The last paragraph in the Times’ obit of Danny Sugerman, Jim Morrison’s ammanuensis, and later part of Iggy Pop’s management:
Danny Sugerman is survived by his wife, Fawn Hall, who was Oliver North’s secretary during the Iran-Contra scandal under Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s.
The lot of you. No one seems to have read the latest Swedish story at all. Still, I have finished it; and if there are any priests reading this, they had best mark and learn from this tragic tale of pastoral outreach.
Have you noticed how getting children to “explore” something is nowadays a synonym for paedophilia, as in “the booklet is used because it is hard to find writings that are both sympathetic to the South and explore what the Bible says about slavery”.
Here is a species of intellectual child abuse, found through William Gibson’s blog. Gibson also has quotes, of which I particularly liked this description of the ante-bellum South: “There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”
The left-hand margin of the topmost piece of paper on the desk is not a persistent storage medium. In two days’ time you will have lost the vital phone number / password you scribbled there. Nor will you remember whose it was; only that it was vital and is now overdue.
PS memos to self about persistent storage written on the nearest handy piece of paper are not themselves persistently stored, either.
I have started to translate another Selma Lagerlöf story of supernatural malevolence over at the Changeling. It’s not improving, but it is wonderful.
Louise brought this up. Witchcraft, in seventeenth century Scotland, was not an organised professions with certification authorities, Worst Practice committees and the other appurtenances of the modern caring professions. Competence was more informally marked: the witch in this story kept a kist [chest, cf Swedish kista ] of men’s members1 to show she meant business. That detail, however, is omitted in Walter Scott’s retelling of the story (after the fold here).
1 Nowadays we’d say “a box of Hewitts”
Whatever they do for Christmas in San Francisco, (and it probably involves unnatural acts with tofu rather than turkey) Andrew Orlovsky has not held back:
Online has always been a promiscuous communications medium: it’s easy to step on and step off, so you can vomit over someone and leave without facing the consequences. It’s why the internet has great flame wars and lousy discussions. Perhaps online is doomed to attract fluffy thinking, too, although that can’t explain why it attracts such Panglossian fantasies as the ‘blogosphere’ and Wikipedia. (The Wikipedia is the open-to-all reference source that’s as good as its last entry. It was started and is sustained by Ayn Rand nuts, and frankly it reads like it; but it has yet to feature on the evangelicals’ radar: which is when the fun will really start).
I think he may be right about this danger to the wikipedia, perhaps because I spent all afternoon drinking claret and talking about Scottish witch trials.
My mother in law gave me for Christmas an extraordinary illustration of the evils of heroin. It wasn’t meant like that. But the Grateful Dead movie was the last sustained piece of work Garcia did before he started smoking “Persian opium”; in fact I believe he got the habit while editing the film. The band was already damaged artitistically as well as in other ways by cocaine. You can hear this in the frenzied repetitive tuneless competence of a lot of the early Seventies jams, though, to be fair, it seems to have improved Billy Kreutzman’s drumming enormously. But in 1974, when the film was made Garcia still listened to the others, still bubbled, and still looked alive on stage. By the time he died, twenty years later, he looked and acted like the harvested giant on Cordwainer Smith’s planet Shayol.
That wouldn’t perhaps have mattered, except for my feeling that after about the end of 1977 he never played another note that sounded sincere.
