Make Winter Great Again

Posted on January 23, 2016 by RegenAxe

Paul Ryan’s Live Stream from the Capitol

This year’s storm of the century is now pounding the East Coast, while we in flyover-land are left here to just watch. So much snow, so much ice, so much narcissism and none of it mine. Our 4” that I was crowing about earlier this week turned out to be only two. Still, they closed the schools and Anne got the day off and I took it off too. I never did make it to Art Hill though. Winter storm Jonas, as the Weather Channel calls this blizzard does appear to be some storm. Very likely earning the appellation, the blizzard of 2016, but such a name is way too prosaic for such a storm in this hashtag era and we can’t just recycle the hashtag names from previous year’s storms of the century, like #Snowzilla, #Snowtastrophe or #Snowmageddon. That simply would not do. Slate had a poll for naming this blizzard and I liked some of their suggestions: #Snoverit, #SnowballWarming, #Snowden and #DavidSnowie, but my personal favorite was #MakeWinterGreatAgain. I wonder how they will manage to blame this storm on Obama. Speaker Ryan has a webcam setup on the front of the Capitol to record and broadcast this event. By the time that I found it, it looked like a polar bear in a snowstorm. It has an interesting soundtrack though. It is a funky, instrumental synth jam that may be Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”. I wonder how many babies will be born nine-months from now? I wonder how many of those babies will be conceived while Paul Ryan’s live stream is playing in the background? I’m just asking.

We The People, We Shall Overcome, Yes We Can!

Posted on January 18, 2016 by RegenAxe

Sunday Morning Breakfast, Horace Pippin, 1943

Sunday Morning Breakfast, painted in 1943, in oil on fabric, by Horace Pippin is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. This newly acquired artwork marries modernist abstract design with an evocative, but simple narrative in a scene drawn from the artist’s childhood memories. It is a fine example of African-American domesticity, for which he is best known.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the national holiday set aside for the remembrance of the man and his acts. It is a cold day, but also a bright day here in Saint Louis. I re-watched Selma last night, the story of the fight for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Led by King, the story centers on the lead-up to the march from Selma to Montgomery. The cast led by David Oyelowo (King) portrays a virtual who’s-who of American Civil Rights leadership. In the movie, the political tactics employed by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the white reaction to these tactics form the central story of the movie. King’s personal life is also a major theme. Some of the violence of that time is terrifyingly portrayed. What we don’t see or rather hear are any of King’s lofty speeches, I was surprised to learn. Director Ava DuVernay was forced to paraphrase many of those iconic words that are owned by the MLK estate, those words had already been licensed to a potential Spielberg biopic. Selma was critically well received, except for at last year’s Oscars. Snubbed, it received only one Oscar for the song, Glory. This year, in true Jim Clark fashion, the Oscars have doubled down and nominated no black artists.

Glory mentions Saint Louis by way of Ferguson and not in a good way. The Michael Brown shooting was a tragedy here that should have acted as a wakeup call for Saint Louis, instead, it sparked a national debate. Black men are still being shot by the police, at an alarming rate, at least now though many more incidents are being scrutinized and not just hushed-up and swept under the rug as they once were. I imagine though that just like Selma, over fifty years ago any change for the better is not so much a reflection of anyone’s change of heart, but is due as much from the introduction of video. Any change for the better is still good, no matter how it is wrought. It is a cold, but sunny MLK day here today. Let’s pray that this sunshine portends brighter days to come.

Please Send More Snacks

Posted on January 17, 2016 by RegenAxe

Trumpeter Swans Amid Ice Floes

Al Bundy, I mean Ammon Bundy, honest mistake there, put out this urgent call for help. Those brave, rugged, American patriots who are defending a bird sanctuary in Oregon against the government and by proxy the rest of us too, have requested aid in the form of “more snacks”. A subsequent call for help, this time disseminated by Ammon’s mommy had a more diversified list of goods. Items range from the mundane, like eggs, which are apparently “needed badly”; to the questionable, like cigarettes either Marlboro Red 100’s or Lights 100’s. I’m pretty sure that this proposed mass transportation of cigarettes across state lines is a violation of the law. I’m just saying; to the really bizarre, like ice scrapers, really, really? What they really need is their own Go Fund Me page and avoid all of these snarky remarks.

We were able to free our own local bird sanctuary today. Since late December, it had been held hostage by flood waters. The Audubon center there was not flooded, but was an island for a while. The main causeway was overtopped and as the flood waters receded it acted as a levee and held the flood waters back, but on the wrong side. Many of the sloes were more flooded than I’ve ever seen them. There was debris everywhere. If you’ve lost a duck blind recently, contact the Riverlands, they have it available for your pickup. Probably the clearest sign of the flooding’s extent were the two navigational buoys that were both lodged in a thicket, a good half mile from the channel that they used to mark.

It was bitterly cold today, with a negative wind chill. The most common bird of interest were the Trumpeter swans. There were hundreds of them. When they flew into the stiff wind, they moved relatively slowly and were easier to photograph than when they flew with the wind and went sailing past you too fast for a picture. There were more than a few bald eagles too, but they usually hung out too far away for a decent photo.