Archive for March 2012
A Virginia middle school teacher recently forced his students to support President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign by conducting opposition research in class against the Republican presidential candidates.
The 8th grade students, who attend Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County, were required to seek out the vulnerabilities of Republican presidential hopefuls and forward them to the Obama campaign.
source: The Daily Caller
Whatever your political persuasion, if you’re completely honest with yourself, just admit it – this kind of thing would only happen in the hands of a left-wing teacher.
From the Communists who took over Russia in 1918 to the Socialists who trampled the German Democracy in the 30s, through all the horrors of Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao to every single totalitarian state that exists on the face of the earth today, they’re all Commies, Socialists and left-wingers who believe in an all-powerful government because they think they know what’s best for you better than you do. So is it any wonder that every time we hear of the indoctrination of young children made to sing anthems dedicated to Dear Leader, a parent striking their child for not paying close enough attention to Dear Leader speaking or a teacher turning his class into a sleazy slandering propaganda machine, that it’s always, always, always coming from a liberal?
Do not try to think for yourself.
We know what’s best for you better than you do.
The link to Marilyn Hagerty’s review in the Grand Forks Hearld comes to us from the folks at fark.com, and I couldn’t have written the tease any better than they did:
Residents of Grand Forks, ND are lining up for blocks to enjoy a one-of-a-kind European dining experience that finally puts the city on the culinary map with its unique brand of Tuscan refinery. It’s called “The Olive Garden”
The review has gone viral, with 300,000 views (compare that to the next closest page at grandforksherald.com having received 5,000.)
Read Mrs. Hagerty’s review here.
There’s a neat little interview from CBS News on that page as well. “Somebody told me I’d gone viral and I had to ask, what’s that?” says Mrs. Hagerty.
For ten years or longer, I don’t think I saw more than one random episode of any show that was running on TV. It wasn’t that I was some elitist who thought everything on TV was garbage (even if we all know that most of it is) I just never happened to wind up in front of the television at the same time next week. Then, October of last year, I just randomly happened to catch the pilot of American Horror Story and as well crafted as it was and as perfectly suited as it was to my twisted tastes, I was hooked, and for the first time in over a decade, I watched and enjoyed every episode of a new show without fail.
For so many years, I had looked at TV as nothing more than a sports and news box (with a little History and ID channel thrown in) but around the same time we were enjoying American Horror Story, we also decided to try a 30-day trial for Hulu and it was then that a newfound love affair for great television shows really blossomed in our house. That Hulu commercial where Gob from Arrested Development has an alien tentacle reaching into people’s brains, like a TV brain snatcher, it’s brilliant because it is pretty accurate. With Hulu and now Netflix, we’ve been binge watching TV most evenings now, in doses far beyond the doctor recommended amount, but you can always tell yourself hey, a one-hour show only runs 47 minutes when you remove the commercials, so those nights when we watched four or five episodes of Lost weren’t really as overindulgent as it might sound.
Enjoying each series from the first through the latest or last episode, in six months we laughed through all 53 brilliant episodes of Arrested Development, watched an enjoyable season of a show called Happy Town (which unhappily never got itself a second season) became engrossed in the 120 episode saga of Lost, caught whatever season or two were produced of the comedies Wilfred and Louie, and we just finished up 33 episodes of Breaking Bad, which was freaking good, but of all the shows we’ve binged on, if there was one show I would recommend to a stranger or friend more than any, it would be Mad Men.
I’ll save for another post my analysis of why, just four seasons in, this show has already earned it’s place in the TV Hall of Fame, but if you haven’t seen it, believe me when I tell you, this show is not to be missed. I can’t believe how lucky we are because we just finished the first four seasons only to find out . . .
Season 5 starts Sunday, March 25!
Watch it on AMC at 9/8c.
If you want to catch the previous four seasons, it’s exclusively on Netflix.
Just a little to whet your appetite:
If you’ve never seen the show and you watch only one clip, watch this: three and a half minutes of the best ad pitch you’ve ever seen in your life. Read the top comment there from “kleebusch” – brilliant analysis.
A huge Pete Campbell fan has compiled three long videos of collections of Pete Campbell quotes from the first three seasons. Here’s the best of Pete, season one.
Fan video of Peggy Olsen set to The Stranglers’ “Strange Little Girl”
Click here for the Mad Men Wiki with three teasers for Season 5.
When the first daughter is vacationing in a country the State Department has said all Americans should avoid and a 7.6 earthquake hits that country, I know the first question on most Americans minds is, “How’s Malia, her 25 secret service agents and the 12 classmates she brought along?”
Thankfully, the scattered media reports which even mention the first daughter’s adventures in Alcapulco, just 100 miles from the epicenter of the quake, tell us that Malia, her secret service agents and all her classmates in tow are fine.
More importantly, of course, is the question of what was the human toll of this massive earthquake on the larger scale, and thankfully I can tell you that there have been no reports of fatalities or heavy damage. (Note again the curious omission in the linked story here – a headline of an earthquake hitting a city where the first daughter is having her vacay and yet there’s no mention of her or her cadre’s status?)
So it looks like we were lucky in the fact that this 7.4 earthquake struck deep and in a largely unpopulated area of Mexico, but should there be any, I would just like to say a prayer for the victims of the Mexican earthquake: may every last one of you be members of the drug cartels.
UPDATE: received a reply from what seems to be an offended member of the drug cartels.
A new milestone, a new inspiration to keep pluggin’ away – two-hundred posts, baby. Some of them crossed all corners of the world, some fell between the cracks, but all of them came from the same lunar view of Earth. I may have pissed some people off in the process, but I had fun doing it and had even more fun with the friends and comments they’ve left.