I think I’ve mentioned that I had a life as a semi-professional DJ, not that I didn’t charge but I didn’t quit my day job either.  I was usually partnered with my buddy who had a very extensive CD collection and some high end hardware to play it on.  We mostly did Club Mixers and Receptions and it can be a lot of fun if people are into the music.

Among the things I learned is that there are many excellent songs that are either impossible to dance to or that no one will dance to because they’re not familiar.  This is why we still have the Chicken Dance even though everyone hates it.

Middle schoolers are a particularly tough audience because if it hasn’t been on Radio Disney 100 times today you might as well be playing a waltz.

Anyway I thought I’d share some of the stuff that I liked that but could never use.  The problem with Soft Parade is that nobody able to move anymore has ever heard of Jim Morrison and it’s got tempo changes (Paradise by the Dashboard Light on the other hand is a sure hit and I hope I never hear it again).

Soft Parade

Call me Ishmael.  Long before the movie there was a book and since paperback pop trash sci-fi was only a hobby I can say that Jaws was worth the $.75 I paid for it and the 2 hours it took to consume not unpleasant if not particularly memorable.  I have no idea why people think Spielberg is a genius either.

Nor are sharks a particular terror of mine, the reason I don’t swim in dark water is my acrophobia and the sensation of falling, not because I’m afraid of getting eaten by a big fish.

Still there is no denying the mass fascination.

About 24 years go the programmers at Discovery were wondering how they could fill the hot dead humid air of August when they came up with an idea.

The Evolution of Shark Week, Pop-Culture Leviathan

By Ashley Fetters, The Atlantic

Aug 13 2012, 1:02 PM ET

Now the longest-running cable TV programming event in history, Shark Week has cemented itself as a fixture in the pop-culture lexicon, both seriously and meme-tastically. Stephen Colbert and Tracy Morgan (the voices of their generation, of course) have both publicly professed the sanctity of Shark Week in recent years: In 2006, Morgan’s character on 30 Rock sagely advised a colleague to “Live every week like it’s Shark Week“, and Colbert proclaimed it the second holiest annual holiday next to the week after Christmas in 2010.

…

By 1994, Shark Week had lured Jaws author Peter Benchley on board as the show’s first-ever host. For its 15th anniversary in 1997, the sharks had costars-Celebrity Shark Week, it was dubbed, with appearances by Julie Bowen, Mark McGrath, and Brian McKnight, among others. Volleyball player Gabrielle Reece jumped into shark-infested waters without ever really informing the producers that she was more than a little new to scuba-diving: “I thought if I told [Discovery],” she said, “they wouldn’t let me come.”

…

To this day, Runnette says, the team continues to develop its programming simply by asking themselves the question that spawned the first Shark Week: “What would be the most fun?” (“Chum underpants” and “the meat suit” are just two unforgettable responses that Runnette mentions, laughing at the memory-but clarifies that neither one has ever been or will ever be actually implemented.)

Shark Week, though, Runnette says, has never been at a loss for fun. “It’s taught us that it wants to be almost like a holiday-which it is for a lot of people,” Runnette says. “They want to wave little flags that say ‘Happy Shark Week.’ I always see pictures of all these cupcakes and these party decorations that they have to celebrate Shark Week.”

A beginner’s guide to Shark Week – a bloody American tradition

Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian

Friday 10 August 2012 12.28 EDT

Thrashing limbs, bloodied ocean and the shell-crushing teeth of the most-feared creature in the sea: this my friends, is Shark Week.

Broadcast annually for a quarter-century, the shockingly educational and often voyeuristic week of shark-oriented programming has dominated American airwaves each summer, courtesy of the Discovery Channel.

…

The combination of courageous camerawork, melodramatic music and terrifying facts – a shark can smell a single drop of blood in an Olympics-sized pool! – has been a ratings boon for Discovery since its inception.

