.
First, a little Monday-morning humor: Kendra Eash at the New Yorker, with “Honest LinkedIn Recommendations“:
Greg is a rare mix of faux intelligence and stalled ambition. Just when you think he’s completely checked out during a meeting, he’ll ask a rhetorical question padded with corporate buzzwords, or look up from his phone to restate something we already know. I am particularly impressed with his ability to appear to be updating spreadsheets while watching MLB.TV. A mediocre addition to any company!…
Also for your consideration, because there are things foreigners can do that Americans can’t/won’t, John Oliver actually went to Moscow to interview Edward Snowden. The Daily Beast reviewer called it “arguably the toughest interview… taking him to task on the leaked NSA documents,” which as far as I can tell is true.
(Warning: NSFW)
User notes: Since anybody reading this probably already has a fair grasp of why Snowden is now living in Moscow, not to mention what might cause the average American to lose patience with the NSA (the NSFW tag is for repeated use of the phrase ‘dick pics’), Oliver actually arrives in Russia at the 13:45min mark. For the best abbreviated summary clip, start at the 32min mark.
***********
Apart from me trying your patience, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
Mustang Bobby
Re: LinkedIn recommendations — I keep getting referrals from people I’ve never heard of such as a pastry chef in West Palm Beach. There’s no way to reply “I have no idea who you are” without having to sign up for LinkedIn, so I just spam it, but I’m sorely tempted to sign on so I can say “Nice guy but he gave me the crabs and wiped his schwanz on the curtains.”
Baud
No American has interviewed Snowden yet?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: There’s always our buddy Glenn. Anybody catch the Glenn and Glenn show(Beck and Greenwald)?
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I thought Brian Williams interviewed Snowden in Russia. Or am I misremebering that event?
sharl
@Baud: Recently disgraced Brian Williams did, though I can remember nothing about that interview. And I think there was at least one other big media personality who talked to him, but I cannot remember who that was.
Oliver did some thorough homework and advance preparation, and I would argue came to the interview with a significantly different agenda than those traditional U.S. media people.
ETA: Your comment #4 slipped in while I was typing this one in…
Ben Cisco
@Baud: Well, it is Brian Williams – it’s entirely likely that HE misremembered it.
ETA: OK, so it appears he didn’t make it up. Mea culpa.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I heard snippets about it, but no real content.
David Koch
Yikes. John Oliver made the little shit look really bad.
BillinGlendaleCA
@David Koch: I just saw the snippet on Morning Hoe. Wow.
Baud
@David Koch: @BillinGlendaleCA:
You’re making want to care.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Sorry about that.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Just don’t do it again.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’ll enter a ‘note to self’ on my watch.
delk
What’s on the agenda as we start another week?
NO more mayoral election ads!
I’ve learned so much about each candidate from them. /BiggestWasteOfMoneyEver
Rumor has it that Rahm has rich friends and Chuy does not have a plan. Don’t quote me on that, though.
There might be something about schools.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I am curious to see how Joe attacks both Snowden and Obama.
Do you really have a smartwatch?
David Koch
@Baud: you gotta love that Mika Brzezinski; she’s a real piece of ass
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Yes, I have an Asus Zen watch. Love it.
ThresherK (GPad)
Discovered, during my insomnia, where all my favorite standards/jazz radio stations have gone. Answer? Basically all are off the terrestrial air, and online.
Still isn’t the same as tuning a radio, though.
MomSense
Made the mistake of checking my work email account this morning. Big mistake. Now I want to call in sick of work.
BillinGlendaleCA
@ThresherK (GPad): Great kickstarter idea, a bluetooth device that looks like an old radio with dials and everything that ‘tunes’ online stations.
MomSense
@MomSense:
Weird. Went back to edit, ended up ranting, and now FYWP has decided I’m having an identity crisis. Guess messages come in unexpected ways.
ETA my rant is gone and briefly my nym was “undefined”.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Don’t you also have that nice camera?
