tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90931704554158065272024-03-12T20:57:13.010-06:00Shooting a FlyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger260125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-25843532678625796452023-02-16T06:03:00.002-07:002023-02-16T06:09:20.951-07:00Biography in Flannel<p> A quarter-century ago when I first took up cohabitation with my wife, she sewed me a wonderful lightweight robe in a bold red-and-blue flannel as an apt and thoughtful welcoming gift. And I am still wearing it in good health and connubial joy. What could be better? It is a part of the warp and weft of my days, so to speak, enfolding me in another morning of my quick passage through this vale of light and shadow, like a familiar arm across my shoulders, a comfort in my dotage, my accustomed armor against the chances of another sunrise. </p><p>Naturally, as it's cotton and not chain mail or rubber, it's worn thin in places over the interim. In fact a detractor might call it downright shabby. Each morning I tie around my waist its third belt. It drapes loosely now, the fabric in places a mere tissue, in other places it is no longer. It fails to cover everywhere, it is copiously patched until now there is no patching it since the flannel no longer has the structural integrity to hold the patch. It is in short become a classic, like the thousand-year-old kimonos that are a palimpsest of the time and labor of forgotten souls, ancient narratives of alien fabrics, repairs and loving reinforcements.</p><p>But now, within a scant quarter-century I hear murmurs of replacement, gentle yet persistent urgings from the other room to look at a new fabric (how about a nice gray plaid for a gray head?). So what, I protest, that the seat has been patched thrice, that the front is worn through, that the shoulders are so attenuated that they will not support the rest of it on a hanger, or even that the patch across the back is worn through again? It has been only twenty-five years; no need that it should last a thousand. It's fine. I'm fine. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't crawl back into it each morning. It has shared my morning surliness and my unfocused negativity ever since our first halcyon days in one another's company.</p><p>At a certain age, different I suppose for everyone, a person acquires a personal museum - a mental catalog of favorite things, or moments, or friends, departed pets, a favorite bicycle or doll or song, perhaps one's signed copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. An iconography of the self. In my own museum this robe will hang in the entrance hall like the feathered cape of a Kwakiutl chieftain or the leathern armor of Genghis Khan.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-33824102894290100112023-02-16T04:15:00.003-07:002023-02-16T04:17:38.365-07:00Kay<p> Our friend and neighbor Kay died yesterday, the day after Valentine's Day. She was her husband's valentine, and he held her hands until the end, when she slipped through his fingers in answer to an inexorable and exacting summons. This little world of Alamos is suddenly quieter and diminished. Geriatric diaries can become raddled with a litany of departures that leave friends standing in the airport lounge and not expecting anyone coming in on the next flight. </p><p>Kay could sometimes be like a small stone in one's shoe. Sometimes you just had to sit down, remove the shoe and ask what exactly would you like right now? Missouri had given her some bracing edges which she deployed with great relish and telling effect. Dave's equanimity was always exemplary - legendary maybe - but Kay would always look over her glasses and grin at the others in the room after a particularly vigorous dressing down of anyone who had excited her impatience. All in good fun and no offense taken.</p><p>She was a confirmed atheist and so never felt the need to discuss further any spiritual encumbrances imposed by ideas of divinity. But at the end she agreed to see a local pastor, an apparently kindly woman who would come for an hour, speak quietly with Kay, sometimes play the guitar. On one of her last visits Kay looked up in her owlish way at the woman and asked, "Are you always this serene? Or are you just fuckin' crazy?" With Kay there were never any two ways about it.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-25668393838217394252021-02-05T12:44:00.002-07:002021-02-05T12:51:26.259-07:00Goats Can't Type<p><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic;">'</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Book Antiqua", Palatino, "Palatino Linotype", "Palatino LT STD", Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic;">Owners of a farm in Lancashire, England, said that they had earned as much as $50,000 by booking goats as guests for Zoom calls, including Lisa, who specializes in “passive-aggressive bleating.”</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Book Antiqua", Palatino, "Palatino Linotype", "Palatino LT STD", Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px;"><i> ' </i>Harper's Weekly Review, Feb. 1, 2021</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In the new regime of virus sequestration and remote work, with the attendant loneliness and isolation, the Zoom meeting seems the sole podium remaining for the lone voice crying in a wilderness of neglected laundry, pet hair, badly-worn slippers, unopened mail, empty vodka bottles, a drift of weekly shoppers' guides strewn across undusted tables, yesterday's bowl of soggy cornflakes - the general wrack of lives edging toward the abyss. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">One might anticipate in the circumstances that Zoom would provide an ideal soapbox for the lonely loggorhetic bore, precisely the sort who even in first-person encounters mostly fails to perceive gentle cues like fidgeting, glazed eyes, yawns, glances at watches, flatulence, lint-picking and other such signs that it's time to sit down. Apropos is a tale a friend tells me of a young fellow of his acquaintance whose father pulled some strings to get him employment with reasonable pay. Came the epidemic and the ascendance of Zoom, and in meeting after meeting a fellow Zoomer inevitably held the (virtual) floor, droning interminably about his personal situation, his "issues," his hopes and dreams. At some point early-ish in the young man's career trajectory he lost patience and launched himself into an obscenity-filled rant. The ensuing silence in the Zoomfest was his cue that he had failed to hit the mute on his laptop. </span><span style="background-color: white;">I understand he is in search of an alternative career path, though one can only sympathize with his pique and his momentary lapse from the passive to the aggressive.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A second attendant difficulty with zoom meetings, aside from the incidence of masturbating under the desk or Zooming naked, is the tendency to zoom in bathrobe and pajamas. My grandson's middle school guidance counselor was constrained to call the lad's parents and let them know that the young on-line scholar was attending classes while supine amongst rumpled bedclothes like an adolescent Hugh Hefner.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">As I have no business to conduct, I have only attended Zoom meetings with family members (friends don't Zoom friends). Most of the preliminaries involve trying to 1) </span><span style="background-color: white;">get</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">an audio connection, 2) </span><span style="background-color: white;">get</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">a video connection, 3) </span><span style="background-color: white;">get</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">both signals simultaneously, 4) ascertaining who isn't present, 5) ascertaining whether those absent might eventually be present or why they can't be, 6) ascertaining why someone .of the party has a glare in their video feed, 7) someone explaining that they have just had to reboot their connection and could the aforegoing several minutes be repeated.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">If the pandemic radically alters the notion of a workplace, if such platforms as Zoom become the usual forum for the conduct of the world's business, then why not, after all? Entropy is the law for the ages and the world seems to be slipping no less smoothly into the abyss even in the absence of face-to-face transactions. I foresee a rosy future in which entire military operations are transacted exclusively over Zoom, like a "World of Warcraft" for Proud Boys and other really serious adults.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The goats-who-Zoom are on hire as an antidote to "Zoom fatigue," the Python-esque syndrome for the modern age which includes such symptoms as boredom, lowered morale, loss of good humor (see above) - the "existential alienation" of the 1950s repackaged for the digital age. And there are other domesticated beasts at least as photogenic and vocally endowed by their Creator as is the goat. Someone innured to a caprine charm may respond more promptly and favorably to </span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;">the bovine,</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;"> or</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times;"> to the jackass, the burro, or any member of class Ungulata. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white;">An entire presidency has been conducted over a Twitter feed; where were these goats when we really needed them?</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: times; font-size: large; text-align: center;"> </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-83456781907589885352021-01-19T15:11:00.004-07:002021-01-21T11:00:41.339-07:00Notes Toward a Cultural Anthropology (3)<p>Winter quarters here in southern Sonora are a small casita inside the walled grounds of a larger villa, which sounds exactly as comfortable and peaceful as it is. The back wall of the casita forms a length of the wall surrounding the property and abuts the street along the property front. In fact, all the residences along Durango are similarly walled from the street in a continuous and varied stucco and brick parapet, save for a large tract of vacant, scrubby ground immediately across the street, the holding of an old tequila factory (now a residence in its own right). The street, with its stretch of unoccupied ground, stretches about 100 meters, up to the corner where it makes an ell and continues along another outside tract of trees and cactus.</p><p>I mention all of these particulars because in Mexico such places are known as "Tailgate Heaven: An Amazing Free Party Venue." The ell at the corner, with vacant space on the outside of the bend in both directions, forms a comfortable nook for six or eight vehicles, many of them cumbered with the sound capabilities of a national soccer stadium or the Nuremburg Platz in its heyday.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAVgGi-LBGoAGSEty04rAAmjz7b6DV_oema8036JOMYqfujizZfa_cO2J3gyyXPWrIe65mqLNwzXGunEYeiFCcrw1V3SqKeOJ0GW2i3vK4a2uhG0VYYtIhdl4qgg1tVTXq6zwvPuKR2swa/s2048/thalyson-souza-hnvjOMC6SS0-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAVgGi-LBGoAGSEty04rAAmjz7b6DV_oema8036JOMYqfujizZfa_cO2J3gyyXPWrIe65mqLNwzXGunEYeiFCcrw1V3SqKeOJ0GW2i3vK4a2uhG0VYYtIhdl4qgg1tVTXq6zwvPuKR2swa/w379-h252/thalyson-souza-hnvjOMC6SS0-unsplash.jpg" width="379"></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">The ell tends to draw a crowd after about 9:00 p.m. ("gringo midnight") on any holiday. And holidays are frequent here - the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is more than a harmless if cloying Christmas carol, it is a confirmed and pernicious custom, something to be taken literally. According to some perverse gloss on the gospel account, it took the three wise men exactly twelve days to track down the young spawn of a miscreant deity, and to offload their cargo of luxury items (which have apparently been subsequently absorbed into the Vatican treasury). As a consequence, the Nativity in Mexico stretches on for an interminable span, culminating on the twelfth day, when every good child gets to explode its gift of fireworks in the street outside my window.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The generous disbursal of holidays throughout the calendar offers an instructive lesson in the cultural relativity of time, both as a general concept and as an arena within which people conduct their daily comings and goings. Time in Mexico is not (yet) the same as money. Time is a flexible, ever-slowing and quickening stream, an arena in which the tempo changes according as the gods may pipe the dance. The clock has little say in the matter, and the calendar, as I say, is studded with the lacunae we call Navidad, the Day of the Magi, the Day of the Dead, the feast of one or other of the vast necropolis of saints, angels, Benito Juarezes and other fathers of the nation.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Winter is a slow time as I have just explained. In winter also comes the Day of the Dead, another quasi-religious celebration. (Mexico is somewhat encumbered by its religion, though blessedly little with theology.) On my first visit to Alamos, nearly a decade ago, I spent a month in a camping park that abuts the local <i>cemetario</i>, its own village of sarcophagi in which a bevy of tearful angels vie with Blessed Virgins of Guadelupe for majority. The resident dead, you'd expect, would be quiet sorts, and so they were until the weekends when, each Friday and Saturday night, the locals would invade the peace of the graves and roister well into the next day. The old caretaker at the trailer park, Firmin, was a regular at these Tecate-cum-tequila bouts, and would often appear at his post late the following day, looking and moving more like an honoree than a participant in the weekly Dia de las Muertes.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The stereotypical picture of a Mexican holiday used to be the lazy <i>tourista</i> lulled into siesta time by the strains of a gentle guitar quartet serenading below the balcony. Maybe a mariachi group strolling amongst the tables in a cantena. Not that I'd particularly look forward to that, but I can imagine the all-inclusive-resort-and-cruise crowd thinking it was quaint. Back at the ell the music and the party go on until someone calls the police, who obligingly move the revelers on. And perhaps the noise would be less objectionable if it were not car radios pumping out Mexican rap and tech-Mex pop and the dreaded ballads with a section of horns and oompah-pah tubas. </p><p style="text-align: left;">These are merely cultural observations, you understand. I'm not really complaining, I hope. Still, I never thought I'd ever say the words, "Give me a high school band playing Sousa." I haven't said it. Yet.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-55799633592694837572021-01-11T13:32:00.001-07:002021-01-11T13:35:51.339-07:00Notes Toward a Cultural Anthroplogy (2)<p>The city of Alamos, like Belle Epoque Paris, still employs a brigade of street sweepers who deploy through the barrios each morning with brooms, dustpans on short poles, and large black trash bags. They clean up the bottles, broken glass, empty cans and gutted snack food wrappers from the night before. But mostly they are there to gather up the considerable deposits of biomass left by the city's innumerable band of street dogs.</p><p>The dog population here may or may not be domiciled - most dogs are generally free to roam at will, to skulk, bark, menace, cower, amble or in the other more tangible way to express their inner beings. Most of them by all reports are regularly and forcibly innoculated against rabies. They remain nonetheless reprobate, uncivilized, generally indifferent to people and to the hour of the day or night in which they live, move and have their being. They only incur one anothers' wrath when they wander, unwittingly or not, into an adjoining barrio and are identified by their resident fellows as interlopers.</p><p>I say they are mostly indifferent to humans, though a cyclist pedalling through the narrow streets can occasionally be surprised by the sudden noisy onrush of a heel snapper from a dusty doorway. Generally a kick will dissuade further intimacies, but they're elusive, cagey, and it can prove difficult to effect a solid human connection. </p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYAepIcgxouMK2ZeXcW2xk1d1xpoXv2Eh8Qboof1w_uem_AUTI2Knn3an-SXss8yZmMHkg8ESqwLr9Hv8c9oJPPkDDRGGejgkwMqDqKpip-yVSsaWqlCNdcO0mDkmTd7uIML9Wjj6w6-A/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="300" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpYAepIcgxouMK2ZeXcW2xk1d1xpoXv2Eh8Qboof1w_uem_AUTI2Knn3an-SXss8yZmMHkg8ESqwLr9Hv8c9oJPPkDDRGGejgkwMqDqKpip-yVSsaWqlCNdcO0mDkmTd7uIML9Wjj6w6-A/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>The dogs in the countryside are more persistent and less easily distracted from their hellish intent. There is nothing in their immediate surrounds more interesting than a pair of hairy legs at eye level; there's nothing they'd rather be doing; it's basically their territory, especially if they're up the road and dozing under the occasional sparse tree; and frankly, there's nothing else, or better, in a barren landscape to talk over later. It's all in good fun.</p><p>It may be that the bicycle is distraction enough - most of the people I know who have suffered a bite have been on foot - slow-moving target with no machinery interposed. I don't mean to test this theory by any extensive research. I'd rather think it may be correct than discover for a fact that it's based on an insufficient sample or fails to fully appreciate the reptilian responses of our putative best friends.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-41640481859806342112021-01-06T10:51:00.001-07:002021-01-06T10:51:51.114-07:00Lowells, Cabots and Gringos<p style="text-align: center;"> <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And here's to the good town of Boston, </span></i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The home of the bean and the cod, </span></i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Where the Lowells speak only with Cabots, </span></i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And the Cabots speak only with God.</span></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #001423; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are Cabots here in Alamos, reputedly scions from the Boston stock of Cabotry. They live within a large walled estate with a Mexican family in residence on the grounds as caretakers, </span><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">about a quarter-mile from Miguel's humbler bespoke villa</span><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">. I do not entertain hopes of enjoying their nearer acquaintance and should probably only stammer should chance bring us together. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #001423; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The late lamented Rip Torn owned a villa in the old <i>centro</i> - a grubby streetside wall of peeling stucco surrounding a courtyard rubbled with chunks of cement and capsized palm fronds, </span><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">still much as he loved it and left it when he departed,</span><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; color: #001423; font-size: 18px;"> though his quarters within were perfectly habitable during his sojourn here. Carroll O'Connor once lived just around the corner in a fine manse at Avenida Chihuahua and El Chalaton. Further down El Chalaton is a hotel once the home of the Mexican actress Maria Felix. All departed.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">Alamos, with a sizeable population of resident gringos, is itsel</span><span face="freight-text-pro, serif" style="background-color: white; color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">f a simulacrum of the cultural divide within the United States. It is not that the Lowells speak only with Cabots (and none, by all the available evidence, speaks with God). It is that the Republicans speak only with Republicans, so far as they can manage it, and the same is true of the Democrats, although they generally speak to Mexicans as well, and in a wider range of voices than the imperative or the diparaging. The Canadians seem above it all, having their own peculiar troubles. And the French have all stayed home.</span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span><span style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px; text-align: center;"> </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgku7BQl80WbWhvcYfBEN0s0g2ZHSe86itSGRPAzvAo81UjP4W8hm_ZT4lo8LTBkj3Y91bE0omoAsK-8iIyX4nFYCood-ubbAEnW6XDaS1Cp4Vgybn-4GFfi0KYZgtfVYEe-S70N0XT1lXb/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="553" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgku7BQl80WbWhvcYfBEN0s0g2ZHSe86itSGRPAzvAo81UjP4W8hm_ZT4lo8LTBkj3Y91bE0omoAsK-8iIyX4nFYCood-ubbAEnW6XDaS1Cp4Vgybn-4GFfi0KYZgtfVYEe-S70N0XT1lXb/" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px;"><i>Cultural Divide</i></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">The population being considerably smaller and people generally remembering one another from before the days of </span><i style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px;">le toxicite mauvais,</i><span style="color: #001423; font-size: 18px;"> everyone makes some effort to get along. No one is perfectly anonymous, as they can be in the larger gene pool to the north, and consequently there is less gratuitous hostility among the factions. But the divide has appeared and persists nonetheless. The unfolding Senate runoffs in Georgia are being tracked here as raptly as in the U.S., the Congressional post-election charade plays here, just as across the border, as shabby street theater, but mercifully muted. All the impoverishment of human character in the national capital seems distant and not very urgent.</span></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-36064300630559919612021-01-02T14:54:00.004-07:002021-01-02T16:58:10.595-07:00Counting Birds<p>The annual Christmas Bird Count is nearly finished for the season. Miguel managed to struggle out one early morning to peer rheumy-eyed into the pre-dawn chill and pencil some candidates for posterity onto a sheaf of lists - from the social (flycatcher) to the solitary (vireo), from the greater (pewee) to the least (sandpiper), from the rough-winged (swallow) to the silky (flycatcher), plain (startthroat) to elegant (trogon), gray-ish (saltator) to mottled (owl). I could go on. A grown man can sometimes feel a bit precious when reciting the names of birds - the yellow-bellied, rose-breasted, red-naped, green-tailed, violet-crowned, or even saying a word like "kiskadee." (I note that a kiskadee has no relation to a chickadee, nor will the one acknowledge or speak to the other.) "Buzzard" seems a manly word but not every bird is a buzzard, nor for all of that, is every buzzard a bird.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhImEFlA_Piwp04AkrcEhVpOsduASKlWeL2lOK3Sf9VL6MGi6Ahnv-YHyLFSaCKQF6LSPksxjXiTzJm-LCXcl-zyAfkUT7NMAF2vfvBrJsA3hAg3ykR3RMla7CXNvF-pfARiDA5yy-RBXMZ/s768/nast_twee.