Please feel free to use this thread to post whatever comments and links you’d like. Self-linking and self-quoting is encouraged.
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Bean pointed this out to me… A musical that was rehearsed and performed with the permission of the mall, but none of the customers and only the necessary mall staff had been warned it was going to happen. (More info here).
I love stuff like this. You should also check out the surprise musical “Teach!,” if you haven’t seen it.
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A comparison of the same scenes from Star Wars, both in American comics and in manga. The result: Manga does it a hundred times better, mostly because of the space restrictions of American comics.
I busted my butt on this, and I would appreciate any feedback!
The whole thing has me furious, but don’t think you can tell in the post! :D
Ruminations on Obama’s preacher
…I totally just came here to link that post by Daisy. It is made of amazing.
Has anybody else seen Obama’s “A more perfect union” speech?
(I know it’s long. Skip the first 15 minutes if you’re pressed for time.)
Up to now, I’ve figured that an Obama presidency would most likely be unremarkable. Clintonish, if you will. That he would be liberalish in most ways, but not liberalish enough to matter, that he would make a few terrible concessions to the right-wing nutjobs, that he would appear great only because of his proximity to the worst president in the history of the Union.
I held out a slight hope that he was actually a liberal at heart; that given the opportunity he would enact decisive and meaningful change that would benefit the country as a whole. After seeing that speech, that hope has grown significantly. He had the balls to address a racial issue as the complex problem that it is, instead of muttering a denunciation of his minister and quickly trying to deflect attention to some other topic. If he can do the same for the other problems the country faces, then perhaps he can get enough political support to work towards real solutions to those problems as well.
Plus, if he speaks like that in the general election, he’ll steamroll all over McCain. Bonus!
At the risk of dominating the Open Thread, I’ll post another.
Recently, Amp went through mild contortions to avoid offending people with mental illnesses when he posted an article about not wanting to be seen as a crank. To clean up the post, he substituted the word “crank” for “nutcase” and “barker”. In doing so, he committed the double sin of obscuring his point (Crank? How is that being a crank? *dictionary lookup* Oh, I guess it is…) and using yet another perjorative term (dictionary.com says a crank is “…an unbalanced person…”). I’ve also seen such gymnastics in previous posts, which I am too lazy to look up now but that I’m sure I remember.
The problem is, in each case the poster is trying to denigrate behavior (be it “irrational”, “crazy”, or “unbalanced”) which is acted out by both a subset of people with mental illnesses, and also by people whom the poster might feel comfortable denigrating (those who are not mentally ill but are nonetheless selfish, rude, or otherwise offensive.) Since the behavior is the same, there is no way to describe the behavior without inherently creating a link between the mentally ill, and people who are offensive in and of themselves. Simply switching to a different term won’t change anything.
I don’t have a solution for this problem. Inventing new terms is only a temporary solution, effective until the general public notices that the new term is substantively the same as the old one. Retaining the current terminology whilst publicly advocating humane and decent treatment for people with mental illnesses makes the most sense to me, but is obviously considered inadequate by some. Ideas?
Our lost moment of renewed greatness. I offer my soliloquy to Sen. Obama for your commiseration.
http://bobbyvhowell.blogspot.com/2008/03/our-lost-moment-of-greatness.html
Anyone here want to comment on this post on a blog I frequent?
Where Want Fewer Women?