Verily, the trials of life shall one day melt, bubble, and and vaporize before the glory of Christ our slain Savior whose face >is like unto the light of a thousand suns.

>I finally found the subject -- "Sacrilege." <g>

I'm glad you found the subject. I thought perhaps your taciturnity betokened disapprobation. You surely know that my velvet tongue is a loose cannon on the deck of diplomacy, decorum, and sensitive, gentle humor. I often lie awake at nights praying about it.

>You might remember what I told about going before the Delgado committee to be questioned about my courses I had written and wanted to teach and they were impressed...I knew they would be. <g> One of them asked what I thought would be fair compensation for my teaching the courses.
I told them this story...

A fellow kept looking for work and was having a tough time of it. Finally, he met a friend and the friend asked, "Did you ever find work?"
He said, "Yes...I am working in burlesque putting body makeup on the girls."
The friend asked, "How much?"
He said, "Seventy-five a week."
The friend said, "That's not much."
The guy shrugged and said, "It's all I can afford."

I added, "I am not going to pay Delgado to let me teach but I don't expect much in recompense...gas money?" They thought that funny and suggested more than I would have asked. <g>

(Thanks to old movies for the story...I didn't tell them where I got it.)

You never cease to amaze me. It seems that at every social interaction in your life, you have some relevant and clever rejoinder or quote or joke or journal entry or personal story to tell or literary or historical story to recount ... Do you remember everything you ever heard and read?

>Cashion! Do you know EVERYTHING? (OK, that's your cue: What do you say? ...
You muse a bit, and say ... "Well, I'm not sure that I can say."

It occurs to me that you would make an excellent Jeeves except for the fact that you would probably not be able to pull off that dash of faux sycophancy; I don't think it's in your nature.

>I wouldn't know..."sycophancy" is not in my vocabulary.

I wonder if maybe your misapprehension derives from your having heard only the likes of Bill Monroe et al. Bill Monroe is a spore pile.

There does exist bluegrass with heart, soul, and beauty, if you look for it. (Funny, I used to tell people I didn't like bluegrass. Now I wonder what in heaven's name I could have been thinking ... go figure.)

>I remember when I was told that Picayune was the third best school in Mississippi. I think I told the principal that I was sorry.

See, there you go again. That's really funny. It reminds me a bit of Rodney Dangerfield. I don't think I would have thought of that off the cuff.

>Only a month ago, someone stole Ron's wine-colored D'Angelico Elite-copy guitar off its stand during a break.  I found this out when Jerry and I were over there Friday...a bassist, Sugar Bear, of the Decatur Street Jazz Band and I were talking and I asked about Ron and Sydney. Sugar Bear said that Ron loved and babied that guitar more than his wife. That was certainly the best guitar he had ever owned...and he had gotten over the total loss in his neighborhood from the canal breaking and was happy to be back in music.
Now, Sugar Bear says he doesn't want to play, isn't looking for another guitar and has withdrawn from a lot of his friends.
Sugar Bear gave me Sydney's phone number and I am trying to make contact with him and see what the deal is with Ron. I don't know what I can do but I can't even decide until I get all the information. There is the Guitar Center in New Orleans and I have a good contact with them, plus I know the best set-up guy over there. Maybe I can arrange something.
You know, after all my life of playing music places and for people, wouldn't be strange that my total contribution to music could be getting someone else a guitar?
I put up $300 for the last one and then me and another guy matched everyone else dollar for dollar.

They say that what you give comes back to you. I don't know whether or not this is true, but who knows? Ron is a good metaphysical investment.

>Every time a musician in New Orleans gets knocked down really bad by Life and is so far down the only to go is up, except that the guy doesn't have the wherewithal even to find the ladder ... all the other musicians get together and pool their money to help the guy get back up. And these musicians don't have money to pool; they're dipping into their grocery and beer money.

That's something we don't see very often in our age of insularity: the houses, the lawns, the TVs, the one-passenger cars in the vacuum suburbs, the neighbors we never meet, the antiseptic, hollow, pointless jobs, the lobotomite human husks that fill up ugly brick crackerbox temples of worship to a long-dead Bronze Age desert-religion despot blood-god -- this T.S. Eliot miasma of unexamined existential ennui. How horrible. I'll take the street musicians any day.

Speaking of jobs, I'm rather pleased. Tutor.com is making available more work than I even want at this time -- I take as much as I want, whenever I want. And the work is kind of fun. And there is no commute, no dress code (I sit at my computer in my underwear in the kitchen). (The computer is not in my underwear -- I'm sitting in my underwear.)

I'm about to get a $2 raise, and their reviews of me are good. As for another of my jobs, subbing: I like Paideia School so much that I'll sub for them even though the pay is low. The woman I interviewed with told me that since she has been there they have hired ten former substitute teachers to be full-time teachers.

The school (Paideia is an exclusive private school) and its teachers and administrators are completely devoid of the bureaucratic inanity that poisons and cripples the public school system. They address intelligently, succinctly, and without PC game-playing the matter at hand: education. There is no dress code (up to outlandishness) for students or teachers, there is an open- classroom policy (students can get up and leave at will if they tell the teacher where they're going), there is an open-language policy (it's perfectly OK for a fascinated student to say: "Adolph Hitler enacted the most extensive animal-rights laws in the history of Europe at the time? No fuckin' way man!").

