Predator on the premises

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I've been watching this impressive little raptor this spring as he has scouted my bird feeders for victuals. Two weeks ago he, or someone very much like him, slammed into my house---the siding, I believe, not a window---presumably while trying to pick a morsel off the two-prong pole near the back of my house. When I got to the back window to investigate, I saw some feathers swirling around and a hawk standing on the ground between the house and the feeder. He hopped to the top of the pole, then flew away, probably embarrassed with himself. Didn't get a good look at him then, though.

Then, a week ago, I came upon this guy with a freshly caught juvenile starling in its talons. He hopped over the fence for more privacy, but I went around and was able to observe him for several minutes at a distance as he picked at his still-living captive.

Today, interrupting myself from a writing task upstairs, I saw him perched atop the two-prong feeder near the ground-floor back windows. I observed him for probably 5 minutes total. Only after about 3 minutes, when he hopped first to the ground then farther away to the patio, did it occur to me to grab a camera. The best I could do was the Sony F717, a fairly high-end older point-and-shoot setup with a fixed Carl Zeiss (i.e., high-quality) zoom lens. I fumbled with it just to find a suitable auto configuration and managed to snap five or six frames while he perched on the arm of the heavy-duty captain's chair normally reserved for Rudy. I wasn't optimistic by the results, but was pleasantly surprised to see the large-scale snapshots. This is the best one, cropped at full resolution but compressed somewhat as a jpeg file. If you click the picture, you should see a decent enlargement with a critical detail for identification purposes.

I am officially identifying this creature as a juvenile or near-adult Sharp-Shinned Hawk. I'd been thinking he was probably a Cooper's hawk, but he is smaller than one I saw last year, and based on previous glimpses he appears to be more aggressive than Cooper's are reputed to be in chasing prey into foliage. The telltale clue is the yellow eye, which aren't found on Cooper's hawks. When comparing this picture with photos on Cornell's bird website, All About Birds, I was satisfied that his head configuration and feather patterns match those of the Sharp-Shinned Hawk.

Beer-D and I call this guy "Omar," in tribute to the oddly ethical "stick-up boy" from HBO's series The Wire. I can't actually verify his gender, but we choose to consider Omar to be a male unless the contrary is proved by an ornithologist.

My lesson learned for the day was to move my Nikon D80 from the closet to a hook by the back windows, set to fully automatic mode with a freshly charged battery and a zoom lens attached. Duh. (Slow learner.)

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I do not dedicate this song to the royal newlyweds. But it is not because of any malice in my heart. I do dedicate this song to you, though, who choose their blog-reading material with care, intelligence, and taste. More specifically, I dedicate it to those of you who have a sweety pie, a libido, appropriate precautionary technology, and a pure heart.



Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes stuck with the style of music, which was what originally made me a Springsteen fan for a short time. Dig Springsteen's sustained "altissimo" vocal note near the end. "The Fever" is a Springsteen composition, but I always knew it as a Southside song. I wish the sound were better in this clip so we could hear the full power of the horns and their slinky accompaniment. As heard from a good audio source, this tune is a tour de force. But at least on this video we can enjoy Clarence Clemons lumbering around the stage, without his tenor but clad in a very tasteful yellow jumpsuit and giant Panama hat, grabbing the mike on cue to belt out his profundo embellishment on the refrain. It's fun!

The Fever, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, with Bruce Springsteen (1978, live performance at the Agora Club, Cleveland, Ohio), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

"Housekeeping"

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The posting has been light lately mainly because I have a freelance editing job that will take a month or two. Also, I'm trying to rethink my posting schedule so I'm not always a prisoner to the laptop on Friday and Saturday nights.

As I've implied in recent months, I'm not satisfied with the same blogging model I've been evolving for the past few years. There are plenty (i.e., way too many) of blogs that comment hypertopically on every unprecedented or heinous development domestically and worldwide. Nothing wrong with that, but my feeling now is that there's no way to keep up with it except for full-time bloggers who specialize in domestic politics, military issues, economics, whatever. I don't have the expertise, time, or energy for that. I feel my originality lies elsewhere, if only I can figure out where. So that's what I've been trying to do for the past several months.

You knuckleheads seem to like the music posts, so those will continue. But not necessarily on Friday and Saturday any more. I can have my prayer meetings and fish fries whenever the fuck I please, so that's what I will start doing shortly.

The Fifty50 keyword system is a wreck and always has been, so I'll spend some time trying to curate it so it's more helpful in finding old posts or whatever.

I want to start including more graphical content again because visual arts are important to me and I like to share. Along those lines, comic strips and animation have always been two of my central joys in life, and I find that others often take an interest if provided a helpful context.

Some readers might remember my referring to a project I called the "Model Of Everything," then scaled back to a "Diagram of Everything." That has been percolating in back of the skullbone all along, and I want to give it some more visibility soon. The point of the project, if I can even call it that with a straight face, is to step back as far as necessary to view science, on one hand, and philosophy/religion, on the other hand, as residing within the same reality context... and, in fact, providing indispensable services each to the other. More later. I do not claim that this is a modest or even achievable endeavor. But I do believe that it's necessary for practitioners in each domain to let go of their blinkered outlooks in order to break a tenacious impasse in human evolution. And if anybody can do that, the fuckin' RubberCrutch can!!!

Finally, I'm closing in on an alternative approach to political and economic commentary. It involves taking about 10 steps back from the "dailiness" of everything; contemplating a much longer timeline than political commentators normally do; and squinting like a painter does to blur out nonessential details and better see the true colors of things. The biggest challenge is to avoid getting sucked into the "dailiness" every time we're treated to a new outrage. In my continuing surveys of philosophy and history I'm finding that there's really nothing new going on. I'm interested in the historic conditions that lead to a revolutionary break from seemingly eternal political, religious, and economic impasses. They do happen, and civilization does move forward. Our jobs are to stop worrying about things that we do not individually control, keep our heads down, and squirt our chromosomes into the gene pool if we wish.

Then and now

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As I revisited Zappa's "Mom and Dad" earlier this evening I was slightly taken aback by the condemnation of police as the Establishment's agents of political violence. I believe that was true: impulsive police disrespect for and harassment of "longhairs" was known by most of "us" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, if not from first-hand experience, then from the accounts of our friends and acquaintances, and certainly from continual news reports. Each individual circumstance differed, of course, and two reasonable people could have reached opposite conclusions about many of them. Also, cops also certainly created uncomfortable circumstances for "hippies" caught in the process of committing a crime, and I doubt that rednecks got any gentler treatment when apprehended committing the same acts. Nevertheless, after sifting through those ambiguities, it was clear then and now that the police, and even the state National Guards, were agents of suppressing lawful political assembly and expression.

This evening, in a TPM report about a possible accomplice in the Giffords massacre, here's part of what Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff Clarence Dupnik had to say to reporters at a news conference:

The sheriff spent several minutes directing his anger at the "vitriol" he said comes from radio and television personalities. "That may be free speech, but its not without consequences," Dupnik said.

"I hope that are all Americans are as saddened and as shocked as we are," he said.

"We need to do a little soul searching."

Arizona in particular, he said, has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

I think it's fair to say that law-enforcement officers tend to be socially conservative in any location. So it's heartening to me that one from an especially "conservative" corner of the nation would directly acknowledge misgivings to a national audience that certain social worldviews in his jurisdiction have gotten way out of hand.

I believe that the typical sworn law-enforcement officer, like the typical soldier, is indoctrinated with a clear concept of duty and professional mission that trumps individual beliefs. I know we can point to racially motivated police brutality, for example, as one of many indicators that cops are no more perfect than any other sector of society. But my point is that at this point in time, police are not largely in the business of suppressing liberal political expression. That task was "privatized" somewhere along the way.

