09:54 – Thanks to OFD for this link to an article about a common thread in mass killings over the last couple decades. The killers had been on psychoactive drugs such as Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.
Yesterday afternoon, Barbara took Colin to see our vet, Sue Stephens. He got his rabies booster, heartworm check, and so on. They ended up having to put a snout protector on Colin because he snapped at Sue while she was working on him. It wasn’t a serious attempt to bite her, just a warning not to hurt him. Colin has always been a timid dog, although he has a truly fearsome threat display. But he didn’t pull his fake Cujo routine with Sue, nor even show his fangs. He just snapped at her.
We’ll be spending as little time as possible outside over the next couple of weeks. The highs recently have been up near body temperature, and the next couple of weeks are to be the same. It’s even been hot up in Jefferson, although usually 10F or so cooler than it’s been here.
Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff and the prepping book, but here’s what I did to prep this week:
- I finished the remaining books in James Wesley, Rawles’ Patriots series. Rawles pretty much defines the term “information dump”. The first book in the series was just okay, but unfortunately the other books in the series are noticeably worse. In absolute terms, I’d give the series 2 out of 5 stars. But for some reason PA novels average much worse than other genres, so in relative terms, I’d give it 3 of 5 stars.
- I ordered some sample cans of Keystone Meats chicken and pork to test. now that Walmart offers these items on its website, it’ll be a lot easier and cheaper to get them if we like them. We already have two dozen 28-ounce cans of Keystone ground beef on the pantry shelves. Barbara and I agree that the Keystone ground beef isn’t as good as the fresh stuff she buys at Costco, but it’s not bad. I’m looking forward to trying their chicken, pork, beef chunks, and even their turkey.
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.
With the exception of Ritalin, which is hugely overprescribed, we could also summarize this as “mass murderers are mentally ill.” Color me surprised.
Actually, we can include Ritalin: I just read that the side effects include “psychosis”.
Yep, just another result of the efforts of public schools over the last several decades to turn little boys into little girls.
Yes, that was the feminization of North Murka.
Now we have the infantilization process going on here.
The now-little-boyz are being turned into big fat dependent baby serfs who do what they’re told. Or get spanked.
I look across the street right now and see one of the Subsidized Denizens loitering in their gravel parking lot wearing the standard Murkan derp uniform: saggy baggy shorts, sneakers, untucked tee-shirt, and baseball hat. It would be one thing if this is what they wear working around the house or playing actual baseball, but they dress like this everywhere they go. Next door to him is the 60-something ‘Nam vet mowing his lawn and wearing the same outfit. But at least he’s doing something and I don’t think he dresses like that elsewhere.
Millions of big fat spoiled babies, gobbling down processed junk, glued to their tee-vees and innernet crap, while fondling their safe queens and bitching about the niggaz in Baltimore and the dune coons in Iran getting nukes.
Meanwhile their university-educated betters in the cities and college towns still plot commie revolution here, by any and all means.
Our rulers must be laughing themselves silly as they continue to manipulate and watch over the disintegration of the country.
This is not gonna end well.
Perhaps there’s been a mutation in the Y-chromosome, but I don’t think so. All of those girly guys you talk about have a warrior buried underneath the superficials. Deeply buried, perhaps, but there nonetheless. I wouldn’t turn my back on any of them.
Re: drugs- are they all on drugs because they all needed help regulating their thoughts and behavior, or did the drugs CAUSE the thoughts and behavior. Don’t want to put the cart before the horse. I know there is mounting evidence that the drugs DO cause some of the behaviors, and we’ve seen it with Ambien, a supposedly benign sleep aid. But it’s just as sound to blame it on their maleness which is another shared characteristic.
What freaks me out is how much this guy looks like the CT guy. Same lightbulb-shaped head, same bowl haircut…
In prepping news: we had a big storm down here in TX. It mostly missed me, despite me being on vacation on the Gulf coast directly in the path. I did learn some lessons from the vacation that apply to prepping though.
SHTF can happen while you are on vacation. In this case we could be confident of driving home, and we were staying in a beach house, so we had more food and stuff with us than someone staying in a hotel might have had. We were away from my preps and thus very limited in our response capability. I did have pretty significant ordinary medical stuff (every day OTC meds, boo boo treatments) plus my truck trauma bag, and my IFAK. As an aside, my wife packed the “everyday” bag very thoroughly, without prompting from me. I guess the mindset is starting to take root.
