Velociworld

Fear and Trembling and the Blue-tailed Skink

I have a small problem. If one considers an infestation of blue-tailed skinks a small problem. And by infestation I mean two or three, possibly another. My skink tolerance ranks up there with my rodent phobias.

I have no issue with your standard chameleonic tree lizard. If fact, I lived in harmony with a feral herd of about two thousand at my Florida abode, so I really had no choice. No, my issue is with the dread skink. These two or three beasts lay about my front porch and sun garden with great insouciance, as if challenging me. I would as soon have a dozen Norwegian wharf rats with human tissue in their bloody fangs sunning themselves by the front door.

The blue-tailed skink is an amazing piece of creation and evolution, however. Consider: when threatened, they disengage their shocking neon blue regenerative tails, which immediately begin writhing in muscle spasms, distracting the predator, while the skink slinks away to safety, and the grim task of growing a new tail. To my knowledge the tail does not even have to suffer trauma to detach; it's pretty much an at will thing.

That's beautiful stuff in the survivor sweepstakes.

Here's an interesting thing: when my mother was in high school in the 1940's there was a fad, wherein girls would capture your basic tree lizard, and tie a piece of thread to its thorax. They'd tie the other end of the thread to their lapel, and wear the little critter to school as an exotic piece of adornment. I'll wager they never tried that with skinks.

Here's another thing: I equate your garden variety leftist with your garden variety skink. For when leftists feel threatened, usually by facts, they pop off a piece of rhetorical writhing blue tail, which substitutes for debate, while they slink away to the safety of their preconceived notions. And that bit of writhing blue tail screams diversionary alarums like Racist! Fascist! Gitmo is a torture camp! There were no WMD's! You get the idea. But a weak and small creature must have some survival skills, after all, so I don't hold it against the leftist, or the skink. It's just their nature.

Oh, didn't get enough of blue-tailed things? Here's Burl Ives singing Blue Tail Fly. Consider it a gift. With a string attached.

Right Wing Death Squads

I spent my youth trying to join one of these awesome fraternities. Alas, they only exist in the fevered minds of leftists. You'll still get an even 242,000 hits on Google for that rather biased term, but the provenance of any article is suspect, to say the least. Mostly, it was Commos executing villagers, then calling AP and saying Lookee here at what the right wing death squads hath wrought. And Seymour Hersh trying to recreate another My Lai in between bouts of suicide drinking.

Memo to self: start yet another garage band. Name? Oh, I don't know...

Tin Soldiers and Obie's Coming...

Here's a nice picture of events in Tegucigalpa, Honduras I ripped from Weasel Zippers via Ace:

That's the face of democracy in action from our brothers to the south. Not only are the Honduran Supreme Court, Congress, and armed forces unanimously opposed to the mad power grab by the fat fellow who fancies himself the next Hugo Chavez, so, apparently, are the populace.

In fact, the only individuals in favor of allowing the supraconstitutional bastard Zelaya to stomp upon the constitution of the nation of Honduras and enthrone himself for a second term are the Castro boys, Chavez, and Barack Obama.

That's pretty thin and shitty company to keep, and what even the most mellow amongst us would call "being on the wrong side of history".

Is there anything Barack Obama touches that he does not get wrong? From the fawning obeisance to the mad mullahs of Persia to this Communist power grabber in Honduras, Barack is 100% on the wrong side of the table. Every fucking time.

By God, Obama is so consistently wrong on everything, every day, I have a new rule of thumb:

If Obama and Dr. Smith from Lost In Space are for it, I'm agin it, godammit.

And fret not: by my reckoning the Venn diagram of Obama vs. Dr. Smith appears to be two completely inclusive circles, one nesting inside t'other.

Look, young Will! A coup d'etat! Hold me!

As an unnecessary but enjoyable aside, in 1981 my cousin and I bought a piece of shit ski boat of seafoam green for four hundred dollars, with a plywood floor, and no cowling cover. I christened it Danger, Will Robinson!, and said name was graced upon the transom of that boat for the entire three weeks of its existence, before it tragically sank in a mild rainstorm.

All by way of saying I know my Dr. Smith.

Man Up, My Bitches

If I read one more conservative lamenting Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? I'm going to punch him right in his pussy.

The correct lament is I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Because the highest form of patriotism is not the free expression of opinion. It's the free brandishing of firearms. With malevolent intent, if necessary. But then, I'm a bit of an attention seeker.

