Apropos of almost nothing

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In reference to the comments thread in this post, here's what a real Cubs manager sounds like:



Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Saturday Night After Hours

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Here's an oddly glorious-sounding ditty from the soundtrack of Frank Zappa's out-of-print movie 200 Motels.



I just happened to listen to my CD version of this tonight whilst making a batch of Utility Research Muffins, Bluberry-Orange, and felt like sharing it with the rest of yez.

They lyrics represent a lament of the late-sixties rock star, who it would seem did not always necessarily have access to the highest-class of groupie after any given show (particularly in a place like "Centerville: A Real Nice Place To Raise Your Kids Up." The falsetto vocals are by Turtles singers Howard Kaylan and Mark Vollman, who formed the core of Zappa's "vaudeville band." (The bass player in this aggregation was Jim Pons, yet another Turtles alumnus.) The subject matter of this band was heavily skewed toward obscene, surreal vignettes from "life on the road," which also was the theme (such as it was) for the movie.

It's hard for me to put my finger on what I like about the timbre of the organ in this one. It's churchy and industrial and atmospheric all at once, with lots of colorful fat-fingered dissonances. The trombone is used in an unusual way in this cut, too, being the only wind instrument in evidence. Even more unusual: it's played by George Duke, known pretty much exclusively for keyboards in subsequent versions of the Mothers and, later, in the jazz world at large. The reverb of pretty much everything is both completely over the top and just right to my earbones.

Another oddity: the mix on this version sounds significantly different from my CD on Ryko. don't know if the poster took this from the vinyl or the VHS movie soundtrack, or if the CD was released more than once with different mixes. Zappa was notorious for doing ridiculous things with the mixes and edits on CD reissues... and not necessarily well loved for it by his fans. In this case, though, the mix on this version is fine by me---it just highlights sounds and nuances that aren't apparent on any version I've heard recently. One day I will pull out the vinyl, wipe it down, and give it a hear.

What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning? Frank Zappa and The Mother Of Invention (1971, from the "original MGM motion picture soundtrack" of "Frank Zappa's 200 Motels," Rykodisc RCD 10513/14), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Go, you White Sox!

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Suck on this, you North Side yuppies, hipsters, and sorry hangers-on!

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Over the past 6 weeks or so I've been bemused by American right-wing Roman Catholic hierarchs and politicians who seem to think that this here is the Papal States of America we all live in. They're dangerous nuts who should stay the hell out of electoral politics and thank the Trinity that their secular activities aren't taxed into destitution, where they belong.



In the 1960s, Tom Lehrer (who Wikipedia tells me is still alive, by gum!) could perform this type of comedy music on a nationally broadcast TV variety show, and I think that most of the audience of the time would have understood the setup he provides here before the song. We had a Catholic president at the time who had pledged sincerely and truthfully that the executive branch under him would be taking no direction from Rome. At the same time, the Vatican II reforms Lehrer refers to were making the Catholic Church less foreign-seeming and scary to everyday Protestant types (not to mention many in the American Catholic congregation).

Can you imagine what the likes of failed presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich would have to say about this performance today were it to be given on, say Saturday Night Live? Demands for boycotts of the network, apologies, congressional hearings!

And I must say, as I listen to these lyrics through adult ears for the first time (I heard this song plenty of times as a kid from the old blond Olympia hi-fi console in the living room), I'm suddenly much less sure that this parody was fully intended in good nature. I really wish Lehrer were inspired out of retirement by the repugnance of RC current events (including the church's indifference toward its own multigeneration pastoral sex-crime rampage and systematic cover-up) to record an update.

The Vatican Rag, Tom Lehrer (11 September 1967, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Gorgeous song; music maybe not what one would expect by the title.



As I've mentioned before, song lyrics have almost always been a secondary consideration to me because I could rarely understand them, articulationwise. I tend to listen to the vocals first as another instrument in the arrangement. Then, if I can understand the words as coherent phrases in English, fine. But I'm a pretty literal-minded guy, so I feel real proud of myself if I can extract the composer's intended meaning from roundabout poetics.

