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Posted on 10.30.10 by Danny Glover @ 7:01 pm
Art is in the eye of the beholder, and in the eye of a redneck who has a pumpkin in his pistol sights, the making of the art is a wonder to behold: The truly amazing part of this video is the shooter’s steady hand and pinpoint accuracy in shot after shot. I wish had that kind of marksmanship. Filed under: Holidays and Hunting & Guns and Just For Laughs and Rednecks and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.30.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:40 pm
To hear media elites tell it, this election season is the nastiest of all time. But the creative folks at Reason.tv have a much deeper sense of history. They remember the rhetoric of the 1800 presidential election between revered founding fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Now Reason.tv has given voice to those personal barbs between Adams and Jefferson in a modern media format — the attack ad. Remember that the next time someone whines that civility is dead in American politics. If civility ever existed at all, it died long before the Tea Party Election of 2010. Filed under: History and News & Politics and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.29.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:30 pm
The Great Recession is now officially history — and part of journalistic history. This month the Associated Press added the term to the AP Stylebook, which is gospel in media circles. Here’s how AP defines the negative economic milestone: “The recession that began in December 2007 and became the longest and deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It occurred after losses on subprime mortgages battered the U.S. housing market. The National Bureau of Economic Research said it officially ended in June 2009, having lasted 18 months.” Doesn’t that make you feel so much less depressed and recessed? Filed under: Business and History and Media and News & Politics Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.28.10 by Danny Glover @ 8:54 am
Last night on “The Daily Show,” President Obama unwittingly coined an uninspiring yet perfectly fitting motto for the Democratic Party just days before what looks likely to be a crushing electoral defeat. The new slogan is a one-word expansion of Obama’s 2008 campaign refrain: “Yes We Can, But …” Obama uttered the phrase when “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart challenged him on whether his administration has delivered on the promise of the “Yes We Can” rallying cry of two years ago.
Obama slowly recovered by adding the phrase “but it’s not going to happen overnight” — a cop-out message he has repeated often over the past two years. But his abbreviated answer is the one that resonates with Americans who believed and voted for the Obama hype. Here are just a few ways to fill in the blank in the Democratic Party’s new slogan:
Add your own Democratic messages in the comments, and tweet them with the hashtag #YesWeCanBut.” Filed under: Government and News & Politics Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.22.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:36 pm
California Democrat Barbara Boxer beclowned herself at a Senate hearing in June 2009 when she chided Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh for daring to be polite enough to call her “ma’am.” “You know, do me a favor,” Boxer whined. “Could you say ’senator’ instead of ‘ma’am?’ It’s just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.” Video of the encounter shot across the Internet, but surprisingly, no one made any good parodies of it — until now, that it. But it was worth the 16-month wait: That clip is destined to earn a spot in the Internet Parody Hall of Fame — which doesn’t actually exist yet, so feel free to steal the idea and create it. Filed under: Government and Just For Laughs and People and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.21.10 by Danny Glover @ 11:05 pm
Casteel is the defensive coordinator for West Virginia University’s football team. He has been on the coaching staff since 2001 and has headed the defense since 2003. I was glad he didn’t flee in the middle of the night three years ago when Rich Rodriguez went to Michigan, and now Casteel is getting his due. He’s also getting it in the humble way I would expect from a Paden City boy:
Filed under: People and Sports and West Virginia Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 10.21.10 by Danny Glover @ 10:16 pm
The U.S. Postal Service has no official creed, but it has this inspiring myth going for it: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The Virginia Railway Express could use a strong dose of postal pride because today we riders received an uninspiring, excuse-filled message from the CEO about how we can expect bad weather to make our lives miserable. Rain and the flash-flood warnings it occasionally brings are the bane of his existence. “While we all know it, it is easy to forget what a strong force water can be,” CEO Dale Zehner wrote in his monthly e-mail. “Flash floods can cause instability in the tracks. Or worse, depending on the force of the water, a flash flood can wash out a section of tracks. Because of this, Norfolk Southern’s operating rules require all passenger trains to operate at restricted speed, under 15 mph. For our Manassas Line riders, this can be quite a long commute.” Tell me about it. I lived that nightmare commute a few times during the summer. The bad news is that I may have to endure it again this fall, this time because of something worse than mere water — leaf oil. Here is Zehner’s explanation:
In other words, we may be living in the 21st century, but leaf oil still trumps locomotion. I have the sinking feeling that I’ll be getting another batch of unwanted free-ride certificates from VRE over the next few weeks because of extra hours on the train. The question is how many hours I will endure before I decide I’d rather drive to work and fight the highway traffic. Filed under: Business and D.C. Commuter Diary Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.21.10 by Danny Glover @ 9:27 pm
There’s nothing like a good “red scare” to snap America’s leaders back to fiscal reality. At least that seems to be the thinking behind this new Citizens Against Government Waste video, which envisions the fall of the tax-and-spend United States to communist China by the year 2030. The fear-mongering plot line, and the evil laughter as a punch line, is a bit much for my taste. Though I fear my country may well collapse under the weight of foolish fiscal policies and phenomenal debt, I don’t care to imagine it happening. On the other hand, I can’t argue with the premise. I predicted way back in 1990 that the United States as we know it would cease to exist within 50 years, most likely because of bankruptcy. Citizens Against Government Waste just sees it happening 10 years earlier. Filed under: Government and News & Politics and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.20.10 by Danny Glover @ 1:10 pm
Statistics are all around us, every day. That’s the message of this informative video from the U.S. Census Bureau, which was produced to celebrate today as World Statistics Day: As a journalist, I’ve always been fascinated by the role of statistics in our lives. Statistics was one of my favorite classes my first year of college. (I learned enough to know how important statistics are — and I learned that math is not my forte.) At the same time, I’m skeptical about how easily statistics can be manipulated to push an agenda. The classic book “How To Lie With Statistics” was required reading in journalism school at West Virginia University, and I recommend it to everyone because everyone will be saturated with stats-based news throughout their lives. We all need to be enlightened about numbers. Filed under: Home Schooling and News & Politics Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.15.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:13 pm
In the movies, actor Shia LaBeouf is a fearless hero who fights giant machines. But in real life, the star of the “Transformers” movies is a sissy boy who throws coffee on harmless photographers and then flees like a coward. Optimus Prime he is not. LaBeouf’s public display of wimpiness came as Hollywood brought the “Transformers” series to the nation’s capital this week to film scenes for “Transformers: The Dark of the Moon.” The appearance led to another embarrassing incident on the streets of Washington, though District of Columbia police were the ones embarrassed. A D.C. police vehicle sped through the on-street set in perfectly bad timing, right into the path of one of the star robotic characters in the movie series, Bumblebee. Watch the accident unfold:
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Maybe the entertainment celebrities should stay on the West Coast. We have enough trouble with the political celebrities in Washington. Filed under: Entertainment and Human Interest and Just For Laughs and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.14.10 by Danny Glover @ 3:10 pm
And this is just to be elected mayor of Winnipeg. It’s rather tame at the outset, but watch to the end for the punchline — or should I say kick line. Just watch. Wouldn’t you love to see an ad like that in a nationally competitive race? Filed under: Just For Laughs and News & Politics and People and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.14.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:30 pm
How would you like to live in a lighthouse? Sound romantic? Not so much. Watch this: Filed under: Human Interest and Video and Weather Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.11.10 by Danny Glover @ 12:52 pm
The race to replace West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd has taken center stage on the national political scene over the past week thanks to a series of campaign advertisements, both good and bad. The flurry of activity started with an ad released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Called “Stop Obama,” the ad featured flannel-clad actors in worn baseball caps saying West Virginians should keep Democratic candidate Joe Manchin, the current governor, in West Virginia so he doesn’t become “Washington Joe” and rubber stamp President Obama’s agenda. The ad’s messaging and casting were brilliant, but the “casting call,” written by a consulting firm to the NRSC, was tone deaf. One five-letter word in the casting call that isn’t even a word — “hicky” — completely undermined the ad and forced the NRSC to pull it. The ad gave Manchin ammunition to blast Republican rival John Raese and his national GOP allies for embracing the stereotype of West Virginians as hicks. Coming soon after news broke that Raese’s family lives in a Florida mansion whose driveway is paved in marble, the ad amplified the Democratic narrative that Raese doesn’t understand or appreciate the hard-working folk in the blue-collar Mountain State. Manchin answered with his own ad over the weekend. “John Raese thinks we’re hicks,” the opening says as the NRSC ad plays in the background. “… It’s insulting — and he didn’t even apologize.” Had Manchin stopped at that line of attack, he might have scored a few points with fence-sitting voters in the race. But the ad closed with a juvenile potshot at Raese’s wife: “Raese’s wife is registered in Florida, so she can’t event vote for him.” Filed under: Hatin' On Rednecks and Hunting & Guns and News & Politics and People and Rednecks and Video and West Virginia Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.05.10 by Danny Glover @ 6:28 pm
If you’ve ever wondered what chicken nuggets look like before they get to all those fast-food establishments, this picture is the answer:
I thought twice about writing this post because our children love chicken nuggets and see my blog when they log onto the computer. But I suspect they’ll have this attitude even after seeing the picture: “It’s obscenely gross and borderline alien but it’s not going to stop me from eating nuggets. They’re too good.” UPDATE, Oct. 11: Any time a story goes viral online, you can count on Snopes.com to get to the bottom of it. And it turns out that although the process of making chicken nuggets is disgusting, the story behind the picture of the pink goop isn’t entirely true. But as far as American kids are concerned, the process doesn’t matter. Even when they see in explicit detail how chicken nuggets are made, they still want to eat them. Filed under: Family and Food and Photography Comments: None |
