Thursday, June 24, 2010

Putting Out the Flags So to Speak

I can't imagine a barroom full of beer sloppy drunk Americans standing en masse and breaking into the national anthem during a football game. American patriotism is cute and icky and the same time; charmingly naive with its yellow ribbons while annoyingly and maybe a in your face spooky(every third house in suburbia puts out a flag year round just for the hell of it). 

I think I learned something about the British national character last night. They are patriotic but it takes a lot of beer and a football match to show it publicly.

 

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Here's Mine

These 10 questions originally came from a French series, "Bouillon de Culture" hosted by Bernard Pivot.

They're better known as the questions that James Lipton asks every guest at the end of "Inside the Actor's Studio" show.

1. What is your favorite word?
Freedom

2. What is your least favorite word?
Wait

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Solutions

4. What turns you off?
Gossip

5. What is your favorite curse word?
MOTH--ER FUCK--ER!

6. What sound or noise do you love?
authentic female sighs

7. What sound or noise do you hate?
"Hello! You have reached the automated answering service of. . ."

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Later Romantic Poet

9. What profession would you not like to do?
Mortgage Closing Attorney

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
Would you like our naked waitress to bring you our wine list?
4 minutes ago ·

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Have Mercy

Lookit, after the 60 minute mark, let's face it. You know and I know it ain't gonna happen.

We welcome "the tap"


Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Rabbit Seasoning - Pronoun Problem

When I mark papers, I use this error symbol P.R.--pronoun reference.


Saturday, June 12, 2010

I Saw Her Standing There (The Beatles)

Personally I'm a bit creeped out by fifty-ish fellers singing the praises of a 17 year old--in public. Bangkok is a whole 'nother story.

Monday, June 07, 2010

Balladeers

Radio Friendly

My bandmates were surprisd I didn't know this song.
I'm happy for Eric Clapton being able to kick his heroin use, but I also stopped listening to him sometime after the last Cream album.

Messin Up Messin with the Kid

Three double shot Vodka and Red Bulls later (we were being paid with comped booze) the only lyrics I could remember were, something something "car!" something something uh, "all around town!" and something something "kid!"

Over Weights Playing The Weight

This is another scene from our forthcoming movie inspired by "Let It Be". The working title is "What It Used to Wasn't"

Fortunately there were a couple of Canadians in the bar who appreciated the song, but the twenty-something Brits smashed on Spitfires and Strong Bows just endure us until the Oasis cover band takes the stage.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Montgomery to Selma--Cyprus to Gaza

Did the Palestinians build death camps? Did the Palestinians subject Jews to pogroms? If so, I'd probably go along with radical Zionism even though it is something Theodore Herzl didn't subscribe to.

Prior to radical Zionism, Jews, Arabs and Christians lived for many hundreds of years side by side in that God forsaken strip of desert--if not necessarily practicing good neighbor policies--then at least in a symbiotic capitalist construct. If they had a common enemy it might have been the Ottomans. After that, to a lesser extent, the British. And the heat. Everybody bitches about the heat.

Radical Zionism believes that Jews (more specifically only Orthodox Jews)  have a right to that land because a fucking burning bush (a fucking talking burning bush no less!) said they could have the land 5,000 years ago. Don't believe me--look it up in the same kooky book of laws that forbids eating shrimp, ham sammiches and considers homosexuality an abomination--including amateur videos with woman-on-woman action. 

And according to the same wacky anthology of desert camp fire tales, ghost stories and a lascivious obsession with who was porking whom, the Canaanites owned this land 6,000 years ago. Their descendants are Levants. Shouldn't the Lebanese also have some claim to the land? Maybe the Poospatuck and Unkechaug tribes should be the ones levying taxes and controlling rents in Manhattan. Or the Lenni-Lenape tribes running numbers, drugs and trafficking prostitutes in New Jersey.

Know what I think? I think that any progressive quasi Commie at heart (my kind of people) who claims to have compassion for the dispossessed, who slaps a FREE TIBET sticker on the right side of their rear car bumper and an AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL sticker on the left, who champions the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the right to habeas corpus, freedom of speech, the right to pursue happiness, gays in the military, gay marriage, universal health care, civil rights, equal opportuntiy legislation, and all that power to the people, rainbow coalition jazz BUT dismisses the plight of the Palestinians is a blind, hypocritical cunt. The Palestinian people are subjected to pogroms and live a diasporic existence, caused, ironically, by the one group of people who should be most sympathetic to this.

Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto--with a few exceptions. Jews could leave the ghetto and enter into Warsaw proper to work. The Palestinians do not have the same privilege. And obviously, no trains to death camps, but if those right wing Biblical border lunatics could get away with it, I do not doubt that they'd be stock piling Zyklon B as I am typing this rant.

And while this is going on (and on and on) we not-so-quiet Americans who believe in separation of church and state continue to send secular tax dollars to this fascist theocratic regime. Why? Beats me. Maybe it has something to do with AIPAC. There is one thing and one thing only that all US politicos running for national office can always agree upon. One cannot seriously wage a successful campaign without first giving AIPAC its mandatory blow job, figuratively speaking. I hope.


There are many, many decent, fair minded people in Israel and Jews around the world who are on a Quixotic pacifist mission to grant civil liberties to Palestinians, who want to return to them their lands, dismantle settlements, even give them a real country. But they're outliers. And apparently, they're pussies.

At the same time, to be fair, when I suggest to Palestinians friends that, according to the book of me, in order to achieve basic freedoms and civil liberties and perhaps reclaim land currently in violation of God knows how many UN resolutions, they need their Palestinian Gandhi, their Palestinian Martin Luther King, their Palestinian Nelson Mandela. But instead, they have Hamas and douche bags like Ahmadinejad speaking for them and continue to believe that violence is the only means to an end.

On the other hand, (and this really baffles me) radical Zionists have on their side Christian fanatics who believe Israel must exist in order for baby Jesus to come thundering out of the skies to whisk them off to paradise--(and when he does, everyone else will go to hell, including Jews, so go figure).


The UN granted Israel a charter in 1948. Any military action within  those borders is legal, outside those borders in violations of international law.

The Saudi Peace proposal--which could put an end to all of this (including piracy and murder in international waters) doesn't even ask for a return to those borders in the original 1948 charter. The plan, endorsed by the League of Arab Nations, asks for a return to pre-1967 borders and Palestinian statehood (which is in the 1948 UN charter).

As a left leaning secularist, a half ass Buddhist and hard core pacifist, I can only pray that a Palestinian passive resistance movement has gotten its jump start with the humanitarian flotilla and that it will continue to gain steam. As a realist who understands real politik and who has to live in the real world from time to time, I know that next up will be more rockets, more bullets, more bulldozers, more bombs. Same old shit.