Thursday, February 28, 2019

Thursday's Place: The White Horse Tavern

There are places, some merely of the imagination, that have taken hold in history and fiction as they represent an era, a time, or a shared cultural experience that has since faded, but is certainly mourned. These places are pockets of nostalgia for what once was or could have been. Most of those to be featured, if they existed at all, are no longer with us, replaced by parking lots, or “big box” stores, or ugly houses. However, if you’re with the right people, or in the right place, to evoke them is to evoke an era that may be long gone, but permitted some creativity and joy.

The White Horse Tavern
New York City


This week's "place" is seminal in the promotion of poetry, both the kind found in high school textbooks and the kind found in court dockets, and of the folk music craze of the 1960's that produced much of the influential music of that generation and beyond.  Bonus: It's still open for business.

From something published earlier in The Coracle:
In the late 1950's, Richard Farina, a Cuban-Irish college drop-out born in Brooklyn in 1937, showed up in Greenwich Village with a dulcimer and a slight repertoire of folk songs such as people had never heard before. Turns out he was also adept at writing, having had short stories and poems published while still a student at Cornell. Being of an attractive and rakish nature, he hung out at many of the favored bars of the creative class, particularly the White Horse Tavern [where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death; Norman Mailer drank and punched people; Jim Morrison of The Doors drank too much, Jack Kerouac drank such a prodigious amount that he was banned from the property; and Delmore Schwartz, come to think of it, drank himself to death, too].
While I would encourage the reader to follow the link to the story of Richard Farina, as he is an interesting and virtually unknown personality in the development of 1960's counter-culture, I couldn't help but notice the importance of The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village in trans-generational, self-destructive, British and American literature.  It is here that the more lubricious writers and artists have gone to appreciate their mortality, either in 1 and 1/2 ounce increments or in quantities more vast and eternal.


Like many of the places of which we will speak on Thursdays, the White Horse started as a neighborhood bar, in this case for the longshoremen working the docks in Chelsea.  Its venerable history, stretching back to 1880, has witnessed and/or participated in all of the societal and economic changes that have visited that portion of New York City.  As the neighborhood became less working and more middle-class, and distinctly more "artistic", by the 1950's the Horse [that's what the locals called it] had become a place to hear folk music, Irish folk music, poetry based on folk music, and folk musicians.  Oh, and the Welsh inebriate who hung out there all of the time because it reminded him of a pub back home.


[Really?  I've been to Wales and never saw any place that even resembled the Horse.  I think the Welshman preferred it because they let him run a prodigious tab.]

I lived nine blocks north of the place when I first moved to New York.  I never went there, as the Eagle Tavern on 14th had better Irish music, and The White Horse Tavern had become touristy enough that it was selling, God help us, t-shirts behind the bar.  In a city not lacking in places for dark slouching, or bars where poets and writers regularly got or get drunk, I really wasn't interested, until I was told they served a really good cheeseburger.  It was good, and if I could afforded them on a regular basis, I would have gone the way of Dylan Thomas, except with beef fat instead of whiskey.

So storied is The Horse in literature that it has its own page on the website of the Academy of American Poets:
The White Horse Tavern, built in 1880, has been a stomping ground for New York’s literary community since the 1950s when the bar’s most famous patron, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, was introduced to this longshoreman’s haunt. The White Horse holds the dubious distinction of being the place where Thomas drank his last whiskey. In November of 1953, Thomas beat his own personal record by downing eighteen shots of whiskey. Soon after the last drink he stumbled outside and collapsed on the sidewalk. He was taken to the Chelsea Hotel and there fell into a coma; the next morning he was transferred to St. Vincent’s Hospital where he died. In addition to the many portraits of Dylan Thomas that adorn the walls, a plaque commemorating Thomas’s last visit to the White Horse Tavern hangs above the bar. The bar soon drew more literary figures as patrons, including James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Anais Nin, and James Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions. In addition, the bar was a gathering place for both the Beat writers, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as well as the New York School poets, such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.
Anyway, any place that has such a hold on literary imagination should be visited at least once, even if it isn't the most convivial in the city.

Although, there is a tradition that is maintained that I've always appreciated.  Jack Kerouac would get so drunk at The Horse that someone once wrote "Jack, Go Home!" on the men's room wall.  While there have been some well-done renovations and restorations to the bar performed in the last sixty years, and the wall painted many times, some individual or series of individuals always ensures that, somewhere on that wall, that command to Kerouac still appears.

That kind of wit needs to be admired, don't you think?

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Call the Firefighters



Are India and Pakistan on the Verge of a Water War?

That is, if the media can tear itself away from bizarre fantasies about bleach-bearing, MAGA hat-wearing, right-wingers who float about a liberal neighborhood in Chicago [a city that has consistently voted Democrat since...1931] in the middle of the night when it's 5 degrees.

The firefighter meme is explained here.  Those of us who have been firefighters like to chuckle about the media's self-image.

Worth Reading

7 things Jordan Peterson taught me last night: And what Christians can take away from his 12 Rules for Life

On a Lighter Note, The History of the Rectangle

This is about the dominance of the rectangular format in a certain tradition of picture making, a dominance that still holds today and extends well beyond the medium of painting. The book, the photographic print, the screen, and the museum—which has tended to favor this format—all guarantee that we encounter most pictures in rectangular frames.

Relax, Kid. When I was Your Age I was Being Prepped to Fight in Vietnam.

WiFi Down For Five Days: 'Hell Is Real And It's Amherst College'

A valid question from the linked article:
"How could this happen?" became a common refrain on campus. How could an elite college with a $2.2 billion endowment and that charges more than $50,000 in tuition a year fail to provide basic services, such as internet access?
Maybe because their investment is in being "woke" rather than, you know, in educating.

A Familiar Plague Exacerbated by Internet Connectivity

There is actually a website named Plagiarism Today.  It doesn't lack for content.

Also, there is now a posted step-by-step response protocol for when you discover that your work has been stolen.

I've been a "ghost writer", although never for fiction.  I would clean up quickly published books written by politicians just prior to their attempts to gain their party's nomination for whatever office interested them or athletes upon their retirement or bored captains of industry.  Frankly, I've never heard of ghost writers for fiction.  That sounds kind of ewwww.  Fiction has always been such a personal genre that I can't imagine any author giving up what seems like their child to some stranger.  Let alone one from a ghost writer service.

I recall sitting as one of the clergy at the ordination of a priest when, while listening to the sermon, I realized that the preacher had stolen about one-third of one of my ordination sermons.  It was one of my first sermons to be published online and also, for that reason, one of the last.

On another occasion, when I was a new rector in a parish, one of the couples from the congregation brought their friend's adult education curriculum to me so that I might use it at our parish.  Since he was a Congregationalist, I was curious to see what he had developed, since most of the Congregational clergy I know merely assimilate from other sources.

Turns out I was more right than I thought.  What they handed me was a direct copy of the curriculum of one the courses I had designed and taught at Hartford Seminary.  It was online, you see, and all the congo fellow did was remove my name and replace it with his.

So, I understand how this could infuriate an author.

The Glory That is...Socialism!


and


Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Oh, Hey, Firefighters? This May Result in Armageddon, So Maybe Let's Hear about It at Least as Much as You Tell Us about Millionaire Actors Giving Awards to One Another


If you're wondering about the "firefighters" reference, go here for some media hubris.

Please Keep Telling Me What an Emergency This Is

Oh, my gerd!  Oh, my gerd!!  We are totally going to die in twelve eleven and one-half years if we don't do something right now, you guys!!!

When they start acting likes it's an emergency, I'll regard it as such.  Otherwise, it's just another attempt to manipulate the simple-minded.

Every Time This is Done, It Makes Climatology a Suspect Science

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time
What the Bureau has done to the historical temperature record for Darwin [Australia] is indefensible. The Bureau has artificially shortened and cooled Darwin’s climate history to make it consistent with the theory of human-caused global warming.

The Difference Between Reporting and Journalism

Amazon fiasco teaches media painful lesson about business reporting

Step One in Destroying Your Small Business [This Time, Without Government "Help"]

Ohio music store owner faces backlash for turning away Trump supporters

You can hate him, loathe him, find him a lout or an overgrown brat, but approximately half your potential customers voted for the guy.  Is your small business so successful that you can alienate half of your potential customers?

Oh, Look: There are Two Sets of Rules

It seems #BelieveAllWomen is used some of the time, but not all of the time.  Here's what one of the leaders of that movement has done:

Sexual misconduct allegations against Time’s Up CEO’s son prompted her resignation
Encouraging victims to “speak their truth” is a key tenet of the #MeToo movement and Time’s Up. But the interaction between Gellert and Bowden illustrates the complexities that can arise with sexual misconduct claims. The situation also demonstrates how a person’s loyalties can be divided, particularly when a loved one faces serious allegations. 
Borders’ “role as the president of Time’s Up was in conflict with being a mother who was taking active steps to defend her son,” said one of the knowledgeable people, who asked not to be identified.
One of the chief things I've learned through almost four decades in The Episcopal Church is that the strident rules of sexual behavior for clergy apply to everyone, unless you're a prominent dean, a prominent bishop, or a well-connected priest.  In which case, wheeeeee!

Monday, February 25, 2019

If You've Never Heard Her Story, It's Because She's Not a Victim

Women of Valor: Lois Gunden

Update: Regrets about the pre-verbal post headline earlier, since corrected.  No, I haven't had a stroke.  I've been playing with this new iPhone and being a little sloppy with it.

Step One in Creating a Viable Black Market for Goods

Marijuana Tax in New Jersey? It Could be $42 an Ounce

Taxing away reasonable profit and discouraging new, small business growth is California's thing, New Jersey.  Why would a marijuana user change from their current supplier if it means higher prices and reduced quality?  Because their supplier is a criminal?  Please, criminality is a standard part of weed culture and actually gives it an exciting frisson.

Sunday, February 24, 2019

Tales of the Post-Christian Age

Anti-Christ Arrives in a World Without Mercy

The Desperate Quest of the Remarkably Ordinary to Deny Their Existential Fate

Transgender sprinters finish 1st, 2nd at Connecticut girls indoor track championships

I never understood why they didn't separate competitions according to chromosomes, rather than by self-identification.  Although, I may compete in the next triathlon as an elderly woman.

Because That's Not the Narrative

Good news: divorce rates are declining

Of Course. Next Question, Please.

Are men the new marginalized minorities on campus?

Needlehooks

L.A. Times: You Should Feel Sad that You Made a Smaller Interest-Free Loan to the Feds Last Year

Counting on a tax refund to balance your annual budget is foolish.  Correctly figuring your withholding is a mature and sensible way to build your finances.  Most people who are shocked that they're receiving a smaller refund seem not to realize that they're paying less in taxes.  I'm not sure why the media are painting this as some sort of "fault" of the non-preferred political party.

Saturday, February 23, 2019

It's the Sound of Cleveland-Style Jazz, as So Many Young Musicians Learned to Play Not in School, but in Church

“Hearing” the Hammond Organ

This is a Fine, Touching Story; You Won't Find It Reported by the U.S. Media

Sheffield bomber crash: Flypast on 75th anniversary

In Socialism, Food is Always a Weapon

Aid is piling up on Venezuela's border. Here's why it's not getting in

Book Review - The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

Not only is this a valuable history, but it may contain the best paragraph EVER about the native experience in U.S. history:
...more than two hundred Lakota who survived Wounded Knee . . . lived on—to experience the pain of loss, yes, but much more as well. They survived to live and grow, to get married and have babies. They survived to hold on to their Lakota ways or to convert to Christianity and let those ways recede. They survived to settle on the reservation and, later, to move to cities. They survived to go to school and to college and to work. They survived to make mistakes and recover from them. They survived to make history, to make meaning, to make life.­­­­

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner: Good, as It's Historically Illiterate

Historians irked by musical ‘Hamilton’ mounting a counter-attack play

Friday, February 22, 2019

Bernard Moitessier


"My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe. Please do not think I am trying to break a record. 'Record' is a very stupid word at sea. I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul."

In 1968, the owners of the Sunday Times of London had the brilliant idea, what they would have called a "brain wave", to sponsor a solo round-the-world sailboat race.  Naturally, it would attract a hearty collection of solitary and salty types on which the Times could lavish gallons of newspaper ink publishing thrilling yarns of their adventures in circumnavigation and use the paper's considerable resources to highlight with their advertisers the ability fully to cover stories anywhere in the world.  It really was a marvelous idea.  On paper, anyway.  Little did they realize what stories they would engender.

