Thursday, December 25, 2008

Nope, ain't there

Have you tried Hare Krishna?

Clown strip-searched before children's charity flight

PC Konk taken aside at Birmingham airport for having plastic handcuffs, a bubble-blowing saxophone and metal bits on his costume

A clown in full costume was left stunned after being strip-searched by Birmingham airport security as he tried to board a plane.

Children's entertainer David Vaughan, 60, was dressed as PC Konk, complete with huge floppy shoes, a policeman's helmet and face paint, when he was taken aside by security staff at Birmingham airport.

Mr Vaughan had been booked by Variety Club Midlands to entertain 100 disadvantaged children on a plane as it circled the region on a one-hour Christmas charity flight. But a piece of metal on his costume set off the security alarm, prompting security guards to confiscate his plastic handcuffs and order him to strip down to his shorts and T-shirt.

Staff also demanded he put the liquid for his plastic bubble-blowing saxophone into a clear sealed plastic bag.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/22/clown-strip-searched-birmingham

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Sean Hannity: Media Matters' 2008 Misinformer of the Year

As Media Matters for America has demonstrated time and again, Fox News' Sean Hannity has been a prolific and influential purveyor of conservative misinformation. But never has he so enthusiastically applied his talents for spreading misinformation as he did to the 2008 presidential race, focusing his energies primarily on President-elect Barack Obama. Day after day, Hannity devoted his two Fox News shows and his three-hour ABC Radio Networks program to "demonizing" the Democratic presidential candidates, starkly explaining in August: "That's my job. ... I led the 'Stop Hillary Express.' By the way, now it's the 'Stop Obama Express.' " Hannity's "Stop Obama Express" promoted and embellished a vast array of misleading attacks and false claims about Obama. Along the way, he uncritically adopted and promoted countless Republican talking points and played host to numerous credibility-challenged smear artists who painted Obama as a dangerous radical. When he was not going after Obama, Hannity attacked members of Obama's family, as well as Sen. Hillary Clinton and other progressives, and denied all the while that he had unfairly attacked anyone.

Hannity's attacks may have also influenced mainstream media coverage. ABC News' George Stephanopoulos appeared on Hannity's radio program on April 15, during which Hannity suggested to Stephanopoulos that he ask Obama at the Democratic presidential debate the following evening about his "association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground." Stephanopoulos assured Hannity that he was "taking notes right now." Stephanopoulos then did ask Obama at the debate to "explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem," though he later denied that Hannity had exerted any influence on his questioning.

Because of the unending stream of falsehoods and character attacks that fueled the "Stop Obama Express," and the countless other distortions he promoted throughout 2008, Sean Hannity is Media Matters for America's Misinformer of the Year.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200812170007?f=h_top

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"My Psychoanalyst Says There Ain't Any Santa Claus"

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Scientists Shed Light On Festive Medical Myths

by Douglas Kamerow

Douglas Kamerow is a family physician and a former assistant surgeon general.

Indiana University doctors Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll have debunked a group of health-related myths in an article in the medical journal BMJ. As we approach the end of the year and its attendant celebrations, bear in mind these scientific findings.

First of all, if you have kids or pets, you don't have to worry anymore about having poinsettias around your house. Despite long-standing beliefs to the contrary, poinsettia leaves and flowers are not poisonous. Toxicity studies in rats and reviews of Poison Control Center data about human ingestion have failed to find any toxic level of poinsettia.

Here's one that will make your kids happy: Eating sugar and sweets does not make children hyperactive. Although countless parents will swear it's not true, at least a dozen carefully controlled studies have failed to find any effect of dietary sugar on children's behavior. And some of these studies were even done on so-called hyperactive kids who were thought to be at greater risk for this reaction.

It turns out that at least part of the problem is parental expectations. This was confirmed by a study that had parents score their children's behavior after they consumed what the parents thought was a sugary drink. Even when the drink contained no sugar, the parents rated their kids' behavior as hyperactive. So, bring on the sugarplums.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98453682

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Here comes Pancho Claus

By MAGGIE GALEHOUSE

Santa has a cousin named Pancho.

