Cynic Swamp
There was a post at neo prodigy yesterday that got me thinking. It starts with a famous quote,
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Micro minds discuss the color of people. “
I added the last part of that.
Now for the fallout of this. I may get motivated later to see if I can determine the author of that gem, but for now I do not know. For all we know, it is the same bartender who came up with the gem ” We are born naked, and everything after that is drag”.
I don’t know if what is going to follow is wisdom fatigue, thinking too much, or wallowing in a cynic’s swamp. As Oscar Wilde observed, ” A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing”.
The point of all this ( besides providing text to go between some pictures) is that many well worded sayings turn out to be nonsense upon close examination.
Take today’s headline quote, about great, average, and small minds. The discourse that followed that platitude was a commentary on the folly of gossip. Now, I agree that in a perfect world people would not gossip. Adding the phrase “bless his heart” does not make it any better. ( Any Yankee who reads this can ask a Southerner for an explanation )
May those who never gossip throw the first pebble. Yea, I thought so, lots of folks are hiding. The truth is, gossip is about as human as lying and pretending. I imagine there is a study of chimpanzees where we see them talking about how mangy their neighbors fur is getting.
Another thing is that not all ideas are good ideas. ( I am going to use a favorite rhetorical stunt here, the Hitler argument ) Adolph Hitler talked about ideas all the time. And a few million folks died as a result. More recently, Jeremiah Wright talks about ideas. At the top of his lungs, and available on dvd.
I dare say the philosophers and thinkers of our time took an interest in the affairs of their neighbors. To think otherwise is to deny their humanity. “Great minds”…or the owners… have other shortcomings. I have heard too many stories about people who get a famous person to come to their party, only to get drunk and make a fool of himself.
There are other platitudes that sound good, but don’t hold up. “ I work to live, I don’t live to work” “ A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” “youth is wasted on the young”.
Maybe the test of a mind is the ability to tell the difference between wisdom and a bunch of sweet sounding words.
Spell check suggestions for this feature:
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dvd- did, dad, dud


words you cannot say
Is George Carlin really that funny?
I saw a link to a routine about euphemisms at AtlMalcontent. I suspect that Malcontent is a euphemism, but who knows.
So, I have too much time, and I click on the link. Mr. C makes a bunch of obvious jokes about the evasion procedures we conduct with the King’s english. There is a link here somewhere, and maybe an embedded screen if I can get that gizmo to work.
One night, Lenny Bruce was performing in Chicago, when the police decided to review the show. Mr. Bruce was taken prisoner by the fuzz. The authorities decided to make the audience members show ID to get out, and one man loudly objected, and was arrested. The man was George Carlin.
Mr. C began to be poopular about the time I was about to graduate from High School. I heard the album about the Seven Words you cannot say on television once, which is enough. They all refer to body parts and body functions, and it does say something about our culture that these words are demonized like they are.
At this point, a look at wikipedia is in order. I was wondering if Mr. C was alive, or if I somehow missed something.
He is from New York.
His real name is Carlin.
He was the first guest host on Saturday Night Live.
In 1961, he married Brenda Hosbrook. The couple was together until her death in 1997.
The message of Jerimiah Wright



YouTube is an impediment to work. I was going to write some clever words to go with these pictures, but I looked at some videos first. All I wanted was the embed gibberish so I could show them to you, but YouTube has more videos on the same subject, and the only way to get rid of temptation is to give into it.
I am glad I got to see the videos of Jeremiah Wright. Friday I was hearing the tapes of him on the radio, and it was most discouraging. When I saw the videos, I realized that this was just another loudmouth for Jesus.
I worked for 6 years with a professional Jesus Worshiper. He was selfish, hateful, vulgar and loud. He frequently directed this anger at me. He used Jesus to hurt me. Often it was over trivial matters. His voice sounded a lot like Mr. Wright’s.
Once, this Professional Jesus Worshiper shouted me down and humiliated me in the name of Jesus. When he was through, he picked up the telephone and told his friend ” I never felt better in my life”.
People ,like Jeremiah Wright, who verbally abuse other people, bring shame to Jesus.
One of the videos I found was a man in Harlem named Manning. He has a video where he talks about the Obama name on the shirt of a woman with a 54 D bra. That is not what the number 54 in my screen name refers to.
Mr. Manning says that Mr. Obama’s African father found a trashy white woman to have his baby, and that the child was called Barack. He said this from a pulpit with a sign attached…”Jesus is Lord”.
This does not speak well of Jesus.
When you see these videos of Mr. Wright, you see people listening with great enthusiasm.
At one point, two men exchange a high five behind Mr. Wright.
One thing I learned while working with the Professional Jesus Worshiper was the importance of the audience. These hatemongers do not just talk to themselves. They need an audience.
These audiences enable these poison spewers. To pray with a loudmouth who shames Jesus is morally equivalent to buying whiskey for an alcoholic.
Barack Obama is that audience.



