Spin Easy Time!

phil manzanera - big day (w brian eno)

2012-02-03T05:33:00.000-08:00

Yeah, forget about Bruce Springsteen, this shit was the bomb in the mid-Seventies. Phil was the guitar player in Roxy Music, and this was a side project that Brian Eno (fellow Roxy) was involved in. The both of them were interested in sound in a very new way for guys in their genre. They were essentially rock guys, pop guys, but they were focused on textures and tones, and lyrics that went way beyond moon/spoon/June. (Like those colossally overrated Beatles, the Kings of old fashioned Moon/Spoon/June.) It was a great time, people were taking chances. These guys, their frame of artistic reference was much broader than the average bear today. Remember Television? Tom Verlaine? Any of you young people know where the Verlaine came from? I didn't think so.

But I understand, you young people today are very knowledgeable and intelligent in your own way. It's cool, I'm cool with it. I know that I can't work an I-Phone, so what do I know? Who gives a shit who the Vice President is? Or where Ghana is?

This modern world is just not our game anymore, we so-called seniors. The important things for us cranky geezers to remember are that nothing is important anymore; giving a shit about anything is stupid; all information is bullshit; reality is overrated; and empathy is counterproductive, totally girlie, and lame.

But some of this geezer music still makes it. Deal with that, youngblood!

U.S. secrecy system “literally out of control”

2012-02-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

U.S. secrecy system “literally out of control”

I don't do politics, generally, but I do a certain amount of moon directed howling about the national security apparatus's takeover of the executive branch, if not the entire Federal Government. Welcome to year sixty-one of the permanent state of emergency that began with Pearl Harbor. Here's a little bit about the state of your security, from the people at Salon.com.

So, do you feel more secure?

Cool Vehicle Alert: Custom Motocross Madness

2012-01-31T02:44:00.000-08:00

I can't tell how much of this came out of the original box, but as it stands this bike is definitely a "custom." I like it.

My English Connection

2012-01-31T02:36:00.000-08:00

This is Rod, my new buddy at the condo. The restaurant in the picture is a Scoozi, one of a chain of pizza parlors in Bangkok. They adjust to suit the neighborhood, or their surroundings anyway, some are plain and some are fancy. This one is in a new mall, “outdoor style,” close to our building, and although the neighborhood is decidedly mixed demographically, with many students, this mall is very hi-so (Thai for high-society). So this Scoozi is quite fancy, with a high-line menu, a very nice layout, and a big wine list (fifteen to forty-five dollars a bottle; four dollars a glass).

We stuck with the pizza, and it was great. They deliver, but it’s always cold by the time it gets there, so a visit is the way to go.

Rod is very simpatico, and, being from Illinois, he is fluent in the American idiom of the English language. I had been spending weeks at a time without having a conversation with a native English speaker, so it was a real joy to meet Rod. He’s a smart guy and a very experienced ex-pat, and he’s a great source of reliable information. It’s great to have someone to speak with in the mother tongue, not having to slow everything down to a standstill and simplify everything. But I’ll tell you, we still avoid talking about anything that would provide clues to our real hearts-of-hearts.

That would be silly, after all. One of the best things about being in Thailand, we agree, is that no one can tell if you are a damaged person, if you are depressed all the time, if you are overly cynical or unremittingly negative, no, they cannot tell at all, not even if you tried to explain it to them. If you are a failure, or if you have made horrible mistakes in life, all is forgotten. We love the fact that one can re-invent oneself over here. If you keep a smile on your face and remain cheerful and polite you can become what you present to the world. Thanks to the language barrier, which I assure you is deep and wide, all conversation is reduced to platitudes. If you're careful, you can almost forget those other nasty details yourself. It’s great, it really is a great blessing.

Rod, I'm sure, has nothing in his past to hide or be less than thrilled to recall. It's just a phenomenon that interests us.

The situation is helpful clinically as well. The doctors will tell you that any depressed person has his triggers, words, thoughts, people, things that set off the darkness. Most or even all of the triggers can be rendered harmless in a place like Thailand. Even beyond the helpful language barrier, Thai culture avoids negatives on its own and tries to keep everything on a nice, even keel.

Rod and I have a great time talking about things. We have wide ranging discussions on a full range of issues. We talk about things that affect only us and others so situated, like VISA and travel issues, we talk about our friends and our activities, and we talk about weird aspects of the American experience in the Twenty-First Century. We self-censor though, to keep our old, less pleasant realities safely tucked away.

We’ve simplified our lives. We’re not seeking adventure, we’re running away from it (and stumbling into new and more manageable adventures along the way). We’re the lucky ones, having found a clean, safe, friendly place to do so. We appreciate our good fortune. It just might be the basis of a nice friendship.

Google Engrish

2012-01-31T02:32:00.000-08:00

Google has a new "privacy" policy. I just signed in on my laptop and a page in Thai about the policy came up. I hit "translate" and was treated to some good Engrish:

Actual quote cut-and-pasted from the Google page: "We quit using Google Privacy Policy across more than 60 of the policy by switching to a shorter and easier to understand than most. Our new policy covers a wide range of products and features. This reflects our desire to provide a simplified user experience across elegant, intelligent and Google."

If you speak native English, if you learned it from your mother, you should thank your lucky stars, because it is a lot harder than it looks.

Cat In A Tree

2012-01-30T06:26:00.000-08:00

He was chased up the tree by another cat, and for a while they were both hanging onto the tree screeching at each other. That would have been a better picture, or video, but I had to go and get my camera and the moment was gone when I got back.

The Screen Actors and Actresses Guild

2012-01-30T06:08:00.000-08:00

Is it really so terrible to call a woman an actress? I'm just watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards show, and maybe just the name of the outfit begs the question.

I think it would be fine to refer to the entire class of person who performed the acting function jointly as "actors" and still refer to women who acted as actresses. What's the harm? To call them "female actors" is wasteful of effort, and if language wants anything for itself it is economy of effort.

When I hear "female actor" it calls to mind a woman cross-dressing to play a male role, or something like that. That's just me being old fashioned I guess. If they need to clarify like that it all becomes so torturous. Wouldn't "actress" be even clearer? I mean, we still call women "women," and not "female men."

If this is such a big issue, doesn't it become unacceptable to make separate awards for men and women? If they're all just actors, I mean.

I don't make the rules though, so whatever the culture thinks is best is okay with me.

Thailight Zone: Hell (Re-Post)

2012-01-27T01:54:00.000-08:00

(Coming up to the fifth anniversary of this blog. What follows was the first post on June 19, 2007.)

In my little provincial capitol in Northern Thailand, where, as they say on television, most people live on $4 per day, there is a golf course, and let me tell you, it sure looks like Hell.

I don’t mean that in any idiomatic sense, like you might say something “looks like sh*t,” no linguistic shenanigans, no “in a manner of speaking.” I mean it actually looks like Hell. If Satan played golf, this is what the course would look like. If god permitted those poor souls who are consigned to perdition to play golf, this is the course he would give them. Maybe lose a ball or two, you say? You could lose a small child right on the fairway, no problem. The fairways are not like any poorly maintained lawn; they are more like overgrown backyards. There’s no real rough; it’s all rough. Actually, out of bounds looks a little bit better, because there’s less shrubbery, it’s more like hard pack. The fairways also feature rolling hills of such frequency and intensity that if you wished to drive on the course you had better bring the Land Rover.

I don’t even want to think about the greens, I’m trying my best to forget them before the nightmares start. A bowling ball wouldn’t roll over those accursed places, not straight or otherwise.

I have on occasion seen people standing still on the course, but I have yet to see anyone take a swing. I think any actual playing is accomplished in the early morning. Certainly my recommendation would be to start a first light and stop at about 7:30 wherever you happened to be, you know, before the heat stroke killed you. I don’t know what they charge, but I would hope that some situational health insurance was included.

I have always found golf to be frustrating enough on the playable courses, to be honest I’m frustrated plenty on the easiest course you could imagine. I can’t even imagine what this place would be like. Maybe I’ll ask Satan next time I see him.

But It Was A Good Cave

2012-01-27T01:07:00.000-08:00

Usually I decline opportunities to visit caves. This is based on hard experience, I feel lucky that I haven't been hurt so far. But this was a good cave.

More importantly, it was a very well set-up tourist destination. I've been to a couple of caves before. There are usually no facilities at all, and the inevitable stairs leading up to the caves have been very rough, slanting in all directions, of uneven height, and without handrails. Here was very different. The stairs were great, the handrails solid, and there were bathrooms and some personnel around. With your admission, you even got the loan of a flashlight for the cave part.

The attendants were pretty nice too. The price was twenty Baht for Thais and three hundred Baht for foreigners. Usually I just shut up and pay the Farang price, but then usually it's more gentle on the difference than this place. Plus, my friend was paying. So I piped up and told the guy, in Thai, very politely, that really I was not a tourist, I was Farang-Thai, and I showed him my business card, which is all in Thai and identifies my Thai university affiliation. He smiled and went for it, I got the Thai price. By then a couple of interested people had gathered around. This is pretty far off the beaten path, and I think they were surprised to find a Farang who could speak a little.

Best of all, the cave part was over very soon, and what came after was beautiful. It wasn't so much a cave as a passage, a passage to some kind of cone shaped lost world. And, as you can see in the cave picture, the floor of the place was very even and dry. The picture of my friend and his family is inside this cone formation, and that rock faced wall behind them enclosed an area about a hundred and fifty feet across.

The Classroom Redux

2012-01-26T19:28:00.001-08:00

Addendum to the post a page or so down . . .

My high school was a funny place. Not funny "ha! ha!" either. Funny like, "mmmmmmm," or "funny in the head."

They did regular locker checks. While we were in class they'd come around, open lockers, and check for . . . what? What did they expect to find? Smut, mostly. They were desperately afraid of smut.

I got caught up in it on at least two occasions. I was a big reader, not the assigned material mind you, but a big reader nevertheless. If they found something that they considered offensive they'd take it and call you to the office of the Dean of Men. That was like being summoned "vor dem Gesetz" in a Kafka story, a nightmare of Jesuit style inquisition.

I got called in one time, and the Dean greeted me coldly and held up my paperback copy of "Crocodile," a Harvard Lampoon parody of the James Bond novels, all of which I had also read. This was in '64 or so. I pointed out to him that it was a Harvard University publication, so I figured it should be okay. He might have kept that one, I can't quite remember. No further trouble though, no punishment.

The other instance is much funnier. The paperback that the Dean held up that day was a Fu Manchu novel, "Daughter of Fu Manchu" I think it was. The cover was quite salacious, I'll admit, with a Chinese woman descending a spiral staircase wearing a tight silk dress with a daring split up the side. I admitted that it was mine. "I guess, if you say it's a bad book," I added sheepishly, "but I bought it in the school library."

Our library had a rack of paperbacks for sale, full retail, and I had indeed purchased it there.

The Dean was sure that I was lying, so he dragged me right to the library and asked the brother-in-charge (the same Brother John from "The Classroom"). Yeah, he said, that's off my rack. I'm sure they had words about that, afterwards.

Like I'd take my smut to school! That would've been stupid, and whatever my grades suggested, I was not stupid. I shoplifted that smut fair and square, and I would never put it at risk carrying it to school.

The Conversation

2012-01-26T06:15:00.000-08:00

I heard the strangest conversation today. I was at the American Embassy to get some additional pages sewed into my passport. Sitting in the waiting area, I overheard a guy behind me talking to the guy next to me. They started before I got there.

The amazing part was, they were taking turns saying something but what they said seemed to have very little to do with what the other had just said. It was like:

"Sure, we bombed them but they declared war on us. The Japs bombed them too, and made them do it. But they spied on the Japs for us!"

"Now we don't know who our friends are. Our old allies. We went to war in Iraq and what, Turkey, somebody else, they tell us we can't fly through their air space."

"The Vietnamese, they're communists but now they want to be our friends."

"I was in that war there, in Vietnam, Laos, I was in this area for eight years."

"Yeah, but what people forget is that America is a capitalist democracy, not a socialist democracy. This Obama is the worst thing that every happened to America."

"Everything is crazy now. My son just got a job with the NSA, and they wanted his original birth certificate! I mean, they have his passport, so he must have had one! I had to turn the house upside down to find it."

"He wants socialism! He wants to turn America into like Europe, going down the tubes."

"The problem is, anybody can vote. I mean, democracy, some people have no education and some people are, you know, not intelligent but every vote counts as one."

I wondered if they were deaf and trying to fake it. You know, picking up a word here and there. They were a little older than me, late sixties I'd say. Both of them had Thai women in tow, fifty-ish and patient looking, taking the bitter with the sweet.

I picked the right day to go, that's for sure. The place was empty, I was the first on line everywhere I needed to go. The whole enterprise took twenty-five minutes all together! Amazing.

Bobby "Blue" Bland-Cry Cry Cry

2012-01-25T07:01:00.000-08:00

This is from one of my favorite albums of all time, "Two Steps From the Blues," by the great Bobby "Blue" Bland. One little complaint though, is it only me or is the bass kind of off key all the way through?

The whole album is like that, the bass I mean. It strikes me as "brother-in-law" bass playing, like he hired his brother-in-law as a favor to his sister. As a result, this is one of the very few instances in which I would welcome a digital replacement of the offending musician.

