Chamblee54

It is another Sunday morning. Wake up and live. After I get moving, I look for something to put on my blog. The idea is to do as little work as possible. This is the guiding principle of the universe … nature will find a way to do a chore with as little effort as possible. With the blog, enlightened laziness means an archive post with few links. Many of these links need to be revived using the internet archive. This process is painfully close to being work.
This is November, which means 30 days of dead. Somebody puts up a Grateful Dead download every day in November. For years I faithfully downloaded every one, only to realize that a substantial percentage were crap. This is the dirty truth about the GD. For all the ethereal vibes, there is a lot of boring crap. … I listened to deadhead babbling before I got to see them. That night at the Omni was late 1973, post PigPen, definitely after the glory days of the band. Of course, I kept trying.
Truckin’ – New Speedway Boogie is the TDOD offering for today, and it sucks. Which is a shame. I like those two songs. A love song for the Altamont concert, what’s not to like? Still, this rendition is clearly from the later days of the band, and just doesn’t have the Jerry juice that the faithful demand. I was going to say that Deadheads live for, but that wouldn’t have made any sense.
The GD were originally the Warlocks, but had to change it because of someone else using the name. It is one to the freakydeaky parts of rock mythology that Lou Reed was also calling his band the Warlocks, and had to rebrand. What if Pigpen had come to rehearsal with an S&M novel, and decided to call his band the Velvet Underground? Or Andy Warhol saw the future of hard drugs, and decided to call his band the Great Dead Junkies. We will just never know.
Three posts from the November archive were considered today. Thanksgiving Letter is from Margaret and Helen. They were a blog sensation in 2005 … these old ladies from Texas who sent folksy posts about their liberal politics and bacon grease. The last M&H post was October 2024, JD Vance thinks bullet proof glass will abortion proof our vaginas.
In 2016, there was a lot of noise being made about Donald J. Trump. While some of it was true, a great deal of it was total nonsense. There was this tsunami of negativity about the orange haired wonder. After a while, it got tough to tell what was true, what was true but you gotta understand, and what was total bullshit. Then I came across one item that was easy to debunk, but which was widely believed by the Hillary Happy Public. This item was the notion that DJT was endorsed by the KKK.
Of course DJT won the election, and America melted down. The various media actors were lamenting the normalization of caucasian stupidity supremacy. One episode in our national reality show was an article in the New York Times about a man in Ohio named Tony Hovater. He enjoyed being white entirely too much. It is only the last part of the second article that I saw the missing piece of the puzzle. Mr. Hovater ranting about the federal reserve. I realized that this was not a threat to america. Instead, this was the guy in the break room who will not shut up and get to work.
The pearl clutchers said that the NYT took what was dangerous and made it seem normal. This put the future of democracy at risk. The truth was the opposite. Tony Hovater is normal and boring, and the NYT tried to make him look exotic and dangerous. … Mr. Hovater seems to have faded into the background. You have to set google search for the last year to find anything. The ADL takes a break from normalizing genocide, to profiling a whiteboy group that Mr. Hovator was connected to. … Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Russell Lee took the social media picture in October 1940. “ Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family, Pie Town, New Mexico … Photograph shows Jack Whinery (1907-1994) with his wife Edith and their five children, Wanda, Edith, Velva, Jack and Lawrence in his father’s lap. ©Luther Mckinnon 2025 · selah