"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
I can’t wait for Saturday, March 25th. That’s when Nancy Hiller will be at the Book Corner, signing copies of her new book and telling a tale or two from it. Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life is available for purchase right now on Nancy’s website. We’ll have scads of copies at the Book Corner as well.
Speaking of Big Talk, man, I coulda taken last week off while Nicci B of the Back Door was in the studio. The co-owner and arts & entertainment director of Bloomington’s premier LGBTQ gathering place bent my ear like a champ. My interview w/ her aired Thursday. Here’s the link to the WFHB feature and here’s the link to the original, pretty-nearly-unedited original interview with her.
Nicci B
[Image: Andrew Grodner/Limestone Post]
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Big Talk will indeed be taking this week off but we’ll return next week, Thursday, March 23rd. I’ll let you know who my guest will be just as soon as I nail someone down.
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Bye-bye
Perhaps the scariest thing about these Days of President Gag is what I’m going to start referring to as the Big Finale. That is, there seems to be an epidemic of thought — suffusing people of seemingly every political and philosophical stripe — that…, well, we’re all about to die.
Here It Comes!
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Environmentalists warn us that we’re poisoning the Earth to the point that humanity can’t survive.
The scared bunnies on the Right tell us that Islamic terrorists are ten minutes away from acquiring a mega-nuke that’ll blow us all to smithereens.
Those on the Left howl that L’il Duce himself is ten minutes away from pressing the nuke button, destroying all life on this mad, mad, mad, mad world.
Gun nuts think hordes of black-skinned people are amassing right now on the edge of town, preparing for some kind of Great Siege.
Nativists believe undocumented brown-skinned people are pouring over the border by the tens of millions.
Fans of organics worry that GMOs’ll result in food as dangerous as a cookie made of arsenic.
A year and a half ago, celebrity “consumer advocate” Erin Brockovich hollered that drinking Bloomington’s water was equal to having tumors surgically implanted in our various and sundry organs.
I can go on and on, but you get the picture. Take all these disparate folk and add to the mix a certain segment of the pop. that believes we’re hurtling headlong toward a day when some defining battle between civilizations, between”winners” and “losers,” an Apocalyptic War, will rid the planet of evil and you’ve got our species’ current zeitgeist in a nutshell.
More than anything else, this Big Finale thing is terrifying. Too many people — the Right and the Left, the pious and the atheists, rich and poor, nice and not — are beginning to act as if they have nothing left to lose.
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The Man Comes Around
Johnny Cash’s homage to the Book of Revelations — specifically the Apocalypse — from the Rick Rubin-produced “American IV.”
The Loved One sent me the link last night and, to say the least, it takes my breath away. Couple that with conservative guru Richard Viguerie saying Mitt Romney lost because he didn’t hammer it home that Barack Obama is a “radical” who is out to destroy our holy land and you get the gist of the angst Tuesday’s election caused much of the nation.
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I wrote on Facebook the other day, “Personal to Republicans like Karl Rove & Glenn Beck and everybody who thinks the nation is gonna collapse now that Obama’s been reelected: Get hold of yourselves, people!”
It does seem on first blush that many Republicans and Me Party-ists and Libertarians have become opera singers and drama queens about an event that occurs every four years.
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While driving The Loved One to work this morning, I said something on the order of, These people are lunatics. She had a flash of equanimity, though, and pointed out that we’d be singing a very similar tune, only with different lyrics, had Romney won.
She’s right.
Then again, I thought of George W. Bush “winning” the 2000 election. I could have consoled myself by saying, “Well, it’s only four years, we’ll get ‘im next time.” The problem was Bush bollixed the Afghan War and then tricked the nation into the Iraq War. Whatever my worst fears were about Bush at the time of his “victory,” those misdeeds far exceeded them.
I don’t expect Obama to manufacture evidence to whip up war hysteria. The thing that petrifies the Right is his willingness to spend dough on social services.
Even if he bollixes that agenda big time — say he creates some useless, bloated federal authority overseeing the health care system — it still won’t come close to comparing with a couple of wars that have thus far cost hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives.
So, on third thought, yeah, the people wailing and gnashing their teeth and predicting apocalypse — literally — over another four years of Obama are pretty much lunatics.
By the way, Sagan’s signature line, “billions and billions”? He never said it. He revealed that tidbit in his book entitled — what else? — “Billions and Billions.”
Sagan’s early passing was a great loss, especially in this era of anti-intellectualism and distrust of science. On the other hand, we’re not totally adrift — the big boss at the Hayden Planetarium, Neil de Grasse Tyson, is a worthy successor. He only needs a signature line — that he never said.
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FIRE
Now the news comes that a half dozen Tibetans have set themselves on fire in recent days to dramatize their unhappiness with the Chinese, whose Communist Party has been convening in Beijing.
That makes a total of some 60 Tibetans who’ve lit themselves ablaze in the last two years.
Buddhist Nun Palden Choetso Immolates Herself Earlier This Year
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Make no mistake, The Chinese are a bunch of bullies when it comes to Tibet. For that matter, they’re bullies in just about every issue, foreign and domestic, they address.
Is it my Western mindset that causes me to think it’d make more tactical sense to, I don’t know, set fire to the enemy rather than yourself?
Is suicide ever called for in a political dispute?
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2000 LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
Psychedelia, baby!
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The only events listings you need in Bloomington.
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Friday, November 9th, 2012
LECTURE ◗ IU Maurer School of Law — “The Transnistria Conflict: Not Frozen,” Presented by Matt Rojansky, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment; Noon
LECTURE ◗ IU Ballantine Hall — “Latin America and China: Primary Goods, Populism, and Political leverage,” Presented by Andrae Marak of Governors State University; 12:30pm
LECTURE ◗ IU SoFA — “Artists’ Books: When the Goblet Becomes the Wine,” Presnted by Bill and Vicky Stewart of Vamp & Tramp Booksellers; 4:30pm
