These Boots Were Made for Laughin'

A classic from McSweeney's "Lists":

Cowboy Deaths,
in Descending Order
of Degree of Dignity.

BY NATHAN THORNTON

- - - -

Boots on

Boots on, but on the wrong feet

One boot on, one boot off

Holding boots above head while crossing river

Boots off

Boots on hands, creating sound effects for campfire story

Boots in carry-on bag, wearing an old pair of tennis shoes until he gets there

One old boot and one new boot, walking around Kohl's shoe department to see how they feel

A Libertarian Prayer

Who else but the president to whom my students often refer affectionately as "TJ":

"Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be." (6.12.1815)

Pick Your Poison

So which form of discrimination do you think will help decide the election?

Racism?

Ageism?

Sexism?

They all just look so good, it's hard to know which one I want to see undermine our marginally democratic process.

Give Yourself a Hand

Two mano-centric videos to delight & amaze:




and

The Evolution of Guilt

As Catholics head out to bars all over the country, here's a question they'll probably be asking themselves tomorrow.

Good to know there's an evolutionary reason for all that hand-wringing.

How I Learned to Start Worrying...

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

- Emily Dickinson

Track terrorism "and other suspicious events" worldwide here.

Track illegal alien activities here.

All powered by Google Maps, of course. Is there anything they can't do? No.

Track corporate technology complicit in big-brother-type surveillance here.

Gosh, I don't know why people are so willing to give up their privacy. Good thing I'm writing this here, telling my thoughts the livelong day, to an admiring blog.

Like the Hudson Without the Water

Albany without the Irish? I guess there was a time:



Business at Mahar's must've been sloooooow.

[THIS AD SPACE AVAILABLE]

In recent years, several European countries have taken it upon themselves to study (and, in some cases, subsequently outlaw) advertising that encourages children to pester their parents.

Though I would be loathe to support such overreaching "nanny-state" initiatives (preferring, instead, that parents take it upon themselves to limit their children's television watching), I am not opposed to banning certain commercials.

Here is my nominee for the chopping block:

• any commercial that uses an alarm-clock sound effect.

It's bad enough at 6 a.m. when it interrupts the gourmet meal I'm enjoying with Padma Laksmhi. At 4 p.m., it's like hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer, as Michael Scott might say.

That is all. Your suggestions?

Zing!

I'm probably just setting myself up for disappointment, but I like him already:

...The Sun's Jacob Gershman asked Paterson, so "New Yorkers don't have to go through this again," whether the LG had ever patronized a prostitute. Paterson seemed ready for that question, and quipped:

"Only the lobbyists."

Too Many Cooks

One more time that quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

"Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."

Because I like that quote so much, I'm going to present the latest installment from Hal Borland with no further blandishment:

"The Big Melt" ~ March 12th

The ice melts and you know the fundamental turn has come, no matter what happens now. We may have more snow and we certainly will have more frosty nights; but now the earth is unlocked and there will be no more long imprisonment until another winter. Upland brooks and rivers flow again, some of them in spate. Lowlands ooze. Frost in the ground slowly retreats, making quagmires of open fields, sodden sponges of pastureland. Snow that has lain in upland woodlots since December trickles away in a hundred rills.

It is a soggy time. Water is everywhere. But this is the very juice and sap of spring, this is water. It is the fluid of life. Without water the land is barren, the seed lies dormant, the bud withers unopened. Life began in the primordial waters, as nearly as we can trace beginnings, and it still needs water for its annual renewal. Only in water can the vital salts be dissolved and fed to the fundamental protoplasm. Water is the basic broth of both blood and sap.

So the water drenches the land, suffuses it, as the cold, insistent rains of March beach the ice. Melt begets more melt. Channels open. Boglands overflow. The earth is an ancient, watery planet again whose land is slowly rising to warm itself in the strengthening sun and clothe itself in green. We have had the big melt. We are ready for spring.

The Age of Reason?

On May 6th, 1903, Pres. Teddy Roosevelt made a speech at the Grand Canyon, in which he said:

"Leave it as is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."

That sounds correct to me. And so sensible. The reactionary opposition of the Right to environmentalist policy is as irrational as is the hippie Pangaea-worship on the Left. Of course, one of these positions - with its animism, emphasis on the religious experience afforded by hallucinogens, and myth-based reverence for nature - is actually rooted in ancient tradition. I'll let you guess which. Hint: it's not the ironically named "Conservative" one.

Irrationality is not, in itself, a thing to be assiduously scorned. Some of the best reasons to be alive derive their goodness from irrationality. Faith, poetry, love, laughter, blue cheese dressing. I'm sure many of these can be explained in rational ways, but, experientially, those explanations are irrelevant. What matters is the feeling. And that feeling is, by definition, irrational.

So there are ratios and formulas that govern our sense of musical aesthetics? O.K. I'm willing to go along with that. But just because you can chart the mathematical relationships of chord progressions or scan my brain - quantifying how my neurons fire when I hear the Kinks' Waterloo Sunset - that doesn't mean you can qualitatively demystify the response. If anything, you've deepened the mystery. As C.S. Lewis wrote, the study of the phenomenon and the phenomenon itself are separate, discrete, and mutually exclusive; the parsing of something precludes experiencing it, like a macroscopic version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

For all our attempts to put reality into a box, irrationality persists.

What is troubling about how this irrationality manifests itself on the Right with respect to the environment and Darwinism - evinced by their obdurate denial of the consensus on global warming and evolutionary biology - is its stubborn self-delusion. It is irrationality masking itself as rationality, speaking in terms of nominally persuasive labels like "millennial trends" and "coincidental aberrations" and "non-representative samples" and "holes in the fossil record." Such misguided efforts to (mis)use science to disprove science underscore a willful blindness. There is madness in their method.

All of this intellectual energy being expended for the purpose of what? To dress up what is essentially an emotional and religious resistance to new ideas. In other words: irrationality. Is it such a dirty little secret? Have the meanings of our words become warped beyond all usefulness?

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.” - Confucius

Irrationality is no more "bad" than any of our other characteristics. Is it wrong to cry? Is it evil to get butterflies in your stomach? To deny our emotional needs, to suppress our religious longings, is to be half-aware, half-alive. It is self-denial in its most comprehensive and most devastating form.

I am not suggesting that one's subjective, internal experience should trump objective, external evidence. I am suggesting that subjectivity is inevitable and therefore ignoring it - in the quixotic pursuit of "personal" objectivity - is ultimately harmful. In Taoist terms: by seeking objectivity, you produce its opposite.

So what does this mean for the anti-green activity on the Right? It means stop fighting science. The effort you exert is wasted. It would be better spent attempting to reconcile the rational and the irrational, the two essential and complementary aspects of the human condition. We were given two halves of a brain. Let's use them both.

For my own part, the few times in my life when I've tried to keep sight of this have been among the most rewarding. In June, 2003 - just over a hundred years after Roosevelt's speech - my one-time college roommate and all-time best (male) friend, Willis [note the parenthetical, Rach] and I visited Roosevelt Point at the North Rim. It was shady and cool on an otherwise warm day, so we stayed for the better part of an hour. And we just watched it. The longer I looked, the more I noticed something strange: across the Canyon, leading up to the edge there spanned a wide plateau, mostly under the care of the Hualapai Indian Reservation. Due to some trick of the light or the gradation of the topography, it looked as if I could see the curvature of the Earth. Rationally, I knew that was impossible. But there it was. And I couldn't stop looking at it. Had I dismissed it and walked away, I would have missed out on what I now consider one of the central religious experiences of my life.

In the end, we moved on because we "reasoned" that there were other sights to see, other stops on the itinerary we had set. We wanted to "maximize" our time. It seemed like the rational thing to do. Looking back, that doesn't make any sense at all.

Where's the Blintzkrieg?

A re-enactment of 20th-century warfare starring regional foods:



Best moment is probably the "arms race" that begins around the 2:40 mark.

As a student of history, I'm mesmerized. As a fan of food, I'm horrified.

Write Your Own Jokes

I'm taking the night off.

But why go a few hours without a funny jibe at a politician's expense? The Daily Show is on right now and they're doing a fine job on Spitzer. Now it's your turn. Sorry, it's the teacher in me:

Step 1: Watch this Campaign Video from 2006



Step 2: Contrast the Video's Message with the News Regarding Spitzer's Behavior

Step 3: Connect the "Road" Theme of the Ad & the News Via Pun/Pithy Witticism/Visual

Extra Credit:

Make a snide observation about the fact that

(1) Spitzer, a superdelegate, endorses Clinton, a woman with well-publicized experience with infidelity.
(2a) at the end of his ad, it says "Day One everything changes."
(2b) one of Clinton's favorite catchphrases is "Ready on Day One."
(2c) Obama insists we are "Ready for Change."
(2d) clearly ALL of them are involved in a slogan-plagiarizing ring.

Also, Andrew Sullivan posted a reader's comment from another blog that to me seemed so obvious and logical that it must have been hiding in plain sight:

Why is it illegal to sell what it is perfectly legal to give away?

