Until Next Time

I saw this headline, Buddhist monk who brought ‘mindfulness’ to the world dies peacefully aged 95 at Vietnamese temple, and I thought, surely not Thich Nat Hanh, but it was.

I’ve read his books Thundering Silence and Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present.

I guess I should not have been terribly surprised that he was still around–Peace of Mind was published but eight years ago. Maybe nine. Sorry, I am still on 2021 in my mental arithmetic.

Jeez, this blog is nothing but death notices of late, ainna? Maybe I should lighten things up and tell you about the most Monday Monday I’ve ever had.

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I Wrote A Short Story About This Once

Mechanic totals $3.4M Ferrari after smashing into tree stump on test drive

Except in my short story, “Joy Ride”, a valet “borrows” a Corvette for a ride over his break, and instead of totaling it, he puts it in a ditch and scratches it. Which might be totaled depending upon the age and mileage, I suppose.

Man, I wrote a lot of short stories when I was in college, back when I thought people might like to read what I wrote.

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In News They Would Prefer You To Think Are Unrelated

The home page of the Springfield News-Leader has three headlines about Springfield Public Schools:

They include:

Given that the Attorney General / Senate Candidate Eric Schmitt has said he’ll sue school districts that impose mask mandates, their legal costs in the next year are about to go up, too.

I am sure professional educational administrators think that their actions make sense and lead to positive outcomes, but I am not sure the actual outcomes back this up.

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The PSAs Have Gone The Other Direction

Instapundit links to a Joanne Jacobs Teens eat more, exercise less.

Which is weird, because all the NFL public and charitable announcement commercials during football games are no longer about Play60, its program to get kids to exercise. Instead, they’re all about the It Takes All Of Us announcements about programs raising awareness about race.

You mean the first actual, you know, health problem wasn’t solved yet and in fact worsened, but it was superseded by a more contemporary political concern?

What is this world coming to?

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The Low Class Entertainments of Brian J., 2021-2022

You know, I was going to get “Weird Al” Yankovic concert tickets for my family for Christmas, something to stick into their stockings for a nice treat. But the page for the concert says that proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test within 72 hours of the event.

The concert is scheduled for next August. In the next nine months, we can expect the definition of vaccination and COVID test to change once or twice.

You know, I stream WSIE, the Sound, the jazz station in the St. Louis area, and all of the concert announcements feature the same stricture. And I saw an out-of-date ad for the Springfield Contemporary Theatre–although I thought I would go to a lot of performances there when I first learned of it five years ago, I haven’t been back. But in addition to Facebook showing me ads for productions that were over, the theatre also has the vax passport or negative test bit.

You know what doesn’t have bouncers at the door checking your papers? Sporting events. Movie theaters. School events. You know, the things that the proles like.

So I guess I’ll be avoiding the hoity-toity cultural events for the nonce.

(Related: It’s time to abolish ‘emergency’ COVID-19 powers by Glenn Reynolds. Although down here in the Ozarks, most of those things have already been eliminated, although my son has to mask up again for his school since they set Protocols at the beginning of the year, and they must slavishly follow them.)

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To Ask The Question Is To Answer It

Nicklaus: The economy is booming. Why are Americans so glum?

Messenger: Of smoking, masks and shifting views of freedom

And to be honest, using “Booming” to describe how the price of everything has gone up in the last year is a bit of a stretch of optimism.

But, yeah, in an inflationary environment, when the elites and journalists are all about explaining how the inflation is good for you and the loss of freedom is good for you, and you’re a racist anyway, why are Americans glum?

Must be the grey skies with little chance of snow.

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A Questionable Study

Volcanic climate impacts can act as ultimate and proximate causes of Chinese dynastic collapse.

It’s not that the ruling regimes became corrupt and unable to manage or perform the necessary government duties. It was the volcanoes.

I just glanced at it, and I can’t help note that all the data stops at 1911. What, no earthquake in 1949? Weird that when the technology and recorded history gets better at recording actual volcanic eruptions, the charts stop.

I am skeptical about anything about China, especially speculative scientific work by Chinese scientists or historians.

(I saw the link somewhere else first, but it also appeared at Instapundit where Professor Reynolds uses it to advocate for space colonization.)

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They’re No Rocket City Trash Pandas

The Beloit Snappers minor-league baseball team finally unveils its new nickname:

A long-gestating rebrand is finally complete for the Beloit Snappers, who announced Monday that their new mascot would be the “Sky Carp.”

Before you ask, a sky carp is a slang term for a goose that doesn’t migrate for the winter.

So why did they change the name? (He asked innocently, but since the article does not say why, he assumes it is because Snapper is also slang for something.)

(As you might remember, gentle reader, the Rocket City Trash Pandas are my favorite minor league baseball team, and it looks like they actually finally got to play this year.)

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Not Like The Old Days

Next buyer of Prince Charles’ $6.7M former home must let him fish there:

Prince Charles’ glorious former home is up for sale for the first time since he sold it over 27 years ago — but there’s a catch.

