Frank: The doctor gave me a relaxation cassette. When my blood pressure gets too high, the man on the tape tells me to say 'serenity now!'
George: Are you supposed to yell it?
Frank: The man on the tape wasn't specific.
The "Serenity Now!" episode remains one of my all time favorite Seinfeld episodes. When I was fiddling with my previous blog, I had at one moment tried to expand my thoughts on the joy and happiness using Frank's approach to achieve peace of mind. But in reading the wikipedia entry on the episode, I discovered another thread in the episode was inspired by the same David Mamet play with which I was also trying to assimilate into the previous blog: Glengarry Glen Ross.
Frank Costanza: Starting tonight we're having a little sales contest. The loser gets fired. The winner gets a Water Pik.
At last! Republicans have been awaiting this moment for five long years, the day that Obama finally gets his gate. You see, every two-term president has a defining scandal that renders him permanently villainous and/or ridiculous. By hallowed convention, the scandal must end with word "gate."
Nixon started it with the gate to begin all gates, Watergate. Ronald Reagan followed up with Irangate. Bill Clinton enthralled us with Monicagate. George W. Bush gave us Plamegate.
And now Obama has got his own gate...or rather his own gates. Since no single scandal is big enough bring him down, Republicans and pundits are eagerly gathering them up in a big stinking pile of nefariousness: IRSBenghAPgate!
By Doctor Cleveland on Mon, 05/13/2013 - 1:27am | Arts & Entertainment, Personal
When I got my first job, I also got a book of advice for new professors. It gave me some sensible-sounding advice about writing. Avoid binge writing, it said. Write at regularly scheduled hours and keep each session brief. Too many graduate students are used to writing in crazy binges, the authors said, rather than developing steady writing habits. Faculty had to learn to write all the time, and also had to learn to STOP writing even if things were going well. And I tried to take that advice seriously.
By Michael Maiello on Sat, 05/11/2013 - 9:18am | Arts & Entertainment
Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, is a fable. It is not a fable now, years after it was written. Fitzgerald structured it as a fable and intended it to be read as such.
By Ramona on Fri, 05/10/2013 - 9:07pm | Social Justice, Media
As if it wasn't enough this week that three young women held captive and terrorized by a madman were found alive after 10 long years, we now learn that in 2004, celebrated psychic Sylvia Browne made an appearance on celebrated sinceremeister Montel Williams' television
I worry when I write about the Middle East because I have no confidence that I know what I'm talking about and probably less interest in the differences and similarities between a Shiite and an Alawite than I do in whether or not I think that Richard Foreman's latest play at New York's Public Theater was any good (it was not.) I sometimes confuse Wahabi with the condiment for sushi. Heck, I don't even feel bad about this -- if the sectarian issues of
At Esquire, Charles Pearce flags a National Review article wherein some person named Dennis Prager complains that free breakfasts for public school children in Los Angeles will damage the character of the city's young, who will grow up thinking that life is nothing but a bunch of government hand-outs. Oh, and, he says, it encourages lazy parents not to feed their kids before school.
By Doctor Cleveland on Mon, 05/06/2013 - 11:29pm | Politics, Sports, Social Justice
It's been a tough week for elite gay-baiting. First Howie Kurtz, hack journalist extraordinaire, lost his job at the Daily Beast because he badly botched an attempt to smear NBA center Jason Collins. Part of what Kurtz botched was the facts, claiming that Collins had concealed the fact that he had once been engaged to a woman when Collins had "concealed" that fact by explicitly stating it in his Sports Illustrated coming-out article. ("When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged," is pretty straightforward.) Kurtz, to his credit, has made a full apology.
Then, Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson (also a columnist for the Daily Beast) was also forced to apologize after publicly gay-baiting landmark economist John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson decided to tell an audience that Keynes wasn't interested in long-term policy effects (itself a gross distortion of Keynes's position) because Keynes was a homosexual in a childless marriage. Yes, really. That's the standard of logic and evidence to which Ferguson holds himself.
DULUTH - In a scene of overwhelming carnage, Bobby Jenkins, 9, brutally murdered more than 100,000 people, zombies, and other entities yesterday.
The slaughter began at 3:30 p.m. yesterday, when Sally Jenkins, mother of Bobby, allowed her son to play the video game "Slaughter Everything." After doing some bills, Sally Jenkins stumbled across the murder scene and immediately sent young Bobby to his room.
"It was really unsettling," said Sally Jenkins. "He was just going crazy, slaughtering everybody."