E's lyrics are very personal, always. People who know something about the personal tragedies he endured as a younger man may have a clue about the enigmatic lyrics of this song. I happened to think of playing it for you tonight because as we approach the climax of the Christian Holy Week it comes to mind that (1) some traditions hold that Christ spent the Saturday after his crucifixion in Hell and (2) we never learned about this part of the religion in Sunday School or even confirmation as young teenagers in the Methodist denomination. At this point I will invite The Minister's Daughter to shed any light on this, as available. (Allegory and all.) Also, Beer-D and/or Big Rock Head should feel free to disambiguate the content of the lyrics to this haunting Eels composition.

Your Lucky Day In Hell, Eels (1996, from "Beautiful Freak," Dreamworks DRMD-50001), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Diana Krall's peckerwood husband.



Just kidding! (Peckerwood-wise.) Elvis Costello has been a favorite of mine for over 30 years, and this cut stands out to me among his long list of masterpieces.

The zippy pop arrangement, as exuberant as bubble gum, provides the happy "vector" for delivering an apocalyptic prophecy for Empire. I assume that Costello's lyrics were understood much more directly by his British audience, being children of an imperial twilight, than by Americans. But his imagery is so vivid that the thrust of the words were readily discerned even by a complacent twenty-something college slacker in 1979 who had little detailed knowledge of colonialism.

This song has not become any less relevant with the decline of the great Western colonial powers, because those empires have been supplanted by extractive transnational corporate enterprises that rival the power of  any in world history. And ultimately, I think the new ones are every bit as doomed as the ill-fated empires of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. This is still a prophetic, snappy little pop ditty that should haunt the brain stem of any plutocrat within hearing distance.

Oliver's Army, Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1979, from "Armed Forces," Columbia JC35709), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Bonus fun stuff: while scavenging my vinyl LP collection for the catalog information I rediscovered the bonus 33 rpm demo EP packaged with the original US release of Armed Forces. It contains "Watching The Detectives," "Accidents Will Happen," and "Allison." Also stashed away in the sleeve: my ticket stub for the 10 March 1979 Elvis & Attractions performance at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Bruce Pavitt's girlfriend smuggled my camera into that show under her greatcoat after a security goon tried to confiscate it from me. Don't try that today unless you're prepared to get beaten in the skull with a five-cell Maglite or else give some fat turd a blowjob.

DuckDuckGo[ogle]

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In addition to some suggestions I recently offered about making your computer and your privacy (possibly) less vulnerable to invasion when using the web, I stumbled across another goodie that seems positioned for breakout popularity soon. It's a search engine called DuckDuckGo.

First, it reminds me of Google 10-plus years ago: a simple site that searches for stuff you type in real fast and returns results rank-ordered in terms of raw relevance in relation to your keywords. Many of us with broadband access at work developed a reflexive Google habit sometime during the second term of Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. And probably just as many of us have retained the habit, uncritically. This has enabled Google to build a colossal technology concern, funded by advertising targeted to your web browser and its search history (and by cross-referencing lots of other stuff in the background). Good for them; I'm happy to see a (somewhat) progressive competitor in the tech business to challenge Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, and whomever.

During the past decade, though, Google dove into an aggressively extractive business model that some people call corporatism. As it has happened everywhere else over the past 30 years, people on the internet have devolved from human beings into customers and then resources; from citizens into capital and then commodities. This isn't Google's fault, of course, but Google is evidently really good at delivering our eyeballs to merchants and marketing snoops who then use them to colonize our attention. (I say "apparently" because Firefox and its privacy plug-ins shield me from most of it, so I don't observe the full extent of the privacy invasion from where I sit.)