The thing is, while sailors who prefer to sail solo do so for a variety of reasons, they are almost universal in their discomfort and suspicion about the remainder of the human race.  In fact, some of them are just plain daft.  Circumnavigators are not going to behave in a manner appeasing to corporate officers and their accountants.  They tend to be unpredictable.

Nevertheless, on June 1, 1968, the race began.  Well, for some, anyway.  Over the next couple of months they would depart in a decidedly piecemeal manner, directed only by the lunar pull of the tides and the very different drummer they heard in their heads.  The word "motley" really does not do them justice.  Only nine responded to the challenge, with four of them not even making it beyond the Atlantic.

The first to leave did so from Inishmore, Ireland; John Ridgway in his boat English Rose IV, which was really designed for simple weekend coastal cruising.  Ridgway would eventually make it to Recife, Brazil before his boat began to reach a point of dangerous disrepair and he would abandon the race.

Chay Blyth, who was such a novice that he didn't know how to rig his own sails, followed shortly in his yacht, Dytiscus.  Despite having no previous experience sailing, he would make it as far as the southern tip of Africa before ending his quest.

[Interesting note: Two years earlier, Ridgway and Blyth had rowed across the Atlantic together in an open boat named English Rose III.]

Robin Knox-Johnston of Suhali, a tiny, 32-footer [Trust me, 32 feet in the middle of a lonely ocean is tiny], would leave from Falmouth in mid-June and, despite suffering some damage early in the competition, would be the race's eventual winner and the only competitor to complete the circumnavigation.  He was probably the most surprised of all of them at that.

Nigel Tetley of the Victress which, when not competing in this singular race, also served as his home, would be leading and make it to within 1200 nautical miles of the finish before the Victress would break apart and sink.  Tetley would be rescued within a day and almost immediately begin the quest to fund a second attempt at circumnavigation, only to succumb to demons never to be determined when he was found hanging from a tree in Dover in 1972.

Speaking of demons, perhaps the most infamous of the competitors was Donald Crowhurst of the Teignmouth Electron, a trimaran of his own design and construction.  According to his radio transmissions, Crowhurst was in the lead for much of the race.  In reality, he was sending out false signals as to his position to obscure the fact that neither he nor his boat were ready for the ardor of such a voyage.  Crowhurst sailed about the Atlantic basin, apparently planning on rejoining the race on its return leg, and forging a false log book to obscure his deception.  His mental state deteriorated during that time and the abandoned Teignmouth Electron would be found drifting near Jamaica by a merchant freighter in July of 1969, with Crowhurst the apparent victim of suicide.

The final competitor was also the favorite upon the start of the race.  In 1968, Bernard Moitessier was considered second only to Sir Francis Chichester as the world's most accomplished solo sailor.  Part of the reason for his success was that, while he was a French citizen his entire life, he grew up by the sea in French Indo-China [later known as Vietnam], a culture that not only supplied him with an appreciation of boats and water, but also with a decidedly non-Western view towards nature.

Instead of seeing the ocean as something to conquer, Moitessier viewed in a more Buddhist light.  While Robin Knox-Johnson would openly state that his reason for competing in the round-the-world race was because it was the last achievement still to be claimed, Moitessier had to be cajoled into doing so.  His response is what makes him a memorable icon to sailors of all types.

While still a young man, Moitessier had to begin his tutelage as a long-distance solo sailor in the manner traditional to such people.  Mainly, he had to attempt something foolhardy, nearly lose his life, and fail in a spectacularly gradual manner.  There really is no other way.

In the early 1950's, the 27-year-old Moitessier bought a small Vietnamese junk, a vessel better suited to coastal cruising, named her Marie-Therese after the patron saint of missions [aka impossibly optimistic actions], and set off from Indo-China to France.  It did not go swimmingly; perhaps I should say it went too swimmingly.

A leak required Moitessier, alone and in the middle of the Indian Ocean, to dive beneath his hull to repair it; a small typhoon blew him into the shores of Diego Garcia, an island that is also a U.S. Air Force base and, hence, off limits to non-military, especially non-American, personnel.  This meant that Moitessier had to be deported to the nearest French outpost, which happened to be on the island of Mauritius.

After three years in exile, he saved some money, built a new and more seaworthy boat, and set out for...well, that's a little hard to understand, frankly.  While his stated goal was St. Helena, the island where Napoleon was once exiled, he found himself again aground, this time in St. Lucia.  Clearly, celestial navigation and the notion that sailboats move both forwards and sideways were things he would have to take into consideration in the future.

[Note: This writer has been to St. Lucia many times, although only once in a sailboat.  It has very pleasant seas and a local delicacy known as banana ketchup.  While managing to be shipwrecked there is an accomplishment, there are worse places for that to happen.]

After working his way to France as a merchant seaman, Moitessier spent some time as an office clerk, saving his money to buy a proper, deep water sailboat and writing the first of his books about sailing, Vagabond des Mers du Sud.  With this volume, he began to craft what these days would be called his "brand", that of the seafaring tramp who traveled wherever the wind took him.  It turned out to be a better source of boat-building revenue than office work.

By 1963, married and with step-children in boarding school, Moitessier and his wife left the south of France in his new, and rather well-equipped, 39-foot, steel-hulled boat, the Joshua; named for Joshua Slocum, the Massachusetts seaman who was the first, in the late 19th century, to circumnavigate solo.  These adventures took Moitessier and his wife, Francoise, hither and yon from North Africa to Tahiti.  Without even realizing it, Moitessier set the record for the longest non-stop sailing passage in history; a full 126 days at sea.  When he arrived back in France in 1966, he found himself the toast of the sailing community and the inspiration for the round-the-world race.

I always thought the Joshua looked designed not only for a modicum of comfort, but so that it could capsize and still remain afloat.  Comfort and buoyancy are actually the twin themes of French philosophy,too, in my opinion.

Naturally, if such a race were to be held, it would not only include Moitessier but recognize him as its "patron saint" and the favored contestant.  However, as he was now well-established in that singular community, and as he no longer needed to work in a conventional job in order to support himself, he was not all that enamored of competing in the race, especially as it would mean doing so without company and with the intention to place himself against others.  So reluctant was he that he was the last of the competitors to join the race, over two months after Ridgway's departure.

