Oh yes, it’s a dance they do, every day, these cats and dogs who live together. They are a pack, which is to say a family, and they love one another. Raebert is the leader somehow, which makes no sense but packs don’t have to make sense. What is he? The odd young’un who holds sway over all the oldsters, mostly twice his age. He cares the most. Odd is hardly the right word. I told my wife he understands everything I say. She took that with a grain of salt until last night or so when he was licking his leg and I said, that’s enough, stop licking and put your head down. Which he did. She stared at me and then at him.
Where were we? Raebert is upset at the loss of Cassie. He’s great at moaning and groaning on a good day. Now he’s almost lugubrious.
So young with so much on his shoulders.
So is Elliott. He’s the only surviving cat in the pack. Clinging wouldn’t be too strong a word for what he’s doing with me right now.
Last cat in the pack.
Rikki knows about death. We don’t want to vigil him. He’s a racehorse in the twilight. He keeps going because he’s a deer in the headlights and makes the headlights blink.
We knew what was happening for several days. There’s been a vigil. Cassie was eating four cans of cat food a day and it wasn’t adding an ounce to her frame. Then she stopped eating altogether. No matter how many cans and flavors we gave her. Raebert went into a funk this morning.
Raebert’s been in a funk. He knows. He always knows everything.
Okay. She was fifteen. No big whoop, right? But in a way she was also one. A few years hiding under beds. Then the move here. Feral. She spent ten years in the rafters of the garage. Then she came down to my lap. Which she suddenly decided was her home. And where she died. This afternoon. Just about sunset.
She was in my lap, you see. My wife and I were squabbling about Mozart. I wanted Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, 2nd movement. My wife wanted to know if I needed to suffer about Cassie more. I said, the way husbands sometimes do, “Do it!” She started the YouTube video and Cassie died immediately upon hearing the first chord. Won’t make any attempt to explain or justify. She just died.
Spare you her sad little face and wasted body. She was fifteen after all. And her brother was my best friend. Why did she glom onto me? Do brothers tell sisters what’s going on in human world? Stop it. Cassie loved me, and I loved her. Now she’s dead, a small wild cat who never knew where she belonged.
Never domesticated. Just like her brother and sister. She was a wild wild thing who just happened to like me.
You know. Seven pounds of dirt and nasty and I’ll scratch your eyes out if you ever lay a hand on me. But this is what she was listening to when she died in my arms.
And when he heard it playing just now, Raebert came running up to join me on the couch. What do all the animals seem to know about Mozart so many humans don’t?
God bless you, Cassie, my dear. I will miss you till the rainbow bridge greyhound folks talk about.
Once in a blood moon we can do this. A Mars Event might be something different.
Talking about what? This weekend we saw all of the football teams we follow win. This is a good omen. All the red teams won, distinct sign of the blood moon: Ohio State, Harvard, Rutgers, and (blessedly) 3-0 Temple had a bye week.btw, just TAKE THIS LINK, which is about more than Harvard and Ohio State. It’s about the huge fun of the Mars Event.
Fate is destiny. Or vice versa. Something like karma. Cornell beat Ohio State the two times they played. Not this weekend. You’d have to be Harvard, Ohio State or Temple to understand that. I went to Cornell for a bit. Doesn’t count in this algorithm.
Obviously it’s time for a Roman Imperial March.
Unless it’s time for a different kind of March altogether.
And a chorale to make it all stick.
Sorry. Red won yesterday. Harvard. Ohio State, and Temple at rest. Hear the drum.
Life is getting worse on all of us, but we can still count on the verities, right?
Whoever said we can’t make it better? Or should we?
When you’re running headlong from the news, and every media voice is biased, pretending, lying, or exploiting ballooning scandals, you wind up watching too much Netflix. I spent five years deriding Blue Bloods because of the sepulchral Tom Selleck they show in the promos. Halfway through Season 1 now. And loving it. See what I mean?
Worst thing about binge watching? The fear you’ll run out of things to watch that won’t assault your religion, your politics, or your person. Why, maybe, you start taking the things you like and imagine them coupling up with other things you like or, more deliciously, things you definitely do not like. The inspiration for this post. Ways the streaming universe could keep good things going, and even a few bad things by way of cross pollination. This is a start. Feel free to join in. (On all photos, click if you want bigger.)
M. Poirot and Miss Fisher
Two delightful period series currently running on Netflix. Cars, clothes, manners, all delightful. Problem? Miss Fisher is in 1920s Australia, and Hercule Poirot is in 1930s Britain. No problem. Before he came to London, Poirot spent a few years in Australia, where he teemed up with the free spirited Miss Fisher, rich, somewhat promiscuous, and always equipped with a golden revolver in her garter belt. If you’ve ever wondered about Poirot’s sexual orientation, which you shouldn’t, this series will lay all your doubts to rest. Miss Fisher doesn’t care what you look like. She knows as much about little gray cells as anybody. And she loves them.
Monsieur Hercule Poirot
Reid and Eppes, Private Eyes
TV loves geniuses. Numb3rs ran for six years, and Criminal Minds is coming up on a decade of gore and lame voiceover quotes and Gulfstream getaways while the devastated parents are burying their dead. Numb3rs had Charlie Eppes, who knows more math than anybody ever thought of. Criminal Minds has Spencer Reid, who has two or four Phd’s in every subject any university ever endowed a chair for. Isn’t it time to put them together?
So Charlie gets tired of being second fiddle to his FBI brother, and Spence gets tired of being bullied by Shemar Moore. They meet at a math symposium and decide to become the world’s smartest private eyes. After all, Spence knows how to use a gun — or at least wear one on his hip as convincingly as any other supermodel — and they both know how to use phones and computers, and any day now one of them will qualify for a driver’s license. Charlie (meaning David Krumholtz) is going to have to lose some weight for this part, maybe all of the eighty pounds he gained after Numbers got cancelled, but we at the Instapunk Network are confident he can do it. Show should be gangbusters. Providing they both learn the difference between tai chi and Krav Maga.
The genius.
The other genius
Star Trek Who?
Two of the greatest sci-fi franchises ever (barring the execrable Star Wars nonsense), it’s absolutely time to bring these two together, and who cares in what time in particular? So Kirk is on the bridge and Spock is practicing his eyebrow raising and then lieutenantess Sulu sounds the alarm that a large red British phone booth is dead ahead. Kirk flings the blonde yeoman from his lap and orders every crewman in a red shirt to be prepared to die in the incipient collision. Excited yet?
Cut to a moment later when the incredibly expansive interior of the Tardis is stretched to the max by a complete starship. That’s when Doctor Who and Captain Kirk exchange their first words.
“You’re telling me my starship is in a phone booth?”
“That would appear to be so.”
“I could have used you back at the academy when we were trying to put eighteen cheerleaders in a phone booth.”
“Pleased to be of assistance.”
“Who are you?”
“Yes.”
A good long season of quality TV will surely ensue.
CSI Wyoming
Picture this. An old school cowboy sheriff whose idea of forensics is holstering his gun after shooting a suspect and then hoisting a few with his Injun (excuse me, Native American) co-conspirator in breaking all three of the laws on the Wyoming books, happens upon a bespectacled monk in the desert studying bugs. His name is Grissom. He is insane. But there’s chemistry. And over the course of a season, Grissom gradually teaches Long mire that not every death in the county is either by gunfire or natural causes. Several words are spoken in each episode. Lou Diamond Phillips seems to understand Grissom, but he doesn’t speak any of the words that are spoken. We are riveted because the words that are spoken are mostly spoken by Deputy Katee Sackhoff.
Responding to a post by Ellen Ganapoulos at Greyhound Friends of New Jersey:
I’ll probably expand this into a real post later, Ellen. But what strikes me most is not cuteness but the recognition we all feel for things greyhound. We all know this stuff, have seen this stuff, love this stuff, and wait for it. Saw a serious medical article questioning whether or not sighthounds were really dogs, because they differ from the main in so many ways, physiological and biochemical. Not quite like the rest.
