Now I’ve said my A.B.C’s. tell me what you think of me.

New York New York It’s a Wonderful Town!
https://twitter.com/hairtoucher/status/1573709551165091840

“She parked her gum and then she said, ‘I’m gonna dance with the guy what brung me.”

Bubblegum   In 1928, Walter E. Diemer, an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia, was experimenting with new gum recipes. One recipe was found to be less sticky than regular chewing gum and stretched more easily. This gum became highly successful and was eventually named by the president of Fleer as Dubble Bubble.

The original bubble gum was pink because that was the only dye Diemer had on hand at the time and it was his favorite color. To test his recipe, Diemer took samples of the new gum to a local store where it sold out in a single day. To help sell the new Dubble Bubble gum, Diemer taught salespeople how to blow bubbles so that they could teach potential customers. 

The need to nuke Google from orbit persists.
RNC Says Google Spiked Over 22 MILLION of Its Emails in September Alone Monday, Fox News reported that “the Republican National Committee [RNC] says Google is suppressing get-out-the-vote [GOTV] and fundraising emails by sending millions of GOP election emails to users’  Gmail spam folders, with party leadership threatening to explore legal options to ‘”put an end’ to what they call a clear pattern of bias.'”Google, biased against conservatives? Why the only people who could possibly be shocked by this are working for Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger.

When guns are outlawed only government drones will have guns.

THE REST OF THIS EDITION OF STRANGE DAZE CAN BE SEEN AT THE NEW AMERICAN DIGEST. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE. THANKING YOU IN ADVANCE.

So @PlanetTyrus gave @greggutfeld his NWA Television Championship belt for this joke. pic.twitter.com/QYh9UPmXzC

— Andrew Wimsatt 🖐 (@ajwimsatt) September 30, 2022

MonkeyWerx has some very interesting insights into The Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Sabotage

One of the more interesting commenters on the US Proxy War with Russia is MonkeyWerx, a man who uses publically available flight information via SkyGlass by AVIAR Labs to track the movement of government flights around the world. Last week he became interested in the flight record of a certain very long, very unusual flight of a Navy P8 (seen above).

That said, the Russians also have this data and it certainly didn’t help our case that Biden told them we would take the pipeline out should the Russians invade Ukraine. We have seen Biden “slip up” on many occasions so this isn’t a surprise. You would think that the bobbleheads would have at least put someone in the game that would have the cognitive ability to at a minimum play the game, but that clearly isn’t the case.

Here are a few facts about the sabotage:

1. Biden said we were going to do it

2. It happened “overnight” on the 26th of September

3. We have a US Navy P8 fly from the United States to a refueling rendezvous point over Grudziądz Poland at 0210 hrs GMT

4. The two aircraft, Callsign N/A, and BART12 sync up at 26,400 ft for an extended 1:20 minute refueling, disconnecting at 0328 hrs GMT

5. The BART12 air refueler RTB’d to Spangdahlem Air Base Germany and one should note the flight record has been wiped

6. The Navy P8 then continues onto the Nord Stream Pipeline location and descends to an altitude of <10,000 ft at 0345 hrs GMT

7. The Navy P8 exits the area just prior to 0700 hrs and is the only aircraft over the area the entire time

8. At 0709 hrs GMT the Navy P8 returns back to the United States. Note: the US Navy P8 HexCode is AE6851 and is NOT listed in the aircraft database. Furthermore, the aircraft flew as “masked” meaning it did not want to be tracked

9. Datapoint, there were recorded 2.3 magnitude shakes in the area at that same time

10. The following morning NATO Forces announce that overnight the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline has been sabotaged

11. A Poland Ministry Official posts a tweet thanking the United States for taking out the Pipeline

12. On September 29th in front of the UN Security Council a Russian Federation spokesperson presents the known facts and asks the United States representative directly in a yes or no requested response, “did the United States take out the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline” in which the US representative did not confirm nor deny it and didn’t answer the question, but instead took an offensive posture. . . .

READ MORE AT THE NEW AMERICAN DIGEST 

The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River, she’s a-goin’ dry
The interest is up and the stock market’s down
And you only get mugged if you go downtown

I live back in the woods you see
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun, a rifle and a four-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive [continue reading…]

NASHVILLE, Oct. 4 — Loretta Lynn, the singer who rose from a hardscrabble upbringing to become the most significant female artist in country music history, died today at her home in Hurricane Mills. She was 90. [And she was beautiful every single day of all those 90 years. — GV]

Her last post on Facebook:

Yes, antisemitism is a clever virus and this shape-shifting is one of its oldest methods of perpetuating itself. Like other viruses currently feasting on humans, this one always has a pleasure principle associated with it. It feels good to get it and we live in the plague years of “If it feels good, do it.” Those whose moral immune systems have been previously compromised by other pleasure-born diseases have souls which are particularly susceptible to this virus.

The origin of the virus is unknown, but many suspect the area to be Bablyon and Sumur with an early leap across borders into Egypt. It was later transmitted through not-so-casual contact to much of the world by traders out of Northern Africa and the Roman Empire.

