Marilynn Rosenthal Hits The Nail On The Head

National Public Radio has a page up with details and audio clips from last night’s excellent “The Price of Security” documentary and town hall meeting, hosted by Ted Koppel. The town hall was live, and was simulcast on public radio stations.

Here’s the detail page: NPR : Ted Koppel: ‘The Price of Security’

It includes audio of the entire simulcast, plus highlight clips.

One of the 9/11 family members, Marilynn Rosenthal, really hit the nail on the head last night about how language is being used to frame the debate about security, civil liberties, and even whether we’re in a “war on terrorism,” or a “war against fanatic Islamist fundamentalism.”

She’s dismissed as a “whack job” by the right, and they’re already doing a hatchet job on her on posts dated today (I’m not even going to link to the muck I found via Technorati). But she’s right. And although several people tried to respond to the first part of her assertion, nobody dared tackle the second part: it’s not really a war on all forms of terrorism, or on all groups that use terror to further their ends, but it’s being framed as one because it’s a convenient handle to hang our government’s agenda
on.

She’s doing
a lot of research to ferret out the truth for herself
, and when she eventually produces a book, it’ll blow the lid off of a simmering pot of lies and half-truths.

UPDATE: Fixed the link, have no idea what I linked to for Marilynn Rosenthal before, but linked to an excellent Metro Times article from Sep 06 2006 that will stand in very well.

Technorati Tags: , ,

You Can Be Too Thin

Madrid bans too-thin models from catwalk – Yahoo! News

MADRID (AFP) – Excessively skinny fashion models will be barred from a major Madrid fashion show later this month for fear they could send the wrong message to young Spanish girls, local media reported.

toothin.jpg

That’s all very well, but when will Japan get around to banning fashion models who wear shoes on their heads? That would be fashion-forward indeed.

Alert the Manolo! Bad fashion alert!

shoehead.jpg

WBEZ Interstitials

Sometimes when WBEZ has a little space to fill in, they play some nice, non-jazz music or an interesting audio file. This can happen between shows, or sometimes within one that goes to station break for long enough to play a song or two.

Music is selected by Jim Nader, who is also responsible for inflicting The Annoying Music Show on an unsuspecting world. He produces Magnificent Obsession: True Stories of Recovery, which airs at a terribly early time Sunday mornings, but that is extremely worthy of a listen for the moving tales of addiction and redemption, and
for the music that soothes the soul. The interstitial segments feature similar cuts, of the kind that make you sit up and listen attentively, because you may not have heard it before, and may not hear it again.

Quite often, they play something that sounds so beautiful and evocative, I had to track it down. Turns out it’s a Leonard Cohen song from the CD :”More Best of Leonard Cohen, but it’s performed by a disembodied, female sounding electronic voice named “Victoria:”

It’s going to happen very soon
The great event, which will end the horror
Which will end the sorrow
Next Tuesday when the sun goes down
I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards
This will reverse the effects of the world’s mad plunge
Into suffering, for the last 200 million years
What a lovely night that would be
What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins
Become bright red again, and the retired nightingales
Pick up their dusty tails, and assert the Majesty of Creation

UPDATE: A couple of Magnificent Obsession episodes, plus the “Music Of” episode, are archived as podcasts at Silent Treatment, a recovery support website. “The Great Event” is on the music-only one, along with a heart-breaking Roy Orbison tune and the song used for the main titles, “Sweet is the Melody.”

WBEZ Interstitials

Sometimes when WBEZ has a little space to fill in, they play some nice, non-jazz music or an interesting audio file. This can happen between shows, or sometimes within one that goes to station break for long enough to play a song or two.

Music is selected by Jim Nader, who is also responsible for inflicting The Annoying Music Show on an unsuspecting world. He produces Magnificent Obsession: True Stories of Recovery, which airs at a terribly early time Sunday mornings, but that is extremely worthy of a listen for the moving tales of addiction and redemption, and
for the music that soothes the soul. The interstitial segments feature similar cuts, of the kind that make you sit up and listen attentively, because you may not have heard it before, and may not hear it again.

