One of my final-exam questions for my Lamar University, Angelina College, and Kirbyville High School students:
16. Rewrite the following CBS-ism as one complete sentence using five or fewer words:
In my own personal opinion, and in conclusion, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, when all is said and done, when the fat man sings, that Mother Nature, in the awesome form of mighty Hurricane Ike thundering and slamming ashore in a turbulent and fateful pre-dawn, wreaked havoc on our homeland, snapping trees like matchsticks and leaving a swath of destruction in her wake that looked like a war zone and changed our lives forever, requiring us to seek closure and healing from grief counselors.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Writing: K.I.S.S.
One of my final-exam questions for my Lamar University, Angelina College, and Kirbyville High School students:
16. Rewrite the following CBS-ism as one complete sentence using five or fewer words:
In my own personal opinion, and in conclusion, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, when all is said and done, when the fat man sings, that Mother Nature, in the awesome form of mighty Hurricane Ike thundering and slamming ashore in a turbulent and fateful pre-dawn, wreaked havoc on our homeland, snapping trees like matchsticks and leaving a swath of destruction in her wake that looked like a war zone and changed our lives forever, requiring us to seek closure and healing from grief counselors.
16. Rewrite the following CBS-ism as one complete sentence using five or fewer words:
In my own personal opinion, and in conclusion, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, when all is said and done, when the fat man sings, that Mother Nature, in the awesome form of mighty Hurricane Ike thundering and slamming ashore in a turbulent and fateful pre-dawn, wreaked havoc on our homeland, snapping trees like matchsticks and leaving a swath of destruction in her wake that looked like a war zone and changed our lives forever, requiring us to seek closure and healing from grief counselors.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
THE PRISONER Fact #9
Yes, #6 catches the swine flu. He catches it, has a few quiet conversations with it, and persuades it to attack #2.
Freshly-Baked, Farm-Fresh, Home-Cooked Feed 'n' Seed
Mack Hall
Once upon a time Main Street in my little town featured The City Café’, but one never hears of that anymore. If the establishment still existed it would surely advertise itself as “Mama’s Country Café’” or “Country Cookery” or “The Country Home Cooking Lone Star Café.’”
Advertising in this part of the world is all about the country thing, even when the concept of country is irrelevant to the matter. When you sit down to the good ol’ bacon and eggs in the morning you know very well they were not cooked at home or in the country; they were cooked in the back of the café’ by Juan. If you want home-cooking, stay home and cook. If you want to start the day with the crossword and someone keeping the coffee flowing for you, you drive out of the country and into town. Town is where they keep the country cafes.’
And speaking of cafes’, a friend noted that one in Beaumont did not feature even a single rusty license plate on its walls. Is that legal? Doesn’t the health department cite restaurants for not having rusty license plates? I think I saw that on Channel 6.
And then there are the various car dealerships prefaced Cowboy. A cowboy is an agricultural worker who herds cows. There really aren’t any of those around here. Car dealerships based on real-world workers would be named Petrochemical Operator Fiat, or perhaps Receptionist Volkswagen, or maybe Pipefitter Opel.
Almost every bread product is billed as fresh-baked. Well, yeah, when a Kaiser roll (and does the Kaiser know about this?) is baked, it’s fresh. A more accurate labeling would be: “This Kaiser roll was baked, then packaged, then loaded on a truck, then driven around East Texas until it was finally off-loaded at this store, and now it’s resided on this shelf for an indeterminate time.”
This leads us to farm-fresh. Is a farm fresh? How fresh? A really honest ice-cream commercial would feature a cow with the scours.
One longs to see a church called Certified Public Accountants for Christ.
Maybe hospitals will follow the country theme: “Yes, ma’am, let us deliver your baby in the country fashion. And don’t mind the livestock grazing in the delivery room.”
Or lawyers: “You got a case against that company that employed you and put up with your absences and indolence and petty theft all those years before finally sacking you? Let our crack country team of country lawyers take th’ Burdizzos to ‘em! Yeeeeeeeee-hawwwwwwwwwwww!”
Chinese cars: “Howdy, pardner, this is Tex Chang of Shanghai Motors, and ah’m here to tell you about our proven line of Red Star hybrid pickups, now available in North America. Whether you’re haulin’ prisoners to execution or vegetables to th’ market, you’ll be country-proud you’re country-savin’ th’ country planet by country-drivin’ a country-hybrid Red Star pickup.”
And, hey, how about that country-swine flu, eh? Rumor has it that it’s going to be bought up by a foreign company and the virus out-sourced to Italy, with you and me paying for it all.
Once upon a time Main Street in my little town featured The City Café’, but one never hears of that anymore. If the establishment still existed it would surely advertise itself as “Mama’s Country Café’” or “Country Cookery” or “The Country Home Cooking Lone Star Café.’”
Advertising in this part of the world is all about the country thing, even when the concept of country is irrelevant to the matter. When you sit down to the good ol’ bacon and eggs in the morning you know very well they were not cooked at home or in the country; they were cooked in the back of the café’ by Juan. If you want home-cooking, stay home and cook. If you want to start the day with the crossword and someone keeping the coffee flowing for you, you drive out of the country and into town. Town is where they keep the country cafes.’
And speaking of cafes’, a friend noted that one in Beaumont did not feature even a single rusty license plate on its walls. Is that legal? Doesn’t the health department cite restaurants for not having rusty license plates? I think I saw that on Channel 6.
And then there are the various car dealerships prefaced Cowboy. A cowboy is an agricultural worker who herds cows. There really aren’t any of those around here. Car dealerships based on real-world workers would be named Petrochemical Operator Fiat, or perhaps Receptionist Volkswagen, or maybe Pipefitter Opel.
Almost every bread product is billed as fresh-baked. Well, yeah, when a Kaiser roll (and does the Kaiser know about this?) is baked, it’s fresh. A more accurate labeling would be: “This Kaiser roll was baked, then packaged, then loaded on a truck, then driven around East Texas until it was finally off-loaded at this store, and now it’s resided on this shelf for an indeterminate time.”
This leads us to farm-fresh. Is a farm fresh? How fresh? A really honest ice-cream commercial would feature a cow with the scours.
One longs to see a church called Certified Public Accountants for Christ.
Maybe hospitals will follow the country theme: “Yes, ma’am, let us deliver your baby in the country fashion. And don’t mind the livestock grazing in the delivery room.”
Or lawyers: “You got a case against that company that employed you and put up with your absences and indolence and petty theft all those years before finally sacking you? Let our crack country team of country lawyers take th’ Burdizzos to ‘em! Yeeeeeeeee-hawwwwwwwwwwww!”
Chinese cars: “Howdy, pardner, this is Tex Chang of Shanghai Motors, and ah’m here to tell you about our proven line of Red Star hybrid pickups, now available in North America. Whether you’re haulin’ prisoners to execution or vegetables to th’ market, you’ll be country-proud you’re country-savin’ th’ country planet by country-drivin’ a country-hybrid Red Star pickup.”
And, hey, how about that country-swine flu, eh? Rumor has it that it’s going to be bought up by a foreign company and the virus out-sourced to Italy, with you and me paying for it all.
The Sky to Moc Hoa
Mack Hall
The Sky to Moc Hoa
The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue,
Layered between heat and Heaven. The damp
Rots even the air with the menace of death.
The ground below, all green and holed, dies too;
It seems to gasp: You will not live, young lad,
You will not live to read your books or dream
About a little room, a fire, a pipe,
A chair, a pen, a dog, a truth-told poem
Flung courteously in manuscript pages
Upon a coffee-stained table, halo’d
In a 60-watt puddle of lamp-light.
You skinny, stupid kid. You will not live.
Then circling, and circling again, again,
Searching, perhaps, for festive rotting meals,
Down-spinning, fear-spinning onto Moc Hoa,
Palm trees, iron roofs, spinning in a dead sun,
Spinning up to a swing-ship spinning down.
A square of iron matting in a green marsh,
Hot, green, wet, fetid with old Samsara.
Gunboats diesel across the Van Co Tay,
Little green gunboats, red nylon mail sacks,
Engines, cheery yells, sloshing mud, heat, rot.
Mail sacks off, mail sacks on, men off, men on,
Dark blades beating against the heavy heat,
The door gunners, the pilot impatient.
All clear to lift, heads down, humans crouching
Ape-like against the grass, against the slime
In sweating, stinking, slinking, feral fear
As the dragon-blades roar and finally fly,
And the beaten grass and beaten men
Now stand again erect in gasping heat,
Some silent in a new and fearful world.
You will not live, young hero; you will die.
What then of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov?
What then of your Modern Library editions,
A dollar each at the Stars & Stripes store
Far away and long ago in DaNang,
All marked and underlined? What is the point?
What then of your notebook scribbled with words,
Your weak attempts at poetry? So sad,
So irrelevant in the nights of death.
The corpses on the gunboat decks won’t care,
Their flare-lit faces staring into smoke
At 0-Two-Damned Thirty in the morning –
Of what truth or beauty are your words to them?
You haven’t any words anyway;
They’re out of movies and books, all of them.
What truth can adventure-story words speak
To corpses with their eyes eaten away?
Write your used emotions onto a page;
You haven’t any emotions anyway;
They’re out of the past, all of them.
What truth can used emotions speak to death?
So sling your useless gear aboard the boat:
A seabag of utilities, clean socks,
Letters, a pocket knife, a Rosary,
Some underwear, some dreams, and lots of books.
And board yourself. Try not to fall, to drown,
To be a floating bloating, eyeless face.Not yet.
Think of your books, your words. Look up:
The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue.
Notes:
1. Moc Hoa, pronounced Mock Wah -- a town on the Vam Co Tay River near the border with Cambodia.
2. “Young lad” or “lad” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers.
3. “Young hero” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers and of Navy Corpsman in Field Medical Service School by Marine sergeant-instructors.
4. Utilities – heavy, olive-drab, 1950s style Marine Corps battle-dress issued to Navy personnel on their way to Viet-Nam. Too darned hot. I had to scrounge lighter clothing.
5. Samsara – in some Eastern religions the ocean of birth and death.
6. Gunboats – here, PBRs, or Patrol Boat, River. The history of this excellent craft and its use in river warfare is well documented.
7. Stars and Stripes store – more accurately, any one of the chain of Pacific Stars and Stripes book stores.
8. Swing ship – a helicopter, in my experience always the famous Huey, employed for carrying supplies and personnel on routine routes. The pilots sometimes spun them in very fast in order to try to avoid ground fire.
9. Seabag – duffel bag.
10. Skinny kid – most of us were.
The Sky to Moc Hoa
The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue,
Layered between heat and Heaven. The damp
Rots even the air with the menace of death.
The ground below, all green and holed, dies too;
It seems to gasp: You will not live, young lad,
You will not live to read your books or dream
About a little room, a fire, a pipe,
A chair, a pen, a dog, a truth-told poem
Flung courteously in manuscript pages
Upon a coffee-stained table, halo’d
In a 60-watt puddle of lamp-light.
You skinny, stupid kid. You will not live.
Then circling, and circling again, again,
Searching, perhaps, for festive rotting meals,
Down-spinning, fear-spinning onto Moc Hoa,
Palm trees, iron roofs, spinning in a dead sun,
Spinning up to a swing-ship spinning down.
A square of iron matting in a green marsh,
Hot, green, wet, fetid with old Samsara.
Gunboats diesel across the Van Co Tay,
Little green gunboats, red nylon mail sacks,
Engines, cheery yells, sloshing mud, heat, rot.
Mail sacks off, mail sacks on, men off, men on,
Dark blades beating against the heavy heat,
The door gunners, the pilot impatient.
All clear to lift, heads down, humans crouching
Ape-like against the grass, against the slime
In sweating, stinking, slinking, feral fear
As the dragon-blades roar and finally fly,
And the beaten grass and beaten men
Now stand again erect in gasping heat,
Some silent in a new and fearful world.
You will not live, young hero; you will die.
What then of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov?
What then of your Modern Library editions,
A dollar each at the Stars & Stripes store
Far away and long ago in DaNang,
All marked and underlined? What is the point?
What then of your notebook scribbled with words,
Your weak attempts at poetry? So sad,
So irrelevant in the nights of death.
The corpses on the gunboat decks won’t care,
Their flare-lit faces staring into smoke
At 0-Two-Damned Thirty in the morning –
Of what truth or beauty are your words to them?
You haven’t any words anyway;
They’re out of movies and books, all of them.
What truth can adventure-story words speak
To corpses with their eyes eaten away?
Write your used emotions onto a page;
You haven’t any emotions anyway;
They’re out of the past, all of them.
What truth can used emotions speak to death?
So sling your useless gear aboard the boat:
A seabag of utilities, clean socks,
Letters, a pocket knife, a Rosary,
Some underwear, some dreams, and lots of books.
And board yourself. Try not to fall, to drown,
To be a floating bloating, eyeless face.Not yet.
Think of your books, your words. Look up:
The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue.
Notes:
1. Moc Hoa, pronounced Mock Wah -- a town on the Vam Co Tay River near the border with Cambodia.
2. “Young lad” or “lad” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers.
3. “Young hero” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers and of Navy Corpsman in Field Medical Service School by Marine sergeant-instructors.
4. Utilities – heavy, olive-drab, 1950s style Marine Corps battle-dress issued to Navy personnel on their way to Viet-Nam. Too darned hot. I had to scrounge lighter clothing.
5. Samsara – in some Eastern religions the ocean of birth and death.
6. Gunboats – here, PBRs, or Patrol Boat, River. The history of this excellent craft and its use in river warfare is well documented.
7. Stars and Stripes store – more accurately, any one of the chain of Pacific Stars and Stripes book stores.
8. Swing ship – a helicopter, in my experience always the famous Huey, employed for carrying supplies and personnel on routine routes. The pilots sometimes spun them in very fast in order to try to avoid ground fire.
9. Seabag – duffel bag.
10. Skinny kid – most of us were.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
THE PRISONER Fact #8
#6 never dines in restaurants featuring old license plates hanging on the walls.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
THE PRISONER Fact #7
An unfortunate incident occurred on the outer perimeter when #34, a former Vatican superspy, tried to surrender to Rover in Latin.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Pilgrimage Along the A1
Mack Hall
From Peterborough drops a road
Across the Fens, into the past
(Where wary wraiths still wear the woad);
It comes to Chesterton at last.
And we will walk along that track,
Or hop a bus, perhaps; you know
How hard it is to sling a pack
When one is sixty-old, and slow.
That mapped blue line across our land
Follows along a Roman way
Where Hereward the Wake made stand
In mists where secret islands lay.
In Chesterton a Norman tower
Beside Saint Michael’s guards the fields;
Though clockless, still it counts slow hours
And centuries long hidden and sealed.
And there before a looted tomb,
Long bare of candles, flowers, and prayers,
We will in our poor Latin resume
Aves for old de Beauville’s cares.
From Peterborough drops a road
Across the Fens, into the past
(Where wary wraiths still wear the woad);
It comes to Chesterton at last.
And we will walk along that track,
Or hop a bus, perhaps; you know
How hard it is to sling a pack
When one is sixty-old, and slow.
That mapped blue line across our land
Follows along a Roman way
Where Hereward the Wake made stand
In mists where secret islands lay.
In Chesterton a Norman tower
Beside Saint Michael’s guards the fields;
Though clockless, still it counts slow hours
And centuries long hidden and sealed.
And there before a looted tomb,
Long bare of candles, flowers, and prayers,
We will in our poor Latin resume
Aves for old de Beauville’s cares.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Saint Joseph the Just
Mack Hall
For Joe Burns, Father and Teacher
Saint Joseph in a dreary winter night
Took to himself a newborn not his own,
Who yet is always his, the Child of Light
Whose crib Saint Joseph knew to be a throne.
Saint Joseph shows men truth: each child is ours,
Adopted by each good man upon birth;
True fatherhood ordained in starlit hours
And ratified in Heaven and on earth.
Saint Joseph is the man who looked into
The eyes of Mary in her happy youth;
This strong man looked into her eyes and knew
She bore within her all eternal Truth.
Our witness is Saint Joseph, ever just:
God calls each man to take each child in trust.
For Joe Burns, Father and Teacher
Saint Joseph in a dreary winter night
Took to himself a newborn not his own,
Who yet is always his, the Child of Light
Whose crib Saint Joseph knew to be a throne.
Saint Joseph shows men truth: each child is ours,
Adopted by each good man upon birth;
True fatherhood ordained in starlit hours
And ratified in Heaven and on earth.
Saint Joseph is the man who looked into
The eyes of Mary in her happy youth;
This strong man looked into her eyes and knew
She bore within her all eternal Truth.
Our witness is Saint Joseph, ever just:
God calls each man to take each child in trust.
THE PRISONER -- Fact #6 About #6
#6 is a STAR TREK man, and would not bother A, B, or C-ing to the galaxy next door to see a STAR WARS anything.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Weak Tea
Mack Hall
The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is said to have been a reasonable protest against taxation without representation. The English view is that after 150 years it was about time for the colonies to stop being a drag on the English economy and to start helping pay for their own maintenance and defense.
The tea parties of 2009 are less defensible, except for the environmental matter – the tea this year was drunk, not dumped into a harbor to pollute the little fishies. The reality is that our contemporary tea parties are not about lack of representation but rather about folks (wearing clothes made in slave-labor camps in the Far East) throwing polite hissy-fits for getting exactly the government for which they voted.
Or maybe the government for which they did not vote at all.
Indeed, if the one requirement for participation in a Taxed Enough Already Tea Party were the possession of an I-voted-last-November voter card, how many people could have shown up?
Under the kings the theory is that the hierarchy of power is from God to the Christian monarch to the people. Under a republic the usual hierarchy of power is from the people to their elected rulers, and there is no God. In our Republic the general idea has been that power is given by God to the people, who then prayerfully and thoughtfully elect their leaders, which explains the saintly Ted Kennedy, who once walked on water.
Unfortunately most Americans don’t vote. Some can’t, because of youth, mental incompetence, or felony conviction (which doesn’t apply to Rush Limbaugh with his illegal drug issues, because he’s special and you’re not). Of the rest, many don’t bother to register, and of those who register, only about half ever vote. One fears they are too busy obediently listening to Glenn Beck yell at them.
A protest against a federal government that was empowered by democratic vote only four months before seems to be pretty weak tea. Similarly, sitting around over coffee (or tea) and belly-aching about the state government, the county government, the city government, or the school board unless the belly-acher actually voted in those elections is an exercise of the absolute freedom to be a gaseous phony.
Historical minutiae of no particular importance:
1. George Washington was the 11th President, not the first. After independence from perfidious Albion, this country functioned (badly) under the Articles of Confederation. The argument that the first ten presidents were leaders of Congress, not of the Confederation, won’t brew.
2. The United States government has in the past sent the United States Army to shoot and hang tax protestors, beginning with Shay’s Rebellion and The Whiskey Rebellion. Being shot might have been a lesser punishment than having to endure that princess CNN reporter.
3. The first President (I capitalize the noun because of my deep respect for the office) born in the United States was Martin Van Buren. The ten Presidents under the Articles of Confederation were all born in English colonies, as were eight of the first nine Presidents under the Constitution. If the concept that an American President must be American born is valid, then the first President is Van Buren and the second is John Tyler, all those preceding being invalid.
4. The final irony about any American tea party is that very little tea is grown here; most tea consumed in America is grown in over forty countries in Asia and Africa, and imported mostly by English companies.
And, hey, how about that balance of trade with Communist China, eh?
The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is said to have been a reasonable protest against taxation without representation. The English view is that after 150 years it was about time for the colonies to stop being a drag on the English economy and to start helping pay for their own maintenance and defense.
The tea parties of 2009 are less defensible, except for the environmental matter – the tea this year was drunk, not dumped into a harbor to pollute the little fishies. The reality is that our contemporary tea parties are not about lack of representation but rather about folks (wearing clothes made in slave-labor camps in the Far East) throwing polite hissy-fits for getting exactly the government for which they voted.
Or maybe the government for which they did not vote at all.
Indeed, if the one requirement for participation in a Taxed Enough Already Tea Party were the possession of an I-voted-last-November voter card, how many people could have shown up?
Under the kings the theory is that the hierarchy of power is from God to the Christian monarch to the people. Under a republic the usual hierarchy of power is from the people to their elected rulers, and there is no God. In our Republic the general idea has been that power is given by God to the people, who then prayerfully and thoughtfully elect their leaders, which explains the saintly Ted Kennedy, who once walked on water.
Unfortunately most Americans don’t vote. Some can’t, because of youth, mental incompetence, or felony conviction (which doesn’t apply to Rush Limbaugh with his illegal drug issues, because he’s special and you’re not). Of the rest, many don’t bother to register, and of those who register, only about half ever vote. One fears they are too busy obediently listening to Glenn Beck yell at them.
A protest against a federal government that was empowered by democratic vote only four months before seems to be pretty weak tea. Similarly, sitting around over coffee (or tea) and belly-aching about the state government, the county government, the city government, or the school board unless the belly-acher actually voted in those elections is an exercise of the absolute freedom to be a gaseous phony.
Historical minutiae of no particular importance:
1. George Washington was the 11th President, not the first. After independence from perfidious Albion, this country functioned (badly) under the Articles of Confederation. The argument that the first ten presidents were leaders of Congress, not of the Confederation, won’t brew.
2. The United States government has in the past sent the United States Army to shoot and hang tax protestors, beginning with Shay’s Rebellion and The Whiskey Rebellion. Being shot might have been a lesser punishment than having to endure that princess CNN reporter.
3. The first President (I capitalize the noun because of my deep respect for the office) born in the United States was Martin Van Buren. The ten Presidents under the Articles of Confederation were all born in English colonies, as were eight of the first nine Presidents under the Constitution. If the concept that an American President must be American born is valid, then the first President is Van Buren and the second is John Tyler, all those preceding being invalid.
4. The final irony about any American tea party is that very little tea is grown here; most tea consumed in America is grown in over forty countries in Asia and Africa, and imported mostly by English companies.
And, hey, how about that balance of trade with Communist China, eh?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Russians in Moc Hoa
I read lots of Russian lit (in translation, of course) while in Viet-Nam
Mack Hall
Russians in Moc Hoa
I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
And then I learned about Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!
Mack Hall
Russians in Moc Hoa
I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
And then I learned about Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!
Monday, April 13, 2009
Little Known Fact #4 About THE PRISONER
#6 hides his Winnie-the-Pooh books unders his pillow. If #2 ever finds out...
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Ubi Petrus
Mack Hall
For Inky and Jason
"Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia."
- St. Ambrose of Milan
Where Peter was, there also was the Tomb --
Blood-sodden dreams cold-rotting in old sin,
The Chalice left unwashed, the Upper Room
A three-days’ grave for hope-forsaken men.
Where Peter is, there also should we be,
Poor pilgrims, his, a-kneel before the Throne
Of Eosian Christendom, and none but he
Is called to lead the Church to eternal Dawn.
Where Peter then will be, there is the Faith,
Transubstantiation, whipped blood, ripped flesh
A solid reality, not a wraith
Of shop-soiled heresies labeled as fresh.
Where Peter is, O Lord, there let us pray,
Poor battered wanderers along Your way.
For Inky and Jason
"Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia."
- St. Ambrose of Milan
Where Peter was, there also was the Tomb --
Blood-sodden dreams cold-rotting in old sin,
The Chalice left unwashed, the Upper Room
A three-days’ grave for hope-forsaken men.
Where Peter is, there also should we be,
Poor pilgrims, his, a-kneel before the Throne
Of Eosian Christendom, and none but he
Is called to lead the Church to eternal Dawn.
Where Peter then will be, there is the Faith,
Transubstantiation, whipped blood, ripped flesh
A solid reality, not a wraith
Of shop-soiled heresies labeled as fresh.
Where Peter is, O Lord, there let us pray,
Poor battered wanderers along Your way.
Pontius Pilate's Pleynt
Mack Hall
My Caesar and my Empire have I served,
A diplomatic functionary, true
To distant duties, and never unnerved
By greedy Greek or perfidious Jew.
Outside the arca archa have I thought,
Festooned my desk and office with awards;
My Caesar’s honour only have I sought
While sparing for myself but few rewards.
I built with focused care my resume’
And filed each memorandum, note, and scrip;
I justly ruled (no matter what they say),
And seldom sent men to the cross or whip.
But, oh! That thing about an open vault –
I never got it. And why was that my fault?
My Caesar and my Empire have I served,
A diplomatic functionary, true
To distant duties, and never unnerved
By greedy Greek or perfidious Jew.
Outside the arca archa have I thought,
Festooned my desk and office with awards;
My Caesar’s honour only have I sought
While sparing for myself but few rewards.
I built with focused care my resume’
And filed each memorandum, note, and scrip;
I justly ruled (no matter what they say),
And seldom sent men to the cross or whip.
But, oh! That thing about an open vault –
I never got it. And why was that my fault?
Another Fact About THE PRISONER
#6 would have rescued the Maersk Alabama but #2 strapped #6 to that aluminum see-saw in the control room and made him too sea-sick to go.
The Maersk Alabama Incident: One Shot, One Kill, One Million Lawsuits
Mack Hall
The brilliant rescue of Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama by the United States Navy leads one to wonder if the roaring we hear is caused by a tidal wave (“tsunami” is so last six months) of lawsuits being filed against America by Americans.
We are awaiting the usual pictures of the requisite peaceful anti-American rioting in London and Paris by peaceful peace activists peacefully chanting “Death to America” and “Peacefully behead those who disapprove of peaceful Islam.”
What has not yet been decided is when the Navy SEALS involved will be turned over to the Belgians for a show trial – uh – fair trial, or when The Leader of the Free World will next genuflect before another thug and apologize for evil, perfidious America’s brutality, colonialism, and carbon-footprintism.
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, America’s leading druggie Republicans, will whoop and strut like the couch-carrot emperor in Gladiator.
Maersk will probably pay off somebody anyway: “Pretty-please don’t steal our ships.”
Mexico will claim that this is all the fault of the few remaining American gun manufacturers.
The American taxpayer will probably be made to give all the Somali relatives (“He was my third cousin twice removed…sob!”) far more money than is granted to American war widows and orphans.
Greenpeace will sue for the global warming caused by the discharge of weapons.
PETA will kill some more dogs while griping that the First Family did not rescue Bo from a shelter. The President’s Death Star limousine will sport a bumper sticker reading “I (heart) My Portuguese Water Dog.” This will replace the Maersk Alabama in the news.
Germany, Britain, and Norway will squabble about the Altmark incident in 1940, but will in the end agree that it was America’s fault. Descendants will sue America because Texaco sold the British government a can of oil that was later used (according to expert testimony) to lubricate a galley ventilation fan on HMS Cossack.
Hey, how about the Chinese navy stepping in and helping out off East Africa, eh?
U.S. Navy officers anywhere in the world who may have heard of the Maersk Alabama will receive medals; the enlisted men who risked their lives will be told to go clean something.
And in the meantime, between satellite-phone consultations with their American attorneys, Somali pirate-lords will be having the lads clean their AK-47s and brush up on their boarding-party skills.
The brilliant rescue of Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama by the United States Navy leads one to wonder if the roaring we hear is caused by a tidal wave (“tsunami” is so last six months) of lawsuits being filed against America by Americans.
We are awaiting the usual pictures of the requisite peaceful anti-American rioting in London and Paris by peaceful peace activists peacefully chanting “Death to America” and “Peacefully behead those who disapprove of peaceful Islam.”
What has not yet been decided is when the Navy SEALS involved will be turned over to the Belgians for a show trial – uh – fair trial, or when The Leader of the Free World will next genuflect before another thug and apologize for evil, perfidious America’s brutality, colonialism, and carbon-footprintism.
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, America’s leading druggie Republicans, will whoop and strut like the couch-carrot emperor in Gladiator.
Maersk will probably pay off somebody anyway: “Pretty-please don’t steal our ships.”
Mexico will claim that this is all the fault of the few remaining American gun manufacturers.
The American taxpayer will probably be made to give all the Somali relatives (“He was my third cousin twice removed…sob!”) far more money than is granted to American war widows and orphans.
Greenpeace will sue for the global warming caused by the discharge of weapons.
PETA will kill some more dogs while griping that the First Family did not rescue Bo from a shelter. The President’s Death Star limousine will sport a bumper sticker reading “I (heart) My Portuguese Water Dog.” This will replace the Maersk Alabama in the news.
Germany, Britain, and Norway will squabble about the Altmark incident in 1940, but will in the end agree that it was America’s fault. Descendants will sue America because Texaco sold the British government a can of oil that was later used (according to expert testimony) to lubricate a galley ventilation fan on HMS Cossack.
Hey, how about the Chinese navy stepping in and helping out off East Africa, eh?
U.S. Navy officers anywhere in the world who may have heard of the Maersk Alabama will receive medals; the enlisted men who risked their lives will be told to go clean something.
And in the meantime, between satellite-phone consultations with their American attorneys, Somali pirate-lords will be having the lads clean their AK-47s and brush up on their boarding-party skills.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Little Known Fact #1 About THE PRISONER
#6 finally realized he could intimidate Rover by glaring at him in that head down / eyes up way he uses in the opening.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
History's Lost E-Mails - a Rebuttal to an Anonymous Committee of Merovingians
Dear Anonymous Accuser:
Thank you for your note, the contents of
which sound much like the block warden’s caution (“Your attitude is noticed,
comrade.”) to Yuri in the film version of Doctor Zhivago.
I have re-read the column, which I wrote
nine years ago, and find nothing offensive in it (although it is rather
puerile), nor do you detail exactly what is offensive in it and why I should be
sanctioned. You are being Kafka-esque, and I say this as someone who has read
Kafka: you do not tell me what offense I have purportedly committed nor do you face
me with an accuser. You do not even face me with you, for you do not give your
name. You employ the passive voice in referring to an “Adult Content policy” and
to “Community Guidelines,” which sounds like something from an episode of
Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner: “The Committee won’t like this, Number
Six.”
Google (and one could find “google”
offensive, with its history mocking someone’s physical characteristics) is a
private company, and so is free to publish or not publish, as is only
right. And I am free to pity Google for
moral, ethical, and literary cowardice.
I was raised in situational poverty,
barely graduated from high school, and spent 18 months in Viet-Nam. Upon
returning to the USA (with life-long skin cancer which the DVA denies) I worked
straight nights (double shifts on weekends) as an ambulance driver and later an
LVN to put myself through university. I taught for almost forty years in public
school, community college, and university as an adjunct instructor of no status
whatsoever. In retirement I volunteered with our local school’s reading program
until the Covid ended that, and I still volunteer with the lads at the local prison.
I volunteer in community cleanup after our hurricanes (tho’ I’m getting a
little old for that). I’ve worked hard all my life, paid my taxes, paid off my
house at age 70, receive only half of my Social Security because of some vague
law, and never gamed the system. Indeed, I would say that the system has gamed
me.
And was all of this so that some frightened
committee of anonymous inquisitors staring at an Orwellian telescreen or a
Mordor-ish Palantir could find an innocuous scribble insensitive?
Pffffft.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Hall
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Mirror of a Man
The Mirror of a Man
For Robin
As his adventures continue
A good knife is the mirror of a man,
Carefully crafted by the Master’s hands,
Forged in the fire, hammered, water-baptized,
And forged again, made strong and sharp and true.
A good knife is the mirror of a friend,
A fellow pilgrim on the sunlit road,
A needful companion, always at hand,
Welcome as sunrise and coffee at dawn.
A good knife is the mirror of a life
Lived humbly in this sometimes Lenten world,
But proven a sword when, at journey’s end,
A man at last enters Jerusalem.
-- Mack Hall, 4 April 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Notre Dame and the Upside-Down Helmet
Mack Hall
You can talk of your Judge Judy and your high school principal and your mother-in-law, but you have never been truly judged and found wanting until you have had a dinner-jacketed maitre d’ at the Notre Dame faculty club evaluate – and find inadequate – your very soul with the subtle arching of an eyebrow above his unblinking reptilian eye.
I was honored to spend a happy summer at Notre Dame under the mentoring of the brilliant and wonderfully humorous Thomas Morris (whom you can find at http://www.morrisinstitute.com and whose books you can find at Amazon.com and other good bookstores). I and the other Fellows of that year’s National Endowment for the Humanities were nominally – remember that adverb – members of the Notre Dame faculty for the six weeks, and I still have my faculty I.D. card somewhere.
Toward the end of our summer we Fellows decided to put on shoes and clean shirts and take a celebratory dinner in the faculty club just to say we had done so, and after appalling Jeeves and some members of the real faculty we enjoyed ourselves immensely in the elegant dining room. It was a fitting end to a marvelous six weeks.
Notre Dame was founded in the middle of the 19th century by a French missionary order, but its football reputation rests on generations of Irish lads who were not welcome at Harvard or Yale. Thus, an accident of immigration resulted in the school mascot NOT being “The Fighting French.” This paragraph has nothing to do with the narrative, and as a teacher I’d take points off for it, but I like it so I’m leaving it in.
The Notre Dame adventure continued when Tom asked me and several others to read and comment on the draft of what would be one of his best books, Making Sense of It All. This was an enjoyable labor for which he gave me many thanks. In all humility I must confess that Tom did not ask me to read or comment on the draft of his next book.
Notre Dame remains dear to me all these years later. I remember with a “I Survived” mentality how our lot were billeted in Saint Edward’s Hall, Lentenly un-air-conditioned during a record-hot summer in which the temps reached 106 day after day. Thus we sloshed in the covered pool when possible, spent our off-class hours reading and writing in the mechanized air of the student commons, and walked in the cool of the evenings, sometimes participating in the Notre Dame tradition of praying the Rosary in the Grotto at dusk.
The Basilica of the Sacred Heart is only a few steps away from St. Edward’s Hall, and we usually entered by the east door beneath these words carved in the stone of the arch: “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” This is much better than “Me, Me, and AIG” or “Me, Me, and Enron” or perhaps “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins.” On either side are bronze plaques commemorating the sons – and now daughters, I fear – of Notre Dame who died in America’s wars.
Someone pointed out to me the light at the entrance – a bulb fitted into the upside-down World War I helmet of Fr. Charles O’Connell, who survived and became the 12th president of Notre Dame. I suppose Fr. O’Connell wanted to make sure he could find his helmet in the middle of the night the next time Germany started a war.
Notre Dame du Lac (“Our Lady of the Lake”) began as a grade school in a log cabin in a frozen wilderness in the 1840s, but the French missionary priests envisioned a great university topped by a golden dome and a statue of the Blessed Mother. Generations of sacrifice and service made it so.
The whole point of Notre Dame is that it is a Catholic university. The football team, the upside-down helmet with a light bulb in it, the lovely lakes, the reconstructed log cabin, the rather stupid-looking leprechaun, Knute Rockne and The Gipper – all these are fun, but they are not what Notre Dame is about, the transmission of Christian civilization, via such great teachers as Thomas Morris, from one generation to the next.
The current administration of Notre Dame has invited the President of the United States to speak at graduation in May. Normally this would be a “how nice” thing, because no one listens to graduation speakers, not even to presidents. One attends graduation to dress up like a monk or monkette, pose for pictures, and toss one’s hat and maybe one’s cookies later on, not to listen to someone expel the usual flatus about dreams being the key (there’s always a key) that unlocks the road to the future of the door or something. I dare to say that were Jesus Himself to speak at Notre Dame’s ceremonies in May the graduates would be too busy text-messaging each other to notice: “dud hu d dud in whit keg mi pl8s l8ter.”
Unfortunately, the current president’s fashionable enthusiasm (hey, all the cool kids are doing it, right?) for infanticide has gotten all tangled up in this Christianity thing. When Jesus said that children should be permitted to come to Him, He didn’t mean that the children should be shot, gassed, burnt, poisoned, or flushed first. Indeed, He was very clear that a failure to protect children would be severely punished.
Jesus appeared in a time when the dominant Greco-Roman culture highly approved of killing off any babies, especially girls, whom the sperm-donor or the state found lacking. The modern science of economics under Hitler would later label such children – and folks past retirement age -- as “useless feeders.”
Certainly one may speak freely in a public forum, and the president probably won’t even mention killing babies anyway.
But this forum is different. This forum is Notre Dame, named for Jesus’ Mother, who chooses life. Further, the speaker is going to be given an honorary doctorate in, oh, doctorness or something, which would imply a Christian school’s ratification of his contempt for the lives of the most vulnerable among us. This ratification is to be made during the graduation of hundreds of young men and women who are now forced into an unhappy alternative: to attend the graduation they have earned and thus possibly be construed as approving of the killing of babies, or staying away entirely and denying themselves their special day. That choice that was not part of the deal when they entered Notre Dame four years ago.
One wonders if the current maitre d’ at the Notre Dame faculty club -– or anyone else -- will lift an eyebrow at that.
You can talk of your Judge Judy and your high school principal and your mother-in-law, but you have never been truly judged and found wanting until you have had a dinner-jacketed maitre d’ at the Notre Dame faculty club evaluate – and find inadequate – your very soul with the subtle arching of an eyebrow above his unblinking reptilian eye.
I was honored to spend a happy summer at Notre Dame under the mentoring of the brilliant and wonderfully humorous Thomas Morris (whom you can find at http://www.morrisinstitute.com and whose books you can find at Amazon.com and other good bookstores). I and the other Fellows of that year’s National Endowment for the Humanities were nominally – remember that adverb – members of the Notre Dame faculty for the six weeks, and I still have my faculty I.D. card somewhere.
Toward the end of our summer we Fellows decided to put on shoes and clean shirts and take a celebratory dinner in the faculty club just to say we had done so, and after appalling Jeeves and some members of the real faculty we enjoyed ourselves immensely in the elegant dining room. It was a fitting end to a marvelous six weeks.
Notre Dame was founded in the middle of the 19th century by a French missionary order, but its football reputation rests on generations of Irish lads who were not welcome at Harvard or Yale. Thus, an accident of immigration resulted in the school mascot NOT being “The Fighting French.” This paragraph has nothing to do with the narrative, and as a teacher I’d take points off for it, but I like it so I’m leaving it in.
The Notre Dame adventure continued when Tom asked me and several others to read and comment on the draft of what would be one of his best books, Making Sense of It All. This was an enjoyable labor for which he gave me many thanks. In all humility I must confess that Tom did not ask me to read or comment on the draft of his next book.
Notre Dame remains dear to me all these years later. I remember with a “I Survived” mentality how our lot were billeted in Saint Edward’s Hall, Lentenly un-air-conditioned during a record-hot summer in which the temps reached 106 day after day. Thus we sloshed in the covered pool when possible, spent our off-class hours reading and writing in the mechanized air of the student commons, and walked in the cool of the evenings, sometimes participating in the Notre Dame tradition of praying the Rosary in the Grotto at dusk.
The Basilica of the Sacred Heart is only a few steps away from St. Edward’s Hall, and we usually entered by the east door beneath these words carved in the stone of the arch: “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” This is much better than “Me, Me, and AIG” or “Me, Me, and Enron” or perhaps “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins.” On either side are bronze plaques commemorating the sons – and now daughters, I fear – of Notre Dame who died in America’s wars.
Someone pointed out to me the light at the entrance – a bulb fitted into the upside-down World War I helmet of Fr. Charles O’Connell, who survived and became the 12th president of Notre Dame. I suppose Fr. O’Connell wanted to make sure he could find his helmet in the middle of the night the next time Germany started a war.
Notre Dame du Lac (“Our Lady of the Lake”) began as a grade school in a log cabin in a frozen wilderness in the 1840s, but the French missionary priests envisioned a great university topped by a golden dome and a statue of the Blessed Mother. Generations of sacrifice and service made it so.
The whole point of Notre Dame is that it is a Catholic university. The football team, the upside-down helmet with a light bulb in it, the lovely lakes, the reconstructed log cabin, the rather stupid-looking leprechaun, Knute Rockne and The Gipper – all these are fun, but they are not what Notre Dame is about, the transmission of Christian civilization, via such great teachers as Thomas Morris, from one generation to the next.
The current administration of Notre Dame has invited the President of the United States to speak at graduation in May. Normally this would be a “how nice” thing, because no one listens to graduation speakers, not even to presidents. One attends graduation to dress up like a monk or monkette, pose for pictures, and toss one’s hat and maybe one’s cookies later on, not to listen to someone expel the usual flatus about dreams being the key (there’s always a key) that unlocks the road to the future of the door or something. I dare to say that were Jesus Himself to speak at Notre Dame’s ceremonies in May the graduates would be too busy text-messaging each other to notice: “dud hu d dud in whit keg mi pl8s l8ter.”
Unfortunately, the current president’s fashionable enthusiasm (hey, all the cool kids are doing it, right?) for infanticide has gotten all tangled up in this Christianity thing. When Jesus said that children should be permitted to come to Him, He didn’t mean that the children should be shot, gassed, burnt, poisoned, or flushed first. Indeed, He was very clear that a failure to protect children would be severely punished.
Jesus appeared in a time when the dominant Greco-Roman culture highly approved of killing off any babies, especially girls, whom the sperm-donor or the state found lacking. The modern science of economics under Hitler would later label such children – and folks past retirement age -- as “useless feeders.”
Certainly one may speak freely in a public forum, and the president probably won’t even mention killing babies anyway.
But this forum is different. This forum is Notre Dame, named for Jesus’ Mother, who chooses life. Further, the speaker is going to be given an honorary doctorate in, oh, doctorness or something, which would imply a Christian school’s ratification of his contempt for the lives of the most vulnerable among us. This ratification is to be made during the graduation of hundreds of young men and women who are now forced into an unhappy alternative: to attend the graduation they have earned and thus possibly be construed as approving of the killing of babies, or staying away entirely and denying themselves their special day. That choice that was not part of the deal when they entered Notre Dame four years ago.
One wonders if the current maitre d’ at the Notre Dame faculty club -– or anyone else -- will lift an eyebrow at that.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Grouchy Man's MeMeMeSpaceBookThingie
Mack Hall
About ME, ME, ME: Why do you care? Why would I care if you care? Get lost.
MY, MY, MY Ten Favorite Movies: Read a book, dummy. But I, I, I confess to enjoying Braveheart and Titanic for their happy endings. Any movie featuring Mel Gibson being ripped apart by cackling torturers is okay by ME, ME, ME.
MY, MY, MY Ten Favorite Television Shows: At the moment I, I, I’m watching The Tudors, but only for the beheading scenes.
MY, MY, MY Turn-Ons: Scotch, cigars, and imagining the inventor of this self-indulgent site falling to his death through a faulty airplane toilet.
MY, MY, MY Turn-Offs: Kittens, puppies, long walks on the beach, sincere people, flowers, candle-light dinners.
MY, MY, MY Music: Wagner. All that 19th-century pseudo-paganism with lots of violence and shrieking makes ME, ME, ME want to go out and conquer France. The repeated “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho!” bits are confusing, though. Was Wagner trying to make the iambics work, or was he yelling for a cracker?
MY, MY, MY Most Specialist Favoritist Memory: When I, I, I ran over a bunny rabbit with MY, MY, MY lawnmower.
In MY, MY, MY Room I, I, I Have Posters of: Vlad the Impaler, Saddamn Hussein, Henry VIII, Mussolini, and Hannah Montana.
MY, MY, MY Bestest Wish For the Mother Earth: Al Gore being eaten by polar bears. Or maybe Heather McCartney’s wooden leg being gnawed by a harp seal.
MY, MY, MY Greatest Fear: Happy children singing and dancing in a sunlit meadow. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
MY, MY, MY Favoritest Food: Critter. Killed. Cooked.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Television Shows: Anything with people being humiliated for laughs. And snakes.
MY, MY, MY Motto: Take time to stomp the flowers.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Car: Anything with treads and a cannon.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Clothes: Coats made from the skins of cute little hamsters sacrificed to weird gods under a full moon.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Song: “Lenin Lived Here,” by the Red Army Chorus.
MY, MY, MY Wish For You: Go Away. A MyMyMySpaceBookThingie site is all about ME, ME, ME.
About ME, ME, ME: Why do you care? Why would I care if you care? Get lost.
MY, MY, MY Ten Favorite Movies: Read a book, dummy. But I, I, I confess to enjoying Braveheart and Titanic for their happy endings. Any movie featuring Mel Gibson being ripped apart by cackling torturers is okay by ME, ME, ME.
MY, MY, MY Ten Favorite Television Shows: At the moment I, I, I’m watching The Tudors, but only for the beheading scenes.
MY, MY, MY Turn-Ons: Scotch, cigars, and imagining the inventor of this self-indulgent site falling to his death through a faulty airplane toilet.
MY, MY, MY Turn-Offs: Kittens, puppies, long walks on the beach, sincere people, flowers, candle-light dinners.
MY, MY, MY Music: Wagner. All that 19th-century pseudo-paganism with lots of violence and shrieking makes ME, ME, ME want to go out and conquer France. The repeated “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho!” bits are confusing, though. Was Wagner trying to make the iambics work, or was he yelling for a cracker?
MY, MY, MY Most Specialist Favoritist Memory: When I, I, I ran over a bunny rabbit with MY, MY, MY lawnmower.
In MY, MY, MY Room I, I, I Have Posters of: Vlad the Impaler, Saddamn Hussein, Henry VIII, Mussolini, and Hannah Montana.
MY, MY, MY Bestest Wish For the Mother Earth: Al Gore being eaten by polar bears. Or maybe Heather McCartney’s wooden leg being gnawed by a harp seal.
MY, MY, MY Greatest Fear: Happy children singing and dancing in a sunlit meadow. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
MY, MY, MY Favoritest Food: Critter. Killed. Cooked.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Television Shows: Anything with people being humiliated for laughs. And snakes.
MY, MY, MY Motto: Take time to stomp the flowers.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Car: Anything with treads and a cannon.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Clothes: Coats made from the skins of cute little hamsters sacrificed to weird gods under a full moon.
MY, MY, MY Favorite Song: “Lenin Lived Here,” by the Red Army Chorus.
MY, MY, MY Wish For You: Go Away. A MyMyMySpaceBookThingie site is all about ME, ME, ME.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Books as Kindling
Mack Hall
Amazon.com is selling its Kindle II, and most of us have never even seen its predecessor, the Kindle I.
The Kindle is a small, light, flat electronic gadget that displays a book one page at a time on its 6" diagonal screen. The real utility of this device is that, according to Amazon, it can store approximately 1,500 books. The number would vary because Peter Rabbit and The City of God, each a book of wisdom in its own way, differ in size.
The Kindle II as advertised by Amazon.com costs $359.00, which includes a one-year warranty with a one-time I-dropped-it protection. A leather Kindle cover – in case you fear you might drop the thing a second time – is $29.99. A two-year extended warranty, which really means only one year following the first year, is $65. Guts, feathers, and all, then, a fully kitted-out and protected Kindle II is $453.99.
Now you’re ready and rarin’ to read, right?
Whoa, pardner; don’t polish those bi-focals just yet.
You’ve bought only the book-holder-thingie. Now you have to buy a book for it. That’s right – this pricey revolution in reading books doesn’t include a book.
Amazon.com offers some 245,000 titles for over-the-air download, most – not all – for $9.99.
Buying a Kindle, then, is rather like paying forty or fifty dollars for a coffee cup at BigBuck’s and then having to pay another couple of dollars for some coffee to put into it.
And while you are buying your cup of coffee and your back is turned someone else will help himself to your Kindle while ignoring the unguarded paperback at the next table.
There are a few people who will pay a great deal of money for the Kindle simply because it is a fashion and they want to be seen to be sporting the latest. For most of us, $350 for a shiny book-holder-thingie that will surely suffer the fragility and mortality of all electronics seems a poor investment. Besides, in a year or two such devices will probably be on sale in a bubble-package at the supermarket checkout, and the downloads will be a few dollars each.
Oppressors won’t like electronic reading devices such as the Kindle because they will make burning books more less theatrical. Instead of tossing each book into a jolly bookfire while chanting "Saint Augustine, we burn you! We burn you!" and "Beatrix Potter, we burn you! We burn you!" the GooberTroopers will be burning only one plastic gadget:
"Comrade Brother UberPhartenFuhrer Smith, why isn’t there a bigger fire?"
"I’m sorry, Comrade Brother UberDooberFuhrer Jones; we found only one Kindle. We had to beat up a reactionary fourth-grader to get it away from her."
"Well, just rake it out of the fire and throw it in again."
"The fourth-grader, mein Comrade Brother UberdooberFuhrer?"
"No, no, no, we burn books only; destroying children is the prerogative of the new Director of Health and Human Services."
-30-
Amazon.com is selling its Kindle II, and most of us have never even seen its predecessor, the Kindle I.
The Kindle is a small, light, flat electronic gadget that displays a book one page at a time on its 6" diagonal screen. The real utility of this device is that, according to Amazon, it can store approximately 1,500 books. The number would vary because Peter Rabbit and The City of God, each a book of wisdom in its own way, differ in size.
The Kindle II as advertised by Amazon.com costs $359.00, which includes a one-year warranty with a one-time I-dropped-it protection. A leather Kindle cover – in case you fear you might drop the thing a second time – is $29.99. A two-year extended warranty, which really means only one year following the first year, is $65. Guts, feathers, and all, then, a fully kitted-out and protected Kindle II is $453.99.
Now you’re ready and rarin’ to read, right?
Whoa, pardner; don’t polish those bi-focals just yet.
You’ve bought only the book-holder-thingie. Now you have to buy a book for it. That’s right – this pricey revolution in reading books doesn’t include a book.
Amazon.com offers some 245,000 titles for over-the-air download, most – not all – for $9.99.
Buying a Kindle, then, is rather like paying forty or fifty dollars for a coffee cup at BigBuck’s and then having to pay another couple of dollars for some coffee to put into it.
And while you are buying your cup of coffee and your back is turned someone else will help himself to your Kindle while ignoring the unguarded paperback at the next table.
There are a few people who will pay a great deal of money for the Kindle simply because it is a fashion and they want to be seen to be sporting the latest. For most of us, $350 for a shiny book-holder-thingie that will surely suffer the fragility and mortality of all electronics seems a poor investment. Besides, in a year or two such devices will probably be on sale in a bubble-package at the supermarket checkout, and the downloads will be a few dollars each.
Oppressors won’t like electronic reading devices such as the Kindle because they will make burning books more less theatrical. Instead of tossing each book into a jolly bookfire while chanting "Saint Augustine, we burn you! We burn you!" and "Beatrix Potter, we burn you! We burn you!" the GooberTroopers will be burning only one plastic gadget:
"Comrade Brother UberPhartenFuhrer Smith, why isn’t there a bigger fire?"
"I’m sorry, Comrade Brother UberDooberFuhrer Jones; we found only one Kindle. We had to beat up a reactionary fourth-grader to get it away from her."
"Well, just rake it out of the fire and throw it in again."
"The fourth-grader, mein Comrade Brother UberdooberFuhrer?"
"No, no, no, we burn books only; destroying children is the prerogative of the new Director of Health and Human Services."
-30-
Books as Kindling
Mack Hall
Amazon.com is selling its Kindle II, and most of us have never even seen its predecessor, the Kindle I.
Amazon.com is selling its Kindle II, and most of us have never even seen its predecessor, the Kindle I.
The Kindle is a small, light, flat electronic gadget that displays a book one page at a time on its 6" diagonal screen. The real utility of this device is that, according to Amazon, it can store approximately 1,500 books. The number would vary because Peter Rabbit and The City of God, each a book of wisdom in its own way, differ in size.
The Kindle II as advertised by Amazon.com costs $359.00, which includes a one-year warranty with a one-time I-dropped-it protection. A leather Kindle cover – in case you fear you might drop the thing a second time – is $29.99. A two-year extended warranty, which really means only one year following the first year, is $65. Guts, feathers, and all, then, a fully kitted-out and protected Kindle II is $453.99.
Now you’re ready and rarin’ to read, right?
Whoa, pardner; don’t polish those bi-focals just yet.
You’ve bought only the book-holder-thingie. Now you have to buy a book for it. That’s right – this pricey revolution in reading books doesn’t include a book.
Amazon.com offers some 245,000 titles for over-the-air download, most – not all – for $9.99.
Buying a Kindle, then, is rather like paying forty or fifty dollars for a coffee cup at BigBuck’s and then having to pay another couple of dollars for some coffee to put into it.
And while you are buying your cup of coffee and your back is turned someone else will help himself to your Kindle while ignoring the unguarded paperback at the next table.
There are a few people who will pay a great deal of money for the Kindle simply because it is a fashion and they want to be seen to be sporting the latest. For most of us, $350 for a shiny book-holder-thingie that will surely suffer the fragility and mortality of all electronics seems a poor investment. Besides, in a year or two such devices will probably be on sale in a bubble-package at the supermarket checkout, and the downloads will be a few dollars each.
Oppressors won’t like electronic reading devices such as the Kindle because they will make burning books more less theatrical. Instead of tossing each book into a jolly bookfire while chanting "Saint Augustine, we burn you! We burn you!" and "Beatrix Potter, we burn you! We burn you!" the GooberTroopers will be burning only one plastic gadget:
"Comrade Brother UberPhartenFuhrer Smith, why isn’t there a bigger fire?"
"I’m sorry, Comrade Brother UberDooberFuhrer Jones; we found only one Kindle. We had to beat up a reactionary fourth-grader to get it away from her."
"Well, just rake it out of the fire and throw it in again."
"The fourth-grader, mein Comrade Brother UberdooberFuhrer?"
"No, no, no, we burn books only; destroying children is the prerogative of the new Director of Health and Human Services."
-30-
Luminous Mysteries, a Poem
Mack Hall
Luminous Mysteries
For Brandon-in-the-Hallway, Leah-Talky-Smurf, Chase-in-the-Back-of-the-Room, Alyssa-the-Troublemaker, Kyle-the-Baby-Bell, Marci-Marci, Erica Diane, Kandace, Christy & Misty (one of 'em is bad, bad, bad -- but which one!?), Kylie Brooke, Drew-the Pretty, Traci Natalia, Queen Amanda, Princess Jerrica, Kayla Drew, Lindsey-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and Merry Barbie!
You fluttered through the fluorescented halls
Like butterflies upon their springtime wings,
And softly touched each flowering soul with love,
Gentling Lent into merry Eastertide
With joy, with happiness, with coffee cups.
Coffee and happiness are but two parts
Of holiness, the Rosary of youth:
Old cars, after-school jobs, crawling the mall,
Your untied shoelaces, your awful jokes
Giving comfort to a suffering, sin-stained world.
And though you yawned at Sunday morning Mass,
Our Lady's Church was ever a kid-safe place
To be, to think, to pray, to love, and you
Are forever a Luminous Mystery
Prayed in the happy morning of your lives.
Luminous Mysteries
For Brandon-in-the-Hallway, Leah-Talky-Smurf, Chase-in-the-Back-of-the-Room, Alyssa-the-Troublemaker, Kyle-the-Baby-Bell, Marci-Marci, Erica Diane, Kandace, Christy & Misty (one of 'em is bad, bad, bad -- but which one!?), Kylie Brooke, Drew-the Pretty, Traci Natalia, Queen Amanda, Princess Jerrica, Kayla Drew, Lindsey-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and Merry Barbie!
You fluttered through the fluorescented halls
Like butterflies upon their springtime wings,
And softly touched each flowering soul with love,
Gentling Lent into merry Eastertide
With joy, with happiness, with coffee cups.
Coffee and happiness are but two parts
Of holiness, the Rosary of youth:
Old cars, after-school jobs, crawling the mall,
Your untied shoelaces, your awful jokes
Giving comfort to a suffering, sin-stained world.
And though you yawned at Sunday morning Mass,
Our Lady's Church was ever a kid-safe place
To be, to think, to pray, to love, and you
Are forever a Luminous Mystery
Prayed in the happy morning of your lives.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
We're All Bankers Now
Mack Hall
Our government has, for reasons of its own, decided that failing banks – meaning their owners in Belgium or Spain, not the employees here in the USA -- should be rescued by the rest of us. Since our taxes will be employed for these endeavors, we, The People (bless us) are now owners of The People’s Banks.
Now that you and I are Owner-Comrade Bankers, shouldn’t we enjoy some of the old-fashioned perqs that go with swelling about as merchant bankers?
I wouldn’t bet on it, not that I could afford to bet. I think our lives as bankers will be the new style:
A banker’s life, old style: The occasional, um, conference in Las Vegas
A banker’s life, new style: Christmas party at Katfish Kloset
A banker’s life, old style: Cash bonuses
A banker’s life, new style: Coupons for two cups of drive-through coffee
A banker’s life, old style: Being greeted at the door by deferential employees
A banker’s life, new style: Being greeted at the door by a sullen security guard wielding an electronic wand that’s been places you really don’t want to know about
A banker’s life, old style: carpeted office with large windows
A banker’s life, new style: wherever you are now, probably with dim, energy-saving, mercury-poisoning, squiggly light bulbs
A banker’s life, old style: showing up for work at eight or nine
A banker’s life, new style: Dragging out of bed at four or five for the long drive to the plant which is due to close before autumn but you’ll have to find money to support the bank anyway
A banker’s life, old style: president of the Rotary Club
A banker’s life, new style: waiter at Rotary Club suppers
A banker’s life, old style: tailored suits
A banker’s life, new style: Nomex
A banker’s life, old style: leisurely luncheons at the club
A banker’s life, new style: a bag of cholesterol from GlopBurger
A banker’s life, old style: walnut-paneled boardrooms
A banker’s life, new style: a quick smoke out back by the dumpster
A banker’s life, old style: Rolex
A banker’s life, new style: Timex
A banker’s life, old style: Mont Blanc
A banker’s life, new style: Mont Bic
A banker’s life, old style: Cole-Haan
A banker’s life, new style: Goodwill
A banker’s life, old style: Private school for your kid in Switzerland
A banker’s life, new style: Hoping your kid can keep his job bagging groceries
A banker’s life, old style: Exchanging bon mots about the old days in the Skull and Bones
A banker’s life, new style: Swapping yarns about the old days in Iraq and Afghanistan
A banker’s life, old style: Skiing in Switzerland every winter
A banker’s life, new style: Disney World. Once. Maybe.
Work hard, my fellow Banker-Comrades; thousands of European and Chinese millionaires are depending on you.
-30-
Our government has, for reasons of its own, decided that failing banks – meaning their owners in Belgium or Spain, not the employees here in the USA -- should be rescued by the rest of us. Since our taxes will be employed for these endeavors, we, The People (bless us) are now owners of The People’s Banks.
Now that you and I are Owner-Comrade Bankers, shouldn’t we enjoy some of the old-fashioned perqs that go with swelling about as merchant bankers?
I wouldn’t bet on it, not that I could afford to bet. I think our lives as bankers will be the new style:
A banker’s life, old style: The occasional, um, conference in Las Vegas
A banker’s life, new style: Christmas party at Katfish Kloset
A banker’s life, old style: Cash bonuses
A banker’s life, new style: Coupons for two cups of drive-through coffee
A banker’s life, old style: Being greeted at the door by deferential employees
A banker’s life, new style: Being greeted at the door by a sullen security guard wielding an electronic wand that’s been places you really don’t want to know about
A banker’s life, old style: carpeted office with large windows
A banker’s life, new style: wherever you are now, probably with dim, energy-saving, mercury-poisoning, squiggly light bulbs
A banker’s life, old style: showing up for work at eight or nine
A banker’s life, new style: Dragging out of bed at four or five for the long drive to the plant which is due to close before autumn but you’ll have to find money to support the bank anyway
A banker’s life, old style: president of the Rotary Club
A banker’s life, new style: waiter at Rotary Club suppers
A banker’s life, old style: tailored suits
A banker’s life, new style: Nomex
A banker’s life, old style: leisurely luncheons at the club
A banker’s life, new style: a bag of cholesterol from GlopBurger
A banker’s life, old style: walnut-paneled boardrooms
A banker’s life, new style: a quick smoke out back by the dumpster
A banker’s life, old style: Rolex
A banker’s life, new style: Timex
A banker’s life, old style: Mont Blanc
A banker’s life, new style: Mont Bic
A banker’s life, old style: Cole-Haan
A banker’s life, new style: Goodwill
A banker’s life, old style: Private school for your kid in Switzerland
A banker’s life, new style: Hoping your kid can keep his job bagging groceries
A banker’s life, old style: Exchanging bon mots about the old days in the Skull and Bones
A banker’s life, new style: Swapping yarns about the old days in Iraq and Afghanistan
A banker’s life, old style: Skiing in Switzerland every winter
A banker’s life, new style: Disney World. Once. Maybe.
Work hard, my fellow Banker-Comrades; thousands of European and Chinese millionaires are depending on you.
-30-
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Dirty Books
Mack Hall
I am a product of…endless books…books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books…in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder…books of all kinds…
-- C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy
The Congress of the United States, having passed laws to protect us from psychotic nail clippers and large, menacing bottles of shampoo is now banning children’s books for our own good. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), passed last August as a response to lead-based paints on Chinese toys (the North Pole has been outsourced to Shanghai), embraces in a B-movie death-hug all children’s books printed before 1985.
Inks produced before that magical year are said to contain lead, and thus are said to endanger children. Said. But said by whom?
Just how many hundreds of copies of Little House on the Prairie a child would have to eat in order to ingest a measurable amount of lead has not been determined, nor is that Congress’ problem. The burden is ours. Anyone – meaning you or me – who gives a child a book printed before 1985 is obligated by law to spend hundreds of dollars having that book tested for lead.
Mom or Grandma, under that law you can be prosecuted for passing on to your favorite rug-rat that untested, unregistered copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm you so enjoyed as a girl.
After all, every parent’s worst nightmare is of his child being pursued down a dark street by lead-intoxicated Scuffy the Tugboat.
Pops, giving the lads in your life your boyhood copies of Old Yeller and Rifles for Watie is verboten unless you pay a great deal of money to have them tested and approved by a benevolent government.
One wonders if this book-banning is an expression of backdoor censorship of old and now incorrect books. A solid American kid who reads Johnny Tremain might be a little more uppity about oppressive governments than some glassy-eyed serf malnourished on the weirdness of Captain Underpants.
So many books have never been reprinted, and exist only because old copies reside in home libraries, public libraries, and used bookstores. The destruction of these books by government edict would be as great a crime against civilization as the Taliban blowing up ancient cultural artifacts in Afghanistan. 2,000-year-old works of art aren’t in harmony with Islam, and 100-year-old children’s books might not be in harmony with powerful and relatively anonymous functionaries within our federal government.
Government controls the means of distribution of intellectual property through the licensing, regulation, and monitoring of radio, television, telephones, and the ‘net. A printed book, though, is a silent expression of freedom. Reading a printed book is an activity that cannot easily be monitored. A book on one’s own shelves cannot be rewritten by a government agency’s computer technicians overnight.
But a book is not completely safe – it can be lost, burned, stolen, or seized. Nor are you safe. Someone in our government has found a way to threaten your freedom to read not by crudely banning books outright but by promoting a bogus health issue: who but a cad could possibly be against safeguarding the safety of children? Thus the book is not demonized, but rather the possibility of content of lead in the type, and by extension he who owns the book. To expose a child to a book thus becomes a crime.
To tyrants, buying your child an old book full of stories of heroes is a criminal act. In truth, giving your child that book makes you a real hero yourself.
Just be careful to look over your shoulder.
“I mean they’ve erased our history and are rewriting what remains…whole zones of literature are now forbidden and are disappearing from libraries.”
-- Antun to Josip re Tito’s Yugoslavia in Michael O’Brien’s The Island of the World
-30-
I am a product of…endless books…books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books…in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder…books of all kinds…
-- C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy
The Congress of the United States, having passed laws to protect us from psychotic nail clippers and large, menacing bottles of shampoo is now banning children’s books for our own good. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), passed last August as a response to lead-based paints on Chinese toys (the North Pole has been outsourced to Shanghai), embraces in a B-movie death-hug all children’s books printed before 1985.
Inks produced before that magical year are said to contain lead, and thus are said to endanger children. Said. But said by whom?
Just how many hundreds of copies of Little House on the Prairie a child would have to eat in order to ingest a measurable amount of lead has not been determined, nor is that Congress’ problem. The burden is ours. Anyone – meaning you or me – who gives a child a book printed before 1985 is obligated by law to spend hundreds of dollars having that book tested for lead.
Mom or Grandma, under that law you can be prosecuted for passing on to your favorite rug-rat that untested, unregistered copy of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm you so enjoyed as a girl.
After all, every parent’s worst nightmare is of his child being pursued down a dark street by lead-intoxicated Scuffy the Tugboat.
Pops, giving the lads in your life your boyhood copies of Old Yeller and Rifles for Watie is verboten unless you pay a great deal of money to have them tested and approved by a benevolent government.
One wonders if this book-banning is an expression of backdoor censorship of old and now incorrect books. A solid American kid who reads Johnny Tremain might be a little more uppity about oppressive governments than some glassy-eyed serf malnourished on the weirdness of Captain Underpants.
So many books have never been reprinted, and exist only because old copies reside in home libraries, public libraries, and used bookstores. The destruction of these books by government edict would be as great a crime against civilization as the Taliban blowing up ancient cultural artifacts in Afghanistan. 2,000-year-old works of art aren’t in harmony with Islam, and 100-year-old children’s books might not be in harmony with powerful and relatively anonymous functionaries within our federal government.
Government controls the means of distribution of intellectual property through the licensing, regulation, and monitoring of radio, television, telephones, and the ‘net. A printed book, though, is a silent expression of freedom. Reading a printed book is an activity that cannot easily be monitored. A book on one’s own shelves cannot be rewritten by a government agency’s computer technicians overnight.
But a book is not completely safe – it can be lost, burned, stolen, or seized. Nor are you safe. Someone in our government has found a way to threaten your freedom to read not by crudely banning books outright but by promoting a bogus health issue: who but a cad could possibly be against safeguarding the safety of children? Thus the book is not demonized, but rather the possibility of content of lead in the type, and by extension he who owns the book. To expose a child to a book thus becomes a crime.
To tyrants, buying your child an old book full of stories of heroes is a criminal act. In truth, giving your child that book makes you a real hero yourself.
Just be careful to look over your shoulder.
“I mean they’ve erased our history and are rewriting what remains…whole zones of literature are now forbidden and are disappearing from libraries.”
-- Antun to Josip re Tito’s Yugoslavia in Michael O’Brien’s The Island of the World
-30-
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Cargo Cult
Mack Hall
A wise man of my acquaintance speaks the truest words I have ever heard about materialism: “It’s only stuff.”
My usual rejoinder is “I like my stuff!”
But he is right. As the anonymous author of “The Seafarer” said some 1500 years ago, the wealth of the world neither goes with us when we die nor does it remain. One’s car, pocketknife, fountain pen, watch, boat, tractor, Brickberry – all will eventually be sold, stolen, rusted, rotted, recycled, or simply lost in the passage of the centuries.
Even so, while one is here on earth a reasonable amount of stuff is good: a nice coat, a radio, plumbing, sensible shoes, a glass of iced tea, a bed, a roof, a good book.
Modern economies are based on the exchange of work, goods, and services, but right now all that seems to have slowed mightily. We are not selling enough hamburgers, insurance, and lawsuits these days.
Japan is in bad shape too, and Panasonic Corporation is demanding that all its employees help Panasonic by buying lots of Panasonic stuff with their paychecks. You make it, you buy it.
If all organizations followed Panasonic’s closed-loop scheme, here are the possibilities:
“Cowboys, ya done a good job in herdin’ these longhorns from Texas to Abilene, fightin’ drought, wolves, Apaches, rustlers, and that satanic bread truck near Waco. 3,000 head o’ cows, and ya got 2,500 through. Now buy them.”
“Hey, Fred, great work in rebuilding those three carburetors today. Now the company executives expect you to do your duty and buy these three carbs plus the one that Bob didn’t finish. At wholesale, natch.”
“Nurse Aide Smith, you are one good caregiver, a true Flo Nightingale. We appreciate you, and the patients appreciate you. In exchange for your paycheck we demand that you take two hundred used bedpans home to your family.”
“Spuds, you are a great short-order cook, and you’ve worked here at Awful House for years. Tell ya what – instead of paying you this week we’re gonna let you eat all you want of the customer leftovers, okay? Do it for the company that loves you so much.”
"Wanda Fay, you have been a great asset here at the newspaper for over twenty years, but we’re having some rough times and are going to have to let you go. We can't give you severance pay, so we’re going to let you have today’s entire press run of 150,000 copies of the newspaper you helped make great. Good bye, and good luck.”
“Corporal Steele, you saved Fort Spitcup from being overrun by wave after wave of screaming terrorists armed with AK47s, AK48s, and suicide underpants through your expert command of your platoon after Sergeant Ironguts was killed in action. In recognition of your bravery and professionalism, and in lieu of treatment or VA benefits for the arm you lost in combat, we’re going to give you all the dead bodies. A grateful nation thanks you.”
“Employees of the sewage plant: as you know, the city is having a cash-flow problem…”
A wise man of my acquaintance speaks the truest words I have ever heard about materialism: “It’s only stuff.”
My usual rejoinder is “I like my stuff!”
But he is right. As the anonymous author of “The Seafarer” said some 1500 years ago, the wealth of the world neither goes with us when we die nor does it remain. One’s car, pocketknife, fountain pen, watch, boat, tractor, Brickberry – all will eventually be sold, stolen, rusted, rotted, recycled, or simply lost in the passage of the centuries.
Even so, while one is here on earth a reasonable amount of stuff is good: a nice coat, a radio, plumbing, sensible shoes, a glass of iced tea, a bed, a roof, a good book.
Modern economies are based on the exchange of work, goods, and services, but right now all that seems to have slowed mightily. We are not selling enough hamburgers, insurance, and lawsuits these days.
Japan is in bad shape too, and Panasonic Corporation is demanding that all its employees help Panasonic by buying lots of Panasonic stuff with their paychecks. You make it, you buy it.
If all organizations followed Panasonic’s closed-loop scheme, here are the possibilities:
“Cowboys, ya done a good job in herdin’ these longhorns from Texas to Abilene, fightin’ drought, wolves, Apaches, rustlers, and that satanic bread truck near Waco. 3,000 head o’ cows, and ya got 2,500 through. Now buy them.”
“Hey, Fred, great work in rebuilding those three carburetors today. Now the company executives expect you to do your duty and buy these three carbs plus the one that Bob didn’t finish. At wholesale, natch.”
“Nurse Aide Smith, you are one good caregiver, a true Flo Nightingale. We appreciate you, and the patients appreciate you. In exchange for your paycheck we demand that you take two hundred used bedpans home to your family.”
“Spuds, you are a great short-order cook, and you’ve worked here at Awful House for years. Tell ya what – instead of paying you this week we’re gonna let you eat all you want of the customer leftovers, okay? Do it for the company that loves you so much.”
"Wanda Fay, you have been a great asset here at the newspaper for over twenty years, but we’re having some rough times and are going to have to let you go. We can't give you severance pay, so we’re going to let you have today’s entire press run of 150,000 copies of the newspaper you helped make great. Good bye, and good luck.”
“Corporal Steele, you saved Fort Spitcup from being overrun by wave after wave of screaming terrorists armed with AK47s, AK48s, and suicide underpants through your expert command of your platoon after Sergeant Ironguts was killed in action. In recognition of your bravery and professionalism, and in lieu of treatment or VA benefits for the arm you lost in combat, we’re going to give you all the dead bodies. A grateful nation thanks you.”
“Employees of the sewage plant: as you know, the city is having a cash-flow problem…”
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Stimulus Package
Mack Hall
The financial depression is getting so bad that day and night I see poor people on three-wheelers fleeing poverty in terror along my road. Yep, rattle-trap old three-wheelers all day long, with mattresses and chickens and Grandma piled on, headed to California.
But I’m okay; I got my stimulus packages, two of ‘em, the other day: DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico, Hecho en China. Someday I will thrill my grandchildren with yarns about the Not-So-Great Depression: “Boy, we was so pore we had only two television sets, and they was analog at that! Thank God for the federal government who came to our rescue with two Convertido Analogicos! I just don’t think we would have made it through the terrible winter of ‘08-’09 without ‘em.”
Rosie the Riveter will be updated to Rosie the DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China Installer. The iconic poster will show Rosie flexing her cell ‘phone and crying “My boss is a sexist meanie!”
Installing a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China will soon be a WPA job, with four supervisors watching one installer do the work.
Standing along the streets the newly unemployed will hold up signs that read “Will Install Your DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China For Food.”
As hospitals wrecked by Hurricane Ike finally have to close forever, patients dying in the weedy parking lots will each be comforted by a brand-new DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China.
As the economy collapses, once-respectable women will stand on street corners smoking cigarettes and whispering, “Hey, mister, want a good DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China tonight?”
An Olympic gold medallist will be photographed smoking something grassy through a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China.
Women with serious pyschosexual issues will take off their clothes to protest global warming caused by the use of DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas.
The Pentagon will pay $4,000 for each DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will demand a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China for each of her offices and houses, and a gold-plated one for her government jet.
Members of The Bright Light Free Will Foursquare Three-and-a-Half Gospels Missionary Temple Fellowship of The Something-or-Other under the The Reverend Doctor Brother Bishop Billy will gather on rooftops at midnight on Ground Squirrel Day trying to receive messages from the Mother Ship on their DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas.
Congress will subpoena tobacco executives to grill them about why teenagers are smoking DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas.
Old people will yarn that “In my day we didn’t need a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China; we sat around watching rocks, and by golly we were glad to have an extra rock for Christmas. We didn’t have DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas, but we had love, and if we didn’t have love my ol’ daddy’d take a razor strap to my heinie and I grew up just fine, so you know what you kids can do with your fancy DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas that you think you got to have.”
In the Khyber Pass an outnumbered, outgunned American patrol, surrounded by extremist Methodists, will radio its last, defiant message: “Send us more DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas!”
War? Depression? Hurricanes? Homelessness? Foreclosures? Unemployment? Republicans lurking under the bed? Stand tall, America; with our DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas we can tackle anything!
The financial depression is getting so bad that day and night I see poor people on three-wheelers fleeing poverty in terror along my road. Yep, rattle-trap old three-wheelers all day long, with mattresses and chickens and Grandma piled on, headed to California.
But I’m okay; I got my stimulus packages, two of ‘em, the other day: DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico, Hecho en China. Someday I will thrill my grandchildren with yarns about the Not-So-Great Depression: “Boy, we was so pore we had only two television sets, and they was analog at that! Thank God for the federal government who came to our rescue with two Convertido Analogicos! I just don’t think we would have made it through the terrible winter of ‘08-’09 without ‘em.”
Rosie the Riveter will be updated to Rosie the DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China Installer. The iconic poster will show Rosie flexing her cell ‘phone and crying “My boss is a sexist meanie!”
Installing a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China will soon be a WPA job, with four supervisors watching one installer do the work.
Standing along the streets the newly unemployed will hold up signs that read “Will Install Your DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China For Food.”
As hospitals wrecked by Hurricane Ike finally have to close forever, patients dying in the weedy parking lots will each be comforted by a brand-new DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China.
As the economy collapses, once-respectable women will stand on street corners smoking cigarettes and whispering, “Hey, mister, want a good DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China tonight?”
An Olympic gold medallist will be photographed smoking something grassy through a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China.
Women with serious pyschosexual issues will take off their clothes to protest global warming caused by the use of DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas.
The Pentagon will pay $4,000 for each DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will demand a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China for each of her offices and houses, and a gold-plated one for her government jet.
Members of The Bright Light Free Will Foursquare Three-and-a-Half Gospels Missionary Temple Fellowship of The Something-or-Other under the The Reverend Doctor Brother Bishop Billy will gather on rooftops at midnight on Ground Squirrel Day trying to receive messages from the Mother Ship on their DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas.
Congress will subpoena tobacco executives to grill them about why teenagers are smoking DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas.
Old people will yarn that “In my day we didn’t need a DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en China; we sat around watching rocks, and by golly we were glad to have an extra rock for Christmas. We didn’t have DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas, but we had love, and if we didn’t have love my ol’ daddy’d take a razor strap to my heinie and I grew up just fine, so you know what you kids can do with your fancy DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas that you think you got to have.”
In the Khyber Pass an outnumbered, outgunned American patrol, surrounded by extremist Methodists, will radio its last, defiant message: “Send us more DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas!”
War? Depression? Hurricanes? Homelessness? Foreclosures? Unemployment? Republicans lurking under the bed? Stand tall, America; with our DTV Digital a Convertidor Analogico Hecho en Chinas we can tackle anything!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Irrelevant -- a Poem
Mack Hall
Irrelevant
For Tod
How wonderful to be irrelevant:
An old car rusting in sere autumn weeds,
An unheard voice no longer pertinent,
A silent solitary bidding his beads.
In youth one roams the glades with Robin Hood,
Sails dream-ships far beyond the classroom wall,
Dances with fairies in a moonlit wood,
Gives homage to our King in Arthur’s hall.
A man, alas, drags Dante’s darksome dreams
Through corridors haunted with smoke and mist,
Where truth is bought and sold by mad regimes,
And lies are given a sly, sensitive twist.
But, oh! Peace! To be nothing at the end,
Nunc dimittis, thou happiest of men!
Irrelevant
For Tod
How wonderful to be irrelevant:
An old car rusting in sere autumn weeds,
An unheard voice no longer pertinent,
A silent solitary bidding his beads.
In youth one roams the glades with Robin Hood,
Sails dream-ships far beyond the classroom wall,
Dances with fairies in a moonlit wood,
Gives homage to our King in Arthur’s hall.
A man, alas, drags Dante’s darksome dreams
Through corridors haunted with smoke and mist,
Where truth is bought and sold by mad regimes,
And lies are given a sly, sensitive twist.
But, oh! Peace! To be nothing at the end,
Nunc dimittis, thou happiest of men!
100 Things to Ignore Before You Die
Mack Hall
A recent visit to the book store reveals that there are only about two kinds of books for sale just now: those with pictures of the President on the cover and those telling you of 100 movies, songs, places, meals, adventures you must see, hear, visit, eat, or experience before you die.
Just what death has to do with any given 100 experience eludes the thoughtful person. You see Plan Nine From Outer Space because you want to laugh at a cheesy film with pie plates doubling as flying saucers, not because your physician has given you a thumbs-down. You listen to Wagner because of some atavistic impulse to listen to people yelling at each other in German with Nibelungsomethings beating on kettledrums in the background. You eat a taco because you’re hungry. You jump out of an airplane because against all logic you really, really feel that some cloth and a few lengths of string will keep you from terminal planet-hugging.
Life should be lived on one’s own terms, as far as is possible (God seems to have His own plans in the matter), not on some other human’s schedule. Perhaps part of the scheme is not doing all that other people tell you. Following are some things that can well be ignored in living a meaningful life:
1. Numerology, horoscopes, and global warming
2. Art that must be explained
3. Poetry that doesn’t scan
4. Bottled water
5. Batman movies
6. Coffee with adjectives
7. National Public Radio on Saturday morning
8. That quiet young man who collects Nazi memorabilia
9. Activists
10. 1968
11. Fat-free potato chips
12. Newark, New Jersey
13. Wedding receptions
14. Golf-as-life metaphors
15. Meeting
16. Movie remakes
17. Afghanistan
18. Margarine
19. Eateries that serve margarine
20. Holding hands with total strangers in church
21. Cell ‘phones
22. Sea salt
23. Air Canada
24. Belgium
25. Lists!
A recent visit to the book store reveals that there are only about two kinds of books for sale just now: those with pictures of the President on the cover and those telling you of 100 movies, songs, places, meals, adventures you must see, hear, visit, eat, or experience before you die.
Just what death has to do with any given 100 experience eludes the thoughtful person. You see Plan Nine From Outer Space because you want to laugh at a cheesy film with pie plates doubling as flying saucers, not because your physician has given you a thumbs-down. You listen to Wagner because of some atavistic impulse to listen to people yelling at each other in German with Nibelungsomethings beating on kettledrums in the background. You eat a taco because you’re hungry. You jump out of an airplane because against all logic you really, really feel that some cloth and a few lengths of string will keep you from terminal planet-hugging.
Life should be lived on one’s own terms, as far as is possible (God seems to have His own plans in the matter), not on some other human’s schedule. Perhaps part of the scheme is not doing all that other people tell you. Following are some things that can well be ignored in living a meaningful life:
1. Numerology, horoscopes, and global warming
2. Art that must be explained
3. Poetry that doesn’t scan
4. Bottled water
5. Batman movies
6. Coffee with adjectives
7. National Public Radio on Saturday morning
8. That quiet young man who collects Nazi memorabilia
9. Activists
10. 1968
11. Fat-free potato chips
12. Newark, New Jersey
13. Wedding receptions
14. Golf-as-life metaphors
15. Meeting
16. Movie remakes
17. Afghanistan
18. Margarine
19. Eateries that serve margarine
20. Holding hands with total strangers in church
21. Cell ‘phones
22. Sea salt
23. Air Canada
24. Belgium
25. Lists!
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Thoughts of Chairman Mack
Mack Hall
In the 1960s the obedient paraded up and down the streets of China waving Mao’s Little Red Book and killing people. Among Chairman Mao’s sayings was “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” If so, then muggers are not muggers; they’re Jeffersonian democrats re-interpreting the Constitution as a living document to be redefined every generation mwamwamwa…mwa…mwamwamwawawa.
And speaking of the Constitution, one reads of lawyers who carry pocket copies of that venerable document as a reminder of the secondary source of law in this nation.
Christians have been known to carry copies of the Bible (known as “MY Bible”) around, though these are more often left on car dashboards or camouflaged in embroidered covers along with arsenals of multi-colored hi-lighters.
Whether or not girls will be making pillows of the Thoughts of Chairman Obama has yet to be determined, but the book is now for sale to all the faithful. You can now replace pocket editions of Mao, the Constitution, and the Bible with the wisdom of the President who has been President for a week or so.
Yes, The History Company (www.historycompany.com) offers a little blue booklet called Pocket Obama at $49.50 for ten copies (Thanks to newsbusters.org for the heads up). The fulsome advertisement compares President Obama favorably to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but does not offer a Pocket Kennedy or a Pocket King. I suppose this is because after a while one runs out of pockets. The cell ‘phone, the water bottle, the MePod, the BrickBerry, and Pocket Obama must take precedence.
And Pocket Obama will definitely take precedence, because www.historycompany.com commands very precisely that “It is an unofficial requirement for every citizen to own, to read, and to carry this book at all times.” Hey, I am not making this up. What is not clear is the distinction between an official requirement and an unofficial requirement, what the sanctions are for not meeting the requirement, and just who is making the requirement. As Number 2 says in The Prisoner, “That would be telling.”
Maybe the guards / counselors / therapists at Guantanamo will start giving free copies to prisoners.
You might want to hurry and buy your copy of Pocket Obama; it will go well with your Chuck and Di mugs, your Pat Paulsen for President button, your Circuit City and Linens ‘N’ Things discount cards, your love beads, your mood ring, and your lava lamp.
But I must leave off now and go weep copious tears before my Ronald Reagan poster.
In the 1960s the obedient paraded up and down the streets of China waving Mao’s Little Red Book and killing people. Among Chairman Mao’s sayings was “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” If so, then muggers are not muggers; they’re Jeffersonian democrats re-interpreting the Constitution as a living document to be redefined every generation mwamwamwa…mwa…mwamwamwawawa.
And speaking of the Constitution, one reads of lawyers who carry pocket copies of that venerable document as a reminder of the secondary source of law in this nation.
Christians have been known to carry copies of the Bible (known as “MY Bible”) around, though these are more often left on car dashboards or camouflaged in embroidered covers along with arsenals of multi-colored hi-lighters.
Whether or not girls will be making pillows of the Thoughts of Chairman Obama has yet to be determined, but the book is now for sale to all the faithful. You can now replace pocket editions of Mao, the Constitution, and the Bible with the wisdom of the President who has been President for a week or so.
Yes, The History Company (www.historycompany.com) offers a little blue booklet called Pocket Obama at $49.50 for ten copies (Thanks to newsbusters.org for the heads up). The fulsome advertisement compares President Obama favorably to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but does not offer a Pocket Kennedy or a Pocket King. I suppose this is because after a while one runs out of pockets. The cell ‘phone, the water bottle, the MePod, the BrickBerry, and Pocket Obama must take precedence.
And Pocket Obama will definitely take precedence, because www.historycompany.com commands very precisely that “It is an unofficial requirement for every citizen to own, to read, and to carry this book at all times.” Hey, I am not making this up. What is not clear is the distinction between an official requirement and an unofficial requirement, what the sanctions are for not meeting the requirement, and just who is making the requirement. As Number 2 says in The Prisoner, “That would be telling.”
Maybe the guards / counselors / therapists at Guantanamo will start giving free copies to prisoners.
You might want to hurry and buy your copy of Pocket Obama; it will go well with your Chuck and Di mugs, your Pat Paulsen for President button, your Circuit City and Linens ‘N’ Things discount cards, your love beads, your mood ring, and your lava lamp.
But I must leave off now and go weep copious tears before my Ronald Reagan poster.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Kirbyville Elementary 2nd Grade, 1955-1956
Kirbyville Elementary School
2nd Grade, 1955-1956
Photo by D. T. Kent Jr. of happy memory
Monday, January 19, 2009
The Prisoner
Mack Hall
By the time we finish with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity.
-- Number 2 in The Prisoner
Once again America has changed governments without any violence other than the occasional storming of a parade-route porta-potty by unrestrained hordes of liberal arts majors who had to let their magna grande cups of lattepuccinis go. A young man who was raised in a little log cabin in Hawaii now lives at the ritziest address this side of Buckingham Palace, and America goes on and on. How do you like them apples, General Lord Cornwallis?
President Obama will now wake up every morning for the next four years realizing that he, and he alone, must in the name of the Land of the Free face unspeakable horrors that would cower a lesser man, said horrors being Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
On the occasion of an inauguration it is a custom for almost everyone within reach of a keyboard to tap out an open letter telling the new President how to run the nation. It is a custom of the new President to ignore said open letters because, after all, he got elected and the rest of us didn’t.
Even so, I will now exercise my First Amendment right to be unread.
Dear President Obama:
Avoid the exotic foo-foo pooches; get a nice brace of beagles for the kids. Don’t do a Lyndon Johnson and pick ‘em up by the ears.
Keep your Blackberry. Don’t let people push you around about that.
If you keep channeling Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden’s going to start thinking more and more about how to call in the boys in the white coats.
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – what were you thinking? I got two words for ya: Lady Macbeth. Watch out for floating cutlery.
Could you please make Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton co-ambassadors to Estonia, and then accidentally forget to budget return tickets?
I’ve always wondered – is the Surgeon General a real general?
Get out into the country often. Walk in the woods in all seasons. Go fishing. Go hunting. Sit around a campfire and smoke cigars and enjoy a little of Scotland’s one gift to civilization with some guys who don’t wear suits.
About Vladimir Putin -- anyone who looks so much like Dobbie-the-House-Elf is not be trusted.
I love the new wheels. Is the engine a hybrid?
Telephone Rush Limbaugh and ask him if he’s registered to vote.
You do know that global warming is a fraud, right? Always remember that big coat you wore for your inauguration.
Don’t even imagine that you are The One to the guy who had to clean out those 5,000 one-holers.
You are now The Man. Be The Man. Be General Patton, not Doctor Phil. A great nation requires a great leader, not a therapist. You are now the Commander-in-Chief, not a Chicago politician.
Don’t be a prisoner of the closed Byzantine rigidity of the insider sub-culture. Don’t believe what your briefcase-carriers tell you. Listen outside The Village.
Be seeing you!
By the time we finish with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity.
-- Number 2 in The Prisoner
Once again America has changed governments without any violence other than the occasional storming of a parade-route porta-potty by unrestrained hordes of liberal arts majors who had to let their magna grande cups of lattepuccinis go. A young man who was raised in a little log cabin in Hawaii now lives at the ritziest address this side of Buckingham Palace, and America goes on and on. How do you like them apples, General Lord Cornwallis?
President Obama will now wake up every morning for the next four years realizing that he, and he alone, must in the name of the Land of the Free face unspeakable horrors that would cower a lesser man, said horrors being Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
On the occasion of an inauguration it is a custom for almost everyone within reach of a keyboard to tap out an open letter telling the new President how to run the nation. It is a custom of the new President to ignore said open letters because, after all, he got elected and the rest of us didn’t.
Even so, I will now exercise my First Amendment right to be unread.
Dear President Obama:
Avoid the exotic foo-foo pooches; get a nice brace of beagles for the kids. Don’t do a Lyndon Johnson and pick ‘em up by the ears.
Keep your Blackberry. Don’t let people push you around about that.
If you keep channeling Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden’s going to start thinking more and more about how to call in the boys in the white coats.
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – what were you thinking? I got two words for ya: Lady Macbeth. Watch out for floating cutlery.
Could you please make Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton co-ambassadors to Estonia, and then accidentally forget to budget return tickets?
I’ve always wondered – is the Surgeon General a real general?
Get out into the country often. Walk in the woods in all seasons. Go fishing. Go hunting. Sit around a campfire and smoke cigars and enjoy a little of Scotland’s one gift to civilization with some guys who don’t wear suits.
About Vladimir Putin -- anyone who looks so much like Dobbie-the-House-Elf is not be trusted.
I love the new wheels. Is the engine a hybrid?
Telephone Rush Limbaugh and ask him if he’s registered to vote.
You do know that global warming is a fraud, right? Always remember that big coat you wore for your inauguration.
Don’t even imagine that you are The One to the guy who had to clean out those 5,000 one-holers.
You are now The Man. Be The Man. Be General Patton, not Doctor Phil. A great nation requires a great leader, not a therapist. You are now the Commander-in-Chief, not a Chicago politician.
Don’t be a prisoner of the closed Byzantine rigidity of the insider sub-culture. Don’t believe what your briefcase-carriers tell you. Listen outside The Village.
Be seeing you!
The Prisoner
Mack Hall
By the time we finish with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity.
-- Number 2 in The Prisoner
Once again America has changed governments without any violence other than the occasional storming of a parade-route porta-potty by unrestrained hordes of liberal arts majors who had to let their magna grande cups of lattepuccinis go. A young man who was raised in a little log cabin in Hawaii now lives at the ritziest address this side of Buckingham Palace, and America goes on and on. How do you like them apples, General Lord Cornwallis?
President Obama will now wake up every morning for the next four years realizing that he, and he alone, must in the name of the Land of the Free face unspeakable horrors that would cower a lesser man, said horrors being Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
On the occasion of an inauguration it is a custom for almost everyone within reach of a keyboard to tap out an open letter telling the new President how to run the nation. It is a custom of the new President to ignore said open letters because, after all, he got elected and the rest of us didn’t.
Even so, I will now exercise my First Amendment right to be unread.
Dear President Obama:
Avoid the exotic foo-foo pooches; get a nice brace of beagles for the kids. Don’t do a Lyndon Johnson and pick ‘em up by the ears.
Keep your Blackberry. Don’t let people push you around about that.
If you keep channeling Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden’s going to start thinking more and more about how to call in the boys in the white coats.
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – what were you thinking? I got two words for ya: Lady Macbeth. Watch out for floating cutlery.
Could you please make Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton co-ambassadors to Estonia, and then accidentally forget to budget return tickets?
I’ve always wondered – is the Surgeon General a real general?
Get out into the country often. Walk in the woods in all seasons. Go fishing. Go hunting. Sit around a campfire and smoke cigars and enjoy a little of Scotland’s one gift to civilization with some guys who don’t wear suits.
About Vladimir Putin -- anyone who looks so much like Dobbie-the-House-Elf is not be trusted.
I love the new wheels. Is the engine a hybrid?
Telephone Rush Limbaugh and ask him if he’s registered to vote.
You do know that global warming is a fraud, right? Always remember that big coat you wore for your inauguration.
Don’t even imagine that you are The One to the guy who had to clean out those 5,000 one-holers.
You are now The Man. Be The Man. Be General Patton, not Doctor Phil. A great nation requires a great leader, not a therapist. You are now the Commander-in-Chief, not a Chicago politician.
Don’t be a prisoner of the closed Byzantine rigidity of the insider sub-culture. Don’t believe what your briefcase-carriers tell you. Listen outside The Village.
Be seeing you!
By the time we finish with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity.
-- Number 2 in The Prisoner
Once again America has changed governments without any violence other than the occasional storming of a parade-route porta-potty by unrestrained hordes of liberal arts majors who had to let their magna grande cups of lattepuccinis go. A young man who was raised in a little log cabin in Hawaii now lives at the ritziest address this side of Buckingham Palace, and America goes on and on. How do you like them apples, General Lord Cornwallis?
President Obama will now wake up every morning for the next four years realizing that he, and he alone, must in the name of the Land of the Free face unspeakable horrors that would cower a lesser man, said horrors being Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
On the occasion of an inauguration it is a custom for almost everyone within reach of a keyboard to tap out an open letter telling the new President how to run the nation. It is a custom of the new President to ignore said open letters because, after all, he got elected and the rest of us didn’t.
Even so, I will now exercise my First Amendment right to be unread.
Dear President Obama:
Avoid the exotic foo-foo pooches; get a nice brace of beagles for the kids. Don’t do a Lyndon Johnson and pick ‘em up by the ears.
Keep your Blackberry. Don’t let people push you around about that.
If you keep channeling Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden’s going to start thinking more and more about how to call in the boys in the white coats.
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – what were you thinking? I got two words for ya: Lady Macbeth. Watch out for floating cutlery.
Could you please make Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton co-ambassadors to Estonia, and then accidentally forget to budget return tickets?
I’ve always wondered – is the Surgeon General a real general?
Get out into the country often. Walk in the woods in all seasons. Go fishing. Go hunting. Sit around a campfire and smoke cigars and enjoy a little of Scotland’s one gift to civilization with some guys who don’t wear suits.
About Vladimir Putin -- anyone who looks so much like Dobbie-the-House-Elf is not be trusted.
I love the new wheels. Is the engine a hybrid?
Telephone Rush Limbaugh and ask him if he’s registered to vote.
You do know that global warming is a fraud, right? Always remember that big coat you wore for your inauguration.
Don’t even imagine that you are The One to the guy who had to clean out those 5,000 one-holers.
You are now The Man. Be The Man. Be General Patton, not Doctor Phil. A great nation requires a great leader, not a therapist. You are now the Commander-in-Chief, not a Chicago politician.
Don’t be a prisoner of the closed Byzantine rigidity of the insider sub-culture. Don’t believe what your briefcase-carriers tell you. Listen outside The Village.
Be seeing you!
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Russians in Moc Hoa
I read lots of Russian lit (in translation, of course) while in Viet-Nam:
Mack Hall
Russians in Moc Hoa
I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
But then learned the sound of Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!
Mack Hall
Russians in Moc Hoa
I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
But then learned the sound of Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Errol Flynn They Ain't
Mack Hall
Along the Horn of Africa some of the local folks have adopted the core financial policy of our American Congress – use force to take money away from people who work. With the reduction of the British Navy to little more than dinner cruises on the Thames, pirates once again find the high seas free of law and the orderly hanging of buccaneers. Piracy has become so common that it has significantly driven the prices of everything from gasoline to Chinese coffee makers.
In November a pirate band (almost always prefaced in the news with the meaningless adjective “rag-tag.” What, really, is a rag-tag?) seized a Saudi tanker, the MV Sirius Star, and held it and the crew hostage. The Somali pirates lived aboard the ship for two months, possibly idling away the hours watching The Sea Hawk and The Pirate Movie.
Last week someone, apparently the dollar-rich Saudis, paid the Somali pirates some three million dollars to make nice and go away.
These pirates weren’t Errol Flynn, though. Erroll Flynn as Captain Blood would have seized the tanker, fitted it with cannons, pushed Basil Rathbone over the side, wooed and won the fair Olivia deHavilland, and sailed up the Thames to be knighted by Queen Flora Robson, all while his muscular, musical, merry men saucily sang sea chanties.
The Somali pirates (maybe with a yo-ho-ho, but with no bottle of rum), not being Errol Flynns, took to the jolly boats with their ill-gotten gains and chests of cliches’, and made for shore. One boat capsized in a storm, drowning some five yo-hoing pirates and dropping the loot into Dhimmi Jones’ locker. Three survivors made it to shore without any of the ransom, and the Pirate King is going to be very, very unhappy with them.
Captain Jeffrey Thorpe would never have let this happen.
Thousands in Europe will protest Bush / CIA / Vatican / Jewish / Masonic manipulation of weather through global warming that targets and oppresses pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Rumor has it that Rick Warren will give the benediction at the pirates’ funerals. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
In response to the upsurge in piracy the United Nations will propose an international law mandating imprisonment for anyone calling pirates pirates; in future pirates must be referred to as undocumented revenue collectors. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Citing Vatican II, American bishops will institute an Undocumented Revenue Collectors’ Sunday with a second collection at all masses for sensitivity training. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
The United States Navy will be required to apologize if the presence of any American warship alarms Somali pirates, causing them emotional stress, lack of sleep, and loss of potential earnings. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Congress will pass an extra gasoline tax to fund law school scholarships for the orphans of Somali pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
For the near future, perhaps Somali pirates should watch more Errol Flynn movies so they can learn a little seamanship.
Along the Horn of Africa some of the local folks have adopted the core financial policy of our American Congress – use force to take money away from people who work. With the reduction of the British Navy to little more than dinner cruises on the Thames, pirates once again find the high seas free of law and the orderly hanging of buccaneers. Piracy has become so common that it has significantly driven the prices of everything from gasoline to Chinese coffee makers.
In November a pirate band (almost always prefaced in the news with the meaningless adjective “rag-tag.” What, really, is a rag-tag?) seized a Saudi tanker, the MV Sirius Star, and held it and the crew hostage. The Somali pirates lived aboard the ship for two months, possibly idling away the hours watching The Sea Hawk and The Pirate Movie.
Last week someone, apparently the dollar-rich Saudis, paid the Somali pirates some three million dollars to make nice and go away.
These pirates weren’t Errol Flynn, though. Erroll Flynn as Captain Blood would have seized the tanker, fitted it with cannons, pushed Basil Rathbone over the side, wooed and won the fair Olivia deHavilland, and sailed up the Thames to be knighted by Queen Flora Robson, all while his muscular, musical, merry men saucily sang sea chanties.
The Somali pirates (maybe with a yo-ho-ho, but with no bottle of rum), not being Errol Flynns, took to the jolly boats with their ill-gotten gains and chests of cliches’, and made for shore. One boat capsized in a storm, drowning some five yo-hoing pirates and dropping the loot into Dhimmi Jones’ locker. Three survivors made it to shore without any of the ransom, and the Pirate King is going to be very, very unhappy with them.
Captain Jeffrey Thorpe would never have let this happen.
Thousands in Europe will protest Bush / CIA / Vatican / Jewish / Masonic manipulation of weather through global warming that targets and oppresses pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Rumor has it that Rick Warren will give the benediction at the pirates’ funerals. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
In response to the upsurge in piracy the United Nations will propose an international law mandating imprisonment for anyone calling pirates pirates; in future pirates must be referred to as undocumented revenue collectors. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Citing Vatican II, American bishops will institute an Undocumented Revenue Collectors’ Sunday with a second collection at all masses for sensitivity training. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
The United States Navy will be required to apologize if the presence of any American warship alarms Somali pirates, causing them emotional stress, lack of sleep, and loss of potential earnings. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Congress will pass an extra gasoline tax to fund law school scholarships for the orphans of Somali pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
For the near future, perhaps Somali pirates should watch more Errol Flynn movies so they can learn a little seamanship.
Errol Flynn They Ain't
Mack Hall
Along the Horn of Africa some of the local folks have adopted the core financial policy of our American Congress – use force to take money away from people who work. With the reduction of the British Navy to little more than dinner cruises on the Thames, pirates once again find the high seas free of law and the orderly hanging of buccaneers. Piracy has become so common that it has significantly driven the prices of everything from gasoline to Chinese coffee makers.
In November a pirate band (almost always prefaced in the news with the meaningless adjective “rag-tag.” What, really, is a rag-tag?) seized a Saudi tanker, the MV Sirius Star, and held it and the crew hostage. The Somali pirates lived aboard the ship for two months, possibly idling away the hours watching The Sea Hawk and The Pirate Movie.
Last week someone, apparently the dollar-rich Saudis, paid the Somali pirates some three million dollars to make nice and go away.
