Reuters Science:
Got to give a public speech? Make love first.
Now the scientists are saying that the full fuck works best. Masturbation would help. A blow job would help. But a full face to face fuck can calm for a whole week! "The release of the so-called "pair bonding" hormone oxytocin might explain the calming effect."
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Sexual Harassment, Discrimination
Poor Isiah Thomas. All those years gracing the court, floating the basketball, swish, through the net, time and time again, from anywhere: three-pointers, jump shots, layups, dazzling the crowd as he melted through bigger guys, hands in his face, trying to clobber him. One of the beautiful, beautiful players: face like an angel too. He retires, comes back coaching, becomes an exec, money dripping off him at every stage.
He's long lived in a world where Wilt, Magic, Clyde ... have the female asses come right into the hands at the bar after the game. Wilt made himself a bed rivaling the court in size to accommodate all the beauties taking turns at his cock, sitting on his face ... God knows how many women Magic had climbing on him before he got AIDS.
Isiah, Michael, Kobe ... could afford to pay everyone of them a C note, or ten times that. But we can bet that the amateurs lined up to take their panties off, no fee required.
Kobe invites the concierge to his room, she goes; then she cries rape. Much of the world laughs, many groan, lawyers come out of the woodwork, the media, as always, stay on the town.
Now some female Knick exec doesn't shed her pants the instant Isiah rubs her -- she says. (Hell, he's older. Hell, he's no longer swishing the pill; not in prime time.) And the Knicks fire her. Everybody in basketball's got a dick. Everybody in basketball's got balls. But don't any of the Knicks have any brains?
All the Knicks are chanting how honorable Isiah is. Of course he is. For basketball. I'm a huge fan. For basketball, for its angel-faced jocks. Would this chick have resisted Patton during the war? But now it's another kind of news. Bureaucracy takes over. God help us all.
He's long lived in a world where Wilt, Magic, Clyde ... have the female asses come right into the hands at the bar after the game. Wilt made himself a bed rivaling the court in size to accommodate all the beauties taking turns at his cock, sitting on his face ... God knows how many women Magic had climbing on him before he got AIDS.
Isiah, Michael, Kobe ... could afford to pay everyone of them a C note, or ten times that. But we can bet that the amateurs lined up to take their panties off, no fee required.
Kobe invites the concierge to his room, she goes; then she cries rape. Much of the world laughs, many groan, lawyers come out of the woodwork, the media, as always, stay on the town.
Now some female Knick exec doesn't shed her pants the instant Isiah rubs her -- she says. (Hell, he's older. Hell, he's no longer swishing the pill; not in prime time.) And the Knicks fire her. Everybody in basketball's got a dick. Everybody in basketball's got balls. But don't any of the Knicks have any brains?
All the Knicks are chanting how honorable Isiah is. Of course he is. For basketball. I'm a huge fan. For basketball, for its angel-faced jocks. Would this chick have resisted Patton during the war? But now it's another kind of news. Bureaucracy takes over. God help us all.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Intelligent Design
Wow. ReutersThe Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution with an article praising a U.S. court decision that rejects the "intelligent design" theory as non-scientific. Time for pk to repeat points about science, evolution, and intelligent design!
I'm all for science: in case you haven't noticed. I'm very much against the Church, in case you haven't noticed that either. I'm all for evolution. Don't it show? One could accuse me of having evolution for my religion and not find me disagreeing too vehemently. And I'm all for the idea of intelligent design: as I understand it from Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,
NY, 1996.
If you haven't read that book, don't assume that you can understand what I'm talking about. You need to go through the microbiological examples, detail by detail: with Behe holding your hand. Reading Denis Wood, Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land [NY 2004] wouldn't hurt either, especially where he argues that a cubic yard of soil is every bit as complex as for example the human brain.
I don't trust the Church to know what science is. I don't trust your average MIT graduate to know what science is. I find the glibness with we we talk about "scientists," humans garbed in a white version of the sorcerer's robe, ludicrous. Science is an ideal that can only be partly realized by any human being, and never 27/7. Science is a goal we never quite get to. Ted Williams was a great hitter, but he was a fraction short of a perfect hitter. Science is a set of cautions and processes that your average educated human being is not capable of understanding the soul of.
