Wednesday, September 30, 2020

The Broken Scarlet Sky


 "So tell me about your friend."

"He lives a couple of slips down from me at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale. He has a small motor boat stuffed with books. We have been friends since the sixties. He is like a big amiable bear. Hairy and clumsy and comical in some ways. But a good friend none the less. The smartest man I know. Well book smart."

"Not street smart?"

"No. Not in the least."

I sat back in my chair for a moment. McGee sat still in my client chair. Confident and still. He didn't feel the need to fill the conversational void. I think we know some of the same things. Susan would shake her head and be amused at what she would call macho posturing. Still it was true none the less.

"So you think he walked into something that he couldn't handle?"

"Without a doubt. Look Meyer was a smart guy. He had developed a couple of algorithms that could predict how stocks would behave. When to buy and when to sell. Something like that would be worth a lot of money."

"So he went to MIT to sell it?"

"No I don't think so. Who would have the money to buy it there? He either went there for the last piece of the puzzle from one of his fellow math geeks or to connect with one of those Silicon Valley types who had the dough to buy the algorithm and do the real work of putting it to practice. I think he wanted to sell it. Look we have a great life down in Florida. We are retired. Do a little fishing. A little partying. At least as much as we can these. Meyer is even older than I am. Somehow it didn't happen. Somebody else must have gotten involved. I need you to find out who."

I thought about that for a minute. I didn't know anybody who had any connection to MIT. Susan was wired into Harvard not MIT. But that wouldn't be a problem.

"I guess we have to talk to someone who knows something about MIT. Luckily enough I know somebody who has connections there."

"Who a professor?"

"No. A leg breaker."


Peak Experience


Travel writers, "life coaches" and similar blowhards think we should be seeking out "peak experiences" and storing them on our mental hard drives, so that we can contemplate them at leisure and bore our friends with them. These tend to be things like climbing Machu Picchu, or watching the sunrise from a sweat lodge, or something. But for me, the things that persist on my hard drive are stupid stuff that struck my perpetual-adolescent sense of humor just right, and made me crack up. For example . . .

On the Fourth of July, 1976, some friends and I took the Metro down to the National Mall to see the Bicentennial fireworks. When we left to return home, we found the Metro station absolutely clogged with people. Predictable, but it hadn't occurred to us to plan for it. So there we were, tired, sweaty and really wanting to be home, on the lower level of the Metro Center station, surrounded by the unmoving crowd.

We needed to get to the upper level to catch a Red Line train. Power to the escalators had been shut off; the platform above, and the escalator, were jammed, and there was movement only when a train stopped above and hauled off a few carloads of people.

The heavy load on the escalator was causing its steps to move gradually downward, so that every half-minute or so the people on it had to take a step upward. That would make the steps sink a little faster, and so on. Eventually, the mass on the escalator were slowly and grimly marching in place, going nowhere, as if on a treadmill. It was like a vision of Hell, or a scene from a dystopian, futuristic 1920s silent movie. I was delighted. For the rest of the long trip home I had a big grin on my face.

It's not Machu Picchu, but I still smile whenever I think of it. And now and then bore my friends with it.


Tuesday, September 29, 2020

WKRLEM: Bikes and Tenderlions.



They go together. 

I just like to give my spin to it. So to speak.

WKRLEM: Wedding Song?





The older I get the less I know.

Stuffed.....and not in a good way!


 So I have to go to a wedding in two weeks. Lisa is going to officiate. She got a mail order degree so she can marry her Wiccan girlfriend and her atheist fiancee in their backyard. Actually it is a hand-fasting which is an ancient ceremony. Which is fine but there is really a fucked up component to it.

I have to wear a suit.

It's been about a year since I tried one on. I did yesterday. It wasn't good. 

You can wear shorts, flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt to a hand-fasting  I think I read about that in the Wiccan bible or something like that there.

The Broken Scarlet Sky

 I was sitting at my desk contemplating a blue berry scone when he walked into my office. He was around six feet tall but he looked like he had lost a few inches since his prime. He gave off the aura of an athlete in his twilight years as he limped up to my desk favoring one leg.

"You Spencer."

"That's what they tell me."

"Names Mcgee. I want to hire you."

"That's what I am here for so it seems you came to the right place. What do you need? Have a seat and let me know what this is all about."

