Double Takes






  • 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….

  • 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 post-classical 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.”

  • 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.”

  • How Big Can Ideas Get?
    Donny Deutsch (The Big Idea CNBC 2006/8/24 22:44 EDT): “I respect anyone that believes in their beliefs.”

  • 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 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.

  • 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”.

  • 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, Göbbels nearly becoming a Jesuit. The only Protestant of the four, Göring, was the most practical, un-idealistic, brutal, and crooked. He and banker Schacht topped the IQ tests of Nazis at Nürnberg jail.) A more idealistic pagan-Catholic-mix than Hitler or Göbbels, 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 andchinless-chicken-former-farmer, 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 gut-strut 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 aryan-leader 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 of socialist leaders once in 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. (Akin to the systematic neutering of Newt starting as soon as Gingrich got the GOP back into power in 1994. N.Pelosi & esp. H.Dean take note.)]
    Lesson: those who believe in the dream of 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 gut any candidate who won't play ball with said elite.

  • 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.”