slavery Archives - Page 5 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Black with a capital B?

Between 1850 and 1920, the United States census classified those of African descent as black, negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon — depending on the visual assessment of the census taker.

Abraham Joshua Heschel walks with Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Courtesy of the American Jewish Archives

Arthur the AmeriNZ sent me an article about the new Speaker of the Nevada state assembly, Ira Hansen, and notes: “This guy obviously endorses the current Republican meme about how the relationship of blacks and the Democratic Party is akin to that of master and slave. I’d love to see your take on that, um, interesting propaganda point.”

Specifically: “[Hansen] wrote that African-Americans are insufficiently grateful for being given their freedom: ‘The lack of gratitude and the deliberate ignoring of white history in relation to eliminating slavery is a disgrace that Negro leaders should own up to.'”

And from this story: “The relationship of Negroes and Democrats is truly a master-slave relationship, with the benevolent master knowing what’s best for his simple-minded darkies.”

Lessee, what do I think? (Roger works mightily to rein in his sarcasm…)

1. I do recall the national Republican Party in the past few years giving at least lip service to the idea that the party needs to be more inclusive. To that end, Hansen is a big FAIL.

2. We’ve been “celebrating” the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War for over three years in this country, and the (very imperfect) narrative that Lincoln freed the slaves, the war was fought to free the slaves, has been front and center. What the heck is he talking about?

2a. Virtually all progress toward freedoms for black people in the United States has involved white people, from the slave owner who freed their “property” upon death to the abolitionists of the 19th century, to the activists before World War II, to the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, some of whom died for the cause. Truman desegregating the armed forces. Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights and Voting Acts, which have been undercut in recent years. Hansen’s argument is a fiction, of course.

3. I could buy the idea that the Republican party stood for “freedom” if so many of their votes and policies haven’t been to disempower the poor and middle class and restrict choices (except when it comes to guns).

4. Goodness knows that the Democratic party in the United States is corporatist and that President Obama is likewise. But maybe a smidgen less than the Republicans, which is why blacks still tend to vote Democratic.

But I really zeroed in on Hansen’s use of the word Negro, which apparently he often fails to capitalize. I happened upon this recent New York Times article about the racial designation.

Between 1850 and 1920, the United States census classified those of African descent as black, negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon — depending on the visual assessment of the census taker. By 1930, the Census Bureau offered just one of these categories: negro…

(I LOVE that 1890 census. Seriously.)

In the mid-1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois began a letter-writing campaign, demanding that book publishers, newspaper editors and magazines capitalize the N in Negro when referring to Black people.

While initially resistant, many mainstream publications accepted the request, “including The Atlantic Monthly and, eventually, The New York Times.”

The article is pushing for the B in Black to be capitalized, as it is a designation of the race. I know this argument rather well, having written a paper for a college sociology class in New Paltz c. 1974; the paper was “corrected” for not capitalizing black, er, Black. This is one of those issues where I just don’t much care one way or another. I get the point, I suppose, but with substantial issues of racism that still exist, it just doesn’t resonate much with me.

An older article describes whether black should be used as a noun or adjective. Given my long-stated disdain for “African-American” as narrow and inaccurate, I’m not much bothered by the noun use.

Mass incarceration

“[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” [H.R.] Haldeman, his Chief of Staff wrote, “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Arthur, the Yankee Kiwi dandy, in response to my July 4 post, notes:

Yep, and now we have people like Bobby Jindal [Republican governor of Louisiana] — who always follows his party’s rightwing, never leads it—declaring that an armed rebellion by rightwing “Christians” is in the offing. It just keeps getting better, eh?

I’d be quite keen to see a post about government overreach. We hear that all the time from the right—the far, FAR right in particular—but I can’t recall ever seeing anyone from our side of the Great Divide talking about it.

Do you want an example of government outreach? OK, and it was massive, and it continues. Per The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, and other sources, there have three major enslaving periods of black people in the United States. A July 4, 2014 talk by Alice Green addressed this phenomenon.

