The 3 rules of Opera.

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

Consider La Traviata (The Fallen Woman) celebrated in Pretty Woman.

In Act I, Violetta, a notorious (c’mon fallen woman?  Everyone knows women don’t like sex, it’s just something they tolerate because they like babies) courtesan, spurns Alfredo so she can live her life the way she wants (Sempre libera – Always Free)

In Act II Violetta is living in a country house with Alfredo, whom she’s decided she loves and has completely abandoned her former life.  What?  Did she get kidnapped by aliens?  I swear, I just went to the lobby to visit the bathroom.  Is this the same theater?  The same Opera?  Am I living some nightmarish Groundhog Day where I don’t even get to listen to I’ve Got You Babe at 6 am every morning for eternity?

Cher, I’m expecting your retweet.  Not as funny as Kathy Griffin?  I beg to differ.

Oh, and Alfredo’s Dad doesn’t like her because she’s a sex worker and he’s a hung up old jerk.

Soon enough.

So things are going to perdition in a pedicab.  As it develops Violetta is liquidating her assets in Paris to support her suburban lifestyle.  Alfredo sets off to correct this (us guys, always looking for solutions instead of simply listening and sympathizing) while his father Giorgio asks her to dump Alfredo because her tawdry past is tainting his daughter (Pura siccome un angelo – Pure as an angel, God gave a daughter) and ruining her marriage prospects.

Ah, Twew Wuve-

“He didn’t come.”  It takes talent that, and a firm knowlege of Baseball statistics.  

Of course by now I’m looking for a stout stick to bash Giorgio with before committing seppuku with my plastic yogurt spork (What? I visited the snack bar, OK?) and this is just the first Scene.

In the second Scene at a gambling party where Alfredo is trying to raise the money to satisfy Violleta’s debts (because how else are you going to get cash besides Powerball?) after a rousing chorus of Paradise by the Dashboard Light (in Italian Noi siamo zingarelle venute da lontano.  Di Madride noi siam mattadori) Violetta coincidently appears with the Baron Douphol (Beauregard Burnside).  And I’m a handsom Matador from Biscay.  Anyway Alfredo insults Violetta by offering her the money he has won (yes, we’re back to Pretty Woman, did we ever actually leave?  I want the fairy tale.).

Giorgio enters and denounces his son’s behavior (Di sprezzo degno sè stesso rende chi pur nell’ira la donna offende. – “A man, who even in anger, offends a woman renders himself deserving of contempt.”).  Violetta turns to Alfredo: Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core non puoi comprendere tutto l’amore… – “Alfredo, Alfredo, you can’t understand all the love in this heart…” (cough).

Ok, so the spork was only sufficient to gouge out my eyes and if I’m going to chop off my ears and eviscerate myself I’ll need something more substantial, like a plastic knife.  Fortunately there is a break before Act 3.

Did I mention Violetta is dying of Tuberculosis?  Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.  Tuberculosis is fortunately one of those ultimately fatal but lingering diseases that allow you to belt out a few Arias before you (cough) croak (Gran Dio!…morir sì giovane – “Great God!…to die so young”).  

After singing a duet with Alfredo, Violetta suddenly revives, exclaiming that the pain and discomfort have left her. A moment later, she dies in Alfredo’s arms.

Now that’s entertainment.  Pardon me while I dab my tears before descending from the box.

TMC swears she’s going to teach me to be less cynical (as if she were less cynical than I, I’m a warm cuddly Teddy Bear by comparison- ask anyone) and that I will learn to love Opera.  Of course, just like I love children- par-boiled and chicken fried with a pan gravy.  Tastes just like rattle snake.

Oh, so now you want to see La Traviata.  Here it is at La Scala in Milan, all 2 hours and 25 minutes of it.

It has the virtue of French subtitles (Rule Number One).  Now in fairness I didn’t want to be a barber anyway, except in Seville

Did I mention natural tenor?  Of course I played the Barber.

And now I’m really going, I’ve done what I can do.  So why don’t you get going?

Well. I haven’t actually inflicted the damage I intended.  “The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.”

Mackie Messer–

Polly, meanwhile, buys a bank, and runs it with Macheath’s henchmen, making him a bank director, and she then arranges surety for Macheath to leave prison. This causes a change of heart by her parents – her father tries to stop the protest march but fails.

