Posted 8:42 AM by Angie Schultz

Up Chuck!

UPDATE: See bottom of post.

Niles and I laughed the other day when we read this article:

Are Americans ready for a possible Queen Camilla?

That's the question Prince Charles and his new bride may be hoping to answer next week as they embark on an eight-day tour of the United States that will take them to New York, Washington and San Francisco.

...


But royal-watchers say it could be a big challenge, given how hugely popular Princess Diana remains in the United States even eight years after her death.

Are there Americans who really give a damn about whether there's a Queen Camilla? I mean, there may be a few rabid Anglophiles who take this a lot more seriously than the British do; and then there are the avid readers of the National Enquirer, who are also deeply concerned about whether their pets' quarters are properly feng shuied; and finally there are those who are informed enough to know to shake their heads when reading about the royals in the Fluffy News snippets in the newspaper (right next to the current starlet marriage league tables). The latter group don't really care, and the former two groups are surely very small. In any case, Americans are kind of out of the loop as far as approval of British royalty goes. As some of us keep pointing out, we fought a war to make sure we'd never have to care again. Surely you've read about it. It was in all the papers.

But, let's assume for the moment that the opinions of the 5% of Americans who give a damn are really really important to C&C, that somehow their approval will persuade Britons that they ought to accept Camilla as queen.

Given that, we see that Charles has exhibited the keen sense of PR that the current crop of British royals is known for, and is planning to lecture Bush about being a mean old bazootyhead to those poor Muslims:

The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11.

Right, like all those concentration camps and Koran burnings and lynchings and whatnot. Or maybe it's just that we still openly allow piggy banks to be displayed, in front of Allah and everybody.

The future head of the Anglican Church (where he'll fit right in) goes on:

"I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational," the Prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.

Unlike those nice mullahs in Iran, with their Great Satans and their martyrs and their rivers of blood and so forth.

Good job, Charles. It's a just as well no one here really cares or matters, or you couldn't sneak Charwoman Camilla into Buckingham Palace.

That Telegraph article states that Charles is actually trying to woo the American media to the Camilla camp, in which case the Islam PR campaign makes much more sense. Anybody who scolds George Bush will be a hero to them.

UPDATE: According to the Australian program Media Watch, as reported by Tim Blair, the piggy bank ban story was "hogwash".

Also, Sky News reports that when asked about the upcoming tour of Charles and Camilla, 81% of Americans breathlessly asked, "Who?" Just as I suspected. (I didn't suspect that Sky could have such a sucky website. Their news crawl is making some of their ads flash off and on in my browser. Animals. Couldn't find a print-friendly version.)

Posted 11:37 AM by Angie Schultz

AIIEEE! IT'S THE BLOG!

Iowahawk has wrestled several classic sci-fi movies into a blender and whipped them into a pastiche for your enjoyment: THE BLOG.

Not one of his better efforts, in my opinion, although it does contain the line:

"Oh, Biff, your hot rod was magnificent!" said Darla, lighting a cigarette. "I would join you and Betsy for a three-way science adventure any day."

The best part was the terrific photoshop job he did on the Criterion Extra-Sooper Dooper Iridium LaserDisc artwork. His version replaces Steve McQueen with Arch Hall, Jr. AIIEEE! RUN!

Via Rand Simberg.

Posted 1:06 PM by Angie Schultz

Where's the Outrage?

The front page of today's Houston Chronicle carries a story about the new TV series Commander in Chief with the headline: "Madame President on TV Stirs Political Intrigue".

The picture of Geena Davis accompanying the article is captioned "Some conservatives taking Geena Davis' presidential role seriously". Also, the subheading on the continuation page inside the paper reads, "Some conservatives are outraged." The picture, caption, and subhead are not available on-line.

The fourth paragraph of the story says:

Some conservatives denounce the show as a liberal Trojan horse for a 2008 presidential campaign by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. Others find that laughable.

The story has twenty-nine paragraphs (all quite short, of course), and it isn't until the 25th paragraph that any actual outrage is reported. That would be the outrage of Rush Limbaugh, who was "exercised" when Geena Davis reported that she was "honored" when she first set foot on the show's Oval Office set. Limbaugh says, "It's a TV show!" Presumably he meant that she should get a grip, remembering it's fiction and not reality. I can see how she'd feel it was an honor to be chosen to play a woman president, but only if you thought a woman president was something new and astonishing. See below.

The next paragraph does feature actual, spittle-emitting, red-faced, bellowing outrage:

Neal Boortz, a syndicated radio host based in Atlanta, wrote on his Web site that a lot of listeners have been phoning in wondering whether the show is an overt setup for Clinton.

Can you feel the OUTRAGE?? No? Sorry, that's all there is. Yes, this and the Limbaugh paragraph are all the "outrage" reported. Ah, but maybe there's some actual foaming and writhing on Boortz's site, eh? Um, no.

In that post, Boortz says he's concluded that the show is designed to promote Hillary Clinton's presidential run, based on the fact that her former communications director is one of the writers, and her (former?) social secretary is a special advisor to the program. I think that's jumping to conclusions, myself, but the point is that Boortz's OUTRAGE! is somehow missing.

The article also quotes a couple of local female Republican bigwigs who agree that it's a Clinton promo, but are not noticeably outraged about it. There's a quote from a Democrat who's outraged at Bush, though.

There's also this:

Before stepping down as executive producer, [series creator Rod] Lurie told reporters that if Clinton does get the nomination in 2008, "We are all taking the credit."

It's that kind of talk that has Internet blogs and some elements of conservative talk radio up in arms.

Whatever. Sounds like a joke to me. I wonder what happens if Condi gets the nomination. Will they take credit then, too?

Frankly, if someone's got to be outraged, it should be the public, for the way that the producers have been patting themselves on the back for their progressive courage in presenting us with a woman! President! Boy, howdy! We're really in the 21st century now!

Sure, Gramps. You do realize this isn't 1975, right?

Apparently not, because they're trying to get away with drivel like this:

The intrepid President Allen, or "Mac" to her intimates, routinely juggles mutinous Cabinet members, bratty kids, foreign policy, political foes, terrorism and a slightly traumatized husband called "the first gentleman."

Urp! Oops, sorry.

In the last episode, first son Horace got into a fight with kids at school who mocked his sweater-clad father as "a wuss." Later, in a confrontation with his father in the White House kitchen, Horace yelled, "You're a national joke, Dad!"

Why isn't this a national joke? The shelf life on that sort of thing expired at about the same time the Mary Tyler Moore Show went off the air.

The show does have one big futuristic, paradigm-breaking aspect: the President's an independent. Now that, I don't believe.

Posted 1:20 PM by Angie Schultz

Great Moments in Prose

In the mornings Niles and I read the newspaper. When he's gone I usually don't bother, preferring to get my news from the Web. Niles is a dedicated newspaper reader though (which is why he's not better-informed), and reads the backlog of papers after he returns from his trip.

Which is the reason why I didn't read the special K section -- a hurricane retrospective -- in the October 7th Houston Chronicle until yesterday, and so missed this priceless example of journalistic prose by Mike Tolson:

In this tale of two cities, there was no best of times -- only bad and worse. One lost its confidence, the other its very core. In the space of a month, the two largest cities on the Gulf Coast were humbled by a rude convergence of climate, geography and bad luck. Houston and New Orleans, who share so little by way of history, now are linked indefinitely by tragedy.

Two cities, two storms. Born near the Bahamas, where they emerged as little more than a gleam in a forecaster's eye, Katrina and Rita found their destiny hundreds of miles away, their last steps a brutal challenge to the hubris of those who would establish major settlements where great storms go to die.

WRITING!

Judging by this snippet reported by Tim Blair, I believe James "I root for hurricanes" Wolcott would approve:

In the week following Katrina's marauding of the Gulf Coast, American journalism magically awakened, arose from its glass coffin, and roused itself to impromptu glory...

