Category Archives: The Culture

Shoppin’ used clothes

Goodwill recently opened a boutique (true story) in a strip shopping center not far from the rancho and I have been encouraged to look through the racks of used but still good condition clothing. I have passed on the shoes and boots.

Andy at MyOldRV does me one better, buying his clothes off eBay. I knew he was buying old wide-brimmed straws there but not his shirts. Of course his shirts are the pricey specialty kind, made in West Point, Mis’sippi. Where slo-drawling Wynell answers the phone. When eBay hasn’t got enough used to satisfy him.

Via MyOldRV

The Martian

Far and away the best self-published book I’ve read. The Martian by Andy Weir started out as a 99 cent indy ebook and didn’t get its current name brand publisher and hard- and softback editions until after it became an Amazon hit.

The story of an astronaut mistakenly left for dead on Mars and how he deals with it does a great job of puffing NASA, Weir obviously being a NASA fanboy. A private space consortium behind the protagonist would have been more logical than a bloated government bureaucracy. SpaceX or one of its progeny. But never mind.

I got a little tired of the technical stuff at several points but it seemed that whenever I did, the author took the narrative in a more interesting direction. Mercifully the story has almost no politics in it nor any of contemporary science fiction’s usual dystopian babble. It was also a pleasure to meet some unadulterated heroes in science fiction again. Hopefully that will become a trend.

It was amusing to see Weir pick CNN and NBC as NASA’s chief media conduits to the public. Perhaps he doesn’t know those two have been dead last in the audience ratings for more than a decade. No mention at all is made of Fox, which is number one, and whose audience is vastly larger than CNN’s or NBC’s combined.

Nevertheless, Weir’s story is an immensely enjoyable testament to the value of the individual. It’s optimistic about humanity in general and human space exploration in particular. Can we get back to it now, all these years after Apollo and the space shuttles endlessly going nowhere?

Great dreams

I met Duke Ellington in a dream the other night in a remarkably small theater after his ensemble had concluded their 1927 composition Black & Tan Fantasy.

I tried to bum a cigarette from the great jazzman, but he refused. I thanked him for doing that. “It will make a better story,” I said. Then I woke up with a smile.

When I told my fiddle teacher about it, he wasn’t surprised. “You’ve been playing his music,” he said. Spooky instrument, the fiddle.

And more random thoughts

Amazes me that anyone still takes the news media seriously. They don’t even take themselves seriously. Rolling Stone’s phony gang-rape story was based on the word of one, uncorroborated, source without any comment from the accused. None at all. When will the firings begin?

New York City’s illegal cigarette-salesman Eric Garner should not have resisted arrest but surely it wasn’t necessary to kill him for it. I have no use for the rioters but I have to agree with them that the system is seriously out of whack. Cops are killing people more often these days and many of their prosecutor-backers are persuading grand juries to do nothing about it.

As Ted Cruz has said, and Rand Paul has chimed in, it’s time to abolish the IRS.

Who will be the Republican nominee in 2016? Why Jeb, of course. It’s his turn. That’s the way the Stupid Party does business.  And creation of a third, Tea Party, will only pad the loss to the Democrats. Sixteen years of ’em. Whew.

There’s one consistent detail about the Democrats. A hundred years later, they are still trying to disarm black people. Only now they’re trying to do it to everyone else at the same time. Except their own elites, of course. They’ll always have guns. Or bodyguards with guns.

Few journalists are independent actors like the Rolling Stone “reporter” Sabrina Rubin Erdely. They do what their editors & publishers tell them and their editors & publishers are primarily interested in keeping the pols, the authorities and the advertisers happy. And, nowadays, keeping their own jobs. Erdely is an outlier. But, then, so is her editor. Are they still employed? Why?

Tell me why anyone would feel safe with a president who considers economic sanctions for Israel while fighting congressional attempts to renew sanctions on terrorism-supporting Iran? Sho’ loves him some jihadis, don’t he?

UPDATE:  The NYC grand jury’s failure to indict for trial the killer cop who murdered an unarmed black man for resisting arrest is a grave injustice that demands redress. Demands it, dammit. Get your heads out of your asses, people.

Rolling Stone’s fake gang-rape story

You know, the one that got all the fraternities at the University of Virginia suspended until further notice? The one that’s now cratered, i.e. the one that the aging look-alike for AARP Magazine (thank you, Ed Driscoll), has now retracted due to “misplaced” trust in its single source.

Its single source. Mull that one over for a while. One person. No corroboration. No support. One person. Wow, it doesn’t take much to move the whole Democrat news media’s needle these days. On the other hand, it was the WaPo that cut up the story. Thanks, no doubt, to its 2013 purchase by Jeff Bezos.

And the usual post-story-collapse cries of “fake but accurate” now resound. These aren’t journalists. They are leftist political activists ever in search of illustrations to support their agenda. And the author of the exclusive (one source!) and the Rolling Stone-AARP Magazine itself did it all before, back in 2011. Only that time, three Catholic priests and a school teacher went to jail.

BTW, I’m still waiting for the leftist “news” hounds to do an investigative piece on the dark power of sororities. Hopefully with more than one source. Dream on.

Via PJMedia.

UPDATE: In which the leftist rag disguised as a journal of news clarifies its retraction/apology.

Gotta get a drone

The more I think about them, the more those camera-carrying quadcopters appeal:

“Outdoor flight is made possible by advanced GPS positioning that compensates for light wind. The Phantom has a fail-safe function and can be configured to automatically fly to and land at its take-off position if connection to the transmitter is lost…With a maximum horizontal speed of 22 miles/hour (10 meters/second) the Phantom lets you capture the action of almost any sport, event or scene.”

Why? Because they’re there.

Or maybe not.

Via Instapundit.

Jesse Jackson and the Internet

Chicago’s famous race pimp and Wormtongue crony is lobbying the FCC for his preferred form of Net Neutrality, which ought to be a tip-off that still more obnoxious Democrat regulation of all our lives is just around the corner.

But stay calm. It was always a matter of time before the pols got their grimy paws on the Internet to create opportunities for themselves. Graft for them and their sock puppets like Jackson. That time seems to have almost arrived.

Via WSJ