He’d hunted big game for years all over the United States. Hunting was a way of life to him. But, in all those years, he’d never shot a buffalo. He’d put his name in for the lottery that gave out yearly licenses to shoot buffalo, but year after year the winning number had eluded him. As he failed, again and again, his need to add a buffalo, an American bison, to his life bag grew to obsessive proportions. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He determined that he would buy a couple of young buffalo, raise them, and then shoot them. It seemed like a plan.
When the buffalo purchase was completed the question arose about where these buffalo were to be raised. He wasn’t a rich man and the cost to two baby buffalo maxed out his credit cards. The only viable option was to raise them on his front lawn in Moab, Utah. Accordingly, the buffalo were delivered and put out to pasture, or “out to lawn” as the case may be.
Besides grass the lawn also contained, courtesy of his kids, a couple of soccer balls. Shortly after the buffalo became his lawn ornaments, he was out walking among them when one of them discovered a soccer ball and butted it over to him with its nose. Without thinking he kicked it back towards the other buffalo, who passed it to the first buffalo who butted it back to him. An hour or so of passing and kicking the soccer ball between man and buffalo ensued.
When he went out on his lawn the next morning, they were waiting for him. One seemed to be playing midlawn while the other hung back by the water trough which had become some sort of goal. The forward buffalo butted the ball towards him. Without thinking he returned the kick over the head of the forward. No good. With a speed belying its bulk, the defensive buffalo moved quickly and butted it through his legs to the porch. When it bounced off the barbecue, they seemed to do a brief victory prance. The game was afoot.
Day after day, week after week, the strange lawn ritual with the soccer ball went on and on. In truth, he had long since pulled far ahead of the buffalo in goals, but what do buffalo know about keeping score?
In time, however, the hunting season came around. He looked out of his house on the first morning and saw the buffalo waiting for him, the soccer ball in front of the forward, the defensive buffalo pacing slowly back and forth by the water trough. It came to him then that he could never shoot them. It would spoil the season — and the soccer season, in the deserts of Utah, is never really over.
On a hot afternoon soon after, he looked out his window and discovered, much to his delight and his neighbors’ shock, that the two buffalo on his lawn were indeed male and female.
Now it is two years later and he has four buffalo on his lawn. He doesn’t hunt anything anymore. Says he’s lost the taste for it. His old hunting buddies come by every so often and razz him about the buffalo.
“You started with two and couldn’t shoot them,” one said. “Now you got four, and next year you’re gonna have five. What are you going to do then?”
He went to his garage and came back with a basketball.
I hate to quarrel with a great story, but…
1) No serious hunter would consider shooting domestically-raised game animals as a satisfactory form of sport.
2) Buffalo are really really strong, and really really disposed to wander. You couldn’t possible keep two buffalo on your lawn without fencing on a scale adequate to stop a tank.
I don’t have a problem with picturing buffalo playing with a soccer ball. I’ve seen horses playing with balls.
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UPDATE: Gerard van der Leun writes to tell me that he took the above photo himself and got the story from the horse’s mouth. I’ll be….
Detail, statue of John C. Calhoun in U.S. Capitol.
The little bolsheviks at the Oldest College Daily gleefully report that the inevitable has happened.
Yale President Peter Salovey and the other invertebrates making up the Yale Corporation on Saturday acted upon the recommendation of Salovey’s hand-picked committee of SJWs and re-named Calhoun College. In future, the Yale residential college formerly bearing the name of the 19th century statesman holding the highest rank in American Government of any deceased Yale graduate at the time the original ten colleges were named will be renamed in favor of Grace Hopper, a black* female who attended Yale Graduate School, taught Mathematics at Vassar, and then served in the Navy Reserve.
Yale’s traditional primary emphasis on the undergraduate college, in 1930, would have excluded any mere Graduate School alumn from consideration for such an honor, but Peter Salovey himself went to Stanford and only attended Yale grad school. Under Salovey, two newly-built residential colleges were recently named for Ben Franklin, whose only connection to Yale was his receipt of an honorary degree, and for some black lesbian (whom nobody not a communist had ever heard of) who went to Yale Law School.
Poor old John Calhoun has been singled out as an exceptional advocate of Slavery by today’s Radical Activist Left based on their hyper-simplified Howard-Zinn-comic-book view of American history. They haven’t, so far, figured out that Elihu Yale traded slaves, that Reverend Davenport owned slaves, that Samuel F.B. Morse was a keener defender of Slavery than John Calhoun, that Benjamin Silliman‘s Yale tuition was raised by the sale of some slaves, that Bishop Berkeley has a college because he kindly gave Yale a plantation equipped with slaves, and so on.
What is important about this farce is the tragic fact that both the Yale President and the Yale Corporation have proven themselves both too cowardly and too intellectually nugatory to stand up to the childish demands of the activist campus mob. They feel themselves obliged to follow the lead, and to take moral instruction, from the Radical Left simply, in the final analysis, because the Left has strong moral opinions, and they, “men with empty chests,” as C.S. Lewis put it, have none at all.
God help Yale, God help America, when the highest of places in the national establishment are occupied by such completely useless nonentities and poltroons.
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Correction: Grace Hopper wasn’t black, merely female. I was misled by her photograph in old age. Thanks to Joel Pomerantz.
Ads in twenty cities are offering $2500 a month on top of $50 an hour to protest Trump’s inauguration. The advertiser calls itself “Demand Protest.” Federalist Papers.
Who do you suppose is supplying all the money? Soros?
“This is a sham, your company isn’t real, your website is fake, the claims you have made are lies, this is a hoax. Let me start at the beginning, however, with your name, Dom Tullipso, which is not your real name. It’s a fake name, we ran you through law enforcement-level background checks and that name does not exist. So let’s start out with the truth. Tell me what your real name is.â€
Okay, let’s back up a second.
Carlson invited the man identifying himself as Dom Tullipso on his show to talk about this new group that’s popped up called Demand Protest. It says on the site, “When your strategy demands paid protest, we organize and bring it to life.â€
A few sites picked up on supposed ads this group was passing around reading “Get paid fighting against Trump!†However, it seems pretty clear this is a hoax.
The back-and-forth between Carlson and “Tullipso†was kind of amazing, and this was the moment when Carlson realized he was witnessing performance art before his very eyes:
“We are greatly, greatly supportive of national treasures such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Peyton Manning, and we really support their efforts to really get the truth out there, and in the case of the current client we have right now, uh, that client is, um, very interested in releasing the Roswell papers.â€
Oh, and in case you’re wondering if the reference to Peyton Manning instead of Chelsea was a slip-up, he did it again a bit later, after he actually said, “We shifted from being against Trump to Trump about 30 minutes ago.â€
But towards the end of the interview, even Carlson’s guest couldn’t help but admit his surprise that he was invited on TV in the first place. After, of course, he said this:
“We are now supporting Trump in the hope that the Roswell documents from 1947 are finally released and put back into the hands of Fisher Stevens.â€
The above linked an earlier story from this from The Verge which contends that the story is a hoax:
According to publicly available who.is information, although demandprotest.com attracted virtually no attention until last week, the domain name was registered last month. Despite having no discernible presence until after the election, the website claims to include an endorsement from an “unnamed†2016 presidential campaign chair, who allegedly called the group’s work “astonishing.†The page also lists a “copyright†of 2015 to 2017 for Demand Protest, LLC., and claims to have been extraordinarily busy in that time, racking up 48 “campaigns†with 1,817 paid “operatives.†Phone contact information leads to a dead-end voicemail box, and the group did not respond to an email.
The story gained traction yesterday, and was picked up by conspiracy website Infowars — where, even then, it was met with some skepticism. (“It’s unclear if the DemandProtest.com website is actually legitimate,†the site’s story says.) Still, other conservative-leaning websites with reputations for inaccuracy have joined in. “BREAKING: Far Left Group Is Paying Activists a Monthly Salary to Stop TRUMP,†the Gateway Pundit blog blared.
Deeply weird. It is still entirely unclear what “Dom Tullipso” and “Demand ProtesT” are all about, but it seems clear that they are not a subsidiary of MoveOn.org.
The fact that Menards thinks they can sell 8″diameter/9 inch high logs for $9.99….
Or that I saw some hipster in fake work boots loading 4 into his cart.
Or 1) that these are unsplit and so large in diameter that you will have to have a fire already going well with a good bed of coals before there is any possibility of getting any of them lit. They are too short for a fireplace and they all need to be split.
and
2) They are all birch (!). Get one of these logs lit finally, and poof! it will be gone in a ridiculously short interval of time.
Not only are these pieces of alleged firewood ridiculously priced, they are useless as firewood.
Commenter Hammond Aikes knows more about these than I did. I thought they were just logs. But “Bonfire Log” is a brand name. They are actually chemically-treated artificial logs, which will light readily and burn 1 1/2 hours in the Regular size, 2 1/2 hours in the Jumbo.
Author John C. Wright urges us to come together because:
The worst possible Republican candidate is better than the best possible Democrat candidate.
But it is not that simple.
