“If you listen to a song and get an image in your head, and then you go home and watch MTV and the image they're showing is the same as the one in your head, kill yourself. You're better off coming back as a lobster.”
Lewis Black
Another year has passed and in a bizarre turn of events I am realizing my own age. Years are racing by and I have not had a decent New Years Eve since 2002. Each one seems to be a harbinger of the horrible year to come. Pessimism is my new crutch. Last year I was trapped at a detestable meat market at Jax Beach and ended up way too screwed up when I got home(not driving). I was ordered by a lady friend's parents not to go out on Y2K, and as Lewis Black said, we knew there was no danger and watched as two guys in Afghanistan rubbing sticks together were having more fun than we would. December 31, 2002 was pretty good, as it was spent with a friend who no longer lives in the area. I have no idea what I will be doing when that mess of flashlights gets to the end of the pole in New York, but I will be looking wide and dewey eyed torward the new year. Like a woman it will probably turn against me sometime in the middle and blame me in the end. So be it.
Happy New Year.
"Well...maybe so. I'd used it on the poor geek in the bar, and now humming along in a Yellow Cab toward town, I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him. And he had, after all, come here once again to make a nineteenth-century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable "tradition.""
Hunter S. Thompson
The Kentucky Derby is Decedent and Depraved
June 4, 1970
"President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)
"No goal, no objective, not until we have those things and a compelling case is made, then I say, back out of it, because innocent people are going to die for nothing. That's why I'm against it."
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/5/99
"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
-Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of presidential candidate George W. Bush
"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning...I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)
"You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo."
-Tony Snow, Fox News 3/24/99
"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years"
-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)
"I'm on the Senate Intelligence Committee, so you can trust me and believe me when I say we're running out of cruise missles. I can't tell you exactly how many we have left, for security reasons, but we're almost out of cruise missles."
-Senator Inhofe (R-OK)
"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99
Why do these people hate America?
Thanks to the many people who have posted these quotes.
I'm watching the coverage that has broken in on the death of President Gerald Ford. Not much news of any value beyond the fact that he has passed. They are trying to stretch it out though. I'm watching CNN and they are interviewing Alexander Haig, a man who was Ford's White House Chief of Staff. Imagine if your old crotchety grandfather that's virulently racist and batshit insane. Also imagine if CNN called him on the phone to comment on the news. That's exactly what it sounds like. He started talking at one point about what a good president Nixon was. He made the comment that he had served seven presidents seven times in two minutes. He served seven Presidents. Ford is the type of President that will never get credit for some things that he did that were of great benefit to the nation. It does make one of my favorite SNL bits highly inappropriate.
This song is based off of my bowling nickname. They totally ripped it off from me. Good thing to that they are not playing like a bunch of no talent ass-clowns trying their best to imitate Creed. This is the kind of music they played when they were briefly the greatest band in the world. In my eyes.
11:49 AM Biggus: I intend to build a rainbow in space.
11:50 AM me: George Jefferson just told me I'm doing a great job
Biggus: I thought he hated white people.
me: he did say, "Honkey, your doing a great job"
11:51 AM Biggus: Did he sound surprised, like he was shocked that a honkey like yourself could manage it?
me: kinda
Biggus: That's my George Jefferson.
I think I'm hearing a rent song on some talk show.
11:52 AM me: You know, Sherman Helmsly looks so sad now that the woman who played Weezy is dead. They had that whole appearing together thing going
Biggus: I think they were getting it on.
me: what talk show are you listening to? Boortz?
Biggus: No, TV. It's on in the living room.
me: I just forgot again that you are home
11:53 AM Biggus: Maybe it's The View.
me: my sister is a regular watcher now that Rosie is on
11:54 AM and Joy Behar is a yenta
Biggus: Your sister needs to be disabused of the notion that Rosie is worth watching.
11:55 AM me: I think it's more passing amusement now
I really liked your Chili Peppers Christmas thing
Biggus: I can't take all the credit.
Since I only linked a picture that someone else doctored.
