Fourth Floor
AC
A recent podcast dealt with the New York accent. Someone did a study, where sales clerks were encouraged to say the phrase “fourth floor”. “He knew where the men’s suits were but he was trying to get people to say the words “fourth floor” to see if they dropped the Rs and said “fawth flaw.”
Twenty years later, and eight hundred miles south, PG was driving a truck for Redo Blue. One of the leading customers was a firm on West Peachtree Street. If you listened to the delivery radio, you would hear people say “Eerie eerie foth flow, eerie eerie sack and flow.” The driver knew to go to Heery Heery, both on the fourth floor, and the second floor.
In Georgia, people have their own way of saying four. The black people say fo, as in friend or foe. The white people make up for the R dropping elsewhere, and say fo-er.
Pictures for this repost are from The Library of Congress. Spell check suggestion for fawth: faith.
Give Up The Funk
PG was stumbling through another morning in the real world. Keep moving, get breakfast, survive i285, and maybe by Sunday you will get out of this funk. Those of you with any sense will skip this text, and look at the pictures. They are from The Library of Congress.
A twitterlady caught his eye. @Flyswatter “Feminists calling each other out for various offenses. At any rate, it’s an interesting and thoughtful article.”
Upon arrival, the page visitor is greeted by a fundraising as for “EMILY’s List.” This is an effort to raise money for select moving lips. EMILY is an acronym. Early Money Is Like Yeast.
Once upon a time, some feminists had a conference, #femfuture. They started to snipe at each other. A hashtag was hatched, #solidarityisforwhitewomen.
Before long, one cornerstone of correctness had an article, 5 Ways White Feminists Can Address Our Own Racism. The article had a header ad from an auto insurance agency. Your suggested next post was I Threw Away My Scale and I’ve Never Felt Better About My Body.
The article about #femfuture is long, and might cause brain damage. The authors are not talking to cismale crackers like PG. Today is going to require a few brain cells to negotiate, and reading these posts might wipe them out.
Classified As An Illness
Adolph Hitler was a terrible strategist. If Germany had someone else in charge, they might have won that war. ~ most misguided self-righteousness is obnoxious ~ fair is a baseball hit between first base and third base ~ Miss Hathaway is a performer I am not familiar with. How is it my fault if she does not get parts? ~ This article is misleading. Miss Hathaway’s career is far from finished. Also, the gloss left out part of the quote that the story is based on. Here is the complete quote. “Hathaway: My impression is that people needed a break from me [laughs].” ~ Keith Emerson, Ray Manzarek, Cindy Wilson, pigpen ~ The Neil Boortz award ~ I think you are better looking clean shaven ~ You could have put the period in that first sentence after television. ~ Maybe we should call a general moratorium on the use of the words racism and racist. They are used much too carelessly.~ A lady on television said once that it is a misperception that an actor puts on a mask to perform. In reality, the opposite is true. We wear masks all the time. The actor takes this mask off to perform. ~ The BS quote is at 4:48. What Mary J. Blidge says next is better At least this quote is real ~ Few things are more ridiculous than hand wringing about #racism by privileged white people ~ Isn’t that what they do to people who vote in Iraq? ~ Janet Jackson did not lip snync ~ There are a lot of adjectives and qualifications in that bit of semantic stew. I would have to think about it for a while, and I am not sure I want to make the effort. I was all set to write a graphic poem, and I made the mistake of looking at facebook. My poem may not be more important, but it will be more fun to write. ~ Not to go all ad hominem on this, but Mr. Freeberg admires Sarah Palin. His blog is still being published, which is saying something. ~ The New Supremes ~ ” I would wager that, of the people behind the incorporation’s not one, once said to themselves “if we do this it will keep the blacks away” If that was the intention, it did not work. There are plenty of POC in the new cities, as well as the counties that declined to participate in MARTA. ~ We could go to Pittsburgh and see drag shows ~ what is that smell? ~ they wear masks all the time. how can anyone be sure who is in the band? ~ maybe jesus said it ~ This may be nit picking, but Mrs. Palin actually said “our founders … would create law based on the God of the bible” ~ #8 Question motivational slogans, especially those with ugly graphics. #7CardinalRules ~ as a native, I have heard this many, many times. complaining about Atlanta is part of living here. I am used to it ~ We get a lot of oil from Nigeria. The oceans there make the gulf of mexico look pristine. ~ If you drive a car, or eat food transported by truck, then you can thank yourself ~ homosexuality was classified as an illness in sweden swedes protested by calling into work sick, saying they felt gay ~ I would leave the word “your” out of that sentence ~ but they lead other people ~ Your is often confused for you’re. One is a second person possessive. One is a contraction of you are. It is good to keep theology, if you must deal with it, as your theology, and not you’re theology.~ Substitute the name of an religion that encourages extremism for the word theology in my sentences above ~ love glove sad bad tears fears wept crept heart bart pain sane ~ On a night like this, you may as well be in California ~ “I have never met a snob who is not a born liar” unknown ~ But when Turney reached the boudoir, she was met by an unsettling sight. Her husband–from whom she is apparently estranged–and Vickie Lynn Morgan, 38, “were both naked, smoking pot, drinking liquor and having anal sex.” The Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office report does not specify whether the pair was engaging in these activities simultaneously. ~ This is an advantage when a book is terrible and needs to be thrown at something ~ I hope you don’t fly out badly ~ Conflict resolution is something you do. It is not something you believe. ~ You could make a blank where the words have compassion are. There are lots of nouns and verbs you could put in those blanks. ~ Are you saving money this way? ~ IANAL This does raise some interesting issues. MM marriage is not recognized as valid in Georgia. Is the federal government now in the business of regulating marriage? ~ I have mixed feelings about this. The federal government has so much power already. .@JoeMyGod Rosie O’Donnell Reveals Weight Surgery : Speaking at a Chicago event for the American Heart Association, Rosie ~ @JoeMyGod tmi When will her fifteen minutes be over? ~ Goodbyes hurt, no matter the cause ~ whether it works with fingers or paws ~ To those lost I wish us both wells ~ tighten up archie bell and the drells ~ have this ache to remember you by ~ just know that wysiwyg is a lie ~ I think the dancers in the video are family ~ People believe translations of what foriegn leaders say ~ no matter how ugly the graphics ~ I just a one word email. It said sup. I just learned that it stands for Sole Ultimate Panjandrum ~ @mbsycamore do sex workers offer a think piece ? ~ @mbsycamore @chamblee54 Let me think about that ~ @TinyPterosaur @amandapalmer @Chumplet maybe you can say Flame Dame ~ @chamblee54 @amandapalmer @Chumplet now THAT has some class ~ Dr. Loury says that Rand Paul has not been messing around with interns. Maybe Dr. Paul just hasn’t been caught. If the scrutiny that Bill Clinton endured was focused on Dr. Paul, there is no telling what they would find. Furthermore, why are you saying that Monica Lewinsky was exploited? She was an adult when the affair took place. She probably wanted it to happen. Maybe Bill Clinton was the one who was exploited. ~ pictures are from The Library of Congress. ~ selah
Peachtree Street 2014
PG finished a book, Peachtree Street-Atlanta. The author is William Bailey Williford, and it was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1962. PG found this at the Chamblee library, and this is probably the best way to find this book today. (Reissued by UGA Press.)
How this road got the name Peachtree is a good question. Most peaches grow south of the fall line. The story goes that there was a Creek Indian village called Standing Peachtree, located where Peachtree Creek runs into the Chattahoochee. During the war of 1812 Fort Peachtree was built on this site.
There was a trail that ran from Buckhead to an intersection with the Sandtown Trail, at what is now Five Points. A short distance south of this intersection was a settlement known as White Hall. For many years, Peachtree Street south of Five Points was known as Whitehall Road. At some point in the last thirty years, a decision was made to change Whitehall to Peachtree. It did not help the rundown condition of Whitehall Street.
In 1835 Governor Wilson Lumpkin decided that Georgia should build a Railroad that would be centered near the junction of Peachtree Trail and Sandtown Trail. The new town was named “Marthasville”, after the youngest daughter of the Governor. Martha Lumpkin is a resident of Oakland Cemetery today.
The village was soon renamed Atlanta, which was a feminine form of Atlantic. Houses, churches, and businesses were soon built on Peachtree Road. In 1856, Richard Peters built a flour mill. To insure a steady supply of firewood, he bought four hundred acres of land, for five dollars an acre. The land was between Eighth Street, North Avenue, Argonne Avenue, and Atlantic Drive.
