During my recent tour of the Southwest I seem to have pulled over to the side of the road and picked up a cold. As near as I can figure it, the cold climbed aboard my body just outside of Bluff, Utah at the border of the Navajo reservation. It was probably dressed in dogwood and sagebrush camo inside of a cloud of pollen. It announced itself in the form of gargantuan sneezing fits so explosive that the car's safety glass shivered and my fellow passengers began to use their smartphones to order Hazmat suits for overnight delivery.
Not content with carpet-bombing the passenger compartment and surrounding landscapes with hell-fire sneezes, the cold immediately sat itself behind my eyes and began to pump out every bit of moisture there through my tear ducts. It seems that it amused my new and unwanted passenger to reduce me to a shaking, shambling, wheezing, sneezing, watery wreck of a man as quickly as possible. It was as if I could almost here it mumble under its foetid breath, "Now that's entertainment."
All colds behave like this. Rude and intrusive and overwhelming without so much as a "pretty please." We try to shake them off at the first sign we've picked them up. We consume vast amounts of zinc tablets, old wives' remedies, pills, ointments, potions, powders, and prayers. And the reaction of this cold was like the reaction of all the other colds I've picked up over the years. It just sits comfy in the passenger seat in your head and sneers.
"Where you heading?" I ask, hoping it just wants a lift to the next Navaho hogan down the road.
Continued...
Now: Bernie Goetz, who became a household name after shooting four young men in New York City in 1984, holds two young squirrels in Union Square Park. Goetz, who said the men had tried to rob him, was later convicted for illegal possession of a firearm. The incident sparked a national dialogue on American’s perception of race and the legal limits of self defense. Goetz, now 63, has undertaken squirrel rescue as a cause. -- WSJ
Then: "I decided to shoot as many as I could as quickly as I could. I did a fast draw, and shot with one hand (my right), pulling the trigger prior to the gun being aligned on the targets. All actual shots plus my draw time occurred easily within 1.6 seconds or less. This is not as difficult to do as some might think, and occasionally I give a description of the technique along with a re-enactment.
Continued...Such a deal.
I've purchased two of these items myself and I am mighty pleased with them (Especially the bench which solved a thorny table problem I've had for years.).
Here they are with seven others at the link: Ready To Ship Hot Stuff from the Sippican Cottage Furniture Company of Maine .
Get Sippican Cottage Furniture, up to 66% off, ready to shipHappy Spring from Sippican Cottage! Nine new items have been added to our Ready To Ship page, to help you spruce up your digs. Solid wood, handmade right here in Maine, and deep discounted for you without any group coupon foolishness.
Sippican Cottage Furniture of Maine - the way life should be.
Well, first of all you gotta go out and find the paper stock from 1961 which isn't easy in a moist climate like Hawaii.
Make it a ream since you're going to have to replace a lot of certificates with numbers leading up to and away from this one. At least 100 in each direction. (Might want to slowly and carefully assassinate some of those contemporary births with natural causes -- see the How-To Manuals from the Kennedy era.)
Continued...Once upon a time that skeevy communist Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar, "This machine kills fascists." Well, this Republican ticket kills moonbats and progressives:
That's right, kills them dead. One look at this concept by an unprepared moonbat and...
It is presently unknown just how many cerebral hemorrhages, massive coronary infarctions, and Medusasque turning to stone in the middle of the street deaths this ticket would cause, but it would be entertaining to find out.
Simply put, this is a ticket that could work for the benefit of the Republican party even if it never ran.
Continued...I like Jonah Goldberg and a lot of what he says, but he's floating in ye olde conservative autoplay bubble machine when it comes to the ever-popular mumbo-jumbo about the president not wanting to "infuriate" his base. Today's example is from Cooling on Global Warming where Goldberg writes, on full cruise control,
One suspects that Obama would dearly love to drill a lot for more oil and gas, simply for the political windfall in jobs and economic growth. But after he flipped on offshore drilling, then flopped after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he cannot flip again without infuriating his base.
With all due respect, this is so much clap-trap. The plain truth is that, no matter what he does, Obama's "base" is going exactly nowhere. This is because it has exactly nowhere to go. Obama's base is deep into the battered-spouse syndrome. It will keep coming back for more no matter how often or how hard he hits it, hoping for some of that old time religion, some of that hot hope-and-change makeup sex.
What are the elements that form Obama's "easily alienated" base?
