Hokum

A collection of ephemera.

The ballad of Gerald R. Ford

When Gerald Ford was president, John Denver composed The Ballad of Gerald R. Ford. Denver sang it in as close to a dramatic baritone voice as he could muster, and it went like this:

I’ll sing you the ballad of Gerald R. Ford
And all the good that he’s done…

…and then Denver would pause on stage until the audience got the joke.

That was the knock on Ford as president — his critics claimed he was a guy who didn’t do much, a target easy to ridicule for his Whip Inflation Now pins, his swine flu concerns, his refusal to blindly fund a New York City bailout, his clumsiness (although he actually was among the most athletic of all presidents), and his pardoning of Richard Nixon.

History has been kinder, and with good reason. You can make a strong argument that Ford was good for what ailed the nation, and that’s just what some people are doing today.

So long, James Brown

James Brown used to scare the hell out of Whitey. “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!” he sang in the 1960s, as he danced in his pointy shoes and flipped back his greasy pompadour.

James Brown begat a whole wave of funk and soul artists, making it possible to put out music for the masses without “sweetening” (read: “whitening”) your songs ala Motown. It’s hard to imagine folks like Sly and the Family Stone, a whole raft of 1970s funk acts or Prince without James Brown.

James Brown died today, Christmas Day, 2006. He will never be replaced.

The fine uses of HDTV

My wife and I, as previously mentioned in this space, bought each other a HDTV for Christmas. It has many fine uses, like the one at the left: A Christmas high-definition broadcast of a Yule log on HDNet. The cool part was that it also came with digital sound of a crackling fire (accompanied, of course, by Christmas carols). It was quite convincing, in all honesty, and cooler than you might expect.

Rudy

The Post this morning has a great takeout on Rudy Giuliani, who’s toe-dipping his way around a presidential bid. I look at Giuliani and wonder how he can clear the ideological litmus tests that are necessary to secure a presidential nomination these days — neither political party much likes folks who don’t match every major party position any more. In fact, I’d think that GOP evangelicals would make it a goal to defeat Giuliani as a sort of affirmation of their status, much like what a big chunk of Democratic activists did to Joe Lieberman back in the Connecticut primaries. Of course, we all saw how well that worked out in the end: Senator Lieberman is still Senator Lieberman. And I suspect that Ex-Mayor Giuliani could be President Giuliani if he could get out of the primaries.