“We are healthy only to the
extent that
our ideas are
humane”

-Kilgore Trout

I have been reading Breakfast of Champions, one of the many books on my life list that I should of read in high school, but was probably banned within the South Carolina public school system. I have been on a Vonnegut kick lately, since I saw Bluebeard on a friend’s shelf a few weeks ago. I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse_5 and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater years ago and when I began reading Bluebeard, it was like visiting with an old friend.

There’s a familiarity in Vonnegut’s writing like you’re being told a story by your eccentric grandfather who is trying to teach you the meaning of life, make you smile, and freak you out a little at the same time. He’s the grandfather who says, “Don’t tell your mother about this one…” and lets you in on a creepy little fact about his life. He comes across as a man who has seen a lot of horrible stuff, absorbed it, and maintained his innocence at the same time.

Well, within these great stories are other great stories, little tangents slipped in (in my opinion) to let you in on the complex inner-workings of Vonnegut’s mind. He gives Kilgore Trout credit for writing these and every time a different one is presented, I find my mind begging for more!
What I’ve realized while reading is that these little asides are set up much like a blog and it’s links. They are put there to emphasize a point, or create a little comic relief. What it comes down to, is that Vonnegut’s style is essentially a blog in a book! Cheers to the 1st true blogger, K. V.

Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order. Enjoy!

How You Doin’?

Trout wrote a novel one time which he called How You Doin’? and it was about national averages for this and that. And advertising agency on another planet had a successful campaign for the local equivalent of Earthling peanut butter. The eye-catching part of each ad was the statement of some sort of average–the average number of children, the average size of the male sex organ on that particular planet–which was two inches long, with an inside diameter of three inches and an outside diameter of four and a quarter inches–and so on. The ads invited the readers to discover whether they were superior or inferior to the majority, in this respect or that one–whatever the respect was for that particular ad.
The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such and such brand of peanut butter. Except that it wasn’t really peanut butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.
And so on.
And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn’t just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.
They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.
So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in every respect.
And then the Earthling armored space ships came in and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began.

Untitled - (Dirty Movies)

It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.
They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.
They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”
This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the Planet:
THE END
It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.
Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.
After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
The audience went wild.
When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver these goodies, of course.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

The Dancing Fool

A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
Zog landed at night in Connectitut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.

The Big Board

. . . It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.
These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and comodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.
The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo–to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers’ arms.
The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.
It worked. Olive oil went up.

Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension

The book was called Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people, whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

The Era of Hopeful Monsters

It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes, with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature’s experiments with creatures which might, as a matter of luck, be better planetary citizens than the humanoids. Most died, or had to be shot, or whatever, but a few were really quite promising, and they intermarried and had young like themselves.

The Gospel from Outer Space

It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being of the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And then that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

How’s that for free speech? What is even more troubling than the above image, is that you can buy it on a T-shirt, from a conservative online shop, which I assume by association endorses the message.

More loveliness from this perfect-example-of-dangerously-blind-ideology here.

I found out this weekend that my mother, who teaches at a Department of Defense elementary school, is not allowed to speak bad about the government, the president or the war in Iraq. She is also not allowed to look at any emails or internet sites, etc. that say anything against the same things. Obviously she wouldn’t want to say anything in front of young children whose parents are in the military and/or are overseas fighting, but it’s the principle, you know? I thought Freedom of Speech was a pretty big deal. Oh yeah, don’t send my mom the link to this blog. She could get fired.

People have been hitting the pavement a lot lately. Just wanted to point that out…

Saw V for Vendetta tonight.
Wow.
Read up on this guy before seeing it.

Who cares about greenhouse gases when we can have space shades?

And when we can simply mimic a major volcanic eruption (which cools the earth with all the junk in the air) by releasing sulphur?

WE MAY HAVE GONE PAST THE TIPPING POINT, but there’s still time to save our lives!

NEW YORK—Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.

At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, the sun began to lower from its position in the sky in a westward trajectory, eventually disappearing below the horizon. Reports of this global emergency continued to file in from across the continent until 5:46 p.m. PST, when the entire North American mainland was officially declared dark.

As the phenomenon hit New York, millions of motorists were forced to use their headlights to navigate through the blackness. Highways flooded with commuters who had left work to hurry home to their families. Traffic was bottlenecked for more than two hours in many major metropolitan areas.

The great City vs. Country debate has been streaming through my mind more and more lately as the Mrs. & I consider the future of the Jórge clan. In our (my) attempt to get further and further away from the ills of civilization and the grid, I have inadvertantly distanced myself further from the kind of community I’d hoped to create and the kind of independence I perceived I’d be gaining. Natural beauty and simplicity aside, I am beginning to recognize that living in a retreat-like setting may be just that, a retreat. And in the event of a failed state scenario or any other sort of major social disruption, I wonder if our isolation would prove a disadvantage despite a natural water source, plenty of firewood, and an ample supply of grilled squirrel.

