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wvParticipantI was hoping for 8 wins this year. But, it looks like we are going to gift the Browns with a high draft choice next year.
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I dunno. Fisher has always had a way of coming back after
games like this. We’ll see how they play at home. They have to win their home games.1 Mon, Sep 12 @ San Francisco 0-28 L
2 Sun, Sep 18 Seattle 4:05 PM ET
3 Sun, Sep 25 @ Tampa Bay 4:05 PM ET
4 Sun, Oct 02 @ Arizona 4:25 PM ET
5 Sun, Oct 09 Buffalo 4:25 PM ETwvParticipantWell….awful as it was, one game is one game.
I’ll have to see a couple more games.
I mean, it could be all the distractions of the move,
and hard knocks, and all that, affected them. Could be
that Fisher just got outcoached. I dunno yet.w
vwvParticipantWell…I like Mike Groh. Thats all i got.
wvParticipant—-
————wvParticipantI wonder how many protesters walked out there to protest?
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Well its a fair question, but its also fair to ask how is one supposed
to be totally ‘pure’ in all actions when one is born into a corporotacracy.
I mean, I have no problem with progressives picking out some major issues and fighting for them, while still having cars, or watching pro football on televisions, etc. Its ‘almost’ impossible to be a saint today. So, i don’t have a problem with non-saints protesting the big issues of the day.w
vwvParticipantI may be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time, but something is up and Wikileaks could bring a major turnabout in this election.
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Well, it would take something really big, to derail Hillary, imho.
What supreme court issues do you care about most? (if u answer i promise no pedantic lectures or arguing 🙂 )
(I mainly care about one at this point — corporate personhood. And Hillary’s appointee would probably be slightly better on that issue than Trumps.)w
vSeptember 10, 2016 at 11:16 am in reply to: Hildabeast used an earpiece to get answers during live NBC TV Town Hall #52551wvParticipantIt’s no different to me than having speech writers to write a candidate’s speeches.
And i assume a lot of the richest national candidates do the microphone-in-the-ear thing.
What matters is the actual policies the candidate will fight for.
Thats what matters. Not ear-microphones or hair-styles, etc.w
vwvParticipantCNN poll — Trump in the lead
And no, i still say he is toast.w
v
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The Unconquerable Trump
Seemingly imploding on the trail, Trump gains in a national poll. WTF, America?
Matt Taibbi
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-unconquerable-trump-w438545
A stunning new CNN poll came out this week, showing Donald Trump in the lead against Hillary Clinton, 45-43 percent. Naturally, the release of this new survey coincided with my own Rolling Stone feature describing Trump in a “freefall,” having “lost his mojo.” What can I say? Sometimes in journalism, you can’t help looking like a buffoon.Let’s look at that poll, for if there’s any truth to it (and there has been some other evidence a “tightening” in the race), it would mean the ultimate worst-case scenario.
On the surface, Trump and new “campaign CEO” Steve Bannon appear to be employing one of the dumbest campaign strategies presidential politics has ever seen.
The recent rebrand is a transparent effort to rehabilitate Trump’s image as a racist loon. Bannon’s play has been to wheel Trump out at campaign events shackled, Hannibal Lecter-style, to teleprompters. At each stop, the candidate tries to focus just long enough to read out a robotic script offering “minority outreach,” while also signaling a “softening” and a “pivot” on his chief issue, immigration.
In person, watching Lecter-Trump labor to push this “minority outreach” script up a hill for 45 minutes or so is embarrassing to the point of being physically uncomfortable.
His “What do you have to lose?” appeals to African-American voters recall the cringe-inducing “My heart is as black as yours” routine of infamous New York Democrat Mario Procaccino, whose 1969 mayoral run has been described as the most incompetent campaign in American history.
It seems impossible that Trump’s Dr. King act would convince an educated person of anything. Just try to picture the mind that would be persuaded by these speeches. It’s not an easy image to conjure.
But in perhaps the ultimate demonstration of Murphy’s Law, it seems to have worked. The Bannon-Trump strategy at least looks this week like a success, even if it was just in the area of scoring one headline in one perhaps-flawed poll.