11:56 AM That's called humility.
me: attaboy
and you just let my poor attempt to use jewish vernacular pass without one insult
11:57 AM Biggus: Tis the season to not entirely fairly malign the jews.
me: that's big of you.
Biggus: Well, a Jew is the reason for the season.
11:58 AM I'm glad I never saw Rent.
11:59 AM me: true
Biggus: Speaking of musicals. Why was Les Miserables turned into one. It's a fucking dense, political/philosophical book that is well nigh unreadable. How does someone read that and say, "Hey, let's make a musical about this?"
12:00 PM me: That Lesbian girl I dated loved Rent and begged me to listen to it
Biggus: More proof that you should never trust lesbians.
me: Les Misarables is a fantastic musical. I've seen it performed three times
Biggus: Fag.
12:01 PM me: "Master of the house, doling out the charm, ready with a handshake and an open arm"
you don't remember that Sienfeld bit about that
Biggus: Yes. Yes I do.
12:03 PM And I still don't understand why they turned that book into a musical. It would be like doing the same with The Brothers Karamozov.
"But instead of seizing this moment, the Clinton-Gore administration has squandered it. We have seen a steady erosion of American power and an unsteady exercise of American influence. Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, "Not ready for duty, sir."
This administration had its moment, they had their chance, they have not led. We will." Governor George W. Bush (R) TX
Republican National Convention August 3, 2000
WASHINGTON -- The Senate's addition of $13.1 billion to the 2007 defense budget will be enough for the Army and Marine Corps to fix broken equipment now sitting idle.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace said the welcome infusion of cash will allow maintenance depots to hire back the skilled labor needed to restore and repair the backlog of vehicles and weapon systems run down by three years of war in Iraq.
However, it's only a drop in the bucket: the Army alone needs $17.1 billion to reset its force in 2007 and anticipates an annual yearly bill of $12 billion to $13 billion until two or three years after the Iraq war ends to reconstitute its equipment back to fighting form.
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
Check out Thinkprogress blog for a good point reguarding President Bush's new embrace of increasing the size of the military. Turns out nobody seems to remember that this was one of Frenchy Senator Kerry's positions in the 2004 Presidential election. At that time Bush was pounding Kerry as a flip flopper, but he said increasing the size of the armed forces would make America "less-safe." Now after things are going less-fantastically than before he has warmed up to the idea. Although wearing flip-flops in the Washington winter will probably give him a cold.
Even though I am engaged in a bitter war against everything Christmas, enjoy one of my favorites.
" To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours—an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness. 5
But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average can not be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher."
Theodore Roosevelt
Citizenship in a Republic
History as Literature
10:44 AM Biggus: Did you know that Vanilla Ice released an album fairly recently that had a sequel to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle song?
10:46 AM me: no
that's rediculous
even ridiculous
Go Ninja Go Ninja Go
10:50 AM Biggus: And it's a rap/metal song.
me: thank god
10:51 AM Biggus: Music has really been missing it since Limp Bizkit split up.
10:52 AM me: did they split up, or did their 15 minutes just end?
Biggus: I was hoping they'd died, but I keep hearing celebrity news every few months about the Durstinator.
10:54 AM me: you are a malicious man Mr. James
Biggus: I just think the punishment fits the crime. My eardrums still haven't recovered from "For the Nookie"
10:55 AM me: good point
Biggus: At the least I should win some sort of settlement even if the jury does acquit due to the glove's undersizedness.
10:56 AM me: is that a word?
Biggus: It is now.
me: or did you just coin it
like Bill O'Reilly coined "San Francisco Values"
10:57 AM after it had been used a couple of times
Biggus: Isn't Rice-a-roni the San Francisco Value?
27 minutes
11:25 AM me: treat
11:26 AM Biggus: Yeah, but it is inexpensive if The Price is Right wasn't lying to me.
11:28 AM me: that show is like a time warp
Biggus: Yeah, it feels like I'm seven everytime I turn it on.
