Olbermann Gets Canned Again

Keith just seems to have trouble holding a job for long.

The television personality, who rejoined the sports network in August 2013, won’t be renewing his deal to anchor his ESPN2 program. The news follows a THR report from July 1, which noted that ESPN management floated an ultimately unworkable caveat: that Olbermann cease engaging in commentary.

If you have a kid with this sort of work history, you sit him down and ask if he's noticed any patterns in why he gets fired. I hope somebody is doing the same for Keith.

Another note: ESPN was spending forty million bucks to rent a studio for him?!?

Zoroastrians Are Upset with Snoop Dogg

Zoroastrians in India are suing Snoop Dogg for mocking their religion.

Little known Iranian-born pop singer Amitis in June released on YouTube a music video co-starring Snoop, also known as Snoop Lion. No word from either artist on how the unlikely collaboration came about. The low budget video depicts the two luxuriating amid gaudy props and set pieces vaguely reminiscent of an ancient Persian royal court, smoking weed, and watching some almost-naked pole dancers. That’s where the trouble starts.
 
In one scene, Snoop smokes one of the 81 daily blunts he claims to enjoy while sitting on a throne under a gold Faravahar, the most sacred symbol of the Zoroastrian religion and an image frequently associated with Persian history. […]

Darayas Jamshed Bapooji, president of the Parsi Zoroastrian Association of Kolkata, a civic organization in the Indian state of West Bengal, watched the music video after receiving angry emails about it and decided to put his foot down. He retained attorney Phiroze Edulji and filed public interest litigation (a type of civic complaint) in a municipal high court in Kolkata alleging that the video infringed on Parsi’s “constitutional rights” and that the government should therefore ban its distribution.

What’s the likely result of the legal action?

The legal standing of the claims remains uncertain, but the Indian penal code does criminalize speech that promotes “enmity between different groups on ground of religion” or is otherwise “prejudicial to maintenance of harmony.”

A spokesperson for Snoop Dogg declined to comment.

Stay tuned, Snoop Dogg fans.

Blatter's Out!

Anheuser-Busch tweeted him, "Time to drink your words." (See the video in the post below if you don't get this). Oliver's response:

John Oliver on FIFA

Magnificent excoriation of FIFA (I'm becoming quite a John Oliver fan -- I may have to start paying for HBO).

Chemtrails

I started hearing about 'chemtrails' starting about six months or so ago, but apparently it's been a thing for several years now (I really need to start going to those 'Out the Illuminati' meetings more often).

Just today, I finally looked it up on Wikipedia to see what the heck it's about. 

According to the chemtrail conspiracy theory, long-lasting trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed for sinister purposes undisclosed to the general public. Believers in the theory argue that normal contrails dissipate relatively quickly, and contrails that do not dissipate must contain additional substances.

Then I read this. Kylie would be so disappointed in me -- please don't tell her.

Self-Driving Cars as Imagined in 1956

Great video (if you enjoy outrageously cheesy stuff, as I do) by General Motors from 1956, showing the self-driving cars that we would have in 1976.

That it all happens to crowds of similarly choreographed cars threading through cloverleaf interchanges in the middle of a desert, complete with rocky prominences straight [out] of a Roadrunner cartoon, is icing on the cake.

The plan for 'self-driving' seems to have been for the roads to control the cars, with a very top-down, somewhat militaristic, governmental authority running things.

Let It Be True, Dear Lord

From Advertising Age:

Amazon's subscription-video service will drop several Viacom shows, including "Teen Mom" and "Mob Wives," people with knowledge of the matter said, evidence that viewer fatigue with reality shows is spreading online.  [...] 

The prime-time audiences at networks that rely more on reality shows, such as A&E and History, co-owned by Walt Disney Co. and Hearst Corp., have declined 20% to 30% this year, according to Nielsen data.

 Wouldn't it be lovely if reality shows went away?

Of course, they'll probably be replaced by something worse.

The President and the Finger-Flipper

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, is making a fool of himself again. This time a teenager flipped off Correa's motorcade, Correa jumped out of his car, screamed at the kid and apparently had him arrested (I haven't seen anywhere what for). The kid was sentenced to do community service. You can't make this stuff up.

Ecuador’s notoriously thin-skinned president took his hypersensitivity to the next level last week when he abruptly ordered his motorcade to halt in the middle of the street to berate a teenager for mocking him from the sidewalk. 

Correa gets pissed and goes after a kid.

President Rafael Correa stopped his motorcade in downtown Quito on May 1 after spotting a 17-year-old teen flipping him the bird from the sidewalk. 

Bravely surrounded by his bodyguards, Ecuador’s most powerful man stepped from his bullet proof vehicle and aggressively huffed and puffed towards the teenager to confront him and his mother. 

The startled teenager, Luis Carrera, says President Correa poked him repeatedly in the chest and scolded him on the sidewalk. He said the president was so angry that tears were forming in his eyes. 

“He screamed ‘Show some respect, little kid! I am your president, you rude scoundrel!’” Carrera said.

Team Correa denied the part about poking the kid in the chest. Oh, well, that makes everything much more presidential, right?

Correa a couple months ago had a twitter snit about a comedian, John Oliver, who made fun of him on HBO for his hypersensitivity (thus, of course, proving Oliver right). Here's a link to the YouTube – it's really, really funny.

Correa also used his weekly TV show to attack a private citizen who had set up a Facebook page that had mocked him, as recounted here in The New York Times Magazine.

These examples are ludicrous, of course, and rather amusing, but it gets more serious when Correa sues newspapers for millions of dollars for criticizing him, in order to shut down dissent in the country.

This doesn't bode well for Ecuador's future.

PBS Drops Their Pants for Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck, a Hollywood star big enough that even I have heard of him, was featured on a PBS TV show about genealogy called 'Finding Your Roots'. The idea of the show apparently is that some celebrity comes on the show, researchers find the celeb's ancestry, and the celeb comments on what they've found. I haven't watched it, but it sound no worse than most TV shows.

Anyway, Affleck was unhappy that the researchers found that one of his ancestors was a slave owner, so he demanded that that fact be deleted from the show.

In an email exchange posted by WikiLeaks, the genealogy program's host Henry Louis Gates Jr. nervously asked a top Sony executive for "advice" in handling Affleck's special request. 

". . . For the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors — the fact that he owned slaves," the Harvard scholar told Sony chief Michael Lynton in the email chain dated July 22, 2014. 

Gates suggested that the censoring could tarnish their branding if word got out and would ultimately be a violation of PBS rules, "even for Batman."

What Affleck wants covered up about his past is his business, I guess. I certainly don't care who his ancestors were. I'm a bit surprised that he'd think it damaging to his public image that somebody in his family tree more than 150 years ago was involved in slavery.

However, Affleck, as is typical of most Hollywood folks, is heavy into left-wing politics; which leads to be real hypocrisy here, that PBS will roll over for big-name lefties. PBS, of course, denies that it did so, pretending that the decision to omit facts that Affleck was uncomfortable dealing with was an editing decision having nothing to do with Affleck.

In a statement responding to the hacked emails Friday, Gates defended their decision to edit out that chapter of Affleck's lineage, reasoning that it wasn't "interesting" enough."We focused on what we felt were the most interesting aspects of his ancestry — including a Revolutionary War ancestor, a 3rd great-grandfather who was an occult enthusiast, and his mother who marched for Civil Rights during the Freedom Summer of 1964," he stated in part. 

"We are very grateful to all of our guests for allowing us into their personal lives and have told hundreds of stories in this series including many about slave ancestors-never shying away from chapters of a family's past that might be unpleasant." 

PBS further stated that Gates made an "independent editorial judgment" when choosing what would go into the episode. It's a decision they stand by.

About Trevor Noah

… of whom I had never heard before today.

For those of you who give a damn, he's the new host of the show that Jon Stewart used to have on Comedy Central. It seems he's a bit of an anti-Semite.

Comedy Central says that Noah's tweets are OK, because he 'pushes boundaries'. Hmmm … Mike Pence should try that defense for Indiana.

But anyway, no doubt some exec has pulled him aside and said, “Hey, Trev, it looks like you'll have to can the Jew jokes until things cool down.”

I'm going to go not very far out on a limb and guess that Trevor Noah is a left-winger. It's probable, in fact, that in drawing up the specs for job interviews Comedy Central had a line that said something like, “Must hold predictably liberal and PC positions on all issues.”

What's interesting is that, among large segments of the left, anti-Semitism is not just an acceptable outlook, it has become PC.

Here's a post about left-wing anti-Semitism in Europe from a while back.

The Good Old Days in Ecuador

It is easy, at times, to become discouraged and to feel that the human race is not progressing at all. At such moments, it's good to take a cold, hard look at what life was really like long ago.

Although I'm a believer in law and order, I'm glad things have eased up a bit since this sentence was passed in Cuenca, Ecuador.

On September 10, 1783, Cuenca resident Melchor del Valle was convicted by the Spanish Royal Court of murdering his brother Sylvester. The sentence: “Two hundred lashes in the public square, then hanging on the gallows until death.” 

The court further ordered that, when the body was removed from the gallows, it was to be stuffed into a leather bag, along with a dog, a rooster, a snake and a monkey. The bag was then to be sewn shut and thrown into the Rio Tomebamba.

Although capital punishment was outlawed in Ecuador in the early 1906 (and had fallen into disuse well before – the last execution there, Wikipedia says, took place in 1884), justice was still quite rough.

The humiliation cross at Iglesia San Sebastian.

Public spectacle continued to be a central element of Cuenca justice until the second decade of the 20th century. Petty criminals were often tied to humiliation crosses at the entrances to the city, where they were kept for as long as two days. Citizens with grudges against the offenders showed up to apply personal versions of justice, usually with fists, whips and sticks. 

One of the humiliation crosses, made of marble, still stands on the corner of Simon Bolivar and Coronel Talbot, in front of Iglesia San Sebastian.

And it wasn't just justice that was tough in the old days. Public entertainment in Cuenca in the 18th Century was not for the squeamish.

According to the Spanish chronicler Marquez Gonzalez Suarez, [Governor] Vallejo [introduced] the popular Spanish pastime of cat roasting to Cuenca. The governor encouraged families to come to the central plaza, now Parque Calderon, on Sunday nights to watch cats in wire mesh cages lowered into a bonfire. According to Gonzalez Suarez, “The caterwauling and writhing of the burning felines always delighted and amused the spectators.” 

Great Moments in the Annals of BS

I am a fan of good bullshit. There are few things I enjoy more than, for example, hearing a garbageman being described as a sanitation engineer.

As a fan, therefore, I want to offer homage to Gwyneth Paltrow. Though I've never seen any of her movies, she is well-enough known that even I have heard of her, and her recent addition to the world's supply of great BS will therefore no doubt bring forth additional gems, as her fans try to emulate her.

I refer, of course, to Ms. Paltrow referring to her divorce as a 'conscious uncoupling'.

What, you might ask, is conscious uncoupling? The point of good BS, I remind you, is that it doesn't have to mean a damned thing. In fact, it's better if it doesn't, since if it meant something it might lead to the bullshitter actually being held accountable for the meaning.

If you want to wallow a bit in obfuscation, however, there are entire websites dedicated to conscious uncoupling, according to Google. Here's a not particularly sympathetic article on the subject:

Paltrow helpfully followed up her initial announcement by posting a 2,000-word treatise on conscious uncoupling from Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami, a married couple living in Los Angeles. (Dr. Sadeghi is an osteopathic doctor who runs an “integrative health center” called “Be Hive of Healing,” pun presumably intended, and whose book Within: A Spiritual Awakening to Love and Weight Loss contains a foreword written by Paltrow. His wife is a dentist.) 

Sadeghi and Sami begin by explaining that given rapidly accelerating life expectancy, these days it’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll be able to stick it out until death do us part, which suggests we “ought to redefine the construct” of marriage. 

“Our biology and psychology aren’t set up to be with one person for four, five, or six decades,” they write. So there’s the science. Now for some New Agey jargon: “Life is a spiritual exercise in evolving from an exoskeleton for support and survival to an endoskeleton,” they write in a section entitled, “Intimacy & Insects.” They mean by this, basically, that you have to look within yourself for support and strength and healing, not to others, or, one can infer, to any kind of external deity. 

Finally, they get to the part about how to uncouple consciously and “avoid the drama of divorce.” You shouldn’t think about it in terms of your marriage having failed, because (a) as we learned, the expectation that it would last was based on an outdated construct, and (b) this is actually going to be a positive experience if you just let go of old notions and approach it in terms of building up your partner’s spiritual endoskeleton. “To change the concept of divorce, we need to release the belief structures we have around marriage that create rigidity in our thought process,” they write. The “belief structure” that marriage should be for life “is too much pressure for anyone.” 

Conscious uncoupling will bring “wholeness to the spirits of both people who choose to recognize each other as their teachers.” What’s more, conscious uncoupling “prevents families from being broken by divorce and creates expanded families that continue to function in a healthy way outside of traditional marriage.” 

They conclude that by “choosing to handle your uncoupling in a conscious way . . . you’ll see that although it looks like everything is coming apart; it’s actually all coming back together.”

To which I can only add, “Bravo – a truly marvelous piece of bullshit.”

Hollywood Is So Hopelessly out of Touch with Reality

Somebody named Ellen Pompeo (of whom I had never before heard, but apparently she’s in a popular TV show) is upset that a dance number in the recent Emmy show didn’t have enough ‘people of color’.

