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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Monday, 26 January 2004

Topic: Bush

I sometimes worry that our leader is not all there - as in "actually detached from reality."
No. Couldn't be. But then again, the problem seems to be spreading.


Ah, it's not just me.

This on the blog Body and Soul today...
Let's twist again, like we did last summer

Remember that bizarre moment last summer when George Bush forgot that Hans Blix existed?

"The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

Wouldn't let them in?

Fine, chalk that up to a senior moment, or even a slip of the tongue. Sometimes I don't manage to say exactly what I mean either.

But then yesterday, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, discussing the David Kay report, Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) repeated Bush's twisted history:

"But, in regards to Saddam Hussein, if in fact he didn't have them, why on earth didn't he let the U.N. inspectors in and avoid the war? That is a real puzzlement to me."

Okay, they're freaking me out now. Either senility is running rampant in the Republican party, or they're making a concerted effort to keep repeating the same lie until it becomes the accepted truth.

Can they get away with it? ... Blitzer didn't even notice Roberts' revision of history.
Well, many of my friends discussed this with me in many an email.

Bush said that last July. I was appalled that Bush either lied or really was detached from reality. My friends in the news business said not to worry, everyone knew what he meant. No big deal.

But I worry.

Posted by Alan at 19:41 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: World View

Self-Referential Irony - Practice Your French

Quelle est l'origine du mot ? snob ? ?

From Novaplanet.com today...
Lundi 26 Janvier 2004 - D'o? vient le mot snob?

Pourquoi un snob s'appelle-t-il un snob? Mot anglais certes, mais qui vient d'o? ? L'explication la plus r?pandue passe par le latin : snob serait l'abr?g? de sine nobilitate : sans noblesse.

Tout faux, d'apr?s l'Oxford English Dictionary. Snob est un vieux mot de dialecte, qui au XVIII?me si?cle signifie "cordonnier ". Le snob, fort bas dans l'?chelle sociale, fabrique des chaussures.

Puis le sens s'envole et commence une prodigieuse ascension. Le snob devient "celui qui admire et qui veut imiter ". Le sens moderne de parvenu frimeur appara?t sous la plume de l'?crivain William Thackeray, avec son Livre des snobs publi? en 1848.

Toujours plus haut, vers 1910, le snob devient enfin celui qui, non content de s'?lever ou de faire semblant, m?prise ceux qui sont rest?s en bas.

Mais la plus belle d?finition reste sans doute celle de Beau Brummel, le prince des dandys de Londres : "Le dandy lance les modes, le snob les ramasse."
And that's that.

If this makes sense to you then you may consider yourself a snob.

Posted by Alan at 08:37 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Sunday, 25 January 2004

Topic: Bush

Go ahead. Take a satire break. Indulge yourself.

On the web you might have come across the site WHITEHOUSE.ORG - a wildly uneven anti-Bush, or anti-establishment, satire site.

As some of you know, my honors thesis in college, and my work in graduate school, was on the satires of Jonathan Swift. Yep, I was particularly fond of A Tale of a Tub and the famous section "A Digression On Madness." I wrote about that here back in mid-July - "What Jonathan Swift would say about Merrill Lynch were Swift still around...".

In the "Digression" one will find a discussion implying that the world can be divided into "fools" or "knaves" - the only two options. It's quite funny, and nasty. And very cynical. Swift only implies a third alternative - there are fools, and there are knaves, and then there can be total cynics who trust no claim about anything, ever.

I'm working on that third option.

Satire these days isn't so subtle. But you might want to check this out.

THE 2004 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS: COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF PRESIDENT BUSH'S SPEECH TO CONGRESS AND THE NATION
WHITEHOUSE.ORG

Here are my favorite parts:
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, fellow Republican CEOs, terrorist-coddling liberals, telegenic colored toddlers, and uniform-wearing military props:

America this evening is a nation whipped into a state of perpetual paranoia over terrorism. And I, your Supreme and Omnipotent Leader, am rising to sustain that. (Applause.)