OK, I gotta settle down now

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Between my current fevered speculations, which are intended to develop a plausible hypothesis about what is really wrong with Obama and his political flubs and miscues of the past 2 years; and some mind-bending reading about current events that I intend to comment on soon, I'm now ready for some west and welaxation. West and welaxation! That's right. So here's a nice-ish photo I shot last night from the back door of the garage.

I made the image on my mighty Nikon D700 using a Nikkor 24mm prime lens opened up to f/2.8 and with an exposure of 1/40th of a second (hand-held). Of interest to old-school photographers, I set the ISO to 6400---16 times faster than the old Kodak workhorse fast film, Tri-X. I didn't even bother to correct for visual noise, which would plague most digital images made at this speed on lesser cameras.

This picture astounds me in terms of how capable this camera is of capturing high-quality images in low light. The key light was a mercury vapor security light that inflicts itself on my property from the alley. I did very little postprocessing, just tinkering a little with the white balance to reduce the red/magenta tint of the light source, then applying the Adobe Bridge vignetting tool in the RAW processor to eliminate the "irising" effect at the corners of the frame, which is inherent to most wide-angle lenses.

I was amused by this sight last night because the patio looked all set up to host a conclave dedicated to booze and cigars, with the only obstacle being about 4 inches of highly packable snow covering everything. By afternoon today, incidentally, we had about 10 inches on the ground here in my small city on a swamp.

Mayor Pennypacker Comes Out For Equality

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Let's give in and all do the "brotherhood" bit.
Just make sure we don't make a habit of it.



The First Thanksgiving, Stan Freberg (1961, from "The United States of America: The Early Years," Capitol W/SW-1573), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

One giant leap for Mankind

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Mick Foley has always been a favorite in the RubberCrutch household. The puppet master for demented WWF/WWE wrestling alter egos Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love, Foley is an authentic badass in the most praiseworthy sense of that term. He is the auteur of countless past jaw-dropping feats of self-endangerment in the ring, the most legendary of which are collected and retold in the 1999 sports documentary Beyond The Mat (still worth renting, in my opinion). That film reveals Foley to be a highly intelligent, sensitive family man (with his lovely wife and adorable kids in tow for portions of the documentary)---an inexplicably genial berserker who is at the core an Everyman and a guy you'd love to have as a neighbor.

A published author many times over (although, admittedly, I think he should consider one more 15-foot dive into a pile of thumbtacks for penning Mick Foley's Halloween Hijinx), Foley has appeared on The Daily Show expressing support for gay rights, and even showed up at a high school with a gay student earlier this year to "threaten" homophobic bullies. He also was  recently a recipient of Jon Stewart's "Medal of Reasonableness" at the recent Sanity/Fear rally in DC.

Now TPM reports that Foley is joining rape survivor advocates to push for federal legislation to move the huge backlog of "rape kits" out of police evidence rooms and through the testing process, where DNA evidence from sexual assaults is analyzed and documented for victims and prosecutors. Activist Julie Weil, with whom Foley is working to promote this legislation, told TPM, "You can't get justice without DNA, it's just the way the world works now. Everyone expects to see DNA."

So hooray for Mankind! I wonder how much more humane and relevant our public discourse might be if, like Mick Foley, America's most hardcore athletic badasses were capable of sincerely and aggressively promoting political causes rooted in basic decency.

But, yet, serious questions are bound to emerge. How will we pay for this Nanny State legislation? Won't it contribute to the bankruptcy of our grandchildren? And, most importantly: if rape victims have no right to terminate pregnancies caused by invasive sexual assault, then what justification can there be to increase the deficit to investigate crimes that the victims probably "asked for," anyway?

Editor's note: this postscript is included to confirm that the previous paragraph is written with satirical intent apropos of certain fundamentalist "Christians" and "social conservatives." Please make a note of it.

RubberCrutch status report

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Hi friends. How are you? I am fine. However, when I feel that this blog is looking lazy I like to provide a status report to deflect your negative attention from my laziness.

