Thursday, April 10, 2008
Just thinkin’
Some believe W invaded Iraq to resolve old oedipal issues.
You suppose McCain has any old issues with Vietnam we need to consider?
Archive for April 10, 2008
‘Less a harbinger of disaster than a wake-up call’
Ask the pilot’s Patrick Smith takes a look at the aircraft maintenance problem — and reminds us:
The system, as it stands, is remarkably safe. Although airlines have been through fiscal hell and back over the past several years, and despite their status as the most consistently dogged pariahs of the postindustrial American economy, they and their regulators have managed to maintain an astonishingly reliable transportation system. Here we are amid the safest-ever stretch since the dawn of the jet age. The last large-scale accident involving a major U.S. carrier was that of an American Airlines A300 in November 2001. That was approximately 43 million flights ago.
The jokes on me
A dog walks into Western Union and asks the clerk to send a telegram. He fills out a form on which he writes down the telegram he wishes to send: “Bow wow wow, bow wow wow.”
The clerk says, “You can add another ‘Bow wow’ for the same price.”
The dog responded, “Now wouldn’t that sound a little silly?”
Early one morning a mother went to her sleeping son and woke him up.
“Wake up, son. It’s time to go to school.”
“But why, Mama? I don’t want to go to school.”
“Give me two reasons why you don’t want to go to school.”
“One, all the children hate me. Two, all the teachers hate me.”
“Oh, that’s no reason. Come on, you have to go to school.”
“Give me two good reasons why I should go to school.”
“One, you are fifty-two years old. Two, you are the principal of the school.”
Two rednecks were seated at the end of a bar when a young lady seated a few stools up began to choke on a piece of hamburger. She was turning blue and obviously in serious respiratory distress. One said to the other, “That gal there is having a bad time!” The other agreed and said, “Think we should go help?” “You bet,” said the first, and with that, he ran over and said, “Can you breathe?” She shook her head no. He said, “Can you speak?” She again shook her head no. With that, he pulled up her skirt and licked her on the butt.
She was so shocked, she coughed up the obstruction and began to breathe–with great relief.
The redneck walked back to his friend and said, “Funny how that hind lick maneuver always works.”
Mickey Mouse is having a nasty divorce with Minnie Mouse. Mickey spoke to the judge about the separation.
“I’m sorry Mickey, but I can’t legally separate you two on the grounds that Minnie is mentally insane…”
Mickey replied, “I didn’t say she was mentally insane, I said that she’s fucking Goofy!”
5 CommentsDeep Thoughts from Bob Dylan
“I don’t trust a man who doesn’t tear up a little watching Old Yeller.”
“All of our shows are for truckers, if not about truckers.”
“They say the earth’s warmin’ up. Be careful of that global warming, and wear your sunscreen.”
“Music City USA – one of the only places where a banjo player can make a six figure income.”
“You know, every shut-eye ain’t sleep. Sometimes you’re sleeping in the ground, taking a dirt nap, saying the big Goodbye.”
“The Harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.”
“Sometimes when you look at a menu, it’s hard to decide what to get. Life is like that, full of difficult choices.”
“Lipstick traces on cigarettes can get you in trouble or remind you of the wonders of the night before.”
“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me…as opposed to when you grow up and you learn that…the pen is mightier than the sword. The world is fill of little contradictions like that.”
“I leave you with the words of Benjamin Franklin. ‘He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.’ Thank you, Ben. Peace out.”
From a Vanity Fair article about Dylan’s XM radio show Theme Time Radio Hour from which the above were all taken. There’s a bunch more other stuff.
April 10th ought to be a national holiday
Today we celebrate the birthday
… of Harry Morgan. Colonel Sherman Potter is 93. IMDb lists 159 credits for Morgan. If you’d like to see him as a relatively young actor, check out the 1943 classic “The Ox-Bow Incident.” Morgan was Henry Fonda’s sidekick. Great, great film.
You may not know the name Verna Felton, but you know the voice. She was the character actress heard in many Disney animations — a matriarchical elephant in Dumbo, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp. She also appeared with Harry Morgan in an early fifties sitcom December Bride — and its 1960 spinoff Pete and Gladys. She died in 1966, but Morgan kept Felton’s photo on Sherman Potter’s desk on the M*A*S*H set to portray Mrs. Potter. Says a lot about both of them, doesn’t it?
… of Max von Sydow, 79.
… of Omar Sharif. Dr. Zhivago is 76. Sharif was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia.
… of John Madden. He’s 72.
… of Don Meredith. He’s 70. “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
… of Paul Theroux (rhymes with through). He’s 67.
It’s the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, “I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal.” He said the Peace Corps was a kind of “Howard Johnson’s on the main drag to maturity.”
The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.
He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).
… of Steven Seagal. He’s 57. No Oscar nominations for Seagal, but he has been nominated for several Razzies and won once.
… of Anne Lamott. She’s 54.
It’s the birthday of novelist and essayist Anne Lamott, born in San Francisco, California (1954). In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).
She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn’t have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-thirties, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent, and that became her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993). It was her first best-seller.
… of Mandy Moore, 24.
The Pulitizer Prize winning author David Halberstam should have been 74 today.
One of America’s most successful authors, David Halberstam began his career as a journalist in the 1950s, first as a reporter for The Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi and later for the Nashville Tennessean. In 1960 he joined The New York Times and shortly thereafter was assigned to the paper’s bureau in Saigon. Halberstam was among a small group of reporters there who began to question the official optimism about the growing war in Vietnam. Halberstam’s work from Vietnam so rankled official Washington that President Kennedy once asked the publisher of The New York Times to transfer Halberstam to another bureau. In 1964, at age 30, Halberstam earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam. His best-selling book, The Best and The Brightest, chronicles America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
And Joseph Pulitzer himself was born in Budapest, Hungary, on this date in 1847.
He came to this country, moved to New York City and bought The New York World newspaper. He said, “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic — dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse potentates — devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World; that will expose all fraud and sham; fight all public evils and abuses; that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity.” With his profits, he endowed the Columbia School of Journalism as well as the annual Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, literature, drama, music.
