Picking My Brain 06-10-29

If you're reading this blog for a living, you're at work now!

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"They haven't been right about one thing. That's one of the most amazing aspects of this, the Left hasn't been right about one aspect of this whole Iraq situation...they've not been right about what would happen in Iraq, they haven't been right about anything. And this is not pointed out by the mainstream press. The more wrong you are, the higher your stature is. It's amazing." -Rush Limbaugh, 4-21-03 [As it turns out, yes we were.]

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It occurs to me that we might not have so much hostility in this country toward people who don’t speak English if we Americans were more open-minded and intellectually curious enough to want to learn other languages. But since we have so many people who lack intellectual curiosity, they believe the solution is that other people learn to speak American English. (If they learned to speak the Queen’s English, too many Americans would still have trouble understanding them.) These ignorant people might argue, “Why should I have to learn to speak their language? Why can’t they just be made to learn English?” To this I would only say, “Why do you not want to learn new things?”

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Here's one of those random silly thoughts I get from time to time. I'm picturing George Stephanopoulos on a new Sunday morning talk show called "Talkin' Like Grups." He and his weekly coffee table of guests sit in large, oversized chairs so that his legs, and those of his regular guests Robert Reich and Madeleine Albright, dangle down. LIke I said. One of those random silly thoughts. After I do this for a while, I'm going to stop warning people that I'm saying one of those things. You'll just have to figure it out for yourself. It may not always be so obvious.

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Loved Keith Olbermann's Friday night newscast. (I noticed that he refers to it that way, and as I don't wish to offend him any further than I may have already by writing to him and calling it a "show", I will use that term from now on.) His #1 segment was a tribute to the death of (no, not Habeas Corpus, he did that one already) "Stay the Course." The president has retired the phrase. A satiric look, of course, but funny in that he started off showing the interview in which he said "We've never been stay the course." As happens so often when he talks, alert peoples' ears perked up (as did some of their dogs') and they said, "I'm sure I heard him say that at least a few times." (Even when people talk to themselves, they use italics. Strange, isn't it?) Then he showed Tony Snow defending the President (as is his job, which I believe he is only just coming to understand) and saying that they looked back and could only find about eight times when the President used "stay the course." So Keith showed those eight times that they probably found, along with at least 21 others they apparently didn't look too hard for. (DubyaSpeak.com has a list of 41 times.) So, in the end, they look like the buffoons they are for trying to think we're the idiots they clearly are.

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From an e-mail I got from The Rockridge Institute:

Staying the Course Right Over a Cliff
The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

George Lakoff's new analysis of how George W. Bush and his administration have failed Framing 101--and why the Democrats may be missing a golden opportunity--is featured as an Op-Ed in today's New York Times. We invite you to read the article here.

We encourage you to take one more simple step, if you agree that the ideas in this article are worth sharing. While viewing the Op-Ed on the New York Times website, please click on the email link on that website to send it to a friend. Because The New York Times posts a list of the most emailed articles on its home page, emailing the article to a friend in this way will not only let your friend know about these important ideas, but also bring them to the attention of many more New York Times readers.

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I think I'm going to start writing about driving, and how many people do not seem to understand the concept behind it. I once heard that in a survey, something like 85% of the people thought that they were "better than average" drivers. This is, of course, mathematically impossible. More than half the people cannot be better than half the people. Yet when I drive out on the roads, it seems to me that more than half the drivers are worse than half the drivers. I'll save the bulk of it for another post (or "feature"), but let me leave you with one very simple rule for driving on any multiple lane highway: If you want to drive the same speed as the car in the lane next to you, then get in the goddamn lane next to you.

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So an analysis was done that showed that red cars are no more likely statistically to be ticketed on the highway than any other color car. If true, then do car insurance companies still justify charging more for insurance on red cars? You may not be more likely to get a ticket driving a red car than any other, but you are 73.2% more likely to be ticketed if there are live birds pecking at your car as you drive down the highway. True fact.

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Bill O'Reilly was a guest on Letterman Friday night and it was great! Letterman did to O'Reilly what O'Reilly does to his guests. He dominated the conversation and gave O'Reilly little chance to coherently respond. At certain points, I saw O'Reilly stop, close his eyes, turn his face downward a bit as if to take a deep breadth, and try to calmly say something. (I saw him do that same look during the Jeremy Glick interview, the young man whose Port Authority-employed father was killed on 9/11.) He was clearly getting agitated and Letterman knew it! At one point O'Reilly tried to go off on a rant and made the mistake of saying, "You call Bush an evil liar..." and Dave interrupts to say, "I didn't say we were a bad country, I didn't say he was an evil liar. You're putting words in my mouth, just the way you put artificial facts in your head." At one point O'Reilly tried to justify his validity as a knowledgeable source by pointing out his ratings. (Apparently O'Reilly forgets that millions of people CAN be wrong, and often are.) And as Letterman was getting in all these great digs, O'Reilly kept (mockingly) re-assuring the audience, "We're actually good friends. This is just an act." Letterman let him repeat that remark several times without commenting on it, either confirming or denying, which means it wasn't true. Letterman ended the interview with, "Well, I don't know what I'm talking about and I suspect you don't either." If, like me, you're a dislike O'Reilly, then you might enjoy Lying Man.

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I've been having trouble with this blog the past few days, but I understand others have, too. I also posted another song parody right before I posted this one, so it should appear below. This one is about what the detainee's might be going through down at GTMO. The tune is The Loving Spoonful's "You Didn't have To Be So Nice." I hope you enjoy it. If the song didn't make it to the blog, I will make sure it does soon (somehow.) I like it.

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That's all for now. I may or may not get down to the office to post stuff again until Monday. Have a good weekend.