Chiaroscuro
Did you see Trump's speech last night? I honestly tried, but I think I only made it a half hour. Somehow it went on for another hour??? You have to question the decision-making ability of somebody who chooses to follow Hulk Hogan.
https://youtu.be/yujF8AumiQo
July 17, 2024
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Zuzu has to get blood work done every so often, and tonight she asked me which blood-taking doctor I like the best. The answer was obvious- "Dr. Acula."
Mitch Hedberg is alive and well and living inside my head.
July 17, 2024
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J.D. Vance posted this on X, just after the assassination attempt, just before being picked for Trump's Vice-Presidential nominee:
"Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination."
Not an isolated incident? He must be stopped at all costs, including assassination? Pure nonsense.
In America you can criticize the president for any reason. Call Biden anything you like, you're allowed. If you don't like it, that's the price that you have to pay for other people's freedom, the same as they have to pay for your freedom when you say something they don't like. It's a small price to pay.
Biden's bullseye comment has gained a lot of traction as an example of violent rhetoric, and he's apologized for it.
He said, "It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye."
Despite deep divisions, there's one thing, and maybe one thing alone, that 100% of us can agree on. Biden does not display good word choice!
Anybody who takes an honest look at that statement knows what he meant. The bullseye has been on him since his cataclysmic debate performance, and it's time to change the focus to Trump, who continuously lied throughout.
Let's turn the mirror on Trump for a second. Every politician speaks hyperbolically, but for Trump violent rhetoric has been an intentional theme throughout all of his campaigns.
In 2016, he said that if he lost, "Second Amendment people" could fix Hillary's judicial nominations. Something tells me he wasn't speaking hyperbolically, that was a little too specific.
After Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked in their house with a hammer (clearly a failed assassination attempt on her), he joked with a crowd at one of his rallies:
“I will stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco... How's her husband doing by the way? Anybody know? (Laughter from the crowd.) And she's against building a wall [on] our border even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn't do a very good job." (More laughter.)
Not exactly my style of humor.
I don't know if you follow the news much, Dear Reader, but there was also the time that Trump incited a rowdy, armed crowd to go down to the Capitol at the exact time the 2020 election was being confirmed, telling the crowd, "We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
Some people point out that he also told the crowd to be peaceful. Sure, some bank robbers are nice to the tellers before they make off with the money.
Again, every politician speaks hyperbolically in this way, saying that we have to fight for the country, but there's a key difference in this case. His crowd then went down to the Capitol, and they literally fought like hell for their country, killing and maiming law enforcement officers, while Trump, the most powerful person in the country, sat on his hands for hours, watching it unfold. There's only one explanation, he wanted them to actually fight.
After years to reflect, Jonathan Karl asked him about his crowd chanting for Mike Pence to be hung, and Trump suggested that maybe he deserved it.
To my knowledge you can't find an equivalent to any of these instances from a major politician from either party within my lifetime, and it's not like there aren't plenty more. They are all disgusting, and any one of them should have disqualified him from the Republican nomination. Yet here we are.
If these instances of violent rhetoric (and inaction to actual violence) don't warrant calling out Trump's authoritarian tendencies, does Vance actually believe in our constitutionally protected free speech?
If Vance is so determined to wipe out anti-authoritarian language, he can start with the guy who said this.
"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler."
That's a direct J.D. Vance quote. His ridiculous argument falls apart when it's turned back on himself. Does he really believe he's responsible for the assassination attempt?
If we are to have any credibility in our beliefs, we have to live up to the standards we hold others to. He has this far proven that he has no standards, that his words can't be taken seriously, and that he should have no role in serious politics.
July 17, 2024
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Gretel said the most surprising thing tonight. We were at Barnes & Noble looking at blu-rays and she wanted to know what the old horror movie Cat People was about, so I read the back to her. Here's a sentence:
"Lewton, a consummate producer-auteur who oversaw every aspect of his projects, found an ideal director in Jacques Tourneur, a chiaroscuro stylist adept at keeping viewers off-kilter with startling compositions and psychological innuendo."
I told her that I didn't know what the word chiaroscuro meant.
She said that she knew- "It means havin do with light and dark."
I didn't even have to look it up, I knew she was right. I couldn't believe it. I should have known it in context, Cat People's cinematography and themes focus on light and dark.
