Hot Air: Advice & Dissent

The Big Time

One of our town’s youngest and brightest journalism stars just may be leaving Bloomington for a post with a major NPR affiliate soon.

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I can’t wait to break the good news here, if indeed good news is in the offing.

Play Nice

Maxxwell Bodenheim points out some excellent advice for Hillary in the pages of The Nation. Writer D.D. Guttenplan offers the presumptive Dem nominee for prez five useful tips if she wishes to sweet talk a sufficient number of Bernie supporters to her camp for the Nov. election. They are:

  1. Back off.
  2. Try to be genuinely gracious.
  3. Listen to Bernie
  4. Change the rules, even though they helped you win.
  5. Take the fight to Trump.

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Read the entire piece (it’s not long at all) for details. One good thing: Hillary already seems to have moved on from fingering Bernie as the opposition and has pointed in recent weeks exclusively at Donald Trump.

Detention?

Why did the FBI raid the offices of the Vigo County School Corporation yesterday? The feds, w/ help from the Indiana State Police, seized items but they’re not named. In fact, no info is forthcoming from either the FBI, the ISP, or the school board.

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The first thing that came to my mind was child porn. Did one or more central office employees download kid stuff on corp. computers?

My pal Pat thinks it’s more likely the feds are interested in contract hijinks — kickbacks and bribes in exchange for school corp. business.

Either way, a certain number of public employees in Terre Haute must be walking around these days in a constant state of panic.

June 9th Birthdays

Elizabeth Garret Anderson — The queen of firsts: she was the first female surgeon in England, co-founded the first hospital staffed by women, the first medical doctor in France, and the first female mayor in England.

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Cole Porter — Indiana-born composer and lyricist. The scion of an extremely wealthy Peru, Indiana, family, he lived in Paris for a time, where he married a Kentucky-born heiress. Their apartment was decorated in platinum wallpaper and zebra-skin upholstery.

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Les Paul — Born Lester Polsfuss, Paul helped develop the solid-body electric guitar. He built his first such instrument in 1940, using a block of pine wood to which he affixed a pickup and strings. Historians credit Paul’s innovation with facilitating the development of rock ‘n roll. Paul recorded with his wife, the singer and guitarist Mary Ford.

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Robert McNamara — Former Ford Motor Company president who was named US Sec’y of Defense by John F. Kennedy and continued in that role through most of Lyndon Johnson’s term. McNamara was part of the brilliant, Ivy League-educated group of JFK advisors whom author David Halberstam nicknamed ‘the best and the brightest.” Despite their smarts, these advisors pushed for and succeeded in getting America stuck on the quagmire of Vietnam.

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Patricia Cornwell — Bestselling mystery novelist; she’s sold +100 million books. Her series of novels with lead character Dr. Kay Scarpetta, helped popularize the forensic work of medical examiners. Cornwell had an affair with the wife of an FBI agent in the early 1990s; the affair came to light when the woman’s husband attempted to murder her.

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On this date in the year 68 BCE, Nero died. Born Nerō Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, he succeeded the reasonable, more republican Claudius as emperor of Rome in 54 BCE. The old line about him fiddling while Rome burned was a canard. The violin had not yet been invented at that time. The historian Tacitus writes that Nero was out of town at the time of the fire. In any case, by the time of the fire Nero had become extremely unpopular (justifiably), so rumor mongers were eager to portray him in an unflattering light at any opportunity. Nero decided to kill himself in 68 BCE, but lacked the courage to do so. He begged and ordered any number of advisors, guards, and colleagues to stab him to death. All refused until he finally persuaded his private secretary to kill him.

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Hot Air: Winners

Tomorrow

Yesterday, natch, was one of the greatest days of my life.

Learning all my tumors have been shrunk to near nothingness and what little le sueur peas that do remain exhibit no undue metabolic activity has changed my life in a way that I’m tempted to describe as miraculous.

For the first time since I was diagnosed with cancer back in the fall, I possess a future once again.

There is tomorrow. There is next year. There is the year 2030. With luck and careful management of this decrepit wreck I call my body, I’ll still be alive tomorrow, next year, and even 14 years from now.

I feel young again.

Fortunately, yesterday and today have been spectacularly beautiful days, the sun shining, temps around 80, the sky deep blue, mottled with fleecy white clouds — just like those in one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s cloudscapes. At one point I pulled over and simply sat in my car just so I could stare at the sky. It filled me with the type of frisson I recall from my days as a carefree, careless teenager when I could experience pure joy.

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O’Keeffe’s Clouds

For the first time in months and months, I didn’t worry I was dying of cancer.

Because I’m not. At least not right now. That’s all I’ve got and it’s plenty.

And Now, The Election

Sure, I’d have been happier with a candidate who wasn’t so head over heels in love with the Goldman Sachs hoodlums. And yeah, I would have loved for Bernie to be a more viable candidate for prez. Hell, I voted for the guy in the Indiana primary, primarily because I wanted to endorse his overall platform.

But Hillary is the first goddamned female candidate to gain her major party’s nomination for president. I’m thrilled to pieces with that.

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Victorious

I’ll simply table my harsh criticisms of her until she inevitably finagles legislation to keep our nation’s capital in the hands of degenerate gambler banksters. Don’t worry; I’ll rip her to shreds as she deserves it.

Bernie’s sticking in the race and I’m okay with that. He should go into the convention with a full head of steam and use that leverage to get as many of his ideas and proposals onto the party’s plank as he can. Happily, Hillary in her coronation/glass ceiling speech last night acknowledged that Bernie inspired debate that was “very good for the Democratic Party and for America.”

Now let’s knock off the debate and get behind his very progressive economic and social agenda.

I’d prefer not to have a corporatist as the Dem standard-bearer but I’ll have to make do with what I’ve got. I can only hope the majority of Bernie’s backers swallow their pride and jump on the Hillary bandwagon. The very idea that Donald Trump has a hair’s-breadth chance of becoming the Grand Dragon-in-Chief of this holy land scares the living bejesus out of me. Hillary’s going to need all the votes, all the support, she can muster to make sure we don’t wind up in Trump hell come Nov.

A certain percentage of Sanders cultists will hold their breath until they turn blue and refuse to vote in the election as long as their boy isn’t on the ballot. Some will even vote for Trump, which is madness. But cultists are prone to madness.

Even after Hillary took California yesterday, some Bernie people are still claiming the entire primary process is “fixed,” this despite the fact that Bernie himself was more than happy with Dem primary rules until this year. To hear some Sanders true believers tell it, Hillary is the capo of a criminal enterprise whose tentacles reach far into government, financial institutions, think tanks, academia, and the mainstream media. Witness their certainty that somehow the Hillary campaign forced or directed or conned the Associated Press into making its Monday pronouncement that she’d passed the delegate minimum needed for the nom.

Funny how this woman, purportedly running such an effective, all-powerful political mafia, couldn’t seem to  overcome a near-unknown in 2008 and even this year was unable to beat a self-described Democratic Socialist in so many state contests.

Then again, cultists seem to enjoy seeing the rest of the world unified against them in grandiose, science-fictional conspiracies.

My fondest hope is that Bernie’s cultists are far fewer in number than their loud voices might indicate.

June 8th Birthdays

Alicia Boole Stott — Irish mathematician who specialized in four-dimensional geometry. Here’s a video explaining the fourth dimension. If, after watching it, you aren’t suffering a crushing headache, you possess a greater intellect than I do.