Anyway, I've found the Google search engine to be a lot less helpful to me in the past several years. Maybe you have, too. And you, like I, have probably read about why this is the case. For example, Google delivers search results keyed to our ZIP code, our search history, stuff reported back to the company by our browser cookies, and so on. At the DuckDuckGo site, they explain it. The term of art is bubbling, as in keeping you in a bubble of isolation, searchwise, based on what Google and its "partners" determine to be the best way to extract consumer-type attention from you. Check it out. It's the clearest and most concise explanation of bubbling I've seen. Likewise, read their explanation of how tracking works. Top-notch education in a dozen pictures and captions.

My initial results with DuckDuckGo seem to be a world away from the chaff that Google delivers these days. I've set a button on my Firefox bookmark bar and will install the DDG search plug-in as soon as Mozilla gets its act together and fixes the Firefox installation bug. (Dumbness that I won't get sidetracked on here.)

I haven't read anything about the company yet, and I hope their strat plan isn't to become "the next Google." If they were to set up as an open-source nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, I'd donate some green stuff to them.

I don't have any animosity toward Google The Corporation, but extractive capitalism is just not compatible with respect for the individual and his or her privacy. So their having a real search competitor is just fine with me.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This late-1940s public service announcement broadcast on the DuMont Television Network is, to me, a heartwarming artifact of an era in media history when at least some people may have been in the business for a constructive social purpose. Its target audience was kids, Video Rangers in particular---fans of Captain Video (such as Ed Norton). The PSA is earnest yet sincere, and the lesson is unassailable: fight discrimination by making friends. Prejudice gets in the way of making friends, and everyone wants lots of friends. Plus, prejudice is... un-American, of all things! Imagine someone saying that on TV today.



In fact, I cannot imagine a PSA of this caliber being created or broadcast in the current era. Even in the best case, I can hear in my mind's ear the condescension oozing through the glottis of some "cool" B-list celebrity paying lip service to some shallow feel-good message, as a vehicle for promoting someone's "brand." (Also: visibility and tax write-off!) The very idea of such a PSA would be considered "controversial," I'm sure, and thus focus-grouped to death before the project was orphaned to PBS where the message could be articulated by red, green, and blue Muppets.

Captain Video Anti-Discrimination PSA (late 1940s, DuMont Television Network), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Special bonus for all you Video Rangers:

I, Edward Norton, Ranger Third Class in the Captain Video Ranger Academy, do solemnly pledge to obey my mommy and daddy, to be kind to dumb animals and old ladies in and out of space, not to tease my little brothers and sisters and to brush my teeth twice a day and drink milk after every meal. 

Apropos of nothing

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I think that the most inherently funny word in the English language is "turd."

It is the perfect comic word. A person doesn't need to know what it means to find it funny; it just sounds funny independently of its meaning. And for that matter, I don't even think a person needs to speak English to find laughter in the word. Turd. It pretty much sounds like what it is.

Social science experiment: ask people of diverse linguistic heritage to repeat "turd" out loud five times and then guess what it means... and don't even tell them what language it is. I am confident that a landslide majority of the survey subjects would get it in one or two guesses.

Reluctantly acknowledging that opinions may differ from mine, tell me: what do you think is the funniest word in English? As always, thank you for your attention in this matter.

Don't mind them---they're morons

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Our correspondent in the Grampian Hills sends a riddle:

I saw [a] preview for the 3 stooges movie—I think it opens around mid April. They (whoever they are) seem to have the impersonations down OK but, why?

That is a bit of a noodle-scratcher, true. Beer-D has provided the most salient market-based analysis I've heard. (Yes, Stooge fans have been discussing this pending corporate profiteering atrocity for awhile.)

As Beer-D sees it, it's difficult to fathom what audience the movie producers are targeting. For kids who aren't familiar with the Stooges, none of the references or tributes to the original cast members will register. People of any age who did not like the original Stooges will have no interest in subjecting themselves to a impersonation of them. And, of course, it is hard to believe that any fans of the original Stooges will respond to the release with anything except contempt.

