perfidy

I leave the world for two months, and look what happens. Der Komissar shows us the new lineup of Blog Stamps. Worthy of note, even in an outstanding array of filatelic art, are the following:

For Allah Pundit:

I have to say, that really kicks ass. For the USS Clueless and for Q and O, we have these:

And for the Commissar himself, this is very apropos:

I always thought that the smurfs were commies. Given that their was only one female smurf, did the workers share ownership of the means of production?

Last Sunday, the family unit was up in Hagerstown, MD where Mrs. Buckethead's band was playing a festival at a city park in that fair burgh. The weather was perfect, an excellent night for listening to bluegrass in thte great outdoors. And I was completely unprepared for the deeply emotional experience I was soon to undergo.

From my youngest days, my favorite candy (and I am largely lacking a sweet tooth, confections I actually liked were rare) was the super rope. Three feet of red (super ropes would never discriminate against any particular red fruit) licorice goodness, available at most gas stations in Northeastern Ohio. Up until about five years ago, I took the super rope for granted. Super ropes will always be there for me, I thought. Months would go by where I didn't even think of them, only to catch a glimpse of slender, plastic wrapped fruity delights hanging from the corner of an end cap at the Speedway. Bliss regained! The longer they had lingered in the back of the station, the better they got. Some might call a five year old super rope stale, but to me it was perfection. Oenophiles might have some inkling of my transports of ecstacy drinking a Chateau Rothschild '52, but somehow I doubt that even they could appreciate the subtle evolution of flavor in a super rope over years of careful aging.

Then, super ropes disappeared. I wasn't even aware of their passing, so blase was I. But one day I looked for a super rope, and none were to be found. Speedways, BP, Exxon, Texaco, Sunoco, Shell all barren. Candy stores had no idea of what I wanted. I grieved, but moved on. I moved to Northern Virginia - and made a desultory effort to find my lost love in the gas stations of the Commonwealth, but to no avail. Even Google, that finder of the unfindable, was no help. Typing "super ropes" into the magic box yielded no matches.

Sir John of the Nine Teeth was feeling peckish and uninterested in mommy's singing, so I wandered over to the park's concession stand. Bought a soft pretzel and a soda. And there, off to the side in an unassuming display, a box full of super ropes. I doubted the evidence of my senses. My world view rocked, I nearly fell to the ground in thanksgiving for this unsought boon.

I bought twenty of them. And now, I have a link that will allow me to purchase more super ropes through the magic of the interweb whenever I so desire.

Fig Newtons are really, really tasty.

Just stretching the fingers, remembering how to google, and kick starting the rusty, two cycle, 2.5hp motor that is my noggin.
 

The wife is in Maryland, doing the band thing for some conspicuously consuming stingy yacht monkeys. The boy is asleep on the couch, preventing me from being asleep on the couch. The railing is replaced on the stairway, the taxes are done (just in time, my extension was running out), the laundry is washed and folded, and I have no desire to enter the jungle that is my garage. I have finished the book proposal, except for editing. Resumes are sent. Email answered. I have no choice but to blog.

For the first several weeks of this hiatus, I was insanely busy and had every excuse to not blog. I didn't watch the news, because I was fixing the house or burying my face in some stripper's tits in Vegas. Good excuses. But as time went by, I wasn't even reading the blog. Not so much for lack of time, but for shame, guilt and remorse.

As a cofounder of this blog, I have responsibilities. Not large ones, granted, but responsibilities nevertheless. And I had been shirking them. And the longer I went without posting, the harder it was to face my shame, read the backlog and start posting again.

I can now tell you that I have faced my fears, conquered my guilt, and sent my shame to its room to sulk. I'm back! Not that that will do you, my esteemed reader, any good because I have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world. I might have noticed if terrorists nuked DC, but only because I'm in the fallout zone downwind of the city. Short of that, for me its still late May.

While my son slumbers, I will read the news and see how much piquant and incisive commentary I can serve up before he wakes.

Michael Totten is back from Tunisia and posting up a storm. Go read! Make sure you catch all his travelogue posts especially, as he has a real knack for lyrical and evocative descriptive writing.

It's finally happened! After years of delays, the Light Sport Aircraft regulations have finally been published by the FAA. Light Sportplanes are small, two-seat planes with significant limits on engines, payload, and gross weight. They have very low stall speeds, are comparatively easy to fly, and are dramatically less expensive than conventional certified aircraft.

With any luck this will usher in a new age of innovation in the small aircraft business, and make flying much more affordable for members of the general public. American kitplane manufacturers have been doing fantastic design work for a long time now, but have never been able to sell their creations in finished form to the public, who will now be able to buy at least some of them. The market so far has been occupied by European companies, whose aviation regulations permitted the "advanced ultralight" designation.

Aero-News has a good summary.

It's nice to see the jobs being created, and the cost of flying lowered.

Thanks to Phil Dennison for making my day! Thanks also to James Lileks for making his day. I shall now make your day. Be sure to click through all the way to the end.

NDR, this is your only warning. Do not click the above link. It will upset you. You have been warned.

Jeff Smith, better known as The Frugal Gourmet, died last Wednesday. It's a measure of how far his star has fallen in the wake of an alleged sex scandal that we haven't heard about this until now. Through the 1980s, he was the biggest name in cooking, second perhaps to Julia Child. I still have and use several of his cookbooks, as I've found that his recipes tend to be pretty bulletproof, if sometimes unexciting.

Posting has been light recently thanks to *actual work* and actual *freelance writery,* though not of the paying kind despite my too-clever-by-half headline.

Will usual volume resume shortly? Who cares!

Rather nasty storm last night on the frontier. I was certainly surprised, because weather is usually mild here. Even summer thunderstorms blowing in from the west or south that start out violent have vented most of their anger and energy on New York or Connecticut- as so many of us will- before they get here. Typically we'll get some snarling, but it's brief and only signals sustained rain to come.

Last night was different. Between 2.30, when I was startled awake by what sounded like a tank's main gun firing (CRACK!!!) beneath my window, until the worst had blown over and I got back to sleep around 3.40, was sustained electrical disturbance and violent atmospheric shockwaves therefrom. Or what I used to call "thunderinlightning".

With me not being accustomed to sustained atmospheric violence, the storm gods certainly had my undivided attention. I couldn't remember the last time I experienced such a storm; there wasn't even that much rain, really. But it was certainly the first time I noticed the smaller subtleties within the larger cacophony.

Different thunders: sustained, tearing ones; low rumbling ones; sharp violent ones. The tank gun "CRACK"s were sudden and powerful but over in a split second. The low rumblers were like artillery, shaking the entire house for several seconds and even feeling reverberations in my own chest. Others still did all of these things at once, or maybe simultaneous discharges made it seem so. Oftentimes with many every minute. And it went on...and on...and on, for over an hour.

It was the light show though that made a true spectacle. Everything was dark, with no ambient light, then lightning flashes would illuminate the whole room, but just for a second, in that purplish glow only lightning delivers and in a weird, pulsating strobe. And as with the thunder, several times a minute for an hour.

The whole experience was Studio 54 on the eyes and the Western Front on the ears.

Ross emails from the great white north:

Weird little DNS errors prevent me from entering this, so I'm just forwarding it to you...

I am currently engaged in some serious R+R on the west coast, up in that Canada place. My gracious hosts have provided me with living quarters that are possibly larger than my house...I've been out on the water, over to the mountains; I've sat on docks watching birds, listened to locals asking for a birthday joint, seen the place where a local grower tragically crashed his harley two nights ago and killed his wife...been on a sailboat at 10:30pm, still in the light, trolling over a reef, catching nothing...i marvel at what my cousin and husband have been able to do out here...it occurs to me that we are all total pussies compared to him ;) i mean, i am typing this in the house he built by hand, a 3000 sqare foot house with beautiful hardwood floors on five acres with its own orchard and swimming hole and five hundred fee of split rail fence, two workshops, a sawmill (that made the lumber for the house)...and i have trouble just organizing my mail. ouch!

people out here just DO things. they do things a lot of people have forgotten how to do. there's ocean and water, children with bikes instead of video games, and everything has to come here on the ferry.

i'll be coming back in two days...

Eric Marciano, daring filmmaker, swashbuckling adventurer, and true-blue, apple-pie (with zabaglione or gelato) loving yet gently demented American presents a showing of his films Narrowcast and The Age of Insects.

Tuesday, 15 June, 7 pm, the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East 3rd St (at Ave A).

Joe Bob Briggs considers "The Age of Insects", "the 'Citizen Cane' of underground films". Take your rosebud downtown and check 'em out.

Now I need a nap..

I got 172/200. Beat that, I dare ya!

Ray Charles on all our money.

I like it!

From Crescat Sententia

At Books-a-Million tonight (no, I don't normally go there, but it was next to the wine store), I could not find a copy of The Federalist Papers, though I searched in American politics, philosophy, and the other likely categories. When I asked the store clerk where I'd find it, he said, "Oh, I shelved that yesterday. It's in fiction."

what?

"It's in fiction and literature. It's been declared a classic."

[continued look of skepticism]

"I agree it makes no sense, but that's where it is."

[figures the guy has to shelve things where he's told to shelve them]

Wal-Mart is making changes to its employee policies, starting with a half-assed attempt to hire a few women in management roles. The article is sketchy on details, but this seems like Wal-Mart are pursuing pretty much half a solution to one part of their many problems.

These small concessions nothing compared to what a wildcat strike would accomplish (to the barricades! *sings* "Arise ye workers from your slumbers, arise ye prisoners of want!") Except, of course, that hourly retail employees aren't unionized and the labor movement of the 20th century has done its job and is now guarding its gains, at least where it's not run by crooks.
Even if that weren't the case the old-school labor movement cannot address the needs of today's service workers, who are more replaceable, economically marginal, and diffuse than ever before.

Well, it's good to know that in the absence of a labor advocacy group working on behalf of retail and service employees, a good old publicly humiliating corporate auto-da-fe can make things happen.

Can anyone tell me if the above referenced song from the early 1990s was New Edition, Boyz II Men, or Bell Biv Devoe? Bless my heart, I can't remember!

Check out Spirit of America, a nonprofit organization whose mission is

to expand the abilities of Americans serving abroad to improve the quality of life of people at the grass roots level. Our objectives are to:
• Increase the reach, scale and impact of the informal humanitarian activities that take place on the front lines in troubled regions.
• Contribute charitable goods that can have a positive, practical and timely impact in the local communities where American personnel are involved.
• Improve foreign perceptions of the American people and our presence abroad.

When I harp over and over on the importance of winning the "hearts and minds" of the people we libervade (not to mention the people we just sell stuff to), this is just what I'm talking about. Better yet, blogger "Armed Liberal" of Begging to Differ is their new COO. Sweet! (and good luck to him.)

Last week I was at a wedding where all the bridesmaids exchanged their silk shoes for flip-flops at the reception. The kicker is that the flip-flops light up when you walk. There's a little capacitor or something in the sole that converts kinetic energy into electricity and causes an array of LEDs in the strap to flash in random patterns of purple, pink and white with each step. My wife was in the wedding party; she got a pair. In addition to being super-fun, they're also mad comfortable. They were $7 at Wal-Mart.

Can you imagine what a US Marine could do with 100 pairs of child-sized self-powered light-up flip flops in Iraq?

A Monterey whale-watching trip went from scenic ocean vistas and cute wildlife to abbatoir in the time it takes to say "Shamu". A pod of six killer whales, which later grew to 17, attacked a gray whale calf and its mother:

"Instead of gentle giants lolling in the sea, they came upon a life-or- death struggle as a pack of six killer whales attacked a gray whale calf while its mother valiantly fought to shield her 8-ton baby... as whale watchers looked on with a mixture of awe and sadness, mother killer whales -- the most experienced hunters -- took turns ramming head- first, like 6-ton torpedoes, into the calf's soft underbelly, their force nearly knocking it out of the water, while others leapt atop the 20-foot baby, trying to drown it."

As usual, the humans witnessing the event were horrified by the display of unfiltered, unfriendly nature. No commercials, no editors, no narrator, no cute and fuzzy, no political correctness, no value judgements. Just nature.

"To the relief of the spectators, the clash had a happy ending: The 40-ton mother gray whale, rolling like a log to shed attackers and lifting the calf on her back above the attack, led her battered and bleeding baby to shallow coastal waters -- where the orcas do not venture."

The "happy ending" was that the calf survived this attack. I guess the corollary, that these orcas and their young have to go another day without food, must also be a "happy ending" to these people. Phew!

I think they should probably amend their mantra to read "Save the (cute) Whales". The predatory ones are much too mean.

I am off to the mountains of Pennsylvania (the western side of the state, not the hoity-toity New-Yorkified eastern half with your liberty bells and your unaccented English) for a week; I trust my cobloggers will carry on in my absence. Carry on like a bunch of howler monkeys, that is! Oh, ho ho ho!

If the world happens to end in that time, well, hey. I'd love to say it's been great knowin' ya.

Work/life interfere. Blogging curtailed.

Oldsmoblogger:

I'd rather live in a country where torture is never justified, but where there are enough of us who would throw ourselves on a grenade for our fellow human beings.

Well said.

By the way, thinking of Oldsmo things, my wife and I just bought a used Oldsmobile to replace the faltering but stalwart Great Black Beast of the North. Great car (the new car's pretty good too.) On Friday I found myself in New York rush hour traffic on the way to a wedding in Jersey, in an Oldsmobile (my Oldsmobile), listening to Norah Jones and still wearing the tie I wore to work. It occurred to me: no way am I a kid any more.