An Almanack

There are three kinds of chick flicks.

Type A often has Meryll Streep and always involves a disease. There is no way to watch this type. Run. Don’t walk. May be there is a hospital fire somewhere that only you can put out? Doubly beware if the name of the movie ends in cutesy symbols such as `XXOO’ or makes inscrutable references to metallic flowers and/or green fruit.

Type B usually has Meg Ryan, Kate Hudson or lately, Ann Hathaway. These are quite watchable, in small quantities.

Never see a chick flick at a theater. Does the phrase captive audience mean anything to you? Always go for Netflix or a DVD at home. Do not hog the remote control. Just for once.

The first hour of the movie is the hardest. (more…)

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My life has meaning now. KO quotes a diary from DKos on his show. OK, it wasn’t my diary, but I read it. Before KO quoted it. On TV! Yes, sometimes if you live a good life and work hard it all pays off in the end. Life is not all unfair.

A celebrity quoted the diary. Someone who is actually paid to be on TV. Just think of that. I am dumbfounded. Or something.It was like the time I was at a concert and a drop of Sting’s sweat fell on me. I didn’t wash for a week. Didn’t want that celebrity saltiness to wash off my skin. Another time I was at a restaurant in Connecticut and someone told me Paul Newman had eaten there the week before. Yes! Just one week before I ate there, Paul Newman had sat at the same table. OK, may not be the same table. Same room. Or general area. Or something. (more…)

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Gov. Sarah Palin has a short announcement to make, after which she will be answering your questions.

Hi America, I appreciate speaking directly TO you, over the heads of the Liberal Media. People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing’s more important to me than our troops who are serving so well defending freedom in Kosovo. And it is in honor of those troops that I announce my withdrawal from the Presidential race of 2012.

And you know me by now, I promised even four years ago to show MY independence… no more conventional “politics as usual”. Real winners make up their own rules, instead of playing by the rules or the constitution or whatever you call them over at your Department of Law in Washington. We broke ground on the new prison. The more people we put in jail, the greater our security will be. I can think of one or two reporters I would like to have as guest in our new prison.

Make no mistake about it. I am no quitter. I am a fighter. Which is why I will be resigning as your President effective the year 2012.

Q: If you are quitting the race how can you resign from the Presidency? (more…)

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T. E. Lawrence, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish Baronet has been immortalized by Hollywood as Lawrence of Arabia. But there is another, less well known, legend about his years as Assistant to H. E. Hogarth, the renowned archeologist.

They were digging at Carchemish, a remote dusty outpost of Syria. The nearest town, Jerablus, was no big shakes either. But at least it gave the young men at the site the kind of diversions that young men look for everywhere in the world. This was strictly against camp policies.Jerablus was close to the Turkish border and one important purpose of the dig was to gather intelligence on a German ally, just as hostilities that were to end in WWI were coming to a head. A British student getting caught at some brothel in Jerablus would be a diplomatic disaster.

Young Lawrence was a hard worker, not distracted by such pursuits. So remarkable was his lack of interest in `going to town’ that rumors about his sexual orientation started to circulate. But after many weeks, the dust, the heat, the loneliness-and hormones- caught up with even Lawrence. He went up to his mentor

Dr. Hogarth, I am a young man and young men have needs. As you know, I have not broken camp rules. But it is getting harder and harder to follow them.

Hogarth:

You are right Ted. I have been working you quite hard. See my camel parked over there? You go to that camel, do what you need to do. I will just look the other way.

Just 45 minutes later, Lawrence was back.

Thank you, Sir. That was *such* a relief.

Hogarth was surprised:

What did you do? I didn’t even see you go into town on that camel? I wasn’t expecting you back till tomorrow..

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When I came to the US thirty years ago, coffee was this brown muck that cost about a dollar per gallon. In the generation that has passed since then, coffee has become a spiritual experience, a political statement and a way to save the planet. Sleek new devices that hiss and purr when stroked have replaced the old coffee machines. The people who make the coffee have never looked better. Many of them have college degrees, even if they are unaware that Venti is simply the Italian word for twenty .

Starbucks just took out a full page ad in the NYTimes touting its exceptionalism.

They Want You To Think Coffee is Coffee. Well, It’s Not Just Coffee. It’s Starbucks.

It’s lotsa bucks actually. Until a year ago, $4.50 was considered a reasonable price for a cup of coffee. Starbucks is, like the Hummer, Enron and the AIG, an emblem of turn of the century excess. Now McDonalds is eating their lunch. The baristas at Starbucks still look upon with you with condescension if you ask for a “small cup of coffee” instead of a “Tall Americano”. But you can see the fear in their eyes. The Ad says that these are highly trained individuals, who can make 87000 different kinds of coffee. If so, aren’t they a bit over-trained? Punching a few buttons on a coffee machine is not exactly rocket science.
(more…)

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The Cheney-Churchill comparison has not yet been made. But it is coming. Sooner or later every conservative thinks he is the next Churchill.

