Wednesday, approx. 5:20 PM local time, seated on the couch with my Poor Wife at my side and Mr. Stinky on my lap on the usual grounds that he'd be the first to know when I got up, possibly resulting in food, even though he should know (and in fact does) that he won't get fed again until 8. Larry was presumably in the basement due to the thunderstorm activity event the weather hairdo had just finished showing us and describing as "remarkably narrow"--something I, with over 50 years weather experience, scoffed at, seeing as how the thing was at least a county wide for much of its hundred-mile length, which seems more like "average" and certainly not "remarkable". It was about two minutes later when I heard the most intense thunderclap I've ever heard in my life (though neither the loudest nor the most impressive), followed (if that word may be used to distinguish the Speed of Sound from the only fractionally slower Speed of Cat startled by thunder) by the fortuitously freshly claw-clipped Mr. Stinky departing the general region of my gonads in a Big Goddam Hurry. At roughly the same moment my Poor Wife was launched a good foot in the air, bounced twice, and locked me in a death grip on landing.
Oh, do not get ahead of me, young tech-savvy interneteers--a few hours passed before I entered my office to find the expected throbbing orange sleep-indicator light in fully flaccid, necessitating a flexing of my UNIX muscles (the sum total of which being the fsck -y command) a reboot, and a quick if hopelessly-last-century dial-up connection to check email with an eye toward cutting Mitch Daniels down to size thereafter (oh, wait...). Instead, a "Modem not responding please check your connection and settings" alert. It is never anything to do with the settings. Once in a while it might be the connection. Still, I check both, because the sign told me to, then I turn on the sound and try to reconnect, and there's no dial tone. So I went over to the kitchen phone and picked it up and heard...a dial tone. Shit.
I went upstairs to my wife's office. Her computer is on a different phone line, but it's the same story. I plugged a phone into that line and dialed our home number and heard the bedroom phone ring. We're fucked.
Of course, this is entirely my fault because I'm what passes for the geek around here. For the first decade or so of computer ownership I dutifully ran around unplugging everything anytime a storm was coming, but I've become complacent. The current surge protectors must be seven years old, and the phone lines weren't plugged into them.
But here is where we exit the reminder to brush your teeth, wash your hands, and keep your pubic region barbered and re-enter the realm of Panglossian economics, because it took only a short time to reacquaint myself with the gaping holes surrounding the total lack of substance in that whole "Aren't you glad you live in a technological wonderland?" schtick.
I'm basically a frugal fellow, but not out of any real respect for money. I'm more than willing to spend what other people would describe as exorbitantly on something I want. There are $200-$300 bottles of wine in my cellar. I buy eyeglasses at the priciest joint in town, and I can't remember when I bought a pair of shoes for under 150 bucks. But I'll tie a broken shoelace together and keep going until the shoe wears out, my non-professional wardrobe is by M. Targét, and I wash and reuse aluminum foil. It's more a reaction to incessant waste than miserliness, but there you go. I have no real intention of buying a new computer (or a car) until the old one doesn't work anymore.
But with a car you can control that somewhat--they still make tires that fit my '95 coupé, and I can still get the proper oil filter and air cleaner and parts for any of the three other mechanical things I've capable of doing myself, but nursing a computer through a decade is a bitch.
So we have six-year-old G3 Macs, my wife and I, and they do everything they've always done, and the only thing I've run into that would require an upgrade is that dual-sided DVD recording business, which means I'll get around to dual-sided DVD recording the next time I buy a new computer, unless DVDs are obsolete by then. By just try telling a repairman you've got a six-year-old machine. You'll get the same response asking him where he stocks the sleeve garters.
I decided that the best approach was to buy a single external modem and see if that solved the problem. $20-30 would beat any repair cost. So I was off to the nearest Big Box at 9 the next morning, only to have to search for fifteen minutes to even find modems (I suspected they'd be hidden somewhere in the Unloved section with the floppy drives and blank 125 MB Zip discs, and they were; I would have asked for help but the three or four knots of employees seemed to be enjoying themselves so much I hated to interfere). Then every single one of 'em is a Windows product. I had not really anticipated this problem in the second half of the USB decade, but watcha gonna do? Three more stops at three more Boxes, plus a side trip to The Apple Store, which is now apparently The iPod Store, Where Do You Think You're Going, Gramps?, with no luck. Home to the Yellow Pages, realizing all the while that this problem would be solved almost instantaneously if I had a freakin' internet connection. Search "Computers--Service and Repair" or whatever it was for little Apple symbols. The first guy I found had no address--not generally a good sign, but he was cheery, told me he had one but not two external modems in stock ("Jus' want but one," says I), but was too busy to meet me anyplace (explaining the lack of address), but he knew for a fact that Fry Electronics near me (that is, 12 miles away) had them. Off to Fry, where the employees are too busy enjoying the latest in electronic wonders to bother wondering why you're there, where I finally find the Apple modems, which read "Required: G4 computer or later." Back home, with one more futile stop in between, call Mr. Homeless Mac Repair again and tell him, nicely, that the modems at Fry weren't G3-compatible, and what did he have in stock? to which he replied, "Oh, I didn't realize you had a G3." Understandable enough, I guess, since I'd only mentioned it twice. But he was a nice guy, and he told me about a repair shop which might have the parts, and I tried them and everything worked out ducky, plus the modems were all that was damaged.
