Welcome To The Kakistocracy

Any way you spell it, we’re living in it.

Something happened during the recent National Spelling Bee. A word that’s lingered in obscurity for a century – a word we all really need today- wiggled back into the public discourse, thanks to Isabel Jacobson, a 14 year old spelling champion from Madison, Wisconsin. She mentioned that her favorite difficult word was kakistocracy.

Someone noticed, sent an email that made the rounds, and a friend of mine had an idea. We all agreed: this needs to be a bumper sticker!

I don’t usually like to put bumper stickers on my car, but this tickled me so I sent ActBlue $10 for three of them. You can get yours here or here.

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Saturday Cartoons

Geiger has ‘em.

The Planet Is Fine

As I’ve said before, George Carlin is my all-time favorite comic and this is my all-time favorite Carlin bit. It’s fifteen years old now, and watching it again in the context of today’s environmental situation it seems even more prescient now than it did then. It also seems to me today to be almost a caricature of itself in that it depicts how clueless even those of us who had an environmental conscience were about the real environmental issues that are now affecting us 15 years later. We were driving around like madmen back then just as we still are today, and even Carlin didn’t see that the massive burning of fossil fuel would be what would ultimately get us. We were all worried about making too much plastic. I also love the AIDS reference at the end. Yes, there is AIDS, but I think that The Planet has thought of a few more ways that it might shake us off when the time comes. Hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornadoes come to mind. Yes George, The Planet will survive us, the question is, can we survive it?Transcript below the fold (h/t Gospel Of Reason)

Late Night Music: So Young

It’s beer thirty here in LA and I’m sitting here wishing I was home on the first Friday in June, but I’m not, so I’m going to go out and get some dinner from the little Chinese place on Sunset and Laurel that I like and then come back to my home away from home and plan the revolution. I’m feeling very young tonight.

The Corrs are another band that my kids laugh at me for liking, but I must confess that I always have. First of all they sound really good, and they’re three sisters and a brother so that’s worth a listen right there. Then they’re Irish, which immediately gives them cache, and the icing on the cake is that the sisters are a joy to behold.

Four reasons I love this video:

1 – It’s a kickass performance of a great song.

2 – Dancing Babies.

3 – It’s is a stirring anthem to youth.

4 – Due to an unfortunate wordrobe/lighting malfunction, Andrea Corr looks like she peed in her pants halfway through the performance.

Enjoy!