Balls and Walnuts
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About Walnut
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I knew it had to happen eventually.
My coins have gained in value, and some have beat the inflation rate. That’s assuming I would ever sell the damned things, or could get a competitive price for them. I never intended them as an investment, except perhaps one of those “let’s leave some cool things for the grandkiddies when we die” kind of investment. But, still, it’s nice to know my purchases weren’t entirely foolhardy.
Coins are beautiful.
My fascination began at around age 8, when my dad’s mother gave me some old coins (some American, some international) she’d been saving in her safe deposit box. The coolest of the cool were the large cents my dad had acquired while cleaning out the basement of some museum in Boston. Acquired, not stole, since he was told he could keep anything interesting he found in the basement.
Or at least that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.
He found a whole jar of Indian Head pennies, which somehow disappeared. Perhaps his brother took them? No one knows. (Not quite as heartbreaking as the mysterious disappearance of my father-in-law’s centuries-old samurai sword, but still . . . And besides, that sword would have ended up with Karen’s brother, so it’s not like she, the youngest daughter, would ever have had a shot at it.)
Those large cents are nearly worthless, since I think the best of the lot is in Very Good or perhaps Fine condition. But it sparked an interest. For a long time when I was little, I would get rolls of pennies, nickels, and sometimes dimes from the bank, and pore over them looking for “finds.” In those days it was common to find wheat ear pennies (but never an Indian Head cent), and you could even occasionally find a buffalo nickel or Mercury dime in circulation. Rare, like once-a-year kind of rare, but always exciting.
The first thing we did when we got married was, we bought a pet snake. And one of the first things we did when I started earning a real paycheck (paltry though it was), was to buy a few coins. I didn’t have much money to put into coins, so it’s not like I shelled out a lot of cash.
Jake does not share my fascination. I showed him the coins when he was very young and impressionable, except I don’t think he was ever impressionable. He didn’t care for them. I showed him the coins tonight, and he looked at them for all of about two minutes. Or less.
I’m not sure why I fell out of the hobby. I think it’s because I got swindled by a couple of dealers and sold coins for much more than they were worth. As hobbies go, this one punishes the ignorant most severely. If I do get back into it, this time I’m going to do my research, and not simply buy coins ‘cuz they’re pretty.
D.
Either they love him or they hate him
We were TP’d last night. Not a bad job, but hardly professional. No toilet paper on the roof . . . no mostly dried-up egg yolk on the driveway or windows. The tree is well festooned, as are some of our bulb plants, but that seems to be the limit of our TP’ers creativity.
What follows is pure guesswork and supposition. For all I know, my partner and his wife had a few too many and decided to flashback to their youth. But given that most TP attacks are directed at the school-age child of the household, I wondered who would target my son.
I didn’t have to wonder long, since only a few of his classmates know where he lives. Specifically, his co-stars in this creation. The better question is this: should we take this as sign of affection, or act of revenge?
See, they didn’t get a great grade on the project. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. They made a video, for the love of all things unholy. But the terms of the assignment specified that certain information regarding drug use had to be in the song’s lyrics, and my son and his fellow filmmakers included the info in a number of captions. The teacher judged this sinful enough to warrant a B rather than an A.
Why blame Jake? Because he insisted that if they make him (and me) do the bulk of the filming and editing, they would need to do the writing. And when he didn’t answer his text-message on the day they wanted his help with the writing (because, tech savvy though he may be, he’s never mastered the art of IM), perhaps they figured he was being good to his word.
In other words (as Karen put it this morning), your basic fight between the writer and the cinematographer.
Or, on the other hand, perhaps one of ’em has a mean crush on my boy.
D.
Jon Stewart on racial profiling.
Okay, so I was wrong.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Explosive and the City 2 | ||||
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D.
High Zombedy
That’s Carrie-Anne Moss (doing her best June Cleaver) dancing with Scottish stand-up comic, John Cleese-lookalike, and zombie Billy Connolly (warning, profanity in that YouTube vid), in Canadian zombie comedy (yes, zombedy) Fido (2006), our latest NetFlix rental. Fido takes place in an alternative universe where the earth has passed through a radioactive cloud which has caused the dead to walk, and hunger for tacos cerebros. Folks live in towns surrounded by high fences, and they live a sort-of normal life until they die, at which point they become zombies. The well-to-do prepay for funerals in which the head is buried in its own little casket separate from the body, elementary school kids practice target-shooting with rifles, old people are suspect, lawbreakers get tossed outside the fence.
