A Sunny Place for Shady People

2003-11-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER MUST READ:
Paul Krugman's two book reviews [of Bush's lies], "Strictly Business," The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2003.

2003-10-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

On Bush the Vile's banditry, deceit, and mendacity, a MUST READ: Russell Baker's "The Awful Truth, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century," by Paul Krugman. The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2003.

2003-10-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Too bad Rush L. and Michael J. are in different jurisdictions: they would have made such swell cellies.

2003-10-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

The smaller the baton the bigger the cigar.

2003-10-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

The first really telling indicator that the president -- our Bellicose Theocrat -- is in really deep shit will be the moment that one (or more) of the Republican Supreme Court justices decides it is time to retire, so the Master of Smug can attempt to get conservative replacements through the U.S. Senate. (One nominee, at least, will no doubt be Hispanic, black, or a woman, all the better to pander.)

2003-09-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 29, 2003

These rants have appeared with some regularity for about a year, and it is time for us to move on now to other writing.

While we can no longer promise to meet a weekly Monday deadline, we will continue to rant, at whim, when stupidity and avarice so move us.

So this is not yet the Final Adieu. (Check by from time to time, and thanks for the visits this past year.)

We will, in parting temporarily, share two financial enthusiasms and one political endorsement.

Long have we been impressed (and profited from) the honest penny-pinchers at one of the nation's largest no commission (no load) mutual fund families, with its numerous stock and bond portfolios and index funds (and its very low administrative expenses and efficiency): The Vanguard Group. (They also offer employers 401(k) plans.)

(The worst mutual funds: Franklin-Templeton, Fidelity, Putnam, Strong, Janus, and any sponsored by brokerage houses.)

A more recent discovery has been a cable (CNBC) financial show remarkably free of cant and pomposity brimming with the savvy energy of its hostess: Suze Orman.

Finally, we concluded that one of the few really compelling reasons to vote (often) for Howard Dean is that his zealous, intense rhetoric will so rattle the mindless Bush in debate (out of handlers' reach) that he'll be revealed for the ignorant, arrogant scum he's always been.

-30-

2003-09-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 22, 2003

What is it the Bush Theocracy doesn't understand about "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" (First Amendment, U.S. Constitution)?

This incurious, ignorant, anti-intellectual President (still uncertain about the scientific validity of evolution) has been the puritan's delight -- especially since he left his carousing behind him. (We prefer a randy president like Clinton who is lusty enough to spermeate the entire Oval Office.)

Bush's self-conscious abstinence (no wonder the French laugh at him) makes him dour, disagreeable, and belligerent.

His evangelicalism is his twisted gyre.

He's determined to infuse his Christianity into all levels of federal government.

He's a dangerous buffoon.

And he's impeachable not just for lying us into war, but for violating that establishment clause of the First.

For example, we recently learned that The Bellicose Theocrat nominated, last fall, one W. David Hager (parts his name on the left: automatically suspect) to the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee of the Food & Drug Administration.

This jerk is a Kentucky M.D. who practices ... faith healing!

He's also very big in something ominously called the Christian Medical Association -- oxymoronic that -- and a veteran of the theological gynecology movement.

He actually believes such humbug as "an emphasis on the restorative power of Jesus Christ in one's life," and recommends readings and prayers to treat headaches and premenstrual syndrome.

He is thus congruent with his Fuhrer, Bush, who actually said: "we all know that if sick people would only place all of their faith in God's hands, we would have a much healthier and spiritually invigorated population."

Retire this Tiresome Theocratic President at first opportunity so he can privately practice this nonsense without harming others, for the First also speaks to that.

-30-

2003-09-12T15:57:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 15, 2003

Is it politically incorrect to suggest that there are many components of the so-called Russian Mafia?

This is murky -- a dismal swamp.

The PC Police have made us all reluctant to generalize about race, ethnicity and religion, especially in assigning high crimes to particular groups.

Russian organized crime, it's generally agreed, is not confined to Russia and Russians.

It's Big Tentism.

Thus we dare not exclude the Japanese gangsters or the Colombian drug cartels.

Apparently the Russian Mafia is not monolithic and hierarchical, like the Cosa Nostra we grew up with.

Russians also lack the tradition of honor and strict rules of conduct that their Mafia predecessors refined.

The origin of the Russian Mafia lies in the cradle of the Soviet police state.

Russians had to devise clandestine and illegal ruses just to acquire the basics of life.

So, when Russians began migrating to the U.S. in vast numbers during the 1990's (a generally undertold tale) many were predisposed to criminality and subterfuge.

Life in Russia was never happy, except for the party elite.

The FBI, in May, 2000, noted that the Russians were the most highly skilled and adept of any organized crime group -- ever.

The Bureau also estimated many professional criminals immigrated or entered the U.S. with temporary visas and remained illegally.

They have concentrated on white collar fraud: banking scams, health care schemes, fuel intrigues, and stock market manipulation (pump and dump tactics, for example).

Allegedly, the Russians have teamed with the Colombians and acquired Soviet military aircraft for drug running.

Gee: all this -- and terrorism, too.

-30-

Highly recommended: Mark Danner, "Iraq: The New War," The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003.

2003-09-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 08, 2003

Euphemism is a pretension that distorts, perverts, slants, and obscures. It is ultimately the enemy of truth.

Decent, honest writers avoid it.

Perhaps it's most unfortunately employed in futilely caressing the inevitability of death.

Examples abound:

* An awfully big adventure (Peter Pan).
* The Big Sleep (which follows its predecessor),
* The Big Casino (cancer).
* Checked, or cashed, out.
* Cross the Great Divide.
* Dreamless sleep (Byron).
* Go West.
* Great Leveler.
* Inevitable Hour (Thomas Gray).
* Negative Patient Care Outcome (winner of the Death Pool).
* Pay one's debt to Nature.
* That good night (Dylan Thomas).
* Undiscovered country (Hamlet).

Government nurtures euphemism, for its own pernicious reasons.

We recently noticed a memorandum dated May 14, 1993, from the U. S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, which is typical.

It discusses the official transition of the perfectly acceptable handicap (itself a euphemism) to the governmentalese of disability.

It goes even further: to stress the "individuality" of disability, by suggesting the verbose substitution "persons with a disability" in place of "disabled person."

Huh?

And it prefers "people who are blind" or "people with visual impairment" instead of simply "the blind."

Well: the blind were not about to accept this insult with their canes folded, and attacked the reference, canes swinging.

The National Federation of the Blind thereupon passed Resolution 93-01, which denounced this usage as PC to "imply that the word person must invariably precede the word blind to emphasize the fact that a blind person is first and foremost a person."

The Resolution concludes that it's quite respectable (if not exactly an honor) to be blind, and the use of euphemisms to convey other images is deplorable.

In short, as the blind so accurately report, euphemism is prissy, ridiculous, tiresome -- and deceptive.

Help scuttle political correctness whenever and wherever it sails into the language.

-30-

2003-08-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 01, 2003

Democrats and Republicans have at least this much in common: arrogance, bribery, brigandage, and corruption.

But they differ considerably.

Republicans venerate ignorance and their so-called Christian god equally, and loathe the UN, the environment, and taxes (not to mention Amtrak), hate women who abort, gays, and anyone daring to have a good time.

They love the ozone layer, war, privatization (Forest Service, Air Traffic Controllers), and the export of jobs (and profits) to foreign shores.

Repubs detest welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, social security, labor unions, and blacks.

They are niggardly, quick to impeach and recall, litigious, mean-spirited, thin-lipped, smug, puritanical, and they shamelessly pander to the corporations and the rich. (They even oppose physician-assisted suicide!)

They have unconstitutionally enshrined and infiltrated their fevered, fundamental religion into the very foundations of the national government and created a quasi-theocracy, perverting the prevalent deism of the Founders by stamping the word "god" on everything, as well as the Ten Commandments.

Democrats are vacillating and unrealistic, too given to political correctness, randy as hell, too beholden to the plaintiff's bar, wary of overly augmenting defense, afraid to offend anyone, squeamish at imposing the death penalty, and have way too much fun (enslaved as they are to drugs, sex, rock and roll, individual freedom, and privacy).

They are timid about stealing elections, raising taxes, spreading malicious gossip about opponents, filching public and private documents, and destroying reputations.

Dems allow themselves to be intimidated by right-wing crazies, talk-radio hosts, the Moonie Washington Times, Fox, and those icy, grating, long-haired blond, blockheaded bitches everywhere on cable television (like that Coulter woman).

Democrats are too dreamy, Republicans too rapacious.

We prefer Democratic intellectual elitism to Republican troglodytic tyranny.

-30-

2003-08-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

Monday, August 25, 2003

The hottest new trend among the crypto-racist set is linguistic profiling.

This fresh passion for stereotyping apparently started with the swindlers and creeps in the real estate racket.

Seems this kind of profiling isn't aimed at enemies du jour -- the Islamists -- but rather at African-Americans, who call a rental agent seeking an apartment and reveal their race by the voices: grammar, pronunciation, inflection, diction.

(Maybe this should be called auditory profiling?)

Racist imbeciles ought remember that speaking non-standard English is not solely the province of blacks.

(Some markers of the non-standard: irregardless, aint, yall, conversate.)

Studies show a large majority of Americans can infer race based on speech. It's relatively easy.

But if you use this kind of profiling as a basis to deny someone a rental, it's illegal -- or should be.

(The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on linguistic profiling per se.)

Why even bother to discriminate telephonically when you can simply (and much less racially) call a national credit reporting agency and get an applicant's FICO (or equivalent) score -- where you really get the goods on him.

That FICO number is far more damning economically -- and far more telling -- than someone's race.

-30-

2003-08-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

Monday, August 18, 2003

The real upper class, about one percent of the total population, owns approximately 40% of all privately held wealth in America.

This elite is coddled, stroked and isolated from the lower and middle classes at all levels and at all stages of their development, especially in education.

The educational system teaches working class students to continue life as working class adults, and upper class students to assume their inherited places at the social ladder's very top.

Look what is offered the working (or lower) class student in high school: skills in auto body work and mechanics, carpentry, computers, "culinary arts," drafting, electronics, printing and welding.

They are taught to know their place and stay in it!

Meanwhile, boarding and prep schools provide a warm cocoon wherein they train their students for both academic success and social station.

These schools, even more than their families, concentrate on transmitting upper social class traditions, as well as regulate the new admission of wealth and talent.

Law Schools of the Elite (example: Harvard) discourage their students from entering public interest law, favoring the corporate and commercial.

They deny access to the legal system for the poor and working classes.

Job interviewers are less interested in an applicant's knowledge of the law than they are in his social graces.

The typical deluded American boob thinks School is the Great Leveler, the equal playing field of opportunity.

Wrong.

[Some fascinating class distinctions follow. For example, the so-called "service" clubs of small town America can be ranked thusly: Rotary: middle class; Kiwanis: lower middle class; Lions: high lower class, basically almost proletarian.

Protestant churches (Jews and Papists transcend class lines) ranked in descending social class order: High Episcopal (Anglican), Episcopal and New England Congregational, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist. (Below Baptist one finds unmentionables like the evangelically fevered charismatics and the snake-handlers.)

Even couples riding in cars betray their social class: lower: husbands in front, wives in rear; middle: husband and wife in front and back; lower upper: husbands with each others' wives front and back.]

The lower class, almost from birth, is taught submission to authority and passivity.

Elitist children are invited to self-study at their own pace with little supervision, and to make their own judgments -- independently and confidently.

So much for the widely touted "classless" America.

-30-

Note: we are much indebted to Whoopee Sue Feinstein's article on "Wealth and Power in America" at 212.net.

2003-08-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

We just received the first batch of our bumperstickers:

"Recall Schwarzeneggar."

2003-08-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

Monday, August 11, 2003

The Anti-Vivisectionist Society is still sickly fashionable in some silly circles, but now clothed in the more modern raiment of P.E.T.A. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), but it still invites ridicule -- and makes as easy a target for us as the good old N.R.A. (National Rifle Association).

PETA elevates animal rights at the expense of human rights to a more disease-free society.

The Anti-Vivisectionists (shades of the 19th century!) speak of "tiny guillotines" used by laboratories to dispose of useless animals. (Guillotines?)

And what do these misguided, naive souls propose as an alternative to animal experimentation?

(They would probably welcome actual human trials in their place, since they place so little value on humanity.)

They advocate "simple lifestyle changes," such as the easy implementation of preventive measures, viz., low-fat vegetarian diets, abstinence (abstinence indeed) from smoking and alcohol, and regular exercise.

These folks are grim.

They're also unrealistically utopian and utterly stupid.

These morons fret about the welfare of mice, rats, birds, guinea pigs (not to be confused with miniature swine), hamsters, gerbils, rhesus monkeys, and imported (!) primates.

Not to mention frogs, sheep, cattle, prarie dogs and owls.

Vivisectors apparently try to employ the "less cute" to stem objections to cats, dogs or rabbits -- or so the party line goes.

The word torture figures prominently in their vocabulary.

Look at some of their recent "action alerts": brewers siding with cockfighting, automakers crushing kittens (testing car doors?), New Jersians slaughtering Canadian geese, and Missourians torturing dogs.

These fools are traitors to their species with too much time on their hands.

Go hunt, Anti-Vivisectionists -- with the loonies from the NRA, and divvy up the catch -- some alive, some dead.

-30-

2003-08-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

Religion is just as irrelevant as one's sexuality, so we are puzzled why the Episcopate is so unduly agitated.

And speaking of irrelevance: Kobe Bryant.

2003-08-06T12:50:00.000-07:00

The selection of Nobel laureates is political correctness at its most elevated.

2003-08-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

Monday, August 04, 2003

We dare attack the ineffectual and failed anti-drug program, D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education).

This is the old Nancy Reagan hymn of "Just Say No" all dressed up with lots of payoffs for the local cops.

Both the U.S. Surgeon General and the National Academy of Sciences have investigated this scam and declared it costly and unworkable.

This bullshit has been ongoing for twenty years -- taxpayers subsidizing a program that doesn't deliver.

This local police-administered scheme is supposed to educate schoolchildren about the dangers of drug, alcohol and tobacco use.

How?

Promoting something called "self-esteem."

Laughable.

Cops teaching self-esteem?

City after city have abolished this racket, including even Houston (not the nation's most liberal burg), along with Oakland, Seattle, Omaha and Burlington.

Studies have shown that D.A.R.E. has no statistically significant long-term effect in preventing illicit youthful drug use.

One problem is that the program broadly condemns all drugs -- making no distinction between marijuana and heroin, for example.

When do we stop lying to the kids?

When we do, maybe they'll, on their own motion, develop this nebulous thing called self-esteem.

And how does one dare to even measure prevention, anyway?

-30-

Partial directory of past offensive rants can be found in the post of July 09, 2003, at Archive.

The rant will hereafter appear at whim, but at least weekly, probably Mondays, and intermittently, as ignornace and cupidity enrage us.

2003-07-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Does anyone read books anymore?

We speak not of "best sellers" by politicians, self-helpers, diet quacks, ideologues, "Mother Naturists," or writers of children's books, "thrillers," religious claptrap, sports trash, Hollywood nonsense, romantic and sexual puff and "historical novels."

Over the almost year run of the rant, we have occasionally recommended books we find unsettling, irreverent, compelling, fascinating and, yes, entertaining -- a well told story of whatever.

(Examples of the last two such: Paul Hoffman's Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont & the Invention of Flight [non-fiction] and Allison Burnett's Christopher: A Tale of Seduction [fiction]).

We understand that many now graduate from a four year accredited (not that this means anything) college without completing a full read of a book.

We know: we're old and cantankerous, but at least literate. (We often read first a book's index -- very telling.)

Society has elevated the visual to the detriment of the printed -- so much easier for the lazy to "watch" television or movies than to engage their own private and personal imaginations grappling with the written word.

Or is imagination mostly dead, too?

We have replaced our home libraries (not that we ever had them) with "entertainment centers," whatever these are. The mass audience wants comic book movies with comic book writing.

Part of the blame goes to the very medium you're reading this page on.

But you are reading, aren't you?

-30-

Recommended blogs:

annoyingwhiteangrymiddleagedbaldingman (High speed connection required)
boynton
fromtheinsidelookingout
merrindonahue
milo
pharyngula
Presurfer
ravingatheist
realityisnotpc
theprocessofweedingout

2003-07-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 28, 2003

How voluntary, really, is this volunteer army of ours?

(For simplification, we'll discuss the army, but the other services are implied.)

The draft was ended, we thought naively, to avoid the massive draft dodging by the better social classes. (Bush qualifies socially, but has since betrayed his class by assuming the pose that was Clinton's birthright: white trash.)

Of course, once the government made military service optional, it then had to admit ladies to its ranks.

Militarily, this female incursion was foolish, and lowered morale and training standards, but as social policy it provided undereducated women (and men) a secure job and promise of advancement -- gone missing in the civilian arena.

(We are not indifferent to the service academies' sex scandals, but what did you expect?)

This volunteer army volunteered to secure steady work -- not actually to engage in combat and, gods forbid, fight real wars.

We pause here to give full marks to our servicemen/servicewomen (see what PC silliness this is?) who fought professionally in the Iraqi wars. We also applaud their success.

But they are not policemen, social workers, or do-gooders. They're not a UN bureaucracy.

Because of the swinish, inept Bush administration's "planning," these good soldiers are now vulnerable to guerrilla warfare, for which they are equally untrained and unpaid.

Of course, the troops' morale is abysmal and we sympathize with them.

We predict the end of the volunteer army and the return of the draft (from which the superior classes will once again flee).

After all, we have miles to go before we sleep -- engaging other "evil" entities like North Korea, Iran, and (dare we hope?) Saudi Arabia.

The complete bankruptcy of the country continues under Republican messianic stewardship.

-30-

Recommended: David Remnick, "Faith-Based Intelligence," The New Yorker, July 28, 2003.

Sex, race, and ethnicity by service

2003-07-22T00:12:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Entertaining glimpses into the politics and economies of our two smallest states, Delaware (DE) and Rhode Island (RI), reveal that corruption blossoms in small places.

Delaware hosts (and panders to) corporate bandits, while Rhode Island the Smaller, welcomes (and defers to) the Mafia and even less lofty brigandage.

With such microscopic and malleable electorates, easily purchased often openly, it's unsurprising that one RI politician bragged, "an honest voter is one who stays bought."

Of the two states, RI is the more raffish, with a lower per capita income, fewer banks, and an economy more blue-collar dependent in services and manufacturing.

The tonier DE caters to chemical industries and high (very high) finance.

Both populations are overwhelmingly racially white.

Lincoln Steffans, early 20th century political reformer and seer, quipped that RI was "A State for Sale."

Still is.

Dubbed the "Louisiana of the North" RI has worshipped cronyism and fixed elections since the War Between the States (or what Southerners call "The War of Northern Aggression") and remains a haven for scoundrels and scofflaws.

And RI has perfected the art of nepotism in a state where everyone is either kin to or knows everybody else.

Contrary, decadent RI.

