Feeding candy

     An interesting thing has taken place in the past year in television advertising.

    A lot of commercials have featured black actors and white women as married or living together couples. This combination is is of a much higher percentage than the previous year or years. In fact, this particular combination of married or "hooked up" couples has become almost the norm in television commercials.

    But one has to ask one's self, is this combination a reflection of the real world?

    Apparently, according to statistics and census date, it is not. 

    The fact of the matter is that the most common combination in an "inter-racial" marriage is between whites and Hispanics. 42% of "inter-racial marriages are between a white and a Hispanic. 15% of "inter-racial marriages are between whites and Asians. 11% of "inter-racial" marriages are between whites and blacks.

    But, in most of the commercials the coupling is between blacks and white, and almost overwhelmingly, between black men and white women. One very rarely sees a commercial featuring a white/Asian couple, and almost a white/Hispanic couple.

    Why is this? Could it be that the advertisers base their advertising on only popular culture in which rap stars and black athletes seem to prefer marrying whites? Is it because of the BLM movement in which blacks are preferred and must be portrayed despite the 13% of the population because some black will pitch a bitch if they are not "represented?" Is it because blacks are more influenced by television commercials than any other race?

    These are questions that are better addressed by honest sociologists than this uneducated writer. But it is a question that deserves to be addressed simply because the advertisement industry is portraying something that just not exist to the point that it insists that it portrays.

    Black men, according to the commercials, are the desired love interest of white women almost over white men. In other words, suddenly black men are the desired demographic for some reason.

    Writing as an uneducated boob, this writer can only assume that the reason is because, despite being the third down the frequency of "inter-racial" marriage, black men will scream because they are not represented as number one.

Stay in your own lane, cracker!

     Well, dear reader, it's been a while since yours has polluted the Internet with his thoughts. This is not because of any form of censorship or because this writer has died. The reason is that the world has become so bizarre in the past months that choosing a topic to rant upon has been a bit like letting a kid loose at the Hersey candy plant and telling him to only pick one candy bar. One becomes frozen with indecision.

    Well, a bit of time has passed, and while the idiocy has not passed like a tropical storm, your faithful writer has become accustomed to the heaving of the seas and has finally gotten past the point of sea-sickness.

    During the inauguration of of President Joseph Biden (otherwise known as Lunch-box Joe, Creepy Joe, or Grandpa Gropes) a young African-American woman (to use the current patois) read what was purported to be a poem that got the intellectual class clapping like seals begging for a sardine. Now your faithful writer admits that he has been unable to appreciate any poetry since the passing of Ogden Nash, so he is no judge of poetry but he knows when words are put together that make a bit of sense and make a statement instead of words strung together like the diary entry of the typical self-important thirteen year old girl who fancies herself the 21st century Emily Dickinson. The chattering classes thought the thing stunning and brave and forward looking. Your friend thought it banal and trite.

    Be this as it may, the young woman, Amanda Gorman by name, is now the poetic toast of the town. A book of her poetry has been published to high acclaim by the chattering class. Not only has the book been published, but it is being translated into other language. Even Dutch.

    And here's the grit in the gears. The originally designated Dutch translator has, after a bit of a dust up, has removed herself from translating the book of poetry. Why? you may ask. Is her English not up to snuff? Is her mastery of the Dutch language that of an uneducated potato farmer or barge pilot? Has she no experience in translating English poetry into Dutch? The answer to all these questions is no. The Dutch translator has a perfect command of the English language, as well as her native language, and she's translated English poetry to Dutch successfully in the past. The reason that she earned the ire of the politically correct/woke brigade is simply because she is a white woman translating the work of a black woman.

    Apparently, among the more enlightened among us, a white woman is unable to translate the "experience" of a young black woman in the same way that a black woman living in the Netherlands is able to. The words and the plain sense of the words mean nothing. What is important in the translation is that a black woman living in the Netherlands, who has never lived the African-American experience can somehow read and interpret the writings of an African-American than a white Dutch woman can.

