The Biggest WTF? Moment in Mitt's VMI Speech

Bette Noir has a good overview of Mitt Romney's VMI Speech, but I feel I have to mention one weird moment that had me scratching my bald pate in puzzlement:


The size of our Navy is at levels not seen since 1916. I will restore our Navy to the size needed to fulfill our missions by building 15 ships per year, including three submarines.


The veracity of this statement can be determined with a little bit of research. In terms of the number of ships, the current U.S. Navy has forty more ships than its 1916 counterpart. Of course, this raw number doesn't address the fact that the firepower packed by today's navy is dramatically greater than that of 1916's navy. Today's navy includes eleven floating cities of doom that would have been inconceivable in 1916- each of these carriers forms the nucleus of a sophisticated mini-fleet. Modern military technology allows our current navy to project power at a much greater range than that of the early 20th century navy.

Mitt's claim, characterized by CNN as pointless, represents another unforced error- it was a stupid claim, easily fact-checked. The fact that Mitt included it in an allegedly "major" foreign policy speech reveals the depth of his ignorance and the breadth of his arrogance- did he not think that someone would research this issue?

Personally, I think Mitt came across his skewed view of the navy while researching pop culture in a hopeless attempt to seem hip.

Happy Garibaldi Day, or Is It Happy Granata Day?

Last year, I proposed that Columbus Day be changed to Garibaldi Day because Columbus was pretty much an awful person while Garibaldi was a paragon of liberalism and national self-determination on both sides of the Atlantic. As if that weren't enough, he was a Noo Yawkah for a brief time. Even though my dad's dad's parents emigrated from a small town near Genoa, I'd rather celebrate Garibaldi's achievements than those of the Genoese Columbus. To tell the truth, I'd rather celebrate Rocco Granata's legacy than Columbus'- as far as I know, Rocco didn't destroy an entire culture, as long as you ignore this unfortunate misstep.

So, do I celebrate my Italian heritage by memorializing a grand hero of Italian unification, who was also associated with revolutionary movements in South America, or do I memorialize the guy who wrote an accordion-driven classic which is played wherever drunk Europeans congregate? Should I even have to choose?

Terror Trifecta

Hey, while poking around the t00bz, I found something season-appropriate which touches on several of my interests. I've never seen Once Upon a Midnight Scary, but it is narrated by Vincent Price, the second part of the anthology is a truncated (I kill me!) version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the third part is an adaptation of The House with a Clock in its Walls by Bastard fave John Bellairs. I can't vouch for the entertainment value of the show, but it contains elements which pique my interest:





While I've written pretty extensively on Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, I haven't written about The House with a Clock in its Walls- I may have to put up a review of the book for another weekend.

In the interest of full disclosure, I composed this post last night.

It Gets Real

I started off my October posts with my usual disclaimer, but tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow, it gets real. Tomorrow, I have to get up shortly after 7AM after five and a half or so hours of sleep, in order to travel to Manhattan for my volunteer gig. Since the kids will probably be rusty, I may have to break out the crash pads and throw them all using tai otoshi to get them used to the idea of falling, then start them off with ukemi. The program wraps up around noon, then I have to get my ass to work. Thankfully, I'll be done with work around 11PM, but there's a lot of running around to do at the end of the shift.

It gets real alright, but at least it's not "Elmo's gonna kick my ass" real.

Big Bird, Big Government

Working the graveyard shift is a mixed blessing. I'm sorry I missed out on the entertaining live-blogging of the debate, but I did have an opportunity to not only hear the debate, but to read some of the post-debate dissection of the debate...

Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Sesame Front. The forces of Republicanism in 2012 have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the war against PBS is within measurable distance of its end.

The general consensus among media types is that Mitt Romney "won" the first debate in the 2012 campaign, but my takeaway is that his victory will turn out to be a Pyrrhic one.

