“And, Brother, Here I Come: Walking the Way I Walk, Talking the Way I Talk—a Nature Boy!”

I have no response to that.

Okay, I've got one, just one.

WOOOOO!

I Also Paraphrase Him Often, Saying “The Most Overrated Things in the World Are Oral Sex and Duke University”

There's to be a Walker Percy movie. Hearing that news has made me uncharacteristically happy. He's one of my favorite writers, and this will hopefully earn him the following he deserves.

If my “library” weren't in storage, I'd grab my copies of his novels and copy a few passages for you to give you an idea of what you're in for. Since everything is still boxed up in the basement, I'll leave you with this, instead, a few paragraphs from my favorite essay, his thoughts on bourbon:

I can hardly tell one bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad bourbons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: “Where are the women?” I have not been able to locate this remarkable bourbon since.

Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, that is, the use of bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there's Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?

Do yourself a favor, and click the link to read the rest of it.

And if you've got nothing better to do—and you don't—go read The Moviegoer. It's this month's Biff's Pick for literature.

“Today, It's Time to Stop Singing and Start Swinging” – Malcolm X (Oops, Wrong Birthday Celebration)

The Daily Kos has a post up called The day the Klan messed with the wrong people. Unsurprisingly, the wrong people included black people in North Carolina.

By the mid-1950's the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and the KKK decided they had to fight back. Their campaign of terrorism swept through many of the southern states, but largely fell flat in North Carolina.

James W. “Catfish” Cole, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, decided he was going to change that. Cole was an ordained minister of the Wayside Baptist Church in Summerfield, North Carolina, who regularly preached the Word of God on the radio. His rallies often drew as many as 15,000 people. As Cole told the newspapers: “There's about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up.”

Cole made a critical mistake that couldn't be avoided by a racist mind — he was completely ignorant of the people he was about to mess with.

Dr. Perry was a black doctor in Monroe, NC, and helped finance a local chapter of the NAACP. One night at a meeting, the word was received that the Klan threatened to blow up Dr. Perry's house. The meeting broke up and everyone went home to get their guns.

Sipping coffee in Perry's garage with shotguns across their laps, the men agreed that defending their families was too important to do in haphazard fashion. "We started to really getting organized and setting up, digging foxholes and started getting up ammunition and training guys," Williams recalled. “In fact, we had started building our own rifle range, and we got our own M-1's and got our own Mausers and German semi-automatic rifles, and steel helmets. We had everything.”

Many of these men were veterans of WWII and didn't scare easily. Men guarded the house in rotating shifts and the women of the NAACP set up a telephone warning system.

On October 5, 1957, Catfish Cole organized a huge Klan rally near Monroe. Afterward the decision was made to move on Dr. Perry's home.

a large, heavily armed Klan motorcade roared out to Dr. Perry's place, firing their guns at the house and howling at the top of their lungs. The hooded terrorists met a hail of disciplined gunfire from Robert Williams and his men, who fired their weapons from behind sandbag fortifications and earthen entrenchments. Shooting low, they quickly turned the Klan raid into a complete rout. “[Police Chief] Mauney wouldn't stop them,” B. J. Winfield said later, “and he knew they were coming, because he was in the Klan. When we started firing, they run. We run them out and they started just crying and going on.”

Amazingly no one was killed, but a number of cars were disabled. The following day the Monroe city council held an emergency meeting and passed an ordinance against Klan motorcades.

Yep, cross burnings are all fun and games until somebody gets on an old black man's lawn in Monroe. It's all shooting and crying after that.

The real lesson to be taken away from this, though, seems to be that black activists weren't the only ones to benefit from Dr. Martin Luther King's teaching of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance tactics. There's at least one Grand Dragon that wishes it had started sooner.

* Pictured, Charlie Warriax and Simeon Oxendine, of the Lumbee tribe, another group of North Carolinians you probably shouldn't fuck with.

As My South Park Hero, Stan Marsh, Would Say, “Dude, That's Some Fucked Up Shit, Right There”

Hans O. (45) appeared in room 117 of Dusseldorf district court with the public prosecutor accusing the 120-kg man of committing sexual abuse and grievous bodily harm.

The incomprehensible incident took place on September 2 last year. Hans and his buddy Alexander J. met in the afternoon in the centre of Neuss, a town near Dusseldorf. They drank beer deep into the night.

Hans O. got completely drunk, and then suddenly overwhelmingly horny…

He unbuttoned the trousers of his friend who was sleeping on the couch, and messed around with his genitals.

When the fondling failed to provoke any physical response from Alexander, Hans became furious…

The prosecutor said: “He twisted the scrotum repeatedly until it broke. Then he took the testicles and hurled them from the window.”

…Police later found the testicles on the roof where they lay in the snow guard.

The prosecutor wants Hans O. to be taken into psychiatric accommodation. The accused himself declined to comment: “I’m saying nothing else.”


