stevengharms.com

Neko Case’s New Single “People Got A Lotta Nerve”

Most definitely my most favorite, sensual, sinister, chanteuse.

More reverb.

Dear Mr. Harms:

Thank you for contacting us about Dr Pepper Pure Cane Sugar.

We enjoy hearing from you and are especially pleased to learn of your satisfaction. We will pass on your compliments to both our marketing department and our research and development department so they can be made aware of the great job they are doing! We will also pass on your comments and concerns with the high fructose corny syrup used in our Regular Dr Pepper.

We hope you continue to enjoy Dr Pepper Pure Cane Sugar products.

Sincerely,

Consumer Relations

I live in Austin and as such I can get Dublin Dr. Pepper fairly easily: the kind with Imperial sugar.

Messieurs, Madames: Please, I beg of you, switch your formula (back) to this base.

It tastes right. I grew up as a kid drinking cold, glass bottles of this stuff on the porch of my great-grandmother’s house in New Mexico. When I taste the Dublin Dr. P. I get a fizzy bit of joy up in my naso-sinus region. It is pure bliss.

I don’t get that from main-line Dr. Pepper. Sure, it tastes good, but it’s not the Platonic ideal of Dr. Pepper that my memory tells me that it should be.

I weep for those kids of today who’ve known nothing but the HFCS-based Dr. Pepper.

Recent news reports that HFCS is loaded with mecury. Dr. P. could lead the way to switching away from this carbohydrate-bomb sweetner by switching back to good-old, made in the U-S-A sugar.

Please consider doing so.

Sincerely,

Steven Harms

Steven: “Hey is that Leonard Nimoy?”
Lauren: “Mayyy…”

Imagines pointed ears and eyebrow makeup

Leonard Nimoy playing Bernabe Zamora on “Wagon Train.”

I am a strong proponent of the separation of church and state. Occasionally, I have met those who have appealed to the founding fathers and asserted that owing to their Christianity, God blessed these United States, and thus we are a Christian nation.

I shall let those who founded the country speak for themselves:

“The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

~ George Washington

“I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

“The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion.”

~ Abraham Lincoln

“A just government has no need for the clergy or the church.”

~ James Madison

“I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end… where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.”

~ John F. Kennedy

“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.”

~ Barack Obama

Elizabeth of York is the only English Queen to have been a wife, daughter, sister, niece and mother to English Kings.

That’s one shallow gene pool. Insert webbed-foot joke here

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

Heh, everyone always quotes Brandeis.

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.

This means that Obama is actively giving weaponry to tear him down to his enemies, press, and to the citizens of this country. He’s offering us the crowbars wherewith to prise him from the edifice of his recently-gained power.

This is accountability: putting the means of your undermining in the hands of your enemies before, not ad hoc, and making that drive you towards excellence.

I really think Barack, excuse me, The President is really the coolest world leader.

Previously, my list was:

1. King of Thailand
2. Carla Bruni
3. Angela Merkel of Germany, for freaking out so stylishly when she got the Bush back-rub treatment

Now it is

1. Barack Hussein Obama, POTUS
2. King of all Cosmos
3. Carla Bruni
4. King of Thailand

It was a hard choice…

versus

In all seriousness, I recall my mom once saying that in her childhood, the Kennedy era, they thought that the government were “cool” guys. I remember her saying this to me and thinking, this is somewhere in the Bush I era, “you’ve got to be joking.” Something died between Vietnam, Watergate, and has, I believe, for my generation, been dead until the election of Obama. Not ever having seen it before, we didn’t know to miss it. Having seen it again, I don’t think that I could well settle for less again.

Recent film adaptations have not given me opportunity to say this at an earlier date, but The Hulk is most definitely my favorite Marvel character.

I wasn’t much into the comic books, but I very much liked the television drama. I first felt my true love for the minor key when I heard the Hulk theme “Lonely Man.”

Thanks to the recent addition of rabbit-ears, we get RTN, the “Retro Television Network” which shows “The Incredible Hulk” TV show weekday evenings.

While I’m no Hulk-ologist, I always liked the subconscious and everyman elements of the Banner / Hulk dichotomy. Even as a young kid I “got” that there is, in every man, a powerful force that he, betimes, may not be in control of.

So there you go. You can have your Spidey, or your Bats, but for me, it’s Hulk.

If you’ve seen Schindler’s List, you can’ help recalling Ralph Fiennes’ masterful performance as the sadistic, truculent, SS-camp administrator, Amon Goeth.

But what if you found out, one day, that the father you had never known was indeed that man who delighted in brutality? And what would you make of your mother, who had worked on her tan within screaming distance to a Polish concentration camp?

And what if your only key for making sense of this was via a woman whose family had been exterminated, a woman who was brutalized and ridiculed in the ornate villa ruled by Goeth? What if you had to encounter the most damaged by that man in order to know that man in order to know yourself?

It’s a story of atonement that not even Philip Roth could have conceived, and it’s entirely true.

“Inheratance” - POV :: PBS