Area Tap Water Has Traces of Medicines
Tests Find 6 Drugs, Caffeine in D.C., Va.
You just can’t add anything to that.
Interesting take on international relations beginning with WWII, in this animated short. Seriously warped and very creative, although you might develope the munchies after watching.
More western ranching and cattle-trailing trivia, for your weekend delectation. (part one is here )
The classical free-range cattle-ranching and long-trail-drive west actually only lasted for about twenty years, from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s when bad weather and a glutted market spelled the end of those ways. The cattle-towns depicted in western movies actually were limited to a very small time and space: Kansas, the terminus for those long drives from Texas, as the railroads crawled west. Abilene was the first of them, and Dodge City the last; in between there were others like Hayes, Ellsworth, Newton and Caldwell – some of whom only thrived for a single gaudy, raucous season as a cow-town.
Most of them were not nearly as lawless as portrayed in contemporary news accounts. Many of the towns were in economic competition with each other, and since each had a fairly freewheeling press and enthusiastic (not to say cut-throat) economic backers… any sort of ruckus in one town was quickly magnified by detractors in another. Two cowboys indulging in a bit of (relatively) harmless gun-play outside a saloon in Newton could be magnified into small war, riot and murder by a rival towns’ newspaper.
The first thing that a typical cowboy wanted, after three or four months in the saddle, alone with the cows and his fellow cowboys was not what you think. They wanted a bath and new clothes, first. Then what you think. Cowtowns offered very nice bathing facilities. Along with the other amenities which were what you think – but the bathhouse was invariably the first to be patronized enthusiastically by the newly arrived.
One very enterprising lady of the evening in Dodge City later went by the name of Squirrel-Tooth Alice. The name came from a gap in her teeth and a penchant for keeping a pet prairie-dog, on a little leash and collar. Her real name was Mary Elizabeth Haley. She married a part-time cowboy and full-time gambler and all around bad hat named Billy Thompson. Against most expectations, she and Billy prospered. She died of almost respectable old age, in a Los Angeles nursing home. In 1953. She had also, as a child of nine or ten, been a captive of the Comanche, until ransomed by her family.
Most murderous gunplay in cow-towns usually involved members of the professional gambling fraternity or local law enforcement professionals. On occasion, this meant the same body of personnel. These were small towns, any other time than the cattle-trailing season. People doubled up when it came to jobs.
The Cherokee tribe assessed a toll of 10 cents per head on cattle herds crossing their lands on the Shawnee Trail, which ran through eastern tracts of present-day Oklahoma, to various points in Missouri – Kansas City, Sedalia and St. Louis. A well-organized patrol called the “Cherokee Light Horse” enforced it; not for nothing were the Cherokee known as one of the Five Civilized Tribes.
One of the largest western cattle-ranch holdings were acquired in California by a hardworking cattle baron named Henry Miller, of whom it was said (with very little exaggeration) that he could travel from Oregon to the Mexican border and sleep on his own property every night. It wasn’t his real name: he was born Heinrich Kreiser. Emigrating to the United States in the 1840s, he was working as a butcher in New York, when he bought a second-hand ship passage ticket to California from an acquaintance who had got the gold fever in ’49, but decided at the last minute not to go. As he was boarding the ship, Heinrich Kreiser noticed that the ticket he had bought was stamped ‘not transferrable’, and became Henry Miller. Not that Henry Miller. This Henry Miller.
And oh, the dice and hit-point jokes that will shower the land.
I never played D+D. I was such a dork in high school even the nerdly kids playing D+D shunned me.
I did start a D+D campaign – when I was twenty-four. Worked up a character and everything. Then the DM deployed to Saudi for Desert Shield so that kinda put a damper on the whole thing.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
So it’s primary day in Texas. I was looking forward to today, so as to finally get a break from all the automated phone calls from the various campaigns.
It’s interesting to see the some rifts in the great clouds of swooning adoration surrounding B. Obama, though. Nothing puts the whole Obamania thing into better perspective than an essay by P.J. O’Rourke, from a couple of years ago. It was a review of a book about the Kennedys, but it does apply still:
“We got a mad crush on the lot of them. They were so stylish, so charming, and – at least in their public moments – so gracefully behaved… This may be the stupidest thing that has ever happened in a democracy. And it certainly shows an emptiness at the center of our idea of government, if not at the center of our lives. A desire to adore a head of state is a grim transgression against republicanism. It is worse than having a head of state who demands to be adored. It is worse even than the forced adoration of the state itself… There are some 230 million of us and we’d better start talking sense to ourselves soon. The President of the United States is our employee. The services he and his legislative cohorts contract for us are not gifts or benefices. We have to pay for every one of them, sometimes with our money, sometimes with our skins.
