American Digest

Inspiring. Much more inspiring than those “Raptors” vs. those “Bucks.” (And what’s with that vaguely racist name anyway?)

These panels taught me … that the creative contextualization of a play like The Vagina Monologues can bring certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue with the Catholic tradition. This is a good model for the future. Accordingly, I see no reason to prohibit performances of The Vagina Monologues on campus and do not intend to do so. — Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., President, University of Notre Dame

Like the befuddled Reverend Father above, I too — in a fit of “creative contextualization”— seek to bring “certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue”. To further that mission, there is a secret evening of drama has been taking place in numerous undisclosed locations about the nation. We are all aware of the unstoppable chunk of feminist flatulence known as “The Vagina Monologues,” but few know about the blowback that is “The Dick Dialogues.”

The Dick Dialogues is usually performed on the down-low in the basements of sports bars, carefully darkened car-repair garages and the deepest forest amphitheaters of the Bohemian Grove. Attendance is strictly male and strictly invitation-only since in many states the mere thought of giving a performance of “The Dick Dialogues” would constitute a hate crime.

“The Dick Dialogues” consists of two men, traditionally named “Plick and Plack. the Fappet Brothers” slumped in Lay-Z-Boys in their Rec Room. Here they field calls on a speaker phone from a series of male, female, and neutered voices. The actors, clad in the traditional native garb of jeans, Hooters t-shirts, baseball caps, and tutus, respond to questions during an extended half-time at a fantasy football league’s Super Bowl. The cost of admission is a donation suggested to be equal to one month of the attendee’s child support. [click to continue…]

Thanks to the unremitting efforts of two wives and a number of desperate girlfriends I have, over the years, become a fully domesticated man. I cook. I iron. I put the seat down out of pure reflex.

And I clean.

Yes, I clean the house. I have a wide variety of products and tools for floors, ceilings, window, toilets, and countertops (I’m especially good on countertops since I not only have cleaning spritzers in plain acid wash and foaming bleach blaster, I also have a compound that renews the polish once the sanitizing has been completed.) I am the very model of the modern major traife buster.

I am, however, a bit sketchy on floors. This is not to say you couldn’t eat off my floors. You could because you’d find a host of food shreds there on any given afternoon. This is not because I like floors configured as mouse buffets but only because, being 6’1”, the floors are so far away I don’t really focus on them. My solution? The world’s most rapacious vacuum cleaner, “The Kirby.”

Actually, I have 2 (two!) solutions since I own 2 (two!) vacuum cleaners. The first is a kind of cheap, plastic metrosexual’s vacuum bought at some box store because it was cheap. Like all metrosexual items, it performs in a manner that lets you know all cheap things are worth much less than you spent on them. It sucks by not sucking as a sucker of floor dirt should. Very sucky. It is, at the best, back-up. Bags and parts for it are sold everywhere.

Then there’s “The 2004 Kirby Diamond” weighing in are over twenty-three pounds of solid chromed steel, titanium bristles that can skin a black rhino, and a woven cloth bag wrapped around the vacuum bag that could be made into an outdoor area rug. The motor in this bad boy is so powerful it can suck kittens out of my basement through the floorboards in the living room. It is the chopped Harley Hog of vacuums.

The bags for this hoovering T-Rex are built to blast stresses and are rare as dinosaur eggs. Finding them always calls for an expedition to far-away strip malls and into some Norwegian albino’s small appliance parts shop sandwiched between a sketchy Malaysian smoke shop and a lap-dance rec room. It’s a chore.

So much of a chore that when The Kirby’s bag filled up about three months back I was too lazy to pack a lunch and go find new ones. My solution? Pure genius!

I took out the old bag which was almost rock-solid with dust mites, hair, and the bones of desiccated kittens and, holding it over the toxic waste recycling bin behind the garage, cut the bottom open and shook the contents into the bin. Then, because there is nothing it cannot do, I duct-taped the bottom of the bag and slapped it back in The Kirby.

“There. I fixed it.”

Fast forward three months and I am manhandling The Kirby over the current mouse buffet and noticing that for a super-sucker its sucking sucks. So I say to myself, “Self, check it out.”

I open the military gauge zipper on the back of the bag and instantly a fibrous tumor of hair and dust mites oozes out. I retreat and don Haz-Mat suit. I inspect the Superfund site that is my kitchen.