DE offers its teats to corporate welfare, granting state charters exempting from accountability legitimate and illegitimate companies, which comprise its unelected and socially unresponsible "government."

Enron, for example, not only to avoid taxation but to conceal its foul deals, set up no less than 685 subsidiaries in Delaware, the better to further its deceit and greed.

Money launderers and the Bluest of Chips (are they mutually exclusive?) flock to DE for its lax, secretive corporate laws.

DE's petite Green Party asserts that the state affords its corporations more rights and freedoms than its citizens.

These two sorry little states more than compensate for their size by proffering bold, bulgy bosoms of bribery, banditry, bootlicking, and barter.

-30-

2003-07-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 21, 2003

Those unfortunate enough to be "in trade" -- the mercantilists -- aren't content to just peddle greedily, but now insist on subjecting their prey -- the customers -- to various forms of snooping, euphemistically called "retail ethnography" or "retail anthropology."

And not satisfied with merely spying on their own employees by using "mystery shoppers" (and cameras placed in workers' toilets), these ignoble marketers are now surreptitiously scouting the patrons as well.

The merchantry uses hidden cameras and microphones to monitor shoppers' behavior.

They hire "researchers" with handheld computers to track -- and log -- one's every move.

This is not shoplifting deterrence, but rather a sneaky intrusion into buyers' purchasing decisions, habits, and personal lives.

Of course the avaricious objective of this trespass is to determine how to display and market goods to extricate the customer from his money as swiftly and profitably as possible.

It may even be legal.

But it's also vulgar, sordid, demeaning.

The sellers claim they are indifferent to what people are buying, but rather what's not bought and why.

This so-called science of shopping ought to give all of us pause. (Linger not in those inquiring precincts.)

It's also another reason to hate shopping (as we -- and most men -- do anyway).

-30-

2003-07-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Start the trading in the organ pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

And thus discard finally the hypocrisy, bribery and manipulation inherent in the organ transplant business.

Let's at long last get real about this.

Money is already being abundantly made (and even legally) by surgeons, hospitals and drug companies.

(Trust none of the above.)

Who gets these life-extensions now?

Sometimes the recipient has indeed been on a legitimate waiting list, under the "sickest first" rule, often a wasteful allocation when sickest dies soonest.

Rational triage is mandatory.

First, simply eliminate the sickest and the healthiest -- the former wasteful, the latter attendable.

Concentrate on the "best use" of the organ, with bias toward those waiting longest.

Some background in the sordid, nasty history of Preferential Treatment (a form of bribery practiced by celebrities in need):

On June 14, 1993 then-Governor of Pennsylvania, one Bob Casey, was the proud beneficiary -- within ten hours -- of a combined heart-liver transplant.

No waiting list for these princes.

And what about one Mickey Mantle? His June 7, 1995 liver transplant (magically delivered within hours also) extended his famous life a little over two months.

(Gov. Casey at least had the courtesy to enjoy his new equipment for almost seven years.)

Smell the nasty stench of corruption and favoritism?

Stop this nonsense about these organs as unpaid, altruistic gifts from kindly donors.

Bullshit.

Not enough donors!

Just pay healthy people a brokered sum as determined by an open organ commodities market.

Trade them like the pork bellies they so resemble.

Prefer your bribery public -- and inclusive. And set trading limits so everyone can bid.

Build in safety nets for the indigent and the poor, and somehow protect impoverished donors from exploitation.

(We have absolutely no answers on how to accomplish that.)

We hope, in time, there will be adequate supply for the greatly increasing demand.

Perhaps animal organ farming in hearts, cloned kidneys, artificial livers?

Just be boldly open about these macabre transactions.

-30-

Sources gratefully acknowledged: 1, 2, 3, 4

2003-07-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 14, 2003

Since we adamantly remain Francophilic, we wish you all Happy Bastille Day.

All this rank posturing about who can be more anti-French is so much propaganda.

We simply agree that the French are as rotten and corrupt as we are.

Our hands are mutually dirty in Iraq.

So let's put paid to that!

(For what this holiday is all about, visit Franceway.)

Herewith, we offer our celebratory selections of spirits of the day.

JUNGLE JAMES (Right Bank) or JUNGLE JIM (Left Bank)

2 oz. Grey Goose vodka
1 oz. banana liqueur
1 oz. half-and-half or cream

Combine in shaker, add ice, shake and strain into a large martini glass.

COSMOPOLITAN

4/8 Grey Goose citron vodka
2/8 Grand Marnier
2/8 Cranberry juice
Dash of lime

Combine in a shaker, add ice, shake and strain into a cocktail glass.

PARISIAN

1/2 oz. premium gin
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
1/4 oz. creme de cassis

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Our wine selections:

Sancerre Blanc AOC 2000, "Duc de Tarente"
Sancerre Blanc AOC 2001, "La Duchesse"

A votre sante!

-30-

Recommended: Jeffrey Toobin, "Fajita Justice [in San Francisco]," The New Yorker, July 14 and 21, 2003.

2003-07-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

N.B.

The posts on the following dates (see Archives) angered, agitated, astonished (as well as amused, animated, and attracted) the most response from readers:

Oct. 18, 2002 "Student of the Month"
Oct. 24, 2002 "FICO and You"
Nov. 7, 2002 "Drug the Homeless"
Nov. 23, 2002 "How Gentlemen Drink"
Dec. 3, 2002 "Niggardly Jewfish"
Dec. 6, 2002 "Teen Sex"
Dec. 21, 2002 "Mother Nature Sucks"
Dec. 31, 2002 "School's Out"
Jan. 7, 2003 "Honeywagoning with Elvis"
Jan. 9, 2003 "Beauty of Death Row"
Jan. 14, 2003 "Sex & Amtrak"
Jan. 16, 2003 "Bribery as Excrement"
Feb. 6, 2003 "Fun with Asexuals"
Feb. 8, 2003 "He of the Smirk & Sneer"
Feb. 12, 2003 "Valentine Shit"
Feb. 25, 2003 "Jury Rigging"
Mar. 4, 2003 "American Status System at Play"
Mar. 18, 2003 "Calvinists at Rest"
Mar. 28, 2003 "Snobbery's Fun!"
Apr. 18, 2003 "Masturbation: How You Can Get Involved"
May 2, 2003 "Astrology & God"
May 6, 2003 "Overbreeding & Sexual Abuse"
June 13, 2003 "Twelve Stepping at AA"
June 19, 2003 "Pee-shy?"
June 24, 2003 "History as Bullshit"
July 15, 2003 "Organ Exchange"

-30-

2003-07-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 10, 2003

And then there are the jackasses who dial 911 for the least and most petty of reasons, non-emergencies all.

Examples: to ask about a parking ticket, to report a missing dog, to pass the time of day.

That leaves the socially responsible in true emergencies fighting the idiots for a place in the 911 queue.

For routine matters, look up the main police number in the book.

But most are too lazy, selfish and illiterate to bother.

These nitwits think only of themselves.

But there's a juicier culprit in this caper. That's the 911 people themselves.

They have refused to fund the hard, tough and expensive public education needed to enlighten the idiotocracy.

And then there's cellular 911.

What the greedy hawkers of cell phone service (especially pitched often to the "emergency-sensitive") won't admit is that their police connections (usually the state) cannot pinpoint your location, which land line 911 does instantly.

This is being "worked on" -- bureaucratically, slowly, redundantly, inevitably.

The cretinous abusers of 911 are probably uneducable anyway.

And that's the 411 on that.

-30-

Unrelated, Highly Recommended: Norman Mailer, "The White Man Unburdened," The New York Review of Books, July 17, 2003.

Recommended blogs:

blackwoodchannel
boynton
fromtheinsidelookingout
merrindonahue
Presurfer
ravingatheist
theprocessofweedingout

2003-07-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 07, 2003

We have endured the miserable, pathetic whining of the telemarketers' lobby bemoaning the loss of jobs because, quite sensibly, millions of Americans are silencing their strident telephones by registering with donotcall.gov.

We are unamused, unmoved, and unwilling to give these swindlers a scintilla of sympathy.

They've greedily earned their impending unemployment.

Apparently they failed to pony up enough payola even to tempt the Republicans-in-Charge (of the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court).

We reckon even Republicans suffer sporadic moments when their thoughts turn (ever so briefly) from their selfishness and ignorance just long enough to render some miscellaneous service that doesn't really cost them anything. (This serves to distract folks from their favoritism for their true patrons -- the rich and the corporate rich.)

Naturally we're skeptical that the registry will ever really silence the strident sales calls.

(There are several loopholes -- exemptions -- and we're certain the telebandits will somehow dance their way through them.)

Maybe these newly jobless opportunists will settle on a more honest and decent profession in their sizzling pursuit of lucre.

Many would enjoy, for instance, prostitution, drug dealing, child pornography, or standing for the U.S. Senate, or just plain breaking-and-entering, since they're already so telephonically expert at it.

-30-

2003-07-01T02:35:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 03, 2003

"I conceive some scattered notions about a superior power to be of singular use for the common people, as furnishing excellent materials to keep children quiet when they grow peevish, and providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-night." -- Jonathan Swift, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708).

(We aspire to Swiftian satire ... and fail.)

But we do fancy the studly and swiftly Swift.

How like him to invent an absurd proposition and then delight in exposing the frailties of Christian virtue.

(His "A Modest Proposal" to feed the blighted Irish by having them eat their own issue is even more charming.)

He's our favorite ecclesiastic.

Certainly the invocation of that "superior power" has been historically useful not only in quieting children, but providing balmy solace to the disgruntled with its seductive promise of an immortality more fruitfully entertaining than life.

Religion desperately needs that "life-after-death" myth to close its sale on maintaining moral order among the meekly obedient wage slaves in the here and now.

Swift's "common people" need the promise of this earned eternal bliss in exchange for good behavior toward their fellow human beings.

(Can't we just be ethical for ethic's sake and leave out the god business?)

Religion is primarily practiced by women and children, and it panders to their inherent weaknesses.

No gentleman embraces religion. (It's vulgar.)

We also berate religion for its prominent role in war, torture, terror, hate, repression, ignorance, oppression, greed, and immorality.

In short: religion's done more harm than good.

And government, especially the Evangelical Administration of the too pious Bush, should concern itself only with the protection of the right to worship.

Of course we believe in our democracy's guaranteeing freedom to be addicted to religion -- but not to unlawfully proselytize.

(This is, we believe, in keeping with the spirit of this Independence Day.)

The terror we today face from certain religious extremists -- at home and abroad (and tomorrow and tomorrow without end) arises out of religion's grasp on the ill fed, ill used, and ill educated.

As Swift would have it, we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

-30-

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-06-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 30, 2003

(Warning: the following "rant" is boringly instructive but probably good for you. Read at your peril for educational purposes only.)

We have all, surely by now, learned never to divulge our social security number (SSN) -- except for the usual self-initiated business transactions involving the federal government or credit.

The gray area is in the private usage of SSN's (usually by thieving low lifes), neither expressly prohibited or authorized by law -- but practiced much too robustly by convention (and subterfuge).

Mostly these numbers are more misused or abused than not. Yet the Feds timidly refuse (well bribed as they are at every turn) to prohibit and control their dissemination.

The SSN has no place, except in a police state (to which we seem to be approaching), as a "universal identifier."

Very few situations actually require one to provide it.

The grandest and greediest opponents to widespread restrictions on SSN's are (rather obviously) credit reporting agencies (which increasingly control your daily life), providers of health and financial services (of dubious value), and state income tax and driver licensing administrators (no doubt well trained in Prussian police state strategies).

And the only specific federal requirement for submitting a SSN is for a commercial driver's permit - - not an individual one.

Now: about the grouping of digits in SSN's, myths are abundantly engaging.

For example, that the middle two digits -- the "Group Number" -- are a racial designation!

Not so.

The Social Security Administration explains the numbering scheme this way.

The first three digit set is the Area Number (originally denoted the state in which the applicant lived at first application).

The second two digit set is that Group Number. (We are unable to determine what it originally meant.)

And the final four digit set is the Serial Number.

The Area Number was assigned in the early years beginning with lower numbers in the east and increasing numerically westward (much as Zip codes today).

The Group Number merely further subdivides the Area Number.

The Serial Number is alloted in numerical order. (0000 is never used.)

(We become numbly number-dizzy.)

An indication of an invalid SSN is an Area Number above 770 (at this writing).

Keep your SSN kept!

-30-

Note: We recommend networkusa.org's Report on use and misuse of these numbers, a valuable resource for us.

Unrelated, Recommended: Max Rodenbeck, "Bohemia in Baghdad," The New York Review of Books, July 3, 2003.

SUMMER NON-FICTION MUST READ: Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight by Paul Hoffman. Hyperion: 370 pp., $24.95.

2003-06-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 26, 2003

On June 20 the U.S. Senate passed, unanimously, The American History and Civics Education Act (introduced earlier in the House as H.R. 1078 on March 4, 2003), a futile exercise intended to promote better teaching of our history and civics in grades K to 12.

Any bill enacted unanimously is immediately suspect. (It also has Bush's support -- even more suspect -- as well as most of the House of Representatives.)

Smelled awfully rotten to us right away.

So: we read the bill.

We also understand from press dispatches that Diane Ravitch, a New York University education professor whose recent book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (recommended earlier this year by this space) also endorses it, and surely she (who lustily condemns the educational perversions of political correctness) should know better.

The travesty is this $400 millions' worth of bullshit (how many seniors' prescriptions could have been filled for that amount?) will only perpetuate and enshrine the continued teaching of myth instead of reality.

(We won't bother mentioning that schools of education rank lowest in prestige on university campuses.)

Aside from the fact that most teachers of history and "civics" (or any other subjects for that matter) are utterly stupid and know little more than their charges, and that the whole of American education is mostly an abominable failure, the establishment by this bill of two week "workshops" for 300 "selected" instructors nationwide to study "key events, key persons, key ideas, and key documents that shaped the institutions and democratic heritage of the United States" is risible.

The legislation defines, for example, "key ideas" as "equal justice under the law" (translation: highest bidder wins); "freedom" (to smoke grass instead of swill booze?); "individualism" (white collar extortion, theft); "human rights" (except for minorities like gays or ladies seeking abortions); and a "belief in progress" (shift factory payrolls to China).

"Key persons" means "the men and women [emphasis added] who led the United States as founding fathers" (ladies as fathers?); "elected officials" (bought or rigged votes); "scientists" (excluding evolutionists, of course); "inventors" (of the richly useless); "pioneers" (those who enslaved Native Americans?); "advocates of equal rights" (this is the biggest myth of all!); "entrepreneurs" (monopolists like Bill Gates); and "artists" (puritanically acceptable conformists, of course).

The bill fails to include a few other "key persons" so essential to our democracy, e.g., bribable judges, larcenous lobbyists, venal lawmakers, Wall Street manipulators, thieving CEO's, lying Presidents, Government Fixers of All Hues, and the sadistic police.

If you aspire to actually teach history and civics, then teach the Ugly Truths, not just the Major Bullshit.

-30-

Highly Recommended, Unrelated: Stanley Hoffmann, "America Goes Backward," The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003.

2003-06-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 23, 2003

(This is the final installment -- of eight -- comprising a reverential review of iconoclast Paul Fussell's important but highly amusing sociological study Class: A Guide Through the American Status System . New York: Dorset Press, 1990. Out of print but available discounted on line.)

Social climbing is especially insidious in the middle class, where the insecure, terrified conformists lurk, ever alert to the possibility they may suffer at any time a decline in their social standing.

Fussell cannily perceives, for example, that while the social climb is well understood, the social sink is not.

"Ambitious male homosexuals, at least in fantasy, aspire to rise and from humble origins to ascend to the ownership of antique businesses, art galleries, and hair salons .... They learn to affect elegant telephone voices and gravitate instinctively toward 'style' and the grand. Lesbians, on the contrary, like to sink, dropping from middle class status to become taxi drivers, police officers, and construction workers .... But as few sink successfully as rise credibly."

"No matter how much effort you expend, if your language doesn't give you away, your grammar will, or your taste in clothes or cars or ideas."

Fussell finds depressing a tendency in the whole of society toward "prole drift," a general sinking as a result, probably, of mass production, mass selling, mass communication, and mass education, resulting in improved ignorance.

"[S]ome of its symptoms are best-seller lists, films that must appeal to virtually everyone (except the intelligent, sensitive, and subtle), shopping malls, and the lemming flight to the intellectual and cultural emptiness of the Sun Belt."

"Self-serve is ipso facto prole. Proles like it because it minimizes the risk of social contact with people who might patronize or humiliate them."

"[P]role drift is grossly apparent in American beer. The brewers noted that they have greatly reduced the hop content, because hops give beer taste and bitterness. Proles want blah and sweetness."

"The sad thing is that we do get what we deserve."

-30-

UNRELATED SUMMER FICTION READ: Christopher: A Tale of Seduction, by Allison Burnett.
Broadway Books 260 pp. $13.95 paper.

2003-06-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Know any paruretics?

That's the newly tony medical appellation for the pee-shy.

Or, as it is coyly (or smirkingly) referred to among its victims -- no laughing matter either -- "bashful bladder syndrome," or BBS.

Too precious, we think.

The Paruresis Lobby is also fond of calling it psychogenic urinary retention (PUR?).

The most common symptom is the inability to urinate in a public toilet.

BBS causes real distress in activities like social adventures, travel, and extended business meetings.

The BBS Agenda includes petitioning for more partitioning in public facilities for the necessary privacy to void.

We're back to the old shibboleth: performance anxiety, usually associated with sexual dysfunction, at critically charged moments.

Many paruretics resort to the old running water trick to start the flow.

Many simply always avoid all public accommodations.

Treatment options for BBS include the afflicted gradually attempting to urinate in more and more awkwardly public locations.

A sizable minority find temporary or permanent relief by learning self-catheterization. (Ouch!)

Or one can join the local International Paruresis Association (IPA) chapter for referral to a "cognitive-behavioral therapist."

One can also join the Friends of the IPA!

This worthy organization apparently assembles support groups to practice a Pee-in to overcome fear.

Finally, for those actively avoiding employer enforced drug testing, simply boldly cite your anxiety disorder from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV, code 300.23 to avoid giving a urine sample under watchful eyes.

Something for everyone.

-30-

2003-06-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 16, 2003

The Twelve Stepping Crowd at Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) must have been twitchingly enraged at recent reports that moderate drinking reduces heart disease risk in men.

Poor self-abasing and self-abnegating babies!

These dependent confessors have even invaded cruise ships, coyly calling their meetings (in the ship's daily bulletin) a nesting of "Friends of Bill and Lois."

They meet daily at the cocktail hour (of course) for their smokes and caffeine. And hand-wringing confessionals.

Why can't these people discipline themselves, and take responsibility for their lives without resorting to whatever gods they worship?

Now we'll concede that AA has been effective for the weak. Or the religious.

But this kind of regimentation isn't for everyone.

Atheists need not apply, for example.

The "12 Steps" are basically exercises in dependency of another kind.

Seven of the Twelve allude to or implicate god.

That's mighty heavy religion for us.

