Got this from here and it gave me a chuckle.
Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”
“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”
His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.
Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”
I read an interview this morning by former Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy, who runs the nonprofit Citizens Energy Corp., which provides discount heating oil to Americans in need in 15 states and the District of Columbia.
On quote of his that stuck out for me was this:
The U.S. oil industry in the last five hears has made over $800 billion in profits. None of them is putting profits back into developing new sources of crude. ExxonMobile put zero percent of profits into renewable or alternative energy; BP, six tenths of 1%; ConocoPhillips, seven tenths of 1%; Shell, 1.3%; Chevron, 0.5%. And everybody says we’re running out of oil. You know, 74% of the earth’s surface – as we all learned in the third grade – is covered with water. And we have developed less than 1% of the energy supplies contained underneath the surface of the ocean. So there’s nothing to suggest to me that right now there’s an imminent crisis
It’s amazing how little these companies are putting towards alternative fuels. It makes me think all those BP commercials I see on the Discovery Channel are totally hypocritical.
My cousin Sam Lewis (aka: “Moose”) is pure genius. He’s one the of the funnier writers you’ll ever meet. For your reading pleasure, i thought i’d introduce you to my favorite 3 blog posts of his. His blog is called “Van Dusen Speaks” and you should make it your home page.
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Here they are with a little excerpt from each:
Number 1: The Captain of the Duke Lacrosse Team’s Time in Prison, as Told by Red in the “Shawshank Redemption” (link)
Day 1: There are some betting days when you know you’ve got your hands reined around the right horse, and when that bus pulled up I knew it was one of those days. They asked me my double down on who was gonna wail first, and I went with the pale faced white boy twirling a stick.
Day 23: I’ve always been known as a man who could obtain certain items. Liquor, dirty magazines, a bag of reefer if that’s your thing. But when Bret Thompson came up to me, it was the first time anyone had ever asked me for a No Fear T-shirt and a shark tooth necklace.
Day 24: The sisters got to Bret that night, making him wish Brine, Inc. made lower body padding. Later on they would know why his plunger was missing from the police evidence locker.
Day 97: So instead of laying tar, we all sat there on the roof on that hot afternoon, drinking those cold Gatorades that Bret’s mom had sent him.
Day 648: That (blasting Dave Matthews over the PA system) stunt cost Bret two weeks in the hole, but for a few minutes he truly felt free.
Number 2: You think you know me, Netflix recommendation software? Well, you don’t know shit (link)
…And let’s talk a little about the “one foreign film begets another” assumption. Just because I randomly order up “The Milkmaid of Avignon” during a bored frantic queuing session doesn’t mean I’m interested in watching just any foreign film. So spare me the instructions to rent some epic tale of a young boy waddling through the Uzbekistani mountains chasing a tire iron. Nor does it mean I will perk my ears up at any movie with a corseted woman on the cover who’s cleavage is about to take over Luxembourg. For your information “The Milkmaid of Avignon” is a gripping period tale of a young woman of humble origins who through courage, determination and unwavering firmness survived famine, the Spanish Inquisition and seeing John Paul Belmondo’s orgasm face. …
Number 3: Holiday Movie Mashup (link)
“My mother the tap dancing penguin.” directed by Pedro Almodovar
The inspiring tale of a young boy who examines the ups and downs of all his past relationships through the viewpoint of his mother, a tap dancing penguin who one night fell victim to the passions of a drunk and lonely Spanish researcher on post in Antartica. This journey of self examination takes him hitchhiking where he meets Esteban, a traveling defibrillator salesman/fluorophiliac (people who like to rub toothpaste on their genitals before sex) on his way to meditate in the confines of a buddhist leper colony. This transformation inevitably takes him back to his roots, where he himself becomes a tap dancing penguin and strangely adopts the voice of Hugh Jackman, who as the voice of a computerized swimming bird uses slightly more facial expressions than he did in “Swordfish”.(Side comment: There’s alot of talk these days about movies being safe for the fragile minds of young children, but I ask you this: which would frighten you more as a young child, computerized tap dancing penguins or Michael Douglas doing a woman from behind over a desk. I say the penguin, unless the name of that actress has the words Glenn and Close in it).
I thought this was an interesting quote by Warren Buffett to a class of Emory students:
What if you could buy 10% of one of your classmates and their future earnings? You wouldn’t buy the ones with the highest IQ, the best grades, etc, but the most effective. You like people who are generous, go out of their way, straight shooters. Now imagine that you could short 10% of one of your classmates. This part is usually more fun as you start looking around the room. You wouldn’t choose the ones with the poorest grades. Look for people nobody wants to be around, that are obnoxious or like to take all the credit. If you have a 500 HP engine and only get 50 HP out of it, you’ll be beat by someone else that has a 300 HP engine but gets 250 HP output. The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.
Let me start by saying that i don’t dislike Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a smart, capable and ambitious woman. She definitely knows the major political issues at hand and has some good first-hand experience. That said, I dislike the “Hillary Clinton situation”
Let me explain. We live in a celebrity culture: US Weekly, E! channel, The Real World, Brad/Angelina and American Idol. We all care and discusses celebrities and those who are on TV. It’s what unites us and makes us American. These people can be talented (Bob Dylan), can be beautiful (Scarlet Johansen), can be controversial (Michael Moore), can be heavily promoted (U2), or just heavily discussed (Paris Hilton) – but they all are known and exist in the public’s consciousness.
Hillary Clinton is one of these people. She was a major player in a huge scandal – Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair. If there was no affair, she’d merely be a First Lady that nobody knows too much about nor cares about. I don’t hold this against her. It’s just a fact.
What i don’t like about the entire “situation” is that this fact – that Hillary is a celebrity – is the major reason why people want her to be President. Like all celebrities people believe that they know her and what she’s gone through. They lived through the scandal with her and sympathize. This, of course, is ridiculous. We don’t know her or what she’s been through. And, even if we did, this should not be a qualification for being the leader of our country. Simply knowing someone – or thinking you know someone – does not make that person more qualified.
To me, The President of America should be incredibly qualified. He/She should be courageous, competent, and charismatic. And there is no way that over the past 19 years, the best people for this job has come from only 2 families (Bush and Clinton). Impossible. I hate what that represents. It means we’re no longer voting for the person but rather for the name. And that is something Hillary has. She has a name and that’s what got her in this race. I just hope it’s not enough for her to win.
I read this post on Caterina Flake’s blog. I thought it was worth a repost. I love the concept of looking vs. eating. I believe we live in a culture that is consistently eating rather than appreciating.
“Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance.
The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. … It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always … in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.”–Simone Weil
Jimmy Kimmel posted a response to his girlfriend’s video about f’ing Matt Damon. That video is here and the response Jimmy did is here:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=het6hg2IlFw]
My thoughts are this: What Matt and Sarah did was really creative, original, and funny. Ben’s response is also funny, but what makes it funny is the amount of effort they went through to re-create the original – the cameo’s and the whole production. In my mind, this is the exact difference between Matt and Ben. While Matt continues to do new things and be original, Ben prefers instead to be a Hollywood star. Ben takes good ideas and brings big budgets and star power to them. For every one of Damon’s Syriana there’s an Affleck Daredevil.
From Sideways8 correspondent Jules – some good videos that should (hopefully) make you feel smarter….
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_9-6Xs6lp4]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsubvaIj2Cg]
For today a poem titled “America” by my favorite poet Tony Hoagland…
America
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends,
letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers,
even then he feels Buried alive,
captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”— .
Which was when I knew it was a dream,
since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river .
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
(looking for love in all the wrong places?)