Norman Rules

This post was last updated at 8:30 AM., Saturday, August 30. Latest entries are “A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting,” “The New Dem Strategy,” and “Poetry Across Scales.” The Instapunk Times is on the racks.. Undernet Black was updated August 30. 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 I made my own pi...

Poetry across scales

August 23, 2025

Minimalism has been a periodic ideal of modern and post-modern esthetics. Purely arbitrary, of course, though not without possibilities and even infinities of its own. For example, there are those who regard Haiku as a sort of supreme test of the poet, since poetry is commonly defined as the best words in the best order. This leaves the door open for imagining that there is an absolute minimum definable for capturing profound truth in the fewest of the best words in the least of the best order. In Haiku there must be 17 syllables, some reference to a season (ensuring universality I guess), and a prohibition against rhyme to prevent cheating (another guess). What if this definition of the minimum is wrong? What if there’s some way to reach great truths in less than 17 syllables? In less than a single word even? And, gasp, in less than a single letter on the page? Impossible? Well, why the hell not? I propose that the graphic above is a poem, subject to meaningful exploration, inte...

The World According to Instapunk

August 21, 2025

It’s time for me to do something I really dislike having to do. I need to write a book that will be printed on paper and will also consist as entirely of words as I can manage. It has been many years since I have regarded that as my preferred medium of expression. I find it confining, technologically and artistically retrograde, and I would avoid doing it if I could. Not that I can’t do it. I have done a huge chunk of work that way. But that aspect of my writing was supposed to be over nearly 30 years ago. The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work. Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mo...

The New Dem Strategy

August 26, 2025

Just got my usual wake-up notification from the standard Instagram donkey expressing disbelief that Trump’s latest press conference didn’t land him in the loony bin. He was particularly outraged that “there is no more national media” to protect us from the President’s insanity. Which is to say that Trump met his objective for the press conference: goading the moribund Democrat Party to keep sawing at the limb of the tree they’re sitting on. I went looking for an animated cartoon that illustrates my point. Unable to find it even with the help of Google’s AI know-it-all, I cobbled one together on my own. Simple and brief as it is, my little animation shows what the lefties are hoping against hope for, that blessed moment when the saw severs the link to the poisoned tree for good and saves them from it. There follows that brief stretched out moment when the limb remains suspended alone in midair while the tree falls. Then the illusion ends and the limb crashes to the ground as the la...

Homework that’s fun

February 09, 2023

IMPORTANT NOTE 8/4/25 : The ‘Shuteye Nation’ files of which The Glossary is a component are stored under the Wordpress application. Wordpress itself is in corporate limbo, unreachable even by fully paid up customers. I can no longer sign in even though I still own the site. Why there is a block against reaching the files the first time you try. It’s simple to bypass. When you click on one of the frames below, you will see a screen saying it is a private file. Click the option offering More Information. The next screen will give you the option of seeing the files anyway. Click on that. THEN refresh your screen and the file will appear. This is the only time in the current session when you will have to do this. It’s an annoyance. That is all. Click the graphic to go right to The Glossary I know there are those out there in the Facebook Universe who do come to look at the longer thought pieces I generally reserve for IPR and other of my websites. The traffic here, by the way, i...

The Roots of TDS in the Dem Rank and File

September 03, 2025

Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...

A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting

August 30, 2025

(1957-1966) You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t. Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again. You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows no...

A quick flash of Klieg lights from the subconscious

July 27, 2025

Saw a short but evocative post from Michael Smith on Facebook yesterday that struck an immediate chord with me: It struck chords with a lot of people in fact. We’d already been through this once with all the guiltiest talking heads in the media interviewing all the accomplices in the political class about how the fact of Joe Biden’s serious dementia could have been covered up so thoroughly. Nauseating to watch. Now we have a similar but not quite identical phenomenon of the complicit talking heads in the huge set of hoaxes designed to destroy the Trump presidency inviting some of of the prime perpetrators on to deny the truth of Tulsi Gabbard’s charges with a straight face. Nodding all around as more lies are piled on top of the mountain of old lies. Does no one realize they are, if possible, making matters worse for themselves when the investigators bring their charges? Reading Smith’s post and the comments appended to it made me think of a movie I had seen as a kid. It w...

What we’re supposed to be doing

August 19, 2025

It’s August going on September. Vacation time. Where we’re all supposed to be. Except maybe for mass media news outlets who still haven’t recovered from the late starts and early “lids” of the Biden days. They’re all still phoning it in, repeating the same lies, even the 10-yo ones about the Steele Dossier, the Epstein case, and the impeccably fair system of elections throughout the nation. Also still pleased with the 4-yo lies about poor, virtuously democratic Ukraine besieged by a corrupt authoritarian state outside their own borders, and the treacherous complicity of OrangeManBad in covering, again , for Putin and raining down death and destruction on innocent migrants, corpse-looking federal judges, and everyone else who isn’t a white man with a billion dollars. Yeah. Got it. Here’s an idea. Let them all keep playing amongst themselves with none of us watching until they fall asleep or something. In the meantime I’m having a little get-together here for my e-friends. Got the...

Into the 9th Month of Trump 2.0…

September 04, 2025

The normal term of gestation is almost done. Apologies to Kubrick. What have we got to go on so far? What kind of President is 2.0 going to be? The 1.0 version was naïve about the extent of corruption and poison in Washington, DC. He got stabbed in the back a lot. Like most of us, he was not nearly suspicious enough of the massive healthcare/pharmaceutical complex and learned the hard way that their “science” is just as fraudulent and mercenary as the Climate Change Mafia. He got a lot done in the first term, but they were successful in removing him from power. What can we expect now. How different is 2.0? Here’s an assessment of who Trump has been since January 20. He is boldly but carefully revolutionary. I say carefully because he is playing the long game and when he drops a big rock in the water he lets the system absorb the shock and respond. People stung by his second term tweets overlook the fact that tweets these days are a frequent substitute for ignoring the law and for...

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