2008 | The American Pile

Ford Motor Company ended 2007 with 533,000 unsold vehicles in stock. The story didn’t identify which model year these were, but it raises a cosmic question: We know that auto manufacturers never exactly match their production to their sales, so. . .where do all those unsold cars go once a new year’s models are introduced? With 2008 models already on the market, where do the unsold new 2007s go? Is there for unsold cars the equivalent of the fabled elephant’s graveyard? (January 4, 2008)

Cosmic Answer: No

“Can it overcome the human tendency toward decisions that prove irrational and dangerous in the short run?”—Kenneth P. Riggs, CEO and president of Real Estate Research Corp., asking the cosmic question as he discussed the financial markets’ recent turmoil and resulting uncertainty for investors. (February 6, 2008)

So That’s Why The News Is Always Bad

The latest research shows that a person shown a sad or depressing movie is willing to pay four times as much for a bottle of water as a person shown an emotionally neutral movie. (February 8, 2008)
The Berkeley, California city council voted 8-1 to declare that a U.S. Marines recruiting office in Berkeley is officially an “uninvited and unwelcome intruder.” One council member likened a military recruiting office to a pornography shop. This further makes the case for sawing off California and pushing it out to sea, or calling in close-air B-52 strikes on council headquarters. (February 1, 2008)

Jus’ Can’t Keep ‘em Away From The Trough!

One of the great Hoosier Legends—former Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz—turned in his chips February 2. Newspaper obits were ever-so-careful in handling the story. The Chicago Tribune noted that Butz had a ”relaxed and earthy style that caused problems in his public life” and that in 1976 while Secretary of Agriculture he was “forced from office” for “making a racist joke.” There were three strategic components--or “keywords” if you’re Googling-- in the punchline of Earl’s joke, which he made the mistake of sharing with reporters. The joke won’t bear repeating in a family newspaper, though several of my friends quickly remembered and recounted the entire episode. Butz was a dean at Purdue University, among other life achievements. He was also a dastardly Republican who in 1981 pled guilty to federal charges of failing to report a lousy old $148,000 of taxable income in 1978. (February 3, 2008)

Instead, He Stayed Home, Sang, Drank, Hung Out With Gangsters, Hookers, And The Rat Pack, and Got Rich. . .

FBI files on Frank Sinatra obtained after his death through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that Sinatra paid a doctor $40,000 to certify him “unacceptable for medical reasons” for military service during World War II.—Factoid encountered while reading an Associated Press story on “government secrecy” in the Indianapolis Star. (March 17, 2008)
“That was always the advantage Clinton had. We never expected any better. He went from Skunk Trot, Arkansas, to Skunk Trot, Arkansas. Spitzer fell from Fifth Avenue to Skunk Trot, Arkansas.”—Ann Coulter, comparing the lives of Sick Willie and the freshly-disgraced former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, in her March 17 column in Human Events.
Hundreds of Indianapolis Colts fans stampeded to the team’s suburban practice complex in late March to compete for the honor of being chosen “the biggest fan.” Free tickets and a limousine ride to the first game in the new stadium were part of the prizes. It made me wonder: How far would someone go to capture this honor? Having your hands and feet cut off and replaced with transplanted horse’s hooves? A full-body horse tattoo from head to hoof? Hard to guess in today’s strange culture. I wish I could have been there to see and hear and touch the contestants. (March 20, 2008)

Please Hang Up, And Don’t Try Again

The opening scene of playwright Sarah Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” (playing through July 27 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company) takes this old-timer back to the days when comedians Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart both were hot with “telephone” joke routines. Berman had a night-club act based mostly on him placing or taking imaginary calls. Ruhl’s “strange. . .little journey” (in the words of Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones) opens in a quiet little café. As Jones describes it. . . A man sitting alone at a table drops over dead.Then his cell phone rings. A woman at a neighboring table “slurps down the remnants of her lobster bisque,” then answers the dead man’s phone. She listens to the caller. She looks down at the corpse.”No,” she says, in a truly delicious understatement. “He’s not.” And then she takes a message. Let’s hope the word gets out –that’s one wicked opening scene! (April 7, 2008)
Celebrity journalist Barbara Walters published her memoir (“Audition”) in May and promptly hit the talk-show circuit to hawk it. Leaked in advance was the news that she had an affair in the 1970s with Edward Brook, a Massachusetts Democrat and America’s first black Senator since Reconstruction. New York Post film critic Kyle Smith reviewed the book and concluded that, like Walters herself, there’s less there than meets the eye. Smith describes Walters as “immensely rich and familiar to all, (someone) who has been around forever without anyone quite knowing why.” He describes the book itself as “an epic of self-absorption unleavened by self-awareness.” She could have saved us all a heap o’ trouble, Smith concludes, and made this “50 pages of cute stories about the great, the terrible, and Monica Lewinsky.” Instead, it weighs in at 612 pages from Walters, who “is an eyewitness to history but then so was Forest Gump.” My kind of reviewing. (May 14, 2008)
Will Elder, the legendary cartoonist, died May 15 of Parkinson’s Disease in a Rockleigh, New Jersey, nursing home. He was 86 years old. He achieved initial fame as a cartoonist in Mad magazine in the early 1950s. His humor was described as ranging from wry to blasphemous, and he was widely known among friends as an “inspired prankster.” Elder’s cartoon creation of “Little Annie Fanny” ran for 25 years in Playboy magazine. He was certainly one of my childhood idols, when Mad was a staple in my knapsack. (May 18, 2008)
Forty-five per cent of Americans between the ages of 18-34 say that international law should trump United States laws in any conflict between the two. . .only 7 of 100 students in the 5th grade could answer correctly a question about why July 4, 1776, was an important date in American history—Two little examples from a CNN report on The Bradley Project, which conducted polling and research on the topic of “The American Identity,” aired on the Lou Dobbs Show. (June 8, 2008)

George, George, George...

