Thursday, May 8, 2008

Notes and Asides without actually blogging...

*I read Coulter strictly for the bombast, a word which when used in association with Ann Coulter is compellingly onomatopaic.
*Oh god, do I hate Omarosa, the black Sandra Bernhard {Helen Thomas's Dorian Gray).
*Here's the most fun I ever had in a passenger jet---
I was on a flight out of Calgary, Alberta to Toronto in a L-1011 widebody. We had hardly retracted the landing gear following take off when a very loud percussion resembling a machine gun firing arrived accompanied by rapid jolts.

It was one of the few times in my life that I seriously thought there was a good chance I was gonna die. Oddly, there was no panic or fear, just resignation and the thought that it had been good while life lasted.

The pilot wheeled the airliner around and took us back to the Calgary airport which, upon our arrival, had fire trucks and foam trucks lining the runway. We landed safely.

I found out later that one of the struts in one of the huge L-1011 engines had come loose and was sucked back into the turbine. The machine-gun fire we heard was the strut breaking turbine blades in its journey through the motor.

Good times!

*Conservatives who thought they had ordered Republican takeout but when they opened the bag at home found it was Democrat-lite can be forgiven their bewilderment if not their apathy. The Contract with America was the clarion call the Republican congress and administration ignored once they got hold of the levers of power. Now they wonder where its supporters went. One of the places is not-to-the-polls.

As for you, Newt, a few more photo-ops with Pelosi and you can go somewhere, too.

*The last time the high imprisonment rate for blacks came up in meatspace, I told the complainant that the courts were evidently even more sexist than the racism being claimed.

When he asked why, I asked him to note that half the population is female and half male, yet prisoners are overwhelmingly male; so justice must be biased.

When he objected that it was because men committed more crime than women, his voice got softer and softer as it slowly dawned on him the fallacy of his belief.

*All I know is that if Reefer Madness is a documentary, I've been paying a lot of money for oregano.

*James Joyce is as unlikeable to me now as he was to the offended back then. I think art that isn't attempting to suade is enjoyable regardless of the artist's politics, but that would mostly apply, I think, to sculpture, paint, architecture and not so much writing. Art Buchwald wrote for many years in a mildly leftist manner that was inoffensive and as exciting as a bucket of warm beer.

Give me Dorothy Parker and Camille Paglia any day. I disagree with them in many areas but feast on their writing. For that matter, my favorite writer of the time, Sinclair Lewis was sharply skewering the society he saw yet I count myself on the conservative, albeit libertarian, side of the divide.

Can we partake of polemical art without being molded by it? Good question.

*Everyone knows computers run on smoke because when the smoke comes out, your computer doesn’t work.

*

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”

Popular Mechanics, 1949

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