I’m not sure what I think about this proposal to take Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Andrew Jackson and so on off the currency and put Bill Gates, Donald Trump and the Koch brothers on there instead. Certainly there’s merit to the idea.
Old Ben Franklin would probably find the knowledge people are rolling up his picture snorting coke and meth through him unsettling. Building him a karmic load he didn’t pay for.
There are certainly more currently recognizable people guilty of all Andrew Jackson did, one-upped him in a hundred different ways. But Jackson might be said to have set the pace and nailed down the precedents, earned his place on those bills. Even though the people handing them over to supermarket clerks to pay for dog food mostly don’t who he was, nor what he did.
A series of bills reflecting their actual value in the world marketplace after the national debt is subtracted might be a good idea. $1 bills with a minus $1 Million across the bottom. A picture of the last couple of presidents on each side.
All in all I think I’d prefer the government to issue a piece of currency molded in the shape of a straw for people to snort their coke and meth through. If it’s got to have a picture on it, use the first chimpanzee to get launched into space. Or Ronald Reagan for starting the War on Drugs. Building the need for a lot more of those bills to be printed.
Or any of the legion of celebrities who’ve overdosed on the stuff and become immortal.
If you are like me you probably sometimes wonder how we got where we are today. All of us so petty, venal, unimaginative, lazy, shallow, wasteful, ethnocentric, egocentric, polarized, gullible, compromised. How did we get here, I asks myself and the cats.
Who was responsible? Was it Chopstickson?
No, I sagely answers myself. It wasn’t. Chopstickson was just one of our elected leaders. The reason he was elected was that he was a mirror-image of the majority of US citizens. He was what we were and we were him. And Chopstickson was a lowlife scum.
Same as LBJ when he went for re-election when his term ended after having JFK shot. Same as JFK and his brothers were. Ad infinitum with all of them except Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, since then.
The reason elected chief executives and other elected politicians are scum is that the electorate elects itself into office to run this country, and the electorate is all the things we’ve come to be. All we have ever been.
As with all peasants, serfs, slaves, we love aristocrats and elect them, their families, their progeny to office to do what we’d like to do if we were aristocrats. Namely get richer. With representative democracy the main difference is we elect the ones most like ourselves.
“Artists shouldn’t enter the arena of competitions until they are tough enough to realize it is only opinion and not a reflection on their worth.” (Mary Moquin)
So… I got a rejection letter. None of the pieces I submitted were accepted, although I’ve been in that particular exhibit twice in years past ( most recently about three years ago).
The above is one I submitted. Problem is with form letters, you never know what it was that made them reject it. I’ll only be able to speculate when I go to the exhibit.
I’ve noted before that they seem partial to some 3-D element for the prize winners, but I haven’t tried that yet. There are a lot of ways that could be done with my work, but without my work by nature being 3-D, I suspect it would look contrived. I also get frustrated when I get too far away from the actual drawing (like those pendants, where the glass cutting and soldering is time-consuming). Cutting paper, layering paper, rotating layers of paper, mirror-edges around the design–all of them sound cool but don’t really sound fun to put together. I’m really not a paper-crafter.
I have a couple of other ideas about how I can give them more depth, so I suppose I’ll concentrate on that first.
I have a couple of little peeves about these exhibits. The first is the application fee (in this case, $25, which isn’t too unreasonable). The second is that photography and other kinds of art work are usually grouped together, and I think photography exhibits/competitions should be held separately from other media. I think photography is an entirely different beast, especially now that good cameras are affordable and it’s so easy to use the computer in conjunction with that. I love it, but just because it hangs on the wall doesn’t make it the same thing.
Evaluating my work is a constant process, always there in the background, but it’s good to put it up front sometimes. Right now the difficulty of getting exposure to promote sales makes it a challenge in ways that don’t have anything to do with the difficulty of doing the work. I hope I’ll be able to draw some honest conclusions later on. Maybe that will include submitting some photographs next time.