Ellen Pompeo wasn't a fan of this year's Emmy Awards show. 

The 43-year-old actress says she "was really disappointed" by Sunday's telecast. 

"I didn't see any diversity in the Emmys at all. The Emmys felt so dated to me," she said in an interview Monday. "... That dance number was embarrassing. Did you see one person of color in that dance number?"

Not that this sort of thing is worthy of any attention at all, but it brings to mind two points.

One is the habit the left variety of wingnuts has of defining ‘diversity’ solely in terms of skin color (and, sometimes, gender). They have zero interest in any other form of diversity (e.g., diversity of thinking, opinion, religion, etc). I doubt that there were many Republicans or fundamentalist Christians dancing onstage, either, but Ms. Pompeo is unlikely to care about such things. (Nor do I, for the record – I hope the producer simply chose the best dancers).

The other is the incredible pettiness of the thing. If one is genuinely concerned with diversity, however defined, aren’t there areas of life more worthy of such concern than the Emmys?

PC Isn't Totally New

We’ve all seen dozens of pictures like this poster – advertisers are especially fond of them. Of course they are absurd and laughable in their pathetic attempt to offend nobody and include everybody. In addition to the omissions noted, I see they're missing the handicapped physically-challenged person.

But they also remind me of another, much earlier effort to be ‘inclusive’ (though less inclusive than today). I’m thinking of those great old World War II movies where at some point Sarge would call roll for the squad, and it would be something like, "Kowalski ... Garibaldi ... O'Malley ... Goldberg ... " and so on.

Of course, the Army wasn't integrated yet, or the list would surely have included a black guy named, no doubt, Washington. No Asians, either. Sometimes there might be a Hispanic, generally named Martinez; he’d be from Los Angeles. That’s because they were also aiming for regional inclusiveness -- there was always a guy from Brooklyn, a southerner, and a ridiculously naive farm kid.

Great stuff.

The Piranha Brothers Were for Real

I am a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus (and I can quote large portions of many skits). One of the more famous Python segments is about the notorious Piranha Brothers -- a pair of outrageously violent criminal, given to such excesses as nailing people's heads to the floor.

I had always thought that Doug and Dinsdale Piranha were just another figment of the Pythons' extremely fertile imaginations, but I have just learned that they were based on very real (and only slightly less violent) London criminals of that era -- the Kray Twins.

Ronnie and Reggie Kray had just been sent to prison for life shortly before the episode first appeared in 1970 (judicious timing on the Pythons' part, since the twins were sensitive to criticism).

You may remember that Dinsdale was thoroughly batty, believing himself pursued by a giant hedgehog named Spiny Norman. This is presumably based on Ronnie Kray's mental problems; while perhaps not quite as crazy as Dinsdale, he was at least twice diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic.

Teen Idols

Once again I was, for no good reason, looking up random information on Wikipedia yesterday. This time it was 1950s-60s teen idols – Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian. As is standard with teen idols in all eras, they had short stays at the top, though they are still going strong (or, at least, still going) on the nostalgia circuit.

No way would you get me to part with any of my money to see these guys, but if you feel differently – go for it.

But the interesting thing I read was about Fabian:

He was drafted, but rejected, for military service during the Vietnam War. According to USMC Lt. Col. Arthur Eppley, Fabian was declared 4F (unfit for service) after presenting a doctor's note stating that induction into the Army could cause him to develop homosexual tendencies. 

To be honest, this thing seems a bit lightly sourced. How does the author of the book cited know this about a draft board decision?

But, if true, the question it raises for me is that I thought one had to actually be gay to get a 4F back then. Would a doctor saying that you might become gay work just as well? Heck, I knew a bunch of guys who would have tried that dodge.

Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse
I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my asthma's getting worse
Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt
Besides, I ain't no fool, I'm a-goin' to school
And I'm working in a defense plant
-- The Draft Dodger Rag, Phil Ochs, 1965

Go-Go

I receive a couple weekly newsletters that deal with the origins of words and phrases, one of many dorky subjects I’m interested in. One of them, World Wide Words, featured a discussion of the word agog this week.

After explaining that the word derived from Middle French en gogues, which meant ‘in good humor’, the writer moved on to this:

Sixties-style go-go girls

Incidentally, a related Middle French form was à gogo, uninhibitedly or joyfully … This is still in the language and appeared in Paris in 1952 in the name of the nightclub and pioneering discotheque called the Whisky à Gogo (that is, Whisky Galore) … The entertainment format became fashionable and it and the name were brought into English, leading to the modified version a-go-go appearing all over the place during the 1960s as a fashionable creation.

