Thursday, August 11, 2005

Crackers with Beans

Just So You Know

As of 9:30 am yesterday, Texas is a majority-minority state.  The white overclass is now a minority in the very home of redneckdom.  Texas follows California, New Mexico and Hawaii into this unnatural state of being.  I’m sure that God is laughing that most of the states in greatest danger of falling prey to this syndrome are in the ex-Confederacy.

Crackers with Beans

I guess the only place that a self-respecting bigot can go is North Dakota, Iowa, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine.


Posted by Buckethead on 08/11/05 at 11:09 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Oops

Darwin Award Contender

Note to self:  if you’re driving a semi filled with 35,000 pounds of explosives, don’t flip the truck. 

Oops

The explosion left a 60 foot wide crater in the road, and the truck was “pretty much vaporized.” Really?


Posted by Buckethead on 08/11/05 at 11:04 AM
Darwin Award Contender • Permalink

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

This Week in Johno’s Animadversion

Just So You Know

“The first step in reforming government is also the first step of making chitlins: first you gotta squeeze out the dookie.”

That adorable little bit of folksy homespun wisdom was handed down to me by my Great-Grand-nuncle Hiram Boggs, a veteran of the Great War, and it was handed down to him by his Great-Grand-nuncle Zachariah Homer Muttonchop Boggs, who fought in the Civil War (on the side of the Blue) and spent his teenaged years fighting Copperheads and slave-hunters in the briar flats of Northeastern Ohio.

That makes seven generations of Boggses, Muttonchops, Mackies, Mackils, Morgans, Melvilles, Patricks, Picklebarrels, and Bagginses who have fought on the side of liberty against the encroaching depredations of the revenuer, the bully pulpit, and the bureaucrat.

And I’m starting to think it’s time for me to do the same. Of course, nobody in my family actually at any point picked up arms against the US Government (well, that’s not entirely true. I had a great-great-aunt killed by a stray bullet by Pinkerton men at Homestead and her husband was killed in a Pullman strike – also by the goddamn Pinkertons), and I don’t intend to either. That way lies madness and death.

But what can an honest man do when the fat cats down in Washington seem intent on Hoovering my wallet with one hand (that’s a pun, get it? Hoover the President and Hoover the vacuum cleaner? Haw!) and beating me about the head and neck with a Jack Chick tract (or a copy of The Noam Chomsky Reader) with the other? And what of an age where, even as our greatest enemies lie as they ever do outside our borders, even raising questions about the direction the country is taking elicits the inevitable “Don’t you know there’s a war on?!? Sinner!?!”

You know what an honest man can do?

Not a goddamn thing.


Posted by Johno on 08/10/05 at 04:32 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Thirty-Wonderful!

Perfidy Responds

This is a public thank-you to the Buckethead Clan for the very generous (and thoughtful!!!) birfday present. However, Buckethead may wish to avoid contact with Mrs. Johno for a while: in her words, you are ”so dead!”

Between that gift and the homebrewing kit I bought myself with the rest of my birthday loot, I’d say I’m going straight to hell. See you all there.


Posted by Johno on 08/10/05 at 04:15 PM
Perfidy Responds • Permalink

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

55 Words to Freedom

Just So You Know

Loyal Reader #0016(EDog) is participating in a New Times Fiction Contest that restricts the writer to 55 words or less per story. 55 words from setup to punchline - that’s tough, and the New Times’ rules are fairly restritive as well; twenty-eight counts as two words, as does “screw’em.” The best such stories will get published on real actual paper and sent to real actual readers who will read your words - on paper! Trust me when I say this is a delicious thrill orders of magnitude greater than blogging.

The Ministry hereby encourages all readers to consider participation. Your compliance is appreciated; indeed, it is expected.

Here is one of EDog’s submissions for your entertainment and edification.

Straight Line, No Chaser by Ian Healy

It was the night Jeremy Stain played the Dove. She stood by the bar, looking available.

“I’m Stan,” I smiled.

“Ella.”

“Want to get out of here?”

“Can’t. Waiting for someone.”

“Buy you a drink?”

“Got one, thanks.”

I paused, considering my next move. “Want to make out in the girls’ bathroom?”

“Ok.” She grinned.


Posted by Johno on 08/09/05 at 09:47 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Monday, August 08, 2005

Is “Islands In the Stream” A Manifesto for Municipal Sewage Treatment Reform?

