As to posting today, this comes at an opportune time.
We've been battling a major cold all week, and a considerable, ass-kicking cough, and we are giving in to taking it easy, and seeing if the meds we acquired today for it, do any good.
Numerous times, over our soon-to-be-five-years, we have attempted to bring your attention to others, usually by the way of a "pointer-post", a "Good Post Alert", what-have you, as a means to highlight some other great writing, or, a good cause, something you should be aware of, or look at.
Tonight, we are going to ask you to pony up.
Earlier this month, on his Facebook page, Barry Crimmins appealed to his readers, for good vibes, prayers, anything positive in the way of thoughts, for a "young lady" who was going through a life-threatening crises.
Even before we talked, I knew this was something extraordinary, though, not unusual, as Barry, typically, is the one leading the charge, often unasked, to help someone else.
Privately, Barry confided that this "young lady" was his 34-year-old niece, who, while on Christmas vacation, in Texas, visiting relatives, fell seriously ill, and at the hospital, cancer was discovered, an aggressive, massive amount of cancer.
The initial prognosis was not good, casting a fearful grimness throughout the family, with its' shuddering finality.
However, additional testing, and further consultations, a short time later, offered a way to deal with the situation, a course of treatment that would save this young, single mother of a 5-year-old "superhero" and deliver her to a healthy life, again.
(In talking with a small circle of friends, privately, as word got around, a special Hat-Tip goes out to Tom Kenny, known to the small fry generation as SpongeBob SquarePants, who, on his own, put together a special, customized audio message to Vanessa's little 5-year-old, from SpongeBob SquarePants, that would knock your socks off)
Barry lifted the curtain today, with a "new" news announcement;The young woman I've been asking you to support with good thoughts and prayers is my darling niece, Vanessa. Her friends have put up a website and they're planning a benefit @ The Oakland Metro Operahouse: The Oakland Metro Operahouse: 6303rd St. in Oakland California FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5TH 8PM..! There's a DONATE button on the site. Any help sincerely appreciated! Thanks so much and please keep the good karma coming!
The site is VanessaFightingCancerVanessa Smith of San Francisco, Oakland, New Orleans, Austin, Dallas, and Black Rock City.. rock & roll musician, artist, dancer, healer, student, single mother of a 5-year old superhero.. during a Holiday visit to her family in Dallas Texas was admitted into the hospital where she underwent emergency surgery and diagnosed with Advanced Colorectal Cancer.
The doctors are saying that her cancer is aggressive, however, it is currently localized and they are hopeful for a full recovery.
They have a PayPal button you can make a donation with, and are asking;Hit the Paypal Donate button. Under donation amount: "$2.00" Put in the subject: ".. ♥ ..fight..!..win..!..we love you..!.. ♥ .."
If you can donate more than $2.00, please do so.
As D.A. of Black Rock (aka Dominic Tinio), who put up VanessaFightingCancer, says, "Until our world can figure out the whole Health Care mess..it looks like we're just going to have to take care of each other the best we can ..."
And, even though he is a super-hero, the 5-year-old is gonna need some help.
(In an effort to give this maximum exposure, we will resume posting to The Garlic on Monday)
Friday, January 22, 2010
Special Announcement - Help Needed!
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Thursday, January 21, 2010
Not Brilliant!
Holy Chuck Cooper, Batman, is this guy dribbling, without the ball?
A Birther basketball league?
Basketball league for white Americans targets AugustaA new professional basketball league boasting rosters made up exclusively of white Americans has its eyes set on Augusta, but the team isn't receiving a warm welcome.
Hey, Don Moose Brains, this movie has already been made!
"Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league," the statement said.
[snip]
Don "Moose" Lewis, the commissioner of the AABA, said the reasoning behind the league's roster restrictions is not racism.
"There's nothing hatred about what we're doing," he said. "I don't hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here's a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like."
Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of "street-ball" played by "people of color." He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas' indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans' dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.
"Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?" he said. "That's the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction."
Like 24-years ago - Hoosiers!
You're deal doesn't sound anything like 'Hoosiers'.
'Hoosiers' was about redemption, and, was loosely based on a real event.
Your deal sounds, very much, like xenophobic racism
And, regular Garlic readers may be wondering, why aren't we rolling out the "Ignorant Dolt" carpet for this?
The reason is, we wouldn't want to sully our dubious Hall of Shame with the likes this cretin.
He goes way, way beyond being an Ignorant Dolt.
Sad News Today ... The Passing of Kate McGarrigle
I can't properly convey the profound sadness I felt, when scanning through the paper today, passing over the Obits, and seeing that folk singer Kate McGarrigle, of the famed McGarrigle Sisters, passed away.
