Dateline—Holiday Inn; Richmond, Virginia.

Wrapping up three days of TV production here in Richmond which followed three days of radio production back home which was preceded by a couple of days of donor chats in Houston which came a couple of days after a three-day client trip to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Which tends to make me a little off balance. Why, I’m as bewildered as. . .; As bewildered as. . .

Hmmm. My euphemism/simile creation utility in my brain seems to be offline. It happens. In fact it happens more often than a. . . than a. . .  (dang it.)

It is at these times I sorely wish some enterprising soul would compile all the pithy sayings of Festus from the old Gunsmoke series and make them available in a searchable online database. Festus would be able to capture my level of disorientation. I just know it.

“Golly Matthew, that feller’s as bumfuzzled as a yearling hog in a goose-down frog strangler.”

Of course, it doesn’t actually make any sense. But it conveys the message all the same.

Here’s an entire web site that is basically a shrine to Ken Curtis, the actor who played Festus. (Sound warning: It starts playing a sound file of Ken Curtis crooning a song when you launch it.) It also features a page of little sound clips of Festus saying things like, “I’ll give it to you before you can say, ‘rat run over the roof with a piece of raw liver in his mouth.'” (No, I’m not making that up.)

Or maybe someone could come with with an automatic “Festus Euphemism Fabricator” along the lines of the Shakespeare Insult Generator. Until someone does, the internet isn’t fully living up to the hype.

So. . . Paid a visit to the family doc yesterday. I have pneumonia, I’m told.

Well, that explains a few things—including that sensation I’ve had for the last couple of weeks that I have inadvertantly inhaled an echidna in my sleep that has become lodged under my sternum.

Apparently my lifestyle — long stretches of high stress periodically relieved by seasons of bone-crunching stress and time-and-space-warping stress — has compromised my immune system a bit.

 Which also explains my blood pressure readings in the last couple of visits, featuring systolic and diastolic numbers that look like a bad SAT score.

Judging by James Lileks’ blog this morning, he’s feeling it, too. James writes:

This isn’t fun. The individual components of my life are fun; I still love what I do, but the aggregate effect is doubleplus unfun. I know it’s hard to understand why I can’t fix the flippin’ email and RESPOND to people to whom I owe responses, but the moment there’s one millisecond of free time the phone rings, or I have to make Gnat lunch, or the Oak Island Water Feature makes a horrid gurgle and I have to shut it off, or the dog yarks up half a crayon, or Gnat needs to have the spelling checked on her thank you notes – honest to God, I feel like a gong that’s being struck every 17 seconds.

All of which explains why God has been speaking loudly and consistently to me about the principle of the Sabbath lately. Seems that everywhere I turn, someone is teaching, preaching or writing about how we ignore God’s prescription of one day of rest in every seven at our peril.

It was even in the Wall Street Journal for crying out loud.

Message received, Lord. A sabbath rest is like tithing. You can never “afford” to do it. You just do it and trust Him to multiply the remainder. And He does.

James Lileks over at Buzz.mn has spotted several instances of the shameful phenomenon I described in this post below.

An excerpt:

Fred Phelps and his contemptible claque believe that God made the bridge fall because Minneapolitans didn’t round up the gays and burn them at a Loring Park bonfire, so they’re going to protest the funerals of the people who died in the bridge collapse.

Fred has issues.

If you haven’t been following the controversy over The New Republic’s Baghdad Diaries written by the anonymous “Scott Thomas,” don’t bother with this post. It’s too complicated to explain.

But if you have, you’ll be interested to know that The Weekly Standard is reporting that the author has now recanted. The opening paragraph:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp–author of the much-disputed “Shock Troops” article in the New Republic’s July 23 issue as well as two previous “Baghdad Diarist” columns–signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods–fabrications containing only “a smidgen of truth,” in the words of our source.

Back on July 18th I posted on the story under the headline, “The New Republic’s New ‘Fabulist.'”  It now seems that comparison was all too appropriate. And it serves as further evidence (as though we needed any) that the media elites cannot be trusted to check any story that fits their preferred narrative or report any news which doesn’t.

It’s been a while since I posted any photography, so here are a few snaps I grabbed in Scotland some years back (click to enlarge):

 These were shot on the Western coast of Scotland in county Kintyre (as in The Mull of Kintyre) a peninsular finger that sticks out into the Irish Sea. In fact, when I took this one I was standing right here. This is on the property of Stonefield Castle on Loch Fyne.

 This former baronial estate may be the most hauntingly beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The place is simply astonishing. Of course Scotland in general is one of the most photogenic places on the planet. It’s mighty difficult to take a bad photograph there. And it can make a hack like me look like he knows what he’s doing.

Here’s a couple more. Click on the thumbnails for a full-size look.

Oh…and if you want to see what a real photographer can do with the place, have a look at this guy’s collection from the nearby Isle of Bute. They’re amazing.

Here’s a blast from the past. A montage of commercial sponsor bumpers from Twilight Zone episodes in the very early sixties. The whole thing runs about 10 minutes. By the way, note the American Tobacco Growers Assoc. spot with the fast talking auctioneer. When we were little, my brother and I thought that was high-larious. We used to try to imitate it and would end up howling with laughter. That memory was completely buried in my subconscious until I saw this reel.

Now I know why I involuntarily blurt out “Sold American!” when I see an auction on TV. Have a look:

Here’s a link in case the embedded player doesn’t work in your browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVMG2307xU

Last evening’s I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis (a bridge I used to cross with some regularity) has brought me fresh evidence of a truly disturbing phenomenon. One that is increasingly predictable in American public discourse.

