Ivan on the Corruption of Language

Ivan, on the ranch in north Alabama, has a carcass to pick with the Huntsville Times:

Hi John -- this is a small deal but shouldn't the outdoors writer be asked not to BS the readers and stop talking about "harvesting" deer when he means "killing" them. I've got nothing against deer hunting so long as hunters stay out of my fields --I've found deer stands in trees in my woods. I've found deer carcasses in my fields with just the haunches removed. nothing much you can do about it so I clean up as necessary. but the thing that gets me is the essential phoniness of the word "harvesting" when it comes to deer hunting. Rabbit hunters don't "harvest" bunnies. quail hunters don't "harvest" birds. corn growers harvest. soybean growers harvest. deer hunters kill.

Ivan Has a Retirement Project

Well, it beats being a greeter at the blood bank:

I got the editors of the Scrabble dictionary to agree to change the meaning of "goat." They said it was a" horned ruminant" and I told them some breeds of goat are hornless. they said they would change it next edition. it's wrong in major dictionaries also but i haven't contacted them yet.

Now, if someone can find us a goat who is not a ruminant...

Where's Charlee?

Here's an item of surpassing triviality and obscurity. My friend Swifty down in Alabama is chortling over how folks down his way refer to a prominent cattle breed as the "Charlee." The correct name, Swifty declares, is the " Charolais."

I was about to tell him he was wrong--that the correct name is neither "Charlee" nor "Charolais," but "Charleroi." Lucky for me I checked Wiki first. Turns out that "Charolais" is indeed a breed of cattle while "Charleroi" is (inter alia) a city.

I have assumed, without knowing, that "Charleroi" is a corruption of "Charles, le Roi," i.e., "Charles the King." Anyone know whether I am right?

Okay, return to your former dull, meaningless lives. There won't be a quiz.

From the Annals of 20th Century Piracy

Once again, Ivan is dousing himself in the warm bath of memory :

In 1948 I was an able seaman on a freighter that carried cargo to pacific ocean ports starting with Pusan (called Fusan by the Koreans). we went to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, and several ports in the Philippines. going south along the china coast from shanghai, we had been warned to be especially wary of pirates. at that time on American merchant ships there were three men to a deck watch -- two able seamen and on ordinary seaman.The able seamen had passed a test and been certified, after sailing 18 months as an unrated ordinary seaman. I was an able seaman and after finishing my turn at the wheel I went to the bow and the seaman there went to what we called standby. one guy at the wheel, one guy on bow lookout -- you rotated, and that completed a four hour watch. Did that twice a day.

Dark, moonless night, kind of cold, and i started to hear a clanging ahead. I picked up the bow phone, called the bridge, they had already heard it. It was a bunch of Chinese in small boats, sampans, anchored and tied together off shore beating pots and pans together to warn us that they were anchored out there in front of the way we were headed. Fishing boats? Pirates setting a trap? We didn't know. I sensed the ship was picking up speed. In a few minutes we were plowing right through them. I could hear them right under the bow as we moved through them but it was so dark I couldn't see anything -- couldn't see or tell if we were plowing the boats in half or they were out of the way. Sounded like we crunched a few. We didn't swerve an inch -- held our course and they beat the hell out of their pots and pans. in a few minutes they were astern of us and the clanging cut out. we didn't slow down.

Maybe the reason that we havent hear much about piracy until recently is that so few ships fly American flags. Maersk is an ancient steamship company from one of the Scandinavian countries -- they arranged to lease or somehow get the Maersk Alabama registered under the American flag. i think a ship has to be flagged American to carry govt paid for relief help -- mostly food -- to foreign countries.

I wonder if Ivan has seen this:That's the number of pirates killed, per US president, going back to McKinley. Source: here.

And Now, For Something Completely Different: Chick Lit

My friend Ivan is philosophizing on the sale of baby birds, and meditating on the old days in Alabama:

I wonder every spring if 10 percent of the ducklings I see for sale in feed stores survive. chicks go on sale first but they are usually bought by people who want to raise some for the dinner table and know how to protect them. but the ducklings -- just days old -- are usually given to little kids who dont have them for long. ducklings need to be protected from rats, weasels, possums, skunks, racoons, snakes, turtles -- whatever roams at night or swims and slithers in the daytime.

Whenever I see the chicks sales start I'm reminded of a 1950's Saturday afternoon in Anniston, Alabama, when I was manning the newsroom in the hours between when we had put out the sat afternoon edition and the pm crew came in to get out a Sunday paper. I was typing away on something of small consequence when one of the Adams brothers came in looking puzzled. The Adams boys ran off brand gas stations and were the leaders of the Klan in Calhoun County. but they liked me because I had written a big article about the founding of the White citizens Council in Anniston -- which they also headed.

The Adams brother -- don't remember his name but he's the one later indicted for starting a bloody fight at a kids' baseball game over an ump's call and for being one of the leaders in the attack on Nat King Cole giving a concernt in Bham.

