Skip to main content

Joined at the Hip

Jesse Ventura and I are almost joined at the hip.  About three years ago, Jesse had a hip replacement, too, as I did three weeks ago.


It is difficult to have more than that in common!  With Jesse.


Jesse is rather scary.  Perhaps I should call him Mr. Ventura.  He used to be a Navy walrus, and then he became a professional wrestler, and then--wanting to ease up a bit as he became older--he ran as an independent, and became the Governor of the Great and Good State of Puzzling Minnesota.  


Truth be told, Jesse was a pretty good Governor, for a while, but towards the end he got his hip out of joint, and seemed not to be entirely happy with Minnesotans.  I have read that he--at least part-time--"lives off the grid" in Baja California, Mexico.  


At the moment, Jesse is in a snit.  Apparently, Jesse's titanium hip set off the airport security alarm as he was proceeding to get on an airplane, and the airport security people took him aside and patted him down in ways that Jesse found unsettling, curiously stimulating, and un-American.  So Jesse went to court to do something about the invasion of his privacy and privates, and the judge threw the case out of court.  


Former Governor Ventura slipped his titanium hip back into position, and said that he was never going to fly a commercial airline, again, and reportedly muttered something about the Fascist States of America, and speculated that he might have to apply for dual citizenship in Mexico, where violence usually does not take the form of people patting your hip and things.  


As I suggested, Jesse and I are somewhat hip in the same ways.  It was my right-wing hip I had replaced.  I assume, without a shred of evidence, that Jesses left hip was giving him problems.  But unlike Jesse, I am looking forward to traveling commercially, again, partly because I have not a prayer of affording a private charter, and partly because of . . . oh, I don't know . . . because it has been quite a while since anyone insisted on patting me.  Maybe ever.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more