Sunday Music Blogging

A  companion piece for today's Shadow Shot Sunday.



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Shadow Shot Sunday - 8/29

High stepping fifers,

Shrill and dedicated - A

Slice of History



To see them in action, click HERE.



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What The Hell?!? Friday -Eeeeeewwww Signage Edition

A picture of a sign at a Texas waterpark, taken by my friend Howeird, who gets the photo credit, and owns the copyright, natch.

Used with permission.
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Haiku Wenesday - Future

FUTURE

The unknown ahead;

But, like nostalgia, it ain't

What it used to be.

Global warming denialism sponsored by big oil.
Tea baggers, aided and abetted by Glen Beck and sponsored by big oil.
Freedom of religion under attack.
Deepening divide between "Real 'Muricans" and the OTHER.
Total denial of reality by regressives who call themselves "conservatives."
Anemic health care converage.
Massive tax breaks for the richest fraction of 1 percent.
The economy in a shambles, and no political will to take clear and obvious corrective action.
A ban on stem cell research.

Corporatocracy and their ignorant anti-intellectual Republican Party stooges are taking away from us everything that once made America great; transforming us in to a nation of serfs to trans-national corporate interests.  And almost nobody can see what is unfolding before their eyes.

I have never been so pessimistic.  And every day for the last decade, my pessimism has gotten deeper.
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Mellow Yellow Monday

In the Butterfly house at the Knoxville Zoo.

This little coquette:

To flirt, does she flutter wings

Or make eyes at me?






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Sunday Music Blogging - 8/22

From the days of live TV. You just never see this kind of fun anymore.

H/T to Lemonade, at the Corner. This hymn was referenced in today's X-word puzzle.

Shadow Shot Sunday - 8/22

West Branch of the Little Pigeon River, Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

Rushing water trips

Over ancient rocks, dancing

To gravity's pull.

What the Hell?!? Friday, Pt 2 -- Conservative Cheesecake Edition

I mean - seriously - "she always knows her place?!? - what the Hell?  Just when you think political discourse has gone as low as it can --- THIS happens.

If you didn't already know everything you needed to know about Repugnicants, this should fill in the gaps for you.

It really doesn't need any commentary - but just to ice the cake, here is some from Nicole Allen,

in an act of shockingly retro, sexist stupidity, a local unit of the Republican Party of Minnesota has broadcast a new reason you should vote Republican: GOP women are hot, and Democratic women are not.

. . . and a tad more from Scott at LGM.




On the other hand, though, you can never have enough  Conservative  Cheesecake.
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What The Hell?!? Friday - Unfortunate Signage Edition

This is on the sidewalk adjacent to the Parkway in Gatlinberg, Tenn. near an alcove that also contains the Moonshine tasting room, and the stairway to the all day $5 parking lot (free if you get your ticket stamped at the wax museum.).  Car entrance to the lot is behind the shops, on River Road.

L.A. Times Crossword Puzzle Blogging

Wednesday, August 18, 2010, Dan Naddor

Theme: ALTERATIONS. The second word of each two word theme answer indicates someone or something that causes some sort of transformation, in plural form.

16. Some den boxes : CABLE CONVERTERS. "Den box" gave me pause. This is the box that allows your old non-cable-ready TV to hook up to cable. CONVERTERS can also change thier religions, or transform things.

22. Hookups to many electronic devices : POWER ADAPTORS. They change the voltage from line current to whatever your device requires.

35. Jacob Riis et al. : SOCIAL REFORMERS. They try to make things better.  Riis' cause was the impoverished of New York City, 100 years ago.

44. Currency pros : MONEY CHANGERS. They'll convert your Sheckles to Denarii - for a price.  But the pros have their cons, and might get chased out of an inappropriate venue by an activist SOCIAL REFORMER, who might even try to CONVERT them.

55. Insurance investigators : CLAIMS ADJUSTERS. Per Wikipedia, they "investigate insurance claims by interviewing the claimant and witnesses, consulting police and hospital records, and inspecting property damage to determine the extent of the company’s liability."   Otherwise, an adjustment is often a small scale fine-tuning, as to your radio dial or 6th cervical vertebra.

Hi gang, it's JazzBumpa, the Toledo Trombonist, blessed to have a Dan Naddor puzzle to share with you. Today, Dan gave us three grid-spanning theme answers, plus two more at 13 letters each, making for an extremely dense and rich blend. With 36 blocks (4 cheaters,) 74 words, and an averages length of 5.11, this is technically very close to a Thursday puzzle. Difficulty seems about right for a Wednesday, though.  I chunked through in 14:43. I had a feeling we were due for one of Dan's, but didn't recognize this as his style. The cluing seems a bit straight-forward, not the normal Devious Dan Delights. But this is a superb puzzle: the theme is tight and coherent, and the long down fill is exquisite.