June closed with the death from heart failure at age 71 of comedian George Carlin. Perhaps best known for his (then) outrageous monologue on The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, and for his A House Is Just A Place For Your Stuff and a striking comparison of the differences between baseball and football. He was a man of multiple substance addictions and unsurpassed zaniness, He was one of the most wonderfully weird human beings ever to walk the earth. My one regret about Carlin was his frequent use of foul language in his acts. He could have been equally funny without ever using a single profanity. His choice to do it helped degrade our public culture. (June 30, 2008)

The Republic of Me

Apparently there’s a growing worldwide movement among at least eccentrics and cranks to establish their own nations—with themselves as heads of state.The July 3 Chicago Tribune Tempo Section offered a lengthy article—“One Nation, Under Me”—on this most intriguing idea. Kevin Baugh, founder and Supreme Ruler of his own nation, The Republic of Molossia (situated in a “scorched corner of the Nevada Desert”), has a Website providing all the “how to” details (www.geocities.com/micronations) and one on his new country at www.molossia.org. The potential seems enormous.
The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy story out of Amsterdam in early July about the arrest and persecution of a Dutch cartoonist who had the mistaken notion that he lived in a country allowing free speech. His crime was to have offended the feelings of some Muslims with certain cartoons on his website. A group of eight or nine police officers, local prosecutors, and other thought crime bureaucrats came to his apartment, arrested him, and launched their persecution. Though the article was fascinating, in a sickening way, I soon threw it down and declared to my wife, Peaches, that if the Dutch or any other supposedly free people tolerate this sort of political correctness then they will deserve what they eventually get. In this case that will be sharia law and their own slaughter as infidels. This plague is widespread across Europe and inevitably will reach the United States. It is already spreading across Canada, our trembling neighbor ninny to the north. I see no evidence that the U.S. will have the will to resist when it arrives here. (July 18, 2008)
“Many universities have become nothing more than re-education camps, marinating our young in a toxic stew of racism, sexism, gender studies, global-warming paranoia and identity grievances.” –Charles Alley, in a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star, commenting on a recent unpleasantness at Indiana-Purdue University of Indianapolis (IUPUI), in which the school’s diversity office publicly humiliated a 58-year-old white janitor and student for reading—during a work break--a book about Ku Klux Klan history in Indiana. The student was accused of racial harassment after a co-worker filed a complaint. The case took on national overtones when the Wall Street Journal publicized it. The university Chancellor finally issued what it felt passed for an apology to the man, assuring him and the entire world that IUPUI was “committed to free expression,” which is, of course, utter baloney unless it’s politically correct expression. (July 18, 2008)

Peaches and I went to a big rodeo in Tucson. What a spectacle! Wranglers, cowpokes, cowpunchers, cowboys, cowgirls, wranglerettes, broncos, wild bulls (all of ‘em ver-r-r-ry angry), little kids wrestling sheep, clowns in barrels. Probably 5,000 people there, in a county fair atmosphere, many with belt buckles bigger than their heads. Outside the arena, PETA was picketing, faces puckered and angry. Peaches invited several of them to come to our house and see her fur coat.
Fox News ran a special July 26-27 on Murder In The Family: Honor Killings in America. This is the delightful Muslim custom giving a father the right to kill his daughters or wife when they are deemed to have dishonored the family. Fox says honor killings were first reported in the United States in 1989. Recently they have occurred in Dallas, Atlanta, Rochester, New York, and St. Louis. In Europe, where such killings are more widespread, local authorities generally stand by and do little or nothing rather than offend local Muslims by prosecuting these crimes. Here, so far, efforts are still made to apprehend the perps and prosecute them. For how long, though?

This Pretty Much Nails It

“Twenty-five years ago when I first went to work for American Airlines, we were issued these little white gloves. Today we are issued handcuffs.” —American Airlines flight attendant, quoted on a cable TV special about the airline industry in the United States, about how her job had changed over the years. (July 27, 2008)

Human Resources, D. C.-Style

U.S. Capitol Police officials have dismissed 15 people, about one-quarter of their latest group of recruits, after discovering the individuals had been hired despite failing criminal background checks, psychological exams and other employment criteria.