Listed at nearly $6.7 million, the next buyer must be OK with his royal highness stopping by to fish.

The listing explains that since the home was built in 1906, it has been owned by the Duchy of Cornwall — an estate that funds “the public, charitable and private activities of the Prince of Wales and his family,” according to its website.

“A quirk remaining from the previous ownership allows his royal highness to retain the right to fish on the property’s riverbank as long as 24-hour notice is given,” a representative for the real estate agency, Knight Frank, told Insider.

In the olden days, of course, the kings and princes could do that at any home they wanted. They were all the king’s fish, after all.

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He Prefers The Trapster

Jim Treacher, a RINO who probably wanted Hillary to win, said:

Yesterday I joked about Marvel giving Paste-Pot Pete his own movie because they’re running out of decades-old comics characters to exploit. Well, the joke’s on me, because Marvel just announced a 2022 Halloween special for Disney Plus that will feature… Werewolf By Night. If the character’s name confuses you, he’s a werewolf. Who comes out by night. Which is redundant if you’re at all familiar with the werewolf legends, but whatever.

C’mon, man, he preferred to be called The Trapster.

But if when it comes to Z-level Marvel characters who I’d like to see, it would be The Fabulous Frog-Man or Speedball.

Of course, they would probably be on Disney+, which I won’t subscribe to, or released in theaters, and I’ve been over super hero movies for some time now. So it wouldn’t matter much to me. And given the things I’ve recently picked up in the dollar comic boxes at Nameless City, I might be over comics too.

Which leaves me more time for men’s adventure paperbacks, I guess.

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He’s Not Wrong

The Very Intersectional Caterpillar: Lefty children’s literature is coming to a library near you.:

Recently, I perused three emails from bookstores offering children’s book recommendations from a national “Indie Next” program organized by the American Booksellers Association (ABA). Amid 93 new books, all published since May, I couldn’t find one that would appeal to my boys. The choices included a “feel-good contemporary romance” about a young trans athlete fighting against a “discriminatory law targeting trans athletes”; a book about a young lesbian with pansexual and nonbinary friends who denounced her white privilege; a “queer coming of age story” about a young lesbian who joins the boy’s football team; a young-adult novel about genderfluidity by a non-binary writer who is the mother of a transgender child; a “tale of self-discovery” about a bisexual love triangle; a book about a transgender witch named Wyatt; and a “fabulously joyful” novel about “drag, prom, and embracing your inner queen” that featured “a fat, openly gay boy stuck in a small West Texas town.” Other titles included the tale of a Puerto Rican eighth-grader who “navigates . . . the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn”; a young-adult thriller with a bisexual protagonist that explores the “politics of systemic racism”; and Don’t Hate the Player, a novel about gamers I thought would appeal to the boys until I realized it was about a young feminist battling misogyny from the “male-dominated gaming community.”

My son, a sophomore now (WHAT? He’s only five, ainna?), and for an English project, he was allowed to choose from a menu of books to read, with wide ranging topics from all cops are bastards to all soldiers are war criminals to coming of age and coming out. When I was in high school, I read Last of the Mohicans as a sophomore and A Tale of Two Cities as a freshman–among other things.

The good news is that he and a number of his classmates see it for what it is and aren’t especially duped by it.

They’re not becoming readers, either, though.

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Bill Clinton: Still Sophisticated

A number of places I’ve seen have reported former president Bill Clinton’s recent hospital stay thusly:

Bill Clinton was released from the hospital for an infection that was not COVID.

It was, however, sepsis (mentioned in this Daily Mail article, but not the New York Post article linked above).

Sepsis kills eleven million people every year. But at least it wasn’t COVID.

But it’s important that the headlines and reporting mention that it was not Wuhan Flu.

Because it’s important that we we not doubt that Clinton is part of the sophisticated, vaccinated crowd.

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A Little Over The Top

Parson says Missouri is pursuing prosecution after St. Louis reporter finds state data flaw:

Gov. Mike Parson said he was pursuing criminal prosecution against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its reporters Thursday after the newspaper discovered a data vulnerability in a state website.

Sections of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s website allowed someone visiting the site to search through teacher credentials and certifications, revealing Social Security numbers within the HTML source code of the pages, the Post-Dispatch reported. That source code is available to anyone visiting a website on a web browser.

Yeah, pumping out the social security numbers in hidden fields is bad juju, and it does not require any manner of hacking to get to it.

I wonder why Parson has gone nuclear over this? To shore up his support with educational professionals? C’mon, man.

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Cousin Effect

Trading For Treasure: the pandemic creates a trading card boom:

Get out the old dusty shoeboxes from the attic because a historic trading card boom is underway. One company is cashing in by helping thousands around the world buy and sell little cardboard versions of their beloved sports icons.

Once a beacon of childhood memories for generations, trading cards are now a booming business for the Camann family in Richmond, Virginia.

Wild cards: Spree has police wondering if bistate gaming thefts are linked:

The thief who shattered the glass door and display cases at Realms of Gaming here Monday, swiping thousands of dollars’ worth of collectible trading cards, also may be behind similar break-ins in St. Louis County.

Police in the bistate region will be sharing notes Wednesday to see if the burglaries are the work of the same people, said Troy police Chief Brent Shownes.

“We’re learning of more and more of these,” Shownes said, estimating a half-dozen such burglaries in recent days.

They include break-ins at two game stores on Watson Road. Game Nite at 8380 Watson Road in Marlborough and Yeti Gaming at 8920 Watson Road in Crestwood were burglarized late Sunday night and early Monday.

I still don’t plan on retiring based on the value of my middle 1980s baseball cards. But perhaps I should plan on having to defend them with deadly force.

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My Beautiful Wife Need Not Apply

Headbanger Recall? Parents ask to boot principal over Iron Maiden fandom:

Some Canadian parents want a heavy metal-loving high school principal to headbang her way to another job.

Parents at Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario launched a petition to remove Principal Sharon Burns because she is an unabashed fan of the legendary British band Iron Maiden.

Fortunately, the church has re-organized its Sunday School program over the last two years, so my beautiful wife does not face ouster from her only child-related instructional role over her notorious Iron Maiden fandom, and decades of uploads have knocked her from a high position on Google image searches for legs. Come to think of it, she is a scandal in a skirt.

At any rate, I think it’s just another instance of only looking at the iconography and metaphor and not looking through it to the substance. Iron Maiden’s music might have satanic themes, although not as much as some, but so does Dr. Faustus. But one should not confuse the appearance with the meaning, ainna?

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Link Dump

It’s so unlike me to do a link dump, but I’ve got a number of interesting bits open in tabs and not enough time to write a post about each. Not that I spend hours writing intelligent, well thought out, and cohesive/comprehensive gloss on what others write anyway.


Suddenly, living in trailers is a hipster paradise: Micro House On Wheels Built For Off-Grid Living.

Yeah, no, I lived in a trailer because we couldn’t afford anything else. I’m not going to do it because it’s cool. Although kids today live in the new subscription economy, where monthly payments for lots more this-n-thats, cell phones, streaming services, and food delivery and whatnot have more line items in the budget than the utilities of old.

Although sometimes I think life would be simpler if I downsized to a single wide somewhere, I know it would not solve the restlessnesses that vex me from time to time because it’s not the sky, it’s myself. Or what Horace said.


A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction: The Executioner and Mack Bolan

Joe at Glorious Trash, whom I linked yesterday, also pointed me to this scholarly work on the early Mack Bolan books. However, a quick online search reveals that it runs $300 or so, so I’ll have to wait until after I get my copy of Summa Theologica, if ever–I have scheduled to forget I want this for next Tuesday.. Unless I find it for a buck at a book sale.


At the Imaginative Conservative Poetry and Holding the Center talks lauds memorizing poetry and how what you’ve just read tends to appear in the real world:

In an article for First Things in May of this year, the British writer Dan Hitchens reflected on what it meant to have poetry memorized, to have it “by heart,” as the old expression goes. He quotes a number of poems that have had a personal meaning to him or to others; as he puts it, they often don’t produce an epiphany, but rather “make sense of a feeling.”

What he means is a little different from the way that literature illuminates experience by making us see the real world more perceptively. The other afternoon, my daughter Julia was reading to me from the The Little Town on the Prairie, the seventh in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, and in this scene, Laura tries to teach a young calf to drink milk rather than to suck it from her mother. She has to counter the calf’s instinct to butt the cow’s milk bag because the calf would knock over the bucket. After Julia finished reading, we went inside to dinner, and through the glass door we could see a fawn and a doe (mule deer are everywhere in Wyoming) close by in the adjoining pasture. The fawn repeatedly butted its mother’s milk bag, swinging its head up violently as it tried to nurse, obviously with the same instinct as the calf. It was like an illustration. Would we have noticed it in the same way if we had not just read Wilder’s description?

(Bob Belvedere of The Camp of the Saints turned me onto The Imaginative Conservative through Facebook postings–I am thinking about adding them to my blogroll but have not yet.)


An almost two month old article came to my attention via a Facebook feed: Some white-collar workers are secretly balancing 2 full-time jobs and earning up to $600,000, a report says. They drop in and out of multiple meetings to avoid getting caught.

I have known some operators like this, and double-dippers like this have made for awkward moments when interviewers ask me if their companies hire me whether I’d continue to consult. The answer is, yes, a little, from time to time, to keep my company active and to continue to support local causes who might have come to depend a little on my company for support. But not two full time positions at once, brah–I’m not going to burn myself out like that. But I am sure many of the interviewers have not believed me. If I were unscrupulous, though, I would just lie.


After reading John Kass’s recent As the Idiocracy takes the country to the dogs, who wins the Golden Moutza of the Month?, I wanted to learn to do a proper moutza. So here’s Kass himself explaining it:

I still need to learn to properly pronounce feesah etho, though.


Okay, I think that’s it; I can close all those tabs now.

Now, in a Paul Harvey voice, Good day!

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