Author: papabluesscrapbook

A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Michael Robbins has been the author and a contributor to six books. BUTTERFLY & SERPENT, the first book in a series, was published in 2012. Mike takes pride in being part of the American labor force for over 40 years. In his prose he strives for unity, not division; humor over prejudice; and heart over heartlessness. His art page can be found at Deviantart.com

RE: The Texas abortion fiasco & the Supreme Court

#TheDudeTrader1

I shared this tweet a few hours ago:

The most distress aspect of the abortion dispute, from the beginning, is that the onus is always on women. The rancor and punishments always directed at them and no responsibility attached to the male. Men have as much to do with pregnancy as women…

But no punishment is attached to their actions. Without their sperm, you wouldn’t have a baby, whether it was voluntary or forced on the woman. Oh heaven forbid we should ruin that boy’s future, he’s a good old boy, and she, oooo, she’s just a…oh please, let’s not.

None of the so called evangelicals seem to give a rat’s that a woman’s life might be ruined, or lost, because we know abortions are not going to stop. They’re just going to be rendered unsafe by a pack of odious, unfeeling justices pursuing their own agenda.

Make no mistake, no man is going to be charged, no billionaires will face consequences for taking part in impregnating a woman, which si another obscenity perpetrated by this generation of vipers.

I’d like to add that admittedly, I’m not fond of people, especially politicians with their false cozying up to the religious maniacs who have spent the last 40 years turning this country into a backwater as venal as Russia under the communists.

But I value LIFE, which includes humans, not matter how dense they are. Nobody in the GOP or the religious right/wrong seem to realize a lot of young women are going to die because of this decision–or NON-decision–by the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Maybe they don’t care. They were certainly fine with Donald Trump committing mass murder last year. I’ll be watching, and pushing with every other decent person, to make sure this ass-backwards law in Texas takes a dive, and to see to it that this SCOTUS does not take us back to the Dark Ages.

–statement by Sherrilyn Ifill, President & Director-Counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF)

https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/ldf-issues-statement-on-supreme-court-decision-in-case-involving-texas-abortion-law/

Review: George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (1949)

(Original printing by Random House in 1949)

One might ask, once you’re done Googling the given title, why the HELL would we be interested in a book published 72 years ago. That was before the Red Scare of the 1950s, before fears of nuclear war overtook all future versions of Armageddon. There is wisdom in old works, perhaps more than can be found in contemporary books. I found for myself this is a more timely text than was seemingly possible.

The back cover of the 1976 edition I read describes this as ‘a novel about a tomorrow that could happen today’. After the events of 2020 it seems very close to home. Our protagonist, Isherwood Williams, spends some time in a cabin in the woods recovering from a rattlesnake bite. He comes back to a city that appears deserted. Scattered newspapers, what’s left of them, tell of a ‘new and unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity of speed, and fatality’. Unlike in 2020, in the novel there was a concerted and competent government response, although this pathogen still wiped out the better part of the population of the late great United States.

I saw a lot of myself in Ish. He was well read, and probably more mechanically inclined than I. Basically he’s a good person trying to make sense of an impossible situation. At first he was all right with solitude, he could do without loads of people and their problems for a while. Peace and quiet were nice, and he was free to do what he wanted. Some inhibitions had to be broken, such as when Ish had to start breaking into stores to get canned goods, just for his own needs, now without fear of prosecution. Given that all means of mass production were essentially gone, canned goods were all that city people had to live on.

But no one can live alone forever. That’s how Ish was adopted first by a homeless dog, Princess, which lead him to Em, his future wife and the woman who would become this novel’s Mother of the community they gather together in an old California suburb. . As the first, original Mother, Em becomes the heart of what they call the Tribe, probably the most intuitive person and the one everyone defers to in matters.

This community Ish gathers, this Tribe, is comfortable, too much so perhaps. Even when a crisis arrives, when the reservoirs have dried up and no more water is to be had from their taps, it is very hard to stir the people to make an effort even to dig a well.

I can see this–I believe it. For a novel written seven decades ago, it has a clarity and insight. These are average people with average goals, without much ambition to rebuild civilization as they knew it. Ish’s efforts to educate the children of their small Tribe come to no avail, until he settles on more basic–and potentially fun skills, such as bows and arrows. And of course there is the Hammer, which Ish has carried with him from the beginning. This becomes an unconscious symbol of power, a tool as well as a faithful companion that Ish has to pass on in the end.

I would highly recommend Earth Abides. There is more truth, more humanity there than a lot of the propaganda we’ve indulged in for the past several years.

(The 1976 Fawcett Crest edition)

Lianna in the Microverse: Conclusion

Soon as this was over she wanted to get stoned again. So much had been real…so much surreal: the heft of Kali Ma’s sword in her fist, the cool solidity of the pommel. Cradling Lady Smirnoff to her chest, her weight in her four arms evenly distributed, drooping like a lazy cat…

Four…arms–!

The Professor and Dr. Chen bumbled into each other as Lianna jumped up. She tossed off the blanket, then immediately tugged it back to her naked chest. She took in the bland white medical cabinet over a sink behind the medics, the stiff sheets under her legs.

Dreamy, fuzzy images floated in the periphery of her thoughts; an emergence of some kind on the main floor of the observatory, her tail swishing between her buttocks. No tail now, she thought. Some wise ass must’ve thought it’d be a good idea to get her to the outpost’s dispensary. That was probably a good idea since she didn’t remember much after first she dropped Lady Smirnoff, and then collapsed herself.

She slapped her left shoulder, groping for ridges, skin folds, anything that would be indicative of a scar. She came up empty. “Professor, how many arms did I have when I got back?”

Their distended eyeballs gave the game away. Troopers that they were, they kept up the pretense. “Two, of course,” the Professor replied, lifting his arms. “Just two. Right, Chen?”

“Oh yes, yes! How many arms were you expecting to have?” His forced laugh reeked of fear and barely suppressed hysteria. And then Petersen burst in.

“Got the stills developed! They’re gonna love this at the…” he frowned, first at the two scientists waving their hands like livid sports coaches. His eyebrows raised at Lianna, nodding at her cot. “Oh. Hi, four-arms.”

That earned him the double sock in the arm that she’d been waiting for. “I knew it!” Lianna bounced off the cot, pacing the room despite the Professor’s efforts to keep up and drape his lab coat over her. “I knew it! It’s the first proof that the Hindu cosmology has a basis in fact! I gotta write this up in the Physicists Quarterly–“

“Lianna…”

“Mom would shit if she could see this! This would be the best–!”

“Lianna!”

Both bare heels slapped on the deck. The Professor stopped himself just in time, finally succeeding in wrapping his coat over her. “Your other limbs disappeared shortly after we had you settled,” he said.

“What, they melted?”

“No, they…how do I say this, dissipated. I can’t explain it better than that. They seemed to vanish as soon as you came off your high. Umm, how much powder did…?”

“A snootful.”

“I thought it’d be a bit much.”

Lianna crossed her arms with a smirk. “And if there had been evidence of a transformation, I suppose you’d keep it from me anyway?”

The Professor sighed. “Lianna, cultivating a personal relationship with Kali is not something I’d encourage.”

“But isn’t that what Mom and Poppa wanted to investigate? Surely that’s the reason they kept such extensive notebooks.”

The Professor nodded to both points, though his downturned bushy mustache suggested he now wished that he’d never let her get her hands on them, let alone follow the hints and star charts highlighted in red in the margins. ‘What happened to my tail? And what about Lady Smirnoff?”

“First, allow me to congratulate you on the successful conclusion of your extraditionary mission. She’s in the next room. Would you like to see? We can discuss the, umm, other item after that.”

Her deep crimson skinsuit glistened even in the dimmed lighting ordered for her recovery room. What was left of it, anyway. Lady Smirnoff looked like she’d been through a war and lost. Her right leg was a purplish stump below the knee. Her left side wasn’t in much better shape. The skinsuit over both her left shoulder and breast was torn, exposed to the dangers of the Microverse. In fact, her left breast appeared to have been punctured by a barbed shaft. Tardigrade, Lianna deduced silently.

Further puncture marks could be found in both wrists, another in her suit through the crotch. Some repulsion prevented Lianna from examining that hole too intensely. Lianna took a scanner from a young medic in training, which enabled her to probe the puncture just below Lady Smirnoff’s breast that almost reached through her chest cavity to her heart. Curiously, all these puncture wounds had been plugged with a flexible, indigo-tinted foam. Further proof, to Lianna at least, of Kali’s charity, or malice.

The medics stepped aside to let Lianna in, but not too far from the floating examination table. They were keeping her in an induced coma for now, they told her, pending a decision by the outpost’s chief of staff toward what exactly they were supposed to do with her; whether her punishment by Kali had been sufficient, if indeed that would factor into any subsequent care she’d receive at a better equipped facility.

