hail seizer

I just picked this up off of my back porch. That's a quarter in the photo. I hate Kansas.

howzat again?

I just noticed this TV program listing: "Thomas Kinkade: Fine Art"


I'm a bit puzzled. Which one is it?

skewed priorities

It's impossible to avoid the massive festival of grief-for-profit that is the Michael Jackson memorial in Los Angeles. The corporation that was footing the bills for Jackson's now-canceled "final" tour stands to make millions of dollars by milking their star's death and it's a certainty that there will be a multi-DVD package of the event that may make as much money as the concerts would have.

I find it difficult to stomach all of this weepy eulogization of a man who was about as psychologically unhealthy as it is possible to be and who really wasn't as gifted a musician as he is being portrayed. Groomed for stardom like an Iron Curtain gymnast of the Sixties, Jackson grew up to be a popular performer not so much for his musical talent but for his image and ability to stage a spectacle of proportions suitable for the ancient Colosseum. Being lauded for his abilities as a musician is a bit odd, since his primary contribution was as an entertainer rather than as a composer.

Regardless of how he became famous and for what, the most tragic part of all of this is watching the state of California (which is now sending IOU's to state employees, welfare recipients, and many of the most vulnerable people in one of the wealthiest states in the union because of its dysfunctional and debt-ridden government) foot the bill for this incredible display of insipidity.

Bread and circuses for the suffering masses, but millions of dollars in support of wealthy private citizens and companies that are profiting like mad off this ginned-up festival of grief. This is how empires die.

happy Fourth of July

There's still some democracy left in the tube after all.

rejuvenated

I just finished taking a four-mile walk on a lovely seventy-five degrees fahrenheit summer evening with a gentle, warm rainshower the entire time, all while I was wearing only shorts and sneakers. I haven't done anything like that in close to thirty years. It was a near-transcendent experience, a communing with the universe of the kind I haven't felt in decades. I think I will probably remember this walk for the rest of my life. Every once in a while you get a quiet pause where you fully grasp the flavor of how wonderful it is to simply be alive and to drink in the sensation in a setting where there are no distractions and the only thing that exists is the moment and yourself. Those brief flashes make everything else worthwhile. Life is good.

uh-oh

According to Firedoglake by way of a CNN source, "a criminal indictment" for Sarah Palin is pending authorization and will be enacted within a few days.

You betcha.

lest we forget

Palin bailin'!

I guess she needs some time to get that log out of her own eye.

UPDATE:

After watching that breathlessly disjointed and scattershot statement, I can't help but wonder if Sarah hasn't made good friends with Levi's mother and is huffing down piles of that classic hand-made Wasilla meth. Or, that there's another shoe going to drop really soon, like maybe that accusation against David Letterman was unintentionally right and the 14 year-old is preggers now, or that Sarah has been hitting her own Appalachian Trail, or that there has been some illegal behavior from the governor's office that's about to come to light. No matter what, this is way more entertaining than the Michael Jackson coverage.

yeah, he takes after his dad...

ouch

The big breaking news story today was that Michael Jackson died intestate.



Wow. I guess he had more surgery than I realized.

true dat

"Is America dying? It’s hard to be sure. But we’re clearly a land of brainless ciphers—and over the course of the past eight years, we have paid a very high price for that powerful dumbness. A modern society can’t run on dumb—and we are now dumb to the core."


Somerby puts it over the fence. Read more at: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh062909.shtml

nature sublime

The other day, I was presenting a live seasonal star show in the dome. It was a summer afternoon, and a young boy was attending the show with family. He was clutching a jar with some holes poked in the lid, and upon a closer look I saw that he had apparently caught some fireflies the previous night and had them captive in the jar. I began the presentation, letting the Sun set in the west, and fast-forwarded to the midnight hours in order to be able to get the classic Sagittarius/Scorpio/Milky Way southern sky of summer, with the Summer Triangle of Vega, Altair, and Deneb high overhead, and brilliant Jupiter rising in the eastern sky. After just a couple of minutes discussing the prominent points of the summer sky I noticed some faint light but really didn't think anything of it, but within another couple of minutes it had become very obvious that the eight or so fireflies contained in the jar had decided that it was nighttime and they started to blink as furiously as they would be doing if it actually was midnight. I thought I had seen everything possible in a planetarium, and suddenly I was presented with one of the most delightful of surprises. What an extraordinary universe we live in.

the other glove drops

childhood's end

ow!

isn't it obvious?

The puzzling "hiking trip" that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has putatively taken over the last several days has the media all aflutter with theories, or at least wild guesses as to where he has been and what he has actually been doing.

I think I can tell you.

Well, I can't tell you for sure what he has actually been up to during his mysterious absence, but I can tell you what the only story he can get away with is.


Governor Sanford is going to step before the cameras and announce that he had big decisions to make and needed to search his soul and that getting some private time to chat with god out in the great wilderness of America would be the right way to do it, and he will announce this with such overt, pious fervor that nobody will dare be rude enough to question it any further. The theocratic base of the republican party will swoon, the media will quietly accept it in order to not be accused of being hostile to religion, and Sanford will ooze piety like Jim Bakker reborn.

It's the only possible play.