From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Friday Carlin
Week's over, which, now that I think about it, doesn’t mean much because the news cycle resembles more of a hamster wheel these days. Tomorrow and Sunday there will be more bombshells! that will scream for our attention. It's crazy. So here…have a minute by George:
There are caregivers and there are caretakers, and yet the two words are not opposites. Why is this?
Trade always exists for the traders. Any time you hear businessmen debating "which policy is better for America," don’t bend over.
Threatening postcard: "Wish you were here, but if you come here I will kill you!"
When the convention of testicle transplant surgeons had its annual softball game, they asked me to throw out the first ball.
The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
Have you ever wondered why Republicans are so interested in encouraging people to volunteer in their communities? It's because volunteers work for no pay. Republicans have been trying to get people to work for no pay for a long time.
People who should be phased out: people who say "Knock knock," when entering a room and, "Beep beep," when someone is in their path.
Someday I wanna see the Pope come out on that balcony and give the football scores.
With the pope we got now, I wouldn't rule it out.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled mayhem. Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Friday, March 14, 2014
Note: Due to a clerical error, everything's all fucked up and we mean everything. Gladys is working over the weekend to fix it. In the meantime, please don't pick up any hitchhiking human-python hybrids. Thankssssssss. ---Mgt.
-
15 days!!!
-
By the Numbers:
Days 'til
Godzilla 2014:
63
Days 'til the
Spring Busker Festival in San Diego:
15
Average bonus for "securities industry employees" last year, up 15% from the previous year:
$164,000
Normal snowfall and this year's snowfall, respectively, in Chicago:
32", 76"
Normal snowfall and this year's snowfall, respectively, in Tahoe City, CA:
150", 38"
(Source: National Weather Service)
Percent of the 200,000 Mainers serving as caregivers to seniors
who have no training or support for the task:
80%
(Source:
The Portland Press Herald)
Percent of Obamacare signer-uppers who have chosen the mid-level Silver plan:
63%
(Source: AP)
-
NEW! Michele Bachmann Departure Countdown
Michele Bachmann and her googly eyes leave Congress in 295 days. Please plan ahead for your next source of jawdropping, stunning, breathtaking chutzpah.
-
Puppy Pic of the Day: Ain't foolin' me…I know cyborgs when I see 'em.
-
CHEERS to "Q." Composing and producing legend---like, the kind of legend that other legends look at and say, "Okay, now he's a legend"---Quincy Jones turns 81 today. Our favorite Q-tune is his junky-tonk theme for Sanford and Son and if you want to release some waterworks just go revisit his score for The Color Purple. For pop thrills there's Thriller. But for sheer mojo-rejuvenating goodness, no playlist should be without Soul Bossa Nova:
I put this first so you can play it while you read the rest of C&J. He's so good, he can even make stories about assholes seem hip.
P.S. Live forever, Q. I mean it.
JEERS to the Worst Role Model for Girls in the World. Speaking of assholes, let's talk about what the fuck Condoleezza Rice was doing being spotlighted as a role model for the Girl Scouts in last Sunday's edition of Parade magazine. This persistent effort on the media's part to scrub the Iraq warmongers' blood-drenched records clean is infuriating. In the article, amazingly titled "Leading by Example" (go ahead---let that soak in for a moment), Rice says, "Words matter." I agree with that. In fact, here are some words of hers I remember quite well when she was Bush's National Security Advisor:
Something is very
wrong with this picture.
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
"The president of the United States did not go to war because of the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein sought the uranium in Africa. He took the American people and American forces to war because this was a bloody tyrant, who for 12 years had defied the international community, who had weapons of mass destruction, who had used them in the past, who was threatening his neighbors, and who threatened our efforts to make the Middle East, a place in which you would have stability and therefore not people with ideologies of hatred driving airplanes into the World Trade Center. That's why we went to war."
"The danger from Saddam Hussein's arsenal is far more clear than anything we could have foreseen prior to September 11th."
So. To be a good American citizen, Girl Scouts of America, take it from role-model Condi: lie, instill fear in as many people as possible, go to war for bogus reasons, and then deny any wrongdoing as you accept a cushy professorship at a major American university. And if you can plink out a tune on a baby grand, make room on your shelf for a Medal of Freedom.
CHEERS to an easy task for your weekend job jar. My representative in Congress is the awesome Chellie Pingree, and among the many awesome things she's doing is kicking up a joyful cloud of dust over the proposed merger of cable giants Comcast and Time Warner, who, if they succeed, will immediately become "too big to lower your bill or give you better service":
"A merger of the two largest cable companies in the United States would be a bad deal for consumers, leading to less competition and likely higher prices for subscribers. And a combined Comcast-Time Warner would be in a position to slow or even block Internet traffic from content providers like Netflix or Hulu if the cable company decided they didn't want the competition."
Tell the vultures to go pound sand. Your weekend assignment, should you choose to accept the 60 seconds it will take:
sign Chellie's petition at Credo Mobilize. Then go play.
CHEERS to the plane truth. I think we finally have some solid information about the fate of that Malaysia Airlines jet. I'm told that this information is absolutely reliable, and will not need to be retracted five seconds from now, like every other media-reported theory has for the past week. And the new bombshell revelation is…
Sorry, but apparently the bombshell has already been retracted. Stay tuned for further updates. And retractions.
