SmokeSound

I have it on good report that the world is going to end on May 21 of this year.  There are signs of the end times everywhere:  trees, rain in some places, a rock over near Stillwater, black crows, an earthquake in Japan and probably one in California.  We had a little earthquake here in western Minnesota just yesterday.  There is water in the Red River, going north to Canada.  Signs of the end times are everywhere! I logged on to EndoftheWorld2011.com just to catch the latest news about our pending destruction, and noticed the ad on the right side of the page:  Viking Cruises.  They are holding a little contest, and will give away two plane tickets and two boat tickets to the winner.  Well, here is what it says:  " Please complete the entry form above and you will automatically be entered to win a FREE river cruise for two with roundtrip air. Contest ends May 31, 2011." What a scam! Do they think we will not notice that the contest winn...

"The "N" word."  I despise the euphemism almost as much as I do the name itself. We can't use it anymore.  Now we have to say, "He isn't one of us.  He was born in Kenya.  His middle name is Hussein." Are any of your kids named "Hussein"?  See?  He isn't one of us!  He is a . . . well, he isn't one of us. "He has no right to be President, you know.  He was born in Kenya." That is what racism looks like when you can't use the "N" word.  You have to use nice-sounding names to call him a . . . to say that he does not belong in the White House.  You have a little tea party, and you invite all your paranoid and racist friends, and you call yourselves "Birthers", and you say that the S.O.B. in the White House, that Nazi, that Communist, that Socialist-Communist-Facist guy in the White House--The White House!--was born in Africa!  He has no right to be President!  He is Bl . . . , he isn't ...

Well, OK!, Barack HeReallyDoesn'tExist Obama first showed us  his Birth Certificate--the one that proves that his mother gave  birth to him in Kenya or Indonesia and then flew immediately  to Hawaii and talked two newspapers and a hospital staff into  saying that he had been born in Hawaii.  It was the usual kind  of certificate; the one we all get when we ask for one. Now Barack HRDE Obama asked the State of Hawaii to give  him the long version of his tall tale about having been born  almost as if he were an ordinary person with a mother and  a father and everything.   Will this deceit never end?  Everybody knows that Barack Obama does not exist!  There is no Black man as President in the White House!  It is all a lie!  It simply cannot be, and is not, true! He never went to Occidental College, or to Columbia University.  He never went to Harvard Law School.  He was never Editor of the Harvard Law ...

The most horrible disease I know is a disease I first learned when I moved to the Mid-west. It is a form of impossible perfection. It has to do with window panes without spots, with floors without footprints, with cabinet tops no one sees, that have dust. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but godliness is next to impossible. The most horrible disease I know is next to you, when you live in the Mid-west. Shame is the footprint of a raindrop on a pane. Shame is a neighbor who stops by, unannounced, who discovers your jacket on a chair, who did not know, until age fifty-three, that there are barbarians who do not dust their interior worlds to non-static purity. It is a Let's-Pretend world, in which every normal, forgotten cobweb is a sin, and sloth is reading a book, instead. It is perfection as the enemy of the good. It is pretension as a good; as a possibility. It is isolation from what we all are, alone, that keeps us alone, afraid of each oth...

Imagine that, somewhere in passing, you heard someone say that there would be a new heaven and a new earth, and that there would be no more sea. "No more sea"! Would you not wonder why?  Who might possibly imagine everything new, everything better--"a new heaven and a new earth"--and that there would be no more sea? Does that person own a fishing pole?  Has that person ever, ever tasted a seafood stew?  Eaten sushi?  Ever had a scallop melt on one's tongue, or wondered what it is about clams that make a broth shine? No more sea?   It might be someone who was afraid of the sea.  Someone dreading a tsunami.  It surely must be someone whose life was mountains, or desert; sheep, or bison, or searing heat.  No one could imagine a new heaven and a new earth, with no more sea, whose life was the sea.   It might have been--and it was--a Semite, with sheep and goats, but without a boat. Heaven is what we think we want.  We ha...

Norwegian Kitchen Witch We are moving on, season to season, celebrating, as we do, every high and holy day!  The Norwegian Straw Tree is down, and stored away to protect it from Spring, when it comes.  The Easter lily, which depresses me, anyway, suggesting as it does, something funereal, is pretending its glory on the dining room table.   You have undoubtedly noticed with what resoluteness I have been facing the seasons, here in St. Paul; both of them: This Winter, and Last Winter.  It is probably time to admit that going mad is an option, right up there with alcohol. The Witch in our Wardrobe is less a symbol of our days, than it is a sign that something serious is fraying in our psyches.  Sterner folk than we have lived here all their lives, and not felt, as some of us do, the need to stockpile green sod.  

You can call us sentimental fools if you wish, but we find it hard not to hang on to the holidays, once they are up and hard to take down.  But here we are, at Easter time, puttering with a ham we shall bake later, finally moved to take down the Norwegian hanging straw Juletre!   Into the box it goes!  Four months of holding hands and doing a slow, circular shuffle around where it would land, if it fell, humming the words we cannot remember to the Norwegian National Anthem (I think it is), is enough!  It is time to move on.   It is time for the Easter lily, which is already turning brown at the edges of its early blossoms.  We do not hang the lily:  neither do we gild it.  We use it as a symbol:  a hope for melting snow, for an early thaw, and for at least a sliver of summer.   Hope springs eternal, here in the hardy northland!  We are believers, and I believe it is time to look for the cloves for the ham.    ...

One of the secrets to The Donald Trump's success is that he does not waste his time on trivialities. For instance, it appears he has not bothered to vote in primary elections for about twenty years. That will save a person a lot or wear and hair. Of course, now that he has discovered that Barack Obama was not born, but sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus-- or was that the Governor of Hawaii?-- it may be that he will do what he does best:  lie about his money. Is it not amazing that, for the moment, at least, The Trump is leading the pack of Republicans who want to become President?  He knows he isn't going to become President, and doesn't have a chance, but we have to give him this:  he knows a stupid idea when he sees one.  A Birther! What if he had voted?  We should be grateful!

Notice the Custom Hood Vents!

Glen Beck called Mike Huckabee "a progressive", just a horrible, horrible thing to do, apparently.  The Huck denies, with all his heart, that he is progressive, and while I have never seen either his birth certificate or his diploma of circumcision, I am content to take him at his word for everything. A progressive!    Shall we revive the term, "dastardly"?  We shall!   Remember that you read it here first:  Glen Beck is a dastard for calling Mr. Huckabee a progressive!  Pusillanimous, shall we say?  Given to Beck-stabbing! Rotten stuff--politics--when people in places of peculiar public trust (like Glen Beck) take time away from drawing pictures of Armageddon and accuse good, decent Arkansans of advocating change, or moving forward. Nice to know.  Explains quite a lot.

We lose perspective about the earth, living on it. When first we sent astronauts into space, they and we were entranced at seeing our everyday from far away. A couple of years ago, I rented a big roto-tiller to loosen a part of the yard for flowers.  It nearly killed me, seizing at the soil, and leaping forward like a mad bull.  It almost threw me over the machine.  It did skin my arm. But the earth, even at its stoniest, is a trembling thing.  The rocks bend at the edges of the tectonic plates like bacon, slipping down and sliding up, shaking. A geologist said that we can best imagine the consistency of earth if we think of it as a very large ball of jello. It heaves, and shakes, and trembles, and slides. Another large earthquake just occurred near Japan, not as dramatic as the huge one, recently, but big. A couple of hundred years ago, a big earthquake occurred in mid-America, causing the Mississippi River to re-route, and even to run...

They call themselves the Third Thursday Birthday Club at the Mall of America. Many of them, most days, come to the Mall early in the morning to walk. They are in no hurry.  Hurrying is something they are trying not to do, any longer. At first glance, they seem accidentally to be at the Mall together, but then one notices that they are part of a community of people who stop and talk to each other.  Passersby, like me, hear bit reports about how the arthritis is doing, or that Ethel was hospitalized last week for something, again.  A few walk less than they talk. They have been coming to the Mall for thirteen years, taking every third Thursday of the month to celebrate birthdays.  Up on the third floor, in the north food court, they decorate tables, and bring plates and casseroles of food.  There are flowers.   This month, they celebrated the birthdays of eight members born in April.  All of them were born long before there was a Mall of America;...

When first we moved to this house, the backyard was a hillside, sliding toward St. Paul. The previous owner wore T-shirts that showed he also muscled a push-mower up-and-down the half acre hillside.  I had a twenty-dollar, used mower that dragged me up-and-down. Using a hundred meters of edging stones, I laid a stream-bed of wild flowers from top-south to bottom-north, winding. "Perennials!", I thought, not knowing that perennials would eventually want to become eight-foot-tall, deep-rooted, tributaries to the Mississippi. Day-dreaming one day, I let a newer mower drift off into the raging river of wildflower eternals, unable to locate it until it stopped snowing. I have put my principles aside, to do the right thing, and chemically discouraged the flowering forest (with degradable poison) in order to start over. This time, there shall be annuals! The annuals jump to the sun, not depending on deep roots to China. The bag of seeds...

We settle it all before we go to work, or to the dogs, or whatever it is we have to do.  Nothing is beyond the scope of our analysis and expertise.  We shred fickle weather and principled politicians with equal ease.   Our attendance shifts a little, as the heavy commitments of sleeping late, or other places to have coffee, keep us shuffling chairs.  Other early-morning coffee customers simply accept that there is nothing to be done about us, except for the weekend Bible Warriors who somehow got it into their heads that it is their space, too.  They have the advantage of ancient documents and opinions.  Our advantage is our lack of principles.  Dennis tries to fumigate the shop with a screaming espresso maker, but when the vibrations make our teeth rattle, we signal to Tom, and Tom sends up a counter-blast that makes steam engines envious.  To get even, we tape stylish old newspapers on the windows to shade us from the sun, and say snide things...

Is there no end to what people will say? Now the Governor of Hawaii,  Neil Abercrombie, says Barack Obama's parents showed him their new baby just days after he was born, and that he has known Obama for years.   Why does he say that?   There is absolutely no reason why Abercrombie should tell the truth!  Is he not interested, any longer, in public office?  Donald-the-Serial Bankruptee knows that sometimes it is necessary to stir the pot a little, you know, like lying through your teeth, just to get the troops riled up.  But Abercrombie?  "No, I was there." Even Jan Brewer, the Governor of Arizona, has apparently come to Jesus.  Either that, or the business community in Arizona said that all that Birther Baloney was hurting the Convention State, and that allowing students to carry handguns to the university might dry up the stream of students willing to come to Arizona from California.    She vetoed a bill requiring more proof of...

Lord, what a mess! First, you teach women that they are something shameful, or that it is shameful for them to be seen.  Require them to cover themselves with a burqa.  That isn't just a mess!  It is criminal: a human rights violation. Next, some of the women will choose, even when they are no longer coerced, to cover themselves.  That is an obvious result.  It is precisely what we hope will be the result of teaching morals:  people will internalize the rules, and regulate themselves.  Now we have a secondary mess:  people humiliating themselves, voluntarily. Then add the French, and the Swiss, and whomever else finds such behavior offensive.  Let them pass a law criminalizing wearing burqas or hajibs.  The Swiss will not allow minarets to be built in their cities.  The French think that might be a good idea, too.  I suspect the Swiss will not ban bell towers and spires on old, musty, empty Catholic and Protestant churche...

Out there in Massachusetts--somewhere over toward the Atlantic Ocean, I think--their Supreme Court ruled that denying marriage rights to same-sex couples violated the State Constitution.  That absolutely devastated Our Belle, Michele Bachmann.  She went for a walk: "And I took a walk and I just went to prayer and I said Lord, what would you have me do in the Minnesota state senate?  And just through prayer I knew that I was to introduce the marriage amendment in Minnesota." (You can tell when an evangelical is praying because they say, "just" a lot, as in, "Lord, I just want to say just this about just that. . . .") What can you do when the Lord tells you just what to do, except just do it? The Lord just didn't tell Michele anything about poverty, or wars, or sexual abuse of women, or kids without health care, or doing justice or loving mercy or walking humbly with God.  The Lord just told her to do something just about same-sex marriages. It...

The Donald is never going to be President, even if he runs.  But what is fascinating is whom he is courting for support:  evangelical Christians! Ralph Reed, the scandal-soiled darling of right wing evangelicals, denies that he has talked to The Trump about managing his campaign.  Oh, what a shame! Are you not astonished at how easily religious fundamentalists enter politics, and even more, whom they identify with, once they get there? "Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy--meditate on these things."                                                                          ...

Is nothing safe, anymore? Is nothing sacred, and pure? People, invited to a fundraiser, at a Playboy Club, got into a hot tub and were infected with Legionnaires' disease! It is scarcely worth trying to be charitable!

"If you, or a loved one, suffers serious side effects or death, contact . . ."--oh, I don't know--your friendly, local tort lawyer, who will sue the hell out of Accutane and keep most of the money. I have done neither, yet, not yet having suffered death. . . . It isn't always the case, but there seems to be a lot of unscrupulous firms selling products that just might kill us, or a loved one, because one has to take chances, you know, to make an honest buck.  On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of unscrupulous lawyers offering lawsuits that just might screw us, or a loved one, because one has to be greedy, you know, to make an honest buck. And there are shysters, both selling and suing!  There are unnecessary insurance companies standing between health care providers and patients whose only interest in health care is how to skim off a quarter of the revenue.  Medicare delivers health care at a fraction of that cost, but we have an almost religious belief t...

The Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions (an extended family of religions) maintain that there is revealed truth.  They don't completely agree on what is revealed, but both have holy books. Revealed truth is not something that human beings achieve.  It is given to them by God; perhaps Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad.  The truth is there to be learned, parsed, praised, and perfected. It is a pretty extensive body of material.  You can learn about the creation of the universe, how human beings came to be, our ethical duties, how to organize families, what to eat and wear, how to talk nicely, which god to pledge allegiance to, and even how the world will end with a bloody war, and not a whimper. If you believe that some truth about things has been revealed to you by God, you had darned well better believe it.  It doesn't matter what anyone else says or thinks.  That makes it rather hard to do curious, critical, scientific thinking.  The easiest exa...

APRIL IN PARIS Vernon Duke / E. Y. Harburg I never knew the charm of spring I never met it face to face I never new my heart could sing I never missed a warm embrace Till April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom Holiday tables under the trees April in Paris, this is a feeling That no one can ever reprise I never knew the charm of spring I never met it face to face I never new my heart could sing I never missed a warm embrace Till April in Paris Whom can I run to What have you done to my heart

April comes in tatters to The Cities, wind-whipped and shivering. I turn up the heat in the garage, dulling the edge of March, and wrestle the lawn mower into fighting trim.  Outside, the bird feeders, hung with holiday care, do figure-eights waiting for snow to fall tonight.  And I change the mower belt! The belt does its own figure-eights, each pulley with a guide that has to be loosened to allow the belt inside.  All the while, I think about the snow waiting to fall tonight, and wonder whether this is prudence or madness I am showing. We have already had seven feet of snow, and more tonight, but I am a believer, and I believe the weather forecast that says there shall only be an inch or two of slushy snow, and it will go by itself, to there where slush filters through the rags of April, to the wetlands, and the rivers beyond, and to the sea. The mower blades, frozen fast by last Summer's hammering at the grass, finally snap free, and bare their rounde...

Why do people listen to Rush Limbaugh? Here he is, describing the people who support President Obama: "His base," Limbaugh said, "is made up of people even more vile than he is.  You've got . . . a lot of it is just walking human debris on the Democrat base side. . . . That bunch of people, those savages that make up the Obama base, are fit to be tied.  He had to get them back, and the one way to do it was to go out and savage us.   That's what they love.  That's what they get off on.  That's their orgasm.  'Cause these people can't find willing mates." Even Our Michele Bachmann said only that the President might be anti-America.  She went rather easy on the walking human debris and the orgasm part.  But she is delicate.  Not Rush! Hate politics--how can we call it anything else?--is pretty nasty. Glen Beck is going to be dumped by Fair and Balanced FOX, but Rush Limbaugh has gotten big enough so that he cannot be dumped: ...

Michael, from North Carolina, taught me to say "bleeve", as in "I bleeve I'll have another beer."  Actually, Michael was a clergyman, so most of his bleefs had to do with religion.  Michael also taught me that Yale was pronounced, "Yay-yull".  (But, ah, hay-yull, I am getting off the point, here!) I was taught to be a believer.  The alternative was to be a doubter, as in Doubting Thomas, who when told that Jesus had gotten up from the dead, said he would believe it when he saw it.  Thomas was said to have seen it, so he became a believer, too.  It is said.   Religions train people not to doubt.  Doubt is the enemy.  Somehow, we are supposed to achieve a serenity that is impervious to questions.  But how can one not wonder?  As a consequence, the inner lives of many religious people is a terror of questions, never tamed. Now we know that the absolutes are gone.  Everything we know is provisional; some very durable, some...

Yesterday, the last of winter's snow melted in our yard. Today, we are under threat of a tornado. Tomorrow, out taxes will be filed. Yesterday, I raked winter's tree waste from the yard. Today, we put out some pansies, and bird feeders. Tomorrow, I will try to find where the feeders went in the wind. On another planet, Bert said his friends had rented a condo in Ft. Myers for the summer.  "Another summer spent inside the house," Dick replied. The Twins are playing in their first home series.  It might be one of the best new baseball stadiums--in downtown Minneapolis--with two superb Irish bars a short walk away.  So far, the Twins have scored 3/4 of a run--not in the game:  all season.  At Kierans and The Local, there are losers, but the scoring is sky high. Born in Tacoma, I didn't know there was a sun until I was twelve. In Berkeley, summers were fog. The heat snapped all the window frames in my car in Phoenix. I wore woolen underwear all summer...

I cannot understand the Republican obsession with crotch politics. Republicans hate big government.  Right?  Sure they do!  There is nothing nastier than government intrusion into our personal and private lives, according to the Republican Catechism.  Grover Norquist, the so-called "Field Marshall of the Bush Plan", said:  "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Forget, for the moment, what a glorious place we would be without fire, police, medical, research, education, military, and military pensions, and everything else civilized societies do after they get out of the cave.  Focus just on the desire to have a smaller government, even a much smaller government. In the last few days, when it appeared that Grover Norquist and his Tea and Republican Party supporters might get their way, if even just for a few days or weeks.  The government was on the verge of a sh...

If you are still You can feel the river bending-- There! --like a deep root Toward the sea. If you are very still.

Here is how that birther conspiracy goes down! Barack Obama had stupid parents.  They got married in Hawaii.  Their plan (as Michael Smirconish says) was to take over the world.  They would have a son, who would become President, so they (plotting very deviously ), went to Kenya to give birth.  See?  Who would have expected that? Then they either rushed back to Hawaii, where there is no record that they ever left, and had birth notices put in a couple of newspapers.  In 1961.  And then they moved to Indonesia, or maybe it was Kenya.  Mike Huckabee is not quite sure which is the real lie.  (It was Indonesia.) Before any of this happened, Barack's grandfather had fought with Patton in World War II, so as to enhance his still inconceivable grandson's military credentials.  (Oh, this is deep and devious!) The kid was put into Harvard Law School.  He was good, that kid!  He even edited the Harvard Law Review. Who...

I am staggered by the insistence of the political right wing to legislate what women can do with their reproductive apparatus. ( Apparatus?  Maybe I was thinking about the Virgin Mary and her immaculate contraption.  Maybe I was trying not to get too anatomical for a blog that is read by precocious children.) Near our neighborhood, someone has huge permanent signs in his front yard railing against abortion.  They are not gentle signs. The inevitable conclusion one comes to is that there is a very angry person living at that house. I listened, recently, to a discussion of the status of women in the world, and one of the speakers--referring to the roles religions and cultures assign to women; roles like property, housebound, hooded, mutilated, set on phony pedestals, non-voters, political outsiders, underpaid, a denial of access to education, and all the rest--said that the abuse of women was the largest moral problem in all the world. Ou...

     . . . So Tim, the man who would be King--that's our Tim, Tiny Tim--the hunk who used to be our Governor, the very mention of whose name makes your heart race, the same Tim who never saw a tax he liked nor a user fee he could not tolerate, who left the State about . . . oh, six billion dollars in the hole, none of which was his fault because he always made it clear that he was opposed to spending more than you had, and that is why he cut taxes, is running for President. It isn't easy to become President.  There is that budget thing, of course, and other people want to become President, too.  Our very own Michele, the Belle of Stillwater and Anoka, something of a hunk in her own right, is looking extremely presidential, in an odd sort of way.  And then there is Newt--he wants to be King, too--as soon as the vows of celibacy return to him. The field is crowded with unannounced candidates, including a Burger King, who wants to be King.  Herman Cai...

I love cooking shows for many reasons. "Iron Chef", for instance, is useful for those of us who have unlimited grocery budgets, million dollar kitchens, and award-winning sous chefs on staff. "Chopped" is for the more relaxed home cook. You get a basket of ingredients--typically something like popcorn, a rubber boot, crankcase oil, and a fungus amongus from Mongolia. Or an anchor chain, cotton candy, a pickle, and a lizard shank; the kinds of things you might find in the fridge, after work. It is easiest if you like Italian food. Make your own pasta, order a $200,000. wheel of parmesano regiano, and wear rubber clogs. Tomatoes everywhere.  Octopus.  Nothing to it! Some shows have judges:  piss ants who pretend they will die if they find a fish bone in the food, or that the carrot pieces are not precisely the same size, by girth and weight. They like their pasta "al dente"; i.e., cold from the box. The sternest judges announce, after...

Of course we have budget problems! Better than half of all discretionary spending is for military purposes. Our health care costs are the highest in the world, although the extent of our care is not.  Too many have no care. We insist that insurance companies should skim from health care dollars, when we ought to have a single-payer, non-profit system. Social Security more than pays its own way.  It always has. We steal Social Security money for general budget use. We are just now climbing out of a huge recession brought on by chicanery and greed and lawlessness. Now our income is less than our expenditures. Forget, for the moment, that in a time like this we ought to go into debt to put the country back on its feet.  If we don't, the recession will drag on for decades.  Cutting back on public spending right now will only make everything worse. So what do our politicians do? They refuse to admit our militarism.  For years, under Bush, they ...

http://www.raptorresource.org/falcon_cams/decorah_eagle_xcel.html Decorah, Iowa, is all hills and river and eagles. The last glaciation left the eroded hills, down to the river, alone to erode some more.  When the English came to this small corner of northeast Iowa, they built Queen Anne houses, and when the Norwegians came, they built a college.  Now the eagles have come, and they have built a nest, eighty feet up in a grand cottonwood tree, the town over the hill, but the fish hatchery just a circling glide away. Yesterday, with two of their three eggs hatched, and the third pecking away at the shell, the parents took turns sheltering the hatchlings and the remaining egg, fortified with a good stock of rabbit meat, what looked like an insolent crow, and a trout from the stream below the hatchery. "The eagles are coming!  The eagles are coming!". About 150,000 people are on line, steadily, watching the new eagles come. More than ...

1970.  Dubuque, Iowa.   I was there for a management trainee course at Interstate Power Company.  It was their theory that training college faculty members would make them better understand the business world.  They had arranged for me to stay for several weeks at Loras College, in Keane Hall, a great brick, blacksmith-of-a-building on top of the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and downtown Dubuque. I was 38, a natural animal of an athlete who had tripped on the tennis court and cracked a bone in his wrist.  I was an uncoordinated natural animal wearing an ace bandage.  Down the hill from Keane Hall I could see the uncoordinated athletic field; at the time, just green grass and a brown cinder track.   "I believe," I said to myself, "that if I start jogging, I will feel better when I am fifty."  I began jogging; one lap runnng, one lap walking, four times, stopping just in time to avert a pathetic death at 38.   I kept jogg...