Hey, if the "better" ideas of the right mean something and are to communicate something, the first thing that needs to be done is the carpet bombing to a wet spot on the tarmac of "Townhall.com." Check this crapulous example of graphic sludge, popovers, popunders, animations, blink tags and other web page bullshit gone wild @ Michelle Malkin : When Big Labor Bullies and Volunteers Collide - Townhall.com

Who is responsible for this dog's dinner of stinking slush? Uncle Jethro? Baby Huey? The last six art directors fired from Porn.com? Does it matter? Nope. Not at all. Trying to read something on Townhall is like getting hit in the face with oozing semi-liquid spam every second. That's it for me. I'm over that site forever. Yes, and its crappy spamacious email alerts as well.

If I want to be sick I can just read NewYorkTimes.com. At least they know how to lay out an idea so it has clarity and impact. At least the New York Times doesn't tell you it has contempt for you going in.

Vanderleun : November 20, 09  |  Your Say (15)  | PermaLink:

Many in the no-longer-so-loyal opposition to the Obama juggernaut of taking the wrecking ball to the Republic fret about how to slow or stop it. Here's the news: You can't.

There are now so many programs and initiatives in play on so many levels that just keeping up with a fraction of them will have you pointing and clicking 25 hours a day. Frantic and "tryin' to make it in due time / Before the heaven doors close" the current administration of crooks, thugs, liars, leftists, and wreckers are pushing every half-assed social theory into law and policy with no let-up in sight and no quarter given. Add to this a media in love with the easeful death this experimental movement brings, and slobbering over whatever turgid appendage our panty-waist president deigns to offer them daily, and you've got a perfect slow motion storm of legal, moral, and cultural disasters.

Take a hint from Keanu Reeves in Speed above. If you can't stop it, you've got to wreck it.... and to wreck it you've got to "make it go faster." They say their plans for the future of the United States are "better?" Okay, take them at their word. Only faster. Let's see how this stuff plays out in real life. As soon as possible. If they're right, all will be well. If they're not, let's have the disaster now and in double portions.

How to do this? Well, the Swiftian commenter "Joe California Now Joe Florida" has some suggestions. Presenting himself as a retired California civil servant in a discussion following an article called, chillingly, "California Has No Idea How Bad Soaring Oil Is Going To Hurt" , Joe has a plan. Check it out. It's a classic example of how to "Make It Go Faster."

After all, as we used to say in the socialist paradise of Berkeley in the 1960s, "If you're going to have a revolution, you've got to do revolting things." In times like these it's not enough to say "No!" You've got to say, "Go fuck yourselves. Here, let me help."

Joe California Now Joe Florida on Nov 19, 8:24 AM said:

Clearly California needs a plan. As a retired California public employee, let me give some suggestions as I sit on my patio in Florida thinking things over in the calm peaceful morning:

-- Encourage more illegal immigration. Immigrants are a great natural resource, and America became rich and powerful thanks to immigrants. Its true, you haters.

-- Increase taxes. After all, where else are you going to get the money? By cutting spending? Politically, there is nothing left which can be cut.

-- Increase all state employee salaries to six figures. Hear me out on this. First, this will result in top talent applying for these jobs. Second, by increasing salaries across the board, there will be a natural increase in the collectible income tax from these increased salaries. Its like printing money for the state! Third, a higher paid state work force will be a more productive work force. California will get twice the value for each additional dollar it pays to its public servants. I know my former state coworkers. They'll give you more than fair value for each additional buck.

-- Mandate private employer paid health care, pensions, etc. Imagine the talent pool of employees which California would create by making California the Mecca for mandated employer-provided benefits. Where would you rather work, in a state where employers do not have to provide benefits, or where employers are mandated to pay in full for a whole spectrum of employee benefits?

-- Eliminate the death penalty and life terms. These sentences only result in costly appeals. No one wins with these sentences, not the state and not the accused. Let's get the emotionalism out of this equation. The "victim" is entitled to see the accused punished, not persecuted.

-- Ban private schools. The reason why public schools are failing is because too many of the better students have flocked to private schools. As a result, the poorer performing students are deprived of the positive effects from social interaction with academic high achievers. By forcing all students into one system, the entire student body as a whole will be raised up by the inclusion of the high achievers.

-- California Has No Idea How Bad Soaring Oil Is Going To Hurt

Vanderleun : November 20, 09  |  Your Say (2)  | PermaLink:

The Green House, Berkeley California, 2008

BACKSTAGE: A Preface to a Prologue

In response to yesterday's note about the publication of Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties a friend and alphablogger whose judgement I respect writes to ask that I write more about what I saw moving through the 60s like some long-haired WASP Zelig.

To recapitulate a remark from yesterday, it's a popular thing to say that "If you remember the 60s you weren't there." My curse is that I was there and despite being a full participant with all that implies, I seem to remember everything. Worse still, the more I do remember, the more I can remember.

One of my larger projects which I hold back from this page is a fictionalized version of what I saw at the "Revolution." In general book length works don't work at all well in this medium and much of the book is only in first draft with other sections coming in in outline form only.

And so, by semi-popular demand, what follows is the prologue one of my longer projects, CEREMONIES OF THE HORSEMEN --

The cloak and dagger dangles,
madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen
even a pawn can hold a grudge.
--Bob Dylan

None of this ever really happened.

1. Prologue

To tell the truth about those years, you'd have to begin with the observation that truth was, like all precious commodities, in very short supply. Like LSD from Sandoz or pharmaceutical cocaine, truth was rumored to be everywhere but became scarce when you attempted to score.

If your ambition was to make a market in Truth Futures, you were in business. No problem and plenty of willing buyers and sellers. But if you just wanted some truth of your own, to get you through the night, your head was straightened on that score in no time. After a few attempts to lay you hands on some actual truth, you came to understand that such a quest was against the secret rules. Scoring pure, uncut truth was not even a part of the game. It wasn't what was "happening, man."

What was happening wasn't, to be sure, the only game in the big BeHereNow Casino out on Sunset trip, but it was the most fun and everyone, well, almost everyone, wanted to play at its table hoping that their new and improved revolutionary system for revolution would beat the dealer. No matter what you wanted to be at that table and be happening. After all, not to be part of what was happening in those years was, in a sense, not to be.

So you learned that as long as you confined yourself to speculation of what the Revolution might be like and what the world after the Revolution would be like, there was no end to truth. But if this made you nervous and you asked any of the fellow players for a little hard truth, a little coin of the realm to cover your margin and theirs, they were quite content to drop a brick of Acapulco Gold on your head and call it The Philosopher's Stone. And because stone was a state of mind, you were left with a headache, a heartache, and overdrawn at the First National Bank of Angst.

Man, you weren't happening.

What was happening was all that mattered. It was the predominant concern of the decade. "What's happening?" was a greeting and a secret sign that would determine if you were one of the elect and the saved. It was later compressed, as was most of our secret language, into a statement: "Happening, bro." Hard to translate now, but it made sense at the time.

Like the ancient and biblical phrase "What is truth?", "What's happening?" did not demand any response more specific than a shrug and a suitably stoned smile. A verbal response would be offered only as long as it began in and returned, at regular intervals, to a rippling fog that covered all our shared mental landscapes like the mist in a Japanese Samurai movie. This perpetually foggy language indicated that the speaker was a member in good standing of the lighter-than-air bunch and not really on the planet. It was the progenitor of an act of mental levitation which was much later converted by Transcendental Meditation into groups of people who learned to jump into the air from the full-lotus position.

