11/24/2011 archive

This also is kind of a tough one.  Whom do I hate more?  The Dolphins or the Cowboys?

Cowboys.

Gee.  That wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be.

This schedule will take you through your second Throwball game, dinner, and your early bird Black Friday.  It goes from 2 pm to 6 am so it covers your wake up time for regular Black Friday too.

I will have the next edition up by midnight, but I need to get my beauty sleep so I can follow Interlagos practice at 10 am Friday.

Busy weekend?  I have no idea what you’re talking about, I sit on my ass all day long.

Some things you may be picking up in medius res.  Check the previous posting.  Latest listings at Zap2it.

Updated to 6 am.

Football is a game you play with your feet.

This one is a pick ’em at my house.  The troll side of me feels a good deal of sympathy for the hapless Lions.  The part that is not under the bridge roots for the community owned Packers, so far undefeated, to continue a perfect season.

Not that the Lions are having a bad year, especially for them.  At 7 – 3 they are off to their best start since 1991 after 9 losing seasons in a row.

Both teams sport high powered offenses and all the pundits are predicting a scoring fest (over/under is 55).  This means of course that it will be a boring defensive struggle decided by a lonely field goal, or perhaps a solo safety.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Buffy Sainte Marie: No No Keshagesh

Keshagesh means Greedy Guts. It’s what you call a little puppy who eats his own and then wants everybody else’s.

I never saw so many business suits

Never knew a dollar sign could look so cute

Never knew a junkie with a money jones

Who’s buying Park Place? Who’s buying Boardwalk?

These old men they make their dirty deals

Go in the back room and see what they can steal

Talk about your beautiful for spacious skies

It’s about uranium. It’s about the water rights

Got Mother Nature on a luncheon plate

They carve her up and call it real estate

Want all the resources and all of the land

They make a war over it; they blow things up for it

The reservation out at Poverty Row

The cookin’s cookin and the lights are low

Somebody tryin to save our Mother Earth I’m gonna

Help em to Save it and Sing it and Pray it singin

No No Keshagesh you can’t do that no more.

Ol Columbus he was lookin good

When he got lost in our neighborhood

Garden of Eden right before his eyes

Now it’s all spyware Now it’s all income tax

Ol Brother Midas lookin hungry today

What he can’t buy he’ll get some other way

Send in the troopers if the Natives resist

Same old story, boys; that’s how ya do it , boys

Look at these people Lord they’re on a roll

Got to have it all; gotta have complete control

Want all the resources and all of the land

They break the law over it; blow things up for it

While all our champions are off in the war

Their final rippoff here at home is on

Mister Greed I think your time has come I’m gonna

Sing it and Say it and Live it and Pray it singin

No No Keshagesh you can’t do that no more.

Well the 18th Annual Big Balloon Parade took place as scheduled on November 20th in downtown Stamford this year.  They had 21 giant helium balloons and featured the debut of 3 new balloons, Hagar the Horrible, Smurfette, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Returning favorites included the Sesame Street Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Kermit the Frog, The Cat in the Hat, Mr. Potato Head, Popeye, Scooby Doo, Garfield, Fred Flintstone, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.  Eleven Marching Bands escorted the balloons and floats and over 1000 volunteers participated in the UBS Parade Spectacular sponsored by Stamford Town Center and The Advocate.  The Honorary Marshalls were Laura Linney, John Benjamin Hickey and Gabourey Sidibe, who star in Showtime’s series “The Big C” which is filmed in Stamford and David Letterman personality Alan Kalter served for the 8th year as Master of Ceremonies.

Oh, maybe you thought I was talking about another Big Balloon Parade, one with only 15 giant balloons (though they have a lot of smaller ones too).

Well, it’s the 85th anniversary of the first Macy’s Christmas Parade in 1924, though to be fair they only started the balloon thing in 1927 with Felix the Cat and initially filled it with air.  When they used Helium the next year they had no way to deflate it so they just let it float away until it popped.

From 1942 – 44 Helium and Rubber were too valuable to the war effort to waste on crass commercialism and there was no parade so this is really the 79th edition, but it is the first with a female Grand Marshall- Amy Kule.

Sonic the Hedgehog is billed as one of their two new balloons, though it’s a retread (that’s a rubber joke) of a previous incarnation.  The only really new one is Paul Frank’s Julius.  Tim Burton’s controversial B is actually classed as a “novelty/ornament balloon, balloonhead or balloonicle”.

