Not Exactly a Palindrome, But Maybe a What What?


Hmmm. An interesting and perhaps relevant flashback to Moon Books at Shuteye Train 1999.

Which is also available in its entirety here.

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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 12:00 PM., Thursday, November 6.  Latest entries are “The Blobfish Boomlet,” “Is there a curse in New York City,” and “A Big Missing Piece.” The Instapunk Times is hot of the presses [ NOV 6 STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated November 6. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and ...
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The Blobfish Boomlet

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  Click the graphic above to watch the Rumble video Why this post? The last 48 hours or so have defined the beginning of a new phase in the adventure of Trump 2.0. Phase 1 was fixing the border, addressing the hot wars in foreign climes, and launching a new trade strategy based on tariffs. Phase 2 was not a restart but a new layer, the beginning of calling the criminals of Trump 1.0 to account, ramping up the deportation campaign in Sanctuary locations, and fighting back against the locally based judicial insurrection against the 2024 election of Trump and his Americans First policies. Phase 3 is another new layer, the immediate aftermath of the death of the Democrat Party in last night’s election results.  I’m calling it the Blobfish Boomlet, because the outstanding feature of the Blobfish is that it is ugly and shapeless, flaccid inertness disguising itself with inflated media presence. Pundits insist we are looking at an ideological divide, a collision between two diametric...
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I’ll be quoting directly in chunks here, so there can be no claim that I am cherry-picking facts, situations, narratives, or contexts. It’s an old subject for me, as you’ll see, but I’m writing now because my wife gave me a hard time about surfacing the racial issues surrounding the mass shooting at Lincoln University, which I raised because she told me the report she’s read did not include the fact that Lincoln is one of the surviving Historically Black Colleges. This is important because the mass media are fastidious about concealing pertinent information about the identities of both shooters and victims these days. She suggested I was dragging race into a sad crime story. Then she left the room. As I expect many of you would too. We’ve been well trained not to see this particular elephant in the room. Or at least not to discuss it. Here’s the NBC account: One person is dead and at least six others were wounded in a shooting amid homecoming festivities Saturday night at Lincoln Unive...
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  They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing  in  the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain. There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling ( congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden. According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long lif...
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A Big Missing Piece

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Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
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Is there a curse on New York City?

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  The island of Manhattan once belonged to the Lenape people, like a lot of NY and NJ. Just asking the question. Because there is historical background, evidence, And repeated rumblings from our Jungian subconscious that’s afflicted with uncannily relevant visions. Writers used to be solemnly warned that “to be universal, you must first be local.” Why my explanation of a possible curse on the Big Apple will actually begin a two-hour bus ride to the south of the Holland Tunnel. Which is not mentioned by accident. The fingerprints of the Dutch are all over the origins of this story.  The place down south of NYC is Salem County, New Jersey, which had a very special relationship with the Lenape people: The Salem Oak Tree was the real center of the county seat of Salem, where I grew up. It was so old and huge that its massive trunk had lower limbs that were the size of mighty oak trees themselves. The tree was already a landmark in 1675 when the treaty was signed under it. The Quak...
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  Her name is Rachel Gilman. I’m sure she’s a pleasant lady in person. Before we get into the nitty gritty, please take a closer look at the graphic in the lower right hand corner of the image above. This could be the most gruesome desecration of the American flag I’ve seen. It  demonstrates the scare tactic of the coat-hanger abortion to a fare-thee-well.  300 deaths a year may be a sad statistic, but it is not a civilizational catastrophe.  We stopped counting abortions many years ago. The numbers you see quoted are all guesstimates, riddled with acknowledged gaps smoothed over by minimizing assumptions to conceal the enormity of legalized deaths that occurred under Roe v. Wade. Numbers in our biggest cities are terrifying when considered by racial breakdown. In NYC, nearly half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. That’s eugenics-level population control. Why Planned Parenthood is so embarrassed about admitting the eugenic philosophy of their patron Saint, Ma...
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