The week’s big argument has been over whether or not the Catholic Church, the Insurance Companies, or the taxpayers should have to pay for a woman to have access to birth control. Let’s ignore the idea that the woman should have some responsibility in making sure she doesn’t get pregnant, and ask another important question:  Why is it that no one is talking about the guy who sleeps with her? Why is the argument about making sure the woman has birth control; is sex now entirely her domain, or does the male half of the couple still have some responsibility?

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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The Super Bowl is the biggest game in the country every year. I was going to say the world, but I don’t know if that is actually true. Soccer is awfully big everywhere else in the world, and it seems like the World Cup final, which doesn’t happen every year, of course, might be a bigger deal worldwide. Anyway, here in the U.S., it’s all about football. There is more press at that game than at any other, and after a close game like the one we saw on February 5th, there must have been a million story lines for writers to pursue. The thrilling last few minutes, the great throw and catch from Eli Manning to Mario Manningham that was the game’s key play, or even the myriad expensive commercials that were broadcast throughout the game would have made for interesting reading. Instead, though, the one story that seemed to be absolutely everywhere early this week was about Gisele Bundchen, Tom Brady’s supermodel wife, and the comments she made after her husband’s team lost the game. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. I Love you, Dearest, to the stars and back,

9. And cannot wait to see from in your eyes.

8. Today the world may seem a little black.

7. Tomorrow knows a brilliant sun will rise!

6. At last, our two halves will make up a whole!

5. Not merely soulmates, but we’ll be twin flames!

4. Through many lifetimes, this has been our goal!

3. Through many lifetimes, and through many names!

2. I cannot wait to see the end arise!

1. Then see the new beginning through your eyes!
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, living poetry by Bob Sullivan
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Among the many abominations foisted on us is the merging of Lincoln’s Birthday with Washington’s and calling it President’s Day. Frankly, we need more holidays, and Federal Holidays should be made mandatory paid holidays. Like in civilized countries – double time for workers and everybody else is off doing their thing. Now, celebrating Lincoln and Washington makes a lot of sense – but, Jerry Ford? Grover Cleveland? Warren G. Harding? John Tyler? James Buchanan? Seriously, give us back our holidays and make the bastards give them to workers… [Read more →]

Tags: black helicopter watch, politics & government by Mike Farrell
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Let’s discuss the etymology of fascism. Fasces, to the Romans were a collection of sticks. The word means no more than bundle or sheaf but a particular bundle was relevant to their daily lives. The fasces were carried as a symbol of office by Roman bigwigs and when they walked through the streets or were carried on litters their bodyguards, called lictors, carried fasces to beat a path through the crowd. The city of Rome was supposedly disarmed by law so the fasces were not considered to be weapons except when the central stick in the bundle was a bronze ax. This symbolized MORE power, in effect the right to chop a lesser citizen into bits. The idea was that state power, as held in the fasces, was to be used coercively but lightly. At first. Stubborn resistors would be beaten. And beaten. And then beaten harder. Finally, reluctantly, sadly… the ax would be employed. [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, politics & government, religion & philosophy by Ken Watson
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Tags: money, politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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If you see a clump of children wearing bright uniforms involved in some type of sporting activity, nearby are sure to be a throng of parents watching with great interest. It might feel nowadays that it couldn’t be any other way. It’s like the old tree-falling-in-the-forest thought experiment: If children played a game and their parents didn’t see it, did the game actually happen? [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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NFL quarterback/total cutie pie Tom Brady has seen his wife Gisele take some heat for suggesting his teammates failed him and, in the process, cost her husband a fourth Super Bowl ring; some have even termed her New England’s own Yoko Ono. While this is an intriguing analogy, as it suggests Tom is about to take football in strange, experimental directions (“What if instead of passing the ball…the ball passed me?”), it’s also deeply unfair to Gisele, who’s leggier than Yoko ever was. Additionally, Gisele could never break up the Beatles: she is the Beatles. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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This was a fun read. When it comes to the backside of Hollywood, you have to admit that Cheryl Crane, daughter of screen legend Lana Turner, really knows her stuff. The Bad Always Die Twice is a Hollywood murder mystery with all of the fun details that only an insider would know.

Nikki Harper is a Hollywood real estate agent, selling those megamillion dollar mansions in the hills with her partner, Jessica Martin. They are young, pretty, celebrity-savvy girls:

“One of Jessica’s most endearing qualities was that she wasn’t any more impressed by celebrities than Nikki was. Their only difference was that Nikki had grown up with them and Jessica slept with them. The combination of their personalities made them a great team at work.”

