Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Nostalgia for Gerald Ford, etc.
The other night, when Karen and I were watching Chevy Chase’s impersonation of Gerald Ford on the old SNL, I said, “Those were the good old days, you know? When the only thing about our president you could make fun of was his clumsiness.”
For a long time now, I’ve wished we had a president whom I could respect. Here’s the Wiki on Jimmy Carter, the last president I liked, a guy my dad still says “was too nice to be president.”
Some heavy-duty insomnia last night, so I may or may not chime in later with something more substantial. I’ll close with two links:
Thanks to Dean* remembering Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, I have tracked down the elusive theme music: Sarah Dash, “Sinner Man.” Amazing that I should have warm thoughts about a disco song, but there you have it.
And here is an interesting link to excerpts from Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, wherein Hochschild speculates on the historic basis for Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. Here’s a snip:
”The ‘Inner Station’ of Heart of Darkness, the place Marlow looks at through his binoculars only to find Kurtz’s collection of the shrunken heads of African ‘rebels,’ is loosely based on Stanley Falls. In 1895, five years after Conrad visited this post, Leon Rom was station chief there. A British explorer-journalist who passed through Stanley Falls that year described the aftermath of a punitive military expedition against some African rebels: ‘Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house!’ If Conrad missed this account, which appeared in the widely read Century Magazine, he almost certainly noticed when The Saturday Review, a magazine he admired and read faithfully, repeated the story in its issue of December 17, 1898. That date was within a few days of when Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness.
Oh how I love the holiday season, tra la la . . .
D.
*Read Dean’s Global Orgasm Day story. Read it now! Much better than anything I have to offer.
yep- dean left a wonderful account… wow.
now I am sooooooo tempted to recount all those moments… somewhat lost in the twisted neuronal pathways leading from my youth to adulthood. heck, if I think long enough, and try to chip away at the plaque buildup in my brain, maybe I will pull out a memory to share.
I have a Global Orgasm Day storytoo, but you probably wouldn’t be interested.