Average Sunsets, Smurf Curses, Tragic Love and More

Haha, an iconic parent/child moment just happened. Zuzu yelled up the stairs, "Daddy!"

Me- "What?"

Zuzu- "There's an ice cream truck!"

We missed it.

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I have a lot of anxiety over tonight's debate! What a ridiculous thing. Who's going to be swayed one way or another? And any who are swayed at this point will continue to be swayed through September, and then we can count on multiple October surprises per day until November when some political nuclear bombs are destined to drop. The election is going to be tight, and my money is on it be decided on something we're not even aware of yet. I might need a drink!

September 10, 2024

One of the great moments in American History! Check the comments.

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Kamala resisting the urge to call Trump a piece of shit.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/g6PSRSs7perFhPAU/?mibextid=xfxF2i

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If on Tuesday you thought someone suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome for thinking Trump downplayed the virus, and on Wednesday after Trump admitted it, you didn't think he suffered from the same affliction... you might have joined a cult.

Join us again tomorrow for the next installment of You Might Have Joined a Cult If...

September 10, 2020

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I've convinced my kids that hate, boring and idiot are all bad words, which is all well and good... but we're watching The Smurfs and they think Grouchy is cursing the whole way through the episode with his "I hate" this and "I hate" that. He's a boring idiot.

September 10, 2018

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I watched the sunrise at the beach today. (To steal a line from Mad Men- it was average.) You know what you don't hear too often in the news- "Don't stare directly at the sunrise without your special glasses!" How have we made it this far without being blinded?

September 10, 2017

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A Call From Emma's Mom

Me- Hello   

Her- You weren't asleep were you?   

Me- No.   

Her- I need a trig function 6 letters long.   

Me- Cosine.   

Her- No, it starts with S-E-C and ends in T?   

Me- Secant.   

Her- How do you spell it?   

Me- S-E-C-A-N-T.   

Her- Awwwwwww. Well do you know a president in the late 1800's who's name starts with A?   

Me- Arthur.   

Her- Awwwwwww. That's it.   

Me- Yep.   

Her- Well that's all I wanted, bye. 

Click.   

Me- Bye.

September 10, 2011

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I can't stand Djokovic and his Frankenstein haircut. Now all I need is a Murray win for me to not care one bit about the US Open finals.

September 10, 2011

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Swiatek lulled me into a trance with her transcendent ball tosses.

September 10, 2022

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I'm playing scrabble with someone who used IMPHEE off the bat, then FEEB, then LOWN after a few other moves, and then YET, but YET created TOEA and EYEN. She's full of crap, right?

September 10, 2011

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I saved seven cents a gallon by going inside and paying for my gas with cash. First time I've done that in years. Little did I know that no amount of money would be worth it.

September 10, 2010

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I admit it... I kind of liked the idea of all those Christian radicals standing in lines in bookstores buying up all the Korans just to burn them. It's like the time back around the start of the Iraq War when they bought all of the French wine just to dump it out in protest.

September 10, 2010

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An earthquake known as "The Lesser Judgment Day" hit Constantinople on this day in 1509. Nice that we have science now.

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Charles Sanders Peirce joined us on this day in 1839. "Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than these facts themselves; and of various hypotheses the least extraordinary must be adopted." 

He's plagiarizing Hume, but who cares.

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Schlitzie Surtees joined us on this day in 1901, famous for his role in Freaks. Gabba gabba.

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Actress Bessie Love joined us on this day in 1898. Picture is from 1917.

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Roger Maris was born on this day in 1934.

"Maybe I'm not a great man but I damn well want to break the record."

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Biologist and author, Jared Diamond, joined us on this day in 1937. A revolutionary thinker.

"History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves."

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Paleontologist, arthur, and baseball enthusiast, Stephen Jay Gould, was born on this day in 1941.

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty."

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Randy Johnson, the John Kruk foil, was born on this day in 1963.

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Mary Wollstonecraft left us on this day in 1797.

"I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves."

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Huey Long left us on this day in 1935, an assassination victim.

"The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down."

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Pier Angeli and James Dean were in love but her mother didn't approve. A marriage with Vic Damone was arranged. James Dean gunned his motorcycle across from the church as they walked out. He died in a car crash shortly after. She lived in unhappy life, and decided to leave it on this day in 1971. Look at him fawning over her. That is a love story for the ages.

