MacPhoenix: WebSpaceI can admit when I was wrong, and these past couple of weeks have been full of humble pie. So when I said bin Laden was definitely dead, I was, in fact, mistaken. A little late, but I wanted the record to be clear.
I wonder why he isn’t, of course, as should most Americans, but apparently, I am in the minority. [sarcasm]I feel so much safer, knowing that he is alive.[/sarcasm]
What follows is a self-typed transcript from the 03 Nov 2004 Talk of the Nation radio program on NPR. This segment was titled “Election Over, Debate over Morals Persist.” The host is Neal Conan. Neal is speaking to George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley. They took a call from a listener, Grace from Louisiana. This transcript starts at about 5:48 on the stream from NPR. The emphasis below is mine to highlight something I felt was beyond belief, and the grammar is theirs, but the spelling is mine.
Grace: Hello?
Neal Conan: Hi, you’re on the air, Grace.
Grace: Yes. Thank you. Ah, I am a first time voter, for the first time in 30 years. Uh. In Louisiana we had the, uh, the amendment for, for, uh, towards marriage that we had, uh, in September. And I registered to vote to vote specifically for that issue. And, uh, as you may know, uh, 79% of the population voted for it, and an activist, uh, judge, uh, has, um, is in the courts right now, he said that it was unconstitutional. And that really goes to the, the grassroots of why you have seen the results in this election, is that we, uh, as a Christian most Christians in this nation trust that God chooses the king, and that means the president. And we have enjoyed the luxury of religious freedom in this nation, which is what this nation was the basis of its founding. And we have seen, in recent years, that an oligarchy is forming in this country where activist judges are using preference over principle in their interpretation of the Constitution, uh, assuming that this church, that the Constitution has a separation of church and state. The only constitution in this, in this world that had that clause in it was the Soviet Union. In the United States Constitution, they do not have a separation of church and state. So we have seen the Ten Commandments taken out of the state capital in Alabama, and we have seen, uh uh a uh an increasing attempt to take away the Christian heritage from this country. And, and we are for everyone having their basic freedoms, but we have been seeing our freedoms to express our beliefs threatened increasingly more.
George Lakoff: (interrupts) Free, freedoms are not threatened, but in effect we do have a separation of church and state in our Constitution.
Grace: (interrupts) It’s not in…
George Lakoff: If you read that Constitution very carefully, there is going to be no established religion in this country.
Grace: (interrupts) And the reason for that…
(Crosstalk)
Neal Conan: (speaking over crosstalk) Uh, Grace, if…
(Crosstalk. Grace’s voice fades out)
George Lakoff: In particular, (garbled) wrong about the, the, um uh you know, uh, the way that, uh, your freedoms have not been impugned. In fact, it’s the reverse. The oligarchy in this country, uh, is the Right, the Radical Right, and Bush is part of the Radical Right. This is a radical issue. Uh, he wants to impose a hierarchy in this country, and, uh, this is not, uh, this is supposed to be a democratic country. That hierarchy is a hierarchy of, among other things, financial success, uh, for one thing. Secondly, a particular view, not only of Christianity, but of religion in general, a “strict father” version of Christianity, not a “nurturing” version of Christianity. And most Christians in this country follow the “nurturing,” not the “strict father” model of Christianity. Ah, your model of Christianity is not that of most Christians in this country. And most Christians in this country want a separation of church and state as is given in the Constitution.
Neal Conan: Well, ah, I think we, uh, saw the divide illustrated…
At some point in my life, I am going to have to accept that I am not part of the mainstream. It is clear to me that a majority of my countrymen are completely blind and deaf. They gave legitimacy to the worst president, the vilest mindset, and the party of reactionary, knee-jerk politics.
I felt the winds of change, and it turned out to be smog from an oil refinery.
My days of a prognosticator are over, for sure. My logic is so flawed that I predicted that this administration would reap what it had sown, but time and time again, these udder incompetents squeak through, and no justice is served. How does a reelection help the chances of prosecuting those that leaked a CIA operatives name? How does a reelection show the world that the Iraq war was an aberration? Four more years of anti flag-burning amendments! Four more years of anti gay-marriage amendments! Four more years of idiocy from the top down.
There are some who think that maybe Bush will be a bit more restrained in his second term. For those that do, I offer this quote, from CNN on Wednesday, 03 Nov 04:
“President Bush’s decisive margin of victory makes this the first presidential election since 1988 in which the winner received a majority of the popular vote,” said Card, referring to the White House victory by Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush. “And in this election, President Bush received more votes than any presidential candidate in our country’s history.”
We’ve given them a mandate. What was once just ugly has turned malignant.
Goodbye, George. I won’t miss you. I won’t weep at your passing.
Goodbye, George. You represented the worst in us. You pretended your faith was your wisdom, when you had neither. You pandered to your base of religious misanthropics. You pandered to animal fears that fester deep in our society.
Goodbye, George. And to all your bastard handlers, too, Cheney and Rummy and Rove. Goodbye all you Nixonites, still skulking around in the system. You should have been purged 30 years ago. But today, we show you the door.
Goodbye, George. Although you pass into historical footnotes, we still pay the price of your idiocy. Tomorrow, we shall have to face the enormous task of cleaning up after your destruction. And tomorrow we shall, never shrinking from our duty, but today we celebrate the end of your madness.
Goodbye, George. Your only mistake, in your own words, was appointing the wrong people. Can you imagine the hubris? Our only mistake was pretending, wishing, hoping, despite the enormity of the evidence, that you would rise into the honorable position of Leader of the Free World.
Goodbye, George. And to those that spun us ’round. Goodbye Condi Rice. Goodbye Tom Ridge. Goodbye Tommy Thompson. Goodbye Andy Card. Goodbye Scott McClelland. Goodbye John Ashcroft. You all failed us in innumerable ways.
Goodbye, George. The world is safer without you.
Well, let the blame game begin. Me, personally, I’m blaming Joe Torre. I love the guy, reminds me of my late grandfather. He’s the reason that the Yankees got this far, limping by with one, sometimes two, competent starting pitchers all season. But Red Sox manager, Terry Francona, did what Torre just did not do.
He played games 4, 5, and 6 as if they were the last games.
Which, of course, for the Red Sox, they were. Having won the first three, the Yankees seemed willing to play on tomorrow. There was always the next day. So instead of pulling starting pitchers into relief rotation, like Francona did with Arroyo and Wakefield, Torre let the struggling Tom Gordon and the spooked Mariano Rivera blow two potential saved games. (Rivera, bless him, has been rocked by the Sox ever since the All Star game.) Instead of pulling tired, struggling batters in extra innings with fresh pinch hitters from the bench, Torre lets Tony Clark bat.
Feh. I’m a timid arm-chair coach at best, and the only team I ever watch is the Yankees, so I can’t even attempt to pretend that I know anything about the mechanics of baseball managing. But I do know this, I’ve seen less crucial games where Torre pulled out a lot more stops in order for a win. And when he made some moves in this last game 7, we were already behind 10 to 3. What took him so long to wake up?
Game 4 was ours to lose, and game 5 was well within our grasp. It never should have come to a game 7, and, when it did, the Sox were, far more than the Yanks, ready to win.
Is your “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper sticker fading to powder blue? Need a more jingoistic message than “God Bless America”? Well, fear no more. Gas stations and 7-Elevens around the nation are on the forefront of mindless patriotic propaganda selling yellow and flag-themed ribbons that you can stick on your car with “Support Our Troops” bravely printed upon them. And since they’re so cheap, many folks have taken to purchase two or more to put them on the same automobile. Because, you know, you wouldn’t want the car behind you to the right OR left to not be able to tell that you’re a red-blooded, kickin’ ass, taking no prisoners unless we can torture them by making them wear underwear on their heads, God-fearing American.
“Support Our Troops.” Brilliant. It is as inspiring and as important a message as “Breath Oxygen,” or “Live Until You Die.” As good consumers and, some of us, income tax payers, we all, indeed, are supporting our troops. Possibly, though, the message is conveying a deeper meaning. Something along the line, perhaps, of “Shut the fuck up, you stupid hippies, and stop making the rest of us think.”
Surely, I could talk about how blindingly obvious it is that Bush administration does not support our troops, past or present. I could talk about the cutting of veteran’s benefits and the reduction of their medical services. I could point out how sending the wrong amount of troops into Iraq, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons is precisely how a president shows he has little regard for our troops and their wellbeing. I might even talk about how we’re on the verge of having a crippled military that will be unable to respond to real threats in the coming years, which cannot possibly be a way to support our troops. But no, I will not talk about these things, which are well-documented elsewhere. I, instead, am going to talk about how most people buying the ribbon bumper stickers have never actually seen a ribbon and so are incorrectly applying these ribbons to their automobiles.
