Nannies and Bots of the Evil Kind

It's still way early (for me) but David Burge is leading the sweeps for the day's best tweet with this:

@iowahawkblog David Burge

All in a day's work for the U.S. Department of Facepalm dailycaller.com/2011/06/22/fed…

Heh.  I'll have to file that away for future use.  Burge is right though... facepalm is the appropriate reaction after reading shit like this (from Burge's link):

The federal government has a growing interest in the eating habits of Americans for the same reason it has an interest in tobacco consumption, said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The reason is money, because three-quarters of medical-spending is driven by chronic diseases, such as obesity and tobacco-related diseases, she said.

Sebelius’ comments came at the tail-end of Tuesday’s White House press conference where officials showcased nine new photos that must be carried on cigarette packs. Officials used a survey of 18,000 people to find the images that would have the most distressing impact on groups of smokers, including young smokers and mothers of young kids. 

Ah, yes.  There's much to dislike here.  A "growing interest in the eating habits..." sounds both ludicrous and ominous at the same time, if that's possible.  Then again, those two words describe much of the gubmint's activities these days.  I won't rant about Nanny's new cigarette pack "warnings," except to say gubmint at ALL levels should be very careful what they wish for.  The taxes paid by cigarette smokers provide for a LOT of gubmint services, especially at the state level.  If every smoker in America quit today each of the 50 states would be in a budget crisis tomorrow.  What?  Oh, OK... make that a worse crisis.

―:☺:―

In other news... My baby has her new hat.  I left El Casa Móvil de Pennington just before 0700 hrs yesterday morning and didn't return until nearly 1800 hrs, which made for a mighty long day, lemmee tell ya.  I put that time to good use by doin' sumthin' I rarely do these days:  I read Robopocalypse from cover to cover (so to speak) in a single sitting.  The lede grafs from a review at IO9:

Cool robots unlike any you've seen before battle humans in a near-future world where computerized cars and military drones are out to smash all homo sapiens. Until some robotics geeks and an army of Osage natives learn to fight back. 

It sounds like the plot to the most awesome robot uprising movie ever, and one day it will be. For now, it's Daniel Wilson's first novel, Robopocalypse. Long before it hit bookstores this month, Wilson's book was already in Steven Spielberg's hands, being turned into a futuristic war movie. And when you read it, you'll see why. Though Robopocalypse follows the general outlines of the classic robot uprising story, it's packed with enough realistic detail and surprising twists that you'll be riveted. Imagine the smartest parts of the Battlestar Galatica remake crossed with the most awesome fight scenes from Independence Day. Yeah, it's kind of like that.

The references are lost on me seein' as how I'm not familiar with either, but the book is a serious page-turner.  This is just the ticket if you're looking for a beach book and you like sci-fi.

Yet Another Sign o' the Impending Apocalypse (An Occasional EIP Series)

David McCullough, quoted in the WSJ (in an article about the gentleman):

'We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people—even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."

He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education. 

[...]

Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"

Answer: We've been teaching history poorly. And Mr. McCullough wants us to amend our ways. 

[...]

Another problem is method. "History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

This topic has long been a hot-button here at EIP (yeah, I know: it's but one among many.  But that's what geezers DO, Gentle Reader).  I'll trot out my objections, rant, rave, and otherwise bemoan the woeful state of the citizenry's historical knowledge every danged time I take one of those current events and/or historical knowledge quizzes, and I've been doing so ever since we created EIP.  So, yeah: more o' the same.

That said, I'm SO very grateful that I received a decent high-school education, long before the advent of politically correct textbooks and the proliferation of This-And-That Studies.  Dead White Men had a lot of good things to say and I'm MOST grateful that educators of my youth realized that, and for the fact they insisted I learn those things.

So, at the risk of preaching to the very small but excellent choir here: RTWT.  All isn't lost, yet.  There's still hope as long as people like Mr. McCullough continue to speak out and people like YOU continue to listen.

Plus ça change...