To hear Fox New's Shepard Smith release an angry howl that hasn't been heard since Allen Ginsberg went atomic, to see CNN's courtly Anderson Cooper tell Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu to wake up and smell the corpses (she got the message, later threatening to punch President Bush if the feds kept bad-mouthing local officials), to witness the sobbing breakdown of Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard as he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press about the drowning death of an emergency worker's elderly mother, who had waited four days for a rescue that never came--it was like removing a lid and and releasing the pent-up truth.

OK, for that, I need a bigger font: WRITING!

So journalism, then, is redefined as overwrought emotionalism, rather than the disinterested pursuit of facts. Obviously Mike Tolson is bound for journalistic glory. Bon voyage!

(By the way, the inclusion of Aaron Broussard's fifteen seconds of fame is particularly apt, since it was all emotion with only trace amounts of pent-up truth.)

Posted 10:07 PM by Angie Schultz

Let's Do Lunchbox

It started with this Tim Blair column in the Bulletin. Near the end, he proposes a new TV show, Bring the Bakhtiaris back from Afghanistan!. (The Bakhtiari family, allegedly fleeing political repression in Afhanistan, sought asylum in Australia. There were a number of difficulties with their case -- for one thing, they were evidently Pakistanis, not Afghans, and I believe some of the kids did some dumb things. They became a cause celebre among Australia's extensive Caring Community. They were eventually sent back to Pakistan.)

So I was thinking that's too long a name, they should just call it Bakhtiari, and could have a catchy repetitive theme song like the old Daktari show. In a fit of nostalgia, I googled up Daktari, and found (er, but not at that site) that it was produced by Ivan Tors, who produced the other beloved nature/adventure series Sea Hunt, Flipper, and Gentle Ben.

But he also did a series I'd never heard of, Men into Space, which starred William Lundigan as Col. Ed McCauley. Here's the IMDB listing.

Wow! I'd been looking everywhere for Col. Ed McCauley, just not lately. Sometime in the 1980s I bought a lunchbox featuring Colonel Ed McCauley: SPACE EXPLORER! I think I bought it for twenty-five or maybe fifty cents -- that's cents. It's listed here for $378. That's dollars. More if you have the vacuum bottle (which mine does not). Of course, that's for one in mint condition, and mine is not.

Wish I'd been able to see that show. It was the subject of an AIAA dinner with speaker David Levinson last year, at the Ramada Inn in dear old Sunnyvale. He was to show two episodes. Man, I'm sorry I missed that.

The Lunchbox Pad has photos of some interesting lunchboxes, and the history of the beast. Part II shows both Hogan's Heroes and Star Trek lunchboxes. Wow!

I know I had several lunchboxes when I was a kid, I just don't remember what they were. The only one I remember for sure was an Archies lunchbox. I wasn't particularly fond of the Archies, it was probably just the best of the available lunchboxes at the store that day.

I had a vinyl lunchbox at one time. I don't remember the picture, but no one could forget the aroma of a garlic baloney sandwich, marinated for four unrefrigerated hours in vinyl fumes. I took garlic baloney because the garlic helped stave off the bacteria for a few minutes more. Occasionally I took peanut butter, which also soaked up the vinyl perfume nicely, and which would be a capital offense these days. Probably garlic baloney is too, as it is offensive to the sensitive undead-American community.

Ahhh, childhood. Smells like...lunch.

Posted 10:23 AM by Angie Schultz

Plucky Island Parochialism Fights Bush, er, Boche

Scott of the Daily Ablution regularly throws himself onto live grenades, reading the Guardian and the Independent so we don't have to. He has noticed an annoying trend in the Arts and Entertainment sections of the British media: no article is complete without a gratuitous swipe at America, Americans, American culture, or (this is the jackpot) George Bush. As examples, he offers this sighting of a story by Rupert Smith, about a giant hog:

But that's not to say that "Hogzilla" didn't have a point. It just wasn't the one producers intended. In its own little way, "Hogzilla" was a satire on America's culture of violence, dishonesty, stupidity and greed. The bad man no sooner saw Hogzilla than he longed to kill him. This he did with a bloody great gun, which would have brought down a dinosaur, let alone a big 'peeyug', as he put it. The farmers and ranchers were all, apparently, terrified of being invaded by organised groups of super-intelligent peeyugs, who may or may not have been linked to radical terrorist groups. 'Ah'd lahk to drop a nooclear bomb on 'em,' said one gentleman, unsurprisingly from Texas. The media-guzzling public were wilfully gulled by a photograph of a good ol' boy and his degraded victim.

In the comments to Scott's post, arlye rightly notes that should be "nucular", not "nooclear", for pity's sake.

Today Scott has another example, from a Mark Lawson article on Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize, which touches on English -- yes, English -- national pride as divined from the new Wallace and Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit:

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while it has the defence of being a Plasticine fantasy, is also guilty of sentimentalising and simplifying England; but unexpectedly this vision no longer feels like the concoction of a 'heritage' country for export but as a heroic refusal to bend to American expectation. In a culture enraged by US arrogance and expansionism, parochialism becomes a form of radicalism and resistance.

This new fashionability - indeed even political correctness - of militant Englishness is a consequence of the Iraq war...

Would that it were! Then we might see some ass kicked (see below).

With all modesty, I must point out that I've noticed this trend before, writing about it (in passing) here. In that post I report on "Oscar-winning animator" Bob "Who?" Godfrey's pronouncement about Aardman Animation (makers of Wallace and Gromit):

[Godfrey] is equally blunt about Aardman's five-film deal (or "Faustian pact" as he calls it) with DreamWorks. "In this country, we have a Rolls-Royce mentality. In America, they have a Model T Ford mentality...

(That's a quote from a Guardian article.)

Well, looky here! The movie whose defiant parochialism gives Mark Lawson such a warm spurt of English pride is part of that Faustian pact with DreamWorks, imperialist churners-out of mass-produced dreck for the lumpenproletariat. Huh.

This sort of thing was very common in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. The cheeky "What's on TV Today?" section typically would have an entry something like this fake-but-accurate offering:

"The Agony of Africa (It's All Your Fault)" (SBS, 7 pm) tells the story of a fish dying on a Gambian beach, almost within reach of a starving child. The film cuts rapidly between the fish and the child as they eye each other in their last moments, filling the spaces in between with newsreel footage of the Vietnam War, the Watts Riots, Hiroshima, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, etc. In the end, seagulls swoop down to pluck out their eyes. While the production is grim and uncompromising, difficult to watch, it is infinitely more rewarding than the kind of mass-produced American rubbish available on the commercial channels."

After years of this nonsense, I've decided that I can't beat 'em, so I'm joining 'em. I shall take a single episode of a British television show and extract a world of unflattering meaning from it, while smugly congratulating my culture for its superiority, preening at my perspicacity, and balancing a red rubber ball on my nose. You'll have to take my word for the last, of course.

The other day I saw an episode of the BBC/WGBH series Foyle's War, about an English police detective during WWII. The series is several years old now, but this was the first episode ("The French Drop", by the way) I'd seen.

Foyle must investigate a dodgy-seeming suicide which leads him to a school for "dirty tricks" and a turf war between competing intelligence agencies. In the end, Foyle delivers an impassioned (well, for an Englishman), inappropriate tirade against the saboteur-school. They teach people hand-to-hand combat! And psychology! And blowing stuff up!

Now, his wrath might've been understandable if they'd assassinated a recalcitrant Cabinet minister (even a German one) during the show. Then he could wax eloquent on the subject of whether resorting to dirty tricks, even in desperation, knocks your cause from its moral high ground, and puts you on the same plane as your enemy.

But the episode (obliquely) makes this argument even though the greatest crimes committed by the organization were 1) defiling a corpse, and 2) lying to police. And the latter wouldn't have occurred if someone in authority had quashed the investigation in the beginning, as should have been done.

