Double Takes






  • But What's Wrong With Citing Shia-Tholerance Nations?
    Haters & Raters
    :
    Isn't President Donald Trump's literacy appalling?! Disgusting! Impeachable! For instance, he doesn't even know how to say “ShiThole”? Can't he pronounce “th” any better than his fellow-Nazis pronounce “BeeTHoven”? (Whom those race-haters actually rate above 'rap!)
    [At least we may credit Trump (whose vocabulary is not notorious for vastitude) with calling-up a generally-unfamiliar word which is not only a valid synonym for “tolerate” but the obvious root for that word. (Could agile Trump alibi that the root was actually his true intent?)
    (Half-serious question that is likely to be misunderstood: does the Koran contain such a word?)
    Nothing new here: Aquinas OK'd snuffing apostates, too.]

  • Question: Why is it that, in filmdom's moonlight scenes with the Moon looming over the aciton, the Moon is always FULL?
    Answer: it's the Sun, with camera-exposure lowered to darken the scene. So, unless you want to wait around for a partial solar eclipse, the Sun is not ordinarily crescent; and not even an eclipse will produce a gibbous Sun.

  • The music of Glazounov's beautiful King of the Jews was written to a mystery play banned by the Czar for fear of triggering pogroms since it ritualistically blamed “the Jews” for killing Jesus, Hearing this broken-record propaganda yet again, Barbara Rawlins asks: why don't they at least say “the other Jews”?

  • CNN-Hack's Journey From Paranoia to Amnesia:
    On 2016/11/23, national news carried word of CNN's establishment-echo “journalist” Christiane Amanpour predicting that Trump's win signals that pressvolk should fear that they might end up in cages, etc --- adding that she's now not interested in reporting two sides. ANYMORE. (How's that for a comic finishing-touch.)

  • No Mirrors Available?:
    Wikipedia insists on Reliable Sources. Wikipedia!

  • Gone With the Wind's front-cast-lists has later-Superman George Reeves as Brent Tarleton and Fred Crane as the other twin, Stuart Tarleton. Has it been remarked that the 1939 film's opening scene and the later up-all-night-thinking-about-it scene on the Wilkes' stairway both have the twins' names consistently reversed?
    [Equally unremarked-upon: when in 1925 Mary Philbin playfully sneaks up on the Phantom of the Opera and rips off his mask, he's NOT FACING HER. So why doesn't he just walk directly away, return with a new mask, and continue as suave-benefactor and fantasizing-wannabee love-object?
    Another unnoted oddity: the opening frame of 1931's Dracula repeatedly bills Carl Laemmle as Producer, and tells us that the film is copyrighted by [sic!] “Universal Pictures Corporation, Carl Laemmle, Presient”.]

  • Anti-Science, Big Brother, and the US' One-Party Press:
    Dembos are rightly appalled at Dumbos' and fundies' anti-Darwinism and over-rigid disbelief in the theory that polluters are not only poisoning air but causing climate change. But when Dembos then call Republicans “anti-science” — even while viciously smearing and firing all who raise the scientific question of genes and intelligence — they lose cred among (genuine) freethinkers. And lose all those who value plain, consistent historical evidence over (ironically) prejudice and who on that subject think beyond the rigid-steel censorial confines of the US' fascistically, totalitarianly one-party Mainstream press.

  • Will the American Poople Only Learn by Mishap Their Paid-Pipers' Inner Thoughts and How They Talk At Home?

    1. Pious new-model-Demmygod Jimmy Carter's 1980 nomination-acceptance speech spoke pseudo-reverentially of old-model (New-Dealer) H.Humphrey thusly: “Hubert Horatio Hornblower — er — Humphrey”.

    2. On Fox's The Five, Dana Perino celebrated 2017's Pearl Harbor Day with a real pearl: when commenting on Olympic athletes that offer political views, she said, “If I were their representatives, I would tell these jer --- these athletes you don't need to do these interviews.”

    3. MostSacredNBC blonde-newshen Amy Robach has told us (MSNBC 2003/9/26) of the latest attack upon “Jewess — Jewish settlements”.

