[Note: I'll be traveling for a day and so, in light of the SOTUS last night, I am reposting this from October of 2008. That's before the election, before the anointing, and before the fall. Nothing I have seen since that October has dissuaded me. And I still pray he is never really tested. The Cowardly Lion makes for great fiction but not as a leader in the real world. That's a recipe for disaster.]

What an enormous number of sheaths!
Isn't the kernel soon coming to light?
I'm blessed if it is! To the innermost centre,
It's nothing but sheaths - each smaller and smaller -
Nature is witty!
- Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Act V, Sc.5

When you peel off the layers of signifying and symbolizing, of blathering and bamboozling, Obama lacks in the elemental qualities of manliness necessary to be President. Obama is like the onion in Peer Gynt. Take away the layers there's nothing at the core.

You’ll peel past many layers about helping people, about caring, about giving and devotion of the Obama onion. Those pungent peels taste good to the poor, the grasping, the gullible, the craven, and the rich-so-rich that nothing dents their days. The layers remain the common malarkey of the con-man who hopes that by stimulating your greed for grub or good feelings now, he'll be able to hoover your bank account later. It's an old con and it works. That's why con-men are always with us; not because they are so smart, but because so many are so stupid. Con-artists (and Obama is a brilliant flim-flam flinger) not only know this, they depend upon it.

Obama is very much a man with “a hand full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged.” Just this morning, as he has for so many mornings, he wrote to me asking for five bucks. This after he squandered so many millions just last night with his noninfomercial for flaming narcissists of all five genders. It’s obvious the man and his minions can't handle money.

The money, however, is trivial. What is critical is whether or not the person for whom I'm voting has the right stuff to lead this country. Right up at the top of that list for me is manliness. And by that I do not mean a quality exclusive to men. Rather I mean the old-fashioned values of courage and the ability to do the right thing, the strong thing, under pressure - regardless of the consequences. Those who do not know what I mean by "manliness" by now will never know it, but by way of example I'll cite the most recent President to possess it, George Bush.

Continued...

Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, Members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:

As we gather tonight, our Nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.

We last met in an hour of shock and suffering. In four short months, our Nation has comforted the victims … begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon … rallied a great coalition … captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists … destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps … saved a people from starvation … and freed a country from brutal oppression.

Continued...

American Digest's Master of 'Massachusettes' Seamus O'Hammer will do your arithmetic for you:

"Herald Today:

Secretary of State William F. Galvin projects between 1.6 million and 2.2 million voters, out of a total of 4 million**, will show up at the polls today despite weather predictions of a mix of rain and snow. More than 105,000 voters have applied for absentee ballots.

Continued...

[ "Speaking of Palin, she will stump for five GOP candidates, four of them will win, everyone will talk about the one who didn’t." ** -- Predictions for 2010 @ House of Eratosthenes

Note: First published July 10, 2009. Right then and becoming more correct with every passing day. She's top dog right now and the Republican establishment, pundits and pols, cannot or will not see it. But they will. She can shift votes and enthusiasms by endorsing. She can get followers to come out and doorbell for her choices. She can get lawn signs planted and voters driven to the polls. She can raise money for her choice of candidates. Lots of money. And, win or lose, when this election is over just imagine how many political markers Palin will have collected.]

Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on. -- Wikipedia
"I can't fight for what's right when I'm shackled to the governor's seat." -- Palin

In the last week Sarah Palin has moved herself from the periphery to the center of power in the Republican party. The Party just doesn't seem to know it yet.

Continued...

In these New England villages and towns I’ve noticed it slowly while driving to this or that seasonal celebration. The holiday lights on the houses and in the yards are fewer this year, switched on later and turned off earlier. At the parties the cheer is a bit more forced. Inside the malls the shoppers all seem a tad glum, the stores’ offerings and blandishments forced, and the sales sooner and more drastic. There’s nothing dramatic, only a sense, a strangely unnerving sense, that this Christmas season is, in a word, diminished.

Somehow this last year now passing has slowly and steadily broken every promise made when it began. Instead of revival, the nation and the spirits of its people have been slowly immersed into a state of quiet desperation as its history and institutions have been stripped from it in such a methodical manner as to seem malicious. Those sworn to be the servants of the people, to preserve and protect their traditions and laws, prove each and every day to be not the exemplars of the best of us, but of the worst.

Now, as we move from the last night of Hanukkah towards the morning of the birth of Christ, our false servants are swearing – for no clear reason – to pursue passage of their rejected laws and Byzantine litigation right into the eve of Christmas. It’s a frenetic secular sacrilege mounted in some obscene ritual to instill in Americans not a respect for their government but a despair of its intent. It tarnishes the season and it is the death of hope.

Continued...

In New England in December the cold does not come in on little cat feet. Instead some mountain god of the great north woods throws open the door to Canada late one night. When you step out the next morning your scrotum promptly goes into hibernation somewhere around your arm pit. The cold gets hammered down tight. And it stays that way. Until, oh, somewhere in the middle of March.

I’d come to New England after many years away and, in Seattle, thought I’d packed well for the trip. I’d made a point to bring my very warm Seattle jacket. I stepped outside into the New England winter this morning and between the door and the car I knew, based on testicle retraction velocity, that my coat had nothing to say to this winter. I might as well have packed and dressed in a Speedo. At least I would have been rapidly arrested and taken to a warm jail cell until my need for medication could be determined.

In the car, having cranked the heat to fat end of the red stripe on the dial, my thawing reptile brain hissed, “Get a coat or die, monkeyboy.” But where? I was only going to be here for a few weeks before going back to the temperate zone of Seattle. I knew that various stores around this township would have vast stocks of sensible and warm winter coats but I didn’t really feel like investing somewhere north of $100 in some multiple layered goose-down body blimp that would warm you even within fifteen yards of Al Gore. I just needed a warm and dependable coat at not too much money… $75 to $85 … that would get me through the New England nights without frostbite.

Then I remembered that this town has something that Seattle didn’t because Seattle is just far too “smart” to have one – A Wal-Mart.

Continued...

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Photograph ©, 2006 by Ethan Russell @ EthanRussell.com

We'd finished filming John and Yoko for the video a day or so before he was shot to death. It was their last video, but of course we didn't know it at the time. There was film of them holding hands and walking in Central Park in the place that would later become "Strawberry Fields." We'd filmed them rolling naked in bed together in a Soho Art Gallery where she looked healthy and ample and he looked small and slight, with skin that was almost transluscent. I remember being slightly surprised by the fact that Lennon's need for Ono was so constant and palpable. He was seldom more than two feet away from her side and had the disconcerting habit of calling her "Mommy" whenever they spoke.

My role was as "executive producer" which really meant that I was to stand around with a roll of hundred dollar bills and pay-off the teamsters and solve other problems with copious applications of money. It was an odd job in more ways than one, but I was grateful to have it at the time.

Continued...

 
Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun -- then and now

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota. She would have been just four years old then. Now she's 90 years old and she comes to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three inch heels, and a six foot long purple boa. She's threatening to sing Kurt Weill's 'The Saga of Jenny" and dance on the table one more time .

She'll sing the Kurt Weill song, but we draw the line at her dancing on the table this year. Other than that, it is pretty much her night, and she gets to call the shots. Which is what you get when you reach 90 95 and are still managing to make it out to the tennis courts three to four times a week. "If it wasn't for my knees I'd still have a good backcourt game, but now I pretty much like to play up at the net."

She plays Bridge once or twice a week, winning often, and has been known to have a cocktail or two on occasion. She still drives even though it causes my brother to fret. This is a good thing since he's the kind of man who sees the incipient disaster in everything and it's good for him to fret about something that has a smidgen of reality to it.

She keeps a two-bedroom apartment in a complex favored by college students from Chico State and, invariably, has a host of fans during any given semester. She's thought about moving to the "senior apartments" out by the mall, but "I'm just not sure I could downsize that much and everyone there is so old."

She was born deep in the heartland at the beginning of the Great War, the youngest of five children. She grew up and into the Roaring 20s, through the Great Depression, taught school at a one room school house at Lake of the Woods Minnesota, roamed west out to California in the Second World War and met the man she married.

They stayed married until he died some 30 years ago. Together they raised three boys, and none of them came to any more grief than most and a lot more happiness than many.

After her husband died at the end of a protracted illness, she was never really interested in another man and filled her life with family, close friends (some stretching back to childhood), and was, for 15 years, a housemother to college girls. She still works three mornings a week as a teacher and companion to young children at a local day-care and elementary school.

She has always been a small and lovely woman -- some would say beautiful. I know I would. An Episcopalian, she's been known to go to church, but isn't devoted to the
practice, missing more Sundays than she attends. She's given to finding the best in people and letting the rest pass, but has been known to let fools pass at high speed.

Born towards the beginning of the 20th century, she now lives fully in the 21st. It is her 90th birthday party. It is attended by over 200 people from 2 to 97, many of whom are telling tales about her, some taller than others.

We don't believe the man who tells about the time in her early seventies that she danced on his bar. He's brought the pictures of the bar with her high-heel marks in it to prove the point.

Other stories are told, some serious, some funny, all loving. But they all can only go back so far since she has only been living in Chico, California for 30 years. I can go back further, and so, without planning to, I took my turn and told my story about her. It went something like this.

"Because I'm the oldest son, I can go back further in time. I can go back before Clinton, before Reagan, before Nixon, before Kennedy, before Eisenhower. We'll go back to the time of Truman.

"It must be the summer of 1949 and she's taking my brother and I back home to her family in Fargo for the first time. I would be almost four and he'd be two and a half. The war's been over for some time and everyone is now back home and settled in. My father's family lost a son, but -- except for some wounds -- everyone else came out all right.

"We're living in Los Angeles and her home is Fargo, North Dakota, half a continent away. So we do what you did then. We took the train. Starting in Los Angeles we went north to San Francisco where we boarded the newest form of luxury land transportation available that year, the California Zephyr.

"Out from the bay and up over the Sierras and down across the wastes until we wove our way up the spine of the Rockies and down again to the vast land sea that stretched out east in a swath of corn and wheat that that I remember more than the pitched curves and plunging cliffs of the mountains. You sat in a plush chair at the top of the car and Earth from horizon to the zenith flowed past you.

"There was the smell of bread and cooking in the Pullman cars that I can still capture in my mind, and the lulling rhythm of the wheels over the rails that I can still hear singing me down into sleep.

"At some point we changed trains to go north into the Fargo Station and, as we pulled into Fargo in mid-morning, my mother's family met us with their usual humble dignity -- they brought a full brass band that worked its way down through the John Philip Sousa set list with severe dedication. They also brought me more family members than there were people living on our entire block in Los Angeles. There may also have been a couple of Barbershop Quartets to serenade us during the band breaks, but I'm not sure about that.

"My mother and brother and I were swept away in the maelstrom of aunts, uncles, cousins by the dozens, and assorted folks from the neighborhood on 8th Avenue South.

"The day rolled into a huge lunch at a vast dining room table where my grandmother ruled with an iron ladle. Then, after a suitable post-prandial stupor, my entire family rose as one and headed out to the nearby park for their favorite activity -- trying to crush each other in tennis. When this family hit the courts, it was like a tournament had come to town. Other would-be players just took one look and headed for another set of courts elsewhere.

"I was still too young to play, although my mother would have a racquet custom-made for me within the year, so instead I would have been exhausting myself at some playground or in one of the sandboxes under the eyes of my older cousins. Then, at dusk, I made my way back to the courts."

"In the Fargo summers the twilights linger long and fade slowly and as they fade the lights on the courts come up illuminating them in the gathering dark. And I sat, not quite four, as the night grew dark around me and my mother and her family played on below.

"Now it is all more than fifty-four years gone but still, in my earliest memories, they play on in that endless twilight. I see them sweeping back and forth in the fading light. Taunting and laughing together. Calling balls out that are clearly in. Arguing and laughing and playing on forever long after the last light of day has fled across the horizon and the stars spread out high above the lights.

"Service. Return. Lob. Forehand. Volley. Backhand. Volley. Love All."

November, 2004 -- Chico & Laguna Beach, California

Billy Joel: He's a nice man, but he's gotta go.

They tell me, in this shaded room where the machines beep softly and the drip feed makes a soft “plop” every minute or so, that I am mad to declare, as I do, that my only solution is to go back in time and strangle Billy Joel in his cradle. They say that I am mad, but I say infanticide is the one ambition that still attaches me to sanity. Like Carthage, Baby Billie must be destroyed!

It wasn’t always this way with me. In fact it all started less than a week ago. Started, as many disasters do, by killing me softly with its love.

The parasite embedded itself in my brain during a vulnerable moment in the postprandial stupor that descended upon me after the third and last helping of Thanksgiving dinner. As the tryptophan torpor of turkey eroded my normal defenses I sat, minding my own stomach, by the warm fire in the study. Next door in the kitchen over a hot hand of Pinochle my host said, “Turn up that Billy Joel song I like.”

If I had known what that meant I would have choked myself with the leftover drumstick at that moment.

But no, I had no inkling of the horror to come. I was drifting through the hideous paragraphs of a tattered paperback novel by Dale Brown, an author who should have gone down with the Old Dog instead of living to write more books. His lulling sentences, so bad they were good, disarmed my natural defenses and so… and so….

In a few moments I heard the beginning notes of my doom. With a lilting melody backed by Thor’s piledriver bass line the following song was hammered into my brain…

It's all about soul.
It's all about faith and a deeper devotion.
It's all about soul.
'Cause under love is a stronger emotion.

In it went. So smooth and unremarked that I scarcely knew it was there. Instead I drifted off into a late Thanksgiving daydream of pecan pie, angels’ wings, dancing hamsters and waltzing kittens.

When I woke I went off to the bathroom for relief and, while washing my hands, I looked into the mirror and thought…. “It’s all about soul.”

Continued...

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.

Continued...

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]

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.

Continued...

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."

Continued...

If you've ever seen the History Channel series Ax Men,

filmed in and around these counties, understand that the foul mouthed, hot tempered, illiterate rednecks featured on this show are the creme de la creme of mossback society. Supported mostly by what is left of the logging industry in these parts, they live largely in dilapidated singlewides surrounded by clearcut woodlands and collections of the rusted remains of every car, truck, motor, transmission, and assorted piece of machinery or scrap metal that have been handed down through generations from father to son. To a city boy like I was at the time, they were suspect in every way. Which leads me to the proverbial hole in the donut of this tale. -- WESTSOUND MODERN

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.

And speaking Personally... and if a man speaks any other way we might as well start looking for his Protoplasm Daddy or Mother Cell...

I Don't Want To Hear Any More Tired Old Liberal Talk And Liberal Con .... The same things have been said a million times and more and there is no point in saying any of them again because NOTHING Ever Happens in the Liberal world.

(And while we're at it: I Don't Want To Hear Any More Tired Old Conservative Talk And Conservative Con about playing nice with these junkies. Once the Liberal needle goes in, it never comes out. Junkies don't kick if you're kind to them. Junkies only kick if you kick them.

Only excuse for this tired Liberal death route is THE KICK when the Liberal circuit is cut off for the non-payment and the Liberal-skin dies of Liberal-lack and overdose of time and the Old Skin has forgotten the skin game simplifying a way under the Liberal cover the way skins will.... A condition of total exposure is precipitated when the Kicking Addict to Liberalism cannot choose but see smell and listen.... Watch out for the cars....)

It is clear that Liberalism is Round-the-World-Push-an-Opium-Pellet -with- Your-Nose-Bullshit. Strictly for Scarabs – a stumble bum Liberal heap of pure bullshit. And, as such, Liberals strap on your drool cups and please report to disposal. We’re tired of smelling and hearing your looping loopy bullshit.

Liberals always beef about The Rush Limbaugh as they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered necks at the mention of the man's name and hissing, like the green lizard dwarfs, "Raaaaacist!"... this is pure Liberal con.

Continued...

I would not feel so all alone, / Everybody must get stoned.

"If religion is the opiate of the people, marijuana is the new religion."

Gentlemen, start your bongs! Today it was announced that the Obama administration "will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday".... and because it's cool!.... and because it takes us a step closer to legalizing (and taxing) a very profitable cash crop.... and because, in the America of the very near future you're going to have to be very, very stoned not to see how deeply you're being screwed.... and because stoned people, if they can get off the couch, tend to vote for their pushers.

And also because the Obama is a stoner and wants to get some fine ganja growing in Michelle's garden. That way he can take up smoking again and have everybody say, "It's okay. It's only some fine White House chronic, not tobacco." Wanna bet?

American Digest saw this coming in the middle of last December....

Continued...

"Go back to the porch!" is code for "You're a house negro." Williams is having none of it.

Via Complicated Shoes

There is a world dimensional
For those untwisted
by the love of things irreconcilable.
--Hart Crane

I've written elsewhere that one of the "things you can't say about the First Terrorist War" is that it is, at bottom, a war of two religions. So it is with the culture wars in America today. It too is, and you are not supposed to say this either, a war of TWO religions.

Then again, that is not quite right. Try it this way.

We are fighting a war of two religions in which only one side is allowed to be designated as a religion -- the Right. "The Right" in these terms is always code for "The Religious Right", which is, in turn, code for "Christianity." This is sometimes, by the legion of scribblers ready to push out the party line at the drop of a hat, modified for form's sake into "Christian Fundamentalism." But realistic observers of this game are not fooled and know it to be the same sort of bearded shorthand by which "Islamic Fundamentalism" is made to stand in for Islam, pure and simple.

In whatever form the attack takes, we have seen -- and will continue to see -- an attack on Religious Americans by another group of Americans that previously identified themselves as "secular," but who lately are trying to wrap themselves in the raiment of religion to a greater or lesser extent. I am expecting a plethora of punditry soon that includes the phrase, "Some of my best friends are Christians, but...." at every opportunity.

Continued...

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
        -- Eliot

Last Sunday in Seattle I was still sitting with my morning coffee when the phone rang. It was my old friend, the constant urban explorer, who lives a few blocks away. "I want to give you a gift," he said, "but I can't bring it to you. Instead, you've got to go to it." This man's gifts are not lightly chosen (Except for the inflatable Sarah Palin love doll -- but he's getting that one back when he least expects it.), so I listened.

"Write this down. Walk to the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in your neighborhood."

"Oh..kay....."

"No. No. You'll be glad you did. Then go in the main entrance and stroll along the road on the west side."

"Right."

"Look to your left for a large white stone with two benches on either side of it. The name carved into the stone is 'PUDDY.' "

"Got it."

"Sit down on a bench and look around. That's your gift. Talk to you later. Oh, you'll want to take your camera."

I wondered for a moment if this could be some sort of geocaching joke. At the same time I knew it wasn't. He's a man with little use for the latest techno-ephemera. He values time, his and others. Sleeveless errands are not his style. It was a bright, somewhat cool, Indian Summer Sunday in Seattle and the cemetery was only a few blocks away. I suited up and out the door I went. In a few minutes I was walking into the cemetery and looking around.

Mt. Pleasant is fine cemetery as cemeteries go. Quiet and expansive without being overlarge. You can be buried with your own kind if you are Asian or Jewish, or you can just be planted helter-skelter in the great Seattle diversity plots that make up most of it's area. I've written about this place before in Small Flags, a meditation about loss and war, but the cemetery tells, as all cemeteries do, more than one kind of story if you settle your soul down and listen.

At first I was a bit disoriented inside the gates since the one-lane road winds hither and yon around the grounds and the office with the map to the grave sites is closed on Sundays. By and by, however, I spied off to my left and over near the wall of trees and bushes and chain link fencing that is the western border of the cemetery a large white stone with two white stone benches on either side. I went over and read:

PUDDY

Come sit with us awhile and share our sorrow. Though you weep share the joyful memories too. Look in your heart: In truth you mourn for that which has been your delight.

For Joy and sorrow are inseparable.

I sat and looked north to the outer edge of the large plot that, so far, had only one grave. And there they were.

Continued...

[Yesterday, my uncle, Arthur Warner McNair, passed away peacefully in his sleep in his 100th year. My mother and I saw him last June to celebrate his birthday and say goodbye.This is a memoir of that visit made at the time. Go with God, Uncle Warner. Go with God. ]

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
-- Eliot

He's one hundred years old and his long hands, once strong, are growing translucent. He does not so much sit in his wheelchair as he is held upright and aslant by straps. Even awake his eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the florescent lights in the roof of the home. His meals of pureed food are spoon fed to him by attendants who speak to him in the tones he once used, long ago, on his infant children. When the drapes in his room are partially opened they reveal a view of a gravel roof, exhaust fans, and the brick facade of the opposite wing of the home. It's not a view but he doesn't mind. His eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the present, and he's gone off on a fishing trip in the summer of 1949 where "Jesus, the fish are thick on the ground." Don't make the mistake of thinking he's not in the here and now, because he'll surprise you now and then. He'll come out for a bit if it is worth it, but it seldom is. And then only for a moment.

He's my mother's brother, my uncle, and his life has now spanned a century. In the year of his birth, 1909, the NAACP was founded as was Tel Aviv while the keel of what was to become the Titanic was laid in Belfast. Taft took over the Presidency from Roosevelt (Theodore) and "Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, became the first woman to drive across the United States." Airplanes were only six years old but the Germans were already working on the anti-aircraft gun. Wisely so since the United States Army Signal Corp Division purchased the world's first military airplane from the Wright brothers in that same year. Not to be outdone, the US Navy decided it needed a central base in the Pacific and thought Pearl Harbor made strategic sense.

In the year of his birth Geronimo died, Barry Goldwater was born, and Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of radio. There's a radio in his room next to his bed but it's never turned on. Neither is the television that hangs from the ceiling and if the phone rings, it's a mistake. But in his mind, there are signals still coming in from elsewhere, from elsewhen, from out there, and if you sit with him quietly, without trying to engage him and without expectation; if you sit with him "where here and now cease to matter" you can sometimes sense where he lives in this his hundredth year.

Continued...

Pull up a chair and sit a spell. Death's in residence on my block

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die
To cease upon the midnight with no pain....
-- Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Once upon a time, when Europe could be had at $5 a day, I found myself hitchhiking on the freezing plains of Spain just outside of Madrid. Car after car swept past me, the winds in their wakes chilling me further. This was very disconcerting since I had with me my fail-safe ride generator, a hot hippie girlfriend (Think a good-looking Janis Joplin.) My ride generator had never failed me before but on this day she was generating zero rides even though the traffic on the road was heavy. Then I noticed two things.

First there seemed to be no trucks on the road. Second, the cars that huffed past us were filled to the gills with whole Spanish families bearing vast bouquets of flowers. And all those Spaniards looked, to the last, very grim.

Continued...

They didn’t want to turn her on but they did. I never want to turn her on but I do. After they had turned her on for awhile they grew tired of listening to her. After listening to her for even ten seconds I’m enraged by her. Somewhere along the long road to their duck hunting camp they named her “The Bitch” and turned her off. At random points on any road I drive I want to throw “The Bitch” out the window and run over her until she’s nothing but a flat black splotch on the asphalt.

“The Bitch” has her uses. She’s helped me find my way to unknown destinations and out of places where I’m hopelessly lost. It doesn’t matter. I hate the very thought of her. She’s the worst nag since Eve made Adam slap on the fig leaf and remarked on how small it was. She’s Lilith and Delilah and the “What-ever Girl.” She’s the most passive-aggressive talker since the last speech by Barack Obama. She’s “The Bitch.”

Continued...

Something wonderful is being posted in episodes at Sippican Cottage. Sippican, not only a star-class furniture maker, has also put in his time in contracting. The current series, part memory, part imagination, part reportage explores money, position, status and a host of other elements seldom seen. It's a kind of extended "This American Life" in prose.

I've arranged the episodes so far in a normal order so you don't have to. It's continuing on Monday. You'd best catch up now.

Some Enchanted Place "It was all you could do to keep yourself from tugging your forelock when you talked to the owners, if you ever even saw them....

So you'd walk like a shade through the byzantine halls, looking for the right door out of the hundreds, to fix something that would stay unfixed for a thousand years in a normal person's house."

Some Enchanted Place, Part Three "No house is an inanimate object....

They all have the same stuff, these people with a vapor trail of names and numerals appended to their names and phalanxes of zeroes marching to the horizon in their hidden bank accounts. They have gravel that must be gathered from a riverbank in Elysium. It doesn't even look like little stones."

Continued...

Graven Images: Racist Fundamentalist Churches of America @ AMERICAN DIGEST

I am a minister's daughter. I attended more than "my share" of church and church programs when my father pastored churches in KY, TN, and NC. All were open to people of all races and each congregation had members of different races.

I attended my denomination's church schools through my freshman year of college. Again, all were attended by children of all different races.

I knew about racism only as a subject touched upon in classes I took (such as history classes) and from what I heard on the news. But, it was not something I really experienced first hand.
I am White and cannot speak for any of the Asian, Black, or Hispanic people I have known through my church. But, as an overly-sensitive type, I do not recall witnessing anything of that nature.

This is what I know: there are so many myths about "fundies," about our intelligence, our academic achievements, and our private thoughts about people who are "different." The reality from inside is this: members of my denomination, compared to the general population, have a higher percentage of advanced degrees; our test scores in church school were higher than those of our public school counterparts (I personally scored a 1400 on the SAT); I see more marriages of couples of different races inside the church than outside the church (I think this is because our religion is a stronger identifying factor for us than our individual races).

I could ramble on and on forever but I guess my main points are this:
A. "They" (liberals? mainstream media?) have no clue about religious people or what drives them. B. It is possible for groups of people to find common ground that transcends their outward appearance (race) that binds them together in common purpose.
C. No one can force "B" on other people and make it stick. You can force them to behave in a certain way but it only works if they are converted.
D. To quote my father, "the ground is level at the cross." A truly Christian church is the truest democracy there is. There *can* be true love among its members because each member recognizes they are a sinner who deserving of hell but is saved through the sacrifice of a sinless Savior who took our punishment upon Himself. When Christianity is at its finest is when the members of a church body put aside judgment of each other and turn that onto themselves. It's the recognition of what Christ did for ME, knowing my own sins all too well, that we can overlook faults in others. We are human too and no church is perfect (meaning the members attending it) but at least we strive for something better than this evil world has to offer, strive to live holy lives pleasing to God. A church such as J. Wright's is of this world and not of God.

And, coming back to my point "A," I have concluded that this is why the media/liberals/whatever, will never have any true understanding of the mindset of Islamic fundamentalism. While I do not, obviously, agree with the religion of Islam itself, any religious person can probably at least understand the what it is to be a BELIEVER. That should not be passed over lightly - a true believer who is a Christian is instructed in the Bible that they may be persecuted to death. One must be willing to die for the sake of Jesus' name. No political talks in this world will change that mind. This is why I pray for conversion of individuals who adhere to the Islamic religion. That is the only lasting path to peace.

Posted by: Karen at September 24, 2009 11:27 AM

[Note: The following was written by FrankP of England in a comment on Quisling Time: I've said it before and I'll say it again, "The Road to a Democrat Led Defeat of America Goes Through Afghanistan" . I thought it perceptive enough to republish here.]

You simply cannot have a Marxist in the Oval Office and lead the world in a fight against a combination of covert communism and the rise of militant Islam - a very unholy and, to the uninformed, incredible alliance. Never before have the Left used such a powerful 'useful idiot' as militant Islam to further its cause, but it is doing it apparently without realizing that Islam may consume it also, eventually.

