I feel a great disturbance in the Force. It’s like a million teenage girls cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
– Joe.My.God. after twitter went down this week in a hacker attack
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Archive for the 'quotes' Category
“This guy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I mean, he claims victory and he is very unpopular…And the danger politically of this, he could ruin the political career of his brother, Jeb Ahmadinejad. You got to be careful.”
— David Letterman, discussing the Iran election during a monologue
(via Pensito Review)
UPDATE: he’s not far off.
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Here’s a real hodgepodge from the past week!
• And you thought Episode I was bad? Check out an early draft of the original Star Wars.
• These two girls totally outdo Robert Loggia and Tom Hanks, but then again, they’re not supposedly improvising.
• Things disappear! Like the Aral Sea and the Amazon Rainforest — and beyond that, farms sink!
• Food from around the world: in hospitals and in schools (and speaking of school lunches, there’s this too)!
• How much do we love to defend marriage?? Oh, so much that the fun overflowed from one video into another! Also, we like to mock Pat Robertson with beautiful music videos.
• In medical and curing blindness news, this is really awesome.
• Do you like to have pictures with your data? Something to make it seem less dry and less science-y? Then you’re going to like these sites.
• Did you have a video made of your wedding? If so, it’s going to seem so incredibly lame after you watch this one.
• Watch out, all you greedy, overbearing religious cult-like groups! Scientology has Scientologists have been banned, and those awful Mormons have been taken down another notch. Ha.
• Attention Ferris Fans! Cameron’s home is for sale!
• And finally, some quotes for the week (we’ll start with the icky and work our way to the more reasonable):
Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate.
– G. Gordon Liddy, troglodyte, doing an awfully good job of making the other neanderthals of his ilk look almost human by comparison. (Update: and there’s always the problem of bears.)
Honestly folks. If we paid as much attention to the sexual activities of Catholic priests as we do to homosexuals wanting to marry, we probably could have saved a lot of children from years of guilt, shame, anger and pain.
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Here are just a few cool tidbits that might not have crossed your radar in the past week…
• Have you been to Awkward Family Photos yet? The offerings there range from the hilarious and the spooky to the downright creepy! UPDATE: and the oh, so patriotic!
• Elsa Barnouw has lived for 90 years in the same NYC apartment.
• Ellen Degeneres gave a fantabulous graduation speech at Tulane.
• Emmie’s got some wanderlust.
• This is so freakin’ cool if you’re into history, architecture, or lifestyles of the powerful and famous: tour the White House — the current one, or historical versions (and the East and West Wings). I could spend hours here!
• How much space does your commute take up?
• Jon Stewart on the back-and-forth between Obama and Cheney.
• And the Quote of the Week, from Ron Reagan, the son of Rush Limbaugh’s greatest hero:
Limbaugh hasn’t had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he’s compensating for something? Now, I wouldn’t pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection—none of that stuff—to me, off limits until! until! Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else—once you start doing that, you’re fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You’re just fair game, and you’re going to get it, too.
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“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.” He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”
–Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-New York), to the heads of Chrysler, Ford and General Motors, in a House Financial Services Committee meeting on Wednesday
UPDATE: more here.
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I’m not of a mind to write these days. I have a few things in the queue, but haven’t been motivated to slap them into shape yet. During the election buildup, I was looking forward to post-election blogging about all things non-political, but nothing really has been flowing for me so far. The gears in my brain haven’t shifted yet, so I just don’t have much to say.
To make matters worse, I’ve been a bit of a bore lately — a happy one, but a yawn nonetheless. What with all the obsessing over Nov. 4th, and especially after hurting my back, things here at Chez 10K were in pretty rough shape. I’ve been poking at it a bit here and there, but was waiting for an all-clear from the physical therapist before I really hit it hard, and I got that on Friday. So, I spent the weekend vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing and generally puttering about the house, and it was wonderful. I loved every minute of it. I fussed over the plants and sucked up the dust bunnies hiding behind the doors and cleaned out the fridge and made homemade pizza and even watched a few movies with Emmie, who came in to keep me company while G-Dog was out of town leading a retreat over the weekend.