But we believe in "live and let live."

If AA works for you, indulge.

But if you're flirting with AA, be ready to kiss your self goodbye and say hello to god.

-30-

Recommended, Unrelated: "Might and Right" [Bush and Iraq], by Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker, June 16 and 23, 2003.

Recommended blogs:

blackwoodchannel
boynton
fromtheinsidelookingout
merrindonahue
Presurfer
ravingatheist
theprocessofweedingout

2003-06-10T12:07:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Black Republicans.

Gay Republicans.

Working Class Republicans.

Oxymorons all!

One can simply dismiss gay Republicanism as a no-brainer; one can also stipulate that the working class is generally ignorant and most susceptible to emotional appeals untainted by reason.

Black Republicans -- because of history -- raise other questions.

Do here we confront political octoroons?

Uncle Tomism?

What possesses otherwise intelligent people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (Clarence Thomas is simply a dunce) to cuddle up to a party that considers Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond worthy individuals?

As Ron Waters recently so tellingly observed: "Black Republicans have been in lock-step with their handlers [emphasis added] on issues such as vouchers, faith-based initiatives, reduction in taxes, belittling civil rights, the war against Iraq and whatever else [the Republican bosses] serve[s] up."

The only black Republican in Congress, Rep. J. C. Watts of Oklahoma, has decided to leave the House for unknown or unknowable reasons.

Political analysis reveals that as blacks have increasingly provided margins of victory to Democrats, working class whites increasingly abandon the party. (This is part racism, part stupidity, and part ideology.)

The voting blocs traditionally Democrat, at least since the 1930's, have been Catholics, Jews, blacks, females, union members, native white Southerners, and the white working class.

Now: scratch those last two blocs.

Republicans have successfully appealed to whites by portraying Republicans as "winners" economically, and losers love to associate with winners.

Are poor whites just plain uncomfortable in a political party increasingly dependent on blacks to win elections?

And why are the talented Powell and Rice seen by some as Uncle Tom and Aunt Tomasina?

They're just opportunists.

They smartly perceived they could more easily defeat their black competition for tony jobs in a Republican party starved for racial and ethnic tokens.

So: how many gay, black, working class Republicans do you know?

-30-

Unrelated, Recommended: Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, Basic Books: 328 pp., $26.

Also Unrelated: we thank Robert Nafius, courtesy of his letter to the Los Angeles Times Book Review (June 8, 2003) for an intelligently compiled list of American satirists, which includes some of our favorite people, to wit:

Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Nast, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, W. C. Fields, "Modern Times," Dawn Powell, Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce.

Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme, David Mamet, Richard Pryor, Jay Ward, Chuck Jones, Mad magazine, National Lampoon, Dilbert, Frank Zappa, P. J. O'Rourke.

Sam Kinison, Gore Vidal, Randy Newman, Albert Brooks, Kevin Smith, Larry David, David Sedaris, Hunter S. Thompson, the Richard Nixon of Dan Aykroyd, the Joe Cocker of John Belushi, the Mr. Robinson of Eddie Murphy, Allen Ginsberg's America.

2003-06-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 09, 2003

(This is the seventh in a series of reverential reviews of Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Dorset Press, 1990. Out of print but available at discount on line.)

Another, and immediate, social marker is one's speech. Perhaps it's the most clearly visible (or audible) giveaway of one's class.

Examples most obvious: "Proles say tux, middles tuxedo, but both are considered low by uppers, who say dinner jacket or (higher) black tie."

An absolute class divider is the use of the double negative by proles, as in "I can't get no satisfaction."

"[M]anaging grammatical number, as in 'He don't' ... are not just 'slips' .... They signal virtually a different dialect ...."

Pronunciation and vocabulary, however, are even more reliable class indicators, especially between middles and uppers.

"The 'grand' words exquisite, despicable, hospitable invite the the middle class to stress the second syllable: those anxious to leave no doubt of their social desirability stress the first."

Patina is a verbal trap for the middle class, which insists on stressing the second syllable, instead of the "proper" first.

The middles seek always to impress with genteel or polysyllabic words.

Or, as Lord Melbourne concluded: "The higher and lower classes, there's some good in them, but the middle classes are all affectation and conceit and pretense and concealment."

And one should never say home when one means house, if only to protect your upper class standing. Home is hopelessly middle class.

"[T]he middle class, by nature both puritanical and terrified of public opinion, welcomed home because, to its dirty mind, house carried bad associations. One spoke of a rest home, but of a bawdy, whore-, fancy, or sporting house."

Middle class euphemisms: lavatories or rest rooms; expecting (for pregnant) ; dentures; passing away; underachiever (for stupid); mental illness; handicapped (or, worse, the challenged).

"If each class has one word it responds to uniquely, the upper class probably likes secure or liquid best. The word of the upper middle class is right .... The middle class likes right too, but the word that really excites the middles is luxury .... Spotless is also a middle class favorite."

"High proles are suckers for easy .... And the word of the classes below is free: 'we never go to anything that's not free,' as the low-prole housewife said."

-30-

Highly Recommended, Unrelated: Elizabeth Drew, "The Neocons in Power," The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-06-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 05, 2003

To paraphrase James McNeill Whistler (not much consulted since the 19th century), on viewing a work of art, you should never say it is not good, but rather that you don't like it: and then you're perfectly safe.

Your ass is covered.

You'll not have to intelligently defend your "feelings," but you'll have to justify any criticism.

We're still unsure whether to trust the "critics" in any field: music, theatre, painting, writing.

There's a Generally Accepted As Safe school that demands homage to the established canon in an artistic arena.

But: trust your own judgement.

First: Know who you are.

(We know people who don't even trust themselves, who don't take themselves personally enough -- much less trust anyone else.)

When we toiled in the groves of academe, we were wary of those students who agreed too hastily with us. And if too many agreed, we figured we must be wrong.

Ignore critics.

Dictate your own choice in art.

Or anything else.

-30-

Unrelated, Recommended (Book review with undertones of social class compositon of armed services): "The Horror is Seductive," by John Gregory Dunne, The New York Review of Books, May 29, 2003.

2003-05-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 02, 2003

(This is the sixth of eight installments of a reverential review of iconoclast Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Dorset Press, 1990. Out of print but available discounted on line.)

"The lust of all classes to acquire status by attaching themselves to universities, learned societies, 'science,' and the like -- anything but commerce and manufacturing and 'marketing' -- [is illustrated by how] the Morgan Library attracts contributors of money by designating them not Donors or Benefactors, but 'Fellows'."

And "[t]he most naked lobbies in Washington, those most deeply dyed in the practices of bribery and coercion like to call themselves institutes ...."

Apparently so much prestige has attached to American colleges and universities that they have been remarkably immune to criticism.

But they deserve disdain and worse for the way in which they have swindled their customers -- their students.

For example, if your college isn't "selective," or has no academic clout, then the awful truth is that your degree confers little or no income advantage over a high school graduate.

This happened, in part, because every state college, or "ag" school, or teacher's college, decided to call itself a "university."

Unearned promotions indeed.

Fussell wryly notes that "[o]ne frivolous but not entirely untrustworthy guide to college quality might be the absence of a given college from national basketball tournaments."

All of this begins, of course, with admission to tony kindergartens and prep schools which lead directly to the "Ivy."

Even what you read (or whether you read) marks your social class.

Prole literature consists of commodities like Reader's Digest, TV Guide, People, New York Daily News, and the National Enquirer.

"The uppers don't care what you think about their reading, and neither do the proles. The poor anxious middle class is the one that wants you to believe it reads 'the best literature....'"

Middles are addicted to how-to books, sets of "Great Books," and noncontroversial periodicals like the National Geographic, Smithsonian, and House and Garden.

Middles also aspire to be thought readers of matter above their station, like Fortune, Forbes, and Barron's.

"[T]he middle class reads to have its notions confirmed ...."

Uppers, having few ideas anyway, read hardly at all.

-30-

2003-05-13T00:22:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 15, 2003

ON HIATUS UNTIL MONDAY, JUNE 02, 2003

We leave today for our Paris apartment to pay our respects to that most seductively beautiful and civilized of all cities.

On our return, expect some hell raising exposition on such diverse subjects as:

Sexual practices of Rotarians, drinking contests in the better prisons, practical fractal geometry, the degrading effect of eyeballs on oil (not acrylic) paintings, bribery in vicarages, physicians and phallicism.

Incest at sea, black magic copulation, raping the economy, secrets of Seventh Day Adventists, creationists and opium, happy deaths, priests at play, what really happened to Judge Joseph Crater.

The prose and poetry of the neglected Kenneth Fearing, funeral festivals, the infantilizing of America, the decline of patriotism, joys of puritanism, why our two smallest states are so big in corruption, and love among the ruins.

A votre sante!

-30-

Recommended blogs:

boynton
merrindonahue
Presurfer
ravingatheist
theprocessofweedingout

The rant will continue to appear on Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-05-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

Monday, May 12, 2003

(This is the fifth installment of an extended, reverential review of Paul Fussell's page-turner Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Dorset Press, 1990. Out of print but available on line at discount.)

What spirits you drink is one of the surest of the social class markers.

Favored by uppers: dry white wine; Perrier; vodka (solo or with water); Bloody Marys (but never after 5 p.m.); Scotch on the rocks; Beck's or Heineken's beer.

Preferred by the insecure middle class: club soda; vodka-tonic; scotch-soda; daiquiris; brandy Alexanders; sweet Manhattans (never taken before dinner); Bud or Michelob.

Proletarians ardently seek the sweet stuff (the higher the consumption of sweets in general, the lower the class): Seven and Seven; bourbon and ginger; Mogen David and other very sugared vintages.

The dinner hour is another firm class marker.

Uppers eat between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m..

Middles "dine" between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m.

Lowers chow down between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m.

("You can identify the nouveau riches by their practice of drinking until 10:00, eating until 1:30, and dismissing the cleaners-up at 3:00 a.m.")

Alcohol with meals:

Upper -- light white wine.

Middle -- some sort of "soda," like Coca-Cola.

Prole -- beer (in the can!).

Even your choice of ice cream signals class: top, vanilla; middle, chocolate; low, strawberry and other fruity flavors.

Now, as to "eating out," which is "a fixation with both middles and proles, since it gives [them] a chance at issuing orders, being waited on, affecting to be somebody."

"[T]he middle class can play the game it loves most, pretending to be in the class above ...."

Proles eat junk: hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos, pizza, common Chinese dishes, Mexican, meat loaf, liver and onions, "Swiss" steaks, and macaroni and cheese.

Middles and proles love to "host" Super Bowl parties. ("The satiric anti-Super Bowl party is sometimes heard of in New York and similar un-American places. Here the whole occasion is sent up by keeping the TV set dark during game time while the guests drink vodka and talk of anything but sports.")

And, of sporting events, the smaller the ball, the upper the class!

"Two motives urge middle-class and prole fans to obsession with their sports. One is their need as losers to identify with winners .... [And] they sanction a ... pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping ... and pseudo scholarship of the sort usually associated with the 'decision making,' or 'executive' or 'opinion molding' classes."

Basically, watch what you drink and eat, as well as when, lest you find yourself in an undesirable social stratum.

-30-

Unrelated, Recommended: Nicholas Lemann, "The Controller [Karl Rove]," The New Yorker, May 12, 2003.

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-05-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 08, 2003

First, only those who can afford children should breed, and that kind of flinty rationality would eliminate 96% of those born yearly, certainly a boon to conservation of scarce resources, such as food and energy.

This will be an unattainable ideal, of course, and perhaps it should be, but those who view their issue as somehow furthering their own fragile immortality, or implementing their own unrealized dreams and ambitions should be wary that their lavish parental attention may constitute child abuse not generally acknowledged, except in the psychiatric community.

Shrinks call this kind of abuse "achievement by proxy," or ABP behavior by objectification -- the inability of adults to separate their own needs and goals from those of the child.

These children become, in short, just a means to an end, e.g., providing the parents financial security by requiring their children to sustain their own narcissistic gratification.

Let's be specific.

Take a 5-year-old beauty queen [remember Jon Benet Ramsey?], a 9-year-old gymnast, a 10-year-old pilot, a 12-year-old actor, a 13-year-old musical virtuoso, an 11-year-old hoopster, a 14-year-old ice skater or tennis player, a 15-year-old college graduate.

Does any of this strike you as, at best, bizarre and, at worst, perverse?

Not all children -- of whatever social class -- will have the genetic predisposition to achieve fame as Olympic medalists, sports figures, rap stars, award winning actors, skaters, aviators, or Nobel Laureates.

Parents aren't the only culprits.

They, too, can be manipulated and exploited -- along with their children -- by greedy career-building mentors and coaches.

Perhaps the worst consequence of this grasping, avaricious misconduct is the sexualizing of children, in such activities as cheerleading, acting, and modeling. Or in child beauty contests and artistic and rhythmic gymnastics.

The so-called parental self-worth is thus sickly dependent on "selling" child sex.

It's child abuse -- pure and simple.

Or even child pornography of sorts.

The sash, crown, and trophy belong as much -- probably more -- to the adult as the kid.

These middle-class beauty contests for moppets age 12 and under is a $5 billion a year industry, concentrated in the more ignorant and backward latitudes -- places like the South, Midwest, and California.

One infant (less than a year old) was actually crowned Oregon's 1996 PeeWee Miss of America -- judged entirely on personality, disposition, sportswear, and partywear! See.

This insanity should be stopped.

Or, better yet, stop the breeding.

-30-

email: theoldbuzzard AT sunnyplaceforshadypeople DOT com

2003-05-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

Monday, May 05, 2003

If you believe in astrology, you may as well go the whole route and believe in god while you're at it.

The zodiac or the bible: both equally dubious.

And, like religion, mostly women are drawn to astrology.

The mumbo jumbo of the zodiacal crowd -- triads, houses, quadruplicity, elements, polarities, imprints, and signs -- is much akin to the theocratically authoritarian.

But you may as well read your morning horoscope for guidance as mumble to the ground or talk to the sky.

Astrology has about as much relevance as religion.

It's all, in short, bullshit.

(The "signs" of the zodiac are essentially and certainly historically meaningless: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces -- although the ignorant know their sign quicker than their social security number.)

Astrology is famously an ancient pseudoscience which holds that "the positions of the solar planets at the time an individual is born are somehow correlated with his ... personality, activities, preferences, and even major life events (accidents, marriages, divorces, etc.)." (See Chris Walker's Astrology Debunked , a well reasoned discussion on the subject.)

Science has proved over and over again that astrology simply doesn't "work."

Points to consider: historically the number of "signs" has varied from culture to culture, as well as their names. Also, life begins, apparently, at conception, not birth, rendering inane the whole horoscope racket.

Walker rightly calls astrology a random-word generation, which relies on an illusion in logical thought called personal validation. (And, yes, god is watching your every move; he has nothing better to do).

"[Validation] depends on the selective nature of memory. If we believe something is so, we tend to remember the events that support it, and forget those which don't."

Neither religious nor astrological superstitious nonsense will occupy this space further.

-30-

Aside: And if you believe in gurus, leaders (and the led) consider the painful case of Bill Bennett, conservative darling of the right, now exposed as a profligate gambler.

We're always suspicious of the pious, prudish, and puritanical -- and Bennett is all three -- and we have come to expect a tragic flaw or two lurking underneath such arrogant moralism.

What surprised us was Bennett's irrational choice of games: video poker and slot machines, which require no skill and guarantee the gamer's loss because of the huge house odds advantage.

We thought this jerk was at least minimally intelligent.

Smart gamblers engage games of skill, like blackjack, poker, and (arguably) craps.

Avoid those who preach morality and virtue -- both overrated pastimes.

Like gambling.

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

email: theoldbuzzard AT sunnyplaceforshadypeople DOT com

2003-04-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 01, 2003

Approaches our "Xmas," our own most revered holy day, which comes once a year on the first Saturday in May: the 129th Run for the Roses, the Kentucky Derby.

More than a horse race, more than an excuse for our old hometown of Louisville to stage its equivalent of Mardi Gras, more than a reason to get so drunk you can't see the horses (which you probably wouldn't anyway), this is a hallowed day.

At Churchill Downs on Saturday there will be frenzy, juleps, the ladies' hats, the jostling of the in-field crowd, the confusion and madness of touts crazed by drink.

This is an adult celebration. No children or other pets, please.

Watching a First Derby was a rite de passage for Louisville adolescents of a certain station.

Clad in white linen suits, sporting boaters, tie and shirt by the Brothers Brooks, we dutifully climbed the grand old staircase at the Downs to the Clubhouse (those steps since augmented, unfortunately, by an elevator, which renders the interior architecture less grand), mingled jovially, bet madly, drank too many juleps, and watched people watching the Sport of Kings.

We were convinced that we were at least Princes.

While we no longer journey to the Old Kentucky Home for the yearly pilgrimage, we do host a small party and gather in camaraderie and joy for a few short hours with friends.

(Secret of a great mint julep: a splash of mint sugar water, three ounces of Maker's Mark bourbon poured gently into a shaved ice-engorged silver julep cup, and topped with a powdered sugar mint leaf -- leaving one's nose suspiciously cocaine-white.)

We have no idea the names of the horses entered for the Race, but we appreciate watching their grace and beauty on the track.

We don't care which horse wins.

That is not what Derby Day is really about anyway.

-30-

email: theoldbuzzard AT sunnyplaceforshadypeople DOT com

2003-04-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 28, 2003

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has set its tawdry sights on a new and promising target for future handgun sales: women.

Josh Sugarman, in his thoughtfully written study The New Equality, has clearly defined one of the malicious agendas of the NRA: "If family ownership of self-defense handguns increases dramatically, the climate of opinion for drastic restriction of handguns will not come about."

There you have it: get the ladies happily firing on a target range (probably at photos of their husbands) and you make another public relations coup for one of the most powerful and perverted lobbies in Washington and the state capitols.

Is the NRA really more committed to preventing or stopping rape (as it so piously claims), or more focused on its aggressive platform to disperse more and more handguns (and volatile weapons) in the land?

We are, as usual, cynical.

This courting of women is an attempt to "humanize" the NRA, to make it seem less an ignorant, redneck paradise of louts devoted to Uzi's and other automatic weapons.

The NRA even audaciously argues that opposition to women owning handguns is an attempt to deny them their equality of freedom.

This reprehensible outfit even cloaks the argument in terms women understand: the language of abortion rights advocates on pro-choice [just the language, not the position].

In other words, women must choose to pack heat to fend off that worst fear: rape.

The good old NRA insists women need their protective weapons to shield themselves against gun-wielding, lady-snatching, marijuana-sucking, baton-carrying, God-unfearing, sex-dwelling, evil-doing, piston-driving, lechery-loving, rage-carrying, sin-embracing, low-living assorted terrorists and other virulent male detritus.

This "new-found firearms feminism" makes emotional purchase in arguments along this line (from Women & Guns magazine): "[I]f you are strong enough to carry a man's groceries and a man's baby, you are strong enough to carry a man's gun."

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), a front group for the NRA, has also conjured alluring ads aimed at encouraging gun toting women to "let them [presumably rapists] have it [full chamber]."

