Yard Sale Saturday
It is the saturday of Caitlyn Jenner week. A media freak is praised for her courage when she gets on the cover of a major magazine. Some black people denounce her for being white. Matt Walsh, who has his own attention whore issues, calls the newly minted lady “an insult to women.” The media circus does a good job of distracting the unwashed public from the other issues of the day.
Maybe it is time to go look at the yard sales. There are two neighborhood spots that PG likes to check for garbage garage sale advertising. The first one did not have any notices. PG rode his bike around the block, and found a sign at the other location. The sale promoted at the second location was two hundred yards down the street from the first location. “My husband was in charge of the signs.”
The sale was the usual assortment of furniture, clothes, books, and knick knacks. The clothes were too small. The desk chair, with a torn up arm rest, was twenty dollars.
The books proved interesting. Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea is by Chelsea Handler, another person who enjoys being the center of attention. Her books are not prestigious literature.
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction is a collection of twenty five essays. The yard sale lady read it in college, and said it was good. That, and Chelsea Handler, were sold for one dollar.
PG then noticed Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead. It is the “journey from straight-laced suburban kid to touring Deadhead.” The yard sale lady said it was her husband’s … or did she say fiancee … and he usually reads good books. This may explain the sign placement issues. The price of the books became three for a dollar.
There was a glittering coffee mug. The handle was far enough away from the base for the mug to fit in a cup holder. The yard sale lady threw that in, and told PG to enjoy the rest of his day. Sometimes it is best to take the hint. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Computer Contest
Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly G-d was tired of hearing all the bickering. Finally fed up, G-d said, ‘THAT’S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.’
So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away. They moused. They faxed. They e-mailed. They e-mailed with attachments. They downloaded. They did spreadsheets. They wrote reports. They created labels and cards. They created charts and graphs. They did every job known to man. Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell.
Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off. Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld. Jesus just sighed.
Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching., screaming: ‘It’s gone! It’s all GONE! ‘I lost everything when the power went out!’
Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work. Satan observed this and became irate. ‘Wait!’ he screamed. ‘That’s not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don’t have any?’ G-d just shrugged and said, “JESUS SAVES”.
This repost is courtesy of gartalker. Pictures are from The Library of Congress .
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, spent an hour talking on Booknotes. This is a C-SPAN show, with author interviews. The show aired March 12, 2000. Later that night was a show about the 2000 election, featuring Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. The role Mr. Nader would play in the November election was unimaginable in March.
The first serious job Mr. Zinn had was World War II. He served in the Air Force. Towards the end of the war, “we bombed a little French town on the Atlantic coast called Royon… `We’re not going to use regular demolition bombs. We have something new. We w–you’re going–instead of dropping our usual 12 500-pound demolition bombs, you’re going to drop 30 100-pound canisters of jel—jellied gasoline.’ It was napalm–the first use of napalm in the European theater.”
Later, Mr. Zinn thought about it all. “And it didn’t s–the–the thing is you’d bomb from 30,000 feet. You don’t see what’s happening down there. You don’t see people suffering. You don’t see people burning. You don’t see limbs falling. You–you just see little flashes in the–in the d–in the dark, you know. And—and you go back, and you’re debriefed and you don’t think about it. And it’s horrifying.
Later–only later did I begin to think about it, and I was horrified by what I had done, and I’m still horrified by what I did. But I think that had an effect on my thinking about war, because here I was in the best of wars. And I believed it was the best of wars because I volunteered for it. A war against fascism? I mean, how could you find a more bestial enemy? And yet it’s a–it complicated the war for me. It complicated the morality of the war, and it made me begin to think that war itself is evil. Even when it starts with good cause, even when the enemy is horrible, that there’s something about war, especially in our time when war inevitably involves indiscriminate killing … war simply cannot be accepted morally as a solution for whatever problems are in the world.
Whatever tyranny, whatever borders are crossed, whatever problems there are, somehow human ingenuity has to find a way to deal with that without the indiscriminate killing that war involves.”
Brian Lamb is the host of Booknotes. He speaks non theatrically, often with questions that are very different from the narrative presented by the author. After this talk about war, the question was “LAMB: What would you have done had you been president and those bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor? Mr. ZINN: That’s the toughest question I’ve ever faced. I … And–and I confess, I–I–I haven’t worked out an alternative scenario.
PHOTUS is known for taking a non-heroic view of our history. Regarding the US Constitution, “When they set up the new government, when they set up the new Constitution, I mean, they set up a strong, central government which will be able to legislate on behalf of bondholders and slaveholders and manufacturers and Western land speculators.”
Mr. Zinn does not discuss The War Between The States on this show. (PG has not read PHOTUS, and does not know how WBTS is treated.) This was a case where the central government was favoring the industrial interests, at the expense of the agricultural interests. How much of that conflict was economic, with abolition serving as a moral fig leaf?
After the war, Mr. Zinn went back to school. A job appeared at Spelman College, and he worked there seven years. After that, he taught at Boston University for 24 years. His next door neighbor was five year old Matt Damon, who later read the audiobook version of PHOTUS.
There is one more bit of amusement from the transcript. Mr. ZINN:`For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history books but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the 19th century. It had instituted a war with Mexico and taken half the country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had opened Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an open-door policy in China as a means of assuring the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations to assert Western supremacy in China and kept them from–kept them for over 30 years.’ LAMB: There’s a lot more in here about Colombia and Haiti and Nicaragua. Is this country at–this sounds like I’m–I’m arguing here, but has this country done anything right?
This is a repost. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress
Temporarily Unable
Contributions to the Black Conservatives Fund are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. ~ And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together. James Madison ~ many sex workers advertise having an automatic transmission, when in fact they drive a stick shift ~ @SlavojTweezek Academic journals, as we all know, are necessary to ensure that cutting-edge knowledge may be disseminated within 6 years. ~ @NairYasmin Can we see oppression in its far more insidious forms than simply that of disallowing two people from entering an oppressive institution? ~ monsanto putting the gross back in groceries ~ This posting has been flagged for removal. [?] (The title on the listings page will be removed in just a few minutes.) ~ @JesusIsAThug hair extensions? the bible said adam and eve, not adam and weave ~ what happened to steve ~ Steve is weaving hair extensions. ~ Cam I love you dearly but sometimes you are just strange! Of course, I think you plan it that way! ~ It is good to know the difference between genuine wisdom and a clever turn of words. ~ he who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god ~ 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to bandwidth limit has been reached for this site. Please try again later. Proudly powered by LiteSpeed Web Server Please be advised that LiteSpeed Technologies Inc. is not a web hosting company and, as such, has no control over content found on this site. ~ if a tree falls in an empty forest, does the chainsaw make a sound? ~ You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct. Benjamin Franklin ~ I had good luck at the Chamblee Plaza thrift store. Mondays are 50% off on all purchases. No jokes about men”s pants half off, please. ~ This podcast deals with “coming out” to friends, etc,, about mental health issues. While listening to it I realized that almost everyone I know has some sort of mental health issue. ~ @WisdomOfChopra “God is only possible in exponential observations” ~ This is what happens when you are too cheap to pay for good musicians. ~ @WernerTwertzog Academe is important for preventing highly intelligent and altruistic people from having any impact on society whatsoever. ~ @JoyceCarolOates Look in junk literature for the definition While there, decide what definition of junk you want Junk religion might be fun ~ @WernerTwertzog I do not remove the dead from my enemies list because I shall see them, again, in hell. ~ There is a saying … you should never go grocery shopping when you are hungry. ~ this picture has 4075 comments, 7,379 shares, 75,132 likes. There is no hope for the human race ~ Six things you need to know about Isis: Astarte, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Iana, Diana ~ Wayne, I admire your commitment. That said, I suspect you have a lot of free time if you are going to see all the videos and read all the articles. If you take notes, this might make for interesting reading. ~ Photo manipulation programs are dangerous. ~ This content is currently unavailable The page you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page. ~ @WernerTwertzog I am told I have resting-German-director-face. ~ @postcrunk coincidences are the universe’s inside jokes ~ Miss Teenage South Carolina spells it Caitlin Upton. ~ This might be a symptom of a community that meets only for parties. Many gatherings are not good for non-happy discussion. ~ @mbsycamore do the #pronounpolice work for the #CaitlynJennerIndustrialComplex? ~ Is this cultural appropriation? ~ When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obligated to call for help of the civil power, it’s a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. Benjamin Franklin ~ Cursive, as in flowing handwriting, seems to be connected etymologically to cursing, as in using naughty language. Certainly, some people trying to read cursive have cursed. As it turns out, the two words have different roots. ~ The person said something about “friends” the problem is this person unfriended me when I called bs on this video ~ Pictures from The Library of Congress. ~ selah
Author Insults
These author insults were borrowed from flavorwire. HT to Andrew Sullivan The pictures are from The Library of Congress This is a repost.