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="512" height="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhImEFlA_Piwp04AkrcEhVpOsduASKlWeL2lOK3Sf9VL6MGi6Ahnv-YHyLFSaCKQF6LSPksxjXiTzJm-LCXcl-zyAfkUT7NMAF2vfvBrJsA3hAg3ykR3RMla7CXNvF-pfARiDA5yy-RBXMZ/w389-h584/nast_twee.jpg" width="389"></a></div><br><p style="text-align: left;">Nonetheless, in this age of data management and cheap digital storage they require to be counted, so off I went with Madame de Montaigne and two other volunteers to tabulate numbers of species and little fuzzy heads. At a time when wiser heads are chary of close association, the count in Alamos this year was largely curtailed to a few local areas. I volunteered to do one of the less populous and least scenic areas on the verges of town, figuring that the nicer walks would already be spoken for and that the head counter would appreciate having an additional purlieu in his final tally.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I had engaged my small party to walk up an arroyo known locally as Las Cabras, fully knowing that no one else would choose to go there. The birding is only fair, the arroyo itself a matter of navigating rock and sand where a quarter-mile can seem like a mile, not quite the same as a walk on the beach. It is also the arroyo that runs just below the municipal waste ponds. It goes without saying that the municipal infrastructure in Mexico, much like its impoverished, Spanish-speaking neighbor directly to the north, is not all that its founding fathers could wish. The air is redolent, nearly visible with various essences, the trickles of water along the bottom of the arroyo do not invite trespass. The birds seem to like it just fine but what do they know, presumably having nothing like a glass of Domaine Romanee-Conte '47 with which to compare it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Four hours and about two miles later we were back at the truck. The birds were gone for the day, we needed some lunch and a rest, and we were done as well. We tallied 30 different species, a modest number but not bad for the arroyo we had walked. The fellow who organized the Alamos count sent me a jubilant email that evening - 40 species and a 14-mile hike up the mountain behind Uvalama. "Young people," chuckled Dave, my fellow bird counter.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-3195863257892532402020-12-28T09:24:00.002-07:002020-12-28T09:31:01.750-07:00Ostensive Definition<p style="text-align: right;"> <i>Ostensive definition: defining an object by pointing to it; a dictionary comprised of actual objects.</i></p><p style="text-align: left;">A cardinal rule of good writing is that no literary production - novel, essay, aphorism, memoir, autobiography nor any such bijou - should commence with the word "I". To do so immediately circumscribes the purview of what follows and promises no further scope to the imagination. The case is nearly the same should "I" occur somewhere within the first sentence. Even to begin with "It . . ." can be treacherous. Nonetheless, my candidate for the best opening sentence of any novel whatsoever violates the latter two of these observations. It is the initial sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel <i>Earthly Powers: </i>"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."</p><p style="text-align: left;">The sentence occurred to me because my next sentence trumps it, at least in the matter of prelates: I was seated on my portico yesterday afternoon when I heard a light thump and watched a cardinal somersault over the side mirror of my pickup truck. The poor chap had spied itself in the mirror and, beset by all the devils, it had rushed the intruder only to send itself ass over tincups onto the flags of the driveway, knocked silly among a tangle of garden hose.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I climbed onto the driveway, cupped him in both hands and set him in the shade on the portico to see if he might recover. He was the very ostensive definition of "crestfallen." By contrast, the female of the pair was rifling through a tray of sunflower seeds, crest erect and as perky as any member of her species. Her counterpart sat on the flags motionless for a quarter hour, finally cocked its head to one side, and relapsed into his semicoma. Eventually something startled him enough to send him careering into the nearby garden wall, where he flopped onto the driveway, sat for another moment, then fluttered off into the bushes. I haven't seen him yet today, but he is doubtless taking the day off from his clerical obligations.</p><p style="text-align: left;">In the short length of his stay under the porch shade, however, he did demonstrate a profound philosophical problem with Bertrand Russell's claim for the fundamental nature of ostensive definitions, that <span style="background-color: white; color: #333a42; font-family: "Noto Serif", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 15px;">“all nominal definitions, if pushed back far enough, must lead ultimately to terms having only ostensive definitions.” For if we are looking to him as a defining example of "crestfallen," he did let something beside his crest fall on the flags. There is always the potential for confused messages in these matters.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-82953690881247971102020-12-22T14:05:00.001-07:002020-12-23T00:39:18.733-07:00Notes Toward a Cultural Anthropology (1)<p>In the palmy years between the Great Wars as the United States reached its ascendancy, the British frequently chaffed Americans at their national pride in the impeccable superiority of their domestic plumbing. Americans discerned no irony in this. As far as Americans were concerned, the Brits were content with their damp wc's, hesitant toilets, smelly drains. The Brits could have them. The American bathroom was a point of technological chauvinism. Elger, Standard, Royal, these were the Google, Microsoft and Apple of their day, a veritable Silicon Valley of crappers.</p><p>What made the Brits smile at this, of course was a quiet pride in their own cultural high points, not Elger so much as Elgar. Chaucer and Bede, Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne and Fielding, Dr. Johnson, Dickens and Trollope, Yeats, all these were a source of their own national pride. Still, they were not far off the mark - there are few proscriptions in the use of the American loo beyond hygiene and general consideration for others. It goes without saying that in the heyday of American advancement, nothing larger than a small dog could be flushed into eternity without incident. </p><p>The case is different in Mexico, where the state of the nation's drains can be parlous in the extreme. The passage of a Post-It note into the national acqueduct can still occasion flooding and nashing of teeth across entire municipalities. Every genial host, every luxury hotel, convenience store, gas station, church, museum, music venue, all have their list of proscriptions and procedures on the safe and inconsequential operation of their plumbing. In the United States, these protocols are only matched for their exhaustive and byzantine intricacy by similar signboards stipulating proper conduct and refusals of liability found at public parks, swimming pools and precipices.</p><p>None of this should reflect badly on Mexico as a polity. We proscribe behaviors and set protocols where ever they might hinder or help the smooth running of the national gears. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGuumGA4inc7LLSuOOldBzXTiKJxm1nTd0gxhydov4tq_n8LcrqbQmLumkSaswzqyOk_cRbMVqJosnj1ADzxtx5ajjIv5sZOy5NPU2SQSHwyJA-iaikEoLz53mxLJZoYTl2R9e5JvcJxPr/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="436" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGuumGA4inc7LLSuOOldBzXTiKJxm1nTd0gxhydov4tq_n8LcrqbQmLumkSaswzqyOk_cRbMVqJosnj1ADzxtx5ajjIv5sZOy5NPU2SQSHwyJA-iaikEoLz53mxLJZoYTl2R9e5JvcJxPr/" width="306" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-17655714281762719852019-02-13T16:03:00.003-07:002020-12-28T09:48:43.763-07:00Discretion the Better Part of ValorHow vain the opinion is of some certaine people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speake but will not, for fear they should be imployed and sette to work.<br />
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- Antoine le Grand, Cartesian philosopher and priest (ca. 1675; cited by David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs")<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>"A simple 'oooh ooooh ooooh' would have been enough, </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>but you had to open your big mouth!"</i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-77902693024805631102019-01-28T11:42:00.000-07:002019-01-29T09:49:30.232-07:00The Samurai Next DoorOccasionally I volunteer my meager skills as a bicycle mechanic to the local bike clinic, run by Brian, who takes donated bicycles, renders them serviceable and passes them along to homeless indigents. The repair shop shares a large driveway with a halfway house where residents can undergo their probation and presumed transition into an enlarged realm of commerce and normalcy. One can easily imagine that the shop is frequently the theater of some raffish characters and lively conversation, much of it encouraged by Brian who readily engages them, transients and habitues alike.<br />
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On a recent weekend, as I was busily truing a wheel, the door opened and in walked a short, grizzled stocking-capped fellow in his 50s, I'd guess, a generous walrus mustache beneath a broad nose, an outmoded bit of eyeware above it. Brian recognized him from some past visit and promptly asked after his general well being. The following transcription is a true and reasonably accurate version of the ensuing conversation:<br />
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Brian: How are you? Haven't seen you in a while.<br />
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Protagonist: I just got out of jail.<br />
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B: Oh - what happened? Why were you in jail?<br />
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P: Well, back in December I moved into an apartment. On December 21st, pretty early in the morning there was a loud banging on my door. So I went and opened it but there wasn't anybody there. Then about 20 minutes later it happened again. Nobody there. I'm looking around and my neighbor walks over and asks if somebody was just banging on my door. I says yeah, somebody did it twice. I think it's the guy on the other side of you, he says. So I go back inside. Third time, bang bang bang - nobody. So I walk over to the guy on the other side and I knock on the door - hey, was you just banging on my door?<br />
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B: So what'd he say?<br />
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P: He says, yeah, turn yer goddam music down.<br />
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B: Oh, were you playing music?<br />
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P: Yeah, I was listening to some CDs.<br />
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B: Oh.<br />
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P: So I go back and shut my door, and he comes back over and bangs on it again!<br />
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B: Uh oh.<br />
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P: Yeah. So I get out my samurai sword and I go back over and he comes to the door, and I say, Do you know what this is? So he just says, Aw, put that effin thing away, you ain't gonna use it.<br />
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B: So what'd you do?<br />
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P: Well, I kinda poked it at him.<br />
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B: You didn't stab him did you?<br />
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P: Nah, I just kinda tapped him on the chest with it.<br />
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B: You didn't draw any blood.<br />
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P: Nah. I don't think so. Anyway, he called the cops.<br />
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B: So what happened?<br />
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P: I got a month in jail. They charged me with assault and menacing with a deadly weapon. And brandishing a deadly weapon. So now I owe three thousand five hundred in fines plus another fifty dollars for my probation.<br />
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<i>"Gotta have my tunes."</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-64024521413450737472017-04-26T11:08:00.000-06:002017-04-27T09:59:45.729-06:00Unfit for Gentlemen<i><b>Politics:</b> "[A] vaguely degrading . . .occupation. . . . plainly a career wide open to all-but-unmentionable talents and an occupation blatantly unfit for gentlemen - let alone gentlewomen."</i><br />
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- John Dunn, <i>The Cunning of Unreason </i>(2000)<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Politicians (eating hot dogs)</span></i></div>
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My neighbor Zeno, an agnostic in most things except in his zealous prosecution of <a href="http://shootingafly.blogspot.com/2011/12/im-with-kim-jong-il.html" target="_blank">Christmas</a>, might have spoken those very words in any of our desultory, Armagnac-fuelled afternoon confreries. A gentleman, he recently opined, is secure in his own opinions; these he has well considered. Further, he feels no need either to broadcast them nor to have them accepted by anyone less informed than he. <i>En court, son assurance c'est complet.</i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">My neighbor Zeno</span></i></div>
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But what about Bill Clinton, I proposed. Or Barack Obama, for all of that. Surely Obama's opinions are by now those of an expert, worth the $400,000 he was paid to address those Wall Street bankers. He is finally being listened to by people who were once his sworn enemies.<br />
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Zeno lifted his <i>balon</i> of Armagnac and studied it in the warm April sun streaming across the north lawn of the chateau and into the belvedere. He sipped it and set it down deliberately on the wicker tabouret at his knee. As perhaps I should have said, he rejoined, a gentleman is secure. A gentleman could never receive what is dubiously called an 'honorarium' for his considered opinion.<br />
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So, I asked, former presidents and official dignitaries - the Clintons, Obama, the various Rices and Powells and Bushes - all offer their expertise and you suppose that they aren't gentlemen - or ladies - because they accept a fee?<br />
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Ah, he said, I spy a drop remaining in that flask at your elbow.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-73327770623753518982017-04-21T14:05:00.002-06:002017-04-22T08:52:11.560-06:00Fox and Hedgehog<div style="text-align: left;">
<i style="background-color: white;">The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.</i><span style="background-color: white;"></span></div>
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-- Archilochus, 700 BC.</div>
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<span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is an old line occasionally whispered around the ivied halls of academia in its rare moments of honest self-evaluation: that academic politics are such a nasty business because so little is actually at stake. It is a (rare enough) recognition that, though the pursuit of accuracy and the love of knowledge are worthy and significant pursuits, the institutional maneuverings incident to any such foregathering of competitive souls inevitably trivialize an otherwise honorable enterprise.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Intellectuals have always furnished easy marks for humorists </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">since Aristophanes skewered Socrates. And when academics arrived on the </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">landscape, </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">like hedgehogs who, being close to the ground, must ignore the big array and </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">endlessly </span><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">rootle the one thing at the end of their noses, then </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Rabelais and Cervantes, Sterne and Swift were swift to follow with the guffaws. It's been the way of the world ever since, the sages and brahmins tweezing out the dwindling crumbs and gnats of wisdom to the evident merriment of the imps and the Great Unwashed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So it seems almost foreordained that the posh little liberal arts school down the street should offer up a symposium on "The Music and Lyrics of Billy Joel." Billy Joel, whose name conjures the kind of ham handed piano banging and the trite imagery (an elderly barroom piano player!?) that shouts 'Tin Pan Alley!"</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From a <i>Slate </i>profile ("The Worst Pop Singer Ever"): "No career re-evaluations please! . . . . He <i>was</i> terrible, he <i>is</i> terrible, he always <i>will </i>be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. . . . Billy Joel's music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: 'Mock-Rock.'"</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/dept/music/newsevents/billyjoel/CC-MUS-BillyJoelConf-WebBanner-2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”: The Music and Lyrics of Billy Joel" border="0" height="231" src="https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/dept/music/newsevents/billyjoel/CC-MUS-BillyJoelConf-WebBanner-2016.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-style: italic; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now playing in a grocery store near you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The music department's overheated blurb describes the event as "a scholarly symposium" on "the consummate singer-songwriter whose compositions translate larger cultural concerns into accessible and compelling musical narratives . . . . aim[ing] to share academically oriented insights . . . in an accessible and approachable manner."</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All this over the course of 30 separate "academic" presentations and a live phone conference with Himself. I am not certain what all this means; would "Mammy's little baby wants shortnin' bread" translate cultural concerns into a compelling musical narrative? How about that anthem for the era of legalized weed, "Love Potion Number Nine," in which the protagonist "didn't know if it was day or night"?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then there's the honors history course on the life and times of Dolly Parton, offered without apparent irony by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "I think there are some stereotypes associated with the area, especially in rural Appalachia," admits the student body president without apparent irony.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">It's probably
worth noting that Dolly is now 71 years old and so has become a legitimate
object of merely academic interest. I suppose this brand of painless curiosity
and effortless intellectual endeavor does no one any harm, but it does seem
like the sort of material one might find covered in an Elderhostel class. It's
a way to seem to get an education but still allow the moral imagination to
remain untouched.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #121212; font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif";">While we're on
the subject of trivial pursuits, there will always be the unfolding historical
panorama of the U.S. presidency, which continues to invite close study.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #121212; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>In the weeds, Mar-a-Lago</i></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-43626915366523012192016-08-09T10:11:00.000-06:002017-04-17T14:21:59.619-06:00Flights of Fancy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Only the insane take themselves quite seriously." </span></span></i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">- Max Beerbohm</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-80743385388246141162015-05-29T15:48:00.000-06:002015-06-03T11:30:20.386-06:00Trending Upward<i>"Arrogance is lording over a planet where a majority of all species that
have ever lived are now extinct, without giving it a second thought . . . . Evolution does not always mean advancement."</i><br />
- Timothy Egan, "The Arrogance of Jeb Bush," NYTimes, May 29, 2015<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>All the prejudices I here undertake to dispose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God."</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> - Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. 1 (Appendix)</span><br />
<br />
Tim Egan's New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opinion/the-arrogance-of-jeb-bush.html?_r=0">column</a> glosses a recent, breathtaking bit of Jeb Bush pre-campaign pandering in anticipation of the Koch Brothers' privately funded Republican primary: “And for the people to say the science is decided on, this is just
really arrogant, to be honest with you,” he said with affecting sincerity. “It’s this
intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it
even.”<br />
<br />
Naturally Jeb's talking about climate science, or climate "science," as he might prefer it. "The people" who say these things, of course, are the very sort who belong to the Royal Society and the National Academy of Science, who issue "<a href="http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-change-full.pdf">reports</a>" which refer to climate change as "one of the defining issues of our time." Always these same people - the ones with the arrogance to pretend to know anything about the very topic they are trained to investigate, who have the unbounded gall to marshall orderly data in support of their contentions, who have the temerity to present a nearly unanimous front, across the global community of climatologists, in their public pronouncements. <br />
<br />
Jeb Bush is supposed to be less appallingly stupid than his older brother, who admitted while he was president that greenhouse gas, to which climate change is tied, "is due in large part to human activity." So to give Jeb the benefit of the doubt, he's probably not stupid, he's only pandering for that imperceptible nod from the Koch Brothers without which no Republican can any longer hope to bear the scepter and wear the royal accoutrements.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"He'll say what I say"</span></i></div>
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Whatever brief enlightenment may have invested our species in the 16th century, when Spinoza wrote, has been suborned, squandered, recklessly spent, traded for a specious idea of our own 21st-century evolution. We've unwisely combined the 13th-century superstition (lifted from Aquinas who lifted it from Aristotle) of a providentially guided universe in which humanity is the acme, perfection and sole purpose, with the (otherwise salutary) idea of evolution. </div>
