I don’t hang out in Grand Haven on a Sunday afternoon in November just for grins. Kate is preparing for an adventure — three weeks in Europe next summer with the international program at her summer camp. Not a bad deal, touring the Continent, playing jazz, staying with the locals. For us, it means a number of weekends between then and now being her Sherpas for the required rehearsals. After we dump the amp and the instrument — and the musician — we are at liberty. And on a lovely, warm day.
So we went to the water:
And then we went to the woods:
This was all within the same state park. Pure Michigan. About a minute after I took that last picture, two sizable does bounded across the path in front of us, having a little frolic before gun season opens Thursday.
And then we had lunch at a nice little diner in Grand Haven, which had that empty look tourist towns get in the off-season. We went into one store and the owner nearly tackled us, introducing us personally to every item of inventory. We escaped with one jar of blueberry jam. Eight bucks. So who won that one? I’d say the guy who got $8.
The walk in the woods was calming. I’m trying to stop slicing off piece after piece of schadenfreude pie, but man, is it good, and every time I see Karl Rove’s face, I must read whatever type surrounds it. But I think I’m done now. (Please, I’m so full. No more pie.) But please, don’t offer my any more. I’m not safe around that stuff.
Instead, how about a good old people-suck story about hazing? It’ll strip your good feelings about your fellow man, I guarantee.
What news I did read this weekend was about Cloak and Shag-Her, to use the NYPost’s outstanding headline on day one of the Petraeus story. When Alan told me this woman was push-up girl, much became clear. Someone tell me: At what age do men stop chasing poontang over a cliff?
Have a good week, all.
Bowditch said on November 12, 2012 at 2:29 am
Schadenfreude pie. But it’s safe, sourced as it is from one of Wall Street’s Last Honest Men.
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Brandon said on November 12, 2012 at 2:37 am
It’ll strip your good feelings about your fellow man, I guarantee.
No.
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Dexter said on November 12, 2012 at 2:44 am
Washington D.C. is a hotbed of affairs, parties, and all sorts of deviancy, I assume. One C.I.A. director’s affair would just be brushed under the rug, but Lindsey Graham, R-SC, is demanding Petraeus testify in the Benghazi hearings. Of course, the fact that Obama never held hearings on the total Halliburton corruption scandal in Iraq , which surely would have ended up in Senate censure of some sort for Cheney…why, you might think a little quid pro quo would be in order here, and Petraeus would be kept out of it. Nope, even though the general was a pick of W43, Graham and his bunch want Petraeus to testify in the Benghazi hearings. I guess Obama thought if he could get Petraeus the hell out of Washington, Graham would leave him alone. I saw Graham on TV…he’s really after Petraeus, while the rest of the country truly wants to move on, just like the early-on Obama just let the whole corrupt Bush administration walk away Scot-free, when the whole damn crew should have been jailed for life, the fucking bastards.
I got along well with my wife’s former in-laws, and I made many trips over the years to Grand Haven, dropping off the girls for long weekends and summer weeks with their grandparents, who owned a marina and later a dockominium where the Holiday Inn now sets. I always got a kick out of driving down to Saugatuck to poke around the galleries and gawk at the fancy boats . Now of course everybody up there is dead and the dockominium has been torn down and something new is in there.
You and Alan are great parents for making this happen for Kate. I hope she keeps you supplied with many photos for this blog when she gets to Europe next summer. This is very cool. Jazz. I am a long-time fan, and I began buying my first jazz records about fifty years ago. Living so far out in the sticks, jazz live was hard to come by, so really the only jazz club I ever hung out at much was Rusty’s on Tedrow Street in Toledo.
I did hang out in a few Chicago Blues clubs over the years, Wise Fools Pub was my fave, up on Lincoln as I recall. I saw many of the great Blues men there, but I never did get around to the only jazz concert I ever promised myself I’d do: one of George Shearing’s Chicago Christmas concerts. Shearing was knighted in England , being so admired. I blew my chance.
Robert Champion’s story is even sadder when you know he was a gay man. Yes, and I could not help but believe those goddam Neanderthal hazing monsters gave “the queer” a few extra-hard kicks to the gut. This story , along with the Trayvon Martin fiasco, made me equally sick in 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKXvMbAKAmY
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Deborah said on November 12, 2012 at 5:02 am
So the second woman has been named, the one who received the harassing emails. It is, of course, all over the Internet.
