Olive videoblogged and blogged from her hostel home and recently updated everyone on her move both from her self-hosted site to Blogspot and her move from more independent living to the nursing home in the same building. In her last weeks she complained of a bad cough and distress, but remained in high spirits, giving an impromptu concert for her new roommate and friends.
Penny, who’s in the next bed to mine, had a visit one day this week from her daughter, who’s a professional singer. Guess what happened! She and I sang a happy song, as I do every day, and before long we were joined by several nurses, who sang along too. It was quite a concert!
Longtime raincoaster readers will fondly recall the old search term roundups of yore. That was before nekkid Britney Spears and Hairy Potter blew all other search terms off the list. Alas, these days unless I check my stats page within an hour of the new stats day’s dawn, I’m stuck with a list that looks depressingly like:
Britney Spears sex tape
BRITNEY SPEARS SEX TAPE
Britney sextape
Hairy Potter
Harry Potter nekkid
naked Daniel Radcliffe
penis Radcliffe Spears fur
beaver shots
fairy [sometimes Cthulhu instead, especially on the high holiday of Squidmas]
etc, etc.
Very boring, I think you’ll agree. Today I became uncontrollably excited when I realized I’d actually gotten some links to other things:
Yay! Something everyone everywhere can celebrate today. America is free! Free of one of the most malevolent and powerful doctrinaire bigots it’s seen since Emancipation.
Let’s all sing along with Klaus Nomi, whom Helms would have hated on general principles, even though he’s not black. Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead!
There are some great comments over on Gawker, but it appears the site is down right now. Instead, let’s look at a sliver of what the Guardian had to say about him:
Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper’s memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity…
He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as “pouring money down foreign rat holes”, and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.
In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”, voted against a supreme court justice because she was “likely to uphold the homosexual agenda”, acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord…
Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, “nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America’s national security more than his retirement.”
I wish the CBC had had the courage to call it like it actually was. For their mealymouthed obit, click here, although why would you?
Here are some quotes from Helms himself:
I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That’s the kind of customers we need!
I’m so old-fashioned I believe in horse whipping.
To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.
Rest in place. Let’s build a monument bigger than the pyramid of Cheops on top of the bugger, lest he try to claw his way back.
Another rival to the clown crown falls to “natural causes.” So-called “natural causes.”
Larry Harmon as Bozo the Clown
“I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet,
(people) would never be able to forget those footprints,” he said.
Yes, one of the most prominent clowns in history, Larry Harmon, has died. Harmon, who played Bozo the Clown for most of the latter part of the Twentieth Century and could plausibly said to have been the first person of any description to clone a clown, is only the most recent in a string of mysterious clown deaths.
One by one, the most prominent clowns in the world have been picked off, most succumbing to the blandly ubiquitous “natural causes,” and none living much past their 84th birthday.
The world shrugs, sighs, says “these things happen,” ah yes, but why do they always seem to happen to the rivals of one man? One man who is known to associate with hardened criminals. One man who has at his fingertips the very substances of which a heart attack is made?
One man, ladies and gentlemen. One man named Ronald McDonald.
I have a long and shameful history, it must be admitted, of crushes on right-wing political figures (the sainted Pierre Elliot Trudeau notwithstanding; as always, he’s a special case) perhaps because of my poorly-disguised thing for preppies, but frankly, above all of them (even Tony Blair who is, come on, right wing) stands one man.
On crutches. Click to enlarge; don’t you wish everything worked that way?
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