If we can remember this, we’ll get a good, dull Cincinnatus like Eisenhower or Coolidge. Our governance will be managed with quiet and economy. We’ll have no need to go looking for Kennedys to love. And no need to boil over with hatred for them later”
– From “Mordred Had a Point – Camelot Revisited” in “Give War a Chance”
Later and post-primary thoughts about Obamania, here, courtesy of the invaluable Rantburg (who is undergoing a persistant DOS attack from someone who apparently doesn’t much like what the ‘Burg reports on these days. Apparently they made fun of Mohammed, or something.
By way of apologizing for the light blogging here – may I offer a sample chapter from Book Three of the Verein Trilogy, or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”? I’ve gotten about two thirds through the first draft of it, and am getting ready to revise Part Two and submit Part One to the usual publishing suspects.
Enjoy… this one has a interesting climax to it, one that I’ve been hinting at, all through the first two books. Previous chapter here
Chapter Forty-Eight: Day of Reckoning
“It all seems very quiet,” Magda remarked, on the Saturday that she and Anna reopened the store. “And so empty!”
It was a week after Rosalie’s funeral, a week after Hansi and the boys returned, empty-handed and covered in trail-dirt, on horses trembling from weariness.
“I still keep expecting to see Vati in his room, or sitting under the pear tree,” Anna agreed, wistfully. “I wish Papa and I could induce Mama to leave her room – but she will not hear of it.” Hansi had exhausted himself, pleading fruitlessly with Liesel. He had finally lost his temper and left with Jacob, taking a wagon-load of goods to Kerrville. He had promised to deliver a load of cut timber to the Becker farm, where work had commenced on the house, after the spring cattle round-up. Magda didn’t know if Liesel would have forgiven Hansi by the time he returned, and was herself too grieved over Rosalie to care very much.
“It’s like one of those starfish,” Sam observed earnestly. He plied a broom with great energy, although Magda thought he was merely stirring the dust around. “When it loses one of its arms,”
“How is that, Sam?” his mother asked, much puzzled.
“It grows another one to replace it,” Sam scowled, thoughtfully, “Or maybe it’s one of those jellyfish things I am thinking of. It grows again into the shape it needs, even if it’s not in quite the same shape as it was before.”
“Clear as mud, Samuel,” Anna said, but secretly Magda thought her son was right. The household, her family – it was reshaping itself, like a starfish. Wearily, she wondered if the starfish, or whatever Sam was thinking of felt pain when part of it was cut off. For they all felt pain, but only Liesel was incapacitated by it, by the unbearable absence, the emptiness in the places where Willi and Grete should have been. She had withdrawn into her deep, deep cellar, leaving Marie to cope valiantly with the household, aided as always by Mrs. Schmidt in the mornings and by her sister and aunt whenever they could step away from the shop, and Hansi’s freighting concerns.
More »
Ok, since we just recieved an automated “vote for me” call from the Barama campaign addressed to voters in Bexar County,Texas… note to y’all; you would get so much farther if you could get the pronuciation right. It’s pronounced “bear”. Not “bechs-ar”. Sorry for the way it looks, spelled out. It’s pronounced “bear”.
So now Blondie is on the line explaining her life story… and to someone who represented himself as a Marine veteran from the west coast who said he served “someplace in Florida” but which he said is closed now, and never said his name, rank, term or serivice, etc. And as she was talking to him, the call center operator reported that they were getting swamped with calls from people likewise compaining about their pronunciation. (Nice guy, very personable. All props for their compaign manager, or whoever Blondie reached after hitting 0, 0, 0+)
We report. You decide.
8:05 PM Another automated call from the Obama campaign. Sorry, you’ve already lost me. My number is on the Do Not Call List – d’ya supose I want to hear from you guys when we’re trying to watch “The Office” and eating dinner??!!!
‘Villa Junque’ (pronounced in Spanish as Hoon-kay’) – sounds so much better than ‘garage full of junk’, which is what mine has descended to, what with Blondie enthusiastically collecting ‘stuff’ for her eventual first apartment/house/place of her own. A couple of years ago, I saw a tee-shirt/sweat shirt with “It isn’t an empty nest until all of their stuff is out of the garage” and truer words were never printed across the parental chest. All of her accumulated stuff from two hitches in the Marines came home with her – the large TV, the stereo system, a lot of Target and Walmart bought kitchenware, a microwave, and several boxes of shoes and bedding. And a strangely comfortable metal-framed armchair and footstool which was apparently the prize of the Cherry Point single barracks, as it gravitated from room to room until my daughter inherited it from a friend and shipped it home with her stuff. She pleaded with me to re-upholster it, which I did… and to give it houseroom in the den… which I also did. As I said, it is strangely comfortable. Her TV and stereo also were allowed in, with some reluctance on my part. They were newer than mine by about a quarter-century, so a bit more complicated… but worked a little better. The classical station still receives badly, but that’s an eccentricity of their transmitter.
Her dog and her two cats were also folded into the household, and it generally works out, although three of my cats hate the dogs and prefer Blondie’s end of the house to mine. It’s all her other stuff which has made my house into the Villa Junque, although I do admit that some of the stuff I moved into the garage was specifically dedicated for her first place – the dining table that was too big for the dining area, some bookshelves superfluous to my needs once I put up hanging shelves and some other small stuff. Really, it wasn’t a patch on what I notice in other people’s garages. I could actually get my car into it, still. (Well, I could until Blondie moved in her stuff.)
