Totally Inappropriate...

But still.

It's funny.

Obtained from one of those circulating joke emails....

OK. so it's wrong.

And the Oscar Goes to....

The article below is an interesting read to anyone who grew up during the space race of the 60's. As young kids, it made us believe that anything was possible if we put our minds to it ...that what we read in science fiction books was about to all come true. The constant breakthroughs brought so many things into our everyday life, and the speed of progress knew no bounds. Or so it seemed.

Now we look back and can see both how primitive it all really was, how incredibly lucky we were, and our changed priorities caused mismanagement, a lack of thoroughness and even failures and catastrophe.

And here we read of the misplacement of the original magnetic tapes that document the first time in ALL HISTORY that man left this planet to stand on another world. How incredible is that? And how sad.

But of course ... should there be any surprise? After all, it's not like we REALLY went there, right?

Hee!

===============================================

ONE GIANT SCREWUP FOR MANKIND
By David Kushner - Wired Magazine
WHEN THE EAGLE LUNAR MODULE TOUCHED DOWN ON JULY 20, 1969, all eyes were on astronaut Neil Armstrong. But Stan Lebar's ass was on the line.
A young electrical engineer at Westinghouse, Lebar had been tasked with developing a camera that could capture the most memorable moment of the 20th century – the Apollo 11 moon landing. The goal of the mission wasn't merely to get a man on the moon. It was to send back a live television feed so that everyone could see it – particularly the Soviets, who had initiated the space race in 1957 by launching Sputnik. If the feed failed, Lebar, the designated spokesperson for the video setup, would turn the camera on himself at Mission Control in Houston and apologize to more than half a billion TV viewers. "It was my responsibility," he says. "I'd have to stand up and take the hit."
Building a camera that could survive the crushing g forces of liftoff and then function in near-weightlessness on the moon was only part of the challenge for Lebar. The portion of the broadcast spectrum traditionally used for video was sending vital ship data to Earth, and there was no room left for the standard black-and-white video format of the era: 525 scan lines of data at 30 frames per second, transmitted at 4.5 MHz. So Lebar helped devise a smaller "oddball format" – 320 scan lines at 10 fps, transmitted at a meager 500 kHz. Tracking stations back on Earth would take this so-called slow-scan footage, convert it for TV broadcast, and beam it to Mission Control, which would send it out for the world to see.
And that was the easy part. To ensure a direct transmission signal from the moon, NASA had to maintain stations in three continents – two in Australia (the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra and the Parkes Radio Observatory surrounded by sheep paddocks west of Sydney); one at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert of California; and one at the Madrid Manned Flight Tracking Site in Spain. As Armstrong suited up for his first moonwalk, Dick Nafzger, the 28-year-old coordinator of the tracking stations' TV operations, was as nervous as Lebar. Nafzger was the guy at Mission Control charged with monitoring ground equipment and the conversion of the slow-scan footage to US broadcast standards. "We were all going to be involved in something of monumental historic importance," he says.
When Armstrong opened the hatch on the lunar module, stepped out onto the moon, and uttered his famous words about mankind's giant leap, the tracking stations with a direct line on the Apollo's signal were the ones in Australia. The 200-foot-diameter radio dish at the Parkes facility managed to withstand freak 70 mph gusts of wind and successfully captured the footage, which was converted and relayed to Houston. "When the door opened, I knew the camera was working," Lebar says, "It was pure elation."
The world watched in awe as Armstrong took his first steps, and the camera engineers at Mission Control started popping the champagne corks. Amid the celebration, though, Lebar scrutinized the video, and his joy vanished. He had known the converted footage wouldn't be as good as a standard TV signal. But as Armstrong bounded through the Sea of Tranquility, the astronaut looked like a fuzzy gray blob wading through an inkwell. "We knew what that image should look like," Lebar says, "and what I saw was nothing like what I'd simulated. We looked at each other and said, 'What happened?'"
With the rush of history upon him, Lebar let the concern pass. "As much as we may have found it disturbing," he says, "the public didn't seem to mind. Everyone seemed happy to see the guy on the moon." Lebar never even saw the raw transmission; only the few tracking-station engineers did. But as they converted the feed for Mission Control and the worldwide audience, they also recorded it onto huge reels of magnetic tape that were promptly sent to NASA to be filed for safekeeping.
Not long ago, Lebar learned why the footage had looked like mush: The transfer and broadcast had degraded the image badly, like a third-generation photocopy. "What the world saw was some bastardized thing," says Lebar, now 81. "Posterity deserves more than that." Good thing the engineers in Australia recorded the raw feed. Now Lebar and a crew of seasoned space cowboys are trying to get that original footage and show it to the world.
There is just one problem: NASA has lost the tapes.
EVERY YEAR, NASA buffs and vets of the Apollo 11 mission reunite for a picnic near Canberra at the site of the Honeysuckle Creek station, which was shuttered in 1981. Seventy-year-old Bill Wood, an engineer at Goldstone during the moonwalk, describes the event as "a bunch of old guys in hard hats looking at an antenna while local TV follows us around." Sometimes, talk turns to the effort to persuade the Australian government to erect a fitting commemorative on the site. But mostly, they just chat and show off old pictures and memorabilia.