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Frank Lloyd Wright — Perhaps the greatest American architect. His Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, is a marvel of innovation, spareness, and lightness. Wright was a notorious philanderer and lost one of his mistresses when a servant at his Taliesin studio axe-murdered her and six other people.

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Eddie Gaedel — Born with dwarfism, Gaedel gained fame when St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck signed him to a one-day contract and sent him up as a pinch-hitter in a 1951 game. He went to the plate carrying a toy souvenir bat and walked on four pitches. He was the shortest player ever to appear in a Major League Baseball game.

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William Calley — A symbol of America’s ill-concieved misadventure in Vietnam, Calley, a US Army lieutenant, was convicted of the murder of 22 civilians in the My Lai massacre. His superiors, who may have ordered him to kill the civilians, as well as those who covered up the atrocity, were never brought to justice.

Lt. William Calley arrives for his court martial in 1971 at Fort Benning, Georgia. (Columbus Ledger-Enquirer/MCT)

Scott Adams — Creator of “Dilbert.” Historically a supporter of Republican candidates, Adams has jocularly endorsed Hillary Clinton for president because she has equated Donald Trump with “nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.” Should Trump win the election, Adams reasons, he (Adams) would be a likely target for assassination because of his previous support for the Hitler-like character.

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Rob Pilatus — Member of the lip-synching duo, Milli Vanilli, Pilatus descended into drug abuse and deep depression after the act’s charade was exposed. Pilatus died of an alcohol and prescription drug overdose during a 1998 comeback tour in Germany.

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Milli Vanilli: Fab Morvan & Rob Pilatus (R)

Gabrielle Giffords — Lucky to be alive, Gabby Giffords was shot in the head by a psychotic gunman at a 2011 appearance in a Tucson grocery store parking lot. At the time a member of the US House representing the southeast Arizona district, she survived the shooting, suffering brain damage leading to language difficulties and reduced vision in both eyes. The attack resulted in absolutely no new gun control legislation.

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On this date in 1874, Cochise died. The leader of the Chokonen group of the Chiricahua Apache, he was a successful general in the sporadic Apache wars against European invaders in the American Southwest. The Apache guerrilla style of warfare worked to their advantage until the Battle of Apache Pass in 1862, when the US Army used wagon-mounted artillery against a Cochise-led army of 500 men. He later wrote, “My people were winning the fight until you fired your wagons at us.”

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Hot Air: Shattering Barriers

Papal Bull

I’ve been super busy (and mildly under the weather) the last week or so. That’s why I haven’t posted anything here in a while.

I’m still super busy (and still mildly under the weather) but a few recent happenings in the world at large demand I pontificate.

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Infallible

BTW: In case you didn’t catch the reference in the subhead above, there is indeed a thing called the Papal Bull. It is a hyper formal letter issued by the R. Catholic Church’s Big Poppa, usually having to do with things like excommunications, clarifications of church legal matters, and other hotsy-totsy decrees. The “bull” comes from the Latin bulla, a lead seal attached to the end of the letter to verify its authenticity. Sadly, the term papal bull is rarely used anymore, obviating newspaper headlines such as “The Latest Papal Bull.”

One more thing: The papal bull largely has been replaced by the papal brief. Sadly, again, newspaper headline writers have thus far refrained from printing the likes of “Francis Reveals His Latest Papal Briefs.”

The world could be so much more fun if I were king.

History

My most ardent Bernie-ista pals will scream bloody murder when they read this but news orgs. left and right last night and this morning proclaimed Hillary the “presumptive” Democratic nominee for the 2016 presidential election.

The Associated Press, apparently, canvassed scads of super delegates and, by its math, determined that HRC now has enough delegates to put her over the top in Philly next month. The rest of the corporate media has taken the AP’s pronouncement as gospel and is similarly crowning Hill.

Does anybody realize what an earth-shaking happenstance this is? Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first woman to be nominated for prez by a major American political party!

That’s huge, babies.

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Pioneer

As huge as Barry Obama catching the nod in 2008.

I’d imagine even the most bilious of the Bernie gang that’s been slicing and dicing HRC non-stop since the beginning of the primary season would recognize the achievement. (One beat. Two beats.) Nah, who am I kidding?

Need I point out it’s been the Dems who’ve nominated the first female vice presidential candidate (Geraldine Ferraro in 1984), and the first black man and first woman to be (take your pick) Führer, Ayatollah, General Secretary of the Communist Party, Cocaine Addict-, Kenyan-, and Lesbian Murderer-in-Chief.

The Republicans, OTOH, have bestowed upon this holy land one Donald John Trump as their candidate for Grand Dragon-in-Chief.

And still there are misguided souls around the nation who swear there’s no diff. between the parties.

Brave

Of all the things Muhammad Ali (nee Cassius Marcellus Clay) accomplished in his life, the thing I respect most was his refusal to be inducted into the US Army during the Vietnam War.

“My principles,” he said, “are more important than money or my title.”

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He could have used his money and/or his influence as the one of the most well-known people on Earth to get out of serving in Vietnam. He could have moved to Canada and boxed all over the world. Professional baseball and football players by the score got out of service by enlisting in the National Guard during the war. That way, they’d only have to give up one weekend a month for training and drills. Ali didn’t do any of that. He reported, as ordered to the induction center and then, when his name was called, refused to respond.

He said:

No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

That’s courage.

And I’m not going to cheapen his stance with mealy-mouthed praise of the bravery of soldiers who did go to Vietnam. I’ve been hearing a lot of that of late. What about the boys who served? What, indeed about them? I know many fellows who went to Vietnam. The lot of them have been damaged physically, emotionally, psychologically — you name it, they’ve suffered it.

They suffered so much because the horrors they witnessed, the killings they had to commit, the pain they experienced, were not justified by their nation’s inherent goodness. American soldiers in World War II saw just as many heads blown off, viscera spilled from riven abdomens, limbs separated from torsos, children riddled with rifle shots, towns, villages and big cities burned to ashes. These horrors could be processed sanely only with the understanding that their country was on the side of right and good. The hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought in Vietnam could fall back on no such rationale.

It was one thing to wipe out a town in an effort to halt the evil of the Nazis. It was quite another to to set fire to a Vietnamese hamlet for…, um…, er…, what was the reason for that again?

Muhammad Ali simply was fortunate enough to have had his consciousness raised by being a black man in America and a member of a religious group that didn’t consider itself fully American. He employed that knowledge to form his principled stance. Tens of thousands of other young men hadn’t yet shrugged off the yoke of patriotism, one that would blind them to their government’s lies. They did what they considered their duty.

So did Muhammad Ali. Only his duty was a lot less popular than theirs at the time.

June 7th Birthdays

Beau Brummell — Yep, there was indeed a fellow named Beau Brummell, and quite the fop he was, too. Born George Bryan Brummell, he ingratiated himself with Prince George, who’d go on to become England’s King George IV. Brummell, the prince, and other notables such as George Gordon, Lord Byron, became what were known as “dandies.” Under Brummell’s influence, the dandies began to wear neckties and an early version of the modern suit, they took to shaving and bathing daily, and paid special attention to their oral hygiene. Brummell would brag it took him five hours a day to complete his toilette and dressing.

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Herman B Wells — Beloved and storied president of Indiana University, serving from 1937 through 1962.

