Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Bubble-Gum Government
George: “Did I ever tell you dudes that I was once in a band?”
Ben: “You rock, dude!”
Tom: “Dude, what did you riff?”
George: “Dude! We were, like, y’know, a fusion of neo-Caribbean folk-punk, indigenous African mountain vegetarian-dysharmonic, and, like, y’know, Tibetan urban squalor existentialist nihilism.”
Ben and Tom: “Dude! You’re so, like, ready to be, totally, commander-in-chief of the army of the rockin’ new republic!”
- A conversation not attributed to George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Republican candidate for president, was pettily faulted by some, oh, artist, for playing one of his screeds in her campaign. Anyone who follows politics even casually will recall the lengthy catalogue of Republican candidates who have been forbidden to spin some rockin’ platters of bubblegum music despite having paid off ASCAP or BMI in order to do so.
The rational Republican faults Congresswoman Bachmann for bringing cheap music to an occasion of rational discourse. But she’s not the first politician to patronize the American people; Senator Bob Dole’s long-ago campaign riff, “I’m a Dole Man,” is still cringe-making.
At what point in history did soft-rock mucous – um, music – become obligatory in any political campaign beyond running for parliamentarian of the junior high school student council?
Consider Abraham Lincoln hiring a garbage – um, garage – band to sing “California Dreamin’” as an intro at Gettysburg.
Imagine Winston Churchill, in Britain’s darkest hour, prefacing his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech with a recording of “Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy, heyuh, baby, why don’cha be my gurllll!”
Perhaps President Reagan should have bracketed his memorial to the Challenger astronauts by twanging out a few chords from “Hang on, Sloopy.”
Think of the combined houses of Congress waving their hands in unison and singin’ along to “Heartbreak Hotel” in response to President Churchill’s “Infamy” speech.
No. Let’s not do any of that.
Democracy is not grounded on a soundtrack; democracy is grounded on a collection of documents which promote the dignity of man based on reasoning from natural law and from divine revelation.
But is music important? Of course it is, along with literature and the visual arts. However, someone standing for political office does not drag along a swiped Shoney’s Big Boy statue to show he’s one of The People sculpturally.
And music has long been employed in political campaigns, John Philip Sousa, for instance, and a bit of Aaron Copeland. These fellows ain’t Mahler or Wagner, but they celebrate an outward and exuberent America in a way that the whiny, introspective me, me, me-ness of adolescent roller-skatin’ noise never can. The reality is that contemporary campaign music is to music what rest-room graffiti is to Cezanne and Matisse.
If politicians must have campaign music then let them bring on something a little more grown-up than Peaches and Herb.
Beyond the election campaigns, this country also needs to consider an appropriate sound-track for bombing the he** out of countries with whom we’re not at war. I suggest “There’s a Kind of Hush all over the World” by Herman’s Hermits.
-30-
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Ash Wednesday in Libya
Ash Wednesday in Libya
For Anthony Germain
The wisdom of the desert is dispersed
Among the industrial monuments
To mechanized murder, wireless chaos,
And war-porn for touch-screen degenerates.
On this Ash Wednesday night while smoky flares
Obscure, with false, flickering fumes, the stars
God sent to dance above those ancient lands,
You choke and weep among the ashes of
More victims of pale Herod’s shopping trips.
So of your kindness grant that we, your friends,
May wear your ashes for you on this night,
And for the weary innocents who flee
The ashes of their burnt and blasted world.
For Anthony Germain
The wisdom of the desert is dispersed
Among the industrial monuments
To mechanized murder, wireless chaos,
And war-porn for touch-screen degenerates.
On this Ash Wednesday night while smoky flares
Obscure, with false, flickering fumes, the stars
God sent to dance above those ancient lands,
You choke and weep among the ashes of
More victims of pale Herod’s shopping trips.
So of your kindness grant that we, your friends,
May wear your ashes for you on this night,
And for the weary innocents who flee
The ashes of their burnt and blasted world.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Rule by Frat Boys
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Rule by Fraternitaspuerate
Remember Joel Fleischman, Northern Exposure’s lead whose sense of entitlement clashed with his obligations to the taxpayers who funded his medical school? Our government at present seems to consist of an oligarchy of Joel Fleischmans, and we the people elected them.
In high school civics class we were told about the basic forms of governance: oligarchy, monarchy, democracy, republic, dictatorship, and so on, and some of the murderous variants such as the concept of the soviet, committee of public safety, and triumvirate.
In our time we have a new form of government, rule by fraernitaspuerate – rule by frat boy, by Joel Fleischman and his partners in perceived privilege.
When Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace, Churchill did not don knee pants and take to the golf course to yuck it up with King George in a baseball cap while England was being bombed. Crockett, Travis, and Bowie did not compromise their differences during 18 rounds on the Alamo’s golf course (officers only, except for Wednesdays and Thursdays). There is no report of a golf course on Masada, but perhaps the Chinese will have built one by next week, along with a luxury hotel near the western gate.
In the news we read of our military operations all over the world, operations of dubious legality that even Emperor Vespasian would find pointless, and on the same page we also read about our President and our Speaker of the House playing golf in the midst of economic and moral crises. Our Merovingian Congress squeaks harmlessly, left leaderless by the knee-pants abdication of John Boehner, R-Ohio, who sacrificed his ethics at the first tee.
Well into the 1970s the leadership of this country, locally and nationally, consisted of folks who suffered through the Depression and World War II, and who worked at real jobs. The question was not “What fraternity did you belong to?” but “What was your outfit?” Some of them had some college but few of them had four-year degrees.
Our leaders now seem to be superannuated frat boys with little sense of responsibility: John Kerry, John Edwards, Anthony Weiner, and now Congressman Boehner and his new-found golfing buddy. Heck, even Sarah Palin has not really explained why she abandoned the Alaskan voters. The lack of gravitas, the nonexistent sense of duty, and the inability to discern between right and wrong seem to be defining characteristics of our leadership and, thus, of the electorate who empowered them.
Perhaps we should asked future prospective candidates to electoral office to respond to the following prompts:
1. Tell us all about your social network issues.
2. Have you ever heard of the Constitution? Does Section 8 of Article 1 mean anything to you? How about the 4th Amendment?
3. Does your church have a history leading further back than, say, last week, and a leadership that consists of more than the pastor’s extended family? Codicil: is your copy of the Bible larger than Bill Clinton’s?
4. Have you misrepresented your military history?
5. Have you ever belonged to a fraternity – that is, have you paid people to humiliate you so they’d be your friends?
6. Have you ever had a job that required you to sweat? (Not going populist on ya here, folks, but all these 4.0-GPA-idea-men are wrecking us)
7. Do you solemnly vow never to use a screen-thingie during your speeches?
8. Do you solemnly vow never to wear a white tie with a dinner jacket?
9. Do you solemnly vow never to wear knee pants / pedal-pushers?
10. Do you solemnly vow never to wear lumberjack shirts while campaigning?
11. Do you play golf? Why? Explain yourself.
12. Do you wear those dime-store wraparound sunglasses that make you look like a dragonfly with glaucoma? Why?
13. Do you understand that if we elect you to office, the airplane, the house, the cars, the staff, the money – they’re not yours; they’re ours?
14. No more soft/pop 1960s rock at the conventions. Seriously. As a codicil, no Republicans trying to dance; there’s enough sorrow in the world already.
15. You ain’t the Queen. If you ever, ever, ever lapse into the first-person plural, you will be required to resign immediately and will lose your citizenship for cause.
Now, then, agree to these terms and one or two of us might consider you for public office; the rest of the electorate are too busy listening to Rush Limbaugh or Oprah Winfrey to vote.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Rule by Fraternitaspuerate
Remember Joel Fleischman, Northern Exposure’s lead whose sense of entitlement clashed with his obligations to the taxpayers who funded his medical school? Our government at present seems to consist of an oligarchy of Joel Fleischmans, and we the people elected them.
In high school civics class we were told about the basic forms of governance: oligarchy, monarchy, democracy, republic, dictatorship, and so on, and some of the murderous variants such as the concept of the soviet, committee of public safety, and triumvirate.
In our time we have a new form of government, rule by fraernitaspuerate – rule by frat boy, by Joel Fleischman and his partners in perceived privilege.
When Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace, Churchill did not don knee pants and take to the golf course to yuck it up with King George in a baseball cap while England was being bombed. Crockett, Travis, and Bowie did not compromise their differences during 18 rounds on the Alamo’s golf course (officers only, except for Wednesdays and Thursdays). There is no report of a golf course on Masada, but perhaps the Chinese will have built one by next week, along with a luxury hotel near the western gate.
In the news we read of our military operations all over the world, operations of dubious legality that even Emperor Vespasian would find pointless, and on the same page we also read about our President and our Speaker of the House playing golf in the midst of economic and moral crises. Our Merovingian Congress squeaks harmlessly, left leaderless by the knee-pants abdication of John Boehner, R-Ohio, who sacrificed his ethics at the first tee.
Well into the 1970s the leadership of this country, locally and nationally, consisted of folks who suffered through the Depression and World War II, and who worked at real jobs. The question was not “What fraternity did you belong to?” but “What was your outfit?” Some of them had some college but few of them had four-year degrees.
Our leaders now seem to be superannuated frat boys with little sense of responsibility: John Kerry, John Edwards, Anthony Weiner, and now Congressman Boehner and his new-found golfing buddy. Heck, even Sarah Palin has not really explained why she abandoned the Alaskan voters. The lack of gravitas, the nonexistent sense of duty, and the inability to discern between right and wrong seem to be defining characteristics of our leadership and, thus, of the electorate who empowered them.
Perhaps we should asked future prospective candidates to electoral office to respond to the following prompts:
1. Tell us all about your social network issues.
2. Have you ever heard of the Constitution? Does Section 8 of Article 1 mean anything to you? How about the 4th Amendment?
3. Does your church have a history leading further back than, say, last week, and a leadership that consists of more than the pastor’s extended family? Codicil: is your copy of the Bible larger than Bill Clinton’s?
4. Have you misrepresented your military history?
5. Have you ever belonged to a fraternity – that is, have you paid people to humiliate you so they’d be your friends?
6. Have you ever had a job that required you to sweat? (Not going populist on ya here, folks, but all these 4.0-GPA-idea-men are wrecking us)
7. Do you solemnly vow never to use a screen-thingie during your speeches?
8. Do you solemnly vow never to wear a white tie with a dinner jacket?
9. Do you solemnly vow never to wear knee pants / pedal-pushers?
10. Do you solemnly vow never to wear lumberjack shirts while campaigning?
11. Do you play golf? Why? Explain yourself.
12. Do you wear those dime-store wraparound sunglasses that make you look like a dragonfly with glaucoma? Why?
13. Do you understand that if we elect you to office, the airplane, the house, the cars, the staff, the money – they’re not yours; they’re ours?
14. No more soft/pop 1960s rock at the conventions. Seriously. As a codicil, no Republicans trying to dance; there’s enough sorrow in the world already.
15. You ain’t the Queen. If you ever, ever, ever lapse into the first-person plural, you will be required to resign immediately and will lose your citizenship for cause.
Now, then, agree to these terms and one or two of us might consider you for public office; the rest of the electorate are too busy listening to Rush Limbaugh or Oprah Winfrey to vote.
-30-
Smoke Break
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Smoke Break
By late next year all cigarette packages in this nation must bear pictures of diseased lungs, smoke issuing from a tracheostomy, and perhaps even dead bodies. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) believes that these grotesqueries will turn folks off to smoking.
The reality, of course, is that pictures of cancerous corpses are just the thing to attract the attention and pocket money of the typical 16-year-old.
If cigarettes really are fatal, then why don’t government entities ban the darned things? Is it possible that quitting tobacco taxes is harder for a government than quitting tobacco is for a three-pack-a-day man?
But the really cosmic question is this: do cigarette company workers have to go outside for a smoke break?
We’ve all heard the news about cigarettes; there are more urgent warnings necessary on these other objects:
Guitar: “Caution – picking up this instrument will give you delusions of talent.”
Television: “Warning – this is not your life.”
Video game: “Danger – play this only if you don’t have any friends.”
Goatee: “Before wearing this, um, style, consider the root word of ‘goatee.’”
Goatee II: “Aviso – the goatee is the hirsute equivalent of the Nehru jacket.”
Big-Box Electronics Store: “Please note that every employee in this building is programmed to lie to you.”
Telephone message: “When we say your call is important to us, we don’t mean it. If your call were important, you wouldn’t be listening to a recording. Have a nice day. If you believe that this recording cares.”
Pencil: “This device does not know mathematics.”
Restaurant: “The servers here have been instructed to nasal out ‘no problem’ instead of saying ‘you’re welcome.’”
Family restaurant: “The ‘family’ bit means screaming children throwing food.”
Vegetarian restaurant: “You can hear the carrots scream when you bite into them. Really. Carrots are your friends. Why would you eat your friends?”
Radio talk show: “Listening obediently to the following millionaire who never had a real job does not constitute participatory democracy.”
Bible: “Reading this does not make you judge of the universe.”
Golf club: “Using this stick to hit a little ball into a hole in the ground does not empower you to send young people to their deaths in other countries.”
State line: “Welcome to New York. You may not marry your bicycle. Yet.”
Bottled water: “This is just water. We took it out of a tap and drained it into a bottle made of weird chemicals. And you’re going to pay for this?”
National Public Radio: “As we go into yet another annoying fund-raising campaign, remember than some of our announcers are given over $300,000 a year to babble on the radio. And now, let’s dig into those pockets, little people; NPR needs the money for, like, y’know, social justice and global warming.”
Oh, yeah, there’s a whole lotta smoke being blown these days.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Smoke Break
By late next year all cigarette packages in this nation must bear pictures of diseased lungs, smoke issuing from a tracheostomy, and perhaps even dead bodies. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) believes that these grotesqueries will turn folks off to smoking.
The reality, of course, is that pictures of cancerous corpses are just the thing to attract the attention and pocket money of the typical 16-year-old.
If cigarettes really are fatal, then why don’t government entities ban the darned things? Is it possible that quitting tobacco taxes is harder for a government than quitting tobacco is for a three-pack-a-day man?