But O, Brave New Electronics Boutique! Who in hell voted for you? Is it possible that Jane Galt, et. al., have never been obsolescenced? I can't imagine they have long to wait, assuming it registers. I'm fifty-two. I remember tube testing machines in the front of drugstores, next to the stamp machine. All those 78s my grandmother gave me were already history, but it was at least a decade before I bought a turntable that wouldn't play 'em. Since then, of course, my vinyl collection has been superceded (but not replaced), most of my cassettes are in critical condition (I never owned an 8-track), and I've got a few hundred videotapes I'll probably have to be buried with just for the sake of space, but those things can mostly be used. So far as I know it's still legal, though perhaps not competitive, to play tennis with a racket smaller than Lincoln Navigator. But what in hell am I going to do with the 14 400 baud modem in the basement, let alone the 9600? Anybody need some 44MB SyQuest cartridges? A grayscale scanner?
Okay, sure, technology marches on, and I'm not trying to stand in the way. It's just that once you've spent two whole days trying to get stuff repaired and even the guy at the Used Mac store looks at you like the only explanation he can come up with is you just woke up from a coma, it's time to put the question to all those people who can't live without the latest ringtone: just how long do you imagine you'll want to keep running after this crap as it changes before your eyes? I'm glad you're enjoying the ride--it is exhilarating--but check that ticket again. You want off, you have to jump.
Saturday, September 30
Wednesday, September 27
Happy Birthday
Asashoryu Akinori (born Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj)
The 68th Yokozuna
born September 27, 1980, Ulan Bator, Mongolia
• 18 Makuuchi Championships
• Only man to win all six honbasho in a single calendar year
• Only man to win seven honbasho in a row
• Won 84 bouts out of 90 in 2005
• Career record: 460-126-17 (.785)
• Yokozuna record: 254-44-17 (.852)
• 4 Zensho Yusho (perfect 15-0 record in basho)
Tuesday, September 26
Pangloss School of Economics Quarterly Report
Roy unearths another example, this time from Jane Galt:
Of course, you wouldn't make this sort of argument if you weren't trying to prove something, and it's the sort of thing that's driven me crazy since Physics 1&2 back in 1970, before the invention of Harvest Gold, when they ran us through the standard experiments designed to prove that Light is both A Particle and A Wave, and that you therefore should find yourself shaking hands with Quantum Mechanics, except that all I noticed was that the experiments were not consistent, so it really just made me question the people who were selling the textbooks. If they'd have just started off explaining the thing to me I'd have believed 'em. I didn't think they had any real reason to lie about such things.
So too, you know, I'm willing to give your argument a fair hearing, but when you hang the whole thing on the fatuous notion that I'd never part with my Best of All Possible iPods I'm reminded we're no closer to a cure for idiocy than we were thirty years ago, despite the need being that much greater.
Okay, one: if you simply must do this sort of thing, avoid Lileksification at all costs. People who were co-ordinating Avocado appliances and yellow formica countertops in the 70s have just as miserable taste in interior decor today, just not so dated. Nothing survives being thought of, as Oscar Wilde said. Your hipster eyewear and flat-screen latte machines are gonna be grist for some smirking retro-trendoid mill by 2036. Count on it.
Two: no internet. Cheap applause line, a Lee Greenwood lyric before the start of the Daytona 500. Hey, I loves me some internet, but I didn't pine away for it in the 70s. Apart from meeting people from around the globe, the internet means free pornography and information at my fingertips instead of a mile away at the public library in case it's not in my own.
Three: no cell phones. And none going off in the middle of a movie, and no self-obsessed bimbo carrying on a conversation about his personal life at the top of his lungs as the two of you share a grocery aisle.
This is not your standard curmudgeonly retort. It's "Conservatives" who are always going on about modern life going to hell in a basket of some sort or other, but here's a device which has clearly increased the public rudeness factor at least 6x, and that's without touching what it does on the roadways, but it makes life worth living because you can call your broker from the dry cleaners.
