Easter Awakenings

At The Crack Of Noon

While reading a movie review by Lewis Wallace, I was impressed by his view on trying to pigeon hole a piece of art into an established category;

“Trying to dump the film into one of Hollywood’s traditional buckets (sci-fi, romance, comedy) simply doesn’t work: To do so would be like trying to pound a square peg into a unicorn’s empty eye socket.”

I sometimes encounter situations where I am asked, “What kind of music do you play?”.

I am expected to name a familiar category like Blues, Rock, Country, Standards, Jazz, or maybe, Dance. Something like that would be misleading and untrue, but it’s a familiar answer for a person, or standardized form that I might be filling out.

Now, I am inspired to combine mythical creatures with idiomatic expressions in an effort to create an appropriate metaphor to illustrate my musical capabilities.

Campaign Contributions

During the last elections, I gave a few dollars to the Obama campaign and the Democratic party. I felt like it helped to let our leaders know that there were some of us in the less than gazillionaire 98%, who could collectively raise significant amounts of money.

We won. I thought the fundraising was done. Silly me.

I unsubscribed to most of the sites that kept asking for more, but I like to get the DCCC updates, so I allow that email to get to my inbox. In the past, I have written to at least one of these fundraising groups to explain why they would not be getting donations from me, unless they changed their strategies.

Today I replied to a DCCC fundraising email from Steve Israel to try to get him to understand;

Dear Steve,

Although I have donated money before, I hesitate to do so anymore.

Let me tell you why, and how we can change that;

I don't want my money going into the republican war chests, and spending money to buy television and radio time on republican owned stations will do that.

Every dollar we spend to buy time on republican owned media, including newspapers and magazines, goes to the 'other team'. That is not smart campaign strategy.

We need to spend our money on promotion methods that put the money into our own businesses.

Printing well designed, simple descriptions of our objectives and goals, and mailing them to our base will be more effective. Use union printers and the U. S. Postal Service and we will divert millions of dollars away from  republican campaigns. In case you haven't figured it out, yet, every dollar we spend in the media is the dollar they will use to outspend us.

If we can get all the registered democrats to vote, we can win every race. They will vote if we reach out to them through the mail, the internet, democratic radio stations, and independent newspapers.

If we spend the money on network TV, Syndicated radio, cable news stations, and right wing owned print media, we are giving the republicans that money to hire the better spin doctors to undo our campaign messages. I can't donate money that affects our party negatively.

I will be glad to donate to a strategy that works for us.

Sincerely,

Phil Seymour

Just as I finished sending that email, I got another appeal for donations from Russ Feingold at Progressives United. I sent him a copy of the email I sent to Steve.

I think I clearly illustrated the flaw in their campaign spending practices, but we will see.

I used about an hour of my Easter Sunday watching TED Talks. I find some of them to be fascinating. Especially the ones that I can relate to directly. Like this version of the encyclopedia game that I would like to include as …

Today’s Educational Video;

Chimborazo!