To judge by the MSM, I may be Nadya Suleman’s only living fan. Think I care? The hell with all of you. I’m glad her octuplets are well, and I hope they all grow up to win Nobel Peace Prizes and stop global warming. Good for PETA, too. There are too many dogs and cats in the world already. The damned things breed like people.

LA HABRA, Calif. — It’s official. Octomom Nadya Suleman doesn’t want your dog or cat following in her footsteps. As a front yard full of paparazzi cheered her on, Suleman unveiled a 3-foot-by-4-foot plastic sign Wednesday that reads: “Don’t Let Your Dog or Cat Become an Octomom. Always Spay or Neuter…”

From Politico:

Pelosi’s great advantage is she has played her cards early and is a proven, aggressive political operative … Yet going forward, Pelosi will have to answer herself for some of the legislative shortcuts taken in her fierce “damn the torpedoes” march toward final passage. “She’s impressive, horrifying at times, but impressive,” said one person who observed the speaker closely in weeks of backroom meetings.

From today’s New York Times:

…What we had to abandon was quite clear: the rigid ideological, political and economic system; the confrontation with much of the rest of the world; and the unbridled arms race. In rejecting all that, we had the full support of the people.

The words could have been spoken by President Obama in his State of the Union, but weren’t. The author instead is Mikhail Gorbachev, who sacrificed his political career by calling off the Cold War.

My favorite college basketball coach used to be Geno Auriemma, of the University of Connecticut women. But that was yesterday, before I discovered Herb Magee. Magee is about to break Bobby Knight’s career record of 902 victories, which is good news for our side. This is because Knight is a complete asshole, whereas Magee is a total non-asshole:

PHILADELPHIA — Along his road to the top of college basketball’s career list for victories while coaching at Philadelphia University, Herb Magee has engaged bus drivers in games of Trivial Pursuit on long trips, bathed in beer after wins and been led onto the court in handcuffs by a police officer as a joke. He has had his mustache mimicked by fans, and he met his second wife, Geri, when she tended bar at the Yankee Doodle Inn…

“He can also spell words backward, including supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” his wife, now manager of the Great American Pub, said. “I married a ‘Rain Man’ type.”

“If it requires a uniform, it’s a worthless endeavor.”

I can’t come close to saying anything better than what Bill Doolittle said about his involvement with and participation in the Civil Rights Movement as well as his coverage of the event, but I hope I can add a little something to remember Dr. Martin Luther King today by posting this YouTube Video of another great American announcing the untimely death of Dr. King, who, like Dr. King, was a short time later likewise shot down in his prime by an assassin’s bullet.

Thank you, Bill Doolittle, for what you said and I hope this short post also helps us to continue to remember the life of Dr. King and the great changes that he and others around him helped make become a reality. I was one who witnessed as a child the horrid conditions in the South for blacks and I saw the changes that he helped to make happen as I grew. And the sad chapter in America now referred to as the Jim Crow Era fortunately passed and was put away in the history books. Unfortunately the ending of that era is sadly forgotten or its elimination viewed with anger by too many Americans to this day.

Let us not forget his tragic and unfortunate death, the circumstances of which still trouble Americans to this day. But the Dream truly lives on in so many of us today.

The World Peace Prayer is a paraphrase of a verse from the Upanishads, the most ancient scriptures of Hinduism, and is also prayed daily by the Roman Catholic Benedictine Sisters. It is also said near the end of the service at the UCC church my wife and I attend.

All right, watch this. Even if you’ve never exposed yourself to Glenn Beck’s show, it’s funny. If you have, you’ll recognize Jon Stewart’s performance as a masterpiece:

I’ve always had a preference for Ian and Sylvia’s version of this song and I regularly look for their version on Youtube, but until I discovered the version below, I never knew that Paul Robeson sang it. I think I’m going to change my preference even though the Ian and Sylvia version has a quiet beauty that I still find spellbinding.