Some few charitable people might at least appreciate any craftsmanship and dedication that the actors may have applied to recreating the original characters and situations. But I don't think that will provide a sufficient basis for either a blockbuster box office or a career boost for the director. However, I may be wrong, and Beer-D may have missed something: maybe the target audiences are the Chinese and the French.

Apropos of nothing

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It's 10:30 p.m. on 20 March 2012, the first day of spring. The outdoor temperature is 70 degrees. There is a fruit fly searching for a grapefruit rind in the kitchen. I'd go hide it in my bedroom, but the possums might find it.

Why I use Firefox [updated]

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I'm a longtime user of the open-source Mozilla Firefox web browser. It has fallen out of favor with some of the high-visibility cool kids these days. Its interface is not as glamorous-looking as Apple Safari or Google Chrome; and it doesn't have the cult appeal of Opera, the Ron Paul of web browsers. But in my experience, nothing beats Firefox in terms of managing browsing privacy and security.

If you use Firefox, I strongly recommend that you look into a new-to-me add-in called Do Not Track Plus by a company called Abine. The add-in displays a simple toolbar button that shows you how many companies are tracking you at any site you visit. If you click the button an alert box appears showing what categories of companies are tracking you---social networks, ad networks, etc---and confirming that the add-in is blocking their view of you. In addition to appreciating the privacy service that the add-in provides, I also find the alert box to be very informative about how many entities are trolling for information on how and where we browse.

The other indispensable add-ins for Firefox, in my view, are NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and HTTPS Everywhere. NoScript allows you to block websites from executing scripts in your browser. In addition to protecting against browser-based malware, NoScript prevents sites from executing all kinds of Java programs that do anything from running pointless animations to harvesting cookie, browsing history, and contact information. You can selectively enable or disable scripts from various sites as you get a feel for which ones are essential for your browser to work fairly normally (such as blogger.com, which I need to enable in order to bring you the finest in web-based social commentary and dokes, delivered fresh to your computer screen every time I feel like it).

AdBlock Plus does just what it sounds like. But, like NoScript, its filters can be selectively enabled if you need to. I basically am intruded upon by zero ads wherever I browse.

Finally, HTTPS Everywhere works with a growing number of sites to encrypt your connection even if they're not running secure (https://) protocols.

This post, incidentally, hints at a bigger issue that I've been wanting to write about for a year or more, namely that the web seems destined to devolve into a corporation-controlled domain dedicated to propagating corporatist values and extracting every available morsel of value from its most valuable resource---human eyeballs.

Update: I've been referring to these little programs as "add-ins," but I am now reminded that Mozilla calls them "add-ons." And more specifically, the items I mention above are "extensions." There are also "plug-ins," which are a slightly different animal, and "skins" that change the look of the browser (most of which suck).

In the shadow of a Magical Kingdom

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It seems that the Orlando, Fla., suburbs now have their own theme parks and "cast members." This one may be called ManslaughterLand, for all I know, but I could not confirm that as of press time. This attraction would appear to be an immersive first-person shooter in which the customer (after spending 40 minutes pacing back and forth in queue) may pick a fight with a kid, shoot him to death, and avoid arrest by telling the Nice Policeman you pulled the trigger in self defense. Since the menace 2 society is deceased and cannot contradict your claim, you get to go home and exult.

From what I read, ManslaughterLand could improve the realism of this attraction by arming the bad guy with a knife or a gun instead of Skittles and iced tea.

Editor's note: I will step out of character for a moment just to make it clear how sickening this news was to me when I heard it this morning on the radio. This morning CNN said:

Incredibly, the man who admitted to killing Trayvon, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, has remained free since the shooting because he told Sanford police that it was in self-defense. After questioning him, police bought his explanation and allowed him to return home. (Police said he has not been charged because there are no grounds to disprove his story of what happened.)

