Interruptions of the Symphony of Silence
I had a dream last night that I was hanging out at a swimming pool with an older Chris Farley. We were clowning around, splashing each other, and telling jokes. I told him how lucky he was, that it was a good thing he straightened himself out because he almost died when he was 33 years old. I remember thinking in the dream, "Chris Farley dead at 33? That would have been incomprehensible."
December 1, 2022
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Noah Yuval Harari's 100th Birthday tribute to his grandma.
https://www.facebook.com/100044185671479/posts/pfbid02XVpmj8A2npkwjBukBH6cXoVsBQsC7MQPTkGPvj51S53V4RsLV7rP6nhwpvjiXs8hl
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You can't see clearly when your head is up God's ass.
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Hannity is saying Trump should preemptively pardon himself. It's simple to prove that presidents can't pardon themselves. Example: Biden is not allowed to strangle Trump at the inauguration and then pardon himself. Unless Hannity disagrees, case closed!
December 1, 2020
Postscript- In retrospect, nothing has ever been more obvious- Trump pressed Hannity to put that garbage out.
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Biden's cringe-inducing No Malarkey Iowa tour put me in mind of what David Foster Wallace said about John McCain's Straight Talk Express. Now rereading it, I think it might remind me more of Trump.
Wallace:
Because here's another paradox. Spring 2000--midmorning in America's hangover from the whole Lewinsky-and-impeachment thing--represents a moment of almost unprecedented cynicism and disgust with national politics, a moment when blunt, I-don't-give-a-shit-if-you-elect-me honesty becomes an incredibly attractive and salable and electable quality. A moment when an anticandidate can be a real candidate. But of course if he becomes a real candidate, is he still an anticandidate? Can you sell someone's refusal to be for sale?
There are many elements of the McCain2000 campaign--naming the bus "Straight Talk," the timely publication of "Faith of My Fathers," the much hyped "openness" and "spontaneity" of the Express's media salon, the message-disciplined way McCain thumps "Always. Tell you. the truth"--that indicate that some very shrewd, clever marketers are trying to market this candidate's rejection of shrewd, clever marketing. Is this bad? Or just confusing? Suppose, let's say, you've got a candidate who says polls are bullshit and totally refuses to tailor his campaign style to polls, and suppose then that new polls start showing that people really like this candidate's polls-are-bullshit stance and are thinking about voting for him because of it, and suppose the candidate reads these polls (who wouldn't) and then starts saying even more loudly and often that polls are bullshit and that he won't use them to decide what to say, maybe turning "Polls are bullshit" into a campaign line and repeating it in every speech and even painting Polls Are Bullshit on the side of his bus...Is he a hypocrite? Is it hypocritical that one of McCain's ads' lines in South Carolina is "Telling the truth even when it hurts him politically," which of course since its an ad means that McCain is trying to get political benefit out of his indifference to political benefit? What's the difference between hypocrisy and paradox?
Unsimplistic enough for you now? The fact of the matter is that if you're a true-blue, market savvy Young Voter, the only thing you're certain to feel about John McCain's campaign is a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen. At the times your cynicism's winning, you'll find that it's possible to see even McCain's most attractive qualities as just marketing angles. His famous habit of bringing up his own closet's skeletons, for example--bad grades, messy divorce, indictment as one of the Keating Five--this could be real honesty and openness, or it could be McCain's shrewd way of preempting criticism by criticizing himself before anyone else can do it. The modesty with which he talks about his heroism as a POW--"It doesn't take much talent to get shot down"; "I wasn't a hero, but I was fortunate enough to serve my time in the company of heroes"--this could be real humility, or it could be a clever way to make himself seem both heroic and humble.
December 1, 2019
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Borowitz, on Mnuchin- Unlike Hillary Clinton, who disgracefully gave speeches to Goldman Sachs bankers, Donald Trump is just giving them Cabinet positions. #populism
December 1, 2016
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On this day in 1952, The New York Daily News reported the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery.