Besides being drawn to the 70%-off shelves at fine retail establishments (where we have snapped up plenty of Christmas ornaments and wrapping paper for next year) Blondie is also a dedicated yard-sale shopper. Walking the dogs early on Saturday morning is nothing more than a disguise. She is actually reconnoitering for yard sales. With luck and walking the dogs, we can beat the roving pros, descending with their battered step-vans and pickup trucks and snapping up the good stuff. I don’t know where these people go with their oddly assorted gleanings; they are usually Hispanic and go for the furniture and the used appliances, but do not distain the clothes, bedding and toys. Blondie now has a nice collection of glass and silver-plate knick-knacks, garden lanterns and ornaments, chairs and crockery. She hopes that some of it may be Antiques Road Show-worthy some day.
I think our neighborhood is moving up, socio-economically; there is a better grade of stuff at yard-sales than formerly. Even the stuff put out for the trash – especially when someone is moving and is sick to death of making decisions about stuff – is a better grade. We struck a bonanza this year with pots and plants, but the absolute prize was spotted Sunday afternoon by our equally bargain-fanatic neighbor Judy. She saw a love-seat placed by the curb with a lot of other trash and made a special visit to our house to tell us where.
It turned out to be upholstered in leather, only a little worn on the seat cushions and two tears in places, and so heavy that it probably is a good grade of furniture. Well and I know that because of the chore it was for the two of us to load it in the back of the Montero and then carry it into the house. Whatever it will be to reupholster a solid hunk o’ small sofa like that is still less than it will cost to buy new. And it is amazing the difference that some cleaning solution, and some carefully placed throws and pillows will accomplish.
The Weevil loves it, since it is large enough for her to sprawl in comfort; Spike and the cats love it because the back and arms are broad enough for them to stretch out in equal comfort and all of them together. And I have to admit – it is a very comfortable place for humans to lounge as well.
But – we are swearing to everyone that we actually scored it at a yard sale for $20.
At present I am about halfway through the first draft of Book Three, the Adelsverein Trilogy – or as has been called “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”. I have gotten the various members of the Becker and Richter families up to the making of their various fortunes in the post Civil War cattle trade, when an acute surplus of cattle in Texas met the advancing trans-continental railroad.
Well, not exactly met, since the cattle were in Texas and the railroads were advancing at a good clip west from Chicago and St. Louis; the Union Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. The actual tracks were stretching ribbons of iron track across Nebraska and Kansas, putting the four dollar a head Texas cow a considerable distance away from that forty-dollar a head market in Sedalia, Kansas City or Abilene.
Out of that not inconsiderable distance was born the enduring legend of the long-distance cattle drive. In the twenty years after the Civil War about 10 million cows walked north, most to the Kansas railheads, but a smaller portion went farther north, into Wyoming and Canada to be used as brood stock for ranches that eager entrepreneurs were falling all over themselves to establish.
Trailing cattle out of Texas to profitable markets elsewhere was not, by that time an entirely new phenomenon. Texas longhorns were brought north beginning in the 1840s, along what was called the Shawnee Trail between Brownsville and variously, Kansas City, Sedalia and St. Louis. Another trail, the Goodnight-Loving trail went from west Texas to Cheyenne, Wyoming, following the Pecos River through New Mexico. But the most heavily trafficked trail was the many-branched Chisholm Trail. It’s tributaries gathered cattle from all across Texas into one mighty trunk route which began at Red River Station, on the river which marked the demarcation between Texas and the Indian Territories of present-day Oklahoma. The Chisholm Trail crossed rivers which, thanks to storms in the distant mountains, could go from six inches to 25 feet deep in a single day and skirted established farmlands farther east, whose owners usually did not care for large herds of cattle trampling their crops and exposing their own stock to strange varieties of disease.
Once into Kansas, the trail split again, over time as the railroads crept west. The end of the trail came variously at places like Dodge City, Newton, Ellsworth and Abilene – depending on the year, how far the railway had come, and the exasperation of local citizens with the behavior of young men on a spree after three months of brutally hard work, dust and boredom. The cattle were loaded into railcars, their drovers paid off… and next year, they did it again. The tracks can still be seen from the air, all across North Texas and Oklahoma.
So this is what I have been researching and writing about, these last few weeks – a world not much like that seen in TV westerns and old B-movies. It was a bit more complicated than it looks, watching an old TV show like “Rawhide”, with a great many more interesting characters, a lot more hard work and not nearly as prone to stupid gunplay and bravado. As one of my characters reflects… “The cattle drive was…uncommonly like the Army. The days combined long mind-numbing stretches of tedium interspersed with back-breaking labor and the occasional moment of innards-melting terror; all of it in the open air and in the exclusive company of men, day after day after day.”