So this is perhaps the time to make the general point about this sort of hooey. Darwin changed the world without knowing anything of genetics, and Shakespeare changed the language without decent medical care. One has to ask what benefit we get from all this technology that makes our times so superior.
Four: no cheap air travel to exotic climes. And no rapid spread of regional diseases into worldwide pandemics. I'm sorry if that's a flippant answer, but it's a flippant comment. How many poor people--how many middle-class people--are jumping on planes for tropical locales on a regular basis? I'm comfortably upper middle class, yet any such trip would require I decide what to give up of equal or greater value, just like it did in the 70s.
Five: no computers, no asthma drugs, three channels and nothing on. So now I've got 120 channels and nothing on, and the easiest way to relate to any stranger is to talk not about Art or current events, but about Survivor. Plus anyone who's ever been on a program is a celebrity for life. You can't even get rid of Howie Mandel. There's a reason it's so profitable to repackage so-called reality into so-called programming: it's because the audience no longer knows what reality is like. Reality is the fucking remote.
Really, remember that when Warhol said everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, he meant fifteen minutes and out. Back then you starred in Johnny Reb, US Marshall, or you crooned a couple of hits for latter-day bobby soxers, and that was it. You had amused us to the fullest extent of your talent, now go invest in real estate. Sunday, Brittany Spears was on the cover of one section of my paper. Why? Her job description for the last three years has been "public embarrassment", and she doesn't even have to produce anything to keep it.
And of course no one's going to argue than medical improvements are a bad thing, but then every time I have to go into the hospital I'm paying for all of it. I pay for equipment I don't need, amenities I don't want, fantastically expensive specialized care that doesn't just save or extend lives but helps infertile couples conceive sextuplets and increases and decreases bust sizes as fashion dictates. Being tested half to death may make you safer than you were in 1973, but it sure makes you poorer a lot quicker, too.
Six: longer life expectancies. Very nice, I'm sure, provided you can afford it. In 1973 you might still imagine you could live on Social Security. At least you had no reason to suspect it would be yanked out from under you.
But let's note here that "longer life expectancies" is not just a linear, March-of-Science achievement but the result of a lot of things that "Conservatives" or Conservo-Libertarians don't think much of. Safer automobiles, safer households, public anti-smoking campaigns, all accomplished with government dollars and "nuisance" lawsuits. It's not just the medical-science-assisted extension of your Golden Years you get to hope you're healthy and wealthy enough to enjoy.
This offer may be void in certain areas if you're a young black male.
I don't know that any of this is meant to be taken any more seriously than Jane's "Harvest Gold" crack. I hope not, or not much. Because--ye gods and little fishes, if this plastic gimcrack society is the Civilization we think our young people should be killing and dying for it won't be too long before the guns are turned the other direction.
But let's say we could find someone who makes $29,931 today, and remembers the 1970's. Do you think that if you offered to send him back to 1973, with 4% more than the 1973 median income, he'd take you up on the deal? What if you doubled that, to 8%? What if you sent him back to 1973 making 15 or 20% more than the median wage, so that he could keep the wife at home and still enjoy a modern level of household income?
Personally, I wouldn't take the deal . . . and not just because I'd be the one stuck at home trying to make the Harvest Gold drapes match the new Avocado refrigerator. 1973 means no internet. No cell phones. No cheap air travel to exotic foreign climes. No computers. No blessed asthma drugs (see my co-blogger's memoir for just how much this means). Three television channels and nothing good on any of them. Expensive books. Air pollution. Shorter life expectancies . More crowded housing. About the only thing more available then were Manhattan apartments, and that was because the muggers were cramping everyone's style. Yes, we all wish we'd done like my parents and bought a co-op in 1973--but that's because we want to live in it now, not then.
Of course, you wouldn't make this sort of argument if you weren't trying to prove something, and it's the sort of thing that's driven me crazy since Physics 1&2 back in 1970, before the invention of Harvest Gold, when they ran us through the standard experiments designed to prove that Light is both A Particle and A Wave, and that you therefore should find yourself shaking hands with Quantum Mechanics, except that all I noticed was that the experiments were not consistent, so it really just made me question the people who were selling the textbooks. If they'd have just started off explaining the thing to me I'd have believed 'em. I didn't think they had any real reason to lie about such things.
So too, you know, I'm willing to give your argument a fair hearing, but when you hang the whole thing on the fatuous notion that I'd never part with my Best of All Possible iPods I'm reminded we're no closer to a cure for idiocy than we were thirty years ago, despite the need being that much greater.
Okay, one: if you simply must do this sort of thing, avoid Lileksification at all costs. People who were co-ordinating Avocado appliances and yellow formica countertops in the 70s have just as miserable taste in interior decor today, just not so dated. Nothing survives being thought of, as Oscar Wilde said. Your hipster eyewear and flat-screen latte machines are gonna be grist for some smirking retro-trendoid mill by 2036. Count on it.