Sort of sets the tone for their interaction. Jessica is the pretty, flashy girl who flirts with the gentlemen clients and reels them in. Nikki is less flashy, with a more understated style, and the Hollywood chops to make the deals. And when Jessica is accused of murder, Nikki puts those Tinseltown connections to work. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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The Government broke a lot of new ground along its path to punish Big Tobacco for the last 40 years.  The powers the government claimed for itself to regulate, and ultimately prosecute, Big Tobacco didn’t fade away once Philip Morris and Co. were finally brought to heel.  The Government used the easily demonized Big Tobacco to increase its power, and now they use those formerly “emergency” powers to regulate and control all kinds of businesses these days.  This is the power of precedent in our legal system.

Based on this observation, I have a question about the way several headlines from the last couple of week will eventually tie in together, and I was hoping for some input.

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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I went into Sunday evening with the thought that, despite my apprehension about the Madonna halftime show at the Super Bowl, I would not be writing about said show as my column for this week. After all, I wrote about the same subject a mere two years back, when they dug up The Who to underwhelm us. I hate to repeat myself, but it is occasionally unavoidable. This is one of those times. What a total crapfest. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. The television screen was so small, you had to take turns watching

9. Every five minutes, some old guy was yelling, “Where’s Knute Rockne?”

8. You missed most of the first half so the host could tell you all about Scientology

7. Somebody had already licked all the orange dust off the Cheetos

6. No New York Giants fans, no New England Patriots fans, just Beyoncé fans

5. There’s a big screen TV, but it’s stuck on a station showing “Matlock” reruns

4. The guacamole was moving

3. It was held on Saturday so no one would miss church

2. When the host ran out of beer, he started serving NyQuil

1. The only snacks were what you could find under the couch cushions
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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An alarming thing has happened and the most alarming bit is that no one is alarmed. Things seem to be proceeding apace in Egypt and the intellectuals are salivating at the prospect of a new Egyptian constitution, to be drafted by around June. That doesn’t leave much time so they are soliciting advice from foreign corners and from one corner was dislodged sitting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg who used the occasion to suggest that under no circumstances should the Egyptian reformers consider the US Constitution as any sort of guide. It is, after all, laughably aged and enfeebled. Much better ore is to be had in the post-War world. Look right at 10:00 to see where she swallows the Constitution she has sworn to defend in one gulp. Most emphatically does she advise the Egyptians NOT to look at this document for guidance even as she describes the ordinary Rights of public participation and arrest that have been made real in the world, in large part, because of the attention given them in our Constitution and the spread of these, through means fair and foul, to every aspiring society.  How the Egyptian fellow did not show shock or even surprise is a bit mysterious but a larger puzzler is how this could have been on youtube for a week and only now drawing attention. Hopefully this was a clever bit of disinformation. The dimmest Cairo cabbie could not fail  to realize, Ginsburg is a Jew. Perhaps the State Department and the Justice came up with a plot of reverse-psychology. “Ruthie,” Hillary might have told her. “You go in and you tell ’em, don’t you look at our Constitution. There is NOTHING in there for you, and they will tear into it like Bill through a Ladies’ Auxiliary!” But no, with the specifics and enthusiasm it is plain, this is Ginsburg Unplugged. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government, race & culture by Ken Watson
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When you’re working in a group, it’s hard to know what you truly think. We’re such social animals that we instinctively mimic others’ opinions, often without realizing we’re doing it. And when we do disagree consciously, we pay a psychic price. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that people who dissent from group wisdom show heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the sting of social rejection. Berns calls this the “pain of independence.”

