Pudding Pudding Pudding Pudding Giga Pudding!!!

Hey Sunshine, it's this week's quiz schedule!

Tuesday, January 26, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: CLASSICAL MUSIC

Wednesday, January 27, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: THE PSYCHEDELIC PSIXTIES

Thursday, January 28, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
No quiz this week so that the bar can have another darn snowboarding promotional event. See you next Thursday.

Blog hits 40,000 visitors

So it looks like we've hit the 40,000 visitor mark. That's over 40,000 distinct IP addresses regardless of the number of visits, which is some multiple of that higher. Thanks for your continued support the past few years.

Hits have come in from more than 130 countries and territories. It took me a few weeks to even engage a counter, so the numbers are even a bit higher than that.

Quiz returns to The Draught Horse this week; general schedule for the week below

Tuesday, January 18, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: FAMOUS FIRST LINES

Wednesday, January 19, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: MYSTERIES (AS IN THE FICTION VARIETY)

Thursday, January 20, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: 2009: YEAR IN REVIEW

South Philly Review prints a correction

This week's edition of the South Philly Review came out this week, and they printed a correction on my response to last week's 'person on the street' interview. Good.

It's always worth it to talk back to the media. The idea isn't just to correct the past record, but more vital it might make the writers and editors think a little harder about the consequences of what gets printed, why and how.

More on the background of Haiti's troubles

Political scribe Ashley Smith has written a great brief synopsis of Haiti's sad recent history, and direct US involvement in it. Below find the meat of that piece.

For a fuller understanding I'd highly recommend reading up on the IMF/World Bank system and how rolling Third World debt essentially transferred wealth equivalent to six Marshall Plans from the poor countries to the richer ones. Great places to start would be the books of Graham Hancock and Susan George.

Remember to check out the post immediately below to donate a little something to the Haitian relief effort. Obama pledged $100 million over an unspecified period to some sort of relief effort from the US, but I imagine most of those funds are going to be spent in federal contracts for American businesses and consultants; that should in no way be accounted as a $100M transfer of wealth from here to there. Keep in mind also that we're spending 7400 times that on next fiscal year's wars. As is always the case when these things happen, individual American donations will dwarf official aid. In this case it'll just take 10 million people giving $10 each. In fact Angelina Jolie just pledged $1 million bucks all by herself.
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"The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti," Canadian Haiti Solidarity Activist Yves Engler said in an interview. "They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why."

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line--U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

During the Cold War, the U.S. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then Baby Doc Duvalier - which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986 - as an anti-communist counter-weight to Castro's Cuba nearby.

Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian economy up to U.S. capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of U.S. agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result, hundred of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to labor for pitifully low wages in sweatshops located in U.S. export processing zones.

In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers from power--later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.

The U.S. in turn backed a coup that drove Aristide from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent U.S. troops to the island--but on the condition that he implement the U.S. neoliberal plan--which Haitians called the "plan of death."

Aristide resisted parts of the U.S. program for Haiti, but implemented other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually, though, the U.S. grew impatient with Aristide's failure to obey completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations during his final year in office. The U.S. imposed an economic embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers even deeper into poverty.

In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti's ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country, and the puppet government of Gérard Latortue was installed to continue Washingotn's neoliberal plans.

Latortue's brief regime was utterly corrupt--he and his cronies pocketed large portions of the $4 billion poured into the country by the U.S. and other powers when they ended their embargo. The regime dismantled the mild reforms Aristide had managed to implement. Thus, the pattern of impoverishment and degradation of the country's infrastructure accelerated.

In 2006 elections, the Haitian masses voted in longtime Aristide ally René Préval as president. But Préval has been a weak figure who collaborated with U.S. plans for the country and failed to address the growing social crisis.

In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Préval government and instead poured money into NGOs. "Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world," says Yves Engler. The Préval government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.

The real state power isn't the Préval government, but the U.S.-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with - or turned a blind eye to -right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.

The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters - severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.

Consider a Red Cross donation to aid Haiti

Here's your link. (Update: Yahoo!/The Huffington Post put together a great list of donation routes available to us, including something as simple as sending a text to Wyclef Jean's foundation.)

