anything up, no Wikipedia (which I shouldn't rely on quite so much anyway, according to Lloyd Pye), no nothing. Go from memory. No consulting, no lifelines, no phoning a friend. And do it in the span of a "class period". Readyyyyyyyyyy BREAK
1776 - American revolution starts w/ signing of Declaration of Independence, written July 3, sent July 4. Something on the 3rd and then the 4th, at least. Signed on the 4th.
1812 - War of. British start up w/ their pissiness again. White House burned. One of the big battles of the war (battle of New Orleans, maybe?) happened after the treaty was signed, because word hadn't gotten to them yet. Maybe that was some other war.
1860 - Um... not the Civil War yet. Dunno.
1914 - WWI starts w/ assassination by anarchist (maybe that was just McKinley) of Archduke Franz (I only know his first name because of the band) Ferdinand. He wasn't that important, but tensions and connections and politics being what they were, it did the trick.
1941 - Pearl Habor, US enters WWII. Roosevelt might have know and let it happen, but jury's still out on that. Also, Japanese diplomats did something. Maybe told the President or wanted to stop it-- something along those lines.
1066 - El Cid, right? Spanish... king? Only remember the name and date from a book called Myths and Legends I had as a kid.
1215 - No idea. No, MAGNA CARTA! BOOYAH!
1640 - No clue. OK, no way the 95 Theses could have been this late, right? Yeah. Henry 8 breaks from Catholic Church, establishes Church of England?
1688 - Spanish Armada? No wait, that was 1588. Not the Diet of Worms, right?
753 BC - Peleponysean war? I know nothing about it besides the name, and that it was Grecean history. Is that the same as 300?
44 BC - Um, probably Rome... something. Dunno. Alexander the Great born? Dies? He was 33, I remember that.
476 - That has to be Charlemange.
1453 - Diet of Worms? Martin Luther nails the 95 Theses?
1783 - Um... American Revolution ends? Battle of Lexington?
1865 - Civil War ends, Lincoln assassinated at Ford's Theater by anarchist-- no, not anarchist, Southern sympathizer, right?-- John Wilkes Booth. Sic Semper Tyrannis. I was a teenager before they explained to me what this guy's problem was. Before that I saw the Unsolved Mysteries that claimed JWB was framed, and actually a conspiracy did it. Lucky I didn't keep that in mind too much.
1799 - Not 89? Dunno. Russo-Chinese war?
Also, this might be the year Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground, unless that was '64.
1918 - This must be the year US entered WWI. So Lusitania, then?
1945 - Hitler dies, Germany quits, Hiroshima, Japan surrenders. We win!
1820 - Seems a safe bet this isn't meant to refer to Joseph Smith's First Vision. So I don't know.
1815 - Huh? Andrew Jackson, maybe? Dunno. Jacksonian revolution? That's in there somewhere.
1917 - Russian revolution, Lennin, Czar killed. Rasputin.
1500 BC - Dunno. Greece?
1912 - Titanic hits iceberg, sinks.
1916 - This must be when those hundreds of thousands of French young men died. Or something. I know it's the name of a Motorhead album.
1588 - Spanish Armada defeated by... English? And it was a big deal, because the SA was so huge and renowned. I only know the date because of the movie Billy Madison.
1929 - Stock Market crashes on Black Tuesday, Great Depression begins.
2001 million BC - Joke. Dave 17.
1348 - No clue. Giotto?
1607 - Nope. Diet of Worms? Henry 8 breaks from Catholic Church, establishes Church of England?
1877 - Couldn't tell you.
1788 - Battle of Lexington?
1898 - Railroads? No no, Britain fights China, takes Hong Kong, and signs 99-year lease on it, because that's the sense of humor of the day. Opium Wars, they're called? Those might be something else.
0 - Jesus Christ born. And I could point out there's no year zero, and that scholars now think he was actually born 6 or 7 BC, because there's Roman records of the big census then and not 1 AD, but, you know. We get it. And "Zero" signifies that people used to have more of a sense of just how important the birth of Christ was that we made it the calender's pivot point. Not just religiously significant.
