Author Archives: Night
Rock’s Rules For The Road
You must be licensed before performing trumpet solos while driving.
Also, children should not play backseat drums without a seat belt.
Loop Factor Nine
[Or: “Captain Jean-Loop Picard”]
Someone edited a loop of the ambient background sound of the Enterprise-D engines idling. A 24-hour long loop.
Might be good white noise for sleeping.
They Have The Internet On Computers Now!
Teens react to 90s internet –
I’m kinda fond of the 90s internet. Most likely some misplaced nostalgia, I’m sure, but it could also be that Night Sky Radio started streaming online in 1995.* This brings back memories of what the station was like back in those days. Have a look for yourself at the 90s version of Night Sky Radio.
I really miss Geocities. Specifically, the way it was before Yahoo bought it. It had a great theme and actually kinda felt like travelling through different neighborhoods.
* After a, well, let’s call it a spirited discussion with the FCC regarding regular broadcast transmissions. The staff attorneys tell me I can’t say anything further on it.
Happy 4th Of July
Your government wishes you a happy Dependence Day.
He knows where to find you, citizen
Okay, I can’t be completely cynical. Have another one.
Superman by Fred Ray, 1942
Hope you’re all having a happy 4th.
Bonus pic, click to embiggen –
Superman in WWII, by Jerry Ordway, 1990
Wednesday Golf Outing
Some more in the style of Hal Gurnee’s Network Time Killers…
– A woman gave birth to twins… six months apart. Doctor blames it on an “incompetent cervix.”
That’s the best turn of phrase I’ve heard all day. All week, even. It definitely deserves to attain idiom status somehow. I’m thinking – to take the easy route – that it would be a great name for a progressive-acoustic feminist wannabe-ironic hipster band.
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A raging AngerSad has erupted over the Hobby Lobby court decision on the Byrne Robotics board. I have a couple question about the decision myself. First, how much does birth control cost out-of-pocket? Is it really that expensive? Considering how prevalent birth control seems to be, it would seem to be rather affordable, given how many women use it, and that mass production lowers costs . But I’ve never bought it, so I can’t say for sure. Second, I’ve seen comments claiming women often need birth control for medical reasons other than actual contraception (which HL still provides). Hobby Lobby only refuses to provide 4 out of 20 birth control methods. The 4 types they won’t cover are abortifacients. Do abortifacients provide any kind of medical benefit the way, say, birth control pills do?
I’m not even going to get into all the issues about the government telling a privately-owned company what it can and can’t pay for, or how HL employees are free to work where the employers will pay for all forms of birth control, etc.
Getting back to the B.R. thread…. a commenter wrote “A single-payer system would have many problems, but it seems to work pretty well for Congress and our veterans.” Hasn’t said system and said veterans been much in the news of late? The commenter does link to a poll claiming most veterans are satisfied with the care they get, but I’m not inclined to trust the Veterans Affairs site’s reporting. As for Congress… drawing on the combined taxes of the entire country to support the health care of 535 people should work spectacularly well. It’s scaling it up to paying for 318 million people that’s the problem.
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Digging down into the internet vaults…. The Comics Curmudgeon examines(!) Rex Morgan M.D. (guest-starring LBJ. Or a lookalike from the same place Hal Gurnee found the Kenny Rogers clone) –
FORE!
I don’t know if they went golfing, but it sounds like someone scored a hole-in-one…
I don’t want to know if there were penalty strokes.
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Somehow I’ve ended up featuring Kenny Rogers twice in relatively rapid succession. I’ve got nothing against Kenny – “Coward of the County” and “The Gambler” are good tunes – but let’s spin another track from that same era and see how many people run screaming.
The guys look like they’re going to, uh, play golf when the ladies suddenly show up.
Baby Maybe
[Or: “Alternative Birthstyle”]
Ryan:(drunk) Sorry…. no no, go go go. Songs of the Chiropractor go back many a many years.
Colin:Do they?
Ryan:Yes they were. And I know as a young black child growing up in the Bronx, none was more popular to me than that boogie-woogie hit, “Is That A Bulging Disc Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?”
Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was saying something about progressives having a “pseudo-intellectual worldview and love of scientific sounding formulas over empirical reality?”
I should have said “terms” instead of “formulas.” With formulas, there’s at least one or two numbers involved, which can be held to some sort of empirical, double-checking standard. Terms sound authoritative and don’t leave the little cracks where factualism can seep in.
Today’s fake-authoritative terminology is “infant gender assignment” –
Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents’ consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It’s called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It’s a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring’s genitals.
Because, as everybody knows, doctors have secret special words that magically make their opinions into concrete reality.