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Blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, left us on this day in 1976. From Johnny got his gun:

"Hickory dickory dock my daddy’s nuts from shell shock. Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and burned out his eyes. A dillar a dollar a ten o clock scholar blow off his legs and then watch him holler. Rockaby baby in the tree top don’t stop a bomb or you’ll probably flop. Now I lay me down to sleep my bombproof cellars good and deep but if I’m killed before I wake remember god its for your sake amen."

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Don Olmeyer left us on this day in 2018, the idiot who will be remembered for firing Norm MacDonald. Also, if you are friends with him, he won't even care if you murdered someone. 

Maybe we should look at it from his perspective though. Would you want a good friend who murdered somebody in a fury, to be furious with you because you show kept making fun of him???

Maybe he only fired the funniest guy on the planet from his comedy show out of self preservation.

Or perhaps he was just a nitwit.

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John Adam Whipple was born on this day in 1822. He took the wouldn't earliest surviving picture of the moon.

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Today is the birthday of Bill O'Reilly and The Magnificent Muraco, each born on September 10th, 1949. In their honor, here's a quiz. Each quote is either from Bill O'Reilly, or from The Magnificent Muraco, from the interview before his steel cage match against "Superfly" Jimmy Snuka at Madison Square Gardens for the Intercontinental Championship. Good luck!

1. So what do you want me to do? Do you want to get excited? Do you want me to cheer? Do you want me to get everybody riled up? It's all been done, it's all been said, I already did it all.

2. What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?

3. I can bloviate on TV. So I’m trying to use the gifts in a positive way. And I believe that’s all directed. And that’s why I’m here on the planet.

4. Nobody knows what it's like, nobody but me knows what it's like to go out there in front of 22,000 people, and feel the hate, feel everything come down right on top of me. 

5. I'm supposed to worry about a cage.

6. I'll tell you what. I've been in combat. I've seen it, I've been close to it... and if my unit is danger, and I've got a captured guy, and the guy knows where the enemy is, and I'm looking him in the eye, the guy better tell me. That's all I'm gonna tell you. The guy better tell me. If it's life or death, he's going first.

7. You walk out these doors and you are in the heart of the Big Apple, where the whole world revolves, and right now it's revolving around us.

8. I am coming after you with everything I have. You can take it as a threat. 

9. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.

Answers: 1. MM 2. BO 3. BO 4. MM 5. MM 6. BO 7. MM 8. BO 9. Trick question. That was Bill O'Reilly quoting the Ultimate Warrior.

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Other notable birthdays- Robert Wise (1914), Mary Oliver (1935), Joey Votto (1983)

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Other notable deathdays- Joanne Dru (1996)

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True Romance was released on this date in 1993.

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The Onion- Blissful Ignorance Commemorated On Annual 9/10 Anniversary

http://www.theonion.com/articles/blissful-ignorance-commemorated-on-annual-910-anni,29513/

September 10, 2012

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Rod Serling- “It has forever been thus: So long as we write what we think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.”

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Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts- "Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough."

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Mark Twain- “The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

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The Magnificent Muraco again- "Jimmy Snuka stood up, 25 feet in the air, drove his knee through my ribs, but did I allow them to carry me out on a strecher? NO! I got right up and walked out!"

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Bill O'Reilly again- We'll do it live. WE'LL DO IT LIVE! FUCK IT! DO IT LIVE... look, I'll write it and we'll do it live! Fucking thing SUCKS!" 

That has brought me a lot of joy in my life!

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Diamond again- "With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them."

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Gould again- "Bacteria represent the world’s greatest success story. They are today and have always been the modal organisms on earth; they cannot be nuked to oblivion and will outlive us all. This time is their time, not the ‘age of mammals’ as our textbooks chauvinistically proclaim. But their price for such success is permanent relegation to a microworld, and they cannot know the joy and pain of consciousness. We live in a universe of trade-offs; complexity and persistence do not work well as partners."

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23 emotions people feel but can't explain

13. Ellipsism

A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.

14. Kuebiko

A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.

15. Lachesism

The desire to be struck by disaster — to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.

