A Little of the Old In and Out

In: Soupbones, Deadly. The Corsair looks out for you, we really do, trying to find interesting morsels of news from the farthest reaches of our far flung solar system, so today we came up with an somewhat "Aquarius-Ascendant" piece of odd arcana, according to TheSmokingGun:

"Meet Ernesto Hernandez-Rosales. The 39-year-old Oklahoma inmate has been charged with the pork chop assault of a fellow resident of the Lexington Correctional Center. According to investigators, Hernandez-Rosales tried last month to settle a beef by stabbing Jermaine Portillo, 21, in the eye with a 'sharpened pork chop bone.' Hernandez-Rosales, who is already serving an eight-year sentence for marijuana distribution, was named this week in a felony information charging him with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Portillo, who was not seriously injured in the pork bone attack, is doing a 20-year stretch for armed robbery."

And you thought "gristle" *The Corsair shudders* was bad.

In any moist Oz-like scenario, where peril lurks behind every corner, evidently even a soupbone can be crafted into a fine weapon to smite the enemies of your intrepid Nuyorican (Ay, Papi!).

Out: Clay Aiken Must Die. Fuck, as if it weren't bad enough that this little Leprechaun nonentity (Averted Gaze) cannot be content with his role as a "singer" (Averted Gaze), now, he bestrides the NY Times Bestseller list at, goddam it, #8 (!), and, as if you couldn't see this coming, the little prick is starting to floss some serious diva attitude ... as if he thinks he's poppin'!

According to the Page Sixxies:

"WE long suspected it, but now it just may be true: Clay Aiken is the devil. The sexually ambiguous 'Ameri can Idol' runner-up is accused of pulling a diva act during a con cert at a New Jersey high school. The Philadelphia Inquirer said Aiken refused to sign autographs for students, sicced security goons on a kid who snapped his photo during rehearsal, and reneged on a promised $500 donation to the school's vocal ensemble. Aiken's handlers couldn't be reached for comment, but Clearview HS Superintendent Mike Toscano told the Inquirer that his students had been taught a lesson they wouldn't soon forget: 'They got a taste of real-life show business.'"

Mixed: Essie May Williams Washington's Memoir. You'll remember her, this was Segregationist South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's daughter. Sure, we'd kind of like to read it, out of, if anything, the same morbid curiosity that we might take a peek of a car accident, but do we really want to relive those formal events when protocol for a meeting between a father and his interracial child involves formality? To wit, the AP:

"'He never called my mother by her first name. He didn't verbally acknowledge that I was his child. He didn't ask when I was leaving and didn't invite me to come back. It was like an audience with an important man, a job interview, but not a reunion with a father,' Williams wrote.

"It was the first of many visits between Thurmond and Williams. He provided for her financially, but their meetings were always formal events where Thurmond ? a health fanatic ? asked more questions about her exercise and eating habits than her personal life.

"During one visit around 1946, Thurmond offered to pay her tuition at an all-black college in Orangeburg, now known as South Carolina State University.

"Moving to the school in the South meant she had to adapt to a segregated culture. The black students rarely left campus and, when they did, they were forced to sit in the backs of buses and visit only certain restaurants and shops.

"Many of her classmates came from prosperous black families. While they talked about their fathers' jobs, Williams held back.

"'With all the family comparisons, I was tempted to brag about my father. ... But the temptation quickly passed. I wasn't crazy. And I was very grateful to my father for making it possible to come here to State. I couldn't afford to lose the opportunity in front of me. For me, it was a state of grace.'"

For me, this is very very sad. That generation is passing, Essie May is now 79. Those old ways of thinking, of accepting table scraps of opportunity to shut up about connections to the well connected, appear to be light years away, of another age altogether, though only 50 or so years have intervened. My feelings are very mixed on this, to be frank although I am glad Essie May survived to tell her story in the way that Sally Hemmings was not, I am embarrassed that these people who went through such shit refuse still speak as if they have some sort of a "colonial complex", some affection for their diminished place in "Old Dixie".