Our Earth Goddess has made a prophecy

OPRAH has announced her last show will be sometime in 2011 - "25 years feels right in my bones" (it does to me too) - and this was promulgated with the utmost gravity. The way it was announced though I thought her last episode was just two weeks away. It's apparently as important as a predicted astronomical event and one can expect a new understanding of Time itself: there was BC, AD and now AO for After-Oprah. So why can't SNL, the Simpsons and the Tonight Show with any host follow suit?

Knew a Jamaican chef once who said he couldn't put his finger on it but he just doesn't like her. "I know she's done good things with her Book Club and all but I just don't like her." Her beneficent and fruitful Womb has spawned Dr. Phil and now Dr. OZ. If she and Obama ever have sex we could have ourselves a new Creation Myth in about 2,000 years hence, the Renewal of the Earth and archaeologists will be unearthing the bones of Republicans and conservatives in the Gobi Desert.

Phil Donahue was big back in the day but not like this. He'd have on say a very sexually active grandmother and raise her hand and say "God bless you Mama!" with cheers from the audience but he kind of resembled a big channel catfish near the end foraging in the muddy river for chicken guts and doughballs the kind a good ole Southern boy night noodle or grapple with. He was a liberal who knew his time was up.

Somewhere in the cold winter nighttime sky between Orion the Hunter and the Twins lies the as yet to be discovered Oprah constellation, future beacon to navigators and seafarers alike and when she passes she will be mummified in a sarcophagus, lines will form around the Globe and Mankind will finally know Peace.

Ah-men.

Does being pro-choice mean you have to be pro-Roe?

Is this constant percolating tension between the social conservatives (SC's) and the fiscal conservatives (FC's) within the party a false one? Can one be pro-choice and anti-Roe vs. Wade? Soapie has said in the past abortion should be a states' rights issue though he is personally very much pro-choice but he seems one of the very few fiscal or libertarian conservatives to actually say this. Put it this way I could (though there are alot of other factors involved here) support someone for political office who is pro-choice but anti-Roe and I would say the majority of pro-lifers these days are not purists on the issue. The Human Life Amendment is pie-in-the-sky stuff except for folks like Judie Brown of the American Life League. If Giuliani had adopted this federalist approach even a few years ago he well might have been the GOP standard-bearer instead of McCain by default. I've never understood it, this internecine political rift between the SC's and the FC's when there is so much potential common ground here. Roe was wrong on so many levels that would be a separate blog unto itself, I'd probably have to break it down into 3 threads at least.

FC's do the same thing with Terri Schiavo, it's always the Congress shouldn't have gotten involved but I've talked to a couple of pro-choice people who saw it from other angles. When that case was living news a chef friend of mine whom I worked with at the time first said he wouldn't want to live like that (DUH, who would?) but then framed it as the husband was suspicious (no mention of Congress' involvement) point being can't the FC's look at pro-life issues from any other perspectives? My chef friend though I disagree with his politics (he's a liberal) generally thinks of things the right way, goes through the correct thought processes and I don't see alot of objectivity out there. Again he and I both had a common ground here about why not just let Terri's family take care of her and so you can't tell me there can never be any thoughts that coincide on the life issues between SC's and FC's or even between conservatives and liberals in general.

George Will once concluded that the abortion issue is stale, maybe that's because he prefers it that way. You take any issue under the sun and I can find new hues, other nuances, perspectives, shades of meaning. Maybe the problem is our limited imaginations.

When conservatism becomes progressive it ceases to be conservative

I'm one of those old-fart conservatives who still feels women don't belong on the battlefield, so put me in a home and when I'm nodding off with my drooling mouth open you can throw peanuts in my mouth. Likewise when conservatives became overly concerned with fellatio in the White House I cringed, they morphed overnight from social critics of sexual harassment law into, oh I don't know a bunch of femi-cons? Original conservatism vs. the remake. I was watching The Taking of Pelham 123 last night, the remake with Denzel and John Travolta. Perfectly ok entertainment, perfectly ok movie but it lacked something. In the original with Walter Matthau you had the twist at the end, the guy with the cough. I knew right off the bat the remake wasn't the same thing, there was the intro with Jay-Z rapping "I have 99 problems but a bitch ain't one of them." McCain can't use the word bitch of course but that's because he's an older white guy who looks like when he shakes your hand there's the slightest whiff of a bad bathroom experience under his fingernails, a touch of Scotch on his breath. Imus of course was never hip although he thought he was. "and I got the motherfuckin' law in my rear-view mirror, put the pedal to the metal" It passed the night but I'll take the Matthau version.

After that I watched Globetrekker, one of the few decent things on the tube these days. A special about the history of slavery. American slaves usually had about one acre they had to complete by the end of the day and they worked from sunup to sundown and if the work wasn't done they worked into the night. The plantation owners were incredibly wealthy and the workers were very very poor. Everyone acts like it was abolished but we still have slavery today only it's under a different form, yeah you knew where I was headed on this one didn't you? The Civil War, now there was a great tragedy, brother against brother with 600,000 casualties. Still boggles the mind and one of the triggers of the War was this guy named John Brown of Harper's Ferry, W. Virginia. Passionately anti-slavery he turned into some type of vigilante, 'twould knock on your door at night and if you were pro-slavery he'd simply stab you to death or something. Eventually brought to justice and put to death and I thought THIS is the stuff they should be showing in school instead of forcing some dry history book on you where you have to memorize dates and stuff. The main problem with education these days is not that it's liberal but that it's BORING.