Traveling with your EDC gun is not hard, even if traveling with anti’s. It does take some extra effort. Most folks are not very observant. I brought my small locking storage in a gym bag (a mini-Vault) and it worked well. I carried whenever I was out of the house, and not in swim trunks. The first day at the beach I carried off body, but after making a threat assessment, decided to leave it in the house after that. Very uncrowded, very low key, few members of the FSA and no hard partiers, no roaming dogs.
SHTF can happen when you have guests. Even ones you would prefer NOT to know
aboutthe extent of your preps. You may find yourself supporting extra people, even ones hostile to prepping. It is amazing how blinkered some people are. At one point in watching the storm coverage my MIL said something dumb about how water seems to be important and maybe we should go get some. My incredulous wife stammered out ‘have you even LOOKED in the back yard?’ [I’ve got 2 rain water collection systems-one with a 125 gallon tank, the other feeding a 55gal drum. They are not obtrusive, but they aren’t hidden; being right next to the raised beds.] MIL says “but that’s not for drinking, it would need to be filtered.” W E L L , that’s what the 80 gallons in stainless steel tanks in the garage is for, and the aquatainers, and the stack of 1 gallon juice bottles are for. Also what the 10000 gallon filter is for. So water in the medium term is NOT AN ISSUE. MIL was quiet after that.If you are away from home when SHTF you might not have any fresh food in the house. We were gone a week, so had almost no fresh food, including milk for the kids. This isn’t a problem in the real sense, but we had houseguests and wanted to keep everything as normal as possible.
Social media can be a good source of info, but like scanners or ham, you have to be practiced with it first. My wife was monitoring social media, particularly the 2 facebook groups for our neighborhood and surrounding bigger neighborhood. She saw posts that our local HEB grocery was mobbed and running out of stuff, and could plan to go to an alternate bigger store. She went and easily bought fresh food, while everyone else was buying canned. We did the same thing in the last hurricane. Having your storage food (and electrical supply) covered lets you buck the trend and get some fresh to take you thru the first few days in style.
Time and tide wait for no man. This early in the hurricane season, I haven’t done my seasonal maintenance yet. My geni started and runs, but isn’t getting enough gas to run off choke. My chainsaw needs work. It’s a good thing I didn’t need them. Those items got bumped up the list. (neither is yet critical as the geni could be used, and I have alternatives to the chainsaw.)
I left one vehicle almost out of gas. I’ve been meaning to rotate some of the storage gas, and so haven’t been filling up as regularly. Again, not critical as I could fill from storage, but potentially unfortunate. Also, as this storm wasn’t a hurricane, I had not increased my storage fuel. I typically only store enough to run the geni for a week, or to double the range of my 2 trucks. I increase that when there is a storm on the way. Hadn’t done any increase.
Lastly, we wanted a campfire on the beach. We’d brought wood, but no newspaper. The rental house we were in DID NOT HAVE A SINGLE WAY TO MAKE FIRE IN THE WHOLE HOUSE. The house is a part time residence for the family that owns it, so that is astonishing, esp. as they suggested the fire, so it’s not something they don’t do. I don’t smoke and don’t have a lighter as part of my EDC. I DO have a ‘trouble’ bag in every vehicle that has several fire starting methods. [it’s not extensive enough to be a bug out or get home bag, but has the basics in it.] Some lessons learned from the campfire- an ordinary lighter gets REALLLY F’n hot when holding the flame to light damp paper. Printer paper, esp. in 100% humidity DOESN’T burn especially well, or at all. Wooden matches will blow out in 20-30 MPH wind, even in a ‘sheltered’ hollow in the dunes, and in a dug fire pit. Fortunately, old christmas trees DO burn well in wind and humidity. So, a couple extra wind and rain proof matches are a good idea. Firestarter tinder is a good idea. One of those ‘crack pipe’ butane lighters that is a mini-blow torch might be a good idea too. All should be additions to a GHB. One of those mini stove fire tabs might be a good idea too.
This week, I got to one estate sale yesterday, picked up a couple of butane back pack style camp stoves, new in box, for a dollar each. Hard to say no. They are new old stock so I’ll have to try them out and be sure none of the rubber is perished. I’ve got a community garage sale to attend today, and possibly another estate sale. There weren’t any yard sales yesterday. Weather was threatening all day. We’ll see.
Afternoon and tomorrow will be dedicated to yard work, household stuff, and small engine maintenance. Maybe I’ll get my antenna finished.
nick
BTW, stopped by the toy store yesterday, expecting to see a bit of a rush, given the blood dancers comments on toy control, but the small rush was generated by local events not national news. Maybe everyone is stocked up already?
Yep, just another result of the efforts of public schools over the last several decades to turn little boys into little girls.
