"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Fighting for hearts and minds
In Pima Air & Space Museum news, I’m ready to certify as a walking tour docent, but no one’s available to bless me until the 15th. Knowing me, given two weeks to prepare I’ll cram so hard I’ll blow my certification tour by mixing up facts & figures for different airplanes or going off on […]
Here’s a Facebook exchange from this morning. Everyone involved (including me) is from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, home town of local hero Rush Limbaugh. Apparently, this is how the folks in AM radio country are going to denigrate Obama’s leadership and great victory: We got Osama because George W. Bush put Afghanistan on the back burner […]
There was an interesting thread on Facebook this morning. US Rider News, a motorcycle magazine, posted a link to a newspaper article about a veteran who didn’t want a veterans’ motorcycle group leading the local Veterans’ Day parade: “I don’t think that’s the image we want,” said Stephen Riggs of West Ashley, a former Army […]
What’s in Paul’s grab bag? Unconnected thoughts and observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might amount to something: The Tube I was 14 years old when The Flintstones began running on TV. Hanna-Barbara was already famous for introducing cartoons to prime time with Huckleberry Hound, so there was a lot […]
Today on Facebook I posted a link to this photo and accompanying story about a racist NASCAR fan, generating this heated comment from a friend, an understandably beleaguered non-racist NASCAR supporter: Probably the most misinformed bit of drivel written about NASCAR to date. Funny how the “journalist” leaps to unsubstantiated conclusions but would scream bloody […]
From an interesting blog post by Julian Sanchez: One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts […]
Unconnected thoughts and observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might just amount to something: Much was made of Stephen Colbert’s rescue of the US Olympic speed skating team, and the Colbert Nation patches they were wearing in practice. Has anyone seen a US speed skater wearing one in the Vancouver […]
Snagged from Facebook, five minutes ago: I’m currently struggling through Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book I realized I had never read. The hardest part, for me, is the depiction of white attitudes toward blacks in mid-1800s America, and the language used to convey those attitudes. And then I remember growing up with whites who still […]