"Not to be on the planet" was to "be in touch with the Cosmos", with "what was really happening, man." This bliss was a state that was yearned for, pretended to, envied, emulated, and approximated. It was rarely achieved. After all, what was really happening usually contained not a few items, mental and material, that were recognized as "bring-downs". Still, not to worry, bring-downs were like highs: all part of what was happening, and were, in the cosmic view, cosmic. One had to go with the flow. It was what was happening.

The decade was burnt as crisp and dark as a napalmed child; was as grotesque as a President dangling beagles by the ears or lifting his shirt to display a scar the shape of Southeast Asia on his paunch. But although the grotesque darkness was visible from a distance, it was nearly impossible to discern in close-up. Only perspective makes proportion visible and perspective was, like truth in those years, something always in very short supply.

Vanderleun : November 19, 09  |  Your Say (14)  | PermaLink:

We all need someone we can bleed on,
And if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me.
We all need someone we can bleed on,
And if you want it, why dont you bleed on me
-- Stones, Let It Bleed

I'm the co-author of the new book, Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, and the End of the Sixties by Ethan A. Russell. The lead author and photographer is my old and dear friend, Ethan Russell. His site is Ethan Russell Photographs and if you like The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who, and a host of other musicians, take a look.

In the meantime, I'm in New York City for a few events surrounding it's publication. Posting the resultant saving of the Republic will be light for the duration.

I'll have more to say about this book in the near future, but for now I am very, very pleased at how this book turned out. But first some samples of traveling music for a trip taken long ago.

And yes, I was at Altamont. They say that if you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there. My curse is that I was there and I remember everything. I think.

Vanderleun : November 18, 09  |  Your Say (20)  | PermaLink:

The Ferris Wheel, lit in long stripes of searing red and blue and green neon like some whirling sketch of an earth-bound star, pirouettes into the night sky above the slate waters of the Pacific at the end of the Santa Monica pier. Below it, the old seafood restaurant now serves Mexican food where gang-bangers herd their Saturday night dates around the bar, and the loud murmur of Angelino-accented Spanish rises above the waves that lap the pilings driven deep through the slow Pacific swell and into the sands below.

In a dark hollow somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, the first winds of winter hiss around an old dance hall where hundreds of white people and one black man stomp the boards in a contra dance. Dressed as vampires, wolf men, fairies, cowboys, and a host of other laughing fantasies, the dancers welcome the day of the dead to fiddles, guitars, pianos and drums as the caller makes the long lines of whirling people into stars and boxes, and a new girl is spun into your arms, flirting and bobbing, with every change in the ancient pattern of the dance, only to roll away with a half-sashay.

Outside the lights from the hall catch the flying drifts of gold and red leaves the wind is tearing from the trees, pushing them across the stars, and rolling them up in long drifts of crisp shadows against the wheels of Willys jeeps, old bangers, and brand new SUVs of every make and model. After the dance, Waffle Houses along Route 26 will fill up with costumed, exhausted dancers, their endorphins convincing them that, for this night at least, they are probably immortal.

The long wave laved beaches of the Isle of Palms outside of Charleston reinforce the new rule that no poor -- or even middle class -- people are now allowed to live by the ocean in America. The lots on which the endlessly elaborate houses that look out on the sea stand now cost between three and four million dollars each. If you bought one and immediately burned down the four to six bedroom three-story house, the cost of the lot would still be three to four million dollars. The house is, in essence, free.

Offshore, even on a dank day with large winds pushing in from the Atlantic, the bright scoops of kite surfers soar and pull their riders up off the crest of the waves high into air before gliding down to slide on the surface of the long breaking waves, and into the sands where the plastic pails of the nation's fortunate children are abandoned just above the reach of the waters.

In the Detroit airport, visitors to the United States stand in line to check into the country via a networked series of touch-screen computers. Above them, those too weak, too obese, or too lazy to walk a block or so can ride the glossy red new monorail from gate to gate, or rather from food court to food court.

Las Vegas, "What? Can't hear you!," Las Vegas is still not finished. After all, it still has a vast waste of desert all around it in which to ooze, even if it is bumping up against the Red Rock on one side. Road rubble and fenced off tracks of hard pack frame the Eiffel and other towers of pure fantasy blotching the night with a collection of illuminated signs that form their own Louvre of lighting.

Inside the outside-of-time casinos, the lights and the beeping clang of the slots still form their own eternal sound tracks as the glamorous and the ugly, the meth-skinny and the morbidly obese all take their turns on the wheel of misfortune. The only sound missing in the Hard Rock Casino these days is the clatter of coins dropping from the slots. Instead, there's the faint staccato as the machine prints your ticket when you "cash out." The barely clad money girl is only too happy to turn your winnings into money and see you on your way with the now standard secular blessing of the United States, "Have a nice day," at the stroke of midnight.

The Strip is like New York's Fifth Avenue at Christmas. There are so many people shuffling between fantasies that you can't walk down the wide sidewalks without getting stuck behind pedlock and fleets of electric Rascals moving those who have been far too long at the $5.00 Buffet. A nice new touch is that, should you require one, you can rent your Rascal at the airport, and all the big buffets have portable defibrillators.

After the casual and lightly populated Carolinas where everyone is slow and polite and easy, there are far too many people happening in the Happy World of Las Vegas. So you rent a car that rides like taking your sofa out for a drive and comes complete with 300 radio stations, and move out to where there will be, surely, not very many people at all, ever: Death Valley.

In the midst of an arid nothing on which 95 North is drawn like some temporary hash-mark on the land, your own personal communicator beeps. It's a friend calling from somewhere far away over the mountains and the vast land sea of the plains. He's driving at high speeds through savannahs. You're driving at high speeds over the desert where not even Joshua Trees make the effort to live. His voice is as crisp as if he was sitting beside you on this mobile sofa: "Death Valley? I went there once. It isn't really there. Not as a destination. It's not a place, it's a region. Gas up and keep going once you get there. You want to see nobody, that's the place to be."

Hours later I swoop down the long descending road to the spot on the map that is the lowest part of the country. Hundreds of feet below the level of the sea, which was once here, and, in time, will be again. At the cross roads at Furnace Creek, cars are being blocked by a Highway Patrol SUV and over the road come hundreds of people on horseback out of the desert to mill around in the parking lot by Furnace Creek Inn. After this mob of cowboys and cowgirls clears the road I drive on about a half a mile to where several thousand people have set out lawn chairs, umbrellas, and coolers by the side of the road waiting, it turns out, for the parade.

It's 49ers weekend in Death Valley and the RV culture has shown up in their multitudes. Across the road and on up the slope of the rise, thousands of RVs bake in the sun as their occupants – mostly all older and "retired but not tired" make for the parade and the barbeque and the beer. In the main it looks a lot like the streets of the Las Vegas strip, but without the neon and Elton John. In the store at Stovepipe Wells, the hottest place in America, I get my choice of popsicles and Dove Bars and at least twenty different kinds of beer, all, of course, ice-cold. This is, after all, America in the aftermath of the 2006 elections, and nothing, but nothing, is going to roil our very Happy World.

Until further notice.

A clear, calm dawn in Bishop, California at the top of the vast Owens valley. The Sierras rise to the West with Mt. Whitney white at the top beyond the brindle hills. There's gold and rose in the meadows and trees here just as there were in the trees around the barn dance in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yesterday, at a fishing retreat at around 10,000 feet in the bright sun small snowflakes blew into my face for a minute or so, spun down from the mountains high above as fly fishermen cast off into impossibly clear and bone-biting cold streams. It's been a long autumn and now winter is falling down from the mountains towards this town.

Later today, I'll drive south through the Mojave and into the wedged and irritated environs of Los Angeles. I'll probably take a room somewhere near the beach in Santa Monica. Tonight I'll go for another ride on the star-lit Ferris Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. I once lived, briefly, above the Merry-Go-Round at the end of that pier and made moonlight love on the damp sand beneath the boardwalk. But that was in another time and in another world with a girl whose name has faded into the smoke of the world.