Monday, September 28, 2020

Bikes & Lions


For all you bicycle fans out there. Apparently bikes and lions go together; I'm not sure why.

From a nice post on old bicycle advertising posters at the AbeBooks blog.


Saturday, September 26, 2020

Sometimes you can skip the long, boring set-up

. . . and go straight to the punchline.



          "Pardon me, Roy -- is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?"

          "I come to seize your berry, not to praise it."

          "The squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sum of the squaws on the
           other two hides."


Thursday, September 24, 2020

Woman Tazed and Arrested at Middle School Football Game For Not Wearing a Mask





This is what it has come down to. The rest of the sheeple just sit there and let this woman who is with her kids get groped, abused, tazed and illegally arrested for not wearing a mask. Someone who they know. As she said someone they got to PTA meetings with every week. Someone that they go with to their kids games.



What is her name? Kitty Genovese?




Dick loves Pat and Pat loves Dick

 


"Say Donald do you know my friend John Bolton? He is a bright young fella who is interested in Foreign Policy. He might be helpful if you are really going to run. What to you think about our endless wars?"

"Menza menza Mr President. I am not a big fan of getting our kids killed unless we get something out of it like a lot of oil or maybe a casino. Anyway nice to meet you."

"Ok Bolton get lost. I told you to grow a mustache."

"I don't think you have tiny hands Donald. Dick's hands are a lot smaller."

"Shut up Pat."



WKRLEM: Life on Venus? Who gives a shit? I want to know if there is life on Gor!





Specifically if there are Slave Girls?

WKRLEM-TV: Serpentine Shel!





Remember Serpentine! Wadda guy!

More Bathroom Books


This is from a gallery of bathroom bookshelves at the decoist website. It makes me want to yell, "Get those damn books away from all that steam and humidity!"

In the same gallery is this hidden secret-door bathroom in a library:


This one annoys me for a different reason: the "library" is fake. It's just a random collection of trash books. Two old encyclopedias, a calculus textbook, a lot of book-club fiction and biography (at least a couple of volumes shelved upside-down), and a whole shelf of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Nice wallpaper in the bathroom, though.


Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Life on Venus?



Maybe. Not giant lizard-fish, but possibly, conceivably, microbes way up in the atmosphere. Here is a good look at the story.

It won't be easy to confirm the existence of those microbes, but if it can be done, it will have large implications for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. If I know that you own a television, that tells me almost nothing about your neighborhood. But if I know that both you and your next-door neighbor have one, it's a good bet most of the other houses do as well. Finding that life arose on Venus as well as Earth will strongly suggest that life on rocky planets is common.

Which has implications for this:



That's Drake's Equation, which will be 60 years old next year. It's a way to estimate how many technological species are in our galaxy. Each of the seven variables is the answer to a question. We're working toward solid answers to the first three; for the others, we just have no idea. Finding life on Venus would move one of them -- fl, "on what fraction of suitable planets does life appear?" -- from "wild-ass guess" toward "solid answer" and push the equation's result in the "sentient life may be common" direction.

Which in turn would bring up Enrico Fermi's famous question, asked in 1950: Where are they?


Sunday, September 20, 2020

The Ultimate Bathroom Book


I found this oddity while sightseeing in Andrew Rickard's old blog. It's a fold-out wooden portable toilet stool disguised as a large (18.5 x 13 x 3 inches), nicely bound book. I've seen books hollowed out to conceal valuables or flasks of liquor, but nothing like this.

The blog post suggests the user might have put a chamber pot underneath it, but I suspect it was strictly for travel. Travelling by carriage looks pleasant and civilized in a Jane Austen movie, but I guess in an emergency you had to tell the driver to stop, and scurry behind the nearest tree or hedgerow; it would be good to have something sturdy and elevated to sit on.

It was sold by a Paris auction house in 2012. Following back the links, I see it was expected to go for 200 to 400 Euros, but actually went for 2,000.

The fake book's title is Voyage aux Pays-Bas, "A Journey to the Netherlands." Is there a sly joke there, referring to the "nether regions?"


Saturday, September 19, 2020

RBG

With the death of RBG, we'll have a shot at the first Conservative Supreme court since Franklin Roosevelt. That's 80 years, kids. A long time. Maybe time enough to strike down Roe, Lawrence, and a lot of other Lefty impositions on the American character.