I started on a fairly ambitious post to denounce whistledick futurists, by whom I mean authors who pose as prophets or sophisticated insiders on the basis of ideas they've evidently gleaned (i.e., stolen) from dystopian fiction and Road Warrior movies. As I try to develop my own reliable synthesis of what's going on in this unsettling era I'm gathering information from history, which I believe is really important for context (and to avoid becoming a whistledick futurist myself). The stimulus of my wrath on this topic was a widely praised post by Douglas Coupland, the sort-of coiner of the term "Generation X," who appears to be an arrogant, under-informed hipster still huffing the vapors of his high-octane heyday. This past week I dedicated several hours to composing a high-dudgeon takedown of Mr. Coupland's condescending drool. But I couldn't get it right, and finally realized that a much more moderate and even-tempered response would do just fine. So I've scrapped the previous effort and will try again this weekend. To me, responding is still a worthwhile task because I feel many of us are buying into stock doomsday scenarios that paralyze our spirits. My preferred approach to social criticism is to avoid everyone's conventional wisdom, even if it comes from people who feel special because they had an Internet login in 1985.

Pictured above is a "cathedral of the prairie," a term I quote from a forgotten author who doesn't readily rise to the top of a Google search. I snapped it on the inadequate iPhone 3G camera, then doctored it in Bridge and Photoshop to approximate how I saw the scene when I felt compelled to interrupt my bike ride to document it. That selfsame bike ride, which took me halfway through Piatt County and terminated (before turning back) a few miles north of Deland, Illinois, ended up setting me back several weeks, sprained-rotator-cuffwise. Ended up being on the bike 90 minutes more than planned due to being waylaid on rural roads crumbling into gravel and dirt. Too much heavy lifting for Mr. Supraspinatus, evidently. So I've been pussing around the house this week instead of tackling the heavy lifting of blog augmentation.

Then there is the strange case of me actually finishing a woodworking project. It's pictured at the right, hanging under a kitchen cabinet. It may not look like much, but it involved some careful measurements, routing and sawing, and stock and stain decisions so it would match the in-place red oak woodwork. I finished cutting and assembly a year ago, then proceeded to stare at the bare wood, despairing about how to mount the thing in a non-remedial way. Finally, a recent chat with a cute lady carpenter on a completely different topic (strictly business) inspired me to buy a Forstner drill bit, apply a little mental elbow grease to hardware selection, then stain and seal it, and hang it up. Click the picture for a bigger view if you like, and note the scroll-sawed arch cut of the sides to match the arched sides of the spice compartment to its upper right. That's some pretty hot-shit woodworking for me, actually. Tonight I'm field testing the shelf to house a cute little AudioSource power amp with an old Sports Walkman (boasting "Mega Bass Groove") jacked in, and a pair vintage B&W speakers. It works!

Finally I've been distracted this past week by the unexpected return of some epic BP numbers, with my favorite being 182/88 (nowhere close to my "personal best," incidentally). I made an executive decision to return to my previous med protocol, which the doc had relaxed in response to my significant weight loss and general awesomeness as a physical specimen. The numbers are returning to where they were, which had been consistent with what might be expected for a world-class athlete at rest or a little old lady on life support.

And those are some reasons why it seems I've been neglecting you, but I assure you that you haven't left my thoughts during this hiatus. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Being a bit lazy here, , for expediency --- going back to my favorite iteration of Blood, Sweat & Tears, masterminded by Al Kooper with very nice, bluesy white-boy vocals and a little psychedelic guitar around the edges. I dedicate it to my old friend, the daughter of a preacher man, who digs horn bands from the late '60s and who was evidently moved by her own political passions to utter the word "fuck" on this very blog a few days ago. Shame on you! Haha!



I Can't Quit Her, Blood, Sweat & Tears (1968, from "Child Is Father To The Man," Columbia CS 9619), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

The beauty of peak hurricane season

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There is, I assume, more much more trepidation than beauty experienced by denizens of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coastal lowlands during peak hurricane season. I think, without an ion of glee, that it may just be the price people pay to live a few miles from white sand beaches and rum shacks, gorge on fresh, affordable seafood at will, and escape the torment of long winters. There are also crosses to bear when emigrating to Champaign, Illinois. It's the nation's most mentally and morally conservative Big 10 university town. Our current alpha creatures are real estate people intent on digging out every last green space in the county to make room for unneeded new townhouses and strip malls in a moribund market. The downsides here are less dramatic than for coastal people, but I'd bet our list is much longer (and beyond the scope of this post).

