Grateful Dead

i was just havin' fun

just sends it to the top of the heap in current topics. No real need to do this...

Sir spamalot is back!!

to david gans!!

The first annual Galileo Looking Glass Award for outstanding literary achievement goes to (drum roll)... Matt Taibbi! I've cobbled together some bits gleaned from an interview Matt did with campusprogress.org recently and interjected some quotes that I felt enhanced the gist. Matt's articles from Rolling Stone Magazine this year on both the economic meltdown and health care reform are outstanding imo. Thanks Matt! CP: You wrote a column in the New York Press a few years back referring to journalism as “shoveling coal for Satan.” I believe you also said that journalism as a career was worse than being a worker in a tampon factory. Should any sane young person consider a career in journalism? MT: If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism. What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors. ~ from campusprogress.org ________________________________________ "...there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms." - Hunter S. Thompson ________________________________________ …for these people, with the proximity to power, being able to sit in an airplane with Hillary Clinton or with John Kerry or John Edwards or Barack Obama—that’s like the sexiest thing they’re ever going to be involved with. And it’s a lot of fun for these people. It’s intoxicating. You can’t take some 25- or 26-year-old kid who is just out of college, put him in that environment, and expect him to be totally objective about it. ~ Matt Taibbi from campusprogress.org ________________________________________ "I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like." ~ Jerry Garcia ________________________________________ CP: ... Rudy Giuliani you called “the electoral incarnation of Tommy Lee Jones’ acid-bath-surviving Two-Face character.” And you referred to Joe Biden’s “creepy poof of blow-dried gray pubic fuzz.” Do you or your editors ever hear from these guys? MT: Yeah sometimes. The biggest thing I get is people not wanting to talk to me again after. Nobody ever calls up and says, “Hey, I don’t have pubic hair on the top of my head.” I mean, what are they going to do, argue? There’s no upside in getting into an argument with a media creature like myself. With somebody who has to maintain a respectable air of decorum like a politician, there’s no winning end game to getting into it with a lowlife like myself. ~ from campusprogress.org ________________________________________ "If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status." ~ Edward R. Murrow

i dunno if it deserves an award, but the crossword puzzle for last friday had merl saunders as one of the answer (37 down jazzman _____ saunders)....thought it was cool....by the way, the same crossword is found in many papers.

Golden Road. And yes, Happy Birthday Nicola Testa.

Happy 153rd birthday, Nikola! Google is doing a nice tribute for him today and if you head over, there's tons of sites with info on one of the greatest scientific minds that ever lived. Thanks NT, for (almost) everything! "All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy Him."

But am compelled to give him the... Star Squirrel Photographer of the Year Award. Golden nut trophy for your mantlepiece Buddy. Soon you'll have a waiting list of squirrels wanting you to photograph their special occasions. ********************************** Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. Mark Twain

To give their lagging sales a shot in the arm