old times not forgotten
Reading about Shirley Q. Liquor brought back memories of a night long ago.
A young man, who I will call Carroll, grew up across the street. In his spare time, he did drag shows. What I was expecting was Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin, using his own voice. One Sunday night, free admission and a buffet was all I needed to venture downtown and see the show.
The venue was an unpretentious bar called Club Sheba. The clientèle was mostly lesbians, many of whom were African Americans.
It is interesting to note that Club Sheba was located on Forrest Avenue. The street was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate General who founded the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest Avenue was later changed to Ralph McGill Boulevard, after the former editor of the Atlanta Constitution.
As show time approached, I saw a table that had empty seats. I pulled back a seat, and a beefy lady informed me that she did not want a man to sit at that table.
The first act was what I expected. The reputation of Carol Burnett did not suffer,and Lily Tomlin was still in the closet.
After the first act, I shot a game of pool with my friend, and went to the buffet for a second plate.
”You’re not supposed to get full”
I went back to the pool table. After a while there was a crowd standing around, and it was evident that a second act was going to start soon. I saw a black lady in the crowd making faces at me, took a second look, and realized that it was Carroll.
He did not use his voice this time, but lip synced to Grace Jones and Diana Ross. He wore blackface and an afro wig.
The crowd at the Club Sheba enjoyed this part of the show. Many of the Black Lesbians went to the stage and stuffed dollar bills in his faux bosom.
Unfunny Entertainment

They have done it now.
The server at my employer, Blanken Blue, has made “free pages” off limits on company computers.
This includes blogspot and live journal, although I suspect more will follow.
There is still plenty of stuff on the internet, and even dead tree media to consider.
Now, the company owns the machine, and can do whatever it wants with them. I still don’t see what it is going to hurt the company to let me look at blogs on my lunch hour.
The first blog to be blocked today was “The Field Negro“. My first reaction was that the name of this organ set off a PC language filter on the PC.
It was more widespread than that, but that is the way it is. When I got home and caught up with Field, I found a link. It was to a young lady who had some problems with Shirley Q. Liquor.
SQL is a white man who plays a drag character. SQL is an unappealing stereotype. I cannot defend SQL,but when the aggrieved blogger takes white gay people to task for this one extremist, she is going too far.
I have one more problem with this blog. When you click onto it, the music player immediately kicks in. At the time I first tuned in, I was listening to something else, and did not appreciate the added sound. Some blogs who do this make the player easy to find, so you can cut the noise down. Jasmynecannick does not do this, and I had to turn down the Winamp until I was through reading her diatribe against SQL.
Please, people with blogs, take note. Not everyone shares your taste in music. It is rude to your visitors to assault them with your idea of groovy sounds.
spell check suggestions for this feature:
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Jasmynecannick- tyrannicalness
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Field and Zee
The Philadelphia layer who blogs as “The Field Negro” had a quote today from a blogger that he disagrees with. It seems as though a (young) lady in Cincinnati named Zee had a few comments on herself and race in America. (Field spells that A-Merry-Ca). Zee is of Eastern European origin, a third generation American. Her daddy made a pile of money, and employed some black people at his auto dealership.
As best I can gather, Zee does not consider herself a racist, but is tired of black people whining. Field thinks that Zee is an idiot.(I bet that would sound really neat in French). He quoted her at great length, and then left a link to her blog. When you click on the link, you see the tag line … ”Dedicated to the fight against Islam and the Left. You will most decidedly be offended if you are a PC drone.”
You need to consider the source.
I am surprised that Zee doesn’t consider the dominant role of Jesus Worship in the Black Community. If she is going to fight Islam, she might want to have a few allies.
As for me, I am a white unit from Atlanta Georgia. My ancestors have been here a long time. I have a troubled relationship with African America. I try to enjoy the good people that I know, and deal with the others as best I can.
I don’t like people who don’t like me. I am not a policeman.
I was working downtown on April 30, 1992. The day before, a jury in Simi Valley, California had delivered an unpopular verdict. A few hundred people went on a rampage in Atlanta, two thousand plus miles away. There was a lot of soul searching after that about race relations, which was quickly forgotten. I had the sense that the anger I saw that day was just a tiny part of the total picture, and that things could be much much worse.
I could say a great deal about this, and may someday. For now, I just try to get along with people, and remember that we are all G-d’s children. This includes Muslims, the left, PC drones, Zee, and Field.
albino ferret

Lunch Lunch was really dull today. The usual sites lost interest quickly, and I found myself looking at the Georgia blog carnival. The GBC does link to me, albeit at my old site.
What caught my eye was a piece about a lost albino ferret.
I had some roommates once who had animals. A bunch of snakes, a cat, and a ferret named Tara. I was ok with the critter as long as Tim and Cheryl has a bathroom they could keep Tara in. The problems started when we moved to another place with only one bathroom. I objected to sharing it with a weasel.
A ferret is a weasel. When I found that out the whole thing became a lot less appealing.
Tara was not an albino. I doubt that it would have helped.
That was about this time 26 years ago. The weasel in the bathroom became an issue. I was out of the new place in less than a month.
This was the early days of MTV, when they played videos. Cheryl’s favorite band was Journey, and whenever they were on this South Georgia voice squeals “turn it up turn it up”.
A couple of years ago I was going to this place outside Gainesville. As I passed a trailer park, the radio played “ Don’t stop believing”.


















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