But the really cosmic question is this: do cigarette company workers have to go outside for a smoke break?
We’ve all heard the news about cigarettes; there are more urgent warnings necessary on these other objects:
Guitar: “Caution – picking up this instrument will give you delusions of talent.”
Television: “Warning – this is not your life.”
Video game: “Danger – play this only if you don’t have any friends.”
Goatee: “Before wearing this, um, style, consider the root word of ‘goatee.’”
Goatee II: “Aviso – the goatee is the hirsute equivalent of the Nehru jacket.”
Big-Box Electronics Store: “Please note that every employee in this building is programmed to lie to you.”
Telephone message: “When we say your call is important to us, we don’t mean it. If your call were important, you wouldn’t be listening to a recording. Have a nice day. If you believe that this recording cares.”
Pencil: “This device does not know mathematics.”
Restaurant: “The servers here have been instructed to nasal out ‘no problem’ instead of saying ‘you’re welcome.’”
Family restaurant: “The ‘family’ bit means screaming children throwing food.”
Vegetarian restaurant: “You can hear the carrots scream when you bite into them. Really. Carrots are your friends. Why would you eat your friends?”
Radio talk show: “Listening obediently to the following millionaire who never had a real job does not constitute participatory democracy.”
Bible: “Reading this does not make you judge of the universe.”
Golf club: “Using this stick to hit a little ball into a hole in the ground does not empower you to send young people to their deaths in other countries.”
State line: “Welcome to New York. You may not marry your bicycle. Yet.”
Bottled water: “This is just water. We took it out of a tap and drained it into a bottle made of weird chemicals. And you’re going to pay for this?”
National Public Radio: “As we go into yet another annoying fund-raising campaign, remember than some of our announcers are given over $300,000 a year to babble on the radio. And now, let’s dig into those pockets, little people; NPR needs the money for, like, y’know, social justice and global warming.”
Oh, yeah, there’s a whole lotta smoke being blown these days.
-30-
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Barnes and Noble -- The Nook's Disappearing Books
The Nook is an amusing gadget, but mine -- this is, of course, a sampling of somewhat less than 100 Nooks -- is unreliable.
When I bought my Nook I decided to download only free books until I found something I really wanted to buy. After all, most of us have the books we really want, and the Nook would be good for travel books, detective stories, easy road-reads, and so on. In the event, I will never purchase a book for the Nook because the free ones have a bad habit of disappearing when wanted, not unlike the sales folks in big-box stores in Beaumont, Texas. Why, then, would I buy a book that might then disappear?
Barnes and Noble's customer service on the 'net and in the Beaumont store are great, and I cannot fault them at all. The problem lies in an ill-tried and clumsy technology, and in gadgets made by the lowest Chinese Communist bidder.
At one point everything I had downloaded was not accessible; the books were only titles on the screen. I went to the store and tried to download them again, and this didn't work either. Finally, the nice B & N staff formed a committee, examined the problem and the machine, and concluded that the only solution was to de-register the Nook and then re-register it.
A critical Why? goes here.
So I spent an hour re-re-downloading my books, some twenty of which wouldn't download again. A problem with this is that the titles still exist, and the only way of getting rid of them is to access one's B & N account on a computer (again, why should this be necessary?), and deleting the non-downloadable titles, one at a time. And this does not always work.
The screen has frozen at least twice, maybe thrice, and while the solution is not demanding -- prying the Nook apart and removing the battery for a few minutes -- why should this be necessary at all?
The e-reader has a great future, and I enjoy downloading obscure, out-of-print books for free. But the Nook is not yet ready. If you buy the gadget, don't trust it.
When I bought my Nook I decided to download only free books until I found something I really wanted to buy. After all, most of us have the books we really want, and the Nook would be good for travel books, detective stories, easy road-reads, and so on. In the event, I will never purchase a book for the Nook because the free ones have a bad habit of disappearing when wanted, not unlike the sales folks in big-box stores in Beaumont, Texas. Why, then, would I buy a book that might then disappear?
Barnes and Noble's customer service on the 'net and in the Beaumont store are great, and I cannot fault them at all. The problem lies in an ill-tried and clumsy technology, and in gadgets made by the lowest Chinese Communist bidder.
At one point everything I had downloaded was not accessible; the books were only titles on the screen. I went to the store and tried to download them again, and this didn't work either. Finally, the nice B & N staff formed a committee, examined the problem and the machine, and concluded that the only solution was to de-register the Nook and then re-register it.
A critical Why? goes here.
So I spent an hour re-re-downloading my books, some twenty of which wouldn't download again. A problem with this is that the titles still exist, and the only way of getting rid of them is to access one's B & N account on a computer (again, why should this be necessary?), and deleting the non-downloadable titles, one at a time. And this does not always work.
The screen has frozen at least twice, maybe thrice, and while the solution is not demanding -- prying the Nook apart and removing the battery for a few minutes -- why should this be necessary at all?
The e-reader has a great future, and I enjoy downloading obscure, out-of-print books for free. But the Nook is not yet ready. If you buy the gadget, don't trust it.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Little House in the Big (and burning) Woods
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Little House in the Big (and burning) Woods
Around 7:45 P.M. evening last week I was enjoying the dusk and giving the plants a drink when I noticed that the fields and woods to the northwest of the house were hidden in a thick white cloud, and with that quickness of mind which is a marvel to all who know me I deduced that we had a woods fire.
I did the 911 thing and then drove across the field to the tree line. I walked into the deepening-dusk woods and heard something moving -- arsonist? Deer? Wolf? Congressman Weiner? Hillary Clinton wearing a Richard Nixon mask?
"Hey!" I called. The moving stopped. I pushed my way perhaps thirty feet into that thickety, attack-briary mess and gave it up, bruised, scratched, and humbled, and returned to the open.
The first responder on the scene was a city police officer, and quick upon his tire-treads followed the Kirbyville VFD. Their sirens set the wolves – and my dachshund, Thunderbolt -- to howling mightily.
The firemen tried to walk into the brush, made it about thirty feet, and returned, scratched and sweating and gasping in the foul heat. This was a sub-theme of the evening -- everyone who responded to the fire, neighbors, firemen, and Forest Service, charged into the thicket against briars and vines, and all returned much exercised. A five-year growth of thicket in East Texas is as effective a barrier as all the barbed-wire in Viet-Nam bunched together.
An advance team from the Forest Service arrived, all kitted out in Darth Vadar helmets with recessed blue lights for forward visuals and blinking red lights on the rear. They charged into the woods and shortly reappeared, frustrated as the rest of us, their navigational lights still shining and blinking.
Two Forest Service bulldozers arrived and were quickly off-loaded, and just as quickly charged into the woods and disappeared, thundering unseen in the darkness toward the flames. These iron dragons surrounded the fire within an hour, isolating it to die, and within an hour or so were back on their trailers being transported to another fire.
The field was crowded with cars and trucks and four-wheelers and all sorts of people smoking cigarettes and talking on radios and cussing and enjoying themselves mightily in the hot night. And God bless 'em, for within a few hours they had the situation controlled. All the neighbors showed up, most of them with shovels, ready to get with it. Good folks, good folks.
The source of the fire is unknown; there was some speculation about lightning strikes from the cruel, teasing black clouds that sail above our year-long drought most afternoons.
Y’r ‘umble scrivener still has a house in which to live because of the quick response of the fire and forest services, but if they had been away on another fire -- the village idiots are loose, you know, loping along with their knuckles scraping the ground, playing with matches, their two or three brain cells misfiring at the synapses -- this narrative might not have ended happily.
Thanks, everyone.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Little House in the Big (and burning) Woods
Around 7:45 P.M. evening last week I was enjoying the dusk and giving the plants a drink when I noticed that the fields and woods to the northwest of the house were hidden in a thick white cloud, and with that quickness of mind which is a marvel to all who know me I deduced that we had a woods fire.
I did the 911 thing and then drove across the field to the tree line. I walked into the deepening-dusk woods and heard something moving -- arsonist? Deer? Wolf? Congressman Weiner? Hillary Clinton wearing a Richard Nixon mask?
"Hey!" I called. The moving stopped. I pushed my way perhaps thirty feet into that thickety, attack-briary mess and gave it up, bruised, scratched, and humbled, and returned to the open.
The first responder on the scene was a city police officer, and quick upon his tire-treads followed the Kirbyville VFD. Their sirens set the wolves – and my dachshund, Thunderbolt -- to howling mightily.
The firemen tried to walk into the brush, made it about thirty feet, and returned, scratched and sweating and gasping in the foul heat. This was a sub-theme of the evening -- everyone who responded to the fire, neighbors, firemen, and Forest Service, charged into the thicket against briars and vines, and all returned much exercised. A five-year growth of thicket in East Texas is as effective a barrier as all the barbed-wire in Viet-Nam bunched together.
An advance team from the Forest Service arrived, all kitted out in Darth Vadar helmets with recessed blue lights for forward visuals and blinking red lights on the rear. They charged into the woods and shortly reappeared, frustrated as the rest of us, their navigational lights still shining and blinking.
Two Forest Service bulldozers arrived and were quickly off-loaded, and just as quickly charged into the woods and disappeared, thundering unseen in the darkness toward the flames. These iron dragons surrounded the fire within an hour, isolating it to die, and within an hour or so were back on their trailers being transported to another fire.
The field was crowded with cars and trucks and four-wheelers and all sorts of people smoking cigarettes and talking on radios and cussing and enjoying themselves mightily in the hot night. And God bless 'em, for within a few hours they had the situation controlled. All the neighbors showed up, most of them with shovels, ready to get with it. Good folks, good folks.
The source of the fire is unknown; there was some speculation about lightning strikes from the cruel, teasing black clouds that sail above our year-long drought most afternoons.
Y’r ‘umble scrivener still has a house in which to live because of the quick response of the fire and forest services, but if they had been away on another fire -- the village idiots are loose, you know, loping along with their knuckles scraping the ground, playing with matches, their two or three brain cells misfiring at the synapses -- this narrative might not have ended happily.
Thanks, everyone.
-30-
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Quotations from the 45th President
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Quotations from the 45th President
“Golf? No, never tried it. But now let me tell you about hunting squirrels when I was a child…”
“I swear to you, the American people, that I will never appear in public in knee-pants, a baseball cap, or those bug-eyed sunglasses that look like a dragon-fly wearing an oil spill.”
“Today I told the Air Force and the Marine Corps to take away the presidential jets and helicopters, and to employ them for medevac purposes for our sick and wounded soldiers. I don’t need all that look-at-me junk and you sure don’t need to pay for it.”
“I told my (husband / wife) that if (he / she) didn’t shut up in public I was going to ship (him / her) to a (monastery / convent) in the Ural Mountains of Russia until this presidential term is over.”
“This morning I apologized to the British people and asked if we could have back that bust of Winston Churchill. Then I had a GS-2 clerk telephone Hamad Kharzi in Afghanistan and advise him that he might want to make his funeral arrangements because as of noon tomorrow I’m withdrawing military protection and leaving him to the mercy of his own folks.”
“I want to apologize to the American taxpayer for all the security that’s around me. I’m told it’s a necessity but I know it cuts me off from reality. I promise you that I’ll do my best to reduce the private armies with which so many politicians, including presidents, surround themselves. If the ordinary working American doesn’t have security guards on the job or at home, why should he have to pay more taxes so others can have them?”
“This morning I withdrew all limousines and drivers from federal service, including the presidential ain’t-I-special-mobile. If an undersecretary for the secretary to the czar of the Bureau of Resume’-Building can’t find his way to work on the salary you’re paying him, then maybe he’s not qualified for the job.”
“I can’t require this, of course, but today I ask all state governors, beginning with the Republicans, to get rid of their taxpayer-funded helicopters and limousines.”
“But folks, you’ve got to do your part. Only about half of you are voting, and so no wonder you’ve got fat governors flying to their children’s ball games while asking you to sacrifice. Don’t complain if you’re not voting.”
“During this presidency the presidential dinnerware and silverware will gather dust. In the White House folks will eat like you do at your house. Also, the self-conscious attempts at culture are over – no more bogus poets who don’t know an iamb from an anapest. No more musical evenings. You elected a president, not a cruise director.”
“Several congressmen suggested to me that somehow it would be to this nation’s advantage if a great many 19-year-old Americans were to die in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and God knows where else. I assured those congressmen that if this nation ever goes to war it will be with a congressional declaration as required by the Constitution, and that their children and mine would be conscripted as enlisted soldiers and sent into combat first.”
“And, now, on the second day of this presidency…”
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Quotations from the 45th President
“Golf? No, never tried it. But now let me tell you about hunting squirrels when I was a child…”
“I swear to you, the American people, that I will never appear in public in knee-pants, a baseball cap, or those bug-eyed sunglasses that look like a dragon-fly wearing an oil spill.”
“Today I told the Air Force and the Marine Corps to take away the presidential jets and helicopters, and to employ them for medevac purposes for our sick and wounded soldiers. I don’t need all that look-at-me junk and you sure don’t need to pay for it.”
“I told my (husband / wife) that if (he / she) didn’t shut up in public I was going to ship (him / her) to a (monastery / convent) in the Ural Mountains of Russia until this presidential term is over.”
“This morning I apologized to the British people and asked if we could have back that bust of Winston Churchill. Then I had a GS-2 clerk telephone Hamad Kharzi in Afghanistan and advise him that he might want to make his funeral arrangements because as of noon tomorrow I’m withdrawing military protection and leaving him to the mercy of his own folks.”
“I want to apologize to the American taxpayer for all the security that’s around me. I’m told it’s a necessity but I know it cuts me off from reality. I promise you that I’ll do my best to reduce the private armies with which so many politicians, including presidents, surround themselves. If the ordinary working American doesn’t have security guards on the job or at home, why should he have to pay more taxes so others can have them?”
“This morning I withdrew all limousines and drivers from federal service, including the presidential ain’t-I-special-mobile. If an undersecretary for the secretary to the czar of the Bureau of Resume’-Building can’t find his way to work on the salary you’re paying him, then maybe he’s not qualified for the job.”
“I can’t require this, of course, but today I ask all state governors, beginning with the Republicans, to get rid of their taxpayer-funded helicopters and limousines.”