(Actually, Hitler did do this as I'm sure you know. He said animal research in medicine was a "Jewish science".)

The students call the teachers by their first names. They teach differential and integral calculus and advanced physics, and they have an orchestra and a jazz band and art galleries and about 15 or 20 sports (including cricket). The advanced-placement European history class has sofas in the room where students lie around eating potato chips while discussing Rasputin, Nicholas, and Tsaritsa Alexandra.

They have no discipline problems whatsoever, except for the most frivolous peccadilloes, and almost 100% of the students go on to college. They have organizations for African history, culture, and art, for women's issues, for "gay, bisexual, heterosexual, and trans-gender issues" ...

They have an "honor system" for all activities, tests, homework, etc., and apparently it works. Most of their teachers have  softline B.S., M.S. or Ph.D. degrees from places like Harvard, MIT, U. California, U. Virginia, Georgia Tech. The campus is beautiful, with trees and old, fine houses that have been converted to classrooms and galleries. They're open-minded folk.

They treat the students like adults, the students respond by behaving like adults. And they are very serious about learning. It's like being on a four-year college campus. The two-year community colleges do not possess this kind of atmosphere.

I am loosing precious novel-writing time. I must work furiously up until online-tutoring prime time -- about 4:00.

Later, gator ...

Charles the Employed (as it were)

Date: 29 Aug 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Yes, there is a subject, somewhere

This seems feels terribly much like dé·jà vu, because I though that I had responded to this e-mail a few days ago. But there is no record of it ... I think I started it and then aborted because I had to do something else and I didn't want to leave it hanging in the middle. Anyway, if you got two responses, perhaps they will be two different responses. I am a multi-personalitied man.

You wrote: "Just because I do not know the answer does not mean by a priori you are correct. My not knowing does not mean that I am incorrect."

Or -- "I know I am intuitively correct but our collective intellect may not be sufficient to understand why."

Or -- "My not knowing why you are wrong does not mean that you are correct."

Those are all precious. The only one I have used on occasion is: "That you believe it to be true has nothing at all to do with whether or not it actually is true."

>Bella Fleck, ectera, are just temporary followers of mountain string bands.

Bella Fleck is (with occasional slip-up exceptions) a jive ass. The folks I drink and pick with do not play jazz on a banjos. It's worse than Bill Monroe. Or, how about Bill Monroe crossed with jazz fusion?

>You've heard blue grass; what you might be missing is mountain string band music.

>It is interesting that we separatists have a hurricane and the power goes off. The windows and doors go open and they share water, propane, ice, MREs...whatever they have. They even share their guard dog without being aware of it. I would awake at night on just a sheet and hear through the open house an Akita three doors down. It was barking its head off and I felt safer because of it. Friendly eyes were watching and sensitive noses were smelling -- and keeping the neighborhood aware that someone had been detected. Just that detection would be a sufficient deterrent if ill-will was the intent.
We sat out in a black night (and with no power in the town, it can be really black) on the tail gate of Bettie's truck and I played the rosewood guitar and sang to us...and I learned the next day that the pistol-toting neighbors at the two entrances to the neighborhood ("YOU LOOT...WE SHOOT! DO NOT COME IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD AFTER DARK!") could hear me pretty good but couldn't be sure who it was or what was being sung..."good background music."
People went walking in boredom and would stop outside and talk to neighbors they had never met because now they were sitting outside trying to catch a little breeze.
Then power came back on.
Lights went on, radios started playing, street lights came on, and the whole neighborhood cheered and clapped...then each got up, turned their back on the conversation in mid-sentence, and took their chairs indoors. The air-conditioners were turned on, windows and doors closed, and the neighborhood was sufficiently sealed outside. The residents were now insulated inside their air-locks and environmental chambers.
The next day the propane tanks were returned to the loaners, the grilles were drug down the streets to where they belonged, and we've not spoken to these neighbors since that Saturday in mid-October, 2005...but occasionally, if we pass in the car while they are in their car or yard, we give them a perfunctory nod. That is all the communication we have time for.
And at night, I sometimes wake up and wish that damned dog would shut up!

All I can say is that, once again, you have written a fine story. It is well paced in the unfolding of time, and it has just the right amount of detail. It reminds me of Garrison Keeler. It is gritty in description, but soft in its adjectival enfolding of the night being remembered. And it's short, and unpretentious. Just, perhaps, a child's story. And the clincher is the final line, about wishing that damned dog would shut up, after your having so incongruously honored the dog on that previous, uniquely lightless night. The last line is a perfect surprise wrap-up for the whole story -- it's a poignant, ironic, almost afterthought, which just takes the whole point of the story and beautifully caps it off. The summarizational irony of that final line is good writing.

>I am capable of working those conundrums out without cue cards. I remember the best one..."The wild life was everywhere. One morning I stepped out of the tent and shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I will never know. It took us hours to get his tusks out. They were so tight. Next week, I am shooting elephants in Alabama...there the Tuskaloosa." (Groucho Marx, of course.)

Groucho Marx, of course, indeed.

>One last one...at the beginning of an episode, Rene, who runs the cafe addresses the camera, "My name is Rene and I run this cafe. I must be very careful to be nice to the Germans because they are winning the war...if I don't, they will shoot me! If I am too nice to the Germans, the French Resistance will shoot me! If my wife finds out that I am fooling around with Evette in the cheese cellar, my wife will shoot me! And if Evette finds out I am fooling around with Maria in the wine cellar, Evette will shoot me! I live in very dangerous times."

