Celtic Thunder

Uh, okay.

"Over the past six months we have filtered out those businesses that want to be good neighbors and those that did not wish to operate legitimate businesses," Fenty said in a statement. "We will continue to monitor our neighborhoods and economic corridors to ensure these illegal businesses open shop in the District again."

D.C.'s used car lot crackdown picks up

Ixnay on that Star Spangled Banner

It seems that academia thinks love of one's country over someone else's is a bad thing. How else to interpret this?

They wanted to see if the songs created a pro-social or an anti-social response. He said the preliminary findings showed that the patriotic songs had a negative effect on the participants, as shown through their responses to the survey's questions about other cultures and diversity. The patriotic songs made the participants close-minded and prejudiced. "Once they were in a patriotic point of view, they were less empathetic," Alvarado said. "They didn't put themselves in other people's perspective." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090625115237.htm

How is empathizing with North Korea and Iran working so far?

Love for sale

Postal service: Worker stole $20,000 in stamps for mortgage

---

"Pssst.  Hey, you...come over here."
"What? What do you want?  Are you selling something?"
"Yeah.  Hey, listen, I got half-priced love."
"Half-price?  How much you got?"
"A hunnert dollars worth for fifty bucks."
"What kind of love?"
"Well, it's like you won't have to lick 'em."
"I really hadn't planned on licking them..."
"All you have to do is peel 'em and stick 'em."
"Oooo!   I like that.  Where are they?"
"I got 'em right here."
"That's just a roll of stamps."
"Yeah, but hey, they're LOVE stamps."
"Say, aren't you my mailman?"
"It's the haircut.  Everybody thinks I'm their mailman.  Well, I'm outta here."
"Bye now. Dang...that's some haircut..."

Blah blah, blah-blah [John Derbyshire]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWU5MzlkZjUzMGMxMzczYjBjMzJlYmIwOTY5YjczNTk=
Monday, May 11, 2009
Blah blah, blah-blah  [John Derbyshire]

Blah blah-ah blah blah, blah - blah blah. Blah, blah-blah-blah, blah!  Blah.

Blah-blah, blah/blah, blah blah-blah blah blah.

    The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list.

Blah-blah blah blah (blah) blah, blah.  Blah blah; blah.

[Occasionally, the internet inadvertently leaks out something profound.]

Buck Up

.

Buck Up

Pirates, hackers and suicide bombers,
you're not even safe at home.
They'll come down the intertubes --
snatch all your data, or blow up
your tour group in Rome.

What good is having a Defense Department
with wide open borders and sky?
If the suitcase nukes or swine flu don't getcha,
they'll serve up  a new way to die.

So rattle your cage bars, trade 'safety' for freedom,
keep terror  from clouding your day.
'Cause just like the cops, fedguv will tell you,
"When it comes down to seconds, we're only minutes away!"

Hillary Reminisces

Bill or Vince?

"Bring me fraud's head on a platter!"

.

Writing on physicist fraud:

"Science was corrected in the Schön case, but not by itself – only because individual scientists made corrections. From would-be replicators in dozens of labs to many sceptics, only a couple of researchers were transformed into whistle-blowers by the unlikely pattern of [duplicated] evidence."

Reich continues, "Fraud was able to stifle questions about Schön's lab technique that would otherwise have been asked, and to turn review processes at journals into opportunities for additional fabrication. Other scientists' support of the fraud was unwitting, but the decision to place so much trust in a colleague was a conscious rationalisation that continues to be defended in science to this day."

Who is this fraud, and why is he stifling me? Even Reich, it seems, must lapse into passive aggression. How could so many be fooled for so long? As Family Circus would say, "Beats me. Not me. I dunno."

It isn't the first time gobbledy-gook cooked books have been taken for gospel. Won't be the last. Still, it self-corrects sooner or later. There's that.

Things you might see at Felony Frank's

.

"Felony Franks is Jim Andrews' new hot dog stand, currently under construction on a busy West Side corner, decorated with freshly painted wieners donning prison garb and a ball and chain, proclaiming "food so good it's criminal."