Ginsburg, in some ways, was one of the worst of the Lefties, justifying her opinions on European law and tradition when the court is supposed to be checking on Constitutionality. That's how bad it had gotten. I remember being on a cruise a few years ago and heard some Masshole bragging, "Baaston is probably the most European city in America".

That's the Lefty rap these days. We must be more like those "advanced" nations in the British Commonwealth and the EU.

My forebears didn't come here, braving high seas, backbreaking labor, indentured servitude, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the British Army (twice), starvation, discrimination, the Confederate Army, the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, the California Gold Fields, and assorted sneers from the WASPs to be Euros.

That said, she was one tough bird.


Friday, September 18, 2020

The Culture's Always Greener

. . . on the other side of the Pond.

Back in the 80s I took a two-week vacation in England -- your stereotype American Anglophile tourist on a pilgrimage. In London, I stayed at a cheapo hotel in Bayswater: shoebox rooms, communal bathroom on each floor, TV lounge off the entrance. Walking in the neighborhood one night, I saw a neon sign that just cracked me up. It read:

"Texas Lone Star West Saloon & Wine Bar"

It was the "& Wine Bar" that made it perfect.

Days later, somewhere in Southwest England (I don't remember which town), I spotted an ancient-looking stone church with a sway-backed slate roof. I later found out it was built in the 14th century. It looked sort of like the Old Post Office in Tintagel:


but smaller and plainer. I crossed the street and walked up to it, ready to breathe in the misty Olde-Englysshe-ness. There was a flyer tacked to the door, a notice for an upcoming Square Dance, illustrated with a drawing of a cowgirl wearing fringed buckskin and holding two six-shooters.


Wednesday, September 16, 2020

OOT - GREET



Seeing Mad Magazine mentioned in a recent comment, I was inspired to post a tribute to the great Don Martin's greatest work. National Gorilla Suit Day is recognized world-wide as a masterpiece of Absurdism. In 1963 it was awarded the Prix Fixe at the yearly Biennale Absurdiste in Cantes.

WKRLEM: You know how I found out?





I heard it had been too long since we last heard from Tom.

Stupid Moose and Squirrel will die!


Bullwinkle J Moose was always astounded that he was such a sex symbol. He was a big old homo and he really came off as a slightly more butch Charles Nelson Reilly but the girls loved him. He would get thousands of love letters every week from young girls who loved him because he was so sensitive. Just like Jim Nabors and Tony Randall. He had to beat them off with a stick.

Bullwinkle used this crazy notoriety to transition from TV to the movies. He left his partner Rocky behind. One of the few behinds that he had access to that he ever left by the way. He started making movies. Going on Johnny Carson and joking around while chewing gum and acting all sexy. He make a couple of CB radio movies that were popular at the time with a washed up Jackie Gleason called Smokey and the Moose. He even did a few romantic comedies where he pretended that Jill Clayburgh was sexy. Still his cowing achievement was when he posed nude in the centerfold of Play-Moose magazine.

It was all downhill from there.

(Jay Ward and Alex Anderson, Rocky and Bullwinkle, E True Hollywood Story)

Greedy, barbarous and cruel.....



President Trump had a big circus of a peace treaty signing today. A bunch of camel jockeys made peace with the hebes and they will trade and travel and do all kinds of great things. It is part of the continuing effort to stitch together an alliance against the mullahs of Iran as the Sunni's work to stave off an Iranian hegemony. I guess it is a good thing. But I don't know if it makes a big difference.

Because you see as Faisal said the Arabs are a silly people. Greedy, barbarous and cruel. They will continue to fight like crabs in a bucket until the end of time. We need to divorce ourselves from the Middle East. We don't need their oil anymore. We don't need any of them anymore. Lets just sell them bombs and guns and let them kill each other. The Jews can handle them. We need to give them a free hand to do what they want and keep our boys home. Take them home from Iraq and Afghanistan. No more endless wars.

I hope the God Emperor keeps his word. I think he will. That is why it is vital that he wins again.

Never forget?


I didn't post a 911 remembrance this year. I was out at a small ceremony and didn't want to do it when I came home. I know a lot of people say "Never forget." But I think most of America has forgotten.

