Walt Whitman's Birthday

America's Poet (one of them at least)


Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

---

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the shower'd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they
were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

Once Paumanok,
When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
Up this seashore in some briers,
Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Shine! shine! shine!
Pour down your warmth, great sun.'
While we bask, we two together.

Two together!
Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.

Till of a sudden,
May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouch'd not on the nest,
Nor return'd that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appear'd again.

And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.

Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore;
I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

Yes, when the stars glisten'd,
All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake,
Down almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

He call'd on his mate,
He pour'd forth the meanings which I of all men know.

Yes my brother I know,
The rest might not, but I have treasur'd every note,
For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights
after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen'd long and long.

Listen'd to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
Following you my brother.

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
It is lagging--O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love.

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!
High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
Surely you must know who is here, is here,
You must know who I am, my love.

Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
O it is the shape, the shape of my mate.'
O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again
if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

O throat! O trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth,
Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

Shake out carols!
Solitary here, the night's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless despairing carols.

But soft! sink low!
Soft! let me just murmur,
And do you wait a moment you husky-nois'd sea,
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

Hither my love!
Here I am! here!
With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you,
This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

Do not be decoy'd elsewhere,
That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,
Those are the shadows of leaves.

O darkness! O in vain!
O I am very sick and sorrowful

O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea!
O throat! O throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.

The aria sinking,
All else continuing, the stars shining,
The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling,
The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of
the sea almost touching,
The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the
atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously
bursting,
The aria's meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard.

Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

O give me the clue! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up--what is it?--I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.

Which I do not forget.
But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray beach,
With the thousand responsive songs at random,
My own songs awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper'd me.

__________________________________________________________________________

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Where the Truth Is, Believe It or Not

We Heard a Growling Outside Our Backdoor; the Door Facing the Wilderness
I am on a bunk. I do want to disappear into some distant coming--like moving my academic grove out on the contaminated ice just off...well there's a problem, right? I thought I could do it. I went back up to Lake Flaccid to visit my pal Barabbas Munn-Dayne--and, yes, I did get to meet Cecil the Dog-faced Boy, in his hood--I challenged him to take it off and he in return challenged me to play him a game of chess and if I beat him he'd remove the hood. Are those hoods custommade for you, I asked, and he said, "Yes, by a lady who was formerly in my grandad's touring company, an Australian dwarf who looks like President Theodore Roosevelt, who I highly admire, by the way."

Of course I lost the chess game. I have too much of a movable-feast mind to be good at chess. Such concentration it takes seems a waste of good mental time on a game to me--a game of kings, queens, armies--and, Jeez, how could I have forgotten to mention Doggy Boy's chess set? Can you imagine what it was? How about characters from Todd Browning's old black and white movie "Freaks"--the pinheads the pawns, little dwarf knights on Chinese dogs (with saddles)--or maybe they were Chinese ponies--the Queen a Bearded Lady wearing a tiara; the King was, damn if it wasn't a Dog-Faced dude wearing a crown--carved out of stone they felt like. As if reading my mind--I suppose I was holding up a pinhead pawn and contemplating--Doggy Boy said, "Those are carved from Italian marble on commission from my grandfather." "Delightful," said I rather boorishly. "Todd Browning was a good friend of my grandfather. He knew him when my family lived in Los Angeles and worked in movies; though, I point out, my grandfather never appeared on screen, he like I, wore a hood when in public, but he knew how to direct freaks, you see. Besides he knew most of them."

OK, and Barabbas was in a sunken sort of mood. And damn it stunk around his cabin. Lake Flaccid. It's really in a Flaccid state--"We're hoping for some melting snow but so far the Finger Lakes aren't draining into Lake Flaccid anymore, it seems like...." "Do you guys drink that crap?" I asked this handyman friend of Barabbas's. "What else we gonna drink, my friend. We either drink it or go to Herman's and drink Genesee God-awful beers--or maybe we start filtering our own piss like the astronuts do." "Astronuts?" "Yep, I think it's death-wish crazy to keep sending these army brats up to spy on us. That's all that space station is--we can see it pass over us--plain as day--spying on us, keeping positioning us, Google imaging us, mapping us and filing us in categorized databanks."

I leaped at the chance of hitching a ride with a Muslim tea salesman back to NYC. He was a Turk so I didn't feel threatened, unless he was really a Saudi-Arabian posing as a Turk, though that might be cause for their beheading him under Saudi-Arabian law--but, I got this ride back to Manhattan, in a Lexus. I said, "Lexus is consider a Jew canoe in New York City." He said yeah he knew that but what the hell, may Allah forgive him for saying it, but in this George W. Bush era of ID-ing haphazardly Muslims as enemy combatants and sending them off to maybe a Turkish jail or even worse an Egyptian jail to be beaten to a pulp, it's safer to pretend to be Jewish--he didn't care to be beaten into confessing yes he was an al-Queda cell member in the US and then being sent to the recently closed down Guantanamo--what, it's still open! They're still torturing "would be" terrorists down there? I'm shocked! I'm not.

Back in Manhattan, I aired out my apartment and began soothsaying. Predicting. Like a spirit had overwhelmed me--and the dailygrowlerhousepianist and I have been having wonderful Socratic dialog on email lately--the DGHP having fallen under the influence of Plato (whether real or unreal) and full of teleologizing on where creation truly begins--and I certainly after all these years know what he means, but the arguing is what's fun, same as it was fun to go to the grove and pester old Socrates with questions. "I hope you bastards are writing this shit down. My wife's giving me holy hell for being in the grove more than I'm in bed with her. Just the other night she accused me of being Gay, preferring you guys to her. 'What do you think? I'm a Sodomite?' and she replied, 'What's a Sodomite, a Greek shepherd?....' A little joke from the wife, you see, boyz, like on a TV sit-com--that's the family she wants. Besides, she's gettin' a little out of shape and my next door neighbor's daughter--she looks like a young boy--is looking anticipatory at me, you know seeing me as a substitute father. So, anyway, first question, yes, Menos?"

When I lived on the Upper East Side of New York City with my rich young beautiful wife I never thought about being an Elitist--yep, my young Tex-Mex-Choctaw-Welsh wife was like Midas, everything she touched, even the ex-dictator of Venezuela, brought her monetary rewards--enough so I trotted around the Sutton Place-1st Avenue-East 57th St area like I owned the place. And I'd get up 'fore dawn and take my notebook down to a little park just in the shadow of the 59th Street Bridge and built out over the FDR Drive to edge and hang over the East River. It looked across the river directly at the Pepsi Sign and the Funk Bakery sign and the stupid-looking shooting jet of water at the end of Roosevelt Island (before the tramway) named in honor of the publisher who built the Central Park Shakespeare Theater. And I'd go there in the dawn light and write out my thoughts. Rebellious thoughts, thoughts of Revolution and Evolution, angry shouts against Fascists and cops and Capitalist tools (fools). Yet there I was living like a Power Elitist and thinking up antagonism against exactly what I was--or at least what my wife was--a Commie sympathizer forced by me into corrupted corporate world of world-conquering dreamers--where she made us rich--later after divorcing me, making herself independently wealthy, and leaving me out of the Power Elite neighborhood and into the up-and-coming haven for starving artists and musicians, the SOHO and TRIBECA areas of recently abandoned by manufacturing lower Manhattan spaces--the fleeing manufacturors leaving behind the huge factory loft spaces which artists gobbled up for long-term leases--a deal which gave them other professions, like when they fixtured up their loft spaces, they learned carpentry, drywalling, plumbing, painting. But it was a chance for me to find my true self and thus my best years began--the Seventies--Jesus, what years of fun in NYC--but I sound like I'm whining. I must drift along with the same ole same ole and act as if it's change. Today in protest against the construction site nextdoor using the entrance of my building to park a huge block-long steel-hauling giant out of Jersey and then swinging a huge crane over the sidewalk to unload the steel onto the site--and I walked straight under that crane and I defied those bastards to drop a load of steel on my invincible head--I growled, "Go ahead drop a load right up here boyz--and I or my family will sue your contractor's ass back to China!" I love street confrontation. We used to have great confrontational street theater in NYC. Fascist Police Commission Little Irish Ray Kelly has now ruled against any street confrontational theater except that performed by his cops as they go about the city openly accusing the Citizens of New York City of being guilty of something--now of being enemy combatants--discovering al-Queda-style homegrown terrorists groups in our midst--against the Jews--Mayor Bloomberg's a Jew, running for an illegal third term for mayor. One supposedly candidate opposing Hiz Billionaire Honor, Anthony Wiener, said he had decided not to run against this self-promoting asshole. He said it was futile trying run against a man who could throw millions of his own personal bucks in your face--not even a popular guy like Anthony (don't worry he threatens to run every four years--he never has yet), a Dumbocrat to boot, could raise enough money to compete with this Bloomingidiotburg bum and his real estate and Wall Street backers. So, we got this son of a bitch whether we want him or not. You know the truth is that if this bum is thrown out of office there goes all this crazy building of hotels and the rezoning of the city for malls, the giving over of Times Square to the Fantasyland neonization geeks, turning Times Square into an amusement park for the wealthy and the tourists, trying to turn the whole of Manhattan Island into a Metropolitan DisneyLand/World--Universal Studio City--a Hollywood reconstruction of Manhattan--fuck New Yorkers, let 'em move to crumbling suburbs--and that's especially true of the black community in both Harlem and Brownsville and the Latinos on the Upper East Side and on up the Upper West Side--he's given the Mid-town west side away to Donald Trump and one of his overbuilt and gaudy Trump Cities--truly tacky architectural edifices with his name emblazoned all over them--Trump City, Trump Towers, Trump Glass House, Trump crap. And this mayor has given old Brooklyn away to his worthless New Jersey Nets-owner developer buddy who has literally raped old downtown Journal Square Brooklyn--old Borough Hall Brooklyn--and Magic Johnson--whose well-used HIV-riddled Johnson seems to have repaired itself and Magic now is an All-American father-type influence on millions of young skinny overtall kids looking to become millionaires by the time they are 19--and then like Magic, they'll get to fuck the babes morning to night, without condoms!...but Magic's been forgiven of his numerous fornications cause he's rich--and Magic now owns the old Williamsburg Savings Bank tower--has turned it into a hi-rise luxury condo apartment building--multimillion-dollar upper-floor apartments with the best views in Brooklyn until this New Jersey Nets (a worthless basketball team that hasn't had a decent coach--another mismanaged basketball team like the New York Knicks)--bullshit is forced on the citizens of Brooklyn against their will--just being given eminent domain privileges by a condemning city, the privilege of destroying the old Brooklyn center city--Atlantic Avenue--oh well, the Pierpont Morgans turned Brooklyn Heights into a Capitalist pig haven way back in the early teens.

