Being Stupid Is Downright Stupid

    

Tucson Weather Today

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What is it I most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”
--Christopher Hitchens

Yesterday I was so upset (outraged) at all the news coverage of the Clippers owner's supposedly racist comments covertly recorded without his knowledge. His comments (in my opinion) were quite evidently a response to continual prodding by a questionably motivated, persistent young woman, prodding for some reason of her own.

After the outrage left me, I found myself so depressed that I could not write about it coherently. I was too pissed off.

I still am . . . pissed off that is, but I will say that (through the guise of racism) this man's constitutionally guaranteed Freedom Of Speech has been blatantly and maliciously violated. Mainly by the media.

It is foolish sometimes, I'll admit, to speak out about one's private thoughts. But it is not illegal.

Racism is rampant, within the minds of men. Most men. Deny it all you want. Go ahead, if it makes you feel acceptably liberal... makes you appear intellectually and morally superior to the ignorant masses.

Here is what I say -- "Racism is not a product of ignorance, but of universal stupidity." wherein the definition of universal is: "of, affecting, or done by all people or things in the world or in a particular group; applicable to all cases."

See what I mean? I cannot write about this incident objectively and unemotionally.

Just can't do it. Not now.

Maybe later, perhaps in the near future.

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Did You Know . . .?

In 2007, University if Minnesota researchers found a huge hole in the universe a billion light years across that is not a black hole and is completely devoid of matter.

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HISTORICAL EVENT

On this day in 1992 in Los Angeles, California, four Los Angeles police officers that had been caught beating Rodney King, an unarmed African-American motorist in an amateur video were acquitted of any wrongdoing in the arrest. Hours after the verdicts were announced, outrage and protest turned to violence, as rioters in south-central Los Angeles blocked freeway traffic and beat motorists, wrecked and looted numerous downtown stores and buildings, and set more than 100 fires.

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WORD FOR TODAY

racism  [REY-siz-uhm]
noun 
1.  a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2.  a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3.  hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

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CELEBRITY BIRTHDAYS

Jerome Allen "Jerry" Seinfeld
(born April 29, 1954)

Jerry Seinfeld is an American comedian, actor, writer, and television/film producer, best known for playing a semi-fictional version of himself in the sitcom Seinfeld (1989–1998), which he co-created and co-wrote with Larry David. For the show's final two seasons, they were co-executive producers.

Uma Karuna Thurman
(born April 29, 1970)

Uma Thurman is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films. Following early roles in films such as Dangerous Liaisons (1988), she rose to international prominence in 1994 following her role in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. She starred in more films throughout the 1990s such as The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Batman & Robin, Gattaca and Les Misérables.

Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis
(born 29 April 1957)

Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation and has earned numerous awards, including three Academy Awards for Best Actor, for his portrayals of Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989), Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007), and Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln (2012).

Michelle Marie Pfeiffer
(born April 29, 1958)

Michelle Pfeiffer is an American actress and singer. She made her film debut in 1980 in The Hollywood Knights, but first garnered mainstream attention with her breakout performance in Scarface (1983). Pfeiffer has had her greatest commercial successes with Batman Returns (1992), What Lies Beneath (2000), and Hairspray (2007). Her other films include Ladyhawke (1985), Into the Night (1985), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Married to the Mob (1988), Tequila Sunrise (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Wolf (1994), Dangerous Minds (1995), I Am Sam (2001).

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Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.
--Claude Pepper

NASA TV

This Is Who I Am

    

3-15-13

    

Tucson Weather Today

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The TV channels are still at it, concentrating on multitudinous details surrounding the recent election of a 76 year old Pope. Some have created even more hype from the incident where a seagull landed and loitered long upon the perch created by the installation of a chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. It has become, according to the ladies of CBS News, a dove like symbol of God's blessing on the new Pope.

 

Glory Be!

Catholicism, in my skeptic's mind, is nothing more than a mixture of naive dependency on childlike superstition and the sheer stupidity of the human race.

Also:

If I understand it correctly, women's groups are calling for more inclusion in Church policy.

Evidently the feminists want to change, for one thing, what Church Doctrine decrees about women being excluded from the priesthood. In other words, modern women know better than does the old outmoded male hierarchy and their sexist God, and only women know what the real role of a woman should be in this enlightened twenty-first century.

When I was quite young, back in the mid to late 1940s, there were several protestant churches in my small Indiana hometown and one Catholic Church with its own Catholic Grammar School. Sometimes, while walking home in the afternoon when school let out, we encountered homeward bound students from the Catholic school. When this happened, it invariably led to the two groups picking up rocks and throwing them at each other accompanied by shouted epithets we'd learned from the older kids in the neighborhood. Stuff like: "Dirty Cat-lickers!" (Catholic-ers)" answered by "Shitty pup-lickers" (Public-ers).


My grandfather told me some eye-popping horror stories about Catholics, such as how the priests sometimes kidnapped women and protestant kids and tied them down on altars and sacrificed them by stabbing them with daggers and drank their blood from jeweled golden cups in midnight rituals called Masses.

 

I think he really believed those stories himself. Many people did in those days. Some still do.

 

There was no Catholic High School in that town so Catholic students attended our Public High School, and I got to know them, and learned how wrong my grandfather was.

And how horribly wrong adults often were (and still are) about things.

Most things.

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HISTORICAL CLIP

On this day in history, March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar, the "dictator for life" of the Roman Empire, was murdered by his own senators at a meeting in a hall next to Pompey's Theatre.

Details at The Ides Of March

 

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WORD FOR TODAY

Pope
noun
The bishop of Rome as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Pope (Latin: papa; Greek: pappas; a child's word for father) is the Bishop of Rome and the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church, the Pope is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter, the Apostle.

Many Protestants claim that when Catholics address priests as "father," they are engaging in an unbiblical practice that Jesus forbade: "Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven" (Matt. 23:9). In his tract 10 Reasons Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic, Fundamentalist anti-Catholic writer Donald Maconaghie quotes this passage as support for his charge that "the papacy is a hoax."

Bill Jackson, another Fundamentalist who runs a full-time anti-Catholic organization, says in his book Christian’s Guide To Roman Catholicism that a "study of Matthew 23:9 reveals that Jesus was talking about being called father as a title of religious superiority . . . [which is] the basis for the  [Catholic] hierarchy."

How do Catholics respond to such objections?

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Judd Hirsch

 

Born Mar 15, 1935
Age: 77 years old

Judd Hirsch is an American actor most known for playing Alex Rieger on the television comedy series Taxi, John Lacey on the NBC series Dear John, and Alan Eppes on the CBS series Numb3rs. He is also well known for his roles in films such as Independence Day (1996), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Ordinary People (1980), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Alan Bean

 

Born Mar 15, 1932
Age: 80 years old

Alan LaVern Bean is a former NASA astronaut and currently a painter. Bean was selected to become an astronaut by NASA in 1963 as part of Astronaut Group 3. He made his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12, the second manned mission to land on the Moon, at the age of thirty-seven years in November 1969. During this mission, Bean became the fourth person to walk on the Moon. He made his second and final flight into space on the Skylab 3 mission in 1973, the second manned mission to the Skylab space station.

Joe E Ross

 

Born: Mar 15, 1914
Died: Aug 13, 1982

Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz) was an American actor known for his trademark "Ooh! Ooh!" exclamation, which he used in many of his roles. He starred in such TV sitcoms as The Phil Silvers Show and as Patrolman Gunther Toody of New York's 53rd Precinct in Car 54, Where Are You?.

Jimmy Swaggart

 

Born Mar 15, 1935
Age: 77 years old

Jimmy Lee Swaggart is an American Pentecostal pastor, teacher, musician, author, television host, and televangelist. He has preached to crowds around the world through his weekly telecast. According to the official website for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, his 1980s telecast was transmitted to over 3,000 stations and cable systems each week.

Sexual scandals in the late 1980s and early 1990s led the Assemblies of God to defrock him, and to his temporarily stepping down as the head of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. He is a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis.

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Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.
--John Guare
    

The Stupidity Of Remaining Ignorant

          

Tucson Weather Today

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What I don't know (and it's a lot) determines what I say more than does the little I do know. And that explains why so many ignorant personal pronouncements appear on this blog. I simply do not know any better. In fact, I don't even know what to do about it, unless it were for me to stop blogging altogether. Which is (currently) unacceptable.

But there seems to be one saving grace regarding my intellectual capabilities. As ignorant as I admit to being, there seems to be a great number of individuals alive in the world who are even more ignorant than am I. And an even greater number of people who are not only ignorant, but are downright stupid.

The above image emerged from History Tech which is frighteningly informative on the subject of ignorance.

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George Will  has written what he calls The time bomb in Obamacare? in which he outlines how The Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) may have been put on a path to ultimate extinction by Chief Justice John Roberts' ruling on its constitutionality.

