1984

 I suppose if one was just carrying his AR-15 from one place to another, like from home to the target range that would not be brandishing.  But taking it down to the Subway to get a footlong, yes, I call that brandishing.  If I am the only one Beagles has read about calling Kyle's act brandishing, I expect that he needs to do more reading.

If Rittenhouse had the sense of a snake he would have stayed home.  Going but not taking his AR-15 would have made more sense than taking it which resulted in two people being killed.

And just for the record what was the purpose of Beagles putting those shotguns in his pickup?  Was he planning on driving down to the Greyhound station and then assembling his armory and then, I don't know, shooting people?

Ah Yammer yammer yammer, and nobody's mind is changed.

I watched 1984 the movie last night.  It was pretty good.  I could have used more of Winston's day to day life and maybe a little less of O'Brien torturing him, but O'Brien was played by Richard Burton (actually his last movie performance) and if you get the big guy to be in your movie you are going to give him as much screen time as possible.

Early on in the movie Winston (whose job is to make changes in yesterday's papers mostly along the line of writing out somebody who the state has decided to crush, is writing in his diary, that he hides away from the omnipresent Big Brother.  “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”  I put the movie on hold and wrote an email on that to myself.  

When O'Brien is torturing Winston he holds up four fingers and asks Winston how many are there, clearly wanting Winston to say five.  At first Winston resists saying 'four' and getting another jolt of the juice until finally he says 'five' because you know, torture.

There are some who think Trump is an evil genius.  Myself I think he is a simpleton who is somehow right in tune with the mob.  But one thing that might lend credence to the evil genius was one of his first actions after his inauguration, claiming that his crowd was bigger than Obama's.

This is no niggling thing like what is the definition of brandishing.  This was something that could be verified by actual evidence that was obvious anywhere, and yet he got away with it.  He said that was five fingers when you could plainly see there were four, and his mob had no problem with that.  Now he knew that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get clean away with it.  You know I am kind of surprised that he never did that shooting.

Again With the "Brandishing"?

 brandish

[ˈbrandiSH]

VERB

1. wave or flourish (something, especially a weapon) as a threat or in anger or excitement.

   "a man leaped out brandishing a knife"

   synonyms:

   flourish · wave · shake · wield · raise · hold aloft · swing · twirl · wag · swish · flap · display · flaunt · show off

Although Michigan has an open carry law, it prohibits brandishing a weapon in a public place. One of the reasons there was a push to make concealed carry permits easier to obtain a few years ago was that a person openly carrying could conceivably be charged with brandishing.  I don't know if it ever really happened, but some people were worried about it.  After they got their concealed law passed, they went on to establish their right to open carry, which they already had on paper.  Last I heard, Michigan legislators were still trying to come up with a legal definition of "brandishing".  I have not heard that they ever succeeded, but there are a lot of things of which I have not heard.  I found this definition easily, and I don't know why they can't just use that.  Okay, I see a problem with the synonym "display".  This could be interpreted to mean that, if the weapon is visible, it is being brandished.  So why can't they just omit that one word from the legal definition?  

Be that as it may, Uncle Ken is the only one I have read about accusing Rittenhouse of brandishing.  I wouldn't call carrying a rifle slung over your shoulder brandishing, but some people might if their sensibilities are offended by the mere sight of a firearm.  Maybe, if Rittenhouse had brandished his weapon at his attackers instead of running away from them, they might have backed off and he wouldn't have had to shoot them.  It is commonly known that you should never run away from a dangerous predator because it gives them the impression that you are prey.  My last dog Splash was one of the most timid dogs I've ever seen, but even he would chase a rabbit or anything else that ran away from him.  I once saw him chasing the neighbor's cat down our driveway.  About halfway down, the cat switched ends and faced poor Splash, who immediately turned tail and ran back into his dog house. 

I think that Rittenhouse displayed poor judgement by going to the riot in the first place but, if he felt that he had to go there, it would have been even poorer judgement to go there unarmed.  If Uncle Ken felt comfortable walking around unarmed in the middle of a riot, it would seem to be inconsistent with his avowed Atheism.  For it is written: "God protects the fools and the drunks."

 

I have no gun and I have no fear

 As I previously said I wasn't too interested in the trial.  I kind of figured that was how it was going to go, the law being the law being the way it is.  I think what the kid did was wrong, and maybe the prosecutors should have charged him with something lesser, disorderly conduct anyone?

It seems to me that for the good of the country it would be wise to discourage meddlers from toting their AR-15s to wherever something is going on that they don't like.  Surely folks will be more likely to do that sort of thing from now on, and surely those after dark rioters will see the need to arm themselves with heavier weaponry, and no good can come of that.

Peculiar that Beagles would think that the Detroit rioters would come to sleepy Cheboygan to shake up the town.  In 1970 when I was living in sleepy Herrin there were antiwar protests in Carbondale twenty miles away, and rumor had it that the good old boys of Herrin were going to get out their shotguns and patrol the dusty streets because they thought that the demonstrators were going to come there and continue the demonstrators.

Why?  Did they think that they were going to all pile into cars and drive twenty miles to some town they had never heard of?  Likewise the guys in Detroit driving almost three hundred miles to what, burn down the town?  Why would they want to do that?  Why would anybody think that they wanted to do that?f

There were demonstrations followed by looting right outside my door in the May of 2020.  But I went out to the store every day without packing heat.  I was never afraid.  

Of course Beagles was not much older than Kyle when he was toting those shotguns in his pickup when he was, I don't know, expecting a Greyhound bus to pull up and let out a load of Detroit rioters.  These days if he lived one state over he would not have to worry about keeping Old Betsy in a box unloaded, he could just brandish his Ar-15 and if he felt like somebody was threatening them he could just blow them away, and Marjorie Greene would be nominating him for a congressional gold metal.  

What could go wrong?

The Rittenhouse Case (2)

I read the whole article and I didn't see anything that changed my mind about the case.  I did learn that it was about an hour after the incident when Kyle's mother persuaded him to turn himself in instead of the next day as I had previously believed, but I consider that an inconsequential detail.  Although I have previously wondered whether Rittenhouse would have ever been arrested if he hadn't turned himself in, that was indeed pure speculation and I never intended it to be taken as anything else.  This speculation was based on the reports that Rittenhouse tried to surrender to police at the scene and was literally chased away.  I now understand that there might have been a legitimate reason for this given the chaos and confusion of the moment.  By the way, it was not a taser but pepper spray that police threatened to use on Rittenhouse if he didn't go away, another inconsequential detail.

I believe that Rittenhouse had as much right to be there as anybody else, but that doesn't mean it was the smart thing to do.  There is no way I would have gone into that situation unarmed, but that's a moot question because I would not have voluntarily gone into it at all.  The summer of 1967 was a summer of riots in Southern Michigan, and it was also my first summer in Cheboygan.  There was some concern among our citizens that the riots Down Below might spread all over the state, even as far north as God's Country.  I owned two shotguns at the time, and I carried them both in my car the whole summer.  They were unloaded and enclosed in cases as required by Michigan law, but they were close at hand in case I needed them.  I had no intention of going anywhere near those riots but, if a riot came to me, I was prepared to shoot my way out of it.  

The Rittenhouse Case

Rather than trusting our memories of the various news articles that we have read, I suggest we use this comprehensive summary from Wiki as a reference:

Kenosha unrest shooting - Wikipedia

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I expect to over the weekend.  For now I have selected these three quotes that address the questions of what Rittenhouse was doing at the event and why he was armed.  It appears that Dominick Black was the only friend that influenced him, they both met the other guys at the site.  It's a little confusing when they say Rittenhouse "took" the rifle from Black, but we see later in the article that Black was the guy who had previously bought the gun for Rittenhouse.  

  Rittenhouse was armed with a semi-automatic^[4] AR-15 style rifle^[5][6] that he took from his friend, Dominick Black, and both Rittenhouse and Black joined a group of armed men who said they were in Kenosha to protect businesses.^[7][8] Rittenhouse said he was there to protect a car dealership from being vandalized and to provide medical aid.^[9]

 Later, together with Black, he arrived at Car Source.^[56][57] Accounts differ as to whether Rittenhouse and Black's help was requested by Car Source. The dealership owner's sons denied that gunmen had been asked to defend the business,^[58][59] but several witnesses testified that armed individuals had been directly sought out by the business to protect their property.^[58]

 Rittenhouse was seen talking with police officers,^[41][60] and offering medical aid to those who were injured.^[41] When McGinniss asked Rittenhouse why he was at the car dealership, he responded: "So, people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business. Part of my job is also to help people. If there is somebody hurt, I'm running into harm's way. That's why I have my rifle, because I have to protect myself, obviously. I also have my med kit."  

I haven't seen anything so far that says Rittenhouse was "strutting" or "brandishing".  He shot the first guy because he was approaching him in a threatening manner.  Kyle tried to run away at first but, when he heard a gunshot nearby, he turned and faced his pursuer and shot him when he continued to advance towards him.  It appears that the others were chasing Kyle because he had shot the first guy.  To read about this, go to the link and scroll down to where it says "First Confrontation" and "Second Confrontation".  I tried to link directly to these sections, but was unable. 

happy thanksgiving

 What is it that people don't know about guns?  We hear and see about them all the time.

What are the facts that lead you to believe that Kyle only showed up to a dangerous situation toting heat was because his friends induced him into it?  And what difference does it make if he was influenced by his friends?  The Law, and I expect The Good Lord, come pearly gate time, also does not accept that excuse.

It was a BLM demonstration, and half the people in BLM are white.  That is what I have observed when they had demonstrations here and is what I saw on tv at the beginning of the demonstrations in Kenosha.

As I have said before I am no big fan of BLM.  I believe in their stated goal of putting a stop to cops killing black people (also white people, but not near as many white people get killed) and getting away with it.  But they seem to think that since their goal is noble, anything they do in what they consider the promotion of their goal is ok.

Another thing is that they have no leader and no firm goals (Like passing House Bill 217A), so nobody is really responsible for what they do.  Just a bad model.  Like those Occupy guys who were kind of lefty and faded away several years ago.

What happens in their demonstrations is that everything is hunky dory until the sun goes down and then the idealistic youth are supplanted by hard core types some who believe in violence for their cause and others who just believe in violence for the hell of it.  That is what happened in Chicago and what happened in Kenosha.

No they did not like a teenager in their midst with an AR-15 because that is a recipe for shit to happen, as it did.  Some of those guys were armed, but none of them were brandishing AR-15s.  I would not like a teen with an AR-15 strutting up and down State Street.  Luckily, for now. I could call the cops to deal with the situation.

Kyle shot three guys and killed two.  What makes you think the long arm of the law would not have come after him?  

Thanksgiving today.  In most of the Thanksgivings of my life I have been coming to the bungalow on Homan Avenue or my sister's place on the north shore, but now that my sister is living fourteen stories above me we will be going to a restaurant like civilized people, and up to her place for pie, and I won't have to wait for the train or for somebody to give me a ride afterwards.  I can just get on the elevator.

Happy Thanksgiving Dawgs.

"Don't Take Your Guns to Town, Boy"

I agreed with the lady when she said that you shouldn't be either for or against guns unless you know something about them.  She said she got that from her husband who encouraged her to take a class on the subject.  I did not agree with what she said about society because she didn't specify which society.  There is more than one you know.  In Kyle's case, I think he was persuaded to attend the riot by his friends, and they would constitute a society.  I think the lady meant "Society" with a capital "S", however, and I don't believe there is any such thing. 

Okay, maybe it wasn't a race riot, at least not at first.  It was supposed to be about police brutality, specifically towards Black people, and I understand that some White people sided with the Blacks on that issue.  Were the guys Kyle shot aligned with those?  From what I've heard, they just didn't like the idea of somebody openly carrying a gun in their midst.  Funny, though, the cops didn't seem to mind it at all, which leads me to believe that the alleged victims were not on the same side as the cops.  That doesn't necessarily mean they were on the same side with the Blacks either, maybe they were on their own side, I just don't know.  I have not heard that Kyle threatened any of those guys before they attacked him.  Did he?  If he was just carrying his gun slung over his shoulder like he was in the pictures I have seen, it would seem to be none of their business.  Maybe Kyle wouldn't have been attacked if he hadn't been carrying, but maybe he would have been, in which case he would have certainly gotten the worst of it.  Were the owners of any of the buildings that were looted and vandalized openly carrying?  Lyle mistakenly believed that he had been hired to protect one of those buildings.  To attempt a job like that unarmed would have been foolish indeed.  

Speaking of foolish, those guys in Georgia that were convicted of killing that Black jogger likely would never have been charged if they hadn't made a video of the incident and posted it on You Tube.  In the Rittenhouse case, Lyle tried to surrender to the police at the scene, but they chased him away, so he went home.  According to what I have read, his mother persuaded him to turn himself in the next day.  If she hadn't done that, I wonder if anybody would have ever come after him. 

 

gee officer krupke

 I had just scanned that article previously because I didn't know what in particular Beagles found interesting in it, so this time I read the whole thing and my impression was that it was so slippery that I wasn't sure what she was talking about.  Whenever it came to an issue of is you is or is you isn't she slid off into something like personal choice.  

Personal choice is getting a lot of play these days and I think it is quite the dodge.  The kind of cereal you eat for breakfast is a personal choice because it really doesn't matter to anyone else.  The personal choice to drive drunk or let yourself be a petri dish for a virus that could sicken or kill you neighbors is different, and in self-defense your neighbors have a right to take that personal choice from you.

I don't think she made a very case for anything on either side.  In the end she concludes that The kid should never have been there, and I think that that is society's failure.  Of course there would have also not have been a problem if he hadn't taken that gun with him.  And society's failure, I mean Gee Officer Krupke.  Everything is society's failure meaning no individual is responsible, meaning there is nothing to be done about it.  I am aware that she calls herself a liberal, but I don't think I would call her one.  Took a visit to her webpage and there was nothing liberal about it.

There was some kind of shenanigans about Kyle's gun.  Somebody else bought it for him and it was kept in Wisconsin so that it never crossed state lines.  The Wisconsin law was confusing and nobody in the court room could make hide or hair out of it so they tossed it.

I'm getting confused about Beagles' question.  Who says it was a race riot?  And is only one race allowed to participate in a race riot, and if so what was Kyle doing there?

Why would Kyle's mother have anything to do with him being arrested?  Plenty of demonstrators were arrested in Kenosha.

That is all I have time for today.

More Questions Than Answers

 I thought that Slate article was interesting because it's about a liberal who saw the light and still calls herself a liberal.  I always thought that a liberal was just a conservative who hadn't been enlightened yet.  I didn't agree with everything she said, but I was impressed by how she stayed on topic in spite of the interviewer trying to steer her off onto his own side road.  He kept trying to get her to say that it was okay to shoot peaceful protesters, as if the guys shot by Rittenhouse were peaceful, but she didn't bite on that one.  

Uncle Ken probably knows more about this case than I do, but that's never stopped me before.  I have read that Rittenhouse was too young to carry a gun in Wisconsin, but I think the judge dismissed that charge on a technicality, something about the length of the barrel.  I'm pretty sure that Wisconsin law doesn't prohibit open carry or else how would people go hunting there?  There may have been a municipal ordinance, but then why didn't the cops disarm him?  I have read that they saw him carrying and even talked with him before the incident.  Talk about your vigilantes, who gave those White civilians the authority to try to disarm him?  For that matter, what were those guys even doing there?  Wasn't this supposed to be a race riot?  Speaking of race, why are the Blacks so mad at Rittenhouse when all the people he shot were White?  Speaking of the cops, why didn't they arrest Rittenhouse when he approached them and confessed to shooting people?  I read somewhere that they threatened to taser him if he didn't go away and quit bothering them.  If Lyle's mother hadn't persuaded him to turn himself in the next day, would he have been charged with anything at all?  And last but not least: Were any of those "peaceful protestors" arrested and charged for all the burning and looting they did?

a bunch of hooey about a big field of dirt

 I've been waiting two days only to hear about Beagles digging up some stretch of dirt?  Sounds like a bait and switch if you ask me.

I did not get as worked up as most of my ilk about this affair.  Legally it seems like anybody who shoots somebody (especially people nobody likes, and I have to say the victims were not loveable) can claim self defense and beat the rap.  Now if those good old boys in Georgia get off the hook, that will be a big deal.

Of course just because something is legal does not mean that it is right, and it doesn't seem like a good way to be running a country if it is perfectly legal for a seventeen year old kid to be walking around with an AR-15 going anywhere he pleases.  

You kind of wonder if those protestors had any right to self-defense.  A seventeen year old kid wandering among them with an AR-15 is certainly a threat, and yet when they try to disarm him and get shot that is just too bad apparently.

I thought it was kind of peculiar that Beagles had that quote from Slate which is a lefty column I used to read, and I was wondering what he had to say about it, and I am still wondering.  I read a little of it and I have read before on this idea of liberals arming themselves, and it is not something I think of as a good idea.  When Beagles and I have both had enough of each other's shit and plan a facedown I would much rather that it was with fisticuffs than AR-15s.

As for that idea that somehow Rittenhouse was led down the primrose path by some wayward pal, I have to say that this is the purest of speculation and to put it more bluntly, it's a bunch of hooey.

JUDGE: Sustained

God Protect Me From My Friends

I copied this link Saturday night and planned to write about it Sunday night, but a four hour power outage prevented that, so here I am on Monday night.  I found this article interesting because if offers a different perspective on the Rittenhouse trial and guns in general.

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/a-liberal-guns-rights-advocate-explains-what-both-sides-got-wrong-about-kyle-rittenhouse/ar-AAQWwzn?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppSha

I think the jury made the right decision in the Rittenhouse case.  Everything I have heard or read about the shooting has sounded like self defense to me, but that's just the shooting part.  The larger question remains: What the hell was this kid even doing out there in the first place?  Rittenhouse somehow got the impression that he had been hired to guard a car dealership, but the dealer himself denies this.  My guess is that Kyle was recruited by one of his friends, and that he naively believed that this friend knew what he was talking about.  I was once suckered into a job like that when I was even younger than Rittenhouse, although it thankfully did not involve the use of deadly force.  

My friend asked me if I wanted to make five dollars for a couple hours' work, which was good money in those days.  All we had to do was dig up a little garden patch in this guy's back yard.  It turned out that it wasn't just a little patch, the guy wanted his whole back yard dug up, which must have been at least a thousand square feet.  The soil was bone dry clay.  We considered wetting it down, but decided that it would make the clay stick to our shovels, which would make the job even harder.  This two hour job stretched out into two whole days.  The first day we brought a grub hoe and two shovels.  We added a railroad pick the second day, which worked a little better, but what we really needed was a jackhammer.  My friend kept assuring me that the guy would pay us more than five dollars once he saw how hard we were working, but he didn't.  Not only that, but it wasn't five dollars apiece, it was five dollars for the both of us.  After paying for our bus fare and lunches (the cheap bastard didn't even feed us), we ended up with about a dollar apiece for two days of hard labor, which was not good money even in those days.

See, I never communicated with the guy that hired us.  I trusted my friend to handle all the details, since it was his project in the first place.  Maybe something like that happened to Rittenhouse.  

I went through the Comments and deleted a bunch of stuff that looked like spam to me.  

spam

 Came across Beagles' last post Sunday afternoon, and have been looking forward to hear what Beagles has to say,  but now it looks like I will have to wait another day.  Just one question in the meantime.  Did Beagles put up that link to reference the event, or was there something in that particular article that he wanted to comment on?

Right after you hit New Post in the upper right, before you hit the New Post there is a Comment section which I check periodically and I see that we have three new comments, but for some reason they are in response to a posting about ghee from 2017.  They appear to be some kind of spam, but I just thought I would bring it up.

And I guess I will have to wait another day to hear what Beagles has to say.

man's best friend

 I was thinking that Old Dog's experience in Geezer Gulch would be similar to my mother's at the Bethany, but now I realize that Old Dog is in senior living while my mother was in a retirement home, the main difference being that in the Bethany they fed you and cleaned your apartment and there was medical staff not far away.

I guess the meals would be the big socializer and without them living at Geezer Gulch is not much different from living in Marina City or Old Dog's previous digs.  The first twenty years I lived here I didn't know anybody more than my immediate neighbors, and in the last ten years after I found the Santa hat on the State Street sidewalk Thanksgiving night and became an extravert I have increased my circle of friends but it is still in single digits.

And really most people are kind of boring and getting older doesn't make them any more interesting.  A lot of old people get into the habit of telling their life stories to anybody they can buttonhole and generally their stories aren't that interesting.  It's nice to exchange pleasantries about the weather while riding the elevator and it's safe because it's over in minutes, but otherwise you want to avoid those yammerers who somehow never pause to catch their breath.

Has Old Dog noticed that there way more dogs in the hood than there were before the pandemic?  That is certainly the case downtown.  Also people are taking them into grocery stores and even restaurants with aplomb.  Well I don't mind people aren't all that clean either.

I think chatting up people with dogs is a fine idea.  Who doesn't want their pride and joy praised and aren't most dogs good boys and girls? And knowing nothing more about a person than whether or not they have a dog, I would prefer the dog owner because they have the experience of caring for somebody and they get out and about.

I'm not a bread baker and the dawgs are not news junkies and that is fine.  Years ago I made a bit of a fuss over ice cream machines and even after all these years I am embarrassed about that.  If you aren't interested in a subject just shine it on and talk about whatever you want to talk about.

For instance my life story with all the fascinating details.  Did I say story? I meant to say Journey because you know it was so profound and is an inspiration for.....

Just kidding.  Or am I?

On the CDs there is always the writer's name next to the song or else it says traditional.  As I said I know what I like and I don't understand the music at all.  I understand that a song can be played as a rock song or a country song or one of those diva songs or whatever, so it seems like the credit is to the arranger and not the author, but what do I know?

I mainly like a song if I like the lyrics.  Well except for the music of my youth most of which have terrible lyrics but they are imprinted in my mind like a baby duck and whatever it spies on opening its eyes.  What interests me is when lyrics are attached to a melody or vice versa.  On songs that I like they both seem so well in tune that it is hard to imagine the lyrics with a different melody or vice versa.  

Well maybe that's because the lyrics and the melodies are so well joined in songs that I really like and songs where they are not so well matched are songs I don't like as well.

But then what do I know?

Bagels For Breakfast

It wasn't a crunchy crust that I was trying to get on my bread, it was a chewy crust.  During the yeast shortage last year, I was looking for some kind of store bought bread that I liked, and I re-discovered bagels.  I seemed to remember that I liked them but I didn't remember why.  According to Wiki, the way they get the chewy crust on bagels is by dropping them into boiling water for one minute before putting them in the oven.  I suppose that might work with my bread too but, with store bought bagels so readily available, I lost interest in home baking.  Most store bought breads are sliced too thin for my taste, you need three slices to get the same amount of bread that I used to get with two slices of my own bread.  The trouble is, three slices will not fit in my toaster oven without overlapping, which leaves an untoasted patch on the slice that gets covered, unless you want to stop the toaster and rotate the slices halfway through the process.  Bagels are thick enough that one bagel, which comes pre-sliced, fits easily and gives me plenty of bread.  The pre-sliced, halves do tend to stick together, so I just run a knife between them to free them up before I toast them.  

One way to avoid the "folkier than thou" argument is to call it "traditional music" instead of "folk music".  For a song to be classified as traditional, the name of the author needs to be unknown.  You can fool around with a traditional piece without running afoul of copywrite laws.  Many traditional songs have several different versions in existence, and you can put your own spin on one of them if you want to with impunity.  It is not uncommon for a totally different set of lyrics to be attached to the same tune, so I am certainly not the first one to do that, and neither is Bob Dylan.  

Errata, etc.

First, a quick correction.  The tobacco I mentioned from Iwan Ries is Three Star, not Four Star.  A minor difference, but still...there are standards that I strive to maintain.

-----

Quite some time ago Uncle Ken asked me about my new digs and the other folks in "Geezer Gulch."  Enough time has passed for me to say that there is not much to say.  I saw more people as I was moving in, entering and exiting a few times a day but now I hardly see anybody.  The place is very quiet and I rarely see anyone in the hallway on my floor.  Once in a while I'll see some folks by the entrances or the mail room but I'm not complaining.  There have been some activities that I manage to ignore, like Bingo.  I suspect that folks are content to mind their own business and do whatever it is they do behind their closed doors.

I'm still slowly sorting things out,  going through old crap and tossing it out and shredding old paperwork.  Now that I'm comfortably settled I don't see any need to rush things.

A surprise benefit that I have is meeting a lot of the neighborhood dogs as I am walking out and about.  When I see someone walking their dog, I'll stand still when they're about ten feet away and see how the dog responds.  Most are friendly and well socialized and I usually say "Hello, puppy."  If they approach with tails wagging and their human gives them a little slack, all is well and I ask the human how the dog is doing.  Just about everyone stops and is happy to talk about their dog and the pups love the attention.  Who doesn't liked to be petted and have their belly rubbed?  I try to keep track of the dogs by getting their name and breed.  There are eight that I've met so far and my favorite is Ellie, a Golden Retriever.  I call her name and she goes nuts with happiness, one of the friendliest dogs I've ever met.  Other dogs I've met are Winky, Kim Chi, Pebbles, Lucy, and Max.  I don't have all their names yet, and I don't have any of the humans' names; I can recognize the dogs but not the people, go figure.  Some of the breeds are Shih Tzu, French Bulldog, Boston Terrier, and Pit Bull.  The fanciest one so far is a Brussels Griffin, a cute little sprout, ha, ha.

-----

Mr. Beagles hit the nail on the head solving my bread problem; I wasn't paying close enough attention to the ambient temperature.  The temperature in the apartment isn't the same in every location but I have it sorted out now.  I let the bread rise in the unheated oven with just the light on, a balmy 85F; no worries.  You're supposed to cover the bowl with plastic wrap but that is too fiddly for me and the film is too narrow for me to get a good seal.  So, I put the bowl with the dough in one of the huge Zip Loc type bags that I have and seal it up; the bag puffs up after a couple of hours so I know the yeast is happy, doing it's thing.  After the second rise it's off to the hot Dutch Oven and a good, crispy crust.  If you are still looking for a good crust on your rye bread, Mr. Beagles, I bet that a big oven bag for roasting turkeys would work.  Put the dough on a piece of parchment paper, slide the whole thing in the bag and close it up the best you can with binder clips of something similar.  Bake at 450F for 30 minute or so and remove bread and parchment paper from the bag and bake another ten minutes or so.  It should work; the bag duplicates the effect of a steam infused oven and that last blast of dry heat gives you a good crust; bake longer for a crunchier crust but don't over do it.  Don't ask me how I know.

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I know Beagles is not much of a news junky, not so sure about Old Dog...

The term is junkie, but who cares?  So little of the news "product" is personally meaningful to me that it isn't worth my time to play close attention to it.  I reserve the right to be a crank, having the opinion that political differences as portrayed are illusory, at best.  We've been fed a line of bullshit all our lives but not many are willing to admit it.  George Carlin said it best, "It's a big club and you ain't in it."  I'll let it go at that.

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“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.”     ― Mark Twain

all that jazz

 I read an interview with R Crumb of underground comics fame who also had a band, The Cheap Suit Serenaders, in which he lamented the invention of the phonograph and the radio.  Before that time if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself or hang around your friends and neighbors who would be playing it. If you were in a band there would be lots of opportunities to play, and since they weren't all listening to the same record there was a lot of variation.  

In the old days when towns were popping like corn along what the townsmen hoped would be the route of the railroad, one of the first things they did was build an opry house because that's where you had to go to hear music.  You could not just turn on the radio or spin a platter.  There are famous performers of those days that we have no idea how they sounded because there were no devices to record them.

But if you lived in the holler far from the big city you had to pull out that washboard and saw and make your own music.  I guess in general that is the kind of music the purists call folk music today.  It's gone now because everybody is influenced by the music they hear on records and the radio, it is no longer grass roots.

I think Beagles once told me that folk music does not have razzle dazzle, and that sounds right to me.  The Kingston Trio was originally formed to play Jamaican music, but then they did that Dooley song and they became a folk group, though with a bit of razzle dazzle.  There were conflicts among the members as to how much razzle dazzle to put in and people went into and out of the band for that reason.

I am not sure what goes on in music stores of the day, or even if there are any if everybody is getting their music on the internet.  But back in the day weren't they something, bin after bin, and the artwork on those big old album covers, fantastic.

They were sorted into various categories, classical, jazz, blues, folk, rock, country, etc.  I think Beagles once told me that any song, where you had words and music on paper can be played as rock, country, latin or whatever.  Myself I don't understand the innards of music so I take him at his word.

I think it was the record companies that were the big impetus in categorizing music into genres to make records easier to sell.  Why push rock on folks who want country and so on.  Back in the day producing a record took a lot of effort, making them, popularizing them, paying off the D J's etc.  They wanted to make sure it was a hit.  I hear tales of them making folk singers play country music, and hard rockers play bubble gum music, at least until they get a little fame and then they can do what they want.

I reckon you can define folk music any way you want.  I think the purest is gone forever due to recorded music, but in general it is music without razzle dazzle that has kind of a simple and generally heartfelt message, though I discovered in researching that there is a whole genre of songs where the guy kills his wife or girlfriend like Tom Dooley.  

And what we call country music has gone through some changes to.  Way back it was folky, and then it became that sad sad music like Hank Williams sang, and then it became kind of pop with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and anymore it sounds like pure crap to me, very poppy and sung by studly guys in cowboy hats who sing like they are selling Ford Trucks.  

Well that is one man's opinion.

a rebirth of wonder

 

Not only is Iwan Ries still in business, they are housed in a building that has just been restored to its former glory. I speak of Louis Sullivan's Jeweler's Building, not to be confused with the latter day Jewelers Building at 35 E Wacker which has plenty of its own stories to tell.

It's one of Louis Sullivan's earlier buildings and not up to the glory of, well let's just call it the Carson's building like we did of yore, not knowing any better, or the bank in Owatonna or the skyscraper in Buffalo. This is the building that turned the eye of a young Richard Nickel famed architectural photographer and hoarder of Sullivan architectural relics as a heedless city tore down one after another, and met his death in the ruins of the Stock Exchange as they were tearing it down.

The first two stories of the building, long derelict are now shining and bright, though strangely there has been no hullabaloo about it.  Maybe they are still planning on doing some work on upper stories which still looks kind of shabby before any razzle-dazzle opening.

Glad you dropped in Old Dog, you are always a breath of fresh air in the cramped, sometimes petty, ranting between Beagles and myself.  I need new stuff to inspire me, lest I go back to my old standby politics, which ok, I do enjoy, but I see where others wouldn't.

As for the first quote let me say this about that.  Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.  That comes of course, from Richard Milhous Nixon, who clearly didn't pay it any heed.

The second one I rather agree with. "Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first."     -Schopenhauer. I never read about an art show before I go there and I never read the caption next to the painting until I have examined it myself. I never read a review of a movie before I watch it, not so much so as not to be surprised by the action, but so that I don't hear the reviewers opinion of it. 

It's kind of like that wave particle duality.  Before I read the review the movie is in its wave mode, fuzzy and uncertain of position.  But once I have read the opinion then it is flattened into its particle mode, smaller and harder, and not very interesting.  It has the footprints of some other guy all over it, and I can't see it clearly with my own eye.  Some people, especially hotshot critics, who make their living giving hotshot opinions, think there is a right and wrong opinion on art stuff, but that is just crazy Man crazy.

I'll get to genres in music in my next post.

A Song Shall Rise

 There are many definitions of folk music.  If there is a "correct" definition, it's the music of the common people as opposed to the music of the aristocracy, which is now commonly called "classical".  Folk music was certainly not invented in the 1960s, it has been around as long as people have been around.  What happened in the 60s was a neo folk revival. It started with groups like The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary taking old songs, mostly from the Anglo-American tradition and putting their own spin on them, which is what I meant when I said "razzle-dazzle".  Technically, all the stuff that falls into the "pop" category is folk music.  I'm pretty sure that future historians will call this stuff the folk music of our era, but if you call it that now, you will just confuse people. 

I don't know about humidity, but temperature certainly affects the rising of bread dough.  The outdoor temperature doesn't matter, it's the ambient temperature of the room.  I found I got the most consistent rising between 70 and 80 degrees.  Warmer than that it will rise faster, and colder than that it will rise slower.  I have been told to protect it from drafts, but I can't say for sure because I never tried exposing it to drafts.  In the drafty farmhouses or yore, home bakers had a favorite rising corner, often behind the woodstove.  

Mid November

But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me...
...I can't get no satisfaction

I can always depend on Uncle Ken to get the Old Dog chasing critters down one rabbit hole or another.  Ah, the sublime pleasures of pipe tobacco!  I remember Cherry Blend, but there were dozens of other flavors, many of which are no longer available according to the Google Hive Mind.  I was partial to Flying Dutchman myself, getting the stink-eye from the Drill Sergeants at Fort Polk when I would roll up a smoke in Zig-Zag Wheat Straw papers.  But I met a lot of good folks that way, too.  Rolling papers were a great ice breaker back in the day (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

And no trip downtown would be complete without a visit to Iwan Ries & Co. on Wabash, in the shadow of the El.  If you wanted tobacco or accessories beyond the selection at the local drugstore (or cigar store, remember those?) Iwan Ries was the place to go.  Their Four Star Blend was excellent, as I recall, and the sales folk were eager to share their knowledge of all things smokable.  It's nice that they're still in business.

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And Mr. Beagles sent me squirrel chasing with his folk music comments.  I don't know what he means by "razzle-dazzle" but Spider John Koerner seems to be an old school classic folkie to me.

My memory of folk music on TV is fuzzy, seems like everybody was wearing a necktie except for the ladies who wore dresses of a respectable length.  Hootenanny was the main TV program of the day but I'm not sure if the music was legitimate folk music or variations of acoustic songs.  Pete Seeger, for sure, was a folk musician but he was blacklisted for quite a while.  Burl Ives was around a lot, and I remember a local guy, Win Stracke, who was on local TV a lot and one of the founders of the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Is Folk Music even a legitimate term or is it a marketing label, more palatable to the buying public than country, hillbilly, or race music?  Folk music always seemed so clean to me, showing very little of the true, gritty roots.  I'm depending on Mr. Beagles to set me straight.

Another question for Mr. Beagles: Is there a special trick for baking bread now that the weather is getting cooler and the humidity is dropping?  I'm not getting the same rise out of my bread; no changes to the recipe.

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This is neither here nor there, but it seems to me that Uncle Ken's recent postings of the rambling narrative persuasion are of a higher quality than the stuff he wrote years ago.  I pretty much skim over the political stuff and I'll let you guys gnaw on those topics as is your wont.

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If you hate a person that means they defeated you.     -Confucius

Saw that line on another obscure YouTube channel I've been following and  thought I'd toss it our there.

