I had a really strange Christmas Day, being a guest of two strangers as I was asked to play the role of surrogate father to a fiftyish neighbor who wanted me to be her guest at dinner with her new boyfriend and his incredibly old mother. My neighbor would not take “no” for an answer, so what the hell. It was better than sitting around in a bleak house having a lot of memories sitting around staring at me.
I had neglected to include Nat King Cole’s signature Christmas song among the ones I highlighted this month, but it’s one that’s appropriate for the whole holiday season, so here it is. I wonder if anyone else noticed that “The Christmas Song,” by Nat, the Carpenters, Dean Martin, among others, or its author, Mel Torme (How must it feel when you are a renowned singer in your own right and the best song you ever wrote is identified with a rival singer?) seemed to get less play on this year than usual. Please tell me it isn’t because the song has been “cancelled” due to political correctness. You know: “Eskimos.”
I once tried to come up with a minimally disruptive lyric change to accommodate “Folks dressed up like Inuits” but the best I could come up with was “Jack Frost nipping at your tits…”
Uh, no.
Nat King Cole is another brilliant, unique vocal artist whose only hold on the culture’s memory is his single Christmas classic. Future generations won’t know what they’re missing. Cole died in 1965, still in great voice at 45. Here’s this marvelous balladeer at his best without chestnuts…
But I digress. If you had any disturbing or amusing encounters with the Trump Deranged yesterday, this would be a good place to relate them. (I did!)
Ethics Alarms 
Nothing particularly worth mentioning, other than the fact that “Jack Frost nipping at your tits” made coffee shoot out my nose.
May you have a truly happy New Year. You’re overdue.
I came up with the painfully boring “…and folks dresses up in heavy cloths“.
For what is worth, I heard this song on near constant repeat, something with a far inferior version immediately after Nat. Didn’t realize he only made it to 45!
The frustrating part of the “Eskimo” controversy is how contrived it is. It is literally just the French Canadians calling them “skiers” (because they strap boards to their feet to glide across the snowy north). Old French adds a lot of e’s before s’s, hence, eski…. Some random race baiter made up the wholy fictional idea that it means “canable”, and that fiction stuck.
Jack wrote, “If you had any disturbing or amusing encounters with the Trump Deranged yesterday, this would be a good place to relate them. (I did!)”
I went an entire day, Christmas Day, without one word of discussion or even a brief thought about anything related to politics, I stayed away from the internet and the news. I also caught another miserable cold on Christmas Eve forcing me to sleep sitting up and I’ve been suffering ever since. Also I got a really deep gash in one of my fingers on Monday requiring over an hour to get the dang thing to stop bleeding, I cut straight through a capillary. After it finally stopped bleeding I got six stitches and a splint to prevent that finger from bending so it would heal properly. It took nearly three hours total in Urgent Care to get it all taken care of. It kinda sucks trying to type with a splint on your middle finger, but on a positive note, I don’t have to strain to flip off assholes.
My wife and I have had a ridiculous year. There have been multiple deaths in the family, either my wife or I have been in urgent care or some doctor’s office at least twice every month, we were forced to completely change half of our vacation because of a health concern while on the road, big medication changes for both my wife and I, we’ve caught everything our grandchildren got including a mid year bout with head lice that we’ve never had in our household before. Only five days left in this year.
Yes, it’s been a crazy year for us, but in spite of all the unplanned craziness, we had lots of time to share some interesting and fun things together.
The only Trump Deranged encounter I had was reading the President’s “Christmas” message.
was that a real duet or one of those postmortem dubbed duets (which i cannot tolerate)?
With the album jacket stating “With the *voice* of Nat King Cole..”, I would think it is one of those constructed albums. There is at least one featuring him and his daughter, Natalie, both as adults, long after Nat’s death in 1965.
No, that one was fake, and inferior to just Nat alone, because Natalie Cole was just OK.
However, the version of “In the Ghetto” with Lisa Marie Pressley i like better than Elvis alone, but just because it’s a lousy song.
I want to file this under “international incident waiting to happen”:
Back in the 60s, Poul Anderson wrote a trio of stories for Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine that involved a human colony attacked by aliens, supposedly by accident and supposedly all the humans on the planet were killed.
Gunnar Heim, the protagonist, learns that most of the people on New Eurpose actually survived and had taken to the hills. The world government refuses to do anything for fear of provoking a war with the aliens, but France, where many of the colonists came from, is more resolute.
France announces, to the consternation of almost everyone, that it has retained the authority, from before it joined the world government, to issue the ancient and almost forgotten Letters of Marque and Reprisal. And that it has done so — to Gunnar Heim.
The story proceeds from there, and these stories were stitched together into the novel, The Star Fox, published around 1965. I thought it was a good read, but I’m a big Poul Anderson fan.
All that said, from my reading on the history of letters of marque, they were issued during a declared war as a way for one combatant to fight the other. There was a convention signed after the Crimean War by a number of European powers agreeing to discontinue the use of Letters of Marque. The United States was not a signatory, but has helped police this ban. So it’s been about 175 years since they were used.
There was a congressional resolution after 9/11 to authorize letters of marque against the terrorists. It never passed Congress. This seems similar.
I don’t necessarily support the idea, but I’ve seen comment online from some fairly knowledgeable maritime types that Letters of Marque and Reprisals should be considered.
The U.S., and other nations, don’t seem to have a problem with hiring mercenaries (many of whom are apparently former special forces types). If you don’t have a problem with that, what’s the moral and ethical difference between a mercenary who operates on land, such as Blackwater, and a privateer?
Well, in employment terms a mercenary is your employee, explicitly hired by you and paid by you. A privateer is an independent contractor, providing his own tools and operating according to his own methods. You pay for the end product. A mercenary typically went to an admiralty court to have his prizes condemned and be awarded the value of them..
Mercenaries are an explicit part of your army. Privateers are not part of your navy.
And, as one commenter on Reddit put it, naval folks have to be ‘special’. They have to have their own rules and their own terminology.