Oscar Pool: For Fun and Bragging Rights

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Bob Stone

For anyone interested in the Academy Awards perhaps the greatest fun in watching the show is predicting who the winners will be.  As this article in the New York Times states:

The Academy Awards ceremony will emphasize the suspense of the unknown on Sunday night. But Hollywood insiders are well aware that many nominees have little chance of winning — and know who those nominees are.

There is nothing new, of course, about Hollywood going into Oscar night with a very good idea of what will happen. That’s been the case for years. The new development is that any of the rest of us who want to know the likely outcomes can do so, with nothing fancier than an Internet connection.    (Continued at: “Before Oscar Night, Playing the Odds With a Bettor’s Mind-Set”– NY Times)

In that spirit I thought it might be fun for readers to pick their winners from the following list of nominees and post them in the comment section.

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Posted in Art, Movies, Uncategorized | 37 Comments

NASCAR, domestic violence, and the Busch brothers

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Chuck Stanley

by Charlton Stanley

Daytona 500 logoThis afternoon, one of the most popular auto races in the world will be held. At 1:00 PM EST, the green flag will drop for the 2015 Daytona 500. This race started as a shorter race of 200 miles, run partly on beach sand, and partly on a beachfront highway, using stock cars.

Racing promoters realized that the race in Daytona had the potential to become a major event. Investors sank a substantial sum into building a 2.5 mile long track, which is the same length as the famed Indianapolis track. However, where the Indy track is in the shape of a rectangle with rounded corners, the Daytona track is a tri-oval. In further comparison to the Indy track, the Daytona track has high and steep banking. This allows higher speeds in the turns.

After speeds at Daytona began to exceed 200 mph, NASCAR introduced “restrictor plates.” The race cars are normally aspirated, with carburetors instead of fuel injectors. The restrictor plate limits the amount of air the carburetor intake can suck in, thus reducing horsepower. The reduction in engine power reduces the top speeds. Restrictor plate racing has one side effect. All the cars perform at nearly the same level, causing cars to bunch up in ‘packs’, with skilled drafting honed to a fine art.

Two or three cars running nose-to-tail can go faster than a single car, due to several factors that are probably of interest only to physicists and dedicated gearheads. However, to draft at a superspeedway like Daytona, requires driving skill that borders on artistry, and trust.

A lot of trust.

Almost everyone who drives has needed a push from time to time. Recall that no matter how careful the driver giving a push tries to be, there is usually a jolt when the two bumpers touch.

Imagine the skill and concentration it takes for Dale Earnhardt to pull up behind Jeff Gordon at 199 mph, and gently bump his rear bumper. If there is a jolt, the car in front will spin out and wreck, so the push has to be as gentle as powdering a baby’s behind. Then, Earnhardt follows Gordon around the track with only six inches separating the two cars. This maneuver is called bump drafting, and is not for the fainthearted or unskilled.

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Posted in Celebrity, Society, Sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Fran Lebowitz Talks about Rudy Giuliani and Racism on Real Time with Bill Maher (VIDEO)

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro
Rudy Giuliana

Rudy Giuliani

By Elaine Magliaro

On Friday, longtime New Yorker and public intellectual Fran Lebowitz was a guest on Bill Maher’s HBO program Real Time. During a panel discussion with Maher, Rob Reiner, Elahe Izadi and Bill Nye, Lebowitz gave her opinion of Rudy Giuliani and comments that the former mayor of New York City had made about Obama not loving America.

Lebowitz talked about the first time that Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993. She said his ads said “vote for me and it’ll be 1952 again. He is just soaked in nostalgia. That’s what he meant when he said Obama doesn’t love the country the way we love the county.”

That’s when Bill Maher asked, “What does it mean…that Republicans want to go back to an era, the Fifties, where America was run by socialism?” Lebowitz replied, “You mean economic policy. The New Deal. That’s not the part they miss. They miss — you know, what is behind Giuliani’s comments, and we’re not allowed to say this, but it’s racism. We now live in a society where it’s worse to call someone a racist than to be one.”