But hurricane season here is outstanding. The careful observer living in the Corn Belt can often peg the beginning of hurricane season, in all its local splendor, to the week if not to the day. Two groups of people are most likely to take note: farmers (but not necessarily agri-businessmen riding in hermetically sealed, GPS-navigated combines the size of a Gothic cathedral) and road cyclists (bi-, not necessarily motor-).

One leading indicator conspicuous to both farmers and cyclists is the prevailing wind direction, which changes here somewhat abruptly from southwesterly to southeasterly and easterly. Another indicator, somewhat less consistent, is humidity, which drops significantly around the time prevailing wind directions change. The humidity drop happens to be convenient to grain farmers, who want to dry down the corn and beans as much as possible in the fields to promote cost-efficient harvesting and marketing. It's also convenient to cyclists, who appreciate hot sun combined with pleasant evaporative cooling effects. I'm certain these weather shifts are directly related to the overarching climate patterns that originate in the tropical mid-Atlantic at this time of the year, but I'm not a weatherman so I can't document that. It's a correlation observed across decades.

Our "twin cities" had a few previews of the change in wind early this month. But last week --- Wednesday, I think --- the area was abruptly overshadowed by an uncharacteristically gray, gloomy day. From the interior of an over-chilled government building, looking out any window, the vibe was late October or November (and even somewhat chilly outdoors after the "closing bell"). Sometime around that day, either the night before or after, about 1.6 inches of badly needed rain fell on the asparagus garden. Then, suddenly, meteorological glory. Bike riding patterns after work became almost exclusively outbound to the southeast, east, and even north once. The object is to ride into the draft on the way out, not on the way home while the sun is racing to auger into the west horizon. Fortuitously, due to seasonal characteristics related to Terra's orbit around the sun on an oblique axis, last 180 minutes of daylight every day for the past week-plus has fully qualified as the elusive Golden Hour that landscape photographers prize so highly. And, as if right on cue, in the Atlantic and near the Caribbean, a new crop of tropical depressions and storms began to sprout.

This is peak hurricane season in the Corn Belt: made for communing with the genial, sunny Midwestern elements in solitude. Perched on the saddle of a lightweight aluminum touring bike tanked up with water bottles; a power bar in the saddle pack; biosystems exerting straight ahead with the help of endorphins and Advil, to a soundtrack of the wind and other breathing; and a fully charged cell phone that one hopes will have signal were a tire to blow 5 miles south of Villa Grove.

The asparagus ranch revivified

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I never informed you about the fate of my asparagus experiment station, which first inserted itself in our shared folklore about here and here. The short version --- short for me, at least, is this:

On April 17 I gave it up, mourned for the asparagus crowns that I had abused the life out of, and backfilled the trench with its 3 tons of Illinois clay loam. It was my intention that after a respectful period of grieving for the little fellers I'd plant the ground with some native wildflowers or grasses. The next weekend, as I glowered over the plot trying to figure out what to do with it, I spotted a stiff purple shoot breaking through the ground at the northwest corner. "Crap," I thought. "Since this one plant is here I'm now obligated to let it grow and reserve the rest of this dirt for another try next spring." I don't like waiting for things to happen, but that's the way it would be.

Meanwhile, Rudy's long-suffering wife had, for reasons not relevant to this post, given me a St. Francis plaque to display near my garden. She had not told me that she'd blessed it with Holy Water before wrapping and delivering the gift. So I chainsawed a groove at the north pole of a walnut log and displayed the placque sort of like a Franklin Mint plate, facing the moribund asparagus patch from the east. Starting the next day, more purple shoots broke the soil. I was bemused, and started marking them with stakes. Well, by cracky, every last one of those hapless asparagus "crowns" eventually made their way to the surface, and as of yesterday I was still seeing new growth. So, as illustrated by the photograph below, which was taken late afternoon on Thursday with a phone camera, this for me truly is the dawning of The Age of Asparagus.* Thank you.