"The streets are full of @&*$!," he told me, in a perplexed, puzzled but also angry voice. "All the street are full of @&*$!."

This was Saturday afternoon on a warm spring day in the Deep South. not unusual for crowds of both white and black rural people to be in town shopping, mingling, seeing who they would see. I looked out the window. There were a lot of blacks on the street. but when I saw what many were carrying, I had the answer.

"This is free chicks day," I told Adams.

Free chicks day was the Saturday when local feed and other stores would give away a dozen day old or few days old chicks to anyone buying a sack of chick starter, the feed you start chicks on. T bigger the bag, the more chicks you got.

"Oh," Adams said. "I got nervous when I saw the streets was full of @&*$!.

Goess I shouldn't try to tell him that if you have to buy a sack of feed, the chicks aren't really free.

Why, When I was a Boy... (Maritime Commerce Division)

My old friend Ivan on his ranch down in Alabama reflects on the mutability of the human condition:

[W]hat amazes me is that Singapore is now... buying up huge chunks of bargain America.

I was in Singapore in 1948 whenIi was a 20 year old able bodied seaman on either the SS Kyska or SS Jean Lafitte (can't remember which) of the John B. Waterman Steamship Co., out of Mobile. Singapore isnt really a country -- it's a nation-state or a city-state. back then it was in what I think was was called the British Federation of Malay States.

Getting docked there was a precarious operation back then. there wasn't enough dock space so ships were tied up alongside each other until it was your turn to be alongside the dock, and loaded or unloaded. A Lykes Brothers ship out of Tampa was being eased away from the dock to make room for us to tie up, and I was manning a steam winch (anybody remember steam operated winches?) on the bow, with a mooring line attached to it. the other end of the mooring line had been passed around the Lykes Brothers ship and was fastened to a bollard on the dock. as slack developed in the 8 inch thick mooring line, I took it up with the winch.

We were just a few feet away from the Lykes Brothers ship as it was being eased out of our way, and some of our crew and some of their crew were on deck, talking across the water. I was totally occupied with keeping that mooring line taut but not to the point of snapping it, but my attention was diverted when I heard one of our crew holler across the water "how's the whores here?" -- a kind of natural question from arriving seamen not really interested in much else.

A kind of forlorn voice, probably suffering from what seamen then called "Cupid's catarrh," responded -- "half of them got the clap." What went through our minds when we heard that? The guy next to me is going to catch it but I aint.

Now, this city-state of Singapore, run mostly by descendants of Chinese immigrants, is buying up industrial America. lots of bargains. GM and Ford together are worth a tiny fraction of what Exxon-Mobil is worth. and the problems we've got are a lot worse than gonorrhea.

Update: John G. Waterman Shipping was long a mainstay of the Mobile economy; it passed oiut of existence in the 70s. Lykes Brothers it was sold out of Bankruptcy Court in Tampa in 1997; merged and merged again, it fell at last into the hands of a German transport company Hapag-Lloyd.

What's The Story on the Virginia Eighth?

My friend Ivan takes me to task for calling the Virginia 8th Congressional district the "mother church of the military-industrial complex" (see previous post). The whole comment is worth hoisting:

i dont think arlington-alexandria, where i lived for several decades plus, is "home" to big military lobbying operations, although the pentagon is located there. arlington-alexandria is a very liberal voting area, and home to democratic party operations that really work at electing liberal democrats. virginia got its first black gov, doug wilder, years ago, because of the white turnout in arlington-alexandria.

Well, I don't think any district that is home to the Pentagon can count itself as free of military-industrial influence. But Ivan is obviously onto something here: A-A does have a record of support for liberals statewide, though their own Congressman, Jim Moran, counts rather more as Blue Dog. In some ways, if you are looking for a military-industrial distrct, perhaps a better case could be made for the much richer Virginia 10th, a bit further east, home of so many of the lawyers and lobbyists that keep the political machine oiled.

On the other hand, here's an argument that's hard to top: Finder analyzes Department of Defense spending by district nationwide. The winner, by a runaway margin the Virginia 8th, with half again more contractors, with almost twice as much spending as the runnerup (which is, as it happens, the Virginia 10th). If that ain't military spending, I don't know what is.

Maybe the clue here can be found at the micro level: A-A liberals are people who are comfortable with government. They work there, or their relatives work there, or they did work there and soon will again. When they think "military," they don't think of a skinhead 20-year-old waving an M16A2; they think of the guy sitting next to them on the orange line to Metro Center, wearing camouflage duds and combat boots, carrying a briefcase and penciling a pile of spreadsheets. In the end, maybe the military-industrial complex comes down to that.

Birth Announcement: Rednecks for Obama

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Rednecks for Obama, the creative usufruct of my old friend Ivan who, as I will swear on a stack of redneck bibles, is a north Alabama pig [Oops--see infra] farmer.

Infra: Ivan sets me straight:

never had pigs. now have a flock of sheep and a herd of goats, total about 125 animals. had to sell my small cattle herd two years ago -- drought. really liked raising calfs -- had a great bull.

Well, farmer anyway. Sorry 'bout that.

"Boy"

I really didn't intend this to be an all-Kentucky day, but here my friend Ivan, impeccably liberal Obama supporter and Alabama cattle rancher, weighs in on "boy:"

Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Ky) used the word "boy" to refer to Obama, but it may not have been with racial intent. I checked his bio out because I was curious about what part of Kentucky he's from. Kentucky is a "funny" state -- folks from SW Kentucky are nothing like those from Louisville, and Appalachian mountaineers are nothing like people from either of those two sections.

His bio says Davis served as a volunteer mentor in inner city Cincinnati schools -- heavily minority schools across the Ohio River from Kentucky. A fellow who is a racist is not likely to volunteer to spend time in ghetto schools helping black kids.

He was a West Point career army officer and helicopter pilot. If you learn anything in Army service its that some blacks and other minorities are just as unqualified as some whites, and some are just just as qualified as some whites. It has nothing to do with color, it has everything to do with the individual himself or herself.

He's from an area of Kentucky that really isnt "southern" like southern Kentucky is -- like hopkinsville, Bowling Green, towns like that. His area is more like Ohio, but on the south side of the river. Does that mean no bigots in that area, no bigots in Ashland or Louisville exurbs? No, but as a former Kentuckian with a long connection to the state -- especially the appalachian mountain area, it's been my experience that the area east of louisville along the ohio river was the least bigoted.

Referring to blacks as "boy" is bigoted -- a throwback to the old days when so many whites felt as though they were maintaining their own dignity and status by denying blacks any designation of dignity. Whites who werent around in the old segregation days may know of thrm only from photos and film, but if you were here in the south and alive back then, you saw it in the raw.

So, Davis may have used the word colloquially, not racially. unfortunately, to me, as an obama supporter, it moves the focus off obama's qualifications, where it should be, and onto his race, which may or may not help in the fight for the nomination. and i want to see him nominated.

Update: Apparently not everyone is persuaded. Ivan says he's heard from a "local African American woman, good friend, fighter, said even if it was not intended as an insult, it's an insult."

I think Ivan's approach is interesting, but I'm unpersuaded. Davis is also a smart and experienced pol, and he knows how to make "a mistake." Cf. Obama/Osama. But somehow I can't get away from the Kentucky theme myself, nor from Wilson Wyatt (cf. previous post (link)). I remember Wyatt in that same '61-'62 campaign season, telling a very upscale audience at a Louisville fundraiser about "the guy who was so rich he bought his dog a boy." As I remember, the, um, joke fell flat. I don't suppose this bunch was all models of racial understanding, but I suspect that at least they knew bad taste when they saw it. And I suspect Geoff Davis understood his audience better than Wyatt did.

The Sound of Two Geezers Barking

Here’s my old pal Ivan, taking time away from his Alabama feedlot, to fulminate about the subprime meltdown:

why are homeowners are at risk of foreclosure? because they borrowed more than they can repay? because they took out a series of home equity loans and blew the money on his-and-hers SUVs, 50-inch flat-screen TVs, and vacations? sure, the home loan industry and all the financial connivers connected to it lead thousands across the line into never never (being able to pay) land. but is the Fed supposed to bail out all of these homebuyers with american tax dollars?

These poor people are losing their homes because of 'plummeting home values.' we're told. No one is at fault - act of God, no one could have foreseen - got to prevent a Depression. that's BS. they're losing their homes because they signed papers for over priced ticky tacks either knowing they wouldnt be able to pay the debt in a few months, or they were duped into thinking they could pay, and they could use the equity for the gas guzzlers they wanted for the driveway.

McCain is right about this, and Obama and Clinton and Bush and Barney Frank and the NYT are wrong. So when Bush decides to adopt a Dem policy, does he get out of Iraq? No. Reduce greenhouse emissions? Guess again. He picks the single most misguided, idiotic, destructive proposal that any Democratic politician supports, and does that. Typical Bush, he's a loser.

Alright, down, boy, back to your cage. But the fact is, I agree with Ivan: much as it pains me to say it, McCain is right this time, and the Dems are wrong. But look who’s talking here: two of the most yellow-dog Democrats you could ever hope to find, total bitter enders. Does it say anything that two old yellow-dog Dems think McCain is right? Or is this just geezerhood talking?

Playing the Racism Card

Ivan rescusitates this gem:

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers, every keeper of Libby, Andersonville and Salisbury, every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labor performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child  every solitary one was a Democrat.

That would have been Robert G. Ingesoll (link), undertaking to save the nation from tyranny by recommending the candidacy of James A. Garfield. For perspective, that is just four years after the Republicans bought the presidency by agreeing to let the Bourbon aristocracy do any damn thing it wanted in the old Confederacy. Oddly enough for so confirmed a Republican, Ingersoll was famously opposed to mainsream religion. "An honest god," my notes quote him saying, though undated, "is the noblest work of man."