Her hand squeezed the smooth blotchy stump, just above the knee. Lianna peeled back one of Lady Smirnoff’s eyelids. Her pupils had shrunk to tiny dots. Her facial features, usually so stern, was relaxed in sedated rest. She hadn’t been prepared for this, Lianna thought, her hand lingering for what little comfort it might offer. Sweet Kali, what a state her mind must be in.

“Baby, come on,” the Professor said, gently taking her hand. He led her along the main corridor to the Specimen Lab. Normally this was where cultures were housed in specialty racks, behind vacuum sealed doors housing the wall-mounted coolant cells. He fixed on the third coolant door to the right, grunting as he yanked the handle down.

A tray rolled out containing no racks full of specimen trays, only an extra-large storage bin, about the size of Lianna’s upper torso. With the input of a code, the top was forced wide open as a bushy something arched out of its confined space.

“It didn’t dissipate…”

“Presumably Kali wanted this preserved, as a keepsake,” the Professor muttered. “So we’d know this wasn’t entirely a dream.”

The thick fur yielded several centimeters to the touch. Moments passed as he watched her stroke the reddish streaks. The end where it should’ve ‘connected’ seemed evenly cut, or partly healed. “Did you guys…?”

“We didn’t have to do anything. It sort of popped off as soon as you two hit the floor, just as a chameleon’s would.” All latches shut quietly, efficiently as he tucked the fur back under the lid and shoved the tray door shut. Lianna drew the lab coat closer, almost disappearing inside it.

“Professor, this isn’t a surprise to you. None of it. I’ve given you probably the most absurd, unscientific reports you’d ever seen, about things that would normally get a gal shipped to the nearest funny farm. And you…you just accept them. How much did you know, before I started out there?”

He kept his hands in his pants pockets, then adjusted the online scribbler in his top shirt pocket with a smile. “I had a more adventurous youth than I’ve let on. Several of my experiences could be described as humbling. I’d like to tell you I was never…hmm, intimate within my interpersonal contacts, but,” he shrugged, “I could never lie to you, child.”

“But you’re never gonna tell me about those experiences, are you?” she asked.

Still smiling, perhaps a little more warmly, he held out his hand to her. “There’s too much to cover in one afternoon,” he said. She clutched the coat to her bunched in one hand, while with the other she took his proffered palm. “But I see no reason why we couldn’t start.”

Continued from ‘Summoned by Kali’: (link)  https://mike3839.com/2021/01/18/summoned-by-kali-a-story/

Here’s where it all began: (link)  https://mike3839.com/2020/02/11/lianna-into-the-microverse-introduction/

Barack Obama A Promised Land review

This has been a hard book to get through. It’s not a difficult read; President Obama has a way of drawing you in, making the hard choices easy to understand. His conversational skills haven’t failed him.

I suppose the problem, for me, was that I remember those years and the bullshit thrown at both he and his wife Michelle. For the first time Obama seems free to express his frustrations and disbelief not only at the continual obstructionism, but also his personal struggle with racism.

What’s also made it hard is the fact that the same dipshits are still in Congress, still spewing the same toxic nonsense they had 12 years ago. If anything, the recent crop of Republicans is 100 percent worse.

I’ve gone on but honestly, it is worth the read. We are guided from his early days as a senator, on through the first presidential campaign in 2008, and closing with…nahh, I won’t spoil it. Can’t wait for the second volume. Cheers.

John and Yoko on the Dick Cavett Show, Part two

https://mike3839.com/2021/04/24/john-yoko-on-the-dick-cavett-show-part-one/

May 11, 1972 [recorded on May 5, 1972]

The last time John Lennon & Yoko Ono came to The Dick Cavett Show, their segment had gone over and ran into a second show. John had been invited to come back and perform. Eight months later that came to pass, under very different circumstances. John was facing deportation at the hands of the Nixon Administration. Even worse might have been the choice of song John had come to perform. But that comes later.

Coincidentally his former partner in crime George Harrison had appeared on the show two months after John, and not long after his historic Concert for Bangladesh. Broadcast on November 30 of 1971, George was in his long-bearded, full beard & mustache period, along with his Indian guru Ravi Shankar. After the monologue he performed guitar behind Gary Wright & his band Wonderwheel on their song, “Two-Faced Man”. It was a bit of musicians returning the favor; after Wright played supporting guitar on George’s All Things Must Pass LP, George helped Wright record his 1971 LP, Footprint. Though George was in the background, his slide guitar was unmistakable.