Two: no internet. Cheap applause line, a Lee Greenwood lyric before the start of the Daytona 500. Hey, I loves me some internet, but I didn't pine away for it in the 70s. Apart from meeting people from around the globe, the internet means free pornography and information at my fingertips instead of a mile away at the public library in case it's not in my own.
Three: no cell phones. And none going off in the middle of a movie, and no self-obsessed bimbo carrying on a conversation about his personal life at the top of his lungs as the two of you share a grocery aisle.
This is not your standard curmudgeonly retort. It's "Conservatives" who are always going on about modern life going to hell in a basket of some sort or other, but here's a device which has clearly increased the public rudeness factor at least 6x, and that's without touching what it does on the roadways, but it makes life worth living because you can call your broker from the dry cleaners.
So this is perhaps the time to make the general point about this sort of hooey. Darwin changed the world without knowing anything of genetics, and Shakespeare changed the language without decent medical care. One has to ask what benefit we get from all this technology that makes our times so superior.
Four: no cheap air travel to exotic climes. And no rapid spread of regional diseases into worldwide pandemics. I'm sorry if that's a flippant answer, but it's a flippant comment. How many poor people--how many middle-class people--are jumping on planes for tropical locales on a regular basis? I'm comfortably upper middle class, yet any such trip would require I decide what to give up of equal or greater value, just like it did in the 70s.
Five: no computers, no asthma drugs, three channels and nothing on. So now I've got 120 channels and nothing on, and the easiest way to relate to any stranger is to talk not about Art or current events, but about Survivor. Plus anyone who's ever been on a program is a celebrity for life. You can't even get rid of Howie Mandel. There's a reason it's so profitable to repackage so-called reality into so-called programming: it's because the audience no longer knows what reality is like. Reality is the fucking remote.
Really, remember that when Warhol said everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, he meant fifteen minutes and out. Back then you starred in Johnny Reb, US Marshall, or you crooned a couple of hits for latter-day bobby soxers, and that was it. You had amused us to the fullest extent of your talent, now go invest in real estate. Sunday, Brittany Spears was on the cover of one section of my paper. Why? Her job description for the last three years has been "public embarrassment", and she doesn't even have to produce anything to keep it.
And of course no one's going to argue than medical improvements are a bad thing, but then every time I have to go into the hospital I'm paying for all of it. I pay for equipment I don't need, amenities I don't want, fantastically expensive specialized care that doesn't just save or extend lives but helps infertile couples conceive sextuplets and increases and decreases bust sizes as fashion dictates. Being tested half to death may make you safer than you were in 1973, but it sure makes you poorer a lot quicker, too.
Six: longer life expectancies. Very nice, I'm sure, provided you can afford it. In 1973 you might still imagine you could live on Social Security. At least you had no reason to suspect it would be yanked out from under you.
But let's note here that "longer life expectancies" is not just a linear, March-of-Science achievement but the result of a lot of things that "Conservatives" or Conservo-Libertarians don't think much of. Safer automobiles, safer households, public anti-smoking campaigns, all accomplished with government dollars and "nuisance" lawsuits. It's not just the medical-science-assisted extension of your Golden Years you get to hope you're healthy and wealthy enough to enjoy.
This offer may be void in certain areas if you're a young black male.
I don't know that any of this is meant to be taken any more seriously than Jane's "Harvest Gold" crack. I hope not, or not much. Because--ye gods and little fishes, if this plastic gimcrack society is the Civilization we think our young people should be killing and dying for it won't be too long before the guns are turned the other direction.
That's Fucked Up
Channel 13 Hairwitness News intro: "Some Colts fans upset over alleged halftime music."
No, it's about the story, not just the hair-brained [sic] use of "alleged" there, which is an actual quote. Local news actually made a story out of this:
Item: I haven't attended a game in about three years, but it's a goddam Dome, and the sound is cranked to 11, and my guess is it's still louder than the Blue Angels taking off directly over your head *. Loud enough that unless you know the words I'm guessing you'd be hard-pressed to pick any out.
Item: Sample:
Yo if you're fucked up, put your cups up
Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, nigga what's up
See he's a gangster, I'm a hustler
Yo it's either thank ya, or it's fuck ya
[Lyrics courtesy songs-lyrics.blogspot.com]
And the thing about that is I could have cut-and-pasted practically any four lines at random. So:
Item: I'm guessing that is not the version they played. Which seems to be backed up by what the Colts' spokesman said, and I'm paraphrasing here:
"That's not the version we played."
