I’m glad I didn’t post what I wrote about L’affaire Keillor, because now no one cares, and I don’t think anyone cared by the time noon came around. Perhaps that’s the reason I should have posted it, though. I think we should care. To give you the tl;dr of a piece you didn’t ask for and didn’t see:
Prairie Home Companion was never my cup of tepid milk; didn’t like the music, found the humor strained, the monologues occasionally brilliant in composition and construction but unbearable in delivery, because I just didn’t buy the “Garrison” persona. Folksy he ain’t. Enjoyed a few of the novels; good work. Columns: a tedious mess when aiming for some sort of Poetic Account of Life, nasty blather when political.
So I’m not a fan. But I’m horrified by the network crumpling him up and shoving him down the memory hole - if the situation that got him bounced happened the way he described it. Now, I believe the accusations that have made up Wienie Roast 2017, from Roy Moore to Lauer to Rose to Simmons et al, et al. (Trump too.) I don’t know if the radio network went for the nuclear option because the charges were more severe than we’ve been told (They’re not talking to anyone, except to say there are no additional allegations beyond the one), or if the standard position now is unperson status regardless of the severity of the accusation.
There are gradations, right? There have to be. On one side, you have the men who do not use their position or power to maul women or expose themselves. We call this The Minimum Acceptable Standard. The Thing that Should Go Without Saying. The gradations kick in on the other side - that's where you have the touchers, huggers, shoulder-massagers, grabbers, goosers, elevator close-operators, exhibitionists, sad wankers, brutes, obsessives, weirdos with a porn loop playing in their head in the workplace all day, and so on, all the way up to the rapists and other criminals.
It seems ill-advised to make the people at both ends of the spectrum serve the same sentence, because it has the eventually effect of minimizing the crimes of the guys on the horrid end of the spectrum. They’re all put in the same basket.
Maybe they belong there, inasmuch as they all exhibit a form of delusional masculinity that compartmentalizes their sexual urges into discrete episodes disconnected from their self-conception. But it's all binary now. I hate the binary construction of every single issue. It's a substitute for thought, and it is dangerously impatient with details.
Well, here’s to a weekend away from the news, then back to another parade of icky, moist-minded, pervy goats on Monday. If there’s one line from the deleted essay I wish I could keep, it’s this: “If you asked a cartoonist to ‘draw a horny Pep Boys character,’ you’d get Al Franken.”
Some random stuff that clogged the MISC folder where I dump stuff in the hopes I’ll get around to it:
Ladies and Gentlemen, the most Minnesota Food Truck ever.
It’s the only one outside the building these days. I smile whenever I see it. I took that shot yesterday; did the skyway walk today, because I wanted a shot of the Great Rail Catastrophe downtown. A light-rail jumped the tracks.
What you are looking at are all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men, because from the accounts on the news they had a hell of a time getting it back on the tracks. By the way, who would ever expect horses to reassemble a broken man-egg? Humpty Dumpty was screwed the moment he hit the ground, and perhaps one of the King’s Men could console him in his final minutes, make a show of getting out some glue, it’ll be fine, stay with me. But horses? Useless in these situations.
At the store I saw a new frozen entree that assures you there is food inside and it’s not a brick of pea-studded ice. But I think they miscalculated this one. Or maybe I’ve just been dealing with too much dog barf.
Speaking of which, and I'm sorry that I am: Back to the vet next week to have some more tests to see if Birch has some rare parasite, as the doc suggested- something that requires her to look at slides of blood cells one after the other, looking for a small little anomaly. (Which made me think of the Andromeda Strain, which made me almost say “I hope you’re not epileptic.” He’s still skinny, which just could be his final form. But he has a bad stomach episode about once a week, which could be due to eating EVERYTHING (Tonight: poked a tooth into one of Daughter’s paint tubes, chewed a wooden incense holder from her room, licked the steps, ate something off a tree) and we have an indoor excretory accident once a week or more, which is dismaying.
He doesn’t act sick, and he’s quite strong - nearly took my hand off on our walk tonight when he smelled something rodental. Good appetite, no lethargy. But we just had his glands expressed and tonight he was not only bothering his hindquarters again, he was barking at his butt in anger.
He was mad at his butt. Knock it off, butt.
Almost topped off.
That was a hole in the ground last year.
Gildersleeve season 7. We're coming to the end of this year's exhaustive catalog of the Gildersleeve musical cues, and believe me: I could go another year. I won't, but I could.
The four moods of Frankie! All the same.
That'll do; see you around.
New Gallery addition today. |