Quite often, they play something that sounds so beautiful and evocative, I had to track it down. Turns out it’s a Leonard Cohen song from the CD :”More Best of Leonard Cohen, but it’s performed by a disembodied, female sounding electronic voice named “Victoria:”

It’s going to happen very soon
The great event, which will end the horror
Which will end the sorrow
Next Tuesday when the sun goes down
I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards
This will reverse the effects of the world’s mad plunge
Into suffering, for the last 200 million years
What a lovely night that would be
What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins
Become bright red again, and the retired nightingales
Pick up their dusty tails, and assert the Majesty of Creation

Technorati Tags:

Atlantis In Orbit

Space Shuttle Full Coverage on Yahoo! News

shuttlelaunch

My husband David and I watched the launch live just now – as they neared a critical point in the ascent, the voice from Mission Control said “You are go for throttle up.” David commented “I hate that phrase.” But all went well, and they’re safely in orbit. Whew.

The Chicago Tribune adds:

On the ground, NASA kept an eye on several cameras zoomed in on Atlantis as the shuttle streaked into space for any signs of hard foam breaking off its large external fuel tank, the problem that doomed Columbia.

A preliminary review of the launch showed no indication of major foam loss before Atlantis separated from its external fuel tank and NASA declared its crew safely in space. The fuel cells that had forced launch delays earlier this week were working as expected, NASA spokesman Kyle Herring said.

Atlantis carried one of the heaviest payloads ever launched into space — a 17 ton truss section that will be added to the half-built space station. It includes two solar arrays that will produce electricity for the orbiting outpost.

The astronauts will make three spacewalks during the 11-day flight to install the $372 million addition.

Later on, we’ll go looking for the video footage that didn’t get shown in the webcast – this time, we’ll see if we can watch from the external fuel tank camera as it re-enters the atmosphere and crashes into the ocean. We watched the solid fuel booster rocket cameras before, courtesy of a link via ***Dave.
When they load the fuel tank video, it’ll probably be at the NASA Multimedia page, where I just watched the video of the astronauts taking their seats from this morning. The Canadian flag patch is clearly visible on the arm of Steven G. MacLean, mission specialist, which makes me think of the other Atlantis. More information on the crew
and mission here
.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Christianity for COMPLETE IDIOTS

I received an odd email at my inbox as webmistress for the Holy Moly website the other day. It looked like spam, but was crackpotty enough to warrant a second look:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like to draw your attention to a new interactive Christian support site which also includes absolute proof for Christianity. The proof is to be used for a peaceful global mass conversion to the true Christian faith.

www.churchalive.co.uk

Username: xxxxx
Password: xxxxx

The archived information is also available at www.worldends.co.uk (no password), which I hope will soon be available in many languages.

Grace be with you,
Alasdair

How could I resist such a kooky approach? Rather than clicking on the links, I Googled around for a while but didn’t find any other references. So I accessed the non-password site directly and had a look at some of the… very odd materials there, which are all apparently PDF files. Here’s what you’re hit with in the first paragraph of the second document, “Leaflet.” The first document is just a rather wacky pitch about buying hundreds of these leaflets and littering the planet with them, for “Safe, easy. Conversion.” The author, apparently named Alasdair, gets the ball rolling:

World Ends – Proof for Christianity

Evidence for God
John 13.6-8: “He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Are you going to wash my feet Lord?” Jesus answered him, “You do not understand what I am doing, but you will understand later.” He meant we would understand 2000 years later when the principal language of Christians would be English. He is washing the sole of Peter’s foot. If you do not allow Jesus to wash your soul, you are not his disciple. This means repent and get baptised into the faith. A foot also has a heel (i.e. heal the soul).

