PAWN MY HONOR, SAY ‘TAINT SO

I just realized something while I was absent-mindedly picking my nose this morning. When our news media spend a lot of ink and hard-drive space talking about Rove or, in another era, Dick Morris/James Carville, etcetera, they seem to be forgetting that they have removed the American electorate from the equation. Reading these evaluations of campaign strategists, one might get the impression that voters are just empty pawns to be moved around by a master chess player into voting quays where they’ll vote as they’ve been manipulated to vote. Giving all the credit to the manipulators of public opinion ignores completely the American electorate to whom the manipulators are appealing. It’s just a little thing, a nuance, an emphasis, a sleight of hand trick, maybe not important at all to think about, but does someone have the emphasis wrong?

OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE, AWFULLY SMOKEY

Did you know how that song got wrote, I mean written? Merle and his band were passing through Oklahoma and saw a highway sign pointing to Muskogee, and, according to Jackie Daly, Tammy Wynette’s daughter (I was giving her bio of her mother a quick read-through while selling books recently), “Merle and the band members were well into smoke [marijuana] by then and someone made the crack, ‘I’ll bet they don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.’ Within fifty miles, the song was complete.”

The irony of that song becoming a conservative anthem, back in the day, can’t be overemphasized, can it? Here was a mocking reference, turned completely around, set on its head and massaged into a conservative, whiskey drinker’s phantasmagoria. Ain’t life just funny as a Muskogee highway sign?

WINSTON

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.” —Winston Churchill

From this one may conclude one very certain thing about dear old Winston—he was not an atheist.

AWFULLY PROUD OF BABY STEPS

To a real mathematician, my page of math is just baby steps. It ain’t much, but here’s one page of exercises from my algebra text, and I’m awfully proud of this very simple page of work. The interesting feature is that one page equals only three exercises. Can’t wait to get to calculus. Just now looking at this sample before publishing, I realize that my "v"s in the final problem are formed incorrectly. They look like radical signs.


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