So almost like Serenity, the
G-23 Paxilon HydrochlorateRitalin calms almost all the kids down, except for the few it turns into Reavers. Except of course that the effects of Ritalin are somewhat weaker than the effects of G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate.Only scumbags and idiots need apply, the rolling gun free zone:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/20/8818247/uber-bans-guns-from-vehicles
Regarding mental diagnoses, cause and effect, specifically Autism:
70 years ago: No autism and all children drank water from faucets.
Currently: Plenty of Autism and growing daily while all children drink purchased, bottled water.
Preps this past week:
Like assholes and excuses, everybody’s got one and I’m no exception; half the week was shot with VA-related stuff and just weird days eaten by locusts, as Jerry Pournelle mentions from time to time.
But a bunch of ammo got here along with two 40-meter QRP radio kits and one 20-meter kit. Some other stuff may have got here, also.
More research into alternate well pumping options; antennas; perimeter fencing and floodlight/webcam options; doors, door frames, storm doors and deadbolts; and slowly getting into a basic PT daily thing, hopefully without breaking or wearing out anything.
I manage to get little nibbles at the five-page to-do list here but I also get weekly revisions via the memsahib, so it’s been a slow progress thus far.
Gorgeous day today and mostly doing grunge and scut cleaning and organizing chit.
Which radios did you get?
These latest are:
Two Ramsey 40-meter, 7 MHz CW transmitter kits, and one Ramsey 20-meter, 14 MHz All Mode receiver kit. I also have an MFJ “Deluxe Code Practice Oscillator” with which I intend to practice Morse, as it may become a nice low-cost, low-vis commo option in the future. Has an external ear jack, built-in speaker, and runs on a 9V battery, as do those radios.
I also have an older Grundig Satellit shortwave radio, two much smaller Sony or Sanyo shortwave radios, a table-top scanner around here somewhere, and a Uniden Bearcat BCD996XT scanner; plus the two Baofengs. Most of this is going up to the attic workshop, from which I plan to run a couple of external antennas from our currently one window up there.
I’m also gonna switch the CentOS 7 desktop over to a Linux Mint ham radio machine and that will be upstairs also. No point in bothering to keep up with RHEL and CentOS stuff anymore.
Does Mint have a special ham radio version, or are you just adding ham utilities?
As to CW, you’re a braver man than I am, and I used to use Morse. My plans are 100% phone, although I’ll probably keep a bug JIC.
I am loving my vintage Panasonic Shortwave RF 2200. It’s 8 bands, analog transistor, and big enough that sitting there spinning the dial is enjoyable. It’s technically a portable but at approx 12 x5 x8 it’s pretty big. I tune around and listen for about an hour a night most nights and I’m still on my first set of D batteries several months later.
I have a few compact and semi-compact transistor sw recievers but I don’t like them as much. The Radio Shack digital is nice for just dialing in a freq, but sucks for spinning thru the bands. It ‘chuffs’ at every freq change. The little analogs have too small a dial to be fun to use. They do fit in a bag along with a weather alert so that’s nice, and they use AAs.
Of course I can use my Yaesu ham radio as a sw receiver, and I do when I want to confirm the program I’m hearing is really on the freq I think, but it takes a lot of juice to run.
I spent some time listening last night, after Alex Jones (good for a check on what the more ahem *extreme* ahem folks believe) there was an awesome music program called “the last radio playing” on WWCR. Great mix of eclectic blues/jazz/folk/country influences and lesser known artists. Chet Akins too. On Tues and Sat night there’s a ham radio focused show with interviews and news that I like to catch. Other than that, it’s usually latin jazz out of Havana (or if I catch it, their ham radio show), or news and local programming out of New Zealand. The rest of what I can hear is usually religious broadcasters, but sometimes I get interesting music from the middle east, or Romania. It’s definitely not the sea of foreign news sources that most preppers vaguely believe it to be.
@ofd, that is a pretty nice scanner. Get it programmed! Get a nice discone from Radio Shack (or elsewhere) being sure it has good coverage in 800 and 900 mhz.
There are a couple of cool things to do with older receivers, like APRS tracking in 144mhz, decoding and tracking aircraft position reporting, and decoding and tracking marine position reporting. All the FEMA disaster interop freqs are in 140 and 440 range, are analog, and specifically NOT supposed to be encrypted or tone coded. I’ve got an old bearcat BC350a for each band.
Get something hooked up!
nick
“Does Mint have a special ham radio version, or are you just adding ham utilities?”
Yes. I’m using Andy Stewart’s Ham Radio Linux:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kb1oiq-andysham/
“@ofd, that is a pretty nice scanner. Get it programmed! Get a nice discone from Radio Shack (or elsewhere) being sure it has good coverage in 800 and 900 mhz.”