It would seem that my duct-tape resealing of the bag had, well, failed to hold the bag’s universe together some months back and that all creatures great and small that had been sucked off my floors were now compressed into a hairball that threatened to expand into all of known space.

Seeing everything that has come off your floors in the last three months in one wad is a unique experience but I resisted the urge to perform an archeological dig on the site. Instead, I deployed a very large garbage bag and, grimacing, transferred the dust mite condo from the bag into the bag.

It was only the beginning.

Upon double-gloved inspection of the inside of The Kirby’s bag, I found that at least an inch of detritus was still impacted into the cloth on all surfaces. I scraped at it a bit but the dust cloud just deepened around me and drifted out onto the previously pristine floors. Disaster loomed. Then I remembered.

“I own two vacuums. I shall vacuum this vacuum with a vacuum!”

Sooper-Genius!

In no time I had deployed vacuum two — the previously mentioned “cheap, plastic metrosexual’s vacuum” — attached the hose with the special little attachment that is used for sucking coins and popcorn kernels out of deep crevices in the couch and switched it on.

Its puny little metrosexual motor wound up and went to its wheezing limit. I tested the nozzle on my hand and felt the feeble suck but knew it would be better than scraping The Kirby’s inner bag surface with my fingernails. I deployed the nozzle inside the clogged bag and carefully and thoroughly went over all the surfaces until they seemed, well, “clean enough for government work.” Then I shut it down and carefully swept the dust and other detritus on the floor into a pile and sucked that up too. Then I mopped the floor of the kitchen. Twice. Until it gleamed.

I took a shower. I mixed a celebratory cocktail. I went to Amazon, found a pack of 12 bags for The Kirby, and ordered them on two-day delivery. I went into the kitchen and thought to myself, “A wise man would now replace the bag in the weak little vacuum that has all the leavings from The Kirby in it.”

I opened the “cheap, plastic metrosexual’s vacuum” and knew instantly that many moons ago I had taken a bag out of that vacuum and somehow failed, FAILED!, to install a new one. A cloud of hair, dust, dust mites and the bones of small animals exploded from the case and drifted across the gleaming kitchen floor and the carefully polished countertops. I stood in the cloud at ground zero and felt the dust of ages settle on me.

They say that “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

Nature’s got nothing on me.

for Tom Mandel, 1946-1995

[NOTE: Yesterday’s inevitable rupture of an old untended friendship among the plethora of my virtual-friends on Facebook put me in mind of another good friend and true from the past, Tom Mandel, and this memoir from 2005. I’m moving it here so that it will not perish from the Net. God speed, Tom. God speed.]

THESE DAYS NEW FRIENDS come more rarely and old friends begin to leave more often. Fate, accidents, God’s will, and misunderstandings take them, as they shall take us all, as the years roll on. And as these years roll on the need to acquire light friendships pales before the deeper ones that endure. But some end too soon, far too soon, and their leaving lingers as if the debt you owe to them is the debt of memory; one on which only the interest can be paid, never the principal.

Those that have left come back to the mind unbidden and at strange moments, moments unguarded and almost, well, casual. This morning I remembered, as I only sometimes do, Tom Mandel — ” the first friend I ever made before I met him.”

At dawn I was watering the eclectic collection of potted plants out on my deck that looks far out to sea from the Laguna Hills. This morning the sea faded into a long blue-grey haze as the light from behind the hills slowly descended on the smooth surface of those waters., Behind me the random selection from the iTunes library chose, at that moment, to play a song I’ve been favoring this past week or so, Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying.”

When it got to the lyrics,

I went skydiving.
I went Rocky Mountain climbing.
I went two point seven seconds
on a bull named Fu Man Chu.
And I loved deeper,
And I spoke sweeter,
And I gave forgiveness I’d been denyin’.
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’.

He said I was finally the husband,
that most the time I wasn’t.
And I became a friend,
a friend would like to have….

And there was good old Tom Mandel standing slim, well-dressed, and sardonic in my haphazard memory palace. And I thought, before he faded,

“Oh, yes. Tom. There he is. What a good man he was. How I regret that I failed him in those last days. I should have been more courageous. But the past is the past and that was the least of the past. What matters now is that, every now and again, I think of him and what a good friend and what a good man he was. Died young. But did he? How long is a life anyway? Has it really been ten years since he died? Turn around a decade’s gone.”

[click to continue…]

“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. “

“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”

 “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”

“Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth.”

“Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.”

 “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Background: At the end of 1924, Escher and his new bride purchased a house under construction in Frascati, a small town outside of Rome.

