Feds Skewer Ex-Trump
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Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans, Affects How They Connect…
Feds Skewer Ex-Trump Inaugural Chair’s ‘Baseless Speculation’ That They Waited Until …
They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!
“I studied alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction” Jordan Peterson
Disney’s debt is about to be Central Florida taxpayers’ problem
Crack In Courthouse Marble Christian Eppinger – accused of shooting an Atlanta cop …
Afterword: Me, The Faerie Queene, and Critical Race Theory
$2 million DeKalb Schools master plan in doubt following Druid Hills High dustup
Marjorie Taylor Greene to testify under oath about Jan 6 …denied any involvement in attack
Cynthia Plaster Caster, artist who made penis casts of Jimi Hendrix, and more, has died
R.I.P. Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton, … Sculptures of Musicians’ Penises Dead at 74
It was Tagore who gave ‘Mahatma’ title to Gandhi: Gujarat HC
Rabindranath Tagore didn’t give ‘Mahatma’ title, says poet
A documentary about the relationship of Mahatma Gandhi and R. Tagore
The Mahatma and The Poet Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941
Rabindranath Tagore gave the title of Mahatma to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Who gave the title of Mahatma to Gandhiji? An RTI activist shot off a query to the Prime …
Mahatma Gandhi – dying for freedom | DW Documentary
1915 – 1941, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi exchanged letters.
Marjorie Taylor Greene disqualification hearing underway, clash over ‘insurrection’ claims
JK Rowling Killed In New Book Written By Trans Author
Miss Pamela’s First Conversation With The Plaster Casters of Chicago
Frank Zappa & Pamela Des Barres (GTOs) March 1989 TV interview
Indictment of Pentagon and Vietnam War: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (1989)
hunter s thompson ~ gsv ~ netflix ~ repost ~ worlds fair
cynthia plaster caster ~ rhoa ~ rfd ~ spree ~ glbt history
crit ~ cis ~ repost ~ politics left ~ walt frazier highway
private video ~ confederate history month ~ transvestite ~ penn station ~ anagnorisis
denver drunks ~ stetson bennett ~ douglas murray ~ hackworth ~ vulgar vignettes
caducity ~ iggy pop ~ on spec ~ gandhi ~ wfmu
meredith monk ~ rex reed ~ silver comet bridge ~ ekphrastic ~ “false modesty”
“I’m not given to false modesty” Noam Chomsky ~ @nihilist_arbys Ah. 420. The one day hippies and Nazis can agree on. Cooooool. Get irie and smoke em up dorks, no matter which of these two totally moronic philosophical lifestyles you espouse. Eat Arby’s ~ “Every word which goes from me, whether verbally or in writing, becomes the subject of so much malignant distortion, & perverted construction, that I am obliged to caution my friends against admitting the possibility of my letters getting into the public papers, or a copy of them to be taken under any degree of confidence.” Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American political philosopher, polymath, statesman, US President (1801-09) Letter to Edward Dowse (19 Apr 1803) ~ @OctopusCaveman Horrifying story from when I worked at a gas station in a terrible neighborhood (thread) TW it’s creepy as fuck ~ So one night working a graveyard shift a fight breaks out in the restrooms outside. These Mexican dudes are beating the shit out of this white guy and there’s a little girl (maybe 7) crying. Some other guys break up the fight and the white guy runs away ~ The guys who were beating up the white dude explain that the poor little girl went to use the girls bathroom, opened the door and this creep was jacking off in there just waiting for someone to walk in and catch him so they did the right thing and jumped in to protect the girl ~ So the cops show up to get a report and hopefully catch the creep and everything is calmed down when I get a customer telling me I need to see the women’s bathroom the guy was in ~ I get my cleaning gear expecting the worst and the walls are COVERED in porn magazine cutouts. I don’t understand how they’re on the wall because there’s no visible tape and it’s a tile wall so I peel one off and ~ It’s shit. The guy used his own shit to stick the porno cutouts to the wall. The whole room was covered in porn stuck on with shit. The Mexican guys who jumped into action watched the register for me while I mopped the walls. ~ pics today are from The Library of Congress. ~ selah
Confederate Memorial Day
Today is Confederate Memorial Day in Georgia. It is an ancient question…how to honor the soldiers from the side that lost. They were just as valiant as the Union Soldiers. Considering the shortages of the Confederate Armies, the Rebels may have been just a bit braver.
The issue of Federalism is a defining conflict of the American experience. What powers do we give the Federal Government, and what powers do we cede to the States? The Confederacy was the product of this conflict. The Confederate States were a collection of individual states, with separate armies. This is one reason why the war turned out the way it did.
This is not a defense for slavery. The “Peculiar institution” was a moral horror. The after effects of slavery affect us today. Any remembrance of the Confederacy should know that. This does not make the men who fought any less brave.
It is tough to see the War Between the States through the modern eye. It was a different time, before many of the modern conveniences that are now considered necessities. Many say that the United States were divided from the start, and the fact the union lasted as long as it did was remarkable. When a conflict becomes us against them, the “causes” become unimportant.
The War was a horror, with no pain medicine. Little could be done for the wounded. It took the south many, many years to recover. This healing continues today. Remembering the sacrifices made by our ancestors helps. This is a repost. Pictures are from the The Library of Congress.
Gonzo
When you type the word gonzo into the amazon search facility, you are given several choices. You can buy gonzo stain remover, gonzo muppett, gonzo odor eliminator, gonzo shirt, gonzo the art, and gonzo the life and work of dr. hunter s. thompson. All of these products are covered in a book PG is wading through, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. This is a repost.
There is lots of speculation about the G word (Gonzo, not G-d, although they may have more in common than some suppose. It is safe to say that no one claims “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” to be the word of G-d.). Lord, lets not get caught on the barbed hook of religion, this is supposed to be a review of a book about Horseshit, or Hunter S Thompson, who has the same initials.
Getting back to Gonzo, it was a cajun expression meaning “to play unhinged.” A man named James Booker recorded a track called “Gonzo,” which is embedded in this commentary. HST played the song non stop, which was not amusing to fellow journalists. One of these people was a Boston fuddy duddy, who called HST “the gonzo man”, and said that in Boston bars, Gonzo meant the last man standing. You can’t believe everything that you hear or read. Taste and feeling are equally suspect, but you can believe what you smell. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, while ugly uses all five senses.
PG used to read a bunch of celebrity biographies, and there is a pattern. They are born, and have childhoods. Somehow, they get a break, and become famous. The fame period lasts a certain time, but the bad habits they acquire last a lifetime. After they have seen the mountaintop (or the place in the Nevada mountains where the high water of the sixties broke up into the sewage of the seventies), there is no where to go but down. Tallulah Bankhead was surrounded by “caddies”, these young queens so enamored of her presence that they put up with her increasingly awful behavior. “A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country”.
HST fell into this mind trap of duality. Apparently his prodigious intake of substances never slowed down, until he was in a wheelchair towards the end. He was writing a sports column for ESPN in his latter days, about 300 pound samoan quarterbacks who will take the NFL by storm. PG had not read anything by HST in years, and was almost surprised that he was still alive.
The ever facilitative dangerous minds has a BBC show about HST. The show was produced in 1978, a few years after the abdication of Richard Nixon, and into the regime of Jimmy Carter. Smiling Jimmy is not mentioned in this telefilm, but there is a conversation between HST and John Dean. In the rest of the show, HST and sidekick Ralph Steadman drive around in the desert between Las Vegas and Hollywood. You see the place in the high desert where the wave of the sixties broke, setting off the tsunami of Nancy Reagan just saying no, and hiring drug runners to ship guns to terrorists.
PG has sixty or so more pages to go on this book. Thursday morning is a ride up to Tennessee, and the book needs to be back at the library. It is not worth an overdue fine. The fun is over, and all that is left if for HST to decline and die. Buy the ticket, take the ride. And play dumb when you learn that the phrase is a registered trademark. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
True Stories
A man is staying in a hotel.
He walks up to the front desk and says,
“Sorry, I forgot what room I’m in, can you help me?”
The receptionist replies, “No problem, sir. This is the lobby.”
You know, I was looking at our ceiling the other day. It’s not the best … But it’s up there.
My nickname at work is Mr. Compromise. It wasn’t my first choice but I’m ok with it.
Where does a dog go when it loses it’s tail, and needs a new one? A retail store.
I don’t trust stairs. They’re always up to something.
How do you get a country girl’s attention? A tractor.
I was attacked by 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9. The odds were against me.
When I caught my neighbor attaching a rocket engine to a deer,
I immediately reported him to the authorities.
Shame on him for trying to make a quick buck.
What did the green grape say to the purple grape. Breathe idiot, breathe.