(If education doesn't automatically qualify one, neither does lack of education disqualify one. Learning, intelligence, ... are not limited to or by education. Education can foster learning, education can stunt learning.) (Education is a commodity: a commodity largely monopolized by the largely incompetent state.) I don't say I do perfectly, but I've got it better than most: than most professional scientists, I believe. I believe it: and I could argue it: if anyone would listen.
In 1859 Darwin kicked human knowledge in the teeth. That's science. A century and a half later some scientists, and some amateurs understand evolution better than Darwin or Wallace possibly could. They remain the towering geniuses of the inquiry though.
Institutions and public instantly, as always, did their best to misunderstand. But the ideas continue to be winning. (Success, "victory," is not guaranteed. We don't know what the future will be. We don't know that "we" will be part of it.)
Darwin didn't want to publish his ideas in his life time. He knew what would happen. Hell, he'd been shoved toward the clergy through his life time. But what he found in his travels, at a time when geologists had been peeling the glib cover off of what was (ahem) known about the earth, was utterly incompatible with any idea of any all-at-once, magical, finished-complete-and-perfect Creation.
Darwin offered an explanation for how species can adapt to changing environments. Old species die, new species are born: analogous with individual creatures. Stress, death ... drive change. Hurray for stress, for death. For change.
Not too much. Too much stress, too much death, is incompatible with life. We can't live at the center of a star: too much happening there. Neither can we live in the center of a diamond: too little is happening there. We live around the edges of the borders between the two. Not total chaos, not total stasis; complexity. (I paraphrase Murray Gell-Mann.) (Now there's a scientist!) (But not 24/7. I doubt that he'd claim that.)
Meantime, how did blood learn to clot? If you don't know how blood clots, something some of us have learned only very recently -- Darwin may not have been able to follow it! not first glance -- then you can't follow this intelligent design argument! Read Behe, let him show you.
How did irreducibly complex things first come about? Mutation is triggered by chance, by accident. Selection occurs in time, by circumstance. Design isn't needed: though design seems to emerge from the process, once we can think backwards.
But the irreducibly complex patterns, relationships, we depend on CANNOT have evolved by any mechanism currently in evolutionary theory. THEREFORE, evolution is incomplete.
What better theory do we have? We don't. Simple as that. Some things are still in the black box. Somethings may always be in the black box.
Do I KNOW that that's true? about future understanding? No, of course not. I believe it.
Now, here's the problem. The second you admit that you don't know everything whole tribes of morons will step forward and shove their beliefs about their ignorance into your black box. If the scientist yields some part of totality to a god, for lack of a better word, then the superstitious will overwrite his "god" with their "God": with their superstition. And suddenly your unknown will be their certainty. Ugh.
No. That's dirty.
I intend most of my Iona Arc posts for eventual transferral to
. This one I'm moving right away to my Thinking Tools. Further editing will take place there.
I'm all for science: in case you haven't noticed. I'm very much against the Church, in case you haven't noticed that either. I'm all for evolution. Don't it show? One could accuse me of having evolution for my religion and not find me disagreeing too vehemently. And I'm all for the idea of intelligent design: as I understand it from Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,
NY, 1996.
If you haven't read that book, don't assume that you can understand what I'm talking about. You need to go through the microbiological examples, detail by detail: with Behe holding your hand. Reading Denis Wood, Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land [NY 2004] wouldn't hurt either, especially where he argues that a cubic yard of soil is every bit as complex as for example the human brain.
I don't trust the Church to know what science is. I don't trust your average MIT graduate to know what science is. I find the glibness with we we talk about "scientists," humans garbed in a white version of the sorcerer's robe, ludicrous. Science is an ideal that can only be partly realized by any human being, and never 27/7. Science is a goal we never quite get to. Ted Williams was a great hitter, but he was a fraction short of a perfect hitter. Science is a set of cautions and processes that your average educated human being is not capable of understanding the soul of.
(If education doesn't automatically qualify one, neither does lack of education disqualify one. Learning, intelligence, ... are not limited to or by education. Education can foster learning, education can stunt learning.) (Education is a commodity: a commodity largely monopolized by the largely incompetent state.) I don't say I do perfectly, but I've got it better than most: than most professional scientists, I believe. I believe it: and I could argue it: if anyone would listen.
