Bright lights, mid-sized city

Drunk women caterwaul. I live in the heart of the nightlife district of a city always full of tourists. Get a couple of sissy drinks in them, and gals who wouldn't think of saying something untoward at home in Toledo squall out long and hard on the streets of Music City. 

Throw in the locals, including college students from Nashville's 957 institutions associated with a niche religion (Send your budding Church of Christ-ers here!). These mostly Southern girls raised on the idea of female submissiveness and a literal hell can get pretty wild on a Saturday night. Beyond the usual "I am soooo drunk," I hear stuff like "Kill him, Brandon!" and "I don't give a good gee-dee what my daddy says!" Yep. That is a serious statement in the South, y'all.

Photo: Lower Broadway, Nashville. From Vermont Digital Newspaper project

Oh, MM

It's late September and I really should be back at school.

Etheridge Unplugged.

Pictured: The Old Well at Carolina, Chapel Hill campus.

The women I want to meet in Nashville

Mandy Barnett
She's from Crossville, y'all, and has a big, ballsy, beautiful singing voice. Need I say more?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvtOzCPxKtM

Maura O'Connell
A voice that rivals Mandy's, and a wide, pretty face with Irish  eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l87JpWkbI0

Minton Sparks
I confess. Got a major crush on this poet/songwriter/spoken-word artist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q4EHAwYNms

Making a mountain out of Mary Magdalene

I am shocked that the Vatican denies that Jesus might have been married. Not.

Come on, y'all. I like the husband/father Christ better than some lily-white fainting lamb.

'Webb drops the hammer on Romney'

The former defense secretary is not happy with Mitt's essentially calling veterans moochers.

"Those young Marines that I led (in Vietnam) have grown older now. They’ve lived lives of courage, both in combat and after their return, where many of them were derided by their own peers for having served. That was a long time ago. They are not bitter. They know what they did. But in receiving veterans’ benefits, they are not takers. They were givers, in the ultimate sense of that word. There is a saying among war veterans:  'All gave some, some gave all.' This is not a culture of dependency. It is a part of a long tradition that gave this country its freedom and independence. They paid, some with their lives, some through wounds and disabilities, some through their emotional scars, some through the lost opportunities and delayed entry into civilian careers which had already begun for many of their peers who did not serve. 

And not only did they pay. They will not say this, so I will say it for them. They are owed, if nothing else, at least a mention, some word of thanks and respect, when a presidential candidate who is their generational peer makes a speech accepting his party’s nomination to be commander-in-chief.  And they are owed much more than that — a guarantee that we will never betray the commitment that we made to them and to their loved ones."

Pictured: Multi-Launch Rocket System at Fort Sill, OK

Today is a great time to be The Gay

So says this thoughtful piece on how every-day dangerous and scary it was to be out not so long ago.

"I had grown up in the fifties and the sixties, when practically the only public homosexuals in America were James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, and (the bisexual) Paul Goodman. There were no gay images on television (unless you count Paul Lynde and Liberace), no politicians in favor of gay rights (much less any who were out of the closet themselves), and no news coverage that didn’t share the tone of a notorious page-one story in The New York Times that appeared in 1963. It carried this headline: Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern."

Change, thank you Buddha, has come partly due to the AIDS epidemic. During that desperate decade before drugs made it a chronic yet manageable disease, people saw their sons and nephews and brothers die painful, wracking deaths in the closet, as the world whistled by.

That horror woke us up quicker to the fact that we are all God's children.

Mid-afternoon doggehs

Today you require canines. I understand.

Wilder, Armaithwaite, et al

The summer I was 15, I clerked at the county school system's records department. I catalogued and filed stuff for the sole permanent employee of the office, a gossipy, blowsy, late-middle-aged woman who smoked like a locomotive (at her desk) and kept the window air conditioner--which blew directly on me--set on max cool. I had a sore throat all summer. But that's a Tammy Tangent.

The records I organized were class logs from the 1920s and 1930s. Mountain people nearing Social Security retirement age then often had neither birth certificates nor Social Security numbers. They needed the latter to "draw" the government stipend, and used the school records to prove their citizenship and their existence.

