January 26, 2012
A Seemly Metaphor
This is all that remains of my ancestral stomping grounds outside of Glasgow:
Ruins. What was a Roman garrison in 80 AD and a castle in 1175 is pretty much an unstable barbecue pit now.
However, with a tarp or two, some paint, and some single malt, I might be able to make a go of this. As long as I can poach the Queen's deer.
Cutting the Chocolate Cake
I just finished my fifth iteration of chocolate fudge, and it's still crumbly. Delicious, but dry around the edges.
This pisses me off to no end. If you know how to make creamy fudge, or know a young girl on the wrong side of the tracks who can make creamy fudge, drop me a line. Unless you are predalien.
January 6, 2012
Episode 38, Season 2
Of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Screw that hippie shit I found so evocative in 1969. My parents apparently lived through a much more sordid existence. The women were extremely loose, and the men murdered people without provocation. And we thought a little weed was going to change the world?
Of course, Chuckie Manson squared that circle.
January 5, 2012
A Sad State of Affairs
Apparently ignoring predalein is not going to suffice. I'm figuring a neutral site, bring your own knife. I'm apparently going to have to gut this fucker.
He won't show, of course.
UPDATE: I know where you live now. I'll be the guy with a 10 inch Bowie knife in his left hand, and a Guatamalan machete in his right. I have no intention of hurting you. I just want to humiliate you, and make you cry like a little girl.
UPDATE 2: Predalein is merely banned. I desire no harm on anyone, even tiny piss ants. If I could sleep, I would sleep sounder.
January 4, 2012
The Bull
When we had the farm, when I was about 10, my dad showed up with a bull. A big black beast. Not sure where he got it. Possibly a legal fee.
This bull was so mean we had to chain it to a creosote post in a pasture. Anything that came within striking distance would be impaled, killed. We used to shoot it with BB's, in order to increase it's rage.
It disappeared one day. Where I know not. But probably unto the stringy hamburgers we ate for the next few weeks.
December 12, 2011
Let's Face It
Jon Stewart is not funny. Jon Stewart has never been funny. He is a shallow placeholder for someone who is supposedly funny.
He is snide. Yes, we all like snide. He recites his writers' jokes with a deft touch. Yes, we all like that, too. He labours to the conventional wisdom, or should I say the liberal conventions, with the perspicacity a plowmule would envy. We actually don't all like that, but it is not unexpected.
The sad fact is, when Stewart is plucked from his womb of protection, he is actually a bitter, snarping little fuckhead. Which is not to say he does not occasionally score a point. But, hell, we all score points. The most retarded amongst us scores an occasional hit. Except for Al Franken.
But the point obtains: Jon Stewart is simply not funny. He delivers his Mercury's pouch of bromides to a self-selected audience, and pulls a muscle slapping himself upon the shoulderblade while that self-selected audience hoots and guffaws.
It's really pitiable. Context: Jon Stewart thinks he is a comedian. He couldn't carry Harvey Korman's jockstrap.
November 25, 2011
November 15, 2011
I've Got a Feeling
The feeling I got is I'd like to get my hands on Lennon's Epiphone Casino for a few moments. Sure, Epiphone makes a replica now, but to touch that bastard, why, that would be rich indeed.
McCartney's Hofner? Don't get me started. My hand is already in my pants.
WTF?
Charles Pierce at Grantland, a normally quite awesome sports site at ESPN, waxes eloquent on why the Penn State scandal was profit-motivated, not institutional-protection motivated. He thinks this sort of behavior would have been tolerated in a corporate boardroom, apparently.
Nick Gillespie takes him to the woodshed.
Kennan
John Lewis Gaddis has written a new biography of George F. Kennan which I eagerly anticipate from Amazon. Kennan was the rather low-level State Department functionary who, as ambassador to the USSR in 1947, outlined our Cold War strategy of Containment first in the so-called Long Telegraph from Moscow, then in an anomymous missive in Foreign Affairs known as the X Article.
I used to plunder a wonderful old bookstore in Virginia-Highlands when I lived in Atlanta. Around 1980 I ran across the first volume of Kennan's autobiography. I'd never heard of the guy. What a read.
The Long Telegraph was in response to a State Department query along the lines of, "Aren't the Soviets quite happy sharing the world with us?" Kennan's response was, essentially, "Are you fucking crazy?" He posited it was an ideological struggle with religious overtones. They expected world domination, and were quite prepared to achieve it. His remarks were eventually fed back to the Kremlin, and he was asked to leave. The only American ambassador ever to be declared persona non grata by the Soviets.
The X Article was a policy thing. Kennan was quite fearful of nuclear Armageddon, and therefore detailed a policy of "containing" the Soviets whenever and wherever they exhibited expansionist tendencies, up to and including military action, covert and overt.
Truman bought into containment, but Kennan was then appalled when containment morphed into appeasement. He gets a bad rap now for containment, but his idea was to engage in small hot wars where applicable, funding resistance and unrest, that sort of thing. I believe selected assassinations would have passed his muster.
At any rate, I am told Gaddis's book is the definitive Kennan tome, and a wonderful read. As an aside, Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101. He was railing at that point against the Hispanization of America, and the dire consequences resulting from that failure to assimilate. So that's kind of a cool footnote.