Funny as all heck. Reminds me of my own dangerous life. (Oh, am I comparing my life to the French Resistance philanderers?)

I must go talk to the plumber now, who has been lying on the kitchen floor and ripping the   wall out for an hour.
(Oh, I read a funny line which said that "Barack Obama must look to and herald the future, for that is where all of his great achievements lie!")

Cheers, ... Charlie

Date: 5 Sep 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Catch Up

Hello ...

I'm glad you're OK, but then, I knew you'd be OK, of course. There was no hurricane. Duh.

>One can watch CNN and know we are all dying in our homes ... those people should be absolutely ashamed of themselves! The viewers outside of the immediate area have no idea how much they are lying.

I've told people several times that I hope Ray Nagin is embarrassed right now. Are some people just too inward-turned and stupid even to recognize that: "Hey, this is it -- I should be and am so embarrassed right now at making such a fool of myself that I am beet-red in the face!"? (Oh, I forgot, Nagin cannot turn beet-red .. oh well.) He referred to Gustav, well before anyone could even know where it was going to land or had any idea what its wind catetory would be, "the mother of all storms" and "the storm of the century". I though to myself, YOU IDIOT. Have you never heard that old tale about the boy who cried wolf? Idiot.

>New Orleans ended up getting an average tropical storm and some rain. Just about what I figured would happen.

(Of course, Nagin also famously refered to making N.O. a "chocolate city" again, and said that god is mad at N.O., because he's sending hurricane after hurricane to hit us, and "I don't care what those people say uptown, or wherever they are.")

I've been doing nothing but some online tutoring, and working on my novel. My research material is burgeoning, which is really good, but the drawback is that I have to scan or read all of this stuff, and maybe take notes and stick in a bunch of bookmarks.

I'm learning more about European history that I ever dreamed of. Wow, the entire history of Europe sounds like the Taliban. And to think, the 11th- to 13th-century frenzy-whipped lay Christians (guaranteed by the Pope an entrance to Heaven if they died as Christ's soldiers) are the ones who attacked, raped, pillaged, murdered, corpse-mutilated, and cannabalized the Muslims. Sometimes I wish I had been born a simple rodent, a member of a haybarn ratpack.

Later ...

Charles, Rodent (next life)

Date: 6 Sep 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Catch Up

>Maybe his folklore doesn't have a "little boy who cried wolf." I am surprised he didn't turn into tiger butter. (Don't make me explain that. <g>)

Tiger butter -- I know that's a race joke about anal sex with Tiger Woods.  (OK, yes, I read Little Black Sambo in grade school.)

>Lets not be too hard on Mayor Nagin. He will soon have his sort in a higher position: President Obama.

Well, except maybe for a trifling difference in schooling, given Ray Nagin received a BS in Accounting from Tuskegee University and an MBA from Tulane University, and that that Obama graduated from Columbia University and got a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and was president of the Harvard Law Review, and he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years.

Here, I'll tell you the last few "Negro stories" that my old friend dating from back in high school days (we were in the band together) has told me recently. You have to hear in your head the way he talks, and hear his voice intonating the words -- he is very articulate when he wants to be, and he speaks in a deep, rich baritone with a solid, strong, nice, relaxed, offhanded Mississippi drawl. He's a big, healthy, deer-hunter guy who drives a real big truck. His aphorisms include things like, "If you knew how little I cared what you think, it would hurt your feelings."

He went back to school about three years ago (after a lifetime of warehouse-management jobs and odd-jobs he hated) and got a degree in nursing -- top of his class, at the toughest and best school in the Jackson metro area.

His most recent Negro stories:

1) HIs co-worker (black female nurse) tells him that her boyfriend has decided to be a Muslim. My freind says: "What, did he convert?"

She: "No, he just decided he IS a Muslim."

Friend: "So, does he like, bow down in the direction of Mecca five times a day to pray?"

She: "Mecca? Wha's Mecca? I ain' her'a no Mecca."

2) My friend walks into a 7-11 shop 'n' rob and heads for the bathroom. The men's room is all boarded up with "out of order" signs, so he goes into the women's room. When he comes out and goes to the cashier to buy his junk, the cashier (a quite fat, mid-youngish female black) hunkers forward over the counter at him and almost shouts at him, "You ain' go' no women's bavroom! You ai' go in there! Wha' you think you is! Tha's a' woman bavroom!" He said he thought, while getting out his money, what appropriate thing he might say to this employee. Then, it occurred to him. In his deep baritone drawl, he said, "But I AM a woman." She gasped and reared back and looked him up and down, sputtering. He just picked up the stuff he had bought and left.

3) He works in an expensive (prestigious? ... go figure) nursing home. There was an 80-something year old white woman there who was being administered to by several black nurses. The old lady was requesting that the various nurses do things for her, and she was saying thinks like, "Excuse me, would you ask that nigger to come over here, I need to ask her about this pill she just gave me"; or "Did that nigger hear what I just asked her about?". One of the black nurses leaned over the old lady's bed and said, "Ma'm, it's not appropriate to use that word. You shouldn't say that." The old lady said, sweetly and innocently, "What? You mean 'nigger'? But, that's what ya'll are." My friend was working on something in the back of the room, and said he was biting the hell out of his tongue to keep from laughing out loud.

