Running of the Quotes - How Bout Right Now Edition Part Deux

Continuing the roll....

Quote of the Day I

But Barris achieved his schlock icon status with The Gong Show in 1976. He was both producer and host. It was awful. But like driving past a car wreck, you just couldn't turn away. 

That pretty much sums up television in the 1970s. It wasn't a show filled with Beautiful People. The talent, the host, and the judges were closer to eye sores than eye candy (except the time judge Jaye P. Morgan briefly flashed the audience during a "Gene, Gene, The Dancing Machine" segment). Again, this was the '70s. 

Now we have America's Got Talent, X Factor, and The Voice. Everyone looks beautiful. And everything sounds beautiful. But I bet Barris and his wacky cast still had more fun. 

-- Victorino Matus remembering Chuck Barris

Quote of the Day II

If you want to know what a pro-Russia policy would look like, Chris, here are some elements of it. You’d slash defense spending. You’d slow down our nuclear modernization. You’d roll back missile defense systems. You would enter a one-sided nuclear control arms agreement. And you’d try to do everything you could to stop oil and gas production. That was Barack Obama’s policy for eight years. That’s not Donald Trump’s policy. 

-- Senator Tom Cotton refuting Chris Wallace's suggestion that Trump is colluding with Vladimir Putin

Quote of the Day III

We are living in a very bizarre era, in which large numbers of otherwise-respectable people consider it a point of moral superiority to commit, or aid in the commission of, federal crimes. This largely explains why Donald Trump is now our president. 

-- PowerLine's John Hinderaker

Quote of the Day IV

Whenever I would tell the missus that I was headed downstairs to play "Resident Evil VII: Biohazard" it felt as if I was sneaking away to watch Skinemax or some other self-indulgent, worthless endeavor. I can morally and aesthetically justify checking out of family time to read Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, but pretending to be a guy killing zombies for an hour seems quite callow. 

In large part this is because, frankly, I'm not that good at video games? I know there are some who think that it's far more pathetic to pour hundreds, thousands of hours into video games yearly—but, I'll be honest, I kind of respect that dedication, that effort to make oneself good, better, the best at something. As a casual gamer—as the sort who gets seasick for the first few hours of a first person shooter after a long layoff, the sort who takes 15 hours to finish a 10 hour game, the sort who frequently relies on internet-based walkthroughs to get past very basic challenges—I'm not really excelling at anything. I'm just stumbling along, a n00b like any other. 

Nobody likes a n00b. More to the point: nobody likes feeling like a n00b. No one likes the self-awareness that comes along with being a n00b. We all want to believe we're great at whatever it is we're doing. Or, at the very least, we want to believe we're competent. The curse of the casual gamer is to know, with very real certainty, that you are bad at the thing you're doing. That you aren't excelling, that any 15-year-old punk with a PS4 and the interest to play the game you're playing would, almost instantly, be better than you. 

This is the shame I live with. I pray it's a pain you never have to feel. 

-- Sonny Bunch in Confessions of a Casual Gamer

Quote of the Day V

If there’s any lesson to take from 2016, it’s that voters love uncharismatic members of stale Democratic dynasties. Then again, this is New York, a state that handed Hillary Clinton the only two meaningful electoral wins she ever notched and which sent Caroline Kennedy’s uncle to the Senate a few decades before. A slugfest between two A-list nepotists hailing from the two most famous Democratic dynasties of the last 60 years would be a golden age for political media, especially in NYC. 

...If Clinton or Kennedy want a foot in the door in Washington, they may be stuck with — alas — the indignity of a House seat in New York somewhere. So very unglamorous, but at least it’ll put them in line for a Senate slot when one eventually opens up. 

-- Allahpundit snarking on the predicted 2020 Chelsea Clinton vs. Caroline Kennedy NY congressional race

Quote of the Day VI

A woman with a business is subject to special rules. Political rules. And if she does not hew to them, she must be destroyed. By a gang of women. You know how women help women? They don’t. 

