Nobody Asked Me, But....

1) NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! HE'S GONE! TO ELEVEN! (photo courtesy)

 

2) As well it should. Only five schools have ever gotten the NCAA death penalty, given for major felonies like accepting a slushee from a donor. Penn State ought to be six. LITTLE CHILDREN WERE RAPED!

 

3) Yes, the Occupy movement is just a bunch of lazy stoned hippies who don't want to work. Sure. 

 

4) Elitist New Yorker is elitist. 

 

5) I disagree with this sentence, but not the verdict. She killed her husband, but she also suffered two decades of physical abuse and finally snapped. Five years in jail for this incident is way too harsh. Five years in-house imprisonment sounds fairer.

 

6) It's a start. It's watered down and barely adequate, but it's a start.

 

7) On this Veteran's Day, we ought to start respecting our fighting men and women. Dontcha think?

 

8) Jim Romenesko resigning from Poynter is like Santa Claus resigning from Christmas. BRING HIM BACK! Over a quotation mark? Really????

 

9) Egypt needs a sense of humour.

 

10) Attention Rdenecks! Wear a condom...

Too Soon?

CAIN/PATERNO 2012

WE GOT YOUR FAMILY COVERED

Melancholia

This premiered last night on HD Movies, and was actually pretty good. It opens in theatres this Friday.

 

Written and directed by the controversial Hitler-wannabe Lars Von Trier, it focuses on two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst, who really has evolved as an actress, and Charlotte Gainsbourg) and how they react to the end of the world in a collision with a rogue planet that looks suspicious Earth-like.

 

Visually, the film is stunning and it's really hard to balance the overall impending crisis on such a large scale with the small-scale claustrophobia of the family. Von Trier does a pretty spectacular job of it, especially as you know how the story must end. The isolation of these four people (Kiefer Sutherland plays a brother-in-law to Dunst, and Gainsbourg has a son), combined with the emotional instability of Dunst's character, Justine, make for a nice combination of "inner reflection, outer panic" that plays our beautifully.

Throwing The Tools Under The Bus

 

The Murdochs really are despicable

The Dam Breaks

 

More to come

You Know Those Gut Reactions You Have?

 

Better pay more attention to them: that's your back-up brain talking to you.

HamedaHamedaHameda

 

Jeesus! The guy can't even get his own SCRIPT right!

Buh-Bye! Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out!

 

I suppose eventually Joe Paterno will reveal what he was thinking when confronted with allegations of child rape by a graduate assistant in 1998. He claims he was only told of fondling and horseplay, but Mike McQueary (who has his own complicity to answer for) testified that he specifically mentioned anal rape.

 

At 84, it's conceivable that Paterno has learned to filter that effectively, to hear ugly truths as less-ugly euphemisms. We all learn coping mechanisms and for someone who both lived his life in a regimented, authoritarian organization (and led it for most of that time) as well as being a man who clearly spent a lot of time in church, another authoritarian patriarchal hierarchy, perhaps he's trained himself to ignore the underside of both.

 

Whatever. He got what was coming to him last night. His reaction, stunned disbelief, speaks to so many things about the psyche of the privileged that it would take a book by a psychologist to fully probe this reaction.

 

I honestly think he believed that, by offering to fall on his sword-- at his convenience, of course-- he could save himself the embarrassment of a firing. After all, there's only three games left in the regular season schedule and no Bowl would dare give Penn State a post-season bid now. Imagine the shock.

 

The trustees really had no choice: they have to deal in the real world, not the insular world of the spoiled. Those are the folks who have to go out and fund raise, and look donors in the eye and explain how a man could go three decades and do the bare minimum to protect the community at large. By taking swift and decisive action, they at least restore a little faith that the entire university ain't broken.

 

Paterno, Graham Spanier, McQueary, former athletic director Tim Curley, and former university vice president Gary Schultz will likely face criminal charges for at least perjury until the entire story is sorted out. Absolutely, they should (the Pennsylvania and United States Departments of Education have already announced inquiries into the matter.)

 

There are no sympathetic figures here. The best you can say is that some people did the bare minimum to comply with the law, but not with morals and conscience, and they had every opportunity to do more, but for whatever failing-- loyalty to a friend, ambition to rise in an organization, fealty to a university, fear, repulsion, perhaps even stunned silence reliving old memories of his childhood-- it is outrageous that this little boy and at least a half dozen others suffered for their silences.

 

Live with that image, gentlemen.

NOTE to Right Wing Asshats

(photo courtesy)

 

THIS is what spoiled privileged college kids look like when they protest.

 

This is NOT Occupy Wall Street.

 

 

Poor "Job Creators"

 

They'll need to double down now.

Herman Cain Fails Geography

 

Thinks Mount Rushmore is in the Black Hills

 

Wait...what? It is???

This Stuff Is Blacker Than "Shaft"

 

NASA invents the darkest material known to man

This Is Not A Repeat From Three Years Ago

 

Toyota is recalling a half million cars.

That Was Only A Test

 

Don't sweat it, and come up out of the bunker.

Today In #OWS

 

Occupy Atlanta demonstrators surround the home of a police officer.

 

To save it from foreclosure.

Cain Is Able

 

He'd take a lie detector test. But he won't.

You've Heard Of Kitlers?

 

Cats (or kittens) who look like Hitler?

 

You know who else resembles an animal?

Not News: Healthcare Reform Upheld On Appeal

 

News: By a panel of conservative judges.

But There's No Global Warming!!!

 

Hurricane in Alaska.

Suck It, Teabaggers*

 

A really good off-year election for Democrats, who are normally the party of "I don't give a rat's ass," but this year showed motivation and commitment to the causes.

 

Collective bargaining was upheld in Ohio (because, really, who wants to vote against the guy who might save your life in a fire?), Mississippi's "personhood" initiative-- that basically says life begins at ovulation-- was defeated, and Dems held legislative majorities and office across the South.

 

But most important? Gov. Chris Christie (R-Obesity) was repudiated in his attempts to steal the New Jersey legislature for the Republicans. He put his personal reputation on the line for several candidates, appearing in television and radio commercials that were so expensive, many candidates pooled campaign resources to get them on the air...AND FAILED!

 

Every Democrat (indeed, every incumbent) was re-elected.

 

It was just one year ago that conservatives were crowing about the Teabaggers and a movement, and the long-sought permanent conservative majority. It was just one year ago that the fantasy of a Christie Presidency was floated.

 

And now, like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon impaled on a spike of reality, that's gone. Deflated. The man couldn't even steal one seat in his own state where he allegedly has broad support of the voters. So much for being Mitt Romney's running mate. Indeed, so much for making campaign appearances for Romney in a general election.

 

The Sidney Greenstreet wannabe earned it. He's bullied, hectored and rancored his way to the governor's office, taking advantage of yet another incumbent NJ governor embroiled in scandal, and proven yet again that Republicans don't have the werewithal to lead without clubbing people. I have no doubt that, had Christie negotiated in good faith in the past ten months, he would have been more successful in accomplishing his goal yesterday.

 

In small, we've seen the evolution of the Teabagger movement play out in New Jersey: meteoric rise based on the "squeaky wheel" theory, only to find out that giving them a little grease didn't solve the problems, but only made them worse.

 

* I mean, of course, suck the teabag.