This is a photo of my father in law pulling a hose in Brownsville in 1971. The conditions we had in 1971 are back today. The Black Liberation army had shot down Officers Piagentini and Jones in their patrol car in an assassination as just happened in LA. The mutts applauded and celebrated then too. The black neighborhoods were in flames and the firemen had to go put out fires when they threw cinder blocks down on them from the roof. My father in law would tell stories about those days. About how he had to stop probies from rushing in to save people because they would set fires, then make holes in the flow and cover them with a sheet so the firefighter would fall and break a leg by falling down a floor. He had a ton of stories about how the animals acted back in those days. Those days are back with a vengeance.

Two kids on a high school football team carried flags honoring the thin blue line and the thin red line on to the field where everyone else had Black Lives Matters flags. They were suspended and thrown off the team. It only lasted a day because of the outcry but that is where the schools head is at. You can honor criminals who die of a drug overdose in police custody by looting a CVS and setting fire to a church but if you honor the fire department you get thrown off the team.

They tried to cancel the reading of the names but a private group funded it and got it done. That is what it is going to come down to if anyone is going to remember. The memory is fading. In time it will be like the dead of World War One. Something in a history book. A white mans history book if they even let us have that anymore.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Monday, September 14, 2020

Even Newer Natural History

Helianthus ferreus

A splendid example of the American Toolflower (Helianthus ferreus). The Toolflower requires a temperate climate, plenty of sun and iron-rich soil. It is often found in abandoned farmlands and gardens. The Toolflower is highly susceptible to fungal infections such as Stem Rust, Black Rust, and, in fact, pretty much any kind of rust.

Saturday, September 12, 2020

Finally, A Cool Spaceship


What We Were Promised


What We Got


SpaceX Starship

The SpaceX Starship may begin orbital flights as early as next year.
Fins, wings, and stainless freaking steel. Thank you, Mr. Musk.

Thursday, September 10, 2020

WKRLEM: Do you know what time it is?





I was thinking. The 1980's were 40 years ago. The music that I put on Alexa when I am washing my balls is the oldies to the current snot nosed little fucks that dominate the culture these days.

I mean it was like my Uncle V telling me about Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa in the the 1980's.

Fuck. Where did the time go?

Whose that girl?

Whose that girl who is one of eduther's favorite actresses. A star at the beginning of the last century she was married to another big star of the early years of movie history. She was a mentor to many including people like John Ford and John Wayne and starred in many a memorable film.

Plus she is sublime in a martini.

Whose that girl!

Out Kick the Coverage has the goods....Interest in Sports is in the toilet.


Have you guys ever read Out Kick the Coverage? It's a sport site that has a pretty good handle on what is going on with sports these days. He also has interesting political posts. I check in every couple of days to see what is going on as I don't really follow sports anymore. He has a post that is really interesting.

A poll has been generated by Gallup that shows that the audience view of sports has dropped 30% this year. All across the board. But precipitously by conservative middle aged white men. You know. The bedrock of sports fans. The guys that get the cable packages and the season tickets and the beers and the cars that they advertise. Now I don't put my faith in polls but this corresponds to the sense I get from people I know. As has been said it takes two months to start a habit and two week to break it. I think a lot of America has gotten out of the habit of watching sports during the pandemic. Many people have fallen out of the habit of following teams and found a lot of ways to spend their time and money rather than worship at the alter of overpaid steroid assholes. The Anti-Americanism and the woke political correctness they are downing us in has been the final nail in the coffin.

I will never watch another football, basketball or heartbreakingly baseball ever again. Many people feel the same way. Sports is in denial. They believe the BLM hype and have killed the Golden Goose.

One of the worst side effects is that it kills so many of my continuing series on the blog.

Photo courtesy of ND Spinelli.

RIP Emma Peel







Only one other woman ever filled out a cat suit better.



You were a pip.

“Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.” ― John Wayne





I want to address Ed's epic post in segments because there is so much to talk about.


"There's something bigger than us."


There is a lot of truth in this. Most Westerns have the underlying theme of bigger issues under the surface of the story they are telling. Westerns started of course in novels and dime novels that were popular before the advent of movies and television. In these novels the story is often set against the backdrop of bigger issues that transcend the plot.

