Tom McMahon

Galleries of Holocaust Images

Galleries of Holocaust Images

Ben Stein On Wal-Mart

From Ben Stein (duh!)

Here’s a shocker. I love Wal-Mart. I know it’s almost always on the receiving end of bad press. It ruins neighborhoods. It puts small businesses out of business. It wrecks the balance of trade. It pays its workers poorly and treats them mean. It makes overseas workers into slaves. That's what the news says. The truth is that Wal-Mart is a major blessing for most Americans who live close enough to one to shop there and for the people who work at them. My smart friend C.L. Werner in Omaha made the point really clearly. When a Wal-Mart opens in a town, he said, it's as if everyone in the town got a raise. That's because the stuff at Wal-Mart is so much cheaper than that same merchandise was anywhere else.

Postal Art Gallery: Alabama Baby by Martha Chase

Postal Art Gallery: Alabama Baby by Martha Chase

100 Years of Ayn Rand

From Andrew Stuttaford:

To call Ayn Rand, the high priestess of the human will, a mere force of nature would to her have been an insult as well as a cliche. But how else to describe this extraordinary, maddening, and indestructible individual? Born a century ago this year into the flourishing bourgeoisie of glittering, doomed St. Petersburg, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was to triumph over revolution, civil war, Lenin's dictatorship, an impoverished immigrant existence, and bad reviews in the New York Times to become a strangely important figure in the history of American ideas.

Even the smaller details of Rand's life come with the sort of epic implausibility found in - oh, an Ayn Rand novel. On her first day of looking for work in Hollywood, who gives her a lift in his car? Cecil B. DeMille. Of course he does. Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for her. Years later, when she's famous, the sage of selfishness, ensconced in her Murray Hill eyrie, a young fellow by the name of Alan Greenspan becomes a member of the slightly creepy set that sits at the great woman's feet. Apparently he went on to achieve some prominence in later life.

I think it would be great fun to work up some sort of virtual boxing match between her and Max Schmeling, who was also born 100 years ago.

The Aerial Photography of Alex MacLean

The Aerial Photography of Alex MacLean

(via The Ultimate Insult )

The Google Calculator Goes To Cooking School!

If you enter this into Google:

1 cup + 2 tsp

You get this:

(1 US cup) + (2 US teaspoons) = 246.446081 milliliters

Very handy for the precision-minded metric-savvy cook, eh? But 6 (!) decimal places for milliliters? You can tell these guys went to Stanford, and not cooking school. (via my old boss Tsuri Bernstein, who long ago rescued me from the abyss of writing huge replacement parts manuals for MRI scanners. )

The Armed Forces Radio Service: Savior of Old-Time Radio

The Armed Forces Radio Service: Savior of Old-Time Radio

From The Digital Deli Online:

Their Transcription Unit recorded most of the popular commercial programs of the era and shipped them overseas to military transmission facilities for rebroadcast. The transcribed programs were recorded primarily on unbreakable, 16-inch vinyl discs, each containing approximately 30 minutes of programming, 15 minutes to a side. At the height of its production, The AFRS shipped an average of just over 50,000 of these discs overseas each month, with an additional 20,000 discs sent to Navy vessels monthly. The AFRS recorded some 70-80 of these programs each week, including as much as 15-20 hours of specially produced AFRS programming. By the end of World War II, the AFRS Network encompassed nearly 800 broadcast facilities worldwide--over 50 of them in England alone. It's to this Transcription Unit that we owe our deepest gratitude, for the vast majority of the shows and episodes that have been preserved to this day.

Lutran Airlines

Minnesota has a new airline... YA, SHURE, YA BETCHA! DIS IS DA LATEST AIR SERVICE TO SPROUT UP IN MINNYSOTA. ALSO SERVING VISCONSIN, NORT AND SOUT DAKOTA AND MONTANA.

If you are travelin soon, consider Lutran Air, da no-frills airline. You're all in da same boat on Lutran Air, where flyin is an upliftin experience.

Der is no first class on any Lutran Air flight. Meals are potluck. Rows 1-6, bring rolls; 7-15, bring a salad; 16-21, a main dish, and 22-30, a dessert. Basses and tenors please sit in da rear of de aircraft. Everyone is responsible for his or her own baggage. All fares are by freewill offering and da plane will not land 'til da budget is met.

Pay attention to your flight attendant, who will acquaint you with da safety system aboard dis Lutran Air 599. "Okay den, listen up. I'm only gonna say dis once. In de event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, I am frankly going to be real surprised and so will Captain Olson, because we fly right around two tousand feet, so loss of cabin pressure would probably indicate da Second Coming or someting of dat nature, and I wouldn't boder with doze little masks on da rubber tubes. You're gonna have bigger tings to worry about than dat. Just stuff doze back up in dair little holes. Probably da masks fell out because of turbulence which, to be honest wit you, we're going to have quite a bit of at two tousand feet ... sort a like driving across a plowed field; but after a while you get used to it. In de event of a water landing, I'd say forget it. Start saying da Lord's Prayer and just hope you get to da part about forgive us our sins as we forgive doze who sin against us, which some people say 'trespass against us,' which isn't right, but what can you do?"

De use of cell phones on da plane is strictly forbidden, not because day may interfere with da plane's navigational system, which is seat of da pants all da way. No, it's because cell phones are a pain in da wazoo, and if God meant you to use a cell phone, He would have put your mout on da side of your head.

We're going to start lunch right about noon and it's buffet style with da coffee pot up front. Den we'll have da hymn sing; hymnals are in da seat pocket in front of you. Don't take yours wit you when you go or I am going to be real upset and I am not kiddin!

Right now I'll say Grace. "Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and let deze gifts to us be blessed. Fadar, Son, and Holy Ghost, may we land in Dulut or pretty close. Amen!"

(via Jim Kohli)

Conspiracy: The Wannsee Conference on DVD

Conspiracy: The Wannsee Conference on DVD

A 2001 production from HBO Films. I haven't seen it yet, but it looks interesting. A production note:

This production used an almost theatrical performance style during shooting. The performers stayed in costume and character from the start to the end of each day of filming. A set was used with solid (non-moving) walls and ceilings, to reinforce the reality of the setting, and eliminate any delays for changing camera or lighting setups. The action was filmed in extremely long sequences, sometimes 20 pages or more of script at a stretch, which is unusual in this type of production. However many of the actors have a Shakespearean background, and having to memorize this amount of dialogue was not a new experience for them. The production style required the use of the Super 16 film format. This was needed because of the longer film magazines available for those cameras, and also the smaller size, allowing the cameras to get in very close to the performers sitting around a conference table, the setting used for the bulk of the story.

This Weird Intermingling of High Ideals With Gross Materialism

From David Brooks:

I hope you heard the president talk about freedom as "the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul," and also saw the drunken, loud and privileged twentysomethings carrying each other piggyback down K Street after midnight.

What you saw in Washington that day is what you see in America so often - this weird intermingling of high ideals with gross materialism, the lofty and the vulgar cheek to cheek.

The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and assume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. The real America, they insist, is the money-grubbing, resource-wasting, TV-drenched, unreflective bimbo of the earth. The high-toned language, the anti-Americans say, is just a cover for the quest for oil, or the desire for riches, dominion and war.

But of course they've got it exactly backward. It's the ideals that are real.