« March 2021 | Main | May 2021 »
I really want to mark Chernobyl's 35th anniversary, but don't have the energy, so it'll have to wait a day or two.
Posted at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
France's is better than our drinking song national anthem.
Posted at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
What I'm reading whilst listening to Pink Floyd:
It’s easy to conceive of a golden era for college radio, one now lost to streaming and Internet radio.
Never mind that college radio lives on, even thrives, despite the digital disruption and the music industry’s recent woes. For Americans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s -- the last of whom have turned 40 -- college radio served as a paragon of individuality, authenticity and free expression, or an experimental training ground for the untested and non-commercially viable, perhaps deservedly, depending on one’s perspective.
It’s tempting to construct that consensus history of college radio. But it would be the wrong view. Rather, college radio holds such a particular place in American culture and memory for more than its role in breaking new bands or helping fans discover their next favorite artist. Its meaning grows from its role as a battleground in the culture wars over how the nation would sound — whose voices would represent communities and identity across space, and receive the benefits of broadcast, even if limited. And there perhaps, it has ceded ground to new media.
College stations connected lovers of the eclectic and avant garde across space. On road trips, music fans knew to keep the dial turned below 91.9 FM, searching for weak college signals that bled through between NPR and Christian radio. The connections they found went beyond mere entertainment, offering more than refuge for young-adult angst and mass culture dropouts.
[ed note: I was a DJ during my college years at WMHB, then 90.5 on your FM dial]
Is there a movement for a Constitutional amendment I'm unaware of? One to increase the number of senators populous (i.e., "urban") states have, v. "rural" states? Or to break up more states so we get more Senators in total? Or to eliminate the Senate, which was originally so "undemocratic" the Senators were appointed by state governors? (and the reality is, the Senate was meant to quell the "populism" of the "rural states.")
Except there weren't any "rural" states in 1788, because there weren't any "urban" states. Aside from the other fact, which is there are only two states in the country now with multiple large cities (Texas, California), and both of those states still have substantial rural populations. So what “urban” states are there?
[ed note: fuck the Founders]
I think our material culture would have been quite different, no doubt our use of electronics and some of the aspects of the use of things like X-rays in medicine, etc. would have been different if physics had not developed in the way it did. If atomic theory had not been developed we would certainly not have developed nuclear weapons and nuclear power which may yet kill us all, for example. But if our material culture had not developed the way it did human lives and cultures would still have most of its pressing problems to fix else we all perish.
I kind of think that our species surviving and living a decent life is what we are more properly concerned with than the speculations of recent and, pretty much, totally theoretical physics and cosmology. I think that the culture of college-credentialed lefties and even many of the vestiges of traditional American style liberalism - NOT the same thing as 18th century European style liberalism - has been rotted out by being distracted from what it should be doing.
[ed note: I can still be nostalgic for college radio, right?]
[W]e have bodies of water all throughout our cities that we sort of ignore because humans have gotten involved in their creation, but humans have been managing streams, and creating damns, and being involved in bodies of water forever. So just because you’re in an urban area doesn’t mean that you can’t be in a relationship with it. In fact, you’re in a place where people have been living and been in relationship probably for a long, long time. So the land is probably used to it. Here in America, a lot of our cities and towns are built on places that were originally inhabited by larger groups of the First Peoples who were here.
[ed note: one of my favorite green spaces in Seattle is by the US District Court a couple blocks from my office]
What are you listening to and reading today?
Posted at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
This song from my college days is almost Jesus Death Age old, I'm older than Michael Jackson Death Age, and approaching Prince & Shock G Death Age. This makes me...uncomfortable.
Posted at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
RMJ:
I felt a very strange sense of relief when this verdict was announced. I still don't know why. I didn't know anyone involved in the trial, I hadn't followed the case that closely. I think the relief was that justice in such an obvious case, was done. I remember the Rodney King case, so I was ready for anything. I'm glad there won't be excuses for anger and violence and public demonstrations of grief and fury.
...
Biden will not cleanse us of our national sin. He can't. Only we can. Will we, is the question. I am relieved we can face that question, this time, without violence. But we can't face without realizing the Chauvin case was so outrageous, so blatant, so public, so acknowledged, that it could not pass. There was no clever argument this time that so many officers assaulted Mr. Floyd that we could not say who struck the fatal blow. This was all, for this case, on Derek Chauvin. If that's still what it takes, if we still can't convict police officers who claim they were "just doing their jobs" when they shoot children and young men and unarmed people and people in their beds, then nothing has really changed.
