Category Archives: Pop culture

Me and the Dalai Lama

I usually don’t touch politics on this blog, but I do touch on questions about the nature of reality. I note with interest that in the looking-glass world of United States politics, nearly all politicians lean towards authoritarianism, conservatives seem like liberals, and the few anti-authoritarian liberals run marginalized campaigns with no hope of success. According to the Political Compass Web site, all but two of the current U.S. presidential candidates are conservatives, and even Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are not particularly liberal or anti-authoritarian. Unreal. Link.

For the record, my political compass scores are as follows: Economic Left/Right: -9.62 (on a scale of -10/Left to 10/Right); and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.31 (on a scale of -10/Libertarian to 10/Authoritarian). In other words, according to the Political Compass people, my political position is far closer to the Dalai Lama than to any of the current U.S. presidential candidates. This helps to explain why U.S. politics makes me feel as if I’ve gone through the looking glass — and no wonder I so rarely preach political sermons. On the other hand, if the Dalai Lama ever needs a running mate, I’d be up for it.

Not paying attention

Julius Lester, one of my favorite bloggers, published a post with an email message from me on his blog. Lester has been wondering why there are no big protests against the Iraq War, and thinking back to the big protests against the Vietnam War. A first post by Lester (link) prompted a response from a reader named Nancy Ewalt (link) which led to my thoughts about why there isn’t any organized protest against the Iraq War. (I guess I wasn’t paying attention, and didn’t notice when he posted this back on August 1.)

Even if you aren’t interested in the topic, you should still check out Lester’s blog. His thoughts about political issues from racism to war to media manipulation are worth reading, and his photos are pretty cool. Link to his blog.

Art on the highway, part 2

On the way back from Maine, I stopped at the southbound rest area at Kennebunk to look at another of the William Wegman murals installed by the Maine Turnpike Authority. The mural is most definitely not what you’d expect to see in a highway rest area. At the end of this short (1:32) video, I ask myself a question that was implicit in a comment on the previous post on the Wegman highway murals….

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Art on the highway

The Maine Turnpike Authority decided to install works of art by William Wegman in several rest areas. When I was driving north today, I stopped at the Kennebunk rest area to check out one of those artworks. (0:42)

Press reports on the murals: The Portland Press-Herald reports that some turnpike authorities would have preferred “a picture of a lighthouse or Mount Katahadin” — whereas the Bangor Daily News offers a quote from a maintenance worker who likes the mural.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

My stupid alter ego, Dan, is still away visiting his aunt and uncle. Another glorious day of ranting and raving on this otherwise tedious and uninteresting blog! And here’s what’s on the mind of Mr. Crankypants today….

What’s with all the overly loud music these days? You know what I mean. Like the New Bedford Whaling Musuem sponsoring monthly gatherings called After Hours, with the stated purpose “to socialize with old friends and meet new ones,” except the music is so loud you can’t socialize. Mr. Crankypants went to “After Hours” a few months ago, and tried to have a conversation with an old friend, but the music was so loud we gave up trying to yell at each other over it. Then an attractive young woman started eyeing Mr. Crankypants, and wandered over to say something, but alas whatever she had to say was completely unintelligible due to the loud music. Mr. Crankypants’s Significant Other said that the pretty young woman wasn’t eyeing anyone, she just had indigestion, and all she was saying was, “Got any antacid?” Which just proves the point — the music was so loud that Significant Other couldn’t hear anything at all.

It’s not just the Whaling Museum, of course. There’s the restaurant up the street that has live music on Mondays and Thursdays. It’s pretty good music, but there is no way you can carry on conversation over your dinner, unless you ask to be seated in the very back room, and even then you have to shout.

At least that restaurant has good music. Down the street from Mr. Crankypants’s apartment is another restaurant that has bad outdoor music on summer evenings. This particular restaurant aims at attracting the over-55 crowd, so the music is a banal mix of insipid 1950’s rock-n-roll and arthritic easy-listening hits (originated by dinosaurs like Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan), sung by middle-aged crooners with potbellies accompanied by karaoke machines. They crank up the volume so loud that Mr. Crankypants can hear the middle-aged crooners two blocks away. When you go down to look at the restaurant, you see a few lost souls huddled at the tables farthest away from the speakers, their hair blowing back from the volume. There’s no way anyone could be carrying on a conversation over that music. Clearly, it’s the sort of restaurant you go to when you don’t want to talk with your date, or when you have to take your unpleasant relatives out to dinner — you surely don’t go there for the high quality of the music.

The Baby Boomers started this trend of overly loud music. They ruined their ears when they were young by listening to too much loud music. Now that they’ve gone deaf, they keep turning up the volume. Which will make everyone in the succeeding generations deaf. It’s probably a good time to invest in companies that make amplifiers and speakers, for theirs is going to be a growth industry.

Two good links

  1. Carol and I aren’t married, so I call her mother my mother-out-law. And my mother-out-law sent me a link to an incredible online resource, the Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative (CDRI). What is CDRI? — “CDRI has assembled an impressive digital image collection that features woodcuts, coins, maps, postcards, sermons, and other ephemera.” For example, here’s a postcard of First Universalist in New Bedford (First Universalist merged with First Unitarian in 1930, and the old church is now an art gallery).
  2. Everett Hoagland, former poet laureate of New Bedford, turned me on to a great news story about the Presidential Scholars who, when they met George Bush, presented him with a petition asking him to cease illegal renditions, and to remove his signing statement to the McCain anti-torture bill. One student’s account of the event is here, and Amy Goodman’s interview with two of the students is here. Apparently, Mr. Bush was a bit nonplussed when presented with the students’ petition. Regardless of their political position, I am glad to hear that our educational system is indeed educating young people for democracy by teaching them how to genuinely engage with our elected leaders. Gives me hope for the future.

July 4th. Woo, hoo.

It’s July 4th, Independence Day. Reading the news usually depresses me. But I managed to find good news in a couple of unlikely news stories.

Today I read an article by Niko Koppel in the New York Times titled “A Country’s Past Is Unearthed, and Comes into Focus.” It’s an article about an archaeological dig at 190 High Street in Philadelphia, right next to the home of the Liberty Bell, a mansion that was the home for presidents George Washington and John Adams when the federal capitol was still in Philadelphia. I knew that George Washington had slaves, but I didn’t know that he went to such great lengths to hold on to them….

Early efforts to end slavery in Pennsylvania resulted in the passage of the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, which allowed Washington, as a citizen of Virginia, to keep his slaves here for six months, at which point they were entitled to freedom. But Washington circumvented the Pennsylvania law, Mr. Lawler [a historian with the Independence Hall Association] said, by rotating the slaves across state lines…. Link.

Yuck. I already know that many of our presidents have feet of clay, so I suppose it’s good for me to remember that the trend began with George Washington. On the positive side, it’s good to know that Pennsylvania passed abolition legislation as early as 1780.

Even better, the news story reveals that two of Washington’s slaves were able to escape from that presidential mansion in Philadelphia. Let freedom ring!

Then I turned to the arts section of the paper, where I read an appreciation of Beverly Sills, the opera star who died on Monday. It’s sad that Sills died, but I loved reading about how she appeared on TV in the 1970’s with comedian Carol Burnett and popular singers Eydie Gormie and Dinah Shore — and how the four of them argued about who was who’s best friend. Beverly Sills not only had a gorgeous voice, but she helped the TV-viewing public realize that “high culture” was a whole lot of fun….

Watching Ms. Sills schmoozing with her friends on television, hearing her sing comic duets with Ms. Burnett one moment and lyrical Donizetti arias the next, had a major impact on American culture. Millions of viewers who had assumed that opera was an elitist art form for bloated divas pretending to be lovesick adolescents experienced little epiphanies before their television sets…. Link.

What a great moment for America, as American-born and American-trained Beverly Sills showed both the intellectuals and the average TV-viewer that Art Is Fun. Makes me proud to be an American.

Coincidence? No!

Mr. Crankypants here, Dan’s evil alter ego — back to educate and enlighten you. While Dan is too much of a scaredy-cat to write about politics, Mr. Crankypants loves to tell you what’s wrong with the U.S. of A.

Generally speaking, Mr. Crnakypants does not believe in conspiracy theories and the like, but the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico is well known to be true (Mr. Crankypants knows it’s true because he read it in a book once when he was ten years old, and he has believed it ever since).

Today, Mr. Crankypants received the following email message from a mysterious, unidentified sender (probably a secret government agent):

Many will recall that, on July 8, 1947, witnesses claimed [It’s not a claim, it’s the truth –Mr. C.] an unidentified object, with five aliens aboard, crashed onto a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

This is a well-known incident which many say has long been covered up by the United States Air Force and the federal government.

However, what you may NOT know, is that in the month of March 1948, exactly nine months later, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Condoleezza Rice, and Dan Quayle were all born.

This information may clear up a lot of questions.

Indeed, this information opens many new avenues of exploration. For example, this reveals that the cover-up is even more extensive than we had thought. Remember that George W. Bush claims to be born in July, 1946; Cheney in January, 1941; Rumsfeld in July 1932; O’Reilly in September, 1949; Limbaugh in January, 1951; Rice in November, 1954; and Quayle in February, 1947. Clearly, the alien conspiracy must reach the highest and lowest levels of government, involving falsification of birth and school records, insertions of birth announcements in newspapers, etc.

On the other hand, Al Gore was in fact born in March of 1948. Or was he? The falsification of records has extended as far as trying smear Gore with the accusation of being alien offspring! Either that, or he was injected with something that allowed him to create PowerPoint presentations on climate change before PowerPoint had even been invented.

Mr. Crankypants would only add that March, 1948, is the month the Hells Angels was founded. Coincidence? Hardly!

Email [curse | blessing], part three

The third installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively. First installment.

I know this is a minor matter, but when it comes to email I’ve been thinking about….

Salutations and endings

We all pretty much know how to write proper letters. If it’s a formal business letter, you start out with “Dear Ms. Lastname,” then you type or print the body of the letter, and you end with “Sincerely,” followed by your signature. If it’s an informal note, you can start with “Dear Firstname,” the body can be printed or handwritten, and you end with “Yours truly, Me.”

None of us really knows how to write proper email messages, because as yet there are no widely accepted standards. I usually begin all my email messages with “Dear So-and-so,” which won’t offend the traditionalists, but which probably seems hopelessly stuffed-shirt to those with easier manners. I usually end my email messages “Cheers, Dan,” which will neither please nor offend the traditionalists, but which probably seems hopelessly boring to many others.

Yet when it comes to church business, in United States Unitarian Universalist circles at least, I do see faint signs of some standards emerging.

For longer email messages:– More often than not, salutations begin with “Dear…” and here in the United States it is usually considered acceptable to address someone by first name even if you don’t know them. When sending email messages to more than one recipient, I most often see “Dear all,” or less often “Dear friends,” (the latter is my preference, at least in church circles). Endings seem to be less formal than salutations. I never see “Sincerely” or “Yours truly.” I do see “All the best,” “Cheers,” and more specialized endings such as “Thanks,” or “My two cents worth.”

For very short email messages, or for routine replies:– For salutations “Hi,” is perfectly adequate, or no salutation at all. No ending is needed; just typing your name seems acceptable. (By “very short email” I mean maybe half a dozen lines or less.)

What are your perceptions of acceptable standards for email salutations and endings? I’m mostly interested in church business, but I’d be curious to know if other subcultures are evolving their own standards.

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing] part four