Implicit Association Test
PG came across a link. The post was: What comes to mind when you see her headscarf? Let’s look at what your mind is seeing. (This post is no longer available online.) Technically, this is about the hijab, pronounced eeJOB. If you google hijab, you will have the opportunity to buy one.
The article talked about the unspoken assumptions people have about a woman with a hijab. For PG, these are going to be mostly positive. Most of the Muslims PG has known are great people. The turmoil caused by aggressive Jesus worshipers is absent when dealing with Muslims.
Much of the article deals with “unconscious bias.” You are given the chance to take a “test your unconscious bias and find the areas of your perspective that need a little extra TLC.” PG is not sure that he trusts “Psychologists from Harvard, UW, and UVA.” Still, the only cost for taking this test will probably be damage to his mental health.
Before you start, there is a disclaimer. “IP addresses are routinely recorded, but are completely confidential.” There is a difference between confidential and anonymous. Big brother knows about PG anyway, so this test probably won’t make much difference. You are asked to agree to the following statement: “I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed.” Fasten your digital seat belt.
Next, you choose a test. The first page has 15 options: Sexuality, Native American, Weapons, Arab-Muslim, etc. PG chooses “Weapons (‘Weapons – Harmless Objects’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Black faces, and images of weapons or harmless objects.)
The first thing to do is answer a questionnaire. You are asked how warm or cold you feel towards white people, and black people. There is a list of statements that you agree or disagree, slightly, moderately, or strongly. Some of these statements are: I think of myself as someone who has an assertive personality, I have considered being an entertainer.
The heart of the test uses photographs. There are pictures of black people, and pictures of white people. There are pictures of weapons, like a bayonet, a historic pistol, a hand grenade, and a battle ax. There are pictures of harmless objects, like a water bottle, tape recorder, camera, and can of Coca Cola. Many of these could be used a weapons; a can of Coca Cola could be thrown at someone. Many Police consider a camera a weapon.
The pictures are flashed on the screen. You hit the e key for the left side, and the i key for the right side. At first the two choices are kept separate, i.e. you choose black or white, weapon or harmless. Then the two groups are combined. The choice is left side black weapons, and right side white harmless. Then they shift sides, to black harmless and white weapons. You are shown a picture, and choose which category to put it in.
The last questionnaire is the demographics. Annual family income is not considered. Ethnicity refers to hispanic/latin, or non hispanic/latin. Religion, age, “political identity,” gender (only male or female,) and education are considered, among other factors.
The result: “Your data suggest a strong association of Black Americans with Weapons compared to White Americans. … The interpretation is described as ‘automatic association between weapons and White Americans’ if you responded faster when weapons and White American images were classified with the same key than when weapons and Black Americans were classified with the same key.”
Whatever. Maybe PG should take another test for comparison. Maybe this time, choose a subject where hateful judgement is not in your face everyday. Since the seminal article is about the hijab, maybe … “You have opted to complete the Arab Muslim – Other People IAT.”
The opening questionnaire is different.”I attempt to appear nonprejudiced toward Arab Muslims in order to avoid disapproval from others, NO spontaneous prejudiced thoughts come into my mind when I encounter an unfamiliar Arab Muslim.”
This test is different from the race test. Instead of photographs, words were used. For the two groups of people, we have names (seemingly all male.) Examples: Arab Muslim – Akbar, Ashraf, Habib – – Other People – Benoit, Philippe, Guillame. The other categories are Good and Bad. Examples: Good – Joy, Love, Peace – – Bad – Agony, Terrible, Horrible.
PG made more mistakes in the fancy part of the Arab test. He took a couple of breaks to take screen shots, one of which is included in this report. At times, he felt himself automatically blaming the Arabs for bad things. This did not happen, consciously, in the race/weapons test.
The result: Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Other People and Arab Muslims. … This new test was prompted by the events of September 11, 2001. Suicide pilots, identified as Arab Muslims, crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. killing about 4,000 people.
While this may have some value to the ivory tower crowd, it does not tell PG much about himself. Arguably, IAT says more about the researchers than it does the respondents. It is doubtful that these tests will “find the areas of your perspective that need a little extra TLC.” This is a repost. Pictures from The Library of Congress. These pictures were not used in the IAT studied today.
Cisgress
Transgress was the center of attention in a curious facebook meme. The ten letters were displayed in a festive font. Topside magenta fades into pink dust, inside a thin blue shell. These tasteful letters were displayed on a white-as-snow background. PG saw the T-meme, and felt moved to make a one word comment: cisgress. Using all lower case was intentional.
For those who are new here, cis is the opposite of trans. The contemporary usage generally refers to gender. Cis people live with the gender assigned at birth. Trans people make adjustments. There are a lot of options. Gender non-conformance is a sensitive, emotional issue. PG expressed concerns about the c-prefix at least twice. Once, he was told “Butch up Mary.”
Getting back to facebook, there was a bit of conversation. Someone said “Cisgreassing = privilege=oppression.” To which PG replied “actually, it was a joke. I took the word transgress. I substituted cis for trans. I came up with the nonsense word cisgress.” There was only one thing left to do: Google cisgress. There were 115 results for cisgress.
Linguistically correct “Simon Hoggart (Changing the gender agenda) asks who decides whether words like “cisgender” should enter the language. I do! English is scandalously lacking in politically and linguistically correct antonyms of this sort. The Queen can create the Duchess of Cambridge, so surely I can create the much-needed expressions “cisgress” (be a good boy), “cisvestite” (bloke wearing trousers), and “cisaction” (no deal). Anyone who doesn’t disagree is a transsy.” UPDATE: This letter was removed from a facebook thread. The note: “kindy do not use trans slurs in your posts”
CIS-GReS is the second google result. It is one s short of cisgress, but will have to do. “CIS-GReS is the official group supported by the School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne. It is also affiliated with the Graduate Student Association. … If you are a graduate research student with a supervisor from CIS, this is your group.”
Pictures for today are from The Library of Congress. Russel Lee was the photographer. Tenant farmers in Oklahoma. June-July, 1939. Living conditions of tenant farmers in Oklahoma This is a repost from 2019. Cis is now considered a slur.
Why We Call Football Soccer
The world cup is scheduled for 2022. It is by far the largest sporting event in the world. And, despite what you hear in this country, they play football (futbol), not soccer.
In the 19th century, the english wrote the rules for something called association football. This was different from rugby football. Somehow, soccer, a nickname for association, became the name of this new sport. When the pastime spread from the upper crust schools to the working class, it became known as football. It made sense, being a sport where you kick the ball with your feet.
In the USA, there was another sport called football. It involves beer and steroids. The ball only gets kicked when it is time for a commercial. For some reason, when association football became popular here, the name soccer stuck.
PG thinks soccer is a terrible word, for a pretty good sport. All those guttural noises sound bad in the mouth, like something is caught in your throat. Maybe, if the sport had another name north of the Rio Grande, it would be more popular.
A young man named Jordan Griner was the designated driver June 19, 2010. After dropping the last passenger off, he was crossing West Peachtree Street at 17th. A lady was driving north on West Peachtree, ran a red light, and smashed into Mr. Griner. . The lady had a blood alcohol content of .229, well above the legal limit of .08. The lady is in a world of trouble, and the man is dead. Mr. Griner worked in the Governor’s office, so the case got some attention.
There is a lot of talk about drinking and driving, as there should be. People should not drive when they are intoxicated. As long as alcohol and automobiles are used, this is going to be a problem.
When you enter an intersection, you should look to see who is coming. If you see a car driving too fast, heading in your direction, wait for it to go through. Especially in midtown Atlanta, at 4 am Saturday.
There used to be a yellow brick apartment building at 17th and West Peachtree. This was the residence of Margaret Mitchell (Mrs. John Marsh). One afternoon, Mrs. Marsh met a friend at the Atlanta Woman’s Club, on Peachtree Street. After a few cocktails, Mr. and Mrs. Marsh left the Woman’s Club, intending to go across the street to a movie. Mrs. Marsh stepped in front of a taxi, and into eternity. Tomorrow is another day.
A developer had plans for the triangle of land between West Peachtree, Peachtree, and 17th. He tore down all the apartment buildings on that block, including the one Margaret Mitchell called home. The deal fell through for the developer, and the corner of 17th and West Peachtree is a vacant lot. The developer should have looked to see what was coming.
This is a double repost. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”, and the chamblee54 collection.
The Last Night Of Judy Garland
“In march of 1969, Judy married her fifth husband, Mickey Devinko, better known as Mickey Deans, a gay night-club promoter. Judy had an unfortunate habit of marrying gay men. They lived together in a tiny mews house in Chelsea, London. The evening of Saturday June 21 1969, Judy and Mickey were watching a documentary, The Royal Family, on television, when they had an argument. Judy ran out the door screaming into the street, waking the neighbors.
Several versions of what happened next exist, but the fact remains that a phone call for Judy woke him at 10:40 the next morning, and she was not sleeping in the bed. He searched for her, only to find the bathroom door locked. After no response, he climbed outside to the bathroom window and entered to find Judy, sitting on the toilet. Rigor Mortis had set in. Judy Garland, 47, was dead.
The press was already aware of the news before the body could be removed. In an effort to prevent pictures being taken of the corpse, she was apparently draped over someone’s arm like a folded coat, covered with a blanket, and removed from the house with the photographers left none the wiser.
The day Judy died there was a tornado in Kansas…. in Saline County,KS, a rather large F3 tornado (injuring 60, but causing no deaths) did hit at 10:40 pm on June 21st, that would be 4:40 am, June 22nd, London time, the morning she died. I know the time of death has never been firmly established, but since Rigor Mortis had already set in, I think this tornado may very much be in the ballpark in terms of coinciding with time of death…. Other news articles suggest the tornado struck Salina “late at night” which could certainly also mean after midnight on June 22, or roughly 6:00 am London time…
The Toledo Blade for June 24th, also in an article located right next to a picture of Garland, in a write-up on the Salina tornado noted that “Late Saturday [June 21] and early Sunday [June 22, another batch of tornadoes struck in central Kansas.” So it seems the legend seems confirmed.”
The text for this story comes from Findadeath. You can spend hours at this site. This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
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.”
Insanity
@RuPaul Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results~Einstein @chamblee54 @RuPaul Everything I have seen on the internet is a lie, but maybe this one is the truth
It is a favorite of English speaking rhetoric mongers. The “definition of insanity” is usually blamed on Albert Einstein. There never seems to be a source, or context. Another possibility is the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous.
DOI is one of those sayings that sound good, until you think about it. Thinking is not a problem for the pontificating masses who trot the phrase out at every opportunity. The fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton quote DOI should tell you something. America is about to elect a Clinton President, and is expecting different results. (See update at end.)
Perhaps the best place to look is the comments. alberto-a-stone: The definition of ignorance is quoting the same thing over and over even though it is not factual. Dollarhide: the definition of insanity is quoting Einstein over and over and expecting to be thought to be clever each time Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
This is a repost from 2016. America did not elect a Clinton President, but got different results anyway. The apparent source of the DOI quote is a Tennessee newspaper article. “Al-Anon Helps Family, Friends to Orderly Lives The Knoxville News-Sentinel Betsy Pickle, October 11, 1981.”
Steve Martin
There is a form letter floating through the intercourse now. It is a letter that Steve Martin used to send to his fans. (The letter was recently immortalized at Letters of Note.)
He …that is Stephen Glenn “Steve” Martin (born August 14, 1945) … has moved up in correspondence with his adoring fans. Mr. Martin now gives out business cards, with the message “This card certifies that the holder had met Steve Martin and found him genuinely friendly”. What a wild and crazy guy!
This is becoming one of those really really modern days here. Listening to a djmix with a Lady Gaga song, drinking coffee out of a Mcdonalds plastic cup, and writing a tribute to Steve Martin. What a day! Oh, before we forget, there is the story about the drive in theater on I85 that was showing “Father of the Bride”. One day, the h fell off the marquee, and the title of the movie became “Fater of the Bride”. Good times.