In a less serious crisis scenario, it appears that New York City would fare best among U.S. cities if oil prices topped $100 a barrel.

We looked at the areas most directly impacted: how people get around, where their food comes from, and how they work.

New York City is the city most prepared to cope with a $100+ tank of gas. With its strong city and regional public transportation system, New York stands out above the rest. From New York City’s subways to the Tri State area’s suburban train lines, New York is truly the only American city where people are committed to riding over driving.

“As the largest city in the country and the business capital of the world New York City must be prepared for what comes our way, and we are,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “That New York City has been recognized by SustainLane as the best prepared city to face a nation-wide oil crisis is testament to the resiliency and strength of our infrastructure.”

Infrastructure indeed, whose definition is the heart of the “what if” question and the meat of much more in-depth conversations around sustainability, permaculture, and the future of how communities can and will survive. For more on that, I highly recommend following this discussion over at Anthropik. Here’s the article that prompted that discussion and got my wheels turning just a little faster:

We cherished our decade-plus in the country, but eventually the realities began to pile up. There wasn’t a local market for the work we did. Community events left us saddened by the gulf between our way of life and theirs. And we were still tethered to the fossil-fuel beast, just by a much longer lifeline of wire, pipe, and pavement. That the beast looked smaller by being farther away no longer fooled us.

The War in Iraq turns 3 today, an occasion many said with absolute certainty we’d never see.

But now, in light of over 2,000 U.S. soldiers and at least 33,000 civilians dead, and new cost predictions floating in the trillions, perhaps an opportunity to learn from the fallacy of pre-judgment is at hand, even for so-called journalists. At least the folks at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) seems to think so:

…[S]yndicated columnist Cal Thomas declared (4/16/03): “All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent. Otherwise, they will return to us in another situation where their expertise will be acknowledged, or taken for granted, but their credibility will be lacking.”

Read the false prophets here. But please, no breath-holding.

A fascinating article was recently published listing the nations that are on the brink of collapse. The study states that economically stable nations should be more concerned about these countries than the superpowers with the fancy technology.

How do you know a failed state when you see one? Of course, a government that has lost control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force has earned the label. But there can be more subtle attributes of failure. Some regimes, for example, lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services. In other countries, the populace may rely entirely on the black market, fail to pay taxes, or engage in large-scale civil disobedience. Outside intervention can be both a symptom of and a trigger for state collapse. A failed state may be subject to involuntary restrictions of its sovereignty, such as political or economic sanctions, the presence of foreign military forces on its soil, or other military constraints, such as a no-fly zone.

The report goes on to name the 30-45 endangered countries (depending on whom you ask) and raises some good questions to what should be done. Free elections don’t seem to be working so well for most of them.

The index does not provide any easy answers for those looking to shore up countries on the brink. Elections are almost universally regarded as helpful in reducing conflict. However, if they are rigged, conducted during active fighting, or attract a low turnout, they can be ineffective or even harmful to stability. Electoral democracy appears to have had only a modest impact on the stability of states such as Iraq, Rwanda, Kenya, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Ukraine ranks as highly vulnerable in large part because of last year’s disputed election.

The part that struck me the most was the last paragraph, where there is a description of the factors used to determine what was defined as a failing state.

What are the clearest early warning signs of a failing state? Among the 12 indicators we use, two consistently rank near the top. Uneven development is high in almost all the states in the index, suggesting that inequality within states—and not merely poverty—increases instability. Criminalization or delegitimization of the state, which occurs when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or ineffective, also figured prominently. Facing this condition, people often shift their allegiances to other leaders—opposition parties, warlords, ethnic nationalists, clergy, or rebel forces. Demographic factors, especially population pressures stemming from refugees, internally displaced populations, and environmental degradation, are also found in most at-risk countries, as are consistent human rights violations. Identifying the signs of state failure is easier than crafting solutions, but pinpointing where state collapse is likely is a necessary first step.

Sound familiar? I realize that the countries they are referring are in a further state of collapse than us, but the same signs could be applied easily to the state of our overcaffinated economy, the polarization of the people, destruction of our forests and wetlands, (not to mention the latest Alaskan oil spill), hurricane refugees, and our consistent human rights violations.

Link.

