Chamblee54

The new year would not be the same without Lake Superior State University’s 40th Annual List of Banished Words. Idea challenged chamblee54 wrote about LSSULOBW in 2014, 2013, 2011, and 2009. Every year, someone in the frozen north chooses a list of words they would like to see less of.
Contest winners were presented in ALL CAPS. This custom needs to be banished. Chamblee 54 has retyped the dirty dozen phrases. bae, polar vortex, hack, skill set, swag, foodie, curate / curated, friend-raising, cra-cra, enhanced interrogation, takeaway, -nation
This is a special year for word banning. In November, Time magazine announced the list of contestants for Which Word Should Be Banned in 2015? One of the possibilities was feminist. Politically correct knickers twisted from coast to coast. An apology was issued. As this feature is written, the contest winner has not been announced.
Feminist and appropriation are used to fill out the tribute poem today. While racism/racist are woefully misused and overused, the sounds they produce did not meet the needs of this poem. Other pictures are from The Library of Congress.

At some point, three holidays started to be observed on a certain Monday. The big three are MLK Birthday, Memorial Day, and Labor Day. This post proposes making long weekends out of two more holidays. Whether this will happen is a good question. In any event, it will be a good excuse for text to go between some pictures. These pictures are from The Library of Congress. The pictures are Union Soldiers, from the War Between the States.
The first holiday to be converted is fourth of July. Under the new plan, Independence Day would be observed on the first Monday in July.
It has long been a good question why July 4 is the big day. The Continental Congress voted to declare Independence on July 2, 1776. July 6 saw the Declaration of Independence announced in the PA Evening Gazette. July 8 saw Col. John Nixon give the first public reading of the Declaration.
The other holiday due for an overhaul is Christmas. Since Christmas Eve is considered a holiday by many, Christmas should be celebrated on the fourth Friday of December.
Like Independence Day, there is considerable debate about when Jesus was born. Many scholars think the birth was in spring. Apparently, Rome decided to hold this celebration on a pagan holiday.
Traditionalists are not going to like this proposed change. It is not likely to be enacted anytime soon. It would be a more efficient use of our working time to not have Independence Day, and Christmas, occur in the middle of the week. It also problematic when the holidays fall on a weekend. Pay for holidays is part of the compensation for many, and having the holiday off on another day leads to confusion. If the holidays were adjusted per this proposal, then this would not be a problem.

Until 2009, PG had never heard of Mithras.
Mithras is a Persian deity, from the Zoroaster tradition.(That is pronounced Zor uh THRUS ta.) Not much is known about Mithras … did he really exist, or was he a legend? There was a cult of Mithras in the first century Roman empire.
There are supposed to be similarities between Mithras and Jesus. These include the virgin birth, the birth on December 25, and rising from the dead after three days. Some spoilsports say the early christians grafted Jesus onto the legend of Mithras.
One indication that this might be true is The Catholic Encyclopedia. “Some apparent similarities exist; but … it is quite probable that Mithraism was the borrower from Christianity.”
This is a repost. Pictures from The Library of Congress .

The word Ecclesiastes has a poetic tingle. It’s place in the Old Testament is between the poetry of Proverbs, and the enticements of the Song of Soloman. Richard Brautigan counted the punctuation marks in Ecclesiastes, and found no errors. Ecclesiastes 3 was even the lyrics for a top forty song.
Turn Turn Turn is taken almost verbatim from the book of Ecclesiastes. Pete Seeger wrote a melody, and added a line. “There is a time for peace, I swear its not too late”. TTT became a hit for the Byrds in 1965, as the escalation of the Vietnam war was in full bloom.
TTT is about the dualities of life, and how there is a place for all these things. When PG was collecting rocks from destroyed houses, it was a time to gather stones together. TTT can serve as a companion to the vibrations of day to day living.
Pete Seeger died January 27, 2014. PG first heard of him when he was on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It was during Vietnam, and Mr. Seeger did a song…”Waist deep in the big muddy”… about how “The big fool said to push on, push on”. The CBS censors did not allow this the first time he appeared. Many thought he was talking about Lyndon Johnson.
“Pete Bowers” was a stage name for a young Pete Seeger. This was to avoid making trouble for his father. The band he played in, the Weavers, popularized a gullah spiritual, “Kumbaya”. This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

It is a popular line. “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The credit, or blame, for this gem is assigned to Ben Franklin. Did he really say it? What was he talking about?
The good news is that Mr. Franklin did say these words. (Here is the text. ) What follows was written by a lawyer. Prepare to be confused.
The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.
Mr. Franklin was writing on behalf of legislators who wanted to assess a tax. The quote is used by tax hating conservatives. The modern conservative wants to send a hundred thousand troops to a conflict eight time zones away, and pay for it with tax cuts.
Another article tells much the same story, but with a couple of twists. There is a google gimmick that shows how often a quote is used. The BF quote was little known until the twentieth century.
The techcrunch article introduces a dandy word for the rampant misuse of quotes. The word is contextomy. This explanation is from Matthew McGlone of the University of Texas at Austin.
“‘Contextomy’ refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as ‘quoting out of context’. Contextomy is employed in contemporary mass media to promote products, defame public figures and misappropriate rhetoric. A contextomized quotation not only prompts audiences to form a false impression of the source’s intentions, but can contaminate subsequent interpretation of the quote when it is restored to its original context. …”
Episode 39 of The Fallacy-a-Day Podcast deals with contextomy. The spell check suggestion for contextomy is contentment. Pictures for this feature are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.

In 1948, Allen Ginsberg was staying in Harlem. Things were not going well in his life. One night, he read “Ah, Sunflower,” by William Blake. He thought the voice of Mr. Blake was reading the poem for him. Later, something similar happened with “The Sick Rose.” Here is a tmi version of the story.
Sixty odd years later, PG is trying to recreate this incident. Instead of reading the work, PG is posting the lines at the feet of dogs. Instead of a Harlem building, with fancy brickwork, PG is in a Brookhaven house. The house was built in 1954. The sky is the same for Harlem and Brookhaven.
Perhaps the strangest bit of synchronicity involves the first paragraph of this text. PG had finished with the meme poem. The third game of the world series was on the tv, seen on a mirror behind the monitor. As PG typed the words “The Sick Rose,” a St. Louis player hit a ground ball. The fielder threw the ball to home plate, and a runner was tagged out. The catcher threw the ball to third base, and the ball got behind the baseman. The runner started to run, and got tripped by the third baseman. Even though he was tagged by the catcher, the umpire ruled that his being tripped made him safe. Is this as weird as hearing the voice of a dead English poet in a Harlem apartment?
Mr. Blake liked to illustrate his own work. Here is what he did for “The Sick Rose.” Whether using dogs is an improvement is a matter for smart people to decide. The text of these poems is copied from the Gutenberg Project. They are happy to get donations.
This is a rerun. The Cardinals are in the baseball post season again. The poem pictures have been redone. The original set was one of the early graphic poems. The techniques have a year of practice behind them. The results should be better.

PG and Uzi had their usual Sunday phone call, and agreed to go to “Sunday in the Park”. It is a festival in Oakland Cemetery, with live music, people in costumes, open mausoleums, and lots of good clean fun. It wasn’t until that evening that PG learned that today is Dead Poets Remembrance Day. Edgar Allan Poe met his maker on this day in 1849. This is a repost.
There was a Chamblee54 post about DPRD two years ago. The idea is to go to a cemetery and read a poem. An effort will be made to do that tonight, although promises about dead poets are notoriously unreliable. The 2010 post is included as part two of this feature.
The first poem read that afternoon was “Looking for the Buckhead Boys” by James Dickey. In the intervening two years, PG listened to a podcast with Christopher Dickey, the son of the writer. Sometimes bard is short for bastard.
So PG, Uzi, and Hazmat went to a festival in Oakland Cemetery. Like everything else, it is more popular and expensive. You had to pay to park, which Uzi generously took care of. The brick walls around the boneyard have been repaired, and no longer look like they are going to fall down. Those walls are important, because people are dying to get inside. This is the second time that PG and Uzi have attended the October festival in Oakland Cemetery.
There are always things that you need to see at Oakland. Margaret Mitchell, the Lion Statue, and the mausoleums are important stops. PG followed the signs to the grave of Bobby Jones. It had golf balls and a putter, which was not necessary.
Don LeVert was a member of the Atlanta Sky Hi Club for many, many years before his departure in 1997. PG and Uzi always seek him out, and it is usually a bit of an adventure finding him.
After visiting Don, PG found the marker for “Brother John Wade”. His time on earth was September 23, 1865 to January 15, 1916. This was from the autumn just after the War Between the States until 37 days before PG’s father was born in Rowland, North Carolina. There was a renewed sense of connection to the stone monuments.

The facebook friend said “Today is Dead Poets Remembrance Day, Oct. 7th, the day Edgar Allan Poe died. Be sure to visit a graveyard and read some poetry today”. PG didn’t have anything better to do.
The first obstacle was finding a book of poetry. PG is not a poetry person. A look at the shelf turned up a paperback, “125 years of Atlantic “. Poetry was to be found between those covers.
The book had two stickers, both saying 69 cents. At the old Book Nook, this meant that the book was half the price on the sticker. With tax, that would be 38 cents.
125YOA had stayed in PG’s car for a few years. Whenever he was stuck somewhere with time to kill, this book was waiting. One afternoon in 1998, there was a slow day at work. PG read a remembrance by Gertrude Stein, about life in France at the start of World War II.
The cemetery of choice was connected to the Nancy Creek Primitive Baptist Church. PG has driven by this facility thousands of times. He walked past the graves until he found a fallen tree to sit down on.
The first poem was “Looking for the Buckhead Boys” by James Dickey. PG began to read out loud, and soon could smell the drug store air of Wender and Roberts. The author bought fifty cents worth of gas at a Gulf station. Today, fifty cents might buy a tablespoon of gas, and Gulf was long ago bought out by BP. Wender and Roberts became a bar, which was torn down, to make way for a shopping destination. One day the money lenders will allow construction.
Buckhead is not what it used to be. When Mr. Dickey was the bravest man in Buckhead (he took a shit in the toilet at Tyree’s pool hall), PG was not even thought of. The traffic jams on Peachtree Street are still there, as the blue haired ladies follow poets into the ground.
When PG finished reading Mr. Dickey, he put a teal postit in the book, where the poem stood. PG looked up, and the graveyard seemed different. Maybe the sun had sank a bit in the sky, and maybe the poem had changed PG in a way he could not put into words. Maybe another poem was the answer. Take the glasses off, open the book at random, and turn the pages until a poem shows up.
On page 404…the historic Atlanta area code…was “The Wartime Journey” by Jan Struther. The 1944 work was unknown territory. A group of people are traveling on a train. The wounded vet, the untried recruit, the salesmen shared the space with a lady, taking a baby for her soldier husband to meet. The theme of the rhymes was that America was totally at war, and that war is different from peacetime. Today’s war in Babylon is not like that.
Halfway through the reading, a freight train pulled by. Today, passenger trains are a novelty, and freight rules the rails. The shipment today was double decked containers, ready to pull off and slap on an eighteen wheeler.
Deaths are said to come in threes, and reading poetry in a graveyard should be the same. PG went on a random search for a Moe, to go with the Curley and Larry already digested. A page of poems by Emily Dickinson was the result. These pages left PG unmoved. It was as if he was back in the sixth grade, with a horrible English teacher forcing him to memorize Hiawatha. It was time to go home.

There is a web entity called the bitchy waiter. Yes, that might be redundant. This presumably male person has a blog, a twitter account (@bitchywaiter,) and a facebook page (Bitchy Waiter.) (The spell check suggestion for bitchywaiter is birdwatcher.) BW got his fifteen minutes recently. He wrote a *viral post* about a celebrity, who took up a table playing chess, while non-celebrities waited.
Today this waste of bandwidth is sponsoring a facebook contest. “Can you write a caption for this photo? The caption with the most “likes” by midnight EST tonight will win a Bitchy Waiter Bitch Proud bracelet.” The picture is embedded with this post, along with other pictures of people, dogs, and a mannequin. The pictures were taken at a neighborhood festival that charges admission.
PG’s entry was “This little piggy went to market.” He clicked “like”, which, while considered tacky, is not technically against the rules. Is a hog, big enough for a man to ride, a little piggy?
Another possibility is that the man is wrestling with the porker. This picture was taken at an opportune moment, when the human was on top, and seems to be winning. It is a bit of folk wisdom… You should never wrestle with a pig, You will just get dirty, and the hog will enjoy it. Porky does seem to be having a good time. Maybe the rider always leaves a good tip. This is a repost.

