How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
I was an avid TV non-watcher for years. Until COVID quarantine. Since March I have viewed more hours of television than in the preceding decade combined. One of the series we whiled our way through was the FX show Justified. It is network TV, to be sure, but it has its charms. One of which was the knavish-yet-sometimes-sympathetic anti-villain of the series, Boyd Crowder.
Boyd knew two things: how to use forty words when just four would do; and how to blow shit up.
I am traveling currently and lodging for a couple of nights at a hotel where I have stayed many times before. They usually have a decent breakfast buffet, and I was looking forward to the offerings this morning.
Alas, the regular fare was replaced by pre-packaged muffins, plastic-wrapped fruit, and packets of instant oatmeal. I had to wait in line to dispense myself a cup of coffee from an urn. All around were my co-lodgers, masked and ultra-cautious, their every motion slowed somehow by their facewear. I felt like I was attending a bandito convention. All I wanted was my morning jolt, and it seemed to take forever.
It occurred to me that the handle for the spigot of the coffee urn was getting touched over and over by unsanitized hands, which same hands would soon peel bananas, uncup muffins, remove masks, and stuff cakeholes. An exercise in hygienic futility. We sat down in turn, properly distanced at our tables in the dining area. Off came the masks, and with them whatever minuscule health benefit they could have conferred towards one another.
As I watched masks being peeled away and actual faces emerge, I could not help but remember this scene from a B-movie of my youth … Continue reading “I Reveal My Inmost Self …”
A question has dominated my thought for a long while now. In this theatrical illusion that is the modern world, who is the Man Behind the Curtain?
Different sites denounce different bad guys. Illuminati. Freemasons. The old aristocratic bloodlines. Bankers. The Vatican. Jews. Or some other tribe of Super-Semites. Putin. Reptilians. Cultural Marxists … Alas, it is an embarrassment of riches. It can’t be all these groups (real or imagined) working together. Because the world doesn’t work like that: in human affairs, cooperation is a limited commodity with a short half-life. Continue reading “Imagine There’s No Wizard”
It should not fall to me to be the one to point this out. I have neither the “infallible artistic eye” nor “mad skillz” with Photoshopping and Face-chopping®. But I have heard nary a whisper on the topic in the forums I frequent, so here goes nothing.
This is neither theory nor opinion. I am merely recounting an experience for you to ponder.
I had a brief meeting the other day with an acquaintance who holds a fairly high position in local government. Our chat was mostly pleasantries, and so I did not broach the topic that was at the forefront of my mind from the moment I walked into his office: namely, the piece of electrical tape over his monitor’s camera lens.
I don’t know how I noticed it—it Continue reading “iSpy?”
Mark’s recent post, Fake events of my lifetime, got me thinking: what news stories of the past left me feeling … unconvinced? A certain incident immediately popped into mind. Either I am an insensitive lout who is pitilessly digging up a family’s grief, or I have put my finger on an old school hoax—one from the days before cellphone videos and crisis actors. You help decide …
Piece of Mindful 