The first period, of course, was chattel slavery, It was, in most ways, the easiest to define. When Frederick Douglas gave his ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ address in 1852, everyone was on the same page as to what was happening, even as they vigorously disagreed about what to do about it.

(Note that in 2014, an Arizona charter school teaches from a book arguing slavery wasn’t so bad.)

This period ended with the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, which reads:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In fact, it is that section between the commas that have been the problem for the next two phases.

After the brief Reconstruction, which ended by 1877, there is the rise of the Ku Klux Klan (and they are STILL around), Jim Crow laws, the 1896 separate but [ostensibly] equal Supreme Court ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, and Slavery by Another Name, picking up blacks for minor crimes and renting out their services to industry.

Following World War II, indeed, in part as a result of the war, the US experienced a major pushback against racism, with Truman desegregating the army, the Supreme Court’s Board v. Board of Education (1954) and other cases, the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956), Freedom Riders, the 1963 March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and various other activities that suggested that equality was right around the corner.

Enter President Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs. Early on, circa 1971, “the majority of funding goes towards treatment, rather than law enforcement.” In a test market the year before, a methadone program in Washington D.C. “reduced burglaries by 41%.” So there were early signs that treatment could work.

For reasons too complicated to go into here – read this The Atlantic piece – Nixon wanted to employ an electoral “southern strategy.” “In Nixon’s eyes, drug use was rampant in 1971 not because of grand social pressures that society had a duty to correct, but because drug users were law-breaking hedonists who deserved only discipline and punishment.”

But there were also more cynical motives:

Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue…that we couldn’t resist it.

– John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon on the rationale of the War on Drugs.

Did you ever wonder how this country went from a prison population of about 300,000 in 1973 to 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million people in 2008, the most imprisoned population in the world, and still over two million today? Is this a result of a sudden lack of moral character? No, this was a function of a decision to criminalize more actions.

States went along with this policy. New York State had the draconian Rockefeller drug laws “that put even low-level criminals behind bars for decades.” It had harsher prison terms for people who took crack cocaine (primarily blacks) than those who snorted powdered cocaine (primarily whites).

Once you have put people in prison, though, they never get out. Not really. Recidivism rates are generally high. Turning one’s life around is difficult with a criminal record and no job skills.

Did I mention that “African Americans constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population”?

Now this an oversimplification, but I think a lot of the problems with police overreaction with criminals, and with citizens who aren’t necessarily committing a crime, are linked to creating a criminal class. The excessive militarization of American policing is the result. A group of people is demonized, again. See, for instance, a woman beaten by a California Highway Patrol cop or the death of Eric Garner.

You may have heard about a new epidemic of heroin use in Vermont, upstate New York, and elsewhere. Most of the addicts are white, and most of the time, you see stories of their parents saying, “He’s not a bad kid, he just needs help.” While I agree with this, I wish the hearts and minds of people were so considerate towards black and Hispanic people with the same problem. White kids need help/black kids need jail codifies the mass incarceration scenario.

Not that white people don’t get caught up in the dragnet of excessive use of jail time. An impoverished mother dies in a jail cell over unpaid fines for her kids missing school. The Pennsylvania jail became a debtor’s prison.

I’ve noted recently how important it is to let people who had been in jail and served their time to be able to vote. (Note: I wrote that before you asked the question, but didn’t post until after.)

Also, this is why I tend to be in favor of legalized marijuana use, which is happening in Colorado and Washington state recreationally. I never “got” pot; the few times I tried it, it just made me sleepy. But the decriminalization of cannabis almost HAS to be better than Drug Enforcement raids.

The problem with the government’s overreach of mass incarceration is that it was so broad that it has become systemic. Now there are other factors, including education and poverty, but too many people in prison certainly affect these as well.

Since I started writing this, there was a stellar piece about prison on This Week Tonight with John Oliver. Also, How Race And Class Drive The Justice System:

Why are African-American youth 4.5 times more likely to end up in jail than white kids who commit identical offenses? According to Nell Bernstein, the answer is simple: Race and class determine who gets locked up in this country.