In short, the British can no longer abide the thought of even the most minor crimes in the pursuit of victory, even in the "Good War", even against the Nazis. Emptying a single grave puts you on the level of those who fill mass graves. I turned to Niles. "The British have become pussies," I said, resorting to unusually crude language in my indignation. "They're doomed. You're not going back."

Maybe the feisty parochialism of the Were-Rabbit will save them.

Posted 11:29 AM by Angie Schultz

The Pong of the Dead, the Pitfall of the Damned

From Damian Penny comes the news that this year's Nobel Laureate in literature is none other than: Harold Pinter. Damian reproduces a Pinter poem, and links to another. Pinter's poetry inspires comments like "awesomely bad", which I think is being over-kind.

'Course, Pinter's prize is for his plays, not his poetry. Actually, it was probably more for his politics than his plays; the BBC article talks as much about his political posturing as it does about his work. (That last clause saved me from a dangerous alliterative meltdown. Hmmm: Political Poseur Pinter Procures Prize for Plays, Not Poems. There, got that out of my system.) And Ginny, in the comments to her post at Chicagoboyz, notes that Pinter's heyday as a playwright was from 1957 to 1965, suggesting that his politics was the deciding factor in today's award.

Perhaps I'm wrong, though. The Nobel committee's timing could be a desperate attempt to hand Pinter the trinket before he disgraces himself completely. According to this Guardian article, Pinter has given up writing plays, but "I haven't stopped writing poems," he said ominously, as in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed of fresh starts in new, nobler careers, like telemarketing.

People have been given multiple scientific Nobels when they've been in on more than one important discovery, and two organizations have multiple Peace prizes, but I don't know if they would award multiple Literature prizes. I gather those are given out for a lifetime's work.

Well, perhaps if Pinter manages to hang on another decade or so, he can win a Peace prize. Surely his poetry will advance the cause of peace! Here's a popular portion of Pinter's peace-provoking poetry:

God Bless America

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

For a critique of this poem, see the Weekly Standard's J. Bottum. He manfully refrains from puerile judgments like "awesomely bad". Barely.

UPDATE: Peruse Pinter's priceless poetry at his official site. Also, this Times article quotes Pinter as saying his politics may have helped him win. Grizzled old sea captain Pinter (see the photo) seems to be recovering from wounds received in a fight with a flounder. (Says he fell.)

Posted 8:35 PM by Angie Schultz

You Can Take It with You

Back in August, just after Katrina, Michele Catalano asked the non-musical question:

You're evacuating your home town, knowing full well that the potential is there for your home to be gone by the time the storm is over. You can only take five things (I was going to say three, but I'll be generous) with you. What do you take?

Well, I had to make that decision, except that I didn't limit myself to five things. I had to limit myself to what I could carry on the plane.

Besides my clothes and so forth, what we took was:

• Niles's two laptops. Usually he keeps one at work, but I had him bring it home so I could have something to work on, in the event that our apartment was destroyed.
  
• Data. Data! Data! Data! I have two boxes about the size of shoe boxes, but narrower, in which I keep music CDs. I threw out the music and filled them with data CDs, packed with various scientific data I'm still (ostensibly) working on. I had half a box left over, so I put some rare music CDs in it. Niles took another box for me, filled with Zip disks and floppies. And of course there was the Holy Zip Disk of Current Stuff.
  
• Negatives. There's no way I could take the thousands of photographs I've taken over the years. I could take the negatives, though, which are in a big cardboard envelope. Of course, that lets out a few old family photographs. Need to digitize these one day, I guess.
  
• Notes. Several folders of notes for scientific projects I'm working on with other people.
  
• Rare books. I took four "rare" books, Kipling's Departmental Ditties and Barrack-Room Ballads, not really a rare edition (1913), but I couldn't bear to leave it behind. I have much older books, but they're packed away. I also took Aristocracy in England, by Adam Badeau, which is a rare old book (1887, I think). Also two copies of The Mystery Science 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, both of which are signed.
  
• Non-rare books. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Traitor's Sun, William Noble's Conflict, Action, and Suspense, Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure, and C.S. Forester's Death to the French. These all happened to be in the reading queue, and I grabbed them. Also, three science fiction magazines.
  
• Diary. I've kept a diary since 1982, but only really started to get serious about it ten years later. I think it runs to a couple dozen volumes now. No way to take them all. I took my current one, and a blank extra. I suppose if I kept it electronically, I wouldn't have to worry about that.
  
• Address book. So I could tell my relatives where I washed up.
  
• Hawaiian shirts. I wear them all the time, and they're expensive, so in they went. There are few occasions in which a Hawaiian shirt is not appropriate. Last December I wore them to a job interview! Of course, that was in Hawaii...
  
• The household gods. Don't ask.
  

I had another couple boxes of rare CDs to take, but they had to be left behind. Along with my postcard collection, Niles's stamp collection (he has every US stamp, he says), and a gazillion dollars in books.

Everything like that got dragged out of its place, was waterproofed as much as possible, and put in a safe place. My clothes were thrown out of their cheap plastic drawers to make room for the diaries and postcard collection. The heavy drugstore rack of paperback books was moved from its place by the living room window into the interior of the apartment. Less fortunate books were just covered over with plastic garbage bags in situ.

And then, of course, the hurricane was a big non-event and I had to spend days putting everything back. Stupid hurricanes.

Posted 9:10 PM by Angie Schultz

Postcard Passions

I'm still digging out the things that we put away "safely" for Hurricane Rita. As predicted, there are things that I now cannot find. If anyone finds two 8"x12" views of the Twelve Apostles, in black frames, wandering around lost, kindly direct them to me.

In digging through the non-rubble I found the postcards I bought at a stamp show on Sep. 17th. I didn't put them away because I meant to blog about them, and then the hurricane attacked and I never got a chance. So I'll bore you with them now.

Still working on that poem post, by the way.

Anyhow, these postcards. Postcard dealers buy up collections from estates (I guess), and so when you dig through their stock you find multiple postcards to the same people. One dealer I see all the time from Iola, Texas, is selling off his grandmother's postcard collection (he's old enough to be a grandfather himself). She got some nice old linen postcards back in the day, and I like the idea of having bought them from her grandson.

So "family postcards" turned out to be the theme of the other day's haul. First up are four postcards sent in the late-'70s to mid-'80s to the Baggins family, Bag End, The Shire. No, wait, it wasn't Baggins, but something similar; and it wasn't Bag End, but something different; and it wasn't the Shire, but Adelaide, Australia. One of them was addressed to "Master Frodo Baggins". OK, not really Frodo, but you get the idea. Three of the cards are in the same (rather curly, European-y) hand, signed "Grandma", and have a return address label stuck to them. Grandma, it seems, lived in Berkshire, England. She sends cards from Piccadilly Circus, Blackpool (a lovely, gaudily-lit night view there), and Tunisia. Doesn't everyone's grandma go to Tunisia? Ah, but she had a special purpose:

Yesterday went to the cemetery that your Dad's name is on the plaque [something?] of the likes of him. Put the posy at the bottom and the Major took a photo with me pointing to the name.

The postcard is from Hammamet, Tunisia, and a little googling turns up the Medjez-El-Bab cemetery near there. Here are some pictures by a Canadian who "does" military cemeteries, whatever that means. I couldn't find a list of names for Medjez-El-Bab, nor could I find a Baggins associated with the cemetery. Grandma's name is not Baggins, so it's possible that this is Mrs. Baggins's mother. Grandma's surname is much more ordinary, and I couldn't find it associated with the cemetery either. Of course, Grandma may have remarried, so if this is Mrs. Baggins's father we're talking about, I have no way of knowing his name.

I didn't read this card until I set out to write this post. Funny. The final of the Baggins' postcards isn't from Grandma, but it is from Berkshire, and mentions young Master Frodo being there.

Next up are some postcards I'd wished I'd bought more of. They're from "Jack" to his mother in River Edge, New Jersey. Obviously Jack was a sailor, since one card (which I didn't buy) showed an English dockyard; on the back he wrote, "We are docked second from right [or something like that]. Not a thing to do in this town." One of the cards I bought is of the waterfront in Long Beach, CA. Jack writes that he's going to some sort of show, and that it is "bank night". He adds "Boy I hope I'm lucky." Not the sort of thing you expect a sailor to write to his mother. ("Bank night" was apparently kind of like a lottery, or bingo, where you got tickets/cards with your movie ticket.) The second of Jack's postcards is from the Panama Canal. "Wrote this just as we passed through the Gatun locks. Very hot now." Jack, it must be said, is not the most scintillating correspondent. But he did send a lot of postcards. These two, by the way, were from 1938.

The last of the family-themed postcards comes from 1919. This fellow, from Hillsboro, Texas, worked at the Hillsboro Cotton Exchange, which we know because he sent them a postcard of the Pennsylvania Hotel in NYC. He writes:

Cotton went up yesterday anticipating my arrival. The majority of the brokers did not know we had worms in the cotton [in] Texas. I told them the worms was not only eating it up but was pulling it up by the roots.

Sounds as if he was trying to get the New Yorkers to believe cotton was going to be scarce. Ha, them rubes'll believe anything.

He sent the same postcard to his family, which doesn't say much interesting, and at some other time (there's no postmark) sent a generic hotel postcard from the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. This poor fellow apparently never got out of the hotel! At least the Pennsylvania's card had a picture of the hotel on it; the Windsor's just has a cartoon of men in 18th-century livery fiddling with some carriages (or possibly automobiles). There's not even a month on this card, but he writes (to his father), "Pretty cool here. Slept under a sheet blanket and counterpane." The fact that this was a source of wonder to a Texas man indicates that the card was sent sometime during the (Texas) summer, which narrows it down to about ten months out of the year. (Hillsboro is north of Waco, so make that eight months out of the year.) He adds, "They sure do write funny here and have funny money".

The last of his postcards has no stamp or date. It's an old-fashioned flowered, gilded, embossed affair which just says "To my pet". Based on the names on the other postcards, I think this is to his mother.

In non-family cards, I got one of those multiple-view, foldy postcards ("Twenty views of beautiful Moose Jaw!"). This one's of the farmer's market in Los Angeles, though, and I bought it largely because of the relentlessly sixties outfits on the women, and especially for one picture in which they're examining "Delicious Fruits from Islands of the Pacific" from beneath giant bell-shaped hats covered in shredded coconut, or possibly sheepdog hair. No, these are not novelty hats; I believe they're meant to be fashionable. There's also a picture of a hairy-armed fellow decorating a cake. Yum!

Now finally we have the rare class of informational postcards. The first has an olde-fashionede drawing of some sort of institution populated by women, and reads:

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor iron Bars a Jail;
But 'til the E.R.A. is Won,
We're only Out On Bail.

Har! Wonder if they've served their time yet. This was one of several ERA (link provided for you young 'uns -- they're still going strong!) postcards there. This one was copyrighted 1977. I thought it was dead before that, but apparently it didn't die until 1982, the previous link notwithstanding. I bought this particular postcard because it -- alone -- helpfully showed the text of the amendment:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

The final postcard is also meant to be informational. It (also one of a set, and I wish I'd been able to buy the others) shows a cartoon of an African village. There are three women, carrying water, wearing short shirts which have cut-outs for their (rather large) breasts. Two naked men, one wearing what seems to be a crown, are watching nearby, and the crowned one is saying, "The missionary says it ain't decent to go without clothes---"

On the back you are informed that this is a GENUINE (don't be fooled!) NUDIST COMIC CARD:

Information about the philosophy and practice of social nudism in America may be obtained by sending a dime to...

...an address in warm and sunny Spokane, Washington. Approved by American Sunbather Magazine!

There were maybe a half dozen of these cards there. I picked this one because it was politically incorrect, and because I actually got the joke. One of them showed a cartoon (all very pretty, the cartoons, in pastels) of hotsy-totsies cavorting around a pool. It was captioned "Wish You Were Here". Well, OK, that one's comprehensible.

But another card had two cuties. One is fiddling with a camera, and says to the other something like, "Nice scenery here." Which would be understandable if Kevin Sorbo were prancing about nekkid, but the only man in sight is a balding, beer-bellied fellow in a chaise lounge. I guess the subtext is supposed to be, "Middle-aged men! The nudist life means hot chicks panting to take polaroids of your tender vittles!" Sure, I believe it. Will Kevin be there too?

Posted 8:07 PM by Angie Schultz

Life Imitates MST3K

Or rather, Glenn Reynolds imitates Mike Nelson imitating Andy Rooney.

Reynolds: ...I've always viewed slow-cookers with some suspicion...

Nelson (as Rooney): I don't trust soups on the whole, no more than I trust stew.

Careful, Glenn, or you'll wind up on Sixty Minutes, wondering aloud why there ten hot dogs to a package, but only eight buns.

Posted 7:39 PM by Angie Schultz

The Machinery of Night Turns Fifty

Er, no, not this blog. Not even its author is fifty.

Thanks to Emily, I now know that Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl turns fifty today. Read about its history here, at the site of the anti-censorship (unless it's someone we don't like) City Lights bookstore.

Howl, of course, gave me the name of this blog:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

I don't really much like Howl, to tell you the truth. It's incoherent, and where it's not, it's nasty, celebrating drug use and the joys of getting sodomized by bikers or candles or whatever. There's also eye-rolling bits like "the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar" and "the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism". Whatever, dude.

However, as I said here, Ginsburg can turn a powerful phrase, which is more than some of your modern poets (example provided at the link) -- who seem to think you can just through in a few surreal phrases and a couple of pop culture references and you're done -- can do.

For personal reasons the phrase "...burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..." resonates with me, hence the blog name.

Emily also informs us that Norm Geras has declared this "Poetry Day" on his blog, for it is National Poetry Day in Britain.

Tomorrow, time permitting, I'll examine my favorite poem by my favorite poet. Its subject matter is waaaay more controversial than Howl sex-n-drugs. Betcha can't wait.

Posted 9:26 PM by Angie Schultz

Hurricane Homecoming

Got home just after midnight Wednesday morning. On the drive down from the airport we looked for (literal) signs of hurricane damage, but didn't see much.

Lighted signs -- plastic (I assume) panels lit from within by fluorescent bulbs -- are ubiquitous, which you don't really notice unless you're looking for them. Last November, when we were in Florida, I noticed that a lot of these signs were smashed, including the one at our hotel. To me, this is a sign of a bad neighborhood, and for a few seconds I was a little wary of staring at a hotel in such a crummy environment. But then I realized that the damage was the result of the hurricanes they'd had a couple months before. Once I figured that out, I noticed broken signs everywhere, even well inland.

So that's what we looked for on the way down from the airport, but we saw only one that had been damaged, and that might've happened at any time. We did see an intact sign which caused us to say, in unison, "Well, Halliburton's still standing."

In fact, we couldn't find any hurricane damage. We had to make stuff up. "Look! Hurricane crunched that traffic barrell, leaving the other twenty intact!" "Leaves in the road! Hurricane must've done that."

On the 22nd Niles went to the grocery store for provisions, in case we were forced to remain at home. By then the shelves were pretty much stripped bare. There was no water, so he bought juice. He was supposed to buy canned stew, or something else that we could eat cold if necessary, but much of that was gone, too. He brought home Campbell's cheddar cheese soup. (I tried this on broccoli once, hot; it was dire. I shudder to think of eating it cold. I'd have made Niles eat it.) There was no bread, so he brought back the nearest thing to it: taco shells, corn tortillas, chocolate chip muffins.

So on Wednesday night we went back to the store, to find it little better. There was no wheat bread, and the tomato selection was just terrible. I thought it was the End of Days. But today we went to Wal-Mart and everything was back to normal.