God is everywhere. There are many words in the English language that relate to Christianity, for example business, cash, medicine, cinema and Sunday (the sabbath ­read it as Sonday, also note that the Son is the spiritual light of the world, and the Sun is the physical light). Evolution, Evil you shun; Evil, Live (i.e. life is the opposite of evil); Devil, evil; Horoscope, horror scope; tarot, to rot; World, sword, worm, wood = Word; gnostic, agnostic; Faith, Earth; love, dove; Eve, evil; Adam, a damn; believe, be alive. See if you can spot any more!

Oh. My. GOD. How completely idiotic.

Somewhere in England, there is a little man committing mail fraud and littering the landscape with these badly written, worse conceived screeds. He must be found, taken gently by the hand, and led to the nearest mental health centre. And then his entire adult education will need to be repeated, with an emphasis on logic, entymology, and 🙄 modern web design.

Not that THIS site is an example of good web design, you understand.

Anyway, his arguments will certainly convince the 43% of the American public that still apparently believe that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks and allied with Al Qaeda. This is in spite of the Senate Intelligence Commitee‘s findings, numerous news articles over the past 3 years or so, many books, PresiDuhnt Bush finally admitting it, Tony Snow dismissing it as “nothing new,” much punditry, lots of bloggery, and other information sources reporting the now well-established fact that SADDAM FRICKIN’ HUSSEIN and IRAQ had NOTHING to DO with FRICKIN’ NINE ONE ONE.

If people are stupid enough to believe that, they’re certainly stupid enough to believe “Alisdair’s” idiotic “proof of Christianity.” And that makes me more than a little worried.

BeerFest: Probably A Perfectly Dreadful Movie

I was checking local movie listings just now, and spotted a potential Perfectly Dreadful Movie contendah. Anything I find bwah-worthy (possibly spit-takeworthy) will be in bold:

 

Beerfest – Movie Details – Yahoo! Movies

 

When American brothers Todd and Jan Wolfhouse travel to Germany to spread their grandfather’s ashes at Oktoberfest, they stumble upon a super-secret, centuries old, underground beer games competition–“Beerfest,” the secret Olympics of beer drinking. The brothers receive a less than warm welcome from their German cousins, the Von Wolfhausens (because evil German cousins are always the Von Somethings), who humiliate Todd and Jan, slander their relatives, and finally cast them out of
the event. Vowing to return in a year to defend their country and their family’s honor, the Wolfhouse boys assemble a ragtag dream team of beer drinkers and gamers: Barry (“Otter”) Badrinath, the consummate skills player with a dark past; Phil Krundle (aka Landfill) ((aka “Bluto”)), a one-man chugging machine; and Charlie “Fink” (“D-Day”) Finklestein, the lab tech with a PhD in ‘All Things Beer’. This Magnificent Five train relentlessly, using their hearts, minds
and livers to drink faster, smarter and harder than they ever have before. (Toga! To-ga! TO-GA!) But first they must battle their own demons–as well as a bunch of big, blond, German jerks ((aka the Doug Neidermeier and the rest of the “Hilter Youth”)) who want to destroy the team before they can even make it back to Munich.

 

Also Known As:

Beer Fest

Production Status: Released

Logline: Two brothers go to Oktoberfest in Germany and stumble upon a super-secret centuries-old competition with beer games. After the brothers are dealt a humiliating defeat, they return to the U.S. and assemble a group of all-star beer drinkers.

Genres: (ALLEGEDLY) Comedy

Running Time: 1 hr. 50 min.

Release Date: August 25th, 2006 (wide – see “U.S. Box Office”)

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive crude and sexual content, language, nudity and substance abuse.

Distributors:

Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution

Production Co.:

Gerber Pictures, Cataland Films, Broken Lizard Films, Legendary Pictures, Inc.

Studios:

Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.

U.S. Box Office: $7,031,228

Filming Locations:

New Mexico, USA (Vot? No Chermany?)

Produced in: United States