Thanks, Everybody...3/8 Through My Work, Feeling Better Physically...

...and have enjoyed suckling at the teat of my many fine blog compatriots who were there to give me a lift and a laugh. I think it was the fatigue and not being in Atlanta this weekend that were getting to me. Nobody needs to worry. I was just doing my usual number and being sarcastic about insipid blogs, as in my proposal to turn Kelso's Nuts into a "positive" site. The blog's motto still obtains: From The Coolies' (an Atlanta punk band--boo-hoo) 2nd album "Doug," a send-up of Tommy -- "Schlitz Malt Liquor is my favorite food/ and pissed-off is my favorite mood."

http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/music/artist/listenwatch/0,,417230,00.html#artist_name

So, let's be honest here. I fuckin LOVED being called a "bitchass" over some stupidity and LOVED returning the favor with "bitchass's" South American and Yiddish equivalents: "Gueco" and "Kurvatz"! If I hadn't been so sleepy, I really would have stuck the knife in. Thanks in order of time received:

TORRANCE STEPHENS (via phone)
GARY'S BONER
SPARTACUS
SUZIRIOT
O'TIM
ANITAXANAXNOW
DIANE TOMLINSON
LIBERALITY
LOVEBABZ

Some side personal notes to this. AXN, for vaht all the "tough love"? I thought you were, like me, more of a Barry Switzer-style coach and less of a Tom Landry! DIANE TOMLINSON, I'm back. That means I'm going to hold you to the boxing posts offer. We've got the big one coming up -- CALZAGHE v HOPKINS super-middleweights. Glad that Pavlik and Taylor stepped-up a notch and transformed something of a backwater weight class into the new glamour division and BUTE is still to be heard from. LOVEBABZ, either tough love or a cuddle or both would be a treat. Thanks for your positive words. I'm Mr August on D-CUP's 2007 Blog-Hottie calendar and while I'm fully clothed, feel free to indulge any fantasy you like. You do know that I'm only 5'7" but having gone from super-middle to middleweight, I'm still a handsome devil. Still a darker, Jewish version of Robert Downey, Jr.

So let's get some more personal stuff out of the way. I did the LPML $1000 buy-in FBB tournament in Marietta by phone and for any baseball fans out there KELSO'S NUTS look like this going into the 2008 Season:

C-M Napoli (LAA)
1B- C Delgado (Mets)
2B-K Johnson (ATL)
SS-J Lugo (Sawx)
3B-A Rodriguez (Rudy Giuliani's Girls)
CNR-J Morneau (MIN)
OF-M Ramirez (Sawx)
OF-B Hawpe (COL)
OF-J Bay (PIT)
OF-R Church (Mets)
OF-C Quentin (CHW)
DH-S Rolen (TOR)

SP-R Oswalt (HOU)
SP-D Haren (ARZ)
SP-J Lackey (LAA)
SP-B Arroyo (CIN)
SP-P Hughes (Rudy Giuliani's Girls)
RP-T Saito (LAD)
RP-B.J. Ryan (TOR)
RP- J Accardo (TOR)

The fellers are off to some nice watering-hole in Buckhead or a dive somewhere on Roswell Road in Marietta. You haven't heard something quite so amusing as a bunch of old Russian dudes getting fired up on Stoli and Klonipins and speaking with Southern Accents. Tomorrow: the Main Event in Buckhead 17-team, $5000 buy-in ABL Tourney. I'll have to miss the Masters' golf Calcutta. Judging by how these things go, I'd expect Woods to go for no less than $1.25mm and if I were there, I'd be bidding for Steve Stricker up to about $50,000. No information as to when where why who or how because the Church Police fucked this wonderful Calcutta up in the early years of Chimpy's presidency and I'm glad it's back up and running.

More good news to report from the world of the PGA. In today's second round of the WGC CA Championship at Doral, yours truly cashed Camilo Villegas of Medellin +183 over Orange County uber-Nazi Phil "FIGJAM "fuck-im-good-just-ask-me") Mickelson.

Comparisons of Obama with Tiger Woods or David Paterson are silly beyond all measure but it does make for a nice segue, however. I'll address the very mutually-supportive exachange over Reverend Wright between Gary'sBoner and AnitaXanaxNow. I think the Boner nails it with "Show me a man who doesn't tune out during sermon and I'll show you Ned Flanders. Preposterous."

Anita's response "exactly g'boner. and i will bet a whole lotta money that what's said in the white "mega" evangelical churches is equally (if not more) repugnant. the 'outrage' of the likes of buchanan and scarborough for obama having sat through those 'diabolical' sermons it is vomit-worthy in my opinion...." is also on point, though how terribly far to the right the USA has moved when one considers that both Buchanan and Scarborough could be considered "populist" and "moderate" respectively. Buchanan has been dovish on Bush's imperialism and on many economic and class issuess as well from the start (for his own malign, but always eloquently expressed, reasons, of course) and Scarborough has been one of the rare Republicans who will always admit to having been wrong when he's shown to indeed have been wrong.

Good points, folks.

It's worth boring everyone yet again with how impressed I was with Barack Obama's 3/18 speech. That somehow this highly intellectual yet intimate speech delivered almost sotto voce has been a net minus for him bends the mind in one sense. In another sense, it doesn't surprise me at all. Time for some totally un-PC stuff here, so buckle up for safety. The big criticism from the MSM is that Obama did not go far enough in repudiating Wright's sermons. I think Gary's Boner put paid to that one, although I had heard but have no evidence that some anti-gay slurs were hurled around although that puts the MSM in a bit of a pickle: which is worse, Black or Gay? While "worse" dosen't enter into it at all among sentient people of all ages, this really drives the MSM crazy. They'd like to figure out a way to insult Black folk and gay folk at once over this but they can't do it! I love watching Blitzer twitch.

While they have no audio of Wright himself making anti-Semitic remarks, there's a line drawn through Louis Farrakhan who is certainly an anti-Semite, although much less so than such noted Hebreo-philes like McCain and Reverend Johh Hagee. Besides, I pay no attention to Louis Farrakhan at all. Until this issue drew him into the racy for the presidency, it had been at least 5 years since I'd even thought of his name. Now, make sure they're buckled tightly because here goes. I'm going to get around to saying some unequivocally nice things about Malcolm X, but before I get there, I'm going to say stuff.

Take this from a guy who hangs out with observant, contemporary Arab Muslims every night. The Nation-Of-Islam with it hand out and Fruit-Of-Islam bruisers and bean-pie merchants in bow-ties, is as different from the Islam I see as chalk is from cheese. The N-O-I is anti-Semitic at its core. Islam as practiced by Semites is hardly anti-Semitic. The "moderate" Islam Bush is always so fond of praising and pledging to protect, but sells out to the Saudis every time, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the heavy-duty, top-down authoritarianism of the N-O-I. Following Malcolm X's personal hadj when he got out of the weirdness of the Chicago headquarters and into the guts of true Islam, he discovered that the N-O-I was indeed something that might have had some social uses at one time but was hardly representative of either the Islam he saw practiced in the Middle-East or the one practiced by Arab-American at home. Malcolm X went back to his history and his Koran and to some DWEM writings on the political economy and no longer saw Islam as a sword with which to hurt the White Man. He became an advocate of a strong left-wing, class-based politics through his religion but that no longer excluded.

A side note here. I know for a lot fans, Spike Lee is like a hundred-zillion times better as a director than Hitchcock or Kubrick were but it isn't so and what particularly galls on this subject is that his movie Malcolm X is the only exposure most Americans have had to the man's life, death and the evolving philosophy which preceeded that death. No Spike Lee's not in the same category as Hitchcock or Kubrick. Not close. Use any metric you like. But the intellectually-awful part is that Lee saw fit to include a 20-minute dance interlude into the movie and yet gives the hadj and it's aftermath about 45 seconds. To be fair to Mr. Lee that musical number and toning down of the left-wing politics may have been commercial issues or issues related to the completion bond.

Historians often leave out, when discussing the assination of Martin Luther King, Jr., what exactly he was doing in Memphis at the time. Having turned from a civil-rights focus to an anti-war and pro-labor focus, because he saw the three as inextricably linked, he was there in support of a transit strike. The drivers were not only Black. Probably a majority of them were White men who despised Dr. King until he got to Memphis and all of a sudden King wasn't so bad after all. Now, to support that strike is what I really call "post-racial" politics. Not the pablum Obama had been offering until 3/18.

The press willfully or ignorantly keeps missing the point about Obama's speech and its importance. Whether Reverend Wright said mean things about America or whether some loose cross-faith friendship between Wright and an anti-Semitic Farrakhan or whether Obama's use of "typically White" to decribe his own grandmother are all irrelevant to the meaning of the speech. The meaning was that Black anger at instituionalized racism in the USA is real and rationally-perceived by its victims and that perhaps parallels could be drawn between that anger in Black America to the anger the citizens of Southie felt over busing. Or the anger White blue-collar workers feel at losing their jobs and homes. Or the anger such White Separatists like those at Waco and Ruby Ridge felt at what they perceived as excessive government intervention in their lives. The message of Obama's speech was that Black and White Americans did not ipso facto have to be enemies. But it was a bigger message still. Each group's anger even toward the other group could be a path to empathy and to if not friendship, a separate peace.

That story, however, neither sells soap nor tells viewers a familiar narrative and forces everyone who heard Barack Obama's words to stop and to THINK.

I've written it before and I'll keep writing it until his message does "become viral." I'll also keep writing that with the full admission that I've always been an Obama skeptic and the briliance of his speech also made me wonder "where the fuck has THIS Barack Obama been hiding?"

Still with a touch of the grippe and still with a lot of work to do and still missing my aunts, uncles and cousins in Atlanta but back with the vengeance you've come to know and hate.

Happy 75th, Kelso-senior!

Kelso's Nuts love you