"Our cooks went to Screw U."
"Do you want to fry with that?"
Try our Diet Dog. It's lite without possibility of a roll.
Your hotdog is free if the cashier doesn't shank you.
Please count your change carefully. We need time to molest your woman.
Employees must wipe their shivs before returning to the service line.
Don't like mustard?  No problem.
Don't like relish?  No problem.
Don't like serial rapists?  We got a problem.
Do not accept hot dogs from server's lap.

Resumé or rap sheet?

The NYT has this to say of Jennifer M. Granholm as a prospect to replace Souter on the USSC:

Jennifer M. Granholm is governor of Michigan and has served as a federal prosecutor and the state's attorney general. 

She stood in for Sarah Palin to help Joseph R. BIden Jr. prepare for the vice-presidential debate last fall.  Which qualifies her as what, exactly?

She has practical experience as a hands-on politician... And we want that in a judge?

 ...in dealing with the ailing auto industry, the state's budget woes and the troubled city of Detroit. Three dismal failures.

---

Would you hire this applicant?

H/T Neptunus Lex

I can't even afford to dress poor

.

Is this Poverty Chic?  I see it as paying a substantial premium for clothing that looks like it came from the local Scratch 'N' Sniff factory-seconds store. 

This dressed-up dressing down is only successful, though, when everyone knows you're doing it.   The point is to show solidarity with people who can't eat and buy $500 canvas spads while refusing to live like one .

Absent the press pointing out your faux thriftiness, as opposed to castigating the governor of Alaska for doing the real thing, and without the same press being a weather vane of Obama vanity, the mini-theater to be had of it all would devolve into wondering how a society in the throes of economic alarmism nonetheless finds time and money for such conceit.

New York, New York

New York City police have begun handing out small cards telling people why they were stopped and searched on city streets.

"Why did you stop me, officer?"
"It's part of our positive reinforcement program."
"What do you mean?"
"I found you doing something good.  You stopped when the 'don't walk' signal came on."
"So, what was frisking me all about, then?"
"Checking you for lumps.  Cancer, you know."
"And these handcuffs?"
"It's just a precaution."
"So what's the positive reinforcement?"
"I'm positive I"ll have some reinforcement in a minute.  Then we're going to kick your ass.  This is New York, you know."
"It's a hell of a town."
"It sure is.  Now get up against the car."

And he deserves to get it, good and hard.

.

"When you jam something down somebody's throat, it's not sustainable," [Democratic Senator Max] Baucus told reporters. "And I want something that will last."

Paging Barney Frank...

Hillary Sets Iraq Aright

"I think that these suicide bombings … are unfortunately, in a tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction," Clinton told reporters aboard her plane.

"So, madam Secretary, you're saying the killing of over 150 people is a good sign?"
"Good in a tragic way, yes."
"And the nature of your committment is to pull out?"
"Yes. We are committed to being gone."
"And if the number of combat troops turns out to be inversely proportional to the suicide attacks in the country, resulting in all-out civil war as the last American soldier leaves, this is the ultimate symbol that Iraq is moving in the right direction?"
"Well, I... yes, I guess that follows."
"So, good means tragic, committed means to leave, and war is the right direction?"
"Yes. I know this is difficult to grasp, but it's a major principle of diplomacy. It's called Catch-22."
"That's quite a catch, madam Secretary."
"It's the best there is."

Sanctuary Mulch

.

*Sanctuary Mulch*

Across the street at a house for sale,
they're putting down new sodded turf.
I wish my last layer of life could be scraped
and topped with such custom made stuff.

Here on my own lot I have to be careful
at Chemlawn's herbicide call,
'cause if it wasn't for evergreen weeds,
I'd have little front lawn at all.

No soap, radio. No sale, either.

.

Progressives lack a Limbaugh-like voice

Those poor progressive babies. They have TV and the print media entanked for their vacuous, stammering "communicator" while taking money from the rest of us to fund NPR and CPB, virtual vassals of liberalism. Seemingly unable to flip from AM to FM radio, or even change the station to nontalk radio, they subsume their San Francisky selves to a quasi-North Korean state of forced listening, ears no doubt propped open in a Clockwork Orange fashion where listening becomes unavoidable, to mind-altering "words."

