Sherry Chandler

I guess you’ll need Liquid Virgin.

Pucker up, gals.

(Think alum.)

via

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

nothing is sacred

or

women do everything and men steal it

Here from the NYTimes:

Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene.

For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.

His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an “ordinary Sunday service” at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers.

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Not, mind you, that I’m accusing Reinhold Niebuhr of stealing. It’s all a little more complicated than that. Most things are.

Read the article.

Speaking of the braiding of cultural threads, I’ll give you this version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in a tip of the hat to Lance’s open thread discussion of Bonnie and Clyde, which will take place tomorrow night, either at the New Critics site or over at Lance’s place.

I’m sure he’d be pleased to have you join the discussion. For me, I fear, the most memorable thing about Bonnie and Clyde was the Bluegrass soundtrack.

Meanwhile, you might enjoy Lance’s post on Bonnie and Clyde in Nixonland.

I love it when the threads of my cultural interest braid into a single wonderful item, like this version of June Carter Cash’s “Ring of Fire” with Earl Scruggs and Billy Bob Thornton. The Sling Blade edit’s sort of fun, too. The song is from Earl Scruggs and Friends.

Update: I was reminded of this cut when I ran across my Oxford American Southern Music Sampler #5 (2001), which may be the best one they ever did. In addition to this cut, it also has Bob Dylan and Ralph Stanley singing “The Lonesome River,” Kevin Gordon doing “Down to the Well” with Lucinda Williams, Ann Peebles doing a pre-Tina version of “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” (here, too) and Jim White doing a really spooky thing called “The Wound that Never Heals.”

because I outsmarted myself.

Care to try?

How smart are you?

Let me also recommend that you check out my Twitter anthology of favorites.

Ah yes, and Black Bert for a catblog:

Are you bored at work?

Play Boomshine.

And if you figure out how it works, please tell me.

Courtesy of Harry.

Well, since we’re about words here, we’d probably better do this one, too. I found it at Via Negativa

While I’m stealing memorials to George Carlin, I’d be remiss in not pointing you to Lance Mannion’s George Carlin is Safe at Home. Lance gives us one of Carlin’s sports routines:

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who’s up?

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

I am not into sports but this one is fun, and touching in the context. Click over and read it all.

I can’t claim to have been a big George Carlin fan but he has been part of the cultural texture of my life for a long time and in losing him we have lost the voice of an era, a voice of my era, a speaker of truth, and his passing grieves me.

I didn’t think I was going to do this (post a Carlin YouTube that is) but Susie at Suburban Guerilla has this one up and I have to pass it on. My Daddy used to say this same thing, in language not quite so colorful, twenty - thirty - forty years ago. It’s only gotten worse.

RIP George Carlin.

This short film by Torill Kove, narrated by Liv Ullmann, won the 2007 Oscar for best short subjects animation. It has everything: love, death, cows, goats, dogs, cats, and poets. Posted to YouTube by the National Film Board of Canada. You can also view it there.