In 1859 Darwin kicked human knowledge in the teeth. That's science. A century and a half later some scientists, and some amateurs understand evolution better than Darwin or Wallace possibly could. They remain the towering geniuses of the inquiry though.
Institutions and public instantly, as always, did their best to misunderstand. But the ideas continue to be winning. (Success, "victory," is not guaranteed. We don't know what the future will be. We don't know that "we" will be part of it.)
Darwin didn't want to publish his ideas in his life time. He knew what would happen. Hell, he'd been shoved toward the clergy through his life time. But what he found in his travels, at a time when geologists had been peeling the glib cover off of what was (ahem) known about the earth, was utterly incompatible with any idea of any all-at-once, magical, finished-complete-and-perfect Creation.
Darwin offered an explanation for how species can adapt to changing environments. Old species die, new species are born: analogous with individual creatures. Stress, death ... drive change. Hurray for stress, for death. For change.
Not too much. Too much stress, too much death, is incompatible with life. We can't live at the center of a star: too much happening there. Neither can we live in the center of a diamond: too little is happening there. We live around the edges of the borders between the two. Not total chaos, not total stasis; complexity. (I paraphrase Murray Gell-Mann.) (Now there's a scientist!) (But not 24/7. I doubt that he'd claim that.)
Meantime, how did blood learn to clot? If you don't know how blood clots, something some of us have learned only very recently -- Darwin may not have been able to follow it! not first glance -- then you can't follow this intelligent design argument! Read Behe, let him show you.
How did irreducibly complex things first come about? Mutation is triggered by chance, by accident. Selection occurs in time, by circumstance. Design isn't needed: though design seems to emerge from the process, once we can think backwards.
But the irreducibly complex patterns, relationships, we depend on CANNOT have evolved by any mechanism currently in evolutionary theory. THEREFORE, evolution is incomplete.
What better theory do we have? We don't. Simple as that. Some things are still in the black box. Somethings may always be in the black box.
Do I KNOW that that's true? about future understanding? No, of course not. I believe it.
Now, here's the problem. The second you admit that you don't know everything whole tribes of morons will step forward and shove their beliefs about their ignorance into your black box. If the scientist yields some part of totality to a god, for lack of a better word, then the superstitious will overwrite his "god" with their "God": with their superstition. And suddenly your unknown will be their certainty. Ugh.
No. That's dirty.
I intend most of my Iona Arc posts for eventual transferral to
. This one I'm moving right away to my Thinking Tools. Further editing will take place there.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Favorites, Sportsmanship
I love my spectator sports: not football, baseball so much, but golf, tennis ... Getting only broadcast shows, I sure don't spend much time these days with the TV, but thanks to DSL and to my.Yahoo.com I follow the Reuters dispatches.
I love my sports favorites, mentioning names now and then: here, at Knatz.com (temp. offline) ... And now that the Australian Tennis Open has commenced, I'm noticing something about coverage, and also noticing something about my noticing. The reporters favor the favorites. Serena Williams gets pushed by an unseeded Chinese player, and the report focuses on Serena choking, not on the unseeded player playing well.
Nothing new there, right? Except that I noticed that I wasn't minding nearly as much as I used to. Perhaps it has something to do with the information age so much increasing exposure. Sports personalities have learned much better manners. Now they're not just tennis players, they're public speakers, actors, models: stars, with responsibilities. Good. We see far fewer tantrums from the frustrated favorite, granting no praise to the winner, whining only about their uncharacteristic slip-up.
Even John MacEnroe has learned to behave a little bit as a commentator, as a legend, and as an occasional masters competitor.
And maybe it's because I no longer feel responsible for educating the world.
2006 01 22 I love how the Australian Open is going: and today I welcome this gracious comment from Andy Roddick, just defeated by a Cypriot newcomer, especially apropos of the above: "I didn't play that badly today. I think I would have beaten most people today but let's give credit where credit's due, he played a great match."
I love my sports favorites, mentioning names now and then: here, at Knatz.com (temp. offline) ... And now that the Australian Tennis Open has commenced, I'm noticing something about coverage, and also noticing something about my noticing. The reporters favor the favorites. Serena Williams gets pushed by an unseeded Chinese player, and the report focuses on Serena choking, not on the unseeded player playing well.