Dick Cheney is on TV every day. Even calls in to a radio talk show in North Dakota. Not only is it out of character for him, it is against the conventions of American politics for a former VP to criticize a new President so soon after the election. Perhaps Cheney is scared that he will be indicted for war crimes and is offering a pre-emptive defense.Torture is not just any war crime: it carries the death penalty. Maybe it is not his own indictment that he fears but that of his former aides like Addington. Or he is drumming up publicity for his book. He could just be bored after his retirement. Is Lynne Cheney making him mow the lawn, if he stays home?

But I think it is something else. (more…)

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Hat tip BIDMC

Looking at these smiling people, you would never think that the topic of the day was possible layoffs, reduction of employee benefits, and other such matters. As promised in my message a couple of days ago, we held the first of a series of town meetings yesterday to explain our financial situation and to solicit ideas and suggestions from people as to how we might meet this year’s budget gap. Keep those ideas coming. This company is about you. If you were not behind me I would not not be able to lead you to a promising future.
(more…)

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I had to write a report this week and was looking through my calendar from last year. Noticed a curious entry, a talk I missed because I was out with a cold. Who exactly is Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley, this denier of Global Warming? The magic of Google and Wikipedia allows us to find out easily. The drawback to such convenience is that such information is often superficial.

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Hat tip Public D

Publisher’s Note
The original author of this photo-cartoon remains anonymous. I took it from a post on Daily Kos and added the following speech explaining Andre’s fate. The photo has since appeared on many websites. The second speech below is a totally unfair parody of one by the CEO of Beth-Israel Medical Center. I blame our staff member Richard Saunders for the biting tone of that parody. Richard has been properly chastised. His only excuse is temporary loss of sanity from performing experiments on the nature of electricity.

Hello everyone. Thanks for taking the time to get together today at an actual work site. How is everyone feeling in those work overalls? Thought it would be a nice change from the eleventh floor.

I’m not going to waste your time or mince words. The reason for getting together is to bring you up to speed on the company’s status. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as we all would have anticipated even 6 short days ago.

There are several issues.
(more…)

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I was humbled and honored to be chosen to give the Republican response to Pres. Obama’s address to the nation last Tuesday. The response to my response has been consistent. Democrats think it was awful. The Republicans are hanging their heads in shame. Only Rush Limbaugh stood up for me. God bless him. He might make me President yet.

I want to begin my response to my critics with another condescending remark about President Obama’s blackness. After all, that is the most important thing about him. It is not important that Obama inherited a country mired in two wars, one of them completely unnecessary. Or that his predecessor was spending twice as much money as he was collecting. I must always start by noting the remarkable personal story of Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother. I mean, it is just awesome how I noticed that about him. Without me pointing it out, some of you could have missed that.
(more…)

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As soon as I saw a picture of Rod Blagojevitch (back during the Dem Primaries) I knew he was up to no good. This judgement, now vindicated, did not come from deep knowledge of IL state politics. I just knew that someone with such a lush growth of hair on his head had to be a bounder. This would be true even if the hair were fake. Donald Trump. Gary Hart (in the eighties, not now). Bill Clinton. Elvis. All talented people, all got in trouble. What do they have in common? Hair where it is supposed to grow, not on their ear or back.

IL has a second chance now with Patrick Quinn. He is different from Blagojevitch in every possible way.

“He’s the anti-Blagojevich, for sure,” said State Representative Jack D. Franks

You have got to love the guy: NYTimes

Mr. Quinn, 60, can be so unassuming that he watched the inauguration of President Obama in Washington crunched down on his knees so that people behind him could get a better view. When prone to boasting, which is not very often, it can be about miserly stuff, like staying in budget hotels and eating discount meals.

More to the point I am making,

And with a hairline more John Lithgow than Elvis, he does not even look the Blagojevich part.

(more…)

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I come home from a business trip to see a large envelope from the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Inside is a handsome card embossed with a Golden Seal.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee requests the honor of your presence to attend and participate in the Inauguration of

My heart beats faster. Finally, all those blogs I wrote on Daily Kos are paying off. Impassioned arguments with Hillary Clinton supporters back in the Spring of 2008. Alegre, eat your heart out in your little corner. We are the ones going to the Inauguration.

Barack H. Obama as President of the United States of America

(more…)

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Hoax phone calls used to be funny. As a teenager, Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple computer, figured out the Bell System technical protocols- he and Steve Jobs had found the manual at the SLAC Library. Woz used this knowledge to call the Pope, pretending to be Henry Kissinger. His fake German accent was good enough to get the Holy Father out of bed. But before he took the phone, an aide figured out that it was some California teenager pulling a prank. (more…)

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Whenever a nation has done something deeply embarrassing, which shames its decent citizens, moral philosophy thrives. As though the obvious atrocity can somehow be hidden behind sophisticated reasonings about abstract thought experiments. Psychologists must have some fancy name for this phenomenon.

We live in such a time now. You cannot open the New Yorker or the New York Times Magazine without running into a conundrum designed by the best and the brightest to teach us lessons on moral values. The difference between us and the ancients is that we look to science, not religion, as the source of our values. Thus, neuro-scientists emerge as the Deep Thinkers of our time. Supposedly their knowledge of how our brain is wired allows them to deduce ab initio what is right and wrong.