Ferris Wheels and Merry-Go-Rounds. Lots of circles in life. It clears the mind to ride our metaphors in the real world from time to time. It lets us see where we stand and where we've been and where we might be going. Even if it is only to "arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

For some weeks now, and mostly without meaning to, I've been taking a core sample of the United States during the election and its aftermath. Over the decades I've done this from time to time. The first time was a college trip in the early Sixties when some friends and I went 9,000 miles in 9 days in a Volkswagen. The last time before this was when I fled New York and went west with marriage on my mind. This time was less intentioned and worked out better. This time there wasn't a plan or a destination, only a route that emerged as I went.

It's a commonplace to say that the states of our nation are now so diverse that we are a deeply divided country. I've come to see that that old saw is a dull old saw, useful for pundits and prognosticators, but much more false than true. It's the view that arises when people are pent up in the cities far too long, and fall far too much in love with their own voice and views; their own set and setting; their own media-mirrored visage.

What all our media mouthpieces assert is happening in America, is happening -- it turns out -- only in their sealed and secular Happy World. It is not what's happening in the core of our states where the whirr and the buzz and the blather of the coasts come through only faintly, like screams heard through walls and quickly fading.

Out here, there's a different drum sounded and different dances danced. And, if you could, as I did yesterday, look out over the Owens valley and coast down into the small town of Bishop and watch the men come out at dusk to furl the American flags that line the sidewalks by the hundreds, you'd know, beyond a shred of a doubt, that the states of our union are still strong, and will survive, no matter what happens in the Happy World of our coastal cities, our capitols of culture and corruption, into which, in the course of the decades, everything cheap and corrupt and loose has rolled and congealed.

What happens in those cities may matter in the news of the day, but out here it is the news of the decade that matters. Here is where what we were and are and will become is finally and irrevocably decided. Everyone who thinks they know what the country is and where it is going needs to take some time out every so often and take their own personal core sample. This, for now, was mine.

[First published 2006-11-12]

Vanderleun : November 18, 09  |  Your Say (14)  | PermaLink:

"No problem. I've done this thousands of times...."

Every time I think that mankind really is "the crown of creation," something like this comes along to confirm we're just God's experiment with "the smart monkey" to see if He can better monologue material for "The Eternity Show:"

A man has been severely injured after attempting to loosen a stiff wheel-nut on his car by blasting it with a shotgun. The 66-year-old American shot the wheel from arm's length with a 12-gauge shotgun and was peppered with ricocheting buckshot and debris. According to a sheriff's office report, he was taken to Tacoma General Hospital with severe but not life threatening injuries. His legs, feet and abdomen were worst affected, but some injuries went as high as his chin.

The man had been repairing a Lincoln Continental for about two weeks at his home near Southworth in Washington state, about ten miles from Seattle. He had successfully removed all but one wheel-nut on the right rear wheel and resorted to firepower out of sheer frustration on Saturday afternoon. -- Man hurt after blasting wheel with shotgun

How I would have loved to have been listening in on that thought process:

"One damn nut to go.... just one.....

Just fit this lug wrench over the nut, and t...w....i....s...t, and....."

SPROING!

"ARRRRGH! SHIT! KNUCKLE FUC.... BUT... BUT... no problem....

Now just whack the sucker with this small sledge hammer and....."

WHAA-TUNK!

"SAAAYWHAT! YOU MOTHER.....! OH, MY SHIN! MY SHIN!....."

Deep measured breathing and slowly rising rage rumblings ensue as the afflicted limps and hobbles about the shop.

"That's it. THAT'S IT! You sombitch nut!

Guns? Yes, that's it. I'll just BLOW THIS MOTHER OFF!

"Get that shotgun out of the cabinet. That's it.

stand at an angle so that there won't be any chance of ricochet and just s..q..e..e..z..e off a round and...."

KABLAMM!

And then a silence over which we hear a slowly rising siren and the a small voice-over saying, "I wonder if they've got Monster Garage on the hospital's cable system...."

Vanderleun : November 17, 09  |  Your Say (33)  | PermaLink:

So my old friend Mr. Stephen Jones and I are doing some urban spelunking deep within the "University District" of Seattle on a rainy Friday night. A couple of movie art houses are presenting bills that offer an ancient Louis Malle flick alongside the towering cinematic achievement of "Saw 2." The corner curry houses are doing a desultory business in over-spiced stews, and in the various coffee houses with free WiFi young couples who used to sit and have "intellectual" conversations over cappuccinos are sitting together staring at their laptop screens. Perhaps they're having "intellectual" instant messaging with each other.

The streets, though damp, boast roving clumps and clusters of drunken or stoned students, and the drunker and more stoned human detritus that takes shelter under the ever forgiving wing of what passes for institutions of "higher learning" in our cities. One young woman with a white marble complexion and wearing a hooded Eskimo coat is mistaken, in the mist, for a storefront mannequin. Hilarity and apologies ensue after a young fellow carelessly shakes his umbrella in her direction.

It's an aimless night on University Way and, aside from Twice-Sold Tales, a musty and chaotic used book store, very few shops are open except those that will give you caffeine, pho and facial piercings. Why no Seattle shop has broken down and offered all three of these things under one roof is beyond me. For a moment, I dream of starting a new international chain, StarPhoTats, to fill this obvious need of a nation with far too much time and money on its hands, but then my attention is distracted by a shop up the street that seems to be open.

I say "seems" because the entryway is dimly lit and the store name above the lintel is not lit at all. Still, the door is slightly ajar with bright white light spilling out onto the wet sidewalk. I look up and find out this emporium (since it seems to be a recycled Five and Dime ) is called "Off the Wall." It's not clear from the contents of the window what this store is selling. The window shows you only a worn and broken mannequin slumped in an ancient chair with a gas mask pulled over its head. It's the kind of display that either sucks you in or makes you turn, set your hair on fire, and run down the misted streets screaming "I got the fear!"

Naturally, we go in.

As the door swings open I see a tired, overly made up eternal female student slumped behind the counter reading what appears to be a used paperback of one of Philip Jose Farmer's porno-sci-fi novels of the 70's. She's got long hair with a bronze-red wash that appears to have been put on by a spray-can while her eyebrows and lip-gloss were being applied by an oar. She grins at us with no smile in her eyes and goes back to Farmer's descriptions of over-endowed aliens having their weird way with buxom earth women before carrying them off to the Planet Qwerty.

My pal Stephen, in his Wall Street Suit and Tie costume which is all he ever wears even while sunbathing in the Bahamas, has wandered to the back of the store to exclaim, in an unusually loud tone, "Exactly what is this store selling and should we franchise it?"

(I should mention at this point that Stephen and I have been visiting some local biotech firms that he tracks on a regular basis as the Wise Man of Wall Street financial analysts. )

Since, in our black raincoats, suits, white shirts Ferragamo ties and well-polished shoes, we probably appear to the clerk as the Men in Black here from her government to help her, I can't help feeling what we once called a "bummed vibe" radiating towards us from behind the counter as her hands carefully move her purse from the counter into a drawer and lock it.

Then I take a look around.

From close at hand to far away in the rear of the store, in glass cases that at times are taller than I am, under intense spotlights, I can see nearly every form of bong, mass-produced or "hand-crafted," known to modern medical science. Yes, it is a vast Bazar of Bongs, a Mini-Mall of Marijuana Madness ("... wherein lurks Murder! Insanity! Death!"). I look up half-expecting to see "jewels and binoculars hung from the head of the mule," but see only other bongs hanging down from the ceiling, glinting in the reflected light.

