Category: Rev. Joe Dirt’s Ramblings

The unsolicited, unreasoned, uninformed, unapologetic opinions of Rev. Joe Dirt

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Drag Queens in Chesterfield

Looking at the local news online this morning, this story – of course, from the local FOX news outlet – was leading the pack : ‘A Drag Queen Christmas’ show sparks heated protest in Chesterfield.

I thought for a minute that a tornado must have grabbed the whole town I live in, Chesterfield, Missouri, and dumped it in Oklahoma while I slept.  But no, we’re still here.  I had to remind myself that I live in Missouri and in the particularly onerous 2nd district, the district which has given us such Republican notables as Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin and Ann “What Climate Change” Wagner.

Since the protesters stated that the drag queens were slapping God Continue reading “Drag Queens in Chesterfield”

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #6,041

yeah I know you did not ask!

I was messing around on a website and the website wanted me to elected a personal pronoun to continue.

Apparently, “No f**** way!”, is not an acceptable response.

I see myself as more than a little liberal. There is no need to be jamming folks up in boxes of acceptability. If it makes you happy, be happy.  I might not want to hang with you, but hey you might not want to hang with me.  We’ll just move on and do our own thing. Life and the two of us will be just fine.

However, this whole woke culture, this whole overly political correct police, is about to turn me into a fanatical reactionary, the bunch of namby pambies.

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Kudos to Missouri American Water

Friday evening along about 1900 hours a neighbor called my wife reporting that we had a new water fountain in our front yard, but in all likelihood it was not going to make her happy. Sure enough she was right on both accounts.  About six or seven feet in from the sidewalk towards our house was an impressive gusher of water. From the volume and force I was reasonably sure it was a water main break of the line that transverses across our front yard, but I had a vague fear it was not, that it might be our service line.  I began to have visions of dollar bills flowing out of our bank account quicker than from the hands of a drunken sailor on his first shore leave in six months.

If I had thought a minute longer I would called the water company, but my first impulse was to call Continue reading “Kudos to Missouri American Water”

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,063

yeah I know you did not ask!

Florida famously is the warm, tacky place old folks retire to to await their pie in the sky.  They are down there in gator-land, realizing that their golden years are more fool’s gold than Inca ingots.  Additionally, their kids seldom come to visit, and when they do it is a fly-by drop in on the way to Disney World.

Wanting to get even for these indignities, they have started sending to the rest of country the most gawd awful politicians imaginable: Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, Marc Rubio, Matt Gaetz, ad nauseam… literally

Go visit the old folks in Florida.  Maybe next  time they go to the polls they will not be quite so vengeful.

Just saying.

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Purgatory?

My troubles are many, they’re as deep as a well
I can swear there ain’t no heaven but I pray there ain’t no hell
Swear there ain’t no heaven and pray there ain’t no hell,
But I’ll never know by living, only my dying will tell,
Only my dying will tell, yeah, only my dying will tell
And when I die and when I’m gone,
There’ll be one child born and a world to carry on, to carry on

The above snippet of lyrics is from the Blood, Sweat & Tears song, And When I Die, a song that reached number 2 on the charts in 1968.

For many reasons the line, “I can swear there ain’t no heaven but I pray there ain’t no hell” has stuck Continue reading “Purgatory?”

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #2,638

yeah I know you did not ask!

Anyone who has ever lived with a dog for any period of time will come to know that they are creatures of habit, creatures of routine.  Señora feeds Princess Lily in the morning, time dependent on when Señora makes the commitment that this really is a new day and rolls out of the warm, embracing bed. But as soon as she does, The Wee Dog is following her around. Señora is very regular on the next feeding  of our proxy child at 1700 hours.

Somehow this punctual pooch protegee knows the time, and about five or so minutes before the appointed hour her hirsute self is parked by her food bowl, her eyes tracking Señora.

I am going to find the miniature Rolex watch that must be buried under the fur on her little doggie wrist, and sell it.  Maybe then I can recuperate, in part, all the money spent on food, all the money spent on treats, all money spent on toys, all the money spent on vet bills, that Señora has lavished upon our copacetic canine companion… or not.

And so it goes in our little ménage à chienne.

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My Retirement in Crypto-Currency?

“In fact, even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money. The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers. Accordingly, most business transactions are executed by moving electronic data from one computer file to another, without any exchange of physical cash.”

The above quote is from the book Sapiens – A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harai.

I started wondering if for some reason electricity generation became an issue then all those 1s and 0s, those bits and bytes in a myriad of computers around the globe would be naught.  There goes 35 or 40 years of hard work, saving , investing and retirement dreams. Of course if electric generation went away there would be logarithmically worse problems on the third rock from the sun.

60 trillion dollars worth of money in the world and 50 trillion of that is in digital form… talk about your cyrpto-currency.  Have you ever noticed the first 3 letters of this new fad in “money” is C-R-Y said the Curmudgeon channeling his inner Seinfeld.

And so it does not go… I hope.

And here is a country worried about electricity: Winter is coming: The ‘best country in the world’ is planning to ban electric cars amid the energy crisis. Is it time to revisit oil stocks? Here are 3 big plays

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Restaurant Red Flags

What triggered this post was an article about a TikTok video posted by a health inspector… somewhere too far north.  I read the article, but I passed on the video.  However, the link to both is at the bottom of this post. Enjoy.

In 1983 my ex-spouse had found a job in Arkansas and I was living in Tulsa, by gawd, Oklahoma.  Deciding I needed to be in Arkansas also meant I needed a job.  A position as a County Sanitarian (Health Inspector) Continue reading “Restaurant Red Flags”

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Corn on the cob

This morning I had a session of Spanish conversation practice with a young indigenous woman from Guatemala, Zelaida Guox.  She is currently going to school to become a teacher.   She had on a pair earrings that were small plastic corn cobs, maize – corn – being very important in the cultures of Mexico and Central America.

We talked about her earrings for a bit, then she asked me if we eat corn here. Claro que sí, señorita… But of course we do, corn on the cob being a very typical food of summer. I then went on to describe how we tend to soak our corn on the cob in butter.  She thought this a little strange. She then described how they commonly eat corn on the cob in Guatemala.  One way is that they squeeze lemon juice, followed by salt, followed by squeezing lime juice on the cob.  Or they put ketchup (salsa dulce) on their corn on the cob or sometimes mayonnaise.  I had heard the mayonnaise addition before, and I am betting it is very good.

Something different to try next time you have one of the emblematic foods of summer.

And so it goes.

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State Violence

Another quote to meditate on from The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.  For some reason the last part of this sentence keeps echoing in my mind, that part of the definition of a sovereign state is that the state has sole proprietorship of legitimate violence within its boundaries.  It is something I knew before, but I had never articulated in quite that manner.

“…is confident that an objective statistical analysis, shorn of sentiment, will show us to be living in an age of unprecedented peace and security. And this, he suggests, is the logical outcome of living in sovereign states, each with a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its borders…“

Well…not an earwig, but definitely a mental perseveration.