The story of Steve Martin and PG began one night at the Great Southeast Music Hall. PG got tired of hearing how great the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was, and decided to see a show. The show started when some guy in a white suit came out with a banjo. John McEuen stood next to him, and kept falling into the microphone stand and saying “this guy cracks me up”.
Steve Martin, the white suit guy, said that he paid somebody five thousand dollars for a joke. He then took this arrow, with a coat hanger wire attached to it, with a shape for his head to fit in, and put it on. That got a laugh, but not worth five thousand dollars. There was another gag…”do you mind if i smoke, no do you mind if i fart”. That got a slightly bigger laugh.
In those days, you could not sell alcohol in public on sunday night in Georgia. To compensate, the Music Hall sold children’s tickets for the sunday night shows. Mr. Martin was not used to having children in the audience. “Hey kid I gotta joke for you. There were these two lesbians…”
The show went over well with the Nitty Gritty crowd. However, it is doubtful that anyone thought, this is the beloved entertainer of our generation.
Mr. Martin was not through for the night. At one point, the NGDB moved to the back of the stage, and a smarmy lounge lizard, in a white suit, came on stage. While the band played “The girl from Ipanema”, Mr. Martin sang about the girl with diarrhea.
This was one of the last shows that Steve Martin did as an opening act. (He did return to the Great Southeast Music Hall. Once, he did a week with Martin Mull, called the Steve Martin Mull Revue.) Within two years, he was a guest host on Saturday Night Live, and a certified wild and crazy guy. A couple of years later, he was famous again as “The Jerk”. Steve Martin had arrived.
This is a repost. The pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. The animated dentures are from chattering teeth. The check is in the mail.
Publicly Shamed
When an author has book product, the author gets interviewed. This is how PG first heard of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson. The act of using “the media” to promote book product is a curious analog to shaming. To have the exhibitionism on the wtf podcast, starring the shame-proof Marc Maron, is an item on the irony buffet. This is a repost from 2015.
Justine Sacco made an unwise tweet about AIDS and white privilege. She landed in South Africa to discover herself notorious, and unemployed. The tabloid press said Max Mosley was at a Nazi themed sex party. He sued the paper about the Nazi part, won a settlement, and boasted of being a player. The tabloid newspaper got caught in another scandal, and was shut down.
This being non fiction, Mr. Ronson goes all over the place. There is a $500 a seat weekend seminar on “radical honesty.” There are academics, of various levels of intelligence, who write about shaming, prison techniques, and other trivia. There is a company who floods the internet with flattering stories about you, so that the trash goes to page three of google. There are also more people whose lives were ruined by public shaming. One example is the rape victim who committed suicide after her cross examination.
The star shaming saga is donglegate. (spell check suggestion: congregate) Two young men at a tech conference made a tacky joke. A lady, Adria Richards, took a picture of the young men. Immediately, the picture was on twitter. @adrisrichards Not cool Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles Right behind me.
In her interview with Mr. Ronson, Ms. Richards said she felt that the dongle joke jeopardized her safety. “Have you ever heard that thing, Men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” “People might consider that an overblown thing to say”… She had, after all, been in the middle of a tech conference with eight hundred bystanders” “Sure And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”
While researching donglegate, Mr. Ronson talked to some people at 4chan. There was a comment made. It went into the preview copies of the book, but not the final edition. This is part of the the publicity process. Someone took offense at this comment, and made an issue out of it. For more details see this story, File under ‘inevitable’: “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” author Jon Ronson slammed by Twitter-shamers.
In all of these tales, Mr. Ronson’s name was spelled correctly. Some say there is no bad publicity. Whatever is said creates awareness of your product. There is a lot of awareness for SYBPS, and Mr. Ronson, right now. @jonronson Feeling incredibly sorry for #RachelDolezal and hope she’s okay. The world knows very little about her, her motives.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Picture #06662 is from “Second International Pageant of Pulchritude and Eighth Annual Bathing Girl Revue, May 21, 22, 23, 1927, Galveston TX.”