11:29 AM And I'm pretty sure the studio audience is the same group of white trash, geriatrics and military personnel that was on when I was seven. My theory is that the studio is some sort of vast cryogenic chamber and the audience is thawed each day for filming and then put back in freeze.
11:30 AM me: that's probably true
I know I live in Florida but this is ridiculous. It is hot enough here for shorts in late December. I know I can't exactly expect dense snowfall in Northern Florida, but it can at least have the good sense to be a little chilly. I feel like I live at the equator or something is wrong. I actually read a plan from someone that included inducing a nuclear winter. I hope that happens. Not as much traffic and I get to wear that fantastic ski outfit I've been dying to try out.
"Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic - a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook - the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness...
... Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. "
H.L. Mencken
On Being an American
from Prejudices, Third Series (1922)
"Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done
too many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived
like a Prussian gambler--sweating worse than Bryant on some nights and
drunker than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare...and
these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines.
-- Hunter Thompson, "Bad Nerves in Fat City",
_Generation of Swine_
This is the introduction to the game Y's Book I and II. This game may look pretty pedestrian for today's standards, but you must understand it was released in 1989. This was a CD based video game a full five years before the Sony Playstation was released. This game had fantastic music and live voices long before they were commonplace.
People tend to look forward and backward in time and expect the unreasonable. Humanity looks forward and often realizes that it had not a clue afterward. Likewise we look backward and expect every single major momentous period in history and expect that it matches the present like a glove. Too often than not it ends up fitting much like O.J.'s did. Yet who should we acquit? Every time a professional sports team wins a championship the announcers begin asking the question, "are team x the greatest team of all time?" No, they are a team that slugged through a mediocre year and were the last sorry lots standing. Every team is not the '90's Bulls, or the Red Wings, the Yankees or the Steelers. Just as every dark and despicable human being on the planet that happens to have a tenuous hold on some bass akward shithole the next Hitler. This is not the great depression. Today marks the anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor that started American involvement in World War II. It being a historical day, it brings to mind the most wretched of historical clinches, that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Anyone who doesn't know history is a moron, but the only thing they are doomed to is the future. We as a species do some predictable things that could be construed with a pattern. We do find wonderful ways to hate each other. I believe it was Dennis Leary that said something to the effect of, "Northern Ireland proves, that even without black people around, white people will find a reason to kill someone." But by and large it doesn't repeat itself. The French built the Maginot Line to fight World War I again, and the Germans flew over it and drove around it. To compare current conflicts to World War II denigrates the memory of the thousands of people who died in that conflict. It also denigrates the brave men and women that have volunteered to serve at the pleasure of the President in the current conflict in Iraq. They are just as brave but their respective conflicts and enemies are far from similar. Comparisons are only valid if they are in sports. And that is why I see so many similarities to this year's BSC Championship game between Florida and Ohio State and The Fiesta Bowl win for OSU against Miami years ago. Although the tables are turned. Now everybody thinks that there is no way that OSU can lose to this team from Florida. So therefore history proves that Florida will win. Take that to the bank. But they will just look at you at the bank like you where trying to exchange Euros or something.
In all seriousness, take a moment to remember some of the brave men that died that December morning in Hawaii.
"The United States has very large power in the world today. And the partner of power-the corollary-is responsibility. It is our high task to use our power with a sure hand and a steady touch-with the self-restraint that goes with confident strength. The purpose of our power must never be lost in the fact of our power-and the purpose, I take it, is the promotion of freedom, justice and peace in the world.
We talk a great deal about patriotism. What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power-to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect to all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. The dedication of a lifetime-these are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
Patriotism, I have said, means putting country before self. This is no abstract phrase, and unhappily, we find some things in American life today of which we cannot be proud.
Consider the groups who seek to identify their special interests with the general welfare."
From Adlai Stevenson's speech on Patriotism on August 27, 1952
So Give a Cheer for the
Orange and Blue,
Waving Forever!
Forever Pride of Old Florida,
May She Droop Never.
Well Sing a Song for the Flag Today,
Cheer for the Team at Play!
On to the Goal,
We'll Fight our Way for
Florida!
