The McRib is a food miracle
The McRib is a miracle sandwich. It’s something delicious that is made from a bunch of seemingly non-delicious ingredients. This apparently bothers some people.
Some people are just never satisfied.
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Bad sports, good sports: It has been a difficult week to be a Penn Stater
I have always managed to avoid covering the same story two weeks in a row, but the Penn State story has totally dominated the sports world’s news for the past week, so there is really no way around it. Since I wrote last, many things have happened. Legendary head coach Joe Paterno, assistant coach Mike McQueary, and university president Graham Spanier are all out, along with athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz. As a Penn Stater, this has been a very difficult week for me for a lot of reasons. [Read more →]
Top ten new campaign slogans for Herman Cain
10. Yes We Cain!
9. Let’s Stop China Before They Get Nukes!
8. Our Guy’s Blacker Than Your Guy!
7. Obama May Be Able — And We All Know Who Slew Abel!
6. Favorite Politician Of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan!
5. Vote For Me And I’ll Make That Smokin’ Guy VP!
4. I Was Referring To Pizza When I Told Those Women To “Hold The Sausage”!
3. Herman Cain — Very Clintonesque!
2. I Just Love Raisin’ A Little Cain! (Wink Wink)
1. Hands On! And Pants Off!
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
Mao is Jesus, champagne, reefer, say wha? and… gratuitous blues
“Oh Huntsman. Take that metrosexual pink tie & good sense over to the Democratic party where you belong.” Ana Marie Cox
So,the inimitable Ms.Cox twittered last evening to the effect that she couldn’t understand why Jon Huntsman didn’t take his calm demeanor, arched eyebrow and good ideas where they belonged, the Democratic party. After glancing through the results of the Republican foreign policy debate, I tend to agree. These people are deranged. While Mitt Romney can probably be forgiven for feeling confident, it’s sort of like feeling confident about pitching a no-hitter against the Yankees after ecking out a win over St Swithin’s School for the Blind, Lame and Criminally Insane. Although frankly, they couldn’t make the team at St Swithin’s… [Read more →]
Time for a TEA Party revival
A year and a half ago I wrote a piece here with the title “Grandma vs. The SWAT Team“, wherein I outlined an idea I had for generating an “iconic image” for the TEA Party movement, that of a little, old, blue haired lady sharing some cookies with a member of the SWAT team Obama had sent in to surround a TEA Party rally. The idea was prompted by the pictures we were seeing in the news at the time, that of illegal immigrants having semi-violent clashes with the police, and the images featured in the story I was discussing in the post, images of little old ladies standing in front of the line of SWAT officers, smiling, laughing, joking around, and taking pictures, but doing absolutely nothing arrest worthy.
I’ve always thought it a great idea, and pondered over the state of TEA Party PR ever since. I think now is the time to have a serious revisit on the idea.
Climbing inside the horse, or: the uses of animals
So anyway, yesterday I was driving down a country road when I spotted a decapitated stag lying in a ditch. The strange thing was that its head had been cleaved neatly from the body, leaving a perfect anatomical cross-section-type view of the interior of the neck. A car accident doesn’t do that – and even if it did, I’d still expect to see the head nearby, surrounded by turkey vultures pecking at the soft parts.
I briefly thought about vivisectionist aliens before settling on a redneck with a chainsaw as the likeliest explanation. No doubt he’d spotted the dead stag during the day then returned under cover of night to remove the “rack” for his collection. [Read more →]
Myth in movies: The Mayans predicted the coming of Green Lantern
By now you have no doubt heard that according to astronomers and anthropologists, December 21, 2012 correlates to the “end” of the Mayan calendar. And, despite having repeatedly heard about this for many, many years now, it is also very probable that you still have no idea exactly what this means. The reason is because it’s very complicated. To even begin to understand it you need to look to the Mayan myths of the Sacred Tree and understand their incredibly complex Long Count calendar of tuns, k’atuns, and b’aktuns as well as their concepts of the Great Cycle, the Great Great Cycle, and cycles within cycles. You’d also need to understand astronomical occurrences involving the precession of the equinoxes and the conjunction of the sun at the intersection of the plane of the ecliptic and the Milky Way. You can do all that, or, you can simply read my interpretation of this summer’s Green Lantern movie, which shares the same message as the Mayan mythology. [Read more →]
Call it what you will … but mark it
IN FLANDERS FIELDS
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved,
and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
[Read more →]
Pray the war lasts to August
It was an election day without candidates on Tuesday, at least around here. There were a couple issues on the ballot. One was to allow carry-out booze sales on Sundays. I favor. The other was for a limited time, special use, educational purposes only county sales tax of ONE PERCENT, morons, not one pennyas it is always said. This, I oppose. These aren’t especially serious matters but examining them might shed a little light on this thing we call Politics (shudder). The Sunday Sales law brings into combat some peculiar coalitions. At odds are two groups: evangelicals and similar religious folks allied with the bar/restaurant industry against a consortium of grocery/convenience and liquor store proprietors supported by forgetful but thrifty drunks. Commercial and personal interests are aswirl. One’s closest ally today is your sternest competitor tomorrow. The result was pretty one sided, though. It was a sweep for Sunday Beer, as it was so quaintly and expertly named. [Read more →]
Lisa reads Every Step You Take by Jock Soto
Every Step You Take: A Memoir
Jock got interested in ballet at the ripe old age of four, while watching Edward Villella dance on the Ed Sullivan Show. (He was performing a piece from Jewels, by George Balanchine, who he would later dance for at the New York City Ballet.) His parents took his request seriously and enrolled him in ballet classes. At 12 years old he auditioned for the School of American Ballet and was awarded a full scholarship. After a brief interruption in his training, he returned to New York with his family and at 14 years old, his family left, leaving Jock alone in New York City, with no income (other than his school stipend) and no adult supervision.