During the 2002 reunion, one of the retirees produced a souvenir he had rediscovered in his garage: a 14-inch reel of magnetic tape from the Apollo era. They passed it around, marveling at how big and clunky it was, and then went back to their barbecue. The next year, a couple of Honeysuckle Creek vets showed up with keepsakes even more impressive: still photos they had snapped of the monitors in the station showing the moonwalk. The images displayed the original slow-scan footage, not the version converted for television.
"When we saw them, we realized they were significantly better than what had been seen in Houston," says Colin Mackellar, a local minister and self-described space nut. He was only 12 during the Apollo 11 mission, but watching it on TV shaped his life. When he's not tending his flock at Greystanes Anglican Church, he's updating his Web site, honeysucklecreek.net, a tribute to the tracking station and the radio wonks he idolized.
Wood dug through his files and found an old Polaroid that showed the slow-scan footage as it appeared on a monitor at Goldstone. Like the Honeysuckle Creek photos, it was of a much higher quality than anyone had imagined. Curious and perplexed, he was determined to figure out whether the raw images of the moonwalk really were more crisp than what the world had seen in 1969.
The potential historical and educational value of the original tapes would be enormous. Late last year, an audio expert caused a big stir when he proved that Neil Armstrong actually said, "That's one small step for a man," not "one small step for man," during his famous walk on the moon. Surely the discovery of a better version of video so iconic that it served as the original network identification for MTV would cause an even greater uproar. Mackellar urged the grizzled crew to send NASA what he calls the "bootleg" magnetic tape reel discovered the year before. Maybe some of the original moonwalk footage was on it.
But the 14-inch reels were an archaic format, almost completely forgotten even at the space agency. After some sleuthing, Mackellar and his comrades discovered the one guy inside NASA who had the know-how – and the interest – to help them: Dick Nafzger. He was the last of the old Apollo video engineers still employed at the space agency; the rest had either retired or died.
Nafzger tracked down a buddy at the Data Evaluation Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The lab was used to record and analyze spacecraft data captured during the agency's golden age. The central treasure there was the analog recorder – a 7-foot-high gray machine with big black knobs and huge reel-to-reel spools. It looked like a prop from the '60s TV show Lost in Space, but the hulking gizmo was the only known piece of equipment that could read data from the ancient tapes.
Nafzger spun the 14-inch reel through the analog recorder, and his heart sank. The tape predated Apollo 11 and contained no video – just audio and data from an earlier mission. But the good news was that the device was able to read it, proving that the tape had not degraded, even after sitting in a garage for decades. The data of the moonwalk might be recoverable after all, if they could just find the right reel in NASA's vast archives.
Lebar, who understood the slow-scan system better than anyone else, had also joined the hunt. Retired since 1987, he had been building educational astronomy installations in public parks around his home in Maryland and taking the occasional trip to Europe with his wife. Like a good engineer, he greeted word of the tapes with skepticism. "I'm not going to go turn NASA upside down based on someone's memory of 35 years ago," he told the Honeysuckle Creek posse.
Then the guys showed him the evidence. Mackellar had posted the sharp photos of the original slow-scan footage and the murky TV broadcast stills side by side on his Web site. When Lebar saw the two together, his jaw dropped. That sinking feeling he had experienced in Houston had plagued him for decades. Had the world seen a lame version of the moonwalk? One look at these pictures and he knew that his camera had worked properly. "We simulated this and watched it on a 10-frame-rate monitor. This was what I remembered," Lebar says, "and here was my proof."
Lebar and Nafzger were both eager to find the tapes, and they both lived within an hour's drive of Goddard. There was one hitch, though: The space agency itself wasn't being helpful. After a few inquiries into the current whereabouts of the tape, the gang ran into red tape and, more surprisingly, indifference. "NASA had so many budget cuts, when we said we were looking for the Apollo 11 tapes, they said, 'Well, that's nice,'" Wood recalls. "It was difficult to get help."
So Nafzger told Lebar, "NASA's not paying me to look for tapes, but I can look unofficially." These guys had transmitted data across 240,000 miles of space before the invention of the microprocessor. A little government bureaucracy wasn't going to stop them.
THERE ARE 4 MILLION musty boxes at the Washington National Records Center, a squat brick building in Suitland, Maryland, that's been housing inactive federal records since 1967. The boxes are stacked on gray girders that rise about 20 feet and would cover the equivalent of 14 football fields of cold concrete bunkers. "We have income tax records, passport applications, patent records, trademark records," says Alan Kramer, division director at the center. "And we have records from NASA, too."
The building grows more crowded every day. In 1950, the federal records totaled 45,000 cubic feet. Today they cover 25 million, and bureaucrats add more than 500,000 cubic feet every year. Digital migration was supposed to lighten the load. It hasn't. "People don't trust computers, so they print out everything," Kramer says.
