(NBC cut to the hammer and sickle in the opening sequence of the Sochi Olympics. Really).
No kidding- the National Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Winter Olympics referred to Communism as “one of modern history’s pivotal experiments” while showing the friendly hammer-and-sickle logo atop the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman monument.
Pivotal experiment indeed. It is one that between wars of aggression and internal oppression killed a hundred million people.
Hell, this is a tough morning, and maybe the airheads at NBC just misspoke, meaning that the symbols of one of mankind’s worst ideas were just sort of ‘experimental,’ like a clinical trial that just didn’t work out.
Normally, I would be generating a puff piece with colorful recipes and some banter by the crowd at Willow- they were out in force last night- and they were a merry bunch, and all over the map. We were doing some power-mentoring for a Navy Lieutenant assigned to John-with-an-H’s office at Foggy Bottom, and we were carrying on about the new estimates for the cost of health care in treasure and jobs was the source of grim merriment for those sweating the prospect of being freed from wage-slavery, as I think Mr. Jay Carney put it, and then the sobering news about the anemic jobs numbers.
Someone from the Administration trotted out that afternoon to say that maybe slower growth was actually sort of good for the economy. That was a rip-snorter of a yarn, a pivotal experiment in rhetorical ju-jitsu, that I was glad there is still something to laugh about in town. Then our crowd moved on to something really pivotal.
(Tink in the former uniform de jour. Not so anymore).
The controversy of the evening was the introduction of the new standard uniform for the bar staff: plain black long-sleeved button-up shirts.
I think that is fine for Brett and Jasper and Rafael, but it has effectively banned the sight of Tinkerbelle’s colorful tattoo on her upper arm, and any hint of cleavage.
You can imagine the response that the policy change registered at our end of the bar. Oh well, you don’t have to like policy. You just have to coexist with it.
That is not the same thing as winter. If you stay in the same place, you have to come to terms with it: bundle up, hunker down, adjust the thermostat and wait it out.
Or strike out boldly and go someplace the weather suits your clothes, as Harry Nilsson once famously opined.
I think I am going to do something like that. I am not sure where I am going, but I think I am going to go someplace. I will start with the farm, and then make it up as I go along. Sort of an experiment in pivots, so to speak.
More from the road, unless I come to my senses in front of the fire down in peaceful Culpeper.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303