Idiots' letters to Newsday
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. My local paper, Newsday, gets letters from some real pieces of work. Long Islanders are notoriously worried about immigration, property taxes, and traffic conditions, for good reasons, so most of the letters to Newsday are related to those categories, but sometimes a letter rises above it all to shine a bright light on its writer’s sheer idiocy.
This letter was in today’s edition, entitled Lefty Schumer. Schumer, of course, refers to New York’s senior senator. The letter is written by William Schroeder of Rockville Centre, and it deals with Chuck Schumer’s warning to the president that John Roberts, Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, will have to face some tough questions when he goes in front of Congress. Here is an excerpt:
[Schumer] will [define what is mainstream] from his far-left perch of the Democratic Party that suffered one of its most crushing defeats in history last November. Not only did the presidency remain in the Republicans’ hands but their majorities in both the House and Senate have been substantially increased.
Crushing defeat? 51% versus 48%? I admit it is crushing to still have Bush as president and that a bare majority in our nation voted for this asshole, but it wasn’t a crushing defeat. Bush (Senior) versus Dukakis, now there was a crushing defeat! The majorities in Congress were increased for the Republicans in the last election, but that was a gain of 4 seats in the Senate and 4 seats in the House. Bad news in the Senate, for sure, but not surprising in the House, where Tom DeLay used undue influence to squeeze out Democratic representative in Texas with a bogus redistricting.
But here is the thing that makes me laugh. “Far-left” Schumer easily won re-election in 2004. The people of New York gave Schumer a huge 70% of the vote. His nearest competitor got 24%. That, Bill Schroeder, is a crushing defeat. The people of New York, therefore, want their senator to stand up against Bush and his far-out agenda. Schroeder sarcastically continues:
How dare George W. Bush think that his impressive victory entitles him to select a Supreme Court candidate when mainstream maven Schumer should be the arbiter of who is qualified and who is not?
Okay, Bill. How dare Chuck Schumer think that his impressive victory entitles him to do the people of New York’s work when idiots like Bill Schroeder should be the arbiter of who is out of the mainstream and who is not?
Posted by Jonathan at 06:31 PM, 30 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Brush with Greatness
I got a letter posted on The Amazing Randi’s website, JREF. If you’re not familiar with it, the JREF has a long standing reward for anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities under controlled circumstances. So far, no one has won this award.
At any rate, Randi publishes a weekly page of letters and links and observations for the JREF called Swift, named, of course, after Jonathan Swift. Last week, there was a note sent in about body temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, which didn’t totally ring true to me, so I sent in a response that was actually published. (Sure, this is not the most exciting of subjects, but, hey! I actually knew a bit about it.)
My time has come folks. Next stop, the lecture circuit.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:27 AM, 30 July 2005 | Comments (0)
So far, Bush has not found the science
There is a great article, titled “Science Wars II,” on CSICOP about the Bush adminstration’s total disregard for scientific data, and scientists and researchers are getting pretty sick of it. The author makes a conclusion:
We don’t have to postulate a nefarious conspiracy, then, to explain the war on science that has manifested itself during the Bush administration. We need only point to an army of political appointees in government agencies who are going about their jobs the only way they know how—i.e., talking a lot to their industry or religious right allies and frequently rewarding their lobbying attempts in scientific areas. In short, it’s a politico-scientific spoils system. And as this particular spoils system proceeds to allocate rewards, it simultaneously undermines, cheapens, and compromises federal agencies as reliable, public-oriented sources of scientific analysis and information.
To which I would add, a huge segment of the conservative movement in America is aimed at the dismantling of the federal government. So the very act of being pro-business and anti-fact is helping conservatives make more money while destroying the institutions that they hate. It feeds into itself. Since we can’t trust the government to remain neutral in matters affecting our health or environment, we have to ask ourselves, “Just what good is government at all?” And this very question helps the conservatives who designed the government to fail for the American people. Party of Lincoln, my ass.
