Today, Son&Heir got a mailout from AARP trying to con him into becoming a “member” of their gang.
Go ahead, AARP, MAKE me feel old, already. . . *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*
Obama Suggests He Will Increases His Support Al-Qaeda: Fixates on Unused Repugncan’t Jock Straps
Syrian factions vie for control of chemical weapons.
Meanwhile, Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda, and Obama Steps Up Military Aid To Syrian Rebels
Personally, I think Syria stored Iraq’s WMD in the unused jockstraps of ball-less, go-along-to-get-along, bend over and say, “Please may I have another” cowardly country club Repugnican’ts who have sucked up to traitorous Dhimmicraps for decades, and The Zero just wants to be in on the jock strap raid, but what do I know?
No Brainer
No, seriously. Absolutely NO thought seems to have been put into this ad for the Hyundai IX35 hydrogen fuel cell powered car:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueuiSLt-HI
“Edgy” huh? #dumbassery
Anyone Notice. . .
. . .that politics have been (mostly) absent around twc for the last short bit? Yeh. Even evil gets a bit boring after a while when all it does is repeat itself: Lies, Damned Lies, MORE Damned Lies and yet MORE. . . with no evidence of any creativity or even the scantest attempt to make the lies anything but blatant, bald-faced yawners.
*shrugs* Maybe that’s the plan, make evil so yawningly, terminally boring that there’s just nothing left to say about it.
Anywho, at least I can watch yet another episode of Poirot via Amazon Instant Video. I never tire of the saxophone in the theme music, and the acting, settings, costuming, dialog and even, to some degree, the fairly predictable Agatha Cristie plots, are all just wonderfully enjoyable. And, of course, the incidental music–quite apart from the theme music–is extremely enjoyable.
There’s that, at least, when all the rest of the world has gone mad, mad, I say. . . *heh*
The “Joys” of Aging #1 Out of #5,728 and Counting. . .
I deal with the pain in joints. Sure it hurts. Yeh, unless I really concentrate on moving beyond the pain, my grip is weaker, for example. Big deal. It’s the worsening tinnitus that ranks right up there at the top.
I’ve fairly well (roughly) isolated the frequencies that result in the most pain/inducement of harmonic disturbances via interaction with my tinnitus. I try to avoid those, but the greater the range of frequencies (and harmonics, overtones, etc.) expressed by a piece of music, the greater likelihood of problems on my end. And that’s a BIG PITA since I really, really find great pleasure in music. (I was actually making significant–to/for me–progress with my lil Bach Strad Cornet before I put it away because playing it just hurt too much. *shrugs* At least I can still “play” it in my head.)
Of course, some of the loudest frequencies in my tinnitus are those ranges also inhabited by the enunciation of consonants in speech, hence a growing dependence on watching an interlocutor, since all the vowels are clear as a bell, and only consonants seem seriously affected by being overwhelmed with noisy tinnitus.
Other frequencies above and below my tinnitus are only interfered with my the apparent “loudness,” which varies according to other conditions. As recently as a couple of years ago, for example, I was able to hear the “mosquito ring tone” us Olde Phartes are supposed to be unable to hear. *shrugs* It was outside those frequencies masked by my tinnitus and the examples I listened to weren’t on any “conflict overtones”.
I hope that the trials on a vagus nerve treatment for tinnitus are successful in humans and are approved for general treatment sometime soon. That would be cool. I could deal with arthritis pain while playing a horn. Heck, I might even try singing again.
Let me dream, OK?
Spring. . . again
Semi-random wanderings/wonderings about this Spring of ours.
Northern Hemisphere, Vernal Equinox: astronomers say it’s Spring since yesterday. What do astronomers know? (How we can let astronomers and accountants–quarterly reports, etc.–run our lives, I dunno. Probably an artifact of public schools.) The daffodils* have called it Spring for nearly a month and a half here in America’s Third World County. The ugly, wild purple clover has agreed for easily as long. So far, robins have not cast their vote, but many plants are budding and (apparently) hardier birds than robins have been making their presence known.
So now, snow. Go figure. Of course, at the rate it’s coming down now, we can expect to have around 2 or 3 hundredths of an inch accumulation. *meh* Not enough to sneeze at. We need more slow-melt moisture right now–or at least I would prefer more.
My gardens already planted won’t mind a few days of cold, since they still have a couple of weeks left before I’d expect any sign of growth anyway. A blanket of snow would be just the trick to hold in what warmth the ground has and then provide some slow watering. One can but hope the rate of snowfall picks up a bit.
Well, it is time for Spring cleanup outside and in. A nice cold day like today encourages the “in” part.
Snow and freezing rain, with a low just reaching freezing temps is forecast for tonight. Folks are talking about this being atypical for Spring weather, but folks have poor memories. Just since we’ve lived in America’s Third World County–a wee tad shy of 20 years–I can recall March weather that was similar.
Maybe I’ll hit the outside long enough to at least mulch the two wee garden areas I’ve planted. Yeh, they’re already covered with garden cloth (with cutouts where I’ve planted seed), but mulching on top of that might be a Good Thing, anyway. We’ll see how it goes. Should have light enough later this afternoon, still.
I wonder if Spring’s pretty much the same as always in West Texas. . .
West Texas Spring–Boing!
*Oh, the asterisk on “daffodils”? When I was growing up, I called them “jonquils” because everyone I knew called ’em that. Regionalism, I guess. Or not. Maybe just a variant name like Narcissus–pretty much the same plant/flower. Orson Scott Card has a gentle not-quite-a-rant on Spring where his take (mentioning jonquils instead of daffodils) is similar to mine.
More Typical Fedgov B.S.
So, since we–very uncharacteristically–have a refund due us from the fedgov this year (primarily due to some rebates on “energy efficient” home improvements and to lower income *sigh*), we filed as soon as all the correct forms were available.
Son&Heir filed a couple of weeks later.
Whose return was processed first? You got it.
Reason #1,386,237 why I hate the IRS.
Memories
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”.
Killing Verisimilitude and Suspension of Disbelief
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.
Holes and Gaps, Cognitive Dissonance and Hypocrisy
[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.
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