Lost for no Good Reason

There’s some things that either disappeared, or are nearly gone except in a few places.  Sometimes the new doesn’t always have to replace the old:  movies didn’t replace theater, television didn’t replace the movies.  Sometimes, the old still has a valid reason to exist, but gets put away anyhow.  Yes, I have my little list.

• the transom.  Dennis Miller on his show mentions transoms 40 times a day, and I wonder how many people know to what he’s referring.  You get to pop open a window up high above a door where the heat is, to let it all out.  Or you can open it to let out the smoke from cooking.
• the awning.  Shade, for miles.  See those old photos of big commercial buildings that had awnings?  Imagine how much you’d cut the a/c bill with awnings, as well as eliminate UV fading on your furniture, draperies, and carpets, and be able to use a chair next to a south window in comfort.  I cannot imagine my house sans awnings.
• the clutch.  Until you drive stick shift, you’re a glorified passenger.  With manual, you control the engine and transmission, and therefore control the vehicle.
• the steam engine.  For overall usage, not just the train locomotive.  I can write a book here.
• camera film.  Every emulsion is a different flavor, with its own character and behavior.  And you shoot what you plan to shoot, and don’t think “I’ll fix it in Photoshop” before you even trip the shutter.
• public transit.  Streetcars, subways, with buses as auxiliaries to these.  Every city or town of any importance had some sort of system in place in the early 20th century, and newer cities had rights of way in the plans for these.  And they didn’t cost a fortune, either, even with paltry fares.  And they weren’t seen as the exclusive province of either the poor, or “people not like us,” which is what seems to kill transit revivals in smaller towns.
• bicycle as transit.  Not as Spandex sport, no, accepted as real transport.  People in their regular clothes.  As in this video from a streetcar ride: 
• the 15 minute newscast.  Not five hours of news.  You can say all I need to hear, and cover national, local, sports, and weather just the same as the long program does.
• the broadcast workout. 
• written correspondence.  Christmas cards.  Letters.  Post cards sent from a vacation spot with the exotic cancel over the stamp.  A ham shack wallpapered with QSL cards from all sorts of countries real and manufactured.  Not only did you have a solid copy, the effort of this required your attention to detail such as grammar, spelling, and format.  Spell check was your mind, or the dictionary.
• the dress hat.  African Americans never gave up hats, and can still pull off a fedora or hamburg and look normal and regular.  White guys let it go, and when wearing a hat look like they’re a movie character in costume instead of a guy trying to not look like a goof with a baseball cap or a longshoreman in a knit cap when he’s in his suit or overcoat.

Oh, Piddle

A woman is a passenger in a car that’s been pulled over, and so begins her unkind adventure.  It’s 4 a.m., she’s outside waiting on a ride, and nature calls.  So she takes a whizz, and now faces public intoxication and public indecency charges.  Public intox?  She was a passenger in a private car, not in public, and her being in public came as a surprise, no fault of hers.  Indecency?  It was 4 a.m.  I’ve witnessed homeless taking dumps in the street in Chicago’s Loop during rush hour and not getting arrested.  The town hall is so far off the beaten path she wouldn’t have been seen from the street.

Go arrest a REAL law breaker for a change.

Salinger? Tesich.

I’m hearing all of those tributes to J.D. Salinger on his passing.  Catcher in the Rye was a good read, but other than getting into the head of some depressed guy who got suspended from a fancy rich boy’s prep school and is kicking around NYC, what was the point?  What great thing did it impart?  Yeah, Salinger tapped the telegraph wires for the internal conversation of the teenager and let us in for a listen, and did a good job of fleshing out a stack of characters that look like people we know so we can identify to a certain extent, but once you were done, you were in the same place you started.

In high school, we had quite a good required reading list, and I lost the drudgery of reading that I developed in grade school.  I loved the quest in Beowulf, had a blast reading the very raunchy Canterbury Tales (which made me ask what the big deal about Howard Stern and Steve Dahl was after reading the Reeve’s and Miller’s Tales), enjoyed the endless cliff hanger endings to each chapter of Great Expectations, and got lost in the court scene in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Something about burning the midnight oil reading homework for enjoyment never did sit right.

I got Catcher in the Rye right when it became infamous due to its influence on Mark Chapman and John Hinckley.  Here, this forbidden fruit became a class assignment!  I loved all the highjinks:  the guy farting in lecture hall, the hotel full of freaks, Holden awkwardly getting a hooker sent to his room, among the features.  It was what Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High became to me later:  having a good laugh at people involved in silly shenanigans and foolish highjinks.  I never saw the draw people had to the book being a benchmark in their lives, giving them the meaning to live, carrying it around at all times like their secular bible, etc.  To me, it was a fun book that went all maudlin and morose and lost my interest before I got to the end.

