The Irish in Me

I have always loved  hedgerows and rock fences

 

 

Scary Times We Live In

You really can’t make this shit up.  It’s a damned chicken sandwich, for Pete’s sake!

 

Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

Don’t see much of Joe Camel anymore, since he was kicked out of most every bar and coffee house in Austin several years ago. These days he can usually be found hanging out with the girls at the Cat Cafe and Lounge.

In honor of my grandfather

Leonard Thomas Williams, Camp Meade, c. 1917-18. He was caught up in the swine flu pandemic, and did not get sent overseas. After he returned home, he never fully recovered his health, and he died in 1935, at the age of 41. The cause of death was listed as “t.b. of the bowels” on his death certificate. And it was this that most folks believed he picked up at Camp Meade; not just the swine flu.

From all accounts, he was a good man and well thought of in his community. My mother was only 13 when he died, and she felt this loss deeply the rest of her life.

Pretty Poppy

First poppy of the season. Looks like a pretty cupcake paper.

 

RIP – A Double Whammy

Chuck Berry

James Cotton

 

 

Rainy Day at the Cat Cafe and Lounge

Mama, Buffy and Fraidy on the chair and Spot in the pot! Easy livin’ for supposedly feral cats. This is year five, and the first year they have hung out on the deck during a rain. Used to be that they all disappeared to some hidey hole until the rains passed. But there has been so much construction in the area lately, perhaps their old hiding place is gone.

Cookin’ with Julia

These pictures don’t do justice to the beauty of the Julia Child rose bush this year. I’m using a new camera and am having a difficult time with focus and depth, even on the auto setting.

Staged?

Perry Mason couldn’t have done it better.

Lawyer’s pants catch fire during closing argument.

This is #Sad

I prefer the OED anyway.  Great article. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Merriam-Webster Trolling Trump

If Merriam-Webster’s editors aren’t careful, though, they will undermine the very thing that makes their dictionary useful. An accusation of bias is (or should be) a death sentence for a dictionary. All the clever jokes in the world won’t save Merriam-Webster from a widespread perception of political partisanship—and promptly cost them half of their readers.

First, they’ll lose the trust of Trump supporters, then the respect of everyone on the Right, and finally all the folks on the Left, even those who despise Trump the most.

That’s because conservatives and liberals alike will reject as too Orwellian a dictionary perceived as politically charged. It will simply be too hard to convince people that cultural or political bias hasn’t seeped into and soiled the dictionary’s definitions. When it comes to lexicography, credibility depends on impartiality.

Regardless of their political opinions, Americans still expect the dictionary to be objective and neutral, even more than they expect that from the media. So at a time when trust and confidence in America’s mainstream media is practically nonexistent, why would Merriam-Webster even flirt with the appearance of partisanship?

If even the dictionary loses its objectivity, it means politics in America has become entirely inescapable. That’s not just dangerous, it’s sad. It’s unhealthy. It’s not good for a society to be so permeated with politics that there is nowhere to hide.

Of course, Merriam-Webster has every right to do what it wants to do. They can turn themselves into a source of political news, comedy, and commentary if they wish. But America already has enough of that. What America really needs, now more than ever, is something solid that everyone trusts and everyone respects. The dictionary used to have that kind of quiet power. Not anymore.