Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly and her new home, NBC, are under fire this week for an interview set to air this Sunday with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones has questioned whether the killing of 26 people in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax. Many argue that giving Jones… Continue reading Should Megyn Kelly’s interview with Alex Jones be pulled?
Leaks and the furor they cause both in the media and at the White House have become synonymous with President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump has repeatedly lambasted leakers and the mainstream media for such leaks as well as the use of unnamed sources. He’s also called for investigations to find out who is leaking information to… Continue reading Report: Twitter Account Claims Conway Leaks
It was on this day in 1949 that George Orwell’s seminal work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was first published.
Generations of readers have looked upon 1984 as a dystopian cautionary tale. However, with the elevation of Emperor Trump it feels more like a How To manual.
One doesn’t have to press too many buttons on the Googalizer Machine to find pundits comparing the current regime in the Oval Office with the events in the book. Here’s just a small sample:
Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America
Revisiting Orwell’s ‘1984’ in Trump’s America
How ‘1984’ can decode Trump’s first 100 days
Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump
George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is a best-seller again. Here’s why it resonates now
1984 Isn’t the Only Book Enjoying a Revival
Orwell named the book by reversing the last 2 digits of the year in which it was written, giving the year 1984 a resonance it would not have had otherwise. According to the WikiWackyWoo, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been published in 65 different languages by 1989, more than any other English language book.
It’s also a book whose time has come, and gone, and come again.
Everything old is new again.
Circle this date on your calendars, folks, because this is going to be a mea culpa for the ages.
Anyone who has ever driven just a few miles with me has heard my rant about Toll Roads. Yet, here’s my newly purchased SunPass just before I installed it on the front windshield of The Grey Ghost.
To make a long story short: I never use Toll Roads if I can help it. However, I can no longer help it because Lyft clients not only expect me to use the Toll Roads, but they are charged for them and I’m compensated.
I want to be clear: I’m not against Toll Roads merely because I’m a cheap bastard. Even if money were no object, I would still avoid Toll Roads because I am philosophically against them. Taxes are supposed to pay for the roads. That’s our socialistic system. Why should some roads charge extra? What kind of capitalism is that? Crony?
But, I digress.
Even crazier are these Express Lanes that they’re building on all south Florida’s highways. Get this: It’s a parallel highway to the main highway, separated by either knock-down poles or not-knock-down concrete barriers. These lanes costs extra to go the exact same place as the rest of the traffic.
I just see it as just another way to separate the HAVES from the HAVE NOTS. The cost for using the Express Lanes changes all the doo dah day. On I-95 during rush hour I’ve seen it as high as $7.50. I’ve read it can go to $10.50. That fee is no guarantee that your Express Lanes will be expressive. I’ve seen those lanes blocked by accidents as I go sailing past with the rest of the Great Unwashed Cars. Worse yet, there are no toll booths or Pay By Plate, as on some of the other Toll Roads around here. You’ll get a heafty ticket for using the Express Lanes without a SunPass transponder.
With a SunPass transponder, it’s just that much easier for the NSA to track people. But, I digress.
Here’s the punchline to the story: This morning I Lyfted a couple from my neighbourhood in Sunrise to the the Miami Airport. It was a white knuckle drive. Not only was it during a torrential rainstorm at 5 in the morning, but it’s been raining that way here for several days. There were flooded roads and accidents everywhere. Meanwhile, the fellow in the car asked me specifically not to use the Express Lanes because they not only make him nervous, but with his bladder condition he wanted to be able to jump off the highway quickly if the need arose.
So, I had to write an email to Lyft to make sure the tolls weren’t charged. Essentially, Lyft told me that the passenger will have to dispute the toll charge if one is applied. That’s what I was hoping to avoid because it’s not fair to the customer to have to challenge the charge.
But . . . I’m just a small cog in a big machine. Now with a SunPass.
The Not Now Silly Newsroom
will occasionally republish
stories that originated elsewhere.
