Cogitamus

Life in the USA - A Photo Album

Bagel Crime, EPIC, and Ralph Nader

Florida Professor Ognjen Milatovic was removed from a US Airways flight this week for transporting a “suspicious bagel.”

Okay, okay, that's not entirely accurate.  One of Milatovic’s fellow passengers complained that his bag was emitting a “suspicious noise.”  But he was arrested and handcuffed for "disorderly conduct" and "interfering with the operation of an aircraft."  Those are the magic words, you know, no matter what you do, whether you behave like a dick or just have a hearing problem (Milatovic's father says he has a painful nerve condition and was trying to stand for as long as possible).  If you don't love, honor, and obey every command aboard an aircraft, you're outta there.

Here are three stories of the incident, so you can take your pick:

column from which I took opening line

Boston Globe

AOL travel news.

What, No Bible??!

Via Wonkette:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Father Christmas at the North Pole.  Well, at the Arctic Ocean, anyway -- close enough.  If that isn't one fab Santa outfit, I don't know what is.  I bet even Tim Gunn would approve!  Merry Christmas, everyone!

DHS and Walmart: A Match Made in Heaven

In a perfect melding of the Keystone Kops Meet O'Brien, Janet Napolitano is coming to a Walmart near you.  Her video, urging "If You See Something, Say Something," is rolling out at W emporia all across the country:

The message will be continuously looped on TV monitors at the 588 Walmarts in the U.S.  One can only imagine the hilarity that will ensue when one gun-buying customer doesn't like the looks of another.  But then maybe Napolitano doesn't really know the People of Walmart that well, after all.

"Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff.  If you need help, ask a Walmart manager for assistance.”  Ah, yes, ask a manager for assistance!  Next time you get in a tug-of-war with another customer over the last Game Boy in the store, just report that sucker to management for "suspicious activity."

Espionage Act: How the Government Can Engage in Serious Aggression Against the People of the United States by Naomi Wolf

Ballgame just brought this column by Naomi Wolf to our attention in another thread, but I think it deserves its own post.  Excerpt (bolds mine):

. . . These two Senators, and the rest of the Congressional and White House leadership who are coming forward in support of this appalling development, are cynically counting on Americans' ignorance of their own history -- an ignorance that is stoked and manipulated by those who wish to strip rights and freedoms from the American people. They are manipulatively counting on Americans to have no knowledge or memory of the dark history of the Espionage Act -- a history that should alert us all at once to the fact that this Act has only ever been used -- was designed deliberately to be used -- specifically and viciously to silence people like you and me.

The Espionage Act was crafted in 1917 -- because President Woodrow Wilson wanted a war and, faced with the troublesome First Amendment, wished to criminalize speech critical of his war. In the run-up to World War One, there were many ordinary citizens -- educators, journalists, publishers, civil rights leaders, union activists -- who were speaking out against US involvement in the war. The Espionage Act was used to round these citizens by the thousands for the newly minted 'crime' of their exercising their First Amendment Rights. A movie producer who showed British cruelty in a film about the Revolutionary War (since the British were our allies in World War I) got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage act in 1917, and the film was seized; poet E.E. Cummings spent three and a half months in a military detention camp under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of saying that he did not hate Germans. Esteemed Judge Learned Hand wrote that the wording of the Espionage Act was so vague that it would threaten the American tradition of freedom itself. Many were held in prison for weeks in brutal conditions without due process; some, in Connecticut -- Lieberman's home state -- were severely beaten while they were held in prison. The arrests and beatings were widely publicized and had a profound effect, terrorizing those who would otherwise speak out.

. . . I call on all American citizens to rise up and insist on repeal of the Espionage Act immediately. We have little time to waste. The Assange assault is theater of a particularly deadly kind, and America will not recover from the use of the Espionage Act as a cudgel to threaten journalists, editors and news outlets with. I call on major funders of Feinstein's and Lieberman's campaigns to put their donations in escrow accounts and notify the staffers of those Senators that the funds willonly be released if they drop their traitorous invocation of the Espionage Act. I call on all Americans to understand once for all: this is not about Julian Assange. This, my fellow citizens, is about you . . . .

Welcome to Your Police State - Grand Central NYC

Uh. Does anyone know why the TSA is performing random bag searches at the Grand Central Terminal subway hub?
posted by @metalia from Twitter for iPhone 23 hours 38 mins ago

Here's the URL.

UPDATE:  Well, this has been going since April.  But I guess since so few people give a shit, as you'll see from the chipper comments in the article, it barely caused a ripple.  Oh, well.  The horse left the barn long ago.

Cheering for your Rapist

 When You're Forced to Cheer for the Man Who Raped You

The story of a high school cheerleader from Texas who was forced to cheer for her rapist has become a horrifying Rorschach test for how our culture views rape and rape victims, by Lauren Kelly.
 

But then, cheering for your rapist, whether actually or metaphorically, is a longtime American tradition.  And don't forget the corollary -- blaming the victim.  These practices are practically de rigeur in high school, encouraged and abetted by coaches, teachers, parents, and that most predictable of animals, fans.  After all, we know who the Good Guys are.

THANKSGIVING: "A Wonderful Adventure Story" by Todd Akin (R) Missouri

Oh, MHB is gonna love this!  Representative Todd Akin, Republican of Missouri, takes to the House floor to regale us with stories of how the Pilgrims were so adventurous and free-spirited and such a "great bunch of Americans; there were knife fights in cabins -- I haven't had time to cover all that with you, but the basics are there."  