Stephen is standing midway in the store looking at but not comprehending the meaning of a case in which over a dozen hand-blown, almost Venetian, glass bongs reside in crystalline splendor. The shortest of these stands no less than four feet high. They all boast bowls so large you could easily (at today's prices) blow through $200 worth of buds at a single sitting (Although how one could sit and still operate a four-foot bong is beyond my imagination. Perhaps it is only for couples. Perhaps toes play a role. ).

"What are these things?" asks Stephen who, since he neither drinks nor smokes, remains remarkably unclued about such matters even though he is well into his fifth decade on the planet.

"These are bongs, Stephen," I tell him. "Remarkable, over-the-top and utterly dedicated bongs. Lovingly hand-made by craftsmen; by der Elves of the Black Forest; by people who blow something other than glass from time to time. They of the caliber of craft a friend of mine once called "Ghengis Bong."

"What's a bong?" Stephen asks. This from a man who also has a teen-aged daughter. Very strong on a financial analysis of any kind in any industry, but a bit behind the curve when it comes to one of the main fuel sources of popular culture.

"A bong is a super-chargable means of smoking dope, Stephen. A bong is...."

"You can't say that here or I'll have to throw you out of the store," says a stern voice from the front.

S-l-o-w-l-y I turned.

"I beg your pardon?"

It's the clerk who is glaring at us from behind the counter. "I said you can't use the B-word in here. They are "waterpipes."

"I'm sorry but I'm still not getting this. Are you saying that one cannot call a bong a bong?"

"Yes. It is store policy. Nobody in here is allowed to use that word in talking about these waterpipes."

"I see," I say although I don't see at all. I glance about the store -- walls, ceiling and behind the counter. There's no sign to that effect; nothing that says "Those Who Call B__gs B__gs Will Be Asked to Leave."

"How," I inquire, "are people supposed to know this? Is this one of these popular American rules you are allowed to know only after you break it?"

"We've been here for years and everybody knows it," she replies.

"Everybody on the block, in the district, in the city or across the whole region? Is this something included in the Freshman Orientation Packet?"

"People just know and now you do too."

Stephen is observing this whole exchange with a deeply bemused but befuddled look on his face.

"So, just to get this straight, you can't call a bong a bong inside this store which is, from the look of display cases and the vast selection of rolling papers and incense behind you, utterly devoted to the rather singular purpose of retailing implements which, to any sane eye, are used to consume marijuana in large and almost lethal doses. Am I right?"

"Exactly and if you keep saying 'bong' I really will have to ask you to leave."

"In a way you already have. So this is really a case in which you can't call a spade a spade -- speaking of course of the standard garden implement?"

"Look," she says ducking inside the cover of... "I just work here. It's the policy."

"I'm not blaming you," I say. "It's just that I find it all, well, rather mind blowing. But okay.... Stephen?"

We make our way towards the door since it is clear our presence is disturbing what is otherwise a very quiet shift for this woman. As I reach the door I glance in a case and see several shelves of a blue plastic product that looks to be a simply funnel attached to a long thick tube. These are encased in blue cardboard packaging that proudly announces them as "The Bluewater Beer Bong."

"Excuse me, but it seems as if these products are called "bongs" right on the label here. Why is that?"

She sighs and says, as if talking to a child, "That's because they are used for liquid, for beer."

"Well, if I filled those 'waterpipes' over there with beer instead of water, could I call them a bong then?"

Stoned and stoney silence ensues. Stephen and I slip out into the night and leave the shop empty except for the clerk who has taken her purse out of the drawer and is rifling through it for something.

"Somehow," Stephen says, "I don't think that store is a candidate for franchising."

"Because of the "Don't call a bong a bong" policy?

"Nope. It has no customers at all and this is a high foot traffic location. I don't think it would do well in malls and truck stops like Starbucks. Hard to see what their business plan would look like."

"Perhaps, but then again maybe you could sell the concept to Ben and Jerry's. Seems like a perfect fit to me."

Down the street the girl with the white marble skin and hooded Eskimo jacket is back to holding so still she looks like a dime store Indian. I wonder how big a role the waterpipes of Off the Wall play in her Friday nights.

Vanderleun : November 16, 09  |  Your Say (29)  | PermaLink:

"Every time you put milk into your coffee and watch it mix and realize that you can't unmix that milk from your coffee, you are learning something profound about the Big Bang, about conditions in the very, very early universe. This is just a giant clue that the real universe has given to us to how the fundamental laws of physics work. We don't yet know how to put that clue to work. We don't know the answer to the who done it, who is the guilty party, why the universe is like that."

"We know that the existing theories aren't right and we need to move beyond them. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible, but nature is not incompatible with itself. Nature figures out some way to reconcile these ideas."

"There is this feeling that inflation is like confession — that is wipes away all prior sins. I don't think that is right. We haven't explained what needs to be explained until we take seriously the question of why inflation ever started in the first place."

Twenty-four fascinating and valuable minutes with the brilliant Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist and a senior research associate at Caltech.

"However, the real world is quite orderly. The entropy is much, much lower than it could be. The reason for this is that the early universe, near the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, had incredibly low entropy compared to what is could have been. This is an absolute mystery in cosmology. This is something that modern cosmologists do not know the answer to, why our observable universe started out in a state of such pristine regularity and order — such low entropy. We know that if it does, it makes sense. We can tell a story that starts in the low entropy early universe, trace it through the present day and into the future. It's not going to go back to being low entropy. It's going to be compliant entropy. It's going to stay there forever. Our best model of the universe right now is one that began 14 billion years ago in a state of low entropy but will go on forever into the future in a state of high entropy." -- Edge: WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES: A Conversation With Sean Carroll

Vanderleun : November 15, 09  |  Your Say (24)  | PermaLink:

It probably works like this. Every morning when Obama rises he takes a deep and refreshing hot coffee high-colonic. During this meditative phase of his day he thinks,

"Let's see... how can I show my contempt for America in a manner not previously thought possible? Last week I was giving the American flag my trademarked "crotch salute."** A day or so ago I was bending over for the Emperor of Japan. Humm, what's left? I know, I'll put on the biggest mass murderer of the 20th century's signature jacket for my photo-op. And some lip gloss! And pantyhose! Fuck yeah! [Fist pump]"

Don't think so? Then, as Bird Dog notes, "figure out these photos of the O in a Mao jacket from today or yesterday.

Good grief. Never thought I'd see the day that an American Pres would put on a Mao jacket. It sends a peculiar message. I would wear a tutu before I'd put on one of those - except maybe for Halloween. -- Life imitates satire - Maggie's Farm

**Signature Crotch Salute as the Flag passes:

Vanderleun : November 14, 09  |  Your Say (26)  | PermaLink:

U.S. President Barack Obama bows as he is greeted by Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko as he arrives at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009.

You know, he is getting better at this sort of thing. Practice makes perfect. This one has to go straight into the Obama Scrapbook section, "My Greatest Achievements."

While a normal, well-brought-up American knows that free men do not bow to monarchs, it is interesting to read Miss Manners on the subject of bowing to foreign monarchs, not that manners is what we expect to see in this case.

UPDATE: Below the fold, HotAirPundit collects photos of other world leaders greeting the Emperor of Japan. Not really a bow in the carload.

Update: A commentor notes it doesn't cut it from the Japanese point-of-view either:

Foreigners are not expected to bow, as they lack the requisite knowledge of the elaborate etiquette governing this for at least 1000 years.

