And more here, at “The Tainted Archive” – one-stop shopping for all fans of traditional westerns … which the Adelsverein Trilogy is, sort of, if you bend down and squint at it sideways.
Reminder – Wild West Monday is Coming!
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Monthly Archives: February 2009
Taken as guy fantasy
We saw Taken last night. My wife’s review?
The movie was very good and kept us on the edge of our seat. It was great to see a parent be able to beat up a slew of bad guys and save his daughter, although it was a bit disconcerting to see he wasn’t the least bit concerned with other people’s daughters and their safe return. You’d think someone that had lost his little girl would have had a bit more compassion, but hey, he saved his girl and it was great.
It is a kick-ass movie, oh yes.
Thought the First. It wasn’t, I think, that he was unconcerned about the girls, but that Liam Neeson’s character is a guy. A guy on a mission. A guy who is focused. He’s got a job to do and not a whole lot of time to do it in. This is, I think, a very guy kind of a trait and very much who the character was.
Thought the Second. There is a scene where he is talking with some Bad Men – and from their actions he is not a guy speaking English but a guy speaking French so well that they think he is a Parisian cop.
Which probably meant that he and they were speaking French. Fine, the part of me that is good at ignoring dumb stuff can handle it.
But oh, Hollywood, how you vex me! I and about 100% of the public would have been fine with Neeson breaking out the Francais and cluing us in with sub-titles. We can handle it.
Final Thought. This is very much a fantasy movie for realistic down-to-earth guys in the way that Anita Blake is smut for gals from the Midwest who would not dream of looking at the naughty stuff.
The bad guys are messing with his baby. There is no time for police or the authorities and the only thing that will save her is a whole lot of ass-kicking and gunfire and clued-in friends with secret-scary access to government databases.
And then he does that thing. And he wins despite long odds against him. Because he is such a bad-ass he doesn’t have to look like Harrison Ford or Stallone – he’s just Liam Neeson.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
The Other Ones
I know I haven’t been writing here much. Haven’t had much going on that I wanted to write about. The one big thing on our minds around here is something I’m not very proud of, but thought I’d throw it out here and see if the half dozen of you who still come around might find it interesting.
My family is going through what millions of families have been going through over the past year or so. We’re looking at losing our house. Now we didn’t buy a house that we couldn’t afford, and we didn’t get a mortgage that exploded one day. Life happened and the economy happened. I lost my job and didn’t find a new one for a month and a half, then my wife lost her job and didn’t find a new one for a month and a half, and we had utilities to pay and food to buy and we fell behind in our mortgage. Our lender is NOT willing to work with us to bring down the payments or to put what’s missing on the end of the loan. They want a payment and a half until we’re caught up. And the way the cost of living went up and didn’t really come back down, we can no longer really afford the mortgage payment much less a payment and a half. We’re the other ones. The ones you really don’t hear about much. We didn’t do anything wrong, we bought the place in good faith. We never thought we’d be trying to choose between paying the mortgage and paying for food. What really kills me is that if we get rid of cable, cell phones and internet, we’d still be short. I’ve never been in that position before. We’ve tightened our belts before, but even if we do now, it doesn’t matter. What really kills me is that we’re making more now than we were when we bought the place. Kinda makes me crazy.
The only thing that MIGHT save us is if there’s anything in the President’s Magical Bailout for us. Our problem? We don’t want YOU paying for OUR mortgage. We’re seriously against that, and besides, from everything I’ve read, we’re not really the folks the President is trying to save. Our lender didn’t screw us over, they didn’t see the economy tanking either. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have lent us the money in the first place.
So we’re looking and believe we found a nice little rental house. I’ve been trying to contact our lender all week but all I get is voicemail. Apparently, we’re not the only ones wanting to talk to them.
We’re going to lose our house and I’d like to feel worse about it but after all the figuring we’ve done I just can’t. We simply can’t afford this place. God help us if the hot water heater or the a/c or the furnace died. There’s no way to replace them. God help us if we had anything happen to either of the cars, which we NEED to work.
We can’t keep going like this and that means letting them foreclose. That hurts. I tend to be on the proud side in case you’ve missed that part of my character over the years and we’re going through all five stages of mourning. I’m going to really miss the backyard, but I’m thinking we can get to the foothills easier once we can buy a tank of gas without worrying about we have enough money for food.
A fine thing
The payback for obligatory attendance at middle school concerts is being privileged to attend your spawn’s high school concerts: good music played well by youth is a fine thing.
Hearing Ashokan Farewell played with skill and joy? Took me right out of winter and clean into a warm summer evening: that was bliss.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Memo: On the Fear of Open Discussion
To: Atty-Gen Holder
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Not having open discussions about the r-word
1. Well, thanks, your attorneyness. Just thanks. After about forty years about being called racists when we open our mouths on any topic remotely to do with race, now we get whipsawed by being called cowards for not opening our mouths. Look, we got wise about noisy race-hustlers long since… is it OK to lump yourself in with them? With Al Sharpton, Jesse the baby-momma-banging-hypocrite Jackson, and Spike Lee and all the rest of the easily offended crowd with the dark year-round tans?
2. Frankly, no one really digs being screamed at when we had one of these mandatory equal-opportunities encounter sessions, and no, it never much changed anyone’s mind, and these little sessions hardly ever cleared the air much. It just took up however many hours were mandated by whoever dictates those matters.
3. It did, however, shut up most of the virulent white bigots… forty years ago. I have a heck of a time recalling the last time in real life that I actually heard someone in a social setting uncork some casual racism, misogyny, or anti-Semitism, so mad props for social pressure and all that. Pity one can’t say the same of thug-rap music, but then I’m white so I’m probably disqualified from commenting on that.
4. Let it be noted that we do, in fact, have discussions about racism with friends and acquaintances of all color – but they tend to be those people who we are fairly sure will not come f&$#@ing unglued and begin screaming and calling us racists when we decline to blame ourselves personally for everything to do with race relations in the United States over the last couple of centuries.
5. Hoping this memo will prove of help in assisting you to understand this, although I am not gonna hold my breath about it. Will we have to listen to you bang on about this for the rest of the Obama administration? (God, it’s going to be a long four years!)
I remain,
Sgt Mom
PS – Just as a reminder, a good chunk of the Founding Fathers were not slave-owners, and very much disapproved of chattel slavery… and seventy years after the founding, we fought a particularly bloody civil war over that very issue. Do history much. AG Holder?
Thrift Shopping
Honestly, I can’t help but think that I am way ahead of the game when it comes to an economic down-turn, incipient depression, bubble-bursting, or whatever the heck the mighty media organs want to call it. I lost three jobs alone last year, before the major misery even started. I’ve already processed the grief, adjusted to a fairly Spartan lifestyle, and gotten very well adept at bargaining with institutions demanding money from me. I cobbled together another series of paying ventures, including fifteen hours a week at the phone bank – which does have as a virtue (perhaps it’s only virtue!) that it is at least reliable in providing work hours and the resulting paycheck. Amazingly enough, I’ve lasted there long enough that many of the other drones on the floor know me by name, which is nice enough, I suppose – but I still call it “The Hellhole”. My original plan called for quitting around Christmas – but alas, Blondie loosing a job of her own put paid to that notion. So – tight budget all around, and welcome to the joys of bargain hunting, at yard sales, thrift-stores and in the untidy shelves at the back of various retail establishments labeled ‘clearance’ or ‘final sale’ or ‘70% off!’
I don’t know if I will really ever be able to embrace full retail prices again, after this year. I don’t think I will ever be able to walk into an upscale shop and cheerfully pay the full price for something, without feeling an incapacitating twinge of regret. I guess I have just enough of my grandmother’s canny puritan soul in me, and how it has a chance to flower. Unlike Granny Jessie in the Great Depression, though – we will not be keeping chickens. That’s going a little too far. But we have picked up a barely-used bread machine (at a yard sale for $10) and make our own bread, since I have a liking for the very expensive wheat varieties that are loaded with fiber and flavorful seeds and spices, which cost better than $3.00 a loaf at the Humongously Enormous Big-Ass Grocery. So one step closer to self-sufficiency – and Blondie is teaching herself how to knit. Much more of this, and I can see us living away off in the country with a satellite dish, a generator, our own water well and a milk cow. Talking over this whole gestalt with Blondie, and neither of us can remember the last time we bought a non-food item at full price. Everything has been on sale, second hand, bought in bulk at Sam’s Club or an ethnic grocery, or made at home. Even the ink cartridges for my printer are recycled from Cartridge World.
And this is not to say we don’t have a lot of quiet fun with this – we have bought some lovely, frivolous things for practically pennies and even some items which miraculously replaced those lost in the fire at Mom and Dad’s house in 2003. This very week at the new Goodwill Store which opened in our neighborhood, Blondie found a round silver-plate drinks tray which – after ten years worth of grimy black tarnish was cleaned off of it and she checked the now-visible hallmark – turned out to have a market value of about a hundred times what she spent for it. And there was also an odd set of crystal glasses, all jumbled among a long shelf of glassware. These were as fragile as bubbles, and appear to be hand-etched with a bamboo pattern; four with a short stem, three with a long stem and three which look like miniature martini glasses. I think they are Japanese, since they look so much like a set of crystal that I bought in the BX there ages ago. Blondie adds them to the collection that she is setting aside for her own house, against the day when I am a best-selling author and can buy her one.
I was much more interested in a find on a table of books: a stack of the old Time-Life series about the foods of the world. Mom had a subscription to the series in the late 1960s; each volume focusing on the food of a particular country or region came as a two-part set. One was a lovely, lavishly illustrated examination of the country and it’s cuisine, and the other a small spiral-bound collection of recipes. Of course, Mom’s collection was among those lost in the fire, and the ones I found at the thrift shop were the coffee-table book only – but still, I was very fond of that series. The cooking of provincial France, of Spain and Portugal, of Great Britain, and Scandinavia…. I think those books were where we all learned to be adventurous about food. It’s good to have them back.
The README is there for a reason
Me: Hey, wait a second. The README claims we need sqlite3 on your webserver. I’m not sure it’s installed …
Her: Give it a shot.
Me: (aghast) But … if sqlite3 is not on the server it won’t work.
And we run smack-bang into a divide more fundamental than the male-female thing: the ones who check things out before launching and the ones who give it a shot and see if it flies or splats into a wall.
God love her, my beautiful and attractively intelligent wife falls firmly into the latter camp.
I fall firmly into the camp whose theme song contains this verse ..
They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s ways may be long in the land.
Oh, and her revamped web site is up and running. Joe Bob says check it out.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Politics at the Speed of Light
Everything moves faster these days. Music has a faster tempo – I find some pop songs that I remember from the 80s as fast and peppy drag along. Television from the 70s – when it’s aired uncut – seems to take forever to get to the point and horribly static.
Heck, even politics moves faster than it used to: it took less than a month for President Obama to break seven campaign promises …
1. Make government open and transparent.
2. Make it “impossible” for Congressmen to slip in pork barrel projects.
3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public. (Even Congressional Republicans shut out.)
4. No more secrecy.
5. Public will have 5 days to look at a bill.
6. You’ll know what’s in it.
7. We will put every pork barrel project online.
Via.
Breaking promises is par for the course with politicians. But a) this guy was supposed to be different [1] and b) has anyone so explicitly promised a set of talking points and then gone back in less than a month?
A comment from Chicago Boys ..
The Ghost Shirt Democrats are doing their dance, but the vast herds of union-member Democrat-voting buffalo will never return to the plains, and [the] magic ghost shirts will not turn the ballots of angry voters into water [in] 2010 and 2012. Of course, the Republicans could still blow it, but even if they do, the Democrats have shown in a few short weeks that they have no idea how to govern the country, just to loot it. They will be replaced, if not by Republicans, then by somebody else.
