This affray did not happen in Texas, but in New Mexico in 1884. It did have all the classic Western elements; rowdy cowboys, a small town fed to the back teeth with their destructive and abusive antics, and a single local lawman determined to up hold the rule of law and order. Here, however, ends any resemblance to High Noon, Tombstone, Stagecoach, Shane or any other classic Western movie. In this case, the single resolute lawman stands out in the annals of Western law enforcement for several reasons; first for sheer, stubborn crazy-brave courage, secondly for being barely 19 years old at the time, a tough little banty-rooster of a guy barely five-seven in boots… and thirdly for being native Hispanic in a time and in a place where anti-Mexican bigotry fell very severely on the non-Anglo population of any what class or income.
His name was Elfego Baca – and there was one more difference to him. Although he had been born in Socorro, New Mexico Territory, he had spent most of his life in Topeka, Kansas, where his parents had sought work and an education for their children. This resulted in Elfego Baca being more fluent in English than Spanish at the time of his returning to Socorro and working as a clerk in a general mercantile owned by his brother-in-law. He had another notable skill; facility with a six-gun. Very much later in life he claimed he had been taught to shoot by Billy the Kid … either William McCarty-Antrim-Bonny, or some other adolescent shootist with the same moniker in New Mexico Territory around that time.
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Come home from walkies with another dog. Meet Nemo. We found him.
Ok, so it looks like North Korea, in the person of Li’l Pudgy Kim has upped their game in the routine and semi-annual national unity game of chicken. (The Norks do this every six months, usually when they want to squeeze some concessions out of the outside world. It’s like an overgrown toddler throwing an international temper tantrum.). Likely, all of his generals (or uncles, even the generals who are not his uncles) have to go along and make the usual noises and poses for the cameras, in spite of the fact that for all their resplendent ribbon-salad displays – they have not fought an all-out, balls-to-the wall war since 1954. Which war was nearly sixty years and three wars ago, as Americans are counting it, which means that their equipment must be getting pretty worn-out as well as their tactical schemes and field practice for using them – outside the boundaries of a pretty tightly-controlled war game which will allow no margin for making the Kim dynasty’s pet soldiers look bad in any way, shape or form.
So, while they might have been able to buy some new stuff on the international black market – which hints that those drug sales by their diplomatic staff must really be paying off, big-time, and they might actually be able to hit what they might be aiming at, on a good day, depending on what they have purchased, and if their vendors didn’t rob them blind, and if the Chinese actually gave them some of the good stuff … still, I remain unworried. Relatively, it must be noted. Alas, while I do believe they can hit Seoul on a good day with their artillery, and kidnap lonely strangers off the beachfront towns in Japan in the wee hours, and possibly come close to hitting Japan with something high-explosive … whacking the continental United States with a ballistic missile is a bit of a chancy prospect. Even trying to smuggle something past the borders in a box-car would probably be a better shot.
But Li’l Pudgy may be just the one maniac to walk it far, far beyond where it can be gracefully walked back. Although this current administration likely will give him every assistance in doing so, being as they seem to be ready to give away the farm every time some international bad-ass gives them a hard look. Still, I’d love to know why the Norks are appearing to target Austin, Texas, as part of their threats to launch missiles in the general direction of the continental United States. Really – Austin? That little patch of blue in an otherwise red state? Holy crapola, Batman, the Leg may be in session this year, but on an Easter break. Was Li’l Pudgy mad at Samsung, or not getting an invite to SXSW this year, or is he just assuming that Austin is the storage site for our vital strategic barbeque reserves. It is good to see that apparently the local humorists are having fun with all this. (See this category on Twitchy.)
And that’s my weekend; half spent in the vegetable garden, seeing how many new varieties of tomato plants that I can sneak in without my daughter noticing, and the other half scribbling and posting on line.
PS- I just put up a new Kindle book of my blog-posts about Texas – The Heart of Texas. Think of it as a set of extended footnotes from my books; The Adelsverein Trilogy, Daughter of Texas, Deep in the Heart, and the latest – The Quivera Trail, which should be ready to roll in November. Assuming that the Norks aren’t really aiming for San Antonio, and this Austin stuff wasn’t a diversion.
In the sanctuary of the pilgrim church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Northern Spain. Have a blessed Easter!
Scott Cooley, who lived for revenge on those who had a part in the murder of his foster-father, Tim Williamson, made a kind of headquarters with his violent and disreputable friends in Loyal Valley. George Gladden had a place there – he, like many other participants in the feud – was a small rancher with a reputation as being handy with a gun. A few weeks after the murder of Deputy Whorle, Cooley’s gang targeted Peter Bader, who was reported to have been in the lynch mob who ambushed Tim Williamson on the road between the Lehmburg ranch and Mason, and had fired the final shot killing Tim Williamson. Unfortunately, Cooley and Johnny Ringo hit Peter Bader’s brother Carl, instead – gunning him down in his own field where he had been working. Whether this was deliberate or a case of mistaken identity is a matter undecided – but by committing this murder, Cooley had thrown a rock into a hornets’ nest. The Clark faction responded by attempting to draw out the Cooley gang to Mason. Sheriff Clark convinced – or hired – a local gambler named Jim Cheney to try and talk the Cooley gang into coming to Mason.