    It's all about skin color, you see because skin color is the datum from which everything is measured. And so that contention changes everything. A translation of the New Testament, for example, into Gujarati or Swahili, Chinese or Inuit, could only be done by a Middle Easterner who speaks Aramaic. Want to see a Shakespeare play in Tokyo? It had better have been translated into Japanese by an Englishman or Englishwoman. In fact, one could argue that no white person has any business reading the works of a black person, or vice-versa, because the reader does not have the life experience of the writer. One could even go as far as to say that no person of color should listen to Bach or that any whitey-bird should listen to Scott Joplin because Bach came out of white Europe with a white European sensibility and Joplin came out of black America with a black American sensibility. In other words, there is no crossing of the cultural color barrier. It's all silly and stupid, as much of contemporary popular and intellectual culture is, and it's enough to gag a maggot.

It's Not All About You.

      An open letter to wokesters, the BLM crowd, and self hating Whites:

      Dear Black racists, Leftwaffe, and the ignorant "educators" at colleges and universities,

     This post may result in this writer getting "cancelled', but, in truth, there is nothing to cancel. This opinionist is neither a person of fame nor the employee of any company. In fact, he does not own his own business that can be boycotted and "shamed", nor any sort of half famous personality who can be brought to his knees by your silly, stupid, and in fact, evil Jacobinism, illiberality, and ignorance. This writer is a free man holding independent thoughts and opinions and beliefs, and he really doesn't much care what you think of him.

     Having stated the above, please, if you have any sense of self respect and self worth, stop making English literature about you. And by "you" it is meant specifically Blacks who look for Blackness in works ranging from the time of Beowulf to the 1950s in England. Almost overwhelmingly none of that literature has to do with you or Black people despite what you have seen in moving picture portrayals of such films as the awful Robin Hood Prince of Thieves in which one of the Merry Men was a Blackamoor. The Robin Hood legend started before there were, or at least, very few Blacks in England. And those few Blacks were either ambassadors or servants. No Robin Hood legend, and there are many of them, feature, or even mention a Black or a Blackamoor member of the Merry Men.

     But, of course, the Robin Hood legend is a "folk" legend, so, therefore, is not "literature" in the proper sense. But to inject a sense of race into the legend (other than Norman versus Saxon) is just plain stupid. It would be like claiming Ulysses S. Grant's chief strategist was a Japanese samurai because Japanese-Americans feel that they were left out of the history of the Civil War.

     English literature was not written with Black people in mind, despite Shakespeare's Othello. The character of Othello was a type loosely based on perhaps a historical character. And in the play Othello was not the victim of racism in any way. He was the man in power and the man able to punish. The only, and this may appear to be a racist statement, Black thing about him was that like many Black men who have married, or have relations with White women, he is jealous of his privilege and sees every White man as a threat. And he is willing to do away with her once he believes that he has "dissed" her. But that is a more universal psychopathic behaviour than it is Black behaviour.

     Traditional English literature has nothing to do with Black people. In fact, it hardly mentions Black people at all. Austen's Mansfield Park mentions the slave trade in passing, but that is all it does. From Beowulf to Look Back In Anger, with the exception of Othello, do not mention Black people except, at the best, in a passing manner. 

     And why is this? The answer is so simple that even an idiot child can "get" it. That literature was written by and for an English readership living in an England or Great Britain the opening of the gates of colonial immigration in the late 1950s. Those novels, plays and poems were written by and for Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Normans, Anglo-Celts. They were not written for Black people or by Black people. To pretend otherwise is to pretend that a purchase from Wal-Mart equals a purchase from Nordstrom (as far as it has fallen) or Rolex. You can pretend that your Timex watch looks like a Rolex, or pretend that your Rolex is a Timex, but you're fooling yourself.

     So please, Black people, the Leftwaffe, and the woke, please don't read English literature and try to make it something that it is not.  Enjoy it, if you can, for what it was and is; story telling and eloquence from the British Isle about the people of the British Isles (and by extension, America pre 1940). Those works were not written for, or about you. Don't try to make Tolkien's Orcs into Black people and bitch about it when , in fact much of the Lord of the Rings saga was based on Nordic mythology. You make yourselves look silly, egotistical, and stupid like a person trying to sneak a tamale into a Cornish pastie competition.

     Look at your own literature, whether African or Black-American and champion that instead of trying to termite literary traditions of the British and other Europeans. Quit riding on the backs of the people you purport to hate. It does nothing but shows your weakness.