And, oh, zombies with control collars fill the role of the permanent underclass — as gardeners, butlers, and even concubines.
Relative newcomer Kesun Loder plays Timmy, Carrie-Ann Moss’s son, and he brings to mind a young Macaulay Culkin moreso than Beaver Cleaver. But the movie’s creative minds have Leave it to Beaver on the brain, or perhaps Father Knows Best, with zombies. (Certainly no stranger than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.) Moss plays the typical perfect housewife, Dylan Baker her tight-sphinctered husband Bill. Fido (Connolly) proves to be a better father than Bill, but when he accidentally dines on a neighbor, chaos follows.
I’ve probably already told you too much. This movie was a delight. Ever since George Romero invented the modern zombie flick, these films have served as vehicles for social satire, often in a heavy-handed way. And while I can’t accuse Fido of subtlety, the satire didn’t lack for personality or cleverness. Rent it.
D.
Rentboy’s clientele
Difficult not to chortle when one of America’s more vocal anti-gay activists was found in the company of a man. A young man. A really young man. The kind of young man who advertises his services at rentboy.com.
(Hat tip to Joe.My.God.)
On April 13, the “rent boy” (whom we’ll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart. That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists.
Rekers claims he only found out the rent boy was a prostitute halfway through this vacation, and that he hired him to “carry his luggage.” No word in the original article as to the rent boy’s age, but both he and Rekers claim nothing sexual happened on the trip.
Rekers is co-founder (with James Dobson) of the vigorously anti-gay Family Research Council and board member of NARTH, National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization that thinks it can turn gay people straight. Perhaps he thought he could bring the rent boy over to the team of straight-shooters. Since he no doubt thinks gay people are doomed to eternal hellfire, this might have been a mission of mercy!
UPDATE: Rekers responds to Joe. Nope, not gay. Nothing to see here, move along!
My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them.
Did I call it or what? Line this man up for sainthood.
D.
Big cat
The best dreams take place in the hour before waking. Or perhaps it only seems that way, since those are the dreams I remember.
I’m walking a trail when a big cat steps out and blocks my path. The cat is large like a tiger, fully capable of taking me out, so there’s really no point in running. She’s midnight black, sleek, glossy.
She paces forward. Without much caution I reach out, stroke her neck. She plops down onto her haunches and I get down on my knees to keep stroking her. She purrs like an Italian sports car. (Yes, I know the big cats don’t purr.) I lie down beside her and rest my head on her neck or shoulder, close enough to hear the purring, and we doze like that for what seems like a long time.
Then we both get up and she licks my hands, arms, face with that great sandpapery tongue. Tiring of that, she stalks off, leaving me to my trail.
Regarding the Times Square bombing attempt, mark my words, this will turn out to be a white supremacist or some other addled person from the Caucasian right. Supposedly the Pakistani Taliban are taking credit, but I doubt the veracity of that claim (particularly since they have a history of making false claims). The attempt had an unusual degree of amateurishness — for example, the perp had removed the VIN from the dash, but not from other parts of the vehicle, and descriptions of the explosive suggest a kluge job.
Law enforcement officials offered a more detailed description of the makeup of the failed car bomb found in Times Square on Saturday night, and said they were reviewing surveillance footage that showed a white man who appeared to be in his 40s walking away from the area as he looked over his shoulder and removed a layer of clothing.
Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said on Sunday that the materials found in the Nissan Pathfinder — gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks — also included eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer, inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker.
I’m not the first person to think that here at home, we’re more at risk from domestic terrorism than we are from the made-in-the-Near East variety. Don’t make me quote Pogo at you.
D.
Niche market, all right.
From Huffington Post (more pix):
Watermelon, or giant green dice?