If Bill Smith came to our office needing a copy of the roll at Boatland School for the school year 1927-28, Miss Locomotive up front wanted to be able to put her hands on the school's record book.

The names of those little one-room places of learning: Pall Mall, Double-Top, Roslin. I learned my county that summer. And I discovered my skill and drive for organization that was still sharp in me as little as 4 years ago.

The quality defined me as the most thorough newspaper reporter at my various small dailies, and as a list-driven, keep-my-shit-in-order, make-no-typos public relations editor/writer. I drove my graphic artist insane, except those occasional times when I was proofing a final "blue-line" copy three minutes before the press rolled and found an error in a publication,

Today I'm a girl who simply does the best she can. Which I suppose was always the case for the place I was at the time.

(Pictured: Barger School, near Allardt, Tennessee. The teacher's hair rocks!)

'New face of American manufacturing?'

Brooklyn hipsters, perhaps.

My heroine

Honey Boo Boo settles the debate over gay rights in 4 seconds.

Mid-afternoon kittehs

You've missed them, I know.

The most religious president

These historians say James Earl Carter Jr.

Jimmy knows that Christianity is about loving your neighbor.

Can I get an amen?

Pictured: Carter as a baby. Love the ponderous look.

My pit bull position

I'm a nutbag when it comes to animal rights and rescue. My ex and I fostered and found homes for a hundred or more cats and dogs when we lived on 17 acres in the country.

But. Pit bulls are unique. They have been specifically and relentessly bred for a killer instinct, and they have the physiology to make that deadly (even if a Chihuahua has a killer mentality, he weighs 8 pounds and doesn't have a jaw that locks on prey).

More sad evidence out of Texas: the mauling death of a 3-month-old child.

Read more about pit bulls and why they are NOT good family dogs.

Pictured: Me and my nephew with MJ, who lived to age 21.

'Broke Down South of Dallas'

It sure beats a load by the side of the road.

Junior Brown and his guit-steel lay it out for you.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Get 'em if you don't. Marijuana fights the big C.

"Mounting evidence shows ‘cannabinoids’ in marijuana slow cancer growth, inhibit formation of new blood cells that feed a tumor, and help manage pain, fatigue, nausea, and other side effects."

The state of the MMJ movement.

Talk to the paw

I'm one of those who talks to animals in everyday, conversational tones. Make eye contact (they almost always reciprocate) and speak in full, observational sentences, not barked commands or cutesy baby talk.

I decided that my crazy-cat lady method might aid and abet evolution. Apparently humans employ complex language partly because we alone have a voice box that allows speech.

I talk to my animal(s) so that they'll be ready to answer when their voice box develops the goods they need.

Tiger, my resident animal, appears to understand occasionally what a six-word sentence from me means. And the human-like emotion he can display on his little cat face!
He does "disdain" the best, of course. He is a feline.

Lunch kitteh

TGIF

Yeah, huh?

Cracked.com points out things that start wars in the office. You can bet the thermostat is on there.

Sorghum, sweet sorghum

As y'all know, I am a "sugar" whore, literally and figuratively. I love to kiss, and I love sweet foods.

Since coming home to the Southeast, I am back on sorghum, a wholesome sweetener that is less pricy and pretentious than agave nectar. Sorghum has a wild, strong taste that appeals to my hillbilly palate. It resembles corn standing in the field, and also is a source of gluten-free, whole-grain flour the world over. (The Chinese distill sorghum into intoxicating drink).

Sorghum. It does a body good.

Also, NOT molasses. Please don't interchange the terms.

"Molasses is a by-product of the sugar industry, whereas sorghum is the syrup produced when the extracted juice from the sorghum is boiled down."

Robinella

You need this. Trust me.

'The humans with super human vision'

Scientists are studying those who can see unfathomable numbers of hues.
Discover Magazine breaks it down.

"Living among us are people with four cones, who might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.Women with color-blind male relatives sometimes have super color vision."

As for that last sentence, Discover cites a 1948 study by a Dutch scientist:

 "While color-blind men had two normal cones and one mutant cone, De Vries knew that the mothers and daughters of color-blind men had the mutant cone and three normal cones—a total of four separate cones in their eyes. He suspected the extra cone could be why the women perceived color differently—not because they saw less than most people but because they saw more. He speculated that such women might be using the fourth cone to distinguish more colors than a trichromat, but he buried this insight on the last page of the paper. De Vries never wrote about four-coned women again."

Tiger insisted I post his pic too

Resident metrosexual feline, forever under-fed.

Your early evening kitteh

You are such a homophone

Here are nine sound-alike word pairs that are confused and misused, according to cracked.com.

As an English-language nerd, can I say that #9 on the list--mantel vs. mantle--was the only one I paused on to cipher the differences? I knew quickly the distinctions between the rest of the homophones.

I didn't choose the grammar life. The grammar life chose me.

"Silent Spring' turns 50

There's a new biography of author Rachel Carson. Here's a review.

"Carson's particular genius was in making science come so alive that the reader did not think of it as science," notes Mr. Souder. "Silent Spring" was only one of many such polemics, but it is the one that got read. This is an important point. All sorts of people were warning of potential dangers of synthetic chemicals, the science of which was only vaguely understood at the time. Six months before "Silent Spring," Knopf published "Our Synthetic Environment," about chemical toxicity in food and the environment. It sank like a rock.."

Because I am re-discovering that American South bugs can be the size of Cessna single-engine planes in the summer, I can understand why society was driven to scatter deadly toxins in order to kill the common housefly.

I grew up on a swine farm in the 1970s, and let me tell you there were times when my parents would have used anything to knock down the swarms in the hoghouses. Including fogs of DDT.

September 11th, soon

The anniversary of the 2001 attacks is upon us.

Thomas Merton wrote the following prophetic words in 1947. The passage is from Figures For An Apocalypse, VI – In the Ruins of New York

Oh how quiet it is after the black night
When flames out of the clouds burned down your cariated teeth,
And when those lightnings,
Lancing the black boils of Harlem and the Bronx,
Spilled the remaining prisoners,
(The tens and twenties of the living)
Into the trees of Jersey,
To the green farms, to find their liberty.

How are they down, how have they fallen down
Those great strong towers of ice and steel,
And melted by what terror and what miracle?
What fires and lights tore down,
With the white anger of their sudden accusation,
Those towers of silver and of steel?

Down on Music Row

My regular Starbucks barista has a degree in audio engineering, but can't get a job in Music City because the economy is in the toilet, big studios are dying down on Sixteenth Avenue, and the old white men who run that street don't cotton to girls in the workplace no-how unless they're answering phones or fetching coffee.

My barista did brush up against a studio job when she interned at a label. That job turned out to be mostly about delivering Martina MacBride's groceries.

I think the world of country music works this way from top to bottom. (It also eats its young. See: Steve Earle).

Here are some girl singers turned out and down by the Nashville bigwig studios.

Shelby Lynne
kd lang
Mandy Barnett

I've stirred my last batch of gravy

The Big Mac declares independence Southern Baptist-style.

She's on all our prayer lists
She's on all our hearts
As for the Easter cantata
We don't know who'll sing her part

Holy panties, Batman!

I don't find "Mormon underwear" any more peculiar than other religious body decor. Jews have Hasidic headgear; Catholics wear Crucifix jewelry. And don't forget Church-of-God coolots.

Here's a hilarious send-up on the subject anyway, with a cast of Christian characters straight out of a Flannery O'Connor story.

"It's a question Ruben Israel and his band of brothers at Bible Believers — "Preaching at big events for over two decades" — are only too happy to answer. Brother Ruben et al have brought a genuine article of Mormon underwear all the way from Los Angeles so that delegates may personally examine the offending garment in the halls of the RNC."

Have I got a deal for you

Megan McArdle explains Amway, et al:

"We are most vulnerable to Ponzi schemes and other confidence tricks when we start to believe that we can cheat the universe—that we can get something for nothing. The best con men succeed mostly because we are so desperate to believe them."

I got a bit much Scotch-Irish skinflint in me to fall innocently for a line (the flip-side being I'm a Doubting Thomas about everything).

Meanwhile, here's my favorite Reba McEntire song. Has she got a deal for you.

