Category Archives: Al Jazeera America

01/18/2016
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Al Jazeera America, Birth Control, House of Thani, Jimmy Wales, Journalism, Mansplaining, Melissa Franklin, NPR Weekend Edition, Scott Simon, Siza Mzimela, Wikipedia, Womansplaining, Zaha Hadid

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Women, You Owe Us Explanations

Jimmy Wales, the founder and big boss of Wikipedia, told Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday that 85 percent of the contributors to the free online hive-mind encyclopedia are male. Wales says that troubles him.

Troubles me, too. Wanna know why? Because it’s so goddamned easy to contribute to Wikipedia that a child can do it. And I’d bet more children, overall, than women contribute to it.

It’s a damned shame that the info resource used by most humans on this planet largely — very largely — reflects the POV of guys. Where are you, smart women? Why aren’t you adding to the entries about Émily du Châtelet and Rosalind Franklin? Why aren’t women who study Harriet Tubman tripping all over each other to add to the abolitionist’s Wiki page?

Do you know who Henrietta Leavitt was? How about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin? Or, for that matter, Hypatia, Irène Joliot-Curie, Melissa Franklin, Zaha Hadid, or Indra Nooyi? They all have Wikipedia pages and, presumably, have been mostly defined therein by males. For that matter, why isn’t there a Wiki page on Siza Mzimela?

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[L to R] Hypatia, Melissa Franklin, Siza Mzimela

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More Q’s. Why is the entry on Birth Control not a place we can read about the desire of women to enjoy sex without worry of conception? Only a woman can write that. The Birth control entry is very dry and clinical. The reasons women use birth control are not. Surely, women can dig up primary sources explicating the need and want to engage in non-procreational bonking. Instead, we’re treated to gobs of citations from vagina-fearing religionists about why birth control is worse than putting a Glock in the hands of a tot. (In fact, there’s even a separate, lengthy entry entitled Religion and birth control.

We hear a lot about mansplaining, the propensity of guys to lecture women. You know what? We could use a little womansplaining. No, wait — a lot of it, please. The tools and the opportunities are waiting. So am I.

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Less News Is Bad News

I caught the news out of the corner of my eye that Al Jazeera America is going under and it saddened me. My primary news sources are NPR, the New York Times, the BBC, and Al Jazeera America (AJAM).

I get my AJAM fix online as I long ago gave up on TV as a dependable source for news. AJAM online always seemed to me to be sober and rational, its reports mercifully absent the shrieking, alarmist, celeb-worshipping crap most stateside corporate media shovel into our ear- and eyeholes on a 24-hour-a-day basis.

Even the look of AJAM’s home page was calm, its background color midnight blue with an Arabic script logo resembling a drop of water.

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Muted

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The Big Mike school of journalism holds that there are no such things as pure objectivity, real truth, and the all-too-ephemeral qualities of fairness and balance our for-profit news mongers try to sell us. Ergo, I want to see human and global issues through the eyes of many and then try to make sense of the whole chaotic mess in my own head.

If you haven’t peeked into how other countries cover the news, I highly recommend it. You’ll be shocked at how differently the folks in Lebanon, Ireland, China, and Nigeria see things. That’s why my preferred news deliverers are an American nonprofit as well as a for-profit biz, a non-profit from the UK, and a for-profit one from the Arab world.

AJAM is the television news operation owned by the House of Thani, the gang of monarchists who run the tiny Arabian peninsula nation of Qatar. These dynasts love to play both sides of the coin, allowing the US and the UK to operate an air force base there from which the Allies can run bombing missions all around the Middle East whenever our generals feel moody. Qatar also has allowed the Afghan Taliban to run an office in the country. The royals like to brag about labor unions and women’s suffrage now being allowed in the country; left unsaid is the fact that both advances were forbidden until very recently. Qatari law allows for stoning and flogging for convicted criminals. Migrant African workers flock to Qatar for what are promised to be high(er)-paying jobs but many find themselves forced into abusive servitude and suffer severe human rights violations.

For some as yet unexplained reason, the royalists who oversee this mess have sunk good dough into a pretty decent news outfit. One possible justification for investing in Al Jazeera: the Qatari kings and princes simply want to make a buck.

Which they aren’t doing via AJAM, ergo that arm of the Al Jazeera Media Network will go dark by April 30th.

When AJAM came onto the scene back in 2013 after buying up the distribution network and the other assets of Al Gore’s Current TV operation, it hoped to reach into most Americans’ living rooms. Unfortunately, the very idea that an Arab-run news source would be infiltrating our happy homes caused some of AJAM’s biggest cable carriers to drop it.

Still, a year ago AJAM was able to gain entry into more than 61 million American homes, a penetration rate of better than 52 percent. Precious few people in those American homes chose to click to the news station, though, with daily viewership hovering between 20,000 and 40,000. That’s kids stuff.

Murricans didn’t care for AJAM despite the fact that it had been established as a Delaware corporation with administrative headquarters and main studios in New York and satellite studios in eleven other US cities. Who, after all, wants to be told by Arabs what’s going on?

You know this already but it needs to be iterated: the citizenry of this holy land wants to get its info strictly from homegrown leggy blondes, tough-talking older men, and Comedy Central jokesters.