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Virginia Apgar — Pioneering obstetrical anesthesiologist who developed the Apgar Score, a method for measuring the developmental capabilities of newborns at five minutes, ten minutes, and — if needed — additional intervals. She studied neonatology and advocated for intensive care for babies born prematurely.

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Gwendolyn Brooks — Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet who wrote about black lives in the inner city. Her poetry dealt with drugs, racism, and poverty. She elected not to finish college because, she reasoned, she only ever wanted to be a writer and the only way to become a writer was to simply write.

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Tom Jones — Welsh singer and sex symbol. Women threw their panties at him as he performed on stage. He was much more than masturbational fodder, though, as illustrated by this duet with Janis Joplin:

Nikki Giovanni — American poet who was one of the more well-known of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. Her poetry championed the struggle for civil rights as well as Black Power. She was known as “the poet of the Black revolution.”

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Prince

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On this date in 1967, the writer Dorothy Parker died. She wrote, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

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Also on this date in 1965, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, striking down a state law prohibiting married couples from using birth control. The Court cited “marital privacy” as the basis for its decision.

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Recovery: Life Is Beautiful

The Verdict

I’m in remission!

I made it!

All that pain and suffering, that horrible months-long ordeal, that poison, that burning, the worry — all gone.

All worth it.

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I was scared beyond words leading up to my visit with Dr. Allerton today. He gave me the news and I broke down. I cried like a baby.

I hugged him…, oh, it must have been ten times. I hugged a few nurses, too. I hugged The Loved One for an eternity.

There is, my dear friends, no more goddamned olive pit. I hereby discontinue the trademark.

Hot Air

Indictments Coming Soon!

Ha! I’d wanted to do this myself but, as usual, I kept putting it off because I was too lazy and/or distracted.

To hear some partisans tell it, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the worst person in the world. Maybe even the worst person in the last 100 years. Worse than J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger, Dick Nixon, Donald Trump, Martin Shkreli…, hell name a reprobate and she’s been compared — unfavorably — to him.

So, this fellow Brett Arends of the website Market Watch a while ago put together “All the terrible things Hillary Clinton has done — in one big list.”

W/o further ado, here it is:

1. When she was first lady, she murdered White House lawyer Vince Foster and then dumped his body in a park.

2. She drove Vince Foster to commit suicide through her temper tantrums.

3. She was having an affair with Vince Foster.

4. She’s a lesbian.

5. Chelsea isn’t Bill Clinton’s child.

6. She murdered Vince Foster to cover up that she once bought a tract of undeveloped land in Arkansas and lost money. 

7. She murdered Vince Foster to cover up her role in firing the White House travel department.

8. After she murdered Vince Foster, she ransacked his office in the middle of the night and stole all the documents proving her guilt.

9. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, she was a partner in the state’s top law firm, and it sometimes did work involving the state government.

10. She once invested in commodities futures on the advice of a friend and made $100,000, proving she’s a crook.

11. She once invested in real estate on the advice of another friend and lost $100,000, also proving she’s a crook.

12. Unnamed and unverifiable sources have told Peggy Noonan things about the Clintons that are simply too terrible to repeat.

13. The personnel murdered at Benghazi make her the first secretary of state to lose overseas personnel to terrorism — apart from Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, George Schultz, Dean Rusk and some others.

14. Four State Department staff were murdered at Benghazi, compared with only 119 others murdered overseas under every secretary of state combined since World War II.

15. She illegally sent classified emails from her personal server, except that apparently they weren’t classified at the time.

16. She may have cynically wriggled around the email law by “technically” complying with it.

17. She once signed a lucrative book contract when she was a private citizen.

18. Donald Trump says she “should be in jail,” and he’s a serial bankrupt casino developer in Atlantic City, so he should know.

19. Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay says his “law-enforcement sources” tell him she is “about to be indicted” — and if a man once convicted of money laundering and conspiracy doesn’t have good law-enforcement sources, who does?

20. She’s a hard-left radical who wants to break up the nuclear family.

21. She’s a conservative “mousewife” who refused to break up her own family.

22. She’s in favor of single moms.

23. She refused to be a single mom.

24. When she was first lady of Arkansas, she pandered to conservative voters by dyeing her hair.

25. Before that, she totally insulted them by refusing to.

26. She’s a frump.

27. She spends too much money on designer dresses.

28. She has “cankles.”

29. She has a grating voice.

30. She yells into the microphone.

31. She spent 18 years in Arkansas and some of the people she knew turned out to be crazy rednecks and crooks.

32. She’s in the pay of the mafia.

33. She’s in the pay of the Chinese government.

34. She’s in the pay of the Wall Street banks.

35. In order to suppress the billing records from her time at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, she cleverly packed them up and took them to the White House rather than shredding them.

36. When she handed over the documents to public officials, they couldn’t find any evidence she’d committed any crimes, so she must have doctored them.

37. Congress spent tens of millions of dollars and six years investigating her investment in the Whitewater real-estate project, and, while they didn’t actually find anything, they wouldn’t have spent all that money if there weren’t something there.

38. By cleverly hiding all evidence of her crimes in the Whitewater affair, she caused Congress to waste all that taxpayers’ money.

39. When she ran for senator of New York, she was still a fan of the Chicago Cubs.

40. She once said the Clintons were thinking of adopting a child, and they didn’t follow through.

41. She was photographed holding her hand near her mouth during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

42. She’s got brain damage.

43. She’s old.

44. She’s really ambitious and calculating, unlike all the other people running for president.

45. She secretly supported Palestinian terrorists, Puerto Rican terrorists and Guatemalan terrorists.

46. She secretly supported a group that wants to give Maine back to the Indians.

47. She’s a secret follower of “radical prophet” Saul Alinsky.

48. She did her law degree at Yale, and it’s a well-known “socialist finishing school.”

49. When she was young, she did things to build up her résumé rather than just for their own good.

50. When Bill was president, she “allowed” him to keep people waiting.

51. She’s married to a sex addict.

52. She’s an enemy of traditional marriage.

53. She didn’t divorce her husband.

54. His philandering is her fault because she is too strong, and too weak, and too frumpy, and too fat, and too cold.

55. She’s hostile to women who fool around with her husband.

56. A divorced taxi driver in Florida told me that if Hillary is elected president, “women will take over everything.”

57. She insulted Tammy Wynette.

58. When they left the White House, she and Bill bought a big house in New York that they couldn’t afford.

59. She sometimes calls her staff during dinner, even when they’re out at a restaurant.

60. She claimed there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, and it turned out there was nothing but a bunch of tycoons financing private investigators, and some fake think tanks and books and news sites and stuff.

61. When she got married, she didn’t “stay at home and bake cookies.”

62. She supported the Iraq war because she’s a secret foreign-policy conservative.

63. She’s a secret foreign-policy radical with a plan to impose worldwide “radical social experimentation” through the World Bank.

64. She is secretly plotting to let children sue their parents for making them take out the garbage.

65. She looked bored during the Benghazi hearings.

66. Oh, yeah — and she totally has a vagina.

Honestly, No. 66 is the kiss of death, though, isn’t it?

The Blog Virus

Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody and her sister have blogs. Acc’d’g to iffy estimates there are upwards of 200 million blogs in the world right now. A lot of them are abandoned — you know, people go into these things with the best of intentions and then they discover, Hey, I’ve gotta write something every day! Sheesh! Next thing you know, they haven’t logged in since November.

