And They Call the Wind Tiffany

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

And They Call the Wind Tiffany

The Weather Channel (D - Georgia), for reasons best known to its coven of Global Warmingistas, is going to name winter storms.

The Weather Channel, which really was founded as a weather channel, has since evolved into infotainment and ideology, and like most ideologies doesn’t tolerate dissent, so you’d better agree to the naming and to the names if you don’t want trouble.

Naming a storm could present legal problems: if The Weather Channel names a cold front Anastasia and you insist on calling it Bob, does The Weather Channel have a case against you?  And if you wish to name your child Anastasia, do you have to pay The Weather Channel copyright fees?

Perhaps other telly shows will begin naming meteorological features.  The Military Channel could name tomorrow morning’s sunrise General Patton while MSNBC calls it PeeWee Herman.  The Western Channel might brand a light overcast James Arness, while Fox News honors a heavy snow as Herman Cain.

General Motors might insist that the moon© is now the Volt©. 

The Weather Channel has issued its manifesto naming this winter’s storms

(http://www.weather.com/news/winter-storm-names-20121001): Athena, Brutus, Caesar, Draco, Euclid, Freyr, Gandolf, Helen, Iago, Jove, Khan, Luna, Magnus, Nemo, Orko, Plato, Q, Rocky, Saturn, Triton, Ukko, Virgil, Walda, Xerxes, Yogi, Zeus.

This list is provisional, since it has not yet been granted a nihil obstat by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D – Texas).

Too bad there’s not a Snooki, but maybe next year.

The reader might become excited about Yogi, thinking Jellystone National Park’s favorite bear was finally to be recognized for his many gifts to American culture, but The Weather Channel advises us that their Yogi is for one who does yoga. 

Iago is for most folks the Spanish for James, as in Saint James / Santiago, but The Weather Channel will have none of that Christian nonsense – their Iago is the villain in Shakespeare’s Othello. 

Draco is for the Athenian lawgiver, but The Weather Channel may not be aware that Draco’s laws (“Draconian”) favored the death penalty for most crimes, even for stealing a cabbage (http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/greecehellas1/a/cylonanddraco_3.htm), and slavery for something less than stealing a cabbage, but only for the peasants; the nobility got a better deal from Draco.

What do we name The Weather Channel itself?  She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed?

In the delightful comic strip Hi and Lois, the youngest child, Trixie, still a rug-rat, greets the morning sun sharing her floor by singing out “Hi, sunbeam!”

A progressive, modern mother would of course put a stop to this nature stuff by drawing the blinds and setting Trixie before flickering images of America’s nasal-pitched answer to Oxford and Cambridge, Big Bird.

And then The Weather Channel would impose upon the sunbeam a progressive, modern name from an approved list respecting the delicate sensitivities of the loudest non-reader available.

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Not Exactly James Bond

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Not Exactly James Bond

Last week local police found a Secret Service agent passed-out-drunk on a Miami sidewalk.  Perhaps he had shaken, not stirred, one vodka martini too many.

Now we know what spy novels mean by a sleeper agent.

Who’s in charge of the Secret Service these days?  Jerry Springer?

The police found the agent despite the early morning darkness by tracing his Get Smart shoe phone through the ring tone: “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.”

Pop culture says a Secret Service agent must be ready to take a bullet for the President, but who knew that said bullet might be a Silver Bullet? 

When Secret Service agents are on an operation, do they need a designated driver?

And how did the Miami police know that the cocktail commando was a secret agent?  Why, that information was readily available on the spirited man’s official Secret Service identity card.

Did the Secret Service agent’s identity card feature a secret glow-in-the-dark compass, a secret key to a secret code, and a secret Sergeant Preston of the Yukon map?

The Secret Service isn’t really all that secret anyway; they have their own web site: http://www.secretservice.gov/join/who.shtml. 

Maybe some of us have watched too many Patrick McGoohan films, but shouldn’t a Secret Service agent try to be, well, you know, secret?  Is snoring in the street in an alcoholic stupor while carrying a Junior G-Man identification card the most subtle way to infiltrate The Hidden Fortress of the Secret Seven? 

Earlier this year, in an episode of Guys Gone Wild, a number of Secret Service frat boys…um…agents got caught with their bulletproof vests down in South America. 

If they keep behaving like this, the Secret Service may soon be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Secret Service is involved in several aspects of federal law enforcement, but they are best known for protecting presidents, vice-presidents, former presidents, presidential candidates, and their families. 

As of late the President appears to be tired and worried, even haggard, and naturally one attributes this to the burdens of office and to a challenging re-election campaign.  But perhaps the reality is that the President is losing sleep because the snoring of his Secret Service keeps him awake at night.

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Chris and Deedra's Porch

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Chris and Deedra’s Porch

Porch-exiled with our beer and cigarettes

We firmly urged the dogs, dead wasps, and heat
To move a bit and make some room for us.
There was no evening cool, no hope of it,
No hope in anything, and there we sank
Into drought-dusty, disreputable old chairs,
Surrendered to the heat and beer and smokes,
Avoided thinking about the death-still dusk.
But then a gentle tease, a gentle breeze
Came wafting coolly from across the fields
Only for a moment, and was gone again,
Not cruelly but of kindness, just a note,
A fairy’s note, soft-whispered through a leaf,
A hymn for exiles, a song of autumn.

Vigil of the Assumption

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Vigil of the Assumption

We will forever venerate our Queen,

Whom God Himself chose happily to be
His Mother, and the Mother of us all.
Each orphaned soul, rejected by mankind,
Adrift among the sloshing, foul debris
Of counsels falsely hissed behind the leaves
Must know that in the wild, sin-howling nights
Of desolation, clutching to himself
The fragments of his failed humanity,
Even so, his loving Mother comes to him,
To tend, to heal, to love, to hold in trust
For God this child of Hers, condemned by time.

Alternative Prayer Before a Crucifix

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Alternative Prayer Before a Crucifix

Our little plastic boxes glow and blink,

They wink, they clink, they link; they almost think -
Until the tenuous connections fail
To silence blown by the January gale,
And we are left in still, cold darkness there:
A candle, a Crucifix, and a prayer.

Night Class

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Night Class

The moonless night presents a nothingness,

As flickering cones of yellow light pursue
Pale wraiths and shadows through the conifers.
The radio hisses in its loneliness,
While miles and hours in meditation pass;
The coffee cup from several towns ago
Is empty now; its caffeine promises
Have faded like a statesman’s solemn vows
While Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in repose
Between the covers of a Moby Book,
Await those even later, owlish hours,
Then to renew their pleynts against the past.

Frogs x 2

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Frogs of August

After surprising summer showers in

A time of heat and dust and lethargy,
Forth from their hidden reptilian repose
The frogs of August rise, and sing a hymn,
A joyful hymn to rain and tasty bugs.

The Pickwickian toad sings of himself,

A stout old gentleman of means and thrift;

The bluff and hearty bullfrog by the pond

Bellows his boasts, and puffs his own praises.

Preferring window screens to rain-damp leaves,

The tiny tree frog trills his outsized voice.

The disparate, dissonant descantations
Of this catalogue of errant froggery
Drift in and out of transient harmony
And back again, an ancient unity
To please the late-night wanderer of hours.

 

O Ye of Little Frog 

For those who deny that frogs sing to God

O ye of little faith in night’s mysteries
Oft hasten to explain away God’s arts,
And dampen joys with your false-writ histories
Believing in dull books, and not your hearts.

You claim that frogs sing only to gain mates,

Based on some long-dead dullard’s science log,
Claiming the last word on reptilian traits -
What do you know of the love-life of a frog?

You might then with equal injustice claim

That Compline is sung in order to attract
Women – but is that Saint Benedict’s aim?
Poor frogs and monks sing hymns; and that’s a fact!

Liesl and the Egrets

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Liesl and the Egrets

Neighbor Willie was mowing the August fields

And to this tillage flew egrets, all white,
Following the blade for its bug-rich yields,
Soaring and wheeling in the mid-day light

Some thirty or more of this hungry flock

Alighted on the lawn beneath the trees
Before the wide window, as if to mock
A spirited dachshund – oh, what a tease!

Young Liesl girded for battle, oh, yes:

The air, the birds, and the doggie were still,
As when a thunderstorm builds, as you may guess,
Or a stalking she-wolf waits for her kill

The door was opened, and, thundering, Liesl sprang

Into the lists of honor, against all odds,
With yelp and yap and yip and paw and fang,
True daughter of the old Germanic gods!

Ere long the scene was silent, free of birds;

An errant feather here and there told the story
Of Liesl’s noble charge far better than mere words,
Told of this day’s dachshundian glory.

Ubi Eras?

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Ubi Eras?

Job 38:4

Their recycled mockery casually slips

Around your soul, coolly, as in an ad
For the season’s fashionable heresy:
Docetism? Yes, after Labor Day,
But Pelagianism’s this week’s thing,
With a subtle twist of Monophysitism,
Or perhaps a hint of existential despair
At noon, to take you through your busy life.

They’ll never suggest that you clothe your soul

With the coarse monastic habit of faith
In Him Who has always believed in you.
You needn’t try to impress Him at all,
For though He thunders entire worlds into being
With less than a flung synapse of His thought,
To you His truth he whispers in His love.

A Doggie Day

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Doggie Day

When leaving for work, one wishes the dogs

A good and useful day at their own jobs:
Barking the cats, sniffing the summer breeze,
Snort-snuffling through the grass, yapping at birds,
Lolling in the sun, doggie-tummies up,
In celebration of God’s creation.
They suffer no meetings and file no reports,
And when they hear that long-familiar step,
Or that happy whistle at the back gate,
They run to have their daily work approved:
A pat, a scratch, a tickle under the chin,
A well-tossed yummie treat caught in mid-air.
The good old dog looks up, and seems to ask
“Good old human, was your day as happy as mine?”

The Garage-Sale Camera

Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Garage-Sale Camera

Surviving the polyester Seventies

Its hippie guitar-strap moldy and frayed
Compromised by corroded batteries
But solid, elegant - Japanese-made

Quite worn with use, some family’s recorder

Of parties, poses, playing in the summer-yard
When children now grown lined up in order
And happily grinned for Grandpa’s Christmas card

First Communion, the trip to Disneyland

A wedding with the groom in a purple tux
A daughter marching in the high school band –
A garage-sale camera, only ten bucks

Families, neighbors, puppies, classmates, friends -

Living forever through this old camera’s lens

Eye of the Hamster

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
29 August 2012

Eye of the Hamster

Much national news writing is predicated on clichés, stereotypes, and hyperbole, and hurricane season is when the keyboard commandos in Our Nation’s Capital (in caps) pour themselves cups of green tea, limber up their manicured fingers, and fling filler-language as carelessly as an oil sheik throwing American dollars at luxuries.

Certain hurricane cliches’ disappear with time – “The Mother of All Hurricanes” is as dead as Saddamn Hussein.  Others, such as “we’re not out of the woods,” seem to be as indestructible as Dracula, popping up out of his coffin every August and September.

Some entries in the well-thumbed dictionary of hurricane-babble include:

Rain event

Dodged the bullet

Storms that brew – what do they brew?  Tea?  Coffee?

Storms that gain or lose steam, as if they were teakettles

Hurricanes that pound

Hurricanes that lash

Hurricanes that pummel

Reduced to rubble

Wreak havoc – what does “wreak” mean?

Left a swath of destruction in its wake -- what’s a swath, eh? 

Hurricanes that make landfall – well, what else would they make?  A gun rack in shop class?

Hurricanes that slam ashore

Hurricanes that storm ashore – well of course they storm; they’re storms

Changed my life forever  

Mother Nature's wrath

Mother Nature’s fury

Mother Nature's anything

Looked like a war zone – no one ever looked over the blood-sodden ground after a fight in Afghanistan and said “Gee, this looks like a hurricane zone.”

Decimated - unless precisely one out of every ten people was killed

Trees snapping like matchsticks - do matchsticks ever snap like trees?

Batten down the hatches  - I forgot to buy a hatch; I wonder if the stores are still open

Hunker down

Cars tossed about like Matchbox toys / Cars smashed like matchboxes

Boats bobbing like corks / boats smashed like matchboxes

Roofs peeled off

Rain coming down in sheets - never blankets or pillow slips?

Calm before the storm – almost always “eerie”

Calm in the eye of the storm – also almost “eerie”

Calm after the storm – yes, almost always “eerie”

ANY allusion to Katrina

Perfect storm

Storm of the century

A Hurricane that defined a generation

Fish storm

In the crosshairs

From this list of fluffery one can then assemble a sentence wholly devoid of meaning, just like the networks do:

In my own personal opinion, and in conclusion, at the end of the day, the bottom line is that when all is said and done, when the skinny man sings, that Mother Nature, in the form of mighty Hurricane Gaia, the storm of the century, thundering and slamming ashore in a turbulent and fateful pre-dawn, wreaked havoc on our homeland, snapping trees like matchsticks and leaving a swath of destruction in her wake that looked like a war zone and changed our lives forever, requiring us to seek closure and healing from grief counselors. 

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Taos -- The Red-Willow People

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Red-Willow People

The original Taos is not the plaza, but rather Taos Pueblo (www.taospueblo.com), some two miles north of town.  Home to the Red-Willow People, the Pueblo occupies some 90,000 acres of northern New Mexico, and has been their land for at least a thousand years.  The North House and the South House in the Pueblo proper date back a full millennium, which makes them coeval with Westminster Abbey.

Hey, maybe Taos Pueblo and the City of Westminster could make a twin cities agreement.

A beautiful little stream flows between the North House and South House, bordered with willows and benches, and visitors are asked not to wade in it or drink from it since it is the source of water.  Someone had tossed an ordinary new kitchen mop into it, though, and one wonders what domestic squabble that was about.

One ‘net encyclopedia advises that the Red-Willow People are “secretive” and “conservative.”  This is errant nonsense; they are in fact hospitable and open to the point of garrulousness.  Remember that Taos Pueblo is an autonomous state, though they do not yet require passports.  When visiting any autonomous state, say, Canada, one does not judge Canadians to be secretive if the ministry of defense does not provide the visitor with detailed information about the airport radar codes.  Similarly, Canada could hardly be considered conservative for not cluttering Ottawa’s Parliament Hill with chain coffee shops, hamburger joints, and neon signs advertising “Genuine Canadian Dancers in Costume.”

It’s their home; they want it to look nice.

Several hundred folks still live in the North House and South House, and by mutual agreement without electricity or piped water.  San Jeronimo / Saint Jerome Church is illuminated with gas for night liturgies, and otherwise people do very well with doors, windows, skylights, and probably early bed-times. 

Most everyone else lives in houses close to the crops, presumably with electricity and water.

The government offices near the front entrance – or, rather, border crossing – are connected to utilities, and the rulers’ pickups are parked out back next to the visitors’ restrooms.  Does the leader of any other nation drive a pickup truck with muddy boots and workman’s tools in the back?  I think he’d help you fix that broken gate you’ve been meaning to get to.

One of the most prominent features just inside the entrance is the tower of a ruined church.  This is the site of the first St. Jerome, from 1619.  That church was destroyed in a revolt against the Spanish in 1680, and was rebuilt a few years later.  In 1847 the United States acquired (nice euphemism) New Mexico, and there was a great deal of confused fighting in and around Taos.  In one of the rowdier misunderstandings, the new American Governor of New Mexico was scalped.  In front of his wife and children.  And then he was murdered.  Again in front of his wife and children.  Now that’s a bad day at work.  Whether or not the Red-Willow People were involved, the U.S. Army thought they were, and attacked the Pueblo.  The result was a massacre of several hundred people who had sought refuge in their parish church.

This isn’t Disneyland, okay?

The new Saint Jerome’s, about a hundred yards away, dates from 1850; the remains of the previous one are a memorial and a cemetery.  Just as we wouldn’t want furriners bopping around our maw-maw and paw-paws’ graves with cameras and fizzy drinks, visitors are not allowed to enter that bit of truly sacred ground.

We visited early in the morning to avoid the mid-day heat.  Early hours are also the best time for pictures because you can do the Ansel Adams thing so much more easily with the area mostly empty of people.  You’ve seen pictures of the buildings all your life, but for some reason few people photograph them framed by the shifting blues and greens of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The sunlit and almost golden facades of the buildings are at first silent and seemingly deserted, but then the shopkeepers begin opening their doors and putting out their signs, and suddenly there’s a lot going on.  The shopping is fun, and the artisans enjoy talking about their work, and Mom’s work, and how Grandpa worked, both at the craftsman’s bench and on the land. 

We met Mrs. Chili Flower in her nice shop, which features jewelry made by her family.  Her son, Richard, also sells by the side of the road west of town close to the Rio Grande Gorge.  Just look for the sign that says “No Vending on Highway Right-of-Way.”  Hey, New Mexico is calm like that.

The Red-Willow People speak Tiwa, Spanish, and English, and the last, at least, quite idiomatically, not that anyone from Texas can with reason critique any accent at all.  A bit of culture shock at first, but then you’ll feel quite at home.

They’re really nice folks; you ought to go visit them.

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