Slam dunk ...8:48 pm
Earlier today, the C-Span TV network aired a live debate (or “conversation”) between Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the President of the American Civil Liberties Union, Nadine Strosser. If you didn’t see it, don’t miss it on rerun, or else be sure to watch it via the C-Span site. In a potentially quite hostile situation, in front of an ACLU gathering and facing the pointed questions of its president, Scalia explained with crystal clear clarity why the only way of protecting all of us against judicial overreaching and the tyranny of the majority is by striving to interpret the U.S. Constitution according to its original intent. Every carefully prepared point brought up by Ms. Strosser was squarely, good-humoredly and definitively knocked out of the court (so to speak). There’s no question that a lot of people watching who may have been very skeptical of Scalia — albeit those people with minds that were not entirely closed — had to have experienced something like a real enlightenment. Continuing the sports analogies, it was simply a home run.
Good work, Nino.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Fark]](http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/fark.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Email]](http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
What Good ...1:41 pm
In his book Tangled Up In The Bible
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Portland, Oregon ...8:54 am
Last night in Portland Dylan played four songs from Modern Times: Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Thunder On The Mountain, When The Deal Goes Down and Workingman’s Blues #2.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Detroit 6; Oakland 3 ...9:11 pm
The Detroit Tigers are now the American League Champions, having swept the Oakland Athletics in the best-of-seven series — by four games to zero.
They now advance to the World Series — where they will face the winner of the current National League Championship Series which is still being contested by the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets.
The Tigers won in the most dramatic fashion possible — a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, with two men on base, instantly turning a 3-3 tie into a 6-3 win. Although the final game was closely fought, Detroit clearly dominated the Oakland Athletics in the series overall.
This qualifies for coverage on this site because the Detroit Tigers are Bob Dylan’s 2006 baseball pick, according to his August interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Dylan’s “baseball prophet” status therefore remains unassailable at this point.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Odds and Ends ...1:05 pm
Katie Couric will talk to Twyla Tharp about The Times They Are A-Changin’ on (… continue reading …)
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Friday, October 13, 2006
To Mel With It ...4:15 pm
I’d be surprised if many people are very satisfied with what (… continue reading …)
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Tigers still roaring ...2:52 pm
In more cheerful baseball news, Bob Dylan’s baseball pick for 2006, the Detroit Tigers, continue on what is now looking like a march to destiny. They are playing the Oakland Athletics in a best-of-seven-game series to decide the winner of of the American League Championship, and they have won the first two games in a pretty convincing fashion, putting Oakland in a challenging hole. And those games were played in Oakland — now the series goes to Detroit’s home field.
Should the Tigers go on to the World Series, it would seem apt for them to invite Bob Dylan to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, wouldn’t it? (Singing the national anthem would be funny, but … well, no, I don’t think so.)
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Media melt-down ...1:20 pm
Yesterday’s events here in New York City certainly provided a few salutary lessons. Mainly: don’t rely on what you hear in the media during an emergency. First, a plane had hit the building. Then, it was “confirmed” as a helicopter. Then, it was back to being a plane again. There were four people dead — two in the plane and two in the building. Then, all four had been in the plane. Then, just two dead — one in the plane, one in the building. The plane belonged to Cory Lidle (this was almost the one fact that never required correction). He was flying it alone — definitely the only person in the plane (the local TV station who provided this information cited the FBI as confirming this). Finally, the plane had two people in it — one flight instructor and Cory Lidle as student. They’d made a distress call. They hadn’t.
One forgets — or at least I do — how much misinformation there was on 9/11, because the ultimate events so vastly outweighed any notion of criticizing how the media reported them. It didn’t matter what piece of misinformation may have been provided at 10 a.m. on such and such a TV network — we all knew well enough what had happened that day, and confusion was to be expected.
The degree to which the media, in the interests of being first with some piece of information, can mess up a far simpler and more self-contained story is instructive, and it’s likewise easy to see how conspiracy theorists can come up with inconsistencies after the fact and piece together a pleasing quilt.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Vancouver ...8:29 am
The set list for the first night of Dylan’s fall tour included just two songs from Modern Times: When The Deal Goes Down and Workingman’s Blues # 2. Something of a surprise that he went for the big ballads right away rather than the the blues romps, isn’t it?
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Bizarre ...5:09 pm
The news organizations appear certain at this point that it was Cory Lidle’s aircraft, flown by him (a pitcher for the New York Yankees) with no one else on board.
…
Addendum 5:28 pm: Mayor Bloomberg now says there were two people aboard, one “flight instructor” and one “student.” He is not giving the names. Stranger and stranger.
…
Addendum 8:17 pm: As someone who lives in the area, I can attest that any notion (like I’ve heard in some media outlets) that the plane should have been “shot down” before it got close to the building is absurd. The airspace over the East River always has small aircraft buzzing around, and it would only take seconds for a pilot (if he or she wanted to) to turn their plane and head for a high-rise. There is no way — even with fighters deployed 24 hours a day — that you could prevent that. Either you ban all such small aircraft, with whatever consequent losses to business and touristic interests, or you put up with the risk of such events. It is still bizarre to me that this plane hit the building so squarely in the middle. We’re not likely to know what happened until the NTSB completes its investigation, assuming that they have enough facts to go on. It is a miracle if only the two people on the plane were killed, as appears to be the case now.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
72nd and York ...3:17 pm
So, the building that was recently hit by an aircraft in Manhattan is about 16 blocks south of RWB HQ. Too early to say much, but, there are two things: (1) today is the 11th of the month. (2) The aircraft seems likely to have hit head-on at speed to do the damage it did. It hit square in the middle of the building, in terms of left/right, so it was not an instance of a wing clipping the building as the aircraft passed.
Now they’re saying it has been confirmed as a helicopter. Well, God help any people in the apartments that were hit and everyone above the fire.
…
Addendum 3:42 pm: Now the FAA is saying that it was a plane; not a helicopter.
…
Addendum 4:18 pm: Info is in dribs and drabs, switching from one local newscast to another. Plane apparently left Teterboro, NJ at 2:30. So, about 20 minutes later, it hit that high-rise in Manhattan. It didn’t dawdle.
…
Addendum 4:34 pm: Until we know who was on the plane, we don’t know much.
…
Addendum 4:37 pm: Local CBS affiliate reporting that the FAA says the plane was “registered to Cory Lidle,” a pitcher for the New York Yankees.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
On the road again ...12:13 pm
Bob Dylan kicks off his fall tour tonight in Vancouver, British Columbia. Presumably the audience will be lucky enough to hear the first live performances of various tunes from Modern Times. Funnily enough, on his XM show today (theme: TIME) he played Cab Calloway doing a tune called 15 Minute Intermission — a song inspired by a musicians’ union rule requiring a 15 minute rest for every 45 minutes of performance time. “Don’t tell my band,” Bob said.
Next week’s theme, by the way, will be: “Guns.”
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Sunday, October 8, 2006
Times passing? ...10:55 pm
Roger Friedman on Fox indicates that the Twyla Tharp / Bob Dylan musicalThe Times They Are A-Changin’ is an irredeemable catastrophe that will lose everything when it opens on Oct. 26th.
Factually, however, he doesn’t have much that goes beyond what was reported in a far less grim piece in the New York Post last Wednesday, which I posted about previously.
In essence, according the the Post, the leading lady (a replacement to the original, pushed by the producers, because she was sexier) was murdering the songs, and had to be replaced, and Tharp was continuing to work on choreography and plot — which is what she had planned to do during this preview run anyway.
So what’s true? Who knows? Clearly it’s a work still very much in progress, with 18 days to go until the official opening. But Tharp has apparently worked this way before, with success to show for it. So I guess there’s not much to do but wait until the show really opens.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
And on the lighter side ...6:36 pm
Finally: a politician going into the closet.
…
The front page story at Montana’s Daily Inter Lake today is this: Mother hound leads rescuers to abandoned pups.
“She dragged Mel right to the spot,’ Guest said. “She got so excited when we pulled up to the intersection.”
About a half mile away, there were the four pups, unprotected but still alive. Rescuers figured they were only two days old.
The hound, named Cilly after Cilly Creek Road, and her pups are being housed at the Humane Society shelter until they´re ready for adoption. Shelter development director Brad Seaman said Cilly “looks like she´s been in a concentration camp,” but is now putting on weight.
“We think, based on information given to us by people in the area, that she and the pups were dumped by her owners right after she gave birth,’ Seaman said. “She´s obviously been badly neglected for quite a while. It´s a miracle that she and the pups survived.”
Guest said the mother and pups are “doing great.
“Cilly is a good mama and such a sweet dog,” she said. “She sure didn´t deserve to be abandoned.”
And that sure makes a nice corrective to the multiplying stories of Muslim cab drivers refusing to accept even guide dogs accompanying their blind owners into their taxis (because dogs are “unclean”).
…
And the literary world is galvanized by this latest breaking development: Kim Jong Il’s Work Published in Mongolia.
The work of Kim Jong Il “The Workers’ Party of Korea Is the Party of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung” was published in booklet by the Munghin Useg Publishing House of Mongolia on Oct. 2. The work brought out on Oct. 2, Juche 84 (1995) comprehensively deals with the undying exploits President Kim Il Sung performed by setting out the idea and theory on building the Juche-oriented party and developing the WPK into an invincible revolutionary party and indicates tasks to be undertaken to glorify the Party as the eternal party of Kim Il Sung and ways to do so.
And if that’s all too technical for your taste, you can check out the story immediately under it on the serendipitous publication of a book containing some of Kim Jong Il’s poetry, like “Korea, I Will Glorify Thee,” and “Best Country.”
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
Questions ...2:12 pm
Bad things — things so awful you can’t get your mind around them — happen to people every day. They may happen to you or me personally. They may happen in such a way that they get covered in the media, with every tragic aspect illuminated for the public to see. More often than anything else, of-course, they happen out of the spotlight, to countless people whose cries are never answered or recorded on earth. You or I may possibly find our own little slice of comfort and safety and contentment, whether for a fleeting time or even for a full lifetime, but that in no way negates the reality of the misery, evil and death that stalks this world both day and night. Last week a man entered a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, possessed by an inexplicable rage, and shot ten young girls who had done nothing at all to deserve their brutal fate, or to deserve anything — we must assume — other than peaceful childhoods and hopeful futures. The parents of the girls who died have been shattered to a depth we’ll never know — if we’re lucky.
Just knowing that this indescribable horror occurred can’t help but cause observers to search their souls.
An atheist might well ask: How can anyone believe in a God who would allow such an awful, unjustifiable thing to take place — this massacre of helpless and innocent girls in the name of a meaningless rage?
A believer might well ask: How can anyone accept life in a world where such things occur without believing in a God who will correct all injustices, make all things right, and “wipe away the tears from all faces”?
They’re good questions. It’s always good to ask good questions of oneself and demand good answers, whatever those may be. Dylan’s always liked putting good questions into songs. Click here for a clip of a particularly transcendent version of Blowin’ In The Wind, from Japan on March 9th, 2001.
Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:
BACK TO MAIN
Original text copyright ©
2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 by RightWingBob.com
Quotes from the works of others are linked to their
source or are as otherwise attributed, and are used
in accordance with Fair Use guidelines. Contact:
rightwingbob(at)gmail.com
