Recent Comments

1. 41 minutes ago on Ben

   Indeed, in Iowa back then it was both a more sedate time, and environment. And the cars were fewer, slower, and less maneuverable, too.

2. about 4 hours ago on Prickly City

   To which I might not err by tacking on the fact that the US electorate has a significant percentage of ignorant, or credulous, or Trump emulating (or all three) members (cue here Ortega Gasset’s Mass Man) who think — no that’s the wrong word — who feel and emote without “engaging the thought process” that this degraded condition of the founders’ republic is the best thing since sliced bread — until the plutocrats and demagogues degrade the republic to the point where there’s no bread for the electorate, but bread aplenty for the plutocrats and demagogues.

3. about 4 hours ago on Ben

   How did we EVER survive bike riding — often, in my case, going to school and elsewhere in the midst of street traffic in an era without safety lighting, or bike lanes, either? Sans helmets, of course, sometimes even barefoot! Around Indianapolis now there are dozens of white bikes#. The first time I recall a bike fatality concerned a 12 boy who was hit, in a residential neighborhood, hard by his home, by a careless driver. That was about 50 years ago, well past my salad days.

   (#) white bikes, like the white crosses (and sometimes Stars of David, I expect) are memorials indicating the location for a fatal bike accident.

4. about 5 hours ago on Ben

   I’m presuming that the candidate hadn’t blimped up too much and didn’t have balance problems that often crop up in senescence.

5. about 5 hours ago on Prickly City

   The authors of “The Federalist” interlarded warnings about precisely what has happened to their (our) republic since the mid-1970’s. They included, in their warnings, the unrestrained rise of money flush political parties funded by (thereby taken over) by greedy and wealthy reactionaries, a demagogic, avaricious executive working hand in glove with said reactionaries, a Congress populated with toadies of the executive, dependent on dirty money to stay in office, and a corrupt and/or impotent judiciary populated by the corrupt executive’s hand pick judges or fellow reactionary judicial travelers also corrupted my dirty money — particularly, in both these corrosive categories, the utterly powerless-to-execute-its-rulings SCOTUS.

   Reminds me of an incident a friend related to me whilst we both were in college. It seems that his roommate was reading a book, I think it was either “The Revolt of the Masses” or “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of “The Brothers Karamazov.” (I think it was the latter work.) Suddenly, in a paroxysm of frustration, the fellow pitched the book into the wall and exclaimed (expletives deleted here), “It’s even truer now than it was then!!”

6. about 7 hours ago on Ben

   It’s possible that I was a year younger. The main problem, apart from my vestibular immaturity, was that a 20" bike was too big for my relatively small body to learn on. (I was a junior in high school before I broke 95 pounds. Then I shot up to a 6ft, 125 pounder by the time I registered.) The girl’s frame of the neighbor’s bike may have helped, too. Learning to ride a bike is interesting in that once one acquires the skill needed to balance one’s self, it sort of becomes innate. I expect a person could — after a brief break-in period — successfully ride a bike after a decades long interval of not riding one.

7. about 7 hours ago on Prickly City

   The Democratic party is nearly prostrate — except for a few with balls, like AOC. The party’s probably as unpopular now with democrats as it’s ever been, and seems goalless and rudderless to boot. Yet, I wonder if this is a tactical venture. That is, are the dems waiting for things to get so abysmal that they could run a yaller dog in any race anywhere and pummel any MAGA/GOP opponent? This is, after all, just about the state of affairs when FDR under the aegis of the Democrats pummeled the GOP in ‘32 and ’36, then largely held sway politically in the US until ’52, and even maintained a relevance until LBJ signed the Civil Right laws in the mid-60’s thus consigning the South to the GOP for the past 60 years. A GOP which has since then turned from a conservative political organization into a full blown reactionary cabal; a cabal which is now a hair’s breadth from being a full bore fascist entity bent on hatred of anything “other,” and thereby poised to drag the US into the pantheon of failed plutocratic autocracies.

8. about 8 hours ago on Wizard of Id Classics

   Right. Too many panels for the average reader to endure.

9. about 8 hours ago on Viivi & Wagner

   If the house was built right (in these vastly oversized and fetishist McMansion days inflicted on buyers nowadays), you couldn’t afford it.

10. about 8 hours ago on Skippy

    And wages were about 50cent an hour — if you could get a job.