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Medvedev beat Alcaraz in the semis, and is about to play Djokovic in the US Open final.

I love Medvedev's answer on how to beat the two of them. "There's only one way, I have to play better than myself."

Spoken like a true philosopher. In order to do the impossible, I must be both X and not X.

It's a strange phenomenon, I've done it myself- believe you must be better than yourself, and you can somehow become better than yourself.

September 10, 2023

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Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics- "What is Faith? Bertrand Russell comments: ”All faiths do harm. We may define ”faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.” 

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Albert Camus:

"Life is meaningless, 

but worth living, provided 

you recognize it's 

meaningless."

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Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey

I remember one day I was at Grandpa’s farm

and I asked him about sex.

He sort of smiled and said,

“Maybe instead of telling you what sex is,

why don’t we go out to the horse pasture and I’ll show you.”

So we did, and there on the ground were my parents having sex.

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William James- "The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."

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Werner Herzog- "If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him."

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A rapturous young fellatrix

One day was at work on five pricks. 

With an unholy cry

She whipped out her glass eye:

"Tell the boys I can now take on six."

Addendum

Sam Harris's Trump diatribe to end all Trump diatribes, from August 25, 2022. (Not a great transcript but I'll take it.)

I think Osama Bin Laden was a more or less normal human being psychologically. He was just living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview the moral structure. He imagined he was living under and wanted to impose on the rest of the world. Given his beliefs was Despicable, so he created immense harm and it's very good that we killed him. But within the framework of his odious beliefs, he demonstrated many virtues. A man who certainly seem to be capable of real self-sacrifice and he was committed to ideals Beyond his narrow self-interest. He was by all accounts, personally, quite courageous, I don't claim to know that much about him, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. If he was generally a person of real integrity and generosity and compassion, it has dealings with his fellow Muslims. None of these things can be said about Donald Trump. Trump is without question, one of the least honest and most malignantly selfish human beings I have ever come across and the Paradox here. It's not really a paradox but what makes the point I'm making confusing to many people. The seeming Paradox is that if Trump were a better person, he would be worse in many ways. If you were brave and self-sacrificing and idealistic if you were capable of being strongly, added to something beyond his narrow self-interest. He would be capable of creating much greater harm in the world, but he's not. He is a child in a man's body. He lies as freely as he breathes and just as compulsively. He can't even put the interests of his children above his own, much less, commit himself to any ideal that requires real self. Sacrifice unlike Bin Laden. It is Payton, Leigh obvious that Trump isn't psychologically normal. He really is missing something that almost every other person on Earth has he is an absolute black hole of self-regard. When I say that wherever you are on Earth, you could probably walk a thousand miles in any direction and not meet a less admirable human being than Trump. I mean, it in the terms I just described. The man is almost completely lacking in personal virtue if you weren't funny, and I admit, he can be funny. He might actually be the least admirable person on earth. Now, some of this is just my opinion, of course, but much of it isn't. Okay. To say that Trump lies incessantly and with a velocity almost never encountered anywhere else in human life is a fact. It is demonstrable. It is nearly of evident and has been for decades, it is as true. And uncontroversial as saying that he's around six feet, two inches tall. I realized that when I say this sort of thing it sounds like an expression of personal hatred and in my own political partisanship but it is neither of those things. I don't hate Trump. I hate the fact of him. I hate this space. He occupies in our world. I hate what he has done to our politics. Yes. I know his ascendance politically is a symptom of many underlying problems but he is also exacerbated those problems massively. Trump isn't the answer to woke - and leftist hysteria because he has done more than anyone to produce that hysteria. If you want to see how crazy the left can get just electrum for a second term in 2024, we have a real problem of populist irrationality and misinformation. And tribal lunacy on both the left and the right Trump has made that problem astronomically worse on both the left and the right. It's not about hating the man. I hate the phenomenon, I didn't hate Trump. When he was just a charlatan on The Apprentice I ignored him and my criticism of trump isn't remotely partisan. It isn't even political because what I have to say about Trump, I wouldn't say about any other Republican and many Republicans with whom I disagree about politics, share. My view of him. I probably agree with most of Trump's politics. In fact, do I think we should have a secure border? Absolutely. Do I think we should be harder on China? Yes. Do I think that much of the left is in the grip of an insane? Moral panic? I do think the phrase defund the police is one of the stupidest ever uttered? Of course. Do I recognize that globalization has produced many casualties in our society? Yes, am I in favor of on Shoring? Much of our supply chain and energy, infrastructure. Yes, I am. Am I appropriately humbled by our Misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and now skeptical of our ability to do anything like nation-building. Absolutely.

