Chamblee54

There has been a mini controversy this week about TED talks. It seems as though a talk about income inequality was recorded. A decision was made to not use it. The talker leaked an email to National Journal, and they published The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You. (The NJ page is sponsored by a health insurance company. A soldier, his wife, and their baby smile for the benefit of a provider network.) The censorship story was picked up by various  outlets, who were duly outraged.
This might be a stage in the growth of the TED talks. Before now, they are almost universally loved. When you are looking for attention, you pick on the biggest target you can find.
TED curator Chris Anderson has a blog of his own, and presents his side of the story. His take is that the talk wasn’t very good, and was overly partisan. TED has a tremendous inventory to present, and only wants to release the best.
The idea of forbidden fruit makes this talk tough to resist. When people find out that something is being kept away from them, the first impulse is to consume the product. With youtube, and the transcript, this presentation is probably getting much more attention that it would have otherwise.
PG has now listened to the talk. The transcript has a lot of mistakes. The talk did not seem especially partisan. The six minutes went by quickly, and the ideas were easy to consume. There was little said that has not been said before.
The partisan charge is especially untrue. Both Democrats and Republicans wallow in money from special interests. The one percent owns both parties. If you want to get elected, you have to solicit campaign contributions from people with money. These same people with money can afford to hire PR firms to sing their praises.
Another problem with the economy today is a curious decision that was made before the invasion of Babylon. We are financing these wars with a tax cut. As if that is not enough, many of the functions of an army have been contracted out to private concerns. These current wars are more expensive than previous wars. And there was a tax cut before the invasion of Babylon. This is unheard of, and we are paying the economic price today.
The talker, Nick Hanauer, was an investor in Amazon. It could be argued that Amazon has led to the demise of many small independent bookstores. Mr. Hanauer is not a job creator, he is a job rearranger. At least he has the courage to say so.

There are two days in every week that we should not worry about, two days that should be kept free from fear and apprehension. One is yesterday, with its mistakes and cares, its faults and blunders, its aches and pains. Yesterday has passed, forever beyond our control. All the money in the world cannot bring back yesterday. We cannot undo a single act we performed. Nor can we erase a single word we’ve said – yesterday is gone! The other day we shouldn’t worry about is tomorrow, with its impossible adversaries, its burden, its hopeful promise and poor performance. Tomorrow is beyond our control. Tomorrow’s sun will rise either in splendor or behind a mask of clouds – but it will rise. And until it does, we have no stake in tomorrow, for it is yet unborn. This leaves only one day – today. Any person can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when we add the burdens of yesterday and tomorrow that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives people mad – it is the remorse of bitterness for something which happened yesterday, and the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us, therefore, live one day at a time! The poem was borrowed from CyberRecovery. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

The world is in turmoil. People are killing people for no good reason. The government is run by liars and scoundrels. Religion is a dirty word. It is time for blonde stories . Thank you Funny Jokes. Pictures are from The Library of Congress
A married couple was asleep when the phone rang at 2 in the morning. The very blonde wife picked up the phone, listened a moment, and said ‘How should I know, that’s 200 miles from here!’ and hung up. The husband said, ‘Who was that?’ The wife answered, ‘I don’t know, some woman wanting to know if the coast is clear.’
Two blondes are walking down the street. One notices a compact on the sidewalk and leans down to pick it up. She opens it, looks in the mirror and says, ‘Hmm, this person looks familiar.’ The second blonde says, ‘Here, let me see!’ So, the first blonde hands her the compact. The second blonde looks in the mirror and says, ‘You dummy, it’s me!’
A blonde suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her, so she goes out and buys a gun. She goes to his apartment unexpectedly and when she opens the door she finds him in the arms of a redhead. Well, the blonde is really angry. She opens her purse to take out the gun, and as she does so, she is overcome with grief. She takes the gun and puts it to her head. The boyfriend yells, ‘No, honey, don’t do it!’ The blonde replies, ‘Shut up, you’re next!’
A blonde was bragging about her knowledge of state capitals. She proudly says, ‘Go ahead, ask me … I know ‘em all.’ ‘OK, what’s the capital of Wisconsin ?’ The blonde replies, ‘Oh, that’s easy. Its W.’
Q: What did the blonde ask her doctor when he told her she was pregnant? A: ‘Is it mine?’
Bambi, a blonde in her fourth year as a UCLA Freshman, sat in her US Government class. The professor asked Bambi if she knew what Roe vs. Wade was about. Bambi pondered the question; then, finally, said, ‘That was the decision George Washington had to make before he crossed the Delaware.’
Returning home from work, a blonde was shocked to find her house ransacked and burglarized. She telephoned the police at once and reported the crime. The police dispatcher broadcast the call on the radio, and a K-9 unit, patrolling nearby, was the first to respond. As the K-9 officer approached the house with his dog on a leash, the blonde ran out on the porch, shuddered at the sight of the cop and his dog, then sat down on the steps. Putting her face in her hands, she moaned, ‘I come home to find all my possessions stolen. I call the police for help, and what do they do? They send me a BLIND COP!’

PG was wasting time with facebook when he saw a friend say “Damn I love this quote”. The passage being praised was “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Desmond Tutu.
The rhetoric alert started to flash. These days, the wolf and the sheep buy their clothes at the same Walmart. To hear some oppressors talk the talk, they are the ones under attack. It is tough to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Also, as the Kony fiasco showed, often you can make things worse by getting mixed up. Sometimes the best thing to do is mind your own business.
Ok, now that is out of the way. Some lines sound good, but don’t hold up to a bit of thinking. As for the veracity of the quote, Desmond Tutu may very well have said it. (or maybe one of his rivals said it, and Mr. Tutu copied it.) The quote has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Patrick Henry, and probably others. Almost no one has a source, for the quote, from the dead white guys.
There was a discussion in Prison Planet Forum about BHO, and his alleged good buddy Larry Sinclair. The signature line for one of the posts was that crowd pleaser, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Thomas Jefferson. All that needed to happen to get the party started was to highlight the quote, right click, and ask Mr. Google to help.
A post called MISQUOTING THE FOUNDERS did not mince words. “The only problem with this scene that has been repeated many times across the country is that Thomas Jefferson never said that, never wrote that, and quite possibly never thought it. Our aspiring politician had fallen victim to the perils of popular misattribution. You could fill a book with misquotes and misattributed quotes we hear repeated regularly today. Right now if I Google “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent” the entire first page of results wrongly attribute it to Thomas Jefferson. The quote and its many variants have been attributed in the past to Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, but no record exists of the quote in any of their writings or contemporary accounts.”
On November 13, 1787, Mr. Jefferson wrote a letter to William Smith. The letter is full of zesty quotes. “What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
A few lines above that, Mr. Jefferson said “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” Twenty years after he wrote this, Mr. Jefferson was President. He probably did not want to deal with a revolution when he was President.
Getting back to the quote about tyranny, Martin Porter wrote an entertaining essay, A study of a Web quotation. He gives credit, or blame, to Edmund Burke. First, a list of different versions is presented. This is a clue that something is awry. The conclusion: “There is no original. The quote is bogus, and Burke never said it. It is a pseudo-quote, and corresponds to real quotes in the same way that urban legends about the ghost hitch-hiker vanishing in the back of the car and alligators in the sewers correspond to true news stories.”
Mr. Porter wrote a follow up essay, Four Principles of Quotation. These principles are:
Principle 1 (for readers) Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.
Principle 2 (for readers) Whenever you see a quotation given with a full source assume that it is probably being misused, unless you find good evidence that the quoter has read it in the source.
Principle 3 (for quoters) Whenever you make a quotation, give the exact source.
Principle 4 (for quoters) Only quote from works that you have read.
If these principles were to be used, then there would be a lot less hotheaded talking on the intercom. Those who are trying to influence you to the justice of their cause will not want you to read this. Pictures for this feature are from The Library of Congress. These pictures are Union soldiers, from the War Between the States. When war is discussed, all inspiring quotes are in doubt.

There is a quote making the rounds from Jack Murtha. It seems like some of his nephews have been profiting from the family ties. The verbatim is “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district.” This appearance of impropriety is a gift to supporters of military adventure in Babylon. Mr. Murtha…a decorated Vietnam Vet…has been a vocal critic of the wars. His apparent ethical issues give war fans a convenient diversion.
This comment brings to mind a former Governor of Georgia, Eugene Talmadge. He was famous for saying, to cheering crowds, “Sure I stole, but I stole for you”. PG suspected an urban legend, and decided to see what Mr. Google had to say.
Eugene Talmadge was Agriculture Commissioner before he was Governor. He had some relatives on the state payroll. There was something funky going on with fertilizer. He bought a bunch of hogs, and sent them to Chicago, where he thought he could make more money. After a while, some people started to ask questions. His answer was “If I stole, it was for farmers like yourselves”. (This is on page 59 of “The Wild Man from Sugar Creek”.
This was in 1931. The depression hit Georgia hard. The wool hat boys were in a world of fertilizer. Mr. Talmadge set himself up as the champion of the dirt farmers, and the enemy of the lyin’ Atlanta newspapers. In 1932 he was elected Governor. He was re elected three times, but died in 1946, before he could serve again. He was replaced by two Governors.
Mr. Talmadge was elected because of the county unit system. Each of Georgia’s 159 counties got a certain number of votes. Three rural counties were the equivalent of winning Fulton County. Mr. Talmadge boasted that he never won a county with street cars.
Mr. Talmadge’s campaigns were legendary. He would speak at the county courthouse, and plants in the crowd would scream questions, like “what about those lyin Atlanta newspapers?”. One of his favorite lines was “Yeah, it’s true. I stole, but I stole for you, the dirt farmer”.
PG’s aunt went to work at the Trust Company of Georgia in the early fifties. There was a story that the new employees were told. It seems as though Governor Talmadge was in the lobby of the Trust Company, after having a happy lunch. He had to use the restroom, and went to the corner of the lobby to relieve himself.
There is a statue of Gene Talmadge in front of the State Capitol. The plate at the base reads “I may surprise you, but I shall not deceive you”. It remains to be seen what will be carved underneath a statue of Jack Murtha.
This is a repost. Jack Murtha died February 8, 2010. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”

PG was looking at the search engine terms for his blog when he saw this… going down with janis opening line. It seems as though the phrase was used in a post about a political consultant. The opening line to that piece was Lisa Baron is a big, cavernous piece of work.
One good thing about this post is finding the exact quote about Janis Joplin. A lady named Peggy Caserta wrote about her life as the gf of Miss Joplin. According to How To Snort an Airplane, the opening line was “I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin, and between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin.”
There isn’t anywhere to go from there but up. As it turns out, the intercom is full of people who supply good opening lines from literature. It saves you the trouble of reading the rest of the book.
Here are Top 10 Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature, in reverse order. Three quotes are included from the comments. Ten are from opening sentences, which advertises Filipino Cupid. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. .
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Douglas Adams 1979 “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
NEUROMANCER William Gibson 1984 “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
1984 George Orwell 1949 “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
INVISIBLE MAN Ralph Ellison 1952 “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1864 “I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts.”
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST Ken Kesey 1962 “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”
TRAINSPOTTING Irvine Welsh 1993 “The sweat was lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS Hunter S. Thompson 1971 “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'”
THE METAMORPHOSIS Franz Kafka 1915 “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Orlando Virginia Woolf 1928 “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor.”
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, 1813 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov, 1955 Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger, 1951 If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens, 1859 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Moby Dick Herman Melville, 1850 Call me Ishmael.
Peter Pan JM Barrie, 1911 All children, except one, grow up.
The Hobbit JRR Tolkien, 1937 In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967 Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy, 1873-7 Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Women Charles Bukowski “I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman—even on non-sexual terms—was beyond my imagination.”
The Bible author unknown Genesis 1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth
Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train… Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back.”

The first picture in this episode is a family portrait of the Quin family in Washington Georgia. The nine surviving children of Hugh Pharr Quin are sitting for the camera. Mr. Quin had joined the Georgia State Troops of the Army of the Confederacy at the age of 16, and after the war went to Washington to live with his sister. Mr. Quin was in the church choir of the First Methodist Church when he met the organist, Betty Lou DuBose. They were married January 22, 1879.
The original name of Mrs. Quin was Louisa Toombs DuBose. She was the daughter of James Rembert DuBose. His brother in law was Robert Toombs, the Secretary of State of the Confederacy, and a man of whom many stories are told.
In this picture, Mrs. Quin is holding the hand of her second youngest daughter so she will not run away. This is Mattie Vance Quin. She is my grandmother.
After The Great War, Mattie Vance Quin was living in Memphis Tennessee, where she met Arthur Dunaway. Mr. Dunaway was a veteran of the war, and was from Paragould, Arkansas. On July 23, 1922 her first Daughter, Jean, was born. This is my mother.
Mr. Dunaway died in 1930, shortly after the birth of his son Arthur. There were hard times and upheaval after this, with the family settling in Atlanta. There her third child Helen Ann Moffat was born on December 12, 1933. This is my Aunt Helen, and my mother’s best friend.

Jean lived for many years with her mother and sister at 939 Piedmont, among other locations. She joined the First Baptist Church and sang in the choir. She got a job with the C&S bank, and was working at the Tenth Street Branch when she met Luther McKinnon. He was a native of Rowland, North Carolina. They were married October 6, 1951.
They moved into the Skyland Apartments, which in those days was out in the country. Mom told a story about Dad taking her home from Choir practice, and going home on the two lane Buford Hiway. There was a man who went to the restaurants to get scraps to feed his pigs, and his truck was always in front of them. This was a serious matter in the summer without air conditioning.
Soon, they moved into a house, and Luther junior was born on May 6, 1954. This is me. Malcolm was born May 10, 1956, which did it for the children. Neither of us had children, so that is where that ends.
The fifties were spent on Wimberly Road, a street of always pregnant women just outside Brookhaven. It was a great place to be a little kid.
In 1960, we moved to Parkridge Drive, to the house where my brother and I stay today. The note payment was $88 a month. Ashford Park School is a short walk away…the lady who sold us the house said ” you slap you kid on the fanny and he is at school”.
In 1962, our family followed the choir director from First Baptist to Briarcliff Baptist, which is where my parents remained.
In 1964, Mom went back to work. She ran the drive in window at Lenox Square for the Trust Company of Georgia until it was time to retire. She became a talk radio fan when RING radio started, and was a friend of her customer Ludlow Porch. She gave dog biscuits to customers with dogs.
During this era of change, Mom taught me that all people were good people, be they black or white. This was rare in the south. She later became disgusted with the War in Vietnam, and liked to quote a man she heard on the radio. “How will we get out of Vietnam?”” By ship and by plane”.
Eventually, it was time to retire. Her and Dad did the requisite traveling, until Dad got sick and passed away February 7,1992. Mom stuck around for a few more years, until her time came December 18, 1998. This is a repost.

Winter Wipe Out TV show had broken bones and manslaughter every minute.
Winter Wipe Out show is produced in Holland by gays, bis, and orgiers.
Why do gays like to see people perishing!
P-E-N-I-S goes into the anus to rupture intestines.
More a man does this more likely he’ll be a fatality or a homicider.
Getting pleasure while the other man passes away reverberates another homicide later.
UNESCO United Nations has gender and bio-ethics conferences combined.
Only gays go to gender studies.
Gays are the biogenerciders in hospitals.
Children can be eliminated.
The Feds said in the December 11th article the Lincoln Journal Star page six,
“Gays should not be employed in hospitals or any health occupation.”
Whitney Huston was found without clothes in a bathtub.
Every corpse found without clothes has a partner that did away with them.
Lesbians and gays rarely live past 40 years old
because it is common for a partner to do away with them or they self-inflict.
We want everyone to live as long as possible, to be 80 years old instead of 40 years old.
Don’t go gay, it’s not healthy.
Anus licking causes sepsis.
If not given antibiotics within a half hour they perish.
Have no gays in education.
A high percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don’t have AIDS yet.
Be on the side of the innocent boy who gets Fs and Ds a year after being molested.
Don’t allow hundreds of molestations a year with this Equality Ordinance!
Where are our school teachers that should be speaking about this today?
Hilary Clinton’s roommate 4 years in college was Eleanor or “Eldie” Acheson,
a gay woman, daughter of Dean Acheson.
To avoid going gay like Hilar—Clinton did, college students need single rooms and single gender dorms.
Going lesbian is not normal.
A college woman is seduced with illegal Rohypnal to go gay otherwise they think it is abhorrent.
Lesbian professors state, quote, wives are enslaved by their husbands, unquote.
All you married councilmen know this is not true and this is deranged thinking.
Have no gays in education.
The Canadian Gaëtan Dugas was the first person to get AIDS in 1980.
He depressed his immune system with pot.
He ruptured intestines as his partner became a corpse!
Candida a fungus grows hugely on a corpse!
AIDS is a candida of fungus disease.
Roman senators went to Roman baths to be promiscuous, gay, bis and orgiers,
then went to the Coliseum to see Christians get mauled and perish!
Do gays become sadistic, yes!
They cuss after coupling, don’t like the land they lay on and
80% of those who did treason by the year 2000 were gays.
Don’t employ gays in military, education, health or psychology.
They are the generciders, molesters, treasonist, deranged.
Gays not a behavior by the way—gay is a behavior, it’s not an identity.
Shoplifters don’t make good salespersons.
Gays behaviors aren’t needed for military, education, health and psychology.
Don’t encourage gays.
Do not harm gays.
Gays can transform [One minute]
I have—let’s see—gays can transform to be celibate to live to be 80 years old.
Gay persons want to adopt children.
California Board of Education said last year,
“Children in San Francisco had the worst scholastic spelling of all subjects all grade levels.
They cry all day and rape each other hetero without being told not to.”
Give us your molested children deranged by seeing only gays kissing.
Don’t ask don’t tell what you do in your bedroom and you’ll be respected for your work.
Read the book Nijinsky to understand the bisexuals always become insane.
A wedding dress is for a woman, not for a man.
Jesus was kissed by Judas, a homo, who tried to sabotage Jesus’s kind ideas.
Do you choose Jesus, a celibate, or Judas, a homo?
You have to choose!
Text is courtesy of discovery, filth, & mechatronics.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. HT to Pure Film Creative.

-02 Some facebookers were using an app (or being used by an app) called 21 questions. If you want to play, Mr. Google will help. PG didn’t want to play, but saw a fun topic to write about. Today’s pictures are from The Library of Congress. Videos are from wtf japan seriously.
-01 There is a highly commercial blog called Cocktails With Mom (A Mom Blogs from Texas: Product Reviews, Giveaways and more!) This is a weird concept to PG, whose mother didn’t drink, and was a total Baptist about it. CWM fit a tasteful feature in between the ads one day, 21 Questions to Ponder. They are repeated below, with possible answers supplied.
01 Why isn’t 11 pronounced “onety-one”? It sounds like twenty one. It might want a drink.
02 Why do people who know the least know it the loudest? They know the least because they are hard of hearing. Since they can’t hear others talking, they don’t bother listening.
03 Who closes the door when the bus driver gets off? The kid who is in trouble.
04 Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead? If the battery was alive it would push back.
05 If money doesn’t grow on trees then why do banks have branches? When you are through at the bank, you leaf.
06 If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing? Not if it is a trial, or an error.
07 Why don’t they call moustaches “mouthbrows”? Because mouthbrow is easy to spell.
08 Why do they say “an alarm goes off” if it’s really going on? The same reason a person who is buzzing is said to “get off”.
09 Do married people live longer than single people, or does it just seem longer? Only if they both star in a John Waters movie.
10 Why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up a project, I end it? If you don’t quit whining you are in trouble.
11 Why is it that people say they “slept like a baby” when babies wake up 10 times every hour? The same reason people said easy as pie, before you could buy pre made shells.
12 Does a clean house indicate there’s a broken computer in it? Only if a dirty mind is involved.
13 Do Lipton employees take coffee breaks? There is a family in Germany, Sechshauer.(spell check suggestion:Schopenhauer) It is pronounced Sex Hour. Most people are happy to get a ten minute coffee break.
14 Why are a “wise man” and a “wise guy” opposites? Not much is known about the wise men, except that they came from a fire.
15 Why is bra singular and panties plural? Because you have two nipples and one reproductive facility.This was a gender inclusive answer.
16 If the plural of tooth is “teeth,” why isn’t the plural of booth “beeth”? You say boo when you don’t like something. Maybe a booth should be a yayth.
17 Why is it that when you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? The same reason you call a ban on product an embargo, whether the product drinks or not.
18 Would a fly without wings be called a walk? A fly without wings would be called an insect.
19 Why are you “in” a movie, but you’re “on” TV? With the digital age, it gets even weirder. In the old days, you could possibly be on a tv set. Unless you are very small, there is no way you will be on netflix, aka the popup ad king.
20 Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavoring, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons? If you think that dishwashing soap is made with real lemons, then there is a mountain resort in Florida waiting on you.
21 What is a free gift? Aren’t all gifts free? This is like the ketchup packs you get. Have you ever gotten non fancy ketchup?

It is a truism that new media borrows content from old media. Stories, told orally from genration to generation, are compiled into books, which are then made into movies. Plastic panels try to look like wood. The newest new media that old fogey PG knows about is twitter. People tell little stories in 140 characters or less, which go around the world in seconds. With this abundance of media, there are not always enough messages to feed the beast.
On twitter, there are people producing twitter feeds from dead authors. Maybe these wordmongers went to a place with internet access. Kurt Vonnegut (three hours ago) “Busy, busy, busy”.  Mark Twain (three hours ago) “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint”. Brautigan’s Ghost (twenty two hours ago) “I cannot say to the one I love, “Hi, flower-wonderful bird-love sweet.”
The deceased content maker best suited to twitter might be Conway Twitty. One slow day two years ago, Yahoo asked peeps Do you think Conway Twitty would have used Twitter? ~ He gave them the idea ~ I think Twitty would tweet, Twitter would be Conway’s, way of of communicating to the world, Twitty would be tweeting his little Twitty head off, ~ I better send out a Twitty Tweet ~ Cute, but a serious answer, probably. A media hound, he’d want to get his name plastered everywhere. ~ If he did that would have made him a ‘Twitty Twitter” ~ Who cares, he’s a twit anyway”.
There are four Twitty Twitter feeds. @ConwayTwitty  (Oct. 21,2009) “The Conway Twitty Musical is getting great reviews in Branson!!! . @TwittyTweats (January 12, 2012) “In Twitty City, it never snows. All the men wear gold medallions and blazers. And the women never cry. Unless you hold them.” @Conway_Twitty (February 20, 2012) “My cock is an amphibious assault vehicle” @conwaytwittier  (April 28, 2012). “@JasonIsbell How’s the English weather treating your hair? I had the hardest time keeping my pompadour in tiptop shape there.”
@twittybirdmoda is written in Japanese.
The original concept for this post was to spotlight twitter feeds borrowing material from Charles Bukowski. Hank is the beer bard of Los Angeles. He is a hero to many. Out of the millions of worthless drunks populating bars, at least one could write poems. It gives you hope for mankind.
The front page of a google search for “charles bukowski on twitter” yields eight feeds. The original plan was to ignore any that were not updated in 2012. An exception will be for @hank_bukowski (Yeah it’s good to be back). (January 25, 2009) “Yesterday I met Adolf H. in hell. He is fuckin stupid.” “too lazzy these days, too drunk to twitter”.
With the 2012-only rule in effect, we are left with three Bukowski thieves. @BukowskiDiz  (May 1) “Curiosidades sobre Charles Bukowski http://migre.me/8UhRf“. @bukquotes (May 8) “all the mules and drunken ladies gone the bad novels march…”. ~ “I always read when I shit and the worse the book the better the bowel movement.” @bukowski_lives  (one hour ago) “Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