    4. House Majority Leader-soon-to-be & Nevada's Dembo Senator, Harry Reid, told us (2005/11/8) whom he was trying to defend: “the American poop — people”.
      [Harry's looong-experience-based contempt for a public that would be idiotic enough to keep electing him, re-appeared in 2008, when he was delighted that the new visitor's center for Congress meant he would no longer have to endure the body odor of commoners touring the Capitol.]

    5. It Couldn't Happen to a More P.C.-Censorial Big Brother: On 2016/12/19 14:39EST, MS-NBC talking-hack Ali Velshi slip-referred to Michelle Obama as “The First Lazy — Lady” (when leading into coverage for MSNBC's and Michelle's latest whining about humanity's hopelessness after Dembos' 2016 loss).
      What makes it particularly delicious is that the very same Velshi was a few minutes earlier rejecting the of-course-baseless worries that LGBTQIABCDEFUVWXYZ-sensitive N.Carolina's gov't's reaction to the Aggrieved Lobby's insistence that it would be offensively traumatic to deny any 7ft 250-lb tranny the legal right to invade girlpersons' bathrooms at will. Velshi did this by comparing the invadee-females' apprehension — of-course-purely-imaginary in rapeless meltiethnic US (below) — by comparing it to the discomfort felt by whites in the old south, a familiar media-ploy to end debate.
      [It works because no one who wants to keep his job in the FreesniggerSpeech US is allowed to point out that maybe (given the explosions of US crime, drugs, illiteracy, rape, murder, that followed invariably-FORCED integration of the US, the Uncomfortables turned out to be … not entirely delusional.] Think Velshi'd never previously called Michelle the “First Lazy” privately?

    6. Veshti's bananapeel-lip incident is the most poetically-just irony since blackcause-hyperOsculator Howard Cosell was fired by ABC-TV for genuinely-affectionately admiring the considerable agility of tiny black Redskins wide-receiver Alvin Garrett (1983/9/5), saying “that little monkey gets loose, doesn't he”.
      [Cosell's firing was at the behest of the same race-obsessed lobby (e.g., Jos.Lowry: Southern Poverty Law Center), who selected&manufactured such pseudo-events as Travon Martin's “murder” (see DIO 20 [2012] p.2, flawed only by underestimation of Zimmerman's courage; see also DIO 18 [2014] p.56 fn 169). Insaneration:
      The hairtrigger-assassination and eating-their-own betrayal of Cosell was nakedly opportunistic, since as he rightly says in 1985's I Never Played the Game Chap.12, “nobody, but nobody in the history of sports in this country has served the cause of black athletes as I have”. Cosell was incinerated by the insanity of the current establishment's paranoiacally intolerant, error-has-no-rights, dissent-sniffing&snuffing, eternally-sysyphan & eternally-miserable anti-racism alchemic-chimera crusade, which he pandered to throughout his career.]

    7. Kleptomania on the Microagression-Antennaed Mind:
      From Michelle Obama's 2015/5/09 commencement address at Tuskegee University (which DR in 1962 visited for an interview and got a job-offer from): “we both [Mr&Mrs B.O.] felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire live [sic], the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety, the clerks who klept [sic] kept a close eye on us in all those department stores, the people at formal events who assumed we were the help, and those who have questioned our intelligence….”
      [Did she ever ask why none of those questioners are ever on the toob?]

    8. Pathological-Lawyer Obama Trumpifies Into Border Guy & Family-Buster
      in Polyfaced Hypocrisy-Orgy
      :
      Prez B.O.:
      [1] Criticizes deportation of Latino border-lawbreakers as cruelly breaking up families.
      [2] Justifies bringing tens of thousands of Syrians to the US by pretending that the 1st installment will (maybe) be just kids & moms (thus splitting families), though a huge majority of his CIA-caused Syrian refugees are males.
      [YOUNG males. What could possibly go wrong? (And the kids'll never grow up.)]
      [3] Supports (2015/11/24) Turkey's border against 2 Russian fighter pilots barely and momentarily intruding. (And having their parachutes and rescue helicopter shot at by Allah-yelling US “allies”.)
      [4] Attempts exec-order-legitimization of millions of Latino aliens who deeply and persistently break US border laws for decades on end.
      [5] Pushes his Justice Dep't to insist on strict literal legality in all police practice, while releasing thousands of law-breakers early, to add to the former policy's helping-hand to street drug-sales and murder.
      [All US policy vis-à-vis Syria (& Ukraine) must be evaluated in the context of an item seldom mentioned in US media's drumbeat condemnation of Syria prez Assad: thanks to his assent, Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean — an unforgivable offense to decades of US Containment policy. (Similarly, the Russian naval base in Crimea, just south of Ukraine, provides open access to the Black Sea.)]