Finally, an accused criminal who gets it. (Does it undermine the point that he's insane?)

Hats off to you, testicle-ripping, nut-slinging dude. I hope you're convicted and put away for a very long time, but I am heartened to know that if you are, it will be without self-incriminating evidence.

Damn it. I promised myself I wouldn't cry.

Click the Link to Read One of the Best Headlines Ever

Accused of repeatedly exposing himself at a SeaTac bar, a 41-year-old man has been charged with indecent exposure with sexual motivation.

On Jan. 3, King County prosecutors claim in charging documents, Basim Salim Abdul-Rahim was seated in the bar of the 13 Coins restaurant when a bartender there noticed he was staring at her. The woman became concerned when she realized Abdul-Rahim was fondling himself.

Abdul-Rahim fled before police arrived, a King County detective said in court documents, leaving behind a container of Vaseline.

Two days later he allegedly returned to the restaurant, prompting the bartender to call the police to report that a man who'd repeatedly exposed himself was siting at the bar, according to court documents. Deputies arrested Abdul-Rahim, finding his hands coated with petroleum jelly.

Confronted by police, Abdul-Rahim allegedly admitted to frequenting the bar but denied following the bartender, according to prosecutors' statements.

Questioned about his Vaseline-covered hands, he said he'd been having phone sex with his wife, prosecutors alleged.

Because that's not a problem at all, having phone sex in a bar. At least not in Seattle. That's a Sunday.

But, of course, he was lying, if his wife is to be believed, and when it's the wife's word against the husband's whose hands are covered in Vaseline, you kind of go with the wife.

So, in addition to his already substantial list of woes, he has Explain Why I Told Police I Was Having Phone Sex with My Wife in the 13 Coins Bar Area when I Clearly Wasn't on the Phone with My Wife. “Oh, that wasn't you? My bad, honey, I could've sworn… Well, I'm just as baffled as you are. I don't know whose voice and comments I was lubing the axle to. But isn't that's soooo like me,” I imagine him saying.

Shortly, afterwards, I imagine there to be cops and EMTs involved.

It Looks Like Someone Picked the Wrong Day to Have Morgan Freeman on the Show

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Harry Reid's Racist Comment
www.colbertnation.com
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Stephen Colbert: Right off the top, I just want to say, “Negro. ”

Negro, negro, negro, negro, negro, negro, negro, negro, negro, negro: You know there are some words that you say over and over again and they lose their meaning, this isn't one of them.…

Now, I don't want to shock any of the black members of my audience—Two and…and there are none. Okay—but, black people, now you know: when you're not around, all white people use the word negro.

We're always negro-this and negro-that. “Hey, there's a Negro over there!” or “I love Negro music!” or “Let's have dinner with the Negroes. They're nice.”

And now, and now, because of this, we know it's okay to say it… So, let's all say, “negro” together, okay? I say, “Knee, you say, ”Grow.”

KNEE!

Audience: GROW!

KNEE!

Audience: GROW!

Jay the Intern! [points to intern]

Jay the Intern: Negro.

Morgan Freeman! [points to Morgan Freeman]

[Gets “Don't Catch a Beat-Down, Bro'” sneer, or as we refer to it in the 'Hood, Angry Black Man Look No. 1 (or just The No.1) for his efforts.]

Which is fair. All of this disturbing behavior lately deserves the No.1, if not, in fact, the implied beat-down behind it, because unless I'm mis-reading the cultural winds, white folks are using Obama's election to get a little too familiar with colored folks peoples of color, to cross boundaries that election didn't get them an all-access pass to. They've become uppity, in other words, and a Stink-eye here or there needs to be shot their way to let them know how badly they've misjudged the post-racial world.

They helped elect a black president, which, while significant in a symbolic sense, isn't that significant in any real sense. To get their votes, the black president had to whitewash the Democratic platform to remove any race-specific policies or strategies for removing the barriers to equal opportunity and equal access to the nation's resources leftover from its long history of government enforcement of slavery and apartheid. It's true. If we're being honest, we have to admit white people didn't vote for him to address our racial woes or to celebrate our successes. It wasn't racial at all. Despite the “Yes, we can” idealism, the president was elected not because of how far we've come as a nation, but because of how low we'd sunk.

So, you get the Stink-eye or the No. 1 when you cross a social barrier your recent inaction hasn't given you access to. You don't know us like that.

Despite having been together since the 17th century, we're still strangers, and you need to treat us like strangers, respectfully, excusing yourself before you take liberties with our personal space.