I first took notice of it in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing back in 1994. And again after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. In fact, I notice it almost every day now. What is this insidious practice that is poisoning the air in the public square?

It is the knee-jerk tendency of ideologues to glom onto the latest tragedy as an ax-grinding opportunity. Here’s all you have to do to join the exploitation parade.

1. Take one shocking tragedy that the public can be counted on to universally consider “a horrible thing.”
2. Take your pet issue–”the one you’re angry and bitter that the American (pick one: public, government, president) hasn’t fully embraced.
3. Find a way to point at the tragedy and shout, “See there! If we weren’t stupidly  _________ (insert failure to embrace pet cause here), then this wouldn’t have happened!”
4. No matter how tenuous the link, no matter how preposterous the correlation, continue to try to hang blame for the tragedy around the neck of your ideological enemy.

Humans of all political persuasions, left and right, are often seduced by this cheap shot logic. But the left has elevated it to an art form.

Remember how the Murrah Building in OKC was still smoldering when then President Bill Clinton tried to suggest that Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts were responsible for inciting the anarchist Timothy McVeigh?

Remember how Robert Kennedy Jr. used a Huffington Post entry to assert that Hurricane Katrina was the Mother Earth’s karmic retribution on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour because he used to be Republican National Committee Chairman for George W. Bush. The logic was if Barbour/Bush had been more supportive of the Kyoto Treaty, the Earth’s troposphere wouldn’t have taken aim at Mississippi and missed slightly to the left.

Remember Kanye’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”?

To be fair, Christians are prone to this as well. (You’ll recall Jerry Falwell’s suggestion that 9/11 was a result of God’s removal of his hedge of protection because of homosexuality and abortion.)

However, no one deploys this maneuver better than ex-conservative Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan’s hobby horse is the U.S. government’s use of tough interrogation techniques, (which he, in a form of semantic bullying, insists on calling “torture.”)

That brings us to yesterday’s horror in Minneapolis.

As divers braved the currents in search of victims, commenters at the Daily Kos were posting many pearls like this:

“Unfortunately, more of these kinds of things will continue to happen as all our monies have gone to the war effort; leaving nothing to take care of infrastructure, and other issues at home. It will take years to catch up. “

You expect that kind of thing in the fever swamps of the Daily Kos comment threads. But before the day was over, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was saying precisely the same thing as he tried to score a few political points over the bodies of the dead and missing” in the process proving once and for all that he us utterly incapable of shame.

There’s a new tragedy in town. Better hurry and hitch up that favorite hobby horse and take it for a ride.

 

A recent Drudge headlined proclaimed, “Scientists Create Mentally Ill Mice.” It linked to a Reuters article  about a breakthrough in genetic engineering.

 It made me wonder: How did the scientists know the mice were deranged? Well, according to the article, it quickly became obvious to the scientists.

One of the mice was heard musing that John Edwards would probably make a fine president. Another was overheard to say that we should stop fighting Al Qaeda and Taliban, bring the troops home and give dialogue and diplomacy a chance. While a third made a big speech about how the government should be running the nation’s health care industry so we can get the same quality health services as British people.

I tell you, it’s downright barbaric what those scientists did to the minds of those rodents. It’s twisted.

On February 12, 1989 I drove the car up to Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City and collected my wife and a 3-day-old baby girl. With pomp and fanfare all captured on VHS tape, we brought Caitlin home, along with a mountain of infant paraphernalia, baby girl accouterments, and a heaping, swirling, throbbing sense of uncertainty that we were remotely qualified to take care of the frail, lovely little thing.

As it happened, we didn’t break her and the authorities never came knocking on the door holding papers declaring there had been a terrible mistake. . . that clueless people aren’t supposed to be entrusted with tiny human lives. In fact, over the next five years, the same heavenly bureaucratic oversight that allowed us to get the first one sent us two more baby girls. An embarrassment of riches.

On August 16, 2007, 17 days from now, we’ll gather up a small mountain of big-girl accoutrements and load up for a move once again. Different car. Same girl. Only this time the move is out. Away.

You see, somewhere along the line that baby girl had the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to become a young woman. A curvy, funny, smart, beautiful Jesus-loving woman. One who got herself accepted to a great college. That’s gratitude for you.

Yes, I know millions of families have done this before. And we’ll be only one family in a vast multitude that are experiencing the very same thing at that very same time two weeks from now. But this is my family. That’s my baby girl.

That’s my dinner table that will now be set for four, not five as has been the case for almost 14 years. That will be me telling the restaurant hostess “Table for five please. . . Oh wait. . . I’m sorry, I mean four. Just four.” That’s my house that will ring with one less laugh. That’s my cheek that will be graced with one less nightly kiss. That’s my father-heart that has swelled and healed a little with every “G’night Daddy. I love you so.”

And so you’ll have to forgive me if there’s a selfish part of me that thinks it’s all so very unfair.

Of course, she’ll be back. But we all know it will never again be quite the same. But that’s okay. What has been, has been very, very good. Far better than I deserve.

Sorry readers. I’ve been on the road for several days with little time and limited internet access.

 As you may know if you’ve been following the story on the blogs, the identity of The New Republic’s anonymous soldier-correspondent became known a few days ago. He is Scott Thomas Beauchamp and he is indeed a active duty soldier in Iraq. However, everything he has written remains very much under a cloud of skepticism.

Dean Barnett has the latest on the story and links over at Hugh Hewitt’s blog. And some background here and here.