Go Around Back: May 2015

Thursday, May 28, 2015

The problem here

is that our mother’s didn’t teach us to sew. So, unthinkingly we pay top dollar for everything.
For example, below – on your left – is a red T-shirt, “resembling the jacket of Clinton’s iconic pantsuit outfits,” as Cameron Joseph puts it in the New York Daily News.* You can get shirts like this in small, medium, large, xlarge, and xxlarge for $30 at Hillary’s new online store. You can also get hoodies, throw pillows, tumblers, mugs, onesies for your babies, all covered with cleverness and all made in America, but by someone else.

But, it’s not too late: You can still make your own for less than $10, even as little as $3.50 with the kit shown on the right.

Here’s all you need (the pattern is at right): a red T-shirt, purchased at your local thrift store for $2; a Sharpie, brand new at $1.49, if you don’t already have one at home; and some white-out. You can buy this in a three-pack for under $6; OR, you can knock on the door of any lawyer’s office in town and ask the secretary if she or he has any he or she isn’t using in her desk. One of them does. If it’s clumpy, a drop or two of fingernail polish remover will take care of that. There’s someone you know you can bum that from, maybe even the lawyer’s secretary, if you don’t have it on hand.

_______________

* Read the article here.
If you missed the point and want to add your thirty bucks (less cost of materials and labor - a buck-adn-a-half more than you can make it for, if you have to buy the Sharpie) to Goldman Sachs’ thirty million, you can visit the store here.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

FF is for flip-flop.

flip-flop • flĭp-flŏp

noun

1. a disconnective unit of time

verb

1. to disconnect time

It can mess you up!

Explanation:

Almost all units of time are connective and consecutive. E.g., there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and so on. Today follows yesterday and precedes tomorrow. The flip-flop disconnects time, especially with regard to speech or action that was in time; thus what one did or said yesterday has no connection with one might do or say today; what one does or says today is disconnected from what one might do or say tomorrow. A sufficient number of flip-flops happening in a sufficient number of places on the planet could destroy the linear nature of time for (Western) historians though not for physicists (who already have their own ideas). Fortunately for historians (and for all Westerners in their day-to-day lives), flip-flops are generally confined to state or provincial, and national centers of government.

Friday, May 22, 2015

* welfare recipients only

Oh, give me a land where the bright diamond sand

Flows leisurely down the stream;
Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along
Like a maid in a heavenly dream.
- Kansas State Song

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Open Carry

Larry Phillips' (R-District 62 - Delta, Fannin and Grayson Counties):

“I have a dream!”

Pope Francis arrives in Dallas on his way to Austin to address a joint session of the Texas House and Senate. Theme: “A Different Kind of Forgiveness.”

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Pride, Anger, GREED, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, and Sloth

I know this is old news, but I can’t get over it.

              Bill Clinton has made $106 million in
          speaking fees since 2001, because, as
            he says, “People like to hear me talk.”
            My guess is not as much as you do, Mr.
          President.

Hillary Clinton was paid $300,000 to speak at UCLA on March 5.
Did anyone ask the 30,000 undergraduates if they’d rather have had ten bucks each? Get seven friends together for happy hour at Sepi’s
– that’s ten pitchers!

I’m available for a bus ticket and one pitcher. Topic: Pleonexia.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

G is for gerrymander.

gerrymander • 'jĕ-rē-man-dər

verb [portmanteau of (Eldridge) Gerry, Massachusetts governor at the time, and salamander, first used in the Boston Gazette, March 26, 1812. See Elkanah Tisdale’s cartoon of the malformed voting district below.]

1. to cheat opponents out of their congressional seats and the people of a state out of their votes. Methods include cracking, packing, and hijacking.

synonyms: maddog, strausstumpchoke, tillwidowbird, tuckasplatta

Christopher Ingraham takes a keen look at “American’s most gerrymandered congressional districts” here, explaining along the way how underrepresented Democrats were in the House elected in 2012, “relative to their vote share in [that] election” – some 18 seats!

“How the Republicans pulled that off was to draw some really funky-looking Congressional districts,” but not to make safe seats for themselves but very safe seats for Democrats. The idea was (and is) to give your opponents districts they can’t lose by squishing as many of their supporters as possible into one or two imaginatively drawn districts, that in turn “lets you spread out your own supporters over a [larger] number of districts. Those districts may not be entirely safe, but they’re “close enough for government work,” you might say.

Here are four of my favorites with new names based on the shape and name of the speaker of the state house at the time.

The Texas 33rd - Joe Straus, Speaker of the House