Other curious things noted as regards the golden age of western cattle ranching:
The average age of a cowhand/drover was about 24. About one in six or seven was black, about one in six or seven Mexican. The work was seasonal, and most did it for only about seven years before moving on to something that paid a little more, or setting up as ranchers themselves.
They usually did not own their horse. Horses were provided as a necessary tool by the cowhand’s employer, to be swapped out when necessary. Which, depending on the work involved, might be two or three times during the working day.
In fact, at the end of a long trail drive, the horses were usually sold, and sometimes the cook-wagon, too. The cowhands returned to their starting point by rail; a ticket home being provided along with their wages.
In 1854 a drover named Tom Candy Ponting took a herd of longhorns all the way from Texas to New York City.
A French nobleman with a glamorous wife and apparently bottomless funds of money, the Marquis de Mores emerged with a small fortune after building a processing-plant and slaughterhouse… and a whole small town at Medora, in the Dakota badlands. Unfortunately, he had started with a large one. He also nearly fought a duel with Teddy Roosevelt.
Wyoming cattle baron Granville Stuart was married happily and successfully for nearly thirty years to a Shoshone Indian woman, Aubony (or Awbonny) Stuart.
Curiously, there didn’t seem to be all much cattleman-sheep herder warfare in Texas. Many Texas ranchers had stocked their lands with whatever herding animal was likely to make a profit. There was horrific bad feeling between cattle ranchers and ordinary farmers, though. See the Mason County Hoo Doo War, in which the farmer and the cowman were pretty evenly matched.
(more to follow – reposted to allow comments)
For the Presidents’ day weekend. Found via Rantburg, my own deep well of news and sarcastic commentary. Our Five Most Bad-Ass Presidents!
Yeah, I know. Totally juvenile… but… ummm. Mostly accurate. There were indeed giants on the earth, in those days.
Interesting post about an event that never happened… but still did a thing to our world. Scroll down to the “DMW Flashback: The Greatest March ” entry
About twenty years before our current popular culture records such an event happening.
Or not.
When I was a young child, sometime back in the dawn of time (oh, sorry – the late 60s), one of my favorite songs was by a group named Think. The song was called “Once You Understand.” It was basically a constant refrain providing the background sound for snippets of conversations between parents & teens. In keeping with the times, every parental interchange was angry/uncaring/non-supportive of their child’s latest dream or activity. The refrain got louder as the song progressed.
“Ma, I’ll be home at 11…”
“You’d better be home at 10, or don’t bother to come home at all.”“Hey, Dad! Did you see my new guitar? I joined a group!”
“Son, there’s a little bit more to life than joining a group, or playing a guitar.”
“Yeah, Dad? What is there to life?”
When I was 10-12, this song was the epitome of everything that was wrong with parents. I had one of the those old K-Tel vinyl compilations that included this song on it. Over the years, the record got lost, and I have periodically scoured the internet hoping to find it. Alas, all searches were in vain.
Today, wandering through my blogroll, I checked out LaShawn Barber’s Corner. LaShawn has recently changed the primary focus of her blogs from politics to music – digital music in particular. She wrote about a new search engine called SeeqPod – kind of a “google” for music. So I jumped over to SeeqPod, and typed in “Once You Understand,” hit search, and crossed my fingers.
Eureka!
I still can’t find it to buy, but at least I can listen to it, and remember singing along at a slumber party 35 years ago. That’s better than nothing.
Thanks, SeeqPod!
h/t LaShawn Barber
Dude works for a big company. Blogs. Gets noticed. Gets fired. It happens.
Now, he claims he’s never seen an employee manual, which I find really hard to believe – those guys in HR are really into making sure people read those things. But, whatever.
Naw – my problem is his usage of metaphor ..
… that is until the day she was taken out into the figurative woods without any warning and given the Old Yeller treatment.
Dude. Ol’ Yeller wasn’t taken into the woods. Yeller was confined to a pen when he turned rabid and that’s where Travis did the deed.
That and .. Ol’ Yeller had to die – he was rabid. I don’t think the fellow is trying to make the point that his friend acquired rabies defending her boy against a wolf, and then had to be shot by his best friend.
Unless that’s really where he’s going; his friend got all weird in the course of her work so her corporate masters had to tearfully execute her. Naw, that’s just too weird.
I call a metaphor penalty.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
It’s expected that his brother Raul will be the new president.
HAVANA – An ailing, 81-year-old Fidel Castro resigned as Cuba’s president Tuesday after nearly a half-century in power, saying he will not accept a new term when parliament meets Sunday.
The end of Castro’s rule — the longest in the world for a head of government — frees his 76-year-old brother Raul to implement reforms he has hinted at since taking over as acting president when Fidel Castro fell ill in July 2006. President Bush said he hopes the resignation signals the beginning of a democratic transition.
Here’s hoping that their next 50 years are better than the last.
UPDATE: Val Prieto (and friends) do their usual good job of providing background and commentary on all things Cuban over at Babalublog. Val’s blog is where I first started reading more about Cuba, a few years ago. It’s always the first place I head when I see something about Cuba in the news.
