Oh dear. Sure hope this isn't true. But it must be; it's on Time Magazine's website. Turns out our Libyan rebels don't have a lot of use for black folks.
This isn't exactly a new story. It's been easily accessible for months to anyone who makes the effort to go beyond Al Jazeera and the BBC for their news. But when the story hits Time, you know it ain't going away anytime soon. Not a pretty story. Our rebels have been summarily executing migrant black workers because, well, because they're black. Oh my. Wonder how our rebels really feel about the leader of the free world?
The story does make a valiant attempt to pin our rebels' atrocities on Gaddafi. Apparently he used to encourage integration. Multiculturalism. Well, no wonder. Even Angela Merkel swore off that idea a little while ago. Maybe there are some wannabe German rebels who, with the help of a six month Nato bombing campaign, could free their country from the oppressive yoke of 42 years of forced multiculturalism. Merkel could take her chess board to Gaza and join Gaddafi and Shalit in their tournament (latest score: Shalit still ahead, six matches to five, with two draws).
And if that's not enough to set our rebels on a righteous rampage, get this; Gaddafi offered immigrants a fast track to citizenship if they joined his military. Who can even imagine such a thing? He wasn't called the Tyrant of Tripoli for nothing, was he? These black guys come waltzing in to Libya from Sudan and Mali and Somalia, serve a couple years in the army, and poof, they're "Libyans" just like our rebels? No wonder our rebels are pissed off.
Oh, wait a minute... got a headline here from the Washington Times, June 18 2009; "Military service offers fast track to citizenship".
That's not Libya they're talking about. That's the USA.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Squirrel hunting
Got hired at Budd Automotive on my eighteenth birthday. It was a UAW shop. Union rules. I'd been a dues-paying member of the USWA for awhile before that, when I worked at the Black Lung Foundry. The Steelworkers didn't mind having sixteen year olds on the roster. At the UAW shops you had to be 18. That was quite a few years before Bob White took the Canadian autoworkers out of the UAW and started the CAW.
Budd was the biggest employer in the Kitchener area at the time. Paid good too. Made car and truck frames for all the major manufacturers. Budd is long gone now. Either cars and trucks don't have frames anymore or the work went somewhere else. I'm guessing Mexico, but that's just a hunch.
Got my first lay-off notice just a few months after I started. Helpful Herb offered to let me stay at his place. He was heading off on a holiday. Needed a house-sitter. Herb had a nice place nestled on the crest of a hill on the edge of town. House sitting there was going to be a sweet gig.
That was an era when you couldn't open a paper without reading about racial tension and racial this and that. The Detroit riots and the Watts riots were a pretty recent memory. All I can tell you is this; when the black brothers and the white brothers and even a few Chinese brothers walked out of Budd with their lay-off notices, we were all brothers in unemployment.
Herb and Mrs. Herb were off to Europe or the Caribean or someplace. All I had to do was water the plants and keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder. I know! There's a gift from heaven just when you get a lay-off notice.
The deal with the squirrels was that they ate all the bird food and if they got a chance they'd eat the birds too. So Helpful Herb left me the keys to his gun cabinet and I went at it. Must have plinked off half a dozen the first day.
Bob White was probably the greatest union leader since C.S.Jackson. No nonsense guy. When Bob was negotiating for the UAW, or later the CAW, nobody ever made the mistake of thinking that the bosses and the workers were going to be sitting around the campfire singing Kum-by-ya together anytime soon.
So I dispatch the first round of feeder-raiding squirrels, and I realize that other squirrels, just waiting in the shadows, come zooming in to take their place. I take care of them, and there's another wave. And another.
The first act of working class resistance that I personally witnessed, I witnessed at Budd Automotive. There were eight welders working at an assembly station, two at each corner of a frame. The bumboys, unskilled labourers like me, would slap the frame parts in the jig, automated clamps would grab everything and hold it together, and these welders would weld it all up.
The automated clamps were all run off hydraulics. At each clamping cycle, which lasted about thirty seconds, one of the welders would stick the end of his mig gun into a hydraulic hose. Next cycle, the guy beside him would do the same. Enough cycles, and eventually the hydraulic hose would spring a leak and the station would be down for an hour or two. Eight welders, be they black or white or Chinese, would get a two hour break. It was a beautiful thing.
So eventually I got the squirrel problem winnowed down to one super-smart squirrel. Darwin's theory in action. But this guy is good. If you miss him on the first shot he's running zig-zag patterns to avoid the next shot. I swear he turns around and gives me the finger while he's zig-zagging away.
So I figure fuck Darwin, I'm gonna kill the furry fuck. I climb up on the roof, where I've got a downward shot at the birdfeeder. I'm peering through the scope, waiting for him to put his head up, and he's moments away from going to that big birdfeeder in the sky. Then, HOLYSHIT!!! A cross-country skier comes a-gliding through my field of vision! Then another one. And another...
