Personal Musings category archive

A lot of the ambivalence over women’s feeding their babies the way God designed is because some men think they, rather than women, must control the breasts of the world.

I’m back from visiting First Daughter in Philadelphia (it was good to be back in Philly). I’ll post some pictures from the trip after I get a chance to prepare them for posting with the GIMP (I have a podcast on using the GIMP coming up at HPR).

She took me to a free art show at UPenn in which Stefan Sagmeister explores happiness. My first impression upon entering the tour was that it might be a bit self-indulgent.

It wasn’t; it was introspective, but also thought-provoking and fun, a difficult combination to achieve.

I recommend it highly. Learn more at the website.

When I grew up in these parts, we never heard speak of tornadoes. Not ever.

Tonight, as we watched our favorite Tivoed mystery shows, we were interrupted by three tornado warnings (not “alerts,” warnings, which mean tornadoes have actually been sighted, not that “conditions are right” for possible tornadoes).

So I have a question.

How the hell have those stinkin’ libruls managed to create actual tornadoes as part of their plot to convince the gullible public that the climate might actually be changing?

How?

Tell me how.

The Republican Party has become a political corporate raider.

It takes over governments, sells off bits and pieces, such as schools, public resources, prisons, and highways, to enrich its corporate masters, and leaves behind the ashes for the citizenry.

In Republican World, there is no such thing as the common good.

There is only the “For Sale” sign.

Washing machines are installed. Art just is.

If you have not listened to Night Beat, do so now.

You will not regret it.

I had forgotten just how bloody annoying Windows is.

Then I set up a computer for a friend . . . .

I listen to a lot of Old Time Radio (“old time” in this context means mostly 1940s and early 1950s, not “old time” to me, but, then, I’m old), mostly because it’s fun (see the links in the sidebar).

It reminds one of the days when writers were able to tell a coherent, concise story with a beginning, middle, and end, in half an hour. (This would appear to be a lost art–not just the “beginning, middle, and end” part, but also the “coherent” part).

One of the shows I sometimes indulge in is “Casey, Crime Photographer,” which under various permutations of that name, aired for a decade.

Somewhere in the introduction, the announcer would always say,

The Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation and its 10,000 employees bring you . . . .

You cannot imagine those words today, for, to today’s employers, employees are not partners in production.

Today’s employees are the enemy, to be vanquished, despoiled, and impoverished.

Especially impoverished, so that Wall Street bonus babies can get their bonuses for “cutting costs.”

Just ask Walmart, whose business model is based on exporting jobs to China and abusing employees.

Inquiring minds want to know.

War is not a board game.

Someone told me about something called “book.”

I intend to investigate this mystery.

Addendum:

I found one of those ebook thingees.

Republican Jesus spake, and, when he spake, he spakest in this manner:

Let them eat cake.

One of these days, I shall go on safari to photograph our most common wild life:

Plastic shopping bags in their natural habitat, shopping center parking lots.

Jason330 finds an analogy for “white privilege” that even a lamer gamer can understand.

Aside:

One characterization that I have settled on for white privilege as it has affected my white life is this: White folks (like me) define the norm; others (not-white folks) define the “diverse.”

You know you’re getting old when you see a car (much) less than half your age sporting “Antique” plates.

Anyone who pays attention knows that the “post racial society” ballyhoo following Mr. Obama’s election was, er, somewhat optimistic delusional.

The outpouring of bigotry, racism, and prejudice, both coded and decoded, from the racist far right and its fellow travelers, dupes, and symps in the Republican Party has exceeded anything since the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.

Optimists are hoping that this is American racial bigotry’s last gasp. Pessimists believe that hatred is always with us, though from time to time it chooses different targets; witness, for example the self-proclaimed Christians who have turned the God of Love into an Idol of Hate since the birth of Christianity.

George Davis muses on the place of the Trayvon Martin case in the “post racial” myth. A nugget:

America might be further along than most places in the world towards having a multi-cultural, multi-racial fusion culture. On the surface Americans of all races usually move among each other with little obvious, or even subtle, racial animosity. In America it is easy to maintain the illusion that we are post-racial, because it is not until you get down into the internal workings of America that you are likely to see any racism that matters very much.

And no place is America more brutally and stubbornly racist than the criminal justice system, which is one of the reasons that the Trayvon Martin case has stayed in public consciousness so long. It has the precise right ingredients for the media to get the American public to look into an area of our historical legacy that most post-racial Americans do not wish to look into.

Dick Destiny seems to have settled into a relationship with Facebook that is very similar to my own:

You’d guess I’m not a good match with Facebook. I have an account and while I post pointers to blog posts on it daily, it’s not good for much.

Facebook does not tell you how many people visit your profile daily. There’s a simple reason for it. If people actually knew how many times their hundreds of friends browser their posts — statistically speaking, not at all — users would desert en masse.

Facebook is a place for lickspittles — people who actually go to the pages of American businesses and hit the “like” button. It’s hard to imagine how lame that is but hundreds of thousands of my countrymen do it.

Follow the link for the rest.

As I told one of my kids the other day, if I did not use Facebook to pimp this blog, I’d have deleted all my data and closed my account long ago.

By the way, ever wondered what happens when you “like” something on Facebook?

You are the fly walking voluntarily into the parlor of the spider. Have it from this marketeer. (Be careful: like a true spider, once you land on her page, she rudely and selfishly won’t let you “Back” out of it; open it in a new tab or window, then close it when you are done.)

If I hear or see one more reference to that boat that sank a century ago, I shall scream.

I must be getting old.

I’m starting to get spammed by The Scooter Store.

Mary Schmich considers the positive side of cameras everywhere:

Shortly after my brother’s cancer flared up again, after a long time in hiding, I started texting him photos from my phone.

A Chicago sunset. Light rippling on the morning lake. The skyline swaggering. Wrigley Field on opening day.

(snip)

I don’t spell any of that out with the photos I send. All I type is an explanatory word or two, caption-style, and he usually texts me back something equally pithy, like “Pretty” or “I needed that.”

I had not thought about it in any depth, but I find myself doing the same thing. If it’s kittens or bunnies or funny license plates, they go to Susan; if it’s anything Virginia Tech, to my brother; and so on. (I used to send them to Facebook, but I decided a long time ago that Zuckerberg knows too much about me already and I was going to stop feeding his databases.)

It is an almost effortless, even lazy (in my case) way to stay in touch while keeping a personal touch.