Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

This is a documentary on the history of psychoanalysis in mass media. Have a look.

Upload by YouTube member tushak

Click the video to watch the full guy in a playlist.

Wax in your right mind.

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From The Wall Street Journal blog - April 28, 2009: An airplane approached Sydney Airport Tuesday. Investors fled the industry Monday on worries about lessening travel due to a possible swine flu pandemic, reminiscent of the 2003 SARS outbreak. (Tim Wimborne/Reuters)

Wax the Aussie skies.

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Image rights to original owners.

“Singer Susan Boyle, our latest instant celebrity, reminds me of any number of singers I conducted in amateur renditions of the easier Schubert or Haydn masses, or the sort of matron who sings “Katti-Shaw” or “Buttercup” in the local Gilbert and Sullivan production. Musical talent springs up like grass, and engaging voices are a dollar a dozen. That Boyle has come to embody the triumph of ordinary people over obscurity, complete with invitations to appear on Oprah and Larry King, is disheartening. The popular audience in the West likes to validate its own mediocrity, and crowns stars-for-a-day.” “Spengler” for the Asia Times April 21, 2009

Is Spengler right? Does the U.S. praise mediocrity. Do the parading America Idol “losers” really think that anybody can be a star? After years of being all about looks, Hollywood embraces a person like karaoke lover William Hung got a record deal from his being tone deaf. Paris Hilton became famous from inheriting millions of dollars. Yes today, reality TV relishes the opposite extreme with shows like VH1 Flavor of Love starring a naturally and almost nutritiously inebriated guy who thinks wearing a top hat and a cartoonishly ponderous clock (which truthfully does not tell time at all) to church is somehow not ostentatious and hemakes a go at “love” with the most uncouth, socially inept, vapid and vacant woman to walk the earth whose most remembered words will likely be, “Bitch, I’ll kill you!” And what is to be said of the relentlessly showcased cavalcade-like fleet of willing participants in eating raw goat testicles on NBC’s Fear Factor? This apparently is part of the latest amendment to the ever-wanted and seemingly now ever-closer American Dream. Do nothing great. Look interesting doing it. Get famous. But after all this, Susan Boyle possesses something else, something which is rarely given a spotlight - talent… despite one’s not looking the part.

(Read the source article).

Wax the truth.

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What’s the real story with Afghanistan? Judge for yourself and leave a comment.

Inside Afghanistan with Ben Anderson: Part 1

Wax for the facts.

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The Photo of the Day is back with special showcase by World Picture News. This slide show encompasses the average and extraordinary with vivid color and visual intimacy on a global scale!

(View the show).

Wax in brilliant color!

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Yes, an article in today’s Huffington Post by Jason Linkins is actually reporting that conservative viewers of comedian Stephen Colbert’s satirical Colbert Report actually believe he is serious on some issues. A study of both conservative and liberal opinions by Ohio State University for the International Journal of Press/Politics entitled “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report” concludes that conservatives feel Colbert earnestly dislikes liberalism and only pretends to be joking while liberal-leaning viewers take the show as a total satire of the ridiculous. Ultimately, the final results showed that “perceptions of Colbert’s political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.” In other words, one’s party line directly affects how Colbert’s humor is read.

Here is one such example:

Posey actually responded to the “alligator alegations in The Orlando Sentinel remarking wholeheartedly, “I expected there would be some civil debate about it, but it wasn’t civil…There is no reason to say that I’m the illegitimate grandson of an alligator.”

Could it be that politicos of all types take themselves too seriously - that they are so blinded by ideology that an unambiguously satirical fake news show on a network actually named Comedy Central has people taking umbrage with it for its “serious” suggestion that Representative Posey actually has a grandpa who is an alligator? Yes… apparently that is the case. To paraphrase Father James Martin, humor keeps one humble about oneself and speaks to a certain truth. What does this speak of any more than partisans blinded by their own self-importance?

Wax well in good humor!

Photo of the Day an Video of the Day return tomorrow.

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I was having a discussion with friend last night about how the economy has seemed to put a damper on charitable contributions. I told her, “Hey it’s bad economy and that’s to be expected.” “That’s no excuse,” she replied. “People spend seven or eight dollars on coffee sometimes.” It’s a good cause, Mikey. People are selfish.”

While my quotation may be a bit less than direct, the point remains intact. How much money do we spend on TV channels we don’t watch, coffee we could easily make at home (to an extent) and food that we can never finish at our favorite restaurant? I have to ask myself at times if I’m spending too much here or there or being to hesitant in my giving and I do find that I often can give more than I first thought.

What’s your view? Can you see yourself spending less on luxuries? Can you afford to? As my father likes to say, if everyone does a little, nobody has to do a lot.

(Click here if you would like to donate to the Jones Beach Multiple Sclerosis Walk. The deadline is May 1).

Wax charitably.

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As many of you may know, this past Wednesday FOX News anchor Shepard Smith spoke out against Torture and a growing conservative base who believes torture techniques may have been helpful despite a counter argument that torture can and has elicited false confessions (as was the case with John McCain) and mental instability in its subjects, and the glaringly apparent hypocrisy of condoning torture when many conservatives readily identify themselves as Christians. They love their enemies like most of us… when it’s convenient.

(Watch Smith’s comments in this Huffington Post feature).

Wax for what you believe in even if no one else does!

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This image by Margret Bourke-White stands as one of the pivotal pieces of art capturing a divide between race and prosperity that existed 1937 America and may still exist today in the minds of many Americans. Despite the fact that unemployment had reached staggering overall lows of 25% during the Great Depression’s worst freefall, the photo forces the viewer to wonder if there are those unmentionable Black folks who will never see the cheerfully advertised “world’s highest standard of living” by their respective standards of lifetime.

(View more of White’s work).

Wax for a decent wage.

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Today comes part two and three of this documentary on humor in the religious life and how being too serious can be destructive to one’s sense of humility.

Both videos upload by YouTube member LoyolaPress

Wax for God’s laughter!

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