Here's another:

"Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first."     -Schopenhauer

a new and improved gun

 I believe the long version of that joke was a shaggy dog story.  You know what the punchline is so you just drag the story out, making up stuff as you go along, and not until the listeners are about to walk away do you hit them with the punchline.  Like the story about Mel Famy famous big league pitcher, who one time had a beer between innings and that tasted so good that the next inning he had two, and as the game went on he had more and more beer, and walked more and more guys. and you can drag it out by innings or add a side story about his sweetheart in the stands and her puppy, Babe, and just as your listeners are getting really tired of the whole thing, he walks in the winning run and afterwards one of the guys on the other team points to all the empty beer bottles on the mound and says, "That's the beer that made  Mel Famy walk us."

Menthol had been around awhile but I think filters were just coming into existence as we were growing up, and shorties, there were still shorties.  As I recall there was a shorty unfiltered Kool cigarette that popped quite a wallop.

It's an old story about blacks preferring menthol cigarettes.  I think that is where I picked up the habit, from hanging with black guys in my hippie days.  It is more likely to kill you than regular cigs, so they would like to get rid of it.  The way they get rid of cigs is by taxing the hell out of them because this way the city or the state gets more dough and that is a win-win.  One of the arguments for not going after menthol is that it is a tax that falls disproportionally on those who can afford it the least.

If the actors took gun safety lessons then we would have no use for these guys who are getting paid good money to do one thing, keep loaded guns away from the cameras.  One job.  It does not seem that hard.  And you know actors, many of them drunks or hop heads or otherwise irresponsible as artists tend to be.  How can you trust them?

You would think that if you paid some outside guys cash to do that one thing, that would be the responsible thing, and maybe that would work if it was like poison or something.  But this is guns, and those giddy gun guys are going to flock to any job where they get to be around guns, and even a stable guy hanging around those giddies is likely to become giddy himself.

There used to be a thing about not letting kids have toy guns.  I had toy guns all my childhood.  I remember one glorious Christmas when all the kids in the neighborhood got something called a burp gun.  Kind of like an AR-15 as I remember. It made some kind of noise when you pulled the trigger and maybe there were sparks.  After Christmas dinner, which we made quick work of, we all got out on the streets and killed each other deep into the night.  

There may have been a bruise or two, or maybe even a skinned knee in all that hullabaloo, but nobody got killed.  All guns, except of course, Old Betsy, should be like that.

"Throat Hot - Smoke Kool"

I first heard that story about the enchanted tree some 50 years ago when the ad slogan was still fresh in people's minds.  Since Uncle Ken talked about the Winston slogan, I assumed that he remembered the Salem slogan as well.  I shortened and cleaned up the original story considerably, summing up the long part about the alleged witch's sexual behavior as "loose morals".  The part about the knothole was also more graphically detailed in the original version.  I only left the one vulgar word in the punchline because it was essential to the outcome of the story.  

 I think that menthol was put into cigarettes to make them easier for women to smoke.  Real men smoked Camels and cigars in those days, but they eventually got over that and joined the ladies with their filtered menthols.  My dad used to smoke my mom's Salems when he had a cold or sore throat, but he eventually switched to them full time.  Salems were one of the first menthol brands, but I think that Kools predated them.  Every now and then there is talk of banning menthol because it allegedly makes it easier for kids to start smoking.  The last time I heard of it was a year or two ago, but it didn't last long because somebody pointed out that menthols are more popular among Blacks than they are among Whites.  (I am not making this up!)

I think that gun accidents on movie sets are pretty rare, but they do happen.  I remember an actor who shot himself in the head with blanks while clowning around on the set during a break.  Apparently he didn't know that blanks can be deadly at close range.  I haven't followed the Rust case closely, but it seems that someone handed Baldwin a gun that was supposed to be unloaded and Baldwin took his word for it.  I don't know what live rounds were even doing on that set but, if Baldwin knew anything about firearms, he would have checked it himself before aiming it a someone.  Maybe they need to make sure that any actor who is going to handle a firearm gets some basic gun safety training beforehand.  

prying guns from hollywood's cold dead hands

 I was taken a bit aback by that story, not remembering that commercial.  Going to you tube and hearing the commercial I remembered it vaguely.  Equating menthol tobacco with the great out of doors is quite a stretch.

I was thinking of investigating how did they come to put menthol into cigarettes, but then Winston-Salem the town caught my attention and took me to wiki, where I was surprised to see that they had a quarter of a million people.  Also surprised to hear that it was founded by the Moravian Brethren, and was just beginning to read about the Moravian Brethren when something came up on the radio.

As I was writing this a story came out of NPR about that shooting on the set of that Rust movie.  My first reaction to this whole thing was you have this whole crew who are pretty well-paid and all, the only thing they have to do, the only thing, is keep a gun with live ammo off the set.  Does not sound that hard.  

This particular crew, just from what I have heard so far, seem to be a group of jagoffs.  I am certainly not talking about Beagles cradling Old Betsy in the deer blind and his ilk, but some folks just get giddy around guns, and some giddy people are drawn to guns, you know like those guys who don't hunt and live in posh gated communities who turn out to have like 10 AR-15's.  Nobody, even in Buffalo, has 10 snow shovels, why do folks have 10 guns?

See, what I am thinking is on paper the system they had sounds pretty good and sufficient.  I guess you could add extra layers to it, and that would make it even safer but you are always going to have that human factor that is going to fuck things up.

And now there are some folks wanting to ban all guns from all sets, period.  This sounds a little extreme to me, but then what is the harm?  How would our movie experience be diminished knowing that that actor who we know is not a real person who is in a place that is a movie set, is holding a gun that cannot hold bullets?  

And even as I am thinking that there is a guy on the radio saying that there is nothing like a real gun and you could just tell, could just tell that it wasn't real and then the whole movie would go to shit.

I am kind of wondering why this story is such a big fucking deal.  People get killed making movies often enough, generally through some stunt that goes wrong.  Okay, stunts are complicated and stunt people know the dangers, but in this case it seems to be that it is one colossal fuck up by some really stupid or nutty guy, so that makes it more outrageous.  But there is something even bigger than that.  it involves a gun.

Right now the whole gun control issue is way down on the list.  There hasn't been a really big mass shooting since Orlando in 2016, and there is so much other shit going on.  But I wonder if, just for sport, just as a reflex action, we might see a proxy fight with the anti gun people insisting no real guns, not even those rendered harmless on movie sets, and the pro gun forces saying the second amendment calls for all guns everywhere, and darkly threatening that taking guns off the sets is a slippery slope that will end up with them coming for Old Betsy.

Maybe cooler heads will prevail, but how likely is that?

The Enchanted Tree of Salem

 A long time ago, when the twin cities of Winston and Salem were mere villages, a certain Salem woman of loose moral character was convicted of witchcraft and hanged from the old oak tree that stood on the village green.  The next morning, a passerby noticed a new knothole had formed on the trunk of the tree during the night.  This knothole bore a striking resemblance to a woman's vagina and was located at a conveniently accessible height.  A crowd soon gathered, and the consensus was that the spirit of the witch must have entered the tree upon her death. 

The men of Salem were pleased by this turn of events, but the womenfolk were outraged.  They stormed into the mayor's office and demanded that he have this evil tree cut down and removed from the village.  The mayor, axe in hand, accompanied the womenfolk to the village green, picking up the sheriff and the preacher along the way.  When they arrived at the tree, the mayor handed the axe to the sheriff and told him to chop it down.  The sheriff hit the tree a mighty blow, which dislodged a dead branch that fell upon the sheriff, killing him.  Filled with righteous indignation, the preacher then picked up the axe and landed another mighty blow on the tree, which dislodged another dead branch that fell upon the preacher, killing him.  The womenfolk then confronted the mayor, insisting that he should cut down the tree himself.  "Sorry ladies", the mayor replied, "But the sheriff and the preacher have clearly demonstrated that you can't take the Cunt Tree out of Salem."

us Institute guys shooting our shit

 

How about this as a creation of those madmen?  First of all it looks like he lost the fight, not something you normally brag about, and secondly who is going around giving out shiners to Tareyton smokers?  But maybe the slugger is doing the smokers a favor because look how happy this guy looks.  One would have to suspect that one cannot truly enjoy the rich taste of fine tobacco strained through that revolutionary dual filter, one of them with world famous activated charcoal, without pain emanating from one's eye socket.

But this did not seem unreasonable back in the days of the madmen.  What did get them into a bit of hot water however was that phrase: Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.  Should be We of course.  As in we men of Harvard will kick your butts in a jolly game of polo.  But consider this us ruffians from the wrong side of the tracks will kick your butts in a jolly game of polo.  Has a little more zing no?

 But still, bad grammar, bad grammar. It is the subject and not the object of the sentence and should perforce be we.

But what can you do?  You can't arrest a guy for using bad grammar.  That's the problem with guys like those yoopers, they have no power.  But for guys in far northern Michigan, where the air is known to be thin and crazy ideas abound, they are pretty savvy, because they know putting up this dog and pony show will get them some notice in the American press.  

So they get their publicity, Beagles gets to feel like he is striking a blow against the ogre, Uncle Ken gets to write a couple pretty spiffy columns that the followers of the Institute get to enjoy, so it looks like a win-win-win-win to me.

And now it is team to lean back and enjoy that fine rich taste with activated charcoal as soon as I can get these boxing gloves on the paws of my kitty so she can give me a shiner so I can have the compleat* experience.

*Merriam Webster approves.

Winston tastes good like a cigarette should

 The language police, I reckon they have always been with us.  We grow up speaking however the folks around us are speaking and we all understand each other and everything is perfectly fine, and then we get to school and learn that certain words and certain declensions are not permitted, because, because teacher says so, and she says so because that is what they taught her in teacher school, and what is taught in teacher school is what some group of black-robed. white-bewigged, committee, speaking surely with a distinct British accent, have decreed, and that, Young Man, is what you shall do if you do not want to go over to that new restaurant at 58th and Kedzie and spend you career asking people if they want fries with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_tastes_good_like_a_cigarette_should  Was not surprised to learn that this big moment in advertising has its own wiki page, because it hit that little outpost of erudition, Enrico Tonti Elementary School,  like a fucking ton of bricks in 1954. It was bad fucking grammar.  Something about using like as a conjunction which you can't do because those robed and bewigged guys say that you can't.  

And you know it doesn't sound exactly right either, sounds a little too breezy, a tad disrespectful.  Winston tastes good as a cigarette should, now that sounds so much better, does it not?  Frankly though if I was choosing up teams I would not select the guy who said that for like shortstop. maybe for right field, if he was the last guy standing and I had to choose him.

Admen, I think they were a new thing back in 1954, only so much you can do with a print ad or radio ad, but tv, they were like tiny movies, and they ran with it.  Like most fourth graders I got all the news I needed from Mad magazine, and admen, with their snap down fedoras and checked sportscoats were a frequent target.  Something cheeky about them, talking about things like running something up a flagpole to see who salutes it, something well, with it.  

And being with it was pretty fucking important back in the monoculture of the fifties.  You were either there or you were square, and there was nowhere else to be.

Well there were beatniks.  To the beatniks the admen were square, the kind of job the beatnik's girlfriend wanted him to take so they could afford that nice new house in Westchester, but the beatnik guy would not even consider it because that would be like selling out Man.  

Well I have come far afield again, but I think I can guide it back to Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.  Tune in tomorrow.

I Did My Part

I found a place to cancel Trump.  Remember the Unicorn Hunters, the guys who banish words from the English language for misuse, overuse, and uselessness?  Apparently they are not the only outfit calling themselves "Unicorn Hunters", but I was able to sort them out of the herd by searching for "Unicorn Hunters who ban words".  If you just search for "Unicorn Hunters" you might hook up with some sexually deviant investment counselors, but y'all don't have to worry about that because I am posting the true link to avoid any confusion.

 Entry Form for LSSU’s Banished Words List 2022 (cognitoforms.com)

Of course I can't cancel Trump all by myself, all I did was submit his name.  They have a committee or something that decides what ends up on the official list of 10 that will be published at the end of the year.  I don't know what selection criteria they use, but it couldn't hurt if we all were to submit Trump's name for consideration.  By "we" I mean, like, everybody.  Of course the Trumpists won't do it, so I guess I mean everybody else.  I don't think there is any way to vote not to ban Trump on this particular platform, so the Trumpists won't be able to anything to stop us.  I am not usually a fan of collective action, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

an elephant, a donkey, and a murder hornet are driving through the desert

 As I am sure Beagles noticed, reading the wiki article, cancel culture is kind of an amorphous thing. This person says it is this and that person says it is that.  But perhaps like another amorphous thing, pornography, we may know it when we see it.  

And it is not at all in the business of ignoring people, it is in the business of defaming people.  Once a person is called out then like the Salem witch trials or the craze of accusing people of taking part in satanic pedophile rituals, what is important is that everybody jump on board by loudly proclaiming the same, lest they appear to be not as pure in heart as their screaming cohorts.  

Who is the we that should stop talking about him?  Trump is not going to stop talking.  His acolytes are not going to cease singing his praises, the majority of what used to be the Republican party cannot get enough of their darling.  But having said all that I am reminded of Pogo that long ago foggy morn in the swamp, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Biden was not my first choice for candidate, but when he emerged triumphant I was for him because here is the man who could beat Trump.  There are certain principles with the republican and democrat parties, but those don't really matter anymore, all that matters is Trump or anti Trump.  When McAuliff based his campaign on Fuck Trump, Fuck Trump, Fuck Trump I thought that was a great idea.  In a state that Biden won by ten how could that lose?

Post mortems of the Virginia race shows that a major factor was dems staying at home.  I'm guessing that Trump has receded into the mist for them.  Used to be in the bad old days everytime you turned around you heard that whining sneering voice, and anymore not so much, so likely the lukewarm dems just didn't see it as a pressing issue.  

Back in the early days of Obama the dems had the most enthusiasm, but since Trump it is the reps.  

Well here it is, the donkey and the elephant are riding their shiny red sports car across the desert and a fork approaches with of course a left and a right option.  The mascots argue which way to turn and as they are doing that a murder hornet flies in the car and begins stinging the both of them.  The donkey sees this as a menace likely to cause a wreck and wants to halt the argument over which way to turn in favor of swatting this bug.  The elephant is also getting stung, but not as much as the donkey and thinks he can take advantage of the disorder and steer the car right while the donkey is distracted.  He thinks the murder hornet can be harnessed to his purposes.  

The car gets turned right but the hornet cannot be harnessed and causes havoc everywhere, so that the donkey can pull the car the left, and thinks he can keep that direction because it knocks the hornet off the hood, but reminding the people of how awful the hornet was does not seem to make any difference and now it is crawling back inside the car.  

What is it Allen Ginsburg said, "Allegories are so much lettuce, don't hide the madness." 

Here is something of a confession.  I have been following the battle over the infrastructure bills for seems like six months.  It's a sprawling saga with many subplots, but the main thing is it is a dem kind of thing, spreading the wealth around a little.  There are actually two bills and stuff has been added and taken out and added again, and offhand I am not sure what is in it.  And I don't care much.  I am sure that it is full of good dem goodies of the kind I favor, but mostly I want them both to get through because it will be a victory for Biden, and for the dems.  And a victory for the dems is one more house of brick to keep the ogre away, and that is mostly what I think about these days. 

Cancel Trump!

 I have been pondering all weekend about how to respond to Uncle Ken's last post about the recent gubernatorial election in Virginia.  If you think about it, every time Trump's name appears anywhere, it gives him free publicity.  It doesn't matter if the reference is supportive or critical because, as a famous person once said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity".  Perhaps the way to take the wind out of Trump's sails would be to stop talking about him.  We could even pretend that he never existed, like in Orwell's "1984" when they made somebody an "unperson".  My recent research suggests that a mechanism for doing just that already exists, it's called "Cancel Culture".

Cancel culture - Wikipedia

What I don't know is exactly how one would go about putting somebody's name on the cancellation list.  I suppose there is a form that needs to be filled out, but I don't know where to get it or to whom it needs to be submitted.  I'll keep searching and let y'all know what I find out.  

old virginny

 I hate to let Friday go by without something.  Usually one of dawgs leaves something for me to chew on, but no such luck this sunny fall morning.  But so it goes.

I know Beagles is not much of a news junky, not so sure about Old Dog, though I think he rather disdains politics, but the big news this week is the election in Virginia, one year after Biden's pretty big win.  Biden took Virginia by ten, and McAuliff the dem incumbent's  opponent was one of those unknown hedge fund guys with a sack of dough to pay for his campaign which both parties tend to favor.  It looked like a lead pipe cinch.  It seemed obvious to the dems, as it did to me, that the thing to do was to tie Youngkin to Trump.  This would cause Youngkin to defend him to keep the Trumpsters in line behind him, and that would likely send him down in flames.

But Youngkin didn't do that.  He never said anything bad about Trump, and indeed goes along with him on his favorite fringe issues, but he didn't try to defend him either.  He basically didn't say much about him at all.  He ignored the elephant in the room.  Normally you would think this would piss off the elephant who would come storming into the state, but in a rare instance of wisdom he didn't.

And then during a debate McAuliff came out against school boards banning racy books from their libraries and said the now famous words: 

“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said during the debate. “...I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Youngkin pounced on this and turned it into something about critical race theory.

Critical Race Theory, the theory that race is involved in most all politics, is a course taught in some graduate schools.  It is not, nor has it ever, been taught in elementary or high schools.

But now that Trump has broken the surly bonds of truth for them, republicans now campaign against teaching critical race theory in grade and high schools, and this has been a mighty cudgel for them.  For them it means not teaching little white kids about things like slavery which would make white kids feel bad.

And that is the way the election went.  McAuliff chanting Trump, Trump, Trump, and Youngkin chanting Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory.  And in the end Youngkin eked out a victory.

This is bad for the dems who were planning to Trump, Trump, Trump their way to victory.  Republicans are still going to have to kiss the Trump butt to win their primaries, but once they win they can pivot and ignore the elephant in the room while campaigning.  And once they have won, and if Trump wins in 2024 because they have really said nothing bad about him they can easily fall into line with Trump.

This is not good.

Have a good weekend dawgs.

the physical universe revisited

 In my early teens I exclusively read science fiction,  The magazines not only had stories they also had articles about science fiction.  And they were purists, they felt it was up to them to decide what was science fiction.  Books and stories that were say, set in the future, but maybe did not have the correct science fiction elements (fantasy was strictly forbidden, no magic or ghosts or crap like that.  You could make up an anti-gravity device as long as you gave it a scientific name, but no witches casting spells that that made you immune to gravity), and especially if it was popular with those dolts who weren't really science fiction readers it was beyond the pale.  I don't think the writers of books like that, like Kurt Vonnegut, worried too much about that stuff, but they were obsessed with keeping their label pure.

I guess so it was with the most pure of the folkies who would only allow songs that were written in the old timey days in Appalachia.  Even though the Kingston Trio were singing a traditional folk tune, they didn't like the way it was arranged and particularly they must have hated how it raced to the top of the charts.  They could have ignored it and continued with their own songs but they thought that folk music was being besmirched.  Likewise when Bob Dylan went electric.  When the lily white Rolling Stones started playing old blues songs the old bluesman did not complain at all.  They had been mopping floors before and now they were rolling in dough.

Then there is this:  https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579527-poll-50-percent-of-republicans-dont-believe-their-vote-will-be-counted

We have seen polls like this before.  Back before the southern strategy we had liberals among the reps and conservatives among the dems.  Afterwards there were fewer and fewer, and the reps believed in like smaller gov and bigger armies, and trickle down, and crap like that, which I abhorred of course, but they were things that could be discussed.  

But in the new Trump era they believe things that aren't true at all.  Remember my boring essays about the physical universe exemplified by the tree in my backyard.  You could argue about whether it was a good looking or ugly tree, or the shading of the leaves or whatnot.  But you could not argue about whether it existed or not, all you had to do was come to my backyard and see for yourself (like all you had to look at were the photos of Obama's and Trump's inaugurals).  But now to reps, the tree is there only if Trump says it is.  And if he says something different the next day it is not there.

You can pretend there are still some old timey republicans who are not Trumpists, but they are few and far between.  Only one of them in congress, and among the rank and file, I think you can tell from this poll, also few and far.  That's why we dems feel like we are the only thing standing between the gains of the enlightenment and the dark ages. 

Folkier Than Thou

 Back in those days there was kind of a culture war going on between the rockers and the folkers.  Additionally, there was kind of a civil culture war within the folk movement.  We used to argue long into the night about what constituted "true" folk music, the other forms being considered "modern" or "commercial" folk music.  This led to what was called "the "folkier than thou attitude", which Peter Paul And Mary spoofed in the following classic. During one of those discussions it occurred to me that rock is technically a form of folk music.  I mean, folk music is the music of the common people, and rock is about as common as it gets.  This did not win me any points with either the folkers or the rockers but, to this day, I still believe that being right is more important than being popular.

PETER, PAUL & MARY ~ Blue ~ - YouTube