Another pioneer citizen with a large landholding was George Washington (Wash) Collier. Mr. Collier bought 202 acres for $150 in 1847. The land was between West Peachtree, Fourteenth Street, Piedmont Road, Montgomery Ferry Road, and the Rhodes Center. Much of the land was used for the development of Ansley Park.
In 1854, Atlanta entertained, for the first time, a man who had been President. On May 2, Millard Fillmore arrived from Augusta on a private rail car.
There was some unpleasantness in 1864, which we will not concern ourselves with.
In 1866, there was a shocking murder. John Plaster was found dead, in an area known as “tight squeeze”. This was an area of shanties, at the present location of Crescent Avenue and Tenth Street. A hundred years later, this was near “the strip”, Atlanta’s hippie district, also called “Tight Squeeze”.
As the nineteenth century rolled along, many mansions were built on Peachtree Street. The road was paved, and streetcars ran up and down. Automobiles came, and came, and came. An expressway was built in the 1950’s, and quickly became obsolete. One by one, the mansions were torn down and replaced with businesses and churches.
The book was written in 1962, when the party was just getting started. The High Museum was known then as the Atlanta Art Association. In June of 1962, a plane full of prominent Atlanta residents crashed in Paris, killing all on board. As a memorial to those people, the Memorial Arts Center on Peachtree, at Fifteenth Street, was built.
Another phenomenon which is not explained by the book is the custom of naming everything here Peachtree. There are countless streets and institutions named for a fruit tree that likes warmer climates. Atlanta has a one street skyline, that stretches from Five Points to Peachtree Dunwoody Road, almost at the city limits. PG lives a quarter mile off Peachtree, in Dekalb County, and has no idea why Peachtree is a magic word.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. and The Library of Congress. This is the annual repost.
Post Racial America
It is a cliche among certain pundits that this is not “Post Racial America.” No one seems to know what PRA would look like. PRA might be less noisy, with fewer odors, than the current model. The opinion that we do not live in PRA seems unanimous. After PG heard the denial of PRA one too many times, he began to wonder something. Who said America is Post Racial?
Mr. Google has 119 million answers to the question “who said america is post racial?” The short answer is nobody. The closest thing on the front Google page is an NPR commentary from January 2008. This was the early stages of the BHO run for the White House. The commenter said that the election of a dark skinned POTUS might usher in a post racial era in America.
This piece will not have any fresh opinions about race relations in America. That subject has been worn out elsewhere. If someone finds it to their advantage to denounce “racism”, there will be an audience. The truth is, very few people have ever said that America is Post Racial.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Tales of Ordinary Madness
PG sat in the workplace cafeteria and read the last line of Tales of Ordinary Madness. TOOM is a book of short stories and underground press columns, allegedly written by Charles Bukowski. This collection was published by City Lights Books, the facility of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The poet-businessman was not admired by Mr. Bukowski.
The author was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. His Catholic parents moved to America in 1923. The name was americanized to Henry Charles Bukowski. Friends called him Hank, and his literary alter ego was Hank Chinaski. Somebody decided that Charles would look better in print.
Hank Chinaski was a hard boiled character, or so he would have you believe. He was not a teetotaler. In spite of his many excesses, Hank lived to be 74, when leukemia sent him to the likkastow in the sky. This was March 9, 1994. Eleven days later, Lewis Grizzard met his maker. Lewis was 47, the same age as Hank in much of TOOM.
You should always separate the creator from the creation. Enjoy the product, and don’t worry about the ingredients. That is the case with TOOM. The stories are reputed to be little autobiographies. (An Amazon one star commenter thinks the stories are the result of “some kind of posthumous ghost writer, and not a very good one.”)
Hank, if nothing else, was productive. He wrote thousands of poems. It is not known if they have all been published, or if anyone is drunk enough to read them. Here is a quote from a previous Chamblee54 feature, The On Time Charles Bukowski.
The writer/drunk had always been a bit of a fascination to PG. Out of the millions of useless drunks feeding the urinals of planet earth, at least one will turn out to have had literary merit… this leads to a newyorker piece about the gentleman. After nine paragraphs, and two poems, there is the phrase that set off PG…graphomaniacal fecundity. (spell check suggestion:nymphomaniac)
As best as we can figure, g.f. means that Hank wrote a lot of stuff. This is a good thing. PG operates on the notion that if you keep your quantity up, the quality will take care of itself. Hank seems to agree, spitting out product “like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.” He seemed to take pride in doing what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac…he doesn’t write, he types.