Nothing new there, right? Except that I noticed that I wasn't minding nearly as much as I used to. Perhaps it has something to do with the information age so much increasing exposure. Sports personalities have learned much better manners. Now they're not just tennis players, they're public speakers, actors, models: stars, with responsibilities. Good. We see far fewer tantrums from the frustrated favorite, granting no praise to the winner, whining only about their uncharacteristic slip-up.
Even John MacEnroe has learned to behave a little bit as a commentator, as a legend, and as an occasional masters competitor.
And maybe it's because I no longer feel responsible for educating the world.
2006 01 22 I love how the Australian Open is going: and today I welcome this gracious comment from Andy Roddick, just defeated by a Cypriot newcomer, especially apropos of the above: "I didn't play that badly today. I think I would have beaten most people today but let's give credit where credit's due, he played a great match."
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Moral Goofs
In the novel Robinson Cruso, marooned on his island, soliloquizes on the uselessness of gold or coin in his condition. Then he strips off his cloths, swims to the wreck, and fills his pockets with a trunk-worth of gold bullion. Then he swims back to shore.
Why did he bother with the gold? What pockets, if he was naked? How did he swim while weighing a ton?
Why should Defoe have paid attention to what he was writing? Surely he can’t have imagined that readers were paying attention to what they were reading.
That restarts yesterday's post; but the balance of the revision has been moved to Knatz.com. There I can better develop, revise, and add to it.
Why did he bother with the gold? What pockets, if he was naked? How did he swim while weighing a ton?
Why should Defoe have paid attention to what he was writing? Surely he can’t have imagined that readers were paying attention to what they were reading.
That restarts yesterday's post; but the balance of the revision has been moved to Knatz.com. There I can better develop, revise, and add to it.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Great News
Surfing can be so great now that we can construct our own news: from Reuters, from Yahoo ... There’s a convicted cannibal in Germany who’s suing because he claims others are basing their commercial fictions on his experiences. Right on. Don’t cannibals have rights?
Some gal in Texas stabbed her lover because he played the same Elvis song again and again. Way to go. How can we know what’s too much until some hero snaps?
I’m reminded of a news item from I can’t say how long ago that reached me long before the internet, at a time when I didn’t read the papers either: boom boxes were plaguing some South American city. Suddenly, there were a series of murders. Police said the one element in common was that all victims were carrying boom boxes. Boom boxes disappeared from that city!
See? Whatever the law, some individuals can change history. Risky, but it may work.
Some gal in Texas stabbed her lover because he played the same Elvis song again and again. Way to go. How can we know what’s too much until some hero snaps?
I’m reminded of a news item from I can’t say how long ago that reached me long before the internet, at a time when I didn’t read the papers either: boom boxes were plaguing some South American city. Suddenly, there were a series of murders. Police said the one element in common was that all victims were carrying boom boxes. Boom boxes disappeared from that city!
See? Whatever the law, some individuals can change history. Risky, but it may work.
The Excitement of Spectator Sports
Some group with scientific credentials just announced that soccer was the most exciting sport. They based their decision on one variable: predictability of outcome. They found more upsets in soccer than in other major spectator sports, recent baseball being cited as a possible exception: in the US in the past couple of years there had been more baseball upsets than soccer upsets. World wide and over longer periods, it’s soccer.
In contrast, tennis phenom, Roger Federer, just announced that his game was pretty solid as it is: he doesn’t see much need for improvement, he merely needs to maintain his quality and his hunger for victories.
In sports where I have a favorite, I’ll be excited enough to see my favorite prevail. On the other hand, watching Roger dismiss contender after contender, I have to admit that my attention may flag, I may fail to focus on every point.
Still, if Federer won every match for the next ten years it would be fine with me. (Ditto the Rocket, once upon a time:or Bjorn Borg, or even John Newcombe.) And I’m not the only fan who’d still be cheering if Michael Jordan was poised to win a tenth or twelfth or fifteenth straight NBA crown.
My beloved Martina Hingis just returned to competition. My beloved Justine Hennin just beat her 6-3, 6-3. I’d hurt, and cheer, either way.
