That was the outcome of the Little League World Series on Sunday, anyway.
You know, I’m not an MLB fan. And I don’t have any kids to get involved in Little League. Still, I like the Little League games a lot more than I do MLB fare.
Photos after the flip to illustrate why.
Recently there was a progressive open house at the Medical Professional Center, a more or less satellite facility to the hospital here where physicians have private practices. The idea was that, in order to publicize a half dozen recently-arrived physicians, there would be a sort of food scavenger hunt from office to office.
Beginning with beverages, progressing to crudité, light mini-foods (BBQ meatballs, scallops, etc.), desserts and finally coffee, visitors were encouraged to go from office to office and meet the physicians. There was live music too and door prizes.
I mention all of this because I was asked to produce the promotional materials for the event, and developed something that was significantly at variance from what is normally found in advertising in a small town in Arizona. Along the way I happened across an unexpected bonus in the form of a kind of visual pun.
The main ad’s after the fold.
This set of images of Earth is, according to NASA, the best full-planet view to date.
At work I have two monitors, which means I get both hemispheres.
Mini versions after the fold (mini-we?). H/T to Seed.
I think Hillary Clinton has lost my vote too. Apparently there has been some discussion of employing nukes — nukes! — against terrorist cells; Clinton refused to say whether or not she’d use them.
The yield of even a small weapon is so tremendous that setting one off to kill the average cluster of terrorists would affect hundreds, if not thousands, of others.
Nukes?
Holy shit. And I thought invading Pakistan was bad.
It’s a ticket that doesn’t even exist. One man is undeclared; the other is far, far behind in polls.
Why not, for once in living memory, choose the best men for the job?
Gore and Kucinich. Because we’re tired of stupidity.
Not me too.
Fark is having a Photoshop contest, depicting Stephen Colbert as God.
Well, here he is as someone who actually really did exist instead.
We’re not technologically capable — yet — of literally destroying the world. What we are capable of, however, is rendering its surface utterly inimical to human life. From that rather self-centered perspective alone, then, we should be careful about what we develop, deploy and refine.
It doesn’t matter if we use atomics or fusion weapons. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of biotech or nanos. It doesn’t matter if it’s robots or particle cannons. The sick thrust to produce bigger, better and more effective killing technologies has cost us a more or less literal paradise on Earth. We have the power to transform our world into a peaceful place of health, well-being and happiness … and yet we stubbornly continue to choose not to.
For the money we have wasted waging war against one nation that did us no harm whatsoever we could have provided universal health coverage to all Americans and revitalized the education system. We could have and damned well should have been a beacon of hope and prosperity for the rest of the world — and instead we’ve become sad, clownish and self-satirizing.
We’re the most powerful nation in the history of our species and we’re pissing away our grandchildren’s inheritance — in the name of what?
That’s the part that rankles most about all the religious swarms. None of them seems to want to consider the possibility they might be wrong, that they might be killing hundreds or thousands of others in the name of something which simply doesn’t exist.
To behave in the way many of the religious do requires not simply arrogance, but total disregard for the humanity of others and total unconcern for anyone but one’s self. Religions which claim to promote altruism and self-sacrifice ultimately prove to be about selfishness and solipsism.
Religion short-circuits intelligence. Every time.
There is no do-over. There is no undo button. If we fuck ourselves off the Earth, we’re done. That’s it.
Part 4 of 5, continuing where we left off.
Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat’s Cradle, wrote of the world’s end.
It came through a bizarre molecular structure, a “new” way for water to freeze at room temperature, melting only at about 114 or so degrees Fahrenheit. A crystal of this Ice-Nine fell into the sea, followed by what he described as The Great Ah-Whoom, the sound made by all the waters on Earth freezing solid in one moment.
I don’t imagine a nuclear apocalypse would sound like that. I imagine it would sound a lot more like the accounts we heard from the survivors of Hiroshima: Black rains falling on burned bodies, and the dying begging for water.
It’s simply incomprehensible to a thinking, feeling human being that anyone would want this kind of sorrow to fall on our world — yet apocalyptic Christian cults pray, every day, for such madness. They believe that it will presage the reign of Jesus Christ on his scorched Earth.
Bush has idenitfied himself prominently as being such a believer.
Continuing the series, Reality Check? 3.
Sometimes the oddest things just irk me.
This sign is present outside of an area where various things are loaded and unloaded in the hospital’s hallway. Some of those things would seem very attractive to certain types of individual. The sign is there, of course, to basically keep honest people honest; a dedicated malfeasant wouldn’t give a good damn about the sign and would simply boost whatever he wanted, figuring — arguably correctly — that the odds of a clean escape were in his favor.
Okay, so what’s the problem?
Well, it seems that — despite the constant video surveillance — someone’s managed to steal our verb.
I had a boyfriend who was bashed, before I knew him. He was beaten with a bat and left for dead in a Dumpster. His skull was fractured in the attack, his jaw and teeth were badly damaged, and he lost a testicle. He was found and taken to an ER. A few more hours and he would have been scooped up into a garbage truck and crushed to death under tons of refuse.*
In relative terms he was lucky. He survived. Many others do not.
Interesting how sanctity of life means protecting a fetus — but has no meaning at all where gays, bisexuals or transsexuals are concerned; interesting how some Christian religious groups are even willing to show support for men who have murdered other human beings.
Despite that, I don’t own a firearm; nor do I have any kind of blade beyond kitchen and utility knives. I own no daggers, and I gave away my swords. I have a four-foot fighting staff and a pair of tonfa, but I believe anything more drastic would be a capitulation to a kind of paranoia that I don’t want to have. My home is peaceful and I want to keep it that way. I recognize the need for self-defense, but I do not want to harbor weapons that make bloodletting easy or casual.
Interesting, too, how thou shalt not kill seems to go by the wayside when we’re talking about different people in different lands.
In the 80s, it was a scandal — of sorts — that Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer regularly. There was more than a little concern that the woman who was closest to the president used little more than tea-leaves and dowsing sticks to judge the future.
Today, we have a “president” who says his greatest inspiration is Jesus Christ. How convenient that he combines an interjection with a reference.
To me, the idea of a president kneeling and asking a phantom for guidance, ignoring the seasoned advice of military and civilian professionals who have lived through virtually every aggressive or diplomatic detente imaginable — going instead with his “gut” — is terrifying.
I know there’s no such thing as The Button. Nevertheless, Bush’s finger is on it.
Here’s part two of Reality Check?, continuing the first installment.