These pirates weren’t Errol Flynn, though. Erroll Flynn as Captain Blood would have seized the tanker, fitted it with cannons, pushed Basil Rathbone over the side, wooed and won the fair Olivia deHavilland, and sailed up the Thames to be knighted by Queen Flora Robson, all while his muscular, musical, merry men saucily sang sea chanties.
The Somali pirates (maybe with a yo-ho-ho, but with no bottle of rum), not being Errol Flynns, took to the jolly boats with their ill-gotten gains and chests of cliches’, and made for shore. One boat capsized in a storm, drowning some five yo-hoing pirates and dropping the loot into Dhimmi Jones’ locker. Three survivors made it to shore without any of the ransom, and the Pirate King is going to be very, very unhappy with them.
Captain Jeffrey Thorpe would never have let this happen.
Thousands in Europe will protest Bush / CIA / Vatican / Jewish / Masonic manipulation of weather through global warming that targets and oppresses pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Rumor has it that Rick Warren will give the benediction at the pirates’ funerals. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
In response to the upsurge in piracy the United Nations will propose an international law mandating imprisonment for anyone calling pirates pirates; in future pirates must be referred to as undocumented revenue collectors. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Citing Vatican II, American bishops will institute an Undocumented Revenue Collectors’ Sunday with a second collection at all masses for sensitivity training. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
The United States Navy will be required to apologize if the presence of any American warship alarms Somali pirates, causing them emotional stress, lack of sleep, and loss of potential earnings. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Congress will pass an extra gasoline tax to fund law school scholarships for the orphans of Somali pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
For the near future, perhaps Somali pirates should watch more Errol Flynn movies so they can learn a little seamanship.
Along the Horn of Africa some of the local folks have adopted the core financial policy of our American Congress – use force to take money away from people who work. With the reduction of the British Navy to little more than dinner cruises on the Thames, pirates once again find the high seas free of law and the orderly hanging of buccaneers. Piracy has become so common that it has significantly driven the prices of everything from gasoline to Chinese coffee makers.
In November a pirate band (almost always prefaced in the news with the meaningless adjective “rag-tag.” What, really, is a rag-tag?) seized a Saudi tanker, the MV Sirius Star, and held it and the crew hostage. The Somali pirates lived aboard the ship for two months, possibly idling away the hours watching The Sea Hawk and The Pirate Movie.
Last week someone, apparently the dollar-rich Saudis, paid the Somali pirates some three million dollars to make nice and go away.
These pirates weren’t Errol Flynn, though. Erroll Flynn as Captain Blood would have seized the tanker, fitted it with cannons, pushed Basil Rathbone over the side, wooed and won the fair Olivia deHavilland, and sailed up the Thames to be knighted by Queen Flora Robson, all while his muscular, musical, merry men saucily sang sea chanties.
The Somali pirates (maybe with a yo-ho-ho, but with no bottle of rum), not being Errol Flynns, took to the jolly boats with their ill-gotten gains and chests of cliches’, and made for shore. One boat capsized in a storm, drowning some five yo-hoing pirates and dropping the loot into Dhimmi Jones’ locker. Three survivors made it to shore without any of the ransom, and the Pirate King is going to be very, very unhappy with them.
Captain Jeffrey Thorpe would never have let this happen.
Thousands in Europe will protest Bush / CIA / Vatican / Jewish / Masonic manipulation of weather through global warming that targets and oppresses pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Rumor has it that Rick Warren will give the benediction at the pirates’ funerals. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
In response to the upsurge in piracy the United Nations will propose an international law mandating imprisonment for anyone calling pirates pirates; in future pirates must be referred to as undocumented revenue collectors. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Citing Vatican II, American bishops will institute an Undocumented Revenue Collectors’ Sunday with a second collection at all masses for sensitivity training. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
The United States Navy will be required to apologize if the presence of any American warship alarms Somali pirates, causing them emotional stress, lack of sleep, and loss of potential earnings. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
Congress will pass an extra gasoline tax to fund law school scholarships for the orphans of Somali pirates. Palestinians will demonstrate and burn the Israeli flag.
For the near future, perhaps Somali pirates should watch more Errol Flynn movies so they can learn a little seamanship.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
A Man's Not Dressed Without His Pocket Knife
Mack Hall
This last Christmas certain environmentalist groups advertised meaningful green gifts – instead of giving your child a bicycle or a football for Christmas you could donate the money you would have spent on your own kid to some stranger who’s shown you a picture of a polar bear allegedly drowning.
It’s a polar bear, citizens; it swims in the water and eats harp seals, you know, the cute widdy-biddy harp seals with the big ol’ eyes. The polar bear rips screaming baby harp seals apart with its fangs and claws, and the baby harp seals die far more horribly than if they got whacked in the back of the head, and then they get eaten. How’s that for a bedtime story, PETA?
When I was a child there was nothing I would have wanted more than to stumble sleepily but excitedly into the living room to find a card (printed on recycled paper with recycled soy-based ink) giving me glad tidings that a penguin had the new cap pistol I wanted. Sadly, my parents weren’t green, and so gave me cap pistols and baseball gloves and toy trains and an ant farm.
Although not as exciting as a new bicycle, a good pocket knife is a far better gift than being bullied into pretending to feel good about a fish or a ground squirrel. Giving a boy his first pocket knife is a traditional rite of passage, and having it taken away a day or two later for misuse is another traditional rite of passage. A knife, after all, is a tool, not a toy, and owning one is a grown-up thing.
My ol’ daddy said that a man’s not fully dressed without his pocket knife; experience demonstrates that this is true. The knife was perhaps the first tool used by humans, probably beginning with a sharp flint, and necessary for skinning a rabbit, slicing veggies, building a fire, eating, building, mending, opening, slicing, dicing, picking your teeth, and cleaning your fingernails. Mind the order of usage, of course! No one who lives close to the land or the sea or the workshop can function without a good knife to hand at all times.
Thomas Jefferson is often credited for inventing the first folding knife, which, while not as strong as a one-piece, is certainly easier to carry about. Manufacturers began adding extra blades, and then the Swiss got the idea of adding specific tools in miniature, resulting in the Swiss Army Knife. Where or not the Swiss Army carries Swiss Army Knives is a good topic of conversation. While these gadgets are fun, I’ll bet your old grandpa could accomplish with his single-bladed pocket knife whatever task was necessary before you could find and unlimber the designated thingie out of a Swiss Army Knife or a multi-tool.
A friend gave me a nice little lock-back with a single blade with saw-teeth. I found this knife so useful that a few weeks later I bought a larger model, made-in-America, even while thinking to myself that the last thing I needed was another pocket knife. And then a few weeks after that Hurricane Rita did not hit New Orleans, and that big ol’ American knife with its one large blade and saw-teeth paid for itself many times over with its survival utility.
Shiny things under the tree or for a birthday are fun: little plastic boxes that light up and make noise, and other little boxes that allow you to hear The Immortal Words of Our Time – “Can you hear me now?” and “She all up in my face!” But when you are long-gone, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not treasure your MePod or your cell ‘phone or your Brickberry, because those dinky disposables will have long since been recycled into beer cans or Chinese cars. But they will treasure your old pocket knife, its edge well-worn from good, honest use and from many sharpenings around a winter’s fire when the stories are told.
Sturdy, American-made pocket knives are great, traditional gifts for men and boys. They are also perfect for skinning baby harp seals.
This last Christmas certain environmentalist groups advertised meaningful green gifts – instead of giving your child a bicycle or a football for Christmas you could donate the money you would have spent on your own kid to some stranger who’s shown you a picture of a polar bear allegedly drowning.
It’s a polar bear, citizens; it swims in the water and eats harp seals, you know, the cute widdy-biddy harp seals with the big ol’ eyes. The polar bear rips screaming baby harp seals apart with its fangs and claws, and the baby harp seals die far more horribly than if they got whacked in the back of the head, and then they get eaten. How’s that for a bedtime story, PETA?
When I was a child there was nothing I would have wanted more than to stumble sleepily but excitedly into the living room to find a card (printed on recycled paper with recycled soy-based ink) giving me glad tidings that a penguin had the new cap pistol I wanted. Sadly, my parents weren’t green, and so gave me cap pistols and baseball gloves and toy trains and an ant farm.
Although not as exciting as a new bicycle, a good pocket knife is a far better gift than being bullied into pretending to feel good about a fish or a ground squirrel. Giving a boy his first pocket knife is a traditional rite of passage, and having it taken away a day or two later for misuse is another traditional rite of passage. A knife, after all, is a tool, not a toy, and owning one is a grown-up thing.
My ol’ daddy said that a man’s not fully dressed without his pocket knife; experience demonstrates that this is true. The knife was perhaps the first tool used by humans, probably beginning with a sharp flint, and necessary for skinning a rabbit, slicing veggies, building a fire, eating, building, mending, opening, slicing, dicing, picking your teeth, and cleaning your fingernails. Mind the order of usage, of course! No one who lives close to the land or the sea or the workshop can function without a good knife to hand at all times.
Thomas Jefferson is often credited for inventing the first folding knife, which, while not as strong as a one-piece, is certainly easier to carry about. Manufacturers began adding extra blades, and then the Swiss got the idea of adding specific tools in miniature, resulting in the Swiss Army Knife. Where or not the Swiss Army carries Swiss Army Knives is a good topic of conversation. While these gadgets are fun, I’ll bet your old grandpa could accomplish with his single-bladed pocket knife whatever task was necessary before you could find and unlimber the designated thingie out of a Swiss Army Knife or a multi-tool.
A friend gave me a nice little lock-back with a single blade with saw-teeth. I found this knife so useful that a few weeks later I bought a larger model, made-in-America, even while thinking to myself that the last thing I needed was another pocket knife. And then a few weeks after that Hurricane Rita did not hit New Orleans, and that big ol’ American knife with its one large blade and saw-teeth paid for itself many times over with its survival utility.
Shiny things under the tree or for a birthday are fun: little plastic boxes that light up and make noise, and other little boxes that allow you to hear The Immortal Words of Our Time – “Can you hear me now?” and “She all up in my face!” But when you are long-gone, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not treasure your MePod or your cell ‘phone or your Brickberry, because those dinky disposables will have long since been recycled into beer cans or Chinese cars. But they will treasure your old pocket knife, its edge well-worn from good, honest use and from many sharpenings around a winter’s fire when the stories are told.
Sturdy, American-made pocket knives are great, traditional gifts for men and boys. They are also perfect for skinning baby harp seals.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
What if Governments Made New Year's Resolutions?
Mack Hall
India and Pakistan: Our two governments resolve to stand down all the border tension and work together in the new year so that we can get back to what we do best, persecuting Christians.
Congress: We’re going to stop bailing out rich people. CEOs who fly about in private jets should not be funded by firefighters and cops and store clerks. Further, the suits who rule the United Auto Workers need to find in their hearts the good will to sell their $33 million lake retreat and their $6 million golf course instead of demanding tax money from Americans who work for minimum wage.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg: In the new year I’m going to, like, you know, vote, and stuff. And disapprove of land mines.
President Bush: Clearly Americans should no longer fund any projects for oil-glutted Iraq; the purportedly poor Iraqis are throwing away perfectly good shoes. Instead of paying American engineers and skilled workers good money to rebuild Iraq, let us pay American engineers and skilled workers good money to rebuild America.
Al Gore: May all humans come to understand that global warming is a hoax promoted by bullies for reasons best known to themselves, and I apologize for having deluded myself. In the end, what we’re talking about is weather. Not that it means anything, but I’m going to stop flying around in my private jet and driving around in convoys of SUVs and preaching to people for big bucks.
Governor Perry: I’ve found out that I’m the only man in Texas who cares diddly about spending millions of dollars rebuilding the governor’s mansion. That old building looked too much like a set from Gone With the Wind anyway. I propose we sell the property for development, thus putting it on the tax rolls.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: I’m going to have a lot fewer of my people’s heads cut off this year.
President Sarkozy of France: You know, my fellow monsieurs, if not for the Americans we’d all be native speakers of German. I think we should host a Thank-a-Yank day.
President Kohler of Germany: You know, mein Herren, if not for the Americans we’d have to rule the French! Ouch! I think we should host a Thank-a-Yank day.
China: Clearly the American government doesn’t care at all about the quality of the food and products we ship to the American people. As a matter of being good neighbors and in the absence of responsible American government we should build quality products and make sure the food we export isn’t poisoned.
Hamas: At some point someone’s going to ask why our Palestinian children are starving while we spend millions of donated dollars to buy rockets to fire into Israel. This year I propose we stop blaming Jews for everything and begin acting like a civilized state.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: I don’t need an expensive Air Force jet just to fly wherever I want to go; I’m going to be a positive role model in matters of thrift and fly commercial this year.
Governor Blagojevich of Illinois: I shouldn’t burden the people of Illinois with my confusion as to what planet I’m from. I’m also going to stop trying to sell public offices and be a responsible governor from now on – if that’s okay with my fraternity brothers and in accordance with Plan Nine From Outer Space.
President Putin of Russia: This year and forever, I am Plan Nine From Outer Space.
India and Pakistan: Our two governments resolve to stand down all the border tension and work together in the new year so that we can get back to what we do best, persecuting Christians.
Congress: We’re going to stop bailing out rich people. CEOs who fly about in private jets should not be funded by firefighters and cops and store clerks. Further, the suits who rule the United Auto Workers need to find in their hearts the good will to sell their $33 million lake retreat and their $6 million golf course instead of demanding tax money from Americans who work for minimum wage.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg: In the new year I’m going to, like, you know, vote, and stuff. And disapprove of land mines.
President Bush: Clearly Americans should no longer fund any projects for oil-glutted Iraq; the purportedly poor Iraqis are throwing away perfectly good shoes. Instead of paying American engineers and skilled workers good money to rebuild Iraq, let us pay American engineers and skilled workers good money to rebuild America.
Al Gore: May all humans come to understand that global warming is a hoax promoted by bullies for reasons best known to themselves, and I apologize for having deluded myself. In the end, what we’re talking about is weather. Not that it means anything, but I’m going to stop flying around in my private jet and driving around in convoys of SUVs and preaching to people for big bucks.
Governor Perry: I’ve found out that I’m the only man in Texas who cares diddly about spending millions of dollars rebuilding the governor’s mansion. That old building looked too much like a set from Gone With the Wind anyway. I propose we sell the property for development, thus putting it on the tax rolls.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: I’m going to have a lot fewer of my people’s heads cut off this year.
President Sarkozy of France: You know, my fellow monsieurs, if not for the Americans we’d all be native speakers of German. I think we should host a Thank-a-Yank day.
President Kohler of Germany: You know, mein Herren, if not for the Americans we’d have to rule the French! Ouch! I think we should host a Thank-a-Yank day.
China: Clearly the American government doesn’t care at all about the quality of the food and products we ship to the American people. As a matter of being good neighbors and in the absence of responsible American government we should build quality products and make sure the food we export isn’t poisoned.
Hamas: At some point someone’s going to ask why our Palestinian children are starving while we spend millions of donated dollars to buy rockets to fire into Israel. This year I propose we stop blaming Jews for everything and begin acting like a civilized state.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: I don’t need an expensive Air Force jet just to fly wherever I want to go; I’m going to be a positive role model in matters of thrift and fly commercial this year.
Governor Blagojevich of Illinois: I shouldn’t burden the people of Illinois with my confusion as to what planet I’m from. I’m also going to stop trying to sell public offices and be a responsible governor from now on – if that’s okay with my fraternity brothers and in accordance with Plan Nine From Outer Space.
President Putin of Russia: This year and forever, I am Plan Nine From Outer Space.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
A Night of Watching
Mack Hall
Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child.
Holy Infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.
-- Mohr and Gruber, 1818
“Christmas…in all his bluff and hearty honesty” (Dickens, 1836) is near, and most of us will be blessed in celebrating this ancient Feast at home with our families, warm and under cover. We can attend a Christmas Eve liturgy and wrap gifts and sleep in earthly (at least) peace because a great many others will be on duty keeping us safe in the long watches of the night.
In the cold beneath the wild and snowy Hindu Kush and along the banks of rivers that Abraham knew, young Americans will be on patrol on Christmas Eve, keeping Osama Bin Ladin and his merry-less men too busy to shoot at the rest of us.
And in our own country, too, men and women will stand to and stand up on Christmas Eve: police, firefighters, utility crews, and medical staffs will count themselves blessed if they can take a few minutes for a cup of acrid, staff-room coffee on the night of the Savior’s birth.
Somewhere under the cold stars of Christmas Eve a cop will give a crying child a teddy bear and try to comfort him when his little world is made cruel by a drunk adult.
On this sacred night fire crews will roll because of a badly-wired tree or a flaming car wreck.
If the ice falling in the silent night takes down the electricity, our rural electric co-op crews will forsake their warm beds and take the trucks out in the sleet to spend cold hours making the rest of us warm again. If the Star of Christmas were to wink out (it won’t, of course), we can be sure that a Jasper-Newton Electric Co-Op truck would soon be rolling up with a crew to mend it.