1984 - The Orwell book.
"Four thousand and some BC" - What could this be? Egypt? Too early for the Exodus. Not sure what this date is meant to signify.
1919 - WWI ends. Treaty of Versalles must be around this time.
1944 - Battle of the Bulge?
1836 - Nada.
399 BC - Rome founded? No... dunno.
1564 - Diet of Worms? This looks like the right date. I know Diet means council, and I think it had something to do w/ the Reformation. Like, DW was against it. That's all I got.
33 - Christ crucified.
1871 - Not sure I've even heard this date cited as important, ever.
337 - Wait, this must be Charlemange. No, it must be something in Church history. Council of Nicea was 316... Wasn't there another Council? Maybe Constantine died? Or is this when Rome gets sacked?
1848 - OK, I once picked a book at the Goodwill Bins called Revolutions of 1848. Apparently lots of stuff happened that year. I haven't read it yet, and may have gotten rid of it. I do remember this is when Karl Marx published I think The Communist Manifesto, but there's an off chance it was Das Kapital instead. Also, something happened in... Denmark?
323 BC - I'm gonna say Hannibal crossing the Alps, even though I think that was way later.
1452 - Dunno.
1789 - Constitution ratified (so I think it's the same year as the Conventions), George Washington elected first President (and it's cute to point out that technically the nation had a "president" before GW, but get over it)
1660 - Uh... Sistine Chapel? No, that was a hundred years before. Got nothing.
1763 - Oh... Boston Tea Party? Stamp Act? One of those.
1849 - I'm gonna say Missouri Comprimise. Did James Polk do something this year?
"And that's really just the beginning"
Tomorrow, I flip to the back of the book, so to speak, and check my answers.
Two years ago, Patrick had made suggestions to their school administration about the curriculum for the course in Christian Apologetics. The school was nominally Christian in its charter, the administration was warm in its response, and Patrick soon discovered that he had volunteered to teach apologetics himself. He was to teach the entire senior class, half of them per semester. Shortly after he began, he discovered that none of his students knew anything about church history. Then he discovered that they didn't seem to know much about history period.
He was nonplussed. He spent the rest of the semester trying to awaken their curiosity about what they had missed, and some of them seemed to respond. When he ran into the same wall of ignorance with the second half of the senior class, however, he decided he had to try something different.
We talked about it and reached the conclusion that teachers must be making discoveries like this all the time. Why don't we ever hear about it? Probably because it's a dirty secret that has to be covered up. So we elected to pursue an opposite course. Perhaps the only positive step one could take was to find bottom.' Just how bad was it?
As part of his curriculum materials, Patrick had a list of seventy-five significant historical dates. We used this as a template and compiled a list of the seventy-five historical events, all the way from the birth of Alexander the Great and the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the bombing of Hiroshima. Amerian history was somewhat over-represented, but not in any esoteric way. In the next class session, Patrick handed out the list of events and told the class to date them (year only).
The results were so appalling that Patrick wound up grading the test on the basis of just four dates: Columbus's discovery of Ameria, The Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor, and the bombing of Hiroshima. Of the thirty-two college-bound high school seniors in the class, two got all four of the dates correct. The majority got only one or two correct. Some got none of them correct. On the rest of the list their performance was laughable.
We weren't laughing, though. By reputation and record, this was a good high school. We thought someone in the administration would want to know what the test had revealed. Patrick discussed it with administrators and history teachers. They wanted to know if he had announced the test. They downplayed the importance of knowing dates. They wanted to know what mainstream historical events had to do with Christian Apologetics. Patrick patiently explained that the Christian faith and the Church existed within the context of western civilization and could neither be understood nor defended without knowing the relationship between, say, the Reformation and the Renaissance. He was told that it was unfair to test students without some warning of what they would be asked about.
