Today's Pun

If Satan ever goes bald, there will will be Hell Toupee.

Hat tip = oldest boy, Nick

Yay, Exceedingly Rich People

I'm glad the new baby in the British royal family is alive and apparently doing just fine.

However, I'm having a pretty hard time understanding why we need to spend the better part of 3 days talking about it, devoting hours of air time and gallons of ink, and the large piles dollars it takes to put all those Press Poodles on the ground to gush about the astoundingly awesome and thoroughly amazing prospect of two normal people who fucked at least once, and then had a baby because of it.

Get over yourselves.

Away For A Bit

So I'm doing the vacation thing here in Colorful Colorado, and my iPad is not the most effective tool for posting stuff.  Please excuse my inability to dazzle you with my brilliantly insightful horse shit for  a while.

Another thing I've noticed is that editing an existing post on iPad can be very difficult because there seems to be something of a glitch in that I can't scroll down thru the post that I'm trying to fix.

If anybody else is having the same problem, please take a moment and advise.  Thanks.

See y'all later.

Today's Oxymoron

Political Reality.

Evolution.  Cigarettes.  Fracking.  Climate Change.  Vaccination.

The list goes on and keeps growing as we keep adding more "issues" that oughta be decided in the lab or in the field by people who're trained to figure out just how all this shit works.

BTW, I put quote marks around the word "issues" because the things on that list are not issues at all.  The things on that list are facts.  They're facts that can be - and have been - verified by the people who actually know what they're doing.

And the "fact" that you have an opinion to the contrary doesn't mean your opinion must be considered in any way equivalent to those facts.

But I digress - the point here is that I was recently hipped to an old Henrik Ibsen play from the 1880s that cuts so close to what's going on now that it made my ears feel hot and the hair on my back stand up.

Here's a little taste from a TV production done in the early 1960s:

(The town is on its way to becoming a big commercial success as a health spa, but a local doctor (Thomas) discovers the water is contaminated, but his brother Peter who is mayor and so a bidness player is hard to convince - and if you've been paying any attention to the redux of Newspeak and Coin-Operated Government and Know-Nothing Rubes and any number of "types" running rampantly abroad in this joint lately, you can guess what a big sloppy mess it turns into - including the old timey versions of Press Poodles and Bloggers)

Sub-par sound levels, but not so bad considering the times and the fact that they did it live in a TV studio.



The more things change...dontcha know.

hat tip = The Professional Left podcast

Here's the Librivox audiobook:

Today's Pix

Death Penalty

I have to admit I think there are people in the world we can do without - Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Justin Bieber - you know, the worst of the worst.  So it's hard for me to say we should lose the death penalty altogether.

That said, we need to take a good hard look at what we're doing and where we stand relative to the rest of the "civilized" world.

State-Sponsored Barbarism isn't exactly what we want USAmerica to be known for is it?

And when we're the only "free" country that still kills its own citizens on a regular basis, it seems American Exceptionalism is completely ass-over-apricots.

Miles Davis

One of the weirdest cats in the business, and one of the great horn players ever.



Sorry - can't find a good link at Amazon.

Ella Sings Billie

The Marmalade

Lesson Time

And this from Tim Wise via HuffPo:

You remember, forever and forever, that moment when you first discover the cruelties and injustices of the world, and having been ill-prepared for them, your heart breaks open.

I mean really discover them, and for yourself; not because someone else told you to see the elephant standing, gigantic and unrelenting in the middle of your room, but because yousaw him, and now you know he's there, and will never go away until you attack him, and with a vengeance.

Saturday night, and I am writing it down so that I will not forget -- because I already know she will not -- my oldest daughter, who attained the age of 12 only eleven days ago, became an American. Not in the legal sense. She was already that, born here, and -- as a white child in a nation set up for people just like her -- fully entitled to all the rights and privileges thereof, without much question or drama. But now she is American in the fullest and most horrible sense of that word, by which I mean she has been truly introduced to the workings of the system of which she is both a part, and, at the same time, merely an inheritor. A system that fails -- with a near-unanimity almost incomprehensible to behold -- to render justice to black peoples, the family of Trayvon Martin being only the latest battered by the machinations of American justice, but with all certainty not the last.

And so begins the task.  It's like we have to start all over - or at least we have to back up to about 1985 and go over the whole thing again.

What makes this really hard for me is the (by now) standard pop tune coming from "the right", which goes something like this:  "We have a black guy in the White House, and we have a black guy sittin' on SCOTUS, and a black guy as AG, and black folk all over the damn place - that has to mean that we really are in Post-Racial Happy-Time, which means I'm free to turn loose all this pent up bigotry that's been festering in my soul for 30 years while I pretended not to be the complete asshole I always knew it'd be OK to revert to being once we got past all this racism talk."

Fuck me now, Jesus.