‘Go-go’ bars became a very big deal in the mid sixties. These were the forerunners of what today are called ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ or ‘cabarets’. They featured ‘go-go girls’, dancers in (usually) bikinis.

The most popular of these bars in Phoenix was called The Hi-Liter. Cleve Cavness, my best friend, and I managed to get in one night though we were underage (which means it was prior to 1968). We had barely gotten settled, though, before one of us (I say it was Cleve, but he may remember it differently) knocked over our beers onto the floor and the bouncer threw us out. An ignominious end to what was looking like a breakthrough evening for us.

Chattanooga Choo Choo

I just learned that Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo was the first golden record. It was introduced in the movie Sun Valley Serenade and reached #1 on December 7, 1941 (I think that date has some other significance as well). It stayed #1 for nine weeks.

I doubt that it could be released today, because of the opening lines:

"Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?" 

"Track 29!" 

"Boy, you can give me a shine."

The record sold 1.2 million copies. I have the Andrews Sisters’ version on my mp3 player.

The Boy Named Sue Was at the Scopes Trial

… and he wasn’t just there – he played a major role in the whole affair.

I looked up the Scopes Trial the other day for some reason. I had been aware that (not surprisingly), Inherit the Wind is not at all an accurate depiction of the events, and I recall reading once a few years ago that it was really just a publicity stunt by the town (Dayton, Tennessee).

After reading about it on Wikipedia, it seems that the whole thing was pretty much a fraud from start to finish.

Here’s the basic story: A fundamentalist legislator got a bill passed making it illegal to teach evolution. The governor signed it, apparently, to appease that constituency, figuring it would never be enforced; the standard biology textbook used in Tennessee high schools had a chapter on evolution.

Then a group of business and professional people in Dayton got the bright idea that they could goose the local economy by staging a big show trial. It would bring lots of people in to watch the trial and get publicity in all the big papers.

One of the group, a lawyer, was good friends with the football coach at the local high school, John Scopes, who also filled in as a substitute teacher as needed, so they called him in. Yes, Scopes told the group, he had taught some biology classes, but no, he couldn’t remember whether he had taught evolution or not (he later told at least a few people that he definitely hadn’t taught it). However, Scopes agreed to say he had taught evolution if that would be helpful, and the group rounded up a few students and coached them on how to testify appropriately ('appropiately' being defined as 'not truthfully').

None of this, needless to say, is depicted in Inherit the Wind, where Scopes is a teacher making a principled stand for academic freedom and scientific truth.

The plan didn’t work all that well, unfortunately. Plenty of people showed up, which gave a temporary lift to the town; but most of the publicity was bad, depicting the town as a batch of ignorant bigots.

But to get back to the headline – the lawyer who was John Scopes’ buddy was named Sue Hicks (he had been named for his mother, who died giving birth to him). In addition to his key role in setting up the whole affair, Sue Hicks served on the prosecution team at the trial.

Hicks later went on to a career as a judge and apparently came to the attention of songwriter Shel Silverstein while addressing a legal conference. Silverstein was amused by the name and wrote the song (which, needless to say, bore no resemblance to Sue Hicks’s life) that Johnny Cash would make famous.

The Mickey Mouse Club

One of the most popular kids’ shows on TV in the 1950s was The Mickey Mouse Club.

I hated it. Looking back, most of my distaste for the show had to do with the smarmy, condescending, talk-down-to-kids manner of the adults on the show (the worst was Jimmie Dodd, the host, whom I detested), and the preachy do-gooder tone of damn near everything on the show.

The only redeeming quality, in my view, was Annette Funicello. Like most of boys of that time, I had a major crush on her. However, she alone was not sufficient reason to watch the show.

Luckily, Phoenix at that time had two excellent local kids’ shows. Easy Does It was a fairly conventional show for the time, undistinguished other than having Three Stooges shorts. Wallace & Ladmo was a really outstanding program, with tons of clever satire to appeal to all ages – when I was in high school, most of us were still watching it regularly, and my father was a fan when he had the opportunity to watch it (like most such programs it was on in the afternoon). It was a tough choice for me – Wallace & Ladmo had mostly Popeye cartoons, which I didn’t much care for, but Easy Does It, other than the Stooges, was pretty lame.

Mickey Mouse Club? Not even in the running.

In the sixties 'Mickey Mouse' became a term of disparagement among teens, referring to something petty and stupid (e.g., in talking about a school rule we didn't like, we would say it was "a Mickey Mouse rule.") I wonder how much the fifties program had to do with the sixties phrase.