Personal Musings category archive
Stray Thought 0
I was tempted not to do my usual Christmas posts, but then I realized that, if there is true spirit of Christmas that transcends sect and creed, it is this:
Keep the faith. baby, even especially in the darkness.
Decorated 0
I am finding it difficult to have much Christmas spirit in the light of current events (more about that on Christmas Day), but I’ve still decorated, because life goes on and the good fight never ends.* Here’s my Slackware desktop (Fluxbox with XMMS, GKrellM, and xsnow).
Take a time out and enjoy your Christmas, then gird your grid for the big one, because it’s happening now.
_________________
*Those who think that the fight ever ends don’t understand how evil works. Evil never gives up and always tries again. Unlike virtue, evil is tireless.
Stray Question 1
Whatever happened to “impressionists” (I mean the comedians, not the painters; I know what happened to the painters–they left their impressions)?
Rich Little doing Donald Trump–what a long strange trip that would have been.
Stray Thought 0
Donald Trump seems to be acting as if winning the Electoral College tally in the recent popular vote is akin to a successful hostile corporate takeover.
Framing 0
Notice how, when Not White people do it, it’s “heroin” and when white people do it, it’s “opioids”?
You’ve Heard of White Flight? Learn about White Fright. 0
Think of the television shows you see. How often are black and brown persons depicted as gangsters, tattooed gang members, terrorists, druggies, and convicts? How seldom are they normal working folks trying to get along?
Growing up as a Southern Boy, I knew many black folks–not well, mind you, but at least I knew them–who worked hard and lived clean.
When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my brother, a black lady came to look after me. When my father needed a new septic tank dug, a black man helped him dig it. My first playmate was a little black boy who lived on a corner of the farm.
I was too young to know prejudice and so was he. Then we got old enough to go to segregated schools, and we both learned it.
Had I grown up in some all-white wasteland, the one Badtux alludes to, I wouldn’t know better and might believe what I see on my television. I know better, but many don’t.
I once read an interview with a black actor, I can’t remember who I wish I could, who said that, when a black or brown man comes to Hollywood, he quickly realizes that his first roles will be as thugs and gangsters. Mark you, this isn’t an indictment of television and movies. Hollywood is a mirror.
A deeply racist society is the cause. This doesn’t mean that every white American is overtly racist, though many are, as the news shows more and more. It does mean that racism is baked into the system from education to housing to law enforcement to name an institution.
If you cannot accept that the United States of America is a deeply racist society, for all the “diversity” you might see in commercials, you do not accept reality and will never understand Trumpery or today’s Republican Party.
Stray Thought 0
Experiments sometimes fail, even noble ones.
Stray Thought 0
Remember, the “Hillary Clinton scamdals” are 99% Fox News lies and one per cent nobody’s perfect.
Football uber Alles 0
Bob Molinaro, sportswriter extraordinaire:
I am sick of football. I am no longer fascinated by large men running into each other.
My local rag covers high school games the way it used to cover college games, college games the way it used to cover the pros, and the pros like it’s the only game in town. Honest to Pete, during the wind-up of the regular baseball season when nary a football game had yet been played, stories about what might happen were a football game to be played overwhelmed the coverage of actual other games that had been played.
Full Disclosure:
When I was in high school, I was the statistician for my high school football team. After each home game, I would call my local rag, that same local rag, with the results of the game. I know what the coverage was like. I was there.
I Have High Blood Pressure 0
I skipped the debate and watched an episode of Midsomer Murders. It was coherent, well-written, logical (if a bit outre), and well-performed.
I’ll read about the debate tomorrow, after I take my blood pressure medicine.
Sleazy Is as Sleazy Thinks 0
I have two daughters. I never ever thought–I cannot conceive of having ever thought–of dating either one of them.
Guess I’m not Republican Presidential candidate material.
Pardon me now while I take a few moments to stop my skin from crawling.
Afterthought:
Today’s Republican Party is a vile and loathsome thing.
Coda 0
Donald Trump has done one positive thing.
He has verified that the Republican Party and the religious right are what those of us to the left of the late Senator Everett Dirksen have been saying they are for three decades or more.
Afterthought:
Oh, my. The wheels are coming off the Trump train.
Whatever will tomorrow bring? And whatever will “Republican Family Values” voters have to say?
(I can answer the latter question: Nothing. Because “Family Values” is nothing more than a marketing slogan for “Republican.” On that statement I shall take a strong and wide stance.)
Symptomatology 0
Trump is the symptom, the boil on the body politic, that has brought America’s worst to painful prominence in the polity.
If anyone can be named as the cause of the eruption, it’s Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, and their vile vortex of villainy that valued victory, however venal the vector, over virtue.
The Tarheel Potty Police 0
One wonders whether those who see God’s revenge in random weather events will see this as God’s revenge for North Carolina’s HB2 Pervy Potty Patrol Peeper Law.
Nah.
Trumpling Women (Updated) 0
Really, now, aside from its having been documented, was anyone at all surprised?
Afterthought:
It will be interesting to see whether this will prove too much for the self-proclaimed “Christians” who have so loudly supported him.
I’m betting it won’t. I expect that they will decide that, whoever the woman in question was, she was a fallen woman, she was asking for it, she was no better than she should be (whatever the hell that means), boys will be boys, and–oh, you can fill in the rest of the blanks.
Addendum, Later That Same Day:
Stray Question 0
If little eagles are called ‘eaglets” and little pigs are called “piglets,” why aren’t little chickens called “chicklets?”
Stray Thought 0
From time to time in these electrons, I have urged my two or three regular readers to “watch what they do, not what they say.”
Occasionally, though, it is sufficient to watch what they say.
I Can Never Remember Birthdays 2
This blog turned 11 last week and I didn’t notice.
A. Twenty Dollars 0
Q. What is the difference between “food” and “cuisine”?
Stray Thought 0
It’s not a “resealable package” if you can’t figure out how to open it without using scissors in the first place.
Furrfu.