In the Boomer Bible, in the book of Psayings, chapter 5Y, there's a list of 50 different years. For lack of the original list of 75, this'll suffice, even though it's a reverse of the original Test, and actually easier having to match up events to years, rather than the other way around. Years are more mnemonic.
I know at least one of the years in the list is a joke, maybe more. Don't know how to tell, though, not really knowing history all that well.
But let's see how I do. Rules for myself: No looking anything up, no Wikipedia (which I shouldn't rely on quite so much anyway, according to Lloyd Pye), no nothing. Go from memory. No consulting, no lifelines, no phoning a friend. And do it in the span of a "class period". Readyyyyyyyyyy BREAK
1776 - American revolution starts w/ signing of Declaration of Independence, written July 3, sent July 4. Something on the 3rd and then the 4th, at least. Signed on the 4th.
1812 - War of. British start up w/ their pissiness again. White House burned. One of the big battles of the war (battle of New Orleans, maybe?) happened after the treaty was signed, because word hadn't gotten to them yet. Maybe that was some other war.
1860 - Um... not the Civil War yet. Dunno.
1914 - WWI starts w/ assassination by anarchist (maybe that was just McKinley) of Archduke Franz (I only know his first name because of the band) Ferdinand. He wasn't that important, but tensions and connections and politics being what they were, it did the trick.
1941 - Pearl Habor, US enters WWII. Roosevelt might have know and let it happen, but jury's still out on that. Also, Japanese diplomats did something. Maybe told the President or wanted to stop it-- something along those lines.
1066 - El Cid, right? Spanish... king? Only remember the name and date from a book called Myths and Legends I had as a kid.
1215 - No idea. No, MAGNA CARTA! BOOYAH!
1640 - No clue. OK, no way the 95 Theses could have been this late, right? Yeah. Henry 8 breaks from Catholic Church, establishes Church of England?
1688 - Spanish Armada? No wait, that was 1588. Not the Diet of Worms, right?
753 BC - Peleponysean war? I know nothing about it besides the name, and that it was Grecean history. Is that the same as 300?
44 BC - Um, probably Rome... something. Dunno. Alexander the Great born? Dies? He was 33, I remember that.
476 - That has to be Charlemange.
1453 - Diet of Worms? Martin Luther nails the 95 Theses?
1783 - Um... American Revolution ends? Battle of Lexington?
1865 - Civil War ends, Lincoln assassinated at Ford's Theater by anarchist-- no, not anarchist, Southern sympathizer, right?-- John Wilkes Booth. Sic Semper Tyrannis. I was a teenager before they explained to me what this guy's problem was. Before that I saw the Unsolved Mysteries that claimed JWB was framed, and actually a conspiracy did it. Lucky I didn't keep that in mind too much.
1799 - Not 89? Dunno. Russo-Chinese war?
Also, this might be the year Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground, unless that was '64.
1918 - This must be the year US entered WWI. So Lusitania, then?
1945 - Hitler dies, Germany quits, Hiroshima, Japan surrenders. We win!
1820 - Seems a safe bet this isn't meant to refer to Joseph Smith's First Vision. So I don't know.
1815 - Huh? Andrew Jackson, maybe? Dunno. Jacksonian revolution? That's in there somewhere.
1917 - Russian revolution, Lennin, Czar killed. Rasputin.
1500 BC - Dunno. Greece?
1912 - Titanic hits iceberg, sinks.
1916 - This must be when those hundreds of thousands of French young men died. Or something. I know it's the name of a Motorhead album.
1588 - Spanish Armada defeated by... English? And it was a big deal, because the SA was so huge and renowned. I only know the date because of the movie Billy Madison.
1929 - Stock Market crashes on Black Tuesday, Great Depression begins.
2001 million BC - Joke. Dave 17.
1348 - No clue. Giotto?
1607 - Nope. Diet of Worms? Henry 8 breaks from Catholic Church, establishes Church of England?
