Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Saturday Morning in the Bookstore
Why are there now so many books of lists of ten things we must do before we die? Why not nine, or eleven? And why should pay someone for a list of experiences he says you and I must fulfill before we shuffle off what Shakespeare is pleased to call this mortal coil? Will my life be meaningless if I don’t jump out of an airplane over Scotland, see a famous statue in a Buddhist temple in Bangladesh, eat fried snake in Singapore, bicycle through Kenya, visit some snaky island off Honduras, or flush a certain Czarist toilet in St. Petersburg?
The history magazines are mostly about war. One magazine I perused featured a photograph of a Nazi general about to be executed in Italy in December of 1945. He looks distressed. Perhaps his “Top Ten Things to Do Before I Die” list was incomplete: “#9 – murder more Italian and American prisoners.”
History magazines sometimes publish articles about what a nice lad General Rommel was, a worthy opponent and all that (stuff), and kind to kittens and children. No, it just won’t do. Rommel was a Nazi general. His career choice was to travel to other countries and then destroy them, killing lots of people while doing so. But then, hey, maybe he was just trying to find himself.
A Nazi connection sells books – any formula-plotted thriller will sell if a big ol’ swishtika adorns the cover. Such stories always begin on a dark, narrow, bleak, foggy, smells-of-cooking-cabbage, wartime London street where our hero (1) stumbles across a corpse bearing Secret Papers, and then (2) finds his way to an old building which discreetly houses a Special Branch of MI5, MI6, MI6 1/2,or MI7 which is more Special Branchy than any other Special Branch, and in which a mysterious Colonel Ponsonby-Snitt rules over a mysterious league of mysterious functionaries who hold the mysterious key – there’s always a key, real or metaphorical – which is going to win the war against jolly Rommel.
Zombies and vampires – I don’t get these genres at all. If someone wants blood, let him order a steak, rare. One reads in the news that some teens – obviously not the smart ones – are in imitation of vampire stories biting each other and swapping blood and, hence, bacteria and viruses. Were they not listening to parental teachings about basic hygiene and the myriads of blood-borne diseases? Well, no. Over in the magazine section one can find magazines devoted to tattoos and piercings. The book retailer could efficiently combine the books on zombies, vampires, tattoos, and piercings into one category: Disfigurement and Disease.
Books about the Tudors, especially Tudor queens and girlfriends, are still big. A nice side-effect is that readers also learn a little history.
Eat / Pray / Love / Drink / Vomit – How many women who work at the fast-food joint or at Big Box get to leave all behind and spend a year in Italy discovering themselves? Heck, most folks consider themselves lucky if they can take the kids to Disney once or twice before the little boogers grow up.
A recent fashion are books bearing covers of vapid-looking girls wearing yarmulkes with strings hanging down from them – one infers that these books, and they are Legion, are about a beautiful but misunderstood Hutterite / Amish / Mennonite girl who finds both Jesus and true love in a buggy while a modest church steeple and some perfect trees pose picturesquely in the background. But I sure wouldn’t know, and never will.
Detective stories – Agatha Christie is still the best. Hercule Poirot is my hero. Well, okay, him, John Wayne, Sergeant Schultz, and Bob Newhart.
Poetry – just keep moving; nothin’ to read here. That which now passes for poetry is pretty much me, me, me, my, my, my in content and free verse (which is a contradiction) in non-structure tricked out with the shabbiest sort of rhetorical bling. If the poet doesn’t dot the i he must be really cool, right? There is neither passion nor intellect nor aesthetics in contemporary poetry, only squalid self-pity flung like a temper-tantrum onto the page.
Westerns – the selection is smaller than it used to be. A current trend is to publish the books that were made into films, which is a great idea. Anyone who thinks John Wayne was one-dimensional has never seen The Searchers, John Ford’s brilliant examination of racism and redemption.
Harry Potter appears to be hiding, at least until the next movie comes out. The first book in the series was mildly interesting, but then the next forty or fifty were but the first book tiresomely recycled – cute kids scream at each other and then fight Him / He Who Must Not Be Named and then some minor character gets killed and then the cute kids reconcile with teary eyes and we learn about friendship being The Most Important Thing. Yawn.
Time for coffee.
-30-
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
For a Football Player Dying Young
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
In the Light
All of us must die; few of us are permitted to die while doing exactly what we should be doing.
There are no easy answers to the eternal why of death. We mourn those who die in the autumn of their lives; we mourn even more those who die in their springtime. Our intellects tell us that death is the natural progression of living; our hearts, in pain, tell us that the intellect’s understanding is inadequate.
Reggie Garrett, as young and proud as one of Beowulf’s warriors, sweat-stained in his West Orange-Stark uniform, died clean and honest and good. He threw a touchdown pass to a longtime friend, trotted off the field to the applause of his teammates, and died.
For the rest of their lives a few good men will speak a little, yes, of their own time on the field, but more often they will say, with great pride, “I played football with Reggie Garrett.”
For high school football is a clean game, clean and honest and good, a celebration of young manhood at the peak of strength and speed and skill. Football is played in the light, sometimes beneath God’s sun and sometimes under the electric lights which push the darkness away for the sake of a fair field for manly sport. Football is played by teams of youths of all sorts of backgrounds who have learned to live and work and play together. Football, always in the light, is happily antithetical to the dark broodings of a misanthrope lurking alone in a dark room hugging his dark resentments to himself in dark echoes of Grendel.
And no doubt there was some fat, cholesterol-sodden old poop in the bleachers popping off about how the pass and the catch could have been done better, but he is irrelevant. The only thing wrong with football is not football itself but with the flawless sideline quarterbacks who are oh, so quarterbackier than the young men who actually play the game.
Football is for the young athlete, not for the old critic.
Reggie did not die in the dark; he did not die watching television or idling on a street corner or doing something wrong or feeling sorry for himself. He died in the light, doing what was right, doing something he loved and doing it very well, glorious in his young manhood.
Reggie, an honor student, was to attend the University of Texas and study architecture. One imagines that the buildings he would have designed would have been filled with light.
“Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.”
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
In the Light
All of us must die; few of us are permitted to die while doing exactly what we should be doing.
There are no easy answers to the eternal why of death. We mourn those who die in the autumn of their lives; we mourn even more those who die in their springtime. Our intellects tell us that death is the natural progression of living; our hearts, in pain, tell us that the intellect’s understanding is inadequate.
Reggie Garrett, as young and proud as one of Beowulf’s warriors, sweat-stained in his West Orange-Stark uniform, died clean and honest and good. He threw a touchdown pass to a longtime friend, trotted off the field to the applause of his teammates, and died.
For the rest of their lives a few good men will speak a little, yes, of their own time on the field, but more often they will say, with great pride, “I played football with Reggie Garrett.”
For high school football is a clean game, clean and honest and good, a celebration of young manhood at the peak of strength and speed and skill. Football is played in the light, sometimes beneath God’s sun and sometimes under the electric lights which push the darkness away for the sake of a fair field for manly sport. Football is played by teams of youths of all sorts of backgrounds who have learned to live and work and play together. Football, always in the light, is happily antithetical to the dark broodings of a misanthrope lurking alone in a dark room hugging his dark resentments to himself in dark echoes of Grendel.
And no doubt there was some fat, cholesterol-sodden old poop in the bleachers popping off about how the pass and the catch could have been done better, but he is irrelevant. The only thing wrong with football is not football itself but with the flawless sideline quarterbacks who are oh, so quarterbackier than the young men who actually play the game.
Football is for the young athlete, not for the old critic.
Reggie did not die in the dark; he did not die watching television or idling on a street corner or doing something wrong or feeling sorry for himself. He died in the light, doing what was right, doing something he loved and doing it very well, glorious in his young manhood.
Reggie, an honor student, was to attend the University of Texas and study architecture. One imagines that the buildings he would have designed would have been filled with light.
“Eternal rest give unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.”
-30-
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Door Prizes at the Last Supper
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Door Prizes at the Last Supper
This year a church (let us call it St. Waycool’s) in a certain university town was pleased to begin the academic term by asking the students attending Mass to bring their cell ‘phones. The reason was not given because, according to the youth minister’s ‘blog, “the intrigue is half the fun.”
Oh, yeah, the Gospel and the Eucharist are Laff Riots. Perhaps what Jesus really says at every celebration of Holy Communion is “Do this in memory of Me – and bring your electronic toys.”
The goal was to coax students to register in the college parish. Now this part was good – the light bill must be paid and the roof repaired and the floors mopped, and all that costs money. People should support the church they attend appropriate to their means. Further, as the youth minister said, young people away from home for the first time have probably never thought of registering in a parish because, as with paying car notes, their parents did that.
All right, then, the homilist could have explained this and probably without a puppet ministry because, after all, the temporary parishioners are university students and can understand, like, y’know, thoughts and big words and stuff. And let the people say “existential.”
Sadly, some church functionaries appear to perceive any sort of outreach, even to university students and other adults, as a junior high experience.
After the homily and before the Eucharist the celebrant at each Mass had the participants whup out their cell ‘phones. Now, now, we mustn’t cling to the old ways, right? No doubt a parish priest in the early 19th century required his parishioners to take out their newest technology, the steel pen, and script their registrations then and there. And perhaps later in the century another priest asked the faithful to bring their wind-up gramophones to Mass. And then came the fruits of Vatican II: eight-track tapes, the Sony Walkman, and the Palm Pilot.
Anyway, at this point two functionaries at St. Waycool’s held up, smack in front of the altar and the crucifix (altar, crucifix – soooo last week), a large banner – what? No Power Point? – instructing the faithful how to report themselves to the parish authorities electronically.
The youth minister on his ‘blog proudly tapped out that this novelty “has never been tried in any other church.”
Wow! After 2,000 years the liturgy is at last enriched by lock-step text-messaging. All the saints and martyrs cry out with joy: “Can you hear me now? How many bars ya got?”
But wait – there’s more! Door prizes! If the faithful obediently texted during Mass and then obediently responded to an email on the following Tuesday they were automatically eligible for one of the following door prizes:
One Apple Ipod.
Five students got to lunch with the football coach.
Five students got to lunch with the basketball coach.
Twenty gift certificates.
Man, if only Padre Pio or Mother Theresa had been so cool!
Clearly the filter through which Christians perceive history must be upgraded because of the epiphany of electronic gadgetry:
The Magi followed their GPS devices (“Recalculating…”), not the Star.
St. Paul lost his signal on the road to Damascus.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me – after they register.”
St. Thomas More was beheaded for claiming his cell ‘phone signal was clearer than King Henry’s.
The Disciples in the photoshopped DaVinci’s Last Supper don’t hear Jesus because they’re all yakking into their cell ‘phones.
St. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for listening to The Voices through a tin cricket in her ear.
The Great Schism of 1170 was due to a rift between Cingular and AT&T users.
Moses received the Commandments via voicemail.
Jesus said to Peter, “If you love Me, tweet My sheep.”
The Centurion at the Crucifixion cried out, “Truly this was the Son of Verizon!”
At St. WayCool’s on that unhappy Sunday there was surely a faithful remnant of young men and women who bravely and stubbornly kept their cell ‘phones pocketed or pursed, and refused to desecrate the liturgy with this mummery. They won’t receive a gift certificate to Kitchen, Bed, Outhouse ‘N’ Stuff, but they won’t need it. They’ve got much, much more.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Door Prizes at the Last Supper
This year a church (let us call it St. Waycool’s) in a certain university town was pleased to begin the academic term by asking the students attending Mass to bring their cell ‘phones. The reason was not given because, according to the youth minister’s ‘blog, “the intrigue is half the fun.”
Oh, yeah, the Gospel and the Eucharist are Laff Riots. Perhaps what Jesus really says at every celebration of Holy Communion is “Do this in memory of Me – and bring your electronic toys.”
The goal was to coax students to register in the college parish. Now this part was good – the light bill must be paid and the roof repaired and the floors mopped, and all that costs money. People should support the church they attend appropriate to their means. Further, as the youth minister said, young people away from home for the first time have probably never thought of registering in a parish because, as with paying car notes, their parents did that.
All right, then, the homilist could have explained this and probably without a puppet ministry because, after all, the temporary parishioners are university students and can understand, like, y’know, thoughts and big words and stuff. And let the people say “existential.”
Sadly, some church functionaries appear to perceive any sort of outreach, even to university students and other adults, as a junior high experience.
After the homily and before the Eucharist the celebrant at each Mass had the participants whup out their cell ‘phones. Now, now, we mustn’t cling to the old ways, right? No doubt a parish priest in the early 19th century required his parishioners to take out their newest technology, the steel pen, and script their registrations then and there. And perhaps later in the century another priest asked the faithful to bring their wind-up gramophones to Mass. And then came the fruits of Vatican II: eight-track tapes, the Sony Walkman, and the Palm Pilot.
Anyway, at this point two functionaries at St. Waycool’s held up, smack in front of the altar and the crucifix (altar, crucifix – soooo last week), a large banner – what? No Power Point? – instructing the faithful how to report themselves to the parish authorities electronically.
The youth minister on his ‘blog proudly tapped out that this novelty “has never been tried in any other church.”
Wow! After 2,000 years the liturgy is at last enriched by lock-step text-messaging. All the saints and martyrs cry out with joy: “Can you hear me now? How many bars ya got?”
