“
Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization. Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write, “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker

This article is a must-read. 

Panoram was the trademark name of a visual jukebox that played music accompanied by a synched, filmed image (the effect being the equivalent of today’s music videos) popular within the United States during the 1940s. The device consisted of a jukebox playing a closed-loop 16mm film reel projected onto a glass screen. The Panoram is now best known for the vast library of short, three minute music videos that were created for it. Called soundies, these films featured most of the great musical stars of the period, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway. Many of the filmed interludes survive and are considered a priceless archive. The Panoram was priced more than $10,000 in 2006 dollars. It was generally seen in bars, cafes, and upscale dancing establishments where they ran as a curiosity. Following World War II, the device never recovered its previous popularity due to competition from Television. Today Soundies are perhaps best known for preserving rare performances of African-American artists who had fewer opportunities to perform in films. Artists such as Fats Waller, Louis Jordan, Dorothy Dandridge, Big Joe Turner, Meade Lux Lewis, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Stepin Fetchit all made Soundies.

Panoram was the trademark name of a visual jukebox that played music accompanied by a synched, filmed image (the effect being the equivalent of today’s music videos) popular within the United States during the 1940s. The device consisted of a jukebox playing a closed-loop 16mm film reel projected onto a glass screen.

The Panoram is now best known for the vast library of short, three minute music videos that were created for it. Called soundies, these films featured most of the great musical stars of the period, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway. Many of the filmed interludes survive and are considered a priceless archive.

The Panoram was priced more than $10,000 in 2006 dollars. It was generally seen in bars, cafes, and upscale dancing establishments where they ran as a curiosity. Following World War II, the device never recovered its previous popularity due to competition from Television.

Today Soundies are perhaps best known for preserving rare performances of African-American artists who had fewer opportunities to perform in films. Artists such as Fats Waller, Louis Jordan, Dorothy Dandridge, Big Joe Turner, Meade Lux Lewis, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Stepin Fetchit all made Soundies.

I love ostriches. They are realists. They only believe what they see. When everything is going wrong, and the world is getting altogether too ugly, they only have to shut their eyes very tightly for the outside world to just melt away. - Jean Luc Godard

(Source: omarsfilmblog.blogspot.com)

Preston Sturges’ Eleven Rules For Box Office Appeal: 

A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.

A leg is better than an arm.

A bedroom is better than a living room.

An arrival is better than a departure.

A birth is better than a death.

A chase is better than a chat.

A dog is better than a landscape.

A kitten is better than a dog.

A baby is better than a kitten.

A kiss is better than a baby.

A pratfall is better than anything

(Source: prestonsturges.net)

Matthew Henson - black guy was the first man to ever set foot on the North Pole, but didn’t get no respect.   Click for high-res photo

Matthew Henson - black guy was the first man to ever set foot on the North Pole, but didn’t get no respect.  

Click for high-res photo
Manhattan Beach Hotel Click for high-res photo

Manhattan Beach Hotel

Hey dudes, nice pickelhaubes.  Click for high-res photo

Hey dudes, nice pickelhaubes. 

“
It also concerns Streep that the part most people have seen her play is one she found less than gratifying - the role of Inga in “Holocaust”. “I did it for the money. I need it very badly, and I make no bones about that. She defines the fame the show has brought her as “something surreal”. “The other day I was riding my bike through Chelsea when these four guys in a Volkswagen started yelling at me out of the window, ‘Hey, Holocaust, hey, Holocaust!’ Can you imagine? It’s absurd that that episode in history can be reduced to people screaming out of car windows at an actress.

SimplyStreep.com - Magazines - Horizon Magazine (1978)

I swear I don’t usually frequent SimplyStreep.com

“
A week after the death of JFK, Jacqueline Kennedy summoned White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port to “rescue” her husband’s legacy. She proposed that White prepare an article for Life magazine drawing a parallel between her husband and his administration to King Arthur and the mythical Camelot. At the time, a play of that name was being performed on Broadway and Jackie focused on the ending lyrics of an Alan Jay Lerner song, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” White, who had known the Kennedys from his time as a classmate of the late President’s brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was happy to oblige. He heeded some of Jackie’s suggestions while writing a 1,000 word essay that he dictated later that evening to his editors at Life. When they complained that the Camelot theme was overdone, Jackie objected to changes. By this telling, Kennedy’s time in office was transformed into a modern day Camelot that represented, “a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.” Thus was born one of the nation’s most enduring, and inaccurate, myths.
Theodore H. White - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mictlantecuhtli (Nahuatl pronunciation: [miktɬaːnˈtekʷtɬi], meaning “Lord of Mictlan”), in Aztec mythology, was a god of the dead. The worship of Mictlantecuhtli sometimes involved ritual cannibalism, with human flesh being consumed in and around the temple. Mictlantecuhtli was depicted as a blood-spattered skeleton or a person wearing a toothy skull.[4]Although his head was typically a skull, his eye sockets did contain eyeballs.[5] His headdress was shown decorated with owl feathers and paper banners, and he wore a necklace of human eyeballs,[4] while his earspools were made from human bones. His arms were frequently depicted raised in an aggressive gesture, showing that he was ready to tear apart the dead as they entered his presence. Click for high-res photo

Mictlantecuhtli (Nahuatl pronunciation: [miktɬaːnˈtekʷtɬi], meaning “Lord of Mictlan”), in Aztec mythology, was a god of the dead. The worship of Mictlantecuhtli sometimes involved ritual cannibalism, with human flesh being consumed in and around the temple.

Mictlantecuhtli was depicted as a blood-spattered skeleton or a person wearing a toothy skull.[4]Although his head was typically a skull, his eye sockets did contain eyeballs.[5] His headdress was shown decorated with owl feathers and paper banners, and he wore a necklace of human eyeballs,[4] while his earspools were made from human bones. His arms were frequently depicted raised in an aggressive gesture, showing that he was ready to tear apart the dead as they entered his presence.

Jesús Malverde, sometimes known as the “generous bandit”, “angel of the poor”, [1] or the “narco-saint”, is a folklore hero in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He is celebrated as a folk saint by some in Mexico and the United States, particularly among those involved in drug trafficking,[2] but he is not recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. The existence of Malverde a.k. ‘El Rey de Sinaloa’ is not historically verified,[3] but according to local legends he was a bandit killed by the authorities on May 3, 1909. Accounts of his life vary – sometimes he was a railway worker, while others claim he was a construction worker. There is also no agreement on the way he died, being hanged or shot. Since Malverde’s supposed death, he has earned a Robin Hood-type image, making him popular among Sinaloa’s poor highland residents. The outlaw image has caused him to be adopted as the “patron saint” of the region’s illegal drug trade, and the press have thus dubbed him “the narco-saint.”[4] However, his intercession is also sought by those with troubles of various kinds, and a number of supposed miracles have been locally attributed to him, including personal healings and blessings.

Jesús Malverde, sometimes known as the “generous bandit”, “angel of the poor”, [1] or the “narco-saint”, is a folklore hero in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He is celebrated as a folk saint by some in Mexico and the United States, particularly among those involved in drug trafficking,[2] but he is not recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

The existence of Malverde a.k. ‘El Rey de Sinaloa’ is not historically verified,[3] but according to local legends he was a bandit killed by the authorities on May 3, 1909. Accounts of his life vary – sometimes he was a railway worker, while others claim he was a construction worker. There is also no agreement on the way he died, being hanged or shot.

Since Malverde’s supposed death, he has earned a Robin Hood-type image, making him popular among Sinaloa’s poor highland residents. The outlaw image has caused him to be adopted as the “patron saint” of the region’s illegal drug trade, and the press have thus dubbed him “the narco-saint.”[4] However, his intercession is also sought by those with troubles of various kinds, and a number of supposed miracles have been locally attributed to him, including personal healings and blessings.

Peckerwood (or simply Wood) is a slur used through the mid 20th century by southern African Americans and upper class whites used to describe poor rural whites. It is roughly synonymous with “cracker” and “redneck”, more prevalent in the southeast, and “White trash”, although the last implies a degree of moral turpitude. Blacks saw blackbirds as a symbol of themselves, and the redheaded woodpecker as a representation of working class whites. They considered them loud and troublesome like the bird, and sometimes with red hair like the woodpecker’s head plumes. This word is still widely used by southern blacks to refer to southern whites. Pecker-wood, (a.k.a. Peck-a-wood), is also a mentality in which white people deem themselves superior to African-Americans, look down on them, and justify ill and inhumane treatment of them, and as a basis of discrimination and separation. Where as the word Pecker-wood may refer to, but is not limited to, southern whites, the Pecker-wood mentality is prevalent in all regions in the United States, and throughout the world.[1] In the 1940s, the abbreviated version “wood” entered California prison slang, originally meaning anOkie mainly from the San Joaquin Valley. This has caused the symbol of the woodpecker to be used by white power skinheads and other pro-white groups.[1][2] Some white supremacist groups call male members “peckerwoods” and female members “featherwoods”.[3] It is usually drawn with a long beak, sometimes drawn to resemble Woody Woodpecker or Mr. Horsepower. Sometimes the letters “PW” or “APW” (Peckerwood and American Peckerwood) are used.[1] The peckerwood gangs are concentrated in California, where some trade inmethamphetamine. Click for high-res photo

Peckerwood (or simply Wood) is a slur used through the mid 20th century by southern African Americans and upper class whites used to describe poor rural whites. It is roughly synonymous with “cracker” and “redneck”, more prevalent in the southeast, and “White trash”, although the last implies a degree of moral turpitude. Blacks saw blackbirds as a symbol of themselves, and the redheaded woodpecker as a representation of working class whites. They considered them loud and troublesome like the bird, and sometimes with red hair like the woodpecker’s head plumes. This word is still widely used by southern blacks to refer to southern whites. Pecker-wood, (a.k.a. Peck-a-wood), is also a mentality in which white people deem themselves superior to African-Americans, look down on them, and justify ill and inhumane treatment of them, and as a basis of discrimination and separation. Where as the word Pecker-wood may refer to, but is not limited to, southern whites, the Pecker-wood mentality is prevalent in all regions in the United States, and throughout the world.[1]


In the 1940s, the abbreviated version “wood” entered California prison slang, originally meaning anOkie mainly from the San Joaquin Valley. This has caused the symbol of the woodpecker to be used by white power skinheads and other pro-white groups.[1][2] Some white supremacist groups call male members “peckerwoods” and female members “featherwoods”.[3] It is usually drawn with a long beak, sometimes drawn to resemble Woody Woodpecker or Mr. Horsepower. Sometimes the letters “PW” or “APW” (Peckerwood and American Peckerwood) are used.[1] The peckerwood gangs are concentrated in California, where some trade inmethamphetamine.

“
The American concept of wilderness has been criticized by some nature writers. For example, William Cronon writes that what he calls a wilderness ethic or cult may “teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of such humble places and experiences”, and that “wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others”, using as an example “the mighty canyon more inspiring than the humble marsh.”[25] This is most clearly visible with the fact that nearly all U.S. National Parks preserve spectacular canyons and mountains, and it was not until the 1940s that a swamp became a national park—the Everglades. In the mid-20th century national parks started to protect biodiversity, not simply attractive scenery.
Wilderness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia