Archive for April, 2009
Monday Open Thread
What’s on your mind as we start this new week?
What stories are you following?
What’s the most outrageous, Orwellian, propaganda fueled thing you’ve read or seen about “The First 100 Days of the Glorious New Golden Age of The One”?
What do you think about this: all that Hope and Change you heard ballyhooed last year ultimately amounts to a whole lot of shortages and rationing. Oh, and while they’re at it, the current Administration will also basically destroy the economy of the Midwest. Welcome to utopia!
HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy Reads to Grown People
HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy, taking a break from her usual busy schedule on Fifth Avenue and the hallowed halls of Bergdorf’s, graciously agreed to read to many grown people the other day in Manhattan.
She read a statement her Uncle Ted Kennedy’s staff or personal assistant wrote, about the need for mandatory volunteerism in America.
“It is imperative that people be forced to do things for others and not be paid for it in this country,” we imagine HRH Princess Caroline saying, flipping her reddish-brown mane from her wrinkled, sun-scorched face, with all the practiced equine grace of her beloved pony, Macaroni. “Compulsory volunteerism is what made all kingdoms great, from the mighty tsardom of Michael Romanov to the glorious Habsburg Empire and the many princedoms of all the various Germanic lands, from Prussia to Bavaria, Baden Wurtemberg to Schezwig-Holstein. And as my grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy told the British people on the eve of WWII, we should do as the Germans do, because the individualism and right to control our own destinies that made Britain and its progeny strong and independent is certainly not what’s needed now. No, we the elite demand the allegiance of ye serfs in the form of unlimited, unpaid, unconstitutional mandatory volunteerism, beginning with polishing the marble floors of my own personal pied-a-terre and making my silver so dazzlingly polished that I can see my gorgeous mane and remarkable smile effortlessly in it.”
Because mandatory volunteerism is a good idea, as proven by the whole-hearted spirited endorsement of a woman who has never worked an honest day in her long, privileged, impossibly fairytale life.
Are people who abused cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s (and who may or may not have written about it in their books) now experiencing early-onset Parkinson's?
According to research, people who abuse cocaine in their 20s and 30s experience increased likelihood of Parkinson’s disease later in their lives.
So, someone who abused cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s (and who wrote about it in his two memoires), would apparently start to show signs of early onset Parkinson’s sometime in the late 2000s, around the approach of 2010 or so, roughly 25 years or so after heavy cocaine use.
Apparently, cocaine abuse damages an area of the brain called the substantia nigra: this damage to neurons makes them susceptible to MPTP, a toxin known to cause symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
The more cocaine abuse, the more damage to neurons in the substantia nigra, the more prone those neurons are to MPTP, the greater risk of Parkinson’s.
Some high-level positions of great importance require medical checks for consideration of employment, where decision-makers for that candidate review the paperwork to determine whether or not a person has something like Parkinson’s before hiring them for a job.
Then, there are world-changing jobs that have no formal application process or requirement to produce any vital paperwork for review at all.
Jobs so demanding that someone with early onset Parkinson’s might just need something like a constant script running in front of him, projected on something like a teleprompter, to keep him from becoming confused, losing his train of thought, and allowing his medication to overcome him with giddiness, paranoia, or hallucinations — all symptoms of Parkinson’s.
Just something to think about, and to watch out for, as 100 days gives way to hundreds more leading up to November 2012.
You all realize the media is playing you for fools over this FLU PANIC! thing, right?
This is one of those things we file under ‘Duh’, but you all realize the media’s playing Americans for fools again over this FLU PANIC! thing, right?
The news media today needs to sell papers and magazines and keep eyes glued to their cable news drivel — and, so, isn’t it interesting that a MASSIVE DEADLY FLU EPIDEMIC OF GIGANTIC PROPORTIONS! happens to coincide perfectly with the May network sweeps period — just when MSNBC, CNN, and the other Orwellian propaganda machines need to attract as many viewers as possible to keep their ad-revenues the highest.
Looking back at past outbreaks of WORLD-ENDING CATASTROPHIC MEDICAL EMERGENCIES!, we suspiciously find most of them also correspond to other sweeps periods, or times when a dearth of sensational news stories required the networks to find something to drive ratings.
With no missing blonde heiress, kidnapped or murdered beauty queen, or abducted pregnant suburbanite to fill 24/7 programming with this sweeps period, welcome to DEADLY MEXICAN FLU OUTBREAK!
Remember the Asian bird flu what was supposed to wipe out life as we know it?
Before that, it was the deadly prions of American-mad cow disease that would kill your children at the dinner table.
Smallpox and bed bugs were both promoted as making deadly or world-changing comebacks.
Mercury in your fish!
Asbestos in your child’s kindergarten!
Demons and elves lurking in playground slides!
DEADLY PEANUT ALLERGIES ROCK PUBLIC SCHOOL LUNCHROOMS!
Please.
Now, just when sweeps needs it most, a deadly epidemic sweeps across Mexico, endangering the entire American southwest, including high-marketshare-media-centers in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc.
We smell a rat, and it’s certainly not the kind carrying bubonic plague.
Which, come to think of it, will most likely make a phenomenal comeback just in time for the next sweeps period.
The disappearing shrines to "The One" in Chicago
We’ve been noticing something interesting in Chicago lately: the businesses that have been maintaining shrines to ‘The One” in their shop windows are taking them down, and instead putting back up displays of merchandise to sell once again. For some reason, frame shops, art galleries, and gourmet food shops in Chicago had the most shrines to ‘The One”. The framers showcased all of his magazine covers or creepy posters. The art galleries had weird homages to him, often painted either by children, or unskilled adults we really wish had been actual children. Food shops highlighted various expensive, tasty treats “The One” and his soul-fixing wife would theoretically enjoy (caviar, champagne, gourmet pizza, heaping helpings of arugula).
From roughly mid-summer 2008 until the last few days, these shrines were seemingly everywhere around town, but now they’re getting harder and harder to find. The absolute creepiest ones are painted on brick walls in rough neighborhoods throughout the city, where Hope, Change, and A New Kind of Politics evidently manifest through sloppily-painted, poorly-executed grafitti. Just like this:
This one is hilarious on several levels, but mainly because it depicts “The One” as a giant, effete, clueless Quinn-the-Eskimo figure, coming to town through some sort of pan-dimensional rainbow portal, with a swarm of gnat-sized question marks swirling around his head, Merry Melodies style . He’s come for Our Children, whose disembodied heads float skyward towards him, as the parents below him cheer.
In this one, someone is so excited to be caught up in “The One’s” particular brand of trademarked rapture that s/he’s doing what appears to be cartwheels in a yellow spandex leotard. ”Vote for the Obamanator” reminds us of something we’d hear late at night on QVC, where lots of junk is sold, when there are polls running for which space-age, impossible-to-believe gadgets are the ones the people sitting at home on their inflatable furniture love best.
This particular panel of vandalism takes “The One” to the galactic level. He is not President of the United States, but President of the World. One of the things 2008 made us realize for the first time was just how much of this “We are the world” brainwashing we received in our many years of liberal arts education. We have been repeatedly taught, since grade school, that America is just one nation on Earth and that we need to consider the feelings, hopes, and dreams of all other countries in everything we do.
That’s nonsense.
If any other country were the top dog on the international scene, that country would surely not give a damn what we Americans think. Buy all the arugula you want at Whole Foods and spend needlessly on those ridiculous canvas bags that barely carry anything because you want to feel good about yourself for “helping the planet”, but do not for a moment delude yourself into believing the world would be a better place if India, China, Russia, or Paraguay was running it. These people who want the US to slip into “just another country” status instead of the master of all we survey role we’ve held since WWII don’t realize their days of blissfully comparing various sampling of swiss chard and edamame in the organic vegetable aisle would come to a screeching end if America really was just another country in the world. The United Nations is a prolonged, unfunny joke. Decision by committee guarantees the absolute worst possible result for everyone. Leadership means dominating the scene you are in and extracting the best possible outcomes for those you are loyal to. In the case of the presidency, that means going to bat for Americans at every turn and in every inning. It does not mean ensuring America’s competitors are happy and enjoying an equal share of the pie. There is no President of the World, nor should there be one. The Clintons get this. The Bushes get this. Reagan got this. Jimmy Carter and “The One” are clueless.
In terms of that, the writing, or graffiti, as the case may be, is certainly, indelibly, on the wall.
Persephone's Ransom
Springtime’s hitting Chicago, as somewhere in the bowels of Hades sweet pomegranate-nibbling Persephone’s ransomed for yet another year. Here are a few shots of a walk around Boystown on one of the first decent days of the year:
How much more Boystown can you get, than a big honking Rainbow hanging over Broadway and Addison?
Little, chartreuse goslings hanging out near the lake.
You know it’s springtime in Chicago when stupid people start doing stupid things outside. Here’s an idiot lobbing golf balls in a park, from a spot in the middle of one of the soccer fields lining the lakefront. There actual driving ranges and golf courses all along the lakefront trails: at least two of each that we know of. Instead of going there, people just pick random places to, essentially, shoot small white projectiles at unsuspecting picnic-enjoying potential victims. Just look to the left in the picture above: an suspecting family enjoying a day at the park, before becoming the opening scene of an episode of Six Feet Under. For every hot, shirtless, exhibitionist, meathead runner we spot along the lakefront paths (thank you, springtime!), there are two or three of these golfing idiots.
A music shop in Rogers Park being totally awesome in its guitar-as-canvas celebration of spring.
The extremely rare powder-pink-picnic-bench pigeon of Boystown.
One of the great joys of life in Chicago is randomly “discovering” Frank Llyod Wright gems around town when out for walks on a nice day.
It’s hilarious that people advertising an “Earth Day Celebration” spray paint their message onto the ground indelibly, so that long after their “celebration” supposedly about protecting the planet has ended, the damage their advertisements for said “celebration” live on, defacing the “Earth” they are so keen to “protect”. Idiots.
No doubt, many Earth-Day big-thinkers attend class at the Edward Crown Center for the Humanitie. Where dictionaries and spell-check evidently have no place whatsoever in naming-convention or proper signage.
Sunday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this Sunday?
Besides the 100 day mark on the 29th, what you do think the next week’s news cycle will be all about?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
Do you have any items you would add to the 100 Days, 100 Mistakes thread the NY Post has started?
Have you heard that Kim Jung Il named his youngest son, 26, to a defense post in North Korea? The very same youngest son who was notorious for partying it up in gay clubs in Switzerland when he was supposedly studying there? And yet, this is not the son Kim Jung Il calls “girlish” and believes to be homosexual. We just think this is HILLARIOUS on so many levels. It’s like that aunt we had in the 70s and 80s who insisted Liberace, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter and all these men she had crushes on were straight…and other guys she didn’t like, who were straight, are the ones she called effeminate. Too funny.