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Your Trusted News Sources

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12/27/2015
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Al Jazeera America, Burritos As Big As Your Head, Centers for Disease Control, Chipotle, Club Lago, Foodborne Illness, Henry I. Miller, It's A Wonderful Life, McDonald's, Natural Foods, Organics, Suicide

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Fable Folderol

Add this myth to the ever-expanding list of commonly-held falsehoods: the holidays are a significant cause of suicides.

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George Bailey, Preparing To Jump

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Yep, you guessed it. It ain’t true at all. It’s so untrue that, in fact, the exact opposite can be argued — the holidays prevent people from committing suicide. That’s what figures from the Centers for Disease control indicate. The CDC tells us fewer suicides occur in November and December than any other time of the year.

So flush this one down the toilet along with the full moon causing mayhem and people using only 10 percent of their brains.

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Food Folderol

I’ve patronized Chipotle ever since I arrived in Bloomington mainly because the place serves the kind of ginormous burritos I’d become accustomed to in my Chicago days. Back in my beloved hometown, there’d be burrito joints and taquerias seemingly on every corner. There was even a place that advertised “Burritos As Big As Your Head.”

The truth is if you can find a burrito as big as my coconut, you’ll enjoy an extraordinarily filling repast indeed. Perhaps two.

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La Bamba Burritos

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Anyway, Chipotle has been the source of a number of foodborne illness outbreaks in the last calendar year.

You might say the company has been the victim of bad luck. There’s a dizzying variety of ways colonies of bacteria can grow in foods at restaurants and grocery stores. From preparers who neglect to wash their hands after using the bathroom to servers who violate time-temperature guidelines, the food you eat could, at any moment, pack a wallop of microorganisms on your forkful that’ll have you hugging the white bowl for days at a time. In fact, pretty much every single forkful of food you shove into your mouth contains scads of sickening germs. Your body’s natural defense system usually takes care of all the invaders entering your gullet. That is, unless the sheer number of microorganisms overwhelms your defenders.

That’s what happened to hundreds of people, Chipotle diners all, on five separate occasions in 2015. Once is a simple occurrence, twice a coincidence, five times a pattern. Chipotle foodborne illness outbreaks this year have affected poor souls in at least 10 states. The causes of these mass horkings have included E. coli, salmonella, and norovirus, three unrelated invaders, indicating the fast food operation has a big problem on its hands.

Chipotle, of course, crows about its local food sourcing and all-natural ingredients. Well, everybody does, but Chipotle was on it early and big, the first national corporate entity to jump on that bandwagon. Chipotle’s “mission statement” (ugh, I detest corporate-speak) claims it offers “Food with Integrity.” (Double-ugh, I detest — almost as much — profit-making under the guise of altruism.)

McDonald’s Corp. was a big investor in Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. from 1998 through 2006, a period of time during which C. grew from a modest-sized Colorado chain to a 500-location coast-to-coast juggernaut. It’s ironic, natch, that a McDonald’s-owned outfit would succeed based on an appeal to the “natural” palate. Mickey D’s “food” is about as natural as that bottle of soap scum remover under your bathroom sink.

A secret: I still, on rare occasions, indulge in a Big Mac. Sue me.

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Guilty

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Somehow, Chipotle overcame the negative image of its corporate overlord and actually became known as a crunchy, New Age-y, safe place to eat. College students went gaga over the place. They could eat fast crap while convincing themselves they were still protecting their holy temple bodies. Chipotle told  customers its food was free from GMOs and other weapons of mass destruction.

Yet, five times in the last year Chipotle’s food has caused hundreds of folk to invert their maws. Yuck.

Now comes Henry I. Miller, bio-researcher, former food and drug regulator, and a Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to say Chipotle’s problems with foodborne illness are a result of its natural, crunchy, New Age-y practices. Miller says locally-produced food is not safer, “pesticide-free” crops actually are rife with potentially dangerous bug-killing substances, organic grains often are tainted by toxins and parasites, and using natural fertilizer — read: animal shit — increases the odds of foodborne illness eightfold.

And it’s not that Chipotle and the like would argue with Miller. Here’s a line from Chipotle’s 2014 annual report (p. 14):

We may be a higher risk for foodborne illness outbreaks than some competitors due to our use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation.

In other words, our methods suck — and are dangerous, to boot.

If you spend your time gathering your food info from profit-driven media or, worse, “natural” websites, you’ll become convinced there are only two types of food in this world:

  1. Magic food that’ll make you healthier, stronger, happier, more orgasmic, and will help you live to the ripe old age of 152.
  2. Evil food that’ll cause cancer, heart disease, obesity, rashes, shingles, warts, poverty, pollution, crime, slavery, and Donald Trump’s hair.

In our ultimately unfulfillable quest to live forever, we’ve latched onto food as the magic pill in recent years. Now, not only is it unwise to ingest Drano, cyanide, nail polish remover, and gasoline, it’s considered almost as rash to eat a slice of bread or enjoy a cob of genetically modified corn. Conversely, if we only buy squash from the organic farmer down the road, we’ll live long enough to see humankind populate Mars.

Here’s a truism from an inveterate talker: People talk too much.

Miller concludes:

Although the crops, meats and other foods produced by modern conventional agricultural technologies may not bring to mind a sentimental Norman Rockwell painting, they are on average safer than food that reflects pandering to current fads.

