Archive for the 'OUT ON A LIM' Category

29 August 2010: Why Don’t You Believe Me?

Paul August 29th, 2010

As though the national hysteria over the right of some non-Christians to congregate and worship in mosques in this freedom-loving country weren’t depressing enough, comes news that academic research shows how native speakers of English tend to distrust people who speak the language with a foreign accent.

Through the years, depending on which country America happens to be at war or at odds with, Hollywood movies have always characterized the enemy by giving them weird German/Russian/Chinese/Japanese accents.  So how would we judge people like Henry Kissinger, Carmen Miranda, Desi Arnaz or Roman Polanski today?  Ooops.  Forget about Arnaz, a Latino who can continue to love Lucy, but probably not in Arizona.  Or Polanski, who is now more American than he is Polish or French, but who continues to be demonized because he was attracted to a pubescent teenager, something our culture obviously does not encourage, even though we worship in the House of Cyrus and the Temple of Bieber.

As for myself, these days, whenever people ask me where I’m from, I no longer go to the trouble of telling them that I was born of Chinese parents in the Philippines, but that I have now lived nearly two-thirds of my life in these United States.  I just smile inscrutably and tell them I’m from Kansas.  However, even though I learned to speak English from the American Jesuits and the Irish Christian Brothers in the schools I attended in Manila, because I still speak the language with a little accent, thanks to “Why Don’t We Believe Non-Native Speakers? The Influence of Accent on Credibility,” the article published recently in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, I now know why no one in America ever believes anything I say.

Tags: , , , , , ,

22 August 2010: Flushing with J.D. Salinger

Paul August 22nd, 2010

News that the standard white porcelain toilet from J.D. Salinger’s North Carolina home is selling for $1 million on eBay gives one pause (the kind that refreshes).  It’s a commodity unlike no other, because it’s where the famously reclusive author might have written the earlier drafts, which he subsequently rejected, of such disemboweling works as Raise High the Toilet Seat, Carpenters; Pee More: An Introduction; Fanny and Pooey; Catcher in the Loo; and, of course, “A Perfect Day for Bananaflush.”

Tags:

17 August 2010: Incoming Class of Tabula Rasa

Paul August 17th, 2010

Beloit College’s Mindset List for the incoming Class of 2014 is both comic and tragic.  It makes me happy to learn that, born in 1992, “a quarter of the freshmen class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority unless it involves real aliens from another planet.”  But it makes me sad that, for most of them, “Beethoven has always been a dog,” and that “they first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.”  Teachers, take note.  The pitcher is empty.  Say that to the kids in class, and they’ll probably tell you where to go for the cheapest beer in town.

Tags: , , , ,

16 August 2010: Obama and Antigone

Paul August 16th, 2010

Kreon’s downfall in the play Antigone by Sophocles is that he chose to pursue the Letter of the Law instead of the Spirit of the Law.  Although “freedom of worship” is one of our most sacred constitutional rights as American citizens, Republicans are now vehemently against the building of a mosque within two blocks of Ground Zero in New York City; they claim it would celebrate the triumph of Muslim terrorists on 9/11.  So President Obama now finds himself between Iraq and a hard place.  The irony of all this, of course, is that in the play by Sophocles, Antigone was upholding a more ancient law.  She violated the king’s new edict when she chose to bury her dead brother according to the religious custom of her time.  With regard to the building of this mosque, I’m afraid that the Republicans are more like Kreon, in wanting to legislate new laws to suit their political and religious purposes; and Obama is the heroic but unfortunate Antigone, the one who upholds the Constitution of the United States.  I hope that what happens to Antigone does not happen to Obama, when the same hypocritical right-wing religious fanatics who argue against our “freedom of worship” begin to rally yet again for our “right to bear arms.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

1 August 2010: Mel Gibson and John Milton

Paul August 1st, 2010

As an undergraduate English major, I dropped out of a class on John Milton (1608-1674) when I couldn’t deal with the poet’s arrogant presumption in Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.”  And then, as a graduate student, I dropped out of a Milton seminar when I came across accounts of how the self-righteous polemicist went blind at the age of 46, and how he proceeded to maltreat the three daughters who were his amanuenses the last twenty years of his life. To this day, I remain ambivalent about having dropped out of those classes.

And now the media is full of news about Mel Gibson’s rancorous racist and sexist rants against his ex-girlfriend and mother of his youngest child.  I hate to confess this, but among my favorite movies are some of Gibson’s earliest work as an actor—Gallipoli (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), and even the Mad Max series.  He started to lose me with the Lethal Weapon movies in the late 1980s, and by the time The Man Without a Face (1993) came along, I noticed that he wasn’t aging well.  Indeed, his face was undergoing a strange transformation.

And now the awful transformation is complete.  The latest photographs of Mel Gibson in the media are hard to look at. It’s hard to believe, but  this man, who was once so blessed with good looks, who might have been one of the good angels in Milton’s paradise, now looks like hell.  But, perhaps all is not lost.  For his next film project, Mel Gibson can now play the aging John Milton browbeating the women in his life.  The part seems tailor-made for him.  Let’s see him unleashing his lethal weapons yet again, as he seeks to “justify the ways of man to woman.”

Meanwhile, I don’t know whether to keep or throw away the Mel Gibson movies in my collection.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

27 July 2010: To Russia, With Love

Paul July 27th, 2010

News leaking out of BP indicates that wayward CEO Tony Hayward is stepping down in October, and will be assigned to a key post at TNK-BP in Russia, where he will presumably oversee all offshore drilling for oil in that part of the world.  No one is saying it, but I have a deep suspicion that Hayward might be CIA’s new undercover agent to undermine the Russian economy and ruin its ecology.  While over there, he will, of course, hook up with defrocked Russian spy Anna Chapman, and they’ll ooze out their lives happily ever after.

Tags: , , ,

18 July 2010: In and Out of Bed with Zsa Zsa Gabor

Paul July 18th, 2010

Before Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, celebrities who are celebrated for doing nothing well or worthwhile except to promote themselves as celebrities, there was Hungarian-born Zsa Zsa Gabor, former beauty queen, socialite and occasional actress who starred in such howlers as Queen of Outer Space and Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood. There’s news this morning that the 93-year-old lady was watching Jeopardy in bed last night with her 9th husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, when the phone rang.  She reached for the phone, fell out of bed, and broke her hips and several other bones.  At her age, this is no joking matter.  But, unlike Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Zsa Zsa Gabor is capable of laughing at herself.  According to the tabloids, she once claimed that she was a good housekeeper because every time she divorced, she kept the house.  I hope the lady recovers and mends quickly.

Tags: , , , , ,

10 July 2010: Shapeshifting With Sarah Palin!

Paul July 10th, 2010

Sarah Palin has done it again!  Although she was born in The Year of the Dragon (1964), she is not content being a mere Dragon Lady.  Through the years, she has, by her own account, been a barracuda on the basketball court, an attack dog on the campaign trail for the GOP, a pitbull with lipstick.  And now, in her latest television commercial, she wants to be identified as a feminist Ursus arctos horribilis, the grizzliest of the Mama Grizzlies.

Keith Olbermann has already pointed out  on MSNBC that grizzlies eat their own young.  To that, I’d like to add the following information which I found on the internet:  ”Grizzlies are subject to fragmentation, a form of population segregation. Fragmentation causes inbreeding depression, which leads to a decrease in genetic variability in the grizzly bear species.  This decreases the fitness of the population for several reasons.  First, inbreeding forces competition with relatives, which decreases the evolutionary fitness of the species.  Secondly, the decrease in genetic variability causes an increased possibility that a lethal homozygous recessive trait may be expressed; this decreases the average litter size reproduced, indirectly decreasing the population.”

How Sarah Palin identifies with all this, I’m not sure.  But, wait.  At the end of her new television commercial, Sarah shapeshifts yet again.  ”Look out Washington,” she warns, “cause there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line, and the E.T.A. for them stampeding through is November 2, 2010.”

So what happens after November 2, 2010?  What specious subspecies is Sarah turning into next?

Tags: , , ,

8 July 2019: Rachel Maddow Plays With Trucks And Guns!

Paul July 8th, 2010

I watch The Rachel Maddow Show assiduously, not only because it’s the best-researched cable news program on the air, not only because Rachel is erudite and isn’t afraid to use big words or to indulge in her love of puns, but also because Rachel herself is one of the most joyous and gleeful political commentators on television today.  She was at her most joyous and gleeful this past Tuesday and Wednesday when her show was aired live from Afghanistan.  There she was in Kabul, striding shoulder-to-shoulder with our brave young soldiers, riding in armored trucks and playing with deadly weapons.  It’s a little boy’s dream come true!  And when she was shopping for a gift to bring back to her mother, Rachel showed no interest in the emeralds or other precious stones from the region which NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was trying to show her. Instead, Rachel chose to buy her mother an ugly little carpet decorated with guns!  Engel looked astonished.  He said he has never seen anyone actually buying one of those carpets. Rachel is now on her way home back to the States. I’d love to see the look on her mother’s face when she sees that carpet.

Tags: ,

2 July 2010: Loose Lips Sink Ships!

Paul July 2nd, 2010

According to The Washington Post, U.S. Marines are being warned to be wary of foreign beauties they might meet and mate while they are on shore leave in the Seychelles islands.  Pictures of Anna Chapman, the ravishing redhead who has been arrested recently as a Russian spy, are being circulated among the 3,000 sex-starved marines who have now been at sea almost seven months, as someone who might show undue interest in them, waiting for them to reveal vital information “when the moment is right.”   That’ll really get us screwed.  Okay, enough said about Pussy Galore.  What about the U.S. Marines who happen to be women? Or gay?  Pictures of which foreign male beauties should they be shown?  Soccer players from Brazil and the Netherlands?  Or maybe Ghana and Uruguay?  Wait, how about Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner?  They’re not human, are they?  Who knows what they’re hiding behind those smoldering eyes?  Or when they’ll sink their fangs into all our sweet and innocent shipmates?  Hmmmm.  For my money, “Give me Bela Lugosi or give me death!”  And my lips will be forever sealed.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Next »