"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."
Probably not.
The Wasteland of Detroit is mulling a new “no-knock list” ordinance to cut down on door-to-door solicitations or whatever.
As though that would make a difference, at least here in America’s Third World County. I figure if Mormon “missionaries,” Jehovah’s Witnesses and door-to-door salesmen don’t take the hints of the “Go Away” mat at my front door and the used target silhouette on a lawn poster, a “no-knock” ordinance wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference.
From The Puppy Blender:
How to Do Everything Kindle Fire, by Jason Rich, is not available in Kindle format.
Good one, dumbasses.
Too many feathers; not enough tar.
(Now, that’s just bad planning.)
Actually, the post title could be an existential cry of pain. “Why, WHY, WHY did the %$#@!% politician survive the fire?!?!?” (Where “%$#@!%” is a statement of a theological probability *heh*)
Whenever I see a Dodge Ram in my rearview mirror (usually tailgating, it seems), I think, “Well, thanks for the warning… ”
Dodge! Ram!
As I noted earlier in “Suspension of Belief” one depiction in film/TV that always nauseates me is an absolutely incompetent portrayal of musical performance or direction. The most recent such “gagamaggot” butchery of a depiction of musical direction I’ve seen was given by Academy Award-winning director Peter Dougan Capaldi in an acting role in the 2006 Midsomer Murders episode, Death in Chorus, where he played a “perfectionist” choral director. Badly. Very, very badly. I’d walk out of the first rehearsal run by someone as incompetent as the director as portrayed by this yutz.
*sigh*
And the actors and the director of the episode apparently didn’t know any better, either.
Gagamaggot.
We have an entertainment center cabinet that’s a wee tad over 5′ in length. When I sit on the couch and hold my teensy lil Kindle Fire at arm’s length, it more than covers my view of the EC. Given the gorgeous display on the Fire, it’s like having my own, personal, hand-held “big screen TV”.
So, as long as I can find streaming video to suit my tastes, I can defer buying a bigger TV, eh? 😉
Of course, the lil 15.6″ screen on my laptop seems even larger in viewing area, when viewed from its usual place on my lap… Heck, in use, it appears to cover 3/4 of the whole wall facing me.
Oh what a difference perspective makes.
Good fiction–written or portrayed on film or stage–requires suspension of disbelief, but that, in turn, requires an at least minimal amount of competence from writers, editors, directors and actors in order that an intelligent and reasonably literate audience not be offended into rejection of the fiction the putative artists are attempting to portray.
It’s usually the little things. In dramatic performances, props and settings don’t have to depict things in meticulous detail in order to be believable within a story’s framework, but such things should at least evoke a credible representation of places and things that advance a story. Items evoking a late 1950s setting should not dominate a late 1960s plot line, for example, and in film, closeups of patently fake stage blood or grossly incongruous weather and lighting, etc., are distractions that any director with half a brain ought to avoid.
So, too, are problems with actors portraying behaviors that their characters engage in daily, routinely–behaviors, “business” in acting terms, that the characters are supposedly competent to perform–and botching the action, sometimes almost too clumsily for words. *sigh* And actors portraying certain professional acts incompetently are complete turn-offs for anyone with even minimal knowledge of competent performance of those actions. My “favorite” is idiots making a hash of portraying music conductors. In fact, in a lifetime of viewing dramatic fiction, I have seen actors portraying the conducting of musical performances do a credible job just twice. The rest of the time the portrayals range from simply stupid and incompetent to offensive.
In written fiction, one of the surest signs of a writer whose characters are little more than babbling descriptions by a blind man of faded shadows of statues based on paintings made from blurred photos of reflections in a carnival mirror is when the writer tries to create a character by listing the things that character owns–usually invoking some currently trendy brands of whatever objects the writer associates with the sort of person the writer thinks he’s trying to evoke. Usually wrongly.
Of course these kinds of things are common in most fiction nowadays, so finding anything contemporary that at least minimizes these sorts of distractions is a Good Thing.
But at least I’m not dealing here with the even more poorly-depicted fiction in newspapers and network news. That’s even worse.
A brief addendum. I’ve mentioned the Brit mystery show I’ve been watching. I’m currently in season seven (of fifteen), and although I still enjoy the incidental instrumental music a great deal and the scenery and sets just as much, one thing has become increasingly grating: the murders. Almost every one of the persons murdered in the stories has been a complete idiot, characters intent on lending Darwin a hand in weeding the gene pool, as it were (though an unfortunate number are portrayed as having reproduced before their stupidity eliminates them).