Yeah, I’m gonna put it in the Toyota RAV4 if I can do that without messing up the SiriusXM; if not, no big thang; I’ll stick it up in the attic shack/workshop and look at discone antennas for either vehicle or house.
And here’s some fun chat from my man Taki:
http://takimag.com/article/somethings_very_wrong_here_taki/print
Yes, something is very wrong here in the West. We’re committing suicide.
@OFD, check the law in your state regarding mobile scanners. In the prog states, because of the high crime and the tendency to take away freedoms from the good people, /editorial comment/, it can be illegal to use a scanner in a vehicle.
Most states that have those laws also have exceptions for licensed hams. Another good reason to get licensed.
nick
Yo, Mr. nick; I’ll check it out but should be OK here, like all our draconian gun laws, haha.
I’m working on the Technician/General licenses and will be a member of a couple of local ham groups/clubs likewise. Fairly inexpensive online classes here:
http://www.hamclass.net/
mmkay….just checked…I’m good…
http://www.fireline.org/scanlaws/laws/scanner/vt.html
“In her essay, Dusbiber spoke out against teaching Shakespeare because of his outdated view of the world and oft-repeated perspective as a white man.”
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article24937138.html
IIRC, the Shakespeare “canon,” whether by the Stratford imposter or Edward de Vere, includes Shylock the Jew, Othello the Moor, and any number of wicked strong women characters, and this during the period of Renaissance England/Europe, way ahead of his time. Leaving all that aside, typical grievance pimp/whore agit-prop, from what Harold Bloom calls the School of Resentment, the plays resonate across cultural, religious, racial and ethnic lines and have done so for over 400 years. Of course performances of them are far preferable, just as poetry is meant to be spoken, sung and heard, but that isn’t always possible, or wasn’t until recently.
If these dipshit ass-hat teachers and profs bothered to make use of the technology available to them, they could show their students performances. But they’d rather gin up some more grievances, resentment and friction between people while also generating media attention for themselves. Fuck them; they pissed me off over 25 years ago and they piss me off even more now.
Back then it was all the fembat stuff; now it’s every possible minority and gender they can find or dream up.
Which is why my favorite Shakespeare stuff are the history plays, which include the greatest comic character of all time, Falstaff (based on the Lollard martyr Sir John Oldcastle), and the sonnets.
That concludes this evening’s aberrant literature discussion…
…and now back to flashlights…lumens…the thickness in mils of plastic storage containers and the wavelength of the light acting upon them…
Just kiddin’ y’all!
Happy Fathers Day to all you disrespected and forgotten dads out there.
Shakespeare had an “outdated” view of the world? Well, yes, because he lived a few hundred years ago. I thought the point of teaching historical literature was, among other things, to give people common cultural roots.
I’m not religious, but since I live culture with Christian roots, it is a definite advantage to have read most of the Bible. For the same reason, anyone living in a culture with Western European roots ought to have read some Shakespeare – even if their family come from a different culture. Why is this hard for liberals to understand?
Besides, Shakespeare is chock full of dirty jokes, which amuses the teenagers. Of course, the liberal pantywads probably don’t explain those bits, because they might be “triggering” or something.
I’m not much of a Shakespeare fan so I hadn’t heard the term “beast with two backs” used till the early Nineties, in Brides of Christ, of all things.
” I thought the point of teaching historical literature was, among other things, to give people common cultural roots.”
Not for quite a while now in the West. The point now is to crucify Western civilization and the white Anglo-Murkan-Euro patriarchal hegemony for its crimes against humanity and people of alternative colors, genders, etc. It’s been all race, gender and class since the 1980s in higher-level academia and has now filtered down quite thoroughly into the publik skool systems.
So Dick and Jane might be a little sketchy with their arithmetic and reading ability, but by Jeezum they’ll know all about Queer Theory and Martin Luther King. And of course self-esteem, where no one is ever at fault and everybody’s a winner.
“Western civilization” is redundant. What other civilizations have ever existed? Please don’t tell me about Asian “civilizations” or Middle East ones, or Genghis Khan or African ones. All of those were merely organized totalitarianism. All that is good comes of so-called Western civilization. Period.
And the so-called Dead White European Males are responsible for at least 99% of human progress.
Oh, wait. Was that a micro-agression? My bad.
No, no, not micro at all. More of a macro aggression, I think.
Tsk. Tsk.
Back to Sensitivity 101 for you.
No, a regular old aggression would be beating an SJW within an inch (2.5 cm) of her life. A macro-aggression would be tracking them all down and beating them WAIOTL.
