Why the Weird Al show was cancelled

Conan the Librarian

Remember this from UHF? \

Weird Al on Tom Snyder

What more could anyone want?

Economic thought of the day

If a billionaire gave everyone in America $1 million, that billionaire would still have $750 million.
Just a thought for all the billionaires who read this blog.

Another Paul and Storm video (with metaphor)

I cannot possibly add anything to your experience of watching this by way of smartass commentary.

Paul and Storm back again

It's been a while since I have linked to one of these, eh?

Here's "Nugget Man." (With Jonathan Coulton, too!)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (that Glenn Beck guy out in front is so much more amusing, anyway)

Here's a story from the New Yorker that is delicious in its irony: It tells us that Glenn Beck is part of a long-term battle of ideas.

Maybe one could use the term, oh, I don't know, conspiracy, like the conspiracy from the Fascist, Communist, Socialist Progressives Beck tells us about every night.

Joe McCarthy, anyone?

I am waiting for the night Beck tells us about the list on his table of 55 known Progressives in the American Congress. This movement that is about bringing down America! The pile of books on his desk, which his staff has just put nice sticky tabs in so it looks like he or they actually read them, shows us how dangerous this movement is. These 157 Progressives in Congress are clearly undermining everything America stands for! This book, for example, Mein Kampf, shows exactly how the Progressives will take control of the government. This list, of 579 known Progressives in our own Congress shows us what kind of trouble our country is in! Watch out! There's one behind your couch! By the way: Remember to keep watching me, so I can tell you more obscurely threatening things about your life that don't really make sense when you think about them! But if you want me to think about them for you, go out and buy all my books and DVDs and then spend even more of your hard-earned American money on my rallies and special one-night-only-in-theater movie events happening soon across the country and in your neighborhood! Be careful -- that person sitting next you just might be an undercover Communist, Progressive, Socialist, Nazi, LaRuche Democrat in disguise. Even if it's your grandmother! You'll never know how to spot them unless you listen to all three hours of my radio show and watch my hour TV show every single day, no matter what!

(Just for the record, if you could get all of Beck's Communists, Fascists, Progressives and Socialists in a room together, they have so little in common they'd spend too much time arguing to actually take over the world.)

Oh yeah. I had a link there to discuss, didn't I? Some points from the story:

Several times a week, Beck informs his audience that socialists (whom he also sometimes calls Fascists or Communists) led by Obama have seized power, and that patriotic Americans must take their country back.

OK, what next?

On September 22nd, amid a diatribe about House, Beck cited a passage from “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” by Eustace Mullins. The book, commissioned in 1948 by Ezra Pound, is a startlingly anti-Semitic fantasy of how a Jewish-led conspiracy of all-powerful bankers established the Federal Reserve in service of their plot to dominate the world.

Huh?

Beck’s readings of Progressive-era politics are nearly as bizarre. Whatever can be said about Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a crypto-radical. It was Roosevelt who coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the extreme leftists of his day, and his concept of New Nationalism—in which an activist government built a vibrant capitalism, partly by regulating big business—looked back to Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx. Nor was (President Woodrow) Wilson a Bolshevik; in fact, in 1917 he sent American troops to Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At home, his reforms sought to break up monopolies in order to restore competition among small companies. “If America is not to have free enterprise,” Wilson declared, “then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever.”

So Roosevelt was a radical? Wilson was a Socialist who was against free enterprise? Who's the revisionist historian now, Beck-o? Do these sound like credible sources and reasonable conclusions?

The story sites another classic example of Beck logic. Here it is:

Part of Beck’s allure is the promise that he will reveal secret information. In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.” Benito Mussolini, of course, didn’t adopt the ancient symbol of authority as the Fascist emblem until the nineteen-twenties; the designer of the coin, the sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, intended it to signify the nation’s military preparedness, and paired it with an olive branch to illustrate the desire for peace.

Apologies to Jon Stewart (and boy, is that a great link), but this is connecting two unrelated things. It's kind of like saying, for example, Barack Obama has a pancreas. Adolf Hitler had a pancreas. Therefore, Obama is clearly a vegetarian Nazi suffering from extreme flatulence.

Beck could find a conspiracy in a coffee cup. Cream from Progressive cows, no doubt.

Here's another story that clearly and concisely sums up my feeling about Beck, from Dana Milbank, who just wrote a book about the popular television common-tater head.

Love him, or hate him, the man is brilliant. How can you not admire a guy who went from a horrible addiction to becoming perhaps the most dominant force in American culture and American politics. I have respect for the way he has been able to see where the country is going, where the discourse is going and get out in front of it. I just have serious questions about how genuine his beliefs are. I think Glenn Beck is a charlatan, but he's the best charlatan there is.

Along that line, and lest we all forget, in the late 1980‘s, Beck resigned from his job as a Phoenix morning drive time radio host (the most prestigious time slot for a radio personality) after calling up a competitors' wife on the air and making fun of her recent miscarriage.

On the air.

During his show.

Live.

I do not buy the he-was-stil-an-alcoholic-when-that-happened excuse.

This incident says everything there is to say about Glenn Beck. What won't he say or do on the air to get attention?

If you still think Beck's tired, alarmist act is anything more than that, you are getting the intellectual soylent green you deserve.

What I did when I was stuck in traffic

I was stuck in traffic for about an hour this morning while trying to pass through the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel.
I listened to all of disc one of the "The Essential Weird Al Yankovic, and concluded that Weird Al improves the songs he parodies.
I also saw the ugliest bubblegum-fuscia colored Volkswagen Beetle I have ever seen.
Further, I pondered something that has always caused me pause to consider:
When drivers pass an especially nasty crash, we tend to comment on how awful it looks, and keep on driving. A few seconds later, we have resumed our normal driving patterns, without considering what happens when we make a mistake behind the wheel.
Rarely does anyone really consider that, on another day, the mangled vehicles they passed could have been theirs.

Wisdom from different sources

From Bob Woodward's book, "Obama's Wars," page 153:

"One outspoken member of the team believed McChrystal should not base his strategy on 'what ifs' and 'if onlys' as the U.S. had appeared to be doing. What if we increase Afghan forces? If only we can reform Karzai ... If only we can improve agriculture ... What if we seize the ring road around the country?
"Such an approach was not reality-based. 'It was hope-based, which is to say, in wartime, illusion-based,' a team member explained to Josh, my assistant."

This, for me, kinda sums up the Cleveland Indians in 2011.

It makes you wonder how anything ever gets done

Having read about the first 100 or so pages of the new book, “Obama’s Wars,” by Bob Woodward, I am struck by one thing: How little actual raw information reaches the president of the United States.
This is to say, the president, this one or any other, makes decisions not on what he knows, but on what other people know, filter for him and present to him.
The staff -- or more probably the staff’s staff, or maybe even the staff’s staff’s staff -- gathers information, turns it into some kind of report and then report works its way back up to the president, from which he makes a decision.
There are two things to recognize about this:
1. With the complexity of the world today, it would be impossible for the president to understand every detail of every facet of his administration; and
2. Part of the reason we pick a president is the quality of the people we think he will put into those key positions.
However, it is disturbing how badly someone who seems to be irrelevant could derail an entire administration by providing bad, skewed or incomplete information to the chain of command. Or, for that matter, push an agenda simply by manipulating the information that reaches the people who reach the people who reach the president.
From John P. Burke’s "The Institutional Presidency," in The Presidency and the Political System:

The Executive Branch and the Office of the President have grown significantly since George Washington first took office in 1789. He purposely downplayed the status of the office, not wanting the people to revere him as anything but a patriotic man willing to serve his country. He dealt personally with the Congress and the Courts, not relying on intermediaries to carry his messages for him. Jefferson employed a staff of two--a messenger and a secretary. By 1900, the White House staff had grown to a dozen. The explosion of activity in the White House during Franklin Roosevelt's administration highlighted the need for additional staff and the number of people working for the President has steadily increased since that time. The Executive Office of the President now employs more than five hundred people.

And that article was in a book (How quaint -- books.) published in 1998. What’s happened since then?

This 500 is just the president’s staff, not the cabinet members and their departments, such as defense, state, etc.
And yet, we expect the president to have an eloquent, informed answer on anything that is happening in any part of the world, including places that many of us have never even heard of.
Just this past week, I learned about the island nations of Sao Tome and Principe, off the coat of Western Africa. But, if I was campaigning for president, I’d be expected to know about it, such as:

In 2001, São Tomé and Nigeria reached agreement on joint exploration for petroleum in waters claimed by the two countries of the Niger Delta geologic province. After a lengthy series of negotiations, in April 2003 the joint development zone (JDZ) was opened for bids by international oil firms. The JDZ was divided into 9 blocks; the winning bids for block one, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, and the Norwegian firm, Equity Energy, were announced in April 2004, with São Tomé to take in 40% of the $123 million bid, and Nigeria the other 60%. Bids on other blocks were still under consideration in October 2004. São Tomé has received more than $2 million from the bank to develop its petroleum sector. São Tomé stands to gain significant revenue both from the bidding process and from follow-on production, should reserves in the area match expectations.

Oh, and in addition to knowing things like that, things that I can just cut and paste from Wikipedia, a president has to that kind of stuff about every country in the world. Even a presidential candidate has to know this stuff.
And, he has a staff to summarize and filter the information so he knows what the key points are and how they relate to his party’s platform.
Oh, and by the way, when questioned, he has to make sure he doesn’t accidentally say something in such a way that inadvertently insults anyone.
It seems a little silly, but maybe we as voters should find out before the president is elected who will be members of his staff and cabinet.
But, to make an informed decision at that level of detail, I’ll need a staff of my own.

P.S. Just for fun, next time you are invited to a town hall meeting with a presidential candidate, ask him about the oil deal between Nigeria and Sao Tome and see what he says.

The Browns won!

In an amazing twist of fate, the Cleveland Brows did something they have not done often and aren't expected to continue: They now have a winning streak of one game.
(In Cleveland Browns terms, since 1999, one win has come to constitute a streak.)
Expect this to end quickly next week, as order is restored to the universe.
But, we can all enjoy it while it lasts.
Anybody going to run out and buy a Peyton Hills jersey?

Not so happy meals?

This story tell us ...

A proposed city ordinance would ban McDonald's from putting toys in Happy Meals unless it adds fruit and vegetable portions and limits calories. The proposal would apply to all restaurants, but the focus has been on McDonald's and its iconic Happy Meals.

Some people don't want anybody to have any fun.
Can you imagine ordering a "Chef Salad" happy meal with a side of sunflower seeds and a pure mountain spring water to drink?
I don't think the product is at fault -- just the people who choose to over indulge. Or choose to let their children over indulge.

Today's pretty picture

I just thought we needed a picture of Groo today.
Enjoy!

(I'll also take this opportunity to note that you can now purchase the hardcover version of "MAD's Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Works" from many places, including Amazon.com for a mere $21.56. I have it, and I am working my way through it. Since it's only $21.56, you can afford to buy it and you'll have some money left over for some cheese dip to eat while you read it.)

Breakfast poll

IHOP won the breakfast restaurant poll by a 2-1-1 margin over Cracker Barrel and Waffle House.
That surprises me.
I like IHOP OK, but after I eat there I always go into a sugar coma for the rest of the morning.
Maybe I should just lay off the syrup.