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Chamblee 54 has moved.
The new address is

http://chamblee54.wordpress.com/


If you prefer to use a link, go here
Piersgavestonjr is on vacation.

Evolution

After 400+ posts, it is time to move on.
Google has been shutting me out of access to my account on my home computer.
I have written emails, filled out forms, and talked to several tech reps from my ISP.
While I enjoy the ease of use here, that does not do much good if you cannot get into your account.
Blogger is not the only game in town.
Last night I made my first post here.
Wordpress has a few quirks that I need to get used to. I also want to experiment at a couple of other venues.
It has been fun, at there is time for a comeback. But I have to see what else is available.

82 Percent

82%LUSH

justonedrinkwonthurtyou
I do so much enjoy internet tests.
This one is easy to figure out. Being a fan of Vincent Van Gogh, I know that Absinthe is made of wormwood. It doesn't take too much shmartz to figure that jagermeister means master hunter. And so it goes.
The test says I am 82% alcoholic, lush.

I took my last drink December 31, 1988.
ht to mingaling . I hope this test is not a requirment for being in APWBWGTTD.




This is a shock. I am able to get into blogger.
For the last 19 days, I have not been able to log onto blogspot. I have spent hours on the phone with tech reps, sent numerous messages to blogger, and been very unpleased. I don't know if what I did tonight was a fluke, but I will try it again later.

Stupor Tuesday

Stupor Tuesday is here.
With the Electoral College all but certain to give Georgia's votes to a Repub, Mardi Gras is the only chance to vote I will get this year.
I don't have to make up my mind until I step in the building, but I will probably hold my nose. The voting is in the cafetorium of my grammar school. It will not be the first time I hold my nose in there.
On Sunday, I had a chat with a Ron Paul guy. I asked if Dr. P was a white supremacist, and the RPG said no. He did say that there were a lot of scary looking black guys in Washington DC.
So, who to vote for?
Hillary Rodham and Mitt Romney are too gross for words.
Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul have statement value. Neither has a prayer to win, but you can make a statement with either one. Of course, neither is one that I care to support.
Which leaves us with John McCain and Barack Obama. When I hear Rush Limbaugh call McCain a liberal, it puts a smile on my face.
When I hear Obama orate with his silver tongue, it makes me wonder what was so bad about Hillary anyway.
It would be good to know who the Vice Presidential choices would be. This is important for an old geezer like McCain, or a cigarette smoking "former" cocaine user like Obama.
And isn't one former coke freak in the White House too many?
No one has a clue about the War in Babylon. I find Obama's opposition encouraging. I find McCain's kill them all clueless ness to be discouraging.
While Obama is a dynamic presence, I keep wondering who is pulling the strings on that puppet. The Ron Paul Guy says that Obama gets lots of special interest money, and I have no reason to doubt him.
I still have a couple of hours to think, before the showdown in the cafetorium. For now, it looks like Obama, but if Huckabee comes through with that fried squirrel I may have to rethink.

Get Naive

Sometimes things you have seen a thousand times jump out.
Anagrams are an interest of mine. The idea is that you take the letters of a word to create a new word. Sometimes the two phrases have a, um, poetic connection. Not that it adds up in two plus two fashion, but there is a vague connection.
So I read this thing by Kiko, where he is discussing the New York N.O.W., Barack Obama, and Ted Kennedy. It seems like the libbers are upset with swimming Teddy because he endorsed the hope and change guy.
So the commentary said something about negative feminist stereotypes, when I looked at the “N word” again, and saw something. Negative is an anagram for get naïve.
And get naïve…or negative…is a good phrase N.O.W. or Ted Kennedy.
This reminds me of my favorite quote about Dick Williams. Once he wrote for the fishwrapper, comparing gay people to Richard Speck, Sirhan Sirhan, and Adolph Hitler. This was in addition to the predictable right wing nonsense, a good bit of which revolved around Ted Kennedy bashing. In the pre Clinton era, saying something rude about Ted Kennedy was required for “conservative” writers who wanted right wing street cred.
One day a letter writer gently admonished Mr. Williams about this. He said that Mr. Williams and Mr. Kennedy should get to know each other, maybe go for a drive in the country some afternoon. Do bow ties float?

These are difficult days in the blogosphere. Google is not letting me connect at home, and any blogging I do needs to be done at work. The picture collection is not here, so the text will have to stand alone.
While I am hoping to resolve the issues with Blogger, I do need to look at other alternatives. Does anyone reading this have any suggestions as to typepad, wordpress, live journal, or the host of other options?
Spell check suggestions for this feature:

Kiko- kilo, kike, kino, kook, kick.
Google- goggles, gouge
Blogger- logger, flogger
Blogosphere- photosphere
Sirhan- Syrian, siphon, iran, saran
Cred- credo, crud, cried, cored, creed

eight candidates in twelve words or less

The original idea was to put the candidates in first name order, regardless of party affiliation. However, when you do this, you have a demo-repub split. This is using last names as a tie breaker, which puts Edwards ahead of McCain.

Barack Obama- Do we really want another coke head in the White (Line) House?
Hillary Clinton- Yuk.
John Edwards- How are we going to pay for all the cool ideas?
John McCain- Angers "conservatives". Would be 79 when his second term ends.
Mike Huckabee- Eats fried squirrel. Wants a theocracy.
Mitt Romney- What do you want to hear today?
Ron Paul -He didn't read those white supremacist newsletters.
Rudy Guliani- Please don't take this personally.
Spell check suggestions
repub- repel, repay, repot, republic, brewpub, rape, ripe
Huckabee- chickadee, checkable, hoecake, huskies, huskier, hotcake

We're not Worthy

asinantiquitythelonelyman
A few weeks ago, I posted something called "heavy metal blunder". There was a quote from a band called Steppenwolf, whose first hit was "Born to be Wild". This song was featured on the soundtrack to Easy Rider, which made Jack Nicholson a star.
Steppenwolf was a painfully relevant group, given to political ranting. They later devolved into a front band for whoever owned the name. As the attached handbill indicates, they once played at the Great Southeast Music Hall. On the next Monday, I was on a Trailways bus for San Francisco. I spent a week in a moonie camp and came back.
"Steppenwolf" was also a novel by Herman Hesse, which I am reading for the second time now. I did a bit of research on it while putting together the earlier post, and was surprised at how little of it I remembered from 1978. I decided it was time for another go through.
There was a girl at my high school, a very pretty cheerleader a couple of years older than I. One day after she graduated, she went downtown, and took an elevator to the 22nd floor of the Regency Hyatt House. She left a copy of "Steppenwolf" on the atrium balcony and jumped into the lobby.
Later in high school, I noticed some of the hippie crowd reading this same book. I said something about "Hess" and was corrected " That is hess-uh, illiterate".
A few more years down the path, I was at the I-85 flea market one sunday morning. A Drive In theatre would rent out space to people selling stuff on sunday morning, and this sabbath I got a copy of "Steppenwolf". A dear john letter and a copy of a birth certificate were inside the book. The introduction was written in 1963 by a professor at Berkeley. The band Steppenwolf was from Berkeley.
The book is about a man named Harry Haller, who is probably a stand in for Herman Hesse. It is set in 1920s Germany. Mr. Haller had been a critic of World War One, which probably had a different name in 1920s Germany. He was not well liked as a result.
Mr. Haller feels himself to be half man half wolf, and does not fit in well with society. He is set to go home and kill himself when he meets Hermine, who breathes life into his putrid existence. There is more to the story, which may or may not be a future post. Maybe the war will end and a candidate I can tolerate will emerge, and I won't have anything else to write about.
The book is full of episodes of synchronicity. I am certain the French have a good phrase for this, but I couldn't pronounce it. I was casting about for an english phrase, which could be applied to these incidents of "fantastic realism". I thought of "yowza". It was used by the Gig Young in a movie, and was repeated in a disco song. So the book has yowzas in it.
The one that got me was the death of Herman Hesse's father. This was in March of 1916, and was two weeks after my father was born. Now, dad was in neutral North Carolina, which Mr. Hesse was in war torn Germany. This struck me as profound, as did other similarities between Mr. Hesse/Haller and your reporter.
There is an episode in the book where Haller meets Goethe in a dream. (And why is Goethe pronounced Gert-tuh?) Mr. Goethe says something uncomplimentary about the times Haller lives in, and Haller immediately tells Goethe that he is correct, that the oldies were great and the moderns are garbage. When I read that, I flashed to the scene in "Wayne's World" where Wayne and Garth bow in front of Alice Cooper, saying “We’re not worthy”.
hesse- Hess, hose, hassle, Jesse, these, hiss
sunday- sundae, sundry, sunray
hermine- heroine, ermine, herman, hormone
yowza- yews, yaws, Iowa, dowse, ooze, doze
Gert-tuh- get up