Selah.
Posted at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I remember watching this stuff when it premiered on Tracey Ullman 34 years ago today.
Posted at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The ship goes onas though nothing else were happening.Generation after generation,I go her way.She will run East, knot by knot, over an old bloodstream,stripping it clear,each hour ripping it, pounding, pounding,forcing through as through a virgin.Oh she is so quick!This dead street never stops!
Anne Sexton.
Posted at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sadie was amazed to learn we not only had microwaves back then, but even when I was a lad (albeit with analog dials).
Posted at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
In addition to getting into video editing, Sam has thrown himself into building our family tree. I guess he's taking on the mantle of Family Historian from me, which is cool. Anyhoo, I was poking around what he'd put together, and learned some new stuff about my great grandfather, Abram.
Back in the day, I blogged a little about the Pritzkys' arrival at Ellis Island after ditching the tsarist pogroms, as well as about their conversion to Christianity. For example, this from The Missionary Review, January 1923:
And this from Missionary Review of the World, December 1922 (my grandfather Boris, looking like a Vulcan, is the kid seated to Abram's right):
The "recently returned from Russia" is of particular interest because it's directly tied to some family lore that Sam has been able to corroborate. At the Statue of Liberty Heritage site, we confirmed that Abram had indeed just returned on September 23, 1922.
Twice.
I first must note that my great grandfather traveled back and forth to the Motherland at least 7 times between 1922 and 1927. In 1922, there is this anomaly wherein Abraham Pritsky is listed as having arrived on 2 separate pages of the President Fillmore's passenger manifest (149 and 182), with one of them corrected to "Abram Boris" (both with the same Brooklyn address).
On top of that strange double entry, we found that Abram applied for an emergency passport in Poland sometime between 1922 and 1925 (the exact date is not readily apparent). One of the stories I heard growing up was that Abram used his missionary work as a cover to smuggle his brother (and perhaps other family) out of the Soviet Union. I now suspect that happened during his inaugural 1922 trip, obtaining a 2nd passport, his brother using an assumed identity.
Sam and I were musing about how lucky it was there were no computers back then to automatically flag this issue and catch the Pritskys in their fraudulent act. How different our family history might be in that case.
In conclusion: abolish ICE.
Posted at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.
Posted at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Happy Apollo 13th Day!
055:55:19 Swigert: Okay, Houston......
055:55:28 Fenner (GUIDO): We've had a Hardware Restart. I don't know what it was.[The legendary line delivered by Lovell is "Houston, we've had a problem" and not the familiar "Houston, we have a problem" made especially popular by the Tom Hanks movie. The writers of the movie have admitted that they had to use the line expected by the viewers, instead of the historically accurate one, for the sake of drama.This of course has perpetuated the line in the popular consciousness, putting it into the top three of misquoted movies alongside "Play it again, Sam" and "Beam me up, Scotty!" Overall, "Houston, we have a problem" surely counts among the most famous spaceflight-related quotes alongside "A small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" and "That's no moon, that's a space station!"]
I love that editorial note so much. The funniest thing to me, besides quoting Star Wars, is that Ron Howard et al didn't worry about historical accuracy of the famous line (delivered so much more dramatically by Hanks than Lovell), all while employing such awesome fx that nobody knew it was fx, even astronauts.
Posted at 08:45 PM in History, Space | Permalink | Comments (0)
Hey, I'll still quote our Founding documents, because at least they're aspirational and it's fun to proof text against MAGAts, but at this point all of the "favorite Founders" I used to have have been reduced to case studies of racist assholery, object lessons in moral failure. Like Thomas Jefferson, high in our national (and once in my personal) pantheon, who wrote lofty paeans to liberty whilst raping Sally Hemings and profiting from his children's enslavement.
But hey, when he wanted to blame somebody for his own failings, he went big, laying slavery at the feet of King George III in his original draft of the Declaration:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die...
Then he had the temerity to whine about the British inciting these MEN to rise up against their oppressors (which did not go unnoticed by the British). Oh, and he blamed South Carolina and Georgia for removing this section.
