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Pigmeat used to chill with Ho Chi Minh. He says so.

Friday night and time to get down, Markham-style, circa 1968.

Pigmeat Markham – Here Comes The Judge + The Trial – 1968 45rpm

Today is unbelievably complicated. Here’s hoping everybody gets where they’re supposed to go and back home again safely. Same goes for all you out there, of course.

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Weekends are always tough on me. Weekdays are hell, though. And holidays make me nervous.

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I’m overloaded with politics for the week, so I’m going to talk about something important. Dogs. And the new one we seem to have acquired.

In part because of the greater presence of bobcats on the property (which we love) but realizing that it began almost exactly when our wonderful late beagle was no longer piddling his ownership along the palisade, we decided we were going to have four dogs again, and the new one would be of a good size, to make predators cautious. This is not because we want to hurt any of the wild animals, but to protect our own small dogs. Animals figure these things out and adjust accordingly.

I’ll post some pictures of him, since he’s a new family member. His name is Johnny, he’s probably (we don’t know because he’s a rescue) half Bernese Mountain Dog and half Lab and he’s gorgeous and smart and a good size, fifty pounds or more. Just doesn’t know @#%! about cats and thinks he’s allowed to eat them, which we will have to discourage, obviously. (I’ll tell the story of how we found out in another post. It wasn’t pretty.) But the dogs annoy the cats in our household and vice versa, so we already have given them separate halves of the house.

Oh, wait, I do have a picture — from his rescue-me album on the website:

So, without further ado — he’s got paws the size of small foreign cars, but he moves like a dancer. A hefty dancer who just happens to be walking across your groin or stomach. Off the street but right on the beat. Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny!

This crosses over from the realm of novelty into “taught me something about the song”… Very cool.

This ‘Voodoo Chile’ Cover on a Gayageum Will Make Your Head Explode

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I’m basically a capitalist, mostly because I think, like representative democracy, it’s a terrible system but a hundred times better than what’s in second place. I think a truly free market of ideas and commerce is the ideal engine for economic and social evolution.

Understand that, please, so you’ll understand better the following brief rant.

Thanks to the “Reagan Revolution” and its systematic rebuilding of America’s infrastructure to reward those who are already rich and powerful, and also to the Bush tax cuts (which reversed an improvement under Clinton) the difference between corporate profits and wages at this moment is the biggest it’s ever been. In other words, a smaller portion of the money made by business is going to workers and more is being made in profit by the businesses themselves. Corporate officer salaries have also skyrocketed to (by far) the highest levels ever. And yet some people still think government has to kept off the backs of poor business folk and corporate officers and investment bankers.

Many of the same people crying for less government are themselves unemployed, disabled, or otherwise government-dependent, but they heroically stand up for the rights of the most privileged, against their own best interests. They seem to forget that the original Tea Party was not a blow for less government, but a resistance against what the original patriots considered to be foreign noblemen trying to swindle them into poverty without any right to represent themselves. At least you have one vote for a senator or congressperson. How many votes do you get on any oil company boards of directors?

Today’s revolutionary cry: “Stop picking on those global corporations and billionaire CEOs, you mean government! Quit crushing their dreams!”

I say these things with more love in my heart than you may believe from the tone of frustration.

You poor suckers. Government, which is only shorthand for “all the rest of us”, is keeping a lot of you alive, and protecting the rest of you from being swallowed by unfettered, pirate capitalism. Government, of, by, and for the people, however imperfect, isn’t something we have to escape from, it’s something we BUILT. It’s an improvement over the earlier models, which were full of things like “legal for your liegelord to rape your daughter” and “if your child doesn’t work well in the mine, we can beat him to death” as a hazard of employment. Government (in other words, us) is the REASON you can say the things you can say, on the internet or through the mouths of pundits, when it used to be the king or the local rich guy could just have you silenced and killed. FREEDOM OF SPEECH. WE BUILT THAT.

We’ve seen the alternative, folks. If it wasn’t for a percentage of the population having the good sense to vote and pay taxes and create and support laws, you’d have people dying in ghettoes from diseases and poverty so fast that they’ll be hauling them through the streets on wagons every day, just like the 17th century. You couldn’t go down to the corner to buy coffee without an armored vehicle. Mitt Romney behind armed compound walls wouldn’t have to worry about dying of plague or being shot for a loaf of bread, but the rest of us would. YOU ARE BEING LIED TO.

I hate bullying, but what I hate even more is when the bullies trick their victims into believing they deserve it.

I am not so lost to sanity and human decency that I actually enjoyed the stuffed tater tots I ordered at Burger King when we had to stop today and do fast food. However, smugness isn’t really in order, because I did order them in the first place.

Off with the family on a Secret Stealth Mission. Will report later.

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And I think you should see this one, too. Because, well, life is serious and you have to learn stuff. Don’t be a Bad Dog.

I feel this is a good time to have you look at this sculpture by Kris Kuksi. I don’t know why, but I feel that.

Why must I be a teenager in love?

Getting to see this is like having video of Mozart or Bach performing. We’re lucky to live when we do.

As they said when Son died, “Every bluesman in the world just moved up a notch, because the best is gone.”

I was listening to this tonight (it shows up in the current B.D. book) and thinking, wow, this is amazing and it happened in my lifetime, more or less. How many geniuses of the past are lost to us forever?

Son House “Death Letter Blues”

Watching a very nice documentary on Harper Lee tonight made me have one of my “Yes, I am going to get to work on that Big Serious Novel. I’m not just going to think about it, I’m going to start working on it.” In other words, that v. n. doc has totally screwed me over and ruined my life.

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Good question.