Chef Mojo

Berlin

Now, that's a Thin White Duke! David Bowie, eat your heart out...

Sebastian Droste and Anita Berber, Berlin, 1920s. 

“Sebastian Droste (1892-1927) was a poet, actor and dancer. In 1922, Droste married expressionist exotic dancer and actress in German silent movies, Anita Berber”

- Wikipedia

Via Retronaut.

 

Essential Knowledge

If you find yourself taking a tour of Europe, you might want to make a copy of this, and pack it.

You're welcome!

Cheers!

Via AoSHQ
. 

Go Away, Bob

The Daily Caller:

McDonnell aides deny resignation rumors are true

Aides to Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell tell The Daily Caller that rumors the Republican is planning to resign as soon as Monday are simply not true.

“The rumors are false,” spokesman Paul Shanks said in an email.

The resignation claims have been spreading across the Internet over the last week as the Republican governor faces intense scrutiny over whether he and his family improperly received gifts and others perks while he has served in office.

Go away, Bob. Find a deep, dark hole to crawl into, and don't come out. Take your wife with you, too. You just couldn't survive on $175,000 a year, could you? You just had to take gifts and Mrs. McDonald just had to be a teetotal bitch to the staff at the governor's mansion, didn't you? Hope the swag was worth it.

Go away. Now. 

You're too stupid to be governor, but just stupid enough to be a Repubilican. 

Tom Hanks as Walt Disney? Yeah. I'm In...

Via Geeks Of Doom:

The first trailer for Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, which sees the great Tom Hanks becoming the man behind the mouse, Walt Disney, has been released online.

The movie tells the story of Disney’s often futile efforts to obtain the rights to make a movie based on the P.L. Travers (played by Emma Thompson) bookMary Poppins. Disney promised his daughters he would make the movie, but did not anticipate Travers’ strict refusal to allow her work to be transferred to the silver screen.

Sounds like a neat story, that features Disney himself escorting Travers on a tour of Disneyland. Should be some deep ephemera in this movie! Check out the trailer at the link. 

 

Dancing The Charleston With Shock Absorbers

Via Retronaut.

A Tragedy That Was Prevented From Becoming A Travesty

Over at The American Interest, the inestimable Walter Russell Mead offers a sober assessment of the Zimmerman trial and verdict, placing it in historical, social and racial context. 

An exerpt:

Even so, as racial drama, the Zimmerman trial was at best second-rate. Atticus Finch wasn’t in the courtroom and no great principles were at stake in the sense that they were in Plessy vs. Ferguson orBrown vs. Board of Education. It was a haunting criminal case about the tragic and needless death of a teen aged boy, but it turned on ‘he-said’ ‘she-said’ and probable cause.  America’s racial status quo wouldn’t have been affected if Mr. Zimmerman had been convicted; it won’t be changed by his acquittal.

Most of what the trial ‘taught’ us is what we already know. Many blacks and whites see the criminal justice system and much else in quite different terms. The presence of large numbers of immigrants from parts of the hemisphere where traditional American racial categories don’t apply very well is slowly blurring racial lines here. The relationship between African-Americans and ‘Hispanics’ is getting more complex and in some ways more tense. President Obama has lost control of the country’s race narrative. African American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton aren’t what they used to be. Class lines in America threaten to become more important, and as that happens, African Americans who are both black and poor find themselves increasingly alienated from whites in general and upper middle class and elite blacks. Florida is a mess.

All this was evident before the trial; nothing that happened at the trial changed any of it.

Nobody really knows or can know if the verdict in the trial is justice for either Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman. Procedurally the trial seemed fair, and enough unbiased observers predicted this outcome that it is hard to call it a surprise. Law and justice don’t always point in the same direction; the state had to meet a tough standard and in the view of the jury, it failed.

The level of emotion generated by this case is off the charts, and misses the very salient point that the law is, and must be blind to those emotions. Trials are duels of evidence. George Zimmerman, under our system, was innocent and remains so. The state had the burden to prove it otherwise, and failed miserably from get-go. I still think this trial should never have happend, based on the evidence at the time. Sanford PD, in my humble opinion, got it right the first time. But the State of Florida bowed to incredible political pressure, and was forced to hack together a dog's breakfast of a show trial. That, as we have seen, turned into a disaster of epic proportions. 

I'll Explain In Due Course, But This Needs To Be Posted NOW

Pirates!

"I'm PAYING for this microphone!"

Well, I am. 

So, I've got a lot of time on my hands, now. I had a bunch of time last year, but I was pretty much in a state of constant pain, so there was that. 

Plus, I'm curious as to if anyone will noticed that I've fired this blog back up. I doubt it, but we'll see. 

Long story short: Cancer, baby! Starting in March of 2012, I recieved a diagnosis for a rather complicated form of cancer. You can follow the story thus far at CaringBridge. Just register and read. It's a real jawdropper in places. 

Let's see where this goes. I'll try to get up to speed again. I really need to keep the fingers limber, after all. 

The story behind this picture can be found at CaringBridge. 

I'm still cheating that pisser bastard Davy Jones, I am.