Add to them the number of bloggers who really ought to find another hobby. Either they’re terrible writers, madly enthusiastic about deadly boring topics , or believe Donald Trump would make a good president. (Isn’t that why we have insane asylums?)

But you read this blog so you know some are actually worth your time of day. I thought I’d gather a list a blogs I like. We in the blogging industry used to call this a blogroll. Now if you are sucker enough to buy a blogroll widget and actually put it on your home page, you’ve essentially confessed to the world that you are 62 years old, semi-retired or shut-in due to illness, have just bought a new computer, and have a pathological fixation on hummel figurines or Civil War battlefields. Not hip, right?

Well, I don’t care what’s hip. In fact, I define my own hip. The Big Mike hip. I’m not going to install a blogroll widget herein but I am going to provide you a one-off list of my top blogs, so here it is:

Dave Hoekstra’s Website — The former Chicago Sun-Times features writer, now host of WGN radio’s “Nocturnal Journal,” Dave is a former Matchbox colleague of mine and a great Cubs fan to boot. He actually travelled to Tokyo to see them the year (2000) they played a season-opening series in Japan.

The Oatmeal — Cartoonist Matthew Inman’s site. I just learned that in 2012, The Oatmeal generated $500,000 in revenue. Now I hate Matthew Inman.

Sheila Kennedy: A jaundiced look at the world we live in — IUPUI law and policy professor in the School of Environmental and Public Affairs, Kennedy calls herself a Republican but, trust me, she’s no more a Republican than I am Benedict Cumberbatch.

Infinite Gestation — A blog on all things literary, the brainchild of three southwest Indiana coffeehouse intellectuals, including my friend, the gentleman, Jeffersonian farmer Samuel Zurcher.

Science-Based Medicine — The name says it all.

Rachel Roams Rabat — The daughter of my next door neighbors the Thickstuns is in Morocco this summer on some kind of student exchange dealio. Morocco. Makes me think of the great old Crosby, Stills & Nash song from the summer of 1969, “Marrakesh Express.” Here’s a sample stanza:

Take the train from Casablanca going south
Blowing smoke rings from the corners of my mouth
Colored cottons hang in the air
Charming cobras in the square
Striped djellebas we can wear at home

Before the interwebs, I never knew what a djelleba was.

Science Blogs — An aggregator gathering posts from such blog titles as Confessions of a Science Librarian, Aardvarcheology, and Starts with a Bang.

Noir of the Week — Offers reviews and essays about the great films noir, my fave movie genre.

Bookslut — Drag, man! This gem of a literary blog just posted its final edition. Nevertheless, if the site remains up, you can enjoy its back issues and learn a few things about books and authors.

Fire Joe Morgan — For baseball fans only, the sports media meta-criticism site mainly written by Michael Schur (aka, Ken Tremendous). Its motto: ‘Wher bad journalism comes to die.” Tremendous/Schur is television screenwriter whose credits include The Office and Parks and Recreation. He also appeared on The Office as Mose Schrute. FJM has been dormant since November, 2008, but it’s still up and still howl-inducing if you’re a fan of “fisking” and bad sportswriters and broadcasters.

Every Goddamn DaySun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg’s blog.

May 30th Birthdays

Howard Hawks — Directed Scarface, His Girl Friday, The Outlaw, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Monkey Business, and Rio Bravo, among many others.

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Cornelia Otis Skinner — Author and actor, her most notable work was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. She liked to describe herself as a diseuse, the French word for female storyteller, but dropped the term when a newspaper article printed it as “disease.”

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Mel Blanc — The king of cartoon voices.

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Benny Goodman — Clarinetist and band leader, Goodman was one of the first white musicians to work with a black man, Fletcher Henderson, with whom he scored arrangements, wrote songs, and performed on stage. Henderson’s influence on Goodman helped the latter become one of the pioneers of swing music.

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Christine Jorgensen — Born George Jorgensen, she was the first person to gain fame as a transsexual. Her first stage reassignment surgery (an orchiectomy) in 1951 was done in Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the very few places in the world where the procedure was performed. She wrote to friends, “Remember the shy, miserable person who left America? Well, that person is no more and, as you can see, I’m in marvelous spirits.”

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On this day in 1911, Milton Bradley died. Founder of the eponymous board game company, the first game he sold was called The Checkered Game of Life, now known as The Game of Life. He got into game making after his lithograph business collapsed when Abraham Lincoln decided to grow a beard. See, Bradley had made a mint selling lithos of Lincoln without a beard in 1860 but when the future president grew whiskers, no one wanted Bradley’s images of him anymore.

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Hot Air

Treasures

Malcolm X’s nephew, Rodnell Collins, has purchased the three-story house in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston where Malcolm lived for seven years as a teenager. Collins wants to rehab the decrepit building and, perhaps, turn it into student housing. But first, the ground around the structure has been sifted and fingered through by a group of urban archeologists, looking for traces and relics of earlier ages.

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Young Malcolm Little

Lo and behold, the searchers found things like iron jacks from a jacks and ball set, a musket ball, shards of ceramics from the 18th and 19th centuries, a pewter mug lid, and fragments of colonial-era tobacco pipes. The neighborhood, like most city tracts, has gone through numerous changes over the years. Before it turned black, it was home to working class Irish immigrants, for instance. The finds, though, indicate the area might have been a colonial plantation with a grand manor on it.

Cool, huh? Makes me want to start digging around in my backyard to see who lived on the present day site of the world headquarters of this communications colossus.

Go here for the full story.

Seeing Things

I thought I saw a lightning bug Friday night. Then I thought I saw one last night.

Both times I watched the space where I thought I saw the flash for long moments and neither time did I see another buggy sexual come-on.

I suppose the sightings were just my imagination. Nevertheless, it’ll be lightning bug season awfully soon.

Kerosene As A Condiment?

They do fish boils up in Door County, a glorious tourist destination on the thumb of Wisconsin. Door County is a hilly, narrow peninsula reaching north into Lake Michigan, with the greater lake to the east and Green Bay to the west.

Honestly, I’m a sucker for these kinds of things. When you go to a fish boil — and pretty much every little hamlet along Green Bay features at least one place that offers it — you sit in a spacious yard and watch as some garrulous, bearded old geezer prepares the dinner over a wood fire. As he cooks, he tells why he’s doing what he’s doing, his explanation interspersed with local lore and corny jokes. Then there’s the boil-over, a spectacular blast of flame and heat caused by — gulp! — kerosene.

Here’s one YouTuber’s vid of the show:

Yep, they toss kerosene into the water that’s boiling whitefish chunks, red potatoes, and onions. As soon as the kerosene hits the boiling water it ignites, sending flames ten feet in the air and creating a column of black smoke. The Scandinavians who brought the fish boil technique to the Midwest found that the process actually burns away all traces of the fuel so that — yeah, I figured you were worried about this — you won’t be gobbling forkfuls of fish and potatoes coated with jet fuel at your table.

Right now, my dear pals, the unlikely Persian-Jewish husband and wife team of crackerjack architects, Mikey and Ati, are there and — yup — they went to a fish boil last night. Dang. I wish I were there with them.

You Are Under My Power. You Are Sleepy… Sle-e-e-e-epy!

Just a reminder that several days ago America’s Shart, Donald Trump, excoriated this holy land’s diplomats and leadership for allowing North Korea to explode their semi-dud nuclear weapons.

He said it would only take a phone call from Himself  as president (pardon me while I clean up my vomit) to halt Kim Jong-un’s nuke ambitions.

Maybe I’ve got this guy all wrong. Maybe he’s a hypnotist or a blackmailer of some sort. All I know is, if he can get Kim to kill his A-bomb program with a single telephone call, I’d like him to dial up Comcast for me. I’ve got issues with them.

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Just Go Home

Nothing good can happen in a bar at 3:00am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. The Herald Times today carries a report about a lively donnybrook in the parking lot of Kilroy’s Dunnkirk at that unholy hour this morning.

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Trouble Hour

Honestly, if you need to drink alcohol that late into the night, you’ve got a huge monkey on your back. If you haven’t picked up somebody by then with whom you can have semi-anonymous and totally unfulfilling sex, whoever you are going to pick up will be as attractive — inside and out — as Aileen Wuornos or Jeffrey Dahmer.

May 29th Birthdays

Tenzig Norgay — The actual first human to reach the top of Mt. Everest.

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John F. Kennedy — He and Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev engaged in a genital-length contest during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thankfully, both leaders possessed enough basic human decency to call off their little competition before mushroom clouds spread over dozens of cities.

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Pepper Paire — Born Lavone Paire in Los Angeles, she was a star catcher for the Minneapolis Millerettes, Fort Wayne Daisies, Racine Belles, and Grand Rapids Chicks of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Her 2009 memoir, Dirt in the Skirt, tells the real story of the AAGPBL as opposed to the Hollywood-ized account in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own.

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Peter Higgs — Nobel laureate physicist who theorized the existence of the Higgs Boson, popularly known as the God Particle. Higgs was a member of Greenpeace until that organization took a stance opposing Genetically Modified Organisms. BTW, fellow Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman, who’s credited with coining the term God Particle, originally wanted to call it the Goddamn Particle.

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Melissa Etheridge — Lesbian Nation’s fave singer-songwriter. She was dubbed “The Great Dyke Hope” by The Advocate editor Judy Wieder. A breast cancer survivor, she criticized actress Angelina Jolie for her decision to have her breasts surgically removed as a preventive measure.

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Mel B — Born Melanie Brown, she was a member of the Spice Girls. I list her here only to remind the world that at one sad moment in our species’ history we cared about the Spice Girls. Mel B was black and so she was identified as Scary Spice. No, nothing racist about that.

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On this day in 1951, Fanny Brice died. Born Fania Borach in New York, she achieved great fame as a comedienne, singer and stage personality. More than a decade after her death, her fame was rekindled when a young Barbra Streisand portrayed her in the Broadway musical Funny Girl.

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Hot Air: The Game Is On The Level

Playing The Numbers

The whole narrative being pushed by Bernie’s most ardent supporters — that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary are in cahoots, rigging the system — gets a lot more play on social media these days than do Bernie’s positions on the issues.

And that’s funny because all he ever talks about are the issues. He’s got a one-track mind and that track is clogged with scads of issues. Which is fine by me. Remember, I voted for Bernie in the Indiana primary.

Hillary talks about issues too. But she seems a bit more open to banter and tangents, her stump speech more conversational than Bernie’s doctrinaire style.

Trump talks issues on rare occasions, especially when he needs to blow his dog whistle on immigration, fat women, women in general, losers, and what a crook Hillary is. Which, BTW, is precisely what Bernie’s fanatics harp on constantly — that Hillary’s no better than a masked mugger waiting to jump out of the shadows.

The more I hear from Bernie’s biggest boosters, the more I hear the echoes of Trump’s people and the Tea Party-ists of a couple of years ago. I hear a bunch of cocksure ideologues screaming in my ear.

My guy Nate Silver, who runs the 538 operation, co-bylined a piece with Harry Enten Thursday asserting that nobody’s rigging nothin’. Simply put, more people in the Democratic Party want Hillary than want Bernie.

The authors ran a chart showing the vote totals in all the states that so far have held caucuses or primaries. Guess what. Hillary’s kicking the bejesus out of Bernie. She’s coming out way ahead in those states that have the most voters and have had higher turnouts, smashing the Bernie-istas’ charge that their guy “wins when the turnout is higher.”

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Click Chart For Full Story

T’ain’t so, kiddies. He wins in low-turnout caucuses which tend to draw committed, avid backers. And, trust me, nobody’s more committed and avid than a Bernie-ista. Unless it’s a Tea Party-ist (I won’t even do the cute faux-Spanish suffix for those numbskulls).

I’ll head off the knee-jerk arguments of my Feel the Bern friends right now. They’re going to say Nate Silver is full of crap because he predicted in February Trump didn’t have a ghost of a chance and/or his and Enten’s numbers are phony.

Silver was wrong about Trump but, honestly, wouldn’t any sentient being back in the winter have considered America’s Shart the longest of long shots?

Only a cynic like me took Trump seriously. And, believe me, it gives me no pleasure at all to be so contemptuous of the intelligence (actually, lack thereof) of the American voter that I foresaw the rise of Trump. At least Silver was clinging by his fingernails to the myth that the electorate of this holy land possesses some tiny shred of perception. I lost my childlike wonder years ago.

Anyway, I’m still looking forward to a bang-up speech by Bernie at the Convention this July. I’m not completely bereft of optimism.

May 28th Birthdays

Louis Agassiz — The 19th Century biologist and geologist was way ahead of his time by studying the Earth and its life through those two lenses. He proposed that the Earth had experienced ice ages, a hypothesis later confirmed. He did, though, believe the races were created by god separately and that Darwin’s evolution ideas were the bunk.

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Ian Fleming — A spy himself during World War II, he wrote the James Bond novels, beginning with Casino Royale. Here’s a shocker: He also wrote the children’s story (and later, movie musical starring Dick Van Dyke) Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Who knew? One more shocker: Have you seen the interwebs push for Gillian Anderson to play Bond in the next 007 film? I’m totally up for that.

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Ruby Payne-Scott — Hey, I just mentioned her in the death section of the May 25th post. She’s worth mentioning again.

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Barry Commoner — He was Bernie Sanders long before Bernie Sanders became a national figure. Commoner, a biologist, in 1970 tied together humanity’s environmental degradation, its energy use, and America’s struggling economy. He ran for president in 1980 on the Citizens Party ticket, garnering 233,052 votes, less than 1 percent of the total cast. I voted for him.

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Betty Shabazz — Born Betty Sanders and also known as Betty X, she was the wife of Malcolm X. She was certain Malcolm was assassinated — she’d witnessed his killing — by Nation of Islam members order orders from Louis Farrakhan. Her daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, was charged with conspiring to kill Farrakhan in the mid-90s. As part of a plea agreement she underwent psychological treatment. Betty, after Malcolm’s murder, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a master’s degree in health administration. In 1975, she served on the American Revolution Bicentennial Council at President Ford’s invitation.

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Malcolm & Betty X

On this day in 2014, Maya Angelou died. Born Marguerite Johnson, she was America’s most well-known poet during her latter years. Here’s even more who knew? stuff: Early in her adult life, Angelou was a nightclub dancer, performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, as well as an actor, appearing in the European touring company of Porgy and Bess. She also released a 1957 album as a singer, Miss Calypso. Her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, brought her international acclaim.

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Hot Air: The Pussy Factor

Trump’s Moment

Wits and wags are standing on their heads — hell, some of them are standing on each others’ heads — trying to make sense of the Donald Trump phenomenon. Psychologists and psychiatrists are psychoanalyzing him and his fans. Pollsters are crunching numbers. Political commentators are pontificating on jobs, the economy, immigration, and tons of other issues that normally define a candidate and his people.

I’m here to save them all the trouble. Stand on your heads no more, experts and mavens. Big Mike has the answer. Ready?

Okay, here goes. Remember as far back as February when Trump was still a joke to most observers? (Well, not to me — I’ve taken him seriously since the day he announced his intention to run for president in 2015. To have viewed Trump as a gag, you have to believe in the rationality, the good sense, and even the sanity of the American electorate. I do not, nor have I ever.)

Anyway, one night in February, after he’d won the New Hampshire primary, much to the shock and chagrin of the smart guys, Trump was giving a speech during which he referred to Ted Cruz. A woman in the audience screamed out, “He’s a pussy!”

Trump played aghast and faux-excoriated the woman. But everyone knew he agreed with her. Everyone knew she’d said precisely what he was thinking. And the beauty of it was, he didn’t have to say the words. She did the dirty work for him. He had his cake and he ate it.

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The Pussy Moment

(Click Image For Video)

It was at that very moment Trump became a hero to millions of Murricans. We liberals, progressives, Democrats, and other dregs of society love to kid ourselves that if everybody just realized how intelligent, thoughtful, rational, even brilliant our guy Barack Obama is, why, they’d just throw kisses at him from morning until night.

Actually, no.

The American people have rarely if ever shown any inclination to embrace intelligence, thought, rationality, and even brilliance. In fact, tell people a guy has those qualities and they’ll smirk. He’ s probably a fag, they’ll tell each other in private. God forbid he’d be our leader.

Many, many, many people of this holy land wish to high heaven god had forbidden Barack Obama from becoming our leader. A few of them even believe the Big Daddy-o in the sky has visited tornados, floods, 9/11, and scads of other tragedies upon us simply because we did indeed vote BHO into the Oval Office.

(How, you may ask, was Obama deemed responsible for 9/11? Simple. The Big Daddy-o is all knowing and all powerful. He looked seven years into the future and saw dark skin in the White House — next thing anybody knew, jumbo jets were crashing into the twin towers and the Pentagon. You’ve got have faith, you know.)

What the American people want is a man. A he-man. A man not afraid to tell it like it is. A man who speaks the truth. A man who’ll bomb ISIS, Mexican immigrants, the Chinese, fat women, the unemployed, and anybody else who displeases him back into the Stone Age.

A man who knows how big his balls are and is eager to share that information with the world.

A man, as well, who knows when another man really isn’t a man. Trump knew Ted Cruz was a pussy.

Trump was a man we could go to war with.

Trump’s tacit endorsement of the woman calling Cruz a pussy was the switch that turned on the carnival ride. “Hehe! He thinks Cruz is a pussy. I like that guy. He speaks the truth.”

As opposed to, say, John McCain who, in 2008 when a woman said Barack Obama was a Muslim and an Arab, shook his head and told her, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man and citizen…. He’s not an Arab.”

The crowd booed and hissed McCain. People shouted that Obama was a terrorist and that McCain was a liar.

You can bet with that exchange, McCain essentially guaranteed that tens of thousands of likely voters for him — perhaps even hundreds of thousands — would stay home on Election Day. I don’t know if McCain would have won the election but the final count would have been a lot closer had he pretended to be aghast and faux-scolded the woman, winking all the while.

Loser

Politics comes from the gut. I like to think that my gut tells me I should be concerned over the plight of those less fortunate than I am, that the environment needs a good clean-up — quick, and that war with China would be pretty much a bummer for all 7 billion of us. But I’m an outlier. Real Murricans’ guts ache for a tough guy. A guy who isn’t afraid to call another man a pussy.

You’re welcome.

Lucky Us

The Loved One and I watched a bald eagle soar 25 or 30 feet above the water at Paynetown yesterday. Then we kept an eye on a couple of chipmunks playing hide and seek in the rocks. At one point, a killdeer flew straight at our car, thinking we might be a threat to his brood.

This is the kind of show I like to take in just about every night at Lake Monroe.

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The View From Paynetown

May 27th Birthdays

Amelia Bloomer — Weird — isn’t it? — that her name should be forever associate with a style of underpants even though she was the editor of the first American newspaper for women, she fought long and hard for women’s suffrage, and she was an early leader in the temperance movement (alcohol, many argued, was responsible for men beating women). She did urge women to wear the eventually eponymous drawers because they allowed greater comfort and freedom of movement.

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Julia Ward Howe — The noted abolitionist and author, like several abolitionists of the middle 19th Century, she argued against slavery but still felt blacks inferior to whites. After the Civil War, she advocated for women’s rights, suffrage, and pacifism.

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Dashiell Hammett — The “ace performer,” in Raymond Carver’s view, of the hard-boiled school of detective writers. Hammett suffered from tuberculosis and was advised to move away from his wife and their two daughters for their own health. He did so, moving across the country, and his marriage soon fell apart. An anti-Fascist and civil rights advocate, he joined the Communist Party USA before World War II. He refused to name names during the communist witch hunts and was sentenced to federal prison for his efforts.

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Rachel Carson — Make no mistake, she was the mother of the environmental movement in the United States, and the world for that matter. A marine biologist, she wrote several bestselling books describing ocean life. One of them, The Sea Around Us, won the National Book Award. Her 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring, spurred chemical companies like DuPont, Velsicol, and American Cyanamid to threaten lawsuits and launch aggressive PR campaigns against her. One company chemist wrote, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”

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Hubert Humphrey — LBJ’s vice president. His groundbreaking speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention  established the party as a champion for civil rights and led to the eventual abandonment of the Democrats by southern segregationists, who were welcomed with open arms by the Republicans in the late 1960s. Here’s a snippet of that speech:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People — human beings — this is the issue of the 20th Century. People of all kinds — all sorts of people — and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.

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Christopher Lee — There was no other Dracula.

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Ramsey Lewis — Pianist and composer, Lewis brought jazz to a wide audience with his gold record versions of “The In Crowd” and others.

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On this day in 1965, US Navy warships began to bombard Viet Cong targets in South Vietnam, dramatically expanding the war. Ho Chi Minh warned the United States, “If you wish to make war for twenty years, we will fight a war for twenty years. If you wish to make peace, we will make peace and invite you to tea.”

Hot Air: Olive Pits & Political Theater

How I’m Doing

I haven’t put up a My Olive Pit™ post in weeks, the reason being there’s really little to report on a day to day basis. I can now eat, talk, walk, drive, and lead a reasonably normal life. Little has changed since I resumed those activities more than a month ago. Folks, though, have been asking for a MOP update, so here it is.

Screen Shot 2016-05-26 at 10.20.42 AM      I’m scheduled for a PET scan on June 2nd, a week from today. They’ll pump me full of radioactive elements and, after I sit in a darkened room for 45 minutes to allow the stuff to run through my circulatory system, they’ll strap me into the big cylindrical scanning machine for some 20 minutes more. The idea being if there’s any cancer left in me, it’ll show up when the nuke stuff hits it.

So, fingers crossed, I’ll get a call a day or two later with good news and I’ll jump for joy. I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

I really only have a few complaints. For instance, my taste buds are only about 60 percent activated. I can taste savory flavors but not sweet ones at all. In fact, chocolate still tastes terrible to me, sort of simultaneously sour and bitter. I’m telling you, that had better change damned soon. A life w/o chocolate just may not be worth living.

The Thespian Party

Have you seen footage of the brouhaha over at Chicago’s DePaul University Wednesday?

Breibart.com squealer Milo Yiannopoulos had been scheduled to speak there. The event was sponsored by the DePaul branch of the College Republicans. His topic was to be “Feminism Is Cancer” and DePaul was the latest stop on his Dangerous Faggot Tour. The emcee’s lectern was emblazoned with one of those Don’t Tread On Me flags. The hall where Yiannopoulos appeared was packed with adoring young conservatives who were fully prepared to shower him with adoration, the vast majority of them baseball-capped white boys.

The whole Yiannopoulos/Depaul College Republicans thing is baffling because Y. is more gay than the love child of Oscar Wilde and Liberace would ever hope to be. So the crowd was sprinkled with gay boys and staunch right wingers which is the equivalent of a Black Lives Matter convention filled with Baltimore cops embracing young black men.

Only the event was disrupted and eventually halted by protesters. Yiannopoulos’s appearances generally draw loud protesters and more than a few have been cancelled due to outcries. Yiannopoulos clearly digs the protests and says things meant to inflame those who loathe him.

At one point on Wednesday, Yiannopoulos said, “Modern feminism has become ever more hysterical about tinier things.” The crowd roared. It’s typical of his appearances. They’re sort of a 2016 update on the old Jerry Springer Show, with speakers trying to incite the crowd to love them or hate them, depending on which side of the fence they’re playing. Here, check out Breitbart’s own video of the event for yourself. Yiannopoulos isn’t introduced until the 35:10 mark. Everything before that you can ignore, trust me.

At the 46:40 mark of the video, a black man marches resolutely up to the stage. Yiannopoulos, catching sight of him, says, “Hello, darling.”

The black man turns to address the crowd, opening with the line, “This man is an idiot!” The crowd goes wild with boos and jeers, drowning him out, but he’s joined on stage by several other protesters, who raise their fists and beckon others to join them.

A woman grabs the microphone out of the emcee’s hand and shouts into it, then she leans in close to Yiannopoulos and screams in his face. The first man who jumped the stage then gets his hands on the microphone and launches into a chant of, “Dump the Trump!”

As the protesters do their thing, Yiannopoulos remains in his chair and alternately giggles and rolls his eyes. Chaos ensues. Several hapless looking security officers make an appearance, look around helplessly and proceed to do nothing about the disruption.

Yiannopoulos eventually is led offstage by event organizers and he later leads a march, supposedly to the university president’s office to complain about the protesters and the ineffectual security presence.

A number of conservative sites have featured posts by opinionators aghast that Yiannopoulos’s “freedom of speech” was so abridged, blaming permissive and liberal colleges for kowtowing to minorities and left radicals. Even the Huffington Post ran a piece by a fellow who laid the blame on milquetoast college administrators. He wrote:

Years of inaction by university administrators has left radical student activists feeling they are immune from the law. Free from consequences, or dissenting opinions, endowed with a feeling of moral high-ground, students have taken increasingly drastic steps to suppress other opinions, and conservative opinions in particular.

The writer goes on to say the president’s office was closed and locked. “There would be no open dialogue today,” he concludes.

If you buy all this, you should be enraged that a speaker on a college campus would be so persecuted and silenced.

I don’t buy it one goddamned bit. I don’t believe the protesters were anything more than paid actors in Yiannopoulos’s theater of the absurd. They look way too comfortable onstage to be real protesters. The things they scream ring untrue for honest-to-gosh Black Lives Matter protesters, to whom they’ve been linked. In fact, none of them wears a BLM T-shirt, which seems both highly unlikely and a reasonable precaution by organizers to avoid litigation from the actual group.

That line about the president’s office being locked, implying the university’s boss was hiding from Yiannopoulos and his supporters? It was well after 7:00pm when the marchers reached the office. Well after, I might add, office hours.

I’ve always said, all politics is theater. Never though, has this been more true than today. In the past, politicians, advocates for this or that issue, and protesters at least had some shred of substance behind their pretenses. When FDR, for instance, spoke to Congress to call for a declaration of war after the Pearl Harbor attack, he didn’t say, “Gee, fellas, I hate to have to ask you this because war is so horrible….”

No, he spoke of the coming war as a great crusade by a righteous, angry people. He spoke forcefully and unapologetically, with not the slightest hint of hesitation. Theater.

FDR had to present an image. Pols and political advocates today present an entirely fictional representation of the world. Our modern-day political theater is more commedia dell’arte, with archetypes playing the old familiar roles. There are heroes and villains, pick your side. Substance? We don’t need no stinkin’ substance.

Milo Yiannopoulos and his defenders, even the guy writing in the Huffington Post, are all full of shit. And if you believe what happened Wednesday at DePaul University was real, you’re a sucker.

May 26th Birthdays

Dorothea Lange — Perhaps the greatest American photographer, she traveled the country during the Great Depression as part of the Farm Security Administration (originally the Resettlement Administration) taking portraits of destitute rural people. These photos have become iconic and now define the Depression in the public’s consciousness.

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John Wayne — Born Marion Morrison, he-man and patriot whose movies many conservatives to this day confuse with reality, he was married three times. His wives, in order, were Panamanian, Mexican, and Peruvian. To illustrate how far political discourse has devolved, Wayne, an outspoken conservative, said of the election of John F. Kennedy, “I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president.”

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Peter Cushing — Best known for playing Van Helsing in Dracula movies. I always viewed him as a villain because I thought Christopher Lee as Dracula was so much cooler.

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James Arness — Brother of Peter Graves, Arness will forever be remembered as Marshall Dillon in the TV oater Gunsmoke. I like to think of him in his horror film roles: as the monster in The Thing from Another Planet and the FBI agent in Them!

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Jack Kevorkian — The suicide doctor.

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Pam Grier — Star of several 1970’s blaxploitation flicks, she showed real acting chops in those otherwise dreadful pix. Grier was discovered while working as a receptionist for American International Pictures. When Quentin Tarantino called her in to read for the part of Jackie Brown, she arrived at his office and found it covered with posters from her 1970s movies. She asked him if he were trying to sway her by hanging them up and he replied he actually was thinking of taking them down — they’d been up long before he’d agreed to direct the film — because he was afraid she’d think that.

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Sally Ride — The first American woman to orbit the Earth, Ride also was the youngest American astronaut to be launched into space. She kept her relationship with partner Tam O’Shaughnessy secret for 27 years until she died in 2012. She’s acknowledged as the first known American lesbian astronaut.

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Caitlín R. Kiernan — Born Kenneth Wright, she was a geologist and paleontologist before turning her attention to fiction. She has written scifi and dark fantasy novels, comic books, and screenplays. She describes herself as an atheist pagan.

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On this day in 1995, Friz Freleng died. Usually credited as I. Freleng (his given name was Isadore), he was Warner Brothers’ top cartoon director for years. He introduced Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety Bird, and Speedy Gonzalez. Freleng considered himself a composer and often worked with story developers, writing on musical bar sheets, to create cartoon plots and time gags to appropriate spots in the music.