Just lucky I had the scope. Without it I wouldn't have even seen the skiers! Can you imagine the newspaper headlines the next day? CARELESS HUNTER BAGS CROSS-COUNTRY SKIERS. Ya right. As if that woulda been my fault.
I eventually got the fucker with the twelve gauge, but I had to buy Herb a new bird-feeder.
Budd was the biggest employer in the Kitchener area at the time. Paid good too. Made car and truck frames for all the major manufacturers. Budd is long gone now. Either cars and trucks don't have frames anymore or the work went somewhere else. I'm guessing Mexico, but that's just a hunch.
Got my first lay-off notice just a few months after I started. Helpful Herb offered to let me stay at his place. He was heading off on a holiday. Needed a house-sitter. Herb had a nice place nestled on the crest of a hill on the edge of town. House sitting there was going to be a sweet gig.
That was an era when you couldn't open a paper without reading about racial tension and racial this and that. The Detroit riots and the Watts riots were a pretty recent memory. All I can tell you is this; when the black brothers and the white brothers and even a few Chinese brothers walked out of Budd with their lay-off notices, we were all brothers in unemployment.
Herb and Mrs. Herb were off to Europe or the Caribean or someplace. All I had to do was water the plants and keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder. I know! There's a gift from heaven just when you get a lay-off notice.
The deal with the squirrels was that they ate all the bird food and if they got a chance they'd eat the birds too. So Helpful Herb left me the keys to his gun cabinet and I went at it. Must have plinked off half a dozen the first day.
Bob White was probably the greatest union leader since C.S.Jackson. No nonsense guy. When Bob was negotiating for the UAW, or later the CAW, nobody ever made the mistake of thinking that the bosses and the workers were going to be sitting around the campfire singing Kum-by-ya together anytime soon.
So I dispatch the first round of feeder-raiding squirrels, and I realize that other squirrels, just waiting in the shadows, come zooming in to take their place. I take care of them, and there's another wave. And another.
The first act of working class resistance that I personally witnessed, I witnessed at Budd Automotive. There were eight welders working at an assembly station, two at each corner of a frame. The bumboys, unskilled labourers like me, would slap the frame parts in the jig, automated clamps would grab everything and hold it together, and these welders would weld it all up.
The automated clamps were all run off hydraulics. At each clamping cycle, which lasted about thirty seconds, one of the welders would stick the end of his mig gun into a hydraulic hose. Next cycle, the guy beside him would do the same. Enough cycles, and eventually the hydraulic hose would spring a leak and the station would be down for an hour or two. Eight welders, be they black or white or Chinese, would get a two hour break. It was a beautiful thing.
So eventually I got the squirrel problem winnowed down to one super-smart squirrel. Darwin's theory in action. But this guy is good. If you miss him on the first shot he's running zig-zag patterns to avoid the next shot. I swear he turns around and gives me the finger while he's zig-zagging away.
So I figure fuck Darwin, I'm gonna kill the furry fuck. I climb up on the roof, where I've got a downward shot at the birdfeeder. I'm peering through the scope, waiting for him to put his head up, and he's moments away from going to that big birdfeeder in the sky. Then, HOLYSHIT!!! A cross-country skier comes a-gliding through my field of vision! Then another one. And another...
Just lucky I had the scope. Without it I wouldn't have even seen the skiers! Can you imagine the newspaper headlines the next day? CARELESS HUNTER BAGS CROSS-COUNTRY SKIERS. Ya right. As if that woulda been my fault.
I eventually got the fucker with the twelve gauge, but I had to buy Herb a new bird-feeder.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Sleeper in shithouse seven
In the early 70's, Alex and Pete, two brothers from Toronto pooled their resources, and with the help of a second mortgage from their father, bought a run-down tavern in the Bowness district of Calgary. Dad had a successful restaurant on the Danforth. The boys had worked there since they were old enough to sweep the floor. He had full confidence.
By the time I landed in the Rundle neighborhood a few years later, Pete and Alex had a thriving business, running what was called at the time an "Indian Bar". That wasn't because you could get a nice plate of daal curry there. No, it was because they made it their practice to over-serve their clientele till the clientele was either spent out or passed out. They found that with the proper pacing they could get the ideal situation, where the clientele achieved passed out and spent out at the same time. No point having a fella passed out on the floor if he still has twenty bucks in his pocket.
Couple of friends of mine from Ontario managed to get the scratch together to buy a little raised bungalow in Rundle. I joined them a little later. It was kind of a drop-in centre for travelers from back east and local friends and acquaintances. We brought a bit of hillbilly atmosphere to what had been a suburban family neighborhood. We were the first people on our street to do car repairs on the front lawn.
I found work in a little fab shop in the south east of the city. Had my 77 Impala at the time, the one with the Corvette motor, the 350 four barrel. My commute from the job to our place in the north east was about 45 minutes. Then I found a short-cut. I could get home in twenty minutes if I cut through the gravel pits. Just drive around the NO ENTRY signs, dodge the gravel trucks, and you were good.