4) Michelle Obama is giving her speech on TV at the night shift at the nursing home where he works. They're panning across the audience, showing tears in people's eyes. He says, under his breath, to no one, "Oh, puleeeaase". A Negro female nurse happens to be passing by him, and stops and turns to him and stares sharply. "Whachou think you dissin' 'bout? You be'er keep yo mough shut! You be'er keep yo' thoughs a' youselv!"

She stomps away, and my friend looks at her vanishing cloud of rage and says, "Whaaaaat???"

Next day, a formal complaint is filed aganst him. Long story short, the some-level director calls him in and asks about this allegation that he was making racially offensive remarks. She asks him, "Did you make racial remarks?"

My friend said, in his simple, riveting baritone, "Nope."

The director, who knows him well, said, "That's what I thought. You know, they make me follow up on things like this."

He said, "Well, yea, I understand, but you know, I would kinda really like to talk to this person that said this."

So the director brought the Negro in, and asked her, "What did he say?" .... "I'm not gonna repeat it" ... "No, I want you to tell me what he said!" ... "Well .... uh ... he was being racially unsenztuv."

"But tell me what he said."

After no answer, my friend, who uncharacteristically was getting really pissed off, proceeded to turn to the Negro complaint-filer and proceeded to wither her about her petty racial paranoia and so on ... then when said Negro went back up to hers and his floor, everybody on the floor (mostly black female nurses) verbally attacked this woman and ripped her to pieces about her bullshit claim against him, to the point that the complaint-filer was literally crying.

5) A Negro nurse who is all flustered asks my friend, passive-aggressively, "Where did you put them bottle a aspirins that was settin' right here!!??" He says, "Umm, where'd I put 'em? Umm ... OK, I give up." The nurse was so flustered she couldn't even think of anything to say.

6) Some black nurse got on the PA announcing something important to all the nurses and doctors on the floor, something like, "Mrs. Sartoris is turning blue, help, we gotta do something quick!" ... but it came out (as usual) as something like, "PPPSphhhsrrsssrgggggjNNMMZzoRRu zaPHHHSSZZZHHturdBLAWheee woh gahhho zmmbbhm'PSSHHHHzingzquwayiikeSSSSHHH!!" My friend (who is head nurse for three floors) rushes down to the room to see what in the world is going on, and he figures it out through years of experience with ebonic-slurred translation (read my lips?) -- so after he puts the crisis to rest he says to the nurse that was using the PA, "You've got to speak more distinctly when you call things out over the PA! This is critical, and I cannot understand a word you are saying! You've got to articulate the words you are speaking. This could be a matter of life and death."

The nurse being addressed turned her nose to the ceiling and stomped away, and a couple of other Negro nurses in the room started to railing Steve: "You kan' say uz how'a talk! We'ond talk like you! We'ond talk no white talk. We talk divrund dah you!"

My friend says, "Excuse me. Have you heard how Tiger Woods talks? Have you heard how Colin Powell talks? Have you heard Condoleezza Rice, or Barach Obama, or Opra Winfrey, or Malcolm X, or Michael Jordan? Have you heard how they talk? This is not a matter of racial culture, it's a matter of articulate communication in a critical workplace situation." (Then my friend told me, as an aside, that he was lying, of course ... it actually was a racial issue, but he wasn't going to tell them that.)

7) His girlfriend bought a battery for his truck, and after a couple of weeks of having it die on him for no reason, and it wouldn't hold a charge, he took it back to Sears for an exchange. The fat black female Negro at the counter looked at the receipt Steve gave her, and she looked at his ID, and she said, "This ain' yow lazzname! Daz ID sayz yow lazzname be one than. Daz receipt sayz da'name be sum'pin else. I kane ta'no baddry back wuff no baa'name! Diz ain' you lazzname.

My friend explained patiently, "My wife retained her last name when we got married."

Negro: Rutane no lazzname! Whacho talkin'? I ain' ne'er hearr'no such thing. Rutane lazzname!"

Friend says, "You're never heard of a married woman retaining her last name when she gets married, or assuming a hyphenated last name?"

Negro: "I ainn' ne'er hear'no such thing!"

He leanes forward onto his arm, on the countertop and says, "OK, listen. Let's analyze this. So I broke into this woman's house and I rummaged through all her belongings until I found a receipt, and I analyzed the receipt and I went out into her carport and stole the battery out of her car and brought it and the receipt here to you just to get a free battery for my thirty-thousand-dollar truck sitting out there in the parking lot."

By now a Negro man had come up who sensibly took over, told the woman to go away, and gave my freind his new battery or his refund, or whatever it is that he wanted.

And while we're at it, don't forget that white man who worked for the crack-addict mayor of DC who had to resign because he used the word "niggardly" in a speech. (The guy probably was just not thinking straight because he was infested with chiggros.)

Regards, and more sooner or later ...

Charlie -- Who is a Sardonic Elitist, beer-hall pool shooter, part-time tutorer (and not at all a supporter of mentally challenged Mediaeval Alaskan redneck stunningly ignorant fascist idiots ... sorry, I just couldn't resist ... I've never been so utterly horrified by America for EXACTLY 28, almost 29, years. I never thought it could potentially get worse. Go figure.)