    9. MS-NBC's Lisa Daniels 2005/4/29 10:34 receiving field-reporter K's story on a multiple-stabbing murder of two children:
      This is the kind of story you don't want to hear about. Thanks, K, for those details….

    10. Visa's (and, o-yes, the US') snowboard-cross championess Lindsey Jacobellis (now tied with GJ for alltime-Pascal-Wager-dimhood) threw away millions of dollars by her final gratuitous hotdogging→crash at the 2006 Winter Olympics. (Though the potential 2010 comeback-drama will net her some solace-coin — and a bigger fortune [than she blew in '06] if she wins after all.)
      [Note added 2022/2/8: SIXTEEN YEARS later, she finally — on her FIFTH crack at the Olympics — earned that longlost Gold Medal. Will make tens of millions. Deserves every mil. (Currency footnote: a million dollars = a billion mils.)]
      As the Greed Channel discussed this tragedy (CNBC 2006/2/24), Sue Herrera commented, in kind sympathy with the Olympics' several other unfortunate corporate-brandname-owned-and-thus-over-PREhyped losers, that it was nonetheless “quite an accomplishment to represent your company — coun, country — I should say.” [Oh — should she?]

    11. Situation-Normal-All-FOXed-Up:
      Finally, we have the News Dep't of FOX (sometimes Over-Rightly False-Or-Xaggerated):
      [i] The report (2006/2/5 12:05PMEST) that Iran is “rumping up the rhetoric” in the Middle East.
      [ii] During FOX's hysterical lockstep-alibiing of Cheney's gunning down his 40y-friend→“acquaintance” on 2006/2/11 Saturday (or was it Friday?), we find FOX anchor Bill Hemmer's hilarious (deliberately?) extrapolation-to-the-heights of the FOX-clan's Hemmer-the-message-home marching-orders, as he (2006/2/17 12:51 EST) called the event just an “accidental shooting accident”.
      Going-Off-Double-Cocked — Bad-News-Diversion Hits a New Low:
      [iii] Finally, as reported on Olbermann 2006/11/6, we have talking-FOX Jane Skinner reporting Afghan locals' election-eve demonstration of the US' degree of control of order in Afghanistan: a multiple murder. “the deputy police chief said six officers were killed, including the district's [nation's] top cock — top — cock after — cop after the vehicle they were riding in was sprayed with bullets. Three other off-[suppressed giggle]-icers were hurt in the attack.” — She and Shep Smith then cracked up with laughter. (As noted by the media's top-cop-or-whatever-trashing-FOX, K.Olbermann: this was a six-policemen-get-shot-to-death story [an incident embarrassing not to Skinner but to FOX-fave Bush] — Olbermann: “It's a big laugh, isn't it?”.) Shep covered nimbly with: “Ah, those South Carolina Gamecocks.” (Fox got revenge in 2014 when MSNBC's Crystal Ball was undone, live, by a gross Howard Stern prank.)

    12. The So-Called Authoritative News Anchor:
      CBS anchor Scott Pelley joined the chorus of the mis-spoken, following the Isis Caliphate's murder of over 100 Parisiennes, by referring (2015/11/16 19:12EST) to Isis' “so-called Caphilate”.

    13. On 2022/2/9 (00:25EST), Fox's bright, classy Shannon Bream uncharacteristically misread her copy (but recovered gracefully), while describing:

      a very rare black diamond. Sotheby's Dubai says the rare gem is more than 555 carets & they believe it came from outer space. They call it the “enema” — “enigma” — heh heh heh — Yes!
      It's set to be auctioned off in London this month….

