Dave is going South and Deb is irked about holidays

I've been remiss in reporting that Dave, our man of the woods, told me on Monday that he's moving in with a friend from Norristown for a couple of weeks and then he will he heading south to Florida. That's sort of good and bad news. The good news, for Dave, is that he'll no doubt be a lot warmer in Florida over the next few months than he would be here. The bad news, for me, is that I'll miss running into him in the woods.

The worse news is that Dave mentioned the possibility that he won't return north, at least this far north, next summer. He's thinking of summering in the mountains of Georgia. I told him to keep in touch, which he will hopefully do with Alex when he stops by the occasional library and can get on email.

In other news Debra showed up for a visit a couple of hours ago because she had dropped her mom Dolores off at the hairdresser nearby. We talked her into having a bit of dinner after which she complained that at her school they are not allowed to refer to Christmas and Easter as holidays, instead calling them winter and spring break. But they do refer to Yom Kippur and Kwanzaa as holidays. Kwanzaa, of course is a fake holiday invented by an FBI informant, if memory serves; but Yom Kippur is definitely a religious holiday.

Well. . . after Deb left I got on the computer and one of the first things I found was a post on The Corner by Jay Nordlinger of National Review complaining about the same sort of thing. Here's what he had to say in a post titled Unsilent Night:

"A reader from Boulder, Colo., sends a note that may interest you. It responds to an item in Impromptus today. She says, “In 1994, the Fairview High School Christmas concert was going to close with the students processing out of the auditorium singing ‘Silent Night.’ Huge controversy, with multiple cries against ‘religion in the public schools.’ The school district’s attorneys said no. Since it was too late for the music teacher to arrange for something else, the students began to recess in silence. The audience was having none of it, and started singing ‘Silent Night’ themselves. That story still gives me goose-bumps.”

Holy mackerel, that took brass (and I’m not talking about trumpets and trombones). By the way, I imagine the Boulder people were not able to call that concert a “Christmas concert.” “Winter Serenade”?

Another reader writes to say, “Every December in Chicago, they have the Christkindlmarket. If they called it the ‘Christ Child Market,’ the world would come to an end! And the local bank flashes ‘Happy Holidays,’ followed by ‘Feliz Navidad.’” True, true: You can’t say “Merry Christmas,” but you can say it in Spanish. “And, in my daughter’s public school, they banned Handel but allow black spirituals.” For sure, and thank goodness for spirituals.

We could do this forever, but I’m stopping now. Happy Halloween! (Actually, it’s the day of the Crash, but in any case . . .)"

You can find Jay's post here: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGVjOTg0NzY1MmQ4MjRjOTEzZmM5YTFmZWU0OWFmM2M=

Feel the Obamaness!

The other evening Linda and I went to Phoenixville to walk around and visit Wolfgang Books. While there we wandered into a very strange store that sells only eco-friendly and/or U.S. made goods. What caught our attention was the oddity of a store that advertises home cooking along with flooring materials and clothing on its front window.

We were greeted and given a little tour by a nice lady who was carrying a mug of arugula and mung bean soup or some such that she said was her dinner. I didn't notice whether she was wearing love beads and a mood ring, but I did notice that she probably doesn't restrict her dinners to one mug of soup every night.

After we departed to the street Linda said "you could just feel the Obamaness."

Until a few minutes ago I thought that Linda might have coined a new word; but after checking on google I find that there have been many prior uses of "Obamaness." There is even a youtube poster who says she is from Yemen who announced plans for a website named obamaness.com way back in February of last year. That poster never got around to doing more than posting "Obamaness - Coming Soon!" at the obamaness.com address. Would that The One had never gotten any closer to power than that.

http://www.youtube.com/user/obamaness

It's interesting that the Yemeni obamaness youtube poster uses an image of a rather shapely thonged behind, presumably her own, as her avatar image. After spending a little while appreciating that image, purely for journalistic purposes mind you since one seldom gets to see what's under the chador, I'm now wondering if the modern day hippy lady who escorted us around in that strange Phoenixville store has a nice big tattoo of The One on her far less shapely posterior.

For those of you who can't get enough of images of your saviour the link below is to a website that got me started on this whole train of thought. If you click on the little circular symbol in the lower left corner of the page you can see as many paintings of Obama as you might want.

Jay Nordlinger of National Review's The Corner led me to the Obama paintings site. Clearly the Michaelangelo of the Age of The One has not yet been located although many of the paintings are quite good examples of the sort of paintings one finds when one has the misfortune to wander into a gallery of Socialist Realism works or when one travels through a train station sporting murals done by the artists who travelled around the country during the Great Depression when Roosevelt hired all the hacks to decorate such places so they wouldn't make nuisances of themselves in New York and Washington.

http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/