But wait – there’s more! Door prizes! If the faithful obediently texted during Mass and then obediently responded to an email on the following Tuesday they were automatically eligible for one of the following door prizes:
One Apple Ipod.
Five students got to lunch with the football coach.
Five students got to lunch with the basketball coach.
Twenty gift certificates.
Man, if only Padre Pio or Mother Theresa had been so cool!
Clearly the filter through which Christians perceive history must be upgraded because of the epiphany of electronic gadgetry:
The Magi followed their GPS devices (“Recalculating…”), not the Star.
St. Paul lost his signal on the road to Damascus.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me – after they register.”
St. Thomas More was beheaded for claiming his cell ‘phone signal was clearer than King Henry’s.
The Disciples in the photoshopped DaVinci’s Last Supper don’t hear Jesus because they’re all yakking into their cell ‘phones.
St. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for listening to The Voices through a tin cricket in her ear.
The Great Schism of 1170 was due to a rift between Cingular and AT&T users.
Moses received the Commandments via voicemail.
Jesus said to Peter, “If you love Me, tweet My sheep.”
The Centurion at the Crucifixion cried out, “Truly this was the Son of Verizon!”
At St. WayCool’s on that unhappy Sunday there was surely a faithful remnant of young men and women who bravely and stubbornly kept their cell ‘phones pocketed or pursed, and refused to desecrate the liturgy with this mummery. They won’t receive a gift certificate to Kitchen, Bed, Outhouse ‘N’ Stuff, but they won’t need it. They’ve got much, much more.
-30-
The Green Martyrdom
One wonders if any martyr tortured to death ever cried as loudly as does a certain bishop who does not receive the veneration and money he feels are his due.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
"I'm learning shoemaking..."
"I'm learning shoemaking and poetry, all at the same time."
-- David in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg
-- David in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Random Acts of Thinkfulness
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Random Acts of Thinkfulness
A great mystery of our time – are American children too fat, or are they starving? One reads an outraged writer’s thesis, complete with statistics, that American children are fat, and so their school cafeterias must be beaten into obedience. But then another writer, with equal anger and another catalogue of stats, declares with the authority of Mount Sinai that American children are starving, and again the school cafeteria (it’s always the school cafeteria’s fault) must be remade in the commentator’s image.
Stop.
In the past few weeks y’r ‘umble scrivener re-read Plato’s Phaedo (which is not Fido), Apologia, Crito, and Symposium. The real philosophical question is why the Athenian state didn’t off Socrates long before.
Snap.
Doctors. So many doctors. No, not M.D.s; we need more of them: I refer to all the other folks who are now doctors of this and that occupation which needed not doctors before. Will it soon be a matter that everyone is a doctor? Heck, I had trouble finishing high school. And now all the reverends are becoming doctors, too, and I have read of one fellow who is a Reverend Doctor Master Bishop. I sure wish I were that enlightened.
Click.
One still hears of those who want to make the world a better place. What if the world doesn’t want to be re-made? And isn’t it rather judgmental for some tweeter to find the world lacking without first having gotten a job?
Go.
I watched a young fellow decant from a city bus while obediently wearing the complete dress code as dictated to him by popular culture: bulbous plasticky shoes, those awful kneepants, billowing fake athletic shirt, and a backward baseball cap with an ironed-flat brim. In his hand he bore a cell ‘phone, and his head was festooned with wiring so he could receive his instructions.
He fled the immediate area of the bus with a practiced insouciance but also with some speed, for despite all his ornamental cool, the unhappy and decidedly uncool fact remained: he had arrived by city bus, and desperately did not want to be seen doing so.
Whirrrr.
Electronic books – the appeal is there, especially while traveling. You can carry your business reading, your travel books, and your Hercule Poirot novel, plus hundreds of other books, all within one little plastic case. Also, you own the books you buy for downloading. When your little machine breaks, as it will, you can buy another one and get all your books back.
Still, it’s a gadget, a successor to the cassette tape, the VCR, and the Polaroid. It’s not actually a book, and you can’t recharge it with a kerosene lamp during a hurricane. You can’t use your pen to argue with the writer, and your grandchildren won’t turn the same pages you did and delight in your marginalia.
Buzzzzzzz.
Several Saturdays ago two rival demagogues (Webster’s New Collegiate, demagogue – “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power”), as jealous of each other as the final two beauties competing for the crown of Miss Watermelon Festival, hosted rival body-counts in the nation’s capital.
Demagogues are free to gogue, and people living under the protection of the Constitution are free to lemming-up in doe-eyed adoration of the latest Dear Leader, but why would they want to?
When the competing golden-calf sessions were over, the two groups happened to encounter each other on the fringes (no pun). The folks involved apparently greeted each other courteously and wished each other well, demonstrating much more dignity than their masters. And, truly, Americans are much better off without masters.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Random Acts of Thinkfulness
A great mystery of our time – are American children too fat, or are they starving? One reads an outraged writer’s thesis, complete with statistics, that American children are fat, and so their school cafeterias must be beaten into obedience. But then another writer, with equal anger and another catalogue of stats, declares with the authority of Mount Sinai that American children are starving, and again the school cafeteria (it’s always the school cafeteria’s fault) must be remade in the commentator’s image.
Stop.
In the past few weeks y’r ‘umble scrivener re-read Plato’s Phaedo (which is not Fido), Apologia, Crito, and Symposium. The real philosophical question is why the Athenian state didn’t off Socrates long before.
Snap.
Doctors. So many doctors. No, not M.D.s; we need more of them: I refer to all the other folks who are now doctors of this and that occupation which needed not doctors before. Will it soon be a matter that everyone is a doctor? Heck, I had trouble finishing high school. And now all the reverends are becoming doctors, too, and I have read of one fellow who is a Reverend Doctor Master Bishop. I sure wish I were that enlightened.
Click.
One still hears of those who want to make the world a better place. What if the world doesn’t want to be re-made? And isn’t it rather judgmental for some tweeter to find the world lacking without first having gotten a job?
Go.
I watched a young fellow decant from a city bus while obediently wearing the complete dress code as dictated to him by popular culture: bulbous plasticky shoes, those awful kneepants, billowing fake athletic shirt, and a backward baseball cap with an ironed-flat brim. In his hand he bore a cell ‘phone, and his head was festooned with wiring so he could receive his instructions.
He fled the immediate area of the bus with a practiced insouciance but also with some speed, for despite all his ornamental cool, the unhappy and decidedly uncool fact remained: he had arrived by city bus, and desperately did not want to be seen doing so.
Whirrrr.
Electronic books – the appeal is there, especially while traveling. You can carry your business reading, your travel books, and your Hercule Poirot novel, plus hundreds of other books, all within one little plastic case. Also, you own the books you buy for downloading. When your little machine breaks, as it will, you can buy another one and get all your books back.
Still, it’s a gadget, a successor to the cassette tape, the VCR, and the Polaroid. It’s not actually a book, and you can’t recharge it with a kerosene lamp during a hurricane. You can’t use your pen to argue with the writer, and your grandchildren won’t turn the same pages you did and delight in your marginalia.
Buzzzzzzz.
Several Saturdays ago two rival demagogues (Webster’s New Collegiate, demagogue – “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power”), as jealous of each other as the final two beauties competing for the crown of Miss Watermelon Festival, hosted rival body-counts in the nation’s capital.
Demagogues are free to gogue, and people living under the protection of the Constitution are free to lemming-up in doe-eyed adoration of the latest Dear Leader, but why would they want to?
When the competing golden-calf sessions were over, the two groups happened to encounter each other on the fringes (no pun). The folks involved apparently greeted each other courteously and wished each other well, demonstrating much more dignity than their masters. And, truly, Americans are much better off without masters.
-30-
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Plato and His Perhaps Imaginary Friend Socrates
In the past few weeks I have re-read Apologia, Crito, Phaedo, and The Symposium. I marvel that the Athenian state did not possess the good sense to poison Socrates earlier.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Ham and Lima Beans and Inspiration
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Ham and Lima Beans and Inspiration
Motivational / inspirational speakers often employ war metaphors and quote admirals and generals. That’s a good sign that their war experience is pretty much limited to watching The Hitler Channel and reading the memoirs of the beribboned and famous. And then there’s the matter of the ham and lima beans barking in the night-time.
What if motivational speakers quoted enlisted men instead of generals? Here are some original sources for them for their next speeches. N.B.: although the wording may not be precise, almost none of this, except for the “be inspired” motif, is fictional.
“All ready for night patrol. Ain’t the C.O. coming?”
“Naw, he’s in his air-conditioned bedroom – I mean, the radio room – practicing his these-eyes-have-seen-it-all stare for his election speeches after the war.”
“He’s inspiring.”
“The FNG got dinged real bad. Anyone told the lieutenant?”
“Yeah, he and the C.O. are in the command bunker writing each other citations for medals.”
“Oh, yeah, they’re inspiring.”
“That swing ship brought the first mail we’ve had in two weeks – where is it?”
“It’s coming; the officers are getting theirs first.”
“Officers inspire me.”
“That idiot C.O. sat in the bunker and radioed conflicting orders all last night. If not for the Chief none of us would have gotten out of that mess alive. Why isn’t the Chief in charge since he knows what he’s doing?”
“’Cause the C.O.’s got a college degree and the Chief ain’t.”
“Oh, well, that’s inspiring.”
“Chief, what’s PTSD?”
“That’s something for officers and for civilians back home; you ain’t entitled. Now get them bullet holes patched and this boat washed down.”
“Okay, Chief.”
“And be inspired, son, be inspired.”
“Get the stand-down crews up. Night patrol’s coming in early. One boat’s burning and being towed. Five dead, a bunch wounded. Man, the generals and admirals in Saigon and D.C. will sure get a bunch of medals for this.”
“I’m inspired.”
“Bubba, what did you do before you joined up?”
“Bathed. Didn’t cuss as much. Didn’t know how popular ham-and-lima beans was.”
“Ham-and-lima-beans inspire me.”
“I got paid more as a sack boy back home than I do here in Cambodia makin’ th’ world safe for democracy and stuff.”
“Inspiring.”
“Say, who are those pretty fellows in the nice new uniforms funnin’ with the C.O.?”
“Those are some famous reporters. They’re going out with us for a few hours to take pictures and talk into their recorders. They’ll be back for the cocktail hour in their hotel in Saigon tonight and back in the states in a couple of days to get journalism awards for talking about how rough it is out here.”
“I’m so inspired.”
“I tossed a c-rat can of ham-and-lima beans over the perimeter to some hungry Vietnamese kids.”
“Yeah?”
“They tossed it back.”
“I ain’t that hungry either. But I’m sure inspired.”
“Do officers ever have to eat ham-and-lima beans?”
“I saw one do it once, but he was just drunk and showin’ off. That was after he ate a cockroach.”
“Most inspiring.”
“Say, whose bright idea was it to make so many c-rations out of ham-and-lima beans?”
“Probably Ho Chi Minh’s.”
“Ah! He was inspired!”
“Why are these boats made out of plastic?”
“Cheap to repair.”
“Are we cheap to repair?”
“Just be inspired, sailor, just be inspired.”
“Man, you don’t want to be captured alive by the V.C.”
“Why? They gonna make me eat ham-and-lima beans?”
“Ain’t you inspired yet?”
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Ham and Lima Beans and Inspiration
Motivational / inspirational speakers often employ war metaphors and quote admirals and generals. That’s a good sign that their war experience is pretty much limited to watching The Hitler Channel and reading the memoirs of the beribboned and famous. And then there’s the matter of the ham and lima beans barking in the night-time.
What if motivational speakers quoted enlisted men instead of generals? Here are some original sources for them for their next speeches. N.B.: although the wording may not be precise, almost none of this, except for the “be inspired” motif, is fictional.
“All ready for night patrol. Ain’t the C.O. coming?”
“Naw, he’s in his air-conditioned bedroom – I mean, the radio room – practicing his these-eyes-have-seen-it-all stare for his election speeches after the war.”
“He’s inspiring.”
“The FNG got dinged real bad. Anyone told the lieutenant?”
“Yeah, he and the C.O. are in the command bunker writing each other citations for medals.”
“Oh, yeah, they’re inspiring.”
“That swing ship brought the first mail we’ve had in two weeks – where is it?”
“It’s coming; the officers are getting theirs first.”
“Officers inspire me.”
“That idiot C.O. sat in the bunker and radioed conflicting orders all last night. If not for the Chief none of us would have gotten out of that mess alive. Why isn’t the Chief in charge since he knows what he’s doing?”
“’Cause the C.O.’s got a college degree and the Chief ain’t.”
“Oh, well, that’s inspiring.”
“Chief, what’s PTSD?”
“That’s something for officers and for civilians back home; you ain’t entitled. Now get them bullet holes patched and this boat washed down.”
“Okay, Chief.”
“And be inspired, son, be inspired.”
“Get the stand-down crews up. Night patrol’s coming in early. One boat’s burning and being towed. Five dead, a bunch wounded. Man, the generals and admirals in Saigon and D.C. will sure get a bunch of medals for this.”
“I’m inspired.”
“Bubba, what did you do before you joined up?”
“Bathed. Didn’t cuss as much. Didn’t know how popular ham-and-lima beans was.”
“Ham-and-lima-beans inspire me.”
“I got paid more as a sack boy back home than I do here in Cambodia makin’ th’ world safe for democracy and stuff.”
“Inspiring.”