He loves kids. He passes out gifts.

And he's a barrio folk hero with as many faces as there are guys across Texas willing to pull on a red suit and get into the act.

In Houston, Richard Reyes' version of Pancho Claus wears a red zoot suit, fronts a swing band, and keeps an entourage of "elves" and lowrider cars. His Pancho, designed to appeal to at-risk kids, grew out of his Chicano version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, which he wrote and turned into a play in 1981: "When what to my wondering eye should appear, but eight lowrider cars all jacked down in the rear!"

In San Antonio, Rudy Martinez dons a red sombrero, a Christmas poncho and a jet-black beard to play Pancho Claus. When children ask, he explains that Pancho drives a team of burros led by a special burro named Chuy. If pressed, Martinez might tell them the legend of Pancho Claus: Two children were standing in a field in Mexico. A fairy godmother appeared and granted them one wish for Christmas. The children said they wished to make all the children in the world happy. Impressed, the fairy godmother created Pancho Claus, Santa's cousin from the South Pole.

Some remember hearing songs about Pancho Claus in the 1950s or '60s, but most date the character to the early 1970s.

"We were introduced to Pancho Claus during the Chicano civil rights era, the same time we started to celebrate Cinco de Mayo," said Nick Hernandez, founder of Taste of Latin lowrider car club in Odessa. The Pancho Claus in Odessa, played by Pete Martinez since 1976, always rides in a lowrider car.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/main/6179505.html

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White Christmas by the Drifters (1954)

Sung by Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters.
Animation by Joshua Held

The Drifters served to link Fifties rhythm & blues with Sixties soul music. They epitomized the vocal group sound of New York City. Theirs was the sweet but streetwise sound of R&B suffused with gospel influences. The material the Drifters recorded came from a variety of sources, including the songwriting teams of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and Gerry Goffin and Carole King. All were New York-based songwriters who wrote evocatively of romance and everyday life in the big city, and the Drifters made an ideal vehicle for the convincing delivery of such scenarios. The records they cut with Leiber and Stoller (who doubled as producers) introduced the sound of strings and Latin-tinged rhythms into the vocabulary of popular music.

http://heavens-gates.com/50s/whitechristmas/

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40 Years Later, Apollo 8 Moon Mission Still Awes

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

The first three humans ever to orbit the moon are shown returning safely to Earth. On Christmas Eve in 1968, Americans turned on their TV sets to watch something unprecedented: a live broadcast from outer space.

Three astronauts were orbiting the moon, sending back images of the gray craters and mountains that were passing by about 70 miles below their tiny spacecraft.

Never before had humans left Earth to circle another celestial body, one that was more than 200,000 miles away. The Apollo 8 mission changed the way that earthlings saw themselves and their world.

After describing the moon, the three astronauts read the first 10 verses of the King James Bible. That was a choice made by Commander Frank Borman, who had asked a friend for a suggestion. He knew the broadcast from lunar orbit would have the biggest audience in history.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98469063

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Direct action gets the goods

By AMY GOODMAN

Tim DeChristopher is an economics student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He had just finished his last final exam before winter break. One of the exam questions was: If the oil and gas companies are the only ones that bid on public lands, are the true costs of oil and gas exploitation reflected in the prices paid?

DeChristopher was inspired. He finished the exam, threw on his red parka and went off to the Bureau of Land Management land auction that the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance called "the Bush administration's last great gift to the oil and gas industry." Instead of joining the protest outside, he registered as a bidder, then bought 22,000 acres of public land. That is, he successfully bid on the public properties, located near the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dinosaur National Monument, and other pristine areas. The price tag: more than $1.7 million.

He told me: "Once I started buying up every parcel, they understood pretty clearly what was going on ... they stopped the auction, and some federal agents came in and took me out. I guess there was a lot of chaos, and they didn't really know how to proceed at that point."