I trace the Western from the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Hawkeye is the genesis of the heroic yet stoic frontiersman who was the precursor of the cowboy. The seminal novel "Last of the Mohicans" is the most famous but I prefer "The Pioneers" which was in fact the most popular of his novels during his lifetime. Natty Bumppo is the stoic hero who is the prototype of the cowboy played by people like the Duke, Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood.

Movies that illustrate the thought that there are bigger issues include "Fort Apache" "The Magnificent Seven"
"High Noon" "Last of the Mohicans" "They Died With Their Boots On" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

Here is the Duke addressing it directly.

Kyrie


The Electric Prunes released Mass in F Minor in 1968. It didn't attract a lot of attention. It got a little bump when the film Easy Rider used the Kyrie for the acid-dropping scene, then it sank into relative obscurity. I liked it then, and still do. I'm a sucker for the West Coast Psychedelic sound.

I like that they decided to do it straight, take it seriously, without irony; to just compose a mass for their time and place. Old wine in new bottles, to twist the parable.

Doing this post, it occurred to me to wonder how that one little snippet of Greek, the Kyrie, wound up in the Latin Mass. I did some research . . . and I'm still wondering. The answer seems to be, "Well, that's just the way it happened."

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do

The American Western has been described as many things. Chuck Connors probably came closer than anybody when he described it as the American Epic, like the Iliad or the Chanson de Roland. When it worked, as it often did, it reminded the world of what America was and American children, boys especially, of what they were expected to be.

What's most intriguing is that it captured the imagination of not only this country, but of the world because it captured the character of America.

"Do you know the difference between money and glory? When you die, you get to take glory with you".

There's something bigger than us.

Along with the war epic, the Western was about seeing the far horizon, understanding the country was more than the sum of its parts. When Errol Flynn kissed Olivia de Havilland one last time and  told her, "Walking through life with you, madam, has been a very gracious thing",  both knew he wasn't coming back. They both face it bravely, Olivia holding back the tears and keeping her composure until he has swept out of the room as the bugles blow Assembly.

The gunfighters in the Magnificent Seven face the same problem. Ride on or go back to save the village. They know the odds are lousy, but they go anyway. Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie face the same issue when Travis draws his famous line in the sand. As Gene Autry put it in his Cowboy Code, "The cowboy is a patriot". Courage is saddlin' up when you're scared to death.

"Mr. Meacham, you're a blackguard, a liar, a hypocrite, and a stench in the nostrils of honest men. If it were in my power, I'd hang you from the nearest tree, leave your carcass for the buzzards".

Integrity. Some things simply cannot be borne.

The lone figure, standing for right, is probably the oldest Western there is, going back to The Virginian, but the archtype is the Lone Ranger. Sole survivor of a troop of Texas Rangers, watched over by an Indian friend he rescued when they were boys, John Reid makes a decision that the lawless new land can't grow without justice. His brother, as well as his brother's family, murdered by the Cavendish gang, left for dead he has no other path but that of the law. Not revenge, which is another theme, but justice. He will use silver bullets as a symbol of justice by law.

Many an actor has made his career with the words, "Now just a doggone minute here". Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford, Gary Cooper have all played the quiet-spoken man who will not be pushed, and the bigger the odds, the sooner he will make his stand.

But it's also drawing the line. When Trampas has a chance to let the old friend who's become a hired gun remove the tycoon who's winning over the girl he loves, he can't do it. He faces off against his old friend after even the Virginian has had to break up fights between the rivals..

"Nobody hands me my gun and tells me to ride on. Nobody!"

Pride of professionalism. The Code of the West.

One young cowboy was picked to lead a herd across a swollen river. He allowed as how he couldn't swim, "But I am a hired hand and will not shirk my duty". Men (and women) of every way of life lived and many times died by that ethos. Working on the railroad was almost considered a death sentence, but men took pride in it. When Britt makes his stand, he's doing so not out of vanity, but the fact that, as JB Books puts it, “I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them”.

"I've been offered a lot for my work, but never everything"

The helping hand. A chance to hit a lick for what's right.

Yul Brynner's quiet admiration for the Mexican farmers who have had enough is the catalyst to the Magnificent Seven. These aren't poor peons, but men who bear the responsibility of providing for their village, as Charlie Bronson so eloquently stated. In one of his last pictures, the Duke holds back from stopping a lynching until one of the lynchers shoves a little Mexican boy.

And that's another theme. The strong have a duty to lend a hand. Not to hand out a living, but to give help when it's clearly needed. In Dodge City, when a boy is dragged to death because the team he was driving is spooked by a gunfight, Errol Flynn can only say, "Little children".

Revenge, of course, plays its part. In a land where there is no law, revenge may sometimes serve the law. The Ringo Kid faces off against the Plummer brothers because the murdered his father and brother, but the vendetta is always destructive. Wyatt Earp goes after the Clantons after they murder one of his brothers and cripple another, but it also destroys his life. His days as a peace officer are through and it takes the life of his best friend, but it's Doc who understands, "Make no mistake, it's not revenge he's after, it's a reckoning".
.
"I'm looking at a tin star with a drunk pinned to it".

Friendship. Loyalty. Family.

In the second season closer, after the Virginian and Steve have finished off the bad guys, one of whom is Randy's half-brother, the Virginian says, "You have to make a choice. Who's your real family". And that is an important part of the Western appeal. The West was, in fact, won by brothers; the Custer brothers, the Masterson brothers, the North brothers, and many more. Louis L'Amour's famous Sackett family is made up of brothers, uncles, cousins, even sisters who come riding along when there's trouble.

Not just blood, but the ties of hard-fought experience. When the Duke confronts Christopher George in the Train Robbers, it's not as a boss, but as a friend, ""I was so busy trying to catch you, I'm the one that let 'em get away". Respect, for a good man. Truth, even though it's embarrassing.

As John T Chance and Cole Thornton, the Duke can't let his best friend destroy himself over a faithless woman. Even though he has gotten away clean from the Indians in Garden Of Evil, Gary Cooper can't leave Richard Widmark to his fate. "He's a little better in every way than I thought. I have to go back there. I have to tell him".

"It just so happens we be Texicans. Texican is nothin' but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Some day, this country's gonna be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come".

A woman's place.

Though Olive Carey in The Searchers and Olivia de Havilland in They Died With Their Boots On are light years apart in social standing, both know their first duty is to their family. Their home. Their man. That requires a steadfastness unfashionable today. When all is collapsing, endure. When he's at the edge, smile. When he needs your strength, give him all. As Geraldine Page put it, "A man can afford to have noble sentiments and poses, but a woman only has the man she married. That's her truth. And if he's no good, that's still her truth."

John Ford got it. Most directors didn't; Howard Hawks couldn't understand a woman who didn't want to go hunting and fishing, but Ford got it. The women they left behind at Fort Apache are right out of the history books. So is Dallas, the hooker who dreams of a better life. She's the embodiment of the soiled dove who was made an honest woman. They were the lucky ones. The rest died of laudanum, pneumonia, gunshot wounds, VD.

Women in the West had to ride and shoot as well as a man. When Pa went off to sell the herd, sometimes it was Mom and the girls who kept the place together, just like their grandmothers in the French and Indian War. 

That was the bargain. Yes, I will warm your lonely nights, bear your children, cook your meals, mend your clothes, nurse your wounds, but for all this I demand churches and schools, law and order, the end of gunfights in the street, and no more saloons on every corner. I want the gambling halls and the houses of ill repute (especially) closed down.

The men may have won the West, but the women made a nation.

Well, I'll be damned.

Redemption. A chance to set things right.

In its third season opener, the Virginian introduced Emmett Ryker, hired gun, gambler, bounty hunter, sometime lawman (based on the Honey Wiggin character in the book). Ryker is offered a job murdering a rancher and he turns it down. When Ryker's old partner, Sam Lake, is offered the job of killing Ryker, Sam hesitates. Ryker sees the chance to give Sam a shot at a better life and offers to split the half of a ranch he's come into. As Chris said in Mexico, "We're the ones who always lose". Why not go out a winner? Have something that's your own. Sam goes for it and ends up taking a bullet. "Was kinda nice, bein' respectable. Bein' on the winning side".

Louis L'Amour defined a bad man as one who was bad to tangle with. Jim Bowie, Bat Masterson, Bill Hickok, Bill Tighman were all such men. But, for the most part, are remembered as heroes. Britt, Bernardo, Harry, and Lee were laid to rest as honored men by the village they fought to save.

That theme of redemption is the heart of the Western. The bad man who was saved by a good woman. Angel and the Badman. The bad man who finally gave up his rough ways for a good plain woman. Hondo.

The bad man who thought he was beyond redemption. Harry Luck.

As Chris Adams put it, "I doubt that".

And this country is still based on those values.

This is for Troop.

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

WKRLEM: In The Garden




I might have posted this before...but it is one of my favorites.

No guru no method no teacher!

What if a asteroid hits the earth!





Graham Hancock is a very interesting guy. His appearances with Joe Rogan are classic and are well worth checking out on Youtube. Highly recommended!

WKRLEM FM: ANTIFA Portland Footloose





Typical of the planning and effectiveness of the animals and criminals of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.



Pig in the Kevin Bacon?

Witches and Portents

"There was a witch and soothsayer in England. After she died, when the priests were singing Psalms, devils violently snatched her up and bore her away through the air on the back of a terrible horse. Their awful cries could be heard for almost four miles."

The Nuremberg Chronicle (Nuremberg, 1493) is an ambitious history of the world from Adam and Eve on. It is one of the first illustrated books, and certainly the first lavishly-illustrated one; it contains more than 1,800 woodcuts (including, possibly, some by Albrecht Durer, who was a young apprentice at the shop which produced the book).

One of my prized possessions is a page from the Nuremberg Chronicle. Page CLXXXIX, in fact. At the top of the verso is the above woodcut and text. The rest of the page is all emperors and bishops and scholar-monks.

On the recto, amid a whole bunch of stuff about Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, is a little woodcut of a burning two-by-four in the sky, with a matter-of-fact line of text:

"A flaming wooden beam of remarkable size was seen in the sky, flying in the region between south and east above the setting sun, and falling to the earth."

No doubt the fireball from a large meteor.

I was surprised at how cheap the page was; I paid more to have it framed than I did to buy it. As a book-lover and former bookseller, I cringe at the thought of someone tearing up a perfectly good book to sell it page-by-page. I prefer to believe that some kindly soul disassembled the fragments of a damaged copy and offered the pages for sale, so that people like me could own at least a piece of a famous incunable. This is much like trying to convince not only your children, but yourself, that Bingo has gone to live at a nice farm upstate, and is very happy.

Sunday, September 6, 2020

Back to the Garden

This time I got several unblurred (almost) pictures of things that were further than six feet away. I continue my slow, steady progress toward becoming this century's Ansel Adams.

"My God, It's full of flars!"

The Mutant Japanese Maple oozes onto the walkway in search of prey.


We got Canada Geese around here like New York City's got rats.


Tennis Balls of the Gods

Friday, September 4, 2020

A New Natural History

The Huff (left) and a Gloat near a patch of I-Told-You-So. 

The Hoodwink on a spray of Ragamuffin. 

Left to right: the Thesaurus, the Stereopticon, and
the Hexameter. The tree is a Sacroiliac.

Thurber, of course. These are from his A New Natural History, which, along with a whole lot of other good stuff . . .


. . .can be found in Alarms and Diversions, one of his best collections. You can download it for free, in PDF, EPub, HTML and a bunch of other formats, here.

Thursday, September 3, 2020

Whose that girll


You would want to give her your best shot on the battlefield but that kind of love is for children. She led the spandex life in the eighties but lived to tell the tale.

She survived many a ham sandwich and a lot of hog.

Whose that rock and roll heart breaker?

Tom Terrific is dead.....and so is baseball





Tom Seaver was my Dad's favorite player. He was an old time Dodger fan who switched to the Mets as a lot of National League fans did when the Dodgers and the Giants fled to the Coast. Tom was one of the two men he admired most along with Roger Maris even though he was a hated Yankee.

I vividly remember this game as my Dad let me stay up to watch the game with him. One of his cronies was over and they were going to go out but they stayed to watch the game. He let me stay up. He even let me sip from a can of Reingold. I felt bad for him when Jimmy Qualls got that hit in the ninth inning.

The simple please of the game visible on that clip are gone to us now. It's all social justice posturing and political slogans to appease the left wing monster machine..

Tom Terrific has passed away. A lonely nation turns its eyes to you.

But you're dead.

Just like the game.

Do as I say not as I Jew.....


Joe Hiden decided he had to pander to the murderous savages of Black Lives Matter so he went to visit the family of the skell who got shot when he refused arrest for his warrants for sexual abuse. Jacob Butler is a real beauty and typical of your basic black activist.

He is a hard core Anti-semite like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or AOC and the Squad. His face book posts are full of posts of how Jews control the world and typical blood libels. Too bad Joe didn't visit him on Rosh Hashanah for Seder.

We hear the Democrats talk about how we have to kneel and worship our poor black brothers because us white people are criminals who indulge our white privilege as we hate on everyone. Meanwhile the members of BLM and Antifa and the Democrats are generally vile haters who hate white people especially the Jews. Just look at the many posts I have made about the knock out game and what is going on in NYC. Look at the Anti-Semitic administration of Comrade Bill in NYC to see how he discriminates against the Orthodox Jews who just want to live their lives in their faith.

You are never going to see any of this discussed on the main stream media Just as you are not going to hear about who this skell is and what he was guilty of in his long criminal career. Pardon the phrase but it is all going to be "white-washed."

So listen to the media and the Democrats. Do as they say and kowtow to the moolies and beg them for forgiveness. Just don't get in the way when they go after the Jews.


Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Language Log Noun Pile Headline Collection Post


The folks at the Language Log blog like a good "noun pile," and so do I. (They seem to have coined this useful term themselves; I've seen it nowhere else, and an internet search yields no results.) I suppose a "pure" noun pile headline would contain only nouns, like the one pictured above, and like this one . . .

               Fish foot spa virus bombshell
               --The Sun, 10/18/2011.

. . . which I love for the surreal imagery it conjures up.

These three are all from the BBC (!); each consists of a seven-word noun pile supported by a single verb:

               Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures
               --BBC News, 4/18/2010

               Citizen science charts horse chestnut tree pest spread
               --BBC News 1/24/2014

               Pilot Fish Project English Channel crossing bid begins
               --BBC News 8/5/2016

The champion seems to be this one, which even the Language Log people had trouble decoding:

               Napa wildfire LNU Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire –
               August 2020
               --SFGate 8/18/2020


Tuesday, September 1, 2020

WKRLEM: A Little Less Conversation





We need less conversation and more direct action. Listen to the King.




Do these animals have a shred of decency?



"The king is gone but he's not forgotten."

Those are the words of famous left wing asshole Neil Young in his song 'Hey Hey My My'

Well the fascist shits of Black Lives Matter don't remember shit. They want to destroy everything that is good and decent about America. They tear down statues. They burn churches. They despoil everything they touch.


These savages painted slogans like "Black Lives Matter" and "Defund the Police" on the stone wall outside of Graceland. Covering up and defacing the heartfelt tributes written on wall by fans from all around the world. These fucking savages have no limits.

I bet if we shot in the crowd randomly we would hit pedophiles, wife beaters and felons. Wait we already did that. 

Black lives matters is the scum of the earth and they need to be eradicated.

WKRLEM TV: This seems very familiar.....





I am a big Martin Clunes fan. You might know his most popular series '"Doc Martin." When I find an actor I like I investigate his filmography on IMBD and see what else he might have done. Lo and behold I found this excellent little series "William and Mary."

Let's see. The plot is this big fat cheerful dofus goes online meets a beautiful buxom brunette who bosses him around and he is delirious happy as she yells at him and his bumbling ways.

I don't know it just seems very familiar.

On Amazon Prime's Brit Box and highly recommended.


Small businesses that didn't quite cut it

In the early 1950's the Sears Roebuck Company devised a new law mower for the germ conscious housewife. It enclosed the driver in a clear plastic bubble so a woman could mow the lawn while wearing a nice dress and pearls and never spill her cocktail.

Best of all it allowed her to take over the lawn care so her husband could repair to his study with his cigar and his whiskey while the little woman took care of all domestic chores.

Unfortunately with the dawn of radical feminism men were no longer to enjoy their status of King of castle. On the other hand rabid bitter hags who loved feminism would have to hire indigent gardeners if they wanted their lawn trimmed. Or if they wanted any trim at all.