Music Wonkery

What really needs to be said about Dolly Parton? She is one of the few country artists to have completely transcended country music to become a legitimate superstar, and unlike latter day superstar crossovers like Garth Brooks, Parton has become a touchstone, an institution, worthy of enshrinement on the Mount Rushmore of country-music transcenders right next to Elvis, Johnny and Willie. They’d have a hard time holding up the boobs though. Some sort of flying buttress system, I suppose.

The Essential Dolly Parton (Sony Legacy, 2005) provides absolute proof that Parton is the whole package. I recently accused Marty Robbins of not having one of country’s great voices. Well, Dolly Parton does have one of the finest voices in country music, a bold and expressive soprano that can either whoop or quaver depending on the need. Few singers have the ability to sing a “white tone” (that is, without vibrato) if they have a strong natural vibrato. Parton, however, has total control over her entire considerable range.


Posted by Johno on 08/08/05 at 05:51 PM
Music Wonkery • Permalink

In a World…

Entertainment

gone mad, one man, ONE MAN has the key to…

Farg it. This kicks ass.

Via the good people of unfogged.


Posted by Johno on 08/08/05 at 01:09 PM
Entertainment • Permalink

Friday, August 05, 2005

To be culturally illiterate is to be less than fully human

Perfidy Attacks

That’s my elitist line in the sand, elicited by a polemical editorial in - of all places - USA Today about how textbooks are making our children stupider. Readers of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police will be familiar with the contours of the argument, and I think everybody out there who reads weblogs at all has lamented at some point the sorry state of our public schooling. It’s as easy as poisoning pigeons in the park. But, MAN.

From the piece:

Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled “Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature,” followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes “Persian and Arabic Literature” and “West African Oral Literature” — and that’s only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it’s the same drill — short excerpts from long works — a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare’s plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard):

“Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language.”

They are? Well goody! And Leo DiCaprio stars!

Allow me to preen for a moment, because I got lucky in high school. Well not lucky in the usual sense; I was a Quiz Team geek and our type didn’t have willing groupies, but lucky in a larger sense. You see, my poor backward rural cow-town in the rust flats of Ohio was blessed with one Mr. Speece, an elderly English teacher who presided over Intensive English I-IV. Over four years, the curriculum went as follows:

Freshman year - American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Ann Porter, etc.
Sophomore year - British writers: Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Maugham, Chaucer (unexpurgated), Beowulf Junior Year - Continental and Russian writers: Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Turgenev
Senior Year - More of the same, but Frencher, plus drama: Balzac, Proust, Ibsen, Checkov.

Every finished book required a five-page expository essay explicating some aspect of the work. We were graded on spelling, grammar, clarity, cogency, and concision of argument. Our sophomore-year midterm consisted of memorizing and writing out in class 500 lines of poetry of our choice. The final: 1000 lines.

Thanks to Daniel Speece, I learned what Spanish Fly is, what “do a Cattleya” means in A Recherce du Temps Perdu, and how to fold and tear a calling card to convey to a lady I call upon that I’d like to have sex with her at some future date. Yes, I hated Hemingway and thought Anna Karenina was turgid and dense, but having read and though about those texts prepared me for college and in some very important ways for life. And without getting too snooty-snooty elitist about it, I’m very happy to have had the chance to read all these books and carry away from them a rich sense of the breadth of human experience. Revenge takes so many forms: Othello’s betrayal, Eustacia Vye accidental vengeance, Mrs. Treadwell watching herself dispassionately as she beats a pattern of crimson half moons in Danny’s unconscious face with her high heel. Ditto love; whether Anna K’s final solution, Hamlet’s roiling mix of love and hatred or poor Philip Carey’s pathetic mooning after his dull and worthless Mildred. None of these things would make it anywhere near most high school English curricula today, and I think we are poorer for it.

Reason mag has a good discussion of this editorial with some great comments including this priceless illustration of what I like to call “the problem:”

When I taught Shakespeare, I was saddened that the kids would laugh at “What ho!” but completely miss the sexual innuendo in something like Mercutio saying, “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.”

Part of what separates us from dogs and robots is our shared heritage, and without that we become something less than complete. This goes double if you can’t even recognize a simple dick-joke. It’s why I became a (failed, apostate) historian and it’s why I get so exercised about junk like this. I’d rather not homeschool my children; my wife and I both like to work. But it looks like I’m going to have to.

[Wik] One of the problems with blogging is that it’s so off-the-cuff. Some writers seem to thrive in that format; I don’t know if I do. My pieces come out better and more fully formed if I give them time to marinate.