“Wonder Woman” and the film’s star, Gal Gadot, have been delivered a taste of the lasso of truth as they’ve entered into non-stop war leading up to the film’s box office debut. After its arrival, many potential viewers are in opposition of the Amazonian warrior’s tale primarily due to Gadot’s nationality. On Friday, June 2, Fox… Continue reading Gal Gadot’s Nationality Is Why ‘Wonder Woman’ Is Being Boycotted
Let’s get something straight off the top: There is no more vile a word in the English language than “nigger”. Full stop.
However, let’s agree — at the very least — that it is a word.
If it’s a word, then you might want to consider that there are just certain times when its use is appropriate and no other word will do. Otherwise, I have a number of objectionable words that maybe we can talk about banning.
I’m a writer. I’m in love with words and language. I hate euphemisms. This awful construct our society has created, “The N-Word”, is an affront to the English language. It takes one of its ugliest words and masks it inside a Disney-friendly jumble of letters. It should come with a happy face.
I’ve wanted to write this essay for a good long time and have pitched it to nearly every editor I’ve had for almost 2 decades. Many years ago I merely told an editor the title of this article (which I had already been writing in my head). We were on the phone, but they blinked so hard I could hear it. After giving them the rough outline, I was told, basically, “Good luck with that.”
Every editor since has said pretty much the same thing.
It’s also worth noting that “The N-Word” is a verbal construct. In print, instead, it’s often rendered as ni**er. Oddly enough, another word rendered this way is fa**ot. It’s like we have a Phony War on the Letter G.
Here’s what triggered the original though in my head so many years ago:
I was watching CNN back in the day when Fox “News” had not yet divided the nation. It had a rainbow panel of people on to talk with the editor of a magazine called “Hebe”, by Jews, for Jews. Her contention was that they were reclaiming the word, much like Queer. It was a very interesting and thoughtful discussion during which I heard the words “spick”, “kike”, “wop”, “chink”, and a few other horrible racial epithets, but all used correctly and within context.
Yet, there was one jarring note in this multicultural discussion.
Whenever anyone on the panel came to a certain word, they stuttered and then said, “The N-Word”. Not a single one of them had a problem with the list of words above. As a young Jew Boy who was called “kike” while I was growing up, I was — somehow — offended and — yes — a little envious of that. Why do only Blacks get their most hated word censored?
On Friday Bill Maher shocked people on the left and the right (who defend racist Ted Nugent) because he made a joke with the word “nigger” in it. I’m not going to defend the joke for two reasons:
In humour, timing is everything. Maher couldn’t have timed his riposte worse considering the political climate of the country right now.
I’ve written about issues of race for years. Was I offended by Maher? No. But, it doesn’t matter whether I was or not because I don’t get to decide what offends other people. Other people get to decide that. Like the NYTs Wesley Morris, who doesn’t seem terribly offended either, calling it something “for the basket labeled ‘Life’s too short.'” Answering his own question in What Was Bill Maher’s Big Mistake?, he writes [emphasis mine]:
[I]ntention is tricky in comedy. Mr. Sasse said something that was, on its face, unsavory. You don’t need much of an imagination to envision Chris Rock, Larry Wilmore or Wanda Sykes taking a whack at that line. ABC’s sitcom “black-ish” exists, partly, to satirize these sorts of conversational bloopers.
But Bill Maher isn’t Chris Rock. He’s not on “black-ish.” He’s a 61-year-old white man who would never get a pass for jesting about slavery or the N-word. (His track record inspires too much doubt to give any benefit.) That’s a license reserved, arguably, for Louis C.K., or Sarah Silverman in her performance-art prime — white comedians who have really grappled with what it means to flirt with racially inflammatory language and ideas, what it means for the flirtation to fail. Mr. Maher’s approach to television doesn’t necessitate that kind of rehearsed rumination. The appeal of “Real Time” is its on-the-spot discourse, its anti-rehearsal. That looseness can tip easily into blurting, flatulence and worse.
The insult to injury here involves the conflation of Mr. Maher’s transgression and the umbrage he feigned at being asked to work in the fields. As my sister might say: Oh, he fancy now. For a long time, black people have deployed slavery-derived hierarchies as a social and psycho-political sorting mechanism. A house assignment might have won a slave less arduous work but more suspicion and contempt from her counterparts in the fields. No one self-identifies as a house Negro — unless that person is making a joke. And even then that person probably shouldn’t be Bill Maher.
