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Snippets

Charlie Kirk said, “George Floyd was a scumbag. Does that mean he deserved to die? No, of course not.” Replace “George Floyd” with “Charlie Kirk.” What would the outcry be?

Pete Hegseth wants “warriors” in this man’s army. Apparently, according to Hegseth, warriors don’t have beards. I watch Sunday football, and many of the players have quite luxurious facial growths. Apparently, at least according to Hegseth, I was wrong if I thought of them as manly men. They have beards. They are wusses. A tradition in the NHL is for players not to shave as long as they are in the playoffs. Once again, they are pansies, not warriors. Hegseth wants lethality in our armed forces. Nothing produced more deaths in our history than the Civil War. After hearing Hegseth, I don’t know how the North won with the bearded Ulysses S. Grant in charge. I thought he was a warrior, but apparently just another wuss. Maybe his side won because the Confederates had bearded Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Those two must have been really big pansies if they lost to Grant. Certainly, the fairy Custer, with his hair, could not be in Hegseth’s army. And in World War II, Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, who were on the front lines for the entire war, were never clean shaven. If they were still around, they might like to know that they are not wanted in Hegseth’s army. So they can just go home.

In the wake of Kirk’s death, I ask, not for the first time, What is a Christian?

Perhaps if General Grant and General Eisenhower had spent less time on military strategy, tactics, and logistics and more on pullups, pushups, and sit-ups, the Civil War and World War II would have ended sooner. I wondered, too, if the generals who were flown from all four corners of the world to Virginia (at enormous expense, one might add) might have had better things to do than to sit in a lecture on sartorial issues and calisthenics.

At my new residence I am about to start a six-week course on the musical theater. The first week, we will study the seminal Oklahoma! When I watched a video of it, I realized that I knew most of the music, but I have no idea how. I have never seen a live production of the musical and only clips of the movie. When I was a boy, our family did not have a record player much less a hi-fi. We did have a radio, but I don’t believe I ever heard show tunes out of it. Still, I know much of the score. How do we learn the stuff we do?

Pete Hegseth seems not to want women in the armed forces. He certainly does not want transgender men. I wonder what his reaction would be to what Tony Horwitz relates in his Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998). As a result of an automobile accident in 1911, a union Civil War hero was discovered to be a woman. She was then sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear skirts, in which she was clumsy. She died as the result of a hip injury after a fall. Horwitz reports that at least 400 women disguised as men fought in the Civil War.

When I was eight or nine, the news was filled with UFO sightings. I wanted to spot one and spent much time in the backyard gazing upward. I was getting discouraged when one day as I looked over the Schneidermann house I saw what appeared to be a rotating, silvery disk. It came closer and hovered almost silently about fifty feet off the ground at the back of our property. A hatch slid open, and a creature came down on a beam of light. It got to the grass just outside the kohlrabi patch, but I could not discern any features. It was fully covered in hair. I could not tell if there was a head, or arms, or feet because of all the hair. But there was what appeared to be a hypodermic needle coming out of where the head might have been. Father must have seen the lights because he was standing just behind me. With my voice that had not broken, I asked, “What is that?” “My last-born son,” he intoned, “that is definitely a furry with the syringe on the top.”

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

          The postponed Olympics from last summer are supposed to be held this summer, and many of us will watch sports that we only watch every four or, in this case, five years. I, for example, haven’t seen a decathlon since the last Olympiad, and I expect to hear announcers intone that the decathletes “are competing to be the best athlete in the world.” That tagline never made sense. Yes, those competitors are amazing, but there are many athletic abilities that are not part of a decathlon, which only incorporates track and field skills. Other talents are needed for making a soccer or American football pass, hitting a baseball, driving the basketball lane, or zooming down a ski jump. The range of sports around the world demanding diverse skills is amazing, and the decathlon tests only a tiny fraction of athletic abilities. The modern pentathlon would seem to be a better test of all-around athletic skill than its ten-part counterpart. The pentathletes compete in fencing, equestrian jumping, swimming, and a cross country race with periodic stops for shooting. Now that is a collection of diverse athletic skills.

          As a part-time resident of the Keystone state, I was interested in the recent news article that said conservation groups were suing to denominate the Eastern hellbender an endangered species. The Eastern hellbender is a less than cuddly salamander that can grow two feet in length. Two years ago it was named Pennsylvania’s official amphibian although the picture of the governor signing the denomination did not include a picture of an Eastern hellbender. The news article said that the animal got its name because the early American settlers described it as “a creature from hell where it’s bent on returning.” One moniker, however, is not enough for this creature because it goes by the increasingly intriguing names of “mud devil,” “lasagna lizard,” and “snot otter.” The vote to name it the state amphibian was lopsided, but it had competition for the little-known trophy from the Wehrle’s salamander, which is named after the late naturalist R.W. Wehrle, of Indiana, Pa. Reading this factoid doubled my knowledge of Indiana, Pa., residents. I already knew that Jimmy Stewart was born and raised there. I am convinced that the brief news report contains the seeds of many jokes, but I haven’t come up with any, so I am posting this, I must admit, so that I can write “lasagna lizard” and “snot otter.”  Let’s do that again: lasagna lizard; snot otter.

          The phone call was with someone who had recently retired and moved to my part-time Pennsylvania community. After we had discussed governance issues, he discovered that I was talking to him from New York City. He was surprised and asked if I was afraid to go out. I started to say that I was cautious about Covid, but Brooklyn was no worse than where he was, when he said, “Friends of mine tell me that after the George Floyd protests, they are afraid to go out in New York City.” I did not know what to say. Those protests ended nine months ago. Is it fair to make conclusions about him from this? What should they be if I do?

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Oscar Wilde.

“The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.