Now, I don't envy their having to listen to Michael Savage, who has for years been about two quarts low, but I don't see where it's had much effect on the voting habits of Pelosi's Pals of the Saddle. And Rush Limbaugh failed to keep two branches of federal govt from falling into the hands of the Kommie-krazies.

All this is normal. It is how words work. And the right-wing message machine has found a way to take advantage of it - activating, as it were, a conservative system of thought.

Note well the choice of "activating" instead of "creating." You activate something that is already in place, that has already been created. Even the cognitive professor from Berkley is forced to admit, and this man makes a living from "words," that many people are innately conservative without understanding the underpinnings of it. They don't naturally believe that someone else owns them or is entitled to fruits of their labor. It is only through the droning adulation of liberal media that the grossly underqualified child of the Chicago machine came to rest on the laurels of this unfortunate nation.

When the French, for god's sake, can see the emperor is buck naked, and to see that without the benefit of talk radio, even the Birkenstocked bimbos of Berkeley must eventually succumb to what their own ears tell them. Blaming it on AM radio is looking like a cry for help.

Wisdom for poetry month

.

A shining lamp, you pierce the fog who
sees yourself as others blog you.

Obama meets the Queen

.

Obama -- "Here's a picture of you, for you."
Queen -- "And here's another picture of me, for you."
Obama -- "I'm thrilled."
Queen -- "We're amused."

Grapes of Wrath Reloaded

"I'm goin' to California, Ma."
"But who'll take care o' you, boy?"
"The governator, Ma. He's goin' to put us up at the State Fair."
"Well, I swan. Whatcha gonna do there, boy?"
"I hear there's mountains o' dope that need smokin', Ma."
"Well, I swan."

Oddly, doing more of what fails, still fails

.

The latest group to call for the prospect of legalizing narcotics is El Paso's City Council.

Out in the west Texas town of El Paso,
they wrote a request to legalize drugs.
"Hell, no!" the Mayor said, "Not in this lifetime.
"Dudes getting high? I'll take Mexican thugs."

Meanwhile, the prisons are swelling with stoners,
while usage continues untrammeled somehow.
Odd how it took a full blown Amendment
to bring Prohibition, but not so much now.

So at last, here I am in El Paso,
watching the border through hotel window.
Drugs and illegals pour through it unhindered,
cash heading back to poor doomed Mexico.

Not so far from Teapot Dome

.

In the Teapot Dome matter of the 1920s, Senator Albert Fall was convicted of receiving a bribe of $100,000 that multimillionaire oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny were cleared of giving.

In our more enlightened age ---

From Wiki:

Smith v. United States, 508 U.S. 223 (1993), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that the exchange a gun for drugs constituted "use" of the firearm for purposes of a federal statute imposing penalties for "use" of a firearm "during and in relation to" a drug trafficking crime.

In Watson v. United States, 128 S.Ct. 697 (2007) the court later decided that a transaction in the opposite direction does not violate the same statute (i.e., Smith holds that one "uses" a gun by giving it in exchange for drugs, but Watson holds that one does not "use" a gun by receiving it in exchange for drugs).

Hollywood slips one over on Obama

Richard Gere Starring in
An officer and a Lentilman

Obama, lost for words

.

If Obama gets a double case of the pink eye and can't read for a while,
does Joe Biden automatically take over?

Does inability to speak extemporaneously qualify for parking in handicap spaces?

Mel Tillis was unable to speak without stuttering unless he sang.
If a teleprompter dies during the next SOTU address,
will Obama turn the speech into musical comedy?

Will Obama's next press give & take be limited to twittering?

When Obama answers the phone, how far past "Hello" can he get?

Gridiron singed by Obama no-show

“I don’t think [Obama] understands the implications of not coming to the [press] club in the first year. It’s not your ordinary state dinner. I think [the Gridiron dinner] would be helpful for him and his relations with the Washington establishment to come to the club.” Politico

So then, there are degrees of adoration?
I'm so sorry to be hearing that.
If adoration isn't quanticized,
a modern Moses taxed with getting media
back to the frontage road of objectivity
has a long, long journey ahead of him,
with no epiphanies, just the steady
grind of backfilling, denial, and amnesia.