    

Be Careful

     It's been another noisy week here at Bloody Nib Manor. A cohort of the local yokels continue, in fact, have increased, their nightly celebration of nothing at all by lighting fireworks of various types that are illegal in the county; quarter sticks of dynamite, half sticks of dynamite, aerial mortars, and sky rockets. It has become tiresome. One, in a cooling evening, is reading the works of Montaigne, John Owen, or John Locke, only to be interrupted by an explosion of some sort caused by a person who is barely able to speak or read the King's English or appreciate what Independence Day is all about. But that's modern America: the disruptive are listened to while the maintaining are ignored.
      Speaking of which, dear reader and friend, have you noticed that during the current racial strife that caucasians, specifically those of European heritage, (and even some Asians, for some reason) are expected apologize to those of African heritage for the sins of not their fathers and not their grandfathers, and perhaps not even their great-grandfathers regarding slavery and racism?
     Now, consider this dear reader. The majority of those of European heritage arrived in the United States after the Civil War (this writer is outside that group since his forebearers arrived in the Americas in the 1600s-- all of them) and none of those people owned or even had the opportunity to involve themselves in the practice of chattel slavery (regarding which this some of this writer's ancestors were indentured servants and some of them may have owned African slaves in the 18th century, but all, as far is as known, fought for the Union during the Civil War). In other words, most of those of European heritage, whether Irish, Swedish, Italian, German, etc. never had an ancestor who owned a slave simply because when their ancestors came to these blessed shores there was no such thing as slavery in the United States. And even for those who are descended from slave owners, their family has not owned a slave since 1865. That is 155 years. Think about it.; 155 years. Outside of people who read old books like Dickens, Austen, and Irving, very few people know anything about life 155 years ago. Ask yourself, dear friend, can you name a song that was popular in the United States 155 years ago? In fact, can you call to mind the old motto for Camel cigarettes or Bon Ami scouring powder?
     It is an undisputed fact that African-Americans were discriminated against up until the 1960s by some people of European heritage, as were Asian people from the 1840s until the 1950s and perhaps later. But that discrimination was not institutional after the late 1950s. That discrimination was based on personal prejudice, not law. A nation cannot make a law that applies on the persona;l level against personal prejudice as much as it would like to do. People have their oddities, whether it be that Jews are cheap and grasping, Japanese are sneaky bastards, Mexicans are lazy, Poles and Swedes are blockheads, or that the English are as cold and cruel as ice. Those are things that come down from families and don't matter in the larger world. Even the most anti-Black person, in public, will give an African-American a job simply because of law if that person can do the job. That person may keep a closer eye on the African-American to make sure that he or she is not doing something that the employer assumes that the person will do that is an infraction of the company policy than he will for a white trash snuff dipping Confederate flag waving cracker and be quicker to fire the Black person fro an infraction than the Redneck. To be short, haters gonna hate. But in modern America, there may be a lot of haters of various races, when it comes down to cases it's all about making a nut to store into the business. A Ku Kluxer will sell Slim JIms or Cherry Coke or a house to a Black person if it means a bit of money into the bank account.
      Now, let's get down to cases.
     During the current unrest the Black Lives Matter and their allies and tools have demanded that white people people apologize for the sins of what the BLM crowed assumes are their fathers. And too many people have done so. They've bent the knee to BLM as did many of the Hebrews did during the Babylonian captivity. They have bent their knee to the modern Baal. They have denied themselves in the hope that they will not be considered "racist" by a group of people who see everything through a racial lens as do the few remaining Ku Klux Klan members or neo-Nazis. They have apologized for things that they, in reality, have no need, in fact, no right, to apologize for. They are apologizing for people who are long dead and who may have had reasons for their prejudice. Can one really apologize for one's great grandfather to one's cousin when it is found out that the great grandfather was a rounder and perhaps wife beater? One might as well apologize for the local feral pigeon crapping on the neighbor's car because the bird usually sits on one's phone line.
     And apologizes are all too often dangerous to one's self when meant in the best of intention. To apologize without any expectation of forgiveness, as is the modern thing, is to really leave one open to a form of never ending extortion. One admits one was wrong and apologizes. The other person, instead of granting a form of forgiveness, holds that apology as a brick-bat to be used again, again, and again. The apology that was intended to make a sort of peace all to often becomes a weapon against one.
     Perhaps that's the reason that, despite the insistence of the U.S. in past years that Japan apologize for the attack on Pearl Harbor Japan never did so. And despite the fact that Japan has called for an apology for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. never did so.
     To apologize for things that one is not responsible, or things seen as required, is to put one's neck on the block with the constant threat of the ax coming down. It makes a man a into a mouse.

