"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point then the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” — George Bernard Shaw
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UH, GEE, THANKS
Every year, someone who cares about you will give you a Christmas/Hannukah gift that you’ll never use. A gift, in fact, that you’d be embarrassed for the firemen to discover should your house go up in flames.
Surly Amy on Skepchick offered invaluable advice yesterday on what to do with a specific genre of such unwanted largesse.
Go Ahead, She Won’t Bite
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A reader wrote in to S.A. asking what to do with all the old pseudoscience, self-help, and pop metaphysics books she’s collected through the years. She has the courage and moral fortitude to admit she once bought into the “ideas” presented therein but now is a devoted skeptic. So, what should she do with those old books?
The usual answer would be to donate or sell them but the reader won’t do that because she doesn’t want to spread these virus-laden items around.
Surly Amy canvassed creative skeptics and was able to offer some fab alternatives:
Make an iPad holder
Make a “book” shelf
Create book art
Fashion paper flowers out of pages and book covers
Voila: A “Book” Shelf!
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Go to MadArtLab for more ideas on upcycling books and other fun projects.
Now you know what to do with those copies of Deepak Chopra’s big seller “Super Brain,” Michael Singer’s mega-seller “The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself,” or Rhonda Byrne’s old reliable “The Secret” that a well-meaning (albeit tragically misguided) soul might give you next week.
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THE JOY OF GORGING
Speaking of X-mas, here’s my tried and true Italian holiday cookies recipe. Make these and you’ll be the toast of the block.
They’re great for dipping and late night snacking. And they’re guaranteed to add inches to your waistline.
I mean, what else are cookies for?
Now then:
Big Mike’s Italian Holiday Cookies
5 cups flour
4 eggs
1 ½ sticks butter
1 cup sugar
4 heaping tsps baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp lemon extract
Half a bag of unsweetened jumbo baking chocolate chips
◗ Mix flour, powder, and salt together. Put aside. In second bowl, cream butter and sugar. In third bowl, fork whip eggs and add vanilla and lemon extracts — mix well.
◗ Pour egg mixture into creamed mixture. Stir well.
◗ Add flour mixture gradually to creamed mixture, combining as much as possible with wooden spoon. Then work dough with your hands. Completed dough should have the consistency of clay.
◗ Refrigerate for 1 hour. Preheat and set oven to 350 degrees. Roll dough into 1-inch diameter balls. Place balls on ungreased, non-stick cookie sheets. Press thumb into center of balls to make lens-like discs. Place large, semi-sweet chocolate baking chip, pointy end down, into center of each disc. Bake for 12-17 minutes, until golden brown.
Eat and gain weight. Worry about your waistline next year.
“Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world. I am left with art, music, literature, theater, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth. That’ll do for me.” — Lynne Kelly
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THAT’S RICH
The most ironic story of the last few days is the news that Washington, DC, host city of the 2012 International AIDS Conference, has an HIV-positive rate of some 3 percent. That’s similar to some nations of Africa, a continent, we’ve been told, which is rife with HIV and AIDS.
AIDS 2012 Opening Day Marchers, Yesterday
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It’s the perfect illustration of how weird and busted our health care system and overall economy are. Richest nation in the history of the world — millions of people uninsured, poverty-stricken, uneducated, and sick.
Oh, that invisible hand.
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THE NATION’S HAND-HOLDER
Barack Obama showed up in Aurora, Colorado yesterday to console the families of the victims of that legal gun owner, James Holmes.
Obama In Aurora
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You, know, Ronald Reagan perfected this aspect of the presidential portfolio. Say what you will about Saint Ronald — and I’ve said plenty about the most terrifying president of my lifetime — he was brilliant as our chief cheerleader, mourner, and tucker of the nation into bed at night.
Mike Royko once wrote that Reagan was a miserable prez for domestic issues and a riverboat gambler when it came to foreign affairs, but he was so good at the above-mentioned tasks that he ought to have been named king for life. He could handle all those warm and fuzzy duties while staying as far away as possible from the more pressing work of the White House.
And that was George W. Bush’s undoing. His abominable showing after Hurricane Katrina led to his downfall, the fracturing of his party, and the election of Obama himself. Reagan would have spent many an hour letting the folks of New Orleans he was with them.
Bush, for his part, seemed blase about the whole deal, his most memorable utterance being that famous frat-boy backslapping, “Brownie, yer doin’ a heckuva of a job.”
It’s Yucky Down There
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Obama’s got this part of the job down pat.
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HILLER THE WOODSMITH; HILLER THE WORDSMITH
Our own Nancy Hiller has a big piece coming out in the October edition of Fine Woodworking (#228).
A little shameless promotion here: we’ll be carrying the mag at the Book Corner. Oh, we’ve got the book, too. See you there.
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CRAZY — TERRIFYINGLY CRAZY
This weekend I noticed a number of references on Facebook to the deranged theory that the Aurora, Colorado shooting was a false flag op carried out by one-worlders eager to strip the the planet’s citizenry of their sacred armaments
The theory goes like this:
The United Nations is pushing its Arms Trade Treaty. See, some of the nations of Earth are making tons of dough selling pistols, rifles, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, mortars, and every other conceivable firearm short of nuclear bombs to the poorer countries so those little guys can shoot themselves up good.
The UN is saying, Hey, let’s slow this biz down a little, huh.
Business As Usual
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Natch, the gun people in this holy land think this is the absolute worst infringement on our rights imaginable. They feel the UN treaty is only the first slide down the slippery slope to the seizure of all guns from all god-fearing Americans.
Don’t ask me why they think that. I can’t begin to explain the psycho-sexual love people have for guns around these parts.
Yeesh!
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Suffice it to say, though, that the Great United States, Inc. is the world’s largest exporter of firearms. Every war in every corner of the Earth is being fought with Americans guns.
It couldn’t be that those simple folk fretting about our sacred rights are being set up by American gun manufacturers and dealers, could it?
Anyway, this weird, weird conspiracy theory holds that James Holmes is sort of a Manchurian Candidate who was hypnotized or drugged to do his dirty deed Friday night, thereby whipping up the namby-pamby nannies of the nation to shriek for gun control.
Yeah, I know, it can’t get any more psychotic.
In fact, I put a post up on Facebook myself the other day saying the next person who espoused this lunacy would be de-friended by me immediately and gleefully.
My old trivia competition pal Andy Wallingford of Louisville took note of my post. He sent me a message and a photo. “Remember,” he wrote, “when conspiracy theories were fun?”
The US Air Force Tunnel Borer
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The conspiracy theorists have put forth a variety of reasons the United Sates Air Force would own the machine picture above. The top among them include the idea that the federal government is creating a vast series of underground mountain tunnels in the western United States, wherein our leaders can retreat and live in splendor while the rest of us die horrible deaths from disease, war, poison gas, asteroid collisions or some other such calamity.
Another theory holds that the tunnels have been created to house extraterrestrials who are working in concert with the feds to be able to skitter underground to all the nations on Earth and then implant their seed in unsuspecting humans.
Try to forget the fact that the proponents of these theories might be living on your block and just enjoy their beauty and unfettered creativity.
Look, I fantasize making sweet, sweet love with Anne Hathaway. My fever dream has about as much chance of coming true as those of the conspiracy theorists.
Oh, Big Mike…
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GOOSEBUMPS
My favorite baseball player of all time, Ron Santo, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday afternoon.
Santo’s Plaque
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Here’s a portion of the acceptance speech given by his widow, Vicki Santo.
Beautiful words: “God, how he loved the Cubs, and the Cubs’ fans.”
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Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.
The phenomenon has only been seen by human eyes seven times.
Wear #14 welder’s glasses or get a pair of those neat eclipse glasses that look a bit like movie theater 3-D glasses. The transit also is visible through one of those pinhole projection boxes the geeky kids in seventh grade always knew how to make when there was a partial solar eclipse.
Eclipse Cheaters
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Which leads me to my fave beat-the-dead-horse question: Why believe in magic and monsters when real life itself is so spectacular?
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WE HAVE A MOVIE
Man, you blew it if you were unable to catch the Italian movie “We Have a Pope.”
I just caught the Ryder Film Series offering last night at the SoFA small theater and it was a delight.
A cardinal named Melville is elected Pope and just as he’s about to greet the crowd in St. Peter’s he suffers what can only be described as a nervous breakdown, brought on primarily by his long simmering lack of self-confidence.
The Moment Before The Breakdown
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The assembled Cardinals, who by canonical law cannot leave the Vatican until the new Pope greets the crowd, panic and eventually bring in a shrink in an effort to get the new boss to the balcony window.
By and by, the new Pope escapes the Vatican and a certain madness ensues.
The beauty of a lot of non-Hollywood movies is they don’t have Hollywood endings. That’s all I’ll say about that.
The movie will run on cable’s Independent Film Channel and if Peter LoPilato can ever get it back here in Bloomington, don’t blow your chance to see it again.
Released in 1988, TLToC dealt with the fever dreams of Christ as he hung on the cross, baking in the sun, driven mad by pain. He imagines an alternative existence wherein he settles into a simple life, marrying Mary Magdalene and not carrying the burden of all humankind’s sins.
The Man Wants Out; The Deity Has A Responsibility
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It’s one of the most pious, spiritual, and reverent movies ever made.
I mean, the whole idea of Christ’s death, as I understand it, was that he was tempted to avoid his fate, but his faith and obedience to his “father in heaven” overcame his human need. And therein, I always thought, lay the foundation for Christianity.
But when TLToC played at the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Catholics and other defenders of the one and only big daddy-o in the sky picketed and shouted and otherwise drew more attention to the film than it ever would have garnered otherwise.