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On this day in 1992, police rushed a video store and drew weapons on an armed gunman, but it turned out to be a cardboard cutout of Denzel Washington.
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Diane Lennon, the oldest of Lennon Sisters was born on this day in 1939. Somehow all five are still alive. Here's Que Sera Sera:
https://youtu.be/y0ltYApM_tk
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Richard Pryor was born on this day in 1940.
“I’m not addicted to cocaine. I just like the way it smells.”
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Thirty years to the day later, Sarah Silverman joined us.
“I’m working on an open letter, and it goes like this: ‘Guess what, Martin Luther King? I had a f–king dream, too! I had a dream that I was in my living room. It wasn’t my living room, but it was, like, playing my living room in the dream. And I walked through to the backyard, and there’s a pool, and as I’m diving in, there’s a shark coming up from the water… with braces. So maybe you’re not so f–king special, Martin Loser King.’ Yeah, I wanna be the first comic to shit on Martin Luther King. ‘Cause people only talk about the good things. They don’t mention… he was a litterbug… He would roll up all the windows, lock them and fart in the car with the heat up, while his family suffered… And he would laugh. I just think people should know everything, before they give someone a day.”
That is a gutsy joke!
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Aleister Crowley began his symphony on this day in 1947.
"Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence."
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James Baldwin died this day in 1987. From The Fire Next Time
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us."
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Hall of Fame pitcher, Gaylord Perry, was a notoriously bad hitter, and said in 1963, "They'll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run."
On July 20, 1969, 20 minutes after we landed on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first and only home run.
He died on this day in 2022.
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Mother Earth- Ethics Office Congratulates Trump for Something He’s Not Planning to Do
I love this story.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/ethics-office-congratulates-trump-something-hes-not-planning-do
December 1, 2016
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Indiewire- Paul Schrader Wants Better Moviegoers, Says Audiences Don’t Take Films Seriously
“When people take movies seriously it’s very easy to make a serious movie,” he continued. “When they don’t take it seriously, it’s very, very hard. We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them. It’s not that us filmmakers are letting you down, it’s you audiences are letting us down.”
https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/paul-schrader-moviegoers-dont-take-films-seriously-1202024149/
December 1, 2018
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The Atlantic- Why Are We Closing Schools?
Pretty interesting case for opening schools, driven by data from different countries, and NYC, weighing expected benefits with costs. My mind is open, pretty odd that students and staff NYC schools would have 40% fewer cases than the general population.
"According to New York City government data provided to me (I served as a resource for the school district in an informal, unpaid capacity), the city performed more than 74,000 tests in 1,224 schools during a three-week period in October, and just 45 students and 63 staff members tested positive. The percent of students and staff estimated to have had COVID-19 during this period is nearly 40 percent lower than the estimate for the general New York City population for the same period. In other words, both teachers and kids are at less risk of getting COVID-19 in school than they are elsewhere in their day-to-day lives."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/ease-restrictions-schools-dont-close-them/617146/
December 1, 2020
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McSweeney's- IT’S ROTTING DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS by COLIN NISSAN
Ahhh, it's December, and you know what that means...
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-rotting-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers
December 1, 2021
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Garry Shandling- "I always had bad luck with pets. I had a beautiful Irish Setter that I adopted from the Humane Society. When he was 8 years old I told him that I adopted him, and he ran away to find his real parents."
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Woody Allen- "I'm very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch."
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Mark Twain- "Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
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Churchill- "Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
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Seneca- "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
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Classic joke:
"Did you hear about the blind skunk who tried to rape a fart?"
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Voltaire- "What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on..."
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Sagan- "My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic."
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Vonnegut- "The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart."
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Sarah Silverman again, on the Iraq War:
“This is not the first time that Europe has been passive while a Jew-hating tyrant with a weird looking mustache killed the people by giving them gas. Obviously, I'm talking about Chef Boyardee.”
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Ricky Gervais- “1st of December, World AIDS Day… I don’t think it’ll ever take off like Christmas.”
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