It’s beginning to look a lot like pre-school…

I know that the use of language in today’s mass media is geared toward a fifth-grade (or thereabouts) comprehension level. Surely, though, the folks we elect to serve in the highest offices should be at least a little smarter than a fifth grader. Perhaps we should have Jeff Foxworthy come and test the entire lot of our nation’s politicians for actual fitness to serve.

Our nation’s savior?

Allow me to illuminate a few things for all of you in national politics.

1. Bush was not a Nazi. Obama is not a socialist. Labels of ‘fascist’ (which few of you appear able to spell) and ‘communist’ are similarly inapplicable to either of them – though it is inordinately amusing to hear words like these applied to two men of quite different ideology. Less amusingly, I believe anyone who has suffered under the rule of such regimes as those of Hitler and Stalin would be rather offended to hear the comparatively trivial measures taken by these Presidents compared to the savagery they were forced to submit to.

Enough name-calling. If you have an issue with a President’s policies, come up with a reasonable alternative and we can all have a civilized debate. If you can’t do that, then keep your mouth shut.

2. Stop talking about whether there is too much God or too little God in the running of the country. Both of these are meaningless. The country was founded in part to ESCAPE the notion of any kind of state endorsement of religion. I have no problem with people worshipping according to their beliefs and legislating according to their values, but don’t use confuse the two and use religion to justify your political acts. In a nation whose founders specifically tried to avoid mixing religion into the law, such actions are hypocritical and offensive.

3. Related to the above: if you’re a bigot, just man up and be a bigot. If you have a problem with blacks, or Muslims, or the poor, or women, or gays, or conservatives, or any other group, just say so. Don’t get into the “un-American” line of bullshit. They’re just as American as you are. They love freedom just as much as you do. (Not that you even know what ‘freedom’ means, if you’re trying to deny it to anybody else.) Last but by no means least: any right which you would claim for yourself, you should also accord to them, whether it’s specifically spelled out in the Constitution or not.

4. Keep your promises. Don’t tell the public one thing and then do another, unless you also give us a damn good reason for the change. Don’t tell one group something and another group the opposite. We live in the Internet age, and we WILL find out. When it happens, enjoy your retirement money. We won’t vote for you to keep darkening our doorsteps.

5. When you watched movies as a youngster, remember how you cheered when the schoolyard bully got his comeuppance. Look at America’s standing in the international community around, say, 2006-7. If elementary school parable is indeed the limit of your understanding, maybe it can at least be allowed to guide foreign policy in years to come.

6. The national media have provided you with a means of understanding whether you are acting logically – whether you identify with the right or left. His name is Jon Stewart. If your name is mentioned on his show more than twice in any given month, you might wish to take a look at your priorities. Jon Stewart, you see, IS smarter than a fifth grader.

7. Perhaps above all, remember this quote from former President Harry Truman – another individual who was smarter than a fifth grader:

“Don’t piss in the soup, boys – we’ve all got to eat.”

America Can Do Better

What the hell is the deal with Megan Fox?

She’s currently on the cover of Rolling Stone, where she is being called “America’s Sexiest Bad Girl”.

I’m assuming that the look on her face there is an attempt at ’sultry’. I can only hope I’m not the only one who thinks she just looks like she’s squinting, possibly through a not-entirely-unintoxicated haze.

Also? Somebody get this woman a fucking sandwich.

I have yet to give enough of a damn about any of the movies she has been in to bother going to see one, but the few clips and trailers I’ve seen suggest that she is at best a mediocre actress – and it appears that her co-stars and directors have spoken of her intellect in less than glowing terms as well.

So she’s 0 for 3 on the beauty-brains-talent scorecard. Much like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, whose appeal I have never understood either.

If this is the best America can come up with for a ’sexiest bad girl’, America isn’t trying hard enough.

Feeling Muldery

I want to believe.

Not necessarily in aliens or spirits or the Loch Ness Monster (at least not specifically) – but there is an awful lot of stuff out there that defies explanation. The planet’s weirdostat is set pretty high.

This image is one of the Ica Stones – a collection of well over a thousand stones, estimated to be between 500 and 1500 years old, with a variety of indigenous carvings. This one, you might notice, depicts a person riding a triceratops.

