Glen Campbell (1936-2017) was, in my view, one of the best natural musicians that I have ever encountered, probably the best guitar player. As you will note if you watch the interview above with Bob Costas, he also was a very charming, natural, and funny man. (It took Costas a few minutes to see what Campbell was really saying about his acting in the movie True Grit that earned John Wayne his best actor gig. He was subtly suggesting that he was so bad that he made Wayne look very good.)
Author: Mark Tokarski
Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.
Where is home?
Home is a place where I am at ease. Like most people, I enjoy company, conversation, playing cards. The pitter-patter of a card game, the things we say while focused on something else are far more interesting than things we plan to say to others. I am most at “home” when with others and absorbed in something else, as with bird watching. Things pass through my mind, and sometimes I give voice, as one day with a group down on Platte River when I repeated the words of a song … out of the blue: “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried, in my own way, to be true to you free.”
“Where did that come from?”, I was asked. I quickly consulted my phone to find I was quoting a song by Leonard Cohen, but why?
The serious matter of being silly
See Addendum at the end of this post.
I am spending more time in the Internet age with comedians, and far less with serious people – you know, thinkers, hacks, non-listeners. The latter, most people, are especially annoying. I can see in the darting eyes no point in trying to engage in serious conversation with most everyone I know face-to-face. They are only lightly engaged in real life.
On our recent vacation, I attempted to engage my grandsons in some serious reflection, telling them that Climate Change is not real, that there is no need to fear any “virus,” but teachers and media have such a hold on them that they are trapped. I do hope in the coming years as they mature that they come to appreciate that one person attempted to tell them the truth, while every other person in their lives, some knowingly but most not, lied to them. Life is absurd, I hope they come to realize.
Media, i.e. TV, YouTube, Facebook and the like … I’ve virtually blocked it out of my life. We have a Samsung TV on our wall, and it sits blackened 23 hours a day, that one remaining hour devoted to a search for wholesome entertainment. We did find it in a British TV series, Call the Midwife, set in London in the 1950s and 60s. It has profound appeal to me as its central characters in part are Anglican nuns of the Order of St. John the Divine. I was taught by Dominican nuns in my formative years, and the portrayal in Midwife is so profound and accurate concerning the quality if these wonderful women.
Aggressive stupidity
“There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Aggressive stupidity: “Stupidity that flaunts ignorance and seeks out opportunities to go toe-to-toe with real knowledge is another story altogether, being at once dismaying and frightening.” (Donald Weick, American Thinker)
This post, I hope when it is done, will qualify as a rant. In my life I have traveled in most circles, from conservative Republican (birth family) to liberal Democrat (the bounce – once I realized that conservative Republicans had it wrong, I assumed liberal Democrats had it right – you might say I was stupid), to Naderite Green and back to “conservative” without the R. On that journey the worst and most thoroughly annoying people I have met are liberal Democrats. Their brains have been shrink-wrapped and function without adequate oxygen. Let me give an example:
“… from a considerable height.”
“I piss on you all, from a considerable height.” (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
The photo to the left is of one of the hardest walks we ever did, somewhere in Italy. It is not that it is a great distance or steep climb – most of us could accomplish this and recover quickly. The problem was this: I placed an orange arrow at the very top of the mountain we had to ascend. Though hard to see, it is Rifugio Lagazuoi, seen above. It is a mountain hotel, where we would be staying in that night. We could see it, and over the entire walk that followed, it never left our sight. It also never seemed to get bigger. This is what made the hike so difficult, a psychological sense that we were not making any progress.
As the photo to the right indicates, we did eventually make it to our destination.
I wish at the outset here to separate myself from men and women who climb mountains. Maybe in another life I will deal with ropes and gadgets designed to suspend people at high altitude, as from the Half Dome or North Face. I have climbed, that is, jumped from rock to rock on minor hills and mountains, pulling myself up, losing fingernails, and I must say it was invigorating. Now, at age 71, I stay on trails. I have never used a rope, helmet, harness in any “mountain climbing” sense, and a carabiner only to suspend a water bottle from my belt or bird feeder from a wire on our property. You magnificent people who do that, go away. This is not written for you, who might echo Monseur Celine above about our efforts.