“Say, who are those pretty fellows in the nice new uniforms funnin’ with the C.O.?”
“Those are some famous reporters. They’re going out with us for a few hours to take pictures and talk into their recorders. They’ll be back for the cocktail hour in their hotel in Saigon tonight and back in the states in a couple of days to get journalism awards for talking about how rough it is out here.”
“I’m so inspired.”
“I tossed a c-rat can of ham-and-lima beans over the perimeter to some hungry Vietnamese kids.”
“Yeah?”
“They tossed it back.”
“I ain’t that hungry either. But I’m sure inspired.”
“Do officers ever have to eat ham-and-lima beans?”
“I saw one do it once, but he was just drunk and showin’ off. That was after he ate a cockroach.”
“Most inspiring.”
“Say, whose bright idea was it to make so many c-rations out of ham-and-lima beans?”
“Probably Ho Chi Minh’s.”
“Ah! He was inspired!”
“Why are these boats made out of plastic?”
“Cheap to repair.”
“Are we cheap to repair?”
“Just be inspired, sailor, just be inspired.”
“Man, you don’t want to be captured alive by the V.C.”
“Why? They gonna make me eat ham-and-lima beans?”
“Ain’t you inspired yet?”
-30-
Monday, August 23, 2010
A Review of Paul I. Wellman's THE FEMALE
The Female by Paul I. Wellman. Wellman is remembered for his western history and western fiction, including The Comancheros, the basis for one of the best Saturday matinee John Wayne films.
The Female is a stab-'em-up, though, not a shoot-'em-up, a fictional bio of Empress Theodora, and it is a curious book much in need of editing. The first third or so is quite pornographic, unnecessarily so -- I'm not, not, not being prissy; there is just no need of page after page of and-then-she-dropped-the-gauzy-whatever-she-was-wearing-and-was-completely-you-know-what, and it drags the plot. After Theodora finds her way to then-Prince Justinian's bed by a clunky plot device the narrative does move faster, esp. in the matter of the Nike / Nika riots. Overall, Wellman clearly did a thorough job of researching Constantinople, but then didn't seem to know what to do with the material.
Wellman's hostility to any form of organized religion is another problem; he dismisses Orthodoxy / Catholicism (this is long before the Schism, remember) as contemptuously as he does Monophysitism. He also -- and this is most curious -- despises all Byzantines of all classes, and, indeed, doesn't seem to like anyone except the person of Theodora herself. Justinian is rendered first as a good, solid man, and then illogically reduced to a useless religious fanatic helplessly wringing his hands. One can conclude that Wellman constructed a Theodora who is nothing more than a somewhat twisted sexual and philosophical fantasy, and makes what could have been an entertaining and useful fiction into something rather creepy.
The Female is a stab-'em-up, though, not a shoot-'em-up, a fictional bio of Empress Theodora, and it is a curious book much in need of editing. The first third or so is quite pornographic, unnecessarily so -- I'm not, not, not being prissy; there is just no need of page after page of and-then-she-dropped-the-gauzy-whatever-she-was-wearing-and-was-completely-you-know-what, and it drags the plot. After Theodora finds her way to then-Prince Justinian's bed by a clunky plot device the narrative does move faster, esp. in the matter of the Nike / Nika riots. Overall, Wellman clearly did a thorough job of researching Constantinople, but then didn't seem to know what to do with the material.
Wellman's hostility to any form of organized religion is another problem; he dismisses Orthodoxy / Catholicism (this is long before the Schism, remember) as contemptuously as he does Monophysitism. He also -- and this is most curious -- despises all Byzantines of all classes, and, indeed, doesn't seem to like anyone except the person of Theodora herself. Justinian is rendered first as a good, solid man, and then illogically reduced to a useless religious fanatic helplessly wringing his hands. One can conclude that Wellman constructed a Theodora who is nothing more than a somewhat twisted sexual and philosophical fantasy, and makes what could have been an entertaining and useful fiction into something rather creepy.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Coffins -- Thinking Inside the Box
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Coffins – Thinking Inside the Box
In an episode of Alice Flo said that when her time came she wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered over Robert Redford.
Christendom has historically been opposed to cremation, probably because of its pagan associations (think of Dido in The Aeneid), and although c’mon-baby-light-my-fire is somewhat more common now, most folks still prefer to be “charitably enclosed in clay” (Henry V). Indeed, to bury the dead is one of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy (Missale Romanum, p. 33).
Our Lord Himself was buried (He didn’t stay buried, of course) clothed in a shroud, but when possible a box is preferable. And in order to bury someone in a box, someone else must first make the box.
Now ‘way down yonder near New Orleans reposes Abbey St. Joseph, a Benedictine monastery some 120+ years old. The Rule of St. Benedict (6th century constitution written in hopes that people living together wouldn’t squabble at the supper table) is very clear that those associated with a religious order should live a life of work, study, and prayer. And St. Benedict was as serious as Gunny Ermey on a bad helmet day about work; a monk is to milk the cows, till the fields, cut lumber, fire up the forge, and all that sort of thing. A Christian monastery does not live by the begging bowl but by the work of the brothers’ hands. And a gift shop.
Abbey St. Joseph used to do some serious dairying and farming, but now is down to kitchen-gardens and forestry as well as maintaining an out-in-the-woods retreat facility which is very popular with many religious and secular groups despite the lack of neon, gambling, and showgirls. The Abbey also runs a fully-accredited four-year college and helps parishes in the area. In sum, Benedictines do not sit around looking, like, holy and stuff.
Still, the Rule is big on the work-with-your-hands drill. What to do, what to do. Hmmmm. Trees. Lots of trees. Could build stuff out of wood. Why coffins? Actually, the brothers at St. Joseph’s have been making coffins for, again, some 120 years for their own end-of-life use. Even bishops have asked to be buried in coffins made by hand by the Benedictines, and other people, too, began asking about coffins for their loved ones.
Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the idea of being buried in a plain, unpretentious box handmade by men who prayed over it while building it – and sometimes listened to New Orleans Saints’ football games on the radio – is more comforting than an expensive, assembly-line, upholstered, chrome-handled, Buick-y, superheterodyne metal construct more solid – and more expensive – than your first car.
So the brothers agreed to make a few more coffins for sale. Not many boxes; this isn’t Willow Run out on the creek near Covington. Just a few boxes for a little income. And how appropriate that the brothers of a monastery named for St. Joseph, the patron of craftsmen, should craft good and useful things out of wood.
Alas, the State of Louisiana and The Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors cried “Prohiberimus!”
It seems that in Louisiana burying folks is a closed-shop, and that includes the funereal accessories. Even the Louisiana legislature, that model of honesty, efficiency, and service which is the envy of the civilized world, forbids the monks to sell unregulated boxes to people who want unregulated boxes. There is no word on whether or not the monks will be permitted to whittle and then sell unregulated birdhouses or unlicensed windchimes. One wonders if a mourner in Louisiana risks prison time for picking unauthorized flowers from his own unauthorized yard or buying unauthorized flowers from an unauthorized florist and placing said unauthorized flowers on Grandpa’s grave without fee-paid supervision from The Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directions.
In order to sell plain pine boxes the Abbey would have to become a funeral home, complete with embalming facilities, and the monks would have to spend a few years learning how to bury the dead government-style. Understand that this requirement stands even if the brothers never embalm one body or carry out one funeral – this is just to sell boxes, pine boxes.
Alas that the Benedictines at Abbey St. Joseph hadn’t thought to build little mosques instead; the State of Louisiana would have backed away in terror at the possibility of being labeled insensitive.
A disclaimer: The brothers of Abbey St. Joseph are kind and patient in putting up with my presence for two or three days most every year. This is probably because Abbot Justin hasn’t yet discovered that every now and then Fr. Raph and I sneak out back for a cigar.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Coffins – Thinking Inside the Box
In an episode of Alice Flo said that when her time came she wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered over Robert Redford.
Christendom has historically been opposed to cremation, probably because of its pagan associations (think of Dido in The Aeneid), and although c’mon-baby-light-my-fire is somewhat more common now, most folks still prefer to be “charitably enclosed in clay” (Henry V). Indeed, to bury the dead is one of the seven Corporal Works of Mercy (Missale Romanum, p. 33).
Our Lord Himself was buried (He didn’t stay buried, of course) clothed in a shroud, but when possible a box is preferable. And in order to bury someone in a box, someone else must first make the box.
Now ‘way down yonder near New Orleans reposes Abbey St. Joseph, a Benedictine monastery some 120+ years old. The Rule of St. Benedict (6th century constitution written in hopes that people living together wouldn’t squabble at the supper table) is very clear that those associated with a religious order should live a life of work, study, and prayer. And St. Benedict was as serious as Gunny Ermey on a bad helmet day about work; a monk is to milk the cows, till the fields, cut lumber, fire up the forge, and all that sort of thing. A Christian monastery does not live by the begging bowl but by the work of the brothers’ hands. And a gift shop.
Abbey St. Joseph used to do some serious dairying and farming, but now is down to kitchen-gardens and forestry as well as maintaining an out-in-the-woods retreat facility which is very popular with many religious and secular groups despite the lack of neon, gambling, and showgirls. The Abbey also runs a fully-accredited four-year college and helps parishes in the area. In sum, Benedictines do not sit around looking, like, holy and stuff.
Still, the Rule is big on the work-with-your-hands drill. What to do, what to do. Hmmmm. Trees. Lots of trees. Could build stuff out of wood. Why coffins? Actually, the brothers at St. Joseph’s have been making coffins for, again, some 120 years for their own end-of-life use. Even bishops have asked to be buried in coffins made by hand by the Benedictines, and other people, too, began asking about coffins for their loved ones.
Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the idea of being buried in a plain, unpretentious box handmade by men who prayed over it while building it – and sometimes listened to New Orleans Saints’ football games on the radio – is more comforting than an expensive, assembly-line, upholstered, chrome-handled, Buick-y, superheterodyne metal construct more solid – and more expensive – than your first car.
So the brothers agreed to make a few more coffins for sale. Not many boxes; this isn’t Willow Run out on the creek near Covington. Just a few boxes for a little income. And how appropriate that the brothers of a monastery named for St. Joseph, the patron of craftsmen, should craft good and useful things out of wood.
Alas, the State of Louisiana and The Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors cried “Prohiberimus!”
It seems that in Louisiana burying folks is a closed-shop, and that includes the funereal accessories. Even the Louisiana legislature, that model of honesty, efficiency, and service which is the envy of the civilized world, forbids the monks to sell unregulated boxes to people who want unregulated boxes. There is no word on whether or not the monks will be permitted to whittle and then sell unregulated birdhouses or unlicensed windchimes. One wonders if a mourner in Louisiana risks prison time for picking unauthorized flowers from his own unauthorized yard or buying unauthorized flowers from an unauthorized florist and placing said unauthorized flowers on Grandpa’s grave without fee-paid supervision from The Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directions.
In order to sell plain pine boxes the Abbey would have to become a funeral home, complete with embalming facilities, and the monks would have to spend a few years learning how to bury the dead government-style. Understand that this requirement stands even if the brothers never embalm one body or carry out one funeral – this is just to sell boxes, pine boxes.
Alas that the Benedictines at Abbey St. Joseph hadn’t thought to build little mosques instead; the State of Louisiana would have backed away in terror at the possibility of being labeled insensitive.
A disclaimer: The brothers of Abbey St. Joseph are kind and patient in putting up with my presence for two or three days most every year. This is probably because Abbot Justin hasn’t yet discovered that every now and then Fr. Raph and I sneak out back for a cigar.
-30-
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Wedding Bullet Blues
Mack Hall
The AP reports that in rural Turkey last Sunday a wedding went off with a bang when the groom shot his father and two of his aunts. Besides taking out Dad and some aunties the groom wounded eight other merry-makers when he discharged his automatic rifle in a moment of giddy happiness at having married such a wonderful girl.
Actually, that reminds me of some of the stories I’ve heard about my ancestors.
Shotgun weddings are so last week; the fashion now is automatic-weapons weddings.
And what a lark when the happy little children, led by the ring-bearer and the flower girl, scrambled merrily for the spent shell casings!
Grooms in most other nations would be happy with a slice of cake and a glass of champagne, but in Turkey the wedding reception is apparently a happy Kalashnikov moment.
This must have been a challenge for the wedding photographer: “Okay, beautiful bride, just hold up your new father-in-law’s severed head; I’ll photoshop the rest of him in later…now smile…”
Maybe that was after the happy bride and groom cut the cake with the bayonet that great-grandpa used on unarmed Greek and British prisoners in 1918.
Imagine the challenges for the wedding planner in a Turkish wedding: groom’s men relatives’ side, groom’s women relatives’ side, bride’s men relatives’ side, bride’s women relatives’ side.
And just what firearms do the groomsmen carry -- the traditional musket, the elegant and understated Walthers PPK, or the manly .44 magnum?
It must be a poignant moment for all when imam or mullah says: “I pronounce you man and wife. Husband, you may now beat the snot out of your new bride.”
Older women reminisce with their husbands about the past with joy: “Suleiman, remember the first time punched me on that moonlit night, and how you whispered to me that you would despise me forever?”
And then the gifts: for the groom, three goats, a box of ammunition, and a blank fatwah for killing any one person the groom doesn’t like. For the bride, a new mop, bucket, broom, and scrub brushes. A touching fashion this year was the presentation of certificates of donations, in the name of the groom (the bride doesn’t count), for the coming triumphal mosque at the site of the 9.11 victory over the infidels in New York City. Moreover, the certificates were printed in soy ink on recycled paper.
Late in the evening the bride tossed her hand grenade to her friends.
But all good things must come to an end, and as the bride meekly followed her husband through a double line of his friends, not hers, his car, not theirs, was decorated with the customary nuptial signs: “Death to Greece and Israel,” “Nuke the Great Satan Amerika,” and “Now Go Make New Little Martyrs.”
Sniff. It just makes one want to cry.
-30-
The AP reports that in rural Turkey last Sunday a wedding went off with a bang when the groom shot his father and two of his aunts. Besides taking out Dad and some aunties the groom wounded eight other merry-makers when he discharged his automatic rifle in a moment of giddy happiness at having married such a wonderful girl.
Actually, that reminds me of some of the stories I’ve heard about my ancestors.
Shotgun weddings are so last week; the fashion now is automatic-weapons weddings.
And what a lark when the happy little children, led by the ring-bearer and the flower girl, scrambled merrily for the spent shell casings!
Grooms in most other nations would be happy with a slice of cake and a glass of champagne, but in Turkey the wedding reception is apparently a happy Kalashnikov moment.
This must have been a challenge for the wedding photographer: “Okay, beautiful bride, just hold up your new father-in-law’s severed head; I’ll photoshop the rest of him in later…now smile…”
Maybe that was after the happy bride and groom cut the cake with the bayonet that great-grandpa used on unarmed Greek and British prisoners in 1918.
Imagine the challenges for the wedding planner in a Turkish wedding: groom’s men relatives’ side, groom’s women relatives’ side, bride’s men relatives’ side, bride’s women relatives’ side.
And just what firearms do the groomsmen carry -- the traditional musket, the elegant and understated Walthers PPK, or the manly .44 magnum?
It must be a poignant moment for all when imam or mullah says: “I pronounce you man and wife. Husband, you may now beat the snot out of your new bride.”
Older women reminisce with their husbands about the past with joy: “Suleiman, remember the first time punched me on that moonlit night, and how you whispered to me that you would despise me forever?”
And then the gifts: for the groom, three goats, a box of ammunition, and a blank fatwah for killing any one person the groom doesn’t like. For the bride, a new mop, bucket, broom, and scrub brushes. A touching fashion this year was the presentation of certificates of donations, in the name of the groom (the bride doesn’t count), for the coming triumphal mosque at the site of the 9.11 victory over the infidels in New York City. Moreover, the certificates were printed in soy ink on recycled paper.
Late in the evening the bride tossed her hand grenade to her friends.
But all good things must come to an end, and as the bride meekly followed her husband through a double line of his friends, not hers, his car, not theirs, was decorated with the customary nuptial signs: “Death to Greece and Israel,” “Nuke the Great Satan Amerika,” and “Now Go Make New Little Martyrs.”
Sniff. It just makes one want to cry.
-30-
Friday, August 6, 2010
BRAVEHEART and TITANIC -- Joyful Comedies
Anyone who can watch Braveheart and Titanic, especially the endings, without tears of laughter streaming down his cheeks has no soul.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Notes from the Okay American Road Trip
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Folks’ vacation narratives are almost always boring, so the Gentle Reader may wish to skip this and go on to something more Snooki and Chelsea.
Roswell, New Mexico
Little Green Men – these aliens come from China. Whoever started the rumors about flying bread-and-butter plates was a marketing mad-man genius, and Roswell’s main runway is a merry we-have-come-in-peace-gauntlet of shops selling toys space ships and tees featuring LGM, and storefront, oh, museums advertising The Truth about UFOs. It’s all good fun. But why are there never any Little Green Women?
Lincoln, New Mexico
All of the little town of Lincoln is a historic site and features many buildings, including Tunstall’s Store, Murphy’s Store (which was also a courthouse, jail, and Masonic Lodge), and San Juan Bautista Church. A ten-dollar ticket gets you into the public buildings and sites, but of course walking around a looking is free. The one-day ticket is also good for other New Mexico State Monuments at Jemez, Coronado, Bosque Redondo, Fort Sumner, Fort Selden, and the El Camino Real International Heritage Center.
The current governor of New Mexico, angling for re-election, is considering pardoning that lethal little freak Billy the Kid because long-ago territorial governor Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur, had agreed to give the Kid a pardon for ratting out his homies. However, B the K continued to murder people and steal their stuff, so any pardon would have been irrelevant since the nasty little dude well deserved The Long Drop for his post-state’s-evidence murders.
As for Tunstall, Murphy, and McSween, they were turf warriors toting fire arms instead of cell ‘phones, and hiring hit-men to murder each other. The Lincoln County War was a gang squabble over government contracts and monopolies, and all the participants were killed or died broke and broken. The one fellow who came out of it looking pretty good was Sheriff Pat Garrett, a stand-up man who put an end to a pathological weirdo. History has been unfair to him.
Magdalena, New Mexico
Magdalena was a large mining and cowtown on the Santa Fe, which long ago pulled up tracks and trucked out of town. The old depot remains as a little museum and library. My father was in the CCC in nearby Horse Springs, which no longer exists as even a name on the map. Also nearby is the VLA – Very Large Array – of very large parabolic receivers trying to receive messages from Captain Kirk or from Little Green Men.
Springerville, Arizona – the morning temperature was 64 degrees.
Fort Apache is a curious place, situated in the middle of the White Mountain community. The first Apache I saw was hitchhiking absent-mindedly while talking on his cell ‘phone and listening to his ear-bud-box-noise-thingie. He wore knee pants and a ball cap.
The Army left Fort Apache in 1922, and the fort is now home to the Theodore Roosevelt School in some handsome buildings. Some of the military buildings, especially the officers’ quarters, are still in use, and there is a nice little visitors’ center / museum headed by a University of Texas graduate. Inside there is the now almost-requisite faux First Nations dwelling reconstruction and a video of a medicine man relating a creation story, but the overlaid drum and flute seemed stagey and the Harley-Davidson cap – well, I dunno.
A few miles away up a dirt track and past the beer cans the red-rock ruins and re-ruins of an ancient pueblo called Kinishba repose silently on a mesa. A 1930s attempt at reconstruction, imaginative at best, is collapsing back into the ages, but the high walls and wreckage and isolation give one pause. Who will be meditating upon our ruined buildings a thousand years from now?
Winslow – there not much to see here except rail lines and blowing dust and small-town streets and that famous corner, which the city parents have nicely fitted out with a mural, a bronze statue of a hitchhiker, and a cherry-red 1950s Ford flatbed in primo condition. Yes, I had my picture taken, but it’s all a tribute to an event which never happened made as a song by musicians who perhaps have never even seen Winslow. No Little Green Men.
Kingman sells itself for maintaining more authentic Route 66 road than any other community, and does a good job of it. The usual souvenir stores obtain, and in the old town area the Power House visitors’ center and Route 66 Museum (and it really was an electrical generation plant) is a very nice stop. Across the road is a little part with a really big Santa Fe steam locomotive and folks selling some nice arts and crafts and some awful Chinese knives. You’ll see lots of beautifully maintained 1950s wheels.
Kingman is the home of Andy Devine, and if you are under sixty you probably wonder what new fusion band that is.
Oatman is a former mining town along the old Route 66 from Kingman to Needles, California. The drive from Kingman is eleven slow miles of I’wonder-if-I’m-going-to-fall-screaming-to-my-death-today terror; from Kingman to Needles isn’t bad at all.
The town was prosperous until 1942 when the federal government whimsically banned mining for gold, collapsing the local economy and impoverishing individuals, families, and companies. Oh, yeah, that helped the war effort. The very narrow main street, about four blocks long, is gauntletted with tourist shops and features the usual middle-aged-guys-shooting-blanks gunfight at noon, but the best part is that the descendants of the miners’ burros wander around town begging for handouts (bring carrots) and doing naughty things in the street.
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard honeymooned in the hotel. Gable often took some quiet-time in Oatman, probably the only place in the world where he didn’t have to be CLARK GABLE in all caps.
The thermometer outside the hotel stood at 120. After Oatman the laptop computer was never again able to send or receive email (maybe the Little Green Men…), but the burros didn’t seem to mind.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Folks’ vacation narratives are almost always boring, so the Gentle Reader may wish to skip this and go on to something more Snooki and Chelsea.
Roswell, New Mexico
Little Green Men – these aliens come from China. Whoever started the rumors about flying bread-and-butter plates was a marketing mad-man genius, and Roswell’s main runway is a merry we-have-come-in-peace-gauntlet of shops selling toys space ships and tees featuring LGM, and storefront, oh, museums advertising The Truth about UFOs. It’s all good fun. But why are there never any Little Green Women?
Lincoln, New Mexico
All of the little town of Lincoln is a historic site and features many buildings, including Tunstall’s Store, Murphy’s Store (which was also a courthouse, jail, and Masonic Lodge), and San Juan Bautista Church. A ten-dollar ticket gets you into the public buildings and sites, but of course walking around a looking is free. The one-day ticket is also good for other New Mexico State Monuments at Jemez, Coronado, Bosque Redondo, Fort Sumner, Fort Selden, and the El Camino Real International Heritage Center.
The current governor of New Mexico, angling for re-election, is considering pardoning that lethal little freak Billy the Kid because long-ago territorial governor Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur, had agreed to give the Kid a pardon for ratting out his homies. However, B the K continued to murder people and steal their stuff, so any pardon would have been irrelevant since the nasty little dude well deserved The Long Drop for his post-state’s-evidence murders.
As for Tunstall, Murphy, and McSween, they were turf warriors toting fire arms instead of cell ‘phones, and hiring hit-men to murder each other. The Lincoln County War was a gang squabble over government contracts and monopolies, and all the participants were killed or died broke and broken. The one fellow who came out of it looking pretty good was Sheriff Pat Garrett, a stand-up man who put an end to a pathological weirdo. History has been unfair to him.
Magdalena, New Mexico
Magdalena was a large mining and cowtown on the Santa Fe, which long ago pulled up tracks and trucked out of town. The old depot remains as a little museum and library. My father was in the CCC in nearby Horse Springs, which no longer exists as even a name on the map. Also nearby is the VLA – Very Large Array – of very large parabolic receivers trying to receive messages from Captain Kirk or from Little Green Men.
Springerville, Arizona – the morning temperature was 64 degrees.
Fort Apache is a curious place, situated in the middle of the White Mountain community. The first Apache I saw was hitchhiking absent-mindedly while talking on his cell ‘phone and listening to his ear-bud-box-noise-thingie. He wore knee pants and a ball cap.
The Army left Fort Apache in 1922, and the fort is now home to the Theodore Roosevelt School in some handsome buildings. Some of the military buildings, especially the officers’ quarters, are still in use, and there is a nice little visitors’ center / museum headed by a University of Texas graduate. Inside there is the now almost-requisite faux First Nations dwelling reconstruction and a video of a medicine man relating a creation story, but the overlaid drum and flute seemed stagey and the Harley-Davidson cap – well, I dunno.
A few miles away up a dirt track and past the beer cans the red-rock ruins and re-ruins of an ancient pueblo called Kinishba repose silently on a mesa. A 1930s attempt at reconstruction, imaginative at best, is collapsing back into the ages, but the high walls and wreckage and isolation give one pause. Who will be meditating upon our ruined buildings a thousand years from now?
Winslow – there not much to see here except rail lines and blowing dust and small-town streets and that famous corner, which the city parents have nicely fitted out with a mural, a bronze statue of a hitchhiker, and a cherry-red 1950s Ford flatbed in primo condition. Yes, I had my picture taken, but it’s all a tribute to an event which never happened made as a song by musicians who perhaps have never even seen Winslow. No Little Green Men.
Kingman sells itself for maintaining more authentic Route 66 road than any other community, and does a good job of it. The usual souvenir stores obtain, and in the old town area the Power House visitors’ center and Route 66 Museum (and it really was an electrical generation plant) is a very nice stop. Across the road is a little part with a really big Santa Fe steam locomotive and folks selling some nice arts and crafts and some awful Chinese knives. You’ll see lots of beautifully maintained 1950s wheels.
Kingman is the home of Andy Devine, and if you are under sixty you probably wonder what new fusion band that is.
Oatman is a former mining town along the old Route 66 from Kingman to Needles, California. The drive from Kingman is eleven slow miles of I’wonder-if-I’m-going-to-fall-screaming-to-my-death-today terror; from Kingman to Needles isn’t bad at all.
The town was prosperous until 1942 when the federal government whimsically banned mining for gold, collapsing the local economy and impoverishing individuals, families, and companies. Oh, yeah, that helped the war effort. The very narrow main street, about four blocks long, is gauntletted with tourist shops and features the usual middle-aged-guys-shooting-blanks gunfight at noon, but the best part is that the descendants of the miners’ burros wander around town begging for handouts (bring carrots) and doing naughty things in the street.
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard honeymooned in the hotel. Gable often took some quiet-time in Oatman, probably the only place in the world where he didn’t have to be CLARK GABLE in all caps.
The thermometer outside the hotel stood at 120. After Oatman the laptop computer was never again able to send or receive email (maybe the Little Green Men…), but the burros didn’t seem to mind.
-30-
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Beach Tarball Bingo
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Beach Tarball Bingo
The real question is why tarballs are called tarballs, since they are neither tar nor balls, and can’t be used for roofing or for games.
Last week I spent a few days at Crystal Beach considering such matters, but not deeply.
Frankie and Annette’s movie beach was always perfect – impossibly clean sand and impossibly clean teens in an impossibly clean early 1960s vision of youth. Perhaps the closest in real life is China Beach near DaNang, but whether the young in Viet-Nam are permitted to be young is much in doubt. If the goose-stepping comrades would give over persecuting Christians and Montagnards and each other they could all score some major tourist euros, yen, pounds, and dollars by developing the beaches of Viet-Nam.
In truth, no beach is a cinema image, no more than Bambi is a documentary about the ecosystem of a forest. Any beach is where the relatively few bits of land encounter the dominant oceans on this water planet, and that means conflict: tides, storms, bacteria, mosquitoes, debris, and predatory wildlife.
Consider the pelican, often cartooned as a comic figure with a bulbous beak. In reality the pelican is a somewhat sinister, pre-historic-looking creature that joins with its comrades to fly in attack formation not unlike those old films of Stuka dive bombers. The pelican’s long beak is designed for strength and violence in wild dives into the water to kill and devour.
And then there was the shark, which turned out to be some old, pre-Ike carpeting rolling in the surf.
Crystal Beach was never crystal, but last week some extra oil showed up, mostly attached to dead vegetation and to walkers’ feet. Local television news featured discussions on whether the oil was BP (nee’ British Petroleum, nee’ Anglo-Iranian) or just some ordinary old oil unworthy of notice. The seabirds appeared to continue to fly and fish, and the waves broke as usual between a rusted propane tank and a concrete septic tank, bringing in their usual nightly quota of driftwood and foam cups.
The beach is more than sand and water and critters. It attracts not only vacationers but residents, some of them more colorful than Frankie and Annette. I encountered a fellow who had braided his long white beard into a long white rope. Just why he had done this is subject to speculation. Perhaps he had finished his library book, or possibly his cable was off, and he needed something to occupy his leisure hours. Or maybe he just wanted some attention, so here it is.
The signs at Crystal Beach are mostly hand-lettered, which adds to the charm, and point the ways to little shops and grocery stores and marinas and restaurants (no shoes, no problem) and surfboard rentals. In law motor vehicles aren’t permitted on the beach; in practice one rattles by occasionally, usually slowly and usually carrying rental toys or maintenance equipment. Folks saunter along the beach looking for shells, and in the evenings build driftwood campfires and swat ‘skeeters. Life is summer-slow at Crystal Beach, and the breeze is warm and salty, and the waves are the same ones that First Nations people fished and played in centuries ago in their food-gathering wanderings. Yes, sometimes the best restorative for the jarred nerves of modern life is sand between one’s toes, and a few hours of not-thinking.
The nights are made even more slumberous by the soothing, sibilant sounds of the sea, which can be heard and felt comfortingly through the air-conditioned (I will give up my air-conditioning when Al Gore’s minions pry my hot, dead fingers off the thermostat) walls of a lovely rental house atop its sturdy piers.
Crystal Beach is a little world on the edge of the planetary sea, a world I visit only occasionally but which is very important to me. I am glad that people live there, people who don’t shave or put on makeup every day and who almost never wear shoes and who give their boats funny names. I hope that they are never regulated out of existence and that their (and our) peninsula is never made very prosperous, for then it wouldn’t be ours anymore. The world needs plywood hotdog stands, bare feet, soda shops made out of abandoned trailers, accessible beaches, the smells of salt air and mosquito repellent, and sand and cheesy snapshots and happy memories of happy hours by the Gulf of Mexico.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Beach Tarball Bingo
The real question is why tarballs are called tarballs, since they are neither tar nor balls, and can’t be used for roofing or for games.
Last week I spent a few days at Crystal Beach considering such matters, but not deeply.
Frankie and Annette’s movie beach was always perfect – impossibly clean sand and impossibly clean teens in an impossibly clean early 1960s vision of youth. Perhaps the closest in real life is China Beach near DaNang, but whether the young in Viet-Nam are permitted to be young is much in doubt. If the goose-stepping comrades would give over persecuting Christians and Montagnards and each other they could all score some major tourist euros, yen, pounds, and dollars by developing the beaches of Viet-Nam.
In truth, no beach is a cinema image, no more than Bambi is a documentary about the ecosystem of a forest. Any beach is where the relatively few bits of land encounter the dominant oceans on this water planet, and that means conflict: tides, storms, bacteria, mosquitoes, debris, and predatory wildlife.
Consider the pelican, often cartooned as a comic figure with a bulbous beak. In reality the pelican is a somewhat sinister, pre-historic-looking creature that joins with its comrades to fly in attack formation not unlike those old films of Stuka dive bombers. The pelican’s long beak is designed for strength and violence in wild dives into the water to kill and devour.
And then there was the shark, which turned out to be some old, pre-Ike carpeting rolling in the surf.
Crystal Beach was never crystal, but last week some extra oil showed up, mostly attached to dead vegetation and to walkers’ feet. Local television news featured discussions on whether the oil was BP (nee’ British Petroleum, nee’ Anglo-Iranian) or just some ordinary old oil unworthy of notice. The seabirds appeared to continue to fly and fish, and the waves broke as usual between a rusted propane tank and a concrete septic tank, bringing in their usual nightly quota of driftwood and foam cups.
The beach is more than sand and water and critters. It attracts not only vacationers but residents, some of them more colorful than Frankie and Annette. I encountered a fellow who had braided his long white beard into a long white rope. Just why he had done this is subject to speculation. Perhaps he had finished his library book, or possibly his cable was off, and he needed something to occupy his leisure hours. Or maybe he just wanted some attention, so here it is.
The signs at Crystal Beach are mostly hand-lettered, which adds to the charm, and point the ways to little shops and grocery stores and marinas and restaurants (no shoes, no problem) and surfboard rentals. In law motor vehicles aren’t permitted on the beach; in practice one rattles by occasionally, usually slowly and usually carrying rental toys or maintenance equipment. Folks saunter along the beach looking for shells, and in the evenings build driftwood campfires and swat ‘skeeters. Life is summer-slow at Crystal Beach, and the breeze is warm and salty, and the waves are the same ones that First Nations people fished and played in centuries ago in their food-gathering wanderings. Yes, sometimes the best restorative for the jarred nerves of modern life is sand between one’s toes, and a few hours of not-thinking.
The nights are made even more slumberous by the soothing, sibilant sounds of the sea, which can be heard and felt comfortingly through the air-conditioned (I will give up my air-conditioning when Al Gore’s minions pry my hot, dead fingers off the thermostat) walls of a lovely rental house atop its sturdy piers.
Crystal Beach is a little world on the edge of the planetary sea, a world I visit only occasionally but which is very important to me. I am glad that people live there, people who don’t shave or put on makeup every day and who almost never wear shoes and who give their boats funny names. I hope that they are never regulated out of existence and that their (and our) peninsula is never made very prosperous, for then it wouldn’t be ours anymore. The world needs plywood hotdog stands, bare feet, soda shops made out of abandoned trailers, accessible beaches, the smells of salt air and mosquito repellent, and sand and cheesy snapshots and happy memories of happy hours by the Gulf of Mexico.
-30-
Monday, July 5, 2010
Jihad Joe Inspires the Troops
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Jihad Joe Inspires the Troops
On Independence Day Vice-President Joe Biden, America’s ambassador of good will, made a surprise visit to our Frankenstein’s monster, Iraq. While giving a speech about how well the war is going or something, some of the lads outside The Green Zone dropped a mortar round into Fort Maginot to remind the white-wine-and-cheese set that Abdul and Achmed are a little miffed about not being invited to the party.
A spokesman said that this was an isolated incident, no one was hurt, and no damage was done. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along, no cameras, please, and just ignore those dead bodies on the croquet lawns and that little man behind the curtain.
Jihad Joe can now join John Fitzgerald Kerry and Hillary Clinton in the pantheon of great American war heroes. He’ll probably get a medal for cussing small business owners while under fire. In the meantime, the E-4 on patrol protecting Fort Maginot will consider himself lucky if he gets a hot shower sometime this week.
Jihad Joe was earning his combat honors in the new American embassy, a modest endeavor said to cost some $700,000,000 dollars. At that price it ought to have restrooms, unlike the proposed Amtrak railroad stop in Beaumont, Texas.
$700 million dollars. For an embassy. In Iraq. Has anyone asked why?
Whatever business is being transacted in Bagdad could surely be accomplished on a couple of floors rented from the Hilton or the Holiday Inn or something. Heck, General Eisenhower led the allied forces in Europe while living in a travel trailer. Does an ambassador need anything better?
When Saddamn took the long walk from a short rope there was much mockery about all his palaces, about how large and pretentious they were, and how much they cost the poor Iraqi people. And yet the ambassadors from our modest republic founded on the rocky shores of New England by sturdy Puritans now seem to expect to live as high on the camel as any supremeissimo generalissimo grandissimo beloved of Allah.
I don’t suppose there are any oil slicks in His Highness the Ambassador’s swimming pool.
Books in the ambassador’s library should include Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and Hell in a Small Place, Brian Farrell’s Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940-1942, Charles Morris’ Massacre of an Army, Michael Asher’s Khartoum, Tacitus’ Annals, Tim Saunders’ Fort Eban Emael 1940, and perhaps just one useful line from Kipling: “Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.”
$700 million for an embassy. I guess that means that the wounded and the shell-shocked are getting some really good treatment, then, eh?
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Jihad Joe Inspires the Troops
On Independence Day Vice-President Joe Biden, America’s ambassador of good will, made a surprise visit to our Frankenstein’s monster, Iraq. While giving a speech about how well the war is going or something, some of the lads outside The Green Zone dropped a mortar round into Fort Maginot to remind the white-wine-and-cheese set that Abdul and Achmed are a little miffed about not being invited to the party.
A spokesman said that this was an isolated incident, no one was hurt, and no damage was done. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along, no cameras, please, and just ignore those dead bodies on the croquet lawns and that little man behind the curtain.
Jihad Joe can now join John Fitzgerald Kerry and Hillary Clinton in the pantheon of great American war heroes. He’ll probably get a medal for cussing small business owners while under fire. In the meantime, the E-4 on patrol protecting Fort Maginot will consider himself lucky if he gets a hot shower sometime this week.
Jihad Joe was earning his combat honors in the new American embassy, a modest endeavor said to cost some $700,000,000 dollars. At that price it ought to have restrooms, unlike the proposed Amtrak railroad stop in Beaumont, Texas.
$700 million dollars. For an embassy. In Iraq. Has anyone asked why?
Whatever business is being transacted in Bagdad could surely be accomplished on a couple of floors rented from the Hilton or the Holiday Inn or something. Heck, General Eisenhower led the allied forces in Europe while living in a travel trailer. Does an ambassador need anything better?
When Saddamn took the long walk from a short rope there was much mockery about all his palaces, about how large and pretentious they were, and how much they cost the poor Iraqi people. And yet the ambassadors from our modest republic founded on the rocky shores of New England by sturdy Puritans now seem to expect to live as high on the camel as any supremeissimo generalissimo grandissimo beloved of Allah.
I don’t suppose there are any oil slicks in His Highness the Ambassador’s swimming pool.
Books in the ambassador’s library should include Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and Hell in a Small Place, Brian Farrell’s Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940-1942, Charles Morris’ Massacre of an Army, Michael Asher’s Khartoum, Tacitus’ Annals, Tim Saunders’ Fort Eban Emael 1940, and perhaps just one useful line from Kipling: “Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East.”
$700 million for an embassy. I guess that means that the wounded and the shell-shocked are getting some really good treatment, then, eh?
-30-
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Pre-Broken Icon
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Broken Before You Buy It
Many American retailers, ever on the trailing edge of progress, have eliminated the need for you to use up or wear out products you buy; the products are now often broken even before you buy them. Instant landfill!
For the benefit of the fashionable, the iconic author of this iconic piece will now re-cast the iconic first paragraph in the iconic contemporary iconic idiom: Many iconic American retailers, ever on the iconic trailing edge of iconic progress, have eliminated the iconic need for iconic you to use up or wear out iconic products you buy; the iconic products are now often broken even before you buy iconic them.
Gentle Reader, you may now employ your own icons.
Two reliable signs of ageing are maintaining hummingbird feeders and bellyaching about how things used to be built better. A friend and I (we both feed hummingbirds) were marveling the other day about how we had each bought an item in the previous week that actually worked, and how functionality had become so rare that it was a topic of conversation.
You see, children, once upon a time long, long ago, back in th’ day, when you bought something – coffee maker, pencil, pocketknife, alarm clock – the item actually worked. You didn’t bother to save receipts because the concept of implied merchantability.
If you bought a coffee pot, the thing made coffee. For years and years.
Pencils from upstate New York – the cedar smelled great when you sharpened them, and they made a nice, clean line.
You sharpened your pencil with your good ol’ American pocket knife, and no one gasped in horror or called in the S.W.A.T. team. If you wanted something fancy in the way of cutlery you bought a knife made in England or Germany, but that was really just for showing off. A lot of us carry American-made pocket knives that belonged to our grandfathers. Those knives do not feature Chinese pictures of Chinese John Wayne or Chinese American eagles; real tools don’t need ornamentation. They simply work.