Listen to Your Betters!!!

     Well, it's been a quiet week here at Bloody Nib Manor. That is if one discounts the fact that the local gun shop has been plywooded over for fear of it being invaded by hordes of kiddie revolutionaries wanting to live in real life the musical Les Miserables while forgetting the song Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. Ah, youth! It's somewhat like the romantization of the wilderness; one goes into the forest believing that every bear is Gentle Ben or Yogi only to find one's self another Timothy Treadwell. In other words, a nice meal. And the local entrepreneurs have been displaying their offering of illegal fireworks for sale for Independence Day by firing them off repeatedly and enthusiastically every night. There's nothing quite like watching a drama on the television only to have the dialogue drowned out by an aerial motor exploding. Of course, the local constabulary does nothing and has never done anything about this, as they have never enforced the laws about loud music from automobiles, or loud parties that go on until four o'clock in the morning. But the parties are usually for mihos and mijas from one to five years old, so who can complain. What three year old lad would love to see his parents and family drunk and fighting with no other kids his or her age are no where in sight.
     But, let's get down to matters of a greater sort: Actors and actresses.
     You friend, admittedly, lost his taste for motion pictures and much of television years ago. This is probably due to the fact that he is an old git and really doesn't appreciate moving pictures about comic book super heroes or cop shows in which the policemen/women are constantly undergoing a sort of existential angst the even the most Sartetian film maker in France abandoned forty years ago. This writer likes movies and television programs with heroes/heroines, who, while they may be flawed, do not sit and ponder if it is the right thing morally, or because of their personal "ghosts", before they arrest or even kill a person who is trying to kill them or save a child from a pedophile, a woman from being raped, or a store owner from being killed for $200 in his till. In other words and to put it simply, your friend likes stories of heroes and the heroes journey. In this way he is a simple man. And perhaps a simple-minded man. But he would rather read about the journey of Odysseus, flawed man and liar and rogue that he was, but who returned home and saved Penelope from the suitors and his son from poverty without a second thought about his past sins, than your friend would watch a deconstructionalist modern detective television series or a pondering Batman. It all really comes down to the Chandler formula: Down these mean streets must a man go who is not mean....
     All the boring above is a too long introduction to the me of the matter. And it's just a way of saying that contemporary films, television and actors/actresses are just silly and stupid and adolescent in their outlook and opinions. Screenwriters and directors are really, nowadays, awful people. They seem to think that they are really artists of some sort, when, in fact, they are not much more, perhaps, much less, than the pulp writers of the 1920s to the 1950s. The modern writer and director are just pushing out stuff no better than the old Republic Studios cowboy movies but without the ethos of the Republic pictures. The modern stuff, even with it's CGI, really amounts to, in it's high points, a horse and rider jumping off a 100 foot cliff into a river from an old horse opera.
     The actors/actresses, are really, in a way, worse than the screen writer/directors.
     Let us face the facts: An actor/actress is really nothing but a dancing monkey on the end of a golden chain. They do what they are told to do be the screenwriter or the director. They create no more than does a three year old kid claiming that he's a tyrannosaurus rex or a homeless man with his dirty paw stuck out saying that if you give him a dollar he'll put it in his daughter's college fund. In fact, those two examples show more creativity than does the average actor.
