Personal Musings category archive

If it has turkey instead of corned beef, it may be a thing, but it’s not a Reuben.

You won’t find me at that dive.

I’ll be at Elias, where a “Philly cheese steak” is a cheese steak and a gyro is a gyro.

My bank does not endear itself to me by displaying “Happy Birthday” on the ATM when I insert my card.

Quite the opposiite . . . .

Virginia mandates a seachange (follow the link for details).

The power of grassroots lobbying was on vivid display Thursday as Virginia lawmakers, injecting themselves into an emotional international dispute, took on the role of geographers, cartographers and content providers for school textbooks.

As hundreds of Korean-Americans watched intently, the House of Delegates passed legislation mandating that any new textbooks approved by the state Board of Education, when referring to the Sea of Japan, must note that it is also referred to as the East Sea.

I don’t really have an opinion about this.

Korean-Americans clearly feel very strongly and I do not. Wikipedia has a long article about the dispute over the name; the dispute itself seems fairly recent, though the names in question are ancient. I’m used to the term, “Sea of Japan,” because, well, it’s what I’m used to, but that’s not a reason.

In the larger picture, though, it seems to me that, if Texas can subvert the nation’s textbooks by mandating what is, ultimately, bullshit, I cannot criticize Virginia for recognizing a legitimate difference of opinion.

Full disclosure:

I have recently been reading a lot of Japanese history, because something–I forget what–got me interested in unlearning Western stereotypes and learning about Japan, which has a long, rich, and complex story.

I’m inclined towards “Sea of Japan,” but I think that’s because of the reading I’ve been doing and of what I’m used to.

Maybe next I should bone up on the history of Korea.

When Pat Robertson thinks you are a joke, does that mean you are a joke squared?

When my parents drove us to Richmond via the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel when I was a young ‘un, we would sometimes see her in port at the Norfolk Naval Base.

She has been in the mothball fleet at the Philadelphia Naval Base for some time.

The USS Forrestal is slated to begin its final voyage from Philadelphia to Texas at 5 a.m. Tuesday.

The Navy offered her for use as a museum or memorial, but there were no viable offers.

I’ll read about it tomorrow. That’s what newspapers are for.

In the meantime, I wish for the end of inane acronyms like POTUS and FLOTUS and SOTU.

A pox on the reporters and bloggers who think such constructions are cutesy-wutesy. They should STFU.

In other news, the snow in the street is up to the level of the top of the curb, indicating that five or six inches have already fallen, and it looks to keep up all night. Looks like a snow day tomorrow. See some pictures here.

One of the nice things about where I live is that I won’t have to shovel snow!

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I have always considered “Cornhole” to be a most unfortunate name for a game.

What Chauncey Devega said.

Right-wingers say mean, nasty, (and, unlike in this case) false and perfidious things all day, every day. Rather than apologize, they do it again, harder, harder. It’s how they roll.

Why settle for one standard, when you can have two?

We went to see The Hobbit, Part 2, last weekend.

It is hardly canonical; in turning one slim book into three fat movies, Peter Jackson dumped a lot of stuff into the film that is not in the original. With one exception (an implied romance between an elf and dwarf? I think not!), it is in the spirit, if not the letter, of Tolkien.

If you are looking for a faithful adaptation of the book, don’t bother seeing the film. If you want a fun three-hour non-stop ride, see it today.

And the scenes of the New Zealand countryside make you want to book an airline ticket to the southern hemisphere as soon as you leave the theatre.

In case you wondered what it is like to be overwhelmed by Christmas–not in “to do list” terms, but in cultural terms, to be an outsider–the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Avrum Link can explain it to you.

I urge you to read it.

Afterthought:

We have been listening to Christmas music, not every day, but a lot on weekends; we prefer internet streams that feature traditional stuff, such as Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Rosemary Clooney, Burl Ives, and the like, the stuff we listened to as kids.

As I listened to a recording of Bing Crosby singing the Lord’s prayer, particularly the bit about

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive the trespasses of others

I found myself thinking of those who mindlessly mouth those words every Sunday, then leave their churches and spend the rest of the week forgiving no one.

Do they ever wonder whether their prayer will be answered, that they will be forgiven in the same manner as they forgive others?

When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, one never heard of buildings having mold problems that made persons ill.

Now, mold is closing schools and forcing folks to leave their homes.

I’m puzzled. What’s different?

Were mold infestations not recognized back then in those Dark Ages, are effete modern persons more susceptible to the effects of mold, has mold mutated into a more vicious form (even though we know that evolution is only a theory because Genesis), or do “climate control” systems that result in windows’ being closed year round make buildings or the persons in them more susceptible to infection?

There is a reason.

Inquiring minds want to know.

No, not that cable news.

Friday, I ran out of windshield washer fluid in my truck. When I pulled on the hood release to refill the reservoir, there was a “clunk” and the hood did not. Release, that is.

Yesterday morning, we took the vehicle to my mechanic, who has taken excellent care of it since I moved to these parts. He fixes what’s broke, doesn’t fix what’s not broke, and stands behind his work. He doesn’t just replace; he repairs.

He warned us that, if a part were needed, it might have to come from a dealer and, because the repair is so infrequent, the part might not be in stock. I was prepared for him to have the vehicle for a couple of days, if necessary (I certainly did not want to drive it without being able to open the hood).

We dropped it off and had barely been back long enough for me to squeeze off a couple of drive-by blog posts when the mechanic called.

Fixed.

Once he got the hood open, he determined that nothing was broken; he lubricated the cable, and the release worked just fine.

When I asked him how much (I don’t mind paying for knowledge and expertise) he said, “No charge. It was barely in the bay for 10 minutes.”

I can recommend Bucky’s on Witchduck Road half a mile south of Independence most whole-heartedly. Bucky’s is competent, honest, and thorough.

I’ve seen many abusive relationships in my time.

There are far more of them than most persons imagine.

This news item just screams “abusive relationship.”

This has been building for some time.

[RANT MODE ON]

What most annoys me about my fellow lefties are the purists–the folks who, if you don’t fight to the death for every jot and tittle of whatever their pet causes may be, turn their backs on you and desert the fight. These are the folks who vote for glibertarians as “protest votes,” because “the two parties are ‘indistinguishable.'”

They are, ultimately, deserters with temper-tantrums.

Do they still think that, if Al Gore had won in 2000, nothing would have been different?

Are they really so clueless?

Purists don’t get stuff done, even as they equate failure with virtue. They remind me of the “student radicals” of my youth, who used to fantasize about American “workers and peasants” uniting, without realizing that the workers hated them (remember the “hard hats“?) and the peasants did not think of themselves as “peasants.”

Purists need to realize that there is a real world–an untidy, un-pretty, sloppy real world–and live in it.

I’m probably about as leftie as you can get and, were I a purist, I would not vote for most of the candidates that I have voted for the past few years. But, honest to Pete, I live in Virginia. I have to take what I can get. And I do so quite happily, because I try to live in the real world.

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As my two or three regular readers, as well as my occasional listeners at HPR, know, I am a mystery buff.

I recently stumbled over a great site about mystery stories. If you are also a mystery buff, you must visit “Looking for a Mystery.”

I was led there by ManyBooks.net, a most excellent site for free ebooks.

I discovered it looking for mystery ebooks to read on my Zareason tablet, which does indeed absolutely rock. If you are interested in a tablet, but don’t want to sell your soul to Apple or your cellphone company, check out the ZaTab. It’s Android, so you still sell part of your soul to Google, but you can keep the rest.

Reg Henry counsels selfie-restraint. A nugget:

Full disclosure on selfies: While I have not taken a photograph of myself on a cellphone, being sufficiently quaint to think that their main purpose is to make calls, the younger me did squeeze into those little photography booths provided in malls for boys and girls to take a strip of photos of themselves while making funny faces.

But that wasn’t about the photography or the egotism; it was about the squeezing. Not the same thing at all.

Do read the rest.

On the rare times that I see myself in a web cam, cell phone, or tablet pointed at my face, I think, “What a stupid looking pose. Don’t. Just don’t.”

And I listen to me.

It’s amazing how much neat stuff you can get done when you don’t waste your weekend watching football games to see 11 minutes of action per three hours viewing time.

Fifty years ago today at about this time, I was in last-period gym class showering up and rushing to make the school bus. Some of the kids had heard a rumor that something had happened to President Kennedy.

As we were immature white students in a segregated school system in the Jim Crow South, we had little love or respect for that n****r lovin’ Yankee, so joking was taking place.

Then Coach Young, he of the piercing light-blue eyes who could see right through you (who also gave me my first baseball glove years earlier, as he and my father were friends) came into the locker room. His look stilled the room . . . .

I remember watching the funeral and the cortège on television.

I’m not sure, but I think school was closed for a couple of days.

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This weekend, I went to Philadelphia to visit kids.

For grins and giggles, I slapped my dash cam into place and recorded the rides across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.

It’s not great cinematography by any means. It’s completely unedited; the camera has a wide-angle lens, so there’s a fisheye effect; and there’s no narration. Nevertheless, if you haven’t crossed the bay on the CBBT, you might enjoy it.

There are three hi-def segments in *.mov format. Because of the hi-def, the files are quite large and may take a while to download:

Northbound Segment One: from the entrance to the south island, where I stopped for breakfast because of the great country ham and the surprisingly reasonable prices (approx. 327MB).

Northbound Segment Two: from the south island to Wise Point (approx. 811MB).

Southbound: Wise Point to Virginia Beach (approx. 1GB).