Listics

Sometimes you run across something on the internets that must be shared.  So it is with Old School Hiphop.

I’m hooked on West Wing re-runs.  Last night Mallory complimented Sam on a moving passage in a speech he had written.  It went something like…"with neither glurge nor glumph; with a fittabit and a grepple, we shall smick and spunder, troob and wickham, now and forever in this great laundromat of ours."  I probably didn’t get all the words right, but when Mallory complimented Sam he said, "Ah yes. Cadence."  The secret to the success of the passage that Mallory loved was the cadence.

Sam and Toby are great writers, and this isn’t the first speech writing hint they’ve shared.  I wonder if any of the fan sites have compiled the list.

Hat tip to Beth for the pointer to Photomuse via today’s NYT.

The "push poll" - when Hans Haacke does it, it doesn’t seem wrong; but, in the hands of Karl Rove it’s an instrument of evil.  It could have something to do with respect for Truth.

Hat tip to Halley for the sourcewatch link.

A friend of mine was a postman in Oakland in the seventies.  He had on his route a house with a stepvan on the lawn and a lion chained to the van.  Or two lions.  I’m pretty sure about the chain, but not the number of lions.  Some of the stories from those days are a little hazy.

I dropped into Borders today and what should I find but a book called "Freedom" by Sonny Barger.  Sonny rode a large motorcycle in the days before the Harley Owners Groups dominated the bike club scene.  You could say that in those days Sonny’s club sort of dominated the scene.

Recently I posted regarding the "last lonely goldfinch" at Dorothea’s house.  As a quiet joke, I linked to the New Riders’ lyrics to "Last Lonely Eagle."  Oddly, the song appears on a recent (2004) NRPS release of a live concert in Veneta, Oregon that happened in 1972. 

The odd coincidence for me is that the town of Veneta, Oregon was named for Beth’s grandfather’s second wife.  It was named by Grandma Veneta’s father, who founded the town when his daughter was an infant.  The town is little more than a bend in the river to this day, but I do have a cat named after the original Veneta, the grandma, not the town that’s named after her.

Large motorcycles, pedal steel guitars, psychedelic poster art…   I swear it’s time to get back to basics.

Franz avers,

If despair presents itself so surely, so tied to its object, so
restrained, as if by a soldier who covers the retreat and lets himself
be blown up for it, then it is not true despair. True despair always
immediately overtakes its target, (at this comma it becomes clear that
only the first sentence was true)

Are you desperate?

Yes? You’re desperate?

You’re running away? You want to hide?

I went past the brothel as if going past the house of a lover

Authors speak a stench

The seamstresses in the pouring rain

Out the train compartment window

Finally, after five months of my life in which I could write nothing
that would satisfy me and for which no power will compensate me, though
all were obliged to do so, I come once again to the idea of addressing
myself. I have always answered whenever I really asked myself, there
was always something here to blaze out of me, out of this heap of straw
that I have been for five months, whose fate, it seems, is to be set
alight in summer and burn up faster than the spectators can blink. If
only that could happen to me! And it should happen to me ten times
over, for I don’t even regret this unhappy time. My condition is not
unhappiness, but it is not happiness either, not indifference, not
weakness, not exhaustion, not another interest, so what on earth is it?
That I don’t know likely connects with my inability to write.

This blog was uncovered by paying attention to what happens at wood s lot.

"Balmy," meaning "weak-minded" is from 1851 London slang.  I would have been a long time learning this if I hadn’t read AKMA’s post referencing Tom’s link to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary.  The title of this, my own post, has nothing to do with it’s antecedents!  Rather, it’s just a little alliterative trope, like "a little alliterative" if you get my drift… words strung together more for effect than precise meaning… never mind.  None of this shit is intentional.  You just shake the box and let the words fall out.