August 7, 2013

Mountain Moral Monday 8-5-2013 Asheville Hallelujah revised

July 31, 2013

A funny Camera-cartoon / Bits of it true for some of us

July 31, 2013

Calling Conservatives stupid may be objectionable.

turning it around to put the other shoe on first, not so much!?!

July 30, 2013

Scalia Offers to Help Pope Judge Gays - as revealed by Andy Borowitz

www.borowitzreport.com

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Responding to Pope Francis’s suggestion that the Pope is not capable of judging gays, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia contacted the Vatican today to say that he would be “more than happy” to help the Pontiff do so.

“If he’s having trouble judging homosexuals, well, then I’m his man,” Scalia told reporters after making his offer. “I have over a quarter century of professional experience.”
Justice Scalia said that he was sympathetic to Pope Francis’s difficulty in judging gays, but added, “Once he spends a few weeks watching the master at work, I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it.”
“I wasn’t great at judging homosexuals my first year in the job, either,” he said. “But now I can do it without thinking.”

Justice Scalia said that once Pope Francis feels confident about his ability to judge gays, he would help the Pontiff learn how to judge minorities and women.

July 25, 2013

The Mind Revisited - An Essay by Hal Crowther - who lives in NC, an observer for a long time

Published on  June 25 2013
By Hal Crowther

OA columnist Hal Crowther lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, the author Lee Smith.



"Klan Country, South Carolina" by Dennis Darling

Books discussed in this essay:
The New Mind of the South, by Tracy Thompson, Simon & Schuster.
In Love With Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal, by H. Brandt Ayers, NewSouth Books.

Since the dawn of introspection, which predates Homer at least, what collective mind has been more exhaustively or passionately psychoanalyzed than the Mind of the South? In the decades since W. J. Cash probed and disparaged it in his historic 1929 essay for The American Mercury, “The Mind of the South” has been revised and revisited by armies of Southern scribes and scholars, and still most of us are unconvinced that we’ve got it right. The Southerner’s tireless search for his identity has been viewed ironically by outside observers—no one has ever written about the “Mind of the Midwest”—and there is no Fellowship of Northern Writers who meet and drink and apply Freud’s tools to the works of Hawthorne or Melville. But I’m in no position to join the ironists; I devoted large sections of two books to this unique obsession, and have addressed it repeatedly in the pages of the Oxford American.

As a troubled South pursues its self—its soul—deep into the twenty-first century, there’s no better place to start than Cash, that doomed and prescient native of Gaffney, South Carolina, who is still remembered by Southern diehards as a traitor to his people. It’s significant that his original essay was published just before October 29, Black Tuesday, when the stock market crashed and launched the Great Depression, the national ordeal that distracted America from so many of the terrible things that happened in the Jim Crow South. Another significant footnote is that Cash’s editor at the Mercury was H. L. Mencken, whose notorious 1917 diatribe, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” argued persuasively and hilariously that the South possessed very little mind worth analyzing.


For the rest of the essay, and more about Hal Crowther go here:

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/authors/crowther-hal/articles/

July 25, 2013

At the waterpark. I was NOT there to take photos, but here are a few anyway

Took these with my Olympus Stylus Tough camera.

Self evident water fun, these guys were under a huge bucket that fills with water and then dumps it down as it is full.


Enjoying the wall of water, I think he is, anyway


A modern day Heidi and her boyfriend right after they came out of a scary almost vertical drop. Yet they're still so gorgeous, I told them that, so they allowed me to take this photo


This kid just stopped me cold. He's a charmer examining the world around him with laissez-faire sophistication

July 23, 2013

Great way to store bikes - don't know where it is though

July 21, 2013

Norman Mailer weighs in on "the Poor and the Rich" and wins my Pulitzer for it

July 21, 2013

"Teach your children well" New illustration, and old song

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And while you're choking up a little (I did), let the song be your companion

July 17, 2013

Borowitz: Queen Elizabeth Rips Chris Christie on Gay Marriage

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LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Moments after approving a new law legalizing gay marriage in England and Wales, Queen Elizabeth II of Britain unleashed a blistering attack on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for “lacking the guts” to do the same.
The British monarch’s brutal evisceration of Gov. Christie stunned observers, who did not know that she was such a close follower of his gay marriage stance.
“I don’t like to badmouth people,” she said. “But I’m the head of a monarchy that began in the ninth century, and I’m apparently more modern than Chris Christie.”
After shocking observers with her opening salvo, she continued to tear Gov. Christie to shreds.
“Look, I know he has to appeal to the crazy right wingers in his party,” she added. “But the fact is, he’s not as forward-thinking as an eighty-seven-year-old lady who wears a crown on her head. It’s pathetic.”
Asked if she had advice for Gov. Christie, the British monarch said, bluntly, “Just sign the damn bill, Chris.”
Responding to a reporter’s question about the upcoming royal birth, Elizabeth replied, “Tell you the truth? I’m just glad the kid’s not being born in New Jersey.”