Date: 8 Sep 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: minority politicians, tiger butter, and the salvation of civilization

>I assume you realize that we will never agree on certain political topics, and that fact makes no difference to me at all. I really don't care. I care about politics only insofar as I feel I should vote. Beyond that, there is nothing that I have the power to do about anything, so I just ignore it.

If our occasional excursions into politics bother you or annoy you, then just don't read what I write, and I'll stop writing. I very seldom discuss politics with anybody. It's just not very high up on my list of interesting things. So if you want, just ignore my political comments and we'll talk about the Western and the Eastern Church, the rise of science, Anglo-Saxon writers, and the possibility of simultaneously existing infinities.

>Sambo was not a darkie...he was a snake-charmer. <g>

Yes, the woman who wrote it was an Injun. But Sambo was a dark Injun.

Well, except maybe for a trifling difference in schooling, given Ray Nagin received ...

>Yeah...same difference.... <g>

Oh, boy ... How I wish you were right. If you were, I would be a lot more likely to employable in a field of scientific research. I have B.S. and M.S degrees from third-tier universities, with GPAs of 3.15 and 3.3, respectively. Ah, if I had it to do over ...

Oh, about a comment you made ... Yes, the Christian church did bring Europe out of the Dark Ages, and that's a fascinating story. Just don't forget to include the observation that without the Irish the Renaissance could not have happened, as you know. They preserved and taught and wrote language (vernacular, Greek, Latin ...), astronomy, mathematics, scripture, literature, etc. Patrick, Columban, et al, spread it all over France and Italy and into the east. I am very, very glad the Church managed somehow to pull all that off.
I will vote for the lesser of two evils. I would not vote at all, except that I am still possessed of the superstitious guilt that was instilled in me in grade school and secondary school (you know, it's from reciting that thing that went "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, one nation, indivisible [sic] ..." (please don't make me explain that one) -- which makes me believe that it's my civic duty to vote. So I vote (at least for national offices).

Back to FORTRAN, C, and UNIX review ... I'm about to apply for science programmer positions with some of the top medical research institutes in the country -- in NYC and Boston. No shit, I'M CONTRADICTING MY ATTITUDE THAT I EXPRESSED ABOVE about the graduating-from-the-third-tier-university thing. Mind you, my observation above may be correct, but my it's my give-up attitude that I'm now contradicting. So I'm still trying. I couldn't believe that, when I quit complaining about all the Web development crap being advertised out there which I don't know very well and do not want to do, and googled "scientific programming", I found several things for which I appear to be, on paper, qualified for educationally and experientially. Maybe, maybe not; we'll see. I may hear back from them, and I very well may not. Hope springs eternal, until you get Alzheimer's disease. Then all them things that seemed so important ...

Charlie, Forked Tongue

Date: 19 Sep 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Fun with statistics, notions of Lala Land ...

This seems odd, and interesting. (I figured it out myself.)

Let's assume that all Americans plan to vote either Democrat or Republican (not true, but let's assume it). Then if I know:

1. What percentage of people (according to polls) plan to vote Republican

2. What the percentage split is for some division of the American population, such as

a. % male, % female

b. % white, % "non-white"

c. % above 45, % below 45

d. % west of the Rockies, % east of the Rockies

e. % north, % south

f. % Catholic, % non-Catholic

So let's assume I have the % split for one of these divisions -- let's say d.

3. What % of Americans east of the Rockies plan to vote Republican.

Then knowing these three things, I can tell you what percentage of Americans west of the Rockies plan to vote Republican. I could tell you this for any one of the categories in 2., as long as I know what percentage of one part of the two divisions prefers Republican.

Don't you think that's kind of strange ... that knowing what % of people under 45 prefer Republican (or Democratic) tells me exactly what % of people over 45 prefer each party?

The thing that got me thinking is, I've always wondered why it is, when there is so much difference in % preferences, sometimes great differences, across different divisions -- black/white, young/old, male/female, and so on and so on and so on, it turns out again and again that when you mix everybody all together you get the overall split for all Americans to be very, very close to 50-50. Isn't this a bit surprising?

I'm tutoring online, and trying to decide whether I should spend my free time working on the novel or searching for scientific programming jobs in California and Maryland and Massachusetts.

I have deftly taken care of my debt manipulation problems, for the time being.

I hope the stock market keeps going back up on the news of a multi-hundred-billions bailout, because when I take out my fortune, maybe it will be worth about four or five hundred dollars more.

I have applied for a scientific-research programming job with Mount Sinai Medical Center, which is at 5th Avenue and 92nd Street, overlooking Central Park. Two blocks from the Lexington Avenue subway line. Imagine that.

I've been reading about Pasadena, CA, trying to determine whether mass transit takes you from there to downtown L.A. (it does) and whether one can live without a car in L.A. (one can, just as one can get to France without an aeroplane, but not many people care to try it). Why am I checking out Pasadena and L.A., you ask? Because the letter I must finish typing right now is an application for a research-programming job with that little engineering school you might have heard of, a place they call Caltech. (Yep, I'm qualified, according to what they say they are looking for.) I have, via google's "Street View", cruised the streets of L.A. (Rodeo Drive, Santa Monica, Sunset Blvd. ...) -- no one ever told me what an exceptionally beautiful city L.A. is. I know that it is utterly unaffordable, but so is Manhattan. L.A. looks like south Florida with the addition grand hills, and everything else multiplied by a factor of 80.