Calling all of my lawyer friends! Is there any corollary to that anywhere else in the law?

Just wondering. O.K. Wasn't I taking the night off?

PS. On the list of superpowers most people wish for, the "ability to summon lawyers" isn't even in the top 100.

Two Quotes Designed to Blow Your Mind

This would be scary, if it weren't so funny:

"Behind me, I heard a young woman of twenty-five say, 'If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.' Now, I'm gonna repeat that, because it bears repeating. 'If it weren't for my horse...' as in, giddyup, giddyup, let's go — 'I wouldn't have spent that year in college,' which is a degree-granting institution. Don't think about that too long, or BLOOD will shoot out your NOSE!" - Lewis Black

This would be funny, if it weren't so scary:

"(Obama will) certainly be viewed as a savior for them," Rep. Steve King told The Associated Press. "That's why you will see them supporting him, encouraging him."

King said his offices have been bombarded with calls — positive and negative — since he said Friday that al-Qaida "would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror."

Is everyone getting this?

September 11th = Islamic extremist victory
Obama Presidency = bigger Islamic extremist victory

Isn't this dangerously close to saying that an Obama Presidency would be a worse tragedy, a worse breach of American security than a massive terrorist attack?

Seriously, I'm asking. I don't even know how to process this level of stupidity. But that's probably because my parents never bought me a horse.

Trail of Tears

“Thou cold sciatica, cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt as lamely as their manners.”

– W. Shakespeare, The Life of Timon of Athens (1564)

Forgive me my own lame manners, but I'd like to whine for a minute about my life-halting sciatica.

A few days before my birthday - January 25th - I injured myself playing basketball. Much as I would like to say that I banged my head on the rim while duplicating Vince Carter's "le dunk de la mort," the reality wasn't quite as majestic.

There was only an ignoble, poorly-planned, head-down drive through the paint from which I learned, for the upteenth time in my life, that two solids could not occupy the same space at the same moment.

Neck go "crunch." Neck hurt. Bulging disc and sciatica ensue.

Now, according to all the experts - my orthopedist, my physical therapist, and (most importantly) my mom - back pain is a notoriously elusive foe. So I shouldn't start to read too much into the fact that it's been such a protracted injury. But optimism of that sort can be hard to come by when I'm locked in a staring contest with the increasingly gray-haired man in my mirror. Even if the duration of my recovery is not necessarily a function of my age, it still feels that way. And, when you're stretched out on your bedroom floor for several weeks, in what seems like a one-man sleepover party that will not die, feelings tend to carry more weight than logic.

Thank goodness for home remedies. My favorite? Brainstorming elaborate, hyperbolic metaphors for the pain in my back. It's not so weird, when you think about it. I've heard that cancer patients often nickname their tumors. It helps them visualize their opponent and empowers them in the face of the disease. Kind of like Peter Jackson's decision to prematurely identify Saruman as a villain in the first Lord of the Rings. It would have been much harder for the Fellowship - and the audience - to get motivated against the forces of darkness if their nemesis was just a giant, floating, flaming Eye.

And thinking takes your mind off the discomfort. There's plenty of evidence to suggest this is so. C.S. Lewis wrote this about such quirks of perspective:

Human intellect is incurably abstract....[The] only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste....The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think....'If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it stops, what do I know about pain?

So I concentrate on the spasms, the soreness, the sharp pangs. I trace the pain's migration from the nape of my neck to the small of my back to my right buttock to my lower thigh and then - it presumably having scored a cheap, round-trip ticket on priceline.com - all the way back again. And this concentration, at least some of the time, has taken me away from the actual feeling. It also revealed, incidentally, that the old song has it all wrong. The neckbone is actually connected to the legbone. Who knew?

Without further ado, I give to you some of the metaphors I've developed for my roving back pain. Yes, English majors, technically these are similes, but let's not get bent out of shape. That job currently belongs to my back.

My back pain is like...

• ...pumping quarters into the Whack-a-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese. I beat those little buggers down with the Advil hammer, but they pop their well-worn heads out again, impervious to the blows of my punishing foam. "Back-a-Mole" would have worked, also.
  
