Here’s a test to find how nerdish one might be. My own results frightened me. Try it yourself.
An excerpt:
Daily Archives: 6/28/2013
Food for Thought – 28 June 2013
First, Chuck Assay’s cartoons have appeared on these pages quite a few times over the years. It appears he’s wrapping it up. He has my best wishes on his future:
SEcond, this cartoon is obviously incorrect. Congress moves a lot, paying for vacations, trips, ‘fact-finding missions’ and other boondoggles, all paid for with the taxpayer dime.
Dear Paula, tell ’em to go to hell!
I am, I found out, a contemporary of Paula Deen, ex Food Network star. I admit to watching Food Network from time to time and I’ve even caught her show a time or two. I tend to strike out on my own for recipes, so I don’t watch for recipes, and if I watched more than a couple of episodes, I’d be surprised.
Paula’s not on the Food Network any more. Nor is her product line going to be sold at that bastion of Americana, Wal-Mart.
You see, Paula, like me, a child of the 1950’s South, used the ‘N-word’. “Nigger”. If you’re a rapper or a black comedian, you’re allowed. Right now. Today. You can storm around the stage spouting vulgarities by the bucketful and say ‘nigger’ or ‘niggah’ and it’s fine with everybody.
But if you’re a sixty-odd year old white person… Nuh-uh!
I was raised in the days when there were three bathrooms at upscale establishments in the South: Men, Women and ‘Colored’. My pediatrician had two waiting rooms at his doctor’s office, one for white folk, one for colored. I personally SAW the water cooler for white people and around the side of the gas station, the water fountain, uncooled, for colored people. People talk about segregation. I was raised in it.
The vocabulary was a lot different then, too, and ‘people of color’ were also colored folks or black or ‘nigra’ or Negro. Also coon, jigaboo, blue-gum, a long list of other names, and yes, ‘nigger’.
Those names are seldom-used any more among the circles in which I exist. They’re anachronisms, hearkening to times long gone.
Did I use them when I was young? Yes. Likely that if Mom or Dad heard me, I got rebuked, too.
That was decades ago.
I cannot take back what the world was when I was young, nor can I erase my own past. And if you have to look at those details long receded into the mists of time and tell me that I must give up what I am today? How many of you out there would survive that scrutiny?
And if you tried, I would grimly tell you to go to hell and then I would get on with my life.
Paula should do the same.
Today in History – June 28
1894 – Labor Day becomes an official US holiday. Naturally we celebrate “labor” by taking the day off.
1902 – The U.S. Congress passes the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to acquire rights from Colombia for the Panama Canal, enabling Jimmy “I never met a murdering dictator I didn’t like” Carter could give it away later.
1914 – Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo by young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, the casus belli of World War I.
1919 – The Treaty of Versailles is signed in Paris, formally ending World War I between Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the United States and allies on the one side and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other side. The terms of the document, mainly due to French demands, place such an onerous burden on German that the foundations of WW II are laid. Twenty-one years later Hitler “let” France sign the surrender to Germany. In the delicate terms of international diplomacy, this is called “rubbing their noses in it.”
1950 – Seoul is captured by troops from North Korea. North Korean Army conducted Seoul National University Hospital Massacre, murdering 900 including doctors, nurses and patients.
1965 – First US ground combat forces in Vietnam authorized by President Johnson . Ain’t nothing like a dimmocrat president playing with the military… MC note: “Wow, man… like deja vu…”