The Pat Robertson can leg-press a ton story has long since been debunked, but the bloggers at Boing Boing decided to skewer all things Robertson. As the doddering peddler of ignorance and superstition becomes increasingly irrelevant to the rest of the world, it seems attempts to recapture the spotlight are becoming increasingly loony.
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.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian.
“The Absurd is more real than life itself,” the street writer scribbled on the corner of his newspaper. p. 117
I’m more than half-way through Stephen King’s The Dark Tower (book seven, and the last, in the series), and I’ve been learning a great deal about King. As my friend Terry observed, The Dark Tower seems in many ways to compare to Robert Heinlein’s The Number Of The Beast; an authors way off gathering the threads together.
King’s latest book, Lisey’s Story, is another exercise in introspection and Powell’s has an excellent interview with King about the book.
I started to write it because I thought it would be really great to write a story about a writer’s wife behind the scenes, because they’re always behind the scenes. You know, academics and critics are the biggest sexists in the world.
They would holler and scream and say it isn’t true, but if you have a famous writer, unless their spouse is somebody like Sylvia Plath, you never hear about them. They’re totally ignored, even though they can be very influential in that writer’s work.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and his wife told him it was an awful book. So he threw it in the fire, and burned it up, and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. For years, critics have mourned that, and thought that he probably threw away a masterpiece and wrote a lesser book.
That is errant sexism, right there. They’re assuming that the wife couldn’t recognize meretricious quality. For all we know, she was looking at something that was bad, and the second book he wrote was the masterpiece, and the one he threw away was crap.
So I wanted to write a book where the woman who was behind the scenes was always saving this guy’s bacon. I saw it almost as a kind of a comedy, but it didn’t turn out that way. It turned out to be a love story, instead.
Isn’t saving our bacon a love story?
A majority of Ohioans breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday, 8 November, when they woke up in a state without Ken Blackwell in its future. But Blackwell isn’t gone. He isn’t even licking his wounds. He’s tan, he’s rested and he’s determined to makes sure that all those unsaved heathens out there get what they deserved. From Salon:
Longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, the former New York Times bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans, knows a lot about the savagery that people are capable of, especially when they’re besotted with dreams of religious or national redemption.
In his acclaimed 2002 book, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” he wrote: “I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of Southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments.” Hedges was part of New York Times team of reporters that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting about global terrorism.
Given such intimacy with horror, one might expect him to be aloof from the seemingly less urgent cultural disputes that dominate domestic American politics. Yet in the rise of America’s religious right, Hedges senses something akin to the brutal movements he’s spent his life chronicling.
The title of his new book speaks for itself: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Scores of volumes about the religious right have recently been published (one of them, “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” by me), but Hedges’ book is perhaps the most furious and foreboding, all the more so because he knows what fascism looks like.
Part of his outrage is theological. The son of a Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Harvard Theological Seminary, Hedges once planned to join the clergy himself. He speaks of the preachers he encountered while researching “American Fascists” as heretics, and he’s appalled at their desecration of a faith he still cherishes, even if he no longer totally embraces it.
Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, “[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it.”
Remember, even Richard Nixon made a comeback. Sometimes you do have to drive a stake through the heart of a movement to kill it.
My dad isn’t the only one who sends me fun stuff via email. A good friend and educational mentor also routinely passes along her share of chuckles — intermixed with not a few requests for veracity on things viral and outragious. Don’t worry, there still plenty of stuff to come From My Dad but occassionally I’ll toss a few of Mona’s finds in as well.
THE STORY OF ELIJAH
The Sunday school teacher was carefully explaining the story of Elijah the Prophet and the false prophets of Baal. She explained how Elijah built the altar, put wood upon it, cut a steer in pieces, and laid it upon the altar. And then, Elijah commanded the people of God to fill four barrels of water and pour it over the altar. He had them do this four times “Now, asked the teacher, “Can anyone in the class tell me why the Lord would have Elijah pour water over the steer on the altar?”
A little girl in the back of the room started waving her hand, “I know! I know!” she said, “To make the gravy!”
When millions have nearly instant access to every word you’ve written it gets tough practice revisionist history. This is the case with not only politicians, but also with the unelected pundits who support them. The American Conservative shines a bright light into the corner and watches the nasty cockroaches scramble.
When political leaders make drastic mistakes, accountability is delivered in the form of elections. That occurred in November when voters removed the party principally responsible for the war in Iraq. But the invasion would not have occurred had Americans not been persuaded of its wisdom and necessity, and leading that charge was a stable of pundits and media analysts who glorified President Bush”s policies and disseminated all sorts of false information and baseless assurances.
Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.
Michael Ledeen, a Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review, chose the boldest option. In response to a Vanity Fair article about the swarms of neoconservatives abandoning the administration and the war as both become increasingly unpopular, Ledeen emphatically denied that he backed the invasion in the first place. Writing on National Review”s blog, The Corner, Ledeen claimed, “I do not feel ‘remorseful,” since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.”
It is difficult to overstate the audacity-and the mendacity-of Ledeen”s claim.
Yes it is. That’s true. Greenwald is absolutely right.
Pat Robertson is so interested in filling his personal coffers that he is willing to spread unreasonable fear among the ignorant by lying to them that he has received a message from his personal delusion (or lie, take your pick) warning that terrorists will kill millions of Americans in a single attack sometime between 1 July and 31 December of this year.
From The Scotsman:
Pat Robertson, an American Conservative Christian broadcaster says God told him a terrorist attack will result in “mass killing” in the United States in the second half of 2007.
“I’m not saying necessarily nuclear, the Lord didn’t say nuclear,” Mr Robertson said on his television show The 700 Club. “It’ll be mass killing, possibly millions of people, major cities.
“The evil people will come after this country and there’s a possibility, not a possibility, a definite certainty, that chaos is going to rule.”
Mr Robertson told viewers they should not be afraid because “if you get blown up or something, you go to heaven; that’s the worst thing that will happen to you”.
He said God conveyed this message to him during an annual prayer retreat. He said he has received other messages during past retreats.
The broadcaster’s 2006 forecast of heavy storm damage in coastal areas was followed by the second-lightest hurricane season since 1995. However, he said his prediction was borne out by storms in New England, Denver, the Pacific Northwest and the Philippines.
That was the challenge I read on the cover of a supermarket checkout magazine yesterday. It was almost enough to make me buy the magazine, but not quite. It was enough to cause me to think about the question. Our days are filled with little fiddly bits of time that we routinely toss away because after all, what can you do in 15 minutes?
I won’t challenge anyone with this meme, but if you think it’s fun, give it a try.
In 15 minutes I can:
Read five pages of non-fiction or 7.5 pages of fiction…
Shower, shave, brush my teeth, comb my hair and get dressed…
Make and pack a week’s worth of lunches…
Fold and put away my laundry…
Write 250 words on a good day…
Vacuum my apartment…
Start a pot of chili or marinara sauce cooking…
Get my recyclables together for collection…
Practice my breathing exercises, or…
Plan my day…
What can you do in 15 minutes?
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian.
My first piece of advice to you is: never believe anything a man tells you. Above all never trust a writer – they trap you in a web of words from which there is no escape. They earn their living making things up, they are professional liars. They tell you stories about things that never happen in the real world. At least, I”ve never witnessed any love story like the ones they write about in their books. p. 115
Women think that guys
like that are different from the guys
driving the trucks that bring cattle
to slaughter, but guys like that are
planning worse things than the death
of a cow. Guys who look like that –
so clean and cool – are quietly moving
money across the border, cooking books,
making deals that leave some people
rich and some people poorer
than they were before guys like that
robbed them at the pump and on
their electricity bills, and even
now, guys like that are planning how
to divide up that little farm they just
passed, the one you used to call home.
From Guys Like That by Joyce Sutphen.
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.
An Indian walks into a café with a shotgun in one hand pulling a male buffalo with the other. He says to the waiter, “Want coffee.”
The waiter says, “Sure, Chief, coming right up.”
He gets the Indian a tall mug of coffee. The Indian drinks the coffee down in one gulp, turns and blasts the buffalo with the shotgun, causing parts of the animal to splatter everywhere, then just walks out.
The next morning the Indian returns. He has his shotgun in one hand pulling another male buffalo with the other. He walks up to the counter and says to the waiter, “Want coffee.”
The waiter says, “Whoa, Tonto! We’re still cleaning up your mess from yesterday. What was all that about, anyway?”
The Indian smiles and proudly says, “Training for position in United States Congress: Come in, drink coffee, shoot the bull, leave mess for others to clean up, disappear for rest of day.”
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian.
“We”re finished,” she told the professional writer when she visited his room one night, half drunk. “This generation knows nothing about suffering, or isolation. Their hearts are numb.”
“And what good does isolation bring?” the writer asked.
“They just don”t take life seriously.”
“Neither did I at their age.”
“Writing demands complete sacrifice. You must pour your soul into the work. Every word has to be paid for in sweat and blood.”
“But if you cut yourself off from today”s world, how can you hope to write about it?” the writer said.
“Writers are the products of their times. A shallow world produces shallow writers. I can”t help missing those years we spent in the re-education camps.”
“The world has moved on,” the writer said. “You”ve been left behind. Those young women understand today”s society better than you. Perhaps a purer form of literature will emerge from their numb minds. They have no prejudice, no interest in politics. Their problems are pretty personal. But your time is already over.” p. 88-9
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.
It’s Saturday and your condom of the week is brought to you by M&Ms!
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Zohar Pritzker Edition Volume 1 by Daniel C. Matt.
“There are, I believe, seven interlinked wonders that the tradition of Qabalah has to offer true seekers…”
“… a vision of the Infinite One, Ein Sof…”
“… a vision of what I call the Sacred Marriage, the constant fusion of male and female, good and evil, light and dark, through which Ein Sof creates and goes on creating the universe… Qabalists believe that no human being can be completely divine, unless, like the original Adam, they fuse within themself masculine power and feminine sensitivity on every level of being and in every activity.
“… the open and flowing system of the ten sefirot – the divine archetypes – through which the workings of the cosmic Sacred marriage can be related to and imagined.”
“… Shekhinah – the clue to the embodiment of divine love and wisdom that I myself love the most, the one through which the other sefirot our their power into this dimension – the one who dwells.”
“… the fertility, inventiveness and creativity of Qabalistic tradition itself.”
“… a secret that transforms your life when you start to understand it. Let me put the secret bluntly: since God is not just static being but also dynamic becoming, God needs us as we need God.”
“… the participation in the living glory of divine life that those who perform tiqun with every aspect of their heart, mind, thought and being can come to experience.” p. xii-xvii
Teflon Don: It’s been something of a surreal day. The air outside is thick with the smoke from the garbage dump, where it seems there is nothing to burn besides some sort of plastic. The acrid stench gives way to the crisper smoke from the assortment of burn barrels, which are once again busy devouring remnents of unkept letters and packages from…
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.
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