Cheney was only able to find George Gladden and Mose Baird; whatever he said to them convinced them to set out on the road between Loyal Valley and Mason. The two of them had just reached John Keller’s general store on the river-crossing just east of Mason – and there they spotted Sheriff Clark waiting, just outside the store. Clark’s men opened fire on the two from behind a stone wall. Both of them badly wounded, they still managed to escape a little way up the road, with the ambushers in hot pursuit. But Mose Baird died of his wounds and Peter Bader – whose brother had been murdered by Cooley and Johnny Ringo – wanted to finish off George Gladden. John Keller, the storekeeper, refused to countenance this, and store he’d kill anyone who’d shoot the wounded man. Peter Bader contented himself by merely cutting a gold ring from the hand of the dead Mose Baird. Perhaps this brief incident best illuminates the bitterness of the Hoodoo war; that some men on either side fully embraced savagery, while others drew back, horrified.
By late September, the situation had degenerated to the point where a company of Rangers was dispatched to Mason, under the command of Major John B. Jones, to restore order. By that time, there was none to speak of in Mason County. Sheriff Clark and a good number of his allies had forted up in Keller’s store, after rumors that Cooley’s band was intent on burning out the German settlers of Mason. Cooley and his band were already in Mason, too. They had tried to intimidate an Irish storekeeper, David Doole, into helping him. Armed with a shotgun, Doole refused; he was on good terms with many of the local Germans. Rebuffed, Cooley and his friends holed up a short distance down the street in Tom Gamel’s saloon on the west side of town – that Tom Gamel, who had been part of that first rustler-hunting posse early in the year, and who had broken with Clark and recruited friends of his own. In the meantime, Johnny Ringo and another of Cooley’s band paid a visit on Jim Cheney, who had led George Gladden and Mose Baird into the ambush at Keller’s store. Cheney invited them to share breakfast with him, apparently certain that his part in the matter wasn’t known. Johnny Ringo shot him down.
Gunfire also erupted in the streets of Mason: Dan Hoerster, the elected brands inspector, his brother-in-law, and third man were shot at, while riding down Main Street towards Gamel’s saloon, although they had been warned of the presence of the Cooley gang. Dan Hoerster fell, and the other two took refuge in the local hotel and fired back, to the horror of guests. Major Jones and his Ranger company arrived in the aftermath of this latest outrage, and began searching for Cooley and his friends. The major had his own problems; he had no cooperation from either side, with Anglo against German, each convinced that he was sympathetic to the other side. Worse still, a number of his own Rangers were former comrades of Scott Cooley – and finally the major called them to order and issued an ultimatum. Any who couldn’t find it in themselves to hunt for Cooley would be granted an honorable discharge from service. Three of the Rangers accepted the offer. The hunt for Cooley and the others continued – and in December, Cooley and Johnny Ringo were taken captive by the sheriff of neighboring Burnet County. Hearing that friends of theirs might break them out of the Burnet County Jail, the sheriff wisely sent them to custody in another and more secure jurisdiction.
With the apprehension of Cooley, the violence tapered off, although there was one last vengeance murder; that of Peter Bader. He had been hiding out in Llano County, but early in January of 1876, George Gladden and John Baird ambushed him on the road between Llano and Castell. With grim satisfaction, John Baird cut his brother Mose’s gold ring off Peter Bader’s hand.
By the end of that year, the Hoodoo War was over, save in memories and nightmares for those who had participated in it or were merely witnesses. Those participants with the bloodiest hands found it expedient to leave Mason County for good. Sherriff Clark, indicted on charges of complicity in the disappearance of suspected Cooley gang members, resigned his position after the charges were dropped and vanished without a trace. Johnny Ringo, charged and acquitted in the murder of Jim Chaney, and John Baird also both departed at speed, and turned up in New Mexico, where they both came to violent and unhappy ends. Scott Cooley, who had suffered a mysterious and chronic illness which medical authorities of the time called ‘brain fever’ died very suddenly from a bout of it, in the fall of that year. The only man convicted by a court of law in any of the Hoodoo War murders was George Gladden, sentenced to prison for the murder of Peter Bader.