Smith & Wesson has a Ladysmith program featuring "four revolvers that manage to be elegant without sacrificing any of their practicality."

And in a Gun World Review of little .45's, the author, Tim Ferguson, observes his wife fancies color coordinating her gun to her outfit.

All of this, as Sugarman rightly notes, is part of a campaign of "subtle sexism of exploiting women's fears of rape ...."

As for us, we already know, from past experience, that women are deadly enough, without carrying.

-30-

UNRELATED, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:

Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Knopf $24.

email: theoldbuzzard AT sunnyplaceforshadypeople DOT com

2003-04-22T00:04:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 24, 2003

We've discovered a new cultural villain and, as well, a hero to combat it.

The miscreant is the micofilm/micofiche industry in league with sinister librarians acting -- as librarians often do -- ignorantly and insensitively by adopting the Orwellian slogan "To destroy is to preserve."

Object of destruction: old newspapers and books.

The savior: Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House. ISBN: 0375504443), an attack on curators compulsively driven to "save space" and prevent these primary sources from disintegrating with age.

Baker persuasively questions both the truth and validity of these assumptions.

He cites the painful case of one Verner Clapp [his very Dickinsenian name a call to arms] a former deputy director at the Library of Congress, who observed that the problem of libraries was to prevent the past from "clogging the channels of the present."

His solution: microfilm.

Based on Clapp's stubborn stupidity clothed in modernity, many librarians subscribed to the Brittle Books Program, in which "thousands of titles were 'disbinded' -- an exquisite library euphemism for 'ripped apart' -- to allow them to be photocopied."

The culprits among these institutions include the British Library, the Library of Congress, New York Public, and the sterile San Francisco Library, the latter dumping most of its printed newspaper records into the rubbish.

(Granted, many popular authors today are writing such drivel that their ultimate destruction may be foreordained. Among our candidates for oblivion -- were we to dare ravage any book -- would be most of the novels by, among others: Mary Higgins Clark, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert Parker, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and -- the worst of the lot -- Danielle Steel, or any fiction that Oprah Winfrey endorses.)

We embrace brittle paper, the tactility and appearance of which we rightly revere, along with a book's binding and its essential comradeship.

"I love the fragility too, it's like the discoloured stone of a cathedral; it cries out that it is old, but bore witness."

Baker even argues that paper actually lasts longer than commonly thought, that microfiche is inadequate as a substitute, and the hunger for space unnecessary.

Why can't we simply preserve the originals and find a solution to "disbinding" that allows for a backup microfiche -- for those who revel in that sort of deviation?

-30-

Review of Baker's new novel, A Box of Matches in The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2003.

Aside:

We remain fascinated with the words people use to look for topics in search engines. Consider these both bizarre and mundane:

games, song lyrics, music, wallpaper, clipart, greeting cards, pictures, baby names, yellow pages, quotes, sublime directory, used cars, airline tickets, white pages, people search, irs, pages, spanking, backgrounds, cracks, chat rooms, jennifer lopez, andrea thompson, free fonts.

aol, consumer reports, driving directions, e-cards, ellis island, pokemon, job search, holiday inn, currency converter, mortgage calculator, gardening, nasa, cartoons, ticketmaster, icons, literotica.com, famous quotes, movie reviews, Jennifer Lopez, madonna, white shadow, travelocity, Discount Travel, brooke burke.

Andrea Thompson, reverse lookup, sears, exchange rates, motorcycles, cinco de mayo, shoes, birthday cards, free movies, drivers, cards, mortgages, shareware, free music, wallpapers, models, china, pages, Harry Potter, death penalty, people finder, movie trailers, emulators, auto parts, science fair project.

Tattoo Designs, elephantlist, Southwest Airlines, japan, verizon, Dog breeds, nascar, credit cards, anna kournikova, espn, radio stations, guns, howard stern, tax forms, snakes, skateboarding, fibromyalgia, porno, pornno, gun control, Holocaust, thumbnails, sound effects, mad cow disease, flash, nokia, cnn.

simpsons, amtrak, child abuse, digital camera, fish, translator, kids, global warming, australia, names, bmw, dog breeds, free backgrounds, soccer, work at home, world war 2, shakespeare, Themes, Real Estate listings, free porno.

Weather Forecast, lord of the rings, quicktime, birds, spain, lupus, car audio, photos, midi, history, smoking, dodge, boylinks, harley davidson, serial numbers, toyota, money, legal, sports, naturist, graphics, humor.

We remain puzzled by the caprice of upper and lower case usages and variant spellings in the above. People are, indeed, quite strange.

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

email: theoldbuzzard AT sunnyplaceforshadypeople DOT com

2003-04-18T01:49:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 21, 2003

* Beating the Bishop
* Blueball baseball
* Cheating on your other hand
* Dropping the kids off at the pool
* Fishing for zipper trout
* Flogging your dumber brother
* Giving the seaman shore leave
* Giving yourself a helping hand
* Having a staff meeting
* Making the bald guy cry
* Milking the lizard
* Polishing the family jewels
* Romancing the bone
* Rubbing Buddha for good luck
* Sanding the obekisk
* Spackling the ceiling
* Spanking the monkey
* Tenderizing the tube steak
* Wanking
* Warming up the altar boy's dinner

All of these phrases [male: sorry ladies] refer to what was formerly pejoratively labeled "self-abuse" or "onanism," but more commonly known today as masturbation.

Yes, there is a Masturbation Lobby, too.

Yes, there is a Masturbation Agenda.

Jackinworld reports these survey results from their readers:

* Average frequency of masturbation drops from eleven per week at age 11, to five per week above age 35.

* 84% of respondents started to masturbate at or before age 13.

* Afterwards, 89% felt happy and relaxed; 10% felt guilty; 1% felt nervous.

* Among the very religious, the percentage who felt guilty was 19%.

We firmly recommend you carefully read the Americans for Purity
website for tips on "Winning the War on Masturbation."

However, for balance, we also commend you to this medical discusssion of the positive and healthy aspects of the sport at
Religious Tolerance.

Saskatoon Sex Therapists Bill and Carolyn Chernenkoff actually promote the practice, opining there's nothing healthier for hormone-crazed teenagers.

One such, when told in Hard-Shell Baptist Sunday School that masturbation would damage his eyesight, asked "Can I do it just until I need glasses?"

We just always thought it an awfully lonely recreation, but that the exercise was somehow good for the prostate.

-30-

Further reading: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, by Thomas W. Laqueur. Zone Press, 2003. $34.

Unrelated Must-read (on Bush and Karl Rove): Elizabeth Drew, "The Enforcer," The New York Review of Books , May 1, 2003

Highly Recommended: David Remnick, "War Without End," The New Yorker, April 21 and 28, 2003

Fascinating aside: selected top 100 of 500 most searched words on the internet (Tip of the hat)

Lyrics, jokes, maps, dictionary, games, weather, autos, jobs, chat, recipes, dogs, travel, health, poetry, flowers, survivor, taxes, horoscopes, kelly blue book, zip codes, free, fonts, hair styles, tatoos, freeware, book.

Free pics, diabetes, free stuff, holocaust, apartments, airlines, dogpile, auctions, love poems, blank, encyclopedia, cheats, Britney Spears, prom hairstyles, cloning, area codes, horoscope, news, passwords, house plans, harry potter, lesson plans, resume, quotations, mortgage rates.

Dogfart, boats, cats, thongs, erotica, blue book, personal finance, internal revenue, service, paintball, free wallpaper, hotels, eminem, black and white, civil war, ringtones, astrology, golf, hacking, real estate, careers, computers, map, animals, art.

Mexico, dog, digital cameras, drugs, cliff notes, women, photography, crack, excite, Free, drivers, stories, webcam, time, love, scholarships, disney, yoga, tires, newsgroups, time zones, vietnam war, easter, viagra, employment.

Recommended blogs:

boynton
merrindonahue
presurfer
proliferations
ravingatheist
theprocessofweedingout

email: theoldbuzzard AT sunnyplaceforshadypeople DOT com

2003-04-15T00:06:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 17, 2003

This is the fourth installment of an extended, reverential review of Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.
New York: Dorset Press, 1990 (originally pub. 1983). (Out of print but available discounted at on line outlets.)

In the chapter "About the House" Fussell observes that curved driveways are superior to straight ones, that beige gravel is more classy than white on asphalt, three car garages discreetly out of sight superior to a two car with its basketball backboard and hoop (very middle class), keeping a useless animal to tend your lawn is very upper, avoiding "the vulgar suggestion of thrift."

"Finicky [lawn] neatness ... is usually a sign of social anxiety, a tip-off that we are approaching middle-class premises."

If the lawn if full of permanent "objects" -- plaster gnomes or flamingos -- we are in proletarian territory.

"Upper-middle-class flowers are rhododendrons, tiger lillies, amaryllis, columbine, clematis, and roses (except for bright red ones.)"

Prole flowers are anything too red, geraniums, poinsettias, chrysanthemums, zinnias, dahlias, and petunias.

"The middle-class longing for dignity frequently expresses itself in columns or pilasters arguing the impressive weight of the edifice."

High prole porches feature a "glider" and even a refrigerator, which proclaims to passers that you are the owner of a costly appliance.

Wooden outdoor furniture is classiest, while plastic and aluminum tubing bespeak the vulgarity of the lower classes.

Uppers favor slightly dirty ordinary cars or old Jaguars and BMW's. Never, never a Rolls, Cadillac or Mercedes.

The middle class living room "can be identified immediately you're inside by the way it stints the space allotted to the bedrooms and backstage areas so that the living room can constitute a more ample theatre of display."

One almost indispensable item in an upper class setting is "the tabletop obelisk made of marble or crystal, a sly allusion not to Egypt -- there would be no class there -- but to Paris."

"If the living rooms of the top classes tend to ape art galleries and museums, those of the middle class and below resemble motel rooms."

As for watching television (hidden away by uppers -- if they even own one), "the more violent the body contact of the sport you watch, the lower your class."

And dogs are favored by those of higher chop, while the lower classes must be content with the less wasteful cat, waste being a hallmark of the upper class.

-30-

Miscellany

Best Thoroughbred Horses (roughly descending order)

Secretariat
Seattle Slew
Affirmed
War Admiral
Whirlaway
Count Fleet
Assault
Citation
Northern Dancer
Swaps

Best Painters (roughly descending order)

Leonardo da Vinci
Pablo Picasso
Paul Cezanne
Paul Gauguin
Vincent van Gogh
Henri Matisse
Claude Monet
Henri Rousseau
Georges Seurat
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Edouard Manet
Edgar Degas
Georges Braque
Mark Rothko
Jackson Pollock
Georgia O'Keeffe
Edward Hopper
Jan Vermeer
Willem de Kooning
Pierre Bonnard

Best U.S. Supreme Court Justices (roughly descending order)

Oliver W. Holmes
Louis D. Brandeis
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Felix Frankfurter
John Marshall
Abe Fortas
Thurgood Marshall
Earl Warren
Hugo L. Black
Charles E. Hughes

Best U. S. Presidents (in exact numerical order)

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt
3. James Madison
4. George Washington
5. Theodore Roosevelt
6. Harry S Truman
7. Lyndon B. Johnson
8. Thomas Jefferson
9. Woodrow Wilson
10.John F. Kennedy

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-04-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 14, 2003

One of the absolutely indispensable reference books -- although charmingly, humorously entertaining -- that we always keep to hand is Charles Harrington Elster's The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. (Unfortunately out of print but available discounted on line.)

This is decidedly not a dry "dictionary of pronunciation," but rather a collection of amusing mini-essays on many of the over one thousand words commonly mangled even by cultivated speakers of English.

And so easy to read and use -- without the perplexing diacritical marks found in lesser and more general dictionaries.

This gentleman's work is unalloyed pleasure to read.

We recommend it especially to the current crop of lazy televison news war reporters, none of whom seem able to pronounce cache [KASH (like cash)].

Familiar -- and frequently used -- words mispronounced (to one's embarrassment, we hope) by even the lettered include: abyss, accompanist, adjective, aged, almond, apartheid, aphrodisiac, aunt.

Barbiturate, bona fide, brothel, bulimia, chauvinism, chic, chocolate, cholesterol, clitoris, coitus, cupola, defendant, deja vu, detritus, deus ex machina, divisive, dour, either, err, eschew, fecal, fecund, fellatio, feral, fetish, finis, flaccid, forte, gala, genealogy, gerrymander, Gila, gratis, gynecology.

Halley's (comet), harass, herb, hygienic, incongruous, Iran, Iraq, irrelevant, Jesuit, Judaism, junta, ketchup, kimono, kudos, laissez-faire, largess, leisure, lingerie, long-lived, Louisville, Magdalen, mauve, milieu, minuscule, Missouri, modem, Moscow, Nabokov[,] Vladimir, naivete, Nazi,
New Orleans, nihilism.

Nuclear, nuptial, oblique, occult, Oedipus, paean, palliative, paradigm, patina, pecan, pianist, plethora, poinsettia, prerogative, prescient, prestigious, produce, quasi, quay, Quebec, quietus, rabid.

Realtor, recluse, repartee, restaurateur, rouge, sanguine, scenario, scimitar, scion, sentient, sequel, sherbet, short-lived, species, Spokane, steroid, succinct, sycophant, temperature, textile.

The, Tijuana, trauma, trespass, ukase, Uranus, vaginal, valet, Van Gogh, vice versa, victuals, vis-a-vis, wintry, Worcestershire, zodiacal, zoology.

Mispronouncing any of these words? Most of them?

Both your social standing and your literacy may be in jeopardy.

Best get this book.

-30-

Addendum (Unrelated):

Best U.S. Newspapers (in roughly descending order)

New York Times
Washington Post
New York Wall Street Journal
Los Angeles Times
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
St. Petersburg Times
Boston Globe
Portland Oregonian
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
San Jose Mercury News

Best U.S. Major Circulation Magazines (in roughly descending order)

Newsweek
Rolling Stone
Time
Playboy
U.S. News & World Report
Southern Living
Forbes
Smithsonian
Sunset
Gourmet

Best Cable TV Networks (in roughly descending order)

A&E
CNN
C-SPAN
AMC
Discovery Channel
TLC (The Learning Channel)
CNBC
VH1
USA
The Weather Channel

Best Record Long-Run Broadway Plays (in roughly descending order)

Tobacco Road
A Chorus Line
The Phantom of the Opera
La Cage aux Folles
Evita
Harvey
Grease
Cabaret
Mame
Arsenic and Old Lace

Best Motion Picture Directors (roughly descending order)

Louis Malle
Orson Welles
Alfred Hitchcock
Francis Ford Coppola
Robert Aldrich
Sydney Pollack
Ingmar Bergman
Jean-Luc Godard
Francois Truffaut
Jean Renoir

Best Non-Profit Theatre Companies (in roughly descending order)

Joseph Papp Public Theatre (NY)
Guthrie Theatre (Minneapolis)
Actors Theatre of Louisville
Alley Theatre (Houston)
Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland)
American Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco)
Lincoln Center Theatre (NY)
Pasadena Playhouse (CA)
Huntington Theatre Company (Boston)
ACT Theatre (Seattle)

World's Best Sports (in roughly descending order)

Horseracing
Yachting
Tennis
Polo
Swimming & Diving
Freestyle Skiing
Figure Skating
Ice Hockey
Soccer
Baseball

Best U.S. First Ladies (in descending order)

Eleanor Roosevelt
Lady Bird Johnson
Jacqueline Kennedy
Edith Wilson
Hillary Clinton

World's Best Religions (descending order)

Taoists
Confucianists
Buddhists
Sikhs
Shintoists

World's Best Cities (in absolute and precise descending order)

Paris
New York
London
Rome
San Francisco
Barcelona
Amsterdam
Venice
Dublin
Sydney

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-04-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 10, 2003

This is the third installment of a reverential review of the iconoclast Paul Fussell's study, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Dorset Press, 1999. (Out of print but available discounted on-line.)

"In general, good-looking people marry up [the social ladder] ... and the insecure and ugly tend to marry down," notes Jilly Cooper (a fellow sociologist of Fussell's).

And the less you smile, the more upper your class.

"Regardless of one's height [the classy are tall and thin] having an ass that protrudes is low, as is having ... very little neck."

And girth travels east to west and north to south, and the fattest live where you have recent immigration and "ancestral memories of hunger closest."

Layering of clothes is upper.

Scarves worn by women are upper.

"If navy is the upper-middle-class color, purple [polyester] is the prole equivalent."

"Clothes are classier the more pastel or faded, and materials are classier the more they consist of anything that was alive."

Yes, the classy wear only natural fibers.

Then there is legible clothing, so favored by the lower classes, clothing that barks some ad or slogan.

Or the wearing of baseball caps, especially when the plastic fastener faces front. If the cap is also "legible," the lower the class.

"[T]he prole associates himself with an enterprise the world judges successful, and thus, for the moment, he achieves some [self] importance," by sporting T shirts with "Budweiser" or "Valvoline" emblazoned thereon.

"The upper and upper-middle classes like to appear in old clothes, as if to advertise how much of conventional [middle class] dignity they can afford to throw away ...."

Hopelessly middle class: died hair, collar stays, well washed automobiles, neat looking attache cases, full Windsor knots, two button suits, "space age" watches, black raincoats, "legible" neckties, poorly fitting coats round the shoulders, V-neck sweaters, "bola" ties, Formica kitchens, and "Colonial" or "Cape Cod" houses.

(Only the middle and some of the lower refer to their dwellings as "homes." The uppers call them, less grandly, houses.)

Finally, Fussell reminds us that uppers venerate the past and the archaic.

"Classy people never deal with the future."

-30-

Rants Planned for the Coming Year Include These Topics:

Academy Awards, Austin Powers, Backstreet Boys, Big Brother, Blair Witch Project, Carmen Electra, Dale Earnhardt, Daytona 500, Drudge Report, Foot & Mouth Disease, Half Life, HotBot, Howard Sterne, Israel & Palestine, Justin Timberlake, Leonardo Di Caprio, Limp Bizkit, Mariah Carey, Metallica, Michael Jordan, Miss World, Nascar.

Nicole Kidman, NY Yankees, Pamela Anderson, Penelope Cruz, Periodic Table, Pregnancy, Ralph Nader, Russell Crowe, Shania Twain, Solar Eclipse, South Park, Super Bowl, Surfing, Survivor, Swimsuits, Teen, Tour de France, UFO's, Wrestling, Zelda.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-04-04T00:02:00.000-08:00

Monday, April 07, 2003

Comes now the moment to confront the inadequately self-taught Ayn [rhymes with whine] Rand (nee Alice Rosenbaum), author (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) of little or no literary merit, and wacky "philosopher" (Objectivism), who weirdly advocated oversimplified versions of personal freedom and the free market (not in themselves objectionable at all).

She's more confusingly contradictory (and often ignorant) than the average "libertarian," many of whom are uncomfortable with her inclusion in their ranks.