Is my tapioca and grits ready? Somebody just stepped on my catheter.

Conservatism at its most primeval

I like every single conservative on the planet oppose the Welfare State but I come at it from a more visceral, more personal angle. Sure I oppose folks sitting on their duff getting a check for the usual reasons, fosters dependence on government yada yada yada but where I differ from most conservatives is when they say work automatically ennobles a person. Occasionally yes but more often no, let's face it work sucks for most of us so the main reason I oppose welfare is if I have to suffer then so do you pal. Not exactly high Newt Gingrich philosophy, won't make the GOP platform but there you have it. I oppose the beatnik philosophy of getting up whenever the hell you want to and doing whatever for the rest of the day because I can't do it. My brand of conservatism is you could say off-kilter, it goes all the way back to the Id. The Id has a few things to say about race too but I'll leave that for another day, well no let's do it here. Folks who are racist are that way because of black crime, not like they wake up one morning and decide to become a bigot. Obama bending over for the Japanese Emperor on his Asian trip, now this Emperor had a father once who was also Emperor by the name of Hirohito I believe who okay'd the attack on our sleeping soldiers at Pearl Harbor. Now I GET the criticism that we conservatives are just looking for stuff, the guy can't do anything right (your basic Shaw Kenawe position) but he's making it too easy. It's times like these when I believe you should be allowed to say without a peep from Keith Olbermann or Bill Moyers the guy's a FUCKING ASSHOLE!

I can't believe I'm living.

Sarah Palin Week & other thoughts you hear seldom expressed (if at all)

distilled thoughts out of nowhere (did someone slip me some acid or maybe it's the Christian Brothers?)

Yeah Sarah Palin Week is coming up. I know if you're a lib you're supposed to hate her and if you're a conservative you're supposed to love her but mine is a non-position just like I'm not for or against Dancing with the Stars because I don't watch it. I'm not into Sarah Palin, there's just something existential about it. I'm at the point in my life where I'm bored with alot of stuff but seems to me

we should have cured cancer first instead of impotence. Impotence is not a tragedy, it's a misfortune and folks often confuse the two. Cancer on the other hand...put it this way, how can you enjoy Sex if you're dead?? Our cultural priorities don't seem very logical but then again it'd give everyone something to talk about if you're lying there in the casket with a boner.

Can or should the act of onanism land you in Hell? Posed this once at a religion forum where I was deemed somewhat controversial but seems to me if you're gonna be damned for all Eternity you should at least have done IT with another party. I don't get Catholic theology on this one, not advocating for or against but just seeing the existential absurdity of it all. God doesn't want you, the Devil doesn't want you (you're not depraved enough) and so there must be some kind of Limbo out there for folks like porno pete.

Re Love % Romance I have alot of thoughts. Now what are the odds exactly of two people feeling exactly the same way about each other? No I'm not talking about being compatible, you both like bowling and hate Obama, you both ipod to Pink, you're both against the oral but the whole Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor, Antony and Cleopatra thing, a love for the ages -- "Elaine!! Elaine!!." Can you grow to love somebody? seems in most cases we have no choice, Life ain't that poetic or doesn't cooperate or whatever which if you go back in my blogging archives is one of my recurring complaints, a romantic peeve of mine. Here's the paradox although we won't admit it, the stalker's view of the universe is the correct one, it's the way Life is supposed to be, but his or her actions are wrong of course, after all as bloggers well know it's the hardest thing trying to convince someone else of your own POV although we sure as hell try. Most folks are against the happy ending, "reunited and it feels so good", and we seem to want to trudge through Life with our bad memories. Goes a long way in explaining
our divorce culture,

It's November the 15th and here in the Northeast it's balmy again. Wondering how long it will take before the rest of my conservative brethren admit maybe the Goracle just may have the smidgeon of a point, a sliver of the total picture. I don't know how to dress in the morning anymore, it's chilly at 6AM but then I find I overdressed around 2 in the afternoon. Wasn't this way in the past when this time of year was autumnal but that was in the era before global warming and the climate change stuff. We shouldn't disagree on this one anymore only question is why do we care so much? if it's 65 degrees out in January why the massive cause for alarm? Enjoy the day, I mean if you don't have cancer.

Obama, the Hamlet of foreign policy

It's the Nobel Effect. What's a peace-prize winner supposed to do, send an additional 30,000-40,000 troops to Afghanistan? although I did read in the paper just the other day he was on the verge of doing just this. Short of a mushroom cloud does the guy call anything a terrorist act these days? I don't feel comfortable.

Thoughts on the chimp lady

Leave it to Oprah to land the big story again. The woman who lost her face due to that Xanax-crazed chimp, didn't know they took out her eyes too because of infection so now she's blind as well. My first thought was if that were me I'd probably want to kill myself, just speaking honestly here, and my second thought which I voiced to someone at work today is whenever you find yourself down in the dumps think of people like her, there's always someone worse off than you. For me the lesson here is why would you give psychiatric drugs to an animal in the first place? it ain't so much the beast as what you put in his system IMHO, time was they played on Johnny Carson's lap. Probably if this were handled in any other venue it might get lambasted as freak TV, macabre entertainment, things they said about that Farrah Fawcett special but somehow O can pull it off. To be in her situation, it has to be surreal and I'm sure it'll be fodder for the usual ghoulish humor you'll find in these tragic situations, I call it Holocaust humor. There really is nothing to add here except your own thoughts......