"There are no grounds to disprove his story of what happened"? I suppose an investigation might begin with the shooter's reported confession to the shooting, the corpse of an unarmed child, a bag of Skittles, and an unspecified quantity of iced tea. This evidence is suggestive of certain interpretations that may cast doubt on the decision to release the shooter.

Apropos of nothing

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Recently, after reading a biography of Jolly Jack "King" Kirby, the late comic book penciling legend who co-invented Captain America, the entire genre of romance comic books, and most of the early superhero stable at Marvel Comics, I randomly remembered that Kirby's characters sometimes employed the epithet "liver lips" to insult an adversary. This thought cracked me up, now as it always did in my slap-happy youth, so I wondered what the hell it meant.

Happily, such mysteries are much easier to investigate today than they were 45 years ago. My first stop was Urban Dictionary, which revealed little that I would consider to be valid etymological information except that in some usages the term has a racist undertone. That interpretation made no sense to me since Kirby was known by all to be a dyed-in-the-wool (as his characters would sometimes say) New Deal liberal straight arrow. And the term was typically used by the good guys (mainly The Think, Sergeant Fury, and possibly The Hulk in his more lucid days), but never in reference to an African American. So I kept searching, thinking maybe it was a New York Yiddish bit of slang, since we sometimes hear the question "What am I, chopped liver?" in Jewish humor. My search didn't get too much farther, because I found everything I needed to know about the term on an old, obscure web page.

The post starts with the intrepid ronda54 describing a youthful brush with fame in the form of "Uncle Miltie" himself: Milton Berle. It seems that ronda54's family lived next to Berle's daughter, Vickie, and son in law, and somehow her parents were enlisted to pick Berle up from the airport and bring him to the daughter's house.

The report was that Milton was rather quite and polite…non descript just like his daughter, although he and my dad cracked a few dirty jokes which increased the respect factor in my dad's mind. I'm sure mom was trying to keep her eyes on the road instead of the freak show in his crotch and she must have managed because when she relayed the story to me the focus was on Milton's lips, not his schlong. His lips looked like two slabs of liver glued to his face. I'm afraid, Vickie had the same problem but hers were less pronounced. I thought this was hilarious and forever more he was known as "old liver lips" in our household. Dad would bellow that he had to give old liver lips a ride to the airport.

So Berle came from a Jewish New York family and was only about 10 years older than Kirby, so perhaps this term was simply used in the Jewish community in reference to big-lipped people in the neighborhood, and... wait a minute! "Hold the phone!" as Frazier Thomas used to exclaim. "Freak show in his crotch," she says? Well, I guess so:

[Berle's] moniker was "Mr. Television." I was more into Cheech and Chong so he was still sounding pretty boring until mom told me about his legendary humongous penis. Milton was getting less boring, now. I guess this thing was a killer…we are talking 14 inches long. We got a 12 inch ruler out of the drawer, added 2 inches and stood there aghast. How was this possible and who would ever marry a guy like this? He may have been a famous television personality but everyone knows that the penis -in a train wreck sort of way- was the real draw. Mom and the neighbor gals all agreed that they would pay money to stare at it.

Wikipedia connects a few more dots regarding "old liver lips" and his legendary unit with some celebrity anecdotes:

Phil Silvers once told a story about standing next to Berle at a urinal, glancing down, and quipping, "You'd better feed that thing, or it's liable to turn on you!" In the short story 'A Beautiful Child', Truman Capote wrote Marilyn Monroe as saying: "Christ! Everybody says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood." Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel, who had written many Friars Club jokes about Berle's penis for other comedians, described being treated to a private showing: "He just takes out this— this anaconda. He lays it on the table and I'm looking into this thing, right? I'm looking into the head of Milton Berle's dick. It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, 'What do you think of the boy?' And I'm looking right at it and I go, 'Oh, it's really, really nice.'"