Great song though, regardless. Real lessons in these songs, for those with ears to hear them.

Nur Genug Geld

2012-01-25T06:35:00.000-08:00

I was reminded today, watching the State of the Union address, that our politicians, of either party, would rather put their right hand in a fire than talk about any of the real problems that we face.

Like the whole idea of "fair wages."

I like the German language, it's very good for communicating ideas and it has a certain weird music to it. Good for poetry, for sure, and lots of good literature too, much of it surprisingly funny. I am reminded of a short story by Heinrich Boell (no umlauts here, sorry, not going to take the time to figure that out). The protagonist is ultra-cynical about the whole concept of work. He describes typical wages as follows:

"Sie dienen nur genug Geld, um weiter arbeiten zu koennen."

That's it in a nutshell: they only make enough money to enable them to continue working.

Guess which party holds strong to that theory. And guess who I'll be voting for later this year. Yeah, I know, he's not perfect either, but he's all we've got. Maybe someday they'll get around to those important issues.

King Naresuwan's Chicken Connection

2012-01-25T05:09:00.000-08:00

The statue of the fellow on the elephant, that's King Naresuwan, a real big-shot from about seven hundred years ago. United the kingdom of Siam, he did, and came up with a new Thai alphabet that is still in use today. Now notice the chicken in the tree, standing right up there like he owned it.

How'd he get up there? He flew, probably. They fly like who-done-what-and-ran, and only briefly, but they can do it. Usually it's because a dog or something is closing in on them.

That's our chicken walking around in the other picture. Handsome little guy he is, too.

Chickens happen to be a totem of King Naresuwan. The big, black chicken statue is part of that trip. The young Naresuwan was a royal hostage in Burma as a boy, and he and the Burmese prince had fighting chickens. The battle of the chickens presaged their later battle with large armies. The battle culminated in an elephant duel between the two kings, and the Burmese king was killed, ending the battle and the war.

I almost called this post "King Naresuwan's Fighting Cock," but finally I thought it was too suggestive.

There is a series of movies in Thailand about the exploits of King Naresuwan, it's like "Naresuwan I," "Naresuwan II," etc, I think they're up to four with five planed. They're good movies, but I doubt if they're available in America. Check your Netflix! If you can catch one, consider how amazing it is that they got such huge looking, glossy costume dramas done on such small budgets.

Thailand Scenery In Uthai Tani

2012-01-23T04:16:00.000-08:00

My Thai friend called this geological phenomenon "the Thai Ayers Rock." Well, at least he compared it to that thing in Australia, he'd been to Australia when he was in the Marines but he'd forgotten the name of the place.

Thais more likely call it that waste of good rice growing land; or that unfortunate interruption in going from here to there.

This is Uthai Tani, and these fields get two or three rice crops per year. This is January in the pictures, and it looks like a recent planting. Right after the floods last year settled down probably. Good soil, looks like to me, but I'm no farmer. Good outcomes though, so I guess I'm right.

Re: Below

2012-01-22T20:46:00.001-08:00

Incidentally, the children in the pictures below are wearing traditional Karen fabrics. The bicycles were donated by the government in this case; sometimes schools like this get bicycles donated by NGO's.

Most importantly, I noticed that the kids had pretty good teeth. This is exclusively due to a government program of routine visits by traveling dentists, and another government program of providing free milk to grammar schools on a daily basis. These are both recent developments. When I first got to Thailand, kids at out of the way schools had horrible teeth and the programs were just getting rolling. So, progress of a sort.

On The Road With Khun Fred

2012-01-22T20:21:00.000-08:00

I was in Uthai Tani over the weekend as a guest of my friend Suksa. Nice guy, nice family, pix to follow. We went up to a "hill tribe" area for a visit. In this area, they are Karen, a tribe mostly associated with Burma. Suksa tells me that hereabouts they are full Thai citizens; closer to the border that is not the case.

("Karen," it took me years to figure out what Thais were talking about. It sounds like "gah-lee-yen." A lot of that happens to me.)

We stopped at a school. We missed out on visiting a class, school was over when we got there, but I did get to hang out with these kids for a bit. When I walk over to them they always get this "what next?" look. I crack the ice by asking them in Thai, "krai poot passa yeruman dai, na c'ap?" ("Who can speak German?") That's two surprises in one, I can speak Thai and the German thing, nobody can speak German over here, almost nobody. So this little crowd developed and we had some fun.

Finally a child asked me where I was from, and when I said America he said, "so why were you asking about German?" Oh, I told him, I can speak German too. "Why do you speak German?" I learned it at university. I got that look, like Farang do the damnedest things. I doubt if they could find Germany on a map, but they know it's a country, separate from America.

The small house is a typical Karen house, there were a lot of them around. The group of dwellings with the fire out back, that could be one of two things. Either they were burning off the stalks from something recently harvested, or they were burning off some forest for new planting. Fire is an important tool for them, and kind of fun too. The government doesn't like it, but people have to make a living. As long as they don't burn too much, it's cool.

Bangkok Buskers

2012-01-17T23:34:00.000-08:00

A nice band of buskers outside a mall in the touristy area of Silom Road. The guy playing the guitar-thing was really very good. He kept it ringing like a bell, and he kept to the musical idea too, a real talent. They were all good actually, and the crowd was most appreciative (with affection and money).

The little green frog doll in the foreground is an automated dancing frog by the way, very cute.

The Classroom

2012-01-17T23:26:00.000-08:00

Why think of these things today? I don’t know, but somehow I found myself thinking of my first year in high school. Just a function of my age, perhaps, bits of memory floating in and out, attempts at finally understanding something or other in the shrinking remainder of one’s time on earth.

It was neither a particularly bad time, nor especially good. The only remarkable thing about it was that my little world became slightly less so, I had to take two buses to get there and I met a new bunch of teachers and fellows from other parts of the city. It was a Catholic school, as my grammar school had been. My disadvantage was that I was too young, more than a year younger than almost all of the other boys. I had turned thirteen one month before classes started, and at that age one year was a great difference. I didn’t realize it then, but the fact that the other boys were bigger, stronger and more aware than I was had a powerful effect on me at the time, and on my future development.

Most of the details elude me, but I can remember two of my classrooms very well. One was my Algebra class. I remember the teacher, one of the Holy Cross Brothers who made up most of the teaching staff, a serious young man with glasses, I forget his name. I can recall him clearly because of his deep devotion to our salvation, as men and souls, which was sorely threatened by the curse of masturbation.

The entire faculty knew that we were all doing it, I mean, thirteen and fourteen year old boys, they didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. Guessing that we did was almost always a safe bet. This brother had a habit of asking one of us at a time to remain after class so he could cross-examine us about it. “Algebra requires concentration,” he’d say, “and masturbation destroys the ability to concentrate.” He’d ask us if we were doing it, and of course we’d say no. One day during such an inquisition he asked me how frequently I had wet dreams, I’m sure he used the term “nocturnal emission,” but really I had never heard any of these words before. I answered, oh, no, I don’t have those either, thinking that was the preferred answer. “That proves that you’re masturbating!” It’s a sin, etc, it will make you crazy, etc, etc, what a bunch of Johnny-One-Notes they were, and you know that they were all at it too.

My clearest memories of that year are of my Latin class. My memories of those lessons stand out in clarity and detail among any other memories from my childhood. Latin, the subject itself, seemed like such an imposition, such a useless exercise, I thought the whole thing was arbitrary and punitive. My teachers were less than helpful.

We started off the term with Brother Juan Capistrano. He was man whose cheerfulness bordered on the giddy. He was not a frightening figure by any means, and he knew his Latin, but we noticed early on that his behavior was a little bit bizarre. One Friday there was a “pep-rally” scheduled for after school, attendance was not mandatory but it was strongly suggested. Before our lesson, he started talking about the pep-rally, drawing on the board as he did. He spoke lovingly about the wonders of school spirit, and how much fun the rally would be, and the songs and cheers, and why didn’t we all stick around for the basketball game too? He went on and on, and on the board he was drawing the school and a detailed rendering of hundreds of young men flocking to the door, you could see every smiling face in the crowd, I see it in my mind as though it were yesterday. He turned to face us, clasping his hands together in a moment of final, ecstatic salesmanship. We had, I assure you, no idea of how to react to this display.

By week six of the semester he was gone, a crazy man, a relapse evidently, sent off for a rest cure. His replacement, we thought, was even crazier, and not in such a nice way either.

Brother John was in charge of the school library, and in that capacity he was a serious but not unfriendly man who we all found non-threatening. In the Latin class, however, he underwent a complete metamorphosis. When the bell rang he would announce, “please arrange your seats.” He had rules about the placement of the individual student desks, the forward left castor had to be centered with great precision on a certain intersection of the floor tiles. After we had all shuffled our desks a bit he would take a tour of the room, and every time he did this he would discover that about half of the desks were not, in fact, placed with sufficient precision. By the time he had worked his way around the room he was in a tizzy of profound disappointment. And this is even before our recitation of the Our Father and the Hail Mary in Latin!

Once these preliminaries were disposed of, the lesson would start in earnest. “Open to page 46,” he would solemnly say, “Cavanaugh, begin reading.” It always seemed that he would pick one of us who had a particularly terrible Latin accent. As the student began to read, Brother John would follow along with his finger in his own book. At some point he would withdraw his finger and close his eyes. He would then place his head on his desk; often he’d begin to cry, real sobbing tears, bitter tears. Poor Cavanaugh would still be reading, wishing that he was capable of a better job of it. All of us became quite anxious at this point, because the crying was frequently followed by a sudden explosion and maybe a little corporal punishment too. That was still allowed.

No surprise that I remember that classroom so well, what a den of insanity. That classroom! It just comes back to me this second! It was two years later, in that same classroom, being tormented with another useless subject (Religion), where I listened to the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot! Oh, the memory is a strange thing, and terrible, in its way.

Bangkok Death Ride

2012-01-17T01:34:00.000-08:00

I see these from time to time. No front brake; no mirrors; I forget if it even had a real license plate on it. Check those straight pipes, imagine what this baby sounds like when it's angry. This is some gangster shit right here.

What Progress We’ve Made

2012-01-17T01:30:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. day is this week, and it’s a good time to take stock of what progress, if any, has been made in the area of race relations since his passing. Or, “his murder” might be a more apt way to put it. A Thai friend of mine asked me about it, something about what’s the difference now from when you were a boy? It’s a fair question. When I was a boy we had Jim Crow laws in lots of places, and now, we do not. When I was a boy, Martin was very likely to be referred to as “Martin Lucifer Coon,” and now we have a national holiday in his memory and a Black American in the white house (and not just serving coffee!). So what’s the deal?

I hedged about my answer, I don’t like to sugar coat these things, but I don’t like to be too negative either. Honestly, I think the current state of race relations in America is a poor, woebegone hooptie in desperate need of an overhaul. But haven’t things gotten better? In some measure anyway? What about that Black president in the White House?

What I said was this: when I was a boy, there was more prejudice against Blacks in America. Now people are not so prejudiced, but the people that are prejudiced against Blacks hate them more than in the old days. I was surprised to hear these words come out of my mouth, it was a new formulation for me.

So is it true? Back in the Fifties most Whites were prejudiced, but it was a casual, unfocused prejudice in most of the country, not advised or well thought out. It was simply the received wisdom of the age. Blacks were thought to be inferior, and keeping them in certain neighborhoods and certain job categories was seen as a natural and paternalistic thing to do. Withholding access to higher education or banking services beyond a passbook account was considered only sensible, because such things were all beyond their capabilities anyway. That’s the way the logic went. There was nothing personal about it.

(I’m talking about most of America. In the states of the “former Confederacy,” of course, it was advised, it was personal, and it was often more vicious.)

Now though, there are a lot of White people, all over America, who are really worked up about Black Americans. Really bitching and moaning up a storm. Not a majority, certainly, but a lot of people. They are being manipulated by cynical politicians and wealthy preachers; they are being told that Blacks want “reparations,” that Blacks are bankrupting our government by demanding “handouts,” that Blacks are making our country a dangerous place to live, and other lies and slanders. There’s this new “right-wing-echo-chamber” media shit storm where all of these disgruntled Whites can get together and roll each other’s logs. The comments are chilling.

This “now” thing is a very different America than the America of my youth, and the reasons for the new hostility to Black Americans are easy to see.

America fifty years ago was a place of low income-disparity and low unemployment. It was a comfortably middle-class society, where pretty much anybody could make a living and support themselves. Access to education was good, for the White people anyway, and access to health care was pretty good generally. There were covenants in place to govern the conduct of employers vis-à-vis their employees, and the conduct of professionals in the market place. Not a perfect place, but it functioned well. For the White people, anyway.

America these days is a pirate cove of bloody-minded greed, absurd accumulation of wealth, and selfish indulgence in luxury. All of the covenants have been discarded, and all of the prior attempts to put constraints on gangster-capitalism have been undone. The great majority of Americans, almost all of us, Black, White and otherwise, are watching our opportunities dry up and our future security thrown into doubt as all of the money drifts into fewer and fewer hands.

Between the harsh reality and the incitement to riot, people are at each other’s necks.