And there it all ended, although many prominent and otherwise respectable men had doubtless been part of the masked lynch mobs. The Mason County courthouse burned, early in 1877, destroying just about all the written records associated with the feud. A long-time Mason resident and descendent of early settlers told me that upon the burning of all the records, the city fathers decided mutually to draw a line under the whole matter and call it a day. I am fairly certain, though – that no rustler or honest rancher – took a casual attitude towards absconding with Mason County cattle for a long time afterwards.
For your Monday delectation – practically every fish-related play on words known to man.
The Hoo-Doo war eventually became so bitter and vicious that all sides involved in it splintered into factions – even the company of Texas Rangers eventually dispatched to quell the range war split over it. The one survivor of the Baccus lynching still in custody, one Tom Turley, was returned to jail when he recovered, but very shortly, he was joined there by one of Sheriff Clark’s original cattle-thief hunting posse; Caleb Hall, now accused of being a cattle thief as well. A second posse member, Tom Gamel, now claimed that the notion of lynching the Baccus gang was first bruited about by the members of Clark’s posse – and he, for one, had been strongly against it. Rumors began flying around Mason that another lynching might be in the works – of Turley, Hall and Gamel themselves. Turley and Hall promptly escaped the jail and Mason County entirely, never to return. Tom Gamel stood his ground, recruiting about thirty friends – cattlemen and ranchers from the local area. He and his friends rode into Mason one day late in March. Not prepared for receiving so many presumably hostile guests, Sheriff Clark skedaddled. Gamel and his friends lingered in town for a couple of days, stewing for a fight … which nearly happened when Sheriff Clark returned with sixty well-armed local German friends. But the two sides declared a truce – and an end to mob justice. More »
It is apparently not news to anyone that the office of the President of the US involves a degree of security – to include an official food-taster, as medieval as that sounds. Been going on for years, apparently, so having a designated expert to cover food safety with regards to the President isn’t something to have a conniption fit over. So someone has to eat a couple of bites – a whole helping? from a dish prepared for the White House table, and if that person doesn’t fall over, gasping and foaming at the mouth, then it is OK for POTUS consumption. Got it. And yes, I do understand very well that security ought to be tight when it comes to food supplies and preparation for any President … but the recent story about President Obama sitting by at a private luncheon with GOP senators and not being able to eat a bite because his food taster hadn’t vetted the food first strikes me as a matter a little deeper and much more insulting than it has been played.
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The so-called Mason County Hoo-Doo War was one of those particularly impenetrable frontier feuds which mixed up all the classic western feud elements into one bloody and protracted mess; legal possession of land provided one element, there was also a clash between cattle ranchers with local farmers and townsmen, wrangling over the ownership of cattle – branded and otherwise – an element of ethnic resentment between German and native-born American or Anglo settlers, the passions of Unionist and Confederate partisans still at a simmer in the aftermath of the Civil War, and finally, that Mason County was situated on the far frontier, where enforcement of the law was a sketchy and erratically enforced thing.
Mason County is in the high Edwards Plateau, north of Kerrville; it was part of the Adelsverein land grant, originally taken up by a consortium of German nobles who wished to follow in the footsteps of Stephen Austin and Greene DeWitt in luring settlers to Texas in the 1840s. The Adelsverein scheme fell through, but not before more bringing more than 7,000 German immigrants to the Hill Country. Although the land grant was later invalidated by the State Legislature, the ownership rights of individual settlers was upheld, and as it eventually turned out much of the best land in the Hill Country was owned by those German settlers. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that during the Civil War many of those same Germans were pro-Union Abolitionists. In the resulting mini-civil war in the Hill Country, it was bitterly said that more Germans were murdered by pro-Confederate forces (legal and extra-legal) during 1861-65 than ever were killed by raiding Comanche Indians, before or after. Such wartime terrors and injustices could not be forgotten or forgiven easily, even though the post-war Reconstruction government tended to favor Unionists.
The post-war boom in Texas cattle provided yet another point of friction between Anglo and German. The cattle trails to the north ran through Mason County. Not infrequently herds of cattle assembled in the Hill Country, before commencing the long walk north on the Chisholm or Goodnight trails, and the cowboys who shepherded them were often not scrupulous about including straying mavericks as they passed through Mason County. Added to that mix, a large number of the frankly larcenous who took advantage of lax law enforcement to collect wandering cattle, legally branded or not … and the German small ranchers and farmers whose stock grazed in the unfenced pastures often had good reason to resent Anglo cattlemen, and to be suspicious of outsiders. Brands were easily changed, and when it came to an unbranded calf, possession was nine-tenths of the law. The German settlers in Mason were infuriated by the constant loss of their cattle, and the inability of anyone to do anything about it. In 1872, they elected a no-nonsense sheriff, who promised a hard line against the epidemic of cattle rustling; an Anglo named John Clark, backed up by a local German, John Wohrle as deputy sheriff and another, Dan Hoerster as inspector of brands. John Clark was well-liked and well-trusted by the local German citizens; he may have been a veteran of the Union Army. Over the next two years, he took a very hard line against neighboring ranch owners whom he considered to have made free with Mason County cattle – a hard line which lead to resentment among the Anglo ranchers and those cowhands who worked for them.