One truth people need to understand is that electing non-conservative Republicans has bad results. Other people, it wasn’t me, elected Richard Nixon. Nixon created the EPA. Nixon recognized Red China and gave it most favored nation trading status. If you do not like US jobs going to China, thank Richard Nixon. Nixon also screwed the pooch politically and had to resign, in the process losing the Vietnam War and electing that nasty little peanut farmer in the process.
George H.W. Bush is a good and decent man, but he is a classic Country Club Republican. He is not a principled conservative. Bush I signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (which imposed mandates costing billions). The Siege at Waco* and the Shootings at Ruby Ridge took place during his administration. And he broke his word and raised taxes and, ooops! thereby elected Slick Willie.
George W. Bush is also a good man. I admire his character, and I respect him. But he screwed up as president. He fiddled around too long in Iraq, and he let the Radical Left demoralize Americans and undermine support for the War. He let the CIA run a disinformation operation against his own administration. He left office unpopular and in bad odor, and he did nothing to help create a Republican succession. He essentially handed the 2008 election to the democrats on a silver platter.
It always happens. Elect a me-too, not-really-conservative Republican and, as sure as the sun comes up in the East, you’ll get another big, fat, expensive and intrusive federal agency or mandate, and that guy will flounder around, losing the political struggle to the democrats. He will leave office under a cloud and, before he goes, the not-politically-engaged majority of voters will pull the lever for a democrat.
If this country is crazy enough to elect Donald Trump (assuming he doesn’t declare himself emperor and start ruling by edict), Trump may very possibly provoke an international trade war and a wave of reciprocal tariff barriers which will sink the whole world economy, and make the recession we have had since 2008 look like the Good Old Days.
You can also bet that Trump will expand the Federal Government and create some other enormous and expensive Big New Thing. A guy like him will have to make his mark on History. And you can rely on it that Trump will be so annoying, such an embarrassment, such a disgrace, in office that his election will present the democrat party with a “One Free Presidency” card, which they’ll use in 2020 to elect some really spectacularly radical and repulsive communist.
Politics is like football. There are times the wisest thing to do (however much you don’t want to), is to drop back ten yards and punt, and allow the other team to screw up. A Donald Trump candidacy would be one of those times. We would be better off having Hillary in there, ruining the future of the democrats, than Donald J. Trump laying the foundation for a dynasty of radical left-wing democrat presidents.
There is a small category of movies which fail to make much of a mark during their theatrical release; but which, when they make it onto television, and are available to be watched repeatedly, begin to commend themselves to audiences in a different and special way and which then proceed to metamorphize into beloved classics.
Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) is that kind of film. Nobody thought much of it at all until television networks adopted it as particularly Christmas-themed, and began making a big deal of broadcasting it around the holiday. Before long, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” turned into a regular seasonal American ritual.
“The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) was a failure in its theatrical release that did not even recapture its production costs, but Ted Turner (then owning Castle Rock, the film’s production company) later essentially sold the movie to himself (as the TNT network) and began broadcasting it in 1997 over and over again. The film slowly and gradually grew in audience acceptance as a sort of 20th century Les Miserables, and now routinely tops the IMBD list of most-beloved films of all time.
“The Big Lebowski” (1998) followed the same pattern, of confusing and boring viewers in the theater, but coming into its own with the aid of repetitive viewings on television.
Exciting news for Big Lebowski fans around the world as a sequel to the cult classic has just been announced.
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, directors of the first Lebowski movie, confirmed with NBC News they will both be returning to direct the sequel.
“We’re thrilled to be coming back to film a second part to this classic movie,†Ethan Coen said. “For years we’ve been staying away from doing this project but when we received this new script and the cast fell into place, it was a no-brainer. We just had to do it.â€
Gage Luce, who helped write the new script, spoke with CNN to shed light on the plot behind the highly anticipated sequel.
“Now 18 years later, Maude Lewbowski (played by Julianne Moore) informs The Dude (Jeff Bridges) that they conceived a son together and that he has been kidnapped. The Dude teams up with his estranged brother, played by actor Bill Murray, and fellow bowling partner Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) to track down the child’s whereabouts. Just like the first movie, there’s guaranteed to be plenty of beers, bowling, and laughs.†…
Accompanying the trio on their journey to find the missing teen is Jesus Quintana, played by John Turturro, who stole the show in the original movie. …
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RETRACTION 10/24:
Bummer! The story is not true. It turns out that it was originated by the spoof news site National Report which has a very annoying habit of purveying completely plausible sounding, but entirely false, news stories. National Report often fools people, and this time a number of sources believed the story and picked it up, including me.