Patrick Shea, a former BLM director, is representing DeChristopher. Shea told the Deseret News: "What Tim did was in the best tradition of civil disobedience, he did this without causing any physical or material harm. His purpose was to draw attention to the illegitimacy and immorality of the process."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/393598_amy25.html

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Merry War on Christmas -- The Religious Right Isn't Going Anywhere

By Frederick Clarkson

The Christian right has launched a permanent religious war to thwart, and even to roll back, advances in civil rights.

Editor's Note: The idea that Bush's departure and Barack Obama's election herald a decline in power for the Christian Right in America is sorely mistaken. As the "War on Christmas" turns into an annual outrage, and progressives argue against the choice of anti-gay, anti-abortion Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration, we are reminded all too soon that the Religious Right is a steady force in the political and cultural arena. Frederick Clarkson's essay makes the case that we are in the middle of a religious war -- and that we should always be on alert against it.

For a year or more in the run-up to the elections, we heard claims that the Religious Right is dead, dying or irrelevant and that the so-called Culture Wars are over, or about to be. Such declarations have turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

There are many reasons for the staying power of the Religious Right. Among them is an extraordinary infrastructure developed over decades, especially at the state level. This infrastructure is an important part of the reason the movement will be able to sustain, restore and replenish itself as the founding generation of Religious Right leaders passes from public life and why it will be able to regroup in the wake of national Republican electoral losses in 2008. But this is not the only reason.

The Religious Right is on a mission, or rather a cluster of interrelated missions. They are religious in nature and transcend not only electoral outcomes but the lives of individuals and institutions. This is much of the source of both the movement's resilience and its development of a vast capacity to move people and shape events to raise up leaders, and to field effective organizations able to wage electoral campaigns at all levels and effectively use the process of state ballot initiatives to drive wedge issues and, ultimately, their legislative and constitutional agenda.

That is why the Religious Right will be a major factor in American politics for at least as long as the life of anyone reading these words.

http://www.alternet.org/story/114798/merry_war_on_christmas_--_the_religious_right_isn%27t_going_anywhere/

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Happy Xmas (War Is Over) - John Lennon

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Paul McCartney, the Fireman and the smokescreen

Paul McCartney has made his most experimental album in years, so why the pseudonym?

Paul McCartney, whose new album revives

the spirit of adventure of the later Beatle years

by Pete Paphides

It's not unreasonable to presume that every Beatles story that lives in the memory of their two surviving members has been told. So, when Paul McCartney experiences the Proustian rush of a hitherto forgotten one, you can't help but feel it too.

Adjourning from the restored windmill that is his Sussex studio, 66-year-old Macca remembers: "There used to be this paper in Liverpool called Mersey Beat. And in it you had a column where you could put personal ads. And so John and George and I used to put them in. Just so we could see our words in print, you know? It'd be like: 'Barry! Meet me behind the station at this time.' And then it would come out and we'd be like: 'Yeah! It got in!' Just seeing it there was a little kick."

For once, the word "little" means exactly what it's supposed to mean. More commonly in Macca-world, the word "little" serves a carefully designed purpose. The Beatles were a good little band; this year's Anfield show, at which McCartney sang A Day in the Life to 34,000 fellow Liverpudlians, was "a good little show".

Compacting the details of his world to a manageable size has long been crucial in McCartney's lifelong attempt to convince himself and others that his days really aren't too dissimilar to yours and mine. Admittedly, Sunday's "little" signing event in HMV won't tilt the world off its axis. But it shows how McCartney can turn the dimmer switch of Beatlemania up or down as whim dictates.

The primary beneficiary of Sunday's hubbub will be Electric Arguments, the new album that — as the Fireman — he and the famously "cosmic" producer Youth wrote and recorded in just a fortnight. This isn't the first time the two have collaborated, but, unlike the instrumental electronica of their first two albums, something long believed missing in McCartney has re-emerged. By lurching dramatically from a stoned modern sea-shanty (Travelling Light) to a lysergically progtacular Maori spiritual (Is This Love), it's closer to the Beatles at their most casually inventive than anyone could expect. How perverse, then, that McCartney should stop short of putting his name to it.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5365557.ece

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