Chamblee54

The following was developed as a mental age assessment by the School of Psychiatry at Harvard University. Timothy Leary was not involved. Take your time and see if you can read each line aloud without a mistake. The average person over 40 years of age cannot do it!

1. This is this cat.
2. This is is cat.
3. This is how cat.
4. This is to cat.
5. This is keep cat.
6. This is an cat.
7. This is old cat.
8. This is fart cat.
9. This is busy cat.
10. This is for cat.
11. This is forty cat.
12. This is seconds cat.
Now go back and read the third word in each line from the top down.

The first hundred days of a presidency is a landmark. At this point, POTUS gets a report card. BHO is approaching this point. The grades he gets at this point depend on the scorekeeper. Democrats seem pleased, and Repubs are buying tea bags.
PG decided that a look at the last few presidents is instructive. John Kennedy tried to invade Cuba in his first hundred days, with disastrous results. Lyndon Johnson watched The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. ( This report is based on PG’s memory. It should not be used as a reference for scholastic purposes).
Richard Nixon moved into the White House. Gerald Ford gave a pardon to Mr. Nixon. Jimmy Carter was portrayed by Dan Ackroyd.
Moving into the eighties, Ronald Reagan got shot in his first hundred days. George HW Bush talked to a rehab center about his son. Bill Clinton tried to get gay people accepted for military duty. George W Bush ignored reports about Saudi students in pilot schools.
PG declines to have an opinion about BHO at this point. The first dog, Bo, made an impressive debut, as did wife Michelle. BHO arguably has worse problems than any of the eight prezzes listed above. How he deals with them is how history will view him.

There is a new superstar on youtube. His “real” name is a mystery. His handle is “Jesusophile”. Chris Crocker, your fifteen minutes are over.
The consensus is that Jesusophile is a put on. He does say some outrageous things. “if you fired all the priests who were pedophiles, there wouldn’t be a lot of priests left”. This is at the six minute mark of the embedded video.
It is the year 2009. In the sixties, there was a movie, “2001 A Space Odyssey”. It is now eight years after 2001, the year that gave us 911. Somehow, this isn’t what we thought the future would look like.

Two of the everyday reads here, Andrew Sullivan and Kikoshouse, are all over this torture business. Go to either site, and you will see much more than you want to know. PG is trying to sort it all out. Maybe a top ten list will do the trick. Publishing it in rainbow colors will make it seem a little less horrible.
1- BHO doesn’t seem to want to do anything. The sense here is that BHO is not morally opposed to torture, and may want to use some of these methods before long. Being a product of Chicago politics does not speak well for his moral compass.
2- The United States has never been that morally superior. We did terrible things to native Americans, and imported a dark skinned population from Africa to enslave. In our most recent wars, there have been civilian casualties galore. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in air raids. In Vietnam the numbers were much higher, and we used a truly horrible concoction called napalm.
3- The School of the Americas is at Fort Benning. ( It has a different name now, and allegedly a more human focus). For many years, this school for Latin American authority figures taught methods of advanced interrogation.
4- While there were excesses on the battlefield, it does seem like the American military had some restraint about torturing prisoners of war. This frontier seems to have been breached during the Bush regime.
5- There is some controversy now about whether to prosecute Bush Administration officials…and possibly W himself…for war crimes. PG thinks this would be a very good move. It will put BHO and future regimes on notice that torture is not acceptable to citizens of the United States.
6- Two Wrongs do not make a right. While 911 was horrible, that does not give our forces the right to stoop to the level of those we fight. Christopher Buckley usually has a bit of sense, but he goes all out with rhetoric along these lines.
7- In the seventies and eighties, frustration over illegal drug use led to a “War on Drugs”. Many terrible laws were passed, many constitutional rights were destroyed, and the majority of Americans did not care. If a person was labeled a drug user, the bill of rights no longer applied to him. Today, substitute “Terrorist” for “Drug User”, and the story repeats itself. Many people do not care if rights are taken away from others, as long as a terrible label is applied to that other. It never seems to occur to these people that they might be next.
8- When you torture someone, he is going to tell you what you want to hear. It probably will not be useful information. It is being revealed that almost no information gotten from tortured prisoners was worthwhile. If the bomb is going off in an hour, you don’t want to go on a wild goose chase.
9- The Vice President seems to have been the person pushing for the use of torture. The Vice President should go to funerals and building dedications, and not make policy. He should not be in a position to degrade America in the manner that Mr. Cheney did.
10- There seems to be a pecking order in the value of human life. White native born Americans have the most value, followed, in some order or another, by Black Americans, foreign born people, Asians and Arabs It seems like the Arabs are almost considered sub human. This may be a function of Islam vs Jesus Worship, and years of incendiary propaganda by Israel. There seems to be an attitude that torturing Arabs is all right, because they aren’t as human as us.
11- It is said that a reason for the attacks on America…ala 911…was that “they hate our way of life”. In the wake of 911, we have lowered our standards, and resorted to tactics that would not have been used before. If the goal of Al Queda was to destroy our way of life, then, by inducing us to lower our standards about torture, then AL QUEDA HAS SUCCEEDED.
12- It seems likely that the Democrats in Congress knew about the torture. This is one reason why they are not eager to press for an investigation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a doozy of a quote:”I think it would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the facts are. And I don’t know a better way of getting the facts than through the Intelligence Committee,”.
13- There has been a lot of talk about waterboarding. What other methods were used? Why is there such an emphasis on waterboarding?
The call for the prosecution of W is in the yellow section. Maybe PG won’t get labeled “Terrorist” after all. Jail to the chief. So there you have it. Thirteen lucky thoughts for a Friday. Two cents doesn’t buy what it used to.

In case you have been under a rock, Opie is a busy moviemaker. He has a feature out in May called “Angels and Demons”. It stars Forrest Gump.
A man named William Donohue wrote a thing, published by the New York Daily News. The letter said : “the tag team of Dan Brown and Ron Howard have collaborated in smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.” Mr. Donohue is President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
When you see the online version of the Daily News piece, there is an ad for a wireless phone company. A cow waves animated ears, and the headline reads ” How can a COW help make sure your wireless calls get through?” No word on whether the COW is Catholic.
Opie responded to this publicity for his film by getting more publicity for his film. He was featured in Huffington Post, saying that his flick was just an adventure movie set in Rome. Rumors of a payment to Mr. Donohue, for his help in publicizing the film, were not addressed.

PG got wound up today about a report involving super glue eight time zones away. Meanwhile, an 11 year old man, who stayed a few exits down the perimeter, hung himself.
The story was that the other kids at school gave him a tough time. “They called him gay and a snitch,” his stepfather said.
Jaheem Herrera was from St. Croix in the American Virgin Islands. The picture shows that he had light skin. Dunaire Elementary School is on South Indian Creek Road in Stone Mountain. The area is predominantly African American.
PG does not know any of the kids who bullied Mr. Herrera. He suspects that many are Jesus Worshipers. The Jesus Worship Church has preachers that verbally abuse the congregation. The Jesus Worship Church has a book which teaches the hatred of homosexuals. They call it “The Word of G-d”.
The Jesus Worship Church has a phrase…”shame the devil”. PG wonders if “devil” was one of the things Mr. Herrera was called, along with gay and snitch. He looked different than his abusers, and was from a different place.
PG worked for seven years with a professional Jesus Worshiper. He clearly remembers the time that “Pastor” streaked in front of him.
“Pastor” shouted down and humiliated PG one day, in the name of Jesus. After the mugging was over, “Pastor” got a phone call. He picked up the phone and screamed “I never felt better in my life”.
Jesus Worship is an aggressive, angry business. Sometimes the results are fatal.

PG got an email this morning about super glue.
“Yesterday I was talking on the phone with Yanar Mohammed from Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (one of my clients). She told me of a horrific event this week in Iraq in which a large number (over 20 as I recall) of gay men were rounded up, had Super Glue applied to their anuses and then forced to drink high powered laxatives. They have been hospitalized and at least some are near death. She sent a link for an Arabic paper with news of the horrific event, but, obviously, I could not read it. Although Yanar serves women’s issues, apparently a reporter from the paper interviewed her because there are so few people willing to take the risk of speaking out against attacks on gays”
PG learned early on that if somethings seems to horrible to be true, it often is not. This is especially true when the only original source material is in Arabic.
Another account of the “roundup” said that it was “Iraqi militias”. Is this Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, Al Queda, Sons of Iraq, or even the American Army (who would have access to the supplies)? Is this militia an ally or enemy of the Americans? Was it just a bunch of Islam fueled teenagers, or even very kinky gays? Since PG does not read Arabic, he will have to wonder.
There is a lot of chaos in Iraq now, even with the “success of the surge”. If this is some isolated militia gang, it will be all but impossible to confirm or deny. What is amazing to PG is how this story is believed so readily, by so many people. It is assumed to be the work of Muslims. Not a day goes by without anti islam hatred creeping out of Jesus Worship/Conservative orifices. Maybe, if this involved light skinned Christians, there would be some skepticism.
The “high powered laxatives” is a nice touch. If the perps wanted to make their victims suffer, just glue the hole shut and leave them alone. Soon enough, the body waste will accumulate. Not using a laxative will prolong the suffering.
PG did a bit of research on this, and non Arabic information is tough to come by. The organization with Yanar Mohammed does not mention super glue on their home page. JoemyG-d has a post about it, along with the observation that the United States has an occupying army in Iraq. We have turned our economy upside down to implement “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Is this what the blood of our troops has purchased?
The search for “truth” in the super glue end game is not without irony. PG went to Snopes, the urban legend mythbusters.
He entered “super glue on anus” in a search engine. The entry did not yield any information. The screen, with the search result, had a header. The ad promoted a nursing home comparison service. If you close your anus with super glue, you will probably need a nursing home.
Spell check suggestions for this feature:
Yanar- canary, canard.
snopes- snipes, slopes, snores

The wordpress home page directs the surfer to a festive post today, “10 smart people who died in really dumb ways”. The appearance of this notice on Four Twenty is probably a coincidence. Also noted  is the latest on Susan Boyle. Miss Boyle is reportedly planning to market a brand of lipstick.
One problem with this post (about post postmortem smarties) is the fog of history. Only three of the smarties are contemporary. The rest are legends. Take Aeschylus for instance. Around 500BC, an eagle mistook his head for a rock, and dropped a tortoise on it. Even if wikipedia were more reliable, that would be tough to prove.
The three contemporaries can be proven. Jim Fixx wrote a book about jogging, and had a heart attack while running. Jerome Irving Rodale was promoting the health benefits of organic food on the Dick Cavett show. He dropped dead during a commercial break. And Tennessee Williams choked to death on an aspirin cap while intoxicated. It could have happened in one of his plays.
The list is not complete. Many famous people have made bizarre exits off the stage of life. Isadora Duncan was well known as a dancer. One night in Nice, France, she was riding in a convertible sportscar, wearing a long hand painted scarf. The scarf became entangled in the open spokes of a wheel, and Miss Duncan was thrown out of the car, and slammed to the pavement.
Even in more recent times, legend sometimes exaggerates the facts. Actress Lupe Velez was troubled about an unplanned pregnancy, and decided to end her life. According to Hollywood Babylon, Miss Velez took an overdose of pills, and felt ill. She went to the bathroom to get sick, passed out, fell face forward, and drowned in the commode. This version is disputed by her secretary Beulah Kinder, who claimed to find her asleep in bed.
The eddywu blog has another recent story, “Disappearances that made History”. This is similar to the other post, except that the body was not found. Included in this collection are D.B. Cooper, Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, and Jimmy Hoffa. With the construction of a new football stadium in New Jersey, Mr. Hoffa will no longer have season tickets.

PG and Uzi wanted to go to one of the festivals, but obstacles were in the way. PG needed to take his brother, GP, to the train station at 330. Uzi was afraid the rain would arrive by then, but PG pointed out that plenty of festivaling was still on tap at 4pm. Finally, a decision was made to go to the 420 festival in Candler Park.
At the end of Euclid Avenue an empty parking space appeared, as if by magic. The walk to the park had a few raindrops, but not enough to scare off determined festivalers. Once in the park, the band was rocking, the beer was flowing, and the bodies were moving. The bodies, that is, that weren’t sprawled on the lawn .
After a few minutes…during which the band played all original material…a few more raindrops made an appearance. PG was enjoying the band and the photo opportunities, but Uzi was not in the mood to get rained out. They found the car with all the windows unbroken.
It was now supper time. A mutual decision was reached to leave Piccadilly and S&S alone this week. PG turned on Ponce de Leon in the direction of Eats. He turned on another street in the direction of the parking lot, and did not see the do not enter sign.
While turning around, PG commented on the “degenerate” smoking a cigarette behind the building. Uzi pointed out that this man worked at Eats. PG hoped he was not the cook…he would not want to eat a meal cooked by a degenerate who knew that PG knew that the cook was a degenerate. Note this is Degenerate as in Ponce personnel, not unfunny Lesbian comedians.
So PG and Uzi went into Eats, and got fed. The parking lot  smoker came inside and started to bus tables. As PG was leaving, he saw the free publications behind the double doors. PG is between jobs, and has a profound appreciation of free publications.
PG managed to work the double doors open from the sidewalk side, and went inside to claim his publications. The  busman came by, and told PG to grab the double doors at the top, they open much easier this way. He was very insistent about teaching this lesson. PG did learn to grip the door on top, to open it from the wrong side.

PG saw a feature the other day about a new “conservative” group forming. In the comment thread, he found this: ” And yes, I’d like to keep the money i make, I’d like to live my life without government hands in my wallet and trying to ru nmy business, and I believe in freedom of speech. I believe that if you assault someone, the penalty shouldnt be based on whether you hated their orientation, race, or hat.”
PG had too much free time, so he replied: ” The “conservatives” claim they want a smaller government, then send 150,000 troops to a war eight time zones away. The “conservatives” claim they want the government out of our lives, and then pass draconian laws against marijuana.
“Conservatives” LOVE big government, the national debt, and interfering in the lives of citizens. And they apparently have you fooled.”
Do we know what is coming next?
“obama sent 17000 troops into Afghanistan, and raised military spending roughly 4% over what the bush white house had projected for FY09 and FY10. is pushing the war into Pakistan with drone bombers and leaving an est 50,000 troops in iraq after the proposed pull out in fall ’10. hasnt done anything to repeal the Patriot Act, and has increased nation debt to 1trill for his FY09 budget. hows that for big gov and national debt. oh and he also mocked the online group who sent the question about legalizing marijuana for taxation purposes in his town hall speech a few weeks ago.
but yep, those dem’s are much better. lol”
When it comes to political discussions, two wrongs make a right. It is not a matter of refuting what someone says, just find something rude to say about someone else. That makes it all ok.
Have fun at the tea party tonight. And don’t forget the whine.

It is the day before the whine party. PG had a nifty exchange in a comment thread, which shows for the thousandth time the silliness of conservatism. It will make a splendid post some day.
Alas, before that haggle of hypocrisy haha hit the whoha, PG checked in on TwentyTwoWords. The subject today is “10 normal words that sound funny when you think about them too long.” This is much more fun.
The original ten words are buffalo, clump, dribble, morsel, people, rattle, shampoo, smock, wasps, wool.
The comments add blog, canker, Cool Whip, duty, gesundheit, forehead, goiter, machete, problem, scissors, soap, trouser and umbrella. In the case of wasps and goiter, the word may be funny, but the reality is not. Got a problem?
One commenter who pays attention added : “Last week for this very reason I had to run spell check on the word “been” because it appeared too absurd to be possible.
FWIW, Ed Clowney, former president of Westminster Seminary, maintained that this effect was at the root of much Eastern mysticism. Persevere Perserverate on any word and the discursive part of our brain would be thrown into neutral and what he called the intuitive would take over, leading some to believe they had become one with the universe.” Uh Hummmmmmmmmmmmm.
And, as obituary readers know, many people have funny sounding names. It is considered rude to laugh.

LostMissing is a public art project. The actor is Mattilda. This is episode 28.
When I see you in a dream again it’s more stressful. I’m doing this dance move in a huge white room, white so high up it’s like the sky and I start on the floor jump to the ceiling the hard part is staying up there without hurting my shoulders against not-quite-sky and then back down to the floor and up, people are impressed most by the jump but remember the hardest part is the smooth roll of the shoulders up top. When I’m done I head upstairs to wash up and there you are at the gym in your workout clothes, back to me, I turn around. I’m at the checkout counter but there’s no one around, I pile groceries and cosmetics and everything I can into bags I don’t even know what all of this is but I walk outside it’s New York I figure I can jump into a cab and if someone says did you pay for that I can just hand them a credit card. The street is further from the door than I thought and businessmen are running out ahead of me, when I get to the corner I realize it’s the highway. I’m trying to get out of the elevator, but the bags are stuck in the door, the door
opens inward not out and then finally I’m out into the abandoned gym of security checkpoints, emptiness without space and finally the locker room, some friendly guys are taking the goods through the backside of the locker but how will I get out?