The month my bathtub made more than I did
The bathtub of my $35 a month Lower East Side walk-up on the cover of National Lampoon. That's coffee, by the way: this was art directed (it was bad, but not that bad).
The Long War: Endless. Pointless.
"Ultimately, the public is at fault for this catastrophe in Afghanistan, where more than 1,000 G.I.’s have now lost their lives. If we don’t have the courage as a people to fight and share in the sacrifices when our nation is at war, if we’re unwilling to seriously think about the war and hold our leaders accountable for the way it is conducted, if we’re not even willing to pay for it, then we should at least have the courage to pull our valiant forces out of it." -- The Courage to Leave by Bob Herbert (New York Times 2010-06-11)
Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars...
Talk about disruptive technologies.
Not only is SpaceX's new Dragon V2 space transport able to carry up to seven astronauts to and from the international space station, not only is its thermal protection system sufficient for the spacecraft to be capable of lunar missions, not only will it be able to return to earth with the precision of a helicopter (paving the way for interplanetary tourism), but its eight SuperDraco engines were produced entirely with a 3-D printer (using a super-alloy called Inconel), making it the first 3-D printed rocket engine to take flight.
Dragon V2 will begin shuttling passengers to and from the space station in late 2016.
Welcome to Tomorrowland.
Act like a national party
The Democrats should use their pac money for a national congressional campaign; instead of backing a few potential "winners" here and there, they should tie the GOP's reactionary majority to its truly lunatic fringe, turn every vote in the country into a judgement on Republican radicalism, make it clear that you can't have that nice Monica Wehby in Oregon, say, without getting Joni Ernst, the new Republican nominee for Iowa’s Senate seat, who is anti-amnesty for immigrants, hates the Nixon-backed Clean Water Act, and wants to privatize Social Security.
Actually, Monica Wehby doesn't seem that nice, but you get my point.
Actually, Monica Wehby doesn't seem that nice, but you get my point.
The Beat Goes On
“So today, Mosul fell. Mosul is the second largest city in Iraq. The Iraqi government we 'installed,' has now 'lost' Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul and other large swaths of the country we invaded at the cost of thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and a couple trillion dollars. (What could your school district do with a trillion dollars?).
"One more maddening day in this 11-year illegal, immoral, greedy and stupid war. Today in Mosul, that Iraqi Army YOU pay for, freaked out, threw down their guns, and literally RAN away. I have friends and acquaintances who lost sons in all three of those cities. I can only imagine what they're feeling tonight. FOR WHAT? FOR WHAT! I am so sorry we couldn't do anything to stop this when it started. A few million of us tried. Last week, Richard Clarke, Bush's former head of counter-terrorism, said he now believes that his fellow members of the Bush administration committed 'war crimes.'
"I continue to await the perp walk.” -- Michael Moore
"One more maddening day in this 11-year illegal, immoral, greedy and stupid war. Today in Mosul, that Iraqi Army YOU pay for, freaked out, threw down their guns, and literally RAN away. I have friends and acquaintances who lost sons in all three of those cities. I can only imagine what they're feeling tonight. FOR WHAT? FOR WHAT! I am so sorry we couldn't do anything to stop this when it started. A few million of us tried. Last week, Richard Clarke, Bush's former head of counter-terrorism, said he now believes that his fellow members of the Bush administration committed 'war crimes.'
"I continue to await the perp walk.” -- Michael Moore
Take the "D" Train
Despite his own modest appraisal of his piano playing, Duke Ellington did fantastic duos and trios with Jimmy Blanton, Louis Armstrong, Mulgrew Miller, Billy Strayhorn, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, and more.
He's the Willie Nelson of jazz.
Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach: Money Jungle
He's the Willie Nelson of jazz.
 |
| (Richard Avedon, 1963) |
Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach: Money Jungle
Living big at $7.25 an hour
The Times spent a few column inches yesterday mulling over the mystery of why the poverty rate hasn't budged in 30 years. Gosh. I don't know. I'm sure it can't have anything to do with the systematic decimation of organized labor and the shipping of American jobs to China and Mexico. Can't see how starving the free universal education system could have anything to do with it. It can't be because of all that expenditure of public wealth on the liberal project of empire-building instead of on the building roads and bridges and harbors and airports and hospitals and schools and housing here at home. Can't be that. You can't blame the war on drugs, or the creation of a vast army of former inmates without jobs, or the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on incarceration instead of education, on building prisons instead of schools. I'm sure it has nothing to do with Bill Clinton's welfare reforms. Surely it wasn't because the minimum wage wasn't linked to inflation or to worker productivity so that as the decades rolled by low end jobs were worth less and less. Couldn't be that. Certainly it had nothing to do with the mortgage crisis. Or allowing the banks to bleed us dry. Or slashing services for the poor and middle class so that taxes for the very wealthiest could be slashed, too. I can't think what the reason might be. Can you?
“The most valuable sense of humor is the kind that enables a person to see instantly what it isn't safe to laugh at.” -- Donald Rumsfeld
Many of you frequent flyers will recall that for a time TSA had signs and loudspeakers prohibiting humor attacks at security checkpoints. “You are reminded that any inappropriate remarks or jokes concerning security may result in your arrest,” warned one loudspeaker message in Dallas last fall. It's ironic that a sign at Burbank's Bob Hope Airport should say, "No jokes."
This came to mind because of the announcement this week by the U.S. Secret Service that it has issued an RFP for software that can detect sarcasm. Since we are decades from producing a computer with a sense of humor, it's likely the service will have to make do with a program that sorts through a giant database of pre-screened tweets and emails looking for tells: wannabe terrorists would do well to get in the habit now of putting smiley faces and LOLs in all their social media posts.
The fact that no one can be absolutely certain the Secret Service itself isn't kidding is evidence of how difficult a task deciphering snide remarks will be. The safest thing is probably to assume that, like TSA, the service is deficient in the skill set needed to detect and catalog gradations of wit, and to try to help them out with some practical alternatives. I started to suggest that, instead of wasting resources developing software that will never be operational, the service ask working comics to apply their expertise to the problem, until I remembered that the functionaries interviewing prospective government humor analysts would be the same ones who can't see the whimsy in an airport sign prohibiting jokes; they'd just end up with a government facility full of Dennis Millers.
More effective might be a change in staffing practices: the service should immediately stop hiring seminary dropouts and returning Mormon missionaries and limit their recruiting to inner city Jews, blacks, Irish and Italians.
This is a serious problem needing serious attention. We certainly don't want anyone arrested at a fund-raising dinner or a Fourth of July picnic for asking the agent groping him, "Do you want me to do you now?," let alone for bringing up his fling with Hitler's mother.
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” -- William James
This came to mind because of the announcement this week by the U.S. Secret Service that it has issued an RFP for software that can detect sarcasm. Since we are decades from producing a computer with a sense of humor, it's likely the service will have to make do with a program that sorts through a giant database of pre-screened tweets and emails looking for tells: wannabe terrorists would do well to get in the habit now of putting smiley faces and LOLs in all their social media posts.
The fact that no one can be absolutely certain the Secret Service itself isn't kidding is evidence of how difficult a task deciphering snide remarks will be. The safest thing is probably to assume that, like TSA, the service is deficient in the skill set needed to detect and catalog gradations of wit, and to try to help them out with some practical alternatives. I started to suggest that, instead of wasting resources developing software that will never be operational, the service ask working comics to apply their expertise to the problem, until I remembered that the functionaries interviewing prospective government humor analysts would be the same ones who can't see the whimsy in an airport sign prohibiting jokes; they'd just end up with a government facility full of Dennis Millers.
More effective might be a change in staffing practices: the service should immediately stop hiring seminary dropouts and returning Mormon missionaries and limit their recruiting to inner city Jews, blacks, Irish and Italians.
This is a serious problem needing serious attention. We certainly don't want anyone arrested at a fund-raising dinner or a Fourth of July picnic for asking the agent groping him, "Do you want me to do you now?," let alone for bringing up his fling with Hitler's mother.
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” -- William James
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
