One of my favorite guitarists, Geordie Walker, has passed.
"Wardance"
Music to march to ...
A forest of things.
This eye, the poor one, the bad one that rolled in its milky socket like a moon, was accomplice to his visions of commanding dreams as well as the dreams he dreamed awake. It’s a good eye to have for a poet. Necessary in fact, though many don’t have it and can’t perceive the loss.Jim described his poems as “flowers for the void,” writing them made him “soar along a foot / from the ground.” The super-masculine tough-guy selves, the reckless gourmands and intellectual wild men of the woods and prairies who populated his famous fictions were only a feather’s breadth remove from the genuinely bold, larger-than-life article. So it is that there is still amazement among his readers that he wrote poetry, that he felt that only in poetry had he found “the right pen” to write what he wanted to say.
“You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite,” he said.“And staying cheerful ... because it’s a wise thing to do. Is that so hard? And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?”
“Coach Moore has said from the get-go he was going to call his most aggressive game he’s ever called,” Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy said. “For the big boys, for Blake (Corum), for myself — it was music to our ears.”Michigan (12-0, 9-0 Big Ten) had largely featured a one-dimensional offense in recent weeks, scoring victories over Penn State and Maryland via the ground. At one point against the Nittany Lions, the Moore-led offense ran the football 32 straight times. And while the run-game dominated the menu again on Saturday, Moore ratcheted up the aggressiveness, too.After Will Johnson jumped a route and intercepted a Kyle McCord pass in the first quarter, Michigan’s offense set up inside the Ohio State 10-yard line and responded by running it three straight times. On fourth-and-goal from inside the 1, Moore made the call to give it Corum one more time — and the program’s No. 1 back answered it.“(He said) he’s emptying the tank — and that’s what he did,” Corum, who rushed 22 times for 88 yards and two touchdowns. “When we get in those fourth-and-1s, coach Moore always says ‘smash.’ Then you have AJ Barner over there screaming in his Triple H voice, ‘It’s time to play the game.’"
Ohio came to bury MichiganAll wrapped in maize and blueThe words were said the prayers were read and everybody criedBut when they closed the coffin, it was someone else insideThe Buckeyes came to bury Michigan --But Michigan wasn't deadFor when the game was overIt was someone else insteadTwenty-two Michigan Wolverines put on the gloves of grayAnd as the organ played "The Victors"They laid Ryan Day away.
John Hadl enjoyed a banner day in 1975 when he passed for 275 yards and two touchdowns against the Giants and performed an a cappella version of Scarborough Fair in the huddle that brought two offensive linemen to tears. pic.twitter.com/zgiueEgznY
— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 11, 2023
I was recently alerted to a Thanksgiving Day lesson at the website education.com, a go-to source for teachers. On the main page was a 60-minute lesson plan titled, “Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving.” “Thanksgiving offers an opportunity to teach young students about early days in the original colonies,” the plan informs us. “Students will discover the purpose and people involved in the first Thanksgiving.”So far, so good. But read on.The introduction instructs the teacher: “Call students together. Ask students to think about some of their favorite holidays and what they like to do on these holidays. Tell students that Thanksgiving is coming up. Ask students what some of their favorite Thanksgiving traditions are. Read Thanksgiving Day.”Thanksgiving Day is one of three books recommended, none of which — notably — mention God or religion. Not one. There are, however, bountiful references to Native Americans, various tribes, corn, stuffing, potatoes, popcorn, yams, jelly, and turkeys. The Creator even gets trumped by cranberry sauce.The “review and closing” portion of the “Thanksgiving” lesson concludes with these exciting guidelines: “Have students line up to present their Thanksgiving fact and what they are thankful for. Congratulate the students on their hard work. Encourage everyone to dig into the yummy food and enjoy having a Thanksgiving feast together!”Dig in, kids, without a thought of thanking the Almighty.Welcome, pilgrim, to the new world — a place, incidentally, that the Pilgrims long ago fled to for religious reasons.
The future is not like the weather. It doesn't just happen to us. We shape our future with the choices we make in the present, just as our present situation was shaped by choices we made in the past.
Don't ever allow yourself to become a victim. Own your choices, but remember: control of anything beyond the end your nose is an illusion.
President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 at the consecration ceremony for the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, nearly five months after the bloodiest episode of the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg had halted General Lee’s second and final push into the North—at the cost of as many as 51,000 casualties, roughly 8,000 of which were deaths.
The war was not yet won, but General Lee’s army was scattered and demoralized, and the Union’s victory seemed imminent. Already Lincoln was looking ahead to the impossible task of knitting together the nation’s wounds. The war—and the barbaric institution of chattel slavery that necessitated it—had called into question the very possibility of republican government.Lincoln was convinced that the future of popular sovereignty the world over rested on not just the outcome of the war, but on what must follow it: the repair of those “mystic chords of memory,” and the restoration of faith in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln knew he must refound the republic.Blaise Pascal understood that all regimes are founded on violence: the strong establish themselves over the weak, and in time the usurpation is forgotten. “The truth about the usurpation must not be made apparent,” wrote Pascal: “it came about organically without reason and has become reasonable.” What was arbitrary in origin may be developed along rational lines—just as monarchic Rome matured into a republic.Harry V. Jaffa, riffing on Pascal in A New Birth of Freedom (2000), observes that Lincoln refused to arrogate to himself unconstitutional power during the war because doing so would undermine his authority to refound the nation. This is why Lincoln delayed so long in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves and allowed them to fight in the Union army.“Military necessity had enabled the federal government to do lawfully what the Constitution hitherto had prevented it from doing,” writes Jaffa. “For that government to have acted against slavery in the states except under the exigencies of the war would … have meant usurping powers to which the people of the United States had not given their consent. It would thus, [Lincoln] thought, have defeated the very ends of human freedom.” The Gettysburg Address served as an apologia for the Proclamation and paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment by recalling the nation to its founding ideals in the only context in which such a refounding was possible.In his remarkable study The Dominion of the Dead (2003), Robert Pogue Harrison argues that all human habitation and culture—the home, the city, even the nation—are founded upon the marked grave. “It is not for nothing that the Greek word for ‘sign,’ sema, is also the word for ‘grave,” writes Harrison: the memorial to the dead is the wellspring and focal point of all meaning. Lincoln’s genius at Gettysburg was his recognition that the living are incapable of founding anything on their own. “We cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground,” he proclaimed. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”