“When that finale is done, the only thing you hear is the rip-roaring of the crowd,” [Hamburg Fireworks president Ken Sprague] said. “They’re saying, ‘Oh, my God,’ and, ‘Wow.’ The wow factor is huge.” . . .
Sprague said it’s difficult to say exactly how much firepower will be let off Monday. But the five-minute grand finale alone has more than 3,000 shots.
“The grand finale is what makes the Lancaster show so awesome,” Sprague said. “Every grand finale, in my opinion, should end with the big loud kabooms, or what we call salutes. It’s very intense at the end of the Lancaster show.”
Five minutes = 300 seconds, so the finale (which actually went for six minutes) averaged nearly 10 shots per second.
Of course, that’s a professional show, but you’d be amazed at what can be accomplished using ordinary consumer fireworks — if you use enough. And by “enough,” I mean Continue reading Now THAT Is What I Call a ‘Finale’ →
“[Obama] really is a solid, normal person who remained grounded in the middle of all this craziness. And I like to think that, now that he’s President, with his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness, he’ll do the job that must be done. The trickery is over.”
— Ann Althouse, Jan. 22, 2009
“The guy who said that his election would heal the planet and cause the seas to recede was the guy we were warning Ann and all the other rubes about. Ann thought she had Obama figured out; that the guy behind the curtain was sane and smart and up to the job; the guy on stage was all an act. As Glenn Reynolds so often asks ‘who’s the rube,’ Ann?”
— Moneyrunner, July 9, 2011
No American should ever feel compelled to vote for a candidate they believe to be the lesser of two evils, and I didn’t.
If you put a gun to my head and told me to vote for John McCain, I’d tell you to go ahead and pull the trigger. The whole point of calling this blog “The Other McCain” was to distance myself from the disgrace of my distant cousin. He is the emblem and example of all that is wretched, dishonest and corrupt in American politics, and if there is any comfort in the Obama Age, it is this: John McCain will never be president.
We should all thank God for that. And the Republican Party should hang its head in shame at having nominated that treacherous bastard.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election, I wrote three columns analyzing the GOP’s well-deserved defeat:
Go read all of those and tell me if I was wrong about any of it. I wasn’t. I was right, right, right, the whole time Ann Althouse was being wrong, wrong , wrong. However, I’m not just reminding you of how right I was for the sake of my own vainglorious ego, but because Althouse — by continuing to defend her disastrous choice as “rational” — is undermining the work that needs to be done to convince millions of her fellow rubes that they should become ex-Democrats:
Such irrational expectations are inevitably followed by disillusionment. No prediction of what the next four years might bring is safer than this: The yawning gap between Hope and reality will produce a bumper crop of ex-Democrats.
I wrote that less than three weeks after Election Day, and Professor Althouse is doing the exact opposite of what needs to be done to persuade those millions to abandon the Democratic Party. Instead of claiming she “made a rational choice,” she needs to begin asking herself why — and honestly telling readers how — she was so completely deluded as to believe that Obama would be successful because of “his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness.”
He’s a left-wing ideological fanatic, Professor!
His calm exterior demeanor, his resonant baritone voice, his occasional nod toward political pragmatism — these superficialities cannot deceive intelligent observers. Barack Hussein Obama is a menace to American liberty, inimicably hostile to everything good and decent in our nation’s traditions, and he must be defeated.
Why does Ann Althouse refuse to own up to being a rube? Does intellectual pride prevent her from admitting that her expectations of Hope and Change were no more rational than those of Peggy Joseph?
“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he’s gonna help me.”
You’re even a bigger rube than Peggy Joseph, Professor, because you should have known better, and you refuse to confess your error.
We know Althouse breaks political convention, and she’s been hammering Obama for some time now. Besides, you just like posting her picture.
No, honestly: Read the linked posts — both Althouse and Moneyrunner — and see if you don’t think it was a bit too much for her to put an asterisked footnote into her Friday post, trying to deny her rubeness.
Or should that be “rubehood”? Never mind. The point is that she needs to own it, and until she does, she deserves to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.
Wow, it hardly seems a whole year has gone by since last summer’s big wedding! And since that grand occasion, Kennedy has graduated summa cum laude, and Martin has been accepted to law school in Baltimore.
And before you ask: No, no grandchildren yet, although now that Kennedy has been hired to teach in Frederick, Md., the young couple are thinking about buying a house. When I say “young couple,” I mean young couple: Kennedy just turned 22, and Martin’s 24.
How many parents today actually want their sons to become full-fledged adults at age 21 or 22, working full-time, getting married and starting families? Not many, I’ll wager. But it was different forty years ago:
Last year Vanessa Wight, of Columbia University, used data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to show how young people are increasingly delaying marriage. In 1970, the median age for a first marriage was 20.8 for women and 23.2 for men. It is now 25.9 for women and 28.1 for men.
She said: ‘Some research suggests that the notion of adulthood is changing and that marriage and parenthood, once the hallmarks of adult status, are no longer as important to defining a successful transition to adulthood.’
It was the cultural norm back then, but now a young couple who marries at the median ages of 1970 raises eyebrows among the older generation. . . .
The key to the whole “Why Johnny Won’t Grow Up” puzzle may be this: the permanent commitment of traditional marriage isn’t only irrelevant to most young adults; it’s not embraced by their parents, either. . . .
Read the whole thing. What is in greatest danger of being lost, I would argue, is the sense of romantic idealism among young people. If teenagers can’t dream that their romance is “Always and Forever,” is it really romantic at all? And if they are constantly urged to delay marriage, told that they are “too young to get serious,” what happens if they start to believe that? Two years ago, I wrote about this issue in “Forbidding to Marry” at the Hot Air Green Room, which I recall to your attention.
But this isn’t a social science lecture, it’s a congratulations to my daughter and her handsome husband. Happy anniversary!
Wow! You’ve got to admit, those U.S. Postal Inspectors are really on their toes. Someone tried to send me a package — which “contained a confirmable CARD to the tune of US1,500,000.00 USD” — but the package got held up due to the “USA Government Anti-Terrorist Campaign.” I never would have known about this if the USPIS hadn’t sent me an e-mail telling me that I need to give them an affidivat number, and “the cost of the Affidavit is US$158.”
The really scary part? This urgent e-mail (with the subject line “Parcel Withheld for Security Reason”) somehow ended up in my spam folder, along with all those bogus Nigerian phishing scam e-mails. However, because I just happened to be checking my spam folder, I saw this urgent notice:
UNITED STATES POSTAL INSPECTION SERVICE
PO BOX 555, NEW YORK NY 10116-0555
This is to notify you that we have intercepted your parcel from UPS COURIER SERVICE for some security reasons stated below:
Our scanning system has detected that your parcel contained a confirmable CARD to the tune of US1,500,000.00 USD.
Also for the Delivery of the Parcel to continue, you are in obligation to obtain from Spain, a Duly Sworn Affidavit from Spanish High Court which will back up the Origin of Fund. This is in line with the Anti-Terrorist Campaign which the USA Government has embarked on recently to protect our Territory from future attacks.
You should therefore contact the sender of the CARD or the UPS Courier Agent in Madrid Spain to get the Sworn Affidavit for you while we wait to receive from you the Affidavit File Number to enable us forward your CARD to your address.
Below the contact information. Note that the cost of the Affidavit is US$158 and do not hesitate to remit the amount to him.
We shall then forward the CARD to you and you will be sure of a genuine CARD that is coming to you. We are doing this for your interest considering the rate which fraudulent and stolen checks/CARD are been sent to our innocent citizen that most times put them in problem. Always send your correspondence to our secure email: postal_inspector@XXX.XXX
Your urgent action on this notice will be appreciated.
Sincerely,
Andrew Marshall
Chief Postal Inspector
My “urgent action” is to share this with all my blog readers, particularly anyone clever enough to contact “Mr Lewis Aries” and see if you can convince him that you’re from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Because that would be freaking awesome, don’t you think?
That’s her in the center, in 1938. “Dancer” is probably not the first thing you think of when you think of Betty Ford, but “rock singer” is probably not the first thing you think of when you think of me. Yet I was once a rock singer and guitarist, and Betty Ford was once a dancer and model:
Betty Ford, the widow of late President Gerald Ford and a co-founder of an eponymous addiction center in California, has died at the age of 93, according to the director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum.
Ford died Friday evening with family at her bedside, according to a family member. . . .
Born Elizabeth Anne Bloomer in Chicago, she grew up in Grand Rapids. At the age of 21, she moved to New York City to work as a dancer and model before heading back to the Midwest two years later.
One year after divorcing William Warren after five years of marriage, she wed Gerald Ford — a former star football player at the University of Michigan and a decorated U.S. Navy veteran — in 1948. That year, the woman now known as Betty Ford campaigned with her new husband on his successful campaign to become a U.S. congressman.
