Video: An experiement with fireworks

I am not quite sure where this video comes from, but you have to admire the pyrotechnician, if not for his talent, certainly for his tenacity. You kind of get the feeling he was going to jump right back in the saddle.


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Retraction: Pablo Fanque makes the rare mistake: Palin pregnancy story goes nowhere--Limbaugh, Hannity, and possibly Lieberman off the hook

On rare occasions, even Pablo Fanque is wrong . On July 4th, 2009, he reported that Sarah Palin resigned the governorship because she was pregant. Best line in his article: "Complicating things even further, another reporter saw Democrat convert Senator Arlen Specter leaving her hotel suite, with shoes in hand, at three in the morning."

Palin resignation bombshell: "Not really sure" if the father is Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh

July 4, 2009

By Pablo Fanque,
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Shortly after Governor Sarah Palin's hastily called, and sparsely attended, press conference at her home in Wasilla, Alaska yesterday, I was contacted by a friend in her administration. Take that with however many grains of salt you wish. . .I actually do have friends in her administration. None of those friends has ever leaked a word, or fed me anything of substance since the day her name began circulating on short lists of Sen. John McCain's VP choices. Until this afternoon.

Following Governor Sarah Palin's resignation announcement earlier today, a CNN anchor wondered: "Is Sarah Palin pregnant?" The talking head inadvertently stumbled onto the story, but failed to dig deep enough to uncover the underlying bombshell.

If you believe my source (I do), Governor Palin joins the ranks of Republicans involved in sex scandals in recent weeks. If troubles, like celebrity deaths, come in threes, Sarah Palin is about to join Governor Mark Sanford, and Senator John Ensign in the doghouse.

At the April Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City, the Governor was at loose ends. She had just been savaged by the press, and McCain campaign staffers were leaking nasty tidbits about her to friends in the press. She was there to network, to forget, and to party.

On at least two nights, she was drinking heavily with supporters and other prominent Republican officials. As it turns out, she became pregnant at the conference. The problem is, she's not sure whether the father is Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Complicating things even further, another reporter saw Democrat convert Senator Arlen Specter leaving her hotel suite, with shoes in hand, at three in the morning."

To quote the Governor from her press conference yesterday, there is little doubt that she is "advancing in another direction."
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Sarah Palin tidbits from Going Rogue and her Equire interview

By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Obviously, we enjoy covering the Ex-Governor. Having her very book in our hands, make it even more interesting. I am including some nuggets from her recent Esquire interview, along with passages from her new book: Going Rogue, An American Life (take advantage of the price wars, and buy the hardcover at Amazon and elsewhere for $9).


On bloggers, and pesky journalists:

"Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me....I'll tell you, yesterday the Anchorage Daily News, they called again to ask — double-, triple-, quadruple-check — who is Trig's real mom. And I said, Come on, are you kidding me? We're gonna answer this? Do you not believe me or my doctor? And they said, No, it's been quite cryptic the way that my son's birth has been discussed. And I thought, Okay, more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism." [Esquire]

On seeing Russia from Alaska:

"You have to let it go. Even hard news sources, credible news sources — the comment about, you can see Russia from Alaska. You can! You can see Russia from Alaska. Something like that — a factual statement that was taken out of context and mocked — what you have to do is let that go." [Esquire]

How Alaska and NYC are the same:



"I would think we all tear up during the national anthem at the beginning of a baseball game, don't we? That's an alikeness between Alaskans and New Yorkers." [Esquire]

How she'd have run the campaign:

"If I were giving advice to myself back on the day my candidacy was announced, I'd say, Tell the campaign that you'll be callin' some of the shots. Don't just assume that they know you well enough to make all your decisions for ya. Let them know that you're the CEO of a state, you're forty-four years old, you've got a lot of great life experience that can be put to good use as a candidate." [Esquire]

On Saturday Night Live:

"I'd been a fan of SNL for decades, and I have a lot of respect for the present talent. I knew it would be a good thing to be a part of. And also, of course, to let Americans know that I can laugh at myself, too." [Esquire]



On McCain strategist Steve Schmidt:

“Schmidt issued a threat that was veiled enough for deniability but clear as day if you were on the receiving end: if there were are any more leaks critical of anybody in the handling of Sarah Palin, then a lot more negative stuff would be said about Sarah Palin.” [Going Rogue]

On the prank call from "the President of France":

“One of the first calls was Schmidt, and the force of his screaming blew my hair back. ‘How can anyone be so stupid?! Why would the president of France call a vice presidential candidate a few days out?"

“Good question, I thought. Weren’t you the ones who set this up?

“As Schmidt’s rant blazed on, I pictured cell towers between D.C. and Florida bursting into flame. I held the phone slightly away from my head.” [Going Rogue]

On Karl Marx and big business:



"In national politics, some feel that big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy," she writes. "Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what's good for business is bad for people. (That's what Karl Marx thought too.)" [Going Rogue]

Quoting her father on her decision to resign as Governor:

"Sarah's not retreating, she's reloading." [Going Rogue]

Sarah waxes poetic:

"It was the Alaska State Fair, August 2008. With the gray Talkeetna Mountains in the distance and the first light covering of snow about to descend on Pioneer Peak, I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier. Cotton candy and footlong hot dogs. Halibut tacos and reindeer sausage. Banjo music playing at the Blue Bonnet Stage, baleen etchings, grass-woven Eskimo baskets, and record-breaking giant vegetables grown under the midnight sun." [Going Rogue]

On the "Free Sarah" movement, and the devastating Couric interview:

"By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate.

"From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn't have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.

"Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

"I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

"Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

"Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.” [Going Rogue]

On the media "blackout" (from Chapter 4):

"Meanwhile, the media blackout continued. It got so bad that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto’s producer. I had a friend call Bill O’Reilly after I was inundated with supporters in Alaska asking why the campaign was “ignoring” his on-air requests for a McCain campaign interview. I had another friend scrambling to find Mark Levin’s number. Aboard the campaign plane I was within twenty-five feet of reporters for hours on end. Headquarters’ strategy was that I should not go to the back of the aircraft and talk to the press. At first this was subtle, but as the campaign wore on, Tracey or Tucker would call headquarters to request permission, and someone in DC would respond, “No! Absolutely not- block her if she tries to go back.” [Going Rogue]

Selected articles on Sarah Palin appearing in All This Is That:

http://bit.ly/17SLDv
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/07/palin-resignation-bombshell-not-really.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/01/sarah-palin-explains-how-obama-won-with.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/11/sarah-palins-fuming-again-this-time.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/04/two-bobs-from-office-space-interview.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/05/sarah-palins-new-heater-nra-gives.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/09/auto-tune-news.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/07/governor-sarah-palin-unelected-herself.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-new-dick.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/07/sarah-palin-for-president.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/07/transcript-of-sarah-palins-resignation.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/06/clown-wars-pablo-fanque-reports-on.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2009/01/and-race-is-on-2012-presidential.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2008/12/chicago-artist-brude-elliott-is-at-it.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2008/11/palin-phone-cll-prank.html
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Characters in Beatles songs (a list)

click the boys to enlarge

I spent some time (probably way too much) tonight writing down the names of every character I remember appearing in a song by The Beatles. I have to have hit somewhere around 90% or so. Remember who you're dealing with here [a codger]. I've been listening to these tunes since around 1963, and more lately since the remastered versions appeared in September, 2009. This was a lot of fun, actually. . .

So, who did I miss?

A barber
A boy
A fireman
A girl
A girl like you
A pretty nurse
A rich man
Another girl
Another lover
Another man
Baby
Bad boy
Beautiful people
Billy Shears
Blackbird
Boys
Boys
Bulldog
Bungalow Bill
Chuck
Crabalocker fishwife
Dan
Dave
Desmond
Doctor Robert
Doris
Edgar Allen Poe
Eggman
Eggmen
Eleanor Rigby
Expert textpert choking smokers
Father Mackenzie
Georgia
Gideon
Hari Krishna
He
Her
Henry the horse
Her Majesty
Him
His Wife
Honey Pie
I
Joan
John
Johnny
Jojo
Jojo
Jude
Julia
Lady Madonna
Lil
Loretta Martin
Loretta Martin’s mother
Lovely Rita
Lucy
Lucy in the sky
Maggie Mae
Magill
Martha
Martha my dear
Mary
Mary Jane
Maxwell
Maxwell Edison
Me
Messrs K and H
Michelle
Miss Lizzy
Mister city policeman
Molly
Mom
Mother Mary
Mother Nature's Son
Mother Superior
Mr. H
Mr. Heath
Mr. K
Mr. Kite
Mr. Postman
Mr. Wilson
Mrs. Robinson
My monkey
Nancy
Nowhere man
Old Flattop
Other Lover
Pablo Fanque
Paul
Peter
Piggies
Pigs
Pigs in a sty
Polythene Pam
Pornographic priestess
Prudence
Rita
Rocky Raccoon
Rose
Rosie
Sergeant Pepper
Semolina Pilchard
Sexy Sadie
She
Sir Walter Raleigh
Taxman
Teddy Boy
The banker
The Blue Meanies
The Eggman
The fool on the hill
The Hendersons
The joker
The Queen
The taxman
The Walrus
Two of us
Valerie
Vera
Wilson
Yoko
You
Your bird
Your boy
Your mother
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Elizabeth Suman's Nerdabout: top ten animal videos

Elizabeth Suman, a friend and former Seattleite writes the Nerdabout blog for Discovery Channel’s webpage. This is her top ten animal video compilation--some you know, and some you won't. Give her a click!
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Sarah Palin's fuming again -- this time over her Newsweek cover story

Sarah Palin’s Newsweek cover uses a photo taken of her for the magazine “Runners World.” Newsweek asks: “How Do You Solve a Problem like Sarah?”

In a Facebook (www.facebook.com/sarahpalin) rant to her almost 1 million fans (well, not all fans--I'm one), Palin said that Newsweek's choice of photo — which she shot for Runner's World magazine — was "unfortunate." Her full comments:

"The choice of photo for the cover of this week's Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this "news" magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner's World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness - a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention - even if out of context."

She also found a little time to rip into critics of her new book "Going Rogue."

"Amazingly, but not surprisingly, the AP somehow nabbed a copy of the book before it was released. They're now erroneously reporting on the book's contents and are repeating many of the same things they spewed during the campaign and afterwards. We've heard 11 writers are engaged in this opposition research, er, "fact checking" research! Imagine that – 11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to "fact check" what's going on with Sheik Mohammed's trial, Pelosi's health care takeover costs, Hasan's associations, etc. Amazing."
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Poem: The Broken Chord

The rain falls
As you practice arpeggios

Running out shimmering notes
In an ever-shifting

Pattern of music sifting
Through the caesuras between the notes

Forming a counterpoint
With the drumming of the rain

Thousand of patterns and polyrhythms
Weave around and through other patterns

The rain chicanes in the wind
Breaking up and merging again

Billions of drops in midair
Bump together in a choreographed ballet

We can never reproduce
But that's nature for you

We sing paint and write the same story
Over and over and over again

And nature trumps us
With her singular snowflake.
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[revised, tuned-up, and reheated November, 2009]

Alien Lore No. 162 - UFO sighting in California, September, 2009

As is often the case, Jeff Clinton sent along this excellent and meticulously enhanced video of a recent alleged UFO sighting in California.

They didn't make the YouTube video "embeddable," so you'll have to jump here to view it.

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Doc Ellis's LSD-fueled no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates

Doc, back then

Thanks to bro-in-law Dean Ericksen for pointing out this fantastic animation of Doc Ellis's amazing LSD-fueled no-hitter. Doc was interviewed not long before he died, and the creators used his hilarious shaggy-dog narrative to create their cool flash piece.

"Sadly, the great Dock Ellis died last December at 63. A year before, radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel, had recorded an interview with Ellis in which the former Pirate right hander gave a moment by moment account of June 12, 1970, the day he no-hit the San Diego Padres. Alexander and Ilels original four minute piece appeared March 29, 2008 on NPRs Weekend America. When we stumbled across that piece this past June, Blagden and Isenberg were inspired to create a short animated film around the original audio."


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Digital art: Drackeela

click to enlarge

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Digital art: The Drunken Birds

click to enlarge the birds

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Big Star's first show with The Posies in the band

In 1993, the legendary Big Star reconvened to play a show in Columbia, Missouri. They brought in The Posies Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer to sing and play guitars. They've been together, off and on, ever since, with the Posies still pursuing their own efforts and the occasional Posies tour and record. Big Star, with Jon and Ken, released their first record in decades a few years ago. This video is from Jay Leno's show the day before that first show in Columbia. I've seen them three times since they tarted up, but not recently.


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