Personal Musings category archive

The landmark (Hollywood sign–ed.) has been at the centre of a $12.5m (£8.1m) campaign to stop it being torn down to make room for property development in the surrounding area. Playboy owner Hefner stepped in with a $900,000 donation that means the 138-acre site around the sign will now be protected.

. . . but I suspect that no one can stop the stupid.

When I lived in Northern Virginia and traveled home to Pine View Farm, I would occasionally detour to take the Whitehaven Ferry on a nice summer day. A ferry has been operating at that spot for three centuries.

It was only a two minute boat ride; the side trip added a total of about 15 minutes to the 3 1/2 or four hour drive; and the jaunt through the Maryland countryside was quite relaxing after fighting the insane beach traffic on US 50.

Now it’s threatened.

Sure, it included War of the Worlds (the 1954 version, not the horrible Tom Cruise thing), The Wicker Man (a fantastic movie–I don’t think I could watch it a second time), Se7en (mediocre plot, but Brad Pitt was great–it was before he became a parody of himself), a bunch of Steven King throwaways, but what kind of list of scary movies gets away without Hitchcock, without Price, without Lorre, without a single Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula movie, without The Collector, not to mention The Vampire Lovers.

Damned whippersnappers think the world began when Rosemary’s Baby was born.

Don’t know what it was, but it hit Saturday afternoon with chills, with a fever up to 102.5 Fahrenheits, and with shakes and shivers.

We won’t mention the aches and pains, but I can recommend this in conjunction with acetylsalicylic acid for symptomatic relief as a satisfied user who is not a medical person in any way.

I’ve spent a good part of the last two days asleep or delirious. (Between the two, I much prefer delirious. At least delirious can leave pleasant memories.)

Today, still shaky, I had to fill out forms for settlement, which is scheduled for Friday, then run around to get them notarized, and deliver them to UPS with the prepaid shipping label the settlement folks were kind enough to provide (this way, I won’t have to drive across three states to attend–my part is done).

As with every settlement I’ve been involved in since the first one 30 years ago, the settlement folks keep coming up with last-minute complications.

It’s what they do. It makes them feel needed.

To quote a friend of mine from another life a long time ago, it was like taking an exam while suffering from a blinding headache (and from the shakes).

Normal insanity seems to be returning.

Then, again, I may still seem delirious. It’s my blog. I’m allowed.

And now it’s time to rejoin some Old Time Radio, which is already in progress.

Coal mining will continue to be dangerous as long as mine operators consider safety to be part of an expense, rather than a way of life.

. . . because whatever he did in his marriage, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was.

Sure, he kept his personal life quiet (with good reason); that means he wasn’t parading his family in public in some kind of family values hype.

He’s more honest than most of the sanctimonious gasbags who are writing and talking about him in the media.

No, I don’t watch golf on telly vision.

This is embarrassing:

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.

Republican governors George Allen and Jim Gilmore issued similar proclamations. But in 2002, Warner broke with their action, calling such proclamations, a “lightning rod” that does not help bridge divisions between whites and blacks in Virginia.

One of my ancestors was a General in the CSA. Several others wore the grey. I honor my ancestors.

I do not honor the lost cause.

They lost and it is good that they lost.

Certainly, some of the persons who fought wearing the grey were honorable men by the lights of their times.

That was then. We–well, some of us–have learned much since then.

It was not an honorable cause, whatever Robert E. Lee or Henry Alexander Wise may have thought at the time.

Honoring the lost cause honors racism, bigotry, and slavery.

Those who honor it say more about themselves than they do about the lost cause.

It is time to stop honoring the lost cause, to stop honoring racism, bigotry, and slavery, even as we may still treasure the memory of our ancestors.

News story via Balloon Juice.

Addendum, the Next Morning:

The Regent and the UDC.

Addendum-De-Dum-Dum:

The Regent misunremembered that whole slavery thingee.

Democracy is what Republicans agree with. If they don’t agree with it, it is by definition not democracy.

Just ask them.

I saw what I think was a bald eagle today, deep in suburban North Wilmington, Delaware.

I was out jawboning with one of my neighbors (soon to be an ex-neighbor when I finish packing stuff up and throwing stuff out–no more back-and-forth) in the way of making a farewell, and this bird flew–well, really, it just sort of drifted–overhead at low altitude, maybe 50 feet.

I won’t miss Delaware all that much, though it is a very nice place to live and is actually quite well run. Delaware has a fortunately low wingnut quotient and is small enough that no one can get away with anything especially sleazy for very long. Heck, I used to run into my governor at PTA meetings because his son went to the same school as my son. He came without any kind of entourage or body guard. That’s small.

My kids are scattered and all my exes live in Texas (yes, they do).

My friends meet Tuesdays for Drinking Liberally in Philly, but they are all also on line, as is much of my life. I will miss Tuesdays more than they realize.

I will miss my neighbors. They have been good neighbors for a quarter century.

But returning to Virginia is returning to family roots that reach almost 400 years. It’s home in a way that many persons in our mobile society cannot understand. Not to mention my friend who I re-met after 40 years.

You can take the Virginian out of Virginia, but you can’t take Virginia out of a Virginian.

But if my friend were elsewhere, I’d be heading there.

Back to the boid:

I wish I’d had my camera or even my camera phone on me, but I didn’t. The bird looked just like this:

I said to the neighbor, “I think that’s an eagle.” She said, “Nooooo.” I said, “Look at the white head and tail.”

And we just watched it sail down the street.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

From one of my two or three regular readers in reaction to this (by the way, the emailer is hardly a leftie):

You know, call me slow on the uptake, but this just hit me.

Liberals will call for all members of BushCo to be tried as war criminals, as they should be. But I’ve yet to see anyone call for Bush to receive a bullet between the eyes.

It’s only the conservatives & rednecks who would see Obama be killed. Or see someone spit on. Or someone else called horrible names.

But they claim to represent the majority of Americans. I bet that if the majority of Americans were polled, they would see things differently.

Aside: I don’t think I’ll take that bet. I think the majority of Americans do not consider throwing bricks through office windows and threatening children optimal ways of petitioning one’s elected representatives incongruously assembled.

I have wondered about this myself: the calls for hatred and violence from the right seem frequent; those from the left, so rare that I cannot think of one off the top of my head.

I haven’t addressed it, because, back in my younger days when I was marching in protests, I heard a lot of pretty horrible things come from the mouths of anti-war activists. I wondered whether writing about it would be a pot-kettle-black kind of thing.

These days are different, of course. Back then, to get a platform, you had to get noticed by the press. Now anyone can set up a blog or a social networking account and have a uncensored megaphone. (Getting noticed may be something else altogether.)

As I think of it, though, I don’t recall anyone who was remotely a mainstream opponent of the Viet Namese War who would have even thought of calling for the assassination of a public figure; the protesters wanted less killing, not more. Even the looniest loons, the ones who thought bombing stuff was a means of protesting bombings, tried to bomb buildings when they were empty.

I don’t think anyone shouted “baby killer” (then an anti-war slur, rather than an anti-abortion one) or “You lie” from the floor of Congress back in those days.

The reservoir of hatred on the political right in this country disturbs one.

The Republican Party’s actions not only to appeal to but also to foment the hatred disgusts one.

Reports of the wreckage of the Republican Party, such as this one from Andrew Sullivan, are no doubt premature.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to take some pleasure in the discomfiture of the Party of Privilege. Dick Polman recalls some history while predicting:

. . .10 years from now, Americans may well be amazed that the new normal was resisted so vociferously by the Republican opposition. All the current talk about “socialism” and “the death of freedom” and the onset of “Armageddon” (House GOP leader John Boehner, yesterday: “We are 24 hours from Armageddon”) is likely to seem quaint – much like actor Ronald Reagan’s 1961 warning about the health-care-for-seniors concept that would soon be known as Medicare (“one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free”); and much like the GOP attacks on the 1935 Social Security proposal to fashion a safety net for old folks (New Jersey GOP Senator A. Harry Moore: “It would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords”).

In the comments to that post, Gee1971 reacts with bafflement (I don’t usually read comments because there’s not enough time, but Polman does attract some interesting ones):

Did Something happen last night? I turned off the TV and sat with my most special loved ones enjoying our last moments together as The End approached. I was stunned when I opened my eyes this morning and St. Peter was not standing before me.

Thomas Jefferson was a good man, even as he was a man of his times, as we are a men and women of our times.

He struggled with the idea of slavery, and he lost the struggle, not being able to deal with its ultimate evil.

But he was moral enough to struggle with it–something many of his (and our) contemporaries refused to do–and to reveal those struggles in writing, even as he was unable rise above his times.

And now Thomas Jefferson no longer exists in Texas.

Blue Commonweath sums it up.

As long as it wasn’t filled with mixed nuts.

Embarrassing because it mirrors the way we were.

I was listening to an episode of The Man Called X here (just to be clear, the show was before my time–not much before my time, but still before my time).

The episode is set in the Congo (called the “Belgian Congo” when I was young, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The “native miners” are not showing up for work (turns out that the “native miners” are being duped by duplicitous white men, because, being natives who are Not White, they are incapable of thinking for themselves) and Ken Thurston, “the Man Called X,” delivers this line:

“No matter how much you offered them in trinkets and money, they wouldn’t come back?”

Trinkets and money.

It is not a very flattering mirror, is it?

The Federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals declined to consider free speech issues, but still ruled that a prosecutor could not charge a teen-aged girl with child porn because a revealing picture of her was on (several) someone else’s cell phone(s).

The prosecutor wanted to turn childhood dumbness into a felony because the girl refused to attend an “education program” of the his choosing (several other girls were involved, but only one took the prosecutor to court).

The court avoided ruling that the case involved a Constitutional issue (judges usually try to avoid ruling on Constitutional issues unless they can find no other way out). Instead, they ruled that the prosecutor acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner:

The court did rule that the district attorney had been wrong to threaten to charge the teen merely for refusing to attend the program.

The court said the girl, then 16 and identified as the daughter of “Jane Doe,” had “a likelihood of success” on the claim that the threatened prosecution was based not on probable cause of a crime but “instead in retaliation for Doe’s exercise of her constitutional rights not to attend the education program.”

Clearly, the girls were silly, stupid, and thoughtless. Teenagers are often silly, stupid, and thoughtless (as I recall, “thoughtless” was one of my mother’s favorite adjectives).

Threatening a felony charge was using a sledge hammer to clean a kitchen counter. (I suspect that any the pornographic content was not in the picture, but in the prosecutor’s head.)

On the block for scrap:

On its maiden voyage in 1952, the SS United States set a transatlantic speed record – New York to Bishop Rock, England, in three days, 10 hours, and 40 minutes – eclipsing by 10 hours the mark set by the Queen Mary in 1938.

But for the last 14 years, the pride of a nation has gone nowhere, rusting away at a pier in South Philadelphia, a fading landmark seemingly destined for one last journey: to the scrapyard.

Its owner, Norwegian Cruise Line, which spends about $700,000 a year to moor and maintain the ship, appears ready to pull the plug

When any falling down junker of a building can attract hordes of “historic preservationists” to protect its existence, even though it has no claim to being “historical” other than being old, unpainted, and unmaintained, to allow this ship, holds stuffed with history, to be sold and dismembered, is a damned shame.

.

My father loved Fred Allen’s humor.

Now I can listen to it also.

Philadelphia School DIstrict considers banning “hoodies”:

Hooded sweats are now so linked to all things nefarious that last week, retired federal judge James T. Giles recommended banning them from South Philadelphia High School in response to the racial violence that occurred there in December between Asian and African American students.

The word hoodie was used five times in his 31-page report, which suggested outlawing the apparel because it hides kids’ faces, making it hard to identify them. Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman later said she agreed with the suggestion, and would consider banning the hooded sweatshirts districtwide.

The article goes on to describe students puling up their hoods to escape surveillance cameras, even when the students aren’t doing anything questionable.

When I was a young ‘un, there were no surveillance cameras (or metal detectors or web spycams) in schools and we had hooded sweatshirts, not “hoodies.” The hoods on hooded sweatshirts fit the head; they didn’t cascade loosely over the face.

Supporters of surveillance cameras claim that they deter misbehavior; the evidence of that is inconclusive, at best. Others argue that they lead to faster capture of malefactors; that also appears questionable, despite what you might see on shows such as NCIS.

I suspect it’s another case of treating a symptom rather than fixing the cause.

I’d like to have the post-halftime Bengay concession for the band.

Afterthought:

It’s a blinking CSI commercial!

The rumors of lawlessness in New Orleans following Katrina were lies (and, yes, I fell for them, too).

Just sayin’.