And they "came here with the idea that, after trying socialism, that it wasn't going to work. They realized that it was un-Biblical and it was a form of theft. So they pitched socialism out; they learned that in the early 1620s."

Golly gee!  Those Pilgrims were so far ahead of their time, they went Back to the Future!

Watch this master of history in action:

Oh, well . . .

Well, I've been saying it from the beginning.  But what the hell.

Next step for scanners trains, bus, metro, says Napolitano

By Jordy Yager - 11/23/10 02:09 PM ET

FIVE WORDS

FIVE WORDS:

Philip Zimbardo.

Stanford Prison Experiment.

Christine O'Donnell Gives Us A Math Lesson

Now, now, naughty children, I know you may not have done all your math homework in school and therefore might not appreciate the elegance of the Transitive Property, but lucky for you the ever-magical Christine O'Donnell (with a little help from Stephen Colbert) can explain it all.  I don't know which is better, the demonstration of the property itself or the debating skills bit that precedes it.  You decide:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Transitive Property of Christine O'Donnell
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Welcome to Baltimore, Hon

 
When people from other parts of the country ask me what Baltimore is like, I always refer to John Waters movies.  "It's just like that," I say.  "His movies aren't fiction; they're real.  That's Baltimore."

I've always reveled in my adopted city's wonderful wackiness, its eccentricities, its characters.  And hoo-boy, are there characters.  (One of them, Divine, lived in my house, long before I moved to Baltimore; I still use the original tub in which his divinity bathed.)

Our Fair City's charms are so inspiring, apparently, that Second City has come to town to check them out.  The fruits of the troupe's labors will be on display from December 30th to February 20th.  I, for one, can't wait to see what they come up with.

Vuvuzela Concerto in B-flat

And today's musical contribution comes from the planet of WTF.

Umm, no, I don't know either. But it's pretty bad ass.

So there's communist worker chicks toiling under the hammer and sickle, zombie Stalins, Gorbachev with the body of Jean-Claude Van Damme (but recognizable by the trademark port-wine stain on his head), Micha killing off the zombie Stalins, and the worker chicks gaining the kind of freedom that allows you to perform oral sex on bread.

Or something.

The song is by АНЖ (ANJ), described as "Gogol Bordello meets Megadeth", and the vid is part of the surely underappreciated computer game Stalin Vs. Martians ("The Unknown Pages of the Second World War"), the existence of which was passed on by the fine folks at Eternal Remont. (The trailer, in case you're curious, features an animated Stalin dancing to Snap!'s Rhythm is a Dancer.)

If you're wondering what the hell the lyrics are, the video's creator, Tom Stern, presented his handywork nine months ago at Vimeo and he posted the lyrics in comment #90 (near the bottom of the first page). But mostly I posted this because what this blog really needed was a post that could be given the keywords video, music, games, history, heavy metal, zombies, stalin, gorbachev, martians, communism and WW2.

The Great Halloween Lantern Parade, Baltimore

This is why I love Charm City.  Parade is happening this weekend, Saturday night, if you can make it:      

Catastrophic Apostrophes, and other Scary Examples of Grammar Gone Wrong

Today is National Grammar Day!  Only a few insufferable schoolmarms such as me would revel in such a thing, but revel we do (care to chime in, litbrit?).  Though my husand affectionately (I hope) refers to me as the Word Wench, I did not invent National Grammar Day.  No, that credit goes to The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, specifically a watchful woman named Martha Brokenbrough.  You can read more about the good Martha in Nathan Bierma's hilarious column.

Of course, at times like these we mustn't forget McKean's Law, developed by the ever witty and frighteningly articulate Erin McKean (full disclosure:  a friend of mine), who, in her spare time, though god knows where she finds it, also runs the inspirational beauty blog, A Dress A Day.

Then again, there's always Lynne Truss, whose book of a few years ago inexplicably shot to the top of bestseller lists all over the English-speaking world.

We're a weird bunch, I know, but we mean well.  It's hard to convey the excitement we feel upon discovering an etymology, observing a new linguistic phenomenon (no matter how annoying it might be), coining a neologism.  And some of us will go to our graves insisting on the clarity and correctness of the serial comma!  Onward, Grammar soldiers!

Me and You (with apologies to Martin Buber)

I often find myself turning to Ellen and Julia Lupton's blog, Design-Your-Life.org, for inspiration.  They are celebrated designers and academics, and I've learned from them how design affects every aspect of our lives.  In fact, the whole notion of design is too broad and expansive to encapsulate in a few words or a single definition.

A recent posting by Julia addresses the phenomenon of blogging (about which I, for one, feel deeply ambivalent).  Both she and her commenters bring up some good points that should provoke spirited discussion.  We hear all the time about how the blogosphere has created a new kind of community -- it's that word "community" that gets bandied about the most -- but does it really?  One wonders.

If Holiday Greetings Were EULAS

Thanks to Ed Foster of The Gripe Line Weblog, I bring you this missive from Mark Mailloux (and here's the definition of EULA):

With the holidays fast approaching and EULAs pretty much a fact of life, please accept -- with no obligation, implied or implicit, on behalf of the wisher or wishee -- my best wishes for an environmentally-conscious, socially-responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice, practiced within the traditions and/or within the religious or secular belief(s) of your choice and with respect for the traditions and/or religious or secular beliefs of others or for their choice to not practice traditions and/or religious or secular beliefs at all; and for a fiscally-successful, personally-fulfilling, medically-uncomplicated recognition of the onset of what is generally accepted as the new Gregorian calendar year, but with due respect for calendars of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great*, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or choice of computer operating system of the wisher.