So we have the holiday for Martin, that’s nice, and we have President Obama, and I think that’s nice too. Progress though? Unfortunately, I think, no, emphatically no.

Inpawa Hotel, Kon Kaen

2012-01-17T00:17:00.000-08:00

Yes, Kon Kaen has a pretty prosperous look to it. This is in the city of Ban Phai, a smallish place forty kilometers or so from the provincial capital. Very easy-going place, easy to cross the street and so forth. This is a brand new hotel, opened in the last year or so. A beautiful place, about twenty-seven dollars per night for a room like this one.

And a nice room it was. The hot water was plentiful, even in the bathroom sink, which is rare. The cable could have been better, the only channel in English was the Australia network (the news was okay, but then it was all surfing documentaries). The room came with free breakfast.

I'd gone out to teach a class, which went fine, as always.

Bus to Kon Kaen

2012-01-17T00:08:00.000-08:00

This is the road from Nakorn Rachasima (also called Korat) into Kon Kaen province and continuing up to Nong Kai and into Lao. You will notice that it is a very glossy, well appointed road.

Kon Kaen had a quite prosperous look over all. The region in general is considered to be a poor place, and some of the surrounding provinces have a down-in-heel character to them.

The Book of Cletis: America's Varied Carols Part 2

2012-01-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

The Book of Cletis: America's Varied Carols Part 2: 14 Orchestra at square dance. McIntosh County, Oklahoma, 1939 or 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Russell Lee. Prints and Photo...

Cletis again, note the spelling, as in "The Book of Cletis," a wonderful blog.

These pix are wonderful. Who knew that there were such things? The color I mean. American history, a fit subject for our consideration.

Building our future is an ongoing project, and we all play our part. Play your cards wisely, dear readers.

Robert Gordon - Someday Someway

2012-01-15T06:55:00.000-08:00

I came across this on the great, great blog called "The Book Of Cletus." Me and him agree on lots of things, and we like a lot of the same music too.

This is a Marshall Crenshaw song, I love Marshall, he never got 10% of the credit that he deserved for the great records he made. That's the music business though, isn't it?

That's Danny Gatton playing the big-time guitar parts here. To say that he was the best would be understating the whole thing. Mr. Gatton was the man, hell, he is the man, thanks to recording technology. Rest in peace, Dan. A peace that was denied you on earth. Like many of us, Danny was depressed, clinically depressed if I don't miss my guess, and finally he just up and took his own life.

And Robert Gordon, there's another underrated talent. He released a great, great album in the late Seventies with Link Wray as a sideman, you can look it up under "no commercial potential."

Five U.S. Senators Are Perfect Koch Servants, Americans For Prosperity Reports

2012-01-12T05:05:00.000-08:00

Five U.S. Senators Are Perfect Koch Servants, Americans For Prosperity Reports: pFive senators and 39 representatives received a perfect 100 percent score from the Koch brothers’ Astroturf group Americans For Prosperity for the first half of the 112th Congress. AFP judged Congress on their votes to protect the Koch brothers’ right-wing petrochemical empire on such issues as the repeal of President Obama’s new health care law, [...]/p

This is the part that gets me every time: is this the peanuts that they sell us out for? Sure, they get more from other, similar sources, and sure, other benefits accrue to them, but finally they sell us out for a pittance. They end up as mere ten-millionaires while their betters laugh at them and we get the shaft. I try to leave the politics to others, plenty of people are much better at it than I could ever be. But I am not without my anger, and my indignation.

Testing Room, Ramkhamhaeng University

2012-01-10T01:52:00.000-08:00

I'm proctoring tests this week; this was my room this morning. This is our "re-test," the second bite at the apple for students who failed the final the first time. The empty seats are no-shows, they decided to just take the F.

Little Junior's Blue Flames - Mystery Train

2012-01-09T03:35:00.000-08:00

Maybe the greatest 45 RPM record of all time, but you know me, I try never to exaggerate.

Following The Rules: Republican Primary Edition

2012-01-09T02:51:00.000-08:00

In Navy boot camp we learned a lot of rules, including detailed rules for how to fold and stow every item of our clothing. The white hats posed a special problem: it was physically impossible to fold them in the prescribed manner. It couldn’t be done. As soon as you let go of them they flipped back open. We had “lockers” that consisted of a few small shelves and one drawer that could be locked, and we were subject to lots of locker inspections, some by surprise. Our company commander, a first class Bosun’s Mate named Richard Passion (no lie!) had a simple solution to the white hat problem. We had only two, and one was always with us, and we were told to keep the other one in the drawer at all times. I consider this a simple lesson in the nature of rules.

Rules, let’s face it, are meant to be bent, broken or ignored. (Bent, in the case of the white hats.) But how? When? What are the rules when it comes to breaking the rules?

Some time later I attended a good Tae Kwon Do school for a couple of years. Great exercise, that. Our teacher was a very accomplished Korean gentleman who had lots and lots of rules. Rules of posture, form, sequence of muscular contractions, rules for attendance, rules, rules, rules, and you broke them at your peril. If you weren’t careful, he’d use you to demonstrate a new technique. So one day one of the bright lights makes the observation that the teacher often violates the rules of form and posture when he is demonstrating something. “And when you have a sixth degree black belt,” he said good naturedly, “so can you.” So having a license to know better is an excuse for breaking the rules.

My favorite rule-related-rule is, “don’t get caught.”

Rules can get you in trouble though, sometimes following the rules can land you in a world of shit. Sometimes rules are contradictory, and following them can lead you down the rabbit hole to the land of impossible situations.

Like the Republican primary. I’m not a big fan of the whole primary process, but the Republican primary just seems crazy. Any Republican running for president must prevail in the primaries, but if they follow the rules for getting the nomination they will probably find that they have rendered themselves un-electable in the general election.

The rules for the Republican primary require that the candidates be against lots of things that the American people are clearly for. For example:

They must be anti-Gay: most Americans just don’t give a shit who someone wants to kiss. “My cousin (or nephew, or son) is Gay . . . so what?” Or, you hear a lot of, “if they want to get married, it’s their funeral!” Not an issue for most people.

They must be anti-abortion: most Americans by far think that this should be a private matter. Don’t listen to the big mouths. They’d have an abortion anyway if they got raped, or if a doctor told them that the baby would only live a month or two and in pain, and probably even if they were forty-three and got pregnant by accident. They’d keep it quiet though, and that’s the whole fucking point! It’s private!

They must be anti-pornography: the American people have spoken most eloquently on this point, with their credit cards, and they are clearly in favor of pornography.

They must be anti-immigrant: most Americans are not overly concerned with immigrants. And definitely most Americans don’t want to start picking their own fruit. Unless your name is “Running Deer,” your people are immigrants.

Alert the media! The new thing to be anti- is contraception! Amazingly, some of these Republicans think that they can score points by being against contraception, because after all, contraception is anti-life. Obviously, they will lose the good will of most Americans on this issue.

So the Republican candidates alienate most of the electorate on their way to the nomination, which in my estimation is not a good plan. And that’s only the “Social Conservative” stuff! Along with it comes the “bomb Iran,” the “return to the gold standard,” the “jail Federal judges who step out of line,” and a host of other weird stuff that Americans don’t want.

Worst of all, they must be against Socialism, or what passes for Socialism in America. Here they are even more out of step with most Americans. Americans love their government’s small gestures at Socialism. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and even the new Affordable Healthcare Act, Americans love that stuff.

As regular readers may have noticed, I hate the Republicans like the Inquisition hated heretics, so for me it’s all fun, all the time, watching them fall all over themselves to paint themselves into a corner in this primary season. Most often referred to by rational people as “the Republican clown car,” this group of candidates has set new low water marks for common sense and common decency. Later on this year I will thoroughly enjoy watching them try to explain “what they really meant” when they said these things.

Bee Song Ha! Ha! Ha!

2012-01-07T21:52:00.000-08:00

I accompanied a friend of mine to a psychiatrist's office one time and the good doctor asked him, as they will, "what time is it?" My friend responded, after some thought, that it was "Springtime?" He failed that test, big time.

As I sit here, it is Sunday, January 8th. The year is 2012, in most of the world anyway. I'm oriented in all dimensions, I am. Here in Thailand, furthermore, it is the year 2555, Buddhist Era. To my knowledge, this is the only system that counts back to the birth of a religious entity. (I'm not an expert on Islam, don't they count back to a pilgrimage or a revelation or something?) You got other ideas? Look it up. That other one was the Emperor Augustus's idea, and the rest was sheer coincidence.

But the year, 2555. In Thai it comes out, "bee song ha ha ha." Thai Interneters don't write "LOL," they write "555," as in ha! ha! ha! So it's going to be a year of fun, one could only hope with a name like that. I hope so anyway, but I wish us all luck. It might be a bumpy ride.

If you missed it, please go back a couple of pages and check out "They Are Our Teachers," dated December 20th. I'm kind of proud of that one.

Santorum To Mother Of Cancer Survivor: Sick To Blame For Pre-Existing Conditions, Should Be Charged More

2012-01-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

Santorum To Mother Of Cancer Survivor: Sick To Blame For Pre-Existing Conditions, Should Be Charged More: pDuring a town hall in Keene, New Hampshire this morning, Rick Santorum told a mother whose son survived cancer that people with pre-existing conditions should pay more for health care coverage because they make poor health care choices. While specifically exempting the woman’s child from personal blame, Santorum insisted that the sick cost more to [...]/p

So, let's face it, these people are just un-fucking-believable. Can we please just take profit out of this equation? Like the civilized countries? Oh, excuse me, Americans are not particularly aware of what's really going on in the world. Look it up, people! The rest of the developed world laughs at your so-called health care. (And your vacations; and your "sick days;" and your pensions . . . you get the idea.)

ABBA - Nina, Pretty Ballerina

2012-01-07T02:52:00.000-08:00

See comments below.

ABBA Bang-A-Boomerang

2012-01-07T02:50:00.000-08:00

A great song from ABBA, and I don't care what anybody says. I took a lot of flack from my LA hep cat friends in the late 70's for loving ABBA (pre-"Dancing Queen" anyway, I embrace the wide range of normality but even I have limits), but I didn't care. I know what I like, and I still love this cut, among others by them.

The pictures that accompany this vid are great, totally revealing of another phenomenon all together. It's always interesting to me how some of these Europeans can seem so hip and so square all at the same time. Did I say square? Doofy, even.

It's the smaller European countries that can pull this off. Holland is my favorite European country, I love the Dutch. They personify this whole thing, the cool/square thing. Definitely go to Holland if you can, it's a great place, but you'll notice that the Dutch dress like blind people who didn't have much of a closet to choose from in the first place. Mixing colors and patterns, weird shirts and combinations, there's a Dutch talk show floating around, check it out and you'll see what I mean.

But ABBA . . . what's not to love?

Grand Finale With Trainee Croc Wrangler

2012-01-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

You've got to love this kid. He came on at the end of the show and they let him man-handle a small croc. And the other man holding a croc, notice how he has taught that particular croc to wave at the audience. All in all, a pretty good croc show, don't you think?

Croc Teasing

2012-01-05T04:02:00.000-08:00

I love the Crocodile Farm, really I do, but the "Crocodile Jumping" attraction is overhyped. The sign at the front of the attraction shows a croc jumping out of the water like a porpoise at Sea World. At the 'Farm, they give you a fish head on the end of a line on a pole and you can go dangle it in front of the eyes of a croc in a sometimes successful attempt to get its attention.

All in good fun, I'm sure.

Please Kill Me Now

2012-01-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

Simultaneously feeling quite the fool, I am considering the purchase of some kind of reading tablet, maybe one of the Kindles. The mere consideration of this gives me a somewhat otherworldly feeling, as though I were viewing the event from afar. These new technologies, if one can generalize, generally sicken me.

None of this new technology lives up to its hype. Take this blog post, for instance. Do I own the copyright? Will I be able to access the copy in the future? Who knows? I am typing this in real time, with no back-up, so if someday there's a "pay wall," or a "software not supported" problem, that'll be that. (In a cooler frame of mind I save them all as Word documents, with appropriate back-up. I'm old fashioned, but I'm not stupid.)

Or am I? I'm typing on an Apple IMac, and although I really do love the interface and the display I must admit that I am convinced that Apple's major corporate emphasis is keeping the user from completely enjoying his own property. I just tried to make a CD of my own pictures, and although I did find, at last, the instructions on how to do so, and copied them out, and followed them assiduously, it was finally impossible to accomplish. I own an IPod, and I would dearly love to load the contents onto this Apple, but alas, that would be impossible. Apple is desperately concerned about so-called piracy evidently, so much so that it is willing to inconvenience nearly all of its dupes, I mean customers.

Maybe you could have done all this, but so what? Is new technology just for you? I ask for help sometimes, and I don't get it.

I then tried to print a couple of pictures myself, rather than having the CD to take to the store. I wanted to avoid this, because my printer makes me even more furious than the rest of my technology. It was cheap, the better to make the money on the always running out four colors of ink. Amazingly, printing only text uses up vast quantities of magenta, cyan and blue as well as the black. "Paper jam!" is my printer's middle name, especially with anything heavier than an Aerogram.

