An old Woody Allen punchline that came up in conversation just now. It's from the movie "Annie Hall." The actress is Carol Kane.
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Whatever happened to Carol Kane? She had such interesting feminine beauty. I can't think of any actresses today who have the her style of beauty. Is it because they've all been surgically altered? I resist movies these days, in part because the actresses all look alike. Presumably, the look is beautiful, but it doesn't read as beautiful anymore, because they all look alike. This was all predicted in the "Twilight Zone" episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You."
I know. It's not a day for talking about feminine beauty. It's a day for masculine beauty. It's Super Bowl Sunday, and here in Wisconsin "Number 12" is Aaron Rodgers, who is interestingly beautiful in an individualistic way. Which reminds me, despite my (and Meade's) resistance to watching movies, we did watch a movie last night: "Moneyball." It features the masculine beauty of Brad Pitt, who has to hide is splendor a bit in baggy pants, greasy hair, and constant munching of food, so he'll seem as though he belongs in the shabby office space and locker rooms of the Oakland Athletics baseball team (and not in the spiffy digs of the Boston Red Sox). Everyone else in the movie is pretty awful looking. He's bookended throughout by the Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who seem to be in a competition over who most embodies the word "tubby." There's scarcely a woman anywhere in the movie, though there is at least one scene with the Robin Wright, who is beautiful in that boring way and who was once in a movie with Carol Kane.Third photo on a theme. A juxtaposition.
Anyway, the judge sent a man to jail for 6 months for killing a stray cat who was damaging his property. When people kill feral animals on their property, it's inflammatory to call it "murder." The method of killing the cat sound horrible swinging it by the tail and cracking its head but the man discovered the cat living in his vacant rental property, where it had been "urinating and defecating all over and tearing up furniture":
He told Hansher that he opened the doors and windows and tried to chase the animal outside, but that it instead hid under the kitchen sink. He said he tried to grab it by the neck but could only reach the tail, and once he pulled it out, the cat began viciously clawing and biting at him.
The judge said: "It's abhorrent and repulsive what you did... I'd rather have an armed robber in front of me than someone like you."
Fearing for the safety of himself, his wife and others in the store, he said, he unholstered his semi-automatic 9mm handgun, cocked it and kept it down at his side as he motioned another customer behind the robber to move away.
When the robber turned the shotgun toward him, Al-Mujaahid said, he fired six or seven shots from about 20 feet away. He said he hit the suspect in the leg and forehead. The robber then dropped the shotgun and bag, and fled the store....
(I guess that says something about a 9mm handgun. Hitting the robber in the forehead seems to have merely changed his mind.)
[Al-Mujaahid] said he did not notice the sign at Aldi prohibiting weapons in the store, and that if he had, he would have gone elsewhere. He said since he began to carry a concealed gun, he has stopped from going into other businesses where he did see the sign.
Okay, now what is the effect of those signs? Are they meaningless when we're happy about the use of the gun?
From the comments at the link:
This person illegally carried a weapon into a public store which prohibits firearms. Now he want to be a hero? What a pathetic loser, fine example of why CC is a failed policy. The ends do not justify the means. Nazir should be happy he did not get killed himself.
Like a bank, it must care about its dignity and an image for stability because of its intimate relationship of trust with its 845 million members, who know their unparalleled cache of personal information is about to turn Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg into a billionaire 24 times over.
So far, Mr. Zuckerberg and colleagues have been more cautious in exploiting customer data than they get credit for. But let us be frank: There is no way the company can grow into such a gargantuan market value by adding even hundreds of millions of new members if it continues to extract only $1 in profit per year per user.
ADDED: In evaluating the worth of Facebook, can we take their judgment in interior design into account?
That is Facebook's own photo, so they are not ashamed to go out into the world looking like that. Disturbing! Those paper lanterns projecting out into the doorway or stuck back behind a trashcan and a rolling chair. The diagonal stripes on the carpet and continuing miniaturized and de-diagonalized on one wall. The horrid clock as the only thing hanging on the wall. I couldn't work in an environment like that, and yet the 2 individuals sitting on that crappy brown sectional couch are both billionaires. And they are billionaires in the business of creating something that will occupy the visual field of hundreds of millions of human beings. Something is terribly wrong!The NYT "pounced on a murky tale about a star athlete" instead of "the erosion of due process at Yale and throughout American higher education." Writes Peter Berkowitz in the Wall Street Journal:
The [sexual assault] complaint lodged against [quarterback Patrick] Witt was part of a new system for dealing with sexual-assault accusations at Yale. The school put the system in place at least partly in response to an investigation by the Department of Education stemming from allegations in early 2011 that Yale maintains a campus atmosphere hostile to women. Under the new system, the Times reported, Mr. Witt's accuser chose to file an informal complaint, which does not involve a full investigation or a finding of guilt or innocence....
