Long Overdue: My July 4th Post

Before we begin, I think I should get credit for getting this post up while it's still July...

Once again, the Welcome America festival took place in the days leading up to July 4th. It is full of great events, including free concerts and fireworks shows, as well as more fun and Philly-centric things such as Wawa Hoagie Day (which I still haven't gotten to) and one event that I've wanted to attend for years. This year, on the big day itself, I finally made it. Here's a link to all the photos I took that day. I've included a few here.

At Penn's Landing each year, the Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival raises money to help fight pediatric leukemia. A $7 donation gives you entrance into the big tent, as well as a plastic spoon, so you can go from table to table and get small cups of ice cream (as well as water ice and some other frozen stuff), as much as you want, all day. If you followed my updates on Twitter or Facebook that day, you know that I stopped at each of the almost 20 tables. (A number of the vendors had more than one table.) It was truly ice cream heaven. The picture above shows the size of the cup. (You weren't expecting pints or quarts, were you?) This one had rainbow water ice, not ice cream.

Thanks to a site called TwimeMachine that makes it easy to go back to look at your older tweets, here's the rundown of what I ate, and in order! Good Humor chocolate, Jack & Jill strawberry, ShopRite vanilla/chocolate, Ben & Jerry's French Toast, rainbow water ice, Turkey Hill cookies & cream, Friendly's orange sherbet, Bassetts chocolate, cotton candy water ice, Edy's mint chocolate chip, Icee raspberry frozen pop, Turkey Hill cookies & cream, Breyers cookies & cream, Haagen-Dazs chocolate, cotton candy water ice, Friendly's chocolate, orange Minute Maid juice bar, Ben & Jerry's English something (toffee?), Breyers chocolate peanut butter.

Restore Sanity?

I'll try and write about the three movies I recently saw in the coming days. But first, a political rant, with Election Day almost here -- and, by the way, make sure you all vote. There's no excuse whatsoever not to vote.

I was amused by the flurry of Twitter activity today revolving around the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" held in Washington. Co-hosted by Comedy Central stars Jon Stewart (pushing sanity) and Stephen Colbert (in character, representing fear), it seemed to be a response to the rally of right-wing nuts back in August, and a plea for kinder, gentler political discourse.

I didn't watch it. Perhaps it was entertaining. (Yes, there were entertainers there, from Sheryl Crow to Mavis Staples to Ozzy Osbourne and the former Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam.) Perhaps it was more than an unusual vehicle to promote "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." But for my money, it was a waste. It's the same old "let's find common ground" message that has failed for the last 30 years, since Ronald Reagan took office and began his reign of terror. Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call yourselves, you need to get this into your heads once and for all: THERE IS NO COMMON GROUND WITH THESE PEOPLE. They are out to defeat you and destroy you. They will never play nice. They'll pretend to do it, and then stab you in the back the first chance they get.

This is why the Republicans are likely to regain control of the House and, at the least, gain a number of seats in the Senate.