Most people will look at something like this and shrug it off as a hoax. And perhaps it is. But what of the Phaistos Disc? the Lid of Palenque? the Baghdad Battery? the Dropa Stones? The Antikythera Mechanism? The gazillions of other oddities and phenomena which sound like Robert Ludlum book titles?

Can they really ALL be hoaxes?

Isn’t there, perhaps, some small chance that maybe we’re WRONG about some of our assertions? Maybe our ‘facts’ aren’t as solid as we think they are when it comes to radioisotope dating*, geological strata, ice core sampling, or even the timing of evolutionary phases.

I’m not suggesting that people ever rode around on triceratops. That strikes me as a very good way to find oneself impaled on horns. At the very least, though, perhaps it means that someone in South America knew about dinosaurs before Westerners began digging them up in the 1850s. Similarly, the Baghdad Battery most certainly suggests that there were people 2500 years ago with some knowledge of electricity. We have pretty much accepted at this point that our ancient forebears had a surprising fluency in mathematics and astronomy – perhaps it’s time we gave a little more and began to seriously look into what else we might have forgotten.

History may be holding onto some seriously cool shit just waiting to be re-discovered.

Also? Perhaps there’s something to the aliens, spirits and/or Nessie as well.

* ‘Radioisotope dating’… if you show me uranium, I’ll show you mine?

Surfacing

Hi there, blogosphere! Long time no see!

For those of you not keeping up with D’s blog or keeping in touch by other means, we are now in Florida (state name: the Alligators With Mickey Mouse Ears State) – specifically, Fort Myers.

There are more palm trees down here than you can shake a stick at, unless you have a great deal of time and an extraordinarily patient stick.

Sun, beaches and other such things also abound.

There are worse ways to spend one’s time. That said, now that we’re starting to find a rhythm here, I fully intend to get back to more regular blogging, as well as writing, genealogy and music. Of course, the job hunt still has to take precedence over a lot of that, but hey. I’m back.

Coincidence? You Be The Judge

For those of you as yet unaware of the situation, I have recently joined the ranks of the unemployed.

Along with the job, of course, goes the house we were gearing up to close on. Hard to pay a mortgage without an income.

I – and many others – have noted that it’s a very big ‘coincidence’ for this to happen JUST as we were about to tie ourselves down for a great many years. Better now than a couple of weeks AFTER we closed on the house and moved in.

We are doing our best to treat this as an opportunity rather than a loss. Obviously there is sadness (mostly regarding the house), and there is stress (mostly regarding the lack of income and health insurance), but we are looking forward and taking this chance to see what is out there. The money we had saved to cover a down payment and closing costs is mercifully still in the bank, and as such the situation is not dire.

It is almost certain at this point that we will be leaving Rochester, likely going quite a long way. California and Florida are both possibilities, and we are also thinking (to varying degrees) about the DC area, Oregon and North Carolina.

So yeah. Haven’t blogged much, and that’s why, but I wanted to make sure folks knew what was up.

The Intro Riff: A Lost Art?

There are a few songs which most of us can identify within the first few seconds, and will be able to do so to the grave.

Love it or loathe it, the intro riff to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one of these. So is the opening to Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”. REM made a huge splash with “Shiny Happy People” and “Losing My Religion”, both of which have immediately catchy riffs.

Axl Rose may have been bitten by a radioactive asshole when he was a young boy, but he and his G’n'R cohorts were no strangers to the great riff either. Will there be a day in our lives where we can’t place the first few measures of “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, “Don’t Cry” or “Paradise City”?

This phenomenon is by no means limited to rock. Since the day that Beethoven wrote the first measure of the Fifth Symphony, the immediate in-your-face intro has been a fixture of all styles of music.

However, this art appears to be… well, if not dead, then at least starting to smell that way.

Who, today, is creating riffs which can stand with Van Halen’s “Jump”, with AC/DC’s “Back In Black”, with Def Leppard’s “Photograph”?