Remarks by Mr. Cain
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen of the press and America out there in the audience, as you know I have lately and suddenly been the subject of a veritable hailstorm of accusations; very vague and unsupported accusations and I have been required to respond without full knowledge of the events being referred to and these are, as you have seen, all much more than ten years old. I have denied them. They are unsupported and responsible members of the media have moved on. Others have not as is their prerogative. Now. There has been some improvement on that front. There is now a woman, Ms Bialek, who has come forward with lurid details and accusing me of actions that clearly are criminal and violently so. Let me set the record straight right here and right now. [Read more →]
The plague of truths
The sun shines. People forget. There is an eminence front for all people and therefore all candidates. For candidates it must be especially thick and durable as it is liable to come under meticulous attack, if not by the people then by the press and the other candidates. Herman Cain has learned this simple truth. Does his need to learn this lesson the hard way indict him? According to the gunslingers not on the Cain payroll, the gunslingers that are have ham-handed this one. What actually happened or was said is immaterial on this reckoning. It’s all about the optics: how it looks and Cain looks like a desperate fugitive. [Read more →]
Bad sports, good sports: Jerry Sandusky brings shame to Penn State
It makes me sad to write this column, but when I looked at this week’s bad and good sports stories, the choice of which story would lead my article for the week was an obvious one. For as long as I can remember, the name Penn State has meant nothing but winning and honor. Head football coach Joe Paterno, who has been at Penn State since man discovered fire, it seems, has led a program that has exemplified the best in college athletics. He has not only won two national championships, accomplished a bunch of undefeated seasons, and put countless players into the NFL, he has done all of that while graduating an unusually high percentage of his players and without having any kind of cheating or recruiting scandals. [Read more →]
Top ten ways people spent their extra hour when they switched back to Standard Time
10. Cooked 20 three-minute eggs
9. Tried to make sense out of Rick Perry’s words
8. Saw who was the fastest at saying “Irish wristwatch” ten times in a row
7. Shared a bottle of wine, then playing “Irish wristwatch” again
6. Speculated on Rebecca Black’s singing career
5. Watched The Best of Two and a Half Men 30 times
4. Wrote a fan letter to Cloris Leachman
3. Sudoku! Sudoku! Sudoku!
2. Tried to re-set the clock on their VCR
1. Made love to the wife, then took a nap for the other 59 minutes
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
A picture’s worth
You know the old saying that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words?’ There’s an interesting discussion of the adage and its origin, and I’m sure many of us can cite at least one occasion from our own, first-hand experience where it has been put to the test, and passed that test with ease.
There are occasions when a picture’s worth might be calculated by other units of measure. For example, might a picture’s worth be measured in terms of how many people are moved to change their hearts and their minds after viewing said picture? [Read more →]
Perspectives
Recently I travelled 3700 miles by car, from Massachusetts to Minnesota, then south to Missouri, and back again. Allowing for the time spent in Minneapolis, the journeyed portion of the trip was only six days. A little over 600 miles a day with many halts and a few wrong turns. It is a small accomplishment I understand, in this modern age, or in the larger scheme of things–even in my own life–but was done for reasons important to me. I had hoped for some perspective on what was to be, and was indeed, a great event, and found more than enough to please me. [Read more →]
Chipping away at our sanity, byte by byte
In the overall scope of human history, we are a prosperous people, us Americans living right now. Yes, the rich are getting richer, the economy is looking bleak, and there are sit-ins and protests around the country — the world could always stand a few straightenings — but if you take a moment you realize we have more, and more access to, things than anybody else ever has. With apologies to the diehard pessimists and the political gain they hope their pessimism brings about, Americans have it pretty good. [Read more →]
Lisa reads Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow
I can’t tell you how excited I was to get Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy
It certainly gets off to a good start! In “Curses” by Jim Butcher, Harry Dresden — the only Wizard listed in the Chicago Yellow Pages — is approached about removing a very old curse from a local sports team. I have a tremendous crush on Harry Dresden and I enjoyed the story immensely — it’s exactly the sort of local flavor I love in the Dresden Files stories.
My favorite story of the bunch was “Priced to Sell” by Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series. I was completely unfamiliar with Novik’s work, although I will certainly be adding it to my watch list. This is a story of the cut-throat Manhattan real estate market. Tough enough, in this economy, but even tougher when your clients are vampires, goblins and other magical creatures. You know it’s going to be trouble when the condo board isn’t concerned that your client’s a vampire, they’re just worried that he’s less than 100 years old. [Read more →]
How we can stop the Kardashians
I realize that the very nature of writing this post is contrary to my big plan but I’m going to write it anyway; because I don’t think I’m alone when I say, “Enough is enough times infinity.”
Over the weekend, the story broke that Kim Kardashian was getting divorced from Kris Humphries. That “news” is so widespread by now that I didn’t even have to look up how long her marriage lasted to confirm that the union lasted 72 days. It is a number that is burned in my brain thanks to all the Twitter jokes and snide Facebook remarks, the links shared and re-shared, the pithy quotes about how much was made per day in this “marriage for money”, and the countless headlines that abound when you dare to search her name in Google. What makes me pause, though, are the comments written beside many of those shared links: “I am so tired of hearing about these Kardashians.” [Read more →]
