It seems to us . . .
Music as torture, hugs for the speaker, flights of fancy and a lost hambone
AHA!: In the category of “parents already knew this,” word arrives that several national and international musicians, including bands the likes of R. E. M. and Pearl Jam, have joined a campaign to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camps in protest over the use of music to torture prisoners there.
Especially incensed were Trent Reznor and Tom Morello, whose music with the bands Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine are mentioned in public records detailing the use of incessant loud music against detainees.
This holds promise. We suggest parents start by providing their teenagers with copies of the Geneva Conventions.
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SOMEBODY NEEDS A HUG: Word also has arrived that the most powerful man in Albany, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, has been named “Legislator of the Year.”
Hmmmm. Wouldn’t have been our choice. But it was for EPL/Environmental Advocates, normally more associated with tree-hugging. The top honors for Silver come in the group’s enviro-policy ratings for its Voters’ Guide, and Buffalo’s Sen. Antoine Thompson also earns praise.
Silver did the most to advance green policy last year, the environmentalists proclaim. We’re more focused on what he and the rest of the Legislature are doing to advance red ink.
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UP AND AWAY: We were wondering the other day how parents possibly could launch a giant tin-foil balloon and claim their six-year-old was inside it. And then we had to wonder how a couple of airline pilots could possibly miss Minneapolis by 150 miles.
Now we’re just afraid to look up.
•••
HAMBONE’S GONE: It was one of his brothers who had been nicknamed Hambone, while Milton Supman was known to his family as Soupbone. But most of us who watched him as Soupy Sales, the anarchic kids’ show host from the ’50s and ’60s, knew he was the real hambone. Who else would take some 20,000 cream pies to the face and also persuade the likes of Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacClain and Tony Curtis to take one, as well? Soupy Sales died Thursday at 83, a ripe old age for a man who provided mid-day mirth for millions of kids. The world may now be safe for cream pies, but it won’t be as much fun.
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