This question is not rhetorical. I really enjoy songs that I can immediately get into, and would welcome any suggestions along these lines. Perhaps you, my faithful readers, will come up with more recent examples in such multitudes as to render this entire post invalid. Indeed, I truly hope you do.

Ding dong?

So the big news of the day is Sarah Palin’s resignation as governor of Alaska.

Supposedly, Palin has grown sufficiently sick of being savaged by the media as to warrant resignation. MSNBC is running a report that says she wants to be out of politics entirely, to take the time to raise her family.

Of course, many people are unwilling to believe that someone as fond of the spotlight as Palin would truly be getting out of it for good. Thus, the theories are flying – what does this resignation really mean? Especially regarding 2012?

One theory is that she’s pregnant again. All things considered, I’m not sure that would stop her from working or running – there were times when Trig seemed as much a campaign prop as anything else.

Another is that she is, in fact, doing this in order to free herself from any constraint on running for the Presidency in 2012. This, to me, seems somewhat illogical, since it gives all of her primary opponents the ammunition of ’she ditched her state once her numbers dropped and oil revenues slowed down, how’s she going to handle the Presidency?’.

Last but not least, she may be planning to run for Lisa Murkowski’s Senate seat in 2010, thus keeping her in Washington and close to the power elite while she builds for a run at the Presidency in 2016. This would also allow her to avoid having to run against Obama’s re-election juggernaut, which is likely to be formidable, and allow some of her 2008 issues to fade from memory. Murkowski herself seems to be aware of this possibility, given that she slammed Palin’s decision before the ink was dry.

So what do you think, faithful readers? What’s going on behind the trademark wink?

Happy Fourth!

Happy Fourth of July to all my fellow Americans!

It still feels very weird to type ‘my fellow Americans’. Sort of like a new pair of shoes, which are very comfortable and look great, but due to their newness still seem a little awkward and tend to squeak if you turn around too fast.

Independence Day is upon us, and is perhaps the holiday about which one would expect me to be most divided; indeed, residual loyalty to Britain does at first glance assert itself.

(Never mind that King George, from whom America famously declared its independence, was about as British as Saddam Hussein – the guy was a German who was only King because his grandfather had once had the strongest of a batch of weak claims to the throne.)

However, for 233 years, America has shone a bright light into the future, leading the way where other nations have trembled and cowered. We – and I can now proudly count myself within this ‘we’ – have had our missteps. Times have not always been easy. We have weathered the storms of economic turmoil, of wars both internecine and international, of nuclear threat and terrorist attack, and we have come through it all carrying the same torch of Liberty and blazing a trail ever forward.

Time for a goodbye

Yesterday I said goodbye for the last time to a dear friend – one who was in my life for ten years, looked cooler than I ever could and was curvy in all the right places.

She was very much the centerpiece of my guitar collection, and never failed to catch the eye and spark conversation.

But I just wasn’t playing. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve picked up a guitar in the last year, and at those times, she wasn’t the guitar I would pick up. (That honor went to a Washburn acoustic – the first guitar I ever owned and still the one I love best.)

So after a full two years without having played her, it was finally time; I’m buying a house and raising a child in an uncertain economic climate – and two thousand dollars is rather more useful than an expensive dust-gatherer.

It was the right decision, I have no doubt of that. It still feels strange and sad, though.

Sixty is the loneliest number

Or at least, it may feel that way to one Harry Mason Reid, currently Senate Majority Leader.

With the election – at last – of Al Franken, the Democrats have the “filibuster-proof supermajority” of which much has been said.

However, I think such things as the recent House vote on Waxman-Markey (the ‘climate change bill’) show that there is no such thing as party unity within Team Blue. That vote saw some moderate Dems vote no due to its potential effect on their constituents, and some highly liberal Dems vote no because the bill was not progressive enough.

Surely the Senate is blessed (or plagued) with the same diversity of opinion.

Can we assume that Al Franken and Arlen Specter will vote the same way on… well, anything?

Reid has often said that if only he had a supermajority at his disposal, he could ensure passage of a great many bills on the Obama agenda – but does he, really and truly, have the votes?

In practice, the Dems may now be able to come together enough to force down the threat of filibusters, but the bills will still have to stand on their own merits, or fall on the lack thereof.