On a high-speed train raveling from Amsterdam to Paris today, three American marines recognized the sound as the 26-year-old Moroccan loaded a Kalashnikov, and jumped him as he exited the lavatory. The gunman got off some shots while being taken down, injuring three people, two seriously. Those injured were one American, one Briton, and French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade.
Crew on Paris-bound train barricaded themselves in their staffroom and locked the door as Kalashnikov-wielding terrorist went on the rampage – leaving PASSENGERS to take him down.
And, as usual, the passengers were 3 Americans and a Brit. When an Islamic terrorist (Can I say that? The French called for caution before jumping to conclusions.) opened fire with an AK-47 (wait, you’re not allowed to have an assault rifle in France!) he was rushed and taken down by Americans Spencer Stone (U.S. Air Force) and Alek Skarlatos (Oregon National Guard) and subdued with the help of California student Anthony Sadler, and British national Chris Norman.
I don’t know if it’s true, but some people say that the Italian parliament currently passes legislation just so that its members can watch Maria Elena Boschi sign it. Maria Elena Boschi is an Italian lawyer, politician, and current Minister of Constitutional Reforms.
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Pshaw! Commenter Col. Goff provides a link demonstrating that the picture is a Photoshopped humor item, which has recently gone viral.
Esther Zuckerman poses as a SWUG. My commenters are often smarter than I am. One of them, unlike me, noticed that Esther Zuckerman actually used a picture of Tina Fey to illustrate the SWUG type. The “NBC” under the photo should have been a clue. Sigh.
The term goes back a couple of years, but the SWUG concept only recently attracted major attention as the result of a lengthy think piece in the Yale Daily News by Raisa Bruner exploring the culture, the pros and cons, and all possible nuances of SWUGdom, its relationship to Feminism, SWUGdom as fate, as life-phase, as life-style, and as identity.
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Yale definitely teaches young people how to play theme and variations on a concept, and Ms. Bruner’s piece caught the attention of one Justin Rocket Silverman (Now that is a millenial generation name!) who, writing in The Cut brought all this to the attention of the World Outside Yale.
Yale senior Raisa Bruner [is] kind of tired of the free-wheeling frat hookup culture that’s so compelling to younger students. The guys know this about women her age, she says, and so they don’t generally hit on senior girls. If she went to Sigma Nu, she’d watch her male classmates focus on that infinitely more fun classmate, the female freshman.
Bruner is a self-identified SWUG — a senior washed up girl. As she explained in a recent feature in the Yale Daily News, to be a SWUG is to embrace “the slow, wine-filled decline of female sexual empowerment as we live out our college glory days. Welcome to the world of the ladies who have given up on boys because they don’t so much empower as frustrate, satisfy as agitate.â€
She and her fellow SWUGs are women who don’t bother dressing up for class, or even for fancy parties (though they might still attend them), don’t seek out meaningful (or even just sexual) relationships, spend weekends at their shared homes drinking in the company of other self-identified SWUGs, and feel utter apathy about their personal lives — all at the age of 21.
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Gawker decided that all this SWUG stuff really amounted to just a pose and a demand for some attention.
Declaring “‘I don’t give a fuck’ at the right moment,” does not a “more complex person” make. Rather than embracing personal growth internally, there is a clamorous, exaggerated declaration that growing out of a social scene is the equivalent of being “washed-up” in the face of other’s halcyon days. Overall, SWUG-life appears to be a melodramatic desire to make an identity out of boredom and dissatisfaction with the collegiate social scene.
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Esther Zuckerman (Y’ 12), at the Atlantic, tells us that she was already a SWUG as a junior two years ago.
I first heard about the term SWUG during my junior year when I was working at the Daily News. From what I can recall, it was described to me as having been coined by a group of girls in the senior class, and I hated it. Yale had been debating treatment of women on campus all year—the school was about to face a Title IX investigation—and the idea of calling any girls on campus “washed-up” was to me offensive and demeaning (the specific words I used in a heated Gchat conversation), even if some fellow women had used the label on themselves.
But I changed my mind on SWUGs as I sort of realized I was one. Looking back through my Gmail inbox today, I crossed into my senior year, when, for me and my friends, SWUG came to be a way we described an attitude that we already possessed. SWUG meant getting meatball subs on a snowy night. SWUGs watched an episode of New Girl twice in a row with a lot red wine. SWUGs baked brownies. In our version of SWUG, an idol might be Liz Lemon, to whom Jack Donaghy once said: “Big night, Lemon? Let me guess meatball sub extra, bottle of NyQuil, TiVo Top Chef, a little miss Bonnie Raitt, lights out.” My fellow would-be SWUGs and I listened to a lot of “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” We cared about our academics and our future careers, but when it came to our social lives in the confines of Yale, well, we, as seniors, couldn’t care less.