Posted by Jonathan at 03:57 PM, 23 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Portal news switch
On my
I mean, CNN always did their best to equate bin Laden to Hussein, which caused me to switch over to ABC.com for a time, but that was when ABC had a raw news feed, where news stories came right off the wire, unedited. It was kind of neat, really, but that didn't last long, and once they got rid of it, they began to wall off much of their content, and I began to feel Disney was busy watching the bottom line. I switched back to CNN, reluctantly, but it was still better than the alternatives.
MSNBC was run by Microsoft. That isn't horrible in of itself, since I used to read Slate.com, which up until recently was run by MS, but MSNBC was lousy on Mac browsers. Horrible. Almost as bad as my site is on IE for PC, and that's bad.
CBS was more like an online advertisement for it's television broadcasts, and FoxNews, of course, I would sooner drown in a bathtub that trust it for actual news. I linked to the BBC for a while, but their coverage was specifically about the big events happening in America, and some smaller, but often more interesting, stories never made it on their site.
So I stayed with CNN. But it was getting worse and worse and worse. Today was it. One of their seven or so top stories, displayed right near the top of the page was "Actress Tiffany Thiessen gets married." Gee, I care. Why is this worthy of national news? At least, I should have been thankful that this bit of entertainment fluff won out for the prestigious headline spot over "Johansson: Nudity yes, bra no," which, while still on the front page, was regulated to their entertainment section. I admit, I clicked on the link. It was an advertisement for The Island disguised as an article where Scarlett Johansson expressed dismay at a cheap bra they wanted her to wear during a love scene to keep the PG-13 rating.
At this point, I said goodbye to CNN.
I clicked on over to MSNBC. The page looked good on Safari, my browser, and it has a blog by Keith Olbermann, who is probably the best newscaster in the business, but will never get anywhere because he knows things, and people hate the smart guy. Thiessen's pending marriage was not to be found within the top stories, for some reason, and Scarlett Johansson and the cheap bra was regulated to the second tier on the Entertainment page, and was not found on the main site.
And so there it is. I'm putting MSNBC on the portal page. I should have ditched CNN a long time ago.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:27 PM, 12 July 2005 | Comments (0)
The Pop-Poseur Rule, Applied to Pink Floyd
I posted this over in the comments of Roger Ailes’s post on Floyd, and I thought that I was so funny and clever that I should post it here as it’s own entry. (I may be funny and clever, but I’m hardly original.) The original post was commenting on some numbnut from the Washington Times who takes issue with the Floyd album, The Final Cut.
There is an argument I make that applies to being a fan of anything. It’s called the pop-poseur rule, and it goes like this:
- If you like the one thing that everyone else likes about a popular artist, you’re not a real fan. (With Floyd this would be saying, “My favorite is Dark Side,” or “I like The Wall.”)
- If you like the most recent thing by a popular artist, you’re a poseur. (“Division Bell is R0x0rz!!!!1”)
- If you know anything about the artist and consider yourself a real fan, then you’re favorite piece is something that will cause arguments with everyone else who has an opinion. (“Animals slightly edges out The Final Cut, but only because there was no keyboards after Waters kicked out Rick Wright.”)
With this in mind, I gotta say, if Division Bell is your top Floyd album, or even in the top 3, you cannot speak of The Final Cut with any authority. You know nothing about Floyd. I dare say you don’t have good taste either.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:42 AM, 04 July 2005 | Comments (2)
Yo' Mamma's a Scientologist
Knowledge is a cruel path, summed up fairly early in our culture with the story of Adam and Eve and the fruit. It wasn’t an apple. You can look it up. Anyway, the fruit was the “fruit of knowledge of good and evil,” and once the Edenites took a bite, they understood more about their environment and could judge right from wrong. Thus the fall from grace. The more we know, the less we’re comfortable in our surroundings.
Think of every person who grew up with commercials selling housewives cleaning products, because their homes were too damned dirty. To highlight this, advertisers gayly showed us close-ups of microscopic germs breeding and breeding on our kitchen countertops. They anthropomorphized these germs into dirty little men with pointy teeth and evil intentions. Only strong Mr Clean or Scrubbing Bubbles would make these horrible creatures go away. A century before, surgeons were just learning to wash their hands before cutting someone open. That was a positive change, of course, but since the idea of germs was imbedded into the mass-market mind, we’ve been inundated with anti-bacterial soaps and lotions and foot-powders and toothpastes and wipes and sundries. The effectiveness of these things can be debated, but we demand them, because a little bit of knowledge has turned us all into OCD patients, thinking, “must wash… never be clean… must wash….”
