Conceived above a saloon, delivered into this world by a masked man identified by his heavily sedated mother as Captain Video,
raised by a kindly West Virginian woman, a mild-mannered former reporter with modest delusions of grandeur and no tolerance
of idiots and the intellectually dishonest.
network solutions made me a child pornographer!
The sordid details...
Requiem for a fictional Scotsman
Oh my God! They killed Library!! Those bastards!!!
A Pittsburgher in the Really Big City
At least the rivers freeze in Pittsburgh
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dcl dialogue online!
no. we're not that kgb.
The Carbolic Smoke Ball
Superb satire, and based in Pittsburgh!
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
"No religious Test shall ever be required as a
Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States."
Article VI, U.S. Constitution
Geek of the Week, 7/16/2000
Cruel Site of the Day, 7/15/2000
miscellany
"a breezy writing style and a cool mix of tidbits"
Our riveting and morally compelling...
One of 52,041 random quotes. Please CTRL-F5 to refresh the page.
Friday, July 01, 2005
The American Dream...
"Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor."-lyrics, Cool, Cool Considerate Men, from the musical 1776.
With Independence Day approaching, I strongly recommend you rent or buy 1776, the 1972 film version of the 1969 Tony award-winning best musical. Make certain you get the DVD version detailed in the link above. Believe it or not, producer Jack Warner removed Considerate Men from the original theatrical release because President Richard Nixon objected to the number after seeing a preview at the White House. (He felt it cast conservatives in an unfavorable light.)
While the show does take some liberties with the historical record- this is a musical, after all- it masterfully captures the attitude and reasoning behind America's fight for independence, and reveals "The Founders" not to be demigods, but ordinary men struggling for their rights and freedom.
It's an intelligent, witty and gripping tale, peppered with lines taken from actual correspondence between John Adams and his wife Abigail. Disgusted with his colleagues, Adams tells them "I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace; that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress!" and complains, "At a stage in life when other men prosper, I'm reduced to living in Philadelphia." As Congress edits Jefferson's Declaration of Independence to avoid alienating certain elements of the British government, Adams fumes, "This is a revolution, damn it! We're going to have to offend somebody!", and "They won't be happy until they remove one of the F's from Jefferson's name!"
This is a great introduction to American history for kids. After the parade and before the picnic and fireworks, sit down as a family and enjoy this film, and feel the tingle in your spine when William Daniels sings Adams' own words,
I see fireworks!
I see the pageant and pomp and parade!
I hear the bells ringing out!
I hear the cannons roar!
I see Americans - all Americans -
Free forever more!
Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin
and William Daniels as John Adams in "1776"
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005
They don't make 'em like they used to...
"...it is perhaps both heartening and sobering to reflect that, in the contest
between Jefferson and Adams in 1796, the electors were offered a choice between
the president of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and chose both of them."
-Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson Author of America, quoted in book
review by Gordon S. Wood, "Founders' Keepers," The Weekly Standard, July 4/July 11, 2005. (posted by David C. Kifer on the alt.quotations Usenet newsgroup.)
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Political observations from my mother
"I can't stand that smirk.
He looks like a guy
who just farted and
likes to smell it."
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Tuesday, June 28, 2005
It's depressing
So Viagra can cause sight loss. Gee. It appears you can go blind either way.
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Psst. Hey, buddy...
Wanna see The Giant Radio Lobes of Fornax A?. Heh Heh. Quite a set, eh?
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It's the little things...
The coffee shop/snack shop in the building where I work in Chicago prices its products for maximum irritation. As if the sales taxes and surcharges in the downtown weren't aggravating enough, the place prices everything so that the maximum number of pennies has to be exchanged to complete any transaction. The bill is always something like $5.41 or $6.59.
Contrast that to the ice cream outlet in downtown Library, PA. It might seem strange to see an ice cream cone priced at 93 cents- but with tax, it works out to a nice, even $1. The only pennies in this business come from little kids or desperate adults who've knocked off a piggy bank to get their cold chocolate fix for the day.
Small town common sense is refreshing. And so is the ice cream.
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Monday, June 27, 2005
Quote of the day
From The Borowitz Report:
"Elsewhere, after White House adviser Karl Rove created a furor with his remarks about liberals and 9/11 last week, the White House demoted Mr. Rove from Bush's Brain to Bush's Ass."
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Off the air
I'm back in Pittsburgh for a two-week vacation of sorts. "Of sorts," because vacations these days consist of doing things that you've put off for so long that you need to take some vacation days to complete them.
Postings here will be sporadic. But check back every other day or so. Or use the down time to peruse the quote collection.
Note the time of this post. Off to a relaxing start, eh?
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Copyright © 1987-2024 by Kevin G. Barkes
All rights reserved.
Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker
Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse.
Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however.
I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993,
and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know
that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but
rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to
type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically
pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about
everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word
about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated
numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would
notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com
they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...
(as a matter of fact, i AM the boss of you.)
It's here!
440 pages, over 11,000 quotations!
Eff the Ineffable, Scrute the Inscrutable
get kgb krap!