No Soup for You

"I can hock a loogie into the soup before you can stop me."
"Hock a loogie? Right here? In my dumpling chicken broth?"
"Yeah. Actually, I already did."
"Get outta here!"
"Yep. That's not a dumpling."
"How would you like a job at the White House?"
"Sorry, I got tax problems."
"Shoot."

The Earth Drive-In

.

Here in our suburban spiral arm,
we watch star-draped archer Sagittarius,
his bow drawn, bolt aimed into the galactic heart.
He never releases since firing the arrow
that punched a black hole Downtown.
The back rows of the cosmic drive-in are rustic
but we get some hot smoochies
and a jones for the coming attractions.

P & P

.

He would consider the rain as it approached,
watch the storm clouds gather, the searchlights
of sun piercing purple clouds and turning the fields
to strobe-light, elf-light emerald.

He sat waiting for the rain to reach him and wet him,
the wind to knock him about. Until it did,
he sat untroubled, like a beast.

Then he got up and opened the meeting house door
with the seven-inch iron key that lived under a stone,
and plodded about inside maybe sweeping around a bit
with the broom that lay under the benches.

He looked out for cobwebs, trapped butterflies, signs of damp.
Accumulated silence breathed from the building,
wafted out on to the fell, swam in again in tides.
Silence was at the root of Charlie's life.

---Jane Gardam, The Meeting House, 1994. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories

Economics, the optional science

.

Schwarzenegger to Stimulus Opponents: Economy More Important Than Principles

In other news, the Governator announced at the conference of the California Education Association in Chula Vista Friday night that math textbooks in the California school system and state college consortia will be altered to reflect a value for Pi of 3.

"It is more important that our children be able to calculate easily than having to deal with a nonrepeating, neverending mess of digits such as 3.14159265OMG!!#WTF. You get the picture," the governor said. "We can't afford useless precision anymore."

When Peggy got Cutting Edge

.

"This is so exciting," [Peggy Noonan] wrote to a friend. "I am on an airplane going over the Rockies. I am sending you an email. Down there the settlers went in covered wagons.

I remember that feeling. Only it wasn't email. I was on a plane headed to Hartford, Connecticut from Santa Clara, California for a corporate meeting with some other folks employed by Konica. The airplane seatback in front of me had one of those credit card telephones on it. Thinking how cool it would be, I called back to the lab in Santa Clara and asked to speak to Denise, my departmental second-in-command.

"Konica Quality Photo, how may I help you?"
"This is Gary. I'd like to speak to Denise, please."
"One moment, please."
And she put me on hold.
For five minutes.

That damned phone call cost me twelve dollars.
Denise was impressed.

"Overturn Roe v Wade," he said. "Let the states decide."

.

What is purportedly being defended here is the right of state government to control the terms of a woman's pregnancy rather than having the federal government dictate it. Let's carry the delegation of power further and see how it looks.

Let's say abortion becomes not just a state, but a local matter. The mayor and city council would decide if it is legal. But wait, as the infomercials tells us, "there's more!" Let's make the decision of whether abortion is legal a neighborhood matter. That's right. Something like Neighborhood Crime Watch would be set up to decide if pregnant women in the neighborhood can have abortions done. A Preggers Block Warden would monitor the gals in the 'hood to make sure they delivered their babies or not. Now, that's local control. It's also reminiscent of some totalitarian ghetto.

Yet all we have done is to delegate beyond the federal-state threshold. It's funny how the problem lights up the closer it gets to home. But it's exactly the same. Government was not created to exercise dominion over a woman's womb. Not at any level.

Everything I need to know, I learned in shop class

.

One of my favorite engineering-type
axioms came into play when tagging
some jury-rigged functional monstrosity
as being "the triumph of spare parts
over common sense."

That describes the generational theft act,
only the parts aren't all spare. Many will
be taken off of equipment that puts
them to better use while disabling
the ability to repair what works now
when it breaks.

What's being kicked down the road
is bigger than a can and growing by the day.

Pelosi Goes Poping

.