One of the first things I noticed about the critical mass achieved within days of these ribbons being brought to market was that no one was actually applying these things to their bumpers. They were always on the trunks or even the side panels. Why? I wondered. Ah, of course, they’re magnetic, and most bumpers are plastic or plastic-coated. But that wasn’t the only odd thing, there was something else about them, and this one took me longer to figure out.
For this demonstration, I am borrowing a ribbon I found at Kingsport City Schools in Tennessee. Here is the ribbon:
Notice that the ribbon hangs like a real ribbon would? That’s what is wrong with the ribbons on most people’s cars and SUVs. They instead affix them like so:
I can only assume the logic here is that the text is horizontal, because the ribbon isn’t set at 90°, which looks more like this:
But if you’ve ever worked with ribbon, or even, I don’t know, ever seen a ribbon, you’d know that the fabric would sag if you hung it on its side. So these magnets represent a great new technology that allows us to boldly denounce the Theory of Gravity. Or something. I think many folks are just too intimidated to hang the ribbon as it should, because then someone might have a problem reading the text, and then sheer anarchy would be the next step.
A few people do get it right, and the really ambitious hang it at a jaunty angle:
Now, I’ve been in the design field for some time, so you can take my word—a jaunty angle is 7° to 13° clockwise from the vertical axis. Anything less is just crooked, and anything more is too much angle. Trust me.
But I digress.
It’s war in the Mideast, and that means that Roger Waters was due to release a new album. There have been rumors of a new rock album for the past 4 years and a new operatic album for the past 6 years. His last album, Amused to Death, came out in 1992. That’s 14 years ago—a long time to deprive his fans.
But he did tour a couple of years ago, and released a kind of greatest hits album in The Flickering Flame. And now he has released two singles, “To Kill the Child” and “Leaving Beirut.” Both are available, free, as streaming audio files on Waters’s website. The songs are also available for purchase and download through various online music stores. Of course, the best place to get them is iTunes.
Of the two songs, “Leaving Beirut” is the stronger and more personal. It is also twice as long as the other. Obviously, both songs are inspired by the current situation our Bozo in Chief got us into, and Waters takes Tony Blair to task for following the Idiot. It’s inspiring to once again hear Waters, even if it takes an awful world-shaking event to move him to write.
Fast Food Patron: I’d like the fish sandwich value meal, please.
Voice in Ordering Box: That’ll be $5.43. Drive up to the first window, please.
FFP: Okay.
(Fast Food Patron drives up to First Window and hands Cashier at First Window a $20 and a $1.)
Cashier at First Window: That’ll be $4.99, please.
FFP: (confused) What about tax?
CaFW: Yeah… (pauses) What?
FFP: What about sales tax? You said $4.99. There’s tax, too.
CaFW: Yeah. (studies register, then nods) Yeah. That’s $4.99.
FFP: (resignedly) Okay!
(Fast Food Patron reaches through First Window and grabs the single out of the Cashier at Front Window’s hand, to avoid further confusion.)
I’ve been so behind in updating anything on my site. So, I’m making a secret pledge to myself to work at least an hour a day on the damned thing. That doesn’t mean that there will be updates everyday, of course, ’cause a lot of it is behind the scenes.
I would make a pledge to update my blog more often, too, but most of those posts in that case would be like this one. And that would be terrifically boring.
There was an ad for I, Robot that, mercifully, hasn’t been shown in this market for a couple of days. The voice-over said, ominously, “We designed them to be trusted with our children, our families, and our homes, but did we design them to be trusted?”
The annoying sound you hear is the venting of my eternal frustration at copywriters that are that dumb. And that entry is my vote for the second dumbest thing ever written for an advertisement.
The first, and I hope you don’t ever see this commercial, is for a company called Vital Basics, which is a stupid miracle vitamin that boosts your metabolism, keeps you alert and awake, and cures dropsy. These guys are so confident you’ll love their product that they are giving it away for free. And so says an unscripted man-on-the-street testimonial from a woman with the shrillest voice imaginable. She shrieks, “They’re giving it away FREE? It must be good.” When she cackles the word “free” it sours milk and causes grown men to weep. It breaks teevee tubes and my glasses. It keeps me up at night with cold shivers. But besides all that: What type of logic is that? Surely I could ask, “They charge thousands of dollars for that? It must be good.” Or even, “They charge $5.95 for shipping and handling? That must be how they make their money.”