More Songs of Dying on the Highway

I just posted that song by the Barnyard Stompers because it's my favorite one that they do, but as I was reflecting on it today I realized that 'death on the highway' is a pretty significant theme for touring Texas bands. I guess if you are a band that makes its living on the road, and your roads happen to be in Texas, you spend an awful lot of time on those highways. Enough time, manifestly, for existential angst to set in.

Here's one by Bob Wayne, who is one of my favorites working today.

It'll probably be Sunday when most of you see this, so you might want to pass over that one until Monday or next weekend. 

Here's one that goes with the last post, because half of it's about dying on the road and the other half is about college sports teams.

There are doubtless more. If you have a favorite, add it in the comments.

Justice on the Gridiron

One rarely encounters anything close to true justice in the world; one never meets any Platonic form in the street, but Justice in particular seems unlikely to show its face among human beings. 

Today, however, we did see something close. The committee that decides such things had chosen to rank the University of Tennessee's football team #1 in the nation because it was undefeated, and had beaten Alabama. It placed the Georgia Bulldogs at #3 even though they were also undefeated and the defending national champions. 

What happened today was that Georgia played Tennessee.

It was a very professional, strategic destruction. Georgia went up three touchdowns to two field goals in the first half, and then spent the second half denying the field on a prevent basis. They didn't get greedy; they didn't try to run up the score. They just burned the clock. Tennessee finally scored a touchdown in the fourth quarter, but it never got close to coming back. Georgia only scored one more field goal, but scoring more points was not their tactical priority. They had plenty of points; they needed to bleed the clock for every point they allowed. The opposing quarterback, a promising young man named Hooker, was sacked six times. 

Justice is likely to be done in the next set of standings. 

Don't Mind Dying on the Highway

That's the Outlaw country / metal band known as the Barnyard Stompers. If any of you like that and are inclined to the highway, they'll be playing tomorrow night at the Bobarossa Saloon. 

By Their Fruits

Or, why black Republicans 'ain't'... er, acceptable. 

How can we distinguish between the different types of Black Republicans? Johnson contends, “we can judge them by their words and deeds.”

What type of Black Republican is Stuber? He was recruited by White Republican leadership to run against Ammons, the only African American clerk in Champaign County history. Like Deering, “the hard, overt and aggressive” White supremacist, Stuber is an election denier.

And like the incompetent, subliterate and coonish Herschel Walker, Stuber reiterates “massa” Trump’s talking points. Intimating fraud, he cast aspersions on the 2020 elections. Stuber alleged votes were not counted in Georgia and Arizona, and further declared, “Champaign County may have stopped counting. I don’t know.” But during a late August interview with The News-Gazette’s Tom Kacich, he dissembled when asked if Trump had won. Again, disingenuously claiming uncertainty, he stated, “I don’t know if he truly was the winner.”

About a month later, similar to Walker and nearly all election deniers, Stuber miraculously backtracked. Without explanation, he affirmed, “Joe Biden was legally elected president of the United States.” I find his reversal unbelievable. Indeed, I believe it’s a tactical move to deceive the electorate.

Now, if any of you had written anything like the remarks about Herschel Walker being forwarded there, people would be rightly outraged and deem the speech explicitly racist. 

I do wish people would stand by the honest and demonstrable truth that the election was illegal in that it was conducted on terms altered by executive branch officials without legislative input, and therefore unconstitutional in that the Constitution clearly states that the legislative branch shall set the terms of elections; and that, therefore, there is no legitimate government of the United States. That is, however, perhaps an unacceptable position for anyone of a conservative temperament: on the principle of 'the king is dead, long live the king,' the idea is that the government cannot be so impermanent as to cease to exist except in the most extraordinary of cases. To hold otherwise is to court the chaos of the world, which whatever else violates that most conservative principle of stability.

For people to be forbidden from raising the point that the election was extremely dodgy at minimum, however, is silly. It was conducted with radical departures from the rules established by the laws of many of the states involved in it, every one of which made it less secure. Questions about its legitimacy should be perfectly acceptable, as should be insistences that future elections abide by the law or that laws should be crafted to create more certainty and credibility for election results. 

Normality

It's hard to realize how bad things have gotten outside of the wilderness in which I have fastened myself. I used to go to this part of Union Station on a regular basis, and it was as advertised a thriving shopping district. Here, where we have happy children and dogs, hikers and backpackers, picnics and boat trips, everything seems like America hasn't changed all that much. I have to look at the news to remember that Washington, D.C. has turned itself into a post-apocalyptic nightmare -- as has San Francisco and many other cities. 

Probably a lot more Americans live in the parts of the nation that have horrified themselves than elsewhere, though. The country has been badly hurt even if there remain oases beyond the concrete. 

Search & Rescue in Panthertown

At least they picked a pretty place to get lost.

This morning was spent rescuing some hikers from the Panthertown wilderness. There is not and never was a town in "Panthertown." It is named for the panthers, which are still regularly attested by backpackers in this area. Panthertown also includes a bear sanctuary region.

A map of today's SAR area.

Aside from taking a while, this rescue went as well as you could want. The hikers had a chilly night. One of them had fallen into a creek during the previous day, so her clothes were wet. They were from Colorado, so they weren't used to land navigation in heavily forested country where even clear landmarks can be obscured by trees and ridges. Making a fire in an alpine rainforest like this is not like making a fire out West, either: it takes a special skillset to know how to obtain sufficiently dry wood and get it going in this environment. 