Macy’s 15 GIANT Balloons are-

• Buzz Lightyear
• Clumsy Smurf
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid
• Super Cute Hello Kitty
• Julius
• Kermit the Frog
• Kung Fu Panda
• Pikachu
• Pillsbury Doughboy
• Ronald McDonald
• Sailor Mickey
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Snoopy as the Flying Ace
• Spider-Man
• SpongeBob SquarePants

And their 11 Marching Bands are-

• Carmel High School, Carmel, IN
• Dobyns-Bennett High School, Kingsport, TN
• Hawaii All-State Marching Band, HI
• Homestead High School, Cupertino, CA
• Homewood High School, Homewood, AL
• Legacy High School, Broomfield, CO
• Macy’s Great American Marching Band, USA
• Miami University, Oxford, OH
• Nation Ford High School, Fort Mill, SC
• NYPD Marching Band, New York, NY
• Plymouth-Canton Educational Park, Canton, MI

NBC broadcasts from Herald Square at the end of the parade and has more set pieces and celebrities.  They’ll also have an 85th Anniversary Special at 10 pm.  CBS is sited farther uptown at Broadway and 42nd St. and concentrates more on the Balloons, Bands, and Floats.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 24 is the 328th day of the year (329th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 37 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a groundbreaking scientific work by British naturalist Charles Darwin, is published in England. Darwin’s theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called “natural selection.” In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. For the sixth edition of 1872, the short title was changed to The Origin of Species. Darwin’s book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.

Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. There was growing support for such ideas among dissident anatomists and the general public, but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to animals. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream.

The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During the “eclipse of Darwinism” from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to  modern evolutionary theory, now the unifying concept of the life sciences.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Last week I described the lower floor of the house in which I grew up, and for this piece you need to read the descriptions of the kitchen and formal dining room.  Most all of the activities around Thanksgiving were conducted there, although there was a fair amount of football watching as well, especially as I got older.

Other than more football, the activities were remarkably consistent over the years.  Of course, faces changed as older relatives died and new ones were born, but any given year was almost identical to any other year.  

Occupy Wall Street Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street is celebrating unity and community with an open feast at Liberty Square. From 2 to 6 p.m. at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) we will meet to share food, stories and inspiration. All members of our global community are invited to break bread with us.

“This is all about supporting the 99%,” said Megan Hayes, an organizer with the #OWS Kitchen working group, and a former high end chef. “So many people have given up so much to come and be a part of the movement because there is really that much dire need for community. We decided to take this holiday opportunity to provide just that – community.”

More than three thousand individually wrapped plates will be distributed on Thursday in accordance with New York State Health Code. People in the community have opened their homes to cook meals. Roger Fox in New Jersey will be making 250 meals, Mia Valh and Alia Gee are also making large numbers of meals. A lot of community organizations are involved and Liberty Cafe in East NY donates space for the #OWS Kitchen working group.

Locally owned family business, Texas BBQ will be providing 2,000 of the meals. They are being purchased with donated funds and will be served along with the home-cooked meals from supporters and food from the People’s Kitchen at Occupy Wall Street. The Owners of Texas BBQ are Egyptian and are supporters of the Occupy Movement.

Indigenous voices, religious leaders, food justice activists and leaders from peoples’ movements around the world are speaking on Thursday at Liberty Square. Occupy Thanksgiving is a celebration for the entire New York community. All are invited.

There will also be a can food drive. Donations of cans will go to local food banks and pantries throughout NYC.

   You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s.

   Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now lets give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits. Lets’ use the coming 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to launch an all-out offensive to unseat the corporate kings on the holiday throne.

   This year’s Black Friday will be the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS. As the global protests of the 99% against corporate greed and casino capitalism continues, lets take the opportunity to hit the empire where it really hurts…the wallet.

   On Nov 25/26th we escape the mayhem and unease of the biggest shopping day in North America and put the breaks on rabid consumerism for 24 hours. Flash mobs, consumer fasts, mall sit-ins, community events, credit card-ups, whirly-marts and jams, jams, jams! We don’t camp on the sidewalk for a reduced price tag on a flat screen TV or psycho-killer video game. Instead, we occupy the very paradigm that is fueling our eco, social and political decline.

   Historically, Buy Nothing Day has been about fasting from hyper consumerism – a break from the cash register and reflecting on how dependent we really are on conspicuous consumption. On this 20th anniversary of Buy Nothing Day, we take it to the next level, marrying it with the message of #occupy…

   We #OCCUPYXMAS.

   Shenanigans begin November 25!

But if you must shop

PORTLAND, Ore. — Occupy protesters want shoppers to occupy something besides door-buster sales and crowded mall parking lots on Black Friday.

Some don’t want people to shop at all. Others just want to divert shoppers from big chains and giant shopping malls to local mom-and-pops. And while the actions don’t appear coordinated, they have similar themes: supporting small businesses while criticizing the day’s dedication to conspicuous consumption and the shopping frenzy that fuels big corporations.

Nearly each one promises some kind of surprise action on the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season.