Mitt never really delivered any telling blows against President Obama in this general snoozefest of a debate. Mitt avoided talking about specific points in his tax plan. Indeed, he avoided specificity on most topics. The fact checkers will be parsing the debate performances of both candidates, while the public spaces out about the facts and figures. Romney's "victory" was due to a largely passive performance on the part of the president... hopefully this was a rope-a-dope tactic on the president's part, a gambit to make Mitt underestimate him before landing some devastating blows during the foreign policy portion of the debates.

Now, for the main reason why I think that Mitt's vague "victory" was a hollow one- the one feature of Romney's performance that will capture the imagination of wags was his declaration of love for Big Bird (who is just the right height), though said love would best be described as creepy and stalkerish, seeing that Mitt wants to cut funding for PBS, the "home" of Big Bird. Already, the meme-generators are hard at work generating facetious images of Mitt. Some of these images are pretty damn devastating. Who the hell is going to remember Mitt's evasive generalizations about his fiscal policies once the social media wags start pushing the Big Bird narrative?

Poor Mitt, he may have won a doubleplusgood victory against Barack Obama in debate round one, but he lost the meme war against Big Bird. It won't be long before one of Mitt's team members tells Wolf Blitzer, "We have always been at war with Sesame Street."

Forgetting to Take Care of Basic Needs

In a comment to my last post, mikey reminds me not to forget the basics of health and hygiene in the busy season:


Have a good October - don't forget to take care of your basic needs. Foot fungus will get you dusted off just the same as a sucking chest wound...


Thanks for looking out, mikey... I promise not to catass. On the other hand, though, a friend of mine told me a cautionary tale.

This particular friend is one of the contract employees who works our special events. She's a personable, loquacious young woman who's trying to balance her lackluster day job with the creative career that landed her her special events contract with us. I see her a couple of times a year (in my first draft, I referred to her as an acquaintance, but I didn't think that would be fair to her, because I really enjoy working with her on those all-too-rare occasions when she's with the organization). This friend of mine has a younger sister who recently started college, and I always make a point of asking her how little sis is doing. This year, I inquire of little sis and I get the cautionary tale:


"Hey, **REDACTED**, how is your sister doing?"
"She had some health problems, but she's okay now."
"WHAT?"
"Well, she had a case of scurvy.
"SCURVY? Was she eating nothing by Kraft mac-n-cheez?"
"No, she was eating nothing but oatmeal. She's in college, and she's been living entirely on oatmeal since she got there."
"Damn, she really needs to eat some vegetables."
"Right? And she's a vegetarian."


The irony of this story is that my friend's typical drink is pink lemonade and gin, to the extent that the barkeeps in the places she frequents have named the drink after her. If only little sis had a taste for her drink, with its antiscorbutic properties, she would not have had her bout with this sailors' bane.

If It's October...

Every October, two things happen to me... October is the major fundraising month at work, so it involves long hours and a lot of running around (one of my running jokes is that my job is cushy, except when it's not, and October is an entire month in the "not" column. As if that weren't enough, my volunteer gig restarts on the first Saturday in October (since it's a kids' athletic program, it roughly coincides with the school year, specifically the months between fall and spring sports seasons). Suffice it to say, I pretty much pull a Captain Nemo- I basically won't surface for a month. My tradition is usually to post a video for my all-time favorite Sex Pistols song, but this year I'm posting the video for Let's Submerge by the late, great Poly Styrene and the X-Ray Spex- BLAST THIS ONE!





I've gotten savvier about posting in the years I've been blogging, so I'll try to set up posts for those days when I leave home in the vicinity of seven o'clock Saturday morning and don't get home until one-thirty or so Sunday morning, and I don't have any downtime for posting (for the record, I'm writing this at work because it's quiet now- all of the techies setting up for our fundraiser have left the site, but that's all about to end this weekend). I'm going to try to maintain a decent blogging schedule, but the posts will probably be shorter ones, with a fair amount of video embeds.