My deep conviction that I must jettison the printer to preserve my happiness led me in the first place to wonder if a Kindle would better serve me. All I want to do is pull text off of the 'Net and read it at my leisure. I don't really need the great reams of paper that I've been accumulating.

Oh, why do we struggle so? It'll all be over soon. Everything will be digitized, and everything "real" will disappear from the world. Get used to it! Digital is the Antichrist, but that's another story I suppose.

So, should I get a Kindle?

Good News! Kim Jong Il Left Plenty Of Photographs

2012-01-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite sites is kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com. To me, Kim Jong Il was the greatest source of unintended hilarity in the world, from the ridiculously bouncy goose-stepping parade troops to the absurdly over-manned public displays of affection for, well, Kim Jong Il.

I was afraid that his recent semi-anticipated demise would be the end of the site, but I was wrong. Evidently he left a treasure trove of photo's of himself looking at things. At some point, I'm sure that the site will move over to showing pictures of the new "Supreme Leader." That'll be fine, he looks pretty funny too.

The Best Room-Reverb In The World, Bar None

2012-01-02T05:46:00.000-08:00

I went to a Christmas party in this house, and I can tell you that this bathroom is the single greatest sound enhancer in history.

It's two bathrooms actually, that's the secret. Each room is about nine by twelve feet, tile floor and wall all the way to the ceiling, and you can see in the picture that they're connected by a wall that stops eight or ten inches from the ceiling. This venting, this connection, doubles the natural reverb, it's absolutely amazing.

You sing a song in here and you sound like Caruso, I swear.

Some People Just Like Monkeys

2012-01-02T05:33:00.000-08:00

Today's trip to the Crocodile Farm was a gift to this friend of mine. She's up against it right now, but this picture with the monkey really put a smile on her face. She put on her best outfit and her best wig for the occasion (that chemo is a bitch). Spent a lot of time on her make-up too, and gave me her best smile here. It's a croc farm, but mostly she likes the monkeys.

We had a great time, and it was no trouble at all. This picture proves that it was a good idea, and appreciated.

Croc Wranglers Risk Lives For Baht

2012-01-02T05:12:00.000-08:00

Sure they know the tricks, how to relax a crocodile so it's "safe" to put you hand in its mouth. It's like NASCAR though, sometimes things go horribly wrong. A couple of years ago the audience at this place was treated to a croc clamping down on a guys arm and starting to do that "croc spinning" thing that they do to tear things off of their prey.

Uneventful today though, a very professional presentation all around. I love how they get people to throw money at them so that they can make it part of the act. That's money in the croc's mouth, if it isn't perfectly clear in the pictures.

I got some video too, maybe I'll make the huge investment of time to put some up in a few days.

Rare Cat Pix

2012-01-02T04:58:00.000-08:00

Went to the Crocodile Farm today and saw . . . a jaguar! And a handsome fellow he was, too. And a tiger! Lots of them actually, this I believe is a young one, maybe a year or so, on the small side with huge paws. Too close for comfort sometimes, they were. For only six dollars they would take your picture with your hands on a tiger, a full sized tiger that didn't look even a little bit drugged. He was chained to a D-ring in the floor, which I know would piss me off. No! But thank you so much for the offer.

The other feline is a fellow traveler at the home of a friend of mine, dining on the remains of the seafood at our Christmas party.

I'd hate to have the only blog on the 'Net with no cat pix.

Jimmy Fallon's Engrish Odysey

2011-12-31T05:39:00.000-08:00

My Asian cable carries CNBC, and they have been showing Jimmy Fallon shows on the weekends. The cable guide is never a paragon of great spelling, but they seem to be having a lot more trouble with his name even than usual.

Within the first few weeks, his name was variously reported as:

Fallon;

Fallan; and

Fellon.

In this month's guide it is listed as:

Fallen.

They've got a few more variants to work through, by my reckoning.

The 'Spin's Greatest Hits: The Serene Beauty Of The End Of The World (April. 2010)

2011-12-31T04:25:00.000-08:00

I was a boy during the Fifties and Sixties, and I can tell you that we all acutely felt the presence of the threat of the end of the world in those days. Lots of people got really worked up about it and made efforts to survive it, at least for six months or so, in private “fallout shelters.” The end that we were half-expecting was, of course, a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It was a real topic of national conversation, and lots of art was devoted to it, because the possibility of it was part of reality, there really were vast arsenals of huge bombs joined to efficient delivery systems, all targeted and ready to go. It was never, perhaps, likely, but, given the contentious relationship of the superpowers and the vagueries of human nature, it was way up into the range of the possible, more than merely conceivable. Scientists invented the Doomsday Clock as a way of warning us to keep our wits about us. Hollywood gave us “Fail Safe,” and “On the Beach,” and even the black comedic masterpiece, “Dr. Strangelove (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb).”

There was a lot of “Post-Apocalyptic” science fiction too, one that I read was called “1999: The Penultimate Truth,” which featured a much reduced human population living in a dangerous new natural world. That was small potatoes though, the real deal was the actual, certifiable End Of The World.

The fear that it engendered in the general population was real and widespread. During the Cuban Missile Crisis I was a high school sophomore, and I distinctly remember the tension among the faculty of my school. They obviously weren't worrying about some ships being sunk, or some soldiers being dispatched. They were worried about the end of the world.

Not surprisingly, given my nature, I viewed the prospect through a romantic, yet strongly cynical, lens. Imagine the thrill of participating in the single greatest event in human history! My role would have been small, no need to prepare ones self for mere vaporization. I lived in New York City, and later on in Los Angeles, and in any nuclear war worth the title both of those places would be multi-targeted and among the first to go. For me, it would probably be a simple matter of noticing the flash from indoors, and having a fraction of a second to feel the pride that comes from witnessing something truly important, however disagreeable.

The worst that I expected was to be reduced to a radiation damaged hulk, essentially disintegrating over the course of the next little while. I could imagine myself kneeling on a lawn, or the dining room floor, vomiting up the remains of my insides and watching my skin sloughing off in big chunks, which was the real life, documented experience of some unfortunate people in Asia on at least two occasions. More time to enjoy the marvelous thrill of a vast nuclear exchange, knowing that a follow up strike will soon end any misery that intruded on the wonder of it.

Honestly, though, I strongly believed that it would never happen. We would never start that war; no cost-benefit analysis, no risk analysis, no possible agenda could justify it. I was also one hundred percent sure that the Soviets would never start it. Even a “victory” would be the end of them, their Soviet style of government. They existed only by the exercise of total control, which would disappear immediately under the first mushroom clouds.

Now we find ourselves in a very different, but almost analogous situation. The Soviets are gone, the number of nuclear weapons has been much reduced (certainly below “end of the world” levels), and the weapons that remain do so in a more stable emotional environment. We live today with the present threat of a different manner of ending for our civilization.

I read a nice bit of fiction the other day, in a New Yorker magazine. “Diary of an Interesting Year,” by Helen Simpson. I say nice, it wasn't great, I was a little bit surprised that it made the cut for that august literary entity. It was a short, first-person (“Diary”), account of the experience of Brits after a sudden, disastrous rise in world temperatures.

Far be it for me to debate the politics, or even the existence of what has come to be called “Global Warming,” I think on the evidence “Global Climate Change” is a more apt title. I think that something is happening, there's plenty of evidence for that, and I think that it should be of concern to us, and I think that it should be investigated without prejudice by the best minds available, but I have no firm opinion as to what might be happening, although I have my suspicions.

Like the U.S. v. Soviets nuclear war, this threatened climate catastrophe is perhaps unlikely, but certainly way up into the range of the possible, more than merely conceivable.

Ms. Simpson's story is very downbeat, the protagonist describes a miserable existence, a slow process of starving to death in disease ridden degradation. If her description of the aftermath of sudden, irreversible climate disruption is accurate, it would be a fate terrible enough to make us long again for those halcyon days of nuclear destruction.

(I do hope that you enjoyed this re-post, a little something to cheer you up for the holiday. I must say that the climate news didn't get any less frightening in the year-and-a-half since I wrote this.)

The End Of The World?

2011-12-25T20:37:00.000-08:00

There’s a lot of talk about the end of the world, scheduled by the Mayans for 2012 in some ungelernte version of Mayan events. The smart money is that the Mayans created their calendar in sections, blocks of predicted time, and that, were it not for the interruption of the Spaniards, the Mayans would have gone on to complete the next section, and so forth. So the “end” of their calendar in 2012 was accidental, they were merely overtaken by events.

End of the world talk is so common in our culture that we get used to it, get used to laughing about it. It’s interesting that the Mayan angle seems to lend more credibility to the enterprise, like they were somehow more reliable in such matters than the usual Christian Apocalypse Mongers. Maybe too many of the Christians have engaged in it, like the boy that cried “wolf!”

I do remember one instance where I was moved to wonder if the prediction was true. It was a summer day in the mid-Sixties, I was a teenager in New York at the time. The prediction made the papers: about seven p.m. on a certain day. At about five-thirty on that day I was in the neighborhood of my girlfriend, looking to kill some time before calling for her at her house, giving them time to finish dinner. I was sitting on a large rock that was buried iceberg style on a patch of ground outside the house of my old second grade teacher, Miss Lepkeger. There were many of these rocks in my town, one of them was as big as a house, known by all as “Indian Rock.” They had been carried down the east coast during the last Ice Age and had been deposited at a time when Long Island was still attached to the mainland.

As I sat there, idly smoking cigarettes and recalling grammar school, the sky grew darker and darker. By six o’clock it was unnaturally dark and a cool wind had come up. The clouds had a roiling, science-fiction quality to them. I started to think that maybe the woman who had predicted the end of the world was onto something.

Well, I wondered, how bad would that be? I grew up in the Cold War period, and we had all become quite fatigued from the constant worrying about sudden apocalyptic death. So the world ends? So what? An end to worry, an acceptable trade-off.

It started raining and it was quite a storm too. A Biblical storm! The world went on about its business though, as it always does in the face of these predictions.

So keep to your financial discipline everybody. In 2013, all of those bills will have to be paid. Happy New Year!

Romney: If I’m President, All College Grads Will Have A Job; If Obama Wins, They Won’t

2011-12-25T07:53:00.000-08:00

Romney: If I’m President, All College Grads Will Have A Job; If Obama Wins, They Won’t: pAsked at a campaign stop in New Hampshire why young people should mobilize behind Mitt Romney for 2012, the candidate had a simple but comically pandering answer. Romney promised 21-year-old Kallie Durkit that he will deliver jobs to college graduates if he’s elected president — that as a businessman he knows “what it takes” to [...]/p

Can you believe the BRASS BALLS on this guy. Well, since you asked me, said Willard, if you are in college now, and I am elected, you will have a job when you graduate; if Mr. Obama is re-elected, you will not have a job when you graduate. Me? 100% Him? 0% And they say these things with a straight face. And if you call them on something you are being a bitch somehow; not getting the big picture; being a deluded Liberal traitor; drinking the Obama Kool Aid. Remarks like this one are just plum stupid, there's no dressing it up, there's nothing political about calling them the spades that they are.

This guy, and all of the sorry-ass useless eaters that he's running with, are beneath our contempt, and yet, they draw air and blow hard in a presidential race, no less. Albeit a Republican race, but still.

And they're not the only one trying our patience these days. Pope Benedict the however many was explaining to us in this jolly season that we should look past the glitter of modern Christmas and return to the simple, straightforward meaning of the holiday. The SIMPLICITY. He said this from his pope's perch, dripping with gold and jewels, surrounded by opulence and oozing luxury from every pore, the decadent MF, pardon my French, or not.

People let them get away with it too, that's the truly amazing part. It seems to be true, most people really do love Big Brother.

Pizzicato Five Groovy Is My Name

2011-12-25T07:28:00.000-08:00

I notice that some of the comments to this vid talk about P5 in the past tense. That's a shame.

This cut is featured on the soundtrack for the movie "Doom Generation." I did some legal work for one of the principals of the movie, and she gave me a CD of the soundtrack. That was my introduction to Pizzicato 5, and this song hooked me immediately.

Sure I live in the past, but some of it is the recent past. It's not like I only listen to the Hollies and the Kinks. But my recent past isn't even so recent anymore. Everything is receding and becoming feint. Is this what they call dying?

What's So Special About Me?

2011-12-22T23:57:00.000-08:00

One subject that I find very important to my country and my culture is race relations in general and Black/White relations in particular. One would think that the Internet would be a great tool in exploring these themes, with its relative anonymity and it's rapid, broad dispersal of ideas. Well maybe, the jury is still out.

I did not wait for the Internet to begin exploring the issues associated with race relations. I have history in this matter. I have had my successes and my failures, but I have tried never to shy away from an opportunity to learn something or to school somebody. The social situations are fun, I don't ask for any credit for those. I have also devoted quite a bit of professional time to the enterprise. I don't ask for credit for that either, not necessarily, but I'm proud of it. Other people have done more than me to explore and try to improve race relations, but many more people have done less. My conscience is clear; I've done my best.

But who knows that? On the Internet, I post comments under my real name and attach a picture, I post under my Blogger identity. So if anyone is so disposed, they may check my own page and find out a little bit about me. No, I'm afraid that's too much to ask. And Internet comments must be limited in scope, mustn't they? You can include an autobiographical essay in each one.

On a web site that I like very much I recently chimed in on an amazing thread about the tension in the American Black community between people of varying shades of color. I took a lot of hits, some favorable, some tolerant, and some comments that brooked great umbrage with my ideas (and the very idea that I would express them). Some of those last included bald misreadings of my content, and many included suppositions about me that just were not true. Like that I didn't know about this or that (but I did, probably); like that I'd never actually spoken to Black Americans (oh, but I have actually); like I'd never had any Black friends (oops, yes again).

Who am I to condemn this knee-jerk assessment of me as a White jerk-off? There's some truth in it, after all. One commenter was especially persistent and personal. I felt like I was being judged too quickly, on too little evidence, mostly the evidence of the picture. Finally I just said, "If it were my role to be the semi-self-educated, slightly aware, occasionally decent, vaguely acceptable White man who really just proved the rule that all White men are vomitous White Supremacist demons, I could live with that, more or less."

But really, who am I? What's so special about me?

I'm empathetic, for one, I feel what other people are feeling, especially the negative emotions. I believe that life is suffering, I believe that we all suffer, each in our way. I do love other people, and I view with charity and resignation the suffering of others. I find it all interesting . . . is that condescending? More than interesting, I find it all important, and not only to that particular sufferer, but to all of us.

We are all in this thing together, I don't think that's an exaggeration. We need to learn to walk in each other's moccasins. We need to try harder to understand each other, and to help each others.

So what's the take-away? Don't be too quick to judge, I suppose. Let's learn to be kinder to one another. Oh, it sounds like such a load of shit, and it flies in the face of all Twenty-First Century logic, but shouldn't we at least try to love each other?

Nat King Cole - The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting...)

2011-12-21T19:39:00.000-08:00

Got a bitter-sweet tone to it, despite the twinkle in his eye. He really was the king, he could do it all. He could sing with great cheer, or with a tear in his eye, or somewhere in between. This is the in-between tone, suitable for Christmas, I think, Christmas isn't everybody's cup of tea.

I'll try my best to be appropriately cheerful, no worries. And to you, my faithful double-dozen, have a wonderful Christmas and a healthy, happy New Year, won't you? I hope you do. And thanks, as always, for reading.

Vaclav Havel, 1936 - 2011

2011-12-20T05:22:00.000-08:00

Vaclav Havel was pretty cool. He was Keith Richards' favorite politician, that's a pretty good recommendation. Vastly quotable too. The following examples I borrowed from Gawker.

On the hidden mysteries of life:

"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."

On the advantages of the underdog:

"There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side."

On loosening up:

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."

On the audacious semantics of hope:

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

On the perks of power:

"If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President."

On the Jesus Connection:

"Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats."

On the true nature of Art:

"There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth."

That's good stuff. Adios, Vaclav, thanks for everything.

They Are Our Teachers

2011-12-20T00:05:00.000-08:00

It’s good to appreciate our teachers, every day should be teacher appreciation day. We should go further and remember all of those who have taught us valuable lessons. The unsung teachers, the unknown, those people who may have taught us a little about life without ever addressing us directly, perhaps without every having exchanged a word with us.

I found myself recently recalling one such man. I was seventeen at the time, riding the subway to my college in Manhattan. My school was across the street from City Hall, on Park Row, next to the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. I knew very little about the races at the time. I was at what might be called “level one of not being prejudiced,” which is to say that I was relatively color-blind when it came to sports figures and entertainers, but I had very little experience of actually talking to Blacks, or Puerto Ricans for that matter.

The racial situation in New York was very tense at the time (1965). Neighborhoods were segregated, but it was nothing official. We were all together on the public transportation, but in New York no one interacts on public transportation under any circumstances. There were virtually no Black police, and the White police played serious havoc in the Black community under the guise of maintaining order. They played havoc with us too, but it was much more gentle. My entire youth was spent in a milieu of constant violence, and I was very quick to put men, especially young men, into the “threat to kick my ass” category. I had no reason to leave the Black teenagers out of that category, since I had hardly ever actually spoken to one. The girls I thought were cute, in my innocent way, not only the Shirelles and the Crystals, but also the girls on the bus. (I had spoken to a few Black girls. I found them to be a bit direct, perhaps, but very nice and pretty.)

Honestly, I had never given the matter of race relations much serious thought at all.

So I was on the subway that day, an IND train I believe. Odd, because I usually took the IRT Lexington Avenue line to school. Across from me sat a middle-aged Black man, maybe fifty or so, when one is seventeen it’s hard to tell. He was wearing a sweater vest over a button-down Oxford shirt, blue I think, dressy but not too fancy pants, dark wool, and comfortable shoes. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses that were almost nerdy. Sitting close to me on my side of the car were a mother and small child, a boy, three or four years old, White.

The man was smiling benignly at the boy and his mom, and the boy noticed and smiled back. There followed a good deal of wordless communication between the three of them, all very appropriate and friendly. Some peek-a-boo was played.

I thought about the man. He looked very smart, and he was certainly very nice. I thought, he must work for the city, and he did get off at my stop, Chambers Street, in the heart of the municipal office area. Probably he’s a native New Yorker, probably a graduate of the city’s university system. A Civil Servant of some kind. I tried to imagine his life. I knew that for him it would have been harder to get into the City University system, and harder to get into the good civil service office jobs. I wondered about his life, his apartment, his family. I had never considered such things before, never considered if such people even existed.

So on that morning, for me, Black Americans became three-dimensional. Black men had previously consisted of Jackie Robinson (et al), Bo Diddley (et al), some nondescript guys on the bus, and those vaguely threatening teenagers. That universe had expanded to include decent, hard-working, every-day human beings. Before too long I discovered that the decent, hard working people were the norm.

I have often wondered about that man over the years. He taught me a great lesson without trying and without even knowing that it was happening. It was a great gift, and I still appreciate it.

Mike Tyson: Girl from Ipanema

2011-12-18T04:49:00.000-08:00

I wasn't really a Christmas person for most of my life. Oh sure, there were a lot of good ones in there, when my boys were young, but usually I need a little cheering up around Christmas time.

This vid did it for me, my first time around was a pretty cool three minutes. I love Mike Tyson. Merry Christmas Mike, wherever you are.

Howard Tate - Ain't Nobody Home

2011-12-16T06:32:00.000-08:00

Better known for "Get It While You Can," but I always liked this cut. A memorial as it were, see below.

Howard Tate Obituary: The Obituary and Death Notice of Howard Tate | Legacy.com

2011-12-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

Howard Tate Obituary: The Obituary and Death Notice of Howard Tate | Legacy.com

Let's take a moment to remember the late, great Howard Tate. A cautionary tale with many levels to it, a great, great singer who just never clicked with the music business or the broader fan base.

I know that Christopher Hitchens also died this week, but I trust that he will be adequately eulogized. No such luck for Howard, who lived in deep cover after a brief flirtation with fame and died in obscurity.

Some of us will miss him, and I for one wish him God speed.

11 week old with Pocket Pond on iPad 2 - part 1

2011-12-15T04:53:00.000-08:00

That's my granddaughter there flicking the switches, tickling the LCD. She's a keeper, she is.

Alvin Robinson - Something You Got

2011-12-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

This is a cover too, you know I love the covers. Chris Kenner had the original, you may know that I love him too.

Alvin Robinson is another one of my favorites. Great laconic style, behind the beat, N'orleans at its finest. Another guy that the Rolling Stones helped me to appreciate. Their "Down Home Girl" was a cover of Alvin's original, largely unknown in New York at the time.

Most Spam Infested Post On This Blog: The Fifteen Greatest Roman Generals

2011-12-14T05:14:00.000-08:00

This is a post of mine from years ago. There doesn't seem to be anything remarkable about it but it has generated a huge amount of spam over the years, and continues to do so on a weekly basis. Why would one post draw a thousand times more spam comments than any other? That's not a rhetorical question, I'd really like to know.

Here's the post:

Don’t take my word for it. I got these names from a book by a real historian, I forget his name right now, the book is nine time zones away. In roughly chronological order:

1. Quintus Fabius Maximus (“Cunctator”) 217 B.C. “The Delayer;” the shield of Rome.

2. Marcus Claudius Marcellus. The sword of Rome; killed Britomarus in individual combat; started turning the tide against Hannibal.

3. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. 209 B.C. Captured New Carthage; defeated Hasdrubal at Ilipa; ended Second Punic War.

4. Lucius Aemilius Paullus. 170 B.C. Conquered Macedonia; battle of Phdna; defeated Antiochus the Great and Perseus.

5. Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus. 140 B.C. Careful preparation, close supervision and controlled boldness; ended Third Punic War.

6. Caius Marius. 110 B.C. Defeated Germanic tribes the Chimbri, Teutones and Ambrones; reformed the army.

7. Quintus Sertorius. Noted for speed, secrecy and misdirection; Civil Wars.

8. Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Young, rich and unconventional; Civil War v. Sertorius; defeated Mediterranean pirates.

9. Caius Julius Ceasar. Aggressive and flexible; battle of Alesia v. Vercingatorix in Gaul; Civil War.

10. Claudius Germanicus Caesar. Adopted son of Tiberius; biological son of Drusus.

11. Cnaeus Domitius Corbulo. Reformed the Roman army to become the new Imperial army; fought in Germany and Armenia.

12. Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus. 70 A.D. Son of Vespasian; siege of Jerusalem.

13. Marcus Ulpius Traianus “Trajan.” 103 A.D. Dacian wars.

14. Julian the Apostate. 356 A.D. Tough wins against Germanic tribes invading Gaul.

15. Belisarius. 550 A.D. Wars against Persia; created a “Medieval army” for Rome.

If I commanded a battle fleet in outer space, I’d name the big warships after these guys.

The Onion, Still Lovable

2011-12-13T06:15:00.001-08:00

They've got a pay wall now, but you can still see all of the headings. Sometimes they are hysterical in themselves. For instance:

"Who is Romney Today?" Very good, subtle, typically Onion. But here's the kicker:

"Al Qaeda claims U.S. mass transportation infrastructure must drastically improve before any terrorist attack."

Botswana Music Guitar - Ronnie -"Happy New Year"!

2011-12-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

Shockingly good, and wildly entertaining. I'd never heard of this guy, but I'm a long time fan of Highlife and Afrobeat (most of my faves are dated now, I'll admit).

I love how these guys take any old thing with strings and make it ring like a bell. I remember reading about a trip that Ry Cooder made to Africa, how the local guys made fun of him for bringing like fifty expensive guitars, a different one for every situation. They just carried their old Japanese beater under their arms, no case. But it is all in the fingers after all, isn't it? And the ear?

Classic Little Movie Lines: Larceny, Inc.

2011-12-13T03:35:00.000-08:00

Edward G. Robinson is a crook with a team and a big idea. They buy a luggage store next to a bank and plan to tunnel in. When customers come in to the store, they just try to get rid of them.

At one point the woman who owns the local lingerie store comes in to say hello. Bonjour! She says. Edward G. tells her, "yeah, we don't want any postcards today."

I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore

2011-12-12T05:54:00.000-08:00

This is a Woody Guthrie song from long, long ago, a historical song, but history has a habit of coming back to bite us, again and again, on the ass. Foreclosures, banker speculators, depressed workers . . . what else is coming around again on the wheel?

The Euro was supposed to help to avoid future wars in Europe. Anybody still think that's working out as planned?

Call me a pessimist, but we're right more often than the Pollyannas of the world.

Laura Nyro - Save The Country

2011-12-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the lo-fi, but you know that never bothers me. What a great song though, and a great rendition. She's such a powerful artist, maybe she's too good for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Pick A Number And Tell Me What’s Fair

2011-12-12T04:43:00.000-08:00

I caught Lindsey Graham on “Meet the Press” last week (December 11, 2011). During a discussion of taxes on the rich, he smugly asked another panelist how they would tax the upper ranges of income. “Pick a number,” he mocked, “tell me what’s fair.” Forgive me, but I find Mr. Graham to be a disingenuous man, lacking a basic sense of fairness.

Well, here’s a simple idea that many will consider fair. I like the idea that all Americans should be taxed at the same rate, but a flat tax at the same percentage, for all income levels, is just a stupid idea. How about a stratified flat tax? where all Americans could be taxed at the same rates, plural. I mean a tax structure where the percentage changes as the income rises, at levels. Not in the old manner, where we looked up our total income and read off the percentage to be offered. Rather, a chart with many strata that all could use, a rate for income from zero to fifteen thousand; another rate for income from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand, etc.

I cannot claim unique invention of this kind of thing. This is a case of polygenesis, probably more than 100,000 people have had this idea, and even then I may be putting myself into too exclusive a group. I heard James Carvill recently say that he would back one.

