---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:09:05 +0200
From: Michael Gurstein <gurstein@gmail.com>
Reply-To: stuff-it@vancouvercommunity.net
To: stuff-it@vancouvercommunity.net
Subject: [stuff-it] FW: [TriumphOfContent] Dear Old Golden Dog Days (Gail
Collins - The NY Times)
LOL!
MG
-----Original Message-----
From: TriumphOfContent@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:TriumphOfContent@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Steven Brant
Sent: October-12-08 7:01 AM
To: steve@trimtabmanagementsystems.com
Subject: [TriumphOfContent] Dear Old Golden Dog Days (Gail Collins - The NY
Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/opinion/11collins.html
The New York Times
October 11, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Dear Old Golden Dog Days
By GAIL COLLINS
I miss the good old days. Remember when the presidential campaign was
all about oil drilling? That sure was fun.
I miss August. August was neat. The Dow was over 10,000 and nobody
had ever heard of Sarah Palin.
Remember how we used to joke about John McCain looking like an old
guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn? It's only in retrospect that
we can see that the keep-off-the-grass period was the McCain
campaign's golden era. Now, he's beginning to act like one of those
movie characters who steals the wrong ring and turns into a troll.
During that last debate, while he was wandering around the stage, you
almost expected to hear him start muttering: "We wants it. We needs
it. Must have the precious."
Remember when McCain's campaign ads were all about his being a
prisoner of war? I really miss them.
Now they're all about the Evil That Is Obama. The newest one,
"Ambition," has a woman, speaking in one of those sinister
semiwhispers, saying: "When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill
Ayers. When discovered, he lied." Then suddenly, with no warning
whatsoever, she starts ranting about Congressional liberals and risky
subprime loans. Then John McCain pops up to say he approved it. All
in 30 seconds! And, of course, McCain would think it's great. For the
first time, the Republicans appear to have captured his thought
process on tape.
The Republican campaign strategy now involves sending their
candidates to areas where everybody is a die-hard McCain supporter
already. Then they yell about Obama until the crowd is so frenzied
people start making threats. The rest of the country is supposed to
watch and conclude that this would be an enjoyable way to spend the
next four years.
Maybe the Republicans should have picked somebody else. I miss Mitt
Romney. Sure, he was sort of smarmy. But when Mitt was around, the
banks had money and Iceland was solvent. And, of course, when we got
bored, we could always talk about how he drove to Canada with his
Irish setter strapped to the car roof.
I miss the old George W. Bush. When he came out of the White House
and made an announcement, you would usually think that whatever he
wanted to do was a terrible idea. But at least you thought he could
actually make the terrible idea happen.
I miss the old American public that was too busy shopping to worry
about the state of the world. Now everybody is getting scared and
weird. They've been racing off in great numbers to see "Beverly Hills
Chihuahua." And nagging Target to take the Little Mommy Cuddle 'n Coo
dolls off the shelves because people think that when it gurgles you
can hear the baby say "Islam is the light."
I miss the old Cindy McCain. The one who used to go to rallies and
sit huddled in the corner looking as if she thought the audience had
a communicable disease. Now, she's right up there on stage, standing
behind her husband and making disgusted faces when he rails on about
the opposition. And she's started railing herself. (The family that
rants together ...) Obama is waging "the dirtiest campaign in
American history." His votes on Iraq were votes "not to fund my son
when he was serving."
Remember when the McCains wouldn't talk about the fact that their son
was in Iraq? Oh well.
Maybe Cindy is trying to hold her own against Sarah, who is with John
almost as much as she is. I miss the old guy-guy McCain who had so
many male pals around he looked like a walking fraternity reunion.
Now, he's starting to resemble an ambulatory patient accompanied by
female attendants on an outing.
Palin has been pressing the line that people don't really know "the
real Barack Obama," and who could make the argument better than a
woman who we've already known for almost six weeks? Really, she's
like one of the family.
We've gotten so close we've already learned that she didn't actually
sell the plane on eBay, didn't actually visit the troops in Iraq and
didn't really have a talk with the British ambassador. As soon as we
get the Trooper thing and Alaska Independence Party thing and the tax
thing figured out, she'll be an open book.
And she's got a point about Obama. True, he's been campaigning for 19
months and has been interviewed by everybody from "Meet the Press" to
"Men's Health." Which would be O.K. if we were talking about somebody
from a small town rather than, as a McCain campaign co-chairman noted
delicately, a "guy of the street."
Back in August, women politicians were afraid of going negative
because it might have made them look too strident. Amazing, the
things you wind up being nostalgic for.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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more real music
Three more, Myk Freedman (steel, organ), myself (banjo, yamaha)
We quite like these; at least for me they reflect jangled nerves...
