February 16, 2010 archive

Olympic Alternatives

You thought I was not serious?

I’m dead serious.  The only way to effect change is through sacrifice (changing your habits) and protest (telling people what you think, publicly).

Plenty of other stuff out on the Hypnotoad.  Just look-

The Hypnotoad.

"Television is a vast wasteland"
hypnotoad

Quit Drinking the Poison

From a distant vantage point on a blog far, far away, an epic traveler through cyberspace who likes to mock and ridicule “purists” posted a story about a land where cynicism and hypocrisy are completely unknown, a land where for some bizarre reason, idealism is honored and respected . . .  

Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.

With immense satisfaction, that blogger informed “purists” that they don’t live in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land, he told them they need to grow the fuck up.    

I have news for Tbogg.  We grew up long ago.  We know where we live.  

This is where we live  . . .

In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn’t have enough money to buy food.  In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.  Over 50 million people need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods.  Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day.  

1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes.  Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today.  Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014.

And what are these Americans being told?   Keep drinking that Two-Party-System Kool Aid, that’s what they’re being told.   By the politicians.  By the corporate media.  By the “progressive” leaders of the Netroots.   That’s their solution.  Keep drinking that Two-Party-System Kool Aid.  

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

I’m Dropping Olympic Coverage

What NBC did tonight to the premier event of Alpine Skiing was just inexcusable.

Half an hour of coverage, 4 or 5 skiers, puff bios and a crash reel.

Followed by Polar Bears.

The Olympics is not worth watching and I’m not going to encourage you to do it.  In fact I’m going to encourage you to watch something else by providing alternatives.

I had hoped this would be a fun event we could share.

Instead I find I have better things to do with my life and so do you.

If we will not vote with our eyeballs against the elite smirking assholes and morons who control our media, what sacrifice are we prepared to make?

I will be busy tomorrow all day.

Caribou, I’m sorry that I involved you in this.  You can make your own decision as can everyone else, but I will not be insulted.

Update: a petition from TheMomCat.

Mike Gravel interview on live right now

Mike Gravel is being interviewed live right now on a radio webcast thing from Muncie, Indiana.  If it’s not on now, they’re starting very soon.  Check it out.

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Eric Holder still wracking his brains over who to prosecute for torture.

Eric Holder, Assistant to Attorney General Lindsey Graham, continues to puzzle over who, if anyone, should be brought to justice over mountains of evidence and allegations of torture.  The chief difficulty that continues to stymie Holder is the problem of credit assignment.  Who in the world can he possibly indict?  And where the heck in the complex and confusing chain of command would one begin?  If only some whistle-blower had the courage of his convictions to step forward and start naming names, to heck with the reprisals and damn the torpedoes, that would make Holder’s daunting problem that much easier.

Overnight Caption Contest

Overnight Caption Contest (new)

Winter Olympics- Day III, Evening

Well the good news about the Canada v. Switzerland game on MSNBC is that it cut Tweety to only half an hour.

The bad news is that I had the misfortune to watch him at all.

Of course if you tune back in at midnight, you’ll get to see that fatuous gasbag for a full hour.

Be still my heart.

No changes in schedule since this afternoon, it’s still pretty much, Men’s Downhill, Pairs Free Skate (Long Program), Snowboard Cross, and Speed Skating (Men’s 500m).

The Snowboard Cross should be much more like NASCAR than this afternoon’s time trials but don’t expect asphalt collapses and flaming chunks of twisted metal (though it is entirely possible someone will slide across the finish line on their roof head).

But it’s really a failure of imagination, pure sports ignorance, and pandering to the “Bubba” audience not to compare it with Moto-Cross which it was modeled after.  It’s a twisty obstacle course with double jumps you have to carry by far enough or FAIL and frankly I saw a lot of people landing short.  The bottom of the turns tend to get rutted too so maybe asphalt failure is not that bad a metaphor (but a major NASCAR FAIL! at Daytona).

4 Boarders to a heat so you get some interaction, but in Moto-Cross they start them 8 or 16 at a time so it’s no worse than that.  In NASCAR you get 32 Cars in 2 Lines wrecking each other 4 or 5 at a clip in the last 2 laps which they have to restart over and over and over and over again until they get a clean White Flag (next to last) lap.

After that it doesn’t matter how many of them wreck eack other, the race is done.  The other 495 miles are just for shits and giggles.

They actually did stick with the (yawn) Cross Country this afternoon which surprised me, especially when it ended early.  Of course they did it out of crass calculation.

NBC Ruins Olympics Men’s Downhill For Millions Of Fans

Henry Blodget, Business Insider

Feb. 15, 2010, 2:17 PM

(A)s usual, NBC wants to maximize its revenue by delaying the event until the most people will watch it: This evening in primetime.  The live finals of the figure-skating pairs competition and other events presumably weren’t enough to ensure the massive audience NBC needs to lose less of its shirt on these Games.

Someday, perhaps, the NBC Sports brass will understand that the world has changed in the past 25 years.  Within an hour or two, the name of the winner of the Men’s Downhill will be everywhere–on the radio, on other TV stations, on the Internet, on news sites.  Even people who want to play along with NBC’s self-serving little game will have a hard time avoiding the news.  Thus, for most of them, the most exciting event at the games will be ruined.

h/t TheMomCat

And there’s some skating too.

Tomorrow evening Caribou Barbie will be handling Olympic coverage.  I urge you to make it a fun and exciting experience.

How the universe began…almost.

KuangSi2Some say that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. But what do we know about our early universe and how we got here? How do we know that our ideas about the early universe are right? What is dark matter and dark energy and why do we think it exists in the first place?

All of the matter in the universe expanded from a single point. It doesn’t matter much what that means, though. To beg the question is to ask what happened before time began. And because of events that happened during the the inflationary epoch, we can no longer see all of the details of how the universe looked at the beginning of time.

But we won’t ask those questions today. Here we will talk about the current state of cosmology given by The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe — the reigning Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation [CMBR] experiment that gives us our best data from the early universe. Within a year, though, we expect a new and improved data set from The Planck Satellite.

Gridlock

grid·lock

noun

1. A traffic jam in which no vehicular movement is possible, especially one caused by the blockage of key intersections within a grid of streets.

2. A complete lack of movement or progress resulting in a backup or stagnation:

“the political gridlock that prevented … the President and Congress from moving expeditiously to cut the budget”

gridlockChiefly US

noun

1. (Engineering / Automotive Engineering) obstruction of urban traffic caused by queues of vehicles forming across junctions and causing further queues to form in the intersecting streets

2. a point in a dispute at which no agreement can be reached; deadlock political gridlock

verb

1. to block or obstruct (an area)

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gridlock

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