The Real Reason for Supply Chain Problems!!!

Disruptions in global supply chains are a big international news story, with many factors cited by the Lamestream Media- a shortage of shipping containers, a shortage of truck drivers, a shortage of dock workers...  Images of a cargo ship gridlock off the LA coast are all over the internet, and consumers are urged to buy Christmas gifts early because of forecast shipping delays.

The 'normie' narrative just isn't that exciting, though, so the fever swamps have conjured up a more lurid narrative, one involving their favorite conspiracy theory about the Global Elite and their esoteric drug habit:

This is a lot of work to find a drug you can order off the internet for 50 bucks a bottle. pic.twitter.com/grSS8NGE1L

— Poker and Politics (@PokerPolitics) October 14, 2021

Oh, yeah, baby! My favorite drug is whacko conspiracy narratives, and this (complete with misspelling) is quite the fix...  My one beef with this particular story is that it completely ignores the Mole Children imprisoned in Deep Underground Military Bases beneath US cities... I mean, how can these people claim to be Making America Great Again when they prefer imported adrenochrome to domestic?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the struggle against the baby eaters continues:

A group of "Satanic ritual abuse" activists - part QAnon part Satanic panic - is holding a protest outside Windsor Castle. Leader Jeanette Archer says the royal family "are not even human" and hold Satanic rituals to torture children and drink adrenochrome from their blood. pic.twitter.com/yCLU6uVcwc

— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) October 14, 2021

Let's take a deeper look at this, shall we?  Leader Jeanette Archer says the royal family "are not even human".  I'm certainly no fan of the British royal family, but seeing this nonsense leads me to believe that Johnny Rotten has a lot to answer for!

Ireland's Musical Ambassador

Yesterday's bummer story was news of the death of Paddy Moloney, multi-instrumentalist and founder of influential Irish folk band The Chieftains, who made their debut in 1962.  The Chieftains were, along with The Clancy Brothers and The Dubliners, were great revitalizers and popularizers of Irish traditional music in the mid-to-late 20th Century.  His contributions to Irish culture, and his introduction of it to the Whole Wide World were honored by Irish president Michael Higgins.

The Chieftains were particularly known for their collaborations with other artists, and their championing of World Music, particularly Galician music.  They collaborated not only with rock artists, but with astronauts (a particularly lovely story).  There could be no better celebration of Paddy Moloney's life than a brief review of his musical career, so here's a sampler.

From the Chieftain's first album, released in 1964, here's s;ow air/jig/air/reel combo:

 

From their second album, here's Brian Boru's March: 

  

From the 1970s, here's The Timpán Reel, which incorporates the hammered dulcimer into the band's sound:

  

In the 1980s, the Chieftains recorded an album with Van Morrison, beginning a tradition of collaborations with rock and pop musicians which continued for decades: 

 

Here's The St Stephen's Day Murders with Elvis Costello: 

  

They also released an album of American country music, here they are will Willie Nelson:

  

Perhaps their best-selling album was The Long Black Veil, on which they collaborated with a cast of rock-and-pop groups. Here's one of my favorite trad songs, The Rocky Road to Dublin performed with the Rolling Stones:

  

Here they are with an orchestra and Luciano Pavarotti singing the 19th century Neapolitan pop song Funiculì, Funiculà:

  

A particular favorite of mine was a collaboration with Irish pop group the Corrs:

  

I've saved some of the more global collaborations between the Chieftains and other artists for the tail end of the post. Here are the Chieftains with Bastard fave Akiko Yano:

  

 Perhaps my favorite song by the Chieftains is Guadelupe, a Galician folksong they originally recorded with Linda Ronstadt and Los Lobos. Linda Ronstadt was unable to appear during a live performance which would have made Los San Patricios proud:

  

Here's NASA astronaut Cady Coleman playing with the Chieftains:

  

Now, here's a real marvel, Frank Zappa leading an ensemble consisting of Johnny Guitar Watson, Mongolian tuva singers, and the Chieftains. It's great fun: 

 

I figured I'd end with a concert performance by the Chieftains and the Pogues, a collaboration between two generations of musicians, the great virtuoso elder statesmen and the younger, punked out enfants terribles:

  

One thing I've noticed in the live performances is the ever-present look of joy on Paddy Moloney's homely, kindly face. By all accounts, he was a gentleman, and he just radiates a beatific look. Here was a man who loved music, and loved sharing his love of music with others. The news of his death is a genuine blow... pun originally unintended.

Words to Live By

Every year, I have to undergo 8 hours of coursework in order to renew my professional license every two years.  Last year, I lucked out, having scheduled the class for February, a month before the world stopped.  This year, I had to apply in advance and pay by credit/debit card, rather than the show up the day of the class and pay cash model of the Before Times.  As you can imagine, class size is now limited.

I have had the same instructor for the past three or four years, and he is a good guy.  He begins the class by telling us, "Don't complain about eight hours of class every year, beauticians need to attend one thousand hours of class before they can get licensed."  I typically reply in half-joking fashion, "But a beautician can really mess somebody up."

He then goes on to delineate his two main rules: "Treat everyone the way you would want your mother to be treated, and if you don't write it down, it didn't happen."  I always keep a pocket-sized pad in the bag I bring to work.  

He's also a stickler for telling us about the dangers of blood-borne pathogens, and I have to say that everything he's talked about has had applications during the COVID-19 pandemic.  He was all about the hand-washing before it was ubiquitous, and adjured us to carry hand sanitizer on our persons, and to don mask and gloves if it were necessary to touch someone who didn't look well.  Yeah, he was right about pretty much everything.  Whenever he'd announce the bloodborne pathogen curriculum, I'd always quip, "This is the content we all crave."  I'm going to specifically thank him for this thorough coverage if he teaches this afternoon.

Right now, I am waiting for a coworker to come to my neck of the woods, so we can carpool to the school in Mount Vernon, one town over from my beloved Yonkers.  We'll probably go back next February, as his license expires in April, and it's wise to give NY State a couple of months to get the paperwork in order.  The curriculum doesn't vary, we cover the same topics every year, but it's useful stuff, especially when it can help you avoid contagion, infection, and death.  Next year, I will thank our teacher profusely again... his words were, in the context of two back-to-back plague years, words to live by.

Indigenous Peoples' Day 2021

As an Italian-American (indeed a Ligurian-American), I don't feel that Christopher Columbus, a horrible person by all accounts (even his own) embodies the virtues that my contadini ancestors lived by, and brought to their new home.  Columbus Day was instituted in the US for interesting reasons, and was proclaimed a national holiday in 1934.

The European colonization of the Americas involved a crime so vast, it changed the climate of the planet... active genocidal campaigns and the passive onslaught of  'Old World' diseases largely depopulated North and South America.  Columbus kicked it all off with his numerous crimes against the Taino, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas are still suffering.  Women in indigenous communities in North America are often victims of violence, and Brazil's Bolsonaro has waged war on the nation's indigenous people.  Even Canada, gentle Canada, is grappling with its history of violence against First Nations peoples.

There are some encouraging developments, though, beginning with the issue over honoring Columbus with a national holiday.  The Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, the nation's first Native American cabinet secretary, has pledged to address issues faced by Native Americans, particularly the epidemic of violence against indigenous women.  The Biden Administration also restored the culturally significant Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to their original size after the former Maladministration reduced their size.  

The Biden Administration's treatment of Native Americans seems to mark a significant change for the better, even making an official proclamation of Indigenous Peoples' Day.  As always, we need to keep tabs on the government, and hold them to their promises, but at least there seems to be some hope for better conditions for our Native American population.

A Shuddersomely Entertaining Tale

Looking through the archives, I see that I only made one post referring to Karl Edward Wagner's much-anthologized short story Sticks, originally published in 1974 in the fanzine Whispers.  Karl Edward Wagner was a titan, literally and figuratively, of late 20th century horror publishing, perhaps being best known for editing DAW Books' The Year's Best Horror Stories anthologies from 1980 to 1994.  In 1973, he founded Carcosa Press to publish collections of stories by authors who published in the 'weird' pulps decades earlier.

Wagner knew the genre in-and-out, and Sticks is a love letter to pulp horror stories.  If you've seen The Blair Witch Project, the creepy stick lattices seem cribbed directly from this story, which cribbed them directly from the work of artist Lee Brown Coye, who often incorporated weird stick lattices in his later artwork.  The story begins with a protagonist, based on Coye, encountering an isolated farmstead surrounded by such stick figures, apparently inspired by an incident in Coye's youth.  The story then takes a turn to the macabre as the Coye-character interacts with characters based on August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft and eventually learns the significance of the figures.  Gruesome fun ensues...

Sticks is a fun read, but its primary appeal is to readers familiar with the old pulp artists, writers, and publishers.  It's a fan-work, but a really well-done one by a superfan who ascended to the ranks of beloved professional author and editor.  Even if you aren't well-versed in the old pulp personnel, there's still a creepy story for your Halloween consumption:

 

As I noted, it is much-anthologized, but I'm not sure how well it's known outside of the pulp fandom community.

Day-Glo Horrors

The aesthetics of Gothic horror, indeed most Western horror works, are gloomy, tenebrous... the aesthetics of a castle brooding on a crag at midnight, of foggy bogs, and dark alleys.  Very rarely does one see horror depicted in bright colors, so when one comes across a property which delivers the shudders in bright, primary hues, one takes notice.

The 2006 Japanese anime series Mononoke a spin-off of the Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales series, grabbed my attention with its imagery rooted in the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings of the 17th through 19th centuries.  Its protagonist is a not-quite-human (he has elfin or vulpine features) 'medicine seller', an itinerant exorcist who wages his battles against destructive spirits by figuring out the shape, the truth, and the reason behind the spirits, a who's who of yōkai ranging from the umibōzu to the noppera-bō.  These spirits are the product of negative human emotions, and the hauntings invariably stem from secret misdeeds, typically evil events in family histories.

While the visuals are bright, the subject matter is dark, dealing with the aftermath of violence and abuse, so here's a content warning.  The typical plot is fascinating, though, taking the form of a supernatural police procedural as our exorcist protagonist divines the shape, truth, and reason behind a haunting, often with opposition from the haunted, who are reluctant to divulge their sordid secrets.  It's heady, sometimes disturbing stuff, but always fascinating.

Here's the opening of the show, which will give you some idea of the art-style, which manages to be beautiful even when depicting horrors:

 

There's also a fan-edited trailer, which beautifully conveys the animation style, with its elaborate depictions of the vulpine medicine-seller, using his various exorcist-skills against a variety of supernatural foes.

I pretty much binge-watched the entire 12-episode series once I found it, having been hooked from the get-go.  I can't guarantee that my readers will be equally enthralled, the subject matter can be disturbing... the horrors it depicts, even though supernatural, are human horrors.  It's subject matter that hits the viewer in the heart, not the stomach.

Horror History

This being the Halloween season, and my busy time at work, I figured that I would post a link to the Hypnogoria podcast, which I have posted about before.  Host Jim Moon delivers, in a charming English accent, well-researched lectures about 'the weird and the wonderful'.  This year, he delivered a multi-part exploration of Universal Pictures' classic horror movies.

If you like watching Dracula, Frankenstein, and all those old groovies, I suggest you give Mr Moon's series a listen.  It's a fun, detailed dive into cultural history and film studio economics... a lot better than my précis could ever be.