Setting: Me and another semi-country boy. Earlier this evening. In the parking lot at Target. Stopping in my tracks to look up into a beautiful Texas sky and behold a fantastic storm migrating to the northwest. The whole, sobering grey and blue palette.
Pardner, passing by: Don’t look good.
Me: Purdy, though.
The Moon will save the human race—
Were loonies beaten off their path—
The unthrown stone remains in place—
Through orbitary aftermath.
A blast unguarded —global fire—
Here’s thirty pieces, you fucking liars—
Now go and reckon what you did
When you did nothing but blame the Yid.
I don’t care what these clowns say: I got Neanderthal genes up in this mug. They’re gonna find that out some day. Whatever they think they know now about our species, they will be wrong about that. That ain’t no mule shoe, neither: I got knuckledragger all over this mofo.
ESPN’s reporting that Ricky Williams has failed his piss test and cannot apply for reinstatement to the NFL until September.
I used to just shake my head a little and make a distracted expression when I’d hear about Williams’ seemingly deliberate inability to not smoke until it occurred to me —just now— that there’s nothing “seeming” about it: it is a deliberate refusal to not smoke.
It would be a good thing if this were widely used as a point of interest in the ongoing [debate] over the almost-incredible stupidity of the war on drugs and on marihuana, in particular, but some people have an interest in pretending that world-class athletes are somehow adversely affected by their use of marihuana. It isn’t true, though. Except, of course, as a legal and, therefore, professional matter. Otherwise, it is self-evidently stupid to suggest that these huge and powerful professional athletes are harming themselves with the recreational use of a plant.
Yeah, well. I know the sports community may speak to it, but it’s just going to be company man bullshit.
The Kentucky Derby means nothing to me. I think I’m glad that it exists as an event in American cultural and historical tradition, and that it gives people who are interested in it pleasure and employment, but watching horses race is something so alien to my own experience that I cannot make myself care about it whatsoever.
I love horses, though. I rode a few back in probably the summer of 1979. They are beautiful animals and they have played such a crucial role in the past half-millennium of Western —and certainly American— history that our lives are inconceivable without them.
But to watch horses race on the TV? No, thanks.
If you’re done sniffing around Rosie O’Donnell’s opinion-hole, you may want to avail yourself of two other such dispenseries, Laurie David and Sheryl Crow. Their recent blog entry at the Huffington Post is, well, indispensible:
Last night Thelma and Louise drove the bus off the cliff or at least into the White House Correspondents Dinner. The “highlight” of the evening had to be when we were introduced to Karl Rove. How excited were we to have our first opportunity ever to talk directly to the Bush Administration about global warming.
Thelma and Louise? That’s certainly an interesting pair for self-identification. Suicidal criminals? Is that the theme here?
We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming. Much to our dismay, he immediately got combative. And it went downhill from there.
We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it.
Oh, for shit’s sake! You know who’s to blame for this? ABC News. When they had Leonardo DiCaprio interview Bill Clinton for Earth Day in 2000, every celebriturd who ever slouched toward Hollywood thought he was the next Katie Couric.
In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”
What an appallingly narcissistic pair of idiots. Sheryl Crow can touch my monkey ’til the cows come home and pigs dare to fly, but she’s not Karl Rove’s study hall tutor. Who the fuck does she think she is? Rove’s obligated to stand there and subject himself to a lecture from a couple of ill-informed shoe-shoppers and face-painters? What?!
It’s a real sickness in the heart of American culture when the merest sort of celebrity is regarded as any sort of moral authority merely because of his or her celebrity. Look at someone, indeed, like Rosie O’Donnell: a mediocre comic and actress who’s enjoyed a second career as a professional lesbian/adoptive mother/dessert topping nutjob. It is difficult to bear the thought that her recent pronouncements on the physics of steel were heard and believed by possibly millions of people.
Celebrity doesn’t make you an authority on anything but narcissistic behavior. And, perhaps, the thing that made people like you in the first place.
Was I not supposed to notice that “global warming” is being forced out by the Gorebot masses and getting replaced by weird phrases like “human-induced global climate change”?
That’s no shit. Just keep this in mind the next time you read something about global warming written from the Left. What’s happening to this phrase that I just used in the previous sentence?
It’s losing its direction.
It’s no longer warming —which certainly suggests a particular direction of the thermometer— but, instead, is changing.
Why the weasel-word? Is the Left’s intellectual conscience stirring from its drunken sloth to recognize that the religious devotion to environmentalism as an ideology may be affecting Scientific truth?
Well. Here’s the news that we short-lived furry mammals don’t ever get because of how long it takes to ride the cycle: you don’t know anything. That is not the elephant’s trunk you’re pulling on, you ignorant sod. Life on Earth is a study —God’s study, if you must— in creation on a knife’s edge. We exist because of where we are and in what proportions and by what accidents we are and would not otherwise be outside that necessity. There is more damage to be done to us and our technologies in the fluctuations in the radiation and heat emanating from the heart of the Sun than there will be in whether or not the ice shelves are melting. You don’t know anything. “Human-induced” what?! If you’re going to take on the mantle of Godhood, you stupid hippies, at least stick with the word that brung you: warming. Global warming. That’s the thing you insist is happening, so use the fucking word and stop being weasels. Because, when you just call it climate change, it really doesn’t speak to me. It seems like a cop-out. And it is. Because you don’t know anything.
It has dropped probably 50 degrees since yesterday evening. It was downright cold all day —and when it blew in last night, it was all thunder, lightning, rain, and power outages. My own lights went out for probably three hours early this morning.
Glad I woke up in time for work today, though. I had a rather productive one at that.
Wow. Look at it snowing in Seattle. I guess that happens there often enough, but you always hear about the rain instead.
Maybe whatever’s bringing all of that down on tonight’s game will make it here to Central Texas by the end of the week. I sure hope so. I’d like to have a real bug-killer of a cold snap around here for once.
Heh, heh. Look at the players make Bill Keane tracks in the snow.
Courtesy of Bouphonia, be sure to check out this site at the Linda Hall Library on “Vulcan’s Forge and Fingal’s Cave,” an exhibit of rare publications and prints on the evolution of our understanding of vulcanism and the basalt of the Earth:
In 1650, when our exhibition begins, there was no such concept as “geological time”. Historical geology had yet to be established as a discipline, and those who wondered aloud about the age of the earth did their wondering under the rubric of “chronology.” Chronology was a sub-discipline of history, and chronologists worked with classical, Babylonian, and Egyptian calendars, and with Scripture. They did not yet work with rocks.
This is really neat stuff. Check it out.
