Thanks for checking in, so to speak (…er, write). I am taking moiself on holiday. From this Friday and through June, I will be posting blogs from the same time period of eight years ago (late May-June, 2014). New posts will return in early-mid July.
Until then, I hope y’all enjoy these reruns (or at least gain a modicum of petty amusement from making fun of them, and/or noting how NOT perspicacious my 2014 blatherings observations turned out to be). Perhaps they may spark some sense of déjà vu in you, or cause you to contemplate what you were doing and thinking in those pre-pandemic, pre-idiocy epidemic times (i.e., before the debacle that was #45).
Moiself apologizes for the fact that visuals (pictures; video clips) in the original posts may or may not be included.
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The Day of all Days
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the largest seaborne invasion in history, WWII’s Normandy Invasion, aka D-Day. My uncle, Sgt. Bill O’Malley, was one of the hundreds of US 82nd and 101st Division Airborne paratroopers dropped behind the German lines. How he ended up not being one of the 12,000 Allied casualties that day was a mystery to him, he would later tell his curious 4th grad niece — that would be me — who asked him about what he did in the war (a question, I later found out, adults almost never posed as Bill had made it plain, after being released from a hospital after the war ended for treatment for “Battle Fatigue” — also aka shell shock, what we now know to be PTSD — that he didn’t want to talk about it).
The enormity and audacity of such an operation…well, there are a many books about it. One of them, Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, which follows the exploits of a paratrooper division “Easy Company” from D-Day through the Battle of the Bulge to the German surrender, was made into arguably the best mini-series ever. You need to see it, if you haven’t already. I’m going to watch part of it tonight, and I’ll be thinking of my late uncle, my father, and the other paratroopers, whose courage and tenacity (a part of which was prompted by sheer circumstance and naivete — they so did not know what they were getting into) needs to be regularly retold, and honored.
The Flinging Blonde
That’s flinging blonde, not singing nun.
Dateline: June 1, out for my morning Nordic Walk on a sunny Sunday morning. I approach the grounds of the neighborhood junior high school and see two high school age girls walking on the sidewalk ahead of me. One girl has long (almost waist-length), shiny, thick, straight blonde hair. Long Blondie does two cartwheels in the grass beside the sidewalk. She springs to her feet after each flip and snaps her head forward and back, which causes her hair to cascade over her face and then down her back. She ceases her cartwheels but continues to fling her head, now from side to side, flipping her golden mane, which shimmers in the sunlight.
Look at this hair! Look what I can do with it! Look at me!
And yes, she had really, really, really beautiful hair.
Stop me before I fling again.
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Speaking of things to fling…
How Much More Clear Does it Have to Get?
There are people, in media and social media outlets, who continue to twist themselves with mental gymnastics worthy of a Cirque de Soleil contortionist in order to assert that misogyny was not a prime motivating factor in the Isla Vista Shootings.
Uh huh.
The killer left a detailed, logically composed narrative – a 140 page manifesto – spelling it out. The killer was a regular participant in chat room forums promoting misogyny, andwas active in the men’s rights (MRA) forums promoting misogyny, and made YouTube videos in which he professed his misogyny, and….
In every facet of his life, he professed and documented his hatred of women. But hatred of women, according to some denialists, could not have been the prime motivation of his killing spree. These denialists also assert that if we talk about misogyny, and about the parts of our culture that treat misogyny as normal, even acceptable or even entertaining, we are sensationalizing or “politicizing” a tragic event.
Sic ’em, Greta Christina:
“When men in Islamist theocracies assault, rape, and kill women, we have no problem calling it misogynist hatred. When they explicitly state that their motivation is to enforce God’s gender roles and put women in their place, we have no problem calling it misogynist hatred. And we have no problem laying the blame, in large part, on the culture that teaches this hatred, and on the thousands of ways both large and small that Islamist theocratic culture teaches this despicable concept of women.
“So why is it so hard to see the Isla Vista shootings as motivated by misogyny?”
In her righteously WTF? blog post Elliot Rodgers and Misogyny Denialism, [1] author and activist Christina calls out the b.s. in her usual, incisive, rational and pissed off prose…even as she she recognizes the motivations behind our desire to recognize the reality of our culture’s underlying misogyny: because it is just to damn painful, and frustrating, and humiliating.
Read it and weep. Better yet, read it and act.
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Is the Paint Dry Yet?
Tuesday evening, the last High School Senior Class Awards ceremony I will ever have to snore through have the opportunity to attend. Belle received four academic awards; local merchants and community organizations gave out community scholarships…and oh, how a certain someone in the audience wanted to sandpaper her eyeballs in frustration when she heard yet another well-meaning, slow-talking older gent preface his bestowal of an award with, “Let me say a few words about the history of….”
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The Snark Watch, Day Seven
MH and I made a bet as to who would make the first snarky comment re Belle’s tattoo: family friend JWW, or MH’s mother. [2] I will not reveal who bet on whom. Thankfully, neither of us has (so far) won the bet.
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Coming Attractions [3]
* In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
(Mark Twain)
* When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
(Oscar Wilde)
* Paris is always a good idea.
(Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina)
* The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald)
To err is human. To loaf is Parisian
(Victor Hugo)
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May the erring and loafing begin, and surely the hijinks shall ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
[1] I know, in last week’s post, I refused to mention his name. There it is.
[2] MH’s parents flew out from Florida last week, visiting for Belle’s high school graduation.
[3] Why are there only three footnotes in this post?