There’s one nice little conclusion to this form-letter rejection, though. I was shelf-reading at work last night (shelf-reading is checking the shelves to make sure that every book is placed in exact order). I always keep an eye out for bookmarks since I have quite a collection. Usually I find check-out receipts and boarding passes. This time, in a book called “The Lord is my Shepherd”, I found $26.00. Just enough to cover the application fee and postage to send the cd. Is that cool, or what?
Trucking down mainstreet toward the courthouse I immediately noticed the flags are gone, and of the dozen-or-more of these signs there a month ago, only three are left.
Bad sign, thinks I while ignoring inconvenient puns. Might mean there are some intelligent, ethical people in Junction, Texas, with some class. People who aren’t allowing themselves to be brow-beaten by kneejerks to backhandedly exploit the dead for some obscure political message.
People who’ve thoughtfully arrived at the realization that some things are better forgotten.
Lousy people to have on juries. Might reduce my chances for getting exempted.
However, then I arrived at the courthouse. The place was strangely quiet.
Clock said it was what? 4:30 am? I’m there in plenty of time. But my watch says it’s 9:00 am.
But the sign on the door explains all.
But parenthetically adds we ain’t allowed to burn down the County Courthouse.
So, I’m free. Got time to kill, a whole town to stick my nose into. Gas gauge is showing empty, so first I swing in for a tank of cheap petrol.
$50 later I drift over for five minutes of free prayer and a Kow Kick. Hadn’t done any gratitude affirmations yet about jury duty being cancelled, and a non-Christian doesn’t get many offers for free prayer. Much less with a Kow Kick thrown in.
Sooooo. Off to the city park for a while, spent an hour or so in the graveyard, which is cool, had some Lum’s barbeque, examined various historical markers. All of which I’ll report to you in loving detail during otherwise dull moments of the future.
Meanwhile, feel free to forget. It’s surprisingly uplifting, cleansing, and clears the conscience of all that guilt for trying to exploit the dead. Helps make a classy individual of you. Might make people believe you’re intelligent, well-rounded and capable of thinking for yourself.
While we all twiddle our thumbs in anticipation waiting to hear whether Old Jules is giving the lawyers a bad day or has gone fishing, here’s a very brief update from me, Jeanne.
I just realized I never showed you the final version of this particular mandala that I was working on in June, so here it is:
Those little shaded areas are actually a clear metallic ink.
I completed four good-sized works in June and July before I went on vacation. I’ll put the others up at some point, or Old Jules will. I entered an exhibit application showing those other three as examples of my work, and if one of them gets chosen, I’ll get that one matted and framed. I’ve been in the exhibit before, which is held in a local nature center building, but I haven’t heard anything yet for this year. I like this one because they let you put prices on your work and the Parks and Recreation Dept. actually makes some purchases themselves for their buildings throughout the county. So we shall see. I’ve never won any prizes or sold anything through this exhibit, but the judge this year is affiliated with our Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), so it makes sense to let one more art professional see my stuff. Usually the winners from this show are either doing photography or have some 3-D element in their work.
I took 2460 photographs on my trip, most of them in Oregon and Washington. If you want to connect with me on Facebook, you can see some of them (I’m there as Jeanne Bangs Kasten). There were some really great photos because I got a new camera, a Canon Powershot Elph somethingorother. Even just set on automatic, the pictures were great. I took pictures at Breitenbush Hot Springs, the Oregon beach, Tacoma, WA, Mt. Rainier, Ballard Locks (Seattle) and the Dale Chihuly Museum at the Seattle Center (right by the Space Needle). I have a ton of scenery and greenery photos, and I have an obsession (apparantly) with running water scenes. I haven’t passed on very many to Old Jules yet because it involves either re-sizing them all or putting them on a separate flash drive.
Well, back to work! And the rest of you can go back to twiddling your thumbs.
Jeanne
I can see how Warren [or anyone else] might justifiably refer to me as an SOB. I’ve no argument on that score.
But why a BIGOTED SOB? [The Mormon post comments]
Everything I said about Mormons was positive, and I could have said a lot of other positive things about them. For instance, Howard Hughs trusted them, always hired Mormon bodyguards, caretakers and administrators. Because they were honest, dedicated, hard working.