Still, on the subject, what fools we are not to watch more soccer.
Part of the problem is TV. There are some sports that don’t televise well: skiing, swimming, horse racing ... people racing ... and soccer.
Those TV execs, and TV device designers, should be working on ways to put the audience better inside the game.
In contrast, tennis phenom, Roger Federer, just announced that his game was pretty solid as it is: he doesn’t see much need for improvement, he merely needs to maintain his quality and his hunger for victories.
In sports where I have a favorite, I’ll be excited enough to see my favorite prevail. On the other hand, watching Roger dismiss contender after contender, I have to admit that my attention may flag, I may fail to focus on every point.
Still, if Federer won every match for the next ten years it would be fine with me. (Ditto the Rocket, once upon a time:or Bjorn Borg, or even John Newcombe.) And I’m not the only fan who’d still be cheering if Michael Jordan was poised to win a tenth or twelfth or fifteenth straight NBA crown.
My beloved Martina Hingis just returned to competition. My beloved Justine Hennin just beat her 6-3, 6-3. I’d hurt, and cheer, either way.
Still, on the subject, what fools we are not to watch more soccer.
Part of the problem is TV. There are some sports that don’t televise well: skiing, swimming, horse racing ... people racing ... and soccer.
Those TV execs, and TV device designers, should be working on ways to put the audience better inside the game.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Skiing and Drinking
Now Bode Miller is in hot water due to his public comments about the partying among ski racers. The racing association in response of course has to put its back up, pretend to ignorance, to insist on hypocrisy.
I want to assure one and all that skiing and drinking have always been associated in my experience. As a kid I saw movies of skiers carrying wine skins. Oh, man, those free souls take their own wet bar with them wherever they go.
By the 1960s, 1970 it was much less true. For one ascent to Tuckerman’s Ravine I packed a quart of pure alcohol and a few vials of scotch flavoring, knowing I’d find good cold water and plenty of it at the top of the tree line: I’d be able to make two and a half quarts of scotch, but have only one quart and a couple of ounces added to my back pack. When I arrived, ready to drink and ski, I found that the bulk of my ilk had carried no scotch at all, no alcohol; they’d merely carried an ounce or two of boo, a sheet of tabs of acid, a teeny vial of cocaine ...
Skiing at resorts I was well familiar how the best ski instructors raced to the bar toward afternoon’s end. I saw them pouring down the first couple of cocktails to get a fast start on that evenings debauch.
One ski patrolman I knew at Sugarloaf told me that he and his crew had been blind on acid since the beginning of the season, expected to stay blind till the end of the season.
Hilary was my companion my second time on skis. Then Hilary was my companion my third, fourth, fifth ... times. Years went by with me tearing my hair as I waited for her to catch up. Ah, but one fine day we were skiing in Switzerland, Grindlewald, near the Eiger, and we stopped for a brew. I bombed the slope, paused, prepared to wait and wait, but I heard her skis edging practically in my tracks. She’s stayed right on top of me through the whole of one hell of a plunge: had never happened before. That’s some beer they make in the Alps. I’d just never before had her boozed enough: to not give a hoot about life and limb.
Good God: our son was already two by then. Maybe neither of us should have had the beer.
I got away with it. Never got hurt. Once, on skis, but that time had nothing to do with booze. I survived riding the motorcycle drunk for decades. I survived the car, and all the other drunks on the roads. But you don’t have to know much to know an awful lot who didn’t. Bad business.
Maybe hypocrisy isn’t all bad.
Still, one has to chuckle. How is it possible that the ski race association didn’t know the skiers liked to party? Is it possible that the Marines in A Few Good Men didn’t know that marines sometimes beat up on each other? that torture among soldiers is older than the US or Cuba or Britain? If so, they must not know it the way baseball didn’t know about steroids until yesterday.
Which is worse: skiers partying? or a racing association that knows nothing about skiers partying? pretends that the standards are different altogether from the behavior?
I want to assure one and all that skiing and drinking have always been associated in my experience. As a kid I saw movies of skiers carrying wine skins. Oh, man, those free souls take their own wet bar with them wherever they go.
