July 25th, 2008
Next on the Timothy Jordan Show, essential functions.
It’s just another Friday around the studio, which these days means that people are missing from the show, others are overworked, and I have forgotten to put a “leaving the house” pair of pants.
It isn’t a problem around here. It’s just the radio station, after all. I’m entitled to feel comfortable around this place. Hell, this show has been on the air longer than the studio that we’re sitting inside. It’s older than our chairs.
So yeah, I have good reason to feel entitled, in this one little area.
The general sense of entitlement doesn’t seem to be all that limited these days, however. Just about everywhere I went today there were people walking, driving, and conducting business as if they were entitled to be jerks.
Is a little consideration too much to ask, a little awareness of the people around you?
Apparently the lady in the brand-new Mercedes who saw fit to cut me off earlier today, despite the efforts of other drivers in the area to let my work truck merge into their lane, considered waiting ten seconds too long, or wasn’t aware of my turn signals.
Well the last laugh was mine, because after she switched lanes I passed slowly to flick a juicy booger on her shiny new car.
I couldn’t do the same to the customer I’d just dealt with a few minutes before. He was probably a bully in middle school. As an adult he can’t go around shoving people into the ground, and so he makes no effort to be anything less than a complete and total jerk. For no reason, either. He’s just a jerk.
It’s too late for him, but if you’re a parent, try and whip a little empathy into your own kids. Maybe together we can get the next generation to pull into the slow lane before there’s a line of traffic backed up behind them waiting to pass.
You’ve already waited long enough, waited for this, the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 25th of July, 2008.
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The comedic high point of the week had to have been John McCain’s Thursday press conference out front of a “German” restaurant in Ohio just on the heels of Barak Obama’s speech before an estimated 200,000 people in Berlin.
One candidate appeared before Germans in Germany, the other had a couple of sausages in Ohio. One candidate spoke to hundreds of thousands of excited people, the other has been lucky to draw more than a few dozen.
It was a remarkably bad week for the McCain campaign by anyone’s measure. Not only did his taunting of Mr. Obama’s lack of foreign travel backfire miserably, but his signature press event for the week failed in spectacular fashion.
The current talking point among Republicans is the need for an expansion of offshore drilling along our continental shelf. This is posited as the solution to the nation’s high gas prices. Never mind that the current bottleneck is in refining capacity, and that oil drilling tomorrow won’t produce any gasoline for five years; it’s all they have left.
So there was old man McCain, set to stage an appearance on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico to promote the idea of winning energy independence today by drilling sometime next decade, set to stage an appearance on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico during hurricane season.
It came as no surprise to my Staff and I when a hurricane just happened to appear, making it even more unlikely that anyone in the press would cover the event.
This train wreck of a campaign is really amazing to watch. Yes, I get it: Republicans are in favor of oil drilling. What I don’t get is how anybody thought that it’d be a good idea to hold a press conference a hundred miles offshore on an industrial oil drilling rig that’s only accessible via helicopter or barge tender.
They may as well have told the press corps that they’d be swimming to the platform through a greasy wake of shark chum. The reporters covering Mr. Obama are hanging out in Paris today. Where would you rather be?
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The McCain team would probably like to forget that their opponent is overseas. It didn’t quite go as they hoped. Instead of looking young and inexperienced, Mr. Obama has looked everything like a visiting head of state, like a President.
Shown comfortably strolling around Baghdad in a pressed suit, Mr. Obama struck a very different image from McCain’s typical kevlar-wrapped beetle.
And then Iraqi Prime Minister al Maliki told one of Germany’s largest newspapers that he favors a 16-month timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal, exactly the time-frame proposed by Mr. Obama.
So much for McCain’s hundred year plan.
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And if it couldn’t get worse for him this week, his oil-rig appearance was still doomed to failure. At a time when he was expected to call for an expansion of the U.S. oil industry, oil was leaking out of a burst pipeline into the river ways of Louisiana.
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Meanwhile the Global War on Terror, Librarians, and Civil Liberties rolls on. Actual victories over real terrorism are expected any day now.
I’d like to read a quote from
Back in the days when we reserved the description “war” for actual wars, we had a President who was forced to make decisions about the fate of the free world itself. With the memory of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg into France and the hell of the Warsaw ghetto fresh in his mind, in his 1942 State of the Union address President Roosevelt told the nation that,
“If any of our enemies, from Europe or from Asia, attempt long-range raids by “suicide” squadrons of bombing planes, they will do so only in the hope of terrorizing our people and disrupting our morale. Our people are not afraid of that. We know that we may have to pay a heavy price for freedom. We will pay this price with a will. Whatever the price, it is a thousand times worth it. No matter what our enemies, in their desperation, may attempt to do to us- we will say, as the people of London have said, ‘We can take it.’ And what’s more we can give it back and we will give it back—with compound interest.”
The only things being compounded these days are innocent people down in Guantanamo Bay, and violations of our Civil Liberties.
• 1942 State of the Union Address
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I’m interested in a little compounding of my own, but instead of stealing copies of our listeners’ emails, I’m going to compound the excellence. It’s…
We’re going to give some credit, but not total excellence this week, to the Avon and Somerset Police Department of Bristol, England. Four months ago they started posting video reenactments of the most idiotic 999 calls their department receives.
Maybe hearing themselves broadcast on youtube will discourage morons from calling the police to ask when the Internet was invented.
• Avon and Somerset police videos
Almost excellent, and so was another youtube find this week. My Staff noticed the work of Mark Jenkins, a street artist currently working in Barcelona.
It’s all-too common to see human statues in Barcelona’s downtown. You’ve seen their act before. They stand very still, and then for the price of a few coins do something sudden and unexpected. Mark Jenkins did something a little different. He dressed a statue of a donkey, a real statue, in clothes, painted it in the style of a human statue, and set it up on the street.
Then he set up a video camera to record people interacting with the real statue, dressed to look like a human pretending to be a statue. I have to say that the crowd was very impressed by the statue’s ability to stand still, like a statue. It was even better at being a statue than a human pretending to be a statue, which really confused people passing by on the street.
I mean, you expect a person that’s pretending to be a statue to move every now and then. A statue remains remarkably still. It does absolutely nothing.
The crowd’s reaction is quite a thing to see. They expect a little bit of movement, something. The less the statue moves, the more impressed they are.
It earned a nice haul in tips, and it earned Mark Jenkins this week’s Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
• Mark Jenkins, the Golden Ass
That video, titled “The Golden Ass”, and links to all of text and our source material will be posted, as always, at timothyjordanshow.com.
And that’s been the News for the 25th of July, 2008.