-- Ann Althouse on the jihad against Ivanka Trump

Quote of the Day VII

The Economist in the last six months published a series of interesting articles on the challenges of anti-submarine warfare. 

As long time readers may have figured out, I love - from a professional perspective - ASW. Neglected and unloved by most, but to me a passion. Though few really cared outside fellow fetishists, I was actually damn good at it - for an officer. 

...As a side note, why does The Economist keep putting stuff out about ASW? One has to remember, the island nation was twice in the last hundred years almost starved to death by submarines. 

She knows. 

-- CDR Salamander

Quote of the Day VIII

Dressed in my favorite pair of non-existent pajamas, I leapt from my bed and pulled the drapes aside. There, not three feet in front of me, was a camera, dangling from the underside of a drone. The red light was on, and the camera was rolling. 

...Seconds later I’d pulled the Mossburg 12-guage from under my bed and grabbed the cellphone from the bedside table. In no time, I was out on the deck downstairs, about fifteen feet below the electronic Peeping Tom. The drone had moved even closer to my window. I could see the camera panning left to right, and I could hear my dog unleashing a level of indignation usually reserved for raccoons and feral cats. Somewhere, in the logical part of my brain, it occurred to me that nothing good can come from an angry B-list celebrity standing on his deck with no clothes and a loaded shotgun, but I was not really in touch at that moment with the logical part of my brain. 

...I had a clear shot – nothing but blue sky above – and more than enough umbrage to justify the destruction I was about to unleash. But then, as I was literally squeezing the trigger, I saw the camera tilt down. It was pointed directly at me, and in that moment – I froze. 

I’d like to tell you I stopped because I realized that discharging my weapon in such a fashion would be frowned on by the local constabulary. But really, what stopped me was the realization that somewhere nearby, a drone operator was staring at his monitor, pondering the image of a very naked guy with a very familiar face, pointing a shotgun into the lens of his Go Pro and looking every bit as crazy as Gary Busey and Nick Nolte at the nadir of their careers. I froze, because I could see the video that might very well appear on the local news, (with considerable blurring, naturally.) The same video that might soon appear on my mother’s computer screen, along with the headline – “Dirty Jobs Guy Totally Loses It – Gets Naked and Shoots Drone From San Francisco Skies.”
When the moment passed I put the shotgun down and reached for my phone instead, just as the wicked contrivance bugged out for the Wild Blue Yonder. 

-- Dirty Jobs guy Mike Rowe recounting how he totally lost it, got naked, and almost shot down a peeping drone with a shotgun

Quote of the Day IX

A millennial member of a focus group has angrily objected to the contents of a television programme because it portrayed millennials as coddled, easily offended and thin-skinned. 

-- from an Independent UK article

Quote of the Day X

Speaking of time, the death of Kurt Cobain is almost as far in the past now as the death of Jim Morrison was when Smells Like Teen Spirit hit the shelves in what were still called "record stores". 

-- Tam from View From The Porch

Running of the Quotes - How Bout Right Now Edition

And here we go...

Quote of the Day I

Police in the tiny town of Foristell, responding about 2 a.m. Thursday to a report of marijuana smoke coming from a motel room, arrested two women from New York who tried to escape by jumping out a second-story window and running half-naked across Interstate 70.

Then things got weird.

Quote of the Day II

The changes that they saw in their lifetimes are nothing short of astonishing. Almanzo lived from 1857 and died in 1946; his birth predated the Civil War and his death happened after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Laura lived from 1867 to 1957; she was born during Reconstruction and died in the same year that Sputnik I was launched. She lived to see the introduction of electricity, the telephone, penicillin, movies, television, air travel, space travel, and two World Wars. She was born in an era of twig brooms and eating hard tack on the trail, and died in the age of vacuum cleaners and counter-top blenders. 

