Uno Reverse Card

“No one’s allowed to speak their mind right now,.  No one’s allowed to say what they really think about things for fear of being cancelled, cancel culture. In cancel culture, disturbing the peace is probably an act of treason.”  ~Madonna (source) 

First off, nobody is "cancelling" Madonna.  We are ignoring her.  Young and naked generates interest; old and naked, not so much.  She's had forty years to come up with a new schtick, and the fact that she hasn't is on her, not us.

Second, there's really no such thing as "cancel culture."  The entertainers who have said offensive things have been been put on the front pages, handed bigger megaphones.  Controversy generates clicks, and comedians and pundits aren't shy (or subtle) about using that to their own advantage.

And lastly, they're trying to create a false dichotomy.  Some issues don't have two sides of equal value.  Shall we have a debate about whether it's okay to lynch Black people?  Have a reasoned discussion about whether gays have a right to exist?  A calm, friendly chat about whether the Nazis should be in charge?

Sometimes they try to throw the Uno Reverse Card at you:  "You don't tolerate my intolerance, therefore you yourself are intolerant!  Ha-ha!  Gotcha!" but that isn't a point, it's a punchline.

If you're a racist, you're a bad person.  If you're a homophobe, you're a bad person.  If you're a Nazi, you're a bad person.

I'll cross the street to avoid you, and that's not "cancelling" you.  

That's rejecting you.

Moose

I thought the plural of "moose" would be "mooses" or possibly "meece," but it isn't; it's just "moose." (source)

Huh.

And that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

I can see them laugh at me

 This is a really nice cover version:

Full lyrics HERE.

It Doesn't Matter

"Appreciate and rejoice, without any expectation. It doesn’t matter if people are unkind to you, it doesn’t matter if people betray you, it doesn’t matter if people don’t even say ‘thank you’ to you; by appreciating everything around you, from happy experiences to sad, your life will become meaningful, full of understanding, joy, strength and fearlessness."  ~Gyalwang Drukpa

Transitory

 

TheCryptoNaturalist is on Twitter, HERE.

There's Always

 “When all else fails, there’s always delusion.”  ~Conan O’Brien

I Had An Amplifier, Too

 

I just really like the verse:

From across the canyon a guitar plays
Through an amplifier on long delay
It was an old melody, I recognized the song
I had an amplifier, too, so I played along…

It sounds very friendly.  Full lyrics HERE.

I Must Try

"If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver."  ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Future

The Second Coming
by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And that reminded me of this:

"I've seen the future, brother, it is murder."  ~Leonard Cohen (YouTube)(Lyrics)

All of the works of William Butler Yeats are in the public domain, and may be read online or downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, HERE. 

But From

 "Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it."  ~Kahlil Gibran

Tolerate

 

1966

"The trouble with government as it is is that it doesn't represent the people, it controls them.  All they seem to want to do-- the people who run this country-- is keep themselves in power and stop us knowing what's going on…  I'm not saying politicians are all terrible men.  It's just the system of government that I don't like.  It'll be hard to change."  ~John Lennon to magazine Disc Weekly in 1966, as quoted by Jon Weiner in Come Together: John Lennon In His Time ©1984

Saved

There have been a lot of songs written on the theme "saved by rock and roll."  Someday I'll make a list.

But not today.

Full lyrics HERE.

The Things That Made Me Happy

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."  ~Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane ©2013

Justiniani

For A Hermit
by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Honeybee, ©2008

   1.
The hermit Justiniani walked across Europe
after refusing to take his final vows.
He walked across the colonial United States,
coming to live in a cave in southern New Mexico.
Once he walked from Las Cruces
to San Antonio
for a little visit.

Justiniani led mystical prayer gatherings,
conducted healings in living rooms,
then walked 20 miles home
to his dwelling in the cave.
People worried he might not be safe,
living alone in those wild times,
as opposed to these,
sleeping without a lock,
or even a door.

He promised to light a fire every Friday night.
They could see it from town.
When the fire didn't appear,
he was found with a knife through his back,
wearing a thorny girdle of the penitentes,
"another unsolved murder" of those days.

Justiniani, pray for us,
our secret sorrows,
our inability to walk so far.
Pray for the signal fires we fail to light,
that we will have the power to light them.
Pray for the battered, unchosen people.
We have not come far at all
from your time.

   2.
Your diary sleeps in untranslated Italian
in a locked glass case.

When I found out about it
I went a little crazy.

I need to know
what you knew.

   3.
The ceiling of your cave is charred.
Along the path, clumps of cactus, desert flowers,
   chips of flint.
I stood inside, trying to imagine which way
   you slept in there,
pointed out or in, listening to the echo of the birds
over Dripping Springs Road.
Please grant us the depth of your silence.
We are lost inside our world.

―•―

Don Juan Maria de Justiniani was a real person who lived from 1800 to 1869.  There isn't much known about him, and the things we do know are all laid out in the poem above.

He doesn't have a Wikipedia page.  The only online resource I found was Find-A-Grave, HERE.

I kind of like that.

Alright

Full lyrics HERE.

Backup Band

 There have been at least four albums where Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were essentially the backup band for somebody else:

• The Missing Years by John Prine
• Unchained by Johnny Cash
• American III:  Solitary Man by Johnny Cash
• Mystery Girl by Roy Orbison

They also backed up Joe Cocker on a Rick Rubin produced album, but Joe hated it so much that he bought back the master tapes and never released it.  (I'd still like to hear it.)

In A Very Specific Way

 

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

 When I was a kid, Hershey Bars came wrapped in aluminum foil and slipped through a paper sleeve.  It was like the Hershey Company was saying, "Here, unwrap this gift; savor it, appreciate it, enjoy it."

Last week I bought a Hershey Bar.  It came wrapped in plastic.  It was like the Hershey Company was telling me, "Here's your damn candy, Augustus Gloop.  Shove it down your piehole and get out of my sight.  You disgust me."

Presentation matters.

I win

It's important to choose your issues.  Not everything vying for your attention deserves it.

Savage Chickens by Doug Savage is on the web at (of course!) SavageChickens.com.

Always Another

"I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance."  ~Jeanette Winterson

Woke

"Comedy now seems the only force capable of making meaningful inroads against the unsmiling, dark armies of cancel culture and corporate-backed wokery." ~Damian Reilly in The Spectator

Well, that's certainly what Dave Chappelle would have us believe.  Thank God for the Brave and Noble comedians, fearlessly defending our free speech rights by telling rape jokes and denigrating homosexuals.

But for all the talk about "woke" and "cancel culture," it's hard to make the case that misogynists, racists, and homophobes have been denied a platform.  I seem to hear quite a bit from them, and their champion was president less than a year ago.

I think they're doing fine.  They aren't the ones that need protection.

Thunder

 

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

I'm Just

The song is just okay, but I love the fifteen-second drum solo at the beginning.

Full lyrics HERE.

Nice!

 

Cassette

 

Back in Olden Days, when a boy liked a girl he'd make a cassette tape of his favorite music for her.  It was a great way for an introvert to open up a bit.

USPS

The letter below was sent to my father by the apartment complex he rents from.  It says that the United States Post Office has become so horribly unreliable that they can no longer use it to send him his water bill.

The current Postmaster General, appointed by Donald Trump and retained by Joe Biden, plans to "fix" the post office by making it slower, more expensive, and less convenient.  Seriously!

I don't understand why basic services provided by every other Western democracy are such a struggle for us.  We're clearly doing something wrong.

What's So Funny?

I don't think getting a laugh is a good enough reason to be unkind.

Comedian Tim Hawkins has done a bit for years where he mocks vegans.  He perpetuates the stereotype that we're all weak and dizzy, and makes it clear that we are not at all like the "normal" people in his audience who applaud his weird gastronomical bullying.

Dave Chappelle apparently has a "comedy" special out that spends a great deal of time attacking gays and trans folks.  He's banking on the "Ha ha, can you believe I just said that?" trope working once again.

It probably will.

It was uncomfortable for me to sit through a set that attacked me for what I eat.  I can only imagine what it's like to listen to a crowd applaud as your very identity is ridiculed.

I don't know why people will pay to hear that.

I think less of them for doing so.

Full lyrics HERE.

For Something Like a Second

And the blessings come from heaven

And for something like a second

I'm cured and my heart

Is at ease…

Full lyrics HERE.

Peter Boyle

 

He was one of my favorite actors, and it makes me happy to know he was thought of fondly by the people who knew him.

Shake

"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet."  ~Matthew 10:14

And that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

The Sea I Swim In

“Depression has often been the general background of my daily life.  My feeling is that whatever I did was in spite of that, not because of it. It wasn’t the depression that was the engine of my work.…That was just the sea I swam in.”  ~Leonard Cohen (source)

I Hope I'm Stoned

I love that it has the feel of a traditional gospel song. 

Full lyrics HERE.

Righteous Indignation™

 Dave Chapelle has been "cancelled."  I know this because it's all over the news.

I guess "cancelled" is kind of a misnomer.  Even with only a passing interest in pop culture, I can name several people who have been "cancelled." I know what they were cancelled for, and what their reaction to it is.  Ironically, being "cancelled" seems like a wonderful thing for a cheap publicity boost.

We went through the same thing in the 80s with "political correctness."  Comedians and right-wing pundits would say purposely offensive things, then punctuate it with "I guess I'm not politically correct."  This never failed to elicit cheers and applause from their  audience, who were eager to see their baser values validated.

They desperately wanted to believe that expressing homophobic, racist, or misogynistic thoughts made them Fearless Defenders of Free Speech, when all it really did was expose them as bullies and jerks.

Then, like now, they tried to hide the truth under a layer of  righteous indignation.