The run-up to this presidential election has a horrid fascination about it, kind of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. We have on one side, Her Inevitableness and the Fresh Prince of Illinois, in the words of a recent blog commenter, vigorously throwing melanin and ovaries at each other. It would be funny, if not for the sure and certain knowledge that one of them will be the Democrat’s anointed by convention time. And also that our grandees of the conventional media establishment will have pulled themselves together by that time and tied a big best-of-show ribbon around the neck of one or the other. Never mind that half the MSM are at present going all wobbly-in-the-knees for Mr. Obama and the other half are indignantly insisting that there is nothing wrong, nothing the least bit wrong with the spouse of a two-term president waltzing into the White House for a term of her own, born up on a rising tide of her previous experience there.
Me, I am left relatively unmoved by the dreaminess, charisma, vision and whatever of Mr. Obana. Like P.O’Rourke, I consider the desire to adore a head of state, or any prospective applicants for that office, to be a grim transgression against republicanism (Small r there, meaning the system of government, not the actual political party). I am also left similarly unmoved by the notion that just because Her Inevitableness is a woman of certain age, with all that long memory of feminism in the last quarter of the last century, that OF COURSE I am going to vote for her. Fight the Patriarchy, the glass ceiling, sisterhood is powerful! Umm, no. Sorry; this is not Argentina and she is not Eva Bloody Peron. Frankly, the thought of Bill “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” Clinton prowling the corridors of the White House trolling for interns – yet again, sort of makes my skin crawl. I would have respected Her Inevitableness so much more if she had dumped his sorry ass, after L’Affaire Monica. And dumped it with vigor and sufficient force to achieve low orbit
On the other side; not much better, really; either Mitt Romney or Rudy Guiliani would have worked for me. I could have voted for either one without too much cringing – but alas, neither had the stamina to hold out long enough to be a serious contender. Which leaves me with John McCain; and I keep thinking I ought to be more enthusiastic about that. Way back in the primordial dark of the 2000 primary season, I had rather liked his candidacy, and held considerable of a grudge against GWB for certain dirty tricks pulled against McCain in the South Carolina primary. So, the man has a good shot at the Republican nomination now – and I ought to feel better about that. But he has a long record in public life, he is a cranky maverick with a bad temper and has gotten into political bed with some pretty unsavory people…so, who knows?
God knows, I don’t. All I can do come this November is to walk into the voting booth and vote for the one that I think is the least worst.
And then I remember – and hope! Even given that the worst of the three takes the oath of office next January. It’s only four years. God knows, we should be able to survive. I mean, we got through the presidency of that blob of vacuous sanctimony known as Jimmy Carter, even if we are still cleaning up some of the mess from his term.
The Air Force recently came by and did some simulated bomb runs on City Hall. The idea is that ground controllers need practice guiding air strikes in urban areas. Most bomb ranges are way the heck out in the middle of nowhere and lack urban terrain, so they come up here and do their thing.
Makes sense to me – you guys in blue do know how to rock on completely.
The paper described the AttackSimEx [1] as controversial but the only people who actually objected were six members from the Fox Valley Peace Coalition. One of whom was confused about what he was upset about.
“Apparently, this exercise is to improve the accuracy of bombs so they don’t have the ‘collateral damage,'” he said. “Collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent people, and I strongly object to my government killing innocent people. This is one small gesture on my part to at least make this known.”
Um, yeah. Actually the military [2] is all about killing as many people as possible; good, bad, innocent, guilty as sin, as long as the gun sight lays on ’em we’ll pull the trigger. Our only problem is we can’t slaughter them fast enough; they keep wiggling around and throwing off our aim.
No, it’s the nancy pants [3] in Accounting that insist we get as much bang for the buck as possible. While carpet bombing is a whole lotta fun and a terrific emotional release it’s just not effective enough. The taxpayer is footing the bill and it’s our fiduciary responsibility to make sure the bombs land as close to the actual target as possible. That way we can use less of them – it’s a win-win for everyone.
Except the guys who are actually the target. But we in the War Mongering business call this hard cheese.
That angular monstrosity is City Hall – the target. Talk about putting the ‘close’ in close-air support …
[1] I have no idea if the milspeak shorthand for this really is AttackSimEx or not – but if it were it would not surprise me.
[2] Sarcasm.
[3] You don’t really believe this, do you?
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
To: The Arch Bishop of Canterbury
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The discrete attractions of sharia vis a vis English Common Law
1. Having been raised in the relatively intellectual and logic-based tradition of the Lutheran church, the temptation to take a swipe at a church founded on Henry VIII’s scheme to get out of one unrewarding marriage and into another more to his liking is almost overwhelming. The Church of England came about because King H. had the hots for Anne Boleyn and she wasn’t giving him any until he ponied up a ring and a crown and lots of other pretty shiny baubles. Lutherans have the 95 Thesis nailed to a church door, and the C of E… has Henry VIII’s gonads. I admit, Bish – you made a damn good show of it though, especially with the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible and all that. Speaking as a wordsmith, it beats Luther’s Small Catechism all hollow. Pure ecclesiastical and literary gold, but lamentably, it looks like your church has been running out of steam ever since.