______________________
* I'm afraid I can't take credit for this pun. To the best of my knowledge it was coined by Robert Crumb in 1969. Also, apropos of nothing, the ornamental rectangular prism near bottom left is a genuine 1901 Culver Block brand embossed street paver.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Uno!
Dos!
One! two! tres! quatro!



This proto-lummox-rock speaks for itself. That said, I will briefly point to a few amusing features of this video, of which I do not know the provenance. First, the Pharaohs look more like Sheiks than what they purport to be. Second, Sam is costumed more like a Sikh than a Pharaoh, but maybe that was why he called himself a Sham. Third, the boys give us a fresh and clever application of go-go girl technology, namely being that the cuties are as motionless as mummies throughout the performance. And fourth, Sam didn't need no stinking lip syncing, as is especially evident during the last chorus as his voice tatters and he even cracks up at being busted with it on live TV. Probably either one run-through or tequila shot too many before rolling videotape. Everything about it looks fun.

RubberCrutch Bonus Trivia! In summer 2007, inspired by my memory of these antic lyric stylings of Domingo “Sam” Samudio whilst being browbeaten by my Chinese date and a small roomful of her equally Chinese students upstairs of a campus bar at a private karaoke party, I plucked this song from the tune menu they kept shoving up my grille. "I'll fix their wagon," I thought to myself. The crowd went wild, so I ended up doing two more by request. And significantly, there was no alcohol whatsoever involved! That's what Sam means by "let's not be L7"!

Wooly Bully, Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs (1966, unknown live TV performance), via YouTube. 

It's Bedtime!

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Time for a story. Once upon a time Old MacDaddy dug a big trench in his back yard, removed more dirt, roots, broken glass, bricks, and chunks of patio concrete than you could shake a stick at. Then he covered the bottom of the trench with manure (regrettably, not his own), then a very special blend of natural and store-bought soil, and dug little holes with a pointed stick to make new homes for 16 of his best asparagus friends (who had been living on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator for a month). Then he planted the asparagi, made cute little mounds of potting soil around them, and took a picture. Finally he fed them some nice fresh water. And that's how Farmer Daddy Brand Asparagus (TM) began its new life. The end. Now get back in bed and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!

Enjoying my hiatus?

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I yam! I could tell tales of physical prowess, ditchdiggery, lumberjackery. But I'm on hiatus, working through some sort of surprise urge to turn the world green and feed all the little birdies. So make up some tales yourself! In the meantime, I share the following words from the final pages of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an instructive 700-page tome by Manly P. Hall (1928):

Ptolemy has been ridiculed for conceiving the earth to be the center of the universe, yet modern civilization is seemingly founded upon the hypothesis that the planet earth is the most permanent and important of all the heavenly spheres, and that the gods from their starry thrones are fascinated by the monumental and epochal events taking place upon this spherical ant-hill in Chaos.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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A spring break edition for two very special little men. And also for that healthcare-loving, ballcutting harridan Nancy Pelosi, who has put The Fear of Grandma into bedwetting wingnuts everywhere.



A city I've never been to, but intend to visit on the recommendation of the lads. A place where the panhandlers are polite and even the meth-heads do their best to make a stranger feel welcome. And the only piece of litter to sit on the ground for more than 5 minutes was one that Beer-D and Big Rock Head threw there as an experiment, then later picked up and threw away just like all the townies do.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This is for Gurlitzer, if you're still out there. Don't know about you, but this was the first rendition of Stormy Monday I ever heard. Many hipsters would say this version is absurd, what with the Hammond organ sounding like a couples skate at the roller rink, and Lee Michaels with his earnest white-boy falsetto. But it hits the same spot as Wagner does on my aural palate.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Here's a classic piece of advice from Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. He must have recorded it umpty-nine times, as was the practice back in the days when the the master recordings would degrade after a finite number of pressings. It's an oddly laconic version, as compared with his original manic lecture to the hapless youth. But truth is truth, whether served up hot or cool, so listen up cubs!