Continued...Wonder no more. Behold as they gather deep beneath the shadowy wings of their great god, Moonbat:
Everyone at the Washington, DC 5 meetup on September 6, 2008. From left to right: SchuminWeb, Aude, Staeiou, Swatjester, Kirill Lokshin, BRG, and Newyorkbrad. -- Wikipedia:Meetup/DC 5 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaContinued...
Near the Four Corners. Close to the border of the Navaho Nation near Cortez, Colorado, we came across this fine example of the focus of Federal Funding. That's right, nothing to be seen in any direction for many, many, many miles. Was the road the project being repaired and refurbished? Nope. Patched and potholed before and after. The only project that could be said to be new was the sign itself. Other than that I read on the back side of the sign this inscription by Zombie:
Continued...
In a hidden valley in the foothills of Utah's La Sal mountains, my old friend and I sat on his stone porch in the fading light and watched the sun disappear behind the soaring red rock of the Moab Wall ten miles to the west. As always from this perch along the fault line between basin and range, the view revealed four different American landscapes: desert, farmland, rolling ranch land and high mountains.
In the pasture to our right, the wranglers were bedding down the ranch's horses for the night. Up along the pine dotted cliffs on our left the last hunting hawks were circling. In front of us the impossible burnt orange of a Moab sunset swarmed up the side of the western sky.
As we sat there, cigars burning low and the Metaxa in the stoneware cups sipped slowly, our conversation ebbed into the long silences that wrap around you when the world puts on its very best end-of-day displays.
Then from very far away over the mountains behind us a faint, rising whoosh arced high overhead. Leaning our heads back we marked the contrail of an airliner slicing across the sky.
Through that still air the line of flight was marked from somewhere far to the east (Chicago? New York City? Further still?), and slanted down the slope of the sky towards somewhere far to the southwest (Phoenix? Los Angeles? Far beyond?). In the following moments while the night rose over the mountain behind us, more contrails appeared from the east arcing down behind the tinted thunderheads that moved towards us from the desert. Just before full dark we'd marked over a dozen, and they lingered, gradually expanded and then dissolved across all that empty sky.
"One of the things I remember about Seattle in the days following the Eleventh." my friend offered as the day faded out, "was the emptiness of the skies. No planes. For the first time I can remember, days with no planes."
"In New York," I replied, "we had planes. Fighters cut across the sky at all altitudes. You'd hear their sharp sounds slice through the air above you at all hours. You were glad to hear them. You slept better when you slept at all."
"Still, it was sort of peaceful in Seattle during those days," he replied. "Peaceful in an unnerving way. No noise from the air. No contrails."
He paused as the last light in the valley faded and the contrails high above still marked the sky like broad smudges on a blackboard.
"Well, they're back now," he said as the stars came on.
"Yes," I agreed. "They're back. For now."
We don't fill in a formula of departments and features and tips and quips every hour every day every week.We're jamming.
We just make up our content on the fly. No going back. No edits. Mainlining others' thoughts.
Lock and Load. Fire and forget.
It's like an endless orchestra of brain musicians high on brain jazz.
If you can type and have something to say, you can sit in on the session and jam.
If you can take it high, if you can take it low, if you can tie it in a knot, if you can tie it in a bow. If you can throw it o'er your shoulder like a continental soldier...
You. Can. Play.
You can play. Any number can play. ANY NUMBER can play a number and that number is always an unknown number. But if you can play unknown numbers you can sit in on the session and jam.
If not, you can just login and kick back and watch the others go at it.
You never know what you're going to get, or which way the next person is going to bend the thread in your head.
You're just there, in real time, and saying, really, whatever comes into your head.
Sometimes its flat, even more often predictable, and, yes, it can get really boring.... just like a lot of modern jazz.
But still, there are times -- rarer now to be sure -- when the whole thing....
Just. Takes. Off....
And you find yourself thinking things you never thought you'd think remembering licks long forgotten and saying things you never planned to say to a lot of people who are coming right back at you, jamming harder and seeing if you can all somehow take it higher.
Not to be profound, just to take it around. It's like being in a Doctor Strange far out on the range in an intellectual groove and you've got lift off.
Have this happen a couple of time and you're hooked, man. Like me, man.
I've been hooked for years, man....
but it doesn't rule my life,
.... man.
First published here in 2003, but written for The Well in 1989.
Click and check the blogroll. Almost everyone on it is still going as one sort of life form or another.
"Just before dawn in Brooklyn Heights a dream woke me...." from "Will the Sleepers Awake," American Digest The New America - Dispatches Thursday, May 09, 2002.
As astute readers might have noted I am out of here for a bit. In my stead I have appointed Joy McCann (aka Little Miss Attila ) as first speaker, prime poster and enforcer. So play nice.
Besides her amazing blog and star-class word-smithing skills, Little Miss Atilla has sometimes been know to live a double life. Here are some other facts about McCann you may not know:
The world's jazz notes made manifest. Stay with it. A video of videos.
"I didn't mean nothing by it. I didn't mean to look. You stood still and the Doppler put you on a carousel, gone loose in the joints, the big, spidery gears smeared with grease and the swarf of a million revolutions. The neon flickers all the time, but sometimes you can pick up the frequency and see the rhythm in it." -- Sippican Cottage:
"All of the victims were shot in their heads
and all but McGowan were shot in their beds,"
Doyle said.
"The beds were undisturbed.
The house itself was undisturbed,"
Doyle said.
"There were no signs
of a break-in,"
Doyle said.
-- No Motive Found in California Murders
Above, the unintentional "found poetry" of a local murder in Garner Valley, California. Exceptional enough to be brought to the ever shortening attention span of the nation because the toll was unusually high: David, Father, age 42 -- believed dead by his own hand; Chase, son, age 14; Paige, daughter, age 10; Raine, daughter, age 8; Karen, wife and mother, age 42; Karen's mother, no name or age given in the report.
We learn that a "911 dispatcher didn't hear any voices on the line, but was able to identify the sounds of the telephone hitting the wall and a gunshot." We learn that the father's body was found next to a handgun and a phone. We learn that "this community is in no danger. We are not at this time looking for a suspect." We learn that the town is really quiet and that, "A lot could happen right next door and you wouldn't even know it."
Continued...
iOwnTheWorld has an interview with the outspoken Ann Barnhardt.Barnhardt is the person who made the videos seen here yesterday at Koran Burning Page by Evil Page: Ann Barnhardt Lays It All on the Line. Some excerpts:
iOTW - Have you been a political activist in the past and were there particular issues, apart from Islam, that you focused on?
Ann – I am not a political activist. I am the owner of three small businesses who looked around two and a half years ago and said, “Oh, HELL no.” Politicians make me ill. I can never and will never be a politician. For the last two to three years I have been focusing heavily on explaining and exposing Marxism, Islam and the fraud that is Obama. But that is triple-redundant, isn’t it?
Continued...Barnhardt has had it with Islam, the Koran, Lindsey Graham, and all the rest of the wretched pack.
"Lindsey Graham, understand that if you pick a fight with me the only way it ends is with you sobbing in the men's room."
How long this lasts on YouTube is anybody's guess.
Here's part 1 where she flays Lindsey Graham down to the bone:
So my pal and I are standing in line in a sandwich shop waiting to see if two chicken salad sandwiches, chips, and cokes will yield any change from a $20 (They don't), when this guy my pal knows staggers in the door and joins the line. He's the blonde, aging and pear-shaped frat boy type on a life pension from his grandparents common in these parts. He's an elite member of the Maynard G. Krebs Zero-Work Brigade.
It's possible to see he is a reasonably good looking man, but just. This is because, besides a distinct wobbling lurch in his step, he also appears to have gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime.
His nose is thickened along with the rest of his face, and not just from a lifetime's love affair with single malt.
There's a huge nasty scab across the bridge of his nose and a larger one running along the side of his jaw and under his chin giving off a rusty red gleam like some speed strawberry birthmark.
Both his eyes have large, dark circles around them as if they've gotten special attention from a ball-peen hammer, and their expression is that of a man who's just walked out of a fire-fight in the Afghan hills.
Continued...
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- The Hitchhiker
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- Sippican Cottage's Spring Sale Announced. Priced at 66% Off Because 666% Off Would Be Just Beastly
- With the Release of the Birth Certificate, Today's Burning Question Has Become, "What took him so long?"
- REPUBLIGEDDON! The Lethal Republican Ticket for 2012
- All His Base Are Belong to Him: Warnings About the O-Base Are Baseless
- "Neutral" Wikipedia Editors. Ever wonder what they look like?
- Southwest of Cortez, Just Off the Rez, Those Stimulus Dollars are Working, Working, Working....
- Contrails
- Brain Jazz
- You know, I've been doing this for almost 9 years. I need a vacation.
- Little Miss Attila Will Be Enforcing Discipline at This Site
- Something Wonderful: A Long, Languid, Heartfelt Plea Launched Into The Ether
- "He Wasn't In His Right Mind"
- Ann Barnhardt on Full Auto: The IOTW Interview
- Koran Burning Page by Evil Page: Ann Barnhardt Lays It All on the Line
- Mr. Wonderful's Bad Day