Back in Maryland (still)

Home taking care of my Dad. He had a hip operation. Is doing swell (not as in imflamation-swell, though that's a whole 'nother story), but swell as in that word meaning "great" that first appeared in a New Yorker review of some restaurant back in the '20s.

Thank you for asking, but Dad is doing swell.

The more time I spend in the South (or is it outside of New York, I sometimes can't tell), the more freaked I become. It's -not- alright for damn-Yankees (yes, you still exist) like most of my friends (don't worry, I still love you) to bitch about the South without context. I may. And I'll bet my more than 50 cousins that I know more about the actuality of the place than any graduate degree in American studies focusing on Georgia.

Yeah, scrap me and I'm that kinda of hick. The cousins galore-kind. I have fantasies about selecting, say, 12 of them and bringing them to some hip par-tay in Brooklyn and watching them form an immovable clot in the midst of the living room.


Anyway, I went to the Bare Essentials makeup counter at Annapolis Mall yesterday. My face has been breaking out, and I wanted some coverage. Didn't buy any. I asked what was in the cover-up, and the woman said "all natural minerals."

"What minerals?" sez I.

"All natural minerals," sez she.

"Yeah, but which?"

"Well it doesn't contain things like talc." (Talc -is- a natural mineral, but I let this one slide.)

"Could you find out for me?" sez I. Much rummaging around in back.

"We don't have the ingredients, but it's all natural minerals?"

I decided to get snippy.

"You mean all natural minerals, like arsenic and asbestos?" Some really blank looks.


Ok, maybe that wasn't fair. And if a New York makeup salesgirl was wearing makeup as cracked as miss natural minerals, she'd be canned. But it's a facet of the suburban South that people take things from commercials as if they're the scientific truth straight out of NIH.

Grumble. Fuck the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, Wizard, n'get me outta here.


BTW, Princeton U has a book coming out Democracy and Torture, by Darius Regali, that gives the history of various torture practices, tracing their lineage. And where lineage goes, follow backwards, and you have origin. And when you have origin, you know who to blame.