The nice people in Alabama who assembled inexpensive wind-up alarm clocks out of metal and glass had this archaic concept that an alarm clock should tell time and that if you set it to ring at 0600 it would actually ring – usually somewhere between 0545 and 0615, but then, you were buying plain-vanilla American functionality at a reasonable price and not German craftsmanship at a German price.
But now, over breakfast early this century, it was something of a rare treat to praise a Famous Name Brand product that, although made in China, actually worked.
The joy was transitory.
After visiting with my friend I drove over to Famous Name Iconic pet store to buy a box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats. When I got home and opened the box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats I was suddenly enveloped in a cloud of small, moth-like critters. Now I don’t know about your pups, but mine aren’t much for moths; they’re picky like that. I immediately took the cloud of airborne critters and their box outside.
I telephoned the 1-800-Your-Call-Is-Important-To-Us number and May answered. Now on some other occasion I would be happy to assist May (for some reason I don’t think that’s really her name) improve her rudimentary English-language skills, but my mission was doggie treats. Sometimes it’s all about the doggie treats. So I rang off and emailed to Famous Name Iconic pet store a polite letter in block format stating that I would be returning the box of moths next week in exchange for a box of doggie treats, and that I would like to open the next box in the store to verify that there are no extraneous life forms in residence.
And you know how this will work out -- if you want to play Godzilla and cause people to flee in terror, just go to a store and look like you might need some assistance.
While I was on the ‘net I looked up the name of the company with reference to complaints, and there were lots of ‘em. I don’t know how reliable any of the complaints were. One lady complained bitterly because she had bought a pet rat from Famous Iconic Name pet store and she had run up thousands of dollars of veterinarian bills for her sick rat. Where to begin, where to begin.
Maybe it’s because she had to pay for her rat; my moth-thingies came for free.
Maybe they’re iconic moths.
Say, what do you get if you cross your rat with a moth?
Mickey Moth!
Sorry. I’ll go quietly and iconically now.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Broken Before You Buy It
Many American retailers, ever on the trailing edge of progress, have eliminated the need for you to use up or wear out products you buy; the products are now often broken even before you buy them. Instant landfill!
For the benefit of the fashionable, the iconic author of this iconic piece will now re-cast the iconic first paragraph in the iconic contemporary iconic idiom: Many iconic American retailers, ever on the iconic trailing edge of iconic progress, have eliminated the iconic need for iconic you to use up or wear out iconic products you buy; the iconic products are now often broken even before you buy iconic them.
Gentle Reader, you may now employ your own icons.
Two reliable signs of ageing are maintaining hummingbird feeders and bellyaching about how things used to be built better. A friend and I (we both feed hummingbirds) were marveling the other day about how we had each bought an item in the previous week that actually worked, and how functionality had become so rare that it was a topic of conversation.
You see, children, once upon a time long, long ago, back in th’ day, when you bought something – coffee maker, pencil, pocketknife, alarm clock – the item actually worked. You didn’t bother to save receipts because the concept of implied merchantability.
If you bought a coffee pot, the thing made coffee. For years and years.
Pencils from upstate New York – the cedar smelled great when you sharpened them, and they made a nice, clean line.
You sharpened your pencil with your good ol’ American pocket knife, and no one gasped in horror or called in the S.W.A.T. team. If you wanted something fancy in the way of cutlery you bought a knife made in England or Germany, but that was really just for showing off. A lot of us carry American-made pocket knives that belonged to our grandfathers. Those knives do not feature Chinese pictures of Chinese John Wayne or Chinese American eagles; real tools don’t need ornamentation. They simply work.
The nice people in Alabama who assembled inexpensive wind-up alarm clocks out of metal and glass had this archaic concept that an alarm clock should tell time and that if you set it to ring at 0600 it would actually ring – usually somewhere between 0545 and 0615, but then, you were buying plain-vanilla American functionality at a reasonable price and not German craftsmanship at a German price.
But now, over breakfast early this century, it was something of a rare treat to praise a Famous Name Brand product that, although made in China, actually worked.
The joy was transitory.
After visiting with my friend I drove over to Famous Name Iconic pet store to buy a box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats. When I got home and opened the box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats I was suddenly enveloped in a cloud of small, moth-like critters. Now I don’t know about your pups, but mine aren’t much for moths; they’re picky like that. I immediately took the cloud of airborne critters and their box outside.
I telephoned the 1-800-Your-Call-Is-Important-To-Us number and May answered. Now on some other occasion I would be happy to assist May (for some reason I don’t think that’s really her name) improve her rudimentary English-language skills, but my mission was doggie treats. Sometimes it’s all about the doggie treats. So I rang off and emailed to Famous Name Iconic pet store a polite letter in block format stating that I would be returning the box of moths next week in exchange for a box of doggie treats, and that I would like to open the next box in the store to verify that there are no extraneous life forms in residence.
And you know how this will work out -- if you want to play Godzilla and cause people to flee in terror, just go to a store and look like you might need some assistance.
While I was on the ‘net I looked up the name of the company with reference to complaints, and there were lots of ‘em. I don’t know how reliable any of the complaints were. One lady complained bitterly because she had bought a pet rat from Famous Iconic Name pet store and she had run up thousands of dollars of veterinarian bills for her sick rat. Where to begin, where to begin.
Maybe it’s because she had to pay for her rat; my moth-thingies came for free.
Maybe they’re iconic moths.
Say, what do you get if you cross your rat with a moth?
Mickey Moth!
Sorry. I’ll go quietly and iconically now.
-30-
Pre-Broken Icon
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Broken Before You Buy It
Many American retailers, ever on the trailing edge of progress, have eliminated the need for you to use up or wear out products you buy; the products are now often broken even before you buy them. Instant landfill!
For the benefit of the fashionable, the iconic author of this iconic piece will now re-cast the iconic first paragraph in the iconic contemporary iconic idiom: Many iconic American retailers, ever on the iconic trailing edge of iconic progress, have eliminated the iconic need for iconic you to use up or wear out iconic products you buy; the iconic products are now often broken even before you buy iconic them.
Gentle Reader, you may now employ your own icons.
Two reliable signs of ageing are maintaining hummingbird feeders and bellyaching about how things used to be built better. A friend and I (we both feed hummingbirds) were marveling the other day about how we had each bought an item in the previous week that actually worked, and how functionality had become so rare that it was a topic of conversation.
You see, children, once upon a time long, long ago, back in th’ day, when you bought something – coffee maker, pencil, pocketknife, alarm clock – the item actually worked. You didn’t bother to save receipts because the concept of implied merchantability.
If you bought a coffee pot, the thing made coffee. For years and years.
Pencils from upstate New York – the cedar smelled great when you sharpened them, and they made a nice, clean line.
You sharpened your pencil with your good ol’ American pocket knife, and no one gasped in horror or called in the S.W.A.T. team. If you wanted something fancy in the way of cutlery you bought a knife made in England or Germany, but that was really just for showing off. A lot of us carry American-made pocket knives that belonged to our grandfathers. Those knives do not feature Chinese pictures of Chinese John Wayne or Chinese American eagles; real tools don’t need ornamentation. They simply work.
The nice people in Alabama who assembled inexpensive wind-up alarm clocks out of metal and glass had this archaic concept that an alarm clock should tell time and that if you set it to ring at 0600 it would actually ring – usually somewhere between 0545 and 0615, but then, you were buying plain-vanilla American functionality at a reasonable price and not German craftsmanship at a German price.
But now, over breakfast early this century, it was something of a rare treat to praise a Famous Name Brand product that, although made in China, actually worked.
The joy was transitory.
After visiting with my friend I drove over to Famous Name Iconic pet store to buy a box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats. When I got home and opened the box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats I was suddenly enveloped in a cloud of small, moth-like critters. Now I don’t know about your pups, but mine aren’t much for moths; they’re picky like that. I immediately took the cloud of airborne critters and their box outside.
I telephoned the 1-800-Your-Call-Is-Important-To-Us number and May answered. Now on some other occasion I would be happy to assist May (for some reason I don’t think that’s really her name) improve her rudimentary English-language skills, but my mission was doggie treats. Sometimes it’s all about the doggie treats. So I rang off and emailed to Famous Name Iconic pet store a polite letter in block format stating that I would be returning the box of moths next week in exchange for a box of doggie treats, and that I would like to open the next box in the store to verify that there are no extraneous life forms in residence.
And you know how this will work out -- if you want to play Godzilla and cause people to flee in terror, just go to a store and look like you might need some assistance.
While I was on the ‘net I looked up the name of the company with reference to complaints, and there were lots of ‘em. I don’t know how reliable any of the complaints were. One lady complained bitterly because she had bought a pet rat from Famous Iconic Name pet store and she had run up thousands of dollars of veterinarian bills for her sick rat. Where to begin, where to begin.
Maybe it’s because she had to pay for her rat; my moth-thingies came for free.
Maybe they’re iconic moths.
Say, what do you get if you cross your rat with a moth?
Mickey Moth!
Sorry. I’ll go quietly and iconically now.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Broken Before You Buy It
Many American retailers, ever on the trailing edge of progress, have eliminated the need for you to use up or wear out products you buy; the products are now often broken even before you buy them. Instant landfill!
For the benefit of the fashionable, the iconic author of this iconic piece will now re-cast the iconic first paragraph in the iconic contemporary iconic idiom: Many iconic American retailers, ever on the iconic trailing edge of iconic progress, have eliminated the iconic need for iconic you to use up or wear out iconic products you buy; the iconic products are now often broken even before you buy iconic them.
Gentle Reader, you may now employ your own icons.
Two reliable signs of ageing are maintaining hummingbird feeders and bellyaching about how things used to be built better. A friend and I (we both feed hummingbirds) were marveling the other day about how we had each bought an item in the previous week that actually worked, and how functionality had become so rare that it was a topic of conversation.
You see, children, once upon a time long, long ago, back in th’ day, when you bought something – coffee maker, pencil, pocketknife, alarm clock – the item actually worked. You didn’t bother to save receipts because the concept of implied merchantability.
If you bought a coffee pot, the thing made coffee. For years and years.
Pencils from upstate New York – the cedar smelled great when you sharpened them, and they made a nice, clean line.
You sharpened your pencil with your good ol’ American pocket knife, and no one gasped in horror or called in the S.W.A.T. team. If you wanted something fancy in the way of cutlery you bought a knife made in England or Germany, but that was really just for showing off. A lot of us carry American-made pocket knives that belonged to our grandfathers. Those knives do not feature Chinese pictures of Chinese John Wayne or Chinese American eagles; real tools don’t need ornamentation. They simply work.
The nice people in Alabama who assembled inexpensive wind-up alarm clocks out of metal and glass had this archaic concept that an alarm clock should tell time and that if you set it to ring at 0600 it would actually ring – usually somewhere between 0545 and 0615, but then, you were buying plain-vanilla American functionality at a reasonable price and not German craftsmanship at a German price.
But now, over breakfast early this century, it was something of a rare treat to praise a Famous Name Brand product that, although made in China, actually worked.
The joy was transitory.
After visiting with my friend I drove over to Famous Name Iconic pet store to buy a box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats. When I got home and opened the box of Famous Name Iconic doggie treats I was suddenly enveloped in a cloud of small, moth-like critters. Now I don’t know about your pups, but mine aren’t much for moths; they’re picky like that. I immediately took the cloud of airborne critters and their box outside.
I telephoned the 1-800-Your-Call-Is-Important-To-Us number and May answered. Now on some other occasion I would be happy to assist May (for some reason I don’t think that’s really her name) improve her rudimentary English-language skills, but my mission was doggie treats. Sometimes it’s all about the doggie treats. So I rang off and emailed to Famous Name Iconic pet store a polite letter in block format stating that I would be returning the box of moths next week in exchange for a box of doggie treats, and that I would like to open the next box in the store to verify that there are no extraneous life forms in residence.
And you know how this will work out -- if you want to play Godzilla and cause people to flee in terror, just go to a store and look like you might need some assistance.
While I was on the ‘net I looked up the name of the company with reference to complaints, and there were lots of ‘em. I don’t know how reliable any of the complaints were. One lady complained bitterly because she had bought a pet rat from Famous Iconic Name pet store and she had run up thousands of dollars of veterinarian bills for her sick rat. Where to begin, where to begin.
Maybe it’s because she had to pay for her rat; my moth-thingies came for free.
Maybe they’re iconic moths.
Say, what do you get if you cross your rat with a moth?
Mickey Moth!
Sorry. I’ll go quietly and iconically now.
-30-
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Flying Topless
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Flying Topless
Are you thinking of leaving your body to science? Well, use your head before making that decision.
As of last week, some “40 to 60 whole and partial heads” (Associated Press) were being held by the Pulaski County coroner after they were denied boarding at Little Rock by Southwest Airlines. Man, don’t you just wonder what conversation was like at the gate!
Maybe there was a problem with the head count. And with 40-60 of them, there was certainly no chance of an employee dead-heading home on that flight.
The heads were not packaged or labeled properly, and a lot of loose and unidentified human heads on an airplane is a situation with which few travelers would be comfortable. It just sort of breaks up the holiday mood.
Let this be a lesson to all of us: when shipping body parts, give the airline a heads-up.
