The Daily Growler Shut Down by Verizon

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DUE TO THE TOTAL UNRELIABILITY OF VERIZON HIGH-SPEED INTERNET SERVICE, A LOUSY SERVICE, THE DAILY GROWLER WILL BE DOWN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. WE LOST OUR INTERNET CONNECTION 15 DAYS AGO AND VERIZON HAS YET TO RESTORE THE SERVICE. WARNING: WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT USE VERIZON FOR YOUR INTERNET CONNECTING. I'M TOLD IT'S ALL RUN OUT OF INDIA.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


To just start writing. As I start writing I think of William Saroyan writing. Sitting in a chair in the window of his house watching the people in the neighborhood. Spotting on one. Focusing. Then beginning to write about that person. Characterizing what he thought that person was like alive. Thinking of William Saroyan saying in the introduction to that book of short stories that a writer had to write at the appointed time they'd set to write. Sit down in front of the typewriter, put a sheet of paper in it, and, BOOM, write. Even, Saroyan said, if all you wrote was gibberish. You know like: "I flew into a charming rage this morning as I gulp the winds from the primary bulb that firmed in terra firma for a foreign number of calliope strains...." or even, "Brrrrr. Guzimond peedo impdkline=de90 dillicuss t8i marge eetlk...." At least you are writing. Writing being the demon that keeps you living. Living being our most valuable source of pleasure. Pleasure the only reason we're living. Pleasure that will take our minds off the fact that being alive means we're on death row. The planet's death row. That's why we human beings are so angry at Mother Nature--the jungle from which we sprang--though, just think, since the originals of us sprang from the sea, there's a little saltiness in all of our instincts.

And all writers are writing about and of themselves. All writers, especially those of great success, are egomaniacal to the point if they peter out they'd rather be dead than living.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler


ONLY THE GODS KNOW WHEN WE WILL BE BACK ON LINE AGAIN.
Back in late November, we signed up for Verizon DSL high-speed Internet service. From Day 1 the service started falling apart. The first thing that happened was our phone was shut off and we were told there was a cable break in our neighborhood and that the break would be fixed on December 5, almost two weeks away. Turned out we didn't have phone service for 8 days--and then it came back on. Everything was fine then and we were high-flying in high gear for a week or so when one fine morning, ZAP, the phone line went dead and the Internet connection service went dead, too. Since then, for two weeks now, we have had neither phone or Internet connection. This time Verizon says the problem is the line into our building, which they said a service person would be coming to our building on December 30th. This person never showed so as we enter this new year, the only way we'll be able to get on line is to go to our favorite Irish Pub and use their WiFi or to the public library. In the meantime, we are referring this matter to the NY Public Utilities Commission--and also we are currently searching for a replacement connection service. Rumor has it that this DSL service is run out of India. Enough said.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler--until further notice.

HAPPY NEW YEAR anyway!

The Daily Growler Visits the Monkey House

Foto by tgw, New York City 2011
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Say Goodbye to: Bob Brookmeyer. I first heard of Bob Brookmeyer through his work with Jimmy Guiffre, a Dallas cat and North Texas graduate who was one of my early-times jazz mentors. Jimmy hired Bobby I believe after Ralph Pena his bass player quit his working band ("The Train and the River")--I first HEARD Bob on a Storyville LP called Morning Fun I bought directly from Storyville's offices in Boston (George Wein started Storyville Records) featuring Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims, with Hank Jones on piano, Bill Crow (he's enjoyed the Growler at least once) on bass, and Papa Jo Jones on drums. Bob after awhile was consistently high up on the Down Beat Miscellaneous Instrument division of their popularity polls because he didn't play a trombone, he played a valve trombone--that put him in the company of the great Don Elliott and his Mellophone and a newcomer out of Indianapolis named Roland Kirk whose miscellaneous instruments were the Manzello and Stritch. Bobby Brookmeyer has left the coil at 81. I'm right now listening to he and Zoot playing Basie's "The King" from that Storyville LP (reissued in the 90s on a Black Lion CD out of Germany). Bob Brookmeyer, 81, American jazz valve trombonist.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Making Monkeys Out of Monkeys
I was thinking, what if nobody showed up to vote in a presidential election? Wouldn't that be great! President Obama gets 0 votes. Newtie Gingrich gets 0 votes. Or what if say only 30 people in the whole USA showed up to vote and they wrote in Adolph Hitler's name, would Hitler be declared president? By the Supreme(ly dumb) Court? How would that work?

I mean, you talk about monkeys acting like monkeys. I'm sorry, folks, but I can't vote for any of these fools that are being trotted out as wholesome honest men with holier-than-thou visions, including the better-at-being-G.W. Bush-than-G.W. Bush-was President Obama. This man's a two-faced dog (my apologies to Cecil the Dog-faced Boy III of Lake Flaccid fame). They talk about a Mormon-idiot like Mitt Romney and a pig-jowled idiot like Newtie Gingrich flip-flopping like scared-shitless just-hooked fishes (calm down, boys, maybe Jesus Christ'll serve you up at the next Sermon-on-the-Mount get-together), but what about President Obama's flip-flopping? Check out his promises in 2008. Check out his recent flip-flopping on vetoing this insulting 600-billion-dollar 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)... Come on, the guy is a lying dog, same as all the rest of them.

Hey, the War in Iraq is over! (Yes, F. Scott, I am laughing at my own joke.) Osama bin Laudin is dead. The jobless rate is down! (Yes, F. Scott, I am laughing at my own joke.) The economy is recovering! The banks have been successfully bailed out and back to their old pirating tactics of ruining world economies again, Praise this God who keeps blessing this country. And Goldman-Sachs, the true rulers of the world, will be doling out some of the biggest bonuses in Goldman-Sachs crooked history that dates back all the way to the Civil War. Goldman-Sachs criminals, like Robert Rubin, will be garnering multimillions in bonuses in just a few weeks. Goldman-Sachs pretty much rules the USA right now, too, with its dick-boy Timmy Guethner as head of the Treasury and another of their dick-boys as head of the Federal Reservs, which in secret has doled out upwards of 26 trillion--did you get that figure?--26 TRILLION dollars in secret funds to both US crooked banks and foreign crooked banks.

Goldman-Sachs rules the world. The current phony heads of Greece and Italy--bankrupt countries--are Goldman-Sachs Europe executives. There is currently, ironically in terms of from whence came Goldman-Sachs, a Nazi-fication of Europe going on in terms of Germany now powerful again and holding a new reign over the current falling apart of the European Union--Great Britain--totally bankrupt if truth be known--is threatening to pull out of the Union. Why all this trouble? It all started when these countries fell into line with both of G.W. Bush's phony invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. And I still say our invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan was just as phony as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which our current Commander in Chief is now going about the country tooting his tin horn in declaring that war as being over (yeah sure)--he is in full campaign mode now--praising our BRAVE TROOPS--those bold brave volunteers--those hearty American boys who it has been shown through secret documents found in an Iraq garbage can this week went about murdering Iraqi men, women, and children as a kind of sport--military records showing one bunch of wild-spreeing brave troopers stopping cars at check points and if the cars had children in them these jerks shot the children in the heads and then let the cars go on through. Wow, come on, Commander in Chief Bush...er-ah, sorry, I mean Commander in Chief Obama, give those brave troops medals of honor! (Yes, F. Scott, I am laughing at my own joke!)

Like Gary Null, I can't watch any of these idiot debates or speeches they are so beneath me in terms of several phases, one being in terms of culture and nobility, that if I do watch such bullshit I tend to watch it the same way we kids used to go out to the Fair Park Zoo Monkey House and mock our monkey relatives to the point some of the more sensible ones had learned how to shoot the bird at us and others to turn their rear ends toward us and then whip around and throw a handful of monkey feces at us. Newtie "the Family Man" Gingrich, Mitt "the Mormon" Romney, Ron "the Super Libertarian" Paul, Rick "Dog Fucker" Sanitorium, Michelle "Chimpy" BachMANN, and yes even Barack Hussein Obama, to me are nothing but political monkeys putting on a monkey house show for the stupidest monkeys in all the zoos, We the People Monkeys of the USA.

The 99% vs. the 1%--that's bullshit. It's more like the 50% vs. the 50%. Remember, G.W. Bush, the worst president ever up until Obama came into the White Man's Monkey House, got almost 50% of the vote in his two fraudulent runs for president. Remember, Rick Perry wasn't chosen by God to be one of the worst governors ever of Texas (the state with a history of horrible and crooked governors) but was elected overwhelmingly by the good citizens of Texas. Michelle Bachmann didn't fuck her way into Congress, her Minnesota constituents evidently love her and her idiotic reasoning enough to trust her as their representative. The Repugnicans didn't take over the House of Representatives by not getting the majority of votes in their bailiwicks. Anthony Weiner, the Brooklyn Democratic jack-off meister, a very "Liberal" dude, was replaced by his constituents with a rightwing Repubnican. Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin, didn't just fly into office on angel wings. Hell no, a majority of Wisconsin cheese-heads put him in office. In most of the United States states, Liberals, Commies, al-Queda, Hippies, Atheists, Anarchists, Progressives are all seen negatively. Why do you think Dumbocrats try so hard not to be seen as Liberals? Why do you think the Democratic Party advised Obama to steer clear of Roosevelt New Deal tactics? Even here in New York City where we are now absolutely living in a Corporate-Police state, a majority of voters keep electing this billionaire bastard originally from Boston mayor creep who is literally rezoning this city to please his billionaire hedge-fund and private equity buddies--this little Napoleonic-complex "girly" man who, I swear, is going to declare himself Mayor of New York City for Life next time it comes time for him to step aside and give us a chance to try a new mayor for awhile, though, more than likely, we'll elect one of the same old kind we've always elected, and I give you: Jimmy Walker, William O'Dwyer, John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Ed Crotch (I can't call him Koch), David Dinkins, Rudolph "Mussolini" Giuliani, and now Mayor Mikey Bloomberg. What a stupid bunch of men. New York State since I moved here in 1969 as a wide-eyed true believer in New York City as being the culture center of the USA (boy was I surprised) has been constantly broke--and the City has been broke--and taxes and rents and everything have gone up to where New York State is the most expensive state in the Union.

So, what if nobody voted in the upcoming Presidential election? What would these little phony elitists do?

And currently our Congress is voting overwhelmingly (a unified Congress) to take away several more of our Constitutional rights through this new 600-billion-dollar the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill that is giving our Commander in Chief the right to declare the USA a combat zone (in the Holy War on Terror) and thereby use for the first time in our history the US military as his enforcement organization (he's already using unmanned drones in this country) to go about arresting and shipping off to Guantanamo (didn't President Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo?) where they can be locked up and the key thrown away any US citizen our President (and his SS goons) decides is a terrorist sympathizer (al-Queda and the Taliban are the underlined devils in terms of key terrorist organizations), enemy combatant, or anti-administration protester.

So why vote to reelect so two-faced a man as Barack Obama? And certainly nobody in his or her RIGHT mind would vote for Newtie Gingrich (check out his pig jowls). Let me do a little soothsaying and say, I'll bet you, Barack Obama is a puppet--I'll bet you a hill of fresh doughnuts, he does whatever these corporate puppetmeisters who have their hands up his ass tell him to do. Obama is just another George W. Bush. Who's really running this country? Why, Goldman-Sachs, that's who.

So there. I'm not voting for these fools. Shit, I'd rather go underground--like the best of the anarchical hippies and Yippies did. Hey, Angela Davis, you're still around, how come you're not very active anymore? Tom Hayden, where are you, dude?

Orwell.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Anarchy Issue of The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Man Returns

From the Algae-Crammed Waters of Lake Flaccid, New York, Comes The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Man: barabbas munn-dayne
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And a hearty Winter Solstice to you one and all. This is the time of year you live off the profits you made from your abundant fall harvest. Fearing invasion and occupation of my cabin, I went into town yesterday to Aunt Milly's Tea Room and Backroom Gun Dealership and looked at pistols. I've got my shotgun still, but I don't know, I feel like I ought to have a pistol. I know...I know, I've been watching too much teevee here lately--and in the shows I've been watching everybody has a damn pistol or firearm of some sort, men and women, cops and criminals and terrorists, no matter. Also, I'm being affected by what's predicted coming our way. Like, according to some folks [and recent Growler posts], OK, so they're atheistic mad scientists and gurus and such, but anyway they're saying that as soon as next year we humans are gonna get hit by a herd-like galloping of solar flares (plasma) as the Sun, our true God, is at its maximum belly full in terms of its heat being turned up to maximum high, expanding its belly until it lets out a mighty burp--which propels out these flying tongues of flaming plasma and this time the storms created by this plasma blowing out into the universe are aimed directly at the good ole USA. Afterwards, these predictors say, there will be a Holy Disorderly Order of Chaos where we'll all be fighting over survival issues like food, water, safety, or vulnerability. I'd feel better in such a circumstance if I had an equalizer.

I know, conspiracy folks, fanatics, doomsday clowns...the end of human life as we know it coming--if not via solar-flare-plasma storms then by the Sumerian-predicted ancient planet's remains hitting us dead center--bull's-eye head on--and thus, as those Sumerian astronomers predicted, the human race will be exterminated.

I remember back when President and Alzheimer's Poster Boy Raygun Reagan, our grade B actor president, the Great Communicator, had his shaky finger on that red telephone in the oval office. The red telephone with the red button on it--isn't that the way it worked?--Ronnie hits that red button and Armageddon begins--and back then I imagined old Ronnie Reagan waking up in the middle of the night in a bit of an Alzheimer fog and imagining the Soviets had fired a missile at the White House--"Mommy, wake up, help me down to the Ovaltine office so I can get on that red phone and warn the Air Force, like I did in...Mommy, what was that movie where I was an Air Force hero?...er-ah...." "Oh, Ronnie, relax, take a shot of that Aricept, you've had another nightmare...what was it this time, that I was bangin' Frank Sinatra behind your back?" And in those days I was thinking, "Yes, Mr. President, you fool, go ahead, push the red button, end human life for ever"--and I wanted to be wide-eyed and bushy tailed when that big red glow appeared in the night sky marking the nuclear end to mankind. I want to witness the end of my kind. A world left to cockroaches.

Aunt Milly showed me the couple of handguns she had left. "They been hittin' me hard in the handgun department. I got some choice assault rifles over here if you'd rather." "No, Aunt Milly, I was thinking more like a Glock." "Tell you what I can do. I gotta contact in the New York City Military Police Department who obtains, that's the word he uses for it, me Glocks at way under wholesale." "What, are they hot?" "Naw, nothin' illegal. They're confiscated off Black guys, raids on Black hip-hop clubs, you know, those boys in blue have ways of gettin' 'em." "What do you get for a Glock?" "Tell ya, what, Barabbas, my boy, since I knew your mom and pop, tell ya what I can do, give me four-hundred smackers on this barrelhead here and I'll have you a Glock by next week. You'll want one around this time of year. Lotta truckers come through here lookin' for folks to kill as a hobby."

There was no arguing with Aunt Milly. That's why I didn't tell her there's no way she could have known my mother and father since not only have they never been up here but they've been dead 30 years now.

The passage of time is amazing to me. How slow time passes when we're young. How ironic is it that time passes faster the older we get--the closer we get to the end of our time.

My father and mother would not have approved of my getting a weapon. My dad always requoted over and over the cliche "if you own a pistol, one day you're gonna have to use it." Of course it's when you don't own one that you need one the most.

As I left Aunt Milly's through the tea room, she hollered after me, "If you need some trainin' on handlin' a Glock, I'm startin' a new firearms class next Wednesday night out at the Big Chief's Shootin' Range. Your Glock ought to be in by then so come on out. We have a ball shootin' our firearms out there, plus there's cold beer and a stick of salami and some brewer's bread from Uncle Don Shines's bakery over by Mount Vanhoevenberg."

As I was leaving the tea room, I noticed a sign on Aunt Milly's bulletin board. It said, "Remember, Dr. Donald Smedley's Pansies Are the Finest Pansies in These Parts for You Pansy Lovers."

I putted on back out to the lake and my cabin. Got cold as Hades over night up here. Temperature was 22 on my back porch early this morning. Winter up here is not bad. The lake doesn't smell as bad as it does in the summer--oh, it still smells, but the cold air keeps the smell low-level, like swamp gas stays hovering just above its watery surface. Getting lonely up here; I miss a woman. There, I've confessed on line. I haven't had a woman in my arms since Cecil the Dog Faced Boy III's sister visited up here from Florida...Jeez, speaking of time flying by...2 years ago now--and still, no one's heard a word from Cecil. His house is still boarded up--though some pranksters did paint swastikas all over the boards--why swastikas, nobody up here knows. Unless it's the Native Americans doin' it. Cecil wasn't Jewish, though, hell, maybe he was. I never even considered that.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jots & Tittles

--It's hard to believe that Newtie Gingrich has suddenly rearisen back to the top of the GOP presidential ladder. Newt "the Family Man" Gingrich, a total phony wholly devoted to representing the Military Industrial Complex, Newtie's home district back in Gawjah being home to Martin-Marietta and Lockheed...or have they merged yet?...anyway, Newtie gets his millions of back-room payoffs every year from those big parasitical defense contractors who couldn't exist without We the People of the USA (the true 99%) surrendering one-quarter of our earnings (without ever seeing it) every year to the US government via the IRS out of which Congress just recently voted 600 billion to the Department of Defense. I mean can you imagine what 600 billion dollars looks like? And what it would buy in terms of getting us out of debt or putting those of us out of work back into some kind of wage-earning position, even if it's digging ditches or shoveling shit. Six hundred billion is ten times more billions than Little Billy Gates is worth or Old Good Ole Boy Warren Buffett is worth; why that's 5 times more than Gates and Buffett's combined billions. And you talk about a draft-dodging coward of a John McCain type; and, yes, like McCain, Newtie's a philanderer, a crook, a purveyor of fabulous reasoning (Palestinians are an invented people); yet, he is now being seriously discussed as a serious candidate on the commercial-pap teevee politico shows--and I'm sure Newtie was the center of conversation on all the Sunday morning politico (right-wing) shows.

--Obama showed up at the Army-Navy football game Saturday--those two second-rate college football teams playing 60 minutes of high-school football while the President did his photo op at midfield with Good Ole Joe, Joe Biden, just back from a junket to Iraq, tagging along, smiling, waving, everything hunkie-dory in their "we hit a gold-mine" lives. And then our compassionate president and second-term presidential candidate praised our fighting men and women for their brave victories against world terrorism--and I'm thinking, but wait a minute, Mister President, you mean you consider the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan successes? How are our troops heroes? They were totally and feebly unsuccessful at stopping 20-plus drunk-the-night-before Saudi-Arabians wielding box-cutters as weapons from attacking us within our borders on September 11, 2001 and blowing down both World Trade Center architectural-tacky towers. Where were these American heroes that day? Obama may as well give the Medal of Honor to Commander in Chief George W. Bush who has to be a hero if our troopers are heroes.

--Did you ever wonder how many people die in automobile accidents every year in the USA? Here's the figures for 2007, from the Census Bureau:

Table 1067. Motor Vehicle Accidents—Number and Deaths: 2007
Motor vehicle accidents 10.6 Million
Deaths within 30 days:
Passenger cars . . . . . . . . . . . . 16,500
Light trucks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12,400
Motorcycle riders . . . . . . . . . . . 5,200
Pedestrians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,700

Notice: That's "Deaths within 30 days," which means those figures are how many folks died in car accidents per month in 2007. Which means around 430,000 people in the USA died in automobile accidents in 2007. Do you know how many people die from drug overdoses in this country per year? I recall years ago in Harper's Magazine's list of ironies they used to run, they showed a statistic that showed only 5 people had died from a cocaine overdose one year; yet that same year we spent like 60 billion dollars on the War on Drugs--always headed up, by the way, by an ex-military high-ranking goon. Ex-generals, by the way, make out a bit of alright when it comes to military retirement pay, pensions, quarters pay, health care, plus more than likely they'll get a multi-million-a-year job with a big Military Industrial Complex contractor or they'll land a job with a lobbying firm representing the Military Industrial Complex.

---US cops are being trained in Israel. Why are We the People of the USA so in awe of Israel? OK, I know it's not politically correct to say anything negative about the Jews in general which includes Israel, Zionism, Israel's having a nuclear weapon arsenal, Israel's now being the longest foreign occupier of a sovereign nation in history--Palestine, which they've occupied now for 63 years. And, yes, I read where New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly has been to Israel more than 20 times to study their police and military methods of continuing to occupy Palestine and laying siege to the Gaza Strip--especially inviting one of the most brutal Israel policemen ever, a dude named Dichter, to New York City to give Mayor Mike Bloomberg's 56,000-man ARMY terrorist training--a dude whose spies in Gaza told him that a Palestinian rebel was sleeping in an apartment building--what should they do? Dichter said, blow the place to smithereens. They replied, but, sir, it's a big apartment building, hundreds of families live there, children.... Dichter said, blow it away, so we kill a few Palestinian dogs along with this terrorist bastard...blow that motherfucker down. So the Israeli Army blew the building down--yes, Praise Yahweh (Allah), they killed the Palestinian rebel (how dare he mean terror toward the kindly Jewish people), but they also killed 8 Palestinian children, 30 some-odd adults, and left 150 people injured and homeless and desperate. Israel's cops and military are more Naht--zee...BUT, oh no, you can't say that can you?

--Sergei Khrushchev... yes, that's right, that old Soviet Khrushchev relation, his son, Sergei. Bet you didn't know that Sergei was or still is a Professor at Brown University on the Providence Plantation.

--On a recent PBS "Secrets of the Dead" episode on the Battle for Stalingrad during World War II--deeply impressive in terms of the horror of WAR. I mean these people had graphic film footage of that battle from both the Nazi side and the Soviet side. Hitler wanted to make a big impression on Uncle Joe Stalin by demolishing the city named after him. But the Soviet forces proved more valiant and defiant than Hitler ever figured. I mean, folks, you watch the footage of this rather large city being bombed off the face of the earth by the German Luftwaffe--the Germans had a camera trained on Stalingrad from across the Volga and you can visually see its once gleaning white buildings being one by one bombed back to the Stone Age. Then the cameras inside the city show bodies every where, pieces of bodies, burnt bodies, smoldering bodies--of the thousands of people living in Stalingrad at the time, only a handful survived. Millions of troops and civilians died in this brutal winter fighting, in the snow and ice and storms--yet these human beings went on destroying and killing and maiming and the Germans captured so many Soviet soldiers they couldn't care for them and kept them in outdoor pens without water or food--and as the German soldiers starved and froze to death, so did those Soviet prisoners. I mean, I can't imagine such slaughter happening in this country; yet, I know damn good and well it surely could one day happen here. Watch that god-damn docudrama--in the PBS show "Secrets of the Dead" archives.

Stalingrad during the Battle of Stalingrad thanks to 3.bp.blogspot.com/

--Progress should spell an end to wars, but it doesn't. No, it ironically makes wars more deadly than before.

--Progesterone--is an anti-brain-aging supplement.

--Women farmers: Of the 3.5 million farmers still left in this country, a million of them are women. Women own 14% of some 2 million farms. Women farmers, per male prerogatives, are discriminated against when it comes to getting loans from the U.S. government.

--Ortega y Gasset wrote: "For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The indivdual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his 'ideas' are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."

--Why stop quoting him?: Ortega y Gasset wrote: "Blood, language, and common past are static principles, fatal, rigid, inert; they are prisons."

--Merrill-Lynch (and yes they did lynch a hell of a lot of us) is being allowed to transfer its derivatives debt onto the failing Bank of America--thereby pushing the debt onto We the People of the USA.

--Albert Pujols--shit yes he left the World Champion Cardinals for the worthless Los Angeles Angels (once the California Angels and Anaheim Angels) and a 5-year deal giving him $254 million bucks. Can you imagine, a baseball player being worth 254 million bucks--$77 million bucks a year? Good for Albert though. He is a great one--though how much you bet he'll DH in the American League--quit playing first base. Maybe I'm wrong. And, hell yes, I would have bailed on the Cardinals, too, though I can't imagine why if he's worth $254 million to the LA Angels, why wasn't he worth maybe $260 million to the Cardinals? Tony LaRussa's retiring, so maybe Albert knows something we don't know about the Cardinals's future. The administration of baseball is run by corporate-crook speculators who invest in these teams as a hobby. Most of them aren't aware of the beauty of the sport.

--In a Sestra commercial: a smiling mid-30-ish actress looks at the camera and says, "In a matter of minutes...(heavy breathing)...I WAS THERE." Where was Sestra when I was a Casanova? I remember being romantically involved with a young woman years ago on our first night to be so involved and as we got undressed and climbed into her bed, she said, "There's a tube of Prolong in the nightstand there if you're the kind of man who needs it." And thus my Heights went a Withering.

--A Verse from Elmer Snowedin (thedailygrowlerpoetlaureate):

Those Who Believe

Those who believe
will believe anything
and anything they'll believe
others follow and believe
and believers all believe
and what is believed
is unbelievable.

--------------------------------------------
A short but pleasurable return from me,

barabbusmunn-dayne,thethedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman
for The Blue Monday Edition of The Daily Growler

The End of Mankind Is Inevitable...SO WHAT?

Foto by tgw, "The Sun Over Manhattan," New York City 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Say Goodbye to: Hubert Sumlin, the Wolf Man's guitar player back in the good ole days of the ripe days of the Chicago blues--After Chester Burnett died in '76, Hubert went out on his own, coming to New York City in the 1980s and 90s and working around town with many of the local White blues musicians, including many Daily Growler acquaintances.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The End of the World
I've been reading an article over on the Signs of the Times (SOTT.org) about how close we are to extinction due to a series of cosmic catastrophic events that are predicted to soon descend upon us by those who devote their lives to studying such supposedly scientifically deduced probabilities. We have survived fairly safely as an animal specie for millions of years now (my apologies to devout Christians who say we aren't but about 6,000 years old, using Holy Babble mathematics and astronomy, this same mathematics and astronomy that told us the Christian-Judaic God Jehovah (Yahweh/Allah) stopped the sun from going around the earth for an hour or so back in the days of the fabled Joshua, yes, the one who "fit de battle of Jericho"). Currently, I would off-the-top-of-my-head approximate that several million of us a year die from a cataclysmic catastrophe--an earthquake; a tsunami; a volcanic eruption; wild fires; famine; drought. In China alone, I wouldn't be surprised to find millions die every year from some form of NATURAL catastrophe. And I emphasize that NATURAL.

This form of human extinction is due to begin sooner than we think, according to this study in SOTT [Mr Ed: Please note, the article under discussion was written and published on Signs of the Time in 2007]. Gary Null on his Progressive Radio Network has been shouting from his Upper West Side Manhattan rooftop for the past several months warning us about these solar plasma storms predicted to hit us as soon as fall 2012. This is the same year, December 21, 2012, the Revelationists are promoting as Doomsday (due to a planet discovered in Sumerian literature that is headed on a direct bull's-eye course toward the earth that is, again according to Sumerian astrological time, scheduled to collide with the earth in 2012--also, December 21, 2012, coincides with the ending of the Mayan calendar)--Revelationist prophets who are the religious fanatics who follow the astronomical science found in the Christian Holy Babble New Testament ramblings of a crazed Saint John the Divine, obviously an early-day schizophrenic, who was exiled to the wild-isle of Patmos by the Greeks after he was caught pandering his brand of threatening Christianity against the Paganist Greeks and their divine authority. Seems the Greeks gave in to Big John's pleas for at least some quills and ink and paper--or had the pencil been discovered by then?--anyway, Johnny got his writing tools and in isolation on this snake-infested piece of despicable land (what did he eat, I wonder?) he set down how he predicted the world would end--resulting in the Christian New Testament Book of Revelations and the coming of Apocalypse Now.

The Island of Patmos...today.

All prophecies lead eventually to doom. Even in my role as a qualified soothsayer--based on my Sociologist focusing, my Gestalt eye that measures the societal environment in which I'm casually struggling to survive--all I can prophesy for the future (that nonexistent place in our hopes) is Chaos. By adopting the principles of the Beat generation and Be-bop culture back in the early fifties when I was maturing faster than the average kids I developed and found myself emulating what was considered The Cool. And along with my cynically brilliant and angrily growling cohort-friend, my life-time best friend, the Quantitative Physics genius who I met during a beating session after school one afternoon in junior high and who became my parallel-lined twin human-animal-hybrid phenomenon brother. This lover of Dostoevsky as a high schooler--this guy I used to read Havelock Ellis with and later Freud with and George Gamov's Birth and Death of the Sun with. Together we advanced en garde well ahead of our peers--and as teenagers we lived the Beat life to the hilt, the cool life, a life based on total liberty, Beat libertarianism, from deep out of Voltaire's Enlightenment preachings, though not to the point of wearing berets and smoking pipes like Ralph J. Gleason, one of the original hippies, a San Francisco newspaper columnist who later became the chief sponsor and promoter of the famous 1964 Monterrey Jazz Festival that gave us Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix jamming the "Stars Spangled Banner," and the amazing music, I think, of John Handy and Michael White [Mr. Ed: Ralph J. Gleason was also one of the founders of Rolling Stone]...but I let myself get sidetracked...hey, life's so damn fascinating, but spinning out so fast, I find myself even while writing racing with my biological clock, which is pretty much in sync with my 60-year-old Bulova Automatic wristwatch, that keeper of human-invented time based on Norwegian gods and Caesars and the Sun and the Moon--humans are so damn weird.

I claim I am a member of the Beat generation, though I'm not really...yes, I'm pretending to be, though I have a right of saying I'm a Beat since I was as I mentioned above so advanced beyond my own generation, a generation I've many times named the Lost Generation, the generation between the Beats and the Pepsi generation--the Me generation--but as a member of the Beat generation, our fear of extinction was evident in the Atomic bomb. In fact, for a short while my bunch were called Atomic Bomb babies...but soon the Hydrogen bomb came along and made the A-Bomb blase...the almighty Hydrogen bomb the Nutty Professor Edward Teller's proud invention...and I used to look at that old ragged-ass fool Teller spouting his hatred of life and projecting that hatred onto human beings by thinking of himself as a god, a god with the power formulated in his head of how to blow the human race and all its relatives and other above-ground animals off the face of the earth. Such power! And it's all about power. POWER. POW. A smack in the kisser or a Prisoner of War.

War is now salvation. And while these savior wars carry on and on, Gary Null and a bunch of progressive scientists and commentators are bullhorning their warnings, their tilting points--or turning points--their warnings of climate change affecting our worldwide water supplies, to the point on that point alone we're facing extinction. We can't live without water, or, Christians, am I wrong? [Mr. Ed: The Wolf Man forgets his Christianity. All the true believers have to do to get fresh water is strike a rock and the water flows miraculously gushing and freshly deliciously free, satisfying beyond holy belief.... I'm being signaled that if I don't quit this bracketed interruption I'll be reminded that President Obama this week OK'd the slaughtering of horses for their consumable meat.]

Warring for water is the next big World War. Invading and occupying countries with enormous aquifers under them (of which there are very few left, the world's largest aquifer under Brazil fastly drying up)--or invading and occupying ice-islands like Greenland so we can chop them up into blocks of freshwater ice and then truck it via huge plastic bags down off the East Coast where they'll sell those Greenland icebergs to cities for their temporary water supplies.

I am pretty sure somewhere in this world of scientific laboratories, some mad scientist is working on a way to strike rocks and bring forth waters. "God won't let us die of thirst." Yet when Jesus Christ asked for a little water for his thirst while giving up the ghost on a Roman execution device, he was given vinegar. "I asked her for a little drink of water and she gave me turpentine." I remember the woman a decade or so ago whose lover took her out on a sailboat into the Atlantic where he then proceeded to fall overboard leaving the woman alone on the ship, sailing wildly around the Atlantic for days--finally being rescued after an unbearably long time at sea without food or WATER. How did she survive? By drinking her own piss. Or how about the little Haitian girl who was trapped in the earthquake rubble for months who survived by drinking the blood of the people dead around her. Imagine the stench, as Somerset Maugham might have written.

And Somerset Maugham's choice as the writer who wrote the best prose ever, Voltaire, has now walked back into my life, having been out of my life for many years since the last time I read Candide. Voltaire the true Libertarian. The man who said he didn't see much difference in good and evil--and in some instances, he said, a man's evil side, like his greediness, or craving for power, might contribute some good to society.

Quoting Mr. Voltaire
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."

"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."

" In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give it to the other. "

Like Candide
I in forgetting my Candide, I also forgot the lesson of that great bundle of great humorous writing--forgetting the basis of my Sociological background--that in spite of downfalls and abuses and absurdities and cruelties and hard times and oppression and murder and threat and catastrophe, one MUST stay POSITIVE.

So, as our extinction arrives, STAY POSITIVE. As Fats Waller said, "One never knows, do one?"

theenlightenedgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

A Little Taste of American Art:

A blog entry for a Daily Growler Hall of Fame Artist, a pal, Nicholas Egon Jainschigg

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

My shirt--Up Now!

That is to say November 30th, since some of you may work for employers discontinuing email in favor of Tweets.

As some of you may know, I got asked to do a design for an art project by a Netherlandish T-shirt company and I rolled out an idea I'd been contemplating for a while: the Indulgences. The design and the Indulgence are attached, in case you're someone who's been within three or so meters of me in the last decade and I haven't explained it to you, in detail, with hand-waving and visual aids.

In any event, the day of its exposure draws nigh, and for those of you curious about the design, or for those of you with a spare $499.00 (Shipping Included) for a T-shirt of unparalleled artistry, or for those of you curious about what sort of being might actually contemplate the outlay of $499.00 for a T-shirt of any degree of artistry up to and surpassing Michelangelic if it didn't contain sufficient DNA evidence to guarantee a hefty out-of-court settlement,may I direct your browser to:

http://sequoiatees.com/

Existentially Existing in the Police State of New York City

Foto by tgw, "Moon Over Manhattan," New York City 2011
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Say Goodbye to: Christa Wolf...a wolf person...a writer I have never read but investigated after a friend told me about her being one of her favorite writers and that she had just died in Berlin December 1st. In checking Christa's Wikipedia bio, I find her interesting enough to now read--she was from a German family living in Poland when after WWII her family was forced to move back to Germany, back into the Democratic Republic of Germany--East Germany, where she became a good Socialist though critical of the DRG leadership. It sounds like a fascinating life--and her book that sounds interesting to me is what's referred to simply as Christa "I". After German reunification, she continued as a Socialist until the 1990s, and she was highly criticized by (West) German critics for some of the roles she played while an East German. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_Wolf
--------------------------------------------
Losing Myself in My Books
Those who write books also read books. God, I hope so. Can you imagine a writer who's never read a book? The one "writer" who comes directly to mind is George W. Bush, our two-term faux never-honestly-elected president. This same faux president who followed the script of the Neo-Con Manifesto to a mindless tee, the mandate that not only called for a downgrading of the US dollar and a drive-to-the-bottom of the U.S. economy but also for a series of invasions and occupations that has led us into this "endless" War on Terror. George W. Bush wrote a book but I'll bet you a pile of organic horse manure he never even read his own book [Mr. Ed.: The Wolf Man forgot about Georgie Porgie reading My Pet Goat].

I am keeping an eye out on politics though I hate politics now and am doing my damnedest to ignore it (or them), though such ignorance could spell my future demise due to the latest anti-American action from Congress, a 600-billion-dollar Department of Defense spending bill that includes a tacked-on addendum that gives our president and future presidents the power to decide whether even U.S.A. citizens can be deemed enemy combatant terrorists--those especially who support al-Queda, a group I thought had been pretty much assassinated and drone-flight murdered out of existence, though our Congress is still quivering in its boots over this little bunch of spoiled-brat Islamic fanatics who if they ever did exist as a terrorist organization they did so under the constant eye of our CIA (G.W.H. "Pappy"Bush was once head of the CIA) and the Israeli Mossad and certainly whose organization and power and whereabouts were known among the Bush Family Circle since Osama's step-brother Prince Bandar bin Ladin (you don't hear much about Bandar anymore) was so close to this family circle they dubbed him Prince Bandar Bush. This new executive-order privilege given our presidents means that the CIA or the FBI or now the U.S. Army (for the first time in US history a "national" unit of the US Army is assigned combat duty in the USA) can go to the president and get a secret back-room meeting with him where they can give him a list of "untrustworthy" U.S. citizens who these spying institutions believe are heading internal "terrorist" organizations or believe they are aiding and abetting other-world terrorist organizations--especially the evilest of them all, our own made-up (by the CIA) al-Queda. Our president can then personally decide which of these so-called U.S.-citizen terrorists are enemy combatants (loyal to al-Queda (the overall catch-all terrorist group)) and by executive order can then order these U.S. citizens busted, shackled, taken into custody, and shipped immediately to Guantanamo prison (didn't Obama say he was going to close Guantanamo?) where they'll be held without charges, without documented evidence, without any hope at a trial, to certainly be waterboarded a couple'a hundred times, and then locked away for good, the key thrown away and the USA saved from an eventual terrorist attack (didn't Obama say upon closing Guantanamo all those poor bastards would get U.S. civilian trials in this country?). Tonto was right, "Paleface speak with forked tongue."

I mean the more I write about politics, the more ridiculous and vehement I get--these overrich White male and Michelle "I Went to Oral Roberts Holy Law School" Bachmann scumbags whose agendas are out to ruin our lives and, by golly, they're doing a damn good job of it, while they live and play the billionaire way, traveling at their leisure around the world, attending all kinds of secret conferences and meetings and forming foundations, like Slick Willie Clinton, that worthless piece of crap (I stole that defining phrase from Grandpa Al Lewis), now the wealthiest ever ex-President, said to now be worth over 200 million dollars. Slick Willie who along with G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush (Bill once announced that Pappy was his new best friend) got their greedy little backwards-thinking hands on several billions of dollars to aid the tsunami victims (remember that tsunami that wiped 200,000 human beings off the face of the planet?), aid that never really got to those people--aid that ended up in both of these ex-President's foundations or libraries or World Affairs Councils. And then Slick Willie teamed up under Obama's orders with G.W. "Spoiled Brat" Bush as U.S. overseers at rebuilding Haiti, this little pair of crooks given billions in aid money for Haiti, aid money that so far hasn't reached the Haitians, 300,000 of whom were wiped off the planet by that earthquake we no longer read or hear a damn thing about and another 100,000 or so killed by a cholera epidemic brought about by foreign soldiers (UN troops) patrolling their streets and byways and raping their young girls, etc. Hey, so these ex-President assholes rake off the tops of these "rescue" funds a few million bucks, justifying it as personal expenses, you know, for air travel, for office expenses, for assistants and cohorts and secretaries and mail-room boys. What a racket!

I look about my cluttered apartment. I'm looking at a large pile of books stacked under the table on which I keep my LAN-line phone (oh how the big communications companies want to dump LAN lines in favor of wireless and cell phones). I am suddenly (I know, I'm breaking one of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing) thinking of W. Somerset Maugham. Just like that I'm recalling a book of his. What the hell one was it? I'm querying myself--The Writer's Notebook? No. And I am mentally drawn to this stack of books, which I start sorting through, blowing the surface dust and grime off them--and there SUDDENLY near the bottom of that stack is the book I was imagining was in that stack, Maugham's The Summing Up. (You see, subconsciously I knew I had that book and I knew it had in it what I was needing to read at this moment in my ever-changing life.)

I pulled the book out of the stack and cleaned it off as best I could. It's a 1956 seventh printing of the Mentor Book paperback edition. It was falling apart. Completely unbound but still intact though wobbly and delicately so. I got out my U.S. Postal Service-approved mailing tape and taped the book back together as best I could and immediately (SUDDENLY), even as I was finishing taping it together, began reading it. Aha! I cried after only one paragraph! This is exactly the book I was imagining--a book in which I can avoid politics... BUT NO! Suddenly in those early pages I read:

"The English are a political nation and I was often asked to houses where politics were the ruling interests. I could not discover in the eminent statesmen I met there any marked capacity. I concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree of intelligence was needed to rule a nation. Since then I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have gained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary affairs of life and I have not often discovered in them either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination. At one time I was inclined to think that they owed their illustrious position only to their gift of speech, for it must be next door to impossible to rise to power in a democratic community unless you can catch the ears of the public; and the gift of speech, as we know, is not often accompanied by the power of thought" [pp. 6-7, The Summing Up, Mentor Books, 7th printing, 1956].

The pen (or in my case, the computer keyboard) is mightier than the sword. Maugham was quite a writer. He's quite a story in himself. His father was a lawyer assigned to the British Embassy in Paris, where Somerset was born and raised and went to school and learned to read and write and do math and stuff in French and yet English was his natural language, the one he learned not in school but just in everyday communications among his English-speaking parents, their friends, and his siblings. Both his parents died when Somerset was very young, his mother dying in childbirth when he was ten and his father dying when he was 14.

Maugham was a natural-born writer. He was compelled to write even though he knew nothing about Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing or Robert Graves's Reader Over My Shoulder. He set about teaching himself how to write.

"When I began to write I did so as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I took to it as a duck takes to water. I have never quite got over my astonishment at being a writer: there seems no reason for my having become one except an irresistible inclination, and I do not see why such an inclination should have arisen in me" [p. 12, ibid].

I, too, began to write as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I, too, took to it as a duck takes to water [breaking another of Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing]. I, however, was luckier than Maugham in that I did have a grandmother who not only was a librarian but a published writer, too, one novel and two books of poetry. Though I came to writing on my own--my first inclination was to be a musician--I did have the inclination for writing passed on to me by my grandmother who I grew up with as she spent her final years with my family, and as such, I heard her typing every morning on her latest attempts at poetry or novels.

Maugham's best book in my opinion? The Razor's Edge.

In the avoidance of politics and politicians...though how can you? I mean the idiocy of Herman "The House Boy Stud" Cain; the inane babblings of a dipstick like Newtie Gingrich; the inane babblings of Michelle "the Fucked Virgin" Bachmann; the lying-dog spoutings of derivatives-trading billionaire Mitt "The Mormon" Romney--I mean, what a Ship of Fools--though, listen to this bit of cynicism, that Ship may be sailing right into that Potomac yacht club's docks in November of next year. Remember, We the People of the USA haven't been too bright when it comes to picking which of the rich White men we elect as our presidents. From Truman through Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Gerald "Who Can't Chew Gum and Walk at the Same Time" Ford (unelected President), Jimmy "Peanut Farmer-Rocket Scientist" Carter, Ronald "Star Wars" Reagan, G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush, Slick Willie "I Did Not Have Sex With That Woman" Clinton, G.W. "Duh" Bush, and now Barack Obama (he turned out to favor his White side more than his Black--and don't forget, he's half White).

Even with another chance to step up and take control of the world and switch it off the path to Chaos and put it on a track toward world unity, Obama will still wilt when he gets around tough White rich assholes, like the men he hires to be his consultants--like the CEO of General Electric--and that wasteful truly uncreative and stupid Supercommittee. As Somerset Maugham so distinctly put it: "Since then I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have gained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary affairs of life and I have not often discovered in them either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination."

Nothing changes...history repeats itself...Americans keep proving over and over how god-damn dumbass and stupid and riddled by fables and fairy tales we truly are.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Sunday Edition of The Daily Growler