The future of the blog
Steve Kelly and I had a chance to get together for dinner with our families this past week. We were in the area, staying at Chico Hot Springs, so Steve and company came over from Bozeman to join us. It was a wide-ranging two-plus hour affair, the wait staff too polite to remind us to move to a different venue. We discussed many things. One of them was Stephers, from our perspective, extremely bright, young and diligent. Her posts are bringing in a new audience, something I think of as a “happy problem.” Something else I’ve noticed, her posts have a much longer shelf life than mine.
I cannot write for that audience. As I told Steve, new feet do tend to step on old hands. He and I are the same age, and each bring a different perspective to this blog.
Expert texpert, choking smoker …
… don’t you think the joker laughs at you? (John Lennon’s songwriting ghosts)
“I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.” (Richard Feynman)
7/4/2021 – We are in Yellowstone National Park with our two grandsons, having a very good time. We did not know what to expect, where we would be. In the past we would stay at Pebble Creek Campground, maybe eight miles into the park from the Silvergate entrance. All of the 27 sites were FCFS, that is, first come, first serve. We would look over the board and see what sites were coming available, and arrive at 5:00 AM the following morning to be first in line.
Thanks to Covid, I Believe in Science
By Guest Writer Scott RC
Over the past year and a half, as I argued with friends and family about the absurdities of the Covid narrative, many of them speculated my objections must stem from a lack of belief in science.
I now realize how right they were. I was a heathen. I didn’t believe.
But recently, I made a discovery… and the scales fell from my eyes.
Like others who follow this blog, I’ve read lots of the scientific studies media and government officials point to when claiming “science supports” whatever they say about Covid. We know these papers prove nothing. They offer no credible evidence. Many are not, and never will be, published in established scientific journals. Yet their mere existence confers the blessing of scientific “support.”
As long as the authors use impenetrable language to describe scientific-sounding work on a hypothesis… and as long as the media likes that hypothesis… voilà! Lo-and-behold, science supports it!
At that point, the hypothesis emerges from the cocoon of imagination, spreads its wings, and manifests into glorious reality.
Come to think of it, it’s a lot like the Law of Attraction—a concept I’m embarrassed to admit I once believed in.
Man, was I stupid. The Law of Attraction never supported any of my hopes and dreams. Not a single one.
On the matter of forest fires
The above is a photo of the ongoing Robertson Draw fire, located in Montana near the Wyoming border, on the east face of the Beartooth Mountains. The map quadrant is known as “Mt. Maurice,” and I assume that to be Mount Maurice itself.
Over 100 homes have been destroyed, a reminder not to build in the forest interface, says the guy living in the forest interface. Evacuations are ongoing or people are in “pre-evac status,” sitting on pins and needles. Just a few thoughts, if I may:
The Rock Hudson affair
One of my childhood memories is being taken to an outdoor movie theater, Motor View, by an aunt and uncle, to watch the movie “Giant,” starring Rock Hudson, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor. I was probably seven years old, and had no business watching that movie. It was incredibly boring, but I think aunt and uncle were charged with taking care of me for some reason, and they wanted to see the movie. I was just assigned back seat duties.
Yesterday I went to read the synopsis of the movie, and I couldn’t get through it. Bored again! The reason for my interest was having just read the last chapter of the book Virus Mania, titled Rock Hudson Gave “AIDS” A Face, and Virus Hunters Godlike Status. I’ve been reading this book off and on for a long time now, having to get away from it now and then because the crap that has gone down in the fields of epidemiology, medicine and virology is so ghastly dishonest and criminal. That they get away with their crimes with utter impunity makes reading about them tortuous. But I did it, got through it, knowing all along that the last chapter was about Rock Hudson.