The United States of Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell wrote a seminal novel in 1932, Tobacco Road. I won't say I don't like the novel, as I had him autograph a deluxe Beehive Press edition for me in 1980, when he was 77 years old (as perverse serendipity would have it, he ultimately died on my 30th birthday).

Caldwell was certainly no Faulkner, or O'Connor, or even Styron. Tobacco Road, like its successor God's Little Acre, was painfully and acutely written in a vernacular both evocative of, and denigrating to, the poor white trash sharecroppers that populated the author's world. If Caldwell had a major fault (and he had many faults) it was in his disavowal of those sharecropper roots, and his willingness to let the novel be staged on Broadway and then be made into a motion picture, both instances being cruel efforts to take the book at face value.

Both subsequent versions of Tobacco Road were considerably altered from Caldwell's vision. While he used humor to accentuate the defeatist and woeful lot of Jeeter Lester and his ilk, these versions played it all for laughs, and the audiences were given a full-blown treatment of southern depravity and ignorance with none of the redeeming virtues these Depression-wracked individuals exhibited. Tobacco Road became synonymous with all of the bigotry and stereotyping of the South in one easy read. It was so bad Caldwell moved to Maine and ran a bookstore for many years. He never returned to the South.

I'm not attempting to deconstruct that unlovable son-of-a-bitch Caldwell here, merely to evoke that time and place when the sturdiest and most prideful of men got tired of eating turnips every day, while his children gnawed sweet potatoes. That time and place when the man in the suit finally knocked on the door of the clapboard shack and said I'm from the government, and I'm here to help, and the desperate fool sold his soul for a relief check embedded with invisible barbs.

Yea, verily, a lot of men let their spiritual sails luff, and suckled the teat of government help. Many men, however, did not. And a generation later you could almost see the great tear in the American fabric: union men on one side, with their sense of entitlement and money-for-nothing that that milk from the teat of the New Deal had nourished in them, and the self-made men on t'other side. On the one side the men who would take any wheel of cheese the government threw their way, men who took pleasure in reaping the grain another man threshed, men who felt no sense of shame picking up the dollar bill that fell out of the other man's pocket, men who, having nursed upon something-for-nothing, came to expect it. They called it opportunity.

On the other side are the men who refused to take the bait, or rise to the siren's song of entitlement. These men ran the gamut of success from Croesus to repeated failure. But a failure who could pick himself up and try again. Who owed nobody nothing, damn it, except for perhaps an education. And I say now that the G.I. Bill was no government teat: that was earned. A man puts his brainpan in the enemy's sights, he gets a well-earned payback for that selfless act. The G.I. Bill was a minor annuity payment in compensation for a man's soul. These men were entrepeneurs, or toiled in good faith for capital entities under the handshake understanding that they worked in a meritocracy, and virtue and hard work could translate to reward.

Now we are a weaker breed of man, and find ourselves in a similar circumstance of uncertainty and dire straits. Who will we be? Who will we prostrate ourselves before for the metaphysical equivalent of a sour raw turnip? I am no diviner of entrails, but a quick glance at the electoral map shows me that we are, to a statistically significant factor, sucklers. And not for that sweet potato: we are as a nation sucklers for someone to mitigate our mortgages, to pump the bilge from the holds of our foundering 401ks, to guarantee our jobs even as it means creating ourselves silly, self-procreating paperpushing jobs from the sweat of another man's brow.

We are become Jeeter Lester.

We are hallooing at God for our fate, and ready, willing and eager to steal another man's turnips for no other reason than we want them. It isn't out fault. It's never our fault. It's that other guy what did it to us.

We are present at the onset of the most earth-shattering, revolutionary capsizing of a civilization ever contemplated, and we are allowing ourselves to be rushed headlong into it, with no more forethought than one would give the purchase of a laptop computer. If we were even given the opportunity, as third party witnesses, to have a say.

One thing is for certain: these changes are immutable. There are no do-overs. There will be no roll back on any programs that manifest themselves as insane or worse. And my fear is, at the end of the day, we'll all just be like Jeeter Lester. Coveting another man's bag of turnips, incensed they are not ours. And petitioning, as debased supplicants, our right to have what that fellow there has, even if it means having the authorities wrest it from his rightful grasp.

We are, I fear, soon enough a nation of Tobacco Roads.

Wiki Rocks

Thirteen minutes after the announcement of Michael Jackson's death I found this on Wikipedia:

And no. You may not ask why I was wiki'ing Tito Jackson. I gots my reasons.

Another Mysterious AWOL Solved

Forgive me for pulling a Mark Sanford and disappearing without a trace. I've been at a conference at Callaway Gardens.

Like Sanford, I hiked some trails, him on the AT, me on Pine Mountain, which is in fact the utter last hobnail in the bootheel of the Appalachians. Unlike him, I'm pretty certain I haven't done anything sinister or shameful, whatever it was he did. Rule of thumb: iffen your own wife don't know where you are or what the fuck you're doing, odds are it's something you wouldn't want your mama or your constituents to see you doing. I'm wagering it was something like a bottle of Old Grand Dad and a pair of ten year old black and white boys. Salt N Peppa!

I tell you, if you're into the botanical or horticultural thing, or natural philosophy in general, Callaway is a state treasure. Absolutely stunning. But I must take umbrage at the scheduling of this event in 96 degree sweltering heat. Even the skeeters were gasping. You can tell it's hot in Georgia when a dog's balls lick his face. Just for the moisture, you see. Never mind.

Curious to see what comes out of that DC Metro crash. In these cases it's a sure thing that 1) somebody fucked up, or 2) somebody fucked up. As in 1) engineer, or 2) dispatcher. Not really sure how Metro trips their switches, or if the first train was even in a siding. But somebody fucked up. Such a pity.

Putting the last touches on getting the novel print-ready. It will be self-published, just so I can flog it hard and move the fuck on. More on that later.

Did I mention how fucking hot it is in Georgia? I'd better post this, as my balls are looking at me funny.

UPDATE: Ouch. This woman, if ever revealed, could be the most famous Argentinian since Fanne Foxe. I also thought it was amusing that Sanford 1) spoke for quite a while until mentioning the extracurricular nature of his trip, and 2) spoke of "a person in Argentina" with whom he'd had an affair for ever and ever before finally mentioning it was, in fact, a female.

Even so, he's fucked forever. Not for the affair. For crying about it on television. Hasta la vista, Casa Blanca.

The Quotidian Quote

The next person who writes

As Lord Acton said, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, or

As Clausewicz said, war is a continuation of politics by other means,

or misattributes Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, to Sun-Tzu is going to suffer a severe case of gonadus Sevareid, courtesy of me.

You want a quote? I'll give you a quote:

"The Barbary ape is quite similar to the Toureg, although the ape is a more sophisticated pickpocket. Hic!"

See? These things practically write themselves.

"The Police Are On Their Way, Mrs. Leadbottom"

There's been some discussion at Instapundit's and elsewhere about the crapulent Brinks Home Security system commercials. Yes, they seem aimed at allegedly helpless women who seem unable to defend themselves. And yes, I believe home security systems actually increase crime, because the perp believes the homeowner is unarmed.

But I'm excited by the fact that, as evidenced by these commercials, 100% of burglary and home invasion felons are apparently pasty white guys, who probably lost their sweet guitarist gigs when Fine Young Cannibals broke up. Makes those line ups a lot easier.

So if my back door glass breaks, and I see an Asian or Hispanic or African-American person brandishing a tire iron, I'll take solace in the fact that they are most likely Jehovah's Witnesses, surge-delivering the latest Watchtower edition for my spiritual edification.

PROFILING!!!

The Man Who Wouldn't Go Away

It seems John Edwards has managed to foist himself back into the public's sensibilities. Not because the pompous buffoon has anything to say, of course, but because he is a safe enough gambit for the Zombie Media to embrace in lieu of 1) investigating the magniloquent machinations of the Current Administration, or 2) mentioning a Republican without a photograph of one with a penis in his mouth.

Speaking of which, I cannot look upon Edwards without thinking of Camille Paglia, because she was one of the few people who actually enthusiastically endorsed this ridiculous Hollow Man. In a way I can see it, because Paglia is a lesbian, and by my reckoning only gays and teenaged girls could ever possibly envision John Edwards as qualified for anything more manly than South Beach on-location reporter for Tiger Beat magazine. Or glory hole recipient.

Paglia has always annoyed me just a bit. Not because she isn't intelligent, which she is, but because she is the mirror image of the Brooksian, Gergenian, Sullivanserai conservative: the liberal conservatives krush gruve over merely because she strays off the plantation once in a blue cheese moon. That may well be, but the bottom line is she was an unabashed John Edwards fangirl before she eventually got gill-hooked by Obama. And that sad fact is Exhibit A in the "You Can't Take This Person Seriously" playbook your Velociboy furiously scribbles in every night, just before he whistles himself to sleep with a melancholy rendition of Taps.