About this time one hundred years ago, Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan. Within two years, with the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, some people kidnapped him from a state prison. Leo Frank was taken to Marietta, and hung from an oak tree.
George Zimmerman is the object of the mob’s fury today. The two cases are different. There is little doubt that Mr. Zimmerman fired the weapon, that killed Trayvon Martin. There is considerable doubt about the guilt of Leo Frank. Much of the venom directed at Mr. Frank was because he was Jewish. Trayvon Martin was the unpopular minority in the current case.
The common thread in the two cases is media fueled demands for vengeance. The Supreme Court took note of this in the Frank case. “Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.”
Tom Watson was one of the leading rabble rousers in Mr. Frank’s case. A politician and newspaper owner, Mr. Watson led the anti semitic charge. Today, a large bronze statue of Tom Watson is in front of the west side of the State Capitol. This side is the site for rallies.Tom Watson is seen shaking a finger behind the speakers stand.
So far, the mob has not executed George Zimmerman. It is not out of the question. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. UPDATE This is a repost. George Zimmerman is still with us, for better or worse. The venegence mob focus has shifted to Darren Wilson. Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are still dead. The statue of Tom Watson has been moved to an undisclosed location.

I miss seeing you, but it is probably better for you to be in Arizona ~ There are a thousand Mike Browns in Gaza. ~ “By myself and others reporting you, we are simply trying to make Facebook a safer place from bullying and harassment and Facebook feels that if everyone on there uses their real name that the goal of a safe space is achieved. So I’m not bullying you, I’m trying to make Facebook better and a safe space. ~ The 10 year reunion was neat. All you had to do was show up alive, and people were glad to see you … even the people who were not nice to you in high school. There were a lot of little stories. There was the girl with the jawbreaker last name who married a man named Smith. There was the honor scholar black girl who lost fifty pounds and was turning heads. It is highly recommended. You can be nice to people one night every ten years, it won’t kill you. ~ Is Marthasville the real name, and Atlanta the cover up? ~ I would *like* what Karma says, except the preceding comment was deleted. There have been too many political things here. ~ What about the Southern Baptist Convention? ~ yuck! your last photo is your best with the bag ~ Sounds like a good day to stay out of town. ~ BBC copyrights ignored, because, as far as I am aware, bbc has never repeated, nor translated into another [sell’ble] format, this documentary, which, it seems to me, says ‘a lot’ [albeit not ‘everything’] about the way we live now … ~ The last reality check I got was returned for insufficient funds. ~ This is a bit of a leap, but one time my hip was hurting. When I got rid of a pair of pants that was too tight, the pain went away. ~ I would ask if you needed glasses. ~ Spell check is your friend. ~ #fuckkroger Who is roger and why do you want to fuck him with an extra k? ~ What did you put in the dear boy this morning, coffee? ~ Bless her heart. ~ What profiteth a blogger to gain a million page views, and lose his soul. ~ Mark 8:36-37 36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? 37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Has the Jesus worshiper taken a promise of life after death in exchange for his soul? ~ A community without the pesky beliefs. That is a nice concept. ~ high-end thrift store ~ We were talking about Chris Crocker last night, along with Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, Joey Buttafouco, and other people who found a life after their fifteen minutes were over. ~ Especially if it is Brittney. ~ You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user. ~ How many #unarmed #humanshield children are being ,hurt in #syria by our drones? ~ Do they have t shirts for sale? ~ Trolling and stupidity are far from mutually exclusive! ~ True, but one form of trolling is just saying the most arrant nonsense that you don’t believe. And then I discover that these people DO believe this arrant nonsense. LOL ~ You were Emily Dickinson In A Past Life. Do your friends know? Share on Facebook ~ Stranczek was born and raised in Crestwood but didn’t speak a word of English until he was 8 years old, he said. It was an accomplishment for the eldest of eight children, who later helped his siblings learn the language. His Polish immigrant parents ran a vegetable farm in Crestwood and sold corn, tomatoes and cucumbers, among other foods. That’s how they always had something to eat, even through the Depression, Stranczek said. ~ This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later. ~ This is a radio show about autism. It turns out that autism is a spectrum, and that what works for one person might not work for another. This program can be tough to listen to. ~ @carissaaa_m I hate being friends with girls who won’t do things on their own. No bitch, I don’t want to come to the bathroom with you. ~ pictures are from The Library of Congress. ~ selah