1877 - Couldn't tell you.
1788 - Battle of Lexington?
1898 - Railroads? No no, Britain fights China, takes Hong Kong, and signs 99-year lease on it, because that's the sense of humor of the day. Opium Wars, they're called? Those might be something else.
0 - Jesus Christ born. And I could point out there's no year zero, and that scholars now think he was actually born 6 or 7 BC, because there's Roman records of the big census then and not 1 AD, but, you know. We get it. And "Zero" signifies that people used to have more of a sense of just how important the birth of Christ was that we made it the calender's pivot point. Not just religiously significant.
1984 - The Orwell book.
"Four thousand and some BC" - What could this be? Egypt? Too early for the Exodus. Not sure what this date is meant to signify.
1919 - WWI ends. Treaty of Versalles must be around this time.
1944 - Battle of the Bulge?
1836 - Nada.
399 BC - Rome founded? No... dunno.
1564 - Diet of Worms? This looks like the right date. I know Diet means council, and I think it had something to do w/ the Reformation. Like, DW was against it. That's all I got.
33 - Christ crucified.
1871 - Not sure I've even heard this date cited as important, ever.
337 - Wait, this must be Charlemange. No, it must be something in Church history. Council of Nicea was 316... Wasn't there another Council? Maybe Constantine died? Or is this when Rome gets sacked?
1848 - OK, I once picked a book at the Goodwill Bins called Revolutions of 1848. Apparently lots of stuff happened that year. I haven't read it yet, and may have gotten rid of it. I do remember this is when Karl Marx published I think The Communist Manifesto, but there's an off chance it was Das Kapital instead. Also, something happened in... Denmark?
323 BC - I'm gonna say Hannibal crossing the Alps, even though I think that was way later.
1452 - Dunno.
1789 - Constitution ratified (so I think it's the same year as the Conventions), George Washington elected first President (and it's cute to point out that technically the nation had a "president" before GW, but get over it)
1660 - Uh... Sistine Chapel? No, that was a hundred years before. Got nothing.
1763 - Oh... Boston Tea Party? Stamp Act? One of those.
1849 - I'm gonna say Missouri Comprimise. Did James Polk do something this year?
"And that's really just the beginning"
Tomorrow, I flip to the back of the book, so to speak, and check my answers.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Angels 7.7-16
The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006 resulted in the release of a large number of trial exhibits. One was an unblemished bandanna in a ziplock bag, which, according to the caption on the website of the The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press listing the exhibits, was recovered from Flight 93's crash site. As photographs of the primary crash site show, the plane buried itself in a crater 10 feet deep, leaving no recognizable debris beyond scraps of charred aluminum. Yet this bandana miraculously survived the crash without so much as a blemish.
How indeed.
How indeed.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The Imus Thing
These should have been the points of the Imus discussion, but got little or no play that I heard:
1. Even though Imus had no value as even a radio personality, it's bunk that he got fired for trying to sound like something more virile than the walking mummy he is.
1a. It's bunk upon bunk that no one's admitted to knowing that Don Imus is, in fact, not racist. It's 2007 and we still have to pretend white people only use rap slang in derogatory mockery, never in playful (or) admiring emulation? Nigga please.
2. And he gets actually fired, to boot? Anyone else reminded of the IRS using whatshisname to make an example out of tax-evading celebrities?
3. This blog is maybe too young to take on Godwin's Law (so I'll just suggest it), but is there any way at all to see Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and I'm sure there's more whose names I'll never know, as valiant champions of unloved downtrodden who never, never get a fair shake? With the Imus stoning, aren't we at the point where that story doesn't hold water anymore? How have black organizations not been full-on thugs here, crushing someone because he said something they didn't care for, otherwise having caused them no injury?
1. Even though Imus had no value as even a radio personality, it's bunk that he got fired for trying to sound like something more virile than the walking mummy he is.