It’s developments like this that explain why the most successful third-party candidate in polls this season – and the only one who attracts wide support among liberals, conservatives and independents – is a giant meteor hitting the earth. (The “Sweet Meteor O’Death” scored 13 percent support, including an impressive 27 percent of independents, in a July poll).
After all, if Trump-Bannon’s nitwit strategy can succeed, that’s a powerful argument in favor of the species needing a reboot.
Or maybe the problem is confined to those of us here in America.
Just look at the math. The total popular vote in 2012 was 129,237,642 people. Assuming a similar turnout, in a theoretical world where Donald Trump scores 45 percent of the vote, that would mean a hair over 58 million human beings casting a vote for a man who thinks vaccines need to be administered one at a time, because “tiny children are not horses.”
Unlike George W. Bush, a pliable ignoramus surrounded by cunning government lifers who were the real candidates for the job, Trump is surrounded by determined conspiracy theorists incapable of speaking English or completing a coherent thought.His spokesperson Katrina Pierson said Barack Obama’s policies “probably” caused the death of a soldier killed in Iraq – in 2004! When confronted about her mistake, she said, “That’s why I used, ‘probably.'”
These are the sort of people whose first move upon entering the Oval Office would probably be to order the file on Area 51, or to check the back of the Declaration of Independence for treasure maps. And yet, somewhere north of 55 million voters, and huge majorities of white people, seem prepared to cast votes for this crew.
Trump would probably require miraculous reversals in demographic trends to win. Most likely, he’d need either absurdly low turnout among minorities and college-educated voters, or an unheard-off increase in turnout among non-college-educated white voters.
But such eventualities can’t be counted out. Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary run of sinister luck since the beginning of this race. The seas have parted for him over and over again in a pattern so improbable, it makes one guess at the existence of a Supreme Being with a serious grudge against the United States.
I bet on Trump to win the Republican nomination last summer, but it didn’t seem like easy money then. Trump’s path to victory in the nomination seemed to depend upon the unfolding of something like a conspiracy of incompetence by his primary opponents.
The likely victory scenario required some combination of John Kasich, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz staying in the race too long, preventing Trump from having to win a one-on-one race.
That did happen, thanks in part to a series of unhappy accidents. Marco Rubio’s New Hampshire implosion, for instance, may have opened the door for already-conceding John Kasich’s surprise second-place showing in the same state. This kept both candidates in through Super Tuesday, allowing Trump to waltz to victory needing only a plurality of voters.
Trump’s Republican opponents proved perfect foils for his suicide-bomber political style. One by one, they each walked into the trap of engaging him in exchanges of schoolyard insults, causing senators and governors to quickly lose their respectable titles in favor of new monikers like “low-energy Jeb” and “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted.”
Trump’s opponents all looked offended and thrown off-script by his attacks, while Trump came across as the same bleating, thin-skinned nut whether anyone engaged him or not. His opponents never figured out that Trump is incapable of losing such contests of insults, since he lacks the self-awareness to feel it when verbal punches land.
The physical proximity afforded by the endless debates was another factor. When you have to share a stage with a candidate determined to turn every event into a circus, it’s pretty hard to play the “I’m above the fray” card. He devoured camera time even in moderated debates, enhancing the impression that he was the dominant personality.
But all of these advantages were supposed to evaporate in general-election season. Instead of needing a plurality of Republicans, he now needed a plurality (and perhaps a majority) of all voters. Moreover his opposition was no longer a field of 16 nincompoops, but a single historically skilled political infighter who happened also to be one of the most famous and admired women on earth.
Unlike Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton was not going to get into a “mine’s bigger than yours” bro-brawl with Trump on live TV. She was sure to do the smart thing: let Trump hang himself with his own stupidity for as long as possible, and then ultimately turn the election into a referendum on dull competence versus cattle cars, race war and global isolation – an easy choice, the political version of Eddie Izzard’s “cake or death” joke.
