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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 12:44 pm on August 21, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    In Defense of White Anglo-Saxon American Protestant Women (and the Continuing Search for the Difference Gene) 

    A few days ago, while doing my weekly power walk down Sunset Blvd in search of ground provisions and other forms of sustenance, there in front of the 99c store loomed ahead of me a young lady hogging the center lane, and sauntering a bit wobbly.  I was unable to determine her exact trajectory so stayed right behind her until the last moment, when I suddenly swerved left to attempt to overtake on the inside lane, at which time she swung wide to let me pass, while simultaneously giving me a long once-over—which I apparently passed—then flashed me a big sh*t-faced grin and a big two-fingered peace sign (one finger bad, two fingers good; got it).  Well, I don’t get that every day, so bounced the big smile back, but keeping all my fingers right where they were, afraid of a catastrophic miscount.

    Then I started thinking: what just happened?  I’ve been grinned up and chatted up more in the last thirty days than the last thirty years put together.  What does it mean?  Am I radiating something?  Do spray-tans really work?  (After a near-eviction, I’ve been swimming for exercise instead of my usual rowdy calisthenics, hence the seasonal rosy glow).  I’ve narrowed it down to a few possibilities: 1) I slipped into a space-time discontinuity, and am now reporting to you from a parallel universe called Zandorf; or 2) the young lady not only approved of my increasing beardliness, but assumed it represented something larger, and more of the hippie sort than the Islamic; or 3) she was an out-of-stater, looking for a little tea and sympathy, and perhaps something stronger; or 4) all of the above; or 5) none of the above. (More …)

     
    • Sven's avatar

      Sven 9:06 am on September 28, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Hardie, I just started reading your stuff/blog…

      I have a friend making a blog that I have been following for years.
      http://mobithailand.com/

      It might not be that interesting his last blogs but check his “Creative writing” in the right hand side! Very good stories! Especially th e one about his life!
      Good guy, going through a lot.

      I will start checking your blog now!

      Sven

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:25 am on August 6, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Future of the Internet: It’s Chinatown, Jake… 

    And I’m not talking about the mock-up tourist-trap Chinatowns of a thousand modern Western cities, graced by a red-tile roof in up-turned smile and filled with Mom-and-Pop trinket shops specializing in red lanterns and fat-bellied Buddhas and calligraphy that says whatever you want.  Nor am I talking about the Chinatown of the Polanski film/Towne script/Nicholson fame depicting 30’s LA, though that comes closer.

    No, I’m talking about the Chinatown of a thousand forgotten real Asian neighborhoods where street signs compete for sight-lines and taxi-girls hustle for ten-dollar fares and old market ladies who haven’t seen sunlight in years huddle in dark dingy stalls, their only sensory stimulation the olfactory interplay between pungent chilies pricking and bathroom odors wafting, may the strongest smell win…  The market always wins. (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:33 am on July 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , US South   

    Southern Linguistics–on the Skids, Y’all 

    In tribute to my southern roots–potatoes, turnips, etc–I rather like saying “y’all” sometimes; it’s kinda’ fun in a kitschy sort of way. The problem arises when it’s time to get plural. You thought “y’all” was plural already? That’s a common mistake. No, the plural of “y’all”–believe it or not–is “y’all all.” You heard it here first. I have it on good authority. Chew on that, Chomsky. You’ll have to admit there’s some symmetry there. It even rhymes. At least we’re consistent.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:27 pm on June 27, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Paula Deen, South, southern cooking, tomatoes   

    Tomatoes Are Like Golden Apples… or plump things with navels 

    IMG_0242

    Still life with author and tomato

    Some people have never seen a real tomato.  I’m not talking about the perfectly uniform red spherical or slightly elongated varieties that typically line supermarket bins and veggie trays in typical neighborhoods, but real lumpy beefy acidic nightshades with genetic histories beyond the greengrocer’s unholy laboratories.  Some whole countries have never seen the real thing I suspect, Thailand for instance, which prides itself on the finest sweetest least-fibrous variety of every possible fruit (no comment on the women), but in this case relegated to the cardboard-cut-out picture-perfect puff-pieces that serve as little more than filler to an honest sandwich or salad.

     

    Many countries and cultures don’t necessarily eat sandwiches, of course, so I can’t blame them for their negligence, any more than I can blame the happy Mexicans who produce most of the ones we Americans eat these days.  They invented the blessed fruit, after all, or at least nurtured its evolution from some primordial berry into the lusty beefsteaks (sometimes) available today, though such varieties are hard to find in Mexico itself (be prepared to ask for jitomates if the word tomate doesn’t work, presumably the most direct etymological descendant of an earlier aboriginal form, something like xitomatl, meaning ‘plump thing with a navel’ in Nahuatl).  Sounds like someone I know.  Italians see them as ‘golden apples,’ pomodoros.