Take the example of brainstorming sessions, which have been wildly popular in corporate America since the 1950s, when they were pioneered by a charismatic ad executive named Alex Osborn. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, ends & odd by Mike Farrell
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If ever I run this town, even before I take revenge on my enemies I will have a statue commissioned. A bronzed Anne Cox-Chambers already man’s the traffic island outside my front door, permanently enjoying a newspaper as only an owner of one could do. Around Underground there are life-size bronzes from the ’30s and 1890s. Naturally we have a smattering of Civil War heroes (or villains), some artsy friezes and a Phoenix both in abstract and figure. There is at least one missing. The subject has not been gone long enough to become historic but I remember and will see her commemorated. She was always in the company of statues when I saw her, usually Herman Talmadge. She stood quite nearly as a statue; an elderly woman, clearly a nifty number from the Mad Men era would stand unmoving in a parka and gloves in the winter, in a sundress with a wet hanky on her head in summer, holding a stack of leaflets in each arm. She didn’t hand them out. She couldn’t have since both hands were full, the half-reams perfectly her cubit. Sometimes they were single sheets and sometimes it would be a stapled pair. Did I mention the rocks? She also had a rock on each pile to act as a paperweight. Around her neck hung a small sandwich board explaining in meticulous print how the private ownership of land was the source of near all of man’s troubles. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, The Emperor decrees by Ken Watson
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Tags: politics & government, technology by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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Following the recent street protests in Russia, international attention has been focused on the country’s political scene. A young person tuning in to the news coverage might be confused by all the long names ending with –ov and –sky, and the series of heads that resemble slabs of meat, lumpy potatoes or some other comestible. Too much of the commentary is targeted at initiates; beginners need a jumping on point. After all, today’s 20 year olds were barely crawling the last time Vladimir Zhirinovsky scored serious headlines in the West. So strap on your shapka and let’s go! [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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Do you remember back when that jury full of carefully selected idiots let Casey Anthony stroll her baby-murdering caboose out of court, free as a bird last year?  Come on, you remember her, right?  The 20 something tart that had either murdered her own two year old daughter, or helped someone else hide the body after they murdered her, and then went on a 31 day party binge, boozing it up and getting new tats before she was arrested, which caused her to immediately began creating lie after lie in an attempt to avoid paying the penalty for slaughtering her kid so she wouldn’t have to deal with the responsibilities of being a parent?

Immediately after the trial, she dyed her hair, let it down out of that ponytail, changed her name, and is now living wild and free, unrecognizable as the baby killing liar we all saw on TV, and the public’s outrage exploded.  The jury hastily ran to the cameras, gibbering about how “Oh, I didn’t say she was innocent, just that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her in the 400 items introduced by the prosecution during the trial!” in an effort to stop the harassment emanating from even their friends and family.  Do you remember what the public was told, over and over again, in an attempt to calm everyone down?

“Our justice system is designed to let 1,000 guilty people go free to avoid punishing 1 innocent person!”

Oh, really?

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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When I heard the news of Robert B. Parker’s passing, I was heartbroken. I have been reading his Spenser novels for ages and the thought there would be no more of them — too much to contemplate. Sixkill is the 39th Spenser novel and, according to the book jacket, “the last Spenser novel Parker completed.” Now, that doesn’t sound very…final. It sounds like there might be some unfinished stuff out there. I am not completely opposed to another author carrying the mantle, as long as we don’t lose any of the snappy dialogue and hooligan philosophy of the original.

In Sixkill, Spenser is older and wiser and without his usual back-up, Hawk, who is off in Central Asia. We start off with a visit from our old friend, Martin Quirk, who wants Spenser to look into a murder. A particularly nasty piece of work named Jumbo Nelson is shooting a movie in Boston and has apparently murdered a young woman he hooked up with. At least, she died in his bed, the coroner isn’t quite sure of what, and he claims to have been barely sober enough to notice she was dead when he came back from taking a leak. Like I said, nasty fella. As much as everyone wants to put him away, Quirk isn’t sure, and Spenser trusts Quirk’s instincts. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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They say it is over. “They” is the Romnoids. But they have been saying it was over before it ever began. Now Newt, bedraggled and forlorn, seems to be in sullen agreement or at least he is not up to energetic resistance, which amounts to agreement. If we needed any more evidence that Newt has a half-life, a shelf-life and an inner-life inconsistent with the rigors of the Presidency, this is it. It seems Newt had begun to believe his own press. Santorum took a much harsher beating but unlike Newt, it was what he expected. Unshocked, he and his 13% will march on. If Newt were an ordinary party loyalist, he would back Mitt immediately hoping for Commerce Secretary to the detriment of the party and the nation. It seems he might be infantile enough though to consider his dignity over his advancement; always the calculation. If Gingrich can demonstrate a weak pulse and continue harrowing Romney it will be the finest service he could ever perform for the nation (and Rick Santorum), not that Newt should gain the office. Romney is the great threat at the moment and the Gingrich Blunderbuss is the only plausible weapon at hand but the powder, while voluminous, has grown damp in the Florida humidity. What if Mitt has succeeded, as of yesterday, to make his nomination a done deal? [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, trusted media & news by Ken Watson
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