  • Geographer Ptolemy Lives:
    The Video Hound is the invaluable complete catalog of film, but how reliable are its ratings? Well, the 2012 edition rates the clever 1949 British films Hidden Room & Obsession at 3 bones & 2 bones, respectively — unaware that they are the same film.

  • The 1931 Spanish version of Dracula (paralleling the Lugosi version but exceeding it in length & artistry) ends with Drac vanquished by the rising Sun, very briefly shown. Close inspection reveals that the “sunrise” is actually a sunset.
    [Evidently the budget was limited for the film's alternate versions.]

  • Cutting-Room Floor:
    Big Julie Caesar: “All Gaul is divided into 3 parts.” (And I've just murdered one of those thirds.)
    [It has been estimated that Caesar's war in Gaul killed roughly 30% of the population. Under Little Augie Caesar, the slaughter of northern Europe continued but not without setbacks. E.g., the Germans ate one of his legions.] All to bring back wealth (slaves and gold, in order of value) for-Rome's-benefit, which instead corrupted and ultimately destroyed the Roman Republic. (Similar to modern oil-cartel wealth's effect on Congress.)

  • The front page of the 2014/9/13 New York Times ran a photo of the late Ian Paisley, captioned “protestant rabble-rouser”. Question: in the last 100y, has the NYT ever located and identified a single “Catholic rabble-rouser”?
    [Equally-banned follow-up question regarding the world's Protestants and Catholics: percentage-wise, which side has the most rabble?]

  • Incessant get-rich-quick ads for silver, by, e.g., Lear, imply the price/oz could be about to take off back to previous highs. The ads graph the fantasy, with a solid line, from the time of the previous high to the present — but then extend that line into the future without dots, instead with JUST AS SOLID A LINE as for the real part of the graph. (Which tells us how alert are the media's truth-in-advertising monitors.)
    Question: if Lear is so optimistic about the prospects for the price-rise with which they're trying to lure the credulous, why let OTHERS make all those dreamed-of profits? — when all Lear need do is sit on its silver and later sell it at those dreamed-up sure-to-come solid-line prices they're advertising?

  • AssIgning Blame:
    Pseudo-overheard Noo-Yoawk-thinking-out-loud:
    “Okay, so 'dis Beethoven guy you're alwaze buggin' me about ain't eczactly crackin' d'yout' crowd. Hey — news-flash — dere's no free lunch 'round heah. What's the Ludster deserve when betcha de guy can't even spell payola?”

  • Mary Kay LeTourneau, poster-girl for rape-is-pro-Life, who evidently hopes to turn child-molester-notoriety into a celebrity-profession, was asked for her reaction to critics (Entertainment Tonight 2005/4/28). With the same obliviousness that has characterized her life, she replied:

    Don't touch my kids.

  • Where Was This Guy on 1962 April 5th-7th?:
    New York Times music critic Bernard Holland (who is so uninterested in the late romantic tradition that he once confused Rachmaninov's 2nd & 3rd piano concertos), commenting on Glenn Gould (International Herald Tribune 2007/11/28 p.9):
    “he played … Brahms with docile acceptance of tradition.”

  • Fox's 2010 interview of Obama interrupted alot, presumably in order to deal with his devious long answers to questions. Dembomedia, e.g., MS-NBC, were more upset over etiquette than lies. But jaws must've hit the floor across the journalistic world when talkshowdom's ultimo rudus-interruptus offender, CHRIS MATTHEWS, unself-consciously led Demedia's coordinated 2010/3/18 charge AGAINST THE SIN OF INTERRUPTING GUESTS. MS-NBC was partially redeemed by Dylan Radigan (its prime remaining rational light), who tempered his criticism by empathetically noting his own (mostly justified) interruptions of guests. Dembo-hack Ed Schultz creditably invited-in a dissenter — but then discreditably tried to stifle her dissent by repeated interruptions.

  • What's the Difference?:
    Post-prez-debate MSNBC-funeral (2012/10/4 12:51EDT): apparent passionate conviction is what distinguishes great politicians and also great actors.

