On the road again …
Moving packing has begun! Heading back to Donelson (yay!) to a smaller house (yay!) with no…Posted by Steve Pollock on Thursday, April 12, 2018
Category Archives: Hope for the Future
Same Here
In Which I Join in on a Hashtag, God Help Me!
There’s this thing that has been closely guarded for going on 40 years in 2018. It’s my secret. So as it hits its 40th birthday in our new year, I decided it’s time to tell the world.
#MeToo.
There. It’s out. More is coming.
[Text by HawkEye. Photo by Mihai Surdu via Unsplash.]
American Carnage: 3-Dec-17
Globaloneyism?
What we learned this week:
• The wheels of justice grind very, very slow, but they are grinding towards folks who allegedly but probably committed treason against the country, but who will almost certainly not do jail time, much less pay the ultimate penalty historically paid by traitors.
• Speaking of future criminals, perhaps they might wish to take instruction from the example of Slobodan Praljak.
• Terry Crews can tell you that it is currently acceptable to be a sexual assault victim … unless you’re a black male. Then people adopt a “meh” attitude. I.e., #MeToo is quite trendy at the moment, but is likely to become passé rather quickly.
• Gronk probably needs to be reined in and it’s probably already too late.
• Life is about to get particularly hellish; CVS is buying Aetna and Disney is buying (part) of Fox. Also, Congress’ War on Everyone Except Their Donors is nearing one of its biggest successes of the last 40 years.
• A would-be blacksmith saw a show on tv that instructed him how to make something weapon-ish, which undoubtedly included a post-ironic “don’t try this at home” small print warning; he then tried that at home, burning down three downtown blocks of buildings in a town near Albany, NY.
• Alabamians (whether it’s a majority of them will be seen on 12-Dec) have no problem with pedophilia rationalization, especially while the Elephant Tides or whatever their stupid name is are winning. There is no surprise here at this reality.
• Nazis are just “the normal people next door” and nothing bad should happen to either them or the New York Times for pointing this out, says The New York Times.
And I’m not linking to any of that because … reasons. Google what you don’t understand.
Good night, y’all.
[Text by HawkEye. Photo by “FreeStocksDotOrg” via Unsplash.]
The Bribes Arrived
The aforementioned bribe came today … in gingerbread and pumpkin. His Majesty is … miffed but mollified.
Posted by Steve Pollock on Saturday, December 2, 2017
Dressing Up
Newschannel Five must have seen my previous post about dressing Steve Layman like an Easter egg the other night….
Posted by Steve Pollock on Friday, November 17, 2017
Squirrel!!!
The demesne was invaded by a legion of one squirrel today, who made a mess in the driveway with, I think, a large…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Casablanca, Here's Looking at You!
"Casablanca" is by far best on the big screen. Would have loved a cleaner print, but Ingrid is indeed luminous and…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Sunday, November 12, 2017
American Carnage: 10-Nov-17
Peckerwoods!
What we learned this week:
• Comedian Louis CK and Crusading Crazy Ass Roy Moore were accepted into that venerable old boy’s club, that newly-open-to-didlers-from-outside-the-church institution, The Ancient and Venerable Order of Priests Expecting Complete, Knightly Exoneration; Rewarded With Oodles Of Dancing Students (a.k.a. “P.E.C.K.E.R.W.O.O.D.S.”) Golf and Country Club. Greeting them at the door was the Ancient and Venerable Third Assistant Vice President Clarence Thomas, who treated the new initiates to pubic hair-laced Coke cans and asked Roy Moore if Moore was interested in buying him, because living conditions in “free” Washington D.C., are highly overrated.
• Corey Feldman is still alive. And also Corey Feldman knows lots of Hollywood people who will be applying for membership at Peckerwoods G&CC very soon. This has Corey quite frightened.
• 150-year-old former presidents need help to take a piss, but are still able to feel up female reporters and tell them dirty jokes, both of which are done in front of former First Ladies.
• White gay men are no longer welcome in the gay rights movement because the whiteness of their skin means they are privileged, cisgendered and non-intersectional. Henceforward, when we’re getting the shit beaten out of us at school; can’t afford college; get harassed or beaten or shot by the police for kissing our boyfriends in public parks; gulp down the handful of toxic drugs we fought to get in the 90s while watching our mothers scour the kitchen sink after getting a glass of water lest God’s disapproval in the form of the AIDS plague will be visited on her house and infect her innocent grandchildren; spending the 54th year of life with our families berating us for our lifestyle choice and allowing demons to inhabit our bodies; well, we cannot possibly have any contribution or role in the LGBTQ community. Because our skin color is white. And that means we cannot participate, question, discuss, converse and sure as hell can’t culturally appropriate anything from anybody. No alliances with us are welcome. No matter how many suicide attempts we committed during our teen years because we are total fags, it counts for nothing. You must be black, female, lesbian, transgendered before you are allowed to participate in efforts to secure civil rights for LGBTQ, etc. Your skin color is white, so you must be a white supremacist Nazi dedicated to keeping people of color down. “Intersectionality is a bitch, white boys; paybacks are hell and Karma gonna bite you in your lily white highly privileged asses.”
