stupid behavior Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

American Stupidity

I’ve indicated that I’ll be voting for Barack Obama for President. No, I don’t think he’s the best thing since sliced bread or anything, but his views are more in line with mine than John McCain’s are.

But then, stuff happens that tend to solidify my support for Obama, in this case two e-mails from the same person who works in my building Friday afternoon. One was titled “American Stupidity?” and starts off:

A lot of Americans have become so insulated from reality that they imagine that America can suffer defeat without any inconvenience to themselves.
Pause a moment, reflect back.
These events are actual events from history.
They really happened!!!
Do you remember?
1. 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by a Muslim male extremist.

It continues on noting events from the Munich Olympics killings to the death of Daniel Pearl, all done by…you guessed it, “Muslim male extremists.”
Then there’s a pro-profiling rant, followed by:

According to The Book of Revelations (sic):
The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

As Snopes notes, such a description is false on at least two levels. The Book of Revelation (singular) has no such description, and it could not be describing a Muslim man since The Book was written more than 400 YEARS BEFORE ISLAM!

And Now:
For the award winning Act of Stupidity Of all times the People of America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the Planet — The Presidency of the United states of America .. A Male of Muslim descent who is the most extremely liberal Senator in Congress (in other words an extremist) and in his 40’s.

Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their Power of Reason ???
I’m sorry but I refuse to take a chance on the ‘unknown’ candidate Obama…
As the writer of the award winning story ‘Forest Gump’ so aptly put it,’Stupid Is As Stupid Does’

This combination of xenophobic fear-mongering, mixed with a bastardization of my Christian faith, really infuriated me. I became desperately desirous to provide a list of a dozen non-Muslims (James Earl Ray, Ted Bundy, the Columbine kids, Timothy McVeigh, et al) who either killed a major figure or committed multiple slayings in the last four decades, but I resisted. Instead, I wrote back: “Obama is not a Muslim”. Then I quickly get a SECOND e-mail:

This one had the usual blather “proving” Obama was a Muslim (disputed by Snopes here, and “ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran. (Snopes addresses that here.)

I suppose the worse thing about this is the fact that the e-mailer considers herself a Christian. Her reason for voting for W. and for now supporting Sarah Palin has to do with their “Christian values”. Well, in my lectionary for this past week, one reading was from Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments. Verse 16: “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” In an electronic age, one’s neighbor is just about everyone.

Now, add to the mix the shocking revelation (chortle) that race actually matters to the American voter, and it’s all mads me a little bit cranky, but also even more likely to vote for Obama than I was before.

So thanks, LJ. Your e-mails have brought me much clarity, but possibly not the conclusion you sought. Oh, and please stop spreading lies.
ROG

Triskaidekaphobic? Not me.

No, I can have “bad luck” any time, usually brought on myself.

1. I went to the local comic book store on Free Comic Book Day last month and bought a book called Persepolis, actually The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, which is about that Iranian girl talking about the period before and after the rise of the Ayatollah Khomenini. It was made into an Oscar-nominated film in the past year that I meant to see but didn’t; it’ll be out on DVD June 24. See, FCBD CAN generate sales.

Generally, I don’t bring books with me when I travel, but I was so intrigued about reading this particular book that I took it with me when I went to my work conference the day after FCBD. Naturally, I left it at the hotel. I realized this even before I got home and called the hotel to ask them if they could send it to me, and they replied quickly. What I didn’t know was that the charge for sending me the book would be $30 – at least $5 more than I paid for the book in the first place. The actual shipping cost was $10.40, but there was a COD charge. And it would have been $1.60 more if I had paid in cash, for then the post office would have had to pay to buy a money order to send to the hotel. Now I could have just blown it off, and bought a new copy of the book, but since I had initiated them sending it to me, I felt it was my error and that I should just eat the extra cost.

2. My friend Uthaclena came up to help me fix my computer. We went out and bought some wine after dinner and I put one of the bottles in the freezer. The next day I opened the freezer door to find that the cork had popped out of said bottle with slushy alcohol across the bottom of the freezer. Fortunately, it spilled only about 10% of the volume. I sat the wine on the counter and it reconstituted into the potable beverage. I suppose it could have been worse; the bottle could have exploded, with broken glass everywhere.

Oh, I must thank my friend Lori in Florida, who I knew from when we went to church together about a decade ago. Because of my injury, she was kind enough to let me dictate content to her over the phone, type it, then e-mail it to me. She did this for about seven posts, including today’s, and I am most grateful.
ROG

Low Tidings, Indeed

Someone sent me a story called Why I Should Be Our Next President by Yo Mama Bin Barack, which you can find here, and if not, I can e-mail it to you. It’s racist and sexist swill – references to jive talk and especially b-slapping abound – which did not surprise me. What did confound me is that it wasn’t in some right-wing manifesto. It appeared in The Independent, a Pennysaver-type of adzine publication for the east end of Long Island, including the chichi Hamptons. This is the electronic version, of course, but there is a print version every Wednesday.

I was willing to suggest the piece was an aberration – I’d never seen the publication before – until I also found this thing by someone named Karen Fredericks:

In case you can’t read it, the explanatory balloon on the left talks about how some women felt betrayed by Oprah’s support for Barack Obama, rather than the woman, Hillary Clinton. The word balloon on the right reads:
Lord have mercy. I didn’t get this rich by being stupid. A female president might improve the lives of women. Then they might have something better to do than watch my dopey television program.
Oprah no dummy.
Besides that Obama gets my va-jay-jay all tingly.

Within 24 hours, the Barack story, written by publisher Rick Murphy, was replaced by this:
Apology
By Rick Murphy
Our Low Tidings “humor” column that appeared in last week’s issue of The Independent that was supposed to satirically address the increasing hostility between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was ill conceived and offensive. The Independent, a multicultural employer with a 13-year history of diversity, apologizes for this lapse of judgment. The column has been removed from our website and a complete apology will be printed in next week’s issue.

Except that the original link to the story was still working this morning. We all say things we oughtn’t but this apparent attempt at “humor” seemed egregiously wrong-headed, and not very good business, to boot.

Here’s the Newsday article. It cites Jerry Della Femina as publisher. Ad guru Della Femina also has a regular column, which is more in line with the usual liberal bashing (Alec Baldwin, et al.), but with at least a sense of propriety.

Meanwhile, Channel 7 news (WABC-TV in NYC) was scheduled to carry a segment about the offending article at 5pm yesterday.

Here’s the contact info for the publisher:
The Independent News, 74 Montauk Highway, Suite 19, East Hampton, NY 11937
Phone: 631-324-2500 Business Fax: 631-324-6496 Editorial Fax: 631-324-2351
Rick Murphy, Editor – rmurphy@indyeastend.com
James J. Mackin, Publisher – jim@indyeastend.com
***
Meanwhile, also annoying me is that idiot church group stalking Heath Ledger’s funeral because he was in Brokeback Mountain. These people give Christianity a bad name. But WABC seems to be LOVING covering his death, which they’re running as a local story, which, I suppose, it is.

ROG

Roger Answers Your Questions, Gordon and Rick

Gordon, whose birthday is the day before mine, albeit ~~a couple~~ ~~several~~ many years later, asks:

1)Who IS your hero?
Actually, it’s anyone who speaks truth to power. But the person who’s moved me the most this year is Bill Moyers on PBS, who used to work in LBJ’s administration. He’s talked about the fallacies of the war in Iraq, taken on Big Media in a BIG way, and speaks about religion and faith and race in a wonderful, open-minded manner. Did you see Keith Olbermann on his show recently? Maybe I’m reading into it, but I think Keith, who I like, BTW, is a bit in awe of Bill, because they are in the same “town crier” business, but Moyers has been doing it a lot longer.

2) In this age of mega media-conglomeration, when the major studios are crying poverty during the Writer’s Strike…what do you suggest we (as citizens) do?
Use less. Interesting sentence, that, because take away the space and it’s useless, which is how I think lots of people are feeling about struggling against the mass everything. And it is a struggle. But to the degree possible, go to the locally-owned movie theater. See the local productions. Watch Moyers. As to the specifics of the writer’s strike, don’t watch the network shows online, don’t buy DVDs (if you really must see the complete Stargate again, rent it.)
Did you see the Story of Stuff? If you do, I think you’ll be less likely to want to buy the crap that we’re being told that we MUST have. It’s all part of the same struggle. On the same news cycle that we read that retailers are hoping for a late pre-Christmas shopping surge, we see that credit card debt is getting higher than ever.
They put out individual seasons of our favorite TV show and we buy that. Then they put out the box set with “extras”, expecting us to buy that too. Don’t. The music industry works the same way; no wonder that many people are “ripping off” the record companies. The system seems to be designed, per planned obsolesce and/or bait and switch, to make you buy the same thing again and again. Don’t let ’em.

Before I get to Gordon’s last question, I want to address this query by George (Rick) Lewis: Why are the daytime talk shows unaffected by the writer’s strike??? Well, I did not know that they weren’t affected. Poking around the Internet, I’ve read that the producers have enough scripts to get through January. And at least during the last strike 20 years ago, ~~scabs~~ non-union “scribes” were hired to pick up the slack. But the particulars of who is or is not covered is not my area of expertise; go ask Mark Evanier.

3) Why do people insist on playing/listening to “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer”? That is one of the most annoying songs ever written.

(Plus, traumatic incidents should never be comedy fodder).

Let me take on the parenthetical aside first. Trauma is often comedy fodder. I understand the feeding the Christians to the lions was considered great fun; well, not to the Christians, I suppose.
Seriously, there are people who think that horror movies where the cliched young adults meet their demise is high camp; I tend not to watch them myself, but that’s what I’ve heard.
One traumatic event I thought was TERRIBLY funny was the end of the movie, The Life of Brian – a crucifixion! And the victims are singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”! A song so strong that it made its way into the musical Spamalot. So I think the eye-gouging of the Three Stooges or Wile E. Coyote’s Acme bomb blowing up before he gets the Road Runner (meep meep) definitely have its fans.

As to the Elmo and Patsy song itself, I’ll admit that I actually purchased the single. (For you youngsters, a single, for about a half century starting in the 1950s, was a seven-inch piece of musical vinyl with a large hole in the middle, to be played at 45 revolutions per minute on something called a “record player”.) And I liked it because it was, to my mind, a lovely little deconstruction of all the cloying sentimentality of the season. I never thought it would turn out to be a perennial favorite, and I don’t listen to it much any more, mostly because I’ve become bored with it. (And the remake that you hear on the radio is not, to my mind, as good as the less-polished version that I purchased.) In any event, Gordon, it may please you to know that others share your sentiment.
***
Confidential to GP: I’m not sure that I’ve had a breakup as devastating as yours with Liar Ex (who told many lies). But the cumulative effect on me of “love gone bad” (title of a Chris Clark song, not bad grammar) has had its impact. Were you ever dumped by an e-mail so circuitous that it took you three reads to get the message? I have. I’m just sayin’. But if I went through the litany, we’d both be way too depressed.

ROG

March Rambling

Yesterday, I was walking home from the drugstore carrying a couple bags, including a couple prescriptions plus bottles of ginger ale and cranberry juice for Carol, who had a couple wisdom teeth removed yesterday morning. This guy in his car yells out his window, something “doing with those f*****’ bags?”, looking at me. Then he giggled and drove away. I’m not sure why, but I’ve been a victim of that “yell and drive” before, in Albany, at least twice with a racial overtone. Sure I can ignore it, but I’d lying if I told you it didn’t bother me, more as a reflection of the inanity of human beings, rather than any real damage done to me.

Still, if I weren’t carrying items that slowed me down, I might have tried to catch up with this dude and ask him why he was being such a [end place for the digestive tract for an equine].

In fact, one time when I was a target of yell and drive, I was on my bicycle, and I did go after the car, which caught a traffic light. I got up to the car, pounded my fist on the trunk once, then pulled over to the passenger side, where the yeller was. He got all “hey, man, only kidding, man, it was a joke, man” on me. I said nothing as the car pulled away. That WAS fun, though.
***
There is this quite lovely woman I’ve seen on the bus. She is, as they say, “a woman of a certain age”, with gray hair. She had age lines but they looked (really) good on her. A couple days ago, I see her and she’s dyed her hair brown. Oddly, it made her look older, for the gray hairs, her face earned; the brunette ones, not so much.
***
High lead levels found in some Albany schools. This is not only somewhat distressing, but also a bit surprising. One of the schools is brand new (opened in January 2007) and is the school Lydia is likely to attend in a couple years.
***
There was an excellent story, written by a sixth grader, in the local paper about her peanut allergy. we’re going to make copies so that Lydia and the people around her will have a better idea what Lydia is/will be going through.
***
Clutter and mess trump clean and neat: a story after my own desk, er, heart.
***
Here’s a useful caffeine reference.
***
My old pal David Brickman has one of his photos, “View of Arbor Hill Neighborhood looking North from Lark Street 1998,” which was purchased by the Albany Institute of History and Art last spring, now on exhibit in their “entry gallery,” where works from the vast permanent collection are showcased. If you are within reach, you can go to the Institute and have a look. Or, use the link to see the image on his website.
***
My daughter woke up screaming at 4 am yesterday from a nightmare. SHE went back to sleep; I didn’t. Then last night, I stayed up watching basketball (I got 3 out of 4 -Memphis won by 1 – ouch) until 12:30 am. Need caffeine. More tomorrow.

ROG