Merry Christmas to you, Tracy, the rugrats, Ruby, whatever-the-cat's-name-is, and whoever else shares your space over the holiday. To all others who read this, happy whatever you celebrate, and if there's nothing in particular you celebrate, just celebrate being you.
First night of Chanukah and the kids are FaceTiming from Toronto, Melbourne, Manhattan and my basement! Harry and l are in the living room working out the terms of endearment!
How could you take off on the day before the Jan. 6 hearing groups wraps up. We need your analysis of what did and did not happen. Just kidding, sorta. Enjoy sometime with family. Have the kids write one of your letters as thanks to you for their flying in for the holidays. . Sally Dorst
Christmas morning at Kate and Tarp's, my grandparents, way up in the Blue Ridge. Buried under quilts, waiting to hear Tarp banging around on the coal fired furnace in the basement,. That meant warm air would soon came out of the registers. And the sounds of Kate stoking her wood fired stove where she did all her cooking. Pretty soon her stove would warm the water jacket attached to its back and we would have hot water, too.
Going up the hill to get a quart of buttermilk from Mrs. Darnell's buttermilk cow. It was years before I figured out that Mrs. Darnell's cow did not actually give buttermilk, Mrs. Darnell made buttermilk from the sweet milk her cow gave.
Riding with Tarp deep into the mountains to get his ration of moonshine. Parked outside the cabin, staying in the car until a man appeared out of the woods with a mason jar.
If you happen to have any southern West Virginia contacts, Bob, you can probably put your hands on present-day moonshine. I was amused when somebody here recently suggested that moonshine, unregulated, is apt to kill you. If that were so, some people I know would have made lurid headlines.
I do not wish to be the skunk at the picnic, but for you Noel Coward fans, I share with you what his Christmas card was EVERY YEAR! "Christmas is at our throats again."
I look forward to going through (getting through?) the new year with Lucian and all of you politically entangled people. Be well.
Many Seasons Greetings to you, Lucian and family! Hopefully, we all will be reveling in great news before the year is out. My very best to everyone who comment and follow you. Let’s strive for more peaceful times, together.
A house where I once lived had a grand piano and a thick Noel Coward songbook. I could read music just well enough to pick through most of the book, mostly songs nobody ever heard. Tom Lehrer's spiritual grandfather, Coward met every occasion exquisitely.
—and both gloriously irreverent! How lucky you are, to know Lehrer.
I knew that he's well into his 90s; before posting this, to avoid surprises I checked into Wikipedia, also searched to get the lyrics of one of my Coward favorites, "That Is the End of the News." I found in Wiki a totally unexpected connection: "At least two [Lehrer] songs were not included on any of his LPs, [one] a reworking of Noël Coward's 'That is the End of the News' (with some new lyrics)."
YouTube has a couple of interpretations. Stefan Bednarczyk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NEKAhIKulKM describes his as a hybrid of the Coward-Lehrer versions. The changes are almost too subtle to notice. My fave: After Aunt Isabel's shingles have met in the middle, instead of "She's buried in Devon/So God's in His heaven," "They took her to Lourdes/but she didn't get cured." Coward's in entirety: https://www.lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/t/thatistheendofthenews.html
Wiki quotes Lehrer: "[…] of his musical career: 'If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.' "
I loved the links and your faves. That last quote is pure Tom. Living in Cambridge (though no longer) I had the fun of hearing him play in friends' living rooms. I'm sure he's changed his arrangements by now, but he taught (mathematics) at MIT, then the next semester (to get away from winter) he taught in California.
He seems to have pretty much relocated to California in recent years. Wikipedia says he simply lost interest in composing—a shame for obvious reasons, but especially when you consider California as Lehrer might have filtered it.
Happy Chanukah to all who celebrate, and also to those who don't, and Merry Christmas ditto. Holidays bring out the best in most of us and IMO the more holidays we have the better. So Thanksgiving was last month but I still want to thank you, Lucian, especially for interpreting and demystifying military news, esp. about Ukraine. I hope that someday there won't be any military news, but since there is, I'm glad you're around to make sense of it. Thanks especially to Tracy, Ruby, and Tazzy for helping keep you on the level. On to 2023!
Your homestead looks cosy! We can’t do it without you, but we’ll be here whenever you come back, eager to read your perceptive insights and raucous writing that lights up the darkness.
whats Christmas without a trek to an airport. I'm at that moment when you have to face the reality that your child has other obligations and won't be there for Christmas dinner. oh well. knew it was coming but he will be here for Xmas eve and Xmas morning for scones and gift exchange
Dear Lucian - many thanks for providing a sane and intelligent space both for your very insightful analyses, and for us to vent. Merry Christmas to you, Tracy, your lovely menagerie, and your far-flung family about to descent on you. We will be hosting a Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day dinner, especially for holiday orphans in need of a place to go. We have decorated the house to a fare-thee-well. Your entrance and ours look very similar. We used to have 11 or 12-foot trees in the living room, but our age (and the incredible cost of big trees) has reduced their size by about 6-inches/year for the past few years. They are a lot more manageable now. Inevitable political dinner table talk will be interesting especially if the J6 Committee comes up with some new into, and makes recommendations for *Rump’s indictment. That would be all the Christmas gift I need. Peace and joy to you and all the subscribers here.
Hello, all, and Happy Holidays – all of them! Having been granted the ability to assist Mr. Truscott while he braves gnarling, snarling, holiday, metro traffic to airports, we elves have the opportunity to fill-in some space here. My idea sparked instantly, though I had to consider, research, and compose. I have been greatly troubled by the increasing number of threats and actual physical attacks against drag performers or their venues across the entire country, where such attacks have occurred in every state but Rhode Island, South Dakota, and West Virginia. GLAAD organized the data and published a report, stating that anti-LGBTQ protests may have happened in those states, but did not receive any coverage. Well, at any rate, 47/50 equates to a ninety-four percent attack rate in the “land of the free,” manifesting once more in physical attacks against New York City Councilman Erik Bottcher, whose council office was vandalized on 19 December. Additionally, protestors gained access to his apartment building, where additional vandalization and physical altercations with at least one resident took place. Calling the attacks “pure hate, unmasked,” Councilman Bottcher released video of the attack on Twitter, and two women were arrested at his apartment building on charges of criminal trespass. I write as a former drag performer at a club that was once on 53rd Street. Though long gone, the club served as a safe haven for the LGBTQ community where drag performances were, to me, always like live theatre. With that idea in mind, I devised a simple chart comparing theatrical performances to drag performances:
A = Always S = Sometimes N = Never (I hope this chart works when I post it)
Fundamental Criteria Theatre Performances Drag Performances
Actors assuming a character role A A
Make-up/costumes/lighting A A
Comedy/humor/pathos/emotion A A
Musical accompaniment S A
Entertainment for all A A
Public service to community S S
Audience participation S A
Brings harm to others N N
Thus, a drag performance is really no more than a form of theatre. In fact, RuPaul refers to drag as “performance art.” The perpetrators of the violence against Americans living their Constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment rights to speech and assembly are the same right-wing political agitators who disagree with others’ beliefs as they seek any excuse to carry their war weaponry into the street to threaten, intimidate, and commit actual acts of violence to invoke their own sociopolitical religious views on the larger population. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazis, Libs of Tik-Tok, and other heavily armed anti- LGBTQ protestors continue to assault people and their Constitutional rights. According to the GLAAD report, written by Mary Emily O’Hara, Rapid Response Manager, and entitled ‘Updated GLAAD Report; Drag events faced at least 141 protests and significant threats in 2022’, was released on 22 November 2022. The top ten states responsible for anti-drag attacks are Texas (20), North Carolina (10), New York (8), Illinois (8), California (6), Tennessee (6), Florida (5), Georgia (5), Indiana (4), and Idaho (4). In fact, one armed Idaho protest set for Coeur d’Alene this past June against a Pride event was successfully thwarted when law enforcement arrested thirty-one Patriot Front members who had traveled from ten states to organize an armed assault in the city. The most ironic, or moronic parts of these escalating threat to peoples’ lives, depending on your perspective, are the actions being taken by Repugnantcan lawmakers in at least six states and Washington D.C. Instead of working to protect Americans’ Constitutional rights to free speech and the right to assemble, Repugnantcan lawmakers are diligently striving to ban all public drag performances (Jack Johnson, Tennessee), banning minors from attending drag story hours or similar events (Texas, Florida, Arizona), classify drag as a “sexually oriented” business on par with strip clubs (Texas), ban all drag as a focus of the next legislative session (Idaho), and ban all drag events from state schools without any evidence any drag even existed at schools (Michigan). Let’s throw out the baby with the bath water. Further, a federal bill introduced in October, and supported by thirty Repugnantcans, would ban any and all drag from federally funded institutions, including schools and libraries. I suppose in their finite ‘wisdom’, legislators will have to ban all school theatre performances too since drag is very similar to theatre. These proposed legislative changes are tantamount to performing a delicate surgery with a sword instead of a scalpel. However, I believe they neither understand nor care about the actual connections between theatre and drag. Votes matter, as do the care and consideration of the white masked males ready to take up arms against fellow Americans who are different from them. To me, this all originates with the same old white men who want to prevent as many forms of social change from happening as possible in their blind attempts to hold onto the vintage perception of their 1950’s white suburban America where only white males held power. And because they can make law a living reality, they can fix the system as best they can against the latest group they seek to disenfranchise while finding succor with the likes of white males armed to the teeth, and only require a dog whistle to vent their white rage against who choose as they perpetrate their violent actions to establish white male control. In closing, Americans have the freedom to free speech and the ability to assemble. A drag reading hour at a library is a community service performed for the single group with no voice in the entire scheme of things; children who want to be read a story. White masked thugs armed with assault rifles have no say in these assemblies freely chosen by those who gather for a peaceful purpose. The law must be significantly present to properly honor the code to “protect and serve.” Armed masked individuals should not even be carrying weapons on school grounds. If this is to remain the country of the rule of law, then lawmakers must consider the greater American population who support the LGBTQ communities across this country and stop pandering to armed white thugs with nothing better to do than scare children at a library. Most of those thugs probably can’t even read beyond a 5th grade level. Thank you for your time; enjoy your upcoming holidays. I wish everyone the best in life, and even more in the New Year.
