[Rhodes22-list] test

Fri Oct 6 22:21:15 EDT 2006

Elle,

Look on the bright side, at least you were there.  I haven't had the
pleasure of meeting Elton but a day with Stan is a rare pleasure.  I'd love
to make the sail show. A few years back, I was visiting my son at Fork Union
Military Academy for parents weekend and we did a Civil War tour, which
included the power boat show at Annapolis (both sides had boats, right?). I
used the good weather today to move topsoil with a wheelbarrow while my
daughter slept, and, spent a great deal of time on the phone with my brother
discussing moving topsoil with equipment other than wheelbarrows.  We're
leaving for Orlando on Tuesday to visit Disney World - thought I was through
with all that.  Actually, I'm looking forward to visiting the 'Disney animal
thing' to see how the hippos I hauled from Switzerland to Orlando in 98' are
doing.  Then, off to Gulfport for bidniss.

Sailing will have to wait until November, but November is a good month for
sailing here!

Brad

On 10/6/06, L. Sailor <watermusic38 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Brad,
> Thank you for that enviable weather report...in
> contrast to that, up here  and in Annapolis (at the
> Boat Show) we had @2" of rain, blustery (winds to
> 20k), chilly. Not so many people...but a goodly
> number, many in flipflops & shorts.. (?).
> Elton & Stan were soaked & huddled in the cabin w/the
> pop-top cover on...but cheery as usual .
>
> elle
>
> --- Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Bill,
> >
> > Let me be the one to break the silence.  Today is an
> > absolutely beautiful
> > day in Tennessee, a perfect day for sailing.  The
> > sun is shining, the wind
> > is blowing, and the temps are in the 70's, but alas,
> > I'm playing Mr. Mom.
> > Since when did Fall Break start?  I don't remember
> > that one as a kid.
> >
> > Here is something from the morning's reading that
> > summarizes my thoughts
> > quite well (from the WSJ) about this whole Foley
> > mess.  Why should anything
> > shock anyone anymore?
> >
> > I feel so sorry for those Amish parents.  A long
> > time ago when I was into
> > raising Haflingers (an Austrian draft pony) I met a
> > lot of Amish at the
> > national shows.  Good People!
> >
> > Brad
> >
> > ---------------------
> >
> >
> > Return to the
> >
> Article<
> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/tides_of_confusion_have_washed.html
> >
> >
> > October 06, 2006 Is This Mark Foley Thing Really
> > Happening?*By* *Daniel
> >
> Henninger*<
> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/daniel_henninger/>
> >
> > <http://www.opinionjournal.com/>Is this Mark Foley
> > thing really happening?
> >
> > I woke up early the other morning after a bad dream
> > about Muslims routinely
> > blowing up and torturing other innocent Muslims. You
> > know the world has
> > turned upside down when your dreams spill over with
> > real problems and your
> > working hours are filled with the most fantastic
> > stories.
> >
> > It's hard to believe that the Foley/instant
> > message/congressional-page/GOP
> > meltdown story has run for a week. Other than the
> > slaughter in Amish
> > country, is anyone aware of anything else of note in
> > the world that happened
> > the past seven days? Dive deep enough beneath the
> > Foley flotsam and you
> > discover reports that North Korea may be preparing
> > to conduct an underground
> > nuclear test. China and South Korea are at this hour
> > trying to forestall the
> > Hermit Kingdom's nuke test and no doubt could use an
> > expression of support
> > and outrage from the American political
> > establishment. Sorry, they're busy
> > reading Congressman Foley's 1995 email traffic.
> >
> > We see also where Europe's envoy to Iran, Javier
> > Solana, threw in the towel
> > after "endless hours" of talks with Iranian
> > President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
> > who on Wednesday told a crowd screaming "Death to
> > America" that sanctions
> > wouldn't stop Iran from enriching uranium. Whatever.
> > The big news in
> > Washington yesterday morning was that the House
> > Ethics Committee sat down
> > "behind closed doors" to think about Mark Foley.
> >
> > We know when we're beaten. Bowing to the gods of the
> > news cycle, let us
> > undertake the great questions of the moment. Where
> > does post-modern American
> > ethics place Mark Foley's homosexuality on a scale
> > of 1 to 10--a 1 being
> > just another gay guy and a 10 being a compulsive,