Vicky Must Be Trying To Raise Cash

I doubt we really want to know what the buyer plans to do with a pair of Queen Victoria’s underpants, which sold for $9,000 at a London auction. The bloomers had a 50-inch waist and were bought by a Canadian. (July 31, 2008)
A pair of Queen Vicky’s stockings sold for $14,300 on September 3, according to the Chicago Tribune. This time the purchaser was identified: The Ruddington Framework Knitters’ Museum in Nottingham. Worth a stop the next time you’ve over there, don’t you think? (September 4, 2008)
Indianapolis Public School officials engaged in a massive effort this week to assure high attendance at the August 13 first-day-of-school by telephoning parents to remind them of all the previous reminders they’d been issued, and by offering “incentives” such as free tickets to Indiana Fever (the local women’s professional basketball league team) games, to encourage a show-up. Long ago and far away, in the days of our youth on the plains of central Indiana, nothing even approaching this effort was needed to assure that students came back to school on schedule. One notice was sufficient. It was a different world, indeed. (August 13, 2008)
Peaches and I recently saw the new film, WALL-E. It is set in a future time—not too far from imaginable, certainly—when, due to pollution, earth’s human population has fled to a nearby space station. There, because they have grown so grotesquely fat, they spend their entire lives gliding about in mobile Barcaloungers. WALL-E is cute, the animation is superb, and the audience leaves the theater well-lectured. (August, 2008)
Mad Magazine again showed why it exists when, in August, it got Circuit City corporate officials so riled up they banned the magazine from all Circuit City Stores. The August issue contained a spoof of the retailer, and “overly sensitive” poohbahs took the bait. Cooler heads soon prevailed, though, and offending copies of Mad were put back on Circuit City shelves to continue their insurrectionist mission. (August 10, 2008)
Legendary atheist Michael Newdow is back in the news. He’s the Sacramento, California, doctor and lawyer who files lawsuits anytime he gets the faintest whiff of God in a public space. This time he’s suing the federal government, demanding that the words “In God We Trust” be removed from all currency. This constitutes the establishment of religion, he claims. MSNBC’s website ran a poll, of course, and as of mid-day August 20, 71% of its voters said Newdow was wrong, and 29% agreed with him. Newdow is the price we pay to have a free society. (August 20, 2008)

Sharia Watch

Denise Spellberg, a faculty member at the University of Texas-Austin, signed a deal with Random House Publishers for a book on Islam. In the final draft stage, the manuscript came into the hands of someone who was Muslim and who was offended. Spellberg was accused of being anti-Muslim. The protest spead and Random House announced this summer it has canceled the book’s publication. Mark Steyn and his publisher have been summoned before three separate local human rights commission in Canada after complaints were filed by Muslims over Steyn’s 2007 book, America Alone: The End of The World As We Know It. Steyn is accused of inciting hatred of Muslims. The plaintiff, one Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, is a man who has publicly announced on Canadian television that he approves of the murder of all Israeli civilians over the age of 18, but has not been summoned before any human rights commission. The British government has begun issuing “Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds” in an attempt to please potential wealthy Muslim investors. A local government council in England has prohibited its employees from having knicknacks on their desks resembling Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick, Piglet, so as not to offend local Muslims, who had complained. England’s largest bank, Fortis Bank, has dropped Knorbert the Piglet as its mascot and stopped handing out piggy banks to children after Muslims complained. Muslim nurses in England’s public hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene rules because, they say, scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is against Islamic law. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said in a BBC interview that it was “dangerous to have one law for everyone” and that the introduction of Sharia law to the United Kingdom was inevitable. Within days of his comments, British and Ontario governments confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions were receiving multiple welfare payments for each of their wives. Harvard University has introduced sex-segregated swimming and gym sessions at the request of the school’s Islamic Society. A Swedish cabinet minister told his fellow citizens they should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to them when they are in the majority. A Dutch cabinet minister said it would be OK with him if his country would vote to introduce Islamic law. (August 21, 2008)

Oh, No!

