Personal Musings category archive
Good Eats 0
I was in Philadelphia the last few days visiting family.
I now have five grandchildren, all of them boys.
I do love Philadelphia. Despite my 300-plus-years of Virginia roots, Philly is as much home for me as any other place. It is one of the world’s great cities, with one of the world’s great inferiority complexes, as it is half-way between New York City and Washington, D. C., cities that bring hubris to life.
It was good to be in Philly for a few days.
I came back with a cooler full of Philadelphia scrapple, because all you can find in these parts is Rapa brand, which, as far as I can figure out, is a combination of lots of bread-like substances with a few pork-like bits, on which I refuse to waste my money. Breakfast can be many things, but a waste of time should not one of them.
I brought back eight pounds of the real thing–I trust that it’s enough to last me until my next trip up north . . . .
“Or Your Money Back” 0
I’m not a big fan of Amazon, as they are trying to hijack all of the retail (cue the chorus: all of the retail) and their warehouses are hell-holes for workers, but I do sometimes order books from them because books are what they do best.
Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised at this: I recently ordered some additional Phryne Fisher mysteries (you should too–I’ve read six and am heading for nine) from Amazon; because I was hitting the road for a few days, I paid for overnight delivery. Two of them arrived as scheduled, but one was shipped late. Amazon refunded the entire shipping fee I paid, an amount equal to the cost of one of the books, because of that. I didn’t care and wasn’t going to complain, as I had two books to take with me and stuff happens you know; they did it on their own hook.
I’m still not a big fan of Amazon, but credit where credit is due and all that, eh what?
Discovering How To Lose Friends and Influence People 0
I reckon that Discover Card’s current internet ad campaign, in which they cover up your browser window for a few seconds, is supposed to get attention.
It’s got mine. If I still* had a Discover Card, I’d cancel it immediately, cut it up in little pieces, and mail it back to them postage-due.
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*Had one once. Got rid of it long ago.
We Have Created a Culture of Stupid, Exhibit Umpty-Ump 0
My electric razor died after over a decade of faceful service, so I shopped for a new one today.
One of the shavers on the store display had a stubble attachment (I shan’t dignify it by naming the brand), so you can get your Yasser Arafat look just right.
Garden Notes 0
If you look back at the photographs I’ve posted, you will see a number of pictures of bumbledy bees.
I haven’t posted any this summer because we have seen hardly any bumbledy bees.
Readers’ Corner 3
If you are a mystery buff, check out the Phryne Fisher stories and the television show based on them. They are most excellent stories which lean more to cozies than to any other sub-genre.
Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Clothes 1
When I was growing up in the days of Jim Crow, I remember my father’s going to pay his poll tax so he could vote.
As he was not-black, it was routine transaction. Also, as he was not-black, when he had come of age, he had passed his literacy test. Being white was all you needed to pass the literacy test.
The voter fraud fraud is the poll tax and literacy test in updated, modern Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
Yesterday, I met someone who had the temerity to defend the Stars and Bars as a memorial that the soldiers who lost their lives defending the “Southern way of life” deserved. She followed that by arguing that the Civil War was about “economic systems,” not about slavery, conveniently forgetting that the Southern “economic system” was slavery.
She repeated the lies Southerners have told themselves and others for the last 150 years so as not to admit that secession was about slavery and nothing else and that the Confederacy was conceived and birthed to defend an evil, the lies that speak of “honor in battle” and dress the Secesh in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
I don’t lose it often, but I lost it.
Vociferously.
Twice.
And I regret it not a bit.
Lies must be called out lest they live forever.
I have had my fill of those who dress the Secesh, past and present, in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
Huckster on the Hustings 0
I got into an unusual conversation with my barber* at my recent haircut, which was on Friday after the gay marriage decision came out.
Turns out that she was raised Southern Baptist, as was I. We compared notes about Sunday school and memory verses (that’s a Baptist thing, or at least it used to be), how so many bits of the Bible contradict other bits, and how much deviant sex the Bible contains, from incest to adultery to you name it.
We also spoke of how persons pluck one phrase out of the Bible and ignore all the contradictory phrases that surround it, how they thunder about a man lying with a man even as they eat shellfish and wear clothing made of multiple fabrics (cotton-polyester anyone?), while missing the message of Jesus, which was love, tolerance, care, and forgiveness.
She’s not particularly liberal by any means–my guess would be quite the opposite when she is in the voting booth–but she can’t figure out why all the hate, why some people just can’t let other people be.
Our conversation didn’t get there, but the answer to “Why all the hate” is quite simple.
Hate sells. There’s always a buyer.
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*This is the same barbershop at which I once got into a shouting match with someone who thinks that Fox News speaks truth. Shouting matches really aren’t my style; I’m more a slow burn kind of guy.
My only defense is that I was infected by the stupid.
Climate Change Is Bunk 0
Therefore the outside temperature at midnight is not 88 Fahrenheits and my two outside thermometers and the weather link on my sidebar over there —-> are lying to me.
Damned scientists.
Howsomever did they manage to suborn my thermometers?
It’s Not Right To Fool Mother Nature 0
The only plants native to Southern California are cacti and tumbleweeds. Everything else is imported and irrigated. (The same goes, natch, for Arizona and most of Nevada.)
I used to have training gigs in Burbank. My Air America flight (Air America is now part of U. S. Scare DBA U. S. Airways) usually involved a change in Phoenix.
The flight from Phoenix to Burbank happened to follow the aqueduct carrying water stolen from the Colorado River to sate Los Angeles’s undying thirst for swimming pools and perfect lawns. Every time I made that flight, looked down on that artificial river through the desert, and watched as my plane cleared the mountains and started its descent above the swimming pools, irrigated lawns, and faux greenery of southern California, I thought to myself, “This is a sin.”
It looks as if reckoning is imminent.
Stray Thought 2
Every week, the persons who do the yard work at this here condo spend large amounts of time blowing dirt and leaves around with leaf blowers.
They don’t gather them up, they don’t compost them, they don’t pile them up; they just blow them around, all the while using gasoline and making noise.
Leaf blowers are evil.
Worse than evil, they are pointless.
Stray Thought, Sunday Supplement Dept. 0
Many years ago, when Parade Magazine first replaced This Week Magazine in the Sunday edition of my local rag, I thought that Parade was a big nothing.
Times have changed. Parade has shrunk.
It’s now a little nothing.
Stray Thought 0
Facebook, Twitter, et al., are not “social” media. They are sociopathic media.
They like you only because you have big da-tas.
The “Marvel Movie Universe” 0
Six-minute cartoons that are three hours long. Who woulda thunk?
Stray Question (Updated) 0
It’s been a long time since I was a high school senior.
Just when did “senior pranks” become a thing?
Addendum, Later That Same Day:
According to The Guardian, high school seniors’ doing stupid stuff has graduated to a “tradition.”
Back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un, we tried to hide our stupid, not broadcast it.
Furrfu.
Stray Thought 0
No right-wing Bible-thumper will think to suggest from Sunday’s pulpit that the flooding of Texas may be a sign from the Almighty that the climates they are a-changing.
Not a single one.
Too Many Governments 0
One of the things that most confused me when I moved to Pennsylvania was the structure of local government.
As a native Virginian, I understood Virginia, and, frankly, many aspects of Virginia’s structure make sense, even as the persons who fill elective offices often do not. “Independent cities,” for example, are a great idea. Cities are not part of counties. Therefore, if you are in a city, the only jurisdiction to hold accountable is the city; bucks cannot be passed back and forth between cities and counties. If the governance of the independent city is incompetent, there is only one government to blame. If voters do not turn them out, it’s their own damned fault.
Pennsylvania counties are divided into townships and boroughs for no good reason that I could ever figure out (“borough” is a term for a “township” that is a little more urban than the surrounding area, such as Narberth, the wonderful place where I lived; it’s a “township” on steroids that, anywhere else, would be called a “town”).
After a while, I figured out that most local governance was provided by the township; that’s where I registered to vote, for example. As far as I could figure out, counties existed mostly to create sinecures jobs.
I did a little research and learned that, after the American Revolution, there seemed to be two schools of thought regarding how to promote democracy. One school advocated concentrating power in the hands of elected representatives as a way of guaranteeing “democracy.” The other believed that the more elected officials, the more “democracy”; New England’s town meetings are perhaps the extreme example of this.
Pennsylvania seems to have opted for the latter choice. There are lots of little jurisdictions with lots of elected officials (one of the elected officials was a “prothonotary”–never did figure out what that was, a notary with a big nose, maybe, though Wikipedia tells me it is what anyone else would call “Clerk of the Court”). I remember reading somewhere that Pennsylvania has over 44,000 state and local elected officials, second highest in the nation, though it is a middling-sized state in both area and population.
Now, a couple of decades after I lived there, Pennsylvania’s system of local governance seems to be collapsing under its own weight.
One thing is certain: No solution that involves reducing the number of jurisdictions or elected officials will be brooked. The number of Babbitts must be held constant.
Stray Question 0
What’s with all the television mystery series’ ending their seasons with cliffhangers?
Do the big brains at the studios seriously expect that, at our Fourth of July picnics, we’ll be wondering how the September (or October or maybe even November after the college football season) opening episode of “Life in the Fast Lane” will pull our heroes back from the edge of the cliff or, for that matter, we’ll remember it at all?
Furrfu.
Off the Rails 0
I must have ridden across this bit of track hundreds of times when I worked for the railroad.
I was in a derailment once.
My buddy and I decided to take the old Night Owl to Boston for the weekend. We planned to leave Friday night, catch a night’s sleep in the sleeping car, and head back Saturday night.
Seems that, as the train left Providence, the coach behind the sleeping car derailed (all that means is that a wheel slipped of the tracks). Given that no one was hurt and no noticeable damage was done, the coaches were cut off the train and the engine, the bag car, and the sleeping car proceeded to Boston.
We arrived on time. As the Owl was an overnight train, there was a lot of padding in the schedule . . . .
I slept through the derailment.