We in the UK have experienced the worst decline in our culture and standing in the world following a a similar event in 1997, when a cabal of Marxists led the Long March of Antonio Gramsci's game plan into No.10 Downing Street. Blair conned the British electorate; Obama has conned the American electorate. Both were Trojan horses. The triumph of the heirs and successors of Gramsci; the Frankfort School; Alinski; Ayers et al means that the Long March has now penetrated the very heart of Washington, giving impetus to the Marxist dictators around the world who see America on the backfoot.

You either get rid of your current POTUS and his political thugs soonest, by electoral demand, or all the blood and treasure spent during World War II and the various engagements to contain and defeat communism since then will have been in vain.

Britain is already down the pan. Its sovereignty has been severely dissipated by the EU and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels; its Capital has been dubbed Londonistan because of its infiltration by Islamic subversives. A predicted change of government from New Labour to 'New Conservative' (probably infiltrated by Gramscian disciples also) will make very little difference. Our currency is under threat and may soon fall to the Euro - a Mickey Mouse currency. The financial and fiscal system has already been destroyed from within. We are no longer a reliable ally of the US.

You have time to rescue your country from a similar disaster to the one that has befallen ours. For God's sake get moving. It needs more than Glen Beck, who has (with a little help from his friends) made a good start. It needs gravitas, analysis and public explanation. As the MSM is part of the problem it can only be done on the blogs. Fox TV is having some success as the only outlet in that medium that has exposed some of the truth about Obama and his roots and even they are holding back much of what could be exposed, presumably because Murdoch wants to keep a get out card just in case the wind blows against him.

I posted messages like this on blogs various during the Presidential campaign, particularly on Melanie Phillips blog who is a prolific writer on the subject and as an apostate of the leftist creed knows what she is taking about. But I have been blogging about the counter culture threat since 2003.

In fact I have been a close observer of Communism on the move since 1952 when as a radio intercept operator in the British Army (the "Y" Service - now known as GCHQ), I listened to the military, diplomatic and agitprop press propaganda spewed out by the USSR and its satellites. I later served in the London Metropolitan Police throughout the 1950s - 1980s and saw at very close quarters the organized subversion that took place through the counter-culture war that still thrives today.

The message must be sounded and writ large: Marxism is still on the move. It is Western Civilization that is crumbling through the death-watch beetle of covert communism and the death-wish spider of the jihad that is rampant throughout its pillars. When the Iron Curtain was torn down, it provided opportunities for Marxism that were undreamed of throughout the cold war.

The British experience must be regarded as a terrible warning, my American friends. Heed it or follow us into the abyss. You have many fine writers and researchers over there who have exposed the truth of the Leftist threat: heed their words and use your votes in the mid-term elections to start the fight back. Time is short, use it well.

[Note: It's now clear that "racism" has somehow not been eliminated with the election of an African-American as president but exacerbated. It has now drenched our discourse with its stench. But from what dark wells is this poison water being drawn? Qui bono? Perhaps it's time we looked a little more closely at places where it still is to be found. And not just at "the usual suspects" which now seem to have been broadened to include all those who do not agree with the program being proliferated by the president. In that spirit I am republishing this essay from March of 2008.]

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
-- William Blake

It seems to me that when visiting the left-leaning sites of the web one is forever bumping into a virulent fear and hate of Christianity. It sometimes is couched in an insecure, buffoon's atheism, but more often than not takes aim at the biggest boogyman the American Left can think of -- Christian Fundamentalism. These rants are not hard to find. They are legion.

We're told, over and over, that Christian Fundamentalism is the single greatest threat to the American way of life; that it is, among many other evils, a breeding ground for race hate. We are reminded of the virtual descendants of Simon Legree among the Baptist Republicans of the Caucasian persuasion. We are harangued without end about their ceaseless lust for power. Baptist Democrats, it would seem, possess a "Get Out of Racism Free" card. Not because of their religious belief, but because of their party affiliation. It is a strange religion where sanctity is determined by politics and not by faith, but that seems to be the case.

This afternoon on the lawn my gardener asked me if I have given myself up to God yet. He is a devout believer, a Christian Fundamentalist with a paperback bible in his back pocket. It's new this year because he gave his well-worn one last September. He is concerned for my soul. And he has reason to be. I confessed I had not but was still searching, as indeed I am.

Continued...

Or, "The Ninja Nibbler of the Night"

As a friend of mine recently pointed out, "Women shop. Men resupply."

Too true. Whenever I find myself in one of our current Cathedrals of Food (AKA: "Whole Foods -- Why Pay Less?"), I don't buy meals, I buy components. Though I've lived alone for some time, I buy like I'm supplying a small tribe. I've tried to control this by selecting the "little" cart. You know, that half-pint shopping vehicle, that grocery Miata, that let's you believe you're not really buying as much as you are. It doesn't work. I come home, unpack my "kills" -- at about $69 a bag -- and mumble, "Who's going to eat all this?"

House guests are the God's answer to "Who's going to eat this?" They are. That's okay. I love to cook for people. I'm good at it and it gets boring cooking for one; expensive too since I loathe leftovers.

Problems return when your house guests are stealth eaters. You know who I mean. Yes, you. Stealth eaters never, ever overeat -- except on the sly. They are the Merrill's Marauders of the post-midnight refrigerator.

Ordinary stealth eaters can be dealt with because the damage done by their pillage is obvious. You had half of a banana cream pie in the frig at sunset but by dawn it is gone. Vanished. Evaporated. Kaput. Never to be heard from again. Not so much as a ransom note, just a crumpled tin husk folded and stuffed down the side of the garbage bag beneath the camouflage of a crumpled milk carton.

Not pleasing, especially when you were planning on banana cream pie for breakfast. Still you suck up your sorrow, move on, and resupply.

No so with the worst sort of stealth eater -- the dreaded food eroder.

The food eroder is so stealthy he or she can even conceal their eating from themselves. The food eroder wishes to eat but not be seen eating nor to be known to have eaten. The food eroder can make your entire refrigerator into a Potemkin village where you think you have a LOT of food, but actually have almost none. A food eroder deals in cuisine disinformation.

Case in point:

Some weeks back I had a house guest. This house guest was a very careful eater -- someone cognizant of the fine points of nutrition; someone who knew the calories in a twice-baked potato down to the last bacon bit swimming in a dollop of sour cream. This nameless but shameless someone also had a finely tuned economic indicator and never met a leftover that was not loved, caressed, and consumed -- even when the original meal was lost to recorded history.

I once had a kind of grudging respect for this guest who was so much more disciplined about food than I could ever hope to be. But that was before I discovered -- after the guest's departure -- that I had been sharing my home and sacred refrigerator with a food eroder, a late-night Ninja nibbler.

You see, in order to fulfill my male mission of re-supply, I need to know what supplies are actually on hand. With a food eroder, this cannot be known since -- if you do not actually hand inspect every item in your larder -- you can never be sure of the quantity. What you can be sure of, I now know, is that a food eroder will guarantee you have less than you think.

The clearest example of this is -- as I have discovered today -- the most often decimated target of any self-respecting food eroder, ice cream.

About a month ago I noted that the house had no ice-cream in the freezer. This is not good -- especially should an after-midnight-ice-cream emergency break out while watching, say, "I Got the Hook-Up."

To prepare for such an emergency, and thus avert an ice cream crisis, I resupplied the freezer with a full half-gallon of French Vanilla. Since my house guest was looking a bit peckish at the time I offered to make a couple of sundaes (carmel sauce, shaved almonds, etc.). My guest gracefully accepted and the half gallon of ice-cream supply was reduced by perhaps a pint overall. This left around three pints. Such was the state of the ice cream three weeks ago at last check. Need for resupply? Negligible.

Fast forward to today when I was suddenly stricken with an ice-cream-emergency (While watching, yet again, "I Got the Hook-Up.") and staggered to the supply in the freezer. As I removed it I noted it felt strangely light for a container that should have contained about three-pints. You can only imagine my shock when upon opening it I discovered that it contained only about a half-inch thickness of ice cream covering the now far distant bottom.

But that was not the worst of it.

On closer examination, the surface of that razor-thin level of ice cream was scored by a series of small parallel grooves across it from side to side. It was as if somebody had gone back and forth over the ice cream with a teaspoon like a lawn mower.

I knew then I had been hit by the food eroder. I knew that, over several nights, my ice cream had be hit again and again and again.

Just a little this time. Just a little more that time. Then a bit again when the compulsion struck. And all, it was clear, in a shameful and furtive way as I slept.

This degradation probably went on and on until the food eroder could no longer avoid the terrible truth that nearly a half a gallon of ice cream had been consumed whilst standing at the refrigerator with spoon in hand. At that point shame overcame the eroder and the container was placed carefully back in the refrigerator so that it would appear to be undisturbed.

The food eroder escaped without ever having to face the shame. I'm off to resupply and thus avoid a post-midnight ice cream crisis. My only solace is that I know that the food eroder, now back home and faced with a refrigerator stocked only with the desiccating remnants of cantaloupe and celery is still having to walk an extra two miles every day in penance. Ice cream giveth, but ice cream doth not taketh away.

Meanwhile, my stock is back to normal. But I am taking steps to avoid future shock. I'm installing a state of the art motion-sensing alarm on the refrigerator instead of my previous sign that said, "Too late. Already here."

Now the wintertime is coming,
The windows are filled with frost.
I went to tell everybody,
But I could not get across.
-- Bob Dylan | It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

Chico, CA: 2007

This September, as in most Septembers, the days have been hot and parched here in the upper reaches of California's Imperial Valley. This year, as in most years, wildfires have been stalking the region sealing the old folks, the ecosensitives, and the ever-proliferating hyper-allergenic inside behind their oxygen canisters, filters, and mounds of medications. The local TV weathermen make much of little, delivering the particulate count as if every second carbon atom spelled doom for untold numbers of weakened and afflicted Americans. It's all part of the shameful litany of vulnerability chanted so often that many previously tough Americans come to believe they are as insubstantial as moonlight at noon. It's how they live now.

Continued...

"Well, it was only 3,000 people and we've moved on. Why can't you? Carpe diem, man."

Simon Dedvukaj, 26, Mohegan Lake, N.Y. janitorial, foreman, ABM Industries / Confirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building 2

The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For joy I did not move and dared not speak,
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient still.
-- Thom Gunn, The Wound

EVERYONE WHO WAS IN NEW YORK ON on "The Day" will tell you their stories about "The Day." I could stun you with an eight figure number by running a Google on 9/11, but you can do that as well.

"The Day," even at this close remove, has ascended into that shared museum of the mind to be placed in the diorama captioned, "Where Were You When." The site has long since been cleared and scrubbed clean. There is even an agreement on the memorial which will, I see, use a lot of water and trees. "The Day" has become both memorial and myth.

Less is heard about the aftermath. Less is said about the weeks and months that spun out from that stunningly clear and bright September morning whose sky was slashed by a towering fist of flame and smoke. You forget the smoke that hung over the city like a widow's shawl as the fires burned on for months. You don't know about the daily commutes by subway wondering if some new horror was being swept towards you as the train came to a stop deep beneath the East River. You supress hearing over the loudspeaker, always unclearly, that the train was being "held for police activity at Penn Station." Was that a bomb, poison gas, a mass shooting, a strike on the Empire State building? You were never sure. You carried a flashlight in case you had to walk out of the tunnels that ran deep beneath the river. Terror was your quiet companion. After the first six weeks you barely knew it was there.

Continued...

At the end of April in 2006 a couple of friends asked me to go with them to see "United 93," but I declined both offers saying I wasn't sure that I needed any reminders other than what I saw in New York on that day. In the end, though, I went to it as I went to the funerals, alone.

When people who were in New York on that day talk about it, it always seems to be focused on the day itself. Nobody talks much about the days and the weeks and the months that came after that day in New York City.

In a way, that's understandable because what happened for days and weeks and months after was pretty much a slowly diminishing repeat of that day. Things got better, got back to the new "normal." The wax from the candled shrines was scraped away, and in time -- quite a long time actually -- even the walls and fences full of fading flyers asking if you had seen one or the other of those we came to call "the missing" were gone.

Continued...

Is that a pistol down my pants or.... BLAM!

Where to begin with this newsquib? It exceeds the mind's capacity for bogglement.

So much for packing a, um, rod

A 15-year-old Brooklyn boy shot himself in the penis Sunday after fumbling with a gun that had slid from his waistband, authorities said yesterday.

Khamir Grant was then arrested for reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon ... law-enforcement sources said.

Grant told cops that he was walking home from Amersfort Park at East 39th Street and Avenue J in East Flatbush around 1:30 a.m., when the gun began to fall into his pants, sources said.

When Grant grabbed for it, he accidentally pulled the trigger, firing a bullet right through his penis.

Grant staggered home and told his mom what had happened, sources said.

They took a livery car to Kings County Hospital, where Grant was released after treatment and then arrested by police.

There's so much now normalized wrongness here that the only thing it underscores is "the banality of evil" in everyday life. But let's review anyway.

Continued...

From the dawn of diversity in 1969.

Once upon a time in the United States, someone somewhere in the government for the greater good asked, "What better medium to get across the message of benevolent government programs is there than comic books?"

The SSA certainly knew this and, along with other government agencies, has a long history of "getting the message out." Here are some samples from the Social Security Administration's Special Collections - Public Information Materials where you are warned, "This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current policies or procedures."

Continued...

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. --- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Sometimes small notions indicate issues of larger moment. In the discussion of a previous post, a commenter delivers a vest pocket critique of America seen from abroad. The salient part reads:

As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't give a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.

What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.

What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?

I could go on - but I won't, except to say two things. Americans' bad habits are a poor example for everyone else - and America's gluttony for oil in particular, and their actions to make sure it gets fed, and the money transfers resulting from it, make the rest of the world much more dangerous

Some observations strike me as fair, others as dubious. Most strike me as those a reasonable man might form on a daily diet of the American media melange. It is a dangerous diet; a diet rich in junk and toxins. In large doses it might make your head fill with harmful fat.

Just as it was when the Soviet Union lived -- and is still to be found on the islands of socialist utopias still extant -- once the propaganda mills are relentlessly anti-American, a real picture is hard to come by. One is pretty much a slave to one's choices of input. Not much can be done to change a mind fed a constant drip-feed of plaint from the current America-based "My country wrong or wrong" crowd.

I can see how the commenter comes by his impressions. I grant that he comes to them fairly by using what he is given to draw his conclusions. They simply don't map well to my experience of ordinary life in America in 2007. As American life, or a simple driveabout will teach you, "the map is not the territory."

It is not my purpose here to flense his critique point by point, only to note that his intellectual malnutrition is, of necessity, determined by what he feeds his head.

By way of example, my day-to-day experience tells me that while the lumbering results of having "way too much food" are more than visible in America, so is the cult of "way too much exercise." The buffed anorexic and the wobbling obese are the opposite ends of the bell-curve. In the middle I see that most Americans are mindful of what they eat because they can afford to be. Making this possible is a system of food production and distribution that delivers such a wide-spectrum of food choice at cheap prices (organic, non-organic, and junk) to every niche of the landscape. Indeed, the system is so advanced and sophisticated that we have achieved a society in which one of the major problems among the poor that remain is obesity.

The impression that Americans are "turning their cities' air into poison gas" is likewise well meant but ill informed. It is demonstrably not true.

Continued...

Probably not....

HT: Doug Ross

Continued...

Outside the ancient offices of the Cosmoangelic Book Publishers that I once worked in at 2 Park Street in Boston, an old lady stood with her back to the old bricks on every working day. A square yard of sidewalk was her office. Eyes behind thick glasses were watery-gray. She stood hunched in a permanent flinch like some dog who'd been struck too many times for nothing. She dressed in clean, shabby, but not too shabby, clothing -- warm enough for the winters and cool enough when summer came around at last. To all who passed by her office she repeated her Bostonian-inflected mantra:
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"

She stood to the left of the entrance for part of the day and to the right for the remainder. You didn't know when she'd shift, but she always seemed to be in your path as you came out of the building.

Going for some coffee?

"Spare a quarta?"

Going to lunch?

"Spare a quarta?"

Going to skip out on the afternoon and catch a matinee?

Continued...

Mike Austin aka Scipio

At the present time, for reasons unknown, The Return of Scipio, is offline. The URL resolves to a parked page at BlueHost.

I've linked to "The Return of Scipio" often in the past and hope to link to it again in the future. As I said above, the page is offline and no information is no information.

Mike Austin, the author of The Return of Scipio, was profiled last week on Esquire's website by John H. Richardson in Is Obama Fascist? Profile of Return of Scipio Blogger Mike Austin as an

"Oklahoma man — eighth-grade teacher by day, militant blogger by night — who may personify it more than any of the conservatives who, when the town halls pass, may be pointing the way to a holy war that goes way beyond health care."

I would hope that this profile has nothing to do with the disappearance of The Return of Scipio.

Any information would be appreciated.

UPDATED: I've received an email from Austin. He's fine and says that he has shut the page down for now for personal reasons. He was not coerced in any way. It is unknown if the page will return.

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

"Paul Mawhinney was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the years he has amassed what has become the world's largest record collection. Due to health issues and a struggling record industry Paul is being forced to sell his collection."

Hard to believe that a buyer won't be found.

Dealers or Collectors, I'm inviting you on a personal tour of the largest privately owned self-sufficient museum of music in the world. I have close to 2,500,000 recordings in the archive. It includes 45 RPM's, 78 RPM's, cassettes, and albums. I have created a database known as "MUSICMASTER" with close to 700,000 titles. I would consided your visit to the museum an honor. Please call and confirm the time and date of your visit at 412.367.7330. -- Record-Rama Sound Archives :: The World's Largest Collection of Sound Recordings Vinyl Records, LP's, 45's, 78's and Rare Albums

Yesterday I heard of a young mother who came downstairs early in the morning to find her fifth-grade son dressed for school but flat on his back in the middle of the living room staring in despair at the ceiling.

MOM: "What on Earth do you think you're doing?"

BOY: "I can't do it. I just can't go to school any more."

We all know how that small strike ended. Management made an offer ("Go to school or else."), and the union of one caved in with a few plaintive "But mom's.... "

I first thought that there was rough justice in that. After all, the thought of actually going on a ten-minute "I-won't-go-to-school" strike never would have entered my ten-year old mind. If it had I would not have heard the dreaded promise, "Wait until your father gets home." No, I would have heard the thermonuclear announcement, "I'm calling your father at work and telling him to come home right now." That one always alerted me that I had only one half-hour to get my affairs in order.

Today, after mulling the lie-down strike a little more, it seems to me there's more than a little to be said on the side of the fifth-grader's strike. After twenty years of schooling and more than thirty on the day shift, those early grades seem -- looked at through society's grubby glasses -- to be an idyllic time. After all, weren't they?

Continued...

You know how it is, Whole. You know. And I know you know. We just can't pretend it is what it was any longer.

Bad things have been happening between us whenever I've tried to get into your sack for quite some time. It's time to face the fact that we just don't have that old natural spark between us any longer. We've faded from organic to conventional. It's time to move on to fresh fruits and vegetables new -- elsewhere. Ditto your firm, moist and alluring meats of many flavors. None of what you're doing to me is doing it for me any more.

I ignored a lot of your irritating habits, Whole -- like keeping that entire wing of the dairy case jammed with your revoltingly raw vegan pastes and six flavors of tofu, those sloppy seconds of soy. I rationalized you were just trying to keep your green ass from getting so fat you couldn't get into that tacky green apron you insist on wearing all the time, because "they go with my Earth shoes".

I put up with your petulant insistence on "helping me" find things I wasn't looking for whenever I paused in an aisle to ask myself "Johnson Grass and Brayla Suet Sausage? What the hell is that and what life form eats it?"

I put up with your plucking money from my wallet while I slept, so you could blow it on wind power and floats in the Green Pride Parades. I figured that every Whole needs a hobby.

Continued...

I encountered the Horseman in Laguna Beach riding along the Pacific Coast Highway. He was ahead of me moving at horse speed. The traffic, hurried as always, slowed to a pause and then pulled around him. As I pulled past him, I could hear the clip-clop of the hooves of his mount and his pack horse. I glanced into the rear view mirror after I got ahead of him and saw the blinking red and blue lights and heard the short bleep of a siren tapped once. He had been pulled over by the Laguna Beach police for an interview. I pulled in around the corner, walked back, and joined a group of citizens already watching this encounter.

Continued...

Any questions?

From Very, Very, Very Small Cars

The Asheville, North Carolina restaurant was one of those common to our post-post-modern world. Open and airy with a wall of windows framing hanging plants. Casual to the point of paper napkins. Sporting a list of local beers and -- surprise -- local wines. Tarted up with the kind of overtly ironic art on the walls where the painter has one statement and one image in his repertoire and repeats it ad nauseam. This time it seemed that the sensibility being trotted out was one of Hieronymous Bosch meets Hello Kitty.

The menu, a litany of updated regional classics such as black-eyed pea cakes, was relentlessly "improved" by garnishes such as avocados and Basmati rice. The joint's "philosophy" -- since all new restaurants must now publish a justifying manifesto along with their menu -- centered on the now tedious homage to "local" "organic" produce and a dedication to "reviving tradition" -- plus the removal of trans-fats. Collard greens, sweetened lima beans, and salty sweet potatoes bracketed the entrees. In the center you'd find rib-eyes under slathers of sauteed onions, broiled slabs of local fish dusted with some orange spice, chickens with a roasted-on glaze, pork in five different variations, and dried cranberries slipped into cakes on the sly just when you thought it was safe.

It was a boutique version of the kind of food once common to the region, but that now survived either in roadside diners named "Granny's" and "Hubert and Sal's,"or at upscale nostalgic eateries such

Continued...

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the cloud.
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
-- Wallace Stevens

A clear day and a long road running south out of Nelson in British Columbia towards the US border. Lakes loom on the left embraced by the forested mountains that rise up displaying more greens than can be counted. The air, as it slips by the window, is crisp even in July. Somewhere up past the first two ranges of mountains, snow lingers. It's a perfect day and the road goes on forever.

We come over a rise and see curling out before us between the forests a rolling S-curve of smooth asphalt arcing down the valley and then up and over the hill far beyond. My passenger, skilled in racing very large motorcycles very well, looks at it and says, "That's the road motorcyclists dream of. Perfectly banked and perfectly curved with a long, long sight line and no oncoming traffic."

I nod and give it the gas. The turbocharger kicks in. The car leaps forward with a growl. The forest outside becomes a green blur. We sweep down and around, up and over the hill. And we're gone.

I pity the future for a lot of reasons, but I really pity that future that will no longer be able to know the pure pleasures of personal speed. As Jack Kerouac knew, "Man, you gotta go."

Say what you like about our poor beaten-down gas guzzlers, they've given us over a century of thrills for everyman.

I pity that future that won't ever experience the sweet feeling of motoring in a vehicle with a large internal-combustion engine running on heavy fuel. A vehicle with a glutton's diet of pure petrochemical byproducts. A car that turns the sunshine that fell to Earth on some antediluvian day 500 million summers gone into a surge of pure speed on this fine July afternoon.

I pity my descendants who will never be able to look out at some sweeping mountain road, perfectly curved, perfectly banked, with no oncoming traffic and just "Give it the gas."

"Give it the photons" just doesn't have the same cachet.

---

HT to The Dipso Chronicles: Literary Antacid for bringing this back.

Unknown photographs from when Adams was, if only for a few days, an urban photographer.

I don't recall what I was searching for when I came across the Ansel Adams photographs of Los Angeles at the beginning of World War II, but I don't think it was a handsome rendering of Half Dome or a Moonrise in New Mexico. It was something much more gritty. On reflection, it might have been photographs of my original elementary school, Benjamin Franklin in Glendale. In any case I was running a search in the Los Angeles Public Library's immense online collection of photographs when something in a record caught my eye, the name "Ansel Adams." The image attached to this record was of a parking lot with a cars jumbled together around a prominent No Parking sign.

I don't normally associate Ansel Adams with ironic snapshots of parking lots or small format urban photography at all. Like you, a photograph by Adams means the classic evocation of the great American wilderness. It never crossed my mind that he had photographed any of the cities of men, much less Los Angeles. But there it was. Maybe, I thought, there were more.

Continued...

In which I discuss how I got from "there" to "here" back in April, 2006....

My Back Pages: Debating on the step of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, 1966. (Left to right:) Me (Somewhat younger but just as strident), An Iranian friend named "Jaz" -- worked with me in the UC library, a refugee from the Shah's Iran -- probably went back after the fall of the Shah, (foreground right) He lost his eye in the Hungarian Uprising and had to run for the border and on into the West to stay alive. In this picture he's attempting to convince me that Communism is an evil ideology. I'm not buying it then, but I buy it now. (Click to enlarge)

Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
-- Maggie's Farm

A friend with whom I have a daily correspondence takes great pleasure in needling me on my, shall we say, adamantine position that we need to start fighting the First Terrorist War to win it and not as if we are engaged in a game of patty-cake. In March of 2004, after the Madrid bombings, while I was trapped on a Cruise Ship somewhere deep inside the sixth circle of Hell, he decided it was an ideal time convert me to his policy of "reasonable accommodation." It was the moment in which, as he put it, "...the common citizens of Spain and France are saying 'Tell us again what this got us, other than lots of angry teenagers with bombs?' "

I replied that I'd lived for years in France, with months in and about Spain, and most of the 'common citizens' of those countries would surrender to anything and sell out anyone if it meant they could shop in peace for a few more years. Vichy and Franco came to mind as examples.

Yesterday, in Tel Aviv, the angry teenager with a bomb on his body came again, as he has so many times over the last few years, and as he will in the years to come. Maybe Spain was right to see the effort as futile. Maybe Europe as a whole should just roll over and not just play dead, but be dead. Perhaps Israel should just shrug and say, "Okay, you win. We'll move or we'll die. You tell us."

After all, what's really in all this fighting and dying for anyone? None of the countries that are engaged in this war against terror seems to be ready to do the terrible things necessary to end terror. ("Don't you see? That would make us just like them!" "Perhaps, but we would be alive to repent and reform.")

I once admired the subtle thought, the careful parsing, the diplomatic pas-de-deux of policy, but lately I seem to have gotten a taste for straight talk. It seems to me that if you don't go to war ready to achieve victory by any means necessary -- by any means necessary -- why would you bother to go at all? And of late, I'm only hearing the weasel word "win." I'm not hearing a lot about "victory," which is quite a different thing.

It seems to me that if you are actually "in" a war, victories, big and small, are what you seek to achieve. Once you have the final victory, and that means that the enemy and all that supports the enemy, is so destroyed and laid waste that there's no fight left in him, then and only then can you say you have "won." Absent a drive for victory, there seems to be nothing in this war for any one fighting terror on any front other than pain and death -- and the added insult of an unremitting disparagement from many of the citizens for whom they fight.

That's certainly true when it comes to the United States of late. We seem stalled at the stage of the struggle that brings to mind Churchill's proclamation that he had nothing to offer except, "blood, sweat and tears." We've had those three things constantly for years -- as our media are so keen to remind us every three minutes of every day.

Another factor in the dumb-show called "Bringing Democracy to the Middle East" seems to be that our leadership has become, shall we say, less than inspiring and more like Monty Hall emceeing "Let's Make A Deal" with contestants and a studio audience packed with crazed and crapulous mullahs. Finally, we're seeing a host of our fellow citizens so immersed in their hatred of George Bush that the impression we are hip-deep in demented traitors is getting hard to shake.

All of these things conspire, on a daily basis, to shake our belief in ourselves, our institutions and our commitment to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism. Lately we seem to be living on a daily drip-feed of despair for our future and estrangement from our past. It's not a new diet in this country, but it is starting to assume the proportions of a runaway fad diet, a political Pritikins. And yet this thin gruel is what's being poured into us from Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C.

Continued...

[With the arrival of summer in Seattle (some actually hot days -- except, of course, this one.) the murder of crows in the pines next door has returned and, at times, their cries shred the air. The cacophony reminds me of this observation from a few years back in southern California.]

When I lived in Manhattan, I never needed to know when winter officially arrived. I could count on one particular coworker to announce it. The official date changed every year, but he never failed to signify it by dropping by my office first thing in the morning, a Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, and saying, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how cold it is? Damn!"

Having just peeled off watch cap, ear muffs, scarf, gloves, and a ten pound top coat, I could -- while watching the sleet moving horizontally across the windows -- say with some conviction, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe how cold it is."

With this exchange, the first of a daily ritual that would be repeated between us for months without variation, I knew that winter had been declared open.

In New York City, there are really only two seasons -- "Winter" and "Road Work." Winter was cold and inconvenient. "Road Work" was hot and inconvenient. My coworker wasn't happy with either. Yet he never failed to announce the beginning of "Road Work." The official date changed every year, but he never failed to signify it by dropping by my office first thing in the morning, his Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, and saying, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how hot it is? Damn!"

He was a living, breathing, mind-numbing example of why the number two fantasy of people who work in offices is the ruthless slaughter of one or more of their coworkers. (The number one fantasy? I don't have to tell you. You know. And you should be ashamed of yourself.)

When I moved to southern California, this was one little daily irritation I was happy to leave behind along with "Winter" and "Road Work." Instead, I got only one season, "Traffic," but since you have to go to "Traffic" in order to be in that was okay. I no longer needed to kill my coworker, so that was a win.

In the hills above Laguna, however, I discovered another two seasons -- "No birds" and "Birds." That's otherwise known as "Not Spring" and "Spring." When the birds leave sometime around the Christmas holidays, you don't really notice it. At least I didn't until I passed a neighbor, a Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, on his daily constitutional and he said, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how quiet it is? Damn! Sure wish the birds would come back."

He walked on but I stopped and turned slowly to look at him. Brief memories of fantasized mayhem washed over my mind until I shook my head and thought, "No. Can't be. Just your imagination," and went on my way.

But, of course, what couldn't be, was. Over the course of the next few months, I'd pass this neighbor on our overlapping walks and he'd invariably say, just to be neighborly, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how quiet it is? Damn! Sure wish the birds would come back."

In time, of course, the birds, as birds will, did come back. I noticed it one day when, just at dawn, a bird woke me with a Bachesque series of trills and calls. A day or so later, when passing my neighbor on the hill, he said, "Boy, oh, boy, did you hear that bird this morning? Terrific!"

But nature is not decorative no matter how much we might wish it would be. Where you have one bird, you get two. When you have two, you get ten. And ten is just the prelude to a hundred or even more, as Alfred Hitchcock knew.

About a month after the first return of the birds, I was awakened by a cacophony of bird calls hooting and screeching at the first crack of light. I shrugged it off and went outside to get the paper from the drive way. My bird-loving neighbor lives diagonally across the intersection. I picked up the paper to go inside when I heard the sliding door to his deck open. I looked across and saw him in his underwear stagger sleepily out into the rising and falling cloud of colorful bird calls, wipe the sleep from his sad eyes, and shout out into the pristine morning, "Shut... UP!"

Even in paradise it seems that some people are never really happy. Must be the traffic.

[Via email today. Hey, it's new on the Web if it is new to me. Okay?]

Dear American liberals,  leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Obama  supporters, et al:

We have stuck together since the  late 1950's, but the whole of this latest election process has  made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated  each other for many years for the sake of future generations,  but sadly, this relationship has run its course. Our two  ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on  what is right so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can  smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our  own way.

Here is a model separation  agreement:

Our two groups can equitably divide up the  country by landmass each taking a portion. That will be the  difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a  friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy!  Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other  assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate  tastes.

We don't like redistributive taxes so you can  keep them. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.  Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the  cops, the NRA and the military. You can keep Oprah, Michael  Moore and Rosie O'Donnell (You are, however, responsible for  finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of  them).

We'll keep the capitalism, greedy corporations,  pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart and Wall Street. You can  have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies and illegal  aliens. We'll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO's  and rednecks. We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and  Hollywood.

You can make nice with Iran and Palestine  and we'll retain the right to invade and hammer places that  threaten us. You can have the peaceniks and war protesters.  When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we'll  help provide them security.

We'll keep our  Judeo-Christian values.. You are welcome to Islam,  Scientology, Humanism and Shirley McClain. You can also have  the U.N.. but we will no longer be paying the bill.

We'll keep the SUVs, pickup trucks and oversized  luxury cars. You can take every Subaru station wagon you can  find.

You can give everyone healthcare if you can find  any practicing doctors. We'll continue to believe healthcare  is a luxury and not a right. We'll keep The Battle Hymn of the  Republic and the National Anthem. I'm sure you'll be happy to  substitute Imagine, I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, Kum  Ba Ya or We Are the World.

We'll practice trickle down  economics and you can give trickle up poverty your best shot.  Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our  name and our flag.

Would you agree to this? If so,  please pass it along to other like minded liberal and  conservative patriots and if you do not agree, just hit  delete.

In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you ANWAR  which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.... 

Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law Student and  an American

P.S. Also, please take Barbara Streisand  & Jane Fonda with  you.

---

I hope that works but I also wonder, "If there's such a thing as a shotgun marriage, can there also be a shotgun divorce? Mossberg owners want to know."

-or- The Pre-Launch Abort Ritual

[Note: I get nervous when NASA seems to be trying too hard: NASA fuels space shuttle for 6th launch try.

Time is running out. If Endeavour is not flying by Thursday, it will have to wait until July 26 so the Russians can squeeze in a space station supply run. A Thursday attempt, however, would result in the elimination of one of five planned spacewalks and a shortened mission.

I hope all will be Go and go well. But just in case, here's something I learned last January at the Kennedy Space Center. UPDATE: Safe liftoff and reached orbit. Godspeed Endeavor.]

Discovery on launching pad

Two M113 Armored Personnel Carriers (Remember these, they'll come in later)

A couple of weeks ago I was on a bus tour of the space shuttle launch area at the Kennedy Space Center Florida. For $58 you can ride a bus past some of the outlying security barriers and get within about a mile of the Discovery on the pad. This is about as close as an ordinary citizen can get without being asked serious questions by men with automatic weapons.

It was an impressive tour in all respects, but this story today brought back a part of the tour related by the guide: NASA Delays Discovery Launch Fourth Time

An all-day review of the craft's readiness for launch left managers still under-confident about the operations of three hydrogen control valves thatchannel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external fuel tank. Engineering teams have been working to identify what caused damage to a flow control valve on shuttle Endeavour during its November 2008 flight. NASA managers decided Friday more data and possible testing are required before launch can proceed.

That's a good call. We can all remember what happens to a shuttle when damage to the surface of the shuttle reacts to the incredible heat and stress of re-entry: it becomes a very unpleasant low-earth orbit comet, kills everyone on board, and litters a vast swath of the southwest.

But what happens when something goes wrong while the crew is in the shuttle but the shuttle has not yet been launched?

When a shuttle is fueled up and ready to go it is essentially a large semi-truck with a couple of solid fuel rockets strapped to the sides, each one containing 1,100,000 pounds of propellant, and one giant tank containing 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen bolted onto the belly. Not a truck you want to be in should anything go amiss.

Fear not, NASA is on the job. NASA has a plan for getting you out (Assuming there is time to get out, of course.) Here, according to our tour guide who had been working at NASA for several decades, is how you "exit the vehicle" should disaster warning bells start to ring before lift-off.

First, consider your situation inside the shuttle before launch. There you are in your seat inside the shuttle all dressed up and ready to go. This means you are sealed in your bright orange space suit, boots, gloves, helmet and all. This is known, optimistically, as the Advanced Crew Escape Suit. It weighs about 80 pounds. The suit comes complete with a "survival backpack, which includes a personal life raft, that is donned before entering the orbiter." In addition there is your "undersuit:"

Underneath the suits, astronauts wear "Maximum Absorbency Garment" (MAGs) urine-containment trunks (resembling "Depends" incontinence shorts) and blue-colored thermal underwear, which has plastic tubing woven into the garments allowing for liquid cooling and ventilation, the latter being handled by a connector located on the astronaut's left waist.

Comfy, right?

You are also strapped into your seat. Various oxygen hoses and other attachments connect you to the shuttle. Did I mention you are sitting in a chair, but since the shuttle is in the vertical you are lying on your back in this rig with your knees kipped up like some bizarre Pilates exercise? Well, you are.

The main hatch through which you came into the crew area is somewhere behind you. It is dogged down and sealed to keep air and pressure in and the vacuum of space out. A good idea if you are going into orbit I'm sure you will agree. And so there you are sitting in the shuttle and in, say, final countdown mode waiting for lift off.

"Final countdown mode" means that everybody not inside the shuttle who wants to live (or at least keep their ears functioning) has long since left the area around the shuttle and gone several miles away. Several long miles away. And they're still going to put ear protection on when the shuttle blasts off. They would very much like to not come back to the launch area until the shuttle is long gone.

There you are, you and your crew mates, all by your lonesomes. Space bound at last. Final countdown and all that sort of thing leading up to lift off.

And then something goes wrong.

I know, I know, you are asking yourself, "What could possibly go wrong?" But suppose, just suppose, something does go wrong and Mission Control informs you that according to their best estimates the chances of the whole thing blowing up are tending towards the highly probable and you would be well advised to get the fuck out.

Okay.

Here's, according to our guide, is all you have to do to save your butt.

1) Unplug everything and get the straps off you.

2) Get to the sealed hatch and unseal and open it.

3) Leave the shuttle and stand up on the gantry. Then cross the gantry, avoiding the elevator that brought you up.

4) On the far side of the gantry is an open platform with slots in the floor below and a lot of cables slanting down and away from the whole shebang. These cables are called "Zip lines."

5) Suspended underneath these zip lines at floor level are wicker baskets. You will climb into these. (Tick, tock, tick, tock... time's a wastin'.)

6) Did I mention you will get into these wicker baskets backwards? You will. Then you will release the basket.

7) Upon releasing the basket you will be propelled backwards and downwards at a very high velocity along the long slanting cable for some distance towards a massive pile of sandbags.

8) Assuming everything's been calibrated properly your basket will shoot through an opening in the sandbags and come to a stop next to the entrance to a highly armored and sealable bunker at the bottom.

9) You will then haul your space-suited self out of the basket, open the door to the bunker and go inside. You will close the door leaving it to any of your more tardy fellow astronauts to open and enter the bunker if their "slide for life" has worked out.

10) Once inside the bunker, which is still relatively close to the now about to explode Space Shuttle, you have to ask yourself one question, "Do I feel lucky?"

11) If you do or do not feel lucky, you can either sit in the bunker and hope for the best, or decide to take Option B.

12) Remember those armored personnel carriers above? They are Option B.

13) Should you select to "move away from the vehicle" you, and any other fellow astronauts who have gotten this far, will go out the back door of the bunker and jump into one of two M113 Armored Personnel Vehicles (Vintage 1960s models, low milage). These are buttoned-up, fully-fueled, keys-in-the-ignition, and engine-running set ups. First astronaut in is the driver.

14) Throw it into gear, pedal to the metal, and you are out of there at a top speed of around 40 miles an hour.

And that's all there is to it. What could possibly go wrong?

Provincetown's "Fresh Sea Clams," 1940.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." -- Yogi

Summer's at last heating up and so it's time for the cool to get cool by the shore. This will be especially cool this year because, so we hear, the coolest president in history may cool out on Martha's Vineyard. How cool is that?

It's even cooler when you consider that the cool One is sure to take the last final shred of whatever may have once, long ago, been cool about the Vineyard and grind it into fishmeal. When that's done, the Vineyard will look and feel, at last, pretty much like Provincetown, but without the Gay Pride floats and speedos. People worry about the coming fall and the heating up of swine flu, but I don't worry about fevers when I see that the all-consuming chill of "cool" is likely to get us first.

Cool's a funny thing. Before it was cool to be cool, being cool was actually sorta cool. But now that being cool is as required as a tramp-stamp at age 14 in order to gain admittence to a U2 Concert, cool's just not cool. Once "cool" is codified it's kaput. And since cool's not cool, there is no way to really be cool. Once you have a bunch of media lapdogs actually lapping on the lap of the President of the United States, even media's uncool. That would be okay since nothing cool is cool forever. After all, the groove must move to keep from becoming a rut.

Continued...

"A man's got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job." -- John Wayne

Once upon a time, there was "The Code of the West." [Original here] That was long ago, far away and in another country. Now there is only, "The Code of the Left." I've compared the two here. The Code of the West is in plain text. The Code of the Left is in italics because, well, it is just so damned important!

* Don't inquire into a person's past. Take the measure of a man for what he is today.

* There are no "people," only "social policies." Don't inquire into a social policy's past or that policy's likely consequences for the future. Take the measure of a policy by how closely it maps to the Socialist Utopia that has already killed and crippled hundreds of millions of people. Dream big nightmares.

* Never steal another man's horse. A horse thief pays with his life.

* Always look to steal another man's money with a "tax." Always ask your fellow citizen to reach for his wallet. All tax thieves are rewarded with a fat government pension and fatter health plan.

* Defend yourself whenever necessary.

* Do not defend yourself or the country under any circumstances. Killers are just grown-up kids who were abused. Terrorists are just people who haven't had their issues listened to with compassion. Make sure nobody else can defend themselves. Use only diplomacy to defend your country. Armies are raised only to place sandbags around towns about to be flooded for the fifth time. When that happens use government money to enable the fools who built them to rebuild them.

