If Only. . .No. 3: President Mario Cuomo

By Jack Brummet
Democratic Affairs Editor

As Number 2 in our series "If only. . .",  we want to present former New York Governor Mario Cuomo.  He was a master speaker, but he was bright (150 watts), with a heart of shimmering gold.  I used to listen to him on his radio show in NYC (what we'd now call a side-project) and got a pretty good measure of the man over many hours listening to him at night.  I voted for him for Mayor in the fall of 1977, a few months after I moved to NYC. 

Why did he decline to run for President, even when it seemed likely he could at the least capture the Democratic nomination?  We'll never really know; but we probably know,  or we can guess:

• The best guys never run for President.  For all the reasons you've heard before.  Don't get me wrong--there have been plenty of ringers. . .good-hearted, decent, and very bright men (men, so far).  

• The timing is never right. This is a perennial problem in Presidential politics--when do you make the contest? There are scores of factors (all of which, in reality, boil down to $$$) and infinite variations exponentiated with chicanery, skullduggery, treacherous to inept boardroom and office politics, and when and to whom various levels of payoffs, grease, compromise, blackmail, and even physical and psychological harm should be applied).

• Skeletons rattling in the closet? Those skeletons were often alluded to, but none ever materialized.  If you ran for Mayor and Governor in New York, the rattling bones would have been shaken from the closet.  I never believed in those skeletons.

• He didn't want to know if he would win or not. He wanted to keep that aura, which would  be sullied by jumping in to The Snake Pit.  For me  at least, this was one of the great political heartbreakers of all time.  OK, not RFK heartbreaking, but a little sad.  You don't throw yourself off a cliff over a woulda-shoulda-coulda. . .but still, I often think about Mario and wonder "what if..."

Check out text of Mario Cuomo's 1984 keynote address, here if you need convincing.  It is one of the greatest speeches of our time.

Other ATIT articles on Governor Cuomo:

The Man Who Should Have Been King
Mario Cuomo Nominates Bill Clinton at the convention
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Halloween costume ideas (probably NSFW)

By Mona Goldwater,
Fashion Editor

It's time for our annual post on Halloween costumes.  Our criteria is mainly that the costume needs to be weird.  We did not include the many costumes that you would consider cute, or dressed up animals, and, believe or not, we left out most of the really sick costumes, or costumes where you might say "it's too soon!" (9/11 costumes, Michael Jackson, etc). 

Little Hitler

Illegal Alien

Twisted Family Costume(s)

The Tooth Fairy

Kind Of A Katamari Babies Costume

Goldilocks

Bomber

Hawaii's Favorite

Priapic Frog

Naughty Bits

Man-sheep

Caged

Man-horse/Centaur

Birth

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If Only...No. 2: The Wallop

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Ren Cummins is giving it away!

By Jack Brummet, Language Arts Editor

Steampunk author Ren Cummins takes Crazy Eddy one step further.  He's not practically giving it away, he IS giving it away.  The first novel--Reaper's Return--in his Young Adult series Chronicles of Aesirium is available as a free download at the site below.  It is available in various e-book formats from plain text to Kindle, Palm Reader, Nook, etc.

Naturally, he hopes this generous taste will drive you to actually buy the rest of the series.

Click here to obtain your copy of Reaper's Return.

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The Spokane River Bigfoot

By Jack Brummet
Bigfoot-Yeti-Sasquatch Editor

 

A YouTube user--Samantha13950 --says she and some friends encountered a Sasquatch while hiking along the Spokane River.

"While hiking, we accidentally caught an image of Bigfoot walking through the woods. I didn't even notice until I got home and saw it on the computer! This scarred the crap out of us! Video uploaded by samantha13950 on May 23, 2011."

Some Bigfoot investigators and aficionados are skeptical of this one, for the usual reasons.  And, they say, there doesn't appear to be a large enough area to sustain a Bigfoot habitat near this sighting.   It's interesting--they have theories of the breadth of its range...although no one has actually examined one or studied them as a group (depending on whose stories you believe).


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One of the sixteen sunrises you see each day at the International Space Station

International Space Station astronaut Ron Garan used a high def camera to film one of the sixteen sunrises astronauts see each day at the international space station in August this year.

This image shows the rising sun as the station flies along a path between Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.  Image, courtesy of NASA.

click to enlarge

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Rick Santorum's Folly

Sending out feelers
    And testing the ground
The right place was the one
    Place he could never be found.

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Five favorite (U.S.) World War II propaganda posters

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KUOW interview with Daryle Conners: "Scale Over Fidelity"

An interview on KUOW 94.9 with our good friend Daryle Conners where she discusses her awesome home theatre, screening movies for groups, and two of our favorite movies, Dr. Strangelove and Stingray Sam.

Daryle Conners: Scale Over Fidelity
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Found art: dropcloth

click to enlarge

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How to hypnotize a chicken at home

By Jack Brummet
Unexplained Phenomena Editor
Thanks to Jeff Clinton! 

An illustration of a hypnotized chicken from an 18th century book by the famous Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher

OK, it's not technically hypnotizing chickens, but more properly, causing tonic immobility[1].   It is related to snake charming, which you have probably seen in cartoons, or B Movies.

A chicken can be put into a trance/hypnotized/lulled into tonic immobility by holding its head against the ground, and then drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at its beak and then running out in front of the chicken. A chicken hypnotized like this will will sit in a trance for anywhere between between 15 seconds and 30 minutes.

In the The 1985 Old Farmer’s Almanac, Linda Riggins wrote about hypnotized chickens:

“A bird will stay hypnotized for a couple of seconds, minutes, or hours,” says White, although in her demonstrations they’re “out” for only minutes. Regardless of the method used, a sudden movement or loud noise will bring the chicken out of the hypnotic trance.

"White adds, 'Pheasants go out faster than any other bird. Wild pheasants are very nervous and high-strung, and usually very easy to hypnotize.' In her demonstrations, she is protective of pheasants, because after they come out of hypnosis, they are likely to hurt themselves unless they are carefully monitored. Noting that domestic birds are more difficult to hypnotize than wild ones, she suggests that one reason may be wild birds are using a survival skill when they submit to hypnosis.

"White has reported the results of her experiments at several New Jersey science conferences and fairs. In one of her studies of 11 birds, the heart and respiration rates, when measured five minutes after hypnosis, were significantly lower than in the pre-hypnotic state. For example, in a Bantam White Cochin cock, the heart rate before hypnosis was 457 beats per minute and after hypnosis 372. The rates for this bird’s respiration were 22 and 20 breaths per minute, respectively. The temperatures of nine of these birds went down or were unchanged in the posthypnotic state."

Interestingly enough, in press briefings, the U.S. military--when trying to avoid divulging information, gives reporters briefings with 20 minutes of intentionally dull PowerPoint presentations and 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone who is still awake. Those presentations are called hypnotizing chickens around The Pentagon.



[1] From the Wikipedia page on tonic immobility:  "Tonic immobility is a natural state of paralysis that animals enter, in most cases when presented with a threat. Some scientists relate it to mating in certain animals like the shark.

"Some sharks can be placed in a tonic state. The shark remains in this state of paralysis for an average of fifteen minutes before it recovers. Scientists have exploited this phenomenon to study shark behaviour. The effects of chemical shark repellent have been studied to test effectiveness and to narrow down dose sizes, concentrations, and time to awaken."

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Poem: The Robot Uprising (with bonus robot painting)

poem and art By Jack Brummet

The bad news for us:
The loss of one member
Is inconsequential--
Just a millisecond diversion
In their march.
A platoon of robots,
Companies of robots
Marching straight ahead
Stepping over broken robots.
A regiment of robots,
Divisions of robots
Executing lines of code.
A corps of robots,
Armies of robots—
Programmed by rogue homo sapiens
To bring it all down.
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