“But folks, you’ve got to do your part. Only about half of you are voting, and so no wonder you’ve got fat governors flying to their children’s ball games while asking you to sacrifice. Don’t complain if you’re not voting.”
“During this presidency the presidential dinnerware and silverware will gather dust. In the White House folks will eat like you do at your house. Also, the self-conscious attempts at culture are over – no more bogus poets who don’t know an iamb from an anapest. No more musical evenings. You elected a president, not a cruise director.”
“Several congressmen suggested to me that somehow it would be to this nation’s advantage if a great many 19-year-old Americans were to die in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and God knows where else. I assured those congressmen that if this nation ever goes to war it will be with a congressional declaration as required by the Constitution, and that their children and mine would be conscripted as enlisted soldiers and sent into combat first.”
“And, now, on the second day of this presidency…”
-30-
Sunday, May 29, 2011
The Autopen is Mightier than the Reality Show
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Autopen is Mightier than the Reality Show
Techniques for job seekers change with the times, but although a dark suit might not be required now, reporting for a job interview while wearing a red cape is probably a no-no.
What’s really funny – laugh now -- is that you’re paying for the red cape.
A taxpayer-funded body called Workplace Central Florida (“employment agency” is, like, y’know, so old-school) has wasted – um, invested -- some $14,000 for red capes for central Floridians looking for work. Folks in the off-center parts of Florida can be grateful that they are merely unemployed, not both unemployed and made to dress like really fey superheroes. The feeling – obviously not thinking – behind this public humiliation of the unemployed is that if they are required to costume themselves like fools they will then take heart as they battle the scourge of (I am not making this up) “Doctor Evil Unemployment.”
Just why the former Mister Unemployment has been granted a doctorate and by what institution eludes the perceptive reader, but then one supposes that “Reverend Unemployment” would offend the millions of men and not a few women who like to be saluted in that market place mentioned in the Gospels.
Workplace Central Florida receives $24 million dollars annually from those of you who already have jobs, and I say that’s money well-spent. If working people were to keep more of the dollars they earn they’d probably waste their income on a new roof or a more dependable car. How good of the wise and benevolent government people vote for to relieve them of making decisions about the results of their own work.
A few states up, in North Carolina, a Presbyterian church in Charlotte has been fined $4,000 for pruning their own crepe myrtle trees (otherwise known as really big weeds) on their own property.
The city of Charlotte employs a “senior urban forester,” who missed his true calling as a Nazi UberSturmPoopFuhrer, to punish people for taking care of their lawns. If there is a senior urban forester then it follows that there are junior urban foresters and perhaps even stadtwaldjugend marching about in black shorts and snooping in Charlotte’s back yards for unauthorized and disharmonious vegetation.
If you wish to trim your own trees in your own yard in Charlotte you must apply to the city foresters, the Green Gestapo, for a permit, preferably with your cloth cap clutched in your dirty hands, you swine, and your head ‘umbly bowed. If your papers are not in order you will be punished at $100 per branch. The North Carolina Division of Forestry makes the friendly suggestion that you should be should be certified by the National Horticulture Board in order to lop off a branch that’s scratching your car, but we’ll overlook it this time, comrade. We have ways of making your daisies talk, and we know where your tomato plants live.
Punishing people for being tidy and responsible is clearly very profitable for the thugs – um, public servants -- in Charlotte’s city hall: look at a tree, decide that you don’t like the way it’s shaped, and write a ticket for $4,000. Someone in Charlotte, North Carolina is looting lots of money from the people through the misuse of police powers.
But, again, the people of Charlotte, just like the people of every city, have exactly the city government for which they voted.
But in fact most people don’t vote. The turnout for presidential autopen elections every four years barely tops 50% of the electorate; off-year state and local elections are characterized by a few dutiful poll-watchers who are as lonely as a touring opera company in Nashville. Perhaps those who don’t vote are too busy listening to Rush Limbaugh and Oprah Winfrey.
But have no fear, the Republicans are here – only it turns out that some of those running for the office of Autopen of the United States don’t have much of a voting record either. They want your money, though.
Sarah Palin, for instance, is touring the United States in a big ol’ bus in order to ask for money. Now since Mrs. Palin already has lots and lots of money from her book and even more from her speaking tour, and according to rumor has recently bought a really big house in Arizona, just why she needs the few pot-metal coins the Tree Gauleiters haven’t yet seized from you is another philosophical question.
Maybe the voters aren’t showing up because there isn’t much to vote for; the Dancing With the Stars audition rejects presented to us by the Republicans won’t cut it any more than the autopen. To paraphrase Wordsworth, “Patrick Henry! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!”
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Autopen is Mightier than the Reality Show
Techniques for job seekers change with the times, but although a dark suit might not be required now, reporting for a job interview while wearing a red cape is probably a no-no.
What’s really funny – laugh now -- is that you’re paying for the red cape.
A taxpayer-funded body called Workplace Central Florida (“employment agency” is, like, y’know, so old-school) has wasted – um, invested -- some $14,000 for red capes for central Floridians looking for work. Folks in the off-center parts of Florida can be grateful that they are merely unemployed, not both unemployed and made to dress like really fey superheroes. The feeling – obviously not thinking – behind this public humiliation of the unemployed is that if they are required to costume themselves like fools they will then take heart as they battle the scourge of (I am not making this up) “Doctor Evil Unemployment.”
Just why the former Mister Unemployment has been granted a doctorate and by what institution eludes the perceptive reader, but then one supposes that “Reverend Unemployment” would offend the millions of men and not a few women who like to be saluted in that market place mentioned in the Gospels.
Workplace Central Florida receives $24 million dollars annually from those of you who already have jobs, and I say that’s money well-spent. If working people were to keep more of the dollars they earn they’d probably waste their income on a new roof or a more dependable car. How good of the wise and benevolent government people vote for to relieve them of making decisions about the results of their own work.
A few states up, in North Carolina, a Presbyterian church in Charlotte has been fined $4,000 for pruning their own crepe myrtle trees (otherwise known as really big weeds) on their own property.
The city of Charlotte employs a “senior urban forester,” who missed his true calling as a Nazi UberSturmPoopFuhrer, to punish people for taking care of their lawns. If there is a senior urban forester then it follows that there are junior urban foresters and perhaps even stadtwaldjugend marching about in black shorts and snooping in Charlotte’s back yards for unauthorized and disharmonious vegetation.
If you wish to trim your own trees in your own yard in Charlotte you must apply to the city foresters, the Green Gestapo, for a permit, preferably with your cloth cap clutched in your dirty hands, you swine, and your head ‘umbly bowed. If your papers are not in order you will be punished at $100 per branch. The North Carolina Division of Forestry makes the friendly suggestion that you should be should be certified by the National Horticulture Board in order to lop off a branch that’s scratching your car, but we’ll overlook it this time, comrade. We have ways of making your daisies talk, and we know where your tomato plants live.
Punishing people for being tidy and responsible is clearly very profitable for the thugs – um, public servants -- in Charlotte’s city hall: look at a tree, decide that you don’t like the way it’s shaped, and write a ticket for $4,000. Someone in Charlotte, North Carolina is looting lots of money from the people through the misuse of police powers.
But, again, the people of Charlotte, just like the people of every city, have exactly the city government for which they voted.
But in fact most people don’t vote. The turnout for presidential autopen elections every four years barely tops 50% of the electorate; off-year state and local elections are characterized by a few dutiful poll-watchers who are as lonely as a touring opera company in Nashville. Perhaps those who don’t vote are too busy listening to Rush Limbaugh and Oprah Winfrey.
But have no fear, the Republicans are here – only it turns out that some of those running for the office of Autopen of the United States don’t have much of a voting record either. They want your money, though.
Sarah Palin, for instance, is touring the United States in a big ol’ bus in order to ask for money. Now since Mrs. Palin already has lots and lots of money from her book and even more from her speaking tour, and according to rumor has recently bought a really big house in Arizona, just why she needs the few pot-metal coins the Tree Gauleiters haven’t yet seized from you is another philosophical question.
Maybe the voters aren’t showing up because there isn’t much to vote for; the Dancing With the Stars audition rejects presented to us by the Republicans won’t cut it any more than the autopen. To paraphrase Wordsworth, “Patrick Henry! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!”
-30-
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Tour de Hello Kitty
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Tour de Hello Kitty
When did America cease to be a nation of workers and become a community of guys in knee pants?
A recent tiff among those of the male persuasion who address each other as “Dude!” and aren’t joking about it is the alleged doping scandal regarding Lance Armstrong, The All-American-French Boy.
France, the nation who gave the world the great Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, took it all back by inventing the Tour de France. “Tour de France” is a French (obviously) phrase which translates roughly as “boys wearing brightly-colored plastic toadstools on their heads and racing their bicycles.”
Once a year the sort of people who subscribe to PBS and voted for John Kerry become excited about the Tour de Knee Pants, perhaps because their boats are being refitted for the yachting season.
Professional cyclists seem to be the sort of people who, if they actually had jobs, would come to work with cell ‘phones and keys in one hand, and designer bottles of designer water in the other.
As in all races, someone wins a pedally-thing, and the others complain. Lance (what were his parents thinking?) won the Tour de Dude on numerous occasions, much to the annoyance of the French. Now he is accused by his bike-riding guy-dude-homies of having taken dope in order to win the Tour de Pedal-Pushers. Why are these accusations made years after the fact? Did Lance sneer at another bike-riding-guy-dude-homie’s bicycle helmet?
And what is with bicycle helmets, anyway? How does a Glad-Bag on steroids reposing on the top of a bicyclist’s hair protect the bicyclist? If a sport requires a helmet, wear a helmet, not a Hello Kitty fashion accessory.
But here’s the thesis of this article: who could be so excited about winning a bicycle race that he would take strange chemicals and ruin his health in order to win it? And, really, who could be so excited about watching a bicycle race without chemicals, mega-doses of caffeine, for instance? “I say, Percy, wake up; here come the leaders in the Tour de Yawn. Rather. Wot.”
Bicycle racing seems so, well, not American. Does one imagine Zorro riding to the rescue on his trusty bicycle? General Patton on a Schwinn? John Wayne pedaling off into the sunset? President Reagan polishing the saddle of his Raleigh? Teddy Roosevelt wheeling up San Juan Hill with one of those bubbles on his head? George Washington kneeling in the snow and praying while his faithful bicycle stands by? I think not.
Look, bicycling is a healthy sport, and many of us grew up falling off our Western Flyers, but when we were old enough to borrow the car we didn’t reject the Ford Galaxie 500 and choose to go cruisin’ downtown on the old bicycle instead.
Bicycling as a serious sport – what next, helmets and knee-pants and accusations of drug usage in shooting marbles?
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Tour de Hello Kitty
When did America cease to be a nation of workers and become a community of guys in knee pants?
A recent tiff among those of the male persuasion who address each other as “Dude!” and aren’t joking about it is the alleged doping scandal regarding Lance Armstrong, The All-American-French Boy.
France, the nation who gave the world the great Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, took it all back by inventing the Tour de France. “Tour de France” is a French (obviously) phrase which translates roughly as “boys wearing brightly-colored plastic toadstools on their heads and racing their bicycles.”
Once a year the sort of people who subscribe to PBS and voted for John Kerry become excited about the Tour de Knee Pants, perhaps because their boats are being refitted for the yachting season.
Professional cyclists seem to be the sort of people who, if they actually had jobs, would come to work with cell ‘phones and keys in one hand, and designer bottles of designer water in the other.
As in all races, someone wins a pedally-thing, and the others complain. Lance (what were his parents thinking?) won the Tour de Dude on numerous occasions, much to the annoyance of the French. Now he is accused by his bike-riding guy-dude-homies of having taken dope in order to win the Tour de Pedal-Pushers. Why are these accusations made years after the fact? Did Lance sneer at another bike-riding-guy-dude-homie’s bicycle helmet?
And what is with bicycle helmets, anyway? How does a Glad-Bag on steroids reposing on the top of a bicyclist’s hair protect the bicyclist? If a sport requires a helmet, wear a helmet, not a Hello Kitty fashion accessory.
But here’s the thesis of this article: who could be so excited about winning a bicycle race that he would take strange chemicals and ruin his health in order to win it? And, really, who could be so excited about watching a bicycle race without chemicals, mega-doses of caffeine, for instance? “I say, Percy, wake up; here come the leaders in the Tour de Yawn. Rather. Wot.”
Bicycle racing seems so, well, not American. Does one imagine Zorro riding to the rescue on his trusty bicycle? General Patton on a Schwinn? John Wayne pedaling off into the sunset? President Reagan polishing the saddle of his Raleigh? Teddy Roosevelt wheeling up San Juan Hill with one of those bubbles on his head? George Washington kneeling in the snow and praying while his faithful bicycle stands by? I think not.
Look, bicycling is a healthy sport, and many of us grew up falling off our Western Flyers, but when we were old enough to borrow the car we didn’t reject the Ford Galaxie 500 and choose to go cruisin’ downtown on the old bicycle instead.
Bicycling as a serious sport – what next, helmets and knee-pants and accusations of drug usage in shooting marbles?
-30-
Sunday, May 15, 2011
The Class of 2011
Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
THE CLASS OF 2011
Children insist on growing up and going away. Their teachers are not happy about that. Really. Every year the old…um…venerable faculty see their high school seniors off to the new world they will make for themselves. Oh, sure, there are always one or two of whom one can sing “Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone,” but the loss of most of the students is very real, very painful, and very forever. And while the teachers taught them not to ever split infinitives (cough), which they immediately forget, the block form for business letters, which they usually remember, and the possible symbolism of Grendel in Beowulf, there are always lots of other little things one hopes they have learned along the way.
Here then, Class of 2011 are some disconnected factoids your old English teacher meant to tell you earlier in the year, before the month of May very cleverly sneaked up on all of us:
1. In October you will return for homecoming. You will find pretty much the same teachers, school, and friends you left behind. It will all seem very familiar at first. But you won’t be on the team or in the band; it isn’t about you anymore, and that will be oddly disturbing. By October of 2012 most of the students in your old high school won’t know who you are -- or were. And they won't care. You'll just be old people.
