Chappelle show classic: black white supremacist

Clayton Bigsby: "If you have hate in your heart, let it out."

Bonus: "The negus ruled Ethiopia until the coup of 1974" from the national spelling bee and the teacher that Boondocks spoofed.

Eric

Boy/Girl Scouts with guns

Our military's non-warfighting activities are sometimes characterized as "Peace Corps with guns", admiringly by some (like me), derisively by others who understandably value the military's combat role above all else and view "operations other than war" as distractions.

I believe the better characterization of the military is Boy/Girl Scouts with guns. I served with a number of former boy scouts. I often thought that the Boy Scouts provided them exceptional preparation as young future soldiers, from the practical skills training to the uniformed heirarchical organization to the social values propagated. Only second to the practical skills training, the community service aspect of the Boy Scouts is similar to the military's community service focus.

Their disaster relief actions are underreported by the media, but our military stationed in Japan are in action helping our ally and their neighbors following the earthquake and tsunami. See the Fox News story and "Operation Tomodachi" updates from the Marines in Okinawa and Air Force at Yokota Air Base.

Eric

Rest in peace, Ms. Schmitt

I found out from the March 2011 Stuy alumni magazine that "Debra Schmitt, who taught English at Stuyvesant in the 1990s, died in January in California. She is survived by a former husband and a child." Here is an obituary.

I was in Ms. Schmitt's class during freshman year at Stuy. The sight of a slinky attractive teacher stretching herself out on her desk during her lesson was fairly exciting for a teenage boy.

The official determination is that Ms. Schmitt committed suicide. R.I.P..

Eric

Thoughts of the day

On Friday in Japan, an 8.9 earthquake and a tsunami hit northeast Japan. That's the most powerful earthquake I can recall. The tsunami was devastating, but Japan seems to have withstood the earthquake exceptionally well except for a failing nuclear power plant that may be steadily developing into a Chernobyl-level disaster. There's little that can be done to protect against a tsunami, but the failure of the nuclear power plant to prepare for the earthquake is a surprise. When even a nation as exceptionally well-organized and prepared for specifically this disaster as Japan misses something so crucial, it shows our helplessness to human fallibility. When the 1 flaw in an otherwise strong structure finally cracks, the 1 disaster that happens overshadows the 999 disasters that were avoided.

I like new Sunday Fox cartoon Bob's Burgers. It's endearing. The show stars H. Jon Benjamin's voice (Coach McGuirk in Home Movies, Ben in Dr. Katz, Carl in Family Guy) as husband, father, and burger restaurant owner Bob. I like that Bob is a hard worker doing his best to care for his quirky family. They're not strangers to each other - the family is close and everyone is invested in the family business. The show pokes fun at its namesake but reaffirms the family bond and retains a good heart, the kind of heart that Simpsons and Family Guy started with. The older Fox cartoons are still funny but they've turned cynical and mean with family members who are separated from each other in the Married ... with Children vein.

The cute State Farm agent in the new-boyfriend/girlfriend commercial is actual State Farm agent Yvonne Solis. The peppy cute office girl in the USPS flate rate box commercial is actress Benita Robledo.

Roissy nails it again. I want him to be wrong, but when he gets right the things I can verify, denial is difficult. Related: Escape from Friend Zone game - amusing, but near as I can figure, you can't win. I guess the lesson is play a different game. Related chilling (or depressing) thought: 'court' = game. Traci said she didn't know I was engaged in a "court". When she said that, the utter dismissal of my soulful investment in her angered me. I didn't believe her. That's how far off the mark I was. I don't know for sure whether Traci's concept of 'court' was game, but I know what I did with her was not a 'court' in her mind. The problem is nothing I remember from the experience argues against Traci equating 'court' with game, whereas my actions and her reactions are well-accounted for by game proponents, 'friend zone' included. Funny but true.

A discount bus returning to Chinatown from the Mohegan Sun casino had a Final Destination type crash at 5:30 AM. The bus slid on its side into a highway sign stanchion at the window level, at which the stanchion sliced through the front to rear of the bus. 14 passengers died and all the other passengers and driver were injured, many badly injured with severe head trauma and/or traumatic amputations. I've taken a discount Chinatown bus to/from the Mohegan Sun, though I don't recall if I used a World Wide Tours bus. The bus driver blames the accident on a tractor trailer clipping his bus. The police are investigating. I wonder, though, if at 5:30 in the morning, the bus driver has any contributory negligence such as falling asleep at the wheel, speeding, and drifting.

The 1st half of 2003's Man on Fire is one of the best love stories ever portrayed on film by two excellent actors, Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning, playing off each other with nuance. It's not a romantic sexual love story, but theirs is a love story nonetheless. Their carefully developed love story is used to explain the 1-dimensional revenge story in the 2nd half of the film that may as well be a different movie.

Eric

David Brooks: The New Humanism

Looks like an interesting article. I should read it more carefully later.

Eric