This BHO bow, because of its degree of declination and the shamefully rounded back, is in Japanese eyes the bow of a crippled toilet attendant to his supreme master.
Posted by: Takuan Seiyo at November 14, 2009 12:19 PM

Update: AD commentor JD contributes this first of what may well grow to be thousands of photoshops:

Top headline on this groveling moment is currently How low will he go? Obama gives Japan's Emperor Akihito a wow bow

Power Line sums up the inner meaning with "Why is this man bowing?"

Obama's breach of protocol is of a piece with the substance of his foreign policy. He means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs and tyrants. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege and royal bloodlines. He gives expressive form to the idea that the United States now willingly prostrates itself before the rest of the world.

Was the bow returned by the emperor of Japan? Let's go to the videotape!

[Note: At present the video is getting slammed pretty hard and may not load. A more direct link is HERE.]

Personal preen: This item, posted at 2009-11-14 00:29:19, Top of the Ticket @ Los Angeles Times (November 14, 2009 | 3:38 am) and Matt Drudge (Some hours after Top of the Ticket.)

Vanderleun : November 14, 09  |  Your Say (37)  | PermaLink:

In the AMERICAN DIGEST comments on "Afghanistan: The Failure to Plan Is "The Plan"" reader BGR asks:

"What can we do to stop him? What can I do to fight the hordes of people who agree with Obama? Whatever are we to do?

I cannot take much more jawboning. We all know the score. What good do we do by talking to one another night after night, day after day, lamenting the truth that we see?

The invaders are taking over and we are just chewing the fat?"

And... a few comments later... Askmom answers:

Vanderleun : November 12, 09  |  Your Say (21)  | PermaLink:

Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you're not a gamblin' man.
Then you find you're back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand.
Your black cards can make you money,
So you hide them when you're able.
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table.

You go back Jack do it again,
(Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round)
You go back Jack do it again....
-- Steely Dan

From where I sit I see many people underestimating President Obama because they cannot get their heads around who and what this man actually is and what he portends. Instead, historical or metaphoric analysis prevails making Obama like “Lincoln” or “Stalin,” like an "angel" or a "devil." Regardless of the comparisons evoked they all fail because Obama is none of these. He is "None of the above." He is not "That what came before." He is all of "What shall come after."

Politically and personally, Obama is a genetic sport, a Chimera; a now not-so-mythical being composed of multiple parts but functioning a a whole. Neither America nor the world has seen his like before. Attempts to analyze him that appeal to history fail because there is no historical precedent. That was, you will recall, part of his mystic allure. As a result many ascribe motives to the president that cannot be accurate; motives that run counter to the blunt evidence of the senses, to the maxim: “Watch what he does, not what he says.”

Interpretations of Obama, either in worship or in condemnation, will always be wistfully Prufrockian and up for "decisions and revisions which a minute can reverse" to the extent they fail to look at man's actions. Everything else is "blue smoke and mirrors."

Case in point: Afghanistan.

In the months long soap-opera of 'deciding' about Afghanistan, it was yesterday revealed that Obama abruptly rejected all the previous Afghan war options. The “reason” given was because, wait for it, "The President seeks clarity on turnover to Afghan government." Reaction to this cold reboot of the “Afghanistan Decision Process” was as swift as it was muddled. From the right or the left or the center the reaction could be headlined in all the newspapers and Drudgesque websites of the world in one modern acronym, “WTF!?”

In somewhat softer tones Legal Insurrection on "Eikenberry An Excuse For Obama's Dawdling" sums up the two poles of the response to the Afghan-Oval-Office-Quagmire saying:

Of course, Obama and Eikenberry are being hailed in the left-wing blogosphere as supremely rational and thoughtful beings. The right-wing blogosphere (including me) and even much of the mainstream media are seeing Obama's dawdling as a sign, 10 months into his term, that Obama doesn't have a clue what to do and cannot make a hard decision. [Emphasis added]

In somewhat more detail the always astute neo-neocon in "Hamlet-in-Chief: Obama loses the name of action" explains the Commander-in-Chief's active inaction as:

Either Obama is (a) constitutionally incapable of making a decision (or perhaps even understanding that this is what presidents have to do); or he is (b) incapable of making a decision that will offend a large group of people either way it goes. In the meantime, he is causing the demoralization of our troops in Afghanistan by showing an abysmal lack of leadership on the war there, after cynically and disingenuously making it one of the centerpieces of his campaign. [Emphasis added]

Much as I admire these two commentators on the passing political scene, I’d suggest that they and many others have it precisely wrong because they are not looking at the blunt fact of the matter. That fact is that Obama’s Afghanistan decision was made, in the privacy of his own chimeric mind, long ago. Obama’s decision was and is,

“I WILL DECIDE NOTHING ABOUT AFGHANISTAN FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE AND THEN FIND WAYS TO DEFER THE DECISION LONGER STILL. MY ACTION WILL BE INACTION.”

Many of Obama’s supporters continue to believe, in spite of constantly mounting evidence to the contrary, that his motives and desires are to better the lot of America, humanity, and Mother Earth. Many of Obama’s detractors continue to believe, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, that Obama is, although malign, a “rational actor;” that his decisions, even though they disagree with them, are arrived at through known and understood political and diplomatic processes.

I submit that neither of these are the case with this particular Chimera and that we have not begun to understand a President for whom there is no precedent. I submit that Obama is proceeding according to a plan, but that is is his plan and his alone; a plan so personal that even his wife may not be a party to it. I submit that the plan is the one that the poet Yeats understood as “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

And for playing with “mere anarchy” you can’t find a better Petri dish than Afghanistan / Pakistan.

Doing “something” in Afghanistan has no possible benefit for either anarchy or Obama. Anything that is “done” – be it sending in more troops or bringing troops out – only increases order and reduces entropy. Decisions, one way or another, direct management solutions. In Afghanistan as it is in America these days increased and directed management of problems decreases chaos and uncertainty. It is not an accident that all of Obama's domestic agenda involves replacing private sector management with government czars and bureaucracies.

If your inner goal is the destruction of established systems of governance you will seek in increase chaos and uncertainty at every turn. This is exactly what we see in Obama’s personal style of what passes for “governance.” We do not have to intuit this. We need only observe and not deny the evidence of our senses.

Veterans of dysfunctional corporations will recognize the Obama style as the one in which upper management is fond of giving middle management “All the responsibility, none of the authority, and zero resources.” It’s a time-tested recipe for failure and demoralization while maintaining an aloof, "concerned," and above the fray posture on the part of the CEO. It is what is being done to the US military, day in and day out, in Afghanistan and, as such, works to Obama’s favor as long as it can be done slowly and without alarm.

There are two benefits to Obama’s decision not to decide in Afghanistan:

1) It increases the instability of Pakistan and makes the likelihood of a radical Muslim coup in that country greater. This would, in one day, bring the control of nuclear weapons into radical Muslim hands. No waiting for Iran to get its act together. It also means that a vast sector of the world, from India to England falls under the spectre of a nuclear holocaust on a hair trigger. If you believe that great creation arises from great destruction, this is to your benefit.

2) It lowers the morale and effectiveness of the US military from the Joint Chiefs of Staff down to Private Grunt on patrol in Kandahar. Since the ultimate check to a politician’s power is always found in the military, anything that decreases that element is always to the politician’s benefit. If you can reduce the budget for the military at the same time you increase its responsibilities, so much the better.

None of this makes much sense if your goal is the improvement of the nation you are sworn to protect and defend. If, however, your goal is to enter history at the level of an Alexander or a Caesar deciding not to decide is a decision you will implement for as long as possible. In this entropy is your friend especially if you know that "for destruction ice / Is also great." You will be given a lot of time to decide not to decide as long as people on all sides of the poltical world continue to see you not as the political mutation you are but as the president you are not.

Until they do you can just "go back Jack do it again, (Wheel turnin' 'round and 'round....)"

Update: Also see Jules Crittenden's Advance To The Rear! on advanced dithering.

Vanderleun : November 12, 09  |  Your Say (47)  | PermaLink:

On Living with the Loss of a Son in Wartime. Written and first published on Memorial Day, 2003

MY NAME, "GERARD VAN DER LEUN," IS AN UNUSUAL ONE. So unusual, I've never met anyone else with the same name. I do know of one other man with the name, but we've never met. I've seen his name in an unusual place. This is the story of how that happened.

It was an August Sunday in New York City in 1975. I'd decided to bicycle from my apartment on East 86th and York to Battery Park at the southern tip of the island. I'd nothing else to do and, since I hadn't been to the park since moving to the city in 1974, it seemed like a destination that would be interesting. Just how interesting, I had no way of knowing when I left.

August Sundays in New York can be the best times for the city. The psychotherapists are all on vacation -- as are their clients and most of the other professional classes. The city seems almost deserted, the traffic light and, as you move down into Wall Street and the surrounding areas, it becomes virtually non-existent. On a bicycle you own the streets that form the bottom of the narrow canyons of buildings where, even at mid-day, it is still cool with shade. Then you emerge from the streets into the bright open space at Battery Park.

Tourists are lining up for Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. A few people are coming and going from the Staten Island Ferry terminal. There are some scattered clots of people on the lawns of Battery Park. Everything is lazy and unhurried.

I'd coasted most of the way down to the Battery that day since, even though it appears to be flat, there is a very slight north to south slope in Manhattan. I arrived only a bit hungry and thirsty and got one of the dubious Sabaretts hot dogs and a chilled coke from the only vendor working the park.

The twin towers loomed over everything, thought of, if they were thought of at all, as an irritation in that they blocked off so much of the sky. It was 1975 and, Vietnam not withstanding, America was just about at the midway point between two world wars. Of course, we didn't know that at the time. The only war we knew of was the Second World War and the background humm of the Cold War. It was a summer Sunday and we were in the midst of what now can be seen as "The Long Peace."

Vanderleun : November 11, 09  |  Your Say (57)  | PermaLink:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-- William Butler Yeats -- "The Second Coming" Analyzed

The secular infection of the post-post-modern mind is beyond virulent and oozing pus wherever one looks. One manifestation of the spread of the epidemic is the "fashionable" compulsion to declare one has no faith by declaring one's faith in atheism. This is becoming a fad among our self-styled artiste class.

This evening I was looking at some interesting work on Flickr and wanted to learn a bit more about the artist, one Michael Paukner. His short Flickr autobiography is "graphic designer, freelancer, musician, atheist, jack of all trades." That's it. That's all. Which of those five things is not like the other four? That's right, the compulsive addition of "atheist."

I must confess I'm always a little surprised by the "passionate intensity" of these childish and malformed souls. It's as if Paukner felt forced to declare himself "graphic designer, freelancer, musician, broken, jack of all trades." If he had he'd have been a bit more honest about himself. As it stands declaring one is a loud and proud "atheist" is I imagine a kind of advertisement for one's own brokenness in order to attract and gather around oneself others who are broken in the same way. I suppose it's a kind of dating behavior of the spiritually malformed in order to wall themselves off from redemption of any sort; a kind of forehead tattoo of the Tribe of Zero.

It's a continuing mystery to me that, faced in every moment with the self-evident presence of the miracle of all that is, people in western cultures can shroud themselves in the deepest dark of "There is no miracle." Then again, I am reliably informed that the grace of free will is what makes this possible and I cannot argue with grace. It has too often been granted to me for me to test it.

Still I wonder at the Tribe of Zero's compulsion to announce it's dark faith in Nothing. In a way, the passionate intensity of atheists is mirrored by the passionate intensity of Muslims who would kill and behead unbelievers and be convinced of their own "tough-mindedness" as they pulled the trigger or chopped at the neck. The difference is, of course, that our post-post-modern atheists, with their t-shirts and tattoos, their mumbles and tacky manifestos proclaiming their "faith," are unlikely to ever kill Muslims. That's not their role in today's global religious war between the submission and slavery of Islam and the liberty and freedom of the west. No, the role of atheists is similar to the role of pacifists. They hide behind those who believe in Liberty and Freedom and carry on their broken lives.

Their only other conceivable role, should the civilization that makes their "faith" possible is, if that civilization should lose, to become the first sheep slaughtered under Sharia law. (Unless of course their "tough mindedness" failed and their rushed to conversions as most would.) Those that stuck too their intensely passionate conviction in "atheism" would quickly discover the truth of the old saying, "If you don't believe in anything, you'll die for nothing at all."

Vanderleun : November 10, 09  |  Your Say (32)  | PermaLink:

Nidal Malik Hasan: Major, Muslim, Doctor, Killer, Traitor

Year upon year in this world's dark woods,
Heaped at the foot of the trees,
The tangles and bundles of dead brush increase
Which sunlight shall never seize.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

The ash that descends in the clearest of skies?
The leapers that swam down the stones?
Best answered by bombs from mid-heaven at prayer
With a fire that hollows their bones.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

If their gods decree war, God's war shall prevail.
His lessons are seared in the stone.
No dreams shall defer, nor wishes erase,
The hate that is burned in the bone.

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by book, chant and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

Only by fire is fascism finished.
This sin is demanded that your line may live.
Only through fire is freedom reborn.
Each generation pulls the sword from the stone.

Vanderleun : November 8, 09  |  Your Say (31)  | PermaLink:

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Jerry Pournelle looks at the traitor who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood:

I would presume that arming oneself and shooting 43 US soldiers is (1) levying war against the United States, and (2) an overt act, and that Major Hassan should be charged with treason.

Political correctness was the cause of the Fort Hood Massacre, and we ought not forget that. The fact that someone could go through -- at government expense -- an undergraduate education with ROTC, then medical school at a US military institution, and remain a traitor to the United States is a significant warning. A very significant warning that the idea of Political Correctness has consequences we can't afford. Corruption of the Legions is one danger the Republic cannot endure.

The Legions remain faithful; but for how long when their officers are no longer faithful? Hassan had been through ROTC and a US armed forces medical school as a commissioned officer. Why was his failure of loyalty to the armed forces not detected earlier? But of course he was a Muslim, and it would not be politically correct to wash someone out of an armed forces medical school for lack of loyalty to the armed forces of these United States.

We sow the wind. We have reaped one whirlwind.

The politically correct spin is coming like a tidal wave. He is a crazy guy who happens to be a Muslim. All of that misses the point: he was disloyal to the United States, and said so openly and many times; yet he remained a commissioned officer of the United States. That is the point that is being overlooked. Whether the disloyalty is due to a psychotic episode or some other cause is not important.

Vanderleun : November 6, 09  |  Your Say (26)  | PermaLink:

Last night upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I hope he never goes away
-- Variation on a nursery rhyme

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.
-- Gertrude Stein

Atheists, like songwriters, are always seeking lines more glib than true. Glib is golden because it obscures the fact that deep down atheism is, like a pop song, shallow. One of the more tedious quips, oft repeated with a tone that oozes ‘What a good boy am I,’ is "God is just an imaginary friend for adults.”

The possibility that God may have given glib atheists everything – space, time, a planet, evolution, and free will – that allows this bromide to roll trippingly off their tongues is something they will not and can not conceive. Their wetware is not evolved enough to perceive God should He deign to reveal himself. God is not finished buffing out their fatal flaw, although He will be, by and by. Until then they cannot grasp that, in some cases, “imaginary friends” can be as real as their friendship is illusory.