2. What on earth where you thinking, urging your fellow citizens to acquiesce to the use of sharia law in Britain, as anything other than a small-scale, mutually-agreed-upon-between-the aggrieved parties adjunct, a sort of counseling service? Did you have any idea of the ruckus that would arise, upon suggesting that it was inevitable and by implication a good thing in this pretty, shiny multi-culti 21st century Britain? Do you even, god save us, have any idea that your casually tossed off remarks appeared to approve of grafting an alien sprout onto the tree of common law? An alien and wholly contradictory sprout that no matter how often or how loudly the praises of sharia law are sung by the usual chorus, casual consumers of recent media reports cannot help concluding those places in which sharia law holds sway are violent and benighted hellholes? In the eyes of those innocent of spectacles constructed of industrial-strength rose-colored glass, it is a turd. No amount of gold-plate will make it acceptable, not least, I suspect, to those who have had first-hand experience of it. (Especially those of the female gender.)
3. It is one thing, my good Bish, to discuss theoretical constructs – it is quite another to install them as workable and working systems, when real-world experience of them suggests that the outcome will be something comprehensively different, from what it appeared to be in ones’ airy world of theory and abstraction. See the practice of communism, when tried out in any place you could name.
4. Hoping that this memo will be of assistance to you, in explaining the storm which has descended upon your miter-capped head.
5. Sorry; coming up with an explanation for all those gorgeous but empty church buildings the length and breadth of Britain is more your line of work. Good luck with that.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
Later:This lovely monologue/rant courtesy of I-don’t-know-who-it’s-a-couple-glasses-of-chablis-into-my-birthday-eve here
Eh – Rantburg, the source of all things sour and sarky
Yes, I did write quite a number of posts about them, didn’t I? Stern words, had to be said. And I think I did a pretty ringing job, the first time around, so here are exerpts and links:
The strength of the West is in that very noisy disputation, our freedom to put everything on the table, to question, to non-conform, and by disputation and argument, make our beliefs even stronger for having all the idiocy knocked out of them. As such has been our custom, and in the reported words of Martin Luther, at the Diet of Worms: “Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason–I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other–my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.” (original post here)
As far as American newsprint and broadcast television is concerned, the phrase “freedom of the press” is from this day now enshrined in my favorite set of viciously skeptical quote-marks. The affair of the Danish Cartoons, and their non-appearance in all but a handful of newspapers has put the lie to every bit of lip-service ever paid to the notion that the American people had a right to know… had an absolute right, enshrined in the foundations of our very Republic to know… well, whatever it was that would goose the ratings, or boost circulation this week… A right that every journalist would fearlessly defend, with every fiber of his principled, journalistic being. Oops, there seems to be a little contradiction there. Principled… journalist… now there is a concept worn to tatters by this little international imbroglio, especially after Eason-gate, Rather-Gate and all the other tedious-gates. (original post here)
…the next time I hear someone pontificating away on the awesome responsibilities involved in upholding the “freedom of the press”… and they are from a newspaper which refused to run the Danish Cartoons, or a television station which refused to air them, citing “community sensitivities” or “deference to religious feelings” or whatever the sad excuse du jour is…. I shall laugh and laugh and laugh. (original post here)
Amusingly, that lugubrious old talking prune, NPR’s Daniel Shorr was coming out on the side of being all sensitive and being responsible about “using the power of the press” as regards the Matter of the Danish Cartoons. (Doesn’t that sound like a very dull Sherlock Holmes adventure, or the worst name for a war since the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”?) Just like the pet professor of international relations whom my local paper keeps on hand to drivel on about the Moslem world and international relations, and how the US must…must…zzzzz… oh, sorry. Dozed off there for a moment. I do that when reading the gentleman’s editorials, but so do probably most of his students. (original post here)
Wouldn’t change a thing… well, except to point and laugh at Daniel Shorr a little more.
No, it’s not a long-hidden horror flick. It’s the next volley in the fight to support freedom of speech/freedom of the press. It seems that the Danish government recently arrested some Muslim conspirators who were planning to kill Kurt Westergaard, the man who drew what was deemed to be the most offensive of the cartoons two years ago.
That would be this one:
You may recall that our own Sgt Mom wrote about this very topic the first time around, castigating the mainstream press for kowtowing to the Islamofacists. I’m certain that she’ll be weighing in on this revival, as well. I’m heartened by the fact that the Danish papers have responded to this recent arrest by re-publishing the cartoons. As Captain Ed says, they are “on the front lines for free speech.”
According to the article, Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch newspapers also republished the cartoons. Anyone want to take any bets as to when we’ll see them in the NY Times?