We all know Albert Einstein was a genius … but his brother Frank was a monster.
“Officer, are you crying while writing me a ticket?” Policeman: “It’s a … moving violation.”
What do you call a helpful lemon? Lemonaid.
People say I’m a plagiarist … Their words, not mine.
I’ve just written a book about falling down a staircase. It’s a step by step guide.
I was on the phone with my wife. “I’m almost home, honey, please put the coffee maker on.”
After a twenty second pause, I asked, “You still there sweetheart?”
“Yes. But I don’t think the coffee maker wants to talk right now.”
I have a perfect memory. I can’t remember a single time I’ve ever forgotten anything.
Did you hear the one about the giant throwing up? It’s all over town.
Why shouldn’t blind people sky dive? It scares the dog.
I recently switched all the labels on my wife’s spice rack.
She hasn’t realised yet, but the thyme is cumin.
My friend keeps saying “cheer up man, it could be worse,
you could be stuck underground in a hole full of water.” I know he means well.
Apparently every country got coronavirus. But China got it right off the bat.
My son asked me what the opposite of “isolate” is. I told him “yousoearly”.
Due to the quarantine, I’ll only be telling inside jokes.
Instead of a swear jar, I have a negativity jar. Every time I have pessimistic thoughts,
I put a penny in. It’s currently half empty.
What did the cannibal’s wife say when he came home late for dinner?
I’m giving you the cold shoulder.
We’re going to need 144 rolls of toilet paper for the 14 day quarantine. 144? That’s gross.
How long do you microwave fish? Tuna half minutes!
CDC: “No handshakes” Cannibal: *shuts off blender* “Awwwwwww….”
If you get an email from the government warning not to eat canned meat,
because is contains Covid-19, just ignore it. It’s spam.
A cable TV installer walks into a bar and orders a beer.
The bartender says, “You’ll be served sometime between 7am and 2pm.”
Does anybody remember the joke I posted about my spine? It was about a weak back.
I asked my wife how to turn Alexa off. “How about walking through the room naked?”
Did you hear about the guy who’s left side was cut off? He’s all right now.
These true stories were borrowed from @Dadsaysjokes and @sodadjokes. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
Mohandas Or Mahatma
Mahatma Gandhi – dying for freedom drops a curious tidbit 164 seconds in. “in the Indian capital Delhi there are several sites dedicated to the memory of the man to whom the poet Tagore gave the name Mahatma, great soul.” PG had always been annoyed by the custom of referring to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as Mahatma. It was time to learn more.
“The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: “great-souled”) was first applied to Mr. Gandhi in 1914, in South Africa.” (Earlier wikipedias said that Mr. Gandhi was “pained” by the title.) A footnote has a googlebooks reference. “… Addresses in Durban and Verulam referred to Gandhi as a ‘Mahatma’, ‘great soul’. He was seen as a great soul because he had taken up the poor’s cause. The whites too said good things about Gandhi, who predicted a future for the Empire if it respected justice.”
“Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) is best known as a poet, and in 1913 was the first non-European writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Mr. Tagore was a big deal in India. “Despite formal address till 1919 (“Dear Mr. Gandhi”) Tagore refers to Gandhi as the ‘Mahatma’ as early as February 1915. “… in April of 1919, Tagore had for the first time addressed Gandhiji as “Mahatma”, even though it wasn’t Tagore who was the first to use the honorific.”
Mr. Tagore and Mr. Gandhi differed sharply. Many of these conflicts were about tactics Mr. Gandhi was using against British rule. “Some of us are reported to be of the opinion that it is mass animosity against the British that will unify India… So this anti-British animus, they say, must be our chief weapon… if that is true, then once the cause of the animosity is gone, in other words when the British leave the country, that artificial bond of unity will snap in a moment. Where, then, shall we find a second target of animosity? We shall not need to travel far. We shall find it here, in our country, where we shall mangle each other in mutual antagonism, a thirst for each other’s blood.”
The matter of who first used the M-word has been the subject of a court case. “The Gujarat High Court on Friday declared that Rabindranath Tagore gave the title to “Mahatma” to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, reported India Today. The court was hearing a petition filed by one Sandhya Maru challenging the answer key of an examination held by a Rajkot local body, which said an “unknown journalist” came up with the title. … Maru said she lost marks because of the ambiguity about who gave the title to Gandhi … An RTI activist from Hyderabad had filed a query with the Prime Minister’s Office in 2012 seeking to know how, when and why Gandhi was given the title of Mahatma. The PMO had forwarded the request to the Indian Council of Historical Research … However, the ICHR informed RTI activist Raju Malthumkar in a letter that neither the NAI nor the Council had any documentary information on the subject.”