By the 1960s, 1970 it was much less true. For one ascent to Tuckerman’s Ravine I packed a quart of pure alcohol and a few vials of scotch flavoring, knowing I’d find good cold water and plenty of it at the top of the tree line: I’d be able to make two and a half quarts of scotch, but have only one quart and a couple of ounces added to my back pack. When I arrived, ready to drink and ski, I found that the bulk of my ilk had carried no scotch at all, no alcohol; they’d merely carried an ounce or two of boo, a sheet of tabs of acid, a teeny vial of cocaine ...
Skiing at resorts I was well familiar how the best ski instructors raced to the bar toward afternoon’s end. I saw them pouring down the first couple of cocktails to get a fast start on that evenings debauch.
One ski patrolman I knew at Sugarloaf told me that he and his crew had been blind on acid since the beginning of the season, expected to stay blind till the end of the season.
Hilary was my companion my second time on skis. Then Hilary was my companion my third, fourth, fifth ... times. Years went by with me tearing my hair as I waited for her to catch up. Ah, but one fine day we were skiing in Switzerland, Grindlewald, near the Eiger, and we stopped for a brew. I bombed the slope, paused, prepared to wait and wait, but I heard her skis edging practically in my tracks. She’s stayed right on top of me through the whole of one hell of a plunge: had never happened before. That’s some beer they make in the Alps. I’d just never before had her boozed enough: to not give a hoot about life and limb.
Good God: our son was already two by then. Maybe neither of us should have had the beer.
I got away with it. Never got hurt. Once, on skis, but that time had nothing to do with booze. I survived riding the motorcycle drunk for decades. I survived the car, and all the other drunks on the roads. But you don’t have to know much to know an awful lot who didn’t. Bad business.
Maybe hypocrisy isn’t all bad.
Still, one has to chuckle. How is it possible that the ski race association didn’t know the skiers liked to party? Is it possible that the Marines in A Few Good Men didn’t know that marines sometimes beat up on each other? that torture among soldiers is older than the US or Cuba or Britain? If so, they must not know it the way baseball didn’t know about steroids until yesterday.
Which is worse: skiers partying? or a racing association that knows nothing about skiers partying? pretends that the standards are different altogether from the behavior?
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Dodo Dumb
The dodo is in the news as new fossils have been unearthed on Mauritius, the dodos' home till its extinction. I want to say one quick thing before I study the news:
The dodo has become a synonym for stupid: dumb as a dodo. The bird is extinct, so it must have been stupid. I sure hope whatever gods find our fossils will say the same of us. But those gods would be wrong; just as we are.
Without studying the circumstances particular to the dodo, I just bet that brainpower had nothing to do with their demise. I bet it was simple lack of experience. I bet the dodo was thriving until man arrived on Mauritius. I bet the dodo simply lacked fear of us: and of the cats and rats that accompany us wherever we go.
We should wait another million years, or another few dozen million years, before claiming that anything alive in the Twentieth or Twenty-first centuries survived because it was the fittest: as in "fit" like Arnold Schwarzenegger, as in fit like Hitler's luftwaffe. There's a word that means completely different things to biologists and to the world of political poetic license.
The dodo has become a synonym for stupid: dumb as a dodo. The bird is extinct, so it must have been stupid. I sure hope whatever gods find our fossils will say the same of us. But those gods would be wrong; just as we are.
Without studying the circumstances particular to the dodo, I just bet that brainpower had nothing to do with their demise. I bet it was simple lack of experience. I bet the dodo was thriving until man arrived on Mauritius. I bet the dodo simply lacked fear of us: and of the cats and rats that accompany us wherever we go.
We should wait another million years, or another few dozen million years, before claiming that anything alive in the Twentieth or Twenty-first centuries survived because it was the fittest: as in "fit" like Arnold Schwarzenegger, as in fit like Hitler's luftwaffe. There's a word that means completely different things to biologists and to the world of political poetic license.
Monday, January 02, 2006
Sirens
I’m on the lake yesterday and in the distance I hear sirens screaming: on the lakeside drive, north of the lake. The other day in town the sirens screamed: the old, east side of the lake. I live just west of the lake, what used to be quiet, seemed rural: cows in the pasture, you’d never guess the number of snowbirds Sebring has crammed into the developments ranging westward from the road. Don’t get lulled by appearances: traffic screams by going seventy.
Early on in college, freshman year or so, I worked part time setting tables at the Faculty Club. I was very fond of a full-timer there: some sort of unschooled but intellectual Commie, spoke a bit of Creole, had Creole folks back in New Orleans. Bang, bang, bang. And we pause setting tables to look down from Morningside Heights onto the roofs of Harlem where cops shot at guys jumping from roof to roof on a somewhat regular basis.
When I was a kid blues sounds got to me before I’d had the merest whiff of puberty. Oh, man, the brass, the tenor sax, the bass ... I bought a couple of Dixieland records, and by age ten or eleven would carry the windup Victrola out into the yard and oppress everyone with my enthusiasm. By actual puberty I had a hi-fi system that needed to be plugged in. I didn’t take it outside, but I sure upped the volume. Everyone on North Forest Avenue had to know what little Paul was listening to.
That’s a familiar part of puberty, isn’t it? Hormones making you scream Me, Me, Me? Imposing your existence, your tastes, your whims ... onto the public environment? Isn’t it the young who scream loudest at football games? in wars? Isn’t it the young who demonstrate en masse at the drop of a pin? Me, Me, Me!
I guess little girls scream a lot too, especially where they’re ganged together and feel safe. Still, puberty is a major contributor to noise. Me, Me, Me.
What I want to know is: Will the kleptocracy ever get out of its puberty? Will the kleptocracy ever grow up?
It’s easy to think that the cops were chasing hypothetical perps from Harlem rooftop to Harlem rooftop. Hell, the guys did run. (Wouldn’t you if you were black and the cops were shooting?) But listen with another ear: weren’t the cops really the state, screaming Me, Me, Me? Look how big Me, with guns, is protecting helpless You. (Terrorizing the niggers!)
Kennedy screamed about "Cuber", Johnson howled about the ’Cong. Bush is currently screaming about eavesdropping, surveillance, how we can’t afford liberty in America: and won’t tolerate it anywhere else.
Ah, but pk, that’s not Me, Me, Me; that’s US, US, US!
Early on in college, freshman year or so, I worked part time setting tables at the Faculty Club. I was very fond of a full-timer there: some sort of unschooled but intellectual Commie, spoke a bit of Creole, had Creole folks back in New Orleans. Bang, bang, bang. And we pause setting tables to look down from Morningside Heights onto the roofs of Harlem where cops shot at guys jumping from roof to roof on a somewhat regular basis.
When I was a kid blues sounds got to me before I’d had the merest whiff of puberty. Oh, man, the brass, the tenor sax, the bass ... I bought a couple of Dixieland records, and by age ten or eleven would carry the windup Victrola out into the yard and oppress everyone with my enthusiasm. By actual puberty I had a hi-fi system that needed to be plugged in. I didn’t take it outside, but I sure upped the volume. Everyone on North Forest Avenue had to know what little Paul was listening to.
That’s a familiar part of puberty, isn’t it? Hormones making you scream Me, Me, Me? Imposing your existence, your tastes, your whims ... onto the public environment? Isn’t it the young who scream loudest at football games? in wars? Isn’t it the young who demonstrate en masse at the drop of a pin? Me, Me, Me!
I guess little girls scream a lot too, especially where they’re ganged together and feel safe. Still, puberty is a major contributor to noise. Me, Me, Me.
What I want to know is: Will the kleptocracy ever get out of its puberty? Will the kleptocracy ever grow up?
It’s easy to think that the cops were chasing hypothetical perps from Harlem rooftop to Harlem rooftop. Hell, the guys did run. (Wouldn’t you if you were black and the cops were shooting?) But listen with another ear: weren’t the cops really the state, screaming Me, Me, Me? Look how big Me, with guns, is protecting helpless You. (Terrorizing the niggers!)
Kennedy screamed about "Cuber", Johnson howled about the ’Cong. Bush is currently screaming about eavesdropping, surveillance, how we can’t afford liberty in America: and won’t tolerate it anywhere else.
Ah, but pk, that’s not Me, Me, Me; that’s US, US, US!
Sunday, January 01, 2006
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