• That Kathy Griffin is a bit off her nut though, isn’t she?
• John Hillerman is dead at 84. Yet, Justin Bieber and Joel Osteen still walk the earth. Osteen’s Mercedes-bestowing god sure has a wicked sense of humor.
• There seems to have been some baseball played. Something about a World Series won by perennially losers the Houston Astros. We wouldn’t know, we weren’t paying attention.
• New England Patriots player and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez’s brain was dissected and shown to be the worst case of NFL of the brain ever recorded. Oh, this just in, it was CTE of the brain. We regret (not) the error.
• O.J. Simpson will continue to haunt our lives even if he actually dies. This week: Tossed out of the Cosmopolitan in Vegas for being … the only intoxicated person in the casino. The Juice owes the Cosmo a favor; that place is a cesspool of skeezy. Getting banned from it for life probably will save his life (or perhaps a few courses of penicillin). We were at the Vdara/Cosmo complex in 2014. The swimming pool still gives me nightmares. And hives.
• They’re remaking/updating/relaunching a lot of old 90s TV series for no apparent reason than, like the Simpsons, the creative well in Hollywood dried up decades ago, probably about the time Carol Burnett packed it in on her variety show, which was was always packed with incredible talent. A Roseanne reboot and a Will and Grace reboot we did not need. Also, The Simpsons must die; each episode is worse than the previous, a race to a bottom we cannot make out but we know it’s there. Family Guy is suffering while its creator is buzzing around the universe, so it’s probably also time that James Woods whips out his AR-15 and ends the show’s life for good and all as well. Bobs Burgers is still reasonably fresh, but it may be peaking now. (And by the way, just ’cause I’m a white faggot does NOT mean I should have to watch the Will and Grace reboot. My intersectionality about class, wealth, New York City snobbery and poor body image means this show deeply oppresses me, even if it may have influenced some people decide not to shoot our faggoty white asses when we got legally married by the U.S. Supreme Court. Whatever may be, I’d still prefer old Lucy Show episodes to most of this dreck.
• Tuesday’s election seemed to be a case of buyer’s remorse, wherein the guy who bought a pink Ford Fiesta with the undercoating package and Scotch-guarded seats wakes up after a long nightmare and wants to toss the Pink Fiesta off the nearest cliff, but knows there’s just no way that’s going to happen. So instead, he settles for going to the nearest Ben and Jerry’s and consuming 23 different punny flavors, coincidentally imbibing enough “RoundUp” (TM) to shrivel his gonads to the size of B.B.s And while waiting for his blood glucose numbers to fall below 1000, stares at the Pink Fiesta and thinks, “I hate this fucking century and this fucking country and powerful people who diddle powerless people and get away with it. Every. Single. Time.” And then, feeling better and on the way home, the wheels on his pink Fiesta fall off for the 45th time that week.
• Speaking of Pink Fiestas, the anniversary of Trump’s ascendance to power is appropriately the same as Kristallnacht and the infamous “Stab in the Back,” whereby leftists and Jews back home knifed German troops on the Western Front in the back just right when they were about to end the whole damn war victoriously, causing the Kaiser to abdicate and the nation to find itself in need of rescuing by an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler. Putting the facetiousness aside for a moment, the 79th anniversary of Kristallnacht should be looked upon as an abject lesson about what happens when you allow hate, ignorance, false equivalency, and frat boy snark mindsets to take over entire countries. But that would require Americans to actually absorb reality and study history, two things we are adamantly refusing to do at this moment. Gott Strafe Amerika! And he’ll do it too.
[Text by HawkEye. Photo by Dawn Armfield via Unsplash.]
The Own Us
Take Back Our Voter Data
The CBC « reports on Professor David Carroll » and the fight to get Cambridge Analytical to tell us what is in our “psychographical” profiles. It’s all a sordid mess and they need to be yanked hard.
“They claim to have figured out how to project our voting behavior based on our consumer behavior. So it’s important for citizens to be able to understand this because it would affect our ability to understand how we’re being targeted by campaigns and how the messages that we’re seeing on Facebook and television are being directed at us to manipulate us.”
—CBC Canada
Nothing will happen here, though; these people gave us the current government and our legislatures are not on our side.
But you can be on Prof. Carroll’s side by « following his Twitter feed » or support his « Crowd Justice pledge » to “take back our voter data.”
Fiery Marble
And I always knew I loved Maureen O'hara. Now I know why, thanks to this clipping from 1945. So, the only thing new…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Sunday, November 5, 2017
Fiery Marble (FB 2017)
And I always knew I loved Maureen O'hara. Now I know why, thanks to this clipping from 1945. So, the only thing new…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Sunday, November 5, 2017
Rip, Gronk, Rip!
My very first animated gif:
Andy and His Opies
The second post from Shorpy for today is another famous Desilu Production: Here's Andy Griffith in 1962, playing…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Sunday, April 24, 2016
Dinah and Desi
Love Shorpy, the 100-year-old photo blog. Here's a couple of blasts from the past: April 3, 1960, Dinah Shore grooving…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Sunday, April 24, 2016
Farewell, Patty Duke
"I've come to believe that whoever I am didn't start on December 14, 1946, and isn't going to end on whatever that…
Posted by Steve Pollock on Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Me Homer
Today's Facebook Quiz:Which MRI image is Homer Simpson and which is me?