I’ll let one typical “victim” stand in as a proxy for almost all the rest. After bludgeoning one cooperative soul to death with a handy cudgel, the murderer continues to stand over the body of his complicit victim. As he’s standing there, another useful idiot approaches and says, “What have you done?!?” and very helpfully kneels over the body as if to say, “Me! Me! Kill me next, please!”
Of course, the murderer obliges.
*sigh*
How many idiotic characters will the writers dispose of before the show ends? The answer: both too many and not enough… No wonder the British Empire is no more. 😉 But… given that the show is still so much better than the fare that attracts viewers in droves on American TV, perhaps that indicates something about an inevitable decline of American society and even–maybe–America’s place on the world’s stage, as well.
“That’s not a huge bald spot.”
*heh*
You can kiss my grits and call me a stinker–I really DGARA–but there are some questions I tire of hearing “answers” to.
“How are you?” and its slightly better, less common, companion, “How are you doing?” are two of them. The now archaic-sounding “How do you do?” (still remotely and occasionally present in the greeting, “Howdy”) is another one.
“Why?”, you may ask. Go ahead, I said you may ask. *heh*
Nowadays, the most common answer I hear to either “How are you?” or even “How are you doing?” is the nonsense answer, “I’m good.” Persons answering either of those questions would be better to simply grunt a nonsense monosyllabic, “Uh.” Are they truly good? Just bragging disingenuously? Outright liars or simply ill-informed, ignorant of their own corrupt natures? No, such respondents are not “good” although they may feel well and be experiencing little or no distress. Besides, the question is not “What are you?” but “How are you?” and I doubt anyone can really answer that one without resorting to a religious exposition. It’s a matter of epistemology that certainly none of the philosophers I have read have answered satisfactorily. Indeed, how are any of us? How do we come to be and continue to exist, if exist we truly do, in a state of consciousness–if conscious we truly are?
If the question responded to happened to be “How are you doing?” then such an answer is still nonsense. “I’m good” as a response still avoids the “How” and has no information whatsoever about what good the person is doing, if any at all (most persons seem to live a quotidian existence without doing anything good at all–and rarely do anything really well, either). And again with the epistemology thingy. Indeed, if Descartes was onto something, then most people simply aren’t, you know?
All either party–asker and answerer–in these greeting formulas accomplishes with such exchanges is just the expulsions of exhaled gases through their respective vocal apparatuses resulting in nonsense sounds, empty of any exchange of meaning. Wasted breath, IMO.
Rare indeed is the person who will answer either of those questions, “I’m well” or “I’m doing well.”
I’ll leave the deconstruction and analysis of answers to “How do you do?” as an exercise for the reader.
BTW, when asked “How are you?” I usually respond, “I don’t know. That’s one of the deepest quandaries of metaphysics, and although many have asked the question and searched for answers, no one has been able to answer the question satisfactorily. What do you think? How am I?” I similarly riff off “How are you doing?”
But I’m not usually asked those questions. Often, I beat folks to the “greet” with, “How am I doing?” The completely clueless will respond with the pedestrian nonsense grunt of “I’m good” since they’ll not have heard the question. The slightly more aware might say, “You’re good” and smile at the sharpness they think they’ve displayed. Of course, when I respond, “Well, I’m flattered, but I’m hardly good. Even Jesus said, ‘There is none good but God’ and I’m not easily mistaken for God, you know?” it causes a wee cognitive dissonance. *heh* The brighter respondents will come back with something along the lines of either, “Well, you look all right [or even ‘good’ or ‘well’] to me” (“Need a trip to the optometrist, eh?” :-)) or even, “I don’t know” (Better). Best, “Oh, dear! [peering at me with “concerned look” written plainly on mug] You should be home in bed I’ll bring some chicken soup by later.” (An actual response from someone I enjoy “speaking in [nonsense] tongues” with around other, befuddled-by-our-nonsense, folks.)
But I don’t always use the “How am I doing?” line. More often, I’ll simply use a form of the neutral, also meaningless, “Good morning [afternoon, evening]” greeting, although most often in the more laconic, “Mornin’ [afternoon, evenin’]. Such a non-committal, inoffensive nonsense greeting serves the function of social lubricant better, IMO.
Of course, with friends or family, instead of casual acquaintances and chance-met strangers, I know I can engage in a genuine greeting/response, but those two classes of persons really aren’t all that common, you know?