…

For the past 24 summers, the network has hosted shows including: Teeth of Death, In Search of the Golden Hammerhead, The Man Who Loves Sharks, Shark Shooters, Blood in the Water and Jaws Comes Home.

…

And though people are more likely to die from digging a hole in the sand than from a shark attack, the programming’s focus on these aquatic onslaughts plays up to the fears most famously induced by Jaws (whose author happened to host the first Shark Week) and helps get great ratings along the way.

…

“People are quite obviously a greater danger to sharks than the other way around, so I talk to them about how we can show that or how we can talk about that,” Runnette said.

Happy Shark Week.  Tomorrow, Little League Baseball.

One factor common to our elite’s failures is their utter and complete unwillingness to accept factual reality.

Eurozone on brink of double-dip recession as growth falls 0.2%

Graeme Wearden, The Guardian

Tuesday 14 August 2012

The eurozone is on the brink of following Britain into a double-dip recession after its economy shrank between April and June.

GDP across the 17-nation bloc fell by 0.2% in the second quarter of this year and economists believe the downturn is continuing. Better-than-expected figures from Germany and France were offset by sharp contractions elsewhere, with the Spanish, Italian, Finnish and Portuguese economies all shrinking. The wider European Union also suffered a 0.2% contraction.

…

The UK … shrank by 0.7%, according to last month’s preliminary estimate from the Office for National Statistics.

…

In Germany, there was some relief that the economy grew by 0.3%. Analysts, though, fear that Europe’s powerhouse could slide into recession soon.

…

With no growth in the last quarter, France has now been flatlining for the last nine months.

…

Portugal continued to be buffeted by the austerity programme now being implemented. Its GDP tumbled by 1.2% in the latest quarter and is 3.3% smaller than a year ago, while the unemployment rate crept up to a new record of 15%.

Greek Economy Shrank 6.2% in Second Quarter

By DAVID JOLLY, The New York Times

Published: August 13, 2012

(M)any economists were skeptical that the heavily indebted Greek state can cut its way out of crippling recession.

A shrinking economy creates pressure for further budget cuts, since the deficit and debt grow as a percentage of the overall economy.

…

Standard & Poor’s estimated last week that the Greek economy would shrink 10 percent to 11 percent cumulatively this year and next, compared with the 4 percent to 5 percent decline the European Union and International Monetary Fund assume.

…

“(W)e’ve long argued that that is a fantasy,” Mr. May (economist at Capital Economics) said. “Greece will have to go through a long recession if it’s going to remain in the euro zone.”

He said Greece needed a 30 percent to 40 percent decline in real wages to restore its competitiveness, a punishing prospect if accomplished as a member of the euro. He said the better alternative might be for Greece to leave the euro and accomplish the same goal with a devalued currency.

US economic recovery is weakest since World War II

By Paul Wiseman, Associated Press

1 hour 50 minutes ago

Economic growth has never been weaker in a postwar recovery. Consumer spending has never been so slack. Only once has job growth been slower.

…

Europe’s troubles have undermined consumer and business confidence on both sides of the Atlantic. And the deeply divided U.S. political system has delivered growth-chilling uncertainty.

…

America’s gross domestic product – the broadest measure of economic output – grew 6.8 percent from the April-June quarter of 2009 through the same quarter this year, the slowest in the first three years of a postwar recovery. GDP grew an average of 15.5 percent in the first three years of the eight other comebacks analyzed.

…

Government spending and investment at the federal, state and local levels was 4.5 percent lower in the second quarter than three years earlier.

Three years into previous postwar recoveries, government spending had risen an average 12.5 percent. In the first three years after the 1981-82 recession, during President Ronald Reagan’s first term, the economy got a jolt from a 15 percent increase in government spending and investment.

This time, state and local governments have been slashing spending – and jobs.

…

Since June 2009, governments at all levels have slashed 642,000 jobs, the only time government employment has fallen in the three years after a recession.

