"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Every now and then things long misplaced just pop into focus from long-ago memories. Here’s one from those after school snack times in front of the TV (B&W, of course) before heading out to play for a bit before dinner (well, actually “supper” in our home :-)). Every afternoon about four a brief video of a jet in flight accompanied by music and the reading of “High Flight” would hold me for a very short time:
The poem
“High Flight”
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
–John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Just one more memory, burnished by time, softly glowing. I can still hear it as one of “the voices in my head”.
One thing I hate in movies is over-production and absolutely stupid direction that manufactures such absolutely stupid physical business that anyone with more active brain cells than are found in a used Kleenex will experience a complete dissolution of suspension of disbelief.
I saw a video (yeh, a pirated video of a TV pilot for s show that didn’t make it past the pilot *shrugs* Good/bad: interesting concept, well-acted, poorly directed and overly post-produced) recently that threw me off in just about every third scene.
Scene: “burglar” (gal “sneaking” her mom’s home late at night) but post production added excessive shoe noises, overly loud openings and closings of doors, etc. I mean, even just walking around normally on our hardwood floors, I can’t MAKE myself walk that noisily, and no normal door opens and closes (latches, hinges and door itself) as noisily as the post-production sounds made those doors seem to. Just stupid.
Then: protagonist shadowing a hit man driving a glaring puke yellow muscle car. OK, that’s jarring. But… the protagonist is driving an almost fluorescent green car. And stakes out the hit man overnight in that “LOOK AT ME!” color car. The hit man does an obvious 360 sweep checking for suspicious activity both before settling in for the night and before entering his car the next morning AND MISSES THE FLUORESCENT GREEN CAR (which he has seen WITH the protagonist before) WHICH IS PARKED ALMOST DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM HIS OWN!!!
*sigh*
And I’ll just bet you that most folks who did actually see the thing when it aired (and flopped) weren’t affected at all by such things.
BTW, despite the bad directing and bad post-production effects (good direction would have required a fix of the script and props, etc., and KILLED the crappy post production shiite), the concept, casting and acting in general carried this particular example to “low-to-moderately-enjoyable” range.
But examples of stupid directing and post-production abound, nowadays, and make it into even main stream movies. *sigh* I’m at about 50% on the Amazon instant videos I check out. About half of them don’t last past the 15-20-minute mark because of crap like this.
[OK, I’m all over the map on this post, but maybe some of it will spark a thought or two. I blame lack of sleep and caffeine deprivation, both. 🙂 ]
The strange thing to my eye about this post by, urm, David Post in response to an article titled, “The Monster of Monticello,” is that he uses the words of Lincoln, a man I suspect was truly decent in many ways, but also truly blind to his own hypocrisy (just one example: see the hypocrisy of the words of the Gettysburg Address spoken by someone waging a war AGAINST self-determination and the very foundational principles of federalism and the very Constitution he swore to defend) to support Jefferson’s place as a truly great champion of freedom, though his personal practices as a slavemaster were at stark odds with the principles he championed.
While I agree with Post’s general viewpoint that yes, Jefferson WAS a great champion of liberty even though he was an individual example of some of the worst practices of slavery, I’m surprised his defense wasn’t simply, “Ad hominem arguments are invalid on their face,” and just leave it at that. After all, reasonable people would agree that attacking the ideas and principles a person utters (and even fights for) by attacking their character is unreasonable, while unreasonable people will just be unreasonable anyway, so ANY reasoned argument is worthless with such.
Ad then there’s the implicit hagiography of Lincoln in the post. *sigh* I’ll not go down that path right now, but using Lincoln’s words to defend Jefferson on the matter of championing liberty is a briar patch I’d certainly not want to throw myself into, but then I do GARA about the facts of Lincoln’s exercise of power leading up to and during the War Between the States. It’s not a matter of Mr. Lincoln’s personal character but of his very well-spoken propaganda in support of his exercise of office.*
So, hypocrisy abounds, but great men can still do good. I believe Jefferson was by far the greater of the two men and has been a far, far greater force for good, but Lincoln did at least manage to kill over 600,000 Americans with his war. That alone makes him a great man in any history.
Oh, and he said a lot of really nice things, as president, that his actions as president–not as a private citizen–contradict. I’ll be happy to take his words and embrace many of them and their ideals. Just spare me from another hypocritically Lincolnesque president.
Jefferson’s slaves never had it as bad as the men Lincoln had shanghaied and sent to their deaths.
This A.M., during our M-Th-F “carpool”, my Wonder Woman and I had one of those “partner telepathy” things that have become more and more frequent over the years. Windshield just looked dewy, not frosted, so I just flipped the wipers for a one-wipe. Nope. “Hmm, looks like it’s a little frosty. I may have to rename today.” Pause. “Maybe I’ll call it ‘Robert'”.
“Funny,” she said, “I thought I’d say ‘Jack’ but then thought ‘Robert’ myself.”
Married long enough yet?
I’ve taken to putting a water-soluble dietary fiber powder in my coffee. No discernible difference in taste or texture, but I do have a rather moving experience several hours later… 😉 Maybe I should also have some jalapeño ice cream with it?
What’s the deal with The Zero? Trying out a new comedy routine or an IQ test for Republicans? “So here’s the deal: you give me $1.2 Trillion in tax hikes and I give you bupkis. Pretty good deal, eh? *wink-wink-nudge-nudge*”
If Repugnican’ts were to get brain transplants (so they can qualify as real Republicans) they’d all voice their severe disapproval of his proposals and then abstain from votes on The Zero’s them and let the Dhimmicraps OWN the resultant disasters. “See? we didn’t stand in the way of The Zero getting what he wanted, while we voiced our disapproval with abstentions. It’s not OUR mess. It’s all on The Zero and his cronies. It’s THEIR policies that have created what we have and you can blame them, not us. So there. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.”
One last appeal to anyone who may be considering a “protest” vote today: Bill Whittle’s “Falling on Principle”
Consider carefully who and what you vote for today, from local races all the way to DC.
Here in America’s Third World County™, polling places were open at 6:00 this morning, and parking places at our polling place were thin on the ground. All the voting “booths” were filled when we walked in, but there was almost no waiting (apart from having our drivers licenses scanned and signing the electronic “register”), because people were, for the most part, voting quickly and getting back on the road to work.
Yep. No Odumbo bumper stickers on the cars outside at all, at all.
I know a number of Ron Paul die-hards America’s Third World County™ who were planning on sitting this one out, but the sheer weight of Makers here in the county as opposed to Takers (many of whom around here cannot legally vote anyway, since they’re illegals*) means that I’ll be hugely surprised if Dhimmicraps receive more than 10% of this county’s votes this year. Seriously.
Would that this county were a microcosm of the rest of the country, third world infrastructure and jury-rigging tightwaddery and all…
In a more perfect world, Frank J. Flemming’s views of government–which are more in line with the goals the Founders had in mind (as the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, et al point to) than those any politician now on the stage declares–his views would hold a strong majority of the electorate, but in our real world, we must fight the fight we have.
If you want to vote against statism, make your vote count. Yeh, the Republicans on your ballot are still very likely drawn from the shallow end of the pseudo-conservative swamp that has, for the most part, given us wannabe elite country club Repugnican’ts since the G.H.W. Bush camp’s slaying of the Reagan revolution lion, but driving toward a cliff at 75mph still gives us more room for maneuver and time to salvage something than driving toward a cliff at the Dhimmicrappic Party’s current 120mph.
Throwing some bubblegum at the vehicle’s tires by casting a protest vote just isn’t going to help anything, and saying, in whatever principled fashion, “All the candidates from the two major parties are scoundrels, so I’ll not vote for any of ’em. Let the country get what it deserves. Maybe when it all crashes down, we can resurrect something worthwhile from the ashes,” is just a libertarian/liberal embrace of the socialist Cloward-Pivens principle that Obama and his ilk have instituted with a vengeance.
Seriously. A “principled” protest vote is nothing more or less than an attempt to do the same ruinous things Obama and his co-conspirators, fellow travelers, cronies and useful idiots have spent the last (nearly) four years doing: burn the house down in a belief that YOUR views will emerge from the ashes.
Tuesday will be the first time since I began voting that I will vote a straight party ticket. No exceptions. Oh, there is one local candidate who’s a Democrat who is OK. He’s done as good a job as anyone else in living memory in the Sheriff’s position (which is somewhere between so-so and “not quite corrupt enough to catch out”–about par for the Sheriff’s job around here from time immemorial, I’m told *sigh*). But this year, quite apart from a late-blooming appreciation for the few points where the Republican presidential candidate does truly shine (and a grudging acknowledgement that he’s mostly all right on more than a few points), my only criterion for voting for any other candidates are that they NOT be Democrats.
It’s my own small way of voting a “punishment” vote on the general Dhimmicrappic agenda. I DGARA if any of the other Republican candidates are genuine Republicans or just country club wanna-be elite Repugnican’ts. I can deal with either of those (although genuine republicans aren’t genuinely conservative enough for me, for the most part), but I will not now, or ever, vote again for a Dhimmicrap, unless the party is utterly broken and remade with genuinely liberal principles the Founders (who sought to CONSERVE, in the sense of Burke’s conservatism, the more liberal traditions of expanding liberty protected by government that had become a British tradition from the Magna Carta onward) espoused.
Just call me a one-issue voter this election. That issue is, “Is the candidate or ballot proposition a Democratic one? If so, consign him/it to the eighth level of hell.”