Early in 1875, a locally-raised posse made a sweep of the ranges northwest of Mason – and found a large herd in the possession of a party of men led by the Baccus brothers, Pete and Elijah. Curiously, the cattle in question bore the brands of practically everyone else but the Baccus brothers. The posse arrested them all, and brought them back to Mason for trial, while Sherriff Clark and another posse pursued another party of rustlers and another herd of stolen cattle. They retrieved the cattle, but the rustlers had vamoosed.
At this point things began to get bloody. The body of a dead man was found beside the road between Llano and Mason, with a note pinned to it; ‘Here lies a noted cow thief.’ Three days later a mob of men wearing masks broke into Wohrle’s home and forced him to give up the keys to the jail, where the Baccus brothers and the others arrested were waiting trial. Sherriff Clark and Ranger Captain Dan Roberts – buying grain for his company’s horses – hurried to the jail together, but there were too many in the mob. Helplessly, Clark and Roberts watched the mob carry away the Baccus brothers and three other men. It took time for them to gather aid and follow. They caught up to the mob just as four of their captives were being hung. In the exchange of gunfire the mob scattered, and Sheriff Clark cut down the prisoners. The Baccus brothers were already dead; two others were so gravely that one died within hours. The fifth man had been able to escape, although his hands were bound. And thus began the Hoo-Doo War.
(To be continued. Crossposted at my book blog and at www.chicagoboyz.net)
Well, that’s likely a bit of a shocker for the panjandrums of the public school system in New York; that 80 percent of graduates have to have remedial education before considering college-level courses. It could have been worse; the first time the story floated past my awareness, I understood it as 80 percent of the public high school graduates were functional illiterates. Ten or fifteen years ago the concept that public high schools were releasing functional illiterates into the wilds of adult life would have been shocking, incredible … but these days? Meh – not so shocking, and not that much surprising, after hearing some of the stories of friends with school-aged children, the occasional stories of malpractice in education which bubble up in the media … and most of all, interaction with some of the products of the public education mill. Some of these were very junior airmen whom I encountered in the military, some were friends of my daughters’ … and many had been appallingly educated.
Honestly, it seemed like they had only gone to school because it was the law that they do and it was no longer legally to send them to work in a factory. What they got out of the modern educational experience seemed mostly to be a big steaming pile of nothing, with a lot of political correctness sprinkled across the top. The cleverest and most focused children manage to educate themselves, in a spotty fashion and in spite of their teachers. The ordinary get passed along until they are dumped out of the end of the educational alimentary canal, while the criminally-inclined gravitate toward that interest – at least until they run afoul of the law. This is all terribly frustrating to read about, especially for people like myself who remember better educational times, before educational heresies such as ‘whole word’ reading, the New Math, ‘relevance’, and sundry other horrors took over the classroom. A group of commenters are lamenting this at According to Hoyt. Truly, truly I say unto you, there is no way that when and if my daughter has children that they are going to public school. I’ll homeschool the little darlings myself, read to them aloud every afternoon or evening, and take them to every museum and educational outreach establishment that there is. And as many books as they want to read; I mean, my brother and I had the complete set of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, and read every volume from cover to cover for the fun of it.
Another aspect of this ongoing educational malpractice is that our taxes are paying through the nose for it. In some cases and in some localities, parents are paying Maserati prices for Yugo results – a situation for which the teachers’ unions don’t even have the grace to be ashamed. And finally, learning of so many incidents of bullying of vulnerable students during the school day, and through social media after it; well, who would want their child exposed a real-life and institutionalized Lord of the Flies, every day and all day? What parent, being moderately well-educated themselves and having access to some resources couldn’t do a better job of educating their children at that? I’m just surprised that there aren’t more stay-at-home parents home educating. Discuss.
Period log and stone farmhouse at Becker Vinyards
Now and again, I dream of what I would like for my very own bespoke retirement property … only that it wouldn’t be retirement, actually; I’ll be working until the day that the medical examiner’s van carts me away. Being retired just means that you do the work you want to do, not the work you have to do … but I would like to have a place done up to my own specifications. To start with – the land itself; an acre would do, maybe an acre and a half. I’d like a slightly rolling property, oriented towards the west to catch the sunset.. I’d like the land to be scattered with a few oak trees – craggy, with gnarled branches, but I’m not particular about what kind. Just oaks; post oaks, live oaks, red oaks, all for the shade, and to hang a wooden swing from a thick branch that parallels the ground. I don’t need a spectacular view, but I would like it to be mostly of countryside: perhaps a glimpse of a distant creek or river.