The Natural History of Problems

Over at Modeled Behavior, Adam asks (and answers):

. . . “what problems do you think are important today that you didn’t think were important in 2004, and what policies would you favor now that you would have opposed then?”. My answer is that low house prices are a problem today where I would previously said low prices are just transfers from sellers to buyers, and I would favor policies that prop them up when I would previously have opposed them. What are yours?

Without any certainty that I actually answered his question, I commented thusly:

My view in 2004 (or maybe it was ’05) was that the prices in both housing and crude oil were in bubbles – parts of the rolling bubble phenomenon as mis-distributed financial assets, aided and abetted by a lack of regulation and the proliferation of derivative instruments that nobody knows how to evaluate, roamed the world in search of the next big killing, rather than being channeled into any productive investment – and that there would be problems when they burst. Oil prices have held up more than I thought – I really expected well below $50 by this time. 

Actually, I think all the problems of today were problems in 2004 – a futile, misplaced, no-win, war effort, extreme and growing wealth disparity, tax policy close to regressive, the choking of the middle class, and an economy on the edge of depression. The latter was pretty well concealed at the time, but I always thought the alleged recovery from the 2001 recession was a chimera.

And I disagree with you about housing prices. They only look too low by comparison to previous bubble-inflated valuations. By rent income producing capability or any other look at fundamentals, they still need to come down. This is really bad news.

We have a long hard road ahead of us. I think the naughts were a lot like the roaring 20′s, with the rich getting richer and the poor struggling with an ever-smaller slice of the pie; and if policy is made by folks who think like Gary, above, channeling Andrew Mellon circa 1930, then the next great depression is far more likely to become a reality.

Sadly,
JzB

Rebecca opines, more or less to my point:

  . . . It’s not that so much has changed, simply that people are becoming more aware. . . .

What do you think?  Has the world changed?  Stayed the same?  Moved farther down a destructive path?  Corrected itself?

Update: On the subject of derivatives, consider THIS.
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Sunday Music Blogging - 8/15

Some Joyful Traditional Jass.




And a bonus track, "Don't need beauty to be loved!"

I encourage you to sing along.

Six Word Saturday 8/14

I am SUCH a flat lander!

Having just spent a rather uncomfortable week in the MOUNTAINS.

Cf Cate's SWS: "this is supposed to be fun!"

I did have a good time, aside from being edgy.

Haiku Wednesday - Comfort

COMFORT

Moonshine can be the 

Southern "comfort."*   I don't like

That Southern Comfort**.

 * By which I mean the numbing of pain, and/or surcease of sorrow.
** By which I mean the so-named commercial product.

Sunday Music Blogging - 8/8/2010

I've never been to New Orleans - but that doesn't mean I can't miss it.





Kid Ory's performance is non-embeddable.   It can be found on You-Tube here.

Six Word Saturday 8/7

Happiness can come from family - really!

Haiku Wednesday - Homecoming

Homecoming

Wonderland is a

Wonder - Oz, too.  But you still

Yearn to click your heels.

Stockman Agonistes

I was as brutal as I could be in my short assessment of David Stockman's NYT OP-Ed piece yesterday.

Other thoughtful commentators have found their own reasons to shred his collection of dishonest idiocy.

Johnathon Bernstein at Plain Politics.

Robert Waldmann at Angry Bear.

Any others?

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Haiku Heights - Week of August 1

Metamorphosis

I am not today

What I was Yesterday, nor

What I will become 

For more Haiku Heights, click on the Badge.

For more from me on this topic see here.
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What Bob Cesca says . . .

is to "circulate this graph everywhere."

Seems like a good idea to me.

Cesca also says:

It turns out that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will only hurt people earning more than $300,000 per year. And it appears as if keeping the Bush tax cuts in place would force people earning $60-150,000 to pay slightly more.

H/T to Southern Beale, extending the chain.

Now, go post this on your blog.

Seriously - what are you waiting for?
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Sunday Music Blogging - August the First

A Honeysuckle Rose Garden

Republicans - All Wrong, all the Time, Pt 18: David Stockman Kicks Mitch McConnell's Ass

David Stockman was St. Ronnie's director of the Office of Management and Budget.  As such, he is up-to-his-eyeballs in the chicanery of supply side economics.  But his NYT op ed today, in which he undresses current Repugs and their desire to extend the idiotic and grotesquely irresponsible Bush tax cuts, is worth a read.

Still, though, he is Repug, and worse yet, an unrepentant supply-sider, who cannot speak of economics without telling huge lies.  So read his piece with your skepticism and critical thinking skills fully engaged.  I'm not going to take the time to do a full-scale DEEP STUPID on him - and since he does get some things right, it doesn't quite fit the mold - but here are a few of the low points.