South Pacific, Shmouth Pacific

Huh?  You are betraying an ignorance of geography if you think Okinawa is in the South Pacific.  The island of Guam, being north of the equator, isn't in the South Pacific, either.

That Old Dog, quite the factual scourge when he wants to be huh?  I suppose in these days of fake news we need somebody to point out factual errors, but is he being (characteristically) way to picky?  Perhaps, let us investigate the pertinent facts.

When I was using the term South Pacific I was referring, of course, to the beloved musical, movie, and album from the movie.  Not that I have seen the play or the movie, but my parents owned the album so I have heard the music, and the album cover, though not as lewd as the paperback covers of the day, did feature a couple ladies, scantily clad enough to draw my young man's attention.

Internet research reveals that the whole thing was taken from Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, one of which tales which made its way into the musical/movie/album involved an affair between an American guy and a Tonkinese woman, by which I'm sure they mean the Bay of Tonkin, and back in the day when we hardly knew about Vietnam it is likely what we called the whole country Tonkin.  And Vietnam is north of the equator, and Guam is just barely north, and Okinawa, well I knew Old Dog was somewhere out there but I wasn't sure where.  You know how it is, when the other guy, and not you, are talking, mostly what you hear is blah, blah, blah.

Summing up, it's kind of Michener's fault.  And secondly, just because an island is north of the equator does that mean it's not south?  Isn't that whole part of the country where Old Dog drove his nookie wagon called The South, even though even Key West is far north of the border?  And thirdly, I'm an American, I'm not supposed to know this stuff.  And now let's just wash that issue right out of our hair.

He finally named them as the main culprits but it was like pulling teeth and you could tell his heart was not in it.

Indeed it turns out that that was indeed the case,  I try to watch CNN every waking hour, but there are times in the day when I am away from the tv, and so I came back from some errand yesterday afternoon and switched it  on, and there was a replay of His Orangeness storming like a trooper, ranting and railing and waving his orange mane, and yelling, and accusing, and blood coming out of his eyes, and likely his wherever, though the less thought to that the better.

That terrible onus of having to say the Nazis and the KKK were bad people had clearly been boring in on him since he, the smartest guy in the world, had been forced to do it by a bunch of pipsqueaks, and now he was breaking free.

What is it with him and the alt-right?  (Looking it up to see if that hyphen is required I discovered that there is an alt-right haircut, just saying)  It's not like they are sitting on money bags like his rich buddies.  In fact his rich businessmen are sidling away from him (Don't stand, don't stand, don't stand so close to me).  Maybe even though he was born into opulence what he really wants to be is just a good ol boy, hanging out at Joe's Bait Shop and telling lies to all the other Good ol boys.


The science fiction I was thinking of was like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clark, Robert A Heinlein and all those magazines with the lurid covers which only occasionally featured scantily clad women.  We hard core science fiction fans looked down our noses at Bradbury, too fantasy, too mainstream.


And the good news is that Beagles has put the kibosh on the guy on the dune, and now is the cock of the walk throughout the north Pacific, which is really not that far from the South Pacific, and now CNN can wash that Kim right of its hair, and consider how those amber strands would look straying from beneath a white hood or one of those cool helmets with the spike on top (Which I know, Scourge, is WW I, but I am being poetic).