I’d want a good-sized vegetable and herb garden; expanded from what I have now. Raised beds would be ideal; filled with good soil and the proper nutrients. A good-sized kitchen garden would have to be surrounded with a stout wire fence. It is exasperating to have a good crop of tomatoes or squash coming in, only to discover that hungry rodents and deer – those enormous rats with hooves and antlers – have helped themselves. I’d have a good variety of kitchen herbs hanging from baskets. Herbs seem to do incredibly well in coconut-fiber lined baskets; this year I have one with a thyme plant spilling over the side and hanging halfway to the ground. Perhaps my garden and dream-house plan would include an arbor of unpeeled cedar poles, from which to hang the baskets of herbs. I’d have to have a place to shelter tender plants during those cold winter snaps when it gets down to or below freezing. Plants that scrape through a cold snap in San Antonio would not do as well during the winter in the Hills … so I likely I would need a permanent small greenhouse.
In addition to the existing trees, I would also plant more; at least a couple of almond verbenas, which start as shrubs and with any encouragement at all turn into medium-sized ornamentals. They aren’t much to look at, but the clusters of tiny flowers have the most amazing sweet almond smell. I’d also have some redbud trees for the look, and a couple of bearing fruit trees. My choice would fall on peaches, plums, and a good pecan tree. The trees would bridge the gap between the practical vegetable garden, and my dream ornamental garden; heavily tilted towards native and native-adapted plants which look after themselves. There would be roses, though – the hardy varieties which would be picked out more for their scent than their appearance. There would also be shrubs to attract birds, butterflies and bees, and a tangle of jasmine somewhere, which would bring their scent in through the windows on those spring days before the summer heat sets in.
And that leads to the house; and that is where I go off, into the the non-standard. I wouldn’t want a single big house, but an eccentric collection of cottages, set in the landscape described. I would like a little house for myself, and two or three others, one for my daughter, and another one or two which would serve as guest quarters when I had company, just enough set apart that we all would have privacy. I’d love to have a well, with one of those old windmill pumps, to bring the water to an above-ground concrete or wooden cistern on legs … just as I have seen on some old properties around the Hill Country.
As for the little houses on the property … I would prefer Craftsman-style bungalows or small Texas farmhouses, maybe even a one or two of them might be repurposed log cabins. The cabins would be the kind with a main room and a loft bedroom over, a kitchen lean-to on the back and a deep porch across the front. One or two of those would suit just fine, but even just a couple of those kit houses from Home Depot would work well, assuming that I could adorn them with vintage architectural surplus.
The final element would be a separate entertainment kitchen – just one large room set up to do brewing and cheese-making, an industrial-sized stove and a deep sink, and outside of it, another deep porch with a barbeque grill and enough space to throw a good party. I’d have an area nearby this all paved in brick or stone; and where the main garden ornament would be. That would be a fountain; a good-sized tall stone one, rather like the ones that adorn the private courtyards in the old houses I used to see in Spain, with a wide enough ledge to sit on surrounding the lower pool. And when I had a party, the guests could enjoy the sound of trickling water, the scent of almond verbena, and look at the late afternoon sun setting in the distance. I love what I have seen in the Sisterdale area; the hills, the creeks, the view to the west, with rolling hills. Ah – I might dream. It is my profession, of sorts; that dreaming thing.
(Crossposted at my book blog)
Such has been the sad state of our very own dear media creatures in these United States lately that I have begun again to read the English newspapers, or their on-line iteration – mostly the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and mostly because the worthy reporters for those establishments don’t seem to give a damn or not if they are ever invited to interview members of the Obama administration or not and thus have no inclination to soft-ball their coverage of American political matters as regards the present occupant of the White House and his administrative flunkies. Frankly, this is rather refreshing, although the Daily Mail site seems to be regularly curated by people who can’t spell, are innocently unscathed by knowledge of the customary rules of grammar and have a penchant for semi-weekly stories about well-trodden aspects of WWII posted as if they were the latest word, evah!
Anyway, one of the regular tropes on the Daily Mail are stories about neighbors from hell; sometimes about spectacular neighborhood feuds between people whom you thought might have known better (some of whom seem at best to be deranged), but most reliably about another kind of neighbor; the ‘council house and violent’ kind having it out with their hapless neighbors. I presume, from the context of the Mail, and from various other sources (movies and popular genre novels like this one, and this one) that ‘council house’ equates to the American version of public housing, or more especially ‘Section 8’ houses … and the presence of certain clients of social services in public or Section 8 are not particularly welcome among their neighbors. Not that I wish to be particularly snotty about this; but any fool can tell you that in a working-class neighborhood of house-proud home owners, the sudden presence of a family moving in with their rent paid by public funds is not often a very often a good or a welcome thing, with or without any racial element attached. Especially if the new neighbors are inconsiderate, destructive and hostile (or oughtright criminal) – and if it turns out that nothing much can be done to dislodge them, as seems to often be the case in once-great Britain. (Unlike the landlord in this story – who has a fine appreciation for a responsible kind of tenant-mix in his properties.)