Apparently it's also the name of a rat in her favorite book. Not too bad of a vocabulary for an 8-year-old!
July 17, 2022
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P.J. Soles was born on this day in 1950. She's the peppy spirit behind the Ramones film Rock 'n' Roll High School. I always felt like she was right on the cusp of super-stardom. Who knows, maybe she still is.
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I haven't taken Gretel and Zuzu to any store since about March, but we all masked up and went into Barnes & Noble tonight. I was going to buy them each a book and look at the half price Criterion films. Another guy was there looking at them too, and he didn't say anything, but if I were him I would have been amazed at how a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old were talking about how much they like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Then we came home and finished watching Koyaanisqatsi. I bet they don't even realize they're enrolled in a free 18-year film course.
July 17, 2020
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Hollywood Chubby-Chonka Kreider's birthday, born July 17, 2021.
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So these racist tweets actually increased Trump's support among his base. Increased it. Some people weren't totally sold on him, then he dragged out that old cliche of a racist trope... "go back to where you came from"... and they thought, "yep, that's my guy!"
July 17, 2019
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Washington Post, July 17, 2018- How Trump retreats: Grudging apologies, plus a wink and a nod to the original insult
Excerpt of analysis on Trump's "apology" on Helsinki:
He read from the paper: “Let me be totally clear in saying that — and I’ve said this many times — I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.”
Then he looked up. Change of tone, to the casual Trump, the voice his followers know conveys his true feelings. And he interjected: “Could be other people also. A lot of people out there.”
And he was off, riffing as he had in Helsinki, once more re-litigating the 2016 election, asserting that “there was no collusion at all, and people have seen that and they’ve seen it strongly.”
He would come back to his script, claiming that his error in Helsinki had been the misstating of a single word — “would” instead of “wouldn’t.”
“So you can put that in,” he said, “and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.”
End of excerpt- Quite an enantiodromiatic apology, huh? The equivalent of, "I actually said the opposite of what everyone thought."
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From a meme-
Media: Lying
Comey: Lying
Obama: Lying
Clinton: Lying
Stormy: Lying
Strozk: Lying
Mueller: Lying
Judges: Lying
19 Sexual Assault Accusers: Lying
Climate Change Scientists: Lying
17 Intelligence Agencies: Lying
Putin: "He means it, I believe him."
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“It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.”
-Pablo Picasso, reacting to the successful Apollo 11 mission, was quoted as saying this in the New York Times in July 1969.
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I'm not sure about the phrasing of what's coming up on This Week with George Stephanopoulos: "John Kerry Talks Terror, Turkey."
July 17, 2016
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Bit-O-Honey forever, Mary Jane never.
July 17, 2011
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Come over for free blackberries, but come before they're all juiced. (You might have to pick out a moldy one or two.)
July 17, 2010
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From Werner's Herzog's book, "Conquest of the Useless":
Yesterday at four in the morning, while it was still dark, Walter shook me awake to tell me that in half an hour a plane would be leaving for Lima. Still groggy with sleep, I jumped into my clothes, then into one shoe, then the other. But there seemed to be a sock bunched up in the shoe. I reached in to pull it out, and suddenly instead of a sock I was holding a tarantula, as big as my fist and hairy. At that moment my heart stopped beating.
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Everyday more people are killed in automobile accidents then we'll be killed over the whole year in airplane crashes, yet the crashes get the headlines. I think this has something to do with our innate fear of falling, that I'd assume could be traced back to our ancestors who lived in the trees.
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On this date in 1933, in Daleville, IN, Dillinger robbed the Commercial Bank of $3,500.
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On this day in 1998, a diplomatic conference adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing a permanent international court to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
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Dirty double-crossing rat, James Cagney, was born on this day in 1899.
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One-liner queen, Phyllis Diller, was born on this day in 1917.
“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
“On my honeymoon I put on a peekaboo blouse. My husband peeked and booed.”
“We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 years teaching them to sit down and shut up.”
"I asked the waiter, 'Is this milk fresh?' He said, 'Lady, three hours ago it was grass.'"
"My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor."
"You know you're old when someone compliments you on your alligator shoes, and you're barefoot."
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Chinese director, Wong Kar-wai, was born on this day in 1958. He's one of the all-time greats, a real cinema director- Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love. He'll be remembered.