“I’m too old to understand this,” is an attitude I run across from time to time in, naturally enough, older people. (Here I am in my 60s talking about “older people” *sheesh*) It’s an attitude that seems to say, “I’m all finished living. I have nothing more I care to learn,” or worse, “I died a few years ago. My body just hasn’t caught up with me yet.”
So, Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” character is coming to the big screen. Sort of. In One Shot (trailer below), Tom Cruise is inexplicably cast as Jack Reacher. WTF?!?
No, seriously: WTF?!?
The Character, as established by Child in–I think–17 novels is 6’5″, 250 pounds of phlegmatic, unstoppable force. I can think of exactly NO “negotiation” (read, “Reacher utterly destroys the bad guys in hand-to-hand, or head-to-face-butt”) scene in any of the books that a guy Tom Cruise’s size could survive, let alone wreak the havoc the Reacher character does.
And then there’s personality. The quirky, birdlike Cruise twitching from one girly-voiced dialog delivery to another is hardly the image of the laconic, phegmatic Reacher portrayed in so many successful novels to date. Absolutely nothing in the trailer, for instance, seems congruent with the Reacher character in the books.
I imagine those who have never read any of the books and have a crush on Pretty Boy Cruise will enjoy the thing, but while I applaud the fact that Lee Child is going to make some big bucks off the thing, I kind of wish he’d played the part of Reacher himself. It’d have been at least a little more believable.
Infant product class, that is. eBooks. I read a lot of ’em. So far, very few eBooks seem to take advantage of the medium to expand beyond print format, and many are weaker products than hardcopy books. Here’s a brief blurb of my consumer-of-print viewpoint.
Many books can benefit from maps, tables and other reference materials. With hardcopy books, these are often included, and if not I often have the material to hand (or nearby) to fill the gaps. eBooks that can benefit from such addenda need them even more than print works, because they’re often read in locales where such things are unavailable even to someone like me who has a wide-ranging reference library at hand. Such things should be included in eBooks that would benefit from them, and they should be, at the very least, context sensitive. For example, when maps are called for, scalable, zoomable satellite or aerial maps (with helpful labeling, perhaps) could be included with little more trouble than simple line-drawing maps. Use your imagination to supply supplementary materials lists eBook authors should include. You’ll have to, though, because so far very few authors have used theirs in that manner.
As to those eBooks that are weaker products than corresponding print works. *sigh* One of the worst examples I can think of offhand was a novel written by a very good writer before eBooks had really taken off. I read it expecting not great but good fun. The story was OK, as were the characters, descriptive narrative and dialog, but… he’d apparently just scanned it–or had it scanned–and converted to electronic format and apparently had not even had it proof read. Too many obvious scanning errors ruined enjoyment of the book. But that’s just one of the worst. Self-published, author edited or proofread (or author edited AND proofread) eBooks seem to be about 85% POORLY edited and proofread. Good lord, folks! Execrable grammar, spelling and punctuation just barely scratches the surface of many crap-laden plots, dialog, descriptive narrative and characters crudely drawn in crayon from B-movie central casting descriptions!
Yes, there are a lot of well-written, well-edited/proofread “Indie” published books available, but the numbers of well-written “Indie” books is only because so very much chaff is out there to winnow the well-written books out of. It’s a real pain in the neck (although the pain’s really quite a bit further south of there) to be reading along thinking, “Interesting story–OH CRAP! GETCHER SYNTAX OUTA YOUR ASS!” or “SPELLCHECK, DUMBASS, SPELLCHECK!!” or “WTF! YOU DIDN’T JUST ‘THERE’S’ ME AGAIN! over and over again.
I’m sure both the crap writing and the features blocks will work themselves out in time, though. eBooks are still in a development phase, and some writers, at least, seem to be thinking seriously about some of these things. Thank heavens. *sigh*
Ordering from Amazon. Placed order w/”2-day shipping” option. Received notice of shipping w/in an hour. By noon, the item was listed as having shipped from a Fedex location about 70 miles from me. Next a.m.? Scanned in at a Fedex location 370 miles from me, though it’d travel more than 400 miles to get here from there via Fedex.
If I’d had direct access to the Amazon Marketplace seller, Imight well have simply driven up and gotten the product, but in that case, paying the extra $3 or $4 (I forget which) for next day delivery… nah, wouldn’t have speeded things up, since item was ordered on Friday. Would probably still have been Monday. And yes, I know Amazon said it’d be here by Tuesday, but it’ll be Monday, if my experiences w/Fedex are any guide.
Still… it will have traveled almost 800 miles to get here from 70 miles away. Something’s just wrong there. It’s almost as if it were coming via the Post Office.* Continue reading “Modern Living”
