Personal Musings category archive
Facebook Frolics 0
Aside:
In case you are not aware of it, you can indeed have a very nice much better online life without Facebook and other social leeches media.
Stray Thought, Election Dept. 0
Vote in the real world.
If you are not willing to vote for the lesser of two evils, you will most certainly end up with the evil of two lessers.
Trumped 0
Christian Schneider, a “conservative” columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, wonders what went wrong. Here’s part of his lament:
For instance, a conservative who listens to talk show radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin or Sean Hannity likely has a far different assessment of the Republican Party than those who curl up with copies of National Review or the Weekly Standard, or even my regular column. While ostensibly working for the same goals, these groups might not even recognize each other if they walked by each other on the street.
Missing from his tua culpa is any recognition that his vaunted Republican intelligentsia has been complicit in rationalizing Republican lies, such as trickle-on economoics and the Great and Glorious Patriot Lie for Irag, and Republican bigotry, such as the right-wing culture war, mass incarceration, and the war on black and brown people drugs.
The difference between the “conservative intelligentsia” and Rush Limbaugh is a difference in style only.
Genteel venality is still venality.
Stray Thought 0
The buffoons on the Weather Channel seem perpetually surprised that, in a snowstorm, snow that falls from the sky lands on the ground.
Dis Coarse Discourse, He’s a President, Not a Dictator Dept. 0
Have you noticed that folks who talk about what President Obama hasn’t done almost never mention what Republicans have been doing?
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Amongst collective nouns, there’s a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a pod of whales.
I propose a new collective: A bray of Trumps.
Stray Thought 0
I really don’t need my bank’s ATM to wish me a “Happy Birthday.”
(No, today is not my birthday.)
Afterthought:
It certainly doesn’t make me think more warmly of my bank, which is, at best, a necessary annoyance and, at worst, a corporate beast in service of mammon.
Stray Thought 0
It’s rather amazing how pleasant a Sunday one can have when one does not waste it on big-time football.
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Allan Miller laments the digital diatribe. A bit:
The targets of this digital abuse may vary from the author to the commentators themselves insulting one another with sophomoric responses. “Sophomoric” is the operative word because many of these comments resemble the stuff that one finds splattered on restroom walls, public buildings and park benches.
I suspect that immediacy is part of this. Back in the olden days, emotion could dissipate while one searched for a pen or rolled paper into a typewriter. One wonders how many hateful commenters would dissipate in the time required to get a keyboard out of the drawer and attach it to one’s electronic computing device.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to KCEA on Qmmp in a VM of PC-BSD in Slackware –Current while reading a Phryne Fisher mystery.
It’s almost enough to help me forget that Virginia Beach will be under water in 50 years.
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Never would I have predicted that the leading candidate for word of the year would be “schlonged.”
“Just Get Her Drunk” 0
If you question the existence of “rape culture,” I commend your attention to an advertisement, which I see before me as I write this, for a new brand of rum* featuring the advertising slogan,
Seduction in a bottle.
No, I won’t name the brand.
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*The world needs a new brand of rum like it needs flavored vodka.
Snobs 0
First wine snobs.
Then beer snobs.
Give me a break.
Afterthought:
I have nothing against quality, but I expect a reasonable ROI.
Some years ago in the very early days of my time on the railroad, a couple of us went on a business trip to a regional office. At dinner one night, our host, the head of said regional office, ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon (and later stuck my coworker with the tab, but that’s another story). As he surveyed the bill for the evening, my coworker said, “I don’t care what’s on the label. No booze is worth $35.00* a glass.”
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*1980 dollars.
I’m in Luck 0
It even comes conveniently in the mail.
Despite the story, though, I suspect that the death rate will remain constant: one per person.
A Chimney Too Far 0
An Italian village is up in arms because a local priest spilled the beans:
(snip)
“Sooner or later all children bitterly discover that Father Christmas doesn’t exist and that gifts aren’t bought by a magic sleigh pulled by reindeer but by mum and dad,” a parent told La Stampa.
I find the quotation in the second paragraph to be rather interesting. I don’t remember any bitter discoveries, nor do I remember any kids going around gleefully bursting other kids’ bubbles back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un.
When I was little, the closest I came to a “bitter discovery” was my older cousin’s replying, when I asked him what Santa Claus brought him, “I’m too old now. Santa doesn’t visit me any more.” I puzzled at the statement at the time, and then one day it made sense. When you reach the right age, somehow you just know.
In my own family, the youngest is fully nine years younger than his siblings. The older ones freely and wordlessly united to preserve the myth for their brother. If “bitterly discovering” were somehow a rite of Christmas passage, I rather doubt that they would have done so.
Indeed, if “bitterly discovering” were part of the package, the myth would have died long ago.
Aside:
Follow the link: there seem to be other, more compelling reasons to put this priest out to pasture.
A. “Wellness” Costs Twice as Much 0
Q. What’s the difference between “health” and “wellness”?
Stray Thought 0
You do not have to look into someone’s heart to know what he or she is like.
If a person’s actions are full of hate, so too is that person’s heart, regardless of what that person may say about his or her motives.
God, Grits, and Guns 0
Ron Littlepage is taken aback. Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest.
The outstanding quote of last week has to go to state Rep. Matt Gaetz.
He’s pushing a bill that would allow the 1.4 million Floridians who have concealed carry gun permits to openly carry their firearms.
During a House committee debate on the legislation, Gaetz had this to say, according to Politico Florida:
The bill restores a right “granted not by government but by God.” Say what?
As someone who was raised in the Baptist church and who graduated from a Baptist university, Baylor, I’ve read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations more than once.
But I must have missed the part about God coming out in favor of open carry.
Jeez Louise, you can’t make this stuff up.
As a Southerner, I often find myself resenting the way white Southerners* are portrayed as dumbass hicks. Even when I was a kid, I couldn’t stand the Beverly Hillsillies.
It’s been a theme since the earliest days of film and, later, broadcast media (we won’t even talk about print). Find any old radio or television comedy show with a character from the South, you will find a dumbass hick. Heck, Tennessee Ernie Ford made a fortune playing dumbass hicks. Even Andy Griffith achieved his first great success as a dumbass hick in No Time for Sergeants. And don’t forget Jim Nabors and George Lindsey.
But, honest to Pete, as long as a great lot of white Southerners continue act like dumbass hicks, I have to concede that they are asking for it.
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*The portrayal of black Southerners is another, much more evil story.