Neanderthal Grandparents

The great Spencer Moore was born on this day in 1919. Here's something that happened once...

Spencer Moore- Bury Me Beneath the Willow

https://youtu.be/eu6X5hJ2qhU

https://www.virginiafolklife.org/sights-sounds/remembering-spencer-moore/

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Bizarre. I just got a book of essays by Christopher Hitchens in the mail today, "Love, Poverty, and War," and was shocked to discover that he wrote an essay on Route 66 back in 2002. I was unaware that it existed, even though I've read a sizable percentage of what Hitchens wrote in his life, I own about 20 or 30 books on Route 66, and traveled the road several times back when he drove it for research. 

The first coincidence I came across reading it was when he mentioned staying in Springfield, Missouri, and it popped into my mind that Brad Pitt was raised there. Hitchens wrote that at the motel that night he was happy to find Thelma & Louise playing on TV, mentioning that Brad Pitt was in it, but not mentioning that he was from that town. 

The next coincidence was when he wrote about driving through the ghost town Glenrio, and noticing the abandoned First and Last Motel in Texas. (If you're driving into texas, it's the first, if you are driving into New Mexico, it's the last. He mentioned that there were a bunch of shards of their cracked and broken sign laying on the ground below it. Well I also stopped at that exact sign and picked up one of those shards as a keepsake. 

I started wondering what other coincidence might be waiting for me, but lost hope when I hit the final paragraph. But... then he made the connection between the Lonesome Dove notion that "The Wild West" becomes domesticated once it's sold as The Wild West and a 12-frame cartoon by Robert Crumb, "The Short History of America," the evolution of the American countryside becoming a conglomeration of strip malls, gas stations and electric lines... and wouldn't you know that I have a poster of that exact cartoon within view of where I sat reading that essay! Wow 

Other highlights:

Here's the best description of road coffee I've ever read.

"The coffee is a mystery as well as an insult: how can it be at once so bitter and so weak? (In "Talking Dust Bowl Blues," Woody Guthrie sings of a stew so thin that you could read a magazine through it; today's percolators contain the ditchwater equivalent. It tastes as if it were sucked up through a thin and soured tube from a central underground lake of stagnant bile.)"

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"Down by the wrong side of the railway tracks, I cheer up further by engulfing two bowls of cheap but gorgeous chili at Lena's Cafe, where Spanish is the tongue and where a flyswatter is placed wordlessly next to my plate. I am politely asked twice, "Are you sure?" The first time is when I ask for a second bowl. The second time is when I leave a $3 tip on an $8 check. A large color poster of Jesus Christ is on the outside of the men's-room door: somehow it's a different Jesus from the one featured in the Protestant highlands and lowlands a few hundred miles back."

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"As I get near to Gallup, a sign on a bridge advises me that GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST—a fascinating ontological proposition."

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"In 1955, John Wayne was playing Genghis Khan, possibly the very worst of his roles, downwind from Yucca Flat during the tests. Of those on the shoot, he was only the most famous one to get lung cancer later on: that location was a culling field. Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Dick Powell were also to succumb. Can Wayne have been fatally poisoned by the military he so adored?"

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"I doubt that Texola or Glenrio will still be there if I travel that way again; outside Glenrio, I could already see and hear the earthmovers. In California the 50-year-old Trails Restaurant, a 66 holdout in Duarte, was demolished almost as I drove by. You never step into the same river twice. All travel is saying farewell. Most voyaging in the United States has become either impossible (by rail) or a misery and a humiliation (by air) or a routine (by roads with no individuality). No poet has yet attempted to say what this defeat means for the American idea. But the melancholy is all around us, transmitted on frequencies that nobody can possess. After one last, brief, yearning sweep along Sunset, I did what I would once have bet I could never do, and roared down Rodeo Drive in a brash Corvette. The window-shoppers barely looked up. The drop-off point for my mettlesome steed was just at the corner of Wilshire. I tethered it, patted it, handed over the keys, and forgot to look back."