This is the bond that ties us all together, the privilege of being with these amazing creatures, the fastest, the slowest, the gentlest, and in some ways the most mysterious. They do comical things, but they are never without the deepest dignity. They look so much alike and yet they exhibit a dazzling array of personalities, all projected through similar pop eyes and needle noses. If there is a supermodel of the dog world, this is surely it, but they are not mean or vain or avaricious like their would-be human counterparts.
If human, they’d be picked for the jocks and cheerleaders with their big chests and slim waists and extraordinary athletic ability. Being greys instead, they carry around Winnie the Pooh, eye your sandwich, accumulate stuffed toys to cuddle, and find couches to lie on.
I’ve been impressed by the number and range of greyhound fanciers. I wish more people got rescue greys than Goldens. The greys are easier for families than the hyperactive ones. I wish more people knew that this isn’t a breed of dog but a species apart, maybe an angel. And I wish they didn’t die so young. But maybe that’s part of being an angel. You visit for a time, offer a healing of some sort, and then return to heaven.
Don’t know how to think about how that might work? We’ll have to agree to disagree. In the meantime…
Got this image from Jeffrey Malashock. He thought it was hilarious, not knowing that I had written this novel all the way back in 1999.
The passion, the degradation…
Yes, back in the days of Shuteye Town 1999, I was the premier writer of women’s romantic fiction. This is a title I’m especially proud of.
The timeless erotica, the perversion, the Rosalie Ryder does Maureen Dowd of it all…(Click for bigger.)
Wait till you read the hot hot hot text. (Pardon what is called Greeking, where the words of one novel might be variable compared to the real pay dirt of female erotica.)
Chapter One
Arma virumque her long skirts and voluptuous yet maidenly form cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the candles which her younger sister had lit hours before venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec the lush scent of the wisteria outside olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque still not married and contemplating the prospect of being a spinster cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto since her virtuous but dull suitor Thomas had fallen off his horse. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit sighed heavily, causing her firm young bosom to heave.
Arma virumque cano handsome stranger, dirty, disheveled, smelling strongly of maleness and travel. Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto ever since the war had begun. Dux femina facta troops and bandits and mysterious things in the night. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Aunt Prunella looked on disapprovingly as arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the stranger looked directly at her and a strange heat grew in her belly venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
“How dare you speak to me in that way, sir?” she protested.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille his arms went round her but she pushed him away and ran back to the house through the rose garden, her breath coming in quick short gasps. terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta and nothing happening for quite a while. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano and nothing continues to happen for a while Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et some cooking and sewing haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque more candle lighting cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris difficulty sleeping iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec rumors of historical events and name dropping in some nearby town olim meminisse iuvabit.
“Wake up!” It was his voice and she came bolt awake, still half in a dream she realized had involved him. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma his arms around her but she pushed him away and virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa more nothing going on but some name dropping and more historical events ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec a famous person shows up and thinks she’s smart and fascinating for a woman olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae more trouble sleeping qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris disturbing rumors about the handsome stranger iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque candles and sewing and cooking and bosom heavings, trouble sleeping, name dropping, horse hooves et cetera Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma around her and this time she did not, could not have resisted because it was page sixty, and she knew it was impossible to hold out past page sixty. She wanted him, had wanted him ever since the moment she first laid eyes on his handsome face and the virile shape of his lean, male body inside those leathern breeches.
“Oh my darling dear,” he breathed, “I’ve wanted you ever since I first saw your beautiful face and the womanly heaving shape of your, er, maidenly form in that dress that’s cut down to here, if you know what I mean.”
And then they didn’t speak. There was only the questing of their hands, their lips, their hundreds of other nonsexual body parts, and finally their things that stiffened or peaked or protuberated or moistened, and they were joined together, as man to woman, and they rose and fell together, as deeply and naturally as the ocean or as two dogs in the street, except that the smell of tallow candles and leathern breeches made it somehow sweeter, more refined, less dirty and disgusting than it is in real life, and they sighed the words of love in the proper dialect in each other’s ear, and kept on joining and rejoining and rejoining some more until dawn, when both of them were exhausted with love, but still not speaking because of the plot complication.
Virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Well, those few paragraphs of Greeking (aka Latining) are about what they imagine when they run into a genuine Don Juan with a yellow carp on his head. Mind blowing. For paragraph after paragraph. After paragraph.
Media Buzz. Half ass kissing and half ass covering (pun intended).
Wow. Wow. WOW!!! Didn’t want to watch but my wife made me. More than I ever wanted to know about Megyn Kelly’s digestive system. She almost couldn’t go on, but Howie Kurtz was too much a gentleman to ask if she was on her period.
In fact, they were very gentlemanly to themselves as a network. The approach of attacking candidates’ vulnerabilities was asserted quite assertively as a good and useful thing. Let’s do everything we can to make them look bad because the New York Times and the Washington Post won’t be doing that on overdrive until November 2016. Oh. That’s right. What we really wanted was for Fox News to get good reviews from the NYT and WAPO.
LET’s see, Megyn. The country is looking for a new president. Immigration. ISIS. Domestic terrorism. A budding race war. Catastrophic debt. An economy mired in the sludge of leftist regulation and phony climate change paranoia. So what’s the most important question to ask the biggest figure on the stage? “Uh, you called a woman a fat pig.”
Thank you, Ms. Media Talent of this new and odious century.
So now Fox News becomes the big coverup machine. Megyn gets ten minutes to explain why she and “the other two” did exactly what the alphabet networks would have done. Hector and embarrass the Republican candidates and re-upped the War on Women meme and the false controversies about how much white men oppose abortion. Then she got another three minutes to act all girly girl, complete with hand and hair histrionics, to tell us about what seems to have a bowel problem on the day of the show.
I kid you not.
I was pretty much done with Fox after that, but then by accident I heard part of Fox News Sunday on the radio. Charles Lane, in his urbane way, repeated the Erick Erickson slander, cementing it into the record. Laura Ingraham pointed out that Trump is saying things people want to hear. Chris Wallace questioned whether any of these Trumpsters are actually Republicans (huh?). Laura, probably hormonal at this time of the month, walked off the set to look after her thug Russian children, and George Will, finally asked about Trump, settled into his primmest grandma mode and let loose.
Can’t quote him word for word but it went something like this. “Donald Trump @&$?$&@? Trump %#^+¥£€ The Donald >€%#£€¥^*!”
No real cuss words, mind. Just the sanitized and oh so clever Princeton kind.
I’m thinking Fox has made a big business bet. Get some respect from the dying MSM and look for a ratings hike. Move left and steal audience from the alphabet news outlets.
The upside is obvious. So is the downside. Become what you used to loathe and despise, and you will lose the ones who once believed in you.
Now my wife has discovered landscape aspect photography. She’s watching the deerhound and greyhound playing together. Funny. Spontaneous. Just like this cut from Sticky Fingers. Made up in the studio.
A past that is cantering away from us, not retreating, just late for something better.
There was a time, not that long ago, when all of us knew ladies. Something I wrote fifteen years ago:
Some of us… can’t help remembering ladies. They were our mothers and grandmothers, our friends’ mothers and grandmothers, and they had no idea they were prisoners of a vicious sexist culture. They knew how to smile, how to make strangers and shy ones feel welcome, they knew how to dress up for a party, how to dance to ballroom music, how to practice countless skills that made houses into cheery homes, and we loved them. In every possible way they exemplified the essential human virtues and mediated their children’s vulnerability through their own. They were playing a life-and-death role, especially in those first six years, and one that fathers couldn’t play because their role back then was different. Fathers weren’t second-string mommies, always playing catch-up on the sensitivities not born into men. They were, when all was said and done, judges — the ones charged with preparing the children to be strong against the institutional temptations and corruptions that were coming after the time of safe haven was over. Their job was not to be taken in the way mother could be by an artful grin or pleading. Their job was to say no, to describe the consequences, to levy the punishment so that the lesson would be learned in the home, not in the dangerous realms of the outside world.
“Before” there were fathers and mothers. “After” we have “deadbeat dads” and a plethora of lawyers, doctors, journalists, executives, and bureaucrats, all with ticking biological clocks and an enduring confusion about the difference between home and government. If they can’t be in the home, then they want the world as a whole made as safe as a home. They want more laws, more protections, more services. They beg the government to come deeper into the home, inside the car, into the chemistry of their children’s brains. [Any] post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis is dead wrong. The women’s vote has played a pivotal role in the rise of nanny government precisely because they’re always looking back in the direction of a home that is no longer what it was.
So, a friend sent me hunt pictures he’d photographed, beautifully, himself. When I asked, he had no idea why I would link a reminiscence about ladies with these tableaus of life among the gracious. He’s that much older. He doesn’t understand the connectedness of things.
I’m just going to show you the pictures and let you spin your own connections, like the spiders we all are. But note the perfectly easy composition, the natural framing of a scene, the unstated emphasis on appropriate attire, and the beauty of formality and order. With more than a nod to the vibrancy and relevance of all kinds of us despicable animals.
Fun and anticipation aren’t just human emotions.
Do you know — you probably don’t — that equestrian events are the one sport where women compete equally with men. They often win. This most aristocratic of contests is where women first staked a claim and proved their mettle. Why? Because it’s important how you look while doing it. AND they’re as brave and skillful as men.
My wife taught me to ride. And laughed when I inevitably fell. Motorhead can’t handle one horsepower.
You can resent the well-to-do and laugh at their pretensions. But all of you who slobbered over a royal wedding need to look in the mirror. There is such a thing as The Quality, and we all admire and depend upon it.
Beauty needs no justification as long as it has no cruel purpose.
The man who took these lovely photographs had no idea why I would connect them to a paean to long gone American ladies.
Can’t think of anything that will convince him. But life is a parade full of costumes and conventions and courtesies. We still have the costumes, ugly though they are, and conventions persist like waves at the shore, whether they bear seaweed or syringes. What we’ve oh so obviously and utterly lost are the courtesies.
One of the best photographs I’ve ever seen.
Although Raebert tells me this one is HIS favorite.
All photos in this post are copyrighted by David Zincavage. Thank you, David. You put real meaning into the term “old school.” Click on any/all of pics to see them bigger.
Is it useless to ask any of you to think esthetically for once? Or is life really supposed to be about bra straps and cargo shorts? My mother was a lady. So were all her friends. I’d trade all of today’s college girls for that tiny band of brave, polite, accomplished, and modest LADIES.
This past week has alarmed me more than I can say. Supposedly good Christians attacking a woman who was the target of a murderous assault by the proud sponsors of videotaped decapitations, rapes, mutilations, and other acts so detestable most people can’t and don’t watch them. The cognoscenti sought to shame her and give fanatical murderers a pass because they were “provoked.”
I’ve had it. At this point I’m entirely willing to be on the outs with friends and family who have forgotten what they shallowly profess to believe. Do I extend to them Christian forgiveness? No. Some sins it is up to God to forgive. But there are sins not even God forgives. Something else our jaded, indolent society has forgotten.
Anymore, most so-called Christians are simple secularists, mouthing the pieties of a world that stands in stark contrast to the religion they believe they believe and don’t actually think about or care about at all. They go to church and go through the motions, checking the boxes of baptism, confirmation, and communion. But motions are all they do.
We’re witnessing an ongoing slaughter of people who really do believe and mostly we don’t care. Not even enough to watch it or take any note of its occurrence.
***********
I got this far the other night, weighted down by the dismissals and denials of professed Christians. One who thought an empty reality show simulacrum of the ritual of First Communion was proof against the proliferating temptations awaiting a girl on the verge of puberty. One who still stubbornly professes to believe in the Constitution as much as his Roman Catholic faith and yet believes that it’s just common Christian decency to let Muslims determine what we can say about their barbaric, utterly indecent cult of theocratic world domination. (A generation younger, he no doubt also believes that the Crusades were an unconscionable war against the world devouring Nazgul of Muhammed. So be it.) One who told me, in all candor, despite being raised in an evangelical tradition, that he just doesn’t care that much about anything that happens outside his own family and neighborhood.
So I put down my iPad and fell silent.
************
Then, today, I found on my newsfeed a commemoration of the first recording the Rolling Stones’s Satisfaction, 50 years ago yesterday. And the old, failing punk rose in me, so that I wrote this in a comment on my own citation of the song:
Of course, I’m no way near as energetic as I was then. But I’m way, way more pissed. Does that count? Can’t figure out why so few people care that our way of life is being taken apart day by day in this Caligulan administration. How can anything be business as usual for anybody who claims to have a brain. Six years of this halfwit clown in the Oval Office, American influence nearly gone, American security crumbling to dust, poor people poorer, talentless billionaires dealing with the White House to enrich themselves further at everyone else’s expense, and the overwhelming majority of the mass media, academia, Hollywood, and every identity constituency still blaming the only economic system that has ever provided prosperity for generations of talented hardworking people. And, btw, Christians, even the ones who take their kiddies to church, no longer know what any of their so-called faith is about, except maybe conceding to MSM secularists that every other religion, even the most proudly vicious and murderous of them, is just as valid, just as good, just as evil. Thus proving they know absolutely nothing about Christianity, which has tolerated other faiths but has never stipulated their equality, just the customary Christian love of sinners, not their sins. Christianity is the light of every aspect of modern consciousness, everything that makes us individuals and connects us to the divine. No other religion is remotely close. Why the near and Far East were both sunk in feudalism and rigid caste systems until American Christian hegemony turned them loose to build new hopes and aspirations for their peoples. Japan, India, Taiwan, Singapore…
And they don’t care. None of their business. Nothing to do with their own Biblical illiteracy, their own ignorance of the prophets, nothing in fact but another little pageant display in a blind church — with a Jumbotron a jumble of stained glass windows with no Christian content whatsoever — presided over by a progressive, collectivist, pro-abortion minister, and a lot of noisy rearranging of deckchairs on the Titanic by men and women in tee shirts and shorts.
While they simply, purely, and completely don’t give a rat’s ass about anything except whether their damaged kids are buckled safely into the child seats of their SUVs.
The Stones were about living, taking risks, daring, shining, not subsiding into an oatmeal-colored limbo of submissive nonentity and unthinking cowardice.
Where did everyone go? I can’t stand even to be in public anymore. Everybody’s fat, loutish, dressed in lewd shirts, obsessed with food and toys more than curiosity, and totally blind to the stars in a streetlightless sky. They’re dead already. Watching American Idol and worshipping Beyonce, Brady, and their trust in Brobdingnagian government.
God help us. But at this point, why would he?
Rant ended. Been building in me like the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Bad news. It will almost certainly erupt again. Satisfaction? No, no, no.
Certainly not with this, which nobody wants to watch or ever will.
Look. LOOK DAMMIT. she could be your daughter. And chances are, she was a better Christian than you will ever be.
I’m never again going to say, “Don’t look.” This is happening, whether your little self-satisfied church gives a damn or not. “LOOK!” You think off-key kid choruses and theology free ads for Obama’s immigration policies and bathetic identity grievances about rape culture in the only country in history where women have achieved cultural dominance will free you from accountability for your sins of omission will ever save you? No. They won’t.
If there’s a part of you that really believes in Christianity, you face damnation. If not, you face damnation.
P.S. Ever noticed that western atheists are all pacifists? They don’t ever see a moral point worth fighting for. Ever noticed that Eurasian atheists are all genocidal totalitarians? They don’t see a moral point worth fighting for. Rational superiority is absolute superiority and they have no qualms about killing everybody else to get what they want. Which is actually the sensible answer given their perspective. It was romantic the way Ayn Rand’s heroes flew away as the lights of New York were going out. Wasn’t it? How the elite have always seen themselves. Above it all and unaccountable to anyone.
Kind of like pretend Christians when you think about it.
You know how conversations go unless you don’t. David Zincavage and I were having a fun back and forth on a post of mine about Gunter Grass on Facebook, which somehow got us on the topic of books that have been made into movies. (You can find the FB post below.) The Russians came up, which they sometimes unfortunately do, and my wife and I started trying to remember movies besides Dr. Zhivago that had been turned into usually terrible movies.
I had already confessed to Zincavage my knowledge of Russian literature was somewhere between zilch and zero, and I reinforced the point with my wife, who actually studied Russian in school, by acknowledging that all I remembered about War and Peace was Audrey Hepburn. Which is red blooded but hardly flattering of my learnedness. Was it Brando who played Napoleon, I asked. No, she told me. Then she leaped onto her iPad and informed me, Herbert Lom. A sickeningly awful movie she said unnecessarily, since my memory of only Audrey was already its own kind of review. Henry Fonda was in it too. Really? Didn’t even know they had Okies in Russia.
Anyway, and this is the conversation part, I adamantly insisted that Brando had played Napoleon at some point and Jean Simmons was there too. Jumping onto my iPad, I quickly found a movie called Desiree, which by golly I had also read the book version of, thus shoring up my lit cred immeasurably.
Thus emboldened, I told her about a breathtakingly complimentary rejection letter I had gotten from The New Yorker 40 years ago. It was a piece called “The Retreat from Moscow,” a journal of said sorrowful journey. The premise was that Napoleon was actually a woman, irritated by small discomforts while his troops starved and froze outside his domestically perfect tent. Why the hand inside the greatcoat. Bosom camouflage. “Funny,” the rejection letter said. “Try something else.”
My wife laughed. Women were off limits even back then. But I was happy, having steered the conversation back to my favorite subject, me. So I told her about other ways I had been cheerfully rejected in humor attempts that weren’t right for their times, long before anyone had even coined the term Political Correctness. How good can things get? I have a perfect opportunity to be whiny and self pitying with my wife AND take credit for it. Nirvana. If that’s a word.
Remember the gas crisis? No, you probably don’t. Back in the late seventies we had the second worst president in U.S. history. Name of Carter. He somehow managed to piss off the middle Eastern oil cartel and gas prices went through the roof, leading to such savage by-products as Pintos, Chevy Vegas, and if memory serves, AMC Gremlins. So I wrote a satire for my favorite literary publication, Car and Driver Magazine, acknowledging what they perversely would not, that all us motorheads were essentially grounded for the duration. It was titled “Carbon Monoxide in the Closet.”
Okay, it wasn’t exactly cheerful. It described an emerging phenomenon called “car bars,” in which sad guys like me gathered together to drink in mostly dark shotgun taverns plastered with signs advertising Castrol, Sunoco mega-octane gas, Roadrunner decals, and wall mounted Hooker headers. There was a jukebox, but the only choices were small-block Chevy, rat motor Chevy, and 340, 440, and 427 Hemi Mopar revs. And probably whatever Ford thought it had going at the time. Guys brought their own fetish parts to stroke in remembrance of times past, fenders, steering wheels, Koni shocks, alloy wheels, you name it. Because life as they knew it was over.
Well, it was THE most complimentary rejection letter I ever got. “Everybody here just loves this,” they said. Apparently they had all passed it around and fell on the floor laughing. They didn’t even mention why they rejected it. Because they didn’t need to. Even then you couldn’t make even an implied comparison to what was already becoming a protected group. I understood.
I’d already been there and done that. I’d been rejected with far less joviality as far back as college, when I submitted a work at the height of the radical era to the famously irreverent Harvard Lampoon. Well, it seemed funny to me at the time. What? My fraternity publication issued by Sigma Delta Sigma, replete with alumni notes about bomb mishaps and ads for such hot items as sweat stained work shirts worn by genuwine UAW members. The way the Lampoon worked, they returned your manuscripts with all the comments members had jotted on them.
There were a bunch of comments, all of them nasty. The one I remember most vividly was a single word: “Shit.” But there was a note from some misguided Poonie, who said, “You have talent. This is funny. Try again.” But, hey, it only takes one blackball to scotch you at the Lampoon. I tried again, just because I had to, but I never heard from them again.
How did we get all the way from Audrey Hepburn to the lowest years of the Harvard Lampoon and me stubbing my toe on the first rung of the ladder to the inferno known as political correctness? It’s called conversation. And my wife and I commit that particular sin all the time.
Why I love Tolstoy so much.
Why I no longer have “lampoon” in my vocabulary.
Next time maybe I’ll tell you about the short story I’ve always loved the most, the one about a man remembered by a 108 year old as “Poley,” whom he encountered as a child on an island off the lefthand coast of Africa. If you’re good. OR if you happen to own a copy of an anthology from the forties called “Bedtime Bonanza.” From a time when stories were meant to be entertaining, not overwritten plotless exercises in existential angst. If you’ve got that book, send it to me or tell me where I can buy my own copy.
My mother in Cancun, 1984. You should have seen her in Paris, 1963.
It used to be that photography was understood to be an instantaneous approximation of kinetic life. Where the word “snapshot” originated. My mother was always in motion. Why I won’t apologize for the blur here. She spent her life doing everything for everybody, but — and this is key — she never lost herself along the way. Not the downtrodden one, not the victim, not the identity-less cipher, she chose the beneficiaries of her effort and love. Her husband, her children, her parents, her husband’s parents, she expended everything for them.
And as I look back on it, all these were co-equal to her. Not my children above all and civilization be damned. Or any of the other rotten excuses for narcissistic obsession we hear so much about these days. She could be stern with the kids and a friend up to a point and a proud cheerleader, but she also understood my dad’s role to guide and discipline us. And her own. I once failed to do my arithmetic homework and begged her to do sums for me. She did them in a trice after breakfast and before the bus arrived, laying down the law that she would watch me perform those same sums when I got home from school. Which she did and I did.
She had some give on the question of whether dad had to know what we had done wrong that day, though she wasn’t afraid to blackmail us. If we atoned properly, our haunted fearful looks would gradually go away. This time, he wouldn’t know.
About those sums. You have no idea how fast she did them. Smart as a whip but never said so. She had a degree in Romance languages — French, Portuguese, Spanish — and as a result worked as a translator at DuPont and as an, of course, “secretary” on the Manhattan Project. In college she was also a jock, swimmer and archer for the Buckeyes. In married life she was an indefatigable knitter and seamstress, producing masterful Irish sweaters for me and all the clothes my sister wore until prep school mandated fancy labels, as well as an endless number of monogrammed bookbags whose proceeds went to our school. She made most of her own clothes too, while supporting every event at our elementary school, from cupcakes to classroom painting, and looking after both sets of my grandparents on an almost daily basis. You literally could never see her not in motion.
Why her only (but multiple) traffic tickets were for failing to come to a full stop at a red light. She was in too much of a hurry. But she could drive fast in her ’65 Mustang.
It’s possible I misspoke above. There was one love that the loss of damaged her. Her dad had wanted a son. (She was supposed to be Glen; she was Glenna instead.) He compensated by bestowing on her the love and attention he’d have given a boy. He taught her how to throw a baseball, and so it happened she could play catch with me. Every Fourth of July he awakened her with a huge firecracker under her bedroom window. She set her alarm hoping to beat him with his own medicine, but by her own admission never made it. When he died at 90 some of the life went out of her.
My wife only met her when she had become an invalid, desiccated by years of over strong blood pressure medication. (When it became critical, a new doctor said, “Good God, woman, how you can you still be alive with no electrolytes?”)
She once weighed 130 pounds and could probably lick you in a fight. At the end she weighed 80 and had only the strength to give Patrick the greyhound a few Cheetos. But the native generosity never left, apart from a Scottish penury that seems to run in the family.
She was never a great cook (when my dad was away in England and France, my sister and I coined the term Europe burgers to describe the ruined stones of ground beef she put between buns with ketchup to feed us), she could hold a grudge with the best of those who had German-Scottish roots, and she never forgave my dad for the incredible fact he reminded her too often of, that in their only two meetings Dad’s Cornell Big Red had defeated her Ohio State Buckeyes.
But you should have seen the two of them together the night they went out for a night on the town in Paris. He was a dagger in his tuxedo and she was a cool blonde dream in a Paris hairdo and a dress that today we could call bling. Princess Grace had nothing on her.
My mother. My dad painted multiple portraits of her. He was unusually adept at catching the truth of his subjects. But he was never satisfied with one of them. Something about a blur, I suspect.
Guy named Matt Zwolinski. Professor at San Diego State. Mixed it up with him over police brutality video. We declared a kind of truce on Facebook, and he assured me he was not a progressive. But I stirred the pot by calling out California’s one party state and the idiotic policies that led to the current water shortage. Then his minions came in as commenters. One, a brightly boy from the Cato Institute, was particularly dismissive. I asked for his credentials. He ducked and insulted me, ducked and insulted me, and ducked and insulted me. Then Matt, the Facebook father, informed me that I was defacing his “wall” and wouldn’t tolerate it. It all ended this way. I made nice with him after the Cato contretemps:
You don’t get it that your young followers know absolutely nothing? Why are you so protective? I had a blog for ten years in which I never banned people, no matter how four letter they were with me. I contended with them and they stopped coming. Take a look at this, a long look. I redefined writing in the Internet era. I did a LIVE Intercolumn Reference in a book that began on an Underwood Standard typewriter.
theboomerbible.com
It also, as one of your followers extorted from me, sold 100,000 copies in print. I don’t usually lead with that. But your defensiveness I find annoying. The lefties call people motherfuckers, shitheads, racists, sexists, and everything else they can think of. Haven’t done that. I just contend. What I’m used to.
I think I like you. Until you retreat into this hypersensitive cocoon that, whether you’re a lefty or not, smacks of political correctness. I’m not interested in that. If you want to talk for real, we’ll talk. If you want to pose, the answer is simple. defriend me.
Then he lowered the boom.
Robert, look. You’re kind of a jerk. I’m sure it’s comforting for you to tell yourself that the reason people don’t want to talk to you is that your ideas are simply too powerful, or that they can’t handle the truth, or whatever. But the fact is that you’re just coming off as a bitter, rude, and arrogant person. And I have no wish to spend my time talking with someone like that. So, goodbye.
I responded. But I had already been defriended. Welcome to the Facebook era.
Maybe I am all those things. How old are you? I’ve watched my country being demolished for decades. You’re a professor in San Diego. While academe rots and putrefies. I’m rude and bitter because I’m watching a rape of institutions I believed in all my life. You’re a disgrace. What single thing do you do to keep freedom of speech alive in your world? Anything? As Hemingway would have said, I unprint myself of you. What is your educational mission, son? Or is it just coasting on tenure?
Anyhow. I did no name calling. No four letter words or accusations about patrimony. I quarreled, asked for attention to my own writing, and persisted in asking for the credentials that make a disrespectful (being kind here) 21 year old commenter Cato Institute material. That makes me a jerk. So be it.
The Internet is amazing. Sometimes you think your childhood past is actually an invented thing. I was trying to explain to my wife — recent convert to Formula 1 racing — about the Vineland Speedway in south Jersey. Tried to frame what it was like to drive in the entrance, which had a, to me, spectacular marquee featuring a dead Kaiser Frazier atop a simple sign. Then, lo and behold, I found the photo above. Exactly as I remembered it.
I’d been teasing her about F1 drivers past, quizzing her about which ones were still alive and which had perished in the world’s most dangerous sport. I mean, if you’re going to plight a troth of this sort, you should know the bodies on which it is built. Because there are a lot of bodies.
The memory of one of the dead drivers propelled me back to the Vineland Speedway, where I experienced many wondrous things as a child in the early 1960s. Events aplenty. Sights, certainly. But also the keenest triggers memory has — smells. Two stand out. In the bleacher seats at the Speedway, the comforting, enfolding aroma of cherry pipe tobacco, which neither of the pipe smokers in my family could stomach. But to my ten year old nose it was beatific.
But cherry tobacco can’t hold a candle to the other smell, which in my mind is still the single best smell I have ever smelled, including you know what. It was that good, that arousing, that magnificent. It’s called Castrol R. A racing motor oil made of castor beans.
No other intoxicant compares.
On the Sundays when there was sports car racing at Vineland Speedway, the air was pregnant with Castrol R heated to a racing temperature. I won’t describe it because no one can. Just think of it as heroin for the nose. Why it’s the sensory trigger it is. A friend of mine and I bought a Norton motorcycle together and put the miraculous lubricant into its crankcase just so we could have the olfactory experience again. It’s not good mechanical practice. If you’re not using the motor more or less continuously, it turns into a whitish gel that gums up the works. But we were young and couldn’t resist.
Where was I? Just past the entrance, off a nondescript and cluttered highway called Route 47, was the parking lot. Orange gravel, no painted lines, just cars of people there for the races. But such cars. License plates from all over the eastern seaboard. How could they even know to come here, to a backwoods track in Vineland, NJ? But here they were. Austin Healeys, MGAs, Morgans, Lotus 7s, even Bentleys and Rolls Royces. And this, which was for me an imprinting experience, the first time I laid eyes on the brand new, heretofore only rumored, masterpiece called the XKE.
Exactly the same as the car I fell fatally in love with. Except there was no grass. Just orange gravel.
You thought I was going to talk racing? I will. The track was narrow and short, although there was a stretch out of sight of the stands. Suspense. Who would be in the lead when they emerged from the hidden part. When I was young I didn’t know the track was short. In my teenage years, though, my friend of the Castrol R fixation and I found the shut down circuit (now part of a community college campus) and ran it in his XKE. Unbelievably narrow, unbelievably tight, with an unbelievably nasty chicane. About there, we hit a dirt bike rider who had the same idea we did. He was unhurt. We shook hands and went our separate ways.
The only real straightaway was immediately in front of the stands. That’s where I saw the first SCCA showdown between a 289 Cobra and a Corvette. Both cars were way too much for such a tinsel track. The Corvette actually had better handling (who’d a thunk it?) and led on the first lap into the straightaway. Then the Cobra thing happened. The driver pressed the accelerator and devoured the Corvette within the first two hundred yards. Never looked back. Never had to.
I saw other things on the Speedway track. Before there was Danica there was Janet Guthrie. Before there was Janet Guthrie, there was Donna Mae Mims.
Yes she was. Donna Mae.
We saw her at the Vineland Speedway. And, yes, back in those dark and oppressive male chauvinist days, we cheered for her like the dickens. Not ironically at all. We wanted her to win. Which she did. The first female SCCA champion in history. The past is not always what you’ve been taught it is.
Imagine. Us flyover hicks from the Jersey backwoods rooting our hearts out for a woman in the most dangerous, most manliest life and death sport. Can’t do it? Sorry for you.
Saw other things you wouldn’t expect in the backwoods either. There was the driver in an Elva Courier with the number ‘000.’ He was simply beyond compare.
Sometimes even hicks get to see genius at work. Guess what. We know it when we see it.
The races were typically 25 laps. Triple-Zero typically lapped every other car in the race, meaning he began in the lead and then overtook every car behind him before the race was over. The driver was named Mark Donohue. How this post got started. I asked my wife how many drivers I had seen in person died on the track eventually. He’s the one.
Funny. In those long lost years I also had the good fortune to travel the course of the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, because my dad was almost as crazy about racing as I was, but that’s a faint and, well, unconvincing memory to me now, because there was no cherry pipe tobacco, no Castrol R, and no local sense of identity about it. It was just a stunt we pulled. The Vineland Speedway was life being lived the way I’ve always wanted to live it.
N.B. Explaining the asterisk above. SCCA stands for Sports Car Club of America. One of the future champions who raced at Vineland was this guy.
Can’t think of his name offhand, but he was nearly as good, or at least in the approximate ballpark, with Steve McQueen.
P.S. Another question my wife flunked. Who’s the driver who invented the tradition of spraying everybody with Champagne after a big win?
Dan Gurney
Like all people who value education, she’s glad to learn about Dan. And she thinks he was better looking than both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. He coulda shoulda been a movie star.
Don’t want to belong to any movement that would have as a member.
This will be after the fashion of Jay Nordlinger’s Impromptus, with no attempt at transitions and thereby enduring the risk of seeming to be stringing non sequiturs together. So be it.
I really do get some of the lefties’s points. Where to begin?
When the Arab Spring started, I suspected what it would lead to, namely dissolution of whatever stability existed in the Middle East. But given what has eventuated from Obama’s essentially isolationist policy in foreign affairs, I find myself agreeing that putting “American boots on the ground” against ISIS is a waste of time. I’m for defending Israel, with nuclear weapons if necessary, but as to the rest of it, the barbarian regimes of the Middle East have made their own bed and they can lie in it. The American people are tired of war, or more precisely, they are tired of wars their government will not support to any successful conclusion. Too much blood shed for victories that are rendered meaningless by self-serving politicians.
I can understand why black people are mad at the police and the criminal justice system. My quarrel is not as much with their indignation as with their methods. I’m a Jersey motorhead. None of us likes the cops. Some are okay. Many are thugs, not necessarily racist but control freaks who like strutting around with guns and bullying people. I believe the DOJ’s report about the Ferguson police department. The Michael Brown affair was a spark that lit waiting tinder. My biggest problem is with politicians who fanned those first sparks into flaming riots and police murders. That was a cynical and unforgivable tactic by a party that is absolutely in the pocket of attorneys who prosecute selectively, unethically, probably illegally, and for the exclusive purpose of building their own political careers and wallets.
Income inequality has become grotesque. Corporate CEO’s are overpaid by factors of ten or higher. Their pay rises as they collude with lobbyists and politicians to eliminate the risk that is supposed to be the basis for reward in a capitalist system. Wall Street really is the epicenter of this phenomenon. I dropped out of graduate business school because I didn’t want to become an officer in the army of those who make nothing and profit by manipulating those who do make things. I met those guys when they were in training. Cynical, selfish, worthless, despite expensive educations that should have taught them better. I just don’t think the answer to the problem is letting the government that connives with robber barons decide who can make how much or who should make at least this much. That’s just more power to the same crooks.
I understand the frustrations and desire for assistance of our astoundingly high population of single mothers. I think of them, all of them, as lost little girls. They’ve been sold a bill of goods. Keep the iPod earbuds in, ignore your own parents, and do whatever the hell you want. That’s liberation, right? That’s freedom, right. Wrong. But there is no law government can pass that will lay down the necessary rules. No, don’t marry an ex-con who will beat you the day after your wedding. No, don’t be careless or promiscuous about premarital sex; someday the condom will break. No, don’t divorce him the first time you realize that your life is not a Disney movie.
So much is broken in our culture, and has been for such a long time, that I also understand the craving for unfettered abortion rights. I get the resentment of men that hard-core feminists have. But it still does take two to tango, and there’s no government in the history of governments that can repeal the anatomical certainty of woman’s greater stake in pregnancy than man’s. I would love to see a lessening of personal pain, blighted lives of both women and children, but I disagree that abortion is the answer. Better behavior is. That makes me a prig, a chauvinist, and an apologist for the predator sex, I know, but these are issues civilization has been grappling with since before recorded human history.
Yet I also recognize the contradictions in conservative positions that even the left finds hard to surface because of the contradictions in its own positions. We conservatives are choleric about fatherless families among the poor, even as we insist that abortion is never an answer. Well, it is an answer in all too many instances. Only problem being, it begins to look like Sanger-esque eugenics when the overwhelming percentage of abortions occur among the poor. That’s the liberal contradiction. If you want social justice, how is it justice that so many poor babies are killed are on their way out of the womb? Neither side has bellied up to this dilemma.
I even get the Hating America pose of so many leftists. They may not know it it, but their animus is an outgrowth of American exceptionalism. If we’re really the best that ever was, how can there be so much injustice? We have to fix this and this and this. The irony is that the precedent for this kind of constant, grinding self criticism arises from exactly the group that they are presently coalescing to hate as much as they seem to hate America: the Jews. It’s part of the Talmudic tradition to go back and back and back to quibble, quarrel, and otherwise question absolutely everything that’s supposed to be written in stone. Why not even Israel is unanimous about its own right to exist. Problem is, the ancient government which spawned this tradition was led by authoritarian kings. Why the contemporary left is so in love with authoritarian answers to human problems. Again, I understand the impulse and the origins, but I disagree profoundly with the methods and proposed answers.
Immigration. Hospitality to strangers is also a Biblical postulate. I sympathize with the desire. But the notion that you should let strangers despoil your own families is ultimately suicidal.
Gay marriage? Try as I might, I can’t get too worked up about anything but it’s hypocrisies. I have no desire to punish homosexuals. But I despise their insistence on requiring by law that we all have to subjugate our religious and other faiths to their whims. That doesn’t make me a homophobe. If anything, it makes me a vandalphobe. Don’t tell me I have to love a lifestyle I believe is wrong. And don’t force me to imagine or see what you do in bed with each other. But if you want two brides in wedding dresses or two grooms in tuxedos, I really truly don’t care at all as long as there is no legal requirement to attend the ceremony.
Well, I could go on, and maybe I’ll add more later on. But my point is that it’s wrong of leftists to think no conservatives ever understand their penchant and ideals. And it’s wrong of conservatives to think there’s no good that can come out of intensive debate. Who’s more wrong that there’s no debate at all but only opposing armies? As a conservative I admit I blame the left more than the right, but I also admit I blame both sides.
People think everything is on the Internet. It isn’t. The guy above isn’t. But he was a big guy, meaning a big man, in the best sense of the word. Big heart above all.
Got started on this line of thought because I was sparring with a friend whose daughter is close to a Yalie, and Harvard lost to Yale at basketball last night, which I couldn’t care less about. I made a dumb joke about Harvard yelling “safety school” at Yale in the closing seconds the way Princeton actually does when it loses to Penn.
You have to understand I’m not too fond of either Harvard or Yale these days, what with Bill and Hillary, the Bushes, Obama, Al Gore, and all the minions who support them and sport degrees from these two schools.
But my friend had reminded me that her daughter was friendly with a Yalie, and I had to ask myself if I had ever liked a Yalie. Hmmm. Him? No. Him? No, definitely not. Him? Are you kidding? Bunch of pseudo-intellectual second-raters who never had a thought worth thinking unless it involved money.
And then, like a shaft of sunlight I felt the warm glow of Francis Lyman Hine, whom I knew as Uncle Hine.
Let’s get the White Privilege charge out of the way forthwith. He had it. He was it. And never was it better bestowed. His friends called him Hiney, with all the connotations you think you invented implicit, and he upped them by naming his rural estate “Hine Quarters.”
If Gatsby had lived to be 50, he might have become Hiney. He had a funny and magnetic wife everyone called “Sis,” five children, two daughters, one son, and two daughters in that order. He had a 400 acre spread which included a rambling 1750s house, an Olympic pool, a brick bathhouse the size of a suburban home, a tournament quality tennis court, and a standing invitation to everyone in the neighborhood to use all of the above with a simple call ahead.
One of the places I grew up. The other was the woods in the back of my parents’ house, where I hunted Indians all alone and later drove my truck at the age of 13 more than 40 mph or faster when I knew I was observable. But when Uncle Hine threw a party, we went as a family. We weren’t rich. But riches didn’t matter at Hine Quarters. He liked everybody.
And he liked my sister and me in particular. Because we and his own children went to the school my grandfather founded and he — basically, er, essentially, er, completely — funded. So my sis and I were close to Helen, Louise, Lyman, Marion, and Priscilla. We didn’t know about money. Funny, huh? They were just our nearest neighbors and the kids we went to school with. My sister and Marion became best friends before there was such a thing as cell phones.
A man with five children doesn’t spend a lot of time with each one. He was the same way with my sister and me. He was loudly pleased when we showed up, wanted to know how we were doing, and then invariably got distracted by the hordes of guests who wanted something more from him than how we were doing.
He was a rich man, you see. His fortune came from something that rhymes with Boca Bola, and he was really truly trying to live his life away from New York’s “400” society families. He was living in the backwoods of southern New Jersey, for God’s sake. But the socialites showed up anyway.
Our elementary school wasn’t the only thing he dreamed up out of thin air. He made up a whole company out of the same gossamer element. Why my sister and I had the unique privilege of growing up in a backward, semi-literate backwater of south Jersey underneath a subset of 1960s jet set society.
Uncle Hine had not served in the armed forces during World War II. He had played four years as an academic freshman on the Yale football line, but something broke in that time which prevented him from joining the military. So he turned his fortune to his St. Paul’s classmates who had served as pilots. Their company reconditioned aircraft motors at the Millville airport, where P-47 pilots had been trained in the war. My dad was a P-47 pilot. Uncle Hine called him Lord Laird. But my dad wasn’t the only pilot in the bunch. There was even a bomber pilot from Princeton who drove a 1956 Thunderbird.
They were all friends. They maybe all drank too much, which is what PTSD was then, but I was there and I never saw any hanky panky. Although there was the time that Uncle Hine was in the pool with the reigning Miss Sweden and Sis got pretty mad.
The thing I always thought was the most exotic was Uncle Hine’s mother, Mrs. Clark, who had a Mark IX Jaguar. I met her once. She looked like Vanessa Redgrave the way she looks now.
You know they don’t actually work, don’t you?
I was a motorhead even then. But it was always breaking down. Uncle Hine was constantly having to rescue her from strange places, but she refused to give up the Jag. I could understand that.
And then we — and all the Hine kids — went away to school — and by the time we returned, there was no more Gatsby time. No more lobster-glutted clambakes at the private lake, no more tennis showdowns between local queens and Smith grads, no more silvery children swimming in the grand pool. All done. I saw Priscilla just two times after eighth grade. Once at a dance between our two boarding schools, where I almost kissed her, and once at her wedding. She is dead now. Note that we didn’t get to go to high school together or to a pep rally or a prom like all the subjugated ones.
White privilege. I won’t apologize. Don’t care who you are or were. If you’d been in the vicinity of Hine Quarters in the 1960s, you’d have been welcome. Just call first.
He didn’t die like Gatsby because he was never a fake. I miss him. And all those of you who never met him or anyone like him should miss him too.
Actually, he probably helped us get there.
P.S. Only telling this part because my wife insisted on an ending. Heard at some point that he was in the hospital having a leg amputated on account of Diabetes. So I called a florist and sent him flowers. He called me from his hospital room to thank me. Mine were the only flowers. Not easy being a rich man with a million friends. Didn’t want to end on this note. But sometimes that’s the note things end on. He died months later.
So I just got off the phone with my plumber because the zero degrees nuked our pump, and by “my” I don’t mean I own him or command him in any way; I inherited him from my long dead dad and he is a man I honor and respect.
Get this. He actually expressed sympathy about the fact that our pump blew up when the space heaters thawed it. Water all over the garage floor. How many times over the years has he heard this story? When he answered the phone I suggested he might be busy and he said, “Just a little.”
But he sailed right into the problem. “I’ll be out there this afternoon.” He also didn’t cushion the blow. “It could be Tuesday before a replacement pump is available.” Did I forget to tell you, he told me immediately the pump we have probably could not be saved?
I love this guy. He always comes sooner than he promises. He starts work whether you’re there or not. We once pulled back a cover from some plumbing fixture to find a snake wrapped around it and looked at one another. He said, “It’s the kind of place snakes like.” Then we finished uncovering the fixture. The snake discreetly departed the scene.
Part of me says he’s too old for what he’s doing. Another part of me says, please, please, don’t ever stop.
You think plumbers aren’t heroes? You probably think Bonnie Tyler is from West Virginia. Guess what. She’s Welsh. From WALES.
My plumber is from heaven.
UPDATE. He came early, of course, and we just now shooed him back to his wife. He’s not sure if the pump is dead. Trying to find a bad wire. Trying too long. It’s snowing like crazy and we’d rather have him in future than water today. How things are in our neck of the woods. He met Raebert. And the Scotty. They all nodded at one another. Hopefully he’s home by now. He’ll be back first thing tomorrow, you can be sure. Life as we used to live it. The grace of confidence among men.
Darwin, Gould, Dawkins. Three icons of evolution who didn’t actually agree on the facts of the matter. A veritable Mount Rushmore of Evolution.
Really tired of left-right Darwin arguments. Tired of the arguments on the left. Tired of the arguments on the right.
One way or the other, absolutely everybody is sanctimonious.
I won’t waste time on the lefties. They’re a bunch of sententious creeps. I’ll direct my ire at the right. Including people I know and ordinarily like. First up, Kevin Williamson, who while seeming to defend Scott Walker, said this:
The relevant scholars in the field do not “believe in” evolution, any more than a physicist “believes in” the proposition that objects subject to earth’s gravity accelerate toward the pavement at 9.8 meters per second squared — they know. As an intellectual matter, Scott Walker’s proclaiming that he “believes in” evolution would be precisely as meaningful as his proclaiming that he doesn’t “believe in” evolution — he has little or no relevant knowledge about the subject, and his choosing the right answer would be as intellectually significant as a chicken playing tic-tac-toe or infinite monkeys banging out Shakespearean sonnets on infinite typewriters.
They know. Sure they do. Proof? George Will.
“Descended from the apes!” exclaimed the wife of the bishop of Worcester. “Let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”
An American majority resists such an annoying notion, endorsing the proposition that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Still, evolution is a fact, and its mechanism is natural selection: Creatures with variations especially suited to their environmental situation have more descendants than do less well-adapted creatures. [emphasis added]
Sure. Fact exists in the case of 2 + 2 = 4. It does not exist in matters such as the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of species. Too many variables. (As with climate.) No scientist is prepared to declare the Big Bang a fact, no scientist is prepared even to offer a definitive theory about the origin of life, and yet we have a full-on army of PhDs prepared to lecture us about the origin of species as FACT. Including notable evolutionary biologist George Will.
Kevin Williamson, take note. Real scientists do not know that Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian or even Dawkins’s “Blind Watchmaker” version of evolution is fact. They just “believe” they have the best hypothesis going.
The science question is not simple. It has two parts. But surprise, the question is not the polar choice offered up in politics. It’s not creationism versus the scientific “consensus.” Which is the kind of yes/no, smart/dumb question the leftists among us prefer. It’s subtler than that. Lots of us dumb righties have no problem with micro-evolution, meaning the demonstrated ability of species to mutate in response to changing circumstances. Which is where academic science has concentrated most of its firepower.
Where we have a problem is with macro-evolution. The ability of species to evolve to altogether new species as a result of Darwinian evolution, punctuated equilibrium, or other “blind watchmaker” mechanisms. Doesn’t pass the smell test.
Occam’s Razor. Which makes more sense?
1. A wholly random universe that just happens to be perfectly attuned in terms of its physics for the creation of life like ours — even if we have to posit a multiverse of infinite parallel worlds for which there is no shred of evidence, let alone proof — which has no meaning whatsoever beyond blind chemistry governed by a law of entropy (i.e., falling apart) that nevertheless succeeds in complexifying itself (i.e., falling apart) into intelligent life forms whose artistic and intellectual achievements seem to mean something for which we can find no antecedent or precedent.
2. An intelligent universe (um, er, uh, created universe) that holds within it the capacity for pattern and self awareness consistent with its origin. That is, a demonstration of the principle that there is no something from nothing. If intelligence can arise, it’s only because there was always intelligence. If there can be music, there was always a music of the spheres. If there is morality and a sense of divinity, they were always part of the program. A program we see enacted in what we call evolution, over an incredibly long period of time, no matter how we much we de-engineer the program and pronounce it 19th century mechanical theory (a la Darwin) and deny the existence of an authoring computer and programmer. Where the hell does DNA come from? Made itself up, did it? Occam is screaming.
The other side is SCREAMING!
This is not about Genesis, George, Kevin, and Jonah. It’s not about dummies versus smarties, not even about you, the real intellectuals of the right who think you have not forgotten how to think.
It’s about the biggest questions ever asked, the biggest mysteries ever pursued. Why Isaac Newton did his thing, and Einstein, and everybody you think is just part of the passing scene. Darwin wasn’t right, not in terms of having determined facts. He just laid down the next rung of the ladder we should all be climbing. Where did we come from? How? Why?
I feel like I’m closer to those questions — never mind the answers — than you are. Ignore me. Most do. But I’m probably happier in my quest than you are.
Do I believe in Evolution? Not an unfair question. Undoubtedly, contrary to your protestations, its adherents do. It has become their religion, or we wouldn’t be subjected to the screeching scripture of Richard Dawkins. Do I? Yes, of course. But in nothing like the polar terms you and your opponents insist on.
P.S. Today is Charles Darwin’s birthday plus one. Many happy returns, old chap. I think you might understand me better than your supposed acolytes.
Happy Birthday plus one, Charles. The one is for tomorrow, of which there is always one, when everything can change. It’s called one to grow on.
Chief editor Daniel Flynn wants to paint the Seahawks as the bad guys.
The New England Patriots, portrayed as the Super Bowl villains by the national media as a result of Deflate-gate, traded their black hat to the Seattle Seahawks at some point during Sunday night’s Super Bowl.
The good guys won, or, if you’re from Baltimore, New York, or any of the 28 other NFL cities and can’t quite admit that, just concede that the bad guys lost.
Rich Tucker from the same site on the same day wants to make us recognize the feminization of America via Super Bowl ads.
The Super Bowl isn’t really a sporting event anymore; it’s a cultural event. As such, it can tell us a lot about where our culture is headed. Based on the ads during Super Bowl XLIX, the feminization of the United States is well advanced.
This year, few of the ads had anything to do with the game, or even seemed to acknowledge there was, indeed, a game. On the field, the football was as violent as ever — witness the Seahawk who intercepted a pass in the first quarter, then was carted off the field with a broken arm.
But the ads that followed that injury tended to be both kinder and gentler.
Consider the nearly identical ads from Toyota and Dove. Both ads centered on the idea that fathers should be nice to their children. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
But what’s the tie-in between dancing with your daughter and driving a Camry? What’s the tie-in between hugging your child and showering? Neither ad seemed to have much to do with selling cars or shampoo.
A generation ago, the ads featured beer bottles playing football (Budweiser) or an “office linebacker” tackling employees (Reebok). The game was the cultural touchpoint. This year, touching seemed to be the only touchpoint.
Super Bowl ads have always been a leading indicator of where things are heading. At the turn of the century, the game was filled with dot-com ads. The ads themselves were often foolish — see the Pets.com sock puppet — but the goal was to encourage you to go to the dot-com website at some point.
This year, though, advertisers almost seemed embarrassed to be trying to peddle a product. In the case of the Dove ad, the product on offer didn’t even appear until the very end of the commercial, leaving viewers at my Super Bowl party wondering what it was an ad for.
Worse, it was Breitbart Sports that probably made the gravest hit on the Patriots as inveterate cheaters in a post yesterday.
Though much of the conversation around Deflategate has centered around whether Brady could throw a deflated football easier, former NFL players have explained that since deflated footballs are easier to grip, players would be less likely to fumble it.
Sharp Analysis also “found that the Patriots performance in wet weather home games mysteriously turned ridiculous starting in 2007.” The Patriots went 0-2 in “home games in wet weather in 2006″ and have “gone 14-1 in those conditions at home since 2007.”
Sharp wondered if the Patriots are “so good that they defy the numbers” or if something else is at play…
Make up your damn mind. The Seahawks are thug tough, sure. How would they have fared against the Oakland Raiders in their heyday? The world is still full of Raiders fans yearning for a return to the days of yesteryear, when quarterbacks were actually football players not beauty models rivaling their beauty model wives. When winning the fight after the game was actually part of the game.
Kenny “the Snake” Stabler. A quarterback I’d bet on ten times out of ten against Brady. And against the wusses who caved at the end yesterday.
The Raiders cheated too. Openly. In your face. Not sneakily. Fred Biletnikoff and his stickum was intimidation, not an under the radar stratagem. Miss those days.
Interesting article at Hotair today. Called “The Smartest Person Who Ever Lived.” The nomination was Isaac Newton, and I can’t disagree. Scientist, theologian, mathematician, alchemist, technologist. Whatever the subject, if he didn’t have the tools, he invented them, including calculus and the scientific method.
I would not, could not dispute this nomination. All I can do is mention the smartest person I’ve ever known personally. As you may have guessed, his name is Frank Bogage. I’ll remind you of the Newton nominator’s criteria:
We must first discuss what we even mean by smart. Colloquially, we routinely interchange the words smart and intelligent, but they are not necessarily the same thing. There is an ongoing debate among psychologists, neuroscientists, and artificial intelligence experts on what intelligence actually is, but for our purposes here, a simple dictionary definition will suffice: “capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.”
Implicit in this definition of intelligence is general knowledge. An intelligent person capable of understanding quantum mechanics is useless to society if he is completely ignorant. So, a truly smart person will know a lot of things, preferably about many different topics. He should be a polymath, in other words.
Finally, there is the element of creativity. Creative people think in ways in which most other people do not. Where society sees a dead end, a creative person sees an opportunity.
What Frank was and is. In college he studied urban development and did onsite archaeology on the Anasazi peoples. He divined how human organizations worked. Then, inexplicably, he became a computer jock. He built microprocessors by hand, he learned machine code, he sussed out systems architecture and systems analysis on the wing.
I learned about him before I ever met him. I went to work at a company called Datapro, where they hired people who could write and might learn something about computers. And they hired people who knew about computers and might be taught how to write. I was an English Major lost at sea. Our business was documenting and reviewing computer hardware, software, and peripherals, including communications. Our most senior editor had worked on the original Eeniac project. We were supposed to be the gray matter of the biz, much in demand by everyone who wasn’t IBM. My editor kept talking to me about Frank Bogage, the smartest guy who had ever worked at Datapro. I took seminars, listened in the hallways, heard much more about the legend of Bogage. I got sick of hearing about him.
By accident, I suppose, I went to work at the same company that had hired Frank. He showed up at my cubicle on the morning of my first day. I forget what questions he asked me. After that we somehow became inseparable. He had made a judgment on incredibly slight data. He chose me as a partner in corporate crime. Jersey boy buccaneers. He would teach me what I didn’t know. He’d decided I could learn it.
Which was the third leg of his four-footed stool of polymathematics. He knew everything about everybody. From the temp secretaries to the most ambitious Vice Presidents. It’s not that he was a gossip. He was curious, his questions prompted answers somehow, and people told him things they wouldn’t have told their parents or spouses. He had a kind of brusque empathy that made people want to talk.
The executives hated him. Not because he knew their personal secrets, which he did and they didn’t suspect, but because he knew their business way WAY better than they did. He was a walking threat to their authority. They used and abused him nearly to death. They sent him on the road to peddle a flawed corporate networking strategy. He was so creative that he succeeded more often than anyone should have thought possible. Hell on the road. Once he couldn’t remember where he was. Only the sight of a dangling replica of the Spirit of St. Louis reminded him he was in the St. Louis Airport. So he had coffee and proceeded to his next Executive Briefing.
Which he accepted because of the fourth leg of the stool. He was, more than a computer genius or a potential office politico, a family man. He did everything he did so that he could take care of his wife and kids. Corporate advancement wasn’t on his list.
But integrity to his profession and job was. He wasn’t prepared to claw his way up the ladder. But he was prepared to fight to the death for principle. Which we did together. He taught me everything I’ve ever known about the computer industry. His rules — like Gibbs’s from NCIS — still hold true. Microsoft operating systems are all fatally flawed. Companies have never figured out that emails are corporate documentation or how to secure them. Great code is worthless without a usable interface or documentation of how everything works. What sank the division where we worked.
They came to hate the sight of us together. They called us the Blues Brothers.
I provided the car. Because though we were both from Jersey, I was the only one of us who was a motorhead.
I played my part. But I wasn’t the one — in the midst of a 36 hour day to defeat a disastrous software release — who descended in a glass hotel elevator looking like a suit-and-tie version of this guy.
Call it the central pillar of a four legged stool. The eyes. Black but not evil. Just hard to meet if you had something to hide. Eyes that made executives hate and fear him. Eyes that made other people tell him secrets. Eyes that saw the future of a technology that just got started. Eyes that saw family as more important than all the other fires burning within.
Now he’s a mild mannered grandfather. I saw him at war. In about 16 months I learned enough from him — about technology, people, organizations, office politics, thinking on my feet, courage in the face of bureaucracy — to build a whole career. Until I discovered the fourth leg of the stool something more than a decade on. He’s a great man. And the smartest I’ve ever known.
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