Pop culture amnesia

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Stephen Worth, an animation producer of note, has been guest-blogging on BoingBoing for a few weeks, and has been unearthing all kinds of vintage animation, film, and sensible ideas about the forgotten richness of American pop culture. This particular post struck a chord with me for two reasons. First, it's a pretty concise summary of the current state of corporate popular culture and its victims who, for example, like "all kinds of music" as long as it's something they can hear played in stress rotation on a Sirius XM channel targeted to their particular consumer demographic. Second, it reminds me how my own tastes as a youth were molded by giant entertainment corporations which gleefully convinced me that, prima facie, the past sucked, so I would be well primed buy their product.

The video embedded in the BoingBoing post is the grand finale from the 1943 musical "Stormy Weather." I'm struck by how different it looks to me now versus how I imagine I would have reacted to it as a late-night TV movie 35 years ago. It would have been unthinkable for twentysomething Baby Boomers to find anything to admire in it. Tap dancing? Shit --- that's what we were forced to sit through every Sunday night while Selig and DoubleE stared at The Ed Sullivan Show with us as collateral damage. The counterculture had no use for tap dancing because purveyors of Revolution like Capitol Records, Warner Brothers, Columbia, and all their groovy subsidiaries convinced us that we were too hip for it. And the funny thing about it: I do believe it was a more innocent time. For awhile, at least, entertainment corporations were content to throw money at freaks and impresarios, stand back, and let them create both innovative music and bales of cash.

So what changed? Why is the product of today's entertainment conglomerates so much more odious than it was 40 or 45 years ago? My guess: the marketing focus group as a social engineering tool --- a tool that, today, is probably less successful at funding the cocaine habits of entertainment tycoons than at trapping the American mind in an endlessly recursive matrix of multimedia cross references, taglines, brand names, and virtual reality.

Tap dancing? It's all about dudes and babes playing jump-jazz percussion using castanets bolted to the soles of their shoes, while bounding across tabletops, grand pianos, and what-have-you. The Nicholas Brothers must have had adductors with the proportionate strength of piranha jaws. So if you have 10 minutes to spare, click through to the YouTube video clip embedded in the BoingBoing post. There are more dancing zoot suiters, foxy babes, and African-American GIs than you can shake a stick at, plus Cab Calloway keeping the tempo and Lena Horne dolling up the joint.

So sorry, honorable readers, for my absence

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Man, I have been bent out of shape for several weeks now and it made me afraid to log on and post here. While I hate to use media-manufactured cliches, the term "perfect storm" does seem to apply in my sad case. Were I now writing to you from the zombie afterlife, another media-propagated cliche --- death by a thousand cuts --- might even be more to the point.

Some causes for my woeful state of affairs include two foolish attempts to have a good-faith conversation with two different certifiable libertarians (borderline psychosis grade); extreme sunlight deprivation due to climate and astronomical conditions; a management change at work with all the associated uncertainties; and a rising tide of "fucking shitwater" (as we like to refer to it around the StuporMundi Thanksgiving banquet table) that passes for public discourse; and a steady stream of reminders about the shortcomings of social life in my little town.

But that was then and this is now. I'll be dipping my little tootsies back into the warm, salty world of Blogspot in no time, and will resume my position in your life as a Polar Star of reasoned discourse and boyish charm before you can say "Jack Robinson."

Families: our most important resource

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Overheard last Saturday on the second level of Bergner's, Market Place Mall, Champaign, IL. Dramatis personae: a Mother, Upholstered with Fast Food; a Daughter, Inflamed with Desire.

Mother: No!
Daughter: Why? I don't have any!
Mother: Put them down before you break them!
Daughter: Whyyy?!? I don't have any!!!