Month: December 2009

Depressing Christmas Songs, Ctd

Several readers have recommended “How To Make The Gravy” by Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly. One writes:

It has depressing, slightly schmaltzy subject matter (man in jail missing Christmas writes a letter to a family member), but leaves you really appreciating what we often take for granted during Christmas.  Throw in a recipe for gravy (light on the specifics, but good on the general idea) and references to Nina Simone and Junior Murvin and you have, IMO, one of the best damn Christmas songs ever. 

Lyrics after the jump: Hello Dan, it’s Joe here, I hope you’re keeping well
It’s the 21st of December, and now they’re ringing the last bells
If I get good behaviour, I’ll be out of here by July
Won’t you kiss my kids on Christmas Day, please don’t let ’em cry for me

I guess the brothers are driving down from Queensland and Stella’s flying in from the coast
They say it’s gonna be a hundred degrees, even more maybe, but that won’t stop the roast
Who’s gonna make the gravy now? I bet it won’t taste the same
Just add flour, salt, a little red wine and don’t forget a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang

And give my love to Angus and to Frank and Dolly,
Tell ’em all I’m sorry I screwed up this time
And look after Rita, I’ll be thinking of her early Christmas morning
When I’m standing in line
 
I hear Mary’s got a new boyfriend, I hope he can hold his own
Do you remember the last one? What was his name again?
(Just a little too much cologne)
And Roger, you know I’m even gonna miss Roger
‘Cause there’s sure as hell no one in here I want to fight

Oh praise the Baby Jesus, have a Merry Christmas,
I’m really gonna miss it, all the treasure and the trash
And later in the evening, I can just imagine,
You’ll put on Junior Murvin and push the tables back

And you’ll dance with Rita, I know you really like her,
Just don’t hold her too close, oh brother please don’t stab me in the back
I didn’t mean to say that, it’s just my mind it plays up,
Multiplies each matter, turns imagination into fact

You know I love her badly, she’s the one to save me,
I’m gonna make some gravy, I’m gonna taste the fat
Tell her that I’m sorry, yeah I love her badly, tell ’em all I’m sorry,
And kiss the sleepy children for me

You know one of these days, I’ll be making gravy,
I’ll be making plenty, I’m gonna pay ’em all back.
 

All the best, and a good end-of-year celebration for you

Throw The Bastards Out

James Joyner thinks I might dump Obama in 2012:

Andrew came here from England in 1984 after winning a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has not supported the same man twice.

Reagan was ineligible to run again in 1988, so voting for his vice president, George H.W. Bush, is as close as he could have come. But he didn’t vote to re-elect Bush, going with Bill Clinton instead. But he didn’t vote to re-elect Clinton, going with Dole. He supported George W. Bush in 2000 but voted against him in 2004. He voted for Obama in 2008.

The pattern could change, of course. He’s genuinely disgusted with the Republican Party at this point. But, if they nominate a palatable candidate, there’s a strong, strong likelihood that Andrew will endorse him rather than going with Obama a second time.

'Tis possible, I 'spose. No party or clique and all that.

But it's hard to see a Republican out there who isn't beholden to fundamentalism of such misguided certainty that it would be tough. But you never know. The fickleness of my endorsements, however, should surely be judged on the merits of each call. My backing for Dole was entirely on character grounds: I readily admitted that I was fine with Clinton's substantive policies and preferred them to Dole's, but felt that Clinton's lying was so pathological that we couldn't risk another term. My only real regret is Bush in 2000. I trusted Bush's incompetence over Gore's insufferable ego. But I suspect that with the invasion of Iraq, the end-result would have been the same. They both would have gone in on false pretenses. And would have failed for similar reasons.

The Green Wave Comes To Qom

NIAC highlights a comment made by one of Mackey's readers:

Qom is in many ways the heart of the last Revolution (how it ended up anyway) and its aftermath. Until now, the regime has tried very very hard to isolate Qom from the protest movement. The security presence there has always been reported as very high to prevent any protests. […] With today’s protests in Qom, and the clergy’s close-up view of it (perhaps for the first time for some of them) it will be interesting to see what the Qom clergy does in the days and weeks to come.

NIAC adds:

The next day to watch is Sunday, when two major days of mourning coincide: the day of mourning for Ayatollah Montazeri (the seventh day after his death) and the religious holiday of Ashura, which marks the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein.

When The Vatican Hierarchy Sees Gray

Thomas P Barnett notes how certainty and moral responsibility can become less important to the Catholic hierarchy: when it involves covering up the rape and sexual abuse of teens and kids. My civil marriage? It's black and white. Their decades-long criminal conspiracy to protect child abuse?

The lawyer sprang his big question: You could have prevented someone from hurting people and you decided not to. Why? The witness was Edward M. Egan, then the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Conn. The question was about a priest who had been accused of sexually molesting children.

“I didn’t make a decision one way or the other,” said Bishop Egan, whom the lawyer suggested had failed to act quickly against the cleric. “I kept working on it until I resolved the decision.”

They make Bill Clinton look honest.

250,000 People Without A Bookstore, Ctd

A reader writes:

I live in Laredo, and when I heard the news, my first thought was, "typical."  This is just the sort of backwards, inexplicable crap that happens in Laredo every day.  I wish I could explain to you why this city of a quarter of a million people has 2 major hospitals, but no 24-hour pharmacy.  Or how our only Outback Steakhouse just went bankrupt a few weeks ago.  Or why there are "eight liner" gambling establishments on every corner, along with our rampant poverty.  Or how Laredo has three colleges campuses, but now, no bookstore.

There's an odd mix of politics and xenophobia at work on Laredo.  It's the biggest inland port in America, but it's also a closed culture, two hours from any other major population area.  In Laredo, you're either a paisano or you're not, and people like it that way.  Laredoans sometimes joke that Laredo is "occupied territory" — it's not quite Texas, and not quite Mexico.

As you might expect, the drug trade is big here too. 

While certainly most cities have a criminal underground, in Laredo, it's practically out in the open.  An estimated 20% of Laredo's population are somehow connected to trafficking.  It's reasonable to suspect that the drug culture is at the root of the vast majority of Laredo's problems.

Our literacy rate is 47%, compared to the national average of about 80%.  Most kids here grow up learning both English and Spanish, but never really master either language, and when they speak, they unconsciously switch back and forth between languages.  We have a library system, but the selections are sparse compared to libraries in other similarly-sized cities.

I realize this sounds like nothing more than a disjointed rant against Laredo.  I wish I could give you something more profound, but even having lived here 5 years, I still don't understand this place.  I can tell you that, for native Laredoans and those that choose to spend their lives here, most of them love the city the way it is and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.  They don't want it to change, even when it's changing for the better.

For myself, the closing of the B.Dalton won't affect me too much, since I've been using Amazon Prime to buy all my books ever since moving here.  Perhaps I'm the reason the bookstore went under?  ;-)

That 47% figure, in fact, is the lowest of any American city surveyed in the last census. And ABC News called the US-Mexican border at Laredo "the most lucrative drug corridor in North America." More on the city here.