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The hybrid notion, of a providentially-guided evolution, is a travesty - the idea that humans evolve according to some divine plan which tends towards the survival, eventual perfection and assured persistence of (at least the more advanced examples of) the species. (Technology abetted by capitalism make, on this view, but a pair of God's handmaidens.) Things don't, of course, work like that in Darwin's world, a nonfictional realm in which the inapt and nonadaptable can not persist, a world directed towards no end, a realm in which survival is merely one outcome of natural process and not a goal towards which things necessarily tend according to some benign inevitability. </div>
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To suppose otherwise, to ignore the fate of the coelocanth and the great sloth, is true arrogance; it is the arrogance that supposes humans alone are exempted from the natural mechanisms that drive the habitable planet. We will likely become the sole species whose extinction was due to its own stupidity.<br />
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Jeb's earnest wish to be able to have this "conversation" is another specious bit of Republican open-mindedness. No, such a conversation is no longer edifying, useful or instructive. Here's NASA's version, if you really want to have that conversation, a version which accommodates the Fox Newsers' claim (accurate so far as it goes) that the mean global temperature has dropped in the past decade :</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-67426035793520606492015-05-23T23:42:00.000-06:002015-05-30T06:43:22.398-06:00Memento MoriListening to certain favorite pieces of music can call up strange and sudden intimations of mortality wrapped in a perfectly consonant sense of transcendence - all of which is, admittedly, temporary if a bit heady. One such piece is Jehan Alain's organ piece, the "Litanies," which comes out of the quiet with suddden bravura, high tones bordering on atonalities that lend a kind of awful immortality to its young composer, a sense that the listener may also share in such good fortune.<br />
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The Litanies is probably the most remarkable of Alain's not so many other organ compositions, mainly written in the 1930s when he was a young organist at the church of Saint-Nicholas de Maisons Lafitte in Paris. Alain was a regular prize winner at the Conservatoire de Paris, a composer of ethereal and dissonant "modernist" compositions - tight, structured, mostly meditative rather than exuberant - whose tonal qualities (not entirely "harmonies") are perfectly matched to the high, reedy tones of a French organ, an instrument which exchanges the grandeur of a German cathedral organ for refinement, a high madness and finesse which suggests immortality founded in spirit and irony rather than in forcefulness and overbearing strength. The Litanies seems to me the swelling exception to this, the intimation of death and transcendence.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Jehan Alain (1938)</span></i></div>
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" . . Alain was a skilled motorcyclist and
became a dispatch rider in the . . .French Army," Wikipedia records. "On 20 June 1940, he was assigned to reconnoitre German
advance . . . and encountered a group of German soldiers at Le Petit-Puy. Coming
around a curve, and hearing the approaching tread of the Germans, he
abandoned his motorcycle and engaged the enemy troops with his carbine,
killing 16 of them before being killed himself. He was posthumously
awarded the Croix de Guerre . . . and was buried, by the Germans, with full military honours." He was all of 29 years old, and a musician at that. It is not implausible that the mechanical sound of such a near and sudden approach of the rebarbative was sufficient to make him die for music.</div>
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The other bits of music that have something of the same effect - a kind of transcending of thought, an immediate sense of something supra-human which religion never seems quite able to illumine in an ironic soul - are Beethoven's symphonies, especially the Third, the "Eroica," (with its grand and awful '<i>marche funebre)</i>; the Seventh (with its even more g. and a. funeral march); and of course the choral Ninth which, with its depth, power and optimism, subverts our post-20th century judgment that (given what we've done to one another in the interim) such a sanguine view of humanity must have been naive.<br />
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The 'Eroica' was written as a tribute to Napoleon, a tribute which was rescinded when, in 1804 Napoleon declared himself "Emporer of the French," thereby becoming, according to the composer, "no more than a common mortal." As are we all. But perhaps, Beethoven seems to whisper and shout, mortals all, we can do better than where the last two centuries incline us.<br />
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After 11 Israeli athletes, in Munich for the 1972 Olympics, had been held hostage and then assassinated by Arab terrorists in the wake of Israel's six-day military assault on Arab territories, the Munich Philharmonic under Rudolph Kempe performed a memorial performance of the "Eroica" - less than three decades after the liberation of Hitler's concentration camps, a memorial to Jews performed freely and in great deference by Hitler's hometown orchestra. If nothing can ever be said, say it with Beethoven.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Hostage takers, Munich 1972</span></i></div>
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And then there is Max Bruch's violin concerto #1, Romanticism in its dark and driving quintessence, the violin wafting in just after the first dark bars of ominous strings, the solo persisting in fleeting and answering strains. A swallow chasing a wasp above a deep and uncompassed sea, the picture of any soul, today and tomorrow. <br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A lost happy soul</span></i></div>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehan_Alain#cite_note-Slonimsky2002-2"></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-85451591357596238922015-05-19T17:32:00.003-06:002015-05-30T06:32:19.449-06:00Have a Twinkie (You'll Feel Better)<i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">“In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last
resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but
inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.” — Ambrose
Bierce, </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Devil’s Dictionary</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And
with all due respect to Mr. Bierce, I submit that the good doctor may
have had it right the first time - the fraud's first refuge, in the United States at any rate, is to carp about the overreach and persecuting zeal of the government (generally pronounced 'gummint'). Either way, Bierce's gloss pays due deference
to the fact that patriotism, like talk and Chinese binoculars, is cheap
and easily come by. Take the Bible and the Constitution, wrap that hellish package in a
flag, then put on yer cowboy hat and you've got the unabashed squinty-eyed humbuggery of
Cliven Bundy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There is a legerdemain practiced by the ultra-right in which some </span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">imaginary "exceptional</span> nation" is cognitively divorced from its government, </span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">and
the resulting gap permits any number of transgressions against the
latter (real) institution in order to preserve the delusion of the
(fictitious) former. By all the available evidence it appears that a deep hatred of government is a <i>sine qua non</i> for true love of country. I can't help but wonder how, say, Sennacherib of Assyria would have felt about such a refined sense of grievance among his own subjects.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Here, hold this - it's your head."</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Here's
how it works: patriotism in the name of some delusional great nation is
the refuge of scoundrels, fraudsters, hypocrites, PayPal scammers,and other assorted felons either currently members of Congress or lobbying said members. But the
federal government - the actual institution, not the fraught imaginings of
such cranks - is charged with protecting the citizenry against those same fraudsters and felons. Their hatred of "government" is only
natural, since it is the very institution charged with insuring that
they can't engage in the sorts of things they intend to engage in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">One unsavory case in point: James T. Reynolds, Sr., Tennessean, patriot, ex-husband of another felon and father of James, Jr., a third felon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The New York Times and any number of other media outlets report today that four nonprofit cancer charities founded by Reynolds and operated by his extended family and associates, have been named in a fraud complaint (not a lawsuit, unfortunately) brought by the Federal Trade Commission in concert with attorneys general for the fifty states and District of Columbia. The Reynolds' operations are estimated to have netted them $187 million dollars in the brief span of four years from 2008 to 2012. You can read the details anywhere on the web, but what particularly caught my eye was this feeble attempt at exculpation by Reynolds Junior, CEO of the Arizona-based Breast Cancer Society.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The society settled before the complaint was filed, then promptly closed its doors. A statement on the society's website reads in part that "Charities - including some of the world's best-known and reputable organizations - are increasingly facing the scrutiny of government regulators. Unfortunately, as our operations expanded - all with the goal of serving more patients - the threat of litigation from our government increased as well."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">"Our government" - nice touch that, offering us all - plain folk and wealthy frauds alike - common cause against the very institution charged with regulating practices like skimming 97 percent of every charitable dollar for personal use - cars, luxury cruises, college tuition and dating services - the remainder going to purchase "medical services" such as boxes of paper plates, plasticware and napkins, or childrens' toys (sent to an adult cancer patient), even boxes of Hostess Twinkies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Feeling better?"</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm guessing that, "threat of litigation" aside, there is no more loyal patriot to be found than Reynolds Minor. He just hates the institution that threatens his livelihood with lawsuits, calls him out for what he is, and won't allow him his cut of the charitable pie any longer. Anyone could eat American Pie if the government would just step aside and let us patriots get about our business. And, though capitalism may be the economic system handed down to our Founders through providential foresight in grace abounding, the Reynoldses are not capitalists. Still, by their considerable enterprise, they have turned even cancer into a free market commodity, and taught us all how charity might trump capitalism as the shorter route to prosperity. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The money isn't there, in case you were hoping for a refund. But you can be certain the tax man didn't get any either.</span></span><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></i></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-87362915445139072062015-05-18T21:02:00.000-06:002015-05-19T19:32:47.878-06:00Fever DreamsIt's no longer news that the State of Texas, that cynosure of every secessionist's fever dreams, is <a href="http://now.snopes.com/2015/04/28/texas-governor-jade-helm/">monitoring</a> some local Department of Defense training operation for sinister and subversive intent. Why the federal government would want to own Texas is anyone's guess except that it already does, so what's the big deal? In the world of crazytown news, I've come to think of Texas as the new Floriduh (another state which keeps a pretty <a href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/strange/floriduh-blog/">stiff pace</a>).<br />