"Hey, lady, ssst! Hey, come over here."
"What? You talkin' tah me?"
"Hey, yeah. Look, I sella you some tickets, you get audience with da Pope."
"Don't you recognize me? I'm the House Speaker."
"Hey, yeah, listen, I'ma the spic inna my house, too. You wanna tickets or not?"
"Well, I..."
"I give 'em to you cheap. Say, whattsamattuh you face?"
"What do you mean?"
"Issa all, I dunno, stretched like-uh cheap skin job."
"You mean, like, I'm a Cylon?"
"Whassa Cylon?"
"You don't get Battlestar Galactica?"
"Hey, if it's inna da Vatican, I getta you in."

Because you can't get enough

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Up stairs and down stairs in his night-gown,
Tapping at the window, crying at the lock,
"Are the children in their bed, for it's past ten o'clock?"

Once he's assured himself all the eyes are shut,
Winkie wends his way back to his quonset hut.
Logging onto porn sites, he whiles the night away,
Eating Cheetos, whacking Willie, 'til the break of day.

But wait, there's more

And now for the rest of the fable...

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many children she didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread,
Then whipped them all soundly
And put them to bed.

The children, enduring such shoe-full abuse,
Found Child Protection a sadist's excuse.
They formed a committee and upstairs they crept
To her room where they slit
Her throat while she slept.

_________________

As I was walkin' up the stair,
I saw a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh how I wish he'd go away.

But when I am reminded that
I live in a one-story flat,
Then climbing stairs that don't exist
Means more work for my therapist.

_________________

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

The owner of the well-topped hill
When sued by Jack's HMO,
Was asked how it was he chose to drill
So high, not down below.

The answer wasn't good enough
And the judge ruled drastically.
Now Jack and Jill own all his stuff
In perpetuity.

_________________

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

You see, the reason I'm contrary,
A narc's among my employees.
As soon as those damned maids are gone
We'll smoke some chronic weed.

_________________

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.
Toss it in the microwave, ten minutes high,
Listen for the pot to crack, smell the porridge fry.
See the windowed door blow out, watch the gooey foam,
Won't this be a funny sight for mom when she gets home?

_________________

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat played the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

"You rub the wrong way!"
Screamed the put-upon spoon,
As the chafing dish fled out the door.
The little dog laughed, crapped on the couch,
And piddled a pond on the floor.
The cat's music stopped on learning that cat gut
Gives violins their punch.
And the cow came back from circling the moon
Vacuum-dried, par-broiled, and lunch.

The doctor is so out, he's in, man.

Q: So, you're a brain surgeon?
A: Yes, I do.
Q: Uh, so you do brain surgery?
A: Yes, I am.
Q: Well, whichever is correct. Where do you practice?
A: I don't practice, man. I got it down pat.
Q: I mean, where do you operate?
A: Out of my kitchen.
Q: You do brain surgery in your kitchen!!??!
A: Cool it, man, I ain't got no license.
Q: I imagine not. What do you do for a living?
A: I play trumpet in Detroit for Jimmy Lunsford.
Q: Jimmy Lunsford's dead.
A: He is? I'm gonna have to quit bugging that cat for a raise.
Q: So what else do you do?
A: I play trumpet for Jimmy Lunsford in Chicago.
Q: I just told you, Jimmy Lunsford's dead!
A: There, too?

The Posse

The Posse

In hot pursuit, bent low, we rode mounted,
Broke cold mountain sunlight, brittle as glass.
Down wind-scraped desert, we burst from the foothills,
Stood anvil-head hailstorms that strafed the stiff grass.

But rapier yucca leaves soon blocked the way
And thorny black greasewood disrupted the chase.
Then fly-swarms and cacti unhinged the horses.
There'd be no rough justice, just us in disgrace.

You can't beat people up and have them say, "I love you."

One Time Only

Free Download

"You can't beat people up and have them say, "I love you."
click here.

Just wanted to say this is a truly terrific lp. It represents a sort of '50s hipster take on hippies, but like his contemporary George Carlin, this is pot-smoking humor at its stoniest. This is actually a very weird cut-up album that includes a Roman stage performance collaged into a lot of stoney sounds and cool r&b. A real find, dig it.

..........................

You Can't Beat People Up was the first album to be released on the Tetragrammaton label, a wildly ambitious concern formed by the managerial minds behind Tiny Tim and Bill Cosby (and later to hit paydirt with early Deep Purple); and Murray Roman was Keith Moon's favorite comedian, a celebrity endorsement that his brand of rapid-fire rudeness was surely born to revel in. And it did.

Today, Roman's distinctly Lenny Bruce-esque dismantling of Vietnam-era Americana resonates more for its shock value than for its original humor. Revived for a modern audience, several of his routines would probably result in him getting stoned, and decidedly not in the manner that his own jokes proscribe. Sex, drugs, rock & roll, war, and schlock all fall into the Roman mill, to be ground up and rapid-fired back at the live onlookers and, if his topics do occasionally seem dated, at the time they slipped effortlessly into the countercultural milieu.

Bart hits puberty

.

Bart: Dad, I need to borrow your shaver.
Homer: Oh, my boy's growing up! Wait a minute... I don't see any whiskers.
Bart: It's not whiskers. I've got...
Marge: Chest hair. You don't shave that, Bart.
Bart: [Groans] Nooo, ooooh, I've got...
Lisa: Bart's got pubes. Bart's got pubes!
Maggie: Squeak-koo!!
Homer: Pubes? Is that like a water slide? Woo hoo!!
Bart: I wish I'd never been drawn.

The drugged-out sixties recalled

.

I remember those days... when Frank Zappa was not only completely intelligible, but was speaking to me directly during the six o'clock news.

"There was a trolley-car accident today in Saigon," he melted.

Babwa on Babawa

Streisand writes: “I am fearful that this Republican opposition is really about pushing back on the Obama administration and testing the waters for future judicial confirmation fights…

"Babawa Stweisand we-veauhed some new powiticaw swogans today. She intwohduced "pushing back" and "testing the watuhs" to a new genuhwation.
Seecwit insiduhs specuwate she is getting weady to spwing "weaching out" on us soon. And that's today's Babawa Watch; I'm youh host, Babwa Wawters."

And that's the name of that tune.

.

"It's a moot point. The Republicans haven't been listening to me, anyway." -- Rush Limbaugh

"Can I have a goldfish, now?" --- Carol Anne, Poltergeist

Joe Biden -- Coal Miner's Daughter

.

The thing I love about Vice President Joe Biden crystalized with the realization that when he assumed the coal-miner biography of Neil Kinnock, he wasn't lying so much as misremembering. That's totally awesome.

Existential Rhythms

.

Existential Rhythms

The question first occurred to me when I was maybe four,
Playing toy Injuns on our Diné hogan floor.
"Momma how did we get here? I don't understand."
She said to talk to Wolf-eye Joe, the village med'cine man.

But Wolf-eye's stories cannot be:
I laughed until I cried.

In later years I wandered off to Flagstaff on a whim
And asked a pale-face friend named Bob what tales had come to him.
The white man's magic litany of woe and ancient grace
Looked a lot like wishful thought, I told Bob to his face.

And he took up my search with me:
We laughed, we thought we'd die.

So Bob and I made steep ascent up yonder distant slope,
And happened by the real old guy who works the telescope.
He let us look eons away, to every time and whence.
"There you be," says he and I've been scared stiff ever since.

But there's no going back, you see.
We laughed until we pryed.

Even a Single Raindrop

.

Even a single raindrop
Assembled on some parched mote,
Jazzing with orphaned electrons,
Shrugging a dewy coat,
Buffeted barely coherent,
Grasping molecular staves,
Even a single rain
                             dro
                                 p

                                 m

                                 a

                                 k

                                 e

                                 s

 waves               waves          waves       

Continuity

.

Continuity

Now, Binky was a problem chick
Who hatched when the lice were low.
She flopped right out of the nest that night;
Her mom ne'er saw her go.

She managed to grow up free of louse,
A shocking turn of fate,
But got back in the itch of things
From Chip, her lousy mate.

Sometimes, though, when the flock hangs out
And sings of bug and tree,
Binky regales her chirpy pals
With tales they scarce believe.

"There's a way of life -- of lice bereft,"
She tells them, hopelessly,
For most infected in the nest
Think itching's meant to be.