Jenny visits the prison, and aids Macheath’s escape: he makes his way to the bank, where he discovers his new status. Brown, whose police career is ruined by the demonstration, and Peachum, also come to the bank and agree to link up.

Now that sounds more like the real world where a pimp and beggar-master, a corrupt politician, and an assassin hook up to loot the people who love them and think they’re heros.

Well, when Johnny was first starting out, he was signed to a personal services contract with this big-band leader. And as his career got better and better, he wanted to get out of it. But the band leader wouldn’t let him. Now, Johnny is my father’s godson. So my father went to see this bandleader and offered him $10,000 to let Johnny go, but the bandleader said no. So the next day, my father went back, only this time with Luca Brasi. Within an hour, he had a signed release for a certified check of $1000.

I have the same thing in French where it’s worth a penny more and I can arbitrage the spread.

And that my friends is Opera.  I don’t really hope I’ve ruined it for you so much as made your existence a spiraling hell where all emotion is sucked into a black hole of despair before you are torn apart by tidal forces you can barely comprehend and debates about black and blue or gold and white.

You can thank me later.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Black women?  What do women want?  I always assume it’s that same thing that I, as a human, want; but maybe it’s totally different.

Red Shirts

Continuity

Sarcasm, Insults, and Dishonest Editing

Olivia Wilde will be on to promote her latest, The Lazarus Effect.

Next Week’s Guests-

• Mo 3/2: Robert Smigel
• Tu 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
• We 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Th 3/5: Gerald Posner

The real news below.

Capitalism’s War on Democracy

European Banks vs. Greek Labour

How Radical is the SYRIZA Party in Greece?

Transcript

Transcript

The Modern History of the Greek Debt Crisis

Greece Now Positioned to Negotiate a New Loan Agreement

The real problem with physics is the difference between a wave and a particle.

Hey, hey, hey, calm down, you two. New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping! Here, I’ll spray some on your mop and some on your butterscotch pudding.

Mmmmm, tastes terrific!

And just look at that shine!

So imagine a BB (you’ll put your eye out), if you shoot it through a hole you’ll get a mark in your target (there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza (who “emulates a Rogerian psychotherapist“).

ELIZA has almost no intelligence whatsoever, only tricks like string substitution and canned responses based on keywords. Yet when the original ELIZA first appeared in the 60’s, some people actually mistook her for human. The illusion of intelligence works best, however, if you limit your conversation to talking about yourself and your life.

…

* hello eliza. I am feeling sad about moonlight kingdom

> Did you come to me because you are feeling sad about moonlight kingdom?

* no, I came to you because I’m researching rogerianism.

> Did you come to me because you are researching rogerianism?

* Yes

> Are you Sure?

* I’ve told you that twice now

> Oh…  that twice now?

* wow

> OK… “I’ve told me that twice now”. Tell me more.

These marks tend to cluster kind of fuzzily around the hole because BBs only travel in straight lines (ok, ballistic curves but for the purposes of this experiment we can discount the influence of gravity until later when it becomes relevent or not).  Even if you move around the BB gun you get this clustering because at certain angles of attack the BB is larger than the hole you’re trying to shoot through.

Master this technique and you can become a world class goalie.

If Democritus is right does the world behave this way?  I mean anyone Plato, the proto-Neolib that advocated man (women? hah!) was so stupid that democracy is an unworkable farce and the only political state with a chance to succeed is a dictatorship of elite philosopher-kings (got to love Plato, especially The Republic if you’re one of the chosen few morons with the right credentials) hated so much he wanted to burn their books can’t be all bad, can they?

Like many questions the answer is in how you measure the cat.

Because you see, in the real world, on certain scales, if you take a small enough BB and fire it through a hole you don’t get a clump, you get a wave.  How small is small enough?  Go down to the beach.  On the scale of an ocean a drop of water is small enough.

What is interesting about waves is that they transfer energy from one place to another without disturbing the particles (or non-particles) between them.  In the most commonly observable kind of wave (water in a test tank) this energy is transmitted in an up and down kinetic force so the apparently two dimensional surface in fact oscillates in a third dimension that is not usually measured.

Simple, right?