When the search for the Apollo tapes began, Nafzger, Lebar, Wood, and their crew of enthusiastic Apollo vets knew their journey would start here. They hoped it would end here as well. Nafzger had unearthed a tracking document that showed the boxes going from the Goddard Space Flight Center to the National Records Center in the fall of 1969, a few months after the flight.
While sympathetic clerks looked the other way, Lebar and Nafzger waded into the Records Center. But they quickly discovered the government's data storage system is a shambles. "There are no people who have any idea what's there," Nafzger says. There's no barcoding or computerized tracking; when a box is checked out, the only record of its removal is a sheet of paper placed loosely on the shelf in its place. The placeholders can sit there yellowing for decades – assuming they don't fall behind the stacks. "That happens," Kramer says matter-of-factly.
So do accidents. In July, the sprinkler system went haywire, soaking 16,000 boxes. The damaged goods had to be shipped off to be freeze-dried. Permanent records are kept at a constant temperature and humidity, but time still does not serve cardboard well. Boxes, stacked 14 feet high and two columns deep, peel and rot. It's hardly the conditions you'd want for your old Mad magazines, let alone the original tapes of the moonwalk.
After schmoozing his way into the stacks and sifting through boxes for months, Lebar found evidence that more than 140,000 tapes from the Apollo era had been checked out of the Records Center between 1979 and 1985 and sent back to the Goddard Space Flight Center. But from there, Lebar fell straight into a black hole. At Goddard, there was no record of where the footage had gone. So the tape hunters hit the phones and the Net, scouring the globe for Goddard retirees who might recall the boxes. It didn't go well. "We're dealing with memories here," Nafzger says, "and those are pretty frail."
Goddard's deputy director, Dolly Perkins, admits that there's no central administrator or database to track what comes into and out of NASA. It's the domain of each NASA facility to "make decisions about what's valuable or not," Perkins says. That means the boxes can come out of the Records Center and sit in someone's office forever – or be decommissioned and trashed.
Then Wood got a good tip. Some of his sources recalled sending 14-inch magnetic reels to a storage area in a building called Goddard Corporate Park. "I thought I'd hit the mother lode," Wood says.
He was wrong. Wood soon discovered that storage facility had been closed for years. "Nearly all the stuff that was there was destroyed," he says. Then he hesitates. "I need to be careful here. Would you cross out the word destroyed?"
It was also possible that the tapes were "degaussed" – erased so they could be used again, a fairly standard practice at the time. In short, no one knows what became of these priceless minutes of historic footage. It's a sad and confusing result, fitting for NASA. Once, the moon landing seemed like the prelude to all our sci-fi fantasies made real. The manned conquest of the solar system would surely follow. But budgets and ambitions have been scaled back so drastically that even the precious data logged during the golden age of space exploration may be lost forever.
Part of the problem was Cold War secrecy: Many key technological innovations of the space program were purposely destroyed so they would never fall into the wrong hands, but most of the loss can be attributed to more mundane issues, like poor record keeping, outdated storage systems, and mortality. In 1999, Joe Miller, a USC neurobiologist investigating microbial life on Mars, asked to see tapes from the '70s Viking probe – only to discover that NASA hadn't maintained official archives. "The programmers who knew the format had died," Miller says. (Luckily, the original investigators had saved hard copies.)
IN OCTOBER 2006, Lebar and Nafzger visit the Data Evaluation Lab. It's about to be shut down as a cost-cutting measure. Floor tiles are missing, gutted computers are everywhere, and intestine-like coils of electrical cables burst from the ground. "Anything hot in here?" Nafzger asks as he steps gingerly over a wire, his necktie flapping against his short-sleeved button-down shirt.
They show me the analog recorder, the last link to the original data. This device was slated for the scrap heap as well. But thanks to the persistent pestering of the old Apollo vets, the device and the facility will be spared for the duration of the search. Nafzger is holding out hope that the tapes will surface. If and when they do, they'll be looped through the machines – and history, once and for all, will be properly preserved. In the meantime, he'll keep firing up the recorder every couple of weeks to make sure it still functions. "If you don't allow it to work once in a while," Nafzger says, "it will die."
Halfway across the world in Australia, Mackellar is keeping the faith. "I've prayed for the tapes to be found," he confesses in a late-night email. "Obviously, I would like to see the better TV image – and I know that those who worked hard to get the pictures from the moon would be delighted to see what they have missed all these years. But I'm praying for something more than that – that somehow this whole thing may help the men and women who think about this to reflect on their own mortality. The tapes won't last forever – and neither will our lives on this earth."
NASA now officially acknowledges that the tapes are missing and has given Nafzger permission to spend part of his workday searching for them. They may yet turn up: Scores of reels of telemetry data from lunar-surface experiments were recently uncovered in a basement at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. In the meantime, the agency considers Apollo 11 a job well done. "We, as citizens, will be disappointed if we cannot find the tapes," Perkins says. "But NASA met the requirement of the mission."

