Chamblee54

Woman Calls Police On Black Family For BBQing At A Lake In Oakland You have probably heard about this story. There is a series of *viral memes* featuring the caller, a well fed white woman. While the optics of the situation are unappealing, “BBQ Becky* might be right about one thing.
The City of Oakland has published a guide to barbecuing in the park. It clearly states “Non-Charcoal Portable Grilling: Allowed in designated areas only.” Find BBQ Locations in Parks goes into more detail. “Charcoal grilling is only allowed in designated areas where stationary grill pits have been installed. Please do not remove hot coals from pits. Non-charcoal grilling is only allowed in designated areas. You may bring in your own portable non-charcoal grill. Your grill can not be wider than 27 inches. Please note: Charcoal grills are not allowed in non-charcoal designated areas.” This prohibition is not race specific. Being black does not give your special charcoal burning privileges.
Is Oakland unique in regulating charcoal grills? A google search is inconclusive. DeKalb County does not appear to have any charcoal ordinances. Atlanta has “Rules Applicable to Piedmont Park Only: Grilling is allowed only in designated areas and only in grills provided. No portable grills or ground fires are allowed.” Massachusetts states “Only a few state parks allow you to bring in charcoal grills. … When using a charcoal grill, be sure to cool and dispose of your used charcoal in a fireproof container.” Burning charcoal is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
Why would a government want to restrict use of portable charcoal grills? Sacramento enacted a barbecue ban once. ““The parks facilities continue to become drier and increase our fire risk,” said Sacramento County regional parks director Jeff Leatherman. “This would prevent people from walking to an open space and setting up a barbecue.”
“Why might charcoal grilling be limited? Here are some potential reasons. Charcoal is carbon based and can be a polluter. A recent American Lung Association report suggested that the combination of traffic, dry weather, and wildfires have led to more soot in California. In fact, SFgate.com writes, “The Bay Area was alongside parts of the Central Valley, which after years of improvement saw increases in the number of days with unhealthy levels of soot between 2012 and 2015, the report shows. The Bay Area ranked among the country’s 10 worst regions for what is known as particle pollution.”
“Particulate matter is typically designated by its size. Particle mass concentrations with a diameter less than 2.5 (10) micrometers is called PM2.5 (PM10). By the way, the average human hair is about 70 micrometers in diameter. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates PM2.5 because smaller particles can penetrate deeper into our lungs causing respiratory and/or cardiovascular issues. Through the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), guidelines are set for levels of certain pollutants over a given period of time. Places that exceed these standards may be deemed nonattainment areas, which could have significant health, economic, or political ramifications.”
According to a Huffington Post article comparing charcoal and gas grills, “Charcoal is dirtier, but can come from renewable resources; gas has a smaller carbon footprint, but is derived from non-renewable fossil fuels. Most charcoal is a funky amalgamation of things like sawdust, corn starch and lighter fluid; when it’s burned, it can result in 105 times more carbon monoxide than burning propane and lots of harmful volatile organic compounds. But, “real” charcoal, also commonly known as “chunk charcoal,” doesn’t have the nasty additives, and burning it is carbon neutral.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. Dorothea Lange took the pictures in California, in September 1939. The spell check suggestion for BBQing is Bobbing. This is a repost.

The football players who won’t stand for the national anthem is the story that won’t go away. Few people have said exactly how this is going to prevent police from killing people. This slack blogger has said little about Kaepernickgate, but has had a thirty part series, Killed By Police. This series, like most factual reporting on police killings, is mostly ignored by the same people who are hysterical about NFL kneelers. It is a strange country we live in.
A theme in the modern meme mania is the notion that the protest is about police brutality, and not about the flag. Or something like that. While the original intent of the kneelers is to protest police killings, the result is to disrespect a display of patriotism. It should not be a surprise that many people feel the NFL protests are an insult to the United States. To say that the protests are about racism, and not the flag, is not right. The result of this well meaning gesture is to insult millions of patriotic Americans. Facebook rubs it in by saying it is your fault.
Blackface used to be a popular form of entertainment. If you were to ask the performers, they probably would have said that this was not intended to insult anybody, but just a way of having fun. That would have been the intent. The minstrels would have to be dumb not to have known that their performances were insulting to black people. Sometimes, your intention is not all that counts. You should consider how other people feel about your entertainment.
It is not known what these protests are going to accomplish. They will probably achieve as much as shutting down a freeway. Others say that the police killings are a symptom, rather than the disease. With millions of weapons in circulation, the police know that anyone they meet might try to kill them. With all that is demanded of police, they are going to make mistakes.
UPDATE The various attorneys worked out a settlement. Money changed hands. One of the attorneys issued a statement: “… The resolution of this matter is subject to a confidentiality agreement so there will be no further comment by any party.” Facebook users are, unfortunately, not bound by this agreement. This is a repost. Pictures today are fromThe Library of Congress.

An internet facility (IF) called Mind Openerz recently posted a feature, Charles Bukowski’s Top 10 Tips for Living a Kick-Ass Life. Hank writes enjoyable stories and poems. This does not make him a role model. Even if the tales of degenerate lifestyle were exageratted for public consumption, as many suspect, the butt ugly drunkard is nothing to aspire to.
One thing to admire about Hank (a publisher thought that Charles would be a better selling pen name) was the volume of product. He would write dozens of poems, with the lines popping out “like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.” Keep the quantity up, quality takes care of itself.
Many of the rules for living were taken from his short stories. PG recently stumbled through Tales of Ordinary Madness, and recognized a few. Hank would toss words of wisdom into stories about being arrested. One time, it was for threatening to rape a lady with a codfish. You can’t beat fun at the old ballpark. Of course, Hank hated baseball, and hated poetry that rhymes. PG writes rhyming poems, with pictures of dogs in the background. Hank is dead, and his opinion doesn’t count.
The fun starts with rule number eight. “8. Have confidence in yourself. “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts.” You are awesome, and all you have to do to let your true talents shine is believe that fact. Have complete confidence in yourself and you might be surprised with all you can achieve.”
Several of the stories of ordinary madness involve people who think they are poets, show work to Hank, and are insulted for the lousy ouput. The line in number eight was familiar, but PG was too slack to go looking through ordinary madness to find it. This is where you ask Mr. Google for help. The full quote: “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

