Clown Show: Budget Edition

clownshow

“Budget proposals always involve some guesswork into the unknowable, and administrations routinely massage numbers to their political advantage. But this proposal is unusually brazen in its defiance of basic math, and in its accounting discrepancies amounting to trillions-with-a-t rather than mere millions or billions.”

(via Politico)

3 Things I Remember About: 1978

Cinnamon City

Let’s do another installment of my 3 Things series.

Here’s the list so far.  I started with the year 1965, because that’s the first year I can remember 3 things about.

1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977

1) The first half of 1978 was the second semester of my senior year in high school.  Because I had already been accepted to college, I tried to sign up for Typing and Shop.  Coach Hutchinson, who in addition to being my favorite teacher ever was the only teacher smart enough to do the schedules pre-computer, put me in Chemistry II and Physics II instead.  At the time I thought it was 45% funny and 55% annoying, but it worked out (although these days I find that I need all the stuff I would have leaned in Shop much more than all the stuff I have forgotten about Chemistry and Physics).

My friends and I were into Thespians, the theater group.  I was the president my senior year.  We did a western comedy as our senior play, and my friend Karen and I decided to spice it up a little bit for our classmates (captured nicely in the above photo, which unsurprisingly didn’t make it into the yearbook).  I was also president of the Key Club.  Some cats tried unsuccessfully to impeach me because they said I wasn’t paying enough attention to my duties- only partially because I missed some meetings and whatnot while practicing for and emceeing the Miss Brave Pageant.  My friend Sarah won.  She later unfriended me twice on Facebook, which is the current record.  There is a large group tied for second at once each.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

2) I have always loved horror movies, and one of the best ones of all time was released in 1978.  Halloween.

3) I started at Wake Forest that fall.  The beer drinking age back then was 18, so you had to be 18 to get in the local bars.  An October birthday meant I got left behind a lot the first couple of months.  A bunch (I’m talking multiple carloads) of my friends from Clemson came up for the football game that fall.  We had a wild and crazy time.  I’ll just leave it at that.

My music of the era:

Here are two records (or 8-tracks) I listened to a lot that year.

Jimmy Buffett – Son of a Son of a Sailor.

Elvis Costello – My Aim is True.  That record ushered in a great decade of new wave/alternative rock.

Assuming you were alive then, what do you remember about 1978?

Misplaced Fandom and the American Clown Show

“The suggestion that Comey was fired to punish him for overzealously mishandling the Clinton email investigation appears laughable: Just this morning, Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino gleefully proposed to release video of Hillary Clinton’s concession call in order to hurt and humiliate her—and top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway laughed along with him.”

This is Not a Drill – The Atlantic

Anyone who is OK with the way Donald Trump is attempting to run our (our, not his or theirs or yours) country is neither a Republican nor a Democrat nor a rational being.  He or she is rejecting everything that matters in favor of some irrational, misplaced concept of fandom and disdain for the “other team.”