In short... BE AFRAID. Be very afraid. Be constantly and persistently afraid. Be totally consumed by fear. Be absolutely, shit-in-your-Dockers terrified. To do otherwise is to voluntarily lay your blue-eyed babies at the Muslamian altar of sacrificial murder. Of course, don't be so a'scared that you feel like you can't let your kids play hopscotch on the sidewalk or go about your daily business as if you were living in the 90's. I've got your back. In fact, I'm the only one who knows how to protect this country from the hole dwellers who tried to kill my daddy.

As we gather tonight, America's military is stretched paper-thin across the face of the Earth. The servicemen and women for whom I feign respect are committing suicide and resigning their commissions in droves. Yet by scattering them around like so much disposal bio-confetti, we keep our domestic news media fixated on war, and in so doing continue to pound the enormous bongo drums of fear which buoy my approval ratings so gloriously. (Applause.)

Indeed, hundreds of military grunts are losing their lives so that you and I can secure the SUV juice we need to keep our country running. Who controls the spice... er, "oil," controls the UNIVERSE! And we thank the Hailiburton Corporation for their tax-deductible, pre-war donation of over 100,000 beautifully ornate military tombstones. (Applause.)

After all, our veterans deserve no less. (Applause.)

Tonight, members of this Republican Congress can take pride in having joined me in donning a fabulous star-spangled toga, invoking terror ad nauseum, and successfully imploding six miserable and horrifying decades of misguided legislation designed by evildoers (yes, American evildoers!) to interfere with God's divine plan for our nation's socio-economically inferior. Way to go, boys. (Applause.)

I want to thank the Democrats, in particular, for having purged their skeletons of the unruly vertebrae which might have otherwise prevented me from experiencing the groin-moistening satisfaction of effortless domination. I know that after this speech, Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi will stutter through their prepared remarks with all the persuasiveness and gravitas of a Richard Simmons tutorial on eating pussy. And for that, I am doubly thankful. (Applause.)
And this further on:
Moving forward, our nation faces a choice. We can act like a sissy little school girl, and waste a bunch of time thinking and talking about boring, non-terror-related stuff - or we can be a massively studly dude, and stay totally focused on bringing the world's most powerful arsenal to bear upon a few hundred hole-dwelling, lice-bearded boogey men. Now some say I'm thick as a brick, but I'm not blind to the irony there. Whoever would have guessed that Americans could believe that the only way to be "tough" is to twist your panties in a frantic perma-knot over some boxcutter-wielding religious loonies all named Mohammed? Not me, for one. But hey, whatever works! (Applause.)
And this:
Lately though, some whiners have been rudely dwelling on the fact that I sold America on an illegal war by promising to unearth weapons of mass destruction, which I have since failed to do. To them I say, "Who cares! Saddam's out of power, and that's a good thing!" I mean, I just don't get those folks. For instance, if I write a check for a new lawn mower, and the dealer brings me an ice cream truck instead, am I going to complain about it? Hell no! I like ice cream! Well it's the same thing with Iraq. Sure, the transaction may have technically been fraudulent, but ice cream is yummy! You'd think liberals could get that through their thick skulls. I mean, sheesh!
And it goes on, covering gay marriage issues, the Patriot Act and the economy.

I guess it's funny.

The link will take you to the whole thing. It's lame in places, and okay in other places, and rather good here and there. We have no contemporary Swift yet.

Posted by Alan at 22:28 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Photos

Minimal blogging today, of course.
The new issue of Just Above Sunset Magazine took most of the day.
Check it out.
The link is in the left panel.



Posted by Alan at 17:38 PST | Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink
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Saturday, 24 January 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Trouble on the Horizon: The United States is Just Not Ready for THIS!

Let's suppose John Kerry wins the nomination of the Democratic Party to run against George Bush in the fall elections.

Make a real leap and assume he wins the presidency.

I know. That is far-fetched. But just assume it could happen.

Here's the problem. The new First Lady would be real departure from what we usually get.

See Kerry's gold
She's rich, clever, outspoken (in several languages) and she's got money ... lots of it. And if she has anything to do with things, she'll be America's next First Lady, wife of a Democrat President.
Edward Helmore, The Guardian (UK), Sunday January 25, 2004

Read this and you'll understand the problem, and see the line of attack that Karl Rove, Bush's best friend and chief political advisor, will take.

Excerpts:
If her spouse of nine years, John Kerry, goes on to win the White House, she will make a First Lady quite unlike any America has seen before. Portuguese by birth, she was raised in Africa and educated in Switzerland. Spontaneous and independent of mind; candid and direct to the point of being impolitic, she is like her husband, a pro-choice Roman Catholic. And she is independently wealthy, to the tune of $550 million, from her first marriage to the late senator John Heinz, heir to the ketchup fortune. She remains a power in her own right as head of the Howard Heinz Endowment and Heinz Family Philanthropies, a charity with a billion-dollar endowment that gives away millions each year to environmental, educational and health causes.

It is a shared passion for the environment that brought John Kerry and Teresa Heinz together. They met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where she had been sent as delegate by the first President Bush. That was 12 months after John Heinz, a potential presidential candidate himself, died in a plane crash. She and Kerry subsequently bonded after he recited a prayer - in Latin - at a Mass they both attended.
This Bush team is going to make mincemeat of her on all this. Portuguese! Born in Mozambique! With a BA from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa! The Bush team is laughing now. Americans won't stand for this.

And Latin? Latin? What's with that?

But wait! It gets worse, or better, depending on your political views. She's been campaigning for her husband:
... On a recent tour of Latino businesses in Manchester, New Hampshire, the French-African owner of a barbershop, who'd been swapping stories with her in French about growing up in Africa, said she hadn't mentioned her husband was running for president. But, said Victor Mbuyi, 'her French was very good'.
Fluent French? The kiss of death! We ALL know about the evil French. French is NOT what they speak in Texas, or anywhere "real Americans" live. And too it does appear she temporarily forget to plug her husband's campaign and kind of got sidetracked into a relaxed, personal conversation. Horrors!

But wait! It gets worse, or better, depending on your political views.
The daughter of a prominent Portuguese doctor, Heinz Kerry, n?e Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, grew up in Mozambique. She attended a school run by British nuns, and later studied Romance languages at senior school in South Africa, where she became involved in the nascent anti-apartheid movement of the late 1950s. At university in Geneva, she was a classmate of Kofi Annan at the city's School of Interpreters. Now fluent in five languages, she graduated and went to New York to become an interpreter at the United Nations, before marrying Heinz in 1966.
An old buddy of Kofi Annan? She worked for the United Nations, those folks who wouldn't support our little war to take over Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein and all those weapons of mass destruction that Dick Cheney said are really, really there - and he said that TODAY at the World Economic Summit is Davos, Switzerland.

This is going to be GOOD. Rove is sharpening the knives now!

But wait! It gets worse, or better, depending on your political views.
... With the perspective of an admiring foreigner, she often speaks of the demise of America's reputation abroad. 'I understand why so many of our friends around the world are so mad at us,' she said at a recent event. We have let them down. In a democracy, the one thing that cannot be done is to destroy its trust, its hope, its idealism. This administration is the most cynical, the most venal, the most Machiavellian administration in my 32 years in Washington.'
Yipes. She thinks what others think of us matters! Condi Rice is giggling now.

And damn, she uses words like Machiavellian! George doesn't.

But wait! It gets even worse, or even better, depending on your political views.
... asked whether she would take her husband's name, she shot back: 'Politically, it's going to be Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I don't give a shit, you know? There are other things to worry about.' And she added: 'Swearing is a good way to relieve tension'.
That cuts it. She's not a subservient, adoring wife. Horrors. It's enough to make Laura Bush weep bitter tears.

And no good Christian swears! Lest of all a Christian woman! There goes the Bible Belt.

Oh, this is going to be FUN!

Posted by Alan at 21:18 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Saturday, 24 January 2004 21:27 PST home

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