2. Some day surprisingly soon you will hear shrieks of insolent laughter from your child’s room. You will find your child and her friends laughing at your yearbook pictures. You will feel very old.
3. Change the oil in your car more often than the manufacturer recommends.
4. Billy Graham attended a public school; Adolf Hitler attended a Christian school. Don’t obsess on labels.
5. You are not going to win the Texas lottery.
6. T-shirts are underwear.
7. MyFace, SpaceBook, Tweeter, and all the rest are surprisingly dangerous to your career and to your safety.
8. When posing for a photograph, never hold your hands folded in front of, um, a certain area of your anatomy. It makes you look as if you just discovered that your zipper is undone.
9. Have you ever noticed that you never see “Matthew 6:5-6” on a bumper sticker?
10. College is not high school.
11. Work is not high school. There is no such thing as an excused absence in adult life. The boss will not care about your special needs, sensitivities, artistic gifts, or traumatic childhood.
12. God made the world. We have the testimony of Genesis and of the Incarnation that all Creation is good. Never let anyone tell you that the world is evil.
13. Most people are good, and can be trusted. But the two-per-centers, like hemorrhoids, do tend to get your attention.
14. Listening to radio commentators with whom you already agree is not participating in our democracy. Until he was in his thirties, Rush Limbaugh never even registered to vote in any place he ever lived. You can do better than that.
15. Why should someone else have to raise your child?
16. Tattoos do have one useful purpose – they will help your relatives identify your body after you die of some weird disease that was on the needle. Oh, yeah, sure, the process is sterile – a tattoo parlor looks like a hospital, right?
17. Your class ranking is little more than a seating chart for graduation, reflecting your performance in a sometimes artificial and often passive situation for the last four years. Your future is up to you.
18. Knowing how to repair things gives you power and autonomy. You will amaze yourself with what you can do with duct-tape, a set of screwdrivers, a set of wrenches, a hammer, and a pair of Vise-grip pliers.
19. Movies are made by committees. Sometimes they get it right. Books are usually written by one person. Sometimes he or she gets it wrong. But there are lots more good books than there are good movies.
20. Put the 'phone down. Grasp the steering wheel firmly with both hands. Stay alive.
21. Save the planet? Reform the establishment? Stop meanies from beating harp seals to death? Get a job first.
22. Time to wear the big-boy pants.
23. Some people are Democrats because they believe the Democratic Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Democrats because they are part of the Socialist / Communist continuum and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Some people are Republicans because they believe the Republican Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Republicans because they have Fascist tendencies and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Hiding out in the woods and refusing to participate is not a logical option.
24. Everyone tells cheerleader jokes, but cheerleaders are among the most successful people in adult life. The discipline, the hard work, the physical demands, the aesthetics, the teamwork, and the refusal to die of embarrassment while one’s mother screams abuse at the cheerleader sponsor do pay off in life.
25. You are the “they.” You are the adult. You are the government. You are the Church. You are the public school system. You decide what will be on the television screen in your home. Your life is your own – don’t become one of the bleating, tweeting sheep.
26. Giving back to the community begins now. Do something as an act of service to humanity -- join the volunteer fire department, teach Sunday school, clean up the city park one hour a week, assist at the nursing home.
27. Don’t bore people with sad stories about your horrible childhood. No one ever lived a Leave It To Beaver or Cosby existence. Get over the narcissism.
28. The shouting, abusive, 1-900-Send-Money TV preacher with the bouffant hairdo strutting about on the low-prole stage set while beating on a Bible and yelling is not going to come to the house in the middle of the night when your child is dying, you don’t have a job, and you don’t know where to turn. Your pastor – Chaucer’s Parsoun -- may not be cool, may not be a clever speaker, may not sport a Rolex watch, and may not have a really bad wig, but he’s here for you.
29. If you insist on taking your shirt off in public, shave your armpit hair. Or braid it. Or something.
30. Don’t wear a shirt that says “(bleep) Civilization” to a job interview.
31. When someone asks for a love offering, offer him your love and watch his reaction. He doesn’t want a love offering; he wants money. Sloppy language is used to manipulate people. Call things by their proper names, and hang on to your wallet.
32. Stop eating out of bags and boxes. Learn how to use a knife and fork.
33. Life is not a beer commercial.
34. On the Monday after graduation you’ll be just another unemployed American.
35. When you find yourself facing a dinner setting with more than two forks, don’t panic; no one else knows quite what to do with three forks either. No one’s watching anyway, so just enjoy the meal.
36. What is the truth? Is it something you want to believe? Something repeated over and over until you come to believe it in spite of your own experience?
37. Green ideology means that gasoline costs more than you make.
38. A great secret to success in a job or in life is simply to show up.
39. No one ever agrees on where commas go. If someone shows you a grammar book dictating the use of commas one way, you can find another grammar book to contradict it.
40. Most people do not look good in baseball caps.
41. There is no such thing as a non-denominational worship service.
42. You will always be your parents’ child. You may become a doctor, lawyer, banker, or, God help you, president, but your mother will still ask you if you’ve had enough to eat and remind you to take your jacket in case the night turns cold. And parents are a constant surprise -- they always have new knowledge you need to acquire.
43. Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is all the English grammar and usage book you’ll ever need. If more people understood that and had a library card, every English teacher in America would be an ex-English teacher standing in line at the Wal-Mart employment office. Keep it a secret, okay?
44. From now on the menus should be in words, not pictures.
45. According to some vaguely named family institute or some such, raising a child to the age of eighteen costs the family $153,000 and a few odd cents. The taxpayers of this state spend about $5,000 per year on each student. Thus, a great many people have pooled their resources and spent about $213,000 on you since you were born. They did not do this in order for you to sit around complaining about how unfair life is.
46. There was never a powerful secret society variously known as The Preps, The Rich Kids, or The Popular Kids, just as there are no unmarked U.N. helicopters. But if you ask me, those guys who play chess need watching; I hear that the pawns are reporting all your movements to The 666 Beast computer in Belgium via computer chips in your school i.d. card.
47. Thank you notes: write ’em. It shows class. You can write; you’re a high school graduate, remember?
48. Don’t reach for the pen in someone else’s pocket. Carry your own.
49. The school award you should have received: For Compassion. While I must confess that I was happy to see some of you on a daily basis because that way I was sure my tires would be safe, there was never one single instance of any of you taking any advantage or being unkind in any way to those who were emotionally or physically vulnerable. Indeed, most of you took the extra step in being very protective of the very special young people who are blended into the student population. There is no nicely-framed award for that compassion, not here, anyway, but even now there is one with your name on it on the walls of a mansion which, we are assured, awaits each of us, in a house with many mansions. God never asked you to be theologically correct; He asked you to be compassionate, and you were. Keep the kindness within you always.
50. Take a long, lingering look at your classmates during graduation. You’ll never see all of them ever again. In ten years many of you will be happy and honorable. Others will have failed life, and at only 28 will be sad, tired, bitter old men and women with no hope. Given that you all went to the same cinder-block school with the same blinky fluorescent lights, suffered the same old boring teachers, drove along the same dusty roads, and grew up in the same fading little town, what will have made the difference?
Well, Class of 2011, it’s time to let go. Thanks for everything: for the paper balls and pizza and pep rallies and recitals and concerts and games, for your thoughts and essays, for your laughter and jokes, for usually paying attention to roll call (“Focus, class... focus...focus...focus...”), for really thinking about Macbeth and Becket and Beowulf, and those wonderful pilgrims (who, of course, are us) forever journeying to Canterbury, for doing those business letters and resumes’ over and over until YOU were proud of them, for wrestling with iambic pentameter, for all the love you gave everyone around you every day. Take all those good things with you in your adventures through life.
And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take:
For ever, and for ever, farewell...
--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.iii.115-117
-30-
mhall46184@aol.com
THE CLASS OF 2011
Children insist on growing up and going away. Their teachers are not happy about that. Really. Every year the old…um…venerable faculty see their high school seniors off to the new world they will make for themselves. Oh, sure, there are always one or two of whom one can sing “Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone,” but the loss of most of the students is very real, very painful, and very forever. And while the teachers taught them not to ever split infinitives (cough), which they immediately forget, the block form for business letters, which they usually remember, and the possible symbolism of Grendel in Beowulf, there are always lots of other little things one hopes they have learned along the way.
Here then, Class of 2011 are some disconnected factoids your old English teacher meant to tell you earlier in the year, before the month of May very cleverly sneaked up on all of us:
1. In October you will return for homecoming. You will find pretty much the same teachers, school, and friends you left behind. It will all seem very familiar at first. But you won’t be on the team or in the band; it isn’t about you anymore, and that will be oddly disturbing. By October of 2012 most of the students in your old high school won’t know who you are -- or were. And they won't care. You'll just be old people.
2. Some day surprisingly soon you will hear shrieks of insolent laughter from your child’s room. You will find your child and her friends laughing at your yearbook pictures. You will feel very old.
3. Change the oil in your car more often than the manufacturer recommends.
4. Billy Graham attended a public school; Adolf Hitler attended a Christian school. Don’t obsess on labels.
5. You are not going to win the Texas lottery.
6. T-shirts are underwear.
7. MyFace, SpaceBook, Tweeter, and all the rest are surprisingly dangerous to your career and to your safety.
8. When posing for a photograph, never hold your hands folded in front of, um, a certain area of your anatomy. It makes you look as if you just discovered that your zipper is undone.
9. Have you ever noticed that you never see “Matthew 6:5-6” on a bumper sticker?
10. College is not high school.
11. Work is not high school. There is no such thing as an excused absence in adult life. The boss will not care about your special needs, sensitivities, artistic gifts, or traumatic childhood.
12. God made the world. We have the testimony of Genesis and of the Incarnation that all Creation is good. Never let anyone tell you that the world is evil.
13. Most people are good, and can be trusted. But the two-per-centers, like hemorrhoids, do tend to get your attention.
14. Listening to radio commentators with whom you already agree is not participating in our democracy. Until he was in his thirties, Rush Limbaugh never even registered to vote in any place he ever lived. You can do better than that.
15. Why should someone else have to raise your child?
16. Tattoos do have one useful purpose – they will help your relatives identify your body after you die of some weird disease that was on the needle. Oh, yeah, sure, the process is sterile – a tattoo parlor looks like a hospital, right?
17. Your class ranking is little more than a seating chart for graduation, reflecting your performance in a sometimes artificial and often passive situation for the last four years. Your future is up to you.
18. Knowing how to repair things gives you power and autonomy. You will amaze yourself with what you can do with duct-tape, a set of screwdrivers, a set of wrenches, a hammer, and a pair of Vise-grip pliers.
19. Movies are made by committees. Sometimes they get it right. Books are usually written by one person. Sometimes he or she gets it wrong. But there are lots more good books than there are good movies.
20. Put the 'phone down. Grasp the steering wheel firmly with both hands. Stay alive.
21. Save the planet? Reform the establishment? Stop meanies from beating harp seals to death? Get a job first.
22. Time to wear the big-boy pants.
23. Some people are Democrats because they believe the Democratic Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Democrats because they are part of the Socialist / Communist continuum and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Some people are Republicans because they believe the Republican Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Republicans because they have Fascist tendencies and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Hiding out in the woods and refusing to participate is not a logical option.
24. Everyone tells cheerleader jokes, but cheerleaders are among the most successful people in adult life. The discipline, the hard work, the physical demands, the aesthetics, the teamwork, and the refusal to die of embarrassment while one’s mother screams abuse at the cheerleader sponsor do pay off in life.
25. You are the “they.” You are the adult. You are the government. You are the Church. You are the public school system. You decide what will be on the television screen in your home. Your life is your own – don’t become one of the bleating, tweeting sheep.
26. Giving back to the community begins now. Do something as an act of service to humanity -- join the volunteer fire department, teach Sunday school, clean up the city park one hour a week, assist at the nursing home.
27. Don’t bore people with sad stories about your horrible childhood. No one ever lived a Leave It To Beaver or Cosby existence. Get over the narcissism.
28. The shouting, abusive, 1-900-Send-Money TV preacher with the bouffant hairdo strutting about on the low-prole stage set while beating on a Bible and yelling is not going to come to the house in the middle of the night when your child is dying, you don’t have a job, and you don’t know where to turn. Your pastor – Chaucer’s Parsoun -- may not be cool, may not be a clever speaker, may not sport a Rolex watch, and may not have a really bad wig, but he’s here for you.
29. If you insist on taking your shirt off in public, shave your armpit hair. Or braid it. Or something.
30. Don’t wear a shirt that says “(bleep) Civilization” to a job interview.
31. When someone asks for a love offering, offer him your love and watch his reaction. He doesn’t want a love offering; he wants money. Sloppy language is used to manipulate people. Call things by their proper names, and hang on to your wallet.
32. Stop eating out of bags and boxes. Learn how to use a knife and fork.
33. Life is not a beer commercial.
34. On the Monday after graduation you’ll be just another unemployed American.
35. When you find yourself facing a dinner setting with more than two forks, don’t panic; no one else knows quite what to do with three forks either. No one’s watching anyway, so just enjoy the meal.
36. What is the truth? Is it something you want to believe? Something repeated over and over until you come to believe it in spite of your own experience?
37. Green ideology means that gasoline costs more than you make.
38. A great secret to success in a job or in life is simply to show up.
39. No one ever agrees on where commas go. If someone shows you a grammar book dictating the use of commas one way, you can find another grammar book to contradict it.
40. Most people do not look good in baseball caps.
41. There is no such thing as a non-denominational worship service.
42. You will always be your parents’ child. You may become a doctor, lawyer, banker, or, God help you, president, but your mother will still ask you if you’ve had enough to eat and remind you to take your jacket in case the night turns cold. And parents are a constant surprise -- they always have new knowledge you need to acquire.
43. Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is all the English grammar and usage book you’ll ever need. If more people understood that and had a library card, every English teacher in America would be an ex-English teacher standing in line at the Wal-Mart employment office. Keep it a secret, okay?
44. From now on the menus should be in words, not pictures.
45. According to some vaguely named family institute or some such, raising a child to the age of eighteen costs the family $153,000 and a few odd cents. The taxpayers of this state spend about $5,000 per year on each student. Thus, a great many people have pooled their resources and spent about $213,000 on you since you were born. They did not do this in order for you to sit around complaining about how unfair life is.
