Critters yelling online

From the blog Animals Talking In All Caps, the tagline for this photo:
YOU READY TO DO THIS SHIT OR WHAT?

Coloring book for big people

I've already completed the Procrastination Station puzzle.

DOMA deemed unconstitutional

Bill Clinton is an old-school Southern Democrat when it comes to queers. As prez he gave us the military's now-defunct"Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that prohibits the federal government from acknowledging gay civil unions or marriages.

DOMA might be on its last legs. A federal appeals court calls it unconstitutional. And so starts its death spiral. We hope.

Night

A LOLdog for your evening.

Promise to post pics of my SarffART SpoofART tomorrow.

Oh, Cumberland

Matraca Berg, Nashville's finest songwriter, poor-mouths and praises the city's river.

Lazy ol' river, not a lick of ambition
Get to Kentucky then you roll on home
If you were a highway, you wouldn't go nowhere
And I wouldn't be lost and all alone

More Matraca here with other Nashville divas, accosting a cowboy apparently.

Highways from hell

My fair city comes in at #28.

Meanwhile, a Music City classic from Trisha Yearwood.

I've been living on the wrong side of Memphis
Full tank of gas in a '69 Tempest
Taking me to that Nashville sign

You say tomato, I say mater

As I scootered through a Revco in my mid-sized Southern city (though my New-York-City-raised friend swears that any city smaller than Singapore is essentially Hooterville), a stock clerk in late middle age rapid-fire drawled (yes, that is possible!) at me, "May ah hep yew?" (American Standard English: May I help you?")

The clerk's "I" was flatter even than what I've heard come out of my own piehole. I, still attuned to Colorado accents, reflexively thought, "Sweet Lord. Where is she from?" Then I (AHHH)--the girl who used-to-could sometimes pinpoint within a three-county radius where you were from in Tennessee based on your accent--realized, "she's from here." Or more specifically, either Lawrence, Giles or Maury County, I'm guessing.

Feel good

Jamie Cullum will make you smile with his songs.

My first LOL of the day

My gal emailed me about running out of coffee at her house and having to go off to work third shift without it. Her description of her despair during that shift:


I’d sell my body at an interstate rest area to get seventy-five cents for one of those paper thimbles of coffee from the vending machine.

Pat and Bob

This photo of Pat Summitt and Bob Dylan together as they get ready to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom strikes me as unlikely and absurd yet somehow so appropriate: A farm-raised Baptist-girl math savant (convince me that coaching basketball isn't about geometry, probability and statistics, and more geometry) and an urban Jew musical genius.

How the decorating goes

Still have a million and a half boxes to unpack. But have set up two pieces of Sarff Art.

I will post pics of the art sometime this week if the artist allows.

Meanwhile, a LOLcat for you, in memory of sweet Squeak (this pic represents a reasonable facsimile of the decorating job Squeak did at my Colorado Springs apartment).

Downtown scenes

From the top:

First Avenue and Church Street

Alley between Second and Third avenues

Lower Broad

Strip club in Printers Alley; note the unit flag for the Army's 101st Airborne out of nearby Ft. Campbell

 The Stahlman apartment building at Second and Union

Hottest little butch in the news business

Just a pic of Rachel Maddow. Sigh. Carry on.

Who I think of most on Decoration Day

Something I wrote last year:

I own few memories of the man who sired me and who I look so alike that having me in front of her must have so pained my mother in the months after she lost her husband.

My father died the summer he was 32 and I was 4. I recall snapshot moments with and of him. He liked to peep around the bedroom doorway to scare me into that giddy “do-that-again-oh-don’t-do-that-again” glee little children love. Late in his illness, he used a wheelchair. One late spring day, my young cousins and I reveled in riding the chair down my grandma’s sloped lawn.

There’s a photo of our family—me, my mother, my sister—surrounding my father as he lies abed in my grandmother’s back bedroom. A kidney dialysis machine, in 1970 the size and shape of a chest freezer, dominates the left side of the frame. I’m blonde and solemn, as I always am in pictures from my early childhood. My 7-year-old sister smiles, but you see in her eyes that she is scared. My parents--they wear the trance of the terrified, the glued-on grins of a couple coming to know that one of them will die soon.

My mother left us a lot in those days, trekking time and again to Nashville with my father. Vanderbilt Hospital was almost 3 hours away from our rural home, and she had no choice. My sister and I stayed mostly with our paternal grandmother and great grandmother and occasionally with Grandma Callie, though she often accompanied her daughter—my mother-- to Nashville to fetch hamburgers, wash laundry and do the nattering chores that don’t go away even when someone you love is fighting for his life.

One day many years later my mother and I were at Vanderbilt for an appointment. As we paused on a pedestrian bridge, Mom started to sob. She’d spotted the boarding house she and my father stayed in when they got the call that a kidney donor had been found. But the family of the man, injured in a car crash, was too pole-axed with shock from the sudden loss of their loved one to bequeath his body parts.  Who can blame them? I don’t think my mother did. But oh the taste of regret and despair that must have risen in her throat when she was told the would-be donor would go into the ground with the kidney that could have given her husband more years to watch his children grow and to see her into her 30s.

My mother came of age quick. A high-school dropout, she ran the dialysis machine that kept my father alive. In those days, that would have been like grasping quantum physics. Except getting higher science doesn’t carry the weight of knowing that one middling mistake and you’d be culpable in the death of the father of your children. Such will season you to stomach and stand what seems unbearable. So thus did Norma Louise become an old woman at 26.

My love, my endless love of hideous pop songs

Teenagers often listen to and love asinine tunes. Songs like REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore" (gawd, I loved that song when I was 14).

Can I confess? I still love that song.


Rolling Stone chronicles the worst pop hits of the '80s. (Maybe not a) Spoiler: Jefferson Starship takes bottom honors.

Pictured: Three epic '80s mullets: Andre Agassi, Mel Gibson and John Stamos. You're welcome.

The things that carried him

An award-winning and heart-gripping Esquire story about a soldier's final journey home.

This story is an example of how and why print journalism will always rule a small corner of my world.

10 things to remember about Memorial Day

It's still often referred to in the South as Decoration Day.

It's pretty much about the pork

Scarlett meets Carol

For CJ, since we can't seem to get around to watching her Carol Burnett Show DVDs.

Animals. They're not like us

It really depends on your perspective.

I'll say it again

Everybody's thinking of them today, but tomorrow and the next day and the next, don't forget these folks.

Meanwhile, I am thrilled that gay veterans in the United States no longer have to deal with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Here are some gay Navy propaganda posters for you.

For a hot, hazy Sunday afternoon

Nina Simone singing to her baby.

That's about right

I swear, has there been a more perfectly named storm for Georgia? I think everyone raised in the South--black and white--either had an Uncle or Aunt Beryl (first names in the South can be strangely non-gender specific) or knows someone who did. White folks pronounce it like "curl" with a B.

Here's hoping everyone stays safe in the storm zone, btw.

People pondering

A shout-out to a fabulous fellow blogger.

Fish wrapper

I got my last newspaper reporting job in 1992 when a spot came open at a mid-sized Tennessee daily. The woman I replaced had taken a job at Nashville's afternoon paper, the Banner (most cities the size of Music City had both a morning daily and an afternoon daily at the time).

20 years later, it's a whole new world for those who buy ink by the barrel.

The images are the flags at the three dailies where I worked.