Holy drunken author synchronicity. Last summer, PG was working third shift in a midtown sweatshop. He would read a couple of stories of TOOM, then shift gears and read a bit of The Dharma Bums. At some point in the procedure, there was a collection of output from Truman Capote.
Hank Chinaski might not like PG. There is the rhyming poetry. There is buying a book of repackaged prose at a yard sale. There is the twenty five year retirement from alcohol use. This is beside the point. You have to live for what is important to you, not what a deceased barfly might think.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
30 Million Hits
Matt Walsh is a blogger. He used to have a radio show, but now intends to make his fortune as a writer. The product today is The two steps to getting 30 million hits on your blog. Yes, he has 30mil hits on his facility. This is 28,821,568 more than Chamblee54.
He has two suggestions for blogging success. Have good content, and plan to be a success. The first is common sense, which is usually a rare commodity. The second is motivational speaker pablum. Raw ambition is seldom fun to read.
Mr. Walsh is a self proclaimed conservative. The last post, before the 30 mil thing, was about abortion. It was textbook straw man rhetoric. He said that some people, who oppose policemen killing puppies, are pro choice. An entire post was spent calling both of these people hypocrites. At last glance, there were 1029 comments. Yes, this sort of thing is popular.
The first time PG heard about Mr. Walsh was a couple of weeks ago. A facebook friend posted a link to a story about people who have great confidence in themselves, and base it on having great confidence in themselves. They are planning to be successful. The post featured a quote, allegedly by Marilyn Monroe. The quote is phony. PG has not seen a comment by Mr. Walsh about the dubious quote. Maybe, if you admit making an error, you are not planning to be a success.
Towards the end of today’s post, Mr. Walsh sells his scheme. “If you don’t have these two covered, I guarantee that your blogging exploits will fail, and fail spectacularly.” It depends on what you mean by failure. PG does not consider himself a failure. He is doing something that he enjoys. A handful of readers enjoy it. His skills as a photo editor have improved spectacularly. Maybe the 30 million hits will come some day. Maybe not. It has been a good ride so far, and it is far from over.
If anyone is interested, Chamblee54 has a page on How To Blog. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This are Union Soldiers from The War Between The States. They did what they thought was right, and did not worry about being popular.
The Boston Tea Party Story
For better or worse (it’s ok to curse), the tea party is a part of the scene. The seminal event was the Boston Tea Party in 1775. The first post below is a look at what really happened in Boston harbor. It is tough to discern truth from fable at a distance of 236 years, but we will try. The tea party metaphor gets worked over in another post, would you like a refill?
The second part is a look at the phrase “founding fathers”. This phrase is “liberally” sprinkled into rhetoric of all persuasions. This author sees a square peg being forced into round holes.
In the first year of the Obama regime, America saw the rise of the “Tea Party.” These affairs are usually right wing, and have lots of clever signs. The general idea is that taxes are too high, government is too big, and that the people need to do something.
The namesake event was the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, crowds of people (some dressed as Mohawks) went on board the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver. The crowds threw overboard 342 chests, containing 90,000 pounds of tea. The crowds were unhappy because the East India Company was importing the tea into America, with a 3 pence per pound tax.
A website called listverse plays the contrarian. (spell check suggestions: contraction, contraption) According to them : “American colonists did not protest the Tea Tax with the Boston Tea Party because it raised the price of tea. The American colonists preferred Dutch tea to English tea. The English Parliament placed an embargo on Dutch tea in the colonies, so a huge smuggling profession developed. To combat this, the English government LOWERED the tax on tea so that the English tea would be price competitive with Dutch teas. The colonists (actually some colonists led by the chief smugglers) protested by dumping the tea into Boston Harbor.”
According to Wikipedia, the Dutch tea had been smuggled into the colonies for some time. The Dutch government had given their companies a tax advantage, which allowed them to sell their product cheaper. Finally, the British government cut their taxes, but kept a tax in place. The “Townsend Tax” was to be used to pay governing colonial officials, and make them less dependent on the colonists.
In Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia, the tea boats were turned around, and returned to England with their merchandise. In Massachusetts, Governor Thomas Hutchinson insisted that the tea be unloaded. Two of the Governor’s sons were tea dealers, and stood to make a profit from the taxed tea. There are also reports that the smugglers were in the crowd dumping tea into the harbor.
The photogenic tea party movement seems to be destined to stay a while. The question remains, how much does it have to do with the namesake event?
People often try to justify their opinions by saying that the “founding fathers” agree with them. They often are guilty of selective use of history. A good place to start would be to define what we mean by the phrase founding fathers.
The FF word was not used before 1916. A senator from Ohio named Warren Harding used the phrase in the keynote address of the 1916 Republican convention. Mr. Harding was elected President in 1920, and is regarded as perhaps the most corrupt man to ever hold the office.
There are two groups of men who could be considered the founding fathers. (The fathers part is correct. Both groups are 100% male.) The Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, which cut the ties to England. Eleven years later, the Constitutional Convention wrote the Constitution that governs America today. While the Continental Congress was braver than the Constitution writers (We must hang together, or we will hang separately), the Constitution is the document that tells our government how to function. For the purposes of this feature, the men of the Constitutional Convention are the founding fathers.
Before moving on, we should remember eight men who signed the Declaration of Independence, and later attended the Constitutional Convention. Both documents were signed by George Clymer, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, George Read, Roger Sherman, and James Wilson. George Wythe left the Constitutional Convention without signing the new document. (He needed to take care of his sick wife. Mr. Wythe later supported ratification.) Elbridge Gerry (the namesake of gerrymandering) refused to sign the Constitution because it did not have a Bill of Rights. Both Mr. Wythe, and Mr. Gerry signed the Declaration of Independence.
The original topic of this discussion was about whether the founding fathers owned slaves. Apparently, PG is not the only person to wonder about this. If you go to google, and type in “did the founding fathers”, the first four answers are owned slaves, believed in G-d, have a death wish, and smoke weed.
The answer, to the obvious question, is an obvious answer. Yes, many of the founding fathers owned slaves. A name by name rundown of the 39 signatories of the Constitution was not done for this blogpost. There is this revealing comment at wiki answers about the prevalence of slave ownership. “John Adams, his second cousin Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine were the only men who are traditionally known as founding fathers who did not own slaves. Benjamin Franklin was indeed a founder of the Abolitionist Society, but he owned two slaves, named King and George. Franklin’s newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette routinely ran ads for sale or purchase of slaves.
Patrick Henry is another founding father who owned slaves, although his speeches would make one think otherwise. Despite his “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, he had up to 70 slaves at a time, apologizing a few times along the way, saying he knew it was wrong, that he was accountable to his God, and citing the “general inconvenience of living without them.”
Patrick Henry was a star of the Revolution, but not present at the Constitutional Convention. The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was in Europe during the convention. Mr. Jefferson not only owned slaves, he took one to be his mistress and kidsmama.
One of the more controversial features of the Constitution is the 3/5 rule. Here are the original words “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” In other words, a slave was only considered to be 60% of a person.
That seems rather harsh. The truth is, it was a compromise. The agricultural southern states did not want to give up their slaves. The northern states did not want to give up Congressional representation. This was the first of many compromises made about slavery, ending with the War between the States. This webpage goes into more detail about the nature of slavery at the start of the U.S.A.
The research for this feature turned up a rather cynical document called The myth of the “Founding Fathers” . It is written by Adolph Nixon. (The original post is no longer available. Here is a partial substitute.) He asks : “most rational persons realize that such political mythology is sheer nonsense, but it begs the question, who were the Founding Fathers and what makes them so great that they’re wiser than you are?”
Mr. Nixon reviews the 39 white men who signed the Constitution. He does not follow the rule, if you can’t say anything nice about someone, then don’t say anything at all. Of the 39, 12 were specified as slave owners, with many tagged as “slave breeders”.
The Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, have served America well. However it was intended, it was written so that it could be amended, and to grow with the young republic. It has on occasion been ignored. (When was the last time Congress declared war?) However fine a document it is, it was created by men. These were men of their time, who could not have foreseen the changes that America has gone through. Those who talk the most about founding fathers often know the least.
A big thank you goes to wikipedia Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. This repost was written like H. P. Lovecraft.
Chamblee54 
leave a comment