So if this is you,
and you're wondering—“Pardon me,” you say—if anyone would be offended if you presumed to understand our blackness

…there is a deeper significance — a racial philanthropy — that perhaps neither man intended. Jay-Z is black black. He is old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black. He is black the way Labatt is blue. He is not white black, Barack black, like our president. Or the kind of black that doesn't curse and deplores the n-word, the genteel black, like Oprah. He is, arguably, the first black-black guy to cross over into Oprah-land and Bill Clintonworld without making the Oprah-sized no-look-back forward flip that means you're selling not necessarily your soul but perhaps something fleshier, a little more external.

the answer is yes. Yes, we would.

And if you're wondering if it's okay for you to fall back on sexual tropes and stereotypes for descriptions of black men, like reducing them to seventy-three sliding inches of blackness, as in

But Jay-Z doesn't really sit. What he actually does is slalom down in his chair, real low like it's a water slide. Seventy-three inches of all-black everything, laid out like a ramp.…

Well, no. Just no.

So, observe the Stink-eye, respect the No.1. Or we'll have to get the big, pipe-slinging brothers with the vice grips and blow torches to get medieval on your asses and get you to back up off us, move you back to your side of the racial divide.

I'm surprised I have to tell you this.

It's True: Once You Enter the City Limits, It's Clothing-Optional

Cover your eyes and lock up your children. The light rail is going streaking.

Well, almost.

“It makes people go, ‘What the f?’” said Kelsey Wildstone, co-organizer of the first-ever “No Pants!” light-rail ride, happening today.

“As long as you're covered and buy a ticket, there's nothing wrong with it.”

If all goes to according to plan, the “No Pants” ride from Westlake Center to Sea-Tac Airport should be exactly what it sounds like — a lot of people riding a train in their undies.


In Seattle, we only see the sun for 365 seconds a year—and it's raining through 364 of those. Try to keep your clothes on while living with that. I dare you.

Until then, don't judge us.

The Thin Blue Line Separating You from Your Drink Order

Police officers in Everett, Washington decided that the best way to spend their time—and spend taxpayers' dough—was cracking down on the perverted, nasty, please-don't-make-them-see-it phenomenon of mostly naked women serving drive-through coffee. It was a tough assignment, but they prevailed. To prove that the women at Grab-n-Go Espresso were straddling the sill of the to-go window while wearing panties without crotches, licking whipped cream off of one another, and otherwise exposing their nether-parts to men, officers—naturally—had to take pictures. Officials have charged the women, who are scheduled for a hearing January 11, with prostitution.

Reluctantly, officers released those photos yesterday, pursuant to a public records request by the Everett Herald, but the staff at the Everett Herald had the good taste not to run those pictures. Fortunately, we don't have that good taste here at The Stranger.


I bet you feel guilty asking your barista for an extra shot of mocha syrup.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, bankrupting Starbucks one drip at a time is the least of our coffee-drinking concerns. We're more concerned about health code violations.

That said, the smegma lattes are not to be missed.

Everything Smokes Afterward in NC

Everything's Bigger In Texas - watch more funny videos

I heard that about Maryland girls, but I didn't want to say anything. You know how sensitive some people can be.

Dr. Stephenson, You've Got Some Explaining to Do

In the waiting room of the Center for Colorectal Health, keep your eyes down at all times.

Lots of ass-shame in that room. So much ass-shame.

I couldn't quite see too well…, so the memory is sketchy due to my weak peripheral vision and tendency to imagine things that might or might not have been real, but I'm pretty sure everyone there but me was in disguise.…

I didn't wear a costume because I didn't know about the ass-shame ahead of time…

It bothered me that I was the only woman in there. I'm pretty sure they all assumed I'd been having shitloads of anal sex, which I haven't by the way. So to prove it I cleared my throat and said “Hey you guys, quick poll! Raise your hand if you hate anal sex!” and raised my hand, so crisis averted, ass-virtue preserved.

But just in case, to make my point clear, I borrowed a post-it pad from the receptionist and made some signs for my ass, and then sauntered casually around the room for a bit.…

You know how in movies, they bend you over the table? I was ready for that.

And you know how at the gyno, they put your legs up in stirrups? I could've handled that.

But what she did was…she rolled me onto my side and told me to pull my legs up to my chest. Then she stuck her jellied finger up my butt while I lay in the fetal position, which is like tucking someone into bed with their teddy bear and a cup of hot cider and nestling them in the arms of the tooth fairy as Santa sits at the foot of the bed making his list and checking it twice and telling you that you've been a good girl and then surprise! Look over there! It's your Nana giving a donkey a hand job! Yeah, see? Confused feelings is right!


Even with the confusion, this sounds like a much better digital rectal exam than I've ever had. Mine proceed like Festivus, starting with the airing of the grievances (what's happened ass-wise since my last exam), and going right into the Feats of Strength — where the doctor and assistants overpower me to get me into the exam room and onto the table. Finally, there's the cuddling, afterwards, which I really hate: I really rather just cry in peace.

Wait. What do you mean digital rectal exams don't require cuddling?