Coming from Paul Robeson, even though he was not Canadian, I still understand how poignant this song must have been for him, and for all of us who know some of what the United States Government did to him solely for his beliefs. In many ways, Robeson himself was an exile in his own country, for example as stated in his Wikipedia entry

To this day, Paul Robeson’s FBI file is one of the largest of any entertainer ever investigated by the United States Intelligence Community, requiring its own internal index and unique status of health file.

If you’re not familiar with who Paul Robeson was and what he stood for and what the US Government did to him for his beliefs, please go read the rest of his Wikipedia entry linked to above. And then listen to the his remarkable voice singing this wonderful but sad folk song.

Incidentally, I noticed that the song is called Le Canadien Errant on this version but is almost universally referred to elsewhere as Un Canadien Errant. I cannot say whether this has any significance but it is unusual to see the song referred to in that manner. (and sung in English with some verse changes) Perhaps it means nothing and perhaps it has a hidden meaning. Maybe one of our French speaking readers or writers here could offer me a clue as I always look for hidden meanings in small deviations from what is considered normal and I find the name change puzzling and can’t help but wonder if it has a hidden meaning, perhaps signaling that Robeson considered himself an exile in his own country.

Me too, Pete. Me too.

Back before the internet had things like browsers that had pictures and when there were computers that would only allow just the use of words, so that people talked with each other online by writing back and forth to each other on usenet groups, sometimes arguing with each other about things, and occasionally meeting online, I had the opportunity to make a short online friendship with Noel Paul Stookie.

Known as Paul of the group Peter, Paul and Mary, they were a group that came of age when I was five years of age but throughout my lifetime, and I’m now 52, they were always popular to one degree or another, for many years with parents who took their children to their concerts, often to hear the song that I guess I first heard them sing when I was five or six years of age, Puff the Magic Dragon.

But Peter Paul and Mary were also heavily involved in making this world just a little better than they found it when they got here. And I think they really did succeed in that. Since they are now no longer a group, Mary Travers having traveled on to the great beyond where we are not, I don’t know what tomorrow holds for Peter and Paul.

But without Mary, Peter Paul and Mary could not have existed and been loved and cherished as they were for so many generations. Or accomplish some of the great things that they did. Nor could Mary have given me a big hug, the story of which is below the fold.

In the days of usenet, I got interested in folk music and particularly old English and Scottish and Irish ballads and there was a rather common song that was only rarely performed well. And I had several versions of that song on a number of records and CDs. The song was called Greenland Whale Fishery or Greenland Whale Fisheries. It tells the story of a whaling vessel that takes off to Greenland in some specific date depending on the singer or singing group, from the 1700s to the 1800s. The day and date vary from version to version and from group to group; perhaps if you felt you did it well you sang it as happening on your birthday or on the death of a loved one, or for some other reason that has probably been lost to history.

And as all whaling boats do, these have a lookout who uses a spyglass to look for the tell tale sign of the whale, the steam of the blow hole, and inevitably the whale is spotted and the hunt is on and it is then mammal against mammal, a fight for survival which the better, more peaceful animal usually loses.

But in Greenland Whale Fishery (or Fisheries as it is sometimes called) the bigger mammal wins the fight and a group of men from four to fourteen or more throw their harpoon into the whale and the whale dives and takes the men and their small harpoon vessel down with them and the whale goes to parts unknown as do the men, who are all drowned.

In some versions of the song, the person who sings the song, who is a crewman or a surviving wife or girlfriend who heard the story, remarks that the captain laments the loss of his men, but what he truly laments is the loss of that great sperm whale, which would make the captain a man like Dick Cheney or George Bush.

But in certain versions, particularly the Peter Paul and Mary version, the captain is presented as a nice man who truly grieves for those men who he worked with — perhaps they were thinking of someone great like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, partisanship being something we try to remember whenever we write at this blog, or at least a few of us do. Others perhaps being more perceptive at times. And that's saying you called some things right, Chuck.

