An opinion: I do not think that Newsweek‘s cover photo of Michele Bachmann ‘went too far’ or whatever we want to call it. I’ve seen plenty of photos of Bachmann, and she just plain flat-out has crazy eyes, which I suspect is because she’s…well, she’s dumb and crazy. I’m sorry to say it, but that’s the only way I can interpret the fact that most of the things she says are dumb, crazy, or dumb and crazy. Plus the fact that her eyes really do look like that. Lord knows, we all don’t photograph well all the time — some of us (yours truly among them, I think) don’t photograph well even a majority of the time — but I’ve never once seen a photo of Michele Bachmann that doesn’t make me think, “Wow, I really hope the docs from the loony bin find her soon.”
I mean, the woman was caught hiding behind a bush once, to spy on an opposing rally. She’s crazy. And she has the eyes to prove it.
We’re having a great time here on the Jersey Shore. It’s funny — I’m aware of the existence of a teevee show called The Jersey Shore, and that’s that, but when I was telling people that my family and I were going to the Jersey Shore, lots of folks grinned and said, “What happens at The Shore stays at The Shore”. And that sounds great and all, but it doesn’t make for good blogging. So, a couple of notes thus far:
:: It turns out that the tastiness of rum varies in direct proportion to one’s proximity to salt water. Rum’s great in Buffalo. But drinking rum when you’re so close to the ocean that even through closed doors you can hear waves breaking? Awesome.
:: I’m planning to sample some tequila later. I’ll just have it on the rocks, maybe with a lime twist. None of that licking-salt stuff; that’s just gross.
:: Yeah, it’s really hot. But late in the afternoon when the wind is coming off the shore, it’s very pleasant and can get downright chilly.
:: Kite surfing looks like more fun than anyone should be allowed to have during one activity.
:: I dislike tourist-trap pricing.
Reactions to world events:
:: The Pirates aren’t just toying with having a season over .500, but they’ve been flirting with first place. In fact, as of this writing, they hold a one-half game lead in the NL Central. This amazes me.
:: The NFL lockout sure has been “on the verge of ending” for quite a while now.
:: Thinking it over, it becomes clear to me that the Republicans have been getting a little crazier each year for something like thirty years. Every time election season starts to roll around, they’re just a little bit more insane. It terrifies me to think that as batshit crazy as Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry are, in 2015 (assuming an Obama reelection next year) there will a whole bunch of Republicans coming to the fore who are crazier than that.
:: Rupert Murdoch apparently got a pie thrown at him today. This disappoints me. I can think of few people less deserving of a pie in the face than Rupert Murdoch. But then, I’m odd.
:: And finally, it continues to amaze me that you don’t have to venture far from Western New York to see how much nicer folks have it just about anyplace else. Cities and towns with waterfronts, that let folks build things as long as they comply with certain zoning requirements, cities and towns that…oh well.
More upon my return to society. Having great time, wishing you were!
This (.pdf warning) may be the greatest judicial ruling ever written. Or maybe not. I’d have to read others by this same fellow to be sure. It’s the final ruling in a divorce case that has apparently been extremely acrimonious, and the judge’s response (the Hon. J.W. Quinn, of St. Catherines, ON — just about a 35 minute drive from Casa Jaquandor, depending on the border crossings!), in the end, is to fill his ruling with lots of dry wit. The very first sentence is “Paging Dr. Freud. Paging Dr. Freud.” And check out the bits during a section wherein he details the various death threats made against the husband by the wife and her family.
:: After noting that Larry (the husband) has provided evidence that Catherine (the wife) tried to run over him with the family van, the judge notes in a footnote: “This is always a telltale sign that a husband and wife are drifting apart.”
:: When noting a threat that Larry would “end up floating in the canal dead”, the judge notes this by saying, “A nautical theme was added.”
:: He closes this section thusly: “As can be seen, Catherine and her relatives are one-dimensional problem solvers.”
Read through this thing. It is terrific!
(The title of this post is a shout-out to a Twitter- and Tumblr-mate of mine who goes by the handle “Silently Judging You”. Greetings, SJY, if you read this!)
I’ve been waffling on whether or not to write this post, as part of it involves blogging about work, which I’m not generally thrilled to do, but I don’t think that the relevant work details are especially sensitive, so here goes.
A few weeks back, the fine folks at Cultural Compulsive Disorder (one of my favorite pop-culture blogs, by the way) decided that it would be cool to show all six Star Wars movies in their favorite bar. They were going to make a thing out of this — they put up flyers, and so on. Come to the bar, buy drinks or snacks or whatever, and watch Star Wars for free.
Unfortunately — but, I think, fairly predictably — Lucasfilm caught wind of this and issued a cease-and-desist letter. Now, they got their details wrong, thinking that this was to be a charged-admission event, but still, the writing was on the wall: No public screening of Star Wars without permission. Naturally, this didn’t go over well with the CCD guys, although they are complying.
Firstly, there’s an awful lot of blasting of Lucas personally here and on CCD. I suspect that Lucas in all likelihood personally knows absolutely nothing about this whole affair, and that this is the work of a legal department and nothing else. And the fact is, this isn’t an abnormal thing to happen. It may suck, but it’s not unheard-of or out of the blue.
Here’s a true story. I work at a big grocery store, as you may know, which is part of a pretty large chain in the Northeast US. A couple of years ago, someone at corporate thought it would be cool to have “Movie Nights” on Fridays in our cafe’s. We’d show a movie in the cafe, something “family friendly”, the idea being that parents would bring their kids to watch the movie and maybe buy a meal or two to eat in the cafe. I’m not sure how it’s worked out in terms of increasing sales, but it’s worked fairly well at least as far as getting people to come watch the movies.
Some stores show their movies on a large flatscreen teevee, but the fellow who was store manager at the time had a “Go big or go home” type of philosophy, so at his command, we went all out. We bought a commercial corn popper. Two dozen bean-bag chairs to be put out for kids to use. A large carpet to roll out (our cafe’s floor is quarry tile). And for screening? We installed a 16′ by 9′ screen, a ceiling-mounted projector, and a home-theater sound system with five surround speakers and a subwoofer. (I got to install all that, along with the help of another guy. It was actually a really fun project to do.) Attendance at our movie nights has been hit-or-miss (we do one or two a month, packing ’em in sometimes and not so much other times), but for quality of the set-up, we’re top-notch.
But about six months ago, we got a letter from the MPAA. They weren’t telling us to stop, but they were notifying us that since we (the company, not my store specifically) were screening movies for more than 25 people at once, this constituted a “public screening”, and thus, we had to pay for the privelege. So now, the company must pay some money to the MPAA every time one of our stores has a movie night. It’s not a huge amount — our company can easily afford it — but still, those are the rules. Oh, and there was one other rule: No screening of Disney movies is allowed. Period. And that includes Pixar, unfortunately. Disney, apparently, said “No free screenings of our films.”
None of this is meant to be a defense of Lucasfilm’s reaction, but, unfortunately, that’s the lay of the land, and has been for quite some time. In all honesty, I do think that the fine folks at CCD should, when dreaming this idea up, have contacted Lucasfilm first to ask permission to have a free screening of the movies in a bar. Those disclaimers at the beginning of every movie on home video since the early days of VHS — “This film is licensed for private viewing only” — are easily dismissed, but legal departments of production companies take them seriously.
I obviously have no idea if Lucasfilm would have OK’d a free screening of Star Wars in a bar or not. I’ve seen screenings of the films advertised occasionally around town, though, so I would think they’d be at least somewhat open to the idea. Again, I don’t know — but I do know that this sort of thing is part of the whole copyright landscape these days, and that organizers of such events are best advised to proceed with caution and get permissions.
Some lady just got acquitted of murder, apparently. Maybe one day I’ll understand why this murder trial commands so much attention over all the other ones that barely enter the public consciousness even in the municipalities where they take place, much less the national consciousness. Maybe, but I doubt it. And I still don’t care.
This is a repost from July 4, one year ago today. Happy birthday, America!
Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”
But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.
…
See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.
Signed, All the guys present
PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.
So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You’re a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.
Amherst police may think they’ve seen everything, but they’ve now arrested a 68-year-old woman accused of trying to stop someone from performing the Heimlich maneuver on a man in a crowded Niagara Falls Boulevard restaurant.
The incident occurred June 18, a Saturday night, when a 43-year-old man was choking and someone began to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
“Leave him alone. Let him die,” the woman reportedly yelled out, according to police reports.
She then allegedly tried to grab the phone from a restaurant employee who was calling 911, police said.
Unfortunately, her plans were thwarted; the guy was fine by the time EMTs showed up.
The New York State Senate passes a bill that, when signed into law by the Governor, will make it legal for homosexuals to marry in this state.
I’ve been very bitter and discouraged on the political front lately, for a lot of reasons, so it’s awfully heartening to see that yes, we do get it right once in a while. New York’s state legislature usually resembles a tire fire that’s been dropped on top of a train wreck. That they managed to make this happen is nothing short of astonishing.
Connecticut.
Iowa.
Massachusetts.
New Hampshire.
Vermont. New York.
I still have my copy of the Buffalo News from September 12, 2001. Now I have another to keep with it.
No, I’m not delusional enough to believe that Osama bin Laden’s death “ends” anything. It may mark a turning point in some ways against a particular enemy, but history is long, isn’t it? Yesterday’s events sprang from that awful day almost ten years ago, but bin Laden was out there before that; he was created, in a sense, by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.
And the first Gulf War came about, in part, because of American support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s…and that came about because of British Imperialism…and that came about because…well, it all goes on. In a way, yesterday’s events can be traced back to Suleiman’s victory at the Horns of Hattin, and before that.
But at least Osama bin Laden exists now only in history. No, he won’t be forgotten. But he’s another name for the history books now.
Also, I had a few posts ready to go yesterday, either in OpenOffice or in my head…but then I was without Internet for the entire day. Ugh! I’m thinking that my next raise at work will go toward funding FIOS here at Casa Jaquandor.
Anyhow, I’ll actually have some fresh bloggage later on, probably tonight. (Gotta work and then go to the gym afterward.) But for now — thanks to the American soldiers who got bin Laden, and to ALL the American soldiers who have worked to make this moment possible for ten years and more.