From August of 1968 to February of 1969, on a passage from Plymouth, England to Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America, Moitessier received no radio communication as to his position in the race or those of the other sailors.  By the time he entered the Pacific and was traveling north by the Galapagos, the absurdity of the race, its commercialism and newspaper-hyped ballyhoo, became onerous to a philosophically-minded Frenchman raised in the midst of Eastern religion.

During the voyage, Moitessier had begun to communicate with the Sunday Times through a singular technique, and it was in this way that he forwarded what became the most famous sentence uttered in the race and one that is still known and sometimes repeated with passion by the solo sailing community.

When passing freighters and other merchant ships, Moitessier would launch a message from his deck to the other ships' by using what continentals call a "catapult", but what is known to any kid who's grown up in America as a sling-shot.  So, in the spring of 1969, with the race still in progress, Moitessier fired off to the Sunday Times his resignation from the competition with the stirring statement, "...parce que je suis heureux en mer et peut-être pour sauver mon ame."  I still try to imagine how that message was received in the London newspaper office three weeks later.

In addition to knowing how to hand, reef, and steer, it's good to practice a little yoga.

And save his soul he did.  Now liberated from the artificial constraint of a managed race with commercial appeal and obtuse rules, Moitessier continued his circumnavigation, setting yet another record for non-stop length of time at sea when he covered over 37,000 nautical miles in 40 weeks.  What makes this of particular interest to sailors is that most of Moitessier's passage was made through the infamous "Roaring Forties", an area of strong winds and notoriously moody weather that abides along the latitude of 40 degrees on a nautical chart.  This he did not for the fame and prize money that the race would have guaranteed, but as a spiritual quest; a test of the harmony possible between a human being and the wildest of wild nature.

Just another day at the office for Bernard

When he finally decided to make landfall, after nearly a year solidly at sea, Moitessier, like his countryman Gaugain before him, settled in Tahiti.  Of course.  From there he lived an idyllic life on shore and a fulfilling life in and around the south seas, becoming a rather maladroit farmer, delving into the concerns of the early environmental movement, and writing books on his relationship with the sea and his role in what became the most famous sailboat race of the 20th century. 

Whenever I'm in a port city, whether it is one associated with sailing or with other aquatic pursuits, if there is a bookstore around [increasingly rare in U.S. territory, as we now prefer to buy books electronically], there is always a section devoted to the spiritual aspects of sailing, surfing, fishing, whatevering.  It is perhaps the most tedious set of shelves in any bookstore as it generally contains the most mundane of observations marketed to an increasingly secularized culture that still, despite resistance, desires a spiritual connection to the greater world.  While most of the volumes are nothing but literary dross, an excellent primer in this sub-genre of literature would be the works of Moitessier.  Regardless of what this niche culture has become, Moitessier's vision of the life aquatic as a spiritual quest with, rather than against, nature is compelling and true.

Moitessier would die in 1994 and be interred in a quiet graveyard in Brittany in his home country.  While the cemetery is ordinary, his grave can always be located as it is not only the frequent goal of traveling sailors wishing to pay their respects to the "vagabond des Mers du Sud", but, in a homage to his preferred medium of communication, it is decorated with slingshots.

Oh, and puka shells.  Did I mention the puka shells?

Although it did sink after a minor misadventure and had to be raised in the 1980's, the Joshua is currently on display in a maritime museum in France.

Moitessier wrote many books about sailing and spirituality, the best of which is The Long Way, which recounts his experience in the round-the-world race.  Other competitors in the race have written volumes, too, notably the winner, Robin Knox-Johnston, but they tend to the technical and, when attempting to speak of the more liminal experiences of sailing, fall rather short of Moitessier's lyricism and true spirituality.

A general volume about the race itself, A Voyage for Madmen, is also still in print and recounts not only the very different adventures of Moistessier and Knox-Johnston, but also those of Crowhurst and the others, including the behind-the-scenes drama at the Sunday Times home office.

Although it has changed sponsors many times, and has attracted a decidedly non-amateur collection of sailors and boat-builders, the race is still held and is, as of this writing, currently in mid-competition.  As the prize money as considerably more than it was in 1968-69, and the competitors far less interesting, it tends to be followed only by those with a close affinity to the sport.

Thursday, February 21, 2019

Thursday's Place: The Elbo Room

There are places, some merely of the imagination, that have taken hold in history and fiction as they represent an era, a time, or a shared cultural experience that has since faded, but is certainly mourned. These places are pockets of nostalgia for what once was or could have been. Most of those to be featured, if they existed at all, are no longer with us, replaced by parking lots, or “big box” stores, or ugly houses. However, if you’re with the right people, or in the right place, to evoke them is to evoke an era that may be long gone, but permitted some creativity and joy.


The Elbo Room
Fort Lauderdale, Florida


This week's "place" is a prominent way-point in the appreciation of Florida in the 1960's.

Everything I knew about Fort Lauderdale, Florida I learned from the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald and the 1960 movie, "Where the Boys Are".  I can't recall if McGee ever hung out at the Elbo Room or a fictionalized counterpart, he was more of a steakhouse kind of guy, but it does make an appearance or two in that otherwise forgettable movie.  I mostly know Fort Lauderdale as a place of boats, sun, beaches, and spring break, although not so much spring breaking since the locals began to realize they were losing money to the crowds rather than making it.

The Elbo Room was established on the beach boulevard in 1938 [making it only twenty years younger than its city] as a dive bar serving the local fisherman and charter boat crews.  It has since become...no, it's still a dive bar.  I mean, let's not talk about the men's room.  Yeesh.


There is no food served at the Elbo Room.  There once was, as the main floor was a restaurant when it first opened, with the bar sequestered to the rooftop.  It didn't take too long for the owners to discover from whence their profit was coming and they dropped the restaurant and made the ground floor into a bar, too.

As it's on a great corner just across from the beach, it is a sublime spot for people-watching, a fact not lost on the producers of "Where the Boys Are", who hired a mess of locals to serve as extras and filmed their stars crossing the street [with the traffic light, of course] numerous times in both the used and unused footage.

It may not have seemed like it would be at the time, but the movie was popular and made the spring break scene in Lauderdale wild and huge for decades to come.  So, in addition to its primo location, The Elbo Room became a pop culture Mecca for all of the beach rats on the East Coast.  For fans of that '60's cache, it can't be beat.

I finally made it there, much later than my college days, while working to find a vendor for some of my guitars.  While it is not known for its surfing, a beach is always pleasant and a beach bar usually a good place to slouch and recall more halcyon days.  It was so with The Elbo Room.

A couple of locals told me that, as spring breakers were once again becoming an issue, with behavior more loutish, common, and grotty than what is captured in that ancient film, and the bands in the area known for being, at best, gloriously mediocre, it was nice that the off-season could be a time of quiet reflection and appreciation of this venerable place to abide and take in a Bud Light Lime or two in the middle of the day.  [Don't judge me on the beer, now.  Most "craft beer" tastes like sewage and, after all, when in Rome....]

They certainly had a point and, in so joining in the conviviality, I came to understand this corner's importance in pop history.

If you want to check out the scene, or spy on your kids during spring break, The Elbo Room sports a collection of live cameras that can be accessed on their website.


Wednesday, February 20, 2019

More from the Mysterious Listserv



For those of you new to The Coracle, there was an online list on which a long-dormant e-mail address of mine was carried.  The address was associated with my work at an Ivy League think tank that, when I moved on, forwarded mail to a subsequent address.  Save for a few bits and pieces that I received for the year after I left the university, nothing came to that address for fourteen years.

Then, and this is where it gets good, about mid-way through the last presidential election cycle, I started receiving "talking points" to that e-mail address from an anonymous source that were designed to help me frame sermons in a way that would aid the Democratic Party.

It was interesting to see how narratives are created in this manner, as I noticed that the information I was given was being repeated not just from pulpits and in newsletters in mainstream Protestant congregations, but by members of the media.  This included direct quotes from the talking points with little or no effort to differentiate them from their original source.  It seemed kind of lazy, but apparently it was effective in narrative creation.

Then, the talking points stopped.  I assumed someone had read this weblog and, realizing I was giving the game away, had pulled the plug on my account.  Apparently, that was either not the case or it was merely a temporary situation.

Yesterday, I received a new communication.  Honestly, this is getting positively thrilling.

The latest missive suggests that I note how "conservatives" are mocking the daughter of a recent Democratic president for drinking wine while underage.  I am directed to scoff at their concern about this and compare it to the beer consumed by a recently appointed justice of the Supreme Court.  I could find no "conservatives" mocking the daughter, but I did find numerous "tweets" that repeated the same talking points that I was asked to disseminate.  Remarkable, isn't it?

Archaeological News

Found: Two of the Quarries Responsible for the Megaliths of Stonehenge

Tales of the Post-Christian Age

Socialism as a Millennial religion
The Millennials can’t remember very much – and they don’t learn very much either. It’s easy being hot for socialism or communism when you actually have a very little idea of what it is and what it did throughout the 20th century. And the Ys have that ignorance in spades; one third of them think that George W Bush killed more people than Stalin and 42 per cent have never heard of Mao – but over 70 per cent agree with Bernie Sanders. Some research suggests that only 15 per cent actually have a correct understanding of socialism. It’s not just politics; the Millennials are the most woefully undereducated and miseducated generation in a very long time. To be fair, that’s not strictly their fault; that attaches itself again to their Boomer grandparents who have been in charge of our failing education systems during this time. Combine the modern indoctrination-cum-dumbification taking place in schools and universities with the attention span-killing impact of information technology and social media, and you have a barely literate cohort, which is simply not equipped with the necessary mental tools to learn about the real world even if they wanted to.
The wonderful thing about historical ignorance is that you can take a word, say "Christianity" or "socialism", and turn into whatever you want it to be, even to a simplistic level.  Christianity = bad; socialism = good.  See, I'm now a deep thinker.

I'm not ready to take the blame for this, however.  My students received an education and they'll be the first to tell you so.  I wanted them to be able to think for themselves in a world that was obviously becoming disjointed from knowledge.  There was an advantage to being the teacher everyone was afraid to have.

Some Wisdom from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

Disruptive Technology

This NYC bookstore can a print a title for you in minutes

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Also Endorsed

All of America is Ranch Lady

Voter Snubs Kirsten Gillibrand in Iowa Restaurant: 'I'm Just Going to Get Some Ranch'

The reactions on Tweety are funny.


There Will Be a Reckoning

The populist sledgehammer kills Amazon jobs that Middle America would love to have

This posting's title isn't meant as regional braggadocio, it's an educated prediction based on history and human nature.

A Pungent Observation

An excitable gentleman from Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner

When I was a reporter, no one was called a journalist and no one, from the city editor on down, was a graduate of a professional journalism school.  This was in the days of copy boys and typewriters, with people yelling into rotary-dial phones when trying to pin down a story.  Mostly, they weren't at their desks at all as the old saying was, "The first casualty of reporting is shoe leather."

It was not the most exciting of worlds, most days.  There would be political stories that would excite the political reporters and almost no one else; there would be sports stories that could be diverting.  Every young reporter wanted to work the police and fire beat, as those stories could be unpredictable and lurid.  The low level guys, like yours truly, got to cover things like the monthly meeting of the Board of Sewers.

Which is why a high-level hoax would get everyone in the newsroom excited.  Not only did the facts gradually reveal themselves in a compelling manner, but the holes in the hoax would turn every reporter into an investigator.  It didn't matter whether or not the hoax served whatever political party was supported by the newspaper [I worked for a chain; some of the papers supported Democrats and some Republicans], it was a good story and reporters and readers [and advertisers] enjoyed the heck out of it.

So, what happened?  I suppose it was the "Woodsteining" of the media, as reporters became J-School journalists, stopped reading literature and history, and now mainly take their cues not from their own intellect and drive, but from drivel written on social media by professional shapers of The Narrative. I don't like to criticize the intellect of others, but it's remarkable how much smarter, in both book and street smarts, were those barely-educated reporters of yesteryear.  They would have never fallen for a poorly designed hoax; they would have never surrendered the story just to score some light and transient points against this year's Emmanuel Goldstein.

Here's Ben Rhodes, the odd fellow who was Obama's advisor, on modern journalists: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

That they are synoptic and naive, not to mention frothy to score partisan points, accounts for the low level of public trust they now enjoy.  However, this guilelessness also leads to eruptions in bizarre hoaxes that are ultimately damaging to society's fabric, and that's unconscionable.

The Coracle doesn't take sides in American secular political ideology, except to find politicians to be universally distasteful; this weblog has always tried to be a virtual version of The Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.  But, we can note how lop-sided is the deliberate naivete of journalists.

Consider this remarkably long list just covering the last two years or so:

Here’s A List Of Hoax ‘Hate Crimes’

Also, there's the curious preference these days only to give press to the wealthy and famous:

On January 29, Two Hate Crimes Occurred. The Media Only Covered The Fake One. Here's Why.

So, No Different Than Humans, Then?

Computers could write full - and wrong - news stories - researchers

Monday, February 18, 2019

Manual Windows, Four on the Floor, and a Cigarette Lighter; Yeah, I Get It

No Presidents Day car sales for me: What I learned from John Wayne, C.S. Lewis and an old truck
An old truck empowers those around it, as we all should do. With four side-windows that each go all the way down - far enough down to wake Ralph Nader with night-terrors - mine trusts my family and me not to ride around like Labradors, with our heads out the windows. As of press time, all noggins remain attached.

An old truck is nonjudgmental, accepting its passengers just as they are, not as it would have them be. I engage my safety belt, but not because my truck pings me with sonar from the moment I sit down. Like a wise teacher, it keeps a respectful silence, giving me time to make the right decision for myself. In gratitude, I buckle up.
I have made one concession with my own ancient pick-up, however.   A few years ago the radio froze and wouldn't resurrect, so I replaced it with a newer, CD playing, HD enabled unit.  It really doesn't match the rest of the vehicle, what with its "disco lights" option, but I pretty much just listen to the folk/jazz station with it.

Endorsed


Episcopalians, Too

Americans continue their march to low-tax states

Friday, February 15, 2019

Harvey Pekar


"As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas."

Maybe you have to be from Cleveland to understand the kind of power an underdog can have.  It certainly helps to be from a place perpetually associated with misery, bad luck, unemployment, provincialism, and really bad pro sports.  I could waste your time and mine with remedial observations such as that Cleveland has the world's greatest orchestra, one of the best art museums anywhere, and a terribly advanced collection of medical facilities; not to mention the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  But most people just reply by asking, "Isn't that where the river was so polluted that it caught fire?"

Yeah, let's just talk about what it is to be an underdog, shall we?

In the years when I was teaching English at one of Cleveland's high schools there was an artistic renaissance occurring within our modest city's bohemian community.  New voices in poetry were being heard and published in a variety of quarterly pamphlets, tactile art was being explored with never-before-seen combinations of media, independent rock music was everywhere [I mean that almost literally], my friend Stephanie had started a theater for urban youth that was becoming an established part of the city's culture, and half the people in my apartment building were writers of some sort.

Then there was this nebbish, this schlemiel; a homunculus who wrote reviews of obscure jazz records for equally obscure free neighborhood newspapers and supported himself as a file clerk at the Veterans Administration.  He was, without question, the walking, talking embodiment of ordinariness.  Despite his status as a quintessential underdog, he became the rallying voice for what is now called in college textbooks the "New Bohemian Movement".  Just as unlikely, the NBM began in...Cleveland, Ohio. Take that, New York and Los Angeles!

Harvey Pekar's literary efforts were aided considerably by one of the other great originals of the era. Fortunately for him and for the NBM, one of his close friends was Robert "R" Crumb, who became the most recognizable artist of the counter-culture in the late '60's and early '70's.  His characters of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural were commonly found not only in free newspapers but on t-shirts and album covers.  [An aside: At last weekend's ComicCon in New York, a four panel collection of original Crumb art sold for $65,000.]

                                                   

Pekar was interested in creating stories for the cinema, but did not have the knowledge, wherewithal, sophistication or looks to mount a production. Instead, he imagined using Crumb's art to illustrate stories in the same manner that a cinematographer frames images on the screen.  With art, especially comic art, imagination could be indulged in a manner both creative and inexpensive.  This idea appealed to Crumb, as did Pekar's notion that their comic stories involve the mundane instead of the spectacular.  After all, they lived and created in Cleveland, where the mundane was splendid.  As he noted:
 When I was a little kid, and I was reading these comics in the '40s, I kind of got sick of them because after a while, they were just formulaic. I figured there was some kind of a flaw that keeps them from getting better than they are, and then when I saw Robert Crumb's work in the early '60s, when he moved from Philadelphia to Cleveland, and he moved around the corner from me, I thought 'Man, comics are where it's at'.
1976 is considered the high-water mark of the New Bohemian Movement, as that was the year the 37-year-old Pekar's comic, illustrated by R Crumb, was published.  Its title was American Splendor, subtitled "From off the streets of Cleveland".  The comic, self-published and self-distributed, became the most desired and elusive volume of literature in northeastern Ohio.  In fact, it was 1980 before I was able to secure my own copy.  In it, Pekar chronicled his magnificently ordinary life and celebrated the mundane in a way never quite seen before.



While only seventeen issues were published from 1976 to 1993, Pekar's comic book was read by the literati of both coasts, making the file clerk famous enough to be a regular guest on David Letterman's NBC show, and even more famous for reducing Letterman to a stuttering rage on what became Pekar's last appearance on the show.

It really didn't matter to Pekar as he wasn't desirous of fame, and certainly not interested in appeasing the perpetually prickly Letterman.  Underdogs don't receive their power from impressing the wealthy and powerful; quite the opposite.  Besides, Pekar's creativity maintained its very original course long after Letterman's shtick had become stale.  American Splendor continued to chart the ups and downs of his very average life, including the dorkily charming relationship with his wife and muse, Joyce, with his co-workers at the VA, and his uber-nerd friend, Toby.

The verite quality of the comic book realized its prime when Pekar wrote of his diagnosis with lymphoma and his long, touching, yet successful, battle to survive it.  In 2003, a film version of his life was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, winning a variety of critics' awards along the way, including the Sundance Film Festival's.



Pekar would eventually retire from the VA and continue to write comic books and music reviews, occasionally appearing in public, although with some reluctance.  While he could be found on a near daily basis at the public library in Cleveland Heights, the cognoscenti knew to leave him be, and the staff was always solicitous towards him.  His last major effort was when he wrote the book for the jazz opera Leave Me Alone!, which premiered at Oberlin College's Finney Chapel in 2009.

Illnesses of various sorts began to take their toll and, while effective fodder for his stories, Pekar was often in great discomfort.  In 2010, his wife Joyce found him dead in his bed of an accidental overdose of his various medications.  In a marvelous...no, splendid...juxtaposition, he is buried in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery right next to Eliot Ness of "Untouchables" fame.  His headstone reads, "Life is about women, gigs, and bein' creative."

Harvey Pekar is now recognized as the poet laureate of Cleveland, an absurd title for a comic book writer, but somehow fitting.  After all, this is Cleveland that we're talking about, and the city follows its own rules of propriety.  Two years ago this month, the Cleveland Heights Library celebrated the installation of a statue to Pekar, an act that he would have found a bit odd, I'm sure, but certainly one that would have found its place in the pages of American Splendor.


For those of us like this writer, who spent his early twenties composing music reviews for the same free newspapers, playing bass for terrible bands in stale, smokey clubs in Pekar's neighborhood, and occasionally getting poems published in journals so crude the print would rub off on your fingers before you could read it, he enabled us to own a small shard of the New Bohemian Movement.  For that alone, he's earned his status as a laureate beyond definition.

Oh, This Again

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?

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Thursday's Place: Cafe Frankenstein

This is a new weekly feature, designed as yet another indulgence for an insomniac who gets to work four hours before the rest of the office staff and finds himself with at least an hour of free time before the rest of the world is awake.

There are places, some merely of the imagination, that have taken hold in history and fiction as they represent an era, a time, or a shared cultural experience that has since faded, but is certainly mourned. These places are pockets of nostalgia for what once was or could have been. Most of those to be featured, if they existed at all, are no longer with us, replaced by parking lots, or “big box” stores, or ugly houses. However, if you’re with the right people, or in the right place, to evoke them is to evoke an era that may be long gone, but permitted some creativity and joy.

Café Frankenstein
Laguna Beach, California


This week's "place" is seminal in the unlikely collision of both the liminal and mainstream culture in late 1950's and early '60's Southern California.

I have a weakness for the images of nascent surf culture. The colors, clothing, patterns, patois, and perspectives of that era I recall as a child when I began to form my awareness of the world. Unfortunately, for those who have to indulge my taste in film, a portion of that weakness involves a non-ironic appreciation of the beach movies made by American International Pictures in the early 1960’s. You know, the ones that starred Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Yeah, those.


You see, the surfers always had a hangout. In one of the movies, the hangout included a catatonic beatnik [eventually revealed to be Vincent Price] and a goateed host [played by B-list comedian, Morey Amsterdam, already well into his fifties] who introduced the house band of Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. Actually, the band was the most authentic shard of surf culture in the movie, as Dale was the creator of the so-called “surf sound” in music.

However absurd the juxtaposition of the Del-Tones with Price and Amsterdam, there was something familiar about the gang’s hangout that would have been recognized by the actual California surf culture of the era, as it was based on a place that was, by turns, infamous, notorious, and necessary.

In 1958, the beat artist Burt Shonberg and television writer [and marijuana advocate] George Clayton Johnson [profiled in The Coracle] bought an empty storefront on the Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. This was a bold move for a couple of reasons. One, they had almost no money and, two, this was in Orange County, California, which was in those days the most conservative portion of the state. It was doomed to start with, but what better for a place named after a movie about a monster.

Shonberg and Johnson

Their vision was to create a European-style coffee house [it was not European at all, of course; it was based on coffee houses in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco and in Greenwich Village] where the various portions of SoCal’s liminal cultures could mix and mingle. This meant that beats, beatniks, surfers, bikers, folk musicians, jazz musicians, and their various fans and hangers-on would have a club house of sorts in the midst of prototypical suburban America.

 

It was an idea that would either be a boon or a complete disaster. For the liminal, it was a boon. For the local police, it was a disaster and, eventually, a target for overbearing and often unlawful harassment.

Café Frankenstein would close just four years later, after numerous citations for everything from underage drinking to wanton licentiousness. The local members of the women’s church society also had objections to the stained glass image in the front window which was not a sacred study, but a depiction of the café namesake’s monster. With that, social pressure began to be asserted against the parents of the local kids attracted, as they always are, to the café’s outlaw ambiance, and fewer and fewer customers came by to drink coffee, talk about surfboard fins, Harley-Davidson brake calipers, iambic pentameter, or some young, mumbling folk singer from Minnesota.

However, before it closed, Café Frankenstein hosted a number of musical acts that could find no other venue in Orange County. Jazz, folk music, and even beat comedians could be heard within the bizarre walls of the establishment. While few are household names, their influence is well-known within the confines of the musical community. It was, at least in terms of sentiment, a success that would serve as a forerunner to the larger, more business-savvy clubs, bars, and coffee houses that would open in Los Angeles County during the remainder of the decade.

In 1962, no longer able to afford a police-harassed, oft-cited, shunned place of business frequented by those who were not from the state’s wealthier demographic, Café Frankenstein closed and was purchased by the owner of the business next door. He had it razed and turned into a parking lot.

A few years later, when she first came to SoCal, Joni Mitchell would hear tales of Café Frankenstein from her fellow folkies and the verse, “Pave paradise; put up a parking lot” would be framed in her imagination.

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

"A Working-Class Hero is Something to Be...."


She Should Have Her Own Date on the Church Calendar

Archive shows medieval nun faked her own death to escape convent
A team of medieval historians working in the archives at the University of York has found evidence that a nun in the 14th century faked her own death and crafted a dummy “in the likeness of her body” in order to escape her convent and pursue – in the words of the archbishop of the time – “the way of carnal lust”.

Title IX Complaints Will Fix This

Higher education has a gender problem: With a surplus of women and a shortage of male students, colleges are becoming more and more gender unbalanced. The more farsighted among university administrators are starting to worry that this will turn universities into a pink-collar ghetto, places that the public thinks of as finishing schools for girls rather than gateways to middle-class stability.

Part of the problem, of course, is that our K-12 system, staffed overwhelmingly by women whom research shows tend to favor girls, leaves a lot of boys demoralized and uninterested in further education. But another big part of the problem is that college has become and anti-male space.

At today’s universities, masculinity is almost never discussed except in negative terms, usually with the word “toxic” attached. When girls and women are discussed, the question is always about how to help them do better. When boys and men are mentioned, it’s almost always as some sort of a problem.

It's Always Healthy When the "We Must All Have the Same Thoughts; We Must All Use the Same Words" Narrative Gets Cracked

Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, is no stranger to breaking gender barriers.

“We don’t need to dress alike. We don’t need to think alike. We don’t need to act alike. We simply need to be present and be working for ALL of the people who elected us,” she wrote.
I appreciate that she's just trying to raise her national profile for future elections, but it's still nice to hear some original, or at least individual, thinking from time to time.

Meanwhile, in News That Matters to the Rest of the World

Since it's neither about Trump nor the preferred politicians of the media class, you may not know that this is going on.  But it is and it will eventually have some form of impact on us.  One hopes for the better, but one hopes for a lot of things these days.

French yellow vest anti-govt protests turn violent in Paris

and

Protesters jump on "gilets jaunes" bandwagon in Latvia

Censorship and Suppressed Expression are Now Liberal Values

It's weird, isn't it?  I guess "free-thinking" does eventually devolve into a kind of moral fascism.  Certainly, that's the case in mainstream Protestantism these days. 
“Mark Twain was racist!”
“Robert Heinlein was sexist!”
 “Jane Austin supported the patriarchy!”
“Dickens was a … he’s just boring.”

If all you read of Dickens is Bleak House or Ye Old Curiosity Shop then I’ll grant the last one. But otherwise, demands that people not read certain books because they do not meet the standards of the last five minutes serves as an example of the painful presentism of the modern censors and regulators of moral purity.

Sooner or Later, There Will Be a Reckoning

Young Adult Fiction’s Online Commissars

Monday, February 11, 2019

This is Something Learned from Clergy, Without Question

A fool makes a mistake [or, in British English, a "thick boy does something thick"] and decides it's a call for him to morally educate the rest of us.

Ralph Northam Has Nobody to Blame but Himself

Wayback

This version of The Coracle is eleven years and one month old; it inherited the mantle from my original weblog that had begun in 2002.  Good Lord, that's a lot of written nonsense, isn't it?

Anyway, I was curious what I was doing on this date ten years ago.  What I found was this photo of where I was spending my days.  For those curious, it's Cozumel.


If This Follows the Historical Pattern, Then Eventually I'll Be the One Determining Who Goes to the Guillotine

Yeah, I can live with that.
One hallmark of the radical French revolutionaries was a poorly disguised but predictable dislike of religion. Today it’s an aversion in particular to Catholicism and Judaism — at least if one collates the various statements of Senators Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and Mazie Hirono, and Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Hank Johnson, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. The mainstreaming of anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, television commentary by the likes of Marc Lamont Hill, and the growing anti-Israeli foreign policy of the Democratic party only add to the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian hostility. 

Revolutionary “scientific” socialism is historically agnostic if not atheist. Anywhere it has taken root in its multifarious forms — China, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela — it seeks to destroy or corrupt religion. We have already seen attacks on Israel supporters within the Democratic party, attacks that are only thinly disguised anti-Semitic rants from the likes of Omar, Tlaib, and Linda Sarsour. One wonders how the anti-Catholicism of the Democratic Jacobins will connect with millions of new first- and second-generation Hispanic Catholic voters. Perhaps one of our young Robespierres can slightly modify the new atheist religion to “The Cult of the Supreme Being” and enjoin us all to worship an anthropomorphic Logos.

Yes, We're Back to Daily Postings

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Ladies and Gentlemen, Our Ruling Class

Cory Booker invents language in awkward interview: 'Swiss! Yeah, I do not speak Swiss'

The Merchants of Fear and Division

And so we have the grand game of make-believe and moral dress-up, in which Field Marshal Sandy rallies her troops on Twitter in the service of a half-organized bouquet of slogans and prejudices that no mentally normal adult — and there are still a few of those around — takes quite seriously. The purported goal of the great national deployment isn’t the point — the deployment itself is. It is an excuse for a great deal of noise and running in circles and excitation and displays of Very High Moral Seriousness that is its own reason for being. Sandy’s war is not a struggle over the future of Earth — it is only a struggle over the future of Sandy, and all the other Sandys out there in the great vast wilds of America, waiting tables at TGI Friday’s or grinding away in the obscurity of some master’s program in women’s studies, sure that however things were supposed to turn out, they weren’t supposed to turn out like this, a mess of loneliness and pointlessness, all dressed up for battle with nowhere to go and no comfort but Netflix and Facebook and Twitter, little fixes of dopamine just strong enough and frequent enough to keep the addicts upright and sedated enough that they do not begin asking the really difficult questions and demanding answers.

The Development of the Modern Dog

Companion and Commodity: The Victorian Dog

Saturday, February 9, 2019

All of the Uniparty Loudmouths are Frothy about This Guy, and That Makes Him Interesting

Howard Schultz unifies the parties — against him

I'm Shocked...Shocked!..to Discover There's Gambling Going On in Here

Amnesty International has toxic working culture, report finds: Bullying, public humiliation and discrimination threaten rights group’s credibility

From media, entertainment, The Church of Rome, and higher education, it seems the more often a person or group imagines themselves on a moral highground, the more often it's shown to be a mere mask for the sins they decry.

The headline reference may be found here.

It's as If Politicians are [Gasp!] Complete Hypocrites

As evidenced by the "For the 99.8% Act" unveiled today by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), as well as the "tippy-top" tax envisioned by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), soaking—and insulting—the rich is all the left-of-center rage this cycle. "Democrats should do the pragmatic thing in 2020," New York magazine's Eric Levitz advised this week, "and wage a vicious class war."

If so, snipers are going to first have to take out some of the party's own 2020 presidential candidates. The estimated worth of Michael Bloomberg, for example, is $47.6 billion, good for 14th place on the planet. Former Rep. John Delaney, whose 2020 bid touts campaign finance reform, was estimated as the sixth wealthiest member of the previous Congress, with a net worth of $92.6 million. Tech entrepreneur and robotophobe Andrew Yang, who likes to warn against the wealth gap, is firmly on the other side of it. Self-help guru and Oprah Winfrey spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson—what, you didn't realize she was running?—is so salt-of-the-earthy that she announced her candidacy this week at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. Join the evolution, indeed.
The party of the Kennedy's is the party that's now against wealth and its privilege.  Yes, I see....