Exhibit A today are yesterday's elections which established the new truth of contemporary American politics, “Barack Obama is the imaginary friend of Democrats.” This dovetails well with another of his many roles, stand-in lower-case god for the vast majority of American atheists.

Even as Obama’s methods grow more radical, his means more aggressive, and his motives darker, and his stubbornness without will most Democrats polled persist in their belief that he really is their friend. It’s entirely imaginary, of course, since we see with every passing day that the “friendship” of Obama only lasts as long as it is needed -- by Obama. When the need is no longer there, the friendship fades like the Highland mist at dawn. The now tattered and overused phrase “Under the bus” has become code for “Any speed bumps on my road will be steam-rolled to a flat black stain on the pavement like an armadillo on an Arizona highway in August.”

And yet, if we are to believe the polls, Obama love endures

Vanderleun : November 4, 09  |  Your Say (8)  | PermaLink:

"I think I know the warm place you allude to.
Just between the thighs, is it not, my lady?"
-- Frank Harris
1.
Copulations on candelabras draped in overcoats,
And illuminated by burning children,
Guide us inside for the pearl of great price.
Our questions and cards of aging identity
Have been checked with our hats at the door.

Within, in the gray steam composed of our breath,
The mongoloid's lips nibble the rose
That pulses and glows in the garden of meat.
No sound at all flows from the audience.
No sound at all but the wind over stones.

Surely some triple somersault is about to be performed.
Surely some deadly edged object is about to be swallowed,
To the death rasps and rattle of drums draped in black.
Surely some revelation is at hand, and it's promise,
A love without name, without years, is arriving at last.

We are decently clothed and seated quite primly.
We have read all the arguments and remained most informed.
We have all made it through to these seats, our reward.

Vanderleun : November 4, 09  |  Your Say (3)  | PermaLink:

Long ago when the Web was the Net and Social Media was Usenet, I spent some years at a watering hole called The Well. From my own personal collection of lists made in those years, I came across this small selection of Sixties slang in the context it was used that I think I made around 1989.

Additions and corrections gratefully accepted.

• ACED:"We aced him out!"
• AX:"He blows a bad ax."
• BAAAD:"Hey, I checked out yer old lady today.She's baaad,man."
• BARF:"You barf after the peyote milkshakes, bro, but, hey, it's beautiful."
• BALLSY:"She is one ballsy chick."
• BALLING:"So we smoked some righteous reefer and spent the afternoon balling our brains out."
• BLOW YOUR COOL:"What ever you do, don't blow your cool."
• BLEW HIM AWAY:"The pigs just blew him away with their shotguns."
• BOONDOCKS:"Let's make it to this pad I scammed out in the boondocks."
• BREAD:"Dope will get you through times without bread better than bread will get you through times without dope."
• BRING DOWN: “No, oh no!, don’t bring me down. No, no, no, no, no…”
• BUMMER:"Bummmmmmmmmer!"
• BUBBLEGUM MUSIC:"Scott McKenzie, my ass! He's the king of teenyboppers and bubblegum music."
• CATCH SOME RAYS:"You've caught enuf zzz's, let's hit the beach and catch some rays."
• CLICK:"That town's about 50 clicks back in the boondocks."
• COPE:"I've got no dope and cannot cope."
• CRASH:"I just wanna flash before I crash."
• CRASH PAD:"Flash runs a shooting parlor and crash pad for teenyboppers in the Haight."
• DINKS:"When I was in Nam we used to waste dinks just to pass the time."
• DING A LING:"He's a star-class ding-a-ling."
• DO YOUR THING:"I do my thing and you do your thing and if by chance they meet, hey, it's yabyum."

Vanderleun : November 1, 09  |  Your Say (21)  | PermaLink:

Your answers for the inquisitor
In his wine-stained satin lace,
Are as irrelevant as answers
Deduced from deepest space.

Your presence in his universe
Confirms him of your crime.
He seeks to seal all passages
Divined from space and time.

Behind the science of his spectacles
Lives a mind reduced by power.
A gesture from his languid wrists --
All's over in an hour.

"We seek to keep our faithful
Baptized, confirmed and saved
From those dark, unknown questions
That live beyond the grave.

"Hunched within my velvet throne,
My pen controls the door
That opens to the vaults of night
Above the killing floor."

Vanderleun : October 31, 09  |  Your Say (11)  | PermaLink:

"I got it!" "No, I got it!" "No, we got it!"

"The New York Yankees’ Nick Swisher climbed a wall to try and catch a ball in Game 1 of the World Series..." (via Photo Journal - WSJ )

As long as we have the World Series every Autumn, I will continue to believe to the adamantine rock bottom of my soul that God blesses America and has an exceptional plan for this nation.

Look at the moment above captured in Game 1. It could be hung in the Norman Rockwell Museum and not be a tittle of a jot out of place. In every face (except Swisher's) is an expression of pure joy as they all realize that on its way to them, at that very moment, is every baseball fan's most cherished dream from childhood: The chance to catch a fly ball in a World Series game in the stands.

In another few instants only one will come up with it, but in this moment all have a chance at it and all are transported at the opportunity to transcend themselves and enter into something bigger, brighter, and finer than their lives would otherwise be.

And that's the way it is in America. That's why we see many footprints leading in and few coming out. For with all our quarrels, our disagreements, our struggles, and our incessant bickering, this remains a land where you can always get another turn at bat, where you can always, right up until six months after death, get another chance to swing for the bleachers. And where, even if you aren't a player in "The Show," you can buy a seat out on the right field line and wait there for the crack of the bat, the rise of the ball against the sky, and... it's coming, it's coming.... and whap, you got it. You're in "The Show."

And in that moment life, the universe, and everything else comes down to one great roar of joy from yourself and the rest of the crowd.

Baseball, the World Series, a high fly ball in an Autumn sky, and America. Nothing else like them ever was. "I got it!" "No, I got it!" "No, we got it!".

Vanderleun : October 29, 09  |  Your Say (15)  | PermaLink:

Illustration via the indefatigable iOwnTheWorld.com

"TALK-SHOW host David Letterman has been recorded on tape having sex with a female staff member - and he is worried that the footage will eventually be leaked, it's reported today." -- News.com.au

It was interesting when Pamela Anderson's "leaked" to the Internet because she still looked like, well, "Pamela Anderson" at the time. It was less interesting when Paris Hilton did it because skank is skank no matter how blond or how rich. Nowadays the concept of celebrity sex tapes is banal and boring and fills me with equal measures of revulsion and inertia. Whose sex tapes would you LEAST like to see?

Snark And Boobs has some suggestions.

• Susan Sarandon & Tim Robbins
• Rosie O'Donnell and her wife
• Bill Clinton & any of his chicks
• Mitt Romney and his wife
• Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
• Al and Tipper Gore
• Harry Reid and his wife
• Keith Olbermann
• Janeane Garofalo

Aside from "all of the above" whose sex tapes would you least like to see? Top of my list would be "Nancy Pelosi with Nancy Pelosi."

Vanderleun : October 28, 09  |  Your Say (16)  | PermaLink:

Yesterday the German news magazine Der Spiegel published in SPIEGEL ONLINE an interview with Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, one of the most influential conservative commentators in the United States. The result is an interview of over 4,000 words giving us in-depth look at Krauthammer's thinking and observations that we'd never see in the American news media. Since a wide-ranging interview of this length is a rarity in any medium, I'd urge you to read the entire piece. It will give you a sense of the Krauthammer's wide-ranging intellect that you can't get from newspaper columns and brief television appearances. That said, here are a few choice excerpts:

On the Nobel "Prize"

SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?

Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it's not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.

SPIEGEL: Why does it?

Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.