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JWfromNJ said on November 12, 2012 at 5:41 am
Dex – the roving band of FauxNews followers who have been marching to the Benghazi beat couldn’t find the city on a map and leaped onto the Petreus boat.
The fact that there is another woman (beside Ms. Broadwell) defines this as a zipper issue. We’re fortunate to have him away from classified information. It suggests he let the little head think for the big head more than once. Paula seems perfect for a guy like him and they both should have kicked the spouses under the bus, but then again she was young enough to be his daughter.
I had to laugh when several publications mentioned Mark Souder in their coverage, the thought of him and his ugly lover isn’t as hot as the mental picture of future James Bond girl Ms. Broadwell. Honestly is this was a script we’d reject the name as too far fetched.
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James said on November 12, 2012 at 7:18 am
At first I thought the Petraues story was just that shopworn one about a aging man chasing tail, but then I heard that Broadwell was married, with kids, and I found myself wondering, what the heck?
I mean, how important was it, to throw away the security and happiness of 2 families?
Sheesh.
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coozledad said on November 12, 2012 at 8:05 am
James: This will all be revealed to you when someone writes “The Etiology of Starfuckery”.
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brian stouder said on November 12, 2012 at 8:26 am
From last thread: Jeff – we didn’t do the Grotto, but if I’d a known there was a Gill connection, we’d have sought it out! As it was, we arrived in South Bend with 50 minutes to spare, and a bum address in the Garmen. Forty eight minutes and many turns and switch-backs later (during the last half of which, we could see the steeple where we suspected we needed to be, but just couldn’t get there), we arrived and hustled into the Basilica – just a moment before the proceedings kicked-off…errrr – stepped off.
After it was all over, many photos were snapped, and we eventually headed to the South Bend Chocolate Factory, for a tour – which was very cool (and they did not turn any of the girls into a blueberry, so that was good, too!), despite the somewhat sketchy neighborhood that it’s in. There was a good-sized biker bar right across the way, and as we left – at maybe 1 in the afternoon? – the place was PACKED with bikes and people milling about, and imbibing. ON the other hand, the South Bend Police Department, and their county lock-up, was just up the same street – so there was that…
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brian stouder said on November 12, 2012 at 9:29 am
I think the lip-biter on the “Dare me” book, on Nancy’s nightstand may well be the push-up girl!
(and indeed, when I first read “push-up girl”, I thought of Ms “All In”s perpindicular breasts, which seem to be firmly pushed up; so the story was all the funnier)
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Connie said on November 12, 2012 at 9:57 am
Nancy, my brother did a Europe choir tour with the same arts camp. They had a lot of rehearsals in Lansing, and the west Michigan car pooling contingent often ended up at my East Lansing apartment for pizza.
Brian if you ever get to ND again I recommend a visit to the bookstore. Mostly just to see the amazing amount of stuff with ND on it.
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Bitter Scribe said on November 12, 2012 at 10:21 am
What kind of depraved mind rationalizes severe beatings as “hazings”?
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4dbirds said on November 12, 2012 at 10:55 am
As many of you know, I served many years in the army as an intelligence officer. Not being a writer, I probably won’t get this across the way I would like, but I’ll give it a try. Military life is intensely intimate. From the beginning, we eat, sleep and work together. Everyone knows exactly how much everyone is paid. You wear your position in the society on your collar. Your rank, those bars, cluster and stripes tell everyone where you rank in the hierarchy. You give up your authority to the person automatically to the person who has more bars or stripes than you do. Your superiors in return are required to take care of you. They make sure you’re getting paid, paying your bills, staying fit, keeping yourself trained etc. Of course at the top of every military organization is the top guy (occasionally the top gal). This guy is the person who can hold your life in his hands. Add all the right elements together and the top commander can hold much sway over his underlings including both men and women. Paula Broadwell was a West Point Graduate, a former officer and not far removed from military culture. I can see where admiration can quickly develop into a sexual situation. There are many different angles to this story that I can’t address; The national security issue, why was the FBI hacking into Broadwell’s email over a personal issue, why did supposedly the Republican leadership know about this issue weeks before the President? I wish we would lighten up about sex or if we can’t, that if you’re in a relationship please leave it when you want to fool around.
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beb said on November 12, 2012 at 11:05 am
what the country would look like if only white males could vote:
http://boingboing.net/2012/11/11/what-the-election-map-would-ha.html
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brian stouder said on November 12, 2012 at 11:15 am
I wish we would lighten up about sex or if we can’t, that if you’re in a relationship please leave it when you want to fool around.
4D – I’m not purposely looking to argue – but have an honest question for you.
When you say “we” – do you mean the military? Or society in general? Or the peanut gallery at NN.c?
I ask because, if the “we” is the military, it raises a question I’d never thought about before: If a very high ranking officer is UN-married, would s/he still be in trouble for having an intimate relationship with a married person?
Presumably the answer would be yes – since that commander still has a very high security clearance, and is then open to blackmail or manipulation.
If the “we” is society at large, then I agree with you, since if we lightened up generally, there would be no fulcrum to enable blackmail.
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Deborah said on November 12, 2012 at 11:30 am
4dbirds, a very interesting perspective. Also, you didn’t mention that military personnel are absent from thier spouses for long periods at a time. And it happens in the workplace all time without nearly as many reasons.
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Judybusy said on November 12, 2012 at 11:33 am
Beb, wow. Also noted: Coulter is in favor of not allowing women and young people to vote, in order to secure a Republican hegemony. How can anyone listen to her?
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4dbirds said on November 12, 2012 at 11:34 am
Brian,
I left off an entire paragraph about sex with subordinates, etc and how that can’t work in a military situation. I guess I should have kept it in. When I say “we”, I think I’m talking about society. The military is governed by the UCMJ and sex outside of marriage is illegal. I think the intimate nature of the military is the precise reason adultery is a crime under the UCMJ. My point is that I understand how easily these affairs happen.
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Dorothy said on November 12, 2012 at 11:42 am
I’m not bringing anything to the discussion today, but have any of you seen this yet today?
http://mashable.com/2012/11/12/red-bull-kluge-rube-goldberg-machine/
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Prospero said on November 12, 2012 at 12:02 pm
An intelligent and humane comment on L’affaire Petraeus:
While all the “reasons” given by the pundits over the General’s resignation bounce from suspicious conspiracy to compromised CIA Director, the reason may be as simple as the fact that the Petraeus’ may need the time to work on their marriage. No one has considered the feelings of Mrs. Petraeus and her children – I wish them the best.
From this article:
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/11/12/sex-and-the-general/
On the other hand if Broadwell threatened another woman’s life, she should be arrested and sent to jail. She sounds like psycho astronaut Depends lady. And that getup she was wearing for the pushup contest on Daily Show looked like Lady Heather, the recurring dominatrix character from CSI.
And here’s a sordid tale of the depths to which Big Coal will submerge in political muck and mire to advance its agenda:
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/05/30/democracy-for-sale-50/
Reminds me of the brillian line from the great Derek Jacobi, as Claudius, commenting on Roman corruption:
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.
Dorothy@18: Mousetrap!!! There’s another one going around the net that involves very extreme parkour. Parkour is also all over action TV shows these days. First I ever heard of it was in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, an excellent novel about spies, Maybachs, the evils of modern consumerism, organized crime, and cool hunting for hipsters.
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DellaDash said on November 12, 2012 at 12:08 pm
‘Pattern Recognition’ is one of my favs, Pros.
Appreciate your inside perspective, 4dbirds!
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Sherri said on November 12, 2012 at 12:25 pm
I liked ‘Pattern Recognition’ much better than Gibson’s more famous ‘Neuromancer.’
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Prospero said on November 12, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Della: Hubertus Bigend is one of the greatest fictitious names ever. I’ve been reading William Gibson’s books all the way back to Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero. The latter is actually science fiction in a traditional sense. I like all of them. I also enjoye The Difference Engine, about Charles Babbage (a little like Lempriere’s Dictionary and Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell) that Gibson wrote with Bruce Sterling, except for the badly fizzled ending.
Sherri, if you liked Pattern Recognition, you would probably appreciate Spook Country and Zero History, which reprise some of the characters. And I believe Neuromancer was his first go. I also liked Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties quite a bit. The guy writes compelling female characters, for, you know, a guy. Cayce Pollard and Hollis Henry are excellent heroes.
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Dexter said on November 12, 2012 at 1:34 pm
The Wreck of the Petraeus…coozledad, here’s your cue and inspiration:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173920
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Jakash said on November 12, 2012 at 1:51 pm
JWfromNJ,
“as hot as the mental picture of future James Bond girl Ms. Broadwell. Honestly if this was a script we’d reject the name as too far fetched.” I dunno, I think the script version might end up “Pushy Galore”…
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brian stouder said on November 12, 2012 at 2:05 pm
ooooo – a sticky wicket.
