Muttroxia – Page 29 – Critical Thinking

Rick Perry and Race

How does this not completely destroy him?

In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.

“Niggerhead,” it read.

Or this?

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who often waxes nostalgic about his small-town roots, grew up in an almost all-white rural area where many referred to slingshots as “niggershooters.” One elderly black resident recalls being introduced by her boss at a party decades back as “my maid, Nigger Mae Lou,”

But somehow he has.

Even his fiercest critics in Texas say that racism is not on their short, or even long, list of Mr. Perry’s sins.

Ah, Texas!

Links o’ Interest

Job interivew

Why an old folk-music collector has the copyright for a Jay-Z song.

Traffic stop joke

Another great drumming video

Great pole dancing move (seriously)

Smooth recovery

Michelle Bachman tapes a soundbite.

Atheist bake sale. I like the last one.

CNN soundtrack fail

Nailed it.

Deaf person hearing herself for the first time. These always get me.

“Greatest music video ever made” And of course, a parody. I still prefer the high school one from a few years back, even better than Grand Rapids. That one still blows my mind.

Just play it how it’s written!

How stress is killing you

Archie out of context

Celery – Nature’s toothbrush

Arthur is just wrong

Great protest sign.

What Does This Sign Mean?

Honestly, I have no idea what this is telling me to do.
sign

Bad User Interface: Toilet Paper Holder

How can you screw up a toilet paper holder? The ‘bumps’ where the holder goes into the wall are big enough that the roll rubs on them. The friction means that the roll doesn’t roll. If it was a quarter inch wider or further from the wall… doesn’t anyone test these things before they are sold? How come the Sheraton is still buying them?

Why Don’t Hotels Have Overhead Lights?

I’ve never been in a hotel room that had overhead lighting. Instead the lighting is from a half-dozen individual lamps. Each of these lamps takes up a lot of space and only illuminates its own area of the room. Even within the same room, they are controlled by different switching interfaces – wall switches, base switches, bulb switches. Why not just have regular overhead lighting, like pretty much every room in America?

Upon further reflection, there is often overhead lighting in the bathrooms. That only makes this phenomenon all the more puzzling, since that shows it’s not the hotel infrastructure that physically prevents overhead lighting from being installed everywhere.

As long as I’m at it, would it kill them to install a dimmer in the bathroom? Either it’s pitch dark or shockingly bright. It would be very helpful to have an in-between setting.

Glee on Bohemian Rhapsody: Not so Good

As long as I’m complaining, the Glee version of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I’m told is selling more than the original) is similarly bad. Cheesy and overblown, and that’s before you have to suffer through the video. Clearly lip-synched (more so than usual), featuring a birth sequence that (as usual for bad television) features no pain drugs, no hygiene, no timing of pushes, no cutting the cord, no afterbirth, and finally produces a baby who is clearly a few weeks old already.

(Making fun of Glee is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I must point out that I love their version of Don’t Stop Believing. Although you are again well served by turning off the video and just listening to the music.)

A Business Center Destroys the English Language

This is a sign for the business center at a conference:

biz

Man, I just want to make a couple xeroxes! Calm down, Hewlett Packard!

OK Go

OK Go is vastly overrated. Their clever videos hide the fact that their songs aren’t any good.

Goodbye to All That (Congress)

This goodbye piece, from a long time congressional worker, should be mandatory reading.

James Fallows provides an interesting follow up.

In a related piece, Joe Nocera has a fawning profile of Jim Cooper as “The Last Moderate”. It reinforces one of my perennial themes, the perfidy of Newt Gingrich. “To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich.” Absolutely true. It was Gingrich who put politics before policy, party before country, and set in motion all the forces that have destroyed the institution of Congress.