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Hot Air: Take Two And Call Me In The Morning

World Domination

Bayer AG is a huge, multinational corporation with more than $46 billion in revenue for 2015. Its profit last year was a cool $4.11 billion.

Monsanto Company is a huge, multinational corporation with some $15 billion in revenue for 2015. Its net income last year was a cool $2.3 billion.

Bayer, a Leverkusen, Germany firm, has offered Monsanto, of Creve Coeur, Missouri, $62 billion to buy out the latter outfit. Monsanto says $62 billion isn’t good enough but it’d be happy to listen if Bayer wishes to sweeten the offer.

Bayer makes pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, over-the-counter consumer health products, miscellaneous biotechnology products, and plastics. The company got its start in 1863, making aspirin. Later it would go on to produce heroin (to relieve coughing) and Flintstones vitamins. During World War II, its parent company at the time employed slave labor for pharmaceutical experiments and produced Zyklon B,  used in concentration camp gas chambers.

Monsanto makes agricultural and biotechnology products. The company got its start in 1901, making food additives like saccharine. Later it would go on to produce such terrifying substances as PCBs, DDT, Agent Orange, and bovine growth hormone.

Should the sale go through, Bayer-Monsanto would be one of only five enormous global agribusiness giants producing the vast majority of seeds and chemicals used by farmers. Monsanto long has created products and employed practices designed to make farmers ever more dependent on it. One of Monsanto’s favorite tricks is to create seeds whose resultant plants produce sterile seeds. Farmers long have depended on the “saving seeds” process  — using this year’s crops’ seeds for next year’s planting — to reduce costs. Monsanto’s lawyers have been wildly successful in curtailing this prudent practice.

In any case, a proposed Bayer-Monsanto unholy matrimony would result in much of the planet’s farming coming under its thumb.

The Nazis wanted to take over the world and IG Farben (Bayer’s parent from 1925 through 1946, the year the occupying Allied powers broke the conglomerate up) tried its damnedest to help them do it.

Now, it seems, Farben’s bastard child Bayer itself may come a lot closer to achieving that nefarious goal without the help of the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, and the SS.

Jason & Ginger

I couldn’t be happier to be back at work at the Book Corner. No. 1, it’s evidence I’m getting better every day after my late winter-early spring foray into cancer territory and, No. 2, I get wired in again to all the happenings around town (the gossip, too).

For instance, Bloomington’s favorite guitarist, Jason Fickel, came in today to buy some music mags. He happened to let drop the news — news to me, at least; remember, I’ve been out of the loop — that he and Ginger Curry have a spanking new album coming out this summer.

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Ginger & Jason

The two will release their third opus, “Some Kind of Love,” some time around August 1st on iTunes. The CD will come out Saturday, August 6th, with a release party that evening at 8 at the Waldron Arts Center.

Jason and Ginger put out their first disk in 2011. All three of their albums thus far have been on Fickel’s own Lost Canyon Records label. “Some Kind…” was engineered by Rich Morpurgo and Christina Ondrik.

Jason told me why he continues working with Ginger: “It’s so gratifying to have my songs performed by that voice — and we just have a lot of fun.”

BTW: Here’s a vid demonstrating how to make ginger curry, AKA inchi curry, a side dish served during Onam, a Hindu festival celebrated in the Indian state of Kerala:

It occurs to me if I were to be lucky enough to be named after food ingredients, I’d want to be called Tomato Garlic. OTOH, that doesn’t trip off the tongue as well as Ginger Curry.

Terrorists?

We still don’t know if terrorists brought down that Egypt Air jet last week. In fact, the only thing we can say for certain is those who  want us to remain in a never-ending state of fear are milking the crash for everything it’s got. And, no, I’m not referring to terrorists.

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Wreckage

Taker-in-Chief

Jeff Isaac found this before I did:

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Click Image For Washington Post Piece

 

The Republican standard bearer has been sucking on the government teat for decades now.

Natch.

May 24th & 25th Birthdays

May 24th:

Jean-Paul Marat — I’ve always felt vulnerable when lying or sitting in a bathtub.

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Lillian Gilbreth — Born Lillian Moller, she was perhaps the first female PhD engineer to actually work in her chosen field. She was a psychologist, industrial management consultant, and college professor. The book and movie, Cheaper by the Dozen, were based on her family’s story (she and her husband did indeed have twelve children.)

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Harry Burnett (H.B.) Reese — Inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. BTW, he and his wife had 16 children, putting the Gilbreths to shame.

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Wilbur Mills — Member of the US House from Arkansas from 1939 to 1977, the powerful Democrat was the House Ways and Means Committee chair from the 1950s through his retirement. And that retirement came about dramatically. Mills one night in the fall of 1974 was stopped by police in Washington DC. The officers determined he was drunk only after an Argentine stripper who performed under the stage name Fanne Foxe dashed out of the car and jumped into the Tidal Basin fully clothed. Apparently, Mills and Fox were loath to have their affair discovered. Foxe was apprehended and thrown in a mental institution. Mills was reelected to the House in a landslide four weeks later. At the end of that month, Mills again appeared in public drunk, taking the stage at the Pilgrim Theater in Boston where Foxe was performing. After this incident, Mills admitted to a drinking problem and subsequently resigned form his committee chairmanship. He did not run for reelection in 1976.

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Mills With Fanne Foxe

Bobby Zimmerman — Some kid from far northern Minnesota.

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Jane Byrne — The first female mayor of Chicago, she was tough as nails. Acc’d’g to lore, on election night she phoned Alderman Fred Roti, the Mob’s man in City Hall and a notorious ballot box stuffer, and told him, “Look Fred, I’ve got a good chance to win this thing. All I ask is that you and your boys give me a fair count. If you do, I’ll be fair with you. If you don’t, I’ll cut your balls off.” Roti later claimed he ordered a fair count for Byrne mainly because he was so impressed with her guts.

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Michael Chabon — Pulitzer Prize winner for the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon was misidentified as homosexual in a 1987 Newsweek magazine piece on young gay writers. Chabon later claimed the error actually helped broaden his audience as many gay readers bought his books.

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On this day in 1974, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington died. He won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1999. The Pulitzer committee wrote: “Bestowed posthumously, commemorating the centennial year of his birth, in recognition of his musical genius, which evoked aesthetically the principles of democracy through the medium of jazz and thus made an indelible contribution to art and culture.”

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May 25th:

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson — The highest paid black entertainer in the age of vaudeville. As a solo tap dancing act, he smashed the prohibition against blacks appearing alone on stage. Known as the “two-colored rule,” the ban required all black stage acts to be duos. At the same time, as ridiculous as it sounds, blacks had to appear on stage in blackface.

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Eve Ensler — Originator of the The Vagina Monologues franchise. Despite its groundbreaking treatment of violence against women, TVM has occasionally been criticized. Early on, the play was slammed as being oriented toward a white, middle-class woman’s point of view. Last year, Mount Holyoke drama students ceased their yearly production of the play because it was not inclusive of transgender people.

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On this day in 1981, Ruby Payne-Scott died. The first female radio astronomer, she was among the pioneers in that field regardless of gender. She also was engaged in top-secret research into radar during World War II. Payne-Scott worked for Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. At the time Australia had a ban on married women holding government jobs so she had to keep her 1944 marriage a secret.

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