Saturday, September 14, 2019

Saturday, September 14, 2019

 Just some random thoughts to get started.



 "Hank Williams died for your sins." I don't believe this, but this would be a good line on maybe a t-shirt with that picture of him getting out of jail & looking like skeletal hell. Hipster-Hank-Williams-was-actually-punk types love that picture. Anyhow, feel free to use that. I don't think I could write anything with a straight face saying that & I'm not in the mood for irony.

 If nothing else, Mississippi's solidly middle-class, the comfortably bourgeoisie as one gets in small town/slightly less small town Mississippi can produce something of note. William Faulkner, Mose Allison & Eudora Welty prove that. I don't know if it makes up for all the rest of Mississippi, but there you go.

 Here's an idea to tack onto the Weird Western I'm kicking around: the Masquerade is still comfortably in place because anyone who spills the beans will be hunted down & killed by nearly everyone else. Sort of a highlander thing, except the less people who operate It, the easier It is to manipulate. Don't use that, that's mine.

 Okay, I've had a nice nap, let's get on with the business at hand. I finished my latest read, Ghost Of A Chance, second in the "Arcane Casebook" series by Dan Willis. It's the story of a noir-ish private detective who's also a practitioner of runic magic during an alternate 1930s New York City that also has alchemists selling healing droughts & powerful sorcerers as titans of industry.

 It's not bad. The lead character is more Archie Goodwin & less Phillip Marlowe, though not as slick as the former & not as hangdog as the latter. The characters are pretty solid & the world building unfolds nicely, though the plotting could stand some tightening up. The last five or six chapters are a dozen plot threads all coming to head one right after another, so it tends to give one ending fatigue. In any event, it's worth checking out & I'll probably go after the third once it's released. Check it out.

 Tropical Storm Humberto seems to be angling its way back into the Atlantic, away from the Florida coast & the Bahamas. The later especially need the break as they're still digging their way out from Dorian & apparently the government's got its hands full already. Humberto's projected to hit hurricane speed by Sunday night, though the National Hurricane Center predicts it's going to more or less leave everyone the hell alone.

 In a triumph for karma, a federal appeals court revived a lawsuit against Fox News brought by the parents of Seth Rich. The network's being sued by the parents of the slain Democratic National Committee staffer, & the three-judge panel reversed a lower court ruling, concluding there are plausible claims that the raggedy-ass network was party to a "campaign of emotional torture".

 The news company falsely alleged the DNC staff member leaked internal party emails to Wikileaks & that's why the Democrats, particularly Hillary Clinton (of course), whacked the guy rather than his death simply being a random, tragic occurrence. Right now, they're busy nailing Roger Stone's nuts to the wall over his part in all this & hopefully there's plenty more nails to go around.

 Here's an excellent column by the only pundit worth paying attention to, Leonard Pitts, Jr., concerning the topic of "electability" & what a bullshit concept it is. The idea is, of course, from Reasonable Centrists that far too many potential Democratic nominees for president lack of "electability", whatever the hell that is. Pitts mocks the idea that nominees like Elizabeth Warren & Kamala Harris are "too fall to the left" for the average Joe America when that is patently untrue & definitely unhelpful. Besides, since we elected a crooked-landlord-turned-game-show-host empty celebrity who is obviously completely over his head & unconcerned with the job, his power only held up by a rabid, butty fanbase, electability doesn't mean shit anymore.

 For what it's worth, I'm pretty confident that apart from any shady bullshit that the GOP will probably try to pull, all of the Democratic front runners - let's say Warren, Harris, Sanders, Buttigieg, & Biden - have a pretty good shot dislodging Trump. The only one I personally am shaky on is Sanders, mainly because apart from the particular hate she got, he's got all the same problems as Hillary Clinton, in that he represents What's Not Worked So Far.

 Plus, he's a creepy loon that Republicans will hoot from the hilltops, pretending they're not backing a credibly accused child rapist who's dumb as a bucket of shit. They're hypocrites, sure, but they don't care. As for Yang, I refuse to give any attention to another Rich Guy With No Experience Beyond Being A Rich Guy. Sorry, Andrew, but that bed's been well & properly shat.

 Moving on, here's a nice "Some More News" vlog concerning what sort of complete waste of space upper-class racist demagogue & New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is. Now, I'm not a big fan of podcasts in general & political yakfests in particular - though they have one with Katy Stoll - nor do I care for the plethora of socio-political jibber jabber that infests YouTube. But I do enjoy formed Cracked editor Cody Johnston's weekly Howard Beale shtick. I don't keep up with Cracked anymore but they did some entertaining work in the past 10 or so years, & this is a nice little gimmick.They do the Patreon thing because that's the only way anyone can make any money these days.

 Is there anything else worth mentioning? It's Saturday & I don't think there was that Friday Evening News Dump the White House likes to throw at people, not one worth mentioning, anyway. I'm still letting the Sleep take me whenever it wants, I can't be bothered to stir otherwise. Maybe since I finished this book I'll be doing something new. Who knows.

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