“A controversy broke out over a claim that a journalist – whose name remains unknown – first called Gandhi Mahatma. Tagore scholar and poet Sankha Ghosh made it clear that the Nobel Laureate was indeed not the first person to use the title. Gandhiji was first addressed as Mahatma at a reception at the Durban Town Hall in South Africa on July 12th 1914.”
A comment to this story has another take. “Nagar sheth of Jetpur Shri Nautamlal B. Mehta (Kamdar) was the first to use and bestow “Mahatma” for Shri Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on January 21, 1915, at Kamri Bai School, Jetpur, India. From then on, Gandhiji was known as Mahatma Gandhi.”
We do not know who first called Mohandas Gandhi “Mahatma.” We also do not know why the M-word is so widely used. Many people think that Mahatma is Mr. Gandhi’s first name. Is Mr. Gandhi more inspiring with an honorific title, rather than the name his parents gave him?
Chamblee54 has written about M.K. Gandhi before. one two. Was Mohandas Gandhi A Racist? looks at Mr. Gandhi’s time in South Africa. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Fat Or Racist
@jimchines Could we just stop with the use of “fat” as an insult already? You’re trying to hit the person you’re insulting, but you’re hurting a lot of other people in the process. Grow the hell up. @jimchines Yeah, Shakespeare also made his share of fat jokes/insults too, unfortunately. Do better. Get creative, and scrub that particular tired, lazy insult from your repertoire.
@chamblee54 What about the use of anything as an insult. I would start with racist.
@jimchines Racism is something we can choose to support, or we can choose to push back against. Too many people simply choose to ignore it. Which means accepting it. Don’t want to be described as racist? Stop doing/supporting/accepting racist shit. Seems simple enough to me. @jimchines Usually when I see people saying “racist” is an insult, all they’re trying to do is shut down criticism and silence conversation about race and racism. It’s tiresome.
@chamblee54 “Don’t want to be described as racist? Stop doing/supporting/accepting racist shit.” That is a lie. Even if you do quit being racist, how will your haters know? That lie is used to justify prejudice. Out of respect for our mental health, this thread should end now.
@jimchines Consider it ended. But in the future, perhaps don’t stir up conversations you’re unable or unwilling to have.
@chamblee54 Point taken. That was not my intention, however. Unfortunately, that is how it turned out. Fat compares to racist, in the third party conception that it is something the insultee has control over. In the case of fat, the change is measurable and apparent.
As twitterspats go, this was mercifully brief. One could go on about the relative merits of using fat, or racist, as weapons of verbal destruction. Both epithets usually have elements of bullying, and hypocrisy, in their use. Many language custodians, who would be appalled by fat, feel virtuous in calling someone racist. It would be better to retire both insults. That probably is not going to happen.
What makes this episode noteworthy is the connection between @jimchines and @chamblee54. There is a third party, who we will call @duh. This is not his name, but does incorporate his initials.
@chamblee54 and @duh quit communicating in 2008, after quarreling at @duh’s LiveJournal. @chamblee54 developed a distaste for online combat, and has tried, with varying degrees of success, to stay out of trouble. @duh, otoh, seems to glory in digital feuds. If a person goes to his facebook feed, they will see many examples of this.
One of these disputes included @jimchines. If you have a lot of free time, you can read about it. (one two three four) The beginning, and end, of one @jimchines post says a great deal. “Well, this has been quite the week. … My thanks to everyone for their patience while I worked through this.”
What makes yesterday’s episode ironic is that @duh is an aggressive pro-black pundit. He will call someone RACIST at the slightest provocation. To see the target of white-shaming defend the use of racist is quite the spectacle.
FWIW, @chamblee54, who sports an old man”s pot-belly, has only seen face pictures of @jimchines. @duh is flamboyantly skinny. @chamblee54 has never met either gentleman irl. Judgements about waistlines, or racial attitudes, are not appropriate.
While finishing this, a tweet turned up. @melaninbarbie “being fat matters. The violence that young fat Black girls experience contributed to her death and if you don’t understand why, y’all need to start cracking open some fucking books on fatphobia.” Pictures are from The Library of Congress. The men are Union soldiers, from the War Between the States. This is a repost.
Chamblee54 
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