EMT crews, driving ambulances pulled by eight huge cylinders rather than by eight tiny reindeer, will carry the gift of life on Christmas Eve. In the hospitals and nursing homes dedicated caregivers will be as the shepherds of long ago who came to the Stable when called, serving Christ in the long, long night by serving His people.
We are all called to lives of duty, not of privilege, and thank God for those who respond to that call better than the rest of us do. The Christmas of those who watch and serve in the night is especially holy. I hope they know that.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
-- Longfellow, 1864
Silent night, holy night,
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child.
Holy Infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.
-- Mohr and Gruber, 1818
“Christmas…in all his bluff and hearty honesty” (Dickens, 1836) is near, and most of us will be blessed in celebrating this ancient Feast at home with our families, warm and under cover. We can attend a Christmas Eve liturgy and wrap gifts and sleep in earthly (at least) peace because a great many others will be on duty keeping us safe in the long watches of the night.
In the cold beneath the wild and snowy Hindu Kush and along the banks of rivers that Abraham knew, young Americans will be on patrol on Christmas Eve, keeping Osama Bin Ladin and his merry-less men too busy to shoot at the rest of us.
And in our own country, too, men and women will stand to and stand up on Christmas Eve: police, firefighters, utility crews, and medical staffs will count themselves blessed if they can take a few minutes for a cup of acrid, staff-room coffee on the night of the Savior’s birth.
Somewhere under the cold stars of Christmas Eve a cop will give a crying child a teddy bear and try to comfort him when his little world is made cruel by a drunk adult.
On this sacred night fire crews will roll because of a badly-wired tree or a flaming car wreck.
If the ice falling in the silent night takes down the electricity, our rural electric co-op crews will forsake their warm beds and take the trucks out in the sleet to spend cold hours making the rest of us warm again. If the Star of Christmas were to wink out (it won’t, of course), we can be sure that a Jasper-Newton Electric Co-Op truck would soon be rolling up with a crew to mend it.
EMT crews, driving ambulances pulled by eight huge cylinders rather than by eight tiny reindeer, will carry the gift of life on Christmas Eve. In the hospitals and nursing homes dedicated caregivers will be as the shepherds of long ago who came to the Stable when called, serving Christ in the long, long night by serving His people.
We are all called to lives of duty, not of privilege, and thank God for those who respond to that call better than the rest of us do. The Christmas of those who watch and serve in the night is especially holy. I hope they know that.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
-- Longfellow, 1864
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Football -- More Interesting Than a Nap
Mack Hall
For those of us gnashing our decaff lattas in the non-athletic darkness, football is only slightly more interesting than a nap, and on Sunday afternoon the nap definitely takes the gold. The basic thrust of the game – carrying an oddly-shaped leather ball across a boundary in the face, facemasks, and sometimes fists of the opposition – is clear enough, but the arcana of rules is terribly confusing. As Andy Griffith asked fifty years ago in “What it Was, Was Football,” why do the convicts in the striped shirts throw yellow flags ever so often and make everyone stop what they are doing?
But our little town’s Wildcats are the exception, even for those who consider Keats more cunning than Knute, know Blake better than Bear, and think Tom Eliot tops Tom Landry.
This exception is because the only real football is high school football, the true inheritor of mediaeval English village sports in which, it is alleged, a live pig was employed at the beginning of the game (by the end, said pig was dead). When the sturdy young men of one’s own village thrash out their differences with the young men of the neighboring village, the competition is local and personal, and thus genuinely interesting.
Our town’s reputation for football has often been expressed in that charitable metaphor, “a rebuilding season.” Further, even in the shifting of districts because of demographics, the Wildcats invariably found themselves up against dynasties of state champions. Great big state champions. Great big state champions whose knuckles scraped the ground as they loped across the field bellowing a rather feral basso profundo like primeval swamp critters. But the games were played on the home fields and in the home mud, against the in-laws from up and down the two-lane, and sometimes the Wildcats won, and it was always fun anyway.
Even shy and retiring bookworms jump up and down with excitement when the Wildcats play.
And now, in the best Disney tradition, the Cinderella Wildcats have not only whupped two dynastic teams but are going to State in high hopes of achieving two almost impossible dreams, the championship and, even better, the championship without a single defeat from August to December.
The Wildcats will play the Muleshoe (um…surely Mules?) at Grand Prairie this Saturday at 6:00 P.M. Muleshoe is across the border from Clovis, New Mexico, named for the 6th century founder of the Merovingian dynasty, which has nothing to do with anything except perhaps to remind us that, like royal dynasties, football dynasties too are transitory.
But for now, just imagine the Wildcats with the state championship!
Yes, this game is going to be far more interesting than a nap.
-30-
For those of us gnashing our decaff lattas in the non-athletic darkness, football is only slightly more interesting than a nap, and on Sunday afternoon the nap definitely takes the gold. The basic thrust of the game – carrying an oddly-shaped leather ball across a boundary in the face, facemasks, and sometimes fists of the opposition – is clear enough, but the arcana of rules is terribly confusing. As Andy Griffith asked fifty years ago in “What it Was, Was Football,” why do the convicts in the striped shirts throw yellow flags ever so often and make everyone stop what they are doing?
But our little town’s Wildcats are the exception, even for those who consider Keats more cunning than Knute, know Blake better than Bear, and think Tom Eliot tops Tom Landry.
This exception is because the only real football is high school football, the true inheritor of mediaeval English village sports in which, it is alleged, a live pig was employed at the beginning of the game (by the end, said pig was dead). When the sturdy young men of one’s own village thrash out their differences with the young men of the neighboring village, the competition is local and personal, and thus genuinely interesting.
Our town’s reputation for football has often been expressed in that charitable metaphor, “a rebuilding season.” Further, even in the shifting of districts because of demographics, the Wildcats invariably found themselves up against dynasties of state champions. Great big state champions. Great big state champions whose knuckles scraped the ground as they loped across the field bellowing a rather feral basso profundo like primeval swamp critters. But the games were played on the home fields and in the home mud, against the in-laws from up and down the two-lane, and sometimes the Wildcats won, and it was always fun anyway.
Even shy and retiring bookworms jump up and down with excitement when the Wildcats play.
And now, in the best Disney tradition, the Cinderella Wildcats have not only whupped two dynastic teams but are going to State in high hopes of achieving two almost impossible dreams, the championship and, even better, the championship without a single defeat from August to December.
The Wildcats will play the Muleshoe (um…surely Mules?) at Grand Prairie this Saturday at 6:00 P.M. Muleshoe is across the border from Clovis, New Mexico, named for the 6th century founder of the Merovingian dynasty, which has nothing to do with anything except perhaps to remind us that, like royal dynasties, football dynasties too are transitory.
But for now, just imagine the Wildcats with the state championship!
Yes, this game is going to be far more interesting than a nap.
-30-
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Encountering the Third World
Mack Hall
The week of Thanksgiving was one of horror, with televised images of terrorism, horror, panic, murder, and blood. And that was just the first few days of Christmas shopping in America.
Like The Religion of Peace-That-May-Not-be-Named, America is beginning to mark its holy days with body counts: one employee trampled to death (though not eaten) by shoppers in a big-box store in Long Island, New York, two dead by gunfire in a toy store in Palm Desert, California, and miscellaneous robberies in parking lots during the start of this festive season.
When the Long Island police closed the big-box store briefly to establish a crime scene for investigation, the murderers were angered that their shopping was interrupted. After a few hours the Arkansas-based chain, in their compassion for an employee murdered while on the job, reopened the store because, after all, this is The Christmas Season.
Perhaps a foreign newspaper will write something like this about us: The really frightening thing is that America, populated by such backward, irresponsible inhabitants, is a nuclear nation. Spain, France, England, Japan, and China have in turn tried to colonize America, but with little residual effect. Americans remain a simple people, easily amused by gifts of shiny but worthless trifles. They delight in adorning themselves as perpetual children; even among the elderly grown-up clothing is as little known as thrift and self-restraint. If such child-like primitives cannot be trusted not to kill each other over made-in-China baubles, how much danger might they be to civilized nations? One fears that the nuclear trigger is in reach of a text-messaging forty-something Yank wearing head-phones, sneakers, knee-pants, and a tee-shirt bearing the iconic message of America in the 21st century: “Whasssssssssssssssss-Upppppppppppppppp?”
President Bush has offered help to India because of the latest mass murders committed by what some are pleased to call youths, but perhaps India could help us first because of murders committed by Christmas shoppers. We point a patronizing finger at other dysfunctional cultures only at the risk of having an equally disapproving finger pointed back at our own.
Every year one reads how commercialized Christmas has become, but Christmas has not become commercialized at all: we have. And commercialization is fine in its place; the buying and selling of goods mean jobs and prosperity. Commerce is good, up until the point where shopping becomes not simply foolishness, like the silly woman who camps out in front of a store for days before a sale, but an act of terrorism.
We can do better.
The week of Thanksgiving was one of horror, with televised images of terrorism, horror, panic, murder, and blood. And that was just the first few days of Christmas shopping in America.
Like The Religion of Peace-That-May-Not-be-Named, America is beginning to mark its holy days with body counts: one employee trampled to death (though not eaten) by shoppers in a big-box store in Long Island, New York, two dead by gunfire in a toy store in Palm Desert, California, and miscellaneous robberies in parking lots during the start of this festive season.
When the Long Island police closed the big-box store briefly to establish a crime scene for investigation, the murderers were angered that their shopping was interrupted. After a few hours the Arkansas-based chain, in their compassion for an employee murdered while on the job, reopened the store because, after all, this is The Christmas Season.
Perhaps a foreign newspaper will write something like this about us: The really frightening thing is that America, populated by such backward, irresponsible inhabitants, is a nuclear nation. Spain, France, England, Japan, and China have in turn tried to colonize America, but with little residual effect. Americans remain a simple people, easily amused by gifts of shiny but worthless trifles. They delight in adorning themselves as perpetual children; even among the elderly grown-up clothing is as little known as thrift and self-restraint. If such child-like primitives cannot be trusted not to kill each other over made-in-China baubles, how much danger might they be to civilized nations? One fears that the nuclear trigger is in reach of a text-messaging forty-something Yank wearing head-phones, sneakers, knee-pants, and a tee-shirt bearing the iconic message of America in the 21st century: “Whasssssssssssssssss-Upppppppppppppppp?”
President Bush has offered help to India because of the latest mass murders committed by what some are pleased to call youths, but perhaps India could help us first because of murders committed by Christmas shoppers. We point a patronizing finger at other dysfunctional cultures only at the risk of having an equally disapproving finger pointed back at our own.
Every year one reads how commercialized Christmas has become, but Christmas has not become commercialized at all: we have. And commercialization is fine in its place; the buying and selling of goods mean jobs and prosperity. Commerce is good, up until the point where shopping becomes not simply foolishness, like the silly woman who camps out in front of a store for days before a sale, but an act of terrorism.
We can do better.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Who Are You?
Mack Hall
The Duke of Norfolk: “What sort of foolery is this? Does the King visit you every day?”
Thomas More: “No, but I go to Vespers most days.”
-- A Man for All Seasons
What one really wants to see at Thanksgiving is the President whippin’ out a .22 and shooting the turkey (the strutting bird, not the strutting reporter) on the White House lawn instead of pardoning it.
Perhaps a new ritual could be initiated – a poor worker could be dragged out in front of the White House and forgiven this year’s confiscatory taxes.
Presidents seem to be required to waste their time on purely secular rituals that carry little relation to the ancient unities of faith and civilization: pardoning turkeys, doing something with Easter eggs, throwing out the first baseball, and worshipping the Superbowl.
The last thing we expect to see of a president in the 21st century is participation in a real ritual such as attending Vespers, making the Stations of the Cross, carrying the Gospels in a procession, standing as a happy witness at a baptism, or pardoning a human prisoner with a brotherly admonition to go and sin no more.
The religious rituals are thin enough now, and as a result the secular ones are increasingly bizarre. Make no mistake about it, humans will have rituals as surely as they will have stories, and if the genuine rituals and genuine stories are discarded they will be replaced with Hallmark ones or worse.
Recently several Texas cheerleaders were indicted for tying and blind-folding younger cheerleaders and then throwing them into a swimming pool, a situation that could well have led to deaths. This humiliation and endangerment were part of, yes, an initiation ritual.
Let us consider the facts. First, the older girls came ‘round in cars early in the morning – also known as the middle of the night – to take away the younger girls, purportedly to breakfast. Second, the older girls bound the girls with duct tape. Third, the older girls blind-folded the younger girls. Fourth, the older girls threw the younger girls into a swimming pool, bound and blindfolded.
And few people saw any harm in this. It’s a ritual; we’ve always done it; if you don’t let us lie to you and humiliate you and endanger you we won’t be your friends.
American soldiers are in federal prisons for doing far less to murderers who strap bombs to women and children.
In a few weeks the Chief Justice of the United States will in a ritual swear in a new President, demonstrating once again that America changes governments without coups or putsches or mass executions of the losing side. The President will take an oath, a public oath, perhaps with his hand resting on a copy of the Bible. And that’s it. He won’t be blindfolded, he won’t be stripped naked, he won’t be bullied into drinking alcohol, he won’t be endangered by torture, and he won’t have to refer to bullies as his brothers.
Humans have a need to be accepted by other humans, and certainly the village grouch is to be pitied. But a human should also possess and good sense of self and a certain autonomy in matters of dignity and self-preservation.
If a group of people come to get you in the middle of the night, like the Venezuelan or Cuban secret police, they do not have your best interests at heart. If you have a choice, why go with them?
If someone blindfolds you, he is taking away your ability to see. Why?
If someone binds you, he is taking away your ability to move freely and your ability to defend yourself. Why?
If someone humiliates you so that you will be permitted to be his friend, well, why? Do you really want to be accepted by people suffering weird psycho-sexual hangups? Far, far better for such unhappy and inadequate people to disapprove of you!
As your old daddy told you, always remember who you are.
-30-
The Duke of Norfolk: “What sort of foolery is this? Does the King visit you every day?”
Thomas More: “No, but I go to Vespers most days.”
-- A Man for All Seasons
What one really wants to see at Thanksgiving is the President whippin’ out a .22 and shooting the turkey (the strutting bird, not the strutting reporter) on the White House lawn instead of pardoning it.
Perhaps a new ritual could be initiated – a poor worker could be dragged out in front of the White House and forgiven this year’s confiscatory taxes.
Presidents seem to be required to waste their time on purely secular rituals that carry little relation to the ancient unities of faith and civilization: pardoning turkeys, doing something with Easter eggs, throwing out the first baseball, and worshipping the Superbowl.
The last thing we expect to see of a president in the 21st century is participation in a real ritual such as attending Vespers, making the Stations of the Cross, carrying the Gospels in a procession, standing as a happy witness at a baptism, or pardoning a human prisoner with a brotherly admonition to go and sin no more.
The religious rituals are thin enough now, and as a result the secular ones are increasingly bizarre. Make no mistake about it, humans will have rituals as surely as they will have stories, and if the genuine rituals and genuine stories are discarded they will be replaced with Hallmark ones or worse.
Recently several Texas cheerleaders were indicted for tying and blind-folding younger cheerleaders and then throwing them into a swimming pool, a situation that could well have led to deaths. This humiliation and endangerment were part of, yes, an initiation ritual.
Let us consider the facts. First, the older girls came ‘round in cars early in the morning – also known as the middle of the night – to take away the younger girls, purportedly to breakfast. Second, the older girls bound the girls with duct tape. Third, the older girls blind-folded the younger girls. Fourth, the older girls threw the younger girls into a swimming pool, bound and blindfolded.
And few people saw any harm in this. It’s a ritual; we’ve always done it; if you don’t let us lie to you and humiliate you and endanger you we won’t be your friends.
American soldiers are in federal prisons for doing far less to murderers who strap bombs to women and children.
In a few weeks the Chief Justice of the United States will in a ritual swear in a new President, demonstrating once again that America changes governments without coups or putsches or mass executions of the losing side. The President will take an oath, a public oath, perhaps with his hand resting on a copy of the Bible. And that’s it. He won’t be blindfolded, he won’t be stripped naked, he won’t be bullied into drinking alcohol, he won’t be endangered by torture, and he won’t have to refer to bullies as his brothers.
Humans have a need to be accepted by other humans, and certainly the village grouch is to be pitied. But a human should also possess and good sense of self and a certain autonomy in matters of dignity and self-preservation.
If a group of people come to get you in the middle of the night, like the Venezuelan or Cuban secret police, they do not have your best interests at heart. If you have a choice, why go with them?
If someone blindfolds you, he is taking away your ability to see. Why?
If someone binds you, he is taking away your ability to move freely and your ability to defend yourself. Why?
If someone humiliates you so that you will be permitted to be his friend, well, why? Do you really want to be accepted by people suffering weird psycho-sexual hangups? Far, far better for such unhappy and inadequate people to disapprove of you!
As your old daddy told you, always remember who you are.
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