Category Archives: General Nonsense

The Life of Celia

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(With apologies to the Obama perpetual re-election campaign. Other people have had a go at this concept – I think The Life of Brian is one of the funniest, but I wanted to have a go at this myself. )

3 Years Old – Under President Eisenhower, Celia stays home with her younger brother, as her full-time work-at-home Mom helps her get ready for school by reading aloud to her, supervising her playtime and providing a secure home environment. She will join thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old – Under President Nixon, Celia takes the SAT and is on track to begin applying for college … which college program includes two years at a local junior college capped by two years at a state university – a public university system that the taxes paid by Celia’s parents over the years have subsidized. The public high school which Celia attends is in a working-class suburb, but offers academically enriched courses for those students who qualify for them.
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May Miscellany

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Holy krep, is it May already? Guess it must be – time flies when you are having fun. My excuse is that I actually took a whole Sunday off; Blondie and I went up to the World Famous Buda Texas Wienerdog Races on Sunday, and I have been working alternately on two paid projects all this week to catch up. So – barely able to keep up with the news, such as it is, between all this and noodling around in the kitchen making another wheel of Leicester cheese and starting two crocks of home-made sauerkraut. All this German stuff is starting to catch up to me, I swear.

Sauerkraut, red potatoes and nice little sausages from the best meat market in New Braunfels, all cooked up in the same pan, make a darned tasty meal. (The recipe is on my book blog, under “The Splendid Table” page. No, seriously – good eats. I’ve begun to wonder, tasting the glories of home-made cheese, how good are the pickles that we have canned, and the sauerkraut which will eventually emerge from the canning kettle.)
Anyway – the news is it’s usual bounty of the richly comic:

Like Professor Elizabeth Warren, who looks like an older version of a Bund Deutcher Madel recruiting poster (League of German Maidens, the female version of the Hitler Youth) claiming to be 1/32 Cherokee Indian … ok, then. Now and again, I met people who told me they were part whatever American Indian. A fair number of them were blue-eyed blonds, which led me to assume that … certain physical traits must have been pretty darned recessive. Even if my friend Esther T. who was one-eighth Shoshone did look like Geronimo got up in drag as a Wagnerian soprano. So who’s really a minority, when you look at first glance like a member of the majority class? Oh, and I won’t even get into how the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous is almost a dead-spit look-alike to my brother J.P. – who in spite of having dark hair and brown eyes and used to tan very easily … is a person of unmixed pallor, Anglo-Saxon and protestant descent for as far back as family records go. Seriously. But honestly, how seriously can you take this s**t these days?

I see where some Occupy Whatever doofuses had a plot to blow up a bridge. But they didn’t have the wit to see that all their needs for explosives were being met by surprisingly helpful FBI informants. I am being reminded of those dear sweet days in the late 60s and early 70s, when law enforcement alphabet agencies made up a substantial portion of the membership of so many of these fringe little groups with violent inclinations. Apparently, they were the only ones willing to come to tedious meetings and reliably pay their dues. I kid, I kid.

And now that all the jollies have been wrung out of President Obama’s boyhood proclivities for chowing down on chow (and hound, and peke and collie), I guess now it’s time to make fun of his composite girlfriends. Seriously, he had girlfriends, composite or individual? My impression was that he was too much in love with himself to get involved with an outsider, but OK … You know, after a certain point, when enough stuff has been composited, created, massaged and shaped, you may as well call it fiction, not a memoir.
And that’s my week. Working up a piece to accompany the administrations latest bit of work “The Life of Julia” will call for a separate entry of it’s own.

(links below – somehow the posting of embedded links on this blog is frelled beyond redemption.)

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/edit/a.3037076371979.2121366.1415091659/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls

http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/one-pan-wurst-supper/

WTF?

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That’s the feeling, really – as Blondie and I walk the dogs of a morning, and discuss such weighty matters as who remembered to bring sufficient poopy bags, if it is safe enough to let the Weevil off leash long enough to have a brisk run up and down the long fence behind which lives another Boxer mix who carries on a sort of fence to fence tag run, how many tomatoes we are likely to get from our current planting of garden bounty, if there will be enough cucumbers to make a decent batch of pickle spears soon, what to have for dinner that evening … and the morning gleanings of various internet news sites that we favor, upon rising from our slumbers first thing of a morning.

I favor Instapundit myself – out of long habit, even if he did drop this site from his blogroll a couple of years ago, but my daughter favors a combination of TMZ and the Daily Mail website, which (oddly enough) often puts up items of American news days before it appears in our own very dear mainstream media organs. Nope, tis true, tis true: sensationalist, twee, celebrity-addled, frequently misspelled/ungrammatical/confusing/sentimental-enough-to-trigger-a-diabetic-reaction, the DM still unashamedly and without much bias that I can detect covers the news. What a concept, hey? (Leaving aside the DM’s editorial bias, whatever it might be. When it comes to Brit newspapers, I used to favor the London Times and the Spectator myself, until they put everything interesting behind a paywall, then the Telegraph, and even the Guardian – until … well, that last just went beyond the pale for me. The lefty establishment bias just got to hard to take. God knows what the Grauniad thinks of the Tea Party; I don’t have a stomach strong enough to check.)

Anyway – to see ourselves as the DM sees us. My daughter notes the increasing numbers of American commenters, who ask why they hell do they have to go to a British newspaper site to see relatively unbiased American news. I’d guess it’s probably because the DM doesn’t seem to actually have a rep in among the White House Press Whores, or among the local establishment in whatever city the interesting story of the moment comes from. So, they can tell the story and access-to-the-elite-establishment be damned. Kind of refreshing, actually: what was the old press motto? To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – damned if it doesn’t seem that principle has been reversed, in these degraded modern days.

Anyway – we were talking about a wide-ranging number of topics, but actually, they weren’t all that wide-ranging. Mostly it was the various aspects of the Federal Gummint’s heavy and strangling hand descending on a variety of concerns and businesses: the EPA going after coal-burning power plants (what – do they want rolling blackouts?), the Department of Labor going all ‘it’s for the chiiiiiiiildren!’ in forbidding children, tweens and teens from working certain essential jobs on family farms, hammering the Catholic church for not handing out free birth control like it was Skittles, the EPA going after rabbit breeders, the Justice Department casually allowing weapons to walk from border states into Mexico, prosecuting Gibson guitar manufacturing enterprise for using certain kinds of imported wood, the TSA (who easily could be the most despised organization in the US today but for all the competition from the EPA) feeling up four-year old girls and ripping off wheelchair bound veterans, the NOAA enthusiastically ruining the livelihoods of New England independent fishermen … and the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio, with respect to flash-mob violence and the disinclination of our own very dear Department of Justice to become involved in prosecuting those who incite racial violence. Long list it was, too. So, I don’t think I want to get fitted for a tinfoil hat just yet … but WTF do these various numbskulls think they are doing? Exactly how far do they think people can be pushed before an individual or a community entirely looses patience? I mean – do they want large numbers of Americans to openly defy the Feds, nonviolently or otherwise? Is this deliberate incitement or just dumbassery on an epic scale?

I know, cheerful thinking for a morning walk. I think I’ll go fire up the canning kettle, and put aside another dozen jars of home made pickles, relishes and sauerkraut. To the best of my knowledge, the EPA or the DOJ hasn’t come out regulating against that … yet.
(Links here. Impossible to embed links any more…

https://truthfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/rabbit-raid-redux-six-bells-farm-update/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903895904576542942027859286.html

http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-regulations-crush-new-england-fisheries/

When Buntline Was in Flower

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Ned Buntline, that is … a dime novel writer, publicist, playwright and producer … as well as publisher and popularize of popular cheap novels about the American west, published in mass quantities during the latter half of the 19th century. His name was actually Edward Zane Carroll Judson, and he had been a sailor, a brawler, an instigator of riots, an ex-convict and a prodigious drinker and public lecturer on the benefits of temperance. Presumably he knew whereof he spoke, on this subject, although the phrase ‘do as I say, not as I do’ certainly does occur to one. But this is not about E.Z.C.Judson, or his alter-ego, Ned Buntline … or even any of the Wild West personalities that he wrote about in his dime novels.

No – what he, and his scribbling ilk did in a fair part, was to popularize the far west – the frontier west as it then existed in the late 19th century – as a fountainhead of unending drama and breathtaking adventure. Granted, anyone who does this now, or in previous decades has had wonderful material to work with: eccentric characters galore, marvelous and improbable events, romance of every variety, warfare and friendship with strange and alien peoples (Indians, unreconstructed Confederates and Mormons among them). But Buntline and his less famous competitors did it first, establishing the meme almost before the dust was settled.

Of course – some of that dust was purposefully raised, in the course of telling a ripping good yarn for the price of one thin dime. They had not the luxury of being able to wait and see, to consider events steadily or see them whole. They were also not able to thoroughly fact-check the back-stories alleged by some of their most famous heroes – say, Buffalo Bill Cody, or Wild Bill Hickok, or cared very little others were out and out criminals and sociopaths. Or that others –like the small landowners and homesteaders who came out on the wrong side of something like the Johnson County War were not, and had experienced the bad fortune of being relatively voiceless in a contest where the other party had the bigger public megaphone. (And that much of their output is hideously racist by modern attitudes should go without saying.) They also were guilty of creating or flat-out exaggerating every convention imaginable regarding cowboys; who were usually plain old working men of every color, performing backbreaking and/or totally boring labor – but they did it in the open air, and from the backs of horses, which must have looked pretty good from the perspective of a factory hand or clerk back east.

Still – Buntline and his ilk set the stage for the enduring image and conventions of the Old West: timeless stories and stock characters, which were lovingly sent up in a movie like Rustler’s Rhapsody. Even so, it was vision of the Wild, Wild West which gripped our grandparents and great grandparents in print, entranced our parents at the movies … and had us glued to the television.

But you know what? The real Wild West was even more incredible than Ned Buntline ever dreamed.

Consider the Michelles of the Field

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…they toil not, nor do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Enough of that simile, since it’s pretty obvious that Solomon in all his glory was not spread all over just about every fashion and women’s mag for the last couple of years, accompanied by cutlines, stories and editorials, all drooling over how chic, fashionable and oh-so-modern and otherwise laudable the spouse of the current occupant of the White House was.

Yep, upon the apotheosis of the Empty Suit known as Barack Obama, to the highest office in the land, I could hardly pass the supermarket checkout stand, without being assured that his Significant Other was the best thing since Jackie Kennedy or sliced bread… so lovely, so tasteful, so chic, the very model of an ultra-modern First Lady. Frankly, the sycophantic chorus got to the point where I began muttering to myself something along the lines of, ‘Sister, I remember Jackie Kennedy – and you, darlin’ – aren’t no Jackie Kennedy. If Jackie Kennedy had ever dressed for a public event by raiding her daughter’s closet and the nearest Goodwill outlet, she would have at least made it look good!’ Frankly, if I never see another picture of Michelle in a boob-belt and too-small cotton cardy, or one of Laura Ashley’s more unfortunate evening dress designs, it will all be too soon. And I speak as one who does raid her daughter’s closet, the local Goodwill store and loved Laura Ashley, but then I do not see any fashion mags out there breathlessly lauding Sgt. Mom’s inimitable sense of style.

About the only mystery left unexamined regarding Michelle Obama’s dress sense is how on earth one can spend a bomb of money and still finish up wearing such desperately unflattering clothes, or clothes grotesquely unsuited for the occasion – or both.

So, you will have gathered that Michelle Obama annoys me. I would have been content to dismiss her as I did, yea these many months ago as “a seething pit of resentment in spite of two high-end degrees, a large income and a mansion; a BAP with a limitless sense of entitlement.” I might have been able, eventually, to blow off the fashion and women’s magazine going all full Pravda on us … but for the vacations.

The incessant expensive vacations to lavish resort locations annoy me. I don’t grudge rich people their amusements, knowing that they mostly pay for such excursions themselves, and that spending on them will trickle down to make a good living for the people who own, run, and work at such places – heck, I live in a destination city, although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a tropical paradise like Hawaii, or an enclave of the uber-rich like Martha’s Vinyard. I certainly didn’t grudge President Reagan, or either of the Presidents Bush from taking vacations at property they owned and improved, and even hosted VIPs at. (I did derive amusement out of the White House Press corps being dragged to Crawford, Texas, in August, though. Awwww, poor cosmopolitan urbanites, being dragged to the ass-end of nowhere in the most miserable part of a Texas summer!)

But at a time when ordinary working people are cutting back to a week or so, taking a frugal holiday here and there, or even not taking a vacation at all – Michelle Obama taking a lavish holiday every two months or so, looks very, very bad to the general public. And the White House must know that it’s going over about as well as a case of the chicken pox at a kid’s birthday party. That someone whose job it is to consider damage control can’t or won’t talk her into slumming it at Camp David instead is not a good thing.

So, Whither Occupy What Street?

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As a terribly scarred and battle-hardened first gen Tea Partier, I am following the fortunes of the OWS with mixed emotions; those motions mostly being a combination of disbelief and horror. Your leaderless insurgency just sort of decided to get together, camp out in a public place and make enough of a spectacle for the media and general public to take notice. Well, that’s a goal of sorts, but didn’t anyone do any serious advanced event planning? Organizing skilled volunteers with specific skill-sets to see to billeting, portapotties and their maintenance, security, law-enforcement coordination, clean-up, outreach and education? Nobody gave consideration about yourselves and your main message (whatever that message may actually be) from pervs, rapists, assorted unappetizing/potentially embarrassing freelance whackos and a collection of thievish and destructive blights on the activist community. Was there no guidance considered to urge protest participants to make nice with business owners and members of the general public who have varying degrees of concern about the space you have chosen to take over for your purposes? Was there any prior planning (which prevents piss-poor performance, as the old military saying goes) in advance of these momentous decisions to take to the streets? No confabulations, through social media, no focused meetings of intensely interested volunteers, no hours-long conference calls, thrashing out the basics?

Sigh – it appears that the answer to these questions is not.

(As an aside – you will never get 100% consensus among rational adults about anything. Settle for 2/3rd majority, respect the dissenting 1/3rd, and move on. Give way to the minority on something else: it’s called negotiation, my dears – or in vulgar parlance: horse-trading. Prioritize what is important and which you will not compromise upon, and work out what lesser principals you will trade off to achieve that. It’s what adults in a functioning democracy do. People who have real lives and real jobs, those who do not live the Great and Shining Cause 24/7, 365 days a year, will not have the patience or endurance for epic meetings deciding upon minutia . . . however, I have noticed that a certain kind of career activitist/community organizer does have stamina sufficient for meetings of the endless and ultimately pointless sort. I’d advise you to avoid that kind of person, but it probably is a bit too late. )

I do have to hand it to the Occupy Whatever Street – the major national news media are already giving the various protest events the warm sloppy tongue-bath, even to the point of serving your public relations functions. It took the SATP a good six months of outreach and conferences with various local TV news directors and newspaper editors to get any respect at all. But, as a sort-of PR professional, I have to say that this good-will towards the OWS probably will not last, and may already be shriveling. A long-established protest site in the heart of a big city can only be made to seem cool, subversive, and glamorous for so long, in the face of ongoing noise and vandalism, reported harassment of local residents and law-enforcement personnel, and just the general rat’s nest appearance of the average OWS protest camp. This will not go over well in the long run with ordinary, hard-working, peace-loving citizens, even those in general sympathy with some of the stated goals. There are a fair number of new reports indicating that your immediate neighbors in your various venues are growing sick and tired of your presence. This is something that you should pay attention to; bad optics, from a public affairs point of view. Which brings me to my next point –

A street protest is just a starting point for a truly broad-based and ground-up political movement. Getting together in a public space all those who are moved enough to be unhappy about things as they are . . . my dear people, that is only the first step. The next one is to go home, to fully understand the issues and the various options that would perhaps alleviate those of most concern, and to continue the outreach, the consultations, the epic convention calls, the even-more-epic meetings among the most dedicated and skilled – the formulation of email lists, the cultivation of donors . . . all of that. It’s much more of a job and not as attention-catching as a simple temporary event. It’s work, and it’s hard and dedicated work. It is not fun – hardly a romp in the park, if I may be so kind as to draw that analogy. It’s work. Hard work and it will almost always take a lot more temporal and psychic energy than you might think at first. Been there – done that, ever since working to resettle Vietnamese refugees in 1975-75.

Unless you are all willing to do that work, then you are merely dilettantes in protest, having a public temper-tantrum.

I remain most sincerely yours and this entry is posted as my best professional advice

Sgt. Mom

Things That Make You Start to Laugh Uncontrollably

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So there we were last Monday evening , sharpening up our awareness of odd things one might pick up at a yard sale or a thrift store for fifty cents or a dollar and which might later turn out to be worth a small or medium-sized fortune, by watching Antiques Road Show (US version) when this particular item was spotlighted for an appraisal. (Go ahead, take a look, you won’t regret it. I’ll wait.)
This episode was a repeat from 2009, actually – our local PBS station depends heavily on repeats, which is one reason I have never pledged to them. (The other being that they would never hire me, although as a retired AFRTS type, I was perfectly qualified for any job they had on offer. Deal with that, KLRN!)
And my daughter took one look at it: having picked up a considerable vocabulary of Brit-speak, through hanging out at various on-line fora, (as well as reading the Daily Mail Online every morning) she exclaimed,

“Balls!”

It’s a family curse – an unexpectly ribald sense of humor, which I blame on my father — or the fact that both of us were some years in the military — not a place you go for refined comedy … because the pictured item immediatly called this novelty item to mind. I began to sing,

“Do your balls hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?
Can you throw them o’er your shoulder
like a Continental Soldier?”
I swear, we laughed, hysterically and uncontrollably all the way through the segment featuring this pot. We even laughed through the following segment, about a pretty piece of custom-made early 19th century jewelry.

One of my daughter’s career ambitions is to buy something at a yard sale, estate sale, thrift store, or even to pick it up from the curb, take it to the next Antiques Road Show and discover it’s worth . . . well, a whole lot.

A pot like that isn’t one of them, though. Although in this current economy, we could certainly make use of the amusement value.

(Cross-posted last week at Chicago Boyz)

Reissue of Memo: John Wayne is Dead and Arnie Has a Day Job

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(In light of the current ruckus over President’s Obama’s very personal wet smooch from Hollywood regarding the proposed “get Osama” movie, I am reissuing my historic memo, from 2004 or so. Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette has the whole depressing, infuriating saga of the world’s longest proposed political advertisement, here.)
To: Providers of our Movie & TV Entertainment
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Lack of Spine and Relevant Movies

1. So here it has been nearly three years since 9/11, two years since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a year since the thunder run from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, and all we get from you is a TV movie, a couple of episodes from those few TV serials that do touch on matters military, and a two-hour partisan hack job creatively edited together from other people’s footage. Ummm … thanks, ever so much. Three years worth of drama, tragedy, duty, honor, sacrifice, courage and accomplishment, and all we get is our very own Lumpy Riefenstahl being drooled over by the French. Where is the Casablanca, So Proudly We Hail, Wake Island, They Were Expendable? My god, people, the dust had barely settled over the Bataan surrender, before the movie was in the theaters. You people live to tell stories— where are ours? What are we fighting for and why, who are our heroes and villains, our epics and victories?

2. And it’s not like other media people have been laying down on the job: writers, reporters, bloggers have been churning out stories by the cubic foot: the brave passengers taking back Flight 93, the stories of people who escaped the towers, and those who helped others escape, as well as those who ran in, the epic unbuilding of the Trade Center ruins. What about the exploits of the Special Forces in Afghanistan, on horseback in the mountains with a GPS, directing pinpoint raids on Taliban positions, the women who ran Afghanistans’ underground girls’ schools? What about Sgt Donald Walters, Lt. Brian Chontosh, the 3rd ID’s fight for the strong points at Larry, Curley and Moe and a dozen others. There’s enough materiel for the lighter side, too: Chief Wiggles, Major Pain’s pet turkey, the woman Marine who deployed pregnant and delivered her baby in a war zone, the various units who have managed to bring their adopted unit mascots back from the theater. (Do a google search, for heaven’s sake. If you can’t handle that, ask one of the interns to help.) The shelves at my local bookstore are pretty well stocked with current writings on the subject, memoirs, reports, thrillers and all. Some stories even have yet to be written; they are still ongoing, and even classified, but I note that did not stop the movie producers back then: they just consulted with experts and made something up, something inspiring and convincing.

3. Of course, actually dealing with a contemporary drama in the fight against Islamic fascism would mean you would have to actually come down out of Hollywood’s enchanted world, and actually, you know … speak to them. Ordinary people, ordinary, everyday people, who don’t have agents and personal trainers and nannies, and god help them, they don’t even vote for the right people, or take the correct political line. Some of them (gasp) are even military, and do for real what movies only pretend to do … and besides, they have hold to all these archaic ideals like honor, duty, and country. (Ohhh, cooties!)

4. And since even mentioning the Religion of Peace (TM) in connection with things like terrorism, mass-murder, and international plots for a new caliphate is a guarantee to bring CAIR and other fellow travelers seething and whining in your outer office … ohh, best not. Drag out those old villainous standby Nazis, or South American drug lords, even the odd far-right survivalist for your theatrical punch-up, secure in the knowledge that even if you piss off what few remains of them, at least they won’t be unleashing a fatwa on your lazy ass, or sending a suicide bomber into Mortens’. Just ignore the three large smoking holes in the ground; cover your eyes and pretend it away. Never happened, religion of peace, all about oil, la-la-lah, fingers in my ears, I can’t hear you.

5.To make movies about it all, is to have to come to grips with certain concepts; among them being the fact that we are all potential targets for the forces of aggressive Islamo-fascism, that it is not anything in particular which we have done to draw such animus, and that we are in this all together, and that we must win, for the consequences of not winning are not only unbearable for us all — but they would be very likely to adversely affect you, too. I would expect an industry dependent on the moods and fashions amongst the public at large to have a better feel for what would sell … but I guess denial is more comfortable, familiar space, Sept. 10th is what you know best.

6. Still, if you could pass a word to Lumpy Riefenstahl, about getting signed releases, for footage, interviews and newsprint. It would be the courteous gesture towards all the little people for whom he professes to care, and save a bit of trouble in the long run.

Thanks
Sgt Mom