Details Here

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Beyonce

 

The main reason I posted that photo was because I wanted to include it in this blog entry. And I wanted to recommend Martin S. Pribble's piece titled A Feminist Issue – Culture or Contract? -- Martin's blog is where I found that photo.

LINK . . .

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WORD FOR TODAY

ignorance
noun
the state or fact of being ignorant; lack of knowledge, learning, information, etc.

Ignorance is a state of being uninformed (lack of knowledge).
Ignorance is distinguished from stupidity (lack of ordinary quickness and keenness of mind).

 Although both ignorance and stupidity can lead to "unwise" acts.

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY


Benny Hill

 

 Born Jan. 21, 1924
Died  Apr 20, 1992

Alfred Hawthorne Hill, better known by his stage name Benny Hill was an English comedian and actor, notable for his long-running television program The Benny Hill Show.

Geena Davis

 

Born Jan 21, 1956
Age:  56 years old

Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis is an American actress, film producer, writer, former fashion model, and a women's Olympics archery team semi-finalist. She is known for her roles in Stuart Little, The Fly, Beetlejuice, Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own, The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Accidental Tourist, for which she won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2005, she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for her role in Commander in Chief.

Telly Savalas

 

Born Jan. 21, 1922
Died Jan. 22, 1994

Telly Savalas was an American actor. He is best known from playing the character Kojak in a television series and many television movies

Jill Eikenberry


Born Jan 21, 1947
Age:  65 years old

Jill Eikenberry is an American film, stage, and television actress. She is best known for her role as lawyer Ann Kelsey in L.A. Law (1986–1994). She has won an Obie Award, been nominated five times for an Emmy Award and four Golden Globes, winning one, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2011.


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Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
--Confucius
    

What Is Creative Non-Fiction?

Tucson Weather Today

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I almost screwed up yesterday while lounging on the loafers' bench outside Fry's Supermarket. Seated by my side was an elderly female welfare recipient who was doing sentinel duty at the nearby sand-filled cigarette-butt urn, watching out for any newly stubbed out butt that might arrive. Her name, I think, is Mary... or it might be Shirley -- she's about 60 years old, painfully skinny and always wears what used to be called flour-sack dresses. -- Anyway, she occasionally begs me to buy her a package of filter-tipped menthol cigarettes, to which I always tell her that I would never buy cigarettes for anyone.

The near screw up I mentioned came about when Mary asked me, "What's yer sign?"

Instead of sensibly answering, "Taurus," and letting it go at that, I loudly proclaimed, "You mean my astrological sign? Ah! I don't believe in that stupidity."

You see, I wasn't feeling my best. I had just walked a mile. And my stomach was still objecting to the heavyweight bout going on between the two thickly battered fried chicken breasts I'd consumed less than an hour before, and Mary, sitting right beside me, was indulging in her usual phlegm rattling cough, which did nothing to ease my discomfort.

She glared at me open-mouthed and said, "What do you mean, stupid? Lots of people believe in it. Even kings and presidents."

I stared right back into her face with its sparse set of brown-stained teeth, which was much too close to mine, and said, rather loudly, "Anyone who believes that astrology is a valid science is either ignorant or downright stupid."

"Oh yeah," she said, "How do you know that? I believe it and I ain't stupid."

I began to lecture about how the locations of the individual stars relative to each other, forming recognizable shapes, was determined by the location of the observer, and thus constellations were observable as mythical creatures or objects symbolic of astrological signs only to denizens of Earth, while observers in distant stellar systems would not see the same star-shapes that we do.

But pretty soon I noticed that Mary was moving her eyes about in a vacant sort of gaze over to the butt-less urn, then down to the bare pavement, then back to the urn, and it was apparent she was no longer listening to me.

"Are you going in the store," she asked me.

"Pretty soon," I told her.

"Treat me to a pack of menthol filters, would you?" she said.

I told her, "After smoking for almost 30 years, I quit cold-turkey on April 12th of 1985 at twelve noon, and I would never buy any cigarettes for anyone... never ever."

"But we're friends," she said, as she once more looked over at the urn.

I just sat there and shook my head. She stared at my face.

"What's yer sign? she said.

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BORN ON THIS DAY

Lou Costello

Born March 6, 1906

Died March 3, 1959

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So . . . What exactly is Creative Nonfiction?