- Alan
http://www.alansondheim.org/alanmyk7.mp3 tenor banjo and pump organ
http://www.alansondheim.org/alanmyk6.mp3 tenor banjo and pump organ
http://www.alansondheim.org/alanmyk3.mp3 yamaha keyboard and steel guitar
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:37:15 -0400
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Religulous
Religulous
Reviewed by Roger Ebert
rogerebert.com
October 2, 2008
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081002/REVIEWS/810020306/1001
Ebert: ***1/2 Users: ***1/2
Cast & Credits
Lionsgate presents a film directed by Larry Charles.
Written by Bill Maher. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated
R (for some language and sexual material). Opening today
at local theaters.
I'm going to try to review Bill Maher's "Religulous"
without getting into religion. Is that OK with
everybody? Good. I don't want to fan the flames of a
holy war. The movie is about organized religions:
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, TV evangelism
and even Scientology, with detours into pagan cults and
ancient Egypt. Bill Maher, host, writer and debater,
believes they are all crazy. He fears they could lead us
prayerfully into mutual nuclear doom. He doesn't get
around to Hinduism or Buddhism, but he probably doesn't
approve of them, either.
This review is going to depend on one of my own deeply
held beliefs: It's not what the movie is about, it's how
it's about it. This movie is about Bill Maher's opinion
of religion. He's very smart, quick and funny, and I
found the movie entertaining, although sometimes he's a
little mean to his targets. He visits holy places in
Italy, Israel, Great Britain, Florida, Missouri and
Utah, and talks with adherents of the religions he finds
there, and others.
Or maybe "talks with" is not quite the right phrase.
It's more that he lines them up and shoots them down. He
interrupts, talks over, slaps on subtitles, edits in
movie and TV clips, and doesn't play fair. Reader, I
took a guilty pleasure in his misbehavior. The people he
interviews are astonishingly forbearing, even most of
the truckers in a chapel at a truck stop. I expected
somebody to take a swing at Maher, but nobody did,
although one trucker walked out on him. Elsewhere in the
film, Maher walks out on a rabbi who approvingly
attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran.
Maher had a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, and was
raised as a Catholic until he was 13, when his father
stopped attending services. He speaks with his elderly
mother, who tells him, "I don't know why he did that. We
never discussed it." He asks her what the family
believed, before and after that event. "I don't know
what we believed," she says. No, she's not confused. She
just doesn't know.
Most everybody else in the film knows what they believe.
If they don't, Maher does. He impersonates a
Scientologist at the Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde
Park, and says Scientology teaches that there was a race
of Thetans several trillion years old (older than the
universe, which is only 13.73 billion years) and that we
are born with Thetans inside us, which can be detected
by an E-Meter, on sale at your local Scientology center,
and driven out by "auditing," which takes a long time
and unfortunately costs money.
Many of Maher's confrontations involve logical questions
about holy books. For example, did Jonah really live for
three days in the belly of a large fish? There are
people who believe it. Is the End of Days at hand? A
U.S. senator says he thinks so. Will the Rapture occur
in our lifetimes? Widespread agreement. Mormons believe
Missouri will be the paradise ("Branson, I hope," says
Maher). There are even some people who believe Alaska
has been chosen as a refuge for the Saved After
Armageddon. In Kentucky, Maher visits the Creation
Museum, which features a diorama of human children
playing at the feet of dinosaurs.
His two most delightful guests, oddly enough, are
priests stationed in the Vatican. Between them, they
cheerfully dismiss wide swaths of what are widely
thought to be Catholic teachings, including the
existence of Hell. One of these priests almost dissolves
in laughter as he mentions various beliefs that I, as a
child, solemnly absorbed in Catholic schools. The other
observes that when Italians were polled to discover who
was the first person they would pray to in a crisis,
Jesus placed sixth.
Maher meets two representations of Jesus. One is an
actor at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando.
He stars in a re-enactment of the Passion, complete with
crown of thorns, wounds, a crucifix, and Roman soldiers
with whips. I suppose I understand why Florida tourists
would take snapshots of this ordeal, but when Jesus
stumbles, falls and is whipped by soldiers, I was a
little puzzled why they applauded. The other Jesus, Jose
Luis de Jesus Miranda, believes he actually is the
Second Coming -- i.e., Jesus made flesh in our time. He
explains how the bloodline traveled from the Holy Land
through France to Spain to Puerto Rico. He has 100,000
followers.
Why have I focused on the Christians? Maher also has
interesting debates with Muslims about whether the Koran
calls for the death of infidels. And he interviews an
Israeli manufacturer who invents devices to sidestep the
bans on Sabbath activity. Since the laws prohibit you
from operating machines, for example, they've invented a
"negative telephone." Here's how it works: All the
numbers on the touchpad are constantly engaged. All you
do is insert little sticks into holes beside the numbers
you don't want to work.
I have done my job and described the movie. I report
faithfully that I laughed frequently. You may very well
hate it, but at least you've been informed. Perhaps you
could enjoy the material about other religions, and tune
out when yours is being discussed. That's only human
nature.
_____________________________________________
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