Happy holidays to Lucian and to everyone on this site. Thank you for your insightful analyses of all the crazy politics this past year. I don’t expect that things will calm down next year, so here’s to another year of crazy MAGAts and to the upcoming criminal trials of the twice-impeached defeated former guy.
Enjoy the downtime, and enjoy the family time. Peace be with you thoughout the season, and the entire year.
Most of us try to make a difference in the world one way or another. Glad to see that you don’t just try, but actually do make a difference. Thank you for that.
Merry Christmas to you, Tracy, the rugrats, Ruby, whatever-the-cat's-name-is, and whoever else shares your space over the holiday. To all others who read this, happy whatever you celebrate, and if there's nothing in particular you celebrate, just celebrate being you.
First night of Chanukah and the kids are FaceTiming from Toronto, Melbourne, Manhattan and my basement! Harry and l are in the living room working out the terms of endearment!
How could you take off on the day before the Jan. 6 hearing groups wraps up. We need your analysis of what did and did not happen. Just kidding, sorta. Enjoy sometime with family. Have the kids write one of your letters as thanks to you for their flying in for the holidays. . Sally Dorst
Christmas morning at Kate and Tarp's, my grandparents, way up in the Blue Ridge. Buried under quilts, waiting to hear Tarp banging around on the coal fired furnace in the basement,. That meant warm air would soon came out of the registers. And the sounds of Kate stoking her wood fired stove where she did all her cooking. Pretty soon her stove would warm the water jacket attached to its back and we would have hot water, too.
Going up the hill to get a quart of buttermilk from Mrs. Darnell's buttermilk cow. It was years before I figured out that Mrs. Darnell's cow did not actually give buttermilk, Mrs. Darnell made buttermilk from the sweet milk her cow gave.
Riding with Tarp deep into the mountains to get his ration of moonshine. Parked outside the cabin, staying in the car until a man appeared out of the woods with a mason jar.
Seems like another country to me now.
It IS/WAS another country.
If you happen to have any southern West Virginia contacts, Bob, you can probably put your hands on present-day moonshine. I was amused when somebody here recently suggested that moonshine, unregulated, is apt to kill you. If that were so, some people I know would have made lurid headlines.
Thanks for the lovely, evocative memories.
Thanks for your wonderful columns over the year. Have a wonderful holiday with your people. All of us are hoping for a good new year.
I do not wish to be the skunk at the picnic, but for you Noel Coward fans, I share with you what his Christmas card was EVERY YEAR! "Christmas is at our throats again."
I look forward to going through (getting through?) the new year with Lucian and all of you politically entangled people. Be well.
Many Seasons Greetings to you, Lucian and family! Hopefully, we all will be reveling in great news before the year is out. My very best to everyone who comment and follow you. Let’s strive for more peaceful times, together.
A house where I once lived had a grand piano and a thick Noel Coward songbook. I could read music just well enough to pick through most of the book, mostly songs nobody ever heard. Tom Lehrer's spiritual grandfather, Coward met every occasion exquisitely.
Tom Lehrer! I still know many of his songs by heart. —learned in high school, when I could still memorize things. Still relevant!
What a good connection you make between Tom Lehrer (whom I know) and Noel Coward (whom I don't.) Both witty and clever.