Alex and Petros, or Pete as he now styled himself, were making a good go of the bar. Most of their clientele were natives from the reserves west of the city. Minimum overhead. If you wanted to eat, there's a jar of pickled eggs on the counter. Twenty-five cents. But people don't come here to eat. Just keep the beer and liquor flowing. By the time I was living in Rundle they had picked up a couple other properties on their street, for investment purposes.
Life in Rundle was a lot of things but it was never dull. The regulars who actually pitched in for the overhead were only three or four, but most evenings there was at least a dozen people in the house. One of the guys was an absolute master of the blue angel. He'd get home from his ten or twelve hour shift behind the wheel of a gravel truck, and spend the rest of his waking hours sitting in front of the TV in his underwear, swigging Jack Daniels straight out of the bottle. Every half hour or so he'd lift his legs, hold a lighter in his crotch, and blast forth a fart that would send a blue flame half way across the room.
Turns out I wasn't the only one driving around the NO ENTRY sign at the gravel pits. It was a hotbed of action for the local motocross community. Every day you'd see guys tearing around in there, kitted out in full-face helmets, shoulder pads, knee pads, motocross boots, beating the hell out of their Kawasakis and Suzukis and Yamahas on the jumps and whoop-de-doos. I imagine more than a few motocross leathers were soiled when future world champion wannabes were passed by a 77 Impala on their practice track.
Life was good for Pete and Alex. In a flash of genius Pete took the doors off the bathroom stalls. It made it so much easier to splash a sleeping customer with a pail of water when you didn't have to lift the bucket over the top. By the middle eighties they were sitting on half a dozen commercial properties in Bowness.
A thousand years before Alex and Pete bought the bar the Blackfoot Nation roamed the Bowness area. Unfortunately, when it came time to sign Treaty 7 back in the 1870's they couldn't prove clear title, and so had to settle for reserves west of the city.
Pete and Alex were hands-on managers. I guess you have to be when you run a bar. People will steal you blind. They worked long hard hours. They knew how many pickled eggs they sold in a day. Last time I was in there I was buying a twelve pack from the off-sales about midnight. I'm standing at the bar, Pete comes along and announces sleeper in shithouse seven. Alex mutters, sighs, and starts to fill a bucket.
Went through Calgary a couple of years ago. The Rundle neighborhood has really changed. Scruffy looking Pakistani and Somali guys fixing their cars on front lawns all over the place. Pete and Alex sold their real estate holdings a few years ago for many millions and moved back to Toronto.
I was told they have a really nice holiday place in Greece.
By the time I landed in the Rundle neighborhood a few years later, Pete and Alex had a thriving business, running what was called at the time an "Indian Bar". That wasn't because you could get a nice plate of daal curry there. No, it was because they made it their practice to over-serve their clientele till the clientele was either spent out or passed out. They found that with the proper pacing they could get the ideal situation, where the clientele achieved passed out and spent out at the same time. No point having a fella passed out on the floor if he still has twenty bucks in his pocket.
Couple of friends of mine from Ontario managed to get the scratch together to buy a little raised bungalow in Rundle. I joined them a little later. It was kind of a drop-in centre for travelers from back east and local friends and acquaintances. We brought a bit of hillbilly atmosphere to what had been a suburban family neighborhood. We were the first people on our street to do car repairs on the front lawn.
I found work in a little fab shop in the south east of the city. Had my 77 Impala at the time, the one with the Corvette motor, the 350 four barrel. My commute from the job to our place in the north east was about 45 minutes. Then I found a short-cut. I could get home in twenty minutes if I cut through the gravel pits. Just drive around the NO ENTRY signs, dodge the gravel trucks, and you were good.
Alex and Petros, or Pete as he now styled himself, were making a good go of the bar. Most of their clientele were natives from the reserves west of the city. Minimum overhead. If you wanted to eat, there's a jar of pickled eggs on the counter. Twenty-five cents. But people don't come here to eat. Just keep the beer and liquor flowing. By the time I was living in Rundle they had picked up a couple other properties on their street, for investment purposes.
Life in Rundle was a lot of things but it was never dull. The regulars who actually pitched in for the overhead were only three or four, but most evenings there was at least a dozen people in the house. One of the guys was an absolute master of the blue angel. He'd get home from his ten or twelve hour shift behind the wheel of a gravel truck, and spend the rest of his waking hours sitting in front of the TV in his underwear, swigging Jack Daniels straight out of the bottle. Every half hour or so he'd lift his legs, hold a lighter in his crotch, and blast forth a fart that would send a blue flame half way across the room.
Turns out I wasn't the only one driving around the NO ENTRY sign at the gravel pits. It was a hotbed of action for the local motocross community. Every day you'd see guys tearing around in there, kitted out in full-face helmets, shoulder pads, knee pads, motocross boots, beating the hell out of their Kawasakis and Suzukis and Yamahas on the jumps and whoop-de-doos. I imagine more than a few motocross leathers were soiled when future world champion wannabes were passed by a 77 Impala on their practice track.
Life was good for Pete and Alex. In a flash of genius Pete took the doors off the bathroom stalls. It made it so much easier to splash a sleeping customer with a pail of water when you didn't have to lift the bucket over the top. By the middle eighties they were sitting on half a dozen commercial properties in Bowness.
A thousand years before Alex and Pete bought the bar the Blackfoot Nation roamed the Bowness area. Unfortunately, when it came time to sign Treaty 7 back in the 1870's they couldn't prove clear title, and so had to settle for reserves west of the city.
Pete and Alex were hands-on managers. I guess you have to be when you run a bar. People will steal you blind. They worked long hard hours. They knew how many pickled eggs they sold in a day. Last time I was in there I was buying a twelve pack from the off-sales about midnight. I'm standing at the bar, Pete comes along and announces sleeper in shithouse seven. Alex mutters, sighs, and starts to fill a bucket.
Went through Calgary a couple of years ago. The Rundle neighborhood has really changed. Scruffy looking Pakistani and Somali guys fixing their cars on front lawns all over the place. Pete and Alex sold their real estate holdings a few years ago for many millions and moved back to Toronto.
I was told they have a really nice holiday place in Greece.
Kipling's Hemi
In 2006 Dodge brought out its new Hemi Charger. For those of us who knew the original from forty years before, it was a sad day indeed. A four door Charger? Please, don't do that on my dear grandmother's grave. What were they thinking?
Kipling had one of the originals. It was a brutish nasty piece of work. A silver '66 with the solid-lifter 426 hemi. Two four-barrels. 4:10's in the back. Unreal power. Terrorized the Highway 86 dragstrip that summer. The big-block Chevy guys would pull up beside you at the lights, think about it for a couple of seconds and suddenly remember they had a hair appointment and turn their signal light on.
Kipling was an original himself, a nasty piece of work in his own way. Then he had one of those life-altering moments. Woke up after a three day party in the Canadian Club and found himself pissing blood. Decided on the spot to switch from rye and hops to the weed of wisdom. Best decision he ever made. Saved his life.
Among the people who are into driving fast cars fast, there's always debate about how high you can rev a motor. Nobody really believes that "factory recommended redline" stuff. That's like an official speed limit; a helpful suggestion but everybody knows you can go faster. Oh, the Chevy small-blocks with hydraulic lifters can be "safely" wound to 6 grand, but with a solid cam you're "safely" good for 7500. Trouble is, you never really know for sure the upper limit of "safely" until it's too late.
Kipling is one of those mechanical geniuses with an intuitive understanding about what makes things run and what makes them run faster. Everybody needs somebody like that in their life, at least if your life includes rebuilding engines, replacing clutches, restoring cars. I personally have a vague understanding of how stuff works, but I'm a bit of a lame-ass in the hands-on department. It's somewhat disconcerting to have a handful of screws and bolts and nuts left over after you've done a brake job on your car. That's why I always call on Kipling.
Now a repair or a rebuild with Kipling always starts with a trip to the NAPA store. How about we fire up one of these before we go, he'll say. Alrighty, I'll say. So we do. Sit around and chat a bit. Maybe fire up another one. Then we're off to NAPA. By now we're getting a little hungry, so we stop at Tim Hortons, have a few donuts. I'm partial to the apple fritters myself. The fruit explosion muffins are damn tasty too, if you've never tried one. Then we sit around there for awhile, shoot the shit some more, and by God, by the time we hit the parts store the day is half over.
By Kipling's calculations the solid lifter hemi should be good for 8,000 rpm, no matter what the factory manuals said. After all, the Nascar guys run them that hard for 500 miles at a time.
So we get our shopping list and make it back to the shop, get the job organized. Well goddamn if we didn't forget the whatever! And this! And that! And the gasket sealer... Guess we gotta go back to the NAPA store. But lets fire up one of these first. Alrighty. So a job that should take an afternoon takes three weekends, but it's done, it's done right, and you had a good time doing it.
Kipling pulls the hemi up behind the start line at the Highway 86 dragstrip and lets loose a burnout that wouldn't have been out of place in the Pro Stock finals at the Winternationals, ten seconds of screaming hemi at 8,000 rpm with just the nose of the Charger peeking out of a billowing tower of tire smoke a hundred feet high. Suddenly, an eerie silence.
Turns out you couldn't "safely" twist the hemi that far after all.
Kipling had one of the originals. It was a brutish nasty piece of work. A silver '66 with the solid-lifter 426 hemi. Two four-barrels. 4:10's in the back. Unreal power. Terrorized the Highway 86 dragstrip that summer. The big-block Chevy guys would pull up beside you at the lights, think about it for a couple of seconds and suddenly remember they had a hair appointment and turn their signal light on.