C’mon, Mr. Morris. A funny joke would still be a funny joke, no matter who says it. However, sometimes race adds a frisson to a joke that can make us all uncomfortable.
Take Lenny Bruce, please.
I discovered Lenny Bruce in my teenage years through Frank Zappa, who released The Berkeley Concert in 1971 on his Bizarre label. The concert was recorded in 1965 and Bruce had been dead 5 years by the time the record was released. I read his autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People and began collecting some of the earlier vinyl, which was really hard to find. Lenny Bruce didn’t sell a lot of records. Therefore, there weren’t a lot of Bruce records pressed.
I’m not trying to turn this into a treatise on comedy. To remind you, I’m writing about the word “nigger”. Lenny Bruce had more than one routine in which he invoked the word, but this one stuck with me over the years as an undeniable truth, delivered almost as if it were a Jazz riff:
Imagine that. If “nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.” Lenny Bruce paid dearly for creating the world in which George Carlin and Louis C.K. could thrive:
Still, despite Bill Maher making the news this week, I was still on the fence about whether I would ever actually finish this post I began researching decades ago. However, a recent incident made my decision for me:
As I was Lyfting yesterday, I picked up 4 young men in Fort Lauderdale who were going some 35 miles to Sumerset Academy, a charter school down in Pembrook Pines. [Don’t get me started about Charter Schools, but clearly their parents felt they were getting a better education than anywhere else in the Public School System.] When these lads got in they did so with their music playing. I closed my music down, saying, “We got too much music happening.
“Crank it up,” I added. I let them plug in their bass heavy Bluetooth speaker and we drove down US-27 with the music cranked.
Now, I’m from Detroit and never heard the word “nigger” as many times as I did during this drive.
I couldn’t help but think that there are some people who do not consider the word toxic at all. There are some people who only consider it offensive when certain people use it. Here’s when I consider it offensive: When it’s used to offend.
On a related note, I told this story on my facebookery last week:
Had 2 Black gents in their 20s in the car when Al Jolson came on.
They were talking and showed no recognition whatsoever. So I interrupted and asked them, “Have either of you 2 gents heard of Al Jolson?”
After they both said “NO” I gave them an entire History Lesson on Blackface and Minstrel Shows. They were shocked.
They were more shocked to learn that there were Black men who blacked their faces so they could perform in Minstrel Shows.
Then I blew their minds when I explained that the original Whites who performed in blackface were imitating the Black folks’ Cake Walks, which in itself was a parody of White High Society that Black folks were lampooning.
It’s the vast circle of life.
Over the years I’ve bookmarked dozens of articles that avoid using the appropriate word, thereby softening these despicable sentiments. As I was in the process of proofreading this article, prior to hitting the PUBLISH button, I came across another ripped from the latest headlines:
Flint official resigns after
he’s caught on tape blaming
‘f*cking n*****s’ for water crisis
Oh, fer f*ck’s sake!
With the frightening emergence of NeoNazis (hiding behind the euphemism alt-right), we need RESIST the enabler in the White House, not get hung up over a word when used correctly.
Some people are incredibly kind.
The other day I picked up 3 women who took a very long time to get to the car.
TO BE FAIR: It was a gated community without a guard. I needed to wait outside and they were forced to walk to me. The youngest actually arrived very quickly. She explained in broken English that her mother and very pregnant sister walked much more slowly.
The Lyft app has a countdown timer. If my client doesn’t arrive in time, I’m supposed to press a button and drive away because “other people may be waiting.” I ignored the app and stayed where I was even though they went 2 minutes over the 5 allotted minutes.
Then . . . I was mildly irritated that, during the drive, all 3 were talking loudly in Spanish — two of them on their cell phones. It wasn’t that they weren’t speaking English that bothered me. It was because I had to turn my music down while they were on the phone.
If there’s no music playing, I forget how to drive.
