I knew who Larry Craig was in the year 2006.  I also knew, or at least believed I knew from one of the authentic sounding Internet rumor-mongering, that he was a closeted homosexual.  What I associated him with in 2006, however, was an attack on parts of the Patriot Act he gave on Rush Limbaugh where he gave the “Imagine if Hillary had these powers” line, along with a “And I remember Ruby Ridge”.  I did not know about his wide stance.

I did not know that Britney Spears had a younger sister.  I kind of resent the fact that I now know she does, never mind that this is pretty funny.

I’m sure it was an eventful year.  After a while I close my eyes and ask, though, “In the year 3027… what event the year 2007 will be worth noting?”  The above two items won’t be the answer.  Time Magazine’s choice of Putin for “Person of the Year” is as good a bet of people that will be remembered in 3027 as anyone.  Better than last year’s choice… I, the winner of that title, will not be remembered.

Mitt Romney has gotten his foot stuck in a quick-sand of explanations and explications for the explanations starting with a defense of the racist past of Mormonism as practiced by his family with his father having Marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. — and having seen it, on to the definition of “saw” — made moot seeing as George Romney never marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. except that everyone post fact marched with King — referencing “saw” as being the same as having seen, say, The Patriots winning the World Series.

Considering that the World Series is cornered into a collection of 30 baseball teams, 29 from the United States and one from Canada, I don’t see why it would be more presumptuous for a football team to win the thing.

The Tom Tancredo post-drop out endorsement will wipe the controvery out, I’m sure.

Mike Huckabee has been scolded for having a Christmas message anti-political political ad with a subliminal floating cross in the brackground.  The world is organized around 90 degree angles, and such a thing is very doable, I suppose, and very easy to … do on purpose… subliminally.

Ron Paul’s blimp crashed.  Oh the Humanity!  Actually, the first Ron Paul news item that pops up poses the question of what one does with the money of less than savory donations.

I am having trouble googling up the famous Grover Cleveland refrain, upon his election despite — or maybe because — of his Bastard child scandal.  It goes a bit like…

Clevland, I Voted Grover Cleveland, and the Kid…  And I’m Glad that I Did. 

Which is a thought that popped in my mind as The National Enquirer looks into some gossip regarding John Edwards.   Assume it to be true for a moment… do you much care?

……………

Found it.

Hooray For Maria!  Hooray For the Kid!

I Voted for Cleveland, and I’m Glad that I did!

… work up a similar ditty for Edwards.

Back in Fourth or Fifth grade, I knew a kid named Billy who made the statement that the first time he saw The Wizard of Oz… I don’t quite recall, either he was rooting for the tornado to blow Dorthoy away or he was hoping she would never find her way back to Kansas again.  Something horrible, at any rate.

It is an attitude that surely would have saddened the grade school teacher, likely ascribing this with some deep meaning with Saturday Morning cartoons and Summer blockbusters and video grains draining away flights of whimsy.  Dig slightly ashunder a few years prior, and if I may say how indifferent I was with any number of childhood fare — regularly shown videos at school, and I think it might be shocking if people were forced to recall the percentage of a grade schools’ school year a teacher shows their classroom.  Some of it I’d grant with some cultural or educational importance, but some of it not.  They crammed The Nutcracker Suite down our throats.  Or maybe better to say my throat.  I think I took a nice nap  during the proceedings, until my reguarly scheduled speech therapy session brought me out of class.  The speech therapist asked what we were watching; I answered “Nutcracker Suite”; she nodded approvingly, saying “That’s a good one”.  This wasn’t a generation gap but it was something of a culture clash meted with the personality type that goes into working with children — this case: she has culture; I shun culture.

I have every reason to believe my fourth grade teacher loved the book Roller Skates, as well I believe she was probably disappointed by the class’s almost violent revulsion.  The one thing I will say about the book is I turned in an art project tied to it, one which a few years later my brother insisted I keep, but one which did not garner as much appreciation from my teacher and garnered comments just short of “Come see me after class” — I seemed to have channeled a crude hybrid of Gary Panter and Basil Wolverton.  I was getting snotty at that age.  Maybe the class could not appreciate and just did not want to place oursleves into the quaint depression-era child protaganists.  Maybe, by all rights, we should have — we would have been better people for doing so.  Years later — sometime during high school, in my presence — I happened to be there– a friend of my mother’s expressed her rememberance and love of Roller Skates in my presence.  I told her that we read it in fourth grade, and I didn’t much care for it.  Her response went along the line of “Yeah, it’s more of a girl’s book” — I opted not to mention that the most violent revulsion came from the girls in the class, moreso than the boys, thinking that might break her heart.

