Laugh Riot At the Dentist

I walked into the dentist office and I was surprised to see the dentist in the waiting room replacing a piece of carpet. Someone had spilled something and there was a big stain. They took me right back to a room and the dentist popped in quick... she heard they were having an issue with two of the electric outlets. She fixed them. The dental assistant told her I was there for a possible TMJ issue. She said she better get the other dentist because he has more experience with that. I took a risk... I said, "Sounds good, and then you can stick to the carpet and electric issues." Very well received, it was a laugh riot. I need to take more risks!

August 29, 2019

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Amelie.

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"Love you daddy you are the best bald head."

August 29, 2020

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Sam Harris- "Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed—and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery."

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Henry Miller, Letters To Emil- "Some day I am going to own a few feet of earth somewhere and put a house over it. Just one big room will do, with a stove and a basin of water, a huge desk, a bookcase and an easel. Then life can go rolling by, and what floats in through my door will be sufficient for me.

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Emma:

"Just got home from Ben Kreider's ACL surgery. As he was fading into anesthetic oblivion, I asked him if he had anything that he wanted to say. He mumbled, "It's a good day to die, but it's an even better day to not die.""

That's the best thing I ever said and I'm not even responsible for it- coopting the Lakota war cry, then twisting it and cheapening it. And for the record, she asked if I didn't make it, what did I want my last words to be. She toned it down for facebook.

August 29, 2012

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I was just going to post this Jon Snow quote:

"When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything, and there are no more answers — only better and better lies."

But when I went looking for the exact quote, it turns out Anthony Scaramucci had tweeted it, and people were reading it as a veiled insult of the president. This from a guy who says things like, "I'm not going to lie to you. I'm going to tell you the truth, and the truth is that I'm not going to answer your question."

Is that the truth, or is that the best lie in history?

August 29, 2017

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This little monkey-face is very eager to drive.

August 29, 2015

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Was born on this day in 1809. Here's a remarkable 198-word sentence that he wrote in the December 1862 issue of The Atlantic:

Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,—fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,—all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices.

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RNC Convention Notes

"We have responsibilities, one to another – we do not each face the world alone. And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves." Paul Ryan, socialist

Alright McCain and now Huckabee both mentioned that we don't want a president that "leads from behind." Are these guys talking in some coded language to appeal to their base?

You know, Tim Pawlenty's jokes aren't as bad as people say. They're worse.

Of all the people the republicans could have asked to give the keynote speech last night, I'll never understand why they asked Jeff Garlin's reflection in a fun house mirror.

Odd, Fox News is just jabber-jawing about the speeches, not actually showing them. MSNBC and CNN do the same thing. (They need to control their message?) The Pinko Broadcasting System (PBS) is doing the best... commercial-free by the way, I wonder what that has to do with it.

John McCain's arms don't reach down to his belt. I bet Sarah Palin sees that as more proof we're not descended from monkeys.

August 29, 2012

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To get ready for my surgery the doctors today gave me a sedative that induces mild amnesia and then apparently stuck me with some big needles to block the main nerve going down my leg. I don't remember the needles but Emma said I was mumbling about them later. Here's the question- if I don't remember the pain, did it really happen?

August 29, 2012

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Watching Hamlet (yeah watching ,what you read it?) and coming across gold nuggets like this- "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

August 29, 2011

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From Werner's Herzog's book, Conquest of the Useless:

"Today the bat was still there. Someone had neatly laid a strip of toilet paper over it. It was dead, its position unchanged. I left it there and did not use the sink, not out of disgust or hygienic considerations but out of an unarticulated sense of respect. One of my favorite words in Spanish has always been murcielago, bat. My life seemed like an invention to me, with its pathos, its banalities, its dramas, its idling."

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John Locke was born on this day in 1632. In 1689 he anonymously wrote a pamphlet, Second Treatise on Government, which had the revolutionary idea that would have probably got him killed if the English government knew who wrote it. 

Here's the revolutionary idea- any government derives its power only through the consent of the governed, and when a government infringes on people's natural liberties, the people have the right to revolt.

Thomas Jefferson considered Locke one of the three greatest people who ever lived, along with Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. If there were no John Locke, there would be no Thomas Jefferson that we would recognize. If there were no Thomas Jefferson, what country would we live in?

Any government derives its power only through the consent of the governed. Novel idea, huh?

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

What advice would Locke give Jefferson about slavery?

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Ingrid Bergman was born on this day in 1915, and left on her 67th birthday in 1982.

"I said, "I don't think I can give you that kind of emotion." And he [Hitchcock] sat there and said, "Ingrid, fake it!" Well, that was the best advice I've had in my whole life, because in all the years to come there were many directors who gave me what I thought were quite impossible instructions and many difficult things to do, and just when I was on the verge of starting to argue with them, I heard his voice coming to me through the air saying, "Ingrid, fake it!" It saved a lot of unpleasant situations and waste of time."