Maybe. We’ll see.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] Yes, even I believed he would be. And there I was, trusting a politician, like a sucker.
The Proud Tower and the Buccaneers (Part 2)
One of the most curious instances of the rich American heiress for old European title exchanges was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough; the wedding itself was covered with breathless interest by the media of the time – which since it took place in 1895, meant coverage by newspapers only. However, the wedding was as lavish, and the interest in every tiny detail as intense as that paid to the nuptials of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It took place at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on New Yorks’ 5th Avenue, and the crowds of spectators outside the church and for a good way down the avenue was so thick that squads of policemen could barely force enough of an open way between them for the invited guests. The inside of the church was lavishly decorated with flowers – pink and white roses, swags of lilies, ivy and holly, arches of ferns, palm leaves and chrysanthemums. No expense was spared – even more astonishing was the fact that Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke had only been engaged for about six weeks and only known each other for barely a year. She was barely eighteen, reserved and sheltered, the very pretty daughter of a woman with a will of iron and ambition to match. After her marriage, she would blossom into one of the acknowledged beauties of that era: Playwright James Barrie supposedly said he would wait all day in the street just to watch her get into a carriage.
Alva Smith had married for money herself – having pursued, wed and just recently divorced the oldest grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, called ‘The Commodore’, who had founded the family fortunes in shipping and branched out into railways. Her own father’s fortunes were sadly diminished by the Civil War, and Alva resolved to secure her own future and those of her family by marrying rich. She emerges as a domineering, driven and stubborn woman with a fiery temper. Very few people ever said ‘no’ to Alva Vanderbilt, least of all her own family; neither her parents, either of her husbands, or any of her children. Her own mother, a cultured Southern belle spoke French, and traveled widely in Europe with her children in those distant days when it meant a long voyage on a sailing ship. In a fragmentary memoir written late in life, Alva recalled that her mother had made a yearly order of clothes for herself and her daughters from a Paris dressmaker. All the clothes they would need for the next year would arrive one time – a means which was sufficient for that era, but not when Alva was raising her own children. By that time, being rich and in the social set meant a degree of ostentatious competition that is purely mind-boggling to contemplate today. Everything about those at the very top of the social network still astonishes, beginning with the ‘summer cottages’ built at the edge of Newport, Rhode Island. Alva was responsible for one of the most lavish, ‘Marble House’ which seemed like nothing much but a couple of square acres of the Sun King’s Versailles, set down in the New World. The balls and parties that prominent members of this high society threw for each other also defy belief. At one infamously grand banquet, an artificial river filled with live fish ran the length of the dining table – and guests were provided with little silver shovels to search for jeweled party favors in the sand at the bottom of the river. Such a grand dinner ran to course after course of elaborately prepared dishes, and an ordinary day for a society woman might involve changing clothes four or five times over. And Alva Vanderbilt was one of the leading social lionesses by the time her daughter was of marriageable age, despite having divorced William Vanderbilt.
Divorce was almost unthinkable in that milieu – and yet, Alva went ahead with it; she would marry her daughter off to a nobleman, and having achieved that apotheosis, would marry again herself, to Oliver Belmont – another wealthy member of the Gilded Age’s highest social circle. Incredibly, she would have a contented marriage with him – and maintain her high position in that society – until his sudden death from complications of appendicitis. Almost without a moment’s hesitation, Alva would involve herself in the campaign for women’s rights to vote, using her considerable wealth to fund suffrage organizations and publications, to lobby in Washington and among the highest levels. She would fight for women’s property and political rights with the same stubborn intensity that she applied to any of her previous enthusiasms. In fact, she became something of a militant – and after her own death in 1931, had a full suffragette’s funeral, with women pallbearers and choir. Never mind the contradiction, of being for women’s rights, yet having dictated Consuelo’s marriage and overruled any of her daughter’s considerable misgivings.