When we got to their destination — at Sawgrass Mills, a massive mall near me — the two in the backseat opened the doors on both sides of the car, which always makes me nervous, especially if the driver’s side opens up onto a lane of traffic. They closed the doors and as I was waiting for them to clear the car so I could drive away, when both back doors were suddenly opened again.
Thinking they may have dropped and lost something, I got out myself to help them look for it. However, as I stood there (dumbly) I watched them pull the floor mats out of the car and shake them off. They apologized and said they had tracked flower petals into the car when they got in. They youngest gestured to her mother and said, “She teach us to leave a place like we find it.”
I thanked them profusely. I would not have noticed that until much later, probably after the petals had already been ground into the Grey Ghost.
On this day 45 years ago The Guess Who set up their equipment on the stage in Seattle, Washington, and performed the music that would eventually be released as “Live at the Paramount.
At this point the band consisted of Burton Cummings, Kurt Winter, Don McDougall, Jim Kale, and Garry Peterson. Randy Bachman left the group almost 2 years to the day earlier, following a show at the Fillmore East on May 16.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock:
The band’s classic lineup wouldn’t reunite for more than a decade and Bachman and Cummings would never write another song together.
Even without their founding guitarist and main songwriter, the Guess Who continued to have success in the early ’70s. The band brought on guitarists Greg Leskiw and Kurt Winter, who took the role of Cummings’ new writing partner. The Guess Who still landed hits on the charts (including “Share the Land,” “Bus Rider” and “Clap for the Wolfman”), albeit to diminishing returns. As hitmakers, the Guess Who were eventually eclipsed by their former bandmate.
In 1971, Bachman formed Brave Belt, which morphed into Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
And in 1974, with “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” another one of Bachman’s bands topped the charts.
Live at the Paramount would be Jim Kale’s last with the band.
Please read Me and Jim Kale, about an ill-fated trip to Sudbury Arena.
The original LP consisted of 7 tracks and clocked in at 48:32. For the 2000 CD re-release the music was remixed and padded out with another 6 tunes from the same night, bringing it in at just over an hour 15. ENJOY!!!
Crank it up and CanCon Corner!!!
This is the start of a brand new series at the Not Now Silly Newsroom, now using our new mobile facilities. The Grey Ghost roams 3 South Florida counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. On the road there’s a lot of time to think. UpLyfting Thoughts are jotted down as they happen, or reconstructed later.
I’ve been driving for Lyft for 3 weeks. If I had to make snap judgements (without being judgemental):
→ About 80% of my clients are POC, whether Black, Latino, or Asian. My brother-in-law who drives elsewhere in the country tells me his numbers are reversed. It’s all about local demographics;
→ 70% of my Black passengers — men and women — wear dreads, some of them fabulously;
→ About 75% of my clients are under 30;
→ It’s about equally 50% men vs. women.
I drove cab for several years in Toronto and there are some distinct differences. To begin with the relationship is different. When people got in my cab, suddenly I was working for them. With Lyft, however, there’s a level of trust because both sides are vetted. My passengers know The Grey Ghost and I had to jump through a number of regulatory hoops to become a certified, including a background check and mechanical inspection. Pretty well anybody can become a cab driver. [TO BE FAIR: You need to take a course and then a test to become a Toronto cabbie. Or, at least you did when I did it.]
On the opposite side of the street, I also know that my customers are vetted. Lyft has their address, phone number, and credit card number on file. Nobody’s going to take a runner. Whenever I drop my passenger I press a button and get to rate my clients on a system of 1 to 5 stars. They also get to rate me on the same scale when they leave my car. If my rating drops below a certain line, I can be delisted.
Everyone on both sides of the equation understands that I am providing a needed service. There’s a totally different level of respect than my passengers had for cab drivers.
And, The Grey Ghost is nicer than any cab I’ve ever driven.
Tune in for other action-packed episodes of UpLyfting Thoughts, as the NNS Mobile Newsroom™ gives a Lyft to those who need one. Happy motoring and back to the freeway which is already in progress.
It’s been a whirlwind few months at Not Now Silly, and not all of it was spent writing.