And thus do wild unlikely things
Endure to grip the mind.
Our kids shall have our parasites
And theirs they'll have in kind.

The Declaration of Dependence

.

It's generational theft.
But we've come to believe that we have
consequenceless rights,
among them the rights to life (comfortable),
liberty (to succeed, but not fail),
and the pursuit of happiness (subsidized).

It's the Declaration of Dependence.

Choked on a chick pea

.

Ever watch a birkenstocker with the flu? Perfectly meticulous, carefully dosing the prescribed medication at the prescribed intervals with a gimlet eye on the latest in thermometer technology.

Later, at the smoke-in, gobbling down shrooms, Mexican 'ludes, and the contents of the host's medicine cabinet, testing for effect, medical acumen sacrificed for treatment by whatever-you-got.

How different is that from a nation electing a president who shrouds his academic trail in secrecy while his job-critical birth certificate remains under lock and lei? We gobble all that down then come up lame because the oath of office got hiccuped, not malapropped into the Hudson River.

We'd swallow a turkey while choking on a chick pea.

A few words about balls

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We, as a nation, should not view the inaugural festivities as high school musical for ugly people but rather let us rejoice in what it is ... the peaceful transfer of talking points.

Afro-Africans --- not black enough?

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Obama, to his credit, has never fed into this. He wants to be judged on his socialistic policies not on his color.

I wonder how much of it has to do with not being reared in the victim-mongering culture of black America. Obama's life experience is not ghetto-class, but truly foreign. He has a different baggage. I imagine Michelle tried to bring him up to whitey-hating code and Rev Wright certainly laid the woe-is-us on him, but it doesn't seem to have stuck.

Obama Believer

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To the tune of I'm a Believer.

Obama Believer

I thought life was sleeping on a waterbed,
Tattooed, pierced and studded like a freak.
Bush was out to get me,
Fired from the boutique,
Unemployed and living week to week.

Then I saw his face, now I'm a believer
Hope and change is my attitude.
I'm in love, Oooh---bama-believer!
Underachiever? No more, dude.

ACORN helped me vote about a dozen times,
You'd think the more you vote, the more you'd get.
I ended up with Hill'ry!
Foggy Bottom that!
Centrist cab'net picking with no vet!

So don't buy the farm, Obama-believers,
Barack's no diamond in the rough.
Savor your love, Oooh---bama-believers!
You could be grieving soon enough.

First snow

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First snow

What stuff is this? the pony called,
that whites me up to turn me bald,
that tickles, trickles down warm ears?
that rides the wind as cold as fear.

The fence that kept the wolves at bay
I'd faith leap o'er to get away
now binds me here in my alarm.
There's no cold comfort on this farm.

Canadians out of tune with the times

An American education professor, one of the founders of a radical 1960s group known as the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings in the United States in the early 1970s, was turned back at the Canadian border last night.

Canadians see Ayers as a terrorist, something his own country declines to acknowledge.

Ah, but that was long ago,
And now our inclinations
Define terrorism down.

Who's your mammy?

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African-Americans may be surprised when they find that Obama is a Kenyan-Indo-American who shares neither their plantation mentality nor, as do not the successful Haitian communities in Florida, their sense of entitlement. This could get very interesting ... and painful for Obama who sleeps, after all, with a rich victim of god-damned America.

The Government We Deserve

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Literary elite dazzled by their own creation
The Australian

Hertzberg recalled one half of Lincoln's old saying, to the effect that you can fool some of the people all of the time. "We now know how many 'some' is," he added, "27 per cent. That's the proportion of Americans who cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job.

[...]

Never mind that Barack Obama makes no claims to academic excellence or that his eloquence was drilled into him, not in ivy-clad college debating chambers, but out of the tempestuous sermons of his Chicago pastor. People will invent for themselves the politicians they want to have (or to hate).

Aye, Poppy

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¶And the Lord spake, saying, "Why punisheth thou my vegetation so?"

¶And the people said, "Yea, Lord, some guy might get high."

¶And the Lord said, "Is it worth all the caterwauling? We're trying to sleep up here."

¶And the people were sore perplexed... the ones that weren't high, anyway.

