Home of the "Little Known Blogger"
The unsolicited, unreasoned, uninformed, unapologetic opinions of Rev. Joe Dirt
Like trite old saying, if you have to ask…it is a good bet you are not a 1%.
This is a little tool found on the Wall Street Journal site.
“The calculator above shows where your income stands on the wide range of the 99%. An annual salary above $506,000 puts you in the top 1%, while you need to make less than $2,500 a year to be in the bottom 1%. Where do you stand?”
It can be argued that household wealth would be a better gauge than household income, but this does give a sense.
Memphis has rails to trails project named The Greenline. It runs from Shelby Farms, a county park, to the area known as Midtown. It has become very popular with bikers, joggers, walkers and the occasional rollerblader. Part of route of The 
Greenline goes by the Shelby County prison.
When I go to jog or bicycle I actually park in a prison parking lot. Interesting enough the County police recently placed a mobile surveillance unit in the lot. You know, one of those contraptions that flashes blue constantly and has cameras up on a stalk. I can only surmise that there had been some issues with vehicles in the parking lot as it is well used by patrons of The Greenline, and visitors and employees of the prison. Is stupidity or chutzpah to commit crimes right at the prison’s front gate?
By the time I get off work this time of year it is already dark. Nevertheless, many evenings I will get a run in. This particular night due the cold and the wind I had on a wind shell with a hood pulled around my head. I had just started on the path, and was doing some fast walking to warm up before I started jogging. I heard someone yell to my left Continue reading “Just another day in Memphis”
…yeah I know you did not ask!
We start off life with time moving a snail’s pace. We end life with it achieving hypersonic speeds, passing so quickly it all becomes a blur.
And another thing I do not understand is this. Why do Evangelicals always quote scripture to you like that is the final authority on everything? Obviously, if you are a non-believer, that is a logical argument of the dog chasing his own tail variety.
This branch of religion (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) has it roots in nomads who could not figure out for 40 years how to cross the Sinai Desert to get from Egypt to Israel. The distance is less than 500 kilometers. The piece de resistance is that while they wandered for 40 years in this barren place, food rained down from the heavens upon them. I can think of many places today that this would be a blessing indeed. I’ve yet to see it though.
Once they finally figured where the heck Israel was, they went on a genocidal tear to take the land from the inhabitants that were already there.
Then we get into Jesus, a religious figure with no historical record. It just seems improbably to me that a personage of this import would not put at least a minor verifiable page into history. All we really have is mythology. This puts him in the same company as Zeus, Thor, and Shiva.
Put that hound on a trail that I can see, feel, smell or otherwise sense, then get back to me.
Okay…I’m trying to understand a couple things that happened the other day.
I walked in a conference room at work. There were a group of folks gathered around a computer monitor. On the monitor was a YouTube clip from Talladega Nights, Will Farrell’s salute to NASCAR. There were 4, 5 or 6 folks watching the clip which was a scene where Farrell’s character, Ricky Bobby, is praying over a white trash dinner about to be served. He is praying to “Baby Jesus”. Shortly Ricky’s wife takes exception with his praying to Baby Jesus. Ricky’s partner pipes in about a partying Jesus.
There were several folks laughing heartily. One was nearly falling out of his chair. Let me be frank. I do not understand Will Ferrell’s popularity. In my universe he is the un-funniest man in America. That is the first thing I do not understand. Why is this man even working in show business.
I know for a fact that all of these folks but one would classify themselves as religious. A couple I would classify as seriously religious. Now I am an agnostic trending Continue reading “Will Ferrell and Baby Jesus”
…yeah I know you did not ask!
Was Wal-Mart the lead lemming or the Pied Piper in the plunge we all took over the cliff when we moved our manufacturing offshore?
A lobbying group, Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, put out a memo to one of their clients, the American Bankers Association about “constructing a negative narrative about Occupy Wall Street”. I’m not sure it is really a smoking gun as most of this falls into the realm of “common knowledge”. I do think that most folks believe this is how our sick system really works. It is, however, very scary to see this in print.
From an article on CommonDreams.org gleaned from MSNBC:
According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Continue reading “Smoking Gun Aimed at OWS”
I met a fairy today who said she would grant me one wish.
“I want to live forever,” I said.
“Sorry,” said the fairy, “I’m not allowed to grant wishes like that!”
“Fine,” I said, “then I want to die after the U.S. Congress gets their heads out of their asses.”
“You crafty bastard,” said the fairy.
We were sitting around the table the other night playing cards (well Phase 10 – which is almost a card game). For some reason the question came up as what the difference was between strategy and tactic. We hashed it around a while, and we came to a consensus.
A few days later I was listening to NPR and they were doing a story on Newt Gingrich. They said of an exchange he had with a reporter that it was “a strategy masquerading as a tactic’. He was turning the tables on the political press. The reporter asked him a long winded question that was essentially of the type “so how long since you stopped beating your wife.” Mr. Gingrich flipped it on the reporter and asked him when he was going to stop asking “gotcha” questions.
From the NPR print version of the story I heard By Attacking The Media, Gingrich Built A Following here is the actual exchange: Continue reading “Strategy Masquerading as a Tactic”