Last Friday the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute published their final working paper by Micheal Greenstone and Adam Looney. The research shows through charts and grafts, that we would have 2.2 more million jobs in the economy if we followed the same policies that we had during the last 5 recessions. The authors compare this recovery rate to past down turns and recoveries. They place the blame squarely on the reduction of public employees in order to reduce debt. Also the authors point out that we fall short of 10 million jobs right now in this economy.
Sometimes one tries to move further along the tracks on a particular train of thought and then just like that one is right back at the old station. While I think humiliation and its role in the facilitation of what some authorities refer to as radicalization is an intriguing topic, I wanted to delve more into the collective perception of the radicalization process.
Critical to understanding the (shifting) core of this perception, I believe, is people's relationship with and understanding of tension and conflict. In particular, tension and conflict as it relates to not only as an expression of human nature, but also in the formation of that same human nature. These perceptions inform our politics, our understanding of our place in the world, and the place of others. As with one of the facets of this tension, humiliation, this topic quickly pushes one to the notion that the personal is political (and the political personal).
The NRA is having another convention and crazy crazy people will show up and give grand speeches about liberty and the Constitution and the commie liberals.
Mediamatters does a splendid job demonstrating how the voices of the right including Hannity and Nugent and beckerhead and so many other nutjobs have been calling for out-right revolution over the last few years.
I assume that Assad has constructed a golden parachute. He could bail out and land in a well feathered nest in any one of several countries. But, if he did so, his minority tribe would almost certainly lose and suffer terrible retribution. So far Assad is hanging tough and so are his followers. We often bandy the term, "existential threat" lightly, but there are many people fighting for the very life of their families, themselves, and their country as they know it.
An Oxford University economist and a Stanford University epidemiologist have combined their considerable breadth and knowledge to conclude the Great Recession and accompanying austerity have caused 10,000 suicides and a million diagnoses of depression in the U.S. and Europe. If you find that hard to stomach, here's something more concrete -- AIDS is once again a full blown epidemic in Greece where budgets have been cut from HIV-prevention programs.
By Ramona on Sun, 04/28/2013 - 7:54am | Politics, Religion
So one day somebody at Northwest Rankin High School in Flowood, Mississippi came up with the idea to hold a series of mandatory Christian assemblies, where students would be required to watch a Christian video and listen to ministers (and fellow students) from the Pinelake Baptist Church preach to them about the importance of being a Christian.
Do not drink too much. Do you hear me? I don't want you passing out or going to the dark side. No going to the dark side!
-- Jack Cole, Sideways (2004)
In the film Sideways, Paul Giamatti plays Miles Raymond, a forty-something unsuccessful writer, wine-aficionado, and depressed middle school English teacher living in San Diego, who takes his soon-to-be-married actor friend and college roommate, Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church), on a road trip through Santa Ynez Valley wine country. Miles wants to relax and live well. However, Jack wants one last sexual fling; at least that is their expressed agendas for the trip.
In the 1993 film Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays a divorcé and unemployed former defense engineer, William Foster, who goes on a violent rampage across L.A. while trying to reach his daughter’s birthday party at the house of his estranged wife. Roger Ebert writes of this character:
What is fascinating about the Douglas character, as written and played, is the core of sadness in his soul. Yes, by the time we meet him, he has gone over the edge. But there is no exhilaration in his rampage, no release. He seems weary and confused, and in his actions he unconsciously follows scripts that he may have learned from the movies, or on the news, where other frustrated misfits vent their rage on innocent bystanders.
A shooting that left five people dead at a Federal Way apartment complex Sunday started as a case of domestic violence, police said Monday. It ended with a woman the suspect was living with and three innocent bystanders dead before police shot and killed the suspect.
Officers responded to 911 calls at 9:30 p.m. at Pinewood Village in the 33300 block of 18th Lane S.
Police said the suspect, in his late 20’s, shot and killed a woman in her mid-20’s who he was living with in the complex.
The suspect then went to the parking lot, where he shot two men who confronted him, police said. He then grabbed a shotgun.
Last Friday the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute published their final working paper by Micheal Greenstone and Adam Looney. The research shows through charts and grafts, that we would have 2.2 more million jobs in the economy if we followed the same policies that we had during the last 5 recessions. The authors compare this recovery rate to past down turns and recoveries. They place the blame squarely on the reduction of public employees in order to reduce debt. Also the authors point out that we fall short of 10 million jobs right now in this economy.
