{"id":5621,"date":"2011-03-04T14:48:48","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T21:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5621"},"modified":"2011-03-09T21:02:24","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T04:02:24","slug":"vandals-and-varmints-and-mau-mau-oh-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5621","title":{"rendered":"Vandals and Varmints and Mau Mau, Oh My!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone spilled paint on the highway leading to our house and my poor daughter, driving home in the dark, didn’t see it in time to avoid it.\u00a0 The result was brown paint all down the left side of my car.\u00a0 Fortunately it proved to be latex and Polly was able, with elbow grease and a lot of Goof-Off, to clean it off.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Do people still name their cars? Mine is "Old Paint."<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sometimes you have to wonder if people spill paint on roads intentionally.\u00a0 Polly thinks so, but I’m not so sure.\u00a0 There are so many more surefire ways to damage cars, it seems to me.\u00a0 And if it were vandalism, wouldn’t they use a more lasting kind of paint?\u00a0 Of course it happened to Polly so she takes it personally.\u00a0 It didn’t happen to me, so it was probably just an accident.\u00a0 If I run over a carpet tack<\/a> on my bicycle, now, that’s vandalism … someone put that tack there expressly to flatten my tire!<\/p>\n

Polly’s reward for two nights spent scrubbing paint off my car is the use of Donna’s pearly-white Lincoln Town Car for a trip to Phoenix this weekend.\u00a0 I know she’ll be keeping an eye out for spilled paint on the freeway.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said some nice things<\/a> today about Al Jazeera, lauding the network for providing “real news.”\u00a0 You can anticipate a ginned-up wave of outrage from hate radio and Fox: first she lesbian-murders Vince Foster, now she’s in bed with Arab terrorists.\u00a0 Sadly, many Americans today think “real news” means “the kind of news we want to hear,” and that’s generally what American networks give them.<\/p>\n

You know how, sometimes, you just want to see some music videos on TV, and they aren’t there anymore because MTV does other stuff now?\u00a0 There are times when I want to watch straight news on CNN, but CNN does other stuff now, too.\u00a0 Stuff like Charlie Sheen, or Nancy Grace.\u00a0 If Al Jazeera’s providing the kind of 24-hour international news coverage CNN once did, then there’s a market for it here.\u00a0 I understand Al Jazeera is in talks with Comcast<\/a> about US distribution.\u00a0 Knee-jerk anti-Muslim opposition will, of course, get in the way of the deal, but we can hope it won’t stop it in its tracks.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

I’m watching a ground squirrel forage for spilled seed underneath the bird feeder outside my home office window.\u00a0 The creatures have come out of hibernation and we’ve been noticing them around the neighborhood, but until today not our yard.\u00a0 Every year I put off poisoning them; then they multiply and start chewing on the siding our our house and I’m sorry I dithered.\u00a0 Not this year.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Something else has been bothering me about Mike Huckabee’s shout-out to the birthers<\/a>: “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do Americans no longer believe the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted our forefathers?\u00a0 What the hell was Huckabee even saying?\u00a0 It doesn’t make sense.\u00a0 We fought a revolution against those British imperialists.\u00a0 Would not the Kenyan view of the British be exactly the same as ours?<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 There’s only one way to make sense of Huckabee’s remarks: he was blowing the racist birther dog whistle.\u00a0 His intent was to utter the words\u00a0 “Obama,” “Kenyan,” and “Mau Mau” in the same sentence.\u00a0 But in his attempt to spread a lie, Huckabee inadvertently revealed a truth: that conservatives know we’ve replaced the British as the imperialists of the world, and that revolutionaries anywhere are now our enemies, just as we were once the enemy of the British.\u00a0 Pretty heavy stuff.<\/p>\n

Mike “Mau Mau” Huckabee.\u00a0 Maybe he’ll go on Dancing with the Stars some day.\u00a0 I hope they ask him to do the Watusi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone spilled paint on the highway leading to our house and my poor daughter, driving home in the dark, didn’t see it in time to avoid it.\u00a0 The result was brown paint all down the left side of my car.\u00a0 Fortunately it proved to be latex and Polly was able, with elbow grease and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,10,16,2,8],"tags":[81,84,83],"class_list":["post-5621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bicycling","category-current-events","category-media","category-personal","category-politics","tag-al-jazeera","tag-huckabee","tag-mau-mau"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5621"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5669,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5621\/revisions\/5669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}