Gotta go finish writing to Caltech ... maybe UCLA is hiring scientific programmers ....

Charlie ...Rambler and gambler, a long way from home

Date: 25 Sep 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: kcashion@charter.net

Subject: Fw: Re: etc. ...

I'm tutoring online, and trying to decide whether I should spend my free time working on the novel or searching for scientific programming jobs in California and Maryland and Massachusetts.

>How is the tutoring going? Pretty much like you expected? Is it taking up much time? Are you getting the money you thought? And are you dealing with the student in real-time, or via e-mail mostly? Curious mind(s) wants to know.

It's going OK, but I need to put in more hours to make more money.

I just applied for a job for which, according to their description, I am TOTALLY qualified -- experientially, educationally, etc. They are one of the 50 largest supercomputing complexes in the world. The are located in Bergen, Norway, on the west coast of Norway buried deep in the fjords. The say that one of the requirements is that you talk real good in English. The have acknowledged having received my resume and letter of interest. We'll see ... Hey, before you scoff: my last (real) job was with the seventh-largest supercomputing complex in the world.

I have deftly taken care of my debt manipulation problems, for the time being.

>Very good...lets hope this is in the past.

The thing in the past is the past: that's a tautology.

If a nonselfreferential word is a word that does not describe itself -- for example, "monosyllabic" is a nonselfreferential word -- then is the word "nonselfreferential" a nonselfreferential word?

>And now a funny...I have never in 73 years had any foot problems like fungal sorts.

>And then I did a while back. I thought three of my right toes were going to rot off. But I had never in my 73 years walked around barefooted in a public shower room and around a pool.

>While doctoring my foot, I started wearing some little flip-flops ...

You need to concentrate on your books and your camera-ed airplanes and your folk songs, and stop thinking about your feet. The feet are best left covered and ignored.

>For open mic in TX, I will do "Sophistication" on the 3/4 guitar with a strip of paper interlaced in the top 4 strings. I need the bottom two strings without the paper because I am playing a lead on them. The other strings will sound the proper notes but be muted a little and rattle on the paper like a snare drum. (I will be in my Kenny Wacky Woo schtick dress.)

For open mic night, I will do "Honey Honey" by ABBA, with kazoo solos.

Honey honey, ooooh you thrill me, uh huh! Honey honey.

Honey honey, ooooh you kill me, uh huh! Honey honey.

>I like to repair electrical things with the power on. I always replace wall switches, lamps, overhead lights and the like with the power connected. I like to have to pay attention on occasion ...

>So I have to keep track of which wire is which, where it is, and all the stuff like that. Touching one hot wire is OK. Touching the other hot wire is OK. Touching both is a real "Ouch!" and worse, it generally makes you bleed. When you jerk your hand back, you always manage to snag some skin on a piece of metal, sharp plastic...something.

I like to sit with a roomfull of stoned, drunk people in the wee hours of the morning in Hattiesburg in the middle of Hurricane Frederick and talk to "Wild Bill", the black sheep of a Hattiesburg biker gang in the '70s, who traveled once from Hattiesburg to L.A. and got arrested three times on the way ... sit with him on the floor next to a coffee table while he drinks shots of whiskey and fingers his switchblade knife and trims his handlebar mustache with it, and I'm telling him (while everybody in the room is whispering at my ears furtively, "Charlie, SHUT UP! That's Wild Bill!") while I'm telling him that he really seems like a nice guy to me, and how come he's got to behave like such a fuckin' asshole, in such a way that people are scared of him and don't like him. I told him, you're a nice, likable guy. What's wrong with you? Then I would take a sip of his whiskey and a toke of his joint. Wild Bill actually liked me and he wanted to talk psychology with me.

Playing with electricity is fun. Boy, speaking of electricity ... could I tell you some girl stories!

You mentioned some Lost Beauties of the English Language -- Here's one for you. I just discovered it while looking up some of your words.

abecedarian , n.

1. a person who is learning the letters of the alphabet.

2. a beginner in any field of learning.

adj.

3. of or pertaining to the alphabet.

4. arranged in alphabetical order.

5. rudimentary; elementary; primary.

Also, abecedary.

[1595 1605; < ML abeced!ri!nus. See ABECEDARY, -AN]

Remember the list of beautiful metaphors you sent me some months ago? I really admired many of them a great deal (and even laughed out loud). Some of these are so brilliant, it (almost) makes me want to write a really bad romance novel. My ex-girlfriend in the graduate department of English at USM was told by a professor in the creative-writing department that if she (my girlfriend) and her best friend would co-write a romance novel, she would, she guaranteed them, get it published. (The professor was an oft-published writer.) Is it really that easy?

I would love to use some of these in my novel they would have to bee used in dialogue, of course.

>The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

>The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

>Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted, her breasts heaving like a student on 31p-a-pint night. (I left this one because is so very, very British.)

>The politician was gone but unnoticed, like a full stop after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

>John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

>Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

>She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

>McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with vegetable soup.

>Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

>Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. (One of my favorites.)

>He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

>Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55 mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. (This one made me think of you.)

>The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.>

>The red brick wall was the colour of a brick-red crayon.

>Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

>He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

>Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."

>She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

>It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

>The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.

>The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

>It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.

>He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing. ("Dustcart" -- How simply divine! Note -- NOT "garbage truck.")

