• Like everyone, I’ve been enjoying the videos of ICE goons slipping and sliding and falling on the actual ice of Minnesota in January. And yes, it’s fun and appropriate that many of these have been set to “Yakkety Sax” and “Entrance of the Gladiators” (Yat-dat da-da-da-da dat-dat daaa-da …).
But the Night Riders of the Third Klan have declared war on the Twin Cities, and since that’s a place with its own rich musical legacy I think that should be reflected in all those supercut video edits of ICE buffoonery. I mean, how can you look at this —
— and not think of Morris Day and the Time teaching us all about a brand new dance called the Bird? And since these scenes unfold not far from Paisley Park, if you’re setting them to music, how can you resist using “All 7 and we’ll watch them fall / They stand in the way of love and we will smoke them all …“?
So much amazing music from the Twin Cities to work with, music that can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile. It’s good American music, and that will help Americans as they struggle to defend America against ICE.
• You can tell a lot about a guy from the way he talks about his exes — ex-girlfriends and, especially, ex-wives. Generally speaking, the words he uses to describe them are the words he uses to describe to himself most women, the words he uses to think of them and to categorize and characterize them all in his mind.
I appreciate that relationships can end badly and that “she done me wrong” can sometimes be an accurate description of that bad ending, but there’s a difference between “she done me wrong” and “I hate that evil bitch.” A guy who sounds like a misogynist when he’s talking about his ex is likely to be an eyelash away from being a misogynist when talking about any other woman.
As I told my daughters, pay attention to how a guy talks about his exes, because that’s how he’s going to talk about you some day. When a guy gets riled up and mean talking about his exes, that’s a red flag.
Back when I first relocated this blog to Patheos, I interacted a lot with another of the “progressive evangelical” bloggers here, a guy who came from the “emerging church” world and often posted a lot of interesting thoughts and questions and insights. I knew him only from his writing and his posts and a handful of emails in a group chat. I liked him. He seemed like a decent fellow.
But then one day he wrote about how family courts were biased against fathers and a little red flashing light went off in the corner of my eye. That post was relatively temperate, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly why it made me recoil. But something off about it just nagged at me, and so I put a pause on linking to his blog as I tried to figure out what. And then, after seeing this subject come up there a few more times, with more of a snarl to it, I dropped it from my RSS feed.
A year or so later, I read an old post here interacting with something he had written and thought “I wonder whatever happened to that guy?” Oh.
You can tell a lot about a guy from the way he talks about his exes.
• Charles Kuffner highlights a story from Houston that shows how, yet again, I have been misled by years of television. All those shows and stories where the hero or the villain can’t go to the hospital because every bullet-wound gets reported to the police taught me that every bullet-wound gets reported to the police. That’s not quite how it works. In Houston, emergency rooms dealt with more than 25,000 gun wounds while police records only accounted for about 6,000. Interesting.
• Recent news and rumor from Minneapolis has me thinking again of the greatest heist in the history of my former hometown, and of how this is a good time for all of us to remember the work of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.
J. Edgar Hoover himself put more than 200 agents on the case but they never found, or even suspected, any of the ordinary workaday heroes who pulled that off because those Delco patriots walked away, never sought credit, and kept their secret for more than 30 years.
• My current Twin Cities music kick has me listening to, among many others, the Hold Steady. The title of this post comes from the lyrics to “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In