In the words of my favorite cook ever, Chico of Club Lago, shut up and eat.

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[Gasp] He’s Naked!

Okay, ready for Evidence Item #33 gazillion that we, the species Homo Sapiens sapiens, are flat-out psychopathic? Here goes.

Some poor schmuck tried to wade through the shallow waters of the Mediterranean Sea the other day in an attempt to get around the barbed wire fence that separates Egypt from the Gaza Strip. He was a Palestinian and he wanted to get out of that god-foresaken apartheid hell and perhaps breathe the relatively freer air of its neighbor to the south (emphasis on relatively).

Egyptian border guards opened fire on him, dropping him like a sack of flour in the surf, errant rifle rounds plucking the waters around him and raising little up-splashes. Huzzah, the sovereign state of Egypt had been protected.

The whole incident was caught on video. The Arabic version of Al Jazeera aired the vid and tut-tutted the tragedy. Only the Palestinian guy had been stark naked as he splashed through the surf, perhaps as a way of showing he wasn’t carrying any arms or weapons of mass hysteria into that ancient land. So, even though we see in loving detail a man’s life being snuffed out in a hail of bullets, Al Jazeera producers protected their viewers from seeing the poor bastard’s cold-turtled junk as well as his bare buttocks by pixellating these horrifying locales.

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Praise Allah — We Can’t See His Penis

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Yes, the Earth, where terrestrial evolution’s highest form is more scared of nudity than bloody homicide.

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03/07/2015
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Al Jazeera America, Amy Schumer, Bloody Sunday, Comedy Attic, David Masciotra, Daylight Savings, Dayna Thompson, Homeless, Indianapolis, Jared Thompson, John Lewis, John Mellencamp, LeRoy Robinson, March (Book One), Nate Powell, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, Selma Alabama

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Rights Without A Home

Well, whaddya know? Our big sister up to the north, Indianapolis, this week passed a law to protect the homeless.

The homeless, for pity’s sake.

How very retro of the Circle City. Hell, you’d think this was 1964 or something. This development is so earth-shaking that the story is being carried in Al Jazeera, for chrissakes.

Not only that, AJ notes, there a whole goddamned “movement” to protect and care about those w/o McMansions or even well-appointed refrigerator cartons in this holy land. Can Al Jazeera be talking about the same country I know?

Refrigerator Carton

Home?

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Acc’d’g to the story, homeless-protection laws are being passed in places like Washington, D.C., Madison, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota. Okay, these three are People’s Republics, primarily run and inhabited by subversives, preeverts, and pointy-heads whose political and philosophical spectra run only from pink to red. But Indy?

Yes, Indy. Under the new law, awaiting the mayor’s pen, the homeless would be guaranteed “the rights… to carry out basic human functions such as sitting, standing, eating and sleeping in public areas.”

Heavens. Gov. Mike Pence surely tossed and turned all last night. Not only are the homeless not billionaires, thereby not worthy of due respect in this Free Market, Ayn Randian, I-got-mine-and-to-hell-with-you nation but they’re not even hundredaires! How can a patriotic American even think about them?

Apparently, Indy Council guy LeRoy Robinson has been thinking of them. He sponsored the bill. I didn’t know anything else about him, but I like him.

Robinson

LeRoy Robinson Of Indianapolis

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So I did a little digging into this Robinson character. Is he a Russian plant? A member of ISIS? Kim Jong Un’s man in America? Perhaps all three?

Here’s what one prominent Indy att’y said about him when he was running for his City Council seat:

I have watched Leroy grow since childhood into a very well rounded young man with a passion for his community, education, and public service.

Evidence, perhaps, that he wasn’t born in Kenya like some other elected officials we know? We’ll see.

He’s a former schoolteacher, which automatically should disqualify him from US citizenship if the likes of, say, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have their way.

Last fall, Robinson displayed on his City Hall desk a sign reading “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” along with four other council members.

I’m liking him more and more.

Funny thing is, he’s a Christianist, which should be cause for me to sniff dismissively. But maybe — just maybe — his religious belief has inspired him to care about silly things like education, justice, and the homeless. If so, he sounds to me like an honest-to-gosh follower of Jesus Christ — as opposed to those who say they are but aren’t.

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Tears Of Joy

The National Weather Service is going way, way, way out on a limb and predicting high temperatures over the next five days to range from 43º today to 56º Wednesday.

I think I’m gonna cry.

Bird & Flowers

Can It Be?

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House Boy

It was learned these last couple of days that no House Republicans were slated to attend the 50th anniversary celebration of the first of the Selma marches and the Bloody Sunday police riot that shocked the nation — well, some of the nation — on March 7th, 1965.

Bloody Sunday/Selma

John Lewis (Foreground) As The March Commences

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Today’s celebration has been attracting pols like bumblebees to bright pink flowers. Jeez, even George W. Bush says he’s going to attend (of course, he doesn’t have to worry about alienating Right Wing voters anymore.) Everybody, it seems, wants to get in on the civil rights act. Everybody that is, except Congressional Republicans.

The tsk-tsking that all Republican members of Congress had better things to do today — including get their cars washed, shoot a round of golf, and clip their toenails — came as an embarrassment to the GOP. So last night, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told the world that, yes, he’ll be in Selma this afternoon.

Perhaps he’ll see what it’s like to be a token.