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Damn that guy is a writer! Is he my favorite? I have tons of journals I kept while on Route 66, I need to find some time to go through them.

February 7, 2026

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I'm rooting for two things as always- minimum head trauma, and that the game is won with a Hail Mary thrown at the last second.

February 7, 2021

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I've had a great week off of work... played with my kids a bunch, read several books, organized 3 years worth of notes from my phone to better storage. Just came across the one below from 3-14-20. When you read back through stuff you wrote (if you bother with that sort of thing), you can never be sure what you are going to find. I'm pleased to see that just a week or to after Covid made it to the popular consciousness I was 100% on the money with my analysis... which I see as proof that I was listening to good sources of info. For grounding, I saw an email I wrote to someone at work on 2-27-20 saying that this could turn into something big. The response was, "Really???"

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3-14-20

"It seems like everybody who is ignoring the severity of Coronavirus is also ignoring a few key things... the exponential rise in cases, the mortality rate, the contagiousness and how long one is contagious before they even realize they are contagious, the parallels to other countries who are ahead of us, the threat of overloading our healthcare system if we aren't proactive, the list could continue. 

They also seem to be too focused on some odd things... it mostly affects old people who already have problems (how is this passed around so nonchalantly?), it's bad but the flu is bad too so therefore they are the same, widespread concern is mistaken for widespread hysteria, the left is just out to get Trump (I guess by pointing out the public health hazard of his own statements contradicting his own experts), media attention is hurting the economy (as if Italy's media sat silent, their economy would be better off right now.) 

If Coronavirus is as contagious as other recent pandemics, and if the mortality rate is what experts believe it to be, we could all know someone who dies. There's that thing going around to downplay it- do YOU know anybody with it? Well that's the exact point- we don't want to. This is not a reason to go berserk, but it is absolutely a reason to be serious. 

So be calm, prepare well, thank the people performing critical duties, and hopefully the only thing you will help spread is good information.

February 7, 2021

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I don't want to alarm you, but one of your 15,000th or so great-grandparents was a Neanderthal. We're all mixed species. (Actually I do want to alarm you.)

February 7, 2021

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Haha! Republican Mississippi Senator Wicker, talking about impeachment, asked if the framers of the Constitution anticipated a president being tried once they are out of office. I don't know about that but I can tell you this- they couldn't have anticipated a president inciting an attack on our own Capitol!

The argument against trying him since he's out of office is absurd. They say presidents can only be impeached while in office. OK... he was. Now we are trying him, and there's value in it. Those saying that he can't be tried, cannot possibly believe it in principle, i.e. a vote to not convict is a vote granting Biden immunity from any wrongdoing in his last two weeks, a notion perfectly ridiculous to 100% of us. 

So is Biden free to commit any crime up to and including having supporters attack the Capitol to remain in power? Do we really live in a country that Biden and all future presidents can seize all power they wish to subvert the vote, for instance pressuring foreign countries to dig up dirt on opponents under threat of withholding aid? Or is it only Republican presidents who can do that? 

Maybe presidents of all parties should just work to deserve our vote so we don't have to deal with this nonsense again.

February 7, 2021

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Wouldn't it be cool if the president was as skilled in the art of keeping good people as he is skilled in the art of firing them.

February 7, 2020

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Reo Hatfield, at the Hatfield-McCoy Truce Signing ceremony in 2003, "We're not saying you don't have to fight, because sometimes you do have to fight, but you don't have to fight forever."

February 7, 2019

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Someone asked me if it's OK for them to call Trump a bald asshole. No, that's hate speech. We're a group. Bald people, not assholes. Assholes aren't a group because they're all assholes, that's obvious. You can't elevate the disparagement by adding a bald to the front of asshole, we resent that. Besides, we don't claim him anyway because he tries to hide it. You can call him an odd-haired asshole, that's fine with us.

Thank you Larry David for helping me see the light.

February 7, 2018

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Dan Rather- "Searching for scapegoats to blame even before an event occurs is to sow the seeds of destabilization to the very fabric of our republic. These are the tactics of a thin-skinned bully who may realize he is in far over his head."

