My Bo Diddley Theory of Nonconformity

Poet John Ford joined us on this day in 1894.

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Weston- Lovely Fragile February

https://youtu.be/yFoiTFqtWSk

Remember when we were young and Februarys were cold???

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February to me, means James Dean's final visit to Fairmount, Indiana. I love this photograph from the trip, with his cousin Markie, at the grave of their great-grandfather, who died before either of them were born.

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When I was working at the Fillet Shoppe in the early '90s, an old lady came in and asked for a "patrami" sandwich. I made some kind of joke about it for my co-workers' amusement, something like, "One patrami sandwich, coming up."

The joke was on me though. I asked her what kind of cheese she wanted on it. She scanned the selection and got an excited look on her face, as if she was going to try something exotic. She said, "Provolene!"

I lost it on the inside, and it was fighting to get to the outside. It took every ounce of my being to keep my composure. If memory serves, I mostly failed.

A third of a century later, that lady is certainly long gone, but her legacy lives on. To this day every time I see provolone cheese in our fridge, I shake my head, still in disbelief, purse my lips, and I whisper, "Provolene."

She's probably somebody's beloved grandma but in my life she plays the role of Provolene Lady.

February 1, 2024

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Bill Maher:

This was a tough week, and I just need to vent a little more about finding out that abuse of power isn't a thing now. That the president is a crime wave in human form and the Republicans said "And your point is what?" That a criminal act isn't impeachable if it happens while the president is Republican. 

That the simple truth about democracy is you can't argue with the will of the minority, and that every Republican senator but one has less political courage than MITT ROMNEY. And maybe the thing that sums up America best right now, that John Bolton was totally free to speak at any point, being the guy who could demolish the last standing Republican argument that no one heard the president personally order the crime. Bolton said "um, I did. I heard that." 

And he could have spoken out this week for the fate of the republic but at the end of the day decided, "Nah, its not worth fucking with my book sales." Now THAT's America in 2020.

February 1, 2020

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This is so funny! Bill Maher's dirty campaign ad suggestion.

https://fb.watch/iq9z7P_94O/?mibextid=NnVzG8

February 1, 2020

Postscript- Best to make your point with humor. If it's funny, people laugh, proof that touched on some truth.

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Werner Heisenberg- "There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."

We lost him on this day in 1976.

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Could have been me once.

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Strange! An anagram of Sean Spicer's name exactly describes how I feel when I see he's talking- "I sense crap."

February 1, 2017

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Watch out for the Little Ninja.

February 1, 2017

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Trump is being inappropriately criticized for his take on Frederick Douglass.

"Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who has done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more, I notice."

What if the roles were reversed and Obama was asked about Trump's political inspiration and moral guide, PT Barnum? It's not like he could have come up with something better.

February 1, 2017

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Glad to hear Gorsuch is an Originalist like Scalia, so he'll have the wisdom to recognize that corporations are entitled to the same freedoms as people like the founders intended. Can't wait to hear his views on whether the president has to follow the laws written by Congress and the decisions set by the judiciary.

February 1, 2017

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Clinton 660, Sanders 656 with 94% in... I suppose a tie at 666 is too much to ask for.

February 1, 2016

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I bet I could skip one of Rubio's ears across the Susquehanna.

February 1, 2016

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These candidates keep thanking Jesus Christ and God. Wouldn't it be creepy if one of them only thanked the Holy Ghost? They'd have my vote.

February 1, 2016

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Some lady named Mary sent me a letter to tell me about the Bible. Here's an excerpt, don't read this before bed.

"Others feel that death is the end of everything. Notice what it says in Ecclesiastics 9:5, 'The dead know nothing at all.' When we die we cease to exist. What else we learn from the Bible. The first man Adam returned to the dust when he died. Genesis 3:19."

Pretty bleak outlook Mary!

February 1, 2016

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Emma always asks why I like watching the Super Bowl. This quote from Herzog sums it up: "So cinema sometimes has a way to figure out the mood of something coming at us. So this is why I'm taking a good look at what is going on in mainstream cinema, and taking a good look at what television does, with Wrestlemania, and the Anna Nicole Smith Show, because the poet must not avert his eyes."

February 1, 2015

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HEY, I WEAR SKECHERS JUST LIKE PETE ROSE!!!

February 1, 2015

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If they let me pick the Super Bowl halftime show, I'd probably go with Noam Chomsky reading quietly from Hegemony or Survival.

February 1, 2015

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Insane Clown Posse:

Fucking magnets how do they work?

And I don't wanna talk to a scientist

Y'all motherfuckers lying

And getting me pissed.

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Since 2003 Sofia Coppola has made three movies, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere and The Bling Ring- all of them about vacuous rich people living meaningless lives. All three are Lost in Translation without likable characters or any redemption. Her films have less reason to exist than the people in them.

February 1, 2014

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Strange to think that we had ancestors alive when the meteor killed the dinosaurs.

February 1, 2014

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On this day in 1964, the Beatles had their first number one hit in the United States with "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Perfect song!

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Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded and mutilated by his captors on this day in 2002.

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On this day in 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during the reentry, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

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On this day in 2013, the hatchet-weilding Hitchhiker, Kai, wielded his hatchet.

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Langston Hughes join us on this day in 1902.

Life is for the living.

Death is for the dead.

Let life be like music.

And death a note unsaid.

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S. J. Perelman joined us on this day in 1904.

"Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin, it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring."

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Photographer Vivian Maier joined us on this day in 1926. My favorite photographer?

Susan Sontag, On Photography- "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."

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Sherilyn Fenn join us on this day in 1965.

Audrey Horne- “Please don’t make me leave.”

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Elvis and Priscilla had a little baby they named Lisa Marie Presley on this day in 1968.

Comedy royalty, Mitzi Shore had a little baby she named Pauly on the same day.

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Other notable birthdays- Boris Yeltsin (1931), Don Everly (1935), Terry Jones (1942)

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Mary Shelley left us on this day in 1851.

"Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."

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Hedda Hopper finally shut up on this day in 1966.

"I wasn't allowed to speak while my husband was alive, and since he's gone no one has been able to shut me up."

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The great director and actor, Buster Keaton, left us on this day in 1966.

"I don’t act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind."

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Country musician Blaze Foley left us on this day in 1989. Did you ever hear the story of Townes Van Zandt lending his guitar to him? Blaze pawned it for some quick cash, then died. Townes discovered it was pawned, got the money, went to retrieve it but they wouldn't give it to him because he didn't have the pawn ticket. Townes got the notion that it was in the jacket Blaze was buried in, so... he rounded up some friends, they dug him up and you guessed it, there was the ticket in his pocket. True? Who cares!

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Gian Carlo Menotti left us on this day in 2007.

"A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance."

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Star Wars Vs Star Trek

I don't agree with the ends, but I like the means.

https://youtu.be/w8O8YbnworA

February 1, 2010

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For Black History Month, might I suggest Black Like Me?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me

February 1, 2012

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Brain Tricks

https://youtu.be/JiTz2i4VHFw

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Buzzfeed- What You Need To Know About The Scarlett Johansson And SodaStream Controversy

Interesting controversy- should Palestinians support an Israeli company based in the West Bank, which is land Israel captured by force? Products made in Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. The factory employs 550 Palestinians but the settlements help keep in place the system of second-class citizenship.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-scarlett-johansson-and-sodas

February 1, 2014

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I don't let Bo Diddley push me around.

I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 and there was a Louis Jordan tribute concert that night where Bo Diddley and others played. Somehow this nice ticket person gave me a free ticket in the front row with all the camera people because someone didn't show up. Bo Diddley came out on stage and said something like, "Let's get ready to boogie, everybody clap your hands." I don't like people bossing me around though, even if they ARE Bo Diddley, so I just sat there not clapping my hands, even though everybody around me stood up and started dancing and clapping.

Bo Diddley did a double take of me, unable to comprehend that someone would not be standing up and dancing and clapping. He gave me a couple more looks, and I swear he was about to call me out in front of the crowd, but he needed to start singing.

This just crossed my mind last night, so I looked it up and I found the video! You can't see me in the video, but I was in the front row to the right of the screen. Watching this 20 plus years later, I can perfectly see him for a split second look at me and think, "Why is this asshole not standing up and dancing and clapping like I demanded???" The only reason I can see it in the video is because it happened to me. He was like 20 feet away from me staring right at me.

