August 15, 2015

Some people just aren't getting it.

Christopher Hedges has recently described the state of American politics as being like the slow-boil stage of a revolution. People are angry. Faith in our political institutions is at an all-time low. Even those who have had little interest in politics heretofore are recognizing that corporate greed has undermined our democracy and is hollowing out what's left of the middle class. Eight years ago, the electorate's anger with the status quo lead to the surprise election of Barack Obama. The flame has been heating the pot ever since and it's made the political landscape highly unstable. Per Hedges, as revolutionary forces build, it becomes increasingly likely that candidates far outside of the mainstream--right or left of center--will enjoy a viability they could never have gained before, and we're seeing this with Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Yet on DU, I'm surprised on a daily basis by the number of posters who don't seem to get it. They blithely remark that Hillary Clinton has nothing at all to be concerned about regarding Bernie Sanders. She's a shoo-in, they say.

Wake up, folks. Business as usual, as a political strategy, is dead. Who are these dinosaurs who are so out of touch with the political mood?

Musing on the above, I made my latest Photoshop effort below. I gave serious thought to putting a pantsuit on the T-Rex, but I think that's beyond my limited skill set. Enjoy. RAWR!



Original artwork: "The End of the Dinosaurs" by Mark Stevenson (aka MasPix).

October 7, 2014

Stephen Colbert: The Great Ebola Conspiracy

Stephen Colbert explains--with helpful clips from Fox News--how the CDC is spreading disinformation to help Obama destroy America.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/ayvbym/a-rare-correction---no-ebola-outbreak-in-the-u-s-

October 6, 2014

John Oliver: Civil Asset Forfeiture

Once again, John Oliver knocks it out of the park.

October 5, 2014

Here's the URL for a slightly better version....

I've added in a bit of shoulder that was cropped in the first version.

Direct link (remove hash symol): http:#//s29.postimg.org/wc9rhuw47/Turtleman_at_Campfire.jpg

... which points to this slightly better version:

October 4, 2014

"I'm not a scientist..."

"... I'm a turtle."



GO, ALISON GRIMES! Defeat the Turtleman! Woo-hoo!

October 3, 2014

Think about this for a second.

America's new security apparatus must be allowed to read your private emails and texts to keep America safe, we're told.

At the same time, a man with a knife in his pocket can dash through the unlocked front door of the White House and run amok for awhile.

Just take a moment and let that sink in because, frankly, it's breathtaking.

National security? Not so much. Spying on and exerting control over the citizenry? Well, they've got that task covered backwards and forwards.

September 23, 2014

John Green: The Need for Clean Water in Ethiopia

John Green, one of the two brothers of the VlogBrothers YouTube channel, discusses the need for clean water in Ethiopia. He's started a fundraiser through Water.org, with a goal of raising $100,000 by October 1. If the $100,000 goal is met, the Gates Foundation will match donations dollar-for-dollar, which would provide sustainable, clean-water solutions for 8,000 Ethiopians.

September 23, 2014

I must've been about 10 or 11 when I started to love reading.

My parents had a set of shelves in the family room that were filled with books. On afternoons after school, I started to look through them out of boredom and opened a few that seemed interesting. There was a big, overstuffed bucket chair by the shelves, so reading was easy; before long, I was completely absorbed. Three titles in particular made a big impression. The beautiful prose in Updike's Rabbit, Run was absolutely entrancing. Crime and Punishment took me inside another human being's head in a way that I'd never known was possible: the guilt! And Catch-22 showed me shocking truths about life in a sometimes-crazy world that made my jaw drop: I can still remember being utterly stunned when an Italian wartime prostitute was pushed out of a window to her death and no one really cared.

In addition to the novels, I also found a copy of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style on those same shelves. I devoured it and read it several times.

Quite honestly, one of the biggest favors my parents ever did me was having copies of those books around. I strongly urge any parents of young children reading this to be sure hard copies of great novels are visible somewhere in the household. Don't hide them away in your bedroom. Put them in the living room or family room. Kids have a way of getting into things on their own and if good books are around, there's a real chance that they may stumble into a lifelong habit of reading great literature.

September 16, 2014

REVIEW: *The Imperfectionists* by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. 272 pp. Dial Press, 2010.
My rating: 5 stars out of 5

Note: This review DOES NOT contain spoilers. Read away with no worries!

The Imperfectionists is stunningly good. Over the course of eleven chapters, Tom Rachman takes us into the hearts and minds of a variety of characters, each of whom has some connection to an English-language international newspaper based in Rome. It's a diverse cast of characters, ranging from the newspaper's publisher, to the editor-in-chief, to a corrections editor, to a faithful reader. Each chapter presents one facet of the overall enterprise, yet is complete and perfect enough to stand on its own as a short story.

The characters are beautifully drawn; some of them are the most memorable characters I've come across in years. For example, there's the hilariously inept Winston Cheung, an insecure 24-year-old who's trying out for a stringer position in Cairo. So nervous that he can't take notes during his first interview with a Palestinian official, he winds up padding his story with lengthy asides about the official's goatee and a passing ice-cream vendor--and includes this all-time great example of purple prose:

"As he spoke, the yellow Egyptian sun shone very brightly, as if that golden sphere were blazing with the very hope for peace in the Middle East that burned also within the heart of the Palestinian undersecretary for sports, fishing, and wildlife."

Then there's Ornella de Monterecchi, the newspaper's most faithful reader. Like a modern-day Miss Havisham, this well-to-do elderly lady is hopelessly stuck in the past. She spends her days reading the paper and, unfortunately, requires a full two days to get through each daily edition--yet refuses to skip ahead. Rachman writes:

When it was the 1990s outside, she was just getting to know President Reagan. When planes struck the Twin Towers, she was watching the Soviet Union collapse. Today, it is February 18, 2007, outside this apartment. Within, the date remains April 23, 1994.

She doesn't own a television and each day her maid enters the house with the day's newspaper hidden in a plastic bag, to be filed away in a cabinet for reading at some point in the distant future.

But as wonderful as many of the human characters are in The Imperfectionists, the main character of the book is the newspaper itself. At the time of the novel, the first decade of the 21st century, print journalism was being supplanted by the Internet and the slow death of print journalism serves as the novel's backdrop. In fact, in some ways, The Imperfectionists is as much an elegy as it is a novel.

This isn't to say that Rachman romanticizes the newspaper business; far from it. All of the faults of the never-named Roman newspaper of his novel are laid bare, from the grimy carpeting beneath it all to the inept management at the top. Published typos and errors of fact abound. It's a messy operation, on its way out, yet we can't help but admire the audacity of it all: on a daily basis, a band of highly-intelligent individuals come together and make sense of the world, more or less, on twelve pages of newsprint.

This peculiar trait of the newspaper--being full of flaws yet worthy of admiration--extends to the characters, as well. Like the paper they are connected with, many of them are broken, malfunctioning, and on the way out. They are, indeed, imperfect. Yet Rachman does such a wonderful job of bringing them to life that we read their exploits with both sympathy and delight.

This is a superb novel, written with wit and precision, and not to be missed. It's hard to imagine how Rachman could've done better. For being one of my best reads of 2014, I give it five well-deserved stars.

September 15, 2014

The Narcoleptic Squirrel Song

~zzzzzzz~ "I'm up!"

|