Just as the wind turbine mania is picking up steam, a news story broke today saying that wind turbines make bats’ lungs explode. The door is open for billions and billions and billions in lawsuit damages. (August 25, 2008)
T. Boone Pickens, the multi-billionaire, is bombarding us with TV and print advertisements for wind turbine farms, buttressed by more drilling for oil and especially natural gas. Texas is one place well-suited for wind turbine farms and some are already in place. Rumor has it that T. Boone has a 68,000-acre ranch down there. Not long after T. Boone began bombarding us with his TV ads (which he is funding with $58 million of his own money), word leaked that Pickens, via a company he runs—Clean Energy Fuels Corp.—stands to make a bundle on a liquid natural gas project, and has a $10 billion wind power project on the drawing board. Might be a good idea, anyway, though lefties will be muttering about unbridled capitalistic greed.
The late-summer death of Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, so close to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, was a cruel reminder to freedom-loving people of the prophetic nature of Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1978 Harvard graduation speech. He then denounced the decline of courage in the West, warned of the “materialist diseases” which caused us to value self-preservation and survival above all else. This failure of the modern democracies to value anything higher than life would ultimately make it difficult for them to defend themselves, Solzhenitsyn said. In a Weekly Standard essay this week on Solzhenitsyn’s life, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield paraphrased the great Russian novelist and hero by noting the importance the (increasingly feeble) West has come to place on “legalism. . .(which is) our substitute for virtue: You don’t have to distinguish good from evil and do good while avoiding evil; all you have to do is obey the law. . .you do not even have to believe that you have a soul or are capable of voluntary, inspired self-restraint.” Solzhenitsyn should be required reading for every citizen: The Gulag Archipelago, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, and Cancer Ward would be good starters. (August 26, 2008)
Vincent Myers of Bowling Green wrote to the editor of Indianapolis Star to complain that Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance “didn’t feel compelled to cover many claims. . .during the early summer floods” but somehow found money to sponsor and advertise at the new Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Vincent needs to understand that insurance companies are not in business to pay claims; they are in business to sell insurance policies and pay as few claims as possible. (September 7, 2008)
The History Channel broadcast a lengthy documentary of the events of September 11, 2001, on the seventh anniversary of the attacks. American citizens should consider this required viewing at least annually, but one gets the feeling a lot of us have already lost interest and moved on to more shopping. The program was an appalling reminder of how dangerously naïve and ill-equipped our country was at the time. Today, seven years later, I have no doubt that our country has the capability of defeating the radical Islamist enemy, but I have considerable doubt that we have the will and toughness to endure the inconvenience of doing what’s necessary to prevail. (September 11, 2008)
Christmas merchandise is already on the shelves at Costco in Indianapolis. Peaches and I personally saw and photographed it on September 15.
Memory Lane, Revisited: In early March of 2006, Reza Taheri-azar, a native of Iran and a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, drove his SUV into a crowd of people on the campus. He was charged with nine counts of attempted murder, and told police he wanted to kill Americans to “avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.” Flash forward: Young Reza was convicted of all nine counts by a jury this summer and has been sentenced to 30 years in prison (appeal to follow, of course). No lefty has yet been heard calling this a hate crime, but we can bet money they’ll be calling the verdict racist and discriminatory. (September 18, 2008)
The experience is universal for Internet users: you get an e-mail you’ve seen before and sometimes seen half a dozen times, or a thousand. It’s as if these things are in endless loops, like planets. There should be a way to send all Internet traffic, eventually, to the equivalent of an elephant’s graveyard, there to die. Every message could be tagged by “miles traveled” or by trips around the planet—and after, say, a million miles, the message would evaporate. (September 29, 2008)
I feel older today. Nick Reynolds is dead at age 75. Who’s he? The founding member of the Kingston Trio, my musical idols in the days of my youth on the plains of central Indiana. Reynolds teamed with Bob Shane and Dave Guard in the original group. “Tom Dooley” was their first No. 1 hit, in 1958. I saw them play live several times, in Scorched Corners and other places. Their music still makes me ever so happy. (October 4, 2008)
A first-grade class in San Francisco was taken to City Hall on a field trip--to celebrate the lesbian marriage of their teacher. School authorities told eager reporters the trip was designed to teach the youngsters about tolerance. (October 15, 2008)

The Heat’s Off!

Unless he’s got relatives, or a designated successor, I can rest easier now. Hollywood’s haughty fashion critic, the legendary Mr. Blackwell, has died. Famous for his annual “worst-dressed lists”—which I somehow evaded by running silent, running deep (actually driving along sea bottoms) and by always flying at under 250 feet while trailing twinkling clouds of empty beer cans and tinfoil to fool radar—Blackwell was 86 years old. His real name was Richard Sylvan Selzer. Associated Press’s obit said he was a little-known dress designer in 1960 when he issued his first “tongue-in-cheek criticism” of Hollywood fashion disasters. It proved to be his ticket to everlasting fame. (October 20, 2008)
AOL ceaselessly runs polls to see how we feel about things: Britney’s implants, Lindsay’s drug bust, Alec’s tantrums, the latest clodhopper kicked off Dancing With The Stars,--you know, the really important business of our lives. Today it was about political crankiness and right-wing nutballs — right up my alley. I voted, then — always curious — checked the poll results. At four o’clock in the afternoon, they were: 1) Do you think liberals are anti-American? (11,115 votes cast, 63% No, 37% Yes); 2) Does negativity (presumably “negative campaigning”) influence your vote? (9,579 votes, 51% Yes, 49% No); 3) Do you think Obama supporters are Socialists? (9,537 votes, 55% No, 45% Yes); 4) How important is the notion of patriotism to your vote? (8,684 votes, 60% Very, 20% Somewhat, 20% Not At All). (October 22, 2008)

Trusting Our Betters

Millions and millions of Americans trusted their betters. They trusted their political elites (meaning Congress, the President, and all the bureaucrats running the nation), they trusted the unelected elites who run Wall Street and the nation’s vast financial markets. They bought in fully on all the soothing, hypnotizing messages about hard work, self-reliance, saving for their future and their children’s. They invested in their 401(k) plans, savings plans and annuities, bought stocks and mutual funds, tucked their money away in safe places. They were in it for the long haul. They went to sleep and slept soundly, in the childlike belief that everything was safe and that their rulers would keep a sacred trust, be careful stewards of the system that made all things possible in this great country. But what happened instead is this: these slick thugs in tuxedos have betrayed us, played us for fools. They gamed the system, looted the moneypot, and left millions of innocents, who did no wrong at all, not only financially devastated but holding the bag for the bailout plans. They’re lying to us to this very moment about how bad it really is and is going to be. And they’re all going to skate away rich and free. Crimes of monstrous proportions have been committed by these elites, and I don’t hear anybody in Wonderland, D.C. demanding that the perps be identified by name, tracked down, indicted, tried, and imprisoned. There will be no justice until that happens, and don’t let any of these sleazy grifter politicians tell you otherwise. (October 26, 2008)

	Scoundrels, Knaves & Fools American Pile Whoops & Squawks Splinters From the Bench Indiana University Sports Lists & Other Minutiae Contact the author	2008 \| 2007 \| 2006 \| 2005 \| 2004 \| 2003 \| 2002 \| 2001 \| 2000 \| 1999 \| 1998 \| 1997 \| 1996 \| 1995 \| Pre-1995 The American Pile Ford Motor Company ended 2007 with 533,000 unsold vehicles in stock. The story didn’t identify which model year these were, but it raises a cosmic question: We know that auto manufacturers never exactly match their production to their sales, so. . .where do all those unsold cars go once a new year’s models are introduced? With 2008 models already on the market, where do the unsold new 2007s go? Is there for unsold cars the equivalent of the fabled elephant’s graveyard? (January 4, 2008) Cosmic Answer: No “Can it overcome the human tendency toward decisions that prove irrational and dangerous in the short run?”—Kenneth P. Riggs, CEO and president of Real Estate Research Corp., asking the cosmic question as he discussed the financial markets’ recent turmoil and resulting uncertainty for investors. (February 6, 2008) *So That’s* Why The News Is Always Bad The latest research shows that a person shown a sad or depressing movie is willing to pay four times as much for a bottle of water as a person shown an emotionally neutral movie. (February 8, 2008) The Berkeley, California city council voted 8-1 to declare that a U.S. Marines recruiting office in Berkeley is officially an “uninvited and unwelcome intruder.” One council member likened a military recruiting office to a pornography shop. This further makes the case for sawing off California and pushing it out to sea, or calling in close-air B-52 strikes on council headquarters. (February 1, 2008) Jus’ Can’t Keep ‘em Away From The Trough! One of the great Hoosier Legends—former Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz*—turned in his chips February 2. Newspaper obits were ever-so-careful in handling the story. The Chicago Tribune* noted that Butz had a ”relaxed and earthy style that caused problems in his public life” and that in 1976 while Secretary of Agriculture he was “forced from office” for “making a racist joke.” There were three strategic components--or “keywords” if you’re Googling-- in the punchline of Earl’s joke, which he made the mistake of sharing with reporters. The joke won’t bear repeating in a family newspaper, though several of my friends quickly remembered and recounted the entire episode. Butz was a dean at Purdue University, among other life achievements. He was also a dastardly Republican who in 1981 pled guilty to federal charges of failing to report a lousy old $148,000 of taxable income in 1978. (February 3, 2008) Instead, He Stayed Home, Sang, Drank, Hung Out With Gangsters, Hookers, And The Rat Pack, and Got Rich. . . FBI files on Frank Sinatra obtained after his death through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that Sinatra paid a doctor $40,000 to certify him “unacceptable for medical reasons” for military service during World War II.—Factoid encountered while reading an Associated Press story on “government secrecy” in the Indianapolis Star. (March 17, 2008) “That was always the advantage Clinton had. We never expected any better. He went from Skunk Trot, Arkansas, to Skunk Trot, Arkansas. Spitzer fell from Fifth Avenue to Skunk Trot, Arkansas.”—Ann Coulter, comparing the lives of Sick Willie and the freshly-disgraced former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, in her March 17 column in Human Events. Hundreds of Indianapolis Colts fans stampeded to the team’s suburban practice complex in late March to compete for the honor of being chosen “the biggest fan.” Free tickets and a limousine ride to the first game in the new stadium were part of the prizes. It made me wonder: How far would someone go to capture this honor? Having your hands and feet cut off and replaced with transplanted horse’s hooves? A full-body horse tattoo from head to hoof? Hard to guess in today’s strange culture. I wish I could have been there to see and hear and touch the contestants. (March 20, 2008) Please Hang Up, And Don’t Try Again The opening scene of playwright Sarah Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” (playing through July 27 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company) takes this old-timer back to the days when comedians Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart both were hot with “telephone” joke routines. Berman had a night-club act based mostly on him placing or taking imaginary calls. Ruhl’s “strange. . .little journey” (in the words of Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones) opens in a quiet little café. As Jones describes it. . . A man sitting alone at a table drops over dead.Then his cell phone rings. A woman at a neighboring table “slurps down the remnants of her lobster bisque,” then answers the dead man’s phone. She listens to the caller. She looks down at the corpse.”No,” she says, in a truly delicious understatement. “He’s not.” And then she takes a message. Let’s hope the word gets out –that’s one wicked opening scene! (April 7, 2008) Celebrity journalist Barbara Walters published her memoir (“Audition”) in May and promptly hit the talk-show circuit to hawk it. Leaked in advance was the news that she had an affair in the 1970s with Edward Brook, a Massachusetts Democrat and America’s first black Senator since Reconstruction. New York Post film critic Kyle Smith reviewed the book and concluded that, like Walters herself, there’s less there than meets the eye. Smith describes Walters as “immensely rich and familiar to all, (someone) who has been around forever without anyone quite knowing why.” He describes the book itself as “an epic of self-absorption unleavened by self-awareness.” She could have saved us all a heap o’ trouble, Smith concludes, and made this “50 pages of cute stories about the great, the terrible, and Monica Lewinsky.” Instead, it weighs in at 612 pages from Walters, who “is an eyewitness to history but then so was Forest Gump.” My kind of reviewing. (May 14, 2008) Will Elder, the legendary cartoonist, died May 15 of Parkinson’s Disease in a Rockleigh, New Jersey, nursing home. He was 86 years old. He achieved initial fame as a cartoonist in Mad magazine in the early 1950s. His humor was described as ranging from wry to blasphemous, and he was widely known among friends as an “inspired prankster.” Elder’s cartoon creation of “Little Annie Fanny” ran for 25 years in Playboy magazine. He was certainly one of my childhood idols, when Mad was a staple in my knapsack. (May 18, 2008) Forty-five per cent of Americans between the ages of 18-34 say that international law should trump United States laws in any conflict between the two. . .only 7 of 100 students in the 5th grade could answer correctly a question about why July 4, 1776, was an important date in American history—Two little examples from a CNN report on The Bradley Project, which conducted polling and research on the topic of “The American Identity,” aired on the Lou Dobbs Show. (June 8, 2008) George, George, George... June closed with the death from heart failure at age 71 of comedian George Carlin. Perhaps best known for his (then) outrageous monologue on The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, and for his A House Is Just A Place For Your Stuff and a striking comparison of the differences between baseball and football. He was a man of multiple substance addictions and unsurpassed zaniness, He was one of the most wonderfully weird human beings ever to walk the earth. My one regret about Carlin was his frequent use of foul language in his acts. He could have been equally funny without ever using a single profanity. His choice to do it helped degrade our public culture. (June 30, 2008) The Republic of Me Apparently there’s a growing worldwide movement among at least eccentrics and cranks to establish their own nations—with themselves as heads of state.The July 3 Chicago Tribune Tempo Section offered a lengthy article—“One Nation, Under Me”—on this most intriguing idea. Kevin Baugh, founder and Supreme Ruler of his own nation, The Republic of Molossia (situated in a “scorched corner of the Nevada Desert”), has a Website providing all the “how to” details (www.geocities.com/micronations) and one on his new country at www.molossia.org. The potential seems enormous. The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy story out of Amsterdam in early July about the arrest and persecution of a Dutch cartoonist who had the mistaken notion that he lived in a country allowing free speech. His crime was to have offended the feelings of some Muslims with certain cartoons on his website. A group of eight or nine police officers, local prosecutors, and other thought crime bureaucrats came to his apartment, arrested him, and launched their persecution. Though the article was fascinating, in a sickening way, I soon threw it down and declared to my wife, Peaches, that if the Dutch or any other supposedly free people tolerate this sort of political correctness then they will deserve what they eventually get. In this case that will be sharia law and their own slaughter as infidels. This plague is widespread across Europe and inevitably will reach the United States. It is already spreading across Canada, our trembling neighbor ninny to the north. I see no evidence that the U.S. will have the will to resist when it arrives here. (July 18, 2008) “Many universities have become nothing more than re-education camps, marinating our young in a toxic stew of racism, sexism, gender studies, global-warming paranoia and identity grievances.” –Charles Alley, in a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Star, commenting on a recent unpleasantness at Indiana-Purdue University of Indianapolis (IUPUI), in which the school’s diversity office publicly humiliated a 58-year-old white janitor and student for reading—during a work break--a book about Ku Klux Klan history in Indiana. The student was accused of racial harassment after a co-worker filed a complaint. The case took on national overtones when the Wall Street Journal publicized it. The university Chancellor finally issued what it felt passed for an apology to the man, assuring him and the entire world that IUPUI was “committed to free expression,” which is, of course, utter baloney unless it’s politically correct expression. (July 18, 2008) Peaches and I went to a big rodeo in Tucson. What a spectacle! Wranglers, cowpokes, cowpunchers, cowboys, cowgirls, wranglerettes, broncos, wild bulls (all of ‘em ver-r-r-ry angry), little kids wrestling sheep, clowns in barrels. Probably 5,000 people there, in a county fair atmosphere, many with belt buckles bigger than their heads. Outside the arena, PETA was picketing, faces puckered and angry. Peaches invited several of them to come to our house and see her fur coat. Fox News ran a special July 26-27 on Murder In The Family: Honor Killings in America. This is the delightful Muslim custom giving a father the right to kill his daughters or wife when they are deemed to have dishonored the family. Fox says honor killings were first reported in the United States in 1989. Recently they have occurred in Dallas, Atlanta, Rochester, New York, and St. Louis. In Europe, where such killings are more widespread, local authorities generally stand by and do little or nothing rather than offend local Muslims by prosecuting these crimes. Here, so far, efforts are still made to apprehend the perps and prosecute them. For how long, though? This Pretty Much Nails It “Twenty-five years ago when I first went to work for American Airlines, we were issued these little white gloves. Today we are issued handcuffs.” —American Airlines flight attendant, quoted on a cable TV special about the airline industry in the United States, about how her job had changed over the years. (July 27, 2008) Human Resources, D. C.-Style U.S. Capitol Police officials have dismissed 15 people, about one-quarter of their latest group of recruits, after discovering the individuals had been hired despite failing criminal background checks, psychological exams and other employment criteria. Vicky Must Be Trying To Raise Cash I doubt we really want to know what the buyer plans to do with a pair of Queen Victoria’s underpants, which sold for $9,000 at a London auction. The bloomers had a 50-inch waist and were bought by a Canadian. (July 31, 2008) A pair of Queen Vicky’s stockings sold for $14,300 on September 3, according to the Chicago Tribune. This time the purchaser was identified: The Ruddington Framework Knitters’ Museum in Nottingham. Worth a stop the next time you’ve over there, don’t you think? (September 4, 2008) Indianapolis Public School officials engaged in a massive effort this week to assure high attendance at the August 13 first-day-of-school by telephoning parents to remind them of all the previous