An oldie but goodie has been re-imagined to reflect today’s news.
Yes, I know its easy to get carried away with the gung-ho vibe that’s permeating the airwaves right now, but I’m savoring it for a few hours before cynicism sets in.
According to Newsday, Osama bin Laden is dead and the U.S. has his body, a person familiar with developments has told the Associated Press.
Update: CNN is confirming that Osama bin Laden is dead. He was killed “in a mansion outside Islamabad along with other family members.”
The news comes eight years to the day that George W. Bush declared “Mission accomplished” in Iraq.
Update: “President Obama said that on Sunday, a small team of U.S. operatives launched a “targeted assault’’ on a multi-million dollar compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad where months of intelligence work had established that Mr. Bin Laden was living. Mr. Bin Laden was killed after a firefight, and the troops took custody of his body.”
A conversation with the brilliant Michael Backes, a Hollywood special effects consultant (films from Jurassic Park to Spider-Man 2) who also happens to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject of medical cannabis. If this is a topic that is of interest to you, you can be assured of finding what he says in this interview fascinating (or your money back!).
Fun fact: Several characters in Michael Crichton’s novels are named “Michael Backes.”
It’s OK: The Beach Boys’ 15th Anniversary TV Special aired in 1976 on NBC. It was a weird affair created when Brian Wilson was at the lowest ebb of his struggle with substance abuse and depression. Produced by Lorne Michaels and written by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the show features a barely willing Wilson lured back into the studio and, in a bit that is both funny and sad, onto the beach and a surfboard. As most of us know, Brian was not a surfer and in this clip he’s barely a pedestrian. I have a feeling this may have been therapeutic for Brian.
This man Einstein is an idiot. He obviously hasn’t heard Rush Limbaugh and other “Ditto Heads” on the radio explain the dangers of socialism.
The thought of people working to benefit all of society is a sick joke. People should work to benefit only themselves, that is what Jesus would have wanted.
Einstein has some strange idea that “the individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.”
The idea that we all depend on each other and that individuals grow and prosper in a compassionate and humane society is totally stupid. We all know that socialism is bad because the rich cannot get fabulously wealthy at the expense of the rest of society.
If the rich can’t get super richer then who is going to buy all of those yachts and mansions?
A society where all prosper is not what America is all about. Leave that to Europe and the rest of the world. America needs to support their super rich by showing we care about their interests above our own. That is what it means to be free.
Einstein is one of those educated idiots Rush has warned us about. Let’s not fall for his brand of economics.
I am really glad I live in a country where nearly all of the wealth has been transferred to the banks and the already super rich. That is what freedom is all about. This guy Einstein doesn’t understand the real world.
Hell, this guy Einstein probably thinks things are relative and that God’s word isn’t absolute. Next he’ll be saying that we should all be Buddhists or something.
This tongue in cheek rebuttal of Einstein’s famous essay “Why Socialism?” was written by Grant Lawrence and originally appeared on OpEd News in 2009
So satisfying to see the Prez roast Trump alive. Good times. Too bad there isn’t a correspondents’ dinner every night.
Three Villagers and a Farfisa.
The Village Square was a weekly TV series that originated in Charleston, South Carolina and was syndicated all across the USA. It aired every week from 1965-68. The show’s house band The Villagers would cover current top 40 hits while the Village Dancers would Frug and Pony in their ultra-groovy go-go boots
In this video, The Villagers cover “Funky Broadway’ while singer Dana Douglas displays his signature serpentine dance moves. Down South, even the white kids know how to mess that shit around.
A gorgeous natural phenomenon beautifully captured by civilian technology and made even more surreal by the total contrast of the accompanying unrelenting noisy industrial/cityscape. Can any Turkish (I think?) DM readers out there please illuminate further ?
With thanks to Tim Waters
Update: Smart and helpful DM facebook friend Jason L. points out that this is a massive flock of Starlings. Thanks !
Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes is community page on Facebook, which re-unites individuals with personal items lost during the recent tornadoes that devastated the southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia and Louisiana. Created by Patty Bullion, after hundreds of photographs and documents fell from the sky into her yard, last Wednesday, as the New York Times reports:
One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.
Ms. Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.
“I feel like I know these people,” Ms. Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”
The first of the images that Ms. Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Ms. Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.
By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.
One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.
If you can help identify any of the people in the pictures, or have photos and documents to post, please check Patty Bullion’s page here.
Previously on DM
Richard Devine’s eerie recordings of tornado tonight in sirens in Atlanta
More lost photographs and documents, after the jump…