The Great State of Rhode Island Once Again Victorious!!

Storm Damaged Russian Submarine Sinks at Providence Pier

PROVIDENCE – “The Russian Sunken Sub Museum” is how engineer Damon Ise answered the phone this morning.
Yes, sometime in the evening, the listing submarine laid over on its side and sank, Ise said.
All that’s visible is the submarine’s periscope, sticking up out of the water at an angle, a radio antenna and one of the sub’s orange life buoys, Ise said.
“One of those [buoys] is bouncing and dancing on the surface, and then there’s just a trail of bubbles coming from the front,” he said. “It’s very sad.”
No fuel is leaking from the vessel, Ise said, and crews are working already on a salvage plan with a professional from New York.
Exactly what shape that salvage plan would take is, well, murky at this point, museum officials said today.
The vessel, berthed at Collier Point Park, had been battered by the storm that hit the region early this week. It had been restored as a floating museum after being bought in 2002.
By midday, TV crews and other members of the press joined several Coast Guard officers and staff of the submarine museum at the small, windswept park overlooking Providence Harbor.
Lines ran along the dock, down to the sub, holding it in place on the bottom. The antenna, and a small, pipelike-protusion stuck up from the relatively calm surface of the water...
Nearby, a sign for Cardi's Furniture -- featuring the three Cardi brothers in sailor suits – urged visitors to follow safety tips, some of which were painfully obvious today:
"Be sure to use caution when in the sub" and "Appropriate footwear required; decks may be slippery."

Here is the link to the Official website of the sub. It was an active enemy combatant, originally called the K-77 - and was thought to have stalked the USS Saratoga, maintaining it as one of its prime targets during the cold war. It is of note that the decommissioned Saratoga is currently also located in Rhode Island a very few miles from the sub that stalked it.

http://www.juliett484.org/juliett/index.html

In later years, the K-77 was used in the filming of the movie "K-19: The Widowmaker", staring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

Finally, this Russian masterpiece of technology, this evil warrior of death, this tool of the evil empire (no, not the Yankees .. the OTHER evil empire) found it's way to Rhode Island, where it was used as a museum until early yesterday, when it was sent to the bottom ... to the BRINEY DEEP.

Thus, it becomes the second submarine that has been sunk in RI waters... the other being the German U-Boat called U-853 which was sunk off the coast of Point Judith. It was, in fact, the LAST U-BOAT THAT WAS SUNK IN WORLD WAR II. This was because the captain of said U-Boat never got the message that the Germans had stopped fighting.