Item: So my sense here is that maybe, just maybe, the folks at Channel 13 knew all along they didn't play any motherfuckin' obscene lyrics but the story was just too good not to use. Call me a cynic.
Item: The Colts also announced that, despite the apparently misunderstanding, they would never, ever, ever, play that song again, because "We want to see kids at our games and we want them to have a good time and we want parents to not have to worry about what songs are played. We have to be more diligent in just screening the songs." Because God knows when you take the kids out for a wholesome afternoon of sitting just in front of several half-naked beer-swilling sports fans in blue body paint and silver glitter, the last thing you'd expect is to hear any profanity.
*Actually happened to me, May 1964, when my Dad took me to see them at the airport, for some unknown reason, although now that I think about it watching planes take off was still a popular spectator sport in the Midwest in them days. There were about six cars parked at the end of a runway and a bunch of guys milling around, and I figured we were about to see them take off across our line of sight when suddenly they roared off maybe a hundred feet over our heads. Two hundred decibels, easy. It would have drowned out the Who.
No, it's about the story, not just the hair-brained [sic] use of "alleged" there, which is an actual quote. Local news actually made a story out of this:
The Colts' play on the field gave fans plenty to cheer about, but there were jeers when it came to one of the songs played inside the RCA Dome.
The song "Go To Church" by Ice Cube, Lil Jon and Snoop Dog contains profanity and fans thought some of that bad language aired on the in-house sound system.
Item: I haven't attended a game in about three years, but it's a goddam Dome, and the sound is cranked to 11, and my guess is it's still louder than the Blue Angels taking off directly over your head *. Loud enough that unless you know the words I'm guessing you'd be hard-pressed to pick any out.
Item: Sample:
Yo if you're fucked up, put your cups up
Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, nigga what's up
See he's a gangster, I'm a hustler
Yo it's either thank ya, or it's fuck ya
[Lyrics courtesy songs-lyrics.blogspot.com]
And the thing about that is I could have cut-and-pasted practically any four lines at random. So:
Item: I'm guessing that is not the version they played. Which seems to be backed up by what the Colts' spokesman said, and I'm paraphrasing here:
"That's not the version we played."
Item: So my sense here is that maybe, just maybe, the folks at Channel 13 knew all along they didn't play any motherfuckin' obscene lyrics but the story was just too good not to use. Call me a cynic.
Item: The Colts also announced that, despite the apparently misunderstanding, they would never, ever, ever, play that song again, because "We want to see kids at our games and we want them to have a good time and we want parents to not have to worry about what songs are played. We have to be more diligent in just screening the songs." Because God knows when you take the kids out for a wholesome afternoon of sitting just in front of several half-naked beer-swilling sports fans in blue body paint and silver glitter, the last thing you'd expect is to hear any profanity.
*Actually happened to me, May 1964, when my Dad took me to see them at the airport, for some unknown reason, although now that I think about it watching planes take off was still a popular spectator sport in the Midwest in them days. There were about six cars parked at the end of a runway and a bunch of guys milling around, and I figured we were about to see them take off across our line of sight when suddenly they roared off maybe a hundred feet over our heads. Two hundred decibels, easy. It would have drowned out the Who.
Monday, September 25
Herbert Lee, Died September 25, 1961, Amite County, Mississippi
He'd been born there just short of fifty years earlier. He farmed and raised nine children. He joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. When SNCC brought its voter registration classes to southwestern Mississippi, Led attended, despite his wife's opposition.
Lee was shot and killed in broad daylight in the parking lot of a cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi by state Representative E. H. Hurst in front of several witnesses, both black and white. A coroner's jury ruled the shooting an act of justifiable homicide that afternoon. Hurst claimed that Lee had come at him with a tire iron, that he had hit him with his pistol in self-defense, and the gun went off.
The African-American witness, Louis Allen, eventually told the real story to FBI agents (sent from Alabama for the purpose; there was no FBI office in all of Mississippi). He was found shot to death out side his home on January 31, 1964. Neither crime has ever been "solved".
Lee was shot and killed in broad daylight in the parking lot of a cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi by state Representative E. H. Hurst in front of several witnesses, both black and white. A coroner's jury ruled the shooting an act of justifiable homicide that afternoon. Hurst claimed that Lee had come at him with a tire iron, that he had hit him with his pistol in self-defense, and the gun went off.
The African-American witness, Louis Allen, eventually told the real story to FBI agents (sent from Alabama for the purpose; there was no FBI office in all of Mississippi). He was found shot to death out side his home on January 31, 1964. Neither crime has ever been "solved".