For that matter, Mormons also have legions of people researching and identifying their dead ancestors, baptizing them ex-post-facto to Mormonism so they won’t be doomed to hell. PHDs in history could learn a lot from those uncredentialed Mormon researchers because they’re better and more accurate doing it than most PHDs I’ve ever come across. When I’ve run up against a brick wall doing historical research I’ve frequently found help among Mormons doing genealogy.
Is that cool, or what? When those researchers run out of relatives to be unknowingly baptized, likely someday one of them will find my name and make a Latter Day Saint of me without me having to do anything, even know it. If they happen to be right, which I personally doubt, it’s still a win/win. Cheap insurance.
So Warren couldn’t possibly be calling me a bigot on behalf of Latter Day Saints.
Okay. Maybe he was damning me because I said I didn’t trust Christians. Or that I’d trust a Mormon more readily than I’d trust a Christian. But the truth is, that opinion is just based on my personal experience.
Some of my best friends have been Christians. Sure, I dropped a lot of them off the list because they pestered me to death with their evangelizing, but I still thought of them as best friends. And as such, I was able to recognize the human flaws they carried around with them, including a weakness for falsehood, many of them. Along with a weakness for personal betrayal, abstractions over personal loyalty. Doing things involving me ‘for my own good’.
Maybe trusting members of one religion over another is lousy judgement, but I can’t see it as bigotry.
The only other thing in that post that might be construed as bigotry was my saying this king is a black white man. But hell, that’s being said all over the web by black folks. They’re calling him an ‘Oreo’ [black on the outside, white on the inside], an Uncle Tom. All manner of things suggesting they don’t consider his decisions, demeanor, perspectives to be similar to their own. Their self-stereotyping of their ethnic attitudes and opinions exclude his. They believe he matches their stereotype of whites, more nearly.
So how can me calling him a black white man be a sign of bigotry?
Brings to mind the Hispanic wife of an Anglo friend of mine during the nineties. They’d built a new house and were showing signs of affluence and the other Hispanic women of Socorro, New Mexico, whispered, shouted, sneered, snarled, “She’s trying to be white!” “She’s pretending she’s white!” Boycotted her beauty-shop business.
Crazy world we’re living in.
I ain’t ‘trying to pretend to be black’, ain’t trying to ‘pretend to be a Mormon’, ain’t trying to ‘pretend to be aChristian’.
Maybe that’s the problem. I wonder which one Warren was trying to pretend to be.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
A while back I was talking on the phone with my bud, Rich, in North Carolina. He’d just returned from a visit to the Georgia Guidestones and was telling me about them, and the general history of the area where they’re located. One anecdote involved the local hero of the American Revolutionary War.
Seems there was a woman settler in the area famous enough for her contribution to be recognized as a hero and locally a focus of veneration. She got a bunch of British soldiers drunk and murdered them while they slept.
I don’t doubt a few more dead enemy soldiers was a boon at the time, but I found myself wondering how the woman felt about it after the dust settled, say three, four decades later. It ain’t as though your average British soldier was a lot different than the people he was fighting against at the time. Just grunts, following orders, doing what they were told to do, same as soldiers everywhere. Probably it’s possible to assemble a set of reasonings to appreciate the impact the event had on the outcome of the Revolution, but it’s less easy to bring up any admiration for the lady who did it.
In fact, I’d guess her neighbors and husband were careful not to offend her during her time around them later. A person who’d do what she did is nobody to be trifled with.
But thinking about all that led me to consider the whole issue of the way we humans celebrate history. Fairly bizarre, when you consider it carefully. The British celebrate a guy who attempted to blow up Parliament, but was thwarted, for instance. Lots of fireworks, but I wonder if they’re cheering the attempt to do it, or the failure of the effort?
For that matter, I wonder if they do much celebrating out on the Rez, shooting off fireworks and cheering the ethnic memory of, say, Custer’s Last Stand. Or the slaughter of Fetterman’s troops during the Red Cloud uprising. If they don’t, are they being sufficiently true to their own tribal histories?, I speculates.
