h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just read your rant on Texas.
I've been here since 84!
Moving from Austin, to Georgetown, to Temple.
I kid you not, Dallas had some of the biggest potholes I've ever seen.
I was driving a Beetle with a six month prego next to me and the speedometer cable decided to squeal and there was no place to turn-off for fifty miles!
Kinda like the Santa Cruz to San Jose commute route....
But I agree with you about those damned access roads and those off-ramps where you come off at sixty miles an hour onto a two-lane, both directions!

But, on the other hand, I grew up in the People's Republic of Illinois and there are many things that I do not miss.
I've been trying to convince the wife to move to North Dakota or Vermont. I'm getting tired of the genetic situation down here.
Some of these people actually go to college to learn to be stupid.
And those are the intelligent ones.

What is Ozzy's favorite monument???

Every month or two I get another signature on my F-Texas guestbook. Every time I see that it has a new guestbook signature, I tell myself while it's loading: this is the one that's going to convince me to remove that site. I'm going to get a death threat or something, and I haven't stayed anonymous enough on the web to prevent some wacko from finding me. So far they've just called me names and invited me to perform various submissive sexual roles. It's no fun anymore, certainly not worth risking my neck.

I remember you talking about Austin. Are you still there, or Temple now? I lived in Houston for a year, courting my pen-pal. Then I clamped on the ball-n-chain and dragged her back with me to Michigan. That rant should really be called F*** Houston, but the whole silly, bragadocious personality of Texas deserved to be rebutted.

I've conceded to my wife that Detroit and some other places in Mich have worse potholes than Houston. I still think Texas has major flaws in the logic of their designs for interstates and curbs and things. I swear every ramp from driveway to street level has a minimum two inch drop in Houston. Seems like road crews in Michigan are better able to estimate where the road should meet the driveway, in order to prevent scraping the cajones off the bottom of your car.

Wait, if you think I got some parts right, then go sign my guestbook! I haven't had a positive response on that thing in months. Couple weeks ago some dude wrote, "You sure were wrong about Bush!" ugh.

Ozzy's Fave Monument = that bridge in Austin where all the bats fly out?

Advice to tourists -- don't let your cousin take you UNDER the bridge to go see the bats. Watch it from above or beside the bridege.

Would it be bragworthy to point out that I've been peed on by a bat before?

He was banned from San Antonio for about a decade. He moistened the Alamo one night in a drunken fit of inspiration.

Damn. I fail yet another pop culture quiz. My wife would have got it. Not because she's from TX, but because she fed on MTV all her young life like it was mother's milk, until I dragged her down into poverty [the level at which you can no longer afford cable tv].

I've read a lot of Texas history. The Alamo was not their finest moment. If Houston had had his way, the whole site would have been razed and the whole thing forgotten.
That kind of Fr. Foreign Legion fight against all odds down to the last man stuff has never sat well with me. A good Commander can take care of his men and the objective at the same time.
Of course, there is a rumor that of Crockett hadn't been very ill, then there wouldn't have been a battle. Bowie was just a well-dressed thug, like Austin, a land speculator. Bowie's brother, on the other hand, Rezin, was a marketing genius.
And John Wayne was an idiot.
I've studied the history of the much-vaunted texas rangers, too.

It seems to me that the real heros in texas have always been the women who put up with these fellows.

I might have to change my position on whether the Alamo is a cool thing to celebrate. All the info inside the San Jacinto monument/museum in Houston says Texans were only liberating the land from corrupt dudes in Mexico. I'm not sure what side you're supposed to take when both sides are unworthy of affection. What Would Emma Goldman Do?

I love the politics behind the San Jac monument. Apparently they drew up plans to build it higher than the Washington monument. Then people in Washington somehow opposed construction (either by witholding money or just bitching at them?), so the plans were changed. When the whole thing was finished, the Texans claimed victory, because somehow the San Jac obelisk is bigger than the Washington obelisk if you measure it in a certain way (from bottom floor of the museum under the monument to the very peak of the monument?).

"It seems to me that the real heros in texas have always been the women who put up with these fellows."

I don't write this very often, but you've earned it. LOL!

Now you've got me. Whom?

Emma Goldman was a semi-famous (infamous) anarchist from late 1800s. I could point you to some amusing MUG SHOTS of her on some websites, but too lazy to work around the h2g2 system that stifles expression of links. If interested look up "Emma Goldman" on some search engine.