Academics and atrocious writing

Those with book learnin' often can't or won't write a straightforward sentence. They write to get published.

"Supervisors typically preach stylistic caution [to their postgraduate students]; they want their students to demonstrate mastery of disciplinary norms, not to push against disciplinary boundaries. Editors and referees, likewise, are often more intent on self-cloning than on genuine innovation or empowerment. Peer-reviewed publications, meanwhile, offer a range of stylistic models that are at best unadventurous and at worst downright damaging. .  .  . Academics who learn to write by imitation will almost inevitably pick up the same bad habits."

Somebody give her a hell, yeah

A Detroit prosecutor runs rapists to ground.

"The thousands of rape kits had piled up in a dusty police warehouse in Detroit for years, ignored, until one of Worthy’s colleagues stumbled upon them in 2009. Since then, an outraged Worthy has been fighting to get the kits logged, tested for DNA, and then entered into the national DNA database."

Lunch doggeh

There's no 'I' in team

I'm watching the RNC convention. Wall-to-wall sis-boom-bah-the-other-guy-sucks. Cue the same tape in Charlotte. This--along with a recent habit of watching re-runs of "The Office"--makes me remember "team-building" workplace exercises of yore.

Gawd. Fall backward into co-worker's arms to boost trust! Take the Myers-Briggs and discover you have the same profile as Hitler! Use an afternoon Mountain Dew buzz to shout wild and random "ideas" at your boss, frantically scribbling your rants onto a whiteboard during the workshop's brain-storming session!

Good times.

 

Robert Johnson

Hellhound on my trail today, y'all.

Kitteh goes to strip club; pratfalls, injuries ensue

'On the Greyhound to Tampa'

The underclass is always with us. But lo, there are so many, so many of them these days.

This blogger writes about the disconnect between the have-nots and the rest of America:

"Politicians used to talk to, and about, the poor. There was the 'War on Poverty.' And Jack Kemp – who GOP Vice Presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan cites as one of his role models — was a vocal conservative voice for the centrality of the poor and working class to American public policy.
But over the last several decades, those same people have found themselves increasingly marginalized by both parties as they have focused on a narrow band of middle class swing voters."

Mid-day kittehs

From the LOLcat archives.

Appalachian spring

Have you seen TLC's reality series "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo," about perceived white trash and the Southern girl pageant circuit?

This writer says the show is just another outlet for sanctimony.

"This idea that the hillbilly’s poverty is a choice allows more upscale Americans to feel comfortable while laughing at the antics before them."

This commentator believes we should hold off judging pageant mom June Shannon.

"More important, the stay-at-home matriarch seems to genuinely enjoy her chalk-miner husband, nicknamed 'Sugar Bear,' and to love all her daughters for who they are. The kids have what they need. They seem secure and happy. What exactly is the problem here?"

I think that's about right. But hey, I'm a hillbilly. I cut my people (and myself) lots of slack.

Todd Akin weighs in on abortion; columnist swats him down

Hee-sterical takedown of  men's micro-managing of women's hoo-haws.

Note to Esquire, et al

To old media with web pages that load properly only on desktops--not tablets and phones: You have a 1998 phone call from print newspapers with a cautionary tale.

Catch up with your web design strategies or go the way of the metro afternoon daily, and really the whole buying-ink-by-the-barrel gang.

So says this blogger.

"For all these reasons, Web companies should focus on building a unified experience that can work across every gadget. In an ideal world, the mobile site wouldn’t be an offshoot of the desktop site—the desktop site would be the same as the mobile site, a clean, quick-loading page that looked good on every gadget."

What a way to make a living

I've found lots to read about the dynamics of white-collar offices of late.

Here are "the 5 most useless motivational tactics every office uses," according to cracked.com.

"There's no way to spin a 'our success is your success' speech into something that doesn't sound like utter bullshit unless employees are getting a cut, and even when they are, it just means that they're generally forced into a position where they look at co-workers as competition rather than people in the same boat, so you're just as unhappy at work. If you are happy at work and don't feel this way at all, consider yourself lucky, and maybe also consider that everyone you work with may hate you."

Dolly P. feels your pain.

Your evening kitteh

From icanhascheezburger.com.

Night, y'all.