46. There was never a powerful secret society variously known as The Preps, The Rich Kids, or The Popular Kids, just as there are no unmarked U.N. helicopters. But if you ask me, those guys who play chess need watching; I hear that the pawns are reporting all your movements to The 666 Beast computer in Belgium via computer chips in your school i.d. card.
47. Thank you notes: write ’em. It shows class. You can write; you’re a high school graduate, remember?
48. Don’t reach for the pen in someone else’s pocket. Carry your own.
49. The school award you should have received: For Compassion. While I must confess that I was happy to see some of you on a daily basis because that way I was sure my tires would be safe, there was never one single instance of any of you taking any advantage or being unkind in any way to those who were emotionally or physically vulnerable. Indeed, most of you took the extra step in being very protective of the very special young people who are blended into the student population. There is no nicely-framed award for that compassion, not here, anyway, but even now there is one with your name on it on the walls of a mansion which, we are assured, awaits each of us, in a house with many mansions. God never asked you to be theologically correct; He asked you to be compassionate, and you were. Keep the kindness within you always.
50. Take a long, lingering look at your classmates during graduation. You’ll never see all of them ever again. In ten years many of you will be happy and honorable. Others will have failed life, and at only 28 will be sad, tired, bitter old men and women with no hope. Given that you all went to the same cinder-block school with the same blinky fluorescent lights, suffered the same old boring teachers, drove along the same dusty roads, and grew up in the same fading little town, what will have made the difference?
Well, Class of 2011, it’s time to let go. Thanks for everything: for the paper balls and pizza and pep rallies and recitals and concerts and games, for your thoughts and essays, for your laughter and jokes, for usually paying attention to roll call (“Focus, class... focus...focus...focus...”), for really thinking about Macbeth and Becket and Beowulf, and those wonderful pilgrims (who, of course, are us) forever journeying to Canterbury, for doing those business letters and resumes’ over and over until YOU were proud of them, for wrestling with iambic pentameter, for all the love you gave everyone around you every day. Take all those good things with you in your adventures through life.
And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take:
For ever, and for ever, farewell...
--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.iii.115-117
-30-
Sunday, May 8, 2011
With Our Thrift-Shop Televisions We Will Conquer the World
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
With Our Thrift-Shop Televisions We Will Conquer the World
With the death of what’s-his-name in a small airborne assault in the great tradition of American raiders dating back to John Paul Jones, the world waits and wonders and ponders this great question: couldn’t the Scourge of Allah afford a better television set?
Did anyone ever tell The Pride of Riyadh “Hey, Fatwallah Guy, they’ve got flat screens now. I can score you one down at the souk for maybe two hundred filthy pagan dollars.”
But The Big Wookie was apparently comfortable with his thrift shop 15-inch and his Just For Bin dye job. Images of the old poop show him squatting on the floor huddled in a blanket and surfing the channels in a filthy room that any monotoothed Hardin County nester would disdain.
Wikipedia reports that the Lyin’ of the Desert’s favorite activities were charity, reading, horses, writing poetry, and following the English soccer team Arsenal. He was a soft-spoken man who perhaps enjoyed walks on the beach and candle-light beheadings of infidels. Hey, girls, isn’t that pretty much the blind date your well-meaning cousin set you up with after your guy Skippy cheated on you with your best friend Tammy?
The Big O was quite the family man, too. No one is clear on just how many wives he infested, and several of his exes (none in Texas) were never seen again. He sperm-donored some 20-25 children, and before his death was living with three wives, which may explain the haunted look on his face.
Did this Ward Cleaver of the Sands attend PTA meetings?
And imagine the home life of the family:
“Daddy, daddy! We’re playing Arabs and Jews, and Brother #12 won’t ever let me be the Arab! Why do I have to be tortured and beheaded all the time?”
“Now, boys, your father’s very busy plotting world domination and global genocide of the infidels; you go outside and play with the nice new Russian Kalashnikovs he gave you for World Peace Day.”
“Aw, shucks, honey, you’re the greatest. I think I’ll wait awhile before having you stoned to death.”
The sad reality is that Lurch was an evil man, a genocidal maniac who inspired others to murder thousands of people, most of them of his own religion. This spoiled son of the rich was technically trained but not educated, and loved machines – especially machine guns – but disposed of humans as mere obstacles to his demon-haunted fantasies of a perfect world.
When a good man dies one often says “We shall not see his like again,” and this is true. All good men exhibit the traits of honesty, loyalty, courage, and civilization, and yet they really are individuals.
But the evil little men who bedevil the world – they are drainage-ditch-common, mumbling and muttering as they listen to The Voices in grubby rented rooms or even grubbier tents, scribbling into their notebooks or tapping into their machines their eternal shrieks against God and man, their endlessly recycled versions of Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Das Kapital, and warehouses full of sophomoric manifestos.
Alas that we will see his like again.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
With Our Thrift-Shop Televisions We Will Conquer the World
With the death of what’s-his-name in a small airborne assault in the great tradition of American raiders dating back to John Paul Jones, the world waits and wonders and ponders this great question: couldn’t the Scourge of Allah afford a better television set?
Did anyone ever tell The Pride of Riyadh “Hey, Fatwallah Guy, they’ve got flat screens now. I can score you one down at the souk for maybe two hundred filthy pagan dollars.”
But The Big Wookie was apparently comfortable with his thrift shop 15-inch and his Just For Bin dye job. Images of the old poop show him squatting on the floor huddled in a blanket and surfing the channels in a filthy room that any monotoothed Hardin County nester would disdain.
Wikipedia reports that the Lyin’ of the Desert’s favorite activities were charity, reading, horses, writing poetry, and following the English soccer team Arsenal. He was a soft-spoken man who perhaps enjoyed walks on the beach and candle-light beheadings of infidels. Hey, girls, isn’t that pretty much the blind date your well-meaning cousin set you up with after your guy Skippy cheated on you with your best friend Tammy?
The Big O was quite the family man, too. No one is clear on just how many wives he infested, and several of his exes (none in Texas) were never seen again. He sperm-donored some 20-25 children, and before his death was living with three wives, which may explain the haunted look on his face.
Did this Ward Cleaver of the Sands attend PTA meetings?
And imagine the home life of the family:
“Daddy, daddy! We’re playing Arabs and Jews, and Brother #12 won’t ever let me be the Arab! Why do I have to be tortured and beheaded all the time?”
“Now, boys, your father’s very busy plotting world domination and global genocide of the infidels; you go outside and play with the nice new Russian Kalashnikovs he gave you for World Peace Day.”
“Aw, shucks, honey, you’re the greatest. I think I’ll wait awhile before having you stoned to death.”
The sad reality is that Lurch was an evil man, a genocidal maniac who inspired others to murder thousands of people, most of them of his own religion. This spoiled son of the rich was technically trained but not educated, and loved machines – especially machine guns – but disposed of humans as mere obstacles to his demon-haunted fantasies of a perfect world.
When a good man dies one often says “We shall not see his like again,” and this is true. All good men exhibit the traits of honesty, loyalty, courage, and civilization, and yet they really are individuals.
But the evil little men who bedevil the world – they are drainage-ditch-common, mumbling and muttering as they listen to The Voices in grubby rented rooms or even grubbier tents, scribbling into their notebooks or tapping into their machines their eternal shrieks against God and man, their endlessly recycled versions of Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Das Kapital, and warehouses full of sophomoric manifestos.
Alas that we will see his like again.
-30-
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Always Wear a Clean Shirt at a Wedding
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Always Wear a Clean Shirt at a Wedding
During the recent royal wedding one could not help noticing the wild, bizarre headgear that seemed to detract from the sacredness of the occasion – I refer to hairy Prince Harry’s hair, of course. He seemed to be channeling Donald Trump. Oh, the follicles of one’s youth!
Prince Harry was in military uniform, and one wonders why his commanding officer didn’t tell him “Lieutenant, prince or no prince, you get that hair cut to regulation.”
Otherwise, how good to see women wearing hats in church and men respectfully bareheaded in the presence of God. Many middle-aged men have done great harm with the me-me-me thing of teaching younger men that respect for God, women, and country is secondary to keeping one’s costume ballcap on during all occasions because, like, y’know, this cap is who I am.
Yes, what man does not want to be a made-in-China cap?
The young princes, both pilots, looked great in their uniforms, and their families and friends were very proud of them. One imagines the awkwardness of someone opposed to military service getting married: “The groom and best man were resplendent in matching cable-knit sweaters.”
No one in the congregation displayed a cell ‘phone. Now that’s class.
No one in the congregation wore tee-shirts.
No one in the congregation wore advertising on his or her clothing.
No guitars. Thank God.
No cringe-making amateur musical moments.
No microphones or loudspeakers dangling from the ceiling.
No miscued audiotapes of “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”
No one in the congregation called out “Where’s the birth certificate, William!?”
Baby sister as maid of honor and baby brother as best man – a brilliant way of avoiding squabbles and crowds on the altar.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London both mentioned God. This could distress NBC and CBS.
There were no air-raid sirens during the wedding; NATO hasn’t yet gotten around to bombing England.
Some gossipy old women on the television judged the guest list and found it wanting. Hey, Miz Grundy and Aunt Pittypat, not your call, okay? Not your family, not your decision. Just be happy if your own children ask you to their weddings.
Finally, although the wedding pictures were lovely, let us not neglect the great photograph of Princess Kate in khaki and boots in a muddy field, a shotgun in one hand and a brace of fowl in the other. Now that’s an English princess of the old school! Cue that country song about the tractor.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Always Wear a Clean Shirt at a Wedding
During the recent royal wedding one could not help noticing the wild, bizarre headgear that seemed to detract from the sacredness of the occasion – I refer to hairy Prince Harry’s hair, of course. He seemed to be channeling Donald Trump. Oh, the follicles of one’s youth!
Prince Harry was in military uniform, and one wonders why his commanding officer didn’t tell him “Lieutenant, prince or no prince, you get that hair cut to regulation.”
Otherwise, how good to see women wearing hats in church and men respectfully bareheaded in the presence of God. Many middle-aged men have done great harm with the me-me-me thing of teaching younger men that respect for God, women, and country is secondary to keeping one’s costume ballcap on during all occasions because, like, y’know, this cap is who I am.
Yes, what man does not want to be a made-in-China cap?
The young princes, both pilots, looked great in their uniforms, and their families and friends were very proud of them. One imagines the awkwardness of someone opposed to military service getting married: “The groom and best man were resplendent in matching cable-knit sweaters.”
No one in the congregation displayed a cell ‘phone. Now that’s class.
No one in the congregation wore tee-shirts.
No one in the congregation wore advertising on his or her clothing.
No guitars. Thank God.
No cringe-making amateur musical moments.
No microphones or loudspeakers dangling from the ceiling.
No miscued audiotapes of “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”
No one in the congregation called out “Where’s the birth certificate, William!?”
Baby sister as maid of honor and baby brother as best man – a brilliant way of avoiding squabbles and crowds on the altar.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London both mentioned God. This could distress NBC and CBS.
There were no air-raid sirens during the wedding; NATO hasn’t yet gotten around to bombing England.
Some gossipy old women on the television judged the guest list and found it wanting. Hey, Miz Grundy and Aunt Pittypat, not your call, okay? Not your family, not your decision. Just be happy if your own children ask you to their weddings.
Finally, although the wedding pictures were lovely, let us not neglect the great photograph of Princess Kate in khaki and boots in a muddy field, a shotgun in one hand and a brace of fowl in the other. Now that’s an English princess of the old school! Cue that country song about the tractor.
-30-
Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Mice That Ate My Car
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Mice That Ate My Car
The micezillas are eating my car.
Why do mice eat the wiring of some makes of cars but, apparently, not of others? My mother’s pickup, made by Brand X, has lived in the country for years, and has yet to host the first mouse. My car, on the other paw, Brand Y, is like a cruise-ship buffet for the better class of rural rodentia.
This is probably because of man-made global warming and so is your fault for not using squiggly light bulbs.
The folks at the dealership are kind and patient and helpful, but lately they look from the gnawed wiring to me and then back to the gnawed wiring, all with profound disappointment, not unlike my parents when they saw the algebra grade on my report card.
The latest manifestation of rats in the wiring was the failure of my right-turn signal. I was quite worried about not having a right-turn signal, not only because I did not want a ticket but because of the safety issue. Further, I felt that good people would stare and point, and dismiss me as unworthy of civilized company because I wasn’t deploying the signal for right turns. I needn’t have worried; in East Texas folks almost never use turn signals at all. Indeed, the safe driver who signals for a turn is an eccentric.
But I drove the afflicted vehicle for a while because I could not endure the guilt-making of the guys at the shop. No sidewalk yellevangelist appears to be as despairing of your soul as a quiet, mournful service writer who really wants the best for you but can only shake his head at your miserable failure to control your rats. A yellevangelist loudly demands “How’s your soul, sinner!?” A service writer quietly and sympathetically asks “Do you know how much a new wiring harness will cost you?”
Were mice one of the plagues of Egypt? Was the harness of Pharaoh’s custom-built chariot cursed with critters? “So let it be bitten; so let it not run.”
I have sewn the ground beneath my car with rat poison, but anything that feasts on wiring laughs scornfully at poison. Someone suggested mothballs, which seems illogical since the wiring is not being eaten with moths. I placed sticky traps, which stuck nothing. After a water moccasin beat itself to death with a shovel (because, PETA knows, I would never, ever wish harm to one of our reptilian co-inhabitants of Gaia, the Water Planet) I respectfully flung its corpse underneath the car as a critter-deterrent.
If I had placed the snake on the windshield it would have been a windshield viper.
And yet the mice cometh and they goeth, and they doeth so in insolence.
In my despair I turned my hopes to a higher power, the internet, which sayeth unto us that some new wiring is coated with soy-based insulation which rats and mice find a part of this complete, nutritious breakfast. Hey, it was on the internet, so it must be true, right?
The ‘net says that I should spread forth rat poison, mothballs, and sticky traps, which I had already done, and avoid soy-based wiring harnesses. The dead snake was my idea; I’m thinking of getting a patent for it. As for the putative soy-based insulation, is there anyone who ever asked a car salesman about the nutritional quality of the wiring harness? Is the battery labeled for its calorie count? Are cruise controls fattening?
I’m at my rats’ end in the matter of the micezillas, and am definitely open to suggestion.
In the meantime, as you go to sleep tonight, remember that The Mice of the Baskervilles might be coming for your car in the hours of darkness when evil is exalted. They might even be under your bed, lurking there, grinning, with glowing green eyes, waiting to feast upon your soy-based flesh, waiting, waiting, waiting….
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Mice That Ate My Car
The micezillas are eating my car.
Why do mice eat the wiring of some makes of cars but, apparently, not of others? My mother’s pickup, made by Brand X, has lived in the country for years, and has yet to host the first mouse. My car, on the other paw, Brand Y, is like a cruise-ship buffet for the better class of rural rodentia.
This is probably because of man-made global warming and so is your fault for not using squiggly light bulbs.
The folks at the dealership are kind and patient and helpful, but lately they look from the gnawed wiring to me and then back to the gnawed wiring, all with profound disappointment, not unlike my parents when they saw the algebra grade on my report card.
The latest manifestation of rats in the wiring was the failure of my right-turn signal. I was quite worried about not having a right-turn signal, not only because I did not want a ticket but because of the safety issue. Further, I felt that good people would stare and point, and dismiss me as unworthy of civilized company because I wasn’t deploying the signal for right turns. I needn’t have worried; in East Texas folks almost never use turn signals at all. Indeed, the safe driver who signals for a turn is an eccentric.
But I drove the afflicted vehicle for a while because I could not endure the guilt-making of the guys at the shop. No sidewalk yellevangelist appears to be as despairing of your soul as a quiet, mournful service writer who really wants the best for you but can only shake his head at your miserable failure to control your rats. A yellevangelist loudly demands “How’s your soul, sinner!?” A service writer quietly and sympathetically asks “Do you know how much a new wiring harness will cost you?”
Were mice one of the plagues of Egypt? Was the harness of Pharaoh’s custom-built chariot cursed with critters? “So let it be bitten; so let it not run.”
I have sewn the ground beneath my car with rat poison, but anything that feasts on wiring laughs scornfully at poison. Someone suggested mothballs, which seems illogical since the wiring is not being eaten with moths. I placed sticky traps, which stuck nothing. After a water moccasin beat itself to death with a shovel (because, PETA knows, I would never, ever wish harm to one of our reptilian co-inhabitants of Gaia, the Water Planet) I respectfully flung its corpse underneath the car as a critter-deterrent.
If I had placed the snake on the windshield it would have been a windshield viper.
And yet the mice cometh and they goeth, and they doeth so in insolence.
In my despair I turned my hopes to a higher power, the internet, which sayeth unto us that some new wiring is coated with soy-based insulation which rats and mice find a part of this complete, nutritious breakfast. Hey, it was on the internet, so it must be true, right?
The ‘net says that I should spread forth rat poison, mothballs, and sticky traps, which I had already done, and avoid soy-based wiring harnesses. The dead snake was my idea; I’m thinking of getting a patent for it. As for the putative soy-based insulation, is there anyone who ever asked a car salesman about the nutritional quality of the wiring harness? Is the battery labeled for its calorie count? Are cruise controls fattening?
I’m at my rats’ end in the matter of the micezillas, and am definitely open to suggestion.
In the meantime, as you go to sleep tonight, remember that The Mice of the Baskervilles might be coming for your car in the hours of darkness when evil is exalted. They might even be under your bed, lurking there, grinning, with glowing green eyes, waiting to feast upon your soy-based flesh, waiting, waiting, waiting….
-30-
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Russian Easter Overture
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Russian Easter Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral piece “Russian Easter Overture” premiered during Christmas of 1888. This is not necessarily an irony since, as the old saying goes, there is no Easter without Christmas and no Christmas without Easter.
REO lasts about as long as “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” that once well-known whine about the local and the temporary, but is a sound poem that celebrates the universal and the transcendent. REO begins very solemnly with echoes of Russian Orthodox hymnology as an image of the grimness of Holy Saturday: Jesus has been murdered and all is darkness and waiting. The music then transitions to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter morning, and finally in the third part is light and frivolous, symbolizing the innocent fun of feasting and merriment that is fitting and proper in its time and place.
The progression of the piece, then, is mourning, joy, and secular delight, all sanctioned by God.
But here’s a problem: to understand the Russian Easter Overture in any of its parts one would have to know more about the Easter than plastic Easter eggs made by slaves in China toiling under their argus-eyed masters.
This is not to deny that Easter eggs should be hunted, even though whole forests have been leveled by Republican (no doubt) chainsaws so that bleak, humorless scriveners sourcing Jack Chick comics could write newspaper articles (their number is legion) denouncing Easter eggs as pagan.
Well, they probably are.
And so are Christmas trees. And, come to think of it, marriage pre-dates Christianity too.
But as St. Teresa of Avila said, there is a time for penance and there is a time for partridge, the partridge part meaning a good, merry meal with lots of jokes and laughter.
I am sorry that I can’t remember anything else St. Teresa said; I should have paid better attention in Sunday school.
Our parents taught us that dessert comes after the meat-and-potatoes. First we eat a good, solid, no-nonsense meal so that we may enjoy good health, and then, if we have been good, we are permitted ice cream or cake. Easter is like that, and so is Christmas. First comes the sense, and then comes the nonsense, and both are good in their proper sequence.
One reads of such events as community Easter egg hunts being held not after Easter morning, but before, and even on Good Friday, and that is teaching our children that they may gorge themselves on candy and not bother with the meat and vegetables at all.
And speaking of vegetables, you may have noticed that most of the secular calendars and even some Christian ones have been bullied this year into recognizing next Friday as Earth Day, which is silly at best. On this planet every day is an earth day, just as on Venus every day is a venusian day. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant A Preface to Paradise Lost, observes that in Milton’s brilliant poem Adam and Eve, who became too proud to bow to God, ended up humbling themselves before a tree, a really large vegetable. Enviros have never met any created life form, including an amoeba or paramecium, to which they are unwilling to degrade themselves and sacrifice other humans.
Rimsky-Korsakov remembered what he was taught in Sunday school, and so did not write the “Russian Earth Day Overture.”
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Russian Easter Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral piece “Russian Easter Overture” premiered during Christmas of 1888. This is not necessarily an irony since, as the old saying goes, there is no Easter without Christmas and no Christmas without Easter.
REO lasts about as long as “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” that once well-known whine about the local and the temporary, but is a sound poem that celebrates the universal and the transcendent. REO begins very solemnly with echoes of Russian Orthodox hymnology as an image of the grimness of Holy Saturday: Jesus has been murdered and all is darkness and waiting. The music then transitions to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter morning, and finally in the third part is light and frivolous, symbolizing the innocent fun of feasting and merriment that is fitting and proper in its time and place.
The progression of the piece, then, is mourning, joy, and secular delight, all sanctioned by God.
But here’s a problem: to understand the Russian Easter Overture in any of its parts one would have to know more about the Easter than plastic Easter eggs made by slaves in China toiling under their argus-eyed masters.
This is not to deny that Easter eggs should be hunted, even though whole forests have been leveled by Republican (no doubt) chainsaws so that bleak, humorless scriveners sourcing Jack Chick comics could write newspaper articles (their number is legion) denouncing Easter eggs as pagan.
Well, they probably are.
And so are Christmas trees. And, come to think of it, marriage pre-dates Christianity too.
But as St. Teresa of Avila said, there is a time for penance and there is a time for partridge, the partridge part meaning a good, merry meal with lots of jokes and laughter.
I am sorry that I can’t remember anything else St. Teresa said; I should have paid better attention in Sunday school.
Our parents taught us that dessert comes after the meat-and-potatoes. First we eat a good, solid, no-nonsense meal so that we may enjoy good health, and then, if we have been good, we are permitted ice cream or cake. Easter is like that, and so is Christmas. First comes the sense, and then comes the nonsense, and both are good in their proper sequence.
One reads of such events as community Easter egg hunts being held not after Easter morning, but before, and even on Good Friday, and that is teaching our children that they may gorge themselves on candy and not bother with the meat and vegetables at all.
And speaking of vegetables, you may have noticed that most of the secular calendars and even some Christian ones have been bullied this year into recognizing next Friday as Earth Day, which is silly at best. On this planet every day is an earth day, just as on Venus every day is a venusian day. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant A Preface to Paradise Lost, observes that in Milton’s brilliant poem Adam and Eve, who became too proud to bow to God, ended up humbling themselves before a tree, a really large vegetable. Enviros have never met any created life form, including an amoeba or paramecium, to which they are unwilling to degrade themselves and sacrifice other humans.
Rimsky-Korsakov remembered what he was taught in Sunday school, and so did not write the “Russian Earth Day Overture.”
-30-
Sunday, April 10, 2011
With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World!
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World
The other day I spent several hours proctoring a standardized test of the sort so beloved of a multinational entity named Pearson – young Texans sitting alphabetically at tables in a gymnasium and silently blotting bubbles and writing essays within the lines.
If you want to know who or what Pearson is, go to www.pearson.com and, well, good luck. I think Pearson, not China, owns us.
The State of Pearson, um, Texas gave me not just one but two different booklets explaining my difficult task, and a sheet of paper with an oath of secrecy requiring me not to know anything about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing and not to speak to anyone about that which I did not know about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing, and what could be more logical than that?
As I walked my post in an unmilitary fashion for Pearson-ness I thought upon these things:
1. I am old.
2. I am overweight.
3. I am holding a coffee cup.
4. I am supervising people who are working but am not actually doing anything useful myself.
5. Thus, I must be a Chief Petty Officer.
Some works of literature will never serve as sources of gobbets for standardized tests. You may have noticed that there are now only three contemporary categories of fiction, one for men and two for women.
The covers of every new book for men feature, in dark tones, any combination of the following: 1. an image of the Moscow Kremlin, 2. an image of an onion-domed Russian church, 3. a swastika, 4. a hammer-and-sickle, and 5. a semi-automatic pistol.
For women there are two categories. All the covers of books in the first category show precisely two – never one, never three – Adirondack chairs on a beach. As we all know, every woman’s life is centered on two Adirondack chairs on a beach and not on her job at BurgerX-Treem while her parasite accessory hangs out in their trailer all day playing video games. Also note that the beach is never cluttered with ranks of rotting seaweed or piles of beer cans.
The second category of fiction for women is all about a pale, rather vacant-eyed young blonde wearing a white beanie with two white strings hanging down. I have no idea why.
What is The Main Idea? Give support from the text. Do not write outside the lines.
As for me, I look forward to seeing a book with a cover featuring a Chinese girl wearing a white beanie while posing in front of the Kremlin with a semi-automatic pistol, tap-dancing on a swastika, and proctoring a standardized test, all at the same time.
Let us compare notes by candlelight, in a hidden underground bunker outside Prague, about conspiracy theories, albino test proctors lurking in shadowy Vatican corridors, secret Templar codes, hidden Nazi gold stashed in a 1939 Imperial Airways passenger plane submerged at the bottom of Lake Sam Rayburn, the Club of Rome, the Third Murderer in Macbeth, the 666 Beast Computer in Belgium, demented Navy CPOs on secret missions to poison the world’s supply of lapsang souchang, and King Solomon’s DNA hidden in a microchip – they can all be traced back to (dramatic pause) Pearson’s. Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
With Our Number Two Pencils We Will Rule the World
The other day I spent several hours proctoring a standardized test of the sort so beloved of a multinational entity named Pearson – young Texans sitting alphabetically at tables in a gymnasium and silently blotting bubbles and writing essays within the lines.
If you want to know who or what Pearson is, go to www.pearson.com and, well, good luck. I think Pearson, not China, owns us.
The State of Pearson, um, Texas gave me not just one but two different booklets explaining my difficult task, and a sheet of paper with an oath of secrecy requiring me not to know anything about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing and not to speak to anyone about that which I did not know about what a hundred or so young’uns were doing, and what could be more logical than that?
As I walked my post in an unmilitary fashion for Pearson-ness I thought upon these things:
1. I am old.
2. I am overweight.
3. I am holding a coffee cup.
4. I am supervising people who are working but am not actually doing anything useful myself.
5. Thus, I must be a Chief Petty Officer.
Some works of literature will never serve as sources of gobbets for standardized tests. You may have noticed that there are now only three contemporary categories of fiction, one for men and two for women.
The covers of every new book for men feature, in dark tones, any combination of the following: 1. an image of the Moscow Kremlin, 2. an image of an onion-domed Russian church, 3. a swastika, 4. a hammer-and-sickle, and 5. a semi-automatic pistol.
For women there are two categories. All the covers of books in the first category show precisely two – never one, never three – Adirondack chairs on a beach. As we all know, every woman’s life is centered on two Adirondack chairs on a beach and not on her job at BurgerX-Treem while her parasite accessory hangs out in their trailer all day playing video games. Also note that the beach is never cluttered with ranks of rotting seaweed or piles of beer cans.
The second category of fiction for women is all about a pale, rather vacant-eyed young blonde wearing a white beanie with two white strings hanging down. I have no idea why.
What is The Main Idea? Give support from the text. Do not write outside the lines.
As for me, I look forward to seeing a book with a cover featuring a Chinese girl wearing a white beanie while posing in front of the Kremlin with a semi-automatic pistol, tap-dancing on a swastika, and proctoring a standardized test, all at the same time.
Let us compare notes by candlelight, in a hidden underground bunker outside Prague, about conspiracy theories, albino test proctors lurking in shadowy Vatican corridors, secret Templar codes, hidden Nazi gold stashed in a 1939 Imperial Airways passenger plane submerged at the bottom of Lake Sam Rayburn, the Club of Rome, the Third Murderer in Macbeth, the 666 Beast Computer in Belgium, demented Navy CPOs on secret missions to poison the world’s supply of lapsang souchang, and King Solomon’s DNA hidden in a microchip – they can all be traced back to (dramatic pause) Pearson’s. Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
-30-
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs
“Guitar” is a French word for kindling, but a great many people enjoying listening to the guitar as well as burning it. A very few can play it well, and too, too many fancy they can play it without inflicting acoustic distress, but their haunted families will painfully scream a dissenting view if asked. But you’d have to ask loudly.
The other day I was at the store looking at music albums, which still exist physically as little plastic discs and so can still feature cover art, though much reduced from the grand days of 33 1/3 rpm albums. On any album on the rack in which guitar music was featured, the cover art featured the artist wearing a guitar. One young musician was depicted (1) playing her guitar, (2) posing on a railway line with her guitar slung on her back, and (3) in bed with her guitar.
Photo #1 makes perfectly good sense – the album photograph accurately advertises the fact that the young woman plays the guitar, and so if the customers wants guitar music he can purchase that album.
Photo #2 is less logical and heavily overdone. Everyone who has ever made a noise with guitar strings has had his picture made while posing soulfully on a railway line and wearing his guitar slung over his back. As we all know, rail passenger traffic declined in the early 1960s because the famous trains, such as the Santa Fe’s Chiefs and the Missouri Pacific’s Eagles, were wrecked in a devastating series of collisions with country-and-western singers. It is a little-known secret that this is the reason air travel become popular.
Photo #3 – I’m not going there, folks, other than to wonder if the guitar were a reincarnation of Les Paul.
Flutists, you will observe, do not pose on railway lines with their flutes strapped to their backs. Satchmo wisely kept his trumpet and himself out of the way of The Sunset Limited. Concussionists generally don’t carry their drums, cymbals, gongs, bells, and other crashy-bangy things about at all, and delicate people are grateful for that. I’m not sure about bagpipes. Since bagpipes sound like a muscular Celt squashing a pig to death I suppose the sound could stop a train.
Herbert von Karajan never required his Wagnerian ensembles to muster in a marshaling yard with their spears and helmets, and James Levine would look plumb silly trying to direct “Orange Blossom Special” with that little baton.
Other occupations avoid posturing on railway lines. The plumber does not gaze artistically upon his premiere pipe wrench while trodding the crossties, and the electrician does not cross the rails with his most expensive circuit-tester. A CPA is never shown gazing down the line with a calculator slung over his shoulder, and a nurse never listens for that lonesome whistle while trying out a new chord on her rectal thermometer.
Enviros have yet to stand in the way of trains while arranging garlands of those poisonous squiggly light bulbs around their necks, but one wishes they would.
Libyans seem to be inadvertently standing in the way of The Cannonball Express, and its stops are unscheduled, its destination is unknown, and no one seems to know who the engineer is.
Perhaps someone will take a photograph of a guitarist in the middle of the runway at the airport as he sings a song about growing up poor and barefoot in a broken-down old Boeing 747 and being snubbed by the rich kids in the AirBus A380 down the long and winding dusty long-lost country road through those old cornfields back home in the condominium where Grandma thawed her special recipe PETA-friendly critter-pie in the microwave lit by one of those squiggly light bulbs giving off down-home country radioactivity.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs
“Guitar” is a French word for kindling, but a great many people enjoying listening to the guitar as well as burning it. A very few can play it well, and too, too many fancy they can play it without inflicting acoustic distress, but their haunted families will painfully scream a dissenting view if asked. But you’d have to ask loudly.
The other day I was at the store looking at music albums, which still exist physically as little plastic discs and so can still feature cover art, though much reduced from the grand days of 33 1/3 rpm albums. On any album on the rack in which guitar music was featured, the cover art featured the artist wearing a guitar. One young musician was depicted (1) playing her guitar, (2) posing on a railway line with her guitar slung on her back, and (3) in bed with her guitar.
Photo #1 makes perfectly good sense – the album photograph accurately advertises the fact that the young woman plays the guitar, and so if the customers wants guitar music he can purchase that album.
Photo #2 is less logical and heavily overdone. Everyone who has ever made a noise with guitar strings has had his picture made while posing soulfully on a railway line and wearing his guitar slung over his back. As we all know, rail passenger traffic declined in the early 1960s because the famous trains, such as the Santa Fe’s Chiefs and the Missouri Pacific’s Eagles, were wrecked in a devastating series of collisions with country-and-western singers. It is a little-known secret that this is the reason air travel become popular.
Photo #3 – I’m not going there, folks, other than to wonder if the guitar were a reincarnation of Les Paul.
Flutists, you will observe, do not pose on railway lines with their flutes strapped to their backs. Satchmo wisely kept his trumpet and himself out of the way of The Sunset Limited. Concussionists generally don’t carry their drums, cymbals, gongs, bells, and other crashy-bangy things about at all, and delicate people are grateful for that. I’m not sure about bagpipes. Since bagpipes sound like a muscular Celt squashing a pig to death I suppose the sound could stop a train.
Herbert von Karajan never required his Wagnerian ensembles to muster in a marshaling yard with their spears and helmets, and James Levine would look plumb silly trying to direct “Orange Blossom Special” with that little baton.
Other occupations avoid posturing on railway lines. The plumber does not gaze artistically upon his premiere pipe wrench while trodding the crossties, and the electrician does not cross the rails with his most expensive circuit-tester. A CPA is never shown gazing down the line with a calculator slung over his shoulder, and a nurse never listens for that lonesome whistle while trying out a new chord on her rectal thermometer.
Enviros have yet to stand in the way of trains while arranging garlands of those poisonous squiggly light bulbs around their necks, but one wishes they would.
Libyans seem to be inadvertently standing in the way of The Cannonball Express, and its stops are unscheduled, its destination is unknown, and no one seems to know who the engineer is.
Perhaps someone will take a photograph of a guitarist in the middle of the runway at the airport as he sings a song about growing up poor and barefoot in a broken-down old Boeing 747 and being snubbed by the rich kids in the AirBus A380 down the long and winding dusty long-lost country road through those old cornfields back home in the condominium where Grandma thawed her special recipe PETA-friendly critter-pie in the microwave lit by one of those squiggly light bulbs giving off down-home country radioactivity.
-30-
Sunday, March 27, 2011
The Reporter in the Closet
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Reporter in the Closet
In a masterful, post-dawn kinetic journalism action strike, Vice-President Joe-the-Tank-Engine Biden’s henchminions made the world just a little bit safer for the most open administration in American history by confining a reporter in a closet and posting a Sergeant Schultz outside the door.
Amtrak Joe was a guest last week at Winter Falls, the Florida mansion of a developer and philanthropist who was hosting a fundraiser for Senator Bill Nelson. The pool reporter for the event was the Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Powers, who upon arrival was Colonel Klinked to a closet lest he contaminate the $500-a-plate faux nobility with the presence of his wretched, ink-stained self.
And certainly there were plenty of closets from which to choose; Winter Falls was designed with all the understated elegance of an oil-sheik-princess’s concept of a shopping mall, bridging the architectural and aesthetic gap between Hello Kitty and an airport.
After an hour or so Mr. Powers was given a brief parole to listen passively to the speeches given (for a price) by the champions of the workin’ folks, and then escorted back to The Cooler without being given a chance to ask any questions of the elected members of the government or talk with any of the Great Washed.
Mr. P wasn’t permitted to refresh himself at the buffet, even in silence. According to the Orlando Sentinel the pre-prandial snacks for the guests (no scriveners need apply) included caprese crustini. I don’t know what caprese crustini is, but then I’m not a welder, miner, or truck driver. The caprese crustini was topped off with oven-dried mozzarella and basil, and I’m not sure how Basil felt about that. Lunch featured Chicken Caesar (no comment) and vegetable wraps.
Vegetables – does this call for a legume change?
The next time I visit the truck stop café’ I’m going to try the caprese crustini in solidarity with The People.
All Mr. Powers got for sustenance was a bottle of water, and nothing was said about how radioactive it might have been.
Mr. Powers was not imprisoned, as some have alleged; surely he could have demanded that he be released, but then he would have missed out on a good joke worth a couple of good columns, some publicity for his paper, and a notch in his resume’. Mr. P sent his editor a picture of the closet via his Blackberry, and so could have dialed 911. A false imprisonment charge, unlike the wings of an angel, wouldn’t fly.
Still, this is not pretty for the President who, for reasons best known to himself and perhaps The Voices, has ordered the military to drop bombs on Libya. The first bomb he dropped, though, was on himself, two years ago, by allowing his grey eminences to pair him with a vice-president who makes PeeWee Herman look positively statesmanlike.
The homeowner, to his credit, later telephoned Mr. Powers to apologize for the enclosetment, maintaining that, like Sergeant Shultz, he knew nothing. Perhaps he sent Jeeves over to the Orlando Sentinel offices with a takeout plate and a festive selection of new typewriter ribbons.
So who is this great nation bombing next week? Canada, maybe? Or Luxembourg? Perhaps the Principality of Liechtenstein? But the President doesn’t need to bomb Liechtenstein; it’s small and harmless and so can be stuffed into a closet for any reason or for no reason at all.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Reporter in the Closet
In a masterful, post-dawn kinetic journalism action strike, Vice-President Joe-the-Tank-Engine Biden’s henchminions made the world just a little bit safer for the most open administration in American history by confining a reporter in a closet and posting a Sergeant Schultz outside the door.
Amtrak Joe was a guest last week at Winter Falls, the Florida mansion of a developer and philanthropist who was hosting a fundraiser for Senator Bill Nelson. The pool reporter for the event was the Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Powers, who upon arrival was Colonel Klinked to a closet lest he contaminate the $500-a-plate faux nobility with the presence of his wretched, ink-stained self.
And certainly there were plenty of closets from which to choose; Winter Falls was designed with all the understated elegance of an oil-sheik-princess’s concept of a shopping mall, bridging the architectural and aesthetic gap between Hello Kitty and an airport.
After an hour or so Mr. Powers was given a brief parole to listen passively to the speeches given (for a price) by the champions of the workin’ folks, and then escorted back to The Cooler without being given a chance to ask any questions of the elected members of the government or talk with any of the Great Washed.
Mr. P wasn’t permitted to refresh himself at the buffet, even in silence. According to the Orlando Sentinel the pre-prandial snacks for the guests (no scriveners need apply) included caprese crustini. I don’t know what caprese crustini is, but then I’m not a welder, miner, or truck driver. The caprese crustini was topped off with oven-dried mozzarella and basil, and I’m not sure how Basil felt about that. Lunch featured Chicken Caesar (no comment) and vegetable wraps.
Vegetables – does this call for a legume change?
The next time I visit the truck stop café’ I’m going to try the caprese crustini in solidarity with The People.
All Mr. Powers got for sustenance was a bottle of water, and nothing was said about how radioactive it might have been.
Mr. Powers was not imprisoned, as some have alleged; surely he could have demanded that he be released, but then he would have missed out on a good joke worth a couple of good columns, some publicity for his paper, and a notch in his resume’. Mr. P sent his editor a picture of the closet via his Blackberry, and so could have dialed 911. A false imprisonment charge, unlike the wings of an angel, wouldn’t fly.
Still, this is not pretty for the President who, for reasons best known to himself and perhaps The Voices, has ordered the military to drop bombs on Libya. The first bomb he dropped, though, was on himself, two years ago, by allowing his grey eminences to pair him with a vice-president who makes PeeWee Herman look positively statesmanlike.
The homeowner, to his credit, later telephoned Mr. Powers to apologize for the enclosetment, maintaining that, like Sergeant Shultz, he knew nothing. Perhaps he sent Jeeves over to the Orlando Sentinel offices with a takeout plate and a festive selection of new typewriter ribbons.
So who is this great nation bombing next week? Canada, maybe? Or Luxembourg? Perhaps the Principality of Liechtenstein? But the President doesn’t need to bomb Liechtenstein; it’s small and harmless and so can be stuffed into a closet for any reason or for no reason at all.
-30-
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Technology -- EEK!
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Technology – EEK!
If an individual were to awaken from a winter of hibernation and read the news today he would conclude from the limited information given that the deaths and destruction in Japan these last two weeks are the result of a nuclear explosion.
There have certainly been explosions enough, hydrogen gas explosions, but there has been no nuclear explosion because a nuclear power plant cannot explode. Our hypothetical reader would also be surprised to learn that the deaths and destruction, including the wreckage of a power plant, are in reality the result of a powerful earthquake and resulting wave action.
Contemporary ideology works within a philosophical framework posited in the grounding myth that all bad things are human in origin, and that the prime cause of evil is that man is a self-actuated tool-maker, not a wretched, hungry hunter-gatherer. In reporting the disasters in Japan, the earthquakes and tsunami are not simply underreported in favor of the it’s-all-some-man’s-fault thesis, they appear now not to be mentioned at all, rather like Hurricanes Rita and Ike.
Japan, with more cause than any other nation to be sensitive to the negative possibilities of nuclear power, is gridded with nuclear power plants, and these power plants have for years operated with great benefit to the Japanese people and economy by producing cheap electricity and warm water. The warm water, by the way, makes for improved sport fishing at the outlets. To the fish in the cold northern Pacific, shivering in their little designer parkas, the waters cycling out of a nuclear reactor are as a dream cruise in the Caribbean to you and me.
To say that nuclear power is dangerous is a truism equal to stating that storing containers of gasoline in one’s living room is dangerous or that building a campfire during a drought is dangerous. Most human activities – welding, bicycling, mowing the yard, building fences, fishing, milking cows, playing baseball -- contain some element of danger. Shall we thus simply cease living? We humans have frontal lobes, and generally know not to give 6-year-olds the keys to the car or allow newly-commissioned lieutenants access to weapons or sharp objects.
As of this writing, not one person has been killed because of the wrecked nuclear plant in Japan.
Further, the American ships that have sailed to Japan with generous gifts of American food and American water and American blankets and American medical care are powered by nuclear power plants. For over fifty years American submarines and large warships have been powered by the atom, and our sailors and Marines don’t come home glowing in the dark and giving birth to children with three eyes. The solution to nuclear safety issues seems to be building nuclear reactors just like those used by the United States Navy.
Finally, while short-term exposure to radiation is dangerous, the long-term implications are less alarming. In 1945, before the bomb was dropped, 419,000 people lived in Hiroshima; now some 1.6 million prosper there. 212,000 folks lived in Nagasaki in 1945; now there are 446,000.