Oh yes, I'll just bet it was. And thanks to King Kirby and ronda54, I've solved the riddle of liver lips with extreme prejudice.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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This is a Chicago furniture store jingle as released on a promotional 7 in. vinyl single in 1970.



My general memory from the late 1950s into the 1970s is that music for broadcast commercials and radio jingles was based either on styles that were mainstream when the ad agency guys were in school---half a generation out of date to a teenager or young adult---or else an agency's smarmy exploitation version of youth-oriented music. The good people at Ember Furniture seem to have farmed out their work to a very smooth soul operator named Sidney Barnes. I have a version of this on CD---an anthology on the Numero Group reissue label. Numero's releases cover a wide spectrum, from interesting, fully listenable minor-league recordings by regional soul (and other styles of) groups to sides that sound like they came from a 1960s and '70s parallel pop music universe. And I guess that's actually the case: there is only so much room on national charts at any one time, and it tends to be allotted according to mystical protocols involving transfers of materiel and sexual favors.

Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, I'd certainly poke into a furniture store that commissioned a commercial jingle like "The Ember Song." As if (as annoying teenage girls used to say).

The Ember Song, Sidney Barnes (1970, available on "Eccentric Soul: The Nickel & Penny Labels" [2011], Numero Group N039), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.  

The fall product rollout [update]

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A few days after I mused here about the new war for which the neocons and corporate media have formed their very own Occupy-style drum circle I had this idea, but I felt it would sound too silly to trouble you with before giving careful consideration to my choice of wording. Welp, as seen on Balloon Juice, it looks like someone has described the prospective conspiracy that corporate media would be expected to denounce as... "a conspiracy theory":

Here’s a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.

See, I think there are certain ideas that may be too dangerous for a nobody like me to fluff up on my crummy blog, but Andrew Sullivan evidently thinks his high profile as a celebrity blogger will protect him from right-wing opprobrium. We'll see about that.

You may remember back in January when the publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times had to "step down" for suggesting that maybe "Israel's most inner circles" might "order a hit" on Barack Obama in order to rid themselves of an unfriendly US president. So here's another approach that might amount to a fatal political hit if the "product" were rolled out as an October Surprise.

I don't think this idea is too insane to have been dreamed of, kicked around all hush-hush-like, or even to have arrived at some stage of planning. Because the marketplace of ideas is oversupplied with insanity. I'm sure the very idea quickens the pulse of many. And who knows: maybe certain people with the right connections and levers think they could get away with such a thing. But if that's the case, they are making one of the classic strategic blunders: underestimating the adversary.

As it happens, every President of the United States has his own "most inner circle," not to mention a heavy metal national security apparatus and---thanks to Richard Bruce Cheney and The Boy Who Would Be President---a carload of extra-constitutional surveillance and law-enforcement powers. And this one knows how to play 10-dimensional chess, so watch out.

Update: I forgot to state that any such conspiracy would not involve nobodies like Santorum, Gingrich, or Romney. But I do think it's fully plausible that it could involve Americans. I don't think there is any shortage of latent traitors on the far right.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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I heard someone commenting on NPR earlier this evening that it would be "impossible to overstate" the impact of Billy Strange on American pop.



Well, I don't mean to pick on the late Mr. Strange, who died on Tuesday. But, no, it wouldn't be impossible at all to overstate his influence. In fact, I'll do it right now:

Billy Strange was without doubt the most influential American pop musician of the 20th and 21st centuries!

Hyperbole is the chronic halitosis of our public discussion. Being the rhetorical equivalent of typing with the CAPS LOCK ON, it's tiresome. (Funny---I just noticed that type on the key cap of the CAPS LOCK key on my MacBook Pro is set in all lowercase characters.) Being the distorter of meaning, it undermines our collective ability to communicate. And in this case, reflexive hyperbole can set up the uninformed (including myself) for disappointment upon investigation. Meaning that it does a disservice to the memory of the deceased. It's cheap.