When I was in high school, I was learning a bit about the food chain and our industrialization of it. I do not recommend this course of study if you want to eat your food guilt-free. Still, I never felt too uncomfortable about it, because I can rationalize justifications for eating chicken, even though most of these involve soup being so damned tasty. But in art class, a fellow student told me that she was trying to become vegan and found that the only thing she ended up eating was Twinkies.
Two things to explain about this. First, this was almost twenty years ago, and it was far more difficult to be a suburbanite vegetarian than it is today. There were no Whole Foods or Wild by Natures on Long Island, and McDonald’s idea of a salad, at the time, was the shredded lettuce and re-hydrated onions found on a Big Mac. When you were a teenager and wanted to eat something without bits of meat in it, you invariably turned to junk food.
But, secondly and sadly, many junk foods were still made with lard. Yes, today the fillings in Twinkies, Oreos, and Hostess Cupcakes are made with vegetable shortening, but then each of these were filled with lard and sugar, a crunchy and rich combination, that some purist still lament the passing of. And I had to tell this to poor, sweet, burgeoning vegan Liz in art class. She looked sadly at me and said, “Oh,” like Pooh when he discovered that he ate the fifth and last jar of honey.
A lesson I should have taken from that is to keep knowledge within, and only release that knowledge when entirely necessary, but I don’t do that. I like to tell people constantly that they’re using quotemarks and periods incorrectly, or that George W. Bush actually is dangerously stupid. I think intelligence is just a matter of getting your facts straight, because if you know a little about anything, you can’t believe in Creationism or acupuncture. But intelligent people do believe crazy things, and I am always amazed at their credulity.
And it was with this in mind that I searched around a bit on the web for things about Scientology, as I often do from time to time. You have to be a bit off, I think, to believe that you have a 75 million year old alien living inside of you that is upset about botched abortions that happened to it several millennia ago. Scientology has been in the media again, lately, because of nutty Tom Cruise and his one man mission to make Scientology look even scarier by preaching it’s virtues. I always start off my web journey into the madness of Scientology by reading xenu.net, called Operation Clambake, which compiles tonnes of materials about the Church of Scientology (or Co$ by its detractors), at much personal and financial risk to the operator of the site. Co$ uses lawsuits to scare critics (in Scientology speak SP, or Suppressive Persons) into shutting up. I imagine in the age of the Internet, this is getting harder for Co$ to do, but they try.
In following some links, I came across a simply formatted page listing various players in Hollywood who are involved in Scientology. And there, knowledge burned me. Learning that Giovanni Ribisi was heavily into the Co$ didn’t bother me. Or that much of the cast of That 70’s Show believes that bad science-fiction author, L Ron Hubbard, was akin to a messiah. I kind of laughed when I found out that Jerry Seinfeld took a couple of Scientology courses in the 70s and 80s and felt it helped his career. No, that didn’t matter much.
But Beck and Neil Gaiman, those were two names that surely did not belong on that list.
Beck first. Beck is a second-generation Scientologist, which means he may not have much choice in the matter, but his catalog of music is built upon the cast-about foundations of other genres. He mixes and melds and is obviously a creative and intuitive person. His continued involvement with a dangerous and destructive, pyramid-scheme of a money-making operation is beyond my comprehension. He looked like he wasn’t really a practicing member for much of the 90s, but a break up with a non-Scientologist girl friend sent him spiraling inwards (inspiring the excellent, but somber Sea Change). He is now married to Marissa Ribisi, Giovanni’s twin-sister, ironically enough. The whole Ribisi clan seems to be fully saturated by the Co$.
