This is too much

There is a role-playing game for mobile devices called "The Walking Dead: Road to Survival" which is advertising itself on television with images of what I guess are the undead engaged in combat with their enemies, whoever they are, over which a male voice recites, in somber tones exemplary of melodramatic over-acting, several lines from what is probably Robert Frost's most famous and possibly most beloved poem, The Road Not Taken. There is only one very tenuous connection between the two that I can see, and that is the "road" that the game player and Frost's narrator will travel.

I am appalled and insulted by the use of something so sublime to sell something so ignoble, and if it were up to me, I would set the game makers and their admen on the road to perdition.

And also in addition Arschbutz too

Fugitive thoughts caught up with me yesterday when a reference on a cooking show to Pork Butt made my mind jump to Rump Roast, and then I suddenly heard an anonymous but southern-drawled voice in my head saying, "Chicken butt fried in grease - want a piece?"

That led me to ruminate on the myriad names we have for that part of the human anatomy (if not that of fowl) that is medically known as nates (NAY-tees). Not a word common enough for general use. ("He fell on his nates" just does not work.)

For polite society, I suppose buttock and buttocks would come next, but those are laughable words, especially the way some people pronounce them. Then there would be gluteus maximus, too big a mouthful and actually a reference to the three muscles that comprise the nates.

That leaves the door open for so many fine names for it, and there are plenty, viz:

arse - ass - backside - back end - behind - booty - bottom -  breech - bum - buns - butt - caboose - can - cheek(s) - derrière - duff - fanny - fundament - haunches - heinie - hind part - hindquarters  - keister - moon - posterior - rear - rear end - rump - seat - sit-upon - stern - tail - tail end - tuchus - tush - wazoo

I presume that final word makes the list in relation to "up the" rather than "sit on."

Fundament and breech are new to me as euphemisms for the tuchus, for which I am using the Yiddish spelling.

Finally, there is no further point to any of this, or, therefore, none at all. My last random thought on the subject is that, as children, my brother and I thought that Fanny Butts was the funniest name in the universe. Maybe it is.

Okay, it's time to get my nates off this chair and go do something productive.

Once a skeptic, always a skeptic

There are evidently people who do not believe that the New Horizons spacecraft actually flew past Pluto and sent us back pictures. They say NASA made the whole thing up and that the pictures are fake.

They are in league with the folks who think that global warming is not real, the moon landings were faked, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

I can almost understand it. When I was in grade school in the (Cold War) 1950's, we were told that the people of Russia were oppressed by a totalitarian government and had none of the fundamental freedoms (speech, press, habeas corpus) that we have; that even though they could vote in elections, there was only one person on the ballot to vote for; that they were lied to all the time about Mother Russia's achievements in every field of human endeavor (which led them to invent television, chewing gum, and the flush toilet, or so they claimed).

There came a time, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, that I began wondering about that. What if my teacher and my school and my government were lying to me? What if we were the oppressed ones, expected to believe whatever we were told? How would I ever know?

As I got older, of course, I was able to accept the view of the world that was revealed to me, taking on faith whatever I did not know or see or experience myself.

It's highly likely that I still take a lot on faith. Like the sun will be rising in the east tomorrow.

Which reminds me of something else I heard in grade school, namely that one day the sun was going to burn out and die, and so would the planet and so would I. That scared the poop out of me, but then I learned that it wasn't going to happen for a few million years, and I felt a lot better.

Beating the Heat

All this recent hot weather got me to thinking about a hot summer day long ago when one of my schoolmates and I decided to open a lemonade stand. His name was Jimmy, and he lived in the next block. We were probably about ten years old.

We set up shop on the sidewalk in front of his house. Instead of the traditional lemonade, however, we were purveying Kool-Aid at two cents per little Dixie Cup.

We had served several customers when a big semi-trailer stopped across the street. The driver hopped down from the cab and came over to us. He must have been very thirsty to stop at a kid's Kool-Aid stand.

He gave us two pennies, and we poured him a cupful, which he swallowed in one gulp. Obviously it didn't slake his thirst. "I'll tell you what," he said.  "I'll give you a nickel for whatever is left in that pitcher."

A nickel? Zowee!

Jimmy accepted the five cents while I poured, but there wasn't enough left to fill the Dixie Cup more than 2/3 full. Jimmy immediately grabbed the pitcher and started off, saying excitedly, "I'll go make some more!"

The truck driver tossed back the contents of the cup and said, "That's okay. Never mind," and went back to his rig, climbed in, and drove off.

Jimmy watched the truck trundle down the street for a few seconds, then  turned to me and said very decidedly, "That guy got gypped."