The house was finished in March, 1925, but the couple did not move in until October. Shortly after Escher moved into his new home outside of Rome, his brother was killed in a mountaineering accident, and Escher had to go to the site to identify the body. After this tragedy, Escher produced his famous Days of Creation woodcuts.

M.C. Escher Biography

These are the original Twelve Steps as suggested by the 2020 Democrat Android, BidenBernie 2.0.

1. We admitted we were powerless over spending — that our deficit had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that taxes greater than currently levied could restore us to solvency.

3. Made a decision to turn our nation and our lives over to the care of Socialism as we understood it.

4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of all the gold in Fort Knox and found two nuggets worth $325.99.

5. Admitted to voters, to the Federal Reserve, and to another eternal Government bureaucracy being the exact nature of our bankruptcy.

6. Were entirely ready to have the U.S. Mint print infinite money on whatever paper they could get at a discount down at Staples.

7. Humbly asked the voters to give us all their money and title to their vacation homes.

8. Made a list of all persons that still had something squirreled away, and became willing to  send in the National Guard to dig up their backyards and basements.

9. Made direct promises to replace any precious metals or gems found with paper money at ten cents on the dollar, to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require a cash award of more than $49.98.

10. Continued to search for hidden assets and when we found them promptly seized them.

11. Sought through Universal Health Care and reducing the military to improve our nation until it resembled Great Britain in real power and influence, and confiscated all guns and ammunition we could lay our hands on to keep pesky disagreements with the National Guard on a name-calling basis, praying only for a disarmed, dispirited, depressed and Universally Medicated citizenry and for the power to rule over them.

12. Having had a rebirth of solvency for 72 hours as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to any surviving free societies and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Now that magic mushrooms have been added to the legalized drugs poo-poo platter in Denver, it is perhaps time to look back at some of the street-legal drugs that existed back in the day when you used to go down to the all-night pharmacy or balsa-model hobby shop to see what over the counter nostrums could be counted on to give you a buzz.

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934.

Laughing Gas, or nitrous oxide, has been used as an intoxicant since about ten seconds after it was first synthesized by Joseph Priestly in 1772. That, however, does not mean that by the 1960s laughing gas was regarded as passé. Au contraire mon frère. You have to remember that in those days people were trying to dry, roll, and smoke the inside of bananas. In those days, nitrous was just another established “fun” recreational drug. In those days you could buy a tank of nitrous just by saying you needed it for underwater welding. Yes, underwater welding. In Iowa. (“Hey, dude, there’s like water, like everywhere, man. Like in.. well. my bathtub, man.”)

A friend I knew in those days discovered that taking a hit of nitrous “helped” him with his creative writing. In a way he was right. He did create very clever and interesting short stories when he’d had a few whiffs from the tank. Indeed, in the spirit of the 60s drug counter culture in Berkeley an San Francisco, he became convinced that if any drug was worth doing, it was worth overdoing. (A common American attitude that persists to this day.)

He was 24 years old and impatient for fame.

In pursuit of more and more “creative push” from his tank of nitrous he designed a mask that would fit over his nose and mouth and be held there by some complicated elastics so he could type with both hands while whiffing from the tank.

It worked pretty well and I recall noticing that his writing did indeed get better and more interesting. Right up to the morning when they found him slumped dead over his typewriter with the mask fixed firmly over his nose and mouth, and the tank still hissing away. Yes, Virginia, there is a death claus in solid nitrous breathing after all.

He was 24 years old and impatient for fame.

He left behind two binders with his writings in them. The stories were good and full of promise as we editors like to say when something is still five years short of publishable. Decades later his short-life’s work was part of the sodden ashes of Paradise.

He “lived fast, died young, and left a good-looking corpse.” And two forgotten binders of “promising” work.

Too much heavy, heavy fuel…

I don’t care if my liver is hanging by a thread
Don’t care if my doctor says I ought to be dead
When my ugly big car won’t climb this hill
I’ll write a suicide note on a hundred dollar bill

‘Cause if you wanna run cool
If you wanna run cool
Yes if you wanna run cool
You got to run on heavy, heavy fuel
Heavy, heavy fuel
Heavy, heavy fuel

Well now, I get low and I get high
And if I can’t get either, I really try
Got the wings of heaven on my shoes
I’m a dancin’ man and I just can’t lose
You know it’s alright, it’s okay
I’ll live to see another day
We can try to understand
The New York Times’ effect on man
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive
[click to continue…]

Spring 1939. “Drugstore window in Washington, D.C.”