From The Associated Press: ANTON, Panama (AP) — A company in Panama is hoping to join in a small niche market of the fruit export business: square watermelons. The Panama Fruit Producer company has started “rounding up” the square fruit, sending its first shipment of 120 boxy melons to New York.
The company expects to produce about 3,000 of the molded melons this year, and will send them to the Netherlands and Germany as well.
Operations manager Gerardo Diaz said Wednesday that people are surprised at first because “it is not what they were expecting.” “Later they ask if it is a genetic experiment,” he said.
Diaz said the watermelons are natural. They are made to grow inside cube-shaped glass boxes and conform to the mold as they get bigger. The first melons cost about $75 apiece, but producers hope to bring the price down.
It’s all a plot to replace grocers with minimum wage slaves. If oranges and apples were shaped like that, anyone could stack the damned things.
Either that, or it’s a devious plan to convince us we need to spend $75 for fruit. Hey, they’ve convinced we need to buy water from bottles, right?
D.
Worst of the worst
I’m really enjoying Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which I’m reading as part of The Classic Slave Narratives. Douglass had a remarkable intellect, which is evident even in the first few pages of his autobiography. Because the premise of my embryonic alt history involves both slavery and religion, I’ve been particularly attentive to Douglass’s thoughts in that regard. This passage piqued my interest:
Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,–a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,–a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,–and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.
Berkeley Digital Library has Douglass’s Narrative in full text here. This should be required reading for high school US History students, or at the very least the AP students. Probably too much to ask that US History textbooks quote liberally from this work, since Texas controls textbook content in this country.
This Christian Odyssey page contains an interesting discussion touching on the Old Testament-inspired theories prevalent during the 17th to 19th centuries, regarding Africans, blacks, and slavery. Probably the most common attitude was the “Hamite view,” which held that blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham (or possibly Canaan), whom Noah cursed for undressing him whilst the old Arkist was in his cups. But a curse of slavery for all generations to come has always seemed a bit extreme to me as a punishment for such a seemingly trivial offense, so I’ve always wondered if there was more to the story. Wikipedia’s article touches on the Talmudic interpretations, which delve deeper:
The Talmud deduces two possible explanations (attributed to Rab and Rabbi Samuel) for what Ham did to Noah to warrant the curse. (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 70a.) According to Rab, Ham castrated Noah on the basis that, since Noah cursed Ham by his fourth son Canaan, Ham must have injured Noah with respect to a fourth son, by emasculating him, thus depriving Noah of the possibility of a fourth son. According to Samuel, Ham sodomized Noah, on the analogy between “and he saw†written in two places in the Bible: With regard to Ham and Noah, it says, “And Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father (Noah)â€; while in Genesis 34:2, it says, “And when Shechem the son of Hamor saw her (Dinah), he took her and lay with her and defiled her.†According to this argument, similar abuse must have happened each time that the Bible uses the same language. The Talmud concludes that, in fact, “both indignities were perpetrated.”
In more recent times, some scholars have suggested that Ham may have had intercourse with his father’s wife. Under this interpretation, Canaan is cursed as the “product of Ham’s illicit union.”
If this discussion stirs a sense of deja vu, it may be because in Greek mythology, Chronos castrated his father, Uranus, and in Egyptian mythology, Osiris’s death and resurrection involve a somewhat more than symbolic castration in the form of a missing penis.
But I digress. The point Douglass makes here and elsewhere is that religious slave owners were adept at using religion to justify their worst excesses; elsewhere, he discusses an overseer (if I remember correctly) whose knowledge of the Bible seemed limited to a passage enjoining slaveholders to punish their disobedient slaves with the lash.
Slaveholders in Douglass’s account seem more than a little ambivalent about providing their slaves with religion. I suspect a good part of that ambivalence related to their desire to keep their slaves ignorant and illiterate, a goal that runs contrary to the judaeochristian tradition, in which textual study is a core value. Indeed, one of the common tropes of the slave narrative is that literacy will set you free: the slave’s acquisition of reading and writing was instrumental to his eventual emancipation.
So here’s my thought, the kernel of an idea which I think could spawn a corker of a novel: aside from a desire for freedom, what other ideas might a group of slaves derive from a careful reading of the Old Testament?
D.