In the next quarter century, the surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it.”
As could have been predicted, it started with a post at Dangerous Minds. The feature was about the late Charles Bukowski, who was called Hank by those who knew him. 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.
A trip to Google city is made, quotes from the bard are found, along with the wikipedia page. All of this leads to a New Yorker 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.
If you google the phrase graphomaniacal fecundity, you can choose from 71 results. The top six apparently quote the article in New Yorker. A blogspot facility called poemanias quotes the paragraph from the New Yorker, with the title “On Bukowski’s afterlife”, while Fourhourhardon reprints the entire thing. Neither provide a link back to the original.
Goliath and Petey Luvs Blog take the same copy-paste approach. The first tries to get you to pay for more reading material. This forum also does the control A-C-V approach, but yields this comment : “He was a contemporary of the Beats, but not quite one of them because he was darker and not as willing to smoke a joint and sing Phil Ochs songs on the lower east side.” The truth is, Hank hated marijuana, and had the classic alcoholic attitude about it. And so it goes.
Keep and share copies the complete New Yorker feature, but has some other thumbsuckers about Mr. Bukowski. It may be fun to read someday. Pictures today are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. This is a repost.

99 percent invisible put up a dandy show recently. The title of the show was “The Xanadu Effect”, which was such a cool title that it was borrowed for this post. It was based on an article by Edward Tenner, with the same title.
The concept is that big, showy buildings tend to turn up in the latter stages of building cycles. The buildings are planned during the boom years, when it seems like the party will never stop. They are finished after the crash, and often wait until the next boom to gain tenants. The Empire State Building was conceived during the prosperity of the Twenties. It was finished during the depression, and was known as the empty state building. In Atlanta, the joke was about the Biltmore hotel … it was too big, they built more than they could use.
The article by Mr. Tenner was published February 19, 2001. One of his examples was the World Trade Center. “The pattern: Giant buildings go up, markets go down. The energy crisis and speculative fever of the early 1970s saw the World Trade Center (1972-1973) and Sears Tower (1974).” A few months later, the markets went down, and the World Trade Center went down.
Sometimes you need to take a long view of these things. Mr. Tenner’s article begins with the opening of The Market Site tower, with the largest sign in Times Square. Soon after this sign was lit, the technology stock boom crashed. That was twelve years ago. Today, the NASDAQ sign is a New York icon, and how are you reading this post?
The producer of the 99PI feature lived in Dallas during the good times. This post is written 4km outside of Atlanta GA, another example of capitalist construction run amok. PG used to work printing building plans, which means working for the emperor’s tailor. In 1990, he was redo blue’s representative in the office of John Portman Associates. At the time, JPA was building a sixty story tower, then called One Peachtree Center. The creditors were getting nervous, and there were many worried people in the office. This building was seen by many as a reckless move. The economic doldrums of the time did not help.
Atlanta has seen a few boom and bust cycles. While building the original Peachtree Center complex, a dinner theater was built in the courtyard. When PG worked in the JPA office, it was located in the former dinner theater. The auditorium was a room for the architects. The dressing rooms, with makeup mirrors, were used as storage rooms office supplies.
The name Xanadu comes from “Citizen Kane”. The real life Kane, William Randolph Hearst, started an enormous castle in California. It drained resources, which became a problem during the depression. In an ironic touch, Mr. Kane sold a chunk of land to the US Government, providing the location for Fort Hunter Liggett. The castle is a popular tourist attraction today.
Mr. Hearst was a larger than life figure. “However, he still retained enough clout with his remaining newspapers (and their ability to publicize movies) in the early 1940s to make life miserable for Orson Welles after the supreme insult of his roman a clef Citizen Kane (1941). Allegedly, Hearst wasn’t so much incensed at Welles as he was at Mankiewicz, a friend who had betrayed his secrets. (“Rosebud,” the name of the Charles Foster Kane’s childhood sled that supposedly is the key to his psychology but is actually a “McGuffin” around which to structure the movie’s plot, was allegedly Hearst’s nickname for (Marion) Davies’ private parts.)
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.