-- From Happy 150th Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder 

Quote of the Day III

Or perhaps the Boomer generation is going out in a fit of frenzied self-recognition: It enjoyed all that was given to it, did not accomplish much itself, and left a mess to its successors. Its metaphor is California’s Oroville dam: Aging greens believe that it never should have been built; but since it was, it came in handy for the good life; but no one should spend any money on its repair; but when it nearly fails, we were all warned that it was never a good idea. And so no more dams will be built for our children. 

-- Victor Davis Hanson

Quote of the Day IIII - Maybe ‘Weird Al’ Was The Real Star All Along

Yankovic has sold millions of albums, played 1,616 shows and outlasted so many of the stars he once spoofed. His most recent album, 2014’s “Mandatory Fun,” featured parodies of Iggy Azalea, Lorde and Pharrell Williams, a polka medley and his usual smattering of original songs. The album hit No. 1. At 57, he’s now readying a complete set of his 14 studio recordings, plus an album of bonus tracks. “Squeeze Box,” on sale through a PledgeMusic drive until the end of February, will naturally come in an accordion-shaped box. “Comedy recording and funny songs go back to the earliest days of the record industry,” says Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, the radio host who introduced Yankovic to the public 40 years ago. “But Al is unique. There’s nothing like him in the history of funny music.” 

For Chris Hardwick — the comedian who created the Nerdist empire and hosts two game shows, “@midnight” and “The Wall” — Yankovic is more than a musical success story. He’s a triumph for all the oddballs and outsiders.

Quote of the Day IIIII - Fuck You Very Much Tom Hayden

General Giap and the NVA viewed the Tet 1968 offensive as a failure, they were on their knees and had prepared to negotiate a surrender. 

At that time, there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. casualties, the Vietnam War was about to end, as the NVA was prepared to accept their defeat. 

Then, they heard Walter Cronkite (former CBS News anchor and correspondent) on TV proclaiming the success of the Tet 1968 offensive by the communist NVA. They were completely and totally amazed at hearing that the US Embassy had been overrun. In reality, The NVA had not gained access to the Embassy–there were some VC who had been killed on the grassy lawn, but they hadn’t gained access. Further reports indicated the riots and protesting on the streets of America. 

According to Giap, these distorted reports were inspirational to the NVA. They changed their plans from a negotiated surrender and decided instead, they only needed to persevere…. 

Today, there are 58,229 names on the Vietnam Wall Memorial.

Quote of the Day IIIIII VI

The blacks in this movie are dignified, striving people, yearning for education and success. Yes, I know it’s propaganda. But the fact that’s it propaganda actually makes my point. Propaganda’s goal is to reach out to people in the most effective way possible to affect their thinking. In 1944, those who made The Negro Soldier looked at black culture and concluded that the best way to reach out to blacks was to present them, not as hip or cool, not as victims, not as rage-filled revolutionaries, but as people of intellectual and moral substance. Moreover, as I noted above, that approach worked for both blacks and whites who saw the movie. 

-- Bookworm on the US Army WWII recruiting film The Negro Soldier

Quote of the Day VII - But It Was How He Said It Edition

A police standoff began in Merrimack after a boyfriend told his girlfriend that the spaghetti dinner she made was “OK,” according to police paperwork.

Quote of the Day VIII

The Democrats are basically a hate group, and they are succeeding in what they attempt to do: instill hate against their opponents among a dwindling number of cult-like faithful. The Democrats have little interest in actual governance, i.e., the issues faced by their Senate Minority Leader. So it shouldn’t be surprising that among Democrats, Steve Bannon – utterly unknown until, say, six months ago – is a more significant figure than their own leaders in Congress. Is this the sign of a dying political party? One would hope so. 

-- PowerLine's John Hinderaker noting that more Democrats can name Trump aide Steve Bannon than their own Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer

Quote of the Day VIIII

It’s hard to make a man understand something that his salary requires that he not understand. 