It's not that I was a devoted fan, and follower, of the McGarrigle Sisters, or Folk Music, overall.
Yet, I had some unusual awareness of them.
They came through Boston, fairly regularly, and with that, I would hear them on NPR, or local radio.
And, it always struck me, on how the McGarrigle Sisters had something beyond cool, something so special, beyond their talents.
Imagine having a career, with your sibling, with something you love, something you had engaged in, virtually, your entire life ...
How many people can claim that?Born in Montreal and raised in St.-Sauveur-des-Monts, a small town about 50 miles north, Ms. McGarrigle absorbed a range of musical traditions around a musical hearth. Her father, Frank, was of Irish-Canadian stock and steeped in Stephen Foster and turn-of-the-century parlor songs; from her mother, Gaby, she and her two elder sisters — the oldest McGarrigle sister, Jane, was a church organist — learned old songs in French.
“Music was always there at home,” Kate McGarrigle said in a 1997 interview in Sing Out! magazine. “At parties, somebody would get up and sing, and my father would accompany them and sing the harmony. There were lots of friends and uncles and each would get up and give their big song.”
[snip]
Love and family life were central themes in both women’s music, and their songs often addressed romance’s place in the quotidian details of life. Kate McGarrigle’s 1990 song “I Eat Dinner” contemplates love lost among the leftovers, and both sisters’ “Matapedia,” from 1996, is based on a real event in Kate’s life, when an old flame saw her 17-year-old daughter, Martha, and mistook her for her mother.
Martha, like Rufus, has become a noted singer and songwriter. Their father is the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, who was married to Ms. McGarrigle in the 1970s.
So sad, as Kate McGarrigle was only 63.
Kate and Anna McGarrigle : Ce Matin
Kate and Anna McGarrigle : Cool River
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Petite Annonce
You can visit the McGarrigle's website here
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Weekend Special - Sautéed Cloves
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Love Means Never Making Me Read That Book Again
We remember, oh, so well, the mania that erupted, when the book, soon followed by one of the sappiest movie ever made, came out, the buzz, the hosannas for the work ...
And, if you had sisters, holy cow, it was 24/7, over-the-moon, heart-clutching anguish, bemoaning the wait for their "Oliver" to come driving up in a little MG.
You couldn't escape it.
So, we pose a query to you out there.
Who else has gone so far, with so little?
Erich Segal, 72; authored hugely popular ‘Love Story’He had originally written “Love Story’’ as a screenplay about the star-crossed love between a working-class Italian girl from Radcliffe and a Harvard boy from an old family. The 1970 film, which starred Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal and became a huge hit, was in production before Dr. Segal reworked it as a novel. When “Love Story’’ was released in paperback, it had the largest print order in publishing history at the time, with 4,325,000 copies.
Although Dr. Segal’s work resonated with the public, critics almost uniformly lambasted it. The judges for the National Book Award threatened to resign unless “Love Story’’ was withdrawn from nomination.
“It is a banal book which simply doesn’t qualify as literature,’’ said novelist William Styron, the head judge of the fiction panel.
But thrust into the limelight, Dr. Segal made weekend jaunts to Paris and London, returning to Yale for his classes on classical civilization. Dr. Segal also parlayed his love of running and knowledge of ancient Greece into a job as an ABC TV commentator for the Olympic Games.
If that was today, he'd have his own Reality television show, by now.
What love really means is never making me read that book again
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Martha Chokely
Oh My!
It really hasn't been, oh, that long ago, that fervent, boiling, in-your-face expectations have been thoroughly crushed, decimated, blown to smithereens.
Just two years ago, when local icons Tom Brady, and Bill Belichick, walked off the Super Bowl field, 18-1, as opposed to the expected 19-0.
Paging Martha Chokely!
Oh boy, did she blow it ... big time!
She took a Ned Lamont-siesta, after winning the primary, and never got into the game.
State Senator Scott Brown is now U.S. Senator Scott Brown, and the first thing he should do, in the morning, with a bouquet of flowers, send a "Thank You" note to Martha Chokely.
- He needs to thank her, for being such a enormously pathetic candidate
- Thank her for settling into the mindset of entitlement, that winning the primary was, essentially, all she had to do
- Thank her for not driving a pick-up truck
- Thank her for not knowing about sports
It will be like a Looney Tunes, with Chokely being punched, kicked, anvil-hit-over-the-head, shot, thrown off a cliff, before crawling to her feet, and being plowed over by the speeding truck.
Most of it, deserved.
However, as to the bigger picture, unless something remarkably uncanny happened, and all kinds of state and federal laws were, suddenly, abrogated, and changed, today, newly-elected Teabagger Senator Scott Brown only won one Senatorial seat, not 18-20, and, unless something else has changed, Brown will come to a dead stop, after he runs-like-the-wind, to get to DC, and join the rest of the PartyofNoicans, in doing nothing.
Amazingly, some three-+ hours ago, Tweety was showering the crowd at Doyles with spittle, foaming over Brown, and all but coronating him the Presidential winner in 2012.
And, that was before the polls closed.
You can expect more of that, when the Flying Monkeys of the Right Wing Freak Show pick up on it, soon followed by the projected pairing of Teabagger Senator Brown with Teabagger MoneyRaker Mommy Moose, the former half-term governor of Alaska.
There'll be endless blabbering about "recalibration", with all the discussion about how the Democrats, for losing one Senate seat, will have to "change" and the calls will grow for them to bend over, and give the PartyofNoicans whatever they want.
What the Dems need to do is, along with growing a few pairs, start governing, start using their majority in Congress, to govern, much as the PartyofNoicans did (when they were known as "Republicans"), during the The Bush Grindhouse years, where they, without a majority, handed The Commander Guy everything he wanted.
As far as governing, drafting up, and passing new laws, polices, etc, Brown's election is but a blip.
The PartyofNoican Leadership (yeah, we know, an oxymoron) will exploit Brown, new red meat to throw out there, and recycle the Obama slurs and distortions, generate headlines on the house rag, The Politico, Matt Sludge, etc. and become the new darling guest Talking Points stand-in, over on Faux News.
So, in sum, more of the same.
No game changer here.
Balls in your court, Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.
Just remember, in any interviews you do in the next few days, Curt Schilling is not a Yankee fan.
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Monday, January 18, 2010
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
Nice to find out, that when we were using The Koran for target practice, the guns and rifles our soldiers aimed, and shot, at the Muslim Holy Book, carried little mini-tweets of Christianity.
The Political Carnival calls them "Guns for Jesus".
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes ... Pentagon Supplier for Rifle Sights Says It Has 'Always' Added New Testament ReferencesCoded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
More, from Justin Elliott, at TPM;The company is not shy about its belief system. It confirmed to ABC that its scopes have the Biblical codes. Trijicon's Web site even says under a section titled "Values" that, "We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals."
[snip]
This is hardly the first time the Pentagon has come under fire for using religious messages in the course of conducting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. GQ reported last May on Donald Rumsfeld's presidential briefing folders that were peppered with Biblical quotes ("Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him...To deliver their soul from death.") printed on images of war.
Good thing this started during The Bush Grindhouse days.
Could you imagine the feces-throwing the Right Wing Freakshow Monkeys would be doing, if this came out of the Obama Administration?
They would, immediately, disregard that the little "LOL Jesus" messages, and claim it was a "Muslim code", confirming, once-and-for-all, that Obama is an illegal-alien-socialist-terrorist, intent on enslaving the entire country.
What's old, is new, again
PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION
Blame Paul Blart
It will be a profound shame, if the Segway's lasting memory is the horribly unfunny 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop'.
I would hate to think of Dean Kamen, the Segway's inventor, sitting on a porch, up there in New Hampshire, staring, zombie-like, into a lake, the image of the corpulant Kevin James in his head, quietly mumbling, droning, on-and-on, "Paul Blart: Mall Cop ... Paul Blart: Mall Cop ..."
Word recently seeped out (talk about a news dump, it was announced on Christmas Day) that Segway was sold to a British Millionaire, an investor in the Segway's U.K dealership.
And, without, the soaring image of millions of people, darting around town, doing errands, going to work, getting coffee (you just know, had they become ubiquitous, Starbucks would have rolled out new stores, geared towards the Segway, perhaps scooping up out-of-business car washes, retro-fitting them to grab your coffee, without having to slow down).
Which leads us to Chris Smith, on SiliconValley.com last Saturday;
O'Brien: Segway reminds us that even the best get it wrong sometimesToday, when we think of the Segway, it seems like a self-contained joke. When it appears in popular culture, like in a movie such as "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," it's for comic effect. The Segway has managed to enter the pantheon of novelty items, albeit on the more expensive end of the scale.
It's hard to remember just how much hype greeted its arrival in 2001. The Segway's inventor, Dean Kamen, had a strong reputation in engineering circles, having invented the AutoSyringe, a mobile dialysis system, and the iBot, an all-terrain electric wheelchair. People waited eagerly to see what mysterious wonder he was concocting next.
Interest was so intense that the Segway was unveiled in December 2001 — on ABC's "Good Morning America," a product launch to die for. Not long after, Jay Leno was demonstrating one on "The Tonight Show." In a Time magazine story, Doerr predicted Segway would be the fastest company to reach $1 billion in sales.
[snip]
But the revolution failed to come to pass. For as Wired magazine wrote last month in a retrospective on the Segway: "With a price tag that started around $5,000, the Segway PT pretty much doomed itself to a niche market: rich guys who aren't afraid to embarrass themselves in public."
Yes, rich guys embarrassing themselves.
I Wonder If Harry Reid Will Do An Endorsement?
Since this didn't happen on NBC (at 10PM, or 11:30PM), and it's not something that Martha Coakley botched a joke over, you may have skipped by this story, from the NYT, the other day;
Creams Offering Lighter Skin May Bring RisksAfter months of twice-a-day applications, her skin was not only fairer, it had become so thin that a touch would bruise her face. Her capillaries became visible, and she developed stubborn acne. A doctor told her that all three were side effects of prescription-strength steroids in some of the creams, which she had bought over the counter in beauty supply stores.
And, as if he didn't do enough chemicals in the ballpark, steroid-aided baseball cheater, Sammy Sosa has a bit of a problem;
[snip]
Some users are seeking to lighten dark spots caused by acne or brown patches known as melasma, which are triggered by pregnancy, menopause or birth control pills.
But many others seek to lighten their entire face or large swatches of their body, a practice common in developing countries as disparate as Senegal, India and the Philippines, where it is promoted as a way to elevate one’s social standing. A small percentage of men in such countries also use the creams.In November, some fans of Sammy Sosa, the former Chicago Cubs slugger, were surprised when photographs from the Latin Grammy Awards ceremony showed his face as uniformly lighter. Online critics accused him of wanting to be white. Mr. Sosa, a Dominican-born American citizen, told a reporter from ESPNDeportes.com that he had used a cream nightly to “soften” his skin and that it had bleached it, too. “I’m not a racist,” he said in the interview. “I live my life happily.”
And, of course, it's the woman's fault;Moreover, it is not as if dark-skinned women are imagining a bias, said Dr. Glenn, who is president of the American Sociological Association. “Sociological studies have shown among African-Americans and also Latinos, there’s a clear connection between skin color and socioeconomic status. It’s not some fantasy. There is prejudice against dark-skinned people, especially women in the so-called marriage market.”
Tale as old as time
Song as old as rhyme
Beauty and the Beast
Funny, the song, devoted to celebrating love, doesn't have any reference to skin-color.
Oh well, those mutant cream companies can always call on Harry Reid, to do their endorsements.
This Date ... On The Garlic
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Sunday, January 17, 2010
Geesh! ... They Could Have Used Wooly Willy ...
Oh man, this is a good one.
I suppose, since The Commander Guy, after his woody with the bullhorn, and all his "Bring it on!" and "Dead or Alive!", effectively, punted, and gave up the hunt, the FBI had to start somewhere when looking for the most notorious terrorist, this side of Cheney-Rumsfeld Smash-and-Grab Syndicate, Osama bin Laden.
But did they have to start in the Spanish Parliament?
Spanish MP's photo used for Osama Bin Laden posterGaspar Llamazares said he would no longer feel safe travelling to the US after his hair and parts of his face appeared on a most-wanted poster.
Holy Cow!
He said the use of a real person for the mocked-up image was "shameless".
The FBI admitted a forensic artist had obtained certain facial features "from a photograph he found on the internet".
[snip]
The FBI claimed to have used "cutting edge" technology, but Mr Llamazares said it showed the "low level" of US intelligence services and could cause problems if he was wrongly identified as the Saudi.
"Bin Laden's safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is," he said, adding that he was considering taking legal action.
Later, an FBI spokesman told the BBC that it was "aware of the similarities in hairline features of the age-progressed photograph of Osama Bin Laden, posted on the web yesterday, and that of an existing photograph of a Spanish public official".
"When producing age-progressed photographs, forensic artists typically select features from a database of stock reference photographs to create the new image."
With their army of lab monkeys, and bloated budgets, some FBI schmuck does what I, and thousands of other bloggers do on a daily basis - head out to Google Images!
We could slash that budget by about 90% and just job out the work to some 7th grade somewhere in the country.
Or, they expense-account it, for about two-bucks ...
They could just have used Wooly Willy.
Bonus FBI Boners
Chris in Paris: FBI uses photo of Spanish MP to make updated bin Laden poster
Steve Hynd: FBI Alters Spanish MP's Picture, Calls Him Bin Laden
Paul Carr: NSFW: Nobody suspects the Spanish politician
Bonus Bonus
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Guarare
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Just Say "Oh No"! ...
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Special Commentary: Welcome To Bushville …