As longtime readers know: Pops died late last year. Since then the Newsroom has expanded from a single small room into several spacious rooms.
Consolidating items, rearranging furniture, and jettisoning what doesn’t work, it’s now pretty close to what I envisioned. There are still a few broad strokes to go, but after that it’s just minor cleanup.
The biggest change is the new Media Room I built just off (and visible from) the Newsroom. It contains a couch; tee vee; sound system; VHS, DVD, and CD players; along with 62 linear feet of CDs lining 2 of the walls. I love music. Music is important to me. Subsequently, I have a lot of it. If I’m not watching the Fox “News” Channel, I’m listening to music. Music makes the world go-round. Music is the best.
FULL DISCLOSURE: The Frank Zappa collection takes up 51 inches of that (and I am still missing almost 50 Zappa CDs and box sets). The next largest section is The Beatles at 43 inches, but that includes solo work and tribute CDs.
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: I didn’t write about this previously for security’s sake, but I’ve been dying to because it’s been an interesting process . . . in both a journalistic sense and a nostalgic one:
Pops left behind a coin collection.
As a kid I remember him spending his spare time in front of his roll top desk examining coins and looking them up in the many books he had on the subject. He owned his own stores in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Back then one could still find rare coins in circulation. I’m sure Pops looked at every coin that came through his till. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got rolls of coins from banks just to look through them.
He tried to get me interested, but I wasn’t having it. Now I wished I had paid attention because my oldest sister (who is Pops’ Executor) and I spent the last several months liquidating Pops’ coin collection, which he spent a lifetime acquiring.
Over the years he sold a some of his collection here and there. For instance, I recall when he and my Mom traveled through Mexico, he collected gold coins at a time when owning gold wasn’t possible in ‘Merka. A few years back I asked him whatever happened to those and he told be they paid for the down payment on the condo.
As many as he may have sold over the years, there were still tens of thousands of coins left. My sister and I treated liquidation like it was a job. And, it was.
Luckily, just before we started this process, I happened to hear that the biggest coin show in the country was happening in Fort Lauderdale. My sister and I went. Because we didn’t know what we had yet, all we really did was collect business cards, ask the out-of-town dealers who they’d recommend that was local, and/or what to look for in a honest coin dealer. We also got a sense of what was happening in Coin World. It was worth spending an afternoon there.
We knew that before we could ask a numismatist to give us a valuation, had to know what we had. Sounds simple, right? Did I mention there were tens of thousands of coins? Maybe hundreds of thousands. Blue books with coins slotted into the holes, 3-ring binders with coins in plastic sleeves, individual coins in plastic sleeves, rolls of coins, cigar boxes full of coins, and loose, unsorted, coins of every description and denomination. I wish I had thought to weigh it because it was serious tonnage.
B & I met once a week for 6 or 7 hours a go. The first several weeks we did nothing but sort the coins by category: ‘Merkin and foreign first. Then we took all the U.S. coinage and separated that into denominations: nickles, dimes, quarters, half dollars, pennies, wheat pennies, steel pennies, Indian head pennies. Who knew there were so many different kids of pennies?
Once it was sorted, we started creating spreadsheets. Each workday we’d open a new spreadsheet (or several over the course of a day) and log the coins by denomination and year. If Pops had noted a condition, we put that on the spreadsheet as well. However, about 95% of the coins were not graded. Coin grading being such a specialized field, we didn’t even bother to guess.
Filling the spreadsheets — logging every coin — took another 5 or 6 weeks. Two more weeks were spent sorting all the foreign coinage by country. One thing I have to say is there are (were?) some beautiful coins from around the world. Contemporary coins are not nearly as pretty.
We continued until we had every coin sorted, logged, boxed, and sealed into various lots, as we named each spreadsheet.
We were both rookies when this process began, but my sister and I learned a fair bit about coin valuations as we researched what we were discovering.
We learned enough that, when it came time to start selling the coins, we could take one of the smaller lots to several local dealers. We knew the value of this set of quarters, so we could judge what they told us. Then we discussed the spreadsheets.
