The Art Neuro Weblog

Today's Mailbag
For some reason, the e-mails came in hard & fast overnight.
Top of the batting order is also leading off for the Baltimore Orioles, an article about Brian Roberts, who had a scintillating April.

"They're almost like wearing sunglasses without wearing sunglasses," Roberts says. "I could tell such a huge difference right away that I was willing to give them a shot." Seven years in the making by Nike and Bausch & Lomb, the lenses — which will be known in the retail world as MaxSight — are so new they have made their way only into a few major league clubhouses so far.

Roberts' the Orioles' leadoff hitter and second baseman, is the only player the Sporting News could confirm is wearing them in games. Reds center fielder Ken Griffey has tried them in batting practice and plans to break them out for real once he becomes more comfortable with them. Reds closer Danny Graves also is wearing them during pregame work. Red Sox pitchers Bronson Arroyo and Mike Timlin and Twins catcher Joe Mauer have been fitted.

Tennis player Roger Federer and several D.C. United soccer players have agreed to try them. The University of Miami has 20 athletes on its football, baseball, tennis and track teams wearing them. The lenses also come in gray-green for golfers, and a set for night use is in the final stages of development.

Joe Mauer! Man, he's going to hit a tonne. What's interesting is, there was nothing in Brian Roberts' career to date to indicate he was capable of such peak performance as he displayed through April. Then again as a wise statistician once observed, anybody could hit anything in 100 Plate Appearances.
Thanks JF for that one.

Next up...
Pleiades sent this one in. Richard Neville's Web page. True to his strident tone, Mr. Neville has web page that complains of the world's ills; replete with multicoloured text. It's cute - as in ugly but interesting. This man used to edit a magazine? :)
Here's one of the reasons Richard feels we ought to be cheerful:

The flair and persistence of domestic dissent. Despite its anaemic trickle into the mainstream, free speech is alive and frothing in a myriad of tributaries. On the net, in thoughtful glossies, at concerts, in cafes, in Flash art, at public meetings, at poetry slams, in small town newspapers, even on military blogs, in docos, in ginger-group emails & on alternative radio and TV, such as the above mentioned Democracy Now. Today’s alternative media thrive on foreign news sources, which offer a counterpoint to the head-in-the-sand corporate staples and, perhaps for the first time in decades, reveal the sad standing in which the US Government is widely held. It was the web audiences who first learned, via the surge of links to Der Spiegel, that the first glimpse of the US President on the big screens at the Pope’s funeral, was greeted with an outburst of “deafening” catcalls.

The blogs reap the reward of mainstream mendacity. From the first thud of the war drums, radical bloggers ridiculed the official reasons for invading Iraq and the manipulation of public hysteria. Long before Colin Powell addressed the UN with his bogus charts and anthrax props, such claims had been discredited. During the siege of Falluja, it was the bloggers who linked to the street lined images of child corpses and eye witness accounts of US atrocities, including the influential whatreallyhappened.com. In April, Rupert Murdoch confessed he had been wrong about “this thing called the digital revolution”, which didn’t “limp away”, as he hoped. But now comes the scary bit. Murdoch plans to “grasp this huge opportunity”, and expand his reach!

Right-o. Paranoia about Rupert Murdoch. Yay. :) But you get the drift. It's quite a cute little old-lefty page; the sort that would send a certain somebody into a frothing rage I'd imagine.

Laura Says Her Hubby Bush Milks Horses
This too is from Pleiades. It's an article about the annual Ball. Laura Bush told some jokes:

Laura's well-written script included several shots of risque material. After revealing that come nine o'clock at night, "Mr. Excitement is sound asleep, and I'm watching Desperate Housewives," she added, "If those women think they're desperate, they ought to be with George." She then joked that she, Lynne Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice had hit Chippendale's late one night. And moments later--after referring to Barbara Bush as Don Corleone and joking about her husband's aversion to reading--she made fun of her number-one cowboy for knowing little of the ways of ranch life when they bought the spread in Crawford, Texas. Such a greenhorn was George, she explained, "he tried to milk the horse. What's more--it was a male horse."

It was a good performance but weird, for Laura had jabbed at her husband for not reading books, had suggested he was no powerhouse in bed, and had encouraged everyone in the room--and all those children at home glued to C-SPAN--to envision George W. Bush pulling on the penis of a horse. (I wondered how social conservative leader James Dobson, who was scheduled to be at the dinner, reacted.) It was not hard to figure out why the White House decided to have Laura upstage George. Her approval rating is almost twice his, and his number--in the mid-40s--are at a record low. But an HBO routine? Afterward, both Al Franken and Bill Maher were complaining that they could not have gotten away with that horse joke.

Laura's racy act was the talk of the town. But there was something more strange and discomforting about the evening than her channeling of Ellen DeGeneres. Neither she nor her husband once referred to the Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly those who had recently lost their lives implementing Bush's policy and (according to the Bushes) defending the United States from evil. At a high-profile event of this nature, it certainly is customary for a president to joke, but he also often concludes with a serious sentiment. At the radio and television correspondents' dinner several weeks ago, Vice President Dick Cheney, standing in for Bush (who was on his way to the Pope's funeral), took a few stabs at humor then devoted most of his remarks to the deceased Pope. Last year, at one of these galas, Bush joked about his inability to find WMDs in Iraq--yeah, he made fun of the mission for which Americans had lost their lives--but then he saluted troops stationed overseas, noting their sacrifices.

His--and Laura's--non-recognition of the American troops (those dying and those doing the real hard work) was not a one-time phenomenon. Two nights earlier at Bush's first primetime news conference in a year, Bush said nothing about the Americans risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not a word of thanks. Not a word of tribute for those recently killed in action.

Thanks Laura Bush for the Presidential Horse-Penis-Pulling image. I guess it's just Texas horse-sense.
Look, GWB can't go around thanking the troops all the time. The Annual Ball is a 'happy' event and there's nothing happy about mentioning the war. People are being irrational wanting the Bushes to be solemn all the time; clearly they're not capable of it but it's not big deal in the scheme of the real killing and shooting and bombing and maiming. Now steroids in baseball I tell ya... Only kidding.

- Art Neuro

UPDATE: Further on Laura's jokes was this article:

Don't you think the press might have been sensitive to the hypocrisy of a president who teaches "absolute" moral values and denounces the allegedly low moral standards of television having his wife employ the same kind of humor? No, not this crowd of D.C. mainstream press insiders. They are so cynical and complacent with their fat paychecks that they just consider the whole presidency a performance. There aren't REALLY issues. There are just appearances to be "reviewed" and power plays to be reported on. Most of the people in that room, are, in essence (whatever their titles), political entertainment reporters working for largely entertainment companies, where their news divisions are just another form of entertainment.

Well, yeah. Isn't that what the media bias is all about? It's biased towards the stupid. There's a good reason why Frank Zappa said politics was nothing but the entertainment branch of the military industry complex.