Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri who got fed up with the nonsense authors such as Michael Pollan were spewing in attacking modern farming practices.  His article in The American, “The Omnivore’s Delusion:  Against the Agri-intellectuals,” was a breath of fresh air in its countering of the drivel of the “self-appointed experts.”  A follow-up article, “Give Thanks for This Harvest,” was equally exhilirating.

He’s published a number of articles in that venue since.  I’ll be working through them over the next few days, but I’m willing to bet they’ll be well worth the time and effort their reading takes.

Ah, the good side of the ’80s!

Enjoy!

He was.  Bernard Vonnegut designed this department store in Indianapolis.  What a cool building.

It makes me think of the parade scene from A Christmas Story.

I was a huge fan of Eric Clapton for many years, but I felt like he got way too namby-pamby back in the ‘9os.  That being said, I’ve always liked this one:

But not as good as this one:

I think I’m a huge fan again…

UPDATE:

Nice to see him bringing the kids along.  I have a lot of respect for John Mayer, who can jam out some serious blues when he’s not wasting his time on pabulum pop.  But dude just got served by EC:

The ones who’ve brought us a minivan commercial featuring Judas Priest’s “The Hellion,” that is.

Dont’ get me wrong.  With all the drivel on TV, I welcome hearing KK Downing and Glenn Tipton’s guitars screaming at me from my set.  But for a minivan?

And what’s with the chinless androgyne who is apparently, to the makers of this atrocity of a commercial, the apotheosis of the man’s man who just needs some good rockin’ to convince him to buy this emasculation of a vehicle?  A vehicle whose purchase will signal that, in the words of a Brazilian woman I know, “You’ve given up on sexy, and it’s never coming back?”

There oughta be a law.  Hell, there is one for everything else that annoys just about anybody.  When do I get mine?

Grunge.  Everyone wearing shorts and flannel shirts.  What was with that?

So I came to Alice in Chains late, years after Layne Staley was in his grave.  But they were the very embodiment of the music, I think — even if you can’t escape Nirvana and Pearl Jam embodying the personae.

Good stuff.

Say, to shift gears, I remember that in its heyday, the video for “Sour Girl” by Stone Temple Pilots got a lot of commentary because Sarah Michelle Gellar was mackin all over Scott Weiland.  But I never saw it at the time.  So I just checked it out on YouTube.  And that part was interesting (although, really, didn’t SMG really look like those girls in college who were just bizarre enough looking that you didn’t find them attractive until you’d had enough to drink?  There was one like that in my days we called “Amanda with the face that comes out of nowhere.”)  But what the hell was with the Teletubbies??

Anyway, God keep Layne.  What a shame — I’d gladly give up his music if his remaining poor and unknown would’ve saved him.

Mr. Vujnovich received the Bronze Star today for the single biggest rescue of US servicemen ever — and it happened in WWII.  Vujnovich, who is 95, led the OSS’s Halyard Mission to rescue more than 500 downed airmen, all shot down over Serbia while on bombing raids targeting the German oilfields in Romania.

And God keep Draza Mihailovich, a Serbian guerilla fighter who collaborated with Vujnovich on the rescue, and whose men helped keep the downed airmen out of Nazi hands until they could be spirited out.  Mihailovich was captured after the war by the communists, convicted of treason, and executed in 1946.  President Harry Truman later bestowed the Legion of Merit on Mihailovich, an award that was kept classified for years to avoid angering the Yugoslav communists.  His daughter Gordana was finally presented with his decoration in 2005.

The complicated politics and the difficulties of the rescues made it all the more amazing that such a mission could be pulled off in the final years of the war.

As Mr. Vujnovich said of his own belated award, “Better now than never.”  Yes indeed — thank you for a job so very well done, sir.

Okay, it’s a “credit where credit’s due” moment for me.  Thomas Friedman’s column yesterday was about how the ChiComs will have to allow social freedoms or will see the progress their country has made come to a halt.  This is from a guy who’s spilled lots of ink expressing his envy of the ability of those very same totalitarians to impose their economic, political and industrial will on their subjects, where we in America have to allow the people to interfere with their betters’ ideas of what we ought to be doing.  So bravo, Mr. Friedman — and welcome (back?) to reality.  Here’s hoping it lasts a while.

One small quibble:  Friedman says this near the end of the piece:

The logic is that all of us are smarter than one of us, and the unique feature of today’s flat world is that you can actually tap the brains and skills of all of us, or at least more people in more places. Companies and countries that enable that will thrive more than those that don’t.

That first phrase is right on the money, as is the second full sentence.  The balance of the first sentence, a rehash of a major point of his book The World is Flat, isn’t nearly true.  Trouble is, Friedman is hung up on the technology world of innovation and production.  But in older areas of production, trade in both products and capabilities have been around long enough that Robert Torrens and David Ricardo pointed out the benefits of comparative advantage back in the early 1800s.  And of course, I, Pencil is from 1958, so it’s not like distributed knowledge and abilities became some hidden legend.

But those are minor points.  Let me wrap it all up by applauding Thomas Friedman for a change.

I’ve always liked his “Hello It’s Me,” so I went hunting for it on YouTube last weekend.  Little did I know the horror that awaited me.

Showed it to Sweet Miss ViVi tonight, and we both agreed we hope the Toddster looks back on this and thinks, “Wow, I don’t remember that AT ALL!  I was so BAKED!”

Beaver’s mom has passed away at 94.

Let’s honor her by harkening back to her most memorable scene: