[Rhodes22-list] Swiss Hippos

[Slim]

Brad,

Ah yes, the Swiss hippo--sometimes called the mountain hippo--roams the
snow-capped peaks.   Their armor looks just like lederhosen and their mating
call faintly resembles Alpen yodeling.

I got a link to the article here somewhere....

Slim

On 10/6/06 9:21 PM, "Brad Haslett" <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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_was
>> hed.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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