I assume I’ll eventually get into a groove when I finally setting into some kind of a post-election routine, but at the moment, I’m at a loss. So, I’ll leave you with this, a quote from my rss reader’s clippings folder, in which I’ve been saving up all sorts of fun stuff for non-political posts. I don’t have a link, but this is a post from a now-defunct blog that was called Fly Over This, by a dude named Zack. The post’s title was “Email Signature Politics.”
You know this Margaret Mead quote? “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” That quote seems to have been adopted as the standard email signature for a certain element of the progressive left.
Meanwhile, Christian email is fast adopting Mother Teresa’s quote, “There are no great things, only small things with great love.”
I like both of those quotes. But I always have the feeling that both are being used as bludgeons against out-of-fashion ideas like long-term planning, goal setting, big-picture thinking and even just plain organizing.
So, at the bottom of someone’s email today I saw a great quote that I somehow have not come across before. Maybe I will add it to my own email settings:
“Small acts of humanity amid the chaos of inhumanity provide hope. But small acts are insufficient.”
- Paul Rusesabagina
Rusesabagina is the Rwandan hotel manager who saved a whole bunch of people in the genocide and inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda.
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Apparently Bono spoke too soon…
“It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to saved 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases.”
Here are a few links responding to the day’s news:
Shorter House GOP: We killed the bailout bill because Pelosi hurt our feelings
Who Are America’s Worst Politicians Today? All Of Them!
Krugman: OK, we are a banana republic
CNN’s Ed Henry: John McCain failed
McCain has another “McCain Moment”
And here’s a quick question from me: Whatever happened to “Country First?” The stock market has set new records in plummeting and the House members have pretty much all split town — and they won’t be back until Thursday?!?!? WTF? What the hell are we supposed to do in the meantime? What do they think the market is going to do for the next few days?!? Did they even bother looking at what this is doing to the world’s markets before they hightailed it out of town?
Uh, would I be speaking for most of the country if I suggested that they just not bother coming back?* With wankers like these, who needs Herbert Hoover?
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Oh, and ps! Michael Bérubé is back, and he’s ready to place the blame!
Also, have you checked out the Tennessee’s Progressive Blog Roundup this week?
*If anyone sees Zach Wamp skulking or slithering about town this week, please smack him upside the head for the rest of us!
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Growing up, there was a kid on my block who was a lot like John McCain. His team was losing touch football 10-75 so he said, “um my mom needs me” and ran home, and, of course, took the ball with him. That’s John McCain.
Oh, it’s a sad state of affairs. The dog ate his homework and maybe it will snow so he doesn’t have to study and maybe he can ferris his way into getting his mom to keep him home with a fever, and time out into infinity and so on…
But it looks like John McCain isn’t going to get the snow day he was hoping for, after all — we’re having a debate tonight!
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Lehman Brothers. Merrill Lynch. AIG.
The Dow dropped over 500 points today — the largest one-day drop since the market reopened after the 9/11 attack seven years ago.
And here’s what John McCain had to say:
The “fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
It brings to mind the words of a US president back on October 29, 1929:
The fundamental business of the country… is on a sound and prosperous basis.
America’s robber barons are once again ruining America’s economy, and John McCain — in his $500 shoes, unmindful of how many homes he owns, after 26 years governing from Congress (if he really had any intention of doing anything to help this economy — or if he “got” the economy — why didn’t he do it in all his years as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee?!?) — is asking us for four more years. That’s if he’s got four years left in him. (If not, we’ll be ‹‹shudder›› stuck with Sarah Palin.)
I’m thinking our answer should be “no.”
Even Greenspan thinks McCain isn’t up to the job.
Even McCain’s chief economic adviser says McCain will have to raise taxes.
And even turdblossom himself, Karl Rove, thinks that McCain is a liar.
And the McCain campaign apparently still thinks America is a bunch of whiners.
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