Fine tuning the numbers would best be left to others, but here’s a model for the idea:

0 to 15,000; 0% (no tax);

15,000 to 30,000; 5%; tax on this level at $30,000, $750; total tax as a percentage of income, 2.5%

30,000 to 45,000; 9%; tax on this level at $45,000, $2,100; total tax as a percentage of income, 4.6%

45,000 to 75,000; 12%; tax on this level at $75,000, $5,700; total tax as a percentage of income, 7.6%

75,000 to 125,000; 15%; tax on this level at $125,000, $13,200; total tax as a percentage of income, 10.6%

125,000 to 225,000; 19%; tax on this level at $250,000, $19,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 14.3%

225,000 to 375,000; 23%; tax on this level at $375,000, $34,500; total tax as a percentage of income, 17.8%

375,000 to 600,000; 27%; tax on this level at $600,000, $60,750; total tax as a percentage of income, 21.2%

600,000 to 900,000; 32%; tax on this level at $900,000, $96,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 24.8%

900,000 to 1,400,000; 35%; tax on this level at $1,400,000, $175,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 28.5%

1,400,000 to 3,500,000; 42%; tax on this level at $3,500,000, $882,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 36.6%

3,500,000 to 5,000,000; 47%; tax on this level at $5,000,000, $705,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 39.7%

5,000,000 to 10,000,000; 53%; tax on this level at $10,000,000, $2,650,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 46.3%

10,000,000 to 15,000,000; 65%; tax on this level at $15,000,000, $3,250,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 52.6%

15,000,000 to 25,000,000; 75%; tax on this level at $25,000,000, $7,500,000; total tax as a percentage of income, 61.5%

Over $25,000,000; 80%

These taxes are cumulative. Add up the taxes at each level for the total tax paid.

See? It’s easy. Every American pays exactly the same rate of tax, at every level. I’m not an expert, so the numbers would have to be juggled to make up the necessary income, but I think something like this would be close. I think we could do away with all deductions and just take these simple numbers off of the gross. No exemptions, no joint returns, everyone pays as an individual. "Income" would be income from any source, wages, investment income, capitol gains, whatever. If you received it, and you could spend it, it was income.

Here’s how it looks as total tax paid (income; tax paid):

$15,000; pay $0

$30,000; pay $750

$45,000; pay $2,100

$75,000; pay $5,700

$125,000; pay $13,200

$225,000; pay $32,200

$375,000; pay $66,700

$600,000; pay $127,450

$900,000; pay $223,450

$1,400,000; pay $398,450

$3,500,000; pay $1,280,450

$5,000,000; pay $1,985,450

$10,000,000; pay $4,635,450

$15,000,000; pay $7,885,450

$25,000,000; pay $15,385,450

Do those sound like fair contributions to the nation’s wellbeing? I think it all comes in lower than the marginal tax rates of the 1950’s. Of course there’d be other taxes, state and local taxes, some sales taxes, property taxes, import taxes, estate taxes. The above are suggested Federal Income Taxes.

Taxes are not evil. They are necessary to the running of any country. Who pays what is a question of fairness. I believe that Americans possess an innate sense of fairness, a sense of fair play. Would that our politicians still shared that sense.

MF Global Explained

2011-12-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

Oh, boy does this one take an investment of time and energy. It's fun, though, on a couple of levels. For one thing, the jargon is kind of hypnotic, between the jargon and the presentation it's down right relaxing. Besides, this kind of financial hanky-panky has become the single most important thing in the world!

Welcome to the end of the world as we know it.

Choose Carefully Your Opportunities For Having An Opinion

2011-12-09T02:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve lived a long time, at least it seems like a long time. I was born while Truman was serving out poor, dead FDR’s fourth term. I’ve lived long enough to see chickens fly (I didn’t expect that one, they obviously keep it a close secret). During this long existence I have developed opinions about many things, usually, but not always, after careful consideration. One thing though, I have lived long enough to know that my opinions regarding certain things are next to worthless. Like my opinions concerning Black American culture.

“We Are Respectable Negroes” is a blog that I really like. The subject of the family names of the ex-slaves came up recently, along with the whole idea of changing names to something African or Islamic. I have an opinion on the subject, of course, and I shared it at length. The reactions ranged from a firm “wrong!” to a gentle reminder that considering my point of view I’ll never really get it.

Two of our regular visitors were in each other’s hair about one having a European name, as in what do you know? with your slave names? This is a guy that I’ve gotten pretty friendly with, we regularly exchange e-mails, and he told the guy, “my parents gave me my names.” So I chimed in. My opinion about the whole thing revolves around honoring the ancestors. My understanding is that the ex-slaves chose family names, and it’s certainly true that one’s own parents chose a child’s name.

“Wrong,” said the naysayer, who suggested that the ex-slaves were just stuck with the name of their last owner and that any European name was a slave name. This actually drove me to do something that I almost never do: research. It turns out that in the slavery days the slaves were not allowed to use family names and were carried on the registers under the owner’s last name, but in reality most of them did know what their real family name was and upon achieving release from slavery most of them resumed using those names. I saw many examples of this from testimony. Otherwise they were allowed to chose a family name for themselves. I read a great story about a guy nicknamed “Cuffy” who chose to become “Paul” and re-Christened himself Paul Cuffy. Many chose the family name of perceived benefactors or great Americans, like Washington.

Through this my friend and I exchanged e-mails on the topic. We were in basic agreement about the honoring the forbearers thing, be proud of your heritage and all that. I got some good schooling though on the whole idea of European names being just too heavy a cross for some American Blacks to bear. Those names, along with any other aspect of White culture, are just anathema to some guys and girls. The total Black experience in America is tied up together, and it leaves some people with a real need to separate themselves from the entire White world. This was a great lesson, and I received it as a gift of love. I was coming at it from a cool-headed, intellectualized, compartmentalized angle, but really the issue is comprehensive, and it is mostly emotional and heartfelt.

That whole experience, you know the one I mean, cut so deep that the wound still oozes. That’s the take-away, that’s the great message for the outsider to remember. It is not an opportunity for intellectual inquiry or opinion mongering. It’s a little bit like when someone loses a loved one unexpectedly. Don’t even try to come up with something clever to say, don’t even try to be helpful. A simple, “that shit is fucked up” will suffice.

This Motorcycle Is Very, Very Old

2011-12-08T22:55:00.000-08:00

The sign says "1948 Harley-Davidson." That was my year too. Somehow, the bike has aged more gracefully than I have.

GRAHAM CENTRAL STATION - RELEASE YOURSELF

2011-12-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

File under "Still Not In The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame."

Larry made the cut as a member of Sly and the Family Stone, but it's a sin and a crime that this band isn't in there on its own. But that's an enterprise that wears it's shame like a badge of honor, isn't it? Half a business, half a social club, rock n' roll my ass.

Mr Lee

2011-12-07T04:57:00.000-08:00

I Love Asia. No Freud, no Jesus, just non-stop singing and dancing.

Willard!

2011-12-07T04:42:00.000-08:00

Willard! Willard! Willard!

The Book of Cletis: Newspeak Has Arrived

2011-12-07T04:04:00.000-08:00

I like "The Book of Cletis." He sounds like a nice guy, and he's got his head screwed on right. Here's a re-re-post from "The Book . . ."

The Book of Cletis: Newspeak Has Arrived: Note from Cletis: This is Orwell's nightmare come true. From Yahoo News: ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Republican Governors Association met this w...

Fred here. I should have more to say about "1984," but it's such a distressing book. I just finished reading it for the umpteenth time. This time it all seemed very apt and very disturbing, but for a different reason. This time I realized that the impulse to power is still with us, and winning, but now power realizes that there's no need to be so bare-faced about it. No need to come on all big and bad. Why try to control everything in every little corner of your world? Just control every important thing and let the little corners take care of themselves. Let people have a little bit more than the proles in "1984;" devise a permanent war that doesn't use up too many resources or take too many lives; put a smiley face on that old Big Brother!

Christmas Around The Corner

2011-12-03T02:05:00.000-08:00

I see that my hit-counter is jumping ahead in leaps and bounds these days. Welcome to you new readers, and thanks everybody for taking time to visit.

Coming into the Christmas season here, so an early Happy Holidays! to you all. In fact, Merry Christmas! There's no war on Christmas at Spin Easy Time! No, quite the opposite, I like Christmas. I find that Christmas works very well as a secular holiday that can be enjoyed by all. (See video, below.) It's easy to leave out all of the Christian stuff, we all know that there's only a one-third of one percent chance that it was the birthday of Jesus anyway. (One in three-hundred-and-sixty-five.)

So keep the tree, as pagan as you can get, the evergreen that stays with you in hard times (like your good friends). And keep Santa Claus, the North Pole version with the elves and all. Take the occasion at the end of the year to thank all of the people who helped you get through another year alive. Gift them, hug them, feed them. Everybody needs friends.

Christmas Mall Display in Thailand

2011-12-02T22:49:00.000-08:00

People taking pictures of people, one of my favorite things. A typically elaborate Christmas display at an up-scale mall here in the Land of Smiles.

You could call this tree "The Tree of Writhing Bodies."

Frankie Lee Sims - I'm So Glad

2011-11-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

This one is dedicated to my great friend BH, who would have loved it unreservedly and who will, unfortunately, never get up on his feets again. Gone, gone, gone, the boy's long gone, all the way gone. I'd pay good money to spend one more afternoon at his place, with him, drinking Gypsy Rose and listening to his Lightning Hopkins records, without a care in the world.

"They will dig your grave in the morning . . ." True that, Brother Frankie Lee, and thanks for testifying.

Baby Washington - Silent Night - 1967

2011-11-27T08:11:00.000-08:00

Let's kick off the Christmas season with a little Justine "Baby" Washington, the favorite singer of no less than Dusty Springfield.

There's so little of Ms. Washington on the 'Tube that it is probably a sin, and certainly a crime against nature. The hit-counts are low too. Don't join the rush to avoid her! Embrace the wonderfulness!

Happy Anniversary! Or Welcome To The Permanent National Security State

2011-11-24T02:32:00.000-08:00

There’s an important anniversary coming up, but don’t look for it on CNN or, God forbid, Fox News. December will see the seventieth (“70th”) anniversary of “emergency” war powers in the United States. I put emergency in quotes because the nature of the emergency has shifted over the years. World War II to the Cold War, and then to the War on Terror. The operative words are “war” and “emergency,” and don’t look for relief any time soon. From now on, it’ll be one thing or another, you can be sure of that.

Through this permanent emergency our vaunted democracy has been subverted by the unitary executive, the new imperial theory of the presidency. Presidential power has grown exponentially since 1941. A real war to win, and then a new godless enemy to oppose. Then a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons to develop and maintain. Along with the weapons came a great diversity of delivery systems and a vast worldwide network of bases to serve the effort. Secret intelligence agencies, we can’t even be sure of how many of these agencies exist. How much they spend is a complete mystery. It’s become a national security state, a permanent shadow government, unelected and barely supervised, jealously guarding its secrets and withholding evidence and information.

And always the fear, fear, fear. Be very afraid, people! And do what we say, and give us what we want. No more Soviets? Be afraid of Muslims! They hate our freedom! Red alert!

It’s part of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, theoretically under the president, but in fact it predates and survives any individual president. Who’s really in charge now is, I think, a valid question.

Barack Obama showed every indication of being a different kind of president. On matters of national security, however, the difference is between what he has done and what he spoke of before he was sworn in. That first couple of days must be murder for a new president, being informed of all of the ongoing programs that must not be disturbed. President Obama has largely hewn to the line that he inherited, and, once more, we see wars ending or winding down with no corresponding diminution of military spending, troop levels, or foreign deployments.

So, Happy Anniversary! Next year we’ll be voting again for president, but whoever wins the job, don’t expect too many changes. I have a hunch that anybody who didn’t take the message in those first few days of briefings would very quickly suffer an unfortunate household accident, you know, break their neck falling down in the shower or something, have an unanticipated heart attack. After all, it’s an emergency!

(Pace, Garry Wills, “Entangled Giant,” 2009, from which some ideas were freely borrowed.)

Hotel View Hat Yai Thailand

2011-11-23T21:20:00.000-08:00

Taken out the window of my room on the twenty-first floor of the Regency Hotel in Hat Yai.

There are a surprising number of tourists in Hat Yai, surprising because it really is quite an ordinary, down-in-heel place. Most of the tourists come from Malaysia, some in family groups and some in groups of men (I leave you to fill in the blanks on that last one).

I will say that the food was outstanding, particularly the sea food. The peninsula is pretty narrow at that point, so the sea is close by on both sides. People were very nice, which seems generally to be true in Thailand. Certainly the one hundred or so grad-students in my class were very friendly and cooperative, as is always the case.

Air Approach Floods One

2011-11-23T00:48:00.000-08:00

Coming in for a landing at BKK, last Sunday. The flood water levels in Bangkok are coming down, but there's still a lot of water around, as can be seen in this video.

The Hollies 'Just one look' NME Awards footage as featured on Ready Stea...

2011-11-22T01:30:00.000-08:00

For me, as you may have noticed, it's all about the covers. The Hollies remain one of the most successful cover bands in history. They stole, or let's say borrowed, from great acts too, including the Beatles, and their versions always hold up very well in comparison.

I used this video to illustrate that they also were a band that could set up and play. It bears repeating: they were a great act, and they deserved every bit of their success.

Doris Troy - Just One Look

2011-11-22T01:24:00.000-08:00

The original. Great song, great production, great singer.

Local Transportation In Hat Yai, Thailand

2011-11-21T01:25:00.000-08:00

Also, a photography lesson: never photograph a large object in strong back-light!

These little snub-nosed pick-up trucks serve as the "song taows" in Hat Yai.