Consuelo married reluctantly, in obedience to her mother. In spite of that, she serenely adorned the great estate of Blenheim Palace – which her marriage settlement helped repair and renovate – and the highest levels of British political and social circles equally. She was one of the noble wives who carried the canopy over Queen Mary at the coronation of King George V. She would produce two sons, and is thought to have been the originator of the expression ‘an heir and a spare’. The marriage was not happy; she and the Duke were of different and incompatible temperaments and Consuelo had something of her mother’s spine. They separated barely ten years after their lavish wedding day, and divorced in 1921, upon which Consuelo married a wealthy French aviation pioneer named Jacques Balsan. She achieved no small victory in managing to remain on easy and affectionate terms with her ex-husbands’ family, which included his redoubtable cousin, Winston Churchill. Her further life adventures included escaping with her husband from France in 1940, and returning to live in the country she had departed nearly half a century before. Amazingly, she lived until 1964 – and if pictures taken of her are any guide – she was still amazingly beautiful.
(No particular reason for writing all this – I had heard of these women in a vague sort of way, but the entire book about them was rather fascinating.)
Happy Valentine’s Day!
I don’t celebrate it personally, but in case you’re one who likes hearts & flowers, here’s a heart for you, courtesy of NASA. 
update: for some reason, it’s showing up sideways. Sorry about that.
What GS cookie are you?
Hey – that’s one of my faves
|
You Are Peanut Butter Sandwiches / Do-si-dos |
 You are easy going and naturally happy. You don’t need a lot to make you smile. You genuinely care about people and are a great friend. You’re always doing your best to make the world a better place. Even though there isn’t an immature bone in your body, you still are like a big kid sometimes. |
h/t: Blonde Sagacity
Here come the personal bail-outs
Not really. But I don’t know what else to call it. The end of accountability? The end of personal responsibility for choices? The beginning of the end of capitalism? Or maybe it’s just plain old greed, and the thought of getting something for nothing.
This might be old news, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it, so it’s news to me. It seems that a Florida jury has decided that a man who chain-smoked for 40 years was helplessly addicted to nicotine, and therefore Philip Morris is responsible for his death. Now they get to decide how much Philip Morris should give the grieving widow.
The article says he was 55 years old when he died in 1997. So he started smoking at 15, in or around 1957. By 1966, when warning labels appeared on all cigarette packages, he’d been smoking almost 10 years then, so I’ll cut him a little bit of slack. That was plenty of time to get addicted to nictoine, and I don’t know what kind of information was available then regarding the dangers of smoking.
So yes, the tobacco companies bear some responsibility in all this. But the ultimate responsibility rests with the human being who made a choice to smoke, and continued to choose to smoke even as medical evidence mounted that it was an unsafe practice. According to the article, he tried to quit on numerous occasions, but kept going back to smoking. Addictions will do that to you, and he was, indeed, addicted. But the original culpability belongs to him, not to Philip Morris. Philip Morris did not come along, tie him to a chair, and force-feed him cigarettes.
What’s next? Can alcoholics who die from the ravages of their disease sue the liquor/beer companies? What about morbidly obese folks who die from complications of being overweight? How about this one – can I sue the credit card companies because they kept increasing my credit limit and so I kept spending their money?
At what point does personal responsibility enter into this? Or have we as a nation moved away from the concepts of being responsible for our own actions, and moved into the concept of doing/saying whatever will give me the most free stuff, especially if it’s coming from a greedy blood-sucking corporation that is only out to advance its own agenda on the backs of the poor uneducated masses (in other words, any company that wants to make a profit). What will happen when they bankrupt the tobacco companies and all the folks who are currently addicted to nicotine can no longer get their cigarettes?
I should probably add that I am not a smoker. In fact, I am almost allergic to cigarette smoke, and hate the smell of cigarette smoke or stale cigarette smoke. That said, I firmly believe that as long as something is legal, then companies have a right to provide it, and people have a right to indulge in it. Cigarettes are legal, and it’s well-known that they are addicting. I don’t know when we first realized they were addicting, but it seems to me that anyone who started smoking after that became common knowledge has no grounds to sue any tobacco company.