Afternoon folks!

Anybody out there enjoy blues harmonica playing? If so, it's a good weekend, there's a nice french compilation double-disc set of Little Walter and an album of crusty 1940's recordings of Sonny Terry - some of them with Woodie Guthrie. After that we've got an album of r&b from The Chambers Brothers and a change of pace with Malo. If you (like most folks) have never heard of Malo, if you enjoy Santana, you'll probably dig Malo. After that, we've got some blues rock albums from Robin Trower and ZZ Top's second album. We finish up this week with a fairly obscure album from Traffic.

Enjoy the tunes and have a great weekend!

Good morning! Hope all is well!

I hope hell has not unleashed by the time this is published, or any other time, for that matter!

I started to write this, noticed something just outside my yard fence, and it was buck. He was looking at me, looking for a way in. The stare down lasted 5 minutes before he trotted away.

Man, 35 yards away.

A song I grew up hearing:

Sometimes when you're watching history happen it goes by really fast. Like the last couple of weeks or so. If political years are like dog years, we all just aged rapidly.

I wont try to add anything new to the Trump Assassination^© story lines, just about all has already been said, but I do want to point out how the incident has proven to be a masterclass in marketing, symbolism and narrative creation and control, both before and after the event.

In a timeline of an event there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are predicated on the present. The present being that fleeting fragment of a millisecond in time that we recognize as the here and now, that swiftly renders the future into the past. It's that fleeting moment of the present that the story tellers use to define the past and the future to fit within a narrative. Never mind that you witnessed the event in real time, that's not what you saw, here's what you saw, laid out in a neat package of cognitive bias.

Package it in patriotism, repeat the media message ad nauseam, add in some slick AI imaging and babbling talking heads, and you've got a story line worthy of a TMZ gossip column.

That's how modern histories are written, and truth is dispatched right before our eyes.

18 July Open Thread - 'Eh'

I didn't and don't have much reaction to the attempted assassination of Trump. Mostly my reaction is, 'eh'. I'm upset about the man who died protecting his family. And the possible screwups, that's bothersome too. What really upsets me is what the shooting revealed, once again, about America. Our country is founded, and built, by violence and the guns that reflect that. RJ Eskow expressed exactly what I've been feeling, but couldn't describe very well, is his article 'One Nation Under Fire: Trump Resurgent'.

Eskow talks about how most Americans are 'under the gun', 'under the gun' of economic hardship as well as random shootings and so on, and about how America was founded in violence and how the wars America has fought in the last 75 years have all been driven by political violence, one way or another. I can't disagree; he's right.

From 2012, but it fits. An editorial cartoon from Cleveland.com.

~

On my way home from the farm. Everything growing just fine. The 4 or 5 inches of hay mulch is holding in the moisture nicely.
Getting up there to water once a week is working out.
I have an automatic watering system going at my home garden, so no worries there.