So I've become a lot more radicalized as I've grown old, particularly over the last few years, right here at home, by Black Americans continuing to be murdered with impunity, White Supremacists walking the hallowed halls of our government, incessant crying over essential truths laid out by the 1619 Project, etc.
Anyway, happy birthday, you dick.
Posted at 07:09 PM in History | Permalink | Comments (0)
Orthodox Easter is still a couple weeks off, but it was a good day to blast this piece out the window.
PS - I got to play the trombone solo once at a concert with the Perrysburg Symphony Orchestra, which was pretty heady stuff for a teenager. 1st chair had to miss one of our performances, so I got bumped to 2nd, who gets the part!
Posted at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The essence of all growth is a willingness to change for the better and then an unremitting willingness to shoulder whatever responsibility this entails.
Posted at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Calm down, my Sorrow, we must move with care.
You called for evening; it descends, it's here.
The town is coffined in its atmosphere,
bringing relief to some, to others care.Now while the common multitude strips bare,
feels pleasure's cat o' nine tails on its back,
and fights off anguish at the great bazaar,
give me your hand, my Sorrow. Let's stand back;back from these people! Look, the dead years dressed
in old clothes crowd the balconies of the sky.
Regret emerges smiling from the sea,the sick sun slumbers underneath an arch,
and like a shroud strung out from east to west,
listen, my Dearest, hear the sweet night march!
Charles Baudelaire.
Posted at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I was going to run with this trippy ode to dear old Pioneer 11, but how can I resist blonde Vikings?
Posted at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wingers are making specious comparisons between GA's Jim Crow 2.0 and places like...CO, what with its disenfranchising universal VBM and auto-registration. This is just an ancient deflection tactic with a long pedigree, as we can see when we revisit Strom Thurmond's record-setting filibuster in '57.
They are voting in the South in larger numbers than ever before. No persons in my State are deprived of the right to vote. If they are qualified to vote, they are allowed to vote. Of course, no man who is not qualified ought to be allowed to vote.
New York State has a much higher standard, as I said a while ago, than we have. If a person can merely read or write in my State, he can vote. In New York one has to be a high-school graduate, I believe or at least has to meet a literacy test. So we are not nearly so strict in South Carolina as they are in New York.
'tis true that New York amended its constitution in 1921 to include a literacy test, which was part of a collection of anti-immigrant election rules. But South Carolina also had a literacy test, going back to 1898 (like, duh...how did SC show that a person could "merely read and write"?)
This test was buried in SC's registration form:
4. I will demonstrate to the Registration Board that
( ) (a) I can both read and write a section of the Constitution of South Carolina; or
( ) (b) I own and have paid all taxes due last year on property in this State assessed at $300.00 or more.
[T]hese provisions allowed registration officials to openly discriminate by providing difficult and complex sections to blacks and then be hypercritical of the registrants' explanations. Whites could be provided with easier sections, with the explanations graded more indulgently.
I can just see an official rejecting a Black registrant because they didn't make the § symbol properly or something. Anyway, there were plenty of other laws and mechanisms to disenfranchise beyond that one provision, like white primaries and full slate laws.
Then there's this section of the registration:
5. I (a) have never been convicted of any of the following crimes: Burglary, arson, obtaining goods or money under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, robbery, bribery, adultery, bigamy, wifebeating, housebreaking, receiving stolen goods, breach of trust with fraudulent intent, fornication, sodomy, incest, assault with intent ravish, miscegenation, larceny, or crimes against the election laws...
That "intent to ravish" particularly stuck out for me, given the Black Brute caricature (which remains to this day in forms like "excited delerium") and the likelihood that Whites would not be convicted of it (and more likely to be pardoned for any covered crimes). But really the whole thing was designed with surgical precision:
Excluded were crimes that whites were thought equally inclined to commit, such as murder and fighting. A man could kill his wife and still vote; but if he merely beat her, he was denied the franchise. The law was a crazy quilt and made sense only when its purpose of excluding blacks from voting was understood.
So yeah, NY was worse than SC because reasons. And this is why a few years after VRA65, NYC was also subject to pre-clearance.
Guess if CO really is worse than GA, we'd best pass the For The People Act...
Posted at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Amen, Dr King: "But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars."
Posted at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)