Or, at least as grotesque, are the black citizens of the projects all over the US going to be cheering for the institution of slavery that brought their ancestors to this geography so’s to allow them to be here, not Africa? Whatever the shortcomings of life in modern US ghettos, probably the average modern resident of their ancestral homelands would gladly change places. Can I hear a few “Amens!” for the institution of slavery in this land concurrent with [gulp, sigh] remembering our noble founding fathers? Their unselfish efforts and sacrifices along the avenue toward ‘freeing themselves’ from British oppression and tyranny?
Is anyone in Georgia going to be singing, Marching Through Georgiatomorrow? Cheering Sherman’s scorched earth burning of Atlanta, and churning across the state burning and looting the citizenry, civilian and military, all the way to Savannah?
Fact is, it all comes out of the same cauldron. Sip a spoonful of it and you have to either like the overall taste, or focus on the flavor of the meat while ignoring the onions and garlic. Here, and everywhere else.
For instance, the Japanese probably have enjoyed their post-WWII / pre-tsunami affluence, freedoms, non-involvement in military adventures. They’d never have gotten any of that without Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, Midway, Tarawa, et al. The destruction of the Japanese Empire.
But I’m betting they don’t have a day of celebration for it.
Probably somewhere in Georgia there’s a community of UK citizens visiting, or living out their lives. Or folks who came here from the UK and became US Citizens. Maybe tomorrow would be a good day for them to visit the Georgia Guidestones, wave a US flag around to acknowledge that history’s a different place for them now, than it used to be. In any case, maybe they ought to be conscious of how much they drink and where they do their drinking. Georgia still has woman patriots.
History’s not an overly hospitable environment without some selectivity and flexibility. Going out tomorrow and killing a few Brits, Japanese, Yankees, whites, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Vietnamese, Apache, Navajo, Lakota, maybe a few Russians for good measure would help everyone remember, better, what patriotism’s all about. Or get’em drunk and cut their throats.
At least it wouldn’t be as boring as a parade. An honest tribute to our ancestors, whomever they might have been, would help us make the same mistakes they did. Which we will.
Old Jules
Who needs fireworks anyway, when you can have the real thing?
Just so’s to clear up my own position regarding the ‘Roswell Incident’.
After I read Witness To RoswellI came away convinced all those interviews had put the ball into the other end of the court insofar as what happened back then and who needed to carry the burden of proof. I carried that line of thought around a few years, including the time of the visit with Loretta.
But my second-thoughts about whether I’d trust the book began when, maybe a year ago, I began getting emails from one of the authors of the book. I’m not certain what it was about his emails cause me to experience a growing body of mistrust, suspicion and dislike, but something did. My gut feel left me thinking I wouldn’t trust the guy far enough to want to step on him barefooted.
So, I’m back where I was from the beginning. I have no idea what happened out on wossname’s ranch in 1947, other than what Loretta said about it during our conversation. And I quite honestly don’t think it much matters in the overall scheme of things, what happened, what anyone believes happened, nuthun.
Nuthun at all. I couldn’t care less whether there are aliens zipping around this planet, time travellers, government flying machines, new world order robots, Roswellcrucians, ghosts, phantoms, vampires, or just bored people making things up.
“Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of CERN where the LHC is based, said he was confident that by the end of the year it will be possible to say whether the Higgs Boson, the particle which is responsible for giving mass to the universe, exists.
“The theoretical particle, nicknamed the God Particle due to its central role it has in explaining modern physics, has never been detected and scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence.
“Scientists hope that high energy collisions of particles in the 17 mile underground tunnel at CERN will finally allow them to create the conditions to allow them to spot the elusive Higgs Boson.
“Dr Heuer, who was speaking at the Hay Festival, said the LHC is scheduled to be closed down at the end of this year for up to two years in order to carry out upgrades that will increase its power and allow it to continue with more experiments.”
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Those guys over at CERN need to think of something else to call themselves. They’re inadvertently allowing their use of language to act as a confession booth. “. . . scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence,” says just about everything needs saying about the difference between science and engineering. Or whatever it is they think they’re doing. “Got me a theory, now I’m going to PROVE it,” ain’t science. But the difference is too subtle to penetrate the ice surface those folks are skating on.