Life Is Like A Guitar

2011-11-21T01:15:00.000-08:00

Tuning a piano is a big job, but it is very straightforward. You can tune each string to its note, and then you’re done. All of the “A’s” are “A’s,” and et cetera. Pianos are meant to be in tune when they are played, and they go there willingly. There’s very little mystery about it.

Guitars are not as simple as all that. Only six strings, but where the notes must be set is not straightforward at all. Six strings, E, A, D, G, B, and E again, but if you merely tune each string to the designated note you will not be able to play chords without the whole thing sounding very sour. Guitars are not meant to be played “in tune,” in fact they are never in tune at all, it’s impossible, they are inherently out of tune.

So tuning a guitar is a real challenge. You need to know quite a bit about what you’re doing, and you need to have a pretty good ear.

As you go from the E to the A, the D and the G, and finally to the B and the other E, the notes must get a little bit sharper every time you move to a new string. Or else it’s trouble, I’m not making this up. You can’t just take one of those electronic boxes and put all the notes where the needle meets the center point. After you get a good E, you need to play an A at the fifth fret and see where the needle goes. It’ll be an A, but it’ll be a little sharp. Then you need to put the A string to the same point on the meter, the same sharpness. And there you go, by the time you get to the other E it’s all pretty sharp indeed.

I like to start from the A myself, get a good A up on the A string. All bands and orchestras tune to the same A, and if they think it’s important, well, I just trust them. I don’t know why they do it that way, but they must have a reason, mustn’t they? These days I keep an A tuning fork around, set the A, and do the rest by ear.

Even then, when you’re done and you’ve got it pretty much where you want it, you need to play a few chords to be on the safe side, and you’ll probably end up sweetening it some more, somewhere.

Then there’s scale length, you’d assume that it was standard, but you’d be wrong. Most guitars have either a twenty-five and a half inch scale, nut to bridge, or a twenty-four and three-quarters inch scale. If you get used to tuning one or the other, switching can be quite an adjustment. Some manufacturers use unique scale lengths, like twenty-five inches, you have to wonder: what were they thinking?

Guitars are mysterious things from the get go, even before you start to play a song. After you start to play something the guitar quickly goes out of the tune you just so laboriously put it in. The rougher you play, the faster it goes out.

Pianos, then, are models of decorum. Simple to tune (although labor intensive, with eighty-eight strings and all), and then they stay in tune for a while, unless the humidity changes or something. Nobody’s hanging on the strings all the time, just little hammers hitting them a little shot.

It occurs to me that tuning pianos is like building a car, or a camera. Just make exactly the right parts, and put them together in exactly the correct manner. No mystery, it’s right or it’s wrong. Tuning a guitar is more like building a life. Some things are more wrong than right, some more right than wrong, but most of it is off in the grey zone somewhere, and it’s all very personal.

Life, like a guitar, is all about feel. What feels right to one person may feel quite wrong to someone else. Often in life, as with a guitar, the clearly right thing turns out to be a little bit wrong. Life comes in different styles and sizes too, and whatever it is that you are accustomed to may be comfortable for you but pinch for someone else.

For guitars, as in life, the truth is an unattainable goal. You have to get used to notes that are a little bit sharp, or a little bit flat, as the situation may require. In either thing, if one were to demand the pure truth, the results would sound a little bit sour to most people. If one is to build a proper life, or tune a guitar, one must have a certain flexibility, a sense of humor about things. One must be accepting of imperfection, and try one’s best to work with it.

I have no idea what brought all of this on. Too much time on my hands, I suppose.

Regency Hotel In Hat Yai, Thailand

2011-11-21T01:04:00.000-08:00

I taught a class in Hat Yai this weekend, and the Regency is where we get our discount. Every little bit helps.

These are the lobby elevators. I walked over to them and it was a minute or two before I found the call buttons. I thought about asking the guy at the door, but I thought that would make me look ridiculous. I considered sitting down where I had a good view and waiting for someone else to come over, maybe see them push a button. Then I thought, I can't let this thing beat me! It has to be here! I stood back, and before long I realized that the buttons were in the snouts of the mythical creatures.

Not a bad hotel, not expensive (eighteen dollars or so, 800 Baht). Good, free breakfast. TV had Fox News, the SyFy Channel, Al Jezeera, NHK, the Universal Channel and Star Sports, that was it for English but that's pretty good. All a little bit down in heel, but you can see that it was really special when it was new, marble bathroom and all.

Blow Up

2011-11-16T05:28:00.000-08:00

Just watching Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" on TCM. God, were we ever so young?

TAB the Band "She Said No (I Love You)".mov

2011-11-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

I love this, and I found it in a strange place. It was part of a musical interlude on the Voice of America channel in my guest house in Krabi (see post down a few). So in between Iranian expat's bitching in Farsi about God knows what they'd play a few songs, and this was one of them, "Music Mix USA." This is on a Thai TV, some kind of low-ball cable situation, at a beach resort town. This is a weird new world we live in, my friends.

Global Warming And Floods, Floods, Floods

2011-11-14T07:36:00.000-08:00

We're having an interesting year in Thailand. Lots of water, lots.

So this whole Global Warming thing, what's up with that? In a nutshell: the numbskulls that run things these days think that they know everything. Why, otherwise, would they have hundreds of millions of dollars while the rest of us have nothing? But really, they don't know jackshit about anything at all. All they know is where the best restaurants are, and how much custom yachts cost. So, if you tell them that a change in average temperatures of only three and a half degrees, Fahrenheit, will absolutely ruin the world and get us all killed, they know much better than the scientists. They know everything! Hah! they say, so it goes up from ninety to ninety three! Big deal! What harm could it do! And what about all of that cold weather last winter? Picture these words in the mouth of George W. Bush to get the full effect. The prototypical power-elite idiot, born and bred.

The effects are a little weird. Here in Thailand, it's gotten a little bit cooler if anything. Global Warming is actually Global Climate Change. So our really, really hot season, which usually came in April, hasn't been so hot the last few years, and our cool season, instead of being some kind of cruel joke, has actually been cool, at night anyway. Instead of being hotter, the rainy season has gotten longer, sometimes in connection with a La Nina condition. In the eastern part of Thailand, there has been plenty of rain the last few years but it started late and came all at once, very bad for the poor farmers. This year the rainy season really kicked our ass, it's still holding us down and beating us, a real curb-stomping.

Alas, Babylon! All of y'all under about forty years old will be hit with the worst of this. I'm with you on the cutting edge here, but I'll be long gone before it all turns into some kind of zombie movie. I hope.

What can be done about it? Oh, don't even think about it. There's nothing that you can do. It's a done deal. The powers-that-be know everything! It's only three degrees! When the zombies are at their doors, 1) their private security guards will keep them safe; 2) they will still have climate-controlled houses and plenty of food; and 3) they will blame it on somebody else, probably the Democrats.

So good luck!

Local Transportation In Trang, Thailand

2011-11-14T01:23:00.000-08:00

Every place in Thailand has its own variety of local transportation. This beautiful tuk-tuk is in the typical style of Trang. Most of the travelers that I saw in Trang were Thai, like this group taking pictures of each other with the Trang tuk-tuk. Almost no Farang.

Lots of motorcycle taxis too, and song-taow (the pick up trucks with two rows of benches in a covered bed, hence "song-taow," or "two rows"). Not a metered taxi in sight. Some local buses, not many.

Everybody that I met in Trang was just great, very friendly and reasonable. I took a few rides on the motorcycles and a tuk-tuk just like this one (the official color, I think). They always quote a Farang a price that is a little bit high, and here was no exception. All of the drivers thought that it was really outstanding that I could give them shit in Thai about the high quote, though. No hard feelings, more like wow! this Farang knows his stuff! Very good natured. In places where there are lots of tourists, the guys resent not getting the tourist price.

From The Phi Phi Andaman Legacy Guest House In Krabi

2011-11-14T01:03:00.000-08:00

I taught a class in Trang province last weekend. Very beautiful countryside, very green, ridiculously green, nice hills with strange shapes, fabulous beaches with islands reminiscent of the hills. The people were wonderful, very friendly, very attractive women, even by Thailand’s high standards, great seafood everywhere, great weather, nice cool breeze. In the provincial capitol of Trang, a pretty big place, I didn’t see many Farang at all, and I got around a bit. The ones I did see looked like they lived there. The plane down was almost all Thais.

For my return flight there was nothing available from Trang, so I booked a flight from neighboring Krabi. My class was in the morning; I took the bus to Krabi in the afternoon, two and a half hours or so. I’d never been to either place before. Same kind of scenery, maybe even a little bit more scenic. Krabi, unlike Trang, was crawling with Farang on vacation.

So walking about I was surrounded by young, White trekker types with colossal back-packs, the town was swarming with them. They were a particularly foul breed, no one was smiling, they spoke languages that I mostly didn’t recognize. Young people from every rat-hole in New Europe can obviously afford to travel now.

They mostly seemed very unhappy and anxious, so much so that it felt vaguely dangerous to be around them. They wore outfits that no self-respecting person would even consider wearing under any circumstances, not even to a dirt-bomb fight. Shorts of all lengths, bandana-headed, petal-pushers, faux ethnic garments, T-shirts and tank tops (the better to display their bad tattoos).

These young people rented huge motorcycles and thundered around town desperately trying to look cool. I’ve only seen these kinds of rentals before in Phuket and Pattaya. Some real Harleys, but mostly Japanese copies, and some big bullet-bikes. (See accompanying photograph.) They parked the bikes in front of bars and sat around drinking bottles of beer in foam cozies, desperately trying to look bored. It was all so desperate, man. Back in Slovakia they probably study accounting.

Older White tourists were present too, dressed only slightly better. People will leave the house dressed in any damn thing these days. The older crowd looked unhappy too, slightly confused, disoriented, like people soon after a hard interrogation.

The TV in the guest house was downright strange. It had the big three Thai commercial channels; French TV5 Monde; a Dutch channel of mostly talk shows where the sound kept cutting in and out; a channel that alternated one of the lesser C-SPAN’s and Voice of America, in Farsi no less, go figure; a strange Thai channel called Top Star that featured very glossy propaganda boosting the Royal Family; a Pakistani shopping channel (!!!!) that spent all day flogging bootleg Blackberries in a mix of English and some local Pakistani language (the “spokesmodel” was a poor bony thing, wall eyed, screechy voice [“50% off! for ten minutes!”], horrible make up, wearing black designer jeans and a tight, black top, mascara all over the place); and of course a music channel featuring unlistenable World-Pop and some Asian lip-synchers.

The Dutch channel reminded one that they really wrote the book on dressing funny, the Dutch. How, I always wonder, can they be so square and so cool at the same time? Maybe they prove that it’s cool to be square.

TV5 Monde showed a French variety show that sub-titled itself “the Greatest Cabaret Show In the World,” in English, as though they were specifically trying to impress us, we English speakers. To their credit, the show did feature topless Crazy Horse beauties, no pasties or tiling. There was a woman with a trained cat act, ten or more cats doing tricks usually associated with dogs. One of the cats was casually grooming itself while it rolled a barrel across the stage. The act was otherwise uninteresting.

I say one of the lesser C-SPAN’s, you know the ones I mean. One show I watched was a panel discussion about President Reagan’s legacy, held at Notre Dame University. It was a love fest. The panel consisted of four old, White, fat Reagan White House capo-regimes, I did not pollute myself with the memory of their names. To hear them tell it, Reagan was a hard working, hands-on genius who solved all of the world’s problems and was personally responsible for every single good thing that has happened since, and not at all the ego maniac who should have been impeached for Iran-Contra. Reaganomics! Trickle down my ass.

On the flight from Krabi to BKK most of the announcements were made in Thai, then English, then tapes of Spanish, French and German. At that, I think they missed communicating with most of this crowd.

Did I say that I try to keep this blog nice and light and airy? My! but I do get the vapors sometimes.

Tin Roof Blowdown Redux

2011-11-13T04:49:00.000-08:00

Like I said, I just read "Tin Roof Blowdown" by James Lee Burke. There is a lesson here for understanding the nature of the 21st Century. My paperback edition was chock full of wild praise from quality sources, the New York Times, other high-tone newspapers in at least two English speaking countries. I say wild praise, it was indeed hyperbolic praise, superlatives even. Deserved?

It's a nice book, but I don't think Shakespeare is in any danger of being overtaken. Nor, I think, should Charles Williford or Elmore Leonard be too worried. Nor the very underrated George V. Higgins. Nor Dash Hammett or that L.A. fellow, Raymond Something. Mickey Spillane is probably safe too. Hemingway? Definitely safe.

So praise these days comes by the bushel, and must be discounted accordingly. Be forewarned.

I did enjoy reading "The Tin Roof Blowdown," but I am famously easy to please. I do read some actually literary novels, some old, some new, but I do enjoy the occasional "railway novel," commuter stuff, read to fill time on the train or bus. Or just to kill time waiting for the inevitable. Anything, God, just make this whole thing go away.

I've read worse; but I could recommend better.

Dixie Cups - Iko Iko (Rare clip)

2011-11-08T05:15:00.000-08:00

I'm just reading "The Tin Roof Blowdown" by James Lee Burke, his Louisiana novels are always a treat. Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of old New Orleans feature prominently. It's got me all jakamo-fino.