    (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:30 am on June 23, 2013 Permalink | Reply  

    A day without the smile of a child is like a day without sunshine: innocent and fresh, outward expanding, barely conscious, attractive by nature…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:18 pm on June 13, 2013 Permalink | Reply
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    It’s amazing how much 60’s music still gets played by even the hippest modern stations, not just dino-rock… as if we were also listening to Al Jolson way back then, or maybe Rudy Vallee…. OK, Frankie Valli, sure, and maybe a little bit of Sinatra, at least in the early years, but 50-year-old music? No way! 60’s politics may have sucked, but the music rocked! It set off ripples around the world that are still being felt…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:30 pm on June 9, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Sunday Lunch: Etymology Already, Now Onomatopoeia 

    Isn’t all war ultimately about onomatopoeia? Think about it: the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, the hiss of spitfires overhead, and the drone of bombing in the background. I imagine the word ‘onomatopoeia’ itself came from the trenches of WWI when a Brit and a Yank with a southern accent (OK, not so Yank, maybe Johnny Reb) passed each other in the rat-maze one too may times and the rap went something like this:

    REB: I might pee right here if the Germans don’t hold their fire soon (but what the Brit heard was more like “onomatopeia rot heah,” etc…)

    BRIT: You’re pissed. I told you not to drink that rotgut swill. This is a bloody trench! There’s no latrine…

    REB: It’s bloody, all right, but I don’t need no Catholic rites yet. And I ain’t pissed, either, ain’t got no reason to be. I jus’ need to TAKE a piss, and I aim to do it right here, if I cain’t find no better place…

    BRIT: I hope you aim that thing better than you aim your gun… and better than you speak English..

    And then I woke up. It was all just a bad dream, two native English-speakers lost in translation. I must’ve ety-lotta-mology and gotten sick, had a nightmare. But that’s about how English works, isn’t it? I concede defeat on the battle fields of orthography. I’ve fought enough already, with the ploughboys in the roughest slough, and coughing up dough in the toughest boroughs, all for nought..

    It’s fun to dream up weird wacko word origins, though. After all, without a true linguistic genome project, we can just make up anything we want, right?

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:56 pm on June 7, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , manic depression   

    It’s funny how, when there’s a mass murder in America, the first thing everyone thinks is ‘mental illness.’ But when a suicide bomber blows himself up in Israel, no one says that, even though, in any other circumstance, suicide is always considered as such, depression or bipolarity usually the immediate cause. “Bipolarity’ was formerly known as ‘manic depression’, of course, mania being just the opposite of depression, hence the term ‘bipolarity’. Now if you could have the mania without the depression, then you’d have something. I guess that’s what drugs try to accomplish.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 9:02 am on June 6, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Chokwe Lumumba, , Harlem, Jackson,   

    Welcome to America and the South: Harlem, Jackson and Chokwe Lumumba 

    chokwe

    Jackson’s New Mayor

    My grandmother was born in Harlem around turn-of-the-previous-century, and now Chokwe Lumumba is mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.  I can’t decide which is more significant, or a better lead-in to the theme of this write, but it’s obvious we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.  Such are the parameters of my accidental inheritance of Deep South heritage, something I’m still not totally reconciled with.

    Now my grandmother probably never considered Harlem home, but if she did, she never mentioned it.  How could she, what with all the changes it and she had been through?  She ended up in Texas and never looked back, not to New York anyway.  For even a second-generation immigrant, ‘home’ is likely to be the old country, in this case Germany, something I could never fully appreciate until I actually went there for the first time in 1996, and it all came back to me at the bed-and-breakfast table—the same white dishware, the same well-oiled furniture, the same well-oiled machinery and smiles. (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 3:11 pm on May 23, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: American commune, , The Fam   

    Eschatology 401: Taking the Communism out of Communes, Putting the Socialism into Social Media 

    Films predict it; sci-fi books thrive on it; non-fiction books expound upon it; now even half-assed TV shows like ‘Revolution’ are jumping on the Ark, with their thinly-scripted post-Apocalyptic scenario based on a B-movie premise of “Who turned out the lights?”  Some of the takes are much more well-thought-out, of course, and the message is the same: we’re heading for the cliff, and no one seems to care enough about it to do anything to change it, as if our cherished out-of-control ‘way of life’ is sacrosanct, iPhone and iPad and the drone of incessant wars in the background. This is not denial; this is deliberate negligence and misguided religious eschatology.  The irony, of course, is that the average world citizen has never been wealthier…as the water rises up around our knees.   (More …)

     

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