Yes, Mr. Strange penned some hits (including the horrible "Limbo Rock" for Chubby Checker) and had some enjoyable musical input to the Frank and Nancy Sinatra repertoire of the mid-1960s. And he was a member of the fabulous Wrecking Crew, a noteworthy career milestone with an ensemble that did in fact have an outsized impact on 1960s rock and pop. But, c'mon, leave the poor guy rest in peace, stupid mass media "culture" reporters.

Here's a nice, previously-unseen-by-me video of Billy Strange performing acoustically with meteoric bilingual boner mill Nancy Sinatra (and I say that with the utmost sincerity). Mr. Strange was a competent and accomplished musician. I'll listen for his Wrecking Crew work next time I play the $#!+ out of Pet Sounds.

Bang Bang, Billy Strange with Nancy Sinatra (mid-1960s, provenance unknown [but probably not US TV considering Nancy's lingua franca intro), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

He just finds it "a little troubling"

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John Ellis "Used To Be A Conservative" Bush (JEB), the former Florida governor whose Republican machine unethically thwarted a fair and balanced presidential vote recount in 2000, feels

it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are"

according to a HuffingtonPost article with an embedded Fox link. JEB is of course referring to those nattering nabobs of negativism, the 2012 Republican presidential candidates. The HuffPost report indicates that JEB's opinion is shared by his bosom old buddy Karl "Still The Queen Of The Jackbooted Neocon Admen" Rove. I'd interpret their sentiment as an unintentional admission that they are momentarily embarrassed by the monster created by Rove's mentor, the late Lee "Nigger Nigger Nigger" Atwater.

The monsters have come to Maple Street

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As seen on Atrios, here's a dispatch from the front lines of the Bedwetter Wars.

I'm sure we all understand the potential dangers that lurk. They're the same as they were 30 years ago and 50 years ago. What's so different in 2012 that a Philadelphia suburb needs to put schools on lockdown because a stranger was seen waiting for a bus?

My first wild guess is that it has something to do with how deeply immersed most people are in electronic infotainment media. A critical insight published by Jerry Mander over a quarter of a century ago in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is that TV is a sensory deprivation technology. He asserted, and I agree, that the pictures, motion, and sound conspire to create an illusion of reality, but that the human mind is not fooled by the illusion for long because boredom sets in rapidly (as compared with sensational, tactile reality). And I will throw computers and mobile IT devices into that pot as well.

As people are immersed in the claustrophobic surreality of corporation-mediated "experience," actual, random reality may begin to seem foreign to everyday experience. And threatening. I wonder if a plurality of the population simply doesn't know what to make of life experience that isn't responsive to a remote control or a computer touchscreen.

Back in the good old days, if we saw a stranger standing on a corner doing nothing we'd never think of calling the cops; we'd just kick his ass seven ways for Sunday. (JK---ROFL!)

Sneak preview of the fall product line

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Many of us remember reading about the July 2002 Downing Street Memo, in which we learned the the chief of Britain's MI6 had expressed the view that our very own President of the United States

wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The US public learned of this interesting fact through a British press leak in 2005, well after the deadly Bush/Cheney hobby horse had galloped out of the corral with the liberal New York Times glued into the saddle like a pair of Judith Miller's panties. When President Obama schlepped the last combat troops out of Iraq (or so "they" say) late last year, it wasn't just because he's a Nice Guy: it was because that corporation-driven war of aggression had no more measurable public support and addressed no critical US security interest.

Everyone who is nostalgic for a post-911 stiffie should be happy to hear that British Foreign Secretary William Hague is blaming Iran for threatening to make the civilized nations of Terra launch a "new cold war." That's mighty thoughty of the Persians, as Bullwinkle used to say, because it seems that this is exactly what all true patriots both happen to want and want to happen. And by all true patriots, I am referring to the usual cast of neocon civilian politicians and their heralds employed by the corporate media. Have you been sensing this lately, too?