From Iowahawk, naturally. How can an English major resist a parody entitled:
“Heere Bigynneth the Tale of the Asse-Hatte.”
Read, and savor the final punchline. You won’t regret it. Really.
(Another one of those rather amusing emails, forwarded by a friend)
The North has Bloomingdale’s, the South has Dollar General.
The North has coffee houses, the South has Waffle Houses.
The North has dating services, the South has family reunions.
The North has switchblade knives; the South has Lee Press-on Nails.
The North has double last names; the South has double first names.
The North has Indy car races; The South has stock car races.
North has Cream of Wheat, the South has grits.
The North has green salads, the South has collard greens.
The North has lobsters, the South has crawfish.
The North has the rust belt; the South has the Bible Belt.
FOR NORTHERNERS MOVING SOUTH :
In the South: –If you run your car into a ditch, don’t panic. Four men in a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a tow chain will be along shortly. Don’t try to help them, just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.
Don’t be surprised to find movie rentals and bait in the same store…. Do not buy food at this store.
Remember, “Y’all” is singular, “all Y’all” is plural, and “all Y’all’s” is plural possessive
Get used to hearing “You ain’t from round here, are ya?”
Save all manner of bacon grease. You will be instructed later on how to use it.
Don’t be worried at not understanding what people are saying. They can’t understand you either. The first Southern statement to creep into a transplanted Northerner’s vocabulary is the adjective “big’ol,” truck or “big’ol” boy. Most Northerners begin their Southern-influenced dialect this way. All of them are in denial about it.
The proper pronunciation you learned in school is no longer proper.!
Be advised that “He needed killin'” is a valid defense here.
If you hear a Southerner exclaim, “Hey, Y’all watch this,” you should stay out of the way. These are likely to be the last words he’ll ever say.
If there is the prediction of the slightest chance of even the smallest accumulation of snow, your presence is required at the local grocery store. It doesn’t matter whether you need anything or not. You just have to go there.
Do not be surprised to find that 10-year olds own their own shotguns, they are proficient marksmen, and their mammas taught them how to aim.
In the South, we have found that the best way to grow a lush green lawn is to pour gravel on it and call it a driveway.
AND REMEMBER: If you do settle in the South and bear children, don’t think we will accept them as Southerners After all, if the cat had kittens in the oven, we wouldn’t call ’em biscuits.
…is that it beats the alternative. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. And for once, I’m not talking about myself, although I don’t seem to be getting any younger, these days. I’m talking about my dad..
He turned 77 on his birthday last November. He spent his birthday weekend in the hospital, dealing with a heart attack. He had gone to the ER in his small town to get checked out for a suspected urinary tract infection (his regular doc had retired, and he didn’t have a new one yet), and they realized he was in the midst of a heart attack. They kept him over the weekend, and released him early the next week.
But my aunt called me last week. She’s the one who takes care of my dad’s finances, and has full power of attorney to handle whatever needs handled, since my mom passed away. Dad’s doctor says he needs to move out of his split-level house, before the stairs kill him. He doesn’t do stairs well – they trip him up. He had a stroke in 1976, and his right leg has never worked particularly well since then. His answer to the stairs in the house was to go out the back door, take two steps down from the back deck, and walk down the sloping hill to his truck. Until he fell one day, and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, two neighbors saw him and came over to help him to his feet.
He is a stubbornly indpendent man, my father. So we are NOT moving him to assisted living. We are helping him get his house ready to sell, and we’ll help him buy a small single-story in his small town. I’ve rearranged my vacation time to go north and help out. Other than that, I try not to think about it.
My daddy… I have always endowed him with some mythical heroic power, and while he may not have hung the moon, I was always convinced that he could have, if he’d wanted to. In one swift move, he could grab me up and hoist me to his shoulders, assuring I got the best view of the Santa Claus parade as it wound through our neighborhood. We found a domestic rabbit shivering in our garage one winter day, and next day, he built a wood and wire rabbit hutch for it, out of scraps he had, and with no plans to work from. When we built our “dream” house in 1975, he and Mom did the roofing, the siding, the flooring… before his stroke he was all-powerful, and full of genius, if short of patience.
After his 1976 stroke, I closed my eyes to his limitations and encouraged him in his successes. It was easy to do then – I was a teenager, still in high school. Now I’m an adult, and high school is 30 years behind me, this May. Dad is 77, and not as healthy as he used to be. His heart is enlarged, his liver is fatty, and his bad leg drags enough to scare you if you watch him walk, because it looks like he won’t make it across the room if he’s barefoot.
But he’s still around for me to love, and that beats the alternative. Still, I find my eyes tearing up at odd times, and I’m dreading this northern trip on Feb 26, helping him get ready to sell the house my mother died in. I find myself wondering if I’ve really told him enough about how much he means to me. I try to reassure myself that actions speak louder than words, even for someone as vocal as I am, and that driving across the Appalachians in the tag-end of winter declares that I care. But I think I’ll work on sending cards more often, to let him know I’m thinking of him, and that I love him.
