A Choice Nugget from the Non Sequitur Bin

Bits and pieces from a 1940's telecom documentary with Tiny Tim singing Led Zepplin as a music bed. Enjoy...

On Shitburgers and Good Intentions...

I always make it a point not to present myself as an expert in parenting, but as I continue through the process (which I did not undertake until I was 41) a core belief becomes more and more an article of faith:

Chief among a parent's responsibilities is that by which the child is duly acquainted with disappointment.

In a refreshingly straightforward meditation in The New Yorker, Joan Acocella notes:

"...the steamy devotion shown by later generations of parents ... has produced snotty little brats filled with anger at such abstract enemies as 'The System,' and intellectual lightweights, certain that their every thought is of great consequence, because their parents told them so..." Read on, if you dare.

For your listening pleasure...

"I'll be in charge of the turkey...!"

Not since I quit smoking have I experienced such difficulty giving up an unsavory habit.

Sarah Palin ought to be yesterday's news. But no. She has evidently undertaken an enterprise which aims to render both Monty Python and The Onion obsolete, in terms of arch irony and patent absurdity. And I just can't look away.

Mark Twain once said that the only difference between fiction and non-fiction is "fiction has to be plausible."

If one were to propose a skit in which Sarah engages in 3 minutes of folksy Thanksgiving chit-chat in front of an automated Turkey guillotine, you'd have no takers.

Yet, behold!

Ein Kleine Rollschuhmusik

unclesmedley, deconstructed

A website that purports to analyze blogs, says that I am "the logical and analytical type, [who] is not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people [that] need some time to understand what [I am] talking about."

I construe this reputed tendency for exasperation vis a vis obtuse assimilative propensities as a manifestly intrinsic excretion of a congenital predisposition toward sesquipedalian articulation, and nothing more

A bit of fermented curd...just because

And she was...

“But not for me personally were those cheers for.” --Sarah Palin

"How can I miss you if you won't go away?"
--Dan Hicks

"puttin' food on people's plates"

From the AP:

“…the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is demanding a share of the proceeds from the sudden wave of T-shirts, posters and other merchandise depicting the civil rights leader alongside Barack Obama. Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King's nephew and head of the King Center in Atlanta (pictured, left) says:

“Some of this is probably putting food on people's plates … we cannot allow our brand to be abused … If you make a dollar, we should make a dime. That's not happening now.

Read on...

Apropos of absolutely nothing...

How I miss this man...

The greatest of his kind. A once in a lifetime mind.

Oh, yeah... Dat's how we do...

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Further Perspective

An old friend came up in conversation today, which provoked the memory of an old song that seems fresher today than it has in decades. God bless America, and God bless YouTube...

Dignity

For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land. He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen. At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn't care; she just beamed with pride.

Perhaps I'm being unrealistic, but I am already weary of all the focus on the racial aspect of Obama's election. The meme about the first black president may be accurate, but it is false--and it is counterproductive. The emphasis should not be applied to his race; it should be applied to the fact that he prevailed, in large part, because he specifically minimized his race and focused instead on his nationality.

That said, I heartily recommend this exceptionally poignant piece.

Quiet dignity never goes out of style.

Perspective

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Sir Charles

Years ago, I saw Ray Charles perform with the San Francisco Symphony. As he sang Your Cheatin' Heart, mine soared as my mind wandered. I thought of Hank Williams, the much-beloved troubadour and son of Alabama, who wrote the song.

I mused as to how he or the myriad sons and daughters of the old south who idolized him during his lifetime (1923-53) might regard such a thing as a blind, black man singing one of ol' Hanks songs with a symphony orchestra in San Francisco.

I reckoned some might interpret it as a sign of the end times. Others might don robes and light crosses. Still others might be as third-world refugees from a natural disaster, bewildered by the annihilation of their world.

I lived down south years ago, and after a significant period of adjustment, I came to the realization that there is much there to emulate, envy and admire in the Land of the Old Confederacy. But issues linger, and there are a few areas where…

I’m sorry, but I must admit that it warms my heart and excites my soul to see an ignorant redneck baffled by the progress of humanity.

So, you can imagine my delight at the absolutely delicious prospect of prospect of Charles Barkley running for Governor of Alabama.

Imagine... Charles Barkley sitting behind George Wallace's old desk. This isn't forty acres and a mule, this is flying pigs, snowballs in hell. Mark Twain once said that the onlkly difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to be plausible. This is Big Jim goin' to da Gubnah's mansion--and somewhere Mister Twain is having a good chuckle.

