Archive for the ‘Opinion/The Rant’ Category
December 24th, 2009
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Author: by Tim Sampson
I’ve been conducting an experiment. I haven’t watched television, especially the news, or listened to the radio or read a newspaper or surfed the Internet news for almost two weeks. Part of the reason is a long story, but part of it has been to see if the quality of my life would change at all. It has. I keep hearing people talk and talk and talk about things and I don’t really know what they are talking about and…
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by Randy Haspel
The recent death of the actor Gene Barry brought a wash of memories over me about the time he visited Memphis. Barry was starring in the lead role of the hit TV western Bat Masterson, the legendary Dodge City lawman, and was to be the featured attraction at the Mid-South Fair’s annual rodeo. Barry’s series was among TV’s top-rated shows when he was booked for the fair appearance, guaranteeing a large segment of the audience would be his young fans.…
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by Tim Sampson
I admit to being way behind the curve on “celebrity” happenings around the world, because I find them utterly tedious, but I am going to ask this question before I spend part of my life conducting a Google search on the matter: Who are Tareq and Michaele Salahi? Yeah, yeah, I know they are the poorly dressed couple who crashed the White House state dinner and have been splattered all over the news ever since (which I’m sure they love),…
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by Randy Haspel
When my e-mail in-box became filled with ads from every merchant from whom I’ve ever purchased anything, offering steep discounts and free shipping, I knew that the holiday shopping season had arrived. Every news outlet was talking about Black Friday. I understand the day after Thanksgiving is when retailers are supposed to “go into the black,” but as a history buff, I can’t help but think of the original Black Friday on October 25, 1929, when the stock market crashed,…
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by Tim Sampson
If you hold the unfathomable belief that life exists only on Earth and not on any other planet, I suggest you pay very close attention to the Sarah Palin Book and Talk-Show Tour 2009 that has been under way for several days now. I defy you to explain from where these followers of hers emerged. Yes. I know. I promised long ago that I would stop writing about her, but her most recent foray into the civilized world is unexplored…
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by Tim Sampson
If you hold the unfathomable belief that life exists only on Earth and not on any other planet, I suggest you pay very close attention to the Sarah Palin Book and Talk-Show Tour 2009 that has been under way for several days now. I defy you to explain from where these followers of hers emerged. Yes. I know. I promised long ago that I would stop writing about her, but her most recent foray into the civilized world is unexplored…
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by Randy Haspel
I would like to offer a heartfelt and blanket apology to anyone I ever mocked or criticized for having inadvertently cast a vote for Sarah Palin while trying to register their choice for John McCain as president. To my lasting humiliation, while casting a vote for Al Gore in 2000, I am guilty of voting for the mamzer Joe Lieberman. At the time, I felt it was an inspired choice by Gore. Holy Joe was the anti-Clinton, and I was…
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by Tim Sampson
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the freakin’ weirdest of times. They were fun times and they were stressful times. It was two decades ago, and we were starting this strange little newspaper called the Memphis Flyer. I was the first editor and in my 20s (for a very short time) and weighed about 50 pounds less than I do now. We didn’t have e-mail, the World Wide Web, spell-check, blogs, Facebook,…
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by Randy Haspel
I suppose it was a coincidence that both the National Geographic and Discovery channels broadcast documentaries about the CIA’s experiments in mind control on successive nights. There was nothing on the shows that had not been revealed during the 1975 Church Committee congressional hearings, where the entire ghoulish laundry list of CIA abuses was unfurled before the public, but one inadvertent piece of evidence made my jaw drop. It concerned the CIA’s MK ULTRA program, begun in the 1950s, which…
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by Tim Sampson
Those crazy Canadians have already beaten us to it. Just when I was organizing my leap into the world of capitalism and had finalized plans to make millions, I read that a company in Canada had created a “Balloon Boy” costume for Halloween. It’s on the market and it is expected to be the most popular costume this year. It’s either that or Michael Jackson, which seems a bit morbid to me. I hope those costumes don’t include intravenous drug…
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