There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
The parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

— The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again

As the days drift on towards the deeper daze of the coming summer it is becoming numbingly clear that the political divide in the nation is between Issues and Aholes. I say “numbingly” because the ceaseless screeching of the progressive witches, bitches, and snitches in search of stitches has risen to such a high keening pitch that human ears can no longer hear it as a pile of plaints but only as the dumb strum of millions of monolithic morons sucking their thumbs.

Once I dreamed that following the release of the Meuller Report I would have some shred of lost time returned, some moment of reprieve in which I could take a bit of a nap in the warm Spring breezes, one scintilla of an iota of a jot of a nanosecond wherein I could find surcease from the political progressive poltroons of the left and their inevitable Ahole blatherfests and exhibitions of autofellatio.  Alas, it was only a box of rain…

It’s all a dream we dreamed
One afternoon long ago.

Aholes cannot change their shape or their sphinctoid function. No matter what the Issue in our perverted politics Aholes must be Aholes. Example One –The Issue with the Meuller Report was simple: Did President Trump Collude with Russia In the 2016 Election? Two years of muck sucking and $40 million later the answer was, “NO.”

Game. Set. Match.

Right? Right.

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
And I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
And I get to the bottom and I see you again, yeah, yeah

Issues-oriented Americans like to resolve an issue and then move on to another issue. Not Aholes if they do not get what they want. Every time that happens Aholes go back to the mattresses for a do-over because “not fair!” This time it was to ignore the no collusion conclusions of Vol. 1 and bellyflop into the soft and warm fecal pudding of the Meuller Report vol. 2 where their crackpipe media told them lurked the crime, the major and jailable crime, of “He wuz doin dat ob-struction thing.”  And so the dull death rattle of their insane ideology has increased in volume and violence until the sane Issues folks start re-reading the 2nd Amendment and buying ammo by the block. [click to continue…]

WANT: If I ever get a large hit from the money machine again, this is at the top of my vehicle shopping list. [click to continue…]

Doris Day, the freckle-faced movie actress whose irrepressible personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star in the early 1960s, died on Monday at her home in Carmel Valley, California. She was 97.

Beneath wholesome image, Doris Day was an actor of depth

The beloved singer and actress, who died Monday at 97, was a contemporary of Marilyn Monroe but seemed to exist in a lost and parallel world of sexless sex comedies and the carefree ways of “Que Sera, Sera” (“Whatever Will Be, Will Be”). She helped embody the manufactured innocence of the 1950s, a product even she didn’t believe in.

“I’m tired of being thought of as Miss Goody Twoshoes …. I’m not the All-American Virgin Queen, and I’d like to deal with the true, honest story of who I really am,” she said in 1976, when her tell-all memoir “Doris Day: Her Own Story” chronicled her money troubles and failed marriages.

There was more to her, and to her career, than not sleeping with the leading man. She gave acclaimed performances in “Love Me or Leave Me,” the story of songstress Ruth Etting, and in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Longing ballads such as “Blame My Absent Minded Heart” led critic Gary Giddins to call her “the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow-ballads in movie history.”

But millions loved her for her wholesome, blond beauty, and for her string of slick, stylish comedies, beginning with her Oscar-nominated role in “Pillow Talk” in 1959. She and Rock Hudson were two New Yorkers who shared a telephone party line. She followed with “The Thrill of It All,” playing a housewife who gains fame as a TV pitchwoman to the chagrin of husband James Garner.

Oh, give me your attention, there’s been a new invention
It isn’t any larger than an adding machine
It’s only fair to mention, though it’s a new invention
It’s one that you have heard about, but few have ever seen

It doesn’t do division and it doesn’t multiply
It doesn’t want to be a bird, it doesn’t try to fly
It came about because they made a big atomic bomb
The new invention’s clicking and because of all its ticking
I know where the idea came from
I tic, tic, tic, why do I tic, tic? [click to continue…]

“In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” -James Madison

Oh, What a Lovely Race War! Leftist antiwhite sites that are allowed to exist by our benevolent internet overlords—sites that are allowed to have advertisers, sites you can post on social media—employ writers who are no more skilled than these murderers, and just as hateful. In terms of writing ability, I’d put Breivik and Tarrant up against any of the semi-tards who post at Salon. Hell, those two guys, whose manifestos together total more than 1,574 pages, are exactly the kind of prolific ideologues who, were they leftists, would be highly sought after by the editors of high-quantity political sites.

Roadblocks to impeachment by James Piereson Some have suggested that the House could order the arrest of the Attorney General and Secretary of the Treasury, and any other member of the executive branch for that matter, for defying the subpoenas. That would be an extreme step and a highly unlikely one, unless the Speaker of the House is prepared to send her Sergeant at Arms to arrest the Attorney General for contempt of Congress, thereby risking a fist fight or a shoot-out at the Department of Justice with the U.S. Marshalls assigned to protect him. That would be an unprecedented spectacle, though perhaps reminiscent of the occasion in 1856 when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina went into the Senate chamber to beat Sen. Charles Sumner within an inch of his life (an event that signaled greater violence to come).

The doggedness of William Barr Dear Demowats, Be Afraid… Be bery afraid: “William Barr has pledged to answer the following questions: ‘How did the Trump-Russia investigation get started? Who started it? On what authority? For what reason? What was the rationale for the FISA warrants taken out against Carter Page and renewed several times? It has been alleged that assets of the DOJ spied on the Trump campaign: did they? The entire investigation was plagued by leaks of classified information, a felony: who leaked it that information? Who, for example, leaked the transcript of the phone call between Michael Flynn, Trump’s first, ill-fated director of the National Security Council and the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak? There is only a small circle of possible candidates.’ [click to continue…]

ML A motherfucking year off the motherfucking boat and got a good business in our neighborhood occupying a building that had been boarded up for longer than I care to remember and I’ve been here a long time.

SWEET DICK WILLIE It has been a long time.

COCONUT SID How long?

ML Too long! Too long. Now for the life of me, I haven’t been able to figger this out. Either dem Koreans are geniuses or we Blacks are dumb.

This is truly a stupefying question and all three are silent. What is the answer?

COCONUT SID It’s gotta be cuz we’re Black. No other explanation, nobody don’t want the Black man to be about shit.

SWEET DICK WILLIE Old excuse.

ML I’ll be one happy fool to see us have our own business right here. Yes, sir. I’d be the first in line to spend the little money I got.

Sweet Dick Willie gets up from his folding chair.

SWEET DICK WILLIE It’s Miller time. Let me go give these Koreans s’more business.

ML It’s a motherfucking shame.

COCONUT SID Ain’t that a bitch.

[Note: First written in 2007 and still, for the most part, true. So far.]

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota in 1918. She would have been just four years old then. When she was 90 years old she came to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three-inch heels, and a six-foot-long purple boa. She’s threatened to sing Kurt Weill’s ‘The Saga of Jenny” and dance on the table one more time. [click to continue…]

[click to continue…]

When Goodfellas what released many movie buffs marveled at the long single take of the entrance into the Copacabana…

But of course, it was only Scorsese’s footnote to the real master, Orson Welles.

1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,

3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.

5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

— Psalm 2

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It’s certainly wonderful to think that “all we need to do is find ways to constructively disagree with each other,” and think that this would solve most, if not all, of our problems. But there’s a tremendous difficulty with applying this to the modern ideological divide between Right and Left, the “reactionary” (true or otherwise) and the progressive. The difficulties lie in that this line of thinking implies that there are two sides which actually want rational discussion and a settling of differences rationally. Yet, there are not. [click to continue…]

I always read the weekly Woodpile Report . You should too. The wisdom of Remus is not to be missed or messed with. Today he starts with the recent leftist obsession with denigrating ALL white folks even if one is ALL white. 

The first wrong step was tolerance, a close cousin to self-delusion. Tolerance is rightly extended to children and pets, not to those who would bring low civilization itself. Reality is a merciless arena, being marginalized and powerless was the charitable option.

We’ve allowed whites to be treated as a noxious contaminant in an otherwise pristine population. No insult, no slur, no lie is forbidden. And no matter how outrageously abusive the slander, it can be done publicly with impunity.

There was a day when I said this only about us Appalachians. There came a day when the assault had expanded to include all white men. Now it’s all white people, past and present, and every construct and symbol of our existence. But they should have a care. There’s a rock ahead of their showboat, just under the surface, as Heartiste has pointed out.

Elitist whites have seen street theatre and random violence by adolescents and impulsive underachievers. They haven’t seen calm, calculated and implacable countermoves by the capable and determined. Now that engine is ticking over. Remember who turned the key.

Read the rest and glean his pointers at Woodpile Report