Posted by Steve Pollock on Thursday, February 25, 2016
Space is Tedious, But Fascinating
Love this and have needed to blog it for awhile. «If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: A Tediously Accurate Scale Model of the Solar System» is a brilliantly creative work that represents graphically the massive amount of space in space.
On the page, 1 screen pixel corresponds to 3,474.8 km, “which is the diameter of the moon or the distance between New York and Las Vegas.” Bring up the page and scroll to the right. You’ll soon get the idea. (To skip to a planet, click one of the icons at the top of the page.) Excellent work by Josh Worth.
3-Jun-12: Dana Air 9J-992
Dana Air flight 9J-992 collided with a power line during an emergency landing after a bird strike near Lagos-Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Nigeria, at 15:43L on Sunday 3-June. 147 passengers, six crew members and ten people on the ground died.
The flight originated at Abuja International Airport, Nigeria. The McDonnell Douglas MD-83, 5N-RAM, was built in 1990 and previously served with Alaska Airlines prior to entering service with Bhoja Air in January of 2009.
Weather was described as 30C with variable winds and 10KM+ visibility.
Bhoja Air began flying in 2008 and serves Abuja, Calabar, Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Uyo.
More details, photos and graphics at «The Aviation Herald» and «the Aviation Safety Network».
20-Apr-12: Bhoja Air B4-213
Bhoja Air flight B4-213 impacted a mountainside 5KM short of runway 30 at Islamabad-Benazir Bhutto International Airport, Pakistan, at 18:46L on Friday, 20-April. 121 passengers and six crew members died.
The flight originated at Karachi-Jinnah International Airport, Pakistan. The Boeing 737-200, AP-BKC was built in 1984 and previously served with British Airways and Comair prior to entering service with Bhoja Air in January of 2012.
Weather was described as poor, with limited visibility, thunderstorms and rain.
Bhoja Air began flying in 1993 and serves Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and Multan.
More details, photos and graphics at «The Aviation Herald» and «the Aviation Safety Network».
25-Dec-12: Air Bagan W9-011
Air Bagan flight W9-011 impacted a road and rice paddy short of runway 36 at Heho Airport, Myanmar, at 08:50L on Tuesday, 25-Dec. A passenger on the aircraft and a motorist on the road were killed. 11 others were injured during evacuation.
The flight originated at Mandalay-Annisaton Airport, Myanmar. The Fokker 100 was built in 1991 and previously served with Air Littoral and British Midland prior to entering service with Air Bagan in 2005.
Weather at Vnukovo was reported as 12C, with dense fog and low winds.
Air Bagan began flying in 2004 and serves destinations in Myanmar and Thailand.
More details, photos and graphics at «The Aviation Herald» and «the Aviation Safety Network».
29-Dec-12: Red Wings WZ-9268
Red Wings flight WZ-9268 overran Moscow Vnukovo’s runway 19 and impacted the M3 highway at 16:35L on Saturday, 29-Dec. Five crew members were killed and three injured.
The aircraft was a ferry flight which originated in Pardubice, Czech Republic; no passengers were aboard. The Tupolev TU-204-100B has a seating capacity of 210 in a one-class configuration. The accident aircraft was approximately four years old. It was the first fatality accident for the Tupolev type, which first flew in 1989.
Weather at Vnukovo was reported as -2C, with snow and crosswind gusts between 16 and 29 knots.
Red Wings, owned by Alexander Lebedev and founded in 1999, has ten TU-204-100Bs in its fleet. It operates scheduled and charter services within Russia and to several destinations in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
More details, photos and graphics at «The Aviation Herald» and «the Aviation Safety Network».
Air Canada 767 Generator Failure at YVR
The aircraft returned to the origin airport for a safe landing 110 minutes after initial departure.
Republic ERJ-175 Bird Strike at EYW
The flight leveled off at 3,000 feet and was diverted to RSW/KRSW 75 minutes after departure.
Philippine A330 Hydraulic Failure at MNL
15 minutes after departure, minus nose-wheel steering, the aircraft landed safely and cleared the runway. A replacement aircraft continued the flight, which was delayed three hours.
Bedroom Cinema 28-Dec-12
« The People vs. Dr. Kildare ».
See a clip « here ».
Is It June Yet?
Grad school is high stress and keeping me busier than a one-armed paper-hanging porcupine in a balloon factory.
It’ll be over soon, thank god.
Things I’ve learned: Don’t question the pedagogy. Just because you’re paying $14,000 ($20,000 if you add in interest) per semester in out-of-state tuition (even though you’ve been a resident for over two years and paid taxes and worked), doesn’t give you the right to whine that, even after two semesters of math and literacy methods … you still are unsure about how to teach math and reading.
Also: Financial Aid … big pricks. And that’s not a compliment.
So, how’s your life?
Update
Commenting is broken at the moment. Something in the CSS of the new skin. Will be back later today.
Update 2:
Commenting is fixed. You may fire when ready.