My other favorite TV experience of the last two days was the clip, showed over and over again, of President Obama's one-handed fly kill, followed by the exclamation, "I got the sucka." Naturally, PETA can't let something like this go by -- the wanton cruelty followed by such pride in the kill:
What I learned on Tuesday and Wednesday while collapsed on the couch with a summer cold:
The best technological news of my lifetime is that "1984" turned out to be wrong. The totalitarian thugs have not had control of ever-more sophisticated means of communication, with which they can keep an eye on all of us and even rewrite history to keep us in line. The information revolution hasn't strengthened the oppressors. If anything, it's helped liberate the masses. Remember way back in 1991, when the fax was cutting-edge technology?
This must be my day to pick on Bloomington -- here's another nutty idea from the town that complements IU's gown:
Bloomington - Joie Canada has been keeping shop on the south side of the Bloomington square for almost forty years.
She and her father are pictured in a book, "Goodbye Mom and Pop." The book preserves in print the vanishing locally owned and operated store.
A bit of mystical, New Age, ersatz Eastern-religious, bubbleheaded crapola from -- surprise, surprise -- Bloomington:
A new club in Bloomington doesn't feature standup comedians or funny improv sketches, but the audience still roars with laughter.
At meetings of the Bloomington Laughter Club, folks gather to laugh for no reason.
Only Monday, but this might stand up as quote of the week, from a forensic psychology professor, on Florida teenager Tyler Hayes Weinman, charged with 19 counts each of animal cruelty and improperly disposing of an animal body in the Miami serial cat killer case:
"When you kill cats, disembowel them and cut their heads off, that is not a good sign and you do not have to be Sigmund Freud to see that," he said.
Another oppressed minority* demands to be heard:
Two Indiana men have declared Monday "National Man Day" and have rallied thousands to their cause on the social networking Web site Facebook.The event's Web page listed more than 260,000 attendees as of Thursday for the event, which the site says is "about being a responsible man and having fun doing it!"
We haven't been able to turn on the TV for the past year without being bombarded by digital-conversion hysteria, and still some people don't get it?
Starting in the morning and going into the night, TV stations across the U.S. are cutting their analog signals Friday, ending a six-decade era for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.
A bitter white supremacist has killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and we all need to take steps to make sure something like that doesn't happen again. So we have to reach out to the moderates in the white community -- those who think affirmative action is wrong, those misguided souls who still think judging people on merit alone isn't racist, those who pretend to have philosophical arguments against Sonia Sotomayor -- so that the extremists can see no harm is meant to them, and they will come back into the fold.
You might be worried that the Obama administration is going to get more and more involved in the private sector, so you might be comforted by these words of reassurance:
Talking tough but stepping gently, the Obama administration rejected direct intervention in corporate pay decisions Wednesday even as officials argued that excessive compensation in the private sector contributed to the nation's financial crisis.
Reason Online provides a valuable public service by choosing the "Top 10 most absurd Time magazine covers of the past 40 years."
Good luck with that:
"We have proven that money is not the answer to great education," says Dr. Tony Bennett (R) Indiana's Superintendent of Public Instruction. Since taking office in January, Bennett has pushed schools to spend more efficiently, "We put a lot of money in education over the last 4 or 5 years in terms of increases and we've really had negligible results."
[. . .]
The city and county haven't always gotten along as much as they should, even when both were run by Republicans. Now, the city seems set on undoing one of the few good city-county cooperative efforts:
Allen County officials have begun to prepare for the city's move from the building that the two governments have shared for four decades.
It's been quite a while since I featured some "Stop the presses!" research from one of our outstanding academics, so here's some good stuff:
In places where young women outnumber young men, research shows the hemlines rise but the marriage rates don't because the young men feel less pressure to settle down as more women compete for their affections.
Commentary at Forbes.com on the Obama administration's $787 billion mistake:
Current economic indicators suggest that our economic crisis will hit bottom soon and that the U.S. will be poised for economic recovery.
[. . .]
One of the benefits of federalism is that states can act as "laboratories of democracy" and the things that are found to work in one or a few of them can then be adopted by many or all of them. Of course, there is the danger that states might copy each other's bad ideas, too. Kentucky proves the point by following possibly the worst example ever provided by Indiana:
Paul Helmke, former Fort Wayne mayor and currently head of the Brady Campaign, spoke in Akron, Ohio, and Chad D. Baus of the Buckeye Firearms Association, referencing the story in the Beacon-Journal, takes him to task on the usual charge of using misleading facts and statistics. He also says Helkme inadvertently spoke the truth a couple of times.
Some people here still shake their heads at the $3.8 billion toll road lease. But, really, what small potatoes that was:
