Author: DOuG pRATt

Moaning Mona

Boston NPR station WBUR produces a show called On Point.  Fridays it usually has a weekly news roundup and commentary.  Yesterday, one of the guests was GOP-aligned syndicated columnist Mona Charen.  Listen to what she thinks is the top news story.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/OCT06/onpoint.mp3]

She spins her reference to Iraq by calling it “The War on Terror,” but what really gets me is her comment about the upcoming election getting “bogged down in a lot of trivialities like people’s sex lives and perceptions of corruption.”

Stop right there.  Perception of corruption was what led to the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons — a perception that was not substantiated.  Further, Whitewater was a business dealing prior to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992.  Contrast Whitewater with Tom Delay and with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose corrupting influence in the GOP is no mere perception.

And if you want to talk about getting bogged down in somebody’s sex life, that’s exactly what happened when Whitewater mutated into an investigation of Bill and Monica.  There was a vote to impeach, based on this triviality!

Read this 1999 column by Mona Charen, for proof that she’s yet another hypocritical Republican apologist.  Honestly, I believe these people have no agenda other than their own wealth and power.

Seven Samurai 7

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/Anime/samurai_7.flv 425 236]

Honorable son Eric’s latest Animé pick is Samurai 7, a series based on the legendary movie, The Seven Samurai.  When I was in high school, the Boston PBS station showed it complete and commercial-free, and it was my friend and mentor Morris Hyman who made sure I didn’t miss it.

Eric and I watched the original movie together not too many months ago, and I was pleased to see that he was suitably impressed.  George Lucas borrowed much from this movie when creating The Jedi Knights.

I’ve spliced together a couple of brief scenes from both presentations for comparison.  Below is, obviously, the original.  No robots!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/Anime/7samurai.flv 320 240]

666 = rw-rw-rw


What is the significance of the 755, mentioned in the previous posting?  Click the picture to watch an excellent animated presentation on UNIX file permissions.

It shows you how binary numbering works, compared to the decimal numbering that we taken for granted, because we have two hands with five digits each.  The value of 1112 is 710.  So the decimal numbers for the permissions are 755, 744, etc., and are pronounced “seven, five, five,” and not “seven hundred fifty-five.”

Last Draft, First Draft

WEN.jpg

Looking for an old newspaper clipping, that I still haven’t found, I came across another clipping. My first published newspaper story. It’s about the last man drafted to serve during the Vietnam War era from Westfield, MA. I remember being surprised by how little of what I’d written had been changed. Of course, now I see it needed more editing. For example, the lead should say "…drafted into the U.S. Army." Click the thumbnail picture to read.