Other examples of both childhood classics and items deigned befitting a child’s imagination which fell short of either my or my peers’ imaginations come to my mind.  Part of it is a fronting, a “Too cool for school”, but even this becomes ingrained to the cultural ethos to hold sway.  What strikes me is that if I were to watch The Nutcracker Suite or read Roller Skates, or certainly view or read The Wizard of Oz today, I have no doubt I would appreciate them — even if it’s possible I might not enjoy particular items.  What’s more, the view of childhood intrinsic in some of these things, and the longings they tap into, might also make more sense to me and have better viscareal appeal…

… Now that I am no longer a child.  And because I am no longer a child.  Figure that logic out.

It dawned on me that the Republican nomination race looks something like this last College Football season. The rule of thumb is attrition — you stand at number one because somebody else has fallen.  John McCain is said to be making some kind of headway right about now.  His campaign had been in the tank previously, but the problem is nobody else looked good, and thus his resurrection, of sorts.

McCain is Ohio State. Lost to Illinois. Fell down and looked out of the national Championship picture.  But then everyone else lost, and …

I had thought that Huckabee might be the Republicans’ best chance.  But that was based on some vaguities that he might be able to fudge a bit, and also based on an assumption that his Evangelistic Right Wing Christianity wasn’t as far in that direction as it has turned out to have been — which he is playing to a greater hilt than I thought he might.  Now that I think about it, McCain probably remains “Most Electable” — the falling out based on his wrapping himself in the Bush Mantle in a manner that looked awkward and stunted — along with the Immigration Bit alienating the Republican base too a greater degree than is not insufferable, but upon reflection this is probably easily enough brushed aside for him to emerge back to that Media Darling and Mr. Sensible everyone loved when he was running in 2000, as well that there “Reform” of “McCain / Feingold”. No one’s paying attention; do-overs are possible.

I am sitting at a business I won’t name but is fairly easily summized if you know your Portland businesses.  Somebody has abandoned an untapped bottle of Kombucha Tea — I suppose bought for an hour of wi-fi access?  I grab the bottle to take a look at the typical spiel of this drink.  From out of the Himalayans, this cured the man’s mom’s cancer, now the elixir is bottled for your purchase.

I don’t know if I should bother with it.  I can basically guarantee I will not like it, but there is a science experiment here.  Compare this quote in quote “raw” Kombucha with what I encountered in one of its various mythical spots of origin — Kargasok, 15 hours up the Ob River from Novisibirsk — under the name “Kargasok Tea”, the home-made fungi fermented in a musky water.  Surviving to become centurians they do, so I hear — though  if they indeed do it may come from the creative way they stuff fish into dishes you never imagined fish could fit into.  Anytime I have shown anyone a photograph of the musty bottle of Kargasok Tea, the reaction was either “That looks disgusting” or “You … drunk … that?”  Also, one man’s ords of wisdom alon the lines of “Don’t drink the water” (when in a quasi-remote place on the globe… probably more to the point, when somewhere you must dart off to an outhouse to do your business).

Since the bottle is clear, meaning one can see the liquid, and something that elicits the reaction of “You drunk that?” is not terribly marketable, even if one cynically thinks something from the far-splung corners of the globe with a natural tinge can be exoticized — the relative “raw”ness of “Raw” Kombucha is something I have to question.

The problem is a science experiment falls apart.  It has nearly been a decade.  I have no real basis for comparison.  It surely is more or less sanitized, but beyond that I’ve got nothing.  There is no point in drinking this.  Leave it there, a product of romanticized Orientalism, as well an odd remnant of an accidental location.

……………………

A few days later, I watch a “Crystal Stroker”, the type I imagine this drink’s appeal fits the wheelhouse for, is drinking it, while laying out a batch of tarot cards to read some people’s fortunes.  I trust she is a believer in the power of the Kombucha, and all that represents.  I would like to mind-meld with her just enough to transport my impressions of Kargasok, one of the origin points of that which she is drinking.  I imagine she holds no romantic notion of, say for example, Dix, Nebraska , meaning I wouldn’t see why she would end up with a similar romantic notion of that town in Siberia… Never mind that her drink is all natural and herbal, and I don’t believe it would change her worldview (which is innocuous enough, and seems pleasant), and it’s far from central to anything here, but maybe it’s a small splinter in a small splinter of the picture worth grounding.