reminders they’d been issued, and by offering “incentives” such as free tickets to Indiana Fever (the local women’s professional basketball league team) games, to encourage a show-up. Long ago and far away, in the days of our youth on the plains of central Indiana, nothing even approaching this effort was needed to assure that students came back to school on schedule. One notice was sufficient. It was a different world, indeed. (August 13, 2008) Peaches and I recently saw the new film, WALL-E. It is set in a future time—not too far from imaginable, certainly—when, due to pollution, earth’s human population has fled to a nearby space station. There, because they have grown so grotesquely fat, they spend their entire lives gliding about in mobile Barcaloungers. WALL-E is cute, the animation is superb, and the audience leaves the theater well-lectured. (August, 2008) Mad Magazine again showed why it exists when, in August, it got Circuit City corporate officials so riled up they banned the magazine from all Circuit City Stores. The August issue contained a spoof of the retailer, and “overly sensitive” poohbahs took the bait. Cooler heads soon prevailed, though, and offending copies of Mad were put back on Circuit City shelves to continue their insurrectionist mission. (August 10, 2008) Legendary atheist Michael Newdow is back in the news. He’s the Sacramento, California, doctor and lawyer who files lawsuits anytime he gets the faintest whiff of God in a public space. This time he’s suing the federal government, demanding that the words “In God We Trust” be removed from all currency. This constitutes the establishment of religion, he claims. MSNBC’s website ran a poll, of course, and as of mid-day August 20, 71% of its voters said Newdow was wrong, and 29% agreed with him. Newdow is the price we pay to have a free society. (August 20, 2008) Sharia Watch Denise Spellberg, a faculty member at the University of Texas-Austin, signed a deal with Random House Publishers for a book on Islam. In the final draft stage, the manuscript came into the hands of someone who was Muslim and who was offended. Spellberg was accused of being anti-Muslim. The protest spead and Random House announced this summer it has canceled the book’s publication. Mark Steyn and his publisher have been summoned before three separate local human rights commission in Canada after complaints were filed by Muslims over Steyn’s 2007 book, America Alone: The End of The World As We Know It. Steyn is accused of inciting hatred of Muslims. The plaintiff, one Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, is a man who has publicly announced on Canadian television that he approves of the murder of all Israeli civilians over the age of 18, but has not been summoned before any human rights commission. The British government has begun issuing “Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds” in an attempt to please potential wealthy Muslim investors. A local government council in England has prohibited its employees from having knicknacks on their desks resembling Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick, Piglet, so as not to offend local Muslims, who had complained. England’s largest bank, Fortis Bank, has dropped Knorbert the Piglet as its mascot and stopped handing out piggy banks to children after Muslims complained. Muslim nurses in England’s public hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene rules because, they say, scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is against Islamic law. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said in a BBC interview that it was “dangerous to have one law for everyone” and that the introduction of Sharia law to the United Kingdom was inevitable. Within days of his comments, British and Ontario governments confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions were receiving multiple welfare payments for each of their wives. Harvard University has introduced sex-segregated swimming and gym sessions at the request of the school’s Islamic Society. A Swedish cabinet minister told his fellow citizens they should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to them when they are in the majority. A Dutch cabinet minister said it would be OK with him if his country would vote to introduce Islamic law. (August 21, 2008) Oh, No! Just as the wind turbine mania is picking up steam, a news story broke today saying that wind turbines make bats’ lungs explode. The door is open for billions and billions and billions in lawsuit damages. (August 25, 2008) T. Boone Pickens, the multi-billionaire, is bombarding us with TV and print advertisements for wind turbine farms, buttressed by more drilling for oil and especially natural gas. Texas is one place well-suited for wind turbine farms and some are already in place. Rumor has it that T. Boone has a 68,000-acre ranch down there. Not long after T. Boone began bombarding us with his TV ads (which he is funding with $58 million of his own money), word leaked that Pickens, via a company he runs—Clean Energy Fuels Corp.—stands to make a bundle on a liquid natural gas project, and has a $10 billion wind power project on the drawing board. Might be a good idea, anyway, though lefties will be muttering about unbridled capitalistic greed. The late-summer death of Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, so close to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, was a cruel reminder to freedom-loving people of the prophetic nature of Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1978 Harvard graduation speech. He then denounced the decline of courage in the West, warned of the “materialist diseases” which caused us to value self-preservation and survival above all else. This failure of the modern democracies to value anything higher than life would ultimately make it difficult for them to defend themselves, Solzhenitsyn said. In a Weekly Standard essay this week on Solzhenitsyn’s life, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield paraphrased the great Russian novelist and hero by noting the importance the (increasingly feeble) West has come to place on “legalism. . .