The young men in the photo above are (left to right) Luis and Hector. My wife and I stayed with them and their family for a few days last week, out in the countryside of Nicaragua. We asked our host brothers to show us somewhere cool and they brought us to this cliff (during the rainy season it’s a waterfall). As we walked to the site, Luis and Hector used a slingshot to shoot down fruit from trees. We snacked the whole way there.

When we arrived, we lay down on the rocks, looking out over a lagoon, rested and talked a little politics. I told Luis about an incident that ocurred earlier that day when our group of US citizens visited a cooperative farm (which our host father helped set up after the revolution). One of my fellow North Americans said to a founding member of the Co-op with sarcastic sentimentality,

So, my government was right when they told us you guys were communists. Because everything you’ve been saying so far, today, sounds like communism.

Luis laughed at that, and began talking about other countries that were communist. He mentioned Venezuela and I ventured that I thought Venezuela might be a democracy, and Luis said:

Communism is the same thing as Democracy.

I told Luis that in my country, many people equate capitalism with democracy, and he kind of shook his head and said something like, “that’s not true” or something.

But to explain what he meant by “communism”, I want to talk about the response to the statement made at the co-op. The leader of the Cooperative responded to the allegation of being a communist with the following paraphrase:

Yes, I am a communist. But I am not a communist so much in the political sense. I am a communist because God is a communist. Does God want us to live in constant fighting? Does God want us all to be against each other? No. God wants us all to live together in communion. And that is what we do. That is why I am called a communist.

Remember, these are the guys that Reagan warned us about. And it turns out that, unsurprisingly, people everywhere are really just the same. They want to live their lives on their own terms, in their own way, without anyone telling them otherwise. For many in the United States, this means a capitalist system. But for the family we stayed in, and for many of the other companeros and companeras in the countryside, that freedom to live the way they choose is synonymous with the cooperation and community lifestyle that we happen to define as “communism”.

Dear Once-a-Dayers:

Last Friday was the first “spring-like” day in New York City. If you’ve ever experienced one, then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well… imagine 8 million uptight, overworked, and stressed-out people taking to the streets and lingering after being stuck inside all winter. It’s fantastic!

I met my beautiful wife at Union Square. We watched a guy juggle with fire while riding a unicycle with a woman on his shoulders. We stopped and listened to a hard rock brass band. Then, we walked through the East Village and had supper at Supper. Yummy, springtime.

Love,

JP

PS: On April 29, United for Peace and Justice will be hosting a major rally in the Manhattan. Please come visit. Protests are sort of like the first day of spring.

The Simpsons:

Synopsis
The producers of “The Simpsons” created this live action version of the show’s opening credits which will soon air on Britain’s Sky One.

I have always wanted to do this.
Google answers hard at work.

I was feeling particularly red-blooded and American yesterday when I decided to clean out the ol’ toolshed. As I was removing the second of three mouse nests, I heard and then saw a bright yellow low-flying plane, almost identical to the one pictured above, rumble across the airspace directly above my house. At first I assumed it was some aerial drill, of the SC-variety. Then, when a similarly yellow helicopter buzzed overhead about ten minutes later, I started to wonder if our unseasonably warm weather had prompted some eager reefer scouts to do some flyovers.

The unfortunate and, in hindsight, obvious answer was that these were aerial firefighters delivering lakewater and transporting fire crews to a forest fire burning right over the next mountain ridge. Apparently the blaze has been going since Friday, when it was said to be under control:

Fire officials said the tinder-like conditions contributed to a large, forest fire in Western North Carolina Friday afternoon. The fire, burning between Saluda and Tryon off Highway 176 in Polk County, was under control Friday evening, Tryon Fire Chief Michael Coggins told News Channel 7.

The dry conditions and high winds pushed the fire up the mountain at a rapid speed,” Coggins said. A helicopter scooped large bucketfuls of water from a local body of water to fight the blaze. Crews were expected to monitor the area overnight.

It’s now Sunday evening and the yellow plane has gotten a good look at my house about a dozen or so times throughout the day as it makes water runs. I’m not too worried, but my yard is getting a little smoky, even for my tastes. Our local Fire Dept. has assured Mrs. Jórge that in the event we need to evacuate, “a fireman will come tell you to leave,” which somehow didn’t make us feel much better.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying my hand at SkyFighter, a harder-than-it-looks Flash game that is the best answer I’ve found to the “I wonder what it would be like to fly one those planes?” question. Give it a whirl, and send us a prayer while you’re at it.

I haven’t watched an episode of The Simpsons in years, which seems strange after it was a regurlarly scheduled and significant portion of my day for several college semesters and beyond. Nearly every situation could be emphasized with a Simpsons quote, and I sometimes found myself alienated when I’d bring one up and no one would get the reference. I still whip one out on occasion, but they’re from 1994, and I have found that they are best kept in my head, as most of my jokes should be. Anyway, I ran across this article this morning and it says a lot about what is making it into the heads of US citizens, and what seems to be filtered out, intentionally or not.