A personnel dweeb once tried to schedule me for sensitivity training, but I explained to him that if he didn’t back off I’d sensitively beat him severely about the head and shoulders. I think he believed me, because my name never showed up on the list of scheduled attendees. Apparently, he decided I was already sensitive enough.
“All that is good comes of so-called Western civilization. Period.”
I sincerely regret to inform you that your application for our program here at Podunk University in the Humanities Doctoral Studies Program has been declined.
“And the so-called Dead White European Males are responsible for at least 99% of human progress.”
Oh wow. You really are a micro-aggressor, aren’t you? Or as the late Australian art critic Robert Hughes called them, the “pale gray penis people.” See also “The Oldest Dead White European Males,” by the late classicist Bernard Knox.
This is a very bad attitude to have, LOL. What I found funny during my grad skool “career” was the lengths to which professors and other grad students would go to include various other parties to the literary canon, so-called. And I would dutifully go read the stuff and it was like that little boy in the fable about the emperor’s new suit of clothes; there’s nothing there!
As I get older and have less time ahead of me on the planet, I’m tending to really cut down on the serious literature I’m gonna spend that time with from now on. I had high hopes once of working my way through 2,500 years of it, but that’s just not gonna happen. I’m down to Homer in the translations by the very late Alexander Pope; the KJV English Bible in the Norton Critical Edition; Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” translated by the very late Arthur Golding; the “Aeneid” by the extremely late Virgil and put into English by the late John Dryden; the Psalms as translated by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Mary, Countess Pembroke; a good chunk of Shakespeare, some of the plays I’m reading and many of them watching on the tee-vee or pooter; and random dabbling in English, Irish and American poetry. Quite frankly this country doesn’t have much worth poetry worth studying in my last years; a few lines here and there of Whitman and Dickinson and Frost, but the best stuff was done by Murkan exiles T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And that’s pretty much it; all dead white penis people except for “The Belle of Amherst,” who rarely left her house there.
And if I wanna keep the old gray matter, or what’s left of it, somewhat sharp, I’ll keep relearning Latin and get into the classical Greek.
This is what I should have been doing all along, instead of screwing around with the grad skool bullshit a quarter-century ago. I’m really not a STEM person; my teaching skillz, such as they are, would be directed on a one-on-one or small group tutorial basis for those dwindling bands of misguided folks who might still be interested in this stuff. Not bloody likely, though, as the whole country continues falling apart.
Check your privilege! You omitted the Official Poet of United States, or whatever she’s called. Can’t remember her name, but she’s some fat, stupid-looking woman with a grudge, whose so-called poetry is crap.
Hmm. Was I just committing an aggression, whether micro-, macro-, or ordinary? Meh, I’m too busy checking my privilege to be bothered about so-called aggressions.
Oh, I didn’t realize I was supposed to be checking my privilege.
Wouldn’t it be easier just to use our aggression and privilege to eradicate these stupid, worthless excuses for human beings?
“You omitted the Official Poet of United States, or whatever she’s called.”
Official title: Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
Currently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Felipe_Herrera
You may be thinking of the one a couple back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Trethewey
We’re gonna make sure it’s two or three fembats and minorities to every gray penis person. Until such glorious time as we can entirely eliminate the latter once and for all.
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to use our aggression and privilege to eradicate these stupid, worthless excuses for human beings?”
Yes.
And that time is coming if they keep pushing and pushing and hassling us. They have no idea, apparently.
We decide and the shotgun sings the song…
I’ll just pick up my guitar and play. We just need to make sure there ain’t no new boss.
Do they really not understand that there are millions of people who’d just as soon shoot them as look at them? Are they fearless, or are they just stupid? Never mind. Dumb question.
“Are they fearless, or are they just stupid? Never mind. Dumb question.”
Not so dumb, Bob. Most are just stupid, yes, but the self-appointed egghead commissars among them across multiple genres and “communities” believe they either already have, or can get, the power of the Almighty State to make their diktats stick. As we have seen, they’ve been able to successfully enforce these diktats all over the place for the past half-century and even now cast a pall on free speech and plain talk pretty much everywhere. In essence, yes, they have the power of the gun to enforce what they want to enforce.
But their days of “glory” are coming to an end soon; even the contemporary popular comics have had enough of their bullshit; Jerry Seinfeld has been very vocal lately about the depredations of PC thought and practice. I never cared for his tee-vee show, but it takes a certain amount of ballz to stand up to this crap nowadays. He’s taken a shit-ton of heat for it, too, like other Hollyweird and Manhattan people who’ve dared to speak up.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jerry-seinfeld-political-correctness-will-800912
As he points out, even our own children have been soaked in this rubbish, to the point that they don’t even question it; it’s the air they breathe.
I really enjoyed my exposure to the Bard. I had a couple of great teachers who delighted in taking us back to the time of nobles and groundlings. What topical humor. His poetry and serious stuff was of course great, too.
He produced so much great work that I tend to believe those who say he was actually several people.
“He produced so much great work that I tend to believe those who say he was actually several people.”
He had collaborators on several of the plays. But it was the same guy. I think the evidence supports the Oxford people; it was Edward de Vere. But we’re in a minority and the Stratfordians still maintain hegemony in the academy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_collaborations
The BBC series is mostly excellent, and I’d hesitate nowadays to recommend that folks actually go see a play somewhere because the usual suspects have done a job on them over the past thirty years. First the fembats, which is where I came in, and then the race-class-gender crowd.
Like anything else, it takes one really good teacher and one or more students who are willing to do the work and enjoy it.
“I’ll just pick up my guitar and play. ”
-Then I’ll get on my knees and pray……………..we don’t get fooled again.
^misplaced faith in an external power to protect you. Better to count on yourself.
(sorry couldn’t resist poking)
nick
BTW, one of the greatest rock bands ever, but a little long in the tooth for teenage anthems…
I saw the Who at the old Boston Gahden a million years ago; Keith Moon collapsed over his drum kit ten minutes into the show and that was that. We got rain checks, and a couple of months later they came back for four hours and blew the roof off the place. It was freaking awesome; I was sharing a hash pipe and drinking Jack Daniels up in the nosebleed seats; at one point I got sick and just barely made it to one of the rubbish barrels near the snack stand. A Boston cop standing there looked down at me and said: “Don’t die in here, buddy.”
Y’all might think I’m exaggerating when I often refer to the Maoist online rag Salon or bring it up in other contexts:
“When a Nobel Prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the Internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of speech is not good. The West, having undergone its own Cultural Revolution, has taken up the baton of Maoist self-criticism.”
http://takimag.com/article/a_fireable_thought_theodore_dalrymple/print
See, two plus two really does equal five. Got it?
Or, if it truly equals four but you say it the wrong way or with the wrong facial expression or attitude, then you are Beyond the Pale.
But it was the same guy. I think the evidence supports the Oxford people; it was Edward de Vere.
Not really. The contemporary evidence is that it was Shakespeare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question
As I said, the current academic establishment is of the Stratfordian school of thought regarding the authorship. And knowing what we know about Elizabeth’s secret police and spies, some of whom were well-known literary figures, like Marlowe, it would have been no great trick to finagle documents, manuscripts, etc., and have others go missing. It would not have done for de Vere to publicly admit authorship, either.
Check out “Alias, Shakespeare,” by the late Joe Sobran, or the flick “Anonymous.”
…the flick “Anonymous.”
Yeah, well Roland Emmerich, the director, also gave us The Day After Tomorrow which had breezes freezing waves in place.
There’s just too many people that would have needed to be shut up at the time if is wasn’t Will.
Apples and oranges, freezing waves and manuscripts.
It was a de facto police state under Elizabeth and Walsingham; agents were all over the place, including the Continent. At least two troublesome, but prominent, writers were either imprisoned and tortured, or murdered outright, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, both contemporaries of Shakspear and de Vere. I don’t think it would have been any great trick to shut people up; it certainly isn’t any great trick now, considering our political history since The Good War.
Eh? You’re saying that the daughter of Henry VIII wasn’t the enlightened and universally-beloved head of a free nation? But she saved England from the heathen Spanish!
The Spanish were not heathens, but Roman Catholics like ME! And like England HAD been. Walsingham was a radical Puritan, while Lizzie (also my wife’s name, actually it’s Mary Elizabeth, haha, two English monarchs for one Irish girl) had seen both denominations slaughtering each other under her father’s and sister’s reigns, so kind of walked the razor’s edge. But ended up more like her dad than her sister.
If the Spanish HAD somehow invaded and conquered England back then, perhaps they would have also had much better success at keeping out and defeating the hadjis, as they’d done it before. And the U.K. would not be in the mess it’s in today and Catholic masses would still be in all the parishes and in Latin. O happy day!
But that bird has flown, alas.
Considering the overwhelming economic success and intellectual progress made by Spain and residents of Spanish-speaking nations over the past four or five centuries, I don’t hold quite as sanguine a view about the rosy outlook if only the Spanish Armada had succeeded. (Spanish literary accomplishment? That would be Don Quixote, the rambling, boring, and pointless tale of a delusional man who blunders from one misadventure to another and succeeds through no virtue of his own. Spanish scientific or engineering accomplishment? Um, I’ll get back to you when they have any. The economies of Spain and their former colonies? They speak for themselves.)
