Ahh, how I long for the stupid legislation of the good ol' days.
I've never claimed to have extensive knowledge of U.S. legislation throughout history, but it's safe to say that I and most people I associate with are law-abiding citizens ... or not. As it turns out, every state in this country has at least one wacky legal stipulation that could land residents in hot water if they don't comply. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Alabama
It's illegal to wear a fake mustache that causes laughter in church.
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#2
Unless a customer specifically requests it, margarine may not be substituted for butter in a restaurant.
I remember one my grandmother's friends telling us that 'Oleo Margarine' (artificial yellow coloring added - as in all 'yellow' margarine) was a communist plot. You couldn't even buy 'yellow' margarine in Wisconsin until the late '60s.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
06/11/2010 8:06 Comments ||
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#3
In the 50s and 60s, you couldn't buy margarine colored yellow in Wisconsin. There were signs at the Illinois state line advertising colored oleo for sale, and the stores did good business. My cantankerous, stingy grandfather looked grumpier than usual when he sat down to the task of adding the yellow food coloring to the white oleo to make it look more appetizing.
The Arizona law about cutting down cactus is not totally out of left field, IIRC. People have been poaching and cutting saguaros and other species, causing drastic reductions in cactus populations.
Speaking of "Out in left field": The original "left field" that gave its name to this expression was the old ballpark in Chicago on Damen Ave. That was the site of the last Cubs World Series victory in 1908. It was torn down a few years later to make room for the University of Illinois hospitals, after the Cubs moved to Wrigley Field. The University built its first mental health sanatorium just beyond the left field fence at that ballpark. So something coming out of left field was coming from the direction of the sanatorium!
#6
When I lived in San Francisco, there was still a law on the books prohibiting "unsightly" people from being on the streets. Nothing implied GolfBravo, just saying.
#8
Actually, Ravel's "Concerto for the left hand" was composed for a pianist friend who had lost his right hand during WWI.
That happens to be true. aul Wittgenstein (November 5, 1887 March 3, 1961) was an Austrian-born concert pianist, who became known for his ability to play with just his left hand, after he lost his right arm during the First World War. He devised novel techniques, including pedal and hand-movement combinations, that allowed him to play chords previously regarded as impossible for a five-fingered pianist. He commissioned several pieces for the left hand from prominent composers, including Richard Strauss, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel and, later, Benjamin Britten.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
06/11/2010 16:45 Comments ||
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#9
#2 Ditto here on Guam when I was growing up in the 1960's and early 1970's. Many Locals gave the "evil eye" of suspicion as per fake butter = margarine.
By now you've heard what he told NBC's Matt Lauer. "I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar," Obama said. "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick, right?"
Riiiiiiight....
It's like a Tonight Show joke.
Leno: "The president is so dorky . . . "
Audience: "How dorky is he?"
"He's so dorky, when he gets angry he convenes a panel of experts to tell him whose ass to kick."
And speaking of The Tonight Show, let me reassure both editors and readers of family newspapers everywhere about my use of the word "ass." Historian Steven Hayward reminds me that in 1979, Jimmy Carter responded to Ted Kennedy's primary challenge by declaring he would "whip his ass." It was one of those moments of presidential lameness that conjures the same bile of pity, schadenfreude, and heebie-jeebies one feels upon seeing a middle-aged balding dude with a long gray ponytail dancing at a rave.
Anyway, Johnny Carson repeated Carter's ass-whipping remark in his opening monologue, without any punch line, explaining that he simply wanted to aggravate the network censors. After all, you can't get in trouble for quoting the president of the United States accurately.
Much like the ass-whipping Jimmy Carter, Obama is in danger of becoming a figure of ridicule, which is particularly ominous for a presidency that runs almost entirely on high-octane rhetoric.... In danger of becoming a figure of ridicule? I think it's already a little past that point:
Posted by: Mike ||
06/11/2010 08:32 ||
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#1
We know which ass to kick
Posted by: No I am The Other Beldar ||
06/11/2010 8:52 Comments ||
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#2
Hee hee....
Posted by: Jefferson ||
06/11/2010 9:02 Comments ||
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Posted by: Frozen Al ||
06/11/2010 11:35 Comments ||
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#4
It's just a matter of time before websites dedicated to ass-kicking Obama jokes (the mirror images of the roundhouse-kicking Chuck Norris jokes) spring up.
#5
ION NEWS KERALA > SCIENTISTS DOUBLE THE ESTIMATE OF OIL FLOWS [loss rates] IN THE GULF OF MEXICO.
versies
RENSE/TOPIX [old] > OIL VOLCANO PRESSURE TO STRONG FOR CONTAINMENT.
I'm still waiting for BP andor USA to tell us the DEPTH + BREADTH, ETC. OF THE GULF OIL FIELDS IN RELATION TO WORLD TOTE RESERVES/CAPACITY.
IMO OWG-NWO + "GLOBALISM" [US-Global Socialist-Govtism Order] ARE NOT MORAL OR GOOD REASONS TO INTENTIONALLY WASTE + DESTROY NOT ONLY A VITAL WORLD ENERGY RESOURCE, BUT TO FORCIBLY DAMAGE IFF NOT DESTROTHE WHOLE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION BY
"UNIVERSALLY" ENTRENCHING AN IDEO WHOSE POWER + DURATION IS ULTMATELY THREATENED BY SAME.
Isolation is pointless if Iran rushes headlong to become a nuclear power regardless; besides, it's not isolated.
In announcing the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran, President Obama stressed not once but twice Iran's increasing "isolation" from the world. This claim is not surprising considering that after 16 months of an "extended hand" policy, in response to which Iran actually accelerated its nuclear program -- more centrifuges, more enrichment sites, higher enrichment levels -- Iranian "isolation" is about the only achievement to which the administration can even plausibly lay claim.
"Isolation" may have failed to deflect Iran's nuclear ambitions, but it does enjoy incessant repetition by the administration.
For example, in his State of the Union address, President Obama declared that "the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated." Two months later, Vice President Biden asserted that "since our administration has come to power, I would point out that Iran is more isolated -- internally, externally -- has fewer friends in the world." At the signing of the START treaty in April, Obama declared that "those nations that refuse to meet their obligations [to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, i.e., Iran] will be isolated."
Really? On Tuesday, one day before the president touted passage of a surpassingly weak U.N. resolution and declared Iran yet more isolated, the leaders of Russia, Turkey, and Iran gathered at a security summit in Istanbul "in a display of regional power that appeared to be calculated to test the United States," as the New York Times put it. I would add: And calculated to demonstrate the hollowness of U.S. claims of Iranian isolation, and to flaunt Iran's growing ties with Russia and quasi-alliance with Turkey, a NATO member.
Apart from the fact that isolation is hardly an end in itself and is pointless if Iran rushes headlong to become a nuclear power regardless, the very claim of Iran's increasing isolation is increasingly implausible. Just last month, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted an ostentatious love fest in Tehran with the leaders of Turkey and Brazil. The three raised hands together and announced a uranium-transfer deal that was designed to torpedo U.S. attempts to impose U.N. sanctions.
Six weeks ago, Iran was elected to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, a grotesque choice that mocked Obama's attempt to isolate and delegitimize Iran in the very international institutions he treasures.
Increasing isolation? In the last year alone, Ahmadinejad has been welcomed in Kabul, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Caracas, Brasilia, La Paz, Senegal, and Gambia. Today, he is in China.
Three Iran sanctions resolutions passed in the Bush years. They were all passed without a single no vote. But after 16 months of laboring to produce a mouse, Obama garnered only twelve votes for his sorry sanctions, with Lebanon abstaining and Turkey and Brazil voting no.
From the beginning, the Obama strategy toward Iran and other rogue states had been to offer good will and concessions on the premise that this would lead to one of two outcomes: (a) the other side changes its policy or, (b) if they don't, the world isolates the offending state and rallies around us -- now that we have demonstrated last-mile good intentions.
Hence, nearly a year and a half of peace overtures, negotiation, concessions, two New Year's messages to the Iranian people, a bit of groveling about U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup, and a disgraceful silence when the regime's very stability was threatened by peaceful demonstrators.
Iran's response? Defiance, contempt, and an acceleration of its nuclear program.
And the world's response? Did it rally behind us? The Russians and Chinese bargained furiously and successfully to hollow out the sanctions resolution. Turkey is openly choosing sides with the region's "strong horse" -- Iran and its clients (Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas) -- as it watches the United States flailingly try to placate Syria and appease Iran while it pressures Israel, neglects Lebanon, and draws down its power in the region.
To say nothing of Brazil. Et tu, Lula?
This comes after 16 months of assiduously courting these powers with one conciliatory gesture after another: "resetting" relations with Russia, kowtowing to China, lavishing a two-day visit on Turkey highlighted by a speech to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, and elevating Brazil by supplanting the G-8 with the G-20. All this has been read as American weakness, evidence that Obama can be rolled.
The result is succinctly, if understatedly, captured in Wednesday's Washington Post headline "U.S. alliance against Iran is showing new signs of vulnerability."
My nine-year-old daughter looked at the front page of the paper, and her eyes grew wide:
The president said ass'?
She swallowed the A-word, because it is, after all, the A-word. I nodded; he said that. She was silent for a while, digesting the information. Presidents, after all, are part of the great Pantheon of Authority, standing over the school principal, teachers, the pastor, police, and perhaps the mailman. To consider them using bad words reordered everything. Unless
He didn't mean donkey,' she said, this being the only possible explanation. I shook my head. It will now be difficult to tell her not to use that word; it will now be a matter of time before my wife says, Well, your daughter was sounding presidential today,' and it won't be a reference to mankind's universal aspirations....
Barack Obama is probably the last guy you'd think would introduce ass' into the mainstream political discourse. It's like Spock announcing he wants to knock boots' a expression both crude and banal coming from someone renowned for dispassionate cool. But the idea that the president should confine himself to polite terminology is one of those antiquated chocks that prohibit true, honest expression, and if the post-Boomer culture has taught us any-effin-thing, it's that authentic people use earthy language, authentically, and only the spats-and-monocle crowd insist on the verbal equivalent of the raised pinky and other useless vestiges of high-tea manners.
Bill Maher took it a bit farther on his TV show, This Week's Reason to Cancel HBO':...The gross reductive identification of race with gangster culture is permitted for Mr. Maher, since he holds approved views on a variety of other issues.... But at the heart of Maher's image of authentic blackness is part of the leftist creed: the trivial niceties of civilization are a barrier to the most important goal of human endeavor, self-expression. Lenny died for your sins. The hero isn't the man who invents the traffic signal, it's Ratso Rizzo who crosses against the light, bangs on a hood of a car that dares to nose into the intersection, and yells I'm walkin' here!'...
Posted by: Mike ||
06/11/2010 09:20 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