Yes, he did. Because we kept the nickel.

If you won't eat it, then just take its picture

The shooting of the Zimbabwe lion Cecil by the Minnesota dentist Palmer has created a hubbub that is taking on a life of its own. I am already tired of it, but since everybody else has spouted off about it, I think I am entitled to do the same.

I think killing animals for food is perfectly acceptable. I am a carnivore at the top of the food chain.

I think killing animals for sport is despicable. I even object to people who go fishing for fun but throw back all the fish they catch.

People will agree or disagree with those statements, and I don't really care who does. What I want to know is this:

If the dentist with more money than decency had shot an unknown lion with no name and no microchip in whom no researcher had ever taken an interest, would people from all over the world suddenly be all up in arms about it?

But I already know the answer to that: No, they wouldn't.

And isn't that a shame?

Pilgrims

I recently took a flying interest in the Mayflower colonists and found a list of passengers at mayflowerhistory.com that pretty much satisfied my curiosity. Before I lost interest completely, I happened to follow a link they provided that sent me to the website of the Archives of the State Library of Massachusetts.

There I found a picture of a manuscript written by William Bradford in 1651. He was governor of the Plymouth Colony from 1621 to about 1657, and for some reason, he took it upon himself to write down the names of all the Mayflower passengers, grouping them by family and including, as appropriate for each entry, the husband, wife, children, and any servants they brought with them, including indentured ones. In the margin next to each entry he wrote the number of people listed so that he could easily get an accurate count, which might have been part of his motivation in writing it all down about thirty years after the fact.

It took me a while to get used to the antique handwriting, what with the funny double-S and the word the looking like a y with an e on top of it (which he doesn’t use all the time), not to mention the old haphazard spellings, but by the time I had plowed through about half of it, I was able to read it just fine. (In quoting from the document here, I have spelled all the words the way he did; there are no typos.)

At the top is his lengthy title:

“The names of those which came over first, in ye year 1620 and were (by the blessing of god) the first Beginers, and (in a sort) the foundation, of all the plantations, and colonies, in New-England. (And their families.)”

Bradford’s own entry is fourth on the list and reads:

“William Bradford, and Dorothy his wife, having but one child, a sone left behind, who came afterward.”

After concluding the list of the original passengers, he writes further, telling what has become of them all. This entry contains familiar names:

“Mr. Molines [Mullins], and his wife, his sone, & his servant dyed the first winter. Only his doughter Priscila survived, and maried with John Alden, who are both living, and have .11. children. And their eldest daughter is maried & hath five children.”

His accounts include nothing but prosaic facts: who “dyed,” who is still living and how many children they have, all reported without comment or criticism. All he says about John Billinton, for example, is, “executed, for killing a man.”

All but one of them, that is, and this particular one is what I find so fascinating:

“John Turner, and his .2. sones all dyed in the first siknes. But he hath a daughter still living at Salem, well maried, and approved of.”

She must have been a very special person for him to editorialize even that much.

___________________________________

You can see the manuscript for yourself at:

http://archives.lib.state.ma.us/bitstream/handle/2452/208249/ocn137336369-Mayflower-passengers.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

How's this for fugitive thoughts?

I need to schedule some time to sit down at my computer and write for this here blog thing. God knows I have plenty to say, I just don't get around to typing it out. Here's what I would have been saying in the past several weeks:

When I said I thought it was inappropriate for the Confederate flag to fly at the South Carolina capitol, I did not know that it is (was) flying at a memorial to the state's Confederate soldiers. I take it back. We would not object if the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho erected a monument of war feathers and tomahawks to honor their fallen warriors at the Little Big Horn or at Wounded Knee, would we? No. As I said in the previous posting, people have a right to honor their war dead, even if they lost and even if their cause is now embarrassing, politically speaking.

The association of the Confederacy with slavery is not going to go away any more than racism is, so we might as well just suck it up.

I let the Supreme Court's decision on same-sex marriage go right past me. As blog topics go, that one was right up my street, as the Brits say. Well, good for SCOTUS, and good for us. Maybe America is growing up.

Although not a big soccer fan, I do like to watch Olympic and World Cup matches if the USA is playing, and I got a major thrill out of our women winning the World Cup. I was just sorry that no player on the American side took her shirt off like the men do and Brandi Chastain did. A great victory nevertheless.

And finally, sick and tired of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as I am, I still think it is incumbent upon me to point out that he must have wanted to become a woman real bad if he was willing to give up the ability to pee standing up.

Now I think I'm all caught up.