Cheers and Jeers for Monday, June 18, 2012
Note: "Hello, customer service? I'd like to exchange my current planet for a new one, please. It broke. Yes, I'll hold………"
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til summer: 3
Days 'til the Yarmouth Clam Festival: 32
Age at which earnings peak for men: 45
Age at which earnings peak for women: 38
(Source: Fast Company)
Number of teenagers hired for summer work in May, a 100% improvement over last year: 160,000
(Source: Time)
Amount contributed to Portland, Maine's economy annually through the arts: $49.1 million
(Source: Creative Portland/Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance)
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Welcome home
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CHEERS or JEERS to gavels at dawn. I know you're all eager to watch me perform my world-famous Supreme Court coin toss this morning, so let's get right to it. Heads: the Supreme Court rules on Obamacare's constitutionality today. Tails: the Supreme Court goes to the beach and announces their decision another day. Here we go, kids… [Flip!] … [Ploink!!] … [Wobble wobble wobble wob…] Oh, look, it landed on its edge. We hope you find this helpful.
CHEERS to making your silence heard. Not everybody observed the spirit of the march against New York City's "Stop and Frisk" policy yesterday, but it was mostly silent:
Nearly 300 civil rights groups were represented in the 30-block walk, from elected officials and labor union members to New York residents angry about how they're being treated when they walk the streets.
Critics say the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to hundreds of thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics. Last year, the NYPD stopped close to 700,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago. … The practice of silent marches dates to 1917, when the NAACP led a protest through New York against lynchings and segregation in the U.S.
Extra poignancy was added to the march when news broke yesterday of the
death of Rodney King, who so poignantly asked during the L.A. riots 20 years ago: "Can we all get along?" As always, the answer remains: maybe tomorrow.
CHEERS to answering a question with a better question. A new Gallup poll shows that 68 percent of Americans have long enough memories to know that responsibility for the shitty economy is still stuck to the bottom of George W. Bush's shoe. And while Mitt Romney and his surrogates are campaigning on the old Reagan chestnut, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?", Chris Matthews suggests that President Obama and his surrogates would be wise to feed on that Gallup number by responding with a query of their own. If you want to silence a Republican in five seconds or less, just ask this:
"What's the difference between Bush and Romney's economic plans?"
And, as they stand there stunned and brain-frozen, you can touch their forehead ever-so-lightly with your index finger and down they'll go. Great after-hours fun: Gooper tipping.
JEERS to America's dark ages. A reminder that we used to be, in certain ways, as backward as any nation that ever was. On this date in 1873, Susan B. Anthony was fined a hundred bucks for the unpardonable offense of...voting. The dustup led to immediate outrage and reform. Unfortunately, in those days "immediate" meant waiting another 50 years before doing anything about it. By the way, she never paid the fine. Her heirs now owe the fed, with interest---[clackity clackity clack clack clackity clack]---eight million dollars. But please not the Susan B. Anthony ones---there's no place in the cash register to put 'em.
CHEERS to Proud Moments in U.S. Space Exploration. Cheer up, America! I know it stung when we lost the space shuttle program. But just as Apollo followed Gemini, and the shuttles followed Apollo, let me introduce you to the next awesome vehicle we can all rally around as one nation united in pride: the X-37B orbital test vehicle, which just completed a 15-month stint in space on behalf of the U.S. Air Force. Whoooo!!!! USA! USA! USA! Don’t ask me what they're doing with it---I have no idea. But seeing a satellite pic of my ass on the USAF web site this morning doesn’t give me warm fuzzies.
JEERS to a good walk self-spoiled. Earlier this week I read that some dude from West Virginia was shot in Montana while he was hitchhiking across the country gathering stories for a planned book called "Kindness in America." He even identified the shooter to the cops, who was promptly arrested and booked. But then they let the suspect go. Because it turns out the budding author had shot himself to gin up cheap (if painful) publicity. He apparently still plans to write the book. Look for it in the fiction section. Really cheap fiction.
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Five years ago in C&J: June 18, 2007
JEERS to big fat partypoopers. Just because ABC investigative journalist Brian Ross is right all the time doesn’t mean he's...right all the time. Exhibit A: he says terrorist suicide squads are, at this very moment, on their way to America. Didn’t he get the memo? We're fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. Thanks for scaring us, Brian. I'm going fear-shopping and charging it to your card.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to brevitization. The Webby Awards were recently handed out and, according to the rules, acceptance speeches are limited to five words. A handful:
"We're going to Disneyland. Seriously."
---Disney Interactive Media Group
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"Forget it Jake, it's Tribeca."
---Tribeca Enterprises
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"Remember, always wash your face."
---Glamour.com
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"But five words aren't enough!"
---Conde Naste
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"Cheaper drugs means happier people."
---goodrx
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"Is baby wipes one word?"
---VICE
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"Sometimes science can be sexy."
---American Museum of Natural History
To all the winners: Rah.
Have a nice Monday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Cheers and Jeers is puerile, mean-spirited and charmless. The laughs are almost always at someone's expense or involve incredibly vulgar jokes about bodily functions.
---Claudia Puig
USA Today
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