• ...getting to the upper levels on Nintendo's Duck Hunt. The waterfowl are flying fast and furious and that damn dog is just chortling his head off. Oh, and every time he snickers, I writhe in agony.
• ...a sophisticated terrorist organization. Raise the threat level to "Red" and stock up on Sterno, but there's always one more splinter cell waiting in the wings. They can, will, and do carry out their godless mayhem independent of centralized direction.
• ...watching the E! network for any length of time.
• ...playing peek-a-boo with a baby. Except I'm the baby. And the back pain is the adult. And every time the pain covers its face, I think it's gone. But it's not gone. It's still there. And it's feeling superior with its fancy, "fully-developed skull" and uncanny ability to hold its head up. I drool. It laughs. My response? A gurgle or two before rapidly crapping my pants.
• ...a tumbleweed, rolling around the streets of early 90's L.A., hoping for the seed it carries to find purchase. It makes it all the way to the beach, to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, maybe even a trampoline party at the Malibu estate of porn magnate Jackie Treehorn. In the background, we hear the soothing narration of The Stranger (voiced by Sam Elliott) and a cowboy choral outfit called the the Sons of the Pioneers. Somewhere in a supermarket, the Dude is buying milk...WAIT! I think I've seen this somewhere before.
• ...a frat-boy road trip. It hired a gaz-guzzling RV, from which it dumps litter and the contents of its septic tank without a thought or care. Pathologically, indiscriminately spoiling the landscape - the height of douchebaggery - it leaves every place it goes that much worse off.
  
• ...a family of Dust-Bowl refugees. Homeless, jobless, feckless, toothless, they make their way across the panhandle of Oklahoma (my latissimus dorsi) singing tuneless songs to the joyless strains of a nearly stringless banjo.
• ...a pain in the ass, only higher.
  

Ahhhhh. I feel better already.

Scandal in the 5-1-8

I'll be waiting for Strange Maps to give us the "Eliot Spitzer" edition of this bit of genius:

"All I did was trade Lunchables..."

This video could give the "Star Wars" girl a real run for her money:

The Lighter Side of Hummers

Those who had hoped for some progressive reform here in the Empire State got some bad news about our golden boy today.

To cheer everyone up, I present:

(a) the (relatively) cleanest site you'll find on the web using the keywords "fuck" and "hummer"

(b) the mildest form of eco-terrorism yet conceived

(c) a hilarious - if unscientific - database of the regional/generational/technical variations on flipping the proverbial "bird."

Bordello or Blood?

Just for fun, I thought I'd do a quick peek-a-loo for prostitution scandals in the august files of the Albany Chronicles.

A word search revealed no matches for:

"brothel"
"prostitute"
"ill repute"
"whore"
"illegitimate"
"indiscretion"
"rape"
"bastard"

Nor any other similar words.

Interestingly, separate searches for "blood," "murder," "violent," "gun," and "mob" revealed many hits.

There are two possible conclusions to draw: either Albany has historically conducted itself as a paragon of sexual propriety or else this book is a better microcosm of America - and its puritanical double standards regarding depictions of sex & violence - than I thought.

Spitzer Jumps the Shark

Just a little over a year into his first term.

Let me go on the record and say that I don't care what private sexual imbroglios politicians get involved in. Let me further state that the political libertarian in me believes prostitution should be legalized. The economic socialist in me believes it ought to be taxed, regulated, and brought up to code with respect to health and safety. And, the libertarian would also like to point out that the socialist is hogging the covers. The socialist counters, saying the libertarian never puts the lid back on the peanut butter.

Anyway, quieting for a moment the likely self-righteous "gasps" from the Family Values set (I can't wait 'til Senate Majority Leader "Uncle" Joe Bruno pretends that this ruffles his crusty old feathers), I want to make a couple of points.

First, I'm not in the habit of quoting Margaret Thatcher, but in this case, "crime is crime is crime." You can't bill yourself as the ethics reform candidate and then pull a boner like this.

Second, I don't demand perfection from my politicians. That's a recipe for disappointment and, it turns out, disappointment is not all that tasty. Needs salt. I've only taught American history for a few years now, but the one thing I've learned is that nobody - NOBODY - is clean.

Quick. Think of a politician you know with that Boy Scout image. You know, the one with the "aw, shucks" smile and the penchant for populist rhetoric. Got him in mind? Good, now place him in a theoretical menagerie with Bigfoot and mermaids. Because he doesn't exist.

Spitzer won't deserve half of the heat he gets from this, but it doesn't matter. My guess is he's effectively finished. Oh, Spitzie. We hardly knew ye.

