Sinatra: I'll Be Seeing You

If I could time travel I'd definitely stop in on this 1961 concert downunder:



Thanks for reading and have a great 2013.

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Johnny Cash: Away in a Manger

Merry Christmas!



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Steyn on Newtown

I was mildly heartened to find someone else objecting to the "these children are our children" line so frequently trotted out since the Newtown mass child-killings. From Jonah Goldberg's The Rush to Impose Reason on Horror:

Contrary to a lot of sloppy prepackaged rhetoric, these weren’t “our” children. They were their parents’ children. To claim otherwise is to try to purchase the sympathy rightly reserved for the grieving on the cheap. 

Right. Read the rest.

Then read Mark Steyn's eloquent The Massacre of the Innocents. A bit:

For those untouched by death this Christmas, someone else’s bewildering, shattering turn of fate ought to occasion a little modesty and circumspection. Instead, even by its usual execrable standards, the public discourse post-Newtown has been stupid and contemptible. 

President Obama is among those who have tried to tie the slaughter to a political agenda:

“Goodness,” Obama said. “If there’s one thing we should have after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important.”

“Right now what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit-reduction deal in place, make sure middle-class taxes don’t go up,” . . . “Focus on issues like energy, and immigration reform and all the things that will really make a determination as to whether our country grows.”

The need to compromise on the fiscal cliff “has not yet taken up on Capitol Hill,” he said. “And when you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple of months — a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory — the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good and not tangle themselves up in a whole bunch of ideological positions that don’t make much sense.”

It was a clumsy attempt, but it's the thought that counts, and his thought was "Never let a crisis go to waste." Stupid and contemptible, exactly.

More from Steyn:

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints, and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else’s, until after Christmas — except to note that the media’s stampede for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. 

Go read the whole thing and pass it on.
 
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All about him

Good heavens. Someone get out the hook. Obama's eulogy to Sen. Daniel Inouye is -- surprise! -- all about Obama. Though parts of his meandering anecdote about visiting mainland America as a child may be true, or truish, and his fondness for the motel pools and the ice machines is no doubt fascinating to his fanbase, his tribute doesn't seem quite suited to the occasion. But that's Barack Obama.

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A few words from my biggest fans

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More gift ideas

Just a couple of things to add to our longer list:

- #2 son asked me to recommend Clear the Bridge!: The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang by RAdm. Richard H. O'Kane, USN, which he says is awesome:


One Amazon reviewer calls it the "greatest submarine book ever written":

I could not put this book down. O'Kanes writing puts the reader inside the sub taking part in every detail of the Tang's patrols during WWII. I found myself refering to the maps every time he gave a description of the Tang's approach to enemy shipping and being able to see his detailed discriptions of the area thru the periscope. O'Kane's memories of details of shooting setups and the details of men at their stations in time of war is uncanny. This is truly a book that takes the reader to the dark days of WWII and the frustration of fighting with defective torpedos and equipment and the "jury-rigging" the crews had to do to make things work and in most cases make equipment better than what was issued. O'Kane was not only a great leader of men he is one of the great heros of WWII. It would be an honor to shake his hand. 

- Labyrinth: My kids loved this game when they were little. It's been unavailable for a while but Ravensburger is apparently making it again and a couple of my twenty-somethings are going to be getting it for Christmas. (Don't tell.)

Also available in an anniversary edition.

- There's a dangerous side-effect to Christmas shopping -- those tchotchkes you irrationally want to buy for yourself. I stumbled upon these this morning:

Only $21.17! But seriously, what would I do with them? I drink my tea from bucket-sized mugs (and those butterfly handles look really impractical). And they aren't even old. (I do have a few pieces of real chintzware that I'm very fond of but they sit hidden in the cupboard most of the time.)

What I really want for Christmas is a new sofa.

This is turning into a Pinterest page. Sorry, guys.

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Happy Birthday* Frank

*Belated. It was yesterday. But this is a treasure:



This wonderful song, written in 1939 by Rube Bloom and the great Johnny Mercer, easily makes my Sinatra top ten.

***
Update: Have another!

***
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Moran saga continues

Hello again. A combination of Obama 2.0, the deadly-boring fiscal cliff "drama," a new interest in family history (did you know that the last of the purebred Alderney cows were eaten by the Nazis?!), and a long Christmas gift list to figure out, has robbed me of the urge to blog. (I even missed Frank Sinatra's birthday yesterday, but I'll try to rectify that in a minute.) I don't know where I'm going with this blog but I'll keep my hand in for now with another charming episode in the Moran Gang saga. Jonah Goldberg:

Meanwhile, Representative Jim Moran is “embarrassed” by the revelation that his voter-fraud-orchestrating son smashed his girlfriend’s face into a garbage can and pleaded guilty to assault. The girlfriend appears to be doing what she can to make the story go away. But don’t worry, the phrase “war on women” may still only be used to describe people who don’t want to pay for someone else’s birth control. 

Daniel Foster comments:

Young Patrick was allowed to plea down from a felony charge and will receive probation. Call me old fashioned, but when you’ve compromised the integrity of a woman’s skull, I think you should be issued a jumpsuit and some soap on a rope. But — if it’s possible — that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is the spin coming out of Moran the elder’s shop.

Yeah. Read the rest. Shame on the ignorant fools (I'm being generous here) who reelect Jim "I like to hit people" Moran year in and year out.

Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

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Dreaming of a Gangnam-style Christmas

So the White House, and its concept of a Christmas-themed event, have come to this:

The South Korean rap star known as PSY is still slated to perform at the White House’s “Christmas in Washington” concert – taping tonight – despite the discovery of an anti-American performance the rapper delivered at a concert protesting the Iraq War back in 2004. The lyrics of the song, “Dear American,” include:

Kill those f***ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives 
Kill those f***ing Yankees who ordered them to torture 
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers 
Kill them all slowly and painfully

Bing Crosby he ain't. But he is sorry "for how these lyrics could be interpreted." Lol.

***
Update: Here's a photo from last night:

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Why Johnny can't learn

His education is being overseen by imbecilic bureaucrats. Case in point:

Seminole high school shut down after student brings mercury thermometer to school

No one was put in harm's way, but a hazmat crew was there as a precaution.

Lol. If the report is accurate, the school was locked down over an intact mercury thermometer. Did they think it was radioactive? I'd love to know the salary of the (undoubtedly) highly credentialed education professional who made that call.

Hat tip to Rush.

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Fiscal cliff drama not a cliffhanger

Two little words that make my eyes glaze over: "fiscal" and "cliff." I think we all know how this movie ends, right? Just look at the prequel. But if you can muster up some interest, read Mona Charen's What the Budget Impasse Is Really About. See also Charles Krauthammer: Obama Wants to ‘Drive a Stake Through’ GOP in Fiscal Cliff Deal. I don't imagine it will be that difficult. Just give them the stake and they'll shove it in themselves.

But Obama's congressional honchos can handle those details, because "fiscal cliff" makes the president's eyes glaze over, too, and anyway, he's busy. Andy McCarthy: Between Golf Rounds, Obama Honors Led Zeppelin, Dustin Hoffman and David Letterman

Good to see the president fully engaged on our cratering economy. I’ll bet that 3-week Hawaii vacation can’t get here soon enough.

I first read that as "catering" economy, which made a certain amount of sense, too, at least in Washington.

It's a comfort to know that, no matter how bad things get in the coming dystopia, we'll still be allowed to admire, from afar, our Really Cool President yukking it up with vintage British rock stars. I guess it keeps the baby-boomers happy as their wealth evaporates and their kids look for jobs that aren't there.

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