I am further enlivened by recent evidence supporting the possibility that such a thing might actually happen: Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenneger, Al Franken... Barack Hussein Obama.

Throughout his career, Barkley argued that athletes ought not be considered role models. "A million guys in jail can dunk a basketball,” noted the inimitable Round Mound of Rebound. “Should they be role models?"

In 1993, he wrote the tag line for Nike’s "I am not a role model" ad campaign., and stirred further controversy in averring, “the media demands that athletes be role models because there's some jealousy involved. It's as if they say, ‘this is a young black kid playing a game for a living and making all this money, so we're going to make it tough on him.’

“What they're really doing is telling kids to look up to someone they can't become," he wrote. "Not many people can be like we are. Kids can't be like Michael Jordan.”

This stand prompted former Vice President Dan Quayle to praise Barkley's oft-ignored call for parents and teachers to quit looking to him to "raise your kids" and instead be role models themselves, as a "family-values message."


On the heels of this modest controversy, I found my self walking one night through San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district, a veritable Mecca for hookers, pimps, junkies, drifters, gangsters, parolees, lost souls and various and sundry down-and-outers from all over the world. To extend the metaphor, the Kaaba of this tawdry precinct is a once-renowned porno multiplex and fetish bazaar called The Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater.

Venerated by some as the birthplace of modern pornography and extolled in apocrypha as the most licentious establishment of its kind outside Amsterdam, Mitchell Brothers’ (as it is locally known) had been a bug-light for the lurid since the 1969 when stag-film impresarios Jim and Artie established their strip club/porn theater/film studio at the bustling corner of O’Farrell and Geary Streets at the bottom of Nob Hill.

Unlike most of the rundown, boarded-up and forbidding haunts that inform the sketchy atmosphere of the neighborhood, The Mitchell Brothers’ was lit up like a Broadway theater, with a Vegas-like marquee and a retinue of presentably imposing doormen arrayed like palace guards behind velvet ropes out front. A favored resort for bachelor parties and the like, taxis and limousines lined-up in front of this curious landmark discharging and retrieving the convivial and depraved from all walks of life.

Playboy Magazine bestowed its imprimatur upon the enterprise, prompting fringe celebrities, fashionable poseurs and well-heeled degenerates to mingle in the vicinity; a predictable coterie of scandalized citizens and aggrieved clergy loudly bemoaned this affront to humanity (thereby amplifying the PR blizzard) and, viola, it was a singular, only-in-San Francisco scene, one of the preeminent wonders of the off-brand world, and a tourist destination rivaling the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf.

So, there I was, ambling past the Mitchell Brothers on a random Thursday night, making my way back home from my bartending gig, taking in the local color, minding my own business. The Mitch was its usual self, kinda pathetic once you get used to it: Conventioneers steeped in bourbon, stumbling in and out of cabs; homeless vagrants and horrific prostitutes bumming change, offering discounts and evading exasperated bouncers; and, of course, the VIP crowd: preening and strolling to the head of the line.

That’s where I saw him, Charles Barkley—a study in conspicuity bathed in neon and resplendent in a luxuriously roomy, ocher suit, lingering unselfconsciously under the marquee. As with all basketball players, he is much larger in person than one might imagine. The likes of Shaquile O’Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skew the perspective and make big guys look normal-sized and normal guys look small. Charles is a large man.

He stood with his back to the street, graciously chatting and with the hoi polloi. From such an angle, the bald head was the primary identifier. But still, it seemed so improbable that a guy of his stature would be seen so publicly, mingling with the riff-raff at the Mitchell Brothers’ on a random Thursday night. So, I decided to verify. I sidled through the crowd to get a better look. It was closing time, so the crush was on between the doors and the curb. Before I knew it, I was almost in the man’s pocket—much closer than I'd intended. I didn’t want to seem nosy or judgmental.

My proximity startled him. He shot me a sideways glance and accurately sized up the situation. He took my measure with just a soupçon of condescension, and looked me dead in the eye.

“Told ya, I was'n no fuckin’ role model,” he said. Then he went back his autographing with the wry smile of a man wondering why folks still don’t believe him.

For those who fret over the dearth of political action after this years election: take heart--we've still got Sir Charles for Governor of Alabama. This oughta be great.