Thursday, September 21
Yoo Hoo
In case you thought you noticed a listlessness in these parts, a magnification of certain middle-aged tendencies, well, it could be true. Late summer means scrambling to get various projects finished so that weather-sensitive chores can be done on time, generally with the slightly optimistic sense that this time I'm going to get ahead of it all only to realize that it was not just pure laziness that left things undone in previous years but the impossibly complex set of steps which must be completed without regard for anything else. To this one may add a demented mother and the required interactions with doctors and drug peddlers, minor computer glitchettes, football season, cat maintenance, some interesting reading, a bizarre real-life Agatha Christie interlude when I accidentally intercepted a cocktail my next-door neighbor had designed to kill his wife which caused me--so I am told, anyway--to turn ghost white and slump in my chair with my head cocked at an unnatural angle, though I was completely aware of all my surroundings and continued to carry on a conversation, if at a somewhat reduced rate of speed, and stranger still, the recurrence of an eerie psychic phenomenon which has followed me at least since age eleven, wherein I suddenly become irresistible to women. Seriously. Not all women, certainly, but enough. And certainly nothing to do with anything I've done, so far as I can tell, and if I could figure it out, believe me, I'd use it. It's a complete mystery. I'm not a handsome fellow--you can see the picture--and I'm no longer a stylish or particularly fit one, and I mostly mind my own business. I was never particularly flirtatious in my youth. I'd go months without a girlfriend, then suddenly find myself holding two generous scoops of homecoming queen or getting explicit phone calls late into the night from girls I didn't know while my stepfather pounded on the wall. Then it would stop as mysteriously as it started. I exempt my college years from the official history, of course, as the Tee Ball of Sex, but with the first job I took afterwards I slept with all six women who worked in the place without having made a pass at any of them. On one particularly memorable weekend in 1976 I, on successive nights: was thrown out of a women's restroom at last call, together with a woman who was at least five inches taller than I, engendering a standing ovation by the remaining patrons; narrowly avoided being caught in a police searchlight while partly clothed in an alley; was led on a streetlight-running chase across the northside of Indianapolis by a woman I had never spoken to before who walked up and snatched my jacket just for that purpose, and who turned out to be some sort of amateur circus gymnast. She also impersonated my doctor's receptionist calling in sick for me that Monday. In no case had I known any of the women involved two hours earlier, and none of us was drunk, a fortunate thing since I was ticketed for running one of those lights. And those are just the ones I can tell you about.
Now, I've known guys whose entire lives are pretty much like that, but the point is with me it arrives like rain in a Kalahari riverbed, and it struck again last week, a cloudburst of improbably young women standing closer than necessary or holding eye contact a couple seconds too long, and I a happy brimming brook.
It is, of course, a purely theoretical exercise lo these many decades, and, of course, my wife has some sort of natural immunity. Although at one point last weekend I did go upstairs to find the bedroom lit only by Lava Lamp, a bag of clothespins on the bed, and Billy Idol's cover of "To Be A Lover" playing on the dinky bedroom CD player. My wife is no musician, but she does have a particular appreciation of that song's tempo. Think "Bolero" on crank. I'm still having trouble using my left arm.
But then even at my age physical maladies eventually heal, but the mental torture of reading
John Yoo, "How the Presidency Regained Its Balance", New York Times September 17
has shriveled me up like a spider on a hot stove.* I think I've taken six swipes at the thing over the past four days, and they're all sitting unsaved on the desktop. Let us say that Yoo, our foremost proponent of the idea that the Supreme Court issues suggestions, writes 1100 words on the erosion (!) of Presidential authority and George W.'s selfless battle to reverse it. Let us say that he, a professor of law, manages to do so without ever citing the law but while quoting Dick Cheney, who holds the rare distinction of having served in the three most lawless administrations since Reconstruction and while evoking the well-known principle of jurisprudence (forgive me, I don't know the Latin) of "this leads to pork-barrel spending". Let us note, again, that we live in interesting times.
And just let me say that if the occasion arises again I'll happily try to send Yoo a cadre of young nubiles if it'll cure his problem.
* Little Big Man, 1970
Now, I've known guys whose entire lives are pretty much like that, but the point is with me it arrives like rain in a Kalahari riverbed, and it struck again last week, a cloudburst of improbably young women standing closer than necessary or holding eye contact a couple seconds too long, and I a happy brimming brook.
It is, of course, a purely theoretical exercise lo these many decades, and, of course, my wife has some sort of natural immunity. Although at one point last weekend I did go upstairs to find the bedroom lit only by Lava Lamp, a bag of clothespins on the bed, and Billy Idol's cover of "To Be A Lover" playing on the dinky bedroom CD player. My wife is no musician, but she does have a particular appreciation of that song's tempo. Think "Bolero" on crank. I'm still having trouble using my left arm.
But then even at my age physical maladies eventually heal, but the mental torture of reading
John Yoo, "How the Presidency Regained Its Balance", New York Times September 17
has shriveled me up like a spider on a hot stove.* I think I've taken six swipes at the thing over the past four days, and they're all sitting unsaved on the desktop. Let us say that Yoo, our foremost proponent of the idea that the Supreme Court issues suggestions, writes 1100 words on the erosion (!) of Presidential authority and George W.'s selfless battle to reverse it. Let us say that he, a professor of law, manages to do so without ever citing the law but while quoting Dick Cheney, who holds the rare distinction of having served in the three most lawless administrations since Reconstruction and while evoking the well-known principle of jurisprudence (forgive me, I don't know the Latin) of "this leads to pork-barrel spending". Let us note, again, that we live in interesting times.
And just let me say that if the occasion arises again I'll happily try to send Yoo a cadre of young nubiles if it'll cure his problem.
* Little Big Man, 1970
Tuesday, September 19
Rest Easy, America
Johansson happy with her curvy figure
NEW YORK (AP) -- Scarlett Johansson struts her stuff in cleavage-baring dresses on the red carpet, but in real life, she'd rather remain a mystery.
"I can't stand those articles where people spill their life story," Johansson says in the October issue of InStyle magazine, on newsstands Friday. "After a while I feel like I know more about them than their best friend does - and that's weird. It's better when you don't know everything."
The 21-year-old actress, whose screen credits include "Lost in Translation" and "Match Point," plays a former prostitute in "The Black Dahlia," opposite Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett.
Johansson says: "Do I ever get nervous about this, right now, being the pinnacle of my career? Yeah, I do. At the end of (filming) every movie I think, `Wow - this is the last one! Nice working with you.'"
She's more confident about her hourglass figure. "I'm curvy - I'm never going to be 5'11' and 120 pounds. But I feel lucky to have what I've got."
And, given the chance, she'd like to trade lives with President Bush. "Whose life would I like to step into for the day? The president's. I could probably get some things done in the Oval Office."
"Mr. Goodwin is not unaware of those attributes of young women which constitute the chief reliance of our race in the battle against insects."
NEW YORK (AP) -- Scarlett Johansson struts her stuff in cleavage-baring dresses on the red carpet, but in real life, she'd rather remain a mystery."I can't stand those articles where people spill their life story," Johansson says in the October issue of InStyle magazine, on newsstands Friday. "After a while I feel like I know more about them than their best friend does - and that's weird. It's better when you don't know everything."
The 21-year-old actress, whose screen credits include "Lost in Translation" and "Match Point," plays a former prostitute in "The Black Dahlia," opposite Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett.
Johansson says: "Do I ever get nervous about this, right now, being the pinnacle of my career? Yeah, I do. At the end of (filming) every movie I think, `Wow - this is the last one! Nice working with you.'"
She's more confident about her hourglass figure. "I'm curvy - I'm never going to be 5'11' and 120 pounds. But I feel lucky to have what I've got."
And, given the chance, she'd like to trade lives with President Bush. "Whose life would I like to step into for the day? The president's. I could probably get some things done in the Oval Office."
"Mr. Goodwin is not unaware of those attributes of young women which constitute the chief reliance of our race in the battle against insects."
-Rex Stout
photo: KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/AP Photo
Sunday, September 17
Joy of Matrimony, Part 683
Me (calling into the living room from my office while reading the Star online): Honey, [80s Indianapolis mullet-rocker] Henry Lee Summer was arrested for DUI in a Southside trailer park after he careened through the park, bouncing off cars, trucks, and at least one home, elbowed a Sheriff's deputy in the head, and was Tasered. And here I...
Poor Wife: Thought he couldn't even get arrested in Indianapolis any more?
Me: That is so not what I was about to say.
Friday, September 15
Birmingham, September 15, 1963
"That Sunday was the annual Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Mamie H. Grier, superintendent of the Sunday school, stopped in at the basement ladies' room to find four young girls who had left Bible classes early and were talking excitedly about the beginning of the school year. All four were dressed in white from head to toe, as this was their day to run the main service for the adults at eleven o'clock. Grier urged them to hurry along and then went upstairs to sit in on her own women's Sunday-school class. They were engaged in a lively debate on the lesson topic, "The Love That Forgives," when a loud earthquake shook the entire church and showered the classroom with plaster and debris....
"Claude Wesley, principal of Lewis Elementary School, did not often subject himself to Sunday-school classes. He had dropped his adopted daughter Cynthia at the church and then escaped to the errands of a pleasant Sunday morning. When the noise of the blast interrupted his shoeshine, he had made his way to the church, the hospital, and finally the morgue, where he and his wife identified their daughter's remains by the feet and a ring on her finger...."
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters
"As Virgil Ware, 13, soared down a lonely stretch of road outside Birmingham, Ala., perched on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle, he was happily unaware of the carnage downtown. It was Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963. At 10:22 that morning, four black girls had been killed by a dynamite bomb set by the Ku Klux Klan at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church was a focal point of Birmingham's civil rights turmoil that year, but that unrest hadn't touched Virgil and his coal-mining family, who lived in a modest, all-black suburb and rarely even saw white people. All Virgil had on his mind that day was the money he and his brothers were going to make with the newspaper route they had just secured....
"Succumbing to peer pressure, [Larry Joe] Sims had gone along with friends to a segregationist rally that day--and now he was holding a revolver that his classmate, Michael Lee Farley, 16, had handed him as they rode home on Farley's red motorbike, its small Confederate flag whipping in the wind. As they passed Virgil and his brother James, 16, Farley told Sims to fire the gun and "scare 'em." Sims closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Two bullets hit Virgil in the chest and cheek, hurling him into a ditch as the motorbike sped on. "I've been shot," Virgil said. "No you ain't," [his brother] James said in disbelief. "Just stop tremblin', and you'll be O.K."
"He wasn't. Instead, Virgil Ware became the sixth and final black person to be killed in Birmingham that Sunday. (Another youth had been shot in the back by police after he threw rocks to protest the church bombing.) Virgil was the last civil rights casualty of the summer of '63--when the defining social movement of 20th century America became a national concern and not just a Southern one. Network television brought the season's atrocities into U.S. living rooms along with the triumphs, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington 2 1/2 weeks earlier....
"Farley and Sims were charged with first-degree murder, but an all-white jury convicted Sims on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter (to which Farley then pleaded guilty). A white judge, Wallace Gibson, suspended the boys' sentences and gave them two years' probation--scolding them for their "lapse"--which made Lorene Ware "break down in the courtroom crying and hollering," recalls Melvin. Says James: "You could get more time back then for killing a good hunting dog."
Tim Padgett and Frank Sikora, "The Legacy of Virgil Ware", Time,
September 22, 2003
"If you're going to blame anyone for getting those children killed in Birmingham, it's your Supreme Court."
Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham Public Safety Director
"Claude Wesley, principal of Lewis Elementary School, did not often subject himself to Sunday-school classes. He had dropped his adopted daughter Cynthia at the church and then escaped to the errands of a pleasant Sunday morning. When the noise of the blast interrupted his shoeshine, he had made his way to the church, the hospital, and finally the morgue, where he and his wife identified their daughter's remains by the feet and a ring on her finger...."
"As Virgil Ware, 13, soared down a lonely stretch of road outside Birmingham, Ala., perched on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle, he was happily unaware of the carnage downtown. It was Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963. At 10:22 that morning, four black girls had been killed by a dynamite bomb set by the Ku Klux Klan at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church was a focal point of Birmingham's civil rights turmoil that year, but that unrest hadn't touched Virgil and his coal-mining family, who lived in a modest, all-black suburb and rarely even saw white people. All Virgil had on his mind that day was the money he and his brothers were going to make with the newspaper route they had just secured....
"Succumbing to peer pressure, [Larry Joe] Sims had gone along with friends to a segregationist rally that day--and now he was holding a revolver that his classmate, Michael Lee Farley, 16, had handed him as they rode home on Farley's red motorbike, its small Confederate flag whipping in the wind. As they passed Virgil and his brother James, 16, Farley told Sims to fire the gun and "scare 'em." Sims closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Two bullets hit Virgil in the chest and cheek, hurling him into a ditch as the motorbike sped on. "I've been shot," Virgil said. "No you ain't," [his brother] James said in disbelief. "Just stop tremblin', and you'll be O.K."
"He wasn't. Instead, Virgil Ware became the sixth and final black person to be killed in Birmingham that Sunday. (Another youth had been shot in the back by police after he threw rocks to protest the church bombing.) Virgil was the last civil rights casualty of the summer of '63--when the defining social movement of 20th century America became a national concern and not just a Southern one. Network television brought the season's atrocities into U.S. living rooms along with the triumphs, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington 2 1/2 weeks earlier....
"Farley and Sims were charged with first-degree murder, but an all-white jury convicted Sims on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter (to which Farley then pleaded guilty). A white judge, Wallace Gibson, suspended the boys' sentences and gave them two years' probation--scolding them for their "lapse"--which made Lorene Ware "break down in the courtroom crying and hollering," recalls Melvin. Says James: "You could get more time back then for killing a good hunting dog."
September 22, 2003
"If you're going to blame anyone for getting those children killed in Birmingham, it's your Supreme Court."
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