What can we do really beyond this? Give 'til it hurts. It'd be kinda cool if we had the military resources like National Guardsmen to help Haiti out in a big way, but we're too busy spending $740,000,000,000 per annum (borrowed at interest no less) sending those guys to blow shit up in poor countries in Western Asia that already struggle with infrastructure problems on a good day. It's not like we could use those helicopters and 20 year olds closer to home, when hurricanes and earthquakes hit. (Parts of New Orleans are still screwed beyond recognition by the by; when will Kanye West point out that Barack Obama doesn't care about black people?)

A few weeks ago I was shown a YouTube clip of a severely physically handicapped kid reciting some poetry. It was more of a "hey look at this" positive thing than a gawking/laughing thing. What stuck with me was a comment left by a visitor, "Poor little guy. Fuck you GOD."

Indeed. Not that I believe in an ordered universe (beyond a few physical and chemical axioms) with a plan-centered creator. That being the case, said creator would be one sick fuck and I'd have to start playing Anton LaVey albums and start reading Aleister Crowley.

So by all means, for hitting one of the poorest countries in the world with a devastating earthquake of the once every-few-hundred-years variety during a period when the country has no ability to provide basic services on a calm, sunny day, I would give the finger to any diety if I believed in one.

Beyond the unavoidable earthquake, Haiti has been beset by 400 years of colonial and neo-colonial misrule, including a very dark period of economic rapine by the father-son Duvalier dictatorship tag team, backed by the United States, the World Bank/IMF system and that other vicious charlatan Mother Teresa.

Natural disasters happen, but as Harry Shearer among others is fond of reminding us, the general conditions created by government misrule and infrstructure neglect make their results anything but "natural" in a poor area.

Haiti's one of those places that those of us in the industrialized world literally owe our standard of living to, and I reckon that helping them out in this time of dire need is more a repayment of outstanding debt than "aid." Hell, our baseballs were even sewn there for years, taking advantage of the cheap-ass labor.

The Eagles already won their Super Bowl

I hate me some Dallas [actually Arlington, formerly Irving] Cowboys (who I hope get eliminated like last last night's dinner ASAP), but there was a certain satisfaction in the humiliation of the pompous-yet-championshipless Eagles team these past two weekends. I say this as a person who started following the team around the time Dick Vermeil took over the head coaching position.

It's been reported that Mike Vick was unanimously elected the team's annual Ed Block award for courage, which if true I recently realized means that the conceited bastard voted for himself. Now how do you cheer for that to win anything?

It was a bit hard to believe going into the season that finally winning the Super Bowl was the priority for the team this year. The actual priority for the team was the supposed 'rehabilitation' of Michael Vick. Like George W. Bush, the Eagles could parade their outscored 58-14 performances over the past two weeks in front of a Mission Accomplished banner with the same tragicomic sense of completion.

Vick himself just wanted to show the league that he could be the same under-80 rated millionaire passer he was before his stint in federal ass pounding prison. He is and he did. Mission accomplished!

The NFL players' union wanted to return Vick to some team with a strong fan base and no recent history of harboring multiple felons for a buffer season under the misguided notion that they could all end up serving federal time after lying to the league and commissioner about a series of felonies. Most players actually have nothing to worry about as the vast majority of players are usually law-abiding and don't make a series of about 500 bad/wrong decisions over several years... but apparently many felt a bizarre, probably racially motivated need to close ranks behind the guy who could paint them all in the worst possible light. Way to advance the cause of diversity, fellas. Mission accomplished!

Andy Reid and Tony Dungy are two religious guys who were pretty clearly trying to work out their terrible track records as fathers with the most prodigal substitute son available in the NFL at the time. Mission accomplished!

The Eagles and Jeff Lurie still managed to keep the stands filled and shift a lot of overpriced #7 jerseys - Ron Jaworski's number fer cryin' out loud - to every thug wannabe in the Lower 48. Mission accomplished!

McNabb seemed to want to appear to be a mentor to an old friend while taking some heat off short yardage, with a player who can run faster but manages to somehow be a less accurate passer, thereby avoiding a QB controversy. Mission accomplished!

Playing well against teams with winning records? For the Xth consecutive year, mission not accomplished.

How many other positions could the Eagles have used help with this year instead of having a third QB on the roster?

It's probable Vick will start for some franchise next year, and good riddance. Anyone reminding the public next season that Vick is being given a professional pass that any comparable felon in any other profession would never get will be accused of rehashing "old news" and harboring a (possibly racist) grudge. It makes one wonder if Idi Amin is signable as a defensive end, bygones being bygones and whatnot.