>She was as easy as the Daily Star crossword. (I will remember this one...It will go with, "The only time she said 'no' was when she didn't hear the question"..."rode hard and put up wet"... "We called her Any Time Annie." And now, "She was as easy as a Mississippi crossword puzzle...bless her heart.")

>She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef. (SUPER!)

>Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.

>It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

More later I have to tutor now.

- Charlie

Date: Oct 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Bob Hope Movie

You wrote:

>I sent a bunch of people a little movie clip where Bob Hope used the line, "You mean like Democrats?"

>I have lost track of who I sent it to, so if I sent it to you, I   want you to know what I have found out.

>Knowing how liberal Hollywood has always been...

They are establishment liberals who take their poodles to pet psychiatrists: They are lala, spacey liberals, not the dirty kind like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Franzz Fanon and Malcolm Little.

>I got to thinking about this and wondered why he didn't say, "You mean like Republicans?" The way the clip was stopped, I thought I could see another syllable in his lips; "Democrats" has three syllables, "Republicans" has four. I decided the film clip might have been doctored.

>It was not hard to find that the movie was "Ghost Breakers." I bought the movie and the other night I put it on. I was all ready to prove it to be another urban hoax...I didn't. He really did use "Democrats."

>I still think that was unusual for an old movie quip, but he did say it.

I've always wondered about movie doctoring. I sometimes believe that they actually film two different versions of scenes (well, of course, before editing they have MANY versions of scenes). I have never been sure whether or not I'm hallucinating, but I could swear that the first time I saw the movie "10", when Bo Derek puts "Bolero" on the stereo and Dudley Moore asks her what she likes to do to "Bolero", she says, "Fuck." The next time I saw the movie, she said, "Make love", and the lip sync was correct. My father always claimed that he was absolutely positive (I cannot verify this) that when he saw Gone With the Wind when he was young, one of the slaves says to a white person, "Nawsa, I caan' do that. Aas a house nigga." But in later years the phrase is "Aas a house worker." (Of course, that would be a rather easy lip oversync to do.)

Obviously I'm naive about these things (movies). I've never tried to investigate the issue. I'm just too busy trying to figure out which of the 27 things I need to do I should be doing and feeling guilty because I'm not doing any of them. ;o} (I say these things only to boost your confidence and make you feel superior. If I don't like somebody, I do just the opposite: I try to make them feel inferior. Sometimes it works if they are dumb and embarrassed about being dumb, as opposed to, say, Paris Hilton, who is dumb and is proud that she is dumb -- or certainly it would not work with someone like you who is not dumb and proud of being not dumb, but then again I wouldn't try to do it with you anyway because you are one of the people that I like ... but, again, I ramble ...)

I must soon interrupt my distress about not getting things done to commute to Newnan, GA to attend a memorial for yet another person I knew who has just achieved the inevitable: he is now dead. I must perform, because of a request from the dead man's daughter, a song at the memorial -- a song I wrote a couple of year ago about an entire two next-door households in Newnan including one of my best friends and his families (I lived there with them for a good while after Fraus Katrina), and about the whole town of Newnan, GA. One of the verses is about a couple that were married almost 40 years before the husband (the man mentioned above) died, just a few days ago. (Another verse is about my friend who killed himself less than a year ago--who was the brother of my close friend in Newnan with whom I stayed after Katrina--when they made me perform the same song at his memorial.) I've now improved the song lyrically and musically, have learned to play it, and have completely rewritten an inappropriate verse about a married man's wife. (I still refer to her, but she is no longer identifiable.) Because it's sitting right here next to me on my screen, I'll attach it to this e-mail just for the hell of it. (Of course, please: No comment is needed or wanted re. the song lyrics. I don't really care any more whether my writing is liked or not, because I'll never make any money or fame out of it anyway. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, I just hide the stinking corpses in my closet. Occasionally I bring one out because I'm a bipolar exhibitionist. I'm more concerned now about workaday survival than about "art".

I got promoted to Tutor 1 by Tutor.com. So now I'm making almost 1/3 what I used to make per hour, minus the benefits!!!! I'll just make damn sure I don't get sick. The Lord is good. Things just keep getting better and better as you grow older and older.

More to you soon--I suppose after the dirge is done ...Charlie.

Date: 2 Oct 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion
Subject: Re: Bob Hope Movie

If course, please: No comment is needed or wanted re. the song lyrics.

>Well, Crap! I am sorry to read this. I was going to say how much I liked it but you didn't want it so I won't.

Hold on just a minute!! Can't you read!? :) :o) I simply said I didn't need it or want it. I said I'm not a beggar. I didn't say you were FORBIDDEN to say you liked it, or even to PRAISE it and rank it with "Desolation Row", or perhaps "I Dream of Jeannie" or "Stardust" or the greatest hits of the Monkees, or even to say that I am arguably the finest poet since a let's say hypothetical cross between Dyllan Thomas, Kahil Gibran, and the author of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"! I was just trying not to impose on your politeness! Who said you couldn't flatter me? Jeeze ...

I'm now going to (as the Americans say instead of "I now shall") go and cut my earlobe off in a corn field and bandage up my ear in a handkerchief and mail the earlobe it to some withering-hot chick with whom I'm embroiled in an unrequited love thing ... precisely who that might be I have no clue, but maybe I'll go out tonight to the local titty bar and meet Her.