> > predatory sex offender?
> > What might fall in between seems to have confused
> > Denny Hastert, two
> > newspapers, one TV network and the FBI. In the
> > event, Mr. Hastert, as the
> > point man, is being driven from office for having
> > failed, in hindsight, to
> > recognize the obvious.
> >
> > On this score, Mr. Hastert has our sympathy. There
> > is much in American life
> > that doesn't seem "obvious" anymore. Call it the
> > transgendering of reality.
> >
> > This compulsion to ambiguity is the reason that both
> > the politicians and the
> > reporters writing about the Foley affair have been
> > describing what the
> > congressman did as "inappropriate." Inappropriate is
> > the word you use when
> > describing behavior that falls on the scale between
> > 3 to 7. Mark Foley seems
> > to be the kind of guy who runs up a high phone bill
> > calling 1-800-SEX-GUYS.
> > That might have qualified as a 10 some 50 years, but
> > not anymore. Former
> > Congressman Gerry Studds had sex in 1973 with a
> > House page. He said it was
> > consensual. Even now, this is a 10. In Florida,
> > doing a 10 probably earns
> > you a johnboat trip to the swamps. But in Mr.
> > Studds's Massachusetts
> > district, it earned him five more trips to Congress.
> >
> > Mark Foley is on his way to oblivion after his 15
> > minutes of infamy. As luck
> > would have it, the originator of the increasingly
> > true prediction that in
> > the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes,
> > Andy Warhol, was the
> > subject of an excellent American Masters documentary
> > a few weeks ago. It was
> > impossible to watch this unsparingly honest account
> > of Warhol's career and
> > the era spawned from the 1960s onward without
> > thinking about the culture we
> > inhabit today.
> >
> > Andy Warhol didn't create the culture we have today.
> > He was merely among the
> > first to recognize that the magic carpets were
> > arriving, and always a fast
> > learner, he knew how to ride them. Whatever older,
> > earthly restraints on
> > personal behavior existed, they were falling away
> > fast back then. You could
> > get away with things. So you did. And did. And did.
> >
> > As a result, we live now in an era awash in cultural
> > confusions. The tides
> > bring in weird phenomena, like the Mark Foley story,
> > leave them on the beach
> > overnight, then drag them back out to sea before
> > there's time to make much
> > sense of what we saw. As often as not, we don't even
> > try. The Web and
> > digital technology have ramped up the cultural
> > velocity to warp speed.
> > MySpace, YouTube--the once-bright line between the
> > private and public
> > spheres has evaporated.
> >
> > This has had an effect on the way we think, or
> > don't. Clarity--thinking
> > clearly--is harder than ever to achieve, because
> > clarity assumes a degree of
> > general social agreement about things. For instance,
> > time was that most
> > people would agree that putting a crucifix in urine
> > and calling it art
> > doesn't qualify as anything but bad thinking. But
> > no, we had to have a big
> > argument over that. At the end of her current stage
> > act, Madonna makes
> > herself the central figure in a crucifixion scene.
> > No problem. Most
> > reviewers simply describe it, and move on.
> >
> > Challenge over the past 40 years became a more
> > powerful social value than
> > clarity. One of the byproducts of challenge is that
> > you don't have to think
> > very much--about the point or the consequences. Just
> > do it. The act of
> > challenge is its own justification. And one of the
> > byproducts of constant
> > challenge is aggressive confusion. Another seer of
> > the Sixties, Bob Dylan,
> > saw what was happening by 1967: "There's too much
> > confusion here, I can't
> > get no relief." Denny Hastert, meet the joker.
> >
> > Looking back again at Ric Burns's Warhol
> > documentary, it is hard not to see
> > in retrospect the inexorable dominance over time of
> > the cultural
> > frivolousness that emerged in those years. Politics
> > is especially
> > vulnerable. A political culture--the politicians and
> > their attendant
> > media--that would allow itself to set aside
> > everything else to spend a week
> > with the Mark Foley "scandal" is frivolous. They
> > look like dupes.
> >
> > So the Foley comet hurtles forward, no doubt into
> > the weekend, like some
> >
> === message truncated ===
>
>
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