-- Glenn Reynolds on why the press doesn't get it

Quote of the Day X - Headlines From Almost 2017 Edition

Clemson University Bans ‘Any Reference to Harambe’ from Dorm Spaces Because of ‘Rape Culture’ and ‘Racism’ 

Quote of the Day XI - Headlines From 2017 Edition

Anti-Trump ‘March for Science’ Forced to Apologize for Calling Women ‘Females’

Quote of the Day XII

When I was a kid, I thought there would be some point where a gong would sound, and a switch would throw, and suddenly I'd be an adult and I'd know it. 

I'm 62 and I'm still waiting. Somehow nothing like that ever happened. 

...All my life, deep down I had this irrational fear that someone was going to walk up to me someday and say, Nope, nope, it was all a mistake. We've decided you don't get to be an adult after all. You have to get back in the cage again and let other people run your life. 

And now I'm facing that as a real possibility. I may have to enter a nursing home, and the prospect fills me with abject terror. I got two and a half weeks of that in November 2012 after my stroke when I was in the rehab hospital, and after one week I was ready to go home, at least mentally. (I sure wasn't physically, though.) 

-- Steven Den Beste three months before his death 

A Pop Quiz

So some prominent famous person said this:

“One of the lines of investigation [scientists] have been pursuing has led them to the conclusion that significant areas of the Middle East and North Africa are in danger of becoming uninhabitable.”

Without following the link can you guess what danger he/she/xe/me/ve was referring to?

Was it:

A. High beryllium content in wind-borne excavated desert soil

B. A single exchange of low grade tactical nukes

C. The appearance of desert-adapted CHUDs

D. Global warming or some such

E. Increased birth rates leading to such high population densities that no one lives there anymore

F. No more water

G. The Joos

Please leave your answers in the comments. No peeking at other's answers please.

The Running of the Quotes - January Catchup Edition

Since the spool has now grown large enough to have its own detectable gravitation, I'm trying to whittle it down towards semi-OSHA-acceptable levels...

Quote of the Day I

The Muslim Middle East is a perpetually Nazi realm. We do ourselves and the Muslim/Nazi children no favor by inviting them into our homes and allowing them to continue their wicked ways. That ensures that the suffering of innocents, both Muslim and non-Muslim, that we currently see will extend into unknown numbers of generations, rather than ending as it should, here and now.

-- Bookworm's harsh (but correct IMO) assessment of immigration from the Middle East

Quote of the Day II

In fact, Carrie Fisher stated in an interview that she found the interrogation scenes in Star Wars so difficult, not due to the nature of the scenes, but because in real life, Peter Cushing was such a nice man it was difficult when acting against him to be intimidated by him. She was quoted as saying she found it difficult to be intimidated by a man wearing carpet slippers.

-- from Peter Cushing's Wikipedia page

Quote of the Day III

Under the Densepack theory, Trump should end DACA now. Not enough bandwidth to have 2 MSM/anti-Trump outrage explosions at once.

-- Mickey Kaus on the current MSM meltdown over Trump's Friday executive order

Quote of the Day IV

One little note; a major reason Europe has enjoyed so many decades of peace following WWII is the huge amount of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing that took place from the Volga to the Rhine. This removed many of the simmering problems related to ethnic minorities stirring up trouble.  Poles were forced at the end of a bayonet to Poland. Germans to Germany. Italians to Italy ... and for the most part that is what happened. Ugly, but effective and probably already saved the lives of tens of millions.

Not content to enjoy the good harvest from the bloody sacrifice of the post-war migrations, the Europeans decided to import an even harder problem.

-- CDR Salamander in Germany is Turning Itself in to What it Didn't Want to Be

Quote of the Day V

It's easy to forget that the ship that is being decommissioned this year was first commissioned just in time to sail off to the Cuban Missile Crisis with a hangar deck full of prop-driven Skyraider strike planes, Phantoms with no guns, piston-engine helicopters, and F-8 Crusader day fighters.

-- Tam on the decommissioning of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65)

Quote of the Day VI

Academia has an infantilising effect. I understand that. Many professors dress and act like adolescents right up to the time they are ready to hand in their tenure and live off their generous pensions. The Peter-Pan aspect of academia is not entirely the professors’ fault. After all, the points at which the real world intrudes upon academia are so few and so tenuous that academics may be forgiven for some of their hyperbole and inadvertently comic displays of self-importance. They exist, like kept women of yore, entirely at the pleasure of an affluent society they despise. So in a way it is not surprising that they endeavour to transform their entire campus into a sort of existential boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”

-- Roger Kimbell on academia’s inauguration meltdown

Quote of the Day VII

The Senate reconvened after the inaugural ceremonies on Friday, with Pompeo’s nomination set to come up at 4:50pm. Cotton angrily confronted Schumer about his broken promise....Schumer told Cotton that the Senate had never previously confirmed a CIA director on Inauguration Day and if Cotton had been around eight years earlier, he’d know that Republicans didn’t extend that courtesy for incoming president Barack Obama. “Eight years ago, I was getting my ass shot at in Afghanistan,” Cotton snapped. “So don’t talk to me about where I was 8 years ago.”

Cotton asked Schumer why he’d gone back on his word. Schumer claimed that he’d only been speaking for himself when he promised to let Pompeo through. “I said that I would not block him,” Schumer said, emphasizing the personal pronoun, according to sources who witnessed the exchange. “I never said that I could speak for 47 other Democrats.”

-- from a Weekly Standard account of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer being true to his nature during the nomination hearings for Mike Pompeo as CIA Director

Quote of the Day VIII

Vaca was driving through Bakersfield, CA, on December 19th when he and a friend were pulled over by police. The convicted felon had a rifle in the car with him and he decided to use the traffic stop as an opportunity to test a theory he had about police brutality, and “What I was hoping for them to do was tell me, ‘Drop the gun! Back away from the firearm! Get on the ground! Turn around!’ and it was going to be an arrest,” he said. “But I was completely wrong.”

When Vaca exited the vehicle holding the rifle, Officer Christian Hernandez opened fire.

-- from Darwin Award Winner Pulls Gun on Cops to “Test a Theory”

Quote of the Day IX

Well, it’s not so much that they think Trump is a Nazi, as that they want to think of themselves as the bold resistance. The absence of actual brownshirts — well, except for the ones from the Left who were smashing windows, and Trump supporters, in DC last night — only makes it easier and more appealing to strike that pose.

-- Glenn Reynolds

Quote of the Day X

The problem for the left is that, when everyone's Hitler, nobody's Hitler.

-- Mark Steyn

Quote of the Day XI - Yet Another Victim of the Bra Edition

George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, "You can't wear a bra under that dress."
So, I say, "Okay, I'll bite. Why?"
And he says, "Because. . . there's no underwear in space."

...What happens [according to Lucas] is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't—so you get strangled by your own bra.

Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit — so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.

-- Carrie Fisher in Wishful Drinking

Contrary to the internet rumors...

I am not dead or comatose - much to the consternation of my enemies and those in the AoSHQ pool. I've just been very busy with real world stuff. There have been lots of things I wanted to blog about (like hundreds of tabs worth) but I just couldn't find enough unallocated time to quite get around to them.

A lot of my free time has been going into home projects that I've been putting off for years such as completely refurbishing the wood fence around the yard. Since no professionals (or even trained people) are involved in this project, I've been doing a lot of pressure washing and basic carpentry. It's going slowly but it did justify my buying a band saw which opens up whole new vistas of caveman carpentry for me.

And then there was repairing and debugging the sprinkler system, re-potting all the plants, troubleshooting the exterior security cameras, plus a couple of  unfinished interior projects and redoing my PC setup. Then at work there's been a whole let's-move-the-entire-facility-to-a-new-location-without-affecting-customers-at-all-except-the-phones-and-internet-didn't-work-for-almost-two-weeks-afterward thing going on.

So yeah - I've been slacking like a slacker.

Quotey McQuoteface Roundup

Quote I

That’s a not insignificant part of the reason why Trump’s favorability is consistently so low in polls, I think. It’s not that he’s not volunteering during a crisis, it’s that he whines inconsolably about every setback despite being one of the hundred or so most privileged people on the planet. Even if you allow that he does it strategically rather than out of simple vanity, because it tends to work in getting him what he wants, the spectacle of a celebrity billionaire who lives in a gilded apartment in the sky above Manhattan whining that the media is mean to him appeals to literally no one outside his own cult of personality. Even Rush, who’s spent the past year apologizing for Trump, seems to find it hard to take. It’s not the sort of thing you’d waste time doing if you’re trying to claw back 10 percent from Hillary Clinton in the polls. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d spend time doing if you’re trying to prepare your base for a loss and are desperate for them to understand that it’s not your fault.

-- Allahpundit on why attacking the media is not a viable presidential campaign strategy

Quote II

“Don’t bring that violence here,” said Kimberly Neal, one of Smith’s sisters.

Despite CNN’s selective editing, Neal was not calling for peace — she was calling for peace in black neighborhoods and requesting that rioters instead target the white community for violence. “Burning down sh*t ain’t going to help nothing,” she continued. “Y’all burning down sh*t we need in our community. Take that sh*t to the suburbs. Burn that sh*t down. We need our weave.”

-- the sister of Sylville Smith calling for 'peace' and better-targeted rioting

Quote III

"The five-shot rifle, that’s a standard military rifle; the problem is if you attach a clip to it so it can fire more shells and if you remove the pin so that it becomes an automatic weapon, and those are independent criminal offenses,” Weld said. “That is when they become, essentially, a weapon of mass destruction. The problem with handguns probably is even worse than the problem of the AR15."

-- Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate Bill Weld who also forgot about the 'shoulder thing that goes up'

Quote IV

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live our lives without warning, like an actor going on cold.”

-- from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Quote V

I personally feel, by the way, that it’s probably time that we start the process of fixing the Star Wars numbering system. I understand that we cannot simply pretend that the first three movies ever happened, but there’s still no reason to reward failure. We need an alternate method for counting these movies.

-- Moe Lane

Quote VI

Now I've analyzed this movie with a team of cheerleaders, who all came to one unanimous conclusion: that if I let them go, they won't tell nobody.

-- from Mr. Plinkett's review of The Phantom Menace

Quote VII

Charli XCX isn't so much a singer who strips as she is a stripper who sings.

-- from WWTDD

Battle of the Boys and Election 2016

Since we're now in the general election season it's time to check in with the boys and see who they're endorsing for president in 2016.

Clock Boy: Not Trump
While he hasn't explicitly endorsed any candidate, his comments and those of his dad make it clear that Trump is a no-go for multiple reasons. And they've been hanging out with Democrats in DC recently so expect a Hillary endorsement at some point.

Balloon Boy: Trump
B-Boy has always been a bit of a wildcard so it shouldn't be surprising that he'd go for the wildcard candidate. And by wildcard I really mean attention whore.

Bat Boy: ?? Trump?
Sadly Bat Boy hasn't been active politically since 2008 when he endorsed McCain then switched over to Obama. His whereabouts and current activities are unknown but assuming that he's even aware of the election in his cave hideout, I have a feeling that he'd go for Trump. Just a hunch on my part though.

And then there's the real bellwether of the election: space alien.

Space alien: Probably Hillary
Space alien is bit hard to peg and he hasn't been active in politics in recent years either but his endorsement/prediction record going back to Reagan in 1980 has been 100%. He supported Clinton both times, then GW Bush, and then Obama. He hasn't said anything to date but based on his long personal history with the Clintons I'm guessing he's on Team Hillary.