Now, like then, it doesn't work.

Well, Okay, but…

 are they serious?

Georgia x 3

 Three songs with "Georgia" in the title:

1. Georgia (YouTube)(Lyrics)
2. Georgia On My Mind (YouTube)(Lyrics)
3. Sweet Georgia Brown (YouTube)(Lyrics)

Are You Really?

"Are you really going to hand over the White House to a real estate agent?"  ~John Lydon, on Donald Trump

Politics is the only field where inexperience and ignorance are considered to be positive qualities.

Apply for literally any other job in the world and tell them, "I've never done this before, but that's a good thing because it shows I lack a fundamental knowledge of the systems and processes involved."  Report back with your results.

Don't Tell Anyone

"Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realize that that is enough to be happy.  There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it."  ~Charlotte Eriksson, in You’re Doing Just Fine ©2015

Just a Different Way to Be

"Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it - its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through - and it's there, and you can see it, and you know what it is: it's a wave. And then it crashes on the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while. That's one conception of death for a Buddhist: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from, where it's supposed to be."  ~Chidi, The Good Place

I don't know what I believe sometimes.  The quote above is very pretty and poetic,  but I don't necessarily believe it.

But if it turns out to be true, and we are all just waves returning to the ocean, that would be okay. 

Two Ways

“People tend to approach challenges in one of two ways:  as problem-solving, or as conflict.”  ~Steven Pinker (source)

That's why the American government doesn't work anymore.  As long as congress sees every issue as a conflict to be won rather than a problem to be solved, we're going to lurch from one extreme to the other.

The big danger is that we'll lurch into a ditch of fascism and not be able to pull ourselves back out.

Uh-huh.

 Joe Biden is exclusively emphasizing the infrastructure bill now.  He is positioning himself to take a victory lap over a bill that was never in question.

He doesn't seem to want to talk anymore about the Reconciliation Bill.  That's the one that would have made health care more accessible and affordable, lowered the cost of higher education, and ensured that everybody got an equal chance to vote.

So he's going to raise his tiny, wrinkled fists in victory, and his aides will explain that, in the name of pragmatism, the Democrats were once again unable to do anything to improve anybody's life.  But, they will say,  if they win the next election, then we'll certainly be able to have those things.

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"  ~John Lydon

Time Time Time

 

Excerpted from a Forbe's review of About Time by David Rooney, available online HERE:

Ancient Romans were well aware of the coercive effect of clocks on daily life. Shortly after the first sundial was installed at the Forum, writers attacked it, damning “the man who first discovered the hours”. Characteristically for a culture fixated on cuisine, the greatest criticism concerned the timing of meals. “When I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial,” complained the playwright Plautus. “But now what there is, isn’t eaten unless the sun says so.”

It's hard to imagine a life without clocks, but their lives were not greatly different than our own.  Somehow they went to school, went to work, went to church, waged wars, imposed taxes, and everything got done.

And, of course, that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

Even If It's Hopeless

Excerpted from The Mayor of Castro Street:  The Life and times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts, ©1982:

Harvey himself never talked much about his childhood in Woodmere and Bayshore, except for two stories. First, the August afternoon a few weeks after his graduation when he was briefly picked up by police for indecent exposure. And then, there was the day his parents sat him down in 1943 to tell him about the brave Jews of Warsaw who were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded by Nazi troops. But they fought on anyway, not because they thought they could win, but because when something that evil descends on the world, you have to fight. Even if it's hopeless. 

By the time Harvey took his high school diploma, news of the Nazi Holocaust had shocked the world, especially the millions of American middle-class Jews who had grown to feel so secure. The Holocaust touched Milk doubly, in a way that he could not have imagined at that time. 

Before Hitler's rise, Germany had an active gay liberation movement that pressed for legal demands and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions asking for homosexual equality. But in 1936, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler issued the following decree: 

Just as we today have gone back to the ancient German view on the question of marriages mixing different races, so too in our judgment of homosexuality-- a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race-- we must return to the guiding Nordic principle, extermination of degenerates.

About a year later, Himmler ordered that gays be rounded up and sent to Level 3 camps-- the death camps. Gays wore pink triangles, so they would not be confused with Jews who wore yellow stars of David. Some estimates put the number of gays exterminated at over 220,000, the second largest category of Nazi genocide victims after Jews. 

This attempt at genocide efficiently squashed the only gay political movement in the Western world. Harvey Milk, meanwhile, was seven years old then, playing in the aisles of grandfather Morris' dry goods store. It would be years before ideas of gay equality rumbled again, this time in the United States.

The "indecent exposure," by the way, was a trumped-up charge the police used to harass gays at the time.  He had merely taken his shirt off in a park.

I really worry that we're about to see an assault on gay rights next.  The trumpists have successfully restricted Black voting rights and female reproductive rights, and there's no reason to believe they're going to rest on their laurels.

We've seen their playbook.

Going On

 

And that, of course, reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.