During the period following the fall of Rome, the virus found traction in early Christianity as a common carrier. In this host it thrived, and was able to survive and spread for many centuries. Of late, many parts of Christianity, now that it has become fragmented, have rejected the virus and those who host it, but strains of the virus can still be found at the center of many subsets of the Christian faith today.

Islam, of course, is the not-that-new major religion to not only host the virus, but to celebrate being infected with it, and to actively take measures to make sure that, within the body of Islam, the virus can thrive and expand. What to do about this new and virulent strain of the virus is something that is now consuming a great deal of the attention and treasure of Western Civilization. [continue reading…]

Yom Kippur observances with lyrics in translation continue here or at The New American Digest

“I’d rather have 10 years of super-hyper-most than live to be 70 by sitting in some goddam chair watching TV” — Janis Joplin

Me too, Janis, me too. But here we are again with you 52 years gone and me with my impossible TV playlists. Vaya con Dios,  Pearl. See you a little further down the road.

Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970), nicknamed “Pearl” Janis Joplin becomes the reigning goddess of the new hippie love generation at the Monterey Pop Festival, belting the blues epic “Ball and Chain” with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. A Texas girl relocated to San Francisco, Joplin is a nobody before she comes to Monterey, but she steals the show. In the Monterey Pop movie, you can see Mama Cass in the audience shake her head and say, ” Wooow ” – and that says it all.

Sitting down by my window
Honey, looking out at the rain
Lord, Lord, Lord, sitting down by my window
Baby, looking out at the rain
Something came along, grabbed a hold of me
And it felt just like a ball and chain

Long ago — in another lifetime — in another country — in another world — I knew Janis briefly. Very briefly. In person, she came across as a very small, very slight, very damaged soul who was, in the absence of alcohol, somewhat shy and painfully aware of her bad skin.

But when she stopped being Janis in her real life and became Pearl on stage, her pipes could and did cure the blues for millions. And then give them another dose.

Mad teenage Texas drove Janis down into the darkness. She never really climbed out.

Once the needle goes in, it never comes out. [continue reading…]

A minute holds them, who have come to go:
The self-defined, astride the created will
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither bird nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
— On the Move by Thom Gunn |

Bottom Line Bob – Founding Questions I’ve always thought of the blog as a kind of Leopard Lodge. A self-chosen community that also polices itself. You don’t have to be “sponsored” to join or anything like that, but it’s pretty obvious that there is an existing community, there are rules (albeit loose and informal ones), and so on. And I’m not talking FQ specifically here; I thought pretty much all blogs worked like that. At least, they were intended to, back in the days.

Kamala on Hurricane Ian relief:

The Biden administration will focus on “giving resources based on equity” by directing funds to “communities of color” pic.twitter.com/uixPpyQWdU

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 30, 2022

The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.” — Winston Churchill at MIT, 31 MARCH 1949

Pensioner “shot down £74,000,000 Russian jet over his home with antique rifle”™ Why the cost figure? And even assuming a 5 to 1 exchange rate, pounds to dollars (I have no idea what it really is), doesn’t $370,000 seem to be an absurdly low price tag for a modern military aircraft? Even a Russian one? In other words, every single thing about that article is a lie –but what is it designed to accomplish, because I promise you, students, it’s not there by accident. Lots of people got paid a lot of money to put that together and publish it. Who, and to what end?

Nordstream | The LawDog Files To quote an email from a petroleum engineer: “Holy Jesus, that [deleted] pipline is one hairy snowball from end-to-end!” It’s hundreds of millions of cubic metres of extremely flammable nay, ‘explosive ‘ gaseous hydrocarbons being transported by Russians, and subject to Russian maintenance. And I’m here to tell you that Russian maintenance under the current oligarchy system isn’t any better than it was under the Soviet system.

The triumph of the blank slate – by Ed West I know of top schools where guest speakers have come in and confidently stated that the sexual binary of men and women was invented by the Church — a completely crackpot idea. It would be like believing the laws of gravity are a patriarchal, heteronormative white supremacist concept and that gravity didn’t even exist until men invented it in the 18th century to uphold racism. . . . .

Much much more for members now published at The New American Digest. Please Join. Yes,  you can still join for free although the items available will be fewer than with a full membership.

The first new Stephen Cutts animation in two years. His attitude has not improved. Worth waiting for. See it now before the end of the world.

HappyAcres on Twitter: “The Streets of San Francisco 

Oh, yummmmmmmm! Served fresh from somewhere down in somebody’s pants! Pray they weren’t going commando.

“Women shop. Men resupply.”

When I worship at the Cathedral of Food ( “Whole Foods — Why Pay Less?”), I don’t buy meals, I buy components. I’ve lived alone for some time but buy like I’m supplying a small tribe. I’ve tried to control this by selecting the “little” cart; that grocery Miata that lets you believe you’re not really buying as much as you are. It doesn’t work. I come home, unpack my “kills” — at about $69 a bag — and mumble, “Who’s going to eat all this?”

Houseguests are the gods’ answer to “Who’s going to eat this?” They are. That’s okay. I love to cook for people. I’m good at it and it gets boring cooking for one; expensive too since I loathe leftovers.

