I understand that there is dissatisfaction with Hyvor, or Hy-Vee, and you want Discus back. So it shall be. It pains me to have the link chum even for a day, but I will pay to have it removed, just as I was paying for Hyvor.
I get one of these a day:
I sent this mail praying it will find you in a good condition, since I myself am in a very critical health condition in which I sleep every night without knowing if I may be alive to see the next day. I am Mrs.Anderson Theresa, a widow suffering from a long time illness.
I have some funds I inherited from my late husband, the sum of ($11,000,000.00, Eleven Million Dollars)
And so on. The incompetence varies from letter to letter; this one is notable for not knowing someone would be called Mrs. Anderson Theresa. Tell me you come from a culture that puts clan name before proper name without telling me, as the overused phrase on Twitter has it.
But this next one . . . it is cake-taking. It gathers into its greedy arms all the cakes.
Dear friend,
Following the sudden collapse of my government in Afghanistan, as the former president of Afghanistan, I have been thrown into a state of utter confusion, frustration and hopelessness by the Taliban take over my country.
I have lost hope and confidence in anybody within the country. You must have heard over the media and the Internet on the huge sums of money i moved to different security firms abroad to the tune of $169m
That’s right: it’s the former President of Afghanistan, reaching out to me! He’s got a cool $169 million, all obtained by means that have nothing to do with fastening on the American taxpayer like an Orca-sized leech, and he wants my help! You see, he put $42 million IN CASH in a bank in Europe, but there is “no record” of this being done, so he needs my bank account numbers to move it.
The email came from ukrsa.com, which is the UK Racket Stringing Association. He wants me to contact him at “A.Ghani@presidency.com," which is totally legit; all the presidents use it.
Every day I get email from Chinese manufacturers. The latest batch are all about . . . this.
I am david. form jinan yizhou laser technology co.,ltd .
Glad to learn you are on the market of underwear .
The Chinese are so far ahead of us they're using lasers to make underwear.
I mentioned the other day that I'd finished a 400-page site on 1940s pre-war ads. We don't think of the early 40s as pre-war, but they were. The ads are notable for their courage and determination and reassurance. Everyone by the middle of 1941 was putting out ads about how they helped with PREPAREDNESS.
Rest assured, we have the meatiest troops around:
Be of stout heart; we are rolling up our sleeves:
Everyone's getting ready, with a smile on their broad, open, honest American faces!
With adequate meat, you can look any man in the eye.
I have no idea if this was the prevailing sentiment, and I suspect it was not. The mood was jittery. No one knew what was coming, except that it seemed to be coming from two directions. The early days after Pearl were not a smoothly-run affair, an effortless tooling up. It was fraught with cock-ups and bureaucracy and maddening bottlenecks. Far from being a Meat Beheamoth, we had undernourished conscripts and volunteers. From what I've read, the mood was downcast, abashed, and hesitant about the future.
I felt that same mood in youth, after Vietnam, when the country was seized by the idea that it couldn't do anything, couldn't make anything - and what we did make was bad, like our lousy cars. But here's the thing: that mood was abroad in the land in the early 90s, too. People forget that Clinton won becaue the nation had been plunged into a deep, traumatic recession! Which wasn't either of those things, but "worst ecomony since the Depression" was a common talking point, and there were lots of stories about industrial inadequacies. I remember this because our news bureau in DC decided to do a series of stories called What Works. It was designed to buck everyone up with tales of the things the country could do, still did, and did well.
This malaise feels different. Before, it seemed as if there were forces both vague and specific that caused our ills. History had turned against us.
Now, it feels entirely self-imposed by a class of managerial technocrats whose indifference is matched only by their incompetance, and a disconnected, destructive, frivilous intellectual class that looks daft and mad to the unwoke.
Hey, could be worse! There is no hectoring Austrian paperhanger barking commands. Instead, we have every organization and institution hastening to reorient itself to the mode of the moment to garner the likes on social media and buy off the pitchfork mobs. But the thing about social media is that it is neither. It is a solipsistic shout in a hall of mirrors. It is “media” in a new sense, which is to say a debased sense without standards. But everyone pretends it’s a community. It’s not. Imagine a million mice in a tornado: that’s the "community" of social media.
So? Ad culture in the 40s wasn't real, either. But look at those messages above: confident. If you express cultural confidence in anything but the destruction of the old cultural confidence, you're the worst.
By itself, that's bad. But add this: the solutions to all our ills are plain. Just as plain is the certainty that no one will enact them.
I was going to give examples, but I'd get on a hobby horse. Think of your own, and ask if the things that cause our malaise are really impossible to fix. I don't think they are.
Yes, yes, the adage: For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong. Everyone who makes a living off systems, or defending systems, uses that. How about this: For every problem there is a solution that is straightforward, possible, and necessary. Someone's going to propose it eventually. Better than person who walks among the crowd than the one who arrives on a horse.
It’s 1930. It’s probable that this newspaper was much bigger than today’s rags; unfurled, it was practically a wide-screen TV.
Gay party took them for jokers:
I find more stories about the victim, but nothing about solving the crime.
"Best known realtors." That can't be an overpopulated category.
During the filming of Thunder in the winter of 1929, Chaney developed pneumonia. In late 1929 he was diagnosed with bronchial lung cancer. This was exacerbated when artificial snow lodged in his throat during filming and caused a serious infection. Despite aggressive treatment, his condition gradually worsened, and he died of a throat hemorrhage on August 26, 1930, in Los Angeles, California.
That’s a cause of death you don’t seem to see much anymore.
Many people don’t know this, and most of them would wonder why they should. But this character is still around. The comic would eventually focus on Fritzie’s niece . . . who had a pal named Sluggo.
Somehow this seems like it should be bigger. And those names!
Pete Von F gets a wikipedia entry:
Peter von Frantzius (sometimes Frantizius) (died April 6, 1968) was a Chicago businessman and arms dealer to the Chicago underworld during Prohibition, later dubbed by the press as "The Armorer of Gangland". An almost exclusive supplier of the Chicago Outfit (although often selling to rival gangs such as the North Side Mob), he was one of the first to supply "Tommy" submachine guns and other specialized weaponry connected to countless gangland slayings during the bootleg wars of the 1920s, including the murder of Brooklyn mobster Frankie Yale in 1928, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 and the 1930 gangland murder of Chicago journalist Jake Lingle.
Never prosecuted; ran a sporting goods store until 1968. As for Jake:
Alfred "Jake" Lingle, Jr. (July 2, 1891 – June 9, 1930) was an American reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He was shot dead gangland-style in the underpass leading to the Illinois Central Randolph Street station on the afternoon on June 9, 1930, as dozens of people watched. Lingle was initially lionized as a martyred journalist, but it was eventually revealed that he was involved in racketeering with the Capone organization and that his death had more to do with his own criminal activities than his journalism.
Yeah, there was a lot of that, I suspect.
America’s Dancing Daughter?
That’s because Crawford starred in a silent in 1928, “Our Dancing Daughters.”
So they stuck “Our” on the title to let you know it was like that other one you enjoyed. In between the two was “Our Modern Maidens.”
Wikipedia . . . says nothing. Google . . . says nothing.
IS THAT THE TREE OF WISDOM
PERHAPS THAT IS THE ROPE OF INITIATIVE THAT RINGS THE BELL OF TRUTH
There you have it. Now visit the 50s, if you please.