Who isn’t a fan of Steroid Abuse, I mean really? Steroids Saved Baseball! You had the strike in 1994, you had fans declaring they would never come back, you had — in particular — two superstars inject themselves with Steroids, and then you had the fans come back in droves. Yay Steroids!

I would be suspicious of a professional sports team where I knew that there were no users. We need victories, after all. The thing about the Mitchell Report… compile an all – star team made up of the players Mitchell has named. Have the players in their post-steroid usage play themselves from the season before they individually injected crap into their asses.  One team would beat the other team every which way past Sunday, and the Greek Gods of Olde will smile down on them.  Case in point, this man… who, reportedly, started with the Steroids in 1997, stopped, then started with the Steroids — I haven’t scanned the reports, but judging by the stats I’d guess — 2003?

WHO WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE PITCHING?

In other repercussions in the world of sports… I hope George W Bush focuses on the issue of Steroids exclusively in his final State of the Union Address, and dedicates his final year in office to nothing else besides cleaning up professional baseball of Steroids. It beats anything else he might want to do with the office.

For the record, Jesus and the Devil are brothers.  Aren’t we all supposed to be Jesus’s brother?

I hate to dredge this thing up, because looking specifically for this item I see it framed this way by the illuminating news sources of Fox News and Newsmax, but…

A new CBS/New York Times national poll out Tuesday shows that 44 percent of Democratic primary voters say they were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton because of her husband. But only 1 percent said they were more likely to vote for Barack Obama because of his supporter, Oprah Winfrey.

I suspect the “Oprah Effect” is a tad under-represented, and the “Bill Clinton” effect is over-represented since it’s already factored into Hillary Clinton’s support.  The problem is that, like it or not, and to some degree it is true and to some degree it is false, a Hillary Clinton presidency is viewed as a restoration of the previous presidency.  But then again, it would be amusing to see Bill Clinton endorse someone else.

I do not understand the Oprah Winfrey detractors — But 80 percent percent of those polled in the CBS/New York Times survey said the Oprah factor made no difference for Obama’s chances, and 14 percent even said she made them less likely to vote for him. — or, maybe I can understand it, but I don’t sympathize with it — Oprah Winfrey is at worst an innocuous figure so I’d be more along the lines of those 80 percent.

Anyway, it’s a comparison between apples and oranges, and this ledger of polls becomes meaningless.  Trudge up a different “Celebrity Endorser” and then see where it gets us.

I can’t quite say I am disappointed, because disappointment is something reserved for a mother who received the call that her child just stole a 6 pack of Coke from the grocery store.  Or for crudely drawn dogs to their crudely drawn adolescent owner.  This is quite a bit more drastic.

Go to the Friday Oregonian and read the first article on the front page of the Metro section.  Or look down the articles at oregonlive.  I would say then type his name into the search function on the sidebar, but even though I know a few conversations with him are on this blog a few times, it doesn’t pop up.  Google his name and something from me will pop up as number one.  If you then push the “images” at google you will not see the photograph I am referring to, but you will see one that would work in a pinch — a stand-off with his mouth agape.

It has been a few years since I have had any extended talk with him.  It has been less than that, somewhere between one and two years, since I’ve exchanged a “Hello” with him.  In the interium he disappeared into Arizona, for reasons that seem to have been explained.  I imagine any number of people reading that article, or seeing that news from elsewhere would have a bit of schadenfruede, mixed with the disgust… another hypocritical pious fundamentalist Christian nut-job, right?  I can’t say I do– I genuinely liked the fellow.  Sooner or later I will see him again, though here I would have his name followed by “Comma Sex Offender,” a millstone he will live with for the rest of his life and will, I guess, have to somehow configure with his judgemental explanation of Christianity.

Statistically speaking, we all know someone who has that dark secret — because statistically we all know a victim (the numbers are rather large) and the numbers would have to match up somehow.  The most famous figure in Oregon is that former governor, generally regarded as one of the state’s best — the media covered up his molesting of a young girl.

What can one say?  It is depressing, and I am somewhere beyond “disappointed”.