George performs behind Gary Wright

At the time John Lennon was 30 years old, and George was only 28. Noting all the promoting going on with John’s last appearance, George said there was something he forgot to plug, namely John’s latest single “Happy Christmas”, which George was happy to oblige. He also believed we should show Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the United States. Well, soon enough…

An interesting conversation followed on the confluence of drugs and rock musicians. The first time he and John took LSD, for starters, they didn’t know it’d been slipped into their drinks by a dentist at a party.

At the time, the film for the Concert for Bangladesh was still in the editing process, but George did bring a clip that rolled in the middle of the show, from the concert featuring George & his all-stars performing his song “Bangladesh”. Ravi Shankar also performed, his face scrunched up with such concentration for a man playing such a relaxed sounding tune. Ravi too had a clip, from his film Raga, which had limited engagements in the United States.

Before John, the first guest on Cavett’s May 11th show was actress Shirley MacLaine, who was very different from how we know her today. She had already done one memoir at this point, and her movie The Possession of Joel Delaney had just come out. She turned out to be a very articulate guest. She had spent the past year campaigning for a candidate she ‘can’t mention’ on the air, because of network rules. She had travelled the country meeting people and had discovered a very different picture from what the media and politicians told us. Hmm, some things never change.

John & Yoko came on halfway through the show. Right off, John observed that Cavett had tossed his tie into the audience during his opening monologue. John said he was crazy about malted milk; “I was on cheeseburgers, but I got over it.”

Things quickly turned serious. “We’re really frightened because some people feel we have to leave this country,” Yoko said. They had chasing Yoko’s daughter Kyoko and her ex-husband Tony Cox all over the world. Even after they got custody of the child, Tony Cox ran off with Kyoko while fighting the courts in the Virgin Islands and Texas. Yoko hadn’t seen her own child in two years; John had to switch channels every time a child came on TV, because it was another reminder her daughter was missing somewhere in America.

Then there was the deportation case, going back to a drug bust in the UK in 1968 that was dismissed. The new charges were trumped up: “They’re after us because we want peace.” People assumed they were going to San Diego to cause a ruckus (they weren’t) and were even blamed for the Chicago riots in 1968, which was interesting since they were not politically active at the time.

At the 46-minute mark, we were treated to an insert. John had come to perform his newest single, “Woman is the Nigger of the World”. ABC felt this was a “highly controversial issue” with the audience, Cavett said, explaining the insert as the only option to a full deletion of that segment. And some complaints did come in, most of them directed against the ‘mealy mouth’ insert that Cavett was forced to put in.

Explaining the song, John said it came from a quote from Yoko in a 1969 interview. John was still a chauvinist at the time; they talked about it and had the song in their heads for two years. Then they joined their back-up band, Elephant’s Memory, on stage. John stripped off his black leather jacket and performed in a purple shirt. The saxophonist was taken in the spirit of the song, swaying in front of his microphone. Yoko had taken up a bongo, smacking it on the beat. John delivered quite a passionate performance. I think he even remembered all the words this time; he had a habit of forgetting his own lyrics during live performances. He wrapped things up by walking off the stage, with Yoko behind him, and sitting back down while the band winds the song down.

Yoko closed the show with her own number, ‘We’re All Water”. John doesn’t even step into the spotlight shining down on Yoko. You’d have thought people would have conniptions when she sang, “There may not be much difference/ between Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon/ if we strip them naked!” And there it is again, that shrieking we all know and ‘love’. Give her props for singing most of the tune. Between screams she yells, “What’s the difference? What’s the difference?” After spending most of the song in the dark behind lead guitar, John walks back from the stage, playing over Shirley MacLaine while Yoko shouts and John proudly introduces Elephant’s Memory.

Before closing the show, Dick asks if he’s met the best two of the Beatles. Surprisingly, John disagrees, saying he should meet Paul. “I think Ringo you’d have a good time with.” While this was the end of this show, John also had an even more fruitful week with Mike Douglas…

Available on: All three episodes featuring John & Yoko were released on a two-disc DVD, The Dick Cavett Show: John & Yoko Collection, @ Oct. 31,2005 from Shout Factory. George Harrison’s appearance was part of a collection released a couple months earlier, The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons, 3-discs, @ August 16, 2005, also from Shout Factory (the same outfit that archives the Power Rangers series on DVD).