Stop living the life I want to live.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I only spend money on tech and cigs.
MomSense
@Baud:
I’m so sick of tech. So many chargers and cords and cases and batteries. The charger fights between kids who think the other kid took their charger and then they start with the arguments about who charged which device where and why that proves the charger belongs to __________ and everyone is all pissy about it and then a couple days later __________ finds the charger in the car/backpack/friend or girlfriend’s house/laundry basket/jacket pocket/dog kennel all chewed up and then I give _____________my charger to use.
ThresherK (GPad)
@BillinGlendaleCA: It would be, except the market for nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
But seriously, as long as it doesn’t end up like the new Crosley line of olde-tyme looking modern stuff which manages to look chintzy and imitative while being way overpriced, I’m interested.
Crosley was a polymath who owned the Reds, built and sold radios, invented the Shelvador, founded WLW, and a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with the current company of the name.
Maybe the Steampunk folks can do something. I have yet to string up an antenna for shortwave here yet.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m surprised about the cigs. You seem active.
I’m trying to decide whether to get the S6 in a couple of months. Reviews are phenomenal. But I didn’t want to pay iPhone prices for a phone. Which is one of the main reasons I don’t have an iPhone.
satby
@MomSense: The universe is telling you to go with your gut and stay home. I’m tempted to as well, but then I can do part of my job at home.
Iowa Old Lady
@MomSense: @satby: Yeah, you’d think time off would make it easier to go back to work, but lots of times it makes it harder.
Botsplainer
@Mustang Bobby:
LinkedIn pisses me off. When you try to hit their inexplicably high ranked pages just to get a phone number, you have to actually be a paying customer for that kind of data to show.
It’s useless. The equivalent of Yelp for business connections.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’m not at all pleased with the lack of the removable battery and the ability to add additional memory with the S6. Then again, I’ve got a Note 3 and if/when I do upgrade, I’ll get another Note(4 or 5).
It did surprise the kid that I didn’t get winded on our hike.
Kathleen
@MomSense: I’ve always been tempted to use “spiritual paralysis” or “existential nausea” as excuses to miss work.
Botsplainer
@MomSense:
Whenever you ground them off electronics, don’t take the devices – take the chargers and enjoy their facial expressions as the power bar dwindles.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Those are the main complaints, but most phones seem to be moving in that direction. LG should be out with the G4 later this month. We’ll see if they ditch those features also.
Mustang Bobby
@Kathleen: I have called in sick to take a mental health day. One time my boss said “Take me with you.”
Baud
@MomSense:
I’ve always wanted to buy one of those electronic label makers. Sounds like you could use one..
Aimai
@MomSense: you can put colored stickers on everyones computer and phone cords so everyone can identify their own stuff. They make four colored sets for your mac. But you can just do it yourself with colored tape.
satby
@Iowa Old Lady: indeed! And no matter how much I get done on a weekend, Monday morning is when I can remember all the stuff I didn’t finish, and all the work stuff I have to try to do. Not enough coffee in the world…
satby
@Kathleen: I like those. They do sum up how I often felt at big soulless IT company.
debbie
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I heard the interview on the radio show. Greenwald tippy-toed up to the religious freedom issue and Beck would have none of it. Otherwise, they were two sympathetic old souls echoing each other’s deepest fears.
Cervantes
@Baud:
Obviously not the case. In addition to aforementioned Brian Wiliams, Snowden has been interviewed by (e. g.) James Bamford as well as Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen — all Americans in the conventional sense.
raven
@satby: Think it’s a gender issue?
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: Wow. Stephen Cohen. Quelle surprise.
satby
@raven: What, not enough weekend? Naw, I bet everyone feels that way.
Iowa Old Lady
Oliver’s interview was great from a number of angles, including that the public cares way more about pictures of their nekkid bods than anything else.
raven
@satby: Every Sunday night my bride sighs that she “didn’t get everything dome that I wanted to get done”. I never say that (unless I’m fishing.)