(which is) our substitute for virtue: You don’t have to distinguish good from evil and do good while avoiding evil; all you have to do is obey the law. . .you do not even have to believe that you have a soul or are capable of voluntary, inspired self-restraint.” Solzhenitsyn should be required reading for every citizen: The Gulag Archipelago, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, and Cancer Ward would be good starters. (August 26, 2008) Vincent Myers of Bowling Green wrote to the editor of Indianapolis Star to complain that Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance “didn’t feel compelled to cover many claims. . .during the early summer floods” but somehow found money to sponsor and advertise at the new Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Vincent needs to understand that insurance companies are not in business to pay claims; they are in business to sell insurance policies and pay as few claims as possible. (September 7, 2008) The History Channel broadcast a lengthy documentary of the events of September 11, 2001, on the seventh anniversary of the attacks. American citizens should consider this required viewing at least annually, but one gets the feeling a lot of us have already lost interest and moved on to more shopping. The program was an appalling reminder of how dangerously naïve and ill-equipped our country was at the time. Today, seven years later, I have no doubt that our country has the capability of defeating the radical Islamist enemy, but I have considerable doubt that we have the will and toughness to endure the inconvenience of doing what’s necessary to prevail. (September 11, 2008) Christmas merchandise is already on the shelves at Costco in Indianapolis. Peaches and I personally saw and photographed it on September 15. Memory Lane, Revisited: In early March of 2006, Reza Taheri-azar, a native of Iran and a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, drove his SUV into a crowd of people on the campus. He was charged with nine counts of attempted murder, and told police he wanted to kill Americans to “avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.” Flash forward: Young Reza was convicted of all nine counts by a jury this summer and has been sentenced to 30 years in prison (appeal to follow, of course). No lefty has yet been heard calling this a hate crime, but we can bet money they’ll be calling the verdict racist and discriminatory. (September 18, 2008) The experience is universal for Internet users: you get an e-mail you’ve seen before and sometimes seen half a dozen times, or a thousand. It’s as if these things are in endless loops, like planets. There should be a way to send all Internet traffic, eventually, to the equivalent of an elephant’s graveyard, there to die. Every message could be tagged by “miles traveled” or by trips around the planet—and after, say, a million miles, the message would evaporate. (September 29, 2008) I feel older today. Nick Reynolds is dead at age 75. Who’s he? The founding member of the Kingston Trio, my musical idols in the days of my youth on the plains of central Indiana. Reynolds teamed with Bob Shane and Dave Guard in the original group. “Tom Dooley” was their first No. 1 hit, in 1958. I saw them play live several times, in Scorched Corners and other places. Their music still makes me ever so happy. (October 4, 2008) A first-grade class in San Francisco was taken to City Hall on a field trip--to celebrate the lesbian marriage of their teacher. School authorities told eager reporters the trip was designed to teach the youngsters about tolerance. (October 15, 2008) The Heat’s Off! Unless he’s got relatives, or a designated successor, I can rest easier now. Hollywood’s haughty fashion critic, the legendary Mr. Blackwell, has died. Famous for his annual “worst-dressed lists”—which I somehow evaded by running silent, running deep (actually driving along sea bottoms) and by always flying at under 250 feet while trailing twinkling clouds of empty beer cans and tinfoil to fool radar—Blackwell was 86 years old. His real name was Richard Sylvan Selzer. Associated Press’s obit said he was a little-known dress designer in 1960 when he issued his first “tongue-in-cheek criticism” of Hollywood fashion disasters. It proved to be his ticket to everlasting fame. (October 20, 2008) AOL ceaselessly runs polls to see how we feel about things: Britney’s implants, Lindsay’s drug bust, Alec’s tantrums, the latest clodhopper kicked off Dancing With The Stars,--you know, the really important business of our lives. Today it was about political crankiness and right-wing nutballs — right up my alley. I voted, then — always curious — checked the poll results. At four o’clock in the afternoon, they were: 1) Do you think liberals are anti-American? (11,115 votes cast, 63% No, 37% Yes); 2) Does negativity (presumably “negative campaigning”) influence your vote? (9,579 votes, 51% Yes, 49% No); 3) Do you think Obama supporters are Socialists? (9,537 votes, 55% No, 45% Yes); 4) How important is the notion of patriotism to your vote? (8,684 votes, 60% Very, 20% Somewhat, 20% Not At All). (October 22, 2008) Trusting Our Betters Millions and millions of Americans trusted their betters. They trusted their political elites (meaning Congress, the President, and all the bureaucrats running the nation), they trusted the unelected elites who run Wall Street and the nation’s vast financial markets. They bought in fully on all the soothing, hypnotizing messages about hard work, self-reliance, saving for their future and their children’s. They invested in their 401(k) plans, savings plans and annuities, bought stocks and mutual funds, tucked their money away in safe places. They were in it for the long haul. They went to sleep and slept soundly, in the childlike belief that everything was safe and that their rulers would keep a sacred trust, be careful stewards of the system that made all things possible in this great country. But what happened instead is this: these slick thugs in tuxedos have betrayed us, played us for fools. They gamed the system, looted the moneypot, and left millions of innocents, who did no wrong at all, not only financially devastated but holding the bag for the bailout plans. They’re lying to us to this very moment about how bad it really is and is going to be. And they’re all going to skate away rich and free. Crimes of monstrous proportions have been committed by these elites, and I don’t hear anybody in Wonderland, D.C. demanding that the perps be identified by name, tracked down, indicted, tried, and imprisoned. There will be no justice until that happens, and don’t let any of these sleazy grifter politicians tell you otherwise. (October 26, 2008) Back to top
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