It has been an interesting year in the world of Spitfire's Hurricane. Just to recap for the masses: got laid off in February by the multinational financial conglomerate I had been working for for more than 3/4s of a decade, got a nice severance as well as stock options, took six months off, went to Costa Rica and communed with poisonous snakes, flying toucans (had no idea they could fly!), and monkeys that use their crap as a weapon (if you get too close to them, that is; they'll crap on cue and chuck it at you). I also wound up crossing paths with a lunatic from Virginia that, due to his intake of psychotropic medication in combination with prodigious consumption of alcohol, went completely wild in the hotel room next to mine, wholly destroying his room in the process. (He was subsequently deported, so it was rumored.) Came back to NYC, went to the gym a lot, started to get bored with my early retirement, then went back to work in September for different multinational financial conglomerate. As for reading, it seems that I've gotten through a record nine books this year, and I'm about a third of the way through a tenth. (Unemployment does have its perks, I guess.) Not small ones, either. The bio on Hamilton was almost eight-hundred pages, and Paul Johnson's epic "History of the American People" clocked in at slightly under one-thousand. At the rate that I'm going, I think I might be intellectually strong enough to tackle Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". I'm currently reading "Rubicon-The Last Years of the Roman Republic", by Tom Holland. Fun, fun, fun.
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In times of crisis, New York has a tendency of being a very interesting place to be in. I've written about 9/11 and its aftermath, but one time I wasn't in New York (meaning Manhattan, that is) was when we had a blackout in the summer of 2003. From what I've been told, it was great fun to be in Manhattan at that time. (I'm kind of sorry I was living in Queens at the time.) I did, however, manage to experience the transit strike last week. Yes, it was kind of a pain in the ass to get around, particularly in light of the fact that it took me two hours each day to get from Queens to Brooklyn by car each day of the strike. (Normally, it is a 20-minute ride by car.) It also kind of sucked that it cost me anywhere from $10-$15 a day to park near the Brooklyn Bridge. And the cold weather made it all that much more challenging. All that can't be disputed. But you know what? I rather enjoyed going across the Brooklyn Bridge every morning. To me, there is no more beautiful bridge than the Brooklyn Bridge, and there's no better view of the east side of Manhattan or downtown Manhattan than from the Brooklyn Bridge. Frankly, I can think of much less visually striking paths with which to walk to work to and from. I'm not going to say it was a wholly enjoyable experience, but it wasn't a wholly unpleasant one, either. The American Red Cross was giving out hot chocolate every night on the Brooklyn side of the bridge; I thought that was cool. I also thought it was cool that Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz was on a bullhorn every night welcoming Manhattan commuters back to Brooklyn. I'm not a fan of Markowitz per se, particularly since he's a lib and he once said he was going to take down a portrait of George Washington from Borough Hall because he "wanted to get rid of all the pictures of dead white guys" (typical lib thing to say), but he won some semblance of my respect for being out there in the cold like the rest of us.
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Saw the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk The Line" about a week back. Decent flick; Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon both did a creditable job.
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Here's a real random thought: How weird does the three-martini lunch seem these days? I was speaking to a co-worker who's about two decades older than I, and according to this fellow, this now-extinct institution was de rigeur up until the mid-to-late 80's, but was particularly common in the 60's and 70's. How weird does the three-martini lunch seem now? About as weird as seeing someone smoking indoors in a public building, I guess.
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I think the taste of most vegetables is awful. I've had people tell me that they like the taste of green vegetables. Bullsh*t, I say. I eat vegetables, but I usually need some kind of topping on them to make them even remotely palatable. No one REALLY likes green vegetables. Anyone who says that they do isn't telling you the truth. I know I'm right on this.
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I've 'ad enough. I'll see y'all tomorrow...or the next day.
1 comment:
Nothing like obnoxiousness to spice things up, eh? Fair enough, though. Let's look at some primary source material, versus what the long-forgotten Christian Union said about our first nineteen presidents; after all, if they said they were Christians in their own writings, I would imagine that would take precedence over anyone's opinion, no?
John Adams:
"I acknowledge myself a unitarian -- Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father."
[Sounds awfully Christian to me! To be fair, Adams was suspicious of what he perceived to be abuses within certain religious orders; it didn't, however, make him a "deist".He was both devoutly Christian, yet was an independent thinker. Read his private papers on this subject.]
Here's Washington, in his own words, speaking to members of the Delaware Indian tribe:
"You do well to wish to learn our arts and our ways of life and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do everything they can to assist you in this wise intention."
I can keep on going on, and on, and on, and on here, but I think you get the point. In the end, the opinion of the Christian Union, or anyone else for that matter, is miniscule in comparison to reading the speeches and letters of the presidents themselves. Primary source material will give you the real answer, and the answer is that your original hypothesis that the first 19 presidents weren't Christian is, at best, a tenuous charge, and at worst, bogus.
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