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Every Sunday night my bride sighs that she “didn’t get everything dome that I wanted tom (to) get done”.
That’s funny, my wife says exactly the same thing.
NotMax
@raven
If it’ll make her feel any better, tell her I cleaned out the file cabinet last week.
Which is something set my mind to do 5 or 6 years ago.
raven
@NotMax: Nothing will improve that situation.
Cervantes
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m not even surprised when people dispute his American-ness. We certainly know how and when to do that in this country.
raven
@NotMax: I got all that pea gravel moved!
satby
@raven: @OzarkHillbilly: LOL, ok, maybe it is. But I’m pretty confident I won’t be saying it when I’m retired. Because every day will be like Saturday. Or so I’ve been told.
Cervantes
@Aimai:
Good idea.
Also might help to put some of that respective colored tape on each person’s assigned “primary” plug-in spot(s).
Admittedly, these kinds of solutions work best for kids who want to make them work. In other cases the conflict is the point — and there you need other kinds of interventions!
satby
@NotMax: about my timeline for doing mine.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@MomSense: Anal Glaucoma
Sherparick
In this little corner of dissent, I note the early blog entry about the massive donations that a few billionaires channeled toward Tom Cotton and other likely war mongering Republicans in the last election cycle. In the wake of tentative Iran deal, one can expect the spigot to be turned wide open not only for Republicans, but for Democrats like Steve Israel who will tow the Likud line. I also note that over the last 10 years, as evidence of human caused climate change actually impacting the world (not just models but actual impacts – record droughts, wild fires, storms,melting glaciers, and rising sea levels), the MSM media, at least broadcast, radio (including NPR), and cable mention it less and less. I must point out the plutocrats had in this, particularly the Koch brothers (who have made themselves big shots in the Public Broadcasting world) and the fossil fuel industry in general. If you can bring yourselves to watch the Sunday shows, or cable news, the number of ads from Koch Industries, American Petroleum Institute, and the Natural Gas Alliance run ads almost as frequently as Viagra and other drug company ads. One can’t piss on one’s profit center can one. Also, a war in the Middle East and with Iran (and Iraq turning into a 3 sided civil war with second American intervention), would like drive the price of oil back up to the $150 level. Good for profits all around!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@ThresherK (GPad):
Just glue some gears on it.
NotMax
@raven
Congrats again. Big job. Moving gravel or moving dirt is a bear and a half.
Mowed only half the property yesterday. Weighed whether to do the rest or acknowledge the back twinges just beginning to give dire warning, and ended up putting the tractor back into the shed. Back half of the property grass is shin high again, but it’ll have to wait. At least the area down by the street and also the lawn surrounding my landlady’s house looks spiffy. :)
raven
@NotMax: I mowed too, every spring I have to remind myself that it is easier to mow once a week no matter how high the “grass” is/
NotMax
@raven
Story you might appreciate.
When worked at a summer camp, we has to get a particular grade of stone for a sewage tile field the state insisted be installed (IIRC, it was #2B clean gravel).
Anyhoo, we had a 1½ ton dump truck and were making multiple runs to and from the quarry, but due to the distance involved could only make a few round trips per day.
Camp owner decided we were going too slow, commandeered the truck, overfilled it, and broke off half the lugs (not the nuts, the lugs) of the rear wheels on his first drive back with a load.
raven
@NotMax: Lucky the axle didn’t go!
boatboy_srq
@Mustang Bobby: I’ve had one or two “messages” from friends on LinkedIn who never sent me anything. They’ve notified LI and changed passwords wholesale, which stopped the messages. I’m waiting to hear about the massive security breach that’s coming.
Cervantes
@NotMax:
!
Baud
@NotMax:
What company did that guy eventually become CEO of?
boatboy_srq
@NotMax: There are things to be said for letting the professionals do what they’re good at doing.
NotMax
@raven
The guys at the International Harvester repair shop laughed their butts off.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I’ll bet her name was Carly Fiorina.
raven
@NotMax: Those studs can be a bitch to get out, “easy out” indeed.
