Oppression Obsession

This is, to me, Tom Walker's benchmark bit for the Jonathan Pie character. Just fucking amazing. 

And it is also the second time that have ever heard the noun, "blancmange," ever. It's a French word, and a French dessert, I suppose, but both incidents of the word have come from British comedians. The first was in an early Monty Python bit that I saw in 1974 on PBS. That bit was hysterical and you could tell from context what a blancmange was, which was very helpful, I can tell you. 

This fellow is really, really good. 

More Fascinating Thai Architecture

For no particular purpose at all, here is a photo of another fascinating example of Thai architecture here in Bangkok. This photo was taken from a moving taxi in the Cheng Watthana district. I was going to visit the immigration office for some reason. I try to forget those details almost as they happen.

I think that the building is the headquarters of some Thai corporation, or more likely a Thai Public Company Limited. Those are very popular these days.

Vacation Pix

More photos of people taking pictures. I can't help myself, I love it so much. Note that I am about halfway through my two-for-one "World Cup" Happy Hour special. There was no World Cup in sight, nor a television, nor even a chalk-board with updates, but they had a World Cup Happy Hour special. 

Traffic - Coloured Rain

This album was recorded in late 1967 and came to my attention in early spring, 1968. My friend Flip and I were unemployed at the time, on the dole as it were, and we spent a lot of the daylight hours at his house listening to records, talking about music, and smoking, ah, cigarettes, that's it, were were smoking cigarettes. And drinking wine most of the time, too. Most of our friends were working, and my girlfriend was in school, so we were killing time until the evening when the really serious hanging out could get started. 

We played this album a few times a day for a while. It's hard to imagine now how fresh and new it sounded. It's also impossible to really understand how fast popular music was developing at the time. You don't get any sense of it looking at the Billboard charts for 1968, because that was mostly for the squares. Amazing musical things happened on a monthly basis all through those few years. 

Flip died in a fire a couple of years later. I got married within a year and joined the corps of adults. 1968 was the worst year in history, politically, but it was a great year musically. I wouldn't want to go through all of that again, but it was kind of fun at the time, as long as you could tune out all of the negativity. 

Jody Williams, You may

Your time may be long or short, but it's coming. Sure as you're born, to coin a closely related phrase. Truer words were never spoken. As the man says, "there will come a time, everybody's got to go."  

Whatever happens to our democracy or our Constitution, we can rest assured that life, fate, and objective reality all believe in equality for all, in the end. 

People Taking Pictures

I love to take pictures of people taking pictures. This shot was taken on my beach vacation last week. It was all very nice. 

Here's a better photo of the nice lady. 

Mushroom Season In Washington

New Federal crimes have been sprouting like mushrooms after heavy spring rains since the Reagan days. Some days it seems like they have criminalized everything already, but then comes a heavy shower, followed by a sunny day, and oooops! There's a big new mushroom!

Kirstjen Nielsen is a high Trump official who is still game to deliver whatever stupid talking points Stephen Miller came up with this morning. Ms. Nielsen is currently our United States Secretary of Homeland Security, although she does have that look in her eye, like she is scanning for exits. She's an old shoe wearing too much polish, if I may be cruel for a moment. I have no idea how she got the job, but I'm sure that it would make interesting reading.

She was ordered to walk point the other day in the administration's daily patrol into enemy territory, which is to say, out the front door of the White House. Alone at the front of the column on a barely visible trail, surrounded by ambushes, land-mines, and booby-traps, her task was to defend our Fearless Leader's policy of family separation at the border.

She earnestly made her point, which was this: (I paraphrase) . . . to say that the policy is inhumane “completely disrespects” the public officials carrying out the policy.

I smell a new Federal crime! Mushroom alert!

Her phrasing of the issue sounds suspiciously like the formula for lese majeste. That would be the crime, still enforced in many countries around the world, of disrespecting the monarch. Lese majeste laws may define the monarchy very broadly, often including the country's military and police forces and even public officials, because they all serve at the will of the king. In our current criminal law environment, declaring it a crime to disrespect public officials would fit right in. Congress would love it, not least because it would offer them some protection from the worst of the obloquy being directed at them. This president would sign it, because he already thinks of himself as a king.

Write it up! Book 'em, Dano!

This could be an ironic legacy for Ms. Nielsen, who does, to her credit, seem to be tiring of this charade. She was one of several administration officials who were driven out of public eating establishments last week. That can't be comfortable. (Although for a very visible Trump stooge to appear in a busy upscale Mexican restaurant in Washington DC cannot be seen as a good idea these days.) Maybe she has realized that she could be damaging the entire Scandinavian brand, which took most of the last thousand years to rebuild after all of that unpleasantness with the Vikings.

The new laws will be masked in fine sounding language, as usual. They will be billed as, “the Decorum and Collegiality Laws,” or some such. Thank God that Trump doesn't read Spin Easy Time! He would love the extra firepower to use against dissent and the press. It could become the law by the end of the summer! Please, whatever you do, don't show him this blog post.