The supply problems return when your house guests are stealth eaters. You know who I mean. Yes, you. Stealth eaters never, ever overeat — except on the sly. Stealth eaters are the Merrill’s Marauders of the post-midnight refrigerator.

Ordinary stealth eaters can be contained. The damage done by their pillage is apparent. You had half of a banana cream pie in the frig at sunset but by dawn, it is gone. Vanished. Evaporated. Kaput. Never to be heard from again. Not so much as a ransom note, just a crumpled tin husk folded and stuffed down the side of the garbage bag beneath the camouflage of a crumpled milk carton.

Not pleasing, especially when you were planning on banana cream pie for breakfast. Still, you suck up your sorrow, move on, and resupply.

Not so with the worst sort of stealth eater — the dreaded food eroder.

The food eroder wishes to eat but not be seen eating nor to be known to have eaten. The food eroder is so stealthy he or she can even conceal their eating from themselves. The food eroder can make your entire refrigerator into a Potemkin village where you think you have a LOT of food, but actually have almost none. A food eroder deals in cuisine disinformation.

Case in point:

Some weeks back I had a house guest. This houseguest was a very careful eater — someone cognizant of the fine points of nutrition; someone who knew the calories in a twice-baked potato down to the last bacon bit swimming in a buttered slough of sour cream. This nameless but shameless someone also had a finely tuned economic indicator and never met a leftover that was not loved, caressed, and consumed — even when the original meal was lost to recorded history.

I once had a kind of grudging respect for this guest who was much more disciplined about food than I could ever hope to be. But that was before I discovered — after the guest’s departure — that I had been sharing my home and sacred refrigerator with a food eroder, a late-night Ninja nibbler. [continue reading…]

Poet. Teacher. Mentor.

My Sad Captains
by Thom Gunn

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

Thom (Thomson) William Gunn, poet, born August 29 1929; died April 25 2004….

======

No. Wait. Do not go.

[ 1929-2004] A bracket of dates and life moves forward. If we were like the beasts that we keep that would be the whole of it. But we move forward carrying the past with us. It is true that age and the ever-spiraling cascade of experience force us to discard large files of memory along the way, but if we are wise we keep those memories that sustain us and let the rest pass.

It is 1967 and I’m living with six other crazed young artists and hipsters in The Green House off Telegraph south of UC Berkeley.

The Green House was not a special place for the time. It was, in that time and in that place, ordinary. The most ordinary place in the world. If the Green House was neither real nor natural, it was fraught with a strange excitement, fecund with endless possibility. It was built of a metaphysic so loose that the most absurd accident could happen and it would only be a part of the Grand Design. It was a place where revelation and prophecy were daily events, the Second Coming scheduled for tomorrow after lunch, magic considered merely another, older branch of science, poetry an acceptable mode of speech, and caricature a widely appreciated attitude. As far as we know Rasputin, William Blake, St. Teresa, and Walt Whitman had never lived in The Green House, but they would have been welcome if they had wandered in.

1967: Because there’s a war on, I’m trying to stay in school. But because there’s a war on I’m trying to leave school. I’m also trying to become a poet for reasons that are now obscure other than it seemed like ‘a good idea at the time.’ Off the kitchen in The Green House is a small mud room with a screened window. Nasturtium and morning glories have twined across the screen and late into the night I sit scribbling and typing one attempt at poetry after another only to abandon most of them at first light. Dawn always reveals a small pool of crumpled sheets filled with errors, false starts, bad endings, failed metaphors, forced similies — all the detritus of … [continue reading…]

“Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing (won’t be nothing)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned
The order of the soul”
— L. Cohen

Lizzo plays James Madison’s crystal flute: NPR
Delicately, I trust.

Already being front-loaded at near hurricane strength into the barrels of media bluster and blather will be the endless “Maria” stories aimed at denigrating and damaging Governor DeSantis. Within the next three days, the flood-sodden Maria stories will be pumped out of a hundred media outlets to be immediately replicated by ten thousand Twitterbots in an intense round of retweeting autofellatio. The aptly named headlines will all be a variation of “Papertowel DeSantis! Worse Than Trump!” Marias will come swarming out of the low-lying poor Florida neighborhoods like Bill Burr’s “epidemic of gold-digging whores.”

Once upon a time, I had an intimate relationship in which I learned in pillow talk what went on in story conferences at the New York clone of NPR. In these Sancta Sanctorum meetings, one was often asked if the morning story line-up could be juiced up with a “Maria Story.”

The “Maria Story” was a handcrafted piece of journalistic lying through dramaturgy. The assigned journalist –who knew what was expected of him– visited one of his minority harems of (mostly) women who excelled at projecting a quiet dignity shining through their grave situation. These “assets” as it were had mastered the art of faking sincerity so the rest came easy; especially the standard “Maria Story” situation. This situation could be of the every suffering Maria who was turned back at the Rio Grande after attempting to swim across while pushing her paraplegic autistic daughter on a reed raft. Handmaid. . . .

Read the rest over at The New American Digest