NotMax
@Baud
Heh.
Actually, he became mayor of a good-sized city (which I shall refrain from identifying).
boatboy_srq
@ThresherK (GPad): Ayuh. I blame XM, Sirius, Pandora and Spotify.
Carolinus
@Cervantes:
Also WaPo’s Bart Gellman. Of course the real final nail in the coffin to the whole “foreigners can do that Americans can’t/won’t” line is that John Oliver is, in fact, an American Citizen who lives in New York City:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/07/29/what-do-john-oliver-dave-chappelle-and-chris-rock-have-in-common-hard-truths/
NotMax
@raven
There was another occasion when we ripped the trailer hitch clean off the same truck.
But as a character in Irma La Douce often said, “That’s another story.”
Botsplainer
@boatboy_srq:
The “Linked In” security breach will cause deep ripples through the business world, I’m sure. About as much as a collapse of Yelp!
Botsplainer
@ThresherK (GPad):
Speaking of nostalgia, does anybody under the age of 70 give a shit about the annual ritual of “The Ten Commandments” at Easter anymore?
Cervantes
@Carolinus:
Yes, I wasn’t counting Gellmann or Greenwald or Poitras as their access to Snowden (and the leaked information) transcends any single interview.
different-church-lady
@ThresherK (GPad):
The drag part of online radio is no human beings. The programmers pick some great music, but then just dump it into the servers and nobody tells you anything deeper information about what you’re listening to. It’s like a “beautiful music” station from the 70s, only with better genres.
Elizabelle
NYTimes has a pretty good article on Steve Coll’s Columbia U Grad School of Journalism assessment of the now recanted (but legendary) Rolling Stone article on campus rape at UVA.
Times article by Jonathan Mahler reviews a history of failed journalism, but manages to never include the words “Judith Miller.” Referred to more obliquely.
Here are your bad journalism subtypes and examples:
and then
Because the NYTimes fell victim to the most complicated of the three types. And it was so hard to see. Uh huh.
Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report
An anatomy of a journalistic failure
By Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, Derek Kravitz
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WXCWpvqh
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Gin & Tonic
@Botsplainer: I think last night commenter lamh36 was waxing nostalgic about it.
ThresherK
@Carolinus: I want to know how a guy from Birmingham becomes a Liverpool fan.
Years ago he was in Connecticut to cover the USMNT for The Daily Show, and in that report was a childhood photo of him in an all-red kit, subsequently confirmed as Liverpool.
NotMax
@Botsplainer
No*.
Double ditto for King of Kings.
Charlton Heston couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag (was subjected to a college film starring fellow classmate Heston made by an English teacher in my high school, multiple times.)
*Ross Douthat and Mike Huckabee excepted.
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: Which I have never done. Even though, as you know, I am certainly not a fan of his.
Matt McIrvin
@ThresherK (GPad):
Those stereos look so interesting until you get up close, and they resolve into cheap crap.
It didn’t register to me until just now that the Crosley brand actually has a long history behind it. Crosley was the same Crosley who attempted to promote the Mignet “Flying Flea” as a hobbyist airplane (it was great except for the little uncontrollable-dive problem).
Cervantes
@Carolinus:
Yes, and his wife is a veteran of the 2003 invasion of Iraq (she was a medic).
ThresherK
@different-church-lady: Oh, that’s the most-missed bit. I remember WNEW-AM in New York, which basically kept this stuff alive in the 70s and 80s. (And also the radio home of the New York Giants and also the New York Cosmos.)
They sent reporters to live-cover Broadway openings back when things weren’t pre-sold Disney adaptations or jukebox musicals. Frankenstein? Bring Back Birdie? I remember hearing about them before they were history.
And the personalities and the interviews with everyone–the musicians, producers, singers, composers, even jazz writers (when that meant “someone read as widely as Rolling Stone is today”)? I don’t want to say that window has closed, but there are just sooo few of those folks around any more, and I’m glad to have witnessed it over the ether.