Donovan McNabb might or might not be back, but at this point I'm done. He's been a great player overall who I've defended in the past, but seems to have plateaued at best, and the general apparent disregard for the fanbase leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Reid we'll have with us until he gets his own planet in Mormon heaven, which seems likelier than a Super Bowl victory while he coaches. We can only assume that Andy Reid's planet will serve a variety of fried foods and have a 100:0 pass/run ratio.

It's 2010 - Where's my damn jet pack?! Where's my robo-servant?!

Tuesday, January 12, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: 2010: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Wednesday, January 13, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: FAMOUS FIRST LINES

Thursday, January 14
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
**NO QUIZ**


See you again third week in January 2010! Thanks to The Draught Horse, Victory Brewing and the Temple U. community for another great term.

Libeled by the South Philly Review

Note: Read the update to this post as well.

Never, ever take it for granted that anything you read in the newspaper or see on TV news is the truth. My few appearances in local media have contained misquotes, lies and blatant libel that would get a ninth grader kicked off the school paper.

A few days ago while running some errands a harried-looking guy with a notepad stopped me near Broad & Snyder. He said he was writing a weekly man-on-the-street column for the South Philly Review. Would I like to participate? Thinking the question might be something civic-minded, I assented.

This is pretty much how the 'interview' went down.

Him: "Our question this week is How are you coping with the cold weather?"

Me: "Oh, not doing much different... I guess I'm staying indoors."

Him: "Staying indoors? OK... uh... Are you drinking anything special to stay warm?"

Me: "Uh not really... I guess beer [laughing]. I convert the excess calories and sugars of the beer into energy. How's that?"

Him: "uhhhh..."

His pen isn't working. He can't write anything down, which is a bad position for a reporter to be in. I let him borrow my pen, as the South Philly Review apparently doesn't have a two-pens-per-reporter budget. That's more a New York Times kinda high-roller, la-dee-da thing.

Scribble, scribble. He thanks me, snaps a photo of me and asks for my name, the paper will be out Thursday.

I just checked the website, and this is the result. Note that there's no mention of the fact that Mr. Greg Bezanis specifcally asked if I were drinking anything special to stay warm, they're just purporting that I was asked how I was coping with the bitter cold weather, and according to the paper I just said I liked to stay home and get plastered. Note that there are quote marks around a phrase I didn't speak. Note that I said beer and Bezanis wrote down "alcohol." Note that I made a specific reference to calorie intake and Bezanis turned this into a "warm sensation." So I'm not providing a quick (semi-)humorous quip to a pointed question any longer, I'm just a random alcoholic.

I'm sending a letter for publication to the paper and referencing this blog post, which will be amended with an appropriate publication and/or retraction. It really makes you wonder how the paper reports more important stories.

Death of the newspaper industry? Can't come fast enough. I'll be a pallbearer.

VH1's interesting perspective

Just watched most of the final hour of VH1's 100 Most Shocking Moments in Music, which would be what they thought were the 20 most shocking moments in music. I caught the top 16.

In about 14th place was the The Who's 1973 show in Cincinnati in which 11 fans were trampled to death.

In seventh? The 2003 Great White fire at The Station in Rhode Island, which killed 100 and injured more than 200.

Annnnd of course that means #6 would have to be something pretty horrifying. In sixth place, and I swear I'm not making this up, was Britney Spears shaving her head.

In case you were wondering, #1 was Michael Jackson dying of a drug OD at 50. Really? I'd have been shocked if Jacko passed away in his sleep at 84. This edged out John Lennon being shot four times, which I think was kinda more surprising for people, no? Third place went to Kurt Cobain shooting himself in the head, as if this too were entirely unexpected. Again, the shocker would have been a 63 year old Cobain doing a stint as Mr. Conductor on Thomas the Tank Engine.

Your first quiz schedule of 2010

Happy New Year to anyone who can actually read this. There appears to be some problem with the domain server which attaches this URL to the blog. Should this ever happen again, the blog can always be reached more directly at http://www.quizmasterchris.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, January 5, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: BLUE

Wednesday, January 6, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: RED

Thursday, December 31
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
**NO QUIZ**

See you again third week in January 2010!