Whimsey

Moon

Fink or Palin?

I read the following by chance this morning and it settled with me into thoughts I have had boiled up like nuisance boils in my attempt to understand the popular interest in Sarah Palin. How does a mindless twit-fart get to such a place of prominence in our national political discourse?

Mike Fink, “He was in fact a Mississippi river-god, one of those minor deities whom men create in their own image and magnify to magnify themselves.” Constance Rourke, American Humor, a Study of the National Character, 1931.

Sarah Palin to me looks like a celebrity fabrication very much along the lines to fulfill the sort of need that Mink Fink, and the mythical over-the-top American legend that folk culture of pulp celebrity has long cultivated if it be Davy Crocket or Paul Bunyan or Wild Bill Hickok or Howdy Doody.

Those wilderness dudes now have female attributes. Go figure.

For me Palin is a more than real person – a mama Klondike moose shooter rough talker that regurgitates the smarmy way my grandmother talked about my grandfather’s toilet errors and she can see Russia like no other bodacious babe since Russ Meyer -- that in many ways epitomizes someone that I would never want to have visit at my humble abode and, if she got past the front gate and the dog did not bite her in the rump cheeks, to stay over.

But she is something and she is noisy and she is still making a stir, if not a last gasp and it occurs to me today that she is magnified to magnify the self-image of her clambered sycophants. It is truly awesome.

Environmentalism: Liberal vs Conservative

access to, and conservation of clean natural resources transends left-right politics and goes to a fundamental right of our human survival

"The hardest places to work are the liberal progressive communities because they think we have a democracy and they are intent on working within the existing structure to try to find a remedy rather than tossing it and working on something from scratch," said Linzey. "What's been fascinating to me is when you have south and north-central Pennsylvania towns passing binding local ordinances that refuse to endow corporations with constitutional rights in their communities. But in the liberal progressive bastion of Berkeley, they were passing non-binding resolutions urging Congress to do something about it. I think that difference in approach has become clear to me over the last decade. Here are rural conservatives passing things saying we won't let our rights be taken away and are using a local law as a municipal, collective civil disobedience tool to actually push up against the state to say 'fuck you.' Whereas in Berkeley people get in a huff and do some hand-wringing and pass a resolution which begs and pleads Congress to do something about corporate rights, which is never going to happen, at least in the next 20-30 years."

http://www.alternet.org/story/149725/vision%3A_how_small%2C_mostly_conservative_towns_have_found_the_trick_to_defeating_corporations

Fieldstone Method - Gerald Weinberg

A writer talking about writing.

As I am a stonemason by trade, writer and collector of stuff -- Weinberg's life perspective is super kool for me.

Jerry's Blog The Secrets of Consulting

Preview then purchase his books at Smashwords.

Old Time Movies

I enjoyed this short when it first came out.

The Celestial Teletransportation Conduit

By the public spirit of our entertainment conglomerate a teletransportation conduit has recently been established between our neighborhood and the Celestial City.  Having little time, I resolved to undertake a trip.

Accordingly, one sultry morning I thought about the corner of Avenue and North 9th, where the cadmium-graphite kiosk, a tensegrity shed, was installed. Rendering a brief howdy and exchange of lucky numbers with my bookie, who was returning from a fact-gathering pilgrimage -- I briskly motioned into the shimmering claptraption.

There was no fanfare. No bright flash, no arcing of electrical jibberations, no background musak. There was no adumbration whatsoever. It was a splendidly delivered dullness. The effect was instantaneously as adverted; nothing was there before me instantly in no time. I was not certain if I had arrived before leaving. Explaining, I suppose, the time bending attraction the conduit delivers for my prosperous bookie.

On stepping out the opposite side I continued to notice an abundance of nothing. In fact, if I had noticed anything I would advise you that the Celestial City is a more ideal destination than it is not. There was light, and there was no light. It is difficult to faithfully describe the erudition of nothing.

Possibly I expected more, but absent imagination, anticipating profoundly grandiose scenery plundered by the entertainment conglomerate, I found less. As it was, the curious shortage of street hustle and zero population, no sidewalk benches, no noisy autos or tourist buses, no nothing, made me wonder what had become of my devoutly deceased ancestors. It also caused me to wonder what would become of me were I to remain too long absent from home.

An attendant, ticket taker, token prophet or holy savior could have been provided to welcome me after my having laboriously expended so much of my precious time to arrive. The end of nothing is somewhat disconcerting. You may trust that I will take this complaint up and write a letter to the damnable conglomerate. Yet, as we think we sow.

The thought of writing a letter to hell brought vivid images to my mind by way of vociferous blasphemy. So then, wonder of wonders, as quickly as I found myself amidst nothing then as instantly I found myself not alone.

He telepathetically laughed outright, my new friend, a curious mix between a large eyed lizard, a googlemensch, and a 40-watt light bulb, gray and pallid of scaly skin, and in the midst of which cachinnation, a smoke-wreath hissed from his nostrils -- he had not a mouth or anything resembling lips -- while a twinkle of butane flame darted out of either eye, proving indubitably that the conduit was a ruse, an abomination, and that in this instantaneous reality an alien abduction was shortly to occur wherein I would be probed, prodded, and androgynously impregnated with the fetus of an alien-human hybrid.

Thinking less of this cliché development, I offered my friend a bottle of orange seltzer that he drank and peremptorily he burst.