Full piece- https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02uRwdECX3qmBc2Ps6WuwcVyyx2yFtTvUoXdxfBZbWTVeM2PjEUxGMxGdPBRxt9WXpl&id=24085780715&sfnsn=mo&mibextid=6aamW6

February 7, 2017

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Isn't it strange that we use the word "self-conscious" to mean "being conscious of others being conscious of us"?

February 7, 2015

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Hahaha, an Onion article just said Santorum won Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado!

February 7, 2012

Postscript- He actually did!

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Huffington Post- Palin Considering 2012 Run, Defends Limbaugh's Use Of 'Retard' On Fox News Sunday

"They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh," she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups "retards." 

"Rush Limbaugh was using satire. I didn't hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with 'f-ing retards,' and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there." 

Following her logic: You can call people retards as long as it's not preceded by "fucking". You can also use "retard" as a synonym of "kook." She's a fucking kook.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/07/palin-considering-2012-ru_n_452602.html

February 7, 2010

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Pinocchio premiered on this day in 1940, Disney's second feature after Snow White. 

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On this day in 1995, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan. I believe they found him because they gave away massive amount of free books of matches with his face and a reward. An example of how Clinton handled the war in terror better than Bush, and how we could have reasonably expected Gore to handle it if the Supreme Court would have allowed him to become president, according to the will of the people of Florida, and the country.

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On this day in 2013, Mississippi officially certified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. Nice work assholes.

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The absurdly named Buster Crabbe was born on this day in 1908.

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Robert Smigel, and by proxy, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was born on this day in 1960.

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Eddie Izzard was born on this day in 1962.

"If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan."

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Chris Rock joined us on this day in 1965.

"I live in a neighborhood so bad that you can get shot while getting shot."

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Other notable birthdays- Charles Dickens (1812), Karl Möbius (1825), Sinclair Lewis (1885), James Spader (1960), Garth Brooks (1962), Ashton Kutcher (1978)

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Nikko, the Japanese priest and founder of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism left us on this day in 1333.

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We lost Frank Robinson but we still have Hank Aaron, and the greatest of all time, Willie Mays. I was going to say that they seem like they're from another century, then realized they are.

February 7, 2019

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Other notable deathdays- Nick Adams (1968), Josef Mengele (1979), Richard Hatch (2017)

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

"Once there was a Middle Eastern potentate who wanted his two sons to become the most intelligent people in the world. In order to do this he called a meeting of all the wise men in the Kingdom and ordered them to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so his sons could read it. The wise men returned in a year with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. The potentate told them that it was far too long and asked them to condense it. The wise men left and returned a year later, but this time with only a single volume. The potentate told them that it was still too long for his sons and ordered them to condense it further. The wise men left for another year and returned and gave the potentate a piece of paper with a single sentence on it. That sentence was, "This too shall pass."

February 7, 2013

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Daily Dot- The 44 greatest prank phone calls of all time

Do yourself a favor and at least listen to #5.

http://www.dailydot.com/lol/45-greatest-prank-phone-calls-of-all-time/?fb=ss&prtnr=mentalfloss

February 7, 2016

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Hollywood Reporter- 20 Outrageous Old Trump Tweets That Surprisingly Have Not Been Deleted

Check out the last one for a window into how he sees the world.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/donald-trump-20-outrageous-old-tweets-have-surprisingly-not-been-deleted-972799

February 7, 2017

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Washington Post- If Bruce Springsteen’s Jeep commercial doesn’t bum you out, congrats on the purchase of your new Jeep

Every once in a while I'm reminded that none other than Stanley Kubrick himself considered well-made commercials among the height of film-making.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/springsteen-sells-out-jeep-ad-superbowl/2021/02/07/b9bd1fa0-6986-11eb-9ead-673168d5b874_story.html

February 7, 2021

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Arthur Schopenhauer- “The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”

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Henny Youngman- "When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."

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George Brett- “I could have played another year, but I would have been playing for the money, and baseball deserves better than that."

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H. L. Mencken- "On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women."