Open Mic August 10

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English: Lady Gaga performing "Speechless...

Eng­lish: Lady Gaga per­form­ing “Speech­less” on the UK arena of The Mon­ster Ball Tour (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The week started off bad — another mass shoot­ing, this time at a Sikh tem­ple in Wis­con­sin.  But then NASA sur­vived seven min­utes of ter­ror to land a new rover, the most ambi­tious yet, on Mars. The Olympics ran its sec­ond week, but Fox News alleged the Amer­i­can ath­letes weren’t patri­otic enough, what with all those non-​​red-​​white-​​and-​​blue out­fits. Willard Rom­ney con­tin­ued to not reveal his tax returns, amid rumors he might announce a choice for Vice Pres­i­dent. Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment was hacked, so you might want to change your pass­words. Again. Lady Gaga appeared on the cover of Vogue. Appear­ing to con­found anti-​​evolutionists, remains of another ancient species of humans was dis­cov­ered in Kenya (no, they didn’t ride dinosaurs).

That’s just some of the stuff that hap­pened this week. What do you want to talk about?

Don’t see an arti­cle on a par­tic­u­lar topic, but want to talk about it some­where? This is Open Mic. Talk about what­ever you want, but stay respectful.

 We cre­ate a new Open Mic every week to give a clean slate, but feel free to add to this topic at any time.

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  1. “Who knew?” 

    Me. ;-)  The first time I saw a repro­duc­tion of that plate depicted in the arti­cle it was enti­tled: Fun­gus man pad­dles Raven’s canoe to the island of the female gen­i­talia. When the Inter­na­tional Myco­log­i­cal Con­gress was held in Van­cou­ver, BC, back around ’94, they put it on the tee shirts (with a cen­sored title, sissies!). Unfor­tu­nately I lost mine, great con­ver­sa­tion starter. Eden­shaw was per­haps the most famous Haida artist of his time and has con­sid­er­able cred­i­bil­ity as a source for var­i­ous ethno­graphic type stuff.  

  2. What a bunch of wild mush­room men! I swear, I will never look on a myco­log­i­cal con­ven­tion in quite the same way again :-)

  3. Cas­tro is the twice elected mayor of San Anto­nio. He actu­ally took the plu­ral­ity in 2005, but lost to Hard­berger in the run-​​off.

    He is very pop­u­lar here, win­ning 80+% last year. But is also very low key. Out­side of the SA paper and TV sta­tions, he gets very lit­tle press, but that can also be attrib­uted to the pre­dom­i­nance of the GOP out­side of the urban area.
    As of now, he has not made any announce­ment about other office, local or statewide.

  6. @DC

    I’m pretty sure I checked the Con­sti­tu­tion, and it only says he can’t be elected to the office of Pres­i­dent more than twice (or more than once after hav­ing served at least two years of the term dur­ing which some­one else was elected). It doesn’t say he can’t run for VP.

  7. mclever, you are cor­rect. But the “cus­tom” is that no one who is not qual­i­fied to be pres­i­dent can/​should run for vice pres, because the most impor­tant role of Vice is to be avail­able to be Pres.

    Thus, a non-​​citizen or non-​​natural cit­i­zen (think: Ahnold the Gov­er­na­tor) can­not (or will not) be nom­i­nated for Vice.

  10. AW, re: the 2016 Sce­nario will I still be able to watch WWE Raw ;) and Three Stooges reruns on cable?

    btw, I’m totally in favor of get­ting rid of Face­book and Twit­ter by what­ever means nec­es­sary! :D

    >

    And the Dec. 21, 2012 Mayan End of Days Prophecy must not be cal­cu­lated correctly …

  11. May 2016 — Dar­ling­ton SC.

    Will this hap­pen before or after the Sat­ur­day night before Mother’s Day? ‘Cause if it’s BEFORE, I think I’ll pass on that years South­ern 500!

  12. Jeez, did y’all not know Oxford Mis­sis­sippi was “invaded” in 1963? 

    Is any­one so naïve to think that plan­ning for almost ANY pos­si­ble con­tin­gency is on a sheet of paper some­where in the Pen­ta­gon? Have been for years!

  15. Inter­net com­ments sec­tions are infested by insane trolls, seem­ingly every­where but here. You shoulda seen the cir­cus on Andrew Exum’s blog back in the day (and prob­a­bly sill, if he’s still writ­ing it). The authors obvi­ously struck a nerve by call­ing out the insane right so pub­licly, and it’s my sin­cere hope that the obvi­ous attempt to scream them down will draw as much pub­licly to this threat as possible.

    I feel like I need brain bleach every time I look at the SWJ forums, so I stay away most of the time. ;)

  16. AW,

    I used to work (very, very part time) in dis­as­ter plan­ning for the largest hos­pi­tal in the state of Mis­sis­sippi. My spe­cialty was chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons. When we’d get brief­ings from the FBI, their biggest con­cern (both before and after 9⁄11) was not exter­nal ter­ror­ist groups, but inter­nal ter­ror­ist groups. Al Qaida got “lucky” (trag­i­cally) with one good blow against Amer­ica that killed almost 3000 but the insane domes­tic ter­ror­ists are more numer­ous and through­out his­tory have car­ried out more attacks on Amer­i­cans than Al Qaida ever dreamt of. 

  19. The Dis­ney­land piece is bril­liant, but I haven’t quite fig­ured out how the Marines intend to get their M777 artillery pieces into the woods with­out (A) get­ting spot­ted mov­ing into posi­tion by rid­ers on the mono­rail and (B) hav­ing inter­ven­ing crest prob­lems with the trees. It’s obvi­ously a sit­u­a­tion call­ing for mor­tars. ;)

  21. @Monotreme

    I think it’s the sort of thing that only con­verts the already con­verted. The only peo­ple cry­ing about Obama’s birth cer­tifi­cate are those who already think any Demo­c­rat is an ille­git­i­mate President.

    Nor will such an ad con­vince any­one that they need to get Obama off of the bal­lot, even if such a peti­tion drive could work. Once someone’s got the job, Amer­i­cans tend to be reluc­tant to dis­qual­ify the can­di­date. (Case in point with the Walker recall.) If Obama loses, it’ll be because mod­er­ates don’t remem­ber the Bush years and not because of birtherism.

  22. @Treme… Does any­one think this will work?

    The Freep­ers have been all over this. They love this stuff. There’s a whole sec­tion at Freep­erville that is ded­i­cated, all day every day, to dis­cus­sion about birtherism, includ­ing posts that run to 1,000 com­ments of excru­ci­at­ing minu­tiae about the micro­scopic forged lay­ers on the long form birth cer­tifi­cate and end­less study of old pho­tos of the Dun­ham fam­ily prov­ing that Obama was really sired by his grand­fa­ther in an inces­tu­ous rela­tion­ship with his mother, was really sired by Mal­colm X and a Lebanese actress named Valerie Sufar and given to the Dun­ham fam­ily to raise, was really sired by Frank Mar­shall Davis in a 3-​​way sex orgy with Ann Dun­ham, Frank Davis and his wife… etc etc etc

    I have noticed an inter­est­ing pat­tern over time, though. Birtherism waxes when Obama is in the ascen­dancy and the Freep­ers feel gloomy about their chances, and wanes when they are hope­ful. It’s a more accu­rate gauge than watch­ing polls. Over the week­end with the Ryan pick, they are feel­ing so gid­dily hope­ful that the birther forum has all but shut down.

    I think they hate Obama so much and are in such desapir over the vagaries of a democ­racy that would foist him on the coun­try, that when he is rid­ing high they grasp at the birther straw as the only way to bring him down.