And I marvel at how the fact that my dad is growing older can make me feel so much like a very young child.
Travel to exotic lands
Meet exciting unusual people
And kill them.
Berkeley, the famously liberal college town in California, has taken aim at Marine recruiters, saying they are “not welcome in our city.”
Unh, ladies? The ditty you’re quoting isn’t a protest slogan. It’s usually found on t-shirts and bumper stickers for sale outside the main gate and in Army-Navy surplus stores across the land. It’s one of those yin-yang duality of nature mock-ironic things that service members do so well and clueless zealots just don’t get.
Instead of mindlessly repeating something you read on a recruiter’s bumper sticker, may I suggest a return to the classics?
1 .. 2 .. 3 .. 4
We don’t want your dirty war!
or
Hey, hey what do I say?
Kick the Marines into the bay!
or
Hey, hey, look our way!
We’re naive and we like it that way!
You’re welcome.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
“You have curious things to eat…but I am fed on proper meat” – From R.L Stevensons’ Child’s Garden of Verses
My mother had a fairly open-minded attitude about what exactly constituted edible animal protein; if Dad’s paycheck could afford it, and it was available from any of the places providing our edibles in the 1960s, she would damn well have a go at making something tasty out of it. Beef-heart casserole and fried rabbit made appearances often; so did ground beef in any of a hundred different guises, as well as liver and onions – basically, if it didn’t look too awful and smelled good, we were prepared to be adventurous. Except where liver and onions were concerned, which smelled good but tasted revolting; and which Mom insisted we eat because it was A) cheap and B) good for us.
Generally, that attitude served me well ever since; overseas on Japan and Korea, in Greenland and across Europe. Roast chestnuts – good to go. Unidentified bits of chicken flesh on a skewer, brushed with some kind of soy-based sauce and grilled over a little charcoal brazier – excellent! Stir-fried noodles and strange vegetables – oh, yeah! Strange meaty stews with lots of potatoes, served up in a French youth hostel in the summer of 1970? My traveling friend, Esther Tutwyler and I cheerfully agreed that it probably was horse-meat and ate it anyway. We were hungry and on a budget – and when in Rome, or in this case, Paris – do as the Romans. We were generally baffled by the bread rolls, though – they went hard and inedible after a day or so, and every time we had had a bag-luncheon from whatever youth hostel kitchen was supplying our nutritional needs, there were at least two of them. What to do with the uneaten extras? Seemed kind of ungracious and wasteful to throw them away, but we had to eventually. There was that time we did have a game of kick-football with one, in the corridor of a subterranean hostel in Vienna’s Esterhazy Park, – until the roll skidded underneath the door of someone’s room. We always wondered what the occupant of that room thought the next day, finding a stale bread roll in the middle of the floor.
On the whole, youth hostel food was pretty much like my mothers – fairly edible and usually recognizable; cheap cuts of meat figured fairly highly, and always good sturdy bread. The breakfasts in Scandinavia were especially tasty, for the hostels generally set up a buffet table, with bins of different sliced bread, and every sort of condiment and bread topping imaginable. Kind of strange, we agreed, having salami for breakfast, but when in Rome, et cetera.
There was only one meal that left us completely baffled – coincidently, it was the evening meal in a Scandinavian hostel: Bergen, Norway, if memory serves. The main course at dinner was… well, we couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It appeared on our plates as opaque white gelatinous circles about three inches across and about half an inch thick, obviously sliced from a canned or extruded mass. It had a very faintly fibrous texture and feel in the mouth, but otherwise had no discernable taste at all, offering no clue as to its origin, animal, fish or vegetable. I mean, it tasted and smelt of precisely nothing. It was served with a dollop of almost equally tasteless béchamel sauce (milk gravy to Southerners) and formed a symphony of unappetizing white on each plate. At least we recognized béchamel sauce, but the stuff that it was on? It appeared almost as if the kitchen staff had just opened generic cans labeled “food” and gorped out a neat and faintly rubbery slice on each plate. I had never seen the like – and after fifteen years of Lutheran pot-luck lunches and dinners, and Mom’s cooking, I thought I had seen everything. We ate it – no one opting for seconds. By luck, none of the kitchen staff that evening seemed to understand English, so the mystery food remained a mystery.
Two or three years later, my high school had a Norwegian exchange student. I described the mysterious rubbery, tasteless white stuff to him, and he said it was fish pudding. A Norwegian national dish, apparently. Kind of like lutefisk, but without the rat poison.
There is one nice thing about changing a tire in Wisconsin in February: all that ice and snow gives you good place to jab your tire iron so it stands upright.
This keeps it ready-to-hand and super easy to find.
That’s for all the idjits who have decided that they’d rather let someone else make their decisions for them. For all the wingnuts who have decided to not vote at all rather than to vote for McCain. For all the moonbats who are pouting because Kucinich has left the race.
VOTE.
As Heinlein once wrote, “There may not be someone to vote for, but there’s always someone to vote against.”