Kipling was an original himself, a nasty piece of work in his own way. Then he had one of those life-altering moments. Woke up after a three day party in the Canadian Club and found himself pissing blood. Decided on the spot to switch from rye and hops to the weed of wisdom. Best decision he ever made. Saved his life.
Among the people who are into driving fast cars fast, there's always debate about how high you can rev a motor. Nobody really believes that "factory recommended redline" stuff. That's like an official speed limit; a helpful suggestion but everybody knows you can go faster. Oh, the Chevy small-blocks with hydraulic lifters can be "safely" wound to 6 grand, but with a solid cam you're "safely" good for 7500. Trouble is, you never really know for sure the upper limit of "safely" until it's too late.
Kipling is one of those mechanical geniuses with an intuitive understanding about what makes things run and what makes them run faster. Everybody needs somebody like that in their life, at least if your life includes rebuilding engines, replacing clutches, restoring cars. I personally have a vague understanding of how stuff works, but I'm a bit of a lame-ass in the hands-on department. It's somewhat disconcerting to have a handful of screws and bolts and nuts left over after you've done a brake job on your car. That's why I always call on Kipling.
Now a repair or a rebuild with Kipling always starts with a trip to the NAPA store. How about we fire up one of these before we go, he'll say. Alrighty, I'll say. So we do. Sit around and chat a bit. Maybe fire up another one. Then we're off to NAPA. By now we're getting a little hungry, so we stop at Tim Hortons, have a few donuts. I'm partial to the apple fritters myself. The fruit explosion muffins are damn tasty too, if you've never tried one. Then we sit around there for awhile, shoot the shit some more, and by God, by the time we hit the parts store the day is half over.
By Kipling's calculations the solid lifter hemi should be good for 8,000 rpm, no matter what the factory manuals said. After all, the Nascar guys run them that hard for 500 miles at a time.
So we get our shopping list and make it back to the shop, get the job organized. Well goddamn if we didn't forget the whatever! And this! And that! And the gasket sealer... Guess we gotta go back to the NAPA store. But lets fire up one of these first. Alrighty. So a job that should take an afternoon takes three weekends, but it's done, it's done right, and you had a good time doing it.
Kipling pulls the hemi up behind the start line at the Highway 86 dragstrip and lets loose a burnout that wouldn't have been out of place in the Pro Stock finals at the Winternationals, ten seconds of screaming hemi at 8,000 rpm with just the nose of the Charger peeking out of a billowing tower of tire smoke a hundred feet high. Suddenly, an eerie silence.
Turns out you couldn't "safely" twist the hemi that far after all.
Monday, August 29, 2011
The n-word taboo
We like to think that we're a lot more civilized than we actually are.
No one I know in polite society would use the n-word in public. Most people in impolite society avoid it too. What does that mean?
Those sweet six year olds who so casually used the word in their rope-skipping games fifty years ago, were they racists? Maybe, maybe not, but any six year old is only as racist as the environment they are being brought up in. Certainly there was nothing vicious or malicious in their behavior.
Fast forward to the present. Fox News has more viewers than any other news channel. Do they use the n-word? Of course not; they are far too civilized. Are they racist? The vast majority of talking heads on Fox absolutely ooze contempt for Barrack Obama. Why? There is a viciousness to their tone that I've never heard directed at any other President. He's caved to the Republicans on virtually every substantive issue, and has even out-Bushed the Republicans when it comes to things like drone strikes in foreign lands and bombing yet another Muslim country. Does anyone truly believe that he'd be treated in such a malicious way if he were a white man?
So we're not throwing the n-word around anymore. We tell ourselves that's symbolic of how much has changed. It lets us avoid the reality that systemic racism permeates our culture. Meaningful change will require a lot more than not using the n-word.
No one I know in polite society would use the n-word in public. Most people in impolite society avoid it too. What does that mean?
Those sweet six year olds who so casually used the word in their rope-skipping games fifty years ago, were they racists? Maybe, maybe not, but any six year old is only as racist as the environment they are being brought up in. Certainly there was nothing vicious or malicious in their behavior.
Fast forward to the present. Fox News has more viewers than any other news channel. Do they use the n-word? Of course not; they are far too civilized. Are they racist? The vast majority of talking heads on Fox absolutely ooze contempt for Barrack Obama. Why? There is a viciousness to their tone that I've never heard directed at any other President. He's caved to the Republicans on virtually every substantive issue, and has even out-Bushed the Republicans when it comes to things like drone strikes in foreign lands and bombing yet another Muslim country. Does anyone truly believe that he'd be treated in such a malicious way if he were a white man?
So we're not throwing the n-word around anymore. We tell ourselves that's symbolic of how much has changed. It lets us avoid the reality that systemic racism permeates our culture. Meaningful change will require a lot more than not using the n-word.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Racism then and now
A few years before anyone had heard of Selma and Martin Luther King I was dropped off at Elora Public School to begin my formal education. I was the only kid in the school who didn't speak English. The language that I did speak wasn't always welcome in the homes of my schoolmates barely a decade after the war, so those were lonely years.