CHEERS to the GREAT STATE OF MAINE!!! We told Massachusetts to kiss our hineys 194 years ago tomorrow, after which we declared our independence and became America's 23rd state:
The official state beast is the Maine
Coon Cat. It eats pie. And cars.
Mainers had begun campaigning for statehood in the years following the Revolution. The Massachusetts legislature finally consented in 1819. What no one in either Massachusetts or Maine foresaw, however, was that Maine's quest for statehood would become entangled in the most divisive issue in American history---slavery. Most Mainers supported abolition. They were dismayed that their admission to the Union was linked to the admission of Missouri as a slave state. This controversial "Missouri Compromise" preserved---for a few more decades---the delicate balance between pro- and anti-slavery forces in the U.S. Congress.
Today we're ruled by a slime-fisted teabagger who is so gaffe-prone that he has to stick his foot in his staff's mouths. Then again, we're the first state in the country to approve marriage equality by a citizen vote independent of the legislature, our scenery will lower your stress level in mere minutes, our lobster melts in your mouth, and the Amtrak Downeaster train that runs from Brunswick to Boston has been a huge success. Come on up and see us once the roads are passable sometime in June. The black flies would love to have you for dinner.
Tonight on the The CW
CHEERS to home vegetation. Normally in mid-March I'd be out playin' naked in the mud, but we're still froze solid up here so it'll be a couch potato kind of weekend. The vegetating starts tonight at 9 with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood from
Whose Line Is It Anyway? doing their "Two Man Group" live improv show
on the CW, culminating in an act where they walk around a mousetrap-filled stage blindfolded. On HBO's
Real Time, Bill Maher natters with Andrew Sullivan, Seth MacFarlane, Alan Weisman, Amy Chua and Salman Rushdie. New DVD releases include the Coen brothers'
Inside Llewyn Davis and the Jason Statham actioner
Homefront. The NBA schedule
is here (the Celtics will "block" the Suns Ha Ha Ha!!!) and the NHL schedule
is here.
On Bill Moyers & Company, investigative reporter Julia Angwin talks about "How America has become a 'Dragnet Nation' where surveillance rules." Sunday night it's episode two of the pretty good Cosmos reboot, during which we'll learn that supernovas are molecularly identical to candy corn. And here's your Sunday morning lineup (please hold your applause until a fern takes a turn getting grilled between two Zach Galifianakises):
Meet the Press: White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer; Foreign Relations committee Senators Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Dick Durbin (D-IL); roundtable with Robert Gibbs,Heritage Foundation hack Israel Ortega, Jon Ralston, and Carolyn Ryan (NYT).
Sunday John Tyler convinces
David Gregory that the Whigs
will be #1 for years to come.
This Week: Thank god they're letting Bill Gates gets some airtime, because he has such trouble being heard! Plus: Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT); roundtable with Matt Dowd, Michael Eric Dyson, Bill Kristol, Katrina vanden Heuvel and, because there always has to be at least one guest from Fox News on the panel, Fox News pundit Greta Van Susteren.
Face the Nation: This week it's Bob Schieffer's turn to babysit Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) while Kristi goes shopping; "Miracle on the Hudson" Capt. Chesley Sullenberger weighs in on the missing plane; former Obama national security advisor Tom Donilon on Ukraine and stuff.
CNN's State of the Union: Sunday morning it's CNN "State of the Union" host Candy Crowley's turn to babysit John McCain while Cindy goes shopping.
Fox GOP Talking Points Sunday: Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ); Rep Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Peter Goelz, former Managing Director of the National Transportation Safety Board; roundtable with George Will, Karl Rove, Judy Woodruff and Juan Williams.
Happy viewing!
-
Five years ago in C&J: March 14, 2009
CHEERS to grownups in charge. In yet another sign that the Obama administration intends to ratchet down the citizen-scaring "War on Terror" nonsense that the Bushies foisted on us 7 years ago to help them win elections, the Justice Department today said it's scrapping the term "enemy combatant." From now on, suspected terrorists will be referred to as "Cheeky Leaky Droopy Boobie Rubber Baby Butterbutts." If nothing else, reading the court transcripts'll be fun.
-
And just one more…
CHEERS to going crazy irrational!!! Let's hear it for secular holidays! Yaaay!!! Today is---for a few more hours, anyway---3/14, and at 1:59 this afternoon the world erupted in slide-rule giddyness for Pi Day:
Dig in!
The first calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes approximated the area of a circle by using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the areas of two regular polygons: the polygon inscribed within the circle and the polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. Since the actual area of the circle lies between the areas of the inscribed and circumscribed polygons, the areas of the polygons gave upper and lower bounds for the area of the circle. Archimedes knew that he had not found the value of pi but only an approximation within those limits. In this way, Archimedes showed that pi is between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.
Among other things, pi is comes in handy when you need to distract mysterious entities who have hijacked your starship:
)
I admit I got mostly Cs and Ds in math, so I think I'll stick with regular pie today, thanks. Humble. With 3.141592653 scoops of ice cream.
Have a weekend for which you become the subject of a blurb in your local paper. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
-