Department Of Let’s Get This Out Of The Way
Uh…Happy Birthday, USA?
‘Twould be the under-est of understatements to say that, this year, moiself doesn’t really feel much like hailing Independence Day. The holiday, which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, rings hollow this year, what with His Royal Orangeness – He Who Puts The Dick In Dictator (along with the vile Vance, traitorous Dick #2 ) – determined to send this nation tumbling ass-over-tit down the slope of authoritarianism. Meanwhile, #47’s butt-snogging, morally-deluded followers seek to replace the independence celebrated on July 4 for the slavish insurrection he instigated on January 6.
Thus, moiself be looking to the past for some wisdom…or just a moment’s diversion. I think the last time July 4 fell on a Friday was in 2014; searching through my blog post of that day for a #47-free excerpt, I see that I had other things on my mind:
Excerpts from The (made-in-China) Flag I’m Not Waving (7-4-14 ),
I can think of few better ways to celebrate our nation’s independence from hierarchical hegemony than to kick a hallowed institution. But, first….
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White People Problems – #568 In An Unending Series
The Warning That Ruins Lives
Don’t you, kinda yeah maybe well sure, want to know things? As in, when a certain variation of A Good Thing to Do has a deleterious or dangerous side effect, and there is a better version of or way to do The Good Thing ®, wouldn’t you want to know about it?
Another helpful hint – it’s too much to handle! Let the little #$&!s get melanoma!
Dateline: A Sunday morning, at the Oregon Zoo’s Cascade Grill. Two Mommy Friends ©, each accompanied by one ambulatory toddler and one infant in a stroller, are chatting outside the entrance doors to the café. One of the women is pregnant. Preggers Woman reaches into her stroller’s storage bag for an aerosol can of sunscreen and begins to spray her toddler’s legs. As the sunscreen mist envelops her child from toes to torso she complains to her friend about how she just read somewhere that pediatricians are advising parents to refrain from using spray sunscreen on their children, because
(a) spray-on sunscreens are not effective as the rub-in lotions, and
(b) children can inhale the sunscreen mist, which is harmful to their lungs.
“And I thought, really?”
PW rolls her eyes and snorts with disgust as she snaps the cap back on the spray bottle and tosses it in the stroller bag.
“I mean, really – it’s just so frustrating! So now what else can’t I give my kids?!”
What else can’t you give your kids?
How about lead paint?
Or an overdose of Tylenol, or….?
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And now, let the kicking begin.
The Honeymoon Is Over
Although the relationship was doomed from the start, I’m surprised more friends didn’t intervene and say, “He’s just not that into you.”
I refer to the liberal religiositati’s [1] high hopes for the latest head of the Catholic church, Pope Francis. He threw them a few bones about caring more about the poor than about divisive social issues and they were practically tripping all over themselves, using their ACLU membership cards to mop up their deferential drool.
It may be true that, as one friend put it, P. Francis is “better than the Nazi,” [2] but talk about damning with faint praise.
PF has consistently dodged questions about raising the status of women in his church, and last week responded to a journalist’s query about the underlying misogyny in the Catholic church by making a “joke” :
Francis replied: “The fact is that woman was taken from a rib.”
PF then laughed “heartily” before saying: “I’m joking. That was a joke.”
That’s one wacky dude! Hard to believe he traded in a promising stand-up comedy career for vows of celibacy and poverty.
Living the vow of poverty, Vatican-style.
Not only is the latest high priestess of Isis/RC witch doctor/holy chicken bone mumbler pope maintaining his church’s separate and unequal gender wall, he seems prone to reinforcing it, as when he spoke a few weeks back about, the need for “… fertility in maintaining a Christian marriage.”
Pay attention to whatever the man in the dunce cap pointy hat – surely a signifier of supreme intellectual aptitude if there ever was one – tells y’all.
Yo, Catholic married couples: Your Jesus (according to RC doctrine) never married and was childless; therefore; it logically follows that to be faithful to this Jesus and his church you should marry and must have children. If it breeds, it leads! Or…something. [3]
Why anyone heeds the admonitions of a childless celibate who presumes to lecture other people on the supposed virtues – and strictures – of a breeding marriage…. RCs, get your heads out of those orifices.
Or perhaps Francis the talking mule O’Pope was trying to divert attention from the latest Catholic business as usual scandal. “Our own little Holocaust,” is what an Irish Mirror writer called the discovery of the bodies of ~ 800 toddlers and babies who died of disease and malnutrition in the Irish institutions that housed their unmarried mothers, who were shamed and damned by the cultural stigma against sexually active females and “bastard” babies – a stigma invented, promoted, and implemented by the church.
On the really, really dim bright side, will yet another set of these latest revelations finally help to break the RC stranglehold on Irish culture, law and politics?
“After the revelations that Irish priests raped countless little boys and Irish nuns beat and starved countless little girls forced to work in the Magdalene laundries, we can’t take any more. The children in the homes were even used as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies to test vaccines… Never again should the Catholic Church dare to point the finger at any young woman contemplating abortion, or lecture on the sanctity of human life.”
The Week (6-20-2014)
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That was fun, wasn’t it?
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Department Of They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To
Television show theme songs, that is.
They still make TV shows; however, it seems to have become more common in the “contemporary classic” era to repurpose existing songs – e.g., The Rembrandts’ I’ll Be There For You, which was used as the theme song for Friends .
But according to a study I just made up, you couldn’t do better than those Golden Years Of TV Theme Songs, ® when composers were paid to come up with original instrumentals – such as the thundering, surf’s-up vibe of film composer Morton Stevens theme to Hawaii Five-0, (later a hit for The Ventures [4]), and Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie psych-out theme for The Twilight Zone; Alexander Courage’s theme to the original Star Trek series.
Or you had actual, narrative, songs-with-annoyingly-catchy-tunes-whose-lyrics-explained-the-show, ala the themes to Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch or The Addams Family. [5]
But that melodious passage which awakened moiself at 2:05 AM Tuesday morning – I figure if you’re going to have a bout of classic TV show theme song induced insomnia, you can’t do better than having arguably the best television main theme ever, with its urgent, hypnotic syncopation (notable for being in 5/4 time), Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin’s Grammy-winning Theme to Mission: Impossible.
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Department Of Pondering Life Choices
Dateline: Thursday, circa 1 pm. Enjoying my sushi lunch at Happy Elephant restaurant [6] in Manzanita, which now serves sushi as well as Thai food.
Sometimes, when I’m having a good meal in a restaurant, moiself wishes I’d followed up on going to medical school, so when the server stops by after I’ve had a chance to sample my food and asked me how everything is, I can honestly say, “It’s just what the doctor ordered!”
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Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself. Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [7]
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [8]
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May you have the odd (and hopefully, rare) pleasure of classic TV theme song insomnia;
May you never take family planning advice from celibate men wearing pointy hats;
May you find reasons to be hopeful on July 4;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Yeah, not an OED-recognized word. But it should be.
[2] The always observant SCM was referring to Joseph Ratzinger, better known by his slave name, Pope Benedict.
[3] No footnote here. Move along folks; there’s nothing to see.
[4] Pride of the Pacific northwest, an instrumental band out of Tacoma!
[5] Just try *not* to snap your fingers.
[6] Formerly, A Mighty Thai.
[7] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[8] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
