Category: Politics, Religion & Money

America at a Crossroads

PBS has a series called America at a Crossroads, hosted by Robert MacNeil. [Link] One of the shows is Frontline’s Gangs of Iraq, which I’ve watched online and recommend highly.

Tonight, one of the local PBS stations re-ran Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime, a collection of stories told by soldiers who have been fighting in Iraq. A variety of storytelling techniques are used in the show, including one that is best described as a video comic book. Not quite a comic book, and not quite a cartoon, this packs a lot of punch, don’t you think? Here it is. The drawings were done by an artist named Christopher Koelle. [Link]
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUN07/AmericaCrossroads.flv 400 300]

Colbert Rises From Database Ashes

Ah, yes. I had posted the complete video of Stephen Colbert roasting George Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. Don’t want this one to languish, because of the database snafu…
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/APR07/ColbertRoastsBush.flv 400 300]

…and I liked Colbert’s cognitive leap that associated Bush’s assurances about Iraq to Charlie Brown being lied to year after year by Lucy about pulling away the football …
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/MAY07/ColbertPeanuts.flv 400 300]

 

Virginia Tech Massacre

This letter is in today’s Boston Globe:

THE SHOOTING at Virginia Tech is another example of why gun-free zones are dangerous. This would have ended much sooner and with fewer people dead or injured if at least one of those students or faculty members had been armed and able to shoot back.

In February in a mall in Utah, another young man started shooting at customers. An armed, off-duty police officer engaged the shooter until other police arrived, and the police were able to kill the shooter.

If that armed citizen had not been there, the shooter could have killed many more innocent people.

When law-abiding citizens have guns, law-abiding citizens are safer and criminals are not.

ANNA DeMARINIS

Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has made this point in the past, that more guns equal more safety. Obviously, this is false. The statistical “proof” for this assertion doesn’t hold up. [Link] Would more guns make Baghdad safer? If the off-duty police officer in Utah saw another civilian drawing a weapon when he engaged the mall shooter, the safe assumption would have been that he was also dangerous.

I haven’t read everything there is to know about who knew what, and when, about the shooter at Virginia Tech, but it seems clear that concerns had been raised with the proper authorities. There was enough to go on for somebody to check if he owned guns, and to put him on a list of names to be reported when an application was made to buy a gun. I don’t know the Federal and Virginia regulations concerning gun ownership, but they were inadequate.

If only Abraham Lincoln had been packing heat. He could have returned fire!

Him Johnny, Her Maureen

This 1934 New Yorker cartoon appeared shortly before the release of the movie Tarzan And His Mate, the second in the series with Johnny Weissmuller and Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan.

William Crawford Galbraith, The New Yorker, 3/3/1934
The New Yorker, 1934

Tarzan And His Mate caused quite a stir, and it contributed to the Hays Office enforcing the Production Code that it had written in 1930. What, exactly, was objectionable? For starters, although Jane taught Tarzan to call her his wife, they weren’t actually married. The video player has eight minutes of the movie that I’ve spliced together.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/APR07/TarzanMate.flv 400 300]

Josephine McKimThe nude swim had been censored from prints of this movie for nearly 60 years. Weissmuller was an undefeated Olympic gold medal swimmer, so he did his own swimming for this scene. The woman with him underwater was another Olympic swimmer, Josephine McKim.

Yet another Olympic swimmer, Buster Crabbe, played Tarzan in a 1933 serial, between Weissmuller’s first and second Tarzan movies. I don’t know why swimmers, rather than gymnasts, were favored to play the Ape Man.