Don't know why I thought of her first, except I was reading a essay by her a night or two ago explaining why patriotism is a bad idea. (Usually used to justify killing the patriots of other countries.)

If I had to simplistically pick one icon to represent my political views, I should have said, "What Would Noam Chomsky Do?"

(Who's Noam Chomsky?!)

yeah, but as a anthropologist he was a little strange. As a linguist, eh...eh. As a philosopher, ok.
Ah, Emma Goldman...ah, wasn't she deported to Russia during the first Red Scare in the teens, when J. Edgar was a glorified office boy in the (justice) department? She apparently had a big part in some union business that the big boys didn't like, but they couldn't kill her because she was too smart and they didn't want her to become a martyr.

I knew Chomsky gets a lot of press for being a linguist and activist, but I wasn't aware that he engaged in anthropology or philosophy that much, more than anyone else. I had thought that he was revolutionary in the field of linguistics, sort of turned linguistics on its ear early in his career. Maybe he just has a good publicist???

Right, Emma Goldman got deported. My main reason for admiring her is those mugshots. Typically monstrous hat and school-marm attire with spectacles hanging from her nose if I remember correctly, and she's getting booked for ??? I don't remember, what do anarchists get booked for generally. Her mug shots would look good on a t-shirt. I should probably learn more about her before guessing that I would agree with everything she said.

Oh, wait, you're talking about OZZY's work as anthropologist, linguist and philosopher! I especially liked his treatise "On Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: An Internetworking of Gestalt Re/actionist Tautology, Vis-A-Vis Pluralist Crunch Didacticism(s) Within the Parameters of This Fiscal Triscuit."

See, it's catching! You've been around me too long.

No, Choamsky (sp?) had a Norman Mailer complex. He had no trouble letting his thoughts be known. You can't be a good linguist or a pop linguist without being an anthropologist, degree or not. And he was as much a philosopher as Mailer was or Ginsburg...though I tend toward James Dickey and Gregory Corso, myself. I think Kerouac was a kook, like Kesey.

Goldman was jailed several times for violating voting laws. She encouraged voter registration and women's suffrage....She was often accused of being with out a visible means of support...a vagrant...

She and Mother Jones made quite a pair....

I think the finest thing he did was to hire Randy Rhoads...who is dearly missed....and I think Ozzy would not have a career now if it hadn't been for Randy's virtuoso efforts...

me go bed

Are we talking about the same Noam Chomsky? Leftist professor at MIT? Author of "Manufacturing Dissent" and bunches of other books condemning US foreign policy, US media, etc? You keep saying "he had" and "he was," but the guy I'm talking about is still alive, I think. I hope!

James Dickey doesn't ring any bells for me, but Corso does, very faintly. Haven't read Kerouac. Have read Kesey, but haven't worshipped him.

A year or two back there was a story in Rolling Stone that said some cable network was considering a sitcom starring Ozzy and his wife and kids, portraying Ozzy and his wife and kids. Would have been funny, but I don't know how they could have got any kind of performance out of Ozzy unless he ad-libbed the whole time.

I don't know how Ozzy managed to become a legend in Metal, or whether Randy Rhoades cemented his status. Personally I prefer really old Sabbath, but I recognize that Randy Rhoades could play a guitar just like a-ringin a bell, as Berry would say. (My neighbor, Noam Berry, the dope-dealing linguist.)

Night night.

James Dickey 'Deliverance'.

Ozzy- on MTV soon in a reality show featuring his family and he wandering around the house...no foolin! They've got six months filmed already.

For Corso and Dickey's poetry, I refer you to 'The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry', edited by Ellman and O'clair, a rather standard college textbook that can be found in most university bookstores considerably used. It includes essays on the life and purpose of each poet and I've gone through about three copies of it over the years,
considering a good text to be the equivalent of a good teacher, at one one-hundreth of the cost!

Was just relating what I thought I knew about Chomsky. Will now seek him on line....

Uh oh. This sounds like homework.

I wonder if the anthology I had for a Literature/Poetry textbook was Norton's? I remember hoping the poetry text would be one the bookstore wouldn't buy back, but they did.

I'm not sure if Chomsky wrote much poetry or fiction, or enough to be acclaimed for it. If he did, then his publicist is failing him again.

Glad to hear that they're going ahead with the Ozzy show. How could it go wrong?

That depends upon how one feels about Chomsky's politics.
A voluminous writer.

I feel the world would be a better place if the US could get Noam Chomsky as Secretary of State.