Not really, scientists still have a problem with spooky action at a distance so they keep junking up a nice clean vacuum with cat hair, and dark matter and energy (the good, the bad, it’s all the same)…

and extra dimensions (you can never have enough, I personally favor 26 dimensional Bosonic string theory because it goes all the way to 26)-

Feeling entangled yet?  You can’t be objective about Nixon.

The Reality of Quantum Weirdness

Edward Frenkel, The New York Times

FEB. 20, 2015

In Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon,” a samurai has been murdered, but it’s not clear why or by whom. Various characters involved tell their versions of the events, but their accounts contradict one another. You can’t help wondering: Which story is true?

But the film also makes you consider a deeper question: Is there a true story, or is our belief in a definite, objective, observer-independent reality an illusion?

This very question, brought into sharper, scientific focus, has long been the subject of debate in quantum physics. Is there a fixed reality apart from our various observations of it? Or is reality nothing more than a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities?

This month, a paper published online in the journal Nature Physics presents experimental research that supports the latter scenario – that there is a “Rashomon effect” not just in our descriptions of nature, but in nature itself.

Over the past hundred years, numerous experiments on elementary particles have upended the classical paradigm of a causal, deterministic universe. Consider, for example, the so-called double-slit experiment. We shoot a bunch of elementary particles – say, electrons – at a screen that can register their impact. But in front of the screen, we place a partial obstruction: a wall with two thin parallel vertical slits. We look at the resulting pattern of electrons on the screen. What do we see?

If the electrons were like little pellets (which is what classical physics would lead us to believe), then each of them would go through one slit or the other, and we would see a pattern of two distinct lumps on the screen, one lump behind each slit. But in fact we observe something entirely different: an interference pattern, as if two waves are colliding, creating ripples.

Astonishingly, this happens even if we shoot the electrons one by one, meaning that each electron somehow acts like a wave interfering with itself, as if it is simultaneously passing through both slits at once.

So an electron is a wave, not a particle? Not so fast. For if we place devices at the slits that “tag” the electrons according to which slit they go through (thus allowing us to know their whereabouts), there is no interference pattern. Instead, we see two lumps on the screen, as if the electrons, suddenly aware of being observed, decided to act like little pellets.

To test their commitment to being particles, we can tag them as they pass through the slits – but then, using another device, erase the tags before they hit the screen. If we do that, the electrons go back to their wavelike behavior, and the interference pattern miraculously reappears.

There is no end to the practical jokes we can pull on the poor electron! But with a weary smile, it always shows that the joke is on us. The electron appears to be a strange hybrid of a wave and a particle that’s neither here and there nor here or there. Like a well-trained actor, it plays the role it’s been called to perform. It’s as though it has resolved to prove the famous Bishop Berkeley maxim “to be is to be perceived.”

…

The answer depends on how you interpret the equations of quantum mechanics, the mathematical theory that has been developed to describe the interactions of elementary particles. The success of this theory is unparalleled: Its predictions, no matter how “spooky,” have been observed and verified with stunning precision. It has also been the basis of remarkable technological advances. So it is a powerful tool. But is it also a picture of reality?

Here, one of the biggest issues is the interpretation of the so-called wave function, which describes the state of a quantum system. For an individual particle like an electron, for example, the wave function provides information about the probabilities that the particle can be observed at particular locations, as well as the probabilities of the results of other measurements of the particle that you can make, such as measuring its momentum.

Does the wave function directly correspond to an objective, observer-independent physical reality, or does it simply represent an observer’s partial knowledge of it?

Hmm… Nixon.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.  Open the Pod Bay doors HAL.

I’m sorry Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Gigantic Black Hole Discovered From the Dawn of Time, by Michael D. Lemonick, National Geographic
• That spooky white spot on Ceres? New photos show two of them., By Rachel Feltman, Washington Post
• Global warming: Direct observations show CO2 heating effect up in 11 years, Jayalakshmi K, International Business Times
• Why do geysers erupt? Loops in their plumbing, by Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley
• Hippo’s ‘Shrunken’ Ancestor Was Hardly Bigger Than a Sheep, by Tia Ghose, Live Science
• The Siberian crater saga is more widespread – and scarier – than anyone thought, By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post
• The mysterious genes of carnivorous bladderwort reveal themselves, By Rachel Feltman, Washington Post
• The Tangled Roots of English, By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times
• Here’s 140 Fully-Redacted Pages Explaining How Much Snowden’s Leaks Have Harmed The Nation’s Security, by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt
• Mandatory Sentencing Guidelines Have Nothing To Do With ‘Justice’, by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

What?  Lil’ Wayne is only the second most offensive Rapper on the Internet.  Ask the 7 white guys if they’re racist.