By Rich Lewis, Mar 02, 2006

The latest in this endless string of gripes about our collective ignorance was in the headlines just yesterday. The McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago released a study showing that 52 percent of Americans can name “at least two members of ‘The Simpsons’ cartoon family” but only 28 percent can name two of “the five fundamental freedoms granted to them by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

The museum glumly reported that 22 percent of Americans can name all five members of the Simpson family while only one-tenth of one percent can name all five of the freedoms.

OK, so when they got a phone call out of the blue asking them to name the five freedoms — speech, religion, press, assembly and petition — only 28 percent of Americans could remember two of them.

You’ve probably exercised all five of those rights in the past year and knew darn well nobody could stop you because “they’re in the Constitution.” Somewhere in there.

And yes, 45 percent said the right to own a gun was guaranteed by the First Amendment. Actually, it’s the Second Amendment, but on the bright side, that’s only off by one.

And sure, 21 percent said the right “to own and raise pets” is in the First Amendment, and 17 percent said the right “to drive a car” is in there. If they aren’t, they should be because Fido and the Ford are just as American as the flag.

But what grinds my gears isn’t the suggestion that the country is falling apart because the citizenry got a D on a pop quiz in civics.

No, what ticks me off is the suggestion that we should be ashamed of knowing so much about “The Simpsons.” In fact, the headline on this study shouldn’t have been: “Ignorance of First Amendment spells doom for America.” It should have been: “Knowledge of cartoon show proves America on right track.”

Because those who watch “The Simpsons” are far better citizens — and human beings — than those eggheads who could win a few bucks on “Jeopardy” by cleaning up on the “Obscure Facts about the First Amendment” category.

No matter what the topic — politics, economics, religion, relationships — if you want the skinny, the Simpsons have it. For 17 years, Homer, Bart, Marge, Lisa, and all the other Simpson characters from Mayor Quigley to Mr. Burns to Ned Flanders have unerringly revealed the truths and consequences of American life.

You have the right to speak and assemble, and that’s important — but the beating heart of American life is all about D’oh! and doughnuts.

In fact, “D’oh” — Homer’s trademark expletive and the ultimate expression of the esteemed American tradition of achieving enlightenment through blockheaded error — is now enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary.

How important is “The Simpsons”? Well, in 1998, Time Magazine TV critic James Poniewozik named it “the best TV show ever” in the magazine’s roundup of the greatest artworks of the 20th century.

And if the Freedom Museum thinks it’s important for us to grasp basic political and civic principles, well, as Poniewozik wrote, the political lessons in the show are “both timeless and au courant,” not just “the comics” but also “the news.”

The show has had a huge influence on popular culture because it evenhandedly exposes the highminded and the hypocritical in the way we actually live skewering the behaviors of those on the left, right, middle and the inside-out.

Jonah Goldberg, editor of the conservative National Review, says “The Simpsons” is “possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever” because its satire “spares nothing and no one.”

The show regularly rips America’s consumerist gluttony (those doughnuts), but also mocks the self-righteous abstainers, such as when Lisa encounters a pompous “level 5 vegan” who won’t eat “anything that casts a shadow.”

Having the First Amendment right to practice your religion is certainly important, but remembering that your religion is one of many may require a little needling now and then, and the show gives it to Catholics, Jews, Unitarians and every other religion, right down to Pastor Timothy Lovejoy of the Springfield Community Church, who is described as “a pan-denominational windbag.”

While American media fret about poking fun at ethnic issues, “The Simpsons” regularly visits with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian manager of the local Kwik-E-Mart, portrayed, as Goldberg notes, “with his outrageously stereotyped accent, religious oddities, bullet scars, and unapologetic price gouging.”

“I love this land,” Apu declares, “where I have the freedom to say, and to think, and to charge whatever I want!”

Now that’s my America, freedoms included.

You feel bad that you can’t name the five freedoms in the First Amendment? Well, maybe you should, a little. At least keep them on a card in your wallet in case some pollster calls you someday.

But feel bad that you can name the five Simpsons? No way, dude. And I have only one thing to say to anyone who suggests otherwise:

Eat my shorts.

link

Don Knotts has passed away. May he rest in peace.

Cheesey it may seem, but I spent many great moments with my father watching Andy and Barney on WOLO or WTBS. Now I’m up North and, alas, I don’t have cable. Thus, no Andy. No Barney. No madcap laughter.