“Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, ‘I’m an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,’ people would say, ‘Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He’s cracked up. You can’t believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth”
I wonder how many realize this woman would still be as unknown to most people as she was before she was picked by the GOP as McCain’s running mate, if only Hillary had beat out Obama for the Democratic nomination. When she was first picked, someone mentioned that to me, they said “yeah, they’re picking her to grab the Hillary vote”. I remember thinking to myself, “no way, don’t these people understand they would be jumping across party lines?”.
See, I could fathom people being ignorant enough to vote for someone, no matter how unqualified, on the single issue of her being a woman. I can see that, I just had no idea there were so many of them. In fact, people who know much more about this sort of thing than I do, such as McCain’s campaign crew, were actually banking on it. They felt that there were so many people dumb enough to completely cross from Democrat to Republican on the single issue of gender that it could make a difference in the election. This shows how little respect they have for the intelligence of the American public, and at the same time how little integrity to whole process has. Not that its all a huge shock to me, but I still find it unsettling every time I’m reminded of it.
These same people who were duped by the GOP, the Hillary supporters who only seem to care that their candidate has a vagina, are the same ones who are now rabidly defending the Palin family from big bad David Letterman. That’s what most of this stink is about. These are the ones boycotting the Letterman sponsors and calling the network asking for him to be fired. They have no concept of political party, which in itself is not an all together bad thing. I wish people were smart enough to not require their political beliefs spoon fed to them, but these people are not even on that level. They’re completely oblivious to the entire system, following one issue alone, gender. On top of it, no sense of humor whatsoever.
The Palins quickly capitalized on this weakness, knowing they could turn this into a huge media circus by simply focusing on an issue that was in the far background of the joke, and bringing it to the surface. Its actually pretty smart. They know their mindless “base” well, and how to stimulate them. They took the situation completely out of context by ignoring the fact that it was first and foremost a joke. Second, they cleverly used the lack of detail by Letterman to show that the joke implied “statutory rape”. That term in itself is misleading, because we all know that it can differ drastically from forcible rape. They even went a step further, by simply saying the joke was about “raping their 14-year old daughter”, leaving the statutory part out altogether. That will really stir up the hornet’s nest.
Now, as a mob of morons protest and call for Letterman’s head, I’m hearing the term “pedophilia” passed around. Dirty old David Letterman, the pedophile who thinks rape is funny and jokes about it to the world to boost his ratings. He’s a nasty, bitter old man, who not only likes raping young girls, but is really mad that he was snubbed a second time for the tonight show. This is how he’ll get them back. Actually that part, aside from him liking rape, sounds pretty believable. I could picture him doing this, maybe even on a subconscious level, to start controversy. The ironic part is that in the process he did Palin a favor. I love her comment about not wanting to boost his ratings by appearing on his show. An arrogant, clueless, pretentious opportunist and hypocrite, what more could we ask for in a potential presidential candidate?
About half of the artists and musicians I meet are quite pretentious, trying to be the big fish in a small pond. They project this certain attitude that’s a little difficult to describe. Its as if they belong to a special club, and want to make sure they don’t accidentally let the wrong people in. Others are required to prove themselves before they deserve attention.
I’m acquainted with a lot people like this, but I don’t consider them “my people”. I prefer to befriend those to which the pretentious would upturn their noses. These are really the most interesting people on Earth, if you can get past the quirkiness, the eccentricity, the fear of the unknown. Its a little ironic, in a sense being a pretentious artist is counter-artistic, against originality.
I’ve observed something that’s probably been around as long as humans have walked the Earth. Most people are either unable or not willing to see matters in the broad spectrum of components that make them up. In a simpler form, it’s seeing things as good or bad, black or white, republican or democrat, this side or that side.
During this presidential race I’ve noticed that exploiting this weakness is a tactic some folks, often employed in the media, use to sway voters away from certain candidates. Obama has been the target of this at times, where it is believed that if he can be linked in some way to a person who is crazy, racist, or perhaps a radical Muslim, that he himself must also possess those same characteristics, while at the same time doing a remarkably good job at keeping them concealed.
One of the funniest examples of this is a chain e-mail I received where the author felt like if he kept capitalizing Obama’s middle name – HUSSEIN that somehow people would make a connection to him either being related to Saddam Hussein or radical Muslims, no matter how ridiculous the idea is. Are people really that stupid? I keep asking myself that question as if somehow continuing to ask it will change the answer to something other than yes.
Binary thinking is one of the root causes of prejudice and discrimination. After a person experiences two or three instances of a person exhibiting a certain behavior that also has some prominent but unrelated trait, they begin to imagine that ALL persons who carry that trait will also exhibit that same behavior.
Is binary reasoning a direct result of survival instinct?
Quick animation test.
I grew up playing the first coin-op video games. PacMan was one that held my attention for quite a while and its popularity remains to the present day. I’ve been playing the latest edition PacMan CE on my Xbox360 thru Xbox Live Arcade.
It was designed by Toru Iwatani, designer of the original PacMan back in 1980. He claims this will be his final game, but at age 52 he’s now going to teach game creation at Tokyo Polytechnic Institute.
I’m pretty impressed with what has been done with PacMan CE. The action is very fast paced compared to the original. It still has the same feel as far as avoiding the ghosts, eating the power pills and eating the ghosts, but it all happens much faster and more often. The challenge now is not seeing how long you can repeatedly clear the same level over and over again without making a mistake, its more about trying to handle the speed. The more points you make, the faster PacMan moves and the faster the ghosts move. It can get ridiculously fast after a while.
There’s numerous other differences that you can read about from the links, so I wont elaborate further. My only small complaint is the outside border of the screen. Its constantly moving in such a way that makes a “tunnel” type effect and it can make you dizzy after a while, and I have to specifically make an effort to avoid looking at it.
This was an excellent movie, the camera work and acting were superb. A lot of people thought it was a bit violent, and I thought the violence was cool. The coolness factor was upped tremendously by this actor Javier Bardem, who played the character Anton Chigurh:
This is an animation I started about a turtle who drinks whiskey. He leaves the swamp and ends up in the city because he’s searching for something or someone, I haven’t really decided yet.