The photo above should give you some clues. We’ve got a lot of green in our front yard and thought it could be improved with a little more color. We’re starting off nice and easy with a small assortment of plants and herbs. We’ll see if they thrive, after which we’ll add to their number.
For a guy from a party whose members talk a lot about so-called “Western Civilization”, Florida Rep. Anthony Sabatini (Republican member of the Florida House of Respresentatives, representing Lake County, just west of Orlando) seems happy to talk about it while knowing very little about it.
In a tweet posted yesterday evening, he (or his Twitter team) wrote:
If Socrates was out philosophizing in American society today, he would be cancelled real quick
— Anthony Sabatini (@AnthonySabatini) May 20, 2021
His understanding of who Socrates was doesn’t seem to be any deeper that of Bill S. Preston and Theodore “Ted” Logan…
…and it’s quite likely that he doesn’t know that Socrates was, in fact, “cancelled”.
Yup, and it was all written up by his student, whose name you should also have heard of: Plato.
If you ever go to the “Met” in New York, you can see what happened to Socrates in Jacques Louis David’s painting, The Death of Socrates, pictured below:
Let me give you the twenty-second version of what happened.
In his philosophizing, Socrates was a social and moral critic of his native Athens (in his time, your allegiance was to a city, not a nation), arguing against the city’s sociopolitical status quo and its “might makes right” ethos.
As a result, he was tried and sentenced to death for the crimes of:
For his sentence, he was made to drink hemlock.
In case you think this is an obscure historical footnote, let me assure you that IT IS NOT. Socrates is pretty much the grandaddy of Western philosophy. His life, and especially his death, are a core part of the Western canon.
In fact, the story of Socrates’ “cancellation” is at least well-known enough for Steve Martin to have turned it into a skit in his 1980 TV special, Comedy is Not Funny (which may seem like a typical Adult Swim routine to today’s audiences, but was mind-blowingly weird back then):
Ummm…no.
Also, in his most recent financial disclosure, he claimed a net worth of $-111,000. That’s right: NEGATIVE one hundred and eleven thousand dollars. I suspect some seriously creative accounting:
If you watch only one cryptocurrency rap video, make it this one: Dog Money!
Once again, here’s my traditional Mother’s Day greeting to all you bad muthas out there.
Pictured clockwise from bottom: Pocket Doge, Flax the Style Destroyer, Gamora Montana, and Edge-Lord.
It’s May 6th, and since 2009, this day has been designated World Accordion Day by the CIA! In this case, the CIA is not the Central Intelligence Agency, but the Confédération Internationale des Accordéonistes, the International Confederation of Accordionists, which was founded in 1935.
World Accordion Day was created to be “a unified global effort to celebrate and promote the Accordion”, which is something I can get behind. You can find out more about what’s going on today at WorldAccordionDay.com or by checking out the 2021 World Accordion Day video below:
That’s an interesting story, and you can find it here.
Here’s one with Seattle band The Beatniks at Safeco Field:
The accordion karaoke performance where I won an iPad:
Entertaining a delayed flight:
During the summer between high school and university, I landed a job at a warehouse where I was often required to drive a small electric forklift.
Prior to getting my 15 minutes of “training” on the use of the forklift, my manager and I sat in the break room and watched the mandatory safety video.
It was the 1980s, which was the golden age of gore–horror worker’s compensation workplace injury ads and videos in Ontario, and the one we watched took things to a red-corn-starch-syrup-soaked new level.
There’s a scene that’s forever seared into my memory. It starts with the Merry Prankster’s golden prize: an unattended forklift with the keys still in the ignition. A carefree teen decides to take it for a joyride, does a couple of donuts in the warehouse, and quickly loses control.
He plows the forks, which have been raised to the “halfway up” position (which you don’t do when the ’lift isn’t carrying anything), into an oh-so-fake wall:
As if that isn’t bad enough, the lunchroom is on the other side of that wall, and so was someone who was just having lunch — he’s now just been forked from behind:
I remember going home that evening and thinking with great disbelief: “Grown adults commissioned, wrote, and made that video. And got paid for it.”
I’d forgotten about that video, and had even begun to think that I’d misremembered it — until this compilation started making the internet rounds. And yup, it features the “forked from behind” scene!
Once again, in case you missed it the first time: