SmokeSound

"Uribe's a guy you have to keep the ball down." Poor Juan Uribe!  Or as Bert Blyleven pronounces his name:  Yew-reeb-ay.   Bert is my favorite baseball color commentator.  He was a pretty good pitcher, and was recently, finally, elected to the Hall of Fame.  He might be elected again, someday, not for what he did as a pitcher, but for  the splendid way he is reshaping the English language. Bert, who lives in Florida, likes to call himself a Californian, where he grew up.  You know, "My California math says that . . ." (whatever his arithmetic suggests.   Bert has redefined the English language.  For one thing, he has decided that adverbs are entirely superfluous, although he is reported as having said, once, that "The weather is well today."  No one hits a ball well, though.  It was hit good.  We owe Bert, big time!  He has helped you and I get rid of all those "-ly" words:  gladly, helpfully.  And an...

Our Courts have ruled that money is equal to free speech; that is to say, you have a right to use as much of it as you wish to accomplish your goals.  If you want to spend a million dollars to run for Sheriff, go right ahead!  If your opponents don't have that kind of money, that is tough!   It might be one man/one vote, but it is obvious that one man with a lot of money is going to talk a lot louder than another with $57.   A lout with a lot of money is going to have to be pretty bad to lose out to an ordinary person with good ideas and no cash.   It is a system that is an offense to fundamental democracy.  The whole idea of one man/one vote is to put aside other human inequities--wealth, intelligence, skin color, religious preferences, or anything else--and to count the number of people who favor, or oppose, a proposition or an action.   Instead, we allow people with obscene amounts of money to shout very loudly, indeed.  There is no...

Now people are fussing because Barack Obama ordered that a bill from Congress, that required his signature, be signed by an autosignature machine.  Obama signs his signature, and the machine copies it onto letters and cards and whatever requires his signature, times 10,000.   The Party that controls Congress, that does not pass bills, at all, because anything Congress does has to be paid for with taxes, and taxes are very, very bad, except for the part that pays the salaries of members of Congress--and that is an evil we just have to grit our teeth and admit is evil, but not so evil as if the Democrats controlled the House, and we all know the world is not perfect--that will have to wait for Jesus and Michele Bachmann to come again, but not together, so we really have no choice but to provide health care, and generous benefits, and an even generouser retirement plan for the people who are opposed to those kinds of social benefits for everybody else. Anyway, those people a...

"Somewhere in the world," the speaker on population growth said, "a woman is giving birth every second." "We must find that woman," someone shouted, "and stop her!" Somewhere else in the world, someone is training restaurant servers to tell us what they like to eat.  "Oh, that is my favorite sandwich!", one enthused.  "I had three of them for lunch!"  Or, "I just love that soup!" Another:  "Our special today is the Spicy Southwestern Blackened Chicken Salad with Avacados and Peppers!  It really isn't too spicy, at all!" I don't care what any passing waiter or waitress likes to eat.  I don't care whether Lori loves alligator bacon, or Curtis has the Chef's Special Broiled Right Rubber Boot for lunch almost every day.   I might care what the specialty of the restaurant is, or whether Cities Magazine has given it an award.  More often, I want to know whether the restaurant has an...

What is one to do, on a rainy day in Memphis, or Minneapolis, or wherever we are (none of the above), except to look for light?  In our case, I decided to put some lights over and under the kitchen cabinets.   I just read that the Missouri River, which begins somewhere up near Yellowstone Park, and meanders to St. Louis to form a partnership with the Mississippi, may remain above flood stage through August!   Lots of snow, last winter, and unrelenting rain, have saturated the ground and turned our optimism soggy. I  have wanted to spray weeds in the lawn (actually, wildflower seeds that the rain and wind redistributed), but when it is not pouring down rain it is blowing too hard to mess with sprays.  Since we live on a sidehill, we don't worry about water puddling, but we do occasionally think about sliding down to the bottom lands.   The Missouri River is on the west side of the State, and we are on the east, or Mississippi, side.  Where we are it...

"Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never was, and never will be."                    --Thos. Jefferson (attributed by David McCollough) It isn't really road rage.  It is religion rage.  They meet in a public place, ready for combat, armed with big Bibles, and read and pray and intimidate each other.  It is passive-aggressive, writ large. They read Bible verses to each other the way satisfied people read fortune cookies, but they aren't satisfied.  As they understand it, what Paul of Tarsus or never-to-be-known editors wrote, is the word of God.  Obscure sentences become pure enlightenment, and universal demands.   It is not unusual for there to be poorly disguised arguments.  Something Paul reputedly said about what Jesus reputedly said about what Moses reputedly said about what God reputedly said on top of Old Smoky, all covered with fire, soon turns their composur...