The heads were being shipped by an organization styling itself JLS Consulting LLC of Conway, Arkansas. And one can understand the name. If a fellow is trying to pick up a cute girl – maybe a Southwest Airlines employee – at a bar, “I’m a consultant” is so much more alpha-male than “I’m a guy who cuts heads off corpses with a hacksaw.”
The police became nosy in this matter of boxes of human heads (police are like that), and asked a few questions. JLS Consulting said that the heads were headed to Fort Worth for physicians to use in continuing education. Education. And you had trouble getting your head into algebra. Talk about a skull session!
And as St. Thomas More might have said, “Why, Richard, what does it profit a man to give his soul for the whole world. But for Fort Worth!”
Still, the authorities remain unclear on several issues, such as where the heads came from. Lots of folks happily donate blood; donating one’s head is somewhat more of a commitment and usually not voluntary. And so the heads wait, chillin’ in the Pulaski County morgue, hoping for the message to “Head ‘em up! Move ‘em out!”
All fooling aside, leaving one’s body to science or donating organs for one’s fellow humans is a wonderful gift of life. How good it would be, upon passing, to know that someone still alive would benefit from one’s eyes or heart, or that physicians would learn something new for the betterment of mankind.
But one’s head rattling around in a box in the belly of an airplane – would that help anyone?
Old Bill was clear about our human need to respect the departed, which means a Christian funeral, not a cardboard box and a shipping error:
Do we all holy rites.
Let there be sung “Non nobis” and “Te Deum,”
The dead with charity enclosed in clay…
- Henry V, IV.viii.117-119
Mhall46184@aol.com
Flying Topless
Are you thinking of leaving your body to science? Well, use your head before making that decision.
As of last week, some “40 to 60 whole and partial heads” (Associated Press) were being held by the Pulaski County coroner after they were denied boarding at Little Rock by Southwest Airlines. Man, don’t you just wonder what conversation was like at the gate!
Maybe there was a problem with the head count. And with 40-60 of them, there was certainly no chance of an employee dead-heading home on that flight.
The heads were not packaged or labeled properly, and a lot of loose and unidentified human heads on an airplane is a situation with which few travelers would be comfortable. It just sort of breaks up the holiday mood.
Let this be a lesson to all of us: when shipping body parts, give the airline a heads-up.
The heads were being shipped by an organization styling itself JLS Consulting LLC of Conway, Arkansas. And one can understand the name. If a fellow is trying to pick up a cute girl – maybe a Southwest Airlines employee – at a bar, “I’m a consultant” is so much more alpha-male than “I’m a guy who cuts heads off corpses with a hacksaw.”
The police became nosy in this matter of boxes of human heads (police are like that), and asked a few questions. JLS Consulting said that the heads were headed to Fort Worth for physicians to use in continuing education. Education. And you had trouble getting your head into algebra. Talk about a skull session!
And as St. Thomas More might have said, “Why, Richard, what does it profit a man to give his soul for the whole world. But for Fort Worth!”
Still, the authorities remain unclear on several issues, such as where the heads came from. Lots of folks happily donate blood; donating one’s head is somewhat more of a commitment and usually not voluntary. And so the heads wait, chillin’ in the Pulaski County morgue, hoping for the message to “Head ‘em up! Move ‘em out!”
All fooling aside, leaving one’s body to science or donating organs for one’s fellow humans is a wonderful gift of life. How good it would be, upon passing, to know that someone still alive would benefit from one’s eyes or heart, or that physicians would learn something new for the betterment of mankind.
But one’s head rattling around in a box in the belly of an airplane – would that help anyone?
Old Bill was clear about our human need to respect the departed, which means a Christian funeral, not a cardboard box and a shipping error:
Do we all holy rites.
Let there be sung “Non nobis” and “Te Deum,”
The dead with charity enclosed in clay…
- Henry V, IV.viii.117-119
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Don't Cry for Me, Vuvuzela
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Don’t Cry for Me, Vuvuzela
Vuvuzela is not a South American country, nor is it an obscure anatomical term; it is a long plastic horn first associated with South African football (we unsophisticated Americans call the game soccer).
Footballers don’t play the vuvuzela in a match because it’s not actually part of the game, and, indeed, in a crush a player could risk getting one shoved up his vuvuzela. The noisemaker, a meter long (we God-fearing folks would say that it’s somewhat over a yard; real Christians don’t do metric), is employed by the fans in order to make, well, noise. Purists say that this could ruin the traditional restrained, gentlemanly demeanor that has always obtained in the stands during soccer matches.
The vuvuzela is said to make a monotone racket, a sort of buzzing sound, and so when thousands of these are blown at the same time the effect is like a stadium assaulted by an apocalyptic horde of lust-crazed uberwasps from outer space, and if that’s not a reason for going to a footie match then what is? The vuvuzela is also said to ruin hearing, so perhaps it is a C.I.A. plot to sell millions of those $14.95 bionic hearing aids as advertised by the Six Million Geritol Man.
The classic South African vuvuzela strategy is to maintain a reasonable lung effort throughout the match but to save some energy for the last part of the game and then make a sustained and concerted racket to kill the spirits of the opposition. If both teams blow vuvuzelas, a match could end up like the finale of Hamlet with all those dead bodies littering the stage.
The vuvuzela must be really cool, because it’s used in soccer matches, and nothing says cool like a few thousand drunk Englishmen throwing up in the bleachers.
Some South African patriots claim that the vuvzela is an ancient African tradition. No doubt these made-in-China plastic horns were buried as priceless grave goods in the tombs of long-ago kings, or were traded north so that Moses and Pharaoh could marvel at the Chinese craftsmanship available from merchants beyond the Nile.
The two or three Americans actually interested in soccer / footer will no doubt transplant the idea here, and this fall we can expect Ye Olde American Cowbell and the traditional Tres Elegante’ Airhorn to be augmented at our real football games by the ancient Chinese-made African Vuvuzela, which can be ordered online.
Before ordering, one might want to consider that the thrifty Chinese make their novelty products, including the vuvuzela, from all sorts of recycled plastic and latex goods, including pre-owned condom(inium)s. As your mother always told you, don’t put some things in your mouth; you don’t know where they’ve been.
The vuvuzela gives fatuous failing footers fresh facesavings for fiascos. When France tied Uruguay last week, the French captain blamed the poor performance of his team on the racket of the vuvuzelas. Yeah, that’s what happened at Buena Vista and Camerone; the Mexicans charged across the blasted landscape with massed vuvuzelas, chasing the French away.
One hopes the vuvuzela doesn’t catch on here. Called me an old-fashioned flag-waver, but there’s nothing that captures the healthy, competitive spirit of American athletics like cheeseheads, Viking helmets, cowbells, platters of toxic nachos, giant foam fingers, air horns, and giant illuminated signs that suck up more electricity than the Taco Bell in Branson, Missouri on a Saturday night.
The United States Border Patrol must be put on alert for gangs trying to smuggle undocumented vuvuzelas across the border, and British Petroleum needs to clean up all those vuvuzelas polluting the Gulf of Mexico.
Let us true Americans always keep this in our hearts: there were no vuvuzelas at Plymouth Rock.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Don’t Cry for Me, Vuvuzela
Vuvuzela is not a South American country, nor is it an obscure anatomical term; it is a long plastic horn first associated with South African football (we unsophisticated Americans call the game soccer).
Footballers don’t play the vuvuzela in a match because it’s not actually part of the game, and, indeed, in a crush a player could risk getting one shoved up his vuvuzela. The noisemaker, a meter long (we God-fearing folks would say that it’s somewhat over a yard; real Christians don’t do metric), is employed by the fans in order to make, well, noise. Purists say that this could ruin the traditional restrained, gentlemanly demeanor that has always obtained in the stands during soccer matches.
The vuvuzela is said to make a monotone racket, a sort of buzzing sound, and so when thousands of these are blown at the same time the effect is like a stadium assaulted by an apocalyptic horde of lust-crazed uberwasps from outer space, and if that’s not a reason for going to a footie match then what is? The vuvuzela is also said to ruin hearing, so perhaps it is a C.I.A. plot to sell millions of those $14.95 bionic hearing aids as advertised by the Six Million Geritol Man.
The classic South African vuvuzela strategy is to maintain a reasonable lung effort throughout the match but to save some energy for the last part of the game and then make a sustained and concerted racket to kill the spirits of the opposition. If both teams blow vuvuzelas, a match could end up like the finale of Hamlet with all those dead bodies littering the stage.
The vuvuzela must be really cool, because it’s used in soccer matches, and nothing says cool like a few thousand drunk Englishmen throwing up in the bleachers.
Some South African patriots claim that the vuvzela is an ancient African tradition. No doubt these made-in-China plastic horns were buried as priceless grave goods in the tombs of long-ago kings, or were traded north so that Moses and Pharaoh could marvel at the Chinese craftsmanship available from merchants beyond the Nile.
The two or three Americans actually interested in soccer / footer will no doubt transplant the idea here, and this fall we can expect Ye Olde American Cowbell and the traditional Tres Elegante’ Airhorn to be augmented at our real football games by the ancient Chinese-made African Vuvuzela, which can be ordered online.
Before ordering, one might want to consider that the thrifty Chinese make their novelty products, including the vuvuzela, from all sorts of recycled plastic and latex goods, including pre-owned condom(inium)s. As your mother always told you, don’t put some things in your mouth; you don’t know where they’ve been.
The vuvuzela gives fatuous failing footers fresh facesavings for fiascos. When France tied Uruguay last week, the French captain blamed the poor performance of his team on the racket of the vuvuzelas. Yeah, that’s what happened at Buena Vista and Camerone; the Mexicans charged across the blasted landscape with massed vuvuzelas, chasing the French away.
One hopes the vuvuzela doesn’t catch on here. Called me an old-fashioned flag-waver, but there’s nothing that captures the healthy, competitive spirit of American athletics like cheeseheads, Viking helmets, cowbells, platters of toxic nachos, giant foam fingers, air horns, and giant illuminated signs that suck up more electricity than the Taco Bell in Branson, Missouri on a Saturday night.
The United States Border Patrol must be put on alert for gangs trying to smuggle undocumented vuvuzelas across the border, and British Petroleum needs to clean up all those vuvuzelas polluting the Gulf of Mexico.
Let us true Americans always keep this in our hearts: there were no vuvuzelas at Plymouth Rock.
-30-
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Rush Limbaugh and Helen Thomas Got Married?
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Paintballs and the White House Press Corps
Because Israel is a tiny country that can be overflown by hostile aircraft in seconds, it has in its short history developed a citizen-soldier army that, despite its small size and its heavy dependence on reservists, is one of the most flexible, effective, and professional militaries in history.
The ever-changing basement governments in what some are pleased to call Palestine (a Roman designation) are careless with their own citizens’ lives but have lots of money to spend in firing thousands of rockets onto Israel.
Just as President Lincoln did to the Confederacy, President Roosevelt to the Axis, and President Kennedy to Cuba, the Israelis have set an ongoing blockade of hostile areas. Their reasoning is that if the neighbors are shooting at you all the time, you do the best you can to see that they can’t easily get more bullets.
So when some peace (cough) activists, no doubt wearing Che Guevera tees, sent several ships to break the blockade, Israel announced that the ships would be boarded and searched, and that non-military goods would be sent on to Gaza.
Alas, some genius decided that, in order to avoid offending anyone, the Israeli commandos would go into action with paintball guns. Oh, some wore pistols, but were all but forbidden to use them. In the event, the peace-loving peace activists, when they stopped laughing, peacefully beat the snot out of the Israeli paintball commandos with peaceful iron bars, even seizing some of the pistols. Finally, someone on the Israeli side made a decision that the lads could fight back, and nine deaths resulted. These deaths could possibly have been avoided if the commandos had been permitted to board fully armed and in a Gunny Ermey mode.
As Czech, Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch, English, and Norwegian diplomats of the last century could attest, trying to make peace with evil gets your country peacefully destroyed and your citizens peacefully killed or peacefully enslaved.
Paintball guns don’t say Churchill; they say Chamberlain.
Imagine how the world might be now if during World War II the allies had employed paintball guns against the Axis powers.
Whatever some Israeli desk-commander was thinking, he wasn’t thinking of his young soldiers. He may have been thinking of trying to save the lives of Israel’s enemies by a show of weakness, but that didn’t work either.
Looking past the paintballs, our own nation has for the past few years been drifting into European-style anti-Semitism unworthy of any civilized man or woman. The dean of the White House press corps, for decades petted and indulged despite her coarseness and vulgarity, this week spat out her wishes that all Israelis would return “home” to Germany and Poland. This journalist’s historical ignorance is commensurate with her malevolence.
You’d think that the White House press corps’ lead reporter’s near-death experience from a house falling on her back in 1939 would have helped her focus on the basic concepts of right and wrong.
We haven’t heard from Helen Thomas or Rush Limbaugh this weekend, and Mr. Limbaugh is rumored to have gotten married. Do you think…? Imagine them exiting the office of a justice of the peace under the arched paintball guns of an honor guard of the Fox Network faithful.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Paintballs and the White House Press Corps
Because Israel is a tiny country that can be overflown by hostile aircraft in seconds, it has in its short history developed a citizen-soldier army that, despite its small size and its heavy dependence on reservists, is one of the most flexible, effective, and professional militaries in history.
The ever-changing basement governments in what some are pleased to call Palestine (a Roman designation) are careless with their own citizens’ lives but have lots of money to spend in firing thousands of rockets onto Israel.