This is exactly how it seemed to play out. After the conventions, Trump plunged into new scandals and controversies on a nearly minute-to-minute basis, from a loony battle with the family of a dead war vet to a claim that Obama “founded ISIS” to a bizarre remark about what daughter Ivanka should do if sexually harassed in the workplace by a Roger Ailes type (“find a new career”).
Then, in the face of plummeting poll numbers and mocking headlines, he panicked and emerged from a campaign reorganization tethered to an insane plan to walk all of this damage back by singing homilies to African-American despair in front of all-white crowds.
It should have been fatal. It wasn’t. Whether the CNN poll taken at the end of this incredible sequence of events that shows him in the lead is accurate or not, is irrelevant. The fact that it’s even close is an awesome indictment of us all.
It’s also a testament to Trump’s uncanny inability to fail even when he seems to be trying his hardest to do so. Not even the most exaggerated view of Hillary Clinton’s deficiencies as a candidate explains it. It feels a lot more like Idiocracy coming powerfully to life at exactly the wrong moment.
I still don’t think Trump really has a chance, but we’re sure headed toward a scary ending.
From ‘Citizen Kane’ to ‘Idiocracy,’ here are the movies that predicted the political rise of presidential candidate Donald Trump. Watch here… see link
wvParticipantI’m not really being down on the team or the coaches or anything, it’s just that I have a weird feeling about this one. Vinovich is the referee, and I don’t like that guy. When he’s the ref, ill-timed penalties seem to occur to the visiting team, and last year – when he was the zebra – the home team won 12 of 16 games.
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Well this is the first time (and ive been posting since 1998), that i have seen anyone post a Referee Stat.
What other strange stats do you know about? What about astrology? Do Scorpio WR’s usually have a big day against the Rams?
w
vwvParticipantSteven A. Smith is out of his mind.
If Goff was ready to be the #2, he’d be ready to be the #1.
He’s not ready. When he is, he will leapfrog Mannion straight into starting. That’s how that works. It’s not a ladder.
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Well he’s done a lot of ranting about Fisher over
the last six months. He’s not particularly rational
when the subject involves Fisher.Its funny, so many media-pundits are acting like the Rams QB situation
is bad — but a lot of hardcore knowledgeable ram fans think the QB
situation is the best its been since the GSOT,
with Keenum, Mannion, Goff.w
vwvParticipantBarring an arrest, or a blow-job, its crooked-hillary.
I dont even think the debates will matter.w
vThe aftermath.
What happens with all his supporters after the election?
I think in the five stages of grief, they don’t get past the first two: denial, then anger.
All those Hillary Haters are just gonna have coronary explosions, and David Duke and his buddies….
I dunno. Either way, things are gonna get even uglier in this here greatest country on earth.
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A thot-experiment — If Trump had won, would those angry-white-males
still like him two years into his term, when their
lives stayed the same or got worse ?Anyway, with President-Hillary as President it gives them
something to live for — smoldering hate.
(and i will be right there with them 🙂w
vwvParticipant“Trump won the nomination by being the cruelest, most balls-out build-a-wall hard-liner. Now he was talking like Jeb Bush on immigration and Bill Clinton on NAFTA. What was the point of all that craziness and rancor and destruction? Who needs Donald Trump playing Jeb Bush, especially since the actual Jeb Bush might have had a chance of beating Hillary Clinton?”
It seems like a bad idea to me. They may be trying to change his image in order to save seats in the senate, house, and so on, but it seems like a losing strategy to me. His supporters may have their enthusiasm dampened. I dunno, though.
—————Well, Taibbi kinda blames him for listening to his latest ‘handlers’ and he also blames the political-handlers for changing Trump’s message — but i think the truth is, it was a No-win situation for Trump.
If he stayed on his Trump-the-outlandish-outsider message — he’d lose.
If he ‘softened’ and listened to his handlers and became trump-lite — he’d still lose.His problem is non-solvable. He simply cannot win enuff ‘middle ground’ votes. Ya know. The ‘undecided types’. All he’s got is his hard-core angry-white-male block. Thats it. Neither strategy gains him any significant voters outside the hardcore block he already has.
If I were Trump, I’d go down being Trump. But thats just me 🙂
Barring an arrest, or a blow-job, its crooked-hillary.
I dont even think the debates will matter.w
vwvParticipantKeenum vs Gabbert — This will be the most anticipated, electrifying QB-matchup since…?
There will be no 7-9 Bullshit, Monday Night.
Los Angeles – 24
San Fran Cisco – 9w
vwvParticipantAnd this is why Trump is, quite simply, Toast:
“That he ended a week of “minority outreach” speeches pulling a crisp zero percent approval rating among black voters – zero percent! – speaks to the absurdity of taking his “outreach” campaign at face value…”
You cannot win a general election for Prez
in this here America, with numbers like that.
Cant be done.w
vwvParticipantMarshall listed Breez,
in the same category as Brady and Rogers.w
vwvParticipantPenn on Trump
wvParticipantStart at about the 17:30 mark. Maria is purty funny, i think:
wvParticipantI will give equal time here. Here’s a rightwing talker/comedian guy:
September 8, 2016 at 9:40 am in reply to: 'deep stories' and 'empathy walls': another book about rightwingers #52444wvParticipantCoupla books mentioned in the article above, fwiw:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0166ISAS8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Hillbilly Eulogy
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https://www.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-America-ebook/dp/B016JPTQ9U/ref=pd_sim_351_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=YB51AT7ABN665VKC9NHY#nav-subnav
he Hidden Aspects of Race and Class in American History
White TrashBook review…
By Herbert L Calhoun on July 26, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified PurchaseThis book explains the unsavory fine points of our national identity by probing and then exposing the not so well hidden loose ends that tie the bottom half of America’s social hierarchy to the top half. It reveals that there is much much more to race and class than what we see at eye level. We learn here that the colonists who came to the Americas were very much a mixed bag.
Initially, the upper classes were investor friends of the British Crown, given concessions to search for gold and to find a non-existent water passage across North America to India. Later, they were made up of political and religious enemies of the beheaded King Charles I.
Jamestown was one of the many failures at finding gold or the non-existent passage to the East. And thus, only as an afterthought did the leaders decide to salvage their costly expeditions by killing two birds with one stone: England’s horrendous social problems of crime, poverty and street violence would be solved by shipping the poor off to America. Then tracts of Indian lands would be sold off to entice the many lost souls hoping to make a life in the New World. These lost souls thus mostly were tricked onto ships in large numbers under a number of unsavory land contract schemes, the most prominent of which was called the “head right system,” in which those who did the tricking were paid in 50-acre land parcels, and in which the contractees thought they would all end up as rich English gentlemen, with free land, slaves and tools, living a life of leisure. Of course, it was all a lie. Most of the founding fathers became rich by acquiring large parcels of land through land scams of the head right variation.
At the bottom of the heap were those of the poor and criminal classes, including children sold off by their parents, or shipped off for petty crimes, or just kidnapped off the streets. But they also included roguish highwaymen or pirates, vagrants, Irish rebels, whores, and convicts shipped to the colonies for a variety of crimes, such as refusing to be impressed into the army being in debt, etc. The progeny of these groups are today’s poor white trash.
The majority of those brought to America’s shores came as indentured servants, a British euphemism for “slaves.” And even the few that did later manage to either escape slavery, or win their freedom outright after long periods of indentureship, seldom owned more than just token amounts of the least productive and most remote land. Most ended up as “squatters” forced into Western territories to “squat” on Indian lands in violation of the Treaty of Paris.
The power of land, for most of American history, lay in being able to get married, “put down roots,” breed a large family of field hands, and then work the land with as many hands as possible. “Squatters,” despised by all sides, typically had none of these. Being the 17th through the 19th centuries’ version of transients, they were young, virile, aimless and restless single white men, ineligible for marriage and forced to keep moving West in search of better and freer land. These unattached single men, wanderers and squatters, were the “free radicals” of the American heartland.