Gaiman second. He doesn’t talk about it, but his father is BIG in the Co$, so big he runs the church in Russia. Gaiman himself seems to have left, and may be an SP, but his wife may still be involved. This is disheartening and disappointing for several reasons, but my ability to rationalize comes into play again, and I think all is forgiven if he really is a heretic to Scientologists. Should it come out that he is still involved in it, a good chunk of my library is suddenly eBay material (or eBayt, a term I just coined now). I’ll still listen to Beck albums, possibly not enjoying them as much because I question the extent of his genius, but I won’t get rid of those. Why would I treat Gaiman worse?
Because much of his output concerns myths and gods and religions, and Neil Gaiman is a very well-read man. Although he is also second-generation Co$, like Beck, Gaiman has to know better. He could easily look up the dozen of sources that L Ron Hubbard ripped off to create Dianetics and Scientology. As a maker of myths, better myths too, I might add, Gaiman could surely see that Hubbard was no more than a charlatan who got lucky, gettting rich off of people’s ignorance.
But who am I to question beliefs? People wish for strange things, and I don’t pretend to understand them. Is a person who believes that living a decent life and believing in the divinity of the right man will send that person’s invisible and undetectable energy/life force into a plane of pure bliss and light, which is also invisible and undetectable, any less crazy than someone who believes an overlord alien solved overpopulation on 26 planets by freezing much of that population and sending them to planet Earth and bombarding them with atomic bombs under mountains? Well, yes, I think a Christian is less crazy than a Scientologist, honestly.
And is it fair to hold that against someone? This is murky ground on top of a slippery slope. I know it isn’t fair, but the knowledge of it disturbs me, and the road ahead is far more twisty than it was when I didn’t know.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:15 AM, 02 July 2005 | Comments (4)
Russell's Law of 50% Returns on Comic Adaptations
Lately, movies adapted from comic books have been successful about 50% of the time. For every X-Men or Spiderman, there is an Electra or The Incredible Hulk. Given that Batman Begins was a pretty good movie, I’m going to have to bet against the Fantastic Four. My motives are partially selfish, though, since one of the most amazing, well-written, and literary comic books (sorry, graphic novels) is being adapted into a movie by the guys behind The Matrix. It is V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore, who also wrote From Hell (an okay movie) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (a bad movie), so by my logic, he’s due for a decent adaptation, too.
When I found out this was going to be made into a movie, I was completely caught by surprise. Along with V for Vendetta, Alan Moore created The Watchmen, which is one of the very best graphic novels, at least amongst those that deal with superheroes. It also, by far, the more popular of the two. Years ago, there was talk of a Watchmen movie, directed by Terry Gilliam, which never came to fruition. The last thing I ever expected to hear was that V for Vendetta would be considered for a movie. Although it slightly edges out The Watchmen for Best Graphic Novel by an Englishman Who Is Not Neil Gaiman in my own personal award ceremony, it is far too subversive for American audiences. Basically, one of its themes is that anarchy is a preferable form of government (or lack thereof) over fascism. I actually agree with that, but I’m not that eager to experiment either way.
In any case, a fear was that, in this wonderful, double-plus good age of enlightenment that America is currently wallowing in, the marketing guys at Warner Bros. would sell this movie rather gingerly. This week, however, they unveiled a new “coming soon” poster (just in time for the Independence day weekend, they said), which had this for it’s tagline:
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
And to that I say, “Amen.”
Another happy happenstance: The main character, “V,” was going to be played by James Purefoy, whom I have nothing against, mostly because I have no idea who he is, but he dropped out. He’s been replaced by Hugo Weaving, the actor behind Elron and Agent Smith. This is happiness, indeed. Of course, if they stay true to the story, we never actually see V’s face, but that’s for later.
The man who introduced me to both The Watchmen and V for Vendetta is Joe Dubecky. He just informed me of his engagement (in the comments of this very blog!). Congratulations, Joe! And where did your website go?
For the past several months, I’ve had ONE blog entry per month. That’s so weak. Thanks to those who stop by every now and then to see if I’ve updated anything. There is always the desire to do more and the laziness that prevents it from happening. Maybe this month, I’ll post twice.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:48 AM, 01 July 2005 | Comments (0)