—and both gloriously irreverent! How lucky you are, to know Lehrer.
I knew that he's well into his 90s; before posting this, to avoid surprises I checked into Wikipedia, also searched to get the lyrics of one of my Coward favorites, "That Is the End of the News." I found in Wiki a totally unexpected connection: "At least two [Lehrer] songs were not included on any of his LPs, [one] a reworking of Noël Coward's 'That is the End of the News' (with some new lyrics)."
YouTube has a couple of interpretations. Stefan Bednarczyk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NEKAhIKulKM describes his as a hybrid of the Coward-Lehrer versions. The changes are almost too subtle to notice. My fave: After Aunt Isabel's shingles have met in the middle, instead of "She's buried in Devon/So God's in His heaven," "They took her to Lourdes/but she didn't get cured." Coward's in entirety: https://www.lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/t/thatistheendofthenews.html
Wiki quotes Lehrer: "[…] of his musical career: 'If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.' "
I loved the links and your faves. That last quote is pure Tom. Living in Cambridge (though no longer) I had the fun of hearing him play in friends' living rooms. I'm sure he's changed his arrangements by now, but he taught (mathematics) at MIT, then the next semester (to get away from winter) he taught in California.
He seems to have pretty much relocated to California in recent years. Wikipedia says he simply lost interest in composing—a shame for obvious reasons, but especially when you consider California as Lehrer might have filtered it.
Happy Chanukah to all who celebrate, and also to those who don't, and Merry Christmas ditto. Holidays bring out the best in most of us and IMO the more holidays we have the better. So Thanksgiving was last month but I still want to thank you, Lucian, especially for interpreting and demystifying military news, esp. about Ukraine. I hope that someday there won't be any military news, but since there is, I'm glad you're around to make sense of it. Thanks especially to Tracy, Ruby, and Tazzy for helping keep you on the level. On to 2023!
I echo all the previous greetings and look forward to a continued analysis of The Rise and Fall of the Trumpian Empire :)
We’ll find out more on Monday with the final hearing of the January 6 Committee.
1 pm EST!
Your homestead looks cosy! We can’t do it without you, but we’ll be here whenever you come back, eager to read your perceptive insights and raucous writing that lights up the darkness.
whats Christmas without a trek to an airport. I'm at that moment when you have to face the reality that your child has other obligations and won't be there for Christmas dinner. oh well. knew it was coming but he will be here for Xmas eve and Xmas morning for scones and gift exchange
Dear Lucian - many thanks for providing a sane and intelligent space both for your very insightful analyses, and for us to vent. Merry Christmas to you, Tracy, your lovely menagerie, and your far-flung family about to descent on you. We will be hosting a Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day dinner, especially for holiday orphans in need of a place to go. We have decorated the house to a fare-thee-well. Your entrance and ours look very similar. We used to have 11 or 12-foot trees in the living room, but our age (and the incredible cost of big trees) has reduced their size by about 6-inches/year for the past few years. They are a lot more manageable now. Inevitable political dinner table talk will be interesting especially if the J6 Committee comes up with some new into, and makes recommendations for *Rump’s indictment. That would be all the Christmas gift I need. Peace and joy to you and all the subscribers here.
Hello, all, and Happy Holidays – all of them! Having been granted the ability to assist Mr. Truscott while he braves gnarling, snarling, holiday, metro traffic to airports, we elves have the opportunity to fill-in some space here. My idea sparked instantly, though I had to consider, research, and compose. I have been greatly troubled by the increasing number of threats and actual physical attacks against drag performers or their venues across the entire country, where such attacks have occurred in every state but Rhode Island, South Dakota, and West Virginia. GLAAD organized the data and published a report, stating that anti-LGBTQ protests may have happened in those states, but did not receive any coverage. Well, at any rate, 47/50 equates to a ninety-four percent attack rate in the “land of the free,” manifesting once more in physical attacks against New York City Councilman Erik Bottcher, whose council office was vandalized on 19 December. Additionally, protestors gained access to his apartment building, where additional vandalization and physical altercations with at least one resident took place. Calling the attacks “pure hate, unmasked,” Councilman Bottcher released video of the attack on Twitter, and two women were arrested at his apartment building on charges of criminal trespass. I write as a former drag performer at a club that was once on 53rd Street. Though long gone, the club served as a safe haven for the LGBTQ community where drag performances were, to me, always like live theatre. With that idea in mind, I devised a simple chart comparing theatrical performances to drag performances:
A = Always S = Sometimes N = Never (I hope this chart works when I post it)
Fundamental Criteria Theatre Performances Drag Performances
Actors assuming a character role A A
Make-up/costumes/lighting A A