Krauthammer: The Chinese are rising, the Indians have a very long way to go. But I'm old enough to remember the late 1980s, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy and the prevailing view that America was in decline and Japan was the rising power. The fashion now is that the Chinese will overtake the United States. As with the great Japan panic, there are all kinds of reasons why that will not happen.

Krauthammer: The phrase "war of necessity and war of choice" is a phrase that came out of a different context. Milan Kundera once wrote, "a small country is a country that can disappear and knows it." He was thinking of prewar Czechoslovakia. Israel is a country that can disappear and knows it. America, Germany, France, Britain, are not countries that can disappear. They can be defeated but they cannot disappear. For the great powers, and especially for the world superpower, very few wars are wars of necessity. In theory, America could adopt a foreign policy of isolationism and survive. We could fight nowhere, withdraw from everywhere -- South Korea, Germany, Japan, NATO, the United Nations -- if we so chose. From that perspective, every war since World War II has been a war of choice.

Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

Vanderleun : October 27, 09  |  Your Say (6)  | PermaLink:

You just have to love John Nese and spend 12 great minutes with a great American businessman. As Chow.comtells it:

John Nese is the proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in LA. His father ran it as a grocery store, and when the time came for John to take charge, he decided to convert it into the ultimate soda-lovers destination. About 500 pops line the shelves, sourced lovingly by John from around the world. John has made it his mission to keep small soda-makers afloat and help them find their consumers. Galcos also acts as a distributor for restaurants and bars along the West Coast, spreading the gospel of soda made with cane sugar (no high-fructose corn syrup if John can avoid it).

I've been dining out lately on the incredible difference between Mexican Coke (sane cane sugar) and the swill passed off as American coke (high-fructose corn crapola). It's true and you can taste and feel the difference with one sip. As a result I am very pleased to listen to this high-priest of boutique sodas, a man who knows what he's talking about.

Here's a few choice quotes pulled from the video:

Corn syrup is totally unnecessary. Why would you use corn as the sweetener? Once a year Coca Cola makes a kosher Coke. It's got a yellow cap. Try it side by side with the regular Coke. The one with the cane sugar just goes pop! And it explodes and it's delicious., The one with the corn just goes fzzzzt.....

"Energy drinks? UGH! Energy drinks just taste bad."

"Big business loves big government. It just uses it to take over the market and then jack up prices."

"What I always wanted to do was to do business with other businesses my size."

"People still come in looking for RC Draft which was a soft cola. Very smooth."

"Coke and Pepsi love recycling. It gets them out of ever have to wash a bottle. If we really cared about the environment you'd have 're-use' and not 'recycling.'"

Re-use rather than recycling. I guess he's hip to the ever expanding glass mountains accruing at municipal garbage dumps around the nation since, surprise, it's cheaper to make glass from sand that to recycle it. Men like Nese should be in government rather than the substandard toads, right and left, that currently infest it. But then again, no. If he did we'd be out one really great soda store and that is just not worth it.

[UPDATE: Yes, Nese's Galcos Soda Pop Shop lets you buy on line for shipping to your parched home address. Check out Galco's Soda Pop Stop for details. ]

Vanderleun : October 26, 09  |  Your Say (15)  | PermaLink:

I'm not at all sure which pagan religion my 10-year-old stepson belongs to. Perhaps it is the arcane cult of "Nintendoism" with its secret rites of "The High Priests of the Thumb". Perhaps he is an acolyte of "Transformerology," which evidently commands him to amass enough Legos to build a Romanesque Chapel in his room that is large enough for himself and two friends.

I am disturbed this unknown cult requires him to keep a graven image in his room that resembles a large square sponge with legs and a Satanic expression. From time to time, he is known to take trays of burnt offerings, in the form of charred circles of dough covered in melted cheese and a sauce as red as blood, into his room. The offering trays are later recovered, but there is no trace of the sacrifice, only vague stains of red on the sponge and rug beneath it.

I am not sure how or when he came by this religion. Perhaps he was converted during one of those dead of night gatherings known among his coven as "sleep-overs." Sure, they sound innocent enough, but I am positive that these are covens at which much arcane and secret knowledge is transferred.

No matter what the source or nature of his unknowable religion, one thing is clear about the dangers of it. He has become convinced that there is such a thing as magic. My fear is that he may be right.

I suspect this because I have witnessed this dark magic at work in my own home.

One often seen magical incident is what I have come to know as "The Ritual of the Spirit Shoes." In this ritual, he discards his shoes at any place in the house in the sincere belief that they will reappear lined up in pairs in his closet. This, you will be astonished to learn, is exactly what happens. They actually do appear in the closet within the next 24 hours. At times they even reappear, as if they sense they will be his choice of footwear for the day, next to the front door ready for his feet in a kind of reverse Cinderella moment.

I have come to understand that "The Ritual of the Spirit Shoes" is only one of the strange effects that comes about through the intervention of "The Magic Floor." This "force" seems to be able to cause any and all items of his clothing discarded at any point in the house to vanish only to reappear, clean and folded, in his drawers and closets.

I have tried to reproduce this effect for myself by discarding items of clothing here and there about the house, but the only magical effect this seems to have is to cause "the look" to appear on the face of my wife. After which, I collect my spurned offerings from "The Magic Floor."

By far the most stunning proof that my stepson's religion is dark magic with large mojo is what I have come to understand as "The Miracle of Toys and Games."

As a 10-year-old boy, my stepson has no job, no prospects of a job, and is currently doomed to be a member of the hard-core unemployed for an unknown number of years. Because of this, he does not enjoy positive cash-flow. In fact, if he has any cash-flow at all, it is decidedly negative.

Still, he seems to have an ever expanding level of possessions. No sooner does he obtain, through prayer, an X-Box than he calls out to his strange gods for a Playstation II and, poof!, it appears. It comes complete with several strange circles of shiny metal that he places in the slot on the Playstation altar for an extended periods of worship.

Objects of this level of expense must, it would seem, be chanted for intensely, and the chants repeated frequently, over a period of time. The more mundane items such as school supplies seem to be the fruits of silent prayer. Still, the miracle manifests itself on a daily basis when, without any tapping of his own horde of cash kept in a large brown cigar box, his possessions multiply around him.

All this happens behind his back and without any intervention from him while in a trance state. At this level of contemplation and meditation he receives visions from strange beings that appear to him hour upon hour. Observing him in this state I can only conclude he is channeling his arcane gods through some mystical conduit that he calls "The Cartoon Network."

I am not sure what messages he is receiving since those few visions I have been allowed to witness involves bizarre figures of a slightly oriental cast flying about on alien worlds. Other than flying and exploding, they are unmoving except for a vibrating crimson squiggle where their lips would be. I am not sure what gospel they are preaching. I am sure, however, that I there is a monthly tithe for this somewhere in my cable bill.

No matter. Although it is a bit unnerving to witness the magical power of my stepson's unknown religion, I am at least comforted to know that he, unlike so many of our materialistic children, has a rich and full spiritual life. That's so important in these days when the secular seems to be dominating so much of our culture. Since many of his friends seem to share the same religion, I am also gratified that he has chosen peers whose family's values also accentuate the spiritual.

Yesterday I thought that I would help my stepson take one of his first steps towards adulthood by getting him his own wallet. In this way I believed I could begin to show him how to be responsible for his own finances. On reflection I thought better of it. His religion is so powerful that he would simply take it into his room, mutter some words over it, expose it to the mystic rays beamed in via "The Cartoon Channel," and it would be transformed into "The Boys' Wallet of Wonder -- Money checks in, but it doesn't check out." He would always leave home without it.

First published five years ago this month.

Vanderleun : October 26, 09  |  Your Say (5)  | PermaLink: