New York City Living: With the Luck of the Irish

This was written on Saint Patrick's Day morning:
Foto by tgw, New York City, 2005
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Saint Patrick Rid Erin of Snakes. His Faithful Followers, However, Were a Total Failure at Ridding New York City of Snakes. Bealtaine bhfuil tú gach luck na Gaeilge. Tá gloine de Óir Jameson's a thabhairt duit go léir.
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Ah the Gaeilge are parading up Fifth Avenue--gayless this year I assume, though with a billionaire Jewish mayor in office you don't hear much pre-parade rumors anymore about St. Patrick's Day Parade squabbles, like are the Irish Gays and Lesbians going to be allowed to march?...or are the Irish Honoraries going to pick an old IRA terrorist as the parade's marshal this year...or an American-Irish teabagger?...or will there be a contingent of child-molesting Irish Catholic priests in this year's march?

Two thing's I won't be doin' t'day are, and these are for sure they are: first of all, I won't be attendin' the parade nor will I be watchin' it on the telly...and another thing's for sure, I won't be settin' foot within a mile of my favorite Irish Pub--though I could probably sneak into the dining room and hang with the staff while the rest of the joint was getting sloppy drunk, but, no, not even that. Hell, it's not that I couldn't mind be'n handlin' a couple'a shots of Jameson's Gold...or even a 12-year-old Jameson's, mind you. I'm not picky when it comes to Jameson's Irish whiskey. Why I even like the 5-year-old.

I'm a excommunicated Scotsman because I'm an Irish whiskey drinker and not drinkin' the blood of Jesus Christ himself they bottle in Scotland as Scotch whiskey. I hear me elders railing at me with so many brrrrrrrrs in their voices you have to listen carefully to understand them (i.e. Groundskeeper Willie on "The Simpsons"): "I suppose ye dunno eat haggis either, yew traitor to yeer klan...nor do yew put on the kilts, I assume, yew disgrace to the tartan of yeer father, a proud Campbell he were now spinnin' with disgrace in his grave."

My apologies to my Scottish forebears. In the defense of my Scottish side of my mixed-up family, I have drank myself stupid on Scotch before. Plus, I dated a young woman back in Dallas who drank a fifth of Teachers every day of her young life. Because of her addiction to Scotch at such a young age, she passed out every night after we made love--stone passed out--like a light--in another world. Thus she caused me to abandon her for her roommate, who became my first wife. What that relationship to Scotch whiskey has to do with my dishonoring my Scotch ancestry I can't tell you--I simply in a extemporaneous way thought of it while writing on this and thought I'd throw it in to add a little spice to the brew. It also gives me a chance to maybe bring it up again at a later date and expand on it.

Hell, I just got hit with another Scotch-drinkin'-woman story, again from my Dallas days.

I knew this woman, not a lover but a coworker--too old for me then--besides I suspected my girlfriend at the time was having a Lesbian affair with her--anyway, the first time they assigned me a case with this woman, she started calling me after work, after dinner, to talk about the case we were working on or to gossip about a rumor flying around the office, whatever. The first time she called me, we were talking along at a rapid clip when suddenly it seemed like the phone went dead. I clearly remember my reaction: I hollered into the phone...and nothing came back but silence. I hung up. I went off. Got a beer. Made a sandwich. Then decided to call my babe--yes, the girl I thought was having a Lesbian affair with this telephoning coworker. I picked up the phone and, damn, the line was still dead...there was no dial tone. I punched the god-damn phone buttons like hell trying to get a dial tone. Nothing. "Hello!" I hollered into the phone. Nothing. "Hey, is someone on the line? HEY! HELLO!" Nothing.

I cursed like a pissed-off sailor. I stomped the floor like a maddened woman. I picked up the phone several times but each time there was no dial tone. Finally, in angry desperation, I tried one more--again no dial tone--EXCEPT this time I stayed on the line long enough to think that I faintly heard something back in the deep distance of that what I thought was a dead phone line. Out of curiosity, I pressed the receiver hard against my ear. I listened with intent. It was breathing I was hearing. Yes, someone or something breathing. I could barely hear it but what I heard I knew was breathing.

It was HER. That drunken broad! Yes, it was this coworker. She had passed out while talking to me. I told my girlfriend about it and she said, "Get used to that. Frankie has a drinking problem. She sips on this cheap Scotch every night after she gets home from work...otherwise she can't sleep. So, yes, she does pass out on the phone a lot. She once fell asleep talking to me and when I woke up the next morning she was still on the line."

Believe it or not, it got so bad, I finally changed my phone number--though I also did that,too, because I broke up with the girlfriend who I thought was having the Lesbian affair with Frankie--and, oh, by the way, I did it, too, because I got married...and moved with my new wife to New Orleans. In New Orleans, like a good Scotsman, I drank Presbyterians--that is until one night drunk in the Vieux Carre, I discovered Planter's Punches, what they called Hurricanes in New Orleans.

The irony of the above Dallas lush-girl stories--those unrelated to my being excommunicated from the Scottish honor rolls for drinkin' Irish whiskey in a public place and claimin' to be a Scotsman at the same time--while all these Scotch-drinking women were cruising through my life, I was drinking CC and 7s: Holy Loch Ness Monster, a bloody Canadian whiskey, eh! Holy Jesus, do you know where I can find some haggis around here?

My mother's brother, my Uncle Uncle, while with the US Navy in WWI, while docked in the Port of Glasgow, had jumped ship and gotten lost in Glasgow because he said while sailing into Glasgow harbor and looking out over the Scottish landscape...especially at the distant mountains...he knew what he was looking at was HOME. He lived in Glasgow until his money ran out, then he turned himself into the US Navy and they shipped him home and gave him an honorable discharge--we weren't at war and so a sailor jumped ship to live in Glasgow a few weeks--"He was probably drunk out of his mind with some Scots whore...boys will be boys, you know." Uncle Uncle used to tell the story that he met this Scotsman in a bar and they went on a tear--a rip-it-up--and ended up in this dude's Glasgow tenement room--broke and with nothing to drink but milk. Uncle Uncle said the Scotsman said, "Wood'ya be likin' to try what we wee Scots call a poor's man's whiskey?" Uncle Uncle said he'd try anything as long as it got him drunk. The Scotsman pour a glass full of milk and then took it over to a gas jet, turned on the gas, and then held the glass of milk up to the gas jet. He handed it to my uncle and said, "There yew go, drink it down as fast as yew kin." My uncle said his head felt like a it had been hit with a brick. He said he had a roaring headache all that night and half the next day with the Scotsman claiming all along that all he needed to repair himself was a little hair of that gas-jet dog that bit him.

I started drinking Irish whiskey back in the late 70s when I was an everyday-everyhour patron at the bar of a downtown Manhattan establishment called the Ear Inn, which is still in business today.

The bar at the Ear Inn: The bar's the same (that bar was the bar when the Ear was the Green Door); the stools look the same; the Three Penny Opera poster hung somewhere else; the painting or whatever that is in the upper left is new to me--looks tacky--there used to be an old Ford Woody station wagon beer placard in there somewhere--my seat for many years was down at the left far end of the bar, just barely showing in the photo--back in the corner just diagonally across from that glass of red plastic stirrers there on the bar.
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The day the Ear Inn opened I was there. It was at a point in my life in New York City where I was once again just out of a divorce and on my own, deciding to try a totally improvisational way of living. For the first time in 10 years I was free as a Bird solo. I was making $500-a-week easy as a copyeditor and I had just moved into a brand new loft--a converted butter and egg dealer's old 5-story building with great old plate glass windows from wall-to-wall and ceiling to ceiling in every loft and a grand old iron fire escape running from just above sidewalk level all the way up to the top loft on the 5th floor. Plus, soon I learned the building's owner had converted our roof into a field of marijuana plants--planted in old olive barrels he got from a wholesale olive dealer over in SoHo. This was before the "fashionably nouveau riche" discovered SoHo loft living and decided what a fabby high-society street West Broadway could become--Victoria's Secret started on West Broadway--the streets then lined with beautiful 19th-Century cast-iron fronted factory buildings, with loading platforms out in front--why the sidewalks in Soho used to be so wide--with wholesale food people all over the area, too, a big fruits and vegetables wholesaler right up Spring Street from us, a big cheese wholesaler over on Greene Street where you could go and find old cheeses they'd put out in the garbage a certain night of the week--sometimes whole wheels of cheese, which we'd take back to the Ear and clean the mold off of them and then slice 'em up into wedges--perfectly good cheese.

Most of New York City's printing plants were in this area, too--this was a time when you could get a job so easily in Manhattan, especially for the kind of editing and proofreading work I was qualified to do. All the printers used what were called VIP proofreaders (Very Important Proofreaders) who supposedly had to know printing terms and measurements and agates and picas and column inches and banner positioning and font sizes and the different font styles--all graphic arts were done by hand then--cut and pasted up dummies that were then sent to the printer by a bicycle messenger where it was reproduced on a 4-color press--nothing computerized yet--though by '82 IBM was putting out the first PC capable of desktop publishing running on the original DOS operating system--the one Bill Gates stole from the small Seattle firm he was able to buy for chicken feed.

Due to the nature of the work in this particular downtown area, there were tons of workingclass bars--like those printers were big drinkers and they had their bars over on Hudson Street or Varick Street--in fact, there were workingclass bars on every corner and in the middle of the blocks all around that area. The Seaman's Union Hall was on Hudson and Spring and there were bars around the Seaman's Hall that catered to the heavy drinking seamen and dock workers and divers and tugboat crews that started drinking at six o'clock every morning when all the bars in that area opened, including the Ear Inn, which had replaced one of those tough seaman bars, the Green Door, but was anything but a workingman's bar. The workingmen thought of the Ear as a Hippy bar or a Faggot bar--a lot of gay truckers (and there are a lot of gay truckers, folks) used to come in the Ear thinking it was a gay pick up bar. It was an artsy-fartsy-plus bar--the only workingclass you found in the Ear was usually the out-of-work class--artists, musicians, poets, sculptors, performance artists--the wackiest of the avant-garde of the time--the wacky ones going in far afield cultural directions from the mainstream, from a gang of minimalist leftovers to a bunch of Columbia School of Music rejects to a little gaggle of white blues musicians and our coexisting rock and roll neighbors and booze guzzlers. All kinds of drugs flowed freely throughout that wonderful old neighborhood we entitled BLOHO--little packets of Mexican horse; tons of Yippy-delivered varieties of pot; tinfoils of rock cocaine; bottles of hash oil; and one night, one glorious wonderful night, a guy we called a name similar to Ivan the Terrible brought in a bag of schrooms and a bag of LSD tabs into the Ear and passed 'em all around--especially to a bunch of German performance artists who were upstairs over the Ear bar celebrating the success of a performance piece by their hero--I can't remember his name now, but I remember him and his group. He had just crucified a lamb at sunset or some such shit on one of the Hudson piers, this when those old saggy piers were still all along where the Chelsea Pier area is now. What a night! Oh what a night! I'm sure nothing like that goes on in the Ear now--it's a respectable joint now--high-priced high-art food and patrons who are having no money problems at all at the moment. [I have not been in the Ear for several years--the last time with an old Ear pal who lives in Seattle now. We were so disappointed, we swore we'd never set foot in this Ear Inn again--and we haven't.]

When I first started attending services at the Ear Inn bar, the bartender was an American Irishman from the potato fields of Long Island--back when it had potato fields. He and I immediately hit it off--our attitudes were the same--"Live and Let Live"--let me do my thing and you do yours and we'll live happily 'til we die. Since I was the first one in the door at 6 every morning and the last one to leave the bar at 4 the next morning (two hours sleep, do you believe it?), this guy and I became fixtures in the Ear. After he got off his shift at the bar, he'd come around on the other side over by me and he'd drink the rest of the day and into the night with me. We both at that time were heavy into Bass Ale--and the Ear had in on tap, so that's mostly what I drank--no hard liquor, or if I drank the hard stuff it was Hennessey or a Cuba Libre con Castro. I liked rum, but rum made a madman out of me. It was rum that brought out the wolf in me the first time. Rum not only made me look like the Wolf Man, it made me run out in the middle of the street and start yowling at the moon, whether there was a moon visible or not or whether if it were visible it was full or not. Rum turned me into the Howlin' Wolf--"If you hear me howlin', howlin' for my darlin'/Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh...ohhhhhhhhhh...a oooooooey!" And the Howlin' Wolf was still in vogue in those days and my friend the Brooklyn guitarist with whom I formed my first New York City band, the Fabulous Swilltones, had the Ear boss man put a Howlin' Wolf record on his old Rockola juke box and it stayed on there until the Mafia made him get rid of it because they controlled the kind of juke box you had in your bar in those days--and the Mafia replaced the Ear's old Rockola with a big very tacky Seeburg stereo set up that played whole albums--shitty music, but you couldn't argue with the Mafia--you could request certain albums be put on there but you still got a lot of Frank Sinatra and Frankie Valli and the Beatles and the Rolling Stoneds and Johnny Mathis--pop shit. The Mafia also controlled cigarette machines and video games in bars in those days, too--both soon to grace the otherwise bohemian Ear.

So one day my Irish bartender friend (he was actually a first-class leathercrafter--he made cool horsehide brief cases and he made me a very nice horsehide barrel-shaped shoulder bag--all of which were in high fashion) said, "Hey, Wolfie, you ever had a Depth Charge?" "Well, I know what you mean, but, no, I can't remember ever having one." He called the bartender over and ordered two Depth Charges--"What kind'a whiskey you want?" My Irish friend said, "Give us shots of Murphy's." And that Depth Charge was my first-ever shot of Irish whiskey--dropped into my pint of Bass Ale and slugged down--watch out, don't swallow the shot glass--at one time they were called ponies--"Give me a pony of Irish, please."

After that one drink of Murphy's, my Irish friend and I made Murphy's the official Ear Inn bar whiskey--and soon all our crowd was swilling Murphy's by the case--the swilling of Murphy's one afternoon in the Ear being the source of the name for the Fabulous Swilltones. And Murphy's Irish Whiskey became the best-selling whiskey in the Ear Inn until one day Murphy's Irish Whiskey was no more.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Irish Daily Growler

Living in New York City as a Nattering Nabob of Negativity

Foto by tgw, Penn Central Building, 34th Street, New York City, 2008
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Originator of a Great American Accusation
Thanks to thewomantrumpetplayer we've been clued in as to the originator of that great Spiro T. Agnew "accusation": Nattering Nabobs of Negativity. Oh my Gawd! the hero screams, it's William Safire . I remember an old statistical legend that said at any one time you are just 4 people away from knowing some highly respected human being--it corresponds to my "Debbie Harry" theory of us being on parallel lines with some human animals as well as even some wild animals--like Roy (of Siegfried and Roy) forgiving the very expensive white circus tiger that almost bit Roy's dumbass human monkey head off--yes tigers will eat monkeys if they get hungry enough, though like wolves they like the still-breathing belly meats of young antelope calves. A baby monkey's belly meats ain't worth the efforts to a hungry tiger. In the case of Bill Safire, thanks to L Hat, I'm just one person away from maybe having met him or maybe listened in to L Hat talking with him on the phone. L. Hat worked as Bill's editor on his last book, the reengineering of Safire's Political Dictionary, from the Oxford Press, before Bill kicked the bucket in 2009. Young Bill Safire was Tricky Dick's speech writer--and naturally he would have written Dumbo Agnew's speeches for him--oh the power of a writer--Bill Safire proved that.

Speaking of being 4 people away from somebody famous, a little tale of further irony, through my wife I once found myself on the Queen Elizabeth II on our way up to Newfoundland to open a huge new jet fuel refinery my wife's boss had negotiated into existence on moneys he finagled out of the Canadian government and his old asshole pal Adnan Kashoggi and his connection with the Saudi Royal Family. And Richard Nixon was supposed to be the special guest to join the boat while at sea via helicopter. Nixon, at the last minute, couldn't make it--so who did they send: how about Spiro T. Agnew!

Adnan Kashoggi, in case you've forgotten, was once the richest man in the world. He was a devious motherfucker (he comes from a Turkish-Saudi family) of the shiftiest kind: making most of his wealth off phony corporations that cover up his international arms dealings--like front companies he set up in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Here's a little known fact: check out the fact that old shifty Adnan met with Richard Perle (anybody remember this bird?) right before our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Kashoggi was born in Mecca--his father was personal physician to the Saudi Royal Family--Kashoggi's sister married into the Saudi Royal Family. I just thought about it, but I was literally just one person, my wife, away from Adnan Kashoggi in those days. I've sat only a few people away from Adnan at more than one banquet and dinner. He once offered my wife a job in Riyadh or a job in Beirut where we would have had use of his hilltop villa overlooking Beirut and the Beirut harbor (this was just prior to the takeover of Beirut by the Syria Army that led to the invasion of the Israeli Army into Beirut and the eventual massacre of 2000 Arabs by old Never Again Sharon--is he still in a coma?).
Adnan is still with us, leading a very comfortable and easy-living leisure-class life in the Principality of Monaco, a haven for over-the-hill filthy rich criminals. Just think, all of Prince Ranier's wasted wealth came from casino gambling.

Staying on our parallel line with Bill Safire, there's a new book out saying that Tricky Dick had a big trick played on him by the same anti-Castro Cuban mugs who probably really did assassinate President Kennedy in the happening and then evolution of the story of the Watergate incident. The new book says old Dick had no idea what he was approving or disapproving during the Watergate happenings--that the whole Watergate incident was set up to bring Nixon down. A big bevy of these Watergate birds were ex-Cubanos who fled Cuba ahead of Castro's Revolutionary forces entering Habana and taking it over. Castro by the way drove out of power one of the most asshole dictators in Cuba's history of being dominated either by Spain, the USA, or those Cubans who became puppets of the US corporate and criminal world that ruled Cuba before Castro--this puppet a Cubano military man named Batista--a criminal dictator living like a duke while his native Cubanos starved to death or were working as slaves for the big US sugar companies down there to drain Cuba of its wealth--leave the natives slaves, thus a cheap labor force just 90 miles from where the US's own Black slaves used to work for free our Old South sugar cane industry that spread all across the South but especially in Louisiana and Texas. So when we Christian White people finally decided that maybe our slaves weren't just jungle animals after all, maybe they were kind of human--anyway, with guilty consciences some of the more "righteous" White men freed our slaves--why, blacks that once worked the sugar cane plantations for free now wanted to be paid wages for their work--they wanted EQUALITY! How dare them! So when Teddy Roosevelt led his phony Edison-rigged-for-filming charge up San Juan Hill and declared Cuba's independence from Spain what he was actually doing was occupying Cuba--why Cuban sugar cane workers worked for chump change compared to our snooty newly freed Blacks--why they were easily cheated out of their money, too--and our big sugar companies learned how to fuck 'em dry--keeping them in the fields for slave hours--there you go.

My friends, who don't know the wolf in me, say I waste too much of my writing time on politics and the critters who I so despise and who I want to ridicule with consistent pestering as if my words are bullets being fired from a wild and out-of-control machinegun, one being activated by a wolf in human clothing. I mean these characters, and that's what they are (Gore Vidal calls them entertainers), they are novel characters, and they are given full pages full of their words, videos of their spiels, constant reminders of their projections, their predictions. Never any substantial solutions. Never any resolutions. Always arguments. No real debates. Only edicts. Like this healthcare bullshit President Obama is trying to shove down Congress's throat. It's not the right healthcare bill. It's not what our President promised in his brilliant and encouraging campaign speeches. It's a bill that benefits the healthcare insurance and HMO industries. Premiums are going up in anticipation of this bill not being passed but if it is passed, premiums will go up even further; healthcare insurance companies will continue to reap so many profits they give billions of them away as prizes for being good little crooks. It doesn't seem to bother people that every employee at one of these financial pirates we bailed out--Goldman-Sachs or AIG probably--the biggest of those pirates--both in the process of building new office towers in Manhattan by the bye--got an average of $400,000 in bonus moneys last year. Amazing. And they continue to rob us blind with no backlash from We the People. President Obama continues to trust these bastards. Why didn't Obama fire everybody who was left over from George W. Bush's administration? Why? I am amazed at how powerful in defeat the Repugnican Party has become. I mean those bastards lost the election so why is our Congress still controlled by them? Vexing, isn't it? Like Joe LIEberman? Why is this asshole still so powerful in Congress?

That's what drives me wolf crazy as a thinker, as a writer, as an empiricist--it's all wrong--they're all headed down the wrong path--at least Bill Safire got his words read and revered by millions--and I assume he made money off his books. That son of a bitch has to be a new idol of mine. Think of it, William Safire put these words in Spiro T. Agnew's mouth: Nattering Nabobs of Negativity.
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A Year Ago--to Remember:
It was a year ago this month that one of my best-ever friends in life dropped straight flat face down dead from a heart attack setting up for an evening's gig. theryefarmerfromqueens --Brother Robert Francis Guida--Cadillac Slim--Raoul Otis--or just plain Bob. Our parallel lines ran side by side from the moment I met the man until he died--there were times when we were playing music together where I'll be damned if our parallel lines didn't meet, though I know that's impossible--ask Debbie Harry--she got it from Isaac Newton.

So I'll be lifting a big bottle of Diet Pepsi (Bob didn't drink booze) to the honor of one of the truest and bluest friends and musicians and finest of men I ever had the privilege of knowing. "The car I drive is a V8 Ford/ I don't claim to be no chauffeur but I can hold it in the road/Hey, baby, let me ride in your little automobile/You got a nice little car, honey/There's just too many drivers at the wheel." Bob was a Cool Driver. Bob's favorite old blues--and he owned one of the rare 1st edition 78s of it--was Skip James's "Cool Driver."

The automobile had been very important in Bob's and my life--especially Cadillacs--we both loved old Caddys. Especially Cadillacs, too, because our blues mentors had desired and cherished and sang about Cadillacs--when you were a Black blues singer and you had your first hit, you sold your V8 Ford and bought a new Cadillac, a sign you were NOW something special. The Cadillac became such a symbol of Black success Whites bailed out and went over to Lincolns (except old Elvis stuck with Cadillacs all his life)--Lyndon Johnson championed the Lincoln as the White man's car of success--he used to drive his Continental lickety split around his Perdenales Ranch with a cold can of beer between his legs.

Several times in my life I was proud to be a member of Bob's Cool Drivers band--I was very proud the day Bob designated me a Cool Driver. "You runnin' down the highway/You runnin' down the road/My baby's doin' the shim-sham-shimmy on the running board/Hey, baby, let me ride in your little automobile/You got a standard carburetor/So you must be burnin' some bad gasoline."

I can still hear Bob's booming voice now calling off our theme, that tune, "'Automobile Blues' in G, boyz, from the 5, ah one, two, ah one, two, three, four...." And off we'd go on another Cool Drive. Bob and I would have never set foot in a Lincoln.
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Willie Davis, 69, American baseball player (Los Angeles Dodgers), natural causes
died a couple a days ago. Yeah, I remember Willie Davis--good hitter--beat the Yankees in the World Series one year--when the Dodgers were managed by Tommy LaSorta--who's still kicking and fat and sassy--a baseball genius but otherwise dumb as a fence post. One question I have about Willie's death--how did he die of natural causes at 69? What are the natural causes of death? Where's William Safire when we need his wordy wisdom.
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You Talk About Coincidence
On March 7th these two women died:
Mary Josephine Ray, 114, Canadian-born American supercentenarian, oldest person in U.S. and second-oldest in world...

Daisey Bailey, 113, American supercentenarian, second-oldest person in U.S. and fourth-oldest in world.


With that, I slither back into my den,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Spiro Agnew Was Right! Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Edition

Foto by tgw, New York City (looking west), 2010
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The Man Himself: The Daily Growler Hall of Famer Spiro T. Agnew
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Are the Pundits Punning Us?
The pundits around the Internet are all confused by the complicated political system we've backed ourselves into, a political system ruled over by a bunch of morganatic bastards in the Old World sense of our Power Elite becoming a Power Effete because it's gotten so inbred. Remember Spiro T. Agnew? Then you remember Spiro's famous use of "big" words, calling the lefty politicos and pundits of his day "effete intellectual snobs." Here's one of Loose Wig Spiro's most famous comments: In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. I like that; I can see myself through Spiro's eyes as a "nattering nabob of negativism"--except as a Sociologist I am a positivist--so I could be a nattering nabob of positivism. Same thing since positivism to Spiro was negativism. Spiro's Power Effete insanity is best seen in this Spiro statement: Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer. And, yes, Spiro's right--since women's cycles are based on the tides then yes I too can see that taming a woman is like taming the ocean except taking a little longer to tame than an ocean. Fools? Well, you tame a fool by ignoring him...well, I suppose that's how Spiro would tame a woman, too.

This foolish sort of reasoning is still going on in the Conservative ranks. I briefly visited some Sunday pundit sites, like I saw the millionaire idiot Chris Matthews spinning bullshit with some politico I recognized but really didn't know who he was. It was one of those plastic Jesus politicians like Mormon Romney--I also think I saw that Perfect Fool Steve Forbes still peddling his wild brand of Forbesian Capitalist Tool reasoning--totally backwards thinking at its dumbest--on the Mickey Mouse channel--and staying on Mickey's own network, ABC, where I listened very briefly to without a doubt one of the dumbest backwards thinkers there is in the millionaire news-blabbing business, George Will. His comments were so off the wall they made me think of Spiro Agnew. Will has no idea what he's saying when he starts to speak. It's like he makes his bullshit up as he prattles along with his off-the-wall attitude about Dumbocrats and the majority of Amurican voters. Will truly believes most Amuricans are as rabidly off-the-wall as he is, and perhaps he's right. Amuricans are Yahoos; George Will is definitely a Yahoo. In looking up some George Will quotes--none of them impressed me--I saw a list in the margin saying Will compared to these witty celebrities, one of which was Dr. Hunter S. Thompson! Wow, that comparison got me to trying to reason it out.

So let's see, here's what Doc Thompson had to say about us: America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. I suppose that's equivalent to George Will saying football is a horrible game because it is so violent and run by committee meetings--as if baseball isn't run by committee meetings.

More Doc Thompson: I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

More Doc Thompson: The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. The Doc is attributed as saying this same statement about the music business--and definitely the TV business is the exact same set up as the music business--in fact, at the current moment television is deciding who our musical artists are, who they are today and for far into the future unless their ratings tank--and that includes as distant a venues as Fox's "American Idol" and PBS's promoting of total droopy-drawer musicians like David Foster (a Canadian), Josh Groban (god I can't stand this dude), Michael Boob-bell (read: Dumbbell)--where did this effete musician come from?--or in the past they've promoted true phonies like John Tesh and Yanni. Whatever happened to Yanni?

Politics is loping along same as usual. The boys and girls in Congress are staging their acts to conform to the coming national elections in November. We'll see a lot of bullshit stances in coming months. The older farts in Congress are fucking up big time--like Charlie Rangel getting caught with his old withered ass in a sling, though what Charlie did is probably pretty common among Congress folks. Certainly what Charlie did wasn't as criminal as what Ben Bernanke and Little Timmy Geithner and Good Ole Hank Paulsen did; yet they're still praised and promoted by our President. Obama however did not give Charlie Rangel any kind of backing. Obama maybe doesn't like Black men. Geez, that just came to my mind. I mean this dude hangs with Joe Biden, about as White a man as he could hang with. I suppose he doesn't want to be seen favoring Black men politicians or else the racist Congressionalists, and most of the White ones are racists (I'll stand behind that), will pounce all over him as a reverse racist. That's what Obama is trying to avoid. He can't afford to be seen as anti-White. Besides, he's half White--something racists certainly have avoided bringing up--he's not only half White but he was raised by his White side of the family. He didn't have much to do with his Black relatives--like his father. So here's an obvious (according the skin color, facial features, and hair) Black male who is literally half White to the point where though his appearance is Black his actions so far as President are very White.

Rangel is a powerful Black man in Congress. Rangel took over from Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., after the old South Dumbocrats drove him into exile on Bimini Island in the Bahamas. Rangel took over from Adam Powell way back in 1971. Plus Charlie is now 80 years old and getting very decrepit--he's overweight, hunchbacked, and slips and slides along when he walks--kind of like old Pappy (GWH) Bush when he wobble-walks these days. Old farts like Rangel and Pappy Bush live good long lives no matter how raucous their lifestyles--like partying every night, always a dinner or a banquet to attend, with few Scotches along with those Kobe steaks, while hobnobbing with the powers who be--and what a good life it is.

Charles Bernard Rangel at his best. Here he is at his Dominican villa--the one he didn't think he had to pay taxes on when he rented it out when he wasn't lollygagging around there. It really pisses you off when you think these birds's wealth comes out of We the People's earned incomes. And Congress people are supposed to be servants of We the People--yeah, sure.

Nancy Pelosi. Let's check out our speaker of the house. Originally from Baltimore. Her father and brother became mayors of Baltimore. She grew up in politics. Being a Maryland Catholic (originally a Catholic state--Lord Calvert; Lord Baltimore (both at one time names of whiskeys)), she was sent to a Catholic girls school and then got her higher education at a Catholic college in D.C. Nancy girl lucked out when she met and married Frankie "Goombah" Pelosi while in college. Since then, Nancy's done a bit of alright for herself:

The Pelosi family has a net worth of nearly $12.5 million as of 2008, largely from investments. In addition to their large portfolio of jointly owned San Francisco Bay Area real estate, the couple also owns a vineyard in St. Helena, California, valued between $5 million and $25 million. Pelosi's husband also owns stock, including $1 million in Apple Computer, and is the owner of the California Redwoods of the United Football League. Pelosi continues to be among the richest members of Congress.

The richest Congress people are worth huge millions--like John D. Rockefeller, Frank Lautenberg (yeah, the old withering senile fart from New Jersey), Uncle Teddy before his demise, Lamar Alexander, John Kerry (did you know Kerry's worth around 300 million bucks!), Kay Baily Hutchinson (the Texas hussy politician who just got swamped in her bid for the Repug candidate for Governor of Texas by Rick "Big Wig" Perry, the current Church of Christ Racist, "execute 'em if they black," governor of my home state of Texas), Hillary Clinton, Ben Nelson, John McCain, Olympia Snow are all worth double-figure millions--Hillary in 2006 was worth 30 million bucks. Kerry is the richest man in Congress now--unless Herb Kohl of Wisconsin is still in the District of Corruption--believe it or not, Herb topped old John Kerry's 300 million bucks by a fistful of millions of bucks.

I can't imagine being so rich. I can't imagine even being a millionaire. The only way I'll ever become a millionaire is through luck--winning a jackpot. My father told me once the only way I was going to get rich was if a bag of money fell from heaven--the problem my dad said was that that bag of money would probably fall on my head and kill me. I find it difficult in today's market (I am involved in a collectibles business) to make 200 bucks. What's it like to be worth 300 million dollars! Or what's it like to be worth a double-figure billion dollars--like our honorable bullshit mayor of New York City. It must be totally boring to be so rich else why would these well-heeled crooks want to be mayors and Congress people?
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A Short Course in the Sociological Thinking of Pitirim Sorokin (known as an Altruist, Sorokin was at one time one of my favorite Sociological thinkers)

Sorokin reviled expansion of government control to complete totalitarianism but, as discussed below, could explain why a people sometimes not only accepted expanded government control, but demanded it. Four brief definitions of complete totalitarianism are 1) “absolute power, especially exercised unjustly or cruelly; 2) a political doctrine advocating the principle of absolute rule; 3) a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state; 4) a dictatorial form of centralized government that regulates every aspect of state and private behavior.”

Sorokin explained that social relationships fluctuate during the four calamities, which he reduces to three later on in his life: war, economic impoverishment, and social emergency of any kind. “Other conditions being equal,” he wrote, “governmental control in a given social system tends to increase in periods of great social emergency; and of these emergency conditions, particularly in the times of strenuous war and in severe economic crises where there is scarcity of the most important means of subsistence for a large part of the population. The emergency conditions call forth an extraordinary effort on the part of the state government, which leads naturally to expansion of its activity, control, and regulation.”

Pitirim Sorokin.

For example, as soon as a society enters war, the

“curve of government interference at once jumps and the state network of social relationships becomes more complicated. Instead of normal laws, martial law and a state of siege are introduced, which means an enormous expansion of government control. Many economic relationships heretofore uncontrolled by the State now become regimented by it: production, distribution, and consumption…Military rule is absolute; it may concern anything that is urgent from a military standpoint; it imposes upon the population anything that is deemed necessary for military purposes. It may impose not only the draft into the army, but even mass execution of groups in the population. In a word, the fact of a sudden expansion of government control in time of war is unquestionable.”

The reason for this “totalitarian swing” (his term) is the need for victory. “Of two nations equal in other respects, the nation that imposes a centralized and rigid discipline upon its population has more chances of being victorious than the nation whose efforts are not organized; which does not have a centralized system and strong discipline,” Sorokin wrote. The army is by its very nature a totalitarian institution, he asserted. “The best creators of totalitarianism, including the state socialism and state communism, have been not Marx or Engels or Lassalle or Lenin, but the greatest organizers of military forces and military empires: Jenghiz Khan, Tamerlane, Caesar, Napoleon, and the like.”

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Hail Caesar and Mary Full of Grace for Sociologists like Pitirim Sorokin--the most fair-minded observers there are on earth--That last statement above of Sorokin's really is a truth of history. If you check out American history, on the timeline, you come across very few long periods of peace. War is always on our horizons. The militaries of the world do get rewarded for their war services much more than peaceful men get for their peaceful efforts--like the US Military budget this year is 800 billion dollars. Had the Nobel Prize committee not been fooled into thinking Obama was a man of peace and had given their prize to a true man of peace that person would have only reaped 300,000 bucks. Robert Gates's salary as head of Defense is probably three or four times 300,000 bucks. (What charity did President Obama give his Nobel Prize money, too? I never saw.)
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The Wisdom of Henry Miller

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy

thegrowlingwolf
for The Nattering Nabobs of Negativism here at The Daily Growler (a blog for human animals)

A The Daily Growler Post From the Recent Past

This is a The Daily Growler post that was never posted--from February 12, 2010
Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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"Heavy snows, record-breaking snows, on East Coast of USA proves 'Global Warming' is a hoax."
That's the message two truly inane smog-brained devious human being animals in Washington, District of Corruption, are trumpeting now--led by that brilliant thinker and great homeland security patriot Senator Jim Imhof of the great backward Yahoo State of Oklahoma (a territory the White intruders, like Imhof, stole from the Native Americans Andy "the Racist Populist" Jackson had forced marched there from their original lands that were in the way of the expanding White US population that needed aboriginal homelands (swamps and all) in order to start plantationalizing the South so that the White Massahs could start shipping in boatloads of black slaves (savages from Deepest Darkest Africa) so they could start growing that cotton the big Eastern mills needed to turn out more and more cloth, like sailcloth for the thousands of freighters and passenger ships sailing back and forth constantly from England and Europe and from the many British and European Colonies and from the Deepest and Darkest parts of Africa).

And Imhof is joined in his harebrained ravings by that other truly great humanitarian and devout Christian racist, Jim "Dimwit" DeMint, of the great still-true-to-the-Confederacy State of South Carolina (a state that was once a Native American homeland--a state that the White Man bulldozed his way right into, rounding up the Native Americans aboriginal to South Carolina and force marching them over the Trail of Tears off to associate nutjob Jim Imhof's Oklahoma so that the White Man could takeover all the Native Americans's land, covert it to cottonfields and bring in more boatloads of those black savages from Africa who since God had cursed them to be the White Man's servants--the curse of Ham--then it was OK to bus 'em over here and make 'em work like donkeys to plant and harvest Mister Charley's King Cotton--besides, the White man's experience with black savages told him they weren't really human beings afterall and were no more better than the average jackass).

This first White clown, Imhof, was somehow allowed to build an igloo (I suppose to honor our Native American Alaskan brothers and sisters citizens, though Sarah Palin says only dumbass savages live in igloos) in front of the White House with his wife and dopey children (little privileged Okies) posting signs ridiculing Al Gore and his Global Warming way of making a living now after Al actually won the presidential election of 2000 but conceded that by golly he guess he really hadn't won the election afterall, so he gave up to G.W. Bush (yep, Pappy's most worthless of his worthless sons) and went to bed early that night with Tipper--whose own attempt at a political career through her infamous "Rock and Roll Sexual-Content Rating System" failed--and as you can see, I have no respect for Al Gore (Gore Vidal, who is kin to him, said Al was the boringest person he'd ever met in his life). But, yes, I certainly know there is a Global Warming effect going on at the moment and that it has been going on at an accelerated pace over the past 200 years all around the world, but Al Gore's Global Warming spiel to me is just him keeping on working and getting income from his political career--not that this boring man may not be sincere, though I find his sincerity this late in the game hypocritical--a career move is all it is, keeping in front of the public eye, I'll sarcastically say. Still, my put down of Al Gore doesn't mean I'm going along with Dumbass Imhof's put down of him--not a put down of Al Gore at all but a put down of Global Warming as a scientific fact.

Old South Racist Jim Demented (DeMint) twittered that since it had snowed 3 feet in Dallas, Texas, and had closed down the airport there, that was proof that the Global Warming theory was a hoax.

Now here's an easy explanation in refuting Okie Imhof's and Old South Racist Jim DeMint's (Demented) claim that Global Warming is a hoax based on it suddenly record-breaking snowing in the District of Corruption area and in Dallas, Texas. First of all, what these dumbass idiots fail to be aware of, IF IT WERE SUMMER INSTEAD OF WINTER THE SNOW WOULD BE RAIN! Idiots! Of course if it heavy rains in the winter, it's gonna come down as SNOW.

Why in the fucking hayride hell would dumbass, Yahoo-stupid White Amuricans believe the insane reasoning (backward thinking) of two Congressional backward-state Senators over the more reasonable (not to say scientists can't be insane reasoners) scientific evidence that there truly is a need to be concerned over Global Warming? Whatever the weather is in the USA at any given time, it's only a mere speck on the wall in terms of weather patterns over the whole world. Africa at the moment is in the midst of a decade-long drought. China has suffered both droughts and heavy rains recently. In other parts of the world rains are heavier than ever while at the same time some green areas of the world are drying up. Sahara dust storms that affect weather patterns all over the world are getting heavier, thicker, more often than normal.

Glaciers millions of years old are receding. OK, so the UN Global Warming report made an error in saying the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2030. So what?

I've been saying all along that these backward thinking rascals are idiots who believe fiction over fact every day of their lives. I back my sarcastic statements by saying whatever I am, I am trained educationally in Sociology, an empirical science--I'm trained by using sociometric measurements (Statistics) (mental measurements using my oval of vision (speaking Gestalt Psychology)) to take notes--like an artist sketches a scene and codes it before he goes about filling in the blanks. Like a sociological observation might be: Amuricans don't trust scientific facts. The fun then in being a Sociologist is that you can investigate that "fact" from all kinds of angles, to the point you can predict (guess at) how much evidential truth there is in the statement or how much biased facts are used to prove the truth of the matter. Of course I use fact and truth and lies and such as metaphors for what moves us as a society to not trust scientists and scientific-produced evidence. Doctors should be considered scientists--yet, most Amuricans think of doctors as being under instructions from God--God's science being the science of idiots like Imhof and DeMint. Al Gore's scientific proofs of Global Warming are hoaxes because they are works of the Devil, Satan, the Master of the World--even though God made the world...you see the yin and yang of this sociological problem?

We human monkeys have so complicated life--when life is very simple. We complicate life through our legends--legends that give us as role models super MEN who are either successful or not depending on their loyalty to some God, some Allah, some Buddha, some Zoroaster--good and evil--yin and yang--two sides to every fucking thing. And a Sociological point of view is one of total neutrality--don't you see--the elimination of all biases, whether they show up as racism, divine interventions, fabrications, or just plain fairy tales. An unbiased view of this Global Warming problem seems simple to me. It's happening and it will continue to happen and given the human monkey biases that are denying it's happening ("God won't let it happen"), it's going to continue continuing until the first major world catastrophe happens, like Los Angeles, yes, finally really sliding off into the Pacific; or, yes, New York City being under 200-feet of ocean one day. And even then there'll be the Biased out railing that it's God's will this should be happening. I mean, the White Man's God has brought much disaster on this earth already; why would he hesitate to do it again?

As I sarcastically said in my last post, about us being under the rule of two backwoods hicks, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Big Ben "Slow Time" Nelson of Nebraska. Now you can add Imhof and DeMint to that list. Both have already been showing their ignorance for years. I mean, come on, how many educated human beings would put any stake in what those clowns are proposing. These assholes want to force us into debt. They want to keep us at WAR! They want to bring back CHEAP LABOR--SLAVERY, folks--and Black folks are right when they say the White man couldn't have picked all that cotton himself--in fact, if it hadn't been for slaves, this country would still be in the hands of its true residents the Native Americans and that includes our Native Americans in Alaska, too; and Native Hawaiians who the White Man has almost totally spoiled--certainly the White Man (Mr. Dole especially) stole Hawaii from the original Hawaiians--enforcing on the island a plantation society--every where the White Power Elite goes they level the forests and create plantations! Even in Alaska, folks--there are lumber plantations, and mining plantations, and oil plantations.

Bullshit. And We the People believe bullshit evidence over good clean and healthy evidence. We the People's only employment left in this country is shoveling up and piling up the bullshit. It's all bullshit whether it's coming out the mouth of President Obama or the mouth of God--shovel away the bullshit and as some old-time pundit once said if you shovel off enough bullshit you might get down to some truth.

Ernest Hemingway wrote about military men having to have good bullshit detectors--as a matter of fact, he wrote that all of us should develop our bullshit detectors.

I suppose you could say a Sociologist is a bullshit detective.

thegrowlingsociologistwolf
for The Daily Growler

Living in New York City Kissing the Asses of Tourists

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010.
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A Hotel to the Front of Me; A Hotel to the Right of Me; A Hotel to the Left of Me; A Hotel Up the Rear of Me............................................................................................
In the above photo, the building on the far right is the new nemesis of my old-fashioned Manhattan neighborhood. It's a just-topped-off (when they top a building off they plant an American flag up there as a sign the building structurally has been completed (or the top has been put on it), 54-story, 242-room hotel.

I walked up Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas to you tourists) toward this building yesterday for the first time since they started construction on this piece-of-shit disruption (architecturally speaking, you understand) back 2 years ago. The site just recently put up some long blue signs on the scaffolding that covers the sidewalk on their Sixth Avenue (west)side of the street. I watched these signs being put up from my apartment window. So I walked over by there out of curiosity as to what they were revealing. The signs declared "A New New York Experience--A New New York Look--an Eventi Hotel--the New New York Hotel--a Kimpton Hotel...."

I Googled "the Kimpton Hotels" and found out who the hell this Kimpton is. Why, son of a bitch, it's an old friend, Bill Kimpton. Bill Kimpton! I know this son of a bitch! I worked in the management consulting business...and, I'm thinking, where did I know him from?

In the 1970s, Random House Publishing decided to move their headquarters from the old Villard Mansion on Madison Avenue over to the far East Side and a new plexiglas-no-windows-concrete-infrastructure building of the kind critics were calling Kleenex boxes turned up on their ends. Random House and Knopf combined so they claimed they didn't have enough space in the Villard Mansion so they moved out of that grand old extravagantly snobbish building and left it up for grabs on the vicious NYC real estate market. Harry Helmsley, a single individual who at one time in this city was allowed by the Power Elite that has ruled New York City since the days of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed (the old Tammany Hall building is still standing down on Union Square) to buy up and eventually own through his Helmsley-Spear Real Estate firm what seemed like to New Yorkers every other damn building--and it seemed absolutely true to people living in Manhattan. It didn't matter to Harry whether it was a 5-story walkup or a skyscraper (he eventually bought the Empire State Building), he bought it and put a Helmsley-Spear sign on it and that was that.

Harry and Leona During the Good Times
Harry in his old age--rich people live long lives no matter their habits--did you ever notice that?--became a bit senile. He and Leona fixed up the penthouse of the Essex House Hotel on Central Park South to live in--one of the most expensive streets to live on in the world--just down the street from the famous Plaza Hotel. This is the penthouse that had the Olympic-sized swimming pool in it. One of the only pleasures old feeble senile Harry had near his end was taking people out on that penthouse balcony that overlooked Central Park to participate with him in his favorite game. Once on that balcony, the game began when old Harry with a gleam in his old tired eyes would begin on his left, the building west of the Essex House, and then progress up to Central Park West and then up Central Park West--and Harry would start saying as he went from building to building, "I own that building there, the next building, too, that building down there, that building next to that building...." The game's goal was Harry going from building to building around Central Park eventually coming back to the Essex House, where he crossed the goal line with a final score. One guest who experienced being a participant in this sport said Harry that day came up with a score of 241 buildings--and remember, that was just around Central Park. So when the Villard Mansion came up for grabs, old Harry was there with his billfold wide open and overflowing with cash for bribing or for buying. Money meant nothing to Harry--only buildings.

Harry's plans soon became known. He and Leona were going to build the grandest hotel ever seen in New York City. Leona said it was going to be called the Helmsley Palace Hotel. And where was this Palace Hotel going to be built? Why on the site of the Villard Mansion. Yep, the Helmsleys were tearing down the Villard Mansion and, by God, Harry was going into the hotel business big time. And on that news up rose New Yorkers by the yelling droves in protest over this gnarly old self-infatuated asshole going to tear down a last example of 19th-Century New York City leisure-class luxury in favor of a glass menagerie tower--Harry's own Palace. As a result of this citywide uproar, the Villard Mansion was declared a Landmark building. That meant, Harry couldn't tear it down--BUT--and these bastards always get us in the BUTS--but, Harry could build his Palace hotel in the air space over the old mansion, which he owned up to the 50-floor limit on Midtown Manhattan buildings in those days, as long as he incorporated the old mansion into his design.

And this is where I first know Bill Kimpton from.

Bill was born in Kansas City. He was a bright boy and he went to Northwestern, a good school, a better-level college for the cornfed and porkfed Midwest kids who they hope are among the MIdwest's best and brightest. On graduating Northwestern, good old Bill went to Chicago and sold typewriters for IBM. Next thing we know, good old Bill is AN INVESTMENT BANKER. He's in NEW YORK CITY working for LEHMAN BROTHERS!! At Lehman Brothers (and later at other financial investment banks, primarily in California) here's what Bill's accomplishments were according to his Wikipedia entry:

He helped take Kentucky Fried Chicken public in 1964. He also gained expertise in hotel development, handling the financing for the Kapalua Bay Resort Hotel in Maui and helping Harry Helmsley raise $23 million to renovate the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York.

("Renovate" in the above statement means "he revised the original plans to include the Villard Mansion.")

The Helmsley Palace Hotel, that tacky glass behemoth hovering over the old Villard Mansion.
Aha! I surely knew old Bill in terms of the Helmsley Palace, but...there was something missing. I'd known him from somewhere else...then, AHA! Again from good old Bill's Wikipedia entry:

He was one of the first to find a niche in moderately priced, intimate European-style hotels, known in the industry as boutique hotels, like the Alexis Hotel in Seattle, the Hotel Palomar in San Francisco and the Burnham Hotel in Chicago. His strategy was to buy small, old buildings in downtown neighborhoods and convert them into hotels.

Mr. Kimpton ''created a hotel system that was truly one of a kind,'' said Bjorn Hanson, the managing partner of the hospitality practice of the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. ''He had hotels that filled a niche, converting old hotels or buildings that were not so hot into very special, distinctive, unusual properties.''

Mr. Kimpton said in interviews that he had found his calling as a young boy, playing Monopoly with friends. His passion, even then, was collecting hotels.

Now I know where I first met Bill Kimpton. This son of a bitch, on money he bilked out of investors while working for the piracy firm of Lehman Bros (the financial firm recently wiped out of existence by the Goldman-Sachs bandits who are still running our economy and ruling over our Congress), good old Bill got to fulfill his childhood passion for hotel collecting--oh hot diggity-god-damn. So this is the bastard who brought to New York City the god-damn boutique hotel industry. This is the bastard who influenced all these other private-equity, bonus-rich boutique hotel collectors, like this Schraeger character who's building this boutique son of a bitch neighborhood-disruptive hotel next door to my 140-year-old apartment building and perkily admits he's Bill Kimpton's protege.

Boutique hotels. Schraeger I've heard owns 200 of them in New York City alone. These bastards have their goons roam neighborhoods with cameras (both digital and camcorders), with clipboards, with tape measures, with tape recorders, and what they do is they walk up and down Manhattan blocks and check every building--listing the addresses, measuring the frontal width, checking who owns it, etc. Then they go back to Lehman Bros. and they crunch all these findings and they come up with maps showing the most vulnerable properties and those with potentials as boutique hotels, which includes all the old early-twentieth-century hotels and old-neighborhood buildings (like the original Life Magazine building just across the street from me that was turned from a whorehouse-crack den into a boutique hotel, the developer of which was allowed by the Landmark Commission to put a totally vulgar and building-ruining extra floor on top of this otherwise elaborately gold leafed and cupid adorned 19th-Century facade).

There are two boutique hotels on my block already--the old Clinton Hotel, now the Herald Square Hotel (the old Life Magazine building) and the once very ritzy and elegant Wolcott Hotel. Who bought and developed the Herald Square I don't know, but I know that an Indian private equity group redid the Wolcott.

These boutique hotels cater to Euro-Trash. They are popular with the Euros because their rooms go for an average of $150 a night whereas if you stay in a big-name hotel, like the Hilton or Sheraton, you're gonna pay around $350 a night. Besides, the Euro-Trash don't mind that they are staying in what once were whorehouses, crack dens, illegal immigrant hiding places, or homes for itinerant bums--in old buildings infested with vermin--infested with roaches, water bugs, and bedbugs--plus lead paint is on the walls and asbestos is between the walls of these old hotels. The Wolcott a few years ago had to trash every mattress in the joint--and it's at least a 100-room hotel--and for weeks there were dumpsters out front packed with mattresses. I assumed those mattresses were infested with bedbugs. The Euro-Trash are here to use the power of their Euro bucks over the US buck to shop, walk the streets smugly with their maps, their backpacks, their Euro-Trash sports togs (made in China just like our clothes)--though, yes, a lot of hayseed American tourists book into these hotels, too, though they are much bigger suckers for the Times Square big-time rip-off hotels like the Marriott or over on the edge of Rockefeller Center behind Saint Patrick's at the Helmsley Palace for instance.

So this max-tacky 54-story, 262-room hotel is being built by what's now called the Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants Corp. Why's this important? 'Cause you see good old Bill Kimpton died of leukemia in 2001.

I wondered as I looked up at this god-ugly structure standing in front of it if good old Bill would have approved of this tacky hotel being built in his name? Sure he would have, I knew all along. His hobby remember was collecting hotels. His boutique hotel concept was just his means of making money off his hobby.

Ironically, as a kid, I grew up 30 miles west of the little West Texas city of Cisco. Cisco was famous as being the site of the very first ever Conrad Hilton hotel, the Mobley.

The First Hilton Hotel, The Mobley, Cisco, Texas, now the site of the Hilton Museum (Cisco, 150 miles west of Fort Worth, is located on the old Bankhead Highway, US Highway 80 (it ran from New York City all the way to L.A.), and was once a station stop on the Texas & Pacific Railroad. In the early 19-teens and 1920s, Cisco was very active little city since it was involved as a railhead for the famous Ranger Oil Field and the Strawn, Texas, coal mining operations, and the Texas & Pacific coal mining town of Thurber. Being on a cross-country highway and being a railhead for the oil and coal boom towns of that time, Cisco had a need for hotels).

The second Hilton Hotel, I was always told, was the Hilton Hotel in my hometown. When you see Paris Hilton now remember she's a totally untalented, dumbass, leisure-class-privileged daughter of a rather worthless couple of slobs who have inherited their wealth and gained their entry into the Power Elite through the hotel business.

Obviously, New York City's only industry now is the TOURIST INDUSTRY. Euro-Trash vacationers. Asian businessmen on a Manhattan hustle trip. Brits vacationing over here and while they are here looking for New York condos to buy. Real Estate agencies bringing potential high-end buyers to New York City and using the boutique hotels to store them in while they're trying to hustle millions of dollars from these other world suckers!

SHIT. My life is now controlled by the New York City tourist industry. Even the air I breathe is controlled by them. Good old Bill Kimpton's hotel has totally blocked any breezes coming in my windows from the west--and I used to get long gusts of Hudson River-cooled breezes coming at me all during the days--not any more.

My old pal who owns my favorite Irish pub tells me that hotels are moneymakers no matter full or not. Even if they're only a quarter full, they can still make money.

Good old Bill Kimpton was also big pals with Wolfgang Puck, a German chef who somehow came to this country, thick accent and all, Californians must love German accents, check out their governor, and managed to somehow peddle the notion that American food was so unchic, so unEuro-Trash, so not Old World, that he managed to advanced himself into the millionaire class over here through making himself a trendy type in his Hollywood Spago--and he now owns a whole Wolfgang Puck enterprises--amazing--and who decided he's a good cook!

That's what these Euro-Trash-lover investors are bringing to the USA, this Old World European style of hostelry, bistros, pubs, garden dining, bars with hundreds of Euro beers, and wine cellars stocked with who-knows? wines these snobby assholes hustle as so chic and with it. And their neostyle cooking turns out scantily small portions but hugely priced portions of weird concoctions of Euro-Trash recipes all surrounded by a ring of raspberry sauce and topped with a twig of parsley and a sprig of fennel or is it the other way around? Euro chefs seem to specialize in a whole lot of scallop dishes. I hate scallops. Euro chefs have also brought to this country what they call "sliders." These are Euro-Trash-style hamburgers--Kobe beef patties fried in veggie oil--topped with mushrooms, bleu cheese, with a slice of Gruyere cheese on top, put under the broiler and served on little Euro-Trash buns with sweet potato fries--and all for only $50. [By the way, whether you fry a sweet potato or a regular old Red Bliss potato in deep-welled grease doesn't matter in terms of healthy cooking--plus Euro-Trash chefs (and this includes this plethora of Brit chefs all over this country, too) use a lot of salt, a lot of bad oil, even a lot of sugar.]

The only place I can still get a good meal in my neighborhood now is at my favorite Irish pub--nicely cooked food: like wonderful pork chops or tenderloin of pork medallions or if you go for fish, they have beautiful Norwegian salmon, tuna steaks, or traditional American Irish dishes like shepherd's pies, Irish sausage and potatoes, or chicken pot pies; or if you wanna really go American, Angus steaks or New York sirloins--or perhaps you prefer a sirloin chopped steak--covered in grilled onions and mushroom gravy--OR hamburgers--man, their hamburgers are cooked the New York City 70s way, thick juicy sirloin burgers served on big nice sesame-seed buns (grilled in a little fat) with a side of, as Roy Rogers called 'em, fixin's: lettuce, tomatos, onions, pickles, mustard, ketchup, and a huge pile of hot freshly deep-fried French fries (or Patriot Fries or Freedom Fries if you're a teabagger). The day my friend hires Wolfgang Puck to take over his kitchen, I'm out of there except to drink.

Anybody used to could come to Manhattan and find an affordable apartment or a nice neighborhood to live in, and then find a good job in a matter of days, and then start enjoying living in this city of at one-time so many diverse neighborhoods--right here in Manhattan we had a German neighborhood (Yorkville--where Henry Miller (of German descent) was born); Little Italy; Chinatown; Little Beirut (my original neighborhood was Lebanese); a Lower East Side Jewish community; a Lower East Side Ukrainian neighborhood; a Lower East Side Polish neighborhood; a Portuguese area over on the West Side; even a French (Normandians and Burgundians) neighborhood over by the French Line docks when there were still ships of all types docking along the Hudson River from the high 50s all the way down to the Latin American ship line piers at the foot of Canal Street. And of course the Irish neighborhood on San Juan Hill or up in Washington Heights and the Puerto Rican neighborhoods all up the West Side--and there were the business districts, too, which were neighborhoods unto themselves: the fashion district, the flower district, the fur district, the millinery district, the business machines district, the radio-television district, the film district, the theater district, the HOTEL district....

No more. Our Billionaire Mayor, a real estate investor himself, is not only mall mad but he's also selling this city off to the highest bidders among his big developer pals. If only he had lost this last campaign we might have been saved from further tragic urban planning moves but with a fresh four years this little cocky bastard can totally and drastically change life (culture, make up, everything) in New York City. He's giving Manhattan away to the rich no matter where they're from or where their national loyalties or their bank accounts lay. I'm speaking as a New York City resident of 30 years and not an ethnocentric fool. I've never thought of New York City as anything but New York City, the ultimate in what I considered a stage on which to show your best in the USA, the reward being a chance to live a full New York City-style life--though, yes, I concede, I'm constructing a dialectic that leads to a utopia--and as a Sociologist I'm well-versed in failed utopias (a great Sociological classic is Karl Mannheim's Utopia). I'm calmed down now. I hope good old Bill Kimpton's first East Coast venture--he made his big money building boutique hotels in San Francisco mainly but also up and down the West Coast--fails big time--oh the hotels old Bill collected. I can remember when rich people collected like art or automobiles; now, like that old gnarly fool, Harry Helmsley, they collect buildings!
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How'd did you enjoy Senator Jim Bunning's performance in We the People's Senate the other day? Yep, old Jim was against extending Federal unemployment insurance payments to the recently laid off--fuck 'em all, old Jim said, "giv'n 'em extended payments will 'cause 'em to stay home and watch teevee rather than goin' out and gettin' 'em a job." That's the old Conservative spin against welfare, remember? Old Jim didn't give a shit if his bullshit was hurting his chances at getting re-elected. He'd already said he wasn't running again because he was having trouble raising campaign funds, so hell, why not filibuster and get another 15 minutes of fame before he retires to his politically gained Kentucky farmland or whatever--his beer distributorship in Louisville--whatever. Jim Bunning, you see, is an ex-baseball player. A pitcher. A damn good pitcher, too. With the Detroit Tigers and the Philadelphia Phillies. 65th in career wins, 247 or so, and 17th on the all-time strike-out list. In the sixties he pitched a perfect game, the 18th perfect game ever pitched in the MLs at that time. Old Jim belonged in and got put into the Baseball Hall of Fame in the 90s. But Old Jim didn't belong in the US Senate, though he got there the true democratic way, starting by being elected to a city council job and moving from there up through the Kentucky State House to make it first to the US House of Reps and finally to the Senate. We'll miss old Jim's backwards thinking. During his filibuster, Old Jim started talkin' 'bout his 40 grand kids and how if he voted for this extension of these Federal unemployment benefits for 30 days he'd hate to think his "40 grand kids WAS" gonna suffer from the damage this bill would do to the Amurican economy. Afterall, Jim at his best was just a baseball player. Jim Bunning's major in college? How 'bout Economics.

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Sociological Thinking
I close this bitchy post with a beautiful passage on Sociological Thinking from an old mentor of mine from way back in my early college days, Jose Ortega y Gasset, from his book The Revolt of the Masses. Gasset was the head chair in Metaphysics at a Madrid U prior to the Spanish Civil War. He was one of the intellectuals behind the Spanish Republican government and became a member of the Spanish Republican Parliament. After becoming disappointed with politics, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, J O y G, went into exile in Buenos Aires first and then later in Lisbon, Portugal. After World War II, J O y G gradually returned to Madrid again as a lecturer in his own School of Humanities. He left the coil in 1955 at age 72.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder is the delight refused to your football "fan," and, on the other hand, is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary. His special attribute is the wonder of the eyes. Hence it was that the ancients gave Minerva her owl, the bird with ever-dazzled eyes. [The Revolt of the Masses, W.W. Norton-Signet Books/Mentor Books, 1950, page 8.]

The Very Dapper Jose Ortega y Gasset

Yeah, man, "ever-dazzled eyes." That's what I love about life: that which dazzles my eyes to wide-open owl proportions--able to observe things in the light as well as the dark.

theowleyedgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

SCANDALOUS! A The Daily Growler Jots & Tittles Edition

It's Duck Season in Lake Flaccid, New York...Read All About It HERE & NOW With
thedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman: Barabbus Munn-Dayne
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Ah, come on, you picture researchers, that's not Lake Flaccid...though it is duck season up here. Fortunately ducks won't come within several miles of Lake Flaccid even in good weather much less with temperatures in the high 20s and recently around 2 feet of snow on the ground. I haven't seen a duck on Lake Flaccid in any of the four seasons including duck season in several years--though, yes, it is duck season up here, maybe a miscalculation on the part of the fiscally desperate Game and Fish folks down in Albany. The fact that there has never been a duck on Lake Flaccid doesn't keep the duck hunters from coming here anyway. Looking out over the lake right now I see about 20 boats with guys with shotguns sitting in them. I can hear them wailing away on their duck calls. A choir of quacks. They are waiting for strays I assume. Unless they are hunting squirrels. Yeah, we've got plenty of pesky squirrels around during this year's duck season. I guess it's OK to shoot squirrels during any season since I don't think there's a squirrel season in NY State, though the State of New York is broke and desperate for new income--so maybe a Squirrel Hunting License is in the works.

I've got something up in my cabin's attic right now but it could be a black bear so hell as long as it doesn't wander down into my quarters--though I do keep an old Weatherby Elephant gun by my bed. Why I consider that protection I don't know. I don't have any ammunition for it. I'm sure it wouldn't scare a black bear so I'm sure it wouldn't scare a squirrel either. Hell, it wouldn't even scare a human. Jesus, now I've just spoiled my thinking about that gun being a protection. How about I buy a surplus machine gun? Set it up next to my bed. Bear falls out of my ceiling, brrratttttttattttatttat, and I've got one blown-away bear. Maybe I'll gain a headless bearskin rug out of it. Forget it if I blew a squirrel away with a machine gun. Squirrel-skin rugs aren't popular at all, are they?

It's not that Lake Flaccid isn't as polluted as the above photo--it's just that ducks don't ever land on our lake's surface. I tease the old lake--and it is an ancient body of fetid water--but actually I love it. The stench is bad sometimes, but, heck, no problem if you stay a little downwind. Like up in the city of Lake Flaccid you can't usually smell the lake--only when the wind blows westerly, which it seldom does.

And speaking of scandals: same as ducks, there aren't any in Lake Flaccid. For instance, there's no leak out yet of my involvement with Cecil the Dog-face Boy III's sister, Barbara--I nicknamed her Poodle--how caninely clever is that? Charlie Hooch driving his cigarette boat ashore over by Jimmy's glass-bottle house isn't scandalous to those of us who know Charlie Hooch as a good Christian man with a good wife, Roomette (honest, she was born on a cross-country train trip), and two good kids, Silly and Spam, the silly daughter, Silly, and the Spam-shaped son, Spam (I call him Maps).

There could be some scandal brewing over towards Lake Placid. Lem Lueller's married son, Jakob Boehm, might have been seen foolin' around, as locals like to call it--an amendment to the "Boys will be boys" truism, "They's jist foolin' a'round"--with Chief Kyle Hamburger's wife, Emma Broadwing Sparrow (she's an Ontario Native American Chief Kyle (not a Native American) met when he was panning for gold up near the Arctic Circle--she was married to a British geologist at the time and Chief Kyle "stole" her (legal stealing up here) from the geologist, got her a divorce (we all assume), and brought her back here to this part of the world, over by the John Brown farm where the Chief runs a strip club called Magic Moments, which is probably where Jakob Boehm ran into Emma Broadwing Sparrow Hamburger--some say she's the star performer in that club, but I would only know about that through rumor and I don't get a chance to hear many rumors around here.

Whoaaa! One of the duck hunters out on the lake mistook something he considered a duck that flew across his field of vision I assume on a level with my screened-in porch since that's where his two shotgun barrels of shot ended up, peppering my porch screen with BB-sized holes. God-dammit. I would go out and cuss them out but they might mistake me for a duck--though I'll admit, in most dead of winters, I look more like a squirrel than a duck.
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And Now Some Jots........&......Some Tittles, Too

--Companies I'd Never Heard of Until About a Week Ago:

Golden Corral fast-food joints--never heard of them in this part of the world until a commercial of theirs during the Winter Olympics.
GHI Emblem one of the new supplemental Medicare health-insurance schemes that are appearing all over teevee by the dozens all of a sudden.
Citizens Medical one of the new diabetes supply services suddenly on the market. Diabetes must be of epidemic proportions in this country given the number of diabetes medical supply companies--each with their free testing meters--"I don't have to prick my fingers anymore!" Diabetes can be controlled through alternative diets and supplemental nutritional intakes like oil of oregano or cutting fats out of your diet.
The Ladder: this new company says it finds jobs for the higher-end employee, the over 100,000-buck-a-year man (how many women make over 100,000 a year?).
Secure Horizons: this is another bilk the senior citizens supplemental Medicare plan. With Obama's health-insurance-pay-or-die plan, Medicare costs are already going up. So yes senior citizens facing death are scared so sure they are suckers for Medicare Plan schemes--one of the reasons Medicare is costing so much is because of the many doctor-hospital-insurance-company schemes to beat Medicare out of more money than is due them.
Quicken Loans: new quickie loan company--you know, one of those schemers who takes all your debts and loans you the money to pay them all off and just owe Quicken Loans for the rest of your life--while you abuse your credit cards and get back into debt in that arena again. Don't worry, Quicken Loans will double up your debt to them.

--Did you know Toyota (the American Citizen version of the Japanese car company) has 40 lobbyists representing it in the District of Corruption? How many lobbyists do you have working for you?

--"Neoplanning"--a word used by a work-out dude on a exercise machine commercial--he used the word in describing how he as a trainer was advanced over other trainers--because he was into "neoplanning"--neologism at its best.

--The Winter Olympics (also called "The Bankrupting of the City of Vancouver" or "What Pissed Off the Native American Gods and Caused Whistler Peak to Blow Its Headdress in an Aftershock?"--what a joke, eh? NBC-TV amazingly managed to cover only US participants, all of whom to NBC were the greatest "winter" athletes in the history of the Winter Olympics--and then suddenly NBC got carried away by the US winning more medals than anybody else in the world and the hyperbolas were flying off the wall as sports experts all agreed the US team was the greatest assembled Winter Olympic colossal team in the history of winter sports--Yahoo!--even though most of those US medals were for 2nd and 3rd places, Canada actually getting more gold medals in this Winter Olympics than any other country ever has. The Winter Olympics when it was a true Winter Olympics was all held outdoors. Even the "figure" skating was held outdoors on an ice pond. It was called figure skating because the skaters actually had to perform "figures," like a figure 8, in their on-ice performances then followed by the free-style skating part of the program. Besides, at one time, both the Winter and Summer Olympics were for amateur athletes only--now, even the skiers, sliders, snowboarders, acrobats, fliers are all millionaire professionals who compete yearly in a World Cup venue for multimillions of bucks and sponsorships. I found it so comical how the final US-Canada hockey game drew so much nationalistic hoopla. All the participants in that match were millionaire NHL hockey players who have played against each other for several months now this season. And, of course, the Summer Olympics is now a millionaire track stars and gymnast stars convention. They've already, too, spent a season competing with each other, the best beating all these second-raters from all over the world--most of them at their peaks in their twenties, gone by the time they're 30, unless they are the phenom champions and then they can keep competing say up to around 36, which I think was the oldest skier I saw at Vancouver this year. Though these thrill-seeking kids break an awful lot of bones during their World Cup seasons--the Georgian bobsledder being killed by what was being billed by the commercial sponsors of this affair as the fastest-ever bobsled run--a challenge to bobsledders to try and survive at 90 mph--a thrill a minute--that it killed a bobsledder--so much the better...oh no, they moved the starting line up to where the girly men start from (the women bobsledders)--plus, oh yeah, they covered up the steel beams sticking out over that most dangerous curve--the one on which the Georgian guy flew off the track to his death. Think of the thousands of sudden bobsledding fans who watched those bobsled runs hoping for another tragedy! There has to be a thrill to it for it to sell. No thrill no sell. So you have a bunch of teenage/twentyish mountain-area-cold-country kids, a lot of them kids whose parents run ski resorts, and a lot of them who know each other very well, who marry each other, who socialize with each other--who practice in each other's countries--anyway--competing for sponsors. Yes, that, folks, is really all they're doing at the Vancouver Olympics--the Olympics now becoming a venue for millionaire sports professionals to show off their attention-getting wares--all of them heavily sponsored by the ski industry and associated industries--ski apparel; ski resorts; airlines, etc.--all millionaires, even the most ridiculous of them.

--Speaking of millionaire professional sports stars, the World Champ New York Yankees just signed has-been South Korean (the first one in the MLs) pitcher Chan Ho Park
(박찬호) to a one-year contract at 1.2 million bucks. By the bye, we haven't heard anything from Marvelous Marv Backbiter lately, speaking of overpaid millionaire sports reporters and announcers--what the heck is going on with him?

--Speaking of scandals: looks like now the sports police are going to accuse poor old once-perfect Tiger Woods of obtaining "enhancing" drugs from yet another sports doctor down in Florida--another quack offering these millionaire game-playing boys enhancing substances. (Everybody in the USA is on some kind of enhancing something, whether a drug substance or an implanted electric shock device that keeps hearts ticking in the right time--Unka Dick probably has one of these mechanical messiahs in his old gnarled chest.) They are grilling Mets shortstop once-blossoming-star Jose Reyes about his letting this doctor shoot him up with some substance that will, I suppose, make him heal quicker since Reyes has been operated on recently. Poor old baseball players in today's brutal sports market--they all have these joint and muscle injuries (torn rotator cuffs; bad knees; back troubles; broken limbs)--they are forced to play injured a lot of times--some play through seasons knowing they need surgery--some play with broken bones or ankle sprains--and think of the pain these poor millionaires are forced to play with--though I'm sure the team trainers have the painkillers in the bottom of their bags--is Oxycontin considered an illegal drug in sporting circles? Like if Reyes had of shown up to spring training still in pain, unable to perform like the general manager (same old dude; they kept him, Omar the Great) wants him to, he might have been put on the trading block; so hell, it's only natural he fall for a doctor who says, "Here, Jose, amigo, trust me, I'm a doctor, let me shoot your ass full of this legit all-natural homemade substance here and you'll be Superman by the time spring training rolls around. Hey, look, amigo, an autographed photo of Tiger Woods here on my wall, right there under my diploma from the Grenada School of Leisure Class Medicine. Now you know this man wouldn't take an illegal substance, would he?" Competition is so vicious now in professional sports--Tiger was such a phenom--I mean, just think of the pressure on Tiger to stay King of the Hill, which is what this is all about--those who get to the tops of the highest hills become our champions! Babe Ruth during his heyday of phenomenal baseball playing and hitting was privileged to a high carousal rating without his baseball career being besmirched. The Babe had been a winning pitcher before he became the big-star heavy hitter who hit record-breaking home runs year after year. So no wonder he was so good a hitter--as a winning pitcher he knew what the pitchers were throwing at him just by the way they held the ball and delivered it--he could know pretty much what kind of pitch they were fixing to throw at him using remembrances of what pitches he would have thrown in this situation when he was a pitcher and thought like a pitcher. After the games and during the off season, the Babe was notorious enough to be known and unashamed enough to be photographed around every whorehouse in every baseball city in the US. Babe was also notorious for showing up to games drunk or horribly hungover--usually a sign he was going to have a great day at the plate--though it is ironic to note, though once a winning pitcher and with pitching knowledge in his bean, the Babe still was sometimes easily struck out. Babe was also well known for eating hot dogs by the dozens and drinking soda pops while sitting on the bench. He was caught many times cheating on his wife--though she stayed with him to the very end. He was also known for smoking big cigars, playing pranks on his teammates, being called "Nig," and driving big cars. Ironically, that's why so many baseball fans loved the Babe. He defied conformity. He wasn't a team player, he was a team in himself. Lou Gehrig was a much better baseball player, but he was supposedly perfect--loved his parents, loved his country, didn't drink, didn't smoke, was academically smart (an Ivy Leaguer)--Lou Gehrig has to die of a horrible disease (it was named after him) before people looked at the amazing record this guy achieved in his much more pure-baseball-playing career than the Babe's, though the Babe is more of a baseball-playing phenom than Lou. You can't expect a kid, as in Tiger's case, who grows up since age 2 doing nothing but learning and being trained on how to play and win at golf to not be overwhelmed by the royalty and majesty and power of being the best-ever in the game of golf or in any sport. Of being better than those White phenoms, Arnie Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, who came before him. Tiger's big goal in life was to wipe out Jack Nicklaus's at-one-time-thought-to-be invincible records, which he was well on his way to doing before this SEX SHIT hit his best fan. To be a phenom in the amateur ranks, as was Tiger, and then at 20 breaking onto the pro tour with even more phenom gallant had to be a wildly traumatic experience--release from which for a man is SEX--and a phenomenal entry into the pro golf world it was, too--his first Master's he creamed all the existing records and won it by the widest margin in this American classic's history--surely Tiger got laid that Sunday night after he won that Master's that first time--surely he got a fine young thing that night. And do we really expect this naive billionaire to suddenly be able to resist the Golf Devil's worst form of temptation, a tempting female human animal? Even though you've got your trophy white wife and trophy kids, you are the Master now; you are the King now; you can summons women of all classes and races and motivations to your side; you can command they kneel before you and worship your proud golf-club hard manhood--"What will I get if I suck your cock, oh my Master Tiger?" "Name your price and get to work, sweetheart." "Wow, ohhh, baby, the way you suck dick I should divorce my wife and runaway with you...ohhh, you got anymore suction left in that Hoover of yours?" No thought of the trophy wife while you're getting the royal dick sucked. Definitely no thought of the trophy kids--they're well taken care of--nannies galore--especially that one really hot nanny you've seen around the compound. These big sports stars all live in compounds. Remember OJ's compound. Tiger can go play golf and keep winning millions in South Africa, the Arab Emirates, and all over Asia--don't worry about his ass. Soon the PGA will forgive him--the US tour suffers when Tiger isn't playing. You just can't get it up for Phil Mickelson like you can Tiger. Nor none of these Brits and Aussies who are all over the US tour now--i.e., Ian Poulter and Paul Casey who recently were in the finals of the World Match Play Championship in Tucson, an event that Tiger always starred in and drew huge galleries at--now that Tiger's not in the hunt, these second-raters are battling each other for Fed Express glory--the US tour is now a European tour--with a recent influx of even Japanese and Korean men golfers (the Ladies Pro Golf tour is dominated by Asian women these days) you could say it's a Euro-Asian tour. Tiger is the greatest golfer in the world--how long do you think the US tour can do without him? I'll bet you one thing, the minute Gator Ade dropped Tiger their sales dropped, too. Now'd be a good time for Red Bull to offer Tiger a deal. I mean isn't male potency the whole reason behind Gator Ade and Red Bull?

--Hey, I'm sorry, I'm no judge of poets, I just happen to like this guy: Elmer Snowedin

How Do the Serious Think?
by Elmer Snowedin, poet laureate of Hay Spring, Nebraska:

With hands full of notes
With lines of deep resonance
With echoes of pasts and morrows
Mixing with language spoken or sung
The writing writing cancrizans of twice-remitted tales
Aligned mathematically to come out
As symmetrically corralled horse-hoof-rumbling verses
Corralled off wild-windswept-plains of thinking
By plain thinking on a variety of planes
Floating and flying high above OUR everyday thoughts
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--The LG Co. (they make appliances, I think) teevee advertisement during PGA golf implies that birds learned to fly from watching airplanes. Isn't this what the Growler pundits mean by "backwards thinking"?

--"Wash like a man, feel like a man"--a Gillette Body Wash commercial I saw on teevee during the Big East basketball games Sunday (Syracuse whipped Villanova bad, man). If you wash like a woman do you feel like a woman even if you're a man? What if a woman washes with this man's wash--does she then begin having Lesbian fantasies?

--A quote from Uncle Carl Jung (a protestant preacher's son):

I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were - a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.

C. G. Jung quoted by Richard Noll. The Jung Cult. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 188.
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"The soothsaying god of the vine"--Jung was right; that's who Christ is. "...and the holiness of an animal." Jung took Freud a step further--he accepted Freud's personal subconscious but he refudiated Freud for not respecting the "spiritual" in man by coming up with his collective subconscious, the lowest level of the psyche. Did you know the word alcohol in Latin has a religious connection in that it can mean a person intaking the Holy spirits (the firmament) to the point of legendary drunkeness--what Benny Hinn and those fakirs call being slain in the spirit. Same way voodoo works. Holy drunkeness. "...a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal." Woof, woof. "Why must I act like that/Why must I chase the cat?/Nothin' but the dawg in me!" Atomic dog.

Bye-bye for NOW, the only time we know for sure we have.

barrabusmunn-daynethedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman
for The Daily Growler

A New The Daily Growler Hall of Fame Inductee:

Earl Mad Man Muntz

A Muntz Jet Automobile


Here's a great site that will surprise you--a site championing the Muntz Jet automobile--and also the history of Earl the Mad Man Muntz. Inventor also of the Muntz television sets. It's all in his story:

www.gatsbyonline.com/main.aspx?page=text&id=260&cat=auto

In Honor of Basil Bunting's 110th Anniversary (see www.languagehat.com for a deeper perspective of Mr. Bunting)--and here's a poem by him--appropriately on a The Daily Growler Hall of Famer's greatest work, Old Ez Pound's Cantos:

On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!