In her shocking new book, Burning Down The House, Bernstein examines America’s broken juvenile justice system and the toll that it takes on those who go through it. Bernstein explains why minorities are treated so much more harshly than their white peers, why the government won’t shut down the most abusive prisons, and how difficult it is for teens to rebuild their lives after spending time on the inside.

Finally, you should read Miriam Axel-Lute’s article on making reparations. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea, mostly because I don’t know what the mechanics of doing that look like at this point. She cites Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic, about which she says, correctly, “Coates ties together a number of disparate historical facts into a compelling, cohesive narrative about how this country didn’t just happen to have slavery until we finally got rid of it, but that our wealth, our economy, even our democracy, is the way it is because of slavery, and the racial violence that allowed it and outlasted it.” Four years ago, Coates opposed reparations.
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And speaking of education: Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells.

And actual slavery is not dead in America.

‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ by Frederick Douglass

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.

This year, in addition to reading the Declaration of Independence – I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere, consider reading Frederick Douglass’ July 4, 1852 address, only a portion of which has been included here. And if you’re in Albany, NY area, check out a speaker on this very subject this morning:

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation… There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence… Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier…

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers… To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.

Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness, and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back…

Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men, there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.

Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold, and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor…

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance…

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness…

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final”; not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times…

THE PRESENT.

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

“Trust no future, however pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act, act in the living present,
Heart within, and God overhead.”

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future… It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country today? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout—“We have Washington to our father.” Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

“The evil that men do, lives after them,
The good is oft-interred with their bones.”

“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?”

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

Read more HERE or HERE or especially HERE, which provides greater historical context for the speech.
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Frederick Douglass: New Tea Party hero?!

R is for Roger, redux

I’d been a fan of Roger Moore since I watched him as Beau Maverick on the television show Maverick.

As I’ve undoubtedly noted, the name Roger comes from the Germanic roots meaning spear bearer, specifically “famous with the spear.”

When you think of the first name Roger, who are the first people you think of? (I mean besides me, of course.) That was the question in this segment of the TV show Family Feud; I’m sorry it is incomplete.

Here’s a list of celebrities whose first names are Roger. The ones that immediately came to mind are some I mentioned three-and-a-half years ago when I last did R is for Roger, plus these that I inexplicably left off:

Roger Clemens – in 24 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Yankees, and Houston Astros, he won the Cy Young as the best pitcher in his baseball league a record seven times and pitched a perfect game in 1994. He would have been a lock for the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2013 except for allegations of him using performance-enhancing drugs.

Roger Federer – the tennis player from Switzerland had spent 237 consecutive, and at this writing, 302 total weeks at number 1 in the ranking and has won 17 Grand Slam singles titles. He’s considered by many to be the greatest player of all time.

Roger Staubach – in an 11-season career, all with the Dallas Cowboys, the quarterback out of the Naval Academy had a Hall of Fame career. I wasn’t much a Cowboys fan, since they were/are rivals with my New York Giants; nevertheless, I always liked him personally.

Sir Roger Moore – I’d been a fan since I watched him as Beau Maverick on the television show Maverick, then as Simon Templar in the TV series The Saint. But, of course, he’s best known as Bond, James Bond, in seven movies. See his other credits.

Roger Waters – he was a founder member of the rock band Pink Floyd, serving as bassist, vocalist, and principal songwriter. In the 1970s and 1980s, the album Dark Side of the Moon spent years on the charts; Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall were other hit albums. He has been performing The Wall all over the world without his former bandmates.

Roger B. Taney – he was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States (1836-1864), and the first Roman Catholic to sit on the Supreme Court. While he dealt with many other cases, I know him for just one: writing the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), that ruled that black people, who were considered inferior at the time the US Constitution was written, could not be considered citizens of the United States, whether slave or free.

Roger Williams – the theologian who left England, only to knock heads (figuratively) with the Puritans, and eventually founded the state of Rhode Island as a place of religious tolerance.