... plus c'est la même chose.  I've mentioned in passing that I'm reading Mark Twain's Autobiography, albeit reading slowly... very slowly... almost to a point where "reading at it" would be more accurate.  It's not that the book isn't entertaining (it is), or that the prose is inaccessible (it's not), or any of the myriad reasons one has for not plowing through a book in a couple o' sittings.  I did put Twain aside in favor of Clancy a while back, but that was when I was in the weeds of the academic notes.  We've since moved to Twain proper and the reading is easy.  But I'm a lot slower than I used to be, in almost any life-category you'd care to mention.  It is what it is.

We digress.  The post title refers to this lil excerpt I ran across yesterday:

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it.

Look at it in politics. Look at the candidates whom we loathe, one year, and are afraid to vote against the next; whom we cover with unimaginable filth, one year, and fall down on the public platform and worship, the next—and keep on doing it until the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year’s evidences brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this year’s.

Look at the tyranny of party—at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master. If we would learn what the human race really is, at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

That bit o' wisdom was written at the turn of the 20th century... say around 1901, or thereabouts... in an unpublished article Twain wrote for The Atlantic, but published in its entirety in his memoirs.  There is a lot more in this vein and I could quote from the piece from now until the cows come home.  Twain was an Independent rather than a registered Republican or Democrat, and waxes eloquently about voting for the man rather than the party, claiming he never once voted a straight party ticket.  That's pretty good advice, no matter what era you live in.  But it's Twain's larger point about humanity's worst aspects being on display at election time that interests me.  I find it fascinating that the more things change, the more they remain the same.  It has been ever so.

The image comes from a generic Google image search.  I chose Twain with a cigar for obvious reasons, that being the only thing we have in common.

It Happens EVERY Year

The time change is kicking my ass in a minor sorta way, in that I'm out of sorts and will remain this way for the better part of a week.  Example:  there are still two cups o' morning coffee to finish.  That said, a week's worth o' body clock adjustment will leave me pleased with the "extra" Happy Hour time.  

OTOH... I'm oh-so-glad I don't have to drag my old ass out o' bed and be somewhere tomorrow morning.  The Spring-forward bullshit REALLY kicked my ass during my working years, mainly because I was always an early-guy, always in at 0600 or so.  I saved the above photo as documentary proof, even though it's 13 years old.  (Rochester, NY... c. 1998)

―:☺:―

As a public service... here's Buck's Brief Treatise On Writing:  Not every freakin' noun needs multiple and increasingly obscure adjectives.  The same relationship exists between verbs and adverbs.

"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."
Ernest Hemingway

That is all.

Entertainment

So... there I was, sitting in my dentist's comfortably-appointed waiting room about ten minutes before my allotted time with the Lovely Victoria, Queen of Dental Hygienists, exchanging small talk about the weather with Jana, Queen of Dental Appointments, you know... bursting pipes, wind-chills direct from the upper reaches of the North Pole... stuff like that.  Whereupon the Lovely Victoria strides right up to me and sez "What are you doing here, Buck?  Your appointment is tomorrow!"  (That's the Readers Digest version, she was much kinder than that.)

Well.

We made a lame joke about needing to spend the briefest of times with our favorite ladies on Valentine's Day and beat a hasty retreat, noticing the badly-hidden smirks on the faces of those occupying the waiting room.  But NOT the staff, of course, for they are FAR too kind to participate in the needless embarrassment of their favorite semi-senile Old Guy.

Oh, well.  At least we got out for a bit yesterday and it wasn't to Wally-World.

―:☺:―

We returned home to El Casa Móvil De Pennington, mucked about with the water and stuff for a while, and then adjourned to the verandah for an extremely satisfying outdoor Happy Hour.  We had been reading the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 but found all the academic notes and references prior to the actual S. Clemens bits way too damned enlightening for our tastes.  We're much more into entertainment than enlightenment these days so we put the Autobiography on the virtual shelf for later slogging and hied our self off to Amazon where we bought Tom Clancy's latest.  And we ARE entertained now.  It's good to see Mr. Clancy back on form; I thought he'd run his string out with the last thing abomination he put out.

There will be more al fresco entertainment this afternoon.  After I get back from the dentist's, of course.

We Is Literate

And we're dog lovers, too.  Good Jumpin' Jehoshaphat... "German Chepper?"  REALLY?  The mind boggles sometimes.  This Googler was from Texas, Gentle Reader, so it's not as if some ESL denizen of the Third World came around lookin' for cheppers.  

Wait.  It was El Paso.  

Never mind. 

Just One More and Then We'll Go...

... which every band has said at one point or another.  But we're on about quotes from Life here, not music.  Here's Tom Waits, speaking about Keef:

I think that nowadays there seems to be a deficit of wonder. And Keith seems to still wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up and just stare at it for a while. Just be rather mystified by it. Like all the great things in the world, women and religion and the sky… you wonder about it, and you don’t stop wondering about it.

Well, that bit stopped me dead in my tracks as I was reading earlier this afternoon.  The sheer profundity of Waits' observation struck me as too, too true.  Yet it's not.  I can only speak for myself... but there isn't one single day that goes by when I'm not struck by a sense of wonder.  It could be a sunset, it could be remarkable photography (shots from the Hubble or that "small world" stuff I linked a while back, or myriad other things in that realm), and MOST especially music.  I often marvel at how a vocal, a guitar lick, or the great execution of horn charts can touch me in ways that are always new and always spot-on.  How can you NOT wonder about things like that?

And that's not even considering the things Waits brought up... like women and religion... either one of which countless tomes have been written.  There's no deficit of wonder in MY world, but then again I could be an anomaly.  Ample evidence to the contrary exists on my teevee screen and in the thoughtless screeds I read every damned day in the political blogs.

Still and even: worth thinking about.

―:☺:―

So.  I've been taken with Keith Richards' work with the X-Pensive Winos over the past coupla few and I defined a couple o' new Pandora stations to that effect.  I listened to the X-Pensive Winos station for a full day before I abandoned it in favor of the Keith Richards station, on account o' because there was just too much extraneous bullshit on the XPW station.  I'm sorry, Pandora, but Def Leppard or Journey ain't Keith OR  the X-Pensive Winos.  Journey?  JOURNEY?  Oh, for fuck's sake... spare me.  Please.

I'm pleased to report the Keith Richards station is MUCH better.  And here's a lil sumthin' I heard earlier this afternoon as a sample:



You're beyond hope if that doesn't get ya where ya live.  Keef and Norah... what's NOT to like, unlikely as it may seem?  And the playin' is simply GREAT, as is the song.  Brilliant.

―:☺:―

Apropos of exactly nuthin'... last night we ordered that rockin' chair Bec turned me on to (click for larger, of course) and a couple of Keith Richards albums to add to the collection.  The last coupla days have been absolutely fantastic, in most every sense of the word.  And things should only get better when the new purchases arrive.  Let's just hope the WX remains cooperative and I get the chance to really rock out on the verandah.  

Heh.

This Is Neither Work Safe Nor for Those of a Prudish Nature

A couple o' few days ago a female correspondent of mine sent along the video below.  I've thought long and hard (heh) about putting this up on the blog, given as how another female correspondent of mine didn't find this funny at all, stating she only went ten seconds into the vid before she quit viewing, adding "Ick."  (Long parenthetical snarky observation: I have more to say about THAT particular expression, given as how I feel "Ick" is just barely appropriate or tolerable in four year olds but much less so in adults.  As a matter of fact, the expression is absolutely INtolerable in adults and we COULD go on.  And on.  But leave us not digress.)

So here's George, a 68 year old Brit, going on in a VERY explicit and detailed manner about the inanimate love of his life (actual naughty bits are pixelated, i.e., censored, but it's the subject matter that's NSFW):

So, OK.  On the one hand I find this pretty danged funny.  OTOH it's pretty damned sad.  On the other, other hand George is a very honest... not to mention creative... sort.  On the other, other, other hand George's P-Shopped photo albums are positively WEIRD if not creepy.  This is prolly a classic case of TMI to boot.  But Hey, it's a Brave New World.

Thoughts, if any?