     Imagine to yourself, dear reader, that you have gone to college or university for four years and received a degree in engineering or English, and when you go out to find a job you can only find a job at Tinker Toy figuring ot new ways to make Tinker Toy structures (not even Lego structures) or you get a job correcting the English usage of people who are applying for visa to the U.S. You've spend four years of study reading, studying and hoping that you will get a job as an engineer on a dam project or in aerospace; four years studying English literature hoping to be a writer or a translator of great works. And you end up not even designing kid's toys or the bad English of Chinese students wanting to get into UCLA  instead of writing a novel. Do you think you would be a bit disappointed and, in fact experiencing an existential crisis of the worst French type?
     Consider the actor/actress who has studied acting at a college or university. That person has spent four years learning how to lie and not perform on stage. That person has usually studied the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Odet and O'Neil and how to perform the roles in the context in which they were written if they are lucky, which is not often. And when they come out of the acting schools they find that the work that they have done is useless in the modern world. Shakespeare is always a go to if the actor/actress can find a gig, but there are damn few Shakespeare plays being performed on television and the movies, which is where said actor/actress wants to be. Instead said actor/actress finds him'her self auditioning for what are really B-movies with big budgets, or television programs that are stupid funny or stupid dramatic. They don't even rise to the 1950s movie Panic in the Streets or the 1950s television show Peter Gunn. They hardly rise to the level of soap operas. In effect, they've spent four years studying engineering only to end up playing with Tinker Toys. Or to put it in musical terms, they've graduated from Julliard and they are playing in the subway, though well paid, instead of the orchestra. It's akin to spending years in the Royal Shakespeare Company only to find one's self working music halls and vaudeville.
     Of course, a lot of actors/actresses never went to  college for acting. They may have attended acting workshops while working at the local Von's or Ralph's, or maybe, because they were/are pretty or handsome, they caught the eye of some director/producer. Perhaps the actor/actress was the son/daughter of a friend of a producer/director.
     To put it short, actors/actresses depend as much on luck as does the average race track tout. They may act/lie better than the clerk at the local 7-11, and even better than the local beggar saying that he wants a handout for the cos of his mother's cancer treatment, but they are actors/liars and are not to be trusted or even honored. They are, in fact, dancing monkeys who will tip their cap to anyone who gives them a penny. They will dance a waltz if the organ grinder says that they should dance a waltz. They will dance a can-can when the organ grinder demands that they do so. They'll play the sad clown when they are happy and the angry clown when they are content.
     It s important to remember that up until the 1920 actors and actresses were considered "not quite right." The actors threatened one's daughters with shame and bastard children, and actresses were considered "loose" women. In fact, this writer's grandfather,m who was not a particularly religious man, considered all actors and actresses as "whores' of some sort or performing simians.
     But times have changed and we are supposed, for some reason, to regard and appreciate, in fact follow, the words and thoughts of a person who is a paid liar. They are better than we are because they are on television or on the silver screen. They live lives of luxury that could not be imagined in the Regency or Edwardian era, but they know better than the shop keeper or the clerk or the craftsman because they are on television. They know better than we do because they are dancing at the end of a golden chain at the command of an organ grinder, whether it be Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. They'll lie to keep that golden chain and that organ grinder while you live and think free. They don't even promise a golden chain for you. All they can promise is an iron collar and rags and a mouth that is sewn shut.

Note to the reader

     Not many people read this blog, and whenever there is a comment submitted to this blog your writer is much appreciative, whether the comment be positive, negative or neutral.
     This past week your friend received a submission for the comment section of the blog. The problem was that the sender wrote his or her name in Arabic/Iranian and the comment was in Arabic/Iranian.
     This writer reads neither Arabic nor Iranian. He reads neither Arabic or Iranian.
     This writer speaks and readers only one language. That language is the King's English.
     All comments, if they are to be published on this blog, should be in the English language, whether it be King's English, American, Canadian, etc.
     If a comment is submitted in any language other than a form of English it will be rejected.

Apologize and mean it!

     It's been an interesting week here at Bloody Nib Manor. Not only have we, for the past several months, been forced to raise the drawbridge because of some plague that escaped from the Celestial Kingdom, but because of the idiocy or cruelty of one man against another there have been demonstrations, rioting, and looting in the shire and the nation. It brings the Luddite revolt to mind, at best, and the overthrow of Louis XVI at worst. One could consider the Russian Revolution, but the Frenchies, for their time, were much more efficient at killing their own considering the technology.
     This writer does not think i necessary to go deeply into the reasons for the present unrest. Simply put, a white policeman in Minnesota, probably because he was just, to put it sort, a thug and hot head, killed a black man by holding the black man to the ground by putting his weight on the neck of the black man (George Floyd) resulting in the suffocation or strangulation of Mr. Floyd.
     It was an act of cruelty and, perhaps, racism. It may have been an act of over-enthusiasm. Who knows what was going through the thick head of the cop? Only he does. And he won't say. At trial he'll lie and say something like, "I feared for my life" or some such nonsense.
     While the death (killing) of Mr. Floyd was a bad thing (this writer will not say that it's a tragedy because it wasn't in the classical sense like Macbeth or Achilles) and a crime, it was a rarity in American life. White law enforcement officers do not go out and hunt black people in the way that Belgian colonists hunted Congolese natives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The overwhelming number of cops start their shifts praying for no trouble and do not go out of their way to look for trouble. In fact, a certain percentage will turn a blind eye to trouble just to avoid the paperwork involved.
     But, for some reason, this particular instance took the fancy of the Internet (and the Internet these days means the public). Probably because it was so gruesome. Adding to the mix is that a week before a white woman was shown on many platforms telling a black man who is a birdwatcher that she would call the police and tell them that she had been assaulted by an African-American man because she felt threatened because he told her to leash her dog in an area that was a leashed dog area (it was the perfect match of the clash of two Karens, but the woman ended up losing her job). The latter, because people assumed that the woman was a racist because she described the man as an Africa-American, in a sense, while not striking the match, took the match out of the box.
     We have all seen the result of the death of Mr Floyd: demonstrations against "systemic racism" by law enforcement agencies and the nation in general.
     And those people who claim to represent black Americans, the Black Lives Matter movement in particular, have demanded that whites, no matter if their ancestors came to America in 1620 or 2019, apologize for what the BLM and their cohort call systemic racism. To be white, and in some cases, to be Asian or Hispanic, is, to the BLM crowd, is to be racist against African-Americans.
     All too many times this writer has seen videos of people kneeling (it's always kneeling; the position of least power and self-direction) repeating like they were reading out of a Roman Catholic Missal apologies read out by BLM leaders. Mass Mea Culpas that Catholic Churches in the U.S. haven't seen in decades. Old white guys who in their youth had Huey Newton posters on their walls when they were in college, old white women who had had one or two black lovers, young Asian women who never saw a black person in the flesh before they came to the U.S. to go to college, young white men and women who think Beyonce' is (to pardon the expression) the "tits." It's like the Lindy Hop back in the 1930s. Everyone's doing it.
     But what they do not realize, besides not being guilty of anything besides being human, they will get no absolution or forgiveness from BLM or any other leftist black group. What they have done is made fools of themselves and given BLM and such a weapon. That apology will always hang over their heads like the sword of Damocles ready to fall at the whim of BLM. They have said, whether they are or not, that they are/were racist and apologize for it and the BLM crowd will always remember it and use it as a weapon against one. One, when it is convenient for BLM, is, was, and always be a racist, and that group and their ilk, will use it like a topping maul on the skull of a hog to get what they want. At least the renegade Christian during the times of the Roman persecution, once they put a pinch of incense on the altar of Caesar, were sent away and forgotten.
      It was a sickening sight for us here at the Manor to see police officers and National Guardsmen kneel before the demonstrators. By doing so they were saying that they were guilty of something they had never done. They did not kill Mr. Floyd. The overwhelming number of them never killed, or even hurt, a black person in any way. Were they trying to be Christ and take what is sometimes called the "original sin" of the nation upon themselves? That's doubtful. They were either afraid or wanted to be friends with people who don't want to be friends. They bent the knee. They bowed their heads. Much like the victims who were beheaded by ISIS.
     It's cheap talk and easy to say, but there was a saying that was popular in this writer's callow youth: It's better to die standing and fighting than to live one's life on one's knees. The knees of too many of those in our various forms of government have been bent in our name, and too many apologies have been made to the undeserving by the clueless lick spittles. And it bodes not well.

Facebook, be like, dumb

     Your faithful corespondent has always had a difficult relationship with Facebook simply because trying to get what is and is not allowed is trying to pick up a blob of mercury.
     So, since Facebook is playing a game of some sort this writer, and your friend, has decided to limit his links to this blog. If nothing else, your friend has control over what he writes and does not grant his purported creativity to a bunch of bots and tools in Silicon Valley.
     So here goes:
     Today was the annual Women's March in the United States during which a bunch of middle and upper class women express how oppressed they are and always have been despite what DeToqueville wrote 200 years ago. One hopes that the said slaves marching while wearing their pink knit caps (sometimes called Pussy Hats despite the fact that they are caps and not hats -- people are so stupid these days) they will remember this woman who does not want to have anything on her head:
   
Iran chess ref Shohreh Bayat fears returning home over hijab row - BBC News

     Not all actors are nuts:
   
Question Time: Laurence Fox on Meghan Markle racism debate | Daily Mail Online

     And finally, the United Methodist aren't so united any more:

     Liberal Methodists Toss Out the Africans | The American Conservative

     Let's get through the weekend with this:

     George Harrison's -- "The Pirate Song" - YouTube