One of the most recent of these stories – and one of the most depressing is this one; of a career welfare recipient with pink-dyed hair who has never, ever held a paying job or apparently a legal marriage, but who has still managed to birth and raise at government expense, no less than eleven offspring. One of her current neighbors had the most viciously accurate comment; describing her uterus as a clown-car. At any rate, this woman seems to have gotten the local council to place her and her spawn at some considerable expense in a custom-renovated house. Why Ms Heather Frost is to be deserving of this is a question unanswered or perhaps better yet, unasked by the council housing authorities, although I’ll bet a lot of her prospective neighbors are demanding to know. She doesn’t seem to have any particular qualities which would justify this tender consideration, other than being warm, breathing, indiscriminant with her favors and embarrassingly fertile. And it also appears that she and her offspring made life such a hell for one of their unlucky neighbors – an elderly widow – that the poor woman couldn’t even turn up the sound on her television without inviting regular, sustained abuse and vandalism. This wasn’t the only account of this kind of situation, oh, no – a couple of months ago, another such neighbor, this time a well-educated and relatively young university lecturer was driven to commit suicide by a similarly feral lot of neighbors. (Can’t find the link – but remember reading it.)
What a hell the local housing authorities create for working-class good neighbors, I must say; it’s almost as if they revel in assigning the hellish, destructive and improvident to live among them – as if cutting loose people like Ms Frost and her brood are a punishment for responsible homeowners who don’t have the wherewithal to respond by moving away, or hiring effective legal help. It’s purely a pity that hellish council house tenants and Section 8 recipients with form can’t all be sent to live in a neighborhood all together, where all they can do is make each other miserable, instead of blameless and quiet-loving working-class homeowners. Or better yet – right next door to those housing authorities
So another week in Chez Hayes, sportsfans; Blondie and I are both creeping back to something resembling health after a bout with the current crud, which may or may not be this years’ flu. Whether or not – it’s a hum-dinger. The comprehensive exhaustion, lack of appetite and the racking cough are something special, and in my case, it is added to the mysterious chronic cough that has had me sounding at intervals as if I were hacking up a lung, ever since the end of November. This is especially mysterious, as I have never smoked. A chronic cough lasting for three months has challenged my medical provider at the BAMC family clinic. Tuesday afternoon I returned from another appointment bearing some serious prescriptions; including for a cough syrup containing codeine, another round of antibiotics and two sorts of inhalers, which I may yet figure out how to use effectively. I know, I am supposed to breathe in two puffs of the ‘emergency’ inhaler … the first attempt made me cough, yet again …
So, it appears that Oooogo Chavez has finally shuffled off this mortal – not unexpectedly, as the folks at Rantburg have been putting up the pic of him with hovering buzzards for about a week or so. I know, speak no ill of the dead … but I’ll bet you anything that Sean Penn is curled up in the fetal position, sobbing uncontrollably. And Venezuela is now blaming the US for Oooogo’s demise, which I would find as amusing as hell since the current administration now must come up with some kind of response, or not… depending. Ah, well – comes on the same day of a couple of other foreign relations crises come to a full boil and likely claiming President Kardashian’s butterfly attention; Iran and North Korea both may have nukes. What fun.
Sigh – yet another black celebrity makes my personal ban-list. Now it’s Bill Cosby, apparently mouthing the canard that the GOP wants to bring back slavery … I had thought better of old Coz, but now alas, he seems to have drunk the racial solidarity Kool-aide. Bye, Coz – it was nice to have been a fan.
And that’s been my week so far – yours?
(I knew this poem from an anthology collection that I had as a kid – it was called The Magic Circle – and I suppose my sister wound up with it, although most of our childhood books wound up in my possession, as I was the first of the four of us to produce offspring. Something – never mind what – reminded me of it, and my daughter had never, ever heard of this poem before. It turns out to be very obscure and finding it by routine googlectomy took some time.)
Achilles Deatheridge
“Your name is Achilles Deatheridge?
How old are you, my boy?”
“I’m sixteen past and I went to the war
From Athens, Illinois.”
“Achilles Deatheridge, you have done
A deed of dreadful note.” “It comes of his wearing a battered hat,
And a rusty, wrinkled coat.”
“Why didn’t you know how plain he is?
And didn’t you ever hear, He goes through the lines by day or night
Like a sooty cannoneer?”
“You must have been half dead for sleep,
For the dawn was growing bright.”
