A Curmudgeonly Word to New Clergy, Seminarians, and Divinity School Students

I've just read some of your essays.  I was looking forward to it, as I've sat at meetings and listened to you explain the church and the world to me, and wanted to see the rational, historical basis for your observations rendered thoughtfully on paper an electronic screen.

Yeah, well I hope for a lot of things.

Some advice that you will ignore:

1.  Stop quoting C.S. Lewis.  He was a fine apologist for our particular branch of faith, but he also belonged to that tweedy world that you, sometimes in the same breath, ridicule as being "pale, male, and stale".  Besides, those of us who are older have not only quoted him ourselves, excessively, but have actually read the books from which the quotations come.  We don't need a primer in Lewis.

2.  Speaking of which, in popular fiction, read something in addition to the Harry Potter series.  It's juvenile and too clever by half and also represents that tweedy world.  I think, for all of your talk about intersectionality, you actually want to be a mid-century Oxford don or English public [what we call "private" in the U.S.] school student.  I've never been an Oxbridge don, but I have some equivalent experience in the Ivy League, and I did attend a British public school, and the image conjured by that privileged Rowling woman and the production staff of Masterpiece Theatre is fantasy.

3.  Find a used copy, or even the latest edition, of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.  You should like it as it's ancient and tweedy.  You will spend a remarkable time in your clergy career writing all sorts of things in all sorts of media.  It would be best if you knew how to punctuate, build a sentence, and shape a paragraph.  I appreciate that your teachers probably didn't know how to do these things, either, and were busy teaching how to be "a good person" according their personal standard of good, but you will find it invaluable.

4.  Please don't use vulgarity or street language to punctuate your points.  It doesn't work.  Also, if you do so in a parish newsletter or, God forbid, from the pulpit, you will lose your audience.  And your job.

5.  Before you spend valuable essay time and space explaining to your reader who Henri Nouwen was, consider that, while you may feel that you have "discovered" him, with so many of his books still in print, that probably isn't the case.  Also, it's possible that your reader was a contemporary of Nouwen's, knew him, and was on a first name basis with him.  You just wasted 200 words and I-don't-know how many essay minutes telling the reader something he already knows more intimately than you.

Look, I applaud your courage in choosing this as a career [sorry, but it is rarely a calling], especially as the job market, and the job, is in the process of evaporation.  However, if you wish to realize your self-image as a liberator of the church, one whose ideas are of an original and sublime nature, you're going to have to prove it with something other than attitude and feelings.  You'll also have to display some serious and pragmatic thinking.  The sacred orders have enough poseurs.

We've Noticed

Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just predicted that the world will end in 12 years if you do not give the government more power over your life. Leftists across the country agreed this is a big improvement on outlandish religious claims that the world will end and you will be judged for your sin one day soon. 

In addition, Lady Gaga pronounced Mike Pence's Christianity as lacking morality, a claim immediately praised by the same people who agree that morality is relative and that you can't judge people based on who they are or what they do.

Welcome to the Post-Christian Age

I mean, this is what was wanted, wasn't it?  The freedom to define morality according to one's whims.

Enshrining mob rule in legal contracts can only further embolden the cranks, the kooks, the grumps — the sanctimonious, the embittered, the aggrieved. As word spreads that outrage on digital steroids can not only hound and intimidate writers, but can consign years of their hard work to the bin, the Twits are further motivated to crucify anyone who breaks their imaginary rules.

There's a Lot of This Going Around

The sad reality is that Martin had no choice but to burble bromides if she wished to remain a member of her progressive intellectual clique. Like Václav Havel’s greengrocer, who put a sign in his window saying “Workers of the World Unite,” not because he believed it but because he wanted to be left alone, so Martin speaks the language of white privilege because that is what is expected of her. “White privilege” might have meant something when McIntosh used it, but for Martin it is simply a way of saying, “I have the approved-of ideas and therefore I win.” It is a moral fashion, and Martin is keen to be seen as exceedingly fashionable.

In The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz explored how intellectuals living under communism gradually slipped into self-censorship and stylistic tedium by fearfully adopting politically correct modes of expression. To anybody preparing to brave excommunication in exchange for clear thought, I offer some words of comfort from this classic:

When people are divided into “loyalists” and “criminals” a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the “criminals” one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves. From the social point of view these persons would constitute the best guarantee that the future development of the social organism would be toward good.

Remarkable how similar the political aspect of mainstream Protestantism is to that of mid-century Communism.  The ecclesial motto has for some time been, "We must all use the same words; we must all share the same thoughts."  Add to that, "We will all share the same eternal guilt".

So, these days, the words of a late colleague come back to me, "Just sit back and admire the pathology."

"Civility on the Decline — A Crisis in Free Speech and Violence"

The American schools has succeeded in reducing the public’s intellect to the level of the perceptual beast. It happened when classrooms encouraged students to approach gaining knowledge of the world through their “feelings”. The world naturally does not make sense to someone who processes their scattered observations of the world through their emotions because they do not know how to put together the data they observed into structured logical thoughts. And like a lost animal incapable of making sense of the world around it, that person lashes out like a beast because the world is unintelligible around them...

Rational thinking is difficult because reason requires a person to be active in his thinking, and logic is a discipline that ruthlessly test the mind. Emoting on the other hand, requires no effort. It is certainly more difficult to engage in thoughtful, witty and constructive discussions. Yelling each other down on the other hand, is easy. Barbaric profanity is essentially the witless person’s lazy attempt at counterfeiting their importance.

Some of us warned of this forty years ago and were ridiculed for it.  Welcome to Cacatopia, folks.  You wanted this.

"Face Crime"? "Aggresive Standing?" What an Age to Be Alive.

So many people hated Sandmann’s smile (excuse me, smirk). But what if he hadn’t smiled? What facial expressions would not have constituted facecrime on the part a white preppy-looking teenaged boy (in a MAGA cap! Let’s not forget the MAGA cap!) being confronted by Phillips and his up-close-and-personal drumming and chanting? A grim face on Sandmann would have been considered even more “aggressive,” wouldn’t it? And laughing would have been even more disrespectful. Telling Phillips to get away? Perish the thought—racist! Turning his face away? Disrespectful again.

I’m not just trying to be cute here. I am serious in saying I believe there was nothing Sandmann could have done that would have changed the outcome, once he was selected as the target for the confrontation and the recording of the exchange on video by Phillips, who was accompanied by people with videocameras filming it from the start.