  • Fox News' deft comment on the death of Michael Jackson (FNC 2009/6/25 19:44 EDT):
    “He touched alot of people in alot of ways.”

  • But Will Such Courage Help Pius' Chances in His Next Election?
    Baltimore News-American 1945/12/24 p.1 headline: “Pope Pius XII asks end of totalitarians.”

  • CNN 2009/3/3 TV 'snews-show (20:07EST): “Campbell Brown No Bias, No Bull, brought to you by Exxon….”

  • James Martin, S.J., on the op-ed page of the Int Herald Trib (aptly 2006/4/1), straight-facedly listed one of the essentials (besides proof of a heroically virtuous life) for a saint's canonization (emph added): “hard-nosed proof of two miracles.”
    [I couldn't deliberately make up such satire.]

  • MS-NBC's Mike Viqueira, post-election (2008/11/5 11:21 EST): it's “probably not likely” that the Dembos will reach the height of control of Congress the Dumbos feared.

  • Turkey-p.r. lady, recently hired to soften EU minds to believe that, e.g., part of Asia is part of Europe:
    “Turks have made huge contributions in Germany, and we need to show this to help German people overcome their fears. Turks are also a growing electoral force there, and we need to exploit this.
    (Int Herald Trib 2005/10/8-9 [pp.15-16] p.16, emph added. Believe it or not, no ellipsis was required here to pair her messages.)
    [Speaking of embarrassingly transparent Turkey-p.r.-ploys to con the EU:
    Has it been much noted that Turkey in 2005 re-adjusted the definition of its currency (the Turkish “lire”) by a factor of merely a million — to paper (if you will) over the fact that its gift for inflation is not restricted to (increasingly fundamentalist Moslem population-growth?]

  • On 2004/2/19, University of Colorado head football coach Gary Barnett defended his team against UC kicker Katie Hnida's report that she'd been raped by a male teammate.
    “It's a guy's sport. And they felt like Katie was forced on her — you know, on them.”

  • CNN on 2004/1/6 reported that a chap named Singleton was scheduled to be executed — for unempathetically stabbing a lady to death (eons of lawyer-fees ago) — “even though” he's [allegedly] insane.
    [A comic has suggested that if a murderer is nuts enough to inspire this kind of reasoning, then he's not even going to know if you're taking him to execution: send him to the electric chair and tell him it's a Ferris-Wheel.]

  • On 2005/11/26, one of the “news” channels covering Iraq-occupation US soldiers' travails spoke of their battling “back” against the “insurgents”.
    Is Orwell's shade smiling? Probably not.
    [Cinemax has since (2011) launched a series on US military adventurism abroad called Strike Back, built upon the same theme of US forces (portrayed as innocent nation-builders) going half-way around the world to mess with some poor nation whose resistance to the intrusion is portrayed as the real aggression, against which the Good Guys are just defensively COUNTER-attacking.]

  • Daleyspeak Lives:
    Live-TV speeches you'll never hear entirely replayed on the PC media: On 2003/12/18, sentencing the Green River killer to life for 48 murders, the black judge condemned him for his “lack of disregard for human life”.

  • The Leonard Maltin 2009 film Guide p.98 typically prefers the 1926 silent Ronald Colman rendition of Beau Geste to the famous 1939 talkie. Yet this page reviews only the 1939 & 1966 versions, not the 1926 one — which is not even included in the Guide's p.1593 list of Colman's films.

  • Pascal Huynh (notes for Erato CD recording [©1999] of Ferruccio Busino's Doktor Faust): to oppose the “cult” of Wagner, “Busoni proposed a fusion between the past (he suggested … Bach & Mozart as an antidote to Wagner) and the present (as represented by futurism and the avante-garde)”. The admission that “futurism” is often merely present passing fashion, is a gem. (See also: DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡3 §B1 [p.18], DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §D3 [p.77].)

  • Ian Kershaw Hitler 1936-1945 p.612 (emph added): “the increased number of pills and injections provided every day by Dr. Morell — ninety varieties in all during the war and twenty-eight pills … could not prevent [Hitler's] physical deterioration.”

  • Hitler on Heinie Himmler: the trouble with Himmler is, he's not an artist.
    [Other than that, no-prob. Himmler was the youngest, daffiest, and least scientifically balanced of the top four Nazis. (Three of whom were cafeteria-Roman Catholic, Goebbels nearly becoming a Jesuit. The only Protestant of the four, Göring, was the most practical, un-idealistic, crooked, and hands-on brutal. He, banker Schacht, & Dunkin' Dönitz, topped the IQ tests of Nazis at Nürnberg jail.) A more idealistic pagan-Catholic-mix than Hitler or Goebbels, Heinie Himmler embodied the ideal of systematic-mass-murderer-as-mystic-race-nut. (He nimbly celebrated the 1940 anti-Comintern pact by trying to prove that Japanese were Aryan and — golly — almost as superior as Germans.) A combination of soldier-philosopher and chinless-chicken-former-farmer (PETA might note the career-dry-run: chickenfarms are bloody killing-prisons), ReichsführerSS Himmler's heroic-aspiration self-image is transparently (if slightly effeminately) displayed in Triumph of the Will, where one can see the pride he took in being able to (as Mel Brooks' Kenneth Mars might say) goose-step the pants off Göring, whose feeble goose-waddle on the same 1934 occasion easily wins the comic-high-point-of-the-film award. Given that Göring was then fresh off shooting-to-death the former SA chief E.Röhm (his main competitor in the non-lean super-aryan category), one is impressed that Leni Riefenstahl didn't edit-out this embarrassment. But perhaps she simply hadn't heard of the incident in which Göring was post-boarhunt-boasting to a Brit diplomat of a “good morning of shooting”, to which the Brit deftly inquired: “Animals, I presume?”
    Note: the army-placating 1934/6/30 murders of Röhm (among others) betrayed [a] the young SA men whose marching and gooning had put Hitler in power, and [b] those who'd ever taken the “Socialism” part of “National Socialism” seriously. (Italy's history of similar buying off & filtering socialist leaders as they approached power culminated in Mussolini. See Peter Neville Mussolini Routledge, London 2004, pp.7, 32-33, 43-44, 46, 67. Mussolini originated from a family so egalitarian-socialist that he was named for anti-Maxico hero Benito Juarez.) A typical bait&switch rulership-swindle. (H.Dean take-Newt: Akin to the GOP's systematic neutering of Newt Gingrich, starting as soon as NG got the GOP back into power in 1994.)]
    Lesson: those who believe in the dream of US justice and equal rights via republican elections nearly always experience the eternal frustration that the goal is a just-around-the-corner but ever-out-of-reach chimera — because those in power will only obey popular elections so long as the public votes for candidates within the vanishingly-tiny-spectrum Dumbo-“versus”-Dembo slate which the elite's media tell them to vote for, while the same slut-media ignore or smear (most recently: R.Nader or R.Paul, respectively) any candidate who won't play ball with said elite.
    [Note added 2017/7/17. This was written nearly 10y before Trump's defiance of the establishment-media put him (improbably!) into the same boat as Nader & Paul, in this limited respect.]

  • MS-NBC topic-headline 00/11/14 14hEST “The Florida Recount”. (What yukkable singular “the” could've one-upped that beaut? THE Gore-camp lawyer?)

  • MS-NBC 2000/11/8 (on Florida absentee ballots): so for us “to presume that this is necessarily going to go the Republicans' way would be — would be presumptuous.”

  • History Channel (2000/2/17, 23:29EST): in the period before the Battle of the Bulge, “The Allied commanders did not expect von Rundstedt to do anything unexpected.”

  • Adman Ethics Course:
    Avon television ad (2000/10/29-30 1:02EST): “It's OK to lie.”

  • Retardation as Superiority:
    G.Alperovitz' review (Wash Post National Weekly Edition 2000/9/18 p.35) of H.Bix's book on the #2 war-criminal of all time, Japanese Emperor Hirohito, stumbles upon a contradiction in racist dictatorship which seems always equally to elude rulers & rulees: Hirohito thought “of his people as mere children and … as a spiritually superior race.”