All of this significantly overlaps with Trump's policies, and with the political concerns of his supporters, I may be an elitist globalist Jew asshole, as many of trump supporters. Now, allege but not only, don't I denigrate many of their political concerns, I share them. My real opposition to Trump beyond all the flaws of his character which again, I consider to be so far beyond the norm that I just cannot believe. We even have to think about this man. But the thing that makes him truly irredeemable and should have made him politically radioactive for Republicans for the rest of his life is that as a sitting president of the United States, he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He declined to do this repeatedly. Many months in advance of the election, I believe this is the most shocking thing to have happened, politically in my lifetime. And of course, Trump's lack of commitment to the most basic principle of our democracy laid. The groundwork for his big lie about having really won the 2020 election. And for the violence on January 6th, this single fact among the thousands of other facts that should have disqualified Trump for the presidency. This fact alone should make Trump impossible to defend much less support. At this point in the fact that the Republican party has found a way to ignore. This truth as it were some tiny detail, is proof that has become a cult of personality. This is the real Trump derangement syndrome to be defending the indefensible. What we are witnessing now among Republicans is not normal politics. So when I described Trump, as an existential threat to our democracy, I'm thinking about things like the willingness to abide by the results of an election and the peaceful transfer of power, the very Norms that Safeguard our democracy. One thing that Trump taught us is that we rely on Norms in so many ways and in some ways even more than laws. It's quite possible that all of what Trump did to corrupt and destabilize our institutions was legal, it remains to be seen whether he's committed any crimes at all. It's legal to just ask the Russians on television to hack the emails of your political opponent and there's no price to pay when they actually do that very thing, it's apparently legal to campaign on the promise that you'll lock up your political opponent, when you win and it seems legal to openly lie about having won an election that you actually lost and to encourage a mob to gather in Washington to quote, stop the steal. And when they begin storming, the capital and call in for the murder of your vice president. In order to stop the steal, it may be legal to just sit on your hands when you're the only person on Earth who can do anything to stop the violence, just to see if things somehow play out in your favor there, don't appear to be a laws to defend our democracy against this sort of thing. It's just that we've tended to expect that. Politicians won't behave in these ways and normal politicians or even just decent human beings. Won't For Better or Worse. The Integrity of our democracy, depends on hundreds of norms like these not being violated on a daily basis, but when I say that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. I don't mean that he is, orange Hitler. Again, Trump is a narrowly selfish con, man. He doesn't appear to think big at all. If you want anything, it appears to be only Fame and money, he seems content to do things. Like rack up millions of dollars in fees at his hotels and golf courses and apartment buildings by doing things like oblige the Secret Service to stay there. We all use the word grifter now with alarming frequency Trump is the ultimate grifter but he's not ideological. He seems to believe in nothing the on the next opportunity to do something venal and selfish. So he is not Hitler and this brings me to another confusing thing about the clip you're about to hear. I use the analogy of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. This was not meant to indicate how bad I think Trump is it was meant to indicate that the( Blank) against that. The podcast hosts were attaching to the term. Conspiracy was misplaced. Anyway, you'll hear how potentially misleading this is. Okay, so now for the clip, here's the necessary context. As I said on Twitter, I was talking about the ethics of ignoring the story about Hunter Biden's laptop until after the election. I won't play other clips from the interview, but suffice it to say that. I made it absolutely clear that I found the decision to ignore this story. A very hard call. Ethically in journalistically, I stated quite clearly that I could argue both sides of the issue and that my mind wasn't made up. It's still isn't made up and I admitted that it was corrosive for journalistic institutions. Like the New York Times to appear to show obvious political bias in this way when everyone knows that would never have ignored a Donald Trump jr. Laptop story. And I said that for me, it really was close to a coin toss. I could go either way on this.