Without knowing the actual condition of the coins (on the spreadsheets), we could only get several ballpark figures from several dealers. They were all within the same range, but the difference of a penny a coin adds up when you have so many. In the end we went with our gut and chose the dealer who made us feel the most comfortable. He was the same price as another guy, but the other guy felt off, if yannow what I mean.
This gent was up in Boca Raton, so for the next 3 Mondays running, instead of my Boca sister driving here, I’d load the car up with coins and drive up there. Each time it was most of the morning (into the early afternoon), a process that was greatly streamlined because we had prepared all the spreadsheets. He said that he’s rarely seen a collection organized as well as we had done.
The first week he double-checked our tallies, but that got old after a while, especially after they all turned out to be correct. Despite how much the spreadsheets helped speed things up, it still took 3 weeks. We’d haggle a bit here and there over price — because we had been learning valuations on our own and consulting other dealers — but we also knew we were being treated fairly. It went both ways, in fact. It was a good relationship and I was kind of sorry when it ended.
One of the things I learned from him is that coin collecting is a dying hobby. Just as I wasn’t interested in learning Pops’ hobby, later generations didn’t care either. Now coin collectors are literally dying off and the market has suffered because no one is collecting. These days there’s more profit in the melt value than you’d get by finding a coin collector looking to fill out their collection, if you could even find one.
IRONY ALERT: Obviously, melting coins makes the ones that are left rarer. However, that’s still not increasing the collecting value of those that are left. Eventually, at this rate, none of these coins will exist.
BOTTOM LINE: All the time we sorted the coins my sister and were hoping to find that BURIED TREASURE. I guess we watched too much Antiques Roadshow. While, there are coins worth tens of thousands of dollars, we didn’t have any of those.
Although there were a few coins that did alright — well above face value — there was no great score. Wheat pennies and steel pennies, which we had tons of (and that might not be an exaggeration) did okay — depending on condition. Because there was so much of it, it added up quickly.
However, most of what we cashed in went for melt value, or even face value. Not everything Pops collected increased in value.
KA-CHING! One Indian head penny we sold him brought in over $40. Later he admitted to us that it was a counterfeit coin, which he took the blame for because he had given it the once-over.
All in all it was an interesting experience.
ME’N’MARLEY: Marley has settled into the Not Now Silly Newsroom nicely and has become the perfect writing partner. She’s helped me put together the latest stories on the Coconut Grove Playhouse, which is heating up again. Meanwhile, we’re still following West Grove, and the new plan to bring much-needed money to alleviate the ghetto conditions along Grand Avenue. We’ll see how that all shakes out over time.
Meanwhile, Marley has taken down the details of several intriguing stories that sources have called in. I’m still chasing these down to see if they pan out, but she takes good notes.
While Today’s Top Ten is always in flux, the All Time Top Ten has settled into a nice groove, and one I’m proud of. [All numbers were reset at the beginning of the year, when we opened up this new joint.]
I never thought there would be another chapter in the Johnny Dollar Wars, but there it is nestled in at number 3, as Johnny Dollar Outed As Roger Ailes Operative?
Speaking of Fox: I continue to craft a Friday Fox Follies for PolitucusUSA and boy have things become interesting lately. Trying to keep the columns to a reasonable length has been a chore.
Getting back to the Top Ten at right: Just below J$, is my demand that Tom Falco issue a retraction and apology. If it’s that high on the All Time Top Ten, imagine how many people have read about his cowardice and scumbaggery.
Holding down the #6 position is the day I shaved my head. You need to see it to believe it.
However, the rest of my All Time Top Ten are stories I’m particularly proud of. Check them out. Collect them all. Trade ’em with your friends.
COIN OF THE REALM: Speaking of which, we’ve sold the Lexus and purchased a new mobile Not Now Silly Newsroom, a 2012 Ford Fusion nicknamed The Grey Ghost. When it’s not being used by Marley and the rest of the News staff, I am driving for Lyft. I’m sure I’ll have stories as time goes on, but I’ve only been doing it for a week and have just 20
See you next time, dear reader. We do it all for you, to coin a phrase.