Every once in awhile I like to prove to myself that I don't have to go along with the crowd. That's how you know you could have resisted being a Nazi!

https://youtu.be/unKL1EKIfK4

February 1, 2020

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Siamese Twins- one for the ages!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2gAc4aNKwU/?igsh=NTM1NmNjNWFlNw==

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David Sedaris:

Once, at a dinner party, I met a woman whose parrot had learned to imitate the automatic ice maker on her new refrigerator. "That's what happens when they're left alone," she'd said.

It was the most depressing bit of information I'd heard in quite a while. And it stuck with me for weeks. Here was this creature born to mock its jungle neighbors and it wound up doing impressions of man-made kitchen appliances.

I repeated this story to Lisa who told me that neglect had nothing to do with it. She then prepared a cappuccino, setting the stage for Henry's pitch perfect imitation of the milk steamer.

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Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People- "When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity."

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Andre Gide- "I alter fax in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality."

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Herzog, pretending he's quoting Pascal, at the beginning of Lessons of Darkness- "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, lake creation, in grandiose splendor."

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Mad Men, Ted Chaough- “Sometimes when you’re flying you think you’re right side up but you’re really upside down."

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George Carlin- “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?"

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Edward Abbey- "Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."

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FDR- "If you treat people right they will treat you right ... ninety percent of the time.

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Mary Shelley again- "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."

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Gandhi- "God has no religion."

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Orwell- "If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."

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Heisenburg again- "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think."

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Molly Ivins- "When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country."

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Mailer- "There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you."

Addendum 

Myspace Blog 

February 1, 2006

The state of the union is... lackluster?

How about that state of the union?! I don't know. Some of those goals were PRETTY lofty. I mean, cutting back our dependence on Middle Eastern oil 75 y 2025? Is that even possible? He says we're developing new technology. He probably means that we're working on a drill that can go through the middle of the Earth to drill the oil ourselves. Eliminate the middle man... or the Middle Eastern man.

In Bush's spirit I made a list of other goals, both personal and political:

I will stop killing gangsters for their 8-ball jackets and Air Jordans by the year 2014.

National Parks will be completely blacktopped over by 2018, as part of the Beautiful Parks initiative. The National Monuments and National Forests will have to wait until 2029. The rest of the planet must wait wait until 2054

I will slowly phase out my camo pants by making them all cut-offs by the year 2023, phasing them out completely by 2034 for my 60th birthday party.

Car companies must raise fuel efficiency by 1 mpg each year for the next 50 years. Wait. 75 mpg by the year 2055? That's foolishness.

By the year 2028 I will buy my last box of Cap'n Crunch, clearing the way for true adulthood. Unfortunately I rediscover the magic of Golden Grahams.

By 2033 we will kill the last person who was about to become a terrorist. That night we'll pray that nobody has any need to avenge him. Or the 20 others that we killed with him. We can do this people!

By the year 2062 we will elect a reasonable congress that can simply pass an amendment every time the supreme court makes an idiotic judgement, making all of their judgements unconstitutional.

By 2057 we'll take George Carlin's advice and do away with a president, opting instead for a king. And every once in a while if he's doing a bad job, we'll kill him.

2055- Publicly televised canings for pundits who lie, finally tops Fox News in the ratings. Liberals in Congress pass a "bleeding-ass conservative" exception to the free public health care.

By 2078, to satisfy unrest in the Christian Conservative minority, a constitutional amendment is added that simply says "Thou shalt not kill." The next year all of the Christian Conservatives end up in prison for supporting wars and the death penalty, and also for fighting abortions where the woman's health is in question, job safety programs and nuclear regulation.

By 2145... Jetson escalator floors. Also fully-functional Datas for all.

By 2387 scientists declare that evolution is wrong. Or at least it's named wrongly. It should be devolve-olution. Proponents of Malignant Design are overjoyed.

After the destruction of Earth we colonize Mars in 2590, killing all native inhabitants with biological warfare. Nobody raises a fuss because the only native was a flesh eating virus.

In 2662 scientists will find a way to construct a giant pool cue in space. They use it to hit the moon into the charred remains of Earth, knocking it into the Sun so we never have to look at it again.

Y3K, second-coming of Jesus. He's mad.