* Look out for your own.

* Look out, first, last and always, for any other people numerous enough to declare themselves an oppressed group (The minimum number is 3) - except if the group is an actual family, in which case seek to disband it by any means necessary.

* Remove your guns before sitting at the dining table.

* Ban guns. Anytime, anywhere. The Second Amendment is a misprint. Erase it in the original. Burn all copies.

* Never order anything weaker than whiskey.

* Never order anything stronger than a decaf double latte made with soy milk. Yes, that drink will shrink your testicles and/or ovaries to the size of peas, but you weren't using them anyway. Make it a double.

Continued...

Click to enlarge

"This starry night sky sparkles above the Black Hills of South Dakota and the United States' Mount Rushmore National Park. The historic site features enormous sculptures of four US presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, carved into the southeast face of granite cliffs. Above the monumental symbols of the country's independence and early history, the night features stars of a familiar constellation to northern skygazers around the world, an asterism known as the Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major."

Takes your breath away, doesn't it? It should.

Continued...

The brilliant Chris Muir hits it out of the park in today's Day by Day.

A short list. In no particular order.

We told our children that any child could grow up to be President. And then we made it come true.

We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.

We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.

Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes hues and scents.

We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.

Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.

Continued...

No, not "blind dating" where the danger is in the dated one, but "bungee dating" where the danger lurks in the date itself. "Bungee dating" because one finds oneself jumping into a situation that is 100 feet deep with a bungee cord that extends to 101 feet.

Thus it was with this sorry pilgrim, this old and true friend, who called my West Coast retreat from New York this morning, tattered and battered from his bungee date of the previous evening, telling his tale of testosterone-powered urban woe.

He will be distressed that I have related it here, but it is for the greater good I do so. Men, take heed. Ladies are advised to avert their delicate eyes.

Continued...

Across the street they've nailed the curtains.
They're getting ready for the feast.
The Phantom of the Opera,
A perfect image of a priest.
They're spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured.
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence,
After poisoning him with words,

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls,
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"
-- Bob Dylan

The Mark Sanford Media Fornication Festival currently climaxing in day-by-day updates, when not interrupted by ignoring where Michael Jackson parked his detachable penis for decades, instructs us yet again in what our media expects of Republican politicians: pseudo-moral celibacy in thought, word, and deed stretching from the cradle to the grave. Democrats, conversely, are expected and required to use their sex organs in ways that emulate and celebrate either Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, or Barney Frank.

It is of passing interest that the "profession" of "Journalism" itself requires no moral celibacy on the part of scribes ( pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, avarice, and gluttony being required activities for advancement -- Current Champions: Perez Hilton and his life partner Arianna Huffington.) The position of the media/entertainment industry en masse is that none of the seven deadly sins are allowed to be present in a Republican. Conversely, all seven deadly sins must not only be present but be celebrated in a Democrat. But since all this is well known and daily shown, we will let this interest in the media's position pass for the moment. Besides, it is futile since long and continuing research into the activities of our media today has shown, again and again, that you cannot insult whores.

Our sermon for today is "What doth it profit a man to gain the office of dogcatcher or above, if he must bid adieu to his sexuality in late childhood?"

Continued...

Via: A Republic -- if you can keep it @ the fascinating WESTSOUND MODERN

During my years in the cities, returning to New York by air at night mezmerized me during the long approach. Sliding down over the Alleghenies from the west, curving in over the Atlantic from the South, or throttling back and easing off the Great Circle Route from Europe, the emergence of the vast sprawl of lights that defined the Hive always enraptured me. On moonless nights, after the humming hours held in that aluminum cylinder hoisted into mid-heaven, you saw the long continents of dark water or land dissolve into shimmering white-gold strands connecting to clusters of earth-anchored constellations that merged to expanding galaxies of towns, suburbs,

Continued...

Previously Published Sunday Reading from the Archives

ABSENT BEING IN A COMA IN A CAVE somewhere on a high mountain in the middle of a cypress swamp, you cannot escape "The Runaway Bride." She is the plat du jour of our blighted age and the story of the decade so far this week. Now that she's back she'll be parsed and probed, drawn, quartered and eviscerated by the rapacious media until she's little more than a damp spot on some surgical sponge.

I hated The Runaway Bride from the first moment it was revealed she was safe and had simply freaked out and taken the geographic cure by getting gone to Vegas. Sane

Continued...

In the account books of friendship, a balance can never be struck. Favors are always owing. True, there's some sort of record and you can, if you really push it, get overdrawn, but the Bank of the Friend is very forgiving of minor transgressions and small inconveniences. You can be lounging about on a weekend morning with no intention of dressing and driving out into the cold, but the call comes in and you saddle up.

Ringtone: "Hello."

"I need help with my equipment I used in the sermon."

"I thought that was just going to be one telephone."

"It got more elaborate."

("Elaborate" is a word he uses when he let his imagination get the better of his judgement. In general, he believes in simple things: zen gardens, books of quotations or jokes, a single perfect leaf next to a perfect rock, wood floors instead of shag rugs. Over the years his friends have learned to fear "elaborate.")

"More 'elaborate' huh?"

"Well, I wanted it to be a memorable sermon."

(This was in response to an invitation to give a speech at a certain Seattle church's 50th Anniversary.)

"And?"

"It started when I decided to give the sermon in the chicken suit."

(He owns three full-body yellow-feathered chicken suits -- with heads. There are full-body bunny suits as well and there was once, briefly, a full-body pink gorilla suit, but that's two other stories.)

"But they've already seen the chicken suit."

"That's exactly what I thought so I decided to dress it up."

"And?"

"So I went down to The Love Connection by Lake Union."

Continued...

“I’m no yenta, but I think this is going to work." - Jim Rogers

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments..."

Submitted for your consideration an item most notable for its soothing palliative tone in which the unusual is normalized. As the age's intellectual insanity assumes the proportions of a plague, the experience of reading the herald of these plague years, the New York Times, becomes more and more like reading dispatches from the alternate universe of "hoping these changes stick." That the changes can only stick if the core of the more normative America holds both economically and militarily (even as the 'changy' culture struggles to destroy it) is where the hoping enters in.

Continued...

"Ye Olde Walk-In Seattle"

Where Lake Washington meets the ship canal at Union Bay, that's where Seattle has tucked in its slight, but somewhat interesting, Museum of Science and Industry. I'd been putting off going there since I seldom hear of anything interesting that the museum is exhibiting. It's a bit like the city thought it needed such a museum in order to qualify as a first-rate city. There's a lot of that kind of stuff in this town. It usually disappoints. However, having little to do other than avoid the rain last week -- and being in the general area -- I pulled into the road to the parking lot.

I had to stop and wait while a bus from a local old-folks home slowly unloaded its compliment of day-tripping seniors. You've seen these groups. They're the people that we usually store out of sight in one of God's proliferating waiting rooms. You know those places too. Somewhere ahead there's one of them with your name printed on a temporary tag and slipped into a bracket next to the door.

Continued...

Poet Baxter Black speaks for me. And for you.

Army Capt. Ed Arntson, of Chicago, kissed the grave of Staff Sgt. Henry Linck in Arlington, Va., National Cemetery Thursday. Staff Sgt. Linck was killed in Iraq in 2006. Armed forces placed flags at more than 300,000 gravestones ahead of Memorial Day.

The cemetery at the end of my streetis busy this weekend. Of course, a cemetery under all circumstances is seldom thought of as a busy place. We haven't had busy cemeteries since 1945. Since then the long peace and its sleep was only briefly, for a few years every now and then, interrupted by a small war. The cemeteries fill up more slowly now than ever before. And our sleep, regardless of continuing alarms, deepens.

These days we resent, it seems, having them fill at all, clinging to our tiny lives with a passion that passes all understanding; clinging to our large liberty with the belief that all payments on such a loan will be interest-free and deferred for at least 100 years.

Still, the cemetery at the end of my street does tend to take on a calm, resigned bustle over Memorial Day weekend, as the decreasing number of families who have lost members to war come to decorate the graves of those we now so delicately refer to as "The Fallen." They are not, of course, fallen in the sense that they will, suddenly and to our utter surprise, get up. That they will never do in this world. For they are not "The Fallen," they are "The Dead."

Continued...

I've already got my Tivo set on "Record Series." What are you waiting for?

HT: El Morgano who also asks "Does Wonder Woman’s Costume Undermine Her Portrayal as a Strong Female Character?" [Illustrated]

In a 1901 essay not published until 1923, years after his death, Mark Twain examines the effects of social pressures on our thoughts and beliefs.

A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties--the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety--the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his lifelong principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances....

In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom--and came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have deeply studied that question, too--and didn't arrive. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a Boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God. Pr'aps.

I suppose that in more cases than we should like to admit, we have two sets of opinions: one private, the other public; one secret and sincere, the other corn-pone, and more or less tainted. -- "Corn-Pone Opinions," by Mark Twain

Every day it does not rain, and many days when it does, this man walks three miles to the Pike Street public market in Seattle to play long alien notes on his Chinese instrument.

You walk by him on your way to the Athenian Cafe in the market. He's got a couple of bucks and change in his begging cup so you toss in a couple more. When you come out of the restaurant an hour or so later, he's got what he had, what you gave him, and a couple of quarters more. Almost everyone is ignoring him. He plays on.

Seattle is a second-level city mostly famous in popular culture for a second-rate rock band who did not so much invent "grunge" as simply show up on stage playing and wearing it. The band and its lead singer have been in different stages of dead for decades now, but their style lives on in Seattle like the galvanic twitches in the corpse of a frog long after it has been pithed. Seattle's left with a zombie pop culture whose only hope for survival is feeding on the brains of the bovine young. That's thin gruel for a zombie, but Seattle's "cultural scene" is eking out an undead living with inspirational shows such as this:

Continued...

Mayor Bloomberg: "There just weren't enough masks to go around so we stiched all our Macy's Parade balloons together and got everyone to breathe out at once."

"X" marks the spot: Close-up detail of President Obama's signature on a bill.

Serious analysis please. No wisecracks about Droodles. Okay?

. . . . . . . . . . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-- -- Ozymandius by Shelley

The last few days have, at last, been sunny and warm in Seattle. As a result, I've been out walking around. Just about everyone else in this city where moss grows on your north and south side has been out too. By this time of year, Seattlites suck up any stray sunshine like jonesing junkies sucking their crack pipes.

On Sunday I went to Seattle Center for the low key Japanese Cherry Blossom festival. Blossoms, ikebana exhibits, one man in a kimono sharpening a samurai blade, calligraphy coloring books... done. Seattle Center also has a number of other attractions such as the execrable Experience Music Project that squats on the edge of the center like so much discarded rainbow colored tin-foil toilet tissue.

It also has a cheesy carny arcade, a ferris wheel, a dwarf roller coaster, and a number of other attractions designed to lure the younger set out for a romp. And when it is sunny and rompish in Seattle the younger set comes out stripped for action. Shorts, t-shirts, and the People's Republic of Seattle mandated sleeveless fleece vest. And since Seattle is, going away, the whitest second class city in the nation, you see a lot of pasty flesh pass you by -- or wobble by, as the case may be.

I saw a lot of it on Sunday and this afternoon as well. Up on the sky island of Queen Anne and down in the swampy arboretum as well. And I noticed one thing.

There seemed to be an unusual number of slightly pregnant 20-30-40 something women around. Not stunningly pregnant as in, "Ah ha! Another woman trying to smuggle a basketball into the park!," but slightly pregnant; just past noticeable and into "Now that woman is with child."

Continued...

I track stories about Sarah Palin via Google Alerts. As a result, I see everything published about her in the MSM and the Not-So-MSM. Boiling this daily feed down to a few words, I'd say the hate and the fear of Palin continues unabated. The only reason I can ascribe to this is that there's something about Palin that scares a lot of people across the political spectrum silly. Very silly and very scared. Why? She's an outlier; a wild card in the normally stacked political deck. After 2008, Palin's got "a chip in the game," but she's not playing the game. She's not even sitting at the table, and shows disdain for the DC trough. Beyond that, Palin's got what most politicians cannot hope to match -- real American values, innate intelligence, and beauty.

As I noted last September in The Beautiful Candidate @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Attractiveness is a quality generally found in the political classes. Not always, of course, but more often than in most other lines of work. And while a certain intelligence plus an ability to immediately make a direct connection to another person are probably more important qualities, attractiveness doesn't hurt.

What is highly unusual, however, is for a candidate for office to be actually beautiful.

In a nation, and a world, that idolizes beauty, most of our politicians are, male or female, woofers. When a politician emerges that not only thinks right but looks right, the ugly dogs bark. Nobody understands this, and other assorted PalinHate, better than Morgan Freeberg in Why They Hate Sarah Palin So Much

1. There is room at the top, not just for women, but for pretty women ... In playing to the weak, wallflower women who don’t want to distinguish themselves in any way, feminism has become an advocacy group for those who lack appeal. With time, it has become an advocacy group for those women who work at not having any appeal. And I’m not talking sex appeal. I mean, being ready to engage in dialogues instead of monologues; talking to people in some way other than as a cross stepmother; motivating your man to come home instead of go out somewhere else, when he’s in the mood for some sex; acting like that’s important to you. We’ve seen the incremental rise of a counterculture of females who are in a great hurry not to have any appeal to anyone else, or to be beholden to anyone else — except other females who don’t have any appeal to anyone else and aren’t beholden to anyone else. They’re a grown-up version of those chubby goth chicks you knew in high school who didn’t know how to behave in public, didn’t care to learn, were horribly out of shape, and kept to their own at all times.

But beauty is not the only reason the PalinHaters -- Left to Right -- fear the MILF from the North. Morgan outlines 11 more reasons they hate her. They're HERE and they're CLEAR.

Thinking of relocating? States with No Personal Income Tax in Red. Yellow states tax dividend and interest income.

Hitchhiking in the Land of the Dead

From a minor tradition of sending kids out for to pick up some free candy, Halloween has mushroomed into a major American fornication festival in which we regularly -- and with increasing intensity -- celebrate the meat state of life while pretending to vaguely celebrate the spiritual part. If you've noted, as I have, the increasing lust for gruesomeness in costumes at every new Halloween, you might have reflected that dark humor has taken a back seat to darker fascinations. One new costume around this year allows you to dress us as a corpse in a body bag complete with wounds and autopsy slashes. And that's a mild one.

Armies of the Blight: Men Seeking Work. Anything Accepted. Cash Only. Illegal Not a Problem.

"What happens to these men if we arrive at a point, in a recession, where there is a lot less work for them in their many millions? What happens when the American dream starts contracting from the edges and the extra cash that allows us to employ them starts to dry up? They won't be counted as 'unemployed' since they were never legally 'employable' in the first place. Where will they go? Back to a Mexico where a recession in the US will breed a depression in that 3rd World country? Unlikely. Their best shot would still be to stay here. But if they did, what would they do? And how many would there really be? And how hungry and desperate would they get?"

Via Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

Through a series of events, I find myself in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn for a couple of days. As is often the case, being in New York City is going to be busy. But it did put me in mind of this set of photographs I created of the city: New York Life: 1,000 Pictures of New York City - a set on Flickr

Beginning in early October of 2001 and ending at around ten in the evening of November 9, 2002, I kept a detailed photographic record of what we were like and how we lived in New York in that shaky first year of our unsought new era. During those months I took over 23,000 photographs in all the areas and neighborhoods and places in which I found myself, night and day. Of these I destroyed most. In the end, I kept about 5,000 that struck me as worth preserving for one reason or another.

To show you, to make you see, what I saw during my walks around New York City in those months, would take a thousand images and an iron constitution. And so I selected them and I've put them HERE . I've selected thousand images because they seem, in aggregate, to give a reasonable impression of my last days in New York, the city I had lived in and loved for the better part of 30 years.

The Flicker Set is HERE.

Politics interprets events in the context of its mythology. But if politics is in the best of times the art of lying to ourselves in the broad day, politics in crisis is the vice of lying to ourselves while we are falling off a cliff. -- Richard Fernandez

You can say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Dr.Bob preaches it:

We stand now at the edge of an abyss. Our technological wizardry, fueled by our moral blindness and hubris, has created a global firestorm — economic and otherwise — which threatens to consume us all. Nations are bankrupt; huge corporations and institutions owe far more than their assets; nation-states are increasingly impotent at providing core and essential services necessary for a safe, stable, and economically prosperous society. The world is going bankrupt, at the light-speed of its digital communications and global commerce.

And we stand at this precipice, in great peril, as those who have fostered this disaster now scurry about pretending to fix it. In our drunken materialism, we bought what we could not afford with money which we did not have; we promoted and elected those leaders who will tell us the same lies which we told ourselves as we catapulted blindly into our current crisis. We hope through a government of crooks and cronies to legislate a stable, fair and compassionate society, when neither we ourselves nor those whom we placed in our have any moral framework by which to establish such a just and equitable society. The criminals sit in the judge’s seat, comprise the jury, and mete out their punishment — and we wonder why our lives and situation becomes increasingly chaotic, dangerous, and violent.

It is a time at which one might hope for some wisdom among the elected; some humility at the daunting task now faced; some responsibility to look out for the common good rather than simply grasp for more power. Yet the fools we have empowered to govern us continue to whistle through the graveyard, pretending in their hubris that the dark forest path upon which they are hopelessly lost really does lead to Paradise — if we only run faster.
- - A Brave New World @ The Doctor Is In

Change? Okay. Change what? Change my mind? Change my socks? Should I change my tires or can I get away with just rotating them? Is it okay to change the future or should I work harder at changing the past? Change for a dollar? Change for a quarter? How do you really make change when there's no cash register to tell you what the answer is? Should I call the doctor if there's any change in the condition my condition is in? What happens if life pitches you a change up? Can I be the change or can I slide through by being the ball? Would it be good if I changed my life? I had two wives who went through the change of life and they didn't seem to enjoy it, nor did I at the time. Maybe I should just be satisfied with ... climate change!

For, lo, it is truly said, "The only person on earth who really likes change is a wet baby."

Hope? Okay. What should I hope for and where shall I hope it? In a town called Hope? Shall I watch "Hope for Tomorrow?" Shall I shit in one hand and hope in the other and see which one fills up first? Is there hope for the future or is hope in vain? If I hope Obama isn't what everything about him says he is am I hoping against hope? Is it better to "hope and pray," or can I slide through on hope alone? And if I can cut out the praying and stay with the hope, can I also dump faith and charity thus saving both time and money? If so, shall I hope for the best or hope to avoid the worst? Does hope float? I mean, really float? Like Ivory soap? And why is hope the thing with feathers in the first place?

For, lo, it is truly said, "Live in hope. Die in despair."

[You know, it seems like almost yesterday I wrote these thoughts down. Oh, wait a minute... it was almost yesterday. How time refuses to fly.]

Hush, little baby, don't say a word.
Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird
-- Traditional American lullaby

The Senator stands before the fixed gaze of the CSPAN cameras in the always empty Senate chamber. His hands hold a stack of paper over a thousand pages thick. He observes, in a voice shaded with resignation and contempt, that no member of the Senate, himself included, has read the endless laundry list of fools’ gold nuggets that a majority are about to vote into law. Then, in what is less a gesture than a simple removal of his hands, he lets the pile drop to the floor where it lands with a sodden thump. The future of what was once a republic is smeared on the sheets of tumbled pile of paper on the Senate floor.

We do not know what this "future" holds within its pages. We know only that no one with the power to approve or disapprove this future that has now been decreed has read it. Like the future it represents the “bill” is obscure and unknowable. Like some czar’s whim it has simply been decreed by those who have made themselves master.

Continued...

Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.
-- Edgar Lee Masters, :The Hill", Spoon River Anthology

Abraham Lincoln, before rising to the Presidency, spoke on the dangers confronting the Republic 150 years ago: "A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND" Springfield, Missouri, June 16, 1858. **

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
"IF we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the seventh year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to Islamic terrorism. Under the operation of that policy, that Terrorism not only has not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, Islamic Terrorism will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.

"A house divided against itself can not stand."

I believe this government can not endure permanently half faint-hearted and half resolved. I do not expect America to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Continued...

iowahawk: With Apologies to Margaret Bourke-White

Mark Twain|Samuel Clemens' short story: Punch, Brothers, Punch

Title: Punch, Brothers, Punch
Author: Mark Twain [More Titles by Twain]
Will the reader please to cast his eye over the following lines, and see if he can discover anything harmful in them?

Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

CHORUS

Punch, brothers! punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

I came across these jingling rhymes in a newspaper, a little while ago, and read them a couple of times. They took instant and entire possession of me. All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain; and when, at last, I rolled up my napkin, I could not tell whether I had eaten anything or not. I had carefully laid out my day's work the day before--thrilling tragedy in the novel which I am writing. I went to my den to begin my deed of blood. I took up my pen, but all I could get it to say was, "Punch in the presence of the passenjare." I fought hard for an hour, but it was useless. My head kept humming, "A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, a buff trip slip for a six-cent fare," and so on and so on, without peace or respite. The day's work was ruined--I could see that plainly enough. I gave up and drifted down-town, and presently discovered that my feet were keeping time to that relentless jingle. When I could stand it no longer I altered my step. But it did no good; those rhymes accommodated themselves to the new step and went on harassing me just as before. I returned home, and suffered all the afternoon; suffered all through an unconscious and unrefreshing dinner; suffered, and cried, and jingled all through the evening; went to bed and rolled, tossed, and jingled right along, the same as ever; got up at midnight frantic, and tried to read; but there was nothing visible upon the whirling page except "Punch! punch in the presence of the passenjare." By sunrise I was out of my mind, and everybody marveled and was distressed at the idiotic burden of my ravings--"Punch! oh, punch! punch in the presence of the passenjare!"

Two days later, on Saturday morning, I arose, a tottering wreck, and went forth to fulfil an engagement with a valued friend, the Rev. Mr.------, to walk to the Talcott Tower, ten miles distant. He stared at me, but asked no questions. We started. Mr.------ talked, talked, talked as is his wont. I said nothing; I heard nothing. At the end of a mile, Mr.------ said "Mark, are you sick? I never saw a man look so haggard and worn and absent-minded. Say something, do!"

Drearily, without enthusiasm, I said: "Punch brothers, punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!"

My friend eyed me blankly, looked perplexed, they said:

"I do not think I get your drift, Mark. Then does not seem to be any relevancy in what you have said, certainly nothing sad; and yet--maybe it was the way you said the words--I never heard anything that sounded so pathetic. What is--"

But I heard no more. I was already far away with my pitiless, heartbreaking "blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, pink trip slip for a three-cent fare; punch in the presence of the passenjare." I do not know what occurred during the other nine miles. However, all of a sudden Mr.------ laid his hand on my shoulder and shouted:

"Oh, wake up! wake up! wake up! Don't sleep all day! Here we are at the Tower, man! I have talked myself deaf and dumb and blind, and never got a response. Just look at this magnificent autumn landscape! Look at it! look at it! Feast your eye on it! You have traveled; you have seen boaster landscapes elsewhere. Come, now, deliver an honest opinion. What do you say to this?"__

I sighed wearily; and murmured:

"A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, a pink trip slip for a three-cent fare, punch in the presence of the passenjare."

Rev. Mr. ------ stood there, very grave, full of concern, apparently, and looked long at me; then he said:

"Mark, there is something about this that I cannot understand. Those are about the same words you said before; there does not seem to be anything in them, and yet they nearly break my heart when you say them. Punch in the--how is it they go?"

I began at the beginning and repeated all the lines.

My friend's face lighted with interest. He said:

"Why, what a captivating jingle it is! It is almost music. It flows along so nicely. I have nearly caught the rhymes myself. Say them over just once more, and then I'll have them, sure."

I said them over. Then Mr. ------ said them. He made one little mistake, which I corrected. The next time and the next he got them right. Now a great burden seemed to tumble from my shoulders. That torturing jingle departed out of my brain, and a grateful sense of rest and peace descended upon me. I was light-hearted enough to sing; and I did sing for half an hour, straight along, as we went jogging homeward. Then my freed tongue found blessed speech again, and the pent talk of many a weary hour began to gush and flow. It flowed on and on, joyously, jubilantly, until the fountain was empty and dry. As I wrung my friend's hand at parting, I said:

"Haven't we had a royal good time! But now I remember, you haven't said a word for two hours. Come, come, out with something!"

The Rev. Mr.------ turned a lack-luster eye upon me, drew a deep sigh, and said, without animation, without apparent consciousness:

"Punch, brothers, punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!"

A pang shot through me as I said to myself, "Poor fellow, poor fellow! he has got it, now."

I did not see Mr.------ for two or three days after that. Then, on Tuesday evening, he staggered into my presence and sank dejectedly into a seat. He was pale, worn; he was a wreck. He lifted his faded eyes to my face and said:

"Ah, Mark, it was a ruinous investment that I made in those heartless rhymes. They have ridden me like a nightmare, day and night, hour after hour, to this very moment. Since I saw you I have suffered the torments of the lost. Saturday evening I had a sudden call, by telegraph, and took the night train for Boston. The occasion was the death of a valued old friend who had requested that I should preach his funeral sermon. I took my seat in the cars and set myself to framing the discourse. But I never got beyond the opening paragraph; for then the train started and the car-wheels began their 'clack, clack-clack-clack-clack! clack-clack! --clack-clack-clack!' and right away those odious rhymes fitted themselves to that accompaniment. For an hour I sat there and set a syllable of those rhymes to every separate and distinct clack the car-wheels made. Why, I was as fagged out, then, as if I had been chopping wood all day. My skull was splitting with headache. It seemed to me that I must go mad if I sat there any longer; so I undressed and went to bed. I stretched myself out in my berth, and--well, you know what the result was. The thing went right along, just the same. 'Clack-clack clack, a blue trip slip, clack-clack-clack, for an eight cent fare; clack-clack-clack, a buff trip slip, clack clack-clack, for a six-cent fare, and so on, and so on, and so on punch in the presence of the passenjare!' Sleep? Not a single wink! I was almost a lunatic when I got to Boston. Don't ask me about the funeral. I did the best I could, but every solemn individual sentence was meshed and tangled and woven in and out with 'Punch, brothers, punch with care, punch in the presence of the passenjare.' And the most distressing thing was that my delivery dropped into the undulating rhythm of those pulsing rhymes, and I could actually catch absent-minded people nodding time to the swing of it with their stupid heads. And, Mark, you may believe it or not, but before I got through the entire assemblage were placidly bobbing their heads in solemn unison, mourners, undertaker, and all. The moment I had finished, I fled to the anteroom in a state bordering on frenzy. Of course it would be my luck to find a sorrowing and aged maiden aunt of the deceased there, who had arrived from Springfield too late to get into the church. She began to sob, and said:

"'Oh, oh, he is gone, he is gone, and I didn't see him before he died!'

"'Yes!' I said, 'he is gone, he is gone, he is gone--oh, will this suffering never cease!'

"'You loved him, then! Oh, you too loved him!'

"'Loved him! Loved who?'

"'Why, my poor George! my poor nephew!'

"'Oh--him! Yes--oh, yes, yes. Certainly--certainly. Punch--punch--oh, this misery will kill me!'

"'Bless you! bless you, sir, for these sweet words! I, too, suffer in this dear loss. Were you present during his last moments?'

"'Yes. I--whose last moments?'

"'His. The dear departed's.'

"'Yes! Oh, yes--yes--yes! I suppose so, I think so, I don't know! Oh, certainly--I was there I was there!'

"'Oh, what a privilege! what a precious privilege! And his last words- -oh, tell me, tell me his last words! What did he say?'

"'He said--he said--oh, my head, my head, my head! He said--he said--he never said anything but Punch, punch, punch in the presence of the passenjare! Oh, leave me, madam! In the name of all that is generous, leave me to my madness, my misery, my despair!--a buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, a pink trip slip for a three-cent fare--endu--rance can no fur--ther go!--PUNCH in the presence of the passenjare!"

My friend's hopeless eyes rested upon mine a pregnant minute, and then he said impressively:

"Mark, you do not say anything. You do not offer me any hope. But, ah me, it is just as well--it is just as well. You could not do me any good. The time has long gone by when words could comfort me. Something tells me that my tongue is doomed to wag forever to the jigger of that remorseless jingle. There--there it is coming on me again: a blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, a buff trip slip for a--"

Thus murmuring faint and fainter, my friend sank into a peaceful trance and forgot his sufferings in a blessed respite.

How did I finally save him from an asylum? I took him to a neighboring university and made him discharge the burden of his persecuting rhymes into the eager ears of the poor, unthinking students. How is it with them, now? The result is too sad to tell. Why did I write this article? It was for a worthy, even a noble, purpose. It was to warn you, reader, if you should came across those merciless rhymes, to avoid them--avoid them as you would a pestilence.

Door to Tower with Scenes from Genesis @ Bok Tower Sanctuary, January 31, 2008

Blossom @ Bok Tower Sanctuary, January 31, 2008

Swans Nesting @ Bok Tower Sanctuary, January 31, 2008

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

-- The Wild Swans At Coole by William Butler Yeats

Four and a half months

Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Pick up on one and leave the other behind.
It's not often easy and not often kind.
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
-- The Loving Spoonful

No Answers Here. Just Observations and Anecdotes

Like most serious people in America today, I've had to struggle with my views on abortion. You are required, in this deadlocked and soul-locked society to have a view on this issue. "I don't know" just wont cut it. You've got to know. It says so right here in America: The Instructions.

But what *do* I know about Abortion? Here's what I thought I knew then and what I think I know now. Why today? Because I read the news today. Oh boy. And the news is only too happy to tell me that today, January 22, 2009, is the 36th Anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that released the crushing Abortion juggernaut to roll over the soul of America.

Abortion is, as we all know, one of the 25 or 30 third rails of American politics. So what? A President must prove to the American people that, from time to time, he can reach out and touch a few of these rails with both hands. This can be, as I am sure George W. Bush discovered and Barack Obama will find, a shocking experience, but I wouldn't want a man as President who couldn't do it.

Like it or not the issue of abortion is one of those rails. Bush grasped it to his cost and benefit, but it is clear he did so out of personal conviction and not political expediency. Whether or not you like his choice depends on your choice. But grasp it he did. I'm pretty clear where he stood on abortion. Obama is on record, where record there is, of being pro-abortion, even in its most odious forms. But it seems that Obama is more a man of expediency than conviction and such men are always malleable. Decisions from Obama, so far, have always had the whiff of Prufrockian diffidence about them:
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

This Prufrockian posture in civic life clothed in the skin and expressions of some smooth operator is one of the main reasons Obama has been able to feed his legions -- so far-- on the thin political gruel of "hope." Now that he has entered the realm of his every syllable being recorded and his every move being examined like auguries, his long stroll on the beach is over. He is now expected to serve up the bitter and chafing gall of "change" and convince his legions it tastes of ambrosia. Somewhere on the list of ingredients in this dish is "abortion."

The Vexation and the Fear. The Abstract Issue and the Real Child

Abortion is one of our most vexing issues. Like a satanic Energizer Bunny it just keeps going... and going... and going. There's no good in it and no good end to it.

Continued...

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors.
The circus is in town.
-- Bob Dylan | Desolation Row

The frozen rain that would not stop drove me out of Seattle a few weeks ago. I took shelter at a friend's house deep in the Florida Keys. No rain. No chill. Turquoise waters. Long bridges and longer sunsets. A half an hour north from Key West. Fish sandwiches, large flocks of snowy egrets, Tiki bars specializing in Rumrunners with a dark rum float. Hammocks and sunshine. Powerboats and new yachts and boat drinks and running up on plane past Little Palm Island and out into the Gulf Stream with twin Cats putting out a perfect wake.

In a word, "Paradise." Right?

Yes. If you don't track in for the close-up.

Because, as much as the boosters of Florida want you to believe it, Florida is no longer "ready for its close-up." Florida is still pretty from the air and also in the middle-distance. But a close up examination of Florida, in the Keys or elsewhere, is like a close-up of a once beautiful woman that time is beginning to dissolve into age lines, lank hair, and too many calories in too many visible places.

Like that fabled great beauty, Florida is going to great lengths to keep anybody from noticing. The brochures have increasing amounts of make-up slathered on in the form of retouching. The flab is being trussed up in Spandex or draped with new clothes cleverly cut for the "ample." Most of all, the fact that large sections of the Keys and the Florida coastline are really quite dead is being hushed up at every opportunity, and new shades of rouge are being applied to the corpse to keep the money rolling in.

Continued...

There's nothing to add to the universal amazement and gratitude regarding this moment except the subject line of a recent email:

"Yet again God speaks to the deaf......"

"I'm melting! I'm melting!" -- The Wicked Witch of the West and Condo crazed Florida

The Ironic Sunday Paper's Front Page

... that everything in Texas turn out to be on my diet!

The second greatest thing about Texas is the if this United States of America thing doesn't work out, Texas is already set up to be its own sovereign nation. (And it's already had a dress rehearsal.)

As in "Don't Mess with..."

Home of Lone Star Beer...

... and strangely enough, Rosie the Riveter.

With the Presidential election finally behind us, and the next at least a week away, I am the third most relieved man in America. The second most relieved man in America would be John McCain. The first most relieved man in America? That would be George W. Bush.

In the meantime, since I think it best to let the predictable waves of "Yea!," "Congratulations!," "We did it to ourselves," and "I told you that bitch was crazy" wash out of the bloodstream, I shall let Mark Twain's immortal insights from 1901 speak. Pay attention. There will be a test. Hell, there will be around 500 tests.

---

FIFTY YEARS AGO, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man -a slave -who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from....

One of his texts was this:

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."....

I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far enough.

1. It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention. This happens, but I think it is not the rule.

2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed....

Continued...

The dyed-finger idea could go a long way to eliminating voter fraud in America.

[Note: In the last week or so, I've heard -- here and elsewhere -- some defeatist carping about "not voting." Worse still is the plan of voting for someone you think is bad in order to make the country worse so that, at some moment in time, it learns from the experience. Both poses -- and poses they are -- strike me as malicious and childish. And I think of this conversation with Paul on Election Day in 2004. He knew what faction and party politics brought. He knew it from hard experience.... ]

Once a week Paul and his sister come to my house to clean it. They're recent arrivals to America from Russia and work at cleaning houses in order to support themselves and take courses at night at Irvine's community college. They're part of a larger group of Russians that live, not in the astronomically expensive beach towns along Southern California's solid gold coast, but inland where life is considerably cheaper.

Every Tuesday Paul and his sister arrive in a beat-up old Toyota, haul their vacuums and supplies in and set to work with a single-minded thoroughness at their job. They're in and out in an hour and off to another house. If they're ever feeling down, I've never seen it. They're pleased to be working and they work hard.

Paul's sister has better English than he does. His is spotty to say the least, but it improves. We all try to spend a few minutes talking in English since they are keen to learn the vernacular. We once spent 45 minutes going over the inflections of "Too cool for school," "Whatever," and the inner meaning of "Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em." I like to think I'm giving them insights into English not available in the classroom.

But this is Laguna Beach, a latter-day hippie stronghold of liberal socialists griping as they sit in homes with an average value of $1,300,000, and so Paul and I don't ever speak of politics. Until election day this week.

Continued...

He said, "Call the doctor. I think I'm gonna crash."
"The doctor say he's comin', but you gotta pay him cash."
-- Eagles- Life In The Fast Lane

Last June I was visiting an old friend in San Rafael, California. He lives the classic Marin county life high on a brindle California hillside. His house is reached by driving the blind curves of one of those thin hill roads. He's got open land and long views next to his house. And a beautiful and extensive garden. A Sunset Magazine garden.

And like most homeowners in Marin, he's got his own personal Mexican to keep it together. Yard work, it's what most of the Mexicans of Marin do. That and construction, and cooking, and cleaning, and any other kind of scut work that brings them cash.

From what I could see, this yard worker gets about $85 a day. Maybe more, maybe less. Maybe for that day only. Maybe for two days a week. Hard to imagine it could be for three. But I have no way of knowing. In Marin it would be the height of political insensitivity to ask, "By the way, how much do you pay your own personal Mexican?"

His personal Mexican doesn't speak much English. Just enough to get by. The home owners treat him with respect and a strange deference, lapsing in a kind of Spanglish in order to talk to him. They ferry their personal Mexican from their house high on the hill to his home -- somewhere in the rambling and beaten down apartment complexes east of the freeway in San Rafael.

Continued...

"Undecided" voters find out early
how to lie to pollsters with a smile.
Say "I don't know" and you won't have to worry,
You can cast your vote in private and in style.

Lying non-disclosure sure gets lonely,
I guess every form of bullshit has its price.
But their Dem friends will love a voter only
If they think they'll vote Obama, maybe twice.

So they tell them they might vote for Messiah
And comfort those Dem friends who'd put them down.
But I know how they're voting on that Tuesday,
They're heading for the Palin side of town.

You can't hide your lyin' eyes
and your smile is a thin disguise.
I thought by now you'd realize
there ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes.

Continued...

Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. -- MATTHEW 14

A disturbing element of the Obama campaign is the shameless use of children by his supporters and the campaign itself. (See this coming weekend's Grassroots "Kids for Obama Parade" in Seattle for the latest of these "pet parades.")

Deploying children in campaigns is not an unusual element in political contests. Supporters are always convinced they are supporting their candidate "for the children." At the same time, it can't be overstated that the Obama campaign and its supporters/parents are more than usually enthusiastic about getting the kids to convince everyone in the nation that Obama really is in it "for the children."

Continued...

Writer (left) & Editor (right)

[Note: James Taranto declares @ Best of the Web Today - WSJ.com

2008 is the year in which "fact checking" of political ads and statements became a full-blown journalistic fad. May it soon go the way of streaking and Mexican jumping beans. The "fact check" is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment.

He's right. People have too much faith in THE FACTS when it comes to politics, or anything else in the media sphere these days. Here's a little something I wrote about the reality of fact -checking inside media back in May of 2007. It is still true today, only more so. And that's THE FACTS, JACK.]

"Fact-checking in publishing." It's such a quaint notion. It thrives on the belief that if publishers checked the facts, the truth would out. But on many levels, most publishers -- especially book publishers -- don't want to check the facts and, truth be told, seldom do. Book publishers are not interested in truth, they are interested in stories; stories that sell.

Having worked for more than 30 years in book and magazine publishing, I had many chances to view the "fact-checking" element at work in both fields and, although it was rigorous in magazines, it was close to non-existent in books. Even the much-vaunted "fact checking at the New Yorker" is pretty much a myth at this point; the kind of myth that lets the current phase of The New Yorker slide on by as a "dependable" source. But it really is about 50% BS now. And for book publishers it always was 95% BS.

Continued...

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
-- Sonnet 18

In the end, it is not our failure to learn from history that condemns us to repeat it, but our mind's turning away from even the briefest glimpse of what the dark passages of history were like that damns us. We may know, but we refuse to see. We blind our own mind's eye. It is our inability to imagine the most evil things that all men are capable of that corrupts us.

No, do not say "our inability" to imagine. Say rather, "our refusal" to imagine since the imagination itself -- if we were honest -- can indeed visualize carnage and depravity with ourselves as the actor and never the acted-upon. Our mind can and does see things that we cannot stand to admit. Our mind can bring to an image and hold in our mind's eye things of infinite vileness.

Continued...

Taken by Wally Pacholka. Click to enlarge.

"Is there any place in the world you could see a real sight like this? Yes. Pictured above is single exposure image spectacular near, far, and in between. Diving into the Earth far in the distance is part of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, taken with a long duration exposure. Much closer, the planet Jupiter is visible as the bright point just to band's left. Closer still are picturesque buttes and mesas of the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, USA, lit by a crescent moon. In the foreground is a cave housing a stone circle of unknown origin named False Kiva. The cave was briefly lit by flashlight during the long exposure. Astrophotographer Wally Pacholka reports that getting to the cave to take this image was no easy trek. Also, mountain lions were a concern while waiting alone in the dark for just the right exposure." - From APOD @ NASA

Dear Congress:

I am writing in response to your request for additional money via the "WTF!? Re-Financing America Extortion Act of 2008." I put "Poor Planning" as the cause of my overnight insolvency. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I am a taxpayer by trade. During the last year of the recent mortgage "accident," I was working alone on the roof of a broken-down six-storey building in West LA, laying down slate shingles and edging it with solid copper gutters, hoping to flip it to "Flip This House" at the Steal It Yourself cable francise. When I completed the paperwork to purchase this pig, I found I had some cash on hand thanks to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" section of the "No-Money-Needed Mortgage."

This money, after I converted it to seemingly solid gold GoogleRands, weighed 240 lbs. This was delivered to me on demand by a bank-insured helicopter drop onto the roof of the building I was hoping to flip. Talk about your "windfall profts!" This was money for nothing. Rather than carry the gold GoogleRands down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. To do so I had the helicopter lift me off the roof and deposit me on the ground. It was all part of their "customer servicing."

Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and

Continued...

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