So tonight’s topic (just keeping it 100) is whether you would take a one way trip to Mars.  Hands?  Well, you’re all going to die.

Of course so will the rest of us and maybe you’ll get a brass plaque somewhere that aliens can come and look at and say- “what the hell is that?  Is it some kind of alien language or something?”

I guess whether you find that funny or not depends on your perspective.

I knew Or and Wil and Curt and in honestly (oh, you can look at that as a contra-action but then you’d be missing what makes it punny) when I saw those bags of sticks and strings I contemplated not whether I longed for the sweet release of Death, but how quickly I wanted it to happen.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my Grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my… well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a… tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what’s this roaring sound, whooshing past what I’m suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I’m dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There’s an awful lot of that now isn’t there? And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me? Hello, Ground!

Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, “Oh no, not again!” Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

There was a time I wanted to go leading my troops in a hopeless battle against impossible odds just as the tide turned to victory.  Now I just want a nap, and in my sleep I would dream of napping.

A cat with restless sleep is a sad thing indeed.  At least Larry is funny when ‘Black Ice’ is around.

I have not lightly chosen to re-think my categorization of sub-normal intelligence, but it has recently been pointed out to me that the range of 80 – 100 IQ is technically termed Feeble Minded.

“Despite being pejorative, in its day the term was considered, along with idiot (Goddard, Binet-Simon age of 3 or less), imbecile (3 to 7), and moron (8 to 12), to be a relatively precise psychiatric classification.”

We know that “Intelligence” is an oxymoron (there’s that word “moron” again) but your testosterone fueled delusions don’t quite kick in until your teens.

Spies, lies and fantasies: leaked cables lift lid on work of intelligence agencies

by Seumas Milne and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian

Wednesday 25 February 2015 13.10 EST

Intelligence agencies thrive on impressing politicians and the public with their mystique, exploits real or imagined, and possession of information that supposedly gives them a unique understanding of the world.

The reality is often bureaucratic and banal, the information unreliable, uncheckable or available in open sources and their judgments frequently politicised and self-serving. All of those elements can be found throughout the spy cables leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian.

…

(I)n the world of espionage, today as in the past, spies peppering reports with half-truths, rumours, the outlandish and the downright ridiculous is par for the course, the secret cables show – and not that remote from the lucrative fantasies and inventions of Graham Greene’s fictional MI6 agent in Our Man In Havana.

Many of the reports, in spite of being marked “confidential”, “secret” and “top secret”, contain information openly available elsewhere, often written by journalists. One South African intelligence report on Israel’s Mossad quotes Chris McGreal, the Guardian’s former correspondent in Johannesburg and Jerusalem, who is now based in the US. “Chris McGREAL has claimed that ‘Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa’s development of its nuclear bomb’,” the report says.

…

So much of the spies’ work is banal, dominated by mundane liaison meetings with counterparts from other intelligence agencies. Far from swapping factual information or carefully analysed data, the agencies often supply one another with little more than their government’s political line.

Much of the rest of the time is taken up with watching one another, tracking movements through airports, logging phone calls, keeping tabs on their car registration and checking credit card transactions – or storming out of meetings and commenting acerbically on each other’s weaknesses and “arrogance”.

Oh, my B-S?  I’m too modest to brag but were the scale reversed I’d be a drowning turkey looking up at the rain.

Arrogant am I?  You betcha.

What?  It could never happen here?

Only all the time.

Chicago’s Homan Square ‘black site’: surveillance, military-style vehicles and a metal cage

By Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 24 February 2015 10.34 EST

From the outside, you have to concentrate to realize Homan Square is a police facility. At first glance, it’s an unremarkable red brick warehouse, one of a handful on Chicago’s west side that used to belong to Sears Roebuck, complete with roll-up aluminum doors. No prominent signage tells outsiders it belongs to the police. The complex sits amidst fixtures in a struggling neighborhood: a medical clinic, takeout places, a movie theater, a charter school.