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Economist and philosopher, Adam Smith, joined us on this day in 1790. Endlessly quotable.
"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."
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French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, left us on this day in 1912.
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp."
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Ty Cobb died on this day in 1961.
"The base paths belonged to me, the runner. The rules gave me the right. I always went into a bag full speed, feet first. I had sharp spikes on my shoes. If the baseman stood where he had no business to be and got hurt, that was his fault."
He was a mean guy, someone you wouldn't want to emulate, but I agree with him on that point. The defenders are free to get out of the way.
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Dizzy Dean left us on this day in 1974.
"Well we're all ten years older today. Dizzy Dean is dead and 1934 is gone forever. Another part of our youth fled. You look in the mirror and the small boy no longer smiles back at you. Just that sad old man. The Gashouse Gang is now a duet. Dizzy died the other day at the age of 11 or 12. The little boy in all of us died with him. But, for one brief shining afternoon in 1934, he brought joy to that dreary time when most needed it. Dizzy Dean. It's impossible to say without a smile, but then who wants to try? If I know Diz he'll be calling God 'podner' someplace today. I hope there's golf courses or a card game or a slugger who's a sucker for a low outside fastball for Diz. He might have been what baseball's all about." - Jim Murray in Los Angeles Times on July 19, 1974
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Mickey Spillane left us on this day in 2006. From My Gun Is Quick: "They were going to die slower and harder than any son of a bitch had ever died before, and while they died I'd laugh my god-damn head off!"
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National treasure, Walter Cronkite, left us on this day in 2009. "America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system."
"We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders."
"In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story."
When asked about his regrets- "Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation."
Take that, media. Did Cronkite save a million lives by drawing the undeniable conclusion that the nation's leaders were not to be believed concerning Vietnam? We miss him.
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John Lewis left us on this day in 2020. Here he is quoting Buddha:
"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”
I wrote this just after he died:
Two key takeaways from John Lewis's life's effort- we've come a long way, and we have a long way to go. He was the living embodiment of his friend Martin Luther King's maxim, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." I believe that, but it doesn't just happen. We can can use his example and others and work toward making it continue to happen.
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
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Another notable deathday- Billie Holiday (1959)
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More evidence that global temps are rising. It's true though that all the evidence isn't yet in- so sit back, relax, and wait for them to do the rest of the months.
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/642177-global-temperatures-were-seventh-warmest-on-record-for-june
July 17, 2011
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The Onion, July 17, 2014- Everyone In Middle East Given Own Country In 317,000,000-State Solution
http://onion.com/1t9pc4j
July 17, 2014
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Okay, let's give credit where credit is due... we've had Trump wrong the whole time. Whenever we thought he was lying, he was actually just a dumbass! Did anybody other than him actually think that Biden said that we should defund/abolish the police???
https://www.newsandguts.com/donald-trump-fails-to-prove-joe-biden-wants-to-defund-the-police/
July 17, 2020
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Collected Insights From Across the Internet:
If You Earn Less Than $36 Per Hour Then You Earn Less Than A Penny A Second. It’s Literally Worth Your Time To Pick Up A Penny On The Ground
The Spiders That Live In Buckingham Palace Are Probably The Descendants Of The Spiders That Lived There During Victorian Times. So There’s A Parallel Royal Family But With Spiders
Lab-grown meat is on the rise, and if it becomes common practice, our children and grandchildren will most likely see us as monsters for killing and eating animals
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Dizzy Dean- "The good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong body, a good right arm, and a weak mind."
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Papa John's transportation LLC is "Trans Papa." They are run by a hardcore Republican who spoke at CPAC, haha. I think they might have picked that name without realizing how it would be perceived in the future!
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When Justin Verlander first met Kate Upton:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/6418950561491892
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Enantiodromia- The changing of something into its opposite.
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Ricky Gervais- "You don't see faith healers working in hospitals for the same reason you don't see psychics winning the lottery."
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Ernest Hemingway- "Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing."
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Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time- "Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us."
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A.P. Chekhov- "What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself."
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Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting- "To laugh is to live profoundly."
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Jean-Luc Picard- "Make now always the most precious time."
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D.T. Suzuki- "God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature. Very funny religion!"
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