It’s getting harder and harder out there for a pseudointellectual pimp. The race to set oneself apart as “enlightened” by discovering deeper and deeper levels of fauxlosophy is barreling toward the horizon at full speed and shows no signs of a finish line.
Hat tip to Bookworm
Rules For Rabbitals
Bugs calls a square-dance tune… [and] redefines the courtship ritual of the dance — a means of channeling and controlling sexual energy — into a fiercely homoerotic ballet.
A Slate article claiming that “Looney Tunes” cartoons were far more brutal than we remember them. James Lileks at National Review concedes the issue, upon the condition that “you’ve had your sense of humor surgically removed, and replaced with an oversized gland that produces chemicals responsible for compulsive frowning.”
What Slate completely missed, and Lileks zeroes in on, is that apparently progressives ran rampant at Warner Brothers studios. Lileks continues, pointing out that the same episode, “Duck! Rabbit, Duck!”
…contains messages that should hearten the heart of a Slate writer, for it contains a very modern message about identity. As you may recall, the plot concerns Fudd’s confusion over which season it is: Wabbit, or Duck? The signage is confusing. Daffy self-identifies as a duck, and this being the ’40s, he is locked in a fixed identity, a product of a culture that says if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it is a duck. But as we now know, “species” is as fluid as any other form of identity.
And that’s something Bugs reveals in a very subversive sequence. Daffy uses colloquial expressions to describe his mood, noting that he feels like a goat. Whereupon Bugs produces a sign that says it is Goat Season. Fudd unloads accordingly. It may look like violence. But it’s really acceptance. If Daffy says he is a goat then he is a goat. He may suffer the consequences, but Fudd has affirmed his statement of identity. Over the course of the cartoon Daffy identifies with various species, and in each instance Bugs has an appropriate placard to nudge Fudd toward accepting the fluid spectrum on which Daffy may choose to locate himself.
Half a century before Facebook’s 57 genders, Warner Brothers was laying the groundwork.
Read the entire piece, and wonder, “How many times did Bugs do himself up in drag again…?”
Speaking of groundwork…. WB cartoons clearly revealed their pseudo-intellectual worldview and love of scientific sounding formulas over empirical reality throughout the “Foghorn Leghorn” cartoons, where the title character was often shown up by the runty, bespectacled Egghead Jr. –
Do Not Aim At Face
It’s been 22 years since the last amendment to the Constitution took effect, but Senate Democrats are hoping to alter the nation’s founding document once again… Despite that seemingly insurmountable hurdle, Senate Democrats are forging ahead with a plan to bring S J Res 19 to the floor.
This resolution would add a 28th Amendment, stating that Congress can regulate contributions and spending in federal elections. It would also give state governments the same authority in statewide contests.
Yet another example of the short-sightedness of liberals/leftists/progressives, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week. Democrats may succeed in regulating money in elections for now, but they can’t stay in power forever. Eventually – or sooner, the way this administration is running things (into the ground) – the Republicans will be in charge again.*
It’s the same lack of foresight that animates all their “living Constitution” moments. Do they really want to build a weapon and then have it turned back against them later on? By the unenlightened minions of Satan, no less?
Perhaps they thought a shift in American demographics will favor the Democrats for a few decades before they needed to worry about it. For a while there, I may have grudgingly agreed with them, but the last year or two seem to indicate that they’re slipping down to the end of their rope.
* I know, I know, it depends on the Republicans somehow overriding their hardwired instinct for running an easy touchdown through the wrong goalposts.
Random Static: Phoning It In
Allamagoosa recently got a new phone.
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Even though I was aware of the song, somehow it escaped my notice (or just as likely slipped what remains of my mind) that Kenny Rogers used to be a psychedelic rocker.
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Discovered this guy last weekend. He’s posted over one thousand videos of (mostly) acoustic guitar or piano covers of classic rock songs and oldies, like the Beatles, Elvis, Burt Bacharach, Frankie Valli, even some Steely Dan. And of course the Monkees.
He’s also taken requests for songs outside his normal sphere, which results in unusual coolness…
He did songs by Human League and Daft Punk just for the heck of it. There’s a Death Cab For Cutie piano cover in there somewhere. And his voice sounds almost dead on like the singer from Right Said Fred.
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I don’t recall if I posted this before or not… this guy is the greatest drummer in the world.
The host blathers until about the 40 second point, but the real show starts around 1:00.
I can offer no explanation about the toilet seat.
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I would apologize for the ultra awful Data joke at the top, but I would be lying.
Happy Paws
…as Steve Martin never said.
Clap your paws if you have
A tennis ball between your teeth
Clap your paws if you like
Running up and down the beach
Cheerfully and shamelessly swiped from Vodkapundit.
nightskyradio 