I try not to bore you with everything that I am thrilled to find on the 'Tube, but I thought this one was worth your time.

Bangkok Flood Update

2011-11-07T01:59:00.000-08:00

I'm still flood free, by the way, but Bangkok in general is still reeling from the whole flood experience.

It's still spreading, coming down from the north and in from the east and reaching areas of Bangkok proper. They finally closed the subway yesterday. The river defenses are holding up, but the entire west bank is under water. I'm on a high spot, twenty-one feet about sea level, so there's a chance that I'll escape altogether. These two coming weekends I'll be teaching at remote campuses, so I'm hoping that the airport stays open. It's surrounded by water too, east of the city, and the predictions for continued service are disturbingly vague. ("We're doing everything that we can!")

I spoke to lots of people at school today, and a few of them have been flooded out of their houses. One is sleeping in her office! My flood-affected colleagues are still getting paid at least, that's one good thing. We're government officials, a privileged minority, the checks keep coming.

Most people who have been affected by this flood season aren't so lucky. Lots of places, huge places, and millions of people, have been unable to work for up to three months now. That's a big problem in a country where, for most people, if you don't work, you don't get paid. Stores are closed, factories too, and rice fields are submerged. All of those people have been without an income for a while now.

The secondary effects of the flooding are starting to show up now. Water-born illnesses, especially in children who cannot resist playing in the water. Crocodile attacks, no lie! Hundreds of the things have escaped from crocodile farms. The no-money thing has really hit home too, suicides are being reported. Tempers are getting frayed, and the ramifications of these floods will be with us for a long, long time.

The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army Live on Conan

2011-11-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

An important point, in a minute.

At this time I was very occasionally taping a Conan show to watch the next day. I was vaguely aware of the White Stripes, I'd heard a couple of things on Napster. I was knocked out by this, the concept, the presentation, the enthusiasm. Nice to see it again.

Now, the lesson. Take a look at this on YouTube so that you can see the two attached comments. Negative comments based on the quality of the video. It just goes to show: what people get free, in abundance, they do not value. Not content with having so much great music at the tips of their fingers, these ingrates want HD.

"What people get free, in abundance, they do not value." I don't want to get maudlin or personal, but you'll think of some examples pretty quickly if you put your mind to it.

Another Flood

2011-11-03T01:49:00.000-07:00

These are from a few years ago, but they answer the question, "where did all of that water in Bangkok come from?"

This is the Yom river up north, taken in a restaurant that was usually about fifty feet from the river. Towards the end of the rainy season, September or so, these rivers can get pretty full. The year in the pictures, this one overflowed.

Every year, all of this water makes its way to the Gulf of Siam, much of it coming through Bangkok in the Cha Prayao river. This year the rain up north was a lot heavier than usual and the entire process was magnified and accelerated.

Wolves That Eat Wolf (And Then Sell Wolf Sandwiches To Other Wolves)

2011-11-03T01:41:00.000-07:00

This comes from Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog (bobcesca.com).

What Could Go Wrong?
Posted on 11/02/2011 at 3:50 pm by JM Ashby

The subprime loan market is making a come back, but with a twist.
This time we will package subprime auto loans at risk of default into triple A-rated securities, rather than home loans.

The Los Angeles Times today noted that investors are pouring money into car dealerships that provide high-cost loans to those with poor credit. The dealers are assembling these loans — about one in four of which defaults — into securities, selling them off much like subprime mortgage securities were sold around the world. In fact, “in the last two years, investors have bought more than $15 billion in subprime auto securities.” The Times noted that “although they’re backed mainly by installment contracts signed by people who can’t even qualify for a credit card, most of these bonds have been rated investment grade.

The subprime auto securities are receiving AAA ratings and being sold in the same manner as the mortgage-backed securities that lead to the 2008 financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Standards & Poor’s does not even consider the United States to be worthy of a AAA rating. Chew on that.

End of re-post.

I love the title, “What Could Go Wrong?” But we all do know, don’t we? Oh, yeah, not all of us, evidently.

Perhaps overlooked is the fact that this kind of lending is unethical in the first place, even if you don’t bundle the dubious loans and pawn off the risk immediately onto credulous morons. It’s just an excuse to gouge an extra ten percentage points or so of interest out of people who can barely afford the car in the first place, the car which they probably need to go to the job where they don’t get paid enough. The wages are low, and the interest high, for the same reason: it’s legal these days to take advantage of powerless fellow citizens, and fewer among us find it immoral to do so.

Back in the 1990’s I worked for a time around the edges of a similar business. It was a small private bank that was involved with real estate loans. They had a lot of good loans, some they held themselves and some were in partnership with private investors. They also did a brisk trade in high risk loans. Second and third mortgages, some totally unsecured because the value of the house wouldn’t even cover the senior mortgages. For the most dangerous of these they could extract over thirty percent interest. Lots of people really love their houses, and they will grasp at any straw to keep them.

The failure rate on these mortgages was understandably high. You could be forgiven to wonder how they made any money on them. The amounts were usually pretty low, almost all under ten thousand dollars. With the interest so high, even a couple of years of payments cut down on the exposure. When the inevitable end came, and the house went into foreclosure, and no money from the sale went to the “washed-out junior,” they were still not without recourse.

At that point, they turned the loan over to collections. This was done by a friend of mine, and my involvement was doing grunt work for him, appearances and paperwork on an hourly basis. I say “collections,” but the cases never generated any cash. The idea was to win the case and record the judgment with the county. That way, the judgment would show up in the escrow if that person ever got back on their feet and bought another house, which happens frequently. The judgment would then need to be paid before the next house deal could proceed. My friend, I can tell you, is a good man, but I still didn’t hang around that crowd too long.

These days companies don’t even have the decency to service their own predatory loans. They quickly bundle them for sale to “investors” who assume a risk that they may or may not fully understand.

These are cruel businesses, selling high interest loans to people with few resources and little demonstrated ability to repay. Instead of helping people who have been driven to near destitution by circumstances, we throw them on the tender mercies of the “free market,” the modern equivalent of “the wolves.” Now, even the wolves feed on each other. Ethics and morals seem to be outdated ideas in our brave, new world. Sometimes I wonder if the red, white and blue isn’t too colorful for our new America. Maybe our new economic reality, this fervent monetism, needs a darker banner. Black, I’m thinking, with a skull and some bones on it. Maybe a wolf’s skull. Even a human skull might be too good for us anymore.

Candido Candido's Funk

2011-11-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

"No information," but this is an album from the early '70's. New York musicians is my guess, sounds like Cornell Dupree on the guitar end.

It's a great album. I have no idea why or how I got it, but it was and is a favorite of mine. I had friends then that showed me the benefits of Latin music, and culture, and food, and life in general. This was still in New York. Always interesting, like the time my friend Herbie asked me, "so Fred, my father moved back to P.R. and I'm collecting his welfare. You think they'll catch me?" He had the identical name, so I told him not to worry.

But Candido . . . I don't know much about him, but this is a great cut, and the entire album is outstanding.

A Good Job For A Lawyer

2011-11-01T02:30:00.000-07:00

Tony LaRussa retired today. He was the number three winningest manager in baseball history, and a lawyer.

I used to think, and may have reported here, or written in a dusty notebook, which is approximately the same thing, that there were four lawyer/managers in baseball. Some sources do list four OTHER guys, but Wikipedia now calls it seven all together. I don't usually give to much credibility to the Wiki, but for this purpose I'm sure they're close enough. They also inform us that Branch Rickey said that "luck is the residue of design," on the strength of a quote from Larry King, serial husband and check kiter. To Wiki's credit though, they do mention that the line actually came from John Milton. Me I thought it was Connie Mack, and I may have reported that here too. Me and Wiki! Watch your ass boys and girls! Check your own damn facts!

For winning, Tony got beat out by Cornelius McGillicuddy (Sr.!), the great Connie Mack, and John McGraw. Tony comes in a number three, everybody else eats their dust.

A couple of the other lawyer/managers are interesting. Monte Ward played back in the day and finished his career with over two thousand hits and over one hundred games won as a pitcher. He's the only guy who ever pulled that off, and he was a successful manager and a lawyer besides. Some guys hog all of the kudos.

Miller Huggins was a very good player, and then he managed the Yankees from 1918 to 1929. With players like that, he had a very, very successful record! He was a lawyer before he got into the baseball racket.

Branch Rickey was a player and a manager, both things without success. He went on to do some interesting stuff as a front office guy. He gets credit for the farm system and integrating baseball by hiring Jackie Robinson.

Connie Mack was definitely not a lawyer, education wise. He did manage to complete the eighth grade before dropping out at the age of fourteen, which put him ahead of two of my grandparents. He lived to the age of 93 though, and he won about a thousand games more than any other manager. He'd have done alright in the courtroom too, that's my guess.

Cool Website Deja Vu: Kim Jong Il Looking At Things

2011-10-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that I've alerted you all to this site before, but I don't keep records, so who knows?

http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

I find the Dear Leader fascinating, and these photographs of him "looking at things," surrounded by obviously terrified lackeys, are the epitome of unintentional hilarity.

Enjoy!

So in Love

2011-10-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

Just looking around on the 'Tube. I love this song, and these guys do it justice. Singing in the subway, for change.

They are the 99%, this no-name acapella busker ensemble. Don't forget, while the 1% is sucking all of the air out of the room, the 99% is providing the culture, the fun, the Soul, and all of the goddamn effort that makes the 1% rich too. They need us.

I'm right on the cusp of negativity here, so I should stop.

Cloud Cuckoo Land Explained

2011-10-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

I got "cloud cuckoo land" from the Germans, who use the term as a catch-all for crazy, impractical ideas. "Wolken Kuckucks Heim," or thereabouts, check that spelling! It turns out that it goes back much further than that.

Generally I don't spend much time reading complex and difficult literature, but I do like to read ABOUT those things. Summaries, criticisms, book reviews, those I have the time and the patience for. So I'm reading this Signet Classic edition of "Books That Changed The World," by Robert Downs. Good stuff, most of which is new to me.

I'm still in the Greeks, and the "cloud cuckoo land" thing comes from a play by Aristophanes (448 - 380 BC), "The Birds." It was written at a difficult period for Athens, lots of war and discontent going on. Nephelococcygia is a city in the clouds, run by birds, and very peaceful, evidently. Comedy results.

Not going to look it up, not me, but I enjoyed reading about it.

Not A Very Interesting Flood Picture

2011-10-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

This is at a van sales lot one block from me. So they're getting ready for something, but it doesn't look like they're expecting a lot of water.

Western BKK is taking the worst of it for now, and all of that water is still in the north and the east. The canal by me is up to the brim. Nothing here yet, but they closed the pool today, "to preserve the water for use in an emergency." Toilet flushing no doubt.

The Rolling Stones - Empty Heart - 45 RPM

2011-10-28T06:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a reverb junky, so of course I love this song. I love the 'Stones later, original stuff too, but some of this early stuff, these slightly Stonsified covers of Southern Race records, are still my favorites.

Don't forget, we couldn't easily hear the original American versions to these songs in New York, or most of America. They were only played on Black radio in the South. In New York, we only got "Quarter to Three," and "Finger Popping Time," the pop chart crossovers. Even the Black stations in New York played regional records, more of a New York sound. So when the 'Stones released these things they were new to us.

"Walking the Dog," "She Said Yeah!" Black American artists, to young English devotees, and back to the American mainstream (or at least maladjusted teenagers like me). It was nice of everybody to cooperate like that, and I for one benefited.

The Land Of Smiles For Every Situation

2011-10-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me a couple of pictures of the BKK flooding that were printed in American newspapers. In one picture, a bunch of Thais are sitting around in some pretty deep flood water and smiling broadly while they're doing it.

I see a lot of pictures like this on local TV too, and in Thai newspapers. People walking around with belongings or supplies on their heads, past their waists in flood water, and smiling for the camera (or in candid shots, even). I say "flood water," it's not just water. Mere water is clean.

So it occurs to me that not everybody knows that the smile in Thailand does not always mean that the smiler is happy. This took me a while to get used to, back when I was new here. On one occasion I was walking into a coffee shop at about eight p.m. I didn't see the heavy, completely unmarked glass door, I walked right into it. Smacked my nose and cheek pretty hard, it hurt. As I completed the process of walking in I noticed that all of the people, and there were quite a few, were smiling at me. I didn't understand the reaction, and I got a little angry because I thought they were enjoying my little accident. Now I understand that when something like that happens to someone Thais smile to show solidarity, it's a "been there, done that, don't be embarrassed" smile.

Here's another example of what in America would be totally inappropriate smiling. When I was up north, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I did a lot of bicycle riding around our small city. Occasionally someone driving a car would almost kill me, Thai drivers, for example, like to spring suddenly out of side streets and driveways without looking. (I'm amazed that there are not more accidents, but the driving on the street Thais expect it.) Still in America mode, I'd give them my "what were you thinking?" look. They smiled, it made me crazy. Now I understand that the smile meant "excuse me, what was I thinking?"

So those people that are smiling in the flood photographs, they're not really happy, not all of them anyway. Many of those smiles mean, "don't worry about me, I hope that I don't ruin your day with my misery, please by happy."