25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley “All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence “Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820) “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling “Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen “Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864) “I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972) “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876) “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
09. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
08. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger “I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
07. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923) “Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’…. One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
06. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning “I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
05. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948) “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
04. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898) “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
03. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce “the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
02. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922) “A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
01. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928) “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
Bonus. Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”
Bonus two, a comment to the original post.: RomanHans Re “The Cardinal’s Mistress” by Benito Mussolini, Dorothy Parker wrote one of my favorite bon mots: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Bonus Three, from Flannery O’Connor “I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
The Death Of Jimi Hendrix
The current episode of WTF podcast features Marshall Crenshaw, a Jimi Hendrix fan. He discusses reports that Mr. Hendrix was murdered by Michael Jeffrey, his manager. This is a repost.
“The rock legend Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager, who stood to collect millions of dollars on the star’s life insurance policy, a former roadie has claimed in a new book. James “Tappy” Wright says that Hendrix’s manager, Michael Jeffrey, drunkenly confessed to killing him by stuffing pills into his mouth and washing them down with several bottles of red wine because he feared Hendrix intended to dump him for a new manager, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday. In his book, Rock Roadie, Mr Wright says Jeffrey told him in 1971 that Hendrix had been “worth more to him dead than alive” as he had taken out a life insurance policy on the musician worth $2m (about £1.2m at the time), with himself as the beneficiary. Two years later, Jeffrey was killed in a plane crash.
These rumors have been around for years. Whenever someone famous dies under mysterious circumstances, people wonder why. If you google the phrase “was Jimi Hendrix…” the suggested searches are left handed, a hippie, black, and murdered.
Mr. Wright’s story is denied by Bob Levine, the United States manager of Mr. Hendrix. He says Mr. Wright waited until 2009 to tell this tale, and he did it to increase book sales. Mr. Levine is legally blind after suffering a stroke. Bob Levine and Tappy Wright are not friends.
“The Orlando-based Wright says the ex-manager (Levine) “wanted me to baby-sit him” because Levine’s alienated his family and staff. “Levine used to say, ‘If you don’t come through, I’m going to slag your book,'” claims Wright, who adds that he has a “signed and notarized” statement from Levine saying that “it’s about time somebody wrote the truth about Jimi’s death. He also did a video interview.” Levine denies Wright’s claims. Levine says he is legally blind from his stroke but has “people taking care of me.” Levine adds that he didn’t discuss Hendrix’s death in the video and has no recollection of signing the notarized statement. Asked why he chose to speak out about the book now, Levine says: “Tappy dared me. He said, ‘There’s no one left to challenge me.'” Adds Wright, “I’m just correcting the story.”
There is a story from an physician who was at the hospital when Jimi Hendrix was brought in.
“John Bannister the on-call registrar at the now closed St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, said in an interview that the patient seemed to have “drowned” in a large amount of red wine.” The last paragraph of the Telegraph story is an amusing post script. “Bannister now lives in Sydney and worked as a doctor until 1992 when he was deregistered for fraudulent conduct.”
Everyone in this story is either dead or sketchy. Michael Jeffrey seems to have been a nasty piece of work. He was a former intelligence agent for Britain’s MI6 agency. There are reports of stolen money, numbered bank accounts, and gangster business tactics. Reportedly, Mr. Hendrix was busy getting new management. The last paragraph of the blog critics story is perhaps the most intriguing.
“Michael Jeffery reportedly perished in a plane crash over France in 1973. But his remains were never found. Eric Burdon, Noel Redding, and others believe he may have checked luggage but slipped away during the boarding process. Jeffery was due in London court the very next day to defend himself in several huge lawsuits relating to his embezzlement, money laundering, and fraud.”
Chamblee54 
leave a comment