My biggest problem, out of many, with the textbook example excerpted above is that the sentence “Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language” is in itself an empty assertion. A person cannot simply read that statement along with two pages of disembodied quotations from larger works and understand in any way why people think Shakespeare is so great, much less how they might think it is so.

I can tell a child that “fire is hot; it burns,” or “someday a woman will break your heart; you will want to die” but one of the tragedies of life is that we all have to live it for ourselves. If I could endure every burn and heartbreak for my (future; as yet theoretical) child, I would in a second. If I could open their eyes to the boundless invention and sheer joy of Shakespeare’s prose, I would in a second.

But for one thing. To know something, really know it, you have to go through it ready or not. That’s what life is all about. And for every burn, for every heartbreak, for every petty cruelty heaped upon an already straining back by the business of daily living, there is a Shakespeare, a Heinlein, a Chandler, a Bible, shit, even a Nightmare on Elm Street to show you there are greater and more wondrous things in the realm of human experience than you ever knew.

A teacher’s job, ideally, is to lead students to the point where they can realize this for themselves. For a teacher cannot instill; they can only create the opportunity for learning. But if we don’t give teachers even the chance to do that, if we deaden the pleasures and pains in the lessons in the name of ‘diversity’ or ‘moral hygiene,’ than we make it a teacher’s job to raise intellectual veals.

Shakespeare isn’t great until you’ve picked your wordy way through Othello or Macbeth, gotten inside the language, been smacked in the face with a wet woolen glop of alien-yet-familar genius and come away a little changed. Before that it’s just “fain prithee jakes petard; forsooth! bawdy bedpresser, for lo thine shivers I see!”

“Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language” in the same way that “it really hurts to break your leg.”


Posted by Johno on 08/05/05 at 01:48 PM
Perfidy Attacks • Permalink

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Huh huh… he said, “do it.”

Music Wonkery

Loyal readers will remember that I have extolled the virtues of master conguero Poncho Sanchez before, in reviews of a budget best-of (Instant Party!) and a live DVD; hopefully some of you have enriched your life with one of these by now. But the question still stands: is a Poncho Sanchez album even close to as good as a best-of compilation of the most memorable bits of several albums?


Posted by Johno on 08/04/05 at 04:59 PM
Music Wonkery • Permalink

President Christ Can See What You’re Doing… And He Is PISSED.

Unmitigated Gall

This morning on NPR, Buzzmachine heard Rick Santorum sum up why my short flirtation with the Republican party a few years back is over for good, unless they do something to get rid of “conservatives” like him.

This whole idea of personal autonomy — I don’t think that most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down, keep regulation down, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that most conservatives understand that we can’t go it alone, that there is no such society that I’m aware of where we’ve had radical individualism and it has succeeded as a culture.

If I read this correctly, real conservatives want to manage my bedroom behavior, raise taxes, regulate everything, prohibit unsavory cultural activities, and make sure people can’t just do whatever they want. Personal autonomy: bad. Government control of behavior: good.

Now I know that some folks might claim that Rick Santorum is an outlier, that he does not speak for conservatism and its place in the Republican party. That would be a fine argument, Margaret, if only he weren’t the third-ranking Republican in the Senate and therefore one of the national spokesmen and leaders of the conservative movement. No, Rick Santorum’s conservatism is part of the Republican party just like Bill Clinton’s wang is part of his body. It may be ugly, it may jump out of his pants at inopportune times and get him into a peck of trouble, it may be shameful and creepy when it rules his mind, but it’s an inextricable part of his identity, part of who he is.

The howler is, of course, that Short Bus Santorum is construing “radical individualism” as a threat to the American way of life. Right. “individualism” like “liberty” and “radical” like “for all.”

As Buzzmachine observes,

That’s not radical. That is the center of America. That is where most of us live — in let-us-be land. Santorum lives on the fringe, right neighborly with the PC folks who would tell us what to think and say.
Yes, the far right and far left do, indeed, meet at the fringes....

God, I hope this guy makes a run in ought-eight. I have a hankering to watch him get torn to pieces in the public arena. Metaphorically speaking, of course.


Posted by Johno on 08/04/05 at 04:20 PM
Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Linger Fickin’ Good!

Just So You Know

As previously noted, I took a leave of absence last weekend to travel to Savannah in the great state of Georgia to visit my sister and my newly arrived nephew, Sir David the Astonishingly Hirsute. They’re both fine.

