I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken 2008, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken 2008. This new platform is much more stable and will never crash or need to be rebooted.blockquote>

Back on 16 October I posted about the push-of-war perpetrated on tens of thousands of Rothingya families along the Bagladesh/Myanmar border. The oppression has enterd a new phase with the Rothingya being forced into slave labor to build a fence preventing movement across the border. From Aljazeera.

Tim Russo writes:

Yeah, ya”ll kinda crawled out from under your filthy rocks on your own in February, I”ll give you that. Very brave. That whole birther thing, wow, now THAT was passion. Real, psychotic, unhinged, bigoted neo-confederate passion. Brought a tear to my eye. As you teabagging minutemen know, the Republican Party sure can sniff that out unhinged psychosis like a blood hound. And boy, there”s nothing like Fox News banging on your teabags until full climax. Ah, the glory days!

If I were a member of a young couple today and planning to start a family, I would be scared witless by the statistics regarding children born with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Only a year or so ago the figure was that one child in 150, or .67 percent, born in the United States would be diagnosed with ASD. Most recently that number climbed to nearly one child in 100, or 1 percent.

We don’t know what causes the condition — no, there is absolutely no connection to vaccinations, that’s simple hooey — but I’ve written before about a study conducted by Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson and Nodir Adilov in 2006 that suggests a link between the exposure of young, developing minds to television or video and ASD.

Given the possibility of a connection the news today that children ages 2 to 5 are watching an average of 32 hours of television a week is frightening.

Our grandparents tagged the real one-eyed monster as the idiot box not long after it invaded our homes. What will it take for us to turn the squatter off, pull its plug from the wall and toss it on the tree-lawn?

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Damian Guevara in the Scene last week had a take on the Issue 3 that has been neglected by most, including me, but touches on a damaging game among Cleveland developers. They vie among themselves for advantage no matter what the cost to community.

It has cost us plenty over the years.

Guevara points out that Forest City Enterprises would be a winner if the measure passes. And that its rival, Jeff Jacobs, wants to stop it, making him the winner.

The battle between the two families – Jacobs & Ratner – has been going on in Cleveland for years. Neither cares much about the damage they cause the city.

“The question for Greater Clevelanders,” writes, Guevara, a former Plain Dealer reporter, “Do you trust wealthy pro-casino interests – in this case, Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert – to deliver on the latest promise of blue-collar and hospitality jobs, multi-million-dollar tax payments and yet another facelift of downtown Cleveland?”

I”d say no.

He calls the manipulation of the constitution inherent in a “yes” vote for Issue 3, a “deal-breaker” for many.

But the beneficiaries are clear, he notices.

“For all the vagueness of the constitutional amendment,” he writes, “there is some astounding specificity to be found in the amendment”s wording, the list of designated parcels put aside for casino construction. In Cleveland, this includes 83 acres of real estate. The Cleveland casino will, parcel-for-parcel, go on land owned by Forest City Enterprises, or the adjacent Scranton Peninsula in the industrial flats, just across the Cuyahoga river, all owned by Forest City.”

Of course, the major opponent to Gilbert”s casino desire is Jeff Jacobs, son of the late Dick Jacobs and a developer and casino operator himself.

The Jacobs-Ratner (Forest City Enterprises) battle has a long history of rivalry in Cleveland. Damaging to the city, too.

When Dick Jacobs built what is now Key Center he made it taller than Forest City”s Terminal Tower. There had been an unwritten law in Cleveland no building should be taller than Terminal Tower. That”s why the Sohio building remained shorter. They are all Public Square buildings.

Some called it developer penis envy.

When Jacobs got a special deal on the Marriott hotel, Sam Miller of Forest City demanded equal tax breaks for his Ritz-Carleton. He got it.

The biggest battle was fought over Chagrin Highlands, a plot of land more than 500 acres that the city allowed for development in 1989. Unbeknownst to anyone, Dick Jacobs was made a principal thanks to George Forbes. When Jacobs wanted to build a retail center at the same time as Beachwood Place was expanding, Mayor Michael White caused the city to sue Jacobs.

The suit stopped Jacobs”s plan; Beachwood Place, with Ratner interests, went ahead with its expansion. The suit was later dropped.

It was Jacobs vs. Ratner on the new County administration building. Jacobs sold his E. 9th property to the County for that purpose while Forest City still owns its offering to the County, the mostly empty Higbee department store building.

The two factions also fought over placement of the Medical Mart/Convention Center with Jacobs winning with the location of the present city”s center.

Originally, when the plan was passed by City Council years ago for a convention center, Scranton Peninsula was its location, with Forest City promising other retail and housing development there.

So around and around these two major Cleveland forces go.

Another question to be answered is whether any principals in the deal, if passed, will be from the Ratner or Miller families. Gilbert isn”t talking about that.

Hate to make a choice on this one but I”m pulling for Jacobs this time.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

I think what keeps a lot of us from attempting a novel is simple fear. Fear that we”ll give up and leave the book uncompleted, or the greater fear that we”ll complete it and have produced something unpublishable. I don”t think these fears are justifiable even when they prove true. So what if a novel is unsalable? For heaven”s sake, the great majority of them are, and why on earth should they be otherwise? In every other trade I”ve ever heard of it”s taken for granted that one will put in a lot of work before attaining a level of professionalism. Why should we expect our writing to be instantly publishable? p. 40

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

It now appears that my innate cynicism was concerning Myanmar”s State Peace and Development Council, i.e. military dictators, ability to ease the detention of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was well founded. No less a figure than Tint Swe, member of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma also calls bullshit.

From AsiaNews:

Signals of optimism are coming from all corners, but when it comes to Burma, there are four strategically important nations and blocs, namely China, ASEAN, India as well as America and the European Union, whose views must be taken into consideration. Hence, the news might seem good and full of hope. It is something like the days when Aung San Suu Kyi was first freed from house arrest in 1995. It is wise however to point out what happened in the 14 years that followed her release: generals remained on top, prisoners went to jail, Aung San Suu Kyi was kept in her home; in short, no changes.

So why all the furor?

[W]hen Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said that Suu Kyi might be able to play an active role in society and possibly, in politics again, he was using a diplomatic expression that can be interpreted as meaning “no”.

Still, all participants were overwhelmed as Burma”s prime minister said that the ruling junta saw a role for Aung San Suu Kyi in the process of reconciliation leading up to elections in 2010.

When the bullshit pile reaches a certain height, even the jaded can take notice.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Newspapers across the country take another smack from readers. They are buying fewer and fewer newspapers, including the Plain Dealer.

Six month circulation figures for newspapers showed steep declines. The Plain Dealer”s daily circulation was down 11.2 percent and Sunday circulation dropped 4.9 percent.

The report was published in Editor & Publisher magazine. The figures come from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

E&P said that newspapers are unable to “shake the dramatic declines in circulation.”

The PD”s daily circulation is 271,180 as of Sept. 2009 and Sunday circulation was 390,636 in the same six month period.

That”s still a lot of newspaper readers.

The PD daily circulation for the period ending March 31 this year was 291,730. The drop was nearly 20,000 a day for the six month period.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Former Congressman Dennis Eckart has joined the party. He”s backing Issue 3. That makes it almost unanimous – every shyster in town is backing a monopoly casino for a billionaire.

What a wonderful town this is.

Eckart, a former Greater Cleveland Growth Association (now Greater Cleveland Partnership) top boss, played a liberal politician for years. It has been a money-maker as Eckart has become a corporate shill here.

WKYC-TV allows this lobbyist free air access many Sunday mornings on Tom Beres”s Between the Lines. Continue Reading »

Bradley Burston writes:

When Soupy Sales died last week, a lifelong friend of mine posted video clips of his work on her Facebook page. Her daughter, herself an adult now, added this comment: “I completely understand your childhood now. Thanks.”

She was joking, of course. But not completely. It’s the nature of jokes, after all, to mask and condense insight in the slapstick shorthand of the one-liner. Just as it’s the nature of children to know more about their parents than their parents do. In the blurry, black-and-white, lo-fi footage of a loopy childrens’ TV show from long ago, my friend’s daughter saw what we should have known all along: What Soupy Sales was trying to do, at root, was to explain our excruciating, bewildering childhoods to us, in real time.

This was an era when the original Mad Men ruled the collective unconscious, when a gleaming pastel future, and, by extension, a lavishly sterile present, were held up as ideals and goals. Children were the very hope of America, and were therefore routinely lied to. Television was sanitized for our protection. Networks could not bring themselves to show married men and women sleeping in the same bed. Minorities, their cultures, music, and disenfranchisement, were conspicuous by their absence, sidelined, stereotyped, silenced and in ways both sophisticated and brutal, shunned.

At the time, programs for children were unnervingly cheerful, unrelievedly sentimental, saccharine and coddling in tone and substance. They were the expression and the vehicle for the Disney-animated postwar America of the mind, in which wishful thinking, however understandably, came in large part to paper over and replace critical thinking.

On the surface, the Soupy Sales Show looked a great deal like other kids’ programs. The host acted, talked, and dressed like a burlesque of an overgrown child. But Soupy, along with a crew of animal puppets whose thorny personalities were often much more human than the norm of human television acting at the time, was to have a diametrically different role. He was preparing an unknowing new generation for a radically broken future.

Also…

Sherry Chandler writes:

And there were a lot of us. I had received a letter assigning me a juror number of 410. But I thought maybe their numbering system began, like checks, at 100 or something. Then I got a letter saying that, because there were so many of us, we were asked to park at the fairgrounds and ride shuttles in to the courthouse.

We were also asked, for security”s sake, to bring nothing with us but our car keys and our drivers” licenses.

And so we filed off the big yellow schoolbuses, up the grand staircase, and through the metal detectors into the courtroom. There was not an empty seat.

The Circuit Clerk began to call the roll, “Juror Number 1.”

Via Blogger Interrupted…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

I think it was Theodore Sturgeon who argued that if the writer has no idea what”s going to happen next, the reader certainly won”t know what”s going to happen next. p. 40

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

The lofty goal of recognizing and defending human rights and Myanmar’s State Peace and Development Council, i.e. military dictators, are difficult to place in the same country, let alone the same region. Yet that appears to be exactly what the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has at least attempted to do.

From the Bangkok Post:

Thailand’s last chance to pull a rabbit out of the hat and turn the ASEAN summit by the sea into a success seemed to rest on the long-delayed launch of the 10-member ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. The birth of the regional body was mildly welcomed by the United Nations and also NGOs as a vehicle to address human rights abuses in the region, but it is already being criticised for a lack of boldness in its design.

The hopes of having a functioning rights body in the near term have been dashed by the unashamed intervention of some ASEAN governments in the national selection processes of their commissioners _ though in fact the word commissioner is not officially used.

I’ve always thought that shame, the concept of honor, was one that played a strong role in Asian governments. Clearly that is not Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I”d have to agree with Elizabeth Sullivan”s Sunday column saying newspaper should take the responsibility of endorsing candidates and issues. I don”t agree, however, that they do it because they “care.” That”s giving them a little too much credit.

I think unfortunately that the closed way they make their endorsements are a disservice to the public.

The Pee Dee and other papers are always calling for “openness” from others. However, the decisions of the Pee Dee editorials provide no “openness.” They are closed about it. Kept mysterious as electing a pope.

We don”t know who wrote them. We don”t know if there was a vote, as we understand there is on certain matters. We don”t know if it was a 5-4 vote or a 6-0 vote. The score would make a big difference in how a reader would interpret the endorsement. Continue Reading »