Still and all, everyone is fine and now back on their way to food and rest somewhere warm and dry. 

Halloween

The Fire Dog was worn out by all the children. 

Jack. 

 

Samhain

R.I.P. Southern Icons

Jerry Lee Lewis, wildest of pianists and rockabilly lord, died this week after a false report earlier in the week. He was recently inducted into the County Music Hall of Fame, having long been in the one for rock and roll. 

Vince Dooley, legendary coach who led the Georgia Bulldogs to their previous national championship four decades ago, also passed on this week. 

When I was at UGA, his wife and he and I went to the same church. I never met either of them, though, because they were such celebrities locally that they were always mobbed.

The National Defense Strategy

The Biden administration put out a National Security Strategy last year; the Office of the Secretary of Defense has now put out its companion piece, the National Defense Strategy. This will inform the National Military Strategy yet to come from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a high level strategic document, it's not terrible except in one huge way: it demonstrates that OSD thinks it still has a lot of time. This is made clear right at the beginning.

President Biden has stated that we are living in a “decisive decade,” one stamped by dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment. The defense strategy that the United States pursues will set the Department’s course for decades to come. The Department of Defense owes it to our All-Volunteer Force and the American people to provide a clear picture of the challenges we expect to face in the crucial years ahead...

Frankly they'll be lucky if they've got a year before some of these bills come due. Some of it is here already, and more of it is coming faster than 'by the end of this decade' or 'in the crucial years ahead.' 

Magic Drinks and Poisons

Professor Emeritus Ann Sheffield begins with the Saga of Olav Tryggvason. It's about twenty minutes for those of you who, like me, enjoy discussions of Norse sagas. 

Psychology of Woke

Definitely a confirmation bias issue here, but this does fit my experience of the people I have personally known who partake in this stuff.

One ought always to be suspicious of attempts to psychoanalyze people who have not actually been examined in person, or to apply psychoanalysis [apparently I was not using the right term; see comments. -Grim] not to individuals but groups. Combining that with my own confirmation bias issues on the subject, I can't actually place any confidence in these conclusions; but I forward them for discussion by those of you who might feel competent to do so.

Honors

One of these is me, Christmas 2008. One of the others in the photo, a good friend of mine, sent it to me today. I must have been just back from outside the wire, because I was in armor with a pack slung over my shoulder. I have no memory of what I might have been doing. 

Strength Sports & Exploitation

The Washington Post has an exposé today on exploitation of female bodybuilders. Because of the well-known differential in average male and female desires and visual nature of much male desires, these things are always about women being exploited. Gay males do it to males, too, but at a much reduced rate simply because of numbers. Of all the forms of exploitation we regularly encounter, this seems to have been less violent and aggressive than we often find: soft-core rather than otherwise, consensual rather than otherwise, coerced only by offers of money, denial of fair treatment for those who didn't play, or promises of favoritism in treatment if  you did. 

Possibly this is because the women were stronger than the men who sought to coerce them! Physical strength is a virtue in the strict sense, and has the pragmatic consequences of being protective as well as enabling one to do certain practical things that others cannot do.

I would advance the hypothesis, though, that this would not be found to the same degree in the other strength sports that women participate in -- I mean my own sport of Strongman ("Strongwoman") and Power Lifting. Of the three, bodybuilding is intensely focused on perfecting physical appearance rather than performance at lifting or carrying weight. This results in body styles that are less attractive, but more functional. 

These charts are about men, but it's not all that different.

Hollywood loves the bodybuilder physique, the triangular one with the abs and the v-cuts. Conan the Cimmerian tends to be portrayed in movies by bodybuilders like Arnold or Jason Momoa, and also artists who depict Conan usually do so in the bodybuilder physique since Frank Frazetta. They are not, though, as strong as those with the rectangular physique and the thick core muscles. They are just preferred aesthetically. Bodybuilding as a sport focuses on achieving that aesthetic, not on lifting huge weights or carrying them over distances or through obstacles. 

My hypothesis is that people who are erotically motivated by sight of strong people probably gravitate towards bodybuilding in a way that they don't towards the other communities. Women who want to compete in a strength sport without such exploitation thus probably have a live option. Women who want to look good in a bodybuilder way, say like a comic book heroine like Red Sonja, are beginning from a path of looking attractive rather than being strong, and that is going to tend to lead to encounters with men like these. 

That's not a moral judgment; you should do what you want. If you want to look good, though, you're probably going to have to develop stronger "coping skills" as Mr. Hines likes to call it. 

Fire Leaves

 

Sharing is Caring

Do yellow jackets get drunk? A social experiment:

UPDATE: Apparently. This one’s definitely not walking straight anymore, and I’ve had to fish him out twice after he fell in.

More Riding Songs

 

Men of the North

Thomas Doubting happened across a Scottish Highland Games somewhere or other -- he'll have to tell you the story -- and sent me some photos. As is well known, the Viking heritage in Scotland is very strong, and numerous clans either were founded by Vikings (like Clan Gunn, descended from the Norse Jarls of Orkney) or became interlaced with them (like Clan MacDonald, "the Lords of the Isles" for generations).

Bugs Bunny & Nimrod

I mentioned Nimrod here just this week, but apparently not that many people knew the Biblical figure and the meaning got transformed.

Riding Weather