On the matter of a paparazzi presidency

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The danger here for Obama is close and at hand. Presidential celebrity becomes parody the instant his 'fans' are traduced. Disappointing the enamored is the nature of presidency, and the spin-around from worship to mockery is done on a dime. It leverages down as quickly as it leveraged up. All the king's horses and all the king's media will struggle mightily, only making matters worse. Have popcorn handy.

Emulate help, not hope

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Obama: Americans must emulate courage of founders

I love that, in a cringing yet metamessage way. Emulations, of course, are reasonable facsimiles of other goods. What we have here is a variation on the peculiar tendency of liberals to sap meaning from concepts for fear, I'm snidely assuming, that what is below the surface is too unsavory to expose all at once.

Remember the 1996 Democratic convention mantra of "Hope is on the way?" Examined for what it is, "Hope is on the way," means that somewhere down the road, as Clarence Darrow told the judge at the Scope monkey trials when the judge said he hoped Darrow wasn't impugning the honor of the court, "one is entitled to hope."

It's not even a thin gruel; it's hope of gruel to come. Thus do expectations get lowered and agendae covered with mush.

In the case at hand, we are asked to pretend-up the courage of people whose problems were several degrees from ours, people whose worldview we so dilute with the paralysis of dependence, down looks like up.

We need our own version of courage, a version of return to individualism, liberty, and making-do without benefit of our neighbor's pocket (or, even more despicable his credit card, or -- the height of self-indulgence -- the already maxed-out credit cards of generations unborn). Too big to fail? Don't assume the US government is, because the assumption alone can lead to the fall.

Emulate, not the founders, but the pioneers. They learned how to survive without bailouts.

Chauncey had it

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It's astonishing. While the potted plants for Bush, if not to say 'bots', remain rooted in intransigent manichean fury that anything Obama does must, by nature, be sinful and unclean because Bush 'kept us safe,' ergo, anythlng he did was, by nature, immaculately conceived, if not always ascension-worthy, the rest of the electorate sees that beyond the blight at the end of the funnel, per Chauncey Gardener in Being There, things might not be all that bad in the garden. It's too early to know, but from where I sit, "I like to watch."

MoDo wraps Dick

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"Even on his way out, Vice is still on top."

The elderly schoolgirl,
having constructed a straw man,
has very dry sex with it,
tells it she's not that kind of girl,
later complains that it
never calls,
never writes.

Elmer Gantry adds to the flock

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With 'Guilty', Coulter Is the Rush Limbaugh of Conservative Authors---Human Events

Ann Coulter is a master of over-the-top bombastic huckstery which, if it's coming from the starboard side of the political spectrum, Human Events is inclined to swallow as uncritically as hippies sharing prescriptions. The ever-trusting sluggard meets his guiding star. "Tell me again about the rabbits, George."

It's a Gas!

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Some silly co-worker of mine (obviously female) asked if a manly fart were the sign of stomach problems. I explained to her the meaning of "recreation."

The Socon Manifesto -- No-fault divorce? Internet? Not for you.

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Those who cast their ballots last November on the basis of "moral values" may have had more in mind than just same-sex marriage, which is neither the only threat to marriage nor even the most serious. To truly reverse the decline of the family, the momentum must be carried forward to confront the others. And eventually we must grasp a painful nettle: The most direct threat to the family is divorce on demand. Sooner or later, if civilization is to endure, it must be brought under control.

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While no-fault divorce laws are certainly the catalyst for the destruction of the family, I believe that the internet is the next biggest enemy of the family, if it is not already here. P*rn online, on demand, meeting people online to have affairs with, on and on...sure these things always existed, but now there are no barriers against them.

Pop a what?

A trail of popcorn on New Year's Day led Sacramento police to a man wanted on a warrant, authorities said.

"Hey, yo, baby-momma! I be here to pop a corn in yo' ass."
"It's not 'pop a corn' you nappy-headed idiot, it's 'pop a cap.'"
"What? Sheeit. It look like most o' the popcorn done spilled out anyway."
"Does this mean I'm safe?"
"Until I be stealing some caps, I s'pose so. Get de door, will ya?"