The Wisdom Of William S. Burroughs
The word advice, for all the condescension implied, has a nifty composition. Ad is short for advertisement, and vice is a forbidden pleasure. Unless you are talking about Vice President, who should be forbidden, forgotten, and fornicated. The topic of discussion today is advice from William Seward Burroughs. The TV station on Peachtree Street was not named for him.
Before we reprint this *piece*, (Chamblee54 did not write the advice) we should ponder the concept of William S. Burroughs. Why anyone would ask this man for advice?
Mr. Burroughs is the namesake grandson of the man who invented the adding machine. He left his heirs a bunch of money. The young Burroughs wound up in New York, and became friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Mr. Burroughs was married twice (to women). The first was a platonic relationship with Ilse von Klapper, a Jew who wanted to get out of Europe. In 1936, this counted as a good deed.
The second wife, Joan Vollmer, helped make his life interesting. She is the mother of William S. Burroughs III, and was fond of speed. Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs were living in Mexico in 1951, when they decided to play William Tell. Mr. Burroughs missed the apple, and Mrs. Burroughs died.
Mr. Burroughs went on to write a few novels, including Naked Lunch. He was famous in hipster circles, and gave lie to the saying “there are no old junkies”. Mr. Burroughs settled in Lawrence KS, and lived to be 83. This leaves out a few inedible details.
Today’s entertainment is a repost, with pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. If you want to read more about Mr. Burroughs, there is always more.
“People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people. Well here are a few simple admonitions for young and old. Never interfere in a boy-and-girl fight. Beware of whores who say they don’t want money.The hell they don’t. What they mean is they want more money. Much more. If you’re doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch,Get it in writing. His word isn’t worth shit. Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
Avoid fuck-ups. We all know the type. Anything they have anything to do with, No matter how good it sounds, Turns into a disaster. Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill. Tell them firmly: I am not paid to listen to this drivel. You are a terminal boob.
Now some of you may encounter the Devil’s Bargain, If you get that far. Any old soul is worth saving, At least to a priest, But not every soul is worth buying. So you can take the offer as a compliment. He tries the easy ones first. You know like money, All the money there is. But who wants to be the richest guy in some cemetery? Money won’t buy. Not much left to spend it on, eh gramps?
Well time hits the hardest blows. Especially below the belt. How’s a young body grab you? Like three card monte, like pea under the shell, Now you see it, now you don’t. Haven’t you forgotten something, gramps? In order to feel something, You’ve got to be there. You have to be eighteen. You’re not eighteen. You are seventy-eight. Old fool sold his soul for a strap-on.
Well they always try the easiest ones first. How about an honorable bargain? You always wanted to be a doctor, Well now’s your chance. Why don’t you become a great healer And benefit humanity? What’s wrong with that? Just about everything. Just about everything. There are no honorable bargains Involving exchange Of qualitative merchandise Like souls For quantitative merchandise Like time and money. So piss off Satan And don’t take me for dumber than I look.
An old junk pusher told me – Watch whose money you pick up.”
Lose The Ability To Remember
PG heard a nifty quote once. “When we begin to write, we will lost the ability to remember.” It was credited to Homer, the Greek poet. The only problem is, PG could never find a source.
But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”
We don’t know how widespread writing was in Plato’s time. Presumably, many of the old tales were transmitted by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. This involves memory. “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.”
There is one more quote worth musing over. Since the invention of the first mediums, new methods have been denounced by traditionalists. Today, we live in an era of constant change. This feature will appear in a blog… state of the art in 2004, and considered obsolete in 2018. Every new medium is greeted with hand wringing over the bad effects it will have on society. Some of these misgivings have been proven false. This *text* goes into more detail about this.
Homer may, or may not, have existed. Since this was 2800 years ago, we may never know. The stories of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” may have been told from one generation, to the next. Maybe Homer really did say that, and was merely afraid of competition.
“You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” . In todays culture, the display of apparent wisdom is more impressive than actual knowledge. These things too shall pass away. Pictures are from Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library. This is a repost.
The 1954 Deferment
As the reader(s) of this blog might notice, there is material posted every day at chamblee54. On many days, PG is too lazy to write new material, and goes into the archive. Today, there are two pieces. 1954 Deferment is from the blogspot version of chamblee54. In 2007, PG had a job making local deliveries, and listened to talk radio. Neal Boortz was in his glory. One day, PG heard enough about Vietnam, and decided to tell his own story. It is below. This post is written in first person.