Enough ravings. To my predictions--I am not a professional soothsayer, trick-bagger, but a professional phony soothsayer, a writer with leisure time on my hands thanks to inheritance--anyway--how about some predictions?:
--my first prediction: Obama will privatize Social Security
--my second prediction: Obama will not bring the troops home from Iraq anytime soon
--the US may be preparing for a new Korean War--Obama may announce soon he's sending his drone forces into North Korea in an attempt to bomb their so-called nuclear facilities--the irony, their nuclear capabilities were given to them by old Unka Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, remember him?, who sold North Korea nuclear capabilities through a Swedish firm they were invested in and on the board of-- and Pappy Bush's New World Order has ordered Obama to cover up the crimes of his worthless little weasel son's absolute worst presidency in the history of the presidency (a stolen presidency at that)--and that includes the administrations of Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Warren G. Harding put together; more crooked and "evil" than the Nixon administration, probably the most crooked administration until Reagan introduced us to all the criminals in today's tumbling downfall of our economy, including Robert Rubin (now with CitiGroup, the multi-failing job-laying-off bank but still big-spender corporation when it comes to executive bonuses and control now thanks to Obama's generosity of billions of We the People's money, to the tune of the wiping out of the middle-to-poverty-classes's monies (wealth)--wiping out the middle-class, wiping out our factory bases, now wiping out the U.S. auto industry by bailing out the culprits who wrecked it, allowing them to close down plants, allowing them to go bankrupt, allowing them through bankruptcy to get out from under continuing to pay on workers's healthcare, pensions, 401K plans; in fact, totally wrecking what used to be one of the strongest unions in the world, the United Auto Workers of America--started by wildman progressive union man, Walter Reuther (Walter Ruthless management called him)--and oh boy did Chrysler and GM and Ford kiss his ass in his heyday and through Walter Reuther the auto workers of America became the highest paid workers in the country, producing well-designed automobiles at fast paces in plants all over the USA--big plants all around New York City as well as St. Louis, Dallas-Fort Worth, where there was a big Ford plant in Arlington, Texas, that hired men and women--always an easy place to get a job--with good pay--and assembly and parts plants in Wisconsin and Ohio and even in Pennsylvania, and Ford plants in Louisians, ahhh, but Obama has wiped the UAW out. The UAW has given up rights to management threats; they've given up pay while Chrysler closes plants--they are not closing their plants in the rest of the world, oh no, just their plants in the USA and Canada. That makes no sense, but none of this does. The bankruptcy court now owns Chrysler and they're soon to own GM, too.
--I predict Obama will not close Guantanamo...instead expand it.
--In about a year, Obama will announce Social Security is broke and that AIG has made an offer to buy the whole system! AIG is We the People's insurance company, which Obama says since we're not in the insurance business and he knows nothing about running an insurance company, so we've got to give it wholehog back to the Wall Street heroes of Obama's who purposely destroyed it in the first place--fucking Reaganomics (Voodoo Economics) is still with us, Milton-Friedman-freaky economics; David Stockman economics; Bill Clinton-type no-regulation anything--whoaaaa, Obama, what the fuck are you talking about?--those sons of bitches that ran these companies and banks in the ground through speculation Capitalism have no business still running AIG, our insurance company--give it to me--I'll run the son of bitch and make it work. We did own Chrysler until Obama gave it away to the bankruptcy court.
--I predict there's not gonna be any soup left for the soup kitchens.
--I predict more war and death and destruction and downward spiraling...

But shit, I'm way behind the times.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

To the womantrumpetplayer--the creator is going to communicate with you--it's hard not to idealize you--the perfect woman in this on-going Sociological experiment! This notebook of several lives blended into one anthropomorphic character, who is real, yes, but not, too. So, we're going to have to have the creator of thegrowlingwolf reveal himself to you--though, if you know anything about the life of the blues singer, composer, and Ray Charles influencer Percy Mayfield who had his face destroyed in an automobile accident--or the Phantom of the Opera--or Cecil the Dog-Faced Boy--wearers of hoods and masks to hide their scary features, then you'll understand what kind of freak so multiple-facial-a-character all these characters are--that doesn't make sense, but that's OK..."Who was that masked man?" "Hi-yo, Silver, away!"


Stan Ribald? Winston Castratado? Raoul Nonsenso? Brad Pits? Claus von Bulow? Moe Howard? The Second Coming of Casanova?

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

The Transcendents for Monday May 25, Not Pacific Time

Question: Why is Nancy Pelosi in China?

Transcending Reality

From www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/kurtz_19_3_1.html

by Paul Kurtz

There is a class of overbeliefs, however, for which no amount of evidence seems to suffice, at least for some people. These generally may be classified as “transcendental beliefs.” It is here that faith or the will to believe intervenes. By the “transcendental,” I mean that which is over and beyond normal observations or rational coherence, and is enhanced by mystery and magic. This surely is what the great mystics have referred to as the “ineffable” depths of Being. Scientific inquiry is naturalistic; that is, it attempts to uncover the natural causes at work. Granted that these are often hidden causes, unseen by unaided observation, such as microbes or atoms; yet such causes can be confirmed by some measure of verification; they fit into a conceptual framework; and their explanatory value can be corroborated by a community of independent inquirers. Transcendental explanations are, by definition, nonnatural; they cannot be confirmed experimentally; they cannot be corroborated objectively.

We may ask, “Why do many people accept unverified occult explanations when they are clothed in religious or paranormal guise?” The answer, I think, in part at least, is because such accounts arouse awe and entice the passionate imagination. In an earlier book I have labeled this “the transcendental temptation,”1 the temptation to believe in things unseen, because they satisfy felt needs and desires. The transcendental temptation has various dimensions. It was resorted to by primitive men and women, unable to cope with the intractable in nature, unmitigated disasters, unbearable pain or sorrow. It is drawn upon by humans in order to assuage the dread of death—by postulating another dimension to existence, the hope for an afterlife in which the evils and injustices of this world are overcome. The lure of the transcendental temptation appeals to the frail and forlorn. There may not be any evidence for a transcendental realm; but the emotive and intellectual desire to submit to it can provide a source of comfort and consolation. To believe that we will meet in another life those whom we have loved in this life can be immensely satisfying, or at least it can provide some saving grace. It may enable a person to get through the grievous losses that he or she suffers in this life. If I can’t be with those I cherish today, I can at least do so in my dreams and fantasies, and if I submit to and propitiate the unseen powers that govern the universe this will miraculously right the wrongs that I have endured in this vale of tears. Thus the transcendental temptation is tempting because it enables human beings to survive the often cruel trials and tribulations that are our constant companion, and it enables us to endure this life in anticipation of the next. It is the mystery and magic of religion, its incantations and rituals, that fan the passions of overbelief, and nourish illusion and unreality. There is a real and dangerous world out there that primitive and modern humans need to cope with—wild animals and marauding tribes, droughts and famine, lightning and forest fires, calamities and deprivation, accidents and contingencies. Surely, there is pleasure and satisfaction, achievement, and realization in life, but also tragedy and failure, defeat, and bitterness. Our world is a complex tapestry of joy and suffering. The transcendental temptation thus can provide a powerful palliative enabling humans to cope with the unbearable, overcome mortality, and finitude; and it does so by creating fanciful systems of religious overbelief in which priests and prophets propitiate the unseen sources of power and thus shield us from the vicissitudes of fortune.

_________________________________________________________

Note: thegrowlingwolf after emailing us the above has done a bunk and gone off into God knows where--he sent the above along with an attempt to explain Painleve transcendents and relate them to transcendentalism--you see, the Wolf Man is heavy into the music of Charles Ives and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson who were both New England transcendentalists--the Wolf Man really can't stand it that these two miraculous Americans believed in a God, a vaporish, intellectual one, yes, but still a God. The Wolf Man can't understand God; we've recently overheard him arguing with thedailygrowlerhousepianist about "believing in God," the House Piano Player saying he believes in God even if God is only a dream. We would publish their dialogs but, like we said, our Wolf Man has done a bunk on us again. He's given us up to pursue his own writing and music endeavors, he babbles. He was playing the guitar around the fabulous The Daily Growler "Dick Cheney Memorial Bunker Offices" in one corner of Dick's seedy, moldy, and gunsmoke-smelling basement the other day saying he'd rather take his guitar out into the street and earn more money than he can earn writing for The Daily Growler. We the Staff thought that was a given--we thought his writing for us was a show of faith in us and the messages and massages we're trying to flush out into the Internet sewer lines of information!

In the meantime, if anyone out there wants to write a long philosophical or dumbass comment, we welcome your response whether highly critical, visciously mean, or just plain dopey--like intellectual Yahoos--what are they like?

thestaff
for The Daily Growler

Happy Memorial (Decoration) Day

The Iraqis getting a dose of enforced "democracy" from a country that is a Republic and not a Democracy--we wonder when the Iraqis will finally get to have a Memorial Day of their own?

A Beautiful Gloomy Sunday

Covering Infields and Outfields
I was watching Bruce Sutter on the Tim McCarver TV show and Bruce said his father told him one day, "Son, baseball is a perfect game; it's the people who play it who are not perfect." I like that. Hell, I even like Bruce Sutter. Bruce says the minor league pitching coach Fred Martin taught him how to throw the split-finger fastball. Martin taught it to Sutter and then to Roger Craig, the old Dodger pitcher who was pitching coach for the San Francisco Giants. Sutter says Craig taught the split finger fastball to other players, but Sutter was the first pitcher to use the pitch successfully.

Bruce Sutter when he pitched for the Atlanta Braves [It is the 1970s--the Hippies really influenced hair styles and beards in those happy Hippie early days.]

Bruce Sutter was a "real" ballplayer. He was first scouted and offered a deal from the Washington Senators. He turned that down. Then he was picked as an "amateur" player by the Chicago Cubs, who then traded him to the Saint Louis Cardinals when they thought he was a worthless pitcher--and, he says, he was--he didn't have a good fastball and he depended on his curve ball but throwing the curve ball pinched a nerve in his elbow and Bruce went back to his hometown in Pennsylvania and had elbow surgery done on his arm--on his own--when he went to spring training with a Saint Louis minor league team he wore long-sleeve shirts to hide the surgery scar, but Fred Martin noticed the scar one day and that's how Bruce Sutter got to be the first pitcher to ever be taught the split-finger fastball.

Eatin' a Little Crow
The Yankees won their 10th in a row last night in yet another walk-off win in the bottom of the ninth. If they'd a been playing in Philly, the Yankees would have lost. A-Rod hit the game-tying home run in the bottom of the ninth and then after a single, Melky Cabrera doubled in the winning run. Over the last 10 games, the Yankees have pulled an amazing number of ballgames out of the fire in the bottom of the ninth. The Yankee pitchers are coin-tosses in terms of their ability to win--Andy Pettite pitched yesterday's game--he looked like regular old Andy--he had stuff but still that Phillies hotshot who already has 17 home runs, folks, poled one off Andy--and Andy ended up taken out of the game losing.

The Yankees without a doubt have the most expensive and the best hitters in baseball today. Jeter, A-Rod, Cano, Cabrera, Damon, Texiera are all .300 hitters--and when Matsui gets off the injury list, he's another potential .300 hitter. It's an awesome lineup; yet, the Yankees, even after 10 in a row still aren't in first place, 1 1/2 behind Toronto who's on top at the moment.

Critics say the Yankees so far haven't played any really tough teams--the Phillies are atop their division in the National League (a game or so over the Mets)--and they are the reigning World Champs, but the Phillies are like the Yankees--vulnerable on the mound. They've got hitters galore, but their pitching is their Achilles heel.

I must admit I may have misjudged Joe Girardi. The players do seem to like him better than they did Joe Torre. Joe was too serious for the fun-loving Yankees. A-Rod has dumped Madonna and is boogie-ing down with Kate Hudson now. I have no idea who Kate Hudson is, but A-Rod is a hell of a player both on and off the field. What a life, eh? You make 150 million dollars a year but you're still a only baseball player, a fieldhand for the rich plantation owning baseball owners; just like Madonna and Kate Hudson are fieldworker whores for the plantation system that is Hollywood. Bruce Sutter for most of the ten or so years he was in pro baseball made an average of a million bucks a year--10 million in ten years. Not bad, but not enough for Bruce to philander. Sutter has been married 35 years to the same woman. "She went through the minor leagues with me, so I thought she deserved to stay with me through the majors--I had to reward her...." Could Bruce Sutter strike out A-Rod? I betcha he could. Some players said when Bruce conquered that split-finger fastball, he was impossible to hit. Sutter was the first pitcher ever installed in the Hall of Fame (2006) who never started a game. Bruce Sutter was one of the first late-innings reliever in a game where pitchers were supposed to go full nine innings with no relief--like Warren Spahn was called an Ironman pitcher because there were many a times when Spahnie pitched both ends of doubleheaders--doubleheaders? Yeah, they don't have doubleheaders anymore now that baseball fans aren't the most important element of the game. Pleasing the high-end ticket "fans" is now the name of the game--fans who can afford $125 General Admission to see a baseball game--or how about fans who can afford $2500 to sit behind homeplate. That's hard for me to comprehend. Think of that, $2500 to see a baseball game. And how about "Ladies Nights" when women got in free? No more. Knothole Gangs? No more. Sushi restaurants? Oh hell yes--a major sushi restaurant at Yankee Stadium. I guess that's for the Japanese businessmen who are the preferred fans at Yankee Stadium because of Matsui, except now Matsui is on his last legs and the big-time Japanese hitter is still out in Seattle, a team that loved Japanese businessmen so much they sold the majority of the team to the Nintendo Corporation. It seems to me like the fascination with Japanese baseball players may be over--or at least hitting a lull. Besides, there are more Dominican Republic players in baseball by far than Japanese players--so why not "Dominican Nights" at Yankees games? I'll tell you why, because Dominicans are peasants to baseball owners! I'm sorry, but there is a class difference in baseball now that it has been totally taken over by Capitalist pigs. I remember when the teams were owned by their managers--that's how old I am--I remember Connie Mack--who owned and managed the Philadelphia Athletics--"Mr. Mack," they called him; and he wore vested suits and bowler hats when he managed.

Connie Mack managing. In the 1920s, Connie Mack had several powerhouse teams starring the likes of Lefty Grove and Jimmy Foxx. The Athletics would win the World Series and then Mr. Mack would sell off his best players for money and field lesser teams the next seasons.

Connie Mack the baseball player. He caught for the Washington Senators in the late 1880s. Mr. Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics into the early 1950s. The last time I saw Mr. Mack managing, he was wearing a seersucker suit and a straw boater. Now Mr. Mack is no more--and Connie Mack Stadium is no more--and the Philadelphia Athletics are no more.

Admission of False Pretenses
I have to admit, last night's Yankees victory over the Phillies was exciting. Both teams are great teams. It was exciting for me to see John Mayberry's son playing for the Phillies! Big John Mayberry--I remember what a pain in the ass he used to be for the Yankees when he played for the Kansas City Athletics. Now his son's a Philly.

Predictions
Yankees should be in the division race most of the way. If they can sweep the BoSox or Toronto, it might help to keep them in first place. However, they've been playing bum teams up until the Phillies hit town. Everybody this year is beating teams like Baltimore and Tampa Bay, though the division is tighter than Dick's hatband--currently the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are only 3 games out of first--oops, I'm sorry, the Devil Rays got Christianized, they're just the Rays now--and that could mean the rays of the sun--why not the X-Rays? And, yes, folks, it's true, the Springfield Isotopes were sold to the Albuquerque team back in that past episode of "The Simpsons"--where Homer's the team's Philly Phanatic. The Albuquerque minor league team is today called the Isotopes.

As for the Mets. I still don't like Jerry Manual, sorry. The Mets like the Yankees have a great hitting team, when they're not injured, and again like the Yankees they are dependent upon their pitchers to win--aren't all teams? Mets pitching at best is wishy-washy. Yet, they should, same as the last three years, be in contention until the end of the season. Can they beat out the Phillies this year? Right now I doubt it.

As you recall, Joe Torre and his Los Angeles Dodgers are hot as firecrackers in their division. San Diego just won 7 in a row and they're still 6 1/2 behind the Dodgers who earlier in the year won 12 in a row before they caught Manny Ramirez using female hormones to repair the injuries done when he used steroids. Come on, folks. It looks like Jose Canseco was right all along--remember how Joe was put down and ridiculed for saying the biggest stars in the game were all using steroids. It's like when they took cocaine away from Doc Gooden...ruined his game.

As I've said many times, when I was in high school, and it's many years ago now, our coaches gave us some little white wafers to take--pep pills they called them then--boosters--enhancers--what they were, we didn't know. We trusted our coaches in those days.

marvelousmarvbackbiter
for The Daily Growler

TODAY in New York City

Terrorists and Swine Flu
Currently, We the Citizens of New York City are involved in several political shenanigans going on at once. The Mayor and his little crooked (check out his record as head of Customs under the Bush Baby) police chief Ray Kelly are patting themselves on the back for breaking up a "TERRORIST" attack against a synagogue in Riverdale, New York, up in Duh Bronx yesterday. Oh boy were Mikey Boy and Shanty Irish Ray looking so serious. I mean their countenances were totally holy serious, as if We the Citizens of New York City should see our Mayor as a brave soul, out there confronting Terrorists--and as the story unraveled, it seems Brother Ray Kelly's boys had already set these "terrerists" boys up by making weapons deals with them and eventually selling them mock weapons! did you read that right? mock weapons; weapons that didn't work--even offering them Stinger missiles--that Shanty Irish Ray said were mocks, too! You see, these guys were dumber than the NYPD. Now that's pretty god-damn dumb, folks. Yes, the NYPD was negotiating with these BOYS to set them up and sell them Stinger missiles! The TERRORIST boys, Shanty Irish Ray said, intended to first blow up the synagogue in Riverdale, then SUV out to Stewart Air Force Base--all terrorists, by the way, have the latest SUVs and so did these dudes--a big black SUV--and these dumber-than-the-NYPD dudes once at Stewart were going to fire their Stinger missiles at US military planes as they were landing or taking off. Wow, what a wild story, I thought as I watched our illegally campaigning mayor going for an illegal third term seriously looking down his nose at We the Dumbass Citizens of New York City in a serious spiel that turned out to be a praising of himself first and then giving a nod of praise to his little runt police chief (both of these guys would have been thrown back in had they been fish), the humble Mayor praising himself as a SUPERHERO and giving Ray a lower status as a SIDEKICK HERO (like Robin was to Batman). And both of these actors humbly tried to scare the fucking shit out of us, at the same time giving us clues that this was probably another bullshit red alert-type scare to kind of get our attention to let us know our Napoleonic mayor is Mikey-on-the-spot protecting us from terrorists--busting up a terrorist ring RIGHT HERE AMONGST US IN THE BRONX. OOOOOOOOOOH! "Mommy, mommy, I'm a'scared!" The Mighty Mayor and his Boy Robin Police Chief calmly told how they had duped and then stung this "homegrown" terrorist cell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This Mayor is so fucking condescending when he talks to "the people of New York City." It's as if he considers us all numbskulls--like we all went to one of his drop-out-rate high and test scores low businessman-run NYC public (constantly going private) school system (why are high test scores supposed to mean you're well educated?), which he proudly says he runs himself--mayoralty management I think he calls it--remember, he's a Harvard Business School grad who lucked out as a software peddler; he's also an ex-Wall Street geek and crooked real estate investor (remember he loves buying real estate in tax havens like Bermuda); and rumor and reports have it that he's maybe possibly a sex pervert (he thinks he's hot shit to women--and he probably is--come on, what dopey babe wouldn't give old Mikey Boy a tumble for a little job in his administration (like Mikey Boy's daughter is New York City's representative to the UN--how about that for a leisure-time-wasting and money-wasting job!). To be fair, no charges of sexual harassment or the fathering of little bastards was every made to stick on Mikey Boy, but there were a hell of a lot of women who worked for Bloomberg LP who trotted out and testified that he'd come on to them rather vulgarly while working "under" him (and isn't everybody "under" him?). And he does look like a guy who searches the Internet for pre-teen model sites--like Don Rickles used to say, "Hey, I'm just kiddin' dah Mayor. He's really a great passionate man who says money means nothing to him (what an attitude!) and he loves New York like he owns it."

All over the local news this morning (Thursday the 21st)--and the national news tonight (Thursday the 21st)--the Mayor and this worthless little rat police chief were telling us this was a homemade terrorist plot and not connected to any outside-influenced "cell" like al-Queda (Oh thank God!)--they love using that phrase "terrorist cell." The only cells I know about in New York City are the secret terrorist cells within the secret areas of the Mayor's office and the Police Department (I wonder where the NYPD torture chambers are located? You do know police have been using torture since policing began--a police captain in Chicago used to personally like to put a telephone book on top the head of a poor bugger (usually a Black man) and then pound on that telephone book with a baseball bat--you know what that must have felt like? Is that torture? And hell yeah this torturing Chicago cop got all kinds of wild confessions out of the many "not yet convicted" buggers he used that treatment on. And instead of being punished for his illegal tactics, he is retired and living well in Florida on a full pension from the Chicago Police Dept. [Turns out on tonight's news, these are 3 American-born Black men and one Haitian-born Black man. All American citizens. George Bush would have declared them enemy-combatants on-the-spot and they'd already be in Egypt getting waterboarded while another Egyptian put electrobes into their testicles--"You, sahib, are al-Queda terrorist, OK? Come on or I fry your balls!" "Oh Achmed, telephone call from Unka Dick Cheney! Keep up the good work, he says." How about that fucking weasel asshole all over commercial television defending the worst presidency in the history of worst presidents--and most of them have been shiftless skunks, trust me--I lived through Frankie D--who was a phony who tricked bagged the American people into believing he didn't really have polio and could stand on his own two feet--plus FDR knew that the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor...but that's water under the bridge as Obama would say...and Hairy Ass Truman--well you should know how I feel about that little chisling haberdasher horse soldier who authorized the wholesale murder of 300,000 innocent Japanese men, women, children, babies, grandmas, grandpas, the deformed, the deaf the dumb the blind, the insane! Melted them--left them like photographic images burned into the walls of buildings. Left the flesh melting off their bodies, dripping off their bones, while they still lived, couldn't die, the flesh just melting away, finally dissolving them whole into a pool of bubbling blubber. Hairy Ass said by massacring 300,000 Jap lives he saved 2 million American boys lives! Then there was Dwight David Eisenhower. Good old Ike. The good soldier; yet in truth, Ike was a dumbass son of a bitch, ignorant West Point grad, and finally a dumbass military leader who was given a lot of credit for our winning World War II--like the Jeep--yet when old Ike was president all he did was play golf. He warned us about the Military Industrial Complex but did nothing about breaking it up and retooling the industry--continuing to build arms and to give the Defense Department and the Pentagon hundreds of millions of dollars and then getting us involved in VietNam--yes, Eisenhower sent our famous "advisors"--I think Colon's Pal was one of those early VietNam advisors--those teachers of the search-and-destroy technique of butchering your enemy--today, in Iraq and Afghanistan it's called "the surge" method of butchering your enemy. Then there was the sex-maniac poor little spoiled brat rich boy Johnny We Hardly Knew You Kennedy--three years before he was shot by probably the Mafia combined with the CIA--he was fucking Sam Gianconda's mistress right under his nose--Judith Exeter--anybody remember her? Then there was Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson--the inventor of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which has since been proven a big fucking LIE! Johnson was driven out of office by a vibrant anti-War movement and as a result we got the amazing Richard Milhouse Nixon. And what a piece of shit this lousy asshole was! Come on, even the Repugnican Party's embarrassed by Nixon! Then we got Gerald Ford--and no he couldn't chew gum and walk at the same time--his best efforts while he served year after year from dumbass Calvinistic Grand Rapids, Michigan, made on the Congressional Country Club golf course. Then we got Jimmy "Mr. Peanut and Rocket Scientist" Carter and Roslyn and old lady Carter and brother Billy Beer Carter--he pissed on a runway while doing some questionable work for the Libyan government! And Jimmy Carter fucked up his attempt at militarily rescuing the Iran hostages--yeah, that was long before most of today's pundits were old enough to read. He later was trick-bagged by Ronnie Raygun Reagan who then ascended to the throne bringing us the likes of Unka Dick Cheney, Karl Boy Rove, David Stockman--and speaking of Reagan's Bear Mountain Gay Camp, I just saw where Jack "Quarterback" Kemp just died--Jack was once suspected of being a member of a gay cell made up of Ronnie Raygun's advisors when he was governor of California--plus, Ronnie gave us old Pappy Bush, old No. 1 Bush--and then we had Good Ole Bill Clinton--and then Georgie Porgie--which one of those birds would you consider a great man? a great thinker? a great president? How insulting to Haiti is it that Bill Clinton's going to be the UN representative to Haiti, a people Bill put by the hundreds in his use of Guantanamo prison to hold innertube flotilla Haitians trying to escape the worst poverty in the Caribbean by floating over to the Paradise of the USA and Miami--and Bill rounded up Haitians and threw them in Guantanamo; then he sent the US Navy to encircle Haiti with orders to shoot any innertube-ridin' refugees--so now old Bill is representing Haiti in the UN. Old Bill Clinton debated G.W. Bush up in Canada recently--am I right or wrong?

We never know here in New York City, especially Manhattan, just what "threat" or "fear" we're going to have to face every morning when we wake up to start a new day of the same old same old. Like we woke up on September 11th, 2001, and son of a bitch, two fucking airliners were flying head long into the architecturally ugly (eyesore) World Trade Center main towers (which I used to could see out of my loft bed window--like I could lay back in bed and look straight down Manhattan Island directly at the WTC! The Twin Towers were monuments to himself built by Power Elite playboy and rich boy ruler, Nelson Rockefeller, built to honor his term as Governor of New York (and then I pause to laugh a bit at remembering how old Nellie died getting a double-headed blowjob from two young women in his fabby apartment behind his fabby Museum of Modern Art (remember the Power Elite buy and collect art; that's a good sign you've got plenty of money to waste). On 9/11 all of us New Yorkers were thinking, Holy shit there's a 100,000 people in those tacky towers--holy shit! We were imagining the death toll! The horror. The inhumanity. Who the hell were these military geniuses who busted through our Bill Clinton-devised Patriot Act screenings at Boston's Logan Airport to board a fleet of airliners up there, five they said originally, to eventually hijack them and militarily start flying them toward USA sacred objects like the WTC, which Islamic militants out of Egypt have been intending to blow up for years. Ironically, Bin Laden wasn't a part of that Egyptian militant movement--remember the Blind Sheik?--to blow up the evil American-Dreamized World Trade Center--the seat of our corruption--and how right they were about that. The CIA's largest databank was in one of those towers. Adolf Guliani's 40-million-dollar bunker was in one of those towers--that fool thought the WTC to be the safest place for him to hide out should the evil terrorists come after him, America's Mayor! That's like finding out Unka Dick Cheney's secret bunker--where he like the coward he is ran off to during the 9/11 attacks--was actually in the basement of his District of Corruption mansion (paid for by We the People, by the way) in the safety of a CIA-protected D.C. Virginia suburb.

Now, we wake up one morning and this little prick Mayor is saying we have a surplus in our budget thanks to his business acumen; then the very next morning we wake up and he's babbling how the City is now suffering from an 8-billion deficit--not his fault, he says; he, like all worthless mayors before him, blames the problem on the State, the Feds, and We the Citizens of New York City. (Remember, the Power Elite really don't think they're ever wrong. They don't make errors--perhaps bad decisions in terms of the game they're leisurely playing--like being Mayor of New York City--yes, it's a powerful seat high up in the Power Elite--but it's a plaything to a man worth 16 billion dollars. Remember, the Power Elite is wasting time and money to prove they're conspicuous consumers and money wasters enough to be in the Power Elite.) Or one morning we wake up and the Manhattan Transit Authority says it's several billion bucks in the hole and must raise subway and bus fares immediately or.... They never tell us "or what." Shut the motherfucker down, I say, if you can't break even running the largest public transportation system in the USA--even though now it is 100 years old and falling into ruin (Chaos). Then the next morning we wake up and we're told, oh boy, hot dog, the Governor has made a deal with the MTA and subway fares will stay the same but service will be discontinued on several lines and bus lines will be discontinued. Then the next morning we wake up and the MTA is saying they are going to raise fares after all--they are just too much in arrears. Yes, they do definitely deserve swift kicks in their time-wasting, money-wasting rich boy and mistress asses--the executive swindlers who manage the USA's largest public transportation system. Then we renters wake up one morning recently and see where the NYC Rent Board in spite of us being in a Great Depression, in spite of us losing our jobs on a daily basis, in spite of us being in debt, in spite of all of that, this Board of crooked scheming bastards voted to let landlords raise rents this year--5% on a year lease. Then we wake up one morning to hear that suddenly because of 13 or 14 Queens school kids who just returned from Mexico--the Saint Francis kids--we were all now subject to something called the Swine Flu, though it really isn't the same Swine Flu we had years ago--no, this is a new Swine Flu--and the Mayor at one time was saying this had nothing to do with pork--we could go ahead and eat pork--do you trust a Jewish man telling you to go ahead and eat pork it's fine?--Swine flu doesn't come from swine necessarily--then we find out from Mexican authorities that this flu originated at the American company Smithfield Hams's pig farm down there in Old Mexico. The we wake up one morning and son of a bitch, suddenly out of nowhere, the Swine flu has attacked New Yorkers worse than it attacked the Mexicans (of course our teevees tell us the Mexicans are lying about having Swine flu under control down there). I mean why are we subject to these day-in day-out fear reports?--we all should be kept shivering in our boots, by whose straps we are supposed to be pulling ourselves up by. Then we wake up one morning and find out all the schools are closed, schoolkids that are going to school are wearing face masks (they say that doesn't keep you from getting the virus), and our Mayor and our new City health officer or whatever he's called are on teevee telling us this maybe an epidemic, to wash our hands, to not touch our faces! Now we wake up this morning and the Mayor's battling terrorists--and these terrorists the Mayor is now saying wanted to start a jihad. Whoaaaa! A jihad? Yep, that's what hiz honor said, these numbskull kids wanted to start a jihad against the Jews for what we were doing in Afghanistan!!! Do you understand this shit? What a trumped up bunch of scary bullshit this little prick mayor is pulling on us as he illegally is running for mayor as all of these shenanigans are developing.

So late in the day today, who does the NYPD, the Mayor, and Shanty Irish Ray trot out as these "homegrown terrorists"? I said to my companion, "I guarantee you there'll be a Black guy first out"...and no sooner had I said that than she said, "Look!" and I looked and the first terrorist they led out was a Black dude; the next guy out looked like a Latino, though it was hard to tell since he was wearing the typical warmup hood jacket with the hood up and over his head--faceless man style. By the way, that's the latest fashion here in NYC, even among the hip White young--the hooded sweatsuit jacket; I've got one myself now.

So later in the day we find out what a fucking grandstanding sham this "homegrown terrorist" plot is. It was stupid as hell. It was as though these guys were undercover police dudes posing as terrorists. Sort of like the NYPD used Larry "Crackhead" Davis as an undercover shill and then turned on his ass and came after him to whack him, except Crackhead went out the back window and disappeared over the roofs, only later to turn himself in saying he'd been set up by the NYPD that he actually worked for the NYPD.... This is the sort of bullshit We the Citizens of New York City wake up to every morning. There's always a scare.

We have a mayor who is the fifth (Wikipedia says 7th) richest man in the United States, which means he clocks in at 16 billion bucks--only beaten out by Billy Boy and Melinda, their big old uncle-type, Unka Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett, and the Walton Gang, Sam Walton's worthless children who combined are the richest family in the USA, land of the free and home of the bravest cowards in the world. Little Michael "Napoleon" Rubens Bloomberg is rich enough now to have tons of leisure time on his hands--money to waste and time to burn. Remember, that's one way you prove you belong to the Power Elite: wasting time and wasting money. Being mayor of New York City is his playing a leisure-time virtual-reality game.

First of all, how did this "poor" little Boston Jewish boy climb that ladder of success so far up and so fucking successfully? You see, Bloomie went to Johns Hopkins where he became an electrical engineer. Then he went to Harvard Business School and those master thieves taught Bloomie how to be a businessman. All during these adventures, Bloomie was a Dumbocrat. Bloomie came to New York City and went to work for Salomon Brothers. Oh yeah! You see it coming, don't you? Bloomie while working at Salomon Brothers, the financial swindlers, developed a systems software, which he turned into Bloomberg LP. He shopped it sort of unsuccessfully but then suddenly out of nowhere came another bunch of swindlers, Merrill-Lynch, and they let Bloomie put his system into their system and it became their main system and from there on Bloomie networked Bloomberg LP into a billion-dollar-a-year software company, with Bloomie holding 88% of his company's stock, which he still holds today even though he's mayor of New York City and isn't supposed to have a vested interest...oh shit, what am I lollygagging around for, trying to be sarcastic? Nonsense. Of course, Bloomie's as crooked as the brotherhood he hangs with.

Bloomie has a checkered past, you know. Yep, Bloomie on top of thinking of himself as a retro-Napoleon, also, like his hero and predecessor, Adolf "Mussolini" Guliani (America's Mayor, remember him; that 9/11 coward who bilked people out of millions with a phony 9/11 victim's relief fund--the victims said they never received a dime of Rudi's relief fund money), considers himself irresistible to the ladies. He's faced several sexual harassment charges over his pompous reign over his Bloomberg LP employees. One pregnant Bloomberg LP employee claiming the little bugger in her womb was from Mikey Boy's powerful roaring seed.

And, yes, Mikey is the founder of the Bloomberg Network--a situation that also was handed to this little Boston bum on a silver platter from Wall Street. And yes, Mikey is into real estate--he owns a mansion on E. 79th on NYC's fawn-ceeee Upper East Side; he owns a mansion in London; and also an estate in tax-haven Bermuda. I'm sure Mikey has several offshore bank accounts and knows all about the banking business. These crooked scheming sons of bitches; how can we get rid of them?

Mikey Boy was limited to two terms as mayor. But, oh no, Mikey Boy, after declaring the city was broke--in fact, the city was 8 bazillionbrazillianbuffaloturdzillion bucks in the hole and needed now his business acumen; therefore, he's changing the law, he's running for an illegal third term. The City Council--the head of which has her nose buried deep in Little Mikey's filthy old crinkling asshole--by 5 votes went right along with tongue-kissing this asshole's ass--27-22, and changed the law to allow this little Wall Street-Harvard-Business-School systems-packaging billionaire to run for a third term. He has already spent 22 million dollars campaigning for mayor. His stupid campaign ads run on NYC teevee every 5 minutes. As I've always said, advertisements are pure-dee LIES; what grains of truth that are in them are so overwhelmed by the overall lies they become lies, too. One Bloomberg ad says that when Bloomie looks out a hi-rise luxury building upper floor window, when he looks down on this city, he sees JOBS--the look out the window shows a hi-rise apartment building going up--the crane standing there like a crowing cock above the building [surely one day one of these leisure-time architects will build a building that is totally held up by a permanent crane incorporated into the buildings designed. There's nothing like watching this 62-story piece-of-crap 2000-room hotel going up just out my west window--they are up about 42 stories now but the crane is like already up 62 stories--that crane will eventually go up way over 70 stories. Build a building out of cranes]--"I see construction jobs..." then they show a shot of the Second Avenue Subway construction--a construction that has been going on since I moved to this fair city back at the beginning of the 70s--and they had been working on it before I moved here. It's a perpetual subway construction site--and the campaigning mayor says, "And I see jobs here...." What a bunch of shit. While the mayor is trumpeting how many jobs he's bringing to this City--and that's all he really says he's going to do--this city is losing like 80,000 jobs sometimes a day. There's a 50% unemployment rate among males in Harlem. Bloomie's cutting back cops and firemen; he wants to close fire houses [all the mayors do this when they claim the city budget needs to be trimmed]. Total bullshit. Remember, all these politicians use Backward Thinking. When they say this they are really saying that. Obama is saying the economy is turning around. READ: the economy is worse than ever. When Obama promised during the election to bring the troops home from Iraq immediately, he was really saying, "I'll be keeping troops in Iraq indefinitely." Using my logic, let me give you some maybe good news: Obama keeps saying he's staying the course in Afghanistan and invading Pakistan with his drone air force. If I'm right with this Backwards Thinking shit, then he's really saying, "Afghanistan is one big unwinable mess and I'm working like a dog trying to find a way to get out of this mess." There was also some good news in the way Obama handled Israel's Nut-'n-Yahoo's (an American, isn't he?) itching to nuke the Bejesus out Iran--which brought out the Iranian rebuttal today saying they had shot a missile into the air and where it landed they knew not where but they were able to say that it was a missile that could easily reach mid-town Tel-Aviv--and even a US military base in the area--and there are hundreds of US bases in the area. [I noticed that since Ecuador kicked the U.S. Army base out of their country, Obama is going to build a 30-million-dollar base in Colombia, our drug-producing good-neighbor in South America. These bases are part of our other unsuccessful and money-upsucking war, the pathetic War on Drugs.

So Michael Bloomberg is running for an illegal third term and is already campaigning to the tune of 22 million bucks. Here's the problem with this. Who the hell is running against this jerk? Where are his opponents's ads? How unfair is this? But New York Citians seem unaffected by their getting fucked up the ass. They are bobble-headed. They understand nothing. They go and blow money in pretentious restaurants--the food is lousy--with 20-something-year-0ld chefs who learned to be chefs off video tapes or rereading Julia Child's books--especially hoards of Brit chefs invading NYC. The food is lousy, trust me. Che-che food. Carmelized food. You notice how every fucking chef under the sun mentions carmelization in their preparations of these trendy foods? Another big trendy bullshit thing in NYC today are custommade drinks--do you know, a drink in a NYC restaurant these days is up around $7.00 or more in the chi-chi joints. A guy told me the other day, he paid $15 for a brandy at a chi-chi joint in downtown Manhattan. Heinies are $7.00 at my fav Irish pub. Last night (Wednesday night) I had a big bowl of linguine with a red clam sauce and two Heinekens. My bill was $28.20, $34.00 with tip. I have eaten in restaurants most of my life. Only in Santa Fe where we had a chef-ready kitchen--complete with copper pots and a restaurant range--did I cook up wonderful dinners--always well-attended especially when I made my famous Beef Wellington with Yorkshire Pudding...or my authentic Commie Chinese pork chops. I had a cookbook I'd gotten as a gift for subscribing to the Peking Review back during a time in this country when subscribing to the Peking Review (a Chairman Mao publication) got you a letter from the United Snakes Government saying you were under suspicion as being a foreign agent--blah, blah, blah. By then I had served my time in the US Army and knew all government threats were bullshit--at least they were until Commander-in-Chief Bush Baby Junior Numbskull came along and made us all terrorists--IF HE SAID WE WERE. Do you realize that any one of us could be arrested just on the whim of a president! A coward president; and I'm afraid that maybe Obama is a coward, too. Cowards are bad news for people seeking peace, love, and tie dye. However, I am glad to see Obama standing up for closing down Guantanamo. Also, today we had a pirate's trial in New York City--yep, the dumbass Somalian teenager the US forgot to shoot when they target shot up that lifeboat with the kidnapped captain.

By the way, the latest on the jihadist homegrown terrorists--one of them's lawyer says he's mentally challenged. Aren't we all.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

"Tuesday's Just As Bad"

The Same Old Same Old Moves Right On Along
Taking us in dizzying circles, Backward Thinking is alive and well, as demonstrated by the very ignorant students at the University of Our Lady over the weekend (didn't the Catholics quit using Latin?--just think, stupid Catholics used to sit through routines (nuns wear habits) they didn't even understand!). Notre Dame is of course supported by its football teams and not Catholics. How ironic is it that a majority African-American football team plays under the teasin' eye of a Fightin' Irishman! And everybody knows about "fightin' Irishmen," that's the symbol we have of Irishmen in general, a bunch of pub-hanging drunken louts telling bullshit stories to one another always raisin' high the pint with a hearty roar, though in the midst of this Irish male symbol shenanigan ceremony of fun and wailin' laughter and good old rosy-cheeked Irish communion there's bound to be one who gets offended--I mean it's so easy to offend a drunken Irishman! OK, I apologize for my vulgar sense of tease. I apologize sort of like Don Rickles used to apologize after he'd racially slurred all over some lonely Black couple in an all-white Las Vegas nightclub, maybe Frank Sinatra and his boyz sittin' in the front row, and Don goes over to this Black couple and he says, "Hey, boy, you got some fried chicken in that papersack in your lap there?--whoaaaa, that's no papersack, folks, that's more like a roll of African bologna...hah, hah, of course, I'm just joking...er-ah, I love Black people...you take Sammy Davis, Jr., he and I are such pals...I love him so much, I have him come over to my house in Beverly Hills once a week and give my shithouse a good polishing...hah-hah, you know how those Blacks love to clean things...everything except themselves...whoooh, mama, funk-eee. Hah, hah, come on, now, seriously, folks, this is just my act, and as a person, I wanna say, we need to come together...."

Notre Dame has to have a national prominent football team or what else is it good for? Here in New York City, we're considered a "Catholic" city. On our commercial teevee channels we get instant news on the new archbishop of New York City, for instance--even coverage of his taking over his duties from the guy he's replacing--and then they even cover this dude's first Mass from Saint Patrick's Cathedral, the Holy Home of the Catholic God (who I assume is different from the Protestant God) in Our Town. During football season, we get every Notre Dame football game on one of our local channels, whether Notre Dame sucks or not, though traditionally, in order to maintain Notre Dame's symbol as a football Titan (from a myth), Notre Dame is never seen as a failure, even though over the past several years, Notre Dame has sucked badly, losing as many as they win, and they've gone through several coaches. I remember when Notre Dame was a team of all-Irish Catholic boys--an men's school and they were Titans when they played against other all-White college teams. But then along came a player named Johnny Bright--a running and passing back at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa [scroll down after the Wolf Man signs off for the Johnny Bright story]...but I am going astray...way astray...like the wolf in me wanting to wander on to the next possible kill.

On the other hand, what's President Obama doing going to a religious school and delivering an address? Separation of church and state isn't it? Except, Obama seems to like walking in G.W. "Georgie Porgie" Bush's footsteps. Have you noticed that? Remember Bush gave a speech at the notorious Christian-fanatic funny farm posing as a college, Bob Jones University (and I actually had a very good high-school friend who went to Bob Jones). Check out old Bob Jones. What a decent Christian fellow he was; a hillbilly hick in the Carolina hills where they called a Spade a Nigger and were proud of it while waving their Confederate flags and teaching Jesus as a White man wearing a white robe and white hood and carrying a burning cross (Hail Caesar!)--in the hills of Carolina where they spit 'backy right smack-dab down on the sidewalks; where they blow their noses by placing a thumb to one nostril and sort of spitting the snot out the other nostril to fling it out to let land where it may fall. Spitting and nose-blowing being very important to the hillbilly culture--that and making unlicensed moonshine and racing their moonshine-carryin' hot rods on the beaches at Daytona, Florida, for fun-having and racin' and womanizin' and eatin' a lot of pork. This is perfectly natural when you trace the backgrounds of these Anglo-Saxon US barbarians--still kicking against the pricks of Death (Satan to them) on and on and on and now into the 21st Century--the same old, same old, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Prussian, Slavic, Teutonic, Visigothic bunch--Barbarians? Here's the Wikipedia entry on "Barbarians"--it's interesting: especially since it says the name Barbara comes from the original put-down word that meant crude, uncivilized, foreign, or "curly haired"--en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian .

And look at the mess this flock of fleeing religious fanatics have put us in. We are so tied up in our fables--but then that's what I was intending in my praise of this movie Esoteric Agenda. How we are ruled by symbols and flags and stop signs and "private, do not enter" signs and big huge neon symbols sailing over the skies of our great gathering places like Times Square, Piccadilly, the new Shanghai. Look at the skyline of new Shanghai (old Shanghai was a cess pool--and it's still there today, but it doesn't appear on the "praising China as the new Capitalist Champion" symbols we see flagged across our faces daily), that skyline is one light show of symbols--symbols like the Mercedes three-arm symbol. Know what it means?

Mastery of 3-dimensions is symbolized by the 3-pronged Mercedes-Benz logo. 2 symbolizes duality. Three is a trinity, or tri-unity. Every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third”. In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored. Carl Jung.

This comes from a very interesting site running a primer on what they call "Sacred Geometry." God, I love this shit. We live in a world of symbols! Too many for us to comprehend how they are enslaving us. Though look at these computers. We know how to harness these symbols but we're still in the elementary stages of making them add up to something besides the same old two-sides-to-every-coin way of existence (every coin collector knows a coin has more than two sides--two faces, yes, an obverse and a reverse, but the coin also has thickness--that forms a rim and edges of the coin, a dimension, too. Some early U.S. coins (and also some recent mint "collector" issues) had what were cataloged as "Lettered Edges," an effort at reducing the chances of counterfeiting gold coins since lettering edges is a difficult minting process).

These symbols are conditioning us. Programming us. We don't know how to live without symbols! Isn't that amazing! A little sample of Sacred Geometry thinking:

The following is excerpted material:
The Principles of Sacred Geometry
There are two main principles in sacred geometry: the masculine and the feminine. Defined by the number One and Two, this universal duality goes by many names, and usually refers to a pairing of opposites: X and Y, 1 and 2, Heaven and Earth, yin and yang, black and white, Up and down, visible and invisible, cross and a circle, positive and negative, ego and spirit. Simply stated, ANY relationship can be defined in terms of maleness and femaleness.

The relationship between a leader and a follower for example is a male-female relationship. The masculine is assigned the number 1, and the feminine is assigned the number 2.

Sacred Geometry and Web Design
If you think of the web as the nexus for ideas, a melting-pot of Mind, your website is the starting point for a piece of communication that spirals outwards, infinitely repeating itself, like the Golden Section or PI. So the starting point for your communication is the most important element because it is the essence of what spirals out in greater complexity. The starting point is a simple definition of goals. Simple definitions are difficult because it is a very small place, the razor’s edge, you might say. When you reach that small place, original goals—the root idea becomes apparent. From there you can build a plan. It’s difficult to talk about sacred geometry or define it with words alone. It has to be shown. Here are a few world-class logos and the sacred geometry imbued in their symbol. I don’t know whether these symbols were designed with this understanding in mind. But it’s because of the meaning they imbue that people are attracted to certain forms. These forms keep repeating themselves through history.

From the sacred to the profane

The pentagram was the symbol of the Pythagoreans, a group of Greek philosophers who thought the secrets of the universe were hidden in numbers and expressed through geometry and music. The pentagram is a universal symbol for growth and regeneration. Penta or five is the center, the mathematical middle of nine (femi-nine) coming together in a circle. The cross is a co-ordiante of a vertical and a horizontal ordinate. X and Y, which stand for direction, and also designate the male and female chromosome. It symbolizes direction and crossroads, and of course, when viewed from below it is the Christian crucifix.
	The Texaco logo derives it’s power from these 2 secular symbols, the pentagram and the cross.

"Trust your car to the MAN who wears the star!" used to be The Texas Company brand tagline!

www.awake.net/sacredgeometryindesign.html

That's such a great site; kind of scary if you think about it too long, though linguists like our pal L Hat can explain this shit in break-down babble that makes sense. I like how the word "babble" relates to the original word for barbarian. Shiver me timbers, this stuff is good reading--reading that makes you think one way or the other--either you believe or you don't believe, it's not that simple.

"Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I ain't worried 'cause I'm carrying a rabbit's foot." And, yes, I carry a "lucky" piece. I'm traditional as hell. Symbols rule my life--even as a musician, if I don't learn how to read the symbols, I'm considered an incomplete and therefore amateur musician, even though the music I'm playing and creating is above the norm in terms of technical and virtuosic performances of it. You see music is understood by people all around the world. My musician friend, Pat Conte, owner of the world's largest collection of ethnic music records, mostly 78s, going back way back into the early recordings of folk music in countries like Madagascar, or Tuva, or Romanian Gypsy or Hungarian Gypsy, or the Pyrenees, and after listening to hours and hours of this "pure" music from these worldwide countries, he concluded all this music was based on the same three changes you find in American Black blues. 3 tones. Dig it. The "Third" Carl Jung talks about in talking about the strongest form of unity. The Trinity. Triumvirates. Trilogies. Tri-pad protection. Triple-ply tires. Triumph. Tri-Star Productions. Three heads are better than one. Or as Mercedes-Benz and the Isle of Man say, "Three arms are stronger than two."

Yes, commenter, we are all confused...but NOT I! I am a Sociologist/soothsayer/raconteur, allowing my animal nature to rule me in the symbolic form of a wolf, a Lone Wolf, though I do side with pack wolves--also I read Carl Jung and Paul Goodman and Fritz Perls and Henry Miller and Philip Wylie and oh, Hell, I'm bragging, trotting out my symbols of wisdom to impress you--there are two sides to me, you see--and, yes, I am weak since I only recognize those two sides--it's that Third that I need that I can't seem to find in reality! Gunther Schuller thought he'd found the Third Stream in jazz! He thought it meant jazz developing through the compositional side of life rather than the unnotated, unscripted, unsymbolized improvisational side of life (meaning the jazz life) where traditionally Jazz the art form has been broken down into two sides, the mainstream and the free form--mainstream eventually meaning what the be-boppers played--and the free form represented by musicians like Ornette Coleman, Burton Greene, Donald Byrd (to an extent--his Free Form album on Blue Note), certainly the Costa Brothers back in the fifties--the great Albert Ayler--and oh what attention it takes to dig Albert Ayler--he'll drive you nuts--and of course the elaborately great John Coltrane, who used his vast knowledge of sounds and colors in every key in the music notational rainbow to give jazz multidimensional aspects--the sound of his horn amongst the urban traffic of the piano, drums, and bass, that constant throbbing over which men and women have to think out their problems. John Coltrane made beautiful music while riding on a Chaotic stream of consciousness and outside aggression. It's hard to continue living such a fast and precise life. It's why musicians are subject to the influences of enhancements--same as baseball players need enhancements to come up with their best glories--like breaking the sacred Babe Ruth home run record--and here I go off on another tangent (Jimmy Guiffre's album Tangents in Jazz--wonderful on-the-spot jazz improvising on tangents)--Babe Ruth's record being a symbol of White supremacy in a White-man-invented sport (a sport invented by the New York City Leisure Class (or Power Elite) for a weekend's bit of leisure-time gaming pleasure--it beat having to hunt game, like in the old princedom days of White rule). Though soon the game was taken up by the workingclass and baseball became America's pasttime sport--a chance for the workingclass to have a little leisure time--a reward under the American Dream plan. However, I'm not proud to say, that the Leisure Class (Power Elite) kept control of the game, and today, the game has turned into an industry rather than a true pasttime game. The mill used to supply the players of the game. Now the game has become the mill and the players are back to being high paid, yes, but workingclass just the same. They are slaves to the mill, no matter what royalties they are getting for their millwork. Like, and I know marvelousmarvbackbitter agrees with me, I can't watch Yankees or Mets home games. I see those pink elephant stadiums We the Citizens of New York City built for both these teams--the waste, the turning of the game over to corporate bonus-baby executives, Japanese businessmen, and our new New York City major industry represented by tourists--nothing for the baseball fan. How's it being a real baseball fan while you're eating sushi in a chi-chi rip-off restaurant setting? As a result, watch a Yankees home game and look at the empty seats. This is a team that under Joe Torre packed Yankee Stadium in 2007, the year Joe was stupidly let go, setting a major league attendance record, almost recording 50,000 a home game! That's why the Yankees were the greatest team in baseball and could afford the best players, they were a New York City baseball fan team and not a tourist attraction like they are now. Soon they'll build amusement parks and gambling casinos around the ballparks--maybe have slots in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at CitiStadium--how insulting is it the Mets selling their stadium name to the swindling crooked CitiGroup who is still even after declaring they were broke and in need of public assistance were able to come up with 300 million cash to buy that stadium name. Oh, I forgot, cash is easy to make these days, isn't it?

Symbolically yours,

thegrowlingwolf

JOHNNY BRIGHT - AMERICA'S LOSS - by Hugh Wyatt

Johnny Bright was a great American athlete. He set professional football records that still stand. Yet today few Americans even know his name, much less his story.

If only as an act of contrition, it is important that they do.

Nearly 50 years after the incident that changed his life forever, it is almost as though America made a conscious effort to forget it ever happened, and in the process forgot about him, too.

Johnny Bright might very well have become the first black Heisman Trophy winner, until a brutal, unsportsmanlike act of racism cost him whatever chance he had. He was a first-round NFL draft choice, but he had already experienced first-hand the physical, racially-directed violence that Jackie Robinson, for all his courage, had only been threatened with. Unsure of his safety on the playing fields of his own country, he left it for Canada, the first NFL first-round draft choice ever to do so. And instead of becoming one of the best players the NFL has ever seen, he became one of the best players in the history of Canadian football, and a valued and respected member of his community when his playing days were over.

To continue reading: www.coachwyatt.com/johnnybright.html

NEWS From Surfing the Blogosphere

From Blogs Come More Truths About What's Going On Behind Our Backs
Our first extraction (excerpt) comes from our old friend J. Orlin Grabbe's posthumous Website. It is called "Fraudulent Finance for Dummies":

When you start with fraud, everything turns to theft via deception and fradulent conveyance. Some examples:

1. The stock market - As money created via bankster fraud chases stocks, it drives P/E (Price to Earnings) ratios to unsustainable levels (infinity in the case of tech stocks such as Microsoft for a while). Venture capital is corrupted as people figure out that selling pipe dreams in the stock market (and to established current companies via M&A) is the quickest way to a corner a fortune in fraud money (the tech boom and bust). Company executives get corrupted by figuring that they can make more "money" selling their stocks and stock options by overstating their company earnings - so long as the company can pay its taxes. This creates Enron like unsustainable corporations, and a government corrupted via moral hazard (the higher taxes paid in), not to forget the politicians and judges paid off to make all this legal.
2. Retirement plans (such as 401K mutual fund based retirement plans) - become a vehicle to channel purchasing power from unsuspecting "workers" into the stock market to sustain the absurd P/E values of unsustainable corporations that employ them. Diversification is of relatively no use as all high performance stocks are all fraudulently sustained.
3. Real Estate - as fraud tokens chase real estate and "investors" flip property, the savings of the people are stolen via deception and the widows and the orphans are made homeless as fools¹ write "money" into existence via fraudulent mortgages that then are fraudulently circulated by the banks², and even people who "own their homes outright³" are evicted by property tax hikes.
4. Payment systems: Credit cards became so popular as it allows everyone to commit fraud. Both the buyer and the seller are extended credit during a credit card purchase³. The banks settle up the bundled assets behind to scenes in a so-called settlement process, which is now ripe for failure and has given us the identity-police state.
5. Producers - now mainly in countries across the pacific from the USA - have sold goods i.e. real wealth - in exchange for fraud tokens.They have no durable store of purchasing power. They have been defrauded, and the Americans who now do not have any manufacturing cannot produce anything to win back those tokens, and these providers of humanity are unwelcome in America to travel there and spend their dollars on falling real estate and to invest in factories - "strong borders" - cry the fools.
6. Every Central Bank - has created local currency backed by the flood of fraud dollars - in a process called Currency Sterilization. The peoples in those countries have fraud piled upon fraud.
7. The upcoming "Global Settlement" being awaited by those "in the know", will simply re-monetize the fraud and back it via theft-by-taxation in a world where producers cannot create or obtain finance without a permit, and every leader of the so-called free world is a world class crook.
   

It looks dim.

Note 1: Literally they have been fooled: made into a fool.

Note 2: The liability of the fool to pay FRN is circulated by the bank (i.e. to the seller of the property and then onward) and further, the "asset" i.e. the mortgage is bundled and sold on to other banks. The "sub-prime" crisis is so named not because of the interest rate, but because of it stinks like rotten meat. There is no honour amongst thieves.

Note 3: There is no private property in America, only title-by-lease from the local town corporation. Stop paying the rent a.k.a property tax, and you are evicted.

Note 4: The banks risked no capital in "lending" to credit card borrowers and to merchants who sold them goods. The entire "industry" runs on fraud. Can you imagine revealing your swiss bank account number to merchants to pay themselves with?! That the whole thing "works" is a testimony to the honesty and integrity of a majority of participants - save the banks who convey the fraud that they are extending real money and the bottom-dweller credit-card infomation thieves that the banks love so they can recover the principal from the merchant, bump up his discount rate and get $50 from the hapless consumer.

Reference: www.rayservers.com/blog/fraudulent-finance-for-dummies

The Following Are an Egyptian Fotog's Flickr.com Photos of Mahalla Strike
President Obama is foolishly going to Egypt to address the Islam nations. Check out the current turmoil in Egypt, a very dangerous place; the Egyptian workers are pissed as hell with the dictatorial Mubarik:

www.flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/collections/72157616929601347/

The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008 From projectcensored.org

www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009/

Who Was Ralph Sutton?

Ralph Sutton

Ralph Earl Sutton was an outstanding pianist in the great tradition of Harlem stride giants James P. Johnson and Fats Waller.

Ralph Sutton was born in Hamburg, Missouri on November 4th, 1922. His career got under way when he joined Jack Teagarden in 1941 while he was still in college. During the '40s he attracted widespread attention, thanks to his participation in a series of radio shows hosted by jazz writer Rudi Blesh, This is Jazz. He had a trio with Albert Nicholas, and beginning in 1948 he worked eight years as intermission pianist at Eddie Condon's club in New York. Later he worked for Bob Scobey and, in 1963, was featured at the first Dick Gibson Jazz Party in Denver. This led to the formation of the World's Greatest Jazz Band in 1968, of which Sutton was a founding member.

Thereafter, Sutton's star rose. He recorded a series of albums and toured the world, solo and in a variety of settings. His musical partners in these ventures included Ruby Braff, Jay McShann, Kenny Davern, and Peanuts Hucko.

On TV, Ralph appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, the Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, the Steve Allen Show, and the Today Show. He appeared at Town Hall and the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Boston Symphony Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. He recorded for Arbors, RCA Victor, Columbia, Verve, Decca, and Commodore, among others. In 1993, Ralph was inducted into the New Jersey Jazz Hall of Fame.

Ralph Sutton died in Evergreen, CO on December 30, 2001, at the age of 79.

Ralph Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Ralph Earl Sutton is without a doubt the greatest exponent today of the two hands and ten fingers style of jazz piano playing...undoubtedly one of the best pianists in jazz today...he swings...tremendous personal beat and drive...Andre Previn once referred to Sutton as one of the few jazz pianists who had complete mastery of his instrument. Sutton plays with both hands and ten fingers, a full harmonic sense and a delightful wit in his solos. He can swing a band, too.

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Afghanistan's Untold History

www.invisiblehistory.com/

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A Short Story by Jack Spicer (Beware: Jack Was Gay--It Was a Part of His Outside Real).................

Jack Spicer

Pillar of Salt

Friday night is the night that custom reserves to Hollywood
High School on the Boulevard. The usual crowds of course pursue
their usual ways, but interspersed among them are blobs of young
faces, nervously noisy and searching vaguely for a key to this more
adult world. If you were to walk with them, as you did once, you
would remember the not distant days of your adolescence and you
would perhaps laugh or perhaps regret.

Lee asks you in his half-deepened voice if we hadn’t better give
up and go to a show and you insist that we walk down the other side
of the Boulevard and say that there aren’t any decent shows anyway.
You both know that you’re looking for something more than a show,
more even than getting into Bradley’s Bar past that woman who is
posted there specially to keep minors out. You have a better idea
than Lee what that something is, but you couldn’t explain it to him in
words. Anyway, he partly understands.

for the whole story: chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/spicer.html

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What's Fidel Thinking These Days? From CubaNow.net

Reflections by Comrade Fidel: Obama And The Blockade
Fidel Castro Ruz
Yesterday I referred to what was funny about the “Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain”. Today I could refer to what is tragic about it. I hope our friends do not take any offence in this. There were some differences between the draft that we received, which was going to be submitted by the hosts of the Summit, and the document that was finally published. In all that last-minute haste, there was hardly any time for anything. Some items had been discussed at long meetings held some weeks previous to the Summit. At the very last moment, proposals such as the one submitted by Bolivia, complicated even more the whole picture. The Bolivian proposal was included as a note in the document. It stated that Bolivia considered that the implementation of policies and cooperation schemes aimed at expanding the use of bio-fuels in the western hemisphere could affect and have an impact on the availability of foodstuffs, the increase of food prices, deforestation, the displacement of populations as a result of the land demand, and that consequently this could make the food crisis to be even worse, which will directly affect low income persons and, most of all, the poorest economies among developing countries. The note added that the Bolivian government, while recognizing the need to look for and resort to environmentally friendly alternative sources of energy, such as the geothermal, solar, and eolic sources of energy, and to small and medium size hydro-power generators, it advocates for an alternative approach, based on the possibility of living well and in harmony with nature, in order to develop public policies aimed at the promotion of safe alternative energies that could ensure the preservation of the planet, our ‘mother land’. When analyzing this note submitted by Bolivia please bear in mind that the United States and Brazil are the two biggest producers of bio-fuels in the world, something that is opposed by an increasing number of persons in the planet, whose resistance has been growing since the dark days of George Bush. Obama’s advisors published in the Internet their version -in English- of the interview the US president granted to some journalists in Port of Spain. At one point, he asserted that there was something he found interesting –an added that he had known of it in a more abstract way but that he found it interesting in more specific terms- which was listening to these leaders who, when speaking about Cuba, did so referring specifically to the thousands of doctors Cuba is disseminating throughout the region, and finding how much these countries depended on them. He said this reminded them in the US of the fact that if their only interaction with many of these countries was the war on drugs; that if their only interaction was of a military character, then it was possible that they would not be developing connections that, with time, could enhance their influence with a positive effect when they may find it necessary to advance policies of their interest in the region.

To Read the Rest of Fidel's Thinking: www.cubanow.net/pages/loader.php?sec=24&t=2&item=6837

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The world is a screwy place, right? It's the Fools versus the Instigators; the Bullshitters versus the Bullshitting Liberals; it's the Ayn Rand Heads versus Reality; NeoCons versus Lenin Commies; with stupid logic pouring forth from the forked-tongued mouths of our fearless leaders--fearless with our lives!

theprefabricatedstaff
for The Daily Growler