Commonplace Book: CURRENT READING

"I think the pace of life is pretty fast-- and art and food and clothing and cars are all disposable and I think it manifests a type of fear of beauty and of emotional intimacy."
--K.D. Lang

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“"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles* from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know.”
 Sen. Jay Rockefeller

[* They didn’t have laser-guided missiles when McCain was dropping bombs; leave it to a registered Democrat to obscure a valid moral point by screwing up a detail for the opposition to focus on. Shades of Dan Rather’s last case! ]
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“What an outrage! [Obama’s comment that Pennsylvanians are “bitter”. ] Next thing you know, Obama is going to tell us that poor inner city blacks are black, poor and live in inner cities - or that outsourcing jobs to India is leading to the outsourcing of jobs to India.”
-- comment on Wonkette by Johnny Zhivago’s Cat
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The Belgrade home of Radivoje Lajic has been hit by meteorites five times since last November.
"I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate." The first meteorite fell on his house in November last year and since then a further four have smashed into his home. ..."I did not know what the strange-looking stones were at first but I have since had them all confirmed as meteorites by experts at Belgrade University.

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The United Nations also conducted a worldwide survey:
"Would you please give your opinion about solutions to the
food shortage in the rest of the world?"
The survey was a huge failure:
In Latin America, they didn't know what “please” meant ...
In China, they didn't know what “opinion” meant ...
In the Middle East, they didn't know what “solution” meant ...
In Europe, they didn't know what “shortage” meant ...
In Africa, they didn't know what “food” meant ...
In the United States, they didn't know what the "rest of the world" meant...
-- posted by “Darehead” to Wonkette comments
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“McCain's emergency appeal to boys who are more afraid of losing than anything else in the world speaks to every clown who ever got in a fist fight at a slow-pitch softball game. The United States has already lost a lot more than a war it never should have started in the first place. Thanks to America's growing police state, we have lost our civil liberties. Thanks to America's practices of torture, illegal detention and extraordinary rendition, America has lost whatever good name it had in the world. Thanks to America's two-term fascist moron president, America has become an international punch-line. Thanks to the low, low prices of politicians, the American government has become a subsidiary of heartless, bloodless corporate scum. And thanks to that, the American military has become Hessians in service of that scum. Under the phony cover of "globalization" America's economic backbone has been filleted and shipped in sharp shards for use in impaling peasant populi around the world. This country is broke, its infrastructure is busted and its health in the exact same condition as the ethics of the insurance and pharmaceutical racketeers who value profiteering more than life. Why exactly should I give a shit WHEN we officially lose a war that was a lost cause the second it became a viable option?
-- Barry Crimmens
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“There are many, many Christians who practice Buddhism and they become better and better Christians all the time.”

--Thich Nhat Hahn
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“In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's challenge to, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines. In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.)
The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy's premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief's medical team, and helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. For his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him three letters of commendation. What is even more remarkable is that this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two branches began to become integrated.
While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/sailor, received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one for being a prospective father. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay in college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections...
After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America's biggest cities. This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who has been in the news for comments he made over the last three decades.”
-- Lawrence Korb
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"A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon! Words fail me, gentlemen."
-- from The Abominable Dr. Phibes, starring Vincent Price