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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Monday, 28 June 2010 20:13 |
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One of my favorite NBA players of all time, Manute Bol, died last week. I only just found out about it from a friend with whom I used to go to Washington Bullets games specifically to watch Bol play. Thin as a telephone pole, but 7 foot 7 inches tall, Bol was one of the most endearingly awkward pro athletes I have ever seen play. He was also a shot-blocking machine and a crowd favorite for his sunny disposition and his good works off the court for his Sudanese people.
He had Connecticut connections, having played a year at the University of Bridgeport in 1984, after being discovered by a U.S. college coach at a clinic in Khartoum. From there, he took a circuitous but inevitable route to the NBA. When I used to see him play, he was the tallest person ever to play in the NBA and his teammate was Muggsy Bogues, the shortest player (at 5 foot 3 inches) ever to play. They presented quite a carnival sight when they were on the court together, yet they were both bona fide players and tough as nails.
His second Connecticut connection, having moved to West Hartford in 2002, was not nearly as propitious as his first. He was nearly killed while a passenger in a tax cab involved in a fatal accident. Somehow he recovered from a broken neck, though he was troubled by ill health for the rest of his life. He died of rare skin disease contracted while doing charity work in Africa. He really was one of the good guys. I’ll always remember the game when he decided that he could dominate not by dunking the ball (he could touch the rim from his flat feet) but by shooting long set shots from behind the 3-point range. Damn if he didn’t hit three or four of them, too. Each shot brought the Capital Centre to its feet.
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Saturday, 26 June 2010 16:16 |
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I am in awe of Sarah Palin. She truly is one of the great con artists of my lifetime, and she only seems to get more brazen and shameless as we slouch through the heat of summer toward an election showdown.
Her latest scam is to hit up her teeming army of Palinistas for cash for her “legal defense fund.”
I’ll let her tell you about it, because I simply cannot top her gall. This is an excerpt from a mass email appeal sent out by Mrs. Palin herself:
“Sarah Palin’s enemies have scored another victory in their vicious campaign to smear, bankrupt, and force this dedicated public servant and conservative leader out of politics!
They have successfully questioned her prior legal defense fund--a fund that mirrored John Kerry's fund and Bill Clinton's fund. So a new fund was necessary to make sure Sarah Palin can continue to speak the truth to Americans.
As you know, Governor Palin made the painful decision to resign last summer rather than waste the good people of Alaska’s time responding to the more than 27 frivolous lawsuits filed against her and her family by left-wing extremists.
Now her enemies say she’s not even allowed to defend herself… My friend, this is a witch hunt, pure and simple.”
This is a textbook case study in what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” Though it’s employed by Glenn Beck, he is a veritable goofball compared to Palin. She really goes for the buzzwords: “enemies,” “vicious,” “left wing extremists,” “witch hunt,” (she really should be careful with that one).
I think my favorite part of this scam is the line about the “painful decision to resign last summer.” Since that “painful decision,” Palin has sewn the fields with this paranoid style and reaped $12 million from her fanatical following, through her book, public appearances, Fox News gig and a television series.
But that’s not enough for Sarah. She’s nickel and diming her minions (many of whom don’t have too many expendable nickels and dimes) to pay for her legal fees.
As for the “left wing extremists” who are tormenting her with these lawsuits, well, her current legal travails are simple: she broke the ethics law of the state of Alaska. Rather than go to the Attorney General of Alaska before setting up her legal defense fund (which then illegally Hoovered$386,000 from her dazzled donors), she chose to get advice from a lawyer who had advised (drum roll please) “Newt Gingrich on ethics issues.”
So, who’s to know if this new Legal Defense Fund that she is now ($12 million richer) setting up is above board? As the carny at the state fair says, you sends your money and you takes your chances.
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Saturday, 19 June 2010 22:25 |
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Free food! Nature’s bounty! It’s all right there for the picking, if you know how to look. Over the years of riding my bike around the area to pick up redeemable cans and bottles, I have discovered that June is the month to swoon over blackberries. No, not those handheld electronic gizmos to which the modern Americans are handcuffed. These arethe edible fruit produced by any of several species in the Rubus genus of the Rosaceae family. During June and July, I always bring a few clean plastic containers with resealable lids on my rides because these black (actually dark purple) morsels are ripe for the picking. And I always come home with a bounty, that I can plop on cereal, yogurt, or just eat plain. They’re particularly good baked in muffins and can augment other berries used in pies.
Blackberries are also health-enhancing, with among the highest ORAC value of any fruit grown in the U.S. (ORAC=oxygen radical absorbance capacity). One recent report ranked blackberries number one out of more than 1,000 antioxidant foods consumed in the U.S. They are high in polyphenolic compounds, like ellagic acid, tannins, quercetin, gallic acid (makes you speak with a French accent), anthocyanins and cyanidins. In other words, you can’t go wrong with blackberries. And, if they’re free for the picking, simply because these thousands of roadside patches are ignored or neglected, well, that’s your gain and everyone else’s loss.
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Tuesday, 15 June 2010 15:55 |
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Every album ever recorded will, if you wait long enough, be reissued. And here’s the living proof:
Collector’s Choice is reissuing all eight of Allan Sherman’s Warner Brothers albums from the early 1960s. If you remember Allan Sherman for anything at all, it is for “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” a single that, after the fifth listening, qualified for the most annoying ever novelty song, rivaling the work of Mrs. Miller, Leo Sayer and Gilbert O’Sullivan. It's hard to decide what is the most amazing thing about this deluge of dated humor: That Allan Sherman was allowed to release eight albums or that anyone in 2010 would want to purchase, much less listen to, eight full length albums by Allan Sherman.
They could have at least tried to update Sherman’s image with variations on “Hello Muddah” by guest rap artists, perhaps numbers like “Hello Mullah, Hello Fatwa” or “Hello Muddah, Hello F*****”.
For this, and hundreds of other reissues the world would be better off without, check out the website of the purveyors of this product:
http://www.ccmusic.com/
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Monday, 07 June 2010 21:23 |
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On my usual roadside litter rounds this past week, I was struck by a phenomenon about waste. It isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s new to me because I’m paying more attention to the “natural spring” water bottles now that state venues offer 5 cents back upon their redemption. (Redemption feels like the wrong word, since there is little redeeming about plastic waste).
The phenomenon: Almost every single “natural springs” water bottle I pick up on the side of the road still contains water inside it. Sometimes it’s just a couple swigs worth, and sometimes it’s a full bottle. Regardless, this strikes me as inexcusably wasteful. According to the Clean Air Council, Americans throw away 2.5 plastic water bottles every hour. If each of those bottles contains even a few ounces of spring water, then Americans are wasting millions of gallons of unreclaimable “natural spring” water every day. Not only is it not consumed, but it is trapped for perpetuity inside a plastic container. A fresh water supply big enough to quench the thirst of the planet is held in plastic suspension forever. And since water is a diminishing resource, this is potentially a grave problem.
What also seems like a potential major problem is that, in order to fill all those bottles with “natural spring water,” we are virtually sucking our natural springs dry. The very least you can do, if you drink spring water out of plastic bottles, is to drink every drop of it. To do any less than this is to live in a fantasy world where fresh water is an infinite resource that will never run out. In the real world, only 42 percent of the world’s rural populations have access to clean, fresh water. In short, billions of people would love to have that water you so blithely heave into the ditches of suburbia.
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Friday, 04 June 2010 21:35 |
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Today (June 5) is the 91st birthday of William Kent of Durham, Connecticut, one of the world’s master artists and certainly the greatest artist whose work you have never seen. His art surprises, challenges and inspires anyone who sees it.
Undisputably one of the world’s greatest sculptors of wood, Bill Kent is also the originator of a slate print style that he created in the 1960s that took the polemical work of protest and turned it into the highest art form imaginable. Using 100- to 200-pound slabs of slate, he carves his images directly into the stone and then printed one of a kind works from those slates. These are no numbered sets of lithographs or engravings. No, each print was a unique work, because the slate had to be cleaned after every pressing.
Unable at his age and with his current health issues to labor on the heavy slates or even the giant ten-foot pieces of wood on which he has carved for decades, Mr. Kent still manages to put in a few hours of work each day in his studio on smaller wood sculptures. I first saw Mr. Kent’s work when I was putting together a “Connecticut Masters” article for Connecticut magazine in 1999. Since that time, I have written about Mr. Kent many times, including a piece for the New York Times and the Advocate. I have never met anyone, in any field, or any genre, who has inspired me quite the way Bill Kent has. The man is not an artist; he is a force of nature. And he deserves to be a national treasure.
When, oh when, will the major museums open their doors to this American master.
This is a link to a site run by Johnes Ruta, the tireless New Haven-based curator and fellow champion of Bill Kent’s work.
http://azothgallery.com/yorksq/bill_kent.html
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Tuesday, 01 June 2010 21:56 |
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Sen. Orrin Hatch, assuming the “Doddering Fool” role so ably filled for decades by Strom Thurmond, is out to get soon-to-be Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Blumenthal’s recent misrepresentation of his Vietnam-era military record created a 3-day media shower that appears to have run its course.
But Hatch, who is now approximately 128 years old and is in his 78th year in the U.S. Senate, is getting a little rusty on the draw. He just now introduced an amendment that would make it a “crime to lie about your military service.”
Because the powers that rule the universe have a warped sense of humor, they supplied a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois, Mark Kirk, who has been lying about his own military record for many months now, and basing fundraising letters on completely fictitious awards that he said he had earned. (Please, most powerful ruler of the universe, please make him at least have earned the captaincy rank, so that he can be called “Captain Kirk”).
As the Washington Post reported:
The question is: Does the bill apply to Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) in the same way it applied to the original target -- Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D)? Would Kirk have committed a crime?
The answer, according to Hatch’s office, is no.
“The amendment’s intent is clear – it would make lying about serving in active duty in the military for the purposes of career advancement a misdemeanor,” Hatch spokesman Antonia Ferrier said.
The funniest part of this whole exercise in pointless political posturing (not unlike the French toast/ “Freedom toast” fracas of 2002) is that Hatch never served in the military himself. He managed to avoid serving in two wars for which he would have been qualified (Korea and Vietnam), never soiled his hands in basic training, never fired a shot in anger. And yet, he has been one of the most vociferous and persistent war hawks in Congress for decades, sending other men and women off to die and to be horribly maimed in order to satisfy his own sick craving for carnage.
Mr. Blumenthal, you would be well advised to make a mental note of this attempt to humiliate you. I am almost certain that, within the first few weeks of your arrival in the Senate in 2011, you will have an opportunity to return the shiv to Hatch’s ribs.
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Tuesday, 18 May 2010 06:58 |
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Like the “sport” on which she has amassed her wealth—and bankrolled her campaign for the U.S. Senate—the Republican candidate Linda McMahon is a total fake. Her entire campaign is predicated on the boilerplate mantra of “creating American jobs.” That’s partly because it can’t be predicated on her experience in elected office. She has never run for anything and she has exercised her right to vote sporadically in her hometown of Greenwich. McMahon’s platform also calls for corporations like hers to have their income taxes reduced “to be more competitive with the rest of the world.” With all that extra money, so the broken record goes, the untaxed and unregulated corporations will, under a McMahon-run government (or non-government, as the case would be), take all that freed up wealth, go up upon the highest mountaintop and “trickle it down” like the very mists of heaven upon the grateful domes of all us lesser beings out here in the work force. Or perhaps the more appropriate metaphor would be that the wealth will “belch up” from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico like the very thickest bile from the depths of Hades.
There’s only one catch. McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., farms out its product lines to sweat shops in China. All those little toys and gizmos that are tie-ins to the fakery in the “square circle” of the WWE are farmed out and made of the cheapest, chintziest crap this side of a recycle bin. As Paul Hughes of the Waterbury Republican American reported on May 17, McMahon’s entertainment corporation realizes revenues of, on average, $10 million a year from these worthless knick knacks, the manufacture of which takes jobs away from red-blooded Americans. In other words, if the Chinese could vote over here, they’d pull the lever for Linda McMahon. And, if the voting machine was manufactured in China, the lever would fall off in your hand and tinkle to bits on the floor.
When asked by Hughes about this glaring contradiction, McMahon sent out her campaign spokesman, Ed Patru, who went on the defensive, er, offensive: “Ninety percent of all toy product produced all over is world is manufactured in China,” Patru huffed, and then he further puffed, “Much of that probably has to do with the fact that average Connecticut families are unwilling to spend $80 for a Barbie doll.”
Uh, Ed, that has to be the lamest defense since Mark Sanford tried to blame a roadmap error for his having wound up in Argentina when he was trying to get to the Appalachian Trail. Are you implying that it’s the fault of “average Connecticut families” that you sell crappy knick knacks at inflated prices? And the whole “everybody does it” defense takes us all back to our childhoods, when we used to actually believe that pro wrestling was real, and our grannies would say things to us like, "If you cross your eyes for too long, they're gonna git stuck that way" and "If everybody jumped off the edge of a cliff, would you jump off too.”
*****
But, alas, the fakery in this U.S. Senate race is not one-sided. One of McMahon’s Democratic opponents, Richard Blumenthal, is facing criticism about some fakery of his own. The New York Times is reporting today that the state’s attorney general, and odds-on favorite to win the U.S. Senate seat that McMahon covets like a championship belt, has been playing it fast and loose with his military record. He has, in recent years, mischaracterized his service in the U.S. Marines to leave the impression that he was in harm’s way during the Vietnam War.
Them’s fightin’ words, Dick!
The solution to this Senate race practically screams out to be noticed by Connecticut’s voters. That is, the only fair and equitable and non-fake way to settle this election is by a caged Texas death match. No holds are barred. No TV time limit will be allowed. It’s a fight to the finish.
May the fakest candidate win!
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Tuesday, 11 May 2010 13:30 |
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Among the “Plan B’s” for plugging the hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico being seriously considered this week are filling it with scrap tires and golf balls. I could not possibly make something like that up. That is the sum total of the foresight and planning that the oil companies and the geological engineers and the business experts have done to deal with what seems like an inevitable crisis. You plug giant holes in the earth’s surface and eventually one isn’t going to close up.
I have a better idea for closing the hole. Take all the diplomas that will be handed out in the following few weeks at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, UCal-Berkeley, Northwestern, Columbia, Cornell, Penn and Teller and roll them up into a giant wet blob—yes, a giant spitball. Next, get all the pundits on the Sunday Morning Wankfests and Fox News all together in one place. Then instruct them to, in unison, blow through a giant straw as hard as they can. That, surely, will produce enough force to send that diploma-spitball jetting through the water and, THUD, into the hole, thus stemming the oil flow. That might be about all that those fancy ass diplomas are good for, at this point. Because with all the expertise we allegedly possess, all the prestigious institutions of higher learning and “can do” spirit, if we have no better ideas than giant slabs of concrete, old tires and golf balls, then we truly are flying blind into the future.
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Written by Alan Bisbort
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Friday, 07 May 2010 13:49 |
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At my age, time already moves too fast for me to wish that the future would arrive any sooner. But I will make an exception for one thing. That is, 2012 can’t get here soon enough, because that’s when we can send Joe Lieberman packing. His proposal yesterday—on Fox News, of course—to “automatically” suspend the rights of citizenship of anyone with “suspected ties” to terrorists was the worst sort of pandering to the crazies. And I suspect that Lieberman knows this. Which is exactly why he did it.
But now he has gone one step further and introduced legislation to do just that. This is one of those “red meat to the mob” gestures that were the hallmark of the Bush years, like flag-burning amendments or illegal declarations of war. They’re designed to force legislators to declare their patriotism, loud and clear. “If you ain’t with us, you’re against us,” says Joe Lieberman, Joe McCarthy and Joe Stalin. This has no place in the United States of America. And anyone who has taken an elementary school course in civics knows this.
Lieberman says “I'm now putting together legislation [so that] any individual American citizen who is found to be involved in a foreign terrorist organization would be deprived of their citizenship rights."
OK, then, Joe. If this crazy nonsense is passed, it should be used to cut both ways. All right wing militias that are armed and dangerous and espouse a philosophy of violence against the federal government must be prosecuted. All CEOs who hide their illegal earnings in offshore tax shelters might also be considered “enemies of the United States” and should be turned over to military tribunals. All Congress persons and former half-term governors who encourage their mobs to “lock and load” would have to be prosecuted. Pat Buchanan would have to be prosecuted. Pat Robertson would have to be prosecuted. There is no end to this.
Two comments at the end of Washington Post blog entry are worth repeating here:
This idea from Joe Lieberman is in the same class as his statement that opposing the 'public option' was a matter of conscience. The American people are not going to let this narrow minded man from one of the smallest states in the Union destroy our Constitution. Here is another reason that he should not be in the United States Senate. What if someone propose stripping American citizenship of those suspected of spying for Israel against the United States? Would that the acceptable?
Isn't this a little bit like having them wear a yellow star?
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