Etch-A-Sketch Moment

Posted on October 17, 2012 by RegenAxe

Who is the real Romney?

CNN reports Romney practicing sitting on a bar stool – never been there. How many of us have that problem?

Can I have your attention, please?
Can I have your attention, please?

Obama points out gas prices were low in late 2008 because of the economic crash. “It’s conceivable Governor Romney could bring gas prices back to those levels, because some of his economic policies could lead to another crash.”

Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?
We’re gonna have a problem here …

If this Obama had showed up at the first debate, we could have been watching the baseball game right now.

And I love cars, I love lakes
I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake

George Bush didn’t call for turning Medicare into a voucher system. George Bush never suggested eliminating Planned Parenthood. Bush supported comprehensive immigration reform, he didn’t call for self-deportation. – Obama

With regards to abortion — pro-life, pro-choice
I firmly believe in my own singing voice

Romney attacks Obama for not reforming Medicare, but I thought the problem was that he did reform Medicare?

Look, if you don’t believe, I’ll tell you what
Ten thousand bucks?

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done – President Obama

So would the real Mitt Romney please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up

Blue Sky Ahead

Posted on October 13, 2012 by RegenAxe

Indiana Country Sky

Two things Biden is that Obama wasn’t.
1) Happy.
2) Warrior.
– Josh Greenman

I watched Thursday night’s Vice-Presidential debate and I liked it. Vice President Joe Biden really brought it. Republicans have argued that he overreached that he was the personification of the drunken uncle at the wedding. At the last debate they complained that President Barack Obama had just phoned in his debate. This debate they complain that Biden has overreached. Some people just can’t be pleased.

Joe Biden wiped the floor with Paul Ryan at Thursday night’s debate, but we might have to spend a day debating whether he laughed too much while doing it.
– Joan Walsh at Salon

It reminded me … of watching a musk ox run across the tundra with somebody underfoot. And in this case, when it came to style, it was Paul Ryan underfoot …
– Sarah Palin

Biden brought all of the arguments that Democrats were left craving after the first debate. In the above video clip he manages to hit all the major talking points in one brief soliloquy. This is all music to my Democratic ears.

You know what’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan? Lipstick.
– Charles Pierce at Esquire

Neither Biden’s performance nor this post was ever directed at other than a partisan Democratic crowd. Expect more rather than less of this partisan rancor. At this point in the election cycle it is more about getting out the vote than it is about trying to find those last few elusive votes.

Hello 911? There’s an old man beating a child on my TV – Bill Maher

What Biden did most effectively was to staunch the feeling of rout among the Democratic faithful. The anguish and gnashing of teeth that was exhibited after the first debate has dissipated. Subsequent debates for better of for worse will have less and less future impact. It is now about energizing the base and getting out the vote. Thank you, Joe.

I miss Jim Lehrer. – Karl Rove

Farm to Market

Posted on October 11, 2012 by RegenAxe

One of Anne’s Many Beach Sunset

The picture with this post is another one of Anne’s cabin sunsets. She took a million of them. This is fast becoming, with some luck and maybe some inadvertent repetition, a weekly series. This promise is similar to my bi-weekly political diatribe promise. Except the promise of a cabin sunset a week is a minimum, while the political rants are a maximum. I’m good on sunsets for the week, but I’m only at half of quota on political rants. Hey, isn’t there another debate tonight? I think so, the battle of the understudies, Biden versus Ryan. Stay tuned tomorrow.

I raved about my work this morning so much that I didn’t get to tell you about Anne’s day. Wednesday, the fourth grade ran their first ever farmer’s market. The school has a gardener that manages the garden, teaches nutrition and generally tries to connect these urban students to where their food really comes from. This being harvest season, it was time to pick some crops, bring them to market and sell them. Anne brought home tomatoes and rosemary.

Anne got to meet some of the parents of the children in her class. She’ll meet them more formally later this month, at parents-teachers night. One of the mothers offered Anne a sort of complement, saying that her child had told her that Mrs R. was kind of hard. At this point in our dinnertime conversation, I had to interrupt. Anne is hard? No way, Pooh is plush. This brought a smile to my wife.

The Salted Carmel Gabfest

Posted on October 8, 2012 by RegenAxe

Anne’s Maple Leaf and Purple Jellyfish

It has become impossible not to notice that Mother Nature has switched off her summer furnace. After weeks and weeks of unbearable heat, things have cooled to the point that there is almost a certain crispness in the air. To put things in the ‘Starkest’ way, “winter is coming”. I mention this as preamble, before I pivot to my larger story.

I am a fan of the multitude of Slate podcasts. The only problem is that I am not a good fan. I don’t use iTunes to download their episodes. Me bad, let’s move on. These talk shows all follow the same basic format that I’ll call Slate’s rule of three. Each podcast involves three participants, covers three topics, has only two commercial breaks (but this is inching up to three) and is finished with each participant making an endorsement, cocktail chatter, what have you. It is a couple of these recommendations that I want to share here. I would like to share an endorsement from Slate’s Cultural Gabfest, another very recent cocktail chatter from Slate’s Political Gabfest and a recommendation of my own. The Slate rule of three is preserved.

The first endorsement comes from Cultural Gabfest’s Dana Stevens. Her pick was Jessica Oreck’s Mysteries of Vernacular, a project of animated shorts, each one exploring the etymology of one word for each letter of the alphabet. So far, only eight letters have been produced using Oreck’s stop motion animation technique. This leaves plenty of room for growth. Check out ‘P’ for Pants.