In any case, do you need any more evidence that no matter what Republicans say, they really, really don’t give a shit about dark-skinned folk?

Hey, while we’re on the subject, here’s a reminder. You oughta get yourself a copy of the graphic novel, March: Book One, illustrated by B-ton resident Nate Powell. It’s the story of then-civil rights activist and current US Congressguy John Lewis’s road to Selma. Lewis was clubbed on the head by one of Alabama’s state troopers and suffered a fractured skull that day fifty years ago.

Bloody Sunday

John Lewis Hits The Ground

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Here’s my January 2014 interview with Powell on WFHB and here’s a longer interview I did with him for for the April 2014 Ryder magazine.

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Daylight Savings

Set your clocks ahead tonight, woohoo!

Clock

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Son Of Seymour

This should make a certain percentage of Bloomingtonians happy and a certain percentage nauseated: a new biography of John Mellencamp will be released next month. Titled Mellencamp: American Troubadour and written by David Masciotra, the book is being published by the University Press of Kentucky and is due on booksellers’ shelves April 6th.

Book Cover

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I don’t know why it is but tons of my adopted town’s citizenry love to tell stories about how their girlfriend’s brother-in-law once ran into Mellencamp at some hardware store and the rock star emeritus was all kinds of a-hole-ish. Sometimes I think peeps expect guys like Mellencamp to pump their hands and say, Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a fan. Can I pay for all your stuff? I s’pose it never occurs to folks that they might be the hundredth person to grab him by the arm that morning and stutter, You’re…, you’re…, that guy…. Right?

Or, maybe he is a jerk. I dunno. Read the book and find out.

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She Likes Us! She Likes Us!

Search me as to why I missed this a couple of months ago but let’s celebrate it now: Comedian Amy Schumer named the Comedy Attic one of her 10 fave clubs in the country in USA Today.

All the rest were pretty much big city joints — the Gotham Comedy Club in New York, Punchline in San Francisco, Hollywood Improv in LA and the like. Schumer’s list ran in the paper’s January 11th edition. She had this to say about Jared & Dayna Thompson’s place and our thriving, throbbing megalopolis:

It’s the Midwest, but they’re nobody’s fool. The people are smart, and I love the culture there, and the restaurants and the bars. It’s kind of a happening city.

Schumer

Funny Girl

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10/16/2014
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A Brief History of Time, Al Jazeera America, Bill Gates, Book Corner, Capital in the 21st Century, Coppola Rosso, David Paglis, Death Wish, Economics, Friedrich Hayek, Jimmy Johns Franchise LLC, Joe Arpaio, John Liautaud, Koch Brothers, National Red Wine Day, Paul Krugman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Piketty

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Another Reason To Go On Living

Happy National Red Wine Day! [h/t to Jan Takehara.]

Coppola Rosso

My Personal Fave

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BTW: Here’s a list of 10 Red Wines for Life’s Biggest Problems. And you thought there was no hope left.

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Dismal

Perhaps the biggest deal in book publishing this year was the release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.

Being a study of economics, it normally wouldn’t have been read by any more than, oh, seven or eight people on the planet — that is, until Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman raved about it. Next thing you know, every liberal worth her or his Prius was dashing down to the bookstore to cop a copy.

Me? I haven’t read the thing. It’s economics, right? I’d rather sear the jelly in my eyeballs with a red hot ice pick than read an economics tome. Loyal Pencillista David Paglis once insisted I read a book by the conservative economist Friedrich Hayek. I tried — I swear — I tried. If I say I got through 50 pages I’ll burn in hell for crossing the 9th Commandment. Economics is not known as the Dismal Science for nothing. Besides, Hayek is a darling of Randists and free marketeers who worship elegant theory and formula and rarely, if ever, concern themselves with trivial things like the needs of human beings.

In any case, Piketty argues that the world’s dough is being hoarded by a tiny fraction of its population. Not only that, uber-rich folk are passing their cash down to their kids, thereby insuring that it won’t find its way into the hands of starving kids in west Africa and other unfortunates in the foreseeable future. Piketty also throws in piles of mathematical equations like r > g, which means…, um, hell, I have no goddamned idea what it means.

More important: I don’t care.

Anyway, we could hardly keep Capital… in stock at the Book Corner, so eager were customers to get their hands on it. My educated guess is not five percent of purchasers actually read the book. Like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, it’s the bestseller that nobody read and now serves only as an interior design accoutrement.

Capital

Obviously A Staged Photo

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Of course, that was then. We now are stuck with four big copies of Piketty’s 700-page epic. They are collecting dust some seven months after it was published.

Piketty’s ponderings, natch, generated about as much criticism as love. In fact, richer-than-god Bill Gates penned a review on his blog the other day. He says he agrees with much of P.’s argument. But, acc’d’g to Bill, wealth inequality is not necessarily the worst thing in the world. It’s a nuanced argument and worth a read, even if Gates does make mention of the dreaded r > g equation. Ugh.

Once you’re finished with that, scoot over to Al Jazeera America for a rebuttal. It’s all a rollicking good time.

Fitting brain candy, I might say, for such a gray day. Just hide the razor blades and don’t turn the oven gas on.

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Logical Leaps

Speaking of wealth, Jimmy John Liautaud seems to be the poster boy for the evil rich these days on the interwebs. Folks probably are getting bored with hating on the Koch Bros. — even if they are among the most odious life forms in this solar system. Liautaud’s the boss over at Jimmy John’s Franchise LLC system of sandwich joints. His mug has been all over laptop screens of late for his co.’s ridiculous employee non-compete agreement as well as his propensity to blow the brains out of magnificent critters.

Jimmy John Safari

 

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Jimmy John

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Jimmy John

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Jimmy John

 

Jimmy John And Some Formerly Living Creatures

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Little known is the fact that Liautaud has been a big contributor to scary Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The Phoenix New Times a few years ago ran a story about a questionably-legal soft money organization that bankrolled a mean-spirited and disingenuous ad campaign against a challenger to the popular-but-lunatic sheriff. Liautaud gave $10,000 to the org.

Funny, isn’t it, how you can make certain assumptions about folks based on just one of their actions? Like it makes tons o’sense that a guy who digs posing proudly with the corpses of elephants, elk, and tigers might be a financial backer of a law enforcement official who makes Charles Bronson in the Death Wish series look milquetoast-y.

Or that he’d try to screw over his own employees (not that non-compete agreements are worth the paper they’re printed on, but still….)

Or even that his products are to submarine sandwiches as Domino’s is to pizza.

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09/03/2014
2 Comments
Al Jazeera America, Indiana University, Islamic State, Kyle Schwarber, NPR Morning Editioon, Rob Crilly, Susan Sandberg

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Learning Luxury

Bloomington’s not the only college town whose character is being radically transformed thanks to an influx of privileged snowflakes whose parents spend big dough setting them up in plush apts. Our own downtown, in the immediate environs of the erstwhile quaint Courthouse Square, has become a set of parallel mini-valleys of soulless condo blocks. The atmosphere around the Square, it follows, has changed profoundly. High end sports bars, chichi restaurants, and urban outfitters now do trade in storefronts that once housed, well, shops.

To understand what downtown Bloomington has become, consider this: You can’t buy a pen or a notebook, a package of batteries, or a small bottle of Advil anywhere within a radius of three quarters of a mile around the Fish on the Dome.

You’ll find, though, a choice of two stores from which to purchase that bush hat you’ve been dying to wear on your next expedition to deepest, darkest Africa.

NPR’s Morning Edition today ran a story on a similar transformation in the campus neighborhood surrounding Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. It, too, has seen an explosion of high-density, well-appointed apartment blocks erected for the children of wealth for whom dorm living or renting out a cramped house would be akin to having their fingernails pulled out by enemy prison guards. Announcer David Green said, “Over the past decade, investors have been cashing in on this growing market.”

Just like Bloomington.

Smallwood

Smallwood On North College Avenue (Jeremy Hogan/Herald Times photo)

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One construction contractor told an NPR reporter he’s building “luxury apartment living catered towards [sic] college students” — a 25-story highrise featuring amenities like a rooftop deck with fireplace, a fountain, a glass handrail and a view of the Atlanta skyline, as well as stainless steel appliances, quartz countertops, and laundry facilities within each unit, and a private bath in each bedroom.

Luxury indeed. Nothing can goose a GPA like truncating that interminable walk from bed to bowl at two in the morning.

Anyway, throw an ear at the report and take solace at least in the fact that we are not alone.

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My Aim Is True

Speaking of the changing nature of our cherished downtown, City Council member Susan Sandberg was pounding the pavement drumming up voters for the county Democratic Party Saturday at the 4th Street Festival for the Arts & Crafts when two college boys approached her. One of them said, “Can I ask you a question?”

At this point, S-Squared was almost giddy. Huzzah, she thought, perhaps the youth of this holy land isn’t such a lost cause after all. Here are two lads hoping to learn about our sacred political processes.

Pledge of Allegiance

Um, No

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Only she hadn’t noticed one of the two was videoing the encounter on his smart phone. Nor had she immediately sensed that the two were boozed up. The first college boy proceeded to inquire whether Sus. Sand. might contemplate performing certain acts of a carnal nature.

The normally eloquent S-berg was left speechless. The boys giggled and pranced merrily away.

I advised the tall blonde legislator that young men like those two possessed testicles just so she could take aim at said gonads with the toe of her combat boot. Miss S. replied she is loath to take such physical steps.

I can only wonder what’s wrong with the Democrats nowadays when we can’t even depend on our party officials to kick deserving louts in the balls?

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Or Is Sandberg’s Aim Truer?

Rob Crilly writes today in Al Jazeera America that for the US to respond militarily or otherwise violently to ISIS’s latest video beheading is precisely what those ghouls want. Crilly writes that ISIS:

… [S]eeks to provoke more powerful enemies into rash actions as their publics demand that justice be done for the wanton act of violence against an innocent, and that the perpetrators be prevented from repeating the act. Thus the wave of pressure on Obama to come up with an Islamic State strategy on the fly, the complexities and challenges of combating the group in Syria and Iraq not withstanding.

So that masked man with the decap. blade is trying to play us, acc’d’g to Crilly. He goes on to say that when ISIS demands the US stop fighting them in Iraq and Syria or else there’ll be more beheadings, the al Qaeda splinter group is lying. Crilly writes:

… [I]s that [what ISIS] really wants? Does it want the US and its allies to back off, or is the group’s real goal to provoke sufficient outrage to provoke Western powers to launch another war in a Muslim land, helping to sustain its warped vision of jihad?

My own initial reaction to the beheadings is that we should dash back over to Iraq and kick the living crap out of ISIS, the way we should have finished off the Taliban in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. Only ISIS couldn’t ask for a better PR and recruitment tool than another US incursion into their backyard.

Screencap from ISIS video

An ISIS Captor And His Prisoner

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Then again, maybe Susan Sandberg is right. Maybe a swift kick to the balls really doesn’t solve the problem.

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All Schwarber, All The Time

Indiana University alum Kyle Schwarber, fast tracking his way to the major leagues in the Chicago Cubs organization, led his Daytona Cubs teammates to a 9-1 victory in their playoff opener last night.

Schwarber clubbed an opposite field grand slam home run during Daytona’s decisive five-run fourth inning. Daytona holds a one to nothing lead in its series against the Dunedin Blue Jays.

Schwarber

Schwarber Earlier This Year With The Kane County Cougars

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So far as a pay for play athlete, the kid whose Hoosier teammates called The Hulk has done nothing but impress.

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07/19/2014
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Al Jazeera America, Alliance Defending Freedom, Armchair Homesteader, Chickens, Clarence Thomas, Contraception, Flat Earth Society, Hobby Lobby, ISIS, Jana Wilson, Misogyny, New Yorker, Samuel Alito, Sara Hellwege, Sharia Law, Susan Orlean, Tampa Family Health Centers, The Islamic State, US Supreme Court, Wonkette

Hot Air

Chicken Checkin’

One of our town’s most talented copywriters spends her time outside the corporate cubicle raising chickens. Jana Wilson lives with her family on a nice 20-acre spread nearby. She writes about Gallus gallus domesticus husbandry in her blog, The Armchair Homesteader.

Tons o’folks these days are growing the birds, mainly to be able to eat fresh eggs and even for the fresh meat to liven up their cacciatore. (Hey, wait a minute: Do peeps eat alla cacciatore around here?) Anyway, the City of Bloomington, for instance, allows residents to raise chicken flocks, although said flocks can’t number more than five birds and none may be roosters. Apparently, that crowing rooster next door might cause some little friction in the n’hood. That and chicken coops often stink.

The chickens-in-the-city trend got a huge jump start about five years ago when author Susan Orlean wrote about it in the pages of The New Yorker. “[R]ight now,” she wrote, “across the country and beyond, there’s a surging passion for raising the birds.”

Chicken

“A Surging Passion”

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When my grandmother, Anna Lazzara, lived in Chi., she was quite put out because the city wouldn’t allow her to keep chickens in the backyard. But back in the 1930’s people could still turn fresh chickens into dinner that night by buying the birds live at the butcher shop. Anna would tell my mother, Sue, to go get a chicken on a given weekday, a chore Ma loathed. She’d have to squeeze the bird between her arm and her chest in order to prevent it from fleeing, the critter pecking and clawing at her all the way home. Then Anna would grab the chicken from my mother, wrap her two fists around its neck and yank. Within minutes, the chicken’d lie still and be ready for plucking, singeing, and washing.

Ma always said those weekly walks from the butcher shop produced in her a phobia of all birds.

Yesterday, Wilson wrote about the problem of newbie chicken-raisers who purchase a passel of chicks and soon discover that one of the purported hens is actually a guy. She writes:

You anticipate these adorable little chicks growing into egg-producing hens and the speed at which they grow is just amazing.  They’re growing more feathers every day, their little combs beginning to develop, their legs lengthening. It’s all very fun and exciting. Fun until the day when little Sue emits the strangest sound. It sounds like a strangled screech. Could it be… oh no, surely not. But yes, its a crow!

Oh dear, little Sue is really little Stan.

Remember, cities that allow residents to keep chickens usually frown on or outright ban the keeping of males. “And for good reason: they are quite noisy and don’t crow just at daybreak,” Wilson writes. “Trust me on this one… they can crow just about any time of the day or night.”

In any case, check out Jana’s blog. You’ll even learn what a Sicilian Buttercup is. (And, no, it’s not me.)

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Après Ce, Le Déluge

It turns out those who’ve been wringing their hands over the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, predicting that all manner of Christianists would start suing to get out of certain laws and responsibilities because their “sincerely-held beliefs” preclude them from doing so, really aren’t just being Chicken Littles. Any number of “sincere believers” have made moves to get out of things like not firing employees because they’re gay and other expressions of deep spirituality.

It would be hard to top this one, though: Pro-life activist attorneys in Florida have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a nurse who applied for a job with the Tampa Family Health Centers. The attorneys claim the medical center refused to consider her for employment because she is Christian.

How horrible, right? What’s this crazy land coming to?

Christians/Lion

Persecution?

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Natch, the case isn’t that simple. The nurse made a point to tell the clinic’s HR director that her Christian beliefs forbid her from prescribing certain contraceptives, which just happens to be one of the primary tasks of the place. I suppose it’d be be rather like a newly graduated cartographer applying for a job at the local globe factory and saying he would not be able to draw maps on the co.’s product because he’s a member of the Flat Earth Society. The wags at Wonkette explain the impasse thusly:

Let’s play a game. It is sort of a choose-your-own-adventure make-believe game. Costumes optional.

You are about to graduate from Thing-Doing School and apply for a job as a professional Thing-Doer, as one does after attending Thing-Doing School. You inform your potential employer that you are interested in the Thing-Doing job but will be unable to perform Thing-Doing duties because of your religious beliefs. Your potential employer tells you, “LOL, that’s hilarious, but we are actually looking for a real Thing-Doer who is willing to perform Thing-Doing duties, because that is the job. Thanks but no thanks.”

For this, nurse Sara Hellwege and her handlers, the Alliance Defending Freedom, will be taking up time and space on the federal district court’s docket to right what they see as a horrible wrong — although the sane among us see it as pretty much a cheap stunt.

Thanks Justice Alito and the rest of the straight, male, white, Catholic majority of SCOTUS. (And don’t write to correct me that Clarence Thomas is not white; he’s whiter than an albino wearing a lab coat in a snowstorm.)

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Stoned, Again

Speaking of regressive fundamentalist extremists, Al Jazeera tells the tale of The Islamic State‘s latest contribution to civilization. The erstwhile ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), fresh off its successful campaign to capture and control a significant swath of Iraq and bits of Syria, is now turning its attention to the behavior of women, AKA sluts.

The Izzy State is bringing back that fave from yesteryear, public stoning for women who dig sex. Acc’d’g to AJ’s report, members of the gang that scares even al Qaeda stoned a woman to death in the public square in the town of Tabaqa, in Syria, because she’d committed adultery.

R. Crumb

Flashback

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An important corollary to the story is the fact that the man with whom she sullied all of Islam was charged with no crime at all because, well…, because he’s a man, you dope.

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04/19/2014
1 Comment
Al Jazeera America, Bruno VeSota, Bundy Ranch, Citizens United, Dick Contino, IU Cinema, James Ellroy, Koch Brothers, Literacy, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Meryl Streep, Opie Taylor's, Peter LoPilato, Roger Corman, Secession, The Ryder, US Supreme Court

Hot Air

Legends Walked Among Us

Bloomington’s own cinema maven, Peter LoPilato was all dressed up with somewhere to go when he strolled into The Electron Pencil’s back office (some people call it Soma Coffee) yesterday AM.

This intrepid reporter grilled him re: his fancy duds — sports coat, collared short, freshly creased trousers and shiny (-ish) shoes.

“What’s up witchu?” sez I. BTW: I just happened to be uploading a pic of legendary film director and producer Roger Corman in my roll as online manager of LoPilato’s Ryder mag. The big feature this month is a long (repeat: lo-o-o-ong) profile of Corman, who just happens to be in town this weekend. Corman’s visit comes hot on the heels of that of mega-screen icon Meryl Streep who was in town earlier this week to cop an honorary degree from Indiana Unversity. Corman lectured at the IU Cinema yesterday afternoon and several of his films are featured there this weekend. (FYI: You missed The Wild Angels and The Trip yesterday. Today you can catch The Intruder, The Tomb of Ligeia, and a documentary, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

Streep/IU

Streep Fêted

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I mention Corman because, mirabile dictu, he’s why LoPilato was togged up.

“I’m going out to lunch with Roger Corman,” he said.

I, of course, could only gasp, “Wow.”

Corman/Price

A Young Corman (l.) On A Set With Vincent Price

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I fondled Peter’s lapel for a moment, hoping some of his cool could rub off on me, then pressed my interrogation. “Where are you two going?”

Peter LoPilato merely smiled and said, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

Harrumph.

Anyway, I hope Corman paid for the meal. Every time I ask the boss for a raise, he motions back over his shoulder at a small crowd of waifs, shoeless and forlorn, staring at me with hungry eyes. “I would, I swear it,” he says, invariably, “but I’ve got a family to feed.”

Funny thing is I thought Peter only had two kids. The magic of Hollywood, I imagine. Well, like I say, I hope Corman picked up the check.

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Superlative Celloloid

My absolutely fave Corman flick is The Attack of the Giant Leeches (he produced it and, to be honest, his fingerprints are all over it). Somehow, on a microscopic budget, Corman and director Bernard Kowalski manage to recreate a steamy, indolent Louisiana bayou world so faithfully that you find yourself perspiring just watching the thing. They get a workmanlike performance out of horror film vet Bruno VeSota, playing his usual corpulent baddie. I don’t know which movie I prefer VeSota in, this one or Daddy-o with Dick Contino. Either way, he’s a treat.

Giant Leeches

VeSota & Yvette Vickers in “… Giant Leeches”

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Oddly, though, despite the loving care Corman & Kowalski take in presenting an oppressive, heat-wilted world, their titled giant leeches look about as leech-like as, well, so many papier mâché Chinese New Year dragons. Then again, it’s got to be a challenge trying to make a leech scary. Slimy and gross? Sure. Scary? Uh-uh.

Giant Leeches

A Leech Carries Off A Victim

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As long as we’re playing the association game, noted LA gruesome murder chronicler James Ellroy wrote a novella entitled, Dick Contino’s Blues. You can find it in Ellroy’s 1994 short story collection, Hollywood Nocturnes.

Daddy-o

Dick Contino Makes The Scene in “Daddy-o”

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Back to Hollywood-comes-to-IU: Roger Corman and Meryl Streep represent two extremes of what the American filmmaking industry does best. Either one is aces by me, as opposed to Hollywood’s current penchant for recycling superheroes and Nicholas Sparks books.

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Huh?

From an article in Aljazeera America:

Aljazeera Screenshot

Click Image To Read Full Article

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Notice in the subhead where it warns about isolating kids from “the digital world of multitasking”? As if that’s a horror that must be avoided at all costs.

When I first saw this, I figured it was a satiric story, you know, where there author turns you around by saying We’d hate to have our precious snowflakes not be able to be psychological overwhelmed by multitasking and productivity pressures because, hell, who wants a kid that isn’t developing a stomach ulcer by 13 and isn’t on antidepressants by 15?

The author says kids today are part of the “net generation.” They learn by absorbing tons of information merely by darting like hummingbirds from one web page to the other. Earlier generations dove into books and concentrated for long periods of time. That’s old hat.

Information is the stuff that’s liable to fill your mind so much that there isn’t any room left for knowledge (this is me speaking). “Information is not knowledge,” Einstein has been credited with saying. It’s also believed he said, “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.”

Yet, members of the net generation are happy as clams that their brain cases are crammed with data. Their parents, apparently, are giddy about this as well.

“Opponents to deep, immersive reading come from all directions. Among American boys, there remains a generations-old sense that books are for sissies; I remember this from my own childhood. For neoliberals and technocrats, reading novels is not ‘what the market wants.’ Concentrated reading doesn’t require ideological opposition to be endangered: The pace of contemporary life, even for children, means that there’s simply no time or energy left for it,” the author writes.

Man, that’s a lousy life.

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Wither Our Nation?

So. I’m sitting in a booth at Opie Taylor’s with The Loved One and our friends Hondo & Les. We’re playing a raunchy, sick joke card game that Hondo’d bought on eBay because…, well, because the mere playing of it will condemn any and all participants to hell if such a place turns out to be real. I really think he’s daring the god neither of us believes in to damn him for all eternity. And, I guess, I’ll be following him.

Anyway, the talk turns, as usual, to how eff’d up this holy land is. The problem with guys like Hondo is they read and listen to too much Far Right palaver. It upsets their stomachs as well as their minds. The minute some minor candidate for the Nebraska statehouse says something like women enjoy being slapped around because then their slapping husbands and boyfriends go all out of their way to apologize and be nice to them, Hondo and his ilk send out urgent messages to the rest of us saying the whole country’s going insane.

Which it is. I just accept it, largely. Sure, I point out funny (in a sad way) wingnut things here on The Pencil and sometimes stamp my foot about Rand Paul or Kirk Cameron or Rick Santorum. But for the most part, I can’t really keep up with all the loons who have YouTube accounts or blogs through which they can lobby for the regression of America to those grand old days of the Salem witch trials.

Witch Trial, 1692

Good Old Days

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I’m more attuned to the utterances of, say, the Reagan/Bush/Bush Supreme Court, especially when it rules that rich guys should own and operate all polling places. Then I’ll yell that the country’s going insane. Between the two of us, Hondo and me, we’ve got the wingnut-osphere covered, I suppose.

Back to lunch at Opie’s. I think it was Les who asked, “Well whaddya think’s gonna happen here over the next few years.”

Natch, I had a ready answer.

The sanctified, blessed, and exceptional Yewnited States of Murrica is in for some changes. As long as the Supremes have codified the establishment of a plutocratic ruling class, the have-nots among us are going to be more restless than ever. Sure, the US always has been run for the benefit of captains of industry and financial pirates, but throughout our history we’ve always pretended that the common citizen meant something herein. No more.

If you have scads of dough, you count much more than if you don’t. That’s law now. Once you shatter the illusion of equality, there is nothing left of the mythical American Dream. When dreams die, people panic.

Now, most of the pop. of this nation is too dense to grasp that a new overclass has been installed, officially, brazenly, and w/o apology. Too many of them think their grand old flag has been sullied by Mexicans sneaking over the border to become busboys and maids, women who want the gov’t to pay for their slut pills, gays and lesbians who want to eliminate every trace of heterosexuality in our precious snowflake children, and, of course, the Kenyan who has taken over as Dictator and Tyrant-in-Chief Forever.

And, yeah, a health care reform that’s turning us into New Stalinville.

While everybody’s shrieking over these imagine threats, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and their coatholders turned the keys over to the Koch Bros. and said, “Here. It’s yours.”

No matter why people think the USA has become the homeland of Satan, they’re fast losing any and all loyalty to the nation. The Bundy Ranch confrontation will be repeated with alarming regularity in the coming years. And one of these times, somebody’s trigger finger is going to get itchy. Once the first shot is fired, all bets are off.

Militia at Bundy Ranch

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A desperate band of gunfondlers is coalescing these days, certain that the US has been taken over by the aforementioned evil people. They’re not terribly organized just yet; their only real commonality is the passel of hatemongers who bark at them daily over Right Wing talk radio and, to a lesser extent, via Fox News. But, book it, some demagogue is going to pop up. He’ll preach “defense” and separation. And a lot of people are going to fall into line behind him.

What have they got to lose? They don’t have jobs, money, or power.

Perhaps Texas will be the first state to make secession noises. Arizona and Utah may join in the chorus. Then we’re going to see some real breaking news.

Think it’s impossible? Why?

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