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English rugby player Richard Harding was born on this day in 1953. Dick Harding huh? No need to brag about it.

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Ishi emerged from the California wilderness and made contact with European Americans on this day in 1911. He is considered the last Native American to make initial contact. Ishi, the Last of His Tribe, one of my favorite books. "Ishi" means "man" in Yahi. They asked him what his name was, but he said that only another Yahi could name him to someone else. The rest of the tribe was killed in a genocide. He was eventually taken in by anthropologists at the University of Berkeley and given the job of a janitor.

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Gene Wilder left us on this day in 2016. When Willy Wonka was talking about tasting snozberries, he was really talking about tasting dicks!

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Ed Asner left us on this day in 2021.

"Raising kids is part joy and part guerilla warfare."

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Other notable birthdays- Preston Sturges (1898), William Friedkin (1935), John McCain (1936), Michael Jackson (1958)

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Herzog got so good at hypnotizing people that he entertained the idea of hypnotizing the audience from the screen until he recognized it as irresponsible. The majority of his opening shots certainly have a hypnotic effect! After seeing the first several minutes of Even Dwarfs Started Small, I had to take a break. It's a different world outside, I can't describe it. Everything seemed to have extra significance. I re-watched the beginning several times over a couple days, and it dawned on me that I should really finish the movie at some point.

August 29, 2012

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Gretel says, "That's a good one."

http://66.media.tumblr.com/a993bfda0c1dd291e408bb35a55dab65/tumblr_oc0vzbUfaW1rpduwho1_500.gif

August 29, 2016

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Washington Post - Why is whataboutism having a moment?

Whataboutism: A rhetorical device such as "well what about what Obama did?" as a means to excuse one's own bad behavior by comparing it to the bad behavior of others you condemn.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/08/29/why-is-whataboutism-having-a-moment

August 29, 2017

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Accidentally revealing lines from the Republican convention:

Dana White, the president of UFC: “Let’s re-elect President Trump. Let’s figure out what the problems are and continue to find solutions.”

Kevin McCarthy: "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris think this election is about the government. They’re wrong.”

My favorite is from Mike Pence- Let's make America great again, again

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John Mulaney- "All my money is in a savings account. My dad has explained the stock market to me maybe 75 times. I still don't understand it."

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William James- "Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."

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Steve Martin- "Be tasteless, rude, and offensive. Live in a swamp and be three dimensional. Put a live chicken in your underwear. Get all excited and go to a yawning festival. Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things you don't know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed."

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Neil Simon- "Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity."

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H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft- "We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction."

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Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States- "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

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Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons- "But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius."

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William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways- "A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity."

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W.E.B. DuBois- "Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe- "We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."

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There was an old whore of Azores 

Whose cunt was all covered with sores. 

The dogs in the street 

Wouldn't eat the green meat 

That hung in festoons from her drawers.

Addendum

Robert Reich:

Friends,

I want to talk about symbols, images, and fascism.

Surely you've seen Trump’s mug shot from his arraignment on Thursday in Georgia. In it he shows a look of defiance — which I’m sure he practiced repeatedly beforehand — intended to make his supporters and his Republican base feel defiant, too.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is Trump’s thousand-word response to Wednesday night’s Republican debate, which he declined to attend.

He timed his arraignment in Georgia for Thursday so that it — and this photo — would dominate the rest of the week's news, rather than anything or anyone emerging from the debate.

But a defiant photograph isn’t “news.” It’s a symbol, an image. Which is exactly what Donald Trump is. He has no political platform, no specific policy agenda, no new ideas, and no plan for what he’ll do if he gets a second term.

He exists as a symbol for the anger, discontent, bigotry, and vindictiveness he has unleashed in America.

He is as close as America has come to a fascist leader, who doesn’t want his followers to think or analyze. He wants them only to feel.

Trump’s lackeys fell in line, expressing the defiance Trump projected in his mug shot.

On Newsmax, Sarah Palin called for civil war.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham told viewers that Trump’s arrest was proof that government officials are trying to “take them out.”

Fox’s Sean Hannity said the Department of Justice will target Republicans “until there’s nothing left of the party.”

All brainless bile.

Last Thursday, Trump complained that Fox News “purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not. Just like 2016 all over again … And then they want me to debate!”

Of course he’s angry. For the man who’s all symbol and image and without substance, a photo like the following conveys a brainless buffoon. It must drive him crazy.

But Trump is not a brainless buffoon. He’s a cunning marketer, a diabolic manipulator of the public, a sly producer of his own daily reality show. His lead in the GOP’s presidential sweepstakes has grown. He will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for president next year — even if he’s in jail.

How to debate a symbol? How to take on an image? How should Biden and the Democrats, and everyone who cares deeply about this country, respond to a demagogue who obsesses over what he projects rather than what he stands for? How to deal with a fascist who doesn’t want followers to think but only to feel rage?

Expose him for who he is — and what he stands for. 

What are your thoughts?

August 29, 2023