As a result, it was announced yesterday the the Rhode Island State flag will be once again amended to update our "kills".

This, therefore, brings the tally to the totals listed below. All I can say is ...if you need something belatedly sent to the bottom of the ocean, we're JUST the people for the job....

Building his OLEG-acy

This is a description from a Canadian TV blog-guy about those FOX spots you might have seen ...
It's a SHOW? Like, with 9 second episodes....
http://krisabel.ctv.ca/blog/_archives/2007/4/10/2869075.html


And here's the link to an entire site about this character.... ONLY FOX... Ugh!!
http://www.fox.com/oleg/

To watch the episodes, click on the radio in his car ...

The best ones are where he's listening to his "English Tutorial" tapes....

I hate getting sucked in by stupid things ... and this is obviously a gimmick.. but a couple of these really are funny, and it's pretty quirky. And I'm totally a gullible ingestor of Pop Culture Non-sense.

PLUS ..there's a 100% chance that there will be outrage at this portrayal of a foreign character by SOME group .... THAT will be entertaining.

Picture of the Week

Boston: The North End (towards the Left) and Government Center (towards the Right)
The dividing line line between nourishment and intellectual starvation...

He'd KILL for Good Seats...

OK ... I sincerely think it would have been proper for the media to demand the specific location of the Yankee's game seats, and publish them in the paper. And during that game, the Red Sox should have NESN put the camera on those seats .... because you KNOW there are going to be two cops (or cop "affiliates") occupying those seats ....



Police: Convicted murderer arrested scalping tickets outside Fenway
By John R. Ellement and Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff (04/12/07)

A 62-year-old man was arrested outside Fenway Park on Wednesday night after police said he tried to sell an $85 Red Sox ticket to an undercover officer for $150.
It was not the first time Michael B. Corradino Jr. had been arrested. On Feb. 27, 1974, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder for shooting a man twice in the head who he had accused of cheating him at blackjack. The conviction carried an automatic sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.
According to the state Department of Correction, Corradino made parole on Oct. 29, 2002. Additional details about his sentence and release were not immediately available.
Today in Boston Municipal Court, Corradino was arraigned on charges of resale of tickets by an owner, peddling without a license, and occupying a street for release of tickets. According to a police report, two plain clothes officers walking on Brookline Avenue at 6 p.m. heard a man yell "tickets." Officers arrested the man, who police identified as Corradino, after he tried to sell the ticket for the seat in the right field outfield for $150.
In his pockets, Corradino also had $608 in cash; two tickets to a Red Sox game against the New York Yankees on June 2; three tickets for a Toronto Blue Jays game on July 13; and 16 tickets for Wednesday night's Celtics game against the Philadelphia 76ers, according to the police report.
In the early 1970s, Corradino ran an after-hour gambling club in Chelsea, according to newspaper accounts. On May 6, 1973, Corradino got in a fight over a blackjack game with a construction worker named Michael Barry, 26. One of the witnesses who testified at trial was Carmino "Bobby" Palermo, who told the jury he heard a commotion at about 6:30 or 7 a.m.
"I heard Michael Barry say, 'I'll break your head. You owe me money,' " Palermo said.
Witnesses testified that Corradino shot Barry twice in the head with a .25-caliber pistol. His body was dumped in a gutter on Carter Street in Chelsea.

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

Goodbye Billy Pilgrim; Goodbye Kilgore Trout. Goodbye Dwayne Hoover.

Godspeed Kurt Vonnegut. (1922-2007).

I sincerely hope that schools today require the reading of at least one or two of Mr. Vonnegut's works, though my pessimism leads me to believe that probably isn't the case.

I did my best to recreate a Tralfamadorian here... Not a bad job, if I do say so myself. Tralfamadore is a planet whose inhabitants (aside form looking exactly as depicted here) exist in multiple times, and thus know the past and future. "The Sirens of Titan" is a great Vonnegut story that addresses our societal manipulation of each other. In today's world .. Vonnegut's future, it's as important a concept as in WWII society. As one critic wrote:

"The author also decries how humans not only use religious and ethical systems to manipulate others but also how humans allow themselves to be manipulated by those systems. Consider Rumsfoord himself; he can see the past, present, and future but he can't see Salo's (the stranded Tralfamadorian) message, and he is genuinely hurt by that fact. Salo's ship crashed on Titan in Earth's prehistory, and his people, the Tralfamadorians, have been sending him messages through Earth's great architectural achievements (.. affecting Earth's history in order to communicate with their stranded pilot). With Salo now gone..., it is possible that humanity will finally make its own destiny, without outside manipulation."

Another Vonnegut work that should be read is "Slaughterhouse 5", a story whose title is taken from the name of the building where, as a POW, Vonnegut and others hid to survive during the bombing of Desden in WWII. It's a novel that speaks to the human condition.

The same with the satire expose "Breakfast of Champions".

There is much to appreciate from the writings of this man. Much of my foundation of literary appreciation is derived from the reading, contemplation and interpretation of Mr Vonnegut's works. He will be missed.

Oh.. and this blog's title? Please allow Mr. Vonnegut explain:

" The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel "Cat's Cradle". A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings."

And the title "Cat's Cradle"? That's the game that the main character of that book was playing when the Atomic Bomb finally went off.....

R.I.P, Mr. Vonnegut. And thanks.

As you would say... "So it goes."

The Big Picture

An interesting take on the recent Imus/Rutgers bruhaha. Mr. Whitlock did this for the Kansas City Star, and it's VERY well written, IMHO.

If this in ANY way ends up with a monetary "donation" on the part of either Imus, MSNBC, or CBS, then it cements the whole thing as a farce.




Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.
JASON WHITLOCK
Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.
You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.
You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.
Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.
The bigots win again.
While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.
I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.
It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.
Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.
It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.
I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.
But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.
I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.
Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.
But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.
In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?
I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?
When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.
No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

The Invisible Sport

Next weekend is the home opener for the New England Revolution - a participant in the most invisible US professional sport. It amazes me that every town is scrambling to build more and more soccer fields for kids to play on (usually right over land fills - that ought to work out well), yet professional soccer is basically ignored. It's a shame, because it's a fun spectator sport, hooligans aside. Maybe people don't like to watch it because there aren't enough TV time outs, or because the whoring advertising industry hasn't embraced and ruined it completely yet.

Whatever. I'm confident that if America ever really DOES cozy up to the sport, it will be dragged down in the name of the almighty dollar anyway.

In the mean time... GO REV'S !!!

Prove What You Say is Right... Or Stop Saying It.

So the article below was published this morning on MSNBC.

And here's my issue with this. As the Vice President, if there are numerous publishings leading to different conclusions than those you profess, you are obligated to show the proof of such alternative conclusions. There has been a proven credibility problem here, and as a citizen, I want to know why you, Sir, are insisting the opposite of what the Defense Department is saying. You need to provide your sources ... Or state publicly that this is your personal OPINION, not to be taken as fact. Your position as VP dictates that you make this clear.

To me, there is an incredible disconnect between the different facets of government here. And such dysfunctions should not and can not be allowed to exist. If the Vice President knows that the various intelligence agencies are incorrect, then it is his responsibility to bring this to light, and we need to fix the problem. This is of dire importance.

On the other hand, if this is merely peristent arrogance and obsinance, then he should be called out. There is no place in this country for more revisionist posturing.

I was brought up to believe that part of the American system requires that we trust our elected officials. We elect representatives - THEY make the decisions for the citizenry, for the good of the nation. I must believe that their decisions are based on facts that everyone isn't privy to. But too often in my lifetime, we are shown that our trust has been used... that we have been deceived... that lies and half-truths have been offered to mask a different agenda.
At this point, it has become necessary that I suspect BEFORE accept.

If what the Vice President says is true, then we need to know why so many other areas of the government say something different. And if the original assessment of data was what lead to the positions taken by the administration, but then was subsequently proven to be incorrect, why isn't that being said? Why hold on to the incorrect analysis?

This infuriates me - and it comes across as pure arrogance. There is no place for this.
What is the point in coming out with such assertions again if no other evidence is forthcoming? If no honest explanation is to be given as to why this is true?

What's the purpose in reasserting this? Mr. Vice President - you are supposedly an intelligent man - what will this accomplish? Other than to tick me off and make me question everything my elected officials profess.


