'First Date'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
I stayed at a friend's over the weekend and just got home this morning to find my apartment building SURROUNDED by ice.
I tried to walk down to the corner Walgreen's to pick up some necessities (i.e., toilet paper) and embarrassingly wound up having to ask my neighbors (who are moving out) if they had a roll I could use. Because I couldn't get across the ice.
How the heck am I getting to work tomorrow?
(And it has stopped snowing.)
How the heck am I getting to work tomorrow?
I think maybe you shouldn't try.
My ice-caused ass bruise is STILL hurting. I can't sleep on my right side at all.
Maybe - - but I have things that I must do and things that I would like to do (i.e., special divisional meeting to set things up for a week of training to help grieving students.)
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment (from the NY Public Library following the 9/11 attacks), she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
The book is The Age of American Unreason
This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society—on the political right and the left. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
Sounds fun.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
Jesus. ::weeps for humanity::
Hey, we're almost out of Natter.
I am not at work today, but I have hours of grading ahead of me.
Edited for cat-induced typos.
I told you all the Fenway bleachers story, right? Where a Korean pitcher, playing for Boston, got heckled (by Boston fans) with:
"Kim! Go back to Pearl Harbor!"
It's like those V-8 commercials where a random passer-by is totally justified in bopping people upside the head.
Hey,we're almost out of Natter
People! Stop bogarting the Natter!
Fascinating BBC footage of geckos coaxing leafhoppers to feed them honeydew. The lizards tap their feet or bob their heads, and the insect dutifully tosses them a bead of delicious tree sap. This definitely qualifies as bizarre zoology.
People! Stop bogarting the Natter!
But it's so TASTY!
t /Homer