Elora was a white-bread tight-assed Presbyterian town at the time. There wasn't a unwhite family in the place, let alone a black kid in the school, so it's no surprise that when my little pure white perfect princess girl classmates went out to skip rope at recess, one of the more popular skipping ditties went like this:
way up north
where the niggers shovel snow
one shoved a shovel
up the other niggers hole
one called the doctor
but the doctor couldn't come
so the poor nigger died
with a shovel up his bum
This rhyme today can be neither written or spoken, so read it aloud a few times, and you'll be helping bust two taboos at once. When the girls went double dutch they'd have to say it twice as fast. Even at the time it was considered somewhat naughty. I recall there were certain stern-faced playground monitors who'd call the children on that one.
Like I said, Elora was all white. White people even ran the corner store. Bird's Variety. One day some catholic kids jumped me on the way to the store and relieved me of my candy money. That was the big cultural divide, catholic vs. protestant. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. We're all white and we all love Jesus. The only way we knew who was catholic was because the catholic kids went to the catholic school. But it's fucked up Ireland for five hundred years. I'm happy to report that when I got a little bigger I extracted more than an equal share of payback.
In those days you still had guys with no legs nicked-named Stumpy pushing themselves along the sidewalk on mechanic's creepers. War vets. There'd always be a guy like that outside the Iroquois Hotel, sometimes selling pencils, sometimes just with his hat out, sometimes just passed out. Don't know why it was called the Iroquois. They'd got rid of those people a long time before.
We don't see our no-legs war vets sitting on the sidewalk selling pencils anymore. The little girls who sang way up north grew up to be liberals and activists and hippies and feminists. There's even (almost) peace in Ireland, for Christ's sake. We've come a long way baby.
There's a lot of self congratulation going on in America these days. MLK's anniversary and all that, and haven't we come a long way and aren't we great. Why lookie here, we've got a black president don't you know!?
The first black president has become the lame duck president of all time. Why? Because there's a great big slice of middle America that is determined to cut him off at the knees no matter what he does. When Reagan raised taxes or H.W. raised taxes or Clinton raised taxes or when any of those white presidents raised the debt ceiling, middle America might not have been happy about it but life went on.
Not any more. We've got the first black president, don't you know, and there's a great big slice of middle America that just wants to see the nigger fail.
Elora was a white-bread tight-assed Presbyterian town at the time. There wasn't a unwhite family in the place, let alone a black kid in the school, so it's no surprise that when my little pure white perfect princess girl classmates went out to skip rope at recess, one of the more popular skipping ditties went like this:
way up north
where the niggers shovel snow
one shoved a shovel
up the other niggers hole
one called the doctor
but the doctor couldn't come
so the poor nigger died
with a shovel up his bum
This rhyme today can be neither written or spoken, so read it aloud a few times, and you'll be helping bust two taboos at once. When the girls went double dutch they'd have to say it twice as fast. Even at the time it was considered somewhat naughty. I recall there were certain stern-faced playground monitors who'd call the children on that one.
Like I said, Elora was all white. White people even ran the corner store. Bird's Variety. One day some catholic kids jumped me on the way to the store and relieved me of my candy money. That was the big cultural divide, catholic vs. protestant. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. We're all white and we all love Jesus. The only way we knew who was catholic was because the catholic kids went to the catholic school. But it's fucked up Ireland for five hundred years. I'm happy to report that when I got a little bigger I extracted more than an equal share of payback.
In those days you still had guys with no legs nicked-named Stumpy pushing themselves along the sidewalk on mechanic's creepers. War vets. There'd always be a guy like that outside the Iroquois Hotel, sometimes selling pencils, sometimes just with his hat out, sometimes just passed out. Don't know why it was called the Iroquois. They'd got rid of those people a long time before.
We don't see our no-legs war vets sitting on the sidewalk selling pencils anymore. The little girls who sang way up north grew up to be liberals and activists and hippies and feminists. There's even (almost) peace in Ireland, for Christ's sake. We've come a long way baby.
There's a lot of self congratulation going on in America these days. MLK's anniversary and all that, and haven't we come a long way and aren't we great. Why lookie here, we've got a black president don't you know!?
The first black president has become the lame duck president of all time. Why? Because there's a great big slice of middle America that is determined to cut him off at the knees no matter what he does. When Reagan raised taxes or H.W. raised taxes or Clinton raised taxes or when any of those white presidents raised the debt ceiling, middle America might not have been happy about it but life went on.
Not any more. We've got the first black president, don't you know, and there's a great big slice of middle America that just wants to see the nigger fail.