Hahahah…very good, Mr. SteveF; you will note that the storm probably saved England’s bacon and they bloody well knew it; Act of God. Puritanism Triumphant! Calvin dancing jigs with the Devil in Hell, with Henry VIII cutting in.
Spain’s last couple of major accomplishments were defeating the Moors and financing Columbus; not much since.
I have “Don Quixote” here but have not been able to stomach the reading of it yet. His contemporary was the man known as Shakspear, so you see the problem.
FWIW, Don Quixote was more tolerable for me listening to a “books on tape” version (actually MP3s from Librivox). I made it only about 1/4 of the way through before giving up on the piece of crap, but that’s almost 1/4 of the book more than I managed when reading it. Then I found a Cliffs Notes or equivalent to see if I was missing anything. Nope, doesn’t look like it. Just a lot more bumbling from mishap to misadventure, interspersed with “deep, humorous insights into human nature” or some nonsensical assertion like that. Whatever. Contrast with, say, Charles Dickens, whose work I also don’t want to read but who I acknowledge did have some deep insights into human nature.
I can only stomach a couple of Dickens books, too; I’m not real big on the 19th-C except for Hawthorne and Melville, and a bit of Dickens and Whitman. Also the “Fireside Poets,” mostly ditzy transcendentalist types from Maffachufetts and Maine. But they’re fun.
For deep and depressing insights into human nature, try Mr. Fyodor Dostoevsky; it used to be kind of a popular and trippy thing for some lit profs to juxtapose Dickens and Dosty in the same course.
“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”
“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.”
“Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.”
See what a fun guy he was?
OFD wrote:
“The Spanish were idolatrous heathens, like ME!”
There, fixed that for you… 🙂
Hahaha….good one, Mr. Miles-Teg down in Oz.
Boy, that’s just some mild stuff, too; there’s been a recent discussion on one of the gun blogs about that Scarlet Whore of Rome’s off-the-cuff spewing about people who make guns not being Christians or something. So the media reports it completely out of context like they always do, and then they treat it like it was a Papal Bull or he was speaking infallibly ex cathedra and isn’t it just awful!
Anyway a bunch of the gun guys had some pretty terrible things to say about Roman Catholics, the Pope, etc., that I wouldn’t even post here, they were so bad. Seems like 19th-C anti-Catholic bigotry and the Jack Chick crowd is alive and well, holy shit. Mind-boggling stupid and visceral hate and loathing; their words were like unto the hissing and spitting the demon makes when splashed with holy water in “The Exorcist.” Wouldn’t surprise me greatly if a couple of them are in fact demons. It was that bad.
Dickens and many of the other classics were paid by the word and IT SHOWS 🙂
They also were writing for an audience that didn’t have TV, movies, or photographs. No one knew what anyplace looked like, except from description, eyewitness accounts, or line drawings. So there is A TON of description.
That is my problem with reading them. Endless wordiness.
And I no longer hate myself or the world enough to read Feodor. It was like sticking knitting needles in your brain for me, while high on cough syrup. Couldn’t do it. Anton Chechov either.
nick
Mrs. OFD and I are book nuts and have grown up and read them all our lives, now nearly sixty years of maniacal reading for us both, since we were toddlers. So the description overload doesn’t necessarily faze us much. But we both know when anyone then or now is still being paid by the word, or whatever the contemporary equivalent is, and wish desperately quite often for a ruthless editor. Bracken’s trilogy, for example, could have been cut down by 50% easy. I said this to another guy whose nonfiction book came out several years ago and he got pretty annoyed with me and persnickety about it; “I wrote that book over two years and EVERY WORD IS NECESSARY.” Bullshit.
Whether nonfiction, fiction, or poetry, you have to be RUTHLESS in cutting out the dross.
OK, forget Russian lit for Mr. nick; also cancel the Jane Austen, Thackeray, and the Brontes, haha. I kinda like Thackeray, though, esp. “Barry Lyndon,” and the film made from it. @nick; you like historical fiction at all? Try Gore Vidal’s Murkan history novels, esp. “Burr” and “Lincoln.”
Or the late George Garrett’s Elizabethan trilogy. All great bedtime reading.
OFD wrote:
“Boy, that’s just some mild stuff…”
I’m a very mild person.
Yes, I’ve read Chick cartoons and books published by Presbyterian and Reformed, and Banner of Truth Trust about how a consistent Catholic can’t be a Christian. I don’t buy that stuff but a lot of what Rome says and does is anathema to me, like worshiping Mary as the Mother of God, and all the bad stuff that triggered the Reformation. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Yup. But just a minor quibble; it’s not really “worshiping” Mary, but venerating. Here’s the scoop, from a former Anglican minister:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2012/04/do-catholics-worship-mary.html
But she saved England from the heathen Spanish!
That was just King Philip coming back to get his dead wife’s property that Elizabeth and her minions had cruelly seized.
@OFD, I’m quite fond of Jeeves and Wooster, if that counts 🙂
I have read some Jules Verne, which keeps my interest despite the word count padding.
I’ve read a little Austen, and was mainly interested in how words and phrases used today without a thought had literal meanings in the past, like “given a living.” Twice daily mail delivery, and the realities of horse drawn transportation caught my eye too.
nick
Twice daily mail delivery? Try several times. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in London and other population centers, one could write a note at breakfast to invite a friend who lived across town to lunch. That friend could receive your note via his third mail delivery of the day, write a response to be picked up by the mailman on his fourth delivery, and you would receive your friend’s reply in time to get out the carriage and meet for lunch. Especially in wealthy areas, it wasn’t uncommon for the mailman to visit once an hour or more often.
I take it you haven’t read many of the Golden Age mystery writers.
Things were bettuh in the old days.
A lot of things.
But a lot of things were worse, too.
We may find out more about all this soon enough.
I quit reading mysteries in my early teens. I just didn’t see the point. They were always going to tell you in the end, and almost all of them made it impossible for you to get it, and if you did get it, so what? So I quit. I remember reading an english series, Topper, I think, that I enjoyed. Except for my problems with mysteries in general.
nick
Most of the editing I do is proofreading and fact checking, but I’ll also weigh in on characterization and internal consistency and such if the author is agreeable and we’ve negotiated terms. “And such” includes pointing out that a section drags or that the entire story feels like it’s a short story grossly padded to novel length. Unless I’ve forgotten one or two, amateur authors always get bent out of shape when I suggest they should drop 30% of the words in a section, and I’m not stomping in with hobnailed boots when I say it; I’m low-key and rather polite in my suggestions.
Yup; I did enough of that sort of thing with probably several thousand student papers and then again more recently with older writers and the students were a captive audience so tough shit for them, but the writers were to a man annoyed with suggestions for cutting their golden jewels of language from their texts. And I was also not the hobnailed and abrasive Mr. SteveF character but warm and gentle and considerate.
ref my earlier statement about abrasiveness: honesty is extremely abrasive. If I agree to edit a work, for pay or as a favor, I’ll do the best job I can. I’ll make the best suggestions I can. If the result is anything other than “This is perfect! Any publisher would leap at the chance to cut you an advance check!”, most amateur authors view it as very abrasive.
Yeah, it’s why I bailed out that whole field; who needs the aggravation? And you’d need to pay dues for decades, probably, and build up your resume to get to the point where you got to edit good, professional authors. I ran outta time for that, and much else.
I’ve never had a problem with editors. Other than changes to enforce political correctness, I tell them that if they see something that needs to be fixed, just fix it. I don’t need to know about corrections to spelling, grammar, etc. My editors are smart enough to know if they’re not qualified to make a change on a technical point.
BTW, it’s not just amateur authors who behave that way. A lot of pro authors pitch fits if an editor suggests even a grammatical fix.
I was to guess, I’d guess you are an adult and not a prima donna.
My editors on computer mags were not that smart. Several times they failed to recognize programming terms of art and “corrected” the sentence to be “grammatical” and thus destroyed the meaning of the sentence. Most of the time I caught it in time and corrected the correction, but a couple times it happened after the final author approval or else they ignored my objection to the mangling and the published article made me sound like an idiot. And Donald Knuth, a man, became a “he or she” because of one copy editor’s robotic insistence on replacing every “he” with “he or she”. Thanks, guys. Rather, “thanks, gals”, as every one of the copy editors was a woman fresh out of college with an English degree and with no computer knowledge except as a user. I complained about incompetent editing to the editor-in-chief of one mag and was told words to the effect of “they’re professionals and you should trust them and be glad for their assistance”. At which point I stopped writing for that magazine and refused to deal with that e-i-c when she went to another magazine.
As for pro authors shrieking about editors’ suggestions, I haven’t encountered it myself. The only pro novelist I edited for was a friend already and he was very grateful for the corrections I made, whether wrong-word or internal consistency problems or whatever. In fact, he implied that he was giving himself brain damaging from dope smacking himself from some of the “how in hell did I miss that” things I spotted.