…

Consumer spending has grown just 6.5 percent since the recession ended, feeblest in a postwar recovery. In the first three years of previous recoveries, spending rose an average of nearly 14 percent.

…

The economy shed a staggering 8.8 million jobs during and shortly after the recession. Since employment hit bottom, the economy has created just over 4 million jobs. So the new hiring has replaced 46 percent of the lost jobs, by far the worst performance since World War II. In the previous eight recoveries, the economy had regained more than 350 percent of the jobs lost, on average.

…

Never before have so many Americans been unemployed for so long three years into a recovery. Nearly 5.2 million have been out of work for six months or more. The long-term unemployed account for 41 percent of the jobless; the highest mark in the other recoveries was 22 percent.

…

(P)ay raises haven’t kept up with even modest levels of inflation. Earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers – a category that covers about 80 percent of the private, nonfarm workforce – have risen just over 6.2 percent since June 2009. Consumer prices have risen nearly 7.2 percent. Adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen 0.8 percent. In the previous five recoveries -the records go back only to 1964 - real wages had gone up an average 1.5 percent at this point.

…

Washington isn’t doing much to help the economy. An impasse between Obama and congressional Republicans brought the U.S. to the brink of default on the federal debt last year -a confrontation that rattled financial markets and sapped consumer and business confidence.

Given the political divide, businesses and consumers don’t know what’s going to happen to taxes, government spending or regulation. Sharp tax increases and spending cuts are scheduled to kick in at year’s end unless Congress and the White House reach a budget deal.

In the meantime, it’s difficult for consumers to summon the confidence to spend and businesses the confidence to hire and expand. Never in the postwar period has there been so much uncertainty about what policymakers will do, says Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business: “No one is sure what will actually happen.”

Voodoo Supply Side Economics does not work.  Period.  It is faith based Mammon worship by the greedy and evil.

The ad’s cynicism contributes to a phenomenon that increases each year, and that is that we are becoming a nation that believes nothing. Not in nothing, but nothing we’re told by anyone in supposed authority.

Peggy Noonan

A closer look at Paul Ryan’s federal budget plan

By David Lauter and Lisa Mascaro, Washington Bureau, Los Angeles Times

August 14, 2012

Under Ryan’s plan, which has passed the Republican-controlled House twice in slightly different versions, the Internal Revenue Service would tax the wealthiest Americans less, but many of the poorest ones more; Medicare would be transformed; Medicaid would be cut by about a third; and all functions of government other than those health programs, Social Security and the military would shrink to levels not seen since the 1930s.

…

The Ryan plan would not balance the federal budget for another 28 years at least, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. … It’s also partly because Ryan’s proposed tax cuts considerably outweigh even his ambitious spending reductions.

Ryan himself concedes that his plan would not balance the budget this decade, predicting it could be balanced by the “mid-to-early 2020s” because his plan would ignite rapid economic growth. Like his onetime mentor, Jack Kemp, the 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee, Ryan argues that the key to economic growth is not balancing the budget but lowering tax rates.

…

In the more than two years since his budget was unveiled, Ryan has not specified any tax breaks he would eliminate. Independent analyses have shown that offsetting the tax cuts would require changing things such as the mortgage interest deduction, the tax exclusion for employer-financed health insurance or other popular tax preferences widely used by middle-income households.

…

Ryan would shift Medicare from a system in which everyone gets the same set of benefits, paid for by tax funds, to one in which the government would give each senior citizen a fixed amount of money.

…

Ryan would also gradually lift the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 by 2034.

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Ryan’s plan would keep the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush and add an additional $4.5 trillion in cuts over the next decade. It would do that by replacing the current six tax rates with two – 10% and 25%. It would also eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax and cut corporate taxes.

…

The net result would be a tax increase for the bottom fifth of households and a big tax cut at the top, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

In many cases, low-income households would see a tax increase of $100 or less, but some would be hit harder. Among households earning between $10,000 and $20,000 a year, about 1 in 5 would get a tax increase averaging over $1,000, the Tax Policy Center analysis showed. Households earning more than $1 million a year would get nearly 40% of the benefits of the plan, with a cut averaging about $265,000. Ryan has not challenged those figures.

…

Ryan would increase the military budget by $300 billion over the decade.

Ryan would keep in place the across-the-board cuts on the domestic side and deepen them by $700 billion more over the decade.

Some of the domestic spending cuts are spelled out in Ryan’s blueprint – a cut in food stamps, for example, that would impose new limits on the length of time recipients can receive aid. Like Medicaid, the food stamp program would become a grant to the states, giving local jurisdictions more say in how the money is spent. Pell Grants for college students would similarly be capped, with new requirements that make only lower-income students eligible. Worker training programs would also be reduced.

Overall, the CBO said in its analysis that under Ryan’s budget, spending on defense and all domestic programs other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would fall to 6% of the total economy by 2030, about half the current level. That would mean a smaller share of the economy going to federal domestic spending other than entitlements than at any time since the New Deal.

Herr Doktor Professor–

Culture Of Fraud

August 10, 2012, 5:10 pm

The big story of the week among the dismal science set is the Romney campaign’s white paper on economic policy, which represents a concerted effort by three economists – Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor – to destroy their own reputations.

…

Romney’s tax plan is now a demonstrated fraud – big tax cuts for the rich that he claims would be offset by closing loopholes, but the Tax Policy Center has demonstrated that the arithmetic can’t possibly work. He turns out to have been dishonest about when he really left Bain. And on and on.

…

Is it really surprising, then, that the economists who have decided to lend their names to the campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud? Maybe some of them were initially reluctant, or thought they could support the campaign with selective renderings of the truth. But the pressure was on to be team players, to give the campaign material it could use – and so, one day, they all ended up putting their names to a report that is just plain dishonest, in ways that can be and have been easily documented.

Galt / Gekko 2012

August 11, 2012, 3:45 pm

What I do know is that anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.

The Ryan Role

August 13, 2012, 5:24 am

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

…

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

Romney/Ryan: The Real Target

August 13, 2012, 1:54 pm

Like Bush in 2000, Ryan has a completely undeserved reputation in the media as a bluff, honest guy, in Ryan’s case supplemented by a reputation as a serious policy wonk. None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air – huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned. See Matt Miller for more.

So whence comes the Ryan reputation? As I said in my last post, it’s because many commentators want to tell a story about US politics that makes them feel and look good – a story in which both parties are equally at fault in our national stalemate, and in which said commentators stand above the fray. This story requires that there be good, honest, technically savvy conservative politicians, so that you can point to these politicians and say how much you admire them, even if you disagree with some of their ideas; after all, unless you lavish praise on some conservatives, you don’t come across as nobly even-handed.

…

So that’s the constituency Romney is targeting: not a large segment of the electorate, but a few hundred at most editors, reporters, programmers, and pundits. His hope is that Ryan’s unjustified reputation for honest wonkery will transfer to the ticket as a whole.

Paul Ryan’s Budget Priorities: Transforming Government

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday August 13, 2012 8:15 am

In fact, the Romney campaign has said that they would never reduce defense spending below 4% of GDP, which means the entire discretionary budget would have to have a negative rate of spending. That includes everything the government does outside of mandatory spending and things like Social Security with a dedicated funding stream. Ryan would also slash spending on mandatory programs for the poor. In fact, in his initial budget, 2/3 of all the spending cuts would hit the poor directly.

Tim Murphy has all of this in chart form. The bottom line is this: Ryan’s priorities have nothing to do with balancing the federal budget. His budget doesn’t do so for over 20 years. He voted for every single budget-busting program of the Bush Administration and he believes in federal spending to support his home district. Balancing the budget is a convenient crutch for his real goal – changing the way government works entirely. He thinks the poor don’t have a safety net, but a hammock. He wants to sever that hammock from the tree, and sever the relationship between government and its neediest citizens. He wants to either privatize government services or end them. Period, end of sentence.

But it’s not just Ryan and Romney, these are Democratic goals too and they’d much rather talk about who cuts less than about massive income inequality, stratification of social class, permanent unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and the humanitarian needs of the 99.9% of us who keep you in your phoney baloney jobs you ungrateful bootlickers.

The Great and Narrow Fiscal Debate of 2012

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday August 13, 2012 9:35 am

(T)his is not only a debate we shouldn’t be having at a time of mass unemployment, but a debate the public doesn’t want in a time of mass unemployment. The media have done yeoman work in trying to conflate “the economy” with “the deficit” – and considering that we could actually use a higher deficit right now for stimulative reasons, this is partially true – but that’s not the debate we’re going to be having. We’re going to talk about what the role of government should play 20 years in the future, rather than what it should play right now when we have an unemployment crisis.

…

It’s a choice between one distinct ideology, and a technocratic center which doesn’t reflect the core belief of the party as it has been defined over the years. The part of the debate that believes Social Security needs to be adequate to provide for retirement and not cut from its already puny benefit – that will not get a hearing. The part of the debate that says that Medicare and Medicaid do a better job of controlling health costs than private insurance, and that they should be expanded and joined for a single-payer program, starting with allowing people to buy in to Medicare – that will not get a hearing. The part of the debate that says that in a time of mass unemployment, government must be the spender of last resort to increase aggregate demand and create jobs – that will not get a hearing. This great deception, that the pole of the debate represented by the Administration represents the [left]ward pole, will only facilitate a post-election move to cut safety net spending, as the “wise responsible middle course.”

I don’t think that the electoral outcome will give running room for policies to deal with mass unemployment – that seems like a rabbit out of the hat. It seems much more likely it will give running room for the policies that would naturally arise out of a two-month debate where one side wants to end a substantial portion of the safety net, and the other side merely wants to cut it in the spirit of compromise as part of a grand bargain.

Erskine Bowles Heaps Praise on Paul Ryan in 2011 Video

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday August 14, 2012 7:35 am

Just avail yourself of Erskine Bowles, floated as a potential replacement at Treasury in an Obama second term, the “liberal” half of the Bowles-Simpson catfood commission, singing the praises of Paul Ryan, a year after Ryan rounded up his fellow House Republicans on the commission and denied the votes necessary to pass the deficit plan because they would have been considered a violation of the Norquist pledge, as a tax increase.

Afghan policeman kills 10 fellow policemen

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press

3 hrs ago

An Afghan police officer killed at least 10 of his fellow officers on Saturday, a day after six U.S. service members were gunned down by their Afghan partners in summer violence that has both international and Afghan forces questioning who is friend or foe.

…

A day earlier, two Afghans shot and killed six American service members Friday in neighboring Helmand province in the south where insurgents have wielded their greatest influence.

In the first attack, an Afghan police officer shot and killed three Marines after sharing a pre-dawn meal with them in the volatile Sangin district, according to Afghan officials.

…

Then at around 9 p.m. Friday in the Garmser district farther south, an Afghan working on an installation shared by coalition and Afghan forces shot and killed three other international troops, said Maj. Lori Hodge, a spokesman for the coalition in Kabul. A U.S. defense official confirmed the three victims also were Americans.

…

Attacks where Afghan security forces or insurgents disguised in their uniforms kill foreign troops have spiked with four such attacks in the past week. There have been 26 such attacks so far this year, resulting in 34 deaths, according to the U.S.-led coalition.

Calendar Table

Mostly an experiment-

Calendar Table

Spoiler Alert!

Acutally it’s been on live for a while now and streaming on the web, but I prefer to ‘enjoy’ it in the same manner as my readers, tape delayed.

Which I wouldn’t have minded so much if they’d just published an accurate schedule.

I got to see most of my weird and wacky favorites at least once and caught some of the pivotal moments though I didn’t let it dominate my life.  Title IX really showed its impact at these Olympics making up for some disappointments in areas of traditional strength.

In addition to being more entertaining, the men are grim relentless joyless competitors.

We are once again reminded that most subjective judging is thoroughly corrupt and that amateur umpires and referees make mistakes too often for all of them to be deliberate.  Again we see the demonstrated jingoistic bias and shallow understanding of traditional USA television, but…

Sometimes you get to see something surprising or inspirational or amusing that you’d be disappointed to have missed.  79 Nations got some medal, 50 got at least 1 Gold.

London 2012: A Gold Medal, or An Also-Ran?

The International Herald Tribune

August 12, 2012

There was anonymity. A U.S. shooter, Kimberly Rhode, 33, won her fifth medal at her fifth straight Olympics. No American has ever done that in an individual event, but almost nobody noticed. Her gun was stolen from her car after the 2008 Olympics, then she had a breast cancer scare. Is she on for 2016? You bet.

…

There were breakthroughs. Oscar Pistorius ran on prosthetic legs and Caster Semenya won the silver medal in the women’s 800 meters. And the Earth continued to spin on its axis. Women boxed for the first time. Three holdout nations – Qatar, Brunei and Saudi Arabia – finally gave up their gender apartheid in sports and allowed women to compete.

…

“The I.O.C. is making a huge fuss about her being here – their spin is that Olympic sports are opening the door for women, especially Arabic women. Which is kind of a joke,” the observer said. “I think these girls are being propped up by the I.O.C. as their token Islamic female participants.”

I’d really rather skip the Superbowl Spectaculars in favor of rewatching my dvred Bissel Kitty Halftime shows, but they’re not going to be talking about that at the coffee machine tomorrow.

Rule Britannia: Olympic closing ceremony explained

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press

22 minutes ago

Organizers say the ceremony will be a celebration of British music “from Elgar to Adele.” Many viewers will have heard of Adele, the big-voiced singer who won six Grammys with her album “21.” Edward Elgar was the composer of the “Pomp and Circumstance” marches and the “Enigma Variations.” His composition “Nimrod,” regarded as quintessentially English, was played at the opening ceremony of the London Games – one of several elements linking the first night of the Olympics with the last.

From there, the ceremony explodes in a kaleidoscope of musicians and eras – from 1960s Mods with The Who, to the 1990s “girl power” of the Spice Girls.

…

British humor has a big role in the closing ceremony, with an appearance by Eric Idle of iconoclastic comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Expect surreal visual juxtapositions as he sings “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” the jaunty but sardonic ditty from the film “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

London Olympics: Preview of closing ceremony

By Lisa Dillman, Los Angeles Times

August 12, 2012

Like the opening ceremony, much of what will happen is being kept under wraps. But a few details have trickled out, and some interesting people have been spotted around town, so we can make a few educated guesses.

How else can you explain the rumored appearance of Muse and One Direction?

…

Annie Lennox, Kate Bush and Kaiser Chiefs, if they appear, could help the gala nudge into bronze-medal territory, up from the DNF zone.

…

Exact details are kept secret, but expected to perform are Adele, George Michael, the Who, Muse, Spice Girls, Pet Shop Boys, Annie Lennox and Fatboy Slim. No word yet if Sir Elton will be there.

There was one act I heard they were unable to book-

More Spoilers.

We close our final day of competition with the Men’s Volleyball Final.  We’ll be having a separate piece on the Closing Ceremony tonight.

Broadcast Schedule

All this is sourced through the NBC Olympics broadcast schedule.

Competitions designated by (Medal) will award winners that day.  ‘all’ means not specified.  Sometimes NBC especially does mashups and doesn’t include event or competitor information.  Elimination means no round robin, one and done.

These schedules are a place for you to make sure you don’t miss a sport you like and share your observations.  Have fun today!