Neanderpundit

Tam is bitching- and rightfully so- at the “jackals” in the press who are associating the asshole in Arizona with one group or another hoping to stir up ant-whatever sentiment.

I have been around jackals. This casts unfair aspersions on Jackals. Hyenas might be closer to the fact. Jackals are downright familial and friendly members of the dog family by comparison.

Listen: I don’t need the press to tell me this or that or the other is a bastard. I’ve known this for some time.

Anyone who has ever been in a failed relationship or who has dealt with the license bureau or the INS knows, people are bastards. Most of them. When you find people who are not, you value them, and cherish them.

Don’t hate Jared Lee Loughner because he’s a marxist, or teabagger, or leftist, or whatever.

But don’t not hate him.

Hate him because he’s scum. Only scum would do this. Only scum kills an innocent kid.

There are plenty of reasons to be misanthropic, I can give you a billion before breakfast without even reading the news first. All the more reason to keep your friends close and safe.

Keep a happy thought for the victims and their families.

To anyone on earth who thinks Crapblogging is a new thing, or that the sort of scatalogical language you hear on blogs these days is a recent phenomenon, let me point you to 1601, by Mark Twain.

Years ago, I worked at a little print shop, which had a small letterpress, an old kelsey. How I wish I had that Kelsey now!

Anyway, there’s a sort of an underground tradition of giving a printer’s devil (apprentice) the manuscript of 1601 to set, and giving him a drawer of pied type- that is, type that has come out of a set document that hasn’t been sorted into it’s proper drawers. Usually it’s an ornate or ugly typeface, like Goudy Stout.

Standing in front of the messed up drawer, digging around for letters, pushing the letters onto the stick while reading 1601 is usually how a devil sets his first type, and doing it while the Boss doesn’t find out (though the boss usually knows about the whole thing all along) is the first memory most apprentices have of their job- this is certainly true in my case. I remember tightening in the quoin on the last side of the frame and lifting the frame gingerly off the stone, not knowing if I had gotten the quoins tight enough, and carrying it to the Kelsey, where we printed a handful of copies on some scrap ‘Carnival Groove” that had been cut off another job.

Twain was a master. His language was far more colorful than you can imagine was possible for that time, and the piece is worth a read, unless you’re sensitive to language or scataology or crude sexal reference.

I wish I still had one of those proofsheets. Someday maybe I’ll find a small printshop that will let me reset it and print it, for old time’s sake.