Our Culture: November 2009 Archives

I hear he's going to work for Telemundo.

Or maybe's heading to Texas to work on the wall to keep the Mexicans out.

Here is The Onion's take -- "U.S. Deports Lou Dobbs."

Leave it to "The Daily Show," a comedy program, to put the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in perspective. John Oliver's riff on it later in the clip is both hysterical and kind of depressing.

Not much to say about this video other than, never, ever give ewoks vodka early in the morning.

This story in today's New York Times reviews recent studies revealing that pigs are very smart.

"(Researchers have) found that pigs are among the quickest of animals to learn a new routine, and pigs can do a circus's worth of tricks: jump hoops, bow and stand, spin and make wordlike sounds on command, roll out rugs, herd sheep, close and open cages, play videogames with joysticks, and more."

Pigs are smarter than your honor student. Who knew?

And they are valued, the story said.

"In parts of New Guinea, they're so important to villages that they're suckled by people," one researcher said.

Mmmmmmmm...bacon...

Shocking news. Retired Judge Emanuel "Mike" Cassimatis died while vacationing in Rome at age 83.

Judge Cassimatis was one of the great ones, a judge whose temperment and knowledge of the law placed him in the upper echelon of our judiciary.

Beyond that, he was just a good man. I always recall running into him at the Greek Food Festivals at the church -- he usually ran the cash register. One of the reasons the line moved so slowly is that Judge Cassimatis had to talk to everybody coming through the line. It wasn't a bother because it was always good to see him and have a chance to say hello and you knew that others felt the same way.

Every lawyer in town has probably heard the story he always told to describe circumstantial evidence. The story involved cookies with powdered sugar and his son.

He was an advocate for children. As longtime juvenile public defender Barbara Lee Krier, Cassimatis's law clerk in 1981-82, said, "Everything done in the commonwealth in the last 30 years concerning juvenile justice is based on his work."

Read Judge Cassimatis' obit here.

Here's a good explanation from Scientific American.

It has to do with how we manufacture flu vaccines in this country.

Another reason?

Hysteria whipped up by anti-vaccine activists, citing pseudoscience. The New York Post had a good piece about it here.

Utz called if off, citing paperwork required by the Federal Trade Commission.

It sounds kind of fishy. There's probably more to it. Stay tuned.

The Harp & Fiddle is expected to re-open. Matt DeRose, who owns Heritage Hills, is taking it over.

Wish him luck. He'll need it. The perception of downtown is that venturing down there after dark is suicidal. That's ridiculous. Downtown needs the Harp. If anything, it gives you a place to go after ball games.

As readers of this blog know, one of my literary pet peeves is the continued existence of Dan Brown. I don't object to Brown's ideas or stories. I object to him because he's such a terrible writer.

Another one of my literary pet peeves has to do with the continued existence of Ayn Rand. She is viewed as a great thinker of our time by a lot of people -- something that baffles me. Her notions -- which can be boiled down to the simple conclusion that selfishness is a virtue -- strike me as infantile and sociopathic. Her entire philosophy is a rationalization for behaving selfishly and having absolutely no regard for any other human being.

She is enjoying a resurgence in popularity now -- well, she would be enjoying if she weren't dead -- thanks to a lot of conservatives who share her belief that selfishness is a virtue. She is hot in publishing and is the subject of two new biographies.

A review of the two books on Slate magazine begins:

"Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"--her readers--were 'lice' and 'parasites' who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is 'evil' and selfishness is 'the only virtue,' she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?"

Here is a passage that reflects just how nuts she was:

"The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented 'the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. ... Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.' She called him 'a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,' shimmering with 'immense, explicit egotism.' Rand had only one regret: 'A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.'"

She probably would have thought John Wayne Gacy was an exceptional clown.

The review concludes:

"The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties."

And if that weren't enough, in my opinion, anyway, as execrable as her ideas were, she was a terrible writer.

Saturday morning, driving in the left lane of Eastern Boulevard, I was behind one of those mini-SUVs, a Suzuki or whatever, that was going very slow and drifting across the lanes. A car was beside me and that driver was afraid to pass the slow-moving dingbat.

I approached the light at Kingston Road and got in the turn lane and looked over, expecting to see, perhaps, a senior citizen.

Instead, it was a person who appeared to be in his 20s. He was looking down at his cell phone and typing.

He was texting while driving.

I'd heard about this, like all of you have, but it was the first time I've seen it in person.

Idiot.

Now, I've seen people reading while driving. I've seen women putting on makeup while driving. But this was the worse.