Real Time with Bill Maher: Fran Lebowitz – Giuliani and Racism (HBO)

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Posted in Barack Obama, Equal Rights, Law Enforcement, Local Government, Racism, Short Video, United States | 13 Comments

Does Fox News Blowhard Bill O’Reilly Really Have “His Own Brian Williams Problem?”

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro
Fox News Bloviator Bill O'Reilly

Fox News Bloviator Bill O’Reilly

By Elaine Magliaro

On Thursday, David Corn and Daniel Schulman of Mother Jones posted a story about Fox News media star Bill O’Reilly. In their article, the authors pointed out instances when O’Reilly had apparently falsely made claims about his experiences as a news correspondent reporting from war zones. Paul Fahri of the Washington Post said O’Reilly’s statements echoed “the exaggerations that engulfed now-suspended NBC News anchor BrianWilliams.”

Corn and Schulman noted how O’Reilly “went on a tear” after NBC News suspended Brian Williams “for erroneously claiming that he was nearly shot down in a helicopter while covering the US invasion of Iraq in 2003…” On his show, O’Reilly “declared that the American press isn’t ‘half as responsible as the men who forged the nation.'” Corn and Schulman said that O’Reilly “bemoaned the supposed culture of deception within the liberal media, and he proclaimed that the Williams controversy should prompt questioning of other ‘distortions’ by left-leaning outlets.” Yet, for years, the authors of the article said, “O’Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don’t withstand scrutiny—even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in.”

Corn and Schulman recounted a number of statements that O’Reilly “has made over the years about his reporting from Central and South America during the early 1980s.” They claimed that Fox’s News’s most popular media figure had “described being under fire in ‘war zones’ that were not actually in the middle of armed conflict.”

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Posted in American History, Celebrity, Media, United States, War | Tagged | 45 Comments

Horror Story: Parents Trying to Cure Their Children’s Autism with Bleach Enemas

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

adf26aa305f24c09d08427298db9f754By Elaine Magliaro

Tom Boggioni (Raw Story) posted an article today about parents who are trying to cure their children’s autism by giving them enemas “using a dangerous industrial solution used for bleaching wood pulp.” He said that some parents have turned to Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS). MMS is said to contain “sodium chlorite which is mixed with citric acid (i.e. orange juice) to make chlorine dioxide.” Boggioni added that the promoters of the MMS solution, which can be taken orally or administered via an enema, claim that it “can cure HIV, malaria, hepatitis, autism, acne, and cancer.”

Regarding MMS from Science Blogs:

What it is, in essence, is industrial strength bleach, 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water. It is frequently diluted in acidic juices, such as orange juice, resulting in the formation of chlorine dioxide, which is, as the FDA characterized it, “a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment.” According to its proponents, MMS can cure almost anything: cancer, AIDS, and just about any other serious disease you can imagine. Never mind that there is no biological plausibility and no evidence, either preclinical or clinical, that MMS can do what its proponents claim it can do. True, bleach can kill bacteria or cancer cells in a dish at a high enough concentration, but that doesn’t mean it’s a useful antibiotic or chemotherapeutic agent.

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Posted in Biology, Health Care, Science | 14 Comments

POETRY FRIDAY: “Warning” by Jenny Joseph (Video)

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

PoetryFridayButtonBy Elaine Magliaro

I often enjoy reading poems that have touches of humor in them. I found one such poem in an anthology that I bought over twenty years ago. The anthology, When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, gets its title from the first line of Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning.

Unknown copy 7

Here is the first stanza of the poem:

From WARNING
By Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

Click here to read the full text of the poem.

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Short Video | Tagged | 8 Comments

Henry A. Giroux on “American Sniper” and Hollywood Heroism in the Age of Empire

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro
American Sniper

American Sniper

By Elaine Magliaro

We have already discussed Clint Eastwood’s hit movie American Sniper  at FFS on the following posts: Hollywood and War: “American Sniper”…a Movie about a Killer Hero  and Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Holly Would “American Sniper.” The pro/con debate about this popular war movie, which is based on Chris Kyle’s memoir,  continues. In the past week, I came across two more interesting articles on the subject of American Sniper and the kinds of war movies being made today.

One of the articles is titled Hollywood Heroism in the Age of Empire: From “Citizenfour” and “Selma” to “American Sniper.” It was written by Canadian author Henry A. Giroux. Giroux’s most recent books include: Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America’s Educational Deficit and the War on Youth, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, and The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine.

Giroux described American Sniper as a “a war film about a young man who serves as a model for a kind of overconfident, unreflective patriotism and defense of an indefensible war.” He said that–for some critics–“Kyle is a decent guy caught up in a war he was not prepared for, a war that strained his marriage and later became representative of a narrative only too familiar for many veterans who suffered a great deal of anguish and mental stress as a result of their wartime experiences.” Giroux added that the movie “deals in only partial truths.”

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Posted in American History, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Iraq, Movies, US Military, War | 12 Comments

Mark Fiore on Brian Williams and the “Frog of War” (VIDEO)

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

By Elaine Magliaro

Award-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore said that it boggles his mind “how Brian Williams could embellish and ‘misremember’ an event like his helicopter ride in Iraq years ago.” He added that “the firestorm around his imagined combat experience is inordinately fierce compared to the relative silence around all of the other Iraq War-era ‘misrememberings, journalistic and otherwise.”

Fiore asked if we remember the “networks’ ‘military analysts’ who were part of a coordinated Pentagon propaganda campaign to sell the war, who personally profited from defense contracts at the same time…” He said he couldn’t “remember any higher-ups in the media or the military getting fired or suspended because of that shameful episode.”

Brian Williams & the Frog of War

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Posted in American History, Humor, Media, Short Video, United States, US Military, War | Tagged | 10 Comments

Department of Justice Could Sue Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department for Racial Discrimination

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

US-DeptOfJustice-Seal.svgBy Elaine Magliaro

Evan Perez and Alexandra Jaffe of CNN announced this evening that the Department of Justice “is preparing to bring a lawsuit against the Ferguson, Missouri, police department over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics used by officers, if the police department does not agree to make changes on its own…” Perez and Jaffe reported that Attorney General Eric Holder had said this week that “he expects to announce the results of the department’s investigation of the shooting death of Michael Brown and a broader probe of the Ferguson Police Department before he leaves office…”

Perez and Jaffe said that it was Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson that had “thrust Ferguson into the center of a nationwide debate over police tactics and race relations.” They added that the DOJ “is expected to announce it won’t charge Wilson for the shooting…” They continued by noting that the DOJ is also “expected to outline findings that allege a pattern of discriminatory tactics used by the Ferguson police.”

Sources said that if the Ferguson police “don’t agree to review and revise those tactics…the Justice Department would sue to force changes in the department.”

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Posted in Equal Rights, Law Enforcement, Local Government, Racism, United States | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

In memoriam: LottaKatz a.k.a. Pamela Janisch

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Gene Howington

Sad CatIt is with great sadness that I belatedly announce the death of longtime blog friend and general good person, LottaKatz a.k.a. Pamela Janisch. Born August 28, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri, she died in her home on February 19, 2014 at the age of 65. Many of us knew she had been ill. Her last comments here indicated she was feeling too unwell to comment and was just going to lurk for awhile. Over the rather busy year since then, her name has come up many times behind the scenes and a few times in the comments. We wondered what had happened to our friend, but we also knew that the events at RIL when it “changed format” had caused her some disgust. I know at one time she mentioned to me taking a break from blogging altogether. She hadn’t been well for some time. Many of us figured she was recovering and taking a break.

To our collective heartbreak, we found out just today that was not the case through the intrepid detective work of our own Charlton Stanley.

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Posted in FFS Update(s) | Tagged , | 28 Comments