I thought Dex had the thread won with the wreck of the David Petraeus (and indeed, the gales of November have come early, this year); but Jakash’s Pushy Galore left that notion adrift amidst the gales
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Prospero said on November 12, 2012 at 2:14 pm
So long, Major Harris. I preferred Detroit to Philly, but this was a terrific song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQAFluMiwIo
And, Wreck of the Hesperus (my choice for a great take on this theme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw-btrdpOG0&feature=related
Longfellow seems to have predicted the Frankenstorm years before its time.
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Prospero said on November 12, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Turns out the Petraus other Other woman” has a twin sister. The two of them look like any two random Kardashians:
http://i779.photobucket.com/albums/yy80/ariuszme/twins.jpg
Petraeus got all sorts of credit for the “success” of the “surge” in Iraq, when, in fact, the surge degerated into simply paying warlords and tribal leaders in the New Beginning to refrain from violence at a cost of billions of bucks. As a military strategy, the surge was a long con.
A. O. Scott in the NYT sure likes Lincoln. For me, Scott is just about as sure a thing as Ebert.
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brian stouder said on November 12, 2012 at 5:06 pm
And she wears a pearl necklace quite well…..(resisting the joke)
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Jakash said on November 12, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Thanks for the thumbs-up at 2:05, brian s. To even be in the running with regard to the thread-winner is certainly a first for me. Of course, it comes as no surprise that it’s on a day with only 28 comments here…
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Deborah said on November 12, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Wow, Dorothy even a non-athlete like me enjoyed the Red Bull Rube Goldberg video.
Judy Busy, did Ann Coulter really say that about men/women voters?
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jcburns said on November 12, 2012 at 5:44 pm
It took longtime Democratic political guru Joe Trippi to give me a slightly better opinion of Karl Rove’s technical skills. This essay by Trippi on the Fox News site is well worth a read. I particularly like the image of them both hammering the Ohio Secretary of State’s website, trying to get those county numbers first.
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Danny said on November 12, 2012 at 7:21 pm
That was a good read, jc.
Jackash, “Pushy Galore” is excellent. It would win on a 200-post day… especially since it dovetails nicely with the release new Bond movie and I really don’t think anyone has the stomach or patience for a parody of the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
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jcburns said on November 12, 2012 at 7:38 pm
And, as we’ve established, ABSOLUTELY ANY BATCH O’ WORDS can be forced into the tune of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Columbus, Ohio White Pages is particularly compelling.
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Catherine said on November 12, 2012 at 9:07 pm
I’m going to try that next time. I just wrote a song about multiplication using Yellow Rose of Texas. It’s dreadful.
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beb said on November 12, 2012 at 9:48 pm
The thing about schadenfreude pie is that it isn’t any good unless the other side is eating Humble Pie. And as near as I can tell the R’s are not having any of it. Already they’re talking that it wasn’t that their message was rejected by mainstream America, but only that they didn’t explain things clearly. I guess that means they’ll have to shout louder for the benefit of the blind.
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Danny said on November 12, 2012 at 10:51 pm
beb, I remember when “ThePoorMan”, Andrew, was still blogging and that was his exact reaction when the Dems lost big in one of the midterm elections during the Bush era. According to him, the Progressive message just had to be repackaged and resold. I guess a lot of people not named Peter Frampton don’t like the taste of Humble Pie.
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Sherri said on November 12, 2012 at 11:21 pm
How do you get the FBI to investigate harassing emails sent to you? Call up your friendly FBI agent who has sent you shirtless pics of himself! http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578115410189757452.html
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Mark P said on November 13, 2012 at 2:18 pm
The FAMU story is big in the Atlanta area, since the victim was from there. At least the one whose death we know about. The casual attitude of the FAMU administration is almost unbelievable. It was clear to me almost from the start that the problem was systemic, and the only solution was to disband the band, maybe for good, but at least for a long time.
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whosear said on November 16, 2012 at 2:25 am
Regarding Patraeus, you have to suffer through an hour of Charlie Rose. Any guy how spends that many hours intimately around a good-looking woman is suseptable. All temptations, I can resist, but with sexual temptation, I run like hell.
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