Patricia Kayden
@Botsplainer: Me, but I have the DVD so I can watch it whenever.
rikyrah
@debbie:
Because whomever believed that Greenwald was anything other than his self-serving delusional libertarian self…
you get what you get.
raven
@Cervantes: Meh, she’s one of them commie vets! /s
boatboy_srq
@Botsplainer: It’ll only matter when it hits TheLadders. Until then it’s just a problem for the little people. It’s still a PITA, though.
boatboy_srq
@different-church-lady: Except that “beautiful music” was Olde Dogwhistel for “music not composed and performed by Those People.”
Ellington, Monk, Fitzgerald and a few others got passed in – but FSM help anyone playing fusion, funk or anything more adventurous.
Cervantes
@raven:
What’s funny — and maybe to John Oliver as well — is that she helped elect Michael Grimm and Allen West to Congress in 2010.
raven
@Cervantes: Shoot me now.
eta, Shit, I mistook Vets for Freedom for Vets for Peace!
raven
ACCCCCK!
Among the Vets for Freedom advisors are Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and former Iraqi Coalition Provisional Spokesman Dan Senor.[32]
Amir Khalid
@ThresherK:
When you consider that the alternative was to support Aston Villa …
ThresherK
@boatboy_srq: Thelonius Monk was “beautiful music”?
Your version of it beats the one I was subjected to.
I thought Beautiful Music meant sanded-down versions of songs often rerecorded and then broadcast through even more aural cheesecloth filters on the radio station side. Plenty of strings, very few vocals, often en masse–think “Mantovani” or the “Ray Coniff Singers”.
(This is not to be confused with Muzak, a service which was never radio and used only its own recordings.)
Then at some point in the 80s it became simply a lighter version of mainly top 40 hits with the same aural cheesecloth filter before it hit your radio dial. (“Light and easy favorites”?) It will now include some twenty- or thirty-year-old recordings by the likes of Tom Petty, Bon Jovi, and John Mellencamp, things which simply Were Not Done back when these songs were new.
Cervantes
@raven:
Not to worry, I probably should not have mentioned her to begin with.
Carolinus mentioned that Oliver is now a (naturalized) citizen of the US. This fact reminded me that when he originally applied for permanent residency, it was not something he could simply take for granted. He eventually succeeded, but not because he married an American veteran. As I recall, he got the green card before they were even engaged to be married — so despite my stream-of-consciousness meanderings, I needn’t have mentioned her.
Cervantes
@ThresherK:
“Easy listening.”
ThresherK
@Cervantes: Hmm. That may be a toMAYto / toMAHto decision.
I do read around the sites run by broadcast veterans, but they don’t really tell us much about that era in such a granular manner.
germy shoemangler
@ThresherK: I spent my teenage years listening to Alison Steele (the Nightbird) with my headphones on. And I remember Scott Muni and a bunch of other DJs who apparently were playing whatever records they felt like playing. The entire first and second side of a new release? No problem!
I remember the afternoon John Lennon wandered into the studios of WNEW, and told stories and played his favorite records.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Gin & Tonic:
She was admiring the loincloth-clad Yul Brynner at his physical peak, as all right-thinking (straight) women do.
jeffreyw
@germy shoemangler: In between tours to Viet Nam, my battlion of the 82d Airborne was tasked with summer camp cadre duty at West Point, where I discovered Allison while channel surfing through the FM dial. I think I fell in love with her, a little. I don’t think I ever thought about her again until I came across her obit somewhere on line a while back.
germy shoemangler
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yul is cool in the Ten Commandments! And my favorite scene is still when the Nubians show up.
I love Edward G. Robinson. He was a great character actor. But when I think of him in Ten Commandments I always imagine him walking around in the period costume: tunic, black socks and black sock garters, black 1940s oxfords shoes. And taking a cigar out of his mouth to say “Yah, Moses, see?”
boatboy_srq
@ThresherK: Agreed – but I was thinking more that Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and others from what we now think of as the golden age of jazz were quickly and efficiently expunged from the rotation – mostly for being Blah, though jazz does have the potential to challenge the ear. Reread your list of performers and you’ll see the same trend.
germy shoemangler
@jeffreyw: She had a voice like silky velvet and she played whatever she felt like playing.
Mike in NC
Is LinkedIn still a thing? Most people I knew in the IT business stopped using it at least five years ago, about the time when I deleted my account.
germy shoemangler
According to Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffery, the song “Night Bird Flying”, recorded by him and released posthumously on the album, The Cry Of Love, was inspired by Allison’s late night Manhattan radio program. and a poem in his handwriting reads: Hello night bird. How was your day? Did you visit the gods in the valleys far away? What did you bring me, in your visit from the sea? The song originally was intended to be the flip-side of a planned single.
Alison Steele did the voice over for a great comedy bit: “Larry Fine At Woodstock”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i16VL-eSFnY
Major Major Major Major
So long, Asia. See y’all yesterday…
Major Major Major Major
@Mike in NC: quite important in the Bay Area for the dev set. For a self professed meritocracy tech sure is nepotistic…
Gin & Tonic
@germy shoemangler: WNEW-FM and WNEW-AM were very different.
germy shoemangler
@Gin & Tonic: Never listened to the AM channel: what was going on there in the 70s? RW talk?
Iowa Old Lady
Steve Benen quoted a NYT story that JEB claimed to be Hispanic on a 2009 voter registration form. They have a photocopy of the form.
germy shoemangler
@germy shoemangler: explained above. Sorry!
germy shoemangler
@Iowa Old Lady: If I try to point that fact out to any RWNJs, they’ll reply “And Elizabeth Warren told everybody she’s Native American!” I can predict their responses at this point, and I’m tired.
Major Major Major Major
@germy shoemangler: it’s also utterly irrelevant inside baseball. Save your breath and pixels.
Brachiator
@germy shoemangler:
And this may still be one of the best short 10 Commandment parodies: 10 Things I Hate About Commandments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MAMsyIZguw
Gin & Tonic
@Iowa Old Lady: I read on Twitter that his first name is pronounced “Heb.”
germy shoemangler
@Brachiator: No doubt!
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Only in Latin America. In Spain it’s “cheb”, with the ch as in “loch”.
Iowa Old Lady
@germy shoemangler: @Gin & Tonic: It’s so weird that I don’t know what to say about it.
ETA: That he did it on a voter registration form adds a layer of…something, given how nuts they all are about voter registration.
Gin & Tonic
@germy shoemangler: Explained incorrectly. WNEW-AM, during the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, with Jonathan Schwartz, Les Davis and others was an outpost of good American music, not “easy listening” or “beautiful music” or any of that whitebread crap. They played pre 1960’s jazz, big band music and what’s sometimes called “The Great American Songbook”, meaning the sort of Porter/Berlin/Gershwin/etc songs that you’ll find being sung by Sinatra, Bennett, Fitzgerald, et al. That lasted until the mid-1980’s. The Boston-area equivalent, Ron Della Chiesa’s “Music America” program on WGBH-FM also did not survive the 1980’s, IIRC.
germy shoemangler
@ThresherK: “They sent reporters to live-cover Broadway openings back when things weren’t pre-sold Disney adaptations or jukebox musicals.”
So true… there was a time when movies were made from successful broadway plays. Now broadway plays are made from movies.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@germy shoemangler: Of course the fact that she has actual indigenous family lineage is immaterial to the RWNJ. And Jeb must be Hispanic through the transitive property – his wife is…
Belafon
@Iowa Old Lady: If I were Jeb, I would claim that I mismarked the form by accident. Let’s see what level of intelligence the Bush campaign has.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: There’s been a @YebBush account on Twitter for a month or two. I suspect it’ll get more followers soon.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: Or as in “Kharkiv” (Ukraine’s second-largest city.) I find native American-speakers have trouble with that phoneme.