Just as President Lincoln did to the Confederacy, President Roosevelt to the Axis, and President Kennedy to Cuba, the Israelis have set an ongoing blockade of hostile areas. Their reasoning is that if the neighbors are shooting at you all the time, you do the best you can to see that they can’t easily get more bullets.
So when some peace (cough) activists, no doubt wearing Che Guevera tees, sent several ships to break the blockade, Israel announced that the ships would be boarded and searched, and that non-military goods would be sent on to Gaza.
Alas, some genius decided that, in order to avoid offending anyone, the Israeli commandos would go into action with paintball guns. Oh, some wore pistols, but were all but forbidden to use them. In the event, the peace-loving peace activists, when they stopped laughing, peacefully beat the snot out of the Israeli paintball commandos with peaceful iron bars, even seizing some of the pistols. Finally, someone on the Israeli side made a decision that the lads could fight back, and nine deaths resulted. These deaths could possibly have been avoided if the commandos had been permitted to board fully armed and in a Gunny Ermey mode.
As Czech, Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch, English, and Norwegian diplomats of the last century could attest, trying to make peace with evil gets your country peacefully destroyed and your citizens peacefully killed or peacefully enslaved.
Paintball guns don’t say Churchill; they say Chamberlain.
Imagine how the world might be now if during World War II the allies had employed paintball guns against the Axis powers.
Whatever some Israeli desk-commander was thinking, he wasn’t thinking of his young soldiers. He may have been thinking of trying to save the lives of Israel’s enemies by a show of weakness, but that didn’t work either.
Looking past the paintballs, our own nation has for the past few years been drifting into European-style anti-Semitism unworthy of any civilized man or woman. The dean of the White House press corps, for decades petted and indulged despite her coarseness and vulgarity, this week spat out her wishes that all Israelis would return “home” to Germany and Poland. This journalist’s historical ignorance is commensurate with her malevolence.
You’d think that the White House press corps’ lead reporter’s near-death experience from a house falling on her back in 1939 would have helped her focus on the basic concepts of right and wrong.
We haven’t heard from Helen Thomas or Rush Limbaugh this weekend, and Mr. Limbaugh is rumored to have gotten married. Do you think…? Imagine them exiting the office of a justice of the peace under the arched paintball guns of an honor guard of the Fox Network faithful.
-30-
Saturday, May 29, 2010
The 1914 Model is Outdated
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
The 1914 Model is Outdated
Some weeks ago a South Korean warship blew up and now the North Koreans and the South Koreans are calling each other rude names. South Korea and Secretary of State Clinton have done the CSI thing on scraps of metal and claim that a North Korean submarine sank the South Korean warship with a torpedo.
What does this have to do with us? Plenty.
Because of 1914-model interlocking treaties, this country backs South Korea, who despises us, and China, who also despises us, backs North Korea, who loathes and fears us.
North Korea is run by an anonymous klaven of frozen-faced men headed by a demonic dwarf in elevator shoes. These characters should be laughable as the villains in an episode of The Avengers or The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; alas for civilization that they are very real and command a huge army, air force, and navy, all equipped with nuclear weapons. As with any Communist nation, North Korea has made its military power and its workers’ paradise by shooting and starving millions of workers. They have nothing to lose.
Standing between these crazies, who, remember, loathe us, and the South Koreans, who, remember, despise us, are a few thousand American soldiers. Don’t expect Belgium or Switzerland to lend a hand with this one, and, really, why should they? And why should we?
Switzerland, as always, will profit from this war, and the Chinese will do their best to stay out of it too, except to sell the North Koreans more weapons to use again others.
South Korea is now one of the world’s most economically developed nations, and maybe it’s time they guarded their own eggs-and-ham border.
Indeed, maybe it’s time we started guarding our borders too. The American military is fighting all over the world, and the people our solders are fighting are genuinely evil. Some of them mean to conquer the world, which is clear in their own book if anyone here would bother to read it.
But the question must be asked: why is it always Americans who must go and try to make chicken soup out of chicken armpit? Other nations help, especially Canada and England, but given that our current regime does not like Canada and has certainly stiffed England with unforgivable ill manners, they may not feel like allying themselves with us in the future.
In the meantime, a sturdy but far too small American army may find itself stranded and annihilated defending a country that doesn’t like us. Remember that the North Koreans possess, thanks to China and Russia, nuclear weapons, and the flight time from North Korean launch sites to our lads on the ground is but mere seconds. Seconds.
This ain’t pretty.
Must more thousands of American young die for South Korea?
Perhaps the next time two nations who hate us go to war with each other, we could stay out of it.
But, hey, how about American Idol and next year’s football season, eh?
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
The 1914 Model is Outdated
Some weeks ago a South Korean warship blew up and now the North Koreans and the South Koreans are calling each other rude names. South Korea and Secretary of State Clinton have done the CSI thing on scraps of metal and claim that a North Korean submarine sank the South Korean warship with a torpedo.
What does this have to do with us? Plenty.
Because of 1914-model interlocking treaties, this country backs South Korea, who despises us, and China, who also despises us, backs North Korea, who loathes and fears us.
North Korea is run by an anonymous klaven of frozen-faced men headed by a demonic dwarf in elevator shoes. These characters should be laughable as the villains in an episode of The Avengers or The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; alas for civilization that they are very real and command a huge army, air force, and navy, all equipped with nuclear weapons. As with any Communist nation, North Korea has made its military power and its workers’ paradise by shooting and starving millions of workers. They have nothing to lose.
Standing between these crazies, who, remember, loathe us, and the South Koreans, who, remember, despise us, are a few thousand American soldiers. Don’t expect Belgium or Switzerland to lend a hand with this one, and, really, why should they? And why should we?
Switzerland, as always, will profit from this war, and the Chinese will do their best to stay out of it too, except to sell the North Koreans more weapons to use again others.
South Korea is now one of the world’s most economically developed nations, and maybe it’s time they guarded their own eggs-and-ham border.
Indeed, maybe it’s time we started guarding our borders too. The American military is fighting all over the world, and the people our solders are fighting are genuinely evil. Some of them mean to conquer the world, which is clear in their own book if anyone here would bother to read it.
But the question must be asked: why is it always Americans who must go and try to make chicken soup out of chicken armpit? Other nations help, especially Canada and England, but given that our current regime does not like Canada and has certainly stiffed England with unforgivable ill manners, they may not feel like allying themselves with us in the future.
In the meantime, a sturdy but far too small American army may find itself stranded and annihilated defending a country that doesn’t like us. Remember that the North Koreans possess, thanks to China and Russia, nuclear weapons, and the flight time from North Korean launch sites to our lads on the ground is but mere seconds. Seconds.
This ain’t pretty.
Must more thousands of American young die for South Korea?
Perhaps the next time two nations who hate us go to war with each other, we could stay out of it.
But, hey, how about American Idol and next year’s football season, eh?
-30-
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Press One for Rational Thought Concerning Arizona
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Press One for Rational Thought
Arizona, a most unfashionable state after firing on Fort Sumter earlier this spring, is now a pariah (or is that a piranha?) for wanting the English teachers in its public schools to speak, well, English.
There is no word on whether Spanish teachers in Arizona schools must know Spanish.
Employing standard English is clearly not a requirement for holding a sinecure as a super special golly administrative assistant czarina in some school districts, but, generally speaking (speaking in English), English teachers really should have pretty good control of the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Belloc, Churchill, Tolkien, and Thomas the Tank Engine.
If a strong accent is a bar to employment as an English teacher, any native Texan currently employed as such ain’t a-gonna be much longer; he’s gonna have t’ drag up pronto an’ mosey into th’ sunset, y’all.
English teachers must know English, just as a nurse ought to know patient care and a welder should use more than Elmer’s Glue for bonding.
Imagine taking your wheezing pickup truck to your mechanic: “Hey, Cletus, Ol’ Blue’s stalling on acceleration again…hey, where are you going?”
“Sorry, old friend, I’ve been reassigned by the government as a dental assistant. Diversity and multiculturalism, they say.”
“Dental assistant? Cletus, you don’t know anything about teeth; you only got two of ‘em anyway! And who’s gonna take care of Ol’ Blue, my 1956 pickup?”
“Here’s Sven, your new mechanic. He’s an expert in Swedish massage.”
“Massage!? Ol’ Blue don’t need a massage! It’s the carburetor!”
“Ja, me fix carburetor good with warm towels, ja. Ze government say so, ja. Ich bin ein multicultural sensitive mechanic now, is good, ja?”
Arizona is catching a lot of flak (which is a German import) for trying to control the international border and protect American citizens in the absence of enforcement of federal laws by the federal government. The reaction in some in the salons of D.C. has been to sneer and to wear the now-obligatory cause-of-the-month rubber wrist bands pooh-poohing a state that was home to sophisticated cultures hundreds of years before Washington was inhabited by anything more than mud turtles and malaria mosquitoes.
Some states are proposing an economic boycott of Arizona. Two problems obtain – Arizona is an exporter of electrical power and water to other states in a nation that, due to governmental short-sightedness, is lacking in both. California, for instance, is no more in a position to dictate terms to Arizona than Washington is to our Chinese masters.
The second issue is this – whom (“whom,” he said, for he had been to school) do the critics think live in Arizona? Vikings? Arizona has enjoyed a Spanish culture for some 500 years, and numerous First Nations cultures for millennia longer than that.
In Arizona you eat breakfast at Juanita’s café’, not at Janice’s, and if you speed you don’t get a ticket from Al Caldwell’s friend Officer Fatback but from Officer Rodriguez. You might buy your gasoline from a station owned by an Apache whose folks have lived on the same bit of land for a thousand years. All these American citizens want to live under the same Constitutional protections as the rest of us.
Boycott them? Why?
For the record, I, unlike the Attorney General of the United States, have read Arizona’s new bill regarding folks who cross the international border without a passport, a driver’s license, or at least a Sam’s Club card. The law is positively Merovingian in its harmlessness and inadequacy. Crossing into the USA for work or study (or, sadly, crime) remains a great deal easier than trying – trying, because you might not be permitted – to pop across the Canadian border to visit Niagara Falls for an hour.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Press One for Rational Thought
Arizona, a most unfashionable state after firing on Fort Sumter earlier this spring, is now a pariah (or is that a piranha?) for wanting the English teachers in its public schools to speak, well, English.
There is no word on whether Spanish teachers in Arizona schools must know Spanish.
Employing standard English is clearly not a requirement for holding a sinecure as a super special golly administrative assistant czarina in some school districts, but, generally speaking (speaking in English), English teachers really should have pretty good control of the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Belloc, Churchill, Tolkien, and Thomas the Tank Engine.
If a strong accent is a bar to employment as an English teacher, any native Texan currently employed as such ain’t a-gonna be much longer; he’s gonna have t’ drag up pronto an’ mosey into th’ sunset, y’all.
English teachers must know English, just as a nurse ought to know patient care and a welder should use more than Elmer’s Glue for bonding.
Imagine taking your wheezing pickup truck to your mechanic: “Hey, Cletus, Ol’ Blue’s stalling on acceleration again…hey, where are you going?”
“Sorry, old friend, I’ve been reassigned by the government as a dental assistant. Diversity and multiculturalism, they say.”
“Dental assistant? Cletus, you don’t know anything about teeth; you only got two of ‘em anyway! And who’s gonna take care of Ol’ Blue, my 1956 pickup?”
“Here’s Sven, your new mechanic. He’s an expert in Swedish massage.”
“Massage!? Ol’ Blue don’t need a massage! It’s the carburetor!”
“Ja, me fix carburetor good with warm towels, ja. Ze government say so, ja. Ich bin ein multicultural sensitive mechanic now, is good, ja?”
Arizona is catching a lot of flak (which is a German import) for trying to control the international border and protect American citizens in the absence of enforcement of federal laws by the federal government. The reaction in some in the salons of D.C. has been to sneer and to wear the now-obligatory cause-of-the-month rubber wrist bands pooh-poohing a state that was home to sophisticated cultures hundreds of years before Washington was inhabited by anything more than mud turtles and malaria mosquitoes.
Some states are proposing an economic boycott of Arizona. Two problems obtain – Arizona is an exporter of electrical power and water to other states in a nation that, due to governmental short-sightedness, is lacking in both. California, for instance, is no more in a position to dictate terms to Arizona than Washington is to our Chinese masters.
The second issue is this – whom (“whom,” he said, for he had been to school) do the critics think live in Arizona? Vikings? Arizona has enjoyed a Spanish culture for some 500 years, and numerous First Nations cultures for millennia longer than that.
In Arizona you eat breakfast at Juanita’s café’, not at Janice’s, and if you speed you don’t get a ticket from Al Caldwell’s friend Officer Fatback but from Officer Rodriguez. You might buy your gasoline from a station owned by an Apache whose folks have lived on the same bit of land for a thousand years. All these American citizens want to live under the same Constitutional protections as the rest of us.
Boycott them? Why?
For the record, I, unlike the Attorney General of the United States, have read Arizona’s new bill regarding folks who cross the international border without a passport, a driver’s license, or at least a Sam’s Club card. The law is positively Merovingian in its harmlessness and inadequacy. Crossing into the USA for work or study (or, sadly, crime) remains a great deal easier than trying – trying, because you might not be permitted – to pop across the Canadian border to visit Niagara Falls for an hour.
-30-
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