Category: Idle Thoughts

How come I love it when I open my Twitter application and there’s 6 or 8 new Tweets, but hate it when I open it and there’s 23?

(That’s why I only follow a few people — so far.)

Don’t you just love these old white men senators who can’t conceive that their upbringing and experience is every bit as biased in its own way as that of any minority group member?

Bloggers and others are reporting on the Sotomayor hearings as if they thought it was something other than show and tell.

It continues to amaze me that so many people assume that the price of their house will go back to its 2005-2006 value sometime soon.

That value was a bubble! An anomaly. An aberration.

Today’s prices are likely to be it for a while — if they don’t drop further what with all the foreclosures yet to come.

How come the news media would have it that Michael Jackson died of a heart attack but Heath Ledger died of a drug overdose?

All this talk about 60 Democratic senators, filibuster-proof and all.

Does anyone know, when did we last have a filibuster? I can’t remember one. Isn’t this all 99.9% talk?

I don’t know if God answered Sarah Palin’s prayers.

But He sure answered mine.

I didn’t know Governor Palin had even been to Argentina?

Why do celebrity deaths matter? Why the outpouring of grief for a person we’ve never truly known?

Anthropologists tell us that so-called primitive societies — wherever in the world — had a few near constants. One of these was the identification of self — of their particular tribe or clan — as “the people.” Everyone else was “the other.”

This human trait continues to the present. We may belong to multiple clans now — family, friends, school, work, church, community, nation, sports teams, whatever. But we still belong — and to some extent everyone who doesn’t belong to our clan is still “the other.”

Celebrities, however, transcend clan. They are the others that we welcome into our lives because they touch it in unique and exciting ways — their humor, their style, their music.

Much too simple I know, but that’s what I think both makes them celebrities, and causes us to grieve for them when they go.

How difficult would it be to get a small computer with voice recognition that could be programmed to mute the TV sound whenever certain sportscasters came on; you know, like Bob Costas?

You know, excepting for Emmett, Elise, Natalie, Jill and my brothers, I could get a better discussion in any bar than I do with this blog.

And at least in a bar someone would buy me a beer every once in awhile.

Do you think Disney is undermining our American sense of democracy with its emphasis on princesses?

Wake me up when Justice Sotomayor is sworn in. Three days of idiots blathering is enough.

I’m still looking for someone to suggest a Supreme Court case wrongly decided by activist justices.

That and an example of a power reserved to “the people” by the Tenth Amendment.

The first people to come to America bearing my surname arrived 299 years ago next month from the Rhineland.

Am I still a German-American? If so, when do I become just an American? Is there a statute of limitations?

[For that matter, the first people to come to America bearing my mother’s surname arrived in Quebec about 350 years ago. Am I also a Franco-American? Or a Franco-Canadian-American? Or a Franco-Canadian-German-American?]

There have been a lot of downright wrong things posted on this blog, nearly all of them by me.

But this is the single most ignorant sentence we’ve had here: “I, as a conservative, would just as soon have a computer programmed to decide based on strict interpretation of the ACTUAL constitution rather than whether the judge agrees with me or Ken.”

I like activist judges.

As long as they are activist in good ways.

If there are a lot less real estate agents (see previous post), that’s going to have a big negative impact on photography studios that take those hilarious glamour shots of realtors.

It didn’t even reach my consciousness until today, but I’ve noticed that far fewer people on airplanes seem to be reading newspapers.

Suppose one of the other Cavaliers hit the game-winning shot last night. Do you think the fuss would be as great?

I sure wish the left-bloggers would quit writing about all the moronic things the right-wing bloggers, radio talk show hosts, TV commentators and politicians are saying. I avoid that stuff for a reason and if I want to read whacko shit, I’ll go to the source. Repeating it, even to ridicule, just keeps the nonsense in circulation.

With one exception. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Asylum). Everything she says is priceless.

I don’t think I can live through the Supreme Court appointment process. I’m already sick of it.

Why not just abandon the pretense and appoint senators for their lifetime — also the lifetimes of their current spouse and any children.

(Arlen Spector is 79-years-old.)

Update: As Atrios says that Harry Reid said: “Arlen Specter’s with us except when we need him.”