Comedy/humor/pathos/emotion A A
Musical accompaniment S A
Entertainment for all A A
Public service to community S S
Audience participation S A
Brings harm to others N N
Thus, a drag performance is really no more than a form of theatre. In fact, RuPaul refers to drag as “performance art.” The perpetrators of the violence against Americans living their Constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment rights to speech and assembly are the same right-wing political agitators who disagree with others’ beliefs as they seek any excuse to carry their war weaponry into the street to threaten, intimidate, and commit actual acts of violence to invoke their own sociopolitical religious views on the larger population. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazis, Libs of Tik-Tok, and other heavily armed anti- LGBTQ protestors continue to assault people and their Constitutional rights. According to the GLAAD report, written by Mary Emily O’Hara, Rapid Response Manager, and entitled ‘Updated GLAAD Report; Drag events faced at least 141 protests and significant threats in 2022’, was released on 22 November 2022. The top ten states responsible for anti-drag attacks are Texas (20), North Carolina (10), New York (8), Illinois (8), California (6), Tennessee (6), Florida (5), Georgia (5), Indiana (4), and Idaho (4). In fact, one armed Idaho protest set for Coeur d’Alene this past June against a Pride event was successfully thwarted when law enforcement arrested thirty-one Patriot Front members who had traveled from ten states to organize an armed assault in the city. The most ironic, or moronic parts of these escalating threat to peoples’ lives, depending on your perspective, are the actions being taken by Repugnantcan lawmakers in at least six states and Washington D.C. Instead of working to protect Americans’ Constitutional rights to free speech and the right to assemble, Repugnantcan lawmakers are diligently striving to ban all public drag performances (Jack Johnson, Tennessee), banning minors from attending drag story hours or similar events (Texas, Florida, Arizona), classify drag as a “sexually oriented” business on par with strip clubs (Texas), ban all drag as a focus of the next legislative session (Idaho), and ban all drag events from state schools without any evidence any drag even existed at schools (Michigan). Let’s throw out the baby with the bath water. Further, a federal bill introduced in October, and supported by thirty Repugnantcans, would ban any and all drag from federally funded institutions, including schools and libraries. I suppose in their finite ‘wisdom’, legislators will have to ban all school theatre performances too since drag is very similar to theatre. These proposed legislative changes are tantamount to performing a delicate surgery with a sword instead of a scalpel. However, I believe they neither understand nor care about the actual connections between theatre and drag. Votes matter, as do the care and consideration of the white masked males ready to take up arms against fellow Americans who are different from them. To me, this all originates with the same old white men who want to prevent as many forms of social change from happening as possible in their blind attempts to hold onto the vintage perception of their 1950’s white suburban America where only white males held power. And because they can make law a living reality, they can fix the system as best they can against the latest group they seek to disenfranchise while finding succor with the likes of white males armed to the teeth, and only require a dog whistle to vent their white rage against who choose as they perpetrate their violent actions to establish white male control. In closing, Americans have the freedom to free speech and the ability to assemble. A drag reading hour at a library is a community service performed for the single group with no voice in the entire scheme of things; children who want to be read a story. White masked thugs armed with assault rifles have no say in these assemblies freely chosen by those who gather for a peaceful purpose. The law must be significantly present to properly honor the code to “protect and serve.” Armed masked individuals should not even be carrying weapons on school grounds. If this is to remain the country of the rule of law, then lawmakers must consider the greater American population who support the LGBTQ communities across this country and stop pandering to armed white thugs with nothing better to do than scare children at a library. Most of those thugs probably can’t even read beyond a 5th grade level. Thank you for your time; enjoy your upcoming holidays. I wish everyone the best in life, and even more in the New Year.
Happy holidays to Lucian and to everyone on this site. Thank you for your insightful analyses of all the crazy politics this past year. I don’t expect that things will calm down next year, so here’s to another year of crazy MAGAts and to the upcoming criminal trials of the twice-impeached defeated former guy.
Enjoy the downtime, and enjoy the family time. Peace be with you thoughout the season, and the entire year.
Most of us try to make a difference in the world one way or another. Glad to see that you don’t just try, but actually do make a difference. Thank you for that.
Happy Christmas from New Zealand to you and yours, Lucien.
I have really appreciated your energy, industry, analysis and insights in each letter.
Many thanks. Keep up the good work!
Dr Dave Bibby PhD
Indeed!
"How sweet it is!" ("A little traveling music, please.")
“And away we go!”
The Honeymooner’s