Pie in the Sky

The shape of the 8th

Hoping against hope and kicking against the pricks (to use two favorite phrases from The Apostle, who knew much about hope and more about , , , never mind), a handful of proposals for the U.S. Congress for 2015 - three about rules and two about language:

• that the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate (beginning immediately) never be from neighboring states and that at least one must be from either north of the Mason-Dixon Line or west of the Missouri River. (No part of Ohio south of Delaware can properly be considered as north of the Line.)
• that the Senate be returned to majority rule.
• that in the House the Hastert Rule be repealed. (My Uncle Albert has declared that he is happy to write Dennis “to condole with him on the demise of that piece of political jackassery.”*)
• that the term “in power” (as in “party in power”) be expunged from legislative discourse.  (The “party in power” shall become the majority; it may not be in power, if certain other (even more pious hopes) be realized.
• that “concession” also be expunged and that “compromise” never be uttered with a sigh or weary smile.

For proposals about the much more politically fraught realm of professional and college sports, see here.

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*Uncle Albert wants to know, incidentally, how the current speaker can describe the House of Representatives as “the people’s House,” as long as the rule remains in effect.

Light Into Darkness

Speaking of hope: Three propositions about professional and three more about college sport. (I do not including the obvious, that Major League Baseball give up on the Godcursed designated hitter.) 

• That the National Basketball Association ban tattoos.
• That the National Football League rewrite the rules to treat quarterbacks
  like other backs, wingbacks, fullbacks, tailbacks, halfbacks, corners, and safeties.
• That in return, they be allowed to call their own plays. In fact, they will call their own plays:
            - that electronics be banned from the floor of the stadium.
  __________________

• That the college football “regular” season be limited to 11 games and bowl games be limited to 5, all to be played in Texas, Florida, and Southern California on New Year’s Day.
• That the college basketball “regular” season be limited to 24 games and so-called March madness end by February 28.
• That college basketball coaches coach only during the week and at halftime. None shall be in the arena during the game itself. Further,
            - that no time-outs be allowed in the last three minutes of any half. What
               is this time-out sh** anyway? - sounds like a play-ground rule, like
               backsies.

Immigration Deform

Moe John Boehner-Brooks

What the President doesn’t understand, perhaps because he was born in Kenya, raised in Indonesia, and educated in California, New York City and Boston,is that we cannot at this time in our history welcome others – especially brown, voodoo-catholics and their dozens of children. Those there should stay there. Turn them back at the border, if they come near it, by any means necessary. Those here should be returned at whatever cost to them or to our economy. Because that’s the law – and the truth. Truth is Truth; there are no shades, it doesn’t come in slivers. It is born whole from the thigh of the Republican Party. And we in the people’s House will uphold it. 

          Happy Thanksgiving, pilgrims!

Sundays at G A B

 - Always what we have is a piece of something else, a fragment.

Quotes of the Week

From the Press, Books, Anywhere at All

fragment

from the fragment – paris in A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne:

---- Now as the notary’s wife disputed the point with the notary with too much heat – I wish said the notary, throwing down the parchment, that there was another notary here only to set down and attest all this ----

      – And what would you so then, Monsieur? said she, rising hastily up – the notary’s wife was a little fume of a woman, and the notary thought it well to avoid a hurricane by a mild reply – I would go, answered he, to bed. 

profoundly uncomfortable

 “This is a profoundly uncomfortable situation for a nation. . . . pornography remains undertheorized.” 

          – Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic, online mar 21 2014, 1:59 pm et

the ultimate politician

“She is a really sincere person - she is the ultimate politician.” 

          - Jan Mundo, “a transformative healing artist,” on Hillary Clinton (to David Freedlander in thedailybeast.com/politics 03.21.14)

theology 101

Overheard conversation:

            “I don’t think you can ignore it completely.”

            “No.  It’s God’s problem.  Let him feel guilty, if he’s not going to do something about it.”

            “ . . . . ”

            “If he can’t, he should stop pretending.”

 Your contributions are welcome.  Email to crabbiolio@gmail.com.

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A Drink of Water

Get a sheet of these at zazzle.com.

Today’s message, as I heard it. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” He paced the platform, took a drink of water, and said:

Mr. Rogers may have loved you just the way you are, but the righteous God does not.  You would like to think he does, but . . . not really.  He loves what he wants you to become.  Perfect as he is perfect.  Or at least! − righteous as he is righteous. Southern, “Baptist,” vested, armed. “Republican.” Patriotic.  Morally narrow enough to steal through the eye of a needle.  For, strait is the gate and narrow is the way.  Don’t think they’re not.

I’m not saying he said this; I’m saying this is what I heard.  It reminded me of e e cummings’ “next to of course god america i.”  So . . . draw your own conclusions.
          I’m not the preacher, so you may want to turn your volume up a bit for this one.

W

Bill's Tin Ear

Oskar’s tin drum may disrupt rallies, turn every march into a waltz and some waltzes into the Charleston; but that does not make him part of the Resistance − he admits as much. He is rather “merely a somewhat eccentric fellow who, for private and also aesthetic reasons of his own . . . ” does what he does. This is what he does:

"In those days [the mid-1930s] you could get the better of people on and in front of a grandstand with a paltry tin drum . . . . I didn’t just drum down rallies in brown. Oskar sat under the grandstands of Reds and Blacks, of Boy Scouts and the spinach shirts of the PX, of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Kyllhäuser Bund, of vegetarians and the Polish Youth Fresh Air Movement. Whatever they had to sing, to blow, to pray, to proclaim: my drum knew better.

     "Thus my task was destruction."

That’s not my task here.  Oskar's drum may know better − I have my doubts − but I don’t. Still, I admire anyone devoted to disrupting the songs or orations or prayers [cant­ūs / orationēs / orarionēs] of shirts, whatever the shirts’ colors – brown, red, black, tan, spinach green, stuffed with bombast.  [See “The Ambiguities” for 2/18/14 – “Heraclitus’ GPS.”]*

          I am imagining for myself, for this tiny, unattended space, something much quieter than Oskar's drumming, though I am aware that you can’t get Bill O’Reilly, or Bill Maher, to shut up by interrupting in a whisper. You can no longer − if ever you could − gain the floor by speaking softly, not unless you have first bludgeoned all opposing idiocy senseless with your big stick. Only then can you begin reaching in the shirts and picking out the padding.

          So the quiet Antic enterprise is doomed to failure.  But, it didn’t expect anything else . . . except, perversely, it had hoped for an audience.

Today’s definition of antic - merry in spite of it all.

f

*In which I defined bombast, originally the cotton or other material used to pad clothing  as “pretentious pomposerosity.”

y

Quite the reverse of bombast:

W

Temporary Home of The Ambiguities

At The Ambiguities.blogspot.com,
this is what you'll see.

So, here we are - in a room full of strangers.  We hope the move is temporary, and we'll be home soon.  In the meantime . . .