"Intelligent Design" isn't science.  It is religion.  It is the Creation Story with the Creator hiding behind an apple tree, where you cannot see him.   Try to imagine an intelligent design without saying anything about the designer.  Try to imagine the intelligent designer without saying "God".   "I didn't say, 'God'!  It is obvious, but I didn't say it."   William Paley, in 1802, had a famous watchmaker argument.  Should you take a stroll and stumble upon a watch, and be amazed by it, you would conclude that someone intelligent had made it.  And so you would.  It is an industrial revolution argument.  Machines are made.  A watch is a machine.   It is not an argument from nature.  Should you take a stroll and stumble upon a baby Robin, and be amazed by it, you would not conclude that it had been intelligently designed.  You would look for its mother or father.  Nature does not manufacture baby Robi...

Tonight--in about forty minutes--the members of Mari's department at St. Thomas are arriving to celebrate the end of the school year, and to cheer on two members of the department who are retiring.   We have been "tidying up the house for about a week".  That is to say, instead of things lying about everywhere, they are lying about out of sight unless, of course, someone takes an unauthorized turn.   The weather is pretty good.  There have been no tornado warnings, yet, so no help is to be found there.  It is quite possible that everyone will get lost looking for our house, but most of them have maps or GPSs.  Some still harbor notions of getting promoted, so they will certainly come.   What is there to do, except as I am doing:  start early!   Our cats are capable of producing enough free-flying fur to rival a vicuna or a musk ox.  Mari says that when she retires, she is going to knit high-end cat-fur scarves, which she will c...

Liberal commentators are doing a most curious thing:  they are angry at the Democratic party for pressuring Anthony Weiner to leave office.  Weiner, of course, is the guy who sent pictures of his crotch to young women, apparently on the grounds that they might want to support his plan to become Mayor of New York, someday.  Something like that.   Their argument is that the same Democrats did not pressure the Republicans to repudiate members of their party when they did similar, or usually, more disgusting things.  "Well, what they did is worse!" is a miserable moral position.  If what Anthony Weiner did was irresponsible enough to cause him to leave office, he ought to leave office.  If what a number of Republicans did was even worse, then they should leave office, too.  That they did not, and that their own party did not force them to, and that Democrats were quiet about it, has nothing to do with it.  Weiner was sending pictures of h...

I would like to say that everyone is interested in sex, but that is not true.  Everyone is more-or-less interested ins sex.  Some more.  Some less.  Some hardly at all.  Some like Anthony Weiner.   The cook on one of the first fishing boats I ever worked on, in Alaska, was an interesting man.  He had played violin in an orchestra that accompanied silent movies.  He threw out leftover food that could not be used for the next meal, instead of eating it, because he said he was not a human garbage can.  He used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, but quit on the day--in driving Seattle rain--when he could not wait to get into the house, but stopped on the walk to light a cigarette, and became drenched, because he could not wait.   Anthony Weiner does not seem to understand that he has an addiction, too.  Even with a seat in Congress, he had--again and again--to stop halfway back to the House, and do what he could not help do...

Walking at the Mall, this morning, while it rained, I saw retro-mannequins:  from the 1930s, I thought.  How did I know that?   Maybe because I was born in 1931.  There are trees, in Washington State, born after me, that have been lumber for years.  I don't just have moss on my north side, where the sun scarcely shines, but all around my trunk.   What I really remember, from those first years, is a kind of matter-of-fact hard times.   There was no money.  Mom told, later, of not being able to find three cents for a postage stamp, for a job application for Dad.  It never occurred to us--the kids--to ask for money for something.  There wasn't any.  We didn't ask.   It was the Great Depression that began in 1929.  We were up shit creek.  Somebody had gambled our livelihoods away.  We were trying to get through.   Before Barach Obama was elected President, our economy almost went down the drain, agai...

Keith Ellison is a Muslim. That is like saying that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, or that Rabbi Zephyr is Jewish. Ellison represents a part of Minneapolis in Congress. He doesn't run as a Muslim, but as a Democrat, but then John Boehner doesn't run as a Sun Tanner, either. Boehner is a Republican; you know:  orange. To say Keith Ellison is a Muslim is like saying that Mike Huckabee is a Baptist, or that the Dali Lama is a Buddhist. Ellison has pre-medieval religious beliefs, but so does the Pope.  So does Michele Bachmann. Ellison is a very good, hard-working Member of Congress. But now--apparently--Lynne Torgerson wants Ellison's seat. "Keith Ellison represents one of the most significant threats to America, and that's why I need your help to defeat him.  This is your chance to help ride our nation of a radical Muslim Fundamentalist, like the people who: carried out a shooting at Fort Hood; attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11; at...

So what if Anthony Weiner did not break a law! Who cares whether Weiner is liberal or conservative? Anybody who sends out pictures of his erection on the internet--in this case, apparently to women he did not even know-- does not deserve to represent us in Congress.  He is sick. Get rid of him!  Send him out behind the barn. Leave him there to explain to no one that he is OK, but that he made a little mistake. It isn't about ordinary, run-of-the-mill sexual infidelity. It is about decency, mental health, respectability, and common sense.  Weiner needs help, not an office.

Do you believe that marriage should be only between one man and one woman?  Which man and which woman? Do you believe that marriage should be only between one man and one woman at a time?  How much time? Do you believe that marriage might be between either two men or two women who commit themselves to the legal and moral bonds of marriage?  Why would any two people like each other that much? Do you believe that whether your married neighbors have, or do not have, sex together is a threat to your own marriage?  Could you draw a picture of how that works? If marriage is for the purpose of procreation, and two people do not want, or cannot have, children, are they still married?  Should they be allowed to enjoy what they are doing together, anyway, or should there be--to follow the logic of Tim Pawlenty, who opposed taxes--perhaps a User Fee, to discourage use?  Maybe the burden ought to be shifted to property taxes, which do not count. Are you ...

What is wrong with Anthony Weiner? Most of what is wrong about a lot of us!  Especially men!  Or maybe it is just most obvious with men. The problem is not that Weiner (pronounced like "wiener":  someone from Vienna, as in "Wienerschnitzel") is sexual, or even sexually out of control.  All the evidence is that most people--that's right:  most--are not strictly monogamous, or even faithful to their mates.  More couples than we would like to know about deal with infidelity; often successfully.   That Weiner only recently married, and that his wife is pregnant with their first child while, at the same time, Weiner was playing sexual games online with several women he had never met, suggests a serious problem with his commitment to his wife.  That is a character issue, and it is not flattering.  It makes one wonder about his fitness to be either a husband or a father. A lot of people are like that, too.  It might be lamentable, b...

When first I heard that Latin was a "dead language", I was completely puzzled.  I had heard, on good authority, that Latin was used in the Catholic Mass.  Cardinals--those red birds who sat around a wood stove burning straw, and elected the next Pope--were said to speak in Latin.  There were books in Latin.  I knew how to write Roman numerals.  Somehow, the "V", carved into stone over school and library entrances, as in "PVBLIC SCHOOL 101", and "PVBLIC LIBRARY", had something to do with Latin.   So far as I was concerned, in the sixth or seventh grade, English was a dead language.  I did not understand a word of what the teacher was talking about when she asked us to diagram sentences.  I memorized defnitions of nouns and adjectives and adverbs, but the process of taking real sentences apart and putting them on staircase diagrams was pure, black magic.   That was how to kill a language! That was in Warshington State, where we warshed o...

Arizona is burning for its sins! (I don't believe that, or we would all be on fire, if not for our transgressions, then for all those wonderful secret desires of the heart that we enjoy, which will, according to the Holy Writ, will send us all to fight fire in Arizona forever.) That was our sun going down, last night.  The smoke from Arizona politicians has drifted half way across the continent to create glorious sunsets and lung cancer. I really don't blame Governor Jan Brewer for forest fires and lung cancer, or  glorious sunsets.  She has not gotten as far as the last. The fire, this time.  Next time, a forty day flood, and a Kentucky ark, squeezing through Lock and Dam #1, by the Ford Bridge.

As I pulled up to the Weis house, after a very long day of driving and work--our first 95 degree day of the season, Spencer looped up on his bike.   "Hi, Gramp!", he called. "Where you you been?", I asked him. "At baseball." "Are you alone?", I asked, intending to learn whether Gail and Marty and Sophie were on their way home, too. "No.  Keyshawn and Brent are coming."  They came, as loopy as Spencer.   "This is my Gramp,", Spencer told them.  "His name is Conrad.  This is Keyshawn, and this is Brent." Good job, I thought.   I was sweaty, dog-tired, and disheveled.  I guess it was obvious.   "It has been a long day," I said.  "I really need a shower." "Well, Keyshawn said, "it's good that you remain active." Every other foot, I thought.  Left, right, left, right.  Lean forward.  Left, right, left.   It's good, at seventy-nine, to remain.  ...

Jack Kevorkian was a doctor.  He just died, at the age of 83.  Pretty good.  Time to go. Perhaps because he was a doctor, Kevorkian knew that everyone does not live to be 83, but will die for reasons other than old age.  Sometimes they cannot bear the god-awful agony of a cancer, or the grief of knowing that they are sliding, inexorably, into dementia.  Before Jack Kevorkian decided that he would help people, not only to live better, but to die better-- when staying alive was worse than death--about the only resort we had was to plead for more morphine to ease our pain, and hope that the dosage was large enough to kill us.   Jack Kevorkian was not a monster.  He understood.   We are beginning to understand, too.  Individual States are beginning to admit, and to allow, sane, rational people, to choose to die rather than to continue what they nearly cannot bear.   Life is, perhaps, the grandest achievement in all the universe, ...

Congress decides how much money to raise for our public needs (taxes), and how much to spend.  It is easier to spend than to raise money, so sometimes we have to borrow to make things work. We do the same things with our family budgets.  Even very frugal people, whose Calvinistic parents taught them to save part of everything they earned, borrow to buy a house, or a car, or get an education.  Sometimes we have to borrow to get enough to eat, or to keep the house warm in winter.   IBM borrows money; perhaps twice as much as it expects to earn in a year.  But IBM knows that, in the longer run, borrowing is an astute thing to do.  Financial institutions borrow about fifty times as much as they earn in a year.  That might explain, a bit, the trouble they are in. Gambling with their investors money is a better explanation.  Derivatives, anyone? The United States government takes in about $14 trillion a year, and our debt is also about $14 tril...

Liss'n, my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride Sister Sarah took in Boston! She swung off her Harley and skipped right past the Donald  and his cheap New York pizza  in order to remind the good people of Boston that Paul Revere  was a pretty Rough Rider himself, whilst savin' the Union  from those Eastern Elite British High Tax and Spenders:   "He warned the British that they weren't goin' to be takin' away our arms, by ringin' those bells, and makin' sure, as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warnin' shots and bells, that we're gonna be secure and we're gonna be free!" Paul was a common patriot, droppin' his "g"s like a reg'lar American. It didn't make the video clip but the Boston Globe reported that Sister Sarah also said, “You’ve got to know a lot about our past in order to know how to proceed successfully into the future.’’ Our Belle, on an earlier swing thro...

Once upon a time, there were no copy machines.  There were mimeographs, and lithographs, and printers and cameras with film, but there were no copy machines.   Xerox machines were introduced in 1959.  The technicians delivered them on commercial dollies, and tuned and tried and prayed for them.  The rest of us learned all about toner cartridges, and memorized the service number.   Late at night, the everlasting juveniles among us climbed up on a chair, and sat jaybird naked on the screen, and showed their friends pictures of what everybody knew they were, anyway.   Anthony Weiner's office has a new Xerox machine. Somebody--surely not Anthony!--sent a copy of Anthony's temporarily bulging shorts out over the internet.  On Weiner's Twitter account.  The image suggest that Weiner's wiener is a Polish sausage; you know, a ballet dancer with a kielbasa in his pants.   Mr. Weiner, a member of Congress, whom everyody thinks might like...

I have been buying 57¢ suet cakes: leftover lard scraps with leftover  nuggets of nuts or berries or gristle. One of the feeders is a metal cage about a foot high, and half as wide. We also get our 57¢ worth of greasy window. Birds that like suet like to hammer at it,  and to flick their heads to clear their bills. "Pfeu!", they say.  "That was a dead skunk!" "Oh, my sweet Jesus!", I called to Mari, "Look at that beauty!"  She did. I moved.  It flew away.  We said, "Who was that red-crested peckerwood?" Glory happens!  In a universe that tries everything, randomly,  there will be dead-ends, and drabness, but there will be, also, glorious extensions of things that work, and cause the heart of a secular soul to say, "Oh, my sweet Jesus!", maybe because Jesus was a peckerwood, too:  something glorious in a world filled with ordinary color. We have orioles, and hummingbirds and doves and cardinals an...

Lutefisk.  Say it after me:  LOOT-eh-fisk.  It means, literally, "lye-fish".  Sounds good, already, doesn't it? Had you lived in Europe before refrigeration, you might have learned to eat lutefisk. It starts with Norwegian cod, often, split and salted and hung up on racks to dry in the wind.  It was a way to preserve food for the dead of winter.   In its unrefrigerated, preserved state, lutefisk resembles split, salted birchwood.  Smelly firewood.  In order to reconstitute the firewood, it has to be soaked to get the salt out, and soaked in lye to soften its wooden texture, and soaked more, and still more, until it vaguely resembles what an Atlantic cod would be had it not been salted, dried, soaked, poisoned, diluted, drenched, and vaguely "reconstituted". A piece of abused and treasured cod, in, and at the end of winter, is delicious (compared to hunger).  In Portugal and Spain, it became bacalao! When I was young, soaking an...