In these perilous times when it sometimes seems that so many of those we thought were our neighbors turn out not to care whether we live or die, Sperm Whales and huge piles of cash being their objective just like that evil captain, I often wonder why we don’t do more to change things. Like march in the streets. But maybe that doesn’t work the same anymore since our national media just ignores those kinds of things and pretends not to notice (but they couldn’t with a group as large as that one in Washington in the video above).

So getting back to Usenet, I asked on the folk usenet group what version was considered the historically correct version of that song, which I realize now was a foolish question. And at that point who else but Noel Paul Stookie comes in to join the conversation since PP&M did that song. To make a long story short, I moved shortly thereafter to Seattle because I was tired of lawyering and foreclosing on people's homes during the end of George H. W. Bush’s term (these Bush guys are predictable about creating financial crises) and I just decided I couldn’t do that kind of work anymore and besides, this new thing called a browser that could do the internet with pictures had been invented and something told me it was going to change the world and the computer was going to be something entirely different than what it was under Usenet.

So I packed my bags and moved to Seattle, Washington, and promptly got horrible ear infections and over the course of two and a half years had two ear operations, a month or two of IV injections that took twenty minutes to get several times every day and an ulcer from what the antibiotics did to my stomach, not necessarily in that order. And during my third winter there, I left due to a busted budget due to the health problems.

But Noel Stookie sent me tickets to a concert while I was there and I passed three of them along to help some people less fortunate than me as I didn’t really know anyone in Seattle yet when I first got there, and I went to the concert with my backstage pass in hand. And after the concert there was this huge throng of people there waiting to see the trio and I figured they had what I had and I would get in that long line.

But I showed my backstage passes to one of the guards and I was quickly whisked to the front of that long line which hadn’t started moving yet and there I stood with the three other people who were with me there — we were the first folks in the door — and Mary Travers, who was twice as wide as I was (and I’m no small guy) had her arms unfolded out wide and she gave me a big, huge, wonderful hug and I hugged her back just as hard and I then very briefly spoke to Paul, Peter being off into his trailer inside that backstage arena and then I went on my way as many others were waiting to “meet” the group.

All because I was curious and had the audacity to ask some questions about a song when the internet was a much smaller group of folks than it is now. But that was such a nice hug and I guess it happened because Mary Travers was the kind of person who wanted to make people in this world feel like someone cared about them. And I suspect that she treated all her fans that way, helping to make them feel better about themselves no matter who they were. So I’ve been one of her fans ever since.

Because the world needs a whole lot more people like her. In particular, Republicans as well as Democrats who care about their fellow man and whether he lives or dies and whether he will be shunted off into a corner to die because a big, fat captain out there somewhere who prefer a dead sperm whale to fill his or her coffers with more cash than he needs to live a good life instead of seeing his neighbors get the opportunity to see the doctor when they are sick.

So here’s a tribute to Peter, Paul and especially Mary when they were at their best. And I’ll follow up later with another song for Mary after a while, which I promise won’t have any writing in it, but will just be a link to a song.

I’ve taken the liberty of showing them here at a very important time when people in our country rose up and told Richard Nixon and all his whaling ship friends who must have loved the money they could get from those big whales more than they cared about people who fought in senseless wars like Vietnam that made a lot of money for a very few people (who Smedley Darlington Butler had cut down once, but not good enough — look him up if you don’t know who he was) and that they weren’t going to take it anymore. Maybe we’ll have to do that again one day.

Maybe we need to do it now and soon.

But what I am writing about now is that I just want this country to do for its citizens what all the civilized modern industrialized countries all do: provide all citizens with health care so they don’t get pulled down by a bunch of big, mean men and women who like big dead whale carcasses, like unnecessary wars for instance, and like what they can get for running wars more than they care about people. Because when that happens we all lose.

And because I am sure Mary Travers would have wanted it that way.