At this point some twit will tweet, indignantly and with two fingers, “So what u sayin is bombin cities is good uh.” No, I’m not saying that at all; the conversation is about nuclear power used wisely for the good of all people.
In an aside we may note that Detroit, which hasn’t suffered combat since the French and Indian War, boasted a population of 1.5 million in 1945; now some 910,000 exist in the ruins of a once-great city.
Nuclear power is good; abandoning humanity to starve in the cold because of Greenist ideology is bad.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Technology – EEK!
If an individual were to awaken from a winter of hibernation and read the news today he would conclude from the limited information given that the deaths and destruction in Japan these last two weeks are the result of a nuclear explosion.
There have certainly been explosions enough, hydrogen gas explosions, but there has been no nuclear explosion because a nuclear power plant cannot explode. Our hypothetical reader would also be surprised to learn that the deaths and destruction, including the wreckage of a power plant, are in reality the result of a powerful earthquake and resulting wave action.
Contemporary ideology works within a philosophical framework posited in the grounding myth that all bad things are human in origin, and that the prime cause of evil is that man is a self-actuated tool-maker, not a wretched, hungry hunter-gatherer. In reporting the disasters in Japan, the earthquakes and tsunami are not simply underreported in favor of the it’s-all-some-man’s-fault thesis, they appear now not to be mentioned at all, rather like Hurricanes Rita and Ike.
Japan, with more cause than any other nation to be sensitive to the negative possibilities of nuclear power, is gridded with nuclear power plants, and these power plants have for years operated with great benefit to the Japanese people and economy by producing cheap electricity and warm water. The warm water, by the way, makes for improved sport fishing at the outlets. To the fish in the cold northern Pacific, shivering in their little designer parkas, the waters cycling out of a nuclear reactor are as a dream cruise in the Caribbean to you and me.
To say that nuclear power is dangerous is a truism equal to stating that storing containers of gasoline in one’s living room is dangerous or that building a campfire during a drought is dangerous. Most human activities – welding, bicycling, mowing the yard, building fences, fishing, milking cows, playing baseball -- contain some element of danger. Shall we thus simply cease living? We humans have frontal lobes, and generally know not to give 6-year-olds the keys to the car or allow newly-commissioned lieutenants access to weapons or sharp objects.
As of this writing, not one person has been killed because of the wrecked nuclear plant in Japan.
Further, the American ships that have sailed to Japan with generous gifts of American food and American water and American blankets and American medical care are powered by nuclear power plants. For over fifty years American submarines and large warships have been powered by the atom, and our sailors and Marines don’t come home glowing in the dark and giving birth to children with three eyes. The solution to nuclear safety issues seems to be building nuclear reactors just like those used by the United States Navy.
Finally, while short-term exposure to radiation is dangerous, the long-term implications are less alarming. In 1945, before the bomb was dropped, 419,000 people lived in Hiroshima; now some 1.6 million prosper there. 212,000 folks lived in Nagasaki in 1945; now there are 446,000.
At this point some twit will tweet, indignantly and with two fingers, “So what u sayin is bombin cities is good uh.” No, I’m not saying that at all; the conversation is about nuclear power used wisely for the good of all people.
In an aside we may note that Detroit, which hasn’t suffered combat since the French and Indian War, boasted a population of 1.5 million in 1945; now some 910,000 exist in the ruins of a once-great city.
Nuclear power is good; abandoning humanity to starve in the cold because of Greenist ideology is bad.
-30-
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Reverend Charlie Sheen
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Reverend Charlie Sheen
An organization styling itself Family Radio declareth unto us that the world is going to end on the 21st of May. There are several reasonable responses:
“What? The world is ending? Again?”
“Oh, no! Can’t the end of the world wait until after graduation?”
“It was on the ‘net, so it must be true.”
“But I haven’t finished reading all my vampire books yet.”
“Well, okay, I guess I won’t have the lawnmower serviced.”
There are few among us these days who aren’t ministers, priests, priestesses, or preachers. Indeed, there are so many churches, ministries, outreaches, fellowships, temples, assemblies, assemblages, and what-nots that soon each one of us will be his or her own The Bright Light Free Will Four Square Full Gospel Missionary Temple of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Lamb Holiness Sanctified of the Infallible Me, Me, Me, complete with a website and an official tee-shirt.
The leader of Family Radio is Harold Camping, who calculated the end through pushing together lots of numbers in a loosey-goosey spasm of numerology that would embarrass even Pope Mel Gibson, grounding the base numbers in dates which aren’t in any of the hundreds of versions of the Bible, but maintaining their (and his) inerrancy anyway.
Oh, yeah, we gotta follow this man.
The Family Radio website (www.familyradio.com) features a button for online donations. Now if the world is going to end in two months, why would Family Radio need your money? They could close out the holy checking account and use the cash for milk and fresh bread, eat out of the pantry and freezer, and not sweat the utility bills. After all, are they going to need money when they’re beamed up to the Hale-Bopp YK2 and KY Mother Ship? It’s not as if there’s going to be a baggage fee.
True believers have left families to travel around the country in caravans of SUVs to advise folks that the very few who are to be saved will be teleported up on the 21st of May and that the rest of us are going to live in a totally Charlie Sheen / Fred Phelps world until October, at which point the cosmic plug will be pulled.
One of the site’s “Caravan Letters” reports from San Antonio, but the photograph accompanying the letter (as of last Saturday) is of the state capitol building in Austin. If these folks don’t know the way to San Antonio, what are their chances of directing you to Heaven?
While The End is only two months away, there’s plenty of time for all of us to start our own churches and then start sneering at each other as unscriptural. Friends have suggested the Cowboy Happy Trails End-Times Ministry, the Truckers’ Last Jump-Start Fellowship, and the Certified Public Accountants for Jesus (Your Number’s Up), but I think I’ll begin The Official Massey-Ferguson Three-Point Hitch Bible Fellowship and Gallery of Collectibles, joining the many who have found the Holy Spirit to have been off-task for the past 2,000 years.
Oh, and where will the Family Radio whatever folks be on The Day? Jerusalem? The Bermuda Triangle? Captain Kirk’s house? Nope. The end of the world takes place in Flagstaff, Arizona, the City of Salvation and jumping-off point for the Planet Krypton. Hey, see ya there, okay? But go ahead and send me your bank account and credit card numbers and your car title. It’s all for the Lord’s work.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Reverend Charlie Sheen
An organization styling itself Family Radio declareth unto us that the world is going to end on the 21st of May. There are several reasonable responses:
“What? The world is ending? Again?”
“Oh, no! Can’t the end of the world wait until after graduation?”
“It was on the ‘net, so it must be true.”
“But I haven’t finished reading all my vampire books yet.”
“Well, okay, I guess I won’t have the lawnmower serviced.”
There are few among us these days who aren’t ministers, priests, priestesses, or preachers. Indeed, there are so many churches, ministries, outreaches, fellowships, temples, assemblies, assemblages, and what-nots that soon each one of us will be his or her own The Bright Light Free Will Four Square Full Gospel Missionary Temple of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Lamb Holiness Sanctified of the Infallible Me, Me, Me, complete with a website and an official tee-shirt.
The leader of Family Radio is Harold Camping, who calculated the end through pushing together lots of numbers in a loosey-goosey spasm of numerology that would embarrass even Pope Mel Gibson, grounding the base numbers in dates which aren’t in any of the hundreds of versions of the Bible, but maintaining their (and his) inerrancy anyway.
Oh, yeah, we gotta follow this man.
The Family Radio website (www.familyradio.com) features a button for online donations. Now if the world is going to end in two months, why would Family Radio need your money? They could close out the holy checking account and use the cash for milk and fresh bread, eat out of the pantry and freezer, and not sweat the utility bills. After all, are they going to need money when they’re beamed up to the Hale-Bopp YK2 and KY Mother Ship? It’s not as if there’s going to be a baggage fee.
True believers have left families to travel around the country in caravans of SUVs to advise folks that the very few who are to be saved will be teleported up on the 21st of May and that the rest of us are going to live in a totally Charlie Sheen / Fred Phelps world until October, at which point the cosmic plug will be pulled.
One of the site’s “Caravan Letters” reports from San Antonio, but the photograph accompanying the letter (as of last Saturday) is of the state capitol building in Austin. If these folks don’t know the way to San Antonio, what are their chances of directing you to Heaven?
While The End is only two months away, there’s plenty of time for all of us to start our own churches and then start sneering at each other as unscriptural. Friends have suggested the Cowboy Happy Trails End-Times Ministry, the Truckers’ Last Jump-Start Fellowship, and the Certified Public Accountants for Jesus (Your Number’s Up), but I think I’ll begin The Official Massey-Ferguson Three-Point Hitch Bible Fellowship and Gallery of Collectibles, joining the many who have found the Holy Spirit to have been off-task for the past 2,000 years.
Oh, and where will the Family Radio whatever folks be on The Day? Jerusalem? The Bermuda Triangle? Captain Kirk’s house? Nope. The end of the world takes place in Flagstaff, Arizona, the City of Salvation and jumping-off point for the Planet Krypton. Hey, see ya there, okay? But go ahead and send me your bank account and credit card numbers and your car title. It’s all for the Lord’s work.
-30-
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The World's Largest Shopping Mall and Noodle Cart
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
The World’s Largest Shopping Mall and Noodle Cart
The world’s largest shopping mall is open for business, but the business isn’t there.
The New South China Mall (is there an Old South China?) features 2,350 spaces for lease, but only about fifty are taken.
With so much empty spaces, mall rats in the New South China Mall really are rats, squeaking about in loneliness along the kilometers of empty hallways.
There is no Target store, of course, for in the glorious People’s Republic of China anyone who disagrees with The People becomes the target. It’s sort of like dealing with the American Department of Justice, a division of the S.E.I.U..
The good part about an empty mall is that finding a parking space is no problem.
And Chinese food? “Hey, kids, we’ll meet at the food court at eleven.”
“But Dad, where’s the food court?”
“Oh, about two miles thataway you’ll find Mrs. Chin’s noodle cart. You can’t miss it; just look for the one light bulb in the mall that’s switched on.”
Organizing a rave would be a problem, though: “This is Sino-Dude evr 1 meet by the Xtreem Jeans Outlet Depot that duznt xist for a r8ve.”
“This is Shanghai Lil over by Cheap Plastic Extreeme Sneaker City that also doesn’t exist. Where is Xtreem Jeans Outlet Depot since there izzn 1?”
“Yeh, guys, this is Beijing Bomber Boy at Xtreem Snail and Eel Kitchen Express which never moved in. Where are y’all?”
“Help! I’m at Old New Jersey Exteeeeeme Cell Phone Outfitters Supply Company Xpress which is empty and all I see is some old guy with bad breath who tells me I need to get right with Buddha. Help! Find me!”
Given the lack of customers, the one book store is named Books-a-Dozen.
Coffee is available at RedStarbuck’s, and there is a HallMarxist store specializing in sympathy cards for political prisoners:
Dear (former) Comrade Sister,
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Hu Jin-Tao’s
Got a death sentence for you
Dear (former) Cousin Comrade Chang,
I detest
Your protest arrest
But I warned you, dude,
And I wasn’t rude
You know our laws
And all their flaws
Surely you cannot
Think it so odd
That due process in China
Is a firing squad
The New South China Mall might be empty because instead of shopping some of the Chinese people are busy working 16-hour days in unsafe factories for poor wages and others are occupied in conquering Asia and in stripping Africa of her mineral wealth. Given this, new uses of the near-empty shopping mall could be dreamed up. Since China is densely populated, perhaps individuals wishing to be alone for a few hours could to go to their local shopping mall and pay for the privilege of solitude.
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
The World’s Largest Shopping Mall and Noodle Cart
The world’s largest shopping mall is open for business, but the business isn’t there.
The New South China Mall (is there an Old South China?) features 2,350 spaces for lease, but only about fifty are taken.
With so much empty spaces, mall rats in the New South China Mall really are rats, squeaking about in loneliness along the kilometers of empty hallways.
There is no Target store, of course, for in the glorious People’s Republic of China anyone who disagrees with The People becomes the target. It’s sort of like dealing with the American Department of Justice, a division of the S.E.I.U..
The good part about an empty mall is that finding a parking space is no problem.
And Chinese food? “Hey, kids, we’ll meet at the food court at eleven.”
“But Dad, where’s the food court?”
“Oh, about two miles thataway you’ll find Mrs. Chin’s noodle cart. You can’t miss it; just look for the one light bulb in the mall that’s switched on.”
Organizing a rave would be a problem, though: “This is Sino-Dude evr 1 meet by the Xtreem Jeans Outlet Depot that duznt xist for a r8ve.”
“This is Shanghai Lil over by Cheap Plastic Extreeme Sneaker City that also doesn’t exist. Where is Xtreem Jeans Outlet Depot since there izzn 1?”
“Yeh, guys, this is Beijing Bomber Boy at Xtreem Snail and Eel Kitchen Express which never moved in. Where are y’all?”
“Help! I’m at Old New Jersey Exteeeeeme Cell Phone Outfitters Supply Company Xpress which is empty and all I see is some old guy with bad breath who tells me I need to get right with Buddha. Help! Find me!”
Given the lack of customers, the one book store is named Books-a-Dozen.
Coffee is available at RedStarbuck’s, and there is a HallMarxist store specializing in sympathy cards for political prisoners:
Dear (former) Comrade Sister,
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Hu Jin-Tao’s
Got a death sentence for you
Dear (former) Cousin Comrade Chang,
I detest
Your protest arrest
But I warned you, dude,
And I wasn’t rude
You know our laws
And all their flaws
Surely you cannot
Think it so odd
That due process in China
Is a firing squad
The New South China Mall might be empty because instead of shopping some of the Chinese people are busy working 16-hour days in unsafe factories for poor wages and others are occupied in conquering Asia and in stripping Africa of her mineral wealth. Given this, new uses of the near-empty shopping mall could be dreamed up. Since China is densely populated, perhaps individuals wishing to be alone for a few hours could to go to their local shopping mall and pay for the privilege of solitude.
-30-
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