The second cocktail chatter harkens back to this post’s preamble. This week’s Political Gabfest’s David Plotz chattered about the Weather Channel’s plan to start naming winter storms. We’re all use to the National Weather Service naming hurricanes. Who could forget Katrina? In past winters we had Snowmageddon, Snowzilla, Snowpocalypse, all names that we can now retire. Instead of NWS first name picks like Andrew, Camille and more recently Isaac, the Weather Channel plans on selecting names from mythology, ancient history, and yoga. Examples for this winter include the following:

Athena: The Greek goddess of wisdom, courage, inspirations, justice and mathematics.
Brutus: Roman Senator and assassin of Julius Caesar.
Gandolf: An 1896 fantasy character in a medieval country (not to be confused with Tolkien’s Gandalf).
Iago: Enemy of Othello in Shakespeare’s play, Othello.
Q: The Broadway Express subway line in NYC.
Rocky: A single mountain in the Rockies (Not to be confused with the movie by the same name).
Yogi: People who do yoga (Bear or Berra?).

My recommendation is for Starbuck’s new Salted Carmel Hot Chocolate. I’m so glad that this little blog operates at such a low-level that it will slip beneath the radar of Slate’s intelligentsia. This is not because I am recommending a Starbuck’s product, but because I’ve only tasted it in their sample size. In Grande sizing it could end up tasting like their pumpkin spiced latté, tasting too much of pumpkin spice by the end. Maybe I should do more research? Nah, I think that I’ll just crowd source this one.

Monday Morning

Posted on October 8, 2012 by RegenAxe

Saint Louis Ballet at Dancing in the Street

Anne and I spent our weekend somewhat separately, only crossing paths while around the house. Friday night we didn’t do much, but at least we did it together. Saturday morning, I went into work. When I returned, I went for a bicycle ride in the park. Anne begged off riding and did school work instead.

On Saturday afternoon, Forest Park was full of its usual fall activities, cyclists, runners and walkers, rugby players and wedding parties. On my way home I passed a particularly frigid wedding ceremony, just setting up on the shores of the Grand Basin. Typically wedding partiers only pause at the Grand Basin long enough for a brief photo-op. Even on a cooler than normal weekend like this last one, the bridesmaids don’t normally catch a chill, assuming of course that they are suitably fortified when they stumble out of their idling party bus.

Saturday night, as reported, I watched Iron Sky. Meanwhile Anne and Joanie enjoyed a girl’s night out, dinner and a show. They had a great time, which was only slight marred by a few unsightly Todd Akin campaign signs. They had dinner at Hendel’s Café in Florissant. The show was a Dance Saint Louis production, performed at the Touhill. Instead of their usual venue, which normally features a visiting out-of-town dance troupe, this show was put together from local dance companies. Most of them, we saw perform the previous weekend at Dancing in the Street. The show dubbed New Dance Horizons, offered four world premiers, performed by four local dance companies and created by four local choreographers. Two of the dancers from one of the dance troupes, Leverage Dance Theater, were pictured in last week’s Presidential Date Night post. Another one of the four groups was Saint Louis Ballet, which also performed at Dancing in the Street and is pictured with this post.

Sunday dawned before noon. Anne and Joanie went to the Shaw Art Fair. I went biking again, this time in a nearly empty park. Afterwards, I started water proofing the back porch, all the while listening to the Cardinal’s game, which they eventually managed to blow. The Red Birds never want to do it the easy way.

Monday, monday (ba-da ba-da-da-da)
So good to me (ba-daba-da-da-da)
Monday morning, it was all I hoped it would be
Oh monday morning, monday morning couldn’t guarantee
That monday evening you would still be here with me
Mamas and the Papas

Iron Sky

Posted on October 7, 2012 by RegenAxe

Nazi Punks F-Off T-Shirt

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum, where the patients all dutifully perform the German greeting. Suddenly, Hitler sees one man whose arm is not raised. “Why don’t you greet me the same way as everyone else,” he hisses at the man. The man says: “My Führer, I’m an orderly. I’m not crazy!”

Even in the stratosphere of political correctness there is one political group that it is still safe to beat down, the Nazis. I must confess a certain fascination about the Nazis. You just have to love to hate them. I’ve read all of Alan Furst’s WW II era spy novels and I am currently reading, City of Women. This is David R. Gillham’s first novel, which Furst has dubbed, “Extraordinary”. It is set in 1943 Berlin, it tells the story of one woman in a city where all the men have shipped off to war. It is like a Furst novels, in the way that it catches the mood of this period.

The true Aryan is as blond as Hitler, as slim as Göring and as tall as Goebbels.

I watched Iron Sky last night. This indie film won praise earlier this year at its debut Berlin film festival. I’ve been anxiously awaiting it US arrival since I first heard of it and saw its trailer and first four minutes. It is a campy film based upon the following high concept:

In the last moments of World War II, a secret Nazi space program evaded destruction by making a daring escape to the Moon. In the intervening 70 years they have re-colonized, re-armed with devastating new weapons and silently plotted their revenge.

It is a dark comedy. For an Indie film the special effects are quite good. It has real Sci-Fi chops. It makes fun of the Nazis, but more pointedly makes sport of the Tea Party movement. It is set in 2018, in the middle of a ‘Sarah Palin’ administration. The only good news here is that apparently Obama got his second term and the ‘Palin’ character is only in the first two years of her first term. I watched it online at Amazon, so it should be available elsewhere.

Hitler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says: “Why don’t you jump?”

The jokes interspersed among my text are authentic WW II German jokes. A Berlin woman was put to death for telling the immediately preceding one. I wish that I could reference the article where I found these jokes from, but in my haste to create this post I lost the author’s name.

The pictured T-shirt was photographed in the AC/DC exhibit at the EMP Museum, Seattle. It was worn by Krist Novoselic, 1984. Matt Lukin of the Melvins made this shirt, referencing the anti-fascist/racist Dead Kennedys’ song.