Roger Rabbit – he is the frantic, neurotic title cartoon character of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film also starred the live human Bob Hoskins, and Roger’s animated human wife Jessica, who is not bad; she’s just drawn that way.
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My review of the late Roger Ebert’s autobiography.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

July Rambling: the God particle, and Key’s defense of slavery

Rod Serling, Mike Wallace, Roger & Chaz Ebert, Banana Splits, Golden Girls, Cookie Monster, 1904 Olympics

Cognitive Deficit: How Budget Cuts Could Prevent Scientific Breakthroughs
“The Higgs boson isn’t just one missed opportunity – it represents how much the U.S. stands to lose if we don’t give our scientists the support they need. The Congress of the early ’90s might have pulled the plug on a $10 billion particle accelerator, but it’s hard to imagine today’s Congress even contemplating such a project when attempts to fund basics like unemployment insurance and infrastructure repair result in partisan gridlock.”
Also:
We’re ALL Immigrants, Higgs is Our Common Ancestor.
Why the boson is like Justin Bieber.

Remembering when Francis Scott Key, the man who penned “The Star-Spangled Banner,” defended slavery in court.
Key “had a much narrower conception of freedom of speech. He argued that the antislavery publications could be suppressed in the name of public safety since they might incite violent rebellion. He defended a narrower conception of American citizenship — that it was reserved for the native-born and whites only… White men did have a constitutional right to own property in people…” Applicable discussion for today.

US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) calls out the sheer lunacy of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) when she and four Republican colleagues accuse Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin of being circuitously connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The deplorable 1904 Olympics.

Jim Stanek, Disabled Veteran Says United Airlines Staff Kicked His Service Dog, Asked If He Was ‘Retarded’

Kevin Marshall collected the musings of Alan Ilagan, who recently served on the jury for a locally prominent murder trial.

Lynneguist’s mom died, and what you can do in honor of that.

The girl I met in Rome in World War II named Miss Mountain of Flowers.

Roger Ebert loves his wife Chaz. Wednesday, July 18, was the 20th anniversary of their marriage.

Wynton Marsalis on America’s Musical Classics. What They Are and Why We Need to Share Them with Our Kids.

The two Londons.

I got an invitation from Glassdoor. At my request, here’s Gordon’s post about it.

If you like classic television, check out Kliph Nesteroff’s Classic Television Showbiz.

Rod Serling in an interview with Mike Wallace just before the The Twilight Zone’s first broadcast.

Steve Bissette writes on Facebook: “I always thought Bob Marley HAD to have seen or heard the BANANA SPLITS theme. Compare Bob’s “Buffalo Soldiers” riff; —c’mon, don’tcha think so, mon?”

This is funny if you’ve watched too much Dora the Explorer.

Cookie Monster connects with his inner Carly Rae Jepsen.

The Superfriends/Golden Girls mashup.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN) on the Senate floor, eulogizing his late writing partner, Tom Davis.

A JED eye chart.

How to write 99 3/4 in Roman numerals.

That classic La maquina de escribbir.

When you write yourself into a corner.

FROM THE OTHER BLOGS

Change in credit card rules?

The new poll tax: voter ID.

Agreeing with Ronald Reagan – hey, it happens.

The Ridin’, Tom Paxton Blues.

GOOGLE ALERTS

In this short video, presented by Applied Transformation, Inc., Roger Green talks with Ivan Misner about Misner’s view on business networking and whether or not it has a place in formal education.

Roger Green, founder of Edinburgh-based Spotless Commercial Cleaning, has stepped down as chief executive after 24 years.

Roger currently serves as Vice President, Strategy, Policy Marketing & Communications for the HealthEast Care System in Saint Paul.

Salvation Army Honors Roger Green with Rare Citation.

Listen to 11 Even by Roger Green: My first full-length solo album after leaving the Czars, features Marc Dalio on drums, Eric Thorin on bass, Eric Moon on Piano.

(Limo picture c 2012 Mark Klonfas. Cat picture c 2012 Alexandria Green)