But the REAL problem is, I have to get out Google Earth to find where there is a cornfield nearby that is accessible by mass transit. And then I have to find the damn post office. (How do you mail an earlobe? Fedex?)

And all my knives are dull.

Cheers ... Charlie, Earless.

Date: 10 Oct 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Bob Hope Movie

>Hey, Bettie and I used to go dancing at the Green Knight in Destin, FL a lot. See, this is the band. Leader Phil Calhoun is the big guy on left in the picture I sent.

Nice plastic sculpture. I've always liked these things -- Big Boys, twenty-foot-high sardines, twenty-foot plastic cows on top of forty-foot rotating pedestals. Almost all of them are in the SW US.

You either must have a lot of ears, or very large earlobes and maybe microslice them and bulk mail them. Or...grind it into a paste, thin it, brush the brew onto a clean ink pad with a little stain...red, would be nice, and with a little Kissy Face, stamp each of several thousand proposals...dainty ones like..."Will you sit on my face...Young Lady"...and tell them that the ink in that stamp is made from your own flesh and blood.

It is just a thought, but not a wholly bad one.

>Thanks for the advice. Your thinking is much more complicated than van Gogh's.

Go to the supper market, one that you don't mind being ban from, go to their hopper of ears of corn, hop up there and do the deed. "From my ear lobe on an ear of corn straight to your heart.." and then the Kissy Face stamp. Thanks again. The most beautiful part about it is the "from my ear lobe on an ear of corn".

And then I have to find the damn post office.

>They'll pick up the letter(s) at your house.

Of course they will, the times the mail is not stolen. The thieves see the flag up, and they empty the box to get the checks or whatever. So everybody here stopped mail from their mailboxes.

>Well...I got up this morning, felt of myself, and decided that being 74 years old is not much different than it was yesterday when I was only 73.

Happy birthday.

>A guy asked me how I would like to bed a 73-year-woman

.... I can honestly say, "It is pretty danged GOOD!"

No problem for me. I don't have sex any more. All the sex I had in New Orleans before Katrina was with attractive (sometimes beautiful) females twenty years or more younger than I was. I now don't care any more. Those years are over.

>All that is to say that I don't feel any older.

You have been very lucky. And remember, the year is based upon nothing but a Newtonian-physics calculation of the period of an ellipse with a (somewhat) arbitrarily large semimajor axis in an inverse-square field, given the mass of the sun and the universal gravitational constant.

>Tonight, Bettie and I will take her favorite friend to Olive Garden in Slidell. I just like to eat there on occasion. I prefer franchises to mom and pop...of Mamagrande and Papa's...places because I am a conservative and want to get what I expect to get from previous knowledge. I am not an adventurist dinner.

The only time my wife and I went to a Olive Garden, the waitress bounced up and wrote her name upside down on the table cloth, then held up two bottles of wine and said, "There are two kinds of wine ... this kind" (she held out the bottle) "is white wine, and it's served chilled. This kind" (she held out the other bottle) "is red wine, and it's served room temperature. Which one would you like to try?" That was the point at which Jane and I knew that we were in trouble.

The thing I have discovered is that the quality of a given instantiation of a Class of chain restaurants depends on which instantiation it is. E.g., I have never liked Red Lobster AT ALL. But I went to the one (several times) in Newnan, GA, and it is one of the best seafood restaurants I have been to. And everybody there knows it. You have to wait a half hour or an hour to get in, and the parking lot is overflowed.

Piltdown Man? Why write a story about it when everybody read about the hoax many decades ago? You could also write a story about the latest Bigfoot hoax in north Georgia. It was so slickly done: possum guts thrown on top of a gorilla suit, photographed with a low-light, low-contrast, out-of-focus camera.

I'm still trying to figure out what to do about a quarter-of-a-million debt I incurred for the crime of being sick without medical insurance (because I could not find a job with benefits and was almost certainly too sick to work anyway). So I'm still looking for a job, although I can't walk too good. I have a letter I have to send right send now to Chicago. But it's in the financial industry and it's well known that they don't hire anyone over the age of forty. So I'll just keep looking. I'm liquidating my last remaining pension fund from LSU medical center ... it's probably enough to keep me afloat for a few months. And then ???

Later ... Charlie

Date: 11 Oct 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Your care package

My lady freind and I were talking about the rich people in Philadelphia (where I used to live) and the rich, beautiful, rolling-hill suburbs and towns west of Philadelphia. I told her about the lawyer east of Philly that once charged me $350 for a one-hour session, and then I thought about the Guthrie song about a Philadelphia lawyer. She said she had not heard it(!!). I wanted to play it for her, but I saw no good cover on the Internet, so I grabbed your care package to try to find your version of it (which I like a lot), but I couldn't figure out which CD it was on quickly enough before she said she had to do something else. So I played her a bad version by someone else.

All of which reminded me, next time I'm not talking to attorneys and accountants and realtors and surveyors and bill collectors and hospitals and retirement funds and other scurvy individuals and organizations, I intend to continue listening to those CDs and DVDs -- the ones I didn't get to. I'll give you feedback, unless you click the box below that says you opt not to receive unsolicited e-mail regarding socio-artistic ramblings.

I showed "Once" to some friends in Newnan, GA a few nights ago, and they liked it so much they wouldn't let me bring it home with me. The want to show it to some other people. (I will get it back.) I have seen that movie I think 5 times now, and I still love it.

I have to go tutor.

Later ... Charlie

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