October Surprise

Angry Old Coot

Attention: McCainites

JUMP BACK! BOCCE MIO!

“Azza badanda! Quazu beedie hep du toll y’all… HIAEHa…!”

“Quanzo bennepitoulo, beastie capalbo… Basta!”

Not since a long-ago encounter with swordfish, garlic, raspberry and fennel, have I been so delighted with a more unlikely amalgam.

Bon appa-freakin’ teet—on the one now!

Oh, say can you see...?

A glorious day at Candlestick Point... The club’s new owner pulled out all the stops. Tony Bennett sang, “I Left My Heart.” The new left fielder received his ‘92 MVP from his godfather, Willie Mays. The kids father, Bobby the batting coach, looked on. The kid hit a dinger in the first inning—a frozen rope into the right field seats.

But, before that game, three local guys, who’d been knocking around since the hippie days, performed the national anthem and blew everybody away.

The lead singer, a guy named Jerry, died a little over two years later. The kid named Barry would go on to unprecedented glory and controversy. The team would leave the Point for a new stadium downtown. Everything changes.

But the memories linger, and that day—was a beautiful day in the cool, gray City of Love.

Wink Wink...

The Gist of Biden v. Palin

Shit Sandwich

Every great cause begins as a movement

becomes a business, and eventually

degenerates into a racket.

—Pat Buchanan

As a fairly reliable rule, there are two segments of society whose invocation by politicians and power brokers signals impendent bamboozlement: The first is “our children,” and the second is “the taxpayers.” Corollary indicators include references to “our way of life,” and “our economy” and, of course, the indispensable, “national security.”

Accordingly, it is not especially difficult to construe the response to the recent economic turmoil as a cynical, typical, self-serving ploy on the part of the usual suspects from Wall Street, Washington and the mainstream media, none of which have done much to engender credibility in recent years, and most of whom are the most acutely vulnerable to the consequences of the “incompetence, negligence, outright fraud, and [other] liberties some have taken in abusing our capital markets” as referenced in the Scott “the Motley Fool” Schedler’s recent entreaty to the hoi polloi.

“Some,” indeed.

Consider the rogues gallery of characters advocating for this proposal du jour. With the notable exception of Ben Bernake, they typically embody conflicts of interest; incompetence in crisis management and a marked proclivity toward the nefarious. The Secretary of the Treasury is essentially on sabbatical from Goldman-Sachs.

Indeed, the entire financial community is similarly compromised because a) they bear considerable responsibility for the mess and, b) the best remedy may well involve significant personal injury to these masters and patrons of the afflicted capital markets. As their personal and professional bottom lines are manifestly in play, these persons can only be expected to craft their professional advice accordingly.

Congressional membership is utterly reliant on big money that is spent, for the most part, on electronic media. So the cable news outlets are doubly inclined to milk this disaster like an abducted child in a terrorist hurricane, and Congress is even more constrained than usual in resolving this crisis.

The Administration has proven preternaturally inept at any useful activity other than electioneering and obstructing justice, and their DNA is riddled with direct connections to flagrantly bad actors like Enron, Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root, et al. So, they lack the competence, the conscience and the inclination to truly do the right thing. And the candidates to succeed George, Dick & Co. are bound for the nonce by a manifest system of priorities that places winning the election above all other considerations.

So, where does this leave the (cue music) hard-working American taxpayers, whose children and way of life and national security and retirement accounts are being subjected to a possible reenactment of The Great Depression?

Clearly, a massive infusion of cash in the capital markets would occasion a salutary effect somewhere in the food chain—but where? And, how? Evidence suggests that control over a significant portion of this cash and credit will accrue to key players in the aforementioned capital markets—presumably, because their good judgment qualifies them above everyone else to make the necessary decisions to right our economic ship.

These are the people who instituted, acceded to or failed to observe the policies that have brought these markets to their knees. They are also the folks who can actually make money off this crisis, so long as their gambling stake comes out of public funds. This sounds like reloading a busted gambler on the basis of collateral amounting to a newly-hatched/can't-miss plan to break the bank at blackjack.

A bailout plan using public monies is a bad idea. The notion was laughed out of the room in its initial incarnation, and is on its third makeover in a week. Talk about lipstick on a pig. Before any money goes anywhere, some fundamental changes in the culture of the capital markets need to be implemented.

It seems clear that the current mess would never have occurred, but for some ill-conceived and overripe federal policies like those embodied by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (aka the Madam and the Pimp of the American Dream), whose wink & nod relationship with the federal government e're bespoke an implicit understanding that the latter would cover the debts of the former—no matter what.

Predictably, this arrangement quickly turned Fannie and Freddie into a pair of degenerate gamblers, who went extra crazy during the tech boom of the nineties, when busboys and receptionists became overnight (albeit, short-lived) millionaires, and then again in the Golden Age of Terrorism, at the beginning of this century, when stimulating the economy was a sine qua non in the burgeoning War Against Evil. Freddie and Fannie had found a new drug: the subprime mortgage—an arrangement in which lenders were encouraged to cultivate long-term relationships with folks who, traditionally, couldn’t qualify for a $500 Capital One credit card.

With the Washingtonian Wink & Nod duly renewed, and seemingly everyone involved duly indemnified, a housing bubble was born with the promise of everlasting life. Alas, to everything there is a time and purpose, and about six years into the Bush Administration, the bubble went pop and the government said, Wink? Whaddaya mean, wink? And, Nod? What nod?

All the burn victims on Wall Street can attest to this. The government was the enabler and the bankers should have known better. So more governmental activity, conducted privately by the banking community, hardly makes sense at this stage of the game—especially with these two outfits using taxpayer dollars to fix their own, private wagons.

The correct solution, as any economics professor or recently unhoused homeowner can tell you, is for the afflicted lenders to declare bankruptcy. Sure, this means that the shareholders take it in the shorts. But, like the old saying goes: Ya pays you’re your money and ya takes your chances. Somebody should’ve thought of this when Joe Lunchbucket and Suzy Twopencil were being put out into the street. This was the mercy of their experience.

But, in an even colder vein, bankruptcy—much like a home foreclosure—doesn’t mean the company or the house disappears; It just means that they’re occupied by somebody else—presumably somebody who has a better handle on how to run the business or keep up with the mortgage payments.

Bailing out these businesses with Joe & Suzy’s tax dollars isn’t just a moral hazard—it’s an affront to the intelligence and trust and decency of those hard working American taxpayers and their beautiful children and their treasured way of life. In other words: it’s freaking bullshit. Just because some folks have always been wealthy doesn’t mean they get to stay that way forever, no matter what. Shit happens. Here we are.

And yes, the bankruptcy option is likely to hurt all over. But remember, we are a government of, by and for the people. As such, we’re all complicit in this mess—some more than others. But, still: it’s medicine time—time for America to reclaim its national character. And as for “the children”: we’ve already piled enough shit on their plates. This is a here-and-now, grown-up problem.

Besides, the current credit crunch is probably a function of smart bankers keeping their powder dry in anticipation of a bailout. Why sell at 20% what the government will buy for 60? It’s a new racket waiting to be exploited.

Furthermore, back when the tech bubble burst, none other than Warren Buffett himself wryly quipped that the wealth that accrued to the aforementioned busboys and receptionists had been essentially returned to where it belonged. Since then, a pretty small slice of society has held onto a pretty big slice of the pie. Perhaps it’s time to start spreading that money around again.

In the meantime, all this economic WMD-who-cried-wolf talk is just what it was on the way to Baghdad—a deliberate lie, used in the service of bamboozling the little guy into trusting the big shot by threatening his family and scaring him half to death.

This is a nation of entrepreneurs. We’re Capitalists, remember? Over the last thirty years or so, we’ve lost sight of that fact. We’ve become a nation of black marketeers and serfs, of the well-to-do and the ain’t-never-gonna.

If the banking industry can’t figure out the right way to handle money, somebody else will. They always do. These so-called toxic assets are not all lethal. There’s money to be made in sorting out this mess. It’s just going to take some actual work.

Sure, in the bailout, the taxpayers stand to recoup a significant portion of the $700 billion—but the object of investment is never just getting your money back. Paying the guys who lost our money to recover it is ridiculous. Spotting them the money to do so is just plain ludicrous.

There are kids with asthma and no insurance right here, right now. Keyenes reminds us that, "in the long run, we'll all be dead." So, for the nonce, what say we all dabble in decency, and let the craven grovel for once.

The reward for the bailout should go directly to the bailor, and the bailee should pay a premium and a penalty and a late fee and a surcharge and a fine and they should not be permitted to pass one nickel of this penance on to the consumer.

They need to eat this shit sandwich.