Dead babies are no joke anymore

There isn't much I can add to the conversation about blackface; it's another tempest in a teapot as far as I'm concerned.  Young people are well known for engaging in stupid and insensitive stunts and I don't think any malice was intended.  And who uses shoe polish, anyhow?  Burnt cork is the only way to go, but don't ask me how I know this.  Finally, if imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery is blackface really a bad thing?

The way American attitudes are trending it wouldn't surprise me if comedy will die as a form of entertainment; we can't make fun of anything anymore.  Milton Berle, one of the original kings of TV comedy, used to dress up in drag a lot but I don't think that act would fly today lest he offend the delicate sensibilities of the transgender community.  I recall a branch of comedy devoted to sick jokes, a lot of dark and creepy stuff but also funny.  You don't hear any dead baby jokes anymore, do you?

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It won't be long until the data sniffing algorithms detect a noticeable uptick in searches for Otava Yo and the band will explode in popularity, and it all started here.  I looked at a few videos and the music is interesting, using both traditional and modern instruments, and very Russian.  It took s while for me to get YouTube's auto-translate gizmo to work properly but I shouldn't have bothered.  Lyrics are not the band's strong suit from what I have seen so far.  Mr. Beagles should be able to download YouTube videos; I think most browsers have plug-ins that allow it and I do it all the time with Firefox.  Burning the videos to DVD will be tricky, though.  I don't think computers and televisions use the same encoding of the video signal; untangling and converting video codecs will be required but Google and YouTube are still your friends.

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I think some of the Democrats are starting to go off the rails.  I read that one of them was stating that all buildings in the US should be rebuilt or upgraded to be more "green."  That idea is screwier than a damn wall, much more expensive, and doesn't seem well thought out to me.  All buildings?  I don't think so.  Another idea is to expand train and rail service so that we can eliminate air travel, another half-baked notion.  Somebody has forgotten that time is money, and that's a completely different can of worms on a different shelf down another aisle.