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I know that I have foresworn my usual diet of tinfoil-hat political mockery, and that this particular bit of regional exceptionalism is old news by now. But as I think I've <a href="http://shootingafly.blogspot.com/2014/10/summer-in-oklahoma-no-mans-land.html">mentioned</a>, I am residing literally within spitting distance of the state (not that I would ever do that), and everything at the house here has been quiet since the rains started and they shut off the irrigation sprinkler motor across the road (in Texas). Which brings me to my point.<br />
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While these sorts of febrile federal-takeover maunderings are the stuff of internet geniuses, adolescent masturbators, and those intelligent enough to see that it's already over, Texas guvunner Greg Abbott has endorsed this mawkish foolishness by deploying the state's national guard to monitor the comings and goings of our boys and girls in government-issue camouflage, now wandering across the abandoned reaches of West Texas, a strange place unto itself but still nominally within the national boundaries. (And frankly a better place for our military personnel than others have imagineered them into.)<br />
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If you look deeply into Gregg Abbott's eyes, as you can do in this photograph of him waving his hands like an ESPN hockey commentator . . .<br />
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. . . you can probably detect nothing more sinister than a genetic vacancy, as you would expect to see in the blank gaze of any elected official - though not quite barking mad, like the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who wears a cross on his sleeve - lapel - as a sort of shamanistic assurance (as in 'everything's working out fine,' not as in 'oh shit, we're all nailed') . . .<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Imagine that this here snowball is the earth's left testicle."</span></i></div>
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I have no further wish to asperse Texans in particular, having come to know and admire many fine specimens of the soil, and having already had my fun in these pages during the reign of Guvunner Rick Perry, who also weighed in on the Jade Helm speculation to allay the fears of his fellow citizens by differentiating between a noble American military tradition on the one hand, and an upstart, sharia-inspired federal presence on the other. That, little as it may be, should keep the lid on in <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/waco-guard-biker-gang-shootout-leaves-9-dead-072100471.html">Waco</a>. (Which is really a different thing from Ferguson and Baltimore, see, because it was white dudes, and they are not a bunch of savages who <a href="http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/04/02/keene-nh-rejects-pumpkin-festival-after-violence/">riot</a>.)</div>
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But in a gentler time when people went crazy, we kept special places for them and transported them there in the padded van . . .<br />
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We offered expert and specalized treatment by a rigorously trained medical profession . .<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Hey, I t'ink we gonna hafta take offa da head."</span></i></div>
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These days we just lock them up (when they happen to look like this) for as long as we can manage to make them stay . . . </div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Angola </span></i><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">(LA)</span></i> State Penitentiary lifer Chris Gage</span></i></div>
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When they look like this - a vacancy of forceful, manly, whiteness - we elect them to the statehouse, even when they exploit their elected office by enacting the sort of <a href="https://www.gregabbott.com/petition-poll/open-carry-sign-petition/">lethal mayhem </a>calculated to keep them in it for as long as they can manage to stay. <br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Sic transit gloria patriae</span></i></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-80481763168597168062015-02-28T18:03:00.001-07:002015-05-18T21:59:23.435-06:002.28 (Saturday) Refulgence of St. Norbert<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">According to the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31522107">BBC News</a>, a Canadian man was rescued from a snow storm after being mistaken </span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> for a seal</span>
by another Canadian man. As the BBC News is not a notable source of
merry japes, the story bears further consideration - particularly so
in a zealous age in which our animal natures are cause for so much unseemly embarrasssment and</span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> hotly denied by right-thinking evangelicals on all
sides of the monotheistic divide. (I also note in passing that, </span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> to my scant knowledge of hagiography, </span>there is no patron saint of seals, so I have had to invent both St. Norbert and his liturgical day for this occasion.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><i>St. Norbert (So? He's Canadian.)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">At the start let me assure everyone that this is not an aspersion on the perspicuity of the Canadian - one mistaking another for a seal. It seems that this chappie was making his way across the snowy Nova Scotian landscape, much in the way a seal might do, wending his way to a hospital appointment, when his car failed him. He exited his car and began to walk to a nearby house, but his arthritic knees quavered. Seating himself in a snowbank to rest, he found himself unable to right himself again after the fashion of humankind. So, fearing hypothermia or some other hazard constitutionally unknown to <i>pinnipediae,</i> he began to crawl along a darkened and snow-covered road toward the nearest lights in the landscape when he was discovered. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Well, he was obviously here."</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His savior cannot in the strictest sense be called a samaritan, since he thought it was a seal in distress - orthodoxy requires that samaritans come to the aid of their fellow humans alone, any other creature in distress being fair game, so to speak, for the table. So the second man's act of kindness was perhaps doubly creditable in that he went willingly to rescue what he supposed to be a dumb creature and no christian at all. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Michel_de_Montaigne.jpg">alter ego</a> </span></span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">was forever exercised by the similarities, even the superiorities of animals over humans (</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"there is no animal in the world as treacherous as man," he thought). He paid attention to his cat and his dog and rarely resisted their attempts to distract him. A fox, he remarks, stopping to listen before crossing a frozen brook, is making the same causal inference, using the same faculty, that supposedly marks humans as superior rational beings. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story of the man walking like a seal is just another case in point, another argument, <i>a fortiori,</i> for the very point I am making - though seals do a seal walk so much better than we do, we can clearly emulate them well enough to fool the average person of good intention. We are (literally, in this case) on all fours with the animal kingdom. And a man out on a wintry night stopping to help a distressed seal is a purely human moment, a recognition of our common animality and an implicit wish to coexist peaceably. The subsequent discovery that it was a person and not a seal adds nothing to the kindness.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"On behalf of all seals, I'd like to thank him for his interest," the rescued seal quipped. And well spoken, too - what better spokesperson for the world's pinnipeds than the man taken for a seal? </span></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-89889624274303050482014-11-13T13:34:00.001-07:002019-02-20T16:32:52.866-07:0011.13 Thursday (Lamentation of St. Genesius)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Saint G., patron of comedians</span></i></div>
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Last week, shortly after deploying another 1,500 American troops back into Iraq, Barack Obama received a letter, purporting to come from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which began thusly:<br />
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<i>It was late in the evening when we first learned
of your decision Friday to deploy an additional 1,500 troops to Iraq. Sorry, we
were catching up on the latest episode of “Lilyhammer.” But, seriously, is
that a tradition in the States? Releasing such news late on a Friday with the
fatuous hope people would forget by Monday? But on second thought, after
perusing the American media, it’s possible such schemes may be effective. There
appears to be more concern over one Ebola patient— in a country of 316 million
people— than the news that your administration is invading Iraq all over
again.</i></div>
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The committee concluded by castigating itself as a group of "delusional dupes" for giving Nobel Peace Prizes to both Obama (2009) and to Henry Kissinger (1973), a former Secretary of State with a <a href="http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/CaseAgainst1_Hitchens.html">formidable record</a> of lethal malevolence and bloody meddling around the globe. "That is all," the committee added. "Now, back to 'Lilyhammer.'" <br />
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I mention this, not because of any special animus I may have against the President (Kissinger is another matter entirely), but because it was reported as fact on several <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/10/letter-norwegian-nobel-committee-barack-obama/">creditable websites</a> though denied as fact on Snopes.com. Yet whether fact or parody, either way it makes perfect sense. It clearly reads as parody, but any functioning adult can see the justice in it. What's more, it typifies the dilemma of any ironic soul who looks askance, obliquely and skeptically at the world, hoping to raise a laugh - namely, the dilemma that nothing seems funny any longer; that what might be the stuff of parody is actually the truth, or, if it is parody, that it seems utterly convincing. I have to admire the people at <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/pandering-nobel-peace-prize-committee-honors-globa,37157/">The Onion</a> these days, obliged as they are to construct a parodic realm arguably funnier than the quotidian.<br />
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I mean seriously - this is an age in which the Hon. <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/2014/11/sen-james-inhofe-line-senate-environment">James Inhofe</a>, senator from Oklahoma, whose grasp of science is roughly that of a twelve-year-old home schooler and who believes climate change is a conspiracy of MoveOn.org, George Soros and Michael Moore, is the next chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It isn't the Onion any longer, but the Koch Brothers, who write the funniest scripts. The White House has just announced an "historic agreement" with China on emissions reductions in which the U. S. reduces its greenhouse gas output to one-quarter of its 2005 level, while China is required to do virtually nothing. This is touted as a partial solution to "an urgent global challenge." <br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Greenhouse gas: Peter Griffin with Michael Moore</span></i></div>
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In Texas, a schizophrenic named Scott Panetti who, while acting as his own attorney at his trial donned a <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/supreme-court-texas-execution-mentally-ill-scott-panetti">purple bandana and a cowboy costume</a> and called witnesses such as John F. Kennedy, the Pope, and Jesus Christ, is scheduled for execution.<br />
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Theatrical producers in Las Vegas are planning to stage a musical, "The Duck Commander Family Musical," based on the Duck Dynasty characters, presumably avoiding the potentially treacherous shoal of the family's historic attitudes towards your stereotypical theatrical producer (remember Roger Debris in Mel Brooks's "The Producers": 'Quick darling, back in the closet!'), many of whom are aghast at the idea of their professional colleagues having any hand in this, if I may use that expression. It may be, as the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/theater/duck-dynasty-musical-las-vegas.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=0">New York Times</a> puts it, "too bayou for Broadway," meaning that now when the Rat Pack visits Las Vegas, they bring their pet rats.<br />
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The problem for a wag is that the targets have become too broad and too easy to skewer. Gone are the palmy days of 2012, when Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich strewed their ample comic benisons over the comedic <i>terra cognita</i>. Now suddenly, it's all become real. When humor is indistinguishable from fact, when it's all too funny, then nothing's very funny. We are all gone through the looking glass.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">St. Donald, patron of comedians</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">(by DonkeyHotey)</span></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-36865289476015179712014-10-26T14:33:00.002-06:002014-10-26T17:08:54.638-06:00Summer in Oklahoma: No Man's LandI have come aground again in one of the Midwest's more curious zipcodes, Texas County, Oklahoma, midway between Goodwell and Texhoma in the panhandle, a mere tenth of a mile from the former Confederate state of Texas where the heady smell of hog barns braces the air. Goodwell is home to both Oklahoma Panhandle State University and the No Man's Land Museum, the latter of which I have seen no reason to visit. Less than a mile up the road from where I'm camped lives a fellow who's in the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame for bareback bronc riding.<br />
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What the landscape lacks by way of trees it compensates for in regularly spaced pods of eight or ten turbines cranking electricity into Texas's open-competition energy market - cowboy wind farms selling to the highest bidder. I can see them in clumps off to the the east and south from the farmyard where I'm camped.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Sunrise on the Oklahoma-Texas line</i></span></div>
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Strictly speaking it isn't summer here any longer, but the daily temperatures are in the upper 80s and low 90s, so it feels like summer could last all through December, even though I know what's coming. To get groceries, I have to drive 16 miles to Guymon. The trip takes me through Goodwell, six miles away, where the local police camp out in eight-hour shifts in the town's picnic area along US 54, which runs on into Liberal, Kansas. As the sole commercial endeavor in Goodwell, so far as I can make out, is a solitary convenience store/gas station which sells no donuts or similar baked goods, I surmise that Goodwell is a hardship posting for the freshly minted graduates of institutes of criminal justice. There is perverse pleasure in the thought that (considering the immobility of a parked car, the bleak landscape out the windshield, the complete absence of life about the place) working for the <i>gendarmerie</i> in Goodwell must be one of the most boring occupations on the planet. The photo files of Goodwell provided by Google's mapping service show this very park complete with cop cars.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Park with cops, Goodwell, OK, from Google Maps</i></span></div>
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I've made myself as self-sufficient as I can out here in my private RV park behind the wind project's field office. I've done the wind farm one better, as you can see, by installing a solar emplacement on a modest scale to charge my auxiliary batteries and heat my solar-powered shower facility.</div>
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There's a farmhouse along the road with a kitchen, bathrooms and several bedrooms, but until the weather turns I prefer the fresh air, the coyotes and owls at night, and sunrise through the plastic sidecurtains. The sandhill cranes are still flying over on their way to the Gulf of Mexico and the Bosque del Apache for the winter. Right now there's a scaled quail rasping away atop a fencepost along the driveway. I reckon the winter will drive me at last into the farmhouse, but for now, Oklahoma is, as the state's license plate used to say, OK.</div>
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I figure I won't venture into the barn. I know it's full of pigeons in the rafters, and I'm betting (this being the Rattlesnake Belt) that it's full of snakes too. But everybody has to live somewhere, and it's usually easier to mind your own business.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-27540478378750960222014-08-02T15:10:00.005-06:002014-08-04T17:27:29.444-06:008.2 Saturday (Expostulation of St. Hilarion)Last month, I received a summons for jury duty. When I espied the errant document in my daily ration of paper recyclables, I did what every true-hearted patriot does - I smote my breast, I rent my garments, I bemoaned the day of my birth, I imprecated whatever gods and sprites of the metropolis, the marketplace and the hearth had failed to forestall this nuisance, this blight upon the daily life of an unoffending, right-thinking American. <br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My household god and favorite party guest</span></i></div>
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When at last Reason regained her throne and I fully appreciated the gravity of my situation, my best thoughts turned promptly to how I might avoid the necessity of answering the summons. Then, remarking the inescapability of it, how to insure that I might seem sorely unqualified to sit in judgment on any of my peers, either by the prosecution or by the defense attorney, and so be summarily dismissed with scarcely a glance or an afterthought. My helpmeet suggested that my red spectacles might be sufficient to set me off as eccentric in some indefinable and slightly disturbing way.<br />
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I knew I needed stronger stuff. But in the event, my imagination failed me. At the appointed hour I appeared at the county court with about a thousand of my fellow citizens, prepared to take my chances in the lottery and, if need be, improvise some peculiarity which might absolve me of further meddling in the affairs of any of my fellow citizens. Should I sit in judgment on a civil case involving some paltry sums of money, I was prepared to proffer capital punishment as a universal panacaea, even though it leaves the creditor no recourse (in that single item it is perhaps inferior to debtor's prison). If it were a capital case such as murder, kidnapping, or default on a student loan, I was prepared to maintain that the death penalty is morally repugnant in any circumstance whatsoever. I thought, this country being what it is and treating its criminal element as it does, that I had my bases covered and was probably due home before lunch was cold.<br />
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In the large auditorium where prospective jurors were herded, everyone was handed a questionnaire to complete with the usual information, plus an additional personal section in which you were asked to list hobbies and interests, what TV shows you enjoy, what radio programs you listen to, what you read, and so on. I sensed the opportunties this afforded me to compromise my eligibility ("Well, right now I'm just finishing <i>Mein Kampf"</i>), but my morale was undermined badly enough that I omitted the section. Large crowds tend to undermine my morale anyway, and this one was no exception, down to the staple character of the large gathering, the guy wearing shorts<i> </i>to show his prosthetic leg to advantage. </div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"I was just gonna walk around the mall all day but I got jury duty."</span></i></div>
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I had nearly reached the lowest, dampest point in my emotional puddle when I spied him standing in the line at the counter to get his questionnaire from the jury commissioner. I knew it was a fateful moment, an avatar of true genius, the convergence of role model and disciple, a Svengali to my gormless acceptance of my unpleasant fate. He was the Kafka-esque Ubermensch, a hero with a thousand possibilities, one not to be trifled with by either prosecution or defense, in a word, the answer to all my questions, the end of my jury time. It was just a guy with a pony tail, a baseball cap on backwards, wearing a freshly minted black T-shirt, white Gothic script across the front, each letter terminating in gorgeous pink flames, that spelled "<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">hatebreed</span>."<br />
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Brilliant. My heart surged with a newfound hope. Why, I asked myself, hadn't I thought of that?<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Uh, sir, you're free to go home."</span></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-6337861058800467542014-07-22T16:54:00.000-06:002014-10-21T04:14:35.979-06:00Kayaks: Where Prostitution Meets Art<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span align="left" style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;">The
Japanese artist Rokudenashiko was arrested earlier this month under Japanese pornography laws for distributing "indecent material" after she mailed artistic patrons 3D-printer
schematics of her vagina in exchange for donations intended for the
construction of a kayak. The artist built her new kayak with a top modelled after the same schematic, an elaborate "selfie" of sorts.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><span align="left" style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;">Megumi Igarashi ("Rokudenashiko")</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span align="left" style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;">One is forced to acknowledge, I think, that the token of gratitude she sent out to her community of patrons was more than just a token. But by the same token one must confess that the item is a less-than-prepossessing prize for the undoubted satisfaction of "supporting the arts" (as they say on NPR). Put your vagina (or for that matter, its masculine counterpart) through a 3D printer and it's going to be pretty much unencrypted when it comes out the other end. Which means that it will never look all that good on, say, the wall in your office or family room.</span></span></div>
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<span align="left" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,Palatino; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The 'artistic process'</span></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span align="left" style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Nevertheless, Japan being what it is and not being, say, <a href="http://ladyoffire.com/sacredeye8.html">India</a>, the artist could spend as many as</span></span><span align="left" style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"> two years in prison and pay a fine of up to $25,000 for distributing printed materials. Given the traditional Japanese preference to formalize their vices, as in the institution of the geisha house, she may have been better advised to offer the genuine article in exchange for her kayak. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span align="left" style="color: black; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">And as marvellous as the notion of printing real things in a 3D printer may seem, I still wonder about it. I mean, what would you do with a 3D vagina? Look at it? shoot it?</span></span></span></div>
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<span align="left" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,Palatino; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiuNlDEOjusf66GjfBi0xQFHCixoO6JN0Fz3tjqxCEsfs8_q2K5j4VIFt8ox9pNoMDmLSXnjMbFfAapa03sd6iUu3aVT2esdc9fl9HeV6CyXaG_5syY0OckTfLX4pf7K6jFon8Fl1pjenT/s1600/3dgun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiuNlDEOjusf66GjfBi0xQFHCixoO6JN0Fz3tjqxCEsfs8_q2K5j4VIFt8ox9pNoMDmLSXnjMbFfAapa03sd6iUu3aVT2esdc9fl9HeV6CyXaG_5syY0OckTfLX4pf7K6jFon8Fl1pjenT/s1600/3dgun.jpg" height="270" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span align="left" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia,Palatino; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Uhhh . . . lemme think about it."</span></i></span></span></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-11057896332260661242014-04-29T14:00:00.003-06:002014-08-04T00:16:31.025-06:004.29 Tuesday (Apparition of St. Cuniculus)<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Culled from "Harper's Weekly Review" for April 29: "Children celebrating Easter in Richmond, Virginia, collected eggs stuffed with white-supremacist propaganda."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5G0ZE5BDRkGp-EIkgcUntBevq6uR6V_XMLDKPVylKRXg7rd-vd3tfq9wDcJ2jZ4aZybhleYWJtkPn_5qF8LYxf5QS0j5Fmv-uMwXev64gPd82Wfr6_TVkgoBnt91V5GZUmfesJo0GL2w4/s1600/1D274905654341-tm-easterbunny-bobbyrustad.blocks_desktop_medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5G0ZE5BDRkGp-EIkgcUntBevq6uR6V_XMLDKPVylKRXg7rd-vd3tfq9wDcJ2jZ4aZybhleYWJtkPn_5qF8LYxf5QS0j5Fmv-uMwXev64gPd82Wfr6_TVkgoBnt91V5GZUmfesJo0GL2w4/s1600/1D274905654341-tm-easterbunny-bobbyrustad.blocks_desktop_medium.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>White supremacist</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Residents in a Richmond suburb who put Easter eggs on their lawn for Easter morning noticed that their private cache had been seeded during Easter eve with alien eggs bearing messages inside like the little paper slips in fortune cookies. A bald attempt to overtake the plastic minds of children <i>ab ovo, </i></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">quite literally</span>.</i> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Richmond of palmy memory was the capitol of the late and apparently lamented Confederate States and home to all sorts of nostalgic, plantation-themed nuttiness like Sons of Confederate Veterans costume galas, battle reenactments (a.k.a., a chance to get it right) and myriad opportunities to get <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=confederate+costumes&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=34201771042&hvpos=1t2&hvexid=&hvnetw=s&hvrand=16823165091450891145&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_2xe5hzhqwm_b">togged out like a Confederate general.</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjigB7pZiNodgDYvU21b9fALqvdhyuzR0TjFcPCAmBcQw-tg58luTjiCUxoA0iNaJECRRA8QClIGi1ZEg1DKr1lZhqyuBIeQ2L_3_mu0JF-D_db_h9lUa9aClc3xXsZBUUwqe-_2w1phDgW/s1600/454px-Dandridge_McRae%252C_in_prewar_militia_uniform.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjigB7pZiNodgDYvU21b9fALqvdhyuzR0TjFcPCAmBcQw-tg58luTjiCUxoA0iNaJECRRA8QClIGi1ZEg1DKr1lZhqyuBIeQ2L_3_mu0JF-D_db_h9lUa9aClc3xXsZBUUwqe-_2w1phDgW/s1600/454px-Dandridge_McRae%252C_in_prewar_militia_uniform.jpg" height="320" width="242" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>White supremacist</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">What could the little missives inside the plastic eggs contain that might send a parent scrambling to wrest it from the sticky hands of a curious little seeker after God's own truth? </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Everyone knows that the Easter Bunny is a white rabbit. </span>But this isn't really about Easter, it's about access to young minds. Santa is also white, but we think about Santa during a season when educational opportunities are scarcer. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">A dog can leave things on a lawn, but</span> it's harder to get inside someone's house to fill the stockings with instructional materials. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJodJclK6v4ByRHyuzvKSbrW1ani9A2Zq-IIUaZbZKUOz1OlsvltkfhLympPTchkcj4JDq0l1I4WaEKpNguK1kSf3Ft-GRm9PFcR3kyTfBG4H2c7DHTDGeDMqQ32NysrpeJKhOgCSYiCQ/s1600/71hJC7P5vBL._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJodJclK6v4ByRHyuzvKSbrW1ani9A2Zq-IIUaZbZKUOz1OlsvltkfhLympPTchkcj4JDq0l1I4WaEKpNguK1kSf3Ft-GRm9PFcR3kyTfBG4H2c7DHTDGeDMqQ32NysrpeJKhOgCSYiCQ/s1600/71hJC7P5vBL._SL1500_.jpg" height="320" width="150" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-size: 14.4px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16.8px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span><i>(Ate an Easter egg) </i></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093170455415806527.post-40729045707638334932014-04-28T04:06:00.000-06:002019-02-20T16:37:42.802-07:004.28 Monday (Diminution of Agia Elisaveta)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF4XNYMENr6xKywnFOdMudY0mwk6pTxWCTR0nflrZHHCFTgw-KB7in_n6zJ0eB__bs2mydeeJ4k7eDKMewI6PQOMu-kJsBrPVyFerV3vL6A__r0_Xv5QKtryUzCPjMyAZXMiSvDmQyftL1/s1600/220px-Elizabeth_Warren--Official_113th_Congressional_Portrait--.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF4XNYMENr6xKywnFOdMudY0mwk6pTxWCTR0nflrZHHCFTgw-KB7in_n6zJ0eB__bs2mydeeJ4k7eDKMewI6PQOMu-kJsBrPVyFerV3vL6A__r0_Xv5QKtryUzCPjMyAZXMiSvDmQyftL1/s1600/220px-Elizabeth_Warren--Official_113th_Congressional_Portrait--.jpg" width="157" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4FwWL4qmDyPEeeOEFNVCSgtvdgPIwIw1pS53Gw26WremGA1OD-z-1E3cQBgjITNDawI5tCRfRJDRc1YtBc7LoKTPVQkZWjP0RIcFdpgHku47KNqayFuVK2NraqhwG8QN0qQwUc6A2Y_Gg/s1600/220px-Elizabeth_Warren--Official_113th_Congressional_Portrait--.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4FwWL4qmDyPEeeOEFNVCSgtvdgPIwIw1pS53Gw26WremGA1OD-z-1E3cQBgjITNDawI5tCRfRJDRc1YtBc7LoKTPVQkZWjP0RIcFdpgHku47KNqayFuVK2NraqhwG8QN0qQwUc6A2Y_Gg/s1600/220px-Elizabeth_Warren--Official_113th_Congressional_Portrait--.jpg" width="157" /></a></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF4XNYMENr6xKywnFOdMudY0mwk6pTxWCTR0nflrZHHCFTgw-KB7in_n6zJ0eB__bs2mydeeJ4k7eDKMewI6PQOMu-kJsBrPVyFerV3vL6A__r0_Xv5QKtryUzCPjMyAZXMiSvDmQyftL1/s1600/220px-Elizabeth_Warren--Official_113th_Congressional_Portrait--.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF4XNYMENr6xKywnFOdMudY0mwk6pTxWCTR0nflrZHHCFTgw-KB7in_n6zJ0eB__bs2mydeeJ4k7eDKMewI6PQOMu-kJsBrPVyFerV3vL6A__r0_Xv5QKtryUzCPjMyAZXMiSvDmQyftL1/s1600/220px-Elizabeth_Warren--Official_113th_Congressional_Portrait--.jpg" width="157" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"The Elizabeth Warrens"</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This past week, on one of my endless daily drives through the Rattlesnake Belt, having reached that point of blank distraction at which even the basest form of cultural diversion would suffice, I turned on the car radio. The instant jackpot was a political talk show, the topic was banking regulation, the sympathies of guest and host alike were faith-based conservative free marketeering. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The guest was a spent intellectual force from American Heritage Action who began reasonably enough by pointing out a shared perception that the "banking industry" has perpetrated high crimes and misdemeanors with no consequences to itself. But if anyone were hoping for a bit of home truth about rigorous new regulation or strict oversight of an institution gone haywire, the speaker quickly volunteered that he did not agree with "the Elizabeth Warrens." A palpable relief emanated over the broadband (which Miguel still thinks of as "the airwaves.")</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Now I confess I was ignorant of any other Elizabeth Warren in political life or in the public notice, not to mention several of them. Who were these other Elizabeth Warrens, I wondered, that he had even heard of them, could know their views on regulation, could know of their universal agreement on the question? And why would these women, all sharing a name, necessarily agree in questions of banking policy? Isn't it at least conceivable that, of the set of all women named "Elizabeth Warren," at least one might have landed on the side of the free market angels?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Oh, Miguel (I chided myself), always too literal minded. I had at last spotted the rhetorical <i>coup de grace, </i>the trick of diminishing a policy or argument by reducing it to the name of its pro</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ponent (Marxism, Keynesianism), then reducing the proponent </span>to a type; the implication is that there is not a single individual named EW, no such person exists in her own right, no one individual capable of advanced and clear thinking. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are only "the Elizabeth Warrens," which is to imply a set of clones or nested Russian dolls or kittens, all singing the same monotonous mechanical tune without a single functioning consciousness. An ideology requiring no counterarguments.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">In a more positive vein, one might speak of "the Ronald Reagans" as a single functioning consciousness.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid3-yhXAM6XnTHV9k7GaQQRNtF7etIjngUZQ7jMxQGYF38I_cVLK5Useja9dWDiQrXZX1oCektEP9_MfshHS_-hZiYSgCpjg6VNvmiHJtg-sB2y11n0DzVq1XIDyHCTXf4PE63ObSQm69V/s1600/Nancy_Reagan,_Ray_Charles,_Ronald_Reagan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid3-yhXAM6XnTHV9k7GaQQRNtF7etIjngUZQ7jMxQGYF38I_cVLK5Useja9dWDiQrXZX1oCektEP9_MfshHS_-hZiYSgCpjg6VNvmiHJtg-sB2y11n0DzVq1XIDyHCTXf4PE63ObSQm69V/s1600/Nancy_Reagan,_Ray_Charles,_Ronald_Reagan.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"The Ronald Reagans"</span></i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0