One the most fundamental of these puzzles is the Trolley problem. It goes something like this.

On your morning walk, you see a trolley car carrying five passengers. It is hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. The passengers are oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five people. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

But wait a minute. Here is the twist. The single worker is Mr. Average Joe, who is working an extra shift so he can pay off his mother’s hospital bill. You just received a text message identifying the five conscious occupants of the Trolley car as Steven Pinker, Niall Ferguson, Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Joshua Greene. (You are carrying an iPhone. Duh.) And you have just enough time to Google these names before making the decision.

Now, which way would you throw the switch?

Who is more valuable? Five moral philosophers or an honest working man?

Those with the correct answer will be entered into a raffle for the complete works of Ayn Rand.

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I am at my daughter’s birthday party the other day, chatting with the father of one of the girls.

“So, what do you do?” (more…)

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An analogy is often made between scientific research and exploration. In High Energy Physics, the accelerator physicists are the ship builders, the theoreticians the map makers, phenemenologists the navigators and the experimentalists are the sailors. The spokesman for the experimentalists is the captain of the ship, a dashing figure with power over life and death during the voyage. Ah, if only we were still in this romantic era..

Exploring in Canoes

The mega collaborations of thousands of physicists, that are being formed, are more like aircraft carriers. A good way of projecting power, but a bad instrument for exploration.

“But you can’t go exploring in a canoe”, I am told when I bring up this point.

Actually, you can. Canoes were exactly what the polynesians used to explore and settle the largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific. (more…)

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Breaking News….

The crack investigation team set up by General Musharraf to investigate the death of Mrs. Benazir Bhutto has submitted its report. The conclusions might surprise some who made hasty deductions based on a grainy video.

Mrs. Bhutto died from a severe case of indigestion. Having lived abroad for so long, her stomach could no longer handle the spicy food of her homeland. A particularly spicy meal of Naan and Chicken Tikka at Army HQ in Rawalpindi did her in. Other than that, the dinner was a nice affair.

In the videos shown you can see her bending over suddenly with stomach pain. Purely by coincidence a young man in the crowd can be seen raising a revolver and aiming it at her head. The near simultaneity of these two events led most of the world to mistakenly conclude that Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated. The truth is mundane but inescapable.

Unscrupulous elements are trying to take advantage of the confusion. They will be put down mercilessly. The truth has always been on the side of the Glorious Pakistan Army.

Absurdistan Zindabad!

We return to our regularly scheduled program now.

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Other Posts on Pakistan

Contrary to popular wisdom it really is the time now to assign blame. It lies squarely with the Pakistani Army and its Commander-in-Chief, Pervez Musharraf. The same army assassinated her father, Zulfikar Bhutto, after a sham trial. The same army has been plundering the country’s wealth and put its judges in jail in the name of security. (more…)

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Our publisher has described the origin of his name elsewhere. Interesting names are all around us.

The Roman Catholic Church had a Cardinal named Sin. He was the Archbishop of Manila, (more…)

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Other articles on Pakistan
Excerpt from an interview with President Bush by ABC News Nov 2007.

What’s his name has agreed to hold elections in January, and he’s agreed to take his uniform off. Frankly, I think he should do that in the privacy of his own home, but hey, everyone wants the man to take off his own uniform, so lets let him do it anyway he wants. Make sure you cover it live Charlie.

Do you mean Musharraf?

Yeah him. Have trouble remembering his name. General. General something. Hey, he knows how to call me, I don’t need to remember his name. (more…)

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The Lincoln of Pakistan

Other posts edited by P. Richard Saunders

Editor’s note I am posting here the full text of my dear friend Mushie’s decree imposing emergency rule. A partial text of the decree has been published before by BBC. I have been able to obtain additional secret parts of the decree as well as Mushie’s own commentary explaining the thinking behind it. A couple of words had to be redacted to preserve good relations with allies. So here goes: (more…)

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My friends abroad, I am writing this with joy in my heart. Our long national nightmare is over. Full Democracy has been achieved and Full Justice has triumphed. Extremism in all its forms has been defeated. The humiliation of public servants by the judiciary has been stopped. Our Mission has been Accomplished. (more…)

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We were just leaked a white paper on the situation in Pakistan written by up and coming analysts who used to man the South Asia Desk at State. Now they write in a blog named The Washington- Not!. For reasons of modesty they wish to remain anonymous. But they acknowledge the influence of the ponderous and inebriated Malarkey penned by a more senior former State Department official (from whom they hope to get a job some day). (more…)

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Read Also Part 1, Part 2

Pakistan is at a turning point. There might be reason to be cautiously optimistic. The Supreme Court has recently (more…)

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I need to hurry up and launch my own brand of yoga before the inevitable yoga backlash sets in. It must be distinctive, eye-catching and easily patented. More than a set of exercises. A whole way of life, which will require many accessories. (more…)

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