I love the Muppets, and the Sesame Street parodies using them are often hilarious. Parodies tend to be better appreciated if you are familiar with the items being made fun of but I found this parody of the newly released The Hunger Games: Catching Fire to be enjoyable because even though I have not seen the original films, I had read enough about them to be aware of the story. [Read more…]
Well, actually he is still dead. But the story about the friend and aide to the Clintons who tragically committed suicide in 1993, and which the right wing got into a lather about claiming that he had been murdered by the Clintons because he harbored some dark secret about them, has now received a new incarnation with a new dastardly plot. [Read more…]
Edward Snowden tops the list of Foreign Policy journal’s list of Global Thinkers for 2013. The top ten people were all associated with the NSA scandal, almost all of them critical of it, except for one (NSA director Keith Alexander) who came second and was immediately followed by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. [Read more…]
Remember when you were a child and were having a silly fight with your siblings or friends and the best part was when the other person became so sensitive to the smallest slight that all that it took to get them riled up about something was to make the slightest gesture (like a look) without even having to actually do anything substantial? [Read more…]
There are some news headlines that are irresistible and that one simply has to follow up on. I do not as a rule track the activities of the parasitic British royal family but when I saw the BBC news headline Police ‘told to leave Queen’s nuts alone’, I had to read more. [Read more…]
All of us are so immersed in religious nonsense that even skeptics like me take these religious rules at face value and do not probe them enough to show how unsustainable they are in modern society. These rules were invented by people living in much more primitive times and they simply cannot be sustained today. A little thought will soon uncover ways to expose how ridiculous they are. [Read more…]
Congressional districts are required to be redrawn after every census that occurs every decade. They have to be contiguous and to represent a limited range of numbers of people but beyond that the process is pretty much up for grabs. Whoever has the power to draw the lines can do so to achieve their own goals, such as to create safe seats for one party or to unite (or disperse) a particular ethnic or racial group, and so on. [Read more…]
We have all experienced the convenience of the auto-complete feature of many software items that save you some typing. But the prompts can often be the wrong ones. For me, the most common error due to autocorrect is to send emails to the wrong people who happen to share the first names or first letters of their names with others, because I hit send before double-checking. So far, that has not caused any problems, except delays. [Read more…]
… that ain’t necessarily so.
Here is a list of 76 things that the book of Leviticus bans, many of which are punishable by death. It is nice to have all in one place to use as rejoinders to those who obsess about just one on the list (#39) and ignore all the others. [Read more…]