Death by Stihl
Been busy bringing in the winter wood. Took the hounds with me this morning. The old girl doesn't like the sound of the saw, but Lucy doesn't seem to mind. I put them in the cab of the truck while I was cutting. Five minutes later I notice Lucy is following me around. I take her back to the truck, thinking the other one is still in there. Nope. So they both jumped out the window, and then one high-tailed it for home and the other stuck around.
Lucy is the ugliest wretch of a dog that God ever breathed life into. She's grown bigger since we got her, but rather than growing into herself she just gets more ungainly. Her paws would be big on a dog twice her size. Ears likewise. When she runs she looks more like a goat than a dog. She looks like a toddler in size twelve sneakers wearing floppy Mickey Mouse ears. Her brindle tiger-stripes get more asymmetrical by the day. Easily the most beautiful dog I've ever had.
I was cutting up the trunk of a maple that I'd originally felled a couple of months ago. Just overhead was a big dead limb coming out of another maple. Tantalizingly out of reach. Twenty feet of dry firewood just hanging there. I could have reached it from the bed of the truck, but I couldn't get the truck in there without dropping half a dozen other trees. So I made a little pyramid out of the stuff I was cutting, and voila, what was out of reach was now easily accessible, as long as I could keep my balance on top of this little woodpile.
Every time I go into Hastie's Small Engines they want to sell me a bigger Stihl. According to them I should have something with a 24 or even 26 inch bar for the kind of work I'm doing. They happen to have just the machine in stock, and by the time we add the tax we're at nearly a thousand bucks. No thanks, but watch this! Who needs a 24 inch bar when you can just stand on a pile of firewood!
So I'm on my tippy toes, saw held as high as I can hold it, and I'm nearly through when the branch takes a twist, I take a tumble, fly ass-over-chainsaw off my pyramid, and I'm lying there with a branch across my chest, Lucy licking my face, and the trusty Stihl ten feet away, still running. Close call.
Reminds me of one of Helpful Herb's chainsaw adventures. Helpful Herb is my mentor in all things farming, and sort of a general life coach. A chainsaw veteran. He's got a John Deere 450 that he uses to build logging trails through his woodlot. One day he's out there, hard at it, drops a fifty footer which gets hung up in some other trees. So he fires up the 450, raises the bucket as high as it'll go, climbs up in the bucket, and he starts cutting where his tree is hung up.
Herb is working on a bit of an incline, and while he's up there in the bucket chainsawing away, the Deere starts rolling down the hill. Holy shit! What's he gonna do? There's the bail-out option, but a bit of a miscue and he'd end up under the tracks. Climb down the side-arms and take control? A possibility perhaps, but again, one false move and he'd be under the tracks. So he figures his best bet is to just sit tight in the bucket till the ride is over, which it was about two minutes later, in the pond at the bottom of the hill.
Helpful Herb is one of those old school European guys who came over here with nothing and did OK for himself. I invited him and Mrs. Herb to Falling Downs for dinner just after I got the place. The day before our dinner appointment I called him up, said can you come a bit early so you can show me how to sharpen the chain on the saw. Next morning at eight o'clock he's pulling up the drive-way. Takes fifteen minutes for the saw sharpening tutorial. Nine hours till dinner. So Herb takes my saw and my truck, and off he goes.
At noon he comes back and him and Mrs. Herb are sitting out having the picnic lunch they brought. Next thing I know, he's climbing the pine tree out in the yard. The man is crowding eighty. What are you doing? Oh, I noticed that some of these branches might interfere with your electricity line. He's twenty feet up the tree with a pruning saw trimming the offending branches. Helpful Herb. Most of my wood my first winter came from stuff he cut down that day.
I've got a lot of respect for these older guys who stay busy. My all-time idol is Eubie Blake. Made a living playing the piano till the day he died, 100 years old. Started on the cigarettes when he was nine. Planning to quit, for his health, but never got around to it.
Herb made it out of Eastern Europe by the proverbial skin of his teeth. Spent five years in a camp in Denmark. Apprenticed as a baker. Figured as a baker his kids, when he had any, would never know hunger. Got off the boat at Pier 21 in 1956 and got a job shoveling coal. In this land of unlimited possibilities he eventually reinvented himself as a businessman. Real estate.
I think in general the idea of longevity is oversold. It's got to be about the quality of life. Cut out fat, booze, cigarettes. Jog. It'll add ten years to your life. If you're gonna spend that ten years sitting in the corner at the nursing home, drooling on yourself while waiting for somebody to change your diaper, I don't really see the attraction.
Helpful Herb was a natural in the business world. He could do a deal in the morning with a guy who had a Treblinka tattoo on his forearm, and a deal in the afternoon with a guy who had an SS tattoo on his upper arm. He had friends on every side of every war. One of his best buddies was an old Scotsman named MacKinnon. They were cut from the same cloth.
One day MacKinnon, well into his eighties, was out in his woodlot cutting firewood. MacKinnon had a successful business career behind him, and could well afford to call the oil truck. But these old school guys, they just have to keep busy. He's taking down a big old dead elm on one of the fence lines. As he's making his back cut a twenty foot branch drops and kills him on the spot.