MomSense
Speaking of office drones, I really should have called in a drone strike on my office.
It is even worse than I feared.
Gin & Tonic
Here’s yet another opportunity for a schism between the business wing of the GOP and the wingnut wing.
raven
@MomSense: Speaking of, I have a bid in on a ride in a Cobra Gunship, hadn’t changed in 4 days and with an hour to go someone jumped in!
germy shoemangler
I’ve got a powerful urge to pack up my things and retire to Cat Heaven Island:
https://vimeo.com/91670646
Tashirojima, an island with 44 elderly people and hundreds of cats in Japan.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: “Military Intelligence specialists have worked for several months with a handful of America’s most incomprehensible citizens to ensure their smooth integration into the Marine Corps. They have also undertaken the laborious task of training specialized linguists to decipher the new Code Talker transmissions.”
Sweet Home!
Amir Khalid
@germy shoemangler:
From what I understand, there’s nothing remarkable about a white person of Midwestern US origins, like Elizabeth Warren, having a soupçon of native blood. Why was it ever a thing at all?
ThresherK
@Gin & Tonic: It’s like you were there too! Don’t forget Ted Brown, Jim Lowe, and (still) the Milkman’s Matinee, and Make-Believe Ballroom.
@germy shoemangler: G&T covered it nicely. I was within WNEW-AM range as a kid, but not WNEW-FM’s range.
Just as well, I wasn’t into rock and roll then. Funny how the AM side was doing a great job of the preservation of one style, while the FM side was breaking ground as a broadcaster of another style.
germy shoemangler
@Amir Khalid: It was a stick to beat Elizabeth Warren with. Didn’t her opponent’s vile supporters show up at her speeches to give “Indian War Whoops” and stuff like that? So glad she beat his ass.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Amir Khalid: Because quotas and scholarships that are restricted to certain ethnicities and/or national origins.
IOW, they’re claiming that she cheated her way into her position as a professor.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: That’s outstanding. I’ve actually been to Alabama several times, and “incomprehensible” is apt.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: It’s a military Onion.
BobS
@Gin & Tonic:Neither are the McCarthyites that populate some of these threads.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
I also liked this precis of John Bolton’s argument for bombing Iran.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Great, isn’t it!
Gin & Tonic
@BobS: Huh. I was a big supporter of Gene back in the day, too. Small world.
MomSense
@raven:
Hope you win the ride.
SiubhanDuinne
Nice Wonkette shout-out to John for his righteous rant on Kansas the other day.
For some reason, I’m always just tickled when I see Balloon Juice cited favorably in other blogs.
different-church-lady
@ThresherK: Right, “beautiful music” was “easy listening” made even “easier”. It sure as hell wasn’t “R&B or Jazz made safe for whites.” That was top 40 radio. (< not quite accurate, as by the 70s top 40 radio had lots of soul and Motown influences.)
raven
@MomSense: I’m going back and forth. Last night on Mr Selfridge he got caught up in bidding war with the evil Loxley and lost his butt. On the other hand I just talked to a pilot and he said he said it was a good deal!
Peale
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Yep. I mean, I guess we can claim that somehow Jeb was taking advantage of all of the special benefits we give to Hispanic voters in Florida. Like unexplained purges from the rolls and fewer local polling places with longer voting lines.
PurpleGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I feel the same way when Barbara O’Brien mentions something she read here at BJ in her blog (Mahablog).
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: Indeed bu for a different reason: it won’t be an issue until she runs for re-election. And if history is a guide, she’ll be “unopposed” in the sense that the only republican running against her will be one of our Quixotic types from the same strain that used to run against Kennedy on a regular basis.
BobS
@Gin & Tonic: The same way Reagan was a union guy. Small minds.
Gin & Tonic
@SiubhanDuinne: Here’s a follow-up on that Novosibirsk/Tannhauser issue from the other day.
Brachiator
@different-church-lady:
Probably more accurate to say “Jazz made safe for squares.”