1a. It's bunk upon bunk that no one's admitted to knowing that Don Imus is, in fact, not racist. It's 2007 and we still have to pretend white people only use rap slang in derogatory mockery, never in playful (or) admiring emulation? Nigga please.
2. And he gets actually fired, to boot? Anyone else reminded of the IRS using whatshisname to make an example out of tax-evading celebrities?
3. This blog is maybe too young to take on Godwin's Law (so I'll just suggest it), but is there any way at all to see Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and I'm sure there's more whose names I'll never know, as valiant champions of unloved downtrodden who never, never get a fair shake? With the Imus stoning, aren't we at the point where that story doesn't hold water anymore? How have black organizations not been full-on thugs here, crushing someone because he said something they didn't care for, otherwise having caused them no injury?
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Toot Toot
LocoPunk closed his first post w/ a boldface Slàn. I felt obligated to get curious.
Wikipedia didn't quite know what I was talking about, but knew of a few articles w/ the word in them: Fear a' bhàta, Manx language, and-- hey, Bingo-- Scottish Gaelic. InstaPunk has proudly trumpeted his Scottish heritage (figures I can't find the posts at the moment) more than once. We have a winner.
Slàn conveniently shows up on the page in a tabled glossary. "Mar sin leat, Slàn leat" roughly means "goodbye" in English, and is rendered in Irish Gaelic as simply "Slán leat". It's surrounded by a bunch of other words, but it seems safe to say Slàn means Goodbye. So Slàn in LocoPunk's post means "Kiss your ass goodbye, sincerely History"? Loosely?
(Slan w/o the stress above the "a", "is the name of a fictional race of superbeings in the 1946 novel of the same name by A.E. van Vogt." I'm sure that's a coincidence. Jommy Cross is a pretty good name for a Punk, though.)
Wikipedia didn't quite know what I was talking about, but knew of a few articles w/ the word in them: Fear a' bhàta, Manx language, and-- hey, Bingo-- Scottish Gaelic. InstaPunk has proudly trumpeted his Scottish heritage (figures I can't find the posts at the moment) more than once. We have a winner.
Slàn conveniently shows up on the page in a tabled glossary. "Mar sin leat, Slàn leat" roughly means "goodbye" in English, and is rendered in Irish Gaelic as simply "Slán leat". It's surrounded by a bunch of other words, but it seems safe to say Slàn means Goodbye. So Slàn in LocoPunk's post means "Kiss your ass goodbye, sincerely History"? Loosely?
(Slan w/o the stress above the "a", "is the name of a fictional race of superbeings in the 1946 novel of the same name by A.E. van Vogt." I'm sure that's a coincidence. Jommy Cross is a pretty good name for a Punk, though.)
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Clobbering Time
Call me Johnny-Come-Lately.
I've had a few reminders in my young life that I don't have all the time in the world to get my head straight. The most recent was a dream week before last where a group of guys were investigating a "stupid gas" about to land and ruin everyone's brain, but got hung up in the process before it came. Last thought: "And then it was hard to understand anything."
I've been reading The Boomer Bible and InstaPunk for years now, and I just haven't been smart enough, educated enough, disciplined enough to get it. I don't have the brains to just piece it together in a cold read, I didn't get the education to understand even half the referents, and I've been in no hurry to do the required reading and thinking to catch up. I stalled, and time marches on. So this is me getting up to speed.
Actual design coming soon.
I've had a few reminders in my young life that I don't have all the time in the world to get my head straight. The most recent was a dream week before last where a group of guys were investigating a "stupid gas" about to land and ruin everyone's brain, but got hung up in the process before it came. Last thought: "And then it was hard to understand anything."
I've been reading The Boomer Bible and InstaPunk for years now, and I just haven't been smart enough, educated enough, disciplined enough to get it. I don't have the brains to just piece it together in a cold read, I didn't get the education to understand even half the referents, and I've been in no hurry to do the required reading and thinking to catch up. I stalled, and time marches on. So this is me getting up to speed.
Actual design coming soon.
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