corn syrup drips down his chest, the color off

This NYT editorial almost has it right–but right now we don’t need to blame anyone. Let’s get the job done. Put a moratorium on blaming people, and fix NO [New Orleans, 2014-02-05] and everywhere else that got messed up by Katrina (hurray for my first Katrina-related post that has nothing to do with a stripper in Montreal). I don’t care whose fault it is. It could be Bush, it could be the NO government, it could be the friggin Democratic party for all I care. It could be the hippies or the glaciers, or even the elves. But pointing my finger at someone and saying “He did it!” never fixed whatever it was I had just broken.

On an aside, it’s really no one’s fault. We don’t need to blame people, we need to help people. 300 years of building your city below sea level on a coast that is repeatedly subjected to hurricanes, and nobody sees this as a bad idea in the first place? (this is what I like to call “blaming people who don’t care anymore). Seriously, to paraphrase what my mum said tonight, if Mother Nature doesn’t want a city there that night, then you had better believe it won’t be there in the morning.

[EDIT: Regarding the title, it probably refers to a movie we made for AP English at the end of my senior year of high school.  We used dyed corn syrup as blood (yes, that kind of movie).  Carry on. 2014-02-05]

Leonardo was a man, who had a craving for yams

“One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students’ weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, ‘When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.'”

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