Tipsy Teetotaler’s Tasty Tidbits 7/3/11

Here’s today’s tasty tidbits, a little light, as is the news:

1. Lessons from Monaco’s Royal Wedding.
2. Some Power the gift tae gie us ….
3. Unsustainability report.
4. Who can you negotiate with?
5. The difference between men and women.

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Skip this if you don’t want to read very blunt language.

Prince Albert II of Monaco has finally wed. He has 2 children out of wedlock (neither of them by his bride, Charlene Wittstock, a former Olympic Swimmer for South Africa) and a reputation as a playboy. The couple reportedly intends to get down to the business of making a baby suitable for the throne.

The take-home from this, IMHO:

1. Prince Albert II is a highly trained and financially privileged royal. Do not try this bastardy thing in your own home, at least until you, too, can afford to invite your whole nation over for drinks after you finally wed.
2. Guys: remember that knocking girls up doesn’t make you a prince. It makes a prince a cad — although perhaps less so if he at least supports them.
3. Gals: remember that pleasuring a guy — even a prince — does not make you a princess. It may qualify you for the next slut walk. It likely will qualify you for a life of poverty unless you’re willing to kill the sort of accident that male-female liaisons tend to produce.
4. Everyone (or at least every Christian): remember that the real shame is not the baby, but making the beast with two backs outside of wedlock.

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Almost 20 years ago, I bought a World-Band Radio, so as to listen to how other peoples viewed us, as we ventured off into the first Gulf War (which, by the way, has never ended, creating, under the VA Non-service Connected pension program, a large liability to all limited-income veterans who’ve served since then).

I was quite disappointed that the English language broadcasts seemed captive to our pop culture, with the exception of Radio Havana (which went crazily off in the other direction). The cacophony of the internet, though, has yielded some insights into how others see the U.S.

It hit me recently that I didn’t really need to listen to Radio China, or watch Al Jazeera on the web to get some different perspective. Our own artists — especially, for me, our popular songwriters who aren’t just writing about romance — may possess an “artistic vision” that is hugely different from that of any pundit, and in many ways more emotionally compelling.

Our neighbor Bruce Cockburn (Canadian), for instance, has some lyrics that I think must be his reflections on the U.S., even though he says so only in introductions in live concerts. (If you’re desperately curious, you can find lyrics here, but there’s a lot more to a song than lyrics.)

And that, in turn, gives me a belated recognition of what my Senior English teacher in high school meant when he talked about “truth” that was not “fact.” I sure didn’t “get it” then, and was sadly suspicious of some liberal agenda. That attitude was, I think, some combination of intellectual sloth, over-reliance on rationality as a computing engine with no room for intuitive or innate knowledge, and a generalization from admonitions to read the Bible “literally.” (Fundamentalist “literalism” is absurdly selective, but I didn’t realize that until a few years later.)

I’m confident that literature and film can do the same thing. I’m just not as tuned into them.

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Remember: “If it can’t go on like this, it won’t.” (From the New York Times, so it may count toward your freebies.)

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There once was a joke: “What’s the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?” The answer was “You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

Gosh, I have no idea why I thought of that just now.  (From the New York Times, so it may count toward your freebies.)

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It’s Dave Barry’s birthday.

From “Dave Barry on Baseball” (1996): “The difference between men and women is that, if given the choice between saving the life of an infant or catching a fly ball, a woman will automatically choose to save the infant, without even considering if there’s a man on base.”

HT Writer’s Almanac.

Bon appetit!