PG sat in the workplace cafeteria and read the last line of Tales of Ordinary Madness. TOOM is a book of short stories and underground press columns, allegedly written by Charles Bukowski. This collection was published by City Lights Books, the facility of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The poet-businessman was not admired by Mr. Bukowski.
The author was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. His Catholic parents moved to America in 1923. The name was americanized to Henry Charles Bukowski. Friends called him Hank, and his literary alter ego was Hank Chinaski. Somebody decided that Charles would look better in print.
Hank Chinaski was a hard boiled character, or so he would have you believe. He was not a teetotaler. In spite of his many excesses, Hank lived to be 74, when leukemia sent him to the likkastow in the sky. This was March 9, 1994. Eleven days later, Lewis Grizzard met his maker. Lewis was 47, the same age as Hank in much of TOOM.
You should always separate the creator from the creation. Enjoy the product, and don’t worry about the ingredients. That is the case with TOOM. The stories are reputed to be little autobiographies. (An Amazon one star commenter thinks the stories are the result of “some kind of posthumous ghost writer, and not a very good one.”)
Hank, if nothing else, was productive. He wrote thousands of poems. It is not known if they have all been published, or if anyone is drunk enough to read them. Here is a quote from a previous Chamblee54 feature, The On Time Charles Bukowski.
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… this leads to a newyorker 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.
Holy drunken author synchronicity. Last summer, PG was working third shift in a midtown sweatshop. He would read a couple of stories of TOOM, then shift gears and read a bit of The Dharma Bums. At some point in the procedure, there was a collection of output from Truman Capote.
Hank Chinaski might not like PG. There is the rhyming poetry. There is buying a book of repackaged prose at a yard sale. There is the twenty five year retirement from alcohol use. This is beside the point. You have to live for what is important to you, not what a deceased barfly might think.
Pictures for the last part are from The Library of Congress. After publishing Hank Chinaski Lives on Tuesday, PG decided to repost two other pieces about Hank Bukowski.

A facebook friend lives south of the federal prison, in a neighborhood he once called “the ninth most dangerous” in the United States. Someone sent him a flyer, not knowing it was about his neighborhood. The flyer purports to be an official notice from the city. Here is the text:
“City of Atlanta Public Notice: Please Do Not Dump Trash on White Supremacist Leaders’ Properties People have been dumping trash on the properties of well-known white nationalists Sam Dickson and Evan Anderson. Dickson has said that this dumping is a financial hardship, and it interferes with his plans of gentrifying the Lakewood area and forcing out people of color. He and Anderson are very busy organizing with other white supremacists, including attending white pride rallies and providing violent white supremacists with material support. It has been too costly for them to hire security at each of these properties, and it is not possible for police to watch them at all times. So we are relying on your honor and goodwill to refrain from dumping garbage or doing other property damage to these locations, such as breaking windows and spray painting ‘Nazis get out’. If the dumping continues, Dickson and Anderson may even be forced to sell the properties at a loss. Here is a list of Sam Dickson’s and Evan Anderson’s properties to please not dump any trash on.”
Atlanta attorney Sam Dickson is at the center of this fuss. The SPLC describes him as a “Klan Lawyer,” who buys properties using shady tax lien practices. The SPLC does not provide a source for the Klan claim. The only thing a quick bit of research uncovers is “representation of a Ku Klux Klan leader in a 1988 civil trial.” ( How Klan Lawyer Sam Dickson Got Rich is the 2006 SPLC tract. A search shows “Income: $50 – $59,999 Net Worth: $250,000 – $499,999.”)
Sam Dickson has been the target of activists before. … the Antifascist group in August flyered the neighborhood about prominent white nationalist Sam Dickson’s ownership of a house on Ridgeland Way. … Dickson, an attorney and real estate investor … has described himself in interviews and writings as a white nationalist, but said in emails that he prefers the terms “racial communitarian” or “racial idealist.” … The Atlanta Antifascists flyers, posted in public and delivered by mail to some residents, were headlined “Neighborhood Alert,” but did not suggest any particular action. A post on the group’s website criticized Dickson and other alleged residents as involved in real estate gentrification as a white separatist tactic, and that the group wants to debunk a liberal perception that racism is only a working-class belief.”
Does this justify a call for vandalism? In any event, Sam Dickson has not been quiet about his opinions. “As has been the case throughout my life, race was my primary concern. The liberal/left side of the political waterfront had completely jettisoned the sensible ideas of early liberals such as Margaret Sanger and Jack London. Liberalism had become simply a front for minority racism and anti-white hate. Little did I know that professional conservatism stood for the same thing. … The entire Left/Right or Liberal/Conservative divide is utterly meaningless and artificial. If white nationalism does not sever itself from the corpse of American “conservatism,” it is doomed.”
The interview cited above goes on and on, and makes a few good points. You can tell Mr. Dickson is a lawyer by the way he builds a case for his viewpoint. He can make it seem reasonable, with a lot of classical and historical references. You can use logic, and rhetoric, to make a case for anything. Like fighting racism, by dumping garbage in a predominantly black neighborhood.
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Jack Delano took the pictures in October 1940. Schoolgirls carrying Aroostook potatoes on sticks a part of the parade on the day of the barrel rolling contest in Presque Isle, Maine.