==============================

Cheney reasserts al-Qaida-Saddam connection
Vice president’s words come as latest Pentagon report again dismisses link

WASHINGTON (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on Thursday as the Defense Department released a report citing more evidence that the prewar government did not cooperate with the terrorist group.
Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June,” Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. “As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.”
However, a declassified Pentagon report released Thursday said that interrogations of the deposed Iraqi leader and two of his former aides as well as seized Iraqi documents confirmed that the terrorist organization and the Saddam government were not working together before the invasion.
The Sept. 11 Commission’s 2004 report also found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network during that period.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had requested that the Pentagon declassify the report prepared by acting Defense Department Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble. In a statement Thursday, Levin said the declassified document showed why a Defense Department investigation had concluded that some Pentagon prewar intelligence work was inappropriate.
The report, which had been released in summary form in February, said that former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith had acted inappropriately but not illegally in reviewing prewar intelligence. Levin has claimed that Feith’s intelligence assessment was wrong and distorted but nevertheless formed part of the basis on which President Bush took the country to war.
Although Feith’s assessment in mid-2002 offered several examples of cooperation between Saddam’s government and al-Qaida, the report said, the CIA had concluded months earlier that no evidence supported the existence of significant or long-term relationships

Cruisin' for a Bruisin' or "It's Raining Men"

Thank GOD!
Below is an AP article from today that discusses the FCC's decision to NOT allow cell phone usage during plane flights. I was going to say "PRIVATE cell phone usage" but that would be impossible. I like the convenience of cell phones as much as anyone, but I also know the propensity of people for abject ignorance. and by 'ignorance' I am NOT referring to the pure sense of the definition wherein someone is completely unaware.... I refer rather to blatantly rude behavior. If cell phone calls were ever allowed in planes, it would most definitely result in more in-flight ejections from moving aircraft than anyone could imagine. Certainly more than there have been to date. This, I would generally applaud, and it certainly could be explained as a simple act of Darwinism, but I must think of the innocent in this case.

The random raining down of ejected cell phone users onto the populous below would simply be too horrific to justify.

I would bet, however, that you would be able to get a number of actual cell phone recordings of people still talking on the way down. "Hello, yeah, Erica? What? Speak louder, hon. I know it's windy. They threw me off the plane.... Can you BELIEVE it? What? No, not in the terminal - over Arizona somewhere. Yeah. No, it's pretty. give me a sec, I'll snap a pic with the phone here. There, it's on it's way. What? Yeah, it's a little cold and all...but getting warmer as I get further down. It makes me mad though, because I JUST had my hair done. I'm telling you.... SOME people. Seriously...."
SPLAT.

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FCC says 'no' to cell phones on planes

WASHINGTON (AP)
A government agency on Tuesday said it will keep a rule in place that requires cell phones to be turned off during airline flights.
The reasoning behind the decision was technical. But the avalanche of comments the Federal Communications Commission has logged from airline travelers have been nothing short of visceral.
"These days it's impossible to get on a bus without at least one person hollering into their cell phone, invading the private space of everyone around them," one member of the public wrote in an e-mail to the FCC.
"That's bad enough when one can get off in 10 minutes. To have to suffer through HOURS of such torture, with nowhere to go and miserably cramped conditions -- someone is going to explode."
The agency has been considering lifting its ban on cell phone usage on airplanes since 2004. Unlike the Federal Aviation Administration, which bans the use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices for fear they will interfere with navigational and communications systems, the FCC's concern is interference with other cell phone signals on the ground.
Airphones installed in cabins use a special FCC frequency that operates outside the range of regular cellular phones.
In an order released Tuesday, the agency noted that "insufficient technical information" was available on whether airborne cell phone calls would jam networks below.
Regardless of the reasoning, some passengers are no doubt pleased with the agency's decision. In an e-mail to the FCC, one person related the story of a "dimwitted young lady" who had a "most inane conversation" after his flight had landed.
"The idea of a person being a captive audience to someone yapping on the phone is simply a recipe for a lot of anger and a fair share of conflicts," he wrote.
The phones have been snapped shut for now, at least as far as the FCC is concerned. But the issue may come up again. The agency said it may "reconsider this issue in the future if appropriate technical data is available for our review."

Spring is in the Air; Baseball Starts; It's all New....

ANNNNDDDDD....
The Red Sox get pummeled. So much for New beginnings.
And here I was with that $1,000 bet that they would go 162-0.
Perhaps not, eh?

Seriously, though ~ I know it's only one game...but it CERTAINLY takes the wind out of all the off-season hype and bountiful expectations.

I'm pretty sure it was all because my new Sox banner wasn't yet proudly hanging in front of my condo. Yeah, that's it.
I put it up this morning, so it will be good now.