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The whole SWUG business may have really been put on the map at Yale by a Daily News article by Chloe Drimal, published last September, titled: Profile of a SWUG.
You’ve all met one. They’re usually at penny shots promptly at 11 p.m. come Wednesday night, and are then found in Durfee’s around 1 p.m. the next day, buying every liquid they can get their hands on.
I was jealous of them when I was a freshman. They were on a nickname basis with the hottest guys at Yale and danced at the bar of DKE with their shirts off. But looking back on it, I realize the boys were trying to get with the freshmen, not the SWUGs. …
She’s the girl who Kevin, the bartender at Toad’s, hugs when she stumbles in Wednesday night. She’ll dance like no one’s looking. She’s a SWUG. She doesn’t care. Tommy at Box 63 and Compadre at Amigos will both give her free shots on occasion; they are not doing this for freshman girls — only for SWUGs.
She’s the girl in the Zeta basement, before the Coach Reno era, who is biting into a can with her teeth to shotgun on a Sunday. Although she could never beat the Zeta boys in a shotgun, she can beat most ADPhi boys.
She’s the girl who knows the code to get into DKE. She knows the code for ADPhi. (If any single senior girl has the key to Zeta, she may want to seek help.) Facebook bores her. She uses Facebook to find out different football players’ birthdays and plugs them into an astrology website to test their compatibility. She is compatible with no one.
She’s the girl who promised she would never hook up with someone younger than her but now finds herself texting sophomore boys who unavoidably turn her down. She thinks this is funny. She thinks about getting a vibrator; she may already have a vibrator. It may be better than that sophomore boy.
She doesn’t need to walk home late at night and chance getting mugged by a New Haven local because she will just sleep on a couch in one of the frats. The late night crew at G-Heav knows to start making her an egg and cheese when they see her stumble through the door, and sometimes they will allow her to dance behind the counter and crack an egg herself. Again, they don’t do this for the young, hot, freshman girls — only SWUGs.
She’s the girl who tells her friends she is going to have a “friendship night.†When they ask what this means she explains she is going to make a guy want her and then turn him down. She gets drunk and wakes up next to the guy she was going to turn down. She knows this will go nowhere, as she has already plugged his birthday into the compatibility website, and their score was a two. She makes up a short lie about a meeting and asks him to leave her room and then goes back to bed. She doesn’t return his texts. She’s a SWUG.
She is the last one at every party, because hey — who is she going home with? She’s not afraid to dance on tables and knows the top floor of any frat always has the cleanest bathroom. She is wise. She is hot, whether the boys believe it or not. She doesn’t give a hoot. She’s single because she wants to be; her daddy told her there’s more fish in the sea. She is a SWUG, and SWUG life is pretty awesome.
Drimal’s glorification of the SWUG made her in a campus celebrity, profiled by the Yale Herald.
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If anyone is not totally SWUGed out at this point, he can turn to some more discussions which appeared in the Oldest College Daily.
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On a personal note, we had hook ups at Yale in my day, but we did not have either the term or the identical hook up culture. I think that, as I remember it, quite a lot of female seniors in those days had long since taken anticipated Susan Patton’s advice and were in long-term relationships with Yale men.
The SWUG concept reminds me of the characteristic resentment of ordinarily-groomed-and-dressed Yale girls toward male friends’ dates from outside Yale.
The girl from Smith staying over at Yale would arrive at breakfast nicely dressed, in full make-up, hair in perfect order, and her escort’s female Yale friends and neighbors would glower and make faces, regarding his date’s superior efforts at presentation as personal affronts.
Yale girls all tended to think dating outside Yale constituted both punishable treason and firm evidence of bad taste. I once took a date to a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, in which my current wife was singing in the chorus, and found Karen was using every opportunity that my then girlfriend’s eyes were averted to make faces at me.
The largest US state is 66 times as populous as the smallest but it has only 18 times as many electoral votes. Wah! Boo hoo! It isn’t fair!
Some people think we ought to change everything so that votes in the electoral college come out the sane as the results of the popular vote. One way to do that would be simply to abolish history and redraw the map of the states, so that every state had approximately the same population.
It’s a spectacularly stupid idea, but it does produce an interesting new map and some very cool new states’ names.
“In an election in which Obama won the popular vote 51%-47%, a politically neutral division of the nation into 50 equal-population states would have given Romney 58% of the electoral votes and Obama 42%. Equal-population districts work against the Obama Democratic coalition.â€
OK, I’m willing to live in Shenandoah and give up plenty of history to avoid another Obama.
