“When my so-called phone rings, my first reaction is ‘Shit. What’s wrong now?’ When I get an email or text message, I feel a tingle of optimism.”
Scott Adams from a blog post on the need for a new name for the device we call a phone.
Another line:
“Ask a teen how often he makes phone calls on his texter.”
“The average human eye blinks at a speed (between) three-tenths and four-tenths of a second. So if you are the batter and you blink at the point of Chapman’s release, the ball will pass you before you open your eyes again.”
Matt Bynum of Hillerich and Bradsby quoted by Paul Daugherty – SI.com.
Estimated time from Chapman’s hand until the ball crosses the plate at 104 mph — 0.36 seconds.
“Great summer tune for a family road trip.”
Customer Review on iTunes for Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.”
“When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.”
And another:
“During the last election, I noticed that at the Republican town halls, people complained constantly about immigration. But what they complained most about wasn’t the possibility of lost jobs, or crime. It was that when they called their bank, a recorded message told them to press 2 for Spanish.”
“These opinions have an agenda. They seek to demonize the Obama Presidency and mainstream liberal politics in general. The conservatism they prefer is not the traditional conservatism of such figures as Taft, Nixon, Reagan, Buckley or Goldwater. It is a frightening new radical fringe movement, financed by such as the newly notorious billionaire Koch brothers, whose hatred of government extends even to opposition to tax funding for public schools.”
We have been reading about the “radio priest”—the young Catholic Father who broadcasts his beliefs from a small chapel in Michigan, and gets as many as three hundred and ninety thousand letters a day from members of the radio audience. He employs eighty-three secretaries to handle this mail—a larger payroll, you must admit, than most young shepherds command. He speaks against birth control, pacifism, and internationalism; and in favor of the multiplication of the body as commanded by God, and of the sanctity of patriotism. This, it seems to us, is a phenomenal leadership. We get accustomed to thinking of the radio merely as an instrument for increasing the sale of trademarked products and the vanity of tenors; yet here is an advocate of the sanctity of patriotism and other barbarous causes, with so many listeners and converts that he can’t handle them without secretaries. We happen to be, in a small way, on the other side of the fence from Father Coughlin on all his points; but we must confess, after reading the statistics about his audience, that being on the other side of the fence from him is like standing all alone in a million-acre field. What an impressive thing it is! Talking against internationalism over the radio is like talking against rain in a rainstorm: the radio has made internationalism a fact, it has made boundaries look so silly that we wonder how mapmakers can draw maps without laughing; yet there stands Father Coughlin in front of the microphone, his voice reaching well up into Canada, his voice reaching well down into Mexico, his voice leaping national boundaries as lightly as a rabbit—there he stands, saying that internationalism will be our ruin, and getting millions of letters saying he is right. Will somebody please write us one letter saying that he is wrong—if only so that we can employ a secretary?
“But what makes the Post still worth reading is its news pages. They are separate from the editorial page operation, which is a notably weak part of the overall product. If you took an equal number of random Washington, D.C., citizens off the street and gave them the job of running the newspaper’s editorial and op-ed pages, you could hardly do worse. You might well do better.”
“Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn’t even have boots were it not for the women who came before.”
From The Mother of All Grizzlies about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Dahlia Lithwick. An excerpt:
To which I would just add that Palin and the Mama Grizzlies also owe a debt of thanks directly to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who almost single-handedly convinced the courts and legislatures to do away with gender classifications in matters ranging from a woman’s right to be executor of her son’s estate (Reed v. Reed, 1970), to a female Air Force lieutenant’s right to secure housing allowances and medical benefits for her husband (Frontiero v. Richardson, 1973), and the right of Oklahoma’s “thirsty boys” (her words) to buy beer at the Honk n’ Holler at the same age as young women (Craig v. Boren, 1976).
“In England, an elderly Swedish tourist lay down on the luggage conveyor belt, after her suitcase, believing that was how she was told to board her plane. Confused? Or prophetic?”
Unknown
“What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. . . .
“What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.”
Paul Krugman October 2008
“If President Obama has a big economic initiative up his sleeve, as he hinted recently, now would be a good time to let the rest of us in on it.”
“Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., born 201 years ago today in Cambridge, Massachusetts, quoted at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
“In The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) [Holmes] wrote, ‘We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.’ ”
Holmes wrote poetry, helped found The Atlantic, practiced medicine, taught at Harvard Medical School, and was the father of a supreme court justice.
From two years ago today:
“I’ve heard of trophy brides before, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of a trophy vice presidential candidate.”
NewMexiKen
And so let freedom ring — from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring — from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring — from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring — from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring — from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that.
Let freedom ring — from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring — from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring — from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
“Free at last, free at last.
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
__________
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., 47 years ago today
“This is going to be almost inconceivably ugly.”
Paul Krugman writing that “all signs are that the next few years will be a combination of economic stagnation and political witch-hunt.”
From three years ago tomorrow.
Quick thinking
A Florida senior citizen drove his brand new Corvette convertible out of the dealership. Taking off down the road, he pushed it to 80 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left.
“Amazing,” he thought as he flew down I-75, pushing the pedal even more. Looking in his rear view mirror, he saw the state trooper behind him, blue lights flashing and siren blaring. He floored it to 100 mph, then 110, then 120.
Suddenly he thought, “What am I doing? I’m too old for this,” and pulled over to await the trooper’s arrival. Pulling in behind him, the trooper walked up to the Corvette, looked at his watch and said, “Sir, my shift ends in 30 minutes. Today is Friday. If you can give me a reason for speeding that I’ve never heard before, I’ll let you go.”
The old gentleman paused. Then said, “Three years ago, my wife ran off with a Florida State Trooper. I thought you were bringing her back.”
“Have a good day, Sir,” replied the trooper.
“In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts ‘warning’ Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in ‘self-defense.’ ”
He has examples of their inflammatory talk.
And this:
“There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.”
You should read Taibbi’s whole post.
Social Security is a “milk cow with 310 million tits.”
Alan Simpson, chairman of the President’s deficit commission
For now, let’s dedicate the next playing of Cee-Lo’s hit track to Alan Simpson.
And if the President doesn’t fire Simpson, we can dedicate the subsequent playing to the President.
[Atrios calls the deficit commission the catfood commission in anticipation of what they'll leave us to live on.]
“A four-term Arizona Senator handily won his primary election last night, and all he had to do was continue to embarrass and debase himself on the national stage.”
I enjoy this story about Julia Thorne, the first Mrs. John Kerry, posted here originally three six years ago:
When she was interviewed for the Washingtonian story [1996], Thorne said she didn’t want to get married again. However, she hadn’t totally soured on love.
“I went to a Wyoming ranch every summer and one year a man came out in the ranch truck to meet me. I saw him and I thought: ‘This man looks like a middle-aged hippie alcoholic.’ And he looked at me and thought: ‘She looks like a bitch on wheels.’ And we’ve been together ever since.”
Thorne and her husband, Richard Charlesworth, now live in Montana.
“Some people who grew up in high altitude areas think the dip in collapsed cakes was designed as a reservoir for frosting.”
Found at Whole Foods High Altitude Baking & Cooking page.
“If you plan on buying a home, how long do you plan on waiting before taking the plunge and watching your net worth decline every month?”
“If gays and lesbians don’t need marriage, why does anyone?”
“Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been Fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events — the oil just spilled there, the safety fence just broke there — that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.”
Terry Pratchett quoted by Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith. Smith points out that when people survive air crashes it’s because the planes were engineered that way and the crews trained.
“I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there’s always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing.”
E. Annie Proulx, who turns 75 today, from a worth-reading profile at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
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