"The harsh certainty of an autodidact and self-made person, and the high handed authoritarian manner of Rand's personality, worked against her case, her cause, and her life," opines the perceptive Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., in a superb article "Ayn Rand, Anti-Communism and the Left", for which this rant is grateful.

You, too, can learn the essentials of Rand's pseudo-philosophy of Objectivism .

Or you can wade through the ideological morass of her novels, with their wooden mouthpieces, mostly dedicated to good old-fashioned selfishness.

These are decidedly not literature -- or not any literature we'd care to linger over -- but just badly dramatized philosophy.

We frankly grew dismissively weary of Rand and her eerie obsessions very quickly.

As Ross observes, "Rand is better taken as a goldmine for ideas than as authoritative doctrine."

Enough said.

-30-

Very Highly Recommended: (Unrelated) Norman Mailer, "Only in America," The New York Review of Books, March 27, 2003.

Highly recommended (but unrelated): Louis Menand, "The Thin Envelope: Why College Admissions has become Unpredictable," The New Yorker, April 7, 2003.

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-04-01T00:29:00.000-08:00

Thursday, April 03, 2003

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."

-- T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, "The Burial of the Dead"

"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in;
it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth."

-- W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939)"

April is also -- maybe you guessed -- National Poetry Month, an American spring ritual usually entirely ignored by everyone.

With perhaps good reason.

Sponsored (in part) by corporate behemoths like large chain bookstores (no friends to poets) and the Academy of American Poets, their slogan might as well be "Poetry's not so bad, really."

Charles Bernstein, in his trenchant piece, "Against National Poetry Month" suggests that the project might as well be "National Mainstream Poetry Month."

This scam is to promote poetry that is safely unchallenging, generic, bland and "morally positive," or "easy listening [which] just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant ...."

It's dilution of art in the service of access.

"[F]ind poetry that more closely resembles the fast and easy reading experiences of most Americans under the slogans -- Away with Difficulty! Make Poetry Palatable for the People!"

"Poetry is very much alive when it finds ways of doing things in a media-saturated environment that only poetry can do, but very much dead when it just retreads the same old same old."

At the very least, you read some swell snatches of Eliot and Auden so far this month.

-30-

Note: we are greatly indebted to the excellent Charles Berstein, author of My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-28T10:46:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 31, 2003

Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

This delightful, entertaining and exceedingly well written book somehow escaped our notice when it was published last year.

We shall now give it its due.

As Joe Epstein opines in his Preface, "Snobbery, like bacteria, is found everywhere...."

Such a gift for humor, wit, and language Epstein unfurls, as in his description of boastful San Franciscans "extolling ... their own city as unbearable Bayarrea."

Integral to all snobbery is the zero sum game: it's not enough to just win. Somebody else must lose.

Or, "acceptance from those above, rejection of those below -- must be in place for the upward-looking snob to feel the full elation of his victory."

Elitism is summarily dealt with in this distinction: "the elitist desires the best; the snob wants other people to think he ... is associated with the best."

The author visits the usual snobbish venues: genealogy, schooling, profession, as well as the social, financial, and institutional.

And, of course, one's taste gives away one's social class.

"In some circles, to speak well of, say, Whitaker Chambers, Andrew Wyeth, Wayne Newton, nuclear power, or processed cheese ... is considered a grave social lapse. 'She is the kind of person,' I once heard a woman say with deadly disdain about another woman, 'who regularly misuses the word hopefully.'"

We won't even go into Epstein's amusing asides into reverse snobbism.

One of the enduring lessons of the book: "[The snob] doesn't understand that one of the best means of acquiring prestige and carrying status is not to give a damn about them, for the paradox of prestige and status is that the more one hungers for them, the more elusive they become."

Not the least interesting of the book's charms is the well read author's selective quotations from those well acquainted with snobbery in all its vagaries.

"'Impotence and sodomy are socially o.k.,' wrote Evelyn Waugh, 'but birth control is flagrantly middle class.'"

Very tellingly, Epstein also chronicles the new snobbery attached to victim's groups: "African Americans, Jews, women, homosexuals, Third World immigrants, the handicapped, and just about every ethnic group going except the poor old Wasps."

Notable authorities on snobbery are also cited, among them: Joseph Alsop, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Cleveland Amory, Truman Capote, Henry James, John O'Hara, Vance Packard, Marcel Proust, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gore Vidal, Andy Warhol, and Edith Wharton.

We would agree with Epstein that "'Live and let live' remains the most sensible of mottos, and so much less demanding than the Golden Rule."

-30-

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

Another (unrelated) must-read: Joseph E. Stiglitz, "Bush's Tax Plan --- The Dangers," The New York Review of Books, March 13, 2003.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thursday, March 27, 2003

A LIST OF LISTS: OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS (in roughly descending order within categories)

MOVIES

Citizen Kane
Casablanca
The Third Man
Sunset Boulevard
On The Waterfront
Dr. Strangelove
Psycho
The Maltese Falcon
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Bad Day at Black Rock

ACTORS

James Cagney
Gregory Peck
Marlon Brando
Humphrey Bogart
George C. Scott
Jack Nicholson
Robert DeNiro
Paul Newman
Al Pacino
Robert Mitchum

ACTRESSES

Katherine Hepburn
Bette Davis
Joanne Woodward
Maggie Smith
Meryl Streep
Jessica Tandy
Susan Sarandon
Gwyneth Paltrow
Emma Thompson
Kathy Bates

GRAMMY WINNERS

The Beatles
Aretha Franklin
Bee Gees
Billy Joel
U2
Santana
Celine Dion
Eric Clapton
Whitney Houston
Bob Dylan

AMERICAN NOVELS

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
All The King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
A Death in the Family, James Agee

AMERICAN DRAMATISTS

Eugene O'Neill
Tennessee Williams
Edward Albee
Arthur Miller
David Mamet
Neil Simon
William Inge
Thornton Wilder
Archibald MacLeish
Wendy Wasserstein

AMERICAN POETS

W. H. Auden
Emily Dickinson
William Carlos Williams
James Merrill
Philip Levine
Gary Snyder
James Ashberry
Sylvia Plath
Marianne Moore
Charles Simic

PHILOSOPHERS

Lao-Tzu (Tao)
Arthur Schopenhauer
Socrates
Albert Camus
Rene Descartes
Immanuel Kant
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Santayana
Jean-Paul Sarte
Ludwig Wittgenstein

-30-

And Recommended Blogs (in capricious order)

blackwoodchannel
presurfer
webraw
boynton
mandarindesign
merrindonahue
brianhughes
ravingatheist
proliferations
theprocessofweedingout
reachm
fynnegan
birdonthemoon
nightmareboy

Additional (last minute) recommendation:

"Gays and Genes," by Andrew Hacker. The New York Review of Books, March 27, 2003.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 24, 2003

It wouldn't do to neglect the pansexuals; they certainly don't neglect us.

Definition: a completly sexual person (Pan = all) in possession of "all" kinds of sexual shadings, inclinations, and possibilities -- heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, autoerotica, sado-masochistic, fetishist, etc.

The Pansexual Lobby proposes that these natural tendencies can erupt at any time, and that children are by nature polimorphoperverse [polymorphous] -- man as animal with several sexual permutations.

Children's curiousity leads them to discover touching their genitals, playing with their mothers, masturbating, exploring their excrement.

Later, they "play doctor," exploring joyfully, we are assured, the functions of the bodies of their friends.

All quite normal, says the Lobby.

Such "perverse" actions, alien to an organized (and highly puritanical) society, are later mostly psychologically repressed -- or made taboo.

Now, the Pansexual Agenda: no repression of any pansexual options and living freely (with, we trust, some modicum of common sense).

To ban these instincts only thus creates frustration, resulting in violent, anti-social behavior.

Very heady stuff.

And it sounds terribly exhausting and awfully effete, leading to a bad case of enervation.

We think we'll just skip the pansexual revolution.

At least for now.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-18T00:05:00.000-08:00

Thursday, March 20, 2003

Think of Calvinism as less a religion and more a system of economic values.

(We are indebted for many of these views -- and certainly the many direct quotations -- to Edward Luttwak's excellent book, Turbo Capitalism. New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Out of print but available online at the usual outlets.)

The three binding rules of Calvinism: "Rule Number One is for high-earning winners. Rule Number Two is for the great mass of working stiffs of varying affluence or poverty but all losers in their own eyes. Rule Number Three is for the non-Calvinists among the losers, most of them poor, who refuse to accept Rule Number Two."

Not only is wealth no impediment to virtue, but a sign of divine favor for the luckily pre-destined. (Rule Number One!)

(So preacheth Calvinism.)

"Far from being condemned for greed, winners are held in the highest regard, and the greatest winners of all have almost an odor of sanctity."

"Even at play, Calvinist winners continue to enjoy themselves as little as possible."

(Reminds us of the puritans and their Republican thin-lipped coterie who absolutely cannot tolerate anyone else having a swell time.)

"Why should the poor envy those who enrich themselves if they [don't] enjoy their wealth...?"

(Of course: many do.)

"[F]ailure is not the result of misfortune or injustice, but of divine disfavor. Just as the ability to become very rich is next to sanctity, an inability to do so is next to sin, indeed almost sinful in itself." (Rule Number Two!)

(Getting ridiculous enough for you?)

"[L]osers blame themselves rather than the system, hating themselves instead of resenting the winners.... The result is that in a country that is literally of the winners, the losers have no political expression of their own. Nobody denies it to them -- it is the losers themselves who want so much to identify with winners that they deny their votes to any candidate who tries to represent their interests."

(They're just the wannabes who hanker endlessly for riches and need to identify with the "monied political party.")

(In other words, they vote against their own economic self-interest, usually by casting Republican ballots. This is why there is no "class warfare" that the Republicans love to invoke when giving tax breaks to the very rich.)

"For the uneducated there is only one possible form of expression: to break the law, by engaging in criminal activities such as muder, armed robbery, violent assault, rape, and the smoking of marijuana." [Italics added.]

In other words, "[i]f drugs were decriminalized, on what grounds could non-Calvinist losers be locked up?"

The "Calvinist System: winners diminish envy by self-restraint, compliant losers blame themselves for their fate, and both groups vent their frustrations by demanding harsh punishment for rebellious losers."

So that's how it works....

-30-

Highly recommended Mutual Fund Family: Vanguard Group

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

The rant appears Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-03-14T07:50:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 17, 2003

(This is the second -- of eight -- installments of a reverential review of the iconoclast Paul Fussell's book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Dorset Press, 1990. Out of print but available online at the usual outlets.)

One should be conscious and cautious of his ZIP code in relation to his class.

The socially most correct (i.e., most Ango-Saxon) are those codes representing such august places as Newport, RI; Haddam, CT; and Bar Harbor, ME.

"Los Angeles would rank low less because it's ugly and banal than because it was owned by the Spanish for so long."

Uppers favor places which have had little or no population increases since about 1940. That excludes the vile Las Vegas, provincial Phoenix, and sprawling San Diego.

"Another sign of class desirability might be the absence of facilities for bowling."

Fussell asserts it's really much easier to identify the undesirable or socially impossible.

Places That Won't Do:

* Anywhere religious fundamentalism flourishes, or where prophecy or "miracle" occurred.
* Army towns.
* Places sporting less than a quality newspaper.
* Florida (except maybe Palm Beach).
* California (except for perhaps San Francisco).
* Where large numbers of bowling alleys beckon, for instance: Midland, TX; Peoria, IL; Alexandria, VA; Billings, MT; Dubuque, IA; Owensboro, KY; Akron, OH.
* Bible college towns such as Greenville, SC; Wheaton, IL; Garden Grove, CA; Lynchburg, VA.
* Just generally unaccetable: St. Petersburg and Miami, FL; Long Beach, CA; Parma, OH; Evergreen, CO; Dallas, TX.

You get the idea.

Now, the middle class is less defined by its income than by its "earnestness and psychic insecurity .... [T]hey remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right."

C. Wright Mills, the Grand Old Man of Sociopolitics, noted the affliction of the middle class was "status panic."

One always finds the snobs in the middle.

"No member of the middle class would expect that anyone is copulating in the afternoon instead of the evening."

The middles embrace optimism and self-improvement -- and laugh at their own jokes.

They prefer polyester to natural fiber.

Timid and conventional, they believe that erecting a tall fence or hedge is an affront to the neighbors.

In other words, the middle class man is scared.

All the time.

-30-

Further highly recommended reading:

Paul Fussell, Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002

Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-11T00:16:00.000-08:00

Thursday, March 13, 2003

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

-- Second Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Now approaches spring, the killing season at junior and senior high schools everywhere in America.

Do we doubt we'll suffer another Columbine this year?

The National Rifle Association (NRA) practically guarantees it by buying the best paid lobbyists, bribing here, cajoling there, and implementing their pro-gun agenda, hiding behind and actively distorting the Second Amendment's meaning.

This bizarre and very dangerous organization prefers to ignore the introductory clause of that sentence in the Constitution.

The Second does not stipulate that, carte blanch, anyone can amass as many of whatever kind of weapons he wants.

This kind of firepower rightfully is reserved for the "Militia."

(We have never seen the need to keep firearms to hand, except for our modest BB gun, which we use to sting, not kill, the flying rats -- pigeons -- who shit in the pool.)

Look at the Board of Directors (not necessarily the current Board), including these lunar luminaries:

Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), keynoter at the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, opposed to interracial marriage, Jews, the welfare state, and white genocide. (Barr knew to whom he was speaking.)

Jeff Cooper, gung-ho columnist for the studly Guns & Ammo magazine, which has advocated gang wars in L.A. (to thin the undesirable populations), considers slavery a natural condition of man, and refers to "Nips," "Oranggautengs" [sic] (South Africa), "slant eyes," and "ragheads."

Grover Norquist, ardent foe of affirmative action, who helped found the American Civil Rights Institute to combat such evil.

Ted Nugent, opponent of a black, civilized South Africa, and so very fond of using the "N" word.

Harry Thomas, who apparently believes the purpose of the Second is to threaten the federal government, a la the "Waco incident" of the 1990's.

These are a few of the good old boys who will help produce this spring's Columbine.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-08T06:50:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 10, 2003

We abhor reminding Bush of the politically unpleasant, especially when he ferociously enjoys these delicious days just before he beats the War Drum.

But he and his House Machiavelli, Karl Rove, have a righteously religious right to pander to. (We're told that Bush really believes the Christ myths.)

The old country club Republicans, whom the evangelically frenzied embarrass, as well as corporate and "monied" interests, have always gorged at the Republican table.

Republicans now court Hispanics, especially conservative, attractive young men being groomed for the Supreme Court.

Republicans fail with Afro-Americans. And will continue to do so.

Still, there's a considerably big tent here.

This raises the question of how to serve these different -- sometimes competing -- constituencies, all of which must be placated, catered to, bribed, and somehow brought together for the 2004 Coronation.

Now, the crazed religious won't tolerate discussion, deviation or dissent.

These are the thin-lipped, closed minded who essentially practice one issue politics.

And they don't understand the Grand Deceptions often licentiously but routinely conducted in the marriage of big business to big government.

These folks are busy impatiently agitating for abortion's demise and prayers restored to schools.

And they don't want payoffs to the rich and the CEO's to intrude on their agenda.

They also do not get the "oil thing."

For example, Bush has trouble defending his friendship with Saudi Arabia (that's a wicked story!) to these evangelical dimwits, like Falwell.

They also despise not only Blacks but Latinos, or any people of color, for that matter.

These are the same jerks who financed Southern private "Christian" academies to remain racially untainted.

Their narrow interests do not often intersect with the aspirations of immigrants -- or of the corporate culture.

Rove and Bush have so far managed a balancing act among all these groups.

But we wonder how long the Faithful will allow themselves to be exploited in the service of corporate greed.

This Big Tent could collapse at any time.

How pretty to think so.

-30-

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-03-04T00:20:00.000-08:00

Thursday, March 06, 2003

To move from one social class to another in America is very difficult, since one tends to remain irrevocably bound to the caste in which one was born. The class lines are rigid: make no mistake about that.

Paul Fussell, in his brilliant, clever and insightful book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Dorset Press, 1990, out of print but available online at the usual outlets) identifies nine such classes in the U.S.

We are indebted to its author for our extended, reverential review of his iconoclastic conclusions.

Historically, some argued for only two classes: rich and poor, employer and employed, landlord and tenant, bourgeois vs. proletariat.

Couth or uncouth.

Those who can afford a house and those who can't.

Those who own cars and those who must rely on public transportation.

Those who get the sugar and those who get the shit.

Two sorts of work: safe and dangerous.

Those who fight our wars and those who don't. (Cf. Vietnam.)

(Anyone for a round of class warfare?)

More popular is the three class division.

In the 19th century, the sturdy intellectual, Matthew Arnold, parted the classes thusly: upper (Barbarians), middle (Philistines), and lower (Populace, or proletarian).

Arnold called the upper Barbarians because they "never ... had any ideas to trouble them."

Today's euphemism for lower class is working class.

Fussell's nine classes are:

"Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle

Middle

High proletraian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian

Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight"

Money isn't the marker here.

It's taste, style and awareness, or as Russell Lyne has it: high brow, middle brow and low brow.

Where money does count isn't the amount, but whether it's inherited (old money) -- or not.

As Fussell cannily observes, upper and lower have much more in common than either with the middle.

Future rants on this topic (eight in total, one appearing about every two or three weeks in the coming months) will explore Fussell's exactitude as to one's betters and who actually comprises the higher orders.

Meanwhile, know that every time you appear, speak and move, as well as what you wear (and how you wear it), will betray your class origin instantly.

-30-

Another viewpoint

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

Unrelated aside: I may be old, but George Bush is the worst kind of bible buzzard. See this week's Newsweek.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-28T01:16:00.000-08:00

Monday, March 03, 2003

Theodosius I, Emperor of Rome in A.D. 394, after concluding that the Olympics were rife with corruption and bribery, had the good sense to ban them.

Thankfully, they stayed banned for about 1,500 years, until they were revived in the 19th century as a surrogate battlefield for warring city-states in Europe.

Where is Theodosius now when we need him?

The Olympics, in all of its event-judged (subjective evaluation) contests, are either rigged or blatantly open to bribery and extortion.

And even in so-called objective matches there looms the nasty business of anabolic steroids.

The recent skating scandals were just like a mole on top of a huge hump of oozing Augean Fix.

Why are we even surprised?

The Olympians just imitate the pros of sports scams: football, basketball, hockey, and baseball --- many of them arguably "fixed."

We won't even dwell on the bribery of top IOC officials (with helicopter rides and plastic surgery!) by various cities snarling at each other in order to profit by "hosting" this nonsense.

Perhaps the only solution is to judge Olympic sports by objective measures only.

Or simply stop pretending these are amateur events and recognize them as professionally and officially corrupt.

Or, better still, get rid of these political games entirely.

And what is this business of a "Gay Olympics?"

The good old regular Olympics is so gay that the thin lipped potentates who run this allegedly non-profit outfit have even been known to blush ever so coyly when the "Games" are at their gayest.

Where are you, Theodosius?

-30-

Unrelated Must Read: Timothy Garton Ash, "Anti-Europeanism in America," The New York Review of Books, Feb. 13, 2003.

Recommended Blogs:

(In whimsical order)

blackwood channel
presurfer
brianhughes
webraw
mandarindesign
reachm
fynnegan
ravingatheist
merrindonahue
proliferations
nightmareboy
vaguenoodle
theprocessofweedingout
birdonthemoon
boynton

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

Thursday, February 27, 2003

We discovered an authoritatively fascinating article (and commend it to you), by the insightful Whoopee Sue Feinstein, on the stereotypes attorneys exploit in jury selection in their unparalleled greedy zeal to prevail at trial --- at the cost of justice thwarted, perverted, and denied.

These generalizations sweeten the wallets of litigators who abuse them in achieving their only goal --- winning.

Justice has nothing to do with it --- or them.

The foundation for these generally acknowledged "truths" among the savvy shysters who employ them is social class, race, and ethnicity.

The DEFENSE prefers these types:

* The heavy, slow moving and round-faced (tolerant, lacking in self-control).

* "Emotional" Latins.

* The easily swayed, the confused, the ignorant.

* Jews --- sentimental and "liberal."

* Women --- "victim sensitive."

* Salesmen, actors, artists and writers --- those who have "suffered" from their exposure to life's seamier venues.

* Blacks --- sympathetic to criminals.

* The Old --- enough to finally understand human frailties.

PROSECUTORS demand these types:

* Conventional, white homeowners with steady jobs.

* The thin, underweight, and delicate.

* Orientals --- conservative.

* Bankers (and all their ilk) for their flinthearted reserve.

* Men --- cold blooded.

* Bureaucrats --- conformists.

* Engineers and mathematicians --- logical.

* Irish-Americans --- cozily comfortable with "law and order."

* Yuppies --- terrified of criminals, in love with themselves and their property, and indifferent to suffering.

These conflicting choices sometimes cancel out each other in the heat of voir dire challenges by opposing counsel. It's a crap shoot.

And jury selection consultants -- for those who can afford their pricey aroma -- are hired to study prospective jurors' backgrounds, appearance, and body language.

In short, as the old lawyer joke goes: "In England, the trial begins after the jury is selected. In the U.S., the trial is over after the jury is selected."

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

2003-02-21T14:29:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 24, 2003

Why do entertainers, more specifically actors, hitchhike on their celebrity by pretending to more knowledge of world affairs and politics than their generally acknowledged level of stupidity entitles them to?

We make no distinction between the ephemeralities of liberals and conservatives, although the former is more vocal at the moment.

A dumb actor pontificating political is still dumb. He's just reading a different kind of script.

Of course, anyone who would act solely on the received wisdom of a celebrity is a fool.

Many are the foolish.

The acting craft traditionally was about one step up from carnival barking. No one took these people seriously.

Least of all themselves.

They were there to be seen, not heard. To entertain, not to wax political.

And that's where they properly belong, in their place, imprisoned behind the proscenium arch.

They themselves are so self-seduced by the fame and fawns that they assert an ill-conceived claim to proselytize on all sorts of issues. (We do acknowledge their First Amendment right.)

This is elitism in extremis.

Actors are authorities only on the unreal.

So be still: George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Rosie O'Donnell, Sean Penn, Janeane Garofolo.

Stay mute: Charlton Heston, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Selleck, Kevin Costner.

As for us, the unknown and non-actors --- we oppose the Bush Inevitable War No.1.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-18T13:01:00.000-08:00

Thursday, February 20, 2003

No surprise that none of the ten most popular given names -- boys and girls -- from 1880-1889 matched even one name from 1990-1999.

(See onomasticist Cleveland Kent Evans.)

Here's the lineup in the early decade.

Boys: John, William, Charles, George, James, Frank, Joseph, Harry, Henry, Edward.

Girls: Mary, Anna, Elizabeth, Catherine, Margaret, Emma, Bertha, Minnie, Florence, Clara.

Takes you back, doesn't it?

The most startling changes are in the girls' names.

Compare these from the most recent decade to the list above: Ashley, Jessica, Sarah, Brittany, Emily, Kaitlyn, Samantha, Megan, Brianna, Katherine.

Ashley, Brittany, Kaitlyn, Brianna?

Perhaps in a hundred years these will seem as quaint as Emma, Bertha, Minnie, Florence (or Hortense, Mabel, and Helga).

The current boys' list is much duller: Michael, Christopher, Matthew, Joshua, Nicholas, Jacob, Andrew, Daniel, Brandon, Tyler.

Now that we're naming names ....

What possesses some of the newly married (or even unmarried cohabitors) to take up hyphenation in hideously combining their last names?

Damned hyphenates. A la Alice Cooper-Jones, for example.

Just retain the original last names and not amalgamate them so grotesquely. (It will not dilute the marriage vows if one party fails to take the other's surname.)

Why inflict this cumbersome hybrid on the language, the already burdened bureaucracy, and possibly even the couple's issue?

And that's the name of that game.

-30-

The rant appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

Unrelated Recommendation: Louis Menand, "Paris, Texas: How Bonnie and Clyde stole the movies," The New Yorker, Feb. 17 & 24, 2003. Article unavailable online, but background is: From the Archive

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 17, 2003

Let's dissect one of the most sinister organizations in the country --- the American Automobile Association (AAA).

Yes, that outfit that delivers a can of gas to the stranded or hands you a highlighted map and a tour book.

Sounds benign.

This enterprise vilely exploits its image as a friendly, consumer-driven purveyor of highway information and safety in order to undermine or destroy environmental protections.

Washington (and the biggest corporations) sleep cunningly with it for its political clout, with its millions in annual members' dues (and profit-making income from insurance, travel and related services).

"Drivers clutching this [AAA] card as a national talisman against automotive calamity should know that, in doing so, they lend support to an agenda in the form of road building, against pollution control and even auto safety measures that help deepen [that] automotive calamity afflicting the nation as a whole." (Ken Silverstein, "Smitten with a Club," Harper's Magazine, May 2002.)

AAA is aggressively hostile toward the environment.

For example, they opposed new rules that required cleaner exhaust systems, and resisted requiring states to reduce smog levels.

This saintly conglomerate has even fought mandatory air bags!

Of course, as a AAA member you're not supposed to know (or care) about these shenanigans.

Their lobbying is a closely held secret. It will not surface in their slick monthly magazine.

Clarence Ditlow, of the Nader Center, has suggested that even "AAA's dogged opposition to gas tax increases has nothing to do with saving its members money. Maybe it's just because higher gas prices [would] mean fewer cars on the road. Maybe it's just business."

The AAA is a truly classic exemplar of the wolf in sheep's clothing.

-30-

The rant now appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

Thursday, February 13, 2003

And a Happy Valentine's Day to you, too.

We take the occasion to enthusiastically embrace private, rank nakedness.

We're mighty comfortable sleeping, eating, walking, swimming and making sex without raiment's restraint.

Sure, we enjoy proper clothing in the ordered world of civility -- even formal attire.

But here at the scatter formality is rare, clothing even rarer.

At home we're permanently basically bare.

It feels good and offends no one.

Oh, we'll don shorts and an old shirt to answer the almost never rung (thankfully) doorbell, or to fetch the morning papers, or to grab curbside mail.

But inside and on the walled grounds, we stride, if not proudly, at least boldly stark butt naked. (The climate is usually very forgiving.)

We don't frequent nudist bivouacs, beaches, or bathhouses.

We just luxuriate in the freedom of deshabille.

You would think all this exposition should logically lead to some shrewdly philosophical conclusions about stripping.

We offer none -- save the muted exhilaration of knowing that being naked is not only natural, but the best disguise.

We could mouth some bromidic homilies about it, or quote Congreve and declare "no mask like open truth to cover lies." (Or our less than monumental endowments.)

But the plain truth: we just enjoy the freedom.

And any freedom in today's treacherous times in the U.S.A. is indeed rare.

-30-

A VALENTINE GIFT FOR VALUED READERS

In keeping with a recent promise to rant on excrement (with self-confidence), we are indebted to the brilliant Bob Schroeck in this fertile field, and we joyously recommend his excellent website for his complete and exhaustive excremental compendium of "The Ideology and Religion Shit List."

Space permits only a few fetid fragrances.

Baptist Fundamentalism: Shit happens because the Bible says so.
Blondism: I'm stupid as shit.
Capitalism: Shit happens, and it'll cost you!
Christian Fundamentalism: The belief that Hell is where everyone must mind his own shit.
Euphemismism: Caca happens.
Evangelicalism: God has a wonderful plan for your shit.
Feminism: Men are shit.
Hedonism: Fuck that shit; let's party!
Jehovah's Witnesses: Let me in your house and I'll tell you why shit happens.
Marines: It's not just shit, it's an adventure.
Momism: You'll eat this shit and like it!
Mormonism: Your shit is shit, but our shit is the ONE TRUE shit.
Nihilism: Everything is shit.
Patriotism: My shit, right or wrong.
Politically Correctism: Nutritionally Corrected Output happens.
Reaganism, Nancy: Just say, "Shit Happens."
Republicanism: We earned our shit.
Surrealism: Shit is shiny and shaped like a Buick.
Yuppieism: It's my shit! All mine!

-30-

The rant now appears on Mondays and Thursdays.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 10, 2003

Bush of the Sneer and the Smirk continues his imbecilic offenses against the commonweal, giving us no pause in our righteous vituperation.

He's the eternal frat rat peering at us on television with such mock earnestness, as he relentlessly turns the country toward the nightmare of war, 1984, and the Depression of the 1930's.

(And all this color-coded alert nonsense is the sound of Republicans covering their ass.)

Bush creepily pursues the New Republican Agenda of war, deficits, taxes, and the death of social and environmental programs.

Not since FDR (and Reagan) has such a blitzkrieg of new regulations and legislation rained down on Congress.

This is the same president who ignores or nullifies international treaties, seemingly at whim, and then courts and bribes the international community when he needs them.

Thank whatever gods for the Old Europe (France and Germany), reluctant to endorse Bush's military adventurism.

At home he's busily building a utopia for the wealthy, where they can comfortably thrive untaxed, untouchable, and unaware.

Deficits he will grow for both the war machine and those tax subsidies for the rich.

These debts will start hurting around November, 2004 (but after his coronation in that election) in the form of higher interest rates.

No more cheap re-fi's and no help at all to the dying stock market. (It will never recover. Trillions have been lost on his watch.)

Apart from giving big teat to the affluent, he will dismantle Medicare and Medicaid to compensate his old pals: the insurance companies and the HMO's.

His pension reform (including Social Security) will abolish "fixed" options, so the lower to lower middle classes will be coerced into a cadaverous market.

His environmental plan entails the destruction of most protections, including "contracting out" jobs, like Park Ranger, and drilling in Alaska. (The same idiot who frisks you at airports will now escort you around Yellowstone.)

He will radically change (with Democratic collusion on this) the bankruptcy laws to favor the wealthy.

Perhaps we'll even rediscover the joys of debtors' prisons, and of course the equivalent of concentration camps for unaborted minority youth.

His narrow vision is for a Christian Nation, with the fevered and vitriolic evangelicals presiding piously over the Religious Gestapo.

Enough.

We are entering a bleak, dark void.

We've begun an active search for a Parisian pied-a-terre and perpetual accommodations in Pere Lachaise.

-30-

Hereafter, the rant will appear on Mondays and Thursdays.

COMING ATTRACTIONS ... Rants on:

The New Calvinism on Wall Street
Whoring with Mormons
Existentialism in the Marines
Popsicles and Valium
The New Lesbianism
Excrement and Self-Confidence
Cock Dudes and Cuddle Boys in the Priesthood
Easy Money with Sexual Abstinence
P.C. in the Drug Wars
Bestiality: How You Can Get Involved

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-06T00:03:00.000-08:00

Friday, February 07, 2003

On the other hand, and after all, there are asexuals to consider.

One tends to overlook them with all the competing sexual shades and combinations extant today.

But they're everywhere.

One's best friend may be secretly asexual, and indeed many are closeted, rightly fearing irrational humiliation, from gays and straights alike.

The number who pass for straight far exceeds those who self-identify as asexual -- and their total amounts to a low one digit percentage.

We are assured by the Asexual Lobby that in the "past few years there have been increasing murmurs [sic] of people identifing [sic] ... [as asexual]."

They should just speak right up, like all the other sexual segments of the pansexual pantheon, and demand recognition and implementation of their program.

A spicy footnote: neuters tend to form close relationships with their own gender, because "intergender are [sic] viewed as sexual relationships in the making."

"As a result when [they] find themselves in love with (and many times living with) people of the same gender they are pressured to identify as gay or lesbian."

It must be that old Homosexual Agenda again!

Definition of an asexual: one who finds no one sexually attractive.

Sexual repression and onanism seem epidemic in this community, a potentially lonely country of the sexually uninvolved.

After all, there are the asexual, and then there are the very asexual.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

Recommended blogs:

blackwood channel
web raw
presurfer
raving atheist
reach m
brian hughes
proliferations
nightmare boy
process of weeding out
merrin donahue
mandarin design

2003-02-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Before we can "reform" the jails and prisons, we need first to release everyone incarcerated for victimless crimes.

We'll immediately shed about one quarter of the prison population, and theoretically reduce the taxpayers' burden by 25%.

That leaves just the perps caged for crimes against persons and property, many unredeemably violent.

Since society long ago discarded the antiquated notion that prisons provide rehabilitative opportunities for the ill-born and ill-educated, misbegotten, misunderstood, and misbehaved, let's focus on what confinement should do: punish.

Eliminate entirely the exercise equipment gracing prison gym clubs, where frustrated felons can bulk up -- the better to assault you on their release.

Provide a healthy menu, but lower the current high rates of salt, sugar and fat.

Stop the economic and and political exploitation of free convict labor for politicians, warders and stewards.

Reward the disciplined with conjugal visits.

Freely provide condoms on request, recognizing that sex is rampant.

AIDS education is in order here as well.

Provide the confined ample law and general libraries, grant complete freedom of reading, and allow uncensored television.

And recognize that drugs are as quickly available as sex.

In this, the keepers have as much to answer for as the kept.

Short of providing medium grade opium (so much preferable to speed) as maintenance, we see no solution to drugs behind bars.

Just one of many reasons prison "reform" is dead.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-02-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 03, 2003

Like the old telephone companies, the post office hires far more than its share of the peripherally deranged and the debauched eccentric.

First, some economic points:

Few opportunities above the service and retail levels exist for most workers in today's America. The factory jobs have fled abroad, mostly, it seems, to Mexico and China.

What remains for the lower middle class are positions driving buses, teaching, nursing, clerking and drudging at some level of government.

To attack and expose the whole of the U.S. Postal Service for the inefficient, costly and indifferent muddle that it's become is too facile, the target too easy.

Where's the challenge in that?

We won't even list the litany of blunders, stupidity and violence.

"Going postal" sums it up.

The average low- to mid-ranking worker is a decent joe just trying to meet his mortgage obligation.

So, blame not the lowly carrier and clerk.

The censure rightly belongs to postal management.

We know first-hand the postal administration's shabby, corrupt and fascistic treatment of their inferiors.

Many of these managers perversely delight in tormenting, rather childishly, their employees. These porkers are truly criminally insane.

Of course, in time, it will change -- for the worse.

So direct aloft your wrath at the P.O.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-30T13:35:00.000-08:00

Friday, January 31, 2003

And then there are last year's obituaries:

Stephen Ambrose, popular historian and known plagiarist; Walter Annenberg, publisher, philanthropist and Reagan's drunken Ambassador to the U.K.; Mary Kay Ash, pink cosmeticist and pyramid-builder.

Linda Boreman, a/k/a Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat depths; Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, teacher of "the wave" for drag queens; the great and good George Harrison of the Beatles.

Thor Heyerdahl, trans-Pacific explorer on the Kon-Tiki; Kim Hunter, the sexy Stella of Streetcar Named Desire; Ken Kesey, fine author (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and 60's tripper.

Ann Landers, sob sister extraordinaire; Walter Lord, popular writer (of the non-plagiarist school) of A Night to Remember (Titanic).

Princess Margaret, frustrated and gin-soaked, but still fun to drink with; Leo McKern, the delightful Rumpole of the Bailey; Chaim Potok, noted Jewish novelist of the religious.

David Riesman, who gave us "other-directed" in The Lonely Crowd; Rod Steiger, brilliant in On the Waterfront and
In the Heat of the Night; John Thaw, ("Inspector Morse").

Lew Wasserman, The Quintessential Hollywood Mogul; Billy Wilder, director of the first chop (Double Indemnity and
The Apartment).

Others died as well.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Social lions that we unblushingly are, we recently hosted a vernissage for a painter friend whose work we have long admired.

It was the most pleasant of evenings with civil discourse, with drinks drunk and pot piped.

This intimate soiree was, however, marred by a waxing social disorder: the ignorance or indifference of the invited to R.S.V.P.
(Or the boobs who R.S.V.P. and then don't show, doubtless having found, at the last minute, a bawdier party.)

The other irritant, although less damning, is the socially tardy.

The very tardy.

These oafs arrive just in time to say goodbye. At party's "official" close, we pointedly and promptly say goodnight to these misfits. (One lingers here by invitation only.)

The habitually late for social or business obligations do so by design, with full knowledge and perhaps even meticulous planning. Their eventual arrival figuratively says: "You and your schedule are trivial to me. I'm the one who counts."

Henceforth, summons will be prominently adorned with the following line: Failure to R.S.V.P. or arrive timely will relieve you of the burden of future invitations.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-25T16:44:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 27, 2003

Bush just can't wait to play Vietnam's Lyndon Johnson as Texan Commander-in-Chief -- or, Bush as Varlet.

Thus the torrents of war with Iraq seem inevitable.

Along with the War on Terror at Home, the unpleasant North Koreans and increasingly vicious attacks on Americans abroad.

Bush refuses to endorse energy conservation and the avoidance of waste generally, but enthuses oozily over travel and spend, shop and drop.

And what color on the alert chart are we today?

Do we even care?

As if knowing we then could do something.

Let's restore the fine and unambiguous designation of the Department of Defense to the War Department, as it was so fondly known to generations.

Now, Bush is probably as (incuriously) competent on the home front as any Democrat would be.

But his Iraqi divertissement is motivated by greed for oil and "regime change."

(It's also about repaying Saddam for his planned assassination of "Poppy" Bush.)

So we continue the Hunt for OBL in Afghanistan, bomb Baghdad, contain North Korea and futilely warn of terrorists in the U.S., keeping the eye wary on Iran, Israel and even Venezuela.

Not much we can do, as civilians, in Kabul, Baghdad, Pyongyang, Tehran, Jerusalem or Caracas.

So what about self-protection at home?

Bomb shelters? These weren't credible even in the 1950's.

Survival stores? Edibly tempting during chemical and biological attack?

Gold coin and bars? If this evolves as the preferred currency, there will be little buying and less living.

We reckon the religious can pray.

And we can continue to live selfishly, guzzling natural resources, and simply accept our lot.

Since there's apparently nothing we can do to make a difference (and a difference to be a difference must make a difference), we can only recognize that life is randomly selective at best, that we are simply the pawns of chance, coincidence and fate.

And that we're simply high-toned nihilists among a herd of crazed and acquisitive war mongers.

Let the varletry begin.

-30-

MUST READ: Joan Didion, "Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History," NY Review of Books, Jan. 16, 2003

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-23T00:02:00.000-08:00

Friday, Janaury 24, 2003

We're addicted to abbreviations and acronyms.

Recently, we noticed a trend, however belatedly: the use of BCE (Before the Common Era) for the old B.C., and CE (Common Era) for A.D.

Happy old atheists are we that we hoped the linguistic brass had finally taken religion out of dating.

Unhappily, we discovered that BCE still means B.C., CE still A.D., defined by the major dictionaries as "Christian" eras.

Nonetheless, we will in future use BCE and CE in all social situations.

In our youth, we were often AWOL (from ROTC) before moving to an APO.

We're thankful for ATM's where we can, PDQ, withdraw SS and COLA money, none of which will be contributed to the DAR.

We endorse the use of DNA in criminal trials, a much more scientific approach than ESP.

FYI: we much prefer NASA to OPEC, the NAACP to the KKK, PC (Personal Computer) to PC (Politically Correct), RIP to SRO, DOA to GOP, CPR to DWI, IQ to SUV, VO to OJ, MVP to IRS, RSVP to SASE, UFO to AA, DNR to AIDS, IMF to FBI, POW to MIA, RFD to ZIP, REM to MD, F to C, and PM to AM.

BRB.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

Recommended blogs:
webraw
presurfer
reachm
proliferations
mandarindesign
ravingatheist
theprocessofweedingout
merrindonahue
blackwoodchannel

2003-01-21T00:04:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

So: it's immaculately tolerable to Drug Enforcement Administration czar Asa Hutchinson (the Arkansas Boob) for our military to abuse drugs (dextroamphetamine: speed; and tranquilizers: sleeping potions) in (and out) of combat, but sternly forbidden for civilians to toke a peace-inducing joint.

Typical Government Hypocrisy.

Not that any of this duplicity is new.

British aviators used (and yes, probably abused) accelerants in World War II, and the Navy and Air Force dispensed Dexedrine to pilots in Vietnam, the 1991 Persian Gulf war and Afghanistan. (Hightimes)

Crank-induced aggression (to which we are adamantly opposed) might define the April bombing of a Canadian army unit, as well as the July bombing of an Afghani wedding party.

Not to mention the three recent Ft. Bragg domestic murders.

Something is terribly askew here.

Now, the only drugs we moderately countenance are marijuana, alcohol, the occasional sedative, and coffee (always generously laced with calming Cognac).

All, excepting caffeine, depressants.

We abhor the high velocity drugs and the numbing idiocy of heroin.

However, we could probably be persuaded to the utility of speed in actual combat.

But this begs the question: who is hooking whom, when, where and why.

Apologize to the Canadians (and the Afghans) and then liberate the doubtlessly innocent U.S. pilots indicted in these "friendly fire" incidents.

Friendly fire indeed.

Alliterative euphemistic mellifluity.

Government is already in the drug regulation business anyway: alcohol.

Asa, Asa, Asa.

Let's just legalize and sanely manage the distribution of all drugs for everyone.

Military or civilian.

Of course, this line is much too rationally sensible for our government to even consider.

Republicans -- or Democrats -- cranking out such legislation would righteously offend the Religiously Effete.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-18T00:03:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 20, 2003

Leave the ladies be: let them continue to practice birth control by abortion on demand -- any demand, any time, and at any age.

(Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on first and second trimester aborticide: January 22, 1973.)

Their bodies (their own) are at risk here, and abortion is a medically safer course (not to mention financially more satisfying) than child bearing.

Why this relatively simple procedure remains so controversial is bewildering, as well as the opposition even to the "morning-after abortion pill," RU-486.

Any civil society respects a woman's choice in these delicate matters.

No one, under any circumstances, should be compelled to birth.

Religion, our ever Constant Antagonist, like government, has much to answer for in this troubled arena.

For religion, again like government, needs to police itself before it intrudes into private lives, private decisions, private morals.

The only parties who matter are the woman and her physician -- and not her husband, boyfriend, parents, church, children or state.

It is really that simple.

Except the religiously moronic, never content to leave one in peace, or in unmissionaried primitive states, insist on minding everyone's business but their own. (Start with your pedophiliac priests, for example.)

How many of these pious zealots would bid for the privilege of adopting a brown or black or yellow or whatever hued infant, who otherwise would have been aborted?

Next to none.

You and they know it.

Herewith, a short list of the more enlightened venues where abortions have increased (against the trend nationwide) from 1992 to 1996: (The World Almanac, 2003): D.C., Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada and N.J.

We commend these polities on achieving more, not less, civility.

Ladies should keep a copy of these kept.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

Friday, January 17, 2003

The cost of doing business as a human being is bribery, plain and simple.

We barter for affection, love, money, toys, advancement, education and pleasures of all hues.

We pay in whatever currency -- sentimental or monetary -- that is appropriate for the particularity.

All human intercourse depends on a form of exchange mutually acceptable to the traders -- all sop -- all granting one thing for another, disguised or undisguised.

Not that there's anything wrong with this. It simply is.

So: bribe boldly and fearlessly.

Some indeed are more openly honest about these emotional and fiscal swaps, but this is extraordinary.

We support candid, forthright, on-the-table bribery whenever possible. (Our love lives might suffer, however, from too much frank discussion.)

Like most unpleasantness (e.g., calling death a "passing") it's conveniently layered in euphemism and deceit.

Our politics would be more vigorous and certainly more vastly entertaining if we knew who paid whom for what when -- and if things were called by their true names. (It's a bit easier with the Bush administration's transparent alliances than it was with Clinton, but both are inevitably culpable.)

Bribery -- like excrement -- is just a natural function of the human condition.

So embrace your payola, boodle, graft and swag enthusiastically and often.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-14T00:03:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Any day now the Senate or the House, in collusion with the President, will assure the demise of the national passenger railroad corporation, Amtrak, long denounced and derided by Republicans, People in a Hurry, freight railroads and airlines.

The only shock is that Amtrak has survived, however fitfully, even this long.

Its birth was traumatic.

(Amtrak dates from the early 1970's, when it was jerry built from the discarded and often unreliable passenger fleets of the old major railroads. It was a bold political payoff to the remaining railway freight operators, who could not believe their blatant bribery had at long last rewarded them so handsomely.)

The U.S. never had the commitment, the culture or the inclination to finance the kind of passenger service now common in Europe and Asia, which is routinely economical, efficient and timely.

We are sad at its imminent passing.

It speaks to a different age, where slower clocks strike happier hours.

Back in our day, always so superior to the present, one dressed for the club and dining cars, after the on board shower, shave and haircut, these venues strictly and properly segregated by class: first and second.

(Yes, there was yet another class -- that of Jim Crow and its vile racism.)

The dining car fare was comparable to food served in the better salesmens' hotels of the day.

Service was routinely impeccable, and briskly and smartly executed by friendly staff.

The riff raff was confined to the day coaches and adequately contained.

As for sex in pulsating Pullman sleeping car drawing rooms and double bedrooms -- it was simply superb.

Right rhythmic.

Perhaps that's what we'll miss most when Amtrak finally departs, probably late as usual.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-11T00:03:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 13, 2003

Want to noogle a skanky tree hugger while relishing a blunt and still maintaining cred?

Sounds sporting to us.

All these strange words have apparently been newly formally admitted (by Merriam-Webster, Inc.) to our language, after having achieved sufficient currency to qualify them for so august a body.

They join an ever changing and vibrantly expanding English that's the envy of the world.

They will become as common as some of their counterparts of yesteryear: soccer mom, e-book, booty, dot com, gated community, day trader, flatline, warp speed, netiquette, road rage, eye candy and electronica.

And we predict dominant dollarization worldwide, led by the American fashionistas in e-tail with webcams, all contributing eventually to the ever expanding repertoire of urban legends.

We live in exacting times with the pleasures of neutraceuticals, foosball, half-pipes, biomimetics, chipotles and hotties.

Hotties, we understand, are insistently in demand.

Translation of the first sentence: Want to rub your knuckles slightly painfully on the head of a filthy but committed environmentalist while smoking a hollowed out cigar filled with marijuana -- and still remain credible?

Gotcha!

-30-

The rant appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-09T00:06:00.000-08:00

Friday, January 10, 2003

While we were never ardent champions for capital punishment, we morally accommodated and acquiesced, and with the other blood thirsties we probably applauded when some low life, convicted of a heinous act, fried, gulped gas or smartly swung.

Not that we actually witnessed any of this.

The press is irrationally barred from such drama.

Our continuing objection to the death penalty is the hypocrisy of pretentiously parading it as a deterrence, and then hiding -- far away from that supposedly deterred public -- the spectacle of electrician, plumber and hangman discharging their grim tasks.

Executions should be public, preferably on prime time television.

But the newly tasty method of eliminating the undesirable by lethal injection would quickly bore today's audience.

Why must felons grand be soothingly sedated, made comfy and then enjoy a peaceful, graceful, painless death, while the rest of us (excepting the ten percent who actually die in their sleep) abide pain, suffering, vegetation and probably the Hell of the Nursing Home in order to finally exit?

Those state governments adopting the lethal chamber have diminished further any assumed deterrence by closeting the secure and harmonious death by injection, instead of choosing a more operatic mode: electrocution, hanging, firing squad.

The irony is that capital punishment cannot be demonstrated to deter crime anyway.

The old and infirm in vegetative states, extreme pain and grand loss of quality of life should be encouraged to book early some of these lethal suites between executions, so they, too, can enjoy a placid "passing."

This should improve a state's budget and serve a worthy cause: a good death for the good people.

Why should only death row denizens delight in their decorously dainty death?

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Once, we honeywagoned with Elvis.

Now, the media insist on commemorating what would be his 68th birthday (January 8, 1935); apparently the iconic putative hipster of the 1950's still stirs irrational reverence among the legions of zealots who dutifully pilgrimage to his Memphis estate every day of the year.

We were contemporaries of but never even slightly addicted to Elvis' guiles, constantly polished as they were by the ubiquitous Colonel Tom Parker, his excessively compensated tutor, pimp, agent and hustler, who is rumored to have pocketed half or more of his tyro's vast earnings.

Whether the good Colonel (honorary title courtesy the Governor of Kentucky: think of that other famous entrepreneur Colonel Sanders) deserved his loot we leave to historians to attempt to determine.

Know that the Colonel was on sentry duty 24/7, protecting his fountain of cash. (He may even have been along on the honeymoon.)

The Colonel also vigilantly screened his charge from the press, which made an interview almost impossible to negotiate.

We tried and failed to win that concession.

In the summer of 1961, Elvis, Parker and their regiments were filming a picture in rural Yankeetown, north Florida.

We were on assignment from the local Gainesville daily to turn in a feature story.

From that summer's published article: "[Parker] was omnipresent and so overly solicitous that he carried the boy's name-stenciled chair for him."

After lunch we sauntered over to the honey wagon (a tony mobile bath and dressing trailer) and got in line for the obviously busy lone inside toilet.

After one of the longest sustained and splashy urinations we had ever heard (and unattended by the Colonel), Pelvis emerged smiling, friendly and very relieved.

We shook hands and exchanged banalities.

We're still not fans.

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-04T08:41:00.000-08:00

Monday, January 06, 2003

U.S. stock markets and major equity indexes are staring impotently at a fourth year of consecutive losses, unknown since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

Partly this plunge derives from the dot com frenzy and overhyped stocks, fueled by criminally corrupt analysts, accountants, the CEO's of large failed corporate giants, program traders, the M&A people, the Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the hedge funders, the short sellers, the LBO queens and your average hustler-broker.

But also Uncertainty, which all markets loathe. This kind of chancy doubt defines the continuing and inevitable debacle for the average investor.

September 11 figures mightily, too.

But so, too, the looming outlay of literally billions to prosecute wars or pay blackmail on at least three fronts: Home, Iraq and North Korea. And other opportunistic nations will line up at the extortion window any day now.

Consider there is legitimate agitation for better health care, pensions, social security, education and infrastructure competing for these billions.

The country could soon be as fiscally bankrupt as it is morally.

But the reason the stock exchanges and prime indexes may never recover is still basically ... uncertainty.

Let us put this as gently and simply as possible: terrorism is and will continue to remain permanently rampant in this country and abroad.

The terrorists, like the poor, will henceforth always be with us.

They personify Uncertainty.

Ergo: avoid the markets.

And neither the survivalist gold in your home safes or back yard bunkers, the bearer bonds and cash in the better mattresses, or the stashed diamonds and baubles will guarantee your liquidity and safety.

The very best investment today thus isn't in the economy, but in the demonstrated and very real love of family and friends.

Do we dare try that?

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2003-01-02T00:03:00.000-08:00

Friday, January 03, 2003

"Let's kill all the lawyers." -- Shakespeare

Ah, a sweet sentiment for a New Year.

And another fit repository for our wrath and rage.

These degenerate swine fleece the stupid and the savvy alike of the lower and the middle classes, swindling here, pandering there, filching everywhere.

(Parenthetically, we hear too often from the overly conservative punditry that "class warfare" is wrongly Unamerican, orchestrated by the diabolical Democrats to rend the country.

What nonsense.

Natural it is that classes clash and that mouthpieces quiveringly prosper from racial and social as well as gender and even generational divisions.)

Those unwilling -- mostly those unable -- to execute their own simple legal documents, or bring a cause to Small Claims, are ordained to suffer the advocates' immemorial pal, Delay, and to pay evermore.

(Be your own counselor. Get yourself to nolo.com and learn enough of the lawyering trade to mend yourself.)

You grander felons may indeed cede much of your ill gotten swag to the vulturous and bloated, who will attend and fawn so long as they are copiously fed.

Two common legal shakedowns come to mind.

Ever observe how the shysters place prominent ads in urban papers seeking claimants for class action suits of all hues? Hell, they're simply harvesting names for a more lengthy and impressive brief with which to enrich themselves at your expense.

You might eventually get a two dollar coupon for your trouble as a putative plaintiff in one of these con games.

Ever wonder why wills are relatively cheap to have drawn? And why living trusts are so expensive?

These scum are out to profit handsomely by your death, but you do get to decide whether to pay the bastards up front for the trust or subject your heirs to a costly probate.

These humbugs are as numerous as the lawyers who voodoo them.

There are schemes within shenanigans within scams without end.

But since we can't just kill off these sows, we can only avoid them as adroitly as we can.

-30-

The rant appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2002-12-31T12:38:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Resolved: Given the hellholes that the public schools have become with violence, death, indifference to learning, inattention and high decibel levels,

That school attendance after age 14 (arguably, even younger) be completely voluntary.

Public schools exist primarily to provide lettered members of the lower middle class with a modicum of income.

No one should pretend anyone is actually educated there.

(In 2000 20% of adults 25 and over were without a high school degree. This figure seems suspiciously low to us.)

And we once overheard, in a college faculty dining room, this observation: "This would be a great school if it just weren't for the students." This attitude seems common at all levels of the academy.

Turn loose the unmotivated, uninterested, indifferent, disruptive and dangerous "students" compelled unhappily to attend school.

Not on my street, you'll protest.

We urge the generally inept police (whose number should be vastly increased anyway) to confront vigorously the gangs we so quaintly called "juvenile delinquents" decades ago.

The teachers, administrators, counselors, dieticians, janitors and security officers can no longer endlessly struggle with teenage arrogance, rebellion and callousness in their public schools (yes: theirs, not ours).

Anti-intellectualism and an ingrained reverence for ignorance permeate America's cultural history. And these traditions are too well entrenched to unearth them.

And if we're going to effect voluntary school attendance, we should be consistently civil and lower the drinking and age of consent to 14 as well.

These kids will need some way to pass the time they would have spent in school.

-30-

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2002-12-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 30, 2002

Ace time of year, in early upcoming January, to make appointments and think fondly of dentistry.

It's also the dreary month of the IRS salutation, Holiday Accounting and General Hangoverville.

Do you really want to squander another gorgeous spring or summer day in the nervous waiting room and in The Chair? (Most dental fear springs from anticipation; it then erupts quickly in the saddle and passes.)

Because of these fears and phobias, focusing on the practitioner, dentists suffer high rates of suicide, viewed as torture artists.

We're not the cheerleaders here. This isn't Happy Teeth Month. This space hasn't been rented (yet) by the American Dental Association.

We, of course, abhor the dental moment just like anyone else. And we won't invite you to share our suffering of past extractions, crown and bridge and root canals.

Palliatives are amply available.

Dentists are forever experimenting with how to assuage the anxious.

While we've been partially satisfied with such balmy procedures as hypnosis, acupuncture and general anesthesia, a new American instrument promises drug free euphoria while under the scalpel and drill.

This novel appliance is the Alpha-Stem SCS (and will soon be a profit center in oral surgeons' offices). Cranial electrotherapy stimulation painlessly passes an electric waveform through the brain via a couple of electrode ear clips.

Patients zap themselves at will with no after effects.

Ask for it by name.

As for the old fashioned, like us, we'll continue to embrace joyfully the charms of nitrous oxide.

Happy January.

-30-

The rant appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2002-12-26T02:08:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 27, 2002

The only trick that sometimes works in defeating the circles of hell that constitute corporate voice mail is to pretend your phone is an old rotary model (thus depriving you of buttons to press on command).

Of course, the most arrogant enterprises simply don't want the business of people so technologically blighted and conservative that they use these old rotary phones and will just condescendingly, after several painful minutes, terminate you.

The Voice Mail Runaround is a racket run amok as the too efficient handmaiden of convenience for the merchantry, and is symptomatic of what's lacking most in American commerce: punctilious customer service. (Or even plain old ordinary customer service.)

From the local fruiterer to the local headshop, patrons are routinely treated as swinish interlopers, an unwanted distraction.

The modern merchant's lament might well be: this would be a great business if it just weren't for the customers.

Vendors don't give a damn about either you or your patronage.

Unless you're very very big.

How they remain in trade is a mystery.

As we have often said to these vermin: "We'll in the future no longer burden you with our business."

They do not care. They metaphorically spit in your face.

Finally, don't make that first mistake of pressing a "1" for English, or you'll never emerge from Voicemail's Kafkaesque loop.

-30-

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theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2002-12-24T00:09:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

A once reputable publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has just issued Talking to God: Personal Prayers for Times of Joy, Sadness, Struggle, and Celebration by one Naomi Levy (264 pp., $19.95).

Levy, we're assured, is the first credentialed female Conservative rabbi to head a West Coast congregation. (In other words, we're not talking hard shell Baptist here.)

Further, she insists that "the remarkable" emerges "when we stop trying to pray to God and start talking to God instead." (Then: why the formulas?)

(LA Times Book Review, Dec. 22, 2002).

Sounds to us more like Dial a Prayer.

We will not read this nonsense, but will "review the review" concerning such asinine foolishness.

We condemn -- yes, condemn, just like the Papists -- a book which promises pre-packaged, ready-for-delivery entreaties (not rambling self-initiated conversations as apparently promised) on topics as absurdly diverse as "unfaithfulness, sleeplessness, pregnancy, miscarriage, addiction, integrity at work, suicide ... [and] procrastination...."

The utter effrontery of this woman's pride (of prayer?) and flamboyant piety in even wildly imagining that an already overburdened, confounded and ill paid deity has the leisure to ponder such pleas is beyond our ken.

Where the ready-to-wear supplications for the home team, big lottery payoffs and touts on the ponies?

Is nothing sacred?

Now, we always thought talking to oneself was damned healthy anyway, which is ostensibly what this guidebook is all about.

But why aren't these "requests" on perforated pages for handy pocket or purse?

If prayer is so elusive to the inarticulate inclined to gratify themselves in this way, perhaps the book will find a cunning niche.

Personally, we still favor the old fashioned prayer wheels in which we insert our written but still piddling petitions, and churn the drum vigorously.

Works every time.

-30-

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theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2002-12-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 23, 2002

No idiom revolts us, nauseates us more than "Mother" Nature.

This locution is loaded with sentimentality, condescension and downright unctuousness.

We flinch at its utterance. (And there are very few words that elicit this reaction, the so called N word among them.)

We're admittedly more comfortable in the urbane than the bucolic, lovers more of steel and concrete than shrubs and trees, hills and dales and honey and bees.

Nature isn't a benign maternal nurturing quasi-deitess lounging patheistically about, awaiting the reverent sucking of her teats.

Rather, in Tennyson's words, it's "red in tooth and claw," violent, indifferently hostile and constantly at work selecting and evolving the species.

It wants respect. Not worship. (We are cautious about worship of any kind.)

We enjoy an active, raging and tumultuous universe: rough North Atlantic crossings, drenching thunderstorms, harmless earthquakes, harmless tornadoes, and harmless hurricanes. We wish they were all innocuous, while still enjoyable. Most diminish both people and property.

We don't just squat at the foot of and look at the mountain: we want that mountain to move, shake and teem.

We favor the alive.

Nature is seemingly cruel and exacts great losses. But you may as well, for relief, pray to a god as to pray to nature.

Neither listens.

And to suck those natural teats often produces the sourest milk.

Just don't call it "Mother."

-30-

theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2002-12-19T00:03:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 20, 2002

"When the prospect is ready, the green flash will come." -- corruption of the Tao

Seen the green flash at sea at sunset?

It's a faint band of light sometimes appearing in the western sky just after sunset, extending up from the horizon at the point where the sun has just set. It's caused by reflection of sunlight from tiny dust particles concentrated on the plane of the ecliptic and thus appears in the region of the Zodiac. (Excerpted from the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.)

Many doubt the existence of this phenomenon.

But does not the very term "Zodical light" playfully engage your mouth and amply roll round your tongue?

Delicious.

Anyway, after peering obsessively evening after evening in Hawaii, doubtless impaired by strong rum and stronger Maui Wowie, we saw It: one of nature's more charming winks, a very brief glimpse into Mystery.

A magical petite infusion.

We're tempted to append an imaginary associative fable or to invoke some sun gods, like the Egyptian Ra, the Greek Helios or even the Eskimo's Malina.

But let it stand alone and as is: an elusive salute from nature.

Or the less grand interpretation might simply be that the green flash will so illuminate the Taoist way that the panthers will thereafter avoid you.

-30-

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2002-12-17T22:28:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

We always preferred a keen choice between the demography of the sleepy rural and the savvy urban -- but never the sprawl suburban.

Suburbia gives truth to all those cliches about homogeneity, tastelessness, banality and boredom.

(We'd prefer woodsy boredom).

We're exurbanites anguishing in this miasma of SUV's, blanketed shopping centres and trivial "culture."

We once were men of substance -- concrete and steel -- buguiled by the city: empyrean buildings, clotted masses and the swarming diversity of it all.

We miss it terribly.

We would almost rather talk to trees in pasture than to negotiate urgent fast food outlets, tacky boutiques, the sacred precincts of the malls, and the general mercantile brigandage.

Here no sense of community or customer service.

Social and business tranactions: frigid.

We'd trade a tony ZIP code for the Village or the Fifth Arrondissement any time.

We're really just old boulevardiers.

-30-

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theoldbuzzard@sunnyplaceforshadypeople.com

2002-12-14T00:04:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 16, 2002

Ex-President Carter reminded us the other day that this is the Season of the Nobel Laureate. And a nod to Jimmy the Good who finally, after hammering nails and watching polls for decades, snagged the Peace Prize he has maniacally lusted after (only in his heart).

Since we remain unabashedly ignorant in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, economics and peace, let's talk literature.

Premise: we basically assume that while the Nobel is probably somewhat free of arrant bribery, the awards are at least as political as they are merited. (People will always be, however charmingly, corrupt.)

We cite the following literary laureates as arguably unqualified for this most prestigious honor: Pearl Buck (1938), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Toni Morrison (1993).

(We salute Jean Paul Sartre, who existentially declined in 1964.)

Now consider these writers unceremoniously denied: Graham Greene, Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, James Joyce.

William Styron, Vladimir Nabokov, E. M. Forster, Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley.

Thomas Wolfe, Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Walker, Dylan Thomas.

W. Somerset Maugham, Arthur Miller, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Edward Albee, W.H. Auden, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty and John Updike.

These neglectees (at least those few who remain at large and alive) might want to spend more productive time in Oslo and Stockholm.

-30-

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2002-12-12T00:02:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 13, 2002

"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." -- Oscar Wilde

No one says it better than that.

The inarticulate dullard Bush II insists on using religious argot to address our enemies. These "evil" domains include North Korea, Iran and Iraq, but not Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis luxuriate in the bosom of bribery, as is common in the Global Oil Business, in which Bush II aspires to membership.

The Saudis, therefore, are among the unwicked.

They're bought.

To characterize anything as evil involves a moral judgment that this Administration is unqualified by wisdom to make.

We distrust the whole appartus of the Moral Judgment Business, almost as much as we revile the religion business.

And are we to have yet another war in religion's name?

Have we learned nothing?

We hope the obscenity of the looming conflict will be vividly vulgar on the evening news.

And we sadly fear the inevitable war with Iraq will end badly for us.

-30-

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2002-12-10T00:02:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Beware the seasonal scammer, the gifted grifter greeting you in the guise of sweet charity.

This is the time that larcenous bamboozlers, preying on assumed good will, assail us on all sides with pleas for all manner of alleged haplessly hopeless causes.

Remember the recently disgraced Red Cross of September 11th, and the fiscal mismanagement of the United Way in recent years? Recall the onerous "administrative" expenses of the AIDS Rides?

This list is endless.

(We've heard for decades the "Red Cross stories" from WWII veterans luridly detailing the charity's sale of everything from doughnuts to prostitutes. This outfit's attempt to swindle the 9/11 victims is in keeping with its sordid and rapacious history.)

We're raging cynics.

If a relief enterprise is oranganized, files IRS reports, pays its staff and advertises and solicits professionally, it's most likely at best a racket to part you quickly from your money, however gracefully.

Most of these thieves spend anywhere from nothing to twenty or thirty percent on actual direct services to the needy and seventy percent or more on administrative and fundraising costs. (It's called the profit in non-profit.)

We are so wary of these parasites that we give them nothing, nada, rien.

We give them the old automatic finger and move on.

Some of the vilest con artists hire telemarketers to pose as firemen and policemen on our telephones to hector (and subtly extort) contributions. And of course the Starving Students always ring twice.

Give to no organized charity.

Seek out the utterly and hopelessly unorganized: the destitute individual on the street corner.

Go to the ATM.

Withdraw $200 (or whatever).

Give $20 bills to the first ten beggars who ask. (Nod to Jon Carroll.)

No Season's Greetings. No dialogue. No preaching. And no thanks required.

Just give and walk swiftly away.

-30-

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2002-12-06T00:03:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 09, 2002

The current number (December 9) of Newsweek sort of got our dander up, with its cover story on "The New Virginity," featuring an immaculately sterile teenage couple smiling at us ever so coquettishly, their purity so stainlessly unstained.

We rather favor the old virginity, the responsible loss of which we always applauded when accomplished, however clumsily, sooner rather than later.

And yes, Virginia, there were infections even in those ancient climes.

Apparently today there's an ungodly conflict between the sex educators and the (mostly) evangelical abstainers.

We support anyone's right, of course, to abstain from sex.

But we also support anyone's right to libertinage.

The problem is that the chaste can be so sexually clueless -- and thus especially vulnerable to the usual diseases, including pregnancy.

These innocents may delay major erotic play, in some cases, until marriage in their thirties. How awful for them.

The usual culprit: religion.

Preach abstinence if you must, ye fundamentalist cultists, but teach the Basics, too. Don't avoid either the reality or the beauty of sexuality.

We happen to think it's perfectly healthy for young and informed teenagers to enjoy protected sex one with another, time after time.

It sure beats masturbation and those awfully hairy palms and creeping blindness.

But hell, whatever the choice, we wish them all well.

--30-

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2002-12-04T17:12:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 06, 2002

Here at the scatter the subject of Xmas decoration is well underway.

And we believe, as always, that less is more.

We venerate the pagan of the season. We erect the phallically totemic tree, fresh and tartly scented, strung with simple white unblinking lights. Maybe a few unique and very personal ornaments (nod to sentimentality) to evoke Xmas Past.

In our saucy, rebellious youth we always placed a large "Screw Off and Die" button atop the tree. We've now outgrown that juvenalia.

The apex is now bare, not even a single bulb and, at bottom, a moat as preservative.

That's it.

Since we unfortunately live in vile suburbia where much attention is paid to garish outdoor light shows and overly illuminated stick figures on roof tops, in the past we were simply dark.

But last year we capitulated to unspoken neighborly pressure and erected on the house's front a single box of unstrung and unremoved multicolored lights neatly arranged, just as they were originally factory packed, in two very tidy rows. Total size: about one foot square.

Arguably existential.

Less is always more, not only in this time of emotional and pious excess, but all year long.

-30-

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2002-12-03T00:04:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

Voices recently raised, all aflutter, in the Florida Keys over a creek and a finny creature called a jewfish: townsmen and visitors are battling over a proposed linguistic reincarnation.

Does political correctness never lapse? Will this insanity never end?

Some are apparently offended by this word "jewfish," which has no "Jewish" etymology, meaning simply a a large, dark spotted grouper. (One dictionary citation did note it was considered so clean it qualified as dietarily Kosher, which should encourage its supporters and embarrass its detractors.)

And, one dares not, anymore, use the word "niggardly" in speech or even writing, for fear of being labeled racist.

This is patently silly.

"Niggardly"'s etymology is Scandinavian and unrelated to bigotry. It simply means stingy, as in "that niggardly Oslovian."

And "Chinaman" is taboo, but not Chinatown, wherein reside not Chinamen but refined Asian gentlemen.

Let's not even consider the crazed feminists' complaints about utilitarian phrases like "Men at Work," or the frantic lady Sabbatists who insist on, minimally, genderless deities or, more starkly, just plain goddesses.

Florida: be completely idiotic and rename that creek and pescine "muslimfish" and really try to test the truly offensive.

-30-

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2002-11-30T00:03:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 02, 2002

Smoking cigarettes or cigars is unheathy, we concede.

We smoke only pot and the occassional Cuban, but we get exercised at those who would exile smokers to a secluded Mojave cabin, there to puff their barren lives away. (Some of the more righteous environmentalists might even object to this banishment as cruelty to plants and animals.)

And to ban smoking in bars seems both unnatural and even puritanically oppressive.

Booze, sex and smokes are an old, unbeatable combination.

May they long flourish!

We're certain the Smoking Police (there are such animals) can cite durable statistics on the health consequences of even second hand smoke. And probably in some venues like vegetarian restaurants, tea rooms, the theatre, hospitals and funeral homes the prohibition may make some sense.

But in taverns, roadhouses and honky tonks?

These Anti-Smoking League Nazis remind us of the environmental fascists alluded to above, who also run amuk too often, sheltering the damn snails, turtles and wildflowers and spouting the fables of "Mother Nature."

Whatever happened to letting Natural Selection do its work?

Government needs to leave people alone to choose responsibly for themselves.

Enough Paternalism.

-30-

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2002-11-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

Friday, November 29, 2002

"I am not so much afraid of Death, as ashamed thereof;
'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that
in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest
friends, wife, and children, stand afraid and start at us."

-- Sir Thomas Browne

Death is process, the denouement of the life-play's beginning, middle and end and, as such, in itself, should be embraced, not feared.

Indeed, it is often welcomed as the "poor man's dearest friend."

What we dread is a bad death: prolonged pain and suffering, the vegetative state, the charnel house of the nursing home.

Most doctors are as uncomfortable with thanatopic dialogue as anyone else. And they are also most likely to dole out, through laziness or indifference, an ugly death.

Better equip yourself, especially if you're as old as we are, with an empathetic and agnostic physician who will, however clumsily, execute your end of life instructions -- to whatever tattered letter.

Death entails real planning, not a consultation with the rapacious undertaker for "pre-need."

We're talking health care proxies, living wills, durable powers of attorney and advance directives: in short, plotting a bully death.

As long time members of The Hemlock Society USA we enthusiastically endorse its purposes, one of which is designer suicide.

(We have often wished that Suicide Cultivation got as much air time as Suicide Prevention.)

Avoid the disgrace, the ignominy of a nasty demise.

We are old friends of Suicide and recommend it in the pursuit of the Good Death.

-30-

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2002-11-26T00:19:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Thanksgiving is perhaps our favorite of the "major" holidays (the other being Derby Day on May's first Saturday), principally because it's free of religion's taint.

One can be thankful without piety as one can be moral without gods.

We hardly count New Year's much of a holiday anymore, since it's just an excuse for the riff raff to get drunk.

And Easter and Christmas venerate Foul Religion.

We remain thankful for our loved ones, our health and our station. We are even frequently hopeful for world peace, Amtrak trains that run on time and a good death.

We honor no particular tradition: we simply enjoy the food, wine and camaraderie.

This year, however, permit us a maudlin moment to simply thank all of you who read, in increasing numbers, this uplifting rant.

-30-

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2002-11-23T00:03:00.000-08:00

Monday, November 25, 2002

The spirits of the holidays encumber us again.

Mad season of mercantile excess and sentimental gluttony.

We are moved to offer modestly a Guide for the Gentleman Drinker -- useful every day as well as in this annual deluge of overabundant enthusiasm. (Thankfully, religion is mostly ignored these last two months of the year, but the marketplace is untowardly elevated.)

Gentlemen observe the following:

Drink only the premium (not always necessarily the most expensive) spirits. (We don't puff brands unless we are substantially bribed.)

Drink:

* Bloody Mary's only before breakfast -- at whatever hour.

* Martini's only before lunch and dinner -- never after.

* Cognac only after lunch and dinner, preferably accompanied by a Cuban cigar.

* Dark, bold beer with raw oysters, fried shrimp, Chinese dishes, pizza and salade nicoise.

* Only one bracer an hour -- unless you're extremely agitated (or when committing a graceful suicide with sedatives).

* Only after the market has closed (or after 5 p.m.).

* Only with other certified gentlemen and ladies -- never alone.

* Only undiluted spirits. (No bourbon and Coke.)

* Authoritative wine with lunch and dinner.

* Absinthe at any hour you can get it.

Finally, you may want to consider poet George Herbert's admonition:

Drink not the third glass -- which thou
Canst not tame
When once it is within thee.

-30-

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2002-11-21T00:16:00.000-08:00

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Friday, November 22, 2002

Recently the primly greedy organizers of the anachronistic Miss America Nonsense became quite agitated that their current girlie, what's-her-name, was preaching abstinence from sex, and possibly stands guilty of even promoting, of all things, virginity.

The hypocrital stewards of this outdated, outmoded and outlandish puerile exhibition that is the Atlantic City Auction already shamelessly promote this tasteless banality ad nauseam.

The fleshly parade's hucksters want their (mostly) docile women unwed, unpregnant and of course undivorced. And properly over-chaperoned to keep them in this pristine state.

One would think the incumbent sovereign would have some license to advance nonsex if she's a mind to.

The ugly truth: this racket's censors don't want to churn the political -- right or left. They merchandise the Great Middle: class, way, life and sex.

These purveyors want their gilded mouthpieces to speak only noncontroversially.

This doll can no more hawk abortion than she can celibacy.

She nods, she smiles, she panders to the all American "values" of family, conformity, teamwork and (probably) Godliness.

This obscene little drama needs to shutter. It's gone bad.

-30-

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2002-11-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

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Wednesday, November 20, 2002

We once worked in a nastily bureaucratic sweatshop (run by the federal government) that sported this sign in front of the cubicles, posted by a too cheerful colleague: "Be Happy. Don't Worry."

This kind of buoyant nostrum nauseates us. Other examples: "The glass is always half full," "every cloud has a silver lining" and "The best is yet to come."

What these blissful slogans encourage is a non-thinking acceptance -- not of reality -- but a rosy state of twilit blindness, a vigorous unwillingness to see things as they starkly are. The slogan mouthers are unwilling to confront and grapple with life's daily demons, but they come with the territory. And that's okay.

Being happy has its place (and should stay in it). (For example, we were last happy on the evening of January 13, 1998.)

Avoiding worry is like avoiding a sunny day: there are too many.

Worrying is just ineffectively squandering both time and energy.

Be a Fatalist.

"Most of what we worry about never happens" is partially perhaps selectively true.

If not a fatalist, then plan as prudently and intelligently as you can rather than fret wastefully. (It doesn't matter anyway.)

And about the only time we're in a state of "Be Happy Don't Worry" is when we're stoned.

-30-

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2002-11-16T00:02:00.000-08:00

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Monday, November 18, 2002

Essential to the comfort of the ordinary (but probably cloistered) gentleman is a competent complement of occupations on which he relies for the more civil necessities: auto mechanic, barber, bartender, clothier, dry cleaner, florist, grocer, housekeeper, pharmacist, physician and undertaker.

Some additionally require able butlers, cooks, drivers, exterminators (when not standing at stud in the Congress), gardeners, maids, poolmen, stable boys and valets.

Uneasy is today's gentleman, whose number ever declines, and for all the usual reasons: the loutish issue of the fecund ill-bred dominate the tasteless banality of everyday American life, and the (untaught) codes of manners and honor have gone missing.

Can you even picture a social stratum in which one's word is his bond, and his equals neither lie nor steal?

Our society values above all avarice and greed, and countenances any means to those ends.

Cheating at all levels is epidemic, probably an attempt to be more preparedely competitive in careers naturally inclined to the avaricious, like politics, law, and order.

Not to mention corporate crime rampant, and violent drug-crazed felons lurking everywhere.

For the gentleman, there are few retreats.

But finding efficient help makes reclusivity easier. One is absolutely lost without a tony mortician, for example.

And do remember: no gentleman ever orders soup for lunch.

-30-

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