Plenty of white people like jazz, and a lot of black people are scared of jazz.
Mike J
@Gin & Tonic:
It’s almost like real businesspeople understand the value of orderly markets
BobS
@Gin & Tonic: Replete with the NED Seal of Approval.
ThresherK
@Brachiator: Jazz made safe for squares?
You are violating Paul Whiteman’s trademark. His lawyers will see you in court.
But seriously, does anyone know of a good book on Whiteman? I zigzag between thinking he was smart in easing boundaries without ruining his opportunity at the time (the 1920s, a.k.a. the first decade of radio) and guessing him too cautious for too long in his heyday.
And would we ever have had “Rhapsody in Blue” without him?
PIGL
@Botsplainer: as in the tedious, bombastic, Charlton Heston vehicle?
Not I.
Gin & Tonic
@BobS: We were talking about opera.
raven
@ThresherK: Years ago we went to the JVC Jazz festival in Atlanta. Miles, the Yellow Jackets, Ry Hargrove and a bunch of greats. It was a nice mixed crowd with many African American folks in attendance. There was a buzz going before a certain performer was due up. It was Michael Franks and a bunch of black folks went nuts when he came out.
BobS
@Gin & Tonic: What makes you think there aren’t opera aficionados at the NED?
raven
Awright! I won a Cobra Ride Auction!!!
Brachiator
@ThresherK:
I do not know, unfortunately.
Didn’t he also hire a young Bing Crosby as a singer?
catclub
@raven: A good one! Check the pub date.
fidelio
@raven: Congratulations! Enjoy the view.
Cervantes
@ThresherK:
Yale published maybe ten years ago a book about Whiteman’s life in music as it intersected with (or transpired alongside) Satchmo’s. You might enjoy it.
divF
@raven: If they can’t find enough Alabamian code talkers, they can always hire mercenary Scots (who are just as incomprehensible).
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Peale: Eh. For us, it’s a dog whistle for “A Bush lied again.”
Means something completely different to someone who thinks “Please fill out this form in black ink” is code for “Whites need not apply”.
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
I had a shipmate (from Michigan) who’s wife was from Down East Connecticut. She was unintelligible to people in Mississippi, and couldn’t understand them either, at all.
She might as well have been posted into Turkey, except it was worse, everyone expected that she would fit right in, as they were all speaking English (NOT!).
Sometimes, when it was important, she would write a little note to the druggist about her medication requirements. If things were going poorly.
I’m so glad we got out of Mississippi without suffering any actual damage. It was worse than a foreign country by far, as they all claimed to be patriotic Americans, even thought they all displayed flags of treasonous revolution against the rightful government of America. They all were also totally racist by reflex back then in 1971-72, to a degree I can’t explain.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: It’s complicated.
Lots of white Americans, especially if they have roots in Oklahoma, have family legends about Native American ancestry. Some fraction of these stories have some actual substantiation (I think Warren’s is in that category, though I’m not sure); many are purely bogus, possibly cover for some other sort of stigmatized ancestry (I suspect this happened in my own family). It annoys actual Native Americans, who constantly have to listen to some white person’s fairy tale about being 1/32nd Cherokee princess.
Anyway, back in the 1990s, long before she entered politics, Warren ended up in some directory of Harvard faculty with minority ancestry because of this. To the American right, engaged in sniffing out “race hustlers” wherever they go, this is indication that she was some sort of affirmative-action cheat.
But what it really was was a way that Scott Brown’s Senate reelection campaign could dog-whistle to their followers about Warren having some kind of unsavory racial association without saying anything overtly racist. They had a lot of fun chortling about “Fauxcahontas” and drawing feathers and buckskins on her. Some guy in my town put up a big sign on his house urging people to vote for Brown because he was “NOT AN INDIAN.” Fortunately Warren won anyway, though it looked like she was actually in trouble over it for a while there.
sm*t cl*de
Blame the help for filling in his personal depositions wrongly: