GEORGE ROTHERT – Page 34 – George’s slightly off-center view of the world

You Are What You Eat

The Los Angeles Times recently published their quality ranking of French fries from fast-food chains. The grades assigned resulted in nearly two-hundred reader responses – not the deluge climate change or gun regulation topics generate, but a lot for fried potatoes – ranging from agreement to ho-hum to outrage that one’s favorite was rated poorly.

Number one: Five Guys, with McDonald’s ranked a distant second.

But what really generated controversy was the dead-last rating of In-N-Out. The California burger icon, lately creeping across borders into other states, is noted for its freshly-cooked menu items. It is also famous for its secret menu, so secret that it could take as long as twenty seconds to find on the Google machine.

“In-N-Out’s fries the worst? Del Taco’s fries among the best? What hot garbage is this???”
“In n Out Fries are awesome. What sucks is this list…who eats at McDonalds?!?!?!!!!!!!!!”
“Anyone who puts McD’s number 2 and In N Out last needs to be deported.”
“I’m horrified to read these blasphemous words about In-N-Out’s fries.”
(Tater-tot advocates also put in a few comments.)

Making America Great

“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” – Dick Cheney

I keep reminding myself to not write about politics. With 24-hour cable news and social media inundating us with politics, there’s no point in adding more to the pile. But, jeeez…

News flash: the federal deficit increased by 77% in the past year. A favorite conservative trope has been that Barack Obama increased the federal debt more than all previous presidents combined. Well, okay, but in fact the deficit went down each year Obama was in office. (You do know the difference between debt and deficit, don’t you?)

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

CNN’s Fake News Chart

“Men should be disqualified for public office. Women should run the planet. They’re better than us.”
– Ted Turner

If your memory is good, you may remember CNN as Jon Stewart’s favorite punching bag. Cable News Network, has had its ups and downs since Ted Turner founded it in 1980. Turner said the first all-news network and the first 24-hour news network was “my greatest career achievement.” (Marrying Jane Fonda was a personal achievement.)

Turner sold his greatest achievement, as part of Turner Broadcasting, to Time Warner in 1996 for $7.3 billion in stock. After Time Warner purchased AOL in 2001 Turner’s net worth sank along with T-W’s stock price.

CNN made its reputation with its coverage of the first Gulf War in 1991 and burnished it with reporting on 9/11. The network lost much of its reputation with incessant dubious reporting on plane crashes and disappeared young blonde women.

The renamed WarnerMedia is now owned by AT&T; CNN is now the favorite punching bag of the current occupant of the White House.

The Leader of the Free World

Although not in the same class as the above video, CNN recently performed a public service by publishing an interactive graphic charting the White House’s ever-changing answers to various issues:

Russian Collusion
Comey Firing
Mueller Legal Process
Russian Business Ties
Trump Associates

Click here to have more fun than spinning your fidget.

Today’s Climate Word: “Hormesis”

In its relentless effort to make the common good even gooder, the White House has proposed a Presidential Committee on Climate Security to determine what, if any, threat to national security is posed by climate change. The panel, to be established by executive order, will be headed by William Happer, a senior director of the National Security Council. He is an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University. Happer is on record that carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant.

Not to worry, though. Even if you think CO2 is a pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency is adopting Hormesis, the belief that certain levels of pollution are actually good for us. Hormesis will replace LNT, the “linear no-threshold” mode that posits any level of pollution is bad.

Ed Calabrese is the person responsible for junkscience.com, the favorite web site of the willfully ignorant. He made his name in the 1980s, doing purported research financed by tobacco companies. Calabrese’s crackpot ideas were considered crackpot until the current occupant of the White House decided the EPA should be filled with energy-company lobbyists and climate-change deniers.

Read about it here so you can tell your grandchildren what happened.

The Legend of Ken “The Hawk” Harrelson

Baseball has always prided itself as the game without a clock. Unlike football or soccer or basketball, a team with a lead cannot “run out the clock” in the waning minutes of a game; baseball gives each team the same number of outs. An average Major League Baseball game takes over three hours. In the 1970s, it was two-and-a-half hours. In the forties, a game took two hours.

Seeking ways to speed up the game, Major League Baseball is inaugurating a twenty-second pitch clock for spring training this year. There is no word yet if the clock will carry into the regular season. Regular-season all-star pitcher Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw has already announced he will ignore the clock and what’re ya gonna do about it. (Kershaw’s salary is about $185,000 per inning pitched.) MLB recently instituted a rule limiting the number of visits a coach or manager or catcher may make to the pitcher’s mound and how long the visit can last.

I have a suggestion: ban batting gloves.

The Legend of Gimme Shelter

It was late on an autumn night in 1969. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were in a Los Angeles recording studio, dubbing vocals into a song for their new album Let It Bleed. Producer Jack Nitzsche suggested a female background voice. He called his first choice who turned him down. He then called Merry Clayton, a veteran backup singer. Clayton, in the late stage of pregnancy, was asleep in bed with her husband. She said she’d never heard of the Rolling Stones. Her husband convinced her she should go. She had worked with Nitzsche on other projects and helping him out on this could benefit her career in the long run.

She did two takes and then went back home, to suffer a miscarriage shortly after. The song was “Gimme Shelter.” Merry Clayton’s galvanizing performance on the recording made that song one of the band’s most memorable. The oft-told story of her participation has become legend in the annals of rock ’n’ roll.

I have wondered what she was paid for making that recording so memorable.