I came across Summer Crossing as an adult, but I’m sure my 16 year old self would have the same book review.  If you want a book that has a normal guy narrating his coming of age, and the experiences he and the people around him have that shape his becoming a man in the year after his graduation, it would be this book.  Steve Tesich was the only author who I ever had the notion to write and let him know how much the book affected me.  Maybe it was his similar Region Rat “son of D.P. parents” heritage, like Alex Karras and Karl Malden, maybe it was the book being set down the street in East Chicago, but maybe it was the weight of the book itself without all this familiarity.  After all, I never felt like dropping Jean Shepherd, or Karras or Malden, a line.  But when I tried to look him up and discovered he died years ago from a heart attack, I actually got mad at him for dying before I could write, as stupid as that seems.

Catcher in the Rye?  An overrated book by an author who hung it all up after his big hit.  The guy who should get credit for pulling off “lightning in a bottle” once in his life, like L. Frank Baum did, but not a great author like Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway, who cranked out the product on a running basis.  Summer Crossing?  The definitive coming of age book by the screenwriter of Breaking Away and Four Friends, which unfairly sits on the dusty shelf, instead of being celebrated for the great book that it is.

If you ever want a good read, buy this book.  If it doesn’t grab at your heart and your mind, I’ll refund your purchase.  You can buy them all day long for under $5 from Amazon or Half.com, so we’re not talking real money.

Shopping

One thing I’ve noticed is that in grocery stores in mostly white areas, the busiest time runs 4-6 p.m., while in mostly urban ethnic (African American, or whatever the p.c. term for the coloreds is nowadays), you’re talking 8 p.m. to close.  In 24 hour places like Wal-Mart, where occasionally you run into someone urinating on $600 worth of steaks at 1 a.m., I can go in one in a white area around 11 p.m. and buzz through and be the only one in line, while I recently made the mistake of stopping in one in a more ethnically challenged area around midnight, and got stuck in line for 45 minutes.  The lines had stopped down to a crawl, since it was Social Hour, and everyone in line and the cashiers had to all catch up on the latest dirt.  Jesus H. Christ on a crutch I’ve seen this same b.s. session to a lesser extent in the white stores too, but not when the face of my cell phone said 00:24, and not ten minutes per conversation.

I was tired of the bull, but stayed the course because no one is going to annoy me from accomplishing my goal (you can’t smoke me, drill sergeant).  When my turn came, I tried to be social and chat up small talk with the anorexic with the five inch nails, but she rang my order up so fast I hadn’t a chance to get the wallet out, and waved her head left and right while bouncing like she had to go bathroom as I slowly dug out the cash, exact to the penny.  I was tempted to say “excuse me while I go to the back of the store to get the milk I forgot to get,” but figured the worthless meat puppet would win that one by canceling my order. Sorry to bust a bubble, but sometimes even white people have to say, “F You, Mr. Cab Driver.”

Steak

According to Fox News, a guy walks into a Wal-Mart, then proceeds to urinate all over $600 worth of steaks in the meat department.

Now when you’re drunk at 01:30 (that’s ante meridian, folks), and you have a full bladder, remember that Wal-Marts all have spacious bathrooms in front of the store, so as soon as you walk in, you can go before you shop.

I’m still at a loss to explain why, even if he was on a hard liquor drunk, a guy would get inspiration in front of the meat counter, then proceed to cast his arc of transcendence across the steak section, instead of doing the usual drunk thing and look for a hidey-corner to dump off a bit to relieve the pressure, then finish the rest in the bathroom later.  Heck, push aside some loaves of 99 cent bread, then belly up to the shelf in relative obscurity.  Maybe, even though I’ve been too drunk to stand, I’ve never been so drunk I didn’t remember stuff, or been so drunk I couldn’t find a bush, dark corner behind a building, or dead dark vista out a window to relieve myself.

I’m just too much of a control freak to let myself get so drunk that I’d feel perfectly fine with standing in front of a meat counter and letting it all spray out.

Loot

Here is a photo essay of Haiti, six days after the earthquake.  Because of problems bloggers have had with reprinting photos, even with full credit, from wire agencies, I’ll not post, but let you click the link beginning the post to see.  Plenty of violence and gore. so you decide if it’s safe for where you are right now.

There are people who break into damaged stores to recover foodstuffs before they spoil, drugs and first aid for the injured, water jugs, and the like.  That I don’t think of as looting.  That stuff is perishable, and would go bad anyway, so why not take it and put it to good use while it still had some life in it?  There is one photo of a water or juice bottle flying through the air to an awaiting crowd.  Another is of people filling up their jugs from a busted water pipe.  This is understandable, and quite natural.

Then there is a photo of a looter taking the backpack off of the looter that was shot dead earlier.  I see photos of guys walking off with bags of balls and balloons (!).  Two thirds of the way down the photo essay, there is a photo of a looter with a slight grin on his face as he lifts a dead Haitian out of a coffin in preparation of stealing the coffin.

If you’re unfamiliar with Haiti, you don’t know this is business as usual.  The country was like this before the earthquake, and will remain so after the cleanup.  A large part of the capital city was damaged, but a lot of it was not.  And the people in the hills were the least affected, if affected at all.  People just came into the damaged business district and the bad areas to take advantage of the anarchy, and help themselves to the belongings of the dead.  These are the types of whom my father used to say, “They’d steal a penny off a dead man’s eye.”  Hell, one man pulled the corpse of another out of his coffin to steal it.  This is not a food fight.  In fact, food is piling up at the airport.

The secular side of me has made the religious side sit down and shut up.  I wouldn’t give a stolen penny to help these s.o.b.’s.  S.o.b.’s because the poor schmucks will have their aid stolen from them by the s.o.b.’s by machete and rock point, who will be the only ones then with the stash, and will lord it over them.  If you think your donation will help the poor farmer and shoemaker and their wives and children, you’re a bigger dupe than I give you credit for.

A few years ago when Japan had a major quake in Osaka, there was cooperation and harmony among the Japanese as they recovered.  I wonder how it was after the two atomic bombs.  Doubtfully do I think it was anything like New Orleans or Haiti.  War ravaged Germany didn’t have this.  When Alaska had its level 9.2 earthquake, was there this?

Haiti lies along a fault line that causes earthquakes.  Too bad it isn’t a fault line of volcanoes, to make it into a new Pompeii and bury the place under hot ash.

Jinx

Obama goes to Copenhagen to campaign for Chicago to get the Olympics.  Chicago is eliminated as quickly as possible in the first round.

Obama campaigns relentlessly for his health care reform act, and cannot get a solid Democrat Congress to pass it through.

Obama is called upon to campaign for a Democrat running for the Senate seat previously held by his supporter, Ted Kennedy, in solidly Democrat Massachusetts.  A Republican is now set to swear in and take the seat (hopefully not before a quick spritz of Febreeze first).

In the 1980’s, many candidates ran as Reagan Republicans, and were able to ride his coattails, even if he was not able to physically come out and campaign for them.  And it was a lift under their wings.  I’ll guess this Senate loss will put to bed any idea of leftists running as Obama Democrats.

To rework the great Gipper’s famous line, the eight most dangerous words in the English language are, “I’m Barack Obama, and I’m here to help.”

Photo courtesy Moonbattery.

Berlin Airlift

The Berlin Airlift took a number of weeks to work out the kinks and provide the necessary tonnage of material for Berlin to make it through the Soviet siege and attempt to force the Allies out of the city via starvation of the residents.  And this with a functioning airport, an in-place functioning government and a seasoned Allied military structure, and well-behaved population wise to what was going on and the efforts the Allies were making to keep them free.  Of the daily 5,000 tons of food and fuel deemed necessary to keep the city going, the Allies got 90 tons a day dropped the first week, and by the second week reached 1,000 tons.  Still way short, until further improvements were developed.

The Haitian earthquake is not even a week old, and already people are raising Cain about American and NGO inability to have the rescue and cleanup done already.  Haiti has no government – it was killed off in the National Palace collapse.  It has a measly airport (its traffic control tower collapsed) and no fuel.  It has roving gangs of parasitic thugs robbing the dead and living of what they can grab.  Missionaries and charities that are already established in the country have been devastated by the earthquake, and they are the messengers on how difficult this was before the damage, let alone now.

In other words, for Christ’s sake, shut up.

When Your Name Is Jihad, What Do You Expect?

This article in the newspaper caught my eye.  Now there’s dozens of stories of men and women both violating restraining orders.  But the doctor’s name caught my attention:  Jihad Kasim.

There’s something about it flowing naturally where a guy named Jihad would go about ramming a garage door and throwing rocks at a house as he went to war against someone.

The incident has absolutely nothing to do with religious or philosophical beliefs, but it tickles me to no end to imagine seeing “Jihad” go ape s**t, then to appear in court and say, “Well, Your Honor, my parents DID name me Jihad.  You name someone Jesse James, and you’re not surprised to see him grow up to be a bad-assed motorcycle builder, or the leader of a metal band featuring a chain saw as a musical instrument, are you?  A jailer nicknames a kid “Evel,” and he grows up to be the most bad-assed stuntman to ever hurl his body along on a bike with only a jumpsuit and helmet for protection.  Well, my name is Jihad:  (as he pulls out a scimitar to wave over his head) Hasan, chop!“

Elephant

Here’s a story of an elephant rampage.  It happened one year after a Hindu pogrom against Christians in the Indian state of Orissa.  The elephants came through the towns at the same time of day on the exact days that the pogroms happened, and proceeded to smash the equipment and homes of the Hindus, leaving property of Christians intact.  For no known reason (i.e. food shortage, habitat disturbance in their homeland), they traveled 300 km to go on this amazingly selective rampage.  Apparently, a smaller elephant cases the town on a scouting mission, then reports back to the larger ones, who come in and lay waste.

Strange things happen in this world.