Enormous numbers of people considered Sandmann guilty on sight because of the categories of person to which he belongs, and because of what propaganda has guided them to believe. I almost wrote “guilty until proven innocent,” but that is too kind to those among them who will not even accept proof of innocence. They want him guilty, because it suits their political and their emotional purposes.

Nowadays even the church assigns sin to people based on genetic components beyond anyone's control; sin that apparently can never be erased, merely addressed by a showy collection of desk bandits.

Here's more from elsewhere:

 See, this is balanced journalism. Yesterday, Savannah Guthrie asked the kid who didn't do anything -- he stood stock-still and did nothing -- if he thought he should apologize. Today, she asked the fraud who lied to her whether the kid who didn't do anything should apologize. Gotta get both sides! (And I just love being lectured by Guthrie, the woman who stood by and did nothing while her co-host raped half the building. Hey, he never did anything to her, right?)

It's Easier to Look Like You're Doing Something, Rather Than Actually Doing Something

A Pungent Realization

Lo, I have become superannuated.

Modern Psychology = Neo-Creationism

What's that?  Here, read this in its entirety, please:

Biologists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, parents, and really almost all regular folk have long believed that there are meaningful and biologically-based psychological differences between males and females. Fortunately for us mere mortals, the APA is setting the record straight. It is an oppressive patriarchy, not biology, that has shaped our psychology. Gender and the masculine traits associated with being male are social constructs. The APA obviously isn’t denying that evolution is true. They aren’t some kind of silly group of religious fundamentalists. But like most educated progressives, they understand that evolution stopped at the neck.   

There is this odd group of evolutionary psychologists who seem hell-bent on holding onto antiquated views about human mental and social life. It seems pretty clear that these individuals are the academic wing of the alt-right. Don’t be fooled by surveys suggesting the majority of evolutionary psychologists self-identify as liberal. We can’t trust people to self-report their own politics. Only the most enlightened are in a position to tell everyone else what they really think. I would laugh at how ridiculous the academics are who continue to insist that males and females are distinct in any meaningful way, but I now know that comedy is a form of oppression.

Perhaps the saddest part of reading the new APA guidelines is realizing just how many American boys and men suffer from traditional masculinity and don’t even realize it, and how many mothers and wives tolerate and even promote this sickness. There are millions of couples and families across the United States who are living lives imprisoned by traditional gender roles and on the surface appear to be happy and flourishing. I especially feel for all the conservatives and devout Christians who are most vulnerable to this illness. It doesn’t help when alt-right institutions such as Harvard publish research suggesting that children may benefit from being raised in such traditionally religious homes.

And People Tell Me Religion is a Scam

Greenpeace’s own environmental vandalism goes conveniently unreported

More on Super-Woke, Post-Christian Corporate Moral Posturing

Gaze upon your new god, 21st century.

In recent years, companies have been told that they need a purpose, a reason for existing beyond making money. Consumers look for authenticity, and prospective employees want to work somewhere that makes the world better. “Purpose” has been touted as the key to 21st-century success by both the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. 

With the world’s top companies staring nobly into the middle distance, it seemed to be the dawn of something magnificent: capitalism with a soul.
LOL, just kidding. 

State Street underpays women. Starbucks paid no U.K. corporate tax for three years on sales of £1.2 billion  (about $1.5 billion), thus failing to nurture my local neighborhoods by paying for police, social services, or even street sweepers. Johnson and Johnson kept 98% of its cash offshore in 2017–almost $42 billion. If you wriggle out of paying the taxes that cover your customers’ healthcare and education, you don’t really care about the well-being of the people you serve. 

Brand purpose is at risk of losing any meaning; it’s already being hilariously mocked.

An Intelligent Star Trek Essay. Yes, You Read That Correctly.

What Is This Thing You Call ‘Social Justice’?

He was a Prophet for a Social Media Age

The Ministry of Mr. Rogers

If I've Learned Anything in the Church, It's That the More Noise Someone Makes About Tolerance, the Less They Represent It

A License To Hate

These outbursts were all voiced from highly educated elites (Caputo has a journalism degree from the University of Miami, Deutsch graduated from the Wharton School, Jeong from Harvard Law School, Strzok received a master’s degree from Georgetown, Wilson attended George Washington University). And all engaged in vicious and cowardly stereotyping of a demographic in a manner that they assumed involved no downside. Rather, the smears were delivered on the expectation of winning approbation from their peers. And they did in twitter-fueled competitions to find the crudest pejoratives.

For decades race and gender studies academics had argued that overtly expressed racism against whites was not real racism, but could be contextualized by prior white oppression. In the age of furor against Trump, their theories now went off campus and were being adjudicated by a wider constituency—and yet they did not seem to win agreement from the general public. The irony, of course, is that these professionals displayed far less humanity in their crude putdowns about smells, toothlessness and apes than did the targets of their smears.

Needlehooks

The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story

At 8:30 yesterday morning, as I was typing this essay, The New York Times emailed me. The subject line was “Ethics Reminders for Freelance Journalists.” (I have occasionally published essays and reviews in the Times). It informed me, inter alia, that the Times expected all of its journalists, both freelance and staff, “to protect the integrity and credibility of Times journalism.” This meant, in part, safeguarding the Times’ “reputation for fairness and impartiality.”

I am prompted to issue my own ethics reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will causally harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory.

I'll Regard It as an Emergency When the People Who Tell Me It's an Emergency Start Acting Like It

Nearly 1,500 private jets to land at climate change-focused Davos summit

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

There are times when it feels as if cricket must be as old as England itself, but this is one of nostalgia’s illusions. Shakespeare knew nothing of the sport, then in its extreme infancy, but his works have been subsequently mined for proleptic cricket allusions, so that one finds cricket anthologies with titles such as Sing all a Green Willow, while fanatics of the game are said, like the dying Falstaff, to have “babbled of green fields”. A visit to the Long Room at Lord’s confirms how English landscape painting, which came of age later than its Dutch equivalent, might sometimes feature a cricket match, and the Augustan era, when such paintings were first made, is the time when cricket arose in the English soul, just as it came to fruition in the 19th century.

Only baseball has a finer literary tradition than cricket.

Mr. A

Not Mr. A.

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.” - Leo Tolstoy

The other day, while watching the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean's ruddy horizon, I was thinking about surfer nicknames.  No, I don't know why, either.  Offhand, the names of champion surfers "Gnat" Young, "Midget" Farelly, Mickey "The Cat" Dora, Greg "The Bull' Noll, Darryl "Flea" Virostko, "Wingnut" Weaver and Dale "The Hawk" Velzy came to mind.  I've surfed or otherwise ridden waves with guys named "Baby", "Hoodoo Bob", "The Razor", and, my favorite, "Goggles" Paisanno.  For some reason, I picked up the nickname "Killer" when I was younger.  I suspect it was because of the damage that I used to do to boards or maybe due to my impressive list of personal injuries.  In recent years, it's been "56 Chevy".  I like to think it's because I'm older, but elegant and serviceable.  However, it's probably because I'm perpetually rusty.

One of my old compadres is a fellow generally known as "Mr. A."  Because he's a professional colleague, I'll leave his Christian name out of this.  It's his nickname that serves as his story, though, so that is what's important.

It's genesis came about on one of those mornings when the waves were of an indistinct nature.  To the north, they looked capable of sustaining a righteous ride; to the south, they were junk.  The problem was that a ride that started in the north would move the surfer to the south, where the ride would shift into ignominy.  While the beginning and middle parts would be great, it would end badly.  We were on the verge of abandoning the morning's session when Mr. A earned his name.

Considering the waves, he looked to the horizon and said, "It's like what Aristotle said: 'A is A'.  They're waves.  We ride waves.  Let's go."

[For those puzzled by the "A is A" comment, or who never had to learn philosophy's Law of Identity, it's defined thus:

To have an identity means to have a single identity; an object cannot have two identities. A tree cannot be a telephone, and a dog cannot be a cat. Each entity exists as something specific, its identity is particular, and it cannot exist as something else. An entity can have more than one characteristic, but any characteristic it has is a part of its identity. A car can be both blue and red, but not at the same time or not in the same respect. Whatever portion is blue cannot be red at the same time, in the same way. Half the car can be red, and the other half blue. But the whole car can't be both red and blue. These two traits, blue and red, each have single, particular identities.

Well, that makes it clear, doesn't it?]

Later, after the morning in the surf, he commented further: "It's like those two guys in the movie looking for the perfect wave.  Why bother?  A wave is a wave.  It's not for them to be perfect, they're just waves.  It's for us to match them.  Then, any wave can be 'perfect' if we can be perfect.  But, since we can't ever be perfect, why bother about the wave?  We just ride."

I'll bet you didn't think middle-aged surfers could be so philosophical, did you?  I mean, Frankie and Annette never were.

Mr. A. is a priest, although he hasn't formally bothered with it much in recent years.  I think it's too small for him. Besides, he's done his time.  Unlike those whom I have known who have sought ordination in their middle age and then left the practice of parish ministry within a very few years when it didn't feed their mid-life expectations,  A. was ordained at 25 and spent the better part of his adult years working in parishes and schools.  We met when we served together as fledgling hospital chaplains and were forced to sit through interminable hours of group discussion and write page after page of self-reflection in order to receive our certification.  After awhile, when we both realized that we were spending more time in self-analysis than we were meeting with patients, we hijacked the meetings and asked more and more difficult and invasive questions of the supervisor, attempting to probe her unstated motivations for avoiding actual hospital work.  After a couple of weeks, we were having fewer meetings and spending more time with those in our charge.

Then we discovered we both enjoyed surfing and have ever since maintained a small reign of terror on beaches of both coasts, at least if you're a line-up jumper, pseud, show-off, surf dullard, or employ unnecessarily foul language in the presence of seagulls. It's been a good friendship.

He left parish ministry one day, rather abruptly, but I understood.  After spending 20 years conforming to canon law, observing the medieval authority of bishops, enduring the general tattiness of congregations and the disdain of secularists, he went all Bartleby. The fact that he did so without another job to which to go outraged his parish [they took it personally] and puzzled his bishop, who recommended he "speak to someone" about his decision.

I read it for the first time in college. That was the last time I read it.  If you've read it, you'll understand.

Instead of saying "I prefer not to", as he does in my imagination, he told the bishop that, yes, he would speak to someone.  Of course, in a world where A is A, when one speaks to someone about the reappraisal of a holy call, it's pointless to speak to a secular therapist with no understanding of living theology and who is generally little more than a cocktail party acquaintance of the bishop's.  If you want spiritual "therapy", go to God not human, which is what he did.  [I've always found it interesting that A.'s bishop assumed he needed some form of psycho-therapy just because A. didn't want to work in the church any longer; as if that's some form of madness, rather than an expression of health.]

After a brief time in prayerful reappraisal, within months A. found himself with a job on Wall Street, an apartment in New York, and a life lived free of denominational authority and identity.  He had a real income and the return of Saturday night conviviality and slow Sunday mornings, of Christmas and Easter with family rather than at work, of what I vaguely recall was the normal life.  It was great, until one sunny Tuesday morning in September when the view out his office window was suddenly obscured with masses of shredded paper and a dark viscous liquid.  It was then that his experience, training, and education took over as he found himself the oldest person in an office filled with traumatized twenty-somethings who had never before had to face the reality of mortality and terror.

That's the remarkable thing about a true calling to the Gospel.  There are many clergy who "play priest" like actors on a stage, dependent upon the outward circumstances to inform their authority.  Their confidence in their call is so shaky that they tend towards the beta rather than alpha in their professional presentation: Too quiet, sedentary, obtuse, and superficial; woefully unaware of how most people lead their lives.  They are more likely to water down Godliness to make it palatable than to celebrate it in triumphal fullness.

It's one of the reasons the greater church has arrived in this current century in a weak and pointless state.  To those truly called, every circumstance, every situation, is an opportunity for ministry, whether in a church on a Sunday morning, a surf beach at daybreak, or in a collapsing building in the midst of a terrorist attack.  It doesn't have to be in controlled settings with distinct roles, but in moments when an organic opportunity is presented.  Ministry is ministry; A is A.

And so, with great care and even greater compassion, A. physically lead his office mates out of "ground zero".  When re-located to a new office, he became the un-official chaplain for one of the great banks; the source of comfort and spiritual sagacity for a collection of young investment bankers who never had much time for "church-stuff", but discovered a very real need for a guide to lead them out of a ground zero of the soul.

But that was over a decade ago now, and those days, like all bad days, have faded in their traumatic power.  On a recent morning, serious consideration of anything was not much on our minds as we looked at choppy waves and a gray sea.  Where we would once have paused and wondered whether or not to bother, it was clear that we were going into the sea.  After all, waves are waves.

And when I have one of those days when I see a moribund greater Church that loves meetings and regulations with the same zeal with which it loves small parish assessment money [if not small parishes themselves], rewards mediocrity and promotes monolithic thinking like any secular institution, I think about what matters and what doesn't.  After all, ministry is ministry.

You May Want to Know About This

Venezuelans set fire to Hugo Chavez statue: It has started

It was only a matter of time.

This is Me at a Diocesan Meeting

Proverbs 4:26

The Vatican’s New Track Team Includes Priests, Nuns and a Scholar

Because We're Mighty and Awesome. Why Else?

The marvel of the human dad

Among our close animal relatives, only humans have involved and empathic fathers. Why did evolution favour the devoted dad?

It's Not the Weather, It's the Taxes

Families Fleeing New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, New York, Study Finds

Clergy, Too.

What happens when your therapist is a Social Justice Warrior? (featuring @LOUontheSUBWAY and @shellyshenoy) pic.twitter.com/Y5cQUzhC47

— We the Internet TV (@WeTheInternetTV) January 18, 2019

Being Woke is Expensive, Given How Overpriced Their Razors Are

Gillette takes on toxic masculinity in new ad campaign

It's interesting, isn't it, that in the post-religious age it's for-profit, multi-national corporations that now lecture us about morality?

The Current State of Environmental Research

Peer review only works when there are no corrupt or stupid peers.

According to colleagues, Lonnstedt, who now lives in Sweden, no longer wants to be con­tacted about her research and, in fact, has abandoned her career in science. 

What she has left behind is a test case of how the science community deals with concerns about alleged malpractice when they are raised. 

Veteran marine scientist Walter Starck, who received a PhD in marine science from the Univer­sity of Miami in 1964, says the Lonnstedt affair is symptomatic of a new era. 

Starck says generations of ­researchers have been schooled in a culture wherein threats to the Great Barrier Reef are an unquestionable belief from which all evidence is interpreted. 

“She (Lonnstedt) got into the ocean acidification and global warming and the effect CO2 was going to have on the behaviour of marine animals and she started publishing,” Starck says. 

“Immediately the publishers lapped it up. As a graduate student she managed to get as much published in one year as most professors do in a decade.”Lonnstedt’s work is now being picked apart.

As well it should, especially as $AUD 1 billion in tax revenue has been spent addressing something that may not exist.

I Blame Roman Catholic Clergy for Messing Up Our Percentages

Gallup's poll of the ethical rating of professions:

Nurses: 84%
Doctors: 67%
Pharmacists: 66%
Teachers: 60%
Police officers: 54%
Accountants: 42%
Clergy: 37%
Journalists: 33%
Bankers: 27%
Lawyers: 19%
Members of Congress: 8%

Both journalists and Congressional members are rated way, way too high.

A Philosopher's View on European Unrest

If you haven't heard of the gilets jaunes, that's because the American media exist only to melt down over the latest things that Trump puts on The Tweety.  Real news of the world is no longer profitable for cable or network news.

However, this is something that may very well be the canary in the coal mine for what's going on in American politics.

Not only does peripheral France fare badly in the modern economy, it is also culturally misunderstood by the elite. The yellow-vest movement is a truly 21st-century movement in that it is cultural as well as political. Cultural validation is extremely important in our era. 

One illustration of this cultural divide is that most modern, progressive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. But none of them approve of the gilets jaunes. Their emergence has caused a kind of psychological shock to the cultural establishment. It is exactly the same shock that the British elites experienced with the Brexit vote and that they are still experiencing now, three years later. . . . 

We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities. 

But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe. 

The middle-class reaction to the yellow vests has been telling. Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.

A Pungent Observation

One of the positive side-effects of the government shut-down is that, with great suddenness, clergy of the Episcopal Church are aware and supportive of members of the U.S. Coast Guard.

This concern will dissipate once the shut-down is over, of course, but something is better than nothing.

By the way, not to be pedantic, but the Coast Guard is not a bureaucratic part of the military.  The USCG belongs to the Department of Homeland Security.  In times of declared war, or a specially-declared emergency [such as in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 atrocity] the Coast Guard can be transferred to the Defense Department and then becomes part of the military.

Needlehooks

I occasionally come across quotations that snag my attention like a needle-hook to yarn.  I may or may not agree with the writer's perspective, I may find them derivative or vulgar, but they represent something that stirs my curiosity and, sometimes, thinking.

From time to time I'll share them and their source, but caveat emptor.

Since I have one parent who was a legal immigrant to the US and another who is the descendant of African slaves brought to America, people sometimes think they can figure out what I think about illegal aliens... 

We are seeing the results of the New Way right now.
There are two types of Open Borders advocates and both are operating from two unspoken and separate but related premises:
• One is that illegal aliens who aren't white are genetically incapable of fixing their countries of origin.
• The second is that, because of the first, allowing them to overrun the US will take this country down and make it ripe for a fundamental socialist transformation... 

So, I say this to both prongs of the Open Borders crowd: I see what you're doing, as do many others. You want to import people *you think* are too inferior to fix their own countries.And you think that alleged inferiority makes them malleable to a mindset of your choosing.You believe the same of black Americans, but too many of us see through it, so we were discarded in favor of the prospective new Serf Class. 

A word of warning: As with many things written on the Internet, this writer makes use of pungent language to accentuate her points.

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

Nietzsche continues to beguile largely because of his exciting and libertine aphorisms, and his unhappy life and tragic end. This is the man who exclaimed ‘God is dead’, ‘live dangerously’, ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’, and who devised the idea of the ‘Superman’ – his idealised human being who not only transcends social rules and the bovine herd, but who also becomes supreme master of himself. Nietzsche is the everyman philosopher for writers and journalists: he wrote beautifully, yet during his life his books scarcely sold at all. He went mad in 1889 and, after his death, his work was disgracefully appropriated by the Nazis. What’s not to like?

Joshua Slocum

[Originally published on June 7, 2013]

All adventurers should have jaunty hats.

“Now, it it well known that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it.” 

I spent one summer in the rain of Nova Scotia, mostly trapped indoors and listening to the only radio station that I could receive, the CBC, which presented the same four hour program of news and music repeated six times a day.  Since my intention was to spend this time sailing, I had brought only two books with me that I wound up having to read very, very slowly.

One was a biography of Jack London and the other an account of the first solo circumnavigation. The common denominator, besides both containing observations about life under sail, was in the name of the boats.  London bought, with the proceeds from The Call of the Wild, a 30-foot sloop that he named Spray.  It was on board his Spray that The Sea Wolf was written.

By coincidence, the second book, written by the captain who managed the feat of circumnavigation,  also was about a boat named Spray, although she was slightly older, having been commissioned [or "planked"] in 1899, four years before London's boat.  Clearly, I recognized the fate in this coincidence and named my 10-foot lateen-rigged sailboard Spray, too.  Although I did not circumnavigate with it nor write a best-seller, it still provided me with some adventure and amusing stories about my earliest, and often maladroit, attempts at sailing.

The original Spray was skippered and owned by a cantankerous and dour maritimer by the name of Joshua Slocum.  He had been born in the mid-19th century in the same area of Nova Scotia where I was staying and, as one of eleven children, sought at an early age to get out of a very crowded house.  He finally succeeded at the age fourteen when he, rather predictably for a Nova Scotian, ran away to sea, moving up the employment ladder from cabin boy to ordinary seaman to able bodied seaman and, at the age of 25, to ship's master.

Captain Slocum married and had children, his family accompanying him as he mastered various merchant craft up and down the Americas.  After a particularly harrowing adventure on a very unlucky boat that left them stranded in Brazil, the Slocums built another boat using local materials and labor and left on the day that slavery was abolished in that country.  The voyage in that boat, named Liberdade in recognition of Brazilian emancipation, was to serve as the subject of Slocum's first attempt at maritime memoir, Voyage of the Liberdade.

Slocum and his family relocated to Fairhaven, Massachusetts upon their return to the United States.  It was there that Slocum bought and re-fitted a retired oyster boat, a 36 foot gaff-rigged sloop, and named her Spray.  

Not the original, unless Slocum was 6 inches tall.

On April 24, 1895, leaving behind his family, Slocum began the "research" on his next book: 

"I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail. A short board was made up the harbor on the port tack, then coming about she stood to seaward, with her boom well off to port, and swung past the ferries with lively heels. A photographer on the outer pier of East Boston got a picture of her as she swept by, her flag at the peak throwing her folds clear. A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood."

Seems a bit surprising when one thinks about it, but in the entire history of sail no one had ever completed a solo trip around the world until the late 19th century.  Maybe it was the daunting notion of manning a labor-intensive boat 24 hours a day, or the absence of fellowship, or the sheer boredom of it all [Remember that song sung by Fred Astaire in one of his early films with Ginger Rogers: "I joined the navy to see the world, and what did I see?  I saw the sea."  That about sums it up.], but no one had ever succeeded in the feat.  Given his skill and experience as a sailor, and the fact that he didn't mind being alone at sea, made him the likeliest candidate for success in the venture.

As one who can get lost sailing from Point Judith to Block Island, or even from Cleveland to Rondeau, Ontario [it's due north, just so you know], it still amazes me that Slocum didn't even use a chronometer for navigation, merely a cheap clock and a sextant with which he took noon sightings.  With these ancient and simple tools, Slocum left the coast of Massachusetts and sailed to Nova Scotia, then to the Azores, Gibraltar [where he out-ran Moorish pirates], the Canaries, Cape Verde, down to Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, East Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and back to the United States by way of Recife three years later.  [To be honest, I just like typing all of those exotic names.]



In addition to pirates, Slocum visited or otherwise kept company with a variety of colorful people, including the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Pacific and, when he fell ill at sea, the apparition of the pilot of Columbus' Pinta, who helmed the Spray through a storm while Slocum was incapacitated.

He returned to harbor in Newport, Rhode Island in June, 1898 and published, the next year, his account of the adventure, Sailing Alone Around the World.  It's still in print and available in hard cover, paperback, and for 99 cents, electronically.  For anyone with even a tangential interest in sailing, it's required reading.

In the winter of 1909, Slocum and Spray set sail again, this time it was a solo voyage to the West Indies.  Neither Spray nor Slocum were ever seen again.  That's rather a perfect end for a sailor; and for a good boat, too.

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”

Altered Service

Good morning, all.

The Coracle is going to reduce its postings for a period, mainly because of increased demands on my time during the week.  So, here's the deal: We will be offering posts new and old on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, but not Monday through Thursdays.

I regret that, as I know many start their mornings with us, but at a time when almost all of my contemporary colleagues have retired, I find myself in more demand than ever.  Just when I think I may be getting too old for this, a new challenge is presented.

We should return to normal before too long, though.  I appreciate your loyalty more than I can say.

Of Disappointment

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you —

It takes life to love Life.

- from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

So, I Was Supposed to Be Vegan This Month? So Much for My Moral Improvement.

Another episode in the dangers involved with faux religion:

In case you hadn’t noticed, this January has otherwise gone by the name of ‘Veganuary’, a month in which we have been exhorted to forgo the consumption and usage of animal products. Or perhaps that should be ‘Smuguary’, ‘Selfrightuary’, ‘Egotistuary’, or any other comparably ungainly neologism. Because such terms would encapsulate the fad du jour, veganism: a narcissistic cult and exercise in self-regard in an age of identity politics.

Although, it may be preferable to this diet:

Model stayed thin thanks to steady diet of ‘tapas and cocaine’

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

TOLSTOY STARTED WRITING Anna Karenina at the end of March 1873 and finished it in the summer of 1877. He complained about the labor and regularly defamed the novel during and after its composition. In the midst of serializing it at the highest rate a Russian author had ever been paid, Tolstoy wanted to kill himself. From the first drafts and sketches he knew Anna would commit suicide, but he didn’t know how he was going to prevent himself from drowning or shooting himself. In terms of hyperconscious despair, Tolstoy was one with his creation. In A Confession (begun in 1875, revised and completed in 1881), he describes himself looking into the chasm of depression; his head spinning, he was ready to plunge to the bottom, but an unusual (for him) lack of conviction held him back.

Do you want to know true despair?  Try writing a 200 page theology introduction.  You'll be too crazy to even worry about self-slaughter.

Bruce Brown

[Originally published on May 31, 2013]

Summer means many different things to different people. To some it might mean the thrill of a high speed catamaran. Others like to float around and soak up a few stray rays. Still others like some kind of inland activity. But for us, it's the sport of surfing.

The first trick was to find a camera that was waterproof, and there weren't too many of those in the 1950's.  He had taken many, many photos and much 8mm film of the surf and the surfers with other cameras, beginning with some photos he made for his mother when he was a high school kid so that she could see that the surfing he did [mostly instead of going to high school] wasn't dangerous and wouldn't result in a broken neck.  Although, to be fair, the waves where he surfed in Alamitos Bay could be wild, even in the days before the construction of the Long Beach breakwall, but what sons don't keep a little bit from their mothers?

Anyway, Brown enjoyed the water and the surf, no surprise since he hung out at the Huntington Beach pier, the place that bears the closest resemblance to my view of the Kingdom of Heaven, and equally enjoyed trying to capture the kinetic action of surfing on film.  So much so that he joined the Navy out of high school and made sure he graduated at the top of his class in submarine school so that he would have his choice of assignments.  He chose Hawaii, the home of Waikiki, the North Shore, Waimea, and the Banzai Pipeline.

After the Navy he became a life guard in San Clemente, trying to save money for that rad camera that would make all the difference, when he heard that the master surfboard shaper, Dale Velzy, was offering $5000 for a film that would highlight the Velzy surf team and the company's product.  This was 1957, when $5000 had the buying power that over $40,000 has today.  This would mean not only a waterproof camera but travel and living expenses for a whole year.  So, in a mad gamble, Brown quit his day job, took the money, bought the camera, and lived out of his beater Ford for the next year.  All he did was surf, sleep in the car, travel back and forth from California and Hawaii, and, oh, yes, take miles of 8mm film of surf, surfers, surfing life, and surfing styles.  The result was the documentary Slippery When Wet, narrated by Brown with a soundtrack by the mildly demented alto saxophonist, Bud Shank.

There were other surf films at the time, but none had the laid-back panache of Brown's.  As was the custom in the late 1950's, these films would be shown in high school auditoriums, at midnight shows in local movie theaters, or even on the outside walls of buildings on Friday or Saturday nights in SoCa.  Sometimes, they would not even have sound and the filmmakers would narrate them live.  Not only did Brown's film offer a soundtrack, he gradually, over the course of making Slippery's sequels, Surf Crazy, Barefoot Adventure, Surfing Hollow Days and Waterlogged, learn how to distribute a surfing documentary so that it could be released like any Hollywood film. 

What surfers once looked like when they traveled.  Heck, what everyone once looked like when they traveled. August, Hynson, and Brown boarding a plane.

The crowning achievement was realized in the documentary, Endless Summer, which was initially released to a growing collection of West Coast theaters in 1964, gradually working its way east where, two years later, it would bring the surfing ethos to a small barrier island in New Jersey where, on a rainy afternoon with nothing else to do, a nine-year-old from Ohio would see it with his father and begin an Ahab-esque fascination with the pursuit.  The nine-year-old wasn't alone.  Perhaps only the Holy Bible has so dramatically altered so many lives, but that may be an excessive observation.  Still, Endless Summer is regarded, without question, as the greatest movie about surfing that has ever been made.

Here's an academic description of the film:
"In his narration, Brown muses that if someone had enough time and money, they could literally follow the summer around the globe, and so Brown and two of his surfing buddies, Robert August and Mike Hynson, decide to do just that. With their surfboards as luggage, August and Henson travel from one coastline to the next, trying the waves in Hawaii, Africa, Australia, Tahiti, and a number of other nations where most folks had never even seen a surfboard before. Along the way, August and Hynson learn a lot about people around the world, and grow up a bit while they search for the elusive perfect wave."

Here's what Roger Ebert had to say:
"The peculiar charm of "The Endless Summer" is something I haven't got quite worked out in my mind yet. This is all the more strange because here, at last, is a completely uncomplicated film, fresh and natural, designed only to please. It does."

If people thought that surfing was about Frankie, Annette and playing bingo on a beach blanket, or what was captured in the insipid songs of the Beach Boys, Endless Summer rectified that misconception.  It is by turns lyrical and absurd, comical and rather sweetly touching; it is very much a product of those particular days in the middle of the 1960's, before drugs, Charlie Manson [another fellow who enjoyed hanging out in Huntington Beach, by the way], and the rancid horror of Vietnam began to discolor history.  The two surfers of the film, August and Hynson, reflect in their personal histories the twin experiences of surfing in the period now known as post-Summer.

Robert August took the smart route, turning his minor celebrity into a surfboard conglomerate that also offers skateboards, clothing, and anything else that feeds the surfing lifestyle.  He still surfs in HB or at his estate in Costa Rica and looks about twenty years younger than his age.  Hynson chose the stupid path and surrendered to drug addiction and smuggling, joined a notorious criminal gang and took the better part of four tragic decades to re-build his life.  To see those two young men in the film is to see a portion of our own history, with its successes and its excesses, revealed in an uncommon pursuit for the perfect wave.

Brown would continue to create documentaries, not all of them about surfing.  In the early 1970's, he would join with actor Steve McQueen to make a motorcycle racing documentary titled On Any Sunday, which would be nominated for an Academy Award.  There would also be a sequel in Endless Summer II, but the times had changed by 1994 and the charm in that film is a little forced.

Brown still lives by the ocean, managing his catalog of fims and giving interviews.  In a recent story, he spoke of his next goal: "Robert August sent me a new board -- for a fat man. He called and said, 'What are you doing, letting the resin cure?' I've been quite the hodad lately, but I'll be back at it soon."

All of his films, including those early black-and-white ones, are available in downloadable form via Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime or what have you.

Here's the original trailer for Endless Summer.  I won't watch it until the end because I will suddenly have the urge to go out to the garage and wax my [Robert August] surfboard.

I Almost Forgot That It was David Johansen's Birthday

These Never Get Old

THE BEST SURF PHOTOS OF 2018

Yes, One May Surf the Great Lakes

PERFECT BLIZZARD SURF IN THE GREAT LAKES

Archaeological Oops

British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head displayed upside down

Don't Let Philosophers Anywhere Near Fireplace Irons

The most infamous “episode” in the life of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) occurred during a meeting of Cambridge University’s Moral Science Club on October 25, 1946, when Wittgenstein, according to some, threatened fellow-Austrian Karl Popper with a fireplace poker during a philosophical dispute.  Some present at the meeting dispute that Wittgenstein threatened Popper; they say he was wont to brandish the poker in the air during the meetings and that it was just a sign of his passion for philosophy. The story ends when Bertrand Russell tells Wittgenstein, his former collaborator, to put the poker down, and soon after this Wittgenstein leaves the meeting in a huff. One could make a Rashomon-type movie based on the various descriptions of what took place at the meeting, but the main point, philosophically, was what the two philosophers were arguing about.

What's great about this story is that there are at least three first-person accounts of what happened, none of which agree with the other.

Before Everyone Loses It About a State of Emergency

As you can see, this is a common exercise of presidential power that has some legs, given that there are still 30 of them in effect going back forty years. 

Clinton was really Mr. Emergency, wasn't he?  Did he need to distract the media from something, hmmm?

It's Been a Few Years Since I Took a Presidential Address Seriously

When it takes a podium, three speakers, two teleprompters, and a strangely out-of-place man standing in the back, just to speak to a Kindergarten class, you know that it's all theater of the absurd.  It doesn't matter who is president or what party is in office.

Well, It's Freedom, Not Liberty, But We Can't Argue With the Sentiment

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. - George Orwell

Humanity's Oldest Fear: The Apocalypse

The Milky Way Could Crash Into Another Galaxy Billions of Years Earlier Than Predicted

"The Rise of the Mindful Museum"

Few spaces in American life today are exempt from the gentle-but-firm dictates of mindfulness. Your corporate employer schedules meditation trainings at the office. Your favorite celebrity promotes the practice as a means to assuage troubles ranging from social anxiety to body shame. The CEO of your second least favorite social media platform rhapsodizes about his Vipassana meditation retreat to Myanmar amid the Rohingya genocide. A “mindful meatitation” event pops up at your local Applebee’s, sizzling moistly. The practice has become a phenomenon of busy bourgeois life, one that’s long since oozed beyond its Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist origins.

The Article Never Says, By the Way

How Did America Become a Nation of Slobs?

I mean, the whole point of this seems to be "People tell me how well-dressed I am.  Aren't I something?  The rest of you are slobs."

A better thinker might note that the historical decline in standards of appearance coincides with the diminution of good manners and considerate behavior, or the increasingly over-familiar and casual relationship one is expected to have with employers and employees.

This is how people used to dress for a flight:

This is how professional surfers...SURFERS!...used to dress back in more polite days:

Yep, I Still Miss Australia

Deadly snake found in couple’s bedroom air conditioner

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

Perhaps the best long-standing editorial note in any print magazine is the one atop the “Night Life” show–listings in the front pages of the New Yorker. “Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives,” it reads. “It’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.” I remember flipping to the page in my high-school library’s copy every week just for the pleasure of imagining what lurked behind the unmarked door of that low-key language, and to bask self-satisfiedly in the cool sophistication of my understanding: of course they lead complicated lives—it’s jazz.

Wilfred Thesiger

Originally published in May of 2013 

"I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across the deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills."

It's hard to imagine, now that we can "visit" virtually any corner of the globe without leaving a computer screen, due to the various Internet services that offer maps and satellite photos of most of the planet, that during our lifetime the world still held places of mystery that repelled all but the most intrepid of explorers and retained long-hidden temples, cities, and even peoples.

The 20th century would be the last in human history where Earth-bound adventurers would push into the unknown using little more than book-based research, remarkable fortitude, and invincible curiosity.  A great number of those explorers have become household names, synonymous both with the art of exploration and the wistful realization that such days are all but done.  However, there are a few who remain almost unknown, and that probably suited them just fine.

One such explorer/adventurer/character was Wilfred Thesiger, pictured above not in some hothouse in Trilling or Tring but in his everyday garb as an honorary Bedu of the so-called Empty Quarter.  How he got to that place is obvious from the title of his autobiography, A Life of My Choice. 

[I'm not sure why those heroes of my youth are so much on my mind these days, perhaps it is the inevitable slide from upper middle-age to the lower elder years, my still novel status as a grandparent, or my realization that a world that made much sense to me, a world guided by now out-of-date values and under-girded by a hearty sense of self, is quickly surrendering to a strange pseudo-paradise where a 26-year-old is considered by the government to be a child in need of care, where a remote political class lives in its own luxurious bubble, occasionally venturing forth to instruct the rest of us on how to be morally evolved, or because I find myself increasingly expected to live by specious social constraints that are becoming more and more onerous.  But, I digress....]

Like others whom we have appreciated on Fridays, Thesiger grew up privileged and British, a dangerous combination in the 20th century it would seem.  After being born in Addis Ababa, where his father was British envoy and a frequent visitor to the lush imperial court of the Ethiopian emperor, followed by a miserable time at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger spiced his summer vacations with jobs on merchant ships that took him to places like Istanbul and Iceland.  While not the most exotic of ports, these journeys did prove useful for his developing personality as an explorer.

After becoming an acquaintance of Halie Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, who had invited Thesiger to his coronation, the neophyte explorer was able to include himself on an expedition to Abyssinia's Awash River and lived for a time with the notoriously unstable and murderous Danakil nomads.  This challenge he met free from fear and with the aplomb for which the British of his generation have become either famous or infamous, depending on which side of the river of history one stands.


A memorable profile, along with a nose that must have made the camels jealous

After graduation from Oxford, and earning a rather spectacular sporting profile due to his nose being broken while serving as the captain of the university's boxing team, Thesiger took a post in the foreign service in the Sudan, specifically the perennially troubled Darfur region, where he admits he spent most of his time shooting the lions that were decimating both livestock and laborers.  It was during this time that he learned how to ride a camel, live, dress, and eat as a native; and to love the Sahara desert, learning to live off the land with nothing other than a compass and stout British rifle.

This ability proved useful during the Second World War, as Thesiger served as an officer in the Sudan Defense Force, the Druze regiment of the Syrian Legion, and eventually with the earliest incarnation of the British Army's redoubtable commandos, the Special Air Service [better known these days as the terrorist-hunting SAS].  In between missions that liberated Abyssinia, routed the Vichy French in Syria, and captured 2,500 Italian soldiers [earning him the Distinguished Service Order, a significant British medal], Thesiger explored the more remote regions and even made a trek to fabled Petra.  After the war, and now a member of the United Nations' anti-locust unit [I could not make this stuff up], Thesiger explored Arabia's Empty Quarter, a place that held a fascination for a number of British explorers, including the previously mentioned Richard Burton. 


The native dress certainly looks more comfortable than the scratchy British wool; but I realize how important it was to wear a tie into battle.

As related in an article about him on the occasion of his death, The Guardian notes: "...between 1945 and 1949. Arabia's legendary Empty Quarter had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward, and although Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As-Sammim. He crossed the desert twice with Bedu companions, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.

During his journeys he was caught up in inter-tribal raids, pursued by hostile raiders, and arrested by the Saudi authorities. He travelled alone in the Hejaz, the Assir and Najran, and explored the Trucial Coast and Dhofar in southern Arabia. He lived with the canoe-borne marshmen of Iraq for several periods over the seven years up to the Iraqi revolution of 1958...."

A scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind, when Prince Faisal, as played by Alec Guinness, cannot fathom Lawrence's interest in the desert.  I quote from that portion of the film's script, as written by the playwright Robert Bolt: 

"I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."

Thesiger, too, seems to have found something in the nothingness.  What that was would be addressed in his well-received and still-in-print travelogues including, but not limited to, Arabian Sands, The Marsh Arabs, both current Penguin Classics; Across the Empty Quarter, one of the Penguin Great Journeys series, and his autobiography, the aforementioned A Life of My Choice.  Each is well-written and each a ripping yarn.

Wilfred Thesiger would carry a number of awards and honours and would die peacefully shortly after his 93rd birthday, just a decade ago. 

For Every Faux Religion, from Cult Politics to Climate Alarmism, This Has Been True

“Mass movements can spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. The strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.”
- Eric Hoffer.

If I Were Pope, I Would Find This in More Compelling Need of Address Than...Climate Change

Nuns in India tell AP of enduring abuse in Catholic church

The Reality at the History Channel May Not Be Too Different

Yes, Although It's the Density of the Finish's Molecular Structure, Rather Than the Color

 John Lennon with his stripped-of-finish guitar on the roof of London's Apple Records shredding the licks for "Get Back"

Can Guitar Paint Affect Your Tone?

Reminder:  In addition to being an annoying curmudgeon and prickly priest, I also run a craft guitar business.  At the shop, we either strip the finish off of a market guitar entirely or make sure that any finish or color that we apply to our own original instruments is not that shiny, lacquer-like varnish that is prized at musical instrument stores.  They do that because people will buy things that are shiny.

The instrument needs to breathe, after all.

Related: The Beatles’ Casinos  The Casino being a model of semi-hollow electric guitar made by the Epiphone company.  It is prized by blues musicians for its warm tone.

Why Do Massachusetts Politicians So Badly Need My Validation?

You would never think an old, Ohio hillbilly like me would be of such interest to these fancy folks.

John Kerry in 2004:

Mr. Kerry’s Ohio hunting adventure started last Saturday, when the senator, campaign entourage in tow, went into a grocery store and asked the owner: “Can I get me a hunting license here?” Even the phraseology sounded staged. Mr. Kerry ordinarily doesn’t talk this way, and his language sounded fake and patronizing — as if he was pretending to talk like someone from rural Ohio.

Elizabeth Warren in 2019:

Seconds later, Warren's apparent craving struck: "Hold on a second -- I'm gonna get me a beer," she said....

Pardon, but I'm gonna get me an air sickness bag.

What is their image handler's rationale for this?  "I heard people from Ohio speak like this in a movie"?

And now, an admission:  I've counted on this particular type of Eastern prejudice my whole life, all through the Ivy League and The Episcopal Church.  As a half-breed, Ohio hillbilly who is of a lumbering appearance and gait, I have found it advantageous when bosses and competitors automatically assume my cultural and intellectual inferiority.  Not only does it present marvelous moments of humorous reflection at the end of a work day, but I remain mostly invisible to them and, with invisibility, comes freedom.

So Elizabeth, feel free to return to your chardonnay and/or single malt drinking habits, that beer nonsense doesn't fool us at all, while I ponder how pathetic pandering does nothing but keep politicians in a cage of pretense while we hillbillies are gonna get us some of that there freedom to simply be who we are.

Oh, and Liz?  On behalf of my 600 tribal cousins from the Midwest, we won't be voting for you.  Being a phony beer drinker is one thing; being a fake Indian for the sake of career advancement is another.

A Pungent Observation

With the new year's new laws, taxes, and regulations, it appears that "lifestyle control" will be the growth industry of the coming decade.

Was It Ever?

Is 'Catcher in the Rye' still relevant on Salinger's 100th birthday?

I read it again about a decade ago and found it as I had found it the first time I read it in college.  It is a minor work designed for a small audience; an audience that doesn't include me, apparently, as I still cannot recognize its particular "genius".  The protagonist is a prosaic teenager and his self-revelation is mundane and facile.  It's not exactly a breakthrough in characterization or narrative voice.

A Pungent Realization

If one treats New Year's Eve as if it were simply any other day, and treats New Year's Day as the Feast of the Holy Name, enjoying one's normal routines, including going to bed early, it makes for a much more pleasant experience.

Besides, as much fun as it used to be to watch Johnny Carson or Dick Clark on New Year's Eve, those days are long, long gone and painfully awkward men on CNN with nothing to talk about, along with the auto-tuned acts of the various "rocking" Eve celebration, cannot approximate anything special or entertaining.

Please don't get me started on the bowel-shriveling "year in review" features, either.  Yes, media and Hollywood, we know you didn't vote for Trump and that you hate him with a form of hate that could only be possible in the post-Christian age, but I think you've explored that topic enough.

Those of us who cared neither for Trump nor Clinton are beginning to find this obsession of yours, along with the bizarre and violent fantasies of what should happen to Trump and his children, to be disturbingly revelatory of what goes on in your collective heart of hearts.  Goodness, that's an ugly locale.

Perhaps the way to make the world a more pleasant and balanced place would be to recognize how morally corrosive is our facile social media disease.  Maybe having the world interpreted for us with those so empty and malevolent is not the wisest way in which to walk a Godly path.

As for me, I'm going to deliver clean, new socks to the homeless today.  It's not much, I know, but it will suffice.

Party on, fancy TV people.

The $5.99 Anarchists

Do we smash windows and assault people?  No.  Do we dress in black?  Well, sometimes, but only when working.  Do we repeat mindless neo-Marxist drivel that was droned at us by third-rate university adjunct faculty?  Please.

We do things like buy plastic straws and use them in restaurants and cafes.

ALINK Assorted Bright Colors Jumbo Smoothie Straws, Pack of 100 Pieces

Not Literally, But Certainly with English Charm

A Town on the Thames Embraces a Beluga