An added benefit of my trip was that my birthday is coming soon, and therefore I ate particularly well. Every year around my birthday, Chainsaw treats me to a giant seafood blowout the likes of which you have never seen. This year we had a cookout during which I began eating at 4 in the afternoon and didn’t really stop until 3 the following morning.

The menu:

  • Gigantic bucketsful of three kinds of shellfish (oysters, clams, mussels), steamed with wine and aromatics.
  • grilled tuna steaks marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil with ginger and wasabi
  • two beer butt chickens
  • a spice-rubbed flank steak, medium-rare
  • bratwursts
  • There was also potato salad. I think.

    We also consumed many more beers than seemed likely, or even possible, considering the advancing age of the several participants. While I will incriminate nobody and admit to nothing, a group of six gentlemen consumed between them more than 100 beers plus a glass each Remy Martin (my birthday, you see!) and an odd martini or three.

    After a late-night snack of empanadas, I retired. The next day we recovered with a lunch of a gigantic pot of sancocho, a South American soup made with various meats (in this case chicken, beef loin, beef necks, and possibly turkey, though pork, oxtail, and sausages are also traditional) and starches (in this case potatoes, carrots, yucca, plantians, corn on the cob) plus aromatics. Truly there is no more restorative food in the world than a cup of sancocho broth and a nice plate of meat and starch garnished with pico de gallo and hot sauce. Did I mention my brother in law is Colombian, and among our party we numbered two former line cooks, a dedicated amateur (yrs truly) and a restaurant manager?

    For dinner that night I made my famous 4-cheese macaroni and cheese, thereby completing the culinary cultural exchange initiated by the empanadas and sancocho, and later I baked bread. I don’t often bake outside of my own house, so I was a bit taken aback when I came into the kitchen after taking my loaves out of the oven to find four grow men standing over my bread with a digital camera, pointing and whispering. They turned to me as one, as though driven by some pack instinct, and asked “when can we eat it??” So that was nice.

    When my family get together, we eat good.

    Then, of course, I came home to my loving wife who was suffering from a deficiency of Vitamin Me.


    Posted by Johno on 08/04/05 at 02:11 PM
    Just So You Know • Permalink

    Wednesday, August 03, 2005

    Warrior Laid to Rest

    		War

    Froggy attended the funeral of fallen warrior James Suh in California. 

    This image moved me in a way I can never describe:

    image

    Those are SEALs’ tridents, gilding Petty Officer Suh’s coffin.

    I have nothing to add to Froggy’s post.  Read it. 


    Posted by GeekLethal on 08/03/05 at 09:28 AM
    War • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

    State Department: Antarctica’s Probably Okay

    		Just So You Know

    The State Department has issued a new, less helpful, round of warnings for Americans considering travelling outside CONUS:

    The warning did not list countries, nor did department officials offer any additional specifics about threats. The statement said “current information” indicates that al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups are planning attacks against U.S. interests in “multiple regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”

    The short version: everyplace with funny-talkin’ furriners and no NASCAR is dangerous.

    The targets could include places where Americans meet or visit, such as residential areas, hotels and restaurants, as well as places of worship, schools, clubs, business offices and public areas, the caution said. It also noted that “demonstrations and rioting” can occur with little or no warning.

    The short version: Everything you do in the weird furrin’ place makes you a target.

    I know that the State Department has been getting shorted the last few years, but even with a shrunken budget isn’t there anyone at State who can devise a more helpful warning than, “don’t go anywhere, and don’t do anything when you’re there”? 


    Posted by GeekLethal on 08/03/05 at 08:41 AM
    Just So You Know • Permalink

    Tuesday, August 02, 2005

    IS IT TRUE PEARLS BRING SADNESS

    		Entertainment

    Having recently returned from a junket to the Ministry’s Southern division in Savannah, GA (what… you think Sherman gave up out of the goodness of his heart??), I am in recovery mode. As a placeholder to occupy your small minds while I get back up to full strength is this page of the funniest unanswerable questions ever asked of Snopes.com.

    [Wik] I have to wonder what circumstances bring a person to that exquisite point of desperate loneliness where the only recourse they can imagine is to send an emailed query in all-caps to the anonymous researchers at a website, asking whether the deep welling sadness they are feeling is really caused by pearls. There’s something melancholy and poetic in the idea. 


    Posted by Johno on 08/02/05 at 10:53 AM
    Entertainment • Permalink
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