Where most year-end greetings come with photos of adorable children and picturesque snow scenes, this one featured a picture of a food-bank truck (pictured) with the following text:
Past contributions by our firm have enabled the Daily Bread Food Bank to deliver over 1.3 million meals to those in need in our community.
This year, we decided to contribute a truck to help make the deliveries a little easier.
When you see this truck in our community, you may notice that our name is not on it. That is because the gift of this truck is made in your honor. It would not have been possible without you.
Nice work, gentlepersons.
The Daily Bread Food Bank (an affiliate of America's Second Harvest) is one of the charities our household donates to.
I don't know if I should be calling this video brilliant, perverted, or a wakeup call for western civilization or all of the above.
Sotted via Boingboing's Cory Doctorow who writes,
This superb video mashup from The Beatnix takes fuzzy footage of the Beatles in concert and seamlessly converts it to a pleasepleaseme-esque rendition of Stairway to Heaven. John Scalzi promises it'll make your head explode and he's not far wrong.
It may be only temporary, but the netroots and the civil liberties crowd won a big victory yesterday by derailing FISA. Senator Dodd spent about ten hours on the Senate floor talking against retroactive immunity. It's the first sign of a Congress willing to stand up to the Bush/Cheney fear-mongering steam roller.
You might think some of this would be fairly big news?
But not much sign of it in the paper this morning, and nothing I can see on the front page of the electronic NYT or WashPost. There are small inside items: in the “Washington” section of the Times, and the “national” section of the Post (A02 of the print edition, which is better than nothing), but clearly neither paper thinks it's that big a deal.
Miami is blessed (?) with both a city government and a county government. So there is a Mayor of Miami-the-city and a different Mayor of Miami-Dade-the-County. I live in Coral Gables, just south of Miami-the-city, but inside Miami-Dade County.
All this is a warmup to introducing this video from Mayor TV, an initiative to get big-city Mayors to talk about the issues that they think the Presidential candidates should be addressing. One of the first to participate is Manny Diaz, Mayor of Miami-the-City.
Not being a constituent, I don't follow Manny Diaz as closely as I do Carlos Alvarez, but I think he did a good job in this video. Apparently, this is characteristic, at least if this complaint from a local columnist in 2005 is to be believed:
Speaking as a columnist, I can say that Manny Diaz has been an absolute disaster as mayor of Miami. As Diaz's first term in office draws to a close and he quietly raises funds for his re-election campaign — a campaign in which he has yet to draw an opponent — it's hardly an exaggeration for reporters to deem his administration as having presided over the worst state of affairs at city hall in three decades. In other words, Miami is finally beginning to resemble a properly functioning municipality instead of a punch line.
For folks trying to live, work, and raise families here, this turnabout is nothing short of miraculous. Our local press corps, however, has grown accustomed to a steady diet of headline-grabbing corruption indictments, dire financial crises, and incidents of bizarre personal behavior better suited to a junior-high playground than an organ of government. And so the prospect of four more years of Manny Diaz is chilling. After all, chronicling the rise of competence never won anybody a Pulitzer.
Did I mention that Mayor Diaz has a JD from the University of Miami School of Law?
Someone please explain how I can get a job as a columnist for a major newspaper.
I guarantee that no matter how badly I do I will never write the sort of ghastly risible utter tripe that appears to be in the new book by the LA Times's latest addition to its pundit stable. See Sadly, No! for a sneek peek at Jonah Goldberg's “Liberal Fascism”.
