The Anger of Compassion

Lost in the rain in Juarez...

Which Bob Dylan song am I? "Tangled Up in Blue."

My new Atlasphere column is up...

...and am I ever sore.

Seriously, the new column is up at The Atlasphere, and available for your daily read.

Rose for more beer as I began this post, to a satisfying soreness in the thighs from tonight's squats. Oh yes. What's more, my weakest lift, the bench press, went even better.

It may not be strictly true that only the strong survive--but it's quite satisfying to become bigger and stronger. Highly recommended.

Guess I'm on the road

Which alter poet am I?

Way to go, your alter poet is Jack Kerouac, who is
by FAR the coolest!


Who is Your Alter Poet?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Hat tip to Classical Values!)

A Fine Discrimination of the Spirit

Sensuality of course involves far more than just sex or the random walk of the libertine. Sensual pleasures are available from the Beethoven string quartets, from a rose garden (I have Honor, Golden Scepter, Love, and Arizona in my own garden), and from the sight of a Vermeer painting--or a sunset. And from food:

Food can be a wonderful lover if you allow it to resonate within you and if you pay close attention to your body’s responses. A friend recently said to me, “I see expertly prepared cuisine as a lover that never disappoints. I embrace the pleasure she brings to my life; I sing her praises; I admire her. She is one of life's greatest pleasures.” I’m trying not to think about how good he must be in bed.

That's Jennifer Iannolo, in "On Food and Sensuality," her latest column for The Atlasphere. To make her case, she employs peaches, oysters, cream soup with truffles (they smell like sex, she says), and more:

During a recent cooking class, I was enamored with the sight and texture of a decadent custard we had just prepared. As I drizzled the pearlescent yellow cream over a dish of succulent strawberries, I couldn’t help but to comment aloud, “This, right here, is sex on a plate.” There were some puzzled looks.

Ayn Rand writes in Atlas Shrugged that sensuality is "a fine discrimination of the spirit." Jennifer's article provides a good illustration of that point.

You can find Jennifer online at Jennifer's Gastronomic Meditations, which I've added to "Websites" over on the right. Pay attention to what she tells you there about tomatoes. And no, I am not trying not to think about how good she must be in bed.

Perhaps another Pericles?

Fred Reed on the Bush White House:

Help me puzzle out Iraq. I’m just a country boy, and don’t understand Advanced Thought, or high strategy, or anything else. I admit it. Tell me about Iraq – quick, 'cause it seems to be blowing itself all to flinders, and it’s hard to study something the which there ain’t no more.

Now, as I understand it from the White House itself, it’s all because of three diehard Saddamites, two terrorists, and an outside agitator. Yes. The White House says ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of Iraqis love us, and want us to bomb them and invade them, and starve them with embargos, and only a few soreheads don’t like it. And I believe the White House. You can only lie so long before you slip up and tell the truth. I figure they’re about due.

And:

But I want to understand about strategy. Yesterday, it said on CNN, the White House bombed a mosque full of people and killed forty of them, to make them democratic. It was because the two terrorists or maybe the outside agitator was inside. Being as I am unwashed and don’t know much, I’d have said it wasn’t the shiniest thought in the idea basket. You got a country full of people who take religion real serious, and so you bomb a church in the middle of services.

But what do I know? Somebody called Mark Kimmitt, a brigadier general, said to CNN, "When you start using a religious location for military purposes, it loses its protected status.” If they hid in mosques again, we’d bomb them again, he said.

Now that he has explained it, it makes sense to me. If bombing one church doesn’t make them democratic, and love us, then bombing some more churches will. It wouldn’t fly in West Virginia, but that’s a different culture. Arabs like being bombed.

Some folks would say Kimmitt has to be dumber than a bucket of catfish. I’m less sanguine. I’ve known catfish. Kimmitt makes a catfish look like Fifth Century Athens. If I were part of the Iraqi Resistance, I couldn’t think of anything I’d like more than some damn fool blowing up mosques. It would save fortunes on recruiting expenses.

"Fifth Century Athens." I like that.

Sunday Night Blues

Highly recommended: The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966, Volume One.

I ordered this one online, trusting the word of communist Dean Esmay (I first heard about it on his blog, and hey, Dean, I'm kidding, okay? In fact, THANKS for the heads up) that it was a CD. It is not.

Anyway, at the time I placed my order, I thought it might possibly be a gift for Norma Martinez, estimable host of Friday Night Blues on KTEP 88.5 FM. Alas, 'twas not to be, as the thing is a DVD, thus not playable in many CD players...anyway, I watched it tonight, after The Sopranos and Deadwood, and I loved it. Norma will have to wait for her blues gift from Craig.

But you don't. Get this one now.

Meanwhile, why aren't you listening to Friday Night Blues on streaming audio? You're allowed to, ya know...

So there you go: two tips from The Anger of Compassion, in one blogpost: read Dean Esmay, and check out Friday Night Blues. You'll thank me for both.

And won't you be braggin' on yerself when Norma's show goes nationwide? Yeah, you will: "Oh, I remember when I had to listen to her on streaming audio, 'cause she was only on the air in El Paso. I was one of Norma's earliest fans, I listened to her on a crystal set I built myself..."

What do women want?

We may not want to find out.

No, bear with me: we often hear that (at least some) women are attracted to a man in uniform. Soldiers, sailors, Marines, policemen...you know the deal.

Next time you have to remove your shoes because you've had the audacity to try boarding a plane for which you've bought a ticket, think on this: there will be women who harbor fantasies, lusts, longings for members of the Transportation Security Administration.

It's probably true already. The decline and fall of western civilization is well underway.

Pleasant dreams.

The urgent need for more premise-checking

Rounding out my Pejman trilogy today, I notice that the good Mr. Youselfzadeh is not amused by a certain Chris Mathews: "Does Chris Mathews just actively dissemble, or does he have the worst short-term memory skills I have ever heard of?"

Some time ago, I heard Mathews on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show, claiming, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that "he saved capitalism." Liddy, allegedly a conservative, offered no rebuke.

I'm not making this up. Now, Liddy has a book on the market which bears the title When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. Liddy apparently didn't want to discuss the fact that one reason this country is a lot less free than it once was is because of the ridiculous Roosevelt regime, and because voters among what he regards as America's "greatest generation" kept voting for him, time after time.

"Greatest generation," my ass: they weren't, not to any degree, and in many ways they constitute one of the worst. And Liddy demonstrates that conservatives, no matter what they at times say about liberty, are emphatically not necessarily allies in the struggle for restoring liberty in America.

I should be on someone's shirt...

Another personality test found through Pejman Yousefzadeh: Which famous leader am I?

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Thanks a lot.

Well, at least I'm not George Lincoln Rockwell. Or Lyndon LaRouche. Or Ross Perot. I guess.

What? I'm not The Godfather?

Found this quiz through Pejman, and took it, and found which classic movie I am. Apparently I'm Sunset Boulevard:

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Sheez, I've never even seen Sunset Boulevard.

Steven Van Zandt, Keith Richards, and Me

That previous post reminds me: yesterday I completed my Rolling Stones collection.

No, I don't have every Stones release, and I don't want them all, either. But I now have what Steven Van Zandt calls "the second great period" and "the greatest run of albums in history"--from Beggars Banquet through Exile on Main St:

Beggars Banquet (1968)

Let It Bleed (1969)

Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out: The Rolling Stones in concert (1970)

Sticky Fingers (1971)

Exile On Main Street (1972)

And as Van Zandt points out, it was all done in three and a half years.

Van Zandt's comments are part of Rolling Stone's cover story, "The Immortals: The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time," in which The Rolling Stones are placed fourth, behind The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Elvis. Rounding out the Top Ten are Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles.

The Easter Egg Hunt

Oh yes, I'm finding 'em, all right: all of the spam messages left in my comments. Geez, I go away and leave the blogosphere unsupervised, and this is the thanks I get. Bastards.

So it's a gray, rainy Easter Sunday here in high desert El Paso, and I have an idea: what better Easter music than "Sympathy for the Devil," that old Rolling Stones classic? None that I could see, so I put it in, and I notice the rain change to hail, as if to indicate that I had pissed off Someone In Charge. Maybe I should have settled for watching Monty Python's Life of Brian.