In 1676, a petite English Gentleman, Nathaniel Bacon, in what was called the Bacon Rebellion, along with a contingent of a few dozen single white men, plus an assortment of an equal number of red, white and black slaves, rebelled against being pushed to the outer edges of the colonies, left in hostile Indian territories to fend for themselves. It was the only time in American history when the lower classes have combined to rebel against the upper class.
With lop-sided gender demographics favoring single white men (in the Caribbean, the male slave ratio alone was sometimes as much as 100-1), minimally marriageable women became a scarce resource. As the author notes, “women went to market with their virginity;” and marriage and fertility played a critical role in defining the shape of early American society. Any woman under 50, no matter how ugly, could find a husband in the top tier of colonial American society. “Breeding capacity became a calculable natural resource — commodified and exploited in the marriage exchange.” For slave women, the womb became an article of commerce; and slave children, like cattle, were transactional property.
James Cartwright has written a wonderfully important book, called “Violent Lands,” on the meaning of these lopsided gender demographics in which large numbers of virile young white men were unable to become stakeholders in frontier American society. He claims that this is why America became, and remains even today, one of the most “Violent Lands” in the world.
Thus, added to the staid and highly sensitive class hierarchy inherited from class conscious Britain, the reader can see why America became an incubator for deep race and class sensitivities, divisions and resentments. The “witches brew” of breeding, biology, race, backed up by Christian biblical text, seamlessly turned into an ideology of white supremacy, still the most enduring instrument on the palette used to shape colonial America’s social order.
Put more directly, America’s founding generations saw good breeding and race as God’s way of establishing white supremacy as nature’s “taken for granted” class hierarchy; and ever since the days of the Puritans, American elites have frowned upon both race-mixing and upward mobility for the poorer classes. Both were seen as threats, either to the menial labor force, which the plantation owning elite depended upon for their very existence; or, to the white supremacist social order, underwritten and mandated by the biblical story of ham, which meant that blacks would remain slaves at the bottom of the pecking order in perpetuity.
Imported slaves and immigrants, either through indentureship, apprenticeships, debtors prisons, or due to indictment on criminal charges, prison-work release programs, etc., have all been forced into long-term arrangements for free, or nearly free, and always grossly unfair wages. These discrepancies between “fair” and “grossly unfair” wages have always rebounded back to land owners, or to big businesses’ bottom line as obscene and unsavory profits.
Inequality, denial of the right to vote or to own land, all followed logically from assumptions of superior breeding and race superiority assumptions. Submission to those at the top of the societal hierarchy was regarded as a natural condition of humankind in early America. The Christian Bible was the final authority that reinforced these notions and poured them into the mainstream. By teaching that some were born to rule, while others were born to submit and obey, breeding, and the biblical story of ham, had placed poor whites, as well as those with black skin, at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Arkansas White Trash: A True Story
At the age of nine, I learned about this bottom-most tier of our society first hand a block from the Arkansas River where I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Just below us — both figuratively and literally — down the sloping banks that literally slid right into the water, lived poisoned snakes, eels, gar and cat fish, turtles, bullfrogs, and an odd assortment of white people, who, though it was never said so openly, frightfully were the true wretched of the earth: These were Pine Bluff’s “poor white trash:” authentic rednecks in the flesh.
The shanty town of jerry-rigged huts made of corrugated tin, cardboard and scrap wood, that they had fashioned as homes, had sprung up over night. It was a racially homogenous tribe of “bruised fruit” and “day old” bread peddling white folks. Daily, in push carts and horse drawn wagons, they sold to us, nearby blacks who lived just up the hill, food-stuffs that had been savaged from grocery store dump bins. These petite entrepreneurs were a curious and motley sort, having to defer to blacks — if for no more reason than to encourage us, their only customers, to buy their “rank” produce.
But here’s the catch: Whenever we bought it, they surely knew that we did so only out of pity for their dismal plight. Yet, curiously, other than interacting at their peddler’s stations, and playing ball with two brothers around my age who would occasionally come up the hill, we maintained a silent modus vivendi that served as an invisible shield between our two radically distinct subcultures. While most of my neighbors were working class blacks, sprinkled with a few college educated professionals, like my stepfather, Carl Redus, the white tribes that lived under the hill, were barely literate, and by anyone’s social reckoning, had fallen well off the deep end of America’s socio-economic grid.
…That is except for two things that I still vividly remember:
First, during the school year, a school bus headed down King, would disappear beneath the sloping hill stopping just short of sliding into the water to pick up a couple of handfuls of shanty town redneck kids. It would then proceed clear across town past several black schools to the nearest white school where they were then deposited.
Second, and this came as quite a shock to a nine-year old black kid, almost without fail on the weekends, noisy redneck parties would occur down under the hill. Rival redneck tribes living farther around the river bend, would come to party, and invariably before Sunday morning rolled around a humongous fight would break out, and things would turn very violent and ugly indeed.
Somewhere in the wee hours of Saturday night, I would be awaken with ear-shattering noises, when literally all hell broke loose in shanty town. The sky would light up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. Bullets would be flying every which way. Shanty town huts would go up in flames, and residents would be running up the hill and screaming as they fanned-out in every direction. It was like a mini race riot, but involving only one race, the white race.
And then, over the flaming carnage and the war-like din, one could hear puffing up the hill, a loud desperate banging on our neighbor, Mr. Harris’ backdoor. In a blood-curling southern drawl, that is still unforgettable — literally a life-and-death scream — I could hear an older white man say: “Harris! Harris! Oooh Mr. Harris, please Harris call the law! Call the law Harris! Please call the law!
As multiple sirens howled in the distance, headed in our direction, soon everything would go completely silent, as the paddy wagons, fire trucks, ambulances and stretchers would arrive. Through my bedroom blinds, I could see parties alien to us, bleeding being carried away on stretchers or handcuffed, being hauled off to hospitals and jails. It was a sight to behold!
The only way we found out what happened in the dark down that hill, is the next day, Marshall and Leonard, the two brothers who occasionally played baseball with us, shamelessly would arrive at our backdoor, in search of food, clothing, bandages, medication, etc. And in exchange for a free breakfast, and a “care package,” we would invite them in to give us the low-down on the fighting that had just taken place.
They never came to our front door and never had enough racial pride to turn down our breakfast invitation, or the “care package” containing black hand-me-down clothes and assorted goods that we invariably gave them. And thus, the brothers, bruised and scraped, seemed to find it cathartic to be able to unload the gory details of the “redneck wars” of the previous night.
What they told us was unsurprising. Invariably the wars were about personal slights, turf encroachments, and men from the wrong side of the river banks “hitting on” women from the right side. Add to this, the occasional hell-raising redneck males, generally on edge and armed: disgusted with not having a secure and respected place in society, and having imbibed too much liqueur, and the tableau of causes of the redneck wars is complete.
This book, “White Trash,” is the first time I have ever seen in print the whole story of people like my river bank redneck friends, Marshall and Leonard, who I later learned both ended up in Reform School, which in Arkansas was the surest training-ground for ending up in adult prison.
The themes exposed here by this author, run true, and vector directly from the banks of the Arkansas River straight through American history like the jagged edges of the St. Andreas fault.
What this author has uncovered, is, that like race, class too is an unacknowledged independent variable that is also America’s most enduring fault line, one that when taken together with race, creates a reality coterminous with American culture itself. How she was able to skillfully separate race from class, and then put them back together again, when clearly they seem virtually inseparable, is part of the beauty of this fine treatment of both subjects.
In short, throughout American history, (including today’s race to the bottom of the global labor pool), America’s social pecking order has depended on maintaining in a steady-state, two racially separated poorer working classes at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. Since Bacon’s rebellion of 1676, rationalizing these two groups as inferior, and pitting them against each other, has proved quite sufficient to keep the ideology of white supremacy in place, and the price of labor at rock bottom. Ten stars
wvParticipantcheck out the 38 minute mark of this vid, and watch
the white folks trying to talk about black folks:
wvParticipantObviously, black people should not have been ethnically cleansed from
their family-lands.But the documentary raises broader issues about private property itself.
Is there a better way to live than the private-property-way ?w
vwvParticipantTrees are made of air, mostly, you know.
“…The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead. These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others…”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/good-thinking/201311/when-knowing-instills-sense-wonderw
vwvParticipantwvParticipantAnd another thing. Photo Synthesis — If mums and other screaming flowers, eat light, then why doesn’t it get darker and darker as more and more flowers eat more and more light?
Maybe its a good thing to run over mums. More light for the rest of us.
w
VScience tells us that as flowers consume the light the sun gets dimmer and dimmer until there is nothing but darkness. The technical term for this is “night” which is short for “no light”. Having consumed all of the sun’s light the flowers enter a state of dormancy in which their voracious appetite for light is temporarily abated. This allows the sun to recharge unmolested. As the sun grows brighter a phenomenon known as ‘day’ occurs and the cycle repeats itself as it has since the beginning of time 6000 years ago.
————–
lol
i cannot top that
u have won this round.
w
vwvParticipantI like the play a lot. Better than Macbeth which I think is overrated. I haven’t seen the movie, but I have seen in on stage 3 times. Is the movie any good?
I have almost finished the movie, and I thought it was quite good. Seemed to get better as it went along, too.
Course, i could watch Vanessa Redgrave read a phone book and I’d
be fascinated.And Ralph Fiennes, who i never would have cast in that part, was great. I had no idea he could create such…intensity/weight/presence. That guy can act.
w
v
wvParticipant..Ironic how your desperation to save the mums actually led to their demise. Poetic, huh?
Oh how they must have screamed in terror and pain as your 2 ton deathwagon slowly backed over them. I’m just glad flowers scream at decibel levels inaudible to the human ear. At least the neighborhood children were spared a lifetime of night terrors from the tortured shrieks you squeezed from the mums as you crushed them with your car.
—————-
And another thing. Photo Synthesis — If mums and other screaming flowers, eat light, then why doesn’t it get darker and darker as more and more flowers eat more and more light?
Maybe its a good thing to run over mums. More light for the rest of us.
w
v“….Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can’t take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower…
I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation.
Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God’s arms.When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, ‘Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.’ That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.
But, I’m sorry, I’m going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.”
― Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
wvParticipantI burn stray cats, here. Its not as efficient as
wood, and there’s a lot of screetching,
but it gets me through the Winter.The chopping is the fun part.
I used to use an axe but I went to Lowes
and invested in a cat-saw.w
vwvParticipantYeah, a lot of heat in that analysis but very little light.
The jilted reporter syndrome.
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Yeah, Im tellin ya, these ‘jilted’ reporters are missing something, imho.I just bet there are a LOT of St.Louis fans who still like and follow
the TEAM. (maybe not the management/owner). I mean most St.Loo folks
just watched em on TV like the rest of us.I doubt if that big group of local pro-rams fans likes all this
bile being spewed by the jilted-reporters.The ‘business’ side of Sports sucks. The team/players/game does
not suck. Just my opinion.w
vwvParticipantThat one fell below, even Jeff Gordon standards.
I wish he wouldn’t pick on the mentally-ill Tre Mason, btw.
That’s a little low, even for a sports-pundit.w
vwvParticipanthttp://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/jeff-gordon/gordo-rams-giving-haters-plenty-of-reasons-to-smile/article_860be581-6fcc-5e83-ac75-c7f0b7b6a826.html
Rams giving haters plenty of reasons to smile
Jeff Gordon
Since St. Louis stole the Rams from Los Angeles, you can’t really complain that LA stole them back.Because you welcomed Georgia Frontiere despite her many eccentricities, you shouldn’t begrudge the City of Angels the right to embrace land-hoarding recluse Stan Kroenke.
What goes around comes around, as Justin Timberlake would sing.
But as jilted fans you certainly can lash out against the sheer incompetence of Kroenke’s regime and his tactless departure. Cheering against the Rams is a healthy way to blow off steam and vent your spleen.
Fortunately they have looked like the Same Old Sorry (Act) Rams during their return to LA.
The problem starts at the top. Listen to Rams CEO Kevin Demoff rave about Kroenke to the Los Angeles Times:
“I’m fortunate to have the tutelage of Stan, who has really pioneered how you combine resources and sports in a way that has never been done before. I’m grateful for his mentorship. He pushes our team for greatness and challenges us to envision the impossible.”
Yes, well, Kroenke is quite the ground-breaker when it comes to converting billions in family wealth into steady sports failure. His Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche can’t keep pace with their NBA and NHL rivals and his Rams set modern standards for futility.
It’s extremely difficult to remain irrelevant in the parity-minded NFL, but, like Kevin says, Stan challenges his people to envision the impossible.
That explains how coach Jeff Fisher could be in line for a contract extension after guiding the Rams to four losing seasons. That explains how tag-along general manager Les Snead could still be employed despite wasting precious draft picks and blowing millions on useless free agents.
Impossible? With the Rams it’s surely not.
This season they may outshine the San Francisco 49ers — who are banking on the unlikely Chip Kelly-Blaine Gabbert collaboration — but they won’t seriously challenge the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals in the NFC West.
Recurring themes undermine this team. At quarterback the Rams pulled the reverse RGIII maneuver and spent multiple draft picks to select Jared Goff first overall in the draft.
Trouble was, Goff wasn’t a Robert Griffin III-caliber prospect and he certainly wasn’t another Andrew Luck. He was a middle to late first-round prospect who rose to the top during a down year at his position.
Like most young quarterbacks, he will need a few seasons to develop properly. Asking him to become the front man for a team moving back into the challenging LA market was absurd.
Look at the numbers Goff posted in the preseason: 55.8 passer rating with a 44.9 completion percentage, two interceptions, four sacks, three fumbles and an average gain of 4.7 yards per passing attempt.
If he serves as the face of the franchise, then the franchise wears a befuddled expression.
By default, pint-sized scrapper Case Keenum remained the starting quarterback. And after a messy preseason finale, Fisher suggested Goff could open the season at No. 3 behind Keenum and fringe prospect Sean Mannion.
Goff would become the first quarterback since, ahem, JaMarcus Russell to arrive as the first overall pick and not start in Week 1. That second overall pick Carson Wentz is the Philadelphia Eagles’ starting quarterback just adds to the disappointment.
Goff’s reserve role is probably for the best, because the Rams lack aerial firepower. Hapless Brian Quick dropped more passes this summer, leaving Kenny Britt, gadget player Tavon Austin and a bunch of rookies as the go-to targets.
The young offensive line remained unsteady, too, particularly with right tackle Rob Havenstein missing preseason time with an injury.
While elite running back Todd Gurley can move the chains, the Rams lack a change-of-pace back. Speedy Tre Mason, a former 75th overall draft pick, washed out of the NFL with some alarming mental health problems.
(After an offseason arrest, Mason told officers that “he was going to call the White House and we were all going to lose our jobs” and that “the police were responsible for teaching al-Qaida how to fly planes.”)
The Rams preseason included the usual special teams sloppiness and practice field chippiness Fisher-coached teams are known for. HBO’s “Hard Knocks” highlighted a brawl started by middle linebacker Alec Ogletree and escalated by Gurley.
Fisher lit into his players with a profanity-laced lecture. From the looks of things this summer, that won’t be the last time he addresses them in such coarse terms.
You should do the same if makes you feel better. Swear your lack of allegiance to the Rams again and again as their sacks, fumbles and interceptions mount.
Let go of it all, from Brian Quick to Jake Long to Jared Cook to the Kellen Shaun Austin Nick Clemens Hill Davis Foles mish-mash at quarterback. Yell loud enough and perhaps those blurred memories of one wobbly pass fading into the next incompletion will finally quit haunting you.
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