New Albany Chronicles

It is safe to say that history was on my mind when I began this blog. One of my favorite books throughout the years has been Cuyler Reynolds' Albany Chronicles. A sprawling, comprehensive account of the city (and environs) from its earliest days to 1906. Note the full original title:

There are brilliant, narrative passages about life on one of America's first frontiers, as well as soporific little snoozers about land deals and excise duties on the Hudson. There are commentaries designed to elevate Albany's stature in the eyes of the nation, as well as goofy asides about unruly cattle almost certain to betray the fact that New York's capital city had its fair share of slow news cycles. Whatever your pleasure, the juicy gossip of yesteryear has ripened with time, yielding a fine vintage.

I will try - as I have been doing with Borland - to highlight passages that are particularly illuminating. Take these excerpts on the Schenectady Massacre:

Even today I find textbooks that render this episode as having been solely initiated by the Indians, an example of lazy scholarship that swallows whole the various Eurocentric versions of the event. And how about that language? With phrases like "blood-besmeared" and "riped open" [sic], we should question whether our evening newscasts are really so shocking and mercenary after all.

Lastly, you'll notice that the fleeing victims had given up Schenectady for lost. For those of you who don't live around here, the promise of reinforcements from Kinderhook, Claverack, and Kingston would hardly be cause for optimism. Google Maps can show you how far each of these places were (and are).

View Larger Map

"Well, not facts..."

For those of you who missed Saturday Night Live's harrowing of the press, Clinton's "red phone ad," and Hillary's tacit endorsement of McCain, here's a fun video from SNL balancing out their recent, regrettable comedy:

Just in time for St. Patrick's Day...

...it's Celtic Techno Burrito.

Who needs MTV when we have Songs to Wear Pants To?

Sites like this & the popularity of karaoke make me think that the D.I.Y. Revolution is just around the corner. An unintended consequence of the cult of unearned celebrity could be the seizing of its apparatus to effect the widespread democratization of culture. Social networking sites (and blogs) could have the net effect of producing a worldwide marketplace of ideas and competitive creativity. Or they could just introduce more porn.

Enjoy the Sunday

When did MTV jump the shark?

My theory: there was a time when the media giant served a purpose. Not that it was ever - contrary to the hoopla - an exceedingly lofty objective, but at least it gave the kids their rock 'n' roll.

Early on, the VJs were geeky, awkward, star-struck fans and the station enjoyed the cachet of being a modestly successful culture-purveyor and influence-peddler.

Somewhere along the way, the little network that could began to believe its own hype and take itself way too seriously. It took ill-advised forays into political advocacy and began to relegate various genres to purgatorial time-slots apparently scheduled to limit, rather than expand, a particular music's fan base. When was Headbanger's Ball on anyway? Those that already felt marginalized by their tastes became more so thanks to this marketing apartheid.

So the self-styled progressive institution that brought Aerosmith & Run-DMC together on the same stage tucked everyone away into their respective corners, abandoned and forgotten. But somewhere in the darkness, those with rebellious thoughts about miscegenation grew angry, alienated beyond all good sense, hatching abortive concepts like "Limp Bizkit" and "Kid Rock." Hey, MTV, next time you try to kill a movement, make sure it's dead. Save us villagers the trouble of lighting our torches and dusting off our pitchforks. We won't be able to get any farming done if we're busy staving off the Children of the KoЯn.

But if you really want to identify the point of no return, the year was 1992. That was when The Real World debuted. And - all cards face-up - I was one of its early boosters. Who has discriminating taste in 8th grade? Certainly not me. And certainly not any of the other millions who watched it, encouraged it, allowed it to take root, muscling out the traditional programming. Three years later, Jenny McCarthy became co-host of Singled Out. A "courageous" move, the network execs said, putting a former Playboy model in their lineup. Yeah, bravo, guys. Congratulations on betting that America would embrace a blonde bombshell. Also, thanks for setting the unattainable standard for female beauty even higher. The anorexic girls in my class owe you one.

I don't blame MTV for creating reality t.v. The conceit has been around since the beginning of television. I do however blame it for embracing the trend so callously, for making celebrity so cheap and available. For decrying the dangers of plastic surgery on Monday's episode of True Life while re-running I Want a Famous Face on Tuesday. For never owning up to its architectural responsibility for the vapid, amateurish, Warholian wasteland of starfucking in which we now live. At least when it was Michael Jackson on the screen you could say - with healthy reassurance - "yeah, he's famous, but I bet his home life is hectic." Now it's our dysfunction on display. Every blemish in high-def relief. Why should the professionals be the only ones able to self-destruct on air? "Reality" killed the video stars.

Here's a throwback to simpler times, when the Dickerson clan would come back from church on Sunday, watch You Can't Do That on Television on Nickelodeon and then a little MTV to round out the afternoon.