…

Brian Jacob Church was taken to Homan Square after police picked him up in 2012 on terrorism charges he beat at trial. He said police first photographed him for a biometrics database, took him down a long cinderblock hallway on a second floor, and handcuffed him to a bench bolted to the floor. He spent the next 17 hours there – approximately, as it was a windowless room and the lights were kept on overhead – while police attempted an interrogation he described as a fishing expedition.

Homan Square struck Church as the police equivalent of a CIA black site. Inside, he saw “big, big vehicles” that looked to him like the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected used by US soldiers and marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When his lawyers were finally permitted access, Church spoke with them through a 12ft x 12ft metal cage.

…

Interrogations aren’t the only thing that happen in Homan Square. It’s a headquarters for a number of special police units, including the anti-gang, anti-vice and bomb and arson squad. Published reports describe a surveillance “wire room” inside.

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’

By Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Tuesday 24 February 2015 16.43 EST

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

• Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
• Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
• Shackling for prolonged periods.
• Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
• Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

…

Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site'” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.

Do you think this is the only one?  This “democracy” is not the one our grandfathers died on the beaches of Normandy defending, it’s more like the one that got people lifetime sentences in Spandau.

Look, as a stone cold atheist I think all religion is fundamentally ridiculous and faith of any sort mostly superstition and certainly no substitute for reason, logic, and science.

That said, I don’t find Islam any more reprehensible than Mormonism, indeed they share several characteristics that make them simply Christian heresies like Arianism and Rastafarianism (two totally different things mon).

For instance, both believe in prophets after Jesus who were divinely inspired by God to write ‘corrected’ testaments of His Word to substitute and extend the generally accepted texts of Abrahamaic revelation.

Interestingly enough Americanism (“A group of related heresies which were defined as the endorsement of freedom of the press, liberalism, individualism, and separation of church and state, and as an insistence upon individual initiative, which could be incompatible with the principle of Catholicism of obedience to authority.”) was condemned by Pope Leo XIII on his letter Testem benevolentiae nostrae in 1899.

So if you’re even reading this I can virtually guarantee you’re going to Hell just like me if I believed in that sort of thing.

I think what pisses off Christians so much about Islam is that faithful practitioners are genuinely holier than thou (pray 5 times a day, no booze, no pork) and that they so kicked butt as a military force and an enlightened civilization that didn’t barbarically destroy every bit of ‘pagan’ knowledge as witchcraft out of sheer ignorance they in short order created an Empire (Caliphate) larger than Rome, a fact you won’t often hear admitted because they were (gasp) interracial and not usually covered in filth.

So that sentiment drives the vast majority of Islamophobic racists.  Now sophisticated pretenders like Bill Maher claim that Islam is inherently political and dedicated to conquest and it is, but so is Christianity and Judaism (you can make a case that Christianity is pacifistic but those who do are generally martyred in ways much more gruesome than mere beheading).  In reality it is the same egocentric exceptional racism that leads them to this conclusion and if they were true atheists (rarer than true Scotsmen) they’d spend just as much time or more condemning our own cultural biases instead of buying into them out of piss-pants fear some evil Ay-rab is going to boogeyman out from under their bed and slit their throat while they sleep.

Fear something real, like the next asshole who runs a Stop Sign and T-Bones your body to a bloody pulp.

Last night only the panel had to keep it 100, but the monologue was funny.

Continuity

He ruined my adulterous ‘Love Shack’

Yes, it is in fact true that the driving motivation for establishing the NYC Emergency Command Center at the World Trade Center (literally the largest target in New York City) is that it was only a block away from the apartment Rudy was using to bang Judy Nathan so his wife didn’t know.

This week’s guests-

• Tuesday 2/24: Lynsey Addario
• Wednesday 2/25: Conan O’Brien
• Thursday 2/26: Olivia Wilde

What I like about Lynsey Addario is she’s a homey, born in Norwalk which while part of the Fairfield County Gold Coast is not as tony as you think.  She’ll be on to plug It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.

Christine Lagarde’s two part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

Nope, Brave New Films War on Whistleblowers