Archive for Popular Culture
Tradition
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Love Songs from the Intertubes
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Born Again American from Born Again American on Vimeo.
Your Hooligan Bonus: A chorus that doesn’t begin with a non sequitur.
Rules and Metarules
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“Anything that can be done can be done meta.” – Charles Simonyi
It’s probably not necessary to explain here what “meta” means, but I’ll quote from Wikipedia anyway:
Meta- (from Greek: μετά = “after”, “beyond”, “with”, “adjacent”, “self”), is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.
Glued To Their Thighs
Posted by: | CommentsJon Stewart once again voices the baffled frustration most Democrats feel when contemplating the Party leadership. No matter what happens in Massachusetts today, Democrats are still holding all the cards. The question is, “Why do they refuse to play them?”
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Mass Backwards | ||||
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Almighty Dog
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©2009 David Cohen • david@cohencidents.com
Happy Birthday, Jesus
Posted by: | CommentsThis post is an annual affair. Enjoy.
The face of Jesus of Nazareth
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirini-us was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” – Luke 2:1-7
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” – Matthew 5:43-45
History: “The middle of winter has long been a time of celebration around the world. Centuries before the arrival of the man called Jesus, early Europeans celebrated light and birth in the darkest days of winter.”
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In Scandinavia, the Norse celebrated Yule from December 21, the winter solstice, through January.
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In Germany, people honored the pagan god Oden during the mid-winter holiday. Germans were terrified of Oden, as they believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people, and then decide who would prosper or perish.”
Here’s a great book with every quote ever attributed to Jesus.
Happy Christmas/Holidays to all of you from a gaggle of grateful Hooligans.
Cecil Nation Open Thread
Posted by: | CommentsCan’t start a thread these days without it being about Cecil, so I reckon I’ll just put a dedicated post up. Councilman Bothwell is going to do a lot of media appearances over the next few days. He wrote about his personal beliefs at his home blog. In an email, Cecil let folks know about these media events:
Monday, Dec. 14: 9:45 p.m., Rachel Maddow (MSNBC)
Tuesday, Dec. 15: 8:30 a.m. Bill Press (880 The Revolution, in Asheville: Air America Network)
Wednesday, Dec. 16: 5 p.m. Matt Mittan (570 AM, Asheville)
For both of you who have no idea what this is all about, I would recommend either Googling “Bothwell atheist” or skipping the whole scene.
Have at it.
Sunday Morning Music – XTC
Posted by: | CommentsThe Courage To Be Civil
Posted by: | CommentsE.J. Dionne’s column this morning holds up former Republican member of Congress, Jim Leach, as a profile in civility. He has, Dionne, writes, “a lot of the old moderate Republican in him” and “an immoderate dose of courage.”
Leach lost his Iowa seat in the 2006 Democratic sweep, but became a Republican for Obama in 2008. Obama appointed him chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. But it was Leach’s recent National Press Club speech, and his planned 50-state “civility tour,” that caught Dionne’s attention.
To wit:
It is particularly difficult not to be concerned about American public manners and the discordant rhetoric of our politics. Words reflect emotion as well as meaning. They clarify—or cloud—thought and energize action, sometimes bringing out the better angels in our nature, sometimes lesser instincts.[. . .]
There is, after all, a difference between holding a particular tax or spending or health care view and asserting that an American who supports another approach or is a member of a different political party is an advocate of an “ism” of hate that encompasses gulags and concentration camps. One framework of thought defines rival ideas; the other, enemies.
Not Exactly the Mercury Theatre on the Air
Posted by: | CommentsAt least the damage was minimal, Frank Rich suggests in this morning’s New York Times. It’s not as if the “balloon boy” fraud led the country into invading a sovereign country in search of nonexistent WMDs, or into investing in dot-coms with no business plans, or into buying oversized homes with no-income no-asset loans.
But “balloon boy” is this generation’s “War of the Worlds” hoax, Rich believes, “the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where ‘news,’ ‘reality’ television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled” — a culture in which media snake oil salesmen are as likely to be suckered as their audiences, if not more so.
Rich observes,
As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.
Not that anyone around him would have gotten it if he were.