Death by Stihl.
Lucy is the ugliest wretch of a dog that God ever breathed life into. She's grown bigger since we got her, but rather than growing into herself she just gets more ungainly. Her paws would be big on a dog twice her size. Ears likewise. When she runs she looks more like a goat than a dog. She looks like a toddler in size twelve sneakers wearing floppy Mickey Mouse ears. Her brindle tiger-stripes get more asymmetrical by the day. Easily the most beautiful dog I've ever had.
I was cutting up the trunk of a maple that I'd originally felled a couple of months ago. Just overhead was a big dead limb coming out of another maple. Tantalizingly out of reach. Twenty feet of dry firewood just hanging there. I could have reached it from the bed of the truck, but I couldn't get the truck in there without dropping half a dozen other trees. So I made a little pyramid out of the stuff I was cutting, and voila, what was out of reach was now easily accessible, as long as I could keep my balance on top of this little woodpile.
Every time I go into Hastie's Small Engines they want to sell me a bigger Stihl. According to them I should have something with a 24 or even 26 inch bar for the kind of work I'm doing. They happen to have just the machine in stock, and by the time we add the tax we're at nearly a thousand bucks. No thanks, but watch this! Who needs a 24 inch bar when you can just stand on a pile of firewood!
So I'm on my tippy toes, saw held as high as I can hold it, and I'm nearly through when the branch takes a twist, I take a tumble, fly ass-over-chainsaw off my pyramid, and I'm lying there with a branch across my chest, Lucy licking my face, and the trusty Stihl ten feet away, still running. Close call.
Reminds me of one of Helpful Herb's chainsaw adventures. Helpful Herb is my mentor in all things farming, and sort of a general life coach. A chainsaw veteran. He's got a John Deere 450 that he uses to build logging trails through his woodlot. One day he's out there, hard at it, drops a fifty footer which gets hung up in some other trees. So he fires up the 450, raises the bucket as high as it'll go, climbs up in the bucket, and he starts cutting where his tree is hung up.
Herb is working on a bit of an incline, and while he's up there in the bucket chainsawing away, the Deere starts rolling down the hill. Holy shit! What's he gonna do? There's the bail-out option, but a bit of a miscue and he'd end up under the tracks. Climb down the side-arms and take control? A possibility perhaps, but again, one false move and he'd be under the tracks. So he figures his best bet is to just sit tight in the bucket till the ride is over, which it was about two minutes later, in the pond at the bottom of the hill.
Helpful Herb is one of those old school European guys who came over here with nothing and did OK for himself. I invited him and Mrs. Herb to Falling Downs for dinner just after I got the place. The day before our dinner appointment I called him up, said can you come a bit early so you can show me how to sharpen the chain on the saw. Next morning at eight o'clock he's pulling up the drive-way. Takes fifteen minutes for the saw sharpening tutorial. Nine hours till dinner. So Herb takes my saw and my truck, and off he goes.
At noon he comes back and him and Mrs. Herb are sitting out having the picnic lunch they brought. Next thing I know, he's climbing the pine tree out in the yard. The man is crowding eighty. What are you doing? Oh, I noticed that some of these branches might interfere with your electricity line. He's twenty feet up the tree with a pruning saw trimming the offending branches. Helpful Herb. Most of my wood my first winter came from stuff he cut down that day.
I've got a lot of respect for these older guys who stay busy. My all-time idol is Eubie Blake. Made a living playing the piano till the day he died, 100 years old. Started on the cigarettes when he was nine. Planning to quit, for his health, but never got around to it.
Herb made it out of Eastern Europe by the proverbial skin of his teeth. Spent five years in a camp in Denmark. Apprenticed as a baker. Figured as a baker his kids, when he had any, would never know hunger. Got off the boat at Pier 21 in 1956 and got a job shoveling coal. In this land of unlimited possibilities he eventually reinvented himself as a businessman. Real estate.
I think in general the idea of longevity is oversold. It's got to be about the quality of life. Cut out fat, booze, cigarettes. Jog. It'll add ten years to your life. If you're gonna spend that ten years sitting in the corner at the nursing home, drooling on yourself while waiting for somebody to change your diaper, I don't really see the attraction.
Helpful Herb was a natural in the business world. He could do a deal in the morning with a guy who had a Treblinka tattoo on his forearm, and a deal in the afternoon with a guy who had an SS tattoo on his upper arm. He had friends on every side of every war. One of his best buddies was an old Scotsman named MacKinnon. They were cut from the same cloth.
One day MacKinnon, well into his eighties, was out in his woodlot cutting firewood. MacKinnon had a successful business career behind him, and could well afford to call the oil truck. But these old school guys, they just have to keep busy. He's taking down a big old dead elm on one of the fence lines. As he's making his back cut a twenty foot branch drops and kills him on the spot.
Death by Stihl.
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