“Well, Captain, I had stood right there
Since six o’clock last night.”
“I cocked my gun at the swish of the grass
And how am I at fault
When a dangerous looking man won’t stop
When a sentry hollers halt?”
“I cried out halt and he only smiled
And waved his hand like that.
Why, any Johnnie could wear the coat
And any fellow the hat.”
“I hollered halt again and he stopped
And lighted a fresh cigar.
I never noticed his shoulder badge,
And I never noticed a star.”
“So you arrested him? Well, Achilles,
When you hear the swish of the grass If it’s General Grant inspecting the lines
Hereafter let him pass.”
But not so bad a case as Bob Woodward is having, I’ll bet. So the automatic spending cutbacks are set to take place tomorrow, and the dominoes begin to fall. Slowly, I think at first, and then faster and faster. Will John Boehner hang onto his newly rediscovered backbone? Will the citizens of this great nation fall once again for the old ‘Closing the Washington Monument’ ploy, wherein a government activity (such as the Park Service) when faced with a proposed budget cut, threatens to cut the most useful/attractive/popular activity within it’s purview? Will President Kardashian be able to finger-point and hector his way out of this one? Probably not, and in any case, he’s probably got a golf game scheduled, and Mrs. O has another television appearance to make. I have it on good authority that she’s angling for the personal appearance grand-slam; a guest appearance as the NBC weather reporter, announcing the prize winners at this year’s Poteet Strawberry Festival, and surprise celebrity judge on America’s Got Talent. It’s a pity that the guest-star gig on Downton Abbey fell through, though. I understand it was a scheduling conflict – there wasn’t enough room for Mrs. O’s entourage at Highclere Castle.
So here we are, one-sixth in to 2013, and the White House seems to be declaring war on Bob “Follow the Money†Woodward, for – I guess – insufficient reverence towards our very own dear President Kardashian. I guess what we are about to see a demonstration of is whether the Chicago Way can really be scaled up nationally. Well, it can – the last four years have been a demonstration of that – but the key question now is – for how long? And is there enough popcorn to last? Ah, well – with poor old Richard Milhaus, the established press seemed to hate his guts on general principles anyway; IIRC, the Washington peanut gallery was cheering on Woodward and Bernstein all the way. Whether they will do the same now – that, as any number of press puppets standing in front of a government building to do their closer are wont to say – remains to be seen. If there is a preference cascade in the making, it might depend on how many other reporters have that ‘O-F-I’ moment and decide to let the chips fall where they may, now that the Grand Old Man of the Washington Press Corpse has led the way. On the other hand – jobs are hard to find these days. On the third hand, given the way in which print media outlets are collapsing – sometimes there is an advantage in jumping before you are pushed.
So – tomorrow begins another month; beginning of the end, or end of the beginning? That all remains to be seen.
Well, damn … so they were. They were written up in the media this morning, which was nice, I suppose. I skimmed the list of winners and noted that I had not gone to see any of them at all. This has been happening more and more often, of late. Curiously, those movies are being released on DVD almost as soon as they have premiered, so that ones’ chances of actually catching them in a theater are, shall we say, diminished. The only movie that we actually made an effort to go see was “The Hobbit†and we went all out to see it at the local Alamo Drafthouse, where we could get dinner and a drink in the theater along with the movie. If going to the theater to see a movie is the expense that it has become these days, might as well go all out. Getting back to the Oscars, I also skimmed the pics of the various personalities arriving, and didn’t see any outrageous get-ups, not like Bjorks’ infamous swan dress. The only big tizzy is that Michelle Obama appeared via remote feed to help present the best picture award. Sigh. There, too, oh Lord? Like Chicken Man, she’s everywhere, she’s everywhere! Just another reason not to watch self-reverential award shows for an increasingly incestuous industry. I might also get away with throwing in the observation that the old canard about Washington being show business for ugly people is in danger of being invalidated…
Sigh … where was I? Oh, yes, Hollywood and showbiz in general, and the fact that most of Hollywood’s shining stars seem perfectly willing to jump into bed, metaphorically speaking, with the Obama Administration. The thought of being a repeat guest at the White House must be a tempting prospect to the many Hollywood A-listers, and those who only dream of it … but still, there is a large chunk of the country who is not absolutely enamored of Barry O and M’Shell. I count myself among them, naturally – and I am given to wonder, if the Hollywood elite who are inclined to worship at the shrine of Obama won’t eventually pay a price for it, in popularity with the general public. I do know that my own household is maintaining an ever-growing list of personalities whose movies and shows we will no longer patronize, precisely because of this unfortunate tendency. As the cost of producing mainstream movies goes up, and as the general public picks and chooses more carefully, won’t this eventually begin to bite? Something to think about, anyway.
Presented without comment.
Or, how many sleeping cats can cram into a single small animal bed?
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It’s kind of creepy, seeing events in real life pattern themselves after thriller novels and Hollywood movies; proof of anything that God – or the Fates – do have an ironic sense of humor. Like certain other bloggers and commenters I am on my knees with gratitude that the asteroid/comet fragment/whatever which detonated upon hitting the atmosphere over the Urals a few days ago did not hit at the height of the Cold War. That would likely have set off a chain of unfortunate events, for which those surviving remnants of the old Soviet high command would have been very sorry afterwards … well, maybe they would have been sorry, but on the other hand, opportunities are not to be wasted. Still – a repeat of Tunguska is fascinating enough, and so is the fact that it was caught on so many dash-cams and CCTV cameras. It’ll be as hard to blame it on global warming as it would be on the US, although some are apparently trying their best. But the wittiest observation on the whole matter simply has to go to a commenter at the Belmont Club, who observed “In Post-Soviet Russia, SPACE EXPLORES YOU!â€
When I was a kid, and hearing this on the classical station which was all my mother allowed on the house radio, I thought this was the most beautiful and lyrical thing I had ever heard. Presented for your edification with subtitles.
Yeah, so I’m a middlebrow with conventional tastes. Deal.
Connor, the middle-aged Malti-poo is at the veterinarians office today, to sort out why he has been throwing up for the last day and a half, has no appetite and is terribly lethargic. The bill for his treatment will be an unexpected expense for me … so anyone going to my book blog and purchasing copies of To Truckee’s Trail, Daughter of Texas, Deep in the Heart, or the Adelsverein Trilogy in the separate volumes will help me to square matters with the vet, and put Connor back where he belongs, sleeping peacefully under my desk.
I was a teenager when the Manson murders went down, in the autumn of 1969 – of course, the cruel and inexplicable murder of a movie star and several of her friends made all the headlines, and had lots of law-abiding citizens looking over their shoulders and being very careful about locking the doors and windows of their homes at night. It wasn’t until some time later that the associated murders of an elderly retired couple also hit the headlines of the LA Times, and other national newspapers. A blood-drenched, hippy cult with a weirdly charismatic leader had committed those murders in order – so they claimed – to trigger a devastating racial war, which they termed ‘helter-skelter’ from a Beatles song moderately popular at the time. Well, it was the late 1960ies; after assassinations, race riots and anti-war protests, ordinary citizens were pretty shell-shocked. A lot of extremely deranged people held equally deranged beliefs back then, and continued to do so for a good few years – cults and communes like Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple, for instance. My parents often resignedly repeated the truism about the US having been tilted at a steep angle, and all the unmoored nutcases, nonconformists and grifters sliding west and ending up in California. Having both been born there, and with recollections of how it used to be, they would grumble about how they wished such people would slide the hell back to where they came from, and stop embarrassing hard-working and relatively conservative citizens of the Golden State.
Helter-skelter didn’t happen – well, not then, anyway. Reading this week about Christopher Dorner, the ex-LAPD cop and former Navy reserve officer, with a chip on his shoulder the size of an an aircraft carrier and a string of revenge murders on his slate … now, I could see helter-skelter happening now, forty years later. A lot of things have happened over in Los Angeles, not many of them for the better. One of them is that the LAPD are nowhere near as respected now as they were formerly. It might very well be that they were no more or less competent or corrupt then than they are now, but it is the public perception of them now that sets the bitter tone. Corruption scandals like the slow train-wreck of Rampart division, the beating of Rodney King, the perception of racism among police officers which allowed OJ Simpson’s legal team to plead for acquittal on those grounds … all of those incidents and accidents have blotted the LAPD’s reputation in the eyes of ordinary citizens of all races.
So, is Christopher Dorner a good and moral man driven mad by the system, or a race-card pulling manipulator with a very hot temper? Big boastful talker or a cold and calculating planner of a campaign of murder? The various stories in the news about the matter have it both ways and every gradation in between. One can take away anything that one wishes to see in his posted manifesto; in any case, the man has gone Rambo, and gone to ground, leaving at least fifty families under police protection, and three people – who looked nothing at all like him, but merely had the misfortune to be driving pickup trucks with a likeness to his vehicle – injured by panicky LAPD officers opening fire. Where is he now? Lost and dying of exposure in the woods at Big Bear, or blending into the background in a comfortable hide-out in Compton. Heading into Canada, or into Mexico, or just laying low until the row dies down? When and if he emerges again, and encounters the LAPD – or any other law enforcement body – the chances of it ending quietly with an uncontested arrest are pretty small. And should it end quietly or not – what are the chances of riots breaking out, regardless?
(crossposted at chicagoboyz.net)
This brought on by a series of color pictures of women working in factories in WWII.
(Through Chicagoboyz.net, who also found the link to the Carbon Leaf song.)