For several years now they’ve been bragging about creating ‘baby black holes’ that ‘dissolve’ [they say the little guys dissolve because they don’t know what the hell happened to them – spang lost track of them]. There’s a body of opinion among outcasts and heretics from the ‘science’ religion that some of what’s going on stands a shot at creating black holes that don’t do any vanishing. Black holes, or something else nobody anticipated.
At CERN, though, they’re got things to prove and they’re not going to let anything stand in the way of proving it. When a physicist somewhere raises his hand to suggest they mightn’t know what the hell’s going to come out of this or that, they shout him down. “There’s an extremely LOW probability of it.”
Back before they detonated the A-bomb at the Trinity Site a group of the physicists there expressed similar concerns. “We oughtn’t do this. There’s a minute chance it will set fire the atmosphere of the planet.”
“Why hell, the probabilities for that are low. How the hell can we know whether it will without TRYING it?”
So guess what! Trinity didn’t set fire to the atmosphere. All manner of other great things grew out of it, though. Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The Cold War. Mutually Assured Destruction. ICBMs. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and a lot of potential today for more drama in the North Pacific centered around Japan. Countless people born deformed downwind from the low-probabilities that became high-probabilities with Chernobyl. Arms races all over the world and weapons of mass destruction used as an excuse to invade any country with something worth stealing.
As nearly as I can figure, those Higgs Boson particles [or something rhyming with them] are out there doing their thing all by their lonesome selves without needing permission from physicists. They do what they do without needing some airhead calling them God particles, Higgs Boson particles, or anything else.
The people at CERN are doing something they’re calling ‘science’, throwing up their hands calling it the innocent pursuit of knowledge, wanting to prove things. Hopefully one of the things time will prove is they were right about those baby black holes dissolving instead of going into orbit around the sun.
Hopefully they’ll prove the human species wouldn’t have been better served hanging them upside down from lamp posts when they had the chance.
This email was waiting for me when I logged on this morning, in part:
“The total bumper stickers on a 2000 mile trip was one Semper Fi, two Obama/Biden, one home made one that said Troginator or something, and one that said “ If religious groups want to get into politics they should pay taxes” which I’ll send to you re-sized sooner than the others if you want to use it. If there are certain subjects I might have taken that you’d like me to email the pic of, let me know and I’ll resize those first just to send along quickly.
“Saw something in a comment that the new bumpers don’t do well with bumper stickers, and since almost all the cars I saw were new, I suspect people don’t want to mess their bumpers up with something that won’t come off. Just guessing.”
Jeanne might be right, of course, same as any of us might as easily be as being wrong at any given time, on any given issue we enjoy strong opinions about.
I hate to think US drivers have become so sissy they’d quit spewing their certainties, hatreds, biases and half-baked simple solutions to complex phenomena just because of their paint-jobs. I’d prefer to think they’ve become uneasy about what’s going on around them, sensed it enough to cause the hair on their necks bristle a bit.
The deliberate polarization of strong feelings in this country regarding politics, religion, environmentalism, ethnics, abortion, sexual preference and patriotism seem to me to have introduced the potential for having tires slit in the parking lot as a means of counter-expression.
The guy in the picture at the top today is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona. His hat was his bumper-sticker. Someone shot a hole in it, ripped it in half so’s he had to sew it back together.
But in another sense, a person might figure, “Hell, if I’m going to be in Swilling’s neighborhood, I ain’t putting no bumper-sticker on my horse.”
The country’s jam-packed with people today who might be sneakier and more cunning than Jack Swilling, but have the same eyes developed listening to talk radio too much. Or spending too much time in the slammer to love their fellow Americans. Or snorting too much of this or that recreational drug.
Jack Swilling’s still out there, but he’s wearing his hat backward most likely. Instead of saying, “What the hell are YOU looking at?” most likely he’ll just drag his keys the length of your paintjob or slit your tires. Unless he can catch you alone broken down on the highway.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 