I have to admit that my previous understanding (misunderstanding) of Creative Nonfiction was the incorrect definition many others besides myself harbored of it, of it being a fictionalized account of a supposedly nonfiction piece of writing. Or a fraudulent essay, of sorts.

Perhaps the best and most concise true definition I have encountered was proposed by Lee Gutkind:

Although it sounds a bit affected and presumptuous, "creative nonfiction" precisely describes what the form is all about. The word "creative" refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction--that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events--in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.

Here is the full article . . .

Additionally --

An interview with Lee Gutkind at Bookslut in July 2005 contains more information about Creative Nonfiction.

Now that I know what Creative Nonfiction really is, this might be the time for me to jump in and get my feet wet, as the old cliche goes; maybe this is a thing I can do, and do well enough, to appear in the pages of a recognized, respected, and reputable publication.

Or maybe not . . .

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I found a word I was unsure of
its meaning, so I looked it up.

risible

RIZ-uh-buhl
Adjective:
Meaning: Such as to provoke laughter.
Synonyms:
ludicrous - ridiculous - laughable - comical - funny

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Entering words, sentences, paragraphs and selected photographs or images into this blog is perhaps a questionable method I employ to ensure that I write something every day. Whether any specific entry is mildly entertaining, intensely interesting, or pedestrian and boring as hell is irrelevant. What is meaningful to me is that I have written (created?) something that day.

Maintaining this daily blog, like going for a two-mile daily walk, has now become a regular habit. Whenever I inadvertently skip a day from either habit I feel guilty and command myself to get my ass back in gear.

Habits can be both helpful and harmful.

How's that for a profound observation?

(Profound but probably not original.)

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An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
--W. Somerset Maugham

Conservative Or Liberal?

Tucson Weather Today

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At times I post dictionary definitions of words that I took for granted as being words I knew the meanings of but then discovered that I did not actually know but only thought I did. And sometimes I post words that I absolutely know I do not know.

Well . . . I thought I knew the meanings of the words conservative and liberal, in the political sense. But when I looked up their definitions, I found the following:

An ideal conservative believes in the importance of the individual person and the family structure; that it is the responsibility for the individuals within each family to do as much as they can for themselves before asking for assistance. When assistance is needed the route taken is community, city, county, state and federal, in that order, with the federal government the avenue of last resort. A conservative believes in the least government possible.

An ideal liberal takes the completely opposite position to an ideal conservative vying for a socialistic form of government working from the top down wherein the freedom of the individual is compromised for the supposed good of the collective group.

A conservative believes that when government assumes responsibility it takes away the freedoms and incentives that make an individual productive. Whereas, a liberal believes an individual’s interests should be subservient to the collective interest of the members of society and thus minimizes reliance on personal responsibility.

Read more about this here . . .

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BORN ON THIS DAY

Desi Arnaz

Born on March 2, 1917

Died December 2, 1986

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I should not write about politics. Doing so depresses me. And it probably depresses all who happen to read my words. It would be better for all concerned if I were to simply write about the things I understand.

Good idea.

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Also Born On This Day

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Born March 2, 1931

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Conservatives think liberals are stupid.
Liberals think conservatives are evil.
--Charles Krauthammer

A Matter Of Perspective

Tucson Weather Today
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There is a TV show titled Are You Smarter Than A 5fh Grader? that I have been watching in rerun lately. I'm not convinced that Jeff Foxworthy has not set this show up to be a hand-picked farce, a dishonest depiction of the unbelievably downright 'stupidity' of the typical American citizen.

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While shopping at Fry's Supermarket I was shocked to discover that the price of a box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran Crunch was $5.99. The Kellogg owners are evidently not satisfied with being millionaires but must have their billions. A similar box of Kroger brand Crunchy Raisin Bran was priced at $2.67. Kroger major stockholders seem to be satisfied with their million. Of course, I bought the more reasonably priced Kroger brand. And, yes, I use Instant Nonfat (powdered) milk.

And speaking of money grubbers, why has the movie industry become such a gold mine for investors? Yes, I am one of those grumpy old codgers who remembers a childhood of thirteen cent movie admission tickets and 5 or 10 cent bags of popcorn.

'nuff said?

Oh wait... I should remind everyone to be sure to read Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged?

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No sooner had I written the above text than Scott Pelly of CBS news reported on the hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugee children who are starving because of drought.

Those video shots of skin-and-bones children make the minor irritants I wrote about above (cereal prices, etc.) seem inconsequential.

Right?

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Why do I even try to write?