Anyway, the key word is "taxable." Throw all the deductions back in and he's only paying 20%. Obviously, then, he should be paying even more. Jesus wants him to pay more.
"For me as a Christian, it... coincides with Jesus's teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required," Obama said, quoting the Gospel of Luke.
"If they began this project where they want it to go between San Francisco and Los Angeles..." "... they would run into so much opposition from the environmentalists, and from local politicians influenced by the environmentalists, that the delays could take the high-speed rail advocates beyond the time limit for using the federal subsidy money. But the green fanatics have not yet taken over politically out in the San Joaquin Valley."
In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.
Wisconsin's system of open primaries means voters do not have to share a political party's affiliation to vote in its primary. So, there's nothing to stop Republicans from voting in a Democratic recall primary and from writing in Walker's name.
If this effort were successful, it's unclear what the effect would be on the general recall election. The Government Accounability Board was contacted Friday, but didn't immediately provide an answer....
When asked about his initial impression of the write-in campaign, Wisconsin Democratic Party Spokesman Graeme Zielinksi said it was, "Surprise, then laughter." Zielinski said the effort has no chance of succeeding.
"Republicans seem frightened by democracy and the will of the people and, given what Scott Walker has done to ruin Wisconsin, they should be," Zielinski said.
Ha ha. I'm laughing too!
ADDED: I'm working on a parody "I'm My Own Recall Opponent," to the tune of "I'm My Own Grandpa." ("I'm My Own Grandpa" lyrics here.)
That sounds like a joke that's just out there waiting for everyone to discover it. I find it hard to believe that she's the first person to say it... and also that she did say it."The NFL Has an 'L' of a Problem." In 2016, it will be Super Bowl L... unless they give up the Roman numerals thing.
The Roman numerals got hard to read quite a while ago, but getting to the simple "L" for 50 is going to look weirder than any of the elaborate configurations of letters we've had to puzzle over or ignore in recent years.
Part of the strategy is the missing space. It should be: Superb Owl.
AND: Speaking of the Super Bowl, here's Madonna:
Who doesn't want to walk along the helmeted heads of football players as if they were a cobblestone street? And... where can I get wall-sconces like that (see 2:25)?"When Iyal is distressed, Chancer is distressed. Unlike Iyal, Chancer knows what to do about it." "Iyal rages by crossing his arms, sitting down hard on the floor and screaming and kicking. Chancer unknots the crossed arms by inserting his wide muzzle through the locked arms from below, opening them up and nuzzling toward Iyal's face, licking and slobbering, until the boy's screams turn to tears of remorse or to laughter.... Chancer doesn't know that Iyal is cognitively impaired. What he knows is that Iyal is his boy."
A dog and his boy.Shouldn't Democrats have had a viable candidate lined up before they went to all the trouble to get a million signatures on those Recall Walker petitions? This list of 11 potential candidates is horrifying or hilarious, depending on how much you like Governor Scott Walker. I mean, Citizen Dave has the 11 in order, and #1 is Herb Kohl! Herb Kohl is a 76-year-old man who's retiring from the U.S. Senate after a quarter century (and very little to show for it). According to Dave, the great thing about Kohl is that he's very rich, so he can use his own money. Note the implied concession: People aren't going to want to make contributions to the other candidates. But, look, there are no donation limits in the recall election. If Kohl wants to dump his money into the election, he can hand it to whomever he wants.Maybe one of the other 10 characters on Dave's list. Maybe #6, Kathleen Falk, who is, you know, the only person on the list who's actually announced her/his candidacy.
The people over in the Isthmus forum are trying to understand Meade.
ADDED: That's from page 5 of a thread that begins with the question why the forum called "Daily Page" forum or "TDPF" doesn't seem to have any participants who are "non-white." By page 3, there's some bizarre race-baiting about intelligence, in which you figure out why it is demanded that Meade admit he is less intelligent than Barack Obama.
ALSO: If you really want to go deeply into the background here, the subject of the thread "TDPF: whites only" is a play on an earlier thread "South Carolina GOP: whites only," which began "South Carolina's population is nearly 30% black. Yet in yesterday's voting, blacks made up approximately 1% of the electorate. It's remarkable how little discussion there is about this...." In that conversation, Meade tells the good liberals of the forum that they are displaying "covert racism," and much defensive posturing ensues.