A prominent radio whiner has been urged to come clean on his military record. In the spirit of not being a hypocrite, and with the optimistic thought that someone is interested, I have decided to do the same. I have what I call a 1954 deferment. I didn’t get a lottery number until the winter of 1973, after the Paris accords had been signed. My number was 337. The minimum age to sign up in those days was 17. If I had been gung ho to stop communism , I could have signed up in 1971.
By 1971 the war was over for America. We were trying something called “Vietnamization”, which meant we were bringing the combat troops home. Mr. Kissinger was working day and night to secure an acceptable treaty, which Mr. Nixon called Peace with Honor. A few weeks before the 1972 election, the announcement was made that “Peace is at hand”. What this treaty meant was that we got our P.O.W.s back, and withdrew the last of the combat troops. The North Vietnamese troops were not required to withdraw. After a while, with Mr. Nixon distracted by Watergate and the American Public in no mood to help, “Charlie” finished the conquest of South Vietnam. Whether we got all the P.O.W.s back is a subject of controversy. There is speculation that some P.O.W.’s were kept in Asia.
I graduated from High School in June 1972. This was in between the death of J. Edgar Hoover and the arrest of the Watergate Burglars. Jane Fonda”s trip to Hanoi was in July of 1972. Anti-war protests hit a peak during the Moratorium, in Autumn 1969. There was a last surge in May 1970, after the incursion into Cambodia. During this time we had the killings at Kent State, and suddenly protest didn’t seem like as much fun. That, combined with Vietnamization, served to quiet the antiwar movement. The Kent State killings were two days before my 16th birthday. The spell check suggestions for Vietnamization are Victimization, and Minimization.
I didn’t go to Vietnam. What if I had been a few years older? The truth is, I don’t know. You really don’t know what you would do until you have to. Probably, I would have gone the student deferment route, or something else non confrontational, to stay in North America. In the early stages of the War I supported it. In the winter of 1966, I attended a rally at Atlanta Stadium called “Affirmation Vietnam”. At that time, the war protesters were seen as weirdos. It wasn’t for a few more years that people realized their government was lying, and got tired of the pointless bloodshed.
In 1965, some people still believed the government when they heard we needed to stop communism. There was a draft, or legally enforced recruiting. The spirit of patriotism from World War II was still strong. When a young man got a draft notice, many assumed it was their duty to go. Many of the fatalities in Vietnam were conscripted troops.
Offends You. is based on a long forgotten facebook page, “If-the-American-Flag-offends-you-Ill-be-happy-to-help-you-pack.” In 2010, PG would see a prompt like that, and spit out a few hundred words before you could say media bias. And almost nobody would read it. The only function this text has is to go between the pictures.
There is a facebook page now, “If-the-American-Flag-offends-you-Ill-be-happy-to-help-you-pack.” This rubs PG the wrong way. PG has had a good life in The USA, and cannot imagine living anywhere else. He pays taxes without complaint. PG compares his thoughts about America with his thoughts about his hometown, of Atlanta GA. He has had a good life in both places, and does not want to live anywhere else. And yet, no one is ever asked to “die for Atlanta”. That duty is reserved for the national political unit. If PG had been 110 years older, he would have had to opportunity to die for Georgia.
The Stars and Stripes should not be used for jewelry, or as a gimmick. The flag should be respected, not left out in direct sunlight for years at a time, until the red, white, and blue is pink, gray, and lavender. A few years ago, after a Supreme Court ruling about flag burning, PG worked with someone who drove a van. There was a bumper sticker on that van, with the American Flag, and the message “Try burning this one”. That van was